Thoughts on education, mathematics, and more from an 18-year veteran math teacher.
Thank you this Memorial Day...
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Thank you to all the brave men and women who answered the call and paid the ultimate sacrifice and to those with an empty seat at the table because of it.
She loved the snow. If she were alive today, she'd be loving this. But 13 years ago today, her life was taken by a drunken, stoned 19-year-old at a party. Teens drinking and using illegal drugs ended the life of Amanda, only four days before she would have turned 18, only four months before she would have graduated from high school. I knew she was partying. I knew she was doing things she shouldn't have been doing. I chalked them up to a teen phase that she would grow out of. She never go the chance to grow out of it. Many teens believe they're immune from harm. Amanda did. She thought she could handle whatever came at her. It's a real phenomenon, a sense of invincibility, a sense of immortality even. If you're a teen, please read the story of Amanda and realize that you're not invincible, and certainly not immortal. Alcohol and other mind-altering drugs may seem fun. Five minutes before Amanda was shot and killed, five minutes before, she texted a friend and sa...
Some may think the (and students) means I consider student needs secondary behind teachers' needs. Not true. I wrote it like that because most students don't really understand what they NEED most, and what they need most isn't necessarily what they want out of school. The classroom is different today than it was five years ago. When we sent kids home in 2020 and told them to hide under the covers and we'd give them an A...for doing absolutely nothing...for learning absolutely nothing...for nothing...nothing, when that happened, a shift in expectations occurred. And it hasn't shifted back yet, at least not everywhere. Teachers (and students) need that to shift back, and they need it now! Kids got used to having great grades for doing almost no work. Kids got used to having a high GPA without learning. To make things worse, when they came back in the fall of 2020, we sent them home for two weeks at a time when they heard the word Covid in the hallways. Over and over ...
In his 2022 book, The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale , economist John List, the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago , defines the Sunk Cost Fallacy as the idea that one must continue to pursue an idea based on money previously invested. The basic idea is that the money previously spent is already gone and no longer recoverable. As humans we have a tendency to feel like that money is wasted if we decide to abandon the effort we spent that money on, even after the project appears doomed for failure. Too often, people continue to pour good money into a failing effort, because they don't want to waste the bad money they've already dumped into it. Teachers are prone to this same fallacy. The year was 2019. I sat for the ACT for the first time since I was a junior in high school, way back in 1984. Thirty five years had passed since the one and only time I'd ever actually SEEN the test. Ov...
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