Prison, Mexican dancers, frogs and plantains

Dec 12, 2006 17:00

The title gives you a brief summary of last weekend for me. It was a good weekend, but a very busy one ( Read more... )

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quale December 15 2006, 06:41:04 UTC
Isn't magnollia that awful movie with frogs falling from the sky. Well I guess I can't say too much I thought it was too awful to watch more than 5 minutes.

I'm glad you like the prison teaching thing. I tried it many years ago (and still can't get off the damn mailing list) and didn't like it much. Mostly because getting out there was a huge pain without a car and I ended up having to be trapped before heading out to guarantee a ride and then felt totally useless once I got there because they had more math people than they really knew what to do with.

Not to mention my general problem with teaching, that sort of horrible self-disgust at knowing I have to be the sort of teacher that I utterly and totally despised through school. I went into mathematics because I really couldn't stand vague pictoral explanations and lack of rigor and prison teaching was an even more extreme version of this than TAing.

Speaking of which do you have a book you would recommend to someone teaching an older child (I'm guess like 5-7th grade) that would explain what was really going on with arithmetic, long division etc.. Something less intense than a number theory book but explains why algorithms work. If not do you know someone I should ask (I promised someone I would ask around for them).

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