Dear students,

Start being right a lot more often. It will make it a lot easier to grade.

- Moth

They are awake and active and like to skip steps and are sometimes facetious.

Shitload Of Math Due Monday

(The Onion)

So, has anyone had a stack of papers to grade, and then you grade it all, and you think, "wow, they totally don't know anything. They bombed totally," and then when you add it all up, they average something high like a 77 in spite of all that? Partial credit is such sneaky, tricky business.

Or: 65 > 6This Summer, the class I taught started with 11 people, and half of them dropped in the first week ( Read more... )

Some talk about math education, and then some more of the same.

The first link also contains in the comments some debate over the value of why vs how in mathematics. I'm pro-why. The second is an offshoot of the first, and centers on an article about how math is misunderstood and why. Though the article suffers from the uniqueness fallacy. Take a ( Read more... )

What I'm up to lately.

So I think that I've finally cracked. In class last week when I went over a problem on adding fractions with variable expressions in the denominators, I said that imposing common denomonators on fractions is kind of like Communism, and that going to college was indeed making them all Communists, just like their parents had always feared ( Read more... )

On Bullshit, by Princeton University professor emeritus Harry Frankfurt is a uniformly entertaining tongue half-in-cheek look at the phenomenon of bullshit. The essay continues to develop around examples for longer than expected, like a highbrow version of Peter Griffin clutching his knee in agony. To cite an excerpt, "Just as hot air is speech ( Read more... )

The semester has finally ended. I spent all day scrambling to put together 60-70% of my final assignments, but all has calmed down now ( Read more... )