I'm in the airport (again) returning from the Math/Science Conference in Juneau. It pretty much could have been anywhere though, since, besides walking to and from the hotel to the high school, I didn't get out at all. I arrived on Wednesday night and left tonight, Friday.
I ran into many, many familiar faces, some from Haines and some from other places around the state, including Anchorage, Kenai and Lower Yukon. Two notable keynote speakers were Ken Wesson, who spoke on brain development and Constance Kamii, a septagenarian who spoke on acquisition of thinking skills.
Dr. Wesson's premise is that teachers should know about the brain. He said that education is the most complex job- compare it to brain surgery. Surgeons only operate on one person at a time whereas teachers must work on up to 30 brains at a time. Surgeons' patients are anesthesized! Surgeons have a whole support crew and teachers work alone. Interesting! His website has some boring looking articles with good information based on brain research.
Constance Kamii challenges that the only way to teach kids to think is to make them think all day long about everything. She talked about hierarchical thinking- keeping in mind 2 concepts at once and referring back and forth. Her examples were place value and elapsed time. In place value, kids generally think of tens as a row of ones instead of a discrete value. If they are hierarchical thinkers, they can jump right from the tens to the ones to manipulate two or more digit numbers. In elapsed time, they juggle hours and minutes. She looks disparagingly at texts, NCTM and standardized curriculum that discourage thinking by mandating rote and algorithm.
Downtown Juneau
A highlight of the conference was a fun dinner at Lori's. Samantha, Leslie, Joan, Bob and I ate pasta and salad at Lori's house on Douglas, overlooking the strait. We told stories, reminisced and hassled the Alaska Teacher of the Year. Good time had by all.
Home again, home again, lickety split.
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