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In his 1985 book, OBSERVING THE EROTIC IMAGINATION, the late psychoanalyst, Robert J. Stoller, offers a number of rules for psychoanalytic research that could well be of usefulness in considering what exists and what is possible in conducting (and consuming) education research (as well as the research in other social sciences. I first give Stoller’s list of rules, without putting them in the precise context in which they were originally presented, for fear of prejudicing some readers about taking these ideas seriously. Note that words in brackets are changes I have inserted to make the rules more obviously relevant in the context of educational research. Original language being replaced is specifically psychoanalytic. Rule 1: anyone can assert anything. Rule 2: no one can show anyone is wrong, since no one can check anyone’s observations (including his or her own). Rule 3: ignorance can be wisdom (“The way toward better understanding, then begins with our understanding how little we un...

From 2000 to 2003, I taught the same intermediate algebra course semester after semester to (mostly) high school sophomores whom I was trying to prepare to take and pass with at least a C the same course given by a community college mathematics department for dual-enrollment credit (this was at what is called a "middle college," located in Ann Arbor and serving a diverse population of students drawn from around eight counties in southeast Michigan). I taught from a variety of materials during the nine semesters in which I taught this course, from very traditional to more contemporary and progressive textbooks, all with accompanying use of graphing calculators to varying degrees. Following the order of topics in the books always resulted in presenting quadratic equations, their graphs, and the relationships between their transformations and parameters before exploring the same issues with absolute value equations and their graphs in the Cartesian plane. And student understandi...

In the Feb/Mar 2009 MAA FOCUS, current President David Bressoud's column is entitled, " Mind the Gap ." In response, Dom Rosa, former associate professor of mathematics at Teikyo Post University in Waterbury, Connecticut and full-time crank, posted to math-teach@mathforum.org: According to the article: "For four-year undergraduate programs, calculus and advanced mathematics enrollments dropped from 10.5% of all students in 1985 to 6.36% in 2005. This occurred while high school students were taking ever more mathematics at ever higher levels." This should not surprise anyone who is minimally aware of the current state of pseudo-education in the U.S. I keep meeting more and more students who do nothing more than scribble on photocopied handouts that are distributed in so-called Geometry, Algebra II, and Precalculus courses. They never open their bloated doorstops. Recently I met a student who was told, "You don't need your [junk] book; just leave it at ho...

In a recent post to the Gerald Bracey's EDDRA (aka, Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency) discussion list, Mark Shapiro, who blogs as The Irascible Professor , wrote regarding FairTest , a group that monitors and fights against the abuse of standardized and other tests: I'm no great fan of PISA. But really "Fair Test" is basically "No Test". While I don't think that high stakes tests alone should be used to determine a student's fate, I do think that standardized tests have a useful place in the assessment of educational progress both at the individual and global level. Just as there are no perfect teachers, no perfect teaching techniques, there likely will never be perfect tests. But that doesn't mean the tests are worthless. Imperfect knowledge is better than complete ignorance. My response I think that in fact there are times where ignorance is actually better than partial knowledge, especially if one uses the partial kn...