Archive for May, 2008:
Mercy by Day
One of my favorite phrases that appears in hymns and songs is “mercy by day and safety at night” (from Family Bible, page 165 in The Sacred Harp). My two others are “joyful doom”, which appears in a lot of things including a verse of Idumea not included in The Sacred Harp, and “God pants”, which was completely taken out of context by a singer I met in New York a few months ago and sounds kind of funny. This post is kind of about the first one.
The way I see it, the job of a boarding school teacher is to, in some limited very not-Godlike manner, provide mercy by day and safety at night. That’s what kids need in an educational and living environment. They need someone to forgive and encourage them during the working day and someone to fend off the marauding bears, wild moose, hungry vampires, angry drunks and other unsavory creatures of the night. These are the bare necessities of a successful boarding school life.
Now that the school year is almost over the limited aspect of this is hitting me harder and harder. I find that I am running out of mercy and forgiveness. On the one hand, maybe this is a sign that I should figure out some way to regain that for myself. On the other, if kids are still screwing up now after a whole year of warning and forgiveness, maybe it’s time to bring out the Old Testament version of mercy. After all, even Jesus is only your friend if you do what he says. (”You are my friends if you do what I command.” John 15:14. Of course, I shouldn’t quote the Bible out of context. The command here is “love each other”. The point still stands, because the easiest way for a kid to screw up is if she does not love and respect another; or herself.)
Subscribe to the comments for this postSome Contradance Thing
The reason for the radio silence is because I’m working on something. This something is a class, a workshop, a talk, a bunch of lunchtime conversations and not getting enough sleep. Here’s a pretty picture. I’ll tell you that it’s related to math and it’s also related to contradancing. I won’t tell you how or why, because I want to ask my students that question and I don’t know the exact ramifications of this yet. I will tell you that the top of the picture is the top of the dance.
The problem was posted by my colleague Amy Cann, solved by fellow math teacher Abihah Reed on a napkin, and I just made this drawing of the solution on GeoGebra.
Tablets, Revisited
A week ago I finally caved in and got myself a Lenovo X60 Tablet PC. ($989 new on eBay.) One week-long retreat later I got it in my mailbox upon my return last night; I’ve been playing with it since then. Did I say play? I meant to say “exploring it with an intent to create innovative pedagogy for use in the mathematics classroom”.
Note: I’m actually typing this on my MacBook because it’s hard to write long things using a tablet; I am also too lazy to revert it to laptop mode from tablet mode. Also, I really like OS X much better than Windows XP (which is still better than Windows Vista, I suppose) for things that I don’t need a tablet for. Read on for some initial impressions and reasons why I bought one of these things.