Category: Education (Page 1 of 7)

Harvard wants to be free.

April 24, 2025 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

Harvard’s president says the school will ‘not compromise’ on its rights with the Trump admin

That’s fine, if I were Harvard, I wouldn’t want the government pushing me around. Money comes with strings attached, so if Harvard wants to be independent, don’t accept a half-billion dollars from the government each year.

About half of Americans pay income tax. That means that I pay Harvard $3 per year. I get nothing from that, and don’t want to do it.

Harvard has $50 billion in the bank, and is tax-exempt. That should be enough.

Ohio doesn’t have serious people in charge.

March 28, 2025 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

Ohio Senator, Al Cutrona’s new bill would create a model curriculum based on the success sequence.

Our feckless state legislature is goofing around, rather than doing real work. The “Success Sequence” is graduate high school, get a job, get married and have kids. If a person does those things in that order, life will probably work out. Continue reading

What good is the Department of Education?

February 16, 2025 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

I taught Physics for 25 years at two nicer school districts and was an instructor for 15 years at an academic summer camp for genius children. There is objective evidence that I was an excellent teacher. Also, I can discuss education forever, so an effort will be made to keep this post limited to the federal Department of Education.

The budget for the federal Department of Education (DoED), is 268 billion dollars. There are 54 million students in k-12 schools. The DoED spends $5000 per student, but doesn’t have any students.

Bill Gates likes being autistic.

January 26, 2025 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

Bill Gates on Autism

These are my students on our field trip to Cedar Point for Physics Day in 2011. They are all weird in their own way. I picked the year at random, because it doesn’t matter.

Bill Gates makes a good point about students being over diagnosed, labeled and medicated.

Dumb blondes in bed with popcorn.

January 20, 2025 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

A few weeks ago, I started watching the Popcorn In Bed Youtube channel. It’s a reaction channel featuring two cute blondes watching movies. The movies are chosen by member surveys and are generally very good. The channel is an easy way to watch a familiar movie in a half-hour rather than a couple of hours.

The two women are charming, and started the channel with virtually no knowledge of movies. Initially, they weren’t familiar with actors such as Sigourney Weaver and Bruce Willis. They don’t know much about history or other topics that might be considered “common knowledge”. It’s usually cute, but occasionally astounding.

Summer School isn’t like the movies.

January 12, 2025 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

I’ve been scanning and organizing old photos.

This is from teaching summer school at Cleveland Heights. The photos look like one of those “White savior” teacher movies where the young White woman is teaching the urban kids that society has given up on. She sees something of value in each and every one, and somehow, ignites a love of learning.

Teaching a bunch of Black kids at an urban school wasn’t like that, but if they make a movie, I want to be played by Gwyneth Paltrow.

Rain Man is an engaging and relevant movie. 8/10.

January 2, 2025 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

Oh boy, this is going to sound bad.

Rain Man is a movie that doesn’t often get mentioned, but it should because it’s relevant to what’s happening with children today. While watching it tonight, it struck how looking after an autistic person is like having a dog. Yeah, that doesn’t sound good at all, but hear me out.

Sparky is smarter than a monkey.

January 1, 2025 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

Dogs succeed while chimps fail at following finger pointing

Ever since we watched Inside the Mind of a Dog, Sparky has been telling everyone that he’s smarter than a monkey because they said that dogs understand human pointing, and primates don’t.

There are times when I suspect that Sparky is stretching the truth. To start the new year off right, I challenged Sparky to demonstrate that he understands human pointing. It took some training, but he is getting the idea.

How to Learn Physics in 2025.

December 16, 2024 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

While working out, my brother and I were chatting about goals for 2025. These aren’t New Year’s resolutions that are vague and optimistic, but actionable tasks that are specific, measurable and recorded. It’s the difference between “start working out” and “go to the gym twice per week”

Not my protégé.

December 15, 2024 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments