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Interesting "stuff"
IainB:
I missed it whilst I was sleeping, but the US Debt Clock carries the news that the US is now in uncharted waters, due to the US National Debt - as tracked by the US Debt Clock - having exceeded $19 trillion.
I would presume/suppose that there is no way back to get out of this condition, should anyone want to try.
We are living in interesting times...
40hz:
When someone first showed this to me, I thought it was a joke.
Unfortunately, it's not a joke. This is how they're "teaching" math using something called the 'common core' approach.
Isn't that interesting? I don't think you could have gotten more of a WTF??? reaction out of me if you tried. :tellme:
And this is the even funnier part. Here we have a half incoherent presentation by a gentleman by the name of Dr. Raj Shah of the Math Plus Academy who will "explain" to us why this method is better than the way math was traditionally taught in schools. (Hint: it's because the traditional way didn't work for everybody, and that was making some students think they couldn't do math - and were feeling bad about themselves because of it. Horrors! We can't have students ever feeling bad about themselves. It's simply "not done" in this our more enlightened (except for the waterboarding) society.)
Those of us old enough tor remember "The New Math" back in the '60s - or unfortunate to have suffered with it in a classroom - will probably hear and see a lot in this presentation they remember. It's that old whine in a new bottle.
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.
When change is absolute there remains no being to improve
and no direction is set for possible improvement:
and when experience is not retained, as among savages,
infancy is perpetual.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - Santayana
Arizona Hot:
Interesting "stuff"
The best part is, not only do the folks at M&A care about art and beauty and the planet - and actually DO something about it - they know how to throw a kick-ass party. Past events have featured architectural towers of food and beer custom-brewed just for the occasion, and the New Year's Eve fete celebrating the end of the golden era was equally gourmet. There was a fountain of chocolate that had the couple kids in attendance going majorly ga-ga over their Willy Wonka fantasies come to life, while the adults sipped fine champagne and gobbled garlicky escargot in a very civilized fashion until the whole kid thing became totally contagious...and...Voila! Chocolate-snail fondue! Would you believe it was actually quite tasty?
CHOCOLATE-COVERED SNAILS AND OTHER NEW YEAR'S DELIGHTS
IainB:
As a parent, I find those "Common Core" critical videos somewhat disquieting.
I looked at some others that were linked/associated with them in YouTube, and the one that helped me make sense of it all was the description of how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pumped and is pumping billions of dollars into what seems to be a half-baked bureaucratic approach to education, driven by some kind of a high-sounding slogan of "No child left behind" ideology, or something. As Deming pointed out, an ethos based on slogans can be devastating in its destructive consequences in any process, and is an example of irrational behaviour - "Action that is not based on sound theory is irrational by definition". Combine that with money/power and you find a motivation for almost anything stupid or evil that mankind has done or is doing around the globe. So Common Core would seem to be in the mix there.
The ideology is bankrupt. The reality would seem to be that we are NOT all born equal in the mental faculties department, and some people will inevitably start to lag behind from the moment of their birth, as HJ Eysenck pretty much established, there being a relatively large distribution of IQs in any given population sample, being arranged about a relatively classic bell curve of a normal distribution with the notional average of 100.
Let's not forget here that IQ tests measure not intelligence per se but a person's ability to answer the artificial IQ tests devised by unscientific psychologists, who suffer from their own human fallibilities, so they will probably only get things partly right at best - with the odd lucky exception, I suppose.
Core Curriculum represents a change, and, good or bad, the majority tend to resist a change. It seems to me that the point made in some of the videos about Core Curriculum math laboriously teaching understanding of how and why basic math calculations are performed was not shown as a necessary preliminary transitional state before teaching efficient calculation methods/algorithms. So be careful not to throw out the baby with the bath water.
When it comes to helping children to become speedy calculators, I think nobody has yet improved on the Trachtenberg speed system of basic math, yet most teachers would not even know what that is and I don't know of any school that teaches it. The fact seems to be that when we calculate (using mental arithmetic), we do it using learned mental algorithms or "tricks", and whilst we are doing it we are not actually really thinking per se about what we are doing. Research has shown fairly conclusively that we can focus on only one mental process at a time.
That's the problem facing educators. To establish its worth, each new approach is essentially going to have to be tested on an unsuspecting population, and only time will tell whether it was better or worse than the last/previous experiment. Kids are the guinea-pigs in all of this. This is the research in prototype.
Using this unresearched hit-or-miss (QED) methodology inappropriately with a secondary objective of also determining some measure of teachers' efficacy/performance as teachers is likely to be a double fail. It will be demoralising, intimidating and likely to cause unintended consequences and sub-optimal coping behaviours as the beleaguered teachers desperately struggle to work the system such as it gets them the best results for their own performance measure.
I predict outcomes of fraud, incompetence and disaster for the teachers and the luckless students who are to be compulsorily afflicted with this experiment. The quality of educational output will necessarily suffer in all of this. One probably only needs to look at India's educational system for a comparison.
Arizona Hot:
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This could only happen in India.
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