"In Defense of Algebra"
Jessica Lahey, New York Times - Motherlode, July 31, 2012

"I know precisely where I lost my battle with math, the moment I was informed clearly and unequivocally that I simply wasn’t “a math person.” My seventh-grade math teacher, an otherwise lovely man, called each of his students up to his desk one by one in order to write a “1” (for the honors track) or “2” (for the standard track) on the school’s official math placement forms. As I watched from over his hunched and courduroyed shoulder, he wrote a beautiful, decisive and neat “1” on my form.

"There it was, in permanent ink. I was good at math.

"“Jess, could you come back up here for a minute?” he asked as I floated back to my seat.

"He reclaimed my form, and carefully overlaid that beautiful “1” with a dark, clumsy “2,” pressing hard with his black pen in order to make sure the ink obliterated any evidence of his indecision.

"And from then on, I wasn’t good at math anymore.

"From the moment I was relegated to standard math, I knew I was never going to be an engineer. I went through the motions of my math education, but never put any heart into the subject. My teachers didn’t push back very hard because the evidence was in: I just wasn’t a math person. I’d make it through to the day I could opt out of math forever, and I would never look back.

"Except, I did. For years, I have eyed my colleague Alison Gorman’s math classroom with wary suspicion. I peek in on her class when I hear laughter, wondering what could possibly inspire mirth in algebra class. I have watched with wonder during recess when her MathCounts students show up with their lunches, willing to spend valuable leisure time challenging each other to think through math problems."

"Voices: Remember the joy of learning?"
Jessica Cuthbertson, EdNewsColorado.org, July 30, 2012

"Aurora teacher Jessica Cuthbertson has a joyful learning experience and it has nothing to do with filling in bubbles, getting graded or working quietly and alone. 
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"We engaged in a collaborative, authentic learning experience.  And as a result, we left the second day committed to creating and constructing authentic learning experiences with our own students in August.
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"We didn’t take tests – though the facilitators frequently assessed and monitored our needs as learners.  We didn’t bubble anything in or respond to prompts or read passages written to meet the criteria of a certain “level” or to “measure” our comprehension.  We didn’t sit silently and passively.  We didn’t receive nor were we expected to arrive at the “right” answer.  We didn’t work in isolation.  We didn’t feel inadequate or invisible because we read a text differently or because we brought (or lacked) certain experiences or background knowledge.  We didn’t face interruptions or distractions.  We didn’t worry about receiving a grade or even if we would receive professional learning “credit.”

"Instead, we experienced the joy of learning. 

"Today’s teachers and students are part of a national culture that values quantifying the unquantifiable.  We are so busy “racing to the top” that it is easy to lose sight of the journey along the way. Authentic learning is the journey. It is hard to measure or quantify a chorus of “oh’s” and “a-ha’s” — the murmurings that fill a room after a rich discussion. It is difficult to measure the transformation of a furrowed brow that turns into a spark in a student’s eye when they see a text, a concept, a problem or an issue in a new way.  Learning is full of such moments — the internal and external dialogue that is at the heart of authentic learning."

"Is Algebra Necessary?"
Andrew Hacker, New York Times Sunday Review, July 28, 2012

"It’s true that students in Finland, South Korea and Canada score better on mathematics tests. But it’s their perseverance, not their classroom algebra, that fits them for demanding jobs.

"Nor is it clear that the math we learn in the classroom has any relation to the quantitative reasoning we need on the job. John P. Smith III, an educational psychologist at Michigan State University who has studied math education, has found that “mathematical reasoning in workplaces differs markedly from the algorithms taught in school.” Even in jobs that rely on so-called STEM credentials — science, technology, engineering, math — considerable training occurs after hiring, including the kinds of computations that will be required. Toyota, for example, recently chose to locate a plant in a remote Mississippi county, even though its schools are far from stellar. It works with a nearbycommunity college, which has tailored classes in “machine tool mathematics.” "

"Extra! Extra! Read all about science:
Teachers and experts share their secrets on using the news to enrich science class"
Andrew Bridges, Science News for Kids, July 25, 2012

"“For me, current events are one way to engage young people in real-world discussions of the applicability of science,” says Robert Simmons, a professor in the education department of Loyola University Maryland and a former middle-school science teacher. “Students have asked me, ‘Why are we learning this?’ If we cannot answer that question, we need to go back to the drawing board and figure it out. The answer cannot be, ‘Because it’s on the test.’” "

"The Final Bell Rings for Weekly Reader, a Classroom Staple"
Noam Cohen, New York Times, July 24, 2012

"While it is tempting to see the close of Weekly Reader as another example of a shrinking print audience, Mr. Goff said that would be misleading. Rather, he pointed to the focus on teaching to the test that has made anything other than math and reading extraneous. “There has been a general loss of teaching kids about current events,” he said. “That is something that has been squeezed out of the classroom.” "

Education Isn’t a Game, But Should It Be?
Lauren Landry, Bostinno, July 24, 2012

"What you’ll sometimes hear teachers and developers say is that they want children to be learning without even realizing it. And while Klopfer admits the idea sounds like a good one, the larger goal should be to help students shake their fear of learning and have them realize education can be fun. "

Fantasy, fairy tales, happy endings:
Teachers find success in NEH program led by Harvard scholar
Edward Mason, Harvard Gazette, July 23, 2012

"Nicole Guillen, a high school teacher at the Alliance Marc and Eva Stern Math and Science School in Los Angeles, said the fantasy of Lewis Carroll or “Peter Pan” read by older generations may not be as relevant to today’s students as the violence depicted in modern literature.

