Essays

I exercised for 300 days in a row - and then I crushed my ankle

Around spring break of last year (2024) I decided to exercise every day. I worked out fairly consistently, 3-4 days a week, for close to two years at that point, but I decided to commit to every day for a few reasons. First, I learned that natural muscle loss from aging can start in your mid thirties. Despite my insistence that the final season of The Office ended just a few years ago (it was 2013), by most chronological accounting methods I’m 35 years old.

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Easily use AI to convert handwritten notes to text

It dawned on me today as I was taking notes on a video about weekly reviews that I could probably upload a picture of my notes to Claude and ask it to transcribe them into text. And, even with my poor handwriting, it did a great job. I also asked it to format it as a bulleted list with sub bullets, which it did. If my handwriting was slightly better it would’ve done an even better job.

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Creating a Critical Thinking Curriculum

A couple of years ago I was on Drew Perkins’s podcast to discuss a curriculum that Will Reusch and I designed called Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines. I realized that I never actually posted about it on my blog, so here it is. Here’s the podcast description: Drew Perkins talks with Will Reusch and Zach Cresswell about the Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines curriculum they’ve created and are piloting with funding through Heterodox Academy.

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AGI or not, we can't close our eyes

There’s been a conversation about when AGI will arrive for a long time. That time horizon has shrunk since chatGPT came on the scene, obviously. However, for a while I thought maybe these models would asymptote. I’m not convinced of that anymore. I think AGI, or something close enough, is hurdling towards us. We need to start grappling with these questions (and by “we” I mean the general public, as I’m sure many in the industry have these conversations frequently):

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Interacting with AI Podcasters in Real Time

AI continues to amaze me. I recorded this video this morning and had to share because it is so mind blowing. Educator friends, this is where we’re at. I don’t even know if this is the leading edge of what’s available, but I have to think that in terms of free tools, this is pretty close. NotebookLM can generate podcasts based on various materials. I uploaded a PDF of an excerpt from John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” and generated a podcast.

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(Finally) Getting Better at Teaching Optimization

In calculus I teach a concept called “optimization,” which, as I tell students, is an application of pretty much everything they’ve ever learned in math class. Not only that, all the problems are “story problems.” It can be a very tough section for students. The irony is that the calculus is not the difficult part. It’s interpreting the situation, sketching it correctly, developing the correct model, integrating constraints into the model, and finally interpreting what the model is telling you.

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Even if I was a therapist, I wouldn’t use social-emotional circles

Part three of a three-part series called “Breaking my silence on social-emotional learning.” You can read part one here and part two here.  Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko Until this point I’ve argued that since I’ve trained most of my adult life to teach math, and not give therapy, I shouldn’t try to become a therapy hobbyist with the teenagers in my classroom. I’ve also argued that the thorny issue of confidentiality probably can’t be overcome with any clear benefit to students.

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What happens in the classroom, stays in the classroom?

Part two of a three-part series called “Breaking my silence on social-emotional learning.” You can find part one, “I am not a therapist,” here. Photo by Eren Li In my previous post I explained how, as a teacher, I am not qualified to run a social-emotional or restorative circle and hinted at the idea that even if I was, I still shouldn’t run them in my classroom. I promise to flesh out that point in the next post, however, as I was writing I realized another problematic aspect of this needs to be addressed – confidentiality.

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I am not a therapist

Part one of a three-part series called “Breaking my silence on social-emotional learning” Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko I’ve been suspicious of “social-emotional circles” since I learned about them several years ago. My first concern was how to fit this practice into a curriculum in which two snow days can mean I have to cut content. However, my second and more substantive concern, was that, put simply, I am not a therapist and am not equipped to lead an exercise like this.

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Explaining well is foundational to teaching well

The ability to explain things clearly is a necessary condition for being a good math teacher.  Many conversations in some circles are around creating activities that help students construct knowledge and understand concepts more deeply. This is great!  But young teachers need to know that explaining concepts clearly is foundational to those activities.  Not that I’m in a position to do it much, but when I talk to young teachers I tell them to teach primarily with direct instruction/guided practice/independent practice/formative assessment their first couple of years.

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Fighting Confirmation Bias Is Like Fighting Gravity (so let’s stop fighting it)

Photo by meriç tuna on Unsplash When you learn about confirmation bias two things are usually explicitly stated. Confirmation bias is inescapable and that we should do everything we can to escape it. This is like saying it’s impossible to escape gravity but you should do everything you can to try to escape it.  Is it possible to hack our bias to confirm our beliefs in such a way that we don’t need to feel like we’re constantly fighting gravity?

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It’s time to make school closures due to Covid an absolute last resort

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash I’ve been working on this post for the better part of a week, trying to decide if it was worth posting. Then yesterday a New York Times headline came across my phone and it nudged me to hit “Publish.” “India’s Lost Generation: Lengthy pandemic shutdowns have led to young people leaving school altogether, dimming the prospects for the country’s economic future” As some epidemiologists, who I’ll come back to later, warned us about in fall of 2020, lockdown policies have have had a devastating impact on young people and it’s time to take that policy decision, school closures due to Covid, off the table.

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Jo Boaler, Tracking, Education Research, and Honesty

Image credit: https://dilbert.com/strip/2012-06-22 A few years ago I read Jo Boaler’s book, “Mathematical Mindsets” and I thought it contained some good ideas. There were a few things that I thought were not realistic or would be difficult to scale, but overall I found the book useful. Our department read it together, and I remember a colleague pointing out that Boaler often cited her own research. That revelation made me more skeptical of her work, especially when she provided citations.

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Antiracism in your school: 9 ways to keep the conversation rational and unifying

A few years ago, I noticed that the words diversity, equity, and inclusion were steadily gaining in popularity, especially in K-12 education. At first, I couldn’t see a problem with the concepts. But as I dug deeper I discovered that much of the movement behind these words, although advanced by people with the best of intentions, was contradictory, illogical, and somewhat unethical. Take the defining of every action as either “racist” or “anti-racist, for example.

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We’re Teaching Slope Fields at the Wrong Time

In our textbook slope fields come during the differential equations unit, which for the last 8 years made sense to me. But every year there were groans from students and comments about how “pointless” they are. Well, here’s why students think they’re pointless. They already know antiderivatives. So they can take many differential equations and find the family of functions whose derivative is given. Many of the basic slope field problems can be somewhat easily antiderived, especially once students know about separation of variables.

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I have a couple of questions about “Social Justice Math”

I have a couple concerns regarding “Social Justice Math” that I don’t think I’ve seen addressed. (If they have been, please let me know.) From what I’ve read SJM is billed as a way to bring real world problems into the classroom with a “justice” lens. Problems related to climate change, economic inequality, racial equity, etc., would be used in class as frameworks for learning different math concepts. (Read more on that here.

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