Recent Posts - page 90

  • Douglas

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    We have a new cat, a long-haired white beast with some dark gray smudges. He’s apparently about eight years old, according to the vet. We had to adopt him because he was a stray who had been hanging around on… Read More ›

  • I'm glad I don't teach in Texas.

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    The final release of the Texas Republican Party platform includes the following plank: We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs… Since the government of Texas is controlled by the… Read More ›

  • Is God a Mathematician?

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    Mario Livio’s Is God a Mathematician? is a first-rate book, so why are there so many negative reviews of it on Amazon? The best answer, I suppose, is that there are always negative reviews on Amazon; any given book can’t be… Read More ›

  • The Windup Girl

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    I’m sure that you’re motivated to read Paolo Bacigalupi’s first novel, The Windup Girl, because it was named by TIME Magazine as one of the ten best novels of 2009, and also won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell… Read More ›

  • New England Math Playoffs

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    Congratulations to the Weston High School Math Team for their strong showing in the New England Math Playoffs! We finished seventh among all the medium-sized high schools in New England. Special congratulations are due to sophomore William Kretschmer, who achieved… Read More ›

  • The Drop

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    Six years ago I reviewed Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer ; I’ve read several other books by Connelly before or since, and I highly recommend them. In recent years I’ve read The Overlook, The Narrows, Lost Light, The Poet, Blood Work,… Read More ›

  • Food Matters

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    Mark Bittman is not Michael Pollan, though they have some things in common. Bittman’s book, with the deliberately ambiguous title of Food Matters, is quite different from his standard fare. Bittman is best known for his cookbooks (and his appearances as… Read More ›

  • Michael Robertson’s Baker Street mysteries

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    As you know, the authentic Sherlock Holmes stories were written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. You may or may not know that there are also two different types of Sherlock Holmes stories that were not written by him. One type —… Read More ›

  • How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

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    For our last movie of the vacation, Barbara and I watched How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, a British comedy from 2008. Being all about celebrities and Vanity Fair magazine, it is not really my cup of tea, though… Read More ›

  • Two very different IMAX films about nature

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    For the last weekday of vacation, I spent the entire afternoon at the Museum of Science, including watching two IMAX films. The verdict is thumbs down for Tornado Alley, thumbs up for To the Arctic. So what’s wrong with Tornado… Read More ›

  • Franklin Park Zoo

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    Spent a lovely morning walking around the Franklin Park Zoo today. I started with the zebra and the aptly named wildebeests, who were running around like…well, like wildebeests, dashing from one end of their huge enclosure all the way to… Read More ›

  • Children of Men

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    Wow! What an amazing movie! Just don’t see it if you want to be cheered up. Its tagline — “No children. No future. No hope.” — rather gives that away. This 2006 film is an impressively well-made dystopian vision of the… Read More ›

  • The Elfish Gene

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    This is a rather unusual but definitely interesting book. The full title of Mark Barrowcliffe’s book is The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange, and that pretty much captures it. Barrowcliffe grew up as a geek/nerd in England in the ’70s, and… Read More ›

  • Radical Equations and related matters

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    A couple of years ago I got around to re-reading Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project, by civil-rights activist/math teacher Robert Moses. Just now I realized an interesting resonance with the post I wrote last week about… Read More ›

  • Everyone who wants to do so should be able to take honors-level courses…right?

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    Yesterday afternoon, one of my students was hanging out in the Math Office after school and started chatting with me and another teacher about a concern of hers: why was it so difficult to override a teacher’s recommendation and take… Read More ›

  • Black Diamond

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    Black Diamond, by Martin Walker, is the third novel in a series of deceptively quiet mysteries taking place in the Perigord region of France. The scene is St. Denis, a small town where Chief of Police Bruno Courrèges is actually the only… Read More ›

  • Gentleman's Agreement

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    A theme seems to be developing here. This is yet another post about a movie that was produced before I was born (though in this case not actually released until shortly after I was born). Gentleman’s Agreement is an effective but… Read More ›

  • Divorce, Italian Style

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    Another old movie here — if a film released 51 years ago counts as “old.” I just saw Divorce, Italian Style for the first time, having missed it back in 1961 (when I would have been too young for it… Read More ›

  • From Elvish to Klingon

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    I know what you were thinking as soon as you saw this title. I can read your mind, so I know that you were thinking something like this: This is obviously a fluffy but nerdy book. It must be a tongue-in-cheek,… Read More ›

  • "Some of our students objectively can’t learn algebra."

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    No, of course I wasn’t the one who said that. It comes from a  petition signed by 14 of Palo Alto High School’s 20 math teachers, listed by name (!) in a blog post by Dan Meyer, who is always… Read More ›