I just finished my teaching my first semester of a computer programming class. I used NetLogo, a descendant of Logo. I hadn't used it much before, but a group at the Santa Fe Institute here in New Mexico was working to have more CS taught in high schools. They were going with netlogo, and the programming curriculum had an emphasis on scientific modelling rather than traditional CS topics like search/sort algorithms.
I was skeptical of Netlogo at first, as my real world experience was mostly with Python/Django, but the kids really took to it. There was some classic Logo programs (Spirographs), but CS topics like recursion (drawing a fractal tree) and sorting (a bale of turtles sorted on different criteria, with different algorithm efficiencies) were covered too. There was some great modelling though, for ecosystems or a disease spread model.
For my second semester of the class I'm switching to Python, to give the kids a different perspective on programming.
I introduced computer programming in my geometry class this semester with Khan Academy. It's a great interface, with clear tutorials, minimal setup (an account helps, but it ties into our school's Google Education domain automatically) and instant feedback for both results and errors. Khan's programming interface is in javascript using processing.
At the start of the unit I polled my students, and of the 63 I have in geometry, only 3 had prior exposure to programming. Those 3 had parents in tech and had done some science/engineering summer camp activities, and were looking into it on their own. I was a little surprised, because when I was a kid, my elementary school all got some programming exposure on Logo on C64s back in the 80s.
1) Be prepared for the fact that many will not have taken a math class in many years, some 5 or more. They will recall little from their previous math classes other than intuition. Their arithmetic skills are poor. Be sure you are evaluating them on their understanding of the stats material, and be forgiving of arithmetic errors
Big agreement here. Check out A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper for an accessible book that explores some of the common misconceptions about stats. Learning what stats say (or don't) is far more useful than learning to crunch the numbers.
I'm working IT at a 1-to-1 laptop school. When implemented right great stuff happens.
Google Docs makes working on group projects actually feasible (though kids still have to be taught how to collaborate effectively.)
Google search necessitates focusing on deeper issues when the answers to most typical school questions are 5 seconds away.
With Wolframalpha, why spend a couple months in math class on the mechanics of factoring quadratics when it's now trivial and there's far more interesting math subjects to explore?
Tech isn't the magic bullet for test scores. That's probably a good thing.
From the article: "Obama's 2011 budget request calls for $19 billion for NASA, a $276 million hike from the previous budget."
What's being cut is Constellation. NASA's budget is being increased and refocused, to as "former astronaut Sally Ride, an Augustine panel member, described the strategic shift as a "significant vote of confidence in NASA" that brings it "back to its roots as an engine of innovation.""
IAAMT, last year 8th grade at a high minority pop, low income school. This next year I'll be teaching Algebra 1 at a high school. I agree with many of the points in Lockhart's article, with the primary exception being that this problem isn't already being addressed by some in education.
Math has been gutted of meaning, but this is changing. There are solid curricula out there that are being used, such as IMP ( the Interactive Math Program) or PBL (Project/Problem Based Learning) style lessons. An example of PBL that I used last year with my 8th graders was in modeling a bride. They were given a plausible scenario (school buildings are getting a 2nd story added on to reduce the number of portable classrooms, they had to design and model a bridge between these 2nd stories.) So, we went out and measured distances, built newpaper bridges and tested how much weight they could hold to find relationships for thickness v. load and length v. load, calculated needed load support based on population, class flow, 8th grader mass, etc., graphed some data in Excel, and used their formula and data to built a cost-optimized bridge. They had fun exploring some rich problems (and some frustration, as it did require some thought) and gained a better grasp of linear relationships, a key concept in 8th grade.
This type of teaching isn't widespread, but it was being advocated by my college advisers.
One of the problems with doing this kind of math is the lack of public support. In the school district I'm in, about half the high schools were giving an option to use IMP to students, but parents complained and such, and now only a few charter schools use it. Still, support is starting to spread some, so the more interesting approaches are being slowly revived.
For those interested in this topic, check out What's math got to do with it?" by Jo Boaler (new edition out later this month.)
I've had students who have refused to stop texting. If they refuse that, they'll likely refuse to go to the Vice Principal's office. After that, the typical options are call security or give up and do nothing. I've recently started calling home and putting the call on speaker phone, which has had good results when there's a viable phone number.
IAMT
I played the beta for a while, and will be picking up the retail when it's not so detrimental to work/school schedule.
