Field Notes

Kids love math until... they don't. They meet the multiplication table, or fractions, or was it trig for you? Were you that early math genius until fourth grade when your parents forced you to do Kumon?

"oh anything but math, my kid is better than I am", said a parent, now facing her nightmares while helping her child do homework. She gets flashbacks to all that negative feeling she carried around with her in math class, sweaty palms, rechecking answers and getting new equivalents, age problems you will never ever use in real life... the world is spinning. 

I remember having a teacher tell my freshman class "well the chinese schools will always do better at math than we will" and that just set a ceiling to all our abilities without even starting the class. GAH! 

A Stanford MOOC that changed the way I think of math, teaching it, and learning more about it, just launched a website tadaaaa:  http://youcubed.org/.

Here is the list of positive norms to set up a great classroom culture around math. Because let's face it, most kids are not bad at math... we were just taught to hate it.

When I see a test paper where a student gave up at #2 it's not because they can't, but because they won't. It's breaking through that mindset that's the first challenge.

I'm cheating and letting you read the back of the book (I copy pasted those norms below as a teaser), 

Positive Norms to Encourage in Math Class

By Jo Boaler

1. Everyone Can Learn Math to the Highest Levels. Encourage students to believe in themselves. There is no such thing as a “math” person. Everyone can reach the highest levels they want to, with hard work. 2. Mistakes are valuable Mistakes grow your brain! It is good to struggle and make mistakes. 3. Questions are Really Important Always ask questions, always answer questions. Ask yourself: why does that make sense? 4. Math is about Creativity and Making Sense. Math is a very creative subject that is, at its core, about visualizing patterns and creating solution paths that others can see, discuss and critique. 5. Math is about Connections and Communicating Math is a connected subject, and a form of communication. Represent math in different forms eg words, a picture, a graph, an equation, and link them. Color code! 6. Depth is much more important than speed. Top mathematicians, such as Laurent Schwartz, think slowly and deeply. 7. Math Class is about Learning not Performing Math is a growth subject, it takes time to learn and it is all about effort.

Advice I usually give peeps who ask me about crowdfunding... in question form... because it's more fun like that.

1. How will the platform you chose support the project? Crowdfunding platforms take a cut, which means the success of your project, is paying for their service. Do they support you in terms of mechanics? ease of use? design? how supportive and strong is the community behind it? around it? If you are choosing to support a start up crowd funding platform, make sure you are ready to do most of the marketing, and you have a plan expands your reach beyond friends and family. There are other traditional routes to get funded, so ask yourself why crowd funding makes more sense than applying for a grant, asking for favors, or looking for an investor

2. How will your rewards involve your funders in your project? For some this will be easy, perhaps an advance release of their CD, or a special funders only version of their product. For others, this is difficult, especially those that are building community gardens, school buildings, green houses, transparency projects. You can choose to go the traditional route, putting funders names or faces on your project, or you can do something awkward, cool, and personal. e.g. name a seed after them, ship them a coconut, create a gif of the building process. If you describe your project in my ASK box, i will blurt out a few random ideas in my spare time just for fun :)

3. Do you know how much this will cost you in time and money? This will not be a build it and they will come kind of endeavour, plan to get featured in news articles, blogs, show progress even without the money in the bank, update more than once a week, even daily closer to the deadline. Plan in sending and creating rewards to your time line. Calculate shipping costs into the reward, after you deduct the platforms 5-20% charge plus amazon or paypal fees. After the thought you put in to the practical side of things... ask yourself question number one again :)

piecing together My Vision for Philippine Public schools

See pic of computer, in a school with no electricity.

myth #1 It's about the content... but the hardware is what sells

This is a great "believed" contradiction. I've heard it three times in my short life as an education upstarter: "We're going to say it's about the computers" "the computers is what will bring people there" "but really it's about the education"

here are my two big points to consider after hearing these phrases (come out of your mouth or someone elses):

1. If you sell the hardware, you will get people (decision makers, and future users) who are there for the hardware, not for the education. People want an education, they are hungry for it, spend more time finding and attracting these people.

2. As you sell the hardware, you will be spending time, energy and money, getting the hardware, making it presentable, and teaching folks how it works., etc. We already said, it's the content that matters, how do we spend more time and resources on that?

and here are the things I wish the education community would do more and more, things which I am writing here, because I have struggled with them.

Lesson #1: Build from the content

1.  Don't spend too much time on the fancy box if you're only going to fill it with hope. I know of too many empty classrooms turned bodegas, too many dusty computer shells covered with fancy printed lola looking cloth. Filipino teachers need to build content that connects to filipino students from all walks of life. We cannot fly in a curriculum from somewhere else and expect it to magically work in the Philippines. BAM! Like magic. Our problems are our problems, WE (tayo mismo) need to build the solutions.

2. Prototype fast, make things accessible. There are so many great thesis, studies, funded projects around #1, with content in context, but they were made for academics, not for students in public schools, their parents and their teachers. Let's measure the success by the number of times it was used, not the number of places it was distributed, by the number of offshoot lessons, and not the number of locations.