Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items matching "math" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
6More

Innovation Isn't About Math - James Fallows - National - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...70402 education math science innovation integration interdisciplinary
shared by Javier E on 29 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Math and science education are important. But the assumptions underlying the focus on Math and science, in relation to innovation, are: that innovation is a technical process, or at least takes place most importantly in technical fields; and, that the first step (Math and science education) will automatically lead to the second (innovation). Neither of which is necessarily true.
  • innovation isn't a matter of subject knowledge. It's about thinking in flexible, integrative, and multidisciplinary ways, across many fields and types of knowledge. It's about being able to synthesize and integrate different perspectives and models; of understanding and taking into account different human, cultural and economic needs, desires, values, and factors and, from all that, glimpsing a new way forward that nobody else managed to see. 
  • educators are beginning to realize that the problem isn't a need for greater focus on math and science. It's a need for better integration among all subject areas, and a need to foster the kind of "integrative" thinking required to make good use of all that knowledge.  
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • True innovators are adept at taking very specific areas of knowledge (technologies, scientific discoveries, social phenomena, etc.) and constantly reframing them in broader social, cultural, or political contexts. Innovation thinkers also know that in order to find opportunities to act, to make a difference in the world, they must collaborate--and be damn good at it.
  • it's the specialization of subject matter, from English and History to math and Engineering, that impedes innovation, more than a lack in any particular subject area
  • it means focusing as much on teaching how to combine those fields of knowledge and think in flexible, integrative, and creative ways, as we do on the subject matter itself. 
9More

The Politics of Math Education - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...olitics-of-math-education.html education math history politics thinking
shared by Javier E on 04 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • The new math was widely praised at first as a model bipartisan reform effort
  • By the 1970s, however, conservative critics claimed the reforms had replaced rigorous mathematics with useless abstractions, a curriculum of “frills,”
  • Though critics of the new math often used reports of declining test scores to justify their stance, studies routinely showed mixed test score trends. What had really changed were attitudes toward elite knowledge, as well as levels of trust in federal initiatives that reached into traditionally local domains. That is, the politics had changed.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Whereas many conservatives in 1958 felt that the sensible thing to do was to put elite academic mathematicians in charge of the school curriculum, by 1978 the conservative thing to do was to restore the math curriculum to local control and emphasize tradition — to go “back to basics.”
  • The new math’s reception was fundamentally shaped by Americans’ trust in federal initiatives and elite experts, their demands for local control and their beliefs about the skills citizens needed to face the problems of the modern world. Today these same political concerns will ultimately determine the future of the Common Core.
  • The idea that the complex problems students would face required training in the flexible, creative mathematics of elite practitioners was replaced by claims that modern students needed grounding in memorization, militaristic discipline and rapid recall of arithmetic facts.
  • controversies are unlikely to be resolved, because there’s not one right approach to how we should train students to think.
  • This was a claim both about who controlled intellectual training and about what forms of mental discipline should be promoted
  • As long as learning math counts as learning to think, the fortunes of any math curriculum will almost certainly be closely tied to claims about what constitutes rigorous thought — and who gets to decide.
6More

Many States Adopt National Standards for Their Schools - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...21standards.html states standards national education US
shared by Javier E on 28 Apr 11 - Cached
  • The quick adoption of common standards for what students should learn in English and math each year from kindergarten through high school is attributable in part to the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition.
  • They lay out detailed expectations of skills that students should have at each grade level. Second graders, for example, should be able to read two-syllable words with long vowels, while fifth graders should be able to add and subtract fractions with different denominators.
  • This time, the standards were developed by the states themselves, not the federal government. Last year, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers convened English and math experts to put together benchmarks for each grade.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • national standards are seen as a way to ensure that children in all states will have access to a similar education — and that financially strapped state governments do not have to spend limited resources on developing their own standards and tests.
  • the new common core standards are stronger than the English standards in 37 states and the math standards in 39 states.
  • “Vocabulary-building in the common core is slower,” he said, citing one example. “And on the math side, they don’t prepare eighth-grade students for algebra one, which is the gateway to higher math.”
3More

