When Butterflys Buzz
Something is odd. There is a regular lovefest going on over at Edwize.
In the comments on Blog Buzz on Charter School Outrage, our own NYCEducator says nice things about Leo Casey.
In discussion of Maisie’s Graduation Report Finally Released, Peter Goodman and Chaz (Chaz!) agree about statistics.
And everyone likes each other when commenting on Leo’s Do Charter Schools Need Unions.
Lest you think this is some wierd Edwize-only truce, in this week’s Carnival of Education, NYCEducator praises Leo’s article:
best and most complete account, better than the one in the NY Times, was written by Leo Casey in Edwize
So, what gives? Do people get all lovey when I leave town? Or does the last day of school mellow people beyond belief? (A few contributions on that theory have appeared recently. I will add links later.)
Or do we, no matter other differences, agree that the DoE plays games with numbers, and that the Charter School Movement and teacher union haters have a great deal of overlap? So no matter other differences, we come together on some core issues.
I like that answer better.
…but the carnival is back in New York
I may be in Greece…
our very own NYCEducator has outdone himself (and also kindly threw me in, though I haven’t written a word about education in.. hmm, let’s not count).
Go visit this week’s carnival of education
Brief Discourse on Cucumber Tomato Salad
There’s a name for this in Greek, something like agorontomata, but I don’t know the spelling and can’t produce Greek characters anyhow.
All the same, I’m addicted. It’s been on my plate for every lunch and dinner over the last 3 days, and I can see this going on for some time…
Basically, it’s ripe tomatoes, in chunks. Cucumbers, in quartered wedges. Onions, chopped. Soaked in olive oil. Sometimes with extras.
Options
The tomato chunks are the same size in any given salad, but the sizes vary somewhat. The smallest I have encountered is a large, single bite. This is the best. The tomatoes must be brilliantly ripe. All have come close. Some closer than others.
The onions can be white or red. Red are better. Sliced think before being chopped are even better.
There can be a lot of oil, or a whole lot. A whole lot is better.
They usually have olives. Black are better.
I had one served with sliced green peppers (probably mildly spicy). Bad idea. Another came with scallions. Also, a bad idea.
Some have fresh parsely. No objection. Some have dried herbs sprinkled on top. Also, no objection.
Finally, if the tomatoes are ripe and the onions are sweet, then the leftover sauce will be incredible, especially if some herbs or parsely are floating around in there. Walking away without sopping it all up would be criminal.
Salad time…
Some Thessaloniki History
I came to this city hoping to find some history. And there are bits and pieces. But not nearly as much as I thought I might find.
Some background: Thessaloniki is a 2500 year old city. That ‘niki’ part means victory, victory over the Thessalans or some people with a similar sounding name.
The part of the history that grabs me starts in the 15th century when the Ottoman Turks conquered it, lost it, the Venetians took it, and the Ottomans retook it and held it until 1916 (?) 1912.
This is not so unusual, there are plenty of Greek cities that were long-ruled by Turks, but something else happened: Thessaloniki, or Salonika as it is often called, became a focus for migration for the Sephardic Jews who had been expelled from Spain. They came speaking Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), and came in such numbers that they played a major role in Salonika’s life for centuries (real centuries, about four of them).
Click For More –> Read more…
If it’s Friday…
Travel journal. Day 0. Day 1.
Ran out of school Wednesday, finished packing (1 bag only! Woohoo!), got a ride to the airport, and was out.
In all my planning I don’t think I properly considered the sleep factor. I was up early Wednesday, straightening the apartment (no one likes coming home to a mess, not even me), and then that damned airplane ride is only 8 hours, starting at 5:30. So if you force yourself to sleep around 9 oclock (which I did) you are arriving at 1:30 am, which is only 4 and a half hours away. Of course the sun comes up around midnight, and breakfast service is soon after, so I got about the best that I could expect: 3 interrupted hours of half sleep.
