Education

There are so many interesting things about the lesson plan marketplace site described in this article. Absolutely, teachers getting tips from other teachers instead of textbook publishers and other major corporations is a smart idea. At the college level, the mailing lists I am on for computing education often field requests for class activities of a certain style or around a certain topic, and they have some associated web repositories. But there are some things that strike me as odd about the auction model. First, I’m just surprised that there isn’t already a free website doing this – whether ad … Continue reading Lesson Marketplace

If you aren’t familiar with the process by which a textbook is created, I highly recommend this “Confessions of a Textbook Editor” article from a couple of years ago. It’s a short snapshot of the considerations that come into play, and the degree to which content is selected in order to avoid controversy from anyone. If you are interested in the topic, I recommend What Johnny Shouldn’t Read: Textbook Censorship in America by Joan Delfattore which I reviewed back in 2002, the book itself being even older than that. It seems the textbook industry has been pretty consistent over the … Continue reading Text Creation

Moebius Stripper asks an interesting question, in discussing a social-justice mathematics text: No, what bothers is this: is anyone familiar with a movement among social studies educators in secondary schools to use math in their courses, or does the movement toward interdisciplinary studies of social justice only go in the other direction? Coming from the math-and-science side of the spectrum myself (not to mention the post-secondary world), I can’t speak directly to what is happening in social science classrooms, but it is definitely the case that students are not graduating from high school with sufficient awareness of the connections between … Continue reading Cross-Curricular Mathematics

Moebius Stripper, always able to supply a nice rant about how integrated calculators in math classes are producing students unprepared for college math, supplies a good set of links to articles about the connections between Texas Instruments and the math textbook industry. For some reason, these articles got me thinking about a related question – how much computer usage in school is a good thing, and how much distracts from real learning? That’s a huge can of worms, so how about just the question of the correct balance of computer usage in my department’s classes?

The NY Times has an interesting article about the trend away from Friday courses on college campuses, and efforts to bring back the serious five-day week. As far as it goes it is interesting, but I think that it misses two points. One, there is a strong implication that it is primarily student pressure to avoid Friday classes – there is only one brief mention that faculty are expected to do much more than teach and having a work day with fewer teaching obligations helps keep on top of research and community obligations. Second, even with Friday classes being common, … Continue reading Bringing Back Friday

I’d never heard of the “Carnival” concept in weblogging before, but it is apparently an arrangement among a number of webloggers to post articles around a central theme during a month and then one weblogger maintains a list of all of these posts, organized into subthemes. I found out about it after seeing a link to Teaching Carnival II – a Carnival about secondary education teaching. It’s a very cool idea for pulling together posts on a particular topic, and I found the Teaching Carnivals (I also went back to check the previous one) really great – people are posting … Continue reading Teaching Carnivals

Moebius Stripper has a good post, and good comments, over in her weblog about

Can I get a big eye roll over the mandate, recently getting press, that all schools and colleges receiving any federal funding must recognize September 17th as Constitution Day and offer an educational program on the constitution on that day? The Department of Education’s notice on the topic does make it clear they’re flexible about the form of such a program, but it’s still being required. Woo hoo – I know I feel better with Congress setting curricular requirements without any pedagogical justification for such an approach to educating students on the topic. I doubt that there are school boards … Continue reading Constitution Day