Category Archives: Curriculum – Math

American Teens Achieve Mediocrity In Financial Literacy, Local math & reading background

Michelle Hackman:

When it comes to financial literacy around the world, American teens are middling.

The United States may fuel the world’s largest economy and operate its most robust financial system. But compared to the financial prowess of teenagers in 17 other countries, U.S. teens come off downright mediocre.

That’s according to a new study published Wednesday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development as part of its Program for International Student Assessment, conducted once every three years.

The OECD, a 34-nation organization based in Paris, surveyed 15-year-old students in 13 member nations and five other nations throughout 2012 to ascertain their level of familiarity with the financial system as they neared adulthood.

“Finance is part of everyday life for many 15-year-olds, who are already consumers of financial services, such as bank accounts,” the report said. “As they near the end of compulsory education, students will face complex and challenging financial choices, including whether to join the labor market or continue with formal education and, if so, how to finance such study.”

Unfortunately, this is unsurprising. Read two useful articles on local math difficulties and long term disastrous reading results.

The OECD report.

Building a Community for High Schoolers Who Code

Avi Romanoff:

Last September, the day before PennApps 2013f, a 48-hour, 1,000+ student hackathon at the University of Pennsylvania, I created a Facebook Group called “PennApps HS Hackers” for the dozen or so high school students who were also attending the event.

If the words “hacker” and “hackathon” evoke mental images of scary-looking criminals breaking into computers, I can assure you we’re nothing like that. Hackers, in the original spirit of the term, are programmers and designers who use technology to build things — not destroy things. Hackathons are events where hackers of all kinds come together to collaborate on new projects and compete for prizes, often on college campuses.

Turns out I picked an incredible time to start a community — the hackathon scene exploded in rhythm with my Facebook Group. In the course of a school year, the group would grow to include high schoolers from all 50 states and more than a dozen countries, organizers from nearly every major U.S. college hackathon, founders of high school hackathons and hacker meetups, and even the president of the well-known startup incubator, Y Combinator.

A Billionaire Mathematician’s Life of Ferocious Curiosity

William Broad:

James H. Simons likes to play against type. He is a billionaire star of mathematics and private investment who often wins praise for his financial gifts to scientific research and programs to get children hooked on math.

But in his Manhattan office, high atop a Fifth Avenue building in the Flatiron district, he’s quick to tell of his career failings.

He was forgetful. He was demoted. He found out the hard way that he was terrible at programming computers. “I’d keep forgetting the notation,” Dr. Simons said. “I couldn’t write programs to save my life.”

After that, he was fired.

Conversations on the Rifle Range 3: The Broom in the Store Room, Multiple Answers, and the Rituals of Groupthink – See more at: http://oilf.blogspot.com/2014/07/conversations-on-rifle-range-3-broom-in.html#sthash.y48Wbg1F.dpuf

Barr Garelick, via a kind email:

I believe strongly in how math should be taught, and even more strongly in how math should not be taught. Nevertheless, when I am involved in teaching it as I believe it should be taught, I feel vaguely guilty, as if I am doing something against the rules and perhaps even wrong. That’s how groupthink works. It is an acculturation process.

I am reminded of a job I had as a nighttime janitor at the University of Michigan Medical School the summer between my sophomore and junior years. The janitors put up with the college kids who worked with them, but they also could give us a hard time. On my first day, the supervisor told me to get a broom from the store room. This was an initiation rite. No matter which broom I laid a hand on, someone piped up “That’s mine!” In fact all the brooms had been claimed except one which belonged to someone who was not there. That one was off limits as well, but the supervisor finally said with an air of reluctance, “Well you may as well use that one. He probably won’t be coming back.” And true enough, he never did and the broom was mine. Several weeks later, another “new guy” joined the ranks and he was told to find a broom. Though I had found this initiation procedure ridiculous, when the new guy put a hand on my broom, to my horror I heard my voice booming “THAT’S MINE!”

My algebra classes used a book published by Holt (referred to as Holt Algebra). The team of authors include a math professor (Dr. Edward Berger) and a math reformer (Steven Leinwand). The book is fairly traditional, as evidenced by something the math department chair had said during the teacher workday I talked about earlier. Sally, the person from the District office had been telling us about the Common Core approach to teaching math—more open ended problems, more discussion, more working in groups, more problems that have multiple right answers. The math department chair brought up the point that it’s hard to do all this because the books they use just don’t have those types of problems in them. “Most of the problems can only be solved one way,” he lamented.

Nevertheless, the book does cater to some of the current groupthink trends in math education. When teaching the first unit for the first year Algebra 1 course, I wanted to focus on how to express certain English statements in algebraic symbols; for example, “4 less than a certain number” can be written as x – 4. While Holt Algebra does do this, it tends to focus more on the other way around—taking an algebraic expression such as 4/x and translating it into English. While most algebra books do this (as did mine from 50 years ago), the good ones tend to focus more on going from English to algebra. Holt Algebra spends more time going from algebra to English. In addition, it asks students to find two ways of expressing it, thus satisfying the “more than one way to solve a problem” motif that supposedly builds “deep understanding”.

“How are we supposed to find two ways to say this? What does this mean?” a girl named Elisa in my 6th period class asked me. She had told me on the first day that she was bad in math and requested to sit in front so she could see better and not be distracted.

“How would you say 4/x in words?” I asked. No answer. “What are you doing with the 4? Multiplying by x? Dividing by x?”

“Oh, dividing,” she said. “OK, so ‘4 divided by x’?”

At Sea in a Deluge of Data

Alison J. Head and John Wihbey:

This spring, more college students than ever received baccalaureate degrees, and their career prospects are brighter than they were for last year’s graduates.

Employers responding to this year’s National Association of Colleges and Employers’ “Job Outlook 2014 Survey” said they planned to increase entry-level hiring by almost 8 percent. But what they may not realize is that these seemingly techno-savvy new hires could be missing some basic yet vital research skills.

It’s a problem that we found after interviewing 23 people in charge of hiring at leading employers like Microsoft, KPMG, Nationwide Insurance, the Smithsonian, and the FBI. This research was part of a federally funded study for Project Information Literacy, a national study about how today’s college students find and use information.

Nearly all of the employers said they expected candidates, whatever their field, to be able to search online, a given for a generation born into the Internet world. But they also expected job candidates to be patient and persistent researchers and to be able to retrieve information in a variety of formats, identify patterns within an array of sources, and dive deeply into source material.

“We are spending billions of dollars in our K-12 system and these kids ought to be able to meet these standards”

Scott Rothschild:

In the world of remedial education, Shine Adams, a Kansas University student, is the exception rather than the rule.

Adams, 38, dropped out of high school, worked for several years and then decided he needed to get his diploma and then a college degree.

Adams got his GED, then, using remedial courses, passed several math classes to satisfy his math requirement and is now working on a degree in social work.

He said he couldn’t have gotten where he is without remedial courses.

But for most students, the remedial courses, sometimes referred to as developmental education, aren’t working.

“We need to do things differently,” said Susan Fish, state director of adult education at the Kansas Board of Regents.

In Kansas, 42 percent of first-time students in two-year colleges and 16 percent in public, four-year colleges enroll in at least one remedial course.

Most students who enroll in remedial courses do not graduate.

State officials say the statistics are cause for alarm as they try to increase the number of people with degrees to meet workforce demands.

“We are spending billions of dollars in our K-12 system and these kids ought to be able to meet these standards. We need to be more honest with ourselves,” said Kansas Board of Regents Chairman Kenny Wilk.

A new report recommends some targeted funding increases and program changes.

The Developmental Education report was put together over the past year by regents staff and leaders at community colleges, four-year colleges and technical colleges.

Remedial Education: Know a Problem to Fix It; Revisiting Madison’s Math Task Force

Inside Higher Education

Remedial education is getting plenty of attention from state lawmakers. Yet there is little consistency in how states track students’ college preparedness and subsequent progress through remedial coursework.

That’s the central finding of a new report from the Education Commission of the States. The education policy think tank also released a companion report today that takes a first crack at creating a national “framework” for how to measure and report on remediation.

Via Noel Radomski.

Madison’s controversial use of reform Math curricula lead to the creation of a task force six years ago. I wonder if anything has changed?

“And the dream at Berkeley is to do social work and then go work for Google or Facebook”

Conor Freidersdorf:

The Chancellor of UC Berkeley, Nicholas Dirks, formerly spent years as a professor at Columbia University. In an Aspen Ideas Festival* panel on the state of the humanities, he summed up the difference between Ivy Leaguers in New York City and graduates of the institution he now runs. “You know, the tradition at Columbia is that you read Aristotle and then you go to Goldman Sachs,” he said. “And the dream at Berkeley is to do social work and then go work for Google or Facebook.”

He added, “All the stereotypes have a lot of truth to them. What I do find interesting is that at Berkeley, about 70 percent of students are taking some computer science across the curriculum. And this, I think, is a national phenomenon. At Stanford I think it’s 90 percent, but that’s Stanford. But we’re actually trying to introduce data science and data analytics into the core arts and sciences curriculum.”

He also noted the decline in English majors at his rival institution:

The Two Cultures of Mathematics

WT Gowers:

In his famous Rede lecture of 1959, entitled “The Two Cultures”, C. P. Snow argued that the lack of communication between the humanities and the sciences was very harmful, and he particularly criticized those working in the humanities for their lack of understand- ing of science. One of the most memorable passages draws attention to a lack of symmetry which still exists, in a milder form, forty years later:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?

I would like to argue that a similar sociological phenomenon can be observed within pure mathematics, and that this is not an entirely healthy state of affairs.

How a Russian mathematician constructed a decision tree – by hand – to solve a medical problem

MathML:

Here’s an excerpt from Love and Math, a book by Edward Frenkel. The author writes about mathematics and his career. One of the stories is about how during his studies in the 80s he built a decision tree to help with kidney transplants. There was no machine to learn from data so humans had to do the work.

The third, and last, medical project I worked on was the most interesting one for me. A young doctor, Sergei Arutyunyan – who also needed help to analyze his data for a thesis – and I had a great rapport. He was working with patients whose immune systems were rejecting transplanted kidneys. In such situation the doctor has to make a quick decision whether to fight for the kidney or remove it, with far-reaching consequences: if they kept the kidney, the patient could die, but if they removed it, the patient would need another one, which would be very difficult to find.

UCLA math star Terence Tao wins $3-million prize

Larry Gordon:

UCLA mathematics professor Terence Tao already has a bevy of prestigious awards for his work in such fields as number theory and harmonic analysis. Now he is adding one more lucrative prize.

Tao, 38, has been named one of five winners of the new Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, an award that provides $3 million to each of its recipients from a fund established by high-tech titans in Silicon Valley and Russia.

Maths and science ‘should be studied up to age 18’: UK Royal Society Report by committee of education experts recommends baccalaureate-style qualification, and better-equipped laboratories

Richard Adams:

All pupils should study maths and science until the age of 18 as part of a broad-based, baccalaureate-style qualification, the Royal Society has recommended in a report on the future of education.

The report, written by a committee of scientists, education experts, teachers and former education secretary Charles Clarke, calls for increased investment in practical and problem-solving work in science and mathematics education from reception until sixth form, including access to adequately equipped laboratories and well-trained teachers.

Conversations on the Rifle Range, I: Not Your Mother’s Algebra 1 and the Guy Who Really Knows

Out in Left Field, via a kind Barry Garelick email:

Barry Garelick, who wrote various letters under the name Huck Finn and which were published here is at work writing what will become “Conversations on the Rifle Range”. This will be a documentation of his experiences teaching math as a long-term substitute. OILF proudly presents the first episode:

Those familiar with my writing on math education know me from my previous incarnations as John Dewey and Huck Finn, whose adventures I recounted in a book called “Letters from John Dewey/Letters from Huck Finn”. I am in a second career which for lack of a better title is known as “trying to obtain a permanent math teaching position in a desirable area of California.” I retired a few years ago and obtained a math teaching credential. Although I have applied for various math teaching jobs, I have only managed to get two interviews, so I’ve had to make do by being a substitute teacher. This situation may be due to age, or perhaps my views on math education are becoming known, or both.

