Balcony Visuals

As requested, here's a photo of our newly cleaned-up balcony. We kept the three nandina bushes and moved them to the corners (where they were when we moved in two years ago). Surrounding them, from left, are our campanula (which has died back for the season), our brand new clematis seedling, our blue-flowered plumbago, a pink geranium, our butterfly bush, some heather and, over on the right, our horseradish.

As you can see, there's a lot more room, but overall the effect is less green and lush than when we had the boxwoods. I have mixed feelings about this, but Dave likes the space and it's nice for the dog to be able to walk to the railing and watch what's going on in the parking lot below.

The boxwoods, meanwhile, look perfectly happy downstairs by the front door of the building.

Maybe now we should get some Rustoleum (or whatever the British equivalent) and paint those metal nandina pots, which are looking pretty weathered. Or not.

I've also toyed with the idea of scrubbing the balcony to get rid of the dirty film that accumulated under the plants. But that seems like housekeeping in extremis, doesn't it? Kind of like painting a driveway, a suburban activity that I've heard about but never understood.

Remembering Diana

When Olga and I went to Kensington Gardens on Saturday, we happened to wander past Kensington Palace. There, at the gates where mourners gathered by the thousands to bid farewell to Princess Diana in 1997, we found this little knot of people.

Saturday, it turns out, was the 16th anniversary of Diana's death. Amazing that it happened so long ago. I remember where I was when I heard the news -- at a journalism convention in Chicago. As you can imagine, the conventioneers were thrown into an immediate tizzy and many had to leave to go back to work. I remember going with a friend to the loading dock at the Chicago Sun-Times to pick up copies of the paper, fresh off the presses, reporting news of her death.

Anyway, this little commemorative gathering featured some eccentrically-dressed characters. This guy appears in his Union Jack suit at many events involving the royals. As I recall, he was also outside the hospital when the newest royal baby was born a few weeks ago.

People left messages, flags, flowers and other items on the gates. Remember when I stumbled onto a similar, smaller display on Diana's birthday last year?

Looking back at that post, I realize I've already told the story about the convention. Oh well. Sorry about that. Some of us get repetitive in our old age!

The Good Fairy, and Balcony Cleanup

This rather sad-looking shopfront is adjacent to our apartments on Portobello Road. It's apparently going to be torn down to make way for a couple of swanky townhouses -- that project is somewhere in the municipal approval process. I worry how it will affect the tree at left, which is in the courtyard of the Earl of Lonsdale pub next door. The developers are supposedly going to dig a deep basement for the new houses, and I'm sure that tree's roots would be affected.

(Of course the construction will probably also make our lives miserable, at least for a while.)

The gray wall on the far right, down at the bottom, is the home of our street-art fox.

We had a busy day yesterday! Several weeks ago Dave bought a couple of new plants, a clematis and a butterfly bush, and I've been bugging him to repot them in more suitable, long-term containers where they have room to grow. Well, Dave stepped out on the balcony yesterday and proclaimed it a mess -- which it kind of was, partly because of my policy of letting weeds grow and generally allowing nature to take its course. Concurrent with repotting the new plants we cleaned up the balcony.

We finally got rid of the boxwoods that Dave hates so much. (He's wanted to throw them out ever since we arrived here.) I feel a little bad about this, because they technically belong to our landlords, but they are past their prime. We set them downstairs next to the front door of the building, where they look pretty good and have more room.

We also threw out our lavender, which had grown woody and gnarled and was partly dead, and we pruned and moved around the other plants. It looks much different out there now, and granted, there is a heck of a lot more space.

Last night we met up with a friend and went to see "Elysium," the sci-fi film about a polluted, overpopulated Earth and an orbiting space station created by rich people to elevate them (literally) above it all. Kind of an interesting movie, and very pertinent so soon after the Occupy movements and all those questions about the One Percent. It has its flaws, though -- the characters are thinly drawn and skew toward stereotype (the rich people speak French; the poor people, Spanish). All in all, a qualified thumbs-up.

More on Math

The article in this month's Harper's that I mentioned yesterday, questioning the need for widespread Algebra II instruction in high schools, was really interesting. Nicholson Baker, the author, argues that there is no need to feed every student -- or even every college-bound student -- through the sausage grinder of higher mathematics. Doing so, he says, simply breeds resentment, boredom, frustration and anger in students with no head for math.

Baker recommends that we instead "create a new, one-year teaser course for ninth graders, which would briefly cover a few techniques of algebraic manipulation, some mind-stretching geometric proofs, some nifty things about parabolas and conic sections, and even perhaps a soft-core hint of the infinitesimal, change-explaining powers of calculus. Throw in some scatter plots and data analysis, a touch of mathematical logic, and several representative topics in math history and math appreciation." Mention some historic figureheads of the math world and how they discovered the topic.

"Make it a required course. Six weeks of factoring and solving simple equations is enough to give any student a rough idea of what the algebraic ars magna is really like, and whether he or she has any head for it," he writes. Let the students who don't simply move on to other subjects.

Higher math, Baker argues, really is not one of the core elements of education that students need to survive. He likens it instead to smelting, farming, knitting or highway design -- areas of specialized study for those who are truly interested. Modern algebra requirements are a remnant of the red-baiting era in the 1950s when the United States feared that Russia was outpacing its students in math and science. At the beginning of that decade, Baker writes, only a quarter of American high school students took algebra, and yet mathematics as a field was prospering -- because those who studied it really loved it.

The article quotes a mathematician who once wrote, "Mathematics is so useful that there could be no civilization without it, and it is so beautiful that some theorems and their proofs -- those which cause us to gasp, or to laugh out loud with delight -- should be hanging in museums." But even this guy agrees that teaching Algebra II to all high-schoolers is a bad idea. "Forcing people to take mathematics is just terrible," he said.

