Recent Posts - page 83

  • Yes, that's the problem.

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  • What works in education

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    It’s hard to know where to begin this post. Perhaps I should simply ask you to read “What works in education” by Grant Wiggins — including the comments. Wiggins discusses John Hattie’s extensive statistical studies that compare the effectiveness of… Read More ›

  • William in a box

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    I guess William wants to be sent by Priority Mail.

  • Bring Your Own Technology: A brief progress report

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    Six months ago I wrote a post about the “Bring Your Own Technology” initiative at Weston (BYOT). It’s time for an informal progress report (from my own point of view — which of course is objective and completely unbiased). On the… Read More ›

  • Come to the Fair!

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    Come visit Weston’s Twelfth Annual Fractal Fair, which is being held on Valentine’s Day this year! That’s Friday, February 14, 10:05-12:15 in the Weston High School Library. The exhibits and presentations by 70 Honors Precalculus students (mostly juniors) will focus on… Read More ›

  • Affluenza

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    I’m uncharacteristically speechless. As Dr. Boyce Watkins puts it, “Rich, white kids have ‘affluenza,’ poor, black kids go to prison.” Here’s the story: A wealthy teen who killed four people in a Texas drunk driving accident will not go to… Read More ›

  • Jamaica Plain: No comment.

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    So I’m in the lobby outside Bella Luna Restaurant in the Brewery Small Business Complex in Jamaica Plain, looking at the bulletin board, and I spot the juxtaposition of these two notices on their community bulletin board. I’ve drawn blue… Read More ›

  • Suppose math tells you something that goes against your preconceived beliefs. What do you do?

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    Yale Law School’s Dan Kahan and three other researchers make the case that those more skilled at math are less likely to come to the correct conclusion on controversial matters—even when the numbers to support that conclusion are clear, empirical,… Read More ›

  • Cryptology? Cryptography? Crypto?

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    One of my students claimed that I was being inconsistent because I sometimes wrote cryptology, sometimes cryptography, and sometimes just crypto. What’s going on here? I suppose I could quote Walt Whitman on the subject of contradicting myself, or I could quote Emerson on the subject… Read More ›

  • Data visualization

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    “Chartjunk?” you ask. “What’s that?” The term comes from Edward Tufte, whose work I have admired for thirty years. If you only have a small amount of time to read what he has written, I recommend the beautiful, 200 page classic, The… Read More ›

  • And God Said

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    Brandeis professor Joel Hoffman’s wonderful linguistic analysis is surprisingly readable and engaging. I recently read his full-length book, And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible’s Original Meaning, which is filled with such analysis. Normally I’m not enthusiastic about quoting other readers’ reviews… Read More ›

  • RIP, Pete Seeger, 94

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    It’s the end of an era. My three childhood heroes were Isaac Asimov, who died in 1992; Adlai Stevenson II, who died much earlier, in 1965; and Pete Seeger, who died much later…yesterday. So it took nearly half a century… Read More ›

  • Grant Wiggins and Diane Ravitch

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    It’s always difficult when you admire two different people and they’re in a bitter dispute with each other. Grant Wiggins and Diane Ravitch both have appropriate, well-thought-out views on education. But they deeply disagree on the role that teachers can… Read More ›

  • 0 for 3

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    “Sigh. I’m 0 for 3 in recent books and movies!” That’s what I said to myself after finishing a book that I had recently taken out of the library. What I meant was that I had disliked all three of… Read More ›

  • PD and edX

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    Yesterday was the fourth day of a long weekend for my students, but a professional development day for us teachers. It was surprisingly productive. As a department we constructed a list of every unit in every math course in grades… Read More ›

  • What is a proof?

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    High-school math teachers and those who know them need to be concerned with what a proof is. That certainly isn’t a new claim. But for most students a proof is something you learn to construct in high-school geometry class and… Read More ›

  • NSA, crypto, and a long project

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    Back in September I wrote a long post about a recent book written by Rafe Esquith. My second paragraph began with this observation: It wasn’t clear to me at first whether this book would have anything to offer a math… Read More ›

  • Where did ten weeks go?

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    How did I manage to go ten weeks without blogging? Just overtaken by events, I guess. But I’m determined to resume my almost-daily posts, starting today. So stay tuned, as they used to say. (Does anyone actually say “stay tuned”… Read More ›

  • Art or math?

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    What is this? Modern art? A lost work by Jackson Pollock? Actually, no. In my precalculus class this morning, we were using the Oscilloscope app on the iPad to produce real-time graphs of various musical tones. Students brought instruments into… Read More ›

  • “What's Old Is New Again”

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    Be sure to read Boris Korsunsky’s short essay in Education Week. With his usual panache, my colleague tells us that “what’s old is new again” in the world of education. This observation comes from…no, I don’t think I’ll tell you, as spoilers… Read More ›