Summer Work/Fun/Study/Travel for teachers
National Endowment for the Humanities Landmarks of History Workshops
One week workshops
(Locations, titles, listed below)
$500 stipend
I did two of these. One week is perfect to explore an area, hang out with a few teachers, learn something, and beat a quick retreat. Pick an interesting area and interesting topic. And you get $500.
Teacher Ranger Teacher (National Park Service)
Acadia National Park
Train and work as a ranger/guide
8 weeks
I’ve never done this.
Landmarks this summer: (topic, location)
- Blue Ridge Parkway, Appalachian State
- Shaping the Constitution, Mount Vernon
- The Underground Railroad, Harpers Ferry
- Pearl Harbor
- Immigration, Religion, Culture, Lower East Side
- Zora Neale Hurston, Winter Park, FL
- FDR, Hyde Park
- Civil Rights Movement, Atlanta
- Andrew Jackson, The Hermitage, Nashville
- Eudora Welty, Jackson, MS
- US Industrialization, Duluth, MN
- James Madison, Orange, VA
- The Constitution, Philadelphia
- African Americans in DC, DC
- Immigration, Ellis Island
- Suffrage in the West, Laramie WY
- Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia
- Abraham Lincoln, Southern Illinois University
- Immigration and Public Health, Ellis Island
- Missouri-Kansas Border Wars, Kansas City
- Inventing America, Lowell MA*
I went to Lowell 2 summers ago. It was a wonderful 5 day course including a day trip to Sturbridge, a day trip to Walden Pond and the Alcott house and Concord. The other three days were spent exploring the factories, canals, and old neighborhoods.
Unions should be pro-union
I am concerned about a recent article on Edwize.
Jonathan Gyurko advised a charter school not to block its teachers from unionizing, if the teachers want to do so. The careful suggestion that teachers, treated right, might not want or a need a union, is counter to what I believe, and counter to what the United Federation of Teachers stands for.
The passage:
Moreover, if and when the school’s teachers want to gain more influence over their practice through collective bargaining, we hope that Equity Project embraces this expression of ownership and accountability.
implies that unionizing is not something that all teachers need.
Three days ago I asked the strongest voice on the blog to clarify the remark, but have been met with silence. This morning I left this comment:
What’s this “if and when” stuff? I think we have a right to expect a pro-union blog, not a union-agnostic blog.
I urge readers of this blog to visit Edwize, and to respectfully remind the blog owners that unions should be pro-union.
Gyurko is a former DoE official, now employed by the UFT. I think he specializes in charter schools. He was directing his remarks to The Equity Project Charter School, which has recently made headlines for announcing that they were opening a school in Washington Heights that would pay teachers a minimum of $125,000 per year.
Assault fizzles
A slimeball lobbyist launched a campaign against teachers and teachers unions, but it’s not too impressive.
You can read more details and find some links from
- Dr. Homeslice (vigilant for me and you)
- Mike Klonsky at Smalltalk
- The Columbus Education Association (CEA)
- Fred Klonsky
- Ed at the AFT (Let’s Get it Right, the AFT blog)
Ed suggested a few aspects of this sleaze I could blog about.
But I went, I looked, I saw a map. I love maps. The scum posted a map. Quick glance, educational attainment, I’ve seen it before. Mississippi keeps Arkansas from being #50.
Except I was wrong. It was a map of where teachers unions were too strong. Silly me.
Puzzle: Simple Construction?
Last week I taught a class to construct a tangent to a circle from a point outside the circle (center O) (construct the segment joining the segment and the center, find the midpoint of that segment (M), construct a circle with center M and radius MO. The new circle intersects the original circle twice, either one of those points taken with the external point is a tangent.)
Can you construct the external tangent to two circles?
So, they get the explanation, more or less (we’ve effectively inscribed an angle in a semicircle) and practiced the construction, and I wonder out loud, why don’t we construct the external tangent to two circles? And I throw them on the board, and someone says to connect the centers, and I agree, and pause.
“Not today guys, I think I know where to go, but I am not sure. We’ll look at this one next week.”
