UFT 2007 Contract
In these pages over the next two weeks I will discuss aspects of the proposed new contract.
Let me start at the end. We should ratify this deal. But we should be clear about what we are ratifying. The agreement is mediocre. We don’t lose anything major, nor do we gain much. The money almost keeps up with inflation. We don’t win back anything we lost in the last, awful contract. And there are a couple of provisions that make me nervous.
Then why ratify? Because, it is mediocre, it almost keeps up with inflation… We are not strong enough, our union is not strong enough at this juncture to have done substantially better. We can use the time to strenghten ourselves. We must.
I have posted the Memorandum of Agreement and will be adding the salary schedules when I have a chance. I will add the data directly (I would prefer not to borrow images that can be fuzzy on some monitors).
And as I said at the top, I will be discussing different aspects and provisions over the next couple of weeks.
Who won?
The Democrats. But by how much?
It is clear that the Democrats took the House – but the numbers are incomplete. CNN is reporting 227 – 194, a swing of 27 seats. Most of my list of 22 were on that list, but not all. (When this is over I will make a real list).
The Democrats needed 6 to win the Senate, won 4, with 2 more to be finalized.
It is essentially tied in Virginia (they hold a narrow lead, its likely going to recount). In Montana they are still counting, slowly, but the Democrat holds a 2000+ vote lead, with over 90% counted. Some voting machine problems will delay a final total until later today.
Click for —-> Read more…
UFT Contract Agreement – First Thoughts
I have not yet seen the agreement, and will have more to say once I have read the details. However, at first blush it seems to be quite mediocre, and I am inclined to support it.
(I was on the Negotiating Committee, but not its Executive Committee. I had school obligations that kept me from yesterday’s briefing.)
The money is one point above DC37, nothing spectacular, but not awful.
I was hoping we could undo a piece, even a small piece, of the last contract. I am disappointed that we have not.
I am nervous, very nervous, about the supposed ‘voluntary’ severance packages for teachers in excess. I want to ask more questions.
I wanted a September 1 expiration. A little disappointed.
All in all, given how weak we are, this may not be all that far from the best we were going to do. Remember, last year when many of us were very angry, Bloomberg did not fear a strike. We need to buy time to get stronger. This contract can serve that purpose, if we really work to strengthen our institutions (primarily chapters, outreach to/recruitment of new teachers) etc.
I will be writing much more after tomorrow’s Delegate Assembly.
Who will win?
Since there are no very interesting elections in New York City, I looked elsewhere to see what was in store for election day (besides a full day of staff development. yeccch)
Seems that the Democrats have a chance to gain each house of Congress. Pundits and Pollsters (but not punsters) get big money predicting what will happen. But hell, it’s just a guessing game, and I am a pretty good guesser. Anyway, anyone can say anything stupid in a bar, but it takes a special kid of stupid to make them in print. Here goes:
Today the Senate is 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats, 1 Independent who caucuses with the Democrats, and Dick Cheney breaks ties. There are 33 (34?) seats up for election, most of which will safely remain with their current party.
Interesting Senate Races
Currently held by Republicans: Pennsylvania and Ohio, Democrats will win those two. Missouri, Virginia, Montana, Rhode Island. Dems leading in all. I think they will only end up picking up 2 – 3, maybe Montana and Missouri. Tennessee and Arizona, Republicans should hold onto both.
more here (with highly speculative numbers!)——> Read more…
How many ‘words’?
How many 3-letter words can be made using the ‘alphabet’: { :) , :( , X , O} if :) and :( are not allowed to appear in the same word?
Examples of 3-letters words: :) O O , X :( O
:) X :( is a 3-letter word that we are not counting.
Order of Operations on Google
This is too cool. Open a google window. Type “10 times 11” in the search box, hit search. Neat, huh?
It gets better. Try these: “Square root of 2,” “log of 750,” “one over pi,” “sin of 57”
But there are order of operations issues.
I was happy that I could, whole language style, parse the difference between “half pi squared” and “half, pi squared.” I am not so happy with “sin of pi over 3”. Maybe someone could figure out how to properly comma-ize (comma-t-ize looks Arabic?) that one. “Arcsin of .2” is fine, but “arcsin of the square root of 1/5” is not.
Riverbend is back
Last week I asked what happened to Riverbend, the young Iraqi woman, former programmer, author of the current Baghdad Burning blog, who had not posted anything since August 5th (my post, here).
There was some buzz and concern across the Internet about her seeming disappearance.
