9/11 Twenty Years Later

Twenty years have passed since that fateful morning that changed the world, and I wanted to be sure that I made a note of the date on the blog. I did a check, and I've done exactly one comic, ten years ago for the tenth anniversary, but that was all that was needed. I wasn't going to harp on it and I couldn't make math problems out of it. I didn't want to trivialize it or be morbid about it. So a handful of times, I had a simple entry like this one to wish everyone a Somber September 11th.

What follows below are the comic from 2011, and a post from a few years later, which was actually written in 2005 about my day walking home in Brooklyn with a bunch of strangers, none of whom I ever met again, but we were important to each other in that moment.

(C)Copyright 2011, C. Burke. All rights reserved. Real-world examples shouldn't be overlooked nor forgotten.

---

As requested (and as promised):

This was originally posted (I think) in 2005. It's been an annual repost since then.

At about 8:40am on that morning, I was walking into the Court building on Adams Street (actually, the Court St. entrance) in Downtown Brooklyn to start serving jury duty. As luck would have it, I had been halfway to the train station before I’d realized that I’d left my Walkman on the kitchen table, so I didn’t bother going back for it. I figured I’d just get a newspaper. Besides, I didn’t know how well I’d be able to pick up AM inside the building anyway.

I sat in a dark room watching a video on How to Be a Good Juror, oblivious to what was going on right across the river. We were told to relax in the room that they have, and I looked out the window at the Marriot Hotel. Traffic on Adams St was snarled, not moving. Must’ve been an accident on the Brooklyn Bridge, I thought. (It was a block away.)

People were standing around outside the hotel. Must be waiting for a tour bus or something. What did I know.

Fire trucks and ambulances started flying by on the wrong side of Adams Street, which had no traffic. Okay, traffic doesn’t come into Brooklyn much in the morning, but something was odd here. I had been facing 180 degrees from where I needed to be looking.

Finally, they had made an announcement. America was at war, under attack. The World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been destroyed. They were trying to get coverage on the TV sets in the jury rooms. I don’t think they succeeded. Even if they wanted to, only CBS would be available because it still broadcast from the Empire State Building.

People were beside themselves, many broke down, everyone was rushing for the payphones. I met a woman who had been listening to her radio. She let me share her earbuds. She was shaken and needed a cigarette. I don’t smoke, but I walked her to the smoking room. (There was one on the floor. Quite a few people were there.)

We were dismissed. Not much was going to get done in the Court building that week. Groups of people huddled outside with questions, comments, gossip and hearsay. Some of the lawyers said they saw it happen. What kind of plane was it?

Does anyone know if the trains are running? What about the buses? No trains. No LIRR. A few buses and they’re all packed. It was time to start walking and no one wanted to walk alone. We walked in groups.

Dust was falling from the sky in downtown Brooklyn like a dirty snow that was covering the cars. Papers fell too. We started walking up Atlantic Avenue. People were wandering around with their cell phones out trying to get a signal. no luck.

We took a turn down Third Avenue. I needed to. I wanted to stop at my mother’s house. It was a good resting point for me. The group I’d tagged along with decided to join me. One guy stopped in a hardware store for masks and passed them out.

When we passed Third St and reached the Gowanus Canal, we had our first real look. It was like a scene out of a bad movie. The skyline was there. But the Towers were missing. Just a terrible column of smoke and a cloud drifting our way.

We didn’t stay long. We kept walking. I made it to my mother’s house and said good-bye to the others. Some were walking all the way to Staten Island. One who had joined our group had walked over the Brooklyn Bridge — after having walked down 50 floors of Tower 1. God was looking out for him.

I watched some of the coverage until the trains were running again. I took one that left me about a mile or so from my inlaws, the meeting place for the rest of the family. I stopped in at St. Athanasius on the way. I hadn’t been there since a wedding about 15-20 years earlier. I stayed for a little while and walked the rest of the way.

Thankfully, my wife, who worked at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge on the Manhattan side had evacuated immediately before the trains had stopped running.

It’s not a walk that I’ll ever forget.

---

Mom isn't there anymore and my "resting place" has since been bulldozed, sadly. Just more things to remember about that day.

A Young Pickpocket Learns A Valuable Lesson

Something happened a couple weeks back while I rode the Bay Parkway bus one weekday afternoon shortly after school let out. The bus was crowded as it usually is even before it got to my stop, by the train station. Naturally, it's a transfer point where many commuters are making a connection.

For those who haven't ridden a bus in New York City (and I haven't ridden elsewhere, but I imagine it's similar), you get on through the front door, the driver says move on back so more people can get on, and generally, people ignore him after moving about 10 feet. Resistance is met with surrender -- if you can't get past two people who refuse to move, you'll likely stop and add to the problem.

I do try to move back as far as I can. For one thin, plenty of people exit through the rear door, so if you can break through the logjam, there's usually breathing room in the back (and sometimes a seat with a bag on it that you can shame someone into removing).

There are a couple of semi-valid reasons for not moving toward the back of the bus. First, you are with someone who managed to get a seat, so you wish to stand near them, which requires you to sway out of the way of people pushing past. (Note: this is difficult to do if you are oblivious to the fact that you are wearing a bulky backpack sticking straight out into the "aisle", which is basically inches wide. Take it off!) Second, you have packages or a bag on wheels with a handle, either of which would be difficult to navigate through crowds.

On this day, there was an older woman with a travel bag with the handle extended immediately to her left, and she also had a sizable pocketbook hanging from left shoulder. I had my briefcase in my left hand, with its strap still on my left shoulder. I was also wearing a pair of earbuds with the wire running down to and disappearing into the right pocket of my jacket. Everything inside my pocket was secure; it always is. I was basically sidestepping through the crowd, leading with my bag to wiggle through, saying "Pardon me, excuse me, pardon me" like an old Bugs Bunny cartoon. My right hand was grasping and moving along the overhead bar because the bus pulled away from the curb rather abruptly. (Schedules!) I noted both of her bags and was being careful.

