Curious George and The Stockholm Syndrome

Watching some early morning Curious George at the Riddy household and I started thinking, "Isn't the 'Man in the Yellow Hat' George's kidnapper?"  But Curious George LOVES the Man!  I think the little monkey is suffering from Stockholm syndrome ("A term used to describe a paradoxical psychological phenomenon wherein hostages express adulation and have positive feelings towards their captors.")

What am I doing to my kids?  Not only are they sympathizing with a kidnapper but the perpetrator is literally "The Man" (albeit with a humanizing fondness for yellow).

On My Way to the Monocle

Often my students have heard me say "I just wear them to look smart" whenever I am without my glasses.  ("Mr. Rideout, are you wearing contacts?")

If I am feeling generous I go ahead and tell them the full story:
  How my right eye is actually 20/20 but my left eye is weaker.
  How, if I don't wear glasses, my brain tunes out my left eye and the optometrist told me I could eventual lose the sight in that eye if I never force it to work.
  How I start centering everyone in my right field of view toward the end of a day without glasses by rotating my head to the left.
  How when I am older and hair is growing out of my ears and my eyebrows are out of control, I look forward to wearing a monocle and breaking it out when a freshman asks me to look over their work. "Hmmm... let me see here, sonny-boy..."



Last friday I added a new one:
  How I wear the glasses to hide my super-hero identity, Clark Kent style.

Fate* has punished me for this latest claim by breaking the right rim of my glasses.  Since my glasses are always dirty, the funny thing is I see better without the clear glass over my right eye.  So I plan to go to school on Monday looking like this:

*by Fate I mean Sebastien because he is the one most likely to twist my glasses in shapes it was never meant to hold.

A Prezi on Energy

I've been thinking about the best way to help clean up the confusion that is Work & Energy for years now.  Feynman is the only one who does a decent job in his textbook, but I've tried to pare it back to the bare bones here.

This is my latest attempt to point out what the differences are between Kinetic, Potential, Thermal, and mass-energy from special relativity... (go full screen to be able to see the details)

Energy on Prezi 

Unions, Letters, and Stewart

Apparently I am part of the problem.  My mean teacher's union which has managed to get me lower pay and worse benefits after 9 years of teaching than when I worked in the private sector 14 years ago is the source of all fiscal woe in the USA.  I actually fired off a letter to the Boston Globe after reading an especially viscous op-ed piece attacking unions the day before and the Globe published parts of it last Sunday:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/letters/articles/2011/02/27/bay_state_unions_have_shown_willingness_to_compromise/

(my original letter was "it takes two to tango")

However, a couple people today brought my attention to the fantastic piece by Jon Stewart that totally trumps my boring little letter:

The Daily Show - Crisis in Dairyland - Message for Teachers
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