kitchen table math, the sequel: Branching Out

Monday, April 18, 2011

Branching Out

In a completely throwaway gag line, football writer (and high school math teacher) Mike Tanier makes a mocking reference to Everyday Math in his offseason column.

I could never be a documentary cameraman. At one point in Sunday's episode of Human Planet (a BBC/Discovery Channel production in the Planet Earth vein) a father takes his two children on a five-day hike along the frozen Zanskar River in Northern India so they can attend a boarding school. The river slowly melts during their journey. At one point, the 11-year-old daughter must crawl along a tiny, cracking ice ledge over the rushing, freezing waters.

...With the poor girl's luck, the school she risked her life to attend just adopted the Everyday Math curriculum, making the whole trip worthless.


Football Outsiders is largely a sabrmetrics site, so the readership is more numerate than average. Still, it warms my heart to see Everyday Math mocked so casually outside of the usual context. I had been planning a post linking Bill Walsh to practicing to mastery, so I guess this serves as a nice segue.

4 comments:

Catherine Johnson said...

oh my gosh --- that is amazing!

Great find.

Catherine Johnson said...

Wonder how he feels about Fountas & Pinnell?

Cassandra said...

Few parents know about Fountas & Pinnell, because "Fountas & Pinnell HomeLinks" do not arrive home via backpacks. I had to ask my child's classroom teacher to learn the name of the sourcebook for teaching reading. I soon discovered that there's nothing like reading the F&P Guided Reading book to get the full flavor of the mis-instruction in beginning reading that is going on around the country.

Cassandra said...

Oops, I meant to cut "to learn" out of the second sentence.