As I think and read about various educational approaches (in the process of preparing for the course I’m teaching in the fall about math and writing), I sometimes see studies with conclusions like this: Students who were taught using method…
Monthly Archives: July 2013
Journalism
A Suggestion for The Economist
by Rafe Kinsey •
The wonderful magazine The Economist has a two-page spread The world this week at the beginning of each issue with very short blurbs about the week’s news. I was reading the section this week when an idea came to me.…
Interesting Links
Links: SWAT Teams, Nostalgia, Lemonade Stands, Why Ice Cream Sounds Fat, Gluten Intolerance, Etc.
by Rafe Kinsey •
An interesting article by Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky on why different sounds have different associations, e.g., why “ice cream sounds fat”. I’ve always been interested in the Saussaurean arbitrariness of sign—the notion that the sound or form of a word…
Education, English 125, Gamut, Math
The Potsdam Miracle: Lessons in Revolutionizing Undergraduate Mathematics
by Rafe Kinsey •
(There’s a printer- and footnote-friendly pdf version—with links still working!—here if you prefer.) A few days ago, while browsing in the library,1 I stumbled across something pretty remarkable. John Poland, writing in 1987 about this “Modern Fairy Tale”, describes the…
Interesting Links, Technology
Links: The Math of Genealogy, Manic Pixie Dream Girls, Techno-Utopianism, Eric Holder, Pope Francis, etc
by Rafe Kinsey •
A few links, as I prepare some more substantive posts. Laurie Penny, I was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl in the New Statesman. (Opening lines: “Like scabies and syphilis, Manic Pixie Dream Girls were with us long before they were…