America just won the world's hardest math contest. Again. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-8ffb-5de6d5e49ada_story.html immigration math contest
shared by Javier E on 02 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • We typically think of immigrants as working as manual laborers in construction, plumbing, hospitality and agriculture.
  • But this is not the whole story. Immigrants are high achievers in some of the most challenging vocations, such as mathematics, physics and computer science — all necessary for a technologically reliant society. Each of these fields requires immense dedication and hard work. mathematics is perhaps the most mentally taxing of these disciplines.
  • By welcoming and giving opportunities to the Lins, Singhs, Steins, Huangs, Hossains, McArthurs, Onahs, Garcias and Rudenkos of the world — who are eager to learn the difficult math, solve the difficult physics problems and write the difficult code — America renews itself and makes itself “great again,
11More

'Doomsday' Math Says Humanity May Have Just 760 Years Left - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ust-760-years-left-11561655839 math prediction probability humanity future survival
shared by Javier E on 28 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Bayes’ theorem is the foundation of the digital economy. It is what enables applications such as Google, Facebook and Instagram to use people’s personal data to predict what they will click on or buy, who they’ll swipe right on and who they’ll vote for
  • Predictions using Bayes’ theorem are probabilities, not certainties, yet they are worth billions to advertisers, because they are generally accurate.
  • In a 1993 article in the journal Nature, Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott III invoked math and population data to predict that the end is likely to come in under a thousand years
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The core of Dr. Gott’s reasoning (independently advanced by two other physicists, Brandon Carter and Holger Bech Nielsen) is known to statisticians as the “German tank problem.”
  • After the war, captured German records revealed that the statisticians’ estimates were almost exactly right.
  • Dr. Gott recognized that demographers have already roughly estimated the number of humans so far. They put the total number of people who ever lived, from the beginnings of Homo sapiens to the present day, at about 100 billion.
  • Since it is equally likely that those of us living today are in the first or second half of all past and future human births, let’s say that we are in the second half—which would mean that there are no more than 100 billion births yet to come
  • There is a 50% chance that is true, which at the current global birthrate (about 131 million a year) translates to a 50% chance that we have at most 760 more years of births. A changing birthrate would modify that estimate, but the calculation is that simple.
  • Using more precise variables, the Carter-Leslie predictions are just as grim as Dr. Gott’s or more so.
  • Dr. Gott has put the chance that humans will one day settle throughout our galaxy’s star systems at 1 in a billion. This claim has struck a nerve—and not just with Trekkies. The doomsday argument all but rules out the final frontier to which many technophiles aspire.
  • He’s an engaging storyteller who has illustrated his predictive method by applying it in simple form to the staying power of marriages and Broadway plays, based on how long they have lasted already. When he predicted a range of closing dates for 44 Broadway and off-Broadway shows and checked back four years later, all 36 that had closed had done so within his predicted window
9More

The Sober Math Everyone Must Understand about the Pandemic - 0 views

medium.com/...bout-the-pandemic-2b0145881993 pandemic forecast contagion model
shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • hospital beds are not the big problem. The lack of ventilators is the big problem. Most estimates peg the ventilators in the United States at roughly 100,000 to 150,000 units.
  • So if 1.5M people of the 10 million infected 30 days from now require hospital care (15% of the 10M estimated total infections), 1.3M may not get the care that they need because we don’t have enough ventilators, beds, and ICU beds in the United States.
  • remember, this is only if ALL OF US EFFECTIVELY start social distancing by April 11th (30 days from today). This increases the mortality rate significantly.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • BUT IF WE START EXTREME SOCIAL DISTANCING BY MARCH 23 (12 days from original writing), WE AVOID OVER 1.4 MILLION PEOPLE GETTING CRITICALLY ILL AND OVERWHELMING THE HOSPITALS
  • the math is very different, as the exponential growth will only be 2 to the 4th power (12 days divided by the doubling rate of every 3 days equals the exponent of 4):2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 16
  • So instead of 10 Million cases in the United States if we wait 30 days, if we act 18 days sooner, we will have only 160,000 cases (16 times the estimated 10,000 actual cases as of today), of which 15% are likely to require hospitalization.
  • This is 24,000 critical patients (a huge difference compared to 1.5 million acute patients). The difference between taking extreme measures now, versus waiting even a few days, is very large due to how exponents work in math.
  • Finally, the article that I posted yesterday written by Tomas Pueyo has been read 30M times in the last few days and has been updated with new information. It’s worth reading again.
  • https://medium.com/…/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-d…
21More

