Why Do I Have to Learn This..?

As we know, Americans are falling behind many of the other industrialized nations when it comes to our mathematical knowledge. Shorter schooldays and school years and more diverse populations of students are a couple of facts that may lead to our low scores in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) subjects. There are many teachers and organizations that are dedicated to finding better ways to teach our students math, so that we can remain to be a competitive nation. Here are a couple of stories I have read about that I would like to share to you.

Audrey Cucci, a high school math teacher in Frankfort, New York, uses group work and various means of technology to create an interactive and collaborative classroom that gives students opportunities to work together and manipulate abstract math problems to find solutions and explain their work. You can click here to read about Cucci’s classroom here, or you can click here to view her lessons on SchoolTube. Cucci uses an interactive whiteboard and microphone to record each of her lessons.

“Why do I have to learn this?” If your students have this question for you during one of your math lessons, you may want to show them the careers that require a solid background in math. Texas Instruments and the Sloan Career Cornerstone Center have dedicated a portion of their Student Zone website to describing various STEM careers and the background it takes to succeed.

As we know, there is still a significant pay gap among men and women and more women than men are graduating with bachelors, masters, and doctorate degrees, But…men still outnumber women in STEM careers which often offer generous salaries. Expanding Your Horizons Network is dedicated to motivating young women in science and math; AAUW Tech Trek is a math/science camp “designed to develop interest, excitement and self-confidence in young women who will enter eighth grade in the fall”; Singer and founder of Advancement of Women Now , Mary J. Blige, has partnered with NASA to encourage young women to pursue STEM career choices.

Kiran Bir Sethi Speaks About an Infection We Want

Kiran Bir Sethi, the founder of Riverside School in India, shows examples of how the empowerment of Riverside’s students shifted the mindset of the students from “teacher told me” to “I can do it.” She uses data to show that when children are empowered, they care more about their world, and they do better in school. I know this is not groundbreaking news, but this video gives us an opportunity to watch these students change the world around them.

Just watch it…the video is less than 10 minutes long.

Tech Companies Sponsoring High Schools

On Tuesday, June 29th, I wrote about Philadelphia’s School of the Future, a high school that Microsoft started in 2006. Today, I learned that IBM participating in the trend of corporate-sponsored education. With the help of the Gates Foundation, the City University of New York and IBM will open a new high school that is expected to teach 500 to 600 students. The school will extend to 14th grade, and upon graduation, students will receive an associates degree in addition to a high school diploma. IBM will have the opportunity to teach the students computer science in a way that will most benefit their company, but students are not forced into any sort of commitment with the company.

So, where is the money coming from to create this computer science-focused school..?

IBM is giving $250,000 to NYC to create the school.

New York City is among the four beneficiaries of the Gates Foundation's Communities Learning in Partnership grant. Each recipient received $3 million to fund innovative proposals to boost college completion rates. (San Francisco, Mesa [AZ], and Riverside [CA] were the other cities given the grant money.)

Finally, NYC was awarded $36 million Teacher Incentive Fund to encourage highly-skilled teachers to work in low-performing schools and to mentor their colleagues.

Education and Gender

In the 2008-2009 school year, women received the majority of the U.S. doctorial degrees for the first time. This should not be a huge surprise because women have received the majority of BS and MS degrees since the 1980s, and women received 49% of doctorial degrees in the 2007-2008 school year. Men continue to earn approximately three-fourths of the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) doctorates.

According to BBC, girls believe they are cleverer, better behaved, and work harder than boys. Boys believed they were equal at the ages of 4-6, but then agreed with the female students by age 8. Researchers questioned 238 students at two primary schools in Kent, England. This research was presented by Bonny Hartley at the annual conference of the British Educational Research Association.

I don’t want to accidently offend someone by summarizing this from my point of view, so please read, and let me know what you think: Geek-aversion May Explain Lack of Women in Computer Science

12-Year-Old Takes the Initiative to Run a School in her Village

At the age of 12, Bharti Kumari, is the head teacher at her school in Kusumbhara, an Indian village. Each morning and each evening after Bharti Kumari attends her school that is a 2-mile walk away from her home, she teaches the English and math learned during her school day to 50 village children who are not enrolled in school. The children at her school are between the ages of 4 and 10 years old, and they are among the 10 million Indian children that are not able to attend school because of poverty.

As an infant, Bharti Kumari was abandoned at a railway stations in Bihar, India. Her adoptive father, Rampati, encourages his daughter to continue her learning in school rather than continuing the rural tradition of pushing young girls into marrying.

Dr. Sugata Mitra: Unsupervised Learning

Most people would agree that there is no replacement for a good teacher, but what happens when the good teachers do not want to go where they are needed the most? In this TED Talks video, Dr. Sugata Mitra argues that every country on earth has regions where good teachers are needed but are not available. He also has suggestions for improving these situations.

Mitra says, “Children will learn to do what they want to learn to do.” He experimented with the ways children will drive their own education by placing computers (without instructions) in various areas of the world such as embedded in a wall in a slum in Delhi, India; then observed the students' interaction with the devices and the students' ability to identify and make use of its resources. Mitra found that the children’s interest in the computers allowed the students to work together to educate themselves in using the hardware and software and in navigating the Internet to find the answers to both simple and complicated questions.

I encourage you to watch the video and check out Hole-in-the-Wall , a learning methodology created by Dr. Sugata Mitra .

Digital ‘Smart’ Pens Transform Paper into a Digital Tablet

Echo, Liverscribe’s latest smart pen:

• streams all notes taken on their special dotted paper in real time to a computer while also recording the notes in pen’s memory. (Currently, it must be connected to the computer via a USB cable to stream notes.)


• records audio as well as handwritten text— by tapping the paper with the pen, students can hear what the instructor was saying at that exact moment in their notes.


• has a 4GB model for $169.95 and an 8GB model for $199.95. The 4GB pen can record about 400 hours of audio while the 8GB pen can record approximately 800 hours.


• provides reference tools such as a dictionary, simple games, and study guides.


• will allow users to instantaneously create a PDF file of the recording and save or share it through email with the click of a button.

…Software allowing the above capabilities will be released this fall.

IOGEAR’s Mobile Digital Scribe:

• does not require special paper.


• is built with enough memory to store the notes on 50 standard-size sheets of paper.


• stores handwritten notes or drawings that can be uploaded to any computer.


• handwritten text and drawings cane be displayed directly on the computer screen when the scribe is connected to the computer.


• provides editing capabilities that make it possible for users to modify their notes.


• allows users to export notes via JPEG format and share notes with other users through email or Instant Messaging.


• supports 12 languages (English, Spanish, Traditional/Simplified Chinese, French, Dutch, Italian, German, Portuguese, Swedish, Korean, Japanese, and Russian).