Week One Reading Reflection

This chapter really struck a chord with me.  For a long time now I have dreamed of working in, or starting, a school which is geared towards improving the quality of education our students receive.  Schools today seem to be caught in an old world mentality and all efforts to break free seem to agitate the system more.  Schools have become so dependent on test scores as a measuring tool of student, and teacher, success; but as Best Practices High School also experienced, drop out rates are not improving, why?  This is something that I want to really investigate and see what measures are being taken to change this trend.  I also like the list on page 13 and 14 of what the national curriculum standards call for from each classroom, more specifically the ideas of cognitive, constructivist, and challenging.  

The Second to None component of 'creating curricular paths to success' seems to be right down the same philosophical path that Best Practices High School takes with students.  Both rely on the idea of higher-order thinking where students are challenged at a higher cognitive level, creating stronger understanding of material.  I must admit, although I agree with the concept of interdisciplinary instruction, I am still trying to find how it works with the subject of mathematics.  I have been trained in a traditional class setting in regards to mathematics, and to break from it seems to be difficult.  I can see that the future math class looks very different from what we see today; in fact I would say we still haven't seen what that class will look like.  All our classes have great ideas for all other subjects, or so it seems, but when it comes to math all our courses seem to draw a blank on suggestions.