Learning Strategies

Recent Posts - page 78

• Why he stopped doing interviews for Yale

  By ljd42 on October 8, 2015

  Ben Orlin hits the nail on the head in his brief essay titled “Why I’ve Stopped Doing Interviews for Yale.” The whole admissions process for highly selective colleges has become an unpredictable mess, as many of my recent high-school students will tell… Read More ›

• Copenhagen

  By ljd42 on October 5, 2015

  So…it’s hard to avoid telling a bad joke about uncertainty…you know, “Heisenberg and Bohr walk into a bar…” But I’m going to try hard to stay away from such jokes, Not that the play isn’t amusing. In fact it has… Read More ›

• The Ophelia Cut

  By ljd42 on September 26, 2015

  

  You’re probably wondering how many John Lescroart mystery novels featuring Dismas Hardy I’ve read at this point. No, you’re not wondering that? That’s just as well, since I’m not at all sure; there are 14 in all, and they seem… Read More ›

• What’s wrong with Strunk and White?

  By ljd42 on September 24, 2015

  The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White, is certainly a popular book, but its popularity is richly undeserved. There, I said it. A recent article by Stanford’s Asya Pereltsvaig in the Languages of the World blog explains why the popularity of Strunk… Read More ›

• “You’re not actually bad at math.”

  By ljd42 on September 22, 2015

  This picture sits atop an interesting article in Slate magazine, titled “You’re not actually bad at math” and subtitled “A new way to think about how to reason.” Although I call the article “interesting,” it’s ultimately disappointing. It raises several… Read More ›

• A Little Night Music

  By ljd42 on September 20, 2015

  Yesterday afternoon Barbara and I went to see A Little Night Music at the Huntington Theatre. Go see it! Although I consider myself something of a fan of Stephen Sondheim, I had never seen this particular musical before, either on stage… Read More ›

• Standards of mathematical practice: A portfolio

  By ljd42 on September 18, 2015

  

  Check out Tina Cardone’s post about standards of mathematical practice. Her suggestions relate closely to my post of August 30, where I discussed the attributes of a good mathematician and how we’re planning to measure them in Weston. There’s a… Read More ›

• Common bonds…or One No Trump

  By ljd42 on September 16, 2015

  What do these three have in common? Tea-partiers who distrust experienced teachers and blame them for everything that’s wrong in education. Climate-deniers who distrust scientists. Republicans who prefer any of the three highest-polling candidates (Trump, Carson, Fiorina). They’re all right-wingers, of course,… Read More ›

• Why?

  By ljd42 on September 15, 2015

  

  What is the key question? Not to sound like Abbott and Costello, but actually “why” is the key question. A year ago, my boss’s boss, Pam Bator — new in that role at the time — started a blog called“Why?” Note… Read More ›

• Using primary sources in teaching, even in teaching math

  By ljd42 on September 14, 2015

  

  Primary sources should provide a significant portion of our information. History teachers know this, of course, but it’s rare among math teachers. Even though my major academic interests are math and linguistics/languages, I was deeply affected by the best course I took… Read More ›

• Teaching isn’t brain surgery

  By ljd42 on September 13, 2015

  I love the provocative title of this talk by philosopher Harry Brighouse: “Teaching’s not exactly brain surgery, is it?” Brighouse is trying to provoke us into thinking that his talk is going to be a teacher-hating rant by some Tea Partier…. Read More ›

• Social skills and teamwork are primary

  By ljd42 on September 12, 2015

  Some of my students hate groupwork. I’m sympathetic; I used to hate it too. Working in a group slows you down, these students say; it forces you to cooperate with less-capable classmates; it makes you assume responsibility for other people’s failings. There… Read More ›

• How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

  By ljd42 on September 11, 2015

  We all like Dilbert. Well, some of us like Dilbert. Those of us who have worked in the software industry post copies of Dilbert cartoons near our desks because they are so much on target about the high-tech workplace and… Read More ›

• “Everyone has to raise their hands”

  By ljd42 on September 10, 2015

  

  The great Sam Shah has written another classic blog post, a post that needs to win a prize for immediately persuading me to implement what he recommends. How often does that happen? Here’s the central paragraph: If your group has a question, everyone… Read More ›

• The Shining Girls

  By ljd42 on September 8, 2015

  What an unusual book! The genre-defying novel The Shining Girls, by South African author Lauren Beukes, might not be your cup of tea…but give it a try. Don’t worry about its genre. Is it science fiction? Is it fantasy? Is it a… Read More ›

• “I’m shocked, shocked to find that cheating is going on in here!”

  By ljd42 on September 7, 2015

  A couple of weeks ago I was shocked —shocked, I tell you — to find a headline in the Boston Globe reading “Harvard, MIT researchers find cheating in online courses.” Imagine that! You have an online course, where students are… Read More ›

• Fantasy Internships

  By ljd42 on September 6, 2015

  For the second year in a row, our college-prep Algebra II classes are all doing a year-long applied math project centering on cryptography, which has long been one of the four units in our Algebra II curriculum. This project is… Read More ›

• Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away

  By ljd42 on September 5, 2015

  Plato! Google! What a combination! Philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein imagines what would happen if Plato were somehow still alive and were visiting Google, being interviewed on talk shows, etc. This premise, of course, requires a certain suspension of disbelief,… Read More ›

• Seveneves

  By ljd42 on September 3, 2015

  Another fine novel from the great Neal Stephenson! Though not by any means his best, Seveneves is still a five-star story. Go read it. At only 880 pages, you’ll be able to finish it in a day or two. Well…no. It really… Read More ›

• What Language is: And What it isn’t and What it Could Be

  By ljd42 on September 1, 2015

  Sometimes people ask me to recommend a good book on linguistics for the general reader — not a textbook, not a technical treatise, just an informative (and accurate) explanation of what linguistics is all about. I’ve never quite been sure… Read More ›

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