Recent Posts - page 127

  • The goal of all creative activity (including math?)

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    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 ›

  • Does Santa work for Bush?

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  • Wikipedia's virtues

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    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 ›

  • The night before solstice

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    ’Twas the last day for this session’s Saturday Course. The “On Stage” class performed James Finn Garner’s very amusing “’Twas the Night before Solstice,” which begins as follows: Twas the night before solstice and all through the co-opNot a creature… Read More ›

  • Highlighting considered harmful?

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    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

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    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

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    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 ›

  • Too funny

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    A parody of one of those pharmaceutical-company ads for a prescription medicine. A Japanese documentary on how to eat sushi.

  • Peers

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    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 ›

  • Mercury Rising

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    Just finished watching Mercury Rising. Cryptology and the NSA. An autistic boy. Bruce Willis. Alec Baldwin. Generally good acting. What more could one want? Well, characterization and depth, to name two. More cryptology. More NSA. Less conspiracy theory. Generally a… Read More ›

  • No snow day

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    Weston, of course, had to have school today. Having a snow day would have been too wimpy. You can’t be Lake Wobegon if you call off school. We didn’t even get dismissed at mid-day, although the forecast correctly predicted a… Read More ›

  • Critical friends

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    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 ›

  • PopCo revisited

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    In the past two weeks I haven’t had as much time to read as I would like. I’m woefully behind on the Globe, and it’s only today that I’ve finally finished reading PopCo. In my post of 11/23, I gave… Read More ›

  • "Units" and "unit tests"?

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    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

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    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

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    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

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    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 ›

  • Vegan firefighters and Starbucks coffee

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    It’s a good thing to break stereotypes every now and again. Vegan firefighters? Sounds unlikely. Vegan Texans? Also sounds unlikely. Now we have a vegan firehouse in Texas! They started out as flexitarians, but became vegans over the course of… Read More ›

  • Silber sees the light

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    Apparently I missed this direct quote from John Silber last month: I don’t believe in one-man rule.

  • A half-Chinese Thanksgiving

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    Thanksgiving dinner was a bit unusual this year. As always, we went to my sister’s house in Somerville — nothing unusual about that. But why was so much of the conversation in Chinese? Let’s see… You first need to know… Read More ›