Math teacher here, I've got a question for you guys:

Math teacher here, I've got a question for you guys:
Schools are pushing to integrate chromebooks/ipads into classrooms, but I feel these are completely wasted on math. What I want to do is teach students to actually use computers in a more mathematical and substantive way through teaching programming. I organize my math classes as being more of a workshop where students have multiple options to get points for the week by completing various activities of their choosing. One of the activities I want to introduce next semester is to allow interested students to use python to program stuff like algorithms for solving certain sorts of math problems, or use it organize and analyze data, etc...

What's the cheapest way to offer this to students who don't have a computer of their own and want to work on this stuff at home? I thought about scavenging craigslist for old laptops and stuff I could wipe and load mint or ubuntu onto, but I don't think administration/parents would feel comfortable with me offering the students old mystery-origin laptops. Another thought I had was to get pic related, but the students would still need a mouse, keyboard, and monitor. Any ideas?

Other urls found in this thread:

sagemath.org/)--It's
gregorybard.com/Sage.html
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Programming without a keyboard is dumb. Just my $.02

PythonAnywhere website and have them program at the library?

get off your fucking ass and teach them how to use long division you fucking idiot

what a dumb idea

Use your school's computer lab

giving students hardware just to do math is a meme

>but the students would still need a mouse, keyboard, and monitor. Any ideas?

That's a pretty good idea.

What a dumb way to divide numbers.

looky into something like these:
h t t p:/ / microbit .org /
like the pi,
you can of course probably find something cheaper straight from glorious ch'i n'a

but buying into a community supported project isn't a terrible idea, i guess.

so cheap chinese peripherals are a good bet. you can get a wait on postage at times, but often its free. hell i've paid $2 for a thing and had free post...
you could get cheap second hand gear. best bet to avoid ending up with ps/2 shit would be to try ex-lease. if you've got a big retail/wholesaler nearby, they might even be talked into some sort of sponsor-donation type arrangement.


good on you you kiddyfiddler.
>don't get caught.

I wasn't going to give it to them, just offer it to them as a potentially subsidized purchase, which is why I was trying to keeps costs low.

Programming is math, you dummy. Or at least it utilizes the same type of thinking.
Many schools don't have explicit computer classes anymore because it's cheaper just to have chromebooks and push around little chromebook carts around. They're not learning any real computer skills besides end-user garbage like what chromebooks and ipads offer. Which is why I'm trying to teach them some actual computer knowledge/skills.

Interesting. Never heard of these before. Bookmarked.

I used excel (progressing to matlab for more complex problems) a lot for my masters in mech. engineering and it was the most enjoyable thing I have ever gone with practical application of maths.

advanced dynamics and 1D fluid dynamics with iterative steps and matrices for basic FEA

More complex analysis which is normally done in Matlab or Ansys could technically be done in Excel with macros. In engineering excel is widely used and having a high level of competence helps a hell of a lot and could get your students to view maths in a more practical way but also allow them to experiment with formula and toy with how each function impacts the result instantly.
Open office should have the same functionality or at least most of it and Octave is a free version of Matlab.

>we can't get a budget increase if we don't use up all of last years budget
literally the only reason these stupid fucking memes are being pushed into the classroom

The pi foundation will actually give you a bunch of free boards and accessories if you're an educational institution. Might be a viable option. the only think you would need to supply in a mouse/keyboard.

Here's how the best math teacher I ever had, taught math:

1. Lecture
2. Examples
3. Practice + Homework [Teacher examines student work and answers questions]

If you were good on what was covered, you'd be finished the homework assignments in-class.

When multiple modules are covered, homework would be done at the end of class and practice would be done between modules.

I wish my other classes actually worked like this. Instead it's Ching Wong with barely legible english reading powerpoint slides for 3 hours and then assigning homework. No time for questions, very few examples.

The worst part is that as a teacher you get shit on from the faculty for not wanting to use them. I always try to explain that kids understand how to *use* computers and ipads and that it's a huge waste of resources. They don't care because they're all just retarded old ladies who have been doing this for far too long and think that ipads are complicated.

Didn't know that. I'm going to look into seeing what they can do for me.

Excel is great, definitely. Only problem is I won't be able to get volume licensing for Windows since only things that come through school IT is allowed to use their licensing.

Similar to how I run my class. Lectures for first part of class. Open workshop after to do classwork/homework. My whole approach revolves around giving them different ways to practice everything. Some students like doing a few easy problems to get the basic gist and then working on just a few much more difficult problems. Others like to do nothing but a bunch of easier problems, and so on.