Elusive 'Einstein' Solves a Longstanding Math Problem - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...thematics-tiling-einstein.html math problem solution history
shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • after a decade of failed attempts, David Smith, a self-described shape hobbyist of Bridlington in East Yorkshire, England, suspected that he might have finally solved an open problem in the mathematics of tiling: That is, he thought he might have discovered an “einstein.”
  • In less poetic terms, an einstein is an “aperiodic monotile,” a shape that tiles a plane, or an infinite two-dimensional flat surface, but only in a nonrepeating pattern. (The term “einstein” comes from the German “ein stein,” or “one stone” — more loosely, “one tile” or “one shape.”)
  • Your typical wallpaper or tiled floor is part of an infinite pattern that repeats periodically; when shifted, or “translated,” the pattern can be exactly superimposed on itself
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • An aperiodic tiling displays no such “translational symmetry,” and mathematicians have long sought a single shape that could tile the plane in such a fashion. This is known as the einstein problem.
  • “I’m always messing about and experimenting with shapes,” said Mr. Smith, 64, who worked as a printing technician, among other jobs, and retired early. Although he enjoyed math in high school, he didn’t excel at it, he said. But he has long been “obsessively intrigued” by the einstein problem.
  • now a new paper — by Mr. Smith and three co-authors with mathematical and computational expertise — proves Mr. Smith’s discovery true. The researchers called their einstein “the hat,
  • “The most significant aspect for me is that the tiling does not clearly fall into any of the familiar classes of structures that we understand.”
  • black and white squares also can make weird nonperiodic patterns, in addition to the familiar, periodic checkerboard pattern. “It’s really pretty trivial to be able to make weird and interesting patterns,” he said. The magic of the two Penrose tiles is that they make only nonperiodic patterns — that’s all they can do.“But then the Holy Grail was, could you do with one — one tile?” Dr. Goodman-Strauss said.
  • Sir Roger found the proofs “very complicated.” Nonetheless, he was “extremely intrigued” by the einstein, he said: “It’s a really good shape, strikingly simple.”
  • When in November he found a tile that seemed to fill the plane without a repeating pattern, he emailed Craig Kaplan, a co-author and a computer scientist at the University of Waterloo.
  • The simplicity came honestly. Mr. Smith’s investigations were mostly by hand; one of his co-authors described him as an “imaginative tinkerer.”
  • “It was clear that something unusual was happening with this shape,” Dr. Kaplan said. Taking a computational approach that built on previous research, his algorithm generated larger and larger swaths of hat tiles. “There didn’t seem to be any limit to how large a blob of tiles the software could construct,”
  • The first step, Dr. Kaplan said, was to “define a set of four ‘metatiles,’ simple shapes that stand in for small groupings of one, two, or four hats.” The metatiles assemble into four larger shapes that behave similarly. This assembly, from metatiles to supertiles to supersupertiles, ad infinitum, covered “larger and larger mathematical ‘floors’ with copies of the hat,” Dr. Kaplan said. “We then show that this sort of hierarchical assembly is essentially the only way to tile the plane with hats, which turns out to be enough to show that it can never tile periodically.”
  • some might wonder whether this is a two-tile, not one-tile, set of aperiodic monotiles.
  • Dr. Goodman-Strauss had raised this subtlety on a tiling listserv: “Is there one hat or two?” The consensus was that a monotile counts as such even using its reflection. That leaves an open question, Dr. Berger said: Is there an einstein that will do the job without reflection?
  • “the hat” was not a new geometric invention. It is a polykite — it consists of eight kites. (Take a hexagon and draw three lines, connecting the center of each side to the center of its opposite side; the six shapes that result are kites.)
  • “It’s likely that others have contemplated this hat shape in the past, just not in a context where they proceeded to investigate its tiling properties,” Dr. Kaplan said. “I like to think that it was hiding in plain sight.”
  • Incredibly, Mr. Smith later found a second einstein. He called it “the turtle” — a polykite made of not eight kites but 10. It was “uncanny,” Dr. Kaplan said. He recalled feeling panicked; he was already “neck deep in the hat.”
  • Dr. Myers, who had done similar computations, promptly discovered a profound connection between the hat and the turtle. And he discerned that, in fact, there was an entire family of related einsteins — a continuous, uncountable infinity of shapes that morph one to the next.
  • this einstein family motivated the second proof, which offers a new tool for proving aperiodicity. The math seemed “too good to be true,” Dr. Myers said in an email. “I wasn’t expecting such a different approach to proving aperiodicity — but everything seemed to hold together as I wrote up the details.”
  • Mr. Smith was amazed to see the research paper come together. “I was no help, to be honest.” He appreciated the illustrations, he said: “I’m more of a pictures person.”
7More

