USU Math 5010

But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting. High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.

"I loved math. I loved algebra. I really loved geometry, [but] I hit the wall at pre-cal," said Rocca. "That's the problem," said Whitney, "because you were only given one road to go through mathematics. You got the impression that once you hit the wall, that's it. There's nothing more for you. In fact, math is this extremely, very beautiful landscape. And we're showing people just one road cut right through the center of it." Whitney says our math curriculum is designed for rocket scientists. Literally! Fifty years ago America was in a space race against the Soviet Union, and beefing up on our math program was seen as a winning solution.

Finland's schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the PISA survey, conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore. In the most recent survey in 2009 Finland slipped slightly, with students in Shanghai, China, taking the best scores, but the Finns are still near the very top. Throughout the same period, the PISA performance of the United States has been middling, at best.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play. All this has led to a continuous stream of foreign delegations making the pilgrimage to Finland to visit schools and talk with the nation's education experts, and constant coverage in the worldwide media marveling at the Finnish miracle.

In which John explains the education continuum and why math and literature both help us understand the universe in surprisingly similar ways.

In many schools in the United States, students struggling the most in mathematics at the start of high school have the worst odds of getting a qualified teacher in the subject, new research finds. Succeeding in freshman-level mathematics is critical for students to stay on track to high school graduation, with students who make poor grades in math in 8th and 9th grades more likely to leave school entirely.

Puzzles, books, games and print materials — they make learning math child's play!

The problem involved mathematical equivalence (i.e., 4+5+7=__+7), which is known to be critical to later algebraic learning. In the speech-only videos, the instructor simply explains the problem. In the other videos, the instructor uses two hand gestures while speaking, using different hands to refer to the two sides of the equation. Students who learned from the gesture videos performed better on a test given immediately afterward than those who learned from the speech-only video. Another test was given 24 hours later, and the gesture students actually showed improvement in their performance while the speech-only students did not.

At Exeter, I learned that what you said was more important than what you knew. I learned that the louder you are, the better you are. I learned that there's only one way to learn anything, and that's to talk in circles until someone takes notice.