Blow it out your ass.

Nu-teacher fags like yourself need to go fuck themselves.Countless bright young people are put off a subject for years just because their teacher wanted to be "creative" instead of simply fucking teaching the material. I speak from first-hand experience.

Homework, black-board, attention. Formula's been followed for centuries and it works (at least for the students who'll have any use of it working). Programming is not math, tech-stuff is not math, and by having them do that instead you'll waste time and put the ones actually interested in math off it.

>What's the cheapest way to offer this to students who don't have a computer of their own and want to work on this stuff at home?

You want to sell them computers?

Except the way you describe is how math is currently taught and it's not fucking working. The U.S. has one of the lowest math scores for a developed country anywhere. That approach only works well for smart kids and I'm not teaching just smart kids. Educational research shows student-centered approaches garner better understanding across the board by giving students options to choose how they want to approach learning a subject.

also,
>Countless
>I speak from first-hand experience
you sound like a legitimate idiot.

A lot of them don't have one

>A lot of them don't have one
I should mention that I work in a pretty poverty-stricken area. All the schools around here are title I schools.
Also, I don't necessarily want to sell them to the students. My end goal is to get a state education grant to get a good amount of actual computers into my classroom (not chromebooks/ipads) and allow the student to purchase them if they wish to keep. I shouldn't have to tell you computers are invaluable tools and the students who don't know how to really use one are going to be left behind.

I shouldn't have to tell you that this isn't your fucking job if your are a teacher.

Niggers don't need computers. They already have phones and tablets. Even the poorest of the poor on welfare can still somehow afford iPhones while I'd never buy such trash.

His job is to teach and educate the people of tomorrow. If he wants to spend money to educate the kids better then praise him. Don't call him a retard.

This is why teachers should be getting paid more. The less shit teachers there are, the better our future is. I went to two public schools that were filled with 60 kids in a class so teachers couldn't help 1 on 1 or to stay on a subject too long just for a small portion of the class for the kids who needed a longer explanation. I was among those kids and I got not help because teachers couldn't afford to care. I ended up going to a continuation school with only 20 kids max per class and I was able to get the help I needed and it the closer connection to the teacher inspired me to actually want to graduate and finish. I can appreciate teachers like OP.

pic related

>I shouldn't have to tell you computers are invaluable tools and the students who don't know how to really use one are going to be left behind.

just how old are you op?

when i was in high school in the late 90's early 2000's all we were taught about computers was typing with the home row and the basics of ms office. yet we are probably the most advanced users of computers despite being taught jack shit about them.

if people want to be computer as fuck they will learn to be computer, if they don't they'll just spend time fucking stacy instead. it's just that simple.

He must be too old

>if people want to be computer as fuck they will learn to be computer
One of the problems is that there are a lot of poor families and gangs and shit around where I teach, and most kids don't have a computer of their own, and many families don't have a computer at all. When I've made assignments that had online portions I've had multiple students come up and say they don't have a computer at their house. So many of these kids don't even really have an opportunity to become super computer literate, and they're just being shown ipads and chromebooks as their first real introduction to computers (thanks to technology grants being fucking squandered by idiot 50+ year old female administration)

Pen and paper

>What I want to do is teach students to actually use computers in a more mathematical and substantive way through teaching programming.

I was a math teacher for ten years, OP, and I felt the same way. Unfortunately my students always hated the computers even more than the math--they viewed it as an unnecessary complication to an already complicated subject.

Anyway there's some great math-centric tools out there that would work fine with a chromebook or ipad if you have any kind of decent bandwidth (if your school has solved the dozens-of-computers-connecting-to-the-same-wifi-access-point problem).

* SAGEMath (sagemath.org/)--It's like Mathematica or Maple, but based on Python and open-source. It's uses a client-server architecture with a web front-end so you could put a SAGE server on a raspberri pi in the classroom and have your students connect to it (you'd probably need some kind of beefy router though) with their chromebooks/ipads. There's also a freemium cloud-based option (cocalc.com) that can do real-time collaboration similar to google docs. I think they might even have developed some course-management software on top of it. There's also a great free book covering how to use sage math: gregorybard.com/Sage.html

* Desmos.com -- A really great html5 graphing calculator that runs in the browser, even offline. It's well-designed enough that it could work on a laptop, tablet, or smartphone equally well. It can do everything a TI-86 can do and more--it's really great at parameterizing a graph to see how different parts of a function effect the shape of a graph. I always told my (adult, community college) students not to bother with graphing calculators and just bring desmos up on their smartphones.

