Cucumber tomato salads
On Alonissos I had a huge fresh tomato salad with juicy, ripe tomatoes. There were a few cukes, and a few onions, and some other stuff. This was not too far from what I was looking for, yet not quite it. I took no photo, choosing to wait for my return to Thessaloniki a few days later. But even there, the cukes were not what I remembered from 2006, and some places simply removed the word “cucumber” from the name of the salad.
So here they are, most of them, with comments copied from my travel journal:
Right: Cafe in Ladadika. “1st cuke-tomato salad – disappointing but good. Too many olives, slightly bitter greens, outer ring of cukes had peels on, red onion, red and yellow pepper. Juice was not oniony/tomatoey enough.”
Left: In Athonos market: “…was closer, but too many peppers, parsley unnecessary, and pepperoncini! This didn’t make a lot of sense. Too few cukes, tomatoes were okay, 3 olives, onions were red. Gavros, though, were quite good” [gavros are small fish. I had them fried, whole, and dressed them with lemon]
(more below the fold —>) Read more…
FoxMaths! and other link updates
Ce n’est pas un renard, indeed!
FoxMaths! is a new blog. Author seems to be a serious math undergrad from the Midwest, with math just hard enough that it is never easy for me, but not so hard that any of it completely blows me away. I need to study the posts. He doesn’t teach me, the way Good Math/Bad Math does, but he has that “puzzle” orientation, at a level just over my head. Love it.
I don’t think I ever introduced Vlorbik properly. Professor (I think), blogs math ed (and very nicely). Vlorbik hosted the most recent Carnival of Mathematics. Which of course you should check out. There is a link in the carnival to the man who taught me to play bridge… (no kidding).
I found that two of my links I haven’t been reading, and am dropping them. Time to say goodbye to Polski3 and Jennifer Spates. Polski’s stuff just didn’t hold my attention (different interests, I guess) and Jennifer is interested in putting out ideas, but seemingly not in discussing them. I know that this has an edge, but I was not shocked to learn that she wants to be an administrator.
A couple links that have been here a while, but are certainly worth clicking now and again. Each of them updates regularly, with real content: Ed Darrell [used to updated! He’s still at it.] teach history (in Texas?). Kimberly Moritz is an assistant superintendent upstate. Dave Marain is a retired math teacher.
There are a lot of links on the right side of this blog. They are there (mostly) because I find them interesting or valuable. As I change my mind, or as the links themselves change, so will the list.
jd2839
Latest in a series of non-reflective reflective posts. Others have included:
Vacation helped. Salad helped. Actually walking places, and hiking… all of it helped.
There is a running joke in all this: the spammers often send me stuff from account names that look like my own, very frequently jd followed by two or three or four random digits…
Fair Student Funding – When does the excessing start?
Check your school’s allocation by clicking here.
Fair Student Funding is a new funding formula for allocating money from the NYC Department of Education to the public schools in NYC. It allocates money per student, based on grade level, poverty, ELLs, special education, and several other categories. FSF does not increase the overall funding to the system. It shuffles existing money. FSF claims to address two major inequities:
- some schools were over-funded or under-funded for reasons that were not well-deserved, or to address conditions that no longer exist. I believe this is true, and was genuinely a source of inequity in the system
- schools previously were allocated a certain number of teachers, and were compensated for those teachers. A school with one hundred brand new teachers might get $5 million, while a school with 100 experienced teachers might get $7 million, a large difference in money.
But schools were not given 5 or 7 mil and told to go hire 100 teachers.
Wacky is a funny word… But not when the results mean 40% defunding of some schools. … Excessing in … June 2009, or 22 months away.
(please please please keep reading below the fold –>) Read more…
Packing light
Here’s three week’s worth: Clothes and sundries (like that word) in the black, mostly books in the blue. I probably took too many books. Two pairs of shorts? One would have been enough. One more shirt would have helped.
