Welcome fellow educators, this is podcast number 114. Today and next week will be all about Mathematics. James Hopwood Jeans, astronomer, physicist and mathematician, know for his contributions in quantum physics and astronomy, was also a philosopher and theist.  Here is what he saw in our Universe:

“All the pictures which science now draws of nature and which alone seem capable of according with observational fact are mathematical pictures ... From the intrinsic evidence of his creation; the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.”

This is captures the thought that Galileo uttered more than 300 years before James Jeans: “Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe.”

Certainly in the dawn of the Digital Age mathematics is become more and more essential for our students to understand and grow in. Hello the age is, wait for it, “digital.” Many of the key professions of the future will require the ability to navigate the pathways that Pythagoras, Newton, Einstein and Nash have opened to our world. They all got there with math.

As a student of theology I have always been thrilled with the concepts that can only apply to God such as, Infinitude, Absolute Perfection, Complete Clarity of His Thought and Mind, the Creative Order of His Ways. I have always believed that the closest we can come to peer into some these mysteries is through our finite yet God given ability to speak the language of mathematics. Until we are face to face with the Author of the Universe we will have to settle for the abstract numbers and symbols found in this language of purity and absolutes.

Probably one of the greatest privileges I have had as an educator is the opportunity I have had to work with my own children and students in the development of our schools. This week and next I have taken time to interview Richard Bitgood who is beginning to develop some very revolutionary ideas about Math instruction. Together with his wife Chelsea and our enhancement team they have developed online curriculum that is beginning to gain a significant reputation and circulation throughout our Province in both Public and Christian schools. They have been teaching with us at our schools for the last three years and began developing online curriculum when they were still in University. Here is part one of my interview with Richard. He will read from a recently published article on the CUEBC.CA.

The Interview is Audio Only

CUEBC Article :

“Education is rapidly changing as more and more of us are realizing the benefits of using technology to help students learn. We have had the chance through the opportunity for flexibility in a distance learning environment to explore how we can use technology to help students gain mastery in math.

One of the biggest challenges for being a teacher in an online distance learning environment is that we have allowed our students to work at their own pace. In fact one of our mottos is “Any pace, any place, any time”. What this means for me as a teacher, is I have to be ready to answer any question, from any course, at any time in the year. It’s been a challenge to say the least, and one that has been a rewarding venture for personal growth. For the students however, this freedom often turned into a procrastination dance, where “Any Pace” just meant “later” to many students. This gave rise to the question, how can we take the reality of all these students working at their own pace (or lack of pace) and make it work out for the student’s benefit?

The answer came to me at a BCEdonline conference a few years ago, when I heard from a teacher that had done away with marks for assignments, and just started giving feedback to students, and developing a dialogue around that. Not giving a grade for assignments, but rather just giving feedback was such a rewarding process for this teacher, because she saw students actually pay attention to her comments, as opposed to looking at a percentage and moving on. This coupled with the next year’s keynote speech at the same conference, by one of the authors of Disrupting Class (http://disruptingclass.mhprofessional.com/apps/ab/about-the-book/) and the concepts of student-centric learning presented therein, lead us to start rethinking the way students moved through our online courses.

We had been developing some pretty exciting animation based math lessons, replacing text-on-screen and “goto page” type learning that had previously been in our online courses. Using these as an asset we got rid of marks for assignments, and switched to a system where a student either got a “good-to-go” on an assignment, or a “more-work-required”, with comments and tips mixed in as feedback. Until a student gets a “good to go”, they have to keep working on the assignment until we, as the teachers, felt that the student was ready to move on and take the test for the chapter. It’s been a bit of a learning process over the year, as we have had to work out the bumps of tracking where students are at, (My eyes revolt at times when scrolling through our massive color-coded spreadsheet) and in explaining to students how doing a question over again would actually be beneficial to them! But in almost cresting June and looking back at the year the results have been extremely encouraging.

Students who originally were appalled at the notion of doing an assignment again, waiting for it to be marked, and then having to submit even more corrections, slowly started becoming thankful for the process, after seeing it show up and benefit their marks. Other students, who would have ploughed through a myriad of assignments per week to just get it done, instead were awakened to those small careless mistakes, and worked with me to find processes to avoid them on tests and in future chapters. And by the end of the year, both the students and us as teachers had gotten into a rhythm and dialogue about assignments, and the math processes they contained.

Our philosophy as math teachers is that we are building skill-sets for students that they can take and apply in solving problems. This means our goal is to make sure they have a complete “math tool belt” so to speak. This mastery based system has allowed us to do it. We are now exploring how these tools and methodologies can be applied to the classroom. Now that we have developed resources that can guide the students at their own pace, we envision teachers becoming Christianson’s described “guide on the side” from Disrupting Class, helping students who are working at their own pace, spending the time needed to master their curriculum, and in turn become a group of math-masters!

The Interview is Audio Only

Thank you Richard, I love your passion which will get ramped up even more in next week’s podcast. Please email us your comments and thoughts on this podcast. Also, if you would like us to mail you a free copy of my book or send you the download link for the audio version of, Discipling This Generation for a Digital World, simply send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and let us know what type of an educator you are, home schooler, classroom teacher, school administrator, or interested parent. Please let us know how you heard about the podcast and, of course, please include your mailing address. Thank you for listening and thank you for your commitment to mastering mathematics through  discipleship-based Christian education.