Professor Robert Devaney of Boston University gave two excellent talks to our precalculus classes (consisting mostly of juniors, with a sprinkling of advanced sophomores and freshmen) on Tuesday. His talk to the college-prep classes (”Precalculus Part One”) focused on the… Read More ›
If you’re in or around Weston on Wednesday, come to our Ninth Annual Fractal Fair! It’s from 10:00 to 12:15 in the Weston High School Library. The exhibits and presentations, by 50 Honors Precalculus students (mostly juniors), will focus on… Read More ›
Be sure to watch High School Quiz Show tonight: Channel 2 at 7:00! The match is between Weston and Woburn, starring Mir Bokhari, Grace Huckins, Jon Birjiniuk, and Matthew Chernick, as seen left-to-right in this brief promotional video.
Weston High School is a great place! With a student body of only 748 students, we had about 150 show up for a chess match of all things! What a delightfully geeky experience. The context was a fund-raiser for the… Read More ›
Congratulations to the Weston High School Math Team for moving on to post-season! We will be competing in the State Meet on April 1 because of our current standing, which is #3 in the state among medium-sized high schools: at… Read More ›
On the whole it was refreshing to read Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions about How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom. Despite the misleading title and overly long subtitle, Daniel Willingham’s… Read More ›
And the award for coolest math video ever goes to…Vi Hart, for her Doodling in Math Class series. These videos are “subversive,” as one of my colleagues (approvingly) labels them. The common theme appears to be that math classes in… Read More ›
Quotation from one of my students: “I hate it when people don’t like negative attitudes.” (Context: He had been solving a problem at the board and made a negative remark, causing one of his classmates to say that he was… Read More ›
A course ought to tell a story. If it doesn’t, it’s just a collection of topics, not a course. Honors Precalculus at Weston definitely does tell a story. I was thinking about the themes of that story today, and I… Read More ›
Why do so many of my students use incorrect names for various polygons? They claim that they are merely recalling what they have been taught; maybe this is so, maybe not. I suppose there are two major possibilities: They are… Read More ›
The Weston High School Library recently posted a slide show from Rutgers University explaining why students shouldn’t use Wikipedia. This carefully produced polemic deserves a thoughtful rebuttal; I have endeavored to write one here. Be sure to watch the slide… Read More ›
Why is it that the phrase “solving the Rubik’s cube” has such a different meaning to me than it does to others? For a long time I was quite puzzled by people who made the implausible claim that they had… Read More ›
At Saturday Course we were working with prime numbers, and one fifth-grader asked his classmates a question: Student A: Is 1 a prime number? Student B: No. Student A: So it’s composite? Student B: No, it isn’t prime and it… Read More ›
A class ought to feel like a community. (Mathematically speaking, that’s what make it a class, rather than a set. Yes, it’s a slightly different meaning of the word “class,” but the resemblance is not a coincidence.) We’ve all been… Read More ›
The Math Department of Weston High School & Middle School was featured in a report on last night’s NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams! Be sure to watch all the way to the end (it’s only two and half minutes), not… Read More ›
Yesterday I wrote about Penny Noyce’s new book, Lost in Lexicon. What prompted that post was that I was on my way to the official launch party for the book. It was a great success, and I saw a couple… Read More ›
Listen in on this conversation: Teacher 1: I hear that you friend your students on Facebook. Teacher 2: Not exactly. I accept friend requests from current and former students. But I never initiate them. Teacher 1: Even so, it’s a… Read More ›
Well done, Weston High School Math Team! Congratulations to Alexandra R., Andrew H., Andy Y., Blake W., Caleb T., Daniel P., Jason M., Jonathan B., Julia B., and Pravina S. for a fine performance at this afternoon’s meet at Lexington… Read More ›
Yes, some students enjoy writing proofs. They accept the task as a challenging puzzle, one that provides an agreeable sense of completion once you’ve successfully threaded a path from the given information to the conclusion. I was one of those… Read More ›
In our department meeting today, we had a guest speaker from the Wellness Department* who talked with us about building closer connections with students, an atmosphere of trust, and greater engagement by our students. All good things, certainly. Part of… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 