Information Age Education Blog

I think of a pithy quote as a very short story. Such a short story can capture an important idea in a very few words, and such quotes tend to remain "fresh" over many years—and even over the centuries.

I have created two personal collections of such quotes for the IAE-pedia. See my general quotes at http://iae-pedia.org/Quotations_Collected_by_David_Moursund and my math education quotes at http://iae-pedia.org/Math_Education_Quotations. [These collections were revised and updated in March 2013.]

I can still remember when I was taking English Composition as a freshman at the University of Oregon. We often had in-class writing tests. My spelling abilities were not very good. I would compose a sentence in my head, check to see if I could spell all of the words, and edit the sentence so that it avoided words I could not spell.

Many years later my quality of life was much improved by spell checkers becoming available on the computers I used.

One of my favorite quotes is:

Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable. (Richard Buckminster Fuller; American engineer, author, designer, inventor, and futurist; 1895–1983.)

As you know, it is easy to construct a test that most students will fail. Or, for a test that already exists, it is easy to adjust the passing mark so that many students will fail.

I am on the Distribution List for the Oregon Council of Teachers of Mathematics. The following is quoted from a 9/13/2010 posting to this list: