What a promising book! My Stroke of Insight is an initially interesting but ultimately irritating work of non-fiction by Jill Bolte Taylor; I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by the author herself. The promise is that Dr. Taylor, a brain scientist… Read More ›
Month: August 2016
Desmos Redux
We had a productive workshop today, identifying and developing materials for using Desmos — primarily, but not exclusively, in Algebra 2 and Precalc 2. There are at least two different ways to use Desmos: as a graphing calculator that’s much better than… Read More ›
I’ll Have What Phil’s Having
Completely inadvertently, I ended up watching two episodes of I’ll Have What Phil’s Having last night. I had never even heard of the show before, but it instantly hooked me when I saw the shot of the piazza in Panicale, a small hilltown (half… Read More ›
Lingo: Around Europe in sixty languages
An informal and totally unscientific poll tells me that most people don’t realize that there are 60 languages in Europe; they are certainly surprised to hear that actually there are considerably more than 60. Dutch linguist Gaston Dorren has written a slightly flawed… Read More ›
Dark Matter
“Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.” Right? This definition, as I’m sure you know ☺, is the opening sentence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a great work that I read at least twice, beginning back in college and then again… Read More ›
Introverted teachers
INTJ … What’s wrong with being an introvert? Nothing, of course. Nothing, that is, unless you buy into the dominant American value: extraversion good, introversion bad. I wasn’t even conscious that that was an American value until I had already been… Read More ›
Do you need help with Ulysses ? Of course you do.
J.D. Biersdorfer knows what she’s talking about: It’s O.K. to admit it: You tried to read James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and ended up chucking the thing aside in frustration. You are not alone. According to her letters, Virginia Woolf (“Never did I… Read More ›
Wilkes-Barre
Wilkes-Barre, PA, the garden spot of the universe! Well … no. But at least it’s Joe Biden’s home town, so I guess that’s something. Not that it has anything to do with why we were there. After I was finished with… Read More ›
Hollywood in Dorchester
What is an old Detroit police car doing on Ashmont Street in Dorchester? The answer, of course, is that they’re making a movie … and 2016 Dorchester is apparently a perfect stand-in for 1967 Detroit: The movie, which is directed… Read More ›
Playing with Fire
You probably think of Tess Gerritsen as the competent author of interesting genre novels featuring Rizzoli and Isles. Usually, after all, that’s exactly what she is. But Playing with Fire is something very different: part serious mainstream literature, part historical fiction, part… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 