What is the definition of ‘month’? Nowadays we think of it as the 31, 30, 28, or even 29 day period of which there are twelve of them in a year. Long ago, a month was defined as the 29.5 day period it takes for the Moon (from which the word ‘month’ is derived) to make a complete revolution around The Earth. The Hebrew calendar still has months that alternate between 29 and 30 days so the average month is 29.5 days. In education research, the word ‘month’ also has an unconventional meaning.
I first learned about this when I had read that there was a study showing that TFA secondary math teachers teach 2.6 ‘months’ more than non-TFA secondary math teachers. The seemed outrageous to me at the time, so I wrote to one of the paper’s authors and detailed my analysis in a post here. In short:…
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