Author Archives
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
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Highlighting considered harmful?
As our students were reading silently (see yesterday’s post), teachers were strongly encouraged to model the process by silently reading the same book along with the students. We were meeting in homerooms — eleven or twelve students per teacher —… Read More ›
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Silent reading: The first day
As I described in my post of November 3, Weston High School is currently engaged in a school-wide interdisciplinary project: reading Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains and integrating it into every course in every subject. The integrating will happen in… Read More ›
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A linguistic exercise
My favorite linguistics blogger, the Tensor, reports an interesting exercise that was held in one of his classes: …the professor had us do a little exercise: sit down with a piece of paper and name as many [living] languages as… Read More ›
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Too funny
A parody of one of those pharmaceutical-company ads for a prescription medicine. A Japanese documentary on how to eat sushi.
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Peers
From Diane Greco’s fascinating December 8 post in her blog: The assumption that children of the same age constitute a true peer group only holds true for children of average development. The term peer does not, in essence, mean people… Read More ›
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Mercury Rising
Just finished watching Mercury Rising. Cryptology and the NSA. An autistic boy. Bruce Willis. Alec Baldwin. Generally good acting. What more could one want? Well, characterization and depth, to name two. More cryptology. More NSA. Less conspiracy theory. Generally a… Read More ›
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No snow day
Weston, of course, had to have school today. Having a snow day would have been too wimpy. You can’t be Lake Wobegon if you call off school. We didn’t even get dismissed at mid-day, although the forecast correctly predicted a… Read More ›
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Critical friends
At yesterday’s faculty meeting, a group of teachers modeled the process of participating in a Critical Friends Group (CFG) in the context of Looking at Student Work (LASW). If you can get through the jargon, the combination of CFG and… Read More ›
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PopCo revisited
In the past two weeks I haven’t had as much time to read as I would like. I’m woefully behind on the Globe, and it’s only today that I’ve finally finished reading PopCo. In my post of 11/23, I gave… Read More ›
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"Units" and "unit tests"?
The other day we were talking about “summative assessments.”. In math a summative assessment usually translates to a unit test. But what about those of us who don’t give unit tests? About seven years ago, the Weston Math Department reformed… Read More ›
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Grading on a curve
In her latest post on Learning Curves, Rudbeckia Hirta describes two methods of grading: Around here there are two schools of thought for grading calculus classes: straight percentages or curving the grades. I favor the former with each letter grade… Read More ›
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Dimensional analysis
On tonight’s All Things Considered on NPR, Congressman Mike Sodrel (Republican of Indiana) says: The information that I get is, like most of my constituents, one-dimensional: it’s flat screen, flat paper. I wanted to see it 3-D.
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Student rights
Students in public high schools and middle schools should know their legal rights — as well as the risks they may be taking when attempting to exercise their rights. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an excellent FAQ on the subject…. Read More ›
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Vegan firefighters and Starbucks coffee
It’s a good thing to break stereotypes every now and again. Vegan firefighters? Sounds unlikely. Vegan Texans? Also sounds unlikely. Now we have a vegan firehouse in Texas! They started out as flexitarians, but became vegans over the course of… Read More ›
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Silber sees the light
Apparently I missed this direct quote from John Silber last month: I don’t believe in one-man rule.
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A half-Chinese Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving dinner was a bit unusual this year. As always, we went to my sister’s house in Somerville — nothing unusual about that. But why was so much of the conversation in Chinese? Let’s see… You first need to know… Read More ›
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A college perspective
Check out two fascinating posts — one yesterday, one today — from the pseudonymous Rudbeckia Hirta. Both of them lament the state of mathematical knowledge of college freshmen and ask what we high-school teachers are teaching them. Of course her… Read More ›
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PopCo
Popco, by Scarlett Thomas. I’m a perfect audience for this book, but I’m obviously not the intended audience for Allison Block, the ALA reviewer on Amazon.com: Mathematical puzzles. Mind-bending codes. A secret manuscript. And a cake recipe, too. Thomas’ latest… Read More ›
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The value of projects
Are projects valuable for students in a high-school math class? I suppose the answer must inevitably be, “Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t.” OK, so we need to shift the terms of the question. We should ask, What kinds of… Read More ›
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Differentiated instruction
In this age of No Child Left Untested, our primary goal is apparently a 100% passing rate on standardized tests. But at least there’s a recognition by The Powers That Be that people learn in different ways and at different… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 