The rise of online education - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQA8e2AdL_print.html online education blended benefits
shared by Javier E on 24 Apr 12 - Cached
  • fifth, sixth and seventh graders learn online for a significant portion of their in-class math periods at the path and pace that fit their individual needs. Meanwhile, teachers will coach the students to keep up with their math goals and help them apply the math concepts in small-group and class-wide projects.
  • Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are working to improve cognitive tutor software that utilizes the most cutting-edge cognitive science and neuroscience to improve learning for individual students
  • entrepreneurs are creating educational video games and embedding gaming techniques inside online learning experiences to boost student motivation and make learning fu
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • the public education system will be transformed into a student-centric one
  • move beyond the old input-based metrics used to micro-manage how people in the existing public-education system work and instead embrace outcomes-based regulations that reward individual student learning gains and liberate educators on the ground to figure out the best way to achieve those gain
  • Focusing on outcomes, on the other hand, encourages continuous improvement against a set of overall goals
  • move beyond today’s time-based rules—those policies, regulations and arrangements that hold time as a constant and learning as the variable, which inhibits the ability to move to a competency-based learning system
3More

Notes of a Native Tiger Son, Part 1 - Oliver Wang - Culture - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...69748 learning chinese education culture children
shared by Javier E on 20 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • the Immigration Act of 1965, partially responding to the pressures of the Cold War/Space Race, didn't just abolish racial quotas, it also created preference categories for science, math and engineering-trained immigrants to come over.
  • Not only did this massive wave of post-1965 immigrants change the demographic composition of Asian America, it also influenced the American perception that Asians were somehow naturally gifted in math and science because there was a disproportionate number of immigrants coming from Asia with those skills.
  • Since being good in math and science proved a boon to our parents, they, in turn, figured it'd be good for their kids.
8More

China's Winning Schools? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...16kristof.html schools china culture learning
shared by Javier E on 16 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • An international study published last month looked at how students in 65 countries performed in math, science and reading. The winner was: Confucianism!
  • In China, school sports and gym just don’t matter.
  • Education thrives in China and the rest of Asia because it is a top priority
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In my Chinese-American wife’s ancestral village — a poor community in southern China — the peasant children are a grade ahead in math compared with my children at an excellent public school in the New York area. That seems broadly true of math around the country.
  • Three of the next top four performers were also societies with a Confucian legacy of reverence for education: Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea. The only non-Confucian country in the mix was Finland.
  • Many Chinese complain scathingly that their system kills independent thought and creativity, and they envy the American system for nurturing self-reliance — and for trying to make learning exciting and not just a chore.
  • the greatest strength of the Chinese system is the Confucian reverence for education that is steeped into the culture. In Chinese schools, teachers are much respected, and the most admired kid is often the brain rather than the jock or class clown.
  • the real challenge is the rise of China’s education system and the passion for learning that underlies it. We’re not going to become Confucians, but we can elevate education on our list of priorities without relinquishing creativity and independent thought.
26More

No Rich Child Left Behind - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...no-rich-child-left-behind education inequality early learning
shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.
  • e proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a ba
  • chelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • new research by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam and his colleagues shows that the rich-poor gaps in student participation in sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and church attendance have grown sharply as well.
  • average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation’s Report Card, have been rising — substantially in math and very slowly in reading — since the 1970s.
  • The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly.
  • the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich.
  • For the past few years, alongside other scholars, I have been digging into historical data to understand
  • 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.
  • The widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement, either. The achievement gaps between blacks and whites, and Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites have been narrowing slowly over the last two decade
  • schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students.
  • That isn’t to say that there aren’t important differences in quality between schools serving low- and high-income students — there certainly are — but they appear to do less to reinforce the trends than conventional wisdom would have us believe.
  • The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.
  • one part of the explanation for this is rising income inequality
  • the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool
  • The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation. The gains are not as large in reading and they are not as large for older students, but there is no evidence that average test scores have declined over the last three decades for any age or economic group.
  • 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.
  • even though middle-class and poor families are also increasing the time and money they invest in their children, they are not doing so as quickly or as deeply as the rich.
  • from 1972 to 2006 high-income families increased the amount they spent on enrichment activities for their children by 150 percent, while the spending of low-income families grew by 57 percent over the same time period
  • the amount of time parents spend with their children has grown twice as fast since 1975 among college-educated parents as it has among less-educated parents.
  • much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.
  • not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.
  • the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think.
  • how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal dividends. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers.
  • improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.
  • Fundamentally, it means rethinking our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone.
6More

