High-school students want to take more and more Advanced Placement courses these days. And we’re encouraging them. At Weston we have altogether too many students who want to skip the second half of precalculus and take AP Statistics instead —… Read More ›
Teaching & Learning
Sudoku challenges and championships
On February 15, Weston High School will be holding a Sudoku challenge in the Library for the first 30 students to sign up. On March 10-11, the first World Sudoku Championship will be held in Lucca, Italy.
Quantitative literacy in college students
According to the National Survey of America’s College Students (NSACS) — a study conducted by the American Institutes for Research and funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts — American college students know even less math than we had thought: Approximately… Read More ›
Can exams reduce stress and be otherwise helpful?
There’s a possibility that Weston may return to a traditional exam schedule after a decade or so of not having one. There have been many justifications for not having a final exam week: An emphasis on exams increases stress. Students… Read More ›
Educator-in-chief
President Bush (on CBS today): My job is not only Commander-In-Chief but educator-in-chief. And I needed to say to the people, you bet it’s tough. George W. Bush as educator-in-chief? Hmmm…
MyLifeBits, Borges, and big ideas
On yesterday’s episode of NPR’s Living on Earth, Steven Cherry interviewed Gordon Bell about his project at Microsoft, called MyLifeBits. Bell is in the process of recording everything in his life in digital form: Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime’s… Read More ›
Science, math, & engineering
A fellow Dorchesterite, calling himself Trxckster — yes, the third letter is indeed an x, not an i — quotes visionary Alan Kay in his blog: Today, science (a concern with what is real) is mixed with mathematics (a concern… Read More ›
Graphic organizers
Many high-school teachers believe that so-called graphic organizers are helpful to students. Readers who are my age may wonder what a graphic organizer is. According to the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, a graphic organizer is an instructional tool used… Read More ›
What's wrong with this problem?
The problem below comes from the Education Records Bureau’s Independent School Entrance Examination (ISEE) for middle school students. How many things can you find wrong with it? Thanks for Thane Plambeck for the pointer.
The goal of all creative activity (including math?)
From Mark Bernstein: …the goal of a Web site must ultimately be, quite simply, to make people think. Even simple sales sites aspire not simply to gain an order, but rather to gain a customer — and to change the… Read More ›
Wikipedia's virtues
There has been a flurry of attacks on one of the most useful sites on the Internet: the Wikipedia. It’s the source that I recommend most often for math and computer science. But students tell me that it’s disparaged by… Read More ›
Highlighting considered harmful?
As our students were reading silently (see yesterday’s post), teachers were strongly encouraged to model the process by silently reading the same book along with the students. We were meeting in homerooms — eleven or twelve students per teacher —… Read More ›
Silent reading: The first day
As I described in my post of November 3, Weston High School is currently engaged in a school-wide interdisciplinary project: reading Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains and integrating it into every course in every subject. The integrating will happen in… Read More ›
A linguistic exercise
My favorite linguistics blogger, the Tensor, reports an interesting exercise that was held in one of his classes: …the professor had us do a little exercise: sit down with a piece of paper and name as many [living] languages as… Read More ›
Peers
From Diane Greco’s fascinating December 8 post in her blog: The assumption that children of the same age constitute a true peer group only holds true for children of average development. The term peer does not, in essence, mean people… Read More ›
Critical friends
At yesterday’s faculty meeting, a group of teachers modeled the process of participating in a Critical Friends Group (CFG) in the context of Looking at Student Work (LASW). If you can get through the jargon, the combination of CFG and… Read More ›
"Units" and "unit tests"?
The other day we were talking about “summative assessments.”. In math a summative assessment usually translates to a unit test. But what about those of us who don’t give unit tests? About seven years ago, the Weston Math Department reformed… Read More ›
Grading on a curve
In her latest post on Learning Curves, Rudbeckia Hirta describes two methods of grading: Around here there are two schools of thought for grading calculus classes: straight percentages or curving the grades. I favor the former with each letter grade… Read More ›
Dimensional analysis
On tonight’s All Things Considered on NPR, Congressman Mike Sodrel (Republican of Indiana) says: The information that I get is, like most of my constituents, one-dimensional: it’s flat screen, flat paper. I wanted to see it 3-D.
Student rights
Students in public high schools and middle schools should know their legal rights — as well as the risks they may be taking when attempting to exercise their rights. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an excellent FAQ on the subject…. Read More ›
Learning Strategies 