Learning Strategies

Recent Posts - page 42

• National Museum of Math: new comments

  By ljd42 on October 14, 2020

  

  What’s wrong with the National Museum of Math??? A lot, apparently, including race and class discrimination as well as horrible management policies. I wrote a mixed review of this museum last year. I had observed that a lot of the… Read More ›

• Beyond my control?

  By ljd42 on October 13, 2020

  

  There’s a minimalism to teaching and learning math that I’ve always loved. With just a pencil and paper I can become a mathematician. With just one good question I can launch a math class. But now there’s a lot more… Read More ›

• Who invented the newspaper?

  By ljd42 on October 12, 2020

  

  It’s all blurred these days: news, fake news, opinion, print, Internet, newspapers, magazines… Do we even know what’s a newspaper and what isn’t? As newspapers keep dying, do people care who invented them in the first place? I do. Or… Read More ›

• You’re Fired! (We can hope.)

  By ljd42 on October 10, 2020

  

  You’re Fired: The Perfect Guide to Beating Donald Trump. That’s the full title. It’s partially successful at fulfilling its subtitle. I give it a B+. This is an often amusing and always fairly quick read despite the 61 pages of endnotes!… Read More ›

• Popularizers V: Raymond Smullyan

  By ljd42 on October 8, 2020

  

  A very special island is inhabited only by knights and knaves. Knights always tell the truth, and knaves always lie. You meet two inhabitants: Zoey and Mel. Zoey tells you that Mel is a knave. Mel says, “Neither Zoey nor I… Read More ›

• International Translation Day (OK, OK, so I’m a few days late)

  By ljd42 on October 6, 2020

  

  Why is a lion a typical translator’s pet? That’s surely your first question on looking at the image that accompanies a post titled Koran dankon, tradukistoj, by the great Gaston Dorren, who posts all too infrequently. (In case that sentence is… Read More ›

• (Yawn. It’s so early in the morning.) What do all these people have in common?

  By ljd42 on October 4, 2020

  

  Tim Cook, Richard Branson, Benjamin Franklin, Rachel Ray, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ernest Hemingway, and Michelle Obama: what do these seven people have in common? Or is it too early in the morning for you? The answer to the first question, according to… Read More ›

• Webinar vs. debate: Supervising in an age of COVID

  By ljd42 on October 2, 2020

  

  “At least,” I figured, “this webinar will surely be better than Tuesday’s debate.” Low bar, I know. (I had watched half of the debate before I couldn’t stand it any longer.) What I am referring to definitely surpassed that low… Read More ›

• You’re Wearing That?

  By ljd42 on September 30, 2020

  

  I’ve never been a mother. I’ve never been a daughter. So why would I want to read You’re Wearing That?, which bears the subtitle Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation? Two reasons: The author is Deborah Tannen, as shown above the title. Tannen, if… Read More ›

• Scots (the language, not the people) (not to be confused with Gaelic, nor with Ulster-Scots, nor with Scottish English)

  By ljd42 on September 28, 2020

  

  The Scots language has been in the news! Until a few years ago I didn’t even know what Scots is. Do you? If you’ve read my post of August 15, you do. Otherwise there’s a good chance that you don’t know, or… Read More ›

• Is it fantasy? Or is it science fiction? Some ruminations.

  By ljd42 on September 26, 2020

  

  Do we care about labeling a literary genre? What difference does it make? Ever since I was a pre-teen, I was interested in science fiction. Fantasy, not so much. But what’s the difference? And who cares? First of all, just… Read More ›

• Is translation even possible?

  By ljd42 on September 25, 2020

  

  “What a silly question!” you reply. “We translate sentences in high-school language classes all the time!” Do you? You might not do that at all (perhaps you took a total immersion class) but let that pass. You probably did at… Read More ›

• If 2020 hasn’t been depressing enough…

  By ljd42 on September 23, 2020

  

  Just in case the year 2020 hasn’t been depressing enough, I was appalled to read today that 13% of millennials in Massachusetts believe that Jews caused the Holocaust. Other related statistics from the study by Schoen Cooperman Research are just… Read More ›

• Popularizers IV: Douglas Hofstadter

  By ljd42 on September 22, 2020

  

  Gödel, Escher, Bach — what more do I need to say? Quite a bit more, you reply, especially since only 8% of you have actually read this amazing book. (Statistics gladly invented on the spot, of course.) If you’ve heard of… Read More ›

• “Even Racists Got the Blues”

  By ljd42 on September 20, 2020

  

  Let’s assume that you neither speak nor read Irish. (Probably a safe guess.) I, too, neither speak nor read Irish. But work with me here. Study this image, which shows an American wearing a custom tee shirt. Without knowing any Irish,… Read More ›

• There is still hope.

  By ljd42 on September 19, 2020

  

  Apparently many people think that the number of Supreme Court justices is immutable, that the Constitution specifies that there must be nine. This is not true. If you think that nine is a magic number written into the Constitution, you… Read More ›

• My slightly updated ethnicity

  By ljd42 on September 18, 2020

  

  Donald Trump doesn’t understand that science is not a fixed body of known facts. It changes all the time — whenever new data and new tools result in new information and therefore new knowledge. That’s why Fauci (et al.) used… Read More ›

• Sometimes Zippy actually makes sense.

  By ljd42 on September 17, 2020

  

   

• More about teaching remotely

  By ljd42 on September 16, 2020

  

  Some schools are back to 100% in-person learning at this point, but most are starting with either hybrid (apparently called “blended” in NYC) or all-remote. As I am (thankfully) mostly retired, do I still have skin in the game? Well,… Read More ›

• Greek! (The Ingenious Language)

  By ljd42 on September 14, 2020

  Where do I begin when I try to describe this marvelous book? If you look at the cover (see image at the bottom of this post), you’ll see that the full title of this book is The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic… Read More ›

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