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In 2018 I semi-retired by retiring from Weston High School after my 21st year teaching mathematics there. This was also my 44th year as a teacher altogether. In 2023 I retired fully, adding in my 18 years at Harvard’s Crimson Summer Academy each summer. For 21 years I had taught at the Saturday Course in Milton, MA, and I used to serve on the board of the Dorchester Historical Society.

I read, cook, and spend a lot of time building my model railroad. For some reason I’m left with less free time than would be ideal, considering that I’m supposed to be retired, but somehow I also manage to devote time to my wife, Barbara, and to our varying number of cats (once up to six, but now sadly down to one).

Larry Davidson
ljd@larrydavidson.com

  • Dot chili cookoff (post-)

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    I wrote earlier about the Dorchester Chili Cookoff, a fundraiser for the Mayor of Dorchester/Dorchester Day Parade. It turned out to be a good experience, but with some flaws. Ten or eleven neighborhoods contributed entries, and IMHO the winner was… Read More ›

  • But we're only a mile from Dorchester!

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    At the Saturday Course in Milton — frequently mentioned in this blog — we teach students from many different cities and towns, including Milton itself and Boston. So we were wondering why we don’t have a more diverse student body,… Read More ›

  • My Favorite Year (I)

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    I finally watched My Favorite Year, in anticipation of Weston High School’s production of the musical version of this classic 1982 film. A slightly disguised roman à clef about Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar, and Errol Flynn, this movie manages to… Read More ›

  • Dot chili cookoff (pre-)

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    “What does this mean?” a local realtor asked Barbara, pointing to a “Craig Galvin for Mayor of Dorchester” sign. “Dorchester is part of the city of Boston; it doesn’t have its own mayor!” So Barbara patiently explained that although there… Read More ›

  • How Doctors Think

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    After a few weeks in the Minuteman Library Network queue, Jerome Groopman’s recently published book, How Doctors Think, finally became available, so I promptly checked it out and checked it out. It lives up to its publicity, though the brief… Read More ›

  • Her students don't know how to work with percents!

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    Rudbeckia Hirta reports that her college students don’t know how to work with percents. I would like to say I’m surprised. I would like to say that all Weston High School students know how to work with percents. I would… Read More ›

  • An Inconvenient Truth

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    As I reported yesterday, part of Weston High School’s Earth Day observances was a screening of An Inconvenient Truth. This event was attended by everyone — students and teachers alike. (Almost everyone, actually. A few kids skipped out, and some… Read More ›

  • Earth Day in Weston

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    We observed Earth Day today at Weston High School (since the real Earth Day will come right after April vacation). Classes were shortened to 55 minutes to allow time for a screening of An Inconvenient Truth, and we had guest… Read More ›

  • The City of Falling Angels

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    Continuing my inadvertent theme of reading books with a strong sense of place, I just finished The City of Falling Angels, by John Berendt of Midnight in the Garden or Good and Evil fame. In this case it’s not a… Read More ›

  • The various crafts of model railroading

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    What is model railroading? Sure, it’s a hobby, but all sorts of disparate activities are admitted into the big hobby tent; some are sports, some are arts, some are crafts. All of them are leisure activities that one does for… Read More ›

  • The Children of Room E4

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    In my post of February 23, I quoted from an NPR interview with Susan Eaton and said, “I’ll have to read the book.” Not surprisingly, I wasn’t the first in the queue for a library copy of The Children in… Read More ›

  • The Shape of Space

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    Consider what we teach in high-school geometry: There’s a lot of content from various two-dimensional topics, such as congruence, similarity, angles, polygons, and area. Much of this rehashes what was already done in middle school, though (we hope) in greater… Read More ›

  • Mifune

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    Had lunch on Saturday at the newly opened Mifune in Arlington Center — despite the fact that a review on Yelp claims that they didn’t open until Monday. Here’s what the reviewer says, dated today, with a few irrelevancies omitted:… Read More ›

  • Ice Chips

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    Barbara and I spent an enjoyable afternoon yesterday at the annual Ice Chips show in Boston (not Cambridge, even though the arena is on the extended Harvard campus). The “special guest star” was Sasha Cohen, but we went primarily to… Read More ›

  • Non-violent video games?

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    My Saturday Course students are designing and programming their own video games. These fifth-graders participate in an intensive introduction to programming, but their “Create Your Own Computer Game” course is also billed as a class in which kids create their… Read More ›

  • Meridian Academy photo show

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    A small but excellent exhibit of photographs by middle-school students at Jamaica Plain’s Meridian Academy was on display for the past two weeks at the JP Art Market. The official description read as follows: Meridian Academy students will show their… Read More ›

  • Math is hard at the Home Despot

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    On the way home from work yesterday, I stopped at the local Home Despot — er, I mean Home Depot — in South Bay in Dorchester, in order to buy some plywood. I picked out a nice sheet, measuring the… Read More ›

  • A Perfect Mess

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    I’ve just read a fascinating book entitled A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder — How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place, by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman. If you’ve ever… Read More ›

  • Roxbury? Perhaps Dorchester? But Back Bay????

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    Check out the website for 1010 Mass Ave in Boston: This six-story building is located at 1010 Massachusetts Avenue in Boston and offers 220,770 square feet of prime office space. Located in Boston’s Back Bay, 1010 Mass Ave is within… Read More ›

  • The Plot Against America

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    I just finished reading Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. This highly fictionalized autobiography is actually an alternative history, based on the postulate that the Republican convention in 1940 was deadlocked and drafted Charles Lindbergh by acclamation. Lindbergh goes on… Read More ›