text:
Saturday, March 1, 2008
teacher test from the 19th century
1. Analyse the following, and parse words in italics:
I cannot tell if to depart in silence,
Or bitterly to speak in your reproof,
Best fitteth my degree or your condition.
2. Write the following in prose, and parse the verb awaits:
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour:
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
3. Give a brief example of a compound and a complex sentence. Give the rule for the use of the subjunctive mood.
4. Define and give etymology of verb, pronoun, conjunction and adverb. Give example of a defective, an auxiliary, an impersonal and a redundant verb. How many kinds of pronouns are there? Give example of each.
5. Prior has the following sentence. State if it be good grammar. If not, why? If it be, parse the word than:
Thou art a girl as much brighter than her,
As he is a poet sublimer than me.
6. Give rule for forming plural of nouns ending in "y," with examples. Give plurals
of staff, radius, miasma, Miss White, rendezvous, talisman, loaf, grief, seraph, Mussulman, forceps, spoonful, who, beef, s, x, 6, and madam. Also singulars of kine, ashes, banditi [sic], swine, animalcula.
7. Compare chief, much, former, far, forth, next, round, up, ill, full.
8. Give the feminines of abbot, earl, duke, lad, marquis, hero, tiger, nephew, testator, bachelor, wizard and ox.
9. Write the past tense and past participle of these verbs.
Lay, Seek, Sit, Get, Dare,
Thrive, Lie, Set, Light, Loose,
Fly, Flee, Chide, Overflow, Catch,
Lose, Swim, Climb, Drink, Slay,
Leap, Quit, Swell, Burst, Eat.
10. Define metonymy, catachresis, and hyperbole; and state difference between a
metaphor and a simile.
11. Punctuate the following lines:
But when I ask the trembling question
Will you be mine my dearest Miss
Then may there be no hesitation
But say distinctly Yes Sir yes
12. Parse the three "thats" in the following sentence:
He that fears that dog thinks that he is mad.
Also parse the word "but" in each of the following:
There was no one but saw him;
We ran, but he stopped;
All fled but Peter;
If you did but know it.
13. Correct the following:
(a) Although I persuaded the old man, he refused to yield, and I expect he divided his estate between his 3 daughters. His example, though he meant well, is calculated to have a bad effect.
(b) As I laid down I seen the smoke raising over the way.
(c) Whom do you say that I am? or who do you take me to be?
(d) John and James were both there, though neither were invited.
(e) As water is froze easier than alcohol, so riches are easier acquired than a good name.
(f) Between you and I, there is some mystery about that fire last night. Did you hear where it was at? I am glad none of my friends were in the house. I should be sorry if either James or William were inculpated in setting it on fire.
(Letter 194, p. d May 23, 1877)
Prepared by Jos: Crosby, Examiner, for June 2/77
1. Give etymology of orthography. What are mutes, labials, and liquids, and why so called?
2. Give meaning of the prefixes, ante, anti, circum, quad, proto, oct, trans, sym, and con.
3. Form derivatives of prefer, begin, stop, run, defy, abridge, tie, and die, with the suffix ing or ed.
4. Write a word containing a diphthong, one containing a digraph, and one containing a trigraph.
5. Define accent, and mark the accent on the words inverse, diverse, adverse, reverse, obverse, calcine, piquant, orthoepy, abdomen, acclimated, area, salutatory, accessary, gondola, illustrate, prolix, portent, inquiry, contemplated, expert, extant.
6. Spell the words (given orally)
(Letter 194, p. d May 23, 1877)
Prepared by Jos: Crosby, Examiner, for May 26/77
Put all your work on the paper and make it explain itself.
1. Define integer, fraction, interest, discount, power, and root.
2. What effect has multiplying both terms of a fraction by the same number, and why; and why in dividing one fraction by another do you invert the divisor and multiply the terms together?
3. If A's age were increased by its 3/7 its 4/5 and 19, the sum would equal 2 1/2 times his age; required his age. [sic]
4. Multiply 718 by .000018 and divide the product by 27 millionths.
5. 32 men agree to construct 28 miles 4 furlongs and 32 rods of road; after completing one-half of it, one-fourth of the number of men left the company, what distance did each man construct before and after one-fourth of the men left.
6. A man drives 97 pegs on a straight line and spaces them 3 ft. 8 in. apart. What is the distance from the first to the last peg, lowest terms?
7. A man receives $65 interest for the use of $600 for 3 years, 7 months and 15 days. What is the rate per cent.?
8. What is due on the following note?
Zanesville, O., Dec. 10, 1871.
One year after date I promise to pay to the order of Richard Roe twelve
hundred dollars, value received.
9. Give the rule for obtaining the difference of time, having the difference of longitude, and vice versa, and give the reasons for the rule.
10. A square lot containing 54,756 square feet is surrounded by a close board fence 12 feet high. What would the boards cost at $13 per thousand?
(Letter 195, p. d May 27, 1877)
Prepared by Jos: Crosby, Examiner, for May 26/77
1. Where does the earth have the greatest diameter?
2. Why do we reckon 180 degrees of longitude and only 90 of latitude?
3. What is meant by the equinoxes?
4. Locate the Crimea, Bombay, Bay of Fundy and the Capital of Mississippi.
5. lnto what three functions is the government of the United States divided?- define each function.
6. Describe the lndus and Niger rivers.
7. Through what waters would a ship pass in going from Duluth to Odessa?
8. Bound France and give five of its chief cities.
9. Name the New England States and locate their capitals.
10. Define equator, zone, latitude and longitude.
11. lnto what bodies of water do the following rivers flow: The Danube, Rhone, Volga, Tiber, Rio Grande, Jordan and Mahoning.
(Letter 195, p. d May 27, 1877)
Sections of a Certification Examination, 1877. Note the civics question ( # 5 ) in a geography examination. The hlahoning River is in northeastern Ohio. Crosby appears to have re-used questions: see "swine" (grammar question #6) and "Lie" (gramnlar question #9) and compare Crosby's comments about the examination given in the summer of 1876 (Letter 133).
Certification in "The Basics" One Hundred Years Ago
John W. Velz
The English Journal, Vol. 66, No. 7. (Oct., 1977), pp. 32-38.
these pages: 36-38
Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-8274%28197710%2966%3A7%3C32%3ACI%22BOH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-C
test-taking strategy
recent comments?
where'd they go?
Friday, February 29, 2008
Stu Savory: Learn to Take Cube Roots In Your Head
Most people can't do mental arithmetic any more. What a pity indeed :-(
Almost everyone relies on calculators these days. So today I'm going to tell you how to do an apparently difficult feat of mental arithmetic. Today you will learn how to take integer Cube Roots in your head! It's really dead easy, believe me!
Go to this blog post for the technique
TMAO on "The Achievement Gap"
Do teachers need to utilize more culturally responsive pedagogy? (Banks et al) Do kids and families of group X need to start acting more like the kids and families from group Y, and like, y'know, get their act together? (Cosby & the staff lounge) Do we put our efforts into wide-scale social transformation, because schools are not powerful enough to overcome such a pervasive inequity? (Rothstein) Do we stop talking about poverty, because it's not about poverty, but about innate factors out of our control? (silly race-based IQ-gap people)
Or do we say, here is School A which has the same demographics as School B, but kids at School A learn and those at School B do not -- just why is that exactly? (Folks who scribble the word educator in front of every published utterance of the phrase "achievement gap.")
That's my thing. Don't engage an endless debate that may or may not get us closer to bringing a better education to more kids.
For those of you who don't read his blog, Teaching in the 408, TMAO teaches in a low-SES, high-percentage-of-English-Language-Learners (ELLs) district in the Silicon Valley.
We must reject the ideology of the "achievement gap" that absolves adults of their responsibility and implies student culpability in continued under-performance. The student achievement gap is merely the effect of a much larger and more debilitating chasm: The Educator Achievement Gap. We must erase the distance between the type of teachers we are, and the type of teachers they need us to be.
Math Program Reviews
The Well-Trained Mind has an excellent review of several math programs, here's a short excerpt:
Which method is better? In my opinion, the one which the student understands most clearly. In both cases, it is possible for the student to learn the mental trick without thoroughly understanding why it works, although the sheer amount of repetition in the Saxon method makes it easier for this lack of understanding to escape detection. But the strongest mathematical training of all would come from a combination of programs – in which the student is taught to do a mathematical process using several different methods and mental procedures.
Currently, Singapore and Math-U-See are "thought-oriented" math programs available to home school parents; Saxon and A Beka are "skill-oriented" programs. A combination of Saxon + Singapore, or Saxon + Math-U-See, or Singapore + A Beka, or A Beka + Math-U-See, may come closest to fulfilling the goals of classical education. Math-U-See + Singapore would also be an excellent combination, as long as you use MUS's supplementary drill sheets. Treat one program as primary and the other as secondary; when you cover a concept in the primary program, look it up in the secondary program and see whether it is explained and illustrated differently.
I like her idea of using 2 programs. I do that all the time with phonics--I know what is best about each program and pick and choose accordingly, I have dozens of phonics programs from my tutoring. Also, if a student is struggling with a certain area, it's good to have a few books that explain it in slightly different ways. I hadn't thought to do the same with math.
There is also an interesting review at Sonlight, a basic review of their math choices from grade school through calculus, and then, they explain their choice for algebra and geometry--teaching textbooks:
- CD-ROM-based "whiteboard" lectures and step-by-step explanation of how to solve every practice problem taught by a tutor who has been teaching homeschoolers for years...since the days he tutored probability and statistics at Harvard . . . and . . .
