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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

  • Word Bomb

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    Fat, doxx, like, trigger, moist, they, partner, renoviction —  what do these eight words have in common? The answer is that they are the topics of the first eight episodes of Word Bomb, a new podcast from Canada. Unlike most of… Read More ›

  • An Enemy of the People

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    Your president just called CNN “the enemy of the people.” This, of course, is far from the first time that he has referred to the press by this phrase. (Marvin Kalb just published an entire book on the subject, straightforwardly… Read More ›

  • Moral hazard?

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    “You learn something new every day of your life,” my dad used to say to me. He was right, of course. A week ago I learned a concept that is, apparently, familiar to economists and philosophers but was for some… Read More ›

  • Entitlement, Part Two

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    This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post in the form of three items that could have been in it, but the post was already long enough without them: First of all, I am bothered by the complainer’s use of an anonymous… Read More ›

  • Entitled at Weston? Or overworked?

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    As we all have learned over the past two years, our Dear Leader’s strategy is to blame others for his own shortcomings, to accuse his enemies of those characteristics that are really his own character flaws, to claim to speak… Read More ›

  • Magicians

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    Finally I’ve finished reading the third book of the Magicians trilogy: The Magician’s Land. (Earlier I reviewed the first two books, The Magicians and The Magician King, so it’s time to complete the picture.) The question — whether overt or… Read More ›

  • Martin Badoian, RIP

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    I am saddened to report that Martin Badoian died on Friday at age 90. Marty taught at Canton High School until he was 89! He is best known for coaching the amazingly successful math team at Canton and for founding… Read More ›

  • “We don’t work with greasy machines!”

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    “In the Mathematics Department we don’t work with greasy machines,” replied one of my undergraduate math professors with a sneer. “You’re going to have to go to the Applied Math department if that’s what you want to do.” That was… Read More ›

  • What is Modern Standard Arabic?

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    Three months ago I wrote a post about whether Chinese is a language (a language vs. a family of languages). Now it’s time to ask a comparable question about Arabic: is it a language? It’s a comparable question because naive Westerners… Read More ›

  • Is it “Music City” or “Athens of the South”?

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    Yes, this is the Parthenon. But no, we’re not in Greece. This is the Parthenon in Nashville, not the one in Athens. Barbara and I just got back from a three-day visit to see our niece, Aviva, who is currently… Read More ›

  • International Pronouns Day

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    As everyone knows, today is International Pronouns Day. Why, you might ask, does such a day exist? There’s no International Adjectives Day, after all. Or International Verbs Day. What’s so special about pronouns? It’s all because English has these gendered… Read More ›

  • New Guinea to New Jersey, 1943

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    No, I’m not old enough to remember World War II. But I can reprint a letter that my dad, then stationed in New Guinea, wrote to my mom in 1943: This was four years before I was born. (In New… Read More ›

  • Do Trump supporters have empathy?

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    What does brain science show about whether Trump supporters have empathy? Three days ago I published a post, “Red Brain, Blue Brain,” about a recent Hidden Brain podcast. I discussed some conservative/liberal generalities, but nothing specifically physiological or anatomical. Now it’s time… Read More ›

  • Elderly?

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    How old is she? From Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop (1946):

  • Red brain, blue brain

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        They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. Remember who said that? I’m sure you do. You probably also remember that it’s a certain well-known Republican talking about immigrants from Mexico… Read More ›

  • The Magician King

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    The Magician King is the sequel to The Magicians, which I reviewed on September 1. As the second book in Lev Grossman’s trilogy, it follows closely after book #1 and appropriately leaves the reader hanging, waiting for #3. Darker and more mature than The… Read More ›

  • A later start time

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    Weston students, parents, and teachers: Is the later start time working? Let me know!

  • Feedback from 46 years ago

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    Going through some old papers, I came across a summary of student feedback from Relations & Functions, a course I team-taught at Lincoln-Sudbury (L–S). This was more-or-less equivalent to today’s Honors Precalculus, and it’s instructive to consider the similarities and… Read More ›

  • Pandas!

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    Giant panda overload this week! Earlier in the week came the first episode of Martin Yan’s newly revived TV series, Yan Can Cook. The new series, Spice Kingdom, is described as “a 13-part series that explores the many aspects of how food and… Read More ›

  • The cat on the (purple) mat

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    Douglas looks so handsome on his purple mat, even if he’s deliberately ignoring the Rubik’s Cube: