Willingham on interdisciplinary work

. . . Gee retells (via Jonah Lehrer) the story of a building at MIT that housed professors from a wide variety of disciplines, with a concomitant flowering of intellectual cross-fertilization. Gee quotes (with approval, I guess) Lehrer: “The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself.”

As an academic who has been doing interdisciplinary work for 20 years, I would counter: “Like hell it does.”

Virtually every school of education is housed in a building with people trained in different disciplines, and interdisciplinary work remain rare. For reasons I won’t get into here (and much to the despair of university administrators) interdisciplinary work is hard.

Book Review: Theory and Practice
7/1/2013

The tragedy of histogeomegraph continues

In the news today: another botched attempt at interdisciplinarity in our public schools:

ALBANY — High school is full of hypotheticals, like “How does one solve for x?” and “What happens if I skip class?” But this week, students at Albany High School were given an alarming thought puzzle: How do I convince my teacher that I think Jews are evil?

[snip]

“Your essay must be five paragraphs long, with an introduction, three body paragraphs containing your strongest arguments, and a conclusion,” the assignment read. “You do not have a choice in your position: you must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!”

[snip]

Dr. Vanden Wyngaard, who met with Jewish leaders in Albany and made a public apology on Friday, said the assignment was apparently an attempt to link the English class with a history lesson on the Holocaust. The assignment itself seems to back up that theory, telling students to use “what you’ve learned in history class.” It also suggests using “any experiences you have.”

It echoed another recent, controversial assignment in Manhattan, where an elementary school class was given math problems featuring the whipping and killing of slaves, according to The Associated Press. That assignment was an effort to combine math and social studies lessons.

Students Told to Take Viewpoint of the Nazis
By JESSE McKINLEY
Published: April 12, 2013

I always thought the problem with teaching all subjects as one was that the results would be superficial and pointless. Like histogeomegraph.

It's always worse than you think.

More slave math

Watching local news tonight.

Today's story: parents being interviewed about a new slave math scandal in school.

The mom who is head of School Council, trying to go easy on the teachers involved, said she thinks it's a very good idea to bring "social studies" into math.

Which reminded me of Histogeomegraph and the tragedy of content isolation. And of the middle school model. And of my own middle school, back when they were bringing in the middle school model here.

With the middle school model, we parents were told, wondrous connections amongst the disciplines would be made:

• In math class, the teacher could point out that Pythagorus was a Greek 
• In English class, the teacher could point out that the father in The Miracle Worker was a patriarchal male who is ashamed of his handicapped child
• In science class, the teacher would take POINTS OFF!!!! for misspelling

The problem with "bringing social studies into math" is that a person who has spent a great deal of time and energy learning math has not spent a comparable amount of time and energy learning "social studies." So the social studies that gets 'brought in" is superficial (Pythagorus was a Greek), wrong ("ashamed of his handicapped child"), obnoxious (POINTS OFF!!!),^* or, in the case of slave math, upsetting and weird.

From 1999, here's Nancy Granstrom:

During our eldest daughter's eighth-grade year in junior high school, I wrote a letter to the editors of the local newspaper praising the education in our school district. The teachers were highly knowledgeable, dedicated individuals, who imparted their expertise so well, and did an exceptional job of preparing students for high school. I was convinced that the Community Consolidated School District 21 in Wheeling, Illinois had cornered the market on how to truly deliver a quality education. Two years later, however, it was welcome to Jack London Middle School for our second daughter.

Our daughter had not been looking forward to all the spelling, vocabulary, history, pre-algebra, and reading of the classics she had seen her older sister do. It turned out that she did not need to worry because little of that took place at her middle school. The explanatory pamphlet from the district stated that middle school theory includes: "Integrated thematic instruction, cooperative learning, problem-based learning, multiple teaching styles, flexible block scheduling, and authentic assessment."

Under this system all teachers taught all subjects, even if they were not qualified to do so. The philosophy was and is that they should be able to teach anything. The reality is they have to, because the majority of the classes are extremely integrated.

A Parent Criticizes "Middle School Theory"
by Nancy L. Granstrom

Funny thing here in my district: we had two years of strife over the middle school model, then they brought in the middle school model, and then...nothing.

Nobody ever heard a word about it again, and except for some scheduling changes, things seemed to be pretty much business as usual.