So I call my geometry expert, McRib. “Easy!” he says, and starts to tell me, and then pauses. “I can do it with ratios, but I need to think about a nicer construction. Let me get back to you.”
I ended up looking it up. And McRib called back a day and a half later, with a construction.
But without looking it up, can you construct the external tangent to two circles?
Did you figure it out, or did you know it?
Teacher Pay Scale – White Plains, NY
White Plains has one of the highest pay scales of those posted here. Westchester and Nassau counties seem to be tops locally, but I’ve had trouble getting them. White Plains was provided by a commenter.
White Plains’ pay scale includes 12 columns: BA, BA+15, BA+30, BA+45, BA+60, MA, MA+15, MA+30, MA+45, MA+60, PhD-Less, PhD.
White Plains is a small city, 60,000, 12 miles north of the Bronx. It is 65% white. Median family income is $72k. There are 6,000 students in 8 schools.
The salary schedule is below the fold ———–> Read more…
Tobacco, alcohol, pesticide lobbyist adds ignorance to his client list
Are union bloggers ready?
The lobbyist plans a broadside against teachers unions. Apparently the AFT is ready to respond. Wouldn’t be surprised if the UFT added its own voice.
But our hero here is Dr. Homeslice. Vigilant. Ready. Rallying the troops.
He’s right. Where’s Reg?
And, hey, Homeslice, how do teacher-unionist bloggers help?
Quality? review?
Help me out here. How can a guy who has never been to my school before spend a day and a half and possibly know enough to write a review? And a review that turns into a grade? (on some sort of 1 – 5 scale, with names like “Proficient” instead of 3)
Now, the highlights seem to have been positive, and even though they will probably get the grade wrong, my school won’t be in trouble, which suits me just fine.
Paperwork reduction? Didn’t Bloomberg’s Chancellor tell principals they didn’t have to prepare binders? But (last year) “quality” reviewers found fault with lack of evidence being placed into their hands. Which principal will be brave enough not to prepare reams of stuff prior to review?
But that aside. A day and a half? And not by a superintendent? Not by the principal? Not a self-evalutation by staff? A day and a half?
math joke from a student
From years ago, and not my student. His family owned the candy store down the street, and when I went in to buy coffee or cigarettes or candy or chips or (did I really buy that kind of stuff all the time back then?), if it wasn’t busy, he would ask me math questions. Or I would challenge him. I killed more than a few evenings there. Sometimes, if it got late, he would share the dinner his mother or sister sent down to them. We squatted in the back of the store over a pot of rice and stew with a little chicken or meat in it, and a spicy tomato-onion concoction. Anyhow, his joke:
John, what’s the limit of m over n as m approaches zero from the left and n approaches zero from the right? (and now I try my Tex skills)
His answer? Negative undefined.
Rumor is he’s back in school, and planning to teach math. I still laugh.
Recent Top Searches
Top searches over the last week. I made my favorite bold and red. “One dice” is also kinda cute.
(Robert did this – I thought it was cute.)
| Search | Views |
|---|---|
| dice | 399 |
| question mark | 370 |
| nyc doe | 35 |
| numbers | 27 |
| gib aids keine chance | 24 |
| nycdoe | 24 |
| washington post | 23 |
| how many days in 2007 | 22 |
| uft contract | 22 |
| nyc teachers salary | 15 |
| nyc teacher salary schedule | 15 |
| nyc doe pay scale | 14 |
| nyc teacher salary | 13 |
| math | 11 |
| nyc teachers pay scale | 10 |
| thessaloniki | 10 |
| uft salary schedule | 10 |
| wyoming obama | 9 |
| salonika | 9 |
| question mark face | 9 |
| greece thessaloniki | 8 |
| new jersey teacher salaries | 8 |
| nyc doe salary | 8 |
| teacher salaries nyc | 8 |
| new york city teacher pay scale | 8 |
| nelson rockefeller park | 7 |
| nj teacher salaries | 7 |
| nyc teacher salaries | 7 |
| cute numbers | 7 |
| clean icon | 7 |
| nj and teacher and salary step | 7 |
| teacher salaries nj | 6 |
| salonika old town | 6 |
| solid democratic states 1992-2004 | 6 |
| uft nyc | 6 |
| uft salary scale | 6 |
| high school math b | 6 |
| nyc excessed math teachers | 6 |
| how many work days in 2007 | 6 |
| pythagorean theorem | 6 |
| ct teacher salary | 6 |
| uft pay scale | 6 |
| jd2718 | 6 |
| nyc teacher salary 2008 | 6 |
| question m | 6 |
| nyc salary scale | 6 |
| one dice | 6 |
| σαλονικα | 5 |
| math education | 5 |
| teachers salary in nycdoe | 5 |
The dice and question mark are image searches.