- CD-ROM-based "whiteboard" solutions guide that works every step in every homework problem, so you see exactly how to solve each problem . . . and why you want to use the methods the instructor (or, more accurately, personal tutor) uses.
We're currently using Math-U-See with our daughter for Kindergarten math. I personally like Singapore or Saxon better, but this is what is working for her. The good thing about Math-U-See is that they have a DVD with each lesson so that if you get that "blank stare," (yes, it is even possible with kindergarten level math!), you can just plop in the DVD and have an actual math teacher explain it in field tested verbage.
Math-U-See's approach to fractions is also interesting, I'm not sure what I think about it. The rectangles do make more sense to me than the traditional circle/pie method. From their downloads page, in sample lesson pages, click on Epsilon.
For an even more interesting and thought-provoking review, read Wild About Math!'s Calculus in 4th grade? I'm really not sure what I think about that one. Luckily, we're still doing kindergarten math so I have time to figure it all out.
Concerned Parent on Catholic schools
Things are clearly quite different than when I attended Catholic school. For starters, when I was in school, almost every teacher was a nun. You just don't see that anymore.
The principal of the school I just visited seemed pleased that the diocese had recently (in the past couple of years) required the school to amend their curriculum to conform with our state standards. Prior to that, Catholic schools were more concerned with meeting national expectations of learning for all Catholic schools. I don't see this change as a positive, however. Our state standards are woefully low (comparing results of the CMT to the NAEP makes clear just how low they are). Projecting forward and over the long haul, this is really not a good thing for Catholic schools.
The other red flag was the pride in their Lucy Calkins style "writer's workshop" approach to teaching writing. They do teach grammar in every grade K-8 and offer Honors English for students who are capable.
The math, on the other hand, was still much more traditional than anything in our public school district. It's neither Singapore nor Saxon, but it's not Everyday Math or Investigations either. They have honors algebra available in eighth grade. They have a significant percentage of the graduating eighth graders place out of algebra at the high school level. That's definitely something.
The other silver lining: I did observe the order, respect for others, respect for self, discipline and self-assured, smiling faces I remember from my own Catholic school days. I contrast this with the disorder, disrespect, and stress I recently observed at a visit to a magnet school in our county. I believe that children thrive in a structured environment because it feels safe and predictable. I still believe this learning environment/school culture element is an important aspect of most Catholic schools today.
I also think that that this type of school culture is what makes schools like KIPP, Green Dot, Stuyvesant, and others so successful.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
the Catholic schools of the 60s
Great, committed teacher/adviser/mentors, high standards, a focused curriculum, a culture of achievement, and plenty of hard work by students well aware that real consequences attach to their performance--what more does a successful school need? Yes, I'm talking about the Knowledge Is Power Program and Amistad, the Academy of the Pacific Rim and Stuyvesant, and others of today's super-schools. But I'm also talking about the Catholic schools of the 1960s and my own time at Phillips Exeter Academy, where by senior year I was awakening at 3 a.m. to study. It paid off, for me and lots of others. (I was able to skip my freshman year at Harvard.) But it was sink or swim--and those who treaded water were sometimes invited not to return for the next semester.
Lessons Learned
Are the Catholic schools of the 60s definitely gone?
Do we know?
train wrecks I have known and loved
We were in high spirits. The physicist laughed as he told his story. "Everybody had agreed on the proposed plan. The mayor had the support of both the citizens and the city council. Because the volume of traffic downtown and the resultant noise and air pollution had become intolerable, the speed limit was lowered to twenty miles per hour and concrete "speed bumps" were installed to prevent cars from exceeding it.
"But the results were hardly what the planners anticipated. The lower speeds forced cars to travel in second rather than third gear, so they were noisier and produced more exhaust. Shopping trips that used to take only twenty minutes now took thirty, so the number of cars in the downtown area at any given time increased markedly. A disaster? No--shopping downtown became so nerve-racking that fewer and fewer people went there. So the desired result was achieved after all? Not really, for even though the volume of traffic gradually went back to its original level, the noise and air pollution remained significant. To make matters worse, during the period of increased traffic, word had gotten around that once-a-week shopping expeditions to a nearby mall on the outskirts of a neighboring town were practical and saved time. More and more people started shopping that way. To the distress of the mayor, downtown businesses that had been flourishing now teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. Tax revenues sank drastically. The master plan turned out to be a major blunder, the consequences of which will burden this community for a long time to come."
The fate of this environment-conscious town demonstrates how human planning and decision-making processes can go awry if we do not pay enough attention to possible side effects and long-term repercussions, if we apply corrective measures too aggressively or too timidly, or if we ignore premises we should have considered.
The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations
by Dietrich Dorner
For some odd reason I'm tickled by the idea that it is apparently not possible to sidestep the conundrum of unintended consequences by simply doing nothing, or by doing just a tiny bit of something.
Too much of nothing is just as bad as too much of something.
There's no sure thing.
image from reflective design
Happy 50th Birthday Kumon!
"The Education industry is burgeoning," says Deven Klein, vice president of Kumon franchising. "Tutoring is a widespread option for an increasing number of families in the United States."
Gee, lucky for us that we have this option.
Over the past five years, the average Kumon Center enrollment in the United States increased by 55 percent, and overall, the company has 80,000 more U.S. students than in 2002.
Kumon opened 84 new US centers last year, and expects to open 120 in 2008. Business is booming.
Calculating the value of a class: Unsatisfactory Data Transfer Rate
I am paying a bit more than $1.20/minute for one of my graduate school classes. How do I know this? I divided the tuition cost for the class by the number of minutes the class is nominally in session.To date, on the $/minute metric, I've spent $864. Personal valuation of information received, to date? $125, max.
Well, I've made some friends and/or future colleagues. That's worth something.
On the other hand, it has really sharpened how I think about the airtime I take up in class. Before I open my mouth (which usually lasts at least a minute), I think, "Is this worth $1.20 of my classmates' money?"
On the gripping hand, there's the Ditz Boredom Index. My urge to talk is directly related to how dissatisfied I am with the rate of [information/data] transfer. I realize I am hogging the airtime....
Grumpity grump. But you know, in every training program there are the slog-through bits.
Hmmn, maybe I should write the syllabus I wish I the class had offered, including a more meaningful reading list.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
write the other way
works if life is about submitting
to silly rules handed down from on high.
& g-d knows: that's what school is *for*.
but i want no part of it myself;
do what thou wilt shall be
the whole of the law.
if they give you ruled paper,
write the other way. etc.
yours in the struggle.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Andromeda on organization & the middle school kid
1) I teach middle school, and it's just scary how much of success at this level is linked to organizational abilities and work habits, not intelligence. I've got crazy-smart kids who do terribly because they do the homework and can't find it, or (more likely) never did the homework because they don't have some consistent way of writing it down, or couldn't do it correctly because they didn't have the notes, or, or, or...All organization. I don't believe in notebook grades, but that does put me in a bit of a bind...
2) Joan Sedita's book on study skills is the bible. I don't remember if it touches directly on organization, but it does a great job identifying and breaking down study skills things that students may be having trouble with, and its general approach is illuminating.
3) As a basic template for organizing notebooks, you can seldom go wrong with this:
Get a three-ring binder with as much looseleaf paper as will fit. (Notebooks where you tear out paper are the devil; paper, once torn out, cannot be put back in any helpful way.) If at all possible, get one which doesn't have folders in the front or back, because then all the paper will end up *in* the folders, getting dogeared and disorganized.
Make four sections: notes; homework; tests and quizzes; handouts. Or maybe five: blank paper.
Everything in those sections is to be chronological. It doesn't matter if the most recent is first or last, as long as it's consistent. This gives you an easy organizing principle: whatever you are working on should be placed directly after the last page with writing on it (or as the very first page of the section, depending on whether you prefer chronological or reverse). Actually, having all the blank paper segregated in a blank paper section will probably benefit the very disorganized (who tend to have random quantities of blank paper interrupting stuff).
HAVE A HOLE PUNCH which lives in the binder. (You can get little thin three-ring punches which have holes so they can live in three-ring binders.) If the teacher gives you anything unpunched (which I think is unacceptable but no one made me god), hole-punch it immediately so you can put it in the appropriate section.
The virtue of the notes/homework/tests and quizzes/handout layout is that pretty much every paper you will ever get in class goes in one of those, and it's generally obvious which. There are a couple of odd cases like syllabi, but they are rare.
As long as we're on the topic of notebooks, rereading your notes within a day of taking them is also a great habit to be in -- it's spooky how much that aids retention (and especially the retention gained/time spent ratio).
THANK YOU, Andromeda!!!!!!!
(And tell us more!!)
playing with blocks
At least, I think I saw something about an identified need on a slide in the Middle School
Then today my sister explained their high school's block scheduling.
So naturally I've been on a Google mission from God looking for the good stuff.
