Learning Strategies

Recent Posts - page 92

• The Drop

  By ljd42 on April 26, 2012

  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

  By ljd42 on April 24, 2012

  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

  By ljd42 on April 23, 2012

  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

  By ljd42 on April 21, 2012

  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

  By ljd42 on April 20, 2012

  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

  By ljd42 on April 19, 2012

  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

  By ljd42 on April 18, 2012

  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

  By ljd42 on April 16, 2012

  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

  By ljd42 on April 15, 2012

  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?

  By ljd42 on April 14, 2012

  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

  By ljd42 on April 13, 2012

  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

  By ljd42 on April 11, 2012

  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

  By ljd42 on April 9, 2012

  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

  By ljd42 on April 8, 2012

  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."

  By ljd42 on April 7, 2012

  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 ›

• Denise Mina

  By ljd42 on April 6, 2012

  So far I have read seven novels by Denise Mina: Garnethill, Deception, Still Midnight, Slip of the Knife, The Dead Hour, Field of Blood, and The End of the Wasp Season. Can you tell that I like the work of… Read More ›

• The Journal of Best Practices: A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man's Quest to be a Better Husband

  By ljd42 on April 4, 2012

  In keeping with the current trend of giving books excessively long titles, this memoir by David Finch tries to pack as much as possible into 19 words. But the title still raises more questions than it answers — and that’s… Read More ›

• Swing Time

  By ljd42 on April 3, 2012

  I’m slowly catching up on some movies that were produced before I was born. One of these was Swing Time (1936), a musical starring the inimitable Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, with music by Jerome Kern. As is common in early musicals, there’s… Read More ›

• School is a 24/7 Job

  By ljd42 on April 2, 2012

  Normally I don’t repost somebody else’s blog post in its entirety, but in this case… Mrs. Smith bitched to the Principal that little Alfie’s teachers never called when little Alfie wasn’t doing well in their classes.  She didn’t know how… Read More ›

• Just My Type

  By ljd42 on April 1, 2012

  What a cool book! Simon Garfield’s Just My Type, subtitled A Book about Fonts, will tell you all you want to know about fonts, in a readable and mostly non-technical style — all you want to know, but not more… Read More ›

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