Some of my students hate groupwork. I’m sympathetic; I used to hate it too. Working in a group slows you down, these students say; it forces you to cooperate with less-capable classmates; it makes you assume responsibility for other people’s failings. There… Read More ›
Teaching & Learning
“Everyone has to raise their hands”
The great Sam Shah has written another classic blog post, a post that needs to win a prize for immediately persuading me to implement what he recommends. How often does that happen? Here’s the central paragraph: If your group has a question, everyone… Read More ›
“I’m shocked, shocked to find that cheating is going on in here!”
A couple of weeks ago I was shocked —shocked, I tell you — to find a headline in the Boston Globe reading “Harvard, MIT researchers find cheating in online courses.” Imagine that! You have an online course, where students are… Read More ›
Fantasy Internships
For the second year in a row, our college-prep Algebra II classes are all doing a year-long applied math project centering on cryptography, which has long been one of the four units in our Algebra II curriculum. This project is… Read More ›
Attributes of a good mathematician
In a Professional Development activity a couple of years ago, we brainstormed the “attributes of a good mathematician.” These were supposed to be the characteristics that a successful math student should be developing, so we started thinking about how to… Read More ›
You Are Not Special
You’ve probably heard about David McCullough Jr.’s much-publicized graduation speech at Wellesley High School back in 2012. Perhaps you even saw it on YouTube. Perhaps you read the book by the same title. Perhaps you were even there in person. In… Read More ›
Pixar: Transformations and mathematical models at the Museum of Science
Pixar? Math? What a combination! When I wrote about what I learned at the NCTM Annual Meeting back in April, I observed that geometric transformations and mathematical models were common themes at that conference. Transformations seem fairly abstract, even if… Read More ›
Missing the point?
As you know, the devil is in the details. Details, you say? Well, the Math Curmudgeon is always worth reading…but I often disagree with him, most especially with some of his details. Consider his post “Missing the Point,” which deals primarily… Read More ›
Temari balls
We traditionally cap off Honors Geometry by ending the course with a brief exploration of non-Euclidean geometries. In recent years we have focused on geometry on the surface of a sphere; we ask freshmen to pretend that they are living on… Read More ›
How science and math see each other
Ben does it again! We’re back to Math with Bad Drawings, with another post that resonates deeply with me as a math teacher. It begins with the somewhat startling claim that “mathematicians and scientists don’t share all that much in common.” How… Read More ›
Oliver Sacks
I’ve long been an admirer of Oliver Sacks — see, for instance, my post on Musicophilia — but it was his recent announcement that he is fatally ill that led me to want to read more than just that book… Read More ›
Reactions to the NCTM Annual Meeting
Fortunately I didn’t write this report just now! (I wrote it at the end of April, right after the NCTM meeting. I never would have remembered all these details if I had waited three and a half months.) Just follow… Read More ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
Only in Georgia? The Atlanta teacher scandal
Why isn’t there more outrage about this? Yes, teachers are human, so we make mistakes. Mistakes in math are excusable, as long as they aren’t too frequent or too egregious. But mistakes in ethics and law are inexcusable. Teachers who… Read More ›
The Triple Package
It doesn’t feel that long, but it turns out that it was three and half years ago that I reviewed Amy Chua’s previous book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Her new book, written in collaboration with her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, is… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 