The EPSRC, or “Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council” is the body in the UK that decides what kinds of research in the physical sciences will get government grant money. Grant money is needed for advanced research in mathematics for the following reasons :
My son was asked to write a short essay on standardized testing. I thought I’d share it with the world. Note that these are his opinions, not mine!
I’ve edited it slightly for clarity.
I was doing a bit of random lunch-hour web-surfing, and came across a blog post by a swimming instructor. It starts with the eye-catching line “before you can teach something, you have to realize it’s hard”
The blogger writes about their insights into how (and how not) to teach swimming, and then wonders “how much this applies to other areas (teaching math in elementary school, for example?)” Having read the post, I’d say an awful lot does. Here’s my take on it.
When I was a student in university, I felt quite strongly about this issue. I believed firmly that education should be free. After all, education is necessary for a nation to succeed. An educated populace, I believed, should be seen as a form of infrastructure – as necessary for a strong economy as good transport or telecommunications systems. Therefore, the government should pay for everyone to get educated for free, I thought.
Tim Harford is an economist who has a newspaper column called “The Undercover Economist”. He presents tongue-in-cheek answers to a wide variety of questions from readers. In his book, “Dear Undercover Economist,” some of his favorite responses have been collected together. Two that really tickled me were related to the practice of grading on a curve.
Would a teacher ever cheat?
Of course this question will raise a few hackles. However, teachers are human, and humans respond to incentives. We do things that reward us, and avoid things that punish us. I’m intending to write a few blog posts about how incentives affect education – for good or for bad.
So, would a teacher ever have an incentive to cheat?
In this post, I want to talk about this statement : it is good to reward good teachers.
Some might say that teachers teach as a passion, and a reward is demeaning. While it’s true that there exist good teachers who are so devoted to their craft that they would work for free, it is still good to reward good teachers.
When someone says “gifted child”, a picture springs to most people’s minds of a child who always does well in school, who finds all topics easy to understand – a dream student. It did for me. I attended a talk a while back that shattered this misconception.
Although I didn’t listen to Obama’s “state of the union” address, I happened upon the transcript and started flipping through it. There’s a lot of encouraging stuff about science and math education.
The classic way to teach fraction division is like this. To work out, say,
we ‘turn the second fraction upside-down’, to get
and then the division question becomes a multiplication question.
