OMG! It’s not a Parabola!

For this assignment in my current grad class (Learning Technology through Design) I’ve been asked to explore a problem that was solved by completely redefining the original problem. For some reason I struggled with finding an example for this project. Then, like a sack of bricks, it hit me. One of my favorite youtube channels is Vi Hart’s channel. In the video below she does everything from give math teachers a gut check to making beautiful math art. But the thing that stood out to me had to do with parabolas. She rants about how math teachers spend so much time on parabolas in class and all the different things you could be thinking about while your teachers drones on about them. During this rant she mentions that we often say that projectile motion is parabolic. While for the objects path that we see on earth it can be modeled by a parabola, since the earth is a sphere and gravity is pulling on the object the path is really a piece of an ellipse. Check out the diagrams I made for a visual. (And physics people go easy on me. These obviously aren’t to scale and are only to give a visual that might help solidify the point.)

Getting to the Heart of the Problem

For my current grad class (Learning Technology through Design) I’m working towards solutions for the problem of the lack of time in education. Over the last couple weeks I’ve spent some time trying to get at the root causes of the problem (you can see some of the techniques I used here). Below is a problem statement that lays out the main causes as well as possible pathways to solutions.

The problem I’m working to solve is that most educators, at all grade levels and subject areas, don’t feel like they have enough time and take hours and hours of work home each week. The root cause of this problem is that there is an outside pressure to increase the contact time teachers have with their students. The problem with this is that it is often done without increasing prep time or collaboration time for educators. In other words, higher expectations and more time commitments in the same time constraints they had before. Teachers need more time in the context of a school day to work on grading, planning, researching creative practices, and reflecting because many good teachers burn out and leave the field in the first five years of teaching. (Did I mention how many teachers are often taking grad classes on top of the normal demands of teaching?) The ones that don’t leave often sacrifice personal time and time with their families for their job.

Broadly speaking I think teaching should be viewed as a creative endeavor. Being creative, planning innovative lessons, and reflecting on those lessons takes time. This means that if we don’t find ways to give teachers time to do the things mentioned above they won’t have the space or motivation to create and it will result in poor learning outcomes for students.

The result of some of my research has lead me to believe that solutions to this problem will vary widely. Almost every teacher has a slightly different perspective or need and this means a menu of solutions should be developed. Some ideas I’m currently pursuing relate to educating the public on the demands educators face and their impact on students, how technology can help free up more time, and how major restructuring of the school day or year could reduce the day to day time pressure put on teachers.

Sniglets: Playing with Words

For my most recent mini-project in my current grad class (Learning Technology through Design) I was asked to come up with a few sniglets. You can read about them in great detail here, but essentially the idea is that you come up with a word for a moment or thing that doesn’t have one yet. Below are the three sniglets I came up with.

Instafasebake (In sta face bake) – adj. This is what happens when you open the preheated oven, bend down too soon to get something out or put something in, and your face gets blasted with a heat that is well over 300 degrees.