Learning Strategies

Recent Posts - page 21

• How can girls succeed at the highest level of high-school debate?

  By ljd42 on November 20, 2022

  

  You know the problem, right? If a girl is meek and submissive, she won’t impress the debate judges. If she is strong and assertive, the judges will call her an aggressive bitch and she won’t do well. So there’s no… Read More ›

• How to tell time (in Estonian, of course)

  By ljd42 on November 18, 2022

  

  Alex Bellos, on Atlas Obscura, has written a fine linguistics/math puzzle about telling time in Estonian. No knowledge of Estonian is required (in fact, it would spoil the puzzle), nor is any advanced knowledge of math or linguistics expected. Here… Read More ›

• What is Jewish Noir?

  By ljd42 on November 16, 2022

  

  According to Wikipedia, film noir comprises “stylish crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and motivations.” So, what then is Jewish Noir? Moving the medium from film to short stories, we get a series (two books so far) edited by… Read More ›

• Ukraine: Its intertwined history and linguistics

  By ljd42 on November 14, 2022

  

  A great article in The Spectator teaches us the history of language in Ukraine in the context of the rest of the history of the country. Author Norman Davies is remarkably thorough and thankfully straightforward, teaching us a lot in… Read More ›

• And Justice for Mall

  By ljd42 on November 12, 2022

  

  Yet another entertaining Jersey Girl mystery by E.J. Copperman. This is the fourth. Although we’re firmly out in SoCal at this point, there are still enough reminders of her Jersey origins that you won’t forget where Sandy Moss, the protagonist,… Read More ›

• The plural of “you” is…“y’all”? “youse”? “yinz”? “you guys”? “you”?

  By ljd42 on November 10, 2022

  Prescriptivists and right-wingers were all outraged back in Shakespeare’s day, when progressives and descriptivists started using the plural pronoun “you” to address a single person. It would be the death of the English language! How dare they try to change… Read More ›

• Remember the…the what? Remember the Alamo? Remember the Maine? No, remember the Horn & Hardart Automat!

  By ljd42 on November 8, 2022

  

  If you are from either the New York or the Philadelphia area—and if you are of a certain age—you will fondly remember the Horn & Hardart Automat. And now there is a wonderful documentary about it, simply titled The Automat,… Read More ›

• What is your favorite mispelling?

  By ljd42 on November 7, 2022

  

  If you look cooly at the maps of common mispellings, paying attention to the miniscule details, it won’t take you a millenium to recognize that many of these words are frequently mispelled. The lists in those maps may or may… Read More ›

• Catch Me If You Can

  By ljd42 on November 5, 2022

  

  Not the book, not the musical: I’m talking about the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio along with Christopher Walken, Tom Hanks, Amy Adams, Martin Sheen, and others that I haven’t heard of but you have. As you probably… Read More ›

• Where can I sit?

  By ljd42 on November 3, 2022

  

  I went up to the den to sit and read in the easy chair, with my feet on the ottoman. But Flicka, of course, was occupying the ottoman again, and William left no room in the easy chair, which was… Read More ›

• Every Last Fear

  By ljd42 on November 2, 2022

  

  Ordinarily you would never expect me to want to read a book with that title. Ordinarily I would never expect to want to read a book with that title. But it had been recommended to me by a reader I… Read More ›

• Were math skills truly destroyed by the pandemic? What is the solution?

  By ljd42 on October 31, 2022

  

  “Disrupted learning during the pandemic brought student achievement among students in Boston and statewide to the lowest levels in a decade or more, according to new data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.” So began an article in the… Read More ›

• Yikes! Rear-ended in my own driveway!

  By ljd42 on October 29, 2022

  

  Bang! What was that? At 7:10 Thursday evening, just as we were about to sit down to dinner, Barbara and I heard a loud bang that appeared to come from our driveway! Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. So… Read More ›

• How many Massachusetts cities and towns can you name?

  By ljd42 on October 28, 2022

  

  Well, at least I beat Steph Solis. But she’ll probably remind me that “it’s not a competition” if she ever sees this. So here’s the situation. Axios Boston posted a link to a site where you can test yourself by… Read More ›

• I’m shocked, shocked! Middle-schoolers were hiding Satanic messages in their mural!

  By ljd42 on October 27, 2022

  

  Take a look at the mural, designed and painted by a high-school student for the Child and Adolescent Health Center at Grant Middle School in Grant, Michigan, a suburb of Grand Rapids: I’m sure you can see the Satanic messages…. Read More ›

• “When napping on the ottoman…

  By ljd42 on October 25, 2022

  

  …it’s very important to show off your extra toes, and to sprawl out so there’s no room for anyone else to sit there.” So says Flicka.

• The woman in the library handed me The Woman in the Library.

  By ljd42 on October 24, 2022

  

  This is the second time in less than a month that I’ve had to use typography to disambiguate the title of a post. This is the better of the two examples, both because it contains the very same phrase twice… Read More ›

• How to build a metaverse

  By ljd42 on October 22, 2022

  

  Cats may have nine lives. You don’t, but at least you can have a Second Life. Second Life, as you probably know, is an example of a metaverse. Do not confuse this with the new name of Facebook’s parent corporation,… Read More ›

• Think globally, eat locally…at Tavolo.

  By ljd42 on October 20, 2022

  

  Another delicious destination last night, all of half a mile away, a relaxing evening at one of our neighborhood’s pair of favorites: Chris Douglass’s Tavolo Ristorante. We started with rosemary focaccia, which always comes with chili flakes, parmesan, and evoo…. Read More ›

• Reading Latin and Ancient Greek for fun and profit. For what? Fun? Yes, fun. Really. And the profit was purely intellectual, not financial.

  By ljd42 on October 19, 2022

  

  Even in my circles, Latin and Greek are not exactly common topics of conversation. Friends and relatives are surprised whenever I read something in Ancient Greek—or even in Latin—for fun. OK, I’m weird. But you probably knew that already. What… Read More ›

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