Reading the recent NY Times Editorial by Sol Garfinkel and David Mumford about how to fix math education, I was struck by the following line:

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I’m probably not the only person to have read this essay on Sunday and have it eat away at them all week. I agree with both parts of this thesis — there aren’t as many great ideas out there and that even if there were, people, individually and collectively, aren’t ready to hear them.…

Reading Bill James too early Saturday morning — not sure what it says about me that the analysts who I think best understand American institutions are a former cop turned TV writer and a baseball statistician turned crime writer– and came across this discussion about what makes a quality lead off man in professional baseball:

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In most schools “mistakes” are to be avoided like the plague.  They often end up marked in red X’s and end up counting against students.  At the Workshop we will encourage students to make mistakes, as we understand error or failure as central to authentic learning.  Unlike regular school, where the assumption is that teachers know and the students don’t, at the Workshop the curriculum will be based on real world problems.  You know, the ones that don’t have the correct answer in the back of the book.…