* Any spreadsheet software -- don't underestimate the mathematical value of a spreadsheet program (e.g. ms excel or google sheets). You can smuggle in a lot of algebraic thinking by getting students to compose formulas & graphs

>The U.S. has one of the lowest math scores for a developed country anywhere

The U.S. has one of the highest black rate in a developed country. White students outperform everywhere else.

Well then I guess I'm interested in trying to teach black students to succeed in math

just give up, thats pretty much impossible.
just do what every other teacher does and just give them a passing grade so they become someone elses problem next year.

>Unfortunately my students always hated the computers even more than the math--they viewed it as an unnecessary complication to an already complicated subject.

that's a little disheartening to hear.
Those other resources are very interesting though that I hadn't heard of. Thanks.

This, teach who actually has a shot to improve the world.

Just give them a Chromebook and their paper, maybe Matlab online with chrome

Kill yourselves

Spending a couple years trying to teach black (priviledged, Mitchelville MD with involved parents) kids algebra is a big part of why I'm now Sup Forums

I know you're probably used to being a virtuous progressive good white that thinks all the correct things and holds all the correct opinions, but if you're not a complete moron the evidence in front of you will mount day by day until you're forced to conclude that intelligence isn't identically distributed among every phenotype.

newb decteted. Wait until you have kids talk to you as an adult that you taught in 8th grade. You can try to lead them, but remember you have a responsibility to help the kids that will do something with their life.

>intelligence isn't identically distributed among every phenotype

I don't think it is, but HS algebra/geometry/precalc is not at all that difficult and is within reach of literally everyone unless they have a literal severe mental retardation.

>is within reach of literally everyone
simple math isn't within the reach of everyone. Abstract thought is not a right.

>t. "im not good at math"
hit the books bitch

...

>sleepy tiem

>but HS algebra/geometry/precalc is not at all that difficult and is within reach of literally everyone unless they have a literal severe mental retardation.

Haha, when did you graduate? Are you gearing up for your first semester in the classroom?

I'm this guy from earlier. I've taught everything from black middleschoolers to white boomers and even engineers. I've taught everything from whole-number addition to diff eq's.

You will find that even fractions are completely out of reach to at least 40% of the population--good luck with rational functions or trigonometry!

There's probably less than 15% of the population that is capable of the abstract thinking required for something like "use this graph of a function's first and second derivatives to locate its zeros."

I tried to tutor the GED program at a local drug rehab residence place because why not and my brief experience supports what you are saying completely.
It was a rough realization and made me feel even further separated from my fellow countrymen and lower my opinion of everyone I walk by on the street.
It was something I'm still not sure if I regret or not.
Can you try to imagine going through life trapped in a mind like that?

Chinese raspberry pi clone, and a cable so you can connect them to the TV. Or buy laptop LCDs and a driver chip, not very expensive either. If they have phones you could probably set something up too, either locally or over SSH to some VM.

Maybe you are not very good at teaching? In my experience you can get even the stupidest kid to understand algebra if you are patient and commited enough to find a way through his convoluted mind.

>You will find that even fractions are completely out of reach to at least 40% of the population--good luck with rational functions or trigonometry!

I don't believe this for a second. Strip it down to the axioms and construct it piece by piece if you have to, but math is not as hard as everyone makes it out to be. Other countries have absurdly high math competency in comparison to the U.S., and there's no reason why people in the U.S. would be just innately stupider.
An important set of experiences that lead me to my view is that I got to observe so many math teachers during my credential program, during my in-school observations hours, and during student teaching and I think the fault lies with very much with mathematics instructors. I've only seen maybe, I dunno, 10% of math teachers provide adequate instruction and I always wanted to step in to clarify. Of all the math teachers I've met and observed, perhaps 1 in 5 were math majors. The rest were teaching outside of their field. I met a lot of humanities, history, and music majors teaching math. That's the problem. Students in the U.S. aren't inherently stupider. Teaching math is what's actually hard, and almost none of the teachers are math majors.

[spoiler]which is why I was offered an $18000 grant to become a math teacher since I did so well during my math undergrad.[/spoiler]

That's a good idea. Don't know much about chinese off-brand markets. Any suggestions?

I even got out the blocks to explain fractions to the 30 and 40 year olds. The fucking blocks user.
It didn't work.