Two or three years later, they brought in Lucy Calkins' reading workshop.

__________________________________________________________

^* I say "obnoxious" because the school was not teaching spelling at all. C.'s spelling was so bad that I had purchased a spelling curriculum I was using at home, and now, in the name of the middle school model, we were being told that the only help our kids would receive in the spelling department would come in the form of a cranky science teacher, nearing retirement, punishing the kids into better spelling by taking POINTS OFF!!! (That's what we always called it, back in the day: POINTS OFF!!!)

I wish now I'd kept a journal of those years. Ed attended that meeting....

Oh, wait! It's coming back to me.

Ed of course was strenuously lobbying against adoption of the "middle school model," and was playing a prominent and vocal role in the parent meeting convened to educate us in the nature of the coming changes. So when the science teacher said her contribution to Subject Integration was going to be taking POINTS OFF!!! Ed said forcefully & without a trace of irony, as if the POINTS OFF!!! plan explained everything (which it did), "That's very helpful to know. The science teacher will integrate English and science by docking points on science tests for spelling errors. That's the kind of information we need."

He told me later the science teacher glared at him.

Really, the best parents can hope for is to get these people's goat every once in a while.

Worst charter school in New York City

Ross Global Academy's interdisciplinary curriculum is taught through an integrated approach that connects all disciplines through a cultural history core. The following outlines the cultural history spiral at the center of the RGACS curriculum. The curriculum is aligned to New York State standards and is designed to prepare students for entrance into a four-year college
Curriculum
Ross Global Academy

Teach the disciplines.

And, from the department of greatest hits: histogeomegraph: preventing the tragedy of content isolation

Let's not and say we did, part 2

Ditch the daily lesson plan

If you think about the “real world” that we’re preparing kids for, how often is the “real world” day broken up into science moments, math moments, writing moments, etc?

I don't know about you, but for me the "real world" day gets broken up into science moments, math moments, writing moments, etc. any time I happen to be doing science, math, writing, and 'etc' all on the same day.

Say I'm studying math for the SAT.

I just study math. Without any science or writing at all. (Also, if I can find a decent worksheet, I do a worksheet.)

Or say I'm writing a book proposal or an article for the local paper.

I just write!

I don't do any math or science to speak of, unless I happen to be writing about math or science. And even then, I don't do math or science. Writing about math or science isn't the same thing as doing math or science.

...science moments, math moments, writing moments, etc? We engage all of these things at all times.

No we don't.

Also, it’s not like integrated units are anything innovative…

True.

Kids don’t need a six-week unit on mastering quotation marks; they need to learn to master the quotation marks piece in the screenplay they write collaboratively about the people of Iceland solving problems around a catastrophic tectonic event that includes the gathering and analysis of quantitative data.

oh, man

Speaking as a person who is finishing up a semester teaching English composition to college freshmen, I would have a very hard time convincing my students that what they really need isn't to learn when and where to use a comma but to write collaboratively about the people of Iceland solving problems around a catastrophic tectonic event that includes the gathering and analysis of quantitative data.

I'd get some stony looks on that one.

Real stony.

let's not and say we did
let's not and say we did, part 2
let's not and say we did, part 3

comp lit

High Tech High again:

The students, almost all African American, more than 80 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, came with skill levels all over the map; a majority read at a 5th-grade level or below. Used to worksheets, paper-and-pencil tests, and being asked to regurgitate information, many weren’t prepared to take control of their own learning. Some thrived on the project-based, interdisciplinary, and technology-rich model, and were finally able to connect to the purpose of school; others simply found it bewildering.

High School 2.0
By Dale Mezzacappa
Education Next

Last I checked, Education Next was a center-right, pro-standards, pro-accountability, pro-knowledge journal sympathetic to the arguments of E.D. Hirsch. And here we've got Ed Next excerpting a book passage that takes as a given the wrongheadedness of everything E.D. Hirsch stands for.

This is what you call your discourse speaking through the subject. Foucault was right.^*

Joanne Jacobs has a post.


critical thinking challenge

How much "information" is a high school student who reads at a 5th grade level able to "regurgitate?"


^* Either that, or the entire universe of edu-writing is being funded by Bill Gates.

next time, try Core Knowledge
Battling the Progressives
what do parents want? Sweden's "Knowledge schools"
comments on Knowledge Schools
project learning in Holland

6th (actually 7th) grade holiday math project: Just Because I Care About You

A Just - Because - I - Care - About - You MATH PROJECT!