And then I was in Rome. I knew that I should get a guided tour – sit down on a bus, preferably with good a/c, and let them talk as I snapped (or didn’t bother snapping) photos. Is that what I did? hmm
This post continues. Click this —> Read more…
Last Day of School
The school year is finally over for all us NYC teachers. Kick back, relax. Not only have you earned it, but you really deserve it.
(apologies to those of you working summer school. I hope your a/c works.)
After awards and groans about canceled field day (and quiet cheers from some teachers, starting with yours truly) I will be off for Rome, Salonika, and some points in between.
Perhaps I can manage the occasional blog entry over the next few weeks. Maybe even a photo or two.
But don’t count on it.
Regular entries should resume the 3rd week of July.
A little more Oaxaca
Due to an upcoming trip, I will not be updating my Oaxaca links.
Edwize reports:
PSC-CUNY, the union of faculty and professional staff at City University of New York are calling for a picket at the Mexican consulate to support our brother and sister Mexican teachers fighting a bitter, difficult strike in Oaxaca, southern Mexico. We call on the Mexican authorities to stop the violent use of police against the strike, and to meet the just demands of Local 22 of SNTE (National Education Workers Union).
Wednesday, June 28th
4:00-5:30 pm
The Mexican Consulate
(27 E. 39th St. between Park and Madison Aves.)
West 238 Street
This is W238 St, between Irwin and Waldo.
Turn off Broadway at the Riverdale Diner, and you come to a dead end.
But it’s only a dead end for cars.
click for more –> Read more…
Expanded contract page
Little by little, I am expanding my UFT contract page. Take a look. Leave comments. What else would be useful? And how do I fix my salary chart problem?
Bad Search, Good Answer
When people reach here by searching, they sort of announce what they were looking for. Many find what they want. But many must be disappointed. Here are a few of those. As a bonus, I will try to undisappoint some of them.
4 4s puzzle
Ah. jd2718 is the wrong site, but Four Fours is a great puzzle you can play with any group of kids. Take four fours, and combine them (lots of flexibility on the rules) to make lots of numbers. I understand everything from 1 – 100 is possible.
Eg: 81 = [4 – (4/4)]4
Here is a description. Search for other sites for lots of answers.
Archaeologists salary charts
– Now there's an idea. Most teachers in this country have salary charts. We have a contract that specifies how much we get, based on years of experience, and sometimes based on additional credentials or education. But archaeologists?
Dr. Dig says I am wrong:
click to continue reading –> Read more…
What happened to mathandtext?
I enjoyed reading and sometimes commenting on jd fisher's mathandtext blog. But, alas, it has been replaced by a nearly blank page. Did it collapse? Was it stolen? Has he resurfaced?
If you have the answers, leave a comment.
(Here's the old link, but it goes to an icky page now: mathandtext.blogspot.com)
edit: The link now goes to what appears to be a commercial site, not very interesting. I am hiding my link to it. Has anyone seen jd Fisher reappear anywhere?
edit: And a commenter found him:
The new URL and a name change:
2718 goofs…
"How many factors does 270 have?"
This question was on my combinatorics final. It was designed for kids to use a quick counting method based on prime factorization, but to allow my laggards to have a reasonable chance to make a complete list.
270 has 16 factors: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 15, 18, 27, 30, 45, 54, 90, 135, 270
| 2050 | 2150 | 2051 | 2151 | |
| 30 | 1 | 2 | 5 | 10 |
| 31 | 3 | 6 | 15 | 30 |
| 32 | 9 | 18 | 45 | 90 |
| 33 | 27 | 54 | 135 | 270 |
I hope you can clearly see the 2 by 2 by 4 calculation that is in play.
So the goof? Look at the prime factorization: 2*3*3*3*5.
I am looking at two papers where the kids knew to factor down to primes, but then added: 2+3+3+3+5= 16
Ouch. 3 point question. Award 1, or 0? I'm not going to say which I did.
But are there other numbers (I haven't given this much thought) where the sum of their prime factors equals their number of factors? Is there anything special about these numbers?
