Learning Strategies

Recent Posts - page 61

• A 5% discount (or is it a five percent discount? or a 5 percent discount? or a five % discount?)

  By ljd42 on April 16, 2019

  

  Like many of you, I grew up learning the traditional rules about when to write out numbers in words and when to use numerals. Most professionals continue to use these rules today, as in the following awkward paragraph from Talking… Read More ›

• Excellent carpentry, Verizon!

  By ljd42 on April 13, 2019

  

  Coleman Road, Arlington (corner of Wildwood Ave). That looks like a first-rate job, safe and secure, doesn’t it? Excellent carpentry, Verizon!

• Code Girls

  By ljd42 on April 12, 2019

  

  You know how college recommendation forms often ask “What three words first come to mind about this applicant?” In the case of Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Codebreakers of World War II, the three words would be fascinating, absorbing,… Read More ›

• A Truck Full of Money

  By ljd42 on April 10, 2019

  

  As you may know, Tracy Kidder is the author of some wonderful non-fiction books, including Soul of a New Machine, House, and Mountains Beyond Mountains. (He also attended both high school and college with me, but that’s not so important.) Apparently this really is a… Read More ›

• Crypto: The KEY to Algebra.

  By ljd42 on April 8, 2019

  

  This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post, where I wrote “I also gave a second talk, in a breakout session, on cryptography.” The crypto talk was a bit more informal than the keynote; it had an audience of about a… Read More ›

• I gave the keynote address… and lived to tell the tale!

  By ljd42 on April 7, 2019

  

  Yesterday I delivered the Keynote Address at the annual conference of the New England Mathematical Association of Two Year Colleges. Despite being an INTJ — which means that I should have been exhausted by the presence of so many other people —… Read More ›

• A student’s take on testing and related pressures

  By ljd42 on April 2, 2019

  Hello my name is worthless Name number and date State your class and hour Let the rubric pick your fate This is the first stanza of a high-school student’s poem, as posted by her teacher, Kevin Bosworth, in Diane Ravitch’s blog…. Read More ›

• Our Stories, our Stuff, our Somerville at the Somerville Museum

  By ljd42 on March 31, 2019

  

    What have you got in your basement? Yesterday I had the opportunity to see a fascinating exhibit of 79 artifacts at the Somerville Museum, all donated by Somerville residents. They have been organized by type of  object, as you… Read More ›

• Another #1 for Weston, plus a public service flowing from Weston to Dorchester

  By ljd42 on March 29, 2019

    Something else where Weston is #1: According to Commonwealth Magazine, “The most generous political donors in Massachusetts state and municipal campaigns last year, perhaps unsurprisingly, tend to live in some of the wealthiest communities in the state… Weston was at the very… Read More ›

• Bimbos of the Death Sun

  By ljd42 on March 27, 2019

  

  No, it’s not what you think. This hilarious novel, by Sharyn McCrumb, is a satiric mystery about a fictional SF con (that’s science fiction convention, to you mundanes out there). The protagonist is a professor of electrical engineering at Virginia… Read More ›

• Congratulations!

  By ljd42 on March 25, 2019

  Congratulations to the Weston High School Math Team for finishing first in the state in the Massachusetts Math League!

• Over the cliff

  By ljd42 on March 23, 2019

  

  Douglas peers down over the edge of a scary cliff:  

• Friends of Dorothy

  By ljd42 on March 22, 2019

  

  In my naive youth, I had no idea what a “friend of Dorothy” was; in-group descriptors, after all, are always known to members of the in group (and allies) long before they are known to the general public. “Friend of… Read More ›

• Mollie on her kitty couch

  By ljd42 on March 20, 2019

  

  That tiny little Mollie doesn’t look quite so tiny when she’s stretched out on her kitty couch:  

• Panic

  By ljd42 on March 18, 2019

  

  Consider this. Here we have a great movie from 2000, starring William H. Macy, Donald Sutherland, Tracy Ullman, Neve Campbell, and John Ritter — so why hadn’t I ever heard of it before? Oh well, better late than never. It’s… Read More ›

• “Libraries are a haven…”

  By ljd42 on March 16, 2019

  

  For more reasons than one you need to read Angela Clarke’s story from six years ago. Shoutout to my sister-in-law Brenda for alerting me to this excerpt from Clarke’s account: My own fragility revealed that a library is not just… Read More ›

• No Pi Day?

  By ljd42 on March 14, 2019

  

  This is the first time in 26 years that I haven’t been able to observe a weekday Pi Day with any of my classes. Sigh. But there are plenty of online resources for my past, present, and future students.

• Weston’s 17th Fractal Fair

  By ljd42 on March 13, 2019

  

  I returned to Weston yesterday for its 17th annual Fractal Fair. That’s a lot of fractal fairs! As you might expect for a subject that keeps evolving every year, with an entirely new set of exhibitors every year, the fair… Read More ›

• Ingrid Thoft

  By ljd42 on March 12, 2019

  

  No, “Identity Theft” is not the title of this book — though you can readily see why Barbara thought so when she glanced quickly at the cover. Identity is Ingrid Thoft’s second novel. In some ways it’s in the tradition… Read More ›

• Old authors never die…

  By ljd42 on March 10, 2019

  

  Lawrence Block’s latest novella, A Time to Scatter Stones, and one of Ruth Rendell’s last novels, The Monster in the Box, have something in common — a couple of things, in fact. It’s no coincidence that both books were written late in… Read More ›