Is it true that in any sequence
of thirty words in The Washington Post
at least two of the words will start with the same letter?
Today's Washington Post has a story about recent declines in learning-assessment scores, especially in math -- both morale and persistence fell as students were remote from the watchful encouragement of in-person teachers.
Back in this blog posting in January, 2011, I offered poetic views of four of my important teachers. Here is a repeat of one of those -- its lines remember Dr. Miriam C. Ayer (d.1972), one of my mathematics professors at the University of Oklahoma in the late 1960s. Even though I found it hard to like Ayer, I learned a great deal from her "Introduction to Topology" class.
Nervous in class and tough
to follow—she made errors
on the blackboard yet demanded
we write perfect mathematics
in perfect English sentences. This was not
an East Coast finishing school, and I hoped
she’d be lenient with the Asian students
even as fear made me work infinitely hard
on papers that she gave back bright
with red-ink from her difficult hand.
No one before or since has read my words
so carefully.