- From the annals of stupidity: Nook ereader does an auto-replace in some books of “Kindle” with “Nook”. The result: a charming passage in War and Peace about how the soldiers had nookd their fires
- Another Onion classic: power grid restored in India meaning 300 million people can finally go back to the status quo — not having power in the first place.
- In case you missed it, a fascinating thread on Reddit where rapists speak out about “their version” of their crimes. If you’re not triggered by these, I think reading a few is a very valuable exercise in understanding the extent, mindset and brutality of rape — especially in terms of understanding emotionally what you might know factually through “mere” statistics. Condensed summary on this Jezebel post
- The Catholic natural law argument against contraception explained in an accessible lay blog post. Again, particularly valuable in seeing just how fractally wrong the whole idea of natural law is. Natural law has a kind of intellectual and academic credibility that’s not deserved at all.
- Greta Christina on the catch 22 of discrimination
- Two good responses that came out almost at the same time to a New York Times opinion piece that we should stop teaching algebra because it’s too hard and supposedly leads to people dropping out in record numbers (but without any actual records, or evidence).
- Twitter smackdown of the decade. Liz Cheney: “Best Bday cake ever – dropped by our 8 yr old on laundry room floor. Nothing beats upside down cake delivered w/love.”. Larry Nocella: “@Liz_Cheney I can think of one thing that beats upside down cake delivered w/love: not losing a child in your dad’s bogus Iraq war”.
Friday Links (24-Aug-12)
August 24th, 2012
5 comments ↓
Interesting as ever.
The link for Reddit doesn’t work.
But found it, anyway.
By the way, there are several newspaper articles in Sweden claiming that mathematics teaching in high school is irrelevant. Of course, these articles are opinion pieces, written by people with dubious qualifications, such as this one, written by a teacher of Swedish and religion. I know the article you linked and was planning to write a comment. But you preempted me!
Thanks for the link update to Reddit.
Of course, the really sad thing is that the author missed an opportunity to talk about the very same issues properly. Potentially some ideas to teach less algebra and calculus in favour of a little more in other areas of maths would be fine — but accompanied by a little more thought than this one.
Personally, I do think most students do find algebra too hard meaning that we really need to rethink how we teach it. Do you know if any visual approaches have been successful? Example: instead of just teaching the algebraic expansion of a(b+c) or (a+b)^2, teach it first using diagrams of rectangles only and then add the formula as an afterthought…
Yes, of course. Most serious people do see the defects of mathematics teaching in schools. When someone tells me “I hate maths”, “I’m bad in maths”, “I never liked maths” and the like, I usually reply that what they hate is not maths but what the teachers told them what maths is about. It’s like saying “I hate music” when the only exposition to music is, say, through endless musical scores but never listening to music itself!
You are right about the teaching of algebra. I have never taught at that level, but my approach would never be to teach a formula or a set of rules. I would start with examples which would make the formula necessary. In the cases you mentioned, perhaps I would draw a rectangle with side lengths a and a+b, in the first case, and a square with side a+b, in the second.
Sometimes when I teach basic courses, such as introduction to probability, I tell the students that there are no formulas in probability. Just ideas. We then talk about the ideas and discover that it is necessary to introduce some formulas in order to make them concrete.
Anyway, I had to give my quick reply, for whatever it is worth. Back to work now….
[...] in taking the word of a rapist about his/her motivations. At the time, I linked to the thread saying that “reading a few [of these stories[ is a very valuable exercise in understanding the [...]