Whatsup: I can’t wait to see you waste another Saturday of your life collecting data on self-checkouts. You should like write a book or something. I’ve been waiting for a resolution all my life, and here it is! Clap your hands, people! This guy’s a nerd!

Some big-boy blogs picked up my grocery express lane post, including Lifehacker last week, from which a few careerist trolls have now immigrated, allowing me a glimpse at the kind of shower mold real bloggers deal with daily.

“Don’t feed the trolls” is sound policy which I’m ignoring here not because I’m looking for affirmation from my usual enablers but because I get this from my students all the time, both personally, about world-record math and graphing stories, but also in the abstract, in our show-and-tell post-mortems. We have watched some incredible videos lately – Rube Goldberg machines and time lapse photography, for instance – and if a video smacks even slightly of concentrated effort or advance planning, someone will inevitably scoff that the subject has a) “too much time on his hands” or b) “no life.”

Ten times out of ten.

And I would so much rather my students understood the value of turning stupid ideas into reality than the entire sum of AlgebraLet me immediately clarify my position that few tools more effectively turn stupid ideas into reality than Algebra so please pause the outrage for a second.. It’s so obvious to me that the kind of person who would create a cocktail-mixer from balsa wood and twine is simply blowing off steam that life will eventually focus in a direction that will be extremely a) constructive, b) profitable, or c) both. I can’t make this obvious to my students. After six years I lack a succinct, meaningful response to my students’ defensive, clannish embrace of mediocrity, though I’m grateful for this tweet, which comes pretty close:

dwineman: You say “looks like somebody has too much time on their hands” but all I hear is “I’m sad because I don’t know what creativity feels like.”

I need to clarify my professional situation, which is nothing like my announcement last spring that I was quitting teaching to pursue a doctorate.

1. I am teaching two math classes. The same remedial Algebra at the same high school.
2. I am working for Google. I have deferred graduate school for a year and accepted a ten-month position as a “curriculum fellow” at Google’s campus in Mountain View, CA. I start Monday, which means my understanding of the job is informed only by the application process and not yet by any actual experience. Regardless, I’m ecstatic. Google wants to hire competent programmers, obviously, so they’re reaching out to university CS professors and down to high school math teachers, which is my angle. I will be working with a handful of other math teachers to embed the Python programming language into traditional math curriculum for adoption on the sort of scale you’d expect from Google. I am realistic. The challenges are immense but so are the possible returns. It isn’t my ideal full-time job developing WCYDWT math curriculum next to an on-call barista but it’s really close.

TMAO, that is, a/k/a Kilian Betlach, Assistant Principal, Elmhurst Community Prep.

It’s awesome to see him back off the bench. If you don’t know why this is a big deal, here is the appreciation I wrote two years ago.

Tom Hoffman, summarizing his gonzo fortnight of investigative blogging, concluding that Common Core’s E/LA standards, adopted by all but Alaska and Texas, are woefully inadequate while overreaching scandalously:

My take on the situation is that as long as all stakeholders, including the states and federal Department of Education can agree that these are not internationally benchmarked English Language Arts standards, but cross-disciplinary literacy standards, and that they should not be seen as supplanting the English Language Arts standards and curriculum, and the various relevant memos and regulations can be updated to reflect that fact, then everything will be ok. Either that or they need to start over and write actual English Language Arts standards. Or we’re just setting the stage for the next crisis in American educational standards, when people suddenly discover circa 2012 that our English Language Arts standards are scandalously lower than our global competitors’.

Essential reading.