About

xiousgeonz is an “academic development specialist” at Parkland College. This involves providing academic support to students in pre-college level courses, especially Math. Numeracy is a special interest.   (You might know her as Sue Jones… or siouxgeonz or @geonz.   )

I want to make math more cognitively accessible, especially to adult learners.

“Acceleration” is often the buzzword but I work with so many students for whom that’s not appropriate.   Developmental education has been deemed a “failure” and rather than examine why, schools are going back to “sink or swim.” Guess who sinks?

I’ve gathered evidence to make a case for alternatives to acceleration:  courses that build math foundations – much as I learned to do with high schoolers who struggled with reading.  We don’t have to treat them as children; their brains are very different as well as their experiences.   We should stop pretending that a little “review” of things they haven’t learned is all they need, and that faster is better.

I want to undo the pervasive, persistent branding of too many students as incapable of understanding math.

Imagine *free and open* materials designed for these students… and in 9/2020 I’m still trying to find a way to do more with this…

I’m  continuing to work on a concept-development math module doing my *darndest* to figure out how to get some lessons on the computer that are not the procedural stuff of ALEKS and just about everything else out there.   Modumath is much more conceptual, but …. is no longer supported.

I have assorted Camtasia adventures here: and I’m hoping over the course of the semester to make my own little website its own portal towards open resources for adult education.   However, our “Center for Academic Success” has essentially been gutted of most our staff, as our administrators are “re-envisioning” the role of the school in the community and want it to be “trimmed.”   (Yes, the part between the lines is in pretty large, readable print.)  I will either have more, or less, “creative time” esp. with the COVID variables.

Then I found desmos and geogebra.     Still striving… https://www.geogebra.org/m/T9jPesSF   actually works 🙂

I wanted to make some activities for learning the times tables because there are mass quantities of sites for “learning” them but they are essentially rote practice.   I want to explore true “adaptive learning” — where based on the error you make, you are guided to a formative activity to build understanding, as opposed to demonstrating a procedure 5 more times.   That said, I also wanted to make a simple “repeated retrieval” app where things you missed showed up again, and that required being able to manipulate arrays in ways that Geogebra can’t…. so I am exploring that in HTML5, JavaScript and CSS here.   

I’m on the prairies in Illinois… the lands of Peoria, Kaskaskia, Piankashaw, Wea, Miami, Mascoutin, Odawa, Sauk, Mesquaki, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Chickasaw Nations before their forced removal.   This is also a land of educationally disenfranchised peoples and I’d like to help create something better than a franchise.