My dear students, I write to you today to tell you that math is your friend. Remember when that math teacher in grade school, and high school, and your parents, and your uncle that you’re not allowed to visit anymore all told you that math really is important for everyday living? Do you remember that? Do you remember working on your multiplication tables or your long division worksheets thinking “no body ever does this stuff in real life!” and “I’m not going to ever use any of this so why bother?” Do you remember all of that? Well, if mathematics hasn’t invaded your daily routine I’m going to help you out a little bit today by outlining the importance of math to your grade.
There are massive changes in education happening everyday. The move to technology, often proprietary technology, has created a strange situation in education. Now I’m not going to say that this an epidemic or anything. I don’t know. I will say that my own experiences in dealing with some of these technologies has been less than perfect. As an educator, I cared enough about my students to not completely trust the digital environment that was doing the “grading” of their midterm and final grades. You see, as these applications become more complicated, expensive, and proprietary, they also become a burden to use. Constant updates change how you must interact with the program and I’ve seen many instructors abandon them entirely (and/or use them incorrectly) in my relatively brief time as a teacher.
Do you know what I did to fix the problem? I used math. I extracted all of my students grades from the offensive program, manually used math to figure out why the program was malfunctioning, and then corrected all of the grades in an application I trusted to compare them with the monstrosity of an application I was nearly required to use. Now, I’m pretty technically inclined — but a lot of your instructors aren’t. It’s not their fault. They’ve taken the training, sat through the lengthy meetings, the webinars, and read the documentation. Maybe it’s a glitch, maybe the did it wrong, maybe something else happened. You, dear students, should really keep track of your own grades. Add them up. Make sure they seem correct. Your instructors will fix your grade if the math is wrong. They might just not see it unless you bring it to their attention. And for that you need to use… what? That’s right: Math.