class
esiegel | May 28, 2012"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there." -Ray Bradbury
Today is Memorial Day here in the United States, where we honor all the soldiers who have fought and fallen for our country. The peace and prosperity that I have enjoyed my entire life is because of a price paid, many times over, mostly by people…
drorzel | May 14, 2011SteelyKid is, as I have noted previously, half Korean, a quarter Polish, and an eighth each Irish and German. Her parents are irreligious, the extended family is Catholic (more so on my side than Kate's), and she goes to day care at the Jewish Community Center. In other words, a thoroughly American sort of upbringing. I can't wait to see what she finds to rebel against when she hits the teenage years.
For no obvious reason, three of the four kids she's most likely to play with on the playground when I pick her up in the evening (we play at the JCC for a while before going home, to give Kate…
drorzel | May 3, 2011Kevin Drum notes a growing backlash against education reform, citing Diane Ravitch, Emily Yoffe and this Newsweek (which is really this private foundation report in disguise) as examples. The last of these, about the failed attempts of several billionaires to improve education through foundation grants, is really kind of maddening. It makes the billionaires in question (Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Eli Broad, and the Wal-Mart Waltons) sound like feckless idiots, but I can't tell if that's just bad writing.
The core of the piece is the finding that the districts these guys put money into haven't…
rallain | August 19, 2010First, where does Chad come up with these links? Oh, I am talking about Chad from Uncertain Principles. In his latest links of the day, I found this:
Skip Class Calculator
What a great idea. Basically, you enter some info about the class - like how often it meets, how many classes you have skipped, when is the next test and stuff. The calculator then tells you if you should go to class or not. Brilliant. Actually, this seems like the academic version of Run Pee. Yes, I said run pee. Run Pee is an app for your iphone that tells you at what point during a movie you can go to the…
jstemwedel | March 2, 2010At Dot Physics, Rhett Allain discusses his philosophy about class meetings:
Here is the point I am trying to make - class is for students. Class is not for me. Students pay for classes, so they should get them.
Here is the other point. If a student chooses not to come to class, that is the student's choice. I am ok with that. Maybe it is not a great idea, but these are adults. There can be a problem. What if the class has attendance as a grade? What if the class will give a pop-bonus-quiz if attendance is low (which is essentially the same thing as attendance for a grade)? Well, I don't do…
thusspakezuska | April 29, 2009McDonald's is everywhere, of course. But it's not completely cookie cutter; only about 99.9% so. For example, the McDonald's at the Heidelberg train station I used to frequent when I felt unbearably homesick in Germany had beer on tap - something you don't see in the U.S! Most McDonald's I've ever been in, though, feature incredibly dispiriting physical environments. You aren't really encouraged to linger and enjoy yourself. It's fast food, after all. It's not like it's your quaint neighborhood Starbucks.
But as we knew all along, the very rich are different from you and I, and so is…
rallain | April 7, 2009Dan Meyer at dy/dan just posted about teacher-student analogies. His analogy is that the student is like a weight lifter and the teacher is the spotter. I like this. It is similar to my usual analogy that the teacher is like a trainer and the student doing some exercise. Another analogy I often use is a person learning to ride a bike. The learner is the one doing stuff, not the "helper" or "facilitator". I am really not sure what to call the helping person. Maybe the Yoda would be a good term. I like that.
Look at a person learning to ride a bike (btw, here are my tips for learning to…
rallain | February 19, 2009I saw this some time ago, probably in The Teaching Professor online magazine thingy. The basic idea is to leave your class alone when they are having a discussion. I have done this a couple of times. Yesterday was the first time this semester. Here is the deal. In this class (Physics for Elementary Education Majors), they collect evidence and build models. For that day, the experiments were giving students evidence about what happens to a fan cart when the strength of the fan changes and what happens when the mass of the cart changes.
When it came time to discuss the ideas, I made sure…