I’ve had a number of Thai students, but so far they’ve been female, and so Darius is exceptional, insofar as he is not only a conformist but hasn’t quite gotten the message that our English teacher from Rhode Island is close enough to retirement that he doesn’t stick around after formal working hours, which means that when Darius looks for him in his office around 330, he’s never there and more than once I’ve had to pick up the slack, but I don’t think he minds, because it’s the one-on-one attention|approbation he needs.
Anyway, today was one of my best teaching days ever, in part because of the synchronicity and vibe that was going on, a shift from “conceptually challenging mathematics” to more “centric” instruction—what my students are interested in in their neighborhoods, the types of questions they can mathematize, even though we’re short of criticality. But this is about Darius: today in class, after I had read his homework about various things in his community, I’d picked up on Sripraphai, truly the best Thai restaurant in the Metro area, a restaurant I frequent and re|commend to anyone willing to come to Queens, doing my best to point out the recent doubling in size, the take-out ratio to dine-in, the types of people who go there, the adjoining businesses, the types of orders, and all the other quantifiables.
But part of why we’re able to connect is because earlier, having seen his desire to get 100 on everything he does, I’d made the joke, “Do you want a grade or a radio station? 103.5!”
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