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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

  • 224, etc.

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    Twenty-five years ago you could count the number of good restaurants in Dorchester  on the fingers of one hand (even if you had broken two fingers). Today it would take both hands and a foot…more likely two feet. The first… Read More ›

  • The Jewels of Paradise

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    Venice! Thrice before [ooh…how often do you get to use the word “thrice”?] in this blog I’ve reviewed books by Donna Leon: Blood from a Stone on March 4, 2007; The Girl of his Dreams on November 27, 2008; and The Golden Egg on September… Read More ›

  • Dirty Old Boston, On the Dot Books, chain stores, and the Dot2Dot Cafe

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    Dorchester does have a bookstore! A very small one, but a bookstore nonetheless — and it’s neither a Barnes & Noble nor a Borders. No, wait…Borders is no more…is Barnes & Noble the only remaining brick-and-mortar chain bookstore? They’re also online,… Read More ›

  • Congratulations to the Math Team!

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    Congratulations to the Weston High School Math Team for their fine performance at this afternoon’s Massachusetts Math League meet! After trekking to the wilds of Acton, the team garnered a total of 111 points. Senior Akiva Gordon was in top place,… Read More ›

  • Bruno and the Carol Singers

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    Normally I wouldn’t even bother to review this slight and forgettable volume by Martin Walker, but it provides such a nice “compare and contrast” opportunity that I can’t resist. Immediately after reading The Children Return, I turned to Bruno and the Carol Singers, another… Read More ›

  • The Children Return

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    How timely can you be? Martin Walker’s latest novel in his “Bruno, Chief of Police” series takes a darker turn. I wrote about these books twice before in this blog: First, of course, came the initial effort, and even then I… Read More ›

  • Thanksgiving Haggadah? Yes, a Thanksgiving Haggadah!

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    So you’ve never heard of a Thanksgiving Haggadah? Clearly you have never participated in a Thanksgiving dinner at my sister’s house! And you didn’t read my account of the one held ten years ago, since you weren’t reading this blog at… Read More ›

  • BiblioTech

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    What an exciting book! “Surely you jest,” you say. “An exciting book about libraries? That’s an oxymoron!” Well, OK, maybe not quite exciting. But it’s a fine book that has a lot of important things to say and will stimulate your… Read More ›

  • No comment.

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    One of my students has this sticker on the cover of his laptop: No comment.

  • Overparenting

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    Take a minute to listen to Stanford’s Dean of Freshmen, Julie Lythcott-Haims: Incoming students are brilliant and accomplished and virtually flawless, on paper. But with each year, more of them seem incapable of taking care of themselves. At the same time, parents… Read More ›

  • What shaped your views on inequality? What shaped mine?

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    Did your school shape your views on inequality? Probably so, according to Carla Shedd. A recent NPR report by Meg Anderson concludes that students at racially diverse schools, particularly black and Hispanic students, are more tuned in to injustice than students going… Read More ›

  • On the Razzle

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    Tom Stoppard’s On the Razzle was this fall’s production of the Weston High School Theatre Company. Wikipedia’s one-sentence characterization is as good as any: Stoppard’s farce consists of two hours of slapstick shenanigans, mistaken identities, misdirected orders, malapropisms, double entendres, and romantic… Read More ›

  • Why Morocco?

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    I was just looking at the stats for this blog, and I was surprised to notice that the second-largest number of my readers come from…Morocco. Why Morocco? A quick search shows that I’ve mentioned Morocco only once ever in the… Read More ›

  • MoS FT

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    Today we took 200 high-school freshmen on a full-day combined geometry-and-physics field trip to the Museum of Science. It was fun, educational, and…exhausting. Sometimes it was like herding cats. Fortunately we had a dozen adults, so no one individual was responsible… Read More ›

  • Is the Quadratic Formula worth it?

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    There’s something warm and comforting about the old, reliable Quadratic Formula (QF). You can plug the parameters of any quadratic equation into it, do a little calculating, and easily come up with the correct answer(s). Simple, right? No, actually, it’s not… Read More ›

  • It’s a matter of fact, not a matter of opinion: it’s science!

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    No, I’m not going to bring up the old misguided debate about putting one or two spaces after a period. That’s because it isn’t a debate. It’s an empirical matter: do you believe the evidence, or do you want to continue… Read More ›

  • Write like you talk. Or not. As the case may be.

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    Paul Graham has some advice for us: Here’s a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language. That’s definitely not what your typical English teacher tells us. Writing and speaking are distinct and… Read More ›

  • Communicating with students

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    Sam Shah, math teacher extraordinaire from Brooklyn, has recently written a useful post about getting information from students. Like many of us, he begins the year by asking his students to write something about themselves. In my own classes this… Read More ›

  • Does a cat fit in a shoebox?

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    “I know I can fit into this shoebox,” says William, “but my leg and my tail aren’t cooperating and have to poke through.”

  • Einstein’s Dreams

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    What a mystifying play! Yesterday I went to see Einstein’s Dreams at the Central Square Theater, and I wish I brought Dr. Korsunsky along so that he could have explained the physics to me. A year of honors physics in high school was… Read More ›