A friend shared with me another withering commentry on a one size fits all approach to ed tech, and how without careful curricular planning this can result in the loss of curiosity in the classroom. The piece is written by Alfie Kohn, an education commentator who I knew through his criticism of competition and reward based learning. His website points to a Time magazine article which describes him as “perhaps the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades and test scores.”

She went on to share a much brighter piece with me on How To Do Adaptive Learning Right, by an academic, Keith Devlin, and a Montessori educator, Randy Weiner, who both now work in ed tech. They talk lucidly about breaking down the symbolic barrier which math puts up, and how adaptive learning can transofrm each educational trajectory, but their focus on “Experience over Knowledge” ressonated the most. I have spent a lot of time recently trying to convince students (and colleagues) that math is can be an experimental science, where our experiments are mind games for small examples, coding allows us to access larger examples, and once we have built up our intuition for what is happening at a deeper level we can then attempt an absolute proof which handles all cases simultaneously. Devlin and Weiner connect with this idea through “Mathematics is primarily something you do, not something you know”.