Those messenger bags are easy to move around. Sure the crisscrossing straps look a little strange, but the mobility! Easy to sit, easy to stand, easy to take one off. They let me take both on the airplane. And easy to completely unpack and repack. And they don’t look like backpacks.
Most of the books were useful. I got some good reading done:
- Mazower’s Short History of the Balkans (gave it away in Berlin)
- Mallory’s In Search of the Indo-Europeans (I still like Renfrew’s approach, and am unwilling to accept all of Mallory’s arguments)
- Hirschon’s collection Crossing the Aegean (gave it away on Alonissos)
- Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time (fantastic book about the Dust Bowl. Weaves witness accounts into a compelling story. Exceptionally well-written)
- A collection of essays on Germans living in other countries today, German Minorities in Europe, edited by Stefan Wolff. (some of the modern scholarship glazed my eyes over, but other essays were clear and informative)
- And I got a good start on Jared Diamond’s Collapse.
On the other hand, I dragged along several books I hardly touched. Why pack a Teach Yourself Greek if you don’t open it? Fermat’s Enigma? And a slim math text, Graphs and Their Uses? The Bulgaria guide book I needed. And Bruce Clark’s Twice a Stranger I brought along as a gift. But three unused books? Poor planning.
Can’t say too much bad though. Three weeks, two bags, one trip.
Let’s get it right?
The AFT wants to reform, rather than repeal, NCLB. No surprise there. Fred says: change the fundamentals of NCLB, and it won’t be NCLB anymore. So today I get postcards in the mail from the AFT, so that I can write my congressman to reform NCLB. And about 15 more cards to give co-workers.
Now, I’ll fill it out, send it in, and get coworkers to fill in the rest in a few weeks when school restarts. But I am disappointed by how weak the language is. Wouldn’t it have been simpler to ask for repeal? (and we could have put bigger letters on the postcard!)
I would at least have liked something about reducing the testing. Oh well. Here’s the text:
A reauthorized NCLB must:
- Provide a fair and accurate accountability system that recognizes student progress.
- Provide educators the support and resources they need to succeed in the classroom. It should not impose new and unnecessary requirements on teachers.
- Increase support for research-based interventions to truly struggling schools to help raise student achievement.
- Provide to districts and schools the funds they need to ensure that our children and teachers have the very best to do their very best.
A few days in Bulgaria
An overnight train brought me from Thessaloniki to Sofia, Bulgaria, for the last few days of my trip. In three days I
- toured the center of the city
- headed south to the Rila Monastery
- took a ride west to Koprivshtitsa, the center of the (last unsuccessful) Bulgarian revolt against Ottoman rule
(a few highlights and photos beneath the fold —> ) Read more…
Random?
In the late ’80s and early ’90s I got profiled. I was traveling to Britain or France whenever I got the chance, and I was stopped, searched, or questioned on a fairly regular basis. Part of the problem was that I was young, male, traveling alone, scruffy, and traveling very light. There was more, but I’d rather not go into it. Suffice it to say, whatever they were looking for they never found, because I never carried anything illegal and I was never looking for trouble, just cheap quickie vacations without baggage weighting me down. (I still travel light).
Now, I didn’t like getting stopped. It was uncomfortable and embarrassing. Travel is stressful enough without hearing “open this” or “come with me.” But what really got me angry was when they claimed “this is only a random check.” Coincidences tend not to be random, and no one likes being lied to.
That’s a long way to come to the point. I am not a huge fan of the Carnival of Education (see this post [link corrected]), but I do contribute to some of them. I submitted to about ten Carnivals since February, including most recently 125, 126, 127, and 131. (they send you a little receipt). Except my submissions to 125 and 131, both on the political side (my graduation speech with the anti-war lines and the bit about not confusing charter schools with public schools), and both with the same host, neither one of these was included in the carnival.
Maybe it’s just a coincidence. But I remember this kind of coincidence, from Orly airport in Paris.
