DoE prioritizes (from the Watch What They Do department)
Yesterday’s Daily News reports on DoE hiring at its central offices at the same time as programs at the schools are being cut.
Instead of an official response, the DoE ran a lame rebuttal through Gotham Schools. The best part, which GS lets pass by without a word of commentary: while schools were taking (was it 5%) an across the board cut, every Tweed department had to propose a 10% cut. But while the cuts in schools really happened, the DoE spared entire departments at Tweed, and even expanded some.
Offices expanded at the expense of kids included:
- Budget
- Accountability (Testing kids, Rating schools – this division should be eliminated)
- Legal
- Human Resources
- The Office of the Chancellor (staff doubled in the last year)
The entire News article is below the fold –> Read more…
Stimulus money for schools is good, but…
I was looking forward to losing ARIS, Progress Reports and teacher tracking. The UFT got on board, to some extent, with all of these, when the DoE brought them in.
But in recent months the UFT offered them up as good places for cost cutting. It was going to be gratifying to hear our leaders argue to defund them… Oh well.
In a likely tight budget, they should be the first things cut; we still need to make the argument.
Honestly, in a flush budget, they should be cut, too.
Puzzle: Right triangle area and perimeter
In the same spirit as the previous puzzle (which generated some nice discussion/solutions), let’s keep to the same theme:
Find all the right triangles for which the area equals the perimeter. (just the numbers. ignore the mismatched units)
Two thoughts
From Rudbeckia at Learning Curves: Learning styles are the academic version of horoscopes.
And from me: often the hardest thing about starting out teaching math is not how hard math is for students; it’s how easy math is for teachers.
Teachers Play at Math
Denise went and started up a brand new carnival: for math teachers and students, called Math Teachers at Play. It will run every other Friday, alternating weeks with the Carnival of Mathematics.
Denise will host, at least at first. And for #1 she pulled in a nice mix of arithmetic and algebra and puzzles, and, well, school stuff. There are 20 links (including one of mine!)
I hope that the two Carnivals remain associated with each other. And I am curious, having found the Italian Carnevale della Matematica if there are any others out there, in further corners of the (I don’t like the word that goes here)?
Bravo to Denise for taking good initiative!
Puzzle: Gone, but not forgotten
Posted a rectangle puzzle a month ago. No real response. Vlorbik recently reminded me. Let’s try again.
Find all the rectangles for which the perimeter equals twice the area. (just the numbers. Ignore the fact that the units don’t match.)
NYS high school exams – testing done wrong
I don’t like the national trend towards high stakes exams. I don’t like graduation requirement exams. I don’t even like SATs. I don’t like the gross over-testing of our young kids, grade school kids, even kindergartners.
But even if I liked these things, I’d hate New York State’s high school testing program. They just get it wrong.
Exit exams? Course exams? NYS Regents exams are both and neither. It doesn’t work.
New York State’s high school exams are called Regents Exams. They were first offered in 1865. I can’t make out the language, but they sound like entrance exams for university or normal school in a particular subject area:
Somewhere along the way, through twists and turns, and the slow phase-out of vocational titles, these exams became the standard for receiving an academic (as opposed to general(?), commercial(?), business(?), vocational(?)) diploma. Read more…
DoE, also incompetent
Progress reports? Malevolent. Teacher data reports? Malevolent. “Open Market?” Malevolent.
ARIS? Malevolent. ATRs? Malevolent. Reorganizations? Malevolent. School closings? Malevolent.
Web site? oh my.
I went to look up an elementary school. Call it PS99 (not the real #). Go to schools.nyc.whatever, and type PS99 into the engine. Brrrpp. Nothing. Takes a few minutes, but since I know the damned school exists I try again, via Google, and get to the correct DoE page. Turns out the DoE website only recognizes PS099 with a zero.
I suspend better judgment. Instead of mocking the morons at Tweed, I find the little “contact us” box and fill it in, with a description of the problem, and the suggestion that they allow the search for PS99 to turn up PS099 (especially since normal folks call it PS99, but I didn’t mention that.)
No difference. Look what I got back from them:
The message could not be delivered because the recipient’s mailbox is full.