Things I liked:
Hugely detailed world (Warhammer has lots of back story)
Diverse classes (each of the 6 races has 3 or 4 classes, each class is somewhat unique)
Public Quests (fun quests you can join casually with others on, very well done.)
Quirky humor (some races more than others, Greenskins especially amusing)
The biggest reason for me quitting WoW was the time commitment in the end game raids. Warhammer doesn't seem to require the same solid block of time that WoW did, which for me, as someone with a family, is huge.
Emphatically agree. I think one of the core problems for mid & high school in the US is that the subjects are treated as discreet bits of knowledge. Powerful learning happens when knowledge gets connected to other knowledge. Science should be incorporating English (i.e., have teachers collaborate so biology and english classes are both reading 'Jurassic Park'). Math should be taught with History (history of math is cool and helps explain it's relevance). Teachers should strive to connect to every other subject whenever possible. There's quite a bit of research on this integrated type of learning, saying it's deeper and more readily applicable than when subjects are treated as discreet topics.
I had a grad class on innovative teaching techniques this summer. I'm pleased to say it wasn't at all like yours... ~ 5 minute lectures, lots of group work and inquiry-based learning, which effectively modeled the style of teaching being advocated by our advisors.
I learned Python and Django at the same time. I needed to transfer some existing apps for the company I was with, and decided to play around with Python/Django to see how that would work. I'd been out of the development/programming thing for a few years and had extremely minimal Python experience, but within a couple weeks I was much further on my projects than was anticipated. Perhaps it's just me, but Python and Django just made sense.
Django's documentation was accurate and thorough, which helped tremendously. Particularly, the Django book was very helpful and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in Django. (disclaimer - was using the beta version of the book)
Because, as Joss put it, "it's your typical Internet musical about a super villain who's trying to make his bones in the super villain community and get some respect, and maybe even work up the nerve to talk to the girl at the Laundromat."
Thoroughly mainstream.
It was completely spoonfed, not a single question dealt with creating your own equations from a text instruction. I'm starting next year as a math teacher, and was recently given a math book used by high school freshmen (~13 yrs old.) All the word problems were of the form: "Some situation is modeled by the equation y = 2x + b. If x = 10 and b is 2, what is the value of y?"
Your word, "appalled," is fitting.
The school system I work for claims they have 12000 employees, of which 6000 are teachers and 2000 are "para professionals." I'm not sure what "para professionals" are specifically, but it seems ludicrous to me that only half of a school system's employees are teachers.
Some unions are the problem. For example, the New York teachers union makes it very hard to fire teachers, to the extent that More than 700 school employees, mostly teachers, are now assigned to centers known as "rubber rooms," after having been removed from the classroom"
As for how you rate a teacher, you do it for demonstrated improvement. If your students come in at a grade 3 level and at the end of the year you've moved them up to grade 4, then you've done your job. If they're moved more than 1 years worth in the year, then the teacher should get a bonus. It shouldn't matter from the teacher's performance perspective if they were supposed to be in grade 3 or grade 10 to start, they moved up a year.
Now, measuring and quantifying that is a non-trivial task that I don't know the solution for.
because private schools can discriminate based on their admission, performance, and behavior criteria (they don't have to take everyone)
This is one of the biggest... Special Ed teachers and support make up about 1/3rd of my school's staff and deal with ~1/8th of the school population. Some students require a full time assistant, ranging from an ASL interpreter for the deaf kids to someone who will change diapers or push wheelchairs for the severely developmentally disabled kids or TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) kids.
Paying for educating everyone is expensive, and is something to keep in mind when comparing the cost of education figures between countries or types of schools, as many don't deal with the high needs students.
Thanks for your list.
There are exceptions, but as a population, parents of private school children do value education more than public schools. I've worked in a public school for 5 years know, and have teacher friends at a couple private schools in town. The private schools get higher participation in parent/teacher conferences, get more response to phone calls/emails about the students, and are more supportive in school activities. The public schools in richer areas of town do better than my school, which does better than the poor schools, so there's some other factors here, primarily income, and since income level correlates to education level, the parental level of education is important too.
Meanwhile the trend for the past three decades has been to spend less on space every year, and yet our rate of return just keeps going up... Then by completely cutting the space program we'll achieve ultimate enlightenment and solve the world's problems. What's there to debate about this?
Timothy Zahn has a series (Conquerors) where humans meet an alien race and a war is started because we try to communicate with them via radio. When an individual in their species dies they become a spirit/energy form, which can still communicate with corporeal beings so the spirits fill many of the roles radio does for us. The radio waves hurt the spirit/energy forms so that was taken as an act of war.
