Marx and Metaphors
I am going to say one word to you, and that word will change the entire way that you are looking at the material we are reading for class this…
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August 6, 2019
The Abduction of Professor X
Never was the tension between teaching and tenure so visible to me as in those moments, locked in an undergraduate apartment, as the reels of the tape recorder turned, and…
July 22, 2019
A Game of Chess
I have never been very proficient at the art of chess. The one time that I tried to remedy this lack by reading a work on the subject the…
July 8, 2019
Teaching In the Fog of War
The United States has been waged more major wars during my life time, than in any comparable period of American history. I have somehow survived World War II, Korea, Vietnam,…
June 21, 2019
Addicted to the Curve
I have been told that this little story is true. I have no reason to doubt its accuracy, but its importance lies, not in its historicity, but rather in…
June 3, 2019
Decoding Art Anxiety
Arranging Victories for StudentsConfronted with images like many of those on this page, some students are as confused as I was by the equations of Professor Brown. But in some…
May 24, 2019
Lost in Lecture
DECODING CULTURAL CAPITAL “How hard is it to raise one’s hand, to approach an instructor after class, or to come to office hours to discuss a difficult assignment?” Let’s imagine…
April 20, 2019
Confessions of a D Student (Part 2)
But the saga of Math 100, described in the previous entry, was not over. There was a final piece of the story to be revealed. At my fiftieth high school reunion I…
April 9, 2019
Confessions of a D Student (Part 1)
If there is a hero to this story, it is David Sunquist, a young high school math teacher, who volunteered in the spring of 1962 to teach a handful of…
April 7, 2019