I'm sorry, but the arguments below (getting fairly well known by
now) still seem to me to be just excuses.

Why can't students just sit at their desks and do several hours of
intellectual work?

"Contextual teachers" seem to jump through hoops to entertain
their students.  Be careful, you'll spoil them!

Robert Einarsson
http://www.artsci.gmcc.ab.ca/people/einarssonb

> What I mean--and I think others mean as well--is teaching without a
> connection to the everyday world of the students. Thus if you teach only
> that 3 + 4 = 7, that is teaching out of context. And of course elementary
> teachers know better than to do such a thing, so they have students add
> pennies or apples, etc.
>
> Yet have you ever heard a teacher provide a meaningful context for
> dividing fractions? Why, for heavens sake, must we invert and multiply?
> And how will I ever remember to do it if I don't know why I should?
>
> And let us not even contemplate negative numbers. My stomach hurts at the
> very thought.
>
> Moreover, the higher we go in math, the more difficult it is to provide a
> meaningful context--the so-called "story problems" notwithstanding. (I
> don't think that having one train start west from New York at 50 mph,
> another east from Chicago at 60 mph and asking students to calculate where
> they will meet is providing a meaningful context.) And one suspects that
> those teaching math had little need for context anyway.
>
> Here's a quote for you:
>
> "We know that many students are bored to death and frustrated to tears
> when faced with "exercises numer 1-29 (odd) on page 253." Compare the
> energy and enthusiasm of a class cooperatively learning statistics with
> bags of M&M's to a class mindlessly and individually inverting and
> multiplying meaningless fractions to arrive at equally meaningless
> answers. Compare a class where students are estimating costs for a
> shopping spree from newspaper fliers prior to using calculators to see who
> comes closest to $100, and a class tediously finding sums of columns of
> context-free numbers."
>
> Steven Leinwand, "It's Time to Abandon Computational Algorithms,"
> Education Week, 2-9-94, p. 36.
>
> How does this apply to grammar? English teachers often use the same
> procedures that math teachers use--requiring students to memorize rules
> that they never understood, working with sentences taken out of context,
> assigning endless drills of inserting the correct version of its/it's or
> diagramming sentences.
>
> As with math instruction, we need a better way.
>
> Bill
>
> William J. McCleary
> 3247 Bronson Hill Road
> Livonia, NY 14487
> 716-346-6859
>
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