Category: teaching

  • Thespiatic

    Wow. It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything. Someday soon I’ll document what a blur my April and May have been, as explanation if not excuse. Meanwhile, let me share my tiny contribution to the recent play The Peter Pan Project, conceived as a community-written work. The prompt was, “Describe the moment you…

  • Faith in an Age of Fear

    Today the Hun School had its second annual Convocation to commence the year. As the current holder of the Distinguished Faculty Endowed Chair, it fell to me to present a speech. (I did this last year, too; you can find that speech online.) The text of this second speech can be found below the fold.

  • Old nuggets

    Anyone checking the frequency of blogging for this site need not be told that I am not a natural diarist. I keep trying to start a regular compilation of my thought but never quite get in the habit. I have a journal I’ve carted from DC to Stanford to Bensalem to Princeton. With my recent…

  • The Mongrel Dogs at Sea (11): Solar Sight

    I experienced something today that I’ve heard a lot about but never quite believed in: the infamous green flash. I’d read that, sometimes, during sunsets, just at the moment the Sun sinks below the horizon, it flashes green. However, the conditions are hard to meet and the occurrence somewhat rare. Tonight as the Regal Princess…

  • Irksome metric

    Today, there’s a piece by Maya Jasonoff in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times on the Americans loyal to Britain during the Revolution, and it has me irked. It’s not the thesis, which I agree with, that we should be more aware that the “self-evident” truths were anything but, to about 20% of…

  • A complicated poster.

    Yet another in the series of posters for the newly-rechristened Second Interworld War. This one is inspired by the many different posters that had streams of planes passing overhead in a not-too-subtle V formation. The purpose was to impress with the sheer excess of Allied production. And of course, the exhortation to work hard and…

  • Nothing But a Dream

    One of the things that goes along with advising Student Council at my school is orchestrating the annual Talent Show. For the past four years, that’s included performing as the first act — largely because I badger my fellow faculty into performing, and I feel I shouldn’t ask them to do something I’m not willing.…

  • more testing of subscribe2

    Let’s see what this does.

  • Quickie: Accidentally-hilarious writing

    I was flipping through the channels and came across FX’s presentation of The Day After Tomorrow. I’d never seen it before — movies like this make my teeth hurt, because the science is just so bad. But I decided to give it a go. My full opinion on the movie would likely bore you but…

  • Snow Day!

    The sweetest two words to any teacher’s ears (well, other than “summer vacation” :)), and the only good reason to receive a phone call at 5 in the morning. 🙂