Word: mathes
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...weeks before she took her life, Alicia seemed particularly happy and motivated. Determined to improve her grades, she asked for a new seat in the math class, front and center. After the tragedy, the teacher, Sandra Crosby, and the students were haunted by that empty seat, and after much discussion, one of Alicia's friends volunteered to fill it. Crosby says she wishes she had known earlier that such a personality change is a common suicide-warning sign, perhaps indicating that Alicia had already made her decision to die and wanted to leave people with positive memories...
...part of the crisis-intervention team, describes the scene the first few days after the suicides hit the 6 o'clock news as "a large-scale psychiatric disaster." Students clustered in hallways weeping; classes sat numb and silent; teachers broke down at an after-school meeting. Says math teacher Crosby: "It was the roughest teaching day I've ever had." Because teenagers--impulsive and susceptible to fashion in all things--are considered particularly vulnerable to copycat behavior when it comes to suicide, counselors made a point of talking with students who had been in each of Amber's and Alicia...
...last book on my nightstand, and the one furthest out of my normal range, is called Godel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas R. Hofstader. It won the Pulitzer Prize in the early 1980s and ties together math, art and music through images of endlessly looping equations, drawings and musical canons. I've slugged through about 200 pages of it. Although it's starting to get into deep computer theory, which is difficult to read, it's still interesting...
...prostitute to pay her tuition at New York University. Right away we know we are in for humor of the zanily incongruous sort because Belle has given her heroine a some-of-my-best-friends-went-to-Exeter name: Bennington Bloom. Bennington is the daughter of a well-off math professor, which makes her job choice even more implausible. She is not so much a hooker with a heart of gold as she is a hooker with nerves of creme brulee, says TIME's Ginia Bellafante. She is comically neurotic -- her heels and condoms are always spilling...
...days I was reading about the after-math of the symphony's demise, I was also listening to a CD I had just bought: Bach's six solo cello suites. A friend had recommended them, and as I listened I thought that there was little better than this on earth. I have had similar feelings about many of the pieces I was exposed to in Robert Levin's Core course, Literature and Arts B-54: "Chamber Music from Mozart to Ravel." From Schubert's light Trout Quintet to Beethoven's brooding late string quartets, all nine pieces I was required...