[postscript. The host explained “There were some problems with the blog carnival sending posts to the proper email” and offered to run the lost submissions (there was at least one more). Of course I accepted and thanked him.
I still won’t go back to Orly]
Four Stone Hearth
I found a way cool carnival: Four Stone Hearth. 
It is an anthropology carnival, extending to archaeology, linguistics, socio-cultural and bio-physical stuff. It’s what I like to read, although I don’t really write about it. If you have any interest, take a look. Click the photo for the carnival’s home, or click here for the latest edition (at afarensis). And then click through. As I said, way cool.
Charter schools are…
Look, this is not going to be a long diatribe. Just, when someone says “public school” we mean schools that the town or city or district runs. That’s not charter schools.
Charters allow anyone in (lot’s of exceptions, eh?), and don’t charge tuition. But stretching that into calling them “public” abuses the language and is deliberately misleading.
Try it this way: If charter schools are public schools, then what are public schools? See?
So let’s be a little more forthright with our language. Charters are charters, public schools are public schools… And if we have to specify the governance and admissions, we can describe charters, per Fred Klonsky, as ‘hybrid forms.’
Frustration – trees
I know the names of lots of trees: maple, elm, oak, ash, poplar, fir, pine, aspen, locust, birch, beech, cherry, apple, peach (is that all the pies?) and a whole bunch more. But can I tell one from another?
I know what oak trees look like from leaves, but not from bark or trunk. And I cannot tell red oak from white oak from black oak from swamp oak (or did I make that last kind up?). I do know Holly Oak from the other, but that one hardly looks like the others.
I can tell maple trees from plane trees by the bark on the trunk or the seed ‘helicopters.’ I cannot tell red from Norway from sugar maple.
I know a willow from the shape of the tree and shape of the leaves. I know a linden when the paper-tape seed thingies are out. I might know the leaves. I think I know the flowers. I know white birch from the bark. I might know other birches from their leaves.
I know cherry trees from the cherries. Ditto lots of fruit trees. I can often tell that a tree is a fruit tree, without knowing what kind of fruit. I know date trees from their smell and leaves, even without the fruit. I can usually tell mulberry trees from the leaves, even without the berries.
But look, there is way too much I don’t know. I was riding through Bulgaria thinking, whoa, those are gorgeous, what kind of trees are these? The center of the capital is lined with, are those chestnuts or horse chestnuts? I couldn’t tell you an elm tree if it fell on me, don’t know what a poplar is. What do ash leaves look like? Couldn’t even tell for sure if I was looking at peaches or plums. At a distance, the shape of those trees is so distinctive. Cedars?
Not knowing trees is a form of cultural illiteracy, and I am certain it is growing. I don’ t think my (urban) students know as much as I do, not even close, and I felt ashamed of how little I know. So, a new project. I’m going to learn something about trees, starting with those growing in the Bronx.
A streetful of mansions
Today I walked Queen Olga St (L. Vas. Olgas or something like that). Just outside the walls of Thessaloniki, it runs south parallel to the shore (and inland just a block or so) for a couple of miles. When it was first built, millionaires built villas there, and many are still standing. I will do a photo-post when I return, but what houses! They are now mostly museums of one sort or another – art galleries, schools, cultural centers. Some have fallen badly (irreperably) into bad states.
Near the end of my walk (and now far from the usual tourist area) I was getting hungry. So I turned back from the Balkan Cultural Center (the next to last mansion, I think), and turned on a quiet leafy street to a restaurant with lots of full tables in front. As it wasn’t yet 5, this was a bit surprising. The others were empty. Anyhow, I was guessing the local were right, and I wasn’t disappointed. It is called Taverna Kronos, and they made the best tomato (no cuke) salad of my stay. Since there were communication difficulty, and the menu was in cursive Greek, an older guy (manager?) led me inside to pick out which meat to cook. The lamb chops were definitely not the wrong choice. Add a bit of retsina, and the complementary watermelon, and this was my best (and last) meal in Thessaloniki. Nice way to end it!
