Bloomberg Says Large Classes Are Fine By Him
In the news on Friday, a statement by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg that is — well, it’s difficult to characterize, so we’re going to just state it, ask the mayor’s office to respond and then open up to comments from readers.
The mayor, speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this week, had a prescription for fixing city schools.
“If I had the ability to just design the system and say ex cathedra this is what we’re going to do you would cut the number of teachers in half and weed out all the bad ones,” Mr. Bloomberg said, according to a report by Marcia Kramer on CBS New York News. CBS has video of the mayor’s remarks.
The context of the statement is missing, but the mayor went on to make his point clear: “And double the class
Cookie Tray Theory Propels Student to D.C.
Students from Stuyvesant High School are perennial entrants in the annual Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology. The Manhattan-based school produced a first-place winner eight years ago and a third-place prize two years ago.
This weekend, a 17-year-old Stuyvesant senior, Brian Kim, is traveling to Washington as one of six high school students who made it to the national finals in the individual category. The prestigious honor comes with a $100,000 scholarship.
Brian’s project is in math, and it is called “Packing and Covering With Centrally Symmetric Disks.” It sounds frighteningly complicated, but he says you can get the picture if you imagine packing cookies on a tray.
“Packing is like normal baking cookies; you try to place them in a tray so that they don’t touch each other,” he
