Check this out. Just coded it. And it works. I don't have time to explain this right now because I'm about to run away to the airport. Click, drag, enjoy.

Things are wrapping up. My first quarter as a student teacher in NYC ends this Friday. It's been a wild ride at International Community High School, and I'm ready for a break. I've just got a few more papers and a few more more math problems between me and a Thanksgiving coma.

Of course, none of that is getting done right this minute. I've just spent an hour crawling the web for video and photos of the OWS eviction that went on in the early am of Tuesday morning. Protesters are promising an exciting day in NYC tomorrow, including attempts to shut down wall street and crowd into busy subway terminals. My guess is that union square and grand central are going to be interesting tomorrow evening. I've posted a video above from the Occupy website. If you haven't been watching this, now is as good a time as any to start.

On OWS:
I visited Zuccotti park for the first time last month, and I was kind of overwhelmed. On that day, there was a march from Washington Square park. Just a few days earlier, the AFL-CIO had released a statement of official support for the movement. The result of this was a sort of chaos, and it really bothered me. To my left, a group representing the voice of several freedom movements were screaming for the release of political prisoners--mostly members of the Black Panther Party. On my right, a 60-year-old man who could have been my high school English teacher, with spectacles halfway down his nose and all, was spouting Noam Chomsky to anyone who would listen. It was confusing. I felt let down. There was a lot of energy around me, but I couldn't hold on to any of it. I couldn't identify with the movement at all. I remember thinking

"Yah, sure. I think some things are fucked up, too. I'd love to point my finger at someone, and Wall Street does seem like a good bet."

But what do I know? If anyone in charge of the shuffling of millions (or billions) of dollars around is anything like Gordon Gekko, it wouldn't be hard to get me pissed off about it--but I just don't know enough. As of right now, I'm trying to change that. Having a lady like Anna P. around helps. When I need a dose of social conscience, she's my gal. She turned me on to bits and pieces of the the history of banking structures, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Pretty crazy stuff. The words "speculation" and "savings account" just don't seem to sit well together. Here's to finding out more once the dust from this quarter settles.

To do list:

1.) Learn more
2.) Learn enough to get as upset as I felt tonight on a daily basis
3.) Muster up some civil disobedience*
4.) Occupy

5.) Find a liberal high school in New York that supports a legit, non-superficial social justice mathematics curriculum**


*Seriously, I don't want to get arrested. If I've learned anything from reading the NYT over the last few months, it's that the NYPD has serious issues.

**Dunno how educators view misdemeanors, but it's probs best not to have a record. If I don't get hired this next year, I'm out 50 grand to Math for America.

Here's a vid from Minneapolis. Some friends of mine and their friends playing on a corner in Dinkytown. Some guy from the Daily was walking by and thought it was worth recording. I'm glad he did; it made my day. In the vid:

-Micah Jay Allen Hunter-Small on guitar

-Channing Alto on banjo

-Brian Munson on banjo thumping

-Cecelia (last?) on mandolin

-Kyle Johnson on tamborine

A story from my classroom:

The other day an announcement came on during one of the classes that I help teach. We were told that the school was in "code blue." Immediately, my mentor teacher asked all students to get out of their seats and get against the back wall away from the door. We stood there quietly for several minutes. Students were getting kind of freaked out, especially when someone knocked on our door--a student coming back from the bathroom.

Eventually, my mentor teacher went out in the hallway to see what was up. Evidently, the administration was never clear on what the code word was for an intruder in the building. "Code blue" was NOT the agreed upon code word; it means that there are police officers or firemen in the building (for whatever reason, we had some visiting firemen). Nothing else.

We wasted about 10 minutes on lockdown, and no one could focus afterword. One student was so shook up that she went to duck under a table when a prankster in the class pointed at the door and shouted "¡Aye, coño!"* I was trying really hard not to laugh with the rest of the class. Being a professional is hard when you're 22.

*Coño is a recent acquisition of mine. I heard my kids from the Dominican Republic saying it all the time, so I had to look it up. Evidently, it originated in Spain, with an English equivalent of "cunt"--not such a nice word for everyone; however, in the most of South and Central America, it's much more acceptable, meaning something more like "damn" or "shit."

Another fun fact: in Chile, a Spaniard can be called a "coño."

Here's an optical illusion for you. This picture is rectangular, but it sure doesn't look like it to me.

Homework is like a knife on the table.

Happy Halloween.

We're teaching Dalhart how to jump. In this picture, she's grabbing a bone off of the peephole/slash doorbell on our apartment door. Next up: catching frisbees.

NYC got its first snow of the season yesterday. Supposedly, we got eight inches, but it all ended up in nasty slush. New Yorkers can't drive in snow. Minnesotans continue to rule.

Apartment news:

-No word on our heat working, yet. Hopefully, the super comes through with that in the next couple of weeks. The plan as of now: mulled wine and hot toddys.

-Met a dude named Fred who lives in the building next door. The dude has Kramer hair. He's throwing a halloween party. Anna is going as my bodyguard. I'm going as her long last pal.

-We've got a solid cooking rotation going. Gareth is a vegetarian, so we go meatless for four nights out of the week. It's surprising how reasonable it is to feed 4 people when you're not buying meat.

