What should an average grade be? This question actually has two very different but intertwingled meanings. Some people, when they ask it, are wondering whether the mean (or perhaps median) grade in a school/department/course should be a B or a… Read More ›
Teaching & Learning
Being visited by scary reviewers
No, they weren’t actually scary. That’s merely what one of my students thought. “Weren’t you scared?” she asked. Each department in the Weston Public Schools gets reviewed every ten years or so. This year it was the Math Department’s turn…. Read More ›
Art Day
The first Wednesday of (almost) every month is professional development day in the Weston Public Schools. Students have a half-day of classes, after which they can go home and the faculty have workshops and the like. Usually these days have… Read More ›
Math education: an inconvenient truth
It’s hard to know where to begin. What’s wrong with the video “Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth, ” which is primarily an attack on TERC’s Investigations in Number, Data, and Space and other standards-based curricula? Well, let me count the… Read More ›
Ethnomathematics
We have recently been discussing ethnomathematics in the context of Weston’s global awareness emphasis. Here are some thoughts on this subject: It’s worth studying number systems other than our own familiar Hindu-Arabic one. Years ago I developed quite a number… Read More ›
What should college freshmen know?
Rudbeckia Hirta reports that she has a “freakishly competent” college calculus class: They come to class; most of them do the assigned work; they earn high scores on the assessments. Whether that situation should be so surprising is another story,… Read More ›
NJ Seeds
I’ve written posts about the Crimson Summer Academy on two earlier occasions: August 20, 2006, and May 23, 2005. Now I’m designing a math curriculum for a program with a somewhat similar basis in New Jersey: the College Prep Program… Read More ›
Getting Things Done Revisited
Slightly over a year ago, I wrote a post about Getting Things Done (GTD) — how it seemed to me to be “the right thing” and yet I couldn’t make myself actually implement it. In the intervening 13 months I… Read More ›
Urban schools success stories? Or not?
So here’s the question. Why does everyone like to hear success stories from inner-city, overwhelming minority public schools? I suppose Democrats like to hear these stories because it confirms their beliefs that non-whites without money can be academically successful, and… Read More ›
Big ideas
LCSI’s new blog, Thinkering, links to Seymour Papert’s homepage, which in turn links to a four-and-a-half-year-old press release from MIT, which reminded me of our commitment to big ideas in the Math Department of the Weston Public Schools. Such are… Read More ›
Modified open campus — a solution to tardiness, or would it make it worse?
We have a problem at Weston High School. Actually, we have more than one — but there’s one problem I want to write about here: every day we have an extraordinary number of students coming late to school and/or late… Read More ›
High-school dropout = criminal?
Last night, Emily Rooney’s Greater Boston included a segment on truancy in the Boston public schools. One of her guests, Suffolk County Sheriff Andrea Cabral, whom I usually admire and respect, claimed that 50% of high-school dropouts (from Boston public… Read More ›
Irrationality
Rudbeckia Hirta reports that her college students have trouble understanding irrational numbers: Most of my students felt that 3 * sqrt(2) / 5 * sqrt(2) was irrational because of the sqrt(2). They didn’t remember that you can “cancel” (hate that… Read More ›
An AP course makes the resume shine
As in a great many other high schools, Weston sees more and more students each year taking Advanced Placement courses. Why is this happening? And is it a good thing? It’s easy to see why it’s happening. Weston students are… Read More ›
Maths
It’s helpful to read what the Brits say about maths teaching. I’ve recently started reading Mathematics in School, a journal published by the Mathematical Association (MA), which is more or less the British equivalent of our National Council of Teachers… Read More ›
"worksheet for students: am i insane?"
The aforementioned Jill Walker has posted a fascinating article entitled “worksheet for students: am i insane?” No, she’s not insane, although some of my students think she’s misguided. But I think she’s on to something. Take a good look at… Read More ›
Happy numbers, unhappy families
One of my students came across the Wikipedia article on Happy Numbers and asked about it in precalculus class. This is the sort of topic for which Wikipedia is an excellent source; in fact, if I wanted to know about… Read More ›
An ethical dilemma
It is unethical, as I’m sure you know, for a teacher to reveal any individual student’s grade to another student. (Students reveal their own grades all the time, of course, but that’s their decision, not ours.) This principle placed one… Read More ›
Maybe we should try this in high school
Rudbeckia Hirta, the pseudonymous math professor from a state university in the south, recounts a story with a delicious little idea at the end: So today I saw one of the football players in the class sending text messages on… Read More ›
Wikipedia revisited
My students have had a hard time finding any errors in Wikipedia (one of their assignments). Of course there are plenty of errors in it, so why was it so hard to find them? I think the issue is that… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 