> Sound familiar to anyone? Absolutely! Yeah, the average HS student just wants to be told what to do. So this has been very tricky - how to get the kids to use something like Sage/Python as a way to explore ideas on their own when all they really want is to be told exactly what steps to follow to guarantee an A.
But I can report that I was very pleased with my FST students today. I told them we were going to expand our idea of a function. Instead of the traditional schoolish notion that a function consumes a single number and spits out some other number, instead we were going to create functions that consumed lists and created new lists from them. So, for example, write a function that will return a list of the reciprocals of the values in list L. Now write a function, harmonic(n), that will return the nth harmonic number making use of the previous reciprocal function. Yeah, I had to ask just the right questions, and it was a lot of work, but wow, they were getting it! They could see the connections. There are some kids in there who have always hated math and thought they couldn't do it but who are starting to light up with this. So this was encouraging. We didn't do this in a lab - just a classroom dialog with Sage as the blackboard, but tomorrow we have the lab. On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 9:16 AM, Chris Seberino <cseber...@gmail.com> wrote: > I tried an experiment where new math topics are introduced by having > students independently work through Sage notebooks. > > Rather than me pushing info to the students in a dialog, they were > supposed to ask me questions when they got stuck on something in the > Sage notebook. > > It seems that high students aren't aggressive/assertive enough to ask > questions and independently do Sage notebooks themselves. Due to > their shyness, they seem to prefer the old style where a teacher > dominates the class time by leading a discussion on a new topic. > > Some may say I should persevere until the students "snap out" of their > old passive way of doing things. If I was sure this was the silver > bullet of math teaching, I would be confident enough to fight this > battle. I'm not sure this is the holy grail yet. > > Sound familiar to anyone? > > Chris > > > -- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "sage-edu" group. > To post to this group, send email to sage-...@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > sage-edu+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com<sage-edu%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu?hl=en. > > > -- "Computer science is the new mathematics." -- Dr. Christos Papadimitriou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-edu+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu?hl=en.
