Mr. Marc Prensky once wrote a famous article entitled “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants I and II”. It asserts that today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach. These students have spent their entire lives surrounded by computers, digital music players, video cameras, smartphones, and various other tools of the digital age. Therefore, our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games, and the Internet.

Digital Native students work in a multitasking environment where they do homework, eat, watch TV, and send text messages simultaneously. On the other hand, digital immigrants “speak with different accents” when they print an email to read or a document to edit rather than simply editing it on the computer.

This difference leads to our first difficulty facing today’s students: students and instructors speak different “languages.” Most students prefer to know the answer immediately when solving math problems rather than waiting several weeks or even months for the instructor to correct and record the results, return them to the students, and explain the correct answers with an answer key. Days of waiting for results discourage student motivation. Once, a college professor wrote a letter three times to the principal of a high school requesting that the math teacher return the test to his daughter for her to review at home, but it was repeatedly denied. Today’s students expect an educational program that offers instant solutions to questions, a personal learning map, digital monitoring and evaluation capabilities to determine strengths and weaknesses that will prepare them to better manage the learning process and be more effective while having fun.

The second difficulty faced by students today is the knowledge and qualifications of the instructors. In September 2011, an article titled “Teacher Says Teachers Need Better Math” was published in Maclean’s magazine. The article mentions that two college math teachers spent two hours understanding the decimal division method taught by local high school teachers to teach their own children. who are in the seventh grade. They were frustrated, recalls the article. Today’s students deserve a better quality education to be well equipped to deal with the toughest competitive environment in the future.

The third difficulty is the reformed program of the Quebec Ministry of Education for secondary schools. The reform requires students to learn more advanced subjects in high school compared to high school. For example, a few years ago, none of the high schools taught logarithmic functions. Any science student would know that the logarithm function and the exponent function are like twins. You cannot learn the exponent function without learning or knowing the logarithm function. This partial education has frustrated many responsible math teachers. Today, math teachers teach these two subjects even in high school three. In addition, problem-solving questions of a few lines have been replaced by two to five pages of situational problems.

A Montreal high school principal told one of our advanced math students that none of the high school teachers were able to teach him more. The student was then encouraged to form a math club for other constructivists to learn on their own or to get help from other tutoring centers.

These three external factors, as well as personal learning motivation, family background, and internal factors, have all contributed to the learning difficulties faced by today’s students. There are many assessment tools available, such as a happiness or depression index to see if one is happy or depressed. As for math, I will develop a math fear index to diagnose a person’s level of fear of math so that we can find solutions to deal with it. As the saying goes, “finding the reason for a problem is half the way to the solution.”

Therefore, to be a good learner, a student needs a quality educational system that incorporates quality instructors, comprehensive and interactive curricula, and an environment that promotes self-motivation to learn while having fun. These aspects combined are what I call the ICE learning method.

“Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants I and II” can be read at http://www.ciberliteratura.com/profiles/blogs/digital-natives-digital

“Teacher Says Teachers Need Better Math” can be read at http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2011/09/16/winnipeg-prof-says-teachers-need-better-math/