…So now you know why “chance favors the connected mind.” Keep that in mind, no matter what organization(s) you’re a part of. I think I’ll show it to my [...]]]> Today we participated in an intense professional development (PD) program and worked on our preparation for NEASC accreditation. NEASC work is often frustrating but often useful as well (more on that later). Today’s PD was quite interesting. The main part of the day’s program opened with “Where Good Ideas Come From,” a great video by Steven Johnson. Drop whatever you’re doing right now, click on that link, and watch the entire four-minute video…

…So now you know why “chance favors the connected mind.” Keep that in mind, no matter what organization(s) you’re a part of. I think I’ll show it to my students.

After that video, as well as other more-or-less related introductory material, we split up into small groups to participate in parallel sessions in which various “professional learning communities” presented progress reports. (You have to keep up with the current jargon, you know.) I chose to attend sessions on Metco, mathematical discussions, and iPads. All were well worth it:

• The Metco presentation was the first time I had heard a report on the entire program, K–12. The central question, how to improve Metco students’ success in math, was of course relevant and important.
• The “mathematical discussions” presentation concerned a project in fourth and fifth grades revolving around Suzanne Chapin’s work, which was reported to result in “increase in civility and logical thinking.” Because the presentation consisted almost entirely of video shot in real classrooms, the findings were powerful and convincing; “they’re articulate and they try to use precise language” was the observation of one teacher.
• Finally, the iPad presentation concerned a pilot project in which an entire class of seventh-graders have been given iPads for second semester to use in science, social studies, and English/language arts. While I teach none of those subjects, the relevance to me is that I was recently approved for participating in an iPad project of my own for one month in Algebra II. So stay tuned for my results and my comparison with what I saw in the report from the seventh-grade teachers.

In the afternoon we watched the film Race to Nowhere and discussed it in small groups. This “documentary,” in the style of Michael Moore, is definitely worth seeing despite its obvious biases. It makes a strong case that our students are being stressed out and pressured to focus entirely on a race to attend the most prestigious colleges. That is certainly true for many students in Weston. But I have several problems with the film: math teachers are always the bad guys (too much math homework drives a girl to suicide???); scenes of black students in Oakland were obviously edited in, probably in response to the otherwise white-suburban bias; scenes from The Blue School in New York City made unfounded generalizations about all other schools; the film claims that 95% of American high-school students cheat, which seems unbelievably high; they also claim that American schools aren’t preparing independent thinkers, which strikes me as a gross over-generalization. Almost everything in the movie is worth thinking and talking about, but I wish it had been more balanced.

At the assembly on March 3, Thursday, the non-profit organization Invisible Children will be presenting their new documentary based on a former child soldier.  Then a speaker from Uganda, a former child soldier, will share his experience and thoughts on the use of children in conflicts.  There will be a brief Q & A with the audience at the end.

This calm description turned out to be something of an understatement. Both the moving documentary and [...]]]> At school yesterday we had a special assembly sponsored by our local Amnesty International chapter. Here is the official description we were given ahead of time:

At the assembly on March 3, Thursday, the non-profit organization Invisible Children will be presenting their new documentary based on a former child soldier.  Then a speaker from Uganda, a former child soldier, will share his experience and thoughts on the use of children in conflicts.  There will be a brief Q & A with the audience at the end.

This calm description turned out to be something of an understatement. Both the moving documentary and the talk by the two speakers highlighted not only the role of child soldiers but also the massive death and destruction caused by Joseph Kony’s terrorists in Uganda and Congo. The audience of Weston High School students was engaged and respectful.

And yet…and yet…I have a couple of reservations. Why is Kony doing these horrible things? One of my students asked the speakers that, and did not get a satisfactory reply. Of course the Wikipedia article is not to be trusted (unlike math and linguistics, this is the kind of topic for which one needs to be suspicious of Wikipedia); saying that Kony wants to establish a government based on the Ten Commandments is bizarre at best. Second, both the festive aspects of parts of this well-made movie and the attempt to get everyone to “stay silent for 25 hours on April 25th” seem orthogonal to the problem and its possible solution. Maybe I’ve just been out of college for too long.

Finally, how does one do anything for 25 hours on a single day? Inquiring minds want to know.