Now there is an alternate explanation about the events which happened next: it is possible that the wire could've caught on either of her bags. It is possbile that the woman shifted and her elbow caught the wire. It's possible that this was just an odd occurrence. But not likely in the slightest.

This is why: I have had the wire to my earbuds snag on things before. The result is always the same -- the earbuds are pulled from my ears. Action/reaction. I think that there was one time that the wire came loose on the other end. However, the path of least resistance, the weakest link in the chain, is the connection to my ears, not to my pocket. Never -- I repeat, NEVER! -- has any snag yanked anything out of my pocket. (Like a little boy's, a grown man's pockets run deep, and they collect many things.)

Here is what I believe really happened. Someone, likely a school-aged individual, saw an opportunity. They saw the wire disappearing into my pocket and my right arm raised over my head, giving them a clear path. They either thought that they could easily lift my phone out of my pocket by the wire, or maybe that if they pinched the wire, my motion to the back of the bus would lift it out on its own. Their objection, I suppose, would be to yank the wire free, palm the phone and swing about in their seat, essentially disappearing into the crowd, leaving me without anyone to accuse. It's not like a cop would stop the bus and search all the passengers, right?

But the little sticky-fingered bandit didn't get away with it. Like Snidely Whiplash with two binomials, his plan was foiled because he hadn't counted on something. There was something he hadn't expected and probably never would have before now.

And so my little pickpocket friend, you have now learned a valuable lesson.

You now know what a Sony Walkman looks like.

(blog): Last Friday's #NYCMathTweetUp Meet-Up

As promised yesterday, more about my weekend meet-ups.

On Friday Night, a gathering of #mathednyc took place at the offices of Offices of New Visions for Public Schools on West 13 Street in New York City, dubbed the #NYCMathTweetUp. I'm not sure how the capitalization worked with hashtags. Prior to the event, I read that n > 30 had RSVPed, where n is "the number of people interested". However, upon arrival, I discovered fewer than that made it there on a cold night, but this didn't discourage anyone.

The icebreaker game started as soon as we stepped off the elevator and filled in our name tag. We had to pick another tag from the tree with the name of another guest. I thought to jokingly call these hashtags, but they actually contained our Twitter handles instead. The goal was to locate that person and start a conversation. I joked that I might find my partner, but she might excuse herself because she was still looking for her partner. And I say "she" because I did, in fact, locate @khatrimath before the evening ended. I didn't have many comments to make at that point, except that I thought that the two of us were the only ones with math in our Twitter handles.

Guests were asked to bring a math activity that we could try out. I promptly forgot all about that. Not a problem, however, because (1) David Wees @daidwees supplied us with a page of New Visions Math Tweetup Puzzles, and (2) we didn't actually do any. But that was fine, because the conversations were flowing nicely. (I even stopped talking long enough to allow other to speak... a few times, any way ...)

The one major activity of the evening (after eating too many sliders) was an activity entitled Things That Suck. As educators, we divided ourselves into three camps -- Totally Sucks, Does Not Suck, and Need More Info/Might (Not) Suck -- on each of several burning topics, including Homework, Regents exams and Professional Development. This last one being the reason I tweeted that the evening was "like Professional Development, but, you know, fun", and why the first response to that was "the kind that doesn't suck", by the aforementioned @khatrimath.

The evening wound down and the conversation continued at a local establishment a few blocks away, where the picture I posted yesterday was taken.

---

Update: What the heck, I'll add a little about Saturday night, too. I was debating whether or not to add a little more about the Celtic Cross concert because the readers here are usually looking for mathy-geeky comics or math-education discussion. But I'm Irish, and I had a good time, so why not? It's not blog, right?

I uploaded a couple of videos to youtube. I'll link you to their cover of Little Talks, which I referenced in a comic last summer. Search on user cjburke23 to find a bunch more. It was a fun show, and I had a sneak peek at their playlist so that I'd know when to film songs I hadn't gotten before. Unfortunately, they strayed from the playlist a few times. After the end of the evening, the crowd was screaming for "One. More. Song. One! More! Song!", and they obliged (and even played two).

It was at this point, the lead singer, Kathleen Vessey Fee called me over (I was close to the front) and said, "Chris, give someone your phone!". Then she handed me the Cowbell and the stick to play it. Unfortunately, I didn't know anyone well enough to hand over my videocamera (it's not a phone) who wasn't also dancing. The thing is: I knew that this would likely happen, given that it was a birthday night out for me, and this was secretly why I invited a bunch of people. So there isn't any video of it (not that I'm aware of), but I played along on the Black-Eyed Peas Tonight's Gonna Be A Good Night, which then led into Taylor Swift's You Belong With Me.

It was at this point that the jaw of the young lady pictured below dropped halfway to the dance floor as did those of several of her friends, all of whom were surprised that I appeared to know the song and could sing along with it. So I got a picture with my first "groupie", Jill. The gentleman with her took it, so I'm safe. And it was about time we were introduced because she and her friends are regulars at these shows, and we've bumped into each other on the (very small) dance floor before.

So no math discussions that night, not even about the Guinness t-test, unless that was a taste test.

(blog): It Was a Meet-Up Weekend

Until recently, I had a lot of make-up weekends, lost Saturdays and Sundays were I made-up the backlog of work that I let snowball from Monday to Friday (or the week or weeks before). However, this weekend was a Meet-up Weekend, where I got to meet up with people I didn't know personally beforehand, but now I can say I have.

Warning: These meetups keep me out late -- not complaining. On the contrary, glad that I'm out of a rut. On the other hand, I haven't made up the sleep yet, so this is a short intro post, and the actual events will get described tomorrow. (No comic tomorrow, either. I haven't done one yet, and don't intend to in the next 20 minutes or so.)