You have been given $2,000 to buy gifts for ten different people in your life. You must decide who you want to give a gift to, what you want to buy them, and why you want to buy them this particular item. You must find a picture of this item with the price. Every item you select has a discount. You must find the discount for each item, calculate how much you will save, and how much the item will finally cost you.

Each student must complete a booklet consisting of 13 pages
Page one is your title page. This must include your name, and title of this project.

Pages 2 - 11 will display:
* A picture of a gift
* The original price
* The discount
* The final price with calculated sales tax ***
* Your math work
* Who the gift is for and why you chose this item for this person

Page 12 will show the price you spent for each item, how much money you spent all together, and how much you have left.
On page 13 you will donate the remaining money to a charity of your choice and explain why you chose this charity.

DISCOUNTS
20% off all major appliances (refrigerator, washer)
...
50% off all jewelry and clothing

***Please remember, there is a 8% sales tax on everything but clothing.

...Your project will be judged on creativity, accuracy, and neatness.

Sample

[Picture of Lamp]

A lamp for my friend Nancy.
My close friend, Nancy, just got married. At the Craft Show last month, she admired a lamp which bears a resemblance to this one. She said it was the perfect lamp for her foyer. I could not pass it up.

[Various calculations]

[Final price]

The best of hands-on, real-world, interdisciplinary, multi-media learning

From In Memoriam: William R. Bennett Jr., Laser Inventor and Collector of Data, in this past week's Yale Bulletin:

Over his 38 years at Yale, Bennett carried out research in diverse fields ranging from atomic physics to computer science and acoustics...

Many of the approaches Bennett used to collect data for his projects provided much amusement to his students and colleagues. For one project, he rented a truck and filled it with equipment and a mattress and, together with his wife and dog, set out to measure the "Fifth Force" at a site where a large body of water changed height rapidly. The site he chose was the locks on the Snake River in Washington, which gave him special dispensation to camp there with his truck for the summer.

He was also frequently seen at various sites around the Yale campus collecting data for his popular course on "The Computer as a Research Tool." For this course he was named one of the 10 best professors at Yale for many years in a row. His lectures in that course were multi-media events and included demonstrations of firestorms, removal of warts by laser, calculations of how long it would take monkeys sitting at the typewriter to produce phrases recognized from great works of literature, and comparisons of the sound waveforms of the French horn and the garden hose.

One time the professor was spotted dressed in scuba gear and pushing scales and other gadgets at the bottom of the Yale swimming pool, measuring drag coefficients.

...He used his expertise in physics and sound to make calculations on how to decrease the noise levels in the Yale dining halls and used those successfully to improve the ability to converse and to enjoy chamber music concerts there. He also measured magnetic fields around campus and around New Haven. With the magnetic field data, he showed that it was improbable that those fields could cause cancer.

(Cross-posted at Out in Left Field).

focus, rigor, coherence

What's Missing from Math Standards?
by William H. Schmidt
American Educator, Spring 2008

Why do some countries, like Singapore, Korea, and the Czech Republic, do so much better than the United States in math? I've heard all sorts of reasons; diversity and poverty top the list. But after some 15 years conducting international research, I am convinced that it's the diversity and poverty of U.S. math standards—not the diversity and poverty of U.S. students—that are to blame.

The single most important result of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is that we now know that student performance is directly related to the nature of the curricular expectations. I do not mean the instructional practices. I mean the nature of what it is that children are to learn within schools. (In the U.S., the curricular expectations are usually referred to as standards; in other countries they are known by various names.) ...

The TIMSS research has revealed that there are three aspects of math expectations, or standards, that are really important: focus, rigor, and coherence. ...

Focus is the most straightforward. Standards need to focus on a small enough number of topics so that teachers can spend months, not days, on them. I'll just give you one illustration: in the early grades, top-achieving countries usually cover about four to six topics related to basic numeracy, measurement, and arithmetic operations. That's all. In contrast, in the U.S., state and district standards, as well as textbooks, often cram 20 topics into the first and second grades. That's much more than any child could possibly absorb.

