rassef social

[redbird]

This one went moderately well. I arrived early, and settled in at the slightly better-lit of the two upstairs groups of couches with my soda and Ken MacLeod's The Star Fraction. After I'd read for a few minutes, aiglet showed up, and we chatted, and were joined by other people, including roadnotes, Arwen, Neil (a Briton who mostly posts to rasf.composition), Aiglet's friend Eric, a David who recently moved to New York, and Danny Lieberman. Conversation ranged over people's lives, weird food, the proper way to teach New Math (which is what Neil is doing for a living--he can't give them set theory, at least not yet, but they're getting number theory and probability, so that's okay), politics (at the other end of the table), and teas. Also, we set a few odd potato chips on fire.

Eventually people talked about dinner. I'd thought of going along on the dinner expedition, and then realized that it would mean an extra walk in the cold, and all of the people I most wanted to talk to were going home. So I came home, and made a chicken curry, using half-and-half because we had it (usually I use milk, because we always have that), and lemon juice because I generally use lime. We're now out of curry powder, and I had to throw in a bit of extra cumin because we were short. It worked well, and we are well-fed and content, and I am inordinately pleased with myself for getting home at 9:20 and heading straight for the cutting board.

Comments

[cattitude.livejournal.com]

I would disagree with the word "inordinately."

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to hear that someone is still teaching New Math. My father was one of the movers and shakers in it, and I still think it makes a lot of sense. It fell from favor because, unlike the old math, the teachers had to understand what they were doing and because parents had to learn something new if they wanted to help the kids with their homework.

Of course that's the old New Math. Now there's rainforest math, which tries to protect the kids from all that supposedly white male exactness.

[redbird]

The New Math has now been around long enough that parents can help their children with it--people who had it in seventh grade have children that age by now. (David said that what he's teaching goes back to 1962.)

[supergee.livejournal.com]

That was the original argument, and I am glad that New Math has survived to the point where it doesn't work. Hunter was, unsurprisingly, an early adopter school. I got to teach some of it in 1968-9 and enjoyed it.