Dear SOE: Back to Basics, Please

Our math methods class last night was irritating. They had this ambitious goal of showing us seven different math instructional technologies with an entire twelve minutes to receive instruction on and try out the technology. If you didn't catch the hint of sarcasm in that last statement, it should have been there. Okay, new technologies are cool and neat and exciting, but twelve minutes to try out statistical packages and math games and symbolic calculators is clearly not enough exposure to be useful at all. While I appreciate that our traditional education classes are trying to "keep up with the changing times," I also believe that our 504 instruction on technology is sufficient and goes more into depth with a few key technologies, thus making the exposure worthwhile. I guess the conclusion to this rant is that I wish the "traditional" education classes would just stay with the basics...we've barely had exposure to things like lesson planning and classroom management--very essential skills that we should learn as pre-service teachers.