... attending a free lecture given by Noam Chomsky isn't a bad excuse.
Just sayin'.
6 comments:
john wenger
said...
That depends on who is hearing the excuse. Noam Chomsky is a world renowned linguist whose politics is on the far left. There is a question of which country he hates more, his own (the U.S.A.) or Israel.
He actually gave a couple of talks at the U of A. The first one, on Tuesday, was about linguistics. The second one -- the one I saw -- was about education. It was political, and certainly critical, but I didn't get any sense of hatred from Chomsky.
You would've liked the talk. Especially when he mentioned new math.
Chomsky argued that it was useless to teach kids concepts they had no way of understanding yet. An example was making kids memorize the periodic table in 5th grade. Another was new math.
He said that his own kids had to learn new math. His daughter learned how to describe sets correctly without having any idea of what she was talking about (which was supposed to be the whole idea behind new math, if I remember what you told me). The teachers who had to teach new math didn't understand it either.
(That was GreyLupine. Seems the login option has changed. There are now _two_ captchas, but no way to log into another site to be named, as I used to.)
6 comments:
That depends on who is hearing the excuse. Noam Chomsky is a world renowned linguist whose politics is on the far left. There is a question of which country he hates more, his own (the U.S.A.) or Israel.
He actually gave a couple of talks at the U of A. The first one, on Tuesday, was about linguistics. The second one -- the one I saw -- was about education. It was political, and certainly critical, but I didn't get any sense of hatred from Chomsky.
You would've liked the talk. Especially when he mentioned new math.
Chomsky mentioned new math? Ooh. Tell me about it.
Chomsky argued that it was useless to teach kids concepts they had no way of understanding yet. An example was making kids memorize the periodic table in 5th grade. Another was new math.
He said that his own kids had to learn new math. His daughter learned how to describe sets correctly without having any idea of what she was talking about (which was supposed to be the whole idea behind new math, if I remember what you told me). The teachers who had to teach new math didn't understand it either.
That doesn't sound too terribly far away from how I felt in my Calc I, II, and III classes at Drexel. ;)
(That was GreyLupine. Seems the login option has changed. There are now _two_ captchas, but no way to log into another site to be named, as I used to.)
Post a Comment