Curmudgeon

Teenagers are different, now.

2012-01-13T21:21:00.002-05:00

"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in 7 years." - Mark Twain

Nope. No different after all.

#AnyQs - Chocolate cake mix

2012-01-13T20:38:00.000-05:00

I also like the last visible comment:
"The batter may look curdled; that's OK, it will bake up fine."

PEMDAS is unfair? I can't believe I read that.

2012-01-12T17:37:00.000-05:00

On a blog which ordinarily doesn't have much silliness, I read the following

You can explain the truly arbitrary elements of PEMDAS (the left to right of AS and MD) through an experiment. Allow students, independently, to do these two problems any way they want, ignoring any stupid arbitrary rule they might have previously memorized:

Include here a few order of operations-type problems.

Enter the Stupid Arbitrary Rule (SAR).
Because we need to all come up with the same answer, we need a rule to follow. Really, it can be any stupid arbitrary rule (SAR). But we agreed, at some point in history, to all follow the “left to right” thing once we were down to addition & subtraction or multiplication & division.

While I agree that it is an arbitrary rule, it's far from stupid and, for me, it highlights one of the reasons why schools exist; that is, telling kids how the world they are about to enter works and what it's rules are. But then I get this:

It’s important to note that kids didn’t get to be part of that agreement we made. Just like they don’t get to vote in elections. Is it fair? Probably not. They would probably do a better job of choosing leaders as well as determining the order of operations. But that’s the way things likes SARs work.

You have to stop that crap right at the source. How can anyone say "that agreement we made" and conclude that it probably wasn't fair that kids can't be part of that decision?

First, of course, is the "we" thing. There is no "we" and "they" here and nobody waved their scepter around declaring that henceforth All Students Will Do It This Way. The order of operations didn't exist at some point in time, but then neither did algebraic notation. There weren't exponents until fairly recently (they were written words), someone had to have been the first to use a zero and place value ... you can go on. The point is that someone started using a notation, explained what it meant and how it worked and others decided it was easier and fell in with the crowd.

Enter the modern student, spoiled silly and clutching his cellphone and fantasies of being a "Digital Native" who can multitask and has no use for That Boring Crap.

What has "fair" got to do with it? Why is this pubescent psycho-babble coming from the only adult in the room?

And when he says students would probably do a better job of electing leaders, you have just heard the sound of a deluded mind. It's typical in education, echoing the "noble savage" mentality. So many teachers harbor this idea that kids know so much more than we stupid adults, that if we only took off the restraints they'd be teaching themselves calculus in no time. They're better than we were, smarter than we were, and by golly just look at how responsible they'd be.

This is a huge disservice and only feeds the disillusionment with school and learning - "Why are you screwing me over? This is so UNFAIR."

And to then make up new rules for mathematics, post them in the classroom and keep using them? You've just gotten through telling them that all the rules are stupid and arbitrary and you want to have them make up and use more stupid and arbitrary ones? I'll stick with the valuable, useful and arbitrary ones and I'm always looking for a new way to demonstrate them ... like this image I found (might be Dy/Dan's):

Now, that's education.

Film Alphabet "Puzzles"

2012-01-11T20:26:00.000-05:00

From Steven Wildish's Friday Project: Film Alphabets.

There was no math warmup problem today. I put the 1990s up as the windows wallpaper and then turned on the SmartBoard. They were fascinated. It seemed a hit so I printed them out from the folder - in Windows, you can print some of the contents of a folder and it will automatically scale them to full-page -- and lined them up on the wall outside my door. Teachers thought it was a hoot. The person with the most solutions? The science teacher across the hall. The second best? A senior with a Netflix connection.

Feel free to put in some answers in the comments. The artist's website is cool too, but there are only solutions for the 80s and 90s up so far.

Teacher evaluations, new research

2012-01-11T17:18:00.000-05:00

eSchool online sends me weekly emails about school reform and technology integration. This week's included this paragraph:

Some states are at risk of losing their Race to the Top funding because they've been forced to delay plans to implement proposed reforms; and a new study indicates that evaluating classroom teachers just once a year will not help teachers to improve.

I'm thinking that delaying some of that reform might well be a good thing in the long run since RttT overly promotes merit pay and other bogus "incentives", weird ideas about testing and technophiliac waste.

Then I get to the second part and I'm struck by the emphasis that evaluating "just once a year" will not help teachers improve, implying that it ought to be several times per year. I actually believe the study, but coupled with what I've seen in the past thirty years or so, "one evaluation won't help a teacher improve" because evaluations don't do much and repetitions of nothing are still nothing. I've had good principals who gave good evaluations that really were helpful but I've had many, many more that were useless.

Overall, the study seems typical of education research and education reporting.

Bottom line for me is that if they found that multiple evaluations each year were beneficial, they'd have said so. Since they didn't say that (and they would dearly LOVE to say that), then it can be assumed that they found no evidence so they fudged the report and let the reader assume.

I'm glad I use Thunderbird for my email, though, because it warned me about this email. Thinks it's a scam.

Smart program.

It's not that colleges don't teach ...

2012-01-10T19:29:00.000-05:00

It's that their students aren't 100% students. Far too many students are unprepared, unmotivated and unwilling to put much effort into their college courses. Fortunately for their delayed entry into the RealWorld, they can still pay their bills (albeit by taking out loans in many cases).

Wander a college campus at night, follow the students around, listen in at campus bistros, check in on the residents, take a class, and you'll quickly see two types of students: the ones who do care, are motivated and who are getting their money's worth and those who feel that work is an imposition on their sex and drinking lives.

"I can't write an essay, that's the weekend."
"My computer stopped working so I didn't do that assignment."
Facebooking during class.
Watching video on the laptop.

Why would anyone be surprised "that 45 percent of undergraduates gain little in thinking and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent show little gains in four years of college"?

Jay Matthews:
The previous post on this blog is my Monday column, complaining about the lack of much reaction to last year's study, which showed that 45 percent of undergraduates gain little in thinking and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent show little gains in four years of college. This is based on results at 24 colleges on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a lengthy essay exam.
I failed to address this question. Do we care about such results, or is the reputation of the colleges of more use, as we choose colleges? Some colleges do release their National Survey of Student Engagement results, which indicate if they are teaching the right way. Have any of us ever sought that data while making a college admission decision? Are colleges right to keep such information confidential if it makes them look bad? Or would anyone care?

My answer to Jay: "No, we expected that 9% are losers until they get the junior-class wake-up call and that 36% never hear that call."

College is not for everyone. Plumbers are people, too. (And they work harder to get as good as they are - that's why they get paid more than a newly minted graduate.)
Education gets more complicated and demands more from you as get older. That's why it costs more and takes more time while taking less class time.
You get what you pay for.
You get what you work for.

The problem is Cross-Curriculum teaching

2012-01-08T16:48:00.000-05:00

from Darren, a school might in trouble for its attempt at cross curricular teaching ...

The question was a word problem that said, "Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?" Another math problem said, "If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?"... (District spokeswoman) Roach explained the teachers were trying to incorporate social studies lessons into the math problems, which is something the school district encourages. But the problem with the questions is there is no historical context.

No, the problem is that when you are teaching in the 21st Century, you need to pull your head out of the hole in the ground (or out of your behind ... some have trouble telling the difference). Much better to use word problems such as these (provided as a public service by the Curmudgeon Math Project, LLC.)

If an elementary teacher makes three stupid decisions per day, how many days will it be until she is fired? For extra credit, make a diorama of the classroom using macaroni and tongue depressors.
If four teachers collectively have an IQ of 380, what is the average IQ of a teacher in this school system? For full credit, don't forget to show your work - text your answers to 1-802-IDIOTIC.
When a teacher chooses to write beyond her intelligence, how many irate parents will it take to get it all written up in the national press? Answers must be posted to Twitter because this teacher is obviously a twit herself. Use the hashtag #LowGradeMoron
Write a paragraph explaining why posting a nude picture of herself on Facebook page would have been a better career move. How many reposts will she get if 3500 people see it every three minutes?
Use the MAKEYOURSELFAFATPIG program on your smartphones to figure out the total amount of ice cream eaten by 26 students who eat 3 scoops of ice cream each, if each scoop of ice cream costs $23 and uses $18,000 worth of 21st Century Technology.
Mrs Barnettt has three real daughters and one imaginary one, if she can claim one extra week of vacation in Costa Rica each time she claims that a daughter died, how many weeks will she be spending on the unemployment line in Costa Rica?

Or you could stick to your strengths,
stop trying to be clever,
and ... just ... teach ... math.

Time off for good behavior?

2012-01-08T15:22:00.000-05:00

New York City school employee faked her child's death to get extra vacation.

Wow.

"Joan Barnett, a parent coordinator at the Manhattan High School of Hospitality Management, was so determined to make the spring break jaunt that she:
* Had one of her daughters call the school to say that her sister had suffered a heart attack in Costa Rica.
* Had another daughter call the school later that day to say that the sister had died and that about a dozen relatives, including Barnett, were traveling to the country for a funeral.
* Faxed a forged death certificate of her daughter “Xinia Daley Herman” to school as proof of the death. The document is required if a city school employee asks for bereavement days.

I can't even imagine the thought process that didn't go into this idea.

Let Math Fix Elections ...

2012-01-07T21:42:00.000-05:00

(Note: I originally wrote this piece last year, but bumped it to the top for obvious reasons)

What if we really wanted to reform elections – How to do it?

The flaws in the current system are obvious to all – campaigns beginning right after the off-year elections, candidates who rarely stray from bullet-point sound-bites, massive amounts of money being raised and spent, and the all-too-common situation of one candidate's reaching a domination point before all of the states have had their say.

The desire for relevance has resulted in a furious jockeying for first primary. New Hampshire is pushing its primary as far back as it can to maintain its first-in-the-nation status, Iowa is following suit and California just moved its primary to February. It doesn't have to be this way and it shouldn't be this way.

I propose that there be 6 days of primary voting, arranged so that the delegate total doubles each time.

Primary Day I
Leave NH and Iowa first, voting at the end of February. They have been first for many years and are located in completely different parts of the country. They are also small. This small size gives all of the candidates an equal chance to get into a bus and criss-cross the two states meeting personally with as much of the electorate as possible. This sort of old-fashioned campaigning is essential at the beginning.

NH and IA are the first:
they winnow the candidates.

The media will, of course, follow and dutifully report on all of the wonderful stories, repeat all the sound bites and give valuable airtime to the candidates. Because only two states are in contention for the next three weeks or so, all of the candidate's attention is on a small number of voters and a small geographical area.

(Day 1: 2% of delegates committed)

After NH and Iowa have done their civic duties and winnowed the field somewhat, we have then three to four weeks before the next group of small states in mid-March.

Primary Day II
Wyoming, Vermont, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Delaware, D.C., and Alaska.

(Day 2 cumulative total: 6% of delegates committed)

After this second day of voting, the candidates have been analyzed, interviewed, tested under fire, suffered through elections, and hopefully taken a closer look at themselves and their campaigns and made realistic projections about their futures. These small contests harden the serious candidates and eliminate any truly weak ones. Group II states are all "relevant" in that they are the first real test, the first crucible of cross-country campaigning.

Viable candidates who are late-comers to the party won't suffer, though. There have only been some small elections. A candidate could declare in March and still have a realistic shot.

Primary Day III
Now its time (1st week in April) for Rhode Island, Maine, Idaho, Hawaii, West Virginia, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Nebraska. Some are blue states, some are red, some are coastal, others are interior states.

(Day 3 cumulative total: 14% of delegates committed)

Our goal now is to force the candidates to campaign to wider audiences. TV ads and news interviews have given the candidates plenty of exposure by now. People in the coming elections are seeing the results of earlier elections and starting to mobilize their parties.

At every step of the way, anyone could take over the lead regardless of the current totals. We're doubling down at every turn - at every stage someone can decide to become a candidate and can come in and sweep up enough delegates to take the lead.

First Interlude
The race is in full gallop. The early debates can happen now. With 18 days or so before the next round, the country has a perfect opportunity to see these candidates in debates and forums. Jim Lehrer can put them through their paces.

Primary Day IV - Super Tuesday
In the 3rd or 4th week of April, we have the first Super-Tuesday. Mississippi, Kansas, Arkansas, Oregon, Oklahoma, Connecticut, South Carolina, Kentucky, Louisiana, Colorado, Alabama bring the delegate total from 14% to 29%.

(Day 4 cumulative total: 29% of delegates committed)

Primary Day V - Super Twosday
Two weeks later, the next Super Tuesday, somewhere near May 10th : Wisconsin, Minnesota, Maryland, Arizona, Washington, Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Virginia.

(Day 5 cumulative total: 50% of delegates committed)

Second Interlude
Candidates are now running around like crazy folk, but the elections are coming with two-week "respites" that will allow everyone time to regroup and refocus on the next set of states.

Remember too, that even now only half of the electoral votes have been assigned – it's still anyone's race. Theoretically, a candidate could step in and sweep the next Super Tuesday and ride triumphantly to the party conventions in June.

