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May 18, 2004
The scorching must-read thesis
Fascinating excerpts from my thesis (currently on page 65). I don't know about anyone else, but this is FASCINATING.
I will be wearing a funny costume and weird hat, grabbing a vellum paper with my name on June 3. I really can't even think about life past that moment.
The cycle of poverty has built up a negative perception towards education in my school, so convincing parents to buy basic scientific calculators is laughable. Bourdieu (1973) states “the negative predispositions towards the school which result in the self-elimination of most children from the most culturally disfavored classes and sections of a class—such a self-depreciation, devaluation of the school and its sanctions or a resigned attitude to failure and exclusion—must be understood as an anticipation, based upon unconscious estimation of objective probabilities of success possessed by the whole category, of the sanctions objectively reserved by the school for those classes or sections of a class deprived of cultural capital” (p.495). The parents weigh the options of spending fifteen dollars on food, or a cell phone, or television, and find the purchase of the calculator to be a waste of their investment. Through observation of their environment, their family, and their culture, they see that the educational capital is a wasted investment. They are resigned to the fact that they will remain poor and economically unfavored.
.....
Research shows that students can naturally develop highly complex ways of dealing with addition and multiplication. One fascinating study (Schliemann, 1998) of Brazilian street vendors demonstrated that minimally educated children developed their own internal commutative property in order to efficiently calculate numerical values, rather than skip counting. Research from Bolduc, Van de Walle, Paris, Fuys, Ball, and Cofield show that a systematic instructional sequence can help students not only memorize their multiplication tables, but more importantly, develop efficient methods of solving more difficult problems. There are criticisms of attempting to teach this mastery, namely that the students still don’t memorize the necessary facts, but I feel that having students develop their own strategies at basic math could help them solve larger, more difficult problems.
Posted by G at May 18, 2004 11:07 PM
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