All Imported Posts
I got an e-mail today describing a change in how parking permits will be given to teachers.
Read this:
Dear JONATHAN,
…. The deal that the union and the city reached yesterday ensures that all on-street and off-street parking spots for schools have been preserved and presents an opportunity for an increase in the number of spots.
Teacher parking has always been a problem in New York City. There has never been enough. In the past, the Department of Education has sought to address this problem by increasing the number of permits without increasing the number of actual spots. This has created problems for neighborhoods and educators. Although I would rather the city not change the process right now, the agreement the UFT reached with the city continues the number of available spots and more closely aligns the number of placards with the number of spots. This brings the decision on who gets the placards to the school level where it belongs…
[OK - that part that I bolded, I think that's the loss - jd]
Under the agreement, the number of permits available to a school will be limited to the number of available spaces currently designated for parking by DOE personnel. The principal and chapter leader in each school will decide the distribution of these on-street and off-street placards, whether through assignment to individual people, pooling of placards for use each day (which could be on a first-come, first-serve basis), or some combination of those two methods. …
Now, all sorts of technical issues come to mind. But leave them aside for now. Did thousands of us just lose our parking permits?
I didn’t know what to do this summer.
I got caught doing lots of work for my school. So I thought about applying to the AFT’s Union Summer program. I figured that I wouldn’t have to plan anything, the work is work I wanted to do, and wherever I was, there would be some relaxing time as well. The other options involved more planning… so I applied. And was accepted. My surprise was ending up in New Orleans, but that was a good surprise.
While there the ten of us (from NY, PA, IL, and CA) did three kinds of work.
- We went door to door with United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO) organizers, talking to (and in some cases signing up) charter school teachers.
- We helped publicize, prepare for, set up, work at, and clean up a big back to school fair (there was food, entertainment, immunizations, an insectarium, school supplies including book bags, and books, all free).
- And we helped clean up, paint, and set up rooms in several New Orleans schools.
We also tooled around New Orleans, taking in some sights, visiting the 9th ward, enjoying good food and entertainment.
Photos below the fold —>
A classroom we helped clean and were helping set up (left), and Larry Carter, UTNO president, at the balloon table at UTNO’s back to school event, August 9.
Lower 9th Ward.
L: A city block, overgrown. R: House, unoccupied, but owner intends to return. The white X, eery, was marked immediately post-Storm as National Guard surveyed for dead people and animals.
L. flood-damaged house, yet to be demolished. R. New house, built higher. (Is the old house part of the foundation?)
Live Oaks Plantation.
As a teacher I am used to going on field trips to museums and sites that have professional staff, National Parks guides, high quality docents, trained interpreters. This plantation had none of that, which was a major disappointment. From a property map on the wall we learned that the plantations were narrow rectangles, with a small amount of Mississippi River frontage each. For shipping, I’d guess.
Grand Isle.
The Last day we ventured down Bayou Lafourche to Grand Isle. On the island, almost everything was built on one story or story-and-a-half stilts. The crab on the beach was dead. And the beach stank, and was thick with aggressive mosquitoes. At sunset there was a weird mix of lights from boats and oil platforms.
When did textbooks start being replaced by particolored monstrosities? I can imagine textbook marketers get excited over the additional appendices, and in-chapter supplements, and case studies showing ‘real world applications’, and highlight boxes, and end of chapter bulleted lists of important points, and outline boxes for each definition, and several figures per page, and that on top of it all each separate feature has its own color for quick identification… but I can’t imagine that readers are nearly as enamored of that clutter.
Remember the good old days when books used one color of ink– black–, and one font family, and because they cost so much, figures didn’t make the cut unless they were actually worth 1000 words? When textbooks didn’t need user manuals? I wasn’t around then, but I learned calculus from a book written in those times, and it outshines any modern calculus textbook I’ve seen with all their educational accoutrements. Likewise Feller far outshines any more modern probability text I’ve come across. Paradoxically, having to work within relatively spartan printing resources helped those authors to focus more on the content of the material than the presentation. It also seems that they were less worried with soft-selling their material: those texts have more gravitas than modern pulpy textbooks.
I wish we could return to those times. Or failing that, I wish I could locate an introductory macroeconomics text that doesn’t induce a migraine after reading several pages.