<EX3VS3.nyced.org #5.2.2>
Dear President Obama (letter from a Bronx 4th grader)
Took this from NYSUT, though I think it was republished elsewhere:
About that mathematical valentine poem…
It bothered me that I didn’t know where it came from, and as it was passed to me at least third hand, without an author three hands away, I googled…
It was published by the MAA in a book called “777 Mathematical Conversation Starters” by John de Pillis, 2002. (Book looks fun, easy to read, very cute)
The original appeared in the Mathematics Teacher in 1965. The Author was Katherine O’Brien, and it appeared in Volume 58, #6, p.537
Maybe she was the original author. But those kinds of things… if she’s around, and we could find her, we could ask…
In the meantime, do I have a copyright issue? Do I need to take the poem down?
Carnevale de Matematica – but what number?
There’s a (new?) mathematics carnival on the block – in Italian. If you read that sort of stuff, check it out. The professore who contributed a post to our Carnival of Mathematics 27 in English last year is the host. The blog is proooof.blogspot (4,count them, o’s) and the blog title is:
The carnival is number 10 in base 10 – we know it is not the first. Beyond that? I wish I knew which base the second 10 was written in…
I can make out some of the topics, and I’ll poke around a little. Maybe some of the posts are in English or mostly diagrams, photos, and equations. Plus, there are links to bloggers… most or all of whom I’ve never seen. So poking definitely is in order.
That is, by the way, how I read big books as a little kid. My aunt got this great Time Life series on nature, and I ‘read’ each volume, mostly sticking to the photos, charts, diagrams, tables, and occasionally dipping into the text…
Any NY field trip advice?
On the heels of this post by Ms. M about an excellent (way to go, motivating with Flat Stanley) and a horrible (you’ll have to click over and read it yourself) pair of field trips, I realized that NY readers could be a useful source:
I am looking for a trip. Free is good. Very cheap is ok. Seniors. After school or weekend. Not a huge group, but could be anywhere from 15 to 70 with the 25-40 range most likely. Museum/exhibit. Fun for kids, but not something most of them have already done. No worksheets, has to be of interest to 17 y.o.s on its own. Small is ok, I’ll combine with some sort of walk and food, but tiny, no. Manhattan is best. Bronx is okay. The other places are not out of the question.
So, NY readers out there, ideas?
Just showing off some math…
Even though I am not eligible (I don’t think) to win Monday Math Madness, since I already won this year, I will continue submitting solutions (since they are fun).
And? They liked my solution to #25, and printed it.
The contest is over, but here’s the question:
A number is considered to be monotonically increasing if each digit is greater than the one preceding it. For example, 24579 is monotonically increasing but 24559 is not (the 4th digit is not greater than the third digit) nor is 24759 (the 4th digit is not greater than the third digit.)
If you randomly select a number between 1 and 1,000,000 what is the probability that the number will be monotonically increasing? Assume that all single-digit numbers are monotonically increasing.
While you are welcome to write a computer program to verify your answer, to be eligible for a prize you must demonstrate how to solve the problem without use of a computer.
Originally published at Wild About Math.
Carnival of Math 49 at 360
Ξ at 360‘s done quite a nice job with the newest carnival of mathematics.
And let me recommend the long post from a blog called bit player. The entry, Division by Zero, is about using computer mapping to find the continental divide. If you like maps (and who amongst us does not?) you’ll find it fascinating. He made a great map almost ten years ago, published in the American Scientist, among other places, but with better data, new map… you’ll need to read.
But there’s also a nice discussion of the number 49, and an array of topics from a book review to flake fractals to an interesting try at correlating Ottoman wars with the origin of the sultan’s mother.
Enjoy.
Happy 214
Valentine
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You disintegrate my differential, |
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You dislocate my focus. |
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My pulse goes up like an exponential |
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whenever you cross my locus. |
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Without you, sets are null and void — |
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so won’t you be my cardioid? |
From an e-mail, purporting to be a forward of a forward of an e-mail from my Algebra II teacher.
Do Not Apply: A Bronx middle school
There are good schools, bad schools, mediocre schools. But in New York City we have a handful of schools that are so poorly run, so out of control, with administrations that are so incompetent, mean, arbitrary, or vindictive, that getting a job in these schools often means ending your career before it starts.
