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Cheating
I was a Phoenix last year (FML), and the fact that the following exists: says a lot and is not surprising at all. First, no, you’re not allowed to get mad because they’re committing fraud. That’s too obvious. Second, no, you’re not allowed to get mad because they’re screwing the curve for all those grind-nosed [...]
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Standards-Based Grading: Misconceptions
Standards-based grading, SBG, or #sbar, is a classroom assessment strategy that honors the variations in time-to-learn for each student. SBG does this by assessing students over the same idea multiple times and using the aggregated data to give a final mark weighted towards most recent information. It therefore punishes students for cramming-and-forgetting by lowering early [...]
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ThinkThankThunk Thurns Three! Saturn Competition
Three years. I have to admit that blogging has changed my life; holy cliché. In three years, you all have pushed my teaching, my grading, my ability to read research, and you’ve taken what I thought was student learning and turned it into a 180-proof-burning, 12-cylinder monster. So, thanks! In celebration, here’s a little competition: [...]
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Inquirist’s Cookbook – Storm Lake Edition
I’ll be running an all day workshop in Storm Lake, IA today. Here are the liner notes: Session 1: Guided Investigation We’ll use the BP oil spill as a narrative start for a lesson that touches physics, biology, chemistry, and geology standards. We’ll run in parallel a skeleton investigation using unidentified animal remains. The big [...]
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The Nullest Curriculum
Let’s pretend you’re 19 again and this is interp of lit. I’ll be your deadlocked, self-loathing Caucasian TA for the duration of the post. 1. Alumni Should be Your Barometer: Recently, I ran into a former student who was manning a gas station. He had obviously changed his path during post-secondary, which is not uncommon. [...]
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How I Teach Calculus: A Comedy (Income Inequality)
This lesson got touchy real fast: However, discussion of the video led to some really great and even-tempered questions. Getting to those questions is the art of teaching. Most people view teaching as either robotic or soap-boxian. It’s neither. Teaching is presenting someone a stem and asking them to believe that their mind has equal [...]
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How I Teach Calculus: A Comedy (Sound Waves and the Chain Rule)
The fundamental rift between what Math is and what math education looks like tears me apart regularly. In a very blue-collar way, I have to prepare these calculus students to do well in college Calc or Calc II. They have to know the strange tricks and unwritten rules of passing math exams and ignoring that [...]
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The Gender-Neutral Physics Project: Rolly Chairs and Mobiles
Cornally and I are on the pursuit of turning his physics classroom into a gender-neutral environment. We have completed two more gender-neutral project designs. The first, a painting project with a somewhat unconventional spin: Rolly-Chairs and Circular Motion: The objective of the rolly-chair project was to introduce the concept of orbital motion in a way that the students could physically experience centripetal forces, [...]
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Trying Not to Leave the Classroom
As a teacher who is trying his hardest not to leave the public classroom, despite pulls in every direction, allow me to paint a picture: First, Second, paying me more won’t produce smarter, more creative students. If I knew how to do that, I’d already be doing it. That’s why teachers are non-invisible-handian. You know, [...]
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Just Throwing This Out There: ThThTh’s School for the Boredom-Averse
Is this really all that much to ask? No schedules No classes No bells No grades No Grades No building Full inquiry-based learning Student-interest driven Community-focused problem generation and solving. Credits given by local community college Portfolio based binary assessment (every student leaves with a sweet FirstnameSurname.com to show off how their projects map back [...]