The teacher enters a classroom with 60 students sitting in rows, 6 desks in a column, 2 students to a desk, 6 columns across the room. The teacher greets the students and proceeds to teach the topic of the day. - writing notes on the board that the students copy, solving a few example problems, and finally assigning exercises to be done in class. The students spend the rest of the class period solving the problems. In all this time, the only interactions between the students and the teacher have been reminders from the teacher to work in silence and an occasional question from the odd intrepid student that is squashed with a “Meet me after class”. -- (Indian Math Classroom circa 1970-2000)
I come from India - I went to school there all the way through graduate Computer Science. I spent most of my early student-hood in such classrooms. My high school math class always had 65 students with one teacher. We were all required to take math upto calculus by the end of high-school. My college math major class had 75 students. Even my graduate computer science class had 45 students. In all these levels, the mode of teaching was lectures - no small group activities, no group discussions, no constructivist activities, no individual attention unless you were in the top or bottom 2%.
My mathematics classrooms in school were very far from how I thought mathematics should be taught to teach children. One of my early motivations (as early as grade school) to enter the business of teaching mathematics came from my own experience with it. I have been good at mathematics ever since I can remember. But I also remember being very troubled that many of my friends could not relate to my joy in it. It was a puzzle to me why an otherwise intelligent like thinking person should be so put off by this subject. As I grew older, I started to be disturbed by the reality that expertise or lack thereof in mathematics was a divisive agency in schools used not so much to direct instruction as to segregate students into the doers and non-doers. Inspite of all this, I loved Math through out high school and decided to pursue a undergraduate major in Math. In this decision however, I was disillusioned and discovered that the realms of higher mathematics did not resonate within me.I went on to do a Master's in Computer Science, while trying to clarify my thoughts around what exactly about Mathematics fascinated me so much. It was while learning functional programming (Miranda/Haskell) and discrete math that I had an epiphany- what I had loved about mathematics was the way in which everything mathematical had patterns and connections. It became clearer that to me that technology was powerful at making clear these connections - e.g.: Propositional Logic, Boolean circuits and Abstract Algebra! It is here that my interest in using technology to teach math was first ignited.
This led to my first attempt at a doctoral degree. But it failed - mainly because I wasn't part of a math education research community and had no grounding in how to do this kind of thing. I was young and passionate and convinced that a strong desire to change the math education landscape was adequate to do research. I discovered the importance of being part of a strong community but could not move to one because of family reasons. However, the time wasn’t all wasted. It was during this era(1995-97) that I discovered the Math Forum, NCTM and Sketchpad. I discovered that there wasn't anything new in my ideas about how Math could be made more interesting to school children : the constructivist theory was all there. The real difference was to be made in the field. But for the lack of an infrastructure to do it, I went back to teaching Math and Theory to Computer Science students.
I spent the next 7-8 years teaching, mothering, moving to the US. Then I went back to school(Stanford University 2004-05) to do a Masters in Education with a specialization in Learning, Design , Technology. I did my masters project under the guidance of Prof. Shelley Goldman. It is a classroom experience designed around the use of technology and manipulatives in middle school geometry classrooms - "Out of the Box". The thesis of the project is to investigate the value of manipulatives in geometry classrooms. One of the key guiding principles was to keep an eye on using technology in ways that would make it relevant to large(50+) classrooms. Preliminary field tests indicate that the excitement during learning in classrooms is not influenced by degree of techno-readiness of the classroom. We discovered that classroom conversations around mathematics flow more smoothly around a physical object. A poster based on this project was displayed at Episteme2.
This also ties in with my interest to study the applicability of research in teaching and learning to schools in India - given the increasing access to technology there. I believe that such thinking can be used to disseminate the benefits of technology to schools with limited infrastructure. It is our mandate as educational researchers, to think out of the box about how best research in constructivist theory, learner centered schools and technology can change the face of how mathematics is learnt in resource challenged learning environments.
I come from India - I went to school there all the way through graduate Computer Science. I spent most of my early student-hood in such classrooms. My high school math class always had 65 students with one teacher. We were all required to take math upto calculus by the end of high-school. My college math major class had 75 students. Even my graduate computer science class had 45 students. In all these levels, the mode of teaching was lectures - no small group activities, no group discussions, no constructivist activities, no individual attention unless you were in the top or bottom 2%.
My mathematics classrooms in school were very far from how I thought mathematics should be taught to teach children. One of my early motivations (as early as grade school) to enter the business of teaching mathematics came from my own experience with it. I have been good at mathematics ever since I can remember. But I also remember being very troubled that many of my friends could not relate to my joy in it. It was a puzzle to me why an otherwise intelligent like thinking person should be so put off by this subject. As I grew older, I started to be disturbed by the reality that expertise or lack thereof in mathematics was a divisive agency in schools used not so much to direct instruction as to segregate students into the doers and non-doers. Inspite of all this, I loved Math through out high school and decided to pursue a undergraduate major in Math. In this decision however, I was disillusioned and discovered that the realms of higher mathematics did not resonate within me.I went on to do a Master's in Computer Science, while trying to clarify my thoughts around what exactly about Mathematics fascinated me so much. It was while learning functional programming (Miranda/Haskell) and discrete math that I had an epiphany- what I had loved about mathematics was the way in which everything mathematical had patterns and connections. It became clearer that to me that technology was powerful at making clear these connections - e.g.: Propositional Logic, Boolean circuits and Abstract Algebra! It is here that my interest in using technology to teach math was first ignited.
This led to my first attempt at a doctoral degree. But it failed - mainly because I wasn't part of a math education research community and had no grounding in how to do this kind of thing. I was young and passionate and convinced that a strong desire to change the math education landscape was adequate to do research. I discovered the importance of being part of a strong community but could not move to one because of family reasons. However, the time wasn’t all wasted. It was during this era(1995-97) that I discovered the Math Forum, NCTM and Sketchpad. I discovered that there wasn't anything new in my ideas about how Math could be made more interesting to school children : the constructivist theory was all there. The real difference was to be made in the field. But for the lack of an infrastructure to do it, I went back to teaching Math and Theory to Computer Science students.
I spent the next 7-8 years teaching, mothering, moving to the US. Then I went back to school(Stanford University 2004-05) to do a Masters in Education with a specialization in Learning, Design , Technology. I did my masters project under the guidance of Prof. Shelley Goldman. It is a classroom experience designed around the use of technology and manipulatives in middle school geometry classrooms - "Out of the Box". The thesis of the project is to investigate the value of manipulatives in geometry classrooms. One of the key guiding principles was to keep an eye on using technology in ways that would make it relevant to large(50+) classrooms. Preliminary field tests indicate that the excitement during learning in classrooms is not influenced by degree of techno-readiness of the classroom. We discovered that classroom conversations around mathematics flow more smoothly around a physical object. A poster based on this project was displayed at Episteme2.
This also ties in with my interest to study the applicability of research in teaching and learning to schools in India - given the increasing access to technology there. I believe that such thinking can be used to disseminate the benefits of technology to schools with limited infrastructure. It is our mandate as educational researchers, to think out of the box about how best research in constructivist theory, learner centered schools and technology can change the face of how mathematics is learnt in resource challenged learning environments.
