<><><><>Movies<><><><>
Born into Brothels - touching look into the lives of a group
of children
The Wild Wacky White's of West Virginia - Philosophy of
Hillbillies?
The Razor's
Edge (Bill Murray version); can't remember who I mentioned this too but it was
very formative for me when I was in college - of course you have to read the
book too!
<><><><>Books (for children or
adults)<><><><>
The Robots Rebellion by Keith Stanovich - He is one of the
most widely sighted researchers in Human decision making and the book is the
foundation of my position during some of our discussions about Free Will, Memes
and Self-Determination
More on Robots:
1) August 2011 issue of National Geographic (the one with
the Spirit Bear) Cool article on Robots
2) Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox - especially the part
about the daydream of the Contemporary Courtyard Garden with Artificial Insects
("with eyes compounded of
luminescent diodes whizzing through the air")
Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from
Socrates to Foucault, by Pierre Hadot (not the book we talked about at Mendham,
but a wonderful collection of Hadot's essays).
<><><><>Youtube, or TED, or other
short videos<><><><>
Tim Minchin's animated movie
"Storm"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U&feature=related
Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk "My stroke of
insight". A neuroscientist describes a stroke she had that inhibited her
analytic brain-regions and gave her zen-like experiences of presence, flow, and
unity with the world http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
Keeping the inner child alive!
Baby laughing at paper ripping
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP4abiHdQpc&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Taylor Mali (teacher poet) performs his "Undivided
Attention"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1MHVqAWGmI and "What Teachers
Make"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxsOVK4syxU
<><><><>Useful
Websites<><><><>
The IAPC is on Facebook for those of you who use it. Let me
know if you prefer that photos of you don't get posted on its page.
goodreads.com - it's a place to log the books you read, and,
if you want, rate them and write short or long reviews about them; but the best
part is social networking: you can see what your friends/family are reading and
how they respond to what they read.
I love seeing what my colleagues, friends and family are reading and
often start conversations about it.
<><><><>Articles and Essays
<><><><>
Paul Lockhart "A Mathematician's Lament"
http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
NYTimes editorial page, about the usefulness of studying
math:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/opinion/how-to-fix-our-math-education.html
Nell Noddings: "The New Outspoken Atheism and
Education," Harvard Ed Review - http://www.hepg.org/her/abstract/653
again, I can't remember who I recommended this to, but remember it was at
lunch. The best answer I've read
yet to the question, should we teach religion in public schools?
<><><><>Music
<><><><>
John Adams: "The Wounddresser," setting of Walt
Whitman's poem about being a nurse during the civil war - one of my all-time
favorites - get the recording with tenor Sanford Sylvan.
John Adams: "The Death of Klinghoffer,"
controversial opera about the notorious terrorist hijacking of the cruise ship,
and maybe my favorite opera ever; includes "Chorus of the Exiled
Palestinians" and "Chorus of the Exiled Jews"
Comment to Lockhart's Article:
ReplyDelete(to grok the title, see
http://mypage.iu.edu/~jasomill/UnderstandingPoetry.m4v)
While your makes a number of good, if commonplace, points, it is also quite flawed in many ways. To take just one example, the author's claim that "you can't teach teaching" is speculative at best; from what I can see, it amounts to little more than sour grapes. And the sort of "educational education" he so derides is _vocational training_ for professional educators: like it or not, this profession demands many planning and compliance skills only tangentially related to education _per se_.
Whether or not this is lamentable is a rather subjective question; even if so, this is merely to say that "how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation," not that "schools of education are a complete crock."
Moreover, why does he not similarly conclude "you can't teach mathematics," and advance similar "arguments" to conclude that the problem with mathematics education is that it exists in the first place? By extension, one must then also conclude that "you can't teach" science, engineering, medicine, . . .
In other words, all this rhetorical posturing overlooks a _critically_ important point: everyone, to a greater or lesser degree, has a _practical_ need for mathematics, independent of one's aesthetic interest in the subject. As such, it would be equally irresponsible to teach mathematics as either an "object of beauty" _merely_, or an exercise in formal logic. For this reason, mathematics has far more in common with the "language arts" than it does with visual art, or music, say, in elementary education.
For what I feel is a more insightful take on "this side of the coin," see
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/2362/1/feynman.pdf
Theorem: The sum of the interior angles of any (planar) triangle is equal to "half a turn."
Sketch of proof: draw a circle around the triangle — it's easy to see that the net rotation of an arrow traveling around the circle is one turn, and that this doesn't change when we de "deflate" the circle like a balloon, into another smooth, closed, non-overlapping curve.
So deflate the circle until it wraps snugly around the triangle. In the limit, the curve will no longer be smooth at the vertices, but it's not hard to see that the net rotation of the arrow around each vertex will be half a turn less the interior angle (draw a picture). So define
pi = 1/2 turn,
then, for interior angles A, B, and C,
1 turn = 2*pi = (pi - A) + (pi - B) + (pi - C),
thus
A + B + C = 3*pi - 2*pi = pi = 1/2 turn.
Unlike the "classical" approach through "pseudo-axiomatic hand-waving," this connects _directly and immediately_ to the great body of "applicable mathematics" students in technical fields will be expected to use on a day to day basis. For a similar, if more complicated, response to a "seemingly simple" geometric exercise, see attached.
One fundamental thing that's often overlooked seems to me to be that abstraction is, more or less by definition, "the art of taking things out of context," and this is (again in my view) "hard" for more or less the same reason it's hard to ride a bicycle "self-consciously." Trouble is, students having difficulties are merely encouraged to "do the same thing, but try harder." The result, quite predictably, is a lot of skinned knees.
Finally, if you _really_ want to use mathematics to "teach students how to think,"
http://books.google.com/books?id=-TWTcSa19jkC
is simply amazing.