In the course of the 2013-14 school year, however, I took on two long-term substitute assignments. The first one was for six weeks at a high school which started at the beginning of the school year. The second was for an entire semester at a middle school, starting in January and ending in June.

Both assignments took place amidst the media hype that focused on the 50th anniversary of events occurring in 1963 and 64 including but not limited to the Kennedy assassination, the Beatles’ arrival in the US and performance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Not mentioned by the press but every bit as important is the fact that it was also the 50th anniversary of my taking Algebra 1. And while I am not an outright proponent of the philosophy that “If you want something done right, you have to live in the past”, when it comes to how to teach math there are worse philosophies to embrace.

As if to keep me from delving too far into my past, my teaching assignments occurred during a year of transition to the Common Core standards. In both assignments, I came to know the person from the District office, who I shall call Sally, whose role was to get the teachers—as part of the transition effort— to try various Common Core type activities with their students. I met her for the first time on the teacher workday held before the first day of school.

Sally started out the meeting by telling us that she had been meeting with the person in charge of putting together the California “Framework” for Common Core. “So he REALLY KNOWS what’s going on,” she said. This stated, she then talked about this in-the-know person’s view of Common Core’s Standards for Mathematical Practice (SMPs).
– See more at: http://oilf.blogspot.com/2014/06/conversations-on-rifle-range-i-not-your.html#sthash.QEod5yFY.dpuf

Commentary on Madison’s special Education and “inclusive” practices; District enrollment remains flat while the suburbs continue to grow

Pat Schneider:

That was one issue that brought together family activists who formed Madison Partners for Inclusive Education [duckduckgo search] in 2003, Pugh said.

“A parent in an elementary school on the west side could be seeing high-quality inclusive expert teaching with a team that ‘got it,’ and someone on the east side could be experiencing exactly the opposite,” Pugh said. Families and the school district are still striving to provide the best learning experience to all students with disabilities.

The key is to establish a culture throughout the district where participation in the classroom by students with disabilities is expected and valued. In addition, all teachers need to be trained to work collaboratively with special education teachers to make that happen, she said.

“It comes down to leadership,” said Pugh, who added that she is heartened by Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham’s remarks about raising expectations for all students. “That’s where we start.”

The district had an outside consultant review its special education programs earlier this year.

“In the next several weeks, we’ll use this information, our own data and expertise in the district to develop an improvement plan, including what our immediate steps will be,” spokesperson Rachel Strauch-Nelson said.

There has been no small amount of tension over Madison’s tactics in this matter from the one size fits all English 10 to various “high school redesign” schemes.

Yet, Madison’s student population remains stagnant while nearby districts have grown substantially.

Outbound open enrollment along with a Talented and Gifted complaint are topics worth watching.

Math for seven-year-olds: graph coloring, chromatic numbers, and Eulerian paths and circuits

Joel David Hamkins:

As a guest today in my daughter’s second-grade classroom, full of math-enthusiastic seven-and-eight-year-old girls, I led a mathematical investigation of graph coloring, chromatic numbers, map coloring and Eulerian paths and circuits. I brought in a pile of sample graphs I had prepared, and all the girls made up their own graphs and maps to challenge each other. By the end each child had compiled a mathematical “coloring book” containing the results of their explorations. Let me tell you a little about what we did.

We began with vertex coloring, where one colors the vertices of a graph in such a way that adjacent vertices get different colors. We started with some easy examples, and then moved on to more complicated graphs, which they attacked.

James Dyson in drive to fill engineering vacuum in UK schools

Richard Adams:

Emma Yates surveys students manipulating 3D printers and wrestling with fibreglass moulds in the bustling design and technology studio of the school where she is headteacher. “I was amazed when I first came here and looked around,” she says.

Yates took over at Hayesfield girls’ school in Bath in January. It was already one of the best state secondaries in the country at teaching design and technology, thanks in part to a £75,000 grant from the James Dyson Foundation.

The 1 Thing That Will Improve Math Learning

Daniel Willingham:

How can we do a better job of teaching kids math? A different curriculum? New pedagogical strategies? Personalized instruction through technology? All these worthy ideas have their adherents, but another method — reducing math anxiety — may both improve performance and help kids enjoy math more. Sian Beilock and I recently reviewed the research literature on math anxiety with an eye towards remediation. Here are some of the highlights.

Math anxiety means, unsurprisingly, that one feels tension and apprehension in situations involving math. What is surprising is the frequency of the problem, and the young age at which it can start. Fully half of first and second graders feel moderate to severe math anxiety. And many children do not outgrow it; about 25 percent of students attending a four-year college suffer from math anxiety. Among community college students, the figure is 80 percent.

On College Debt & lack of K-12 Math Teaching

Heidi Moore:

And the contract terms on private college loans are rigid to the point of cruelty. Borrowers have almost no say and little ability to renegotiate the terms if financial trouble occurs – an inevitability. Many private lenders don’t allow students to pay down the principal of a loan, which means endless payments just to cover the high interest, without ever chipping away at the real amount. Payment options like forbearance are temporary and restricted; prepayment or consolidation are largely forbidden. The most dangerous part for such a significant debt is that there is no escape, no way to ease the burden.

Private or publicly guaranteed student loans are a sideshow. Our K-12 schools should be teaching basic math, skills that students can use to understand the implications of their choices.

Getting started in data science: My thoughts

Trey Causey:

There’s no denying that ‘data scientist’ is a hot job title to have right now, and for good reason. It’s a tremendously fun and challenging field to be in, and despite all of the often undeserved hoopla that surrounds it, data scientists are doing some pretty amazing things. So it’s no surprise that many people are clamoring to find out how to become data scientists. As I run a blog that attempts to teach some basic data science using sports analytics, I often get email asking how one gets started in data science and/or how quickly one can learn the prerequisites for being a data scientist. Instead of replying to these all the time, I thought I’d write my thoughts up here.

In short, there are lots of great, free resources out there for the motivated autodidact. I’ll list some of them here. The more nuanced take, though, is that I’m highly skeptical that many or even most people can ‘become’ a data scientist through MOOCs and tutorials. And certainly not quickly enough to be qualified to get a job as a data scientist before the data scientist salary market comes crashing back down to earth.

Mathematicians Urge Colleagues To Refuse To Work For The NSA

Kashmir Hill:

In January, the math community had its big event of the year — the Joint Mathematics Meeting — where 3,000 mathematicians and math students gathered to talk about new advances in the field and jostle for jobs. The National Security Agency is said to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the country and so it always has a sizeable presence at the event to recruit new candidates. This year, it was even easier for the agency as the four-day conference took place at the Baltimore Convention Center, just 22 minutes away from NSA headquarters in Fort Meade. Thomas Hales, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who describes himself as a “mathematician who’s upset about what’s going on,” is dismayed at the idea of the brightest minds in his field going to work for the agency. In reaction to the Snowden revelations — which started exactly a year ago – about NSA’s mass surveillance and compromising of encryption standards, Hales gave a grant to the San Francisco-based civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation to fly a representative to Baltimore to try to convince mathematicians young and old not to go help the agency with data-mining and encryption-breaking.

Dumping Everyday Math? The Future of Seattle Elementary Math Education Will Be Decided on Wednesday

But I would suggest an even more important vote will occur on Wednesday, one that will decide the future of tens or hundreds of thousands of Seattle students over the next decade: the Seattle School Board’s vote on the future elementary math curriculum.

As I have noted in previous blogs, Seattle Public Schools is now using a grossly inferior math curriculum, Everyday Math. Most school districts in the area (and around the country) have dropped it because it fails to provide basic competency in elementary-level mathematics, crippling students’ ability to learn algebra and higher mathematics later in their career. Everyday Math is a prime example of “fuzzy math,” with students spending much their their time inventing their own algorithms, writing long essays, using calculators, and doing group projects. Everyday Math is a wonderful example of the tendency to jump on the latest fad, which may sound good, but fails in the classroom.

So you would think the district would be doubly sure not to make a serious mistake again.

Last month, a committee established by the district provided their recommendation of a possible new curriculum. Their rankings were:

1. EnVision Math
2. Go Math!
3. Math in Focus (MIF), which is a U.S. version of Singapore Math.

As I explained in my last blog of the subject, their evaluation was a great disappointment. Math in Focus, based on the extraordinarily successful Singapore Math approach, was downgraded because it advanced student’s too rapidly (compared to the latest fad, the Common Core standards). Go Math! is glossy and weak. EnVision, their top choice, is glossy and full of excessive reading and writing, making it a poor choice for students who do not have strong English skills. But better than Everyday Math for sure.

Much more on Everyday Math, here.

Related: Math Forum audio/video.

Locally, Madison has also used Everyday Math.

Brightest UK girls’ among physics A-level dropouts

Judith Burns:

A teacher-run study is canvassing this year’s students’ attitudes to the subject and will track how many return for A2 physics in September.

Physics has a higher student dropout rate after AS-level than most subjects.

“It always upsets me when we lose them but the biggest upset is when we lose high performing girls,” said study co-ordinator, Ronan McDonald.

Mr McDonald, who teaches physics at a London state school, said the study emerged from a discussion on an online physics teachers’ forum.

Steep rise
Teachers want to know why girls are more likely than boys to drop physics, often despite getting better grades.

Computer Science and Math

Dean Chen:

I came across an interesting discussion regarding the role math in computer science education on SIGCSE’s (ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education consisting of CS professors) mailing list. Brad Zanden, a professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Tennessee, started the conversation with:

I understand that discussing the role of math in CS is one of those religious war type issues… After 30 years in the field, I still fail to see how calculus and continuous math correlate with one’s ability to succeed in many areas of computer science… I have seen many outstanding programmers who struggled with calculus and never really got it. I also constantly see how what I consider to be excessive continuous math requirements in our program (calculus 1, 2, and 3, plus linear algebra) stops students from entering computer science…

OLPC Memo 5: Education and Psychology

Marvin Minsky:

What goals do we want our schools to achieve? Most parents agree that their children should learn about History, Language, Science and Math, and get some instruction in Health, Sports, and Art. Most parents also want their children taught to behave in what they regard to be civilized ways. And surely, most parents would also agree that schools should help children learn good ways to think. However, while schools have good ways to teach facts about subjects, many pupils still fail to build adequate skills for applying that knowledge. [[1]]

But if “good thinking” is one of our principal goals, then why don’t schools try to explicitly teach about how human Learning and Reasoning work? Instead we tacitly assume that if we simply provide enough knowledge, then each child’s brain will ‘self-organize’ appropriate ways to apply those facts. Then would it make sense for us to include a subject called “Human Psychology” as part of the grade-school curriculum? I don’t think that we can do this yet, because, few present-day teachers would agree about which “Theories of Thinking” to teach.

So instead, we’ll propose a different approach: to provide our children with ideas they could use to invent their own theories about themselves! The rest of this essay will suggest some benefits that could come from this, and some practical ways to accomplish it—by engaging children in various kinds of constructive, computer-related projects.

Who or What Broke My Kids?

Brooke Powers:

I am Desperate

I am on a desperate search to find out who or what broke my students. In fact I am so desperate that I stopped class today to ask them who broke them. Was it their parents, a former teacher, society, our education system or me that took away their inquisitive nature and made math only about getting a right answer? I have known this was a problem for a while but today was the last straw.