Well, she is back. Today’s post, The Lancet Study, is not her most interesting, but I think most of her readers will just be glad to have something, a sign of life.
Welcome back.
Next UFT contract? Coalition bargaining update
No commentary. No real news. Just this item from the UFT Update:
Coalition bargaining session set for Oct. 19
The municipal bargaining coalition, of which the UFT is a part, will begin bargaining by submitting its economic demands to the city on Oct. 19.
Our 300-member negotiating committee on Oct. 11 unanimously approved a set of non-economic demands and demands concerning our functional chapters that were confirmed by the Ad Com and will be brought to the Executive Board and Delegate Assembly for confirmation as well.
The demands were not included as an agenda item in the proposed agenda for Wednesday’s Delegate Assembly. I assume that they will be presented at the Executive Committee on Monday, and that the Executive Committee will recommend them to the DA, and that delegates will receive a revised agenda Wednesday.
What’s the best way to use Flickr?
I set up an account a few months ago, but uploaded nothing.
Now WordPress tells me I am at my limit for uploading to WordPress (mostly, I suspect, because I uploaded some massive photos for the Van Cortlandt Park South and Nine Photos of Salonika posts back in August. Live and learn, but too lazy to reformat.)
So, Flickr is really a new world for me. Hints, tips? Any interesting ways to use it? Things to avoid? Public vs private?
Can you use Flickr to share family photos? Without showing them to the whole world?
I am starting at zero here. I’ll go do some reading, but anything you can fill in in the meantime would be greatly appreciated.
Open House NY: What I saw
Saturday and Sunday were the Fourth Annual Open House New York. A friend and I have gone in the past. Saturday we made it four in a row.
Our original plan was to visit the Tom Otterness studio in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, neither one of us realized that reservations were required until it was too late. We recovered, somewhat, by visiting Nelson A. Rockefeller Park at Chambers Street and the Hudson River, which is loaded with Otterness’ whimsical statuettes.
From there we made our way to Teardrop Park in Battery Park City. 
Smack dab in the middle of highrises, Teardrop maximizes utilization of a tiny bit of open space. To the north is a pleasant lawn. To the south, after a large stone wall, a crisscross of overpasses, underpasses, walkways, and a central area with sand a pretty impressive slide.
Finally we found the new 7 World Trade Center. The 45th floor, unoccupied, is home to a photo exhibit and a fund-raising video. 
It is the backdrop for Lower Manhattan Development Corporation announcements (not because it is an office, but rather just for the emotional effect.) It is also home to quite a view.
More views, if you click —-> Read more…
The Mad Carpenter
The Mad Carpenter builds stools. He attached legs to a seat. But he is totally, certifiably insane. Instead of planning his carpentry, he attaches legs at random locations around the edge of the seat. After attaching a leg, he attempts to stand the stool up. If it stands, he starts a new stool. If it falls, he attaches another leg.
What is the average number of legs on the Mad Carpenter’s stools?
Open House New York
Tomorrow and Sunday are Open House New York. This is the fourth annual weekend of skyscrapers, architectural firms, landmarks, studios, etc, in all five boroughs, being open to the public.
If you have some time, check out the list of sites, and visit one or two.
Of course, some of these places are open other days as well, but all the same, what a nice excuse to go out and see some parts of our City.
In past years I have gone to the top of the arch at Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, to the top of the Highbridge Water Tower, uptown, toured the Chelsea Market, visited the lobby of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank (now called One Hanson Place or something like that) and visited a few more interesting sites.
Will I go? Yup. I planned on visiting the Tom Otterness Studio in Brooklyn, but the tours are booked solid. I will visit a few other places, and maybe post a photo or two.
<— Tom Otterness Sculptures
(Go to Nelson A Rockefeller Park, Chambers Street at the Hudson River, for a parkful of this work. A short walk up from Battery Park City. It’s worth seeing.
Click for one more Tom Otterness photo—> Read more…
How jd2718 won a prize
No, not one of those great School Me! Teablogs like Frizzle or 3 standard deviations to the left (and others) got. This was not a prize for good blogging.
I solved a puzzle on Jenny Kissed Me, and the owner, Leigh, rewarded me with my own limerick. I only needed to name the topic, and he would write it.
Over on Evolving Education, the owner (a middle school math and science teacher, from the Midwest, but teaching in the south) had been wondering about “island dwarfism,” and if it extends to cave-dwelling species. The topic caught my interest.