Didn't take long:
Effective Instructional Strategies for Block SchedulingIn 2000 Jenny Burrell, Stephanie McManus, and I identified and reviewed several instructional strategies that are suitable for blocked classes.48 However, we admit that, just as a 90-minute lecture is inappropriate, a 90-minute discussion session is probably too long too. We found that teachers should change activities every 10 or 15 minutes. blah blah blah
Cooperative learning. blah blah blah
Case method. blah blah blah
Socratic seminar. blah blah blah
Synectics. In the early 1960s, William Gordon developed an approach that, through the use of analogy, enabled students to associate a new topic with prior experience.50 The teacher asks students to describe the similarities between a given topic (the concept) and some unrelated item (the analogue). For example, a biology teacher might ask her students to describe the similarities between the parts of an animal cell and the parts of a city. After reviewing these similarities, students are asked to "become" the concepts and analogues by using first-person statements of feeling. The teacher may elicit such statements as "I feel strong when my cell membrane keeps out impurities." If obvious differences exist between the topic and the comparative element, the teacher can address these differences while being careful not to destroy the links previously made. Finally, students create their own new analogies to enable them to better retain the original concepts. This method serves well as a review activity and can be a valuable tool in assisting students to retain facts and concepts.
Concept attainment. blah blah blah
Inquiry method. blah blah blah
Simulations. blah blah blah
Block Scheduling Revisited
That's a new one.
help desk - adding Carnival of Education widget
I can't see how to add the Carnival of Education widget to the blog...
an amazing math teacher
Here's how he ran his class.
Every week his students have 3 chances to take a test on that week's material. The test is short, perhaps 5 key problems. If they ace it the first time, they're done. If they don't ace it, they take it again; if they don't ace it the second time, they take it one last time. The final grade stands.
The cool thing: the tests are cumulative.
The first week students take a test on the the first 5 problems; the second week students take a test on those five problems along with the next five problems; the third week they take a test on the first week's 5 problems, the second week's 5 problems, and the 3rd week's 5 problems, and so on.
By the end of the semester they've worked up to a final exam covering everything they've learned in the course, which they remember because they've been re-tested on it every week of the semester.
The teacher also sends each parent a weekly email laying out in detail his child's progress in the course. Parents can see whether or not their child mastered that week's material, and they can see when he mastered it: 1st test, 2nd test, or 3rd. Parents can also see any set of 3 tests where his child did not master the material even with three tries. My sister says you could glance at the email and see exactly which material your kid barely squeaked by on.
The teacher explained his system on Back to School night and told parents not to panic when they got the initial emails because early on in the year the point total could suddenly drop 50 points when a student blew the first or second test. He told parents not to panic & not to yell at their kids because they'd have two more chances.
The emails don't function as a veiled request for parents to kick in with reteaching and tutoring. They are information. Parents know what their kids are doing in the course. I assume that his emails do function as an invitation for parents to kick in with oversight and homework monitoring. Which is fine by me. Parents of students in his class know exactly what they need to know to manage the situation at home.
This may be especially important in my sister's school because some kids intentionally blow off the class due to a complicated CA system whereby they get credit for "Math 1" even if they flunk Algebra 1. My sister and I agree that the problem these kids pose is school level, not teacher level. In my view (not necessarily my sister's) the school needs to kick in with supervised homework sessions and the like. (See: LaSalle High School.) Working in a system that rewards kids for flunking algebra, this teacher deals with it by making sure parents know their kids have decided to flunk algebra, providing them with a weekly update on just how much algebra their kids have flunked to date.
The teacher is available every lunch hour and frequently after school for Extra Help. And: Extra Help actually helps. My niece went in twice when she wasn't getting something. The reason she knew she wasn't getting it was that she had barely squeaked by on the first two tests and still came up with a low score on the 3rd test.
She went for Extra Help after the 2nd test. My sister says the 3-test format taps into the Magic Number 3 that is embedded in the hearts and minds of children everywhere, as in: "I'm going to count to 3 and when I get to 3 you better be factoring trinomials or else."
Clearly, the three tests serve as formative assessment. The teacher knows, the student know, and the parent knows whether the kid has or has not mastered the material covered in the course to date. That doesn't happen in a normal math class. In a normal math class, as my sister points out, "Since no one grades homework, you don't find out if they know anything until they flunk the test."
This math class is far from normal because, as it turns out—and this came as a surprise—this teacher also grades homework. The way my sister and my niece found that out was that one day my niece blew off her homework: she just wrote down whatever came to mind and turned it in.
The homework came back with an "F" on top. The teacher had read her homework, corrected her homework, and graded her homework.
She went to see him and apologized. It had been years since a teacher had so much as looked at her homework and she'd assumed he wasn't going to look at it, either. She asked if she could do it over again & the teacher said yes.
It will probably come as no surprise to learn that the homework sets weren't burdensome. Perhaps because this teacher read and graded all the homework, or perhaps because he knew exactly how much homework the kids needed in order to master the concepts, he gave small problem sets. My other niece, whose teachers never so much as glanced at anything the kids did outside class, would be assigned dozens of problems every night; she'd sit and slave over her math and no one at the school would give it a second thought. As a result, the stuff they turned in was "the crappiest sh** you've ever seen."
The kids in this teacher's class, because their teacher was a collecter and correcter, learned to produce neat, readable solution set with the answers circled.
I would put money on it the kids in this man's class have some of the highest math achievement coming out of a public school Algebra 1 course in the country.
They better have, since it'll be 9 long months before any of them looks at the inside of a math book again.
the Gambill method
"It doesn't matter how well or poorly you teach" , part 2
I'm sure it's not true. My own belief now is that TA quality absolutely, positively, can matter in college courses. This is true in math courses, computer science courses, physics courses, etc. I'm sure it's true in the humanities as well.
Now, for a while as a TA I thought the profs were right, that it didn't matter, because I didn't see any TAs whose students significantly outperformed others. But I went on to lecture that very same intro sequence course, and had 6 of my own TAs. My results looked very different: one TA's students were better than the rest, and two were markedly worse. Those TAs were outliers--and those outliers had effects.
After that, I began to believe again, and I began to improve my own TAing ability in other courses, until it became clear I could, in fact, remediate students, and if I could, then so could others. In one course, I was able to pull up grades of students who were in danger of flunking through my hard work and theirs on at least half a dozen occasions. This wasn't about motivation: it was about reteaching the material differently, and starting with tiny, baby, solvable problems until class level problems were clear. I was no extraordinarily gifted teacher. I was simply a student who had almost flunked the same course as an undergrad, and I understood what was wrong with the presentation after I had remediated myself in it years later.
So why did the profs think that TAing didn't matter?
TAs were basically given no guidance. What guidance they had was at the discretion of the prof, and most profs felt that since TAing didn't really matter, then there was no point in structuring or teaching the TAs. So they were just told what the weekly material was, and expected to fill an hour of section. They weren't even expected to attend the course. So, the TAs weren't taught how to teach the material at all. Self fulfilling prophecy. So "how well or how poorly you teach" was really a misnomer in the first place: most didn't teach well or poorly; probably, they didn't actually teach at all.
Next, neither the students nor the TAs had any idea what they did not know. Of course the students don't know what they don't know, so they don't know they need remediation. But neither do the TAs: they did well enough to get into grad school, or get a good grade in the course, and that's that when it comes to examining their knowledge base. Students in section seldom speak up to stump a TA; there's nothing good that comes of that, so TAs aren't challenged on the material. Even if they know the material, that doesn't correspond to having the skills to remediate the students. At best, they attempt minorly to remediate those who say "I'm deficient HERE". How many students can do that?
But the outcome, that another generation of soon-to-be-profs believes that teaching doesn't matter, is huge.
From my perspective, this attitude in college courses--not just in ed school, but in college at all, is another big source of this hard-to-break-myth that teaching doesn't work, can't remediate, can't "get out what God didn't put in", so to speak.
It means even college educated parents don't believe teaching matters--because they didn't see teaching matter for them. It means the talented members of their fields don't think remediation works, so they don't bother to do it. And it means that even before teachers enter ed school, they've already been primed by a system that told them teaching didn't matter.
University attitudes trickle down, and not just through ed school.
should I install the wavy letter thingie?
Should I go ahead and install the wavy-letter-thingie that prevents spam?
I hate to do it because of the FWOT aspect, but I think we're at that point.
Speaking of the wavy-letter-thingie, Jeff Hawkins' book explains why it works.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision
The fundamental problem with learning mathematics is that while the number sense may be genetic, exact calculation requires cultural tools—symbols and algorithms—that have been around for only a few thousand years and must therefore be absorbed by areas of the brain that evolved for other purposes. The process is made easier when what we are learning harmonizes with built-in circuitry. If we can't change the architecture of our brains, we can at least adapt our teaching methods to the constraints it imposes.
For nearly two decades, American educators have pushed "reform math," in which children are encouraged to explore their own ways of solving problems. Before reform math, there was the "new math," now widely thought to have been an educational disaster. (In France, it was called les maths modernes, and is similarly despised.) The new math was grounded in the theories of the influential Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who believed that children are born without any sense of number and only gradually build up the concept in a series of developmental stages.
Piaget's view had become standard by the nineteen-fifties, but psychologists have since come to believe that he underrated the arithmetic competence of small children. Six-month-old babies, exposed simultaneously to images of common objects and sequences of drumbeats, consistently gaze longer at the collection of objects that matches the number of drumbeats. By now, it is generally agreed that infants come equipped with a rudimentary ability to perceive and represent number. (The same appears to be true for many kinds of animals, including salamanders, pigeons, raccoons, dolphins, parrots, and monkeys.) And if evolution has equipped us with one way of representing number, embodied in the primitive number sense, culture furnishes two more: numerals and number words. These three modes of thinking about number, Dehaene believes, correspond to distinct areas of the brain. The number sense is lodged in the parietal lobe, the part of the brain that relates to space and location; numerals are dealt with by the visual areas; and number words are processed by the language areas.