A perfect carnival
Carnival of Mathematics 28, the last perfect carnival until 2026, appears at Tyler and Foxy’s Scientific and Mathematical Adventure Land!
Once again, I forgot to submit (in time – I tried – 36 hours late). I will submit a full week early. I will submit a full week early.
They link good stuff. Go look.
Here’s the link to all the old carnivals, perfect and otherwise. (Abundant – perfect – deficient?)
Pi Day, what sort of ideas?
My principal asked me today if we should do something for Pi Day, and I replied that I was never a Pi Day fan. (but if I didn’t do enough cutesy stuff in the classroom, he should tell me. No, he replied, I am plenty cutesie.)
But just now I noticed that H at Coffee and Graph Paper asked other math teacher bloggers to ask for Pi Day ideas, so here goes: What good stuff could you do with an Algebra I class on Pi Day? Have you actually tried any of this?
There is a current discussion on the Association of Mathematics Teachers of New York State listserve, here.
Superannuated
I got an e-mail today, from an old confederate, and I needed to look up a word. That doesn’t happen to me with non-technical, non-jargon terms very often.
March link updates
In the course of preparing the last math carnival, and of generally rooting around, I have run into a bunch of blogs worth linking. Today I am doing that:
- Threesixty – hosted Math Carnival 26, and disagrees with me sharply about multiplication. “TwoPi” appears to be the main writer. (College math from western New York, wild enthusiasm for secondary math and random topics)
- mathstories – Mr. K. (apparently the “math sage”) shares useful notes and stories about becoming and being a (math) teacher.
- God plays dice – Isabel is a PhD student, interested in far more math than what she is working on. Good blogger (and she’s out in other peoples’ comments, a lot)
- Science after sunclipse – random-y math/physics/general science and general ramble from Blake (at MIT?)
- So you want to teach? – Joel. Band guy. Great idea, very helpful.
- Math in 153 – middle school math teacher from Texas. Math, students, school.
- A teacher’s diary – joys and frustrations of teaching high school
- learning curves – Rambling college math instruction and regular stuff. Fun. By Rudbeckia Hirta.
I’ve also decided to pare back a bit.
- Ogretmen – done.
- The Reflective Teacher – out since November.
- dydan – I find this blog frustrating. Students are his audience (they almost never play another role in the entries). Math is a series of worksheets and quickie presentations (like advertising). When pedagogy appears, it doesn’t ring right. There is a limit to how long I want to read about integrating images and video. That limit has been passed.
- Educator on the Edge – deleted
- Teaching Matters Most – no updates in almost a year
- Ms George Teaches ELA – a perfectly reasonable blog I am just not that interested in
Traffic update
This blog has been busy. Not from the carnival (#9 had 3000 views, #18 had 1100, #27 is only at 300 so far – why do they go down when they are getting bigger and better?), but even those 300. And the old pay scales, and the new ones (Yonkers and Paterson), and old math posts, and old teaching posts, and old puzzle posts, and UFT/DoE posts. Long and short of it: February was busier than January, which was my biggest month so far. Numbers are in thousands.
| blank | March 2007 | September 2007 | January 2008 | February 2008 |
| visitors | 7.8 | 10.8 | 15.4 | 16.5 |
| views | 13.0 | 16.8 | 21.9 | 23.2 |
Leap day, my a$$.
Leap Luck!
Ms. Whatsit started a great tradition: teacher’s potlucks – a sort of social, food-oriented, teacher carnival.
The Leap Day Potluck just appeared over at Meeyauw. Neat stuff – recipes, food pictures, food stories, and teacher chat. Go visit. And don’t skip the recipe for herbal cough drops!
