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conuly
A blog post on same-sex couples and hospitals that doesn't even mention the recent atrocity
An article on same-sex marriage and free speech
Before Gay Marriage Fight, Clashes on Free Speech
By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON
That sound in the distance at the Supreme Court these days is the debate over same-sex marriage.
It will be a couple of years until that central issue in the culture wars reaches the court. But two early skirmishes — if not proxy battles — arrived this month. Both are fights over the First Amendment ground rules for the debate.
On Monday, the justices considered the rights of a Christian student group to bar gay members from leadership positions. Next week, the court will hear arguments about whether the names of people who signed a petition to place an anti-gay-rights measure on the ballot in Washington State should be kept secret.
The student group, the Christian Legal Society, bars “unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle,” which it says includes “all acts of sexual conduct outside of God’s design for marriage between one man and one woman, which acts include fornication, adultery and homosexual conduct.”
A public law school, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, part of the University of California, withdrew official recognition from the group after it refused to comply with a school policy that forbids discrimination on various grounds, including religion and sexual orientation.
At Monday’s argument, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wondered what the group would have to say about a prospective member who said, “I don’t believe in sexual relationships before marriage, and that’s why I want to work for homosexual marriage.”
Michael W. McConnell, the group’s lawyer and a former federal judge, said taking that position would be enough to disqualify the student.
“If he does not agree with the organization on the point of marriage, then he can be excluded from leadership in the group,” Mr. McConnell said.
In an interview last week, Mr. McConnell said the issue in the case, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, No. 08-1371, was an instance of a larger problem of intolerance for disfavored views, one that sometimes affects gay groups and at other times religious ones.
“I have no doubt at all that different parts of the country at different times present different threats to free speech,” Mr. McConnell said. “What we’ve been doing is ostracizing large segments of the American public.”
Advocates of traditional marriage say their free speech rights are under assault, as a brief in Monday’s case put it, for holding views “contrary to the reigning zeitgeist.” Proponents of same-sex marriage say their adversaries mistake debate for harassment and have a lot of nerve to claim the mantle of victim.
The divide between the two sides is even starker in the case to be argued next week, Doe v. Reed, No. 09-559. The question there is whether Washington State’s open records law violates the free speech rights of people who signed ballot petitions by requiring their names to be made public. Some of those people say they fear retaliation and harassment from advocates of same-sex marriage.
A number of news organizations, including The New York Times Company, filed a brief in the case, arguing that the petitions should be treated as public records.
But a supporting brief filed by the American Civil Rights Union, a group that says it supports “all constitutional rights, not just those that might be politically correct,” warned that openness could have dire consequences and likened gay rights activists to Nazis.
“There must be no place in our democracy for Brownshirts seeking to force their way through thuggery and violent intimidation,” the brief said.
A supporting brief filed by gay rights groups accused the other side of using a “largely fictitious tale that those who seek to deprive lesbian and gay Americans of rights are the ones being victimized.” It added that the civil rights of gay men and lesbians had been put to a popular vote more than those of any other group and that hate crimes against them had risen while such initiatives were under consideration by voters.
Evan Wolfson, the executive director of Freedom to Marry, a group that supports same-sex marriage, said its opponents were using a sort of rhetorical jujitsu. “When they pour tens of millions of dollars to strip rights away in the Constitution, that’s just speech,” Mr. Wolfson said. “When people don’t like it, that’s harassment.”
A brief filed by four political scientists analyzed the evidence on harassment, drawing a distinction between financial supporters of Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that did away with same-sex marriage there, and people who merely signed petitions to place an issue on the ballot.
“More than a million names of signers of petitions for referenda and initiatives opposing gay marriage have been posted on the Internet,” the political scientists’ brief said. “Yet there is no evidence that any of these signers has faced any threat of retaliation or harassment by reason of that disclosure.”
The Supreme Court has, however, been receptive to arguments based on fear of retaliation. It shut down camera coverage of the same-sex marriage trial in San Francisco in January, partly on the theory that witnesses might be subject to harassment.
In Citizens United, the big campaign finance case, eight justices endorsed disclosure requirements for corporate election spending. But the court suggested that it would have a different answer in the context of same-sex marriage.
Laws requiring disclosure would be unconstitutional, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote, “if there were a reasonable probability that the group’s members would face threats, harassment or reprisals if their names were disclosed.”
That cannot be heartening for gay rights advocates. Mr. Wolfson said debate about free speech, anonymity and retaliation was a worrisome distraction from a direct discussion of the meaning of marriage.
In law school, Mr. Wolfson said, you learn three possible ways to win a case. You can argue the law. You can argue the facts. Or you can make a fuss.
He said opponents of same-sex marriage were down to the last tactic. “They’ve lost the argument on the facts and increasingly on the law,” Mr. Wolfson said. “What they’re doing now is pounding the table.”
An article about teaching philosophy to eight year olds
The Examined Life, Age 8
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
A few times each month, second graders at a charter school in Springfield, Mass., take time from math and reading to engage in philosophical debate. There is no mention of Hegel or Descartes, no study of syllogism or solipsism. Instead, Prof. Thomas E. Wartenberg and his undergraduate students from nearby Mount Holyoke College use classic children’s books to raise philosophical questions, which the young students then dissect with the vigor of the ancient Greeks.
“A lot of people try to make philosophy into an elitist discipline,” says Professor Wartenberg, who has been visiting the school, the Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School of Excellence, since 2007. “But everyone is interested in basic philosophical ideas; they’re the most basic questions we have about the world.”
One afternoon this winter, the students in Christina Runquist’s classroom read Shel Silverstein’s “Giving Tree,” about a tree that surrenders its shade, fruit, branches and finally its trunk to a boy it has befriended. The college students led the discussion that followed — on environmental ethics, or “how we should treat natural objects,” as Professor Wartenberg puts it — with a series of questions, starting with whether the boy was wrong to take so much from the tree.
“We don’t actually try to convince them that trees deserve respect,” he says, “but ask them, ‘What do you think?’ We’re trying to get them engaged in the practice of doing philosophy, versus trying to teach them, say, what Descartes thought about something.”