A Probability Lesson Gone Wrong

It started out innocently enough working on the seventh grade Common Core standard 7.SP.C.5 about understanding that all probabilities occur between zero and one and differentiating between likely and unlikely events which I thought would be simple enough. After the introduction and class discussion we began partner work on this activity from the Georgia Common Core Resource Document (see page 9). The basic premise of the activity is that students must sort cards including probability statements, terms such as unlikely and probable, pictorial representations, and fraction, decimal, and percent probabilities and place them on a number line based on their theoretical probability. I thought it would be an interactive way to gauge student understanding. Instead it turned into a ten minute nightmare where I was asked no less than 52 times if their answers were “right”. I took it well until I was asked for the 53rd time and then I lost it. We stopped class right there and proceeded to have a ten minute discussion on who broke them.

Statistics Examinations reading list

Royal Statistical Society:

We provide reading lists for each of the papers of our professional examinations, to assist candidates preparing for them. In some cases, there is one reading list that covers two papers.

The reading lists provide a choice of books and it is not suggested that you should buy all (or even most) of them. You might for example find that you can easily locate one or two books on a list in an academic library, or even a public library, and perhaps those books would suffice – or at least would give you an indication of other areas that you need to try to cover. Some of the lists are annotated with specific advice about particular books.

Finns beat U.S. with low-tech take on school

Caitlin Emma:

At the start of morning assembly in the state-of-the-art Viikki School here, students’ smartphones disappear. In math class, the teacher shuts off the Smartboard and begins drafting perfect circles on a chalkboard. The students — some of the highest-achieving in the world — cut up graphing paper while solving equations using their clunky plastic calculators.

Finnish students and teachers didn’t need laptops and iPads to get to the top of international education rankings, said Krista Kiuru, minister of education and science at the Finnish Parliament. And officials say they aren’t interested in using them to stay there.

Teacher content knowledge surely trumps tech gizmos and endless grant driven schemes.

Analysis of Over 2,000 Computer Science Professors at Top Universities

Jeff Huang:

As part of a class assignment in my human-computer interaction seminar, students used crowdsourcing to collect information about the computer science professors from 5 universities each. This information comprised the names, institution, degrees obtained, and when they joined the university, for professors in the traditional role that involves both research and teaching. The data excludes lecturers, professors of practice, clinical, adjunct, affiliate, or research professors; only because we were constrained by time and resources. My Ph.D. student Alexandra Papoutsaki worked with a handful of students in the course to correct, normalize, and merge the data, and has posted it along with some descriptive information.

The posted data includes 51 top universities in the United States and is already useful for students planning to apply to graduate schools, but there are some interesting insights that we can still draw from a more aggregate analysis. This analysis is meant to supplement the data and Alexandra’s report, and looks more at:

From The Ivy League To State Schools, Demand For Computer Science Is Booming

Colleen Taylor:

For years, people in the tech industry have worked to persuade more young people in the United States to become interested in studying computer science. It now looks like they’ve finally gotten the message.

Demand for computer science classes and programs is booming at universities across the U.S., according to data presented this past week at the NCWIT summit for Women in IT by Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, and Stanford Computer Science professor Eric Roberts.

At Lazowska’s own school, the number of incoming freshman who plan to major in computer science is soaring — the graph below, published earlier this week by Geekwire, speaks for itself:

A Math App That Offers an Unusual Human Touch

Kenneth Chang:

Tabtor is an expensive iPad math-teaching app for kindergartners through sixth graders. Although free to download and try for two weeks, thereafter it costs $50 a month per child.

At first glance, Tabtor — the name is “tablet tutor” mashed together — does not look particularly different from the hundreds of other math offerings in Apple’s app store and the gazillion math-drill software programs on personal computers.

For each problem, there is space on the touch screen to scribble calculations with a finger or a stylus before punching in the answer on an on-screen keypad. A green check mark and a pleasing clanging sword sound greet a correct answer; a wrong one gets a red “X” and a less pleasing clang. There is a second chance to get the problem right.

So what does the $50 a month buy? Unlike any other math teaching app I’ve encountered, it comes with a human being.

A Mississippi School Striving for Excellence

Deborah Fallows:

One warm and misty May morning in Columbus, Mississippi, the lobby of the classroom building at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science (MSMS) (more) was full of teen-agers milling about, waiting for morning classes to begin.

In one corner of the glassy space was a grandfather clock, probably about 8 feet tall, constructed by one of the students out of brightly colored plastic pieces. (Right.) On the hour, a little white ball would roll down a chute, tripping levers to ring a small chime. Upstairs in one of the science rooms was a 3-D printer, a rough-and-ready contraption that, with a little more luck, is approaching the final stages of actually printing something. Another of the students, a senior, had made it himself. I recognized several other students whom I had seen performing in an after-school stage production, one dressed as Eco-Man in blue and green tights, cape, and mask.

MSMS is a public boarding school in Columbus, occupying a few of the more modest buildings on the grounds of the elegant Mississippi University for Women, is called “The W”. The men who have enrolled at The W since it became co-ed, say they always have a time explaining themselves to those not in the know.

2+2=What? Parents rail against Common Core math

Michael Rubinkam:

What could be so horrible? Grade-school math.

As schools around the U.S. implement national Common Core learning standards, parents trying to help their kids with math homework say that adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing has become as complicated as calculus.

They’re stumped by unfamiliar terms like “rectangular array” and “area model.” They wrestle with division that requires the use of squares, slashes and dots. They rage over impenetrable word problems.

Related: Math Forum audio & video.

U.S. Students from Educated Families Lag in International Tests

Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson and Ludger Woessmann:

“The big picture of U.S. performance on the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is straightforward and stark: It is a picture of educational stagnation…. Fifteen-year olds in the U.S. today are average in science and reading literacy, and below average in mathematics, compared to their counterparts in [other industrialized] countries.”

U.S. secretary of education Arne Duncan spoke these grim words on the bleak December day in late 2013 when the international tests in math, science, and literacy were released. No less disconcerting was the secretary’s warning that the nation’s educational problems are not limited to certain groups or specific places. The “educational challenge in America is not just about poor kids in poor neighborhoods,” he said. “It’s about many kids in many neighborhoods. The [test] results underscore that educational shortcomings in the United States are not just the problems of other people’s children.”

In making his comments, Secretary Duncan challenged those who cling to an old belief that the nation’s educational challenges are confined to its inner cities. Most affluent Americans remain optimistic about the schools in their local community. In 2011, Education Next asked a representative sample to evaluate both the nation’s schools and those in their own community. The affluent were especially dubious about the nation’s schools—only 15 percent conceded them an A or a B. Yet 54 percent gave their local schools one of the two top ratings.

Public opinion is split on how well the nation’s schools educate students of different abilities. In 2013 Education Next asked the public whether local schools did a good job of teaching talented students. Seventy-three percent said the local schools did “somewhat” or “extremely” well at the task, as compared to only 45 percent who thought that was true of their capacity to teach the less-talented.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org.

Lessons From the World’s Best Public School

Grant Birmingham:

Jinjing Liu, a 15-year-old ninth-grader at Meilong Intermediate in central Shanghai—and part of the best education system in the world’s most populous country—is ticking off her normal class schedule: “Physics, chemistry, math, Chinese, English, Chinese literature, geography…the usual stuff,” she says in impeccable English.

That’s not Jinjing’s school day schedule; that’s her workload each and every Sunday. The Lord may have rested on the seventh day, but Jinjing studies, from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. She relates this over lunch on a Saturday afternoon, “the only day,” she acknowledges, that she has “any free time to relax.” And lest you think she is some whiz-bang academic geek on the fast track to Tsinghua, China’s M.I.T., think again. Ask who else in her high school has that Sunday routine and she says, “Pretty much everyone.”

Over the past several years, the Shanghai public school system has drawn global envy—and stirred controversy—by acing an international test given every few years by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that seeks to measure the quality of school systems globally. In 2009 (the first time the city participated in the test) and again in 2012, Shanghai finished first out of 66 locations surveyed in the so-called PISA exams (Program for International Student Assessment) in the three key disciplines: reading, science and mathematics. At the same time, the test showed the United States dropping lower in the global standings in all three disciplines, most precipitously in math.

Cincinnati’s achievement gap initiatives

Kim McGuire:

When educators nationwide want to look at proven ways to turn around a struggling urban school system, this is the city they visit.

Over a decade, Cincinnati Public Schools’ graduation rate has jumped from 50 to 80 percent. And in the past five years, the reading and math proficiency of its elementary students has climbed in many schools.

Those gains have been fueled by big improvements in the performance of black students, who make up more than half of the district’s 30,000 students. In 2006, 2007 and 2010, black students’ graduation rates surpassed those of whites.

Via Molly Beck.

Cincinnati spent $602,605,253 during 2013 [PDF] for 33,000 students or $18,261/student.

Madison plans to spend $402,265,253 for 25,107 full time and 2,079 pre-k students (about 14,800/student) during the 2014-2015 school year [detailed budget package 2.5mb pdf]

Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Lately, Coding

Matt Richtel:

The event was part of a national educational movement in computer coding instruction that is growing at Internet speeds. Since December, 20,000 teachers from kindergarten through 12th grade have introduced coding lessons, according to Code.org, a group backed by the tech industry that offers free curriculums. In addition, some 30 school districts, including New York City and Chicago, have agreed to add coding classes in the fall, mainly in high schools but in lower grades, too. And policy makers in nine states have begun awarding the same credits for computer science classes that they do for basic math and science courses, rather than treating them as electives.

There are after-school events, too, like the one in Mill Valley, where 70 parents and 90 children, from kindergartners to fifth graders, huddled over computers solving animated puzzles to learn the basics of computer logic.

How to Fill the Skills Gap: Bring Back Apprenticeships

Robert Maxim:

Manufacturing is growing in the United States, but many companies claim that they face a “skills gap.” These companies have unfilled vacancies, but say that unemployed workers and recent high school graduates do not have the technical knowledge needed to fill them. Apprenticeships have historically taught students the necessary skills for a career in manufacturing. However, there has been a sharp decline in apprenticeships across the United States, some 40 percent over the past decade, and cash-strapped state budgets have forced schools to cut technical education in favor of four-year college preparatory curricula.

Get coding into CA schools

Carmel Deamicis:

Today some of the biggest names in tech came together to make a stand. It wasn’t a stand for immigration reform or a stand for shuttle-bus stopping rights. It was for something far less sexy: Coding classes.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Square CEO Jack Dorsey, investor Vinod Khosla, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppelman, and Netflix’s Reed Hastings joined a list of 30 that reads like the who’s who of Silicon Valley. All the participants signed a letter to California’s Governor Jerry Brown to explain the need for programming courses in California’s public school system. A choice excerpt:

Online Learning: A Bachelor’s Level Computer Science Program Curriculum

agupieware:

A few months back we took an in-depth look at MIT’s free online Introduction to Computer Science course, and laid out a self-study time table to complete the class within four months, along with a companion post providing learning benchmarks to chart your progress. In the present article, I’ll step back and take a much more broad look at com-sci course offerings available for free on the internet, in order to answer a deceptively straightforward question: is it possible to complete the equivalent of a college bachelor’s degree in computer science through college and university courses that are freely available online? And if so, how does one do so?

The former question is more difficult to answer than it may at first appear. There are, of course, tons of resources relating to computer science and engineering, computer programming, software engineering, etc. that can easily be found online with a few simple searches. However, despite this fact, it is very unlikely that you would find a free, basic computer science curriculum offered in one complete package from any given academic source. The reason for this is fairly obvious. Why pay $50,000 a year to go to Harvard, for example, if you could take all the exact same courses online for free?