Rigor is also pretty straightforward—and we don't have enough of it. For example, in the middle grades, the rest of the world is teaching algebra and geometry. The U.S. is still, for most children, teaching arithmetic. It's not rocket science: other countries outperform us in the middle and upper grades because their curricular expectations are so much more demanding, so much more rigorous.

Coherence is not quite as easy to grasp, but I believe it is the most important element. Coherent standards follow the structure of the discipline being taught. All school subject matter derives from some academic discipline, be it geography, history, mathematics, physics, etc. Once that formal academic body of knowledge has been parsed out and sequenced from kindergarten through 12th grade, it should reflect the internal logic of the discipline. This is especially important in mathematics, which is very hierarchical. Topics in math really need to flow in a certain logical sequence in order to have coherent instruction. If you look at the math curricula of top-achieving countries, you see a very logical sequence (which I describe in the sidebar on the right). The more advanced topics are not covered in the early grades. Now, that seems obvious—until you look at state and district standards in the U.S. Everything is covered everywhere. Far from coherent, typical math standards in the U.S. often appear arbitrary, like a laundry list of topics.

Thematic teaching cannot reflect the internal logic of the liberal arts disciplines.

Histogeomegraph is not a discipine.

Histogeomegraph is a mash-up.

trouble in paradise

uh-oh

Remember the mom who wrote about her 5th grade daughter entering KIPP?

Now she's going to meetings, emailing the Board, and finding teachers weeping in bathrooms:

Thanks for all your support on my ongoing KIPP struggle. The struggle continues, really nothing new to report, other than there are now 12 of 18 teachers who will not be coming back next year. I'm waiting for one of the Board members to get back in town and hopefully respond to some of my concerns. Reading your comments definitely helps me keep my determination to keep fighting. Thank you.

So I went tonight to the KIPP meeting after all. I wasn't going to go. I was going to give myself the night off. I was going to spend the time with my Riley, while Sylvia's still away on her field trip. We were going to have a quiet evening at home.

Wouldn't you know, Riley said she wanted to go. My 7-year-old daughter wanted to spend her evening in a Board meeting. I've corrupted my child!

So we went. I did learn some things. But, unfortunately, not many of them were encouraging. I'm Chicken Little. I'm screaming at the top of my lungs that the sky is falling, and while they listen (and don't laugh), I don't feel like they hear me.

I just made one more effort, one more attempt. I wrote a 1,240-word email. And somehow that's not enough. Once that was done, all I wanted to do was blog. No wonder my 7-year-old is corrupted; I'm seriously disturbed.

I haven't eaten dinner these last 2 nights. I've been in meetings, and when I get home, my appetite has been thoroughly drained. I'm tired, but I can't sleep.

Tonight, I'm having some wine to go w/ my whine. I may have to qualify this as a BUI post.

So here's my main concern. Because screw it, I'm putting it out there.

I have no confidence in the woman who has been hired to replace our Principal. I don't feel like she gives a crap about our concerns. She's treated the teachers poorly. As of tonight, 2 of them still don't know if they have a job next year! As of tonight, 9 out of 18 teachers will not be returning next year. After tomorrow, that number could rise to 10. I personally know only 2 teachers that are returning next year, and only one of them will be my daughter's. I think.

I don't know what the changes will be in the curriculum. I've heard that some subjects will be combined, but when my daughter's in school for nearly 10 hours a day, I don't see the need. Nor do I know what she will be doing in the times she used to take certain classes.

I don't like the sound of some subjects will be combined.

That is a directive straight from the BLOB.

The edu-world's blind faith in wholeism really is something. Here's a typical Statement of Core Belief:

We decided to create a unit plan on ocean animals for many reasons. One reason is the fact that children could have a lot of fun learning this information. It is a topic that sparks a child’s interest and makes them want to learn more. Children need to learn more about ocean life and how that ocean life relates to us. Because the loss of life in the ocean can and will affect everyone in the world it is important for the children to have a general understanding of the life that lives in the ocean, even if they do not live near the ocean.

In addition, this theme is being taught in many schools today and we felt that it was important for us as future teachers to understand that there are many subjects that could be taught using this general theme. The ideas using this theme are endless. Teachers should understand that children will feel that what they learn is important if it is relevant. Teaching subjects in isolation leaves the children feeling disconnected and bored with learning in general. Learning by using themes is a way to add some creativity and enjoyment to learning subjects. Students need to be actively learning and doing in order to grasp the concepts involved. These hands on activities will get the students involved and thinking critically about animals on land as well as those who live in the ocean.

