Week 3 Readings - Derek Grimes

This week's reading was a really good review for me. I really tried to relate some of the material to my classroom today. I do not teach in an online environment (yet) but rather in a traditional classroom. The three metaphors of learning were interesting to me. As much as I would love to say that I spend most of my time on knowledge construction, fact of the matter is I don't. Most of my time is spent in the response strengthening area. I teach math, which is a little different than most subjects. What I have found is that my students basically do not come prepared. Instead of learning the basics for what I am teaching, they have learned concepts that will not help them in my class. This coupled with the tremendous amount of material we are required to cover makes getting beyond this metaphor is tough. Anyone else have that issue?

Secondly, I was reminded of how we, as educators, must not fall into a rut, but constantly be refining our teaching in the classroom. Managing the limited cognitive resources during learning was a great section for me to read. I think, at least for me, I do a lot of this subconsciously. I basically leave out any irrelevant information. However, I think my lessons would be much better and more efficient if I took the time to consciously eliminate extraneous processing and focused on the generative processing. From my experience, when the teacher can get to this point, the students are actually more responsive. It's just getting to that point that is tough for me.

Finally,I thought the section on statistics was interesting. I must say that, as a math teacher, I was very disappointed in how poorly this section was written. The math was not explained well at all. Also, I can not say that in my 7 years of teaching that I have ever given an exam that had a 10 point standard deviation. I just don't think that is possible. Students range (even from advanced honors to general classes) from highly motivated and wanting to do well to totally disconnected from their educational experience. The numbers here are good for theory but I don't think they are practical at all. Just my opinion.