Our distinguished governor, Mitt Romney, advocates merit pay for teachers, based on the standardized test scores of their students. Vivian Troen and Katherine C. Boles wrote an op-ed piece about this idea in the Boston Globe on 9/28. I was… Read More ›
Month: September 2005
Back-to-school night
Yesterday evening we held our annual Back-to-School Night at Weston High School. You know the drill: the parents come to school, arrive late at their first-period class because they can’t find a parking space, go to one ten-minute class after… Read More ›
Partial Credit
One of my students — let’s call her Artemis — muses in her blog: Giving partial credit may be helpful to a student’s grade in school but in real life, people don’t want to know how you did something, they… Read More ›
Habits of highly effective teachers?
Key Curriculum Press publishes our new Algebra II textbook as well as two software products that have had a significant impact on many high-school math teachers, Geometer’s Sketchpad and Fathom. Their recent catalog includes a moderately long article entitled “The… Read More ›
Bullet voting, pro and con
On Tuesday, Boston voters will go to the polls in the “preliminary election” for City Council. Something like a primary, the preliminary election narrows each race down to a number of candidates equal to twice the number who will be… Read More ›
Standards-based Education, Part IV
Standards-based education encourages us to give untimed tests. This idea makes a lot of sense: if I want to tell whether a student can solve a quadratic equation, I shouldn’t be testing how fast s/he can solve the equation. The… Read More ›
The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics
If you look at almost any set of modern standards for mathematics teaching — such as the NCTM’s or the Massachusetts curriculum frameworks or Weston’s own standards — you will see a prominent role for applications of mathematics. This is… Read More ›
Standards-based Education, Part III
One key tenet of standards-based education is the observation that some students take more time than others to master any given skill or concept. No one can disagree with the observation, but the conclusions to be drawn from it are… Read More ›
No bad puns
In this week’s New York Times Magazine, language expert William Safire observes that there are no bad puns: Remember, there are no “bad” puns — all plays on words are good, and the louder the groans they elicit, the better…. Read More ›
Shodor
Math teachers who are looking for short, narrowly focused math activities should check out the Shodor Foundation. Although they tend to focus mostly on middle-school math, they have plenty of interactive activities that are suitable for high-school students of all… Read More ›
Constitution Day unconstitutional?
Some lawyers, including one of my colleagues, point out the irony that the new law requiring all schools and colleges to observe yesterday’s Constitution Day may be unconstitutional. (Techically, it’s not “all schools and colleges” — just those receiving federal… Read More ›
More on the miraculous iPod
This is a follow-up to my post of September 14 concerning my student’s iPod with the picture of Jesus on its screen. First, Keith got himself interviewed by Fox News the other day and showed the iPod on camera; I… Read More ›
Standards-based Education, Part II
This is a follow-up to my post of September 13. Today’s topic is also testing, but from a different POV: the use of “formative assessment”. We all know that testing has four purposes: To provide feedback, both to the teacher… Read More ›
A miraculous iPod
One of my ninth-graders accidentally dropped his iPod, and the screen shattered into an image of Jesus! I told him he could probably sell it to the National Enquirer for tens of thousands of dollars, but he decided to sell… Read More ›
Standards-based Education, Part I
Several years ago the entire faculty of the Weston Public Schools participated in a series of workshops on so-called Standards-based Education (SBE). There were actually a lot of good ideas in these workshops. In fact, I estimated that I had… Read More ›
FEMA and Internet Explorer
Now that Michael Brown has resigned, maybe we can learn about everything else that’s wrong with FEMA. One thing that’s wrong is that FEMA requires everyone to use Internet Explorer: Hurricane Katrina victims seeking to file claims with the Federal… Read More ›
Showing a calculator to a group
How do you display a calculator to a large group of people, such as a class? Simple if it’s a TI graphing calculator: just download the free Virtual TI, which displays not only the calculator screen but also the entire… Read More ›
The Kutztown 13
Bruce Schneier describes the Case of the Kutztown 13: …a group of high schoolers charged with felonies for bypassing security with school-issued laptops, downloading forbidden internet goodies and using monitoring software to spy on district administrators. The students, their families,… Read More ›
Grade inflation?
According to an article in this morning’s Boston Globe, the principal of Hopkinton High School has raised the grades assigned by a math teacher with 25 years of experience: Hopkinton High School teacher Rachel Bartlett appeared before the School Committee… Read More ›
Microsoft woes
Our westonmath.org website looked great in Safari on Mac OS X. But then we discovered that Microsoft misinterprets much of the CSS code, so the site looked terrible in Internet Explorer on both Macintosh and Windows. Worse yet, it looked… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 