Learning to Automatically Solve Algebra Word Problems

Nate Kushman, Yoav Artzi, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Regina Barzilay:

We present an approach for automatically learning to solve algebra word problems. Our algorithm reasons across sentence boundaries to construct and solve a sys- tem of linear equations, while simultane- ously recovering an alignment of the vari- ables and numbers in these equations to the problem text. The learning algorithm uses varied supervision, including either full equations or just the final answers. We evaluate performance on a newly gathered corpus of algebra word problems, demon- strating that the system can correctly an- swer almost 70% of the questions in the dataset. This is, to our knowledge, the first learning result for this task.

A High-School Freshman’s Investing Lesson: Time Horizons Matter

Jonah Jakob:

You don’t have to be old enough to drive to play master of the universe. I’m just 15 years old, but in a national stock-market game sponsored by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, I quickly grasped the way hedge fund managers must feel when they make decisions.

My friend Zachary Weiss and I had two months to beat 1,235 other groups of New Jersey high schoolers. There wasn’t any real money at stake, so we were playing for glory and, in the case of Northern Valley Demarest Regional High School, where we’re freshmen, a tour of the New York Stock Exchange.

Unfortunately, we won’t be visiting the Big Board. We didn’t even finish in the top half. But we learned some valuable lessons. First, that you shouldn’t have a two-month time frame in mind when investing. And second, that people do funny things when their own money isn’t at stake.

As the game was getting underway, my dad, who writes The Wall Street Journal’s Ahead of the Tape column, showed me some of the most volatile securities out there, which my partner and I thought of as essential for victory in a short-term game where anything can happen.

Deciding the market probably would rise, we sold short securities that produced double the daily return of VIX futures. My dad explained that, on average, they should lose over 90% of their value each year. We also bought securities that did the opposite. We used the proceeds from our shorts and bought on margin, increasing our risk and potential return. Then Vladimir Putin came into our lives and we found ourselves in 1,016th place.

When use of pseudo-maths adds up to fraud

Stephen Foley:

An academic journal called the Notices of the American Mathematical Society may seem an unlikely periodical to have exposed fraud on a massive scale. The investigation, published in the current edition, is certainly not going to sit among the nominees for next year’s Pulitzer prizes. But a quartet of mathematicians have just published a piercing article in the public interest and in the nick of time.

In their paper, entitled Pseudo-Mathematics and Financial Charlatanism, they make the case that the vast majority of claims being made for quantitative investment strategies are false.*

By calling it fraud, the academics command attention, and investors would be wise to beware. With interest rates about to turn, and a stock market bull run ageing fast, there have never been such temptations to eschew traditional bond and equity investing and to follow the siren sales patter of those who claim to see patterns in the historical data.

The (unnamed) targets of the mathematicians’ ire range from individual technical analysts who identify buy and sell signals in a stock chart, all the way up to managed futures funds holding billions of dollars of clients assets.

There will be many offenders, too, among investment managers pushing “smart beta” strategies, which aim to construct a portfolio based on signals from history.

Why (And How) Students Are Learning To Code

Katie Lepi:

Coding is more important now than ever before. With computer related jobs growing at a rate estimated to be 2x faster than other types of jobs, coding is becoming an important literacy for students to have and a more integral part of education and curricula. The handy infographic below takes a look at some of the interesting statistics about coding and computer science jobs. So if you aren’t yet sure why learning to code is important, you’ll find out below. Keep reading to learn more!

The Common Core makes simple math more complicated. Here’s why.

Libby Nelson:

You might not know what a number sentence is. Neither does Stephen Colbert, who recently suggested “word equation” and “formula paragraph” as nonsensical synonyms.

But millions of American students soon will. Math education is in the middle of big changes — including new ways of learning that might frustrate parents even more than students.

The Common Core state standards, now in place in 44 states, will require that elementary school kids not just to know how to subtract, multiply and divide, but to understand what they’re doing and why.

That means more number sentences — the term, if you’re curious, just means “equations” — and other unfamiliar concepts, like area multiplication and number line subtraction.

Mathematics for Programmers

Mathematics for Educators:

Disclaimer: I write this as a computer-scientist that uses math a lot in his work (I’m a research assistant at a university).

Introduction:

There are three (overlapping) aspects of math in computer science:

Math that is actually useful.
Math that you can run into, and is generally good to know.
Math that lets you build more awesome math.
First is essential, because the students need to be able to do stuff. Second is important, because you cannot teach students everything, and at the same time trying to get into a new field all by yourself is quite hard (i.e. it’s good to know the barest basics of everything). The third are these which aren’t directly useful, but present meta-concepts that happen all the time (a bit like design patterns in programming); you can live without them, but intuition you gain there makes life much easier.

The list was sorted by (subjectively defined) importance.

Mathematics Awareness Month 2014: Mathematics, Magic, and Mystery

Mathaware:

Juggling has been around for centuries, and yet in the mid-1980s an entirely new class of tricks was found, all coming from using math to analyze what had previously been thought to be unanalyzable. Including Time Travel.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. This story begins with the idea that we can find and identify the patterns within the patterns of juggling. Mathematician and master juggler Colin Wright demonstrates:

More Financial Aid + Less Need to Work = More STEM Graduates?

Goldie Blumenstyck:

Students who major in the sciences often spend more time in out-of-class work—in labs or field research—than other students do. That means less time to earn money while in college, and sometimes it’s the reason financially needy students switch out of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics, the STEM fields.

Would an extra $1,000 a year in financial aid help some of those STEM-inclined students stick with it?

That’s the essence of a new study getting under way next fall at 11 Wisconsin colleges. With $4-million from the Great Lakes Higher Education Guaranty Corporation, which will make possible the extra $1,000 a year, and a $1.5-million grant from the National Science Foundation, Sara Goldrick-Rab will study the effects of the extra aid by comparing the academic paths of 1,000 students who will get the money with 1,000 others who won’t.

The grants won’t displace other financial aid that the students are otherwise due to receive, and when students are told they are getting the money, “it’s not going to say, ‘You’ve got to do STEM,’” says Ms. Goldrick-Rab, an associate professor of educational-policy studies and sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The idea behind the project is simply to see if giving students fewer reasons to work, and no other requirements, makes a difference in helping more lower-income students pursue STEM majors.

Spokane Administrative plan for math is to fix the math program later

Laurie Rogers:

According to The Spokesman-Review, Spokane Public Schools Superintendent Shelley Redinger said in October 2013 that math outcomes in Spokane are “average” and that’s why the school district is focusing on repairing its English/language arts program.

The impression given in the article was that math instruction in Spokane is in an OK place, not great but not terrible, and that attention needs to be paid first to ELA.

Such an impression, however, isn’t what college remedial rates indicate to be true. It isn’t reflected in most high school graduates, nor in most students in any grade prior. It isn’t what I have told the superintendent; it isn’t what she has repeatedly acknowledged to me. It isn’t what she told me that the rest of the Spokane community has said to her. Even board directors appear to have gotten a clue: On Dec. 4, 2013, director Rocky Treppiedi called the district’s math program “a disgrace.” And it is.

I asked Dr. Redinger about her choice of the word “average” to describe math outcomes in Spokane, and she wrote that she chose the word because district scores are “at the state average in mathematics.”

If I didn’t know better, I might accept that. However, I do know better.

Why Computer Science Should Be a High School Graduation Requirement

Jeff:

The facts about computer and smartphone ownership make it extremely apparent that smart technology and the internet has become a human necessity. This technology has become almost as essential as access to transportation or grocery stores. People simply cannot survive in this modern era without access to computers and the World Wide Web.

Clearly, students should begin to grow up with a deeper understanding of the technology that defines their lives. They are required to have a fundamental understanding of natural sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology, as well as mathematics, like geometry, trigonometry, and algebra. Presumably, these requirements were put into place so that students would graduate from high school with at least a basic understanding of how the world around them works, but if these students don’t understand computers, they won’t even come close to understanding the world around them.

What good is math and why do we teach it?

Keith Devlin:

This month’s column comes in lecture format. It’s a narrated videostream of the presentation file that accompanied the featured address I made recently at the MidSchoolMath National Conference, held in Santa Fe, NM, on March 27-29. It lasts just under 30 minutes, including two embedded videos.

In the talk, I step back from the (now largely metaphorical) blackboard and take a broader look at why we and our students are there is the first place.

Elementary Financial Literacy: Lesson Ideas and Resources

Brian Page:

My daughter is in elementary school. She hates math, but she loves to count her own money! I have used her allowance to help bring basic mathematics alive, including some of the lessons created by the U.S. President’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability exhibited on the website Money As You Grow. These are 20 essential, age-appropriate financial lessons — with corresponding activities — written explicitly for parents. At a time when parents are most involved with their children’s lives, this is an ideal resource to engage them about teaching money management skills at home.

Schools are beginning to partner with organizations and provide matched savings programs, which enlist donors to make contributions to low-income children’s college accounts. My dream would be to see these opportunities available for every student. I doubt that matched savings programs in our elementary schools are scalable in the immediate future, but they may be in the years that lie ahead. Research has found that such opportunities lead to improvements in knowledge and attitudes toward money.

However, schools don’t need a matched savings program partner to integrate financial literacy skills. As you will read below, there are a number of ways that financial literacy can be integrated into English and mathematics.

Race, gender, schooling and university success – six key charts

George Arnett:

Does any part of how you are born and raised mean you are more likely to be successful after reaching university?
 
 A report by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) looked at how students from a variety of different backgrounds performed at English universities after entering a full-time degree course in 2007-08.
 
 The key element of the analysis is seeing which students were more likely to achieve first or upper second class honours than others who have the same A-Level results but come from different backgrounds.
 
 Each of the charts below is broken down by A-Level grades so the left-hand side shows how those with the highest marks performed compared to those on the right hand side who had the lowest marks.

What Chess and Moore’s Law teach us about the progress of technology

Praxtime:

Computers beating humans at chess is old news. But that’s precisely why it’s worth reviewing. Solved problems sometimes hold the best lessons. And the numerical chess rating system makes it particularly useful in quantifying some common assertions about the progress of technology.

Chess player’s competitive level is ranked using the ELO rating system. Players gain rating points by beating a competitor. And lose points when beaten. The scale is constructed so that “for each 400 rating points of advantage over the opponent, the chance of winning is magnified ten times in comparison to the opponent’s chance of winning.” The competition outcome is modeled as a logistics curve. The way the math works, when a player rated 1100 competes against a player rated 1000 (rating gap of 100), they’ll win 64% of the time. When a player rated 1400 player competes against a player rated 1000 (rating gap 400), they’ll win 92% of the time. What matters here is: a) the chess rating scale is exponential, and b) a 400 point gap means 10x better.

A Progress Report on (math &) the Common Core

Tom Loveless:

William H. Schmidt of Michigan State University presented research on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for Mathematics at the National Press Club on May 3, 2012.[1] A paper based on the same research, co-authored with Richard T. Houang, was published in Educational Researcher in October 2012.[2] Schmidt and Houang’s study (also referred to as the “MSU study” below) was important for endorsing CCSS’s prospective effectiveness at a time when debate on the CCSS was beginning to heat up. Opponents of the Common Core had criticized the CCSS for lacking empirical support. The MSU study showed that states with math standards similar to the Common Core, after controlling for other potential influences, registered higher NAEP scores in 2009 than states with standards divergent from the CCSS. The implication was that the math standards of CCSS would boost state math performance on NAEP.
 
 Is there reason to believe that projection will become reality? In this section of the Brown Center Report, a two-part investigation attempts to answer that question. First, the ratings of state standards provided by Schmidt and Houang’s study are examined using NAEP data that have been collected since their study was completed. The central question is whether the MSU ratings predict progress on NAEP from 2009-2013. Second, a new analysis is presented, independent from the MSU ratings, comparing the NAEP gains of states with varying degrees of CCSS implementation. The two analyses offer exploratory readings of how the Common Core is affecting achievement so far.
 