I started running again on Sunday night. Between sucking down cold air for the past couple of mornings and nights, and leaving my overhead fan on at night to avoid overheating, and thereby having a constant stream of air rushing over my neck, I’m dealing with a sore throat. So, I decided to spend the day at home — theoretically, I can do my work here just as well,and I’ll be in range of all my lozenges and fluids.
Anyhow, I started off my morning by checking out my blog roll backlog. Jam Donaldson did a post on the Black in America series on CNN on her Conversate is not a Word blog. At the time, I wanted to see this, but not having cable, I would have to youtube it, or otherwise stream it, and it’s just not that crucial to me. So I guess I’m a bad person too? I’ve seen several of these types of shows, and I don’t usually learn anything worthwhile, or hear any good suggestions, so I don’t think I’ve missed anything major.
On the humorous side, this was one of the comments on Jam’s post. Is this sarcasm, or is she serious?:
Quesha on 25 Jul 2008 at 2:20 am #
i haven’t watched it…but i did dvr it. i want to check out how we are being portrayed for the white folks.
it would be interesting if the next big program was called “being white in america.” now i know most sitcoms are predominately white, as are “reality” shows. but i want to know how they really live. gimme their secrets. let me see into their houses and their true thoughts and feelings. actually i want to tape them when they don’t know that they are being taped.
Not really. Just some photos I took while down there.
The first is of red ants at a dragonfly feast. (click any photo to open larger, clearer version - or the entire Picassa Album)
The Sunday we were there some of us drove to a plantation west of New Orleans by an hour or so. As we were walking the grounds we heard a loud flutter - an owl. I took a bunch of photos, slowly approaching. The first, you can see his face. then I bunch more. Finally, I got too close. The second was the last I took… he flew off. Plus his head is turned.
Last photo is of some unfortunate New Orleans shrimp…
Today one of the first years studying for his qualification exams asked me a question that he came across on a previous year’s probability qual: If people are removed from couples, what is the expected number of remaining couples?
Give it a shot, then see under the cut for my solution
We spent a couple of minutes reluctantly thinking of a way to phrase this as a counting argument, but being at the coffee shop away from pencil and paper, we were forced to look for *nice* counting arguments, none of which were immediately evident (basically because the events of given couples remaining are not independent). If you can think of any, let me know.
Then, I remembered that a lot of the randomization algorithms I’ve seen use the expectation of indicator functions to calculate some pretty nontrivial averages. Once you make the observation that the expected number of surviving couples can be written as the expectation of a sum of indicator variables, the problem is pretty trivial. There are copies of the same indicator variable, , which is 1 when a couple remains, 0 otherwise. Note that the interdependence of these indicator variables doesn’t matter, because of the linearity of expectation. The probability that a particular couple remains after removals is clearly , so the desired expectation is .
The moral of the story is, when you’re asked to calculate expectations of ‘binary’ events, try to introduce appropriate indicator variables. It’s a powerful tool.
What a privilege to spend time with a good and smart friend. Since we began planning for this day back in January, I’ve been looking forward to it. It was remarkable to see how many traveled a fair distance to attend this one day event.
The day was well crafted by Ewan that included a series of short presentation type deliveries followed by opportunity to discuss and play.
As a group, we decided these were the most important ideas from the morning:
- R & D is for everyone
- Building Shared Awareness
- Remix the curricula
- Balance between structure and flexibility, saturation and overload
- Importance of rules in play
The afternoon was spent exploring gaming and the concept of gaming as a learning tool.
One participant summarized his learning this way, “One mistake I’ve made is I’ve never played with a computer”. This was a telling statement about how we view ourselves as learners.
Lots of ideas were explored and my goal was that folks left willing to continue to innovate, explore, learn and share. Not entirely new but a fresh set of eyes always helps.
Working out a New Game photo: by Ewan Mcintosh
I won’t tell, but she does.
I don’t think so. I don’t think they have a very good sense of distance, of rate, of volume, of area, as expressed in most standard units (traditional or metric).
Can we do anything about this in math class? Does it matter?
Yes, and yes.
It matters in the real world. There’s a piece of literacy that’s missing if I kid knows 5 miles is far, but can’t get more specific. How much is 2 gallons of soup? Adults don’t get square feet. And move to metric in the US, and lots of people are lost. We encounter the terms daily. We should understand how much, how far, how long, how fast, in terms that make sense.
And it matters in math class. All those annoying word problems, in context, with answers in cubic feet or meters per second. Shouldn’t kiddies know if their answers make sense? What good is the context if they don’t sense the scale?
