CTK Insights

This is a Math teachers at play carnival, issue # which I am going to reveal shortly. See if you can make it from what is known as a single image stereogram. Try focusing your eyes behind the screen. In this month issue: What is the number of this issue? Sad news Interesting and relevant [...]

I think this is the first time in a long while that I read education news both without resentment or disbelief. Detroit Public Schools is set to open its first school without a principal — teachers will be running the day-to-day operations and making all pertinent decisions. (Peggy Walsh-Sarnecki, Detroit Public Schools tries something new: [...]

Professor Kim Sun-woong from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee has published in The Korea Times, Friday, July 2, 2010, an article, Koreans’ education zeal unparalleled globally. The article opens with a well deserved panegyric: Korea is one of the most highly educated nations in the world. As of 2010, the enrollment in primary schools [...]

One of my favorite examples of simple mathematics that seems to benefit from the tools that only appeared at the end of the last century is the problem of breaking chocolate bars. Given a rectangular chocolate bar that consists of a number of small squares. The task is to break it up along the “fault” [...]

As I just mentioned a collection of articles Judgement under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases edited by D. Kahneman et al, I thought that perhaps it would be worth adding a quote or two from the text, especially because some ideas appear to have bearing on what is happening with math education. Here’s one from an [...]

Valerie Strauss in the Answer Sheet blog tells us of the “most powerful learning experience” Arne Duncan, the US Secretary of Education, shared with author and educator Sam Chaltain. Arne Duncan’s Learning Story I grew up going to my mother’s afterschool tutoring program in a church basement on the South Side of Chicago. It is [...]

Here is a question: should students be given partial credit for incomplete solutions. I was still reading Andrei Toom’s online book to which I referred in the previous post when I was advised on twitter.com that New York City Council is in turmoil over a controversial policy that gives students partial credit for wrong answers [...]

I’ve been following the links the new edition of the Carnival of Mathematics sponsored by the Wild About Math! blog. This is an issue #66, and it appears that I have learned about this undertaking relatively late, of which I regret. It is a curious collection of online articles. The next submissions deadline is set [...]

I just received a copy of Paul Lockhart’s A Mathematician’s Lament. He has much to say about the role of proof in mathematics and math education and their treatment in school curriculum. I have also written repeatedly about the rampant misconception exhibited by teachers of what a proof is and the process of arriving at [...]

In one of the recent posts I quoted a retired teacher on the relevance of educational fads on success or failure of the teaching process. In his opinion there was none. And I believe this is indeed the case. All the educational theories, even when supported by the so-called research, remain what they actually are [...]