The beauty of the fundamental theorem of calculus
Michael Bérubé is back with Arbitrary but Fun Friday, and other bloggers have Friday entries on fish, movies, fun, … so what the heck am I supposed to do? I got the staid bearded portrait up there in the corner of the blog. It’s staring at me right now, daring me to be frivolous. Or […]
Worst. Gates. Mistake. Ever?
Prince George’s County superintendent John Deasy is becoming deputy director of the Gates Foundation. The Washington Post article on the topic buries the scandal that enveloped the University of Louisville around Deasy’s diploma, awarded after one semester of work at the University of Louisville and after Deasy’s former district awarded the center run by the […]
On Wendy Kopp, TFA, and Linda Darling-Hammond
Back in June, I wrote a long entry on Teach for America and Linda-Darling Hammond’s critique of the Kopp organization and model. I had been puzzled at the claim by Kevin Carey and others that Darling-Hammond simply hated TFA with the type of bile that is usually attributed to Karl Rove, Bill Belichek, and others […]
Both Fish and Bérubé are wrong
Some years ago, I ran across someone who was so firmly convinced that schools were heterosexist, he thought that K-12 teachers should be forbidden from mentioning anything about their private lives lest they reinforce heteronormative assumptions. I asked, “Okay, so that means you can’t have a picture of your spouse or children on your desk?” […]
In formidonis
A week ago or so, my daughter’s composition class teacher assigned an essay that was clearly linked to the history class: not an essay, but Jonathan Edwards’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741), the quintessential First Great Awakening sermon. I am not religious, certainly not Christian in any of its flavors, yet […]