“Chartjunk?” you ask. “What’s that?” The term comes from Edward Tufte, whose work I have admired for thirty years. If you only have a small amount of time to read what he has written, I recommend the beautiful, 200 page classic, The… Read More ›
Month: January 2014
And God Said
Brandeis professor Joel Hoffman’s wonderful linguistic analysis is surprisingly readable and engaging. I recently read his full-length book, And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible’s Original Meaning, which is filled with such analysis. Normally I’m not enthusiastic about quoting other readers’ reviews… Read More ›
RIP, Pete Seeger, 94
It’s the end of an era. My three childhood heroes were Isaac Asimov, who died in 1992; Adlai Stevenson II, who died much earlier, in 1965; and Pete Seeger, who died much later…yesterday. So it took nearly half a century… Read More ›
Grant Wiggins and Diane Ravitch
It’s always difficult when you admire two different people and they’re in a bitter dispute with each other. Grant Wiggins and Diane Ravitch both have appropriate, well-thought-out views on education. But they deeply disagree on the role that teachers can… Read More ›
0 for 3
“Sigh. I’m 0 for 3 in recent books and movies!” That’s what I said to myself after finishing a book that I had recently taken out of the library. What I meant was that I had disliked all three of… Read More ›
PD and edX
Yesterday was the fourth day of a long weekend for my students, but a professional development day for us teachers. It was surprisingly productive. As a department we constructed a list of every unit in every math course in grades… Read More ›
What is a proof?
High-school math teachers and those who know them need to be concerned with what a proof is. That certainly isn’t a new claim. But for most students a proof is something you learn to construct in high-school geometry class and… Read More ›
NSA, crypto, and a long project
Back in September I wrote a long post about a recent book written by Rafe Esquith. My second paragraph began with this observation: It wasn’t clear to me at first whether this book would have anything to offer a math… Read More ›
Where did ten weeks go?
How did I manage to go ten weeks without blogging? Just overtaken by events, I guess. But I’m determined to resume my almost-daily posts, starting today. So stay tuned, as they used to say. (Does anyone actually say “stay tuned”… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 