Learning Strategies

Recent Posts - page 15

• Two truths and a lie

  By ljd42 on May 5, 2023

  

  Your task, of course, is to figure out which of the three is the lie. Yesterday, you see, was a special occasion. (No, not my birthday. And that’s no lie.) As a result, Barbara and I decided to indulge in… Read More ›

• Teachers deserve better.

  By ljd42 on May 3, 2023

  

  “Teachers deserve better. They deserve more trust and respect, and less standardized testing, smaller class sizes, and yes, larger paychecks.” So says author Alexandra Robbins in The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession. A well-known long-time New… Read More ›

• A language-learning proposal

  By ljd42 on May 1, 2023

  

  Continuing to sing the praises of the under-appreciated Helen DeWitt, I must tell you about her language-learning proposal. For a bit of context, I will first tell you about a brief conversational exchange I had with my ninth-graders at Weston… Read More ›

• မြန်မာဘာသာ

  By ljd42 on April 29, 2023

  

  When you read this post on your device, does the title look like (as it should), or does it look like a bunch of boxes? Or maybe just like random gibberish? If your device and software are old, you might… Read More ›

• Why isn’t there an “r” in “castle”? And why isn’t there an “r” in “please”?

  By ljd42 on April 27, 2023

  

  “Why should there be?” you reply. (It’s always best to answer a question with a question.) Either of the two questions in the title of this post presupposes that an “r” is expected. But why? A brief (but relevant) digression:… Read More ›

• The Best Book of the Year!

  By ljd42 on April 25, 2023

  

  Yes. I know. How can I honestly say “best book of the year” when the year isn’t even half over yet? Furthermore, of course, I can judge only the books that I’ve read. So, let me rephrase. Of the 17… Read More ›

• Sardinian. (No, it’s not the language that sardines speak.)

  By ljd42 on April 23, 2023

  

  Your second guess will probably be that Sardinian is a dialect of Italian spoken on the island of Sardinia, so maybe it really is related to sardines, since you suspect that Sardinia was named after the many sardines that are… Read More ›

• As promised, Via Cannuccia!

  By ljd42 on April 21, 2023

  

  A mere week and a half after opening day, Barbara and I finally got to have dinner at Via Cannuccia, which is small (maybe 30 seats), very Italian, and absolutely delicious. Warm and welcoming too, it’s clearly destined to be… Read More ›

• 13 Quirky Stories

  By ljd42 on April 19, 2023

  

  I have written about the fascinating author Helen DeWitt four times over the past eleven years: They say that third time is the charm, but what about the fifth time? Well, the verdict is mixed. DeWitt’s short story collection, Some… Read More ›

• Tavolo again, Via Cannuccia soon

  By ljd42 on April 17, 2023

  

  Now that Ashmont Grill is no more 😢, our closest local restaurants are Tavolo and Via Cannuccia. Barbara and I haven’t been to Via Cannuccia yet (it just opened), but we had dinner at Tavolo last night. As usual, the… Read More ›

• Is this a conventional Christie? Just suspend judgment until the convention is over…

  By ljd42 on April 15, 2023

  

  In her novel The Christie Caper, author Carolyn Hart pays explicit and implicit homage to Agatha Christie. As you would expect, she does it with panache. Clearly Hart loves and admires Christie. To enjoy this book you don’t need to… Read More ›

• Forming Our Future

  By ljd42 on April 13, 2023

  

  Eight months ago I wrote a post about our first attempt at interdisciplinarity at the Crimson Summer Academy. It was a start. Perhaps even a good start, but still no more than a start. This summer we are keeping the… Read More ›

• NSFW

  By ljd42 on April 11, 2023

  

  Don’t leave this book—Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide—lying around casually at work. Your boss might get the wrong idea. Now that it’s safely on your night table at home, or on the end table next to your… Read More ›

• How well does ChatGPT do when it tries to talk about Trump and Greek literature/mythology?

  By ljd42 on April 9, 2023

  

  “Write a short essay comparing Donald Trump and Admetus.” That was the prompt I gave ChatGPT, just to see how it would handle a presumably unfamiliar topic. I’ll show you the essay in a minute, but first I should remind… Read More ›

• A Jewish student at a (thinly disguised) Ivy League college in the ’90s

  By ljd42 on April 7, 2023

  

  If you’ve read My Last Innocent Year, you quickly figured out that it’s meant to be Dartmouth, right? Yes, it’s subtly called Wilder College, but it’s described as an elite college in New Hampshire that used to be all male… Read More ›

• Daffodils, supervised by neighborhood cat

  By ljd42 on April 5, 2023

  

  Look closely…

• Kapow

  By ljd42 on April 4, 2023

  

  A few months ago I observed that we now have three Thai restaurants along Dorchester Avenue between Lower Mills and Fields Corner! The oldest of these closed briefly a few months ago and recently reopened under new management with a… Read More ›

• The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling

  By ljd42 on April 2, 2023

  

  That’s the title of a seven-episode podcast about the attacks on J.K. Rowling from both the left and the right—originally from the right but now mostly from the left. Personally I think that both groups of critics are wrongheaded and… Read More ›

• Which trig is which?

  By ljd42 on March 31, 2023

  

  A friend of mine claims to have had a bad experience with trigonometry in high school. Is this because she had a bad teacher? (Most people blame their teacher.) Or is it because she was a bad student? Or is… Read More ›

• Which do we want, democracy or fascism? Pick one. (Wait…isn’t this supposed to be a book review?)

  By ljd42 on March 29, 2023

  

  Jo Walton claims to be an optimist. So does Margaret Atwood. Keep that in mind while reading their dystopian novels. If you take the long view, you can see what they mean, but it’s all too easy to imagine that… Read More ›

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