In-house newsletter

Thanks to everyone who chimed in on the homework blegging on Barbara McClintock. You managed to explain some very complex ideas in ways that made them accessible to my seventh-grade friend, for which she asked me to say thanks.

The girls’ school actually has an excellent “homework helper” Web site for parents. It’s a very nice resource if, for example, you’re trying to help your kids with factoring polynomials and you’re a bit fuzzy on the subject, not having factored one yourself for the past 15 years.

That homework helper site is a good first step at using the Web to supplement what schools can achieve, but it’s still a kind of limited, Web-as-broadcast-medium approach. The next step schools should explore would be to harness the hive-mind powers of parents (and older students) through blogs and message boards. The school district’s site, for example, doesn’t have much to say on the subject of gene mobility, but I’d guess there are parents (or siblings, or older students) in the district who could offer help on that, or any, subject.

We could have used something like that back when I was in elementary school, when we first learned to do long division. Most of our parents hadn’t learned this, so Dougie and I wound up doing a bit of tutoring for our classmates parents so that they could, in turn, help their kids with the New Math (obligatory Tom Lehrer link). What I’ve never understood was how our parents’ generation did arithmetic like long division before the new math.

Anyway, seeing schools beginning to use the Web in this way is encouraging — much more encouraging than what has been, up until now, the primary use of the Web in schools, i.e., students’ use of Google as a tool for plagiarism, followed (a bit too slowly) by teachers’ use of Google as a tool against plagiarism.

One more lesson w/r/t homework blegging: I should keep future requests for such help in discrete posts so that the comments threads will be somewhat less likely to contain unrelated flamewars and/or cruelly funny and disconcerting bits of meta-fiction. (Disconcerting, for me at least, because no one likes to picture themselves as Roy Stalin.)