Back to Work

Naomi and I started teaching again this week. She was pretty nervous about it, but it went fine. Thankfully, she will be cutting back on her tasks this Wednesday. This will give her some time to recover.

I had an interesting week at school. On Tuesday I had the idea of getting rid of Math as a subject. I think it should be integrated into other subjects, and the skills immediately applied. The basic problem is that students are not able to take what they learn in one subject (math) and apply it to another subject (physics). The subject teacher has to re-teach the skills anyway.

I would like to develop an integrated, project based approach to this problem, combining the sciences and math at the middle school level. Once things get a bit tougher, then the kids can split up into their different subjects.

Anyway, I talked to the administration and a few teachers about it, and we all agreed to set up a pilot program. We will start with one combined project this year, and hopefully a full blown pilot this coming school year. Nice that they were so supportive and enthusiastic about my idea! The main challenge will be convincing the more traditional teachers...

Getting distracted from their new game...