Starting tomorrow, I’ll be sharing my “30 Days of Marc Cohn”, to get myself ready for the Valentine’s Day show I’ll be attending with Annie. (And this message is mostly about testing some WordPress features I intend to use.)
Category: teaching
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Filling in the memory hole
Following Noah Smith’s lead, I am simply copying John Derbyshire’s ludicrous racist screed to do my bit to prevent it from vanishing down the memory hole once he and his sponsors realize how damning it is. Distributed democracy for the win.
Racist nonsense below the fold. UPDATE: Smith has published some thoughts on the screed, which capture some of what I’d been thinking, so I figured I’d link to that too.
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My philosophy of education
Edited to correct some grammatical mistakes.
The new school year is about to start, and it’s customary to take a moment and philosophize. But I’m really busy, so I’m going to dust off something else and let that stand in. Back in 2010 December, I was nominated for a prize offered by Princeton University Teacher Prep. Part of the process was to submit a statement of my “philosophy of education”. I’d never actually put down on paper my educational philosophy, so I had to write it fresh.
I didn’t win the prize 🙁 but I did get to spend some time thinking about why I’m doing what I’m doing. That’s worthwhile. And since I was once instructed by a very wise professor that anything worth writing is worth using at least three times, I figured I’d recycle my statement here. Enjoy.
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The iPad at two months
I’ve had my iPad for just under two months now and thought it’s a good time to reflect on it.
I’ll admit to hesitating before buying one. I’m not really a fan of Apple — they do good hardware but (in my opinion) only so-so user interface work, and I cannot abide the zealots who are legion who believe that every decision by the Cupertino company is sublime, inspired, and unassailably correct. (The single button mouse? For twenty years? Really?) But my school is currently investigating providing an iPad to every student, and purchased 20 for faculty to use to get acclimated, and then offered a decent deal on purchasing them. So I thought, What the heck?
My impressions are below the fold.
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WordPress and the iPad
So I wonder why my iPhone can run the WordPress app and see Mongrel Dogs but the iPad (running the same app) cannot see the posts (but it -can- see the comments). Odd.
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Excellent headline explaining why we’re headed for the next Great Depression
Bravo, Paul Krugman!
“The Invisible Bond Vigilantes Continue Their Invisible Attack”
Could we call this the phantom menace? 🙂
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Days of miracle and wonder, indeed
For about ten years, I’ve been running a project in my Honors Physics course called Days of Miracle and Wonder (yes, title taken from a Paul Simon song). In it, the students are asked to create a business case for a product or service not available today but likely to be so by 2030. Although they are expected to construct a likely technological path from today’s state-of-the-art to that future product, they aren’t expected to actually build their device because, after all, it’s supposed to be 20 years away.
In one of the early years, a team chose as its device a free-standing holographic display a la the chess scene on the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars. They presumed it would involve some sort of fast-spinning mirror.
Today, I came across this — a SIGGRAPH paper and video demonstrating a free-standing three-dimensional display utilizing a fast-spinning mirror. It’s about 20 years early.
I guess I have to revise my project rubric. 😛
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Texas approves explicitly conservative curriculum
The writing was on the wall for a while, but Texas just approved a revision to its history curriculum. It has an explicit conservative bent — I mean, literally, students are to learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”
Because it is such a large market and has a very central purchasing authority, Texas carries a lot of weight with textbook publishers, meaning that students of many states will receive textbooks crafted to meet the Texas requirements. (California is an even larger market but is not buying new books for a long while due to its ongoing slow meltdown.)
Am I worried? Less than might be expected by people who know me. Why? Because I’m a teacher. I have learned that the easiest way to cause students to reject any piece of knowledge is to proclaim it loudly in a textbook. Especially with an increasingly distrustful and tech-savvy student population, attempts to ram down an official line on anything seem likely to fail.
