Music professor and composer Delvyn Case gave a refreshing and informative talk yesterday afternoon about the music of the Beatles. The talk, of course, was part of the Dorchester Historical Society’s lecture series. Of course. What do I hear you… Read More ›
Month: October 2014
Another Sunday with the Common Core
Three more perspectives on the Common Core State Standards: For all my doubts and negative reactions to the Common Core, I start feeling sympathetic to it when I read articles with headlines like “Common Core is Indoctrinating Kids with Socialism”: if right-wing… Read More ›
Douglas on the world's stage
Douglas is world-famous now: he has just appeared on TUAW, and he is very excited about this exposure.
What we value in students
Always interesting Tina Barseghian, a blogger for KQED, wrote a recent post about what we should value in our students (beyond test scores, as she explicitly points out). She included a great infographic (by Jackie Gerstein), quoted below. Reading it… Read More ›
When Desmos fails
I have become a great fan of Desmos, a free web-based graphing calculator app. It is easy to use and remarkably powerful, providing evaluations, graphs, tables, and probably a lot of other things that I haven’t learned yet. What’s especially… Read More ›
Turmoil and Transition in Boston: A Political Memoir from the Busing Era
This is an engaging memoir by Boston politico Larry DiCara, former City Councillor and former mayoral candidate. Part political history, part personal, it provides a convincing insider’s account of Boston politics in the ’70s and ’80s, focusing on the busing… Read More ›
More on the Common Core
Right when I’m writing several posts about the Common Core, it’s not entirely coincidental that the Boston Globe had a big article about it this morning. Focusing on teacher training (a.k.a. professional development, or PD), the first few paragraphs of Alexandria… Read More ›
First math meet of 2014–2015
Congratulations to the Weston High School Math Team for an outstanding performance in the first math meet of the year. We consider 100 points to be a good score — yesterday the team scored a total of 125, including a… Read More ›
What works in education (revisited)
How do we know what works in education? Educational experiments are always suspect, since it’s impossible to control all the variables. There are also ethical issues involved in experimenting on students. So how can we possibly measure the effectiveness of… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 