February 2012
26 posts
2 tags
Can you steal something free?
A homeless Connecticut woman, Tanya McDowell, was arrested last night for selling marijuana and crack cocaine to undercover police officers. On the same trial, she’s being tried for sending her son to an elementary school in Norwalk, Connecticut, when her legal residence was in Bridgeport.
She’s being charged with larceny, 20 years in prison, and fines which amount to over $15,000,...
“It is always a good idea to be able communicate clearly—no matter the...”
– Ta-Nehisi, on writing being a trade and industry
1 tag
Writing is a Practical Skill
Matt Yglesias defends the liberal arts from a hackish utilitarianism:
In order to do well in courses on 19th Century British Literature or Social Anthropology or Philosophy or American History in a properly running American college, what you need to do is get pretty good at reading and writing documents in the English language. These are very much real skills with wide-ranging practical...
1 tag
How I Edited an Agricultural Paper, by Mark Twain
Studio A on WFUV Radio recently did a read-aloud from the various sarcastic writings of Mark Twain. This was some of the best radio I’ve heard since I was a kid listening to NPR Sunday morning storytime.
Title: The How I Edited An Agricultural Paper Author: Mark Twain [More Titles by Twain] I did not take temporary editorship of an agricultural paper without misgivings. Neither would...
3 tags
"Relevant" Curriculum
About half of New York City’s CTE (career and technical education) high schools are on the state’s Persistently Low-Achieving list.
According to Dana Goldstein, who reported on this recently, there’s actually a program in one such school called “video game art,” with a 38 percent graduation rate.
While colleges are businesses, designed to take your money when and...
Rural California: Illiterati
Before I left California’s Central Valley to return to the public schools of New York, I interviewed my students. I asked them about their lives in Delano, and their outlook on the future.
In one interview, I spoke to Oscar, who, in my 7th grade class, read at the second grade level and could frequently be found crawling under the desks. “Do you plan to go to college?” I asked him. “With my...
2 tags
Stone Cold Cady
The Solitude of Self, Vivian Gornick:
For a girl, feeling strongly usually meant the pursuit and consummation of romantic passion; this, from time immemorial, had been the territory over which women of temperament had squatter’s rights. In Elizabeth, the parts had come together differently. Feeling strong through sexual love was not what she would ever be about.
The story has it that the...
“Real isn’t how you are made,” says the Skin Horse. “It’s...”
– The Velveteen Rabbit
Myth #8: You can't teach people to become good...
In some ways we look at this myth as a logical extension of academic Darwinism: You hire talent you don’t train it. Thus, we’ve heard many academics dismiss teacher development programs at universities as a waste of resources because good teachers are both, not made. Perhaps one reason many faculty members believe this is that American graduate schools have historically done precious...
“to be an artist, in [Jed’s] view, was above all to be someone submissive.”
To read or not to read: Houellebecq's new one
Decorate a reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a mustache and goatee, and you have a humorous take on classical painting, thought Marcel Duchamp. Paint a pipe, and beneath it, the wry caption, “this is not a pipe.” Witty, to René Magritte. There’s fearful symmetry between the curvature of a woman’s back and a violin, so paint f-holes on a model, photograph her, and call...
Successful students, we say, are the ones who follow the adults, who do as the adults do. Successful students, we say, are those that do what we tell them.