Major candidates are now invited to the second round of debates. During these two weeks, the candidate debates can be held every four days or so. The League of Women Voters and other civic groups conduct debates, get-togethers, and candidate forums.

Primary Day VI
So here it is, the last Super Tuesday, in the week of May 24th … North Carolina, New Jersey, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Florida, New York, Texas, California. These are the biggest states with the most voters. Candidates still have the chance to "come from behind." They have been in the news for weeks and have had ample time to get out the vote in these big states, raise money, buy ads, and spend money.

(Day 6 cumulative total: 100% of delegates committed)

We've been doubling the totals every time to keep everyone relevant. We've kept the elections to six intense days, instead of scattershot across the five, six or seven months.

Every state matters because no candidate can get an insurmountable lead. Every vote counts because no one can be declared a winner until the end of May. Even the last set of states are relevant: without this group, no one can get over the top. Between Valentine's Day and Memorial Day, we've conducted our business, and can take the holiday weekend off.

We'll have earned it.

Curriculum mapping in standard little boxes

2012-01-02T14:43:00.001-05:00

Writing is horizontal ... except in maps.

I was struck by a few things the other day when the Mrs. was putting together her curriculum maps for the year ... her curriculum coordinator was demanding that all teachers use the same template so there wouldn't be any confusion and there wouldn't be multiple formats coming in to her office.

1) Why does the template have boxes labeled by the month?

My math classes are split into chapters/ units that have never corresponded to months all that well. The lengths of the months is different as well because of the random nature of vacations, exams, sporting events. We're in block scheduling so the second semester has a completely different pace than the first. Obviously, some variations are less disruptive than others but the month-by-month format seems to be the format that least well corresponds to the course. English classes don't think month by month either. Nor does pretty much anybody else. Why insist on it?

Then you have the long words that don't fit. Unless you teach math, "Prop ortio nal Reas" isn't that meaningful nor is "Probl ems and Linea."

Adding to the silliness is the repetition, as shown here. This teacher has broken the course down to the weekly level ... and repeated everything. Enlarge the image above ... by my count he pasted "Linea r Equa tions" 56 times.Why? Because he wasn't allowed to combine table cells. Legibility is sacrificed and some of the words don't even show up in the cells but we were able to keep the format.

Writing is horizontal. Except here, where six letter words are split with a single "r" on the next line and there's no thought of proper hyphenation. This is crazy. The formatting should not take higher precedence than the content.

2) Why does the Coordinator assume that the course changes significantly from year to year?

Maybe it varies in some classes, but the essence of the transcript is that we are awarding a credit for Algebra I. For that to mean anything, the Algebra I class needs to have some consistency from section to section and from year to year. If it doesn't, then something is wrong. The "C" in Algebra I means that the student has accomplished a certain amount of algebra with a certain amount of facility and thus can be admitted to Algebra II and placed appropriately.

Or you need to give a grade for "Individualized Mathematics" and be ready to explain it to anyone who needs to know. If you're a single tutor of a single home-schooled kid, then this is the rule. When you are dealing with a few thousand kids, however, each kid's transcript needs to be clear. When you are hiring a math teacher to teach Algebra I, you need to know what that entails.

3) Different formats would complicate things for parents.

This complaint is a weird one to me. Even if I thought a parent would read the curriculum map, certainly not a winning bet, I would expect that the parent would have a harder time with the terms and descriptions than with the organization. Labeling the top of the chart Sept, Oct, Nov gives less information than sections 1, 2, 3 and much less than "Polynomials", "Slopes and Lines", "Linear Functions".

A format that provided greater information is preferred here as well as one that doesn't force weird splits in short words: "Probl ems and Linea"

Remember that the original idea (in Jacobs, Heidi Hayes: Mapping the Big Picture ) was for the teachers to make the map so they could identify missing pieces and make the entire school curriculum into a coordinated whole.

If the course isn't taught month-by-month, why map it that way? The teachers are the audience. The point is to identify gaps ... months do not add to that information. Further, Common Core and other standards purposefully do not specify when a particular topic be addressed or how ... why examine it that way?

4) What kind of confusion could possibly arise - doesn't the curriculum coordinator know enough about the curriculum that she could interpret pretty much any format?

Unfortunately, no. If she is like ours, she only wants you to enter all of this data into an online database that she has paid a lot of money for (and needs to justify the expense). The online database was never designed to accommodate teachers and this is what you get.

But she gets to push a button and the database will scan through and determine whether you've addressed standard F-TF (Functions, Trigonometric Functions).

She couldn't just look herself because she's never taught math and has no idea what we put in the boxes.

5) Why does everything have to fit into one box even when different?

Here's the funniest thing (and we get to use this screaming gem of a program so the word "funniest" is coming through clenched teeth) ... Everything in the month goes in the same box, so you have extra lines put in so you can keep the resources for topic one aligned with the content, skills, and assessment for topic one. Add a few words to clarify one thing and you have to go back and adjust all the other columns ... which gets all messed up when the font size changes.

Like when a browser is set differently (full-screen vs. windowed) or when you print.

Did I mention that the web form accepts Word formatting, so a copy and paste job from the equally useless Word document you did three years ago) comes with 80KB of unbreakable hidden formatting? Yeah, it does. We spent so much time trying to make it look right, we finally broke down and re-typed every word. And every link to the "Standard" had to drill down through the entire document ...

Nothing changed.
Nothing improved.
No benefit to the students.
No mysterious "missing content" suddenly found.

Just five in-service days wasted changing from a Word document which was a printout from the last web company mapping system, itself a conversion from the excel spreadsheet which was a conversion from a word document which had been in wordperfect format fifteen years ago.

I still have the binder.

Rules are rules. Especially for Coaches.

2011-12-28T12:30:00.000-05:00

Yahoo News has a short piece decrying the horrible tactics of some high school league:

With his stepfather in jail, Brown spent a year at South Kent School in Connecticut, then decided he needed to start over, so he moved to Southern California. After a season at Simi Valley (Calif.) Stoneridge Prep, where the Brooklyn native was a boarding student, Brown was left with nowhere to go when Endres learned of his precarious situation. Without thinking twice, the coach did what he thought was right: He took in a teen in need, regardless of who he was on the court. Now, both the player and coach are being punished for what is virtually universally recognized as a truly samaritan act.

Well, actually, the kid is a pretty good basketball player and they transferred him after the residency deadline and the coach expected everyone to happily go along with it because, of course, he wouldn't have an ulterior motive. It's just a coincidence the kid would be the best one on the team, right?

Here's a thought: If you really want to help the kid, give him a home and send him to school. Next year, his residency requirements will have been met and he can become whatever player he was destined to be. The education he gets will be worth far more in the long run than a single season on the basketball team in the hands of a fool who can't figure out why this "truly Samaritan act" might look a little sketchy. And why can't this genius think of anything good that might happen except for the kid's being able to play?

As reported by the Times, the Marmonte League principals didn't even let Endres speak at the hearing set up to decide whether or not to approve a waiver of CIF residency requirements which would allow him to play for Thousand Oaks.

Maybe this video helped them decide:

The Kindle is Better than Public Schools. Kneel before its mighty visage.

2011-12-27T22:16:00.000-05:00

Here is your teacher. Revere it as I do
for it will save the world.
It will remove the shackles of
the evil teachers from the necks
of our precious children.
Deus in Machina. Amen.

I read, with some amusement, A World without Schoolteachers by Richard F. Miniter over at American Thinker.

The Kindle and Nook may make for not only the most important advance in reading since Gutenberg, but also, quite likely, a major lesson in unintended consequences. Especially for the educational establishment, because for the first time in history, Americans should be able to envision a future without public-school teachers -- indeed, a future without public-school administrators or state departments of education with their rigidly enforced, politically correct social-transformation curriculum. A future without onerous school taxes, "education president(s)," self-preening school boards, or million-dollar classrooms. But most happily, a future without a single supercilious finger wagging in our face as we're forever lectured about how much a securely tenured, part-time, self-important, overpaid class of public employees "cares" about our sons and daughters. Really, really, really cares. And, of course, knows much better than we do how to bring them up. And it's all possible because these cheap, handheld, downloadable reading devices such as Kindle and Nook now give parents a choice between tutoring and classroom education.

If only I'd known. It seems so simple. It seems so perfect. So ... egalitarian and utopian.

Call me when it works.

Dividing by a Fraction

2011-12-27T20:00:00.026-05:00

We "invert and multiply", "multiply by the reciprocal" or insist on using the fraction key because we can't remember or were never really taught the reasons or the algorithm. Is there a simple explanation for the method we old farts memorized years ago in third or fourth grade? Why does it work?
Let's start with a problem: $\frac{3}{4} \div \frac{5}{6}$ and change to a compound fraction: $\dfrac{\frac{3}{4}}{\frac{5}{6}}$

Now what? Dividing by a fraction is confusing, but dividing by one is obvious. So we turn $\frac{5}{6}$ into unity by multiplying by its reciprocal. Of course, you can't just multiply part of our problem by $\frac{6}{5}$ without changing its value, so we multiply by one: $\dfrac{\frac{6}{5}}{\frac{6}{5}}$

All in one image: $\dfrac{\dfrac{3}{4}}{\dfrac{5}{6}} \rightarrow \dfrac{\dfrac{3}{4}}{\dfrac{5}{6}} \cdot \dfrac{\dfrac{6}{5}}{\dfrac{6}{5}} \rightarrow \dfrac{\dfrac{3}{4} \cdot \dfrac{6}{5}}{\dfrac{1}{1}} \rightarrow \dfrac{3}{4} \cdot \dfrac{6}{5} \rightarrow \dfrac{18}{20} \rightarrow \dfrac{9}{10}$

Divide by one. Seems simple to me.

Apparently the OSS knew about Highly Ineffective Principals

2011-12-27T17:00:00.002-05:00

In Teachers’ Unions as Saboteurs?, Andrew Gillen quotes the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, published by the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA) during World War II. It includes advice for indirect sabotage in “General Interference with Organizations and Production.”

(1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. (Just like my principal - who knew?)
(2) Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences… (This sounds like me. What if I'm the one?)
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” (HIPster has this one covered.)
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions. (Mission statement, anyone?)
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate “caution.”
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon…

This can also be caused by Ineffectiveness, but ineffectiveness looks the same as sabotage.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-23T17:59:00.000-05:00

Graphical Literacy - Graphicacy

2011-12-19T22:37:00.000-05:00

Graphicacy is a wonderful term, a combination of literacy and graphics, coined here.

I love data visualization, though I admit to not being particularly good at the artistic side of it. Information is Beautiful is a great place to start exploring.

Earlier this year, when the science fair projects were in their beginning stages, we had time in math to get them a narrow picture of methods and types, but nothing too extensive. I showed them how to make graphs in Excel and led them through a few samples, then had them create a few by hand. I also ran them through some of the correlation - causation slides from the statistics class but they were convinced of their own brilliance and didn't want to pay too much attention.

Well, Science Fair just happened and we'll be reviewing the graphs created for that. It's really fascinating what kinds of things kids will do in pursuit of that last-minute, late-night graph. I had line graphs that should have been box-and-whisker plots, column graphs that had no business being sorted and probably should have been scatterplots and a couple other sins against proper representation.

We'll critique and re-format, re-create and fix. It should be interesting. I'll be introducing them to the infographic in its role as a data presentation tool, too.

For the interested person, here is a chart of data visualizations that, strangely, doesn't include periodic-table visualizations ....

Once Again, Jay Matthews

2011-12-18T11:06:00.001-05:00

A TFA teacher asks for lesson plans and guidance on how to run a classroom. "How are they supposed to know what works when they have so little experience? Couldn’t the experts get together and give us the best possible guide?"

An excellent question. Education theory runs rampant with this idea that experience taking classes is equivalent to experience teaching them.

So why not tell the new teacher what to do? The answer is, of course, that the new teacher's creativity might be stifled.

"He learned that many teachers, and the organizations that represent them, don’t want ready-made lesson plans. They feel it limits their creativity and turns them into robots doing whatever their department head or the district curriculum chief wants."

AnyQs? Not sucky.

I personally think this is utter crap. Robots? Hardly. When you don't tell people anything and barely train them, you get wishy-washy or useless garbage or dull and dreary. You get barely remembered tactics ("Don't smile before Christmas.") or silly uber-liberal dreck that doesn't work. You get KIPP drill teams and 10-hours days. You get "Learning Styles" and Small School Initiatives. You get cooperative learning that never results in learning and assessments that never measure anything. You get "fresh, new ideas" that upend a US History II course to the point that it only covers 1870-1960 for the course. "But they made a wiki" is not an answer.

Normal teacher prep programs give a lot of instruction on how to run a classroom, set up things, deal with students. Despite the fact that I think they're focused on the wrong things, at least they try. There's the six-month student-teaching with an experienced teacher to help sort many of those things out. It's not great but it's better than TFA's 6 weeks in the summer.

You need to help out the new teachers, give them materials and ideas, and essentially walk them through the course. You can't just HOPE they can come up with good stuff.

