Last day of the trip we decided to take a day trip to The Hague. On the way we passed through Haarlem For some reason I couldn't get this song out of my head We had some time to do some wandering and even stumbled upon their Chinatown: but the reason for the trip was the Escher museum Cool museum in a beautiful mansion. It had tons of Escher's work along with his story.

We started walking from our hotel to the Van Gogh museum. On the way we passed the Cow Parade store. This was pretty cool since we remember the Cow Parade from back when it was in New York decades ago. Big fiberglass painted cows at random spots in the city. The Van Gogh museum was pretty amazing (and also had wood floors). While most of his best known works might be in other museums around the world there were plenty of great ones to view and admire.

Final leg of the trip in Amsterdam. Train ride and hotel went smoothly but we were hungry so got a quick bite across from the Rembranthuis After some wandering we found our way to the WWII Dutch Resistance Museum. Great place to go if you want to be both proud and inspired and depressed at the same time. It contained propaganda from both sides Photos of hiding people and equipment:

Heading to Amsterdam this morning and we'll be here until mid next week. We spent yesterday in Antwerp but for a while we didn't know if we were going to get there. Unbeknownst to us when we planned our trip, yesterday was the season's first general strike in Belgium. When we found out in Brussels we weren't sure we'd be able to get out of the city at all but it turned out that while the local trains would be out the intercity ones were going business as usual.

We spent the last few days in Brussels. Got in on the Eurostar at around 1:00. We were crashing with a good friend - a teacher who worked with Devorah back in the day but left NY and is now in Brussels. The catch was that she wasn't getting home from work until 5:00 so we had to occupy ourselves until then. Schelpping around rolling suitcases usually isn't a big deal but there were two challenges.

A friend of mine reached out the other day, it turns out a friend of theirs was all of a sudden locked out of Amazon. Couldn't view videos, couldn't purchase, as far as I could tell and couldn't get to their paid for content. Amazon said that the user violated their terms of service but didn't specify how or when and after a couple of back and forths they declared the case closed.

This morning, Devorah, Batya, and I drove up to Hunter to start to clean out my office - the next step in officially becoming retired. I wasn't really looking forward to it. When I moved from Stuy to Hunter it was something of a rush so I basically boxed everything up that I thought I wanted to keep and moved it to the new digs. So, three decades worth of accumulated crap to deal with.

Today our Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to eliminate racial considerations in admissions decisions or affirmative action. This will be celebrated by some and reviled by others even though it probably won't make a huge difference in terms of class makeup at most "elite" institutions. Given my leanings and who I follow, you can probably guess which views I'm seeing more of. The cases that have generally been brought against institutions implementing affirmative action usually amount to "I was more qualified than the affirmative action candidate you took" with public cries of "you're lowering standards.

So, this morning I taught my last two classes as a full time teacher. I still have grading for a few weeks and then some other things to wrap up my programs and, due to my contract and how terminal leave works I won't officially be retired for a few more months but today was kind of my last day of actual work, work. Some approximate stats: Taught approximately 290 specific course sections (probably a little more) Taught somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000 different students Created more than 12 courses from whole cloth to go with new version of a dozen or so more Started three major programs from scratch (StuyCS, Hunter honors CS, Hunter CS Teacher Education) along with a non-profit and it's programs (CSTUY), Google CAPE, and aided in the design of others.

It's once again teacher appreciation week. That's a week late in the semester ostensibly celebrating our teachers. Over the years there have been a few highlight moments for me during these teacher appreciation weeks but overall, I can't say I've been a fan of the "event." Why not? Because it's usually made up, superficial, and frequently patronizing. Some stores offer discounts. Staples and Office Depot offering essentially discounts on supplies for the classroom that teachers shouldn't have to purchase in the first place.