I’m sure that you’re motivated to read Paolo Bacigalupi’s first novel, The Windup Girl, because it was named by TIME Magazine as one of the ten best novels of 2009, and also won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell… Read More ›
Month: April 2012
New England Math Playoffs
Congratulations to the Weston High School Math Team for their strong showing in the New England Math Playoffs! We finished seventh among all the medium-sized high schools in New England. Special congratulations are due to sophomore William Kretschmer, who achieved… Read More ›
The Drop
Six years ago I reviewed Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer ; I’ve read several other books by Connelly before or since, and I highly recommend them. In recent years I’ve read The Overlook, The Narrows, Lost Light, The Poet, Blood Work,… Read More ›
Food Matters
Mark Bittman is not Michael Pollan, though they have some things in common. Bittman’s book, with the deliberately ambiguous title of Food Matters, is quite different from his standard fare. Bittman is best known for his cookbooks (and his appearances as… Read More ›
Michael Robertson’s Baker Street mysteries
As you know, the authentic Sherlock Holmes stories were written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. You may or may not know that there are also two different types of Sherlock Holmes stories that were not written by him. One type —… Read More ›
How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
For our last movie of the vacation, Barbara and I watched How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, a British comedy from 2008. Being all about celebrities and Vanity Fair magazine, it is not really my cup of tea, though… Read More ›
Two very different IMAX films about nature
For the last weekday of vacation, I spent the entire afternoon at the Museum of Science, including watching two IMAX films. The verdict is thumbs down for Tornado Alley, thumbs up for To the Arctic. So what’s wrong with Tornado… Read More ›
Franklin Park Zoo
Spent a lovely morning walking around the Franklin Park Zoo today. I started with the zebra and the aptly named wildebeests, who were running around like…well, like wildebeests, dashing from one end of their huge enclosure all the way to… Read More ›
Children of Men
Wow! What an amazing movie! Just don’t see it if you want to be cheered up. Its tagline — “No children. No future. No hope.” — rather gives that away. This 2006 film is an impressively well-made dystopian vision of the… Read More ›
The Elfish Gene
This is a rather unusual but definitely interesting book. The full title of Mark Barrowcliffe’s book is The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange, and that pretty much captures it. Barrowcliffe grew up as a geek/nerd in England in the ’70s, and… Read More ›
Radical Equations and related matters
A couple of years ago I got around to re-reading Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project, by civil-rights activist/math teacher Robert Moses. Just now I realized an interesting resonance with the post I wrote last week about… Read More ›
Everyone who wants to do so should be able to take honors-level courses…right?
Yesterday afternoon, one of my students was hanging out in the Math Office after school and started chatting with me and another teacher about a concern of hers: why was it so difficult to override a teacher’s recommendation and take… Read More ›
Black Diamond
Black Diamond, by Martin Walker, is the third novel in a series of deceptively quiet mysteries taking place in the Perigord region of France. The scene is St. Denis, a small town where Chief of Police Bruno Courrèges is actually the only… Read More ›
Gentleman's Agreement
A theme seems to be developing here. This is yet another post about a movie that was produced before I was born (though in this case not actually released until shortly after I was born). Gentleman’s Agreement is an effective but… Read More ›
Divorce, Italian Style
Another old movie here — if a film released 51 years ago counts as “old.” I just saw Divorce, Italian Style for the first time, having missed it back in 1961 (when I would have been too young for it… Read More ›
From Elvish to Klingon
I know what you were thinking as soon as you saw this title. I can read your mind, so I know that you were thinking something like this: This is obviously a fluffy but nerdy book. It must be a tongue-in-cheek,… Read More ›
"Some of our students objectively can’t learn algebra."
No, of course I wasn’t the one who said that. It comes from a petition signed by 14 of Palo Alto High School’s 20 math teachers, listed by name (!) in a blog post by Dan Meyer, who is always… Read More ›
Denise Mina
So far I have read seven novels by Denise Mina: Garnethill, Deception, Still Midnight, Slip of the Knife, The Dead Hour, Field of Blood, and The End of the Wasp Season. Can you tell that I like the work of… Read More ›
The Journal of Best Practices: A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man's Quest to be a Better Husband
In keeping with the current trend of giving books excessively long titles, this memoir by David Finch tries to pack as much as possible into 19 words. But the title still raises more questions than it answers — and that’s… Read More ›
Swing Time
I’m slowly catching up on some movies that were produced before I was born. One of these was Swing Time (1936), a musical starring the inimitable Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, with music by Jerome Kern. As is common in early musicals, there’s… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 