Anthony Krinsky Fractures Reality

A new name is out there amongst the deformers, Harvard grad Anthony Krinsky. I had Anthony on my radio show (which will return after the 1st of the year) back on August 23. He was a gracious guest and a good sport.

The name Anthony Krinsky might sound familiar to some. He has a blog and a website, StopUTLA. Anthony also appears to be a disciple of Ben Austin out there in Los Angeles and presumably is head over heels with Michelle Rhee.

You also might have read of Krinsky in Whitney Tilson's blog. Whitney seems to have a big man crush on Krinsky. I mean who wouldn't. But Whitney likes to quote Krisnky from time to time.

The last week or so Krinsky and I have had a tit for tat, back and forth email exchange with stayed pretty friendly yet quite opinionated. I do wish to credit him for being quite the mensch in inquiring about the status of my wife and I thank him for that. But one thing gnawed at me. I missed asking him a question when he was on my radio show.

If you listen to the recording of that evening at about 44:50 in Krinsky shares with me how in 1994 he as an Americorps member was volunteering in West Philadelphia High School. He shared this with me in response to be asking what he has done for the "cause."Never mind that he called the students "hooligans," but he was quite proud of his involvement.

On the show Krinsky said that he took students who couldn't even read a ruler and taught them to add and subtract fractions during the homeroom period over, I would guess, several weeks. I say several weeks because in his email Krinsky claimed 15 hours of work. This is what confuses me. Maybe things have changed, but when I was in high school homeroom was no longer than 20 minutes and we were basically just there for attendance, the morning announcements and any business that needed to be taken care of. Where was the time to educate these students into adding and subtracting fractions?

On the radio show I asked Krinsky if there was anyway to verify that this took place. Now I had forgotten that I had asked him this question and asked him last week to verify his service. Last week Krinsky shared with me that the organization he was with is known as WEPIC, or as he later said which the acronym stands for, West Philadelphia Partnership, and that either a Blain Stoddard or Krinsky's WEPIC manager Mike Connelly should be contacted for verification. The crack team has spent numerous man hours scouring the ends of the earth and have been unable to find entities known as WEPIC, The West Philadelphia Project, or even Blain Stoddard or Mike Connelly.

But in listening to the recording of the show tonight, when asked if there was anyway to verify Krinsky's involvement with West Philadelphia, Krinsky flat out said, "No." Strange isn't? Even stranger is Krinsky also sharing with me that he was forced to leave WPHS by the union for doing too good a job.

What else is strange is that Krinsky claims that he was with Americorps during this time at WPHS in 1993-1994 school year. However, according to the Americorps website, President Clinton did not sign the Americorps bill until September 1993 and the first class of 20,000 Americorps members does not start serving in its 1,000 communities until September of 1994. This totally contradicts Krinsky's timeline.

We here at SBSB have many answers for Anthony Krinsky. How did you assess that these students learned how to add and subtract fractions? Did the students retain this information? Was teaching of this task done in isolation? Were simple fractions, common denominator used, or were these mixed fractions? Was this done with any visuals? What were the math levels of these students? How many students exactly did you teach? Was it whole class or in a group setting? And even more curious, why would Krinsky leave this remarkable feat off his LinkedIn page?

We here at SBSB look forward to hearing about Anthony Krinsky's version of reality. We welcome him to respond in the comments box and look forward to all 5 readers of his blog to respond as well.