 Background
 Schmidt and Houang used state NAEP scores on the 2009 eighth grade math assessment to model the potential effectiveness of the CCSS. They first developed a scale to rate the degree of congruence of each state’s standards with the CCSS. The ratings were based on earlier work also conducted by Schmidt and his colleagues at MSU. That work made a lasting and important contribution to curriculum studies by attempting to represent the quality of curriculum standards—both international and domestic—in a quantitative form.[3] The key dimensions measured in the MSU ratings are focus and coherence. Focus refers to limiting topics in the math curriculum to the most important topics and teaching them in depth. Coherence refers to organizing topics in a manner that reflects the underlying structure of mathematics, allowing knowledge and skills to build sequentially.
 
 In the National Press Club talk, Schmidt presented a chart showing how the states fell on the congruence measure (see Table 3-1). Alabama, Michigan, California, and the others at the top of the scale had standards most like the CCSS math standards. Arizona, Nevada, Iowa and those at the bottom of the scale had standards that diverged from the CCSS.

Redesign helps boost math successes at Tenn. college

Community College Daily:

John Squires, associate professor of mathematics and head of the math department at Chattanooga State Community College in Tennessee, has become a recognized leader in the nation’s reform initiatives of mathematics.
 
 In the course of three years, Squires has assisted with the redesign of 12 math courses at his college. During the redesign of those courses, he worked with faculty to produce quality resources for each course, including videos and Powerpoints.
 
 As a result, the college’s math lab has grown from 60 to 180 computers. A continuous enrollment plan has been implemented so students who finish a course early can immediately begin the next course.

How our 1,000-year-old math curriculum cheats America’s kids

Edward Frenkel:

Imagine you had to take an art class in which you were taught how to paint a fence or a wall, but you were never shown the paintings of the great masters, and you weren’t even told that such paintings existed. Pretty soon you’d be asking, why study art?
 
 That’s absurd, of course, but it’s surprisingly close to the way we teach children mathematics. In elementary and middle school and even into high school, we hide math’s great masterpieces from students’ view. The arithmetic, algebraic equations and geometric proofs we do teach are important, but they are to mathematics what whitewashing a fence is to Picasso — so reductive it’s almost a lie.
 
 Most of us never get to see the real mathematics because our current math curriculum is more than 1,000 years old. For example, the formula for solutions of quadratic equations was in al-Khwarizmi’s book published in 830, and Euclid laid the foundations of Euclidean geometry around 300 BC. If the same time warp were true in physics or biology, we wouldn’t know about the solar system, the atom and DNA. This creates an extraordinary educational gap for our kids, schools and society.

Gifted in Math, and Poor

New York Times
To the Editor:
Re “Even Gifted Students Can’t Keep Up” (“Numbers Crunch” series, editorial, Dec. 15): Educators know that when the curriculum is set at an optimal difficulty level, students learn to persist, attend carefully and gain self-confidence. For mathematically gifted students, the curriculum must move more quickly and in greater depth so that they can become disciplined, resilient students.
When the mathematically gifted sons and daughters of affluent, well-educated parents are not challenged, their parents spend considerable amounts of time and money finding tutors, summer programs and online courses. As a psychologist who has worked for more than 20 years with the families of gifted students, I have seen how much time and money is required for this effort.
For mathematically gifted students from poorer families, there is neither the time nor the money to seek educational opportunities outside the public schools. A weak public school system without flexibility or adequate challenge can seriously limit the educational experiences and lifetime employment opportunities of these students. A weak public school system ultimately limits quality education to those few whose parents can pay for it privately.
JULIA B. OSBORN
Brooklyn, Dec. 19, 2013
Related: “They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine — NOT!

STEM to STEAM

STEM to Steam
The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) is encouraging Art/Design to be included with the K-20 STEM curriculum.
What is STEAM
In this climate of economic uncertainty, America is once again turning to innovation as the way to ensure a prosperous future. Yet innovation remains tightly coupled with Science, Technology, Engineering and Math – the STEM subjects. Art + Design are poised to transform our economy in the 21st century just as science and technology did in the last century.
We need to add Art + Design to the equation — to transform STEM into STEAM.
STEM + Art = STEAM
STEAM is a movement championed by Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and widely adopted by institutions, corporations and individuals.
The objectives of the STEAM movement are to:

  • transform research policy to place Art + Design at the center of STEM
  • encourage integration of Art + Design in K-20 education
  • influence employers to hire artists and designers to drive innovation

Mathematics Education: Being Outwitted by Stupidity

Barry Garelick:

In a well-publicized paper that addressed why some students were not learning to read, Reid Lyon (2001) concluded that children from disadvantaged backgrounds where early childhood education was not available failed to read because they did not receive effective instruction in the early grades. Many of these children then required special education services to make up for this early failure in reading instruction, which were by and large instruction in phonics as the means of decoding. Some of these students had no specific learning disability other than lack of access to effective instruction. These findings are significant because a similar dynamic is at play in math education: the effective treatment for many students who would otherwise be labeled learning disabled is also the effective preventative measure.
In 2010 approximately 2.4 million students were identified with learning disabilities — about three times as many as were identified in 1976-1977. (See http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/xls/tabn045.xls and http://www.ideadata.org/arc_toc12.asp#partbEX). This increase raises the question of whether the shift in instructional emphasis over the past several decades has increased the number of low achieving children because of poor or ineffective instruction who would have swum with the rest of the pack when traditional math teaching prevailed. I believe that what is offered as treatment for math learning disabilities is what we could have done–and need to be doing–in the first place. While there has been a good amount of research and effort into early interventions in reading and decoding instruction, extremely little research of equivalent quality on the learning of mathematics exists. Given the education establishment’s resistance to the idea that traditional math teaching methods are effective, this research is very much needed to draw such a definitive conclusion about the effect of instruction on the diagnosis of learning disabilities.1

PROGRAMMING, EDUCATION, AND RATIONALITY

Ethan Fast:

Do you hold a consistent mental model of the world? For many of us (though less likely for the readers of this blog), the answer is “no.” That’s troubling. It’s hard to be correct, if your world-view doesn’t even type check. [1] People are entitled to opinions. But hold them in a state of contradiction, and they’re wrong.
Though it’s easy enough to apply consistency checks, inconsistent world-views abound. I suspect it’s because people never learn to be consistent. Education under-represents logic and reason in the classroom. High school math class is the closest many people come to an education in rationality, and math is “just too abstract.”

7th Inter-School Pakistan Mathematics Olympiads held

The Daily Times:

The 7th Inter-Schools Mathematics Olympiad 2012 was organised on Sunday at the Pak-Turk International School Campus. Over 3,000 students from 470 schools of Jhelum, Attock, Chakwal, Rawalpindi and Islamabad participated in the mega educational competition. In order to evoke interest among the students, Pak-Turk International schools and colleges have been arranging the ISMO competition for the last six years. Speaking at the event, educationists said that there are not enough chances for student to exhibit their talent to the world. There is an immense need of such programmes for the brilliant youth, they added. This unique competition provides a great chance for the students of 5, 6, 7 and 8 classes or grades to show their incredible potential and win handsome prizes.

“Women Worse at Math than Men” Explanation Scientifically Incorrect, MU Researchers Say

Steven Adams:

A University of Missouri researcher and his colleague have conducted a review that casts doubt on the accuracy of a popular theory that attempted to explain why there are more men than women in top levels of mathematic fields. The researchers found that numerous studies claiming that the stereotype, “men are better at math” – believed to undermine women’s math performance – had major methodological flaws, utilized improper statistical techniques, and many studies had no scientific evidence of this stereotype.
This theory, called stereotype threat, was first published in 1999 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Essentially, the theory is that due to the stereotype that women are worse than men in math skills, females develop a poor self-image in this area, which leads to mathematics underachievement.

Learning to Write Teaches Westerly Students Science
“Therefore, in conclusion, learning to write promotes scientific thinking. Other districts would do well to take notice.”

Posted by Julia Steiny Columnist EducationNews.org on January 25, 2012

Back in December 2009, excited 4th graders at Westerly’s State Street School (http://sss.westerly.k12.ri.us/) sat down to take a practice science test. Like little sports jocks, the kids approached the task as if it were training for the big game coming in the spring, the statewide science NECAP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NECAP).
In 2008, the whole Westerly district had performed so poorly on that test that teachers actually volunteered their time to form a K-12 Science Task Force focused on redeeming their sullied academic reputation. (See last week’s column about this Task Force (link to my column from last week) .)
Then, insult to injury, in 2009 State Street’s scores tanked again.
The heat was on. State Street had already started implementing the Task Force’s recommendations, including its strong emphasis on teaching writing.
Wait. Writing? That’s English, not science.
But more on this in a moment.
Westerly’s students had struggled particularly with the “inquiry” part of the NECAP, where kids to do a hands-on task and draw conclusions from what they see in front of them.
State Street’s Principal Audrey Faubert says, “Science (NECAP) is only given at the 4th grade (and later at 8th and 11th), so K-3 weren’t exposed to the rigors of testing. We decided to give all the kids an inquiry task to complete. And the faculty also took some of the released test items from the RIDE website. (http://www.ride.ri.gov/assessment/necap_releaseditems.aspx) Even though they’d been teaching inquiry with the science kits (http://www.uri.edu/hss/education/GEMSNET-URI/index.html) , it was interesting for the teachers to be on the other side of a test.”
But the spotlight’s glare was on those 4th graders.
Faubert smiled sadly, “The room was buzzing. The kids thought they did fantastic.”
Working in pairs, the school’s entire teaching staff scored the kids’ work. The results were enough to induce clinical depression.
But as it turns out, the school’s good efforts hadn’t quite paid off yet. The Task Force was onto a good thing when they decided writing was key to learning science. State Street’s instruction had only just started to take root.
Here’s the problem: Old science was about answers. When a test asks a question like: “How does wind change sand dunes?” somewhere in the science textbook was an answer that the kid was supposed to have memorized.
New science is about thinking and reasoning. The way Faubert puts it is: “The (NECAP) science test is a thinking test, not a knowledge test. Science isn’t about recall any more, but about synthesizing information.” New science poses essential questions, such as the sand dunes example, but now the kids need to derive the answer themselves, by sorting through data. Teachers provide techniques, tools, research methods, and experiences. But like scientists themselves, students must do their own research and figure out what their discoveries mean.
Writing is always the product of thinking. Writing forces a kid to organize her thoughts to be expressive and communicate clearly.
Middle-school principal Paula Fusco says “Prior to the work of the Task Force, we’d left writing up to the English teacher. But whatever the kids did or didn’t know, they weren’t able to communicate their understanding of science.
To work on that understanding, Fusco says, “we’ve been taking the vocabulary out of NECAP–infer, predict, explain. So the kids aren’t afraid of the words they’re encountering.”
The ability to define “predict” doesn’t help at all if the ability to MAKE a prediction isn’t also a familiar habit. Kids need to demonstrate, by their writing, that they understand what they need to DO when the test asks them to predict, infer or explain.
Similarly, Fusco’s teachers began to work with the kids on “sentence starters” to guide their thinking–However, In conclusion, Whereas, Therefore.
Fortunately, Westerly’s students were in the habit of writing in science journals. But they had used them mainly to record observations. Faubert says, “Every teacher brought in examples of their students’ science journals. Oh, here are the strengths and weaknesses right in our own notebooks. We’d never had the kids prove their thinking in their journals. Think like a scientist, based on what’s in front of you. Prove your thinking. Prove your thinking. We said that so many times.”
At the end of the day, teaching the kids to EXPLAIN their predictions and reasoning was the clearest way to teach them habits of scientific thinking. And those explanations also helped the teachers assess kids’ understanding and misunderstanding.
By February, State Street dared to try another practice test with the 4th graders. Again, the staff scored it together. Ahhh, much better. So much so, Faubert felt more confident about improving on the 49 percent proficiency they’d managed in the prior year’s test.
In fact, when the results were released last Fall, State Street kids hit 80 percent proficiency, 8th highest in the state, out of over 150 schools that take that test. (And Westerly is the 8th lowest-income community in the state.)
Superintendent Roy Seitsinger’s take on the situation is this: “Nobody (meaning veteran educators) signed up for what we’re doing now. Most of the people weren’t trained to bring students through a thinking process. Now the educators’ job is to teach kids how to sift through all that information and to be critical, reflective and make decisions. We have too much information and not nearly enough sorting skills.”
Therefore, in conclusion, learning to write promotes scientific thinking. Other districts would do well to take notice.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears at EducationViews.org and GoLocalProv.com. She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

How to Learn to Love Maths

Alex Bellos:

Britain is about to fall in love with maths. Well, that’s the dream. Yesterday one of the government’s top advisers on further education said that maths should be compulsory for all students until 18 or 19 – no matter what else they are studying. Professor Steve Sparks, chairman of the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education, also said that he wants a new maths qualification between GCSE and AS-level to be introduced by 2016.
Maths is justified in this country because it is useful. Sparks said his proposals were necessary because young people need a better grasp of maths to compete in the job market, where an understanding of technology and numeracy are increasingly important.