And if evolution has equipped us with one way of representing number, embodied in the primitive number sense, culture furnishes two more: numerals and number words. These three modes of thinking about number, Dehaene believes, correspond to distinct areas of the brain. The number sense is lodged in the parietal lobe, the part of the brain that relates to space and location; numerals are dealt with by the visual areas; and number words are processed by the language areas.
Nowhere in all this elaborate brain circuitry, alas, is there the equivalent of the chip found in a five-dollar calculator. This deficiency can make learning that terrible quartet—"Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision," as Lewis Carroll burlesqued them—a chore. It's not so bad at first. Our number sense endows us with crude feel for addition, so that, even before schooling, children can find simple recipes or adding numbers. If asked to compute 2 + 4, for example, a child might start with he first number and then count upward by the second number: "two, three is one, our is two, five is three, six is four, six." But multiplication is another matter. It is an "unnatural practice," Dehaene is fond of saying, and the reason is that our brains are wired the wrong way. Neither intuition nor counting is of much use, and multiplication facts must be stored in the brain verbally, as strings of words. The list of arithmetical facts to be memorized may be short, but it is fiendishly tricky: the same numbers occur over and over, in different orders, with partial overlaps and irrelevant rhymes. (Bilinguals, it has been found, revert to the language they used in school when doing multiplication.)
The human memory, unlike that of a computer, has evolved to be associative, which makes it ill-suited to arithmetic, where bits of knowledge must be kept from interfering with one another: if you're trying to retrieve the result of multiplying 7 X 6, the reflex activation of 7 + 6 and 7 X 5 can be disastrous. So multiplication is a double terror: not only is it remote from our intuitive sense of number; it has to be internalized in a form that clashes with the evolved organization of our memory. The result is that when adults multiply single-digit numbers they make mistakes ten to fifteen per cent of the time. For the hardest problems, like 7 X 8, the error rate can exceed twenty-five per cent.
Our inbuilt ineptness when it comes to more complex mathematical processes has led Dehaene to question why we insist on drilling procedures like long division into our children at all. There is, after all, an alternative: the electronic calculator. "Give a calculator to a five-year-old, and you will teach him how to make friends with numbers instead of despising them," he has written. By removing the need to spend hundreds of hours memorizing boring procedures, he says, calculators can free children to concentrate on the meaning of these procedures, which is neglected under the educational status quo.
This attitude might make Dehaene sound like a natural ally of educators who advocate reform math, and a natural foe of parents who want their children's math teachers to go "back to basics." But when I asked him about reform math he wasn't especially sympathetic. "The idea that all children are different, and that they need to discover things their own way—I don't buy it at all," he said. "I believe there is one brain organization. We see it in babies, we see it in adults. Basically, with a few variations, we're all travelling on the same road." He admires the mathematics curricula of Asian countries like China and Japan, which provide children with a highly structured experience, anticipating the kind of responses they make at each stage and presenting them with challenges designed to minimize the number of errors. "That's what we're trying to get back to in France," he said.
It makes for fascinating reading. I still don't agree with the give a calculator to a five-year-old stuff, though. Nope. I just don't buy that.
Are Our Brains Wired for Math?
Jim Holt
The New Yorker
March 3, 2008
Miss A and Moneyball
Harvard Study on teacher effectsI mention Moneyball because of a rondelay amongst Kevin Carey, Matthew Tabor, and Leo Casey over the question of whether teachers can or cannot be an undervalued "commodity" in the sense that hitters with high on-base percentage were before Bill James and the Oakland As demonstrated their true worth.
A brilliant piece of research and analysis appeared in the 1978 Harvard Educational Review. Authored by McGill University sociologist and administrator, Prof. Eigil Pedersen and colleagues, "A new perspective on the effects of first-grade teachers on children's subsequent adult status" is masterfully written and caps more than a decade of extremely sophisticated data collection and analysis. It attracted little mainstream media attention at the time.
Pedersen and his team were sociologists, looking for factors that made children from impoverished backgrounds successful in later life. Following in the wake of Coleman and Jencks, who both detailed the powerfully negative predictive value of low SES on academic achievement, Pedersen's insights and meticulous research were probably not given the attention they deserved, and their most powerful implications were missed.
Pedersen selected for his study a low-income, chronically low-performing school in an urban industrial area situated in the article "in a large city in the Northeast." It was, in fact, Royal Arthur School in the former Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal -- a mammoth brick edifice with windows barred like a jail, situated across the street from a brothel, and sandwiched between toxic industrial factories.
This school had by far the lowest levels of academic achievement of the 80 elementary schools in the school district at the time, and a high rate of discipline problems. Fewer than ten percent of pupils went on to graduate from high school; more than half dropped out before completing Grade 10.
Pedersen had access to pupil records covering a 25-year period, from about 1935 to 1960. Along with detailed achievement, attendance, and discipline records, the school also had scores of standardized IQ measures on every pupil, given in Grades 3 and 6. While tabulating other data (from which he gathered many useful and interesting conclusions, adverted to in the article), he noted a strange, and unexpected, phenomenon. There were a number of cases in which individual students' IQ scores changed dramatically, either up or down, in some cases by more than 2 standard deviations -- the difference between being "low average" and "gifted." This is a huge differential, and something that is not supposed to occur except under extraordinary circumstances. Pedersen's curiosity was tweaked. In addition to analyzing his other data about student performance, he decided to take a large set of pupils in 3 categories: IQ's that had risen substantially, IQ's that fell substantially, and IQ's that remained more or less constant, and examine these three cohorts in more detail.
Noting that the first measure of IQ was taken early in Grade 3, he wondered if students' achievement in Grade 1 was a predictor of their Grade 3 IQ. So that led him to examine and tabulate student data by Grade 1 class. There were three Grade 1 teachers who were on staff throughout the period when the pupil records were sampled. Pedersen called them Miss A, Miss B, and Miss C; others who came and went after varying short terms, he presented in aggregate form as "Others." Studying his matrix of data, Pedersen was astonished to observe consistent and striking differences between the three long-term teachers, compared to random variation apparent in the aggregate "Others."
Miss A had taught most of the students who showed a large IQ increase between Grades 3 and 6, and it didn't matter whether they were male or female. Miss C taught most of the students who showed a large decrease in IQ, and again, it didn't matter whether they were boys or girls. Miss B taught many female students who showed an increase in IQ, and males who showed a decrease. When they investigated further, the researchers found that Miss B had always evidenced a preference for girls, seating them in the front rows, holding them to a higher standard, and engaging them more frequently, while boys were banished to the back of the room.
This was all interesting, but not what Pedersen's study was about. He and his fellow-researchers went on to a more ambitious project, locating a large number of adults in their late 30's who were graduates of the school, and interviewing them and getting data about their current lives. He developed a complex dependent variable he entitled "adult status" which involved level of education, income, type and cost of home, employment status, etc. He got independent analysts to develop a classification system from 1 to 9 to represent "adult status." An example of 1 would be "on welfare, has never worked" and 9 would be "professional" (dentist, university professor, etc.). The bottom 3 were grouped as "low status," the middle 3 as "medium" and the top 3 as "high status." This team collaboratively assigned each participant an adult status ranking from 1 to 9.
So, Pedersen et al were looking at a number of variables, and studying data from a number of sources. However, when they had tabulated their findings, one things stood out so stunningly they had to stop what they were doing and change direction entirely. It was what they saw when they looked at "adult status" vs. "first grade teacher."
The mean adult status for the aggregate "Others" was 4.6 -- smack in the middle between 1 and 9, and exactly what , with random variation (and a large sample) would be predicted.For Miss C, it was 4.3. For Miss B., 4.8. All within the range expected. For Miss A it was a stunning 7.0 ! Even more remarkable was the percentage of pupils in the various groups. The other teachers averaged 29% "high status" adults and 40% "low status." For Miss A, an amazing 64% were in the "high status" category......and the percent in the "low status" category was --- ZERO.
The researchers went back to their data collection to rule out alternate hypotheses. They found that classes were not stacked in Miss A's favour, there were no significant differences between her assigned pupils and other class groups in terms of parents' occupations, families on welfare, behavior problems or other identifiable issues. All classes were heterogeneous. Miss A. had retired by the time Pedersen had reached this point in his study but he was able to interview former colleagues and pupils to identify factors in her success. She loved her work, she expected every student to learn and succeed, she gave extra help to kids who needed it, she was a low-key but firm disciplinarian, she showed affection to the children and had an amazing memory for their names and biographies -- remembering them in department-store chance encounters 25 years later.
But a major reason for her results is probably summed up by a former colleague who went on to be an administrator with the PSBGM: "It did not matter what background or abilities the beginning pupil had; there was no way that the pupil was not going to read by the end of Grade One."
If all, or even just 99.9% of, students learned to read in their year with Miss A, they were a long step ahead along the road to success.....and their IQ increase between Grs. 3 and 6 is likely due to the increased language aptitude engendered by their reading skill (kids who can't read consistently show an IQ decrease over the elementary years).
In her 34 years at this one high-poverty school, "Miss A" taught about 1200 students. While the researchers were unable to follow up all of these students, the cohorts they studied showed such consistent patterns that we can be sure she had an immeasurable effect on countless lives which could easily have gone nowhere, due to such unfavourable beginnings. The difference between the achievements of her students and the "average" of the other teachers' students is HUGE.
When I read and studied all of this, all I could think was, WOW.