Needless to say, this is not what is typically meant by "coherence." This teacher's Thematic Unit on Ocean Animals springs out of nowhere. It doesn't follow logically from what has come before, nor does it lead logically to what will come after. It simply appears, full-blown, sprung from the brain of Zeus.

Behold, children!

A thematic unit on ocean animals!

We have the universities to thank for this, I think. They got caught up in an interdisciplinary quest a while back, leading to the proliferation of programs ending in the word "Studies." Cultural studies was pretty much the apotheosis of interdisciplinarity, and we know how that turned out.

Interdisciplinarity at the college level is now a selling point in college promotion materials, and continues to have its adherents. (warning: If Robert Sternberg has his way, the middle school model will be coming to a college near you).

There are any number of problems with interdisciplinarity, all of which, for our purposes, can probably be boiled down to the observation that interdisciplinarity doesn't work:

For nearly a decade, I regularly start the semester by asking students in my upper-level interdisciplinary general studies seminar what distinguishes the sciences, social sciences, and humanities from one another. ... [F]ew can offer more than vague ideas of how they differ. Most can identify disciplines that typically fall under the sciences; the majority can situate psychology and sociology in the social sciences, but further categorization of disciplines eludes many of them, as do other distinctions about these areas of the liberal arts such as hallmark methodologies and primary objects of study.

Having significant exposure to disciplines in the liberal arts in conjunction with a primary area of study is a distinctive feature of higher education in the United States. Every spring and fall for at least four years, students throughout the country have to consider fulfilling general education requirements in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. But, for many, maybe most, their general education courses are blank slots to be filled by brief conscripted voyages into less familiar disciplinary waters. They graduate more well rounded, with more breadth of content, not just depth, but few leave with a conscious understanding of how scholarly inquiry is conducted outside of their major and how inquiry in the liberal arts illuminates timeless questions and pressing concerns of humankind. As undergraduates accept their diplomas and exit the stage, they leave with an inchoate awareness of what they have been a part of.

In teaching upper-level interdisciplinary general studies seminars I also have observed that my soon-to-be-graduates struggle mightily when they engage in scholarly thinking themselves. Specifically, they have difficulty forming an intellectual thesis that goes beyond the obvious and supporting it with scholarly evidence, a formidable task. When writing papers or giving presentations, the majority of students unwittingly inhabit the lower realms of epistemological taxonomies. To situate their position in terms of two well-established schemas of educational development, my students are generally more comfortable being asked to recall and comprehend knowledge, the first rungs in Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956), as opposed to being asked to apply, analyze, synthesize, or evaluate knowledge, the higher end of this taxonomy....

Fortunately, students are called upon to reach these upper realms of thought in their major discipline, perhaps many times but particularly in capstone courses, such as senior seminars. The challenge is to do likewise in a capstone general studies course, particularly when such a course is interdisciplinary. However, the extent to which undergraduates can engage in, not simply learn about, interdisciplinarity is uncertain. Some academics who contemplate pedagogical issues, including Howard Gardner, renowned Harvard professor of cognition and education, wonder whether students in undergraduate education have enough disciplinary knowledge to do genuine interdisciplinary thinking (2006, p. 73). In his recent book, Five Minds for the Future, Gardner considers:

"And what of genuine interdisciplinary thought? I consider it a relatively rare achievement, one that awaits mastery of at least the central components of two or more disciplines. In nearly all cases, such an achievement is unlikely before an individual has completed advanced studies" (p. 77).

"Interdisciplinary" courses in middle school aren't interdisciplinary.

Thematic teaching isn't interdisciplinary.

The only people who can actually do interdisciplinary projects -- let alone interdisciplinary teaching -- are people who are expert in more than one discipline, and there are about five people like that on the planet:

We have an enduring fantasy of a grand, unified theory of knowledge in which each discipline contributes building blocks to a seamless edifice. How can we know the ways we are unified if we don't talk to one another?

What we see in practice, however, when broad categories like the sciences, humanities, and social sciences are supposedly bridged, are a lot of courses on "Women and Health" or "Shakespeare and Art." Those are billed as interdisciplinary, and they are if you consider that an English professor who has some interest in visual arts is teaching the latter or a historian who has read about the history of medicine is teaching the former. But such courses aren't really interdisciplinary because both are taught by people trained in one discipline who are essentially amateurs in the other.