Three Puzzles from Searchers
Some people reach this blog with search engines. But what do they search for?
Some are still looking for the answers to that 24 puzzle that I got wrong. Deal or No Deal still generates hits. Lots want UFT information. (More about this later this week). Some are really looking for other bloggers I have mentioned or I link to.
But some are searching for puzzles that I haven't written about.
Here are, as best as I can construct, 3 searcher-driven puzzles:
1, 3, 4, 6 make 23
I get it. Combine these 4 numbers using +, -, *, and / to make 23. I don't see a solution without making up new rules. Readers?
Largest 9 digit perfect square no 9s.
Seems to have clear ground rules. I know that 20,0002 = 400,000,000, but I assume we can do much better. But I can't imagine checking the next 9,999 perfect squares.
As an aside, the number of 9 digit numbers is 900,000,000. The number without the digit '9' is less than 350,000,000. Even stripping away the last hundred million, a random choice has a greater than 50% probability of including a '9'.
Largest 3 digit number 10 factors
OK, this seems clear, too. I can step in on this one, but let's see if a reader wants to attack it first.
Keep solving and keep searching!
Oaxaca
There is a teachers’ strike that has some of the aspects of open rebellion taking place in Oaxaca, Mexico.
I am creating a Oaxaca links page [link deleted August 6, 2006] with links to news and blogs (need to find some background pieces), and will update the links at least daily while the crisis continues.
Check back. Share links/sources. And do what you can to let others know.
In June Teachers Quit
Last week I wrote about a NYC Teaching Fellow leaving the profession at the end of her first year. Now here is a North Carolina teacher who is quitting (Don't let the name fool you. She is First Year Teacher, but she made it through 3 years).
You must take a look at her resignation letter. But do poke through the rest of her archives as well. English teacher, middle school, strange state, strange kids, strange people… it's a well-written teacher blog with some nice stories.
I wonder how many teacher bloggers are quitting this month? (teaching, not blogging). If I find a few more, or if anyone points me in the right direction, maybe I'll make a page.
Ghost the Bunny
Laura’s pet bunny, Ghost, hops up a flight of 12 stairs. Ghost can hop up one or two steps at a time, and never hops down. How many ways can Ghost reach the top?
(note, if Ghost goes up one at a time, and ends with a double hop, or if he starts with a double hop, then goes up the rest one at a time, those count as two different ways) (iow, order matters.)
SVP IV: Niagara and Lowell
Summer Vacation Planning IV
NEH Workshops
For me, this summer is for travel. After getting back from Rome, Thessaloniki, and Istanbul*, there will be more.
The National Endowment for the Humanities sponsors:
which are one-week workshops in American history. Although their principal audience would seem to be history teachers, I was told they accept the token math or science person. So I figured I could try and apply for two of them (the max allowed). And I got both.
The last week of July I will be attending the
Click below for more
Goodbye too soon
The list of links that need to be described includes Altruism Gone Wild, but alas, Fellowette, AGW’s blogger, has come to an end. I mean as a fellowette – she is leaving teaching. Here is her last day. For the record, Fellowette was a first year high school English teacher in a big school in the Bronx.
If you get a chance, go look, hunt through her archives. This is first year teaching in NYC, in the Bronx. That’s how it really looks. Sad, funny, and frustratingfrustratingfrustrating! Maybe Fellowette hadn’t planned to stay very long, but with these conditions, who has a choice?
Click below for more
Rough Day
Read about a 4th grade teacher's day from hell here. Try reading the entry out loud to a friend. It's sad and keystone kops frustrating and hillarious all at once. How can it get worse? (but it does)
New Look
WordPress has very nice themes, which is why I came over here a month and a half ago, but I quickly learned that I had less control over layout than I would have liked.
Finally, just today, I learned that some of the precanned themes allow much more flexibility than others, and I moved from my sharp 3-column sliver/blue/steel blue to a duller but more manageable “Regulus” theme.
The folks (folk?) (guy) who designed this layout say they appreciate thanks and links, and they just got both.