Beyond SATs, Finding Success in Numbers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ats-finding-success-in-numbers university education students lower-class
shared by Javier E on 16 Feb 12 - Cached
  • the Posse Foundation selects about 600 students a year, from eight different cities. They are grouped into posses of 10 students from the same city and go together to an elite college; about 40 colleges now participate in the program.
  • The posse was key. “It’s so easy to get lost. I couldn’t imagine going to college without a group of people I already knew. I don’t think I would have made it.” They were all studying different things, she said. They didn’t do homework together, but they held each other accountable for doing it. “If you needed somebody to get you out of bed and get you to the library, Antoinette” — a Posse member — “would get you to the library.” The Posse members, she said, held each other up to the standard they had set: “how are you doing in class, how you behaved socially and whether you were supporting people you agreed to support.”
  • Posse offers schools an efficient way to find the kind of students it chooses — they can ride on its selection process. After it chooses its winners, it releases the list of finalists who didn’t win.   The 40 colleges that are Posse partners can then recruit from the list.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Posse is subversive is that it shows that academic chops do not completely determine college success. It demonstrates other important factors: whether a student has social support, a sense of belonging and a network that can offer advice. People from a dominant culture take these things for granted, but minority students have to build them. Posse helps. Every Posse member I talked to said having the group is crucial.
  • There’s one other provocative issue raised by Posse’s results: the damage wreaked by stereotype threat.  The objects of a stereotype can find their performance greatly affected by simply being reminded that the stereotype exists. Researchers, for example, gave a math test (pdf) to a group of Asian female students. Before the test, the women filled out one of three types of questionnaires. One asked about their gender, one about their ethnicity, and one asked about neither. Those who were reminded they were Asian did the best on the math test. Those reminded they were female did the worst.
  • anonymous on 22 Feb 12
     
    With the stress of the SATs steadily climbing to an all time high, it is nice to hear about success stories from those who achieve lesser-than-exceptional scores. Posse sounds like a great program that offers many underprivileged students opportunities that they would not otherwise have had. Hopefully, colleges learn from this program in that SAT scores do not necessarily predict your success in college- or life for that matter.
8More

Mooresville School District, a Laptop Success Story - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ct-a-laptop-success-story.html school success laptop
shared by Javier E on 15 Feb 12 - Cached
  • The district’s graduation rate was 91 percent in 2011, up from 80 percent in 2008. On state tests in reading, math and science, an average of 88 percent of students across grades and subjects met proficiency standards, compared with 73 percent three years ago. Attendance is up, dropouts are down. Mooresville ranks 100th out of 115 districts in North Carolina in terms of dollars spent per student — $7,415.89 a year — but it is now third in test scores and second in graduation rates.
  • “Other districts are doing things, but what we see in Mooresville is the whole package: using the budget, innovating, using data, involvement with the community and leadership,”
  • Mooresville’s laptops perform the same tasks as those in hundreds of other districts: they correct worksheets, assemble progress data for teachers, allow for compelling multimedia lessons, and let students work at their own pace or in groups, rather than all listening to one teacher. The difference, teachers and administrators here said, is that they value computers not for the newest content they can deliver, but for how they tap into the oldest of student emotions — curiosity, boredom, embarrassment, angst — and help educators deliver what only people can. Technology, here, is cold used to warm.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Many classrooms have moved from lecture to lattice, where students collaborate in small groups with the teacher swooping in for consultation. Rather than tell her 11th-grade English students the definition of transcendentalism one recent day, Katheryn Higgins had them crowd-source their own — quite Thoreauly, it turned out — using Google Docs. Back in September, Ms. Higgins had the more outgoing students make presentations on the Declaration of Independence, while shy ones discussed it in an online chat room, which she monitored.
  • Mooresville frequently tests students in various subjects to inform teachers where each needs help. Every quarter, department heads and principals present summary data to Mr. Edwards, who uses it to assess where teachers need improvement.
  • In math, students used individualized software modules, with teachers stopping by occasionally to answer questions. (“It’s like having a personal tutor,” said Ethan Jones, the fifth grader zooming toward sixth-grade material.) Teachers apportion their time based on the need of students, without the weaker ones having to struggle at the blackboard in front of the class; this dynamic has helped children with learning disabilities to participate and succeed in mainstream classes.
  • Many students adapted to the overhaul more easily than their teachers, some of whom resented having beloved tools — scripted lectures, printed textbooks and a predictable flow through the curriculum — vanish. The layoffs in 2009 and 2010, of about 10 percent of the district’s teachers, helped weed out the most reluctan
  • “I’m not sure our kids can be trusted the way these are,” one teacher from the Midwest said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid trouble back home. Thomas Bertrand, superintendent of schools in Rochester, Ill., said he was struck by the “culture of collaboration among staff and kids” in Mooresville
8More

