The BladeForums.com 2024 Traditional Knife is ready to order! See this thread for details:
https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/bladeforums-2024-traditional-knife.2003187/
Price is $300 $250 ea (shipped within CONUS). If you live outside the US, I will contact you after your order for extra shipping charges.
Order here: https://www.bladeforums.com/help/2024-traditional/ - Order as many as you like, we have plenty.
Back out of the hospital this time just 2 days. I think I'm going to start offering our hospital as an alternative address for me. As the Rolling Stones said in the first line of "Mothers Little Helper" "What a drag it is getting old"
VIDEO HERE
Sorry to hear you've yet another hospital visit Randy 
Hope things start to get better for you soon my friend 
Randy, love that song, sure you don't need that kind of shelter! Good to know you're out (of hospital) today!Back out of the hospital this time just 2 days. I think I'm going to start offering our hospital as an alternative address for me. As the Rolling Stones said in the first line of "Mothers Little Helper" "What a drag it is getting old"
VIDEO HERE
GT- Do you find that some kids REALLY get common core math, some kids REALLY don't and a good portion of the kids are in between depending on their willingness to learn it?Sorry for the delayed response, David. We're not supposed to get political, and the Common Core Curriculum has become a real political football, with people seeing implications for the old battles of states' rights (or even local school districts' rights) versus "one nation ... indivisible", or even connections to the difficult balance between "liberty AND justice for ALL". So I don't want to address any of those disagreements (often between people who really know very little about data-driven best practices in teaching and learning, other than their own school experiences).
So my personal opinion of Common Core for math is that it's common sense. I think you accurately characterized Common Core standards for math as proposing that students learn both HOW math works (often called procedural knowledge) and WHY it works (part of what's called conceptual knowledge). In our society today, much of the procedural stuff can be quickly and accurately done by technology, but the "why" can only be handled by humans. For example, 36 divided by 3 is easy to calculate. But I think Common Core rightly expects that if kids are to be confident and creative users of math, they need to know a lot more than just 36/3 = 12.
For example, if I have 36 pocket knives that I want to give to 3 friends, and I want to know how many knives each friend gets, 36 divided by 3 is what we need. But if I have 36 knives that I want to package into boxes of 3, and I want to know how many boxes I'l get, 36 divided by 3 is also what we need. But these two situations are different in the sense that in the first we know how many piles to make and want to find the size of each pile (this is sometimes called "fair sharing"), while in the second we know the size of each pile and want to find how many piles we'll get (this is sometimes called "repeated subtraction" because we keep subtracting 3 knives until we run out). Students ought to learn that both situations call for division. Division of fractions is MUCH easier to understand from a repeated subtraction perspective (3/4 divided by 1/8 asks how many eighths can be subtracted from three fourths, and since each fourth "contains" 2 eighths, there must be a total of 6 eighths in 3/4: 3/4 divided by 1/8 = 6).
I think Common Core also wants students to realize that 36/3 = 12 is related to 3x12 = 36 = 12x3, that multiplication and division are related. Also that 3x12 means 3 groups of 12, 12+12+12, that multiplication can be seen as repeated addition.
And that 3x12 = 3x10 + 3x2 = 30 + 6. The more someone knows about how math ideas are related, the more powerful that knowledge is.
I think the same idea applies to your car analogy. Even though I don't know very much about why cars work, I know a lot more than my daughter does, and I think that makes me a better-equipped car owner than she is. I can do a much better job of trouble-shooting and problem solving than she can, just because I can identify symptoms and their severity and even make reasonable conjectures about what might be wrong based on my better (but still quite limited) understanding of the workings of vehicles.
Probably all you wanted is my bold-faced sentence.Sorry to lose control!
- GT
I'm glad it was a short stay and you're home now. Best wishes for good health.Back out of the hospital this time just 2 days. I think I'm going to start offering our hospital as an alternative address for me. As the Rolling Stones said in the first line of "Mothers Little Helper" "What a drag it is getting old"
VIDEO HERE
Only if you want one of them upside your head!
Sad to hear you had to spend time in hospital again, RandyBack out of the hospital this time just 2 days. I think I'm going to start offering our hospital as an alternative address for me. As the Rolling Stones said in the first line of "Mothers Little Helper" "What a drag it is getting old"
VIDEO HERE
, but glad the stay was quite short! Are they still working on old problems, or did some other system develop a glitch? (Or do you just have something going on with a nurse there?? )Are you asking about what role history, culture, and philosophy should play in learning math, Joshua? I think that's an important question, and depends to some extent on the rationale for requiring students to take math classes every year in school. Some advocate that math should be taught for its usefulness and applications; as so many fields become more "mathematized", not learning math can close doors on more and more careers. Others say the content of math isn't really all that useful for most people in later life, but math is an excellent area in which to develop critical thinking and problem solving skills that translate into all areas of life. And still others claim that math should be learned simply because it's a marvelous and beautiful human achievement, one of the liberal arts like literature or fine arts or music. That last group is certainly going to promote exploring how math and culture have mutually interacted throughout time and place.
Yeah, I think the biggest challenge for teachers of ANY subject is motivating their students, and if you have 30 kids in class, you may need 30 different motivational techniques! Talk about dreaming the impossible dream!
Sad to hear you had to spend time in hospital again, Randy
That pretty much sums up (pun intended) my view of why students should take math. It teaches your brain how to do hard crap.
I’m in the liberal arts camp. The quadrivium that originated in the Greco-Roman system and reached fruition in the Middle Ages taught mathematics not so much as an applied science, but as a liberal (liberating) art: an art that would bring humans to their full intellectual and spiritual potential. I wonder if Leibnitz or Newton could have made the discoveries they did with only “applied” mathematical curriculum.Sad to hear you had to spend time in hospital again, Randy
Are you asking about what role history, culture, and philosophy should play in learning math, Joshua? I think that's an important question, and depends to some extent on the rationale for requiring students to take math classes every year in school. Some advocate that math should be taught for its usefulness and applications; as so many fields become more "mathematized", not learning math can close doors on more and more careers. Others say the content of math isn't really all that useful for most people in later life, but math is an excellent area in which to develop critical thinking and problem solving skills that translate into all areas of life. And still others claim that math should be learned simply because it's a marvelous and beautiful human achievement, one of the liberal arts like literature or fine arts or music. That last group is certainly going to promote exploring how math and culture have mutually interacted throughout time and place.
Yeah, I think the biggest challenge for teachers of ANY subject is motivating their students, and if you have 30 kids in class, you may need 30 different motivational techniques! Talk about dreaming the impossible dream!
- GT