A commenter on a previous post said "Questions that fascinate and practice that doesn't suck? You sound like the typical math reformer who holds procedures in disdain, and wants kids to understand what math is REALLY about. How about starting beginning piano students with the Moonlight Sonata?"

When you don't read carefully, you can make the same mistake that "J.D. Salinder" made.(Other than being too clever choosing his "name".)

I believe in practice that doesn't suck ... but I still believe in practice. Drill is useful and valuable, in soccer, music, math, art, handwriting and pretty much any field. Mindless repetition is just that, but practice to the point of correct automaticity is priceless.

Learning is not practice, but practice helps learning. Learning can't begin with Moonlight Sonata because the Moonlight Sonata isn't happening without learning which keys are which, i.e. scales, and learning rhythm and timing, and learning to read music.

You can't start by dropping the TFAer into the deep end of the pool with no training -- sure, some people learned to swim that way, but others simply drowned and their students got crap.

Questions that fascinate are an equally important resource. If they fascinated students last year and the year before, they will probably do so again. They may be pure, raw math and still fascinate. Those UVM problems are not ones that I created, but it sure would have been nice if I had had them early in my career.

I've hated psuedo-context since high-school and so my math classes had tremendous amounts of chemistry and physics in them (I'm a mechanical engineer), but again needed someone like Dan Meyer to clarify and put it into words. Dan Willingham studies and teaches neuro-science. Listening to him has meant that I now have a better sense of why I hated learning styles.

Now we get to the paragraph that got me started. Jay Matthews (right there, you know this isn't going to end well) says in this article,"If you are like me, and preferred learning your job by doing it rather than being told what do to, you wonder why Friedrich didn’t appreciate the freedom of making his own choices."

Why? Why shouldn't the teacher "learn on the job" like the education writer for the Washington Post did? Because the Post won't go bankrupt or fail if Jay writes a crappy column or if he espouses wrong-headed reform or if he promotes KIPP to the exclusion of systems that would actually work for all public school students. Rather, the Post probably loves Jay for his idiocy. It brings more comment, more notoriety, and more readers.

"Maybe Bruce Friedrich raised the lesson plan issue because he was so out of sync with the recent college graduates who were the other Teach for America instructors at his Baltimore high school. He was 40." Maybe, he raised the issue because his preparation was lousy but unlike the other TFAs, he realized it. This, for me, is the true indictment of the program. TFA preparation is considered perfect unless you've got maturity and knowledge. It's just that the rest of them don't realize how bad it sucks to learn on the job without real help.

Why shouldn't I learn to be a teacher on the job?

Because they're not my kids. This is their only chance of getting high school right.

Forget that at your students peril.

Copper Statue

2011-12-18T09:44:00.000-05:00

"The Statue of Liberty ("Liberty Enlightening the World" by Frèdèric Aguste Bartoldi) in New Jersey waters outside New York Harbor is sheathed in copper of average thickness 2 mm. The statue is 50 m high and some 80 metric tons of copper was required for its fabrication. It is probable that few projects before or since the Statue`s construction in 1876-1885 ever required as much copper."

Any Questions?

Finally, Jay Matthews!

2011-12-15T20:11:00.000-05:00

Of course, Jay misses the irony in his "5 ways to save American Education".

A research team led by Marc S. Tucker, a relentless advocate for adopting successful international practices in U.S. schools, recently concluded that we, in essence, are doing almost nothing right. His investigators could find no evidence, Tucker said, “that any country that leads the world’s education performance league tables has gotten there by implementing any of the major agenda items that dominate the education reform agenda in the United States, with the exception of the Common Core State Standards.”

I'm from Washington
and I'm here to help. Heh.

In the past, Jay said that the answer is to blindly cast about for another shiny, dangly-bit of education reform so we can save our schools once and for all. "KIPP is the solution," he said. "Play nice, be smart, be indoctrinated into your little cages" he said. "Vouchers will save your kids from the evils of public schools", he mumbled.

How about "Just teach math. Raw, pure math with questions that fascinate and practice that doesn't suck."

I'd be good with that.

Now it's Canada's Turn for Deform

2011-12-15T19:51:00.000-05:00

Harrison wasn't allowed either.

Yes, the times tables are vitally important.
Yes, algorithm is important.

No, those new-fangled methods aren't really new. In fact, they are hundreds of years old. They were in use for centuries until the algorithms were developed. Then, everyone switched to the new algorithms because THEY ARE MORE EFFICIENT and EASIER TO USE. Education deformers who lacked any sense of history and never learned those algorithms have developed the old ways all over again: lattice multiplication, grouping by thousands and hundreds.

Isn't that incredible? It's like arithmetic archeology posing as cutting-edge but acting like the Handicapper-General in Harrison Bergeron. Why should today's kids use what works efficiently? If a Deformer couldn't learn this "long division" thing, why should America's kids? The Deformer was a "C" student so everyone must be limited to the same inadequate and tedious multiplication methods. "You MAY NOT USE the easy method."

MARGARET WENTE: Why Alex can’t add (or subtract, multiply or divide); Globe and Mail

A parent I know went to an information session about math at his kid’s school. After listening to the visiting curriculum expert explain how important it was for students to “understand” the concepts, he asked: “So, how important is it for them to learn the times tables?” The expert hemmed and hawed and wouldn’t give an answer.
The elementary teacher
is a math-phobe.
Where did you think the kids got that fear?

Parents across Canada might be surprised to learn that the times tables are out. So are adding, subtracting and dividing. Remember when you learned to add a column of numbers by carrying a number over to the next column, or learned to subtract by borrowing, then practised your skills until you could add and subtract automatically? Forget it. Today, that’s known as “drill and kill,” or, even worse, “rote learning.” And we can’t have that.

Nope. Can't do it. Practice is right out of the math classroom. It's much better do have the kids hop onto the computer, log in to their Khan Academy account and do rote learning and drill there. It's a computer, don't you see? That means it's not really drill. It's shiny and new so it must be better than making the kids learn math.

“The designers of the new curriculum have decided it would be a really good idea not to teach these things,” says Robert Craigen, an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Manitoba. He sat on the province’s math curriculum committee for years. Unfortunately, nobody was interested in what he had to say. So today, he’s got calculus students who never learned long division. “The undergirding motive is: We want to teach understanding, and all this mechanical detail gets in the way of understanding.”

Because nothing allows you to think like knowing nothing. Lots of room for all those thoughts to bounce around. When you open your mouth, pretty much anything comes out.

The common methods used to add and subtract are known as standard algorithms. They are efficient and foolproof. But, instead of being taught these methods, students are encouraged to find “strategies,” such as breaking numbers into units of thousands, hundreds, tens and ones and working horizontally. It works, but it’s not efficient. And every time a student sees a new problem, he has to start from scratch – and pick his “strategy.” It’s like playing the piano without ever learning scales, or hockey without basic drills.

If Practice is so Bad,
why am I constantly hearing about
Teaching's Best Practices?

But that's how NHL players are made, aren't they? Don't those little kids just skate around the rink devising new ways to score? We should let them invent the rules they want to play by. There's plenty of time to learn skill. We'll use a video game. Yeah, that's the ticket. A video game.

The loony thing is that Canada is way behind the times. After a decade of disastrous experimentation in the United States, this approach to math education has been repudiated. The leading U.S. heavyweights in math came out decisively against it in 2008. Sadly, it seems this news has not yet reached Canada. Here, curriculum developers and boards of education are pressing forward, undeterred by the objections of math experts or the bafflement of parents and children alike.

Ooooooh, you went there. Except that the information is not quite right. There are plenty of experts in the US who still believe that Practice is the Road to Hell and that Engagement at any cost is Royal Road to Mathematics.

Meh.

Apparently, drills are fine on the football field but not in the classroom. Maybe that's why we're so much better at football.

Find love elsewhere.

2011-12-06T21:21:00.001-05:00

Joanne Jacobs has this from Reason.com:

Reason‘s “Nanny of the Month” highlights a law that would make student-teacher sex a felony, even if the student is 18 or older. Adult ed teachers and school volunteers are included in the proposed Michigan law.

I don't have a problem with this law. Your classroom roster isn't an old-school version of match.com and isn't where you should be looking for a good time.

It's the same as sleeping with your boss, fraternizing in the military, or looking for a wife at the family picnic. It's a bit unseemly and in practice quite problematic. Someone invariably winds up being hurt. While the situation isn't as bad for the two parties, an adult education teacher whose spouse becomes the student shouldn't be teaching a spouse in a formal situation anyway.

Rather, the law seems to be trying to close the "loophole" of a teacher who points out that "his high school girlfriend juuuuust turned 18, so its okay!"

Seriously, graduation can't be that far away.

Submitted. No Comments.

2011-12-06T17:10:00.001-05:00

Speechless.

WEST WINDSOR — Two men are accused of breaking into the home of a Vermont state game warden and stabbing two goats in his barn. State police have arrested 33-year-old Nick Ashline and 20-year-old Daniel Parry following an investigation into the Oct. 30 incident.

Police said Steven Majeski had returned home in West Windsor after work. He said two of three goats housed in his barn had been stabbed. One of the goats died. Ashline and Parry have been charged with burglary and cruelty to animals.

Top the Nation in Blood

2011-12-05T22:51:00.000-05:00

This is what comes of not paying too close attention to banners and headlines. I was signing up for blood donation. The big city (pop. 63,000) is trying to beat the national record for a one day blood drive. We hold the New England per-person record, but lost out last year to Boston for the overall. Unwilling to let Boston attempt to claim any type of superiority ....

So anyway, I'm clicking the form and I glance at the header:

"Let's top the nation in blood." I had just gotten finished watching a "Zombie Christmas" so I'm primed to see that Texas Chainsaw Massacre headline.

Alas, it was blood donation:

Silly.

"The GOLM collected 368 pints that first year, and has grown steadily ever since. For three straight years, the GOLM has broken the New England record for a one-day community blood drive. Boston held the record of 772 pints until Rutland collected 856 in 2008 and 1,024 in 2009.

In September 2010, Boston collected 1,177 pints to reclaim the New England record, but Rutland took it back in December, with 1,400 pints. Manchester, N.H., broke that record – and the national record – in August 2011, with 1,968 pints – setting the stage for our 2011 goal of topping the nation in blood donation.

Colleges' Math - Science Death March

2011-11-30T21:56:00.001-05:00

The group that made a YouTube
video denigrating the education
they were ignoring while they made it
-- and then wondering
why they couldn't understand
the material they were ignoring.

But maybe there's a reason that so many drop out?

But, it turns out, middle and high school students are having most of the fun, building their erector sets and dropping eggs into water to test the first law of motion. The excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls “the math-science death march.” Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.

So what? There's a reason why they made those courses so hard -- so 75% of the freshmen WOULD drop into something else. They need the worthless chaff to switch and leave the wheat behind.

The STEM courses have always been difficult if your preparation

consisted of "fun" and "dropping eggs" and stupid computer games pretending to teach.
involved "student-directed learning", standards-based grading based on vague rubrics instead of knowledge and ability, and open-ended questions with no middle, beginning or point.
didn't include calculus, chemistry, and physics.
focused on inquiry-style explorations that managed to avoid inquiring or knowledge.
didn't involve 40-page research papers and English teachers who dropped the grade by a LETTER for each grammatical mistake on an in-class, timed essay.
focused on computer usage and gaming rather than programming. (Hello World!)

I love the appeal to pity "a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out."

If you can't learn from her,
you need to change your major.

It's hard. It's supposed to be hard. None of these careers has all that much room for error and few have much room for whiny crybabies. There's a LOT to learn. Relying solely on a Google search and a Wikipedia article while building a 2000' skyscraper is dubious at best. If you can't hack it, get out of the way of those who can.

Face facts. Stop lying to yourself. Tell your momma to go home; this is your time to make a decision. Work for a degree or don't. There are lots of people who destroy their health and hole up like an anchoress to get a degree in this stuff. Slide your lazy, drunken, over-sexed butt into something more your speed.

If you can't put some effort into the $35,000 /year you're spending (or borrowing), why should anyone care about you and your obvious lack of critical thinking and adult decision-making skills?

Outlook Confusion

2011-11-30T19:20:00.001-05:00

This cracks me up. I should only preview files from someone trustworthy but previewing might not show everything so I should open it instead but always warn myself before doing that.

Right

Grade Inflation in College? I'm Shocked!

2011-11-29T19:55:00.000-05:00

Who would have thought?

Go to this web site and search the course roster at the University of Wisconsin and find out what grades were given each semester for the last several years.

I wandered the Fall 2010-2011 Grades
Intermediate Organic Chemistry: 2.8
Evolving Universe (in the Astronomy Department): 2.9
Freshman Composition: 3.7
Curriculum and Instruction (EDU) had a department average of 3.927
Engineering: 2.902
Thermodynamics: 2.818

You get the knowledge you work for. The grade hardly matters anymore.

College debt Post Hoc fallacy

2011-11-29T19:31:00.002-05:00

Joanne Jacobs asks: Is fear of debt worse than debt itself? College students who borrow are more likely to go full-time and complete degrees.

Is it the going into debt that causes the degree completion, or is it that those who feel confident of their ability to finish are more likely to incur some debt to do so?