Algorithmic Education (including the Mathematics of Cramming)

Samuel Arbesman:

Many of us don’t learn in optimal ways. We know that we forget new material, neglect to review older material, and study in ways that elevate cramming and procrastination to art forms. But there is research about how to be more efficient in these things. For example, dating back to 1885, there is a rich literature that explores how timing our learning of new and old material can affect education.
For a long time, these theories were only loosely applied. They couldn’t be put into quantitative practice because of the difficulty of carefully implementing them. But with the ability to create educational software, customized to ensure a student has an optimal learning experience, we have a wonderful opportunity to actually employ this knowledge. Unfortunately, there are so many competing concerns, it’s far from trivial: We need to begin constructing new algorithms to figure out how best to learn.

Teaching programming to a nine-year-old

Dr. Prabhakar Ragde:

My younger daughter is nine. After watching me sit with a laptop all term preparing material using Scheme, she wanted to know something about it. She is self-taught on the application side of computing (browsers, paint programs, word processing) but knows nothing of computation itself. So I opened up a DrScheme Interactions window. “You add like this,” I said, typing in (+ 3 4). No problem. “Try some other operations, some bigger numbers.” It looks like a calculator without a ten-digit limit.
I wrote out some arithmetic expressions for her to convert to Scheme. She had difficulty with them, but not with Scheme: I had forgotten how much algebraic notation is taught later. She didn’t understand concatenation for multiplication, / for division, or putting two expressions one above the other with a horizontal line in between. Once I explained those, she converted them into Scheme expressions very quickly.

Hold district accountable for deceit, academic failure and questionable activity
“Where ignorance is bliss, ignorance of ignorance is sublime.” – Paul Dunham

Laurie Rogers, via a kind email:

Last week, I went to a Spokane Public Schools math presentation at Indian Trail Elementary School. It was billed as a forum in the school newsletter and on the reader board outside of the school. It was not, in any way, a forum. It was a tightly controlled 20-minute presentation that offered no data, little information, allowed for no parent input and was patronizing in tone.
At one point, parents were asked to define math to the person next to us. (The principal said he would not offer his definition.) We also were told to describe to our neighbor a math experience we’d had. These conversations ended right there, thus being pointless. We watched a video of several small children talking about the importance of math. The kids were cute, but the video was long. It was made clear to us that math is hard, parents don’t get it (see slide 7 of the presentation), “traditional math” is no longer useful, and math is intimidating to all. Printed materials reinforced the idea of parent incompetence, with students supposedly “taking the lead” and teaching their parents.
Parents were warned to stay positive about math, however, despite our supposed fear and lack of skill, and we also were told what a “balanced” program looks like – as if that’s what Spokane actually has.

Related: Math Forum audio & video.

Apple, America and A Squeezed Middle Class

Keith Bradsher & Charles Duhigg:

Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.
Some aspects of the iPhone are uniquely American. The device’s software, for instance, and its innovative marketing campaigns were largely created in the United States. Apple recently built a $500 million data center in North Carolina. Crucial semiconductors inside the iPhone 4 and 4S are manufactured in an Austin, Tex., factory by Samsung, of South Korea.
But even those facilities are not enormous sources of jobs. Apple’s North Carolina center, for instance, has only 100 full-time employees. The Samsung plant has an estimated 2,400 workers.
….
“We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”

Well worth considering from a curricular, finance and social perspective.

Student Math Scores Jump 20 Percent with HMH Algebra Curriculum for Apple® iPad®; App Transforms Classroom Education

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt:

Pilot study finds students in Riverside Unified School District who used Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s HMH Fuse™: Algebra 1 app were also more motivated, attentive, and engaged than traditionally educated peers.
Global education leader Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) today announced the results of a yearlong pilot of HMH Fuse: Algebra I, the world’s first full-curriculum Algebra app developed exclusively for the Apple iPad, involving the Amelia Earhart Middle School in California’s Riverside Unified School District. The pilot showed that over 78 percent of HMH Fuse users scored Proficient or Advanced on the spring 2011 California Standards Tests, compared with only 59 percent of their textbook-using peers.
The pilot showed that over 78 percent of HMH Fuse users scored Proficient or Advanced on the spring 2011 California Standards Tests, compared with only 59 percent of their textbook-using peers.”
The first assessment of the pilot– Riverside’s district Algebra benchmark -took place during the second trimester of the 2010-2011 year. Students using HMH Fuse scored an average of 10 percentage points higher than their peers. The app’s impact was even more pronounced after the California Standards Test in spring 2011, on which HMH Fuse students scored approximately 20 percent higher than their textbook-using peers.

Christina Bonnington has more.

Wolfram Education Portal

Wolfram Education:

Wolfram has long been a trusted name in education–as the makers of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, we’ve created some of the most dynamic teaching and learning tools available. We are pleased to offer the best of all of our technologies to you here in the Wolfram Education Portal, organized by course. In the portal you’ll find a dynamic textbook, lesson plans, widgets, interactive Demonstrations, and more built by Wolfram education experts. You can take a look at the types of materials we offer below, but to get full access to all materials, you need to sign up for a free account.

Learn to code at any age

Emma Mulqueeny:

This is a cross-post of something I wrote for The Guardian, but just thought would be handy to have on the blog over here. It is also a small update from an old post: How to teach kids, or anyone, how to code – that’s the history bit done! Now the science…
The beauty of programming is that it does not matter how old you are (within reason – under 7 is possibly a bit optimistic) you can learn using exactly the same, mostly free resources to be found on the Internet. You can learn basic programming easily within a year and then you can choose to hone and refine whichever aspects of coding most excite you. Done! It’s not hard.
For the purposes of this post I have referred to resources aimed primarily at younger people – but they are all useful for the beginner.

New York City gets a Software Engineering High School

Joel Spolsky:

This fall New York City will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city’s first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software. The project has been a long time dream of Mike Zamansky, the highly-regarded CS teacher at New York’s elite Stuyvesant public high school. It was jump started when Fred Wilson, a VC at Union Square Ventures, promised to get the tech community to help with knowledge, advice, and money.
I’m on the board of advisors of the new school, which plans to accept ninth graders for fall of 2012. Here’s why I’m excited about this new school:

160 Minn. students to compete in regional Science Bowl

Associated Press:

Some 160 high school math and science students from across the state will be competing this month in a regional Science Bowl in St. Paul.
They’ll be vying for the chance to represent Minnesota in the national competition in Washington, D.C. The event is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Students compete in teams of five to solve technical problems and to answer questions in all branches of math and science, including astronomy, biology, computer science and physics. The tournament is conducted in a fast-paced question-and-answer format.

Data and GIS Winter Newsletter 2012

John Herndon:

Data driven teaching and research at Duke keeps growing and Perkins Data and GIS continues to increase support for researchers and classes employing data, GIS, and data visualization tools. Whether your discipline is in the Humanities, Sciences, or Social Sciences, Perkins Data and GIS seeks to support researchers and students using numeric and geospatial data across the disciplines.

Voices of a Quant: ‘It’s very tempting to just stay in the world where everything can be understood in mathematical language’

Joris Luyendijk:

We’re meeting for lunch at a restaurant in Canary Wharf, where many of the major global banks are located. He is a man in his late 40s, inconspicuously dressed, and in possession of a firm handshake. He orders a Coke, and then a pasta dish he will dig in with great relish. In his volunteer email he said he was with a software firm (working in investment banking). When asked for a job description, he simply says he is a “quant”.
“My parents discovered that I was of a mathematical bent aged three when I was apparently lining up my toys in order of size and then colour. I was one of these terrible, precocious kids who did their mathematics O-level aged 12. After a long academic career I ended up doing theoretical physics for my PhD, and spent a couple of years at Cern in Geneva. Many people I know from back then are still at universities, doing research and climbing the slippery slope to professorships and fellowships. They work the same astonishing long hours as I do, yet get paid a fraction and, from a purely scientific perspective, get to do some really, really interesting science. I often say (only half jokingly) that I “sold my soul” – I make a little over £200,000 a year, including my bonus.
“I am in a world of data, and I build all sorts of models for banks. For instance, one that helps a bank decide whom to lend a mortgage to. You have all this data about the person who is applying, and then the model works out the risk of lending to that person. You look at both the probability of this happening, and at the size of the loss in such an event.

STEM charter high school planned at DSU

Wade Malcolm:

Earlier this year, two top Delaware State University officials visited two colleges in Ohio.
President Harry L. Williams and Provost Alton Thompson took the trips not to meet with fellow leaders in higher education. They wanted to see two high schools — operated by and located on the campuses of Akron University and Lorain County Community College.
The model they saw in action on their visits is known as “Early College High School.” And if the state approves its charter school application, DSU will open the first school of that type in Delaware on its Dover campus by the fall of 2013.

ROOTLESSNESS

Two of our overriding efforts in Lower Education in recent years have been: 1) raising the low math and reading scores of black and Hispanic students, and 2) increasing the number of our high school and college graduates capable of employment in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics [STEM}.
Very recently evidence has been allowed to surface pointing out that while students in the bottom 10% of academic performance have indeed improved, students in the top ten percent of academic performance have stagnated, where they have not dropped out from boredom. Related evidence now suggests that complacency with secondary public education in our more affluent suburbs may have been quite misplaced as well.
As Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum point out in their recent book, That Used To Be Us, “average is over.” That is to say, students in other cities (Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai) and countries (Finland, South Korea, Japan) take their educations so much more seriously than our students (and teachers) do that their economies are achieving gains on our own that are truly startling, if we take the time to notice.
If we are to retain good jobs, restart our manufacturing, and otherwise decide to compete seriously with others who seem to take both education and work more seriously than we have come to do, it might be wise to increase the interest of our students in STEM fields. According to the Kaiser Foundation, our students aged 8-18 are spending, on average, more than seven hours a day with electronic entertainment media.
Now of course we want our young people to buy our electronic entertainment hardware and software and we definitely want them to have a good time and be happy, but probably we would like them to be employable some day as well. Friedman and Mandelbaum point out that not only blue collar jobs and white collar jobs, but increasingly sophisticated professional work can be done to a high standard at a much lower cost in other countries than it can be done here.
Having our students spend 53 hours a week on their electronic entertainment media, while their high school homework tops out, in many cases, according to ACT, at three to four hours a week, is not a plan that will enable us to resume our competitive position in the world’s economies.
So perhaps we should assign students in high school 15 hours a week of homework (which would reduce their media time to a mere 38 hours a week) and pass on to them the information that if they don’t start working to a much much higher academic standard they will probably face a more depressing future in a greatly diminished nation than they currently imagine they will have.
But, is STEM enough? I remember the story told about a visit Sir Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, made to the gleaming new Salk Laboratory in La Jolla. A young biologist, thrilled to be a guide to the Nobel Prize-winner, was very proud to be able to show off all the bright new spotless expensive state-of-the-art research equipment. When they finished the tour, the young man could not stop himself from saying, “Just think, Sir Alexander, with all this equipment, what you could have discovered!” And Sir Alexander said, “not penicillin.”
Because the discovery of penicillin relied on serendipity and curiosity. Fleming found some petri dishes contaminated by something that had come in, probably, through one of the dirty old badly-closed windows in his lab in England. Instead of washing the dishes so he could start over with them, as most scientists would have done, he asked himself what could have killed off those bacteria in the dishes. And a major breakthrough was made possible.
Just in passing, amid the rush for more STEM, I would like to put in a word for serendipity, which often fuels creativity of many kinds, by making possible the association of previously unrelated ideas and memories when in contact with a new fact or situation not deliberately sought out.
I argue that serendipity is more likely to occur and to be fruitful if our students also have a lot of experience with the ROOTS of civilization, that is, the history, literature, art, music, architecture and other fields which have provided the background and inspiration for so much that we find worthwhile in human life. Steve Jobs found his course in calligraphy useful when he came to think about Macintosh software, but there are countless examples of important discoveries and contributions that have been, at least in part, grounded in the ROOTS of civilized life. So let us push for more STEM, by all means, but if, in the process we neglect those ROOTS, our achievements will be fewer, and our lives will be the poorer as a result, IMHO.
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review

