I have long loved Maxwell’s Equations as the epitome of beauty in physics and as the source of inspiration for my teaching. But though the equations are beautiful and even familiar, very few people understand them. So, when I came across this paper by the great physicist Freeman Dyson called “Why is Maxwell’s Theory too …
Our education model is broken. Despite the economic promise of and documented need for a bachelor’s degree: graduation rates are stagnant, achievement gaps are widening, and costs are bankrupting our kids. While Digital-technology has transformed work, our schools retain their 19th century form and function defined by medieval paper-technology. The problems confronting our schools are …
I built a Lab for you to play with the Syracuse Problem and to learn to use spreadsheets to play with like problems in fun and interesting ways. The Syracuse Problem is a simple one. Pick a number, any whole number. If it is even divide it by 2, if it is odd multiply it …
I like to hang out in the Harvard Graduate School of Education library. It has a good vibe, is usually full of students focused on my favorite topic, and is set up to enable technology as you well might expect. Every student has their own laptop. Lots of tables have power. The Web is open …
Three years ago I read a wonderful book by Keith Devlin called The Man of Numbers. It told the story of Leonardo of Pisa who was the first to convert Arabic arithmetic and algebra for European use. Devlin told Leonardo’s story and he described the process by which Leonardo’s book Liber abbaci (The Book of Calculation) became the …
Museums were one of the great inventions of the 19th century. People loved collecting, collecting all sorts, and often funded buildings to display those collections for others to enjoy and admire. The museum craze ran from animals to furniture, stamps to tools, swords to seeds, fossils to bottle caps, rocks to coins, baseball cards to …
Teaching done right has always been a hard job, but it is now substantially harder. Talk to any teacher and they will tell you that they are overwhelmed. Blame it on kids more distracted, on parents more demanding, on the misery of an over reliance on testing that saps creativity and judges teachers on things …
On this 10th anniversary of the iPhone it is worth remembering that this invention, as world-changing as it was, will not be deemed the most important one of that decade. It will, in the long thrust of history, take second place to an event that truly and profoundly changes the course of human thought. For …
Cape Cod in the winter is one of those marvelous places filled with interesting shops and people waiting in the quiet winter time for the soon to come crowds. It was on one of those pretend spring is here days in February that we went to visit a dear friend on the Cape and then …
Scatterplot graphs enable us to build shapes using spreadsheets and to practice transformational geometry. They are surprisingly flexible tools. And since they depend upon a table of value and that table can have both fixed numbers and rules, we can not only build shapes but change them and watch the graph immediately reflect those changes. …