He is not the first philosopher to work with children. In the 1970s, Matthew Lipman, then a professor at Columbia University, argued that children could think abstractly at an early age and that philosophical questioning could help them develop reasoning skills. It was the Vietnam era, and Professor Lipman believed that many Americans were too accepting of authoritative answers and slow to reason for themselves — by college, he feared, it would be too late.
Professor Lipman’s view opposed that of the child-development theorist Jean Piaget, who asserted that children under 12 were not capable of abstract reasoning. He and others, including Gareth Matthews, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, concluded that their curiosity and sense of wonder make children ripe for philosophic inquiry.
“The world is new to them and they want to figure things out,” says Professor Matthews, who has written extensively about children and philosophy. “Young children very often engage in reasoning that professional philosophers can recognize as philosophical, but typically their parents or teachers don’t react in a way that encourages them. They might say, ‘That’s cute,’ but they don’t engage the children in thinking further about whatever the issue is.”
In 1974, Professor Lipman, now 87, started the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children at Montclair State University, which has since developed curriculum materials that have been translated into more than 40 languages and used in more than 60 countries. But American public schools have been slow to embrace philosophy for children; while outreach programs are offered by a handful of universities — among them the University of Washington andCalifornia State University, Long Beach — many school officials either find the subject too intimidating or believe it does not fit with the test-driven culture of public education these days.
“Our current educational system is about standards and efficiency,” says Joe Oyler, programs coordinator for the institute at Montclair State. “It’s not fast and it’s not clean. We help children become comfortable with ambiguity and responding to it, so it’s tough to fit in.”
Ms. Runquist's students managed to fit philosophy in between writing and science. This was their sixth lesson of the year, and by now they knew the drill: deciding whether or not they agreed with each question; thinking about why or why not; explaining why or why not; and respecting what their classmates said.
Most of the young philosophers had no problem with the boy using the tree’s shade. But they were divided on the apples, which the boy sold, the branches, which he used to build a house, and the trunk, which he carved into a boat.
“It’s only a tree,” Justin said with a shrug.
“The tree has feelings!” Keyshawn replied.
Some reasoned that even if the tree wanted the boy to have its apples and branches, there might be unforeseen consequences.
“If they take the tree’s trunk, um, the tree’s not going to live,” said Nyasia.
Isaiah was among only a few pupils who said they would treat an inanimate object differently from a human friend.
“Say me and a rock was a friend,” he said. “It would be different, because a rock can’t move. And it can’t look around.”
This gave his classmates pause.
Professor Wartenberg and students use eight picture books to introduce children to the major fields of philosophy, including aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, social and political philosophy and philosophy of the mind.
With Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad Together,” in which Frog and Toad try to determine whether they can be brave and scared at the same time, the pupils examine the nature of courage — one of Aristotle’s central virtues. With Bernard Wiseman’s “Morris the Moose,” about a moose who mistakenly assumes all his friends are also moose, they consider how someone can maintain a belief in the face of contrary evidence. And with Peter Catalanotto’s “Emily’s Art,” about a talented young artist who loses a contest, they debate whether there can be objective standards for evaluating works of art.
“The world is a puzzling place and when you’re young it doesn’t make sense,” Professor Wartenberg says. “What you’re giving them is the sort of skills to learn how to think about these things.”
Professor Wartenberg has written a book, “Big Ideas for Little Kids: Teaching Philosophy Through Children’s Literature” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), to spread his experiment to more elementary schools. His focus is on teaching undergraduate philosophy students how to work with children, and his decade-old course at Mount Holyoke, “Teaching Children Philosophy,” has led many of his students to pursue careers in early-childhood education.
“A lot of them don’t know what to do after college,” he says. “If they want to do something with philosophy, this opens up an avenue.”
Professor Wartenberg also says that philosophy lessons can improve reading comprehension and other skills that children need to meet state-imposed curriculum standards and excel on standardized tests. With a grant from the Squire Family Foundation, which promotes the teaching of ethics and philosophy, he is assessing whether his program helps in the development of argument and other skills.
“It’s giving kids a way to figure out what they think, support their own views and reason with one another,” he says. “So I can’t imagine this isn’t helping them on standardized tests.”
But the pupils in Ms. Runquist’s class said they liked philosophy because it involved reading good books and expressing themselves.
“We can say things about what we believe and stuff,” a girl named Autumn said. “It’s what we feel and what we think.”
One about girl scouts in private schools (Note: Samoas != s'mores, as some commenters thought. Duh.)
It has pictures
Girls in Private Schools Ask, Thin Mints or Samoas?
By JOANNE KAUFMAN
Two dozen fourth graders from the Chapin School, all in regulation green vests that were dotted with badges, popped up from their chairs to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and the Girl Scout promise: “On my honor. ...”
The girls, members of Troop 3157 of the Junior Girl Scouts, had a snack — string cheese — and discussed the troop’s closing ceremony in June, where they would present the fruits of their “create your own business” projects. These include custom pillows, knitted iPod cases and baked goods for people with food allergies. Then it was on to the day’s outing: a trip to a local landmark.
“O.K.,” said the troop leader, Alyssa Moeder. “Who knows what Gracie Mansion is?”
“It’s where the mayors used to live,” answered a petite, curly-haired 10-year-old named Grace.
“But Mayor Bloomberg doesn’t live there,” she confided.
“Why?” asked Missy Rice, co-leader of the troop.
“Because,” Grace said, “he has a much better house.”
Scouting has come to New York’s private schools, a world known more for couture and expensive co-ops than for cookies and campcraft. Besides Chapin, schools with newly formed troops include Berkeley Carroll, Brearley, Dalton, Packer Collegiate, Spence and Trinity.
There are now 550 Brownies (first to third grade) or Junior Girl Scouts (fourth and fifth grade) in 25 Manhattan and Brooklyn private school troops, up from 200 girls and 9 troops last year, and from just a few dozen participants the year before.
This growth, helped along by mothers who were scouts themselves, caught the Girl Scout leadership by surprise.
“We were living with a false assumption,” said Dolores Swirin, the chief executive of the Girl Scout Council of Greater New York. “It was sort of an inferiority complex on our part. The thinking was that there were too many competing activities.”
The push has paid off in increased membership, prestige and visibility for the Girl Scouts, and has also produced a nice little dividend. In New York, cookie sales are up 11 percent so far this year, while they are flat or up only slightly in other parts of the country.
