There has been a surplus of interesting, provocative, and useful material running across my desk recently:

• Christopher Danielson takes a break from his relentless obsession with Hung-Hsi Wu to drop some knowledge on our standards-based grading community. “No, you need to change your thinking about that rubric. That 0-4 grading scale? It’s not made up of numbers, my friend. It’s made up of categories.”
• Zac Shiner and Dave a/k/a Mr. Math Teacher are both graduates of Stanford’s teacher education program and both of them are taking on water in their first year teaching, writing thoughtfully on the challenge of being a human being and a math teacher both.
• Matthew McCrea, David T. Jones, Alex Eckert, and Daniel Schneider are all on my reading list and they all have a special fondness for Khan Academy. As I try to figure out Khan Academy, I find it helpful to read these pieces and ask myself, “What need do these teachers have that Khan Academy serves? Is the need legitimate (skill practice, let’s say) or not (classroom management)? Is there a better way to serve that need?”
• Speaking of Khan Academy, here’s how to cheat the badge system. [via @fnoschese]
• Mike Konczal, whose high-quality economics blogging has already been covered on this blog, ran a script to parse and analyze the data on the We Are 99% Tumblr. Age distribution, keywords, etc. This would not be the worst assignment for a statistics class right now.
• Best in show goes to Freddie deBoer who writes a piece I commend to the attention of all my techno-utopian blog buddies. In short: the transition from high school to college to career is a status contest for kids. Will Richardson’s been ringing this bell for a long while, but where Richardson sees the Internet as our best means for bypassing that contest, deBoer makes a persuasive case that the Internet, for our twentysomethings, is only extending it. Read it twice.
• I’m off the path now, but deBoer’s later piece on the Occupy Wall Street movement is the most interesting I’ve read.

Comments closed. I’ll check in with you at each of the blogs above.

BTW: Matthew McCrea responds. So does Alex Eckert.