There is a review of the documentary movie American Teacher by Brian Jones, over at Susan Ohanian’s site. The review is here. Some representative quotes from the review: The American Teacher filmmakers show us a teacher in Texas, Erik Benner, who is doing his best to inspire his students, to bring history to life and … Read more
Current grading policies at most schools are intended to measure learning, but they are counterproductive in that they actually inhibit learning. Taking a typical university mathematics course as an example, students might have a handful of assignments, a mid-term test, and a final exam. The number of graded items is small because universities are strapped … Read more
Diane Ravitch reviews two new books on the current “crisis” in education in the New York Review of Books (hat tip to Susan Ohanian, who has a very interesting site devoted to education here; incidentally, Ms. Ohanian is married to physicist and fine textbook author Hans C. Ohanian). Her review is entitled School ‘Reform’: A … Read more
A review by Jim Powell of two recent books by Wendell Berry can be found here. A quoted fragment of one of his poems will give you a sense for Berry’s worldview: Ceaseless preparation for war is not peace. Health is not procured by sale of medication, or purity by the addition of poison. Science … Read more
The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, a new online-only, peer-reviewed mathematics journal, is in its first issue. The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics aims to provide an open forum for both academic and informal discussions on the various threads of mathematical inquiry. The focus of submitted papers should be on the aesthetic, cultural, historical, literary, pedagogical, philosophical, … Read more
I’ve spent a lot of my time in the past few days working around the house, constructing bookshelves (from store-bought Ikea-like kits), tearing down some interior walls in our basement, and whatnot. I found myself thinking about the physics courses I’ve taught in the past, and how some key points in the courses were perfectly … Read more
We adults tend to fear making mistakes. We weren’t like that as children; watch any child learn to walk, or learn to ride a skateboard, shoot baseline jumpers over and over, or do just about anything that requires practice. Children keep at it, despite making mistakes repeatedly, because it’s fun. That is, the activity they’ve … Read more
Way back when I was a little high-school student, I recall the pride I felt when working through the nuclear reactor unit of our Grade 11 physics course. The pride derived from the featured CANDU reactor. Wow! Our little Canada somehow produced the best nuclear reactor in the world. How did I know CANDU was … Read more
From Indiscrete Thoughts, by Gian-Carlo Rota: The best introduction to mathematics is not achieved by rigorous presentation. No one can learn calculus, linear algebra, or group theory by reading an axiomatic presentation. What one wishes is a feeling for a piece of mathematics. Let the student work with unrigorous concepts that lead as quickly as … Read more
In teaching mathematics for many years, one of the things I emphasized over and over again was that students should memorize the absolute minimum necessary, and then I did my best to make explicit what this absolute minimum is. It is better, I explained, to spend time solving problems, discussing applications, “reading around the subject,” … Read more