Of the five New York City scouting districts, the East River “service unit,” which includes most of the private schools, “has the highest sales rate this year,” said Dina Rabiner, a project specialist for the scouts.
Recruitment efforts began five years ago with Ms. Moeder, who had been a Brownie during her childhood in Queens and whose mother had been a scout leader. She was looking for a troop for her daughter Nicole, who was a kindergartner at Chapin.
At the invitation of a friend who was on the Girl Scout Council board, Ms. Moeder attended the organization’s annual tribute dinner, “and it was quite moving to see all they were doing with the programming,” she said. So Ms. Moeder, a first vice president in Merrill Lynch’s private banking and investment group, joined the board, too.
Soon after, Ms. Moeder said, when she sent fellow kindergarten parents an e-mail message to generate interest in establishing a Brownie troop the following school year, “we were full within 48 hours and had a waiting list.”
Ms. Moeder has just sent out e-mail registration forms for a Brownie troop at Chapin that will include her younger daughter, Sarah, who is 6.
“We’re already oversubscribed,” she said.
Madelyn Adamson, a onetime Campfire Girl (a group like the Scouts), had a similar experience when she started a troop at Columbia Grammar for her daughter Elissa.
“We thought we’d get 10 girls, and we got 25,” she said. “The only issue that came up was parents saying, ‘My daughter doesn’t like wearing uniforms. Does she have to wear a uniform?’ We let them choose between a sash and a vest.”
In fact, Ms. Swirin said, the uniform is optional. “You’re considered in uniform,” she said, “just wearing the membership pin.”
The New York Girl Scouts, who have 22,356 members across six levels ranging from Daisies (generally kindergarten and sometimes first grade) to Ambassadors (11th and 12th grade), have long had troops in public and parochial schools. But Ms. Swirin said, “Girl scouting had not had a presence in the independent schools for generations.”
Sensing the beginnings of a revival, the organization realized the gold that could be mined and hired Ms. Rabiner about 18 months ago to spearhead the expansion in private schools.
“It’s kind of a courting process,” she said. “The progressive schools have been less willing, but they’re starting to come around. Some schools just told me, ‘We don’t do Girl Scouts.’ ” She declined to name the schools.
Not surprisingly, the Boy Scouts are hoping to follow the girls’ lead.
“We’ve identified neighborhoods where there’s a heavy concentration of kids and not enough troops to support them,” said William Kelly, spokesman for the Greater New York Councils, Boy Scouts of America. “The Upper East Side is one of those target areas.”
While otherwise staying uninvolved, some schools, including Trinity, Columbia Grammar and Chapin, have made classrooms — and sometimes snacks — available for troop meetings.
These gatherings, which in some instances occur only monthly, make scouting a relatively easy sell for students juggling homework, piano lessons and sports.
“The activities are very appealing to this age level, and the girls get a finished product, whether it’s a badge or the sale of a box of cookies,” said Stanley Seidman, the director of the lower school at Columbia Grammar.
Scouting’s newfound popularity among the private schools, he suggested, is a reaction against life lived on the Internet.
“There’s a wholesomeness about scouting that should be encouraged,” he said. “It may not be quite the thing in the view of our more sophisticated parents, but I think it’s great.”
Troop leaders play a significant role in organizing activities. One mother, a docent at the Metropolitan Museum, organized a special tour there; another, a yoga instructor, led her troop in a yoga class.
Last year, Ms. Moeder’s troop did their own version of “Project Runway,” an activity that involved a trip to the garment district, the purchase of fabric and the creation of patterns, and that culminated in a fashion show.
“I also had my dermatologist come and talk to the girls about skin care,” Ms. Moeder said. “Afterward, she told me there was nothing she could tell them they didn’t already know.”
Ultimately, cookie selling and tent pitching are great equalizers. Like other Girl Scouts, the scouts in private schools busily push thin mints, Samoas and Do-Si-Dos and brave overnight trips to Camp Kaufmann in Dutchess County, a local scouting tradition.
“They had to clean the bathroom at Girl Scout camp,” Ms. Moeder said. “For a lot of them, it was the first time they had to clean a bathroom.”
An article about the recent quake in China
With pictures
After Quake, Tibetans Distrust China’s Help
By ANDREW JACOBS
JIEGU, China — The Buddhist monks stood atop the jagged remains of a vocational school, struggling to move concrete slabs with pickax shovels and bare hands. Suddenly a cry went out: An arm, clearly lifeless, was poking through the debris.
But before the monks could finish their task, a group of Chinese soldiers who had been relaxing on the school grounds sprang to action. They put on their army caps, waved the monks away, and with a video camera for their unit rolling, quickly extricated the body of a young girl.
The monks stifled their rage and stood below, mumbling a Tibetan prayer for the dead.
“You won’t see the cameras while we are working,” said one of the monks, Ga Tsai, who with 200 others, had driven from their lamasery in Sichuan Province as soon as they heard about the quake.
“We want to save lives. They see this tragedy as an opportunity to make propaganda.”
Since a deadly earthquake nearly flattened this predominantly Tibetan city early Wednesday, killing at least 1,400 people, China’s leadership has treated the quake as a dual emergency — a humanitarian crisis almost three miles above sea level in remote Qinghai Province, and a fresh test of the Communist Party’s ability to keep a lid on dissent among restive Tibetans.
President Hu Jintao cut short a state visit to Brazil to fly home and supervise relief efforts, while Prime Minister Wen Jiabao postponed his own planned visit to Indonesia and came to the quake site promising that China’s Han majority would do whatever it could to aid the Tibetans.
The official state media prominently featured stories of grateful Tibetans receiving food and tents, and search and rescue specialists toiling to reach survivors even as they cope with altitude sickness.
The relief effort has indeed been impressive. With thousands of soldiers and truckloads of food clogging Jiegu’s streets on Saturday, earth-moving equipment started clearing away toppled buildings from the downtown. More than 600 of the seriously injured have been taken to hospitals in the provincial capital 500 miles away. In recent days, blue tents bearing the Civil Affairs Ministry logo have popped up across the city.
But despite outward signs of government largess and ethnic unity, the earthquake has exposed stubborn tensions between Beijing and Tibetans, many of whom have long struggled to maintain their autonomy and cultural identity amid a Han-dominated country. Widespread Tibetan rioting against Han rule severely disrupted Beijing’s planning to host the Summer Olympics in 2008, and China has kept Tibet and predominantly ethnically Tibetan regions of China under tight police and military control since then.
The Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader who has not set foot in China since 1959, has issued a formal request to visit the disaster zone. It will most surely be denied.
Since the quake hit early Wednesday morning, thousands of monks have come to the city, some making a two-day drive from distant corners of a largely Tibetan region that spreads across three adjoining provinces.
It was the burgundy-robed monks who were among the first to pull people from collapsed buildings. On Saturday at dusk, long after the rescue experts had called it quits, they could be still be seen working the rubble.
“They are everything to us,” said Oh Zhu Tsai Jia, 57, opening the trunk of his car so a group of young monks could pray over the body of his wife.
On Saturday morning, the monks ferried 1,400 bodies from the city’s main monastery to a dusty rise overlooking the city.
There, in two long trenches filled with salvaged wood, they dumped the dead and set cremation pyres ablaze.
As the fires burned for much of the day, hundreds of mourners sat mutely on a hillside next to the monks, who chanted aloud or quietly counted prayer beads of red coral and turquoise.
The police and Han officials were conspicuously absent.
The monastery’s leaders said no one from the local government had included their dead in the official tally although they were careful not to voice any criticism. Many of the younger monks, however, were not as reticent.
At the No. 3 Primary School, the monks said they had pulled 50 students from collapsed classrooms but when an official came by to ask how many had died, the police offered half that number. “I think they’re afraid to let the world know how bad this earthquake is,” said Gen Ga Ja Ba, a 23-year-old monk.
One of the most persistent complaints, however, was that many of the official rescue efforts have focused on the city’s larger structures and ignored the mud-brick homes that, with few exceptions, collapsed by the hundreds. Others spoke of skirmishes with the police over bodies, although such accounts could not be verified.
The other more incendiary criticism heard wherever monks gathered was that soldiers had prevented them from helping in rescue efforts during the first few days after the earthquake.
Tsairen, a monk, spoke about how he and scores of other monks tussled with soldiers at a collapsed hotel that first night. “We asked why they wouldn’t let us help, and they just ignored us,” said Tsairen, who like some Tibetans, uses only one name.
Later, he and more than 100 others headed to the vocational school, where the voices of trapped girls could still be heard in the rubble of a collapsed dormitory.
They said the soldiers blocked them from the pile and later, the chief of their monastery, Ga Tsai, scuffled with a man they described as the county chief.
“He grabbed me by my robe and dragged me out to the street,” Ga Tsai said.
In the evening after the soldiers had left the scene, they went to work, eventually pulling out more than a dozen bodies.
Even if exaggerated, such stories can only work against the government’s efforts to win over Tibetans.
In recent days, the government has vowed to rebuild Jiegu, which is also known by its Chinese name Yushu, promising to spare no expense. But while many Tibetans expressed gratitude for the relief efforts and the official outpouring of concern, others were less appreciative.
As an excavator and a bulldozer sifted through the remains of the vocational school dormitory on Saturday, Gong Jin Ba Ji, a 16-year-old student, stood watching.
A day earlier, she said, the machinery inadvertently tore apart the body of a classmate. She was still waiting for them to recover the body of her older sister.
“I wish they would work more carefully,” she said numbly. “Maybe they don’t care so much because we are only Tibetans.”
On math teachers in the US (it's not pretty)
U.S. Falls Short in Measure of Future Math Teachers
By SAM DILLON
America’s future math teachers, on average, earned a C on a new test comparing their skills with their counterparts in 15 other countries, significantly outscoring college students in the Philippines and Chile but placing far below those in educationally advanced nations like Singapore and Taiwan.
The researchers who led the math study in this country, to be released in Washington on Thursday, judged the results acceptable if not encouraging for America’s future elementary teachers. But they called them disturbing for American students heading to careers in middle schools, who were outscored by students in Germany, Poland, the Russian Federation, Singapore, Switzerland and Taiwan.
On average, 80 percent to 100 percent of the future middle school teachers from the highest-achieving countries took advanced courses like linear algebra and calculus, while only 50 percent to 60 percent of their counterparts in the United States took those courses, the study said.
“The study reveals that America’s middle school mathematics teacher preparation is not up to the task,” said William H. Schmidt, the Michigan State University professor who was its lead author. To improve its competitiveness, Dr. Schmidt said, the nation should recruit stronger candidates into careers teaching math and require them to take more advanced courses.
The 52-page report provides the first international comparison of teacher preparation based on a test given to college students in a significant number of countries, he said.
In the study, a representative sample of 3,300 future math teachers nearing the end of their teacher training at 81 colleges and universities in the United States were given a 90-minute test covering their knowledge of math concepts as well as their understanding of how to teach the subject.
There were two distinct tests, for those preparing to teach in elementary schools and for candidates for middle school.
The same tests, developed by an international consortium, were given to college students in 15 other countries, including advanced nations like Germany and Norway as well as underdeveloped ones like Botswana.
On the elementary test, students from Singapore, Switzerland and Taiwan scored far above their counterparts in the United States. Students from Germany, Norway, the Russian Federation and Thailand, scored about the same as the Americans, and students from Botswana, Chile, Georgia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Poland and Spain scored well below, the report said.
On the middle school test, American students outscored students in Botswana, Chile, Georgia, Malaysia, Norway, Oman, the Philippines and Thailand, the study found.
The study found considerable variation in the math knowledge attained at different American colleges, with students at some scoring, on average, at the level of students in Botswana, the study said.
“There are so many people who bash our teachers’ math knowledge that to be honest these results are better than what a lot of people might expect,” said Hank Kepner, professor of mathematics education at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, who is president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. “We show up pretty well here, right in the middle of the pack.”
Gage Kingsbury, a senior research fellow at the Northwest Evaluation Association, which administers math tests in many states and in 60 countries, called the study ambitious but faulted it because of the limited number of advanced countries that participated.
“They don’t have most of Europe,” Dr. Kingsbury said. “And to suggest that you can’t be a good middle school math teacher unless you’ve taken calculus is a leap, because calculus isn’t taught in middle school. So I think they overreach a bit.”
A quick opinion piece about learning math by NOT starting with counting
And one about "Street Mathematics"
And finally, a dismal, dismal post by... oh, you'll have to read it.
