First Lessons
Exit 10A
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3y ago
     My first year teaching was both the most difficult and the most exciting of my career.  The workload was staggering and the learning curve was steep, but every day was a new adventure and the thrill of finally having my own class took a long time to wear off.  Looking back, I'm not sure who learned more, me or my students.  Here are three valuable lessons from year one:    I.  The Gym Teacher      Mr E, the gym teacher, was on the back nine of his career.  When I first met him he seemed hard-edged, like something bad had hap ..read more
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Rooting For the Laundry
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3y ago
      Ricky F.  was one of my very first students.  He was a bit undersized for a second grader, but more than made up for it with his boundless enthusiasm and energy.  As an NFL draft expert would say, the kid had a motor.  He also had a love of baseball and an intense dedication to the Chicago Cubs.      Chicago Cubs fans are not easy to find here in central New Jersey, where we straddle the line between Philadelphia and New York.  We've got Phillies, Yankees, and a smattering of Mets supporters, but Cubs fans are few and far between.&nb ..read more
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Flick Lives!
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3y ago
    Around this time of year, when the temperature really starts to drop and mornings become frosty; when the leaf blowers finally go silent and the smell of chimney smoke begins to pervade the block; when most of the houses in the neighborhood dress themselves in lights and wreaths and the lawns fill up with reindeer, snowmen, sleds and Santas; it's right around now that in one bay window there invariably appears a strange sight:    This is the notorious "leg lamp", made famous in A Christmas Story, the popular holiday movie co-written and narrated by the legendary ..read more
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"Count Be Wrong, They'll Mess You Up."
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3y ago
     One of the most unforgettable characters in David Simon's epic masterpiece The Wire is Wallace. Wallace is portrayed by a young Michael B. Jordan.  Jordan, who grew up in Newark, NJ, has gone on to star in Fruitvale Station,  Fantastic Four,  Creed, Creed II and Black Panther.    A low-level drug dealer in the Barksdale crime organization, the sensitive 14 year-old, not much more than a child himself, also acts as a "house dad" to a group of stray youngsters living in an abandoned Baltimore tenement.  He rousts them out of ..read more
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Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
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3y ago
    To mark the 10th anniversary of the Common Core's publication, here are my capsule-length reviews of selected K-8 standards: (All reviews stolen from movie listings posted daily in The New York Times.) 3.OA.C.7  By the end of Grade 3, know from memory all products of two one-digit numbers.  Curiously retrograde 1.OA.7 Understand the meaning of the equal sign, and determine if equations involving addition and subtraction are true or false.  For example, which of the following equations are true and which are false?   6 = 6,  7 = 8 - 1,  5 ..read more
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A Requiem For Twitter Math Camp
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4y ago
    Five years ago this month I boarded a plane in Newark, NJ and, after a layover in San Francisco, flew into the small airport in Ontario, CA.  I had traveled across the country to attend something called Twitter Math Camp, which in the summer of 2015 was being held on the campus of Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA.  It was difficult to explain to my family, friends and co-workers exactly what it was, or what I was going to be doing there, because I didn't really know myself.  Was it a camp?  Was it a conference?  What does twitter have to do with it ..read more
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And Then They Came For the Statisticians
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4y ago
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) -- The world's largest statisticians group added to a chorus of criticism this week against the recent hiring of two political appointees at the U.S. Census Bureau.  The American Statistical Association says the appointments earlier this week of Nathan Cogley and Adam Korzeniewski to top posts even though they have little experience at the agency "are in direct conflict with the bureau's mission to ensure proper, accurate, and timely delivery of statistical information to the public." Cogley is a political science professor who wrote a series of opinion pieces agains ..read more
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Solidarity...Forever?
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4y ago
     So it turns out that police unions are bad actors.  (Yes, I am way late to this.)   Will Bunche, in a recent opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer, likens police unions to "A protection racket, sounding more like the Mafia than anything 'benevolent.'"  As difficult as it is for me to watch the videos and hear the accounts of police murder and brutality, it's almost as hard to watch the displays of solidarity from police unions as they circle the wagons.  And as I learn about the role they've played, and continue to play, in perpetuati ..read more
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Greetings From the Planet Tralfamadore
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4y ago
1.  The Soldier       At approximately noon on Wednesday, February 14, 1945, a group of American POWs climbed out of an underground meat locker in the middle of Dresden, Germany.  It was a break in the middle of a two day, combined British and American aerial attack that would drop nearly 4,000 tons of high explosive bombs and incendiary devices on and around the city, known as "Florence on the Elbe".  The war was nearing its end, and Dresden had thus far escaped the fiery destruction that many other German cities, including Berlin and Hamburg, had already s ..read more
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How One Experiences History
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4y ago
August 11, Sunday (1935)      The feeling stronger every day for weeks now, it cannot go on like this much longer.  And yet it does go on and on. Victor Klemperer I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years: 1933-1941 *      When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, Victor Klemperer was a professor of Romance Languages at the Technical University of Dresden.  Born in 1881 to a Jewish family, he converted to Christianity, married an Aryan woman, and served in the German Army in World War I.  He considered himself fully and completely German ..read more
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