Objectives

I am often struck by how different the structure of the curriculum is from what is typically in the schools.  At our teachers’ workshop in Ottawa in August there were many comments that the stories were certainly interesting, but they were also challenging—for both students and teachers.  However it was the kind of challenge we all needed. 

Of course most students already find math hard enough, but the challenge of RabbitMath is of a different kind.  And what I’m thinking is that a different kind of challenge requires a different set of objectives. 

The past few decades have been focused on objectives that were principally technical.  Increasingly it was found that student’s technical proficiency was poor, and so the technical component of the curriculum was ramped up and so was the amount of testing.  Guess what?––there was no significant improvement.  So more ramping up and (surprise surprise) still no real improvement. 

Now I certainly value technical proficiency, but the effect of focusing simply on that led to a curriculum that was, in a word, fragmentary. The stories were fragments. Oh there were stories alright, but question 13 is about Shreya’s bank account and question 14 is about rides in an amusement park, and 15 is about renting a car.  It’s like an English curriculum where the novels are all just a paragraph long. There’s really no “experience,” no sustained narrative thread. 

In the end, even more important than the fact that so many students have low technical proficiency, is the fact that when they get to university or even to their career, they can’t handle sophisticated narratives.  They live in a fragmented world.

That’s the objective we want to focus on—being able to work with whole complex structures.  Technical skill must follow organically from that. 

- Peter Taylor