An article on same-sex marriage and free speech
Before Gay Marriage Fight, Clashes on Free Speech
By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON
That sound in the distance at the Supreme Court these days is the debate over same-sex marriage.
It will be a couple of years until that central issue in the culture wars reaches the court. But two early skirmishes — if not proxy battles — arrived this month. Both are fights over the First Amendment ground rules for the debate.
On Monday, the justices considered the rights of a Christian student group to bar gay members from leadership positions. Next week, the court will hear arguments about whether the names of people who signed a petition to place an anti-gay-rights measure on the ballot in Washington State should be kept secret.
The student group, the Christian Legal Society, bars “unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle,” which it says includes “all acts of sexual conduct outside of God’s design for marriage between one man and one woman, which acts include fornication, adultery and homosexual conduct.”
A public law school, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, part of the University of California, withdrew official recognition from the group after it refused to comply with a school policy that forbids discrimination on various grounds, including religion and sexual orientation.
At Monday’s argument, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wondered what the group would have to say about a prospective member who said, “I don’t believe in sexual relationships before marriage, and that’s why I want to work for homosexual marriage.”
Michael W. McConnell, the group’s lawyer and a former federal judge, said taking that position would be enough to disqualify the student.
“If he does not agree with the organization on the point of marriage, then he can be excluded from leadership in the group,” Mr. McConnell said.
In an interview last week, Mr. McConnell said the issue in the case, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, No. 08-1371, was an instance of a larger problem of intolerance for disfavored views, one that sometimes affects gay groups and at other times religious ones.
“I have no doubt at all that different parts of the country at different times present different threats to free speech,” Mr. McConnell said. “What we’ve been doing is ostracizing large segments of the American public.”
Advocates of traditional marriage say their free speech rights are under assault, as a brief in Monday’s case put it, for holding views “contrary to the reigning zeitgeist.” Proponents of same-sex marriage say their adversaries mistake debate for harassment and have a lot of nerve to claim the mantle of victim.
The divide between the two sides is even starker in the case to be argued next week, Doe v. Reed, No. 09-559. The question there is whether Washington State’s open records law violates the free speech rights of people who signed ballot petitions by requiring their names to be made public. Some of those people say they fear retaliation and harassment from advocates of same-sex marriage.
A number of news organizations, including The New York Times Company, filed a brief in the case, arguing that the petitions should be treated as public records.
But a supporting brief filed by the American Civil Rights Union, a group that says it supports “all constitutional rights, not just those that might be politically correct,” warned that openness could have dire consequences and likened gay rights activists to Nazis.
“There must be no place in our democracy for Brownshirts seeking to force their way through thuggery and violent intimidation,” the brief said.
A supporting brief filed by gay rights groups accused the other side of using a “largely fictitious tale that those who seek to deprive lesbian and gay Americans of rights are the ones being victimized.” It added that the civil rights of gay men and lesbians had been put to a popular vote more than those of any other group and that hate crimes against them had risen while such initiatives were under consideration by voters.
Evan Wolfson, the executive director of Freedom to Marry, a group that supports same-sex marriage, said its opponents were using a sort of rhetorical jujitsu. “When they pour tens of millions of dollars to strip rights away in the Constitution, that’s just speech,” Mr. Wolfson said. “When people don’t like it, that’s harassment.”
A brief filed by four political scientists analyzed the evidence on harassment, drawing a distinction between financial supporters of Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that did away with same-sex marriage there, and people who merely signed petitions to place an issue on the ballot.
“More than a million names of signers of petitions for referenda and initiatives opposing gay marriage have been posted on the Internet,” the political scientists’ brief said. “Yet there is no evidence that any of these signers has faced any threat of retaliation or harassment by reason of that disclosure.”
The Supreme Court has, however, been receptive to arguments based on fear of retaliation. It shut down camera coverage of the same-sex marriage trial in San Francisco in January, partly on the theory that witnesses might be subject to harassment.
In Citizens United, the big campaign finance case, eight justices endorsed disclosure requirements for corporate election spending. But the court suggested that it would have a different answer in the context of same-sex marriage.
Laws requiring disclosure would be unconstitutional, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote, “if there were a reasonable probability that the group’s members would face threats, harassment or reprisals if their names were disclosed.”
That cannot be heartening for gay rights advocates. Mr. Wolfson said debate about free speech, anonymity and retaliation was a worrisome distraction from a direct discussion of the meaning of marriage.
In law school, Mr. Wolfson said, you learn three possible ways to win a case. You can argue the law. You can argue the facts. Or you can make a fuss.
He said opponents of same-sex marriage were down to the last tactic. “They’ve lost the argument on the facts and increasingly on the law,” Mr. Wolfson said. “What they’re doing now is pounding the table.”
An article about teaching philosophy to eight year olds
The Examined Life, Age 8
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
A few times each month, second graders at a charter school in Springfield, Mass., take time from math and reading to engage in philosophical debate. There is no mention of Hegel or Descartes, no study of syllogism or solipsism. Instead, Prof. Thomas E. Wartenberg and his undergraduate students from nearby Mount Holyoke College use classic children’s books to raise philosophical questions, which the young students then dissect with the vigor of the ancient Greeks.
“A lot of people try to make philosophy into an elitist discipline,” says Professor Wartenberg, who has been visiting the school, the Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School of Excellence, since 2007. “But everyone is interested in basic philosophical ideas; they’re the most basic questions we have about the world.”
One afternoon this winter, the students in Christina Runquist’s classroom read Shel Silverstein’s “Giving Tree,” about a tree that surrenders its shade, fruit, branches and finally its trunk to a boy it has befriended. The college students led the discussion that followed — on environmental ethics, or “how we should treat natural objects,” as Professor Wartenberg puts it — with a series of questions, starting with whether the boy was wrong to take so much from the tree.
“We don’t actually try to convince them that trees deserve respect,” he says, “but ask them, ‘What do you think?’ We’re trying to get them engaged in the practice of doing philosophy, versus trying to teach them, say, what Descartes thought about something.”
He is not the first philosopher to work with children. In the 1970s, Matthew Lipman, then a professor at Columbia University, argued that children could think abstractly at an early age and that philosophical questioning could help them develop reasoning skills. It was the Vietnam era, and Professor Lipman believed that many Americans were too accepting of authoritative answers and slow to reason for themselves — by college, he feared, it would be too late.
