Reflections based on the video “Education is broken”

Chris Lehmann seems to be very enthusiastic about his ideas, but he shows at the beginning of his video many signs of pessimism. Industrial food? Repetitive schedule? Stuff you will never need?

I teach Mathematics in a school where food is good and healthy and schedule changes all the time (we had a special ski day yesterday).

I do not agree with his idea that box and whisker plot diagrams are not useful in life. As you probably know a box and whisker plot is a very useful way of graphically describing complicated numerical data using only 5 numbers: the smallest observation (minimum), the lower quartile, the median, the upper quartile and the largest observation (maximum). This obviously helps students understand statistics, which is, in my opinion, very useful in life.

Health insurance companies use statistics to sell us their policies, travel agencies their trips, advertising agencies their products and even politicians use statistics to sell us their proposals. Not being able to understand statistics in the 21^st century is worse than not being able to read in the 19^th. By teaching statistics to our students we are helping them be better citizens of the world.

He was also quite pessimistic with regards on how education has developed. I feel like he describes in his video how teaching used to be. But most teachers I know are much more advanced than that.

I agree with him that for our students what matters is the present and not quite the future, but it is our role also as teachers to show how our actions today can make a difference in the future.

Often in Mathematics we learn to solve problems that are not relevant to student’s present needs, but they are very present in their future lives. I cannot possibly see how improving our students’ problem solving skills could not benefit them.

I also agree that often students do not understand the value of doing homework and only do it to get better grades and put more effort when they have good rapport with their teacher. This is one of the reasons why creating a good rapport with students is so important.

Finally, I agree that self-assessment and peer to peer review do have a positive benefit in our students’ learning and I encourage other teachers to use it. I have created a system in which students create videos showing how to solve Mathematics problems and publish them online to help their peers who help them back when reviewing their work.