Place Value
Teacher Appreciation Week was just celebrated last week.
What did you do for a teacher to show them how much you appreciate and value what they do?
What value do you place on education and the educators that do so much to make a difference in the life of a child, and therefore, this world in which we all live?
To explore this very critical topic a little, I want to play around a little with these two words: PLACE and VALUE.
In Math, place value refers to the value of a digit based on its position in a number.
For example, in the number 463, the digit 4 has a place value of 400 because it is in the hundreds place. The digit 3 has a place value of 3 because it is in the ones column.
Sometime I think about place value in terms of how we rate, rank and value teachers in the education profession.
I could change the syntax of the words and ask “what VALUE do we PLACE” on teachers?
This totally changes the meaning, doesn’t it?
When we place a value on a teacher based on their student test scores, it seems like we are just ranking them and putting them in a place among other numbers and digits.
So, a teacher whose student test scores are ranked 26th out of 30 schools in the district will not have much value placed on what they have done and on who they are as a teacher.
There are so many mitigating circumstances and uncontrollable variables that can affect those scores, and therefore, that ranking.
Zero is the absence of value, and is just a placeholder.
YET, it can seem to add great value to a number.
For example, 5…50…500…and so on.
Which has more value?
It seems to me that the more zeros, the more value???
Wait, what???
That’s not how math works!
The more zeros a student has, the more value?
Hmmmmm, I say, scratching my head!
What do I mean by all this? (more…)