Site icon Clayton Harbour

Math, Newspapers and Schools for Profit

Clayton Harbour

Math

I am really going to try hard to not have this sound like a product review.  I am probably going to fail because…well it is a product review. The intent is to give my son’s teacher a look at Splash Math and also a way for her to share out to other teachers if she likes it rather than forwarding an email.  

Splash Math is a neat little program we’ve used on the occasion that uses games to teach math concepts.  Yes, you read that right, it uses games to teach math concepts, a brilliant idea right? Don’t tell my son that, he’ll hate video games forever if he thought they taught him anything.

I believe that there are a few of these on the market so if you’ve got a favourite and would like to share, please let me know.  The things that I liked about this one:

It has also become a bit of a gold standard for other applications I’ve looked into for learning such as duolingo schools and Grammarly.  These programs are at various levels of maturity with respect to their reporting and gamification.  Also, if you use these tools remember it’s a good way to keep an eye on progress but it’s not a substitute for sitting down with them and working on things together.  It just gives you the opportunity to reserve the “fun” problems together.  

Newspapers

A real-world example of the fun problems would be like solving for X when you need to walk your son through how many subscriptions of the school newspaper he needs to sell to pay the employees he’s already hired so he doesn’t run out of allowance money before he can get the newspaper off the ground.  Yes, this actually happened last year, however, the school year ended before we could get too far into it.  

I have huge hopes that this year will be the year and then we can continue the conversation about the cost of supplies when their “angel funding” ends.  He’s already talking about feeding the money back into the school after this, what an amazing heart. 

Schools for Profit

The newspaper idea was a great one and I liked how he wanted to feed the money back into the school, brilliant.  This is a great idea that a colleague (thanks Derar!) posted recently – https://codifyacademy.org/.  They launched their first course which sold out in 1h!  C’est incroyable!

The fine print for that is the following:

Moving beyond the fine print and if you can consider that some parents are also inclined to spend money on tutoring this might start to make sense as a way to generate revenue if we started hosting these events in local schools.  This would provide income for schools that are normally challenged to find fundraising ideas and also provide a direct improvement to the school in terms of dollars and education. I work with a great bunch of people that would love an opportunity to volunteer with schools and this would be a great project to collaborate on.

I know there are probably a lot of barriers people can think about why this wouldn’t work, some of the issues I can see with the experience I have had:

I’m going to wrap it up there for now because I am getting a bit excited and my mind is scattering trying to figure out all the details of how this would work.  I’d also like to pause and say that there have been a lot of people that I’ve had conversations with that have either knowingly or unknowingly helped with this idea.  Thank you for taking the time to talk to me and listen to my sometimes scattered thoughts.  Thank you.

References

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