Next one is also at Meeyauw, Pi Day, March 14. I’ll put something in for that one. Send e-mails to meeyauw[at]gmail[dot]com. Figure March 12 or 13 is the deadline.
Teacher Pay Scale – Paterson, NJ
The strangest New York area pay scale I’ve seen in over a year of searching them out: Paterson, NJ has minimal raises for the first 10 years, followed by $35,000 in raises years 11 through 15.
Strange pay scale: Start with a BA: $47k. At 10 years with a masters: $55k. At 15 years MA+30: $93k.
Paterson’s a blue collar city of about 150,000, about 15 minutes west of the GW Bridge. The city is about a third Black, and half Hispanic (Puerto Rican, but also Dominican and from South America). There is a large middle eastern population. Median income is about $35k.
There are about 30,000 students in 50 schools in Paterson. The school district was taken over by the State of New Jersey in 1991.
Paterson’s salary schedule is below the fold ———–> Read more…
Polya in Italian?
I can’t really read this but:
Capire il problema
Elaborare una strategia
Mettere in pratica la strategia
Controllare
look familiar enough that I am guessing the last one says “check,” and I automatically objected (looking back involves so much else, as the professor’s text actually said. It’s the word in the heading I objected to)
New York State: looming geometry teacher shortage
Most schools in New York State haven’t offered “Geometry” in decades.
Proof was in a long slow decline when Sequential Mathematics Course 1, 2, and 3 were introduced in the late 1970s. Parallel lines and vertical angles were in Course 1. Triangle congruence was in Course 2. Circles were in Course 3.
And separate as these were, proof withered. As Course II (where some proof remained) was begin phased out in the late 1990s, the proof section of the NYS Regents exam was predictable: choose one 10-point proof from two out of three possible choices, from: 1) logic, 2) Euclidean, or 3) coordinate geometry.
Math B (2000-10) was a rambling exam. All over the place. Sometimes there was proof, sometimes not. A few schools decided not to bother with proof – it was never more than 6 points anyhow – when it showed up.
Integrated Geometry
Next year New York State introduces an Integrated Geometry Regents. Algebra starts this year; it likely will be quite easy to pass – it is a graduation requirement. Geometry is not. The people who worked on the geometry committee were old school, tough. The course will be geometry only, a throwback. The State attempted to delay starting these exams, (1, 2, 3) not because of algebra problems, but because of concerns about geometry.
Who will teach this? Few people educated in New York State in recent years got a strong high school foundation in geometry. Colleges don’t, as a rule, teach the Euclidean geometry we associate with high school – at CUNY it is banned as a high school course. Pull teachers out of retirement? Recruit from out of state? Mandate crash-course ‘institutes’ to cover missing topics?
They (who is they?) will go the crash-course route. They will violate a cardinal rule of teaching math: it is not ok for the instructor to know just a little more than the students. They created this mess. And they have no other way out.
But not quite yet. Next year most schools won’t realize they are in trouble. Plenty of NYers think they learned enough in Course 2 to teach geometry (with no extension, no reinforcement in college). We will see results in June 2009, and then administrators will start scrambling.
Carnival of Mathematics 1000
– – – – – – – – –
I’ve divided the submissions into 100 topics with at least 10 posts per topic.
| 00 – Meta-topic (3’s) |
10 – Pedagogy | 20 – Applications |
| 01 – Math and Culture |
11 – Fun/Recreation/Puzzles | 21 – More Undergraduate + |
| 02 – Undergraduate + | 12 – Elementary School & Elementary Math | 22 – Middle & Secondary + School |
– – – – – – – – –
00 – How to find Pythagorean Triples? Alexandre Borovik discusses at Math Under the Microscope.
00 – A geometric interpretation of how to extract cube roots (for the brave) over at Blog 360. (Also, for the brave and non-brave alike, discussion of how to extract square roots).
00 – Ternary Geometry and Ternary Geometry II from Arcadian Functor, a New Zealand physics blog with an awesome photo wallpaper
01 – There is a wonderful, illustrated treatment of math and visual art at MathTrek (Julie Rehnmeyer). Read if you like that sort of math, but even if you don’t, just go and look. You won’t be disappointed.
