[Edu-sig] Excited about Crunchy Frog

[kirby urner]

> Can Crunchy Frog do things that books can't? Absolutely. Let's use it for that.
> But education from books can still be fantastic.

Running yet another edition of 'Calculus Today' for every student in
California is a waste of paper, plus they're too heavy, even in back
packs.

You still have the option to print various sections, if your book is
on a CD or DVD.

Anyway, I'm agreeing that more market forces will be in play, once we
stop enslaving ourselves to textbook publishers at the state level
(doesn't seem to happen in higher ed, just in K-12 -- or does some
state standards body tell you what to use at Wartburg?).

> > Kay's big objection, that children have unequal rights as publishers,
> > is still a concern.
> >
>
> At the risk of sounding like Arthur, quotes (actually indirect references)
> like this make me question the wisdom of Kay as an education guru.

Well, it's a very loose characterization, but he's all about
technology removing the barriers to self expression, even if you're a
pretty young kid with minimal typing skills.

We've seen a lot of hype about kids making friends with other kids in
distant lands, by sharing family pix 'n stuff, but that's mostly all
it's been:  hype.  Getting easier though.  Just very slowly.  $100
laptops will be nice.

> Fair enough, but I for one favor forums with higher signal-to-noise ratio
> than "Joe Shmoe's Blog"

Haven't checked it.

> I'm not a fan of this winner take all system either, but it's market forces at
> work, not big states "colluding" with publishers. I doubt that textbook
> decisions are based on the interests of "big publishing." Rather big
> publishing's decisions are based on the interests of the standards
> committees.

There wouldn't *be* any big publishing, in the sense that we now know,
if statewide adoption wasn't a built in feature of the code.

> I think technology is addressing this problem, but not in the way you envision
> it. Short run and custom printing is economically feasible now, and there is
> no reason that smaller states, even individual districts, could not (if they
> so chose) have different textbooks.

I'm not against using hardcopy books.  The move to smaller publishing
is actually the case in some Portland Public Schools.  E.g. my
daughter's school uses 'Visual Math', produced locally by the Math
Learning Center at Portland State.

> Just because the state provides the funding for education is no reason to think they
> should be able to form committees of so-called experts in academic
> disciplines to decide how that money can best be spent.

There's very little public participation in this process, and not much
a teacher can do to opt out, even if skilled at teaching from
different resources.  There's also far less choice for parents.  It'd
be better to give more disgression to teachers, as is done in higher
ed.

Why politicize the process at the state level.  It's *individuals* who
pay taxes.  More local and community control (with input from around
the world, given the web), makes more sense.

> Education is all about myths in the sense of the stories that we tell ourselves about
> ourselves.

Like this story that we have some freedom to self govern, that
democracy is of, by and for the people.  What does that mean in
practice?  A school is a first place to test the theory.

> You yourself suggest that a mathematics education without
> certain Fulleresqe geometric concepts is useless and should be tossed out. I
> happen to respect your opinion, but I'm no expert. Statements of that sort
> need to be tested in the marketplace of ideas. That's what standards boards
> should be, the qualified judges that need to be convinced.

There's no way to get a lot of small competing experiments going (my
democratic ideal) with a big brother state deciding for all of us
which edition of 'Calculus Today' to buy.

I do agree there should be protections in place, to keep schools from
falling into the hands of parochial cabals who care nothing for
societal systems and norms. OK for private schools maybe, but if it's
tax supported, you need some standards (including public health
standards).

But I don't see the current system really addressing that need either.

The state apparatus gets used by control freaks to suppress discussion
of such topics as evolution.  I think authoritarians among us have a
dream to gradually win, state by state, the right to dictate their
sanitized curriculum.

> You seem to think that every school should just do its own thing and let the
> best schools somehow "win." The problem is that there is _no_ way to evaluate
> the fitness of a curriculum outside of expert judgements. There is no
> objective "market."

I'm all for judges.  Have their judgments freely available.  Give
people choices.  In a society with lots of schools to choose from, all
doing something different, it's unlikely that one in particular will
be "the best" in every dimension.  People have different aspirations
and goals, for one thing.  In my town, we have an "environmental
middle school" where kids do some gardening.

> I'm all for teacher empowerment, but let's face facts:  there just aren't
> enough really smart people for every teacher to be enlightened and brilliant.

I think we could do a lot better here, by giving teachers more
responsibility and control over what they teach.  We also have more
ways to enrich the classroom with teachings originating elsewhere.
Really, the true teacher is within each student.  In a real community,
teaching is a shared responsibility anyway.

> Teachers come on a bell-shaped curve, and probably only the very tail are
> capable of the sort of independent curriculum you crave. Who will educate the
> rest of our children? Your last sentence makes it sound like there is some
> vast conspiracy to make sure that our education system sucks. I find that
> hypothesis hard to swallow.

I don't.  There's a lot of collusion of this kind "I won't call you on
your BS if you won't call me on mine".  There's also this tendency to
overspecialize, to surrender any commitment to comprehensivism.  The
result:  mass "de-geniusing" of young people, as they're infused with
a sense of apathy and hopelessness in the face of an apparently
deteriorating world (at least that's what happens to a *lot* of 'em --
and yet we still call it "education").

> I see lots of problems in education, but I see very little evidence that these
> problems are the result of any "hive mind" nomenclatura, whatever that is. Of
> course, I don't have your philosophical background. I'm just a small cog in
> the repressive system trying my best to teach the students I see with the
> meager skills I can muster. I happen to think well-written textbooks are one
> of the very best tools at my disposal.

Good luck getting permission to use your well-written textbooks.  In
K-12, it's not your decision which books to use.  Python will not be
mentioned, take that as a given (probably no Euclid's Algorithm
either).  Learning math has nothing whatever to do with writing
computer programs, your over-specialized "experts" have seen to that.

> I suppose in your world that makes me
> hopelessly old-fashioned, hive-minded, and ineffective. I suppose some of my
> students would agree...

I think you have way more academic freedom than the rank and file
public school teacher, as does Wartburg vis-a-vis some Los Angeles
high school.

If high schools were more like small colleges, in terms of teacher
freedoms, I'd be a lot happier.

> Just my 2 cents. My apologies to Guido and the rest of you for the lack of
> Python content in this post.

Thanks for your feedback.  I managed to mention Python once anyway.

Kirby