I've no idea if that kind of biology/society is possible but unless we have some common basis (as in Star Trek, a parental race,) assumptions about what other alien species must be like should be regarded as tenuous at best.
What will multiple parties do? It just means that whichever candidate wins the election will be less likely to match my views, or any other single person's views. Not mathematically possible in my case...
Unless you define omniscience to be "God knows everything that's knowable." If the future doesn't yet exist, then it's doesn't diminish his omniscience if he doesn't know what's not there to know.
Slashdot Mirror
I just finished my teaching my first semester of a computer programming class. I used NetLogo, a descendant of Logo. I hadn't used it much before, but a group at the Santa Fe Institute here in New Mexico was working to have more CS taught in high schools. They were going with netlogo, and the programming curriculum had an emphasis on scientific modelling rather than traditional CS topics like search/sort algorithms.
I was skeptical of Netlogo at first, as my real world experience was mostly with Python/Django, but the kids really took to it. There was some classic Logo programs (Spirographs), but CS topics like recursion (drawing a fractal tree) and sorting (a bale of turtles sorted on different criteria, with different algorithm efficiencies) were covered too. There was some great modelling though, for ecosystems or a disease spread model.
For my second semester of the class I'm switching to Python, to give the kids a different perspective on programming.
Would be nice to have in the summary.
I introduced computer programming in my geometry class this semester with Khan Academy. It's a great interface, with clear tutorials, minimal setup (an account helps, but it ties into our school's Google Education domain automatically) and instant feedback for both results and errors. Khan's programming interface is in javascript using processing.
At the start of the unit I polled my students, and of the 63 I have in geometry, only 3 had prior exposure to programming. Those 3 had parents in tech and had done some science/engineering summer camp activities, and were looking into it on their own. I was a little surprised, because when I was a kid, my elementary school all got some programming exposure on Logo on C64s back in the 80s.
1) Be prepared for the fact that many will not have taken a math class in many years, some 5 or more. They will recall little from their previous math classes other than intuition. Their arithmetic skills are poor. Be sure you are evaluating them on their understanding of the stats material, and be forgiving of arithmetic errors
Big agreement here. Check out A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper for an accessible book that explores some of the common misconceptions about stats. Learning what stats say (or don't) is far more useful than learning to crunch the numbers.
I'm working IT at a 1-to-1 laptop school. When implemented right great stuff happens. Google Docs makes working on group projects actually feasible (though kids still have to be taught how to collaborate effectively.) Google search necessitates focusing on deeper issues when the answers to most typical school questions are 5 seconds away. With Wolframalpha, why spend a couple months in math class on the mechanics of factoring quadratics when it's now trivial and there's far more interesting math subjects to explore? Tech isn't the magic bullet for test scores. That's probably a good thing.
From the article: "Obama's 2011 budget request calls for $19 billion for NASA, a $276 million hike from the previous budget."
What's being cut is Constellation. NASA's budget is being increased and refocused, to as "former astronaut Sally Ride, an Augustine panel member, described the strategic shift as a "significant vote of confidence in NASA" that brings it "back to its roots as an engine of innovation.""
Math has been gutted of meaning, but this is changing. There are solid curricula out there that are being used, such as IMP ( the Interactive Math Program) or PBL (Project/Problem Based Learning) style lessons. An example of PBL that I used last year with my 8th graders was in modeling a bride. They were given a plausible scenario (school buildings are getting a 2nd story added on to reduce the number of portable classrooms, they had to design and model a bridge between these 2nd stories.) So, we went out and measured distances, built newpaper bridges and tested how much weight they could hold to find relationships for thickness v. load and length v. load, calculated needed load support based on population, class flow, 8th grader mass, etc., graphed some data in Excel, and used their formula and data to built a cost-optimized bridge. They had fun exploring some rich problems (and some frustration, as it did require some thought) and gained a better grasp of linear relationships, a key concept in 8th grade.
This type of teaching isn't widespread, but it was being advocated by my college advisers. One of the problems with doing this kind of math is the lack of public support. In the school district I'm in, about half the high schools were giving an option to use IMP to students, but parents complained and such, and now only a few charter schools use it. Still, support is starting to spread some, so the more interesting approaches are being slowly revived.
For those interested in this topic, check out What's math got to do with it?" by Jo Boaler (new edition out later this month.)
