Mr. Marc Prensky once wrote a famous article titled “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants I & II”. He claims that today’s students are no longer the people our education system was designed for. These students have spent their entire lives surrounded by computers, digital music players, video cameras, smartphones, and various other tools of the digital age. Our students today are therefore all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games, and the Internet.
Digital native students work in a multitasking environment where they do homework, eat, watch TV, and send text messages simultaneously. On the other hand, digital immigrants ‘speak in different accents’ when they print an email to read or a document to edit instead of just editing it on the computer.
This difference leads to our first difficulty facing students today: students and instructors speak different ‘languages’. Most students prefer to know the answer immediately when solving math problems rather than wait several weeks or even months for the instructor to correct and record the results, return them to the students, and explain the correct answers with an answer key. Days of waiting for results dampen a student’s motivation. There was once a college professor who wrote a letter three times to the principal of a high school to request that the math teacher return the test to his daughter to review at home, but was repeatedly denied. Today’s students expect an educational program that offers instant solutions to questions, a personal learning map, digital tracking capabilities, and assessment to determine strengths and weaknesses that will prepare them to better manage the learning process and be more effective while having fun.
The second difficulty facing students today is the knowledge and qualifications of the instructors. An article titled “Teacher Says Teachers Need Better Math” was published in Maclean’s magazine in September 2011. The article mentions two college math professors who spent two hours understanding the division-decimal method taught by local high school teachers to teach their own children who are in grade 7. They were frustrated, the article recalls. Today’s students deserve a better quality education so that they are well equipped to face the toughest competitive environment of tomorrow.
The third difficulty is the reformed program of the Quebec Ministry of Education for secondary schools. The reform requires students to learn more advanced subjects in high school compared to high school. For example, a few years ago, none of the high schools taught logarithmic functions. Any science student would know that the logarithmic function and the exponent function are like twins. One cannot learn the exponent function without learning or knowing about the logarithmic function. This biased education has frustrated many responsible math teachers. Today, math teachers teach these two subjects even in third grade. In addition, problem solving questions of a few lines have been replaced by two to five pages of situational problems.
There was a Montreal high school principal who told one of our advanced math students that none of the high school teachers were capable of teaching him any more. The student was then encouraged to form a math club for other constructivists to learn on their own or to get help from other tutoring centers.
These three external factors, as well as personal learning motivation, family history, and internal factors, have contributed to the learning difficulties faced by today’s students. There are many assessment tools available, such as a happiness or depression index to see if one is happy or depressed. As for math, I will develop a math fear index to diagnose a person’s fear level of math so we can find solutions to deal with it. As the saying goes, “Finding the reason for a problem is half the way to the solution.”
Therefore, to be a good learner, a student needs a quality educational system that incorporates quality instructors, comprehensive and interactive curricula, and an environment that promotes self-motivation to learn while having fun. These combined aspects are what I call the ICE learning method.
“Digital natives, digital immigrants I and II” can be read at http://www.ciberliteratura.com/profiles/blogs/digital-natives-digital
“Professor Says Teachers Need Better Math” can be read at http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2011/09/16/winnipeg-prof-says-teachers-need-better-math/
