Month: October 2023
Many things have been urged upon the beleaguered public schools: install computers, reduce class size, pay teachers better and respect them more and give them bodyguards, reform teacher training, restore the principal's authority, purge the bureaucracy and reduce paperwork, lengthen the school year, increase homework, stick to the basics, stop ''social promotion,'' kill social studies and bring back history, and (the latest plan) pay kids not to drop out or play truant.
For historians of #EdTech and #Ungrading, here’s a nice little essay by Jacques Barzun from 1988 which he later published in a book under the title of “Reasons to De-Test the Schools“. The follow up is telling as well.
Dr. Mike Miller announced in class last night that in the coming Winter quarter at UCLA Extension he’ll be offering a course on elliptic curves.
The text for the class will be Rational Points on Elliptic Curves (Springer, Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics) by Joseph H. Silverman and John T. Tate. He expects to follow and rely more on it versus handing out his own specific lecture notes.
He mentioned that while it would suggest a more geometric flavor, which it will certainly have, the class will carry an interesting algebraic component which those not familiar with the topic may not expect.
To register, look for the listing sometime in the coming month or so when the Winter catalog is released.