Professor Lipman’s view opposed that of the child-development theorist Jean Piaget, who asserted that children under 12 were not capable of abstract reasoning. He and others, including Gareth Matthews, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, concluded that their curiosity and sense of wonder make children ripe for philosophic inquiry.
“The world is new to them and they want to figure things out,” says Professor Matthews, who has written extensively about children and philosophy. “Young children very often engage in reasoning that professional philosophers can recognize as philosophical, but typically their parents or teachers don’t react in a way that encourages them. They might say, ‘That’s cute,’ but they don’t engage the children in thinking further about whatever the issue is.”
In 1974, Professor Lipman, now 87, started the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children at Montclair State University, which has since developed curriculum materials that have been translated into more than 40 languages and used in more than 60 countries. But American public schools have been slow to embrace philosophy for children; while outreach programs are offered by a handful of universities — among them the University of Washington andCalifornia State University, Long Beach — many school officials either find the subject too intimidating or believe it does not fit with the test-driven culture of public education these days.
“Our current educational system is about standards and efficiency,” says Joe Oyler, programs coordinator for the institute at Montclair State. “It’s not fast and it’s not clean. We help children become comfortable with ambiguity and responding to it, so it’s tough to fit in.”
Ms. Runquist's students managed to fit philosophy in between writing and science. This was their sixth lesson of the year, and by now they knew the drill: deciding whether or not they agreed with each question; thinking about why or why not; explaining why or why not; and respecting what their classmates said.
Most of the young philosophers had no problem with the boy using the tree’s shade. But they were divided on the apples, which the boy sold, the branches, which he used to build a house, and the trunk, which he carved into a boat.
“It’s only a tree,” Justin said with a shrug.
“The tree has feelings!” Keyshawn replied.
Some reasoned that even if the tree wanted the boy to have its apples and branches, there might be unforeseen consequences.
“If they take the tree’s trunk, um, the tree’s not going to live,” said Nyasia.
Isaiah was among only a few pupils who said they would treat an inanimate object differently from a human friend.
“Say me and a rock was a friend,” he said. “It would be different, because a rock can’t move. And it can’t look around.”
This gave his classmates pause.
Professor Wartenberg and students use eight picture books to introduce children to the major fields of philosophy, including aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, social and political philosophy and philosophy of the mind.
With Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad Together,” in which Frog and Toad try to determine whether they can be brave and scared at the same time, the pupils examine the nature of courage — one of Aristotle’s central virtues. With Bernard Wiseman’s “Morris the Moose,” about a moose who mistakenly assumes all his friends are also moose, they consider how someone can maintain a belief in the face of contrary evidence. And with Peter Catalanotto’s “Emily’s Art,” about a talented young artist who loses a contest, they debate whether there can be objective standards for evaluating works of art.
“The world is a puzzling place and when you’re young it doesn’t make sense,” Professor Wartenberg says. “What you’re giving them is the sort of skills to learn how to think about these things.”
Professor Wartenberg has written a book, “Big Ideas for Little Kids: Teaching Philosophy Through Children’s Literature” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), to spread his experiment to more elementary schools. His focus is on teaching undergraduate philosophy students how to work with children, and his decade-old course at Mount Holyoke, “Teaching Children Philosophy,” has led many of his students to pursue careers in early-childhood education.
“A lot of them don’t know what to do after college,” he says. “If they want to do something with philosophy, this opens up an avenue.”
Professor Wartenberg also says that philosophy lessons can improve reading comprehension and other skills that children need to meet state-imposed curriculum standards and excel on standardized tests. With a grant from the Squire Family Foundation, which promotes the teaching of ethics and philosophy, he is assessing whether his program helps in the development of argument and other skills.
“It’s giving kids a way to figure out what they think, support their own views and reason with one another,” he says. “So I can’t imagine this isn’t helping them on standardized tests.”
But the pupils in Ms. Runquist’s class said they liked philosophy because it involved reading good books and expressing themselves.
“We can say things about what we believe and stuff,” a girl named Autumn said. “It’s what we feel and what we think.”
One about girl scouts in private schools (Note: Samoas != s'mores, as some commenters thought. Duh.)
It has pictures
Girls in Private Schools Ask, Thin Mints or Samoas?
By JOANNE KAUFMAN
Two dozen fourth graders from the Chapin School, all in regulation green vests that were dotted with badges, popped up from their chairs to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and the Girl Scout promise: “On my honor. ...”
The girls, members of Troop 3157 of the Junior Girl Scouts, had a snack — string cheese — and discussed the troop’s closing ceremony in June, where they would present the fruits of their “create your own business” projects. These include custom pillows, knitted iPod cases and baked goods for people with food allergies. Then it was on to the day’s outing: a trip to a local landmark.
“O.K.,” said the troop leader, Alyssa Moeder. “Who knows what Gracie Mansion is?”
“It’s where the mayors used to live,” answered a petite, curly-haired 10-year-old named Grace.
“But Mayor Bloomberg doesn’t live there,” she confided.
“Why?” asked Missy Rice, co-leader of the troop.
“Because,” Grace said, “he has a much better house.”
Scouting has come to New York’s private schools, a world known more for couture and expensive co-ops than for cookies and campcraft. Besides Chapin, schools with newly formed troops include Berkeley Carroll, Brearley, Dalton, Packer Collegiate, Spence and Trinity.
There are now 550 Brownies (first to third grade) or Junior Girl Scouts (fourth and fifth grade) in 25 Manhattan and Brooklyn private school troops, up from 200 girls and 9 troops last year, and from just a few dozen participants the year before.
This growth, helped along by mothers who were scouts themselves, caught the Girl Scout leadership by surprise.
“We were living with a false assumption,” said Dolores Swirin, the chief executive of the Girl Scout Council of Greater New York. “It was sort of an inferiority complex on our part. The thinking was that there were too many competing activities.”
The push has paid off in increased membership, prestige and visibility for the Girl Scouts, and has also produced a nice little dividend. In New York, cookie sales are up 11 percent so far this year, while they are flat or up only slightly in other parts of the country.
Of the five New York City scouting districts, the East River “service unit,” which includes most of the private schools, “has the highest sales rate this year,” said Dina Rabiner, a project specialist for the scouts.
