Learning Strategies

Recent Posts - page 90

• MIT does not equal Mitt

  By ljd42 on November 10, 2012

  They don’t even sound alike. An MIT alumna was nearly prevented from voting in Florida because she was wearing an MIT shirt. A poll worker thought she was illegally campaigning for Romney inside the polling place.

• What motivates teachers and students?

  By ljd42 on November 8, 2012

  This is important! You’ve got to set aside ten minutes and watch this TED talk by Dan Pink. While it’s not specifically about teachers, nor specifically about students, it tells us a lot about what motivates and doesn’t motivate both groups. Presented by… Read More ›

• Math wins!

  By ljd42 on November 7, 2012

  This morning’s XKCD:

• Fractal pancakes!

  By ljd42 on November 5, 2012

  Maybe some of my precalculus students will make fractal pancakes for the Fractal Fair in March (though I’m not sure where we could serve them, as the Fair is held in the school library). Here’s what they look like:

• An excellent way to improve a school's test scores

  By ljd42 on November 4, 2012

  What’s the best way for a school to improve its test scores? That’s easy: you get rid of all the low-performing students, of course. Or you send truant officers to their homes on the morning of test day, and the… Read More ›

• How many other good teachers are going to quit for similar reasons?

  By ljd42 on November 3, 2012

  A North Carolina teacher named Kris Nielsen recently posted a letter that has been finding its way around the Internet. As a teacher in Massachusetts, I am fortunate not to have the problems that she reports, but they ring all… Read More ›

• Emulating the TI-84

  By ljd42 on November 2, 2012

  

  American schools have been using Texas Instruments calculators for more than a quarter of a century now. They have become the de facto standard. More recently, computers and projectors have become ubiquitous, so you would think that we would have a better… Read More ›

• Boston Cream

  By ljd42 on November 1, 2012

  I had never heard of Canadian crime fiction writer Howard Shrier before reading Boston Cream, part of Shrier’s series featuring Toronto detective Jonah Geller. In a recent interview, the author said that “some Canadian readers have said that these books are… Read More ›

• Privacy is highly overrated.

  By ljd42 on October 31, 2012

  Actually, privacy is a fine idea. But anyone who thinks we have it anymore is deluded. Basically, everything about you is available to anyone who looks hard enough. But that doesn’t mean that we should give it up voluntarily. The… Read More ›

• What is school for? Eight things in education that will change.

  By ljd42 on October 30, 2012

  Set aside 17 minutes, and go watch this video by Seth Godin. Then watch it again. It’s not that I agree with all of Godin’s eight points — in fact, there’s a lot that I disagree with. Nevertheless, the 17… Read More ›

• Sandy

  By ljd42 on October 29, 2012

  Power just went out…then it came on…then it went out…then it came on…then it went out for a longer time…now it’s back on (obviously)…. So I’m sitting here grading geometry quizzes, while Douglas naps on my left side (when he… Read More ›

• "Questions are more important than answers."

  By ljd42 on October 28, 2012

  A new book by…Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana…, Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions, documents a step-by-step process to help students formulate and prioritize questions about nearly everything. So writes Katrina Schwartz. Not that the idea… Read More ›

• Ex-Marine turned teacher: "Stop demonizing me and my profession."

  By ljd42 on October 27, 2012

  That’s the pull quote that a recent Washington Post column uses as a headline for a link to a must-read piece. I love the juxtaposition of “ex-Marine” and “teacher,” so I’ve kept the headline. There are not very many teacher-haters… Read More ›

• The travel(l)ing salesman: a movie?

  By ljd42 on October 26, 2012

  If you’re into advanced discrete math, you know all about the Traveling (in the U.S.) or Travelling (in other English-speaking countries) Salesman Problem.  If you aren’t, you don’t. I won’t attempt to summarize it here; just go read about it… Read More ›

• What can goats teach us about problem solving?

  By ljd42 on October 24, 2012

  A lot of people take their dogs along for a hike…but never before had I heard of taking one’s goats hiking. “What,” you may ask, “does this have to do with math?” Read Dan Finkel’s excellent post. And be particularly… Read More ›

• BYOT

  By ljd42 on October 22, 2012

  It seems that we will soon be following in the footsteps of other schools that have adopted a “bring your own technology” plan. Many of our students already bring MacBooks, PC laptops, or iPads to school, so the idea is… Read More ›

• AP classes are a scam (says John Tierney).

  By ljd42 on October 20, 2012

  In a recent article in The Atlantic, John Tierney claims that “Advanced Placement courses [are] one of the great frauds currently perpetrated on American high-school students… The AP classroom is where intellectual curiosity goes to die.” Like most other provocative essays, Tierney’s piece… Read More ›

• McCall Smith for the fifth time…or maybe sixth?

  By ljd42 on October 19, 2012

  I’ve written about Alexander McCall Smith before — several times. Maybe this is my fifth post…or even my sixth. It’s not that McCall Smith’s a great writer, nor that his books are especially thought-provoking. It’s just that they are truly entertaining… Read More ›

• Which is better? One point of view or two?

  By ljd42 on October 17, 2012

  For many years we have taught an introduction to logic as one of the first two units in Honors Geometry. Typically we present a single set of symbols and a single set of rules of inference, keeping everything consistent so… Read More ›

• Could it have anything to do with her gender?

  By ljd42 on October 15, 2012

  I don’t quite know where to begin. It’s not just that a highly respected math educator (a professor at Stanford, no less) has been unfairly attacked by a couple of mathematicians. The shocking thing is that the attacks are so… Read More ›

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