Excerpt from an interview with David Ballard, recipient of the 2009 RAPSA Best Practices Teaching Award
The most important thing that you can do to teach mathematics is to provide ample opportunity for perfect practice. Students must practice Algebra, and they must practice it perfectly. To see that perfect practice is available to my students, I wrote and recorded an Algebra I and Geometry text. I have recorded the Algebra I and Mrs. Folse, our Geometry teacher, is recording the Geometry. These videos are available to our students via take home hard drives, take home DVD sets, in school networking, and now available via the internet to the whole world for free at http://math.prairiland.net. I have been working hard to see that these videos become available and am presently converting them to MPEG-4 files to create faster downloads and to make them ready to dump into I-Pods, I-Phones, etc. I am portable. The students can take me with them everywhere they go. All of the Algebra I and Geometry material on this sight is free for download and may be used by anyone. It is not for sale and is not to be sold. My number sense material will be for sale.
We mandate success. I call it mandatory opportunity. You can see my grade recovery policy on my teacher web-page. www.prairiland.net/fm/dballard/files/2008-2009pare.doc. We place our bottom 30% in an academic lab class as an Algebra I study hall. They do not stay the bottom 30% for very long. They use all 45 minutes positively. We require attendance to tutorials and detentions for academic shortfalls. Time on task is the answer.
The most important thing that you can do to teach mathematics is to provide ample opportunity for perfect practice. Students must practice Algebra, and they must practice it perfectly. To see that perfect practice is available to my students, I wrote and recorded an Algebra I and Geometry text. I have recorded the Algebra I and Mrs. Folse, our Geometry teacher, is recording the Geometry. These videos are available to our students via take home hard drives, take home DVD sets, in school networking, and now available via the internet to the whole world for free at http://math.prairiland.net. I have been working hard to see that these videos become available and am presently converting them to MPEG-4 files to create faster downloads and to make them ready to dump into I-Pods, I-Phones, etc. I am portable. The students can take me with them everywhere they go. All of the Algebra I and Geometry material on this sight is free for download and may be used by anyone. It is not for sale and is not to be sold. My number sense material will be for sale.
We mandate success. I call it mandatory opportunity. You can see my grade recovery policy on my teacher web-page. www.prairiland.net/fm/dballard/files/2008-2009pare.doc. We place our bottom 30% in an academic lab class as an Algebra I study hall. They do not stay the bottom 30% for very long. They use all 45 minutes positively. We require attendance to tutorials and detentions for academic shortfalls. Time on task is the answer.