01 – Used and abused, infinity and eternity, philosophy and mathematics, and popular culture. Alexandre Borovik supplies a special-for-the-carnival version of a post on the culture of kitsch.
01 – Math and music? We know the relationships, right? Well, how about using math to clean up a primitive recording? MathTrek tells how a good algorithm helped win a Grammy (for Woody Guthrie).
01 – Kaz of Mathematical Poetry asks Is Pure Math is Poetry? – continuing a discussion from the last carnival.
01 – And for, ahem, a different kind of poetry, Jackie’s got a link to a mathematical limerick collection.
02 – I like when I read and understand serious math. Quomodocumque publishes an accessible summary of a recent paper on the equation and its solutions. A bit reminiscent of Fermat’s Last Theorem? Yup.
02 – Charles Daney asks “Why should anyone care about unique factorization?” in his latest installment on algebraic number theory at Science and Reason. Best part? When he discusses the problems a person can get into for not caring. Like Euler…
02 – Elliptica points out that extending the chain rule to multivariate calculus gets tricky when there is a change of variables.
02 – The Universe of Discourse discusses a “most uninteresting real number” in a twist on the old chestnut “What is the first uninteresting natural number?” (Berry’s Paradox). Marc’s proposal, uninterestingly enough, is something called Liouville’s number. As the earliest submission, this one does not qualify as uninteresting!
02 – At the Geomblog Suresh discusses “Alternating Optimization,” which in practice is employed, but seems to be missing from the relevant literature.
02 – Brent continues his “Recounting the Rationals” series with a post on the Euclidean algorithm at Math Less Traveled.
02 – 11011110 (DE) plays with the combinatorics of chord diagrams (he considers those that do not form triangles), and leaves some exercises for the reader. In case you were wondering, I did them. This level of work I find challenging, but not frustrating.
10 – Sol is Wild About Math. But calculus for 4th graders? Not as wild as it sounds?
10 – H at Coffee and Graph Paper slams the notion of relevance as it is applied to teaching mathematics.
10 – Dennis DeTurck’s nutso scheme to deny teaching fraction manipulation to most public school students got a rise out of bloggers and the mainstream media. Alane speculates that we’ve been Swifted (not boat, Jonathan) in a post at Math Notes.
10 – Mathmom asks if extracting square roots by hand has any relevance today.
10 – Do you agree that Math skill = Arithmetic skill? At Killing Mind, Heath says no. I am on the fence. This is a discussion that needs to happen.
10 – Are schools “cognitively nutritious?” Alvaro presents some interesting research (and some engaging problems!) involving elementary school children at SharpBrains. And ‘engaging’ means engaging for you and me, too. Do take a look.
11 – For Valentines Day (not so long ago!) Walking Randomly investigated heart plots, surfaces, and tangrams.
11 – Terence Tao proposes a problem about some blue-eyed islanders. But who knows what their own eye color is? (logic puzzle)
11 – I have a hat-guessing (not really guessing) problem here.
11 – Zeno’s got a hot little circle problem at Halfway There.
11 – We have a mathematical magic trick (cards) with directions at TextSavvy.
11 – The Telegraph’s obituary editor says probability is hard, and proceeds to make the confusion over Monte Hall sound not so hard. Read the nice little problem at the end. Catalan?
11 – Who needs language when we have math? Il Professore at Gli studenti di oggi has a nice discussion of Steiner’s Problem, (minimizing the road distance between cities in a plane), with good diagrams, and the soap bubble trick. Read the original in Italian, or this google translation into English.
12 – Learning Games discusses a the effects of some games on learning arithmetic. Daniel discusses starts with a comparison of a physical and a mental game.
12 – There is a nice little game with lots of subtraction practice at Let’s Play Math.
12 – A well-chosen diagram can blow the lid off an elementary problem. And even some not so elementary ones. Over at Big Ideas.
12 – Praveen has a little legs problem targeted at people with little legs at Math and Logic Play. Do you agree that his count is off by two?
