Quotes from work

[Annie Subjunctive]

I would say they're even weirder than Falun Gong. Plus, they try to manipulate Soka Gakkai members into political positions and they own significant shares in a lot of major companies like 7&i Holdings and the Daiso 100 Yen shops. I knew Japanese LDS members who refused to shop at Daiso because of that. No one stopped shopping at 7-11, though.

[BlackBlade]

Falun Gong members light themselves on fire and believe their leader can fly. They also infiltrated disturbingly high echelons of the Communist Party apparatus before they were really noticed. Let's hope Soka Gakkai and Falun Gong never have a baby.

[Annie Subjunctive]

Ack! I just discovered in this same project that a list of "resiliency skills" they're using in the curriculum and as a handout is lifted pretty much word-for-word from resiliencyskills.com. That's kind of an IP problem.

[Jonathon]

I've said before that there's a huge problem with plagiarism at the Church Office Building. I think it's done mostly out of ignorance, but that's still no excuse.

[dkw]

When I was a TA for a Buddhist-Christian dialogue class the speakers the professor brought in to talk about Buddhism were from SGI. I think he liked them because part of their doctrine had some similarities to a particular Lutheran doctrine and he leaned on that for the correlations he was trying to draw. I just tried to make sure that the students realized that they were a particular sect and didn't represent all of Buddhism any more than one denomination represents all of Christianity.

[Jonathon]

The argument with Dick Boulton is potentially embarrassing for the doctor since he loses his temper and is bullied by the bigger Dick . . .

The editor suggested rephrasing that last bit to avoid an unintentional double meaning. Uh, yeah, good idea.

[BlackBlade]

*snerk*

[rivka]

A long-time financial aid person explaining the history behind the federally-mandated separation of duties.

When I first began, the financial aid director wrote checks from the federal account to students. But there was an incident when a financial aid director took all the funds, his secretary and his boat and was heading for Mexico. He got caught. Should have left the boat behind.

[Tante Shvester]

Good advice, there.

[Keith]

The last thing we want to do is build a product that nobody uses, so we're really trying to cover our tracks in the early stages of the project.

This same guy is a frequent source of malapropisms.

[Jonathon]

A long-time financial aid person explaining the history behind the federally-mandated separation of duties.

When I first began, the financial aid director wrote checks from the federal account to students. But there was an incident when a financial aid director took all the funds, his secretary and his boat and was heading for Mexico. He got caught. Should have left the boat behind.

I feel like I'm missing the joke.

[rivka]

Maybe its funny-factor is not as mainstream as I'd thought.

After all, stealing thousands of bucks from the government, not to mention from students waiting for checks, isn't such a big deal. Just getting caught.

[Jonathon]

Suppose you see the sign in figure 5.1 at a local library. This sign would indicate that the library has handicapped parking or maybe a wheelchair ramp. This sign is a symbol indicating that there are certain accommodations for disabled people. There are many symbols in today’s world. Many of these symbols exist in mathematics.

I hate this entire paragraph. It's just . . . ugh.

[Keith]

I kind of laughed when I got to the final sentence.  I had NO IDEA from the preceding text that we'd be talking about math. 

[Jonathon]

Actually, the next paragraph is pretty bad too:

Mathematical expressions are a combination of numbers and operations. There are four operations. These are addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. In algebra we use different symbols for some of these operations. Let’s look at different ways these operations can be represented.

There's nothing that explicitly connects symbols and operators, and I think they might mean "operators" when they say "operations". Plus, there's a lot more than four operations.

[Jonathon]

I kind of laughed when I got to the final sentence.  I had NO IDEA from the preceding text that we'd be talking about math. 

Well, if you were enrolled in this seventh-grade math course, you'd probably have some idea that we'd be talking about math.

But I think that still goes to show how badly written the paragraph is. It starts off on a seemingly irrelevant topic (why are we talking about handicapped symbols in a math course?) and then suddenly jumps to math without any transition.

[rivka]

With a few notable exceptions, over the past 20-30 years, American elementary, junior high, and high school math books have become less and less about math, and more and more about all kinds of other stuff. Textbook indices used to have things like "multiplication". Now you're more likely to find "hamburger" (because a sidebar on one page talked about them).

Those quotes are not an exception to this dreadful trend.

[Jonathon]

I don't have a problem with the content per se; I think think it's a really clumsily written and roundabout way of saying "algebra sometimes uses different symbols for these operations." It especially sticks out because the rest of the course content is not like that—it's totally dry and boring, but it's just about math.

[rivka]

Fair enough.

[pooka]

Rather than circumventing the inevitable question "when will I use this in real life" they cement the idea that math is about things you already knew everything about before you got to math.

[Jonathon]

With a few notable exceptions, over the past 20-30 years, American elementary, junior high, and high school math books have become less and less about math, and more and more about all kinds of other stuff. Textbook indices used to have things like "multiplication". Now you're more likely to find "hamburger" (because a sidebar on one page talked about them).

Those quotes are not an exception to this dreadful trend.

You might appreciate this week's Sherman's Lagoon strips.

[rivka]

 

(But yes, amusing.)

[Annie Subjunctive]

I'm personally a bit of a champion for the new ways we teach math. All the facebook ranting about common core (it's not common core, it's just more modern pedagogy) insists that "the way we learned it" was just fine. And it was, if the intent is just to teach how to use algorithms. But in the past we weren't actually very good at teaching numeracy, which we're a lot better at now. So no, you might not understand your child's homework, but that doesn't mean that the teachers are being ridiculous. It means we're teaching math concepts and not just how to use algorithms.

[rivka]

Except they increasingly get to college without basic math knowledge. And this is true at prestigious and selective schools.

For some types of math knowledge, memorization is not merely a necessary evil; it is deeply necessary. And maybe not actually all that evil. (And I say this as someone who loathed being required to memorize things.)

[Annie Subjunctive]

Well, I would argue that what they know by the time they get to college has a lot to do with high-stakes assessment, in math and every other subject. We don't teach students anything permanent when their assessments are so arbitrary and ineffective.

I'd have to look into the literature, but I'd say that students that are taught well with more conceptual methods do have better retention of concepts. In fact, I'm sure that's what the literature says because that's what my peers in math education are championing lately. The problem, as always, is in translating what we know works from research into what is actually achieved in the classroom environment.