Expecting the Best Yields Results in Massachusetts - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-results-in-massachusetts.html massachusetts education reform school testing
shared by Javier E on 18 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • If Massachusetts were a country, its eighth graders would rank second in the world in science, behind only Singapore, according to Timss
  • Massachusetts eighth graders also did well in mathematics, coming in sixth, behind Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan. The United States as a whole came in 10th in science and 9th in math
  • behind Massachusetts’ raw numbers are two decades of sustained efforts to lift science and mathematics education. Educators and officials chose a course and held to it, even when the early results were deeply disappointing.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • consistent in their hands-on approach, inviting students to explore and explain. “Much more hands-on than what we ever used to do,”
  • came ed reform,” Dr. Kendall said, “and now everybody had to learn math.”
  • “Ed reform” was the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, passed by a Democratic Legislature and signed by a Republican governor, William F. Weld.
  • The three core components were more money (mostly to the urban schools), ambitious academic standards and a high-stakes test that students had to pass before collecting their high school diplomas.
  • noteworthy was what the reforms did not include. Parents were not offered vouchers for private schools. The state did not close poorly performing schools, eliminate tenure for teachers or add merit pay. The reforms did allow for some charter schools, but not many.
8More

Russell Brand on revolution: "We no longer have the luxury of tradition" - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...russell-brand-on-revolution revolution activism conservativism crisis politics spiritual
shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-121540-1']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); Russell Brand on revolution: “We no longer have the luxury of tradition” window.onerror=function(){ return true; } var googletag = googletag || {}; googletag.cmd = googletag.cmd || []; (function() { var gads = document.createElement('script'); gads.async = true; gads.type = 'text/javascript'; var useSSL = 'https:' == document.location.protocol; gads.src = (useSSL ? 'https:' : 'http:') + '//www.googletagservices.com/tag/js/gpt.js'; var node = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; node.parentNode.insertBefore(gads, node); } )(); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.defineSlot('/5269235/Test_NS_Minister_widesky', [160, 600], 'div-gpt-ad-1357235299034-0').addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.pubads().enableSingleRequest(); googletag.enableServices(); } ); var loc = document.URL; var n=loc.split("/",4); var str= n[3]; googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.defineSlot('/5269235/NS_Home_Exp_5', [[4, 4], [975, 250]], 'div-gpt-ad-1366822588103-0').addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.defineSlot('/5269235/NS_Vodafone_Politics_MPU', [300, 250], 'div-gpt-ad-1359018650733-0').addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.defineSlot('/5269235/Vodafone_Widesky', [160, 600], 'div-gpt-ad-1359372266606-0').addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.defineSlot('/5269235/Vodafone_NS_Pol_MPU2', [300, 250], 'div-gpt-ad-1359374444737-0').addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.defineSlot('/5269235/NS_Vodafone_Politics_Leader', [728, 90], 'div-gpt-ad-1359018522590-0').addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.defineSlot('/5269235/NewStatesman_Bottom_Leader', [728, 90], 'div-gpt-ad-1320926772906-0').addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.pubads().setTargeting("Section", str);googletag.pubads().setTargeting("Keywords","property news","uk house prices","property development","property ladder","housing market","property market","london property market","uk property market","housing bubble","property market analysis","housing uk","housing market uk","growth charts uk","housing market predictions","property market uk","housing ladder","house market news","housing boom","property boom","uk property market news","housing market trends","the uk housing market","london property boom","property market in uk","news on housing market","the housing market in the uk","uk property boom","housing market in the uk","how is the housing market","property market in the uk","housing market trend","the uk property market","how is housing market","help to buy news","help to buy government","housing uk help to buy","housing market help to buy","property news help to buy","spectator blog help to buy","property boom help to buy","uk property boom help to buy","housing ladde
  • The right has all the advantages, just as the devil has all the best tunes. Conservatism appeals to our selfishness and fear, our desire and self-interest; they neatly nurture and then harvest the inherent and incubating individualism. I imagine that neurologically the pathway travelled by a fearful or selfish impulse is more expedient and well travelled than the route of the altruistic pang. In simple terms of circuitry I suspect it is easier to connect these selfish inclinations.
  • This natural, neurological tendency has been overstimulated and acculturated. Materialism and individualism do in moderation make sense.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Biomechanically we are individuals, clearly. On the most obvious frequency of our known sensorial reality we are independent anatomical units. So we must take care of ourselves. But with our individual survival ensured there is little satisfaction to be gained by enthroning and enshrining ourselves as individuals.
  • For me the solution has to be primarily spiritual and secondarily political.
  • By spiritual I mean the acknowledgement that our connection to one another and the planet must be prioritised. Buckminster Fuller outlines what ought be our collective objectives succinctly: “to make the world work for 100 per cent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous co-operation without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone”. This maxim is the very essence of “easier said than done” as it implies the dismantling of our entire socio-economic machinery. By teatime.
  • The price of privilege is poverty. David Cameron said in his conference speech that profit is “not a dirty word”. Profit is the most profane word we have. In its pursuit we have forgotten that while individual interests are being met, we as a whole are being annihilated. The reality, when not fragmented through the corrupting lens of elitism, is we are all on one planet.
  • Suffering of this magnitude affects us all. We have become prisoners of comfort in the absence of meaning. A people without a unifying myth. Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist, says our global problems are all due to the lack of relevant myths.
20More

