If you know Connie Willis at all, you probably think of her as a science fiction author. I just finished reading her 1997 novel Bellwether, and indeed it was marketed as science fiction; it even was nominated for a Nebula Award!… Read More ›
Month: January 2013
We’re adults…but sometimes we’re still in high school.
Just to put this in context, you will want to know that my friend Mark Bernstein is the Chief Scientist of Eastgate Systems, with an undergraduate degree from Swarthmore and a doctorate in chemistry from Harvard. He knew Aaron Swartz; I… Read More ›
Transit maps TED talk!
I suppose it’s possible that you don’t share my passion for transit maps. That might be hard to believe, but I admit that it’s possible. Whether you love transit maps or not, you still need to watch Aris Ventikidis’s first-rate (and… Read More ›
Monk
For some reason I have never watched any of the Monk television shows. But I’ve read a couple of the short stories about Adrian Monk, all written by Lee Goldberg — who was the writer of the three of the… Read More ›
Professional development
Yesterday, while our students were enjoying their last day of a four-day weekend, it was a regular workday for teachers. Well, actually, “regular” isn’t quite the right word. We did have a full day of work, but of course there… Read More ›
An Egyptian cartoon…not
I was just flipping through a Middle Egyptian textbook that I had bought at a used book store last year (not to be confused with a used bookstore), and I came across this cartoon drawn by an unknown previous owner… Read More ›
Reamde
Where do I start? How do I write a post about a thousand-page epic? Clearly I can’t do it justice, so I won’t even try to write more a single paragraph. Reamde (not a typo) is a sprawling Neal Stephenson novel about massively multiplayer… Read More ›
Douglas is so helpful.
Here’s Douglas, helping me grade geometry quizzes:
The Universe in Zero Words
Well…not really zero words…closer to 100,000, in fact. But the main point of Dana Mackenzie’s beautiful book about beautiful mathematics is his combination of illustrations, numbers, and the equations relating those numbers to each other. Essentially, The Universe in Zero… Read More ›
Make Just One Change
I dunno. In this book, Make Just One Change, authors Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana try passionately to make a compelling case for their view that education can be transformed by making “just one change”: teaching students “to ask their own… Read More ›