Recruitment efforts began five years ago with Ms. Moeder, who had been a Brownie during her childhood in Queens and whose mother had been a scout leader. She was looking for a troop for her daughter Nicole, who was a kindergartner at Chapin.
At the invitation of a friend who was on the Girl Scout Council board, Ms. Moeder attended the organization’s annual tribute dinner, “and it was quite moving to see all they were doing with the programming,” she said. So Ms. Moeder, a first vice president in Merrill Lynch’s private banking and investment group, joined the board, too.
Soon after, Ms. Moeder said, when she sent fellow kindergarten parents an e-mail message to generate interest in establishing a Brownie troop the following school year, “we were full within 48 hours and had a waiting list.”
Ms. Moeder has just sent out e-mail registration forms for a Brownie troop at Chapin that will include her younger daughter, Sarah, who is 6.
“We’re already oversubscribed,” she said.
Madelyn Adamson, a onetime Campfire Girl (a group like the Scouts), had a similar experience when she started a troop at Columbia Grammar for her daughter Elissa.
“We thought we’d get 10 girls, and we got 25,” she said. “The only issue that came up was parents saying, ‘My daughter doesn’t like wearing uniforms. Does she have to wear a uniform?’ We let them choose between a sash and a vest.”
In fact, Ms. Swirin said, the uniform is optional. “You’re considered in uniform,” she said, “just wearing the membership pin.”
The New York Girl Scouts, who have 22,356 members across six levels ranging from Daisies (generally kindergarten and sometimes first grade) to Ambassadors (11th and 12th grade), have long had troops in public and parochial schools. But Ms. Swirin said, “Girl scouting had not had a presence in the independent schools for generations.”
Sensing the beginnings of a revival, the organization realized the gold that could be mined and hired Ms. Rabiner about 18 months ago to spearhead the expansion in private schools.
“It’s kind of a courting process,” she said. “The progressive schools have been less willing, but they’re starting to come around. Some schools just told me, ‘We don’t do Girl Scouts.’ ” She declined to name the schools.
Not surprisingly, the Boy Scouts are hoping to follow the girls’ lead.
“We’ve identified neighborhoods where there’s a heavy concentration of kids and not enough troops to support them,” said William Kelly, spokesman for the Greater New York Councils, Boy Scouts of America. “The Upper East Side is one of those target areas.”
While otherwise staying uninvolved, some schools, including Trinity, Columbia Grammar and Chapin, have made classrooms — and sometimes snacks — available for troop meetings.
These gatherings, which in some instances occur only monthly, make scouting a relatively easy sell for students juggling homework, piano lessons and sports.
“The activities are very appealing to this age level, and the girls get a finished product, whether it’s a badge or the sale of a box of cookies,” said Stanley Seidman, the director of the lower school at Columbia Grammar.
Scouting’s newfound popularity among the private schools, he suggested, is a reaction against life lived on the Internet.
“There’s a wholesomeness about scouting that should be encouraged,” he said. “It may not be quite the thing in the view of our more sophisticated parents, but I think it’s great.”
Troop leaders play a significant role in organizing activities. One mother, a docent at the Metropolitan Museum, organized a special tour there; another, a yoga instructor, led her troop in a yoga class.
Last year, Ms. Moeder’s troop did their own version of “Project Runway,” an activity that involved a trip to the garment district, the purchase of fabric and the creation of patterns, and that culminated in a fashion show.
“I also had my dermatologist come and talk to the girls about skin care,” Ms. Moeder said. “Afterward, she told me there was nothing she could tell them they didn’t already know.”
Ultimately, cookie selling and tent pitching are great equalizers. Like other Girl Scouts, the scouts in private schools busily push thin mints, Samoas and Do-Si-Dos and brave overnight trips to Camp Kaufmann in Dutchess County, a local scouting tradition.
“They had to clean the bathroom at Girl Scout camp,” Ms. Moeder said. “For a lot of them, it was the first time they had to clean a bathroom.”
An article about the recent quake in China
With pictures
After Quake, Tibetans Distrust China’s Help
By ANDREW JACOBS
JIEGU, China — The Buddhist monks stood atop the jagged remains of a vocational school, struggling to move concrete slabs with pickax shovels and bare hands. Suddenly a cry went out: An arm, clearly lifeless, was poking through the debris.
But before the monks could finish their task, a group of Chinese soldiers who had been relaxing on the school grounds sprang to action. They put on their army caps, waved the monks away, and with a video camera for their unit rolling, quickly extricated the body of a young girl.
The monks stifled their rage and stood below, mumbling a Tibetan prayer for the dead.
“You won’t see the cameras while we are working,” said one of the monks, Ga Tsai, who with 200 others, had driven from their lamasery in Sichuan Province as soon as they heard about the quake.
“We want to save lives. They see this tragedy as an opportunity to make propaganda.”
Since a deadly earthquake nearly flattened this predominantly Tibetan city early Wednesday, killing at least 1,400 people, China’s leadership has treated the quake as a dual emergency — a humanitarian crisis almost three miles above sea level in remote Qinghai Province, and a fresh test of the Communist Party’s ability to keep a lid on dissent among restive Tibetans.
President Hu Jintao cut short a state visit to Brazil to fly home and supervise relief efforts, while Prime Minister Wen Jiabao postponed his own planned visit to Indonesia and came to the quake site promising that China’s Han majority would do whatever it could to aid the Tibetans.
The official state media prominently featured stories of grateful Tibetans receiving food and tents, and search and rescue specialists toiling to reach survivors even as they cope with altitude sickness.
The relief effort has indeed been impressive. With thousands of soldiers and truckloads of food clogging Jiegu’s streets on Saturday, earth-moving equipment started clearing away toppled buildings from the downtown. More than 600 of the seriously injured have been taken to hospitals in the provincial capital 500 miles away. In recent days, blue tents bearing the Civil Affairs Ministry logo have popped up across the city.
But despite outward signs of government largess and ethnic unity, the earthquake has exposed stubborn tensions between Beijing and Tibetans, many of whom have long struggled to maintain their autonomy and cultural identity amid a Han-dominated country. Widespread Tibetan rioting against Han rule severely disrupted Beijing’s planning to host the Summer Olympics in 2008, and China has kept Tibet and predominantly ethnically Tibetan regions of China under tight police and military control since then.
The Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader who has not set foot in China since 1959, has issued a formal request to visit the disaster zone. It will most surely be denied.
Since the quake hit early Wednesday morning, thousands of monks have come to the city, some making a two-day drive from distant corners of a largely Tibetan region that spreads across three adjoining provinces.
It was the burgundy-robed monks who were among the first to pull people from collapsed buildings. On Saturday at dusk, long after the rescue experts had called it quits, they could be still be seen working the rubble.
“They are everything to us,” said Oh Zhu Tsai Jia, 57, opening the trunk of his car so a group of young monks could pray over the body of his wife.
On Saturday morning, the monks ferried 1,400 bodies from the city’s main monastery to a dusty rise overlooking the city.
There, in two long trenches filled with salvaged wood, they dumped the dead and set cremation pyres ablaze.
As the fires burned for much of the day, hundreds of mourners sat mutely on a hillside next to the monks, who chanted aloud or quietly counted prayer beads of red coral and turquoise.
The police and Han officials were conspicuously absent.
The monastery’s leaders said no one from the local government had included their dead in the official tally although they were careful not to voice any criticism. Many of the younger monks, however, were not as reticent.
At the No. 3 Primary School, the monks said they had pulled 50 students from collapsed classrooms but when an official came by to ask how many had died, the police offered half that number. “I think they’re afraid to let the world know how bad this earthquake is,” said Gen Ga Ja Ba, a 23-year-old monk.
One of the most persistent complaints, however, was that many of the official rescue efforts have focused on the city’s larger structures and ignored the mud-brick homes that, with few exceptions, collapsed by the hundreds. Others spoke of skirmishes with the police over bodies, although such accounts could not be verified.
The other more incendiary criticism heard wherever monks gathered was that soldiers had prevented them from helping in rescue efforts during the first few days after the earthquake.
Tsairen, a monk, spoke about how he and scores of other monks tussled with soldiers at a collapsed hotel that first night. “We asked why they wouldn’t let us help, and they just ignored us,” said Tsairen, who like some Tibetans, uses only one name.
Later, he and more than 100 others headed to the vocational school, where the voices of trapped girls could still be heard in the rubble of a collapsed dormitory.
They said the soldiers blocked them from the pile and later, the chief of their monastery, Ga Tsai, scuffled with a man they described as the county chief.
“He grabbed me by my robe and dragged me out to the street,” Ga Tsai said.
In the evening after the soldiers had left the scene, they went to work, eventually pulling out more than a dozen bodies.
Even if exaggerated, such stories can only work against the government’s efforts to win over Tibetans.
In recent days, the government has vowed to rebuild Jiegu, which is also known by its Chinese name Yushu, promising to spare no expense. But while many Tibetans expressed gratitude for the relief efforts and the official outpouring of concern, others were less appreciative.
As an excavator and a bulldozer sifted through the remains of the vocational school dormitory on Saturday, Gong Jin Ba Ji, a 16-year-old student, stood watching.
A day earlier, she said, the machinery inadvertently tore apart the body of a classmate. She was still waiting for them to recover the body of her older sister.
“I wish they would work more carefully,” she said numbly. “Maybe they don’t care so much because we are only Tibetans.”
On math teachers in the US (it's not pretty)
U.S. Falls Short in Measure of Future Math Teachers
By SAM DILLON
America’s future math teachers, on average, earned a C on a new test comparing their skills with their counterparts in 15 other countries, significantly outscoring college students in the Philippines and Chile but placing far below those in educationally advanced nations like Singapore and Taiwan.
The researchers who led the math study in this country, to be released in Washington on Thursday, judged the results acceptable if not encouraging for America’s future elementary teachers. But they called them disturbing for American students heading to careers in middle schools, who were outscored by students in Germany, Poland, the Russian Federation, Singapore, Switzerland and Taiwan.
On average, 80 percent to 100 percent of the future middle school teachers from the highest-achieving countries took advanced courses like linear algebra and calculus, while only 50 percent to 60 percent of their counterparts in the United States took those courses, the study said.
“The study reveals that America’s middle school mathematics teacher preparation is not up to the task,” said William H. Schmidt, the Michigan State University professor who was its lead author. To improve its competitiveness, Dr. Schmidt said, the nation should recruit stronger candidates into careers teaching math and require them to take more advanced courses.
The 52-page report provides the first international comparison of teacher preparation based on a test given to college students in a significant number of countries, he said.
In the study, a representative sample of 3,300 future math teachers nearing the end of their teacher training at 81 colleges and universities in the United States were given a 90-minute test covering their knowledge of math concepts as well as their understanding of how to teach the subject.
There were two distinct tests, for those preparing to teach in elementary schools and for candidates for middle school.
The same tests, developed by an international consortium, were given to college students in 15 other countries, including advanced nations like Germany and Norway as well as underdeveloped ones like Botswana.
On the elementary test, students from Singapore, Switzerland and Taiwan scored far above their counterparts in the United States. Students from Germany, Norway, the Russian Federation and Thailand, scored about the same as the Americans, and students from Botswana, Chile, Georgia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Poland and Spain scored well below, the report said.
On the middle school test, American students outscored students in Botswana, Chile, Georgia, Malaysia, Norway, Oman, the Philippines and Thailand, the study found.
The study found considerable variation in the math knowledge attained at different American colleges, with students at some scoring, on average, at the level of students in Botswana, the study said.
“There are so many people who bash our teachers’ math knowledge that to be honest these results are better than what a lot of people might expect,” said Hank Kepner, professor of mathematics education at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, who is president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. “We show up pretty well here, right in the middle of the pack.”
Gage Kingsbury, a senior research fellow at the Northwest Evaluation Association, which administers math tests in many states and in 60 countries, called the study ambitious but faulted it because of the limited number of advanced countries that participated.
“They don’t have most of Europe,” Dr. Kingsbury said. “And to suggest that you can’t be a good middle school math teacher unless you’ve taken calculus is a leap, because calculus isn’t taught in middle school. So I think they overreach a bit.”
A quick opinion piece about learning math by NOT starting with counting
And one about "Street Mathematics"
And finally, a dismal, dismal post by... oh, you'll have to read it.
