housebion.blogg.se

1. All students take calculus rule negative degrees plus#
2. All students take calculus rule negative degrees professional#

So, let’s- could we start - if you’d just state your name and what you do?

All students take calculus rule negative degrees professional#

So you’ll have to bear with me I might not be as professional as Dubner would have been. I’m used to being on the other side, being interviewed rather than doing the interviews. Steve LEVITT: So, Jo, I am not used to doing this. The first step on my journey was talk to someone who has thought about this subject much longer, and more deeply, than I have. I wrote up a grant proposal, and I convinced the philanthropy Schmidt Futures to give me some resources to put together a small team to explore modernizing high school math. So, after years of idle complaining, I finally decided to try to do something about it. Which makes me think that we must be able to do better for our children when it comes to teaching them math. But here is the thing: the math tools I actually use, and the math tools I see people around me actually using, seem to have nothing to do with what my kids are learning in school. I use mathematical thinking, statistics, and data analysis constantly, whether I’m writing economics papers, trying to get better at golf, or hoping to pick winners at the race track. Why are we teaching kids these things? Does anyone actually use the math we are teaching in their daily life? Is there any benefit at all to learning this stuff? And are there not more interesting and useful things we could be teaching them? Don’t get me wrong. More often than not, after helping them answer whatever questions are assigned that day, I’m left with questions of my own - questions that I can’t find good answers to. I’ve spent a lot of time working with them on their math homework. Steven LEVITT: Can you tell us what an imaginary zero is?

All students take calculus rule negative degrees plus#

Find the imaginary zeros of the equation: f of x equals 4x to the fourth, plus 35 x squared, minus 9. Sophie LEVITT: Rationalize the denominator in the equation: 3 over the square root of X minus 7. These are the kinds of questions she’s working on in her math classes - the questions that I’m responsible for helping her with. Sophie LEVITT: I’m gonna be a sophomore in high school at the University of Chicago Lab Schools. And I gotta say, as much as I like math and as much math as I’ve learned myself, I really think that we would do an incredible service to society if we rethought high-school math and turned it into something that was actually useful. LEVITT: This might seem crazy, but I’m so irritated - I’ve spent a lot of time helping my kids with homework. I’d love to give it a shot.ĭUBNER: If you’re gonna take over the podcast for a week, is there any topic that is so front-of-your-mind that you’d like to spend the time making a podcast about? LEVITT: I’d be nervous having what I say go out to 6 million people when I’m used to it going to six people. And that will be heard by a lot more than six people. I mean, if you wanted to, you could sit in my chair for a week and take it over and do whatever you want. So if you want to reach the people, and make change in the world, I suggest you get on this podcast a little bit more. This is obvious to me, but apparently you never thought of it. What am I doing?ĭUBNER: Levitt, you’re much smarter than me, but I’m gonna share something with you that I think you may find useful. I just spent three years pouring my heart into something that has basically been read by six academics and nobody else in the world. And I went through them, and the sum of the citations across those three papers was six. And the other day I got onto Google Scholar and I thought, I just want to look and see how much they’ve been cited. The final straw about academics is about three years ago, I embarked on three different research papers, all of which I thought were really important. I’ve had dozens of papers where I thought, wow, this is important. The kind of stuff I do is related to the real world, but it’s always a little bit off. LEVITT: Well, a lot of academics has nothing to do with the real world. And I’ve always been interested in the real world.ĭUBNER: So when you say that you’re interested in the real world, that implies that academia has nothing in common with the real world? LEVITT: Well, I’ve been doing this for a long time, 25 years I’ve been at it. And just came back from California where I was doing some work, and now I’m back in Chicago for a while.ĭUBNER: Is this a midlife crisis? Are you- you’re leaving behind all the things that you’ve done for the past couple decades - teaching, economics? I spent some time in Germany and I went up to northern Minnesota, where I used to go with my parents as a kid. Where’ve you been? You’ve been gallivanting?