Next up: Sofia.
Some Thessaloniki stories
1. Last year I loved cucumber tomato salad, which I found consistently prepared everywhere, with only minor variation. This year I’ve gotten dried oregano, sliced onion, pepperoncini… I’m still trying, but what happened to those wonderful ripe tomatoes, cold cucumbers, and red onion, with just olive oil?
2. I made them do another take. It is hot here. Not like last week people-dying-in-several-countries hot, but in the 90s. So I am walking on the shadowed edge of a square, and a woman runs up to the guy in front of me, and it looks like she hassles him and he walks the other way. And then I approach. She comes at me, smiling, speaking in a hushed voice, and rapidly, and motioning for me to join a little group of people to my right (in the sun). Now, it’s Greek, so I just avert my eyes and walk on, good New Yorker style. But she shifts, still whisper-babbling, still smiling, but more urgently motioning for me to join them. I’m thinking this is a strange mime, or a cult, but either way, I’m not joining in. So I walk by, she looks sad, I look back, and they were filming a cellist. She was motioning for me to walk around. Look, my fault, right? I should know Greek. But she could make life easier. If the message was “stop” that’s what she should have communicated. And that would have worked fine. Bad communication is so easy, and in this case, comes from such good intentions (she didn’t want to come off harsh).
(5 more stories, just below –>) Read more…
A puzzle – higher powers
Eight and nine are the third power of two and the second power of three, respectively. Are there any other examples of consecutive numbers which are of the form 
Hm. Maybe this is not such a quick one. And it really is a question, rather than a puzzle. I don’t know the answer.
The Pirate Museum of Alonissos
This was certainly an unusual museum. Just to the south of the harbor, just a bit up a hill, in an impressive white building, is a four story museum. The ground floor will house some archeology, but for now all it has is the reception area.
The basement is one small rectangular room with dioramas of village life. Some have no labels, some are tagged with short Greek paragraphs, and even shorter English. You’ve seen bad museum English? This beats it. I finally asked when I read about the sandals made from the skin of monks. (turned out, monk seals). In the center of the basement are some modernish sculptures. I think I liked the olive press the best.
The first floor above reception has a little art gallery (so-so watercolors of the island, a temporary exhibit), a history room, which is little more than a glass case full of artifacts for each of the last few wars, and the pirate room. This is like an antique shop, with cases and cases of “stuff.” I wished there was some context, but I had fun imagining it.
Finally, free coffee or softdrinks on the roof, with a view of the harbor. Strange, but well-worth the 3 Euros ($4)
Lucky Carnival
Carnival of Mathematics 13 is up! I am away, confused, on vacation, and did not contribute. But we can still read! Check it out at Polymathematics.
(and yes, he starts with lucky 13)
A long train trip
My travel journal is in a quad-ruled notebook, but since I found the internet again, I thought I’d put a few details on the blog.
I got to my destination, the Greek island of Alonissos, last night. The total travel time was about 74 hours. (I was figuring a day and a half). Fires throughout southeastern Europe and fires and power outages in the Balkans delayed what should have been a little under two day’s journey.
The train trip – well I kept a very spotty journal – but the Vienna – Belgrade leg was slow, and I missed the connection. Had nice company, a young, very cute Belgian couple. But we got put up in Belgrade overnight, and I left on my own in the morning. But Belgrade – Thessaloniki… imagine, it was well over 40 degrees all day. We saw smoke plumes from forest fires on every side. The car roasted. I was drifting in and out of sleep, but maybe it was some uncomfortable set of hallucinations, not really sleep at all. You know in the movies when someone is badly feverish and muttering? The air tasted like it was coming out of a dusty oven. Lean out the window, and the breeze was even hotter.