First of all, it’s absolutely essential to see it in 3-D, preferably in IMAX. The three-dimensional effects were absolutely convincing, especially in the outdoor scenes, giving the viewer the sense of being in the action rather than watching the action. The result was a thoroughly entertaining, amazing film. I was totally absorbed by it, having no trouble sitting for nearly [...]]]> What more can I add to all the chatter about James Cameron’s Avatar? Not much, except to share my opinions. You probably already know all that you need to know about this movie, and I certainly don’t want to include any spoilers.

First of all, it’s absolutely essential to see it in 3-D, preferably in IMAX. The three-dimensional effects were absolutely convincing, especially in the outdoor scenes, giving the viewer the sense of being in the action rather than watching the action. The result was a thoroughly entertaining, amazing film. I was totally absorbed by it, having no trouble sitting for nearly three hours. (The Tempur-Pedic seats definitely helped! I guess that’s one of the benefits of seeing a movie in a theater that’s located in a furniture store.)

The linguistically sophisticated artificial language of the Na’vi was of course of interest to me, though it was really a minor part of the movie. Although the three-dimensionality allowed subtitles to hover well in front of the action — thereby making them less intrusive than they would be otherwise — it was still appropriate for Cameron to use the device of having the main Na’vi characters be more-or-less capable speakers of English as a second language. Doing so allowed him to get away with minimal use of subtitles. Perhaps I’ll write a follow-up post concerning their own language .

I was surprised to see some little kids at this showing (early Sunday afternoon). Either their parents had no idea that there would be so much violence, or they didn’t care. Avatar is basically a war movie, after all, so they should have cared.

As a war movie, it included every cliché in the book, and therein lies its major flaw. The flaw isn’t the lack of originality; I discount critics who observe that this movie has been made before. Yes, the theme and story line are taken from other efforts, but so what? It’s commonplace for plays and films to do this; even Shakespeare took story lines from elsewhere. No, the flaw is the piling on of cliché after cliché. Fortunately the action and the visual effects are so stunning that it’s almost possible to ignore this problem, but “almost” isn’t good enough. As an unsubtle metaphor for the Europeans’ destruction of American Indians and their lands, it was bound to be somewhat predictable — but it didn’t have to go to such extremes. The result was a collection of one- and two-dimensional characters who fell into situations that anyone in the audience would have expected.

Despite that flaw, and despite its transparent political correctness, Avatar is still a successful film. Aside from the special effects, the spectacular scenery and the attention to detail redeem the story. Go see it — warts and all!

Anyway, earlier in this calendar year — but it was last academic year — two of my Weston sophomores were aghast to hear that I had never seen The Lion King. After a great deal of persuasion, both from them and from my niece, I agreed to see it. One of my Weston colleagues had warned me that it was offensive and patriarchal, so I was wary. Also, I’m not into Disney films.

My verdict: I definitely enjoyed it — though not with anything like my students’ level of [...]]]> Somehow this post got delayed from earlier in the year. Oh, well…hakuna matata.

Anyway, earlier in this calendar year — but it was last academic year — two of my Weston sophomores were aghast to hear that I had never seen The Lion King. After a great deal of persuasion, both from them and from my niece, I agreed to see it. One of my Weston colleagues had warned me that it was offensive and patriarchal, so I was wary. Also, I’m not into Disney films.

My verdict: I definitely enjoyed it — though not with anything like my students’ level of enthusiasm — and I didn’t find it the least patriarchal or offensive. Mostly I found it folkloric, and of course there are patriarchal elements involved in folklore. I liked the animation and the wit. The songs weren’t bad. Although I’m still puzzled why my niece named her cat Zazu, I found the various animals cute and/or captivating, and the actors were effective in reading their voices. All in all, it will never be one of my favorite movies, but I’m definitely glad that I saw it. I wouldn’t want to draw any conclusions about Weston students or teachers from my tiny sample on this matter.

Perhaps I was waiting for the movie — though how could I have ever known that there even was going to be a movie? Anyway, Barbara and I just watched the movie on DVD, so now I can review both at once. Of course I violated my usual principle that it’s better to see the movie before reading the book, but then again that’s [...]]]> Two and a half years ago I read Karen Joy Fowler’s novel, The Jane Austen Book Club, and I am surprised that I didn’t write a review of it at the time. I no longer remember why.

Perhaps I was waiting for the movie — though how could I have ever known that there even was going to be a movie? Anyway, Barbara and I just watched the movie on DVD, so now I can review both at once. Of course I violated my usual principle that it’s better to see the movie before reading the book, but then again that’s usually impossible, given the relative schedules of publishing novels and making movies.

