Word: sevens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...technique is valid for higher math as well as basic arithmetic. In East Lansing, Mich., Magdalene Lampert's fifth-graders connect numbers to real-world situations. Instead of dutifully working out common denominators to compare fractions, for example, one of her students reasoned that "five-sixths is smaller than seven-eighths because the piece that is missing in seven-eighths is smaller than in five-sixths." Says Lampert: "This reveals more complicated thinking and a better understanding of symbols than the blind use of rules...
...science and reading are taught through abstractions that, in the words of one expert, are "void of the complexities of the real world and thus irrelevant and even boring." The results can sometimes be ludicrous. Alan Schoenfeld, an expert on math education at Berkeley, notes that students characteristically answer "seven buses remainder ten" when asked how many 35-passenger buses are needed to transport 255 students. In practical terms, of course, the answer is eight, since the remaining ten students will need another...
...only a matter of time. For seven weeks the world had marveled at the restraint demonstrated by both Beijing's rulers and the thousands of demonstrators for democracy who had occupied Tiananmen Square. The whole affair, in fact, had developed the aura of a surrealistic ritual, with both sides' forces stepping in circles as if they were performing some stately, stylized pavane. Violence, it seemed, was out of the question. And then, early Sunday morning, the dance ended in a spasm of fury, the worst day of bloodshed in Communist China's history...
...bloody assault by Deng's armed troops ended all that, and also the Goddess of Democracy, which was crushed by a tank once the troops gained control of the square. Even so, the events of the past seven weeks immunized vast numbers of people against the traditional propaganda bromides and convinced them that the government was not invulnerable: it was only an agency of brutal power. If the student campaign failed, it at least succeeded in forging a historic new link between China's intellectual community and its masses. As an observer said earlier in the week, "It will...
That spurred the alliance's 16 foreign ministers through a seven-hour marathon meeting that ended with a compromise on the hotly divisive subject of negotiations to lower the number of short-range nuclear forces (SNF) in Europe. West Germany won agreement that bargaining would indeed begin, but not until conventional-arms reductions were under way, which would be 1992 at the earliest. Britain and the U.S. held fast for agreement that such talks would aim at only a partial reduction of U.S. and Soviet warheads and not, as Bonn wanted, at their complete elimination...