Learning Strategies

Recent Posts - page 71

• Very Bad Words

  By ljd42 on October 3, 2017

  Now for the third installment of posts about linguistics podcasts: Very Bad Words. Yes, it’s what you’re thinking. But it’s a podcast, not a broadcast, so they can get away with it without being bothered by the FCC. It’s the creation… Read More ›

• The World in Words

  By ljd42 on October 1, 2017

  As the title suggests, The World in Words is an offshoot of Public Radio International’s The World. It’s a linguistic podcast that focuses on…well…the world. And words. It’s also the subject of this second review of linguistics podcasts, as promised in… Read More ›

• Lingthusiasm

  By ljd42 on September 30, 2017

  OK, yes, I know that on September 26 I wrote that “My next four posts will deal with four different linguistics podcasts.” But then I was overtaken by events and just had to write a post about the noxious and… Read More ›

• Aren’t we supposed to be promoting STEM?

  By ljd42 on September 28, 2017

  This is disgusting. A leading member of Congress, Republican Dave Schweikert of Arizona, spent all day yesterday talking about the new Republican tax plan — yikes! numbers! — and had this to say about it on NPR’s All Things Considered this… Read More ›

• Linguistic Podcasts

  By ljd42 on September 26, 2017

  My next four posts will deal with four different linguistics podcasts — a new medium that has recently come to my attention. I’m sure you’ve been listening to podcasts for years, but I became aware of them only six months… Read More ›

• Camino Island

  By ljd42 on September 24, 2017

  It’s John Grisham, so I never expected it to be great literature. But I was still disappointed. The beginning was absorbing, and I liked the premise. The novel is all about booksellers and novelists — well, more like a bookseller and a novelist —… Read More ›

• Homework and Causation

  By ljd42 on September 22, 2017

  As this academic year ramps up, it’s worth recalling a conversation overheard by a colleague a couple of years ago: At the beginning of the third quarter, two sophomores were talking about their second-quarter report cards. “I got a C… Read More ›

• Why “Names of polygons”?

  By ljd42 on September 18, 2017

  Whenever I go to the WordPress Stats page for this blog, I see that my most popular post (most popular by far) is “Names of Polygons,” which I posted on December 10, 2010! It had 361 views last month, nearly… Read More ›

• Nine ways (or six, she said originally) to do linguistics in high school

  By ljd42 on September 16, 2017

  Unfortunately, I’ve never heard of a high school offering linguistics courses or indeed knowing much of anything about linguistics. So writes distinguished linguist Gretchen McCulloch. After all, everyone knows that linguistics is purely an undergraduate and graduate subject in colleges… Read More ›

• York. Book One: The Shadow Cipher

  By ljd42 on September 9, 2017

  Yes, it’s a YA novel; I don’t teach middle school, so why did I read it? The Shadow Cipher (Book One of Laura Ruby’s promised trilogy, York) is clearly aimed at intelligent seventh-graders. Yes, it got great reviews — but still, why would… Read More ›

• Ancient Babylonian trigonometry? Really? Really???

  By ljd42 on September 7, 2017

  It’s pretty clear what this clay tablet says, right? Obviously it’s written in… Oh, wait, maybe it isn’t so obvious. You probably don’t read Babylonian, or Akkadian, or Sumerian, or whatever language these cuneiform carvings represent. But this tablet has… Read More ›

• The first day for all

  By ljd42 on September 5, 2017

  Although the first day for faculty and freshmen came last week, yesterday was the first day when all who should be here were present at Weston High School. From where I sit, it was an especially smooth opening day. As… Read More ›

• Do negative numbers exist? And why do two negatives make a positive?

  By ljd42 on September 4, 2017

  A brief interchange on Facebook yesterday and today with three of my former students prompted this discussion of the two questions stated in the title of this post. It all started with this implausible claim from a reliable math website:… Read More ›

• New York 2140

  By ljd42 on September 3, 2017

  Most good science fiction takes a single premise (which may or may not be believable) and spins out the consequences of that premise. To be convincing, there should just be that one premise, since most readers are willing to suspend disbelief… Read More ›

• School of Rock

  By ljd42 on September 1, 2017

    I really didn’t think I would enjoy this movie. “Not my style,” I said to myself. But I was wrong. Although it’s true that it is not my style, I still enjoyed it a lot. In case it’s not… Read More ›

• A portal for parents

  By ljd42 on August 29, 2017

  There’s an excellent article in last week’s New York Times on the downside of checking kids’ grades constantly through an electronic portal for parents. Here are a couple of excerpts: The reality, at least in high-pressure school districts, is that some parents… Read More ›

• I Know a Secret

  By ljd42 on August 27, 2017

  

  Don’t read Tess Gerritsen’s newest Rizzoli and Isles novel, I Know a Secret, if you (like someone I know) are prone to having nightmares based on books and movies. The rest of us will find it fascinating and suspenseful. To a large… Read More ›

• “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?” (Rethinking quadrilaterals)

  By ljd42 on August 26, 2017

  

  Why on earth would we spend two whole days rewriting our Honors Geometry quadrilaterals unit? Our textbook, after all, contains a perfectly serviceable sequence of four lessons on this topic: These lessons are adequate. In the words of the standard… Read More ›

• New furniture!

  By ljd42 on August 25, 2017

  

  Arrived yesterday to find new furniture for students to use in our Math Office. As you can see, the chairs have wheels and the tables are modular (eight of them, though not all are visible in this photo). This combination… Read More ›

• Coding in middle school math

  By ljd42 on August 24, 2017

  

  Google Blockly? What’s that? And should we say coding or computer programming? We’ll deal with that terminological question in the last paragraph, but let me first tell you about Blockly and about the workshop we had yesterday. A group of… Read More ›

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