Speaking of schools, it makes me think. Can't we lower the cost of computers for schools if we just had a server with an ryzen and ran a bunch of VMs? Rpis can be used as thin clients.

Upgrades and maintenance only bed to be done back end, and who cares if a kid breaks a cheap rpi.

I hope you're not OP, this kind of mindset is why even upper year university students these days can't do polynomial long division and it kills them in certain fields.

Then you clearly used an approach that wasn't working... Jesus, how do they teach teachers in your country?

Or maybe some people are just so damn retarded, they refuse to learn?

How do you not understand fractions? Doesn't everyone know how coins work? Quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies. Surely even idiots know how to buy things.

The most well known ones are Banana Pi and Orange Pi. You can buy them from aliexpress or ebay. Shipping is a few weeks, worst case a month. There's a general, about buying stuff from China. I think the cheapest one is about $10.
The CPU isn't the expensive part. Keyboard, screen, all that costs a lot. Since they're mostly using laptops, it doesn't come out any cheaper. And what you save is easily offset by the servers, the network hardware, and so on.

OP here. I actually have a quad-xeon hp proliant server in my garage doing nothing super important. I could go through IT and see if they'd be willing to let me set it up on our network and do that. Interesting idea. Thanks.

It wasn't me. Long division is more of a 4th-7th grade concept, and I wish I had the opportunity to teach it. I wish I could teach the student's first introduction to fractions. One of the hardest part of teaching math is breaking retarded habits imbued by elementary school teachers who self-profess to hate math themselves. They always end up teaching the stupidest ways of thinking about things and it makes it so hard to build on mathematical knowledge when students are only learning topical applications to solving the specific kinds problems on state tests. Trust me, it's infuriating.

I'm not a teacher. I just volunteered to help with a free ged program at a drug rehab.

Really if you can find a way to make pic related not work it would be impressive

No, they don't. That's what I'm trying to get across to I tried the currency explanation, I THE BLOCKS out, it just didn't work. I'm not saying they couldn't figure out how to work with the fractions, it's that they were unable to understand what the fuck a fraction is. They being 3 adults.

If you say "they refuse to learn", you are saying they can learn. If you are a teacher it is your job to make them want to learn. I know thats hard, but if you want an easy job you shouldn't teach.

My God, user. You are in for a rude awakening if you think you can get a 90 i.q. student to understand polynomials--to say nothing of transcendental functions--if you *just explain it better*

>When the teacher pulled down the projector screen and everybody gets excited but then she pulls out this thing.

>I'm not a teacher. I just volunteered to help with a free ged program at a drug rehab.

Oh shit nigger what are you doing.

How old are these students?

Trying to make where I live a better place?
Trying to improve my country?
Not falling into bad habits over an extended period of time with out obligations?
Mostly the third one

Some people aren't visual and can't or don't think of fractions as physical objects. One way to teach fractions differently is to take a more rigorous approach as opposed to an intuitive approach. The field Q is completely comprised of axioms from lower-level rings (i.e., the integers) and so you can teach proper fundamental manipulation of fractions through axiomatic handling of the divisor operator on integers. Almost everybody understands integers, and there are only a finite number of adjustments that need to be made to how operations work between the ints and Q. If you can do that, then you "get" fractions.

Polynomials are nothing and I've never had any serious difficulty teaching them.
The discussion of transcendental numbers begins and ends with pi for the most part in high school. (Or e if they get into calculus). It's not hard to convey the idea that pi is not algebraic. What's that mean? It means you can't take an ordinary number and perform a finite number of algebraic operations on it(addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, exponentiation, etc...) and arrive at pi. Show that you can do a finite number of steps to move between any two ordinary numbers (i.e., up to an including non-transcendental irrationals), but you'll never be able to do so to get to pi.

Why? You'll have to take real analysis in college to get an answer to that question.

There are way better things to do than trying to educate a bunch of niggers.

You are only getting into trouble.

Read a book
Learn Languages
Start a hand skill like machining or carpenty.

Something that wont get you stabbed over stepping on some niggers stolen jordans

>People having problems with fractions

whatever man

Haha, well it sounds like you've got all the answers then. Good luck user. If nothing else I'm glad it sounds like you've spent more time in real math courses than bullshit cargo cult education courses.