For Cornell Tech School, a $350 Million Gift From a Single Donor

Richard Perez-Pena:

The donor whose $350 million gift will be critical in building Cornell University’s new high-tech graduate school on Roosevelt Island is Atlantic Philanthropies, whose founder, Charles F. Feeney, is a Cornell alumnus who made billions of dollars through the Duty Free Shoppers Group.
Mr. Feeney, 80, has spent much of the last three decades giving away his fortune, with large gifts to universities all over the world and an unusual degree of anonymity. Cornell officials revealed in 2007 that he had given some $600 million to the university over the years, yet nothing on its Ithaca campus, where he graduated from the School of Hotel Management in 1956.
The $350 million gift, the largest in the university’s history, was announced on Friday, but the donor was not named. Officials at Atlantic Philanthropies confirmed on Monday evening that it was Mr. Feeney, a native of Elizabeth, N.J., who is known for his frugality — he flies coach, owns neither a home nor a car, and wears a $15 watch — as well as his philanthropic generosity, particularly to medical research.

Statistical Illiteracy, Media Narratives, and the Spread of a Canard

Tom Elia:

The other day AP published an article titled, “Census shows 1 in 2 people are poor or low-income,” which pointed to a US Census Bureau report showing that half of all households earn less than the median national income. Yes, you read that correctly.
The AP’s Hope Yen reported:
Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.
The Census Bureau’s definition of a ‘low-income household’ is less than $45,000, as the AP’s Yen wrote:
Many middle-class Americans are dropping below the low-income threshold — roughly $45,000 for a family of four…
As we noted in a post on the AP ‘story,’ the US Census Bureau estimates that the median 2009 US household income was about $50,000.
So it seems the crux of the AP article can be accurately shortened to: Half of all households have an income below the median average!

There really is no difference between men and women’s math abilities

Alasdair Wilkins:

There’s a longstanding myth of a gender gap between boys’ and girls’ math performance, suggesting some basic biological difference in how the two genders approach math. It’s deeply controversial and widely discredited. And now, a new study has completely debunked it.
Until now, there was maybe a sliver of statistical data to support the existence of this gender gap — nothing remotely convincing, mind you, but just enough that the idea couldn’t be entirely dismissed out of hand. While most who studied the issue pointed for cultural or social reasons why girls might lag behind boys in math performance, there was still room for biological theories to be proposed.
The best-known of these is the “greater male variability hypothesis”, which basically says ability among males varies more widely than that of females, which means you’ll see more males at the extreme ends of the spectrum, good and bad. Then-Harvard president Larry Summers infamously put forward this idea back in 2005 as a way to explain the lack of great female mathematicians, and this was one of about a dozen different factors that ultimately cost him his job.

China Is Poised for an I.T. Golden Age

Kai-Fu Lee:

Chinese universities graduate more than 600,000 engineering students a year. China has consistently placed at or near the top of programming competitions. And while we have not seen China become a leader in information technology and computing, I expect that this will change in the coming decade.
Since the Internet revolution of the late 1990s, many successful companies have been built by taking American ideas and localizing them for China. These companies may have “copied” from the United States at first, but they acted swiftly, focused on their customers and developed their products, adding more and more local innovations.
For example, Tencent, one of China’s three Internet juggernauts, started with an instant-messaging product named QQ, which was a replica of the same system on which Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger were based. But today, QQ has evolved to become a very different product — a combination of instant messaging, social networking, universal ID and gaming center. QQ has built the world’s largest online community (about 700 million active accounts), while its American counterparts continue to build instant messaging as loss leaders.

Madison Schools for Whites Equivalent to Singapore, Finland (!); Troller Bids Adieu

Susan Troller, Via email:

Madison schools aren’t failing, by any stretch of the imagination, for many students.
In fact, if you’re a white, middle-class family sending your children to public school here, your kids are likely getting an education that’s on a par with Singapore or Finland — among the best in the world.
However, if you’re black or Latino and poor, it’s an unquestionable fact that Madison schools don’t as good a job helping you with your grade-point average, high school graduation, college readiness or test scores. By all these measures, the district’s achievement gap between white and minority students is awful.
These facts have informed the stern (and legitimate) criticisms leveled by Urban League President Kaleem Caire and Madison Prep backers.
But they doesn’t take into account some recent glimmers of hope that shouldn’t be discounted or overlooked. Programs like AVID/TOPS support first-generation college-bound students in Madison public schools and are showing some successes. Four-year-old kindergarten is likely to even the playing field for the district’s youngest students, giving them a leg up as they enter school. And, the data surrounding increasing numbers of kids of color participating in Advanced Placement classes is encouraging.
Stepping back from the local district and looking at education through a broader lens, it’s easy to see that No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have aimed to legislate, bribe and punish their way toward an unrealistic Lake Wobegon world where all the students are above average.

Remarkable. Are there some excellent teachers in Madison? Certainly. Does Madison’s Administration seek best in the world results? A look at the math task force, seemingly on hold for years, is informative. The long one size fits all battle and the talented and gifted complaint are worth contemplating.
Could Madison be the best? Certainly. The infrastructure is present, from current spending of $14,963/student to the nearby UW-Madison, Madison College and Edgewood College backed by a supportive community.
Ideally, Madison (and Wisconsin) should have the courage to participate in global examinations (Florida Students Take Global Examinations, Wisconsin’s Don’t). Taxpayers and parents would then know if Troller’s assertions are fact based.

For young math phenom, age is just another number

Mila Koumpilova:

In his first algebra class last year, Mani Chadaga slumped low in his front-row seat and pretended to read his new textbook intently.
Mani could make himself only so inconspicuous: He was, after all, a second-grader in a junior high class at St. Paul’s Capitol Hill Gifted and Talented Magnet School.
So he stopped trying.
Soon, he was piping up with solutions to the teacher’s questions and standing before his stumped classmates, explaining how he arrived at them. These days, as a third-grader juggling Algebra II and geometry, he kneels in his seat, only a smidgen of his early shyness and all his humility intact.

Help Math & Science Education

Jim Young, via a kind Chan Stroman-Roll email:


Dear Colleague: I am writing this letter because I sincerely fear that the future of our children and grandchildren could be in jeopardy. While there are numerous important issues facing America today, one continues to be high on my priority list, K-12 Math and Science. What scares me the most is that no one seems to care – not parents, teachers, administrators, politicians or business people – that we have FALLEN TO 25th GLOBALLY IN MATH.
It has been our strength in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) and the resultant innovation that fueled the great businesses of the 20th century. Automobiles, airplanes, radio, television, space travel, telecommunications and the Internet are just a few industries that are reliant on strong Math and Science skills and have produced a significant number of good jobs. There is a very good chance that our personal good fortunes can in some way be tied to the early innovation of our grandparents.
This comparative table needs no detailed explanation. Based on 2009 statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), it clearly shows how far we have fallen and how competitive the rest of the world has become

Related: www.wisconsin2.org Updating the 2009 Scholastic Bowl Longhorns 17 – Badgers 1; Thrive’s “Advance Now Competitive Assessment Report”.

Mathematical beauty

Javier Irastorza:

Reading science books for the general public, you’ll often find physicists talking about elegance, beauty and words of the like describing laws or theories.
The Wikipedia has an entry for “Mathematical Beauty“. Another entry says “Many mathematicians talk about the elegance of mathematics, its intrinsic aesthetics and inner beauty. Simplicity and generality are valued. There is beauty in a simple and elegant proof […]”.
The Spanish journal El Pais is publishing each week a mathematical challenge to its readers to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Spanish Royal Mathematics Society.
Last week’s challenge was to solve the sides of the different inner squares that compose the following rectangle, knowing that the red one has a side of 3.

Stanford’s Cryptography Class

Dan Boneh:

Cryptography is an indispensable tool for protecting information in computer systems. This course explains the inner workings of cryptographic primitives and how to correctly use them. Students will learn how to reason about the security of cryptographic constructions and how to apply this knowledge to real-world applications. The course begins with a detailed discussion of how two parties who have a shared secret key can communicate securely when a powerful adversary eavesdrops and tampers with traffic. We will examine many deployed protocols and analyze mistakes in existing systems. The second half of the course discusses public-key techniques that let two or more parties generate a shared secret key. We will cover the relevant number theory and discuss public-key encryption, digital signatures, and authentication protocols. Towards the end of the course we will cover more advanced topics such as zero-knowledge, distributed protocols such as secure auctions, and a number of privacy mechanisms. Throughout the course students will be exposed to many exciting open problems in the field.

Stepping Back on Madison Prep Governance Rhetoric

Susan Troller:

Late last week I got an email from Kaleem Caire, Urban League CEO and champion of the Madison Preparatory Academy charter school proposal.
Caire was unhappy with the way I had characterized the latest version of the charter school proposal.
In a blog post following the Madison Prep board’s decision late Wednesday to develop the proposed school as what’s known as a “non-instrumentality” of the school district, I described this type of school as being “free from district oversight.”
While it’s true that the entire point of establishing a non-instrumentality charter school is to give the organization maximum freedom and flexibility in the way it operates on a day-to-day basis, I agree it would be more accurate to describe it as “largely free of district oversight,” or “free of routine oversight by the School Board.”
In his message, Caire asked me, and my fellow reporter, Matt DeFour from the Wisconsin State Journal, to correct our descriptions of the proposed school, which will be approved or denied by the Madison School Board in the coming weeks.
In his message, Caire writes, “Madison Prep will be governed by MMSD’s Board of Education. In your stories today, you (or the quotes you provide) say we will not be. This continues to be a subject of public conversation and it is just not true.”

I wonder if other Madison School District programs, many spending far larger sums, receive similar substantive scrutiny compared with the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school? The District’s math (related math task force) and reading programs come to mind.
Ideally, the local media might dig into curricular performance across the spectrum, over time along with related expenditures and staffing.
From a governance perspective, it is clear that other regions and states have set the bar much higher.
Related: Updating the 2009 Scholastic Bowl Longhorns 17 – Badgers 1; Thrive’s “Advance Now Competitive Assessment Report”.
In my view, the widely used (at least around the world) IB approach is a good start for Madison Prep.

The New Physiocrats, or, Is There Value in the Humanities?

