第一吃瓜网

I don t teach The children teach themselves I help them in the process doing German right now he says And that means writing A few rooms down the hall teacher Christine Mangel is sitting with students tutoring them in remedial maths Four girls with dyscalculia i e a weakness in arithmetic But Man gel knows how to reach them First they play some multiplication table games in teams of two versus two The girls are loving it they re doubled up with laughter Then Mangel hands out worksheets on long division Can you do this or is it too hard The girls hesitate One of them says It s too hard The teacher knows that German is Hanna s favorite subject she s very creative and writes excellent essays What is division exactly Mangel asks her What s this all about She is trying to figure out how Hanna thinks and how she approaches a maths problem What is division Tell a story about it How would you explain it to a little kid Step by step they get closer to the heart of the issue now Mangel knows how Hanna ap proaches maths problems and under stands her strategy There s no one size fits all strategy for every child luckily there are lots of different ways to do maths she says Is it OK if I finish the whole worksheet one of the girls asks at the end Where else would you find children with dyscalculia begging to finish a maths worksheet Mangel shrugs It s all a question of relation ships and motivation You ve got to measure up to society s expectations and to the parents expectations of course Mangel says And that s not always easy The neighbors kids are already learning fractions Why aren t you teaching that She hears that question often Or The curriculum says that the kids should already be able to count to 1 000 why can my child only count to 100 But what good would it do for a child to teach fractions if he or she still needs to learn the fundamentals Mangel asks During a break she sits with Wolfram Otto in the principal s office He s a wiry man with gray hair dressed in a track suit Together they dis cuss the next steps The two of them are jointly responsible for organizing grades five through eight she s a trained special needs teacher and he a high school teacher Of course you need a hook some form of content that seems worth learning Otto says But that wasn t always so obvious to him When he was studying to become a high school teacher educational research wasn t really an issue they touched on It wasn t until he graduat ed in the middle of a hiring freeze and ended up working as an educational consultant for the state sports associa tion that he encountered teaching methods where motivation and per sonalized learning played a central role In schools you often hear peo ple say that if a child doesn t know something it s because they didn t pay attention he says But really the question should be Why weren t you interested in that As an educator why wasn t I able to reach this child While some of his colleagues complain about the hard work of teaching in a way that meets everyone s needs Otto can t imagine teaching any other way these days This job is so fulfilling when you see that you re making a difference Once when he was teaching high school he decided to evaluate his teaching methods for his biology class He put together a multiple choice test on the material they had covered that school year It was sober ing to see how little of the material actually stuck with the kids And that was despite his activity oriented teach ing style From his perspective the problem was that all the children had to learn the same thing at the same time 17THE MAGAZINE 3 18

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