Friday night, if you are a math educator in or near New York City and you blog, tweet or post anything about education, you should have joined us at the NYC Math Education Tweetup at New Visions for Public Schools. According to my email, about 30 people were scheduled to attend; however, I think the weather might've scared a few off. Likewise, parking in Manhattan (I took a train) can be a nightmare and finding the correct address was a minor adventure in oddly-labeled buildings. Again, I'll go into more detail tomorrow. I didn't have a decent camera on me, but pictures were taken, and I'm waiting for more to show up online or in email. One picture did show up at the "after-party" -- that's me on the right.

I got a little turned around in the village and thought I was heading in the correct direction for the train. I should've taken the hint when I was standing at the corner of West 4th Street and West 12th Street that something was amiss. I did figure it out, and eventually trains did get me home much later than I expected.

Unfortunately, my body won't sleep late once the sun's up unless it's extremely cloudy, so I lost a couple of hours. However, that didn't prevent me from joining Celtic Cross at a concert. (By joining, I mean that we were all at the same place at the same time.) The music didn't start until after 10pm. Funny thing, back in college, I never went to a late-night show like this. Now, I seem to do it every couple of months. It was an extra-special outing for me in that some family and friends were going to join me for a change to celebrate my birthday last week. Unfortunately, by showtime, every one of them had a legitimate reason for not being there. But I didn't care. I met other people, fans of the band, some of whom I've seen before, even if we hadn't spoken. I also found out others were having birthdays. At one point, three of us met and discovered that we were 30, 40 and 50. Unfortunately, one of us walked away before we could get a picture. I won't mention which it was, but here are the other two (me and Elizabeth).

I wore a red shirt to be festive for Christmas and all that, but by that part of the evening, it was too hot, so I wore it open. I got some compliments on the Celtic Cross design on my shirt, which has no connection to the band other than their name. (That is, their logo is different.)

Again, I can go into detail about the fun I had in a post tomorrow, but if you need to know why I like this band so much and follow them around, here's a little bit of a hint:

(me and Kathleen Vessey Fee)

(blog): Happy Consecutive Number Day!

It's seems like every day, like every number, has something special about it, but as George Orwell might've said, but wisely chose not to, "Some dates are more special than others". (Had he said something about some numbers being more equal than others, that could've been a problem, but would've fit well into his theme. But that's a subject for another blog post.)

Today is Consecutive Number Day because it is 12/13/14. We've had a Consecutive Number Day for each of the past 11 years -- TWO, if you use the Commutative Property of Dates (also known as the DD-MM-YY format). This last fact makes this year's date even more special because there won't be a 12-13-14 is London or Madrid or pretty much everywhere else in the world where they use that format because there isn't a 13th month.

Finally, it's special because after 12 years in a row, this one will be the last one for a long time. Now, don't fret yourself into a worry. You don't have to wait until 2103 for another one ... unless you're some kind of crazed purist. Me? I like to run the numbers, have fun with the numbers.

The first Consecutive Number Day that I took note of happened when I was in ... kindergarten, no, wait, Pre-K! Yeah! That's the ticket! ... in 1978. It was 5/6/78 and we even had to pause at 12:34 pm (I was asleep for 12:34 am) to note that it was 12:34 5/6/78.

Eleven years later, digital watches were common and we knew the correct time to the second, if we ever bothered to set it correctly, so we knew when it was 1:23:45pm 6/7/89. We could do the same the following year, although 7/8/90 wasn't quite as much fun.

Two thoughts come out of this. First, given the accuracy of today's computing, I had to wonder if the atomic clock could tell us when it was exactly 1:23:34567891011 12/13/14 (and, if so, did some geek take a selfie of it?). Second, it gives us something closer to look forward to.

Hold the date now in your datebook app for 1/2/34. Sadly, there isn't a 5:67 am or pm. Not even in London. Or even in Pasadena, where they'll be hosting the Rose Bowl because New Year's Day is on a Sunday.

(Blog): MATHice in Scienceland

Only three days into my new substitute assignment, and I have a few observations. Now, i don't want to get political or start anything -- that's not me. I try to roll with it, whatever it is, and not stir the pot. Especially, considering that I have to revisit this pot for the next month. But, here goes ...

One of the school's Living Environment teachers has been out sick. (I don't know how many the school has.) I've covered her classes every day this week, so far, and likely will continue to do so. I don't mind, but the kids do. They're objecting to the work posted on the board with no one to teach them. They're frustrated and confused and don't like to be told to read the text book. Some of them do what they have to do and try their best. Some of them, I think they just want a teacher to tell them the answers to the questions. And some don't seem to care at all. And none are happy that there's a math teacher in their science class.

Today, I tried to talk to a few of them. It was a good day for this because many of the freshmen were gone on a trip and some of my classes had fewer than a dozen students present. Unfortunately, they just wanted to complain (which is fine, so far as that goes), but they didn't want to hear any solutions -- not the ones that are possible or likely. They need to step up and take matters into their own hands, but they don't have the maturity for it.

Have you heard me complain lately that today's freshmen are less mature than the junior high school students I needed to get away from a dozen years ago?

I don't have all the facts, just some anecdotals. At my last school, while they were losing teachers to budget cuts, I knew that the Living Environment (aka Biology) teachers were safe. (This is my impression, mind you, not a statement of facts.) They were needed more than any of the other science teachers because they were the freshmen class, and everyone has to pass that class and Regents exam. If I extrapolate this, Living Environment teachers are likely in high demand, meaning that they have options as to what school they teach in. Which means that they'll leave a poor school in a heartbeat if something better becomes available.

Without passing judgment, I tried to explain to the kids that if someone was looking for a position, would they pick a school that's been around for 50 years or one that was reopened in the past five? That's not the perfect measure for adults, but that's something the kids could understand without feeling insulted.

