Good morning, everyone and welcome to Saturday’s Morning Open Thread.
Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
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I’ll admit up front that the voiceover in this video is a bit odd—but the information is there and I really like engineering shorts. So I guess more suffering for knowledge is in store. I do believe the worst teacher I ever had was Ms. Sanders, with Mr. Fesi (sixth-grade English) as second by a nose. Ms. Sanders taught fifth grade math and was terrible at it—just so bad it’s difficult to describe.
The curriculum back in my day wasn’t overly challenging (remember, this is Louisiana). We had to master the basics of a coordinate plane and ordered pairs (like reading a map), decimals past a hundredth, calculating basic volumes (the length x width x height variety), and forms of mathematical conversion (for example, decimals to fractions, feet to inches). It didn’t take the full first six-week session to calculate that this woman was not going to get beyond basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. She had absolutely no capacity to teach anything else and her limits had long been reached.
And though she was a terrible math teacher (we lost an entire year of instruction), I will tell you that she was a kindly old woman (well into her 60s when she taught me in 1970). So while I lost a year of math, I learned that adults didn’t actually know everything and that ignorance of any particular subject doesn’t preclude kindness.
Cheers everyone.
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If you’re interested, please click on over to Smithsonian Magazine to read:
The Costs and Benefits of Hydropower
This is an open thread, so you know what to do.
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.