The night after I first heard about the new tutoring opportunity at West High I had a dream. This dream was odd even by the standard of dreams. It began as a spy thriller set along aroad through the woods. The road was unpaved and muddy; a car driving along would be at serious risk for getting stuck in the mud. (I know; you would expect me to dream about being stuck in the snow. But this dream was set in August.) The woods beside the road had been developed for use by a youth rustic camping program. No youth were present at this moment which is probably good given the dangers inherent in any spy thriller.
What really set this dream apart was not the content, the plot line, the visuals, or the particular risks the characters encountered. What makes the dream notable is what I thought about when I woke from it. That was an actual experience with an International Baccalaureate math course. You will wonder: Why would a dream set in the August woods with a muddy road evoke concerns about the teaching of IB math?
The real life memory raised by this dreaming was of a particular topic which was confusing a number of students last fall. Another real tutor and I had tried to help some of these students but neither of us could figure out what they were being asked to do. Eventually the other tutor found a boy who kept very clear and careful notes; she took pictures of the notes, analyzed the pictures, and reached a conclusion about the expectations. Her reconstuction was mathematically correct and consistent with what students had told us.
As near as I could determine the reconstructed lesson was also pedagogically pointless.
I have doubts about this reconstruction because I have never previously come upon an IB presentation in any subject which I could not tie to fundamental educational goals. This reconstructed lesson came across as learning a very particular rote sequence for the sole purpose of knowing that very particular rote sequence. (This would presumably be helpful should you move to England and pick up the IB program there.)
We have broken away from that sort of rote learning across modern education. We have also moved away from using the next class in sequence as a justification for the content of the current class.
So we in real life were trying to decipher what students were being assigned to do by reading notes taken by another student. That version of actual reality sounds a lot like trying to maneuver along a muddy road in a bad dream.