Kae Inoue: Unchanging Feelings for Children

2023/08/22

"Students are children of society"—this is what a senior teacher told me when I was working at a junior high school. In fact, when I taught at multiple schools, I found that despite the schools being different, the characteristics shown by students in each grade were similar. I realized that children unconsciously and sensitively sense the movements of the world.

From elementary school to university, children learn various knowledge and skills. In the Faculty of Pharmacy, the Model Core Curriculum for Pharmaceutical Education outlines the knowledge and skills pharmacy students should acquire, and I structure the content of the mathematics and statistics courses I teach based on those guidelines. To provide knowledge more effectively, it is necessary to understand the knowledge and learning methods students acquired before entering university, so I also examine textbooks used up through high school. High school textbooks are created based on the Academic Advisory Board Guidelines, and their content is revised every ten years. One might think that the content taught in arithmetic and mathematics is not as influenced by society as other subjects. However, textbooks from shortly after the war featured many instances of using mathematics in daily life. Subsequent revisions added abstract and difficult content to contribute to the development of science and technology, and further revisions incorporated the intention of thinking deeply from multiple perspectives; clear changes can be seen with each revision. In those changes, one can feel a strong desire for children to respond to the problems facing Japanese society and to survive with strength. In the Academic Advisory Board Guidelines revised a few years ago, statistics is emphasized more than ever within the accelerating information society, and following that trend, we are able to teach various statistical methods at the university level as well.

The behavior of students in the classroom has changed significantly following the COVID-19 pandemic. While many students still write on paper lecture materials, an increasing number of students are using electronic pens to write formulas and notes on materials downloaded to their PCs. When slides are difficult to see, they take a photo with their smartphones and enlarge the image to check. It is outdated to think that students looking at their smartphones during class are not listening. When I peeked at their PCs, I saw wonderful lecture materials being created, with reference images attached like sticky notes and memos added in various colors. Students adapt to society and evolve without stopping. Seeing them master digital devices so brilliantly, I spend my days in trial and error to provide even better materials.