PV PENINSULA: June 2011 Archives

Future Peninsula High school freshman David Steinberg became the New York Times' third-youngest crossword constructor with the paper's publication last week of his puzzle.

Deb Amlen, writer of the Times' blog Wordplay, joked in an entry that 14 1/2-year-old Steinberg was failing to measure up, seeing that the youngest-ever puzzle-maker was just 14 when his construction was published back in 1976.

It makes me wonder what Mr. Steinberg has been doing with his time that has been causing him to slack off so much.

All kidding aside, Steinberg's Thursday puzzle impressed Amlen, who said most first-timers go easier on the Times' audience of crossword fans.

Mr. Steinberg dives right into the deep end with a Thursday theme that sets us a very clever task: Find the four-letter words (no, not that kind) that surreptitiously clue us in to a code that needs to be broken. Once you get that, there's one more job. You will need to understand what Mr. Steinberg is saying to you in order to understand the gibberish in the center of the grid at 39 Across. I love code-breaking games, so this was fun, fun, fun for me.

Steinberg will start in fall at top-achieving Palos Verdes Peninsula High in Rolling Hills Estates. He's currently living in Seattle and is moving down to the South Bay this summer after a five-week session at Google. His mom, Karen Steinberg, let the Breeze know about his unusual accomplishment this month.

The teenager says he spends most of his time constructing and solving crosswords -- a passion he developed when he was 12. He has submitted 35 puzzles to the Times, but finds time for interest in Latin, robotics, computer programming and ping pong.

The Washington Post erred in its exclusion of Palos Verdes Peninsula High School from the newspaper's list of the nation's top 1,900 public secondary campuses, according to an email from a Post columnist to Pen High. I described Pen's surprising exclusion last week.

The index should be updated later this week, and Pen High will be somewhere around 192nd rank, making it the top school from the South Bay and Harbor Area, and placing it within the top 1 percent nationwide.

Here's part of an emailed apology from Post columnist Jay Mathews to Peninsula High:

The Post erred in failing to place Palos Verdes Peninsula High School on our 2011 High School Challenge rankings of the nation's high schools. It is entirely my fault. I expect that great school--one of the first I visited when I conceived this project 15 years ago--will be added to the list this week, along with other schools we missed in the first version of the list. Every year since this list began in 1998, we have had a second updated version to make sure we include every school, including those who failed to notify us of their numbers and those, like PVPHS, whose paperwork I lost somewhere on my desk.

PVPHS will be ranked in the top 200, somewhere around 192, which puts it in the top one percent of US public schools measured this way. Its line on the list will read as follows:

Palos Verdes Peninsula Rolling Hills Estates CA 73.00 2.10 3.489

Those three numbers are, in order, the percentage of seniors who had at least one passing grade on an AP exam while in high school, the percentage of students qualified for federal lunch subsidies, and the school's Challenge Index rating (the number of AP test in 2010 divided by the number of graduating seniors.)