How timely can you be? Martin Walker’s latest novel in his “Bruno, Chief of Police” series takes a darker turn. I wrote about these books twice before in this blog: First, of course, came the initial effort, and even then I… Read More ›
Month: November 2015
Thanksgiving Haggadah? Yes, a Thanksgiving Haggadah!
So you’ve never heard of a Thanksgiving Haggadah? Clearly you have never participated in a Thanksgiving dinner at my sister’s house! And you didn’t read my account of the one held ten years ago, since you weren’t reading this blog at… Read More ›
BiblioTech
What an exciting book! “Surely you jest,” you say. “An exciting book about libraries? That’s an oxymoron!” Well, OK, maybe not quite exciting. But it’s a fine book that has a lot of important things to say and will stimulate your… Read More ›
No comment.
One of my students has this sticker on the cover of his laptop: No comment.
Overparenting
Take a minute to listen to Stanford’s Dean of Freshmen, Julie Lythcott-Haims: Incoming students are brilliant and accomplished and virtually flawless, on paper. But with each year, more of them seem incapable of taking care of themselves. At the same time, parents… Read More ›
What shaped your views on inequality? What shaped mine?
Did your school shape your views on inequality? Probably so, according to Carla Shedd. A recent NPR report by Meg Anderson concludes that students at racially diverse schools, particularly black and Hispanic students, are more tuned in to injustice than students going… Read More ›
On the Razzle
Tom Stoppard’s On the Razzle was this fall’s production of the Weston High School Theatre Company. Wikipedia’s one-sentence characterization is as good as any: Stoppard’s farce consists of two hours of slapstick shenanigans, mistaken identities, misdirected orders, malapropisms, double entendres, and romantic… Read More ›
Why Morocco?
I was just looking at the stats for this blog, and I was surprised to notice that the second-largest number of my readers come from…Morocco. Why Morocco? A quick search shows that I’ve mentioned Morocco only once ever in the… Read More ›
MoS FT
Today we took 200 high-school freshmen on a full-day combined geometry-and-physics field trip to the Museum of Science. It was fun, educational, and…exhausting. Sometimes it was like herding cats. Fortunately we had a dozen adults, so no one individual was responsible… Read More ›
Is the Quadratic Formula worth it?
There’s something warm and comforting about the old, reliable Quadratic Formula (QF). You can plug the parameters of any quadratic equation into it, do a little calculating, and easily come up with the correct answer(s). Simple, right? No, actually, it’s not… Read More ›
It’s a matter of fact, not a matter of opinion: it’s science!
No, I’m not going to bring up the old misguided debate about putting one or two spaces after a period. That’s because it isn’t a debate. It’s an empirical matter: do you believe the evidence, or do you want to continue… Read More ›
Write like you talk. Or not. As the case may be.
Paul Graham has some advice for us: Here’s a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language. That’s definitely not what your typical English teacher tells us. Writing and speaking are distinct and… Read More ›
Communicating with students
Sam Shah, math teacher extraordinaire from Brooklyn, has recently written a useful post about getting information from students. Like many of us, he begins the year by asking his students to write something about themselves. In my own classes this… Read More ›
Does a cat fit in a shoebox?
“I know I can fit into this shoebox,” says William, “but my leg and my tail aren’t cooperating and have to poke through.”
Einstein’s Dreams
What a mystifying play! Yesterday I went to see Einstein’s Dreams at the Central Square Theater, and I wish I brought Dr. Korsunsky along so that he could have explained the physics to me. A year of honors physics in high school was… Read More ›
No problem.
Kudos to “Miss Conduct” in today’s Boston Globe for her scientifically and morally correct answer to a reader’s question about language. A reader from East Falmouth had written in with the following question: When I thank waitstaff or some other… Read More ›
Flowering Judas
For some reason it has been nine years since I’ve reviewed a Jane Haddam novel, despite the fact that I’ve read and enjoyed almost all of the 25 or so books in her Gregor Demarkian mystery series. Flowering Judas is the most recent;… Read More ›
We’ve discussed this before, but…
…I can’t resist returning to the topic. You know what I mean. Please read the entire post in today’s Math with Bad Drawings. It won’t take you long. Then, as an exercise for the reader, think about two of the drawings in… Read More ›
“All students are expected to attend detention.”
Announcement I just noticed on the school’s closed-circuit TV: “All students are expected to attend detention.” Hmmm….
Cut scores: What are they, and why do we care?
“Cut scores”? That certainly sounds like esoteric jargon, doesn’t it? But it turns out to be an important concept, even if the general public doesn’t know the phrase. Whenever we scale a test to convert raw scores to scaled scores, we… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 