All posts by Andrew

Oliver, Photo

End of Third Grade

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Oliver wraps up his third grade year this week. This is a big transition year in Montessori from “Lower Elementary” to “Upper Elementary.” Oliver has spend the past three years in the same classroom. At this point, he is one of the leaders. Next year he will enter a 4th, 5th, and 6th grade classroom as one of the newcomers. He is, of course, both ready and excited for the change.

The final days of school have dress up themes. Wednesday’s theme was “Fancy.” Alas, Oliver discovered that he had outgrown his suit, but we think he came up with a pretty good substitute. And the hat! Love the hat.

Photo, Sarah

Garden

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Despite all the land around our house, we haven’t grown many vegetables yet. We’ve planted a few tomato and pepper plants around the edges of other plots, and a few herbs, but nothing like the small farm we had at our old place.

With her characteristic energy, Sarah decided to do something about that this summer. Using recovered cedar and some redwood from our old deck, we built two new raised beds. Sarah came up with the box design and built the first one. Oliver and I then tackled the second, larger one. In addition, Sarah has been extending the existing mulched plantings in the yard to introduce local prairie grasses, milkweed for the monarchs, and native flowers.

Broad view
10×3 and 6×3 raised beds
Expanded garden

Andrew

Shame of the Nation

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I took a screenshot of this image from the New York Times this morning. It’s hardly the worst of President Trump’s offenses, but it crystalized for me how humiliating it is to have such a petty buffoon sitting at the resolute desk.

Exchange of messages between Norway and the United States on Sunday.

Teaching

Gemini Math

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As I’ve mentioned before, I play with AI regularly to make sure I understand how it works. Gemini, Google’s LLM, has generally been pretty impressive. It’s not without its hallucinations (and numerous other concerns), but more often right than wrong.

Simple polygon using GeoGebra.

Today, I was working on some exercises for my beginning computer science students. They need to be able to use Cartesian coordinates in their Python programs (using the “turtle” module). Most of them need more practice. I created a simple polygon in GeoGebra so that they can identify the vertices. I needed to create a bunch more.

Then I thought, This is a perfect task for Gemini! I explained what I wanted to Gemini and this is what it came up with:

Yikes! Even if math isn’t your thing, I suspect you’ll be able to see some egregious errors here. It is utter nonsense, wrong in just about every possible way. I’m surprised that it knew which axis to label x and y. (Even then, it added the specious “0” and “e“.)

I think my colleagues in the math department don’t have to worry about being replaced by AI “teachers” quite yet.