Parents and students in the Mountain View school district consider their use of math software called Teach to One to be a failure.

The Mountain View school district apparently budgeted $521,000 to implement and operate this new-fangled math program in two local schools. Had they adequately beta tested the program beforehand, the school district might have discovered that Teach to One teaches math (we’ve found) in a disjointed, erratic, and non-linear fashion that leaves many students baffled and disenchanted with math. The program contains errors in the math it teaches. Parents end up having to teach kids math at home and make up for the program’s deficiencies. And all the while, the math teachers get relegated to “managing the Teach to One program rather than to providing direct instruction” themselves.

Sounds like they would have been much better off to just use http://khanacademy.org or http://schoolyourself.org So why are they using this expensive, seemingly untested service?

Sara Holbrook had two of her poems used on the Texas state assessment tests. She verifies what I thought as a student. The questions are ridiculous. The test makers seem to think that their interpretation of a work is the only interpretation, and that they can read the author's mind and know their intent.

"Texas paid Pearson $500 million bucks to administer the tests". Is that right? Was that for just one year? What else could we do with $500 million?

She mentions a study showing that the results of another standardized test could be predicted pretty well using just three data points about families in the community: the percentage with income over $200K; the percentage in poverty; the percentage with bachelor's degrees. So the standardized test tells you nothing that you can't guess by looking at local incomes and education levels.

What a scam.

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Since there is no proven “right way” to assess and track student learning, the most effective option is to turn this responsibility over to the students. Because learning should stem from intrinsic motivation, teachers can spend time showing students how to track the feedback and their progress from long-term learning experiences. This way students will learn to reflect on their growth, set better goals, and be accountable for their own growth.

-- Starr Sackstein<br> http://hackingassessment.com/<br> http://hackinghomework.com/

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The significance of the "Billie Jean" when it came out was do to the fact that the song was about a person being told that they are some kids father.

Sunil Singh asks us to stop promoting mathematics based on its current applications in business and science. Math is an art that should be enjoyed for its own sake.

This reminded me of A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart. This is a 25-page essay which was later worked into a 140-page book. (And Sunil Singh has read at least one of them. He credits Lockhart in one of the replies.)

It also reminds me of this article on the history of Gaussian elimination and the birth of matrix algebra. Newton's algebra text included instructions for solving systems of equations -- but it didn't have much practical use until later. (Silly word problems are as old as mathematics.)

We should let people learn at their own pace. We should neither rush them, nor hold them back. If they show a talent, then encouraging them to push themselves is fine.

Math isn't for everyone, and that's fine. The same is true of any other subject. We should help people learn what they are interested in learning.

Susan is obvious on how she is bias towards Adnan being not guilty. She constantly is pointing out that Jay lies in his story. She is good at pretending like she is not bias by giving statements with Adnan recorded voice being involved in the situation, but it all leads back her pointing the finger of guilt to Jay. With this being told by Susan it is really convincing that Jay's story has many more holes and things that do not exactly match up. When she brings up the Jay interview involving taping and Jays's pauses in the interview, she really sold me on the idea that Adnan was wrongfully tried. Susan really did successfully used pathos, ethos, logos. Using the logic of the common person, it is very clear that something was wrong in that interview.

This seems to be the author's claim of the purpose of the episode to describe what she is investigating. She seems to want to keep her ethos by not saying anything particularly bias to her opinion to far. This podcast is very similar to Koenig's and has many similarities with how she uses the evidence and how she presents it.

So interesting to see this "realization" included in the K-12 report but not in the HE report. Fostering curiousity, interest, creativity, and ownership. Short jump to an open pedagogy model but pretty unclear that's where this is coming from.

Neil Fraser says Vietnam is doing well with computer science education.

"If grade 5 students in Vietnam are performing at least on par with their grade 11 peers in the USA, what does grade 11 in Vietnam look like? I walked into a high school CS class, again without any advance notice. The class was working on the assignment below (partially translated by their teacher for my benefit afterwards). Given a data file describing a maze with diagonal walls, count the number of enclosed areas, and measure the size of the largest one."

"If given the opportunity all teachers would stop grading their students. You’ll never find a teacher who loves grading papers, projects or tests. In 20 years as a classroom teacher, I heard more complaints about grading than anything else."

"So, if they hate it so much, why don’t teachers stop grading? Because parents, administrators, and bureaucrats won’t let them."

Mark Barnes

"Real gifted education (not gifted programs) involves seeing every student as an individual, finding out what they need, what they want to learn, and what they care about, and then adapting the instructional environment and curriculum to those needs, wants, and passions."

"There’s no reason we can’t do this for everyone, letting gifted students soar without the downsides of selective gifted programs."

Gerald Aungst

There are sixteen lines of verse before Milton reaches his first period. He uses this first sentence to call forth the "Heavenly Muse" (possibly the Holy Spirit) to help him compose his "adventurous song."

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