Tests for Teachers

"What!? Every teacher should be tested on the things they teach!" said the nine year-old unschooling kid this morning.

We were talking about our word game that had turned into a math conversation and back into a word game, but not before I figured out why any number to the zero power is 1.

It turns out the answer isn't "Because I said so," as my 8th grade math teach would have had me believe. There's a more intuitive answer that comes out right away if you talk about raising numbers to powers as shifting rather than multiplication or teacher-inspired mysticism. It's simply that for the zero power of any number written in its own base, you just don't shift. In other words you shift zero times. The kid and I arrived on this purely by accident this morning because we had the time to play with numbers while we were talking about how many different words you could get out of a 26 letter alphabet for each size of word, (one characater, two character long, three character long words, etc...)

When I remarked that my school teacher did't know the answer to why the zeroeth power just gives you one, the kid hollered out the opening to this little post :) Which was a bit interesting in and of itself as we were standing in the middle of a group of parents and other onlookers at the time, waiting for a museum to open.

When I further remarked that well, they pretty much don't test teachers, but they do test kids, things went downhill from there. We talked about teachers not knowing the answers to some of the questions on the tests. (Hell, I didn't know the answer to some of the questions on the 3rd grade math test when I volunteered as a visiting engineer. The teacher and I never did figure out what the test was asking, but she had a method to plug the numbers into for the correct answer. It's Magic!)

So, today's takeaways? Unschooling kids and their parents learn things by playing. In case you didn't notice, they do it all over the place, not just while locked into buildings, or forced to sit in chairs. And finally, unschooling kids harbor a strong opinion that the standardized testing thing is not only wacky, but also that it's backwards. That's all :)

What do you think?

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