Enjoying the Summer and Running, running, running

Another late posting (meant for summer) I am starting to hate browser based publishing!--Cory

I admit, I've taken a respite from posting.  Not because of lack of material (but thank you Richard Byrne, I'm gone for a week and I find my RSS bin up to 200), but because I needed a mental vacation.  Obviously when I went on vacation my mind was at work much to my wife's chagrin.

Well, I took a physical vacation, and by the picture on the right you can see I visited Devil's Tower as one of my stops.  To list, I've been to Rapid City and Rushmore (again), over to Gillette, WY and down to Riverton.  From there I went through the forests and parks (Grand Tetons), with many stops there. After that we kept going north through Yellowstone and saw Ol' Faithful, and many hot springs (and one unstable geyser, which I DIDN'T know until I read the sign right in the middle of it!)

Of all the sites I saw, (and animals--tons in the Northeast corner of the Yellowstone area, maybe moved there because of the Colorado fires), this one of Devil's Tower struck me as one of the most incredible sites. (Besides being on TOP of the mountains, by taking Highway 212 and finding ourselves driving through a Winter Wonderland).

Why?? The mountain views were breath taking (both out and D O W N). This one stood as a challenge. One or two dots on the left side of the face are climbers, which really puts things in perspective of this whole thing.  The narrow trail around it is about 1.5 miles (maybe a little more). Connection to Education?  Student views of our current system.

The "effective" methods you can learn in professional development, are more of a clash when it comes to what students can really do with ways they obtain, manipulate, disseminate, and synthesize information.  This is why the old Rock of Education must either come down, or chiseled into a shape that's usable ("Pretty" for lack of a more tactful term).

How to make meaning of math doesn't have to be as intricate as Dan Meyer's approach (of 3 Acts), but sure keeps us from beating the textbook to death when schools like those in Byron, Minnesota develop an ongoing open-source mathematics text for their classes.