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Quick! - finals in progress and I can't help my daughter with this one ... and I hsve the ANSWER! I think ... A to B? A) 3x cubed - (3x squared) - 18x Problem: Simplify B) Answer: 3x(x+2)*(x-3) Q: That's simplified? Is

HISD may alter math-science requirement Students may cut high school load with early credits; experts fear plan is 'a step backward' Houston ISD students could earn high school diplomas without taking a single math or science class after their sophomore year under a proposal that is drawing criticism from some national education experts. Critics say the change will leave students unprepared for college and the workplace. "I'm surprised they would be considering this move," said Anne Tweed, president of the 55,000-member National Science Teachers Association. "That's a step backward." Superintendent Abe Saavedra wants to do away with a policy that...

"America is slipping!" It's become a standard lead, guaranteed to grab readers' attention. Add in a few alarmist quotes from self-serving lobbyists with hidden agendas, along with the obligatory conclusion that "Education is the answer," and you've got the economic horror movie that Americans love so much to watch. CNET News.com has got this formula down pat. Its piece, Can Johnny still program?, laments that in the annual collegiate programming contest held by the Association for Computing Machinery, the best that any American team could do this year was a miserable 17th place. The United States hasn't won a world...

Sunday May 08, 2005 LOS ANGELES (AP) Louis Leithold, who wrote one of the most widely used calculus textbooks and helped change the way the subject is taught, has died. He was 80. Leithold was found dead April 29 at his Los Angeles home by the parent of a worried student. The coroner's office said he died of natural causes. Leithold wrote ``The Calculus,'' which became a standard text and was credited with changing the way the subject is studied. The book, first published in 1968, is widely used in high schools and universities and is in its seventh printing....

Saunders Mac Lane, one of the country's leading mathematicians and a professor at the University of Chicago for nearly four decades, has died. He was 95. He died April 14 in San Francisco after a long illness, according to a statement released Thursday by the university. In a landmark paper he co-authored with Samuel Eilenberg in 1945, Mac Lane developed new ways of thinking about mathematics _ introducing what are known as "categories," "functors" and "natural transformations," the statement said. "A very great deal of mathematics since then would quite literally have been unthinkable without that language," University of Chicago...

Strange Accusations Get Princeton Student Barred Record, The; Bergen County, N.J. 04/07/2005 PRINCETON - A Princeton University graduate student has been barred from campus after he was accused of surreptitiously cutting locks of hair from women on campus and pouring bodily fluids into women's drinks. Officials say the student, Michael J. Lohman, 28, apparently targeted Asian women in a spree that may have begun in 2002. Lohman was arrested March 30. A woman reported last month that a man cut off a lock of her hair on a campus shuttle bus, triggering an investigation. University spokeswoman Lauren Robinson-Brown said...

Mathematician Untangles Legendary Problem Karl Mahlburg, a young mathematician, has solved a crucial chunk of a puzzle that has haunted number theorists since the math legend Srinivasa Ramanujan scribbled his revolutionary notions into a tattered notebook. "In a nutshell, this [work] is the final chapter in one of the most famous subjects in the story of Ramanujan," says Ken Ono, Mahlburg's graduate advisor and an expert on Ramanujan's work. Ono is a Manasse Professor of Letters and Science in mathematics. "Mahlburg's achievement is a striking one, " agrees George Andrews, a mathematics professor at Penn State University who has also...

LEICESTER, England -- In her 10th-grade math class, Frankie Teague dimmed the lights, switched on soothing music and handed each student a white board and a marker. Then, she projected an arithmetic problem onto a screen at the front of the room. "As soon as you get the answer, hold up your board," she said, setting off a round of squeaky scribbling. The simple step of having students hold up their work, instead of raising their hands or shouting out the answer, gives a leg up to a group of pupils who have long lagged in math classes -- girls....

NEW YORK (AP) - City officials recalled preparation material for math tests that had been sent to teachers after discovering they were filled with math and spelling mistakes. The materials were designed for math students in grades 3 through 7, and had been sent to math coaches and local instructional superintendents. The errors were found late Wednesday before the guide reached classrooms. Several answers in the guide were wrong. There were also sloppy diagrams and improper notation of exponents. There were at least 18 errors in the guide, and grammar and spelling issues proved just as problematic as the math....

The hate mail I got for my op ed, ‘Ten Reasons to Change Social Security,’ got me thinking hard about why I want real change, right now. Annually, the Social Security Administration sends me a report that shows I’ve worked and paid Social Security taxes every year since I was 16 years old. I’m 54 now. Shouldn’t I be more grateful to government for providing for us working people? Consider these pro-Social Security testimonials found in their name-calling email. 1. I Hate Poor People. Any savings plan – any, every, all, each – provide more return on investment. Social Security...