Can one person ever be a master of two trades? A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, but a lot of knowledge can be even more dangerous. Careering off in varying directions isn't what our current educational system is about. After all, it takes a lifetime to learn a single discipline. In English, for example, to be expert you have to read a vast body of literature over a long period of time. If a physicist decides to teach an interdisciplinary course on literature and cosmology, will she really be proficient in both fields? Or if I decide to venture into medicine or science, will I have the training of a scientist or a physician? Obviously not.

A Grand Unified Theory of Interdisciplinarity
by Lennard J. Davis
Chronicle of Higher Education
June 8, 2007

These voices will not be heard. Even Howard Gardner, a man who has now written an entire book arguing that K-12 schools should devote themselves to teaching the disciplines, not the interdisciplines, will not be heard.

nope

Instead, we'll be hearing from the likes of Tom Friedman and Daniel Pink:

Pink: Once again, it goes back to integration. Or what I’ve called symphony, which is the ability to fit the pieces together.

Friedman: Absolutely. My friend Rob Watson — a great environmentalist who founded the LEED building concept — Rob likes to say that integration is the new specialty. The generalist is really going to come back. The great generalist — someone who has a renaissance view of the world — is more likely to spark an innovation than the pure engineer.

Pink: Let’s take this to the people who are reading this interview — school superintendents and administrators. Right now we frog-march kids from math to science to English — and too rarely make the connections among the disciplines. In your travels have you seen any examples of a smarter approach?

Friedman: I’ll give you one of my favorite examples: Rainforest Math. There’s so much one can learn from the laws of nature — not just biology, but Einstein, Newton, physics. And you drive both environmentalism and you drive math. So it’s those kinds of intersections that are going to produce the most innovative students.

Pink: So how do we bring that into the system? There’s team teaching, integrating the arts into the curriculum, writing across subject areas. What else?

Friedman: I think you’ve got to force it a little like Georgia Tech did and say: “You are going to study computing, and you are going to study screenwriting.” Then the assignment in the class is: Write an online play with what you’ve learned.

Pink: That makes sense. Instruction in the subject matter areas, but then leave the execution to the students. And give them a fair amount of autonomy along the way.

Friedman: Right. The assignment can be: “Mash these two together.”

Pink: And these kids get mash-ups.

Friedman: Oh, they get mash-ups. They do it naturally. And today, he who mashes best will mash most and be wealthiest.

Pink: Which country is the best masher on the planet?

Friedman: Oh, we are still. It’s not even close.

Tom Friedman on Education in the 'Flat world'
The School Administrator
February 2008

Tom and I see eye to eye on that one. When it comes to mashing up the liberal arts disciplines, American public schools lead the parade.

Congressman Miller comes up with a plan to subvert historical thinking through interdisciplinary teaching

Barry attended the House Committee on Education and Labor hearing on the National Mathematics Advisory Committee report on May 21, 2008.

Not much to cheer about, it seems. Math coaches, technology, interdisciplinary studies.... and Project Lead the Way:

Another crowd pleasing testimony came from Dr. Wanda Talley Staggers, Dean of Manufacturing and Engineering, Anderson School District Five, Anderson, South Carolina. She is involved in a program called "Project Lead the Way™". Pardon my cynicism but it's hard for me to not notice the trademark symbol after the title. This program provides pre-engineering type classes in middle and high school that can only be taught by teachers who have been certified by this trademarked program trains such teachers, and testified that "After six years of training high school teachers during the Project Lead The Way™ Summer Training Institutes across the nation, I have heard overwhelmingly from teachers that they come away from the experience with a rejuvenated interest in teaching."

Maybe so, but the key is whether the students in Project-Lead-the Way™ courses will learn any math or simply be entertained.The program is based on the premise that students don't take a lot of math because it's too removed from the real world.The solution? Hands-on project-based courses that involve the students.In order to take such classes, however, they must be enrolled in regular math classes—thus a carrot and stick approach. The program has not been field-tested or validated, and is too young to have data showing whether this strategy is likely to work.Plus problem-based learning, tends to be rather discovery-heavy despite teachers' best and stated intentions that they use a "balanced" approach—the type of balance where someone's finger is on the scale.

