Philosophy Without A Home

Image via Wikipedia A Cross post from my JHU/ISTE blog .  Are public schools doing enough or are they trying to do too much? In the case of Hendrick Hudson School District v. Rowley A lower court noted that: “she performs better than the average child in her class and is advancing easily from grade to grade,” but “the she understands considerably less of what goes on in class than she could if she were not deaf” and thus “is not learning as much, or performing as well academically, as she would without her handicap,” ( Russo , 6th edition p. 1002) Thus they decided she was not receiving a “free appropriate public education,” ( Russo , p. 1002) The supreme court reversed the ruling stating, “if personalized instruction is being provided with sufficient supportive services to permit the child to benefit from the instruction, and the other items on the definitional checklist are satisfied, the child is receiving a “free appropriate public education” as defined by the Ac

Image via Wikipedia Here is a great activity for a classroom.  It’s accessible to every student in the class, it can quickly and easily be modified to be more difficult, it leads to dozens of different questions for further exploration. Now the question is what standards does this problem meet? Obviously, it can meet the need for subtraction in a second grade classroom and easily be modified for use with decimals and fractions for older grades. But what about some higher ordered thinking. (If you don’t think about this then the activity is simply practice in a frilly dress) Moving to the next blog post we can see some very interesting questions on Algebra. So now this interesting activity moves from being a lesson practicing the skill of subtraction to an open ended question on creating and proving Algebraic equations. Then someone goes and suggests using n-gons instead of squares and finding the properties of such a system. Suddenly, we can see that this simple activity is

The other night I had a dream. I dreamt that I had died and gone to heaven. I realized immediately I didn't belong. I asked God what I had done to to deserve such an exception. God responded, "Your children will grow up to be better people than you are, they will be a success where you were a failure, they will avoid the mistakes you made, and make better choices. They will realize the dreams you have and that will be only the beginning.” “So I make it to heaven because I was a good parent?” “No, you are here because you children will be lonely without you. Now, go back and be the type of parent you wish you were.”