Why Nerds are Unpopular...

...is Paul Graham's take on the relationship between high school culture and being smart. He's got a lot of insightful things to say about why high school culture in the United State (and, by extension, Canada, I think) is the way it is, specifically, why it is all too often cruel and pointless if you're not at the top of the popularity hierarchy.

Consider:

"So far I've been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them as if they were interchangeable. In fact it's only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison.

Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they'll tend to become nerds. And that's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after."

and

"Merely understanding the situation they're in should make it less painful. Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. It's hard to find successful adults now who don't claim to have been nerds in high school.

It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it."

Survival Skills for Occasional Teachers

From your friendly neighbourhood (Ontario) teacher's federation comes Survival Skills for Occasional Teachers. I cant' speak to its quality. I haven't read it myself yet but I plan to in the next couple of weeks.

Link.

Mathematics Technology Reource

In the course of researching for an assignment in my Mathematics ABQ, I came across the following resource from the University of Illinois' Math Teacher Link site. It's an elearning resource targeting teachers interested in using technology to teach Mathematics.

There's some particularly good stuff on using and teaching Geometer's Sketchpad. They also have modules on Mathematica and Fathom.

Why is Math harder than English?

Why do most people who are not math-heads find it so hard compared to, say, English? I think that one reason is that when students are learning English or History they are, for the most part, being asked to employ skills that they have already mastered (language) and use in everyday life. When it comes to Mathematics, however, students are being asked to employ an essentially artificial skill set that they don't make regular use of in everyday life.

There's indirect evidence that this is indeed true in that one of the ways to lead students towards mastery of math skills is to encourage them to use math skills in everyday life and, for that matter, to model that use yourself.

Things I Do Wrong All the Time

Good tip from a fellow student in the Teaching and Learning in the Senior Division course we all have to do for an ABQ (Sr. Mathematics in my case).

Most students have something (or things) that they consistently get wrong (or forget to get right). Do this. Get them to note that thing in the back of their notebook or textbook. ("I always confuse there and their.") Then tell them to forget about it when initially doing the work. Afterwards, they check the back of their text or notebook and go through their work and correct it.

The Tao of Teaching (literally!)

Two thought-provoking quotes from Ursula K. LeGuin's translation of the Tao Te Ching (verse 27).

"Good people teach people who aren't good, yet. The less good are the makings of the the great."

and

"Anyone who doesn't respect a teacher or cherish a student may be clever but has gone astray. There's a deep mystery here."

Hunting the elusive snark, er... job.

This relevance of this post is restricted by geography. Some parts only to Ottawa and the Ottawa Carleton District School Board (OCDSB). Other parts apply to Ontario, more generally.

At one point during the school year just past, there was some discussion about the bureaucratic hoops we needed to jump through to get our certification from the Ontario College of Teachers (OCT) and to get hired locally in Ottawa. Here are a couple of things I learned yesterday that I didn't know before and that had tripped me up.

1. The OCT needs a number of documents from you in order to complete your application and issue your license to teach in Ontario. One is a recommendation from your Faculty and another, not surprisingly, is a transcript of your marks. The Faculty of Education at Ottawa U. will automatically forward a recommendation to the OCT for you. However, your transcript comes from the Registrar's Office and, as a result, you must initiate the forwarding of your transcript to the OCT. I got caught on this and, as a result, there's now a delay in processing my application to the College.
2. You can request a transcript online and the neat thing about doing so is you can make the request prior to convocation/graduation and it will be processed when your transcript is available.
   
3. If you want to be a substitute teacher in the OCDSB or apply for an Extended Occasional Term (EOT) contract (which is what gets posted to replace someone on maternity leave, for instance) then you have to get on the Occasional Teachers List. To get on the Occasional Teachers List, a principal needs to recommend you electronically on applytoteach. I had thought that you needed to have your OCT application complete and finished and processed before the principal could do this but I was wrong. I called Human Resources at the OCDSB and they said that that was up to the principal's discretion. Obviously, you have to have enough of your portfolio completed on applytoeach for the principal to be able to review it.
   

Wiki Race

I learned about this from a student at Hillcrest where I've been volunteering in the ICS3M Comp. Sci. class. Pick two apparently unrelated concepts like tacos and apocalypse. Beginning at the taco entry on wikipedia, two or more contestants then try to navigate to the apocalypse entry in wikipedia using just the links in the pages. It's kind of a six degrees of separation for culture jammers thing.

