As reported on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday this morning, we will be observing International Dadaism Month for a short month consisting of only 13 days: 4 February, 1 April, 28 March, 15 July, 2 August, 7 August, 16 August, 26… Read More ›
Month: December 2005
From David Allen
Two quotations (from David Allen’s newsletter): A task left undone remains undone in two places — at the actual location of the task, and inside your head. Incomplete tasks in your head consume the energy of your attention as they… Read More ›
Worth a detour
Despite the general lack of excitement in Elmira, it does boast two great attractions: the Arnot Art Museum and the Chemung Valley History Museum. Walking into the history museum, I was immediately taken aback by being offered the senior citizens’… Read More ›
Hotel or B&B?
When we go to Elmira (see yesterday’s post), Barbara and I usually stay at the Hilton Garden Inn in Horseheads. (Yes, you heard that right: Horseheads.) Like any of the low-end Hiltons, it is boring, predictable, and perfectly adequate. So… Read More ›
Sunny Elmira
Here I am, enjoying my vacation in the tropical paradise of Elmira, New York. No, wait! I must be thinking of someplace else. Elmira isn’t a tropical paradise — it’s a cosmopolitan urban center with hundreds of exciting cultural opportunities… Read More ›
The goal of all creative activity (including math?)
From Mark Bernstein: …the goal of a Web site must ultimately be, quite simply, to make people think. Even simple sales sites aspire not simply to gain an order, but rather to gain a customer — and to change the… Read More ›
Wikipedia's virtues
There has been a flurry of attacks on one of the most useful sites on the Internet: the Wikipedia. It’s the source that I recommend most often for math and computer science. But students tell me that it’s disparaged by… Read More ›
The night before solstice
’Twas the last day for this session’s Saturday Course. The “On Stage” class performed James Finn Garner’s very amusing “’Twas the Night before Solstice,” which begins as follows: Twas the night before solstice and all through the co-opNot a creature… Read More ›
Highlighting considered harmful?
As our students were reading silently (see yesterday’s post), teachers were strongly encouraged to model the process by silently reading the same book along with the students. We were meeting in homerooms — eleven or twelve students per teacher —… Read More ›
Silent reading: The first day
As I described in my post of November 3, Weston High School is currently engaged in a school-wide interdisciplinary project: reading Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains and integrating it into every course in every subject. The integrating will happen in… Read More ›
A linguistic exercise
My favorite linguistics blogger, the Tensor, reports an interesting exercise that was held in one of his classes: …the professor had us do a little exercise: sit down with a piece of paper and name as many [living] languages as… Read More ›
Too funny
A parody of one of those pharmaceutical-company ads for a prescription medicine. A Japanese documentary on how to eat sushi.
Peers
From Diane Greco’s fascinating December 8 post in her blog: The assumption that children of the same age constitute a true peer group only holds true for children of average development. The term peer does not, in essence, mean people… Read More ›
Mercury Rising
Just finished watching Mercury Rising. Cryptology and the NSA. An autistic boy. Bruce Willis. Alec Baldwin. Generally good acting. What more could one want? Well, characterization and depth, to name two. More cryptology. More NSA. Less conspiracy theory. Generally a… Read More ›
No snow day
Weston, of course, had to have school today. Having a snow day would have been too wimpy. You can’t be Lake Wobegon if you call off school. We didn’t even get dismissed at mid-day, although the forecast correctly predicted a… Read More ›
Critical friends
At yesterday’s faculty meeting, a group of teachers modeled the process of participating in a Critical Friends Group (CFG) in the context of Looking at Student Work (LASW). If you can get through the jargon, the combination of CFG and… Read More ›
PopCo revisited
In the past two weeks I haven’t had as much time to read as I would like. I’m woefully behind on the Globe, and it’s only today that I’ve finally finished reading PopCo. In my post of 11/23, I gave… Read More ›
"Units" and "unit tests"?
The other day we were talking about “summative assessments.”. In math a summative assessment usually translates to a unit test. But what about those of us who don’t give unit tests? About seven years ago, the Weston Math Department reformed… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 