Not all 50-year-old schools are great, but they've "reorganized" the poorer performing ones in recent years. But if you're looking for a position (which I've done too much of in recent years) and you see a school where, say, 80% of the kids graduate in 4 years and 70% go on to college, and a second one where, say, 40% of the kids graduate in four years and who wants to contemplate the low number going to college, which do you think the teacher is going to lean toward? If one school has staff who have been there for more than a decade, and the other is only five years old and no one's been there for more than three of those five years, which do you think the teacher is going to lean toward?

If a teacher were to walk into my classroom while I was subbing and saw what little respect the students had not only for me (the sub), but for the property of their actual teacher and (let's face it) for themselves, would they want to come to this school?

End result: if the school is poorly-performing, then you aren't going to be able to attract a qualified teacher whose future depends on the performance of immature individuals who have been taught to respect themselves above all else to the exclusion of having any respect for others, without actually recognizing that they aren't respecting their own future as they find "disrespect" in everything anyone tells them that is contrary to their own preconceived (and immature) notions of reality.

Is that the school's fault? Is it the kids' fault? The parents' fault? The teacher's fault?

I don't know. I'll play it safe. I'll blame Bloomberg. He didn't create the mess. He just made it worse by trying to remake the schools in his own image. And he's not my boss anymore, so I can get away with that now.

(Blog): 8 Lies Math Students Love to Tell!

In honor of the marking period ending and grade submissions coming due, we present to you ...

The Top 8 Lies Math Students Love to Tell

8. I'm doing my work!

7. Why am I failing? I handed in all my homeworks and passed all my testses (sic).

6. I was just about to get started.

5. Hey, why'd you erase it? I was copying that.

4. I said that!

3. I'm finished.

2. Mr. Burke, you the greatest math teacher evah! (week before grades are due and/or parents coming to school)

And the Number One Lie Math Students Love to Tell. . .

1. I did my best. I tried really, really hard.

Blog: Jeopardy and Non-Common Core Math

Last week, Jeopardy had a Kids Week and on Friday night, one of the categories was Non-Common Core Math. As a math teacher and just someone who likes numbers, I was curious what the category would be. The kids, on the other hand, well they were curious, too, at first, but then ran away.

It started innocently enough, with the $200 answer being: "1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5". Quick mental math gave the question, "What is 15?" A simple exercise in triangle numbers, which are formed by summing consecutive numbers. It's one of those things which most kids will see and do even before they hear the phrase "triangle numbers", and long before they know they memorize the formula. Besides, a small sequence like this is quicker to add (if you don't have it already memorized) than computing a formula.

Things got trickier with the $400 answer, "1 - 2 + 3 - 4 + 5". There was some hesitation as the contestants (I almost typed "students") worked that one out before one of them arrived at "What is 3?" (I didn't tape it, so I can't review it to see if someone got it incorrect first. I don't remember.) There are two short cuts for this problem, and both have to do with pairing. If you noticed that each pair "1 - 2" and "3 - 4" yield a result of "-1", you have -1 + -1 + 5, which is 3. If you noticed that "-2 + 3" and "-4 + 5" yield a result of "+1", then you had 1 + 1 + 1, which is still 3. If you just oscillated your numbers, you took more time and you probably didn't buzz in in time.

The kids gave up on the third answer: "1 * 2 * 3 * 4 * 5". Given the ages of the kids, I would have thought that at least one of them had seen factorial before, and this was the definition of 5!, although the numeric equivalent was needed. Perhaps they got stuck on 24 * 5, not thinking to reverse the order (20, 60, 120, 120). Whatever the reason, no one got the answer, and they bailed on the category.

It proved so unpopular that when Trebek cautioned "less than a minute to go" (a.k.a < 1 min), the two Math clues remained, and were the final ones of the game.

The $800 answer: "-1 * 2 * -3 * 4 * -5". This actually bothered me that none of the kids gt it. First, for the reason Alex gave. Second, because I had to listen to Alex give it. The previous clue had a result of 120. The numbers multiplied are the same, only some of the signs have changed. Multiply a negative times a negative times a negative and the product will be negative (times two more positives, which won't affect it). The question should have been "What is -120?", which should have been easy considering the previous question gave them the number, and they only had to add on the sign.

The final reason to be annoyed? Alex took so long to explain what should have been obvious that we didn't get to see the last clue. Would it have had division? Exponentiation? Mathematical minds want to know!

But that clue won't be revealed, and it's likely that they avoid such mathematical categories during future Kids Weeks.

---

UPDATE: I wrote a little More about that Jeopardy category after the blog The Political Hat referenced this entry.

And Jeopardy had Another Math category, with adults, shortly after this.

Blog: How Do We Make a Scatterplot?

I was going through a shoebox of stuff in my basement. I found a handful of paperbacks I'd started, some old stubs and statements and, underneath all that, some pages ripped from both spiral and composition notebooks. Most of them appeared to be random questions and answers to homework assignments from April, 2012 (not too bad), but with them was a lesson plan dated December 8, 2004, almost exactly 10 years ago. It was my first year teaching high school, and only my second full year teaching. I remember the students enjoyed the activity, but in my morning class and my afternoon class. However, I don't think I ever did it again. A few reasons I can think of -- I spent the next few years teaching Geometry, teaching Special Ed, and switching gears from Math A to Integrated Algebra. Every year, it seemed, the ninth grade curriculum was being rewritten or reordered. And, frankly, some groups of students were better than other when it came to activities (try to close an activity and bring the class together for a summary without half of them packing their bags!), and some times of the year lend themselves to this sort of thing more than others.

So, basically, this is the sheet of paper I kept. I'm sharing it with you and, thus, keeping it electronically, so I can throw this scrap away.

December 8, 2004

Aim: How do we make a scatterplot?

SWBAT make a graph comparing numbers of words spoken per second/minute.

