Recent Posts - page 90

  • Walking through the brick wall

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    Because of the expansion and renovation of our physics classrooms, the doors were all relocated over the summer. The old entrance to Room 12 was bricked over, but the old sign remains. As it’s hard to walk through the brick wall, someone altered the… Read More ›

  • Ashmont Grill, yet again

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    OK, time to write about the Ashmont Grill for the nth time. For some reason, attendance at their Wine Club has been getting sparser and sparser each week. Actually, today was only the second time in several months that Barbara… Read More ›

  • Dropbox

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    I don’t want to sound like an ad…but Dropbox has changed my life. Really. One problem that I used to have was that I would have different versions of a given file: one on my desktop computer at home, one… Read More ›

  • When will I ever use this in real life?

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    I suspect that it’s not only math teachers who are faced with the question, “When will I ever use this in real life?” But I can only answer it from the math teacher’s point of view. One of my freshmen… Read More ›

  • The myth of being required to teach yourself

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    There’s an unfortunate myth that is believed by many Weston students and their parents. Like all myths, it isn’t true. Like most myths, it does contain a grain of truth. The myth goes something like this: “In order to succeed… Read More ›

  • 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 ›