Learning Strategies

Recent Posts - page 80

• 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 ›

• Attributes of a good mathematician

  By ljd42 on August 30, 2015

  In a Professional Development activity a couple of years ago, we brainstormed the “attributes of a good mathematician.” These were supposed to be the characteristics that a successful math student should be developing, so we started thinking about how to… Read More ›

• You Are Not Special

  By ljd42 on August 25, 2015

  You’ve probably heard about David McCullough Jr.’s much-publicized graduation speech at Wellesley High School back in 2012. Perhaps you even saw it on YouTube. Perhaps you read the book by the same title. Perhaps you were even there in person. In… Read More ›

• The Berkshires: Mostly museums

  By ljd42 on August 23, 2015

  

  Barbara and I have just returned from a mini-vacation, which we were able to squeeze in between the end of Crimson Summer Academy and the beginning of workshops for Weston High School. We decided we would spend three days in… Read More ›

• Ace Atkins as Robert Parker

  By ljd42 on August 21, 2015

  Reading Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels is a guilty pleasure. The Boston and Cambridge locales are spot on, the dialog is snappy, and most of the plots are entertaining. Or perhaps I should say it was a guilty pleasure, as Parker died… Read More ›

• Pixar: Transformations and mathematical models at the Museum of Science

  By ljd42 on August 19, 2015

  

  Pixar? Math? What a combination! When I wrote about what I learned at the NCTM Annual Meeting back in April, I observed that geometric transformations and mathematical models were common themes at that conference. Transformations seem fairly abstract, even if… Read More ›

• The new Boston Public Market

  By ljd42 on August 17, 2015

  The new Boston Public Market opened a couple of weeks ago to much fanfare. Along with a lot of positive publicity, there were some vocal critics, so I had to check it out. This isn’t the kind of farm stand… Read More ›

• It's just so much work being a cat all day…

  By ljd42 on August 16, 2015

  

• Missing the point?

  By ljd42 on August 15, 2015

  As you know, the devil is in the details. Details, you say? Well, the Math Curmudgeon is always worth reading…but I often disagree with him, most especially with some of his details. Consider his post “Missing the Point,” which deals primarily… Read More ›

• Temari balls

  By ljd42 on August 14, 2015

  

  We traditionally cap off Honors Geometry by ending the course with a brief exploration of non-Euclidean geometries. In recent years we have focused on geometry on the surface of a sphere; we ask freshmen to pretend that they are living on… Read More ›

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