It’s easy to find plenty to dislike about MCAS, but I was particularly struck by the cogency of Sanjoy Mahajan’s piece entitled “Public School Math Doesn’t Teach Students How to Reason.” Aside from the usual arguments against MCAS — it… Read More ›
Teaching & Learning
Working hard is not enough.
This post, like part of yesterday’s, brings up an educational dilemma:
On the one hand, we want students to work hard. That means that we need to provide incentives as rewards for working hard. Grades are pretty much the only currency we have in high school, so students expect to get good grades if they put in a lot of effort.
College-prep? City council candidates and math education!
City council candidates and math education? Those are two utterly unrelated topics, aren’t they? But there turns out to be a connection. First of all, this afternoon I had already been intending to comment on an op-ed piece from this morning’s… Read More ›
The age of distraction?
A recent article in Salon opens with the conventional view of “kids today”: They live in a state of perpetual, endless distraction, and, for many parents and educators, it’s a source of real concern. Will future generations be able to… Read More ›
Inverting the classroom
Several different threads have recently been coming together under the heading of “inverting the classroom.” The basic idea is that modern technology has let some of us come to the conclusion that the traditional model of the classroom has it… Read More ›
High School Quiz Show Quarterfinals
Be sure to watch Weston vs. Hamilton-Wenham in the quarterfinals of High School Quiz show, to be broadcast tomorrow night, 4/24, at 7:00 PM on Channel 2!
A beautiful fractal project
In last month’s post about our Fractal Fair, I made the following promise: Stay tuned for a post on one project in particular, a spectacular children’s book on fractals. So here’s the follow-up, or at least a preliminary follow-up. I… Read More ›
Making the Grades
Everyone who has any connection with education — teacher, student, parent, administrator — needs to read Todd Farley’s Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry. Yes, the book is a bit repetitive, and of course it reflects… Read More ›
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
I’m sure you’re familiar with all the controversy surrounding Amy Chua’s memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Some of the controversy is well-deserved, but much is not. This book came to the world’s attention through an excerpt published in… Read More ›
Massachusetts State Math Playoffs
Congratulations to the Weston High School Math Team for coming in fifth in the state at the Massachusetts State Math Playoffs in Shrewsbury on Monday! We have just learned that those results have qualified us to enter the New England… Read More ›
Lost in Lexicon, but not lost in Brookline
A terrific turnout last night at the Driscoll School in Brookline. More than half (!) of the fourth- and fifth-graders (and their parents) showed up for an evening event revolving around Penny Noyce’s Lost in Lexicon. My role was to… Read More ›
A Latin test from 1964
Continuing yesterday’s theme, I offer you a Latin test from 1964, with no comment about how well I would do on it today:
An AP US History test from 1964
Deep in my attic, in an old file folder, I discovered an AP US History test that I took back in October of 1964: I wonder how many of those questions I could answer correctly today, especially within a 50-minute… Read More ›
Rubrics
We’re all being pressed to use rubrics. For those of you not in the ed biz, a rubric is described pretty well in Wikipedia: A rubric is a scoring tool for subjective assessments. It is a set of criteria and… Read More ›
A test should tell a story.
A colleague who does not teach in our Math Department was tutoring one of my students. Not being familiar with our mildly unusual Honors Geometry course, she found that she herself did not know how to do the last problem… Read More ›
English literature, “foreign literature,” and poetry month
When I was talking with a Weston English teacher the other day, I realized that my own high-school experience with literature as assigned by English teachers was badly skewed. “This is an English department, not an American department” was one… Read More ›
Math should be useful, or fun, or beautiful…
The great Art Benjamin, whom we’ve had the pleasure of listening to twice at Weston High School, made the following remarks in his TED talk: If I had an extra minute, I’d also talk about how we shouldn’t only show the mathematics… Read More ›
Professional development/Race to Nowhere
Today we participated in an intense professional development (PD) program and worked on our preparation for NEASC accreditation. NEASC work is often frustrating but often useful as well (more on that later). Today’s PD was quite interesting. The main part of… Read More ›
Suing your child’s preschool
Strange but true (like many of the other news reports heard on Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me): A Manhattan mom is suing a $19,000-a-year preschool, claiming it jeopardized her daughter’s chances of getting into an elite private school…. and the elite… Read More ›
Pi Day — or Tau Day???
This is a few days late, but… We held our annual observation of Pi Day on Monday in two of my classes and on Tuesday in the other two (since they didn’t meet on Monday). But one of my students… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 