Recent Posts

  • The long hiatus is over.

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    Resuming my blog after a hiatus of too many months — eight, in fact! — so, stay tuned!

  • Dare Me and Exit, Pursued by a Bear

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    “Exit, Pursued by a Bear.” Hmmm… where have I heard that before? It sounded like a Shakespearean stage direction, and it seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it… so of course I looked it up. I’ll save you the trouble: it’s… Read More ›

  • Bullying Three Ways

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    I originally started drafting this post well before last night’s presidential debate and the follow-up by Van Jones, but these events have slightly rearranged what I need to say. This thread actually started on September 27 with four talks (to different… Read More ›

  • Too Like the Lightning

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    It’s definitely necessary to avoid spoilers on this one. Ada Palmer’s dark novel, Too Like the Lightning, is partly fantasy, mostly science fiction, and completely fascinating. Oh, did I mention philosophy? It’s clearly a work of philosophy as well. And sociology/anthropology. And a… Read More ›

  • For the win!

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    What a great start for the Weston High School Math Team! In our first Massachusetts Math League meet of the year, our goal was a simple one: to beat Canton. Simple, but definitely not easy, as it almost never happens. And beat Canton… Read More ›

  • Station Eleven

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    Is Station Eleven a post-apocalyptic survival novel? Well, yes, in a way. Is it science fiction? Well, yes, in a way. But it’s not really either of these. In a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards, Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel has… Read More ›

  • My Stroke of Insight

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    What a promising book! My Stroke of Insight is an initially interesting but ultimately irritating work of non-fiction by Jill Bolte Taylor; I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by the author herself. The promise is that Dr. Taylor, a brain scientist… Read More ›

  • Desmos Redux

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    We had a productive workshop today, identifying and developing materials for using Desmos — primarily, but not exclusively, in Algebra 2 and Precalc 2.  There are at least two different ways to use Desmos: as a graphing calculator that’s much better than… Read More ›

  • I’ll Have What Phil’s Having

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    Completely inadvertently, I ended up watching two episodes of I’ll Have What Phil’s Having last night. I had never even heard of the show before, but it instantly hooked me when I saw the shot of the piazza in Panicale, a small hilltown (half… Read More ›