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Monthly Archives: October 2007

Iterations Toward Irrelevance

Friday, October 26, 2007

Wondering about how we lose touch with what everyone else seems to be talking about. At some point I stopped caring about popular music, for example. I listen to it on the radio now when the kids are in the car. But I don’t care about it like they do. I stopped paying attention to [...]

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This Explains Everything

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Paul Krugman: Some people seem to think that I’m saying that racism and the other issues I classify as “weapons of mass distraction” are what movement conservatism is about. They aren’t. What the movement is about is economics: the core goal is, as Heritage says in its fundraising letters, to roll back the New Deal [...]

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Between Scylla and Charybdis

Saturday, October 20, 2007

There are many other things I could be writing about. But I got sidetracked by teacherken: I am angry. I despair. I am outraged. I am exhausted. I teach about a government that perhaps no longer exists, one that had three co-equal branches, that had checks and balances, in which the power of the executive [...]

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The Big Picture

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

From the Earth Observatory News Room: The Arctic Ocean’s shift from perennial to seasonal ice is preconditioning the sea ice cover there for more efficient melting and further ice reductions each summer. The shift to seasonal ice decreases the reflectivity of Earth’s surface and allows more solar energy to be absorbed in the ice-ocean system. [...]

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Homework for Pirates

Friday, October 12, 2007

Yesterday one of my students had some gold coins with mysterious markings on them, and I asked him where they came from. I don’t know, he said. I told him they looked like something you’d find in a pirate’s chest. He said, “I have a shirt that says, ‘Pirates took my homework’. And that’s kind [...]

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Setting the Dial on Rationality

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Davis and Sumara’s book about complexity theory in education, mentions the Santa Fe Institute, a center for complexity research, but I’d never heard of it. They also referred to a book by M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, which as it turns out, tells the story of [...]

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Managing the InfoStream

Thursday, October 4, 2007

Chris Lott’s post about managing the infostream comes at a time when I’m feeling overwhelmed with competing demands for my time and attention. There are hundreds of unread feeds in my reader, and a dozen open tabs on the web browser while I grade papers, plan lessons, meet with teachers, call parents, and work through [...]

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