It's raining so I didn't start running...

I was going to go on a run this morning.  I hate running but I need some exercise and need to do something to force a change in habits.  It started to rumble just as I was getting the motivation and then it started to rain.  I probably could have gone and only got a little wet but it looks like the sky will fall at any moment and I don't feel like getting caught in that type of mess.
So I read somewhere that Goldman Sachs drove up the aluminum market and made a bunch of money by buying a couple of huge warehouses and moving the metal back and forth between the two.  They did not do anything illegal, they merely found a way within the system to make cheap money. This littlish event brings about a variety of questions and perhaps no answers.  I saw that some people had suggested that the government should have closer oversight of necessary resources.  We need to be careful of granting any entity more power.  One should look and see if that entity will be motivated to act in a general best interest with this added power.  What would the government's motivations be in the aluminum trade?  Would it change prices for preferential contractors? There is a history of such treatment and so we have no reason to think otherwise?  The brokerage firm was interested in buying the warehouses to control the price of aluminum stock.  It had no interest in making cylinder heads and airplanes.  No one group should control a needed commodity but those with the least interest to drive up price would probably be at the manufacturing end.  The company selling cylinder heads is not selling aluminum work done.  If that company did have the power to control the aluminum, it would change its focus and look toward how to generate a profit by manipulating the market.  This mess demonstrates how the free market is supposed to work as a network of people and companies whose overall best interest is to work together.  The network is compromised when a member can gain too much control or whose interest is not aligned with the rest.  How can the market decide which members are necessary for the whole and which are like Goldman, providing no benefit to the network?  How can you develop a system that meets the needs of individual and the group without having a governing body?

All this mess is not making too much sense yet and so I am just using this space to explore the various ideas involved.  My initial point was that I don't understand how people make money without doing any work.  The real estate "bubble" was inevitable when people where making hundreds of thousands of dollars just by buying and selling a house without doing anything to it.  I guess it is all part of the need for instant gratification by the buyer and the seller.  Well, back to marinating on the original idea of an organization with no governing body...Is it possible?

Off to the fun world of math and stuff...

No paper...

I seem to be lacking something to write on but this stupid keyboard. I suppose it will have to do. We are at some typevof opening at a gallery down the way from home. It is a bunch of presentations and very boring for kids. Fortunately, there is a pretty cool area in the back where someone has made a concrete backyard, full of intriguing things for kids. I wouldn't mind watching the stuff inside, but gotta make sure kids get new experiences and don't drive everyone else crazy. Time to go....more on it in a minute.

Another year wandering away.

I finished up another year of school this past Friday.  I am back at the school on a Sunday morning. I really don't mind it and feel more at ease with the preparation, planning, meetings, and misc. work I have for the next academic year than drifting through the summer.  It has been a different year, but each one has been so. The highs were less but the lows weren't so jarring and I feel like I may be growing to be a part of a school that identifies itself with a very tight community.  Along the way, I have learned a great deal as a teacher and let me see if I get a jump on the planning through this summer so I can use what I have learned.  Knowledge and experience are only valuable in how we respond moving forward and adjust our understanding of our place in the world.
I am really looking forward (because I am a dork) to studying more about the history of math and physics, which brings about a history of learning and it all turns into some understanding of the world, thought, myself, and some other esoteric stuff that I can use to make class more interesting since the people that came up with quadratics and angular momentum and gravity were nutty cool.  It is a summer, that among other things, I need to raise my level of learning to another level so that I can be a better teacher.  My best teachers challenged me to be the best and were so full of knowledge that almost everything they said taught me something.
I'll add some more later but this it for the moment.