Teach them to convert
So there’s two pieces here. There are a number of ways to convert. I like what I call factor-label. Example. I want to know how fast 100 meters in 9.69 seconds is in miles per hour. Look at this:
Now, ‘cancel’ the units (it’s not really math, but it works) as if we were canceling common factors in fractions, multiply across, and presto: 23 point something miles per hour (the bad 8:5 conversion limits my significant digits, but no matter. I can’t perceive the difference between 23 and 24 mph. Does 23.2 vs 23.3 really matter to the kids?)
There’s other ways to convert units, but the kids must be armed with some tool.
Teach them human-scale reference units
Miles per hour. Sounds so natural. Rolls off the tongue. But I am fairly confident that most of my students don’t have a good grasp of how fast 2 mph, 10 mph, 20 mph, 50 mph, 100 mph, etc, really are.
Time is okay, but it is worth teaching them to count out seconds. Really.
Distance is tougher. Little distances? Put rulers in front of them. Ask kids to show with their fingers, for example, 3 inches, 2 centimeters, one foot, 5 centimeters, one inch. Drill it a little here and there. They will get better, but they need practice. From feet, once they are down, get some estimates of heights of ceilings, widths of classrooms, lengths of hallways. Estimate, measure, estimate again. They will get better.
Bigger distances? In New York I use blocks (I specify short Manhattan blocks). Twenty blocks (approximately) make a mile. Reexpress them in meters, in kilometers, in feet, in yards. But let “block” be a good unit, one that they can refer back to.
Area? Estimate, measure and multiply, estimate more. Classrooms. Desktops. Sheet of paper. The classroom makes a good standard, human-scale unit.
Volume. You know, this is tough. I fall back on liters (thank you Coke!), but I don’t work much with it. Do the volume of the teacher’s desk, shock them with the answer, and that’s pretty much it. It helps if they have an inch cube or a foot cube in front of them. The centimeter cube is too small and they don’t ‘feel’ the relationship. I haven’t seen a meter cube, but I think it would be too big. Textbook volume wouldn’t be bad, but it’s different for each book, and the cover can throw things off.
Rate. That’s the big one. Miles per hour is foreign. I start with seconds per block. We estimate normal walk, slow walk, brisk walk, run, bicycle/skates/skateboard, slow car, fast car, and then take the reciprocal and convert to miles per hour. Can do kph, too. And meters per second. Seconds and parts of minutes they get. Blocks they learn. And that gives them something to hang their hats on for the harder (but more common) units.
This is about an argument about nothing.
A respected math columnist went after teachers for saying that multiplication is repeated addition, but it turns out that he doesn’t know if many teachers do this. I called him on it. And his response came up short.
Background
Yup. One more Devlin post. Synopsis so far for those of you who weren’t watching the whole multiplication vs repeated addition follies.
Keith Devlin, back last Fall, wishes that he could stop teachers from saying multiplication is repeated addition. He elaborates, big time, in “It Ain’t No Repeated Addition” in July. Denise, who teaches math, thinks about it, and asks, then how should we teach multiplication? That’s when the comments get a bit out of hand. Denise posts again. Some other people post. Even I post.
Mostly the posters and commenters were yelling and screaming about whether or not multiplication is repeated addition. In all of this, the question that matters - how should we teach, was pretty much buried.
Question pops up
Fast forward a few days. I am in New Orleans, setting up classrooms. And I stop to skim a variety of elementary and middle school math texts. And I don’t find the error Devlin is chasing. Instead I find books discussing and introducing multiple meanings of mathematics.
Could there be some texts that say Repeated Addition = Multiplication? Sure. But my unscientific sample didn’t find them. Could some teachers ignore the texts and teach Repeated Addition = Multiplication. I know that some do. But I don’t really know if it is very many. So I wondered out loud if Devlin was jousting with a straw man.
Devlin’s rebuttal
His recent column, he’s making one more go of it, attempts to rebut 6 arguments. It is longer because he will “be quoting from some of the leading mathematics education scholars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries…”
But when he comes to my arguments, um, no. He provides next to nothing. There is one British ed journal article that says teaching multiplication as repeated addition is a problem (from ten years ago, directed to British national policy, looks like the research was a small study in London.)
And his coup de grace? Studies (one British, one Canadian) that show adults, when asked to define multiplication, respond with repeated addition.
