Comedian Louis CK, on bypassing ticket retailers to sell seats directly to fans through his website:

Well, it’s all so interesting. It’s all so interesting. It really is. I love knowing why I was able to sell out in one town, and why I wasn’t in another town. I love knowing what goes into everything–the economics, the technical aspect, and how to create the ideas in the show. It’s great. If you can have access to all of that, why would you not want to know? I just love learning. I think learning is how you live. The verb of my life is learning.

There are people who find failure interesting. Those people’s failures are often more interesting than their peers’ successes. Their lives also tend towards success even though the prospect of a successful life motivates them less than the prospect of an interesting one.

Sam Shah, chalking up another reason to love the math edublogosphere:

For a few weeks now, I have had this idea bouncing around in my head. A new blogger initiation! All it involves is writing four blogposts. There will be no hazing of any kind, except for the kind where we all say how much we think you’re awesome. That’s a form of hazing, right? Like happy hazing?

It’s a great idea and I can’t wait to read the summaries. If you haven’t created your own faculty lounge online, now is the time. Sign up by August 14.

The interesting question isn’t, “Should every high school graduate in the US have to take Algebra?” Our world is increasingly automated and programmed and if you want any kind of active participation in that world, you’re going to need to understand variable representation and manipulation. That’s Algebra. Without it, you’ll still be able to clothe and feed yourself, but that’s a pretty low bar for an education. The more interesting question is, “How should we define Algebra in 2012 and how should we teach it?” Those questions don’t even seem to be on Hacker’s radar.

Featured Comment

Paul Salomon:

I certainly think every student should have algebraic experience and fluency in some sense, but we definitely need to reconsider the idea that working through systems of 3 linear inequalities is an essential component of a mathematical education.

It occurs to me more and more that programming and science are the best places to utilize and manipulate algebraic expression, so it should be reconsidered, how algebra should be learned and experienced by our students

1. Math Mistakes, a project from Michael Pershan, who’s also killing it on the blog-front lately.
2. Geometry Daily, “a new minimal geometric composition every day,” each one worth framing and hanging alongside the hunting trophies at dy/dan manor.

Keep it up, everybody.

Featured Comment

Jason Buell:

There’s also one for physics by Kelly O’Shea

http://physicsmistakes.wordpress.com/

Kate Nowak prefaces her #mtt2k contribution:

Before y’all get out your flamethrowers and head to the comments, I’d like to say a few things. I’m neither vitriolic, panicked, nor bitter about Khan Academy. I think it’s a great resource and it’s an excellent place to see a demonstration of procedures. I send my own students to it during exam review time, and they report that it is helpful.

Where Khan and the Gates Foundation overextend their claims, though, is when they suggest that the Khan Academy can serve as standalone instruction in Mathematics. Enduring learning requires productive struggle and time to noodle out unfamiliar problems, posed by a teacher who knows what you’re ready for, and can provide expert scaffolding. Lecture-only instruction focused on mastering procedures is an impoverished substitute for doing Mathematics, and it doesn’t matter if that lecture is in person or in a video.

Well-put, all the way around.

For my part, I find it pretty difficult to talk with people about the uses and limitations of Khan Academy if either of the following conditions are true:

1. that person believes teachers are frequently motivated by jealousy,
2. that person’s own math education comprised ten years of lectures followed by procedures repeated ad nauseum.

Occasionally both conditions are true simultaneously and we’d be better off discussing less intractable issues than Khan Academy, like abortion or climate change.

BTW. As long as we’re here: Khan Academy frequently asserts itself as interested in more than lectures and procedures. Whenever a blogger points out that, “No, there’s not a whole lot of evidence for that,” a Khan Academy proponent named Jay Patel (who comments under various pseudonyms on this blog and others) will often link to this page in the Khan Academy customer portal, which cites as its project-based bonafides an activity called Simpsons Sunblocker. No problem there, except that Simpsons Sunblocker was developed by my team at Stanford – here’s the activity; have fun! – not Khan Academy, whose representatives tried to convince us we should do the activity only after the students watched a lecture about proportions and practiced those procedures. (Playing a game of basketball only after shooting hours of foul shots, essentially.)

I don’t care about credit. As I say at the end of this comment, I would love for Khan Academy’s deed to match its word on project-based or problem-based or anything-other-than-lecture-and-procedure-based learning, but I haven’t seen it.