Assorted links

I just read the New York Times article linked to discussing teaching by example. I think the author of the article (and possibly the authors of the study — I can’t tell) completely missed the point. “Teaching by example”, as epitomized by the ‘two trains’ example in the article, was never meant to facilitate the student’s learning, but rather to complicate it, to see if the student could actually apply the math to a ‘real-world’ situation. The purpose of such concrete examples is not to help the student learn the math, but rather to learn how to apply the algebra he has learned. The idea that a teacher uses the ‘two trains’ to teach algebra (rather than how to use algebra) is absurd.

I couldn’t access the article so I can’t tell if this misapprehension derives from the NYT or the study. The conclusion cpould conceivabl make more sense in the context of the liquids and tennis balls examples than the trains example, so it’s possible that the NYT author just used a bad example, although the quote from Dr. Kaminski seems to imply the contrary.

Hitchens is interesting because he’s not really a “neocon”, and that he’s still an angry-at-God atheist, and one who is angry at all Gods, not just the Christian one. He’s actually more consistent than most political atheists – he’s angry at various religions in proportion to the atrocities committed recently in their name, which means that he’s much angrier at Islam than at Christianity.