Interview

This week I was asked to interview for a math position in the High school.  The interview was Friday.  As I began the meeting with the High School principal he asked me what my ideal role would be in the high school.  I expressed my interest in working with the faculty to incorporate effective technology into their lessons.  As our discussion continued he asked me a question that I had never thought about and it caught me off guard.  “How much of your curriculum is spend on information that students don’t need to retain? With all of the technology around our students today and how quickly they can access the information, how important is the retention of certain information?”  I think this is a wonderful question.  I began to think about the curriculum and how many equations and formulas I try to get the students to memorize and how much time I spend on getting them to practice them.  If I took that time and gave in to allow the students to “look it up” not in the book but using technology; I could focus more on teaching the students how to use the information and apply it to solve problems.  Would this not cut down on the amount of material and increase the time we could use to master the application of it.  I told him we would have to change a lot about the structure of education and make a lot of teachers uneasy.  Teachers like to teach the way they were taught, even if the students they are teaching are not going up in the same world.  Our conversation was wonderful and he shared several articles using Evernote that he has been collecting and some discussion he has been having with a few of the upper school faculty on the subject.  This was my first time using Evernote which seems like a really cool way to share information and articles.   This has gotten me extremely interested in the direction of our school.