"“They’re growing up where gangs are part of everyday life,” Guillen said. “In some communities, what kids see is very real and it’s a horrifying type of reality, and that’s why they like seeing it in a book: I don’t have a Wonderland or a Neverland, but I do have this reality.”

"Elizabeth Gray, who teaches at an alternative East Brooklyn, N.Y., high school, countered that escapism is an important part of fantasy literature.

"“I teach a lot of gangs; I’m not sure they always want to read about gangs,” she said. “They might prefer to read about Neverland. I wonder if [“Hunger Games”] is too close to home?”

"Lauren Bielefeld, a ninth-grade reading teacher from Fountain Valley High School in Orange County, Calif., said fantasy literature tests moral compasses.

"“Kids like to imagine what kind of kid they would become,” Bielefeld said. “I can hear my kids do that with ‘Lord of the Flies’ and with ‘Hunger Games.’”"

"A Key Support For Students: Supporting Adult Learning for The Sake of Learning"
Laura Shubilla, Competency Works, July 18, 2012

"But low and behold this time the journey was different and something funny happened on the way to “adult development.”  For the first time in years, I reconnected with myself as an adult learner.  Not the kind of adult learner who was trying to learn something to either be in compliance or to improve the various metrics on which I was being evaluated, but as an adult learner who had my own interests and passions, anxieties and questions.  I was asked to actually be curious, to better understand myself, and to pursue new ways of learning that often stretched me beyond my comfort zone and towards my learning edge.
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"About half way through this process, it hit me – why have we stopped thinking of adults as learners and what would it look like to create a fractal-like system where the learning of adults actually increases and enhances one’s own ability to understand new ways of learning that then results in better support for students?"

"College Degrees, Designed by the Numbers" 
Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 18, 2012

"Data diggers hope to improve an education system in which professors often fly blind. That's a particular problem in introductory-level courses, says Carol A. Twigg, president of the National Center for Academic Transformation. "The typical class, the professor rattles on in front of the class," she says. "They give a midterm exam. Half the kids fail. Half the kids drop out. And they have no idea what's going on with their students." 

"As more of this technology comes online, it raises new tensions. What role does a professor play when an algorithm recommends the next lesson? If colleges can predict failure, should they steer students away from challenges? When paths are so tailored, do campuses cease to be places of exploration? 
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""We're steering students toward the classes where they are predicted to make better grades," Mr. Denley says. The predictions, he adds, turn out accurate within about half a letter grade, on average.

"The prediction process is more subtle than getting a suggestion to watch Goodfellasbecause you liked The Godfather. Take the hypothetical health major encouraged to take physics. The software sifts through a database of hundreds of thousands of grades other students have received. It analyzes the historical data to figure out how much weight to assign each piece of the health major's own academic record in forecasting how she will do in a particular course. Success in math is strongly predictive of success in physics, for example. So if her transcript and ACT score indicate a history of doing well in math, physics would probably be recommended over biology, though both satisfy the same core science requirement.

"Mr. Denley points to a spate of recent books by behavioral economists, all with a common theme: When presented with many options and little information, people find it difficult to make wise choices. The same goes for college students trying to construct a schedule, he says. They know they must take a social-science class, but they don't know the implications of taking political science versus psychology versus economics. They choose on the basis of course descriptions or to avoid having to wake up for an 8 a.m. class on Monday. Every year, students in Tennessee lose their state scholarships because they fall a hair short of the GPA cutoff, Mr. Denley says, a financial swing that "massively changes their likelihood of graduating."

""When students do indeed take the courses that are recommended to them, they actually do substantially better," he says. And take them they do. Last fall 45 percent of classes on students' schedules were from the top-10 recommendations, and 57 percent from the top 15. Though these systems are in their infancy, the concept is taking hold. Three other Tennessee colleges have adopted Mr. Denley's software, and some institutions outside the state are developing their own spins on the idea."

"A Conversation With 2 Developers of Personalized-Learning Software"
Marc Parry, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 18, 2012

"Here's why education is different from search or social media. For one thing, the average student studies for more time than they spend on Google or Facebook. People spend way more time in Knewton than they spend on Google—they spend hours a day as opposed to minutes per day. So that's one big reason why we produce a few orders of magnitude more data per user than Google, just based on usage.

"But then there's the more important reason even than that, which is that education is not like Web pages or social media. It's a different product. And it lends itself infinitely more to data-mining than does any other industry right now. The reason is that nobody has tagged all the world's Web pages for Google down to the sentence level, the way that we ask publishers to tag every sentence, every answer choice of every question. They say, Here's what this sentence is about, or this video clip. They're basically telling us every single thing about every single piece of their content. That's how we can slice and dice it so finely."