Kenneth Anderson:

In general, I agree entirely with the many commentators who have argued that the United States needs to produce more STEM graduates. But I also take note of the many people who have written to me to argue that the only truly employable STEM fields at the moment are engineering and computer science, and only certain disciplines within those. (I.e., I take the point made by many commenters that STEM graduates are not doing all that well in this economy either — when we say STEM = employment, so commenters point out, we don’t mean scientists or mathematicians as such, we mean particular fields of engineering and computer science. I can’t vouch for that but do accept it.)
It’s also worth keeping in mind that the United States could easily produce an excess of engineers — yes, even engineers. The labor market of a complicated, division-of-labor society means many, many specializations, and most of them are not STEM. We need lawyers, human resources staff, janitors, communications specialists, and many things that too-reductionist a view might lead one to believe are purely frivolous intermediary occupations. Maybe they are parasitical, and maybe they will get squeezed out of existence over time. But there is a sometimes incorrect tendency these days to believe that since innovation is the heart of all increases in productivity and hence in long run growth and wealth, STEM must be responsible for it and that because STEM is the root of innovation, only STEM jobs are truly value added. I exaggerate for effect, but you see the point.

Madison Math Circle gives young students a taste of higher math and science

Pamela Cotant:

Every week, middle and high school students are invited to the UW Madison campus to hear a talk designed to stimulate their interest in math and science and then to mingle with professors and their peers over pizza.
Called Madison Math Circle, the activity was started this fall as a replacement for the former High School Math Nights previously run on campus every other week. Organizer Gheorghe Craciun, associate professor in the math and biomolecular chemistry departments, said middle school students are now included because he found high school students are often too busy with other activities to attend.
Kevin Zamzow, who attended the Nov. 7 Madison Math Circle with his son, Noah Zamzow-Schmidt, approached the UW Madison math department about organizing the activity. Math circles are held at campuses around the country although Zamzow doesn’t know of another one in Wisconsin.
“I enjoy math,” said Noah, 12, a seventh grader at Edgewood Campus School who is taking 10th and 11th grade math classes at Edgewood High School. “I really enjoyed the topic tonight.”

AI-Class Exams at the University of Freiburg

University of Freiburg:

Both exams, that is the midterm and final exam for the online course “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, can be taken at the University of Freiburg, supervised by Prof. Dr. Wolfram Burgard. For both exams, you will have to be physically present at the location mentioned below. If you should be unable to come to Freiburg for both exams, you cannot receive the certificate.
Why you would want to do that, if you can do it at home, too? Because if you will pass the exams, you will get a certificate (in German: Schein) signed by Prof. Wolfram Burgard that you have passed the exam of the course and that this is equivalent to the AI course at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Freiburg. Typically, German and many international Universities accept such a certificate.
If you would like to take part in the exams at the University of Freiburg, please write an e-mail to Prof. Dr. Burgard to enroll:
burgard@informatik.uni-freiburg.de. Please use the subject “Stanford AI Course Exam Registration” for your email.

Wisconsin’s annual school test (WKCE) still gets lots of attention, but it seems less useful each year

Alan Borsuk:

Wisconsin (and just about every other state) is involved in developing new state tests. That work is one of the requirements of getting a waiver and, if a bill ever emerges form Congress, it will almost certainly continue to require every state to do testing.
But the new tests aren’t scheduled to be in place for three years – in the fall of 2014. So this fall and for at least the next two, Wisconsin’s school children and schools will go through the elaborate process of taking a test that still gets lots of attention but seems to be less useful each year it lives on.

The oft-criticized WKCE often provides grist for “successes”. Sometimes, rarely, the truth about its low standards is quietly mentioned.
I remember a conversation with a well educated Madison parent earlier this year. “My child is doing well, the WKCE reports him scoring in the 95th percentile in math”……
www.wisconsin2.org is worth a visit.

Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard)

Christopher Drew:

LAST FALL, President Obama threw what was billed as the first White House Science Fair, a photo op in the gilt-mirrored State Dining Room. He tested a steering wheel designed by middle schoolers to detect distracted driving and peeked inside a robot that plays soccer. It was meant as an inspirational moment: children, science is fun; work harder.
Politicians and educators have been wringing their hands for years over test scores showing American students falling behind their counterparts in Slovenia and Singapore. How will the United States stack up against global rivals in innovation? The president and industry groups have called on colleges to graduate 10,000 more engineers a year and 100,000 new teachers with majors in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math. All the Sputnik-like urgency has put classrooms from kindergarten through 12th grade — the pipeline, as they call it — under a microscope. And there are encouraging signs, with surveys showing the number of college freshmen interested in majoring in a STEM field on the rise.

Common-Core Math Standards Don’t Add Up

Grant Wiggins, via a kind reader’s email:

There is little question in my mind that national standards will be a blessing. The crazy quilt of district and state standards will become more rational, student mobility will stop causing needless learning hardships, and the full talents of a nation of innovators will be released to develop a vast array of products and services at a scale that permits even small vendors to compete to widen the field to all educators’ benefit.
That said, we are faced with a terrible situation in mathematics. In my view, unlike the English/language arts standards, the mathematics components of the Common Core State Standards Initiative are a bitter disappointment. In terms of their limited vision of math education, the pedestrian framework chosen to organize the standards, and the incoherent nature of the standards for mathematical practice in particular, I don’t see how these take us forward in any way. They unwittingly reinforce the very errors in math curriculum, instruction, and assessment that produced the current crisis.

Wisconsin 25th in 2011 NAEP Reading

Wisconsin Reading Coalition E-Alert, via a kind Chan Stroman Roll email:

The 4th and 8th grade NAEP reading and math scores were released today. You can view the results at http://nationsreportcard.gov. The presentation webinar is at http://www.nagb.org/reading-math-2011/.
Following is commentary on Wisconsin’s NAEP reading scores that was sent to the Governor’s Read to Lead task force by task force member Steve Dykstra.
2011 NAEP data for reading was released earlier than usual, this year. Under the previous timeline we wouldn’t get the reading data until Spring.
While we returned to our 2007 rank of 25 from our 2009 rank of 30, that is misleading. All of our gains come from modest improvement among Black students who no longer rank last, but are still very near the bottom. The shift in rank is among Wisconsin and a group of states who all perform at an essentially identical level, and have for years. We’re talking tenths of points as the difference.
It is always misleading to consider NAEP scores on a whole-state basis. Different states may have very different demographic make-ups and those difference can either exaggerate or mask the actual differences between the two states. For instance, the difference between Florida and Wisconsin (all scores refer to 4th grade reading) at the whole-state level is only 3 points. In reality, the difference is much greater. Demographic variation masks the real difference because Florida has far more minority students and far more poverty than Wisconsin. When we look at the subgroups, comparing apples to apples, we see that the real differences are vast.
When we break the groups down by gender and race, Florida outperforms Wisconsin by a statistically significant margin in every group. The smallest difference is 8 and some are as large as 20. If we break the groups down by race and school lunch status Florida outperforms Wisconsin by a statistically significant margin in every group, except black students who don’t get a free lunch. For that group Florida does better, but not by enough to declare statistical certainty. The smallest margin is 9, and many are at or above 15.
10 points are generally accepted as a grade level for this range of the NAEP. Every Florida subgroup except one exceeds it’s Wisconsin counterpart by a nearly a full grade level, and most by a lot more.
When we compare Wisconsin to Massachusetts the story is the same, only worse. The same groups are significantly different from each other, but the margins are slightly larger. The whole-state difference between Wisconsin and Massachusetts (15+ pts) only appears larger than for Florida because Massachusetts enjoys many of the same demographic advantages as Wisconsin. In fact, Wisconsin students are about the same 1.5 grade levels behind both Florida and Massachusetts for 4th grade reading.
If you want to dig deeper and kick over more rocks, it only gets worse. Every Wisconsin subgroup is below their national average and most are statistically significantly below. The gaps are found in overall scores, as well as for performance categories. We do about the same in terms of advanced students as we do with low performing students. Except for black students who don’t get a free lunch (where the three states are in a virtual dead heat), Wisconsin ranks last compared to Florida and Massachusetts for every subgroup in terms of percentage of students at the advanced level. In many cases the other states exceed our rate by 50-100% or more. Their children have a 50 -100% better chance to read at the advanced level.
We need a sense of urgency to do more than meet, and talk, and discuss. We need to actually change the things that will make a difference, we need to do it fast, and we need to get it right. A lot of what needs to be done can be accomplished in a matter of days. Some of it takes a few hours. The parts that will take longer would benefit from getting the other stuff done and out of the way so we can devote our attention to those long term issues.
Our children are suffering and so far, all we’re doing is talking about it. Shame on us.

Physics vs. Phys Ed: Regardless of Need, Schools Pay the Same

Tom Gantert:

There are 19 gym teachers in the Farmington School District who make more than $85,000 a year each. The average gym teacher’s salary in Farmington is $75,035. By comparison, the science teachers in that district make $68,483 per year on average.
That’s not unusual in Michigan schools, according to Freedom of Information Act requests received from around the state.
In the Woodhaven-Brownstown district, 18.5 (FTE) science teachers average some $58,400 per year in salary, while 12 gym teachers averaged nearly $76,700. In Harrison, science teachers earned $49,000 on average while gym teachers averaged $62,000.
This is not unusual, because school districts don’t differentiate what a teacher does when considering compensation, regardless of the district’s educational needs. Teachers are paid on a single salary schedule based on seniority and education level.

Royal Society journal archive made permanently free to access

The Royal Society:

The Royal Society continues to support scientific discovery by allowing free access to more than 250 years of leading research.
From October 2011, our world-famous journal archive – comprising more than 69,000 articles – will be opened up and all articles more than 70 years old will be made permanently free to access.
kite
The Royal Society is the world’s oldest scientific publisher and, as such, our archive is the most comprehensive in science. Treasures in the archive include Isaac Newton’s first published scientific paper, geological work by a young Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Franklin’s celebrated account of his electrical kite experiment. Readers willing to delve a little deeper may find some undiscovered gems from the dawn of the scientific revolution – including Robert Boyle’s account of monstrous calves, grisly tales of students being struck by lightning, and early experiments on to how to cool drinks ‘without the Help of Snow, Ice, Haile, Wind or Niter, and That at Any Time of the Year.’

My Favorite Test Question of All Time

Sam Shah:

In Calculus, we just finished our limits unit. I gave a test. It had a great question on it, inspired by Bowman and his limit activity.
Without further ado, it reads:
Then I ask part (b)…
Which reads: “Scratch off the missing data. With the new information, now answer the question: What do you think the limit as x approaches 2 of the function is (and say “d.n.e.” if it does not exist)? Explain why (talk about what a limit is!).
So then they get this…

There’s Enough Math in Finance Already. What’s Missing is Imagination.

Jason Gots:

For some of us, it was Spock. For others, a humiliating performance as a pilgrim in the kindergarten musical.  For me, it was William Blake’s relentless (and beautiful) attacks on Reason. But everyone at some point encounters – and many of us swallow – the dangerous notion that creativity and calculation are irreconcilable enemies. 
This perspective lives at the very heart of our school curricula from first grade through graduate school, as our talents are identified and we, complicit in the scheme, label ourselves ‘artistic’ or ‘sporty’ or ‘scientific.’ No doubt there are real, epigenetic differences in the way people think and see the world, but in epigenesis lies the key: Nature gives us talents, but nurture determines how we use them, and how mono or multidimensional our minds become. 
Like many quants – the mathematicians whose equations shape high-stakes decision making on Wall Street – Emanuel Derman arrived on Wall Street with little knowledge of economic theory. Unlike many of his colleagues, though, he had a background in theoretical physics, a field in which imagination and mathematics are happy bedfellows. From 1990-2000, Derman led Goldman Sachs’ Quantitative Strategies group, presiding over the rise of mathematical modeling as the engine driving financial betting on Wall Street.