Activity: Students will break into groups. Each will have a sports article. Their task is to take turns "auditioning" for a sports announcer job (like "Ron" on "G-Unit Radio")

Note: Ron was a school aide who did the morning announcements with a little bit of a flair, and he referred to it as "G-Unit Radio", the "G" for the school name and "Unit" for "Family" ... and having nothing at all to do with a similarly-named hip-hop group from Jamaica, Queens.)

Each article is marked off at 10-word intervals (for easier counting). One group member will be the timer, another the recorder. Students will take turns talking for 10, 15 20 and 30 seconds and then counting the words. After the data is recorded, data will be graphed.

Q: Is there a relationship between time and # of words?

HW: Finish the graph based on the data.
Work on December HW packet.

---

I remember when making groups, one of the keys decisions in grouping was how many of them had a watch. This was before everyone has a phone as well.

I also remember being told to come up with a Christmas vacation assignment. I hate those, and some of my students would be traveling (some outside the country) and did I really want them to bring books along? So I make a packet of HW for the month of December and told them it was due the day after the day we got back because everyone always forgets it the first day back. (Some of them were doing the entire packet the day we got back, which might explain we I haven't done that since.)

I hope you enjoyed my trip down memory lane. Try the activity yourself, and let me know how it works. FYI: I was in the middle of a free six-week trial subscription of Sports Illustrated, courtesy of whatever store I had started my Christmas shopping in, and I pulled an article from there. The sports pages work, too, especially if your school is listed in them!

Blog: Knew It Was Going to Happen, And Yet . . .

Taking me cue from the discussion the other day about randomness and probability, we come to my last day at my current school. I stepped in to a temporary position while another colleague was on maternity leave, and now she is returning. As luck would have it, today was also the last day of the marking period. Normally, I'd be bringing a massive amount of work home to grade, but since I won't be going back to return anything, I had to leave a pile for me to check. I left answers keys and hints that she might just want to "check" the work and score it all. At this point, most of the kids are "good" about leaving two-thirds of the papers blank if they don't know what they're doing. Anyone finishes the page in what looks to be a neat and unrushed manner probably has a handle on things.

Today's events: I brought in doughnuts and put them out in the Teacher Center a dozen at a time during my preps. Some of the folks who hang out there (many stay in their rooms or elsewhere where there are conference tables) knew that today was my last day and that I'm having a birthday next week, when I'll obviously no longer be there. It was a little busy today. Friday's are little crazy because the periods are very short and there's 90 minutes of PD (professional development) at the end of the day for the teaching staff. (This was something that was voted on my the teachers last year.) I was doing double duty making sure that I packed what I wanted and tied up loose ends while creating work for the kids who I'd kept in the dark about the switchover. There can be some troublesome elements in the class, and they didn't need encouragement to misbehave, which they'd do despite the fact that I'm handling the second marking period grades this weekend.

Now, before I forget, when I arrived at work this morning, there was a bag with a bottle in it on my desk. I believe it's essentially an Italian version of Bailey's, which was confusing because it was a gift from a lovely Russian woman. So by the time that PD came around at the end of the day, after a lot of well-wishing (and an incident I'll mention at the end), I hadn't thought more about it. I had to go to the library for yearbook photos and I was going to take the remainder of the doughnuts, and I was supposed to go out for a drink with one or two coworkers.

That's when I ran into Pamela. (I'll call her "Dr. Pamela" this once, just to give her her due on the title, but I'm leaving off the last names right now. I don't know why.) She apologizes that it's Friday and the end of the day, but it's my last day, and could I help her set up that document camera she found in her desk drawer. (True story: I put it in that desk drawer a year and a half ago because it was the only piece of the computer not tied down. No one noticed since. I wasn't in the school all last year.) Well, sure thing. We'd talked about it once, and I hadn't done it, so it was the least I cou---

SURPRISE!

Seriously? The document camera? You lured me into a surprise party with a document camera??? Points for originality. So I celebrated my last day and my landmark birthday with my Math Department colleagues. Unfortunately, my boss couldn't make it, being pulled in "six directions at once". (I'm guessing: each way on the x, y, and z axes.) And others from the Teacher Center were likely corralled with their own departments at the moment, so they missed out.

And the thing is, I knew it was coming. I thought I knew. And yet ... Still a random moment and I expected none of what was there. And just to show you that I'm not the only person who think mathematically all the time, take a look at the equations and expressions on this word wall:

I'm leaving that school in capable hands. And, who knows, I might find myself returning.

As for the unfortunate incident, the less said the better. In literally the last minute of teaching at this school, a fight broke out. I'd hope it was just a flare-up, some hurt feeling that a slap on the arm would resolve and diffuse and not go anywhere else. Sadly, it did go somewhere -- out into the hall. A crowd did form, but I have to give a shout-out to students who tried to separate, restrain(*) and calm the participants. (*: when it comes to "restraining" a student, many are looking to be held back just to save face. However, that was true only for the instigator.) The kids came to each others' aids before it got worse. But like the inevitable car wreck you witness, you know what's about to happen. I wish I could say more, but I've probably said too much already. I was bummed out for the prep period before my PD, which in itself was a bit silly to go to, so I was even happier about the little diversion. Maybe it someone wants to join me for that new job/landmark birthday drink, we can talk!

Blog: Is It Still a Random Event If You Know It's Coming?

It's only the Third of December, and already there's a digression. That's why I love blogs: the very randomness about them. Randomness, probability, math. The circle of circles.

I have been bouncing around the New York City educational system for a few years now, and that's okay. I know that I'm wanted and there will be a soft landing somewhere. I figured that if I didn't get back to where I wanted to be in a reasonable amount of time, I'd find another suitable position. In the meantime, I'd be in the Absentee Teacher Reserve (ATR) pool. The downside to being in the pool is that you never know where you're next assignment will be: good neighborhood or bad, conveniently located or not. The upside? Well, no lesson plans, no mindless nights grading mindless papers writing meaningful comments, which likely wouldn't be read anyway. And I can most likely reset my alarm for a later time. Currently, I have a tendency to get to work an hour early to prep for a first period class because I don't wish to do all that work the night before when I could be sitting in front of the television, watching the insides of my eyelids.

