I actually watched a different presentation last Sunday from early May and then did some more tracking. Lovely stuff like how to integrate SEL outcomes into the close reading strategies and learning which words to skip. Probably do not make it into the presentations to evangelicals that he talks about.

If so that guy’s sense of humor is even drier than mine. And that is pretty scary in itself. The rest of the speech is actually better than the first 8 minutes.

Starts off dismissing the whole intellectual tradition of inquiry, saying that a meeting cannot possibly come to a consensus because everyone will insist all “their stuff” get included resulting in a hopeless hodgepodge. With this he moves on having “proven” that “evidence based” standards are the only ones that could work, and the experience of professionals in the field be damned.

Then he says that a survey of top performing countries in math education had only three topics in common in their curricula: “addition, subtraction and the quantities they measure.”. (I cannot believe they do not cover multiplication, division and so on under one name or another.) Then he says that therefore we should focus on only those three topics.

That’s all within the first 8 minutes. The mind boggles — this guy is an evil lunatic.

Bennington does seem like a pretty Common Core kind of place. Here’s the academic planning process expected of each undergraduate student:
http://bennington.edu/Libraries/docs_Academic/PlanProcess.sflb.ashx

I found this while browsing the site looking for something else about Prof. Zimba, or at least a faculty list, and finding neither.

I had not heard of the Majorana Prize so I looked it up and the wikipedia page is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majorana_Prize

Zimba received it in its first year, 2006. His name links back to the same page I gave before, the one where the “vita” link doesn’t work. There seems to be no other page about him on the web.

To see how things should be, click on any of the other winners. For example the first. It takes you to a page with lots of other links, with a couple of links you can find what he teaches, what research problems he has worked on and techniques he uses, probably the text of some of his papers, etc. This is typical of an active academic physicist or other scientist. It’s professionally expected.

One really cannot be an academic full professor and have no trace on the web. It. is. impossible. Except for Jason Zimba.

http://danetteclark.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/common-core-architect-david-colemans-history-with-the-ayers-and-obama-led-chicago-annenberg-challenge/

Straight Up Conversation: Common Core Guru Jason Zimba
By Rick Hess on February 11, 2013 6:30 AM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMMe8_4s9KE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rje1NOgHWs

Coleman says he just got married….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPoUmSfTTNI
Boston on May 31, 2013
short version

Jason Zimba was a contributing author of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and is a Founding Principal of Student Achievement Partners. Jason holds a bachelor’s degree from Williams College with a double major in mathematics and astrophysics. He earned his master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Oxford and his doctorate in mathematical physics from the University of California at Berkeley. Jason’s published research spans a range of fields, including astronomy, astrophysics, theoretical physics, philosophy of science, and pure mathematics. His academic awards include a Rhodes scholarship and a Majorana Prize for theoretical physics. Jason has held faculty positions in physics and mathematics at Grinnell College and Bennington College. As an educator, he has taught physics, mathematics, and other subjects to college students, university physics and engineering majors, adult prison inmates, disadvantaged high school students, and children of non-English speaking immigrants. Jason was also a co-founder of The Grow Network, an education technology company formed to help state and district school systems use assessment to inform instruction. As the company’s Head of Education and Product Development prior to its acquisition by McGraw-Hill in 2004, Jason was responsible for standards alignment, curriculum design, product development, educational strategy, and psychometrics, working closely with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and education leaders. He is the author of Force and Motion: An Illustrated Guide to Newton’s Laws.