are parents rational?

Steve H. needs to hie himself over to Dan Willingham's blog right this minute and share his wit and wisdom re: parents and their ability to think as clearly as a person who has obtained a professional administrative services credential.  

the world is far more beautiful

"The universe is a far more beautiful and elegant place than any of us can imagine. We must be ready and able to both construct and use mathematics to help explain ever more subtle aspects of it, and the phrase `I will never use it' should be deleted from our students' vocabularies."

Jim Milgram

making connections

from "nowthatshockey" on Beyond TERC:

Mathematical reasoning does not lie in the connection of mathematics to the real world, but in the connection within mathematics.

How mathematics is applied is its connection to your world.

4-15-2007

making connections
help desk

education quotes

Today I am going to do something different. Here are some quotes from around the education blogosphere.

"Today, educators are better at making excuses and inventing phony disabilities than they are at making educated students." D-EdReckoning

"If we, as teachers, explore the notion of letting go the past and our fear of lost autonomy - in a profession which just might be clinging too tightly to the ideal of individuality for employees over the general welfare/benefit of its consumers - what might we accomplish?" RedKudu

"Public education: Turning our kids into babbling idiots, one by one." Right Wing Professor

"After having done the work to earn a Masters a few years ago, and never hearing about Direct Instruction once during that process, while having some other stuff thrown at me that was pure crap, this makes me a little angry." Dennis Fermoyle

"It’s hard to build on your knowledge if you don’t know much." Joanne Jacobs

"Constructivism is to education what creationism is to science." Instructivist

Fridays education quotes

Educated parents are usually smart enough not rely on the education system to educate their kids.

Homework helps reinforce what the kids didn't learn in school.

Good schools are a bridge to success, bad schools are an obstacle course.

"Harvard is the storehouse of knowledge because the freshman bring so much in and the graduates take so little out." Charles Eliot

"In the first place God made idiots. That was for practice; then he made school boards." Mark Twain

more education quotes

Enrichment is the speed bump of education. It slows down the fast learners just enough for everyone else to catch up.

Our school system ensures that half the kids learn half the material half the time.

The only true accountability in education is at roll call.

Lowering standards is more cost effective than raising performance.

Entry from the Educators Thesaurus:

Main Entry: research
Part of Speech: noun
Synonyms: opinion, conjecture, assumption, imagining, wishful thinking

Education schools scientific method:

1. Draw conclusion
2. Perform experiment
3. Analyze data
4. Eliminate contradicting data
5. Reanalyze data
6. Eliminate the rest of the data
7. Invent data
8. Publish conclusion

Note: Steps 2 - 7 are optional

If we really wanted No Child Left Behind, we would stop teaching everyone.

Diversity ensures that everyone is different in the same way.

wit and wisdom

We can't trust parents to make decisions about educating their kids. They might screw it up. We need ed schools to really screw it up properly.

today's quotation

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Flannery O'Connor

today's quote

Here's today's ironic education quote.

Alice Treuth said it's fun to work on laptops in her fourth-grade class at St. Francis de Sales Catholic School because she doesn't have to write.

Sigh.

An even more ironic update:

On the other side of the class, Michael Vogel raised his hand for help. A red squiggly line appeared under a word on his screen indication to Vogel that what he typed was incorrect.

"Why is it wrong?" Vogel asked [the teacher].