A quick summary of the past few years: my school was shrinking because Bloomberg was trying to close it down despite its high grades on his own report card system. It stayed open but lost staff, including half the Math Department (which was three people, not counting the Support Services teachers). That event inspired this comic: Kiss Today Good-bye. After nearly a decade, I was leaving what felt like home.

That fall, I spent a month in Williamsburg at a small school that really didn't need any substitutes, and I mostly circulated the rooms, trying to help, which was easier to do when the subject was math. That was followed by a week at a school ten minutes from my home. At that point, a teacher at my old school retired, and I was on my way back. Things had changed a little. I had mostly freshmen, unlike the previous year, and the schedule was a little ... challenging. One could theorize that the classes were particularly rough because they wanted to encourage the former teacher to retire sooner. I think he had his plans set from the first day of school. It was a bit of a rough year, but I was promised a better horizons the following year ... and then I was excessed again.

My personal Year from Hell started in August. (I actually asked an A.P., who called to request an interview, if he had time the following day as I would be busy on the day he proposed, attending a funeral.) Professionally, it wasn't a bad year at all. I was called into Bed-Stuy, which sounded worse than it was, and spent a month there, watching them build the sets for The Knick, literally, right outside my window. Note: I am NOT misusing the word "literally". I have pictures. And Clive Owen even retweeted one of them! (Actually, it later turned out it was a FAN account, but I didn't know that at the time.)

This was followed by a few week in Park Slope, at my old zone school, which had been broken up years ago. Park Slope went through Yuppie-ville into Hipster Haven, but many of the kids traveled there from other areas. It wasn't an impressive place, and said to say that the teachers I worked with weren't fully versed in the topic they were teaching. I was able to nonchalantly correct a couple of things as if something was simply misspoken, but one thing in particularly was just so wrong, I kept my mouth shut. I figured that it was a tough topic and I could help individually with the students, but I couldn't undermine the teachers for the rest of the year. They weren't idiots, and I didn't want them to be thought of that way. (And I did explain their mistake later, during a prep period.)

Sometime in October, I got a call from a school in Staten Island. It would be a bit of a hike, and the Verrazano Narrows bridge has an incredibly expensive toll. (Not kidding -- even with a discount, it was costing me more than $10/day to get to work over one bridge.) It was supposed to be temporary, which worked out for me, because I knew that there was going to be an opening for me in Brooklyn at any given (i.e., random) moment. Except that there wasn't. For whatever reason that the teacher was on leave (I wasn't told; I never asked), she didn't come back. I was there until June, and I had settled in and had started to make friends. I attended a graduation dinner for a colleague, a summer barbecue. I even met a parent who I hadn't seen since we were both 13, some mumblemumble years ago.

At the end of the year, the AP asked me what was next. She didn't ask if I wanted to stay. maybe she assumed I wanted back in my old school ... or just my old borough on the other side of the bridge.

Which brings us back to randomness and inevitability. I went back to my old school during the summer for Regents Review classes, and subbing for a little spending money. One of my former colleagues was 8 months pregnant. She would be out on the first day of school. The AP of school organization started the paperwork to get me back on a temporary basis, and I was happy to go back. The only problem was that I hadn't a clue how long I would be back for. No one seemed to know how much time she would be taking. It was going to be six weeks plus whatever sick leave she had saved up (as far as I could guess) but I hadn't a clue how much that would be. Three months? A semester? Two marking periods, it turns out.

And here I am. Ready to leave again. Probably for the last time. I don't seem them -- at this moment -- turning things around. I don't see them expanding the student population, and with it, the budget. How long do I stay in the ATR pool? Sooner or later, I will have to find a position. Sooner or later, I will be subbing in a good school and I'll seek a position. (And maybe even regret not seeking last year's position again.) But in the meantime, I can count on two things:

A high probability of randomness, and an absolute certainly of zero lesson plans.

Remembering 9-11 and a Long Walk Home

I've pretty much used up the math metaphors for the Twin Towers years ago, so I don't have another comic commemorating the event. Maybe next year. On the other hand, I do have something that I wrote a few years ago in another forum. People from around the country participated, and I was one of the "locals" to the Event there. My story is just one of the millions that could be told that day, and it's hardly one of the more frightening, nor one of bravery and heroism. It's just a first-hand report.

My moderator of the forum asked me the following year if I would mind reposting it. Of course not, and I did. In the years since, she's had my permission to post it if I'm not on by a certain time to do it myself.

My report is here. Just one from the crowd. If anyone wishes to add their stories, please use the comment section. Thank you.

---

As requested (and as promised):

This was originally posted (I think) in 2005. It's been an annual repost since then.

At about 8:40am on that morning, I was walking into the Court building on Adams Street (actually, the Court St. entrance) in Downtown Brooklyn to start serving jury duty. As luck would have it, I had been halfway to the train station before I’d realized that I’d left my Walkman on the kitchen table, so I didn’t bother going back for it. I figured I’d just get a newspaper. Besides, I didn’t know how well I’d be able to pick up AM inside the building anyway.

I sat in a dark room watching a video on How to Be a Good Juror, oblivious to what was going on right across the river. We were told to relax in the room that they have, and I looked out the window at the Marriot Hotel. Traffic on Adams St was snarled, not moving. Must’ve been an accident on the Brooklyn Bridge, I thought. (It was a block away.)

People were standing around outside the hotel. Must be waiting for a tour bus or something. What did I know.

Fire trucks and ambulances started flying by on the wrong side of Adams Street, which had no traffic. Okay, traffic doesn’t come into Brooklyn much in the morning, but something was odd here. I had been facing 180 degrees from where I needed to be looking.

