roybot

Exeter Math

So I just discovered tonight that Phillips Exeter has all of their homegrown math texts in downloadable PDF form on their website. I downloaded them all and have been really enjoying them. Great reading and lots of stuff I can use. It was hard to head off for my dinner plans. More soon.

Here is the link: Exeter Web Site

Why You Need A Manual for Wikipedia

There is a great new article in the new issue of The New York Review of Books on Wikipedia (1), The article is also, ostensibly, a review of O'Reilly's new Wikipedia The Missing Manual Book. Its amazing to read about all the bureaucracy that has developed inside Wikipedia, how the site has evolved over time from a wild-west to an ordered system -a system so complex that you now need to buy a book if you want to fully participate in it.

(1) Wikipedia remains my go to site for quick, reliable information. On Friday for example after school we were reviewing for the IB Math HL exam when Akshay wanted to know exactly how many points he needed to pass the IB (this sort of plan, while initially very attractive I warned him, with personal experience from Calculus III, is generally not a good strategy for exam success). His instinct was to go to the IBO website where he searched in vain for the details for about 10 minutes. I launched wikipedia and found the answer almost immediately.

Who Owns The Organics?

So this is a cool chart showing who owns the big organic companies. Its from LawGeek via Good Magazine. It connects well with some of my favorite books lately including The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food, What to Eat, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Just Read: The Riddles of the Sphinx

So I just finished reading The Riddles of the Sphinx which I stumbled across this weekend at the best bookstore in Mumbai, Landmark. The place is a bit of an orginizational disaster (beyond what would come naturally from everything being miscellaneous) but I like to go there every few weeks to check out what is new and see what things that catch my eye. Plus it is the biggest bookstore in town, rivalling perhaps a small US Barnes & Nobles.
The Riddles of the Sphinx is a survey of puzzles, (focussing mostly on pencil and paper puzzles) it covers roughly from Lewis Caroll and Sam Loyd at the end of the 19th century through the Sudoku craze of today. (It is so far the first book I have read to document the history of current puzzles) It is great because in addition to the interesting history of each puzzle type it offers and abundant collection of actual puzzles of each type to solve as well. There are nice collections included of matchstick problems, amusing "catch questions", lateral thinking puzzles, as well as a full range of Japanese style logic puzzles. I'll be brining my copy of the book to school tomorrow for my student teacher - who was asking me on Friday for some puzzles and would recommend the book to other math teachers for their classrooms as well.

Teachers Behaving Badly

So I mentioned Scott McCleod's Dangerously Irrelevant blog here the other day. The site is truly thought provoking. The current post is about students videotaping their teachers behaving badly. When I first saw the clips last Wednesday my first reaction was wow, these videos are awesome. Awesome in the original awe inspiring sense of the word. The next thing I did was to tell as many people as I could about them and begin discussing. If you haven't seen the post yet go check it out here now. Today (Sunday morning) I got back to the post to read the comments. The comments are riveting and appalling. It is sad to read some of the comments blaming the students, and wishing them ill. These comments are even more troubling when you have to figure that many of Scott's readers are probably fellow educators.

Here are a few choice comments that caught my eye:

"Fortunately most of these kids will end up in jail or dead."-Sick of rudeness
- there are sadly many responses like this and they don't deserve replies, why are teachers thinking this way? Why are these people in classrooms?

"I was pretty shocked to see that kids have cellphones and i-pods in school. They should be confiscated at the door of the school like weapons are."-June Marie
- I am not sure if the person who wrote this really meant to imply that cell phones and ipods are weapons (although I think they did). But certainly the devices are not the problem it is the classroom environment, teaching (or lack there of) and engagement. We have as much technology at my school as any in the world, and yet kids are still engaged in their classes. When I see a student surfing the web, or facebooking, or whatever in class my first reaction is to question my lesson and its relevance and certainly not to pull rank and confiscate their technology.

"You know what, those kids deserve to get yelled at. It's obvious that the teachers receive no respect, that they students are complete troublemakers, and they deserve harsh punishment. I don't think the phone was used as "journalism", it was just to record kids being bastards to their teachers as a joke."-Mandie
No one deserves to be yelled at. Many of the posts refer to respect as some sort of divine right that needs to be granted to teachers. This is not the case. Each of us, teacher or not, needs to earn any respect that we receive. Certainly sometimes getting the respect of a class of students can be very difficult work but its achievable. In his current book Letters to a Young Teacher Jonathan Kozol does a good job of describing situations where teachers in neglected inner city schools can manage to engage and earn the respect of their students. With this in mind it can certainly happen in prosperous surburban schools too and in international schools like mine.

"Its like continuously poking a stick at a helpless dog through a cage and then getting upset when the dog eventually bites back."-Sublime
-The person who wrote this comment is speaking about the teacher as the helpless dog, but I think it makes more sense viewed the other way around.

Many teachers would probably feel uncomfortable showing these clips to their students. So instead I suggest the clip A Vision of Student's Today. It is about student lives today, and is great for discussion. It was created by Mike Wesch who also did the clip related to Everything Is Miscellaneous I linked to last week. The quote at the beginning is classic. Thanks for reading and posting. More soon.

Everything Is Miscellaneous

So I was reminded of one of the best books I've read this year over the weekend at our ASB Unplugged conference. David Weinberger's excellent Everything Is Miscellaneous. The book is basically about how, no matter how hard we try to classify things, tree style or otherwise, the point will surely come where new items we want to classify will not fit properly into the classification system we have devised. He gives lots of excellent examples of this from animals in biology, to the dewey decimal system, to race. These problems of course get amplified in the digital world with all of the additional data. Luckily with the digital world we also have new solutions like tagging.
Although the book sounds incredibly nerdy, and I suppose is, it is also completely fascinating. I find myself constantly thinking of examples that connect to the book in day to day life. The other night I watched King of Kong for example (which was unfortunately not as great as I had hoped) and much of the story hinges on whether Twin Galaxies is in some ways inconsistent with the way it ranks high scores.

If you are curious about all this here are some links:
Information Revolution a You Tube video by Mike Wesch connected to the book.
Everything Is Miscellaneous a You Tube book talk the author gave at Google.
Author's Website - where I am sure there is tons more.

By the way, I used to blog mostly about India, at least while I blogged, but I am shifting the focus to include more things related to my teaching as well and other varied interests like speedcubing and such.

The World Is Flat

So Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat was one of the first books I picked up when I moved to India back in August of 2005. That first hardcover copy which was cheap (books tend to be significantly cheaper here than in the U.S.) has remained on the shelf pretty much since then. I still hadn't read the book as of last year when I saw Friedman speak at the National Council of Teacher's of Mathematics conference in Atlanta. At NCTM he talked all about the book and it seemed even more interesting and so I figured I would go home and read it. But then he mentioned that a new version of the book would soon be published with updated new material and such so I waited again and bought a new copy of the paperback when it was published here in India in August. (So much for saving money on that first unread book)
This time I read the book though, and while it took me since August (I have read about 5 other books in between) it was worth it. Friedman uses interesting "oh wow I had no idea" examples to explain how globalization has affected and enhanced our everyday lives. The stuff about UPS is particularly intriguing. He also talks alot about India which is cool since I live in India and feel mildly guilty about not doing as much reading about India as I probably should. Finally, he makes the case for the importance of teaching mathematics -and it is obviously impossible for me to argue with that.

On my facebook page I rate the books that I read, The World Is Flat gets an A.

About The Pic: This very goofy picture of my sister and I was taken on the Maelstrom ride in Epcot's Norway during our recent trip there.