Skeleton of a dwarf elephant from Sicily
For some extra details, and a link to my poem, click –> Read more…
Ewen Park steps
The steps through Ewen Park qualify for this page. They run Riverdale Avenue and W 231st Street, west through the park, swinging north near the west of the park, where the hill gets steep, and finally rising in three irregularly spaced flights to the west, reaching Johnson Avenue a hundred yards or so south of W 232nd Street.
At the corner of Riverdale Avenue and W 231st Street is a park.
The park rises to the west, up a gentle hill. From W231st St stairs guide you into the park.
These are not steep stairs. There are 25 mini-flights, starting with 6 steps each near the entrance, and decreasing to 4 steps per flight towards the center of the park
Below: Steps leading away from the east entrance, steps turning northwest, steps heading north.
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But what is in the rain gutter, to the side of the rail? (Click —–> Read more…
Great graph game
Last week we took a break from combinatorics and I taught the students what graphs were, and a few terms related to graphs, and how to inspect very simple graphs for isomorphism (I hope I’ve used the correct word).
As a nice follow up, just for fun, and to give them a break, the next time we meet on a Friday (trips intervene) we will play this little graphs game, if I can get it to run on a set of laptops.
The idea is to get the lines not to overlap. Try it yourself, (click the image), but be forewarned, it is addictive.
A moment of confusion
Today I combined my walk with a shopping trip. I walked a while, climbed down some stairs, and arrived at Staples and Stop & Shop.
The bags weren’t too heavy, and I hauled them back up, via a different route. The steep part was up a street with an “S” shaped curve, and mid-curve I was passing three people. Two of them, a man and a kid, passed by, but the third, also a man, approached me, stopped in my way, and started to speak. And I froze. The guy was white or Hispanic, an adult. I didn’t understand a word. FWIW, the guy and kid who passed me looked Black. Whatever the guy said, it wasn’t English. I replayed the words in my head. It wasn’t Spanish.
Click here ———–> Read more…
Tricky 24
In a comment Nick points out that using the 4 basic operations to combine 4 numbers to make 24 can be tricky when the only solution is of the form
a/(b – c/d), for a suitable choice of a, b, c, and d!
This blog has gotten repeated hits for 3,3,8,8, which has a solution of that form, and 1,3,5,7 (apparently making 21, not 24), with a solution of the same form.
Can you come up with more? I find that most neat ones have easier solutions. 2,3,8,17 can be combined Nick-style to make 3/[(17/8)-2] , a nifty 24, but why bother when 17+8+2-3 accomplishes the same thing?
2,4,6,13 doesn’t work. 4/[(13/6) – 2] looks nice, but why not the much simpler 2(13 – 4) + 6 ? Are there any others?
By the way, Nick runs a site with grown up puzzles which I find quite challenging and enjoyable. To take a look, click
Nick’s Mathematical Puzzles
Where is riverbend?
There is a link on the right side of this page, near the bottom, to Baghdad Burning. The author, an Iraqi woman, was a computer programmer before the US invasion. Since August 2003 she has been blogging, usually once or twice every two weeks.
“Riverbend” as the author calls herself, has been quite critical of the occupation. She has also provided much insight on daily life.
A volume of her blogs was published by The Feminist Press at CUNY in the spring of 2005.
Her latest post, August 5, talked about families being threatened and intimidated into leaving their (mixed Sunni-Shi’a) neighborhood. And now it has been over 8 weeks and not another post. Is there any information? Is she ok? Will she be blogging again?
More searches
Too lazy today to put up stepstreet photos (maybe later), so looking at searches again. There are many searches that bring people to jd2718 because what they are looking for is here. That’s great. But there are also searches that get here by mistake. Why not try to help them out?
Holidays and Union Stuff
1. new york city government open yom kippur. Schools are closed. Alternate side parking regulations are suspended. Careful however: meters must be fed. (got that from NYC’s official website). Everything else, I believe, is open, but I am not certain. Anyone want to confirm or correct me?
2. Do I get off work on Columbus Day? Yes, if you are a NYC teacher you get October 9 off. (That’s a Monday). You can check the Board of Ed calendar directly.
We don’t get November 11, Veteran’s Day off. It falls on a Saturday. Either at the last Exec Board or Neg Comm meeting UFT President Randi Weingarten spoke about making a fuss about getting Vets Day off when it falls on a weekend – we really should.
Click for more —-> Read more…
Some puzzles suggested by searchers
?
Puzzle solvers, try your hand at these. I looked at some search strings from people wandering in here looking for answers, and tried to guess what puzzles the searchers were trying to find solutions to.
