Recent Posts - page 133

  • Representations

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    Dennis and I were talking about multiple representations. Multiple representations are one of the Big Ideas that wend their way through all our math courses. A table and a graph and a function machine and a mapping diagram are all… Read More ›

  • Awards

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    Is Weston High School the only school that gives out too many awards? Probably not. I counted 14 awards for one of our seniors, and 14 for another as well! And, of course, there were hundreds of others for seniors…. Read More ›

  • Numb3rs

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    Please read Graham Cormode’s review of the TV show, “Numb3rs” (which he claims is pronounced “Numbthreers” rather than “Numbers”). Brief excerpt: Given low initial expectations, it was probably one of the better attempts to show mathematical topics within the context… Read More ›

  • Literature & math: imaginary gardens with real toads

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    This week’s New York Times Book Review contains a fascinating Literary Map of Manhattan, preceded by an explanatory article written by Ethicist Randy Cohen. Quoting Meg Wolitzer, Cohen defines his (their?) “cartographic motto”: a strong sense of specificity, even though… Read More ›

  • What math has taught him

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    Sam Hughes is the author of the Venn Diagram cited in my previous post. I also recommend his list of “Things mathematics has taught me”: That there are such things as unanswerable questions — indeed, provably unanswerable questions That Occam’s… Read More ›

  • Don’t confuse England with Britain

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    Perhaps a Venn Diagram would help.

  • Statistics for kids

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    Do check out the NCES Students’ Classroom site. Good stuff — even though a lot of it is in Comic Sans (see yesterday’s post).

  • Ban Comic Sans!

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    In a column in this week’s Boston Phoenix, Mike Miliard reports on the worldwide campaign by Dave and Holly Combs to ban the Comic Sans font: …It’s Comic Sans, the goofy, ungainly typeface, meant to mimic handwriting that’s somehow proliferated… Read More ›

  • Another gender difference?

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    My impression is that there are significantly more female teen bloggers than male ones, but maybe I’m wrong. A fascinating study by David Huffaker says that “BlogCensus randomly sampled 490,000 blogs to find 40% male and 36% female, with the… Read More ›

  • Homework considered harmful

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    Homework can be counterproductive, according to an article on the physorg.com website. Here are a few excerpts: Instead of improving educational achievement in countries around the world, increases in homework may actually undercut teaching effectiveness and worsen disparities in student… Read More ›

  • Building learning communities

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    A conference on Building Learning Communities — right here in Weston! I don’t know much about it, but it’s led by Wellesley’s distinguished former tech coordinator, Alan November, and the blurb looks interesting. Stay tuned for more info…

  • Chris Lydon redux

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    Yesterday Christopher Lydon returned to NPR with his new show/blog called Open Source. Day #2 concluded a few minutes ago. Actually, of course, it was only the broadcast portion that concluded a few minutes ago. The Internet portion — the… Read More ›

  • An argument from continuity

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    Two sophomores approached my colleague Josh with a question: “How can we construct a fair 5-sided die?” Josh posed a prior question: Is it even possible to construct such a die? He fashioned an interesting argument from continuity: Consider two… Read More ›

  • Intel, security, and Apple

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    Paul Otellini, the new CEO of Intel, says that he “spends an hour a weekend removing spyware from his daughter’s computer,” according to a Wall Street Journal article about its recent All Things Digital conference. When asked whether a computer… Read More ›

  • The new SAT

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    An interesting column by Mark Franek concerning the writing section of the new SAT includes the following observation: The writing section is entirely new — 70 percent of it is composed of pesky multiple-choice grammatical questions (where students aren’t writing… Read More ›

  • The view from college math

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    Rudbeckia Hirta (a clever pseudonym for a math professor who carefully keeps her true identity hidden) observes: Due to reasons beyond my understanding, high school math and college math are completely unaligned. The K-12 system sends us students whose knowledge… Read More ›

  • William of Orange

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    The newest member of our family: William of Orange

  • Where visuals fail

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    Some of us couldn’t possibly forget the 1969 draft lottery, the new and supposedly “fair” system to pick who was going to be sent to Vietnam. My Algebra 2 class is studying probability and was remarkably interested in learning about… Read More ›

  • Don’t do this

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    From this morning’s Boston Globe: A public school teacher fed up with his students’ behavior found a way to berate them in the context of a class assignment. The Jefferson Parish teacher wrote and distributed a two-page essay to his… Read More ›

  • Do department names matter?

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    As in most high schools, computer science courses at Weston High School are taught under the aegis of the Math Department. (One of the first exceptions to this rule was Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, where we spun off a separate… Read More ›