Pura-pura email Prof. {ini hanyalah draft]
Dear Prof,
I have been spending timing reading the ICME study. I also read your writing “The dilemma of transparency: Seeing and seeing through talk in the mathematics classroom”. I enjoyed reading it.
There are two interesting have came into my mind.
First, I would like to open a discussion: Is the Internet as a solution or a new challenge for mathematics teaching in Indonesian context?
What I mean by “Indonesian context”
- Maths teachers have been facing a new demand as a result of the Goverment policy. Math and science teachers in particular were advocated to teach in English. Even though the learners who came to those schools were tested in English as an addition to National exams. In short, they must learn maths in English even though no students have an English background (non-English native).
- Another challeng is that they must have a good skill in ICT therefore, the goverment provide funding for ICT infrastructure, allowing students to have access to the Internet.
- In this situation, the availability English textbook is very limited. One textbook was available, is the translation of the Indonesian textbook and unfortunately, they contained some issues quality in content and language.
Here, I was thinking, despite my personal disagreement to this situations, I was concern about the limited access of students to mathematics. Maths learning itself is complex and even more complex when we demand them to use the lnaguage in which they are very limited.
Here, my study about the uses of the Internet as a tool for maths learning is relevant. As a result, I was proposing an idea how to make use the Internet as one solution to open access or to improve access to English maths for students in particular.
The proces to do this, we introduced teachers with mathematical websites.
[interesting, they could responded well, the language of maths is general in many ways/understandable even though you do not know English very well, since the representation of math in different context, however the challenge for them, what mathematical ideas do they want students understanding and how this website will helped the students.
The next step was discussing with teachers in designing the lesson plan, since they were the person who knows the situation at schools, the learners. However, the researchers visited the school to make sure that the infrastructure available to conduct the maths learning using the Internet.
The experiment were conducted for 3 days, and the teachers chose about 10 learners across 5 classes. The criteria was the learners who struggled in maths learning including the basic math such as fractions, while the learners were started to learn algebra.
We realise that they found it difficult in learning maths and and we certainly believed that this would bocome more complicated when they must learn from teachers who were not able communicating well maths in bilingual or in English.
During the experiments, there are several critical incidents need to be discussed. While teaching math using the Internet can enhance math learning of students (ref), in this situation, even though the lesson were designed carefully by both teachers and researchers, the visual representation of fraction were interpreted differently by the learners [described!]. This required the discussion. Here where the language seems constrain the rich discussion. Teachers (as advocated to teach in English or if not in bilingual) resulted No flowing.
The complexity of this learning .... Unfortunately, the policy didn’t followed by a valid research about how effective of the teaching math in bilingual. Despite some positive impact such as more people want to learn English, realise that English is one important tool to have access to knowlege or better education.
The second interesting case was the development of lesson plan in integrating the Internet.
We did experiment, where we were teachers.
This interesting in terms of the developing country context with that kind of policy.
In designing lesson, many things were antisipated such as:
- The nature of connectivity, instable
- The consideration of learners tendency to visit the website that not relevant for the math laerning in that day
- The challenge to involve learners in learning, not only clicking and make the teacher loose on what they were doing.
- Anticipation on the limitation of their English.
There were two lesson plans and they were exprimenting to the same group of learner. 6 learnet grouped into 2 groups. This paper will discusse the nature of the lesson and they were quite different mainly because of the nature of 2 different website that we included in the lesson plan. Interestingly the animation available constrainted students thinking or lead them to make limited generalisation and this was not a part of our lesson design.
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