education

Boston public schools map switch aims to amend 500 years of distortion

Posted by

0

A Guardian article tells us that Boston public schools are switching maps. Instead of using the Mercator projection maps most of us are used to, Boston will now be using Peters projection maps. The article begins:

When Boston public schools introduced a new standard map of the world this week, some young students felt their jaws drop. In an instant, their view of the world had changed.

The USA was small. Europe too had suddenly shrunk. Africa and South America appeared narrower but also much larger than usual. And what had happened to Alaska? [continue]

Maggie won the Global Teacher Prize!

Posted by

0

In the Exaltation of Links post yesterday, I noted the CBC story about Maggie MacDonnell, who was nominated for the Global Teacher Prize. (And that comes with a whack of money.) Maggie teaches in Salluit, in a remote community in northern Quebec.

And now Maggie has won! Here is a blog post about Maggie from GlobalTeacherPrize.org, and here’s a page that includes a touching video about Maggie’s contributions to her community.

Why I’m hiring graduates with thirds

Posted by

0

Ha! I love this, and have been meaning to blog it for ages. From Rory Sutherland’s article in The Spectator: Why I’m hiring graduates with thirds this year.

Let me explain. I have asked around, and nobody has any evidence to suggest that, for any given university, recruits with first-class degrees turn into better employees than those with thirds (if anything the correlation operates in reverse). There are some specialised fields which may demand spectacular mathematical ability, say, but these are relatively few.

So my game theoretic instincts suggest that if we confine our recruitment efforts to people in the lower half of the degree ladder we shall have an exclusive appeal to a large body of people no less valuable than anyone else. And such people will be far more loyal hires, since we won’t be competing for their attention with deep-pocketed pimps in investment banking.

The logic is inarguable: the best people to hire (or date) are those undervalued by the market. [continue]

School for teenage codebreakers to open in Bletchley Park

Posted by

0

Who can resist things that land on the intersection of history and geekiness? From the Guardian: School for teenage codebreakers to open in Bletchley Park.

Its first operatives famously cracked coded messages encrypted by the Nazis, hastening the end of the second world war.

Now Bletchley Park is planning a new school for the next generation of codebreakers in order to plug a huge skills gap in what is fast emerging as the biggest security threat to 21st-century Britain. [continue]

Why some kids aren’t heading to school today

Posted by

Here’s a bit from Tony Woodlief’s article, Why Some Kids Aren’t Heading to School Today.

We decided when we got married that our home would be better than what we knew as children. The foundation is love, order, and relentless application of rules like: Eat all your vegetables, and Mind your manners, and Don’t push your brother’s head into the toilet.

So we frown on radicalism. Yet we have embarked on one of the most radical endeavors families can undertake: home-schooling. Given preconceptions about this practice, I should note that we are not anti-government wingnuts living on a compound. We like literature, and nice wines, and Celeste would stab me in the heart with a spoon if I gave her one of those head bonnets the Amish women wear. We are not, in other words, stereotypical home-schooling parents. But neither are most actual home-schooling parents.

Even though Ma and Pa Ingalls sent their children off to the little schoolhouse in Walnut Grove, we’ve decided to start our own. In the eyes of Kansas authorities that’s exactly what we’ve done; regulations require us to establish a school and name it. Ours is the Woodlief Homestead School. I wanted to go with something like: "The School of Revolutionary Resistance," but Celeste said that was just inviting trouble. [continue]

Continue reading →