Last summer I started a list. I started with Bronx high schools, and moved on to Manhattan high schools. Since then I dropped Pablo Neruda (lack of evidence of an ongoing problem; there were a series of bad incidents of teacher harassment, U, discontinuance, but not ongoing) and added Bronx HS of Science.
Today, we have our first Bronx middle school, from the Pelham Parkway area, District 11.
The Bronx Green Middle School is on Wallace Avenue, in the MS135 building. It is not a good place to work. Incidents are not reported, including threats to teachers. Administrators treat one group of teachers as favorites, and the rest as garbage. And those teachers are regularly abused by administrators.
If you know about other schools that fit the “Do Not Apply” category, let me know. E-mail is [this blog name] [at] [gmail] (and then dot com). Tell me, as specifically as possible, why the school fits that category.
Here are the Bronx high schools:
- Bronx Aerospace HS (+) (in the Evander building) (follow up)
- Eximius College Prep HS (near Crotona Park) (follow up)
- Bronx Theater HS (in the JFK building)
- Discovery HS (in the Walton building)
- Fordham HS of the Arts (in the Theodore Roosevelt building)
- HS for Performance and Stagecraft (no longer in the Truman building)
- Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology (in the Theodore Roosevelt building)
- Bronx High School of Science [follow up with details of special complaint]
- [Felisa Rincon de Gautier Institute for Law and Public Policy]*
- ~And here are Manhattan high schools:
- *HS of Art and Design
- *Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis HS
- *Life Sciences HS
- Urban Assembly School for Media Studies (in the MLK building)
- *MLK HS of the Arts and Technology
The sources for this list are (highly) reliable, but I do not have supporting details at this time. Until I have those details and anecdotes, I will leave an asterisk next to a school, to show that its inclusion is unconfirmed. I believe my sources, I believe that these schools belong, but I still want confirmation.
Contractual rights (duty-free lunch, no 4 in-a-row, right to decline per session, pre-ob for untenured teachers) may be routinely violated, or those who exercise them may be retaliated against.
In the end, when we see 40%, 50% of the faculty from September doesn’t return the following September, we know.
Charter Schools are not Public Schools
Nor are they private schools. Charter schools are a hybrid.
If we polled the American public, we’d find that some people know this. We’d find that many think charters are purely private.
But charter advocates are intentionally deceptive.
Here’s Bloomberg pushing “charters are public schools” earlier this week.
Here’s Gotham Schools last month, offering some strange wording to make the same point.
Why do charter advocates insist on saying that charter schools are public schools? Idk. And speculating is beyond the scope of this post.
But most people get it. Public schools are public schools. Private schools are private schools. Charters are somewhere in between.
History, fwiw, agrees. Privately run, open to the public “Charity Schools” were replaced by what the public now calls “public schools.”
Experienced Teachers in NYC
Mayor Bloomberg and his Chancellor, those champions of stripping experience from the system:
- by closing schools (and reorganizing District 79), created a pool of teachers, including many senior teachers, who needed to find new placement
- by messing with funding and transfers, directly discouraged principals from hiring experienced teachers
- and today propose forcing these teachers out.
Their claim that that these are teachers who “nobody wants” deceives the casual listener.
It is our obligation, it is our union’s obligation, to remind the public of 1 – 3. And we need to do a better job.
It is our obligation to remind the affected teachers that we know what has happened, that we know that they have been set up. And we need to do a better job.
Save MS399
Activism begins at home.
Local issues are often the most important issues, to those affected. They also affect the least number of people.
MS399, a middle school in the Bronx, off the Concourse, is threatened with closure. Pretty typical, it is targeted because it teaches a vulnerable population, largely English Language Learners, whose scores… You get it. It’s worth noting though, that 399’s numbers are recently up, not down.
The DoE’s intent is to disrupt the system, to confuse and displace poor and immigrant students, to force teachers onto the Open Market and create more ATRs.
Good people, students, teachers, parents, have only good reasons to keep 399 open.
The rally is this Thursday, at 5PM. Colleges are closed for President’s Day. There are not competing events. Teachers, whose own schools have been or may be targeted, this is an opportunity to add our voices, to show solidarity.
