LL is being flooded with emails this afternoon.
Many requesting we stay online, others saying farewell.
I hope we can stay on as long as possible. We're just taking a new and mature approach to this blog.
Starting with this:
Stephanie Scoggins, this is my public apology.
To all the others who have been hurt in Larry Lohan's infancy, I apologize from the bottom of my heart. Things will be changing around here. Codenames are going to be enforced. Sorry if this takes some of the fun out of the blog, but it's to protect the reputations of your peers. I urge you to send gossip as much as possible, but like I mentioned, it will be screened. The intent of this blog is not to hurt anyone and not to ruin the reputations of any of the people who are "mentioned". If you believe you are the person the post discusses, you are free to do what you wish with it. We are not responsible for you blabbing your identity to the world.
In other words, I'm flabbergasted over the content of many of the emails. It's touching to know that your good old Uncle Larry helped you forget how small this town is. To take you away from the HELL that Moorpark is and make it a little more bearable.
Keep the emails coming, I really do LOVE hearing from all of you. I'll do my best to respond to those of you who deserve a message back.
And because learning makes us smarter...
Rena Petrello believes everyone can learn math. It doesn’t matter if you’re a word person or mystified by even basic algebra.
“I try to keep math from being abstract,” said Petrello, a math professor at Moorpark College. “If someone is verbal, I give a real life example. If I can boil it down to money, people get it.” Petrello teaches developmental math classes for students not quite ready for college-level courses. She teaches most of the classes online, using videos she has created. One advantage is the rewind button, she said.
“My students always tell me, ‘I can’t rewind my instructor, but I can rewind your videos,’” she said.
Michelle Fields, 21, had almost no confidence in her math abilities before she took an online intermediate algebra class with Petrello. But she changed her attitude in the class, which, she said, was like learning math from a friend.
“I always had math anxiety,” said Fields, now a student at Pepperdine University in Malibu. “When I was in high school, my parents spent hundreds of dollars each year trying to teach me math. But she gave me confidence.”
Indeed, Petrello said she’s something of a psychologist with her students as well as a math professor.
“When my students come to me, they’ve already seen a lot of failure,” she said. “They have a lot of negative feelings about math. I teach with the understanding that there are holes in their education, and I need to fill those holes. I’m an encourager.”
That’s why Petrello also holds office hours online. For some reason, students feel less intimidated talking to her online rather than in the confined, one-on-one space of an office, she said.
“This is a generation that is used to having an online presence,” Petrello said. “They’re used to a chat-room experience. I’m coming to where they are.”
In the online videos, Petrello uses a digital pen to do math problems, and she tries to make her examples concrete, using examples from real life, such as money to figure out equations or gardens to determine area.
One student still remembers how she explained quadratic equations, setting the formula to “Pop Goes the Weasel.”
“She has a folksy approach,” said colleague Donna Beatty, a math professor at Ventura College. “She helps them remember it, so it’s not scary.”
That might explain why Petrello’s online courses have proven so popular. A recent class
had 80 students and a waiting list, she said
Suck at math? I do.
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