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 ›
Learning Strategies 