You would think Black Lives Matter would care about this, but God forbid they criticize public education. If a charter school produced stats like these, the leftists would be howling to shut it down. Note the goal for Black male students: to have only 1/3 score an A or B in Algebra I! Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations. Math assessments, discussed during Des Moines School Board...
How the woke are ruining math in our schools
As the New York Times reports, “testing results regularly show that math students in the United States are lagging behind those in other industrialized nations. And within the country, there is a persistent racial gap in achievement.” And the traditional approach to math creates the appearance of a conflict between these two real problems: To improve math education, we need to better tailor the...
50-yr-old math teacher wins Monte Carlo Rally
Isabelle Galmiche, a 50-year-old math teacher and part-time auto racer, won the World Rally Championship's Monte Carlo Rally as co-driver to Sebastien Loeb this past weekend. With the win, the Frenchwoman became the first female to score points in the series since 1997, while her compatriot Loeb, 47, set a record as the oldest driver to win a world championship round. It was also Loeb's record...
School shootings, mathematics edition
I always hated square roots; we should ban them, for the sake of the children: On the afternoon of Feb. 20, detectives investigated a report of terroristic threats at the school, where they learned that a student had been completing a math problem that required drawing the square-root sign. Students in the group began commenting that the symbol, which represents a number that when multiplied by...
Who knew Art Garfunkel was a mathematician?
He also does a lot of mathematics, having read it as a student at Columbia. “I’m precise. I think in proportions. I play games with numbers and I proportionalise. I imagine we have now done 1/8th of our interview.” I check my watch. He even took a job as a maths teacher at one point, in the Seventies, despite being a world famous pop star. “I’d just got married and moved to Connecticut, and there...
Using math to look smart in meetings
From the Cooper Review. The percentage one is now in my toolbox.
The key to Napoleon’s success
Napoleon excelled at mathematics. ‘To be a good general you must know mathematics,’ he later observed, ‘it serves to direct your thinking in a thousand circumstances.’ He was helped by his prodigious memory. ‘A singular thing about me is my memory,’ he once boasted. ‘As a boy I knew the logarithms of thirty or forty numbers.’ Napoleon was given...
Mathematics via mime
This article has inspired me to teach my entire causal inference class next fall via mime: Without saying a word, a man walks on stage carrying a case full of small plungers. Each time he reaches in the case to take some plungers out, he tries to array them in order on a table in front of him, but he always has one left over. Five, seven, 13: No matter what number, there is still that one left...