Archive for the ‘Learning mathematics’ Category

I like the Associated Press article from Contra Costa Times Vocational education back in vogue [no longer available]. School is too academic for the vast majority of students. Learning should come from doing and exploring - and thinking about what happened and why it happened. For a long time now, education has been too much […]

Dallas Morning News education writer Holly Hacker in a recent article National panel pursues formula for excellence in teaching math (link no longer available) describes yet another attempt by the Americans to improve mathematics standards. This time it is a panel of experts appointed by George Dubya and led by Larry Faulkner. Two extremes of […]

In this day and age, shouldn't we reward the student who uses the most appropriate tool to get the job done quickest and most accurately?

Google Trends shows search trends and the relative interest for search terms in different cities, countries and languages. It is a very interesting tool.

It is interesting to compare the spending on education and defence for various countries. Japan spends 7.5 times more on education than on its defence.

I remember when I first started my mathematics teaching career, one of my supervisors said in a meeting of teaching staff: You are all English teachers. This was a defining moment for me. Since then, and after a lot of thinking about it, I felt that every educational situation is about much more than the […]

If you are math-phobic, this would be a scary computer virus. The article is from f-secure.com: "Infected CD-ROM Disks In Circulation". Two separate cases, in which a file originating from a CD-ROM disk had caused a virus infection, were discovered in October and November. In both cases, the involved disks were globally distributed shareware collections. […]

The airline industry were amongst the first to use simulations for learning. At Asian Aerospace today, I asked 3 of the simulator exhibitors to give me a fly, but they politely refused. Damn - it would have been a lot of fun: One of the exhibitors was showing this scenario-based simulation for military training: Learning […]

Quote from a TERC (Technical Education Research Centers) Everybody Counts: A Report to the Nation on the Future of Mathematics Education (1989) Mathematical Sciences Education Board (MSEB) in math teaching: "In reality, no one can teach mathematics. Effective teachers are those who can stimulate students to learn mathematics. Educational research offers compelling evidence that students […]

The Americans continue to worry about the state of their nation - especially what it means for the future with China and India experiencing rapid growth. Some gems from a USA Today article: a Raytheon Corporation survey of 1,000 11-to-13-year-olds released last month found that 84% said they would "rather clean their room, eat their […]