Should I go into debt to ensure that I finish?

Algebra 2 for All

2011-11-27T09:47:00.001-05:00

When all adults in California can understand and complete an algebra II course, then it makes sense that all high school students should be able to.
Otherwise ...

It's not that these California math teachers had the stones to sign, it's that more of us don't feel we can.
http://mrmeyer.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/palo_alto_high_anti_ag.pdf

Maybe this is why tenure is so necessary?

I Don't Do Math - Accepting False Limits

2011-11-26T17:26:00.001-05:00

Seth Godin (Marketing Expert) has this: Accepting false limits and you'll probably guess that I'm about to throw out "I Don't Do Math", but bear with me.

I will never be able to dunk a basketball. This is beyond discussion.

Imagine, though, a co-worker who says, "I'll never be able to use a knife and fork. No, I have to use my hands."

Or a colleague who says, "I can't possibly learn Chinese. I'm not smart enough."
This is a mystery to me. A billion people have learned Chinese, and the failure rate for new kids is close to zero. If a well functioning adult puts in sufficient time and the effort, she'll succeed.

The key to this disconnect is the unspoken part about time and effort and fear. I agree that you will never ship that product or close that sale or invent that device unless you put in the time and put in the effort and overcome the fear. But I don't accept for a minute that there's some sort of natural limit on your ability to do just about anything that involves creating and selling ideas.

This attitude gets me in trouble sometimes. Perhaps I shouldn't be pushing people who want something but have been taught not to push themselves. Somewhere along the way, it seems, I forgot that it's none of my business if people choose to accept what they've got, to forget their dreams and to not seek to help those around them achieve what matters to them.

Not sure if you'll forgive me, but no, I'm not going to believe that only a few people are permitted to be gatekeepers or creators or generous leaders. I have no intention of apologizing for believing in people, for insisting that we all use this moment and these assets to create some art and improve the world around us.

To do anything less than that is a crime.

Not exactly.

There's a huge difference between the picture above (girl being told she isn't good enough, pretty enough, fat enough, skinny enough, smart enough, slutty enough) and a girl making an honest self-assessment of her abilities. There's a big difference between giving up too early (accepting FALSE limits) and accepting true limits.

Not everyone seems to be able to do math as well as I can. I can't draw or paint as well as my uncle. My uncle can't drive (and doesn't need to) and certainly can't do math. My grammatical sense is better than that of most teachers, if I can believe what I read and hear on the Internet.

I know scads of folks who "can't do algebra" but who consider themselves successes, engineers who could never understand related rates or scale factors, artists who understand percentages and accounting but not much more, actors who couldn't write to save their lives, and scientists who can't speak to an audience or write coherent sentence without endless rewrites and help from their significant other. White Men Can't Jump ... but that didn't stop him from playing basketball and pretty damn well.

The California teachers who signed a letter saying that students should not be required to pass algebra 2 as a graduation requirement are probably spot on with their assessment of the kids' abilities and completely off the mark when it comes to assessing the political and academic climate. Eighth grade math seems to be about the least you can learn and still have a shot at claiming yourself a success in life.

"I don't DO math" should be an incentive rather than an excuse, I know, but I also have to accept that not everyone is going to be "proficient" in this topic or any other. We need to tell them "Do your best and don't let the stupidity of youth drive you to deny an ability that you may develop in a field you haven't got a clue about yet" but we also must accept that not everyone can be good at everything.

Even math teachers.

Good to Know about those Exit Cards.

2011-11-24T09:28:00.000-05:00

We're back with another episode of "Highly Ineffective Principal."

*rimshot*

"Oh, sorry. That wasn't a joke?"

So we all got an email from him that told us of the information that he put in our mailboxes (right there, you know this is a good one). He went to a conference and heard about something INCREDIBLE and he wanted to make sure we all knew about it. It had the key words "brain research" and "student engagement" and "achievement" so you know we were all on pins and needles.

Exit cards.

Yup.

Forget instant communication, clickers, voting by text, Google poll, smartphone. We aren't going to be trying any new, 21st Century stuff. Our HIPster is enthralled by note cards. "Before I file the information away, there are several items in my notes that I want to share with you."

We teachers apparently have never heard of this "Exit Cards" idea.

We also can't seem to get the 12 pages (double-sided, too) of information as a .pdf or a text email. It was photocopied for every person in the building. And put in mailboxes.

This moron is teaching future math teachers

2011-11-17T20:19:00.000-05:00

and giving them extra credit for this:

Unless they changed the rules recently and I never noticed, irrational numbers are still real.

This is the problem with math education in America.

Not the students who hand in this mistake.
Not the teachers nationwide who cringe at this mistake.
Not the schools who do their best with unwilling or unmotivated students.

No, it's the college teacher preparation programs that instill faulty knowledge and reinforce it with extra credit ... these students obviously don't know their subject all that well and this "teacher" is no better. "Hands On Math: Burn The Textbooks, Shred The Worksheets, Teach Math." is the blog motto.

Seems like reading a book and learning a fact or two might come in handy.

Cost of Changing to Common Core?

2011-11-12T10:44:00.001-05:00

Joanne Jacobs - What will common standards cost?

It will cost $800 million for California to implement Common Core Standards, down from an earlier estimate of $1.6 billion, according to the state education department. That includes training, learning materials and testing.

Other states are starting to worry about the cost. Washington state estimates it will take $300 million to prepare teachers and principals and buy new textbooks; updating the state’s testing system will be extra.

Give me a break.

“Washington state estimates it will take $300 million to prepare teachers and principals and buy new textbooks; updating the state’s testing system will be extra.”

This is a silly point. Washington will buy new books regardless. They will also spend money in Professional Development to train new teachers (and old) in the current system or they can spend money in Professional Development in Common Core. What would be interesting would be the amount EXTRA needed with Common Core. My guess is zero.

I’ve personally gone through full curriculum rewrites and what seems like dozens of formatting changes in order to to align to old standards, new standards, frameworks, GLEs, etc. This is simply the new fad. The real problem isn't the Common Core. It's "Change the Standards Because We Don't Know What Else to Do".

It's the idea that all students will succeed if we could just find the ONE SINGLE PERFECT WAY TO DO THINGS. Watch Malcolm Gladwell's discussion of finding the perfect spaghetti sauce.

Public schools can never be the perfect solution to all students, all the time, by 2014 or any other date.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #20, 21 and 22

2011-11-11T06:30:00.018-05:00

Probably my favorite problem. Looks so fierce and imposing, yet so tame.

Difficulty: easy.

Difficulty: Pretty complex.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest 2004

answer 20, answer 21, answer 22.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #19 and 23

2011-11-10T06:30:00.015-05:00

This year was 2004. They had to work that in somehow.

Difficulty: easy.

Difficulty: Pretty complex. I was chasing log rules around for a while trying to get all this worked out.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest 2004

answer 19, answer 23.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #18 and 24

2011-11-09T06:30:00.014-05:00

Surprisingly easy for this late in the test.

Difficulty: easy.

Difficulty: Changing everything to a common base goes a long way here.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest 2004

answer 18, answer 24.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #17 and 25

2011-11-08T06:30:00.013-05:00

Fraction fun. Maybe simple enough for the SAT but maybe not.

Difficulty: easy.

Difficulty: Another one of the problems that needs you to manipulate one expression until it looks like another. Try cubing.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest 2004

answer 17, answer 25.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #16 and 26

2011-11-07T06:30:00.012-05:00

Simple algebra -- as soon as you've stated the problem with algebra.

Difficulty: easy.

Difficulty: Functions. Meh.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest 2004

answer 16, answer 26.

AnyQs - Cleaners

2011-11-06T21:32:00.000-05:00

Two seemingly identical bottles. 28 and 32 oz.

If you can't read it, it says
33% more
than other leading national brands **
**Compared to 24 fl.oz. of other leading national brands.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #15 and 27

2011-11-06T06:30:00.010-05:00

Slope. Parallel and perpendicular lines and a big honking radical. What joy!

Difficulty: easy.

Monster blog has monster sized misconceptions

2011-11-05T21:07:00.000-04:00

Monster blog has this article about Gen Y Talent Myths. I am amazed at the nearsightedness in evidence here. Not to knock the guy -- he has spent over six years as a career counselor at a top-flight research university so he must know the habits and talents of the entire Gen Y demographic, right? Anyway. I was amused.

First, he feels that Gen Y is CONFUSED rather than LAZY. Okay, not all of them are lazy but the truth is that they would rather be playing video games and chatting and Facebooking than working. This is not a particular surprise since every generation back to prehistoric times has said that about it's teenagers.

That being too complicated a thought, he felt it was due to "the world and technology constantly changing and becoming more complex, members of Gen Y are just trying to decipher how to navigate their way around" and "Generation Y lacks the experience and foundation to best utilize these various technological resources." On the other hand, "Generation Y is the most experienced and qualified to understand and decipher the social media landscape". Proof by confusing contradiction?

He then feels that if we aren't "moving at the speed of these technologies, we are already behind before we’ve even started." You say, "Touche", I say "Cliche." Come on, dredge up a better one than that. "Moving at the speed of these technologies" doesn't even mean anything.

Generation Y seems to "Lack Morals". According to David, they merely have "Different Values" because they were the product of the ‘Me Generation.’ I guess that excuses them from sharing the values of the society at large or something.

Conservative AND socially conscious.

Now we get weird. Correlation, causation and all that. He claims that Gen Y got Obama elected (really!) and so we think they must be more liberal. They're not, though, because they "prefer to seek opportunities to make a difference in their communities". Wow. They're not liberal because they like to make a difference? That's just funny.

"How else do you explain the rise of social entrepreneurs (Tom’s Shoes?), the growth of core value-laden companies such as Zappos and Google (witnessed by Google’s core principle 'you can make money without doing evil?'), and the new found commitment/interest in non-profit organizations?" Actually, dude, those companies weren't founded by, and aren't run by, GenY.

The last bit of fun comes when this guy claims that GenY thinks it's smarter than the older folk, and therefore is smarter. How dumb can you be?

Every generation thinks it's smarter than the previous one. This one isn't smarter, but they think they are. David feels they are smarter "as long as they utilize reputable sources" and points out that "Five-year-old children are able to find more information on a smartphone or tablet than their parents."

Holy crap, what kind of evidence is that? Are you sure you're at a university? A five year-old on an iPad makes for a cute picture but it’s less of an indication of brilliance than a 1990 kid on a Commodore 64 with an encyclopedia nearby.

The next line is the funniest. In his day, "one could get a quality college education with an SAT score of 1100 … care to guess the average now?" Uh, 1538.

Does genius boy know why the average has risen ... all the teachers reading this do. Ding-ding-ding! Three sections! 1538/3 is 513 or so per section. Back in his day, the per-section score was 550. OOPS, not so good on the math, either. Must be more of that top-flight research university training, huh?.

I guess I know why so many kids come out of college they way they do.

Obligatory Nov 5 reference:

The article below the fold:

While Generation Y is in the midst of booming into the workforce, the job market for millennials is anything but booming.

The truth is, there seem to be fewer and fewer jobs available, a matter further complicated by the fact that many members of the emerging workforce have been pigeonholed into stereotypes that aren’t necessary reflective of reality.

You know the ones: that Gen Y has unrealistically high expectations for career advancement, born out of a false sense of entitlement and overinflated sense of their skills and abilities. That they’re lazy, lacking morals, ethics and emotional intelligence, and have a general antipathy towards hard work or paying the dues necessary to make it in today’s world of work (and so on…)

I’ve personally spent over six years in my current role as a career counselor at a top-flight research university, where I interact with countless Gen Y students and alumni every day, and I realize that many of these myths, like most stereotypes, are born out of ignorance or inexperience.

Because the fact of the matter is, these generalities about “Digital Natives” or “Generation Next” prove misunderstood, misinterpreted and misinformed.

Generation Y might be more beneficial and valuable to organizations than most might think, representing a proverbial “sheep in wolf’s clothing.” The very characteristics that many see as weaknesses are in fact, strengths that many members of the emerging workforce possess – and many employers desperately need.
5 Common Millennial Myths and the Truth About Gen Y Workers

One thing I see every day, in countless interactions with members of Generation Y, is a growing divide and disparity between perception and reality. That’s why it’s important to take a different approach, and deeper look, at some of the most pervasive Gen Y myths.

Here are a few of the most common and the realities that require rethinking what you think you know about Generation Y:

Perception #1: Generation Y is Lazy

Reality: Generation Y is Confused

Explanation: With the world and technology constantly changing and becoming more complex, members of Gen Y are just trying to decipher how to navigate their way around. Every day, Millennials are bombarded with thousands of messages, and it is often difficult to determine best practices from easier options (which is why recruiters are bombarded with 1000 resumes per job posting versus more effective techniques such as networks).

And while other generations in the workforce are faced with the same problems, Generation Y lacks the experience and foundation to best utilize these various technological resources.

