By this point you’ve probably heard of Wes Moore, as he has been making quite a splash in the mainstream media from NPR to Oprah. After hearing him on NPR, I just had to read his non-fiction memoir, The Other Wes Moore. The one-sentence summary is that the author grew up fatherless in a [...]
Adult friends often ask me about “tracking” at Weston. Apparently they’re referring to their own high school experiences, in which a student entered high school in a certain “track,” such as honors or business, and then remained there forever. This is a foreign concept to me (not just at Weston, but everywhere else I’ve taught [...]
Don’t read Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey if you dislike offbeat science fiction. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf come to mind…although Fforde’s novel is a bit more down-to-earth, so to speak. Maybe it should be considered fantasy, like his Nursery Crimes series. But it’s a bit more like his [...]
“Reading it is like being there.” That was a comment (on The Lord of the Rings) uttered by Mori, the narrator and protagonist of Jo Walton’s fascinating novel, Among Others. It was that comment that hooked me on this novel, which I ended up devouring, mostly because of the writer’s voice. And that comment is all [...]
As is the case in most restaurants, when you sit down at a table at Bella Luna you see a place setting in front of you. But at Bella Luna you get a plate that has been drawn or painted by a child. The last time I was there, the plate [...]
Of course I wanted to like this book. What could be better than a mystery about a Massachusetts math teacher? But unfortunately this novel by Ada Madison (pen name of Camille Minichino) falls flat, IMHO at least.
Apparently my opinion is a minority one, if the so-called reviewers on Amazon are to be believed. [...]
It’s easy to find plenty to dislike about MCAS, but I was particularly struck by the cogency of Sanjoy Mahajan’s piece entitled “Public School Math Doesn’t Teach Students How to Reason.” Aside from the usual arguments against MCAS — it takes time away from learning, it puts the cart before the horse, it [...]
This post, like part of yesterday’s, brings up an educational dilemma:
On the one hand, we want students to work hard. That means that we need to provide incentives as rewards for working hard. Grades are pretty much the only currency we have in high school, so students expect to get good grades if they put in a lot of effort.
City council candidates and math education? Those are two utterly unrelated topics, aren’t they? But there turns out to be a connection.
First of all, this afternoon I had already been intending to comment on an op-ed piece from this morning’s New York Times, titled “How to Fix Our Math Education.” And I was going to [...]
A recent article in Salon opens with the conventional view of “kids today”:
They live in a state of perpetual, endless distraction, and, for many parents and educators, it’s a source of real concern. Will future generations be able to finish a whole book? Will they be able to sit through an entire [...]
Over the years I’ve read many books (more than two dozen) by the great mystery writer, Marcia Muller, who actually has a website now. Why is that surprising? Well, here’s the explanation in her own words:
For those of you who know of my well-documented aversion to modern technology, it must be a surprise [...]
On yesterday’s “Weekend Edition Sunday” on NPR, there was a five-minute segment on “What’s Your Favorite Number and Why?” The interview with British mathematician Alex Bellos is definitely worth listening to; you can find a listen-to-the-story link on that webpage. But it’s also worth reading Robert Krulwich’s follow-up at the same location, especially various [...]
Several different threads have recently been coming together under the heading of “inverting the classroom.” The basic idea is that modern technology has let some of us come to the conclusion that the traditional model of the classroom has it all backwards:
Students currently spend a lot of class time in a group of 25 [...]
My inspection sticker expires this month, so I took the car to our dealer this morning (in case any work was needed) and discovered that our registration had expired two months ago! The current registration was nowhere to be found. What to do, what to do? Obviously I should drive to Braintree or to Watertown [...]
Apparently poster has become a verb. If Harvard says so, it must be true. This sign appears on the gate of the fence that separates Harvard Yard on the south from the Science Center and Memorial Hall on the north:
After a hiatus of more than three months, it seems fitting for me to resume blogging with a post about the Ashmont Grill. For Barbara and me it has become our go-to restaurant at least twice a month. It probably doesn’t hurt that they know us there, and we know them, but all that [...]
You’ll recall that a month ago I wrote a few words about Mitch Cullin’s novel, A Slight Trick of the Mind:
I can’t yet review A Slight Trick of the Mind, by Mitch Cullin, as I am only halfway through reading it. I can, however, report that it is written in a much more [...]
Yesterday another successful Dorchester/Roxbury/Mattapan Community Seder was held at First Parish Church in Dorchester. There were only 40 attendees — half of last year’s number — probably because Passover managed to overlap with both Easter weekend and school vacation week this year. As always there was a great ecumenical spirit, even though there still wasn’t [...]
Be sure to watch Weston vs. Hamilton-Wenham in the quarterfinals of High School Quiz show, to be broadcast tomorrow night, 4/24, at 7:00 PM on Channel 2!
I finally saw the March of the Penguins. It’s unquestionably informative and beautifully photographed. Almost everything in it was new to me, and I couldn’t help being astonished and moved by what these birds do in Antarctica. (They’re very different from the penguins I see in the Aquarium.) Despite the occasional sentimentalized and anthropomorphized portions [...]
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