Recent Posts - page 128

  • 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 ›

  • A college perspective

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    Check out two fascinating posts — one yesterday, one today — from the pseudonymous Rudbeckia Hirta. Both of them lament the state of mathematical knowledge of college freshmen and ask what we high-school teachers are teaching them. Of course her… Read More ›

  • PopCo

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    Popco, by Scarlett Thomas. I’m a perfect audience for this book, but I’m obviously not the intended audience for Allison Block, the ALA reviewer on Amazon.com: Mathematical puzzles. Mind-bending codes. A secret manuscript. And a cake recipe, too. Thomas’ latest… Read More ›

  • The value of projects

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    Are projects valuable for students in a high-school math class? I suppose the answer must inevitably be, “Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t.” OK, so we need to shift the terms of the question. We should ask, What kinds of… Read More ›

  • Differentiated instruction

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    In this age of No Child Left Untested, our primary goal is apparently a 100% passing rate on standardized tests. But at least there’s a recognition by The Powers That Be that people learn in different ways and at different… Read More ›

  • How people get to this page

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    It’s a bit puzzling to see how various readers found their way to this blog. Looking at the referrers, I wonder at some of the searches. Here are a few examples: Google: rachel, bartlett, chicago   Google: venn, diagram, about, bubonic,… Read More ›

  • God had a deadline

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    For the second time this year I came across a link to “The Eternal Flame,” a song that speaks to those of us who believe in the power, efficiency, and mathematical insight offered by the Lisp/Scheme/Logo family of computer programming… Read More ›