Which leads to the next major misconception…

Perception #2: Generation Y Is Apathetic

Reality: Generation Y Is Bored

Explanation: Since everything now is accessible at our fingertips, and Generation Y is the most experienced and, dare I say, qualified to understand and decipher the social media landscape, their attention tends to waver quickly from one task or subject to another. It doesn’t help that a world now filled with YouTube and DVR allows us to more quickly get to (or through) the information we need.

As such, if, as an organization, we are not moving at the speed of these technologies, we are already behind before we’ve even started. As a result, we perceive a younger workforce that is disloyal and needy, when, in fact, we are having difficulty just maintaining their interest.

Perception #3: Generation Y Lacks Morals

Reality: Generation Y Has Different Values

Explanation: Millennials are the product of the ‘Me Generation,’ where money and status were king among core values (think: Wall Street). As such, other core values such as service, respect, and change are often difficult to decipher, even though they are hidden way deep inside the heart of this generation.

After all, the Millennials were the key demographic behind the success of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election, which leads to yet another common misconception, that Generation Y is more liberal than previous generations. In fact, what you may not have noticed is their tendency to prefer to seek opportunities to make a difference in their communities and/or through their work.

How else do you explain the rise of social entrepreneurs (happen to hear of Tom’s Shoes?), the growth of core value-laden companies such as Zappos and Google (witnessed by Google’s core principle “you can make money without doing evil?”), and the new found commitment/interest in non-profit organizations?

Perception #4: Generation Y Has Trouble Finding Jobs

Reality: Generation Y Has Trouble Networking

Explanation: The age-old standards preached by Dale Carnegie are becoming a lost art.

How to Win Friends and Influence People has given way to ‘How to Find Jobs Without Getting Information.’ The problem is, Gen Y thinks online job searching is the easiest way to get a job because it’s the most accessible.

They also are accustomed to taking a Trait-Factor approach (that is, a Gen Y candidate might look at a job description and think “the job description asks for qualifications and requirements that I already have so I should fit right in!”) to determine whether they fit a job or not—without taking into account the other facets of career satisfaction.

The recent growth of management development training programs and formalized mentorship initiatives seems to be a product of this dilemma because it assists Millennials with the other facets of career satisfaction, including personality fit, skills/interest match, among others.

Perception #5: Generation Y Thinks They’re Smarter Than You Were At Their Age

Reality: Generation Y IS Smarter Than You Were At Their Age

Explanation: …as long as they utilize reputable sources.

Five-year-old children are able to find more information on a smartphone or tablet than their parents. Quadruple that age to 20 and the possibilities are endless. The Millenial generation is growing up faster and expected to act more like adults at younger and younger ages in real life as well as online.

Back in my day (did I just age myself using that expression?), one could get a quality college education with an SAT score of 1100 (OK, definitely aging myself)…care to guess the average now?

Of course, with college costs and debt soaring, these scores aren’t the only thing inflated since the halcyon days of Boomers and Generation X.

Of course, there are many other perceptions about Generation Y that need a reality check. For instance, do they truly have a positive outlook or are they scared to wit’s end? Do they have a sense of entitlement and power or are they actually searching for love and acceptance?

Recognizing the truth behind the myths is the first step to determining the best ways to attract, grow and retain these valuable members of our workforce (and society).

Condi Rice's Opinion of Khaddafi

2011-11-05T18:42:00.002-04:00

She said it, not me.

Herman Cain's Positively Negative Trendline

2011-11-05T18:08:00.002-04:00

FiveThirtyEight had this little graph and the comment. "It looks to me as if Mr. Cain had been on a positive trajectory before, perhaps having moved up to about 28 percent of the Republican vote.

Really? You see an upward trend there? Is that blue trendline all that reasonable?

I see a downward trend if I get rid of the first week's data. If I include the first week, then I can see that blue line being the calculated trendline but it should be obvious that the bump he received on Oct 8th (appearance on Huckabee, touting his 999 plan?) brought him to a plateau and he's been losing ground ever since. The allegations didn't change that downward trend.

Borrowing Without Collateral

2011-11-05T13:30:00.004-04:00

The country is running up against the whole college loan things again. There's a website that claims the trillion dollars of student loan debt should all be forgiven because that'll stimulate the economy.

Intelligent people ask that those loans get deferred a couple years so that the loan payments can be made when the borrowers are a little more solvent. I'm okay with that as it acknowledges that the borrowers are accepting their debts and making the books right.

Others want all college loans wiped off the slate so that graduates can get on with their lives. WTF?

Why adults should get $100,000 loans wiped clean is beyond me. They took out loans as adults to pay for adult things and now they all get off free? What's next? Should we give them a home loan and then excuse the loan when the first few mortgage payments are due?

Which begs a question: What's the collateral in a student loan?

NYT Sob Story

Future earnings, of course.

At what point are the banks and loan-makers going to ask for that collateral? Why should a bank finance a degree in women's studies or in some other navel-gazing, narcissistic puffery which has ZERO value in the future marketplace?

I'll say it again. If you're using your own money, or you're putting up Daddy's business as collateral for this loan, then feel free to get any degree you'd like.

If your state is willing to give a free college education (not including fees), then you are free to accept the offer and take any degree the college will offer you.

If you're borrowing money with no other collateral than your future earnings, you shouldn't be surprised if the lender asks for a degree with better prospects than Burger King or trophy wife.

If you're "conned" into borrowing what you can't afford, yet you still "need" a degree in women's studies at very expensive college like NYC, don't expect much sympathy. Pay your damn loans.

"Do you want fries with that degree?"

It's high time the federal government college loan programs start demanding valuable degrees as "collateral" for their loans. Otherwise, taking out a loan with no thought of paying it back is fraud.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #14 and 28

2011-11-05T06:30:00.007-04:00

Thinking is fun.

Difficulty: easy.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #13 and 29

2011-11-04T06:30:00.009-04:00

Multiply or divide? You decide..

Difficulty: Algebra rules.

Difficulty: Well, do we count her different personalities as different people?

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest 2004

answer 13, answer 29.

Experience

2011-11-03T17:26:00.000-04:00

Seth Godin (Marketing Guru) has this little post

Are you doing math or arithmetic?
I have enormous respect for mathematicians. They're doing work on the edge, a cross between art and science and music. Arithmeticians, not so much. They are merely whacking at a calculator, doing repetitive work better done by a computer or someone cheaper.

Many fields have precisely this same division. There's a chasm between the proven, repetitive work that can be farmed out and the cutting edge risky work that might just change everything.

With my students, I tell it this way:

A mechanic is looking for a job.
He tells the manager "I have twenty years experience."
The manager asks "Is that twenty years of experience or two years experience repeated ten times?"

Which is it for you? Are you still teaching the same things with the same worksheets and the same quizzes and the same methods that have worked over and over? There's a lot to be said for consistency, but you do have to stick your head up and make sure that what and how you're teaching is still relevant.

I'm making the change to tablets instead of textbooks, .pdf instead of paper. It's still a work in progress, especially the video. I'm still trying to figure out if the inverted classroom is fad or future. I'd love to get the note-taking features of the iPad/Android to mesh with the marginalia of the textbook, but we're not quite there yet. Where is the graphing calculator app that works with a spreadsheet?

Some tech is incredibly useful. Some tech is incredibly damaging, especially to teenagers. Texting is, without a doubt, the most pernicious distraction ever created by man. Read Daniel Willingham's work on concentration, learning and the cellphone call in the middle of the information storage process.

It'd be nice if the nation was a little more together on all this.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #12 and 30

2011-11-03T06:30:00.008-04:00

I find it probable that even sum of your odd students will get this one.

Difficulty: Easy.

Difficulty: This one took a minute to even get started.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest 2004

answer 12, answer 30.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #11 and 31

2011-11-02T06:30:00.011-04:00

What percent will get this correct answer? Correct!

Difficulty: Quick. Only the reckless will get this wrong.

Difficulty: Oddly difficult.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest 2004

answer 11, answer 31.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #10 and 32

2011-11-01T06:30:00.007-04:00

Algebra and number theory. Easy day..

Difficulty: Algebra rules.

Difficulty: Medium.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest 2004

answer 10, answer 32.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #09 and 33

2011-10-31T06:30:00.001-04:00

Round and Round we go!

Difficulty: Can they complete the square?

Very Difficult Treasure Hunt

2011-10-30T22:26:00.000-04:00

A while back, I was floating around the web and found the following treasure hunt. I saved the images, and put a description and source into a Word document which has disappeared. If anyone can help, I'd appreciate it.

Who is responsible for this nasty, wonderful, complex, multi-layered, multi-disciplinary, I-Can't-Wait-To-Edit-It-and-Give-It-To-My-Own-Students puzzle?

Yes, it will take you a while.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #08 and 34

2011-10-30T06:30:00.016-04:00

We're mixing it up today.

Difficulty: Algebra rules.

Difficulty: Boring ... but that's solely my personal feelings.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest 2004

answer 08, answer 34.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #07 and 35

2011-10-29T06:30:00.016-04:00

Wordiness.

Difficulty: Too simple? Maybe.

Difficulty: Interesting. Don't count ties.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest 2004

answer 07, answer 35.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #06 and 36

2011-10-28T06:30:00.015-04:00

How well do yours remember their geometry rules?

Difficulty: Similar triangles. Simple.

Difficulty: It's the obligatory infinite series, but what's the ratio? That's what will trip them up.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest 2004

answer 06, answer 36.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #05 and 37

2011-10-27T06:30:00.018-04:00

Time for circles and triangles.

Difficulty: "I never thought it would be THAT."

Difficulty: You can hear it now ... "Why did they just ask for the sum of the areas of the triangles?"

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest 2004

answer 05, answer 37.

#AnyQs -- Roof tiles

2011-10-26T19:05:00.000-04:00

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #04 and 38

2011-10-26T06:30:00.006-04:00

How well do yours remember exponents?

Difficulty: Simple, maybe.

Difficulty: Number theory. Tough little bastard until the AHA! moment.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest 2004

answer 04, answer 38.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #03 and 39

2011-10-25T06:30:00.009-04:00

Every year, they manage to work the date into question. Here's this year's:

Difficulty: Pretty Simple.

Difficulty: Relies on a bunch of work and a couple AHA! moments. Tough.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest 2004

answer 03, answer 39.

Samples must be numerically significant or else conclusions are worthless.

2011-10-24T19:29:00.000-04:00

Parents Against Tired Truckers is losing it's religion over the results of a new study on an experiment up here in Vermont. Just as in education, small sample sizes and incomplete data are being misunderstood and misrepresented to further a viewpoint that may do more harm than good. PATT has it's heart in the right place, but it's brains are sorely lacking.

Vermont asked the Feds to study whether allowing 100,000 lb rigs on major highways would be more dangerous than having them travel the back roads.

The study results came out. PATT shouted

The Trucking Industry Is Wrong on the Maine and Vermont 100,000 lb. Truck Pilot Program – DEAD Wrong

Wow. That must be some study. "Dead wrong" isn't mincing words.

" .. the Truck Safety Coalition (TSC) released startling information revealed in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request sent to the Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans)."

Impressive. "Startling", you say? Took a FOIA request, huh? I must read further. "Catastrohic results" "People needlessly died." Damn.

The number is SO BIG.
Documents show that during the 100,000 lb. truck pilot project in 2010, Vermont’s commercial motor vehicle fatal crash rate tripled from .49 fatal crashes per 100 million miles traveled in 2009 to 1.44 fatal crashes (“Vermont Truck Interstate Pilot Study- Report to Congress (State of Vermont Version for Review) – Summary Report (Draft)” prepared for FHWA by Cambridge Systematics, Inc, hereinafter “Vermont Report”).

What does that mean Regis? The Death rate tripled. Holy Batman, mackerel. They're quoting Government documents and it sounds so official.

Well, actually, it doesn't mean much at all. You see, Vermont had one death involving trucks on its roads in 2009 and three in 2010. Yeah, the death rate "tripled" but you need to have a bigger sample size before you can claim that trucks are making things more dangerous.

You also need to look at the reality of those crashes. In the one crash, two trucks and a car were involved in an accident that was blamed on icy roads and bad conditions. One of the truck drivers and the car's driver were killed. In the other accident, the car (probably drunk) crossed the 50-foot median and hit the truck head-on. Again, hardly the fault of the truck driver.

As in education, there's always some fool trumpeting results based on small sample sizes and assuming the study will scale up. Remember when Bill Gates spent nearly a billion dollars to create the Small Schools Initiative? The smaller schools that did better than the large public schools were showcased until the next year when the same school would do worse, at which point the deformers would shout about some other school which HAD done well that year. Variation of the small groups, not the inevitable superiority of the charter school, small-school, voucher school, Catholic School, whatever.

To give you another example, consider Daisuke Matsusaka (RedSox). He had four starts. Two were terrible and then two were decent. Can we say that trend is positive? Yes, but I'm not giving him a contract based on that.

Still another comes from here:
Last week I tossed a coin a hundred times. 49 heads. Then I changed into a red t-shirt and tossed the same coin another hundred times. 51 heads. From this, I conclude that wearing a red shirt gives a 4.1% increase in conversion in throwing heads.