Regulus gives better control over pages and sub-pages. It is now possible to add comments to pages (not only posts.) Before it was almost a waste of time to expand the UFT Contract page. Now I will add to it, slowly.
I may also be creating an outdoor staircases of NYC page, and posting my first photos there later this week (thank you Kevin!)
Regulus also allows the user to play with colors, which few of the other wordpress canned themes do, alter layout slightly, and design your own header image and text. You may see other, relatively minor changes in this space over the next few weeks.
A new teacher blog link, and some older ones
I just added Polski to my blogroll. His lighthearted take on the craziness that is middle students and the extracraziness that is middle school administration, well, it makes a good read.
This is a good time to catch up on a few more teacher blog links that I added but never mentioned.
Chaz is a NYC teacher (HS in Queens, science, I think). And he spells trouble for our union. He is disatisfied, and articulate. Not all of his issues are my issues, but all of his issues are important and worth reading seriously. Dismiss him at your own risk.
3σ → Left is a Minnesota high school math teacher. That squiggle is a greek ‘s’ (sigma), and it stands for standard deviations. So 3σ → Left could mean 3 large units away from the center (maybe a political label?) or 3 units to the left (on an intelligence curve, that would be, um, oops), or 3 units away from the mainstream in general. Anyhow, lots of slice of life, teacher and school policy issues, frustrating stories of seniors not doing work, administration backing parents who may not always be doing the best things possible, education-wise, etc. Real teacher, real issues, hard to answer questions.
Mathematical Musings is Jeanne Simpson, a middle school math teacher in Alabama. Jeanne uses lots ‘o technology, including blogs with her class, and blogs about it, of course.
Click below for more
How to Grieve Letters
Months too late, a searcher suggested the need for a guide to grieving letters. Here is an old one I posted this morning.
Free Throw Percentage Puzzle
A basketball player has .750 free throw percentage. (that's what they call it, even though we have a 3 decimal digit number – oh well.)
And for those of you who don't know, basketball players take one free throw at a time, and either make them, or not. So someone could go 1 for 1, then 1 for 2 (miss), 1 for 3 (another miss), 2 for 4 (make), 3 for 5 (make), 4 for 6 (make), 5 for 7 (make), etc.
So here's the puzzle: A basketball player has a .750 free throw shooting percentage. Some time later he has raised his percentage to .900 (from 3/4 to 9/10 for those of you who prefer fractions). Did he have to be at .800 (4/5) somewhere in between?
What’s your question? (2)
Searches that find this blog often imply questions. Last week I answered a few of them. This week I will answer a few more.
Old questions
First off, some of last week's questions remained popular. More searches reached here trying to solve 3 3 8 8 in the game of 24 than reached here for anything else. Here is my most humiliating link where I post the wrong answer, but a commenter patches things up.
There also remain many implied queries for the UFT, or the UFT contract in general. Go to the source. Pay scale questions? Ditto.
For those of you with problems with 3020a hearings, international teacher status, or other serious matters, please please, don't get your information off a blog. Go to your Chapter Leader, and if stuck, then call your borough office for information.
Expected Value and a real game, (for kids)
My Combinatorics class needed a final unit that would tie together a bunch of what they had learned in some sort of real world application.
The disappointing part of this is that we never reached Deal or No Deal in class. We needed to have the kids watch episodes, and analyze them, and the time just wasn't there.
(For the record, we would have done very simple expected value calculations, discovered that based on expected value alone that the last few offers were the only ones that were ever worth taking, but we would have explored other rational decision-making factors other than expected value.)
(Further, we would have attacked the banker's math, but I don't think the kiddies would have cracked his plan. I haven't, though I haven't tried too hard. The median and mean seem involved, but there is something inversely proportional to the number of remaining cases, as well.)
Instead, we learned to play Rouxletxte. (excuse the x's, I am hoping they defeat the search engines). We learned what the wheel looked like, where the chips go, what the payouts are. And I didn't need to tell them anything.
JD2718 