Anyway, the book is worth reading, and the movie is worth seeing — though I’m sure that both would have been significantly enhanced if I were more familiar with Austen’s work. Unfortunately my English Lit background is insufficient, as I’ve read no Austen other than Pride and Prejudice and a bit of Emma. This deficiency doesn’t matter so much in the actual book club scenes, but it’s glaring in the overall structure of the book and movie, where the big concept is that these characters’ lives are replaying the interactions among various Austen characters. I think Fowler must have created a one-to-one match between Austen’s novels and the modern characters, though it’s hard to tell for sure. Each member of the book club hosts a discussion of a different novel, and I suspect that her (or in one case his) life is reflecting that novel. Six novels, six characters.

The movie is surprisingly faithful to the book, although the 30-month gap makes it hard for me to remember details. One glaring difference is that the character Allegra is explicitly 30 in the book but is in her early 20s in the movie — a distinction that wouldn’t always make a difference but definitely does in the case of Jane Austen. The actress who played her, Maggie Grace, was 23 when the film was made, enhancing the impression of youth. Prudie, a French teacher, is the youngest in the book (28) but seems older in the movie — although a male student’s crush on her suggests that maybe she isn’t, and the actress portraying her, Emily Blunt, was only 24 at the time. She is a rather annoying character in many years, although she’s the subject of an excellent line: in response to a suggestion that Prudie should stop speaking French, Jocelyn says, “Or at least go to France, where it would be less noticeable.” Actually, that’s the narrator’s line in the book, but Jocelyn’s line in the movie, where there is no narrator. Also, the phrase “at least” was inserted in the movie; I have no idea why. The student with the crush on Prudie causes her to say one of the best lines in the movie — one that I don’t think was in the book at all: “He looks at me like he’s the spoon, and I’m this dish of ice cream.”

What’s unsurprising is that the one male lead, Grigg, is the only book club member who is not already familiar with Austen (though at least he’s enthusiastic about Ursula LeGuin). Male members of book clubs are already rare enough; they would be rare to the point of extinction when a book club is devoted to Jane Austen. The Grigg of the novel is carefully reproduced in the movie, providing a useful foil to the otherwise all-female take on human relations. He’s pretty much a “sensitive, new-age guy.”

Both the book and the movie are well-written, clever, intelligent, at times amusing, and always engaging. Read one. See the other.

Math content included Fibonacci spirals in nature, and the Unexpected Hanging paradox in its original form. In order to make the latter less gruesome and more relevant to students, it is usually changed to an unexpected quiz, as Jim Loy points out in the linked article. It goes something like this:

I’m going to give you a pop [...]]]> On the other hand, the season opener of Numb3rs — Season Six, which is hard to believe! — was pretty good, even it was skimpy on the math and a bit long on tensions between Charlie and Amita. But this is television, after all.

Math content included Fibonacci spirals in nature, and the Unexpected Hanging paradox in its original form. In order to make the latter less gruesome and more relevant to students, it is usually changed to an unexpected quiz, as Jim Loy points out in the linked article. It goes something like this:

I’m going to give you a pop quiz next week, and I guarantee that it will come as a surprise to you. Of course I can’t give it on Friday, since if you walk into class on Friday and haven’t had the quiz yet, it will no longer be a surprise. So you rule out Friday.

Could I give it Thursday? Since you’ve already ruled out Friday, you will expect the pop quiz when you walk into class on Thursday. Then it won’t be a surprise. So I can’t give it Thursday.

By the same reasoning, I can’t give it Wednesday. Similarly, I can’t give it Tuesday. Or even Monday!

So, I guess I’ll just have to give the quiz right now.

And I hand out the quiz.

Where’s the flaw?

It’s no surprise that this is not a very good movie, though that probably makes it appropriate for a snow day. I can recommend it only to those who have recently seen Midsummer Night’s Dream and/or some other high school theatrical production. Get over It is a [...]]]> What do you do on a snow day? Watch a movie, of course. Get over It had been on my shelf for awhile, since I had ordered it from Netflix shortly after seeing Midsummer Night’s Dream at Weston High School back in November. Time to watch it and then return it to Netflix, right?