Chairman Miller (D-CA) saw the value of this type of program and made a leap from math connecting to applications of math, to math connecting with everything.He rhapsodized about a school he saw in Oregon that became a math academy through an interdisciplinary approach.All courses were interrelated—students had to understand the mathematics of history: distances between cities, depth of the oceans.

I ran that one by Ed, a person who is, by profession, an actual historian as opposed to a Congressman. Paraphrasing: Ed says that measuring the distance between cities in a history course defeats the purpose of history because throughout most of history distance is relative to technology. For example, the distance from Marseilles to Alexandria is 1500 miles; the distance between Marseilles and Paris is 400 miles. But in the ancient world in the Middle Ages, Marseilles was for all intents and purposes much closer to Alexandria because of the ease of shipping in the Mediterranean and also because, culturally, until fairly recently the Mediterranean ports had more in common with each other than Marseilles did with Paris. Marseilles wasn't integrated into the French kingdom until the late Middle Ages. There were no decent roads from the Mediterranean parts of France to Paris. It was an incredibly arduous trip. But it was relatively easy to get from Marseilles to Egypt. The Mediterranean Sea was protected from storms and bad weather, and it was fairly rare for a ship to be lost at sea in the Mediterranean.

Or take the words, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume."

It took 6 months for these words to travel from the center of Africa to the nearest telegraph station. From there, it was only a matter of hours until these words had traveled to all parts of the world linked by telegraph.

To have students in a history course "calculate" the physical distance between cities is to willfully have students overlook the cultural and technological factors that make distance meaningful. It's not just a waste of time, it undermines and subverts historical thinking; It is the opposite of historical thinking. It is harmful.

Howard Gardner on the liberal arts disciplines

JB: How you educate everybody?

GARDNER: I want people at the end of their education to understand the world in ways that they couldn't have understood it before their education. In speaking of the world I mean the physical world, the biological world, the social world ÷ their own world, their personal world as well as the broader social and cultural terrain. I believe that these are questions that every human being is interested in from a very young age. They're questions which kids ask all the time: who am I, where do I come from, what's this made out of, what's going to happen to me, why do people fight, why do they hate? Is there a higher power?

[snip]

These are also the questions that historically have been looked at in religion, philosophy, science. While it's great for people to ask these questions on their own, and to make use of their own experience, it's crazy for people not to take advantage of the other attempts to answer those questions over the millennia. And the disciplines represent to me the most concerted efforts to provide answers to those questions. History tells us where we come from. Biology talks about what it means to be alive. Physics talks about the world of objects, alive or not.

It's important to emphasize the role of disciplines when you're talking about precollegiate education. Some people think the disciplines are irrelevant, and some people think all the interesting work is interdisciplinary so you can kind of jump right into that. I reject both of these claims. Disciplines are what separates us from the barbarians; I don't think you can do interdisciplinary work unless you've done disciplinary work.

A Talk with Howard Gardner

You'll notice that while ed schools everywhere teach Gardner's unsupported theory of multiple intelligences, one hears nary a word about Gardner's belief that high schools should teach the liberal arts disciplines.

extra credit: Interdisciplinary teaming empowers teacher!

histogeomegraph: preventing the tragedy of content isolation

from Minneapolis, Vicky S sends this poster session from the upcoming NAGC convention:

Presentation Title Histogeomegraph: Connecting History, Geometry, and Writing (listed under "National Presentations")

Presenters Betty K. Wood, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, AR; Abby Dragland, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, AR

Category/Topic Math & Science

Level of Session Intermediate

Date/Time 11/9/2007 2:45 PM - 3:45 PM

Location Minneapolis Convention Center - Lower Level

Description

Research shows that the use of interdisciplinary units in teaching skills is more effective than teaching skills in isolation. Eliminating content isolation helps students recognize the interconnectedness of subjects. Euler, Descartes, Escher, Pascal, Plato, Carroll, Dudeney, and Loyd are examples of ancient to contemporary individuals who made contributions to the study of mathematics. Discovering the history of the person, playing with their mathematics, and reporting the findings can be incorporated into exciting activities. The objective of this session is to make teachers comfortable with combining these elements into meaningful activities. They receive examples of activities from these historic personalities

Isn't it Dave Barry who always says you can't make this stuff up?

gifted