• 10 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • After doing some searching, it appears that period life expectancy is a perfectly reasonable metric for life expectancy. It looks to be a clever way of capturing a sort of “instantaneous” life expectancy for a given year. In a given year, you can track how many people of each age range die, but that only tells you death rates, not life expectancy. And you can’t just average the ages of everyone living because you don’t know when they’ll die. So what they do is they take the death rates for age ranges within a given year and they calculate the expected value of an infant’s death age, assuming that infant would live through the same death rates that were tracked that year. In my opinion, this seems like a natural choice.

    That said, there’s definitely other bullshittery going on.




  • My bosses have both said that students don’t know what they need to be able to learn and all they want to do is minimize the amount of work they gave to do (they have stereotyped the students who end up in remedial math as being generally bad students, which I hate. It’s a really toxic way of looking at the students you teach, and it’s just plain wrong. These students want to succeed. They have just been left behind by a broken system). But that’s not been my experience in the slightest. I got so much genuine constructive feedback just by being open to student concerns, and I would have never grown as an instructor if I hadn’t taken the time to listen to them. I can’t even imagine having the mentality that I just simply know better about what students need to learn than the actual students.







  • “If I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul- crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education” -Paul Lockhart


  • A few of the professors in other departments have some pretty interesting technique as far as grading goes, and they’re seeing a good deal of success. There’s also a growing body of research on alternative practices and the effects on student engagement, and the results outperform traditional grading in pretty much every way relevant to student learning in every study. I’m not saying we gotta immediately do something radical, but what I’m saying is we’re trying to pretend like we’re being radical, while not really making even the slightest push in the right direction. Like even just a little bit of trying something new in order to figure out what works would be wonderful. We don’t have to immediately figure it out. But what we can do is draw from other courses that had success and try to work the principals into our course. However, we’re just stuck in this nightmarish cycle of underperforming in some aspect and pinning it on the students, instead of doing what’s on our product label and making an attempt to free them from the same sort of BS they’ve had to deal with in other classes.

    Nothing comes immediately, but it’s like we’re not even trying.