Pretty foolish. Besides, everyone knows that wearing a red shirt is tantamount to a death sentence anyway, so I'm not sure what can be made from this "study" either.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #02 and 40

2011-10-24T06:30:00.001-04:00

A nice fraction and a seemingly simply area question. Nice!

Difficulty: Simple.

Difficulty: Easy after the AHA! moments.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest 2004

answer 02, answer 40.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2004 #01 and 41

2011-10-23T06:30:00.005-04:00

Start of a new series. A nice fraction and a holy craptastic function thing. Wow!

Difficulty: Simple.

The Daily Pair of Puzzles - An Explanation.

2011-10-22T16:00:00.001-04:00

An explanation from a few months back - reposted to introduce the new set of questions.

I'll be (and have been) posting a lot of puzzles/questions over the next few weeks and I thought I'd address a few comments.

First, a little background. These questions are from a yearly contest put out by the University of Vermont for any in-state student. The math department up there has been doing this for years and I've been giving it for years. Each year I add to our (me and the Mrs.) collection but I just recently acquired a notebook of tests going back to something like '72. These are great questions for students and I figured you all would appreciate if I'd share - judging from the response, you do.

I give them to my seniors as warm-ups, problems to work on while we wait for the morning announcements to interrupt us. Since the SmartBoard doesn't have particularly good formatting options, the best thing seemed to be for me to post them as images. I'll only post two at a time so you won't be tempted to work on the whole thing at once. I know you people; you have work to do.

The test itself is 41 questions. The students have 2 hours and all the scrap paper they need. No calculators, no computers, no Wolfram Alpha, no smartphones, no collaboration; it's just you and this piece of 11x17 paper folded to a four page booklet ... and a pile of scrap paper.

Mmmmm. Tasty.

It's raw, pure math.

Another thing about this test: "Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced." This is both a blessing and a curse for the students. The smart ones realize quickly that everything must reduce, and that helps them stay on track. They realize that there need to be lots of things cancelling -- how else can the answer be found in a few/ten minutes and expressed as a rational number?

"All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example." Again, we're not getting a decimal here. The answer must be something you CAN find in 3-7 minutes.

So, time is a consideration, "brain freeze" is rampant, the occasional quiet muttered "You bastard, I gotcha" and you can't discount the missing calculator. It's a challenge and every question is "just on the tip of their brain and then everything cancels and 'viola'." That "aha!" moment happens often. The dope-slap happens too, when they forget to reduce 14/10 to 7/5.

For me as a teacher, it's a perfect vehicle for breaking them loose from tech, for giving them a sense of perspective, for giving them a challenge and setting them up against the best of the state. Most importantly, it's a single test that incorporates EVERYTHING that they know from Pre-Calculus into one single set of questions. To solve each one requires a complete knowledge base and access to both trivia and method, and theorem and idea. Most questions are asked in an odd way that's a fun twist on what you've already done. It's a way for kids to realize that they actually DO know something and that getting a tough answer is really satisfying.

Afterwards, UVM will give out a Best in School and Best in Region, along with money prizes to the top six in the state. Best in School is usually 12-15 correct. I tell the PreCalc kids that 6-10 is an achievement.

The test format: The first one is always some kind of compound fraction and page one (10 - 13 questions) usually contains questions that are "easy" for the students in that they have SOME idea of where to go. They'll make computational mistakes here.

Pages 2-3 are medium difficulty in that the students really struggle to get anywhere that seems "right" and the questions tend to be wordy and confusing.

My brain is melting!

Page four are the ones that students rarely get. As math teachers, we look at an infinite series as easy, but the students don't ... when you have it as a infinite series of triangles, they wilt in the heat.

And don't forget that 2 hour time limit.
And that other problem that took an entire page of algebra and twenty minutes.
And "I forgot the square of 14 was 196, not 216, so that problem needs fixing. Oh wow, all this cancels now. Is that the answer? It seems too simple."

And these are juniors and seniors. In high school. Hating you at this moment.

But loving it when they succeed.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #20, 21, and 22

2011-10-21T06:30:00.023-04:00

Greatest Integer Function and Radicals in one problem? Be still my beating heart. A problem where intuition works best? Awesome. Similar triangles masquerading as a tough problem. Wow!

Difficulty: moderately difficult for students who don't see how the GIF is applied here. Of course, the resulting radicals are complicated, too.

Difficulty: Simple answer is the correct one. Proving it is an interesting discussion.

Difficulty: Again, pretty simple if they're paying attention.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 20, answer 21 and answer 22.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #19 and 23

2011-10-20T06:30:00.020-04:00

Functions and Prime Factors! Yay! Radicals! Yay! What's the mathematical idea here?

Difficulty: Medium. The trick for me was prime factors ... and remembering the 1.

Difficulty: Medium. Just go for it.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 19 and answer 23.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #18 and 24

2011-10-19T06:30:00.016-04:00

Permutations with a twist. Let's go do the twist. And ARCLength!

Difficulty: medium.

Difficulty: Are they paying attention? It's a lead-pipe cinch that most will get the degrees of arc and forget to RTFQ.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 18 and answer 24.

Any Questions? License Plates

2011-10-18T21:52:00.000-04:00

Yup. Nearly 100 years old.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #17 and 25

2011-10-18T06:30:00.021-04:00

Using every possible rule of Logarithms and a bit of combinatorial thinking:

Difficulty: Pretty Tough for students.

Difficulty: Much simpler than it appears. Brute force solution works best.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 17 and answer 25.

Any Questions?

2011-10-17T20:34:00.001-04:00

Four one-gallon milk jugs in the red crate.
Nine half-gallon milk jugs in the gray crate.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #16 and 26

2011-10-17T06:30:00.016-04:00

Trig rules. Did'ya memorize the half-angle formulae or will you need to derive them?

Difficulty: Easy if memorized. Difficult, if not..

Difficulty: Pretty easy, if you draw the diagram correctly from the description.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 16 and answer 26.

California - Tech vs Fine Arts

2011-10-16T22:13:00.000-04:00

Broke in a broken system.

Joanne shares about California's new law.

"Music and art teachers are complaining about a new California law that expands graduation requirements: Students can take one career or technical education course in place of art, music or a foreign language, reports the San Jose Mercury News. Arts and foreign-language courses are twice as likely as vocational classes to be certified as college-prep courses, so students who choose career tech could be ineligible to go from high school directly to the University of California and California State University systems."

So here's my question ... if VoTech is what the kid wants to study, why are we so hell-bent on getting him into a college degree he'll waste his time on?

Take that woman in the picture. She went $100,000 in debt to finance a women's studies and religious studies major at NYU and now is working as a photographer's assistant for $20 per hour. (It's obviously CitiBank's fault for giving her the loan. That's why they posed her there.)

Why? Why should she incur that debt for such a meaningless degree? Because she's stupid, self-centered and gullible -- she willingly took out loans without considering how she'd pay them back.

California provides a free college education to its residents (well, except for fees, but I digress.) Why should California provide a free college education for someone like her who serves no practical benefit to the society which pays that bill?

There is nothing wrong with a life and a career without a degree. Millions of people accomplish it all the time. They become fine upstanding members of the community and college grads look down their noses at them at their peril.

We must stop this "college for all" one-track mindset.

Some urban districts, such as Oakland Unified, San Jose Unified and East Side Union in San Jose, use UC’s college-prep curriculum as their graduation requirement.

Which is ridiculous.

Public schools should not be pretending that all kids belong in college nor should it require that all kids be ready to make that step before we're willing to let them go out and be successful.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #15 and 27

2011-10-16T06:30:00.020-04:00

Weird expressions and the Sum of an Infinite Series ... yum.

Difficulty: moderately difficult. Students have trouble if you ask for the value of an expression rather than for a value of x. How does that second expression relate to the first?

Difficulty: Sum of a series. But what's the ratio?

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 15 and answer 27.

Circle of Failure

2011-10-15T20:36:00.000-04:00

The other day I was in a 504/IEP meeting and a kid was being considered for alternative programs. The tech center guy was sitting across the table and was discussing the kid's options.

"Well, the Hospitality Program would be a good fit."
"She doesn't want to put in any effort. What would be her options after that?"
"Well, she could work with the elementary school kids. She really likes kids."

What I wanted to say was "This girl has failed at every possible program we can think of. She is lazy, and spoiled, and even her mother can't bribe her to do well. She hates math and barely tolerates English and Social Studies. She couldn't care less about academics of any kind. ... Why would you put her with a bunch of impressionable elementary kids? How can that possibly work out well?"

Fortunately, I didn't have to say that, but at some point you need to put the majority's needs ahead of the reclamation project.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #14 and 28

2011-10-15T06:30:00.019-04:00

Mixture problems don't seem to show up as often nowadays as they used to. I think we've changed the algebra curriculum to pave way for the 7th and 8th graders ... I'm thinking that these questions were deemed irrelevant or too difficult.

Difficulty: Intuition doesn't help here. Only algebra..

Difficulty:Fairly difficult. Where do I start?

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 14 and answer 28.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #13 and 29

2011-10-14T06:30:00.002-04:00

Patterns!

Difficulty: Easier than it looks. Getting students to begin seems to be the key.

Difficulty: Patterns, again.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 13 and answer 29.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #12 and 30

2011-10-13T06:30:00.008-04:00

More set theory! And Combinations! and Probability! And Exclamation Points!

Difficulty: moderately difficult for students who haven't done combinations in a while.

Difficulty: Much simpler than the location in the test would indicate. I'd be curious to know how your kids solved it.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 12 and answer 30.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #11 and 31

2011-10-12T06:30:00.019-04:00

I love algebra!

Difficulty: moderately difficult for students, but I enjoyed the heck out of it. Guaranteed that they will forget about (x+2) at the end.

Difficulty: There are many possible subsets, so this didn't thrill me at first and I didn't notice the shortcut. When I read it, it was obvious.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 11 and answer 31.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #10 and 32

2011-10-11T06:30:00.002-04:00

Fractions and reasoning!

Difficulty: Pretty easy, for us old fogies who aren't scared of fractions.

Difficulty: Double angle formula. Yum. Algebra. Yummier.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 10 and answer 32.

Flipping: Fad or Function?

2011-10-10T20:51:00.000-04:00

Joanne Jacobs talks about flipping. So does Education Next:

Flipping instruction — typically, students watch a video at home and work through problems at school — is going mainstream, writes Education Sector’s Bill Tucker in Education Next.

I'm not convinced that this is the answer for everyone. I think, like SBG or Portfolios, this is a method that will work well with certain classes and certain teachers in certain situations.

As long as you can boil your whole lecture down to a five minute video tweet, it's great. Is that really the goal in a math class? How well does it work in a class that discusses the new material for more than 5 minutes a day? This seems better for learning programming, where a tiny idea must be put into place with debugging and tweaking needed all the way through.

The right stuff: One of the gushing reports is from an AP Calculus teacher who claims that she is done with the AP Calculus curriculum a month early because of it. While I am a bit skeptical of that claim, it is possible because she's dealing with the best, brightest and most responsible group of students in the entire school. They probably have a great deal of time and a lot of parental support, computer access and other advantages.

What kind of time is needed?

Flipping began at the college level. I think it is a better fit there because of the tremendous amount of time required on the students' part -- time the college student has and the high school student typically doesn't.

I am not convinced that my ninth grade students (or frankly any of my students) can get to this video learning each night, after practice, for each of their six or seven classes, fighting their older brother for computer time. Even if they can manage the time, are students capable of absorbing new information and methods from six different classes, at 9pm?

The problem, of course, is that it will scale badly down at the highschool level, yet the educrats and deformers will leap on this bandwagon with both feet tied behind their backs.

Habits of Highly Ineffective Principals: Um ... Confidentiality?

2011-10-10T11:45:00.002-04:00

The true HIPster is acutely aware of his school's scores and how NCLB is bearing down on his job as a result. Fearful for his bloated salary, he flails out with any half-baked idea that might have an effect on the school's results, regardless of the damage it does to students. After all, he's HIP.

You could give them gang tattoos, too.
"Anaheim Union High School District has killed a controversial incentive program that assigned students color-coded ID cards and planners based on state test scores, required those who performed poorly to stand in a separate lunch line and awarded the others with discounts. The program was designed to urge students to raise scores on the California Standards Tests, but it also raised concern among parents and students who said it illegally revealed test scores and embarrassed those who didn't do well."

Yeah. "Urge" them to raise scores. Or maybe "humiliate" them might be more accurate. "Here are all the smart kids in the school and none of them are you." Other than painting a target on the smart kids' backs (because you haven't really solved that bullying problem, yet, have you?), all that this accomplishes is to divide the students against each other and raise resentments higher than they were naturally.

And to have to carry around binders and ID cards that announced continuously that you were deficient -- who thought this was a good idea? A HIP. It's akin to saying "All you Black kids in this line. All you Asian kids in the Yellow Line. Hispanics in the Brown Line. Normal kids in the White Line." I can cite psychology experiments (one quote above) that demonstrate what's wrong with this idea and history is filled with stories of whole societies that took this idea and ran amok. Never mind the confidentiality laws - you CANNOT announce a students scores on tests.

No matter how desperate your job prospects are.

