Talk:Eugene Maier





Comment by David Moursund 1/28/08
I spend a lot of time learning new things. I tell my friends that this is necessary because my rate of forgetting has gotten so high. If I don't learn a lot of new things each day, I will be experiencing a serious overall decline in what I know.

It is easy to talk about wanting our students to be lifelong learners. It is the nature of the human brain that we are all lifelong learners—at least to the point when our brain begins to seriously deteriorate.

So, we need to be more specific. A teacher needs to learning new content and pedagogy on a day by day basis. It is not sufficient to go off to a workshop once or twice a year. Rather, what one needs to do is to develop learning habits that lead to important learning occurring every day.

If you are a math teacher, the set of short articles by Eugene Maier can provide you with many weeks worth of daily input and food for thought. You don't have to agree with each of his ideas. What you need to do is think about each idea and decide how it fits in with your current knowledge and skills in math content general pedagogy, and math pedagogy. If an idea lends itself to trying out in your teaching environment, try it out. Do some action research. Share the results with your colleagues.