Carolyn on Connected Muck

email from Carolyn:

Grr. We just did a Connected Muck homework project on box-and-whisker plots. The kid is supposed to look at a huge sheet of data on the length of arrowheads from several different sites (each having maybe 40 arrowheads), then derive box plots from each one of them, then derive two more box plots from new sites and compare them. Then he is supposed to do the same thing all over again for the widths of all the arrowheads, and this time the widths aren’t even in an ordered list! You’d have to be obsessive-compulsive to be willing to do all that by hand.

Do you remember how people were always talking about how adults who were taught math the old-fashioned way couldn’t understand the CMP homework? We-he-hell. I understand exactly what they’re getting after in every one of their assignments; the trouble is the goal is STUPID. What they’re usually getting after is making some connection to calculus or higher math that the kids aren’t ready to take in yet, or they are trying to get kids to think flexibly about a topic they have just then been exposed to, and haven’t learned much less mastered yet. It’s stupid. It flies in the face of cognitive science studies.

3-11-2008

In person, Carolyn always says "We-he-hell." I can hear her saying it now!

We need to beseech Carolyn to come back and write beaucoup posts on Connected Muck and sundry.

Carolyn is in Redmond!

Home of Microsoft and Where's the Math.

When Carolyn told me she & Bernie were moving, I completely forgot that Washington state's math standards are rated F.

That's OK. It's time for Carolyn to get back in the game. When I told her about C. not being able to calculate 10% off a price, she said, "How did that happen?"

Clearly, our Miss Carolyn has been away from the wars too long.


about Carolyn

that settles it

I've always wondered whether there was more autism in Silicon Valley and Redmond.

Just spoke to Carolyn a few minutes ago. She says Microsoft has an "autism benefit." They pay 100% of costs for placement of employees autistic children in ABA programs.

from Carolyn

IMing with Carolyn, who sent me to this site, which she says is unbelievably cool.

But it doesn't work on my Mac!

dang

Carolyn on Everyday Math

I just noticed this comment from Carolyn on rightwingprof's Ricky post:

Ben learned the range, maximum, minimum, mode, and median every year from 1st grade through 4th grade. In the 5th year they learned to divide and so they taught them to calculate the mean. This is still going on in middle school -- but in the curriculum they are using, they do seem to give it less emphasis.

You brought back my Everyday Math experiences with Ben in grade school -- every day he'd come home with something in homework that they hadn't been taught. I remember the day he came home with division problems, when he hadn't been taught long division. It turned out they were intended to do the divisions with calculators -- that left them more time for learning higher-level skills like calculating the max, min, median, etc..

It's a nightmare.

We're almost halfway through Year 2 in Irvington's "Phase 4" accelerated math class & the kids are dropping like flies. (Not quite, but close enough. Kids who managed last year's class pretty well are seeing their grades drop; more tutors are being hired.)

Even Ed is now talking about hiring our Own Private Math Teacher.

Which won't do much good, seeing as how even Our Own Private Math Teacher will have to practice reactive teaching to get Christopher through the tests in one piece.