Of course, it is an inspiring story. But also a cautionary, and disturbing, one. Why?
Because it was only because of Pedersen's work that anybody NOTICED what an extraordinarily effective teacher this person was, and how her effectiveness changed lives for decades to come (there's more about that in the article). In the "real world" of urban school systems, effectiveness is not only not recognized, it is rarely even noticed. But for Professor Pedersen's serendipitous research and meticulous data analysis, Miss A's. astounding effect on generations of low-income students would have gone unremarked, except by those students and their families. The "Miss As" among us today -- and they are out there, perhaps not in every school, but certainly not isolated phenomena -- fly similarly under the radar screen while initiatives to "improve schools" come and go with predictable regularity and minimal overall effect.
Not all education professionals would like Miss A. Not all share the view that it is the teacher's responsibility to TEACH every student, never mind what the student brings to the table. Successful learning does not depend upon intrinsic factors in the students (motivation, self-esteem, nourishing home environment, et al) OR in the teacher. It can be MADE TO HAPPEN. Michael Pressley's work on motivational behaviors of effective primary teachers clearly demonstrate this.
Miss A proved it, and her successors among us today continue to do likewise. Alas, I doubt the message her accomplishment sends -- that teachers can be far more effective than anyone dreamed -- will be taken to heart any more now than it was 28 years ago. If we collectively had a commitment to ALL students learning, what we do in schools would look a great deal different than it does.
A belated thank you, Miss A -- you put the lie to the persistently proffered argument that students' background, SES, IQ or previous experience is an insurmountable barrier to success in school and adult life. Perhaps some day we adults will be "developmentally ready" to learn from you. I hope so.
For the whole article, check interlibrary loan and look for Pedersen, E., Faucher, T. A., & Eaton, W. W. (1978). A new perspective on the effects of first-grade teachers on children's subsequent adult status. Harvard Educational Review, 48(1), 1-31.
* "Miss A" was in fact named Iole Appugliese (YO-lay AP-poo-lee-YAY-zee), and she was born in Montreal to Greek immigrant parents. Her pupils, who could not pronounce her name, called her "Miss Apple Daisy.") She retired only when she discovered she had terminal cancer. An interesting finding of Pedersen's was that more ex-pupils remembered being in her class than actually were. While many could not remember who their other early grade teachers were, every one remembered "Miss Apple Daisy" 's name and had memories and stories to share. Judith Harris hypothesized that part of the reason for her consistent student results was due to her creating a community culture of learning and achievement that carried her pupils through elementary school. By Grade 7, the largest predictor of student achievement (outweighing IQ, SES, family status, etc.) was which first grade teacher a pupil had had. Amazing stuff.
One alumnus Pedersen interviewed remarked that he had a five-year-old about to enter first grade. Sadly he sighed, "I only wish there was a Miss Apple Daisy for him."
What value-added research is showing us – and no one seems to have absorbed this yet – is that a good teacher is vastly more valuable than anyone recognizes:
"The biggest factor affecting student achievement is teacher effectiveness," said Sanders, who emphasizes that class size effects and differences in ethnicity, family income, and urban-suburban location fade into insignificance when compared to teacher effects.All of us have known or heard of teachers like Miss A: teachers who change young people's lives.
Excuses, Expectations, and Learning Gaps
But has any of us suspected that the Miss A's of this world were changing IQs? That the Miss A's in our schools were altering forever the future education, income, and life prospects of the children they taught?
Or that they were doing so for hundreds upon hundreds of children year in and year out?
The answer is no. None of us imagined or knew.
online jigsaw puzzles
Until 5 minutes ago I had no idea there were jigsaw puzzles online.
This could be bad.
coming soon to a high school near you
I thought this could be fun. Catherine asked about the infamous "Folding House Poem Project" in another thread. I'll post as many artsy projects as I can remember that I've encountered over the years teaching middle and high school which had little to no redeeming value for the lesson at hand. You see how many you've seen. Add more if you think of them. I'll post more as they come to me.
1. The Folding House Poem Project: A favorite for 11th grade on-level English, until I became team leader and flat out refused to do it, to consider it, to support it, or to give any of the new teachers the resources for it. (I hear there was some black-market trading under the radar, but for the most part the teachers seemed relieved.) Students make about 5 folds in a rectangular piece of paper until it vaguely resembles a house on the outside. They decorate the outside either like their house, or their dream home. When the front flaps are opened, you get the "interior" which is decorated like their room. Open it up all the way to reveal a poem about their house, their room, their life, or some vague, abstract pseudo-poem or loose verse (no format, of course) about anything that might relate to their ideas of what "home" means.
What could be taught: how to write descriptive passages using directions (prepositions), how to follow a poetic format, how to mimic a poetic format based on a poem read in class.
What is not taught: see "What could be taught."
Purpose: killing time in the first 3 weeks of school when class size and enrollment fluctuate due to schedule changes, simply because no one wants to put together a horizontally aligned, level-wide lesson plan that could accommodate students changing classes.
2. The Mandala Project: 10th grade. Students write and discuss opposites, a la yin and yang. Compose copious journals on their personal opposites, animals, colors, objects which represent them and why, etc. They then are shown mandalas, and given a paper plate. They trim the scalloped edge from the plate, and create a "mandala" of their own, which they color in and draw or paste pictures to, to represent all the aspects of their personality. The removed scalloped edge is either thrown away, or used as additional decoration in creative ways.
What could be taught: I'm still flummoxed by this one in an English class, except for personal journaling. Anyone?
Purpose: killing time again. Those first 3 weeks are killers.
3. The 1-Pager: Directions may vary. Students are required to complete a letter-sized page "poster." Used generally as a vocabulary reinforcer. Each student picks a vocab word from the reading. (Just one per student, mind you.) Students must put the vocab word on the page, include a definition, include a quote from the story where the word is used, and then various pictures "attractively arranged" to a) represent the word, b) represent the word's meaning, c) represent the student's interpretation of the word, d) represent what the student thinks about the word, e) represent how the word is used in the story, f) represent the word's importance in the story, g) represent the character related to the word...ad nausea um. (My point being that these projects are usually terribly vague and abstract and difficult to grade EXCEPT on their artistic merit: 1-2 pics +content = C, 3-5 pics +content=B, and etc.)
Purpose: What? You can't tell that's a good 1-2 weeks of
every-other-day classes for prep and production time?
4. The Tri-fold: as seen in Catherine's KTM post about The Project Method (http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2008/02/project-method.html).
Students are required to buy an enormous cardboard "tri-fold" and fill it with stuff. Our AP students know this as the "Author Project." To be fair, they also have to research the author, read two of his/her works, and write some analysis. But then they have to create this tri-fold monster, the best of which go on display in the library, and include 10 or more "artifacts" representing the author's life, works, etc. Every single year someone staples a decapitated Barbie doll head to one of those suckers. Every. Single. Year.
Purpose: myriad - can be adapted for any purpose/genre/subject.
5. The Alphabet Book: Students must create an alphabet book in which they use one word per letter to describe anything and everything in a book they've read/subject being studied. 1 page per word, 1 definition, 1-3 pics, lengthy (and sometimes groping) explanation of how their chosen word relates to the book (especially up in the XYZ category). I have seen some of these which looked like they were worth a small fortune in scrapbooking supplies. Very pretty. Very time-consuming. More points for better artwork presentation, leaving cash-strapped kids out in the cold.
Purpose: Darwinian annihilation of students who cannot buy out the Hobby Lobby's selection of stickers, ribbon, scrapbook paper, and small, adhesive medallions.
Warning: also can be adapted for any subject.
6. The Cell Project: Students must create a 3-d representation of a cell (or something from the periodic table) using "whatever." I don't know much about this one, honestly. It appears to happen around 9th grade. During this time, small Styrofoam balls litter the hallways, being kicked, thrown, punched, hackey-sacked, tossed and speared by cafeteria sporks, bounced off pretty girls' heads in passing (it is 9th grade, after all), rolled for the tripping factor (10 points for teachers who stumble), and all around abused. Generally, they have little to recommend them except some markered cross-section which once had little labels on toothpicks stuck in them. The toothpicks are long gone, no doubt used for nefarious purposes.
Purpose: to annoy, I think.
7. Salt Maps: do I need to explain this one?
So, what have you got?
Just noticed redkudu has added a paragraph on technology!
8. "Interfacing" with technology: any project which has, at its core, the intent to teach students how to interface with technology on a superficially cosmetic level, such as replying to a classroom blog, etc. Has it escaped anyone that teenagers are very, very good at interfacing with technology? I have a colleague with a "Smart" classroom (wired to the hilt, that is), who is having her students make slide shows of books they're reading. She is struggling to learn the technology as her students zoom past her - thus, it isn't the students who are learning anything, it's the teacher. She also has a classroom blog, but when questioned admitted she doesn't read any blogs, nor know of any to recommend her students read. So what is the point then? What students need to be learning is how to manipulate technology, how to use its myriad programs and capabilities to arrange, display, and explain information. Some good examples of this are dy/dan and his Feltron project, or some of the ideas to be found at 21st Century Collaboration. I'm not against technology in the classroom, just don't make a project of it if it isn't teaching students anything about using it.
worst project ever
worst project ever, part 2
the project method
"The Project Method: Child-Centeredness in Progressive Education"
Where did the math changes in your local school come from?
We're all trying to find the right angle or leverage to create the most change. Perhaps [Prof. Wu] can change the thinking at the NCTM level, I don't know, but I don't think he will have much effect at the local level.
