Joann's blog

Five out of four people have trouble with fractions
-- Comedian Steven Wright

Apparently, Steven Wright and I are kindred spirits. Math was my Achilles’ heel in middle and high school, and to this day I cringe when measuring objects that stubbornly refuse to measure to the exact quarter inch. Hence, I am an excellent cautionary tale for students who moan about what useful purpose fractions can possibly serve in real life. Tell them that their window shades and blinds will fit correctly. So there!

It’s been 75 years since renowned pilot Amelia Earhart mysteriously disappeared over the Pacific Ocean, and her disappearance and ultimate fate continues to fascinate the public to this day. At this writing, an expedition to locate debris from Earhart’s plane is wrapping up near the island of Nikumaroro in the western Pacific. The expedition was prompted by new analysis of photographs of the area from 1937 that appear to show airplane landing gear partially submerged in the water.

The late Christopher Hitchens was famous for turning in pitch-perfect articles and columns that he’d dashed off in one fell swoop – no outlines, no preliminary drafts, no revisions. It irritated his fellow writers to no end, as they labored over each sentence while their publication deadlines loomed. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of us often have difficulty with writing at one time or another. Writing can be a messy business, and it often stymies novices and experienced authors alike.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
- William Faulkner

The above quotation by William Faulkner was trotted out one year by one of my high school history teachers. Someone in class had been muttering about the “uselessness” of learning ancient history, and Mr. Short’s head snapped around to stare at the offending student. Mr. Short then quoted Faulkner to the class, and asked us what we thought it meant.

A few years ago, a second grade teacher told me how she stumbled onto teaching about the stock market to her students. It was pure serendipity, and prompted by a conversation that she overheard by group of students talking about a new guinea pig. The owner of the guinea pig had named it “NASDAQ,” and the other students wanted to know where the name had come from – what the heck kind of name was NASDAQ?

My fourth grader came home recently, disappointed at not having performed as well on a Math Olympiad contest as she’d anticipated. As we talked about it, she suddenly perked up and said, “Well, girls aren’t supposed to be good at math anyway.” This statement momentarily threw me for a loop, since she certainly hasn’t been raised with these stereotypes, and she is good at math – this was an enrichment class for kids who needed additional math challenge.

Recently, I read a harrowing account of a doomed 1912 Arctic expedition, where a ship seeking new hunting grounds became frozen in the pack ice of the Kara Sea. After a year and a half, the author and 13 crewmen decided to leave the ship and the remaining crew, embarking on a perilous 235-mile journey for help via kayaks and homemade sledges, and complete with polar bear attacks, starvation, snowblindness, and mutiny. The book is called In the Land of White Death by Valerian Albanov, and it’s a great read for high school classes and above.

It’s the rare child (or adult) who isn’t fascinated by dinosaurs. The ancient creatures capture the popular imagination in a way quite unlike anything else. Through the study of dinosaurs, students learn about what life on Earth was like long ago, and the many changes that have occurred in geography, geology, and climate since then.

Summer vacation is coming. The students are probably beginning to lose some of their focus, and perhaps their teachers are as well. Wandering minds are inevitable at this time of year, with the promise of lazy days by the pool, endless sports, and the freedom from homework. But as educators, we know that the glory days of summer have a dark underbelly – the dreaded “summer slide.”

There’s a drought sighting on the horizon of STEM education and careers, and it’s got many people worried. The number of U.S. college students obtaining engineering degrees is dwindling at alarming rates, with one science writer citing that in 2006, only 4.5% of American college degrees were in engineering, compared to 33.3% in China.