(p.s. transcendental *functions* aren't the same as transcendental numbers)

>(p.s. transcendental *functions* aren't the same as transcendental numbers)
woops, misread that.
But yes, I am glad I got a real education on this stuff. I'm right with you on calling them "cult education courses". I don't even want to get into the shit I heard while getting my credential.

tl;dr the whole bread
OP, is there a nonprofit in your state like computers for Kids? Millions of Core2duo era and similar machines are being scrapped or recycled every year, despite still being perfectly usable.

Get the Chromebooks and have them program in that. Wipe and install Ubuntu if needed. Done have them program math stuff, they'll be twice as uninterested.

It is wasted on math. Because you should be teaching children how to do math, not how to use computers to do math for them.

Chromebooks are being adopted in education because they are very cheap and very secure. That said, math teachers should just be teaching math, not programming.

Teaching every fuck programming is the worst meme right now

OP you really have a bug up your arse about women don't you?

You shouldn't get kids some Chinese clone with shitty support.

>teacher here

fuck off pedophile

I hope your school has some sort of IT person (or team there). Maybe ask them about the idea of you purchasing some second hand computers and would they be willing to confirm the computers are acceptable for students to use?
That's my first thought.

My second thought is you could just get second hand monitors and buy cheap raspberry pis or something and convince the school it's a way of teaching the kids programming.

The fuck is a teacher doing on Sup Forums
You wont learn anything here because its all shills anyway

Hey OP, cant really help with the topic but im one of those inner city kids. Thanks for trying to teach us - i would have been dead by now if it wasn't for someone like you - i'm alive and work as a sys admin. I'm also an arch user

What community college do you work at where you can just alter your entire subject and curriculum based on what you read on the internet last night?
>I teach my class as a workshop where students can choose various activities to get week points
Yeah you do whatever you want in your little playpen, luckily no school would subsidize mandatory hardware for a rent-a-room lecture anyways

This 100%

Chrome OS has a web based terminal built in accessing the underlying gentoo system, you shouldnt have a hard time installing vim and gcc / other dev tools (python already seems to exist but dont teach kids that) with portage.

What in tarnation

You're literally the nu-wave shitheads that are the reason education doesn't work
You do realize that it's incredibly easy to teach math without some ba tier "art of teaching" needing to make you feel confident enough to speak

Get a bunch of used T420 thinkpads off Ebay and buy new keyboards/wristpads/trackpads/small SSDs with them. They'll probably run about 300-400 each and after replacing all that shit they'll basically be new and they'll last forever.

Kids don't care for your technofetishtry, they want touch screens not clunky fisherprice looking lumps of plastic.

Fuck kids.

>implying current math teaching doesn't suck

"Learn these simple steps by heart and don't even try to think" that's an almost verbatim quote from my high school math teacher

That's why he got into teachering

Not gonna lie, Sup Forums was the first place I've seen a thinkpad mentioned since I I used my dads' hand me down ones as a kid

In case the thread wasn't obvious enough yet, this is a really stupid idea.

Programming is about defining procedures, instructions for a computer to do. It doesn't have anything to do with math inherently. Trying to teach math in a gimmicky way like this will actually set your students back, as now they would need to learn two things at once: math, as well as programming.

Programming should be left to its own course. Don't try to use programming as a gimmick for something else.

Do you know what logic is?
Logic isn't an expressional art, it's defined and self-constructive, you wanna be confident in functions then you learn functions until it's so deeply ingrained you can think about in 40 different ways confidently, you don't want to do that then tough titties maybe they deserve a class where there's no wrong answers
But I'm assuming you're teaching mandatory primary school garbage to at-risk fucks who have no intention of ever attempting to give a shit
>yo what's calkooluss

What in the fuck are you babbling about?

t. someone who has never tried teaching math to black kids

No clue what this fag0t is saying

>"remember these specific functions by heart"
>specific functions get remembered by heart
>no optional knowledge
>no weekly good boy points
Wow the state of education today is disgusting

>One way to teach fractions differently is to take a more rigorous approach as opposed to an intuitive approach. The field Q is completely comprised of axioms from lower-level rings (i.e., the integers) and so you can teach proper fundamental manipulation of fractions through axiomatic handling of the divisor operator on integers. Almost everybody understands integers, and there are only a finite number of adjustments that need to be made to how operations work between the ints and Q. If you can do that, then you "get" fractions.
I have an M.S. Eng and minored in math and I have no idea what you typed right there.

>specific functions get remembered by heart
and then forgotten a week later because there's no actual understanding.

Any teacher as self absorbed as op gets the reference

This. Was this a trollpost?

I think polynomial long division is the only reason we actually still teach people long division...