RealAudio 3.0

	All tenth-graders at North are required to take "Career Investigation." ( Click here for larger image).

Rosen: We've been investigating 16 different careers that we might be interested in, each of us. We're going to narrow it down to four next week and you're going to be required to have four resources - whether they're interviews, whether they're software that are from Minnesota careers, books - four resources.

Student: The career I chose is professional snow-boarder. The main requirement is just being very good at snow-boarding. You can't be, like, a loser that's not, who, like, gets in trouble with the law.

Rosen: I think they're going to realize that education doesn't end at grade 12, regardless of whether you go into the service or go into college or into the workforce; that you're going to be responsible for educating yourself and that never ends. You're going to have a variety of careers in your life and the goal is, basically, hopefully, we get them off the bench and into the starting lineup in life, not to make a final career decision, but to be exposed to what's out there and know the pros and cons and how they can benefit from these opportunities.

Klein: I think the basis of graduation standards is to get the kids to learn broad skills and concepts so that they can apply those skills and concepts to whatever content there might be. It's not that content isn't important, because you can't learn concepts and skills without content. But saying that every child has got to know every battle from the beginning of time up to the 20th century or 21st century is no longer reasonable when we think of knowledge doubling, tripling, quadrupling in such a short period of time.

	Students don't just plug numbers into equations, they solve real-world problems like how to design an efficient package for storing tennis balls. Teacher Ellen Delaney says this project demonstrates understanding of a number of different mathematical skills at once.

Segnar: As I look at the future, I'm really worried because there is no standard for grammar. I was told by the higher-ups that "that's just a bunch of facts. We want process." I think grammar is valuable. I've had kids come to me after they've taken the A.C.T. and tell me, "I am so glad I took the class because I did well on the verbal section." And as I look at the future, I see that the grammar classes will just go down to probably nothing because as kids go, they'll have to take more and more classes that offer the standards, and it will disappear.

Class: Are you all with me here? You know the defining recursive equations. You already know which data are from an additive process and which are from a multiplicative process, but what are efficient ways to identify such data when you don't know in advance what type they are?

Delaney: They studied areas of things. They had to study percentages. They had to study proportions and they had to do comparisons. So there's some interesting math, but then put on top of that all the geometry to it. They had to know the shapes. They had to know their dimensions, how those dimensions impact the size. How do you compare size when you're in different dimensions?

Sather: We're doing calculator projects and I had a D- student that just did this amazing project, and everybody was clapping for him and things like that. And it's a kid who actually had a brain surgery-type thing, and I think it was really good and powerful for him to do that, and he's a special education student as well. And he just made this incredible project with the year 2000 and confetti and stuff like that on a calculator. He made it himself.

	During a recent class, teacher Ellen Delaney (seated, right) tried to convince a group of students that they'll eventually understand how to do integrated math even if their parents or siblings can't help them with their homework.

Ludke I think the math is harder than what it used to be. I liked the old math a lot more. I don't like all the words. I would rather just have a problem put out, you know, on the paper instead of all these words to tell me what to do.

Darden: We struggled a lot with integrated math. My daughter is very much a cut-and-dried, black-and-white kind of a person. And now with this generic, well we have to find the problem in the middle of the world, while yes that is a real-world situation, it's a very difficult thing for her to understand because she's not in those real world situations so it's just as obtuse as it would be to set a formula down for her.