Mr. Marc Prensky once wrote a famous article entitled “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants I & II”. He notes that today’s students are no longer the people our education system was designed to teach. 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 text at the same time. On the other hand, digital immigrants “speak with different accents” when they print out an email to read or a document to edit, rather than simply editing it on the computer.
This difference leads to our first difficulty facing students today – learners and teachers speak different “languages”. Most learners prefer to know the answer immediately when solving math problems rather than waiting several weeks or even months for the teacher to correct and record the results, return them to the students, and explain the correct answers with an answer key . Waiting days for results reduces a learner’s motivation. There was a college professor who wrote a letter to the principal of a junior high school three times, asking the math teacher to return the exam paper to his daughter to check at home, but was repeatedly refused. Today’s learners expect an educational program that offers instant solutions to questions, a personal learning map, digital follow-up opportunities, and an assessment to identify strengths and weaknesses that prepare them to be better at learning and be more effective while having fun .
The second difficulty that students face nowadays is the knowledge and qualifications of the instructors. An article entitled “Prof says teachers need better math” was published in Maclean’s magazine in September 2011. The article mentions two university math professors who spend two hours understanding the decimal division method taught by local high school teachers to teach their own seventh-grade children. They were frustrated, the article recalls. Today’s learners deserve a higher quality education in order to be well prepared for the tougher competition of the future.
The third difficulty is the Québec Department of Education’s reformed program for secondary schools. The Reformation required students to learn more advanced subjects in junior high compared to senior high. For example, a few years ago none of the high schools taught logarithmic functions. Any science major would know that the logarithmic function and the exponential function are like twins. One cannot learn the exponent function without learning or knowing the logarithm function. This partial training has frustrated many responsible mathematics teachers. Nowadays mathematics teachers even teach these two subjects in the third secondary school. In addition, problem-solving questions of a few lines have been replaced with 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 able to teach him anymore. The student was then encouraged to start a math club for other Constructivists to study on their own or get help from other tutoring centers.
These three external factors, along with personal motivation to learn, family background, and internal factors, have contributed to the learning difficulties faced by today’s students. There are many assessment tools such as B. a happiness or depression index to see if you are happy or depressed. As for math, I’m going to develop a math anxiety index to diagnose the level of a person’s anxiety about math so we can find solutions to deal with it. As the saying goes, “Finding the cause of a problem is half the way to the solution.”
Therefore, to be a good learner, a student needs a quality education system that includes quality teachers, complete and interactive curriculum, and an environment that encourages self-motivation to learn while having fun. I call these combined aspects the ICE learning method.
«Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants I &II» can be read at http://www.ciberliteratura.com/profiles/blogs/digital-natives-digital
“Prof says teachers need better math” can be read below
Thanks to Amos Tsay | #Learning #Difficulties #Faced #Students #Today
