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 ›
Learning Strategies 