Habits of Highly Ineffective Principals: Idealism Run Weird

2011-10-10T08:30:00.000-04:00

Everyone has standards - things we will or won't tolerate in class. All of us have administrators who toss in a few of their own - no hoods, no hats, no gum, no food in the rooms, no drinks in the halls, no glass bottles; you've heard them before.

But then you have the Highly Ineffective Principal. He goes way beyond the reasonable ... all the way to "perfect".

1. Every class should have 100% attendance daily. It is the teacher's responsibility to call parents and make this happen.

I am speechless.

This is "perfect", all right. Perfectly idiotic.

h/t to Pissed Off Teacher, who has a list of these from a real HIPster.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #9 and 33

2011-10-10T06:30:00.003-04:00

An easy one and then one to make you iRate!

Difficulty: Pretty easy, once they understand the idea.

Difficulty: Rates and people going every which way ... whatever. Complex but not terribly difficult.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 09 and answer 33.

Habits of Highly Ineffective Principals: Make a new committee

2011-10-09T10:21:00.000-04:00

So we have a committee that is charged with discussing the way testing will happen. They talk about the testing schedule and the testing environment. A question comes up about a different group of students that isn't being tested at that time and a proposed change for them.

As a HIP, what do you do?

Do you appoint someone to make the change work? Do you state clearly that you believe that a school should do X in a situation like this one and that the current committee should make a decision? Or do you form a new committee that will meet at a different time, comprised of different people but still has you, the HIPster principal as its head?

Yup, make a new committee.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #8 and 34

2011-10-09T06:30:00.018-04:00

A complex function that creates a pattern that, once understood, is beautifully simple.

Difficulty: Few students have dealt with a function of this nature.

Difficulty: To be honest, I had no clue on this one. I would have to rate it difficult because the answer method seems so esoteric to this engineer. Maybe the math majors will face-palm on my obtuseness, but I'll have to risk it.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 08 and answer 34.

It's not a dichotomy ...

2011-10-08T17:54:00.000-04:00

Okay, I'll admit. I am a math teacher. Furthermore, I live in an area of the country where living costs are surprisingly low, which is why the top step in our pay scales around the state are in the $55k - $65k range. Having said that, I'd like to take issue with this little tidbit of rabble-rousing.

First, no one is asking for teachers to take a 20% pay cut. At most, I've heard of negotiations proposals that ask for teachers to take on an additional teaching assignment instead of a prep period. In one of our previous contracts, the teachers agreed to a 15 minute extension on the day. Similarly, you'd think the School Board was demanding capital punishment when you heard the outcry.

Nobody wins when you blatantly exaggerate like this. Especially if you're of the opinion that the upper tax rates are way lower than they used to be, and lower than they should be.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #7 and 35

2011-10-08T06:30:00.000-04:00

Complex numbers, binomial expansion, rationalizing the denominator, oh-my! Then combinations!

Difficulty: moderately difficult, time is the problem for some.

Difficulty: Combinations annoy me.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 07 and answer 35.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #6 and 36

2011-10-07T06:30:00.002-04:00

Some triangle work and a bitchin' series!

Difficulty: Simple triangle rules.

Difficulty: Just algebra. Looks much worse than it is.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 06 and answer 36.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #5 and 37

2011-10-06T06:30:00.016-04:00

Geometry rules. Then number theory.

Difficulty: Not too bad. Arc length, anyone?

Difficulty: Just algebra. Okay, there's some heavy lifting here, but LOTS of stuff cancels.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 05 and answer 37.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #4 and 38

2011-10-05T06:30:00.001-04:00

The first one is very similar to a classic SAT question that always trips up students who aren't paying attention. The second - do they remember LoC?

Difficulty: simple.

Difficulty: Not bad, if they remember.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 04 and answer 38.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #3 and 39

2011-10-04T06:30:00.000-04:00

One from the beginning that's totally easy for them. The second one is surprisingly easy IF they remember how to work functions!

Difficulty: simple.

Difficulty: Just algebra.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 03 and answer 39.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #2 and 40

2011-10-03T06:30:00.000-04:00

One from the beginning (generally easier) and one from the end (generally harder for the kids) so you can have a choice.

Difficulty: pretty easy for most 12th graders.

Difficulty: Some substitutions that will challenge them.

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 02 and answer 40.

Education Nation is Full of Narcissistic Fools

2011-10-03T00:09:00.000-04:00

SO NBC, that bastion of level-headedness, has this thing called Education Nation. I did not watch the two segments. After reading the following list, I couldn't do it. I feel somewhat sick already and didn't want to push it.

The Innovative Educator thought this was all peachy-keen and listed out some of the talking points that resonated in its empty head.

Apparently, no one listens to the students and that's bad. Of course, most of us do but that's not the Reformer Way of Describing Teachers so we obviously don't do that and obviously The Students Are Always Right When They Complain.

" In their discussion, young people provided insight into their own experiences with education and what they think needs to be done to ensure that every student receives a world-class education." Because we all know that students are the Font of Wisdom and teachers are morons. Quick note: Sleeping through class does not make you an expert on education.

But let's let their words speak for them ...

I have to critically think in college, but your tests don't teach me that.

They're not supposed to teach you that. They're supposed to help form and guide your learning and measure it, give that college some idea of what you can do.

We learn in different ways at different rates.

SO? Even though you really aren't all that different from your peers. It's funny how I easily I can predict what each student will be able to achieve and what time frame it will take to do it. Amazingly, the whole class is within a short time of each other.

I can't learn from you if you are not willing to connect with me.

Bullshit. Teachers can connect but it's a two-way street and you're not playing. If you can't learn without the touchy-feely crap then you'll never learn from Salman Kahn, a computer, an online program, a disinterested presenter or any teacher who is even slightly less than your ideal of perfection. That's a damn shame.

Teaching by the book is not teaching. It's just talking.

Minor point. Teaching by the book is accepting that someone smarter than I and with more time and help from his graduate students, has put together a pretty damn good calculus book. Why would I change it radically?

Caring about each student is more important than teaching the class.

Bullshit. Caring about you is not the reason I get paid nor the reason you're in that class. Teaching is a profession and one that I enjoy but I am not your parent, your priest or your counselor. I am the teacher.

This is my job.
Every young person has a dream. Your job is to help bring us closer to our dreams.

Nope. My job is to teach math the best I can. See all that stuff to the right? Your job is to see to your dreams. You're the only one who can force you to put in the effort to reach your dreams. This is an internal incentive. External forces don't work here.

We need more than teachers. We need life coaches.

Really? "Life coach"? When did teachers take the place of your parents? Do you really want me to (A) know about all of your off-campus shenanigans and problems and (B) are you willing to let me solve them? Did it ever occur to you that I might not have an answer for why your religion is retarded or why your mother is drug-addicted? I might not be the best person to counsel you on what to do with your life. How can I possibly know what you want? You can't even tell me what you'll be doing next summer, forget what you'll spend your life doing.

Or do you want someone's shoulder to cry on and pat you condescendingly on the head? If you want my advice as a Certified Life Coach: stop being a navel-gazing narcissist and grow up. The world really doesn't give a damn about your "life coaching".

The community should become more involved in schools.

Meh. If there's anything less appealing, it's having a whole bunch of people around who are convinced that they know everything because they went to school. You don't second-guess any other professionals in your life, why the eagerness to second-guess teachers?

Even if you don't want to be a teacher, you can offer a student an apprenticeship.

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.

Us youth love all the new technologies that come out. When you acknowledge this and use technology in your teaching it makes learning much more interesting.

I love them, too. Now get out your iPads and load up the Kindle version of the textbook and get to work. If you can't connect to the school's network, then set up a wi-fi hotspot off your iPhone, go to wolframalpha.com, find the answer to the first part of the question and incorporate it into the Excel spreadsheet to further analyze the problem, dump the results to Powerpoint, send it to your portable printer or convert it to one of the four acceptable electronic formats. Then, don't send it to my email account but rather submit it to the class Moodle in the proper forum. You know how to do that, right? By the end of the week, I'll want you to be able to explain all this and apply your knowledge to something completely different, so you need to get cracking.

You should be trained not just in teaching but also in counseling.

Really? Cool. That'll get me an additional $50k per year, and I get to send the rest of the class away for the period while we talk. Feel better now? Made much improvement in math while you sorted out your ego?

Tell me something good that I'm doing so that I can keep growing in that.

You're a big boy, now. If you don't know your strengths, my telling you over and over isn't going to help. I give praise when it's deserved and to encourage students. I don't give out gold stars because that's demeaning. You need to do something difficult. You need to fail, and then pick yourself back up, fail and finally succeed. YOU need to tell YOURSELF what's good. You're not supposed to be dancing to my tune on that.

When you can feel like a family member it helps so much.

Not it doesn't. I'm not your parent. Our relationship is on a friendly, but professional level.

We appreciate when you connect with us in our worlds such as the teacher who provided us with extra help using Xbox and Skype

I'd appreciate it if you paid attention in class and made the most of the limited time we had. Since we only have those 60 minutes and there are quite a few equally needy souls in the room, how about we dispense with the games and focus on the math you signed up to take? My understanding was this was pre-calculus. I know a whole lot more than you do about what you'll need in the workplace ... XBox, not withstanding.

Our teachers have too many students to enable them to connect with us in they way we need them to.

Grow up. Seek out the teachers. The good ones will be there. Just wait until you get to college and have the privilege of sitting with 400 of your closest friends in a lecture hall listening to a TA with a heavy foreign accent. Nobody is connecting until you show up at Office Hours and ask an intelligent question.

Bring the electives that we are actually interested in back to school. Things like drama, art, cooking, music.

Those things should never have left. Don't blame me for the morons in the community who made that decision. HOWEVER, student interest should never drive their education decisions ... they have no idea what they'll need and waste the limited time they have on things that are easy and un-challenging rather than on things they will later wish they'd done.

Education leaders, teachers, funders, and policy makers need to start listening to student voice in all areas including teacher evaluations.

Nope. Until you have some experience, your "opinion" is worthless and people will blow you off. When you have that experience, you'll find we already do listen.

You need to use tools in the classroom that we use in the real world like Facebook, email, and other tools we use to connect and communicate.

You need to put away your childish toys and realize that gossip and passing notes is something we did when we were young, too, and that Facebook and twitter are simply the new version of that. There's a reason why older folks don't communicate as often - they communicate BETTER. Quality will someday replace quantity. In the meantime, continue sending 300+ texts a day .... I'm sure someone is reading and thinking deeply about them. At some point, though, the two of you sitting on each end of the couch texting each other might consider putting the phone down and "talking".

You need to love a student before you can teach a student.

Awesomely silly. and false.

We do tests to make teachers look good and the school look good, but we know they don't help us to learn what's important to us.

I don't like those tests either. If I had my choice, you'd have four tests per semester and an end-of-course exam. Five scores. That's it. No homework grade, no participation grade, no effort grade, no attendance ... nothing but "Do you know what you're doing"?

I'm glad we had this talk.

Two Puzzles for Seniors: 2002 #1 and 41

2011-10-02T14:25:00.000-04:00

We're starting these again!

They've been so helpful to my calculus kids, reminding and challenging them, getting them going in the first couple of minutes of class, that I figured you'd want to try them with your kids, too. Since I last did this in April, we'll start 2002 over again.

Difficulty: cake with frosting.

Difficulty: Just algebra. If all kids took and passed algebra II, this problem would be easy for everyone..

Standard instructions for this series: No calculator allowed. Express answers in reduced form. Rationalize denominators. Radicals must be reduced. All numbers are base ten unless otherwise specified. Do not approximate radicals or π. Leave such answers as 1025π or √39, for example. Source: UVM Math Contest

answer 01 and answer 41.

Liberal Outlook is the result of Maturity.

2011-09-17T22:18:00.000-04:00

Or so says Kevin Wolfman in education news.

If you're not a liberal when you're young, you've got no soul.
If you're not conservative when you're older, you've got no brains.

or "A conservative is a liberal who just got mugged."

Anyway, the gist of the man's argument is:

"Few conservative students ever become liberals during college, and vice versa. Higher education’s political influence may be less one of liberalization and more one of polarization, as centrist students gradually drift to one side of the spectrum or the other. Conservatives agitated over the idea of pervasive university radicalism are frothing at the mouth over nothing. Hard, statistical evidence pointing to a widespread “indoctrination” of college students into liberal thought simply does not exist.

What benign increase in the ranks of liberal students during college that does occur—roughly 4 percent—is not due to “indoctrination” at the hands of tenured socialists and radicals. It is, rather, a result of intellectual maturation combined with a stimulating collegiate social life that shapes and strengthens the values of equality and acceptance. If the lecture halls of America’s universities are “one-party classrooms,” as Horowitz says, maybe it’s because conservatism has forgotten that school is in session.

Atari Founder will do what no one else can

2011-09-17T22:08:00.000-04:00

At least, he thinks so.

Atari Founder to Create Game to Reduce High School to 1 Year: Nolan Bushnell thinks we can make better use of technology and what we know about learning to streamline high school from 4 years down to 1. A complete high school education in one year? Although details are sketchy, Bushnell plans to utilize his experience as a game designer to fix, what he calls, “broken computers and maladjusted teachers.”