(To look for yourself, find the heading “The Problem Is WIdespread” about three quarters of the way down)
Now, think for a moment. Of the various models we may use in teaching multiplication, isn’t repeated addition the strongest? Isn’t that exactly what you would expect an adult, 15 or 30 years removed from grade school to recall first? They remembered what we should expect them to remember - but that doesn’t tell us what they were taught.
Could he have cited something else? Yup. If he found state or national standards telling teachers to teach RA = M, but I don’t think they exist. If he had found studies that said, “teachers do this a lot”… If he could show us texts that do the same… maybe they are there. Josh at TextSavvy might know?
Two things went wrong here.
Like the engineer who comes to a school knowing math but not knowing how to teach it, Keith Devlin arrived to a topic (math ed) that he remembers. He was a student. And he probably remembers better than most. But we are talking memories, not current knowledge here.
And second. Something I recognize. Stubbornness. Look how well he writes. Pick any other column. Pick his recent interview. There’s intellect, there’s quality of expression. He hasn’t poorly defended his position because he argues poorly; it’s just stubbornness without facts supporting it.
I’d be interested in recommendations about multiplication should be taught, but as for this topic, I think this will be my last post.
That’s #39 - hosted by It’s the Thought that Counts. Clever name, huh?
It’s a new blog to me. The authors are A (computer science) and Z (physics). Subtitle: “critical analysis and interesting ideas.” Self-description of content: “commentary on all manner of topics — politics, society, science, morality, religion, and whatever else comes to mind.” So, the writing’s good. While your looking at the Carnival, and trying the puzzle, you might take an extra peek around.
Puzzle? Yup. Just for fun, he (she? they?) leads off with a combinatorial poser (39 people sitting around a circular table, none in the right place…) (Looks combinatorial, but might bend quicker to algebra).
Reminds me of this old problem, that appears never to have gotten a general solution on this blog. I’ll repost, soon.
As far as old white guys go, Bill Moyers is one of my favorites.
Question of the day: communism is supposed to be all about workers’ rights, right? My question is, what would happen if the soi-disant ‘communist’ Chinese government encouraged (or at least allowed) the formation of labour unions?
Schools can be chartered (ugh). Companies can be chartered. Boats can be chartered. Helicopters can be chartered. Flights can be chartered. Companies can be chartered.
A course can be charted. Land can be charted. Water can be charted. The skies can be charted.
These are different words. A chart is a map. To chart something is to make a map of it. Mapped land. A mapped out course. By extension, to chart can mean to make a plan. Uncharted means unmapped or unplanned.
A charter is a contract, a guarantee of rights, something like a constitution for a club or company, or a lease of a vessel (boat, helicopter, airplane, etc). Unchartered means unleased, or operating without a charter (constitution) or without a charter (grant of rights).
Waters can be uncharted. That means unmapped.
A boat can be unchartered. That means unleased.
But unchartered waters? Huh? Can you make sense of that?
I wince when I hear my president mangle the phrases together. But it showed up in today’s Jay Cost analysis of the election. And a google search reveals one hit for the mangled version for every ten hits for the one that makes sense. Ugh. Don’t we think about what the words mean?
(is this called a malapropism?)
A nice addition to the links here: f(t) is a new (from July) high school math teacher blog. Kate teaches in Syracuse, New York. (I’ve been there!)
So far she’s posted problems, lesson ideas, and a little bit about her work. Nicely written, easy to read.
Best of luck!
Not summer reading. Summer books. Summer reading has been a little more than half of Mike and Sue Klonsky’s small schools book, and a few slow chapters of First Farmers, The Origins of Agricultural Society (which may be just a tad too technical for me, but it is fascinating when I force myself to struggle with it). I also snagged a copy of The Atlas of Changing South Africa (revised 2001, I once skimmed the original 1994 edition), but I have more dipped in to read maps than actually read text.
Ah, but summer books! I picked up a buttload of birthday presents last month (half a year late on the pickup):
- Bad Blood (Linda Fairstein). I have no idea what it is, but she was a District Attorney here in New York? I think I have to read this.
- Phillip’s Atlas of World History. For the collection. I have quite a few old maps and atlases, and current atlases, and historical atlases. And this one is new to me (not just the binding, the individual maps as well.
- A People’s History of American Empire (Howard Zinn). Nope, I didn’t already have this. I will dip into it here and there, but I don’t plan to read it straight through.