I find this an interesting point to elaborate on. I understand Steve's point, but I don't know if I agree: Steve, what do you think created the perspective at the local level?
Personally, from my outsider perspective, it looks to me like all of the local changes in our school board to disasters like Everyday Math or TERC came from the top level. They came from national boards. They came from national foundations, big things like Gates, etc. And overwhelmingly, the ideas came to them from ed schools' ideas having infiltrated the very top of the food chain, and that food chain is now pushing down down down to the local level.
I cannot IMAGINE a situation where a local public school board change is made without the national ethos changing first. That's why it takes privates or charters or any other structure to just get decent textbooks.
But maybe I'm wrong. What do you all think? I'm not a teacher in the schools. For those who are, where did these changes come from? Top down? Has ANY change come bottom up? What can an individual teacher or even principal do? What would it take to make a change at the local level if philosophies on the national level aren't changed?
"It doesn't matter how well or poorly you teach"
I heard it again from another lecturer as well, and this lecturer was famous as the best teacher in the department (he was only a lecturer, not a researcher.) He was beloved for teaching this course, and he too said it didn't matter. Actually he even said "I've straight scaled the class because it doesn't matter. The grades will fit a bell curve. They always do, have for the last 20 years."
Bracket for the moment whether these teachers have given up and are jaded, or have hit a wall, or simply have found some universal truth.
Assume for now that this attitude is the predominant one among faculty in college, at least among those who teach several hunded person courses. Assume it's the correct attitude once you average over all of the various motivations for students in such a class: this is a subject they love, this is required for the major but NOT IN their major, this fulfills a breadth requirement, they have to pass it to graduate, they excel at school, they are taking this because of parental expectations, they have no background, they've seen the material before, they go to college to carouse and do drugs, that they are full time students, they go to school on the side of full time work, etc. etc. etc.
But now do the backwards regression:
At what point is it no longer true? At what point DID TEACHING MATTER? If the college profs say it doesn't matter by the time the 17-22 year olds enter, do they think it matters for high school? Has this idea trickled down to middle school? Grammar school?
Is the in vogue idea of "student maturity" just another way of saying that middle school teachers think EXACTLY the same way that college profs of adults think about their law-of-large-numbers-averages across hundreds of students?
Is this taught in ed school? Is this such a prevalent idea in college that ed school can't undo it anyway? Because if you believe this, then WHAT IS THE POINT of going into teaching?
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Math education IS mathematical engineering
Wu gave the plenary talk at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NTCM) Annual Meeting in 2007. The comments here are taken from the slides of that talk (available here) and from recent papers he has written on the same subject, that of the relationship between mathematicians and math educators (see here). The errors or confusions should be considered due to me, rather than Wu. Consider the comments in italics to be straight from his talk or papers, and the rest to be from me.
Wu uses this definition of engineering: engineering is the customization of abstract scientific principles to satisfy human needs.
Mechanical engineering, then is about turning the laws of classical physics into pulleys, cranes, refrigerators, etc. It's how you build your cel phone or IPod so you can drop it without it breaking. Likewise, chemical engineerings is about turning chemistry into the plexiglas for your aquarium, the non toxic antibacterial cleanser you use on kid's toys, the gas you put in your car.
Mathematical engineering, then, is about customizing mathematics for use by students and teachers in K-12. That is the human need of mathematical engineering. Without the customization of math to students and teachers in K-12, math cannot be used by adults. It is as if you were unable to make any use of chemistry or physics. Math education, and its pedagogy, matters deeply. You cannot simply throw adult math at school age children.
Engineering gets better over time, with refinements, but the underlying principles don't change. Engineering must find its way between two principles: the inviolable scientific principle, and user friendliness of the end product.
Likewise, mathematical engineering must improve with better pedagogy, better adaptation to the students, etc. but it can not change violate the principles of mathematics: 1) precision, 2) definition, 3) coherence, and 4) reasoning, 5) purposefulness.
Precision means making clear, unambiguous mathematical statements. There is no unspoken context in math: you are expected to make clear what is known/given, and what is unknown.
Definition: concepts in math have specific definitions. A specific concept as a specific definition--one, and all others can be shown equivalent. But the structure of math demands a definition for all concepts.
Coherence: math builds on prior knowledge. Nothing comes out of the blue, but it unfolds from what is known already.
Reasoning: mathematics cannot proceed without reasoning. Reasoning must be illuminated.
Purposefulness: math is goal oriented. It solves specific problems.
Mathematical engineering, that is, math education, to date as lost these principles. While there is some pedagogy available for teachers, over and over again we see that the teaching of basic ideas (geometry, fractions, etc.) of math violate most or all of the above 5 principles. This is unworkable engineering: it is the equivalent of chemical engineering labs that don't know enough chemistry to create stable chemicals.
In other papers as well as this talk, Professor Wu elaborates on the failures of current pedagogy to address those 5 principles. He does this by showing the failure in the presentation of fractions, geometry, and in what he calls the Fundamental Assumption of School Mathematics. I will address the fractions presentation in another post.
For geometry, he states that the mathematics of Euclid and Hilbert goes from axioms to theorems to proofs in an un-user friendly way. However, the major school presentations either teach it this way, without addressing students' learning capacity, or they present it without definitions, theorems, and proofs, as if it is experimental geometry, and so it lacks precision, coherence, reasoning, etc.
For the Fundamental Assumption of School Math: mathematically, it is true that all arithmetic operations on fractions (i.e. rational numbers) can be extrapolated to work on the reals. Why this is true is nontrivial mathematics. School math is only about rationals, and then presentation of irrationals is done without any such claim or explanation that it can be done. The assumption is left unstated: a vioation of the precision, definition, reasoning, etc.
So mathematical engineering requires both mathematicians and math educators, just as chemical engineering requires engineers and chemists. The math educators are needed because they know the students, and what is needed by the students at their various ages. Math educators know what the school math curriculum is for a given level, if not how to present it. They, too, are familiar with what the maturity level of their students is. Mathematicians are needed because correct mathematics must be taught at each of these levels, even though what is known at each level is different. That means a variety of correct explanations must be made available. That requires deep subject knowledge--deep enough to understand what's true and correct from a variety of view points. And in truth, these issues come together as we attempt to find the best approach for each student: you need both pedagogy and mathematics in order to reach students and still teach them math that adhered to the above 5 principles.


text:
VIDEO | Tom and Kathi Schwai prep for Strawberry Fest
Author: Judy Steffes | Posted in Business, Cedarburg, Ozaukee County, Washington County, West Bend No comments
Washington Co., WI – Tom and Kathi Schwai will be at Strawberry Fest in Cedarburg. The pair are touting strawberry brats, Gorman Thomas sauce, and whatever you need for grillin' on this Father's Day.
Stop in at the Farmers' Market for grilled brat patty with a piece of cheese and Hankerson's bun.
Also watch for retaliation from former Brewer Gorman Thomas as he is about to light up Tommy Schwai for calling him a 'phonie.'

subset: commoncrawl


text:
It is four stories tall and nearly a half-million square feet in size. The stone structure sits at the end of a scenic, tree-lined avenue in Parsippany and has its own chapel, complete with pipe organ.
But Morris County wants nothing to do with taking title to the 133-year-old, abandoned behemoth Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, a state facility that was allowed to turn into a contaminated ruin.
Problem is, if the county doesn't want that building it's not likely to get some 50 acres on the Greystone campus it wants to buy for open space, to use as a buffer for its new county park and a host of human services and mental health facilities located there.
"It's the million-pound elephant in the room," said Parsippany Mayor Michael Luther, referring to the old hospital.
Luther trekked to Trenton last week with Morris Plains Mayor Frank Druetzler and Morris County Administrator John Bonanni to try and work out a land deal with the state.
But they were rebuffed by state officials who want any deal to include all of the abandoned Greystone campus, including the old hospital and several other abandoned buildings, said members of the Morris County contingent. 7
"They had no interest in what we proposed unless we take the old hospital," said Bonanni. "I don't think that's something we can do, especially in this economy. But I'm not sure anyone else is willing to take that on, either. At least this way they could get some dollars from the county."
State Treasury Department officials and state Sen. Bob Smith (D-Middlesex), who chairs the State House Commission, met with the Morris County officials.
The abandoned Greystone land and buildings were transferred to Treasury for disposal last year after a new Greystone opened nearby. Any deals for the excess land or buildings would require approval by the State House Commission.
On Friday, Smith pointed out Morris County already received 300 excess acres on the Greystone campus from the state for a dollar in 2002, in a deal brokered by Republican Gov. Donald DiFrancesco and the all-Republican freeholder board and the county's GOP legislators.
"Never in the history of the state has something like that happened," said Smith. "In terms of financial implications, that was huge. When Montgomery Township wanted to buy the site of the North Jersey Developmental Center, it paid $5.9 million. But Morris County paid nothing."
County officials, however, have countered Morris taxpayers already have spent more than $10 million on cleanup and demolition of run-down buildings on the old campus, and the county has financed renovations to a group of homes used by a mental health agency for its clients.
But Smith contended Morris County wants to "cherry pick the Greystone property," just taking the best land and leaving the state with the remainder.
"Look, when I cut my arm I bleed green, I support saving open space," said Smith. "Certainly no one wants to see a Paramus Park Mall built on that land. But we have to play fair with each if something is going to get done here.
Smith said he is waiting for Treasury officials to provide a detailed assessment of the costs of cleaning up the old Greystone hospital.
