[Note: unsure whether a square root symbol (√) will appear properly in any given browser, I will use an older typographic convention in its place. sqrt (x) here indicates the square root of x, presumed to be the positive square root unless otherwise stated. It’s a bit cumbersome, and definitely ugly, but not as ugly […]
I lead a parsimonious life. Never liked spending money, and rarely find myself wanting consumer goods. Living too long as a struggling college student, and later without income as a homemaker only served to intensify my miserliness, but it’s been part of me for as long as I can remember. Now I’m bound for a […]
Caught my kids cheating on their homework yesterday. Five kids got the same wrong answer. That’s only to be expected now and again when they work together, and I’m perfectly happy that they should work together, but this was a stupid wrong answer, the kind of wrong answer that kids working together and not merely […]
I needed to review the quadratic formula before addressing it in class, mostly to make sure I could work my way through it smoothly, but partially I must admit to be sure I could do it at all. Turns out I can. No sweat. Compared to some of the gyrations of differential equations or network […]
To my surprise, today was declared a snow day at my school. Between NPR grossly underestimating last night’s snowfall and the fact that we had no snow day a week ago, with nearly as much snowfall, I expected snow warnings to prove a false alarm. So I missed the opportunity to sleep in. Not a […]
I’m a strong believer in motivation when it comes to instruction. I do not mean here the importance of motivation as a general desire to learn; that is indeed critically important, and the techniques for instilling a desire to learn are discussed endlessly in education. Here I mean something much smaller: the importance of explaining […]
Like virtually all schools, Barringer practices “tracking,†the segregation of students by speed and quality. Tracking is the subject of a lot of educational debate, and arguments can be made for and against it, but nearly every school in the country has an honors track, a standard track, and a remedial track by some name […]
My first week of student teaching just finished, and already the kids are testing my authority. One quite publicly announced my fly was open—I think I handled that one with aplomb, stage-whispering that none of the students should let Mr. LeBlanc, sitting at the back of the room, know, lest he consider me unprofessional. I’m […]
As regular readers realize by now, I’m a fan of the Great Lectures series, whichever name it goes by. Only the Egyptian history lectures have disappointed so far—but I have to say, the lectures on religion in the classical Mediterranean world come close. On the whole, the lectures are enjoyable, informative, and well narrated. But […]
Observational instruction—“student teaching,†to use a familiar but not-technically-accurate term—varies with the subject, but even more by the student teacher’s supervisory instructor. The difference between strictly observing and “hands-on†observation is particularly significant. The latter is tiring, to be sure, and often frustrating. The exhaustion, at least, is a good sort of exhaustion. But just […]