AM News: "Rumblings of Resolution" For Chicago Strike

Strike Talks In Chicago Move Toward End Game AP:  Contract talks pushed on for more than 15 hours Thursday with little word of progress until negotiators called it quits close to 1 a.m. Friday. Chicago School Board President David Vitale said the two sides had worked past the contentious evaluations issue, though he didn't elaborate, and had begun crunching numbers on financial matters. 

Deal Near in Chicago Strike WSJ Key to a possible agreement, both sides said, was progress on how to evaluate teachers and fire low-performing ones—issues at the center of the national debate over improving public schools.

Fresh Hopes for End to Chicago Teacher Strike by Weekend NYT: When asked whether a deal could be brokered in time for a resumption of school next week, Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, said: "I'm praying, praying, praying. I'm on my knees for that. Please, yes, I'm hoping for Monday."

Chicago Strike Enters Day Four With Rumblings of Resolution EdWeek: "We're hoping we can tighten up some of the things we talked about yesterday. . .and get this thing done," Lewis told reporters. Barbara Byrd-Bennett, chief education officer with Chicago Public Schools, was equally confident of a deal today but said she still thinks kids could be back...

Teacher Evaluation Dispute Echoes Beyond Chicago NPR: Just the fact that there's a growing discussion around teacher evaluations is a huge leap for the education industry. Historically, reviews have been haphazard, ranging from nonexistent to an annual classroom visit from the principal — often referred to as the "drive-by."

Comments

[Bruce]

The willingness to ruin teachers' careers over untried formulas unable to distinguish unreliable, spurious statistical noise from good (or poor) teaching is appalling. There is no possibility I would advise my children to consider a career in teaching, even though both their father and their mother are teachers. Contemporary American culture does not deserve good people to go into teaching, and that is the fault of the adults, and in particular of misguided adult leaders, and not of the children. Instead, the children are the victims, through classroom backwash, of the determination of a vain exetasecracy's (my coinage: "rule by examination" -- more at http://principalfoundations.blogspot.com/2011/09/on-exetosecrats.html) desire for self-validation and class reproduction.

[Andrew]

F(x) = x^2-5x+6 and g(x) = sin x

is it tedious to solve this equation?
NO there is a rescue operation given by the application

Solving these two equations will require 3 pages of solution while it doesn't add to the conceptual understanding of the problem, if graphs are used, it would have been solved in few lines and would have contributed in better understanding of a function. The application Mathrena (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ces) helps in plotting accurate graphs and find point of intersection of the equations. Mathrena (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ces) also find the roots of the equation f(x) and g(x).

The handy nature of the Mathrena brings immense help to those who find it difficult to plot the graph manually, same arises with the graphical properties of a function. It was difficult to calculate the Eigen value and vectors of a matrix but through this application one can solve them in seconds. The application has helped to leverage the concept to Mathematics so that students spend more time in understanding the application rather than on tedious equations.

Download it from here : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ces

[Bruce]

The response of "Andrew" to my comment perfectly illustrates the depths into which our now mechanized discourse has fallen.