1. Math puzzle Combine 1, 5, 6, 7 to make… I assume 24? I don’t see an answer. Other puzzlers? Do you think using factorial should be allowed? (then I’ve got 7!/[5(6+1)] )
2. All factors of 90: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 15, 18, 30, 45, 90. You could divide each number, 1 through 9 into 90, and then include it if it goes in evenly, and then ‘partner’ each of those factors with a larger one: 90/9 = 10, 90/6 = 15 , and so on. Or you could note that 90 = 213251 and review the logic in this post.
3. Distance formula puzzle. Oh, there are lots of those. I like this one: How far is it as the crow flies from the front upper left corner of a 10x10x10 room to the back lower right corner? Make them use it twice, help them generalize something a little bit neat, if you have time.
I have some other really neat crossing a room puzzles. Maybe I will put one up soon. Anyone else have favorites?
4. Puzzle 5 25 243 1024. Hm. These are all powers of a single prime, they are ascending, but I don’t see the sequence. Any help out there?
5. jbl problems? What’s jbl?
No more lesson plans
I really think so. For new teachers.
I am tired of hearing how hard new teachers work on lessons. They should be learning how to teach, how to cope with difficult classrooms, with abusive and incompetent administrators.
Someone should hand new teachers a stack of lesson plans for the first year. Plans exist. Good teachers have developed them. Why shouldn’t new teachers use them? Why should new teachers reinvent the wheel, and badly at that?
The first year is stressful enough. Let’s give these guys a break, so they have a greater chance of reaching the second year.
Who should do this? Our union? The administrators? Individual teachers?
Really, any school where new teachers are writing lessons should be penalized.
Fixing the swing room
Last week I wrote about the swing room, the space in our school shared by so many teachers that none of us was taking responsibility for the room. As a starting point I spoke to other teachers about coming up with a better seating plan. The teacher in there a bit more than me agreed that something could be done. But we didn’t seem to have time to work out the details.
Nine days ago I arrived in the swing room first period, and decide that my geometry students might be good industrial designers. I gave them the parameters:
Seats could be in rows, or horseshoes, but not in groups. Teachers should be able to walk between students to get to any individual student. The back board should, if possible, be opened up. Both front boards (not just the center one) should be in good line of sight for all students. They could not remove seats from the room, but we only needed 29 active seats. They could also suggest moving unneeded furniture out of the room. Heavy furniture could not be stored against the side walls.
Before
(dashes are desks, rectangle front left is teachers desk, X is a structural pillar, Boards are to its left and right, and in the back right, obscured by equipment. PCs are along the back wall. 1 box is roughly 2 feet square)
Click for after —> Read more…
Neat slope trick
We discovered (I assume rediscovered, since all of this stuff has been done before, and better) a neat way to show something about slopes.
Plot a right triangle with vertices at (0,0), (0,b) , and (-a,b). Notice that the slope of the hypotenuse is -b/a.
Plot another right triangle with vertices at (0,0), (0,a), and (b,a). Notice that the slope of the hypotenuse is a/b.
Also notice that since the triangles are congruent, the sum of the angles that meet at the origin is 90, and that the lines are perpendicular.
We are only a bunch of really nitpicky details away from a nice proof that lines in the plane that cross both axes are perpendicular if and only if the product of their slopes is -1.
Does anyone know if this is a widely used demonstration?
A Page for Steps
With three sets of staircases on this blog, and four more in the camera, for posting in the near future, it is time to roll out a steps of NYC page. OK, it is a mess so far, but it will get there.
Send me your favorite steps, and I’ll take a stroll over and put them up. Or complain about the layout, and maybe it will get better?
Linguistic Link
In my readings on planetary namings and un-namings I stumbled on Language Logs. The authors are a collection of linguists from Penn (I think they are from Penn), and the topics are a mix of light and more serious. It’s fun to just rummage through.
A couple I liked from their front page today include a Dilbert-connected stereotypes post, some alleged fiction masquerading as fact at the New Yorker, Gabby Guys: the Effect Size (read it to find out), and a whole bunch of “talk like a pirate” posts, including an embedded youtube video and a photo of some interesting pirate technology.
One of my favorite writers on linguistics (primarily a researcher, but the research is often too technical for me) is William Labov. He is definitely at Penn, and his stuff is worth talking about. Not now though. But if you are up to it, poke through his homepage a bit. Dialects of American English. Great stuff.
JD2718 