I hear people say they aren’t good at taking tests all the time. “I understand the material, but when I take the test, I fail!”
I can understand this problem for people who get excessively nervous and can’t think when they take the test. But for people who take the test with a sound mind?
I think this is a problem of understanding. I don’t think “not being good at taking tests” is a fair excuse; the problem is far deeper.
Refer to my earlier post for details.
PowerPoint seems to be a popular teaching aid. After all, it saves lots of messy writing on the board or the use of boring overhead projectors. And who doesn’t enjoy bulleted lists swooshing on screen complete with sound effects and little clipart stick figures?
I don’t.
Continue reading →
For those of you interested in how many people visit your blog, go to your blog admin panel and click Plugins. You should see a plugin called FireStats enabled — just activate that and head to Dashboard->FireStats and you should be able to see all the stats you’d ever desire. (It only starts counting when you enable it, so you’ll see 0 hits at first.)
Have fun.
I spend quite a bit of my time helping high school students understand physics and mathematics concepts, so I’ve also spent some time wondering how I can better help them understand things. It’s a tough challenge, because I’ve never been like other people in terms of understanding — I’ve always been such a voracious reader that I can use my prior knowledge to make sense out of things.
I do not, however, see many other people doing the same.
Continue reading →
Some of you might be wondering how we linked SFN and WordPress together. Others are just glad that it does work. For those of you that wonder, here’s the answer.
WordPress and vBulletin don’t integrate easily. (There are plugins for each to make them integrate, but we use WordPress MU — the multi-user edition.) We decided (or rather, dave decided) that the best way to do it would be to hack WordPress to use vBulletin’s user database.
This required writing a WordPress plugin that overrides WordPress’s native login functions using vBulletin’s system. We then disabled WordPress’s own login page and forced it to redirect to vBulletin’s, since WordPress doesn’t know how to create a new session in vB’s system.
From there it was just a matter of beating WordPress with a stick until it worked the way we intended it to.
If you’re interested in being able to integrate WordPress MU and vBulletin yourself, ask and I might be able to help.
Limericks are fun. Science limericks more so.
A woman in liquor production
Owns a still of exquisite construction.
The alcohol boils
Through magnetic coils.
She says that it’s “proof by induction.”
(You’ll want to think about the pun there for a little while.)
– via limerickdb.com
I just updated the SFN blogs to the latest version of WordPress MU (1.3.3, which corresponds to WordPress version 2.3.3) for both security reasons and the new features it brings.
Most notably, WordPress 2.3 now allows tagging — you can “tag” your posts with various labels the same way you can put it in categories. It’s up to you how you use them (or if you use them at all), but tags are a fairly big Internet fad and they’re rather handy for organization. I’m testing them out on this post.
Also, there is now a WordPress plugin installed called Spam Karma 2 that should help fend off spam on your blogs. Head over to the Plugins section of the WordPress Admin screen and enable the plugin to use it. It works out-of-the-box by capturing spam, and you can see the latest “harvest” by going to Manage->Spam Karma 2->Recent Spam Harvest.
Report any problems you have with WordPress here.
I’ve been active on the Internet for several years now and I’ve seen my fair share of teenagers and young ‘uns posting on the Internet. I’ve often read essays written by them, looked at school newspapers, and generally observed what they write. And I’ve come to a disturbing conclusion: a significant portion of teenagers (meaning “high school students”), despite their extensive English education, still can’t write more than a few cohesive sentences.
To me, this is the result of outdated thinking on the teachers’ part.
I’m often rather disturbed by how mathematics is taught in school. Take, for example, the way I was taught the following (important) equation:
$latex int_a^b f(x) ,mathrm dx = F(b) – F(a)$
Those of you familiar with calculus will immediately recognize what this means. Those of you who aren’t should know that the above set of squiggly lines means something very important in the upper levels of confusing math.
When I first was taught the equation I was taught it by being exposed to it exactly as I just exposed it to you: an equation. There were some words with it too, but they made just as much sense as the equation did at the time. A few moments later the teacher explained what the equation means: one can find the definite integral of an equation using its antiderivatives.
But we were never taught why that’s the case.
Labs are a great idea for teaching students chemistry, physics, and all the other assorted sciences. They allow students to learn for themselves just how various laws and theories work, and to hopefully discover various phenomena themselves.
Okay, correction: Labs would be a great idea if they were used for the above purpose. But they aren’t.