Finally, they had made an announcement. America was at war, under attack. The World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been destroyed. They were trying to get coverage on the TV sets in the jury rooms. I don’t think they succeeded. Even if they wanted to, only CBS would be available because it still broadcast from the Empire State Building.

People were beside themselves, many broke down, everyone was rushing for the payphones. I met a woman who had been listening to her radio. She let me share her earbuds. She was shaken and needed a cigarette. I don’t smoke, but I walked her to the smoking room. (There was one on the floor. Quite a few people were there.)

We were dismissed. Not much was going to get done in the Court building that week. Groups of people huddled outside with questions, comments, gossip and hearsay. Some of the lawyers said they saw it happen. What kind of plane was it?

Does anyone know if the trains are running? What about the buses? No trains. No LIRR. A few buses and they’re all packed. It was time to start walking and no one wanted to walk alone. We walked in groups.

Dust was falling from the sky in downtown Brooklyn like a dirty snow that was covering the cars. Papers fell too. We started walking up Atlantic Avenue. People were wandering around with their cell phones out trying to get a signal. no luck.

We took a turn down Third Avenue. I needed to. I wanted to stop at my mother’s house. It was a good resting point for me. The group I’d tagged along with decided to join me. One guy stopped in a hardware store for masks and passed them out.

When we passed Third St and reached the Gowanus Canal, we had our first real look. It was like a scene out of a bad movie. The skyline was there. But the Towers were missing. Just a terrible column of smoke and a cloud drifting our way.

We didn’t stay long. We kept walking. I made it to my mother’s house and said good-bye to the others. Some were walking all the way to Staten Island. One who had joined our group had walked over the Brooklyn Bridge — after having walked down 50 floors of Tower 1. God was looking out for him.

I watched some of the coverage until the trains were running again. I took one that left me about a mile or so from my inlaws, the meeting place for the rest of the family. I stopped in at St. Athanasius on the way. I hadn’t been there since a wedding about 15-20 years earlier. I stayed for a little while and walked the rest of the way.

Thankfully, my wife, who worked at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge on the Manhattan side had evacuated immediately before the trains had stopped running.

It’s not a walk that I’ll ever forget.

---

Mom isn't there anymore and my "resting place" won't be around much longer, either, sadly. Just more things to remember about that day.

Real-World Math: Bushels of Fun

Author's Note: I started writing this yesterday (Saturday), but by the time I returned home, there wasn't time to finish it and clean it up. I worked on it this morning, but all references to "today" were really yesterday.

There are four pecks in a bushel. I know this because my mother loved me a bushel and a peck. She'd tell me this all the time in song. Okay, so I was never sure what a "peck" was. Something chickens do, right? And those little kisses on the cheek, too. So four pecks would be two kisses on each check. One extra would make a bushel and a peck. At least, it would to a six-year-old.

Seriously, I knew what a bushel was -- it was a large basket that you could fill with fruit or other farm produce. In particular, tomatoes, which I'll get back to.

Now, in this day of metric measure, you may ask how many liters of tomatoes are in a bushel? Or should it be kilograms?

The answer is: who cares? The more important question is "how many jars of sauce will it make?" The answer to which is, about 18, if you're lucky. Not overly precise and not very scientific but quite an accurate estimate. Then again, maybe it is scientific since this is empirical evidence: we got an average of 18 jars per bushel. That's correct: I said "average". It wasn't precisely the same for each bushel. How could it be? (And do we really know?)

Today was Tomato Jarring Day aka Sauce Day. We started with five bushels of tomatoes. When everything was cut, boiled, strained, and boiled again, we had put 90 jars of sauce to bed, wrapped in blankets. We could do the math on this and convert it, if we wanted to:

One bushel is 35.293 liters, although the decimal portion would be silly because there's no way to know that we had precisely 1.0 bushels. Let's call it 35.3 liters. That makes five bushels equal to 176.5 liters.

In the end, we filled 90 one-quart jars with sauce. Ninety quarts is about 85.2 liters. So 176.5 liters of tomatoes created 85.2 liters of tomato sauce? Wow! That's odd! Half of the tomatoes disappeared? Was there that much skin and garbage and rot that we tossed aside? Nah, couldn't be. It's just that we're comparing two different quantities ... with the same units.

That Metric System sure is complicated and confusing in Real Life, aint it! (And don't get me started that "metric" means a standard of measurement, so metric measure means . . . you get the picture).

Converting it to metric does nothing for me. It's very scientific, but not particularly practical for us non-scientists who just want to think about the next couple years' worth of pasta-based meals. (And chicken parm, of course.)

But moving on from this. I am kidding, of course, but not by much. There are those who will insist that there is inherent beauty in the metric system's sets of ten this and then that all connected in a unified theory of scientific terms that apply to no one's life outside of academia and rocket science. Yes, rocket science is important and I'm all for it! But I -- and just about everyone I know -- will never participate in it. Get me the Moon, and I might change my tune!

Speaking of tunes...

There was much Beauty in my mother's singing. And she wasn't alone and Bushel and a Peck was hardly a one-in-a-million tune. I knew the words to Five-Foot-Two, Eyes of Blue before I was three-feet tall! No one will ever sing "157 point 5 Centimeters, Eyes of Wavelength 475 Nanometers"

To quote something that I think I read in one of my grandmother's Readers Digests several decades ago: "Who would walk a million kilometers for one of your thermometers?" Not Al Jolson. (Or Fred Mertz, either!). Or the Proclaimers. Or Venessa Carlton. Or ... you get the picture. Or, rather, the song.

Feet, inches, yards, miles... we know what they are, and what they are are musical and memorable. They're all different? They're all beautiful, like the rolling hills across the countryside. Imagine every mountain was the same size. Would you still climb one because it was there, if it was like the one next to it? Would you fly halfway around the world to climb one?

