The Whizz

Who would have thought legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson would inspire a talented young woman to pursue a career in maths?

Prominent mathematician Moon Duchin, profiled yesterday in the Scientific American in a ‘where-are-they-now’ feature, reveals what inspired her to study maths.

“I wanted to be a mathematician since I was 7,” she says. She was fascinated at the time by a book on Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in baseball, and so “I wanted to blaze a trail as a woman in math—once I decided I probably couldn’t be a baseball player,”

 [Top Mathematician Moon Duchin, inspired to excel in maths by Jackie Robinson]

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The adventurous academic with a funny hat is back!

He’s exploring central American jungles, learning about ancient cultures and bringing his young sidekicks along for the ride.

…no, not him, The Professor!

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Stop the press: News Report Shows Maths is Useful. Bit of a no-brainer, that one, but not everyone would appreciate just how useful maths and physical science skills are to one industry in particular - computer gaming.

The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones reports from the north-east of England on the state of the UK’s computer gaming industry and the dearth of programmers with the relevant academic background to make truly great computer games.

Star-Wars! (maths-haters need not apply)

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Math-Whizz has made an appearance in the US on local TV in Seattle, Washington state. King5’s Jane McCarthy looked at the successful integration of Math-Whizz into the Everett School District curriculum. Click here to watch the clip and read the accompanying story.

The segment, shown Friday 13th on King5’s morning show, focussed on the usefulness of the service for staving off ’summer learning loss’ (discussed on our blog here):

“Since using the program, Everett teachers have seen some students gain a year of math knowledge in just three months.

“And with summer approaching, they don’t want all that knowledge to slip away. Studies show that summer break isn’t always good for the brain because students can lose months of knowledge.”

Marianne Stine, Everett School District’s Curriculum Director, pointed out that “[students] lose up to two or three months and struggling students even more,” over the summer break.

It seems a number of parents and teachers had the same concerns in mind when they visited our US site and subscribed to Math-Whizz following King5’s report - we’ve had a phenomenal response and hope it will continue!

If you are a teacher or a parent in the US interested in Math-Whizz online tutoring, email Ben Keogh at ben.keogh@whizzeducation.com.

Maths is vital for young people. Without maths students lose out educationally and, later, professionally.

If we didn’t believe this fervently, we wouldn’t have embarked on producing Maths-Whizz in the first place. As it turns out, lots of parents and teachers (and even students!) agree with us. It now seems the UK independent think-tank Reform is equally enthusiastic about learning maths, but they have come at it from a different angle.

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The long summer holidays will soon be upon us. But those endless warm afternoons of childhood may conceal a hidden menace - stupidity (aka ’summer learning loss’).

The Education Guardian last week reported on plans from think-tank The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) to shorten the long summer holidays. IPPR policy wonks have found that:

…children from the poorest backgrounds suffered most with ’summer learning loss’ because they were the least likely to practise reading and writing during the six-week break.

(Is this cat suffering from ’summer learning loss’? Find out after the jump)

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Maths is too geeky, according to a UK research council study reported in the Education Guardian .

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) study showed:

…that students think of mathematicians as old, white, middle-class men who are obsessed with their subject, lack social skills and have no personal life outside maths.

You might be tempted to wonder if this report comes from the university Department for Stating the Bleeding Obvious, but it’s worth pausing for a second and thinking hard about where such attitudes come from, and what effects they have.

(Danica McKellar, full-time actress, part-time published mathematician, author of ‘Math Doesn’t Suck’ (trans: ‘Maths Isn’t That Bad, Honestly’), and - if the ESRC study is anything to go by - the exception that proves the rule)

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The testing system in England is in danger of damaging children’s education, according to a recent report from the Children, Schools and Families parliamentary select committee.

As the BBC reports, 25 million papers are taken in an annual orgy of testing that, the committee argues, risks placing too much emphasis on too few types of test and on teaching to the test.

More damningly, the report states:

…that the single-level tests’ “one-way ratchet” system will lead to an “artificial” improvement in results, in which pupils will be “certified to have achieved a level of knowledge and understanding which they do not in truth possess”.

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The parents’ evening is going out of fashion, according to an article in The Guardian, yesterday.

Polly Curtis reports:

Rather than an evening a term queueing for a five-minute chat with teachers, parents want more frequent access, or to monitor their children’s progress online, according to research commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

The DCSF report, summarised here, suggests that parents’ working lives are getting in the way of engagement with their students’ education, especially homework.

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Whizz Education is on Facebook!

The social networking website that threatened to take over the world in 2007 now features a Whizz Education company site where you can become a fan, view Whizz videos, check out Whizz company pics and chat away about Maths-Whizz Tutoring and Maths-Whizz Teachers’ Resource with other fans until the cows come home.

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