Everyone who shows up Thursday is far more likely to come to the citywide anti-budget cut demonstration March 5. Come. Bring one other person from your school. Make a small difference today, to make a larger difference down the road.
Attend the Rally to
Save MS 399!!
February 12th at 5pm
In front of Middle School 399
120 East 184th Street
Middle School 399 is Working
Phase in MS399
Plead or (boldly) organize?
I know it’s over a week late. Still fun. Hat tip, Blake.
Teaching off topic 3
I go off topic all the time; it’s how I teach. I wrote about how I was miles away twice at the beginning of last month. Here’s the first story. And here’s the second. But there’s a third, too:
My friend, a former chapter leader from a former school, he works with a newish math teacher who was having problems with classroom control. And he asked me to come by. And I did.
Nice guy. Soft, quiet. Told me his math was good (I never asked a single question about his mathematics). Classes were out of control, and this was not his first year.
I listened as he described his classroom procedures, and what actually happens. He talked about how often he has to stop to quiet kids down, how they don’t listen. He leaves each day discouraged, and exhausted.
I asked about test grades (most kids fail each test) and about homework (maybe a third of the kids do it). He has trouble keeping up with checking it.
(continues) Read more…
Guess who’s a winner?
Monday Math Madness is an every other week contest, divided between two blogs: Wild About Math and blinkdagger.
Many of the contests (most?) are counting problems. My kind of stuff. And I enter about half the time. I like to solve the problems as I compose the e-mail, without, if I can help it, pencil or paper.
And last week, #24, I won.
And next week, #25, was fun. I solved it kind of tipsy last night. But I don’t think I am eligible anymore.
My prize: some sort of gift certificate, I will make it a prize for a puzzle solution in my combinatorics class. I might even use #25… Think a high school kid could do it?
And that’s the thing of it… these puzzles are hard, but… it’s what I teach my students. I assume that in a class of 25, if I had run the MMM contests every two weeks, figure that’s 8 contests, we would have had at least one correct solution, and perhaps a few.
But they are still fun for me, and I encourage you to take a look. And I figure that it’s ok to take the prize if I am using it to motivate kids.
A few more new links
Over the last year I added and took away blogs from reader – but didn’t properly update my blog roll. I started correcting that last month, here and here, and today a little more:
- Math Tales from the Spring – I think I already introduced her, but really, take a look. This latest about the negative effect of NCLB on Special Ed kids in her school is worth special attention. West Texas is so far from here, yet…
- A new favorite – Chalk Dust Makes Me Sneeze – high school math teacher, Cherry Hill, NJ, posts are short, punchy, and funny (like me sitting here laughing out loud funny). Try the newest posts, or look at this painfully amusing standardized testing anecdote: Can’t I leave just one behind?
- Believe it or not, I never linked NY Public School Parents. Oversight corrected. That’s a must-read blog for NYC public school politics.
- Hearts a bubble in the rubble is about to become a math teacher, and was just frustrated by being passed over for a job – there was an RTR interviewing. That one’s tough. We don’t want teachers to get fired. But HBR has a math major, did student teaching, and will likely be snatched up once teachers already on payroll get placed.
- If you follow education in New York, stick NYSUT‘s top stories feed into your reader. http://www.nysut.org/cps/rde/xchg/nysut/hs.xsl/index.htm or something like that. I find that they sometimes share more information than either the UFT or the AFT, are more topical, etc, etc. If you don’t read their feed, you can miss stuff.
- For national ed policy, Bridging Differences is a relatively important read. Deborah Meier and Dianne Ravitch write. It’s not that frequent, and probably not as influential as some thought it would be, but thoughtful, and at the fringes of the center.
- Sumidiot (see alternate spelling below) is a math grad student who makes sure that there’s some fun while he’s taking it all seriously. Read on:
The Borromean rings are quite possibly my favorite link. It’s 3 circles in space, no two of which are linked, but together, they can’t be unlinked. Fantastic.
He then proceeds to build a set, out of business cards, and post photos. He also has a less fun, more serious fork: a math blog. For those of you who don’t like pictures or color. And his name his Nick. But I like the name, below:
Integrated Algebra January 2009 Conversion Chart
or here –> Read more…
JD2718 