Like religious fundamentalists seeking to stamp out the teaching of evolution, feminists stomped Harvard University President Lawrence Summers for mentioning at a January 14 academic conference the entirely reasonable theory that innate male-female differences might possibly help explain why so many mathematics, engineering, and hard-science faculties remain so heavily male. Unlike most religious fundamentalists, these feminists were pursuing a careerist, self-serving agenda. This cause can put money in their pockets. Summers's suggestion -- now ignominiously retracted, with groveling, Soviet-show-trial-style apologies -- was that sex discrimination and the reluctance of mothers to work 80 hours a week are not the only...

WASHINGTON DC - MATHEMATICS teacher Stacy Jones asks her class of nine-year-olds at College Gardens Elementary School: 'Who can tell me the perimeter of a rectangle which has a length of 9cm and a width of 5cm?' Numerous hands shoot up in her fourth-grade class of about 25 children. She points and a pupil answers correctly: '28cm'. The teacher had more questions: 'How did you get that answer? Who can tell me what we mean by 'perimeter'?' Many hands go up again. At the end of the lesson, Ms Jones asks: 'Who loves maths?' A chorus of young voices replies...

In some public schools math teachers do more than teach algebra and geometry — they give their students lessons intended to purge what they consider racism. The "anti-racist education" program in place at Newton Public Schools in Newton, Mass., a wealthy, liberal niche of the Bay State, has angered some parents who believe the school district is more concerned about political correctness than teaching math skills.

Math class 2005 style Subject: math class… Last week I purchased a burger for $1.58. The counter girl took my $2 and I was digging for my change when I pulled 8 cents from my pocket and gave it to her. She stood there, holding the nickel and 3 pennies, while looking at the screen on her register. I sensed her discomfort and tried to tell her to just give me two quarters, but she hailed the manager for help. While he tried to explain the transaction to her, she stood there and cried. Why do I tell you this?...

Report: Tuition waiver for elite high school discriminatory By WILLIAM L. HOLMES Associated Press Writer The state Legislature's offer of free tuition at University of North Carolina schools to graduates of an elite public high school is disciminatory and should be repealed, according to a higher education policy group. Last year's graduating class from Durham's North Carolina School of Science and Math was the first eligible for the tuition waivers. About 80 percent of the 290 graduates are now attending one of the 16 UNC system campuses. Not charging them tuition is costing the state about $700,000. That's a waste...

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches. He who cannot teach, teaches teachers. This original quote by George Bernard Shaw became modified by that American gadfly, H.L. Mencken in the early 20th century. He had a pretty low opinion of the "Professor Doctors" of our institutions of higher learning. H.L. Mencken was often ridiculed for his political views and his sometimes irascible attacks on the system and its status quo. But most scholars give Mencken high marks for his Treatise on the American Language. This work is both complex, complete for its time and highly readable considering its content,...

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Students and teachers beginning in the fall will face a newer kind of math in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. The state Board of Regents this week adopted the new policy for schools statewide that will include teaching algebra concepts starting in the fifth grade and quadratic equations in eighth grade. The teaching of those subjects in depth has mostly been reserved for high school. "There is no question in our minds that this will position New York state well internationally," said William Brosnan, superintendent of Northport schools on Long Island and chairman of the Regents' panel...

I was visiting my brother the other day and his 9-year-old son was doing his math homework. I took a look at the Math problems and realized that they were almost impossible to de-cipher. My sister in law explained to me that the goal was to learn how to guess. A few days earlier, I was attending a discussion with other parents whose children attend the school my daughter attends. The subject of Math came up and they nodded their heads in agreement when someone made the point that the Math homework given to their children was virtually intelligible. One...

To test your diversity acumen and math skills, please read the following 10 names and calculate the percentage of the names that have something in common. (Note: Recent public school graduates will be better at the diversity part of the quiz than the math part.) Julian Gau John David Strickland Aniket Ketkar Sreyas Chintapalli Carl Lian Neil Gurram Oliver Fang Marcele Januta Kent Huynh Alex Xu If you determined that 80 percent are Asian names, you are partially correct. The rest of the answer is that 100 percent are American students from grades one through 10 who won the Kumon...

William H. Schmidt, Michigan State University Papers and Presentations, Mathematics and Science Initiative Today the President addresses a serious issue in American education—How well we as a nation do in educating our children in mathematics. Dr. Loveless has addressed this issue using data from our nation's report card—NAEP. I will address the same issue but from an international point of view. The data are clear. Recent results from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) show that US eighth and twelfth graders do not do well by international standards—ranking below average in both grades and, in fact, near the...