Shawn Cornally:

So the question I ask myself before I give any calculus lesson is: “Why on Earth would anyone actually go through the trouble of doing it this way?” There really is a rich set of useful problems that can only be solved using differential calculus, so why not present them (or, God forbid, let the kids think of them) to students and work your way out?

My rhetoric here is getting a bit lofty, and I hope my actual lessons don’t end up being a let down, but they sometimes are for me, too. It turns out that it’s hard to come up with real things for math to do when you’ve only been modeled the most sterile way of learning math.

I find this kind of exuberant, confident, loose-limbed classroom introspection pretty much irresistible. It’s rare you find an edublogger this prolific who also works full-time in a classroom.

Put your money in Shawn Cornally, Inc., while his stock price is low.

Darren Kuropatwa:

You can’t be a change agent if you’re an expert. [..] Experts have a different aura about them. That aura of expertise is intimidating for neophytes. The aura of “not quite an expert”, the sense of newness associated with someone learning something they’ve just learned, is motivating for newbies. We need less experts, more neophytes. Actually, a constant influx of neophytes to provide a continuous stream of models to engage new learners.

Having had my own crisis of faith, recently, I can concede most of Darren’s premise while at the same time criticizing his conclusion as overly defeated. As Larry Bird became Larry Bird, were more or less people inspired to take up a basketball? Larry Bird became a figure of aspiration, which is what Darren is to a lot of educators. But Larry Bird, to a greater degree than most aspirational figures in the NBA, was also an educational figure, collaborating with coach Red Auerbach on several volumes of video tutorials.

Darren thinks his situation requires more novices when instead it requires better experts. Hungry experts. Experts who empathize with the novice, who constantly re-evaluate their own assumptions from the perspective of a novice, who get outside their own heads as much as possible and as often as possible. This is the fun and the challenge of what we do.

Jason Dyer:

I am taking a leave of absence next year to join the faculty of the University of Arizona. I will be working with elementary and middle school teachers teaching them how to teach mathematics, and developing an online curriculum to do the same.

I tweeted this video two days ago. I tagged it on delicious a day ago. Short of driving to your house and forcing you to watch these 100 seconds of abstract geometric bliss, this is all I can do:

Vanishing Point from Bonsajo on Vimeo.

I still may drive to your house.

Kate, tripping guilt with the best of them:

If you want to find excuses for why you can’t possibly teach class differently than you have for the past n years, you will find excuses. If you want to find solutions, you will find solutions.

If they got to Kate they can get to any of us. Double the watch. No one sleeps tonight.

PS. But seriously: where is the comparative study of “no excuses” rhetoric between the Rhee reformers and the edtech evangelists? If you close your eyes, they sound the same.

PPS. Do not close your eyes!