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 ›
Weston
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 ›
The Outlier Effect
Just came back from seeing The Outlier Effect, a one-act play written and performed by Weston High School’s Theater Company. That’s right: not only performed by them, but also written by them. Collaboration by a mere two authors is difficult… 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 ›
WoW and Second Life: follow-up
This is a follow-up to my earlier post on Second Life (SL) vs. World of Warcraft (WoW). One of my students, Dan Spector, replies to that post by writing the following remarks in an email message to me (quoted by… 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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
Romantic pairings: inappropriate for high school?
No, it’s not what you think. Of course there are romantic pairings in high school, and there’s no point in considering them inappropriate. But that’s not what this post is all about. The question is whether a precalculus class that’s… Read More ›
Once again, addressing the achievement gap
We had a day-long workshop last week on the achievement gap, which I’ve discussed in various earlier posts. What troubles all of us is that our black and Latino students (mostly from Dorchester, Roxbury, and other Boston neighborhoods) get significantly… Read More ›
Excellence without a Soul
I highly recommend Excellence without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education, by Harry Lewis. Though nominally about Harvard, it’s really about a much larger domain, including not only elite universities but also elite public high schools such as… Read More ›
Somebody Else's Music
I just finished reading Somebody Else’s Music, by Jane Haddam. One of the best in her Gregor Demarkian series, it is distinctly darker than its predecessors. Most interesting to a high-school teacher is its theme of high school as real… Read More ›
Balance or integration?
In many school districts, including Weston, we try to resolve the Math Wars by promoting a balance between skills and concepts. We tend to adopt the party line as promoted by former Education Secretary Richard Riley: We are suffering here… Read More ›
Misoverestimating minority populations
It worries me that people so consistently overestimate the populations of all minority groups. We know that estimation is difficult, but the magnitude of the errors that I see has genuine political implications for us as citizens. This isn’t just… Read More ›
Honor Roll
A local suburb, Needham, has decided to stop publishing its High School’s honor roll in the newspaper. Is that a good idea? An article in the local paper explains the reasoning: “We’ve collected valuable data on the issue,” [High School… Read More ›
Homework, oral traditions, and religions
Many questions can be raised concerning homework, such as why it is given and what its purpose is. I’ve discussed these big issues in an earlier post. Here I just want to mention a smaller but still significant issue —… Read More ›
Sudburyopoly
I am told that there is an unfortunate preposition in the game of Sudburopoly, where the first half of the slogan of Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School is misstated as “Think of yourself,” rather than “Think for yourself.” I know a… Read More ›
Connecting math with other disciplines
From time to time we try to connect our math teaching with other disciplines. Often this happens naturally — physics examples in precalculus, biology examples in Algebra II, etc. It’s no coincidence that both of these other disciplines are scientific… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 