Today is the day I get my GACE (Georgia Assessments for the Certification of Educators) scores. Sometime between 5 and 10 PM I’ll have an email in my inbox as to whether I will be teaching secondary math in June or if I’ll be paying a ton of money to go back to Georgia to…

Yesterday I sat in my fiancé’s living room with his roommate and my good friend J. We were celebrating the coming of the weekend (no Friday classes) and lightly discussing our plans for after graduation. J had finally sent his résumé to Oscar Myer – we’re all crossing our fingers that he becomes a Weinermobile…

I recently read a post by a teacher who was concerned about the Common Core’s apparent focus on making sure that kids are understanding the math they are learning, as opposed to simply being able to just calculate correctly right away. I have a strongly differing interpretation of a story she shares about her son…

I currently serve with City Year and I taught as part of TFA last year. On my way to the airport for winter break, I saw public recruitment advertisements both for TFA and for City Year. The City Year ad was on the public bus I took to the airport. The TFA ad was glued…

It is very frustrating to me that many students (and an apparently-increasing number of administrators, politicians, text book authors, and even teachers) seem to think that the most effective way to learn math is to have students practice problems that are the same as problems that the teacher has already shown the class how to…

TFA has gotten pretty good at using student data to inform instruction and track progress of students and teachers. (Sometimes I think TFA doesn’t always track exactly the right things, but that’s a topic for another day!) I’ve recently been thinking about broadening the use of this student data beyond the typical “Oh, <student 1>…

I’ve recently been learning more about loan amortization. When you make a fixed monthly payment on a loan (say, a mortgage), at first most of the money in each payment just covers interest and very little actually goes towards paying off the principal. Towards the end of the loan period, most of each month’s payment…

I have recently been thinking about the implications of repeating academic course content again in future courses. I have been thinking about this in two contexts: 1. A curriculum purposefully designed to cycle back through topics or skills students have seen in previous courses. 2. When a college student ends up in an intro class…

My classroom was set up, my outfit was picked out, and I was mentally ready for the first day of school. Then, the day before the first day I broke a bone in my foot. I spent half the day in the ER getting x-rays and meeting nurse practioners, but the end result was that…

There was a recent piece in the New York times asking Is Algebra Necessary?   Here is my response: http://havingneweyes.com/2012/08/07/is-algebra-necessary/