Link – Chris Aldrich

Read Opinion | Multiple Choice Flunks Out (Published 1988) by Jacques Barzun (New York Times)

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.

Bookmarked Topics in Ring Theory and Modules by Michael Miller (UCLA Extension)

Topics to be discussed include the isomorphism theorems; ascending and descending chain conditions; prime and maximal ideals; free, simple, and semi-simple modules; the Jacobson radical; and the Wedderburn-Artin Theorem.
Ring theory is a branch of abstract algebra that deals with sets—for example, the collection of all integers—that admit both additive and multiplicative operations. Modules generalize the notion of vector spaces, but with scalars drawn from a ring rather than a field. Beginning with a survey of the basic notions of rings and ideals, the course explores some of the elegant algebraic structuring that defines the behavior of rings—both commutative and non-commutative—and their associated modules. Topics to be discussed include the isomorphism theorems; ascending and descending chain conditions; prime and maximal ideals; free, simple, and semi-simple modules; the Jacobson radical; and the Wedderburn-Artin Theorem. Theory will be motivated by numerous examples drawn from familiar realms of number theory, linear algebra, and real analysis.

Mike Miller has announced this fall’s math course at UCLA.

Bookmarked Return to Blogging by Christopher Long (cplong.org)

A new year brings new calls for a return to personal blogging as an antidote to the toxic and extractive systems of social media.