A couple of days ago I watched a video that really depressed me. Here‘s a link to a local news story from Ankeny, Iowa – I’d encourage you to take a look at the news clip there (unfortunately, I can’t embed it here). The story concerns a 6th grade student who has memorized the decimal expansion . . . → Read More: Pi, I Shake My Fist at You
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A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post ran an op-ed written by G. V. Ramanathan, emeritus Professor in mathematics, statistics, and computer science, entitled “How much math do we really need?” As the title suggests, Ramanathan uses his space in the paper to argue against the grain of conventional wisdom when it comes to mathematics . . . → Read More: A Sufficient Mathematical Background Late last month there was apparently a bit of a ruckus over whether or not California should adopt new national education standards as part of a competition among the states dubbed “Race to the Top.” Although Race to the Top (the brain child of education secretary Arne Duncan) hasn’t received much media attention, it was one of . . . → Read More: Race to Where? Last year, I remarked on a TED talk from mathemagician Arthur Benjamin, who argued for the displacement of Calculus by Statistics in the hierarchy of high school mathematics. This year, TED has sponsored a talk by high school math teacher Dan Meyer, who discusses what, in his view, are the major problems with the way mathematics . . . → Read More: Patient Problem Solving Late last year, a study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which tried to pin down origins for the gender gap in mathematics education. As I’ve discussed before, the gender gap in math education is shrinking, and has been shown to be less about biology and more about culture – in cultures . . . → Read More: Gender Gap Genesis Earlier this month, Wired published an article written by Daniel Roth, enticingly titled “Making Geeks Cool Could Reform Education.” It serves as an interesting counterpoint to the commonly used argument that the best way to reform education is to better integrate it with the most current technology, so that going to school feels less like . . . → Read More: Reforming Education through Geek Chic Let me begin by saying that, in response to the question Why is 9/09/09 so special?, my response is simple: it’s not. In fact, I would argue that 09/08/09 is much more interesting. This claim has nothing to do with numerology, and everything to do with President Obama’s speech to the youth of America on the . . . → Read More: Make Money Money, Make Money Money Money! (and Learn Math, too) I recently had the pleasure of stumbling across Paul Lockhart’s essay, A Mathematician’s Lament. Lockhart, a former research mathematician in analytic number theory who received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1990, decided to leave academia in 2000 in order to concentrate on K-12 math education, which he hass been doing at Saint Ann’s School in . . . → Read More: Read a Mathematician’s Lament A friend recently shared with me the following video from TED (see below). In it, mathematician (or, in this case, mathemagician) Arthur Benjamin gives a brief argument for eliminating calculus as the top of the “mathematical pyramid” in high school education, and replacing it probability and statistics. The main reason for this shift is . . . → Read More: Restructuring the Math Pyramid? Here’s an interesting article about Tom Farber, a high school Calculus teacher from San Diego who is fighting tough economic times and cutbacks in education spending in a rather novel way – he’s selling ad space on math tests. The goal here certainly doesn’t seem to be the development of a second income. Many teachers report . . . → Read More: Commodify your Mathematics? |
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