This is terrible. Did you know that it's legal in Oregon to burn stuff in your wood stove or fireplace? And it's a huge health hazard! The sub-story is that folks might burn garbage in there, but of course, most folks don't. So the main story is all about how burning stuff is bad. And burning wood is particularly bad. Interestingly, this makes a fine argument in favor of resuming selective harvest on our timberlands…oh, wait. That's bad too.

Wood smoke contains hundreds of toxic compounds including benzene and tars similar to those in cigarette smoke. The particles are so fine, smaller than 2.5 microns, they easily pass through human nasal filters and imbed themselves in peoples' lungs. (A micron is 300 times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.)

Many of the toxics pose known risks for causing cancer in humans.

This YouTube video featuring Seattle area Meteorologist M.J. McDermott, was passed on to me by a Seattle area, not Seattle School District, teacher whose district uses the same TERC textbooks mentioned in the video and confirmed how ineffective they really are. Here is the money quote:

The authors of Everyday Mathematics do not believe it is worth the students' time and effort to fully develop highly efficient paper and pencil algorithms for all possible whole number, fraction and decimal division problems. Mastery of the intricacies of such algorithms is a huge endeavor, one that experience tells us is doomed to failure for many students. It is simply counter productive to invest many hours of precious class time on such algorithms. The mathematical payoff is not worth the cost, particularly because the quotients can be found quickly and accurately with a calculator.

In related news, I hear that most good books are eventually made into movies.