When I was in the sixth grade, I wrote a long tirade to my grandmother complaining about my teacher’s terrible penchant for assigning too much homework. Now a teacher myself, I assign homework every day of the week, including weekends.
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Like many of us, high school students are often attracted to stories with characters going through similar struggles and life changes. I have found some success teaching Alan Sillitoe's novella The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959), whose 17-year-old protagonist from a working class home, Colin Smith, has been caught burgling and is sent to a reform school. Discovering Smith’s gift for running, school officials enter him in a cross-country competition.
Ask Charlie Sitler for his favorite mathematician and he’ll be glad to tell you: Georg Cantor (1845-1918). “I crossed paths with his ideas at Fordham College. Cantor proved that there were actually different types of infinity—a veritable hierarchy of infinities, if you will. It was mind-blowing! Encountering Cantor’s theories made me want to teach math even more. I wanted everybody to know there was so much more to math than y = mx + b.”
When did you know you wanted to teach?
Happy π Day! If you are a numbers geek, you might already know when this day is celebrated. If you don’t, it’s on March 14, which has been designated as National Pi Day (made official by Congress on March 12, 2009). Pi Day is celebrated all around the world and has a special place at The Beekman School, as well. I started celebrating it a few years ago, as it was the perfect opportunity to share my love of math, pi, and pie with the students at Beekman.
As a child of educators and as an educator myself, I’ve always had an interest in the topic of education. Even before I became an administrator, I would read any article or snippet about teaching that caught my eye. Recently, the subject of teens and mentoring seemed to be popping up everywhere I looked. From a study done by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health to a
If you’re reading this blog, you have probably already heard about the College Board’s changes to the SAT. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the changes, here’s a summary: Starting in Spring 2016, the SAT will go back to the 1600-point format. They’re getting rid of vocabulary words that are largely out of use and hard-to-understand math questions, the essay is becoming optional, and the overall focus of the exam will be on decoding the presen
I love springtime. Having successfully shoveled my way through yet another winter at Beekman, I look forward to the budding trees outside of my office window and the sunlight that fills our garden.
There is an ancient eastern truth that if you put six blind men around an elephant and have them describe it, you will get six different, partial descriptions.
New York City is a multi-cultural metropolis. Shouldn’t your child’s school be too? The Beekman School, nestled in a charming Eastside townhouse, is an entire global community in one building.
A generation of Americans remembers where they were when John F. Kennedy was shot, when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and the first time they saw John, Paul, George, and Ringo on TV. Fifty years ago this month the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and, overnight, a social revolution began.