I'll take the ten miles of smiles or even ten feet of sleet, over meters of liters or liters of meters. I'll even take bushels of pecks 'til I'm filled to the gills. All 297.89 of them. Now, excuse me, it's time for some pasta; we needed four pounds to feed everyone.

Math Isn't Everything. It Isn't Even the Only Thing.

Math isn't everything. It isn't even the only thing.

That may sound shocking coming from me, but theoretical math (you know, a lot of that Algebra stuff) needs to be applied to real life using real life conditions, which sometimes (most times?) take you out of the scope of any classroom problem. This is why some people don't think they're using algebra (when, in fact, they are), or why they think it isn't really practical.

A quick example of what I mean: there's a joke floating around that goes something like this: only in a math class can you buy 36 oranges and 25 apples and not be thought crazy.

Here's a different example (not a joke). Each weekend in August, the Miller family barbecues six hot dogs. Buns come in packages of eight. Over four weekends, how many packages of buns should they buy?

Don't scroll down until you're ready for the answer.

The "correct" answer is four packages.

Now, wait a minute, you protest! The cook 24 franks, they need 24 buns, and you get 24 buns in three packages of eight.

That is certainly true. On the second weekend, you still have 2 buns leftover from the prior weekend. This brings the next question -- the real world question -- who gets the stale buns? Probably the shy, quiet one who doesn't speak up for himself. Or the youngest one who doesn't know any better. Most likely, Mom, who who sacrifice for her children, giving them the food from her mouth if need be, assuming she wanted two hot dogs to begin with. (Take better care of Mom, she's been good to you!)

In the real world, even if the bread hasn't reached it's expiration date, those leftovers still won't be as fresh as new rolls will be. Moreover, consider the fourth weekend. All of the bread is leftover, and no one gets a fresh roll. If you're not on a really tight budget, buy new bread each week.

What do you do with the extra bread? Feed the birds. Make breadcrumbs. Have a really funky looking sandwich on Monday.

What do I know? I'm a math teacher, not a cook.

Day 14: Does Primetime Need Writers? My Students Are Hatching Plots!

For anyone keeping track, this is Day 14 of a 30-Day Challenge. Thirty days of updates. Counting today's comic, this makes two for today.

Yesterday's "Life Insurance" lesson in Financial Algebra class didn't go -- to use the vernacular -- too, too badly. There were diminishing returns as the day wore on. Basically, period 3 with the co-worker worked better than period 4 solo, when I didn't have another adult to bounce thoughts back and forth. I did my best in period 4 to cover the most crucial topics. But period 7, late in the day, wasn't the time to bore the students with such a topic, especially when it became evident that whatever worksheet I might have had wouldn't be given out. (And it wasn't.)

But the kids did have some interesting questions, many of which I expected, although perhaps not in the way they were presented. There were questions about policies and suicides, which were quickly replaced by hiring someone to kill you or beneficiaries killing the policyholder. Not that they had dollar signs in their eyes -- as I informed them, first they'd have to find someone with a sizable life insurance policy to name them as beneficiary. Then they'd have to make it look like an accident.

Well, I didn't have to tell them that part. Most of them were already planning ways to do just that. And, of course! they'd get away with it! They're teenagers, after all! They know how to do everything! (Except, perhaps, some of the problem in Chapter 8 ... and Chapter 6 ... but I digress.) I think the big unanswered question was, "How would they know?"

They weren't satisfied with, "Trust me, they'd know. They have investigators who seen this sort of thing before." When that didn't convince them, I added, "And you haven't even done this once." (That I know of...) "It's not like you'll get it right the first time. It'll probably take four or five tries to get it to really look like an accident. The problem is dealing with the fallout from the first three or four tries."

I think that convinced them to give up their plans for fraud and murder. One can only hope. My final thoughts on the topic (which I actually repeated when the topic came up the next period and the one after that), check out an episode of Law & Order or Bones or any other criminal show. They just know.

That being said, I think my students could hatch a plot worthy of prime-time, even if it unravels, as all such criminal plots tend to do when the investigators take the case.

But one show they can't write for: when I showed the final slide of my presentation with the Mortality Tables, I introduced it with "Valar Morghulis". Not a comment. Not even from the geekier kids. I had to fall back on another punch line: talking about using life insurance to pay for funeral expenses because they are quite costly, a student asked why cemeteries are so expensive. I couldn't stop myself from telling her: "Cemeteries are crowded and they're very popular.... People are dying to get in."

Oh, yeah. I did.

"I Am Providence"

I drove to Providence, RI this past weekend to visit Brown University. While I was there, I took a site trip to the cemetery when I found out who was there.

Earlier Rant has been pushed down a bit.

The inscription reads "I AM PROVIDENCE"
H. P. Lovecraft resides in a plot right behind the Phillips family monument. So in my circle of friends, I've probably read the least amount of his works, but I'm the only one to have paid him a visit. Geek Cred.


My earlier Rant continues below. I could add that editing this text box has been almost as big a hassle as loading and copying the image. But I won't.

okay. This is now a Rant. I hate the new iOS on my iPad which will no longer allow me to upload from my camera roll. I just spent 20 minutes, and most of that was waiting for it to load images that are already online at blogger. And worse than that, there is no option for my iPad, just for my phone -- but this isn't a phone! And the iOS should know that it isn't. If I click on the phone option, it find one video and ignores literally 100s of images.

So you'll have to wait until I find a PC or a laptop to show you the gravesite marker of H.P. Lovecraft. Maybe there's some unspeakable horror preventing the image from uploading. Yeah, let's go with that!

until later.

So I Had a Moment Like This Today

So I had a moment like this today . . . Someone decided to have a snack, spilled some on the floor, didn't do anything about it, and I don't know anything until I'm walking through it . . . and all I can think (and I'll only publicly admit to "thinking" it) can be summed up in one sentence:

There wasn't really any more to say after that.