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When Maid Silvia Anna M. Ruf gave the signal to start the Forest Festival Race last Sunday, she was clearly a leader, and I knew I had seen her before. On Monday when Anna and the Queen's Department came to Kump Education Center, she reminded me that she had presented at the annual Kump Education Research Seminar in April, and she wanted her parents to see our Optimum Learning Lab where she made her presentation.
Anna earned her degree at Davis & Elkins College in Secondary Math Education this spring as a Magna Cum Laude graduate. She had a full four-year Leadership Scholarship and was a member of the Student Education Association. Anna is well prepared to move forward using educational technology and she received the D&E Academic Achievement Award for the Department of Computer Science, Mathematics and Physics.
The following Research Abstract explains what Anna Ruf did for her student teacher Capstone project last spring.
Sixth Grade: Decimal Operations
by Anna M. Ruf
"My project includes a student-designed unit of study that is aligned with state and national mathematics standards with an emphasis on math applications and real-world connections. This unit includes problems that involve practicing long division of multi- digit whole numbers, as well as adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing decimals. The activities included in my lessons are Task Cards, workbook problems, a decimal division maze, and whiteboard practice. My data that is included are the scores of my Pre-Assessment and my Post-Assessment, which show the total growth of each of my students throughout my unit. The average score for my Pre-Assessment was a 50.7%. On my Post-Assessment, the average score increased to 82.3% (Presentation April 26, 2023)."
We really need teachers like Anna now. Being a teacher has never been easy, but most seasoned educators will agree that the pandemic and post-pandemic years have been some of the hardest for teachers.
Schools were shut down March 13, 2020 and have not been the same since. Randolph County was slow getting the Chromebook computers, and good internet service has been lacking in many parts of our larger rural county. Some students have seemed antisocial in school, and behavioral issues have been more serious with a possibility of local drug access.
Now, more than ever before, we need young teachers like Anna Ruf to help students realize that artificial intelligence is not going to make the world better unless the people who use it are trained to make ethical decisions based on a good education.