Mr. Marc Prensky once wrote a famous article titled “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants I and II”. He asserts that today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed for. 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 simultaneously. On the other hand, digital immigrants ‘speak in different accents’ when they print 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: students and instructors speak different ‘languages’. Most students prefer to know the answer immediately when solving math problems rather than waiting several weeks or even months for the instructor to correct and record the results, return them to the students, and explain the correct answers with an answer key. The days of waiting for results dampen a student’s motivation. There was once a college professor who wrote a letter three times to the principal of a high school requesting that the math teacher return the exam to his daughter to review at home, but was repeatedly denied. Today’s students expect an educational program that offers instant solutions to questions, a personal learning map, digital tracking capabilities, and assessment to determine strengths and weaknesses that will prepare them to better manage the learning process and be more effective while learning. they have fun
The second difficulty that students face today is the knowledge and qualifications of the instructors. An article titled “Professor Says Teachers Need Better Math” was published in Maclean’s magazine in September 2011. The article mentions two college math professors spending two hours to understand the decimal division method taught by high school teachers. premises to teach their own children. who are in grade 7. They were frustrated, remember the article. Today’s students deserve a better quality education to be well equipped to face the tougher competitive environment of tomorrow.
The third difficulty is the reformed program of the Quebec Ministry of Education for secondary schools. The reform requires students to learn more advanced subjects in high school compared to high school. For example, a few years ago, none of the high schools taught logarithmic functions. Any science student would know that the logarithmic function and the exponent function are like twins. One cannot learn the exponent function without learning or knowing about the logarithmic function. This biased education has frustrated many responsible math teachers. Today, math teachers teach these two subjects even in the third year of high school. In addition, the problem-solving questions of a few lines have been replaced by 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 capable of teaching him more. The student was then encouraged to form a math club for other constructivists to learn for themselves or to get help from other tutoring centers.
These three external factors, as well as personal learning motivation, family background, and internal factors, have all contributed to the learning difficulties faced by today’s students. There are many assessment tools available, such as a happiness or depression index to see if one is happy or depressed. As for math, I will develop a fear of math index to diagnose a person’s level of fear of math so that we can find solutions to address it. As the saying goes, “finding the reason for a problem is half the way to the solution.”
Therefore, to be a successful learner, a student needs a quality educational system that incorporates quality instructors, comprehensive and interactive curricula, and an environment that promotes self-motivation to learn while having fun. These aspects combined are what I call the ICE learning method.
“Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants I and II” can be read at http://www.ciberliteratura.com/profiles/blogs/digital-natives-digital
“Prof Says Teachers Need Better Math” can be read at http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2011/09/16/winnipeg-prof-says-teachers-need-better-math/
