You are a student taking an important math course taught in large lecture sections by an adjunct (who dropped out of your elite school’s graduate program). That frees up some of the professorial staff to work with a few brilliant math students that your college recruited for their Putnam team. (The Putnam Math Competition is […]
“The Fish Stinks From the Head”
June 25, 2013 by
The following is a comment about how administrators may have taken a statement by David Riesman. The comment was made on the following article. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323836504578551904167354358.html?mod=WSJ_article_comments#articleTabs%3Darticle Let’s see, there’s teacher training, not so good, overall. Then there’s STEM training, not so good, overall. Oh, there’s lawyer training, not so good, even “unscrupulous”, according to some […]
A Suggestion for Holding Colleges Accountable for Teacher Performance
June 25, 2013 by
I posted the following suggestion as a comment to this WSJ article http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323836504578553933214167460.html?KEYWORDS=arne#articleTabs%3Darticle A significant part of the teacher competency problem is no fault of the teachers. It starts with the training they get in college. Many high school teachers are especially penalized by inadequate preparation in their subject. This is no fault of […]
Opinion Piece in NY Times on Higher Ed
June 17, 2013 by
Here is the link to it. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/schooling-ourselves-in-an-unequal-america/?comments#comments I commented as follows: The point about college completion rates between generations is greatly magnified by two factors. In that same time period, (1) amount of time studying has decreased by 35%, though grades have gone up, with only 20% now studying as much as students did 30 […]
Not a Bad Life For Students With Time on Their Hands
June 14, 2013 by
See the interesting “student housing” article in the NYTimes, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/us/in-luxury-student-housing-gym-tan-and-study.html?pagewanted=1&ref=us#postcomment My Comment: Hey, the kids have got to do something with their time. The amount of outside study that we professors require for even good grades has more than halved over the years. (See the great book “Academically Adrift” for the details.) Not giving the […]
Link to A Column by Paul Krugman on Education
June 14, 2013 by
I think it is informative – and a little scary. I worry that it makes the mistake of confusing “degreed” with “educated”. I made a comment online to that effect. Here is the link to the article, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opinion/krugman-sympathy-for-the-luddites.html?ref=opinion&comments&_r=0#postcomment
Important Paper on the Value of a Good Teacher (from a MacArthur Award Winner)
June 13, 2013 by
Raj Chetty (MacArthur Award Winner, HS Valedictorian, Harvard Summa Cum Laude [in only 3 years], Harvard PhD in Economics [in only 3 years], now a Harvard Professor) and his colleagues, John N. Friedman (Harvard) and Jonah E. Rockoff published “The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added And Student Outcomes in Adulthood.” I will be posting […]
Good Op/Ed in WSJ about Online Courses and Education
June 3, 2013 by
In my view, an important part of the article is the discussion of resistance to MOOC’s. Also, the author speaks from experience, not from studies. We need both, but we are short on op/ed’s from experience. It is by Andy Kessler. You can find him in Wikipedia. Here is the link, followed by my comment, […]
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