Chapter 9

I love the concept of an educational system that adapts to a student's personal style much like amazons recommendations for each buyer. With the number of students I have each year it would be very difficult for me to take on this kind of personalizing myself. It would be interesting if we had some sort of software that would help make recommendations for each child. Treating each student as an individual is as far as I think I will get with this particular idea.

I also enjoyed reading about video games being given more creedence. I think that math could be taught some in a level based game. Especially, while learning multiplication tables or other topics that are enhanced with memorization. I liked what was said about people come back to what they have invested in, and wonder what I can do to help my students feel that buy in with my class.

I do disagree with one statement that was made which is that in your classroom the answers should always be close by. Perhaps I am misunderstanding what the author intended by this statement but I firmly believe that if I want to see really creative solutions from my students I need to give them problems they haven't seen before. I do not give these kind of problems on tests to measure their understanding, but as warm ups to see how much they can do.

Another point that was made that struck me was that teachers are too busy doing what they are already doing to change to meet the needs of our changing students. I agree, and the thought of changing much of what I am doing is frightening. I do think that teachers should be willing to make baby steps. I am not going to transform my classroom into a fancy 2.0 classroom overnight, in fact, probably not even in a year. However, I am going to make a few changes this year, then next year and keep changing until eventually I will be doing a lot more than I am now.