IAE Blog

Recently I bought a Kindle Fire tablet computer  on a special sale for about $40. (Currently it retails for about $50.) What a bargain! I have a large, personal library on my Kindle.

Wouldn’t be nice if a parent or teacher could go to one or a very few websites and find many thousands of free books they could download to build a personal library for their children and students? Significant progress has occurred in this endeavor. My 5/11/2016 Google search of the expression free downloadable children's books online produced over 13 million results. While it requires Web connectivity to download such books, once they are downloaded they can be read without connectivity.

Watch a first grade student playing a game that involves rolling dice. Probably you can look at the outcome of rolling a pair of dice and immediately say the total. The first grader may need to carefully count one die and then keep going with the second. The transition to the level of expertise you have comes from practice. People who advocate use of games in math education want the practice to be fun and to include additional learning activities.

For example, suppose only one die is rolled, and it comes out 4. Is it likely that, when a second die is rolled and added to the first, the total will be 11 or higher? (This is a tricky question—you want to challenge the child.) That is certainly a challenging question to most first graders. Answering it takes some understanding of the number line and some practice at doing mental arithmetic.

What’s your Intelligence Quotient (IQ)? Has knowing—or not knowing—this number made any difference in your life?

Likely you have taken several IQ tests during your lifetime. Perhaps you have not made any particular decisions based on your IQ, but maybe others have. For example, maybe your IQ was measured while you were in elementary school and the resulting number was used to decide whether you were eligible to be in a Talented and Gifted program or a Special Education program.

Recently I was browsing some of my “older” writings and I came across a paper, Me–A Course of Study, that I wrote nearly 12 years ago (Moursund, November, 2004). It represented some of my guesses and hopes for what our educational system would look like in 2014.

The paper is a scenario—a view of education as seen through the eyes of a student just about to graduate from high school in 2014. The scenario presents a number of potential educational improvements that I thought would be well integrated into our educational system over the coming decade (2004-2014). The student intends to go to college and become a teacher.

I recently published an IAE-pedia document titled, What You Can Do (Moursund, 2016). The title comes from the What You Can Do section found in each of the hundreds of IAE Blogs that I have written.

The essence of this new document is summarized by two quotations at the beginning:

As best as I can tell, the term Computer Literacy was first used in two different publications published at about the same time in 1972 (Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences, April, 1972; Luehrmann, Spring, 1972). By then computers had been commercially available for about 20 years and were beginning to have a significant impact on the world (Moursund, 2016).

Quoting from Arthur Luehrmann (Spring, 1972):

During my teaching days at the University of Oregon I taught in the Mathematics Department, the Computer Science Department, and the College of Education. The last 20 years or so of my career was in the College of Education where I taught courses about computers in education.

Currently I am associated with a group of approximately 35 University of Oregon faculty members who are concerned about what the UO and/or their particular departments are doing in terms of adequately preparing students for the effective use of computer technology.

For many students, math word problems are the bane of their existence. High school math teachers tell me that a number of their students just refuse to even try to solve such problems—perhaps because of years of failure and unwillingness to subject themselves to further failure. Many other students manage to “get by” through memorization of rules of thumb such as “of” means “times” while “and” often means “plus.” They have little understanding of what they are doing, or how it relates to solving “real world” problems.

I have recently revised and updated my 27-page IAE-pedia document on Math Word Problems (Moursund, 2016a). My target audience is K-12 teachers and parents of students in these grade levels. Unfortunately for struggling students, there is no “magical solution” to solving word problems in this document. However, it contains considerable useful information.

"Nothing can be more absurd than the practice that prevails in our country of men and women not following the same pursuits with all their strengths and with one mind, for thus, the state instead of being whole is reduced to half." (Plato; Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world; 428/427 BC–348/347 BC.)

In the United States, March is women’s History Month (U.S. Library of Congress, 2016). This IAE Blog entry is a contribution to the celebration of women.

Graph images from Erica Manfield (2/18/2015)

I am 79 years old. So, when I see an article about “aging brains,” it tends to catch my eye. I have just read an article by Michael Tortorello, Is Donald Trump Too Old to be President? (Tortorello, 2/28/2016.) While the title uses the name Donald Trump to attract attention, the coverage and information is much broader.