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The California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) tests skills in arithmetic, pre-algebra, and Algebra I. This project addresses the Algebra I standards only.
The CD contains an introduction and 22 "whiteboard video" lessons keyed by standard. (Some standards are broken into several lessons. For instance Standard 2 is broken into four presentations labeled 2-1, 2-2, 2-3, and 2-4.)
(Half-size screen shot)
The CAHSEE Algebra I standards are a subset of the standards for the complete Algebra I course. To be able to progress in science and further mathematics courses, students should strive to master all of the Algebra I standards. However, students who have had difficulty with mathematics would do well, as a minimum, to review the CAHSEE standards to reinforce their basic understanding.
There is no magic pill for this...algebra is not just a set of facts that can be memorized. To succeed in algebra the student must learn to view real-life situations in terms of relationships among variables. The only way to do this is to really understand the basic ideas and processes that make algebra a useful tool. Students cannot skip over the fundamentals and expect to do better later. Gaps in understanding can become permanent roadblocks.
These whiteboard video lessons can be a special help in reteaching for several reasons:
- Hearing the same thing over and over again from the same teacher may raise barriers. A video lesson that reinforces the classroom lesson gives the student the opportunity to interact with the same material, but from a teacher with a different voice, different personality, and different teaching style.
- Constant repetition can become burdensome for a teacher, and it can result in a negative tone of voice (or body language) that signals a student to stop asking questions. Repetition is not a problem with video lessons. The teaching is as fresh and positive the second or third or tenth time through as it was at first.
- Pacing is a judgement call in the classroom. What is too quick for some students may be slow, to the point of boredom, for others. In a video lesson, the viewer is in control. The video can be paused, re-played, or scanned through at will. (The CAHSEE Algebra videos come with a built-in media viewer that has exceptionally good scan control. Dragging the program pointer causes the video to display clearly while in fast forward or fast reverse, making replaying easy.)
- A video lesson is not burdened with the stop-and-go process of regular classroom teaching. Interruptions are a fact of life in the classroom. By breaking the train of thought, slower or more distracted students may never really see or understand critical connections. With video, the lesson is presented start-to-finish with a coherent train of thought without interruption. If interruptions occur at the viewer's end, the lesson can be paused or replayed.
- [Personal note from the author's perspective...] I have been teaching physics, astronomy, and mathematics since 1972, from elementary school through junior college (mostly secondary), in public, private, international, and charter schools. I have also put the mathematics I have learned into productive use outside the classroom, designing software for star mapping, orbit calculations, and computer control of telescopes (see www.davidchandler.com). However, my primary love is teaching, and I have brought my experience using mathematics into the way I teach mathematics. For me, teaching through video is a way to reach a larger audience and leave a more permanent legacy. I am not trying to compete with the mathematics teaching staff at your school. However, I would like to join your teaching staff, in a sense, as an experienced colleague at least in this limited way through the medium of video.
Just for the record:
I want to say that I am not a big fan of "high stakes testing." I think it puts pressure on schools to replace "teaching" with "test prep," and is thus fundamentally destructive to good teaching. I believe in requiring certain minimum standards, but too often the pressure of high stakes testing transforms these into "maximum standards," where anything not listed in the standards is treated as "fluff." I have consciously avoided approaching this project from the perspective of "test prep." I do cover the algebra material tested on the CAHSEE, but beyond that, I am not focused on the test or drilling test-taking skills. Rather, I am reteaching the material from the ground up. The goal is the same as at the beginning: fundamental comprehension and fluency. If students really understand what they are doing, the test will take care of itself.
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