November, 2010
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Standards-Based Grading: The NYT Treatment
Is our not-so-little SBG movement being legitimized? Or does coverage in the New York Times spell death-by-fad for standards-based grading? Personally, I don’t really care. I don’t really care what you call it. I don’t really care where you get your standards (your state, your administration, your own brain, wherever). I especially don’t care if [...]
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Gratitude Aplenty
After coaching my wife through thirty hours of labor, and then another four hours of pushing, I feel like I have some tangential understanding of the joy felt at the first Thanksgiving. When you work for hours on something not knowing if what you’re doing is actually making progress, your mind starts to go crazy [...]
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How I Teach Calculus: A Comedy (The Parabolic Arch)
Jumping to this mental state — that math shouldn’t be creative, or require previous knowledge — so easily is what we need to fix. The backwardsness1 of math education is something I spend a lot of time thinking about. As I stare into the porcelain eyes of my newborn daughter, I wonder about how her [...]
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Calculus: While I’m Out
This post is intended for my Block 2 Calculus students, but the more the merrier in the comments, ya know? Ya know. While I’m on my paternity leave, I would still like all of you to continue making larger connections concerning your skills in calculus. I will be teaching my newborn the same material, I [...]
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There’s a New Kid in Town (Almost)
This summer I spent a month of my free life developing SBGradeBook.com. This meager AJAX offering serves as a fairly slick way to keep track of standards, scores, change logs, feedback, and what have you. However, I am a very very crappy programmer, especially when the task is probably more fitting for a team of [...]
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Beware! Are You The Points-Buffet Impresario?
If I had a drug problem, it would be a really big problem. I’m a junkie. When I get in to something there is absolutely no amount of it that can satiate me until the job has been finished. When I record music, I master every nanosecond for maximum volume. When I make bacon, I [...]
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How I Teach Calculus: A Comedy (Buffon’s Baguette)
About this time of year the repetition of the school day starts to make me a little crazy. Like cocked-head, outbursts of mania/depression, eyes filled with creepy red and white swirlies crazy. It might also be that I’m expecting my first child, producing a Christmas album, and responsible for the education of 100 of America’s [...]
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Inquiry Stylee: Hooke’s Investigations
Here are the open investigations that are currently running in my room. I do not generate these ideas, but they are created when I introduce the students to something easy and quite guided. This is my model for getting kids engaged, but yet staying on track. I fire the warning shot, they fight the war. [...]
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The Bestest Method (Newton’s?)
I’m not really a math teacher. I hope you all know that. All of the methods you were taught in teacher school I’m discovering on my own, which is why many of you probably face-palm regularly as you read these posts. Here’s something I’ve been giving a really good kick around the ol’ yard: as [...]