Snakes on a Plane - PG Version

Alec Couros ran across this on YouTube. It's a family friendly version of Samuel L. Jackson's famous line from "Snakes on a Plane":

A Mathematician's Lament

I just finished reading Paul Lockhart's book A Mathematician's Lament and I'm pretty confused. I both loved and hated the book.

Paul Lockhart seems like he'd be an amazing math teacher. His book The A Mathematician's Lament shows him to be an incredibly motivated teacher of the subject. The book is a prolonged critique of contemporary mathematics education and as such, Lockhart lands a number of serious blows.

Math education, he argues, is currently designed to kill students' love of the subject. It is devoid of the aesthetic beauty that is the essence of math and is instead a pointless series tasks to be memorized. His goal is to elevate mathematical pursuits to the level of an art. Rid the topic of all its pseudo "usefulness" and teach as something to be appreciated on its own terms.

On the whole, I found the book convincing. One point that stuck out especially for me was his call to include the history of math in math courses. He'd also like to see the philosophy of the subject discussed so that students can see the passion that mathematicians have. Doing so would certainly have given someone like me more to work with rather than the memorization and pattern recognition that dominates so much of math education today.

Where he loses me is in his dismissal of all attempts to develop curriculum. He dismisses it and every attempt to do so as "bunk". Education schools are absurd. The only thing that matters to Lockhart is the individual teacher and his efforts to do what's best for students. One part of me wants to believe that this is in fact the case, but this seems misguided at best. This Randian view of the heroic individual standing up against all the world's fools sounds good (I guess), but does not conform to the reality I've encountered in my years of teaching and as an administrator.

Can teachers learn from others? I don't have a sense that Lockhart feels he's learned much from anyone but himself. How is a teacher to ensure that students have some consistent and meaningful expeience over the years? Are they to wander from master to master with no direction? Is there really no responsibility to give students some semblance of a coherent experience?

The heart of the problem seems, to me, at least, to be Lockhart's overweening self-confidence. From his text, Lockhart apparently has all the answers and those who don't agree with him are fools. So while I am sure he's a great teacher, I do wonder if his students come to possess what appears to be his elitist dismissal of "lesser intellects". That has nothing to do, I guess, with math, but it does have everything to do with character.

You can take a look at the original (and shorter) lament here.

Stalin vs. Martians

Big Download blog just reported what may be the bleeping stranges idea for a video game since someone decided to make a game out of Dante's Inferno. It's Stalin vs. Martians. Yes, Stalin vs. Martians. In case the premise is confusing to you, it pits Stalin vs. Martians. The release date? April 20 -- Hitler's birthday.

Here's a video preview of the excitement that awaits you:



And for those of you wondering what Dante's Inferno will look like as a game, here's a taste.

I'm Confusing Even Myself

My school's in the midst of a ton of interesting initiatives surrounding diversity, global education, tech, pedagogy, professional development, curriculum, etc. It's all really exciting stuff. I was trying to explain what we're doing to a colleague from another school this afternoon, however, and I found it difficult to give him any "elevator speech" that ties everything together. And what we're doing is tied together pretty tightly around a few very clear conceptual pillars. I really need to put everything down into one place and construct a coherent narrative that explains everything simply and clearly. I worry that we could lose ourselves in the details as we make so much progress on so many fronts.

Having read Made to Stick a while back, I'm acutely sensitive to issues surrounding messages and their reception. I want to avoid all the "21st century skills" boilerplate and get toward something that's a bit less grounded in trendiness and more set in sound reasoning and logical construction with a healthy dose of clarity thrown in for good measure.

Sorry if this blog post reads more like an inner dialogue than it does an actual posting, but I'm trying to publicly commit myself to the task in as public a manner as possible. Not that I've got an audience for this blog, but still...

Kansas 7th Graders' KKK Project Draws Flack

Some kid in Kansas did a project which involved a Klan-inspired board game. It was highlighted at a parent open-house and people were upset. Go figure...

World's Largest Model Railroad

I used to take my kids to Northlandz when I live in New Jersey. I thought it was a pretty big place. This video makes me realize that maybe it wasn't all that big after all...

St. Petersburg/Leningrad: Then and Now

The web site English Russia has some really interesting photos of St. Petersburg/Leningrad which intersperse current photos with footage from the Nazi siege of the city during the war. I'm a sucker for anything relating to Russia in WWII -- it's endlessly fascinating to me.