ALEKS?

  Pewaukee School District has a pretty unique take on learning. Why do I think that you may ask? Well everything middle and high school students do is on the computer. We are each given out own laptop to write essays on, learn Spanish on, and even communicate with teachers on. But the most relevant reason for our laptops, is ALEKS, the math learning program that is entirely online, leaving students to learn every topic on their own without a teacher teaching it to them. With ALEKS no teacher is necessary, the only things you really need are a computer, and the ability to read the explanations that are given for each topic. That is the entire point of ALEKS, to learn math independently, and (supposedly) more efficiently.  Therefore shouldn't it stay that way?

    Every Monday, the math pupils of Asa Clark are forced to participate in Focus Monday. Their purpose is to get us to "focus" hence the cleverly thought out name. But in my eyes, and in the eyes of several of my classmates for that matter, it should be renamed "A day to waste on a pointless activity, so that you feel as if we're actually teaching you." You see, us math students can use all of the time on ALEKS that we can get. When you're expected to teach yourself an entire course worth of math within a single school year, you don't really want to have silly interruptions like that. Mondays usually go something like  this: Start by finding a good spot by your friends, next talk the entire class period, finally copy down what the teacher has written on the board and turn your paper in! Easy and pointless all in one! There are many other interruptions as well such as emails home to our parents and ILP learning plans that we have to type out and keep track of, and instruction, where a teacher teaches you a topic in a completely different way, in twice the time it would take you to learn it yourself. As an ALEKS user, I simply want to make the most of my math time, but the teachers don't seem to agree with me.

     A typical day in math class starts with something called a daily warm-up, and it is eerily similar to Focus Monday. It has the same format: Come in, sit by your friends, pull out a piece of paper and copy what it says on the board. The worst part about these daily warm-ups, is the fact that they somehow take up 20-30 minutes of time. Don't we already waste an entire day on this same thing? How focused do we really need our minds to be? If anyone actually pays attention to the content of daily warm-ups, they would find questions such as "How many sides on a (insert name of polygon)?" Another big one is numbers that appear the same written backwards, or sometimes even upside down! Why are we wasting valuable ALEKS time on such things?

     Overall if it were up to me, our math curriculum would be more focused on actually using the learning program that we have invested in. There is no point in the ALEKS program if we can hardly work on it, and instead must work on a bunch of other activities.  The program is all about independent learning, not "focusing" and "collaboration." So what is the point of forcing such things on us?