Activities, Writings, and Videos by Debra K. Borkovitz
Third in a series. First is here. My second MOOC, Creative Programming for Digital Media and Mobile Apps, started about a week after the Mechanics ReView MOOC, and at first it seemed a joke in comparison. There were about eight … Read More
Second in a series. First is here. The first MOOC I started, Mechanics ReView, was originally developed at MIT as a short three week course for students who didn’t do well in their regular introductory Newtonian Mechanics Course (generally the … Read More
Note: I have many more ideas for writings about education than I actually ever complete or share, due to my inclination to make everything part of a bigger and bigger picture, as well as my perfectionism. I am experimenting in … Read More
When someone shares a syllabus with me, it’s usually to show me the course content, not the attendance policy, but these days I also think about the message the syllabus sends to students with chronic illnesses or medical crises. That … Read More
The video below is my entry into the MTT2 contest, where people are making commentary videos on videos from the Khan Academy (KA). This contest began when John Golden and David Coffey posted their “Mystery Teacher Theater 2000” video, where … Read More
The Farey Sequence, \(F_{n}\) is the list of all simplified fractions between \(\dfrac{0}{1}\) and \(\dfrac{1}{1}\) with denominator less than or equal to \(n\). For example, \( \large F_{5}=\dfrac{0}{1},\dfrac{1}{5},\dfrac{1}{4},\dfrac{1}{3},\dfrac{2}{5},\dfrac{1}{2},\dfrac{3}{5},\dfrac{2}{3},\dfrac{3}{4},\dfrac{4}{5},\dfrac{1}{1}\)
Last year I had surgery that resulted in unfortunately placed stitches; in order to avoid tearing them, I couldn’t sit or bend at the waist (and for the first two weeks, I couldn’t shower and had to minimize standing and … Read More
Unfortunately, I can’ t give you a simple scale to tell you how your score on my practice questions relates to your likely score on the MTEL. Setting the scoring level for each test is a complex process, and the scores … Read More
It’s hard to make sense of multiplication and division of fractions. Before fractions, multiplication can almost always be seen as repeated addition, and the answer is never smaller than both the numbers you started with. Division is usually … Read More