David Acevedo's Blog

I recently bought myself a Math book that I'm delighted with (Mathematics 1001 by Elwes). I'm finally understanding many math concepts I had not understood in my education and I've reached an few interesting theories on how math should be taught. There should be three things that a math class should teach at the same time: 1. Memorization 2. Visual (Graph-Based) 3. Procedural (Equation-Based) 4. Historical All four are part of a whole and some students will respond better on one than the other. These are four avenues to teach the same thing by the way not three different things. Memorization should begin really early. There is no need to explain how multiplication works to have the kids start to memorize the multiplication table. The reason is not that you * need * to memorize it but  that by doing so or encouraging kids to do so, they'll be faster at doing calculations. Here are the things I think should be memorized in math: a. all the pairs of numbers that...

This past month has been fun. Univision declared a celebration for Puerto Rico's independence, an event that hasn't happened. And the Huffington Post shared a racist tweet from the adviser to the speaker of the Puertorrican House of Representatives. In other news Canada has the same crime rate as Puerto Rico . No, no, I mean the BBC reports Canada has less number of murders ( 598 ) for a population of around 35 million that Puerto Rico has with just 3.5 million (around 1,000 ). But what's a factor of ten between friends? Yet friends of mine on Facebook still defend Puerto Rico as if it wasn't that bad. It was bad in 1993 when I finished H.S. and we had almost 1 murder per day. Now it's at over twice that. What's going on? From afar you have a different perspective that from inside. But all I'm seeing is the fulfillment of trends that have been a long time going. 1. Brain Drain . This was a problem 15 years ago, but it was pretty much ignored. N...

I've been rather bemused by the calls to increase STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) education in this country. Mostly because I think the stress is in the wrong area. The US in my opinion doesn't need any more STEM mayors. What it needs is to have the base level of understanding in those subject areas raised across all disciplines . The fact that a simple process like global warming is misunderstood and one as complex as evolution dismissed and in danger of being taught along side creationism in many states (see teach the controversy bills) are real problems. But a shortage of engineers sounds fishy to me. I can't put my finger on why exactly that is but I have a good intuition about this things and I'll trust it. One clue however is the H1-B1 program . In my former company we had software-engineers that were part of that program and I found something strange about it right away. The visa is owned by the company you work for not the individual: it is a hi...

One of the weird things that is hard to explain about growing up in Puerto Rico is the lack of Public Libraries. I'm a bit of a compulsive book buyer. So being able to borrow books is still a novel concept for me. Of course Universities and schools in Puerto Rico have libraries but a public library, one that's there for the community? That still shocking to me. And it's a very American thing too. Even tiny towns I've visited seem to have them and some are shockingly nice. The Oviedo Florida public library was gorgeous, and I loved to go there. The Burbank Public Library has meeting rooms you can use and a whole section for children. I tell you this because another thing that was shocking to me was the Abram Friedman Occupational Center Adult School . From the outside it looks way worse than I was expecting. It looks like a prison, actually a juvenile detention center. No windows, painted while like a polar bear with a blue strip down the bottom. Only a government build...

These are three secrets I've learned that have made learning Ruby much easier than when I tried to learn Python. 1. Have Multiple books. I have three books for Ruby and this allows me to look up my doubts in one in the others, plus I get totally different perspectives and order of priorities. I have two pdf ebooks (one of which I printed) and one physical book. They are: why's (poigniant) guide to Ruby , David Black's Ruby for Rails , and Satish Talim's Ruby ebook . 2. Don't Read in ( strict ) order Jumping around can be useful as you can learn something while you jump around but also this allows you to approach topics that the author may think are hard but you find easier in a quicker way. The only book I'm reading in order is Talim's ebook. I read it mostly in order because the topics he presents build on each other but are not presented in order of complexity . In one paragraph he'll introduce a very hard procedure very quickly. On why's book ...

Learning modalities One of the most important things I've learned about teaching is the importance of modalities. Modalities describe the way one learns. I define modalities loosely here, so that when I taught English in Japan, one modality was grammar-learning-learning, another was conversation-driven-learning, interactive, solitary, repetitive, or generative. The trick was to be aware of one's own bias and to teach to as many modalities as possible (not necessarily in the same lesson but throughout the class). I for one am a very visual person. I aced geometry and had headaches with algebra. I can't memorize a math formula with ease but can at a glance figure out angles on parallelograms. I enjoy photography and can't keep a musical beat. Which explains why programming languages with highly equation-driven syntax look like gobbledygook to me, and why when I serenade people I do it John Cussack style -- with a boom-box. This is the coolest thing about Ruby, my ...

The open source movement and the creative commons revolutions have brought a lot of power to regular people by sharing the underlying code and logic of programs and other knowledge. To take advantage of this freely available knowledge and to truly partake the power of open source, one must be able to code. Thus began my search for good resources for learning to code, and for good resources to teaching coding or programming to children. This search led me to Ruby, a programming language particularly suited for teaching children code. But why is Ruby so great? After all learning coding is like learning a new language, a time consuming and challenging proposition, and Ruby is not as famous or as popular as other languages such as Java. The answers lies in what you should teach to children. Teach something fun to learn. The first step in making learning fun is not balloons or clowns but a good learning curve . If the student feels his mastery of the subject increasing, it ...

In this 21st century more than learning how to operate Buck Roger's jet-pack of yore, programming will be an indispensable tool for children . I've been researching the easiest language to learn, mostly for my own benefit, but throughout I've kept an eye on what would be the best way to teach children programming. I learned basic programming (with BASIC actually) in high school but was completely unprepared for a transition to college level programming and stopped there. So a few years back when I ran into a need for a very simple program, I found myself baffled at the few options to learn programming on the market for kids. It seemed that children were still being showed the equivalent of the LOGO turtle drawing vectors on a computer as if that was in some way preparation toward programming. I scouted around and it seemed the only group thinking about how to teach programming to children at the time was the OLPC group which code almost everything in Python, allowing ...

With persistent attacks on teachers being bandied around because of the situation in Wisconsin , I thought it would be good to comment on this. While I agree that the teachers unions have brought about part of this because of two very important and very stupid conditions they don't like changed: teacher pay based on seniority instead of performance and the constant harping of smaller class sizes; to blame the unions is both misguided and ridiculous. The only thing that unions are responsible for is making things harder to improve, but they are not responsible for how they got this way. In my opinion the number one reason that teaching is under-valued is due to the success of feminism. It used to be that if you were a highly-gifted woman like let's say Danica McKellar , one of the best jobs available for you would be math teachers. Because being a TV star/math-book writer was not easily within reach. Now, this is an extreme example and they've been women scientist for a long...