Cognitive dissonance is supposed to shake down the too-primitive explanation so that we can build a stronger, further-reaching one. When your current understanding just doesn’t work, it makes you receptive to a deeper explanation. The cognitive dissonance model gives me cognitive dissonance, though. It seems inherently unpleasant. I think there’s another way of shaking up… [Read more…]
May 3, 2012
Once again, I’ve told somebody with some pretty good procedural math software that there’s a lot of research backing up what my experience tells me: that it would behoove us to develop more instructional materials that … wait for teh really, really complex phrase… …. teach the concepts. And, once again, I get this incredibly… [Read more…]
January 4, 2012
Welp, I’m glad I’ve been posting positive things about other people’s math videos. Honestly, I’m not one of those persons who think I know more than anybody else out there. However, my stomach did some flippy floppies listening to this rah-rah video on youtube: http://vihart.com/blog/announcement-khan-academy/. They’re joining forces gleefully for the wonderful cause of fighting… [Read more…]
December 29, 2011
Hacking through cyberspace, I have been. I’ve found “math for grownups” (http://www.mathforgrownups.com ) and “the math mom” (http://www.themathmom.com), and “elevated math.” I’m afraid I deposited my apprehensions about the Magic of Flipped Classrooms on that blog, and once again got the feeling of that void between People Who KNow and Love Math and … the… [Read more…]
December 24, 2011
Scoop.it linked me to an article about how, if you're anxious about math, if you get your frontal and parietal lobes going you'll do just about as well as that other person who isn't anxious (as long as you're all right-handed -- lefties were excluded) ; I have no idea what kind of site where… [Read more…]
December 21, 2011
Got a little traffic yesterday from a common-core-mathematics “curator” link at “scoop.it.” Reckon I picked the right tags? Wondering today about whether anybody does individualized assessments of people’s math skills beyond sticking a paper or computer in front of ‘em and having them crank out computations or answer word problems (and then making grand assumptions… [Read more…]
November 9, 2011
Yesterday was the day for figuring out right triangle sides. The fearless instructor wrote “Pythagorean Theorem” on the board. One of the students doing very well drily declared that this was one of those things that teachers always explained, but nobody ever really understood. The teacher said that she wasn’t a betting woman, but she… [Read more…]
November 4, 2011
Here are today’s first 600-odd words. I hadn’t thought about math as being a way to build and enhance learning…. oops, better go down and put this *in* It grieved her sorely, she thought… this guy really, really doesn’t like figuring out the area and perimeter of half a circle. Too taxing on the working… [Read more…]
October 23, 2011
I really was all set to do the “minimalist ad” part of my Digital Foundations course (uber-newbie Gimp effort) on the Bicycle, having a Sturmey-Archer generator wheel running over a malformed gas tank… maybe running over a million SUVs… but then I got home and there was a fundraiser letter from The New Community School… [Read more…]
October 15, 2011
One of my favorite parts of teaching beginning swimming was teaching the back float. Back floats are really, really scary and one of the things that keeps people from getting to Advanced Beginner. They can do everything but the back float. (Can you see the connection to math yet?) And… if you’re scared, you tense… [Read more…]
May 8, 2012
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