How to Teach White Kids About Race - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...569185 white race privilege
shared by Javier E on 05 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • I use the phrase bundled choices because it seemed to me that there were some pretty striking patterns that emerged with these families in terms of how they set up their children’s lives.
  • For example, I talk in the book about how choosing a neighborhood leads to a whole bunch of other choices—about schools, about the other people in the neighborhood. Decisions about who to carpool with, decisions about which soccer team to be on—you want to be on the same one as all your friends, and all these aspects of the kid’s life are connected to the parents’ choices about where to live.
  • kids are growing up in these social environments that their parents shape. They’re having interactions with other people in these environments, and that’s, I think, where they’re developing their own ideas about race and privilege and inequality.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • the explanation they usually provide for those choices is that they just want what’s best for their children. This rationale is generally considered understandable, even honorable, but can you talk about its dark side?
  • we have this collectively agreed-upon idea in our society that being a “good parent” means exactly that—providing the best opportunities you can for your own child.
  • some of these parents are also people who believe strongly in the importance of diversity and multiculturalism and who want to resist racial inequality. And these two things are sort of at odds with one another.
  • These affluent white parents are in a position where they can set up their kids’ lives so that they’re better than other kids’ lives.
  • how frequently some of these children used the phrase That’s racist or You’re racist. They were using this word in contexts that had nothing to do with race: They were playing chess, and they would talk about what color chess pieces they wanted to have, and then one of them would say, “Oh, that’s racist”
  • part of it is how we choose to define “the best.” Some of the parents in my book, they rejected the idea that their child needed to be in all the AP classes. They valued other elements of their children’s personalities, such as their concerns about ethics or fairness or social justice
  • There were also affluent parents who were very much opposed to having police officers in schools, and they were using their position of influence in the community to try to get the police officers out of there. Maybe others would be aware of their own presence at PTA meetings, making sure they’re not dominating them and making sure they’re not putting their own agenda ahead of their peers’ agendas.
  • Can you talk about how, for a lot of affluent white parents, diversity is something that can be toggled on and off as they please?
  • when things basically got too challenging, they just picked their kid up and took him to a different school, a private school. And the ability to do that was not only a reflection of their economic privilege—they had the resources to suddenly, mid–school year, send their kid to an expensive private school—but also a reflection of racial privilege in that you can somehow escape racism when you want to as a white person
  • kids themselves actively contribute to the formation of racist beliefs. How does that work?
  • When we think about parents calling up the school and demanding that their child have the best math teacher, what does that mean for the kids who don’t get the best math teacher?
  • These kids have taken this phrase, That’s racist, and inverted it in a way such that it’s become meaningless.
  • I really think—and this might sound kind of crazy—that white parents, and parents in general, need to understand that all children are worthy of their consideration. This idea that your own child is the most important thing—that’s something we could try to rethink.
  • My overall point is that in this moment when being a good citizen conflicts with being a good parent, I think that most white parents choose to be good parents, when, sometimes at the very least, they should choose to be good citizens
  • pragmatically speaking, wouldn’t that ignore a biological impulse to look after one’s own?
  • the way we think about what it means to be a parent is to some extent socially constructed. We have other societies that do things differently. I think when we look across time and history and geography, we can see that the way that we’re doing it—prioritizing your own child over everyone else—is one way, but I don’t think that has to be the only way
  • I don’t have any grand answer, but I think people could think in bigger ways about what it means to care about one another and what it means to actually have a society that cares about kids.
16More

