Oh, hello. Happy Channukah. Here’s stuff I thought you might like:
- Is it a good idea to scale-up one-on-one tutoring for the entire country? Probably not. This series of posts uses a goofy vaccine analogy to make some good points. To put it briefly, tutoring is teaching and teaching is hard. I like their recommendations.
- Educational resources are best spent on poor and disadvantaged kids, say economists. I like this study for how it measures school quality using things besides learning (like socio-emotional skills and safety).
- Do elite public high schools improve students’ life outcomes? Basically, no.
- I wrote about teaching people how to argue good. Teach people to make good arguments by helping them make good arguments.
- Kent Haines asks about math and games, and math teachers chime in with many many recommendations. And I can’t wait for Ben Orlin’s book about math games to come out.
- Wikipedia: Has anyone turned this into a lesson or essay yet? If not I call dibs. “The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research employed electronic random event generators (REGs) to explore the ability of test subjects to use psychokinesis.”
- Cool Internet Stuff: I once found myself needing reliable information about how safe various inclines were for trucks to drive on, and soon found myself fascinated by this extensive discussion on a trucker’s forum.
- I spent a lot of this week thinking and reading about dots on circles and how I’d teach it – which I don’t really know.
- For the calculus nerds out there, there are definitions of the derivative that provide more precision for the low cost of breaking mathematics. Seems like a fair trade tbh.
- Reading rec: My library has a lot of Oxford University Press’ “Very Short Introduction” books on ebook, which was exactly what I was in the mood for this week. Robert J. Allison’s VSI to the American Revolution had me furiously scribbling down notes as I was reading.
It snowed here this week. Maybe it snowed where you are too. Snow is good, it lets you know the sky is still working. Have a great week,
Michael