- cartographica extraordinaire. The Historical Map Transformed. (Rumsey and Punt) Wow. True coffee table book. The publisher, ESRI, is a major GIS vendor. This 13″ x 14″ hardcover blends historical maps with modern data via GIS and related computer mapping. The results are gorgeous. Stunning.
(other late-pickup presents were a set of wooden dominoes, hetian rose — it’s a tea, but what is it? who knows? — and two teas, one white, one green, labeled only in Chinese)
My reading to do list:
- Read Bad Blood
- Finish Collapse (I got done with the fun stuff, but bogged down in Jared Diamond’s conclusions)
- Finish Klonsky, and write a review.
- Finish First Farmers? Nah, I think I will restart next summer. Or over a vacation.
- I saw a review in The New Yorker for a new book called Traffic - Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt . I think I want to read it.
- Find and read a readable math book (read no math this summer. Boo. Hiss. Maybe H.A. Thurston’s The Number System?)
WordPress kindly includes all kinds of stats for us bloggers. I like the search engine stats. They show that most people come looking for salary info, and then by mistake (circus tents, dice, sea monsters), and finally for NYC public school info or for math problems and math ed related discussion.
I don’t know if the numbers are right, but they are consistent. Here are the top searches from today, so far:
nyc teacher salary
6
.
nyc board of education pay chart
4
nyc principal salary schedule
3
yonkers public school teacher salaries
3
how many squares are there in a chessboa
3
nova scotia teachers salary scale
2
more below fold:
charter school teacher’s salary scale
2
integrated algebra 9th grade pacing math
2
new york public school pay scale
2
step by step math b regent jan 2006
2
new york city public schools paraprofess
2
how many rectangles in a chess borad
2
fordham leadership academy for business
2
new york city teacher salary
2
salary steps for board of education teac
2
nyc public school teacher salaries
2
how many squares on a chessboard? math
2
city data forum westchester teacher sala
2
teacher salary bergen county nj
2
new york school salary schedule
2
nyc doe salary differentials
I finally got the sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora yesterday; I was so excited about it finally being available in paperback, and so enamored of its prequel, that I picked it up without even reading the blurb. Then I got home, read the blurb, and steeled myself for a more typical novel about the ‘larcenous exploits of a band of daring thieves’:.
The Lies of Locke Lamora followed some momentuous events in the lives of a band of young priests, recruited from among the most talented and incorrigible of the orphans of the city of Camorr, whose rather unorthodox sacrament is thievery. The sequel follows the surviving priests, who have fled to another city, and according to the blurb, is about their attempt to swindle from the most reknown of the city’s gambling houses, a place where those caught cheating are guaranteed a swift, sure death.
The twist is that someone knows about their background and their plot, and is out to ‘make them pay for their sins’… Granted, his first book was off the hook, so Lynch could probably breathe new life into the old troupe of the gentlemen rogues, but if this was truly as deep as the book got, the result would definitely not be anywhere near as delicious as The Lies of Locke Lamora.
Luckily, it turns out that the sin being referred to is one from The Lies of Locke Lamora. Without giving too much away, before they fled the city, they avenged themselves on a bondsmage who killed some of their friends. They would have liked to kill him, but the Bondsmagi are a unique force in their world: they maintain a monopoly on magical ability by killing mages who attempt independent practice; their magic grants them some terrible abilities, like being able to voodoo puppet anyone whose name they know. Consequently, they can do what they will when they will without fear of retribution– the murder of a bondsmage led to the casual destruction of a city once– and will do pretty much anything for anyone who can afford their services.
Apparently, the Bondsmagi don’t like what was done to one of their own … So, an exciting premise. One as puzzling as that of the prequel: how can they possibly survive against the Bondsmagi?
The City University of New York and the Professional Staff Congress (AFT Local 2334) reached a tentative contract settlement. The proposal gives back very little, makes some gains, but failed to make some key gains for adjuncts and part-timers.
The Delegate Assembly recommended the agreement by 92-13-7 (yes-no-abstentions), but in the immediate discussion afterwards the PSC leadership agreed to open a “contract bulletin” where views of some delegates could be shared.
Over thirty delegates responded with statements of up to 500 words. You can read them all here. You can read a summary of the contract proposal here.
Barbara Bowen is the president of the PSC. Sándor John is the most outspoken opponent of the agreement. Alex Vitale wrote a statement that captures the complexity of the issue.