A Mathematical Challenge to Obesity - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ical-challenge-to-obesity.html health US opinion
shared by aleija on 09 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Since the 1970s, the national obesity rate had jumped from around 20 percent to over 30 percent.
  • “Why is this happening?”
  • Why would mathematics have the answer? Because to do this experimentally would take years. You could find out much more quickly if you did the math. Now, prior to my coming on staff, the institute had hired a mathematical physiologist, Kevin Hall. Kevin developed a model that could predict how your body composition changed in response to what you ate. He created a math model of a human being and then plugged in all the variables — height, weight, food intake, exercise. The model could predict what a person will weigh, given their body size and what they take in. However, the model was complicated: hundreds of equations. Kevin and I began working together to boil it down to one simple equation. That’s what applied mathematicians do. We make things simple. Once we had it, the slimmed-down equation proved to be a useful platform for answering a host of questions.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • With such a huge food supply, food marketing got better and restaurants got cheaper. The low cost of food fueled the growth of the fast-food industry. If food were expensive, you couldn’t have fast food.
  • The epidemic was caused by the overproduction of food in the United States. Beginning in the 1970s, there was a change in national agricultural policy. Instead of the government paying farmers not to engage in full production, as was the practice, they were encouraged to grow as much food as they could. At the same time, technological changes and the “green revolution” made our farms much more productive. The price of food plummeted, while the number of calories available to the average American grew by about 1,000 a day.
  • Well, what do people do when there is extra food around? They eat it! This, of course, is a tremendously controversial idea. However, the model shows that increase in food more than explains the increase in weight.
  • There’s no magic bullet on this. You simply have to cut calories and be vigilant for the rest of your life.
  • Americans are wasting food at a progressively increasing rate. If Americans were to eat all the food that’s available, we’d be even more obese.
  • What new information did your equation render? That the conventional wisdom of 3,500 calories less is what it takes to lose a pound of weight is wrong. The body changes as you lose. Interestingly, we also found that the fatter you get, the easier it is to gain weight. An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one. Also, there’s a time constant that’s an important factor in weight loss. That’s because if you reduce your caloric intake, after a while, your body reaches equilibrium. It actually takes about three years for a dieter to reach their new “steady state.” Our model predicts that if you eat 100 calories fewer a day, in three years you will, on average, lose 10 pounds — if you don’t cheat. Another finding: Huge variations in your daily food intake will not cause variations in weight, as long as your average food intake over a year is about the same. This is because a person’s body will respond slowly to the food intake.
  • People don’t wait long enough to see what they are going to stabilize at. So if you drop weight and return to your old eating habits, the time it takes to crawl back to your old weight is something like three years. To help people understand this better, we’ve posted an interactive version of our model at bwsimulator.niddk.nih.gov.
  • we should stop marketing food to children.
  • weight change, up or down, takes a very, very long time. All diets work. But the reaction time is really slow: on the order of a year.
  • I could see the facts on the epidemic were quite astounding. Between 1975 and 2005, the average weight of Americans had increased by about 20 pounds
  • People think that the epidemic has to be caused by genetics or that physical activity has gone down. Yet levels of physical activity have not really changed in the past 30 years. As for the genetic argument, yes, there are people who are genetically disposed to obesity, but if they live in societies where there isn’t a lot of food, they don’t get obese. For them, and for us, it’s supply that’s the issue.
  • I think childhood obesity is a major problem. And when you’re obese, it’s not like we can suddenly cut your food off and you’ll go back to not being obese. You’ve been programmed to eat more. It’s a hardship to eat less. Michelle Obama’s initiative is helpful. And childhood obesity rates seem to be stabilizing in the developed world, at least. The obesity epidemic may have peaked because of the recession. It’s made food more expensive.
  • I think the food industry doesn’t want to know it. And ordinary people don’t particularly want to hear this, either. It’s so easy for someone to go out and eat 6,000 calories a day.
1 - 20 of 141 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page