Ended up making friends with some Serbs and Makedonians, which served me well as we sat for 2 hours on the Serb border, and then 1 more on the other side. There were passport problems, and power problems, and fire problems. We shared remaining water, joked around, enjoyed the temperature drop as the sun set (outside only… it remained somewhere between 95 and 105 in the car). On the Makedonian side it was not so bad, as there was a hose that we were welcome to, and it was already a bit cooler.
Scheduled 9PM arrival in Thessaloniki? Got in at 5AM local time. Fortunately, I texted a friend in NY with instructions for my travel agents, and they booked a hotel for me near the station. It was, in a way, cool, half-asleep, to drag myself into a hotel on Monistirou near Democracy Square, and have the clerk say “Yes, yes, yes, we knew you would be late…”
I have hiking and swimming, so I won’t bother hyperlinking the weather-related problems and deaths in this region. You can google them, probably.
Four things (from Profe)
A week ago I was running, getting ready for vacation, and didn’t acknowledge getting tagged by Miss Profe. But I saw it, and here’s my turn:
Four jobs I’ve had
~Teacher
~Research Cartographer
~Transportation Planner (sort of)
~Receptionist
(much more, and new tags, below the fold –>) Read more…
Puzzle – what’s your divisibility quotient?
Consider this statement:
Every three-digit number is a multiple of 11 or can be turned into a multiple of eleven by changing one digit.
eg 832 is not divisible by 11, but 834 836 is. Again 265 is not, but 165 is.
- Will you first try to prove or disprove this?
- What will your first approach be?
After a few answers come in, I will share how I attacked this one, and why I chose that approach.
(this is one of several vacation posts. They will be spotty. They may be strange. And no pictures or images until I get back)
If I come back with peeling shoulders and good teeth…
Homeland Security seized my sunscreen. But they were fair. They let me keep my toothpaste.
(this is one of several vacation posts. They will be spotty. They may be strange. And no pictures or images until I get back)
jd2962 – irrational, well-rounded
on the way out the door… slight progress, but measurable… Explanation? The goal is 2718, starting around jd3100 last winter. The previous progress report was here.
(category should be: navel gazing and challenges)
Summer vacation: Much less blogging
jd2718 will be on a decreased blogging schedule for a chunk of the summer as I tour parts distant. I will, from time to time, and as the mood and opportunity allow, blog. I may, on my return, blog parts of my travel journal. Regular (daily or so) blogging will resume early or mid August.
How Open is the Open Market?
Read this second year teacher’s take on the difficulties she is facing. Anecdotally, this seems more the rule than the exception.
(This image is not linked to any real job offers)
Carnival of Mathematics Number Twelve
A new carnival is up, over at the Vedic math place. (as this is the first carnival of the summer, it is a slightly trimmer version than usual, but with a range of teaching topics, higher math topics, and even some science-related). Go, quick, take a look.
Have you seen the top 100?
My e-mail said it was from the American Film Institute. You remember The Life of Brian? I am sure the American Institute of Film disagrees. And the Film Institute of America just sits in the endzone by himself, muttering.
Anyway, this is the list.
- I’ve bolded what I’ve seen,
- italicized the definites, the best,
- indented the ones that I am pretty sure shouldn’t be here.
MissProfe, one of my new favorite blogs (that’s her, in the new slot in the blogroll on the right), she has her own top 100 list. (it’s only got 17 films on it, but that’s just the newest stuff. I figure she owes us 83 older movies). Maybe one day I will have my own. Soon, in fact. For now it’s easier to criticize someone else’s.
One note: they seem to not be interested in foreign films. That will not be my position when I make my own list.
And, oh yeah. If this looks like one of those meme things, and you like those meme things, “poof, your tagged”
1. Citizen Kane
2. The Godfather
3. Casablanca – I don’t know that I have ever watched it beginning to end
4. Raging Bull
5. Singin’ in the Rain
(95 more, below the fold –>) Read more…
JD2718 