teaching

I’m recommending this — especially item #7 — to my students, right now. Tip from Homeschool Math Blog by way of MathandText. Read more

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.   — Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut I’ve used this quotation frequently in my statistics classes, but today was the first time I’d looked it up.  The late Edsger Dijkstra wrote a great obituary for Dr. S;  the University Read more

How often have you heard teachers spout that line to their students, in an effort to get  them to participate?  I think this is one of the boilerplate items we’re implicitly taught to use in the obligatory First Day of Class Lecture. Well, it’s crap.  Any mathematician knows that a single counterexample blows an assertion Read more

Wired News has a neat article about consternation in the academy over the RateMyProfessors web site.  The article certainly supports my belief that universities are deeply conservative institutions, at least in the sense that they resist change. "Anyone can contribute ratings, whether they know how to rate someone effectively or not and whether they are Read more

Big discussions going on all over the blogosphere about the sex ratio of college graduates; I even got a brief mention in the comments on Ann Althouse’s excellent blog (Quick, Bill, add a second digit to my hit meter!)  The commenters seem to be stuck on two major themes:  The War Against Boys and Male Read more

obelus. From the all-too-infrequent MathandText. Update (22 Sep):  Read J.D. Fisher’s comment for my favorite new word, w-a-a-y better than my clumsy "bizspeak." Read more

In my probability class, I’ve been teaching my students about joint probability mass functions with two random variables that are not independent.  Since this is a new concept, I use a very simple example. Let X be random variable determined by the roll of a single fair die, so X = 1, 2, …, 6, Read more

OK, readers (all three of you), why didn’t anyone tell me about Junk Charts or Mahalanobis?  I had to read about them from Gelman… Mahalanobis is to economics as Gelman is to social sciences; I expected to get some great lecture material and student project ideas there.  Junk Charts is going to become one of Read more

Meghan Cox Gurdon writes for NRO and the WSJ; since much of her writing centers around raising her kids, I haven’t been terribly interested in her stuff.  Until today, when I read her piece about girls magazines in the Opinion Journal.  Good column, but the payoff was the reference to slam poet Taylor Mali.  Up Read more

The irrepressible Kim Swygert has coined the ultimate phrase to describe college undergraduates: "while some people drink from the fountain of knowledge, others merely gargle."  Follow the link, too; Moebius Stripper always has something interesting to say. These questions seem like they should have been in the lesson, not the homework. It seems like they’re Read more