Dan Grass Response to Teaching Math to People Who Hate Math.

This calls to question many different thoughts about Math. Why is math so widely disliked amongst students? It must be how it's taught. I can't imagine the fact that they are numbers not words to be the reason. I myself am a math hater. I don't really know why. I just always have been. Perhaps if the techniques used were more in line with that of history or literature. Where pictures and images dominated the curriculum as apposed to the current state where abstract numbers are the corner stone of learning. I like to think of this in relation to my own teacher. I as a music teacher, must teach scales. For every one of my students they hate they sharp keys. They do however love the flat keys. Why is this? They are both abstract ideas. One is not longer, or more difficult than the other. But yet, they still refuse to admit that they are less difficult. I would imagine it has everything to do with exposure. Maybe if we start exposing children to the harder ideals earlier than the easier we can reverse what is considered difficult. Would we then have a whole new set of problems?

Dan Grass Response to Peer-to-peer evaluation.

This article brings up a very interesting point for me. Peer evaluations are a dangerous subject. I worry that in a situation where you have many peers evaluating many different teachers, you lose the consistency that you need to have a successful evaluation system. Can you trust a system where a teacher evaluates one person but a completely different teacher evaluates the others? What happens when evaluations become a reason a teacher is unable to get a future job? Does that then fall back on the teacher who did the evaluating? It's important that if you do this style of evaluation that you really focus on the guided questions to lean the evaluation towards a successful method. On a positive note, as an administrator, this frees up time to be able to focus on other problems plaguing the school. I'd like to see research on what the success rates are of school assessment programs that are centered around the self evaluation.