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We have to answer the question of what we are teaching so we can then think about how to get our students to do that learning. For most of us, that means returning to the curriculum standards and being crystal clear about what we are supposed to teach, not what we might have been taught, not what we’ve always taught, not what looks cool or interesting. What are the implications of this for us as educators decades after my father was in school? I think it all comes back to doing some deep thinking about our goals. With a new method, namely typed text via computer, he achieved the goal of communication. What made it a success was when the goal was clarified to be communication and the means were left up to my father to choose. If the goal of the education my father received was to make him capable of communicating via hand-written text, it was a failure.

If the goal of the education my father received was to make him capable of writing by hand, it was a failure. To this day, I remember laughing aloud when reading him gloating about the fact that the speed limit out West was posted as “reasonable and prudent,” which my father and brother interpreted to mean “How fast can we make this rental car go?” while on a college trip. I still remember the shock of getting emails from my father–lengthy, detailed correspondence where his distinctive voice and sense of humor came through clearly. When I went to live in Ecuador in my early 20’s, I got my first email address. When I was in middle school, and my father was in his mid-30’s, we started using a personal computer at home for school and work. I would also argue, then, that those lessons were a complete failure. I would argue that the goal should have been for him to be able to communicate his ideas. Which brings me to a question: what was the actual goal of whatever lessons in handwriting my dad sat through? Despite those social and academic expectations, he did not learn how to communicate via handwritten text. There was a typewriter in my grandparents’ house, one that I played with for hours when I visited, and I imagine my father started using that as soon as he could, but he grew up in an era when writing by hand, and writing in cursive, was mandatory and was expected as the norm. My father is 66 years old, so it’s a pretty safe bet that he was expected to write by hand as a child, young adult, and well into his early 20’s. Over the years, he has simply ceased to write by hand, to the point where my mother writes the messages on birthday cards and other gifts, while my father scribbles a “Love, Dad” in the corner once she has determined the location designated for his chicken scratches.

#Chicken math paper full#

He has minuscule handwriting which is cramped, full of incomplete formation of letters, and really just impossible to decipher. My father is notorious in my family for what we refer to as his chicken-scratching.

You can follow her on Facebook at and on Twitter at. As Tracy Beckerman’s main column is shifting focus - her kids are grown and she has moved back to the city - we are rerunning her earlier work for readers who may have missed these the first time around.

This is a repeated Lost in Suburbia column, which has appeared in GateHouse Media newspapers since 2008. “Apparently, dyscalculia is also inherited.” There was silence on the other side of the phone. “Well, when you have dyscalculia, you have trouble with numbers and math concepts which is why I always thought that a rhombus was a kind of Spanish dance.” “I finally figured out that the reason I have always been so bad at math! I have something called dyscalculia, which is like math dyslexia.” “I am dyscalculic!” I was so excited about this realization that I immediately picked up the phone to tell my mom. According to the study, anything with numbers can cause people with dyscalculia to have anxiety and even panic. It said that people with dyscalculia have a normal intelligence but struggle with even simple math concepts. Then one day as I was reading the newspaper online, I saw an article about something called Dyscalculia. I sat up quickly and yelled, “barbequed chicken!” Is it any wonder I have been math-challenged ever since? Oddly enough, though, I am still a big fan of barbequed chicken. Unfortunately, I had fallen asleep on my mat on the floor and I woke up with a start when I heard my name.

#Chicken math paper plus#

When I was little I had a teacher who asked me what 2 plus 2 equals. I thought that maybe it had something to do with being math-traumatized as a young child.