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Catherine,

You beat me to this. I intended to post on this fabulous new blog. I printed out all her marvelous posts on constructivism and am settling down to read them in comfort.

You may also be interested in this math blog:

http://exsultet.blogspot.com/

-- CharlesH - 01 Oct 2005

I am already worried about him or her.

Grad schools eat students who try to go against the flow for lunch.

-- CarolynJohnston - 01 Oct 2005

Check out that blog! It's terrific!

-- CarolynJohnston - 01 Oct 2005

So where's she going "with this"?

Searching for agreement with your views is not "research."

-- JdFisher - 01 Oct 2005

They both are! I'm blogrolling them.

-- CarolynJohnston - 01 Oct 2005

Hi JD!

-- CatherineJohnson - 01 Oct 2005

I wonder what she's doing at Columbia Teachers College. I wouldn't set foot inside that place.

CTC is the source of constructivism; that's where it all started a hundred years ago.

Path dependency.

-- CatherineJohnson - 01 Oct 2005

The NYU ed school sounds radically better, and here in NY you develop a feel for who's producing the most b*s, since ed school professors get quoted in news articles from time to time.

Whenever NYU professors are quoted, they're making sensible, content-filled observations.

Here's the list of math-teaching courses you take to get certification to teach middle & high school math at NYU:

courses on teaching math:

Restricted Elective: Choose one of the following

-- CatherineJohnson - 01 Oct 2005

Check this out.

This is what you find when you click on the link for the Ph.D. program in supervising math education at the high school level

-- CatherineJohnson - 01 Oct 2005

Hey Caroline--how would you like to move to NYC?????

-- CatherineJohnson - 01 Oct 2005

There's your college prof job, right there!

-- CatherineJohnson - 01 Oct 2005

You'd probably still get to do some higher level mathematics....(I'm guessing).

-- CatherineJohnson - 01 Oct 2005

JD

This is the problem the ed school student faces:

Usually, the instructor lectures for about 10 mintues, and then for the rest of the hour we just talk back and forth about the articles we read. The thing is, none of us really know what we're talking about. We read the articles, but that doesn't mean we really understand them. That's why we're in school for this crap. The lecturer, on the other hand, is familiar with many of the major studies on the issues we're studying and could actually set us straight about some stuff. So we end up arguing but not learning anything. And so, I am actually in a constructivist learning environment in which I am arguing about how ineffective constructivism is, and it actually is quite ineffective for me. Weird, huh?

It's not a question of looking for confirmation of her views, though everyone wants confirmation of his or her views.

It's a question of looking for information, for content, for domain knowledge.

She's not getting that, and it appears she's not getting it in at least 2 of her courses (since the other course veers off into lengthy discussions of U.S. prisons).

-- CatherineJohnson - 01 Oct 2005

Having spent 7 years doing science writing for NAAR, I can tell you that just reading an article, particularly a research article, isn't enough.

For a variety of reasons (many having to do with 'genre requirements' of scientific publication) the lay reader needs either to speak with the researcher directly or speak to a teacher or professor who has expertise in the research literature.

-- CatherineJohnson - 01 Oct 2005

Interesting.

-- JdFisher - 01 Oct 2005