Peter Braunfeld
Peter Braunfeld will be leading a discussion about Common Core. The Common Core Mission Statement asserts that "the standards are designed to be robust, and relevant to the real world." But a sampling of the Common Core test items utterly fails to support this thesis. This seminar is designed to help attendees understand the abyss between pious hopes and dismal reality.
In response to the launching of Sputnik almost 60 years ago, the US has struggled to reform school mathematics. We've spent large sums of money on new curricula, teacher training and technology. What seems to be working, and what remains to be done?
Educators are always talking about "what mathematicians really do." Fact is, they do lots of very different things, most of which require technical vocabulary and a lot of mathematical background
Around 1890, Georg Cantor invents a theory of infinite sets and shocks the mathematical world. Luckily, this theory is not only genuinely elegant, but doesn't require much background. So, it's a wonderful example for both high school teachers and students to show at least what some mathematicians do or have done.
"Is Algebra Necessary?", the title of a piece by Andrew Hacker (an Emeritus Professor at Queens University) in a recent issue of the Sunday New York Times is the topic this Friday. It came to my attention because Hacker briefly quotes me in the piece. Hacker argues that the algebra requirement for all high school students is misguided. Hacker's view is hardly new, but it raised quite a bit of traffic in the blogosphere.
Peter Braunfield of MSTE gives an exciting MSTE Friday Lunch presentation about Mathematical Modeling.
Join us for our MSTE Friday Lunch with Peter Braunfeld as he talks about numerals. What do the ordinary English names for numbers like one, two, three, hundred, thousand, etc. (and those of other languages) reveal about the history of our understanding of numbers?
Peter Braunfeld will join the group to discuss "The First Calculus Text: 1609."
