As many of you know, a political battle is raging in Utah this fall over the issue of School Vouchers. Oak Norton, who has been a prominent thorn in the side of the local school system for some time now, has evidence suggesting that individuals may have been illegally using their positions within School Districts, and District resources available to them, to push their Anti-Voucher agenda.
In an anti-voucher PowerPoint presentation he acquired, Oak uncovered given to Oak by a nameless source, the the following incriminating meta-data was noticed:
Created: Tuesday, July 31, 2007 9:08 PM
Modified: Friday, October 12, 2007 10:13 AM
Last saved by: Cache County School District
Revision number: 30
Total editing time: 689 Minutes
Here is the screenshot:
A few years ago, in addition to our own little children, my wife and I were the legal guardians for a few of her siblings. One of her brothers, who at the time was 13 years old, was struggling with learning Math in the local Middle School.
I would spend hours every week sitting down with him to help him understand the math he was expected to be learning for his class. Even with my contribution he really struggled.
The next school year the Alpine School District adopted a new math curriculum called Investigations math based on a Constructivist philosophy of learning. To be fair there are some portions of Educational Contructivism that I agree with, but the applied Contructivism of the Investigations program turned out to be a really terrible way to learn math.
Check out this excellent article by Orson Scott Card entitled Groupthink and the Intellectual Elite
Excerpt:
One of the most amusing things about the movement to force immigrants to speak only English is that we have a much more serious language problem on our hands—and it’s centered in the universities.
I apologize for the recent lack of posts. It’s been a busy couple of weeks. In addition to working to meet some pretty important deadlines at work, working on a contract programming job after work, providing some support for the recent release of my open source project, xajax, and fulfilling family responsibilities, I started school again last week.