It’s no surprise that this is not a very good movie, though that probably makes it appropriate for a snow day. I can recommend it only to those who have recently seen Midsummer Night’s Dream and/or some other high school theatrical production. Get over It is a light, frothy teen comedy about a high school that is putting on an adaption of Midsummer Night’s Dream, turned into a musical with the addition of a dozen songs written by the director, who is not only a drama teacher but also the head of the Fine Arts Department. (At Weston the director is in the English Department. I don’t know if that’s significant or not.) The twist is that these high-school students are also living through a plot that’s vaguely reminiscent of Midsummer Night’s Dream — appropriate enough since Shakespeare’s own plot involved a group of actors who performed a play within the play. The movie is fun but weak. Here’s an unedited comment from a British teen:

To be short — I am exactly the audience that this film is aimed at (daft teenaged girl) and I found it pretty pitiful.

One of the things that really annoyed me though is that I love A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I HATED that they tried to ignore huge parts of that story to fit in with their own parody of it. Kelly fancies Berke, who’s in love with his ex Allison still, and she’s now going out with Striker. They all get cast in AMND, and for some insane reason they cast Striker as Demetrius and Berke as Lysander. Lysander and Demetrius are both in love with Hermia (Allison) while Helena loves Demetrius from afar, and Hermia only loves Lysander. So why the hell did they make Berke Lysander when they’d set up the whole story for him to end up with Kelly?! Surely starting out with both Striker and Berke in love with Allison, but Allison running off with Striker is a PERFECT set up for both Lysander and Demetrius being in love with Hermia, but Hermia being forced to marry Demetrius by her father?!?!?! In the end, Berke ends up with Kelly just as Demetrius ends up with Helena. So why the hell was Berke playing Lysander?!?!? (and don’t even get me started on ignoring the other plots — Oberon and Titania, and the play of Bottom and his friends)

It just makes no sense. The actual story is okay, but there’s so little point to the shakespeare sub plot.

Well….yes.

Some of the acting, at least, is pretty good. In particular, Kirsten Dunst presented a convincing Kelly/Helena. The casting, however, turned out to be confusing from a Weston point of view, though of course that’s nobody’s fault. It was hard for me to remember that it was Dunst who was playing Helena and Melissa Sagemiller who was playing Hermia: Sagemiller looks more like Katherine Donahue, who played Helena at Weston, and Dunst looks more like Anna Been, who played Hermia at Weston, so that’s how I think of the two roles now.

I’m not convinced that I should see all of them. I’m not even convinced that I should see any of them, except maybe Slumdog Millionaire. What do you think?

I’m sure everybody knows the plot by this point, but I’ll still stay away from spoilers in these brief comments. My major observation is that all of the actors were entirely convincing in their portrayals of various teens and adults, most notably Ellen Page as Juno, who kept reminding me of various Weston students of mine. [...]]]> Last night’s New Year’s Eve festivities included watching Juno, which neither Barbara nor I had seen before, even though it was released over a year ago. On the basis of reviews and personal recommendations, I had expected to like this movie. It exceeded my expectations.

I’m sure everybody knows the plot by this point, but I’ll still stay away from spoilers in these brief comments. My major observation is that all of the actors were entirely convincing in their portrayals of various teens and adults, most notably Ellen Page as Juno, who kept reminding me of various Weston students of mine. No students in particular, I hasten to add — just different generic students at different points. J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney were much more genuine than the parents in the typical movie about teenagers, although I kept being distracted because I knew I had seen Simmons before but couldn’t remember where (I’m not good at actors). When I looked him up, I discovered that he plays Dr. Skoda, who appears off and on as the consulting psychiatrist in Law and Order; the temperaments of the two characters are almost identical, thus reinforcing the distraction. Also, Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman were effective (if a bit creepy) in their roles as the soon-to-be adoptive parents.

Early in 2008 there was some chatter about whether Juno glamorizes and therefore encourages teenager pregnancy. Frankly, I don’t see it. Admittedly, Juno isn’t portrayed as a bad kid, as the right-wingers would prefer; she doesn’t suffer much for her mistake, and her friends and family are all accepting of her. But that doesn’t mean that the movie glamorizes pregnancy, and since Juno immediately decides to have the baby adopted, it shouldn’t encourage the standard worry among adults that a girl will want to get pregnant in order to have a baby who will love her. In fact, since neither Juno nor her family is dysfunctional, what we have here is simply a straightforward tale of how a normal (if rather counterculture) teenager grows up and interacts with adults and with other kids. It’s well worth seeing, just for the quality of the acting if nothing else — but it’s also worth seeing because it’s such a refreshing and captivating story.

