Blog
School, Homeschool, Unschool: This New (Old) Way Beats Them All
Education was once a matter of sitting down with a learned person and having a discussion. This could involve drawing with sticks in the sand as with the ancient Greeks or being given challenging tasks and asked to return with progress like the, largely lost,...
A Manifesto
I started studying physics as a boy in Maine while teaching myself the mathematics as I went. There were strengths and weaknesses to this method. There were holes in what I knew but also a great sense of confidence in understanding things that people who...
On Entrepreneurship
I have a great love of entrepreneurship and was lucky to be part of the Entrepreneurship Initiative at NC State. I have a few small products I have been working on. My team was in the 2014 ACC Clean Energy Challenge with a novel home wind turbine, one that would be...
School Board Elections
Chapel Hill/Carrboro School Board elections are happening again. As far as I have seen they have drawn a moat and kept parents out. Block math for Math III/Precalc next year has been cancelled. Not that you can get any consistent or believable answer out of the administration, but my theory is that, now that the College Board has created its own precalc curriculum, it has become difficult to try to move kids along faster with a half year class.
I’m not sure how the College Board got so much power over school curricula. They have dumbed down calculus and now will effectively exclude a bunch of topics to suit the needs of their test for precalc. It makes no sense to have Precalc as a college level class for which you get credit except in a world where the math standards keep dropping so that more high school topics need to get taught in college.
Anyway we should keep our ears open for candidates who have an interest in this. The standard marching orders seem to be to get people excited about politics that have dubious implementation at the level of school policy which 1. cost nothing much and 2. distract from the desperate need to raise teachers compensation (which does cost $).
Book a Session
Rates
Check / Venmo: $95/hour