Which is a very cool idea. I mean, think of it ... a whole lot of 13 and 14 year-olds who have finished their high school education and are now looking for jobs. Because what more does this country need than ill-prepared 13ers running around thinking they know everything? (They already do that but this program would put a stamp of approval on the whole charade.)

Hummmmm.

This project, known as Speed to Learn, incentivizes learning by providing students with interesting payoffs. Good work could earn one a nap or time with a laser cutter, for example. At an education summit in New York, Bushnell described the program as arcade-style videogames combined with aerobic activity for the purpose of education.

Interesting choice that. A nap or time on a laser cutter. Wonder which one the kids will choose? At first, the laser cutter. That'll get boring quickly because it's online and no one wants to give a bunch of 13ers the really good materials. They'll just take a nap ... or go outside ... or play real video games that are fun.

Hold on, how's he going to pay for the materials and the $100,000 laser cutter? I thought this was going to save us money? Are the kids doing this at home? From the WinXP machine in the corner of the kitchen?

While visiting schools, Bushnell noticed that up to 15% of available terminals were unusable due to various computer problems, a number that he aims to reduce with the new system.

Well, THAT certainly rings a bell. Going onto the cloud won't do much for that dream if the computer itself is crap, though. Or if the network is down. Or it's Vermont, where half of the state is still dialing in to log on.

The educational speed gains will come mainly as a result of the unique way of rewarding students for successfully accomplishing their tasks, such as obtaining a solution to a problem in a specified period of time:

Ahhh. A modern-day version of a Skinner box. As long as we're all pigeons, it should work out just fine.

“We’ve been in hundreds of classrooms with 40,000 kids. We are currently teaching subjects 10 times faster. We believe that when we roll this up to full curriculum we’ll be able to teach a full career of high school in less than a year. And we think we’ll be able to do that by the end of next year.”

I can solve your problems
with a magic box.
In one year, all of your students
will graduate with honors.
But not yet.

Well, let me know when you have something, Nolan. Be sure to do some testing, though. Just saying you're "Like Salman Kahn" and proclaiming the next coming of Jesus Christ isn't enough. "We are currently teaching subjects ten times faster" means nothing if those kids aren't learning anything.

"When we roll this up to a full curriculum"? How about getting one course first? You know, a beta version?

I'm sick of computer guys assuming that they have the answer to all of education's problems just because they managed to write a computer program once. Online learning is a sham. Video games don't teach math. The kids are getting screwed.

"Deus Ex Machina" was a theatrical trick in Ancient Greece and it's a theatrical trick now.

"Bushnell has said that he’s been working on Speed to Learn for over ten years, but so far there are no demos or screenshots to examine. However, if he intends to stick to his ambitious launch deadline, those should be appearing in the very near future."

At this rate, I'm expecting Duke Nukem Forever to come out first. The kids will really enjoy that and they might learn something about the promises Broad and Gates and Bushnell make and recognize them for the false prophets they are.

Education is going digital - yeah, right

2011-09-17T20:36:00.001-04:00

Don't get me wrong, I'm a tech guy but I also teach math. I've been teaching using technology and computers since the time of the TRS-80 and the graphing calculator that came free with a ream of paper and a pack of Ticonderoga #2s.

Education has come a long way but the dreams and ideals of the "21st Century Learning" fanatics are going to have to take a backseat for a while. The realities of high-tech just don't make for easy dreaming.

Consider: The IT guy.

If you are lucky enough to have IT who are responsive and dedicated to supporting the teachers and students (and that's a big if), their jobs are usually way too overburdened - budget cuts that cut in the weirdest places, stupid administration making demands that don't parse, clueless users breaking shit constantly and students trying to get around the filters, wasting time, downloading games, listening to Pandora, etc.

How does that guy, all by himself, maintain the machines needed for the "21st Century Dream"?

He doesn't.

We all got an email from him the other day listing his tickets and to-do list. He was under a lot of pressure from everyone to "Do this job now" and "Fix my machine" and had weeks worth of backlog. I know he was also making his own job more difficult in places but that's not the point.

- The entire domain was lost this summer
- Not all of the faculty are up yet.
- The student accounts need to be arranged.
- Roaming profiles are NOT working yet.
- Elementary school Netbooks need to be imaged.
- Vendor printer driver issues.
- wireless issues.
- scheduled replacements have been dropped for budget reasons - meaning re-imaging and re-using old machines.
- Special ed laptops need to be finished.
- VP laptop needs to be finished
- Principal's laptop is dead.
- Software installation - MSOffice upgrades, Windows upgrades, anti-virus upgrades and updates.
- servers need to be setup, fixed or vendor calls need to be made.
- email server (we're changing our email system .. again)
- orders placed for supplies and equipment
- content filtering isn't working.
- He wants to completely change the grading and student information system.

Much of this should have been done over the summer, but it wasn't. Don't know why, but the usual reason is "Life intervened" and "Shit Happened." There's nothing to be done but move on and let him do what he can, when he can. Crap ALWAYS happens and the "Best laid plans of mice and men, yada, yada, yada."

Some of this list is federal and state mandates - we're really proud of the service and education we give to our special ed students here and the SpecEd laptops are critical. Probably 50% of the work lies in dealing with filling out the paperwork. (This is no shit.) If they don't work, lots of people have lots of extra work.

Some of this list is us. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to help the other teachers with an issue that left me shaking my head in wonder. (PEBKAC - Problem exists between keyboard and chair.) How is it possible that all the admin's laptops are dead? Seriously? Why do all the teachers insist on "I need training !!!" when they are really asking for someone to hold their hand? Is RTFM really unreasonable? Can't we just figure out the problem and let IT have some time? Apparently not.

Some of this list is our guy whining about things he knows he should have better organized. If I were doing this task, I'd have spent many nights until I got the scripts perfected -- "make student account, give student permissions for his network folder, give student permissions for Internet use, create email account, set starting passwords, create network connections ..." Then push the "Start of School" button and sit back. Creating the database of students would be the hardest part - typing.

Some of this is our guy refusing to let others take work off his hands. There are several people who could help but NO. Case in point, the school website. IT still insist on being the only ones who can edit it and everything has to be handed to them so they can put it up. Really? I want to post homework and I have to email it to them so they can check it and put it on a webpage? Even the daily announcements (compiled by the school secretary) are sent to IT daily to be posted. It's only a five minute task, but it interrupts and it's a needless extra step. What's the phrase - bottleneck? Gatekeeper fetish? I would -- long ago -- have set up a way for the school secretary to do that automatically and have it completely out of my hands. Instead, they fall back on "That would be too much trouble to implement and maintain."

School blog? Nope!
Wiki? Forum? No!
Moodle? Not a chance.
Google for education? Nope.
Install winplot? Nope.
Connect my tablet to Wi-Fi? No.
Install Geometer's Sketchpad? Nope.
Install software on machines accessible to the teacher who will use it? Nope. (And we're talking Adobe CS here. Ten licenses ain't cheap.)

Video-conferencing software? Say what?
How about an online student information system? No.
Give the teachers an easy way to connect? Are you kidding?

Don't even get me started on the SmartBoards that teachers demanded and then pushed to a corner.

So the faculty who are pushing the envelope technologically are all spreading out and tripping over each other - this one uses Moodle on his own domain, another has a free Moodle site somewhere else, that one uses Moodle on HIS own domain. Three others use Google apps through personal gmail accounts, that one has kids going to an ad-serviced wiki site. This one has made a Facebook page, that one uses edmodo.com and the guy down the hall gives kids his cellphone number so they can call him at night. I've told all my Calc kids about Wolframalpha's iPhone app and the graphing calculator app ... and let them use them in class. It's against the rules, but screw it. Social media and collaborative tools are all over the place. Anyone with a clue is doing his/her own thing using a different set of tools, or different locations for those tools.

I just wonder what the kids are thinking when they have so many places to go to just to get homework, or write in forums, or whatever.

One department paid $1500 for a school-wide license for a streaming video service. A second department paid $1500 for a school-wide license for a streaming-video service. You'd think someone would notice the correlation by the time the History Department requested money for an online streaming video service school-wide license.

I blame

the principal for not paying better attention to education instead of the fad of the week.
and the Superintendent for not stepping in with a vision for education, or implementing all of this in an organized fashion
and the School Board for focusing only on their own kids' needs and the fad of the week.
and Bill Gates and Eli Broad for pushing agendae that don't include education .. the fad of the week.
and the ed-reformers who are demanding that we all transform somehow regardless of the utility and worth of that change.
and IT who don't get it and who won't let go.
and ...
and us teachers for demanding all this change (we fall for the fad of week, too) and technology (I wanna SmartBoard) instead of just being teachers and teaching with what we've got.

We need to get our eye on the ball again.

Government is shrinking

2011-09-09T17:24:00.001-04:00

Interesting graph out of Silicon Valley. The Federal workforce as a percentage of the private workforce has been dropping for decades.

The spikes seem to be census-related.

You can see the punchline coming

2011-09-05T17:26:00.001-04:00

But still I'm LMAO:

Technology is not a Magic Bullet

2011-09-05T11:38:00.001-04:00

NYTimes: "In a nutshell: schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning."

Of course there's proof: “This is such a dynamic class,” Ms. Furman says of her 21st-century classroom. “I really hope it works.”

What more proof do you need?

And then there's this: "Last summer, the district paid $500,000 to CCS to replace ceiling-hung projectors in 400 classrooms. The alternative was to spend $100,000 to replace their aging bulbs."

Finland, Teachers and the Common Core

2011-09-05T11:29:00.001-04:00

Joanne quotes A case against standards
by P. L. Thomas (originally posted in The Answer Sheet, WaPo)

Since we often choose to demonize U.S. education by international comparison, I suggest we consider the attitude toward the professionalism of teachers in Finland from Henna Virkkunen, Finland’s minister of education:

“Teachers in Finland can choose their own teaching methods and materials. They are experts of their own work, and they test their own pupils.

Hold on to your horses, PL., you're mixing apples and orange Volkswagens.

Teachers in the United States can take four years of college drinking, masquerading as a student of history, attend a 6 week TFA summer course, and be considered the Savior of the Universe -- and some even become decent first-year teachers. Or you can take a couple education classes, student teach with a "master teacher" who ignores you for a couple months and be certified. You can fail out of every other major in college and slide down the slippery slope to elementary education - at which point, you can get As. Or you can participate in Troops to Teachers, which assumes that military training and the ability to order people around is an automatic guarantee of the ability to teach.

None of these methods is a guaranteed loser - some sergeants are really good at teaching twelve-year-olds, some elementary ed students came from the top of their class, and some TFAs last more than a year and really can teach.

The problem is that most of these teachers think of themselves as great but are the last people you want to be "autonomous" and they're certainly not masters of their own work. (NSFS - Not Safe for Sanity)

Finnish teachers, on the other hand, come through a highly selective process, spend years as a teacher-in-training under the direct observation of a master teacher, and generally are all from the top tier of graduating college students. They are all using roughly the same methods because they've been through a lot more training than US teachers and seen what works.

Many US teachers do get to toss cards in the air and arbitrarily decide that they'll teach in a constructivist style with no books and little direction or lecture. Finnish teachers, by and large, stick to what we denigrate as "traditional" methods. Any that deviate from those "traditional" methods have been around for a long time, actually are masters of their own field, and can be trusted to test their students.

US teachers are under tremendous pressure to raise grades on tests (to the extent of 25% pay raise or cut, in some places) and are constantly being second-guessed by everyone and anyone while Finns are not. This over-whelming desire to improve and change means that US teachers are constantly swinging between great and lousy at the whims of the most recent fad.

Fad or Innovation? Wait until your pet innovation fails because the students don't like the "inverted" classroom because of the extra work. (Just to pick one current idea out of the fad-hat.) See how long you are able to continue.

Ideas fail with students all the time but might work with a different group or a different teacher. Just because ThinkThankThunk can pull off a non-traditional format doesn't mean that everyone else can. Similarly, dy/dan has great ideas, most well worth stealing, but you can't just blindly copy a few WCYDWTs and hope it's a course - there is the other 90% of one of his algebra courses still out there and the always pesky issue of making his curriculum fit your kids instead of his. Robert Talbot successfully "inverted" his college classroom but had mixed reviews for linear algebra and loved it for programming.

K-12 teachers and teacher educators must be afforded the autonomy of professionals--not further bureaucracy and invalid accountability.

Autonomy? Not until you've proven yourself. I don't trust the first-year teacher and I certainly don't trust those who've already demonstrated their incompetence. "Professional" doesn't apply to everyone.

Uphill both ways.

2011-09-02T20:58:00.000-04:00

From NPR:

Many families who live in Mendon, Vt., have been stranded because of road damage from the post-hurricane flooding. One place they can't get to is the local elementary school. But instead of staying home, about 20 kids from Mendon have been hiking over a mountain pass to get to a nearby road, where a group of parents then ferries them to school.

Yep. You can get theah from heah, but you might have to walk some.