How Things Work - Doha Academy of Tertiary Studies

BOX 8.1. (cont.)
analysis and Synthesis 149
episode to several mathematics educators, and they were considerably
dismayed. My own analysis was that the students had learned more than
they had mislearned, that in no way had they been hurt.
What I saw them getting from the several math periods was the
sense of a science or engineering study. It required thinking about comparison,
about causation, and about measurement, e.g., representing
size and elasticity with numbers. They were supposed to learn something
about central tendency of a distribution, but they learned very
little. They may have mislearned something about the median, but since
they dealt with the concept of middleness so briefly, their miscalculation
probably was of little consequence. They had an experience of trying
to solve a problem, to do an experiment, to arrive at an answer to an
interesting question using their mathematical skills. It was not a demonstration.
They did the thinking. The teaching was not the success it
might have been, but it provided a sustained opportunity to carry out
an experiment.
With a succession of graduate students, I had been evaluating the
professional development activities of the Academy for 5 years. Each
year we prepared a report, indicating our observations of the staff work
and the work of participating teachers. I had visited Miss Grogan’s classroom
several times before this multiday math project. I did not expect
it to be a story that I would want to publish in detail, but I did and am
doing so again here.
The Academy trainers had encouraged teachers to do projects and
even to consider teaching about experiments. Somewhere they had
included a lesson for the teachers on action research and another on
indicators of central tendency. I did not follow up with questions to
Grogan as to how she had planned this project because I felt she was
embarrassed both by the theft of gum and by the error in calculating
the median.
I described a bit of the context here and in other descriptions of
Grogan’s professional activity: her participation in staff development
and admiration for the Academy, her Hispanic neighborhood, the features
of the school, including its hallway exhibits and its vigorous teaching
of the arts. I tried to think of how the context was influencing her