I cannot tell you how much I loved this article. As a student who struggled with math, who shed tears over it, who participated in screaming fights with my math-teacher parents because I just couldn't see what was so obvious to them, I think he is right on the money. Quotes like the one above, about the beauty of math, literally make my skin crawl. They give me the same feeling that I get when I hear the whistles and cheers of an NFL football game -- a visceral revulsion rooted in, I suspect, my frustration that I just don't get why people like this stuff. I can guarantee you that I have never gasped or laughed with delight at a theorem or proof.

A basic one-year introduction to mathematical mysteries would have suited me just fine -- sort of like the one-year course I got in chemistry. I don't use much chemistry in my daily life but it pays to understand what an electron is, or how atoms torn apart or smashed together might produce powerful reactions or new elements. You know what I mean? All most of us need are the generalities.

Anyway, if you're at all interested in this subject, grab a copy of the magazine and read the article. I really love Harper's.

And speaking of magazines, Dave pointed out that Olga is featured in a corner of the cover of this week's New Yorker (left)!

(Top photo: A couple in Hyde Park, where I went walking with Olga yesterday.)

Periodicals

I've been waiting to get a clear shot of this storefront for months and months -- there are always cars parked in front. Finally, the other day, walking Olga early in the morning, I lucked out!

So I think I've mentioned that part of my job at the school library has to do with monitoring and organizing all the periodicals. Yesterday I was working on updating the list on the school's Web site of all our available magazines, which meant I had to visit the publications online to make sure our logins work. And of course, because it was basically unavoidable, I got to browse the content of the magazines.

I learned:

-- that hedgehogs sometimes spread themselves with foamy saliva that looks like bubble bath, and no one knows why.

-- that temporary tattoos have been designed for runners to monitor their lactate levels, which helps improve performance.

-- that there's a fun list of inventive songwriting rhymes that can (theoretically) turn any of us into Sammy Cahn. As the headline says, "'Mildewey, St. Louis, chop suey' -- it just needs a tune!"

Finally, I was excited to see that the newest issue of Harper's includes an article titled, "Wrong Answer: The Case Against Algebra II," with cover art of a room full of terrified schoolchildren. I can't wait to read this article. Algebra was the bane of my existence in school, and in fact I never studied any math higher than Algebra II. My parents are math instructors, but I hated math, with all its tiny rules and restrictions and its merciless precision. (I'm sure a psychologist could theorize about what kind of rebellion is going on there.) Give me the messy gray areas, the in-between zones, the feelings and opinions where rights and wrongs are debatable and murky. Far more interesting, in my book.

Mind Noise

If this stencil is supposed to be someone recognizable, it has failed me. Or maybe I've failed it. I kind of like it, though.

The mindfulness group at work is meeting again this morning, but because they meet before school starts it's really too early for me to attend. (My workday doesn't begin until 9:15 a.m., about an hour and a half later.) We've kicked around the idea of having an afternoon group of some kind. I've said I will lead it, which basically involves just ringing a bell, but so far I've only heard one other person say they may be interested and we haven't worked out any details. For now I'm being mindful on my own!

Last night I lay awake playing conversations with students through my head, trying to imagine what to say to them in circumstances that require a disciplinary voice. As you can imagine, I'm not extraordinarily experienced in cracking down on unruly kids. I need to not rehearse, though, you know? If I do, I'll just sound rehearsed. This is the focus of a lot of my mental energy at the moment, not that the students where I work require an extraordinary amount of discipline. (On the contrary, they're remarkably composed.)

The folks who run our housing estate on behalf of the local government have installed benches in the little grassy yard in front of our apartment building. That sounds much nicer than it actually looks. The benches are these wooden things, sort of spindly, and they've been augmented by stray chairs brought down by other residents. We're starting to look like a used furniture store!

Not Blogging About Work

Oh, there are so many things I could write, but many of them have to do with work and I've sort of promised myself (and my coworkers!) that I won't blog about the job. I have nothing snarky or negative to report -- it would be more like my musings about what's gone well and what it's like to learn to interact with the kids -- but I suppose I should just let all that unfold within for now. Internet discretion is such a drag.

It makes blogging a bit tough, too, because such a large portion of my brain is occupied with work stuff at the moment. C'est la vie.

Did you see the article in a recent New Yorker about police property seizures? As is well known, police departments can seize money, cars, houses and other property that investigators believe was used in or gained via the commission of a crime. Drug money, grow houses, that sort of thing. What I didn't realize, and what this article made clear, is that some police departments are seizing the property of completely innocent people who are never charged with a crime (because there's no evidence) and who are subsequently unable to hire lawyers to get their stuff back. It is truly shocking.

In one memorably recounted incident, police in Detroit busted up a music event at a local museum because, they alleged, the proper permits weren't in place. All the guests, after being made to lie on the ground, were issued citations and forced to turn over their car keys and their vehicles were impounded. They then had to pay hundreds of dollars each to get them back again, or risk forfeiting them entirely.

Tactics like this, of course, earn police departments a pretty penny.

In some cases, like the one in Detroit, courts have ruled that the police have overstepped their bounds. (As I recall from the article, the police have appealed.) But other cases, particularly against individuals, have been less successfully challenged. It's really unbelievable. Go read that article.

Olga is a little sluggish this morning -- I suspect she's eaten some sticks, or bits of Carnival detritus, while in the company of her dog-walker, which will be the subject of a phone call later. (It hasn't slowed her down much -- she saw two cats on her morning walk and nearly pulled my arm off trying to get at them.) Meanwhile the streets are much cleaner this morning, so we're pretty much back to normal.

(Photo: A storefront on Portobello Road. Seems appropriate in light of recent events in Syria.)