I've had students who have refused to stop texting. If they refuse that, they'll likely refuse to go to the Vice Principal's office. After that, the typical options are call security or give up and do nothing.
I've recently started calling home and putting the call on speaker phone, which has had good results when there's a viable phone number.
IAMT
Things I liked:
The biggest reason for me quitting WoW was the time commitment in the end game raids. Warhammer doesn't seem to require the same solid block of time that WoW did, which for me, as someone with a family, is huge.
Emphatically agree. I think one of the core problems for mid & high school in the US is that the subjects are treated as discreet bits of knowledge. Powerful learning happens when knowledge gets connected to other knowledge. Science should be incorporating English (i.e., have teachers collaborate so biology and english classes are both reading 'Jurassic Park'). Math should be taught with History (history of math is cool and helps explain it's relevance). Teachers should strive to connect to every other subject whenever possible. There's quite a bit of research on this integrated type of learning, saying it's deeper and more readily applicable than when subjects are treated as discreet topics.
I had a grad class on innovative teaching techniques this summer. I'm pleased to say it wasn't at all like yours ... ~ 5 minute lectures, lots of group work and inquiry-based learning, which effectively modeled the style of teaching being advocated by our advisors.
Just sharing this as it may give you hope.
I learned Python and Django at the same time. I needed to transfer some existing apps for the company I was with, and decided to play around with Python/Django to see how that would work. I'd been out of the development/programming thing for a few years and had extremely minimal Python experience, but within a couple weeks I was much further on my projects than was anticipated. Perhaps it's just me, but Python and Django just made sense.
Django's documentation was accurate and thorough, which helped tremendously. Particularly, the Django book was very helpful and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in Django. (disclaimer - was using the beta version of the book)
Because, as Joss put it, "it's your typical Internet musical about a super villain who's trying to make his bones in the super villain community and get some respect, and maybe even work up the nerve to talk to the girl at the Laundromat."
Thoroughly mainstream.
Or, try Mexico, if you're coming from anywhere south of it.
Just to clarify, the equations differed, but were always explicitly given.
Your word, "appalled," is fitting.
The school system I work for claims they have 12000 employees, of which 6000 are teachers and 2000 are "para professionals." I'm not sure what "para professionals" are specifically, but it seems ludicrous to me that only half of a school system's employees are teachers.
Some unions are the problem. For example, the New York teachers union makes it very hard to fire teachers, to the extent that More than 700 school employees, mostly teachers, are now assigned to centers known as "rubber rooms," after having been removed from the classroom"
As for how you rate a teacher, you do it for demonstrated improvement. If your students come in at a grade 3 level and at the end of the year you've moved them up to grade 4, then you've done your job. If they're moved more than 1 years worth in the year, then the teacher should get a bonus. It shouldn't matter from the teacher's performance perspective if they were supposed to be in grade 3 or grade 10 to start, they moved up a year.
Now, measuring and quantifying that is a non-trivial task that I don't know the solution for.
- because private schools can discriminate based on their admission, performance, and behavior criteria (they don't have to take everyone)
This is one of the biggestPaying for educating everyone is expensive, and is something to keep in mind when comparing the cost of education figures between countries or types of schools, as many don't deal with the high needs students.
Thanks for your list.
There are exceptions, but as a population, parents of private school children do value education more than public schools. I've worked in a public school for 5 years know, and have teacher friends at a couple private schools in town. The private schools get higher participation in parent/teacher conferences, get more response to phone calls/emails about the students, and are more supportive in school activities.
The public schools in richer areas of town do better than my school, which does better than the poor schools, so there's some other factors here, primarily income, and since income level correlates to education level, the parental level of education is important too.
Timothy Zahn has a series (Conquerors) where humans meet an alien race and a war is started because we try to communicate with them via radio. When an individual in their species dies they become a spirit/energy form, which can still communicate with corporeal beings so the spirits fill many of the roles radio does for us. The radio waves hurt the spirit/energy forms so that was taken as an act of war.
I've no idea if that kind of biology/society is possible but unless we have some common basis (as in Star Trek, a parental race,) assumptions about what other alien species must be like should be regarded as tenuous at best.
Dr. Seuss had the best explanation in his documentaries, The Sneetches.
Unless you define omniscience to be "God knows everything that's knowable." If the future doesn't yet exist, then it's doesn't diminish his omniscience if he doesn't know what's not there to know.