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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

  • Calculus limericks?

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    I can’t resist quoting from Rudbeckia Hirta’s post in her blog today: I have been dared by one of my colleagues to write one of the questions on my calculus exam in the form of a limerick. This is especially… Read More ›

  • Getting things done

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    For several months now, I’ve been determined to implement some version of David Allen’s compelling Getting Thing Done. His book by that title was one of those rare self-help books that immediately grabbed my attention and thoroughly convinced me that… Read More ›

  • Graphic organizers

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    Many high-school teachers believe that so-called graphic organizers are helpful to students. Readers who are my age may wonder what a graphic organizer is. According to the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, a graphic organizer is an instructional tool used… Read More ›

  • dbar

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    Dorchester is actually getting some high-quality restaurants. A couple of years ago, the Blarney Stone in Fields Corner transformed itself from a typical Irish pub to an excellent restaurant. The new C.F. Donovan’s in Savin Hill serves inexpensive but reliably… Read More ›

  • Who buys lottery tickets?

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    Try doing a Google search on the pair of phrases “lottery tickets” “tax on the poor”; you’ll find surprisingly few hits. Change poor to stupid and you’ll collect a few more hits, but still only 507 (at this moment). I’ve… Read More ›

  • Pre-fix

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    One of my precalculus students (or is it the hyphenated pre-calculus?) thought that he was studying calculus. He figured that precalculus was a kind of calculus, just as differential calculus is a kind of calculus. What does that prefix “pre-”… Read More ›

  • Numbers and Palindromes

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    Numbers and Palindromes. No, not numbers that are palindromes: Numbers and Palindromes, the television show and the movie. I wrote about Numbers six months ago; at that point I had only seen three episodes, and it would have been premature… Read More ›

  • Identifying a language

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    I was excited to read about Xerox’s Language Guesser. If you can’t identify a sentence in a foreign language, just paste the sentence into their convenient type-in field, and the intelligent Xerox software will correctly guess the language. Sounds like… Read More ›

  • What's wrong with this problem?

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    The problem below comes from the Education Records Bureau’s Independent School Entrance Examination (ISEE) for middle school students. How many things can you find wrong with it? Thanks for Thane Plambeck for the pointer.

  • Pi

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    Listen closely…

  • Another B&B

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    Just got back from Narragansett, RI, where we attended the wedding of two of my former students. They became high-school sweethearts ten or eleven years ago, and now they’re married! And so we have another B&B to report on (see… Read More ›

  • Dadaism lives

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    As reported on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday this morning, we will be observing International Dadaism Month for a short month consisting of only 13 days: 4 February, 1 April, 28 March, 15 July, 2 August, 7 August, 16 August, 26… Read More ›

  • From David Allen

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    Two quotations (from David Allen’s newsletter): A task left undone remains undone in two places — at the actual location of the task, and inside your head. Incomplete tasks in your head consume the energy of your attention as they… Read More ›

  • Worth a detour

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    Despite the general lack of excitement in Elmira, it does boast two great attractions: the Arnot Art Museum and the Chemung Valley History Museum. Walking into the history museum, I was immediately taken aback by being offered the senior citizens’… Read More ›

  • Hotel or B&B?

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    When we go to Elmira (see yesterday’s post), Barbara and I usually stay at the Hilton Garden Inn in Horseheads. (Yes, you heard that right: Horseheads.) Like any of the low-end Hiltons, it is boring, predictable, and perfectly adequate. So… Read More ›

  • Sunny Elmira

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    Here I am, enjoying my vacation in the tropical paradise of Elmira, New York. No, wait! I must be thinking of someplace else. Elmira isn’t a tropical paradise — it’s a cosmopolitan urban center with hundreds of exciting cultural opportunities… Read More ›

  • The goal of all creative activity (including math?)

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    From Mark Bernstein: …the goal of a Web site must ultimately be, quite simply, to make people think. Even simple sales sites aspire not simply to gain an order, but rather to gain a customer — and to change the… Read More ›

  • Does Santa work for Bush?

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  • Wikipedia's virtues

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    There has been a flurry of attacks on one of the most useful sites on the Internet: the Wikipedia. It’s the source that I recommend most often for math and computer science. But students tell me that it’s disparaged by… Read More ›

  • The night before solstice

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    ’Twas the last day for this session’s Saturday Course. The “On Stage” class performed James Finn Garner’s very amusing “’Twas the Night before Solstice,” which begins as follows: Twas the night before solstice and all through the co-opNot a creature… Read More ›