When the old Greystone closed last July, the state declared the hospital and auxiliary structures on 130 acres as surplus. With the blessing of the State House Commission, the Treasury Department retained commercial real estate broker Cushman and Wakefield to prepare the site for sale or lease.
The land is zoned rural residential, according to a town official. Morris County wants to buy six small parcels, mostly at the eastern end of the sprawling hospital campus, furthest away from the main Greystone building.
Their goal is to preserve open space to serve as a buffer for human services agencies located on or adjacent to the Greystone campus and the new Central Park at Morris County. Also, they want one piece of land, off West Hanover Avenue, that could be used to create an entrance to the new park, which already includes two skating rinks and a baseball field for disabled persons.
Bonanni said county open space trust fund dollars could be used to finance the land purchases, which could be a boost to the cash-strapped state. Also benefiting the state, the county could take down an abandoned nurses cottage and take over responsibility for several road right-of-ways on the Greystone tract, he said.
Druetzler, a former Morris County freeholder, and Luther both urged the county to maintain a dialogue with the state on this issue.
"I'm always trying to be optimistic about our options," said Druetzler. "The goal is to keep this land as open space, so we have to re-group and come up with some good options. That would serve the public the best."
Lawrence Ragonese can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.com or (973) 539-7910.


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Design Week Awards winners set to be unveiled
The winners of the 2011 Design Week Awards are set to be announced tonight.
The winners will include the Best of Show award and new additions to the client Hall of Fame.
All the winning, commended and shortlisted projects will be published in the Design Week Awards supplement, available with tomorrow's issue, as well as online at www.designweek.co.uk.
Post a comment


text: Robert Virding wrote: > Easy, when macros were first requested all that was asked for was a > way for defining constants. I wasn't too convinced of the benefit of > adding them at all so as an added "bonus" (it was a joke) I went the > "whole hog" and did a copy of C macros. Almost a complete copy anyway. > That's why they don't support same name different arity. So my hunch about C/C++ similarity was correct. Nice to know I'm not a complete simpleton *grin* > It wouldn't really be a problem to add that feature now I don't think > it would actually break any code. Except perhaps just to not catch > errors. Though I doubt it has high priority. Given that there was a solution to the problem posted shortly after my email (using a fun I believe); combined with the fact one can simply make the macros LOG1, LOG2,...,LOGN - I would have to agree the priority is probably pretty low :) > The reason why they work at token level is that this was easier to do > and better provided the functionality that was asked for, i.e. > constants. You can do much cooler things with LISP-like macros but > they are "not trivial" to implement in a language which doesn't have a > close connection between code and data like LISP or Prolog. Just ask > those who have tried for Erlang. Or tried to make a backquote like > functionality. Hmmm, having never used LISP beyond a simple "teach myself LISP" session a year or so back - I'm not that fussed about missing the backquote functionality. Then again, it's probably incredibly useful for LISP programmers who actually know more than the syntax and basic semantics *shrug* Thanks for the info, Robert. --B.J.Tolputt


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A flurry of Middle Eastern and Asian news websites are reporting on "unusual" cold sweeping across vast areas of Asia and the Middle East.
The online Thailand pattayamail.com reports "Hundreds of thousands of residents of northern and northeastern Thailand are suffering from the current cold snap, with many areas having been declared disaster zones. […] Some 100,000 people are suffering from the cold and in need of winter clothing. "
The German language thailand-tip.com reports that the "Meteorological Institute forecasts temperatures in the north to fall another 4 – 7°C by Thursday."
Snow – in Vietnam!
The Asian Correspondent here writes that residents in North Vietnam "were treated to a rare sight Monday: snow", writing that "the white stuff" is a "rare sight in this part of the world".
Not only Southeast Asia is being hard hit by unusually bitter cold, but also vast areas of Central Asia, Middle East, and North Africa. Some of these regions are typically famous for agreeably warm temperatures. The charts on this page are the forecast temperature anomalies for the coming 7 days.


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Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy (November 20, 1925 – June 6, 1968) was an American politician and lawyer from Massachusetts. He served as the United States junior senator from New York from January 1965 until his assassination in June 1968. He was previously the 64th U.S. Attorney General from January 1961 to September 1964, serving under his older brother President John F. Kennedy and his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson. Kennedy was a member of the Democratic Party, and is seen as an icon of modern American liberalism.
Robert F. Kennedy's speech on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I'm only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening, because I have some -- some very sad news for all of you -- Could you lower those signs, please? -- I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world; and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.
Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black -- considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible -- you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.
We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization -- black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with -- be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.
But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times.
My favorite poem, my -- my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King -- yeah, it's true -- but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love -- a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.
We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past, but we -- and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.
And let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.
Thank you very much.


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We've won awards and earned a lot of publicity. But most importantly, we're helping clients save money on their marketing.
St. George, UT (PRWEB) May 20, 2013
LogMyCalls, the next-generation of call tracking and call analytics, is celebrating its one year anniversary. LogMyCalls emerged from Beta in May 2012.
LogMyCalls is celebrating its one-year anniversary by offering $40 off their Pro service plan. So instead of paying $69/month, you'll pay only $29/month. To take advantage of this offer, just visit the LogMyCalls pricing page and use the coupon code PRO80.
In the 12 months since LogMyCalls emerged from Beta, the call tracking tool already has more than 1,000 customers. LogMyCalls also won the Internet Telephony Produce of the Year, the Customer Interaction Solutions Product of the Year and other product of the year awards. In December, LogMyCalls competed against 900 other businesses to win the Grand Prize in the Grow America business competition. In January, LogMyCalls won the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Global Startup Challenge—over 2500 companies applied. And just recently, LogMyCalls was named the Utah Innovation Solutions Product of the Year Finalist.
Agencies and advertisers use LogMyCalls to track which keywords, campaigns and marketing channels are generating phone calls. LogMyCalls also actually tracks what happens during the call. LogMyCalls uses speech recognition technology and sophisticated algorithms to track marketing ROI, gather call analytics data, and automate marketing and CRM actions via Webhooks. LogMyCalls does all these things based on the phrases, words it 'hears' during the call conversation.
LogMyCalls is utilized by SMBs, enterprise-level companies, and agencies throughout North America.
"It has been a great first year for LogMyCalls,"said CEO Jason Wells. "We're adding clients and integrators every day. We've won awards and earned a lot of publicity. But most importantly, we're helping clients save money on their marketing. LogMyCalls is giving them in-depth marketing ROI data. That's what we're about."
About ContactPoint, makers of LogMyCalls
LogMyCalls is the next generation of intelligent call tracking and mobile marketing automation. This award-winning application allows businesses to gather conversation analytics and track phone calls generated via SEM, SEO, PPC and other online traffic channels. It allows marketers to score leads, map close rates and even automate marketing. LogMyCalls marries big data and phone calls. It is a service of ContactPoint. For more information visit LogMyCalls.com or call 866-811-8880.


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All seems to be almost set for Resurrection Sunday. Posters and leaflets will soon be proclaiming the death, burial and resurrection of our Lord and Saviour.
As the seasons change and Spring slowly creeps in with warm lovely sunshine and milder temperatures so will the enthusiasm to glorify God for isn't man's primary purpose is to glorify God and enjoy him for ever?
If you are wondering what Resurrection Sunday or Easter is all about – why don't you come along and find out!


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Jessica C. Graves, Owner, 1760 E. River Rd. #191, Tucson, AZ 85718, 520.468.3838 - Hablamos Español
Each dependency case will be different. However, the following flow chart helps explain the general process. The timelines will vary from case to case, and there may be additional hearings and events that take place. The following flowchart is a general graph and not meant to show what will happen in a specific dependency case. It is important to talk to an attorney if you have any questions regarding your specific case.


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Ken Russell, the avant-garde filmmaker behind Women in Love and The Boy Friend, has died. He was 84.
Russell died Sunday following multiple strokes, his son Alex Verney-Elliott told The Associated Press. "My father died peacefully. He died with a smile on his face," he said.
See the celebs we lost this year
Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell was born in Southampton, England. He moved to London in his 20s, studied photography and became a documentary filmmaker at the BBC. His first feature film was the 1964 romantic comedy French Dressing. In 1967, he directed the spy movie Billion Dollar Brain with Michael Caine. Russell earned his first Academy Award nomination for his 1969 film adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love. The film, which was censored for featuring full-frontal nudity from its two male leads, won star Glenda Jackson an Oscar for Best Actress.
Music was also a big influence on Russell's films. In 1971, he wrote and directed The Boy Friend, an homage to the musicals of the 1930s. The movie starred supermodel Twiggy, who won two Golden Globes for her performance. Russell also adapted the rock opera Tommy, which was based on music from The Who.
In 1991, Russell directed his last controversial film titled Whore, which received an NC-17 rating.
Russell — whose films included 1980's Altered States and 1987's Gothic — was honored in 1995 by the American Cinematheque with a retrospective of his work called Shock Value. His sometimes over-the-top films could be polarizing, and provoked Pauline Kael to say they "cheapen everything they touch."
More recently, Russell appeared on the British reality show Celebrity Big Brother in 2007, but left within the first week.
Russell, who was married four times, is survived by his wife Elise Tribble and his children.


