Therefore is my second year of teaching I was awesome and have been going steadily downhill since. Or the tests are suspect and they mean crap.

http://schools.khanacademy.org/post/59054029309/oakland-unity-from-20th-percentile-to-99th-percentile

Here is the link to the free e-book:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EP4XBJE/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00EP4XBJE&linkCode=as2&tag=khanacad-20

You may say the increase in test scores is an artifact of California’s state tests–do they only test shallow learning? (I don’t know, never seen them). But a result that strong isn’t nothing, and at a minimum, it points to the possibility that KA may actually help motivate students.

Then the question becomes, do you accept that form of motivation, in which students want to learn so they can get things right, raise their grades, and earn badges? Or do you think that kind of motivation is not valuable in comparison to the motivation that leads students to be persistent in puzzling over a challenging problem they’ve never seen before.

If one thinks of a course (in college or otherwise) as a ranger-led hike, there is an assumption that the students share a similar level of stamina, powers of observation, and fluency of vocabulary. Any student who is lacking in one of these will quickly find the hike boring or exhausting or both.

Much as “drill-and-kill” is unfashionable, I believe that part of the purpose of practice (in math or other subjects) is to develop the stamina, skills of observation (of patterns) and fluency of vocabulary. I am not saying the practice has to be solely outside the school, or without a teacher/ranger/guide.