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Struggle Bus
Once a student emailed me with the subject line, “Help, I’m on the struggle bus…” I laughed so hard that bacon came out my nose. I then drew a struggle bus. A student then scanned it into Illustrator and put our class motto on it. T-shirts were then made and worn regularly.
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What’s Crazy?
You administer a valid summative exam. It had every standard on it with an even keel attempt at assessing the student’s ability. The student gets a 18/28. The student is immediately driven into the depths of despair over their ‘D’ You then tell them the test has been curved down to 22-points. The student is [...]
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Bacon-Wrapped Lessons Workshops: The Saltiest PD Ever
My boss over at IowaTransformED and I created Bacon-Wrapped Lessons in order to meet PD needs that weren’t getting met. That’s in fact my entire job over there, and what a sweet job it is: Find problems that Iowa’s teachers are dealing with; fix them. Sooooo, we’d like to invite any of you who are [...]
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Help! I’ve Taught Traditional and I Can’t Get PBL!
This post was written by a the unflappable Leif Segen, who teaches in central Iowa. I try to be honest with my students. When I hear their lamentations of the meaninglessness of their experiences in school, I admit the parallels between school and prison. They’re quick to say, “You get it!” That said, I’m in [...]
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How I Teach Calculus: A Comedy – Man v. Food
I have to get this down before I forget. A discussion of what it means to be exponential (which colloquially is beyond misunderstood and bordering on abused) led to a discussion of what it means to grow because you’re growing. Does gravity work this way? They asked. Thankfully not. You don’t fall faster because you’re [...]
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Thanks, The Atlantic?
So, The Atlantic posted this: That chart is probably obvious to most of us, especially those of us in the Math Ed Twitterblogopinosphere. But here’s where things gets stupid: These numbers alone aren’t an open and shut case against teaching complex math to most high school students. But they do suggest that what we teach [...]
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WTF FIJI WATER?
You know something is crazypants when you get a terrible feeling in your gut just looking at the marketing as you stand in a CVS. You know something is really really crazywaders when you go to their website and feel lulled by their corporate concern for the every man. FIJI Water is just such a [...]
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Processing 3D Camera-Vector Sandbox
Giving students a sandbox of code and having them play around is really fun for me. They get to see some basics in action (the stuff I did), and I get to see what crazy ideas they come up with. Welcome to Explore Planets. The code allows you to fly the camera around a world [...]
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Venn Curriculum
Just a few quick thoughts: As 4-year schools push remediation courses (like whatever-the-bananagrams “college algebra” means) down onto online “institutions” and community colleges, do they realize they’re asking for a disruption of their other course offerings as well? As more colleges, with their attractive open schedules and other freedoms, offer these remediation courses, high schoolers [...]
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Object-Oriented Programming: An Intro for the Procedurally Minded
Learning to program is mystical to most people. It’s like putting your hand into a running engine block and not getting burned or mangled. Worst of all, programming can come across as arbitrary and fickle. Those of us that learned to program in Java probably remember thinking thoughts like “public? static? wtf? I just want [...]