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(the short list)
In the past four years CMAC has assembled an extensive coalition of entertainment stakeholders: including venues, promoters, bands, djs, food and beverage purveyors and wholesalers, and media organizations. The results of this diverse and powerful coalition have changed the very framework by which entertainment is perceived and treated in San Francisco. Among our proudest achievements are:
2013 - Western Soma Plan: CMAC advocated for and won amendments to the Western SOMA plan that for the first time in 30 years created protections for the entertainment community by making entertainment an "as of right" use and barring any additional residential on Eleventh Street between Howard and Harrison Streets.
2013 - 11th Street BID: CMAC started discussions on creating an 11tth street BID that can have a large voice on the look and future of development on the street.
2013 - 4 am Legislation: CMAC created the campaign, funded it, and received nearly 11,000 signatures for Mark Leno's 4 am legislation with no notice and only 5 weeks, start to finish. We didn't win this one but we'll be back in 2015 because we believe that we need to prepare our cities to meet the challenge of our new 24/7 economy.
2013 – OEWD Industry Rep: CMAC lobbied first for the position of a citywide entertainment hire in the Office of Economic and Workforce Development and then to make sure it was funded for a full time position.
2013 - Polk Street SUD: CMAC helped organize Polk street bars to push back against Supervisor Chui's proposed SUD and managed to insert a five-year sunset clause on the moratorium against new bars and restaurants.
2013 - 50/50 Interpretation: CMAC advocated for and won an agreement with the ABC to stop placing and enforcing their 50/50 interpretation definition for a Bona Fide Eating Place.
2012 - CMAC helped to defeat an attack on large-scale music events in Golden Gate Park.
2012 - Economic Impact Study – CMAC lobbied for, and eventually succeeded in bringing to fruition the city's first ever study of "The Economic Impact of San Francisco's Nightlife Businesses". Supervisor Scott Wiener's first legislative effort was this landmark study and CMAC was instrumental in supporting its creation, the participation of stakeholders and dissemination to the public. The results were astounding. Despite the non-inclusion of outdoor events and all-ages indoor venues, this limited sample nonetheless demonstrated that entertainment is a crucial economic driver in San Francisco's economy to the tune of $4.2 billion and more than 50,000 jobs. Stay tuned for the companion EIS, likewise sponsored by Weiner, that for the first time will study the economic impact of large scale outdoor events.
Ongoing - CMAC is assisting Pacific Institute for research and evaluation with an unprecedented 6-year (to date) study of alcohol and drug use at nightlife venues. The study aims to develop empirical data that will assist nightlife professionals in improving patron safety through better employee training
2010 - Defeat of the Alcohol Tax: In 2010, CMAC helped lead a coalition that defeated a proposed local alcohol tax that would have disproportionately impacted smaller businesses
2010 - Statewide Understanding of Infused Beverages: CMAC assisted State Senator Mark Leno in an effort that stopped the California Alcoholic Beverage Control Department's overregulation of infused beverages.
2010 - CMAC led a coalition of public and private stakeholders to push back against an unprecedented ABC crackdown on long-held and beloved music venues based on a dubious interpretation of ABC foodservice guidelines. Since this time, CMAC has remained a vigilant defender of the specific rights of music venues and a welcome resource to ABC to communicate questions, regulation changes and concerns to our member base
Have questions? We'd be happy to answer any questions you have. Just shoot an email to email@example.com.


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I was only needed to play dead in a special picture and then to share my ideas about "what do you think happens when we die?".
I love Certosa (the initial "C" is pronounced like the "ch" in church) cemetery. It has been a burying place for the dead for more than two thousand years. First it was an Etruscan cemetery, and then a Roman cemetery, and then over the past fifteen hundred years, as Bologna changed from a settlement and assumed the form of a city, Certosa has slowly grown bigger.
In the medieval period (1300-1500 DC), people started making there monumental graves with sculptures. Therefore, many areas of Certosa are like an open air museum, with hundreds of statues. The most common theme in this museum, as you can guess, is bereavement, with statues evoking feelings of loss, sadness and crying. However, there are many statues on the tombs of big and famous persons, that are more about power, wealth and vanity.
Surrounded by verdant hills, some parts of the cemetery have lovely views. Over the last two decades, cremation rather than putting the dead persons in graves, has also become more common. They even have an open grassland, where those who do not wish for a grave or an urn, can scatter the ashes.
In today's culture, where emphasis is on enjoying life, normally people do not want to talk or think about death. It was not always like this. For example think of the huge tombs built by Egyptian kings for their own burial, because they were worried about their afterlife, and wanted to make sure that they could continue to live as kings after their death.
Most of us have difficulties in talking about death and bereavement. Amitav Ghosh in a beautiful article about the death of his friend Agha Shahid had written in 2001:
Although Shahid and I had talked a great deal over the last many
weeks, I had never before heard him touch on the subject of death. I did
not know how to respond: his voice was completely at odds with the content
of what he had just said, light to the point of jocularity. I mumbled
something innocuous: "No Shahid—of course not. You'll be fine." He
cut me short. In a tone of voice that was at once quizzical and direct, he
said: "When it happens I hope you'll write something about me."
I was shocked into silence and a long moment passed before I could
bring myself to say the things that people say on such occasions: "Shahid
you'll be fine; you have to be strong …"
Shahid ignored my reassurances. He began to laugh and it was then
that I realized that he was dead serious. I understood that he was
entrusting me with a quite specific charge: he wanted me to remember
him not through the spoken recitatives of memory and friendship, but
through the written word. Shahid knew all too well that for those writers
for whom things become real only in the process of writing, there is an
inbuilt resistance to dealing with loss and bereavement. He knew that my
instincts would have led me to search for reasons to avoid writing about
his death: I would have told myself that I was not a poet; that our friendship
was of recent date; that there were many others who knew him much
better and would be writing from greater understanding and knowledge.
All this Shahid had guessed and he had decided to shut off those routes
while there was still time.
"You must write about me."
We have an old dog and often I am worried that one day he will be gone. Also, when you cross fifty, I think that consciously or unconsciously, you begin to ask yourself, how many years you still have to live. So I think about death off and on for some time now.
I had visited Certosa many times and had already expressed my thoughts to my wife that when I die, I would like to be cremated and I would like my ashes to be scattered in the Certosa open grassland area. Therefore when Virginia asked me to be part of her art installation on death, I didn't think twice and immediately agreed. However, some of my friends were not so sure if it was a good idea.
"Won't it be inauspicious to have your picture there while living? It is only dead persons' pictures that are put there?", they worried.
I looked at it differently. "How many of us get a chance to see our pictures as dead? How many of us get to see our pictures displayed in a cemetery? No one. So if I have this opportunity, I don't want to miss it."
Virginia had a special technique for taking pictures, so that it looked as if the person was coming out of darkness. She took pictures both with persons' eyes open and with eyes closed. "I won't take off my glasses", was my only condition. I know that dead don't need eye glasses, but what fun is to play dead, when no one recognises your picture because you are without your glasses?
I also spoke to Virginia about my views about death, influenced mainly by Hinduism, though not in the sense of paradise or hell:
I like the way death is described in Kenopanishad and Kathopanishad. I think that everything in the universe is pervaded by the same consciousness, and when we die, our individual consciousness goes back to all pervading consciousness, like a river goes in to the ocean. That all mountains, plants, animals and humans are inter-connected through this consciousness.Virginia recorded my views in Hindi also.
I think that everything in this physical universe is made of molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles and these particles are exactly the same in every thing. Thus, all persons, animals, birds, plants, rocks are made of same building blocks, but our level of consciousness energy is different.
I like the understanding coming from quantum physics that at sub-atomic level, a particle can be in many places at the same time and that between the particles there are huge spaces, so much that relatively, the distances between the constantly dancing sub-atomic particles inside each atom that compose us, are like the distances between the planets. Therefore, each particle of our bodies, is like a solar system. I think that this describes the concept of Maya that Upanishads talk about.
The art installation was set up an underground hall from 14th century. Along the 700 hundred year old tombs, there were our images on the walls. We were 12 persons representing 12 different religions and cultures. We all spoke our views about death in our languages. People could also read our views.
It was a wonderful sensorial experience. And, there was enormous diversity in our views about death. Virginia says that this multi-media art work was very inspiring for her. Now she is planning to involve even more persons and one day come out with a book about it.
Are you comfortable talking about death? What do you think happens when we die? Do you believe in reincarnation? Would you accept to be part of an exhibition, where you are shown as dead?


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Villanova, PA, May 21, 2013 – Jay Tighe '13 VSB won the 2013 Thomas J. Mentzer Award for significant contribution to "expanding opportunities for the poor and marginalized." The Center for Peace and Justice Education staff chose the winner from among nominations.
Jay was a Presidential Scholar who double majored in Economics and International Business. As a first year student, he studied abroad in London and interned at a human rights nonprofit that encourages investments and creates jobs in Africa. Jay also studied abroad as a junior in Argentina, where he taught English at a community center. In 2011, Jay joined a group of Villanova students to establish the Student-Run Emergency Housing Unit of Philadelphia, a student-led non-profit that provides shelter, food and community to homeless individuals in Philadelphia. His peers later elected Jay executive director, and he trained over 200 volunteers in cultural sensitivity and awareness to work with the homeless population.
In 2012, Jay attended the prestigious Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) Meeting, moderated by President Clinton. CGI U brings together approximately 1,000 students from all over the world, along with nonprofit leaders, entrepreneurs and celebrities engaged in efforts to create positive change. After graduation, Jay plans to work in international nonprofits to help ensure people have access to clean water, food and health care.