Tests are the Bestest

I love teaching.  Learning is fascinating and guiding through others in the process is a honest joy.  Education should and could be one of the best parts of growing up but it is being suffocated by those who want to make it a controlled process rather than the inherently organic system it is.  I asked the internet the other day "Why can't I learn algebra?" and found enough interesting answers to get the rusty gears turning.  People could not even explain why they did not understand the subject for it was so obtuse to their line of thinking.  They had demonstrated problem solving through their writing or had successful careers and so they had the honest question of why they were forced to learn something that they never understood and so clearly aided little in their development.  Math is a growing field and we have found a way to apply it everywhere we can because it provides evidence to our arguments and makes us more confident in our decisions; moreover, computers only make choices based on logical progressions, though those are designed by people.  I have students who can grasp programming logic as if it is second nature but struggle mightily to solve an equation.  They think they are bad at math but I see them demonstrating and making use of calculated and formal decision making, finding patterns, and solving a problem.  If that ain't math, then I don't know what is.  Really, what is math?  My favorite thing to hear from a student is that, "It makes me think so hard." I know I have had some measure of success and he or she is gaining the real key from the study (at the level I teach).  I could have them make and design all kinds of cool stuff that allow them to have a purpose for thinking so hard.  I could try to guide a discussion on infinite and nothingness and all that would entail, or try to make sense of transcendental numbers but I need to make them learn how to find out how long it will take John to paint a house if he and Bob usually can do it in 7 hours and Bob can do it in 28 hours. Why? It could be on a standardized tests.  ETS, a non-profit, had a revenue of over $1,000,000,000 last year.  The largest component of education reform is standardized tests.  Kids in middle school are forced to stress out all year and then take two weeks of tests that determine their worth.  Later on, they are forced to believe that the ACT/SAT is the most crucial element for getting into college because all those grades mean so little.  There are many studies that don't support this, Geiser and Santelices have an excellent study.  Grades are the most important predictors of college success, followed by subject tests.  Those tests are focused and allow the student to demonstrate his or her strengths.  One going into the liberal arts needs to be able to write and one into STEM needs to be able to add.  Grades show a greater body of work as well as a student's work ethic.
At this time, we have models in other countries of better education systems that don't use testing.  The education communities are constantly proving that we need to foster real growth and learning for the best success but it falls on deaf ears.  Your tax dollars pay for people with PhD's to find the best solutions but those results are not use because someone else paid legislators for a different solution.  I want the smartest people solving the hardest problems, not the richest.
I got lost somewhere in this train of thought but it is a question I am still working with.  I believe all students can learn math and can find value in the subject but algebra is not the only math out there.  Even as a math, it is a toolbox and not an end.
- to be continued.

Birds and other things

A small flight of soon to be earrings resting on the windowsill I see.  Taking pictures of jewelry is kinda tricky, but we can all appreciate the grainy cell-phone picture in its beauty.  Every moment must be documented so we can prove to ourselves how cool we are in those times when we are being our more standard selves.  That isn't really true but the pseudo-intellectual cynics deciding what has weight in the discussions of the everyday like to think so.  The greatest moments in my life weren't documented at the time.  I wish I wrote about them more but that will come in time as I forget what they were and struggle to preserve what I have left.  The reality is that those moments define who I am and they resonate through me for I have been molded by my interactions with the world.  What causes a more profound impact, the few individually great ones or the continuous cycle of mundane ones?  Who knows but the nature of the question reminds us that the everyday moments are vital to the lives we lead and the people we wish to be.  I, for one, have an extremely difficult time changing my habits and changing these multitude of small interactions for the best, despite my best wishes.  Oh well.
I will put up some better pictures of the earrings when they are finished. Shout if you are interested.

Why do we need this.

I am about to be teaching my students about rational functions.  The one above is one I am planning on basing a lecture around.  In all likelihood, a few students will ask why they need to know this and what it is that they need to know.  I want them to be able to explore the relationships involved in the function and how they result in the curve.  There is some application of the problem, I am not sure of what that is but one can find areas where math is used in all kinds of interesting places.  People did not arrive at these problems to solve an application, though.  The vast majority of math problems have been solved as reasons unto themselves. What purpose does this have? Math is a creation of man.  We use it to explain things around us but everything you see above is applied thought, not a reflection of observation.  Many of the courses we study are based on observation of actions and reactions of the world around us but some are extensions of personal expression.  People recognize paintings and songs as such but they like to exclude math from this group.  The do so because math takes study to understand. 
How do these forms of expression aid our knowledge? Why study them? Our minds, bodies, and souls are built from the same stuff as the rest of the universe.  Those things that we create from within are not expressions different from what we observe but internal developments in a manner that reflect the relationships we see in the world and amongst ourselves.  Math is a study of thought and provides us a possible window into the cognitive process of the everything around us.  Does this make sense? I wish I could more carefully formalize the argument and make a more profound connection.  Hopefully, through the act of teaching and learning, I can.