20 – Need help finding the perfect mate? No one here can help you. But Ben Webster turns a search for stable marriages into a combinatorial discussion at the Secret Blogging Seminar. Cool, btw, to have a real seminar blog.
20 – And, while you are there, Ben liked the marriage bit for the carnival, I kind of liked his major dis of Arrow’s Theorem (mathematics of voting, considering spoilers).
20 – Before you start, you might like to check out Pissed off teacher who has a nice introduction to fair elections. (seasonally appropriate)
20 – A bit old, but there is an annoying temperature discussion at Think Again. Just what does “average temperature” mean?
21 – Aaron Roth explores social welfare in Nash equilibrium, but the aspect that catches his attention is the “Price of Malice.”
21 – In Basics of Patch Theory Brent explores the mathematical theory behind version control systems, particularly as it applies to collaborative editing.
21 – Suresh brings a guest blogger in to the Geomblog (Ganesh Gopalakrishnan) to discuss work on model checking by Clarke, Emerson, and Difakis (won the ACM Turing award).
21 – Michi finished his thesis, and found the time to post an introduction to algebraic geometry (in two parts).
22 – There is a list of common student errors (with interesting discussion) at MathNotations.
22 – Speaking of which, Robert explains the Illini method for simplifying radicals at Casting Out Nines.
22 – And Vlorbik rails against publishers and their sloppy use of the √ (sqrt) symbol. Trust me, he takes this (-: seriously.
22 – Is Jackie’s class data normally distributed? Read about it at Continuities.
22 – Dan Myer (dy/Dan) is convinced that teaching is better with digital/2.0/power point – and here he shows off how he introduces “rates” – it’s a reasonable guess that no chalk was harmed during that lesson.
22 – Dave Marain has a rich middle school introduction to ratios.
22 – Some of us have run into conceptual problems teaching inequalities in Algebra 1. H discusses a recent experience at Coffee and Graph Paper.
22 – Jose Vilson “abstracts the concrete” as he challenges middle school kids to find missing sides. Concrete is really on his mind. Not math, but his next post discusses, concretely, what’s happening to the concrete on the squares and rectangles in his own neighborhood.
– – – – – – – – –
OK, now, about this base 3 business. This is, after all Carnival 27. Carnival , right? And it was my 3rd carnival. And I hosted 9 and 18. And I was out of ideas.
Now, some divisibility, but with bad notation. Feel free to correct. In base 3, we have some strange divisibility rules. Multiples of 10 – er, 3, end in 0. Multiples of 9 end in 00. Even number? the sum of its digits will be even (and odd? odd!). Consider a number base 3 to be a string . Find the difference between the sum of
for i even, and sum of
for j odd. If the difference is a multiple of 4, so is A.
– – – – – – – – –
The next Carnival of Mathematics will revert to base 10 and appear at a blog run by the guy who used to run http://growthratenlgn.wordpress.com/ http://greedygreedyalgorithms.blogspot.com/ and he wants you to submit directly by e-mail to (tylerofmanyminds AT gmail dot com). When I know more, I’ll put it here.
Bush impersonators

Zeno (Halfway there) posts a video of Hugh Laurie (Dr. House) doing a country western Bush impression. If you like that sort of thing, Dave Lippman and his alter-ego, George Shrub are performing in a rare NYC appearance, downtown tomorrow, Saturday 2/23/08:
People’s Voice Cafe, with the Prince Myshkins
45 East 33rd St.
8pm $12
What states are not battlegrounds?
A. a state that went for the same party in 1992 – 2004 (2000 and 2004 by at least 5%) is not a battleground.
B. a state that went for the same party in 2000-04 by at least 10% is not a battleground (the earlier elections had the Perot wildcard)
C. went for the same party in 1992 – 2004 but closer than 5% in 2000 or 2004 – semi-battleground
D. went for the same party in 2000-04 by at least 5% – semi-battleground
Watch: New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Missouri, Tennessee, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire.
A. Democratic states: Washington, California, Hawaii, Illinois, DC, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine. Total: 183 electoral votes from 14 states and DC.
A: Republican states: Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana. B: Republican states: Kentucky, Georgia. Total 158 electoral votes from 18 states.
(click for more –>) Read more…