Teacher news:

-I taught my first Bard-observed lesson on Friday. It went well, except for that was supposed to take 10 minutes took the entire lesson time. My mentor teacher is nay happy, but I say it's a good thing. We talked about like terms for half an hour--evidence that the pace the class is moving at might is too fast. They were supposed to know like terms three weeks ago. It's frustrating that a group of ELL students, many of which are (speculatively) up to 6-7 years "behind" in content knowledge, are expected to succeed in an algebra II course. State standards can be terrible things, especially when teachers aren't given the support/time they need to meet them. They're even worse when you work at school with no psychologist/no way to assess special needs, which translates to no way of providing IEPs for students that need it.

-People in my program are freaking out about coming home from the Bronx on Halloween. Evidently, tomorrow is a known gang initiation day. In my opinion, a group of 15 student teachers in shirts and ties walking two blocks to the subway in a crowd of school children seems pretty safe. Errbody gotta chill.

-I'm still studying sandpiles.

Anna says these look like people walking. G says he likes the white rose. I like them bricks.

Going to Greenpoint tonight to chill with G, David Price and Uncle Ray Ray. Takin' the g train.

-scotch bonnet

NY update: it's cloudy and misting and gray. It's also raining cigarettes. Saw a dude get hit in the shoulder with a lit cigarette butt as he was walking down the sidewalk. Our neighbors just throw them out the window--no look style. Some unlucky cabrón is gonna get his hair set on fire.

Math update: just wrote up a proof of the fact that the minimal ideal of a finite, commutative monoid is an Abelian group. Taste it. I'm still studying piles of sand.

Shout out to Josiah Burns; I hear from a reliable source that you're keeping it real.

I went with Anna to visit her rooftop garden in the Bronx. She hooked me up with some jalapeños and cilantro--both awesome. We already have mad* tomatoes from this place, and they've overstayed their welcome in our kitchen. So many tomatoes. I've knocked out five in the last few days, but we've got a long way to go.

Occupy Wall Street is still happening. Gonna go and check that out tomorrow and take pictures.

If the NYT coverage of Occupy isn't doing it for you, or if you wanna see some great photos, you should check out the adventures of Ben Valentine on the Brooklyn Bridge:

http://www.contemporaryartruck.com/2011/10/occupywallstreet.html

He got some great shots and didn't get arrested.

Meet Ms. Dalhart Skrivanos, our three-year-old pitbull mutt. She's a sweety.

I start a full schedule of student teaching this week. I got lucky and will be working with the same teacher I've been observing in September. I'm really looking forward to it. The kids, 10-12 graders, are awesome. In my class are students from

-the Dominican Republic
-Yemen
-Senegal
-Liberia
-the Ivory Coast

They all address me as Mr. James--which is sick--and they think that I'm crazy for wanting to teach math. Hopefully I'll have some good stories when I start teaching lessons. Right now, I think I've been teaching more English to students than mathematics. Some of them are already whiz kids, it's just a matter of re-teaching math in English well enough so they can pass the NY state regents exam. Everybody wants to learn idioms. They love them.

My first embarrassing language use faux pas as a teacher:

"Mista James, why you wanna teach kids about triangle?"
"I don't. Geometry isn't my thing, but polynomials...now there's a serious turn on."
"A what? Ms. Aiza [my supervising teacher], what's a turn on?"

Radiohead is playing in NYC next week. Gonna see if I can score some tix.

In the meantime, I'll be considering this logic problem. You should, too. It's a good one my professor showed me the other day. Been thinking about it on the subway on the daily.

Crossing the Desert

An unlimited supply of gasoline is available at one edge of a desert 800 miles wide, but there is no source on the desert itself. A truck can carry enough gasoline to go 500 miles (this will be called one "load"), and it can build up its own refueling stations at any spot along the way. These caches may be of any size, and it is assumed that there is no evaporation loss.

What is the minimum amount (in loads) of gasoline a truck will require in order to cross the desert? Is there a limit to the width of a desert the truck can cross?

(My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles, Martin Gardner, Dover 1994)

I've found a solution which uses four loads, but have yet to prove that it's optimal. If you get anything good, drop me a line.

The rust is coming off in New York, today. Just ask Dubya.

I'm going to a talk hosted by the Columbia U department of American studies. Preppin' for some serious social science action.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/amstudies/events.html

-midtown from our roof

First class of the fall quarter starts today. Talkin' bout algebra--the ring kind.

A funny thing happened yesterday when I dropped off my new teacher pants to get tailored. Not knowing my measurements, Kim Kyung Ho had to take them for me. As he measured my inseam he reminded me, through a thick Korean accent, that size really does matter. Dude's got a creepy laugh, but he's got all my future business on lockdown.

-Puerto Rican prayer circle shot from our roof

Dal the Texas pitbull is flying in on doggy air tonight. The BK9.

I've moved to the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn--phase two of getting an MA in math education from Bard College. For the next several months, I'll be student teaching in the Bronx, taking classes and doing math some math research (research blog forthcoming). Google disabled my other blogger account, so I'm starting fresh and calling it jooklyn. I'll be posting pictures and updates on what I'm up to.

What's good so far:

earthquake, irene, bodegas ad infinitum, roberta's, wire shelving, peaches the vietnamese(?) produce goddess, potstickers and 4$ shot-beer combos.

My new home:

179 Knickerbocker Ave

Apartment 2F

Brooklyn, NY 11237

Fall classes and student teaching start on Monday.