dy/dan

Subscribe

Join 30K+ other people in receiving Dan's monthly updates on innovations, ideas, and news in math education.

Month: December 2009

Total 16 Posts

Edublog 2009 Nominations

By • December 8, 2009 • 5 Comments

Just a little love where it’s due.

Best Group Blog

Sup Teach?
http://supteach.blogspot.com/

I shared a bus ride with Ian Garrovillas at CMC-North and then a table at a conference session with him, Scott Farrar, their friend Joe, and some young genial guy named Dallas and, man โ€“ you just want to staff a school full of people your own age like that. And that’d be a terrible school and no good whatsoever for kids but you couldn’t mistake the loose-limbed, hyperkinetic vibe at that table, a vibe that I lack at a school where the next math teacher up the seniority ladder from me is in his 40s.

SupTeach? brings that vibe post after post.

Best New Blog

Sean Sweeney
http://sweeneymath.blogspot.com/

Sean opened huge with a month’s worth of killer multimedia resources but his blog’s been dark since early November. Consider this my encouragement to keep at it.

Best Teacher/Individual Blog

Kate Nowak
http://function-of-time.blogspot.com/

Kate’s second year blogging has been a blast to watch. I don’t know if I just imagined a surge in self-confidence, but her wit has never been sharper and she hasn’t hesitated to hip-check some of the biggest names in edublogging. Toss in a post count that belies how hard she works on a full-time teaching schedule and my nomination is locked.

Best Individual Tweeter

Elissa Miller
http://twitter.com/misscalcul8

If you missed it, Elissa became a teacher on Twitter. Starting last summer and continuing into her preservice year, she badgered her followers relentlessly for advice on classroom management and for help with lesson development. Incredibly, her persistence only scored her more followers, which has weird implications for teacher preparation in the 21st century.

Best Educational Use Of Video / Visual

Rhett Allain
http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/

Rhett pairs diagrams in Keynote with LaTeX equations to explain the physics behind the punkin chunkin and other frivolities. I’m not sure there’s anything in his life he wouldn’t film with a FlipCam and analyze with Tracker if it meant a better (or at least more amusing) understanding of physics for his readership. I’m particularly fond of the running, one-sided dialogue he has with various TV personalities who fudge their physics computation even a little. Mythbusters’ Adam Savage will rue the day.

Most Influential Blog Post

Weird Kipp Op-Ed, Tom Hoffman
http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2009/01/weird-kipp-op-ed.html

Tom’s recent coverage of the Common Core ELA Standards was exemplary and some of the best eduwonkery you’d find last year inside or outside of a funded think tank. But that was a Tom Hoffman pasteurized and bottled for transport as far outside his blog as he could get it. Tom’s best piece last year, for my money, was his withering takedown of an op-ed by KIPP’s Feinberg and Levin, the kind of excoriation that reminds me to pause that extra second before I hit “publish” just to ask myself: “Is Tom Hoffman gonna punch a hole in my chest for this or what?”

Lifetime Achievement Award

TMAO
http://roomd2.blogspot.com/

Amen.

The Jay-Z Honorarium For Most Convincing Non-Retirement

Christian Long
http://thinklab.typepad.com/

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

By • December 6, 2009 • Comments Off on What’s Wrong With This Picture?

I’m still compiling my notes from a very strange and very cool CMC-North. Until then, consider this graphic, ripped from children’s television by Bill Farren as a visual assessment for engineering students:

I have underrated the assessment question, “what’s wrong here?” I need to do more of that. It isn’t that tricky, though it is tricky to deliver that assessment visually, as Bill has done here. It’s trickier still to rip that visual from a kid’s show, packaging the whole assessment in the sort of scientific put-down of children’s entertainment that appeals directly to the inner misanthrope I keep loosely tethered on a fraying leash.

Comments are closed here. Tell Bill what’s wrong over there.

CMC – North 2009: My Playlist

By • December 4, 2009 • 6 Comments

a/k/a Asilomar 2009

I’m at CMC – North this weekend. CMC has cut itself back quite a bit in light of these Tough Economic Times. Nevertheless, past experience has set my expectations pretty high for this conference. My slate is particularly strong this year, also, with two sessions from Steven Leinwand (engaging presenter with an interesting approach to problem-based learning), one from Michael Serra (author of the least helpful Geometry curriculum I have ever used), and one from Allan Bellman (my teaching mentor at UC Davis). In the middle of all that I’ll be presenting my own material.

If you’ll be there, tweet at me (#cmcn09), drop a comment here, say hi. I’ll be blogging most sessions and I’ll update this post with links later.

  1. Thoughts On Rationalizing Algebra In Ways That Serve Kids, Not Universities, Steven Leinwand.
  2. What Do We Do With The Seniors?, Robert Loew.
  3. Don’t Just Cover Geometry, Discover Geometry, Michael Serra.
  4. Be Less Helpful, Dan Meyer.
  5. Lights, Camera, Action! Fun And Success For All In Algebra, Allan Bellman.
  6. Intriguing Lessons About How Math Is Taught And Assessed In High Performing Asian Countries, Steven Leinwand. Sick. Left the conference early.

Score One For The Forces Of Innumeracy

By • December 4, 2009 • 1 Comment

In these exponential times, I admit that even I find it easy to nod my head credulously at a passage like this:

When it comes to [Facebook’s] online chat function, 1.6 billion messages are sent every single day and 1.4 million photos are uploaded a second.

Not so Nat Friedman who crunched some numbers in an utterly classroom-appropriate exercise in unit conversion and calculated that this means everyone on Earth is uploading approximately 20 photos per day.

Which means I had better hurry up and get a Facebook account.

[via daring fireball]

[N.B. The Internet has been pretty generous today, right?]

[1] http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html

David Foster Wallace’s Grammar Challenge!

By • December 4, 2009 • 2 Comments

DFW just keeps on giving. One of his former students has posted a ten-question worksheet he wrote titled:

IF NO ONE HAS YET TAUGHT YOU HOW TO AVOID OR REPAIR CLAUSES LIKE THE FOLLOWING, YOU SHOULD, IN MY OPINION, THINK SERIOUSLY ABOUT SUING SOMEBODY, PERHAPS AS CO-PLAINTIFF WITH WHOEVERโ€™S PAID YOUR TUITION

For instance:

4. I only spent six weeks in Napa.

And the answers. [via kottke]

Unless otherwise noted, everything you and I post here is licensed
for reuse under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.