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 ›
Month: April 2012
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 ›
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