I’ll have to ask my student who recently moved to Weston from Minnesota about St. Cloud, where the adoptive parents live in the movie. The director portrays it as a lot like Weston.

Addendum at 8:10 PM:
I wrote the above earlier in the day. But now I’ve just finished watching the first Greater Boston of the year on WGBH, a retrospective of 2008. Emily Rooney’s guest Dan Kelly (identified just as “attorney”) made the following remarks in connection with the supposed but unproved pregnancy pact among girls at Gloucester High School:

The message of all this is not that more birth control is the answer. The message is that Time Magazine picked up on the bandwagon of sensationalizing teen pregnancy, and that bandwagon is out there because of Britney Spears’ sister pronouncing how wonderful it is to be a teen and to be pregnant… The Juno movie, the Juno effect. The Juno movie in a lot of ways was a great movie from my perspective because it showed the dignity of a human life before it’s born. It’s a pro-life movie and it sends a wonderful message to kids. But it also is a movie that glorifies teen pregnancy to some extent. To say that there will not be that many side-effects, that you can get through it, that it is not such a colossally terrible thing, and it also glorifies in some respects teen sex, although I think the message of that movie is that teens are not prepared to have sex and should not be having sex.

This analysis is just plain wrong. The movie doesn’t glorify teen pregnancy, and it doesn’t send a message. It’s not a political document. It’s a story, a work of art, which presents a group of characters and deals with the internal and external conflicts of the main one, just as stories usually do.

So now I’ve watched it, with help from Netflix, which coincidentally delivered the DVD on Erdős’s birthday! This really was a genuine coincidence, since I had put it in my queue a couple of months ago with no idea when [...]]]> I mentioned two days ago that I was going to watch N is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdős, a documentary that had been enthusiastically recommended to me by my former student, Kelly Mathislife. She writes that N is a Number is the “best movie ever” — although she does admit to a slight bias since Erdős is her hero.

So now I’ve watched it, with help from Netflix, which coincidentally delivered the DVD on Erdős’s birthday! This really was a genuine coincidence, since I had put it in my queue a couple of months ago with no idea when it would rise to #1. Anyway, Kelly knows that I certainly intend no disrespect toward her when I point out that of course she was exaggerating; N is a Number isn’t quite the “best movie ever.” It isn’t even even the best documentary ever. But it’s definitely a well-made, captivating documentary that should be watched by every math teacher, math student, and mathematician. It becomes totally clear that Erdős meets Paul Graham’s criteria that I discussed two days ago: absolute honesty and caring obsessively about his work.

Erdős, who died 12 years ago at age 83, was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th Century and certainly the most prolific; he is best known for his peripatetic life style, having had no fixed abode and collaborating extensively with hundreds of other mathematicians wherever he traveled. The movie is successful at vividly letting the viewer know the kind of person Erdős was, portraying him in person and through the eyes of his collaborators. Fortunately the filmmakers were willing to use subtitles extensively, since the accents of various Hungarian mathematicians (and others) could get in the way of ready understanding, even though almost everyone in the documentary was speaking English. As a math teacher, I thought there was a bit too much of an emphasis on anecdotes, but that’s a small cavil; I use anecdotes myself in similar ways, and I recognize that it’s the best way for the film to appeal to a general audience, who wouldn’t want to watch or listen to lots of mathematics.

I want to quote a couple of snippets out of N is a Number. One comes from Ron Graham — another Graham! but no relation to the aforementioned Paul Graham, as far as I know — who has a major role in the movie:

When mathematics appears in print, it’s theorem, proof, theorem, proof, but when we’re doing math it’s a completely different thing. It’s three or four people sitting around with cups of coffee, a pad of paper, throwing ideas back and forth, making a lot of conjectures, most of which turn out to be completely false. 

That’s what should happen from time to time in our math classes, but it almost never does, even at Weston, except in last year’s Friday-afternoon optional after-school math get-togethers.

The other snippet comes from Erdős himself:

We’re trying to read the pages of The Book. We don’t create mathematics, we’re just trying to read the pages of The Book. 

How Platonist can you get? This is clearly the right attitude toward the mathematical endeavor!