The pedagogically nice thing about this is the way it forces students to think laterally about how concepts are related. It also encourages an understanding of conceptual schema as hierarchical. As you get more experienced in the game, it becomes clear fairly quickly that certain higher level concepts are good waypoints to reach quickly that can then be used to drill down into the new concept area.

Take our example above:

1. Taco leads to Mexican Cuisine.
2. Mexican Cuisine leads to Mexico.
3. Mexico leads to United States.
4. United States leads to the Language and Religion anchor on the United States page.
5. The Language and Religion anchor leads to Christian.
6. Christian leads to Christian eschatology.
7. Christian eschatology leads to End Times.
8. And End Times leads to Apocalypse.

One of the keys to forging this conceptual trail is to get to the United States page. Because it's a fairly general concept the entry for United States has links to a lot of different areas of knowledge (conceptual locales). If we'd been trying to navigate to uranium, for example, we probably could have got there from United States via that page's geography anchor.

Another point to note about the game is that it can reward relatively obscure bits of knowledge. I knew, for example, that Christian eschatology would probably get me to Apocalypse but that's because of my philosophy background. Knowing that eschatology dealt with the historical arc of Christianity made that move a sensible one. It wouldn't necessarily have made sense to go that way to anyone else. Them's the breaks.

Math Jeopardy

The following is a link to the location an electronic version of Jeopardy about Grade 9 Applied Math.

http://ped3101jeopardy.pbwiki.com/FrontPage

100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know

According to Houghton Mifflin these are the 100 words every high school graduate should know:

1. abjure
2. abrogate
3. abstemious
4. acumen
5. antebellum
6. auspicious
7. belie
8. bellicose
9. bowdlerize
10. chicanery
11. chromosome
12. churlish
13. circumlocution
14. circumnavigate
15. deciduous
16. deleterious
17. diffident
18. enervate
19. enfranchise
20. epiphany
21. equinox
22. euro
23. evanescent
24. expurgate
25. facetious
26. fatuous
27. feckless
28. fiduciary
29. filibuster
30. gamete
31. gauche
32. gerrymander
33. hegemony
34. hemoglobin
35. homogeneous
36. hubris
37. hypotenuse
38. impeach
39. incognito
40. incontrovertible
41. inculcate
42. infrastructure
43. interpolate
44. irony
45. jejune
46. kinetic
47. kowtow
48. laissez faire
49. lexicon
50. loquacious
51. lugubrious
52. metamorphosis
53. mitosis
54. moiety
55. nanotechnology
56. nihilism
57. nomenclature
58. nonsectarian
59. notarize
60. obsequious
61. oligarchy
62. omnipotent
63. orthography
64. oxidize
65. parabola
66. paradigm
67. parameter
68. pecuniary
69. photosynthesis
70. plagiarize
71. plasma
72. polymer
73. precipitous
74. quasar
75. quotidian
76. recapitulate
77. reciprocal
78. reparation
79. respiration
80. sanguine
81. soliloquy
82. subjugate
83. suffragist
84. supercilious
85. tautology
86. taxonomy
87. tectonic
88. tempestuous
89. thermodynamics
90. totalitarian
91. unctuous
92. usurp
93. vacuous
94. vehement
95. vortex
96. winnow
97. wrought
98. xenophobe
99. yeoman
100. ziggurat

I knew 96 of them...if your definition of know means being able to use in a sentence without looking too lame.

I'll have to brush up on bowdlerize, moiety, orthography and ziggurat.

Courtesy of the inimitable Joey de Villa.

Why "Open Source" Teacher, anyways?

I've been around the internet block a few times. I'm old enough to have grown up when a world-wide communications medium meant paper mail, or the telephone system, or ham radio. As an almost-child-of-the-sixties I've always appreciated the internet's DIY, grassroots atmosphere. The Open Source movement is the latest (and possibly greatest) incarnation of that. I wanted to bring some of that to teaching.

So, I mean open source in terms of the fact that I envision this blog as a place where I (and hopefully you, dear readers, who are, as yet, just a gleam in my eye) can share ideas, tips, HOWTOs, frustrations, jokes, best practices, websites, resources, and experiences. I'm hoping to leverage the power of our network to become a better teacher more quickly than might otherwise be possible. I'm also hoping that the collaborative heart of open sourceyness will get played out here - that by sharing I/we might find a whole that does a little bit more than just encompassing the parts.

And who, BTW, is us? By us, I mean mostly (but not exclusively) grads from the University of Ottawa's 2007 Bachelor Education program. You know who you are. Don't be shy. Leave a comment. Or a condiment. As the spirit moves you.