I read it somewhere...

“I’m a believer that there’s no substitution for competition year-round, and I don’t necessarily...

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 10:16:09 -0700

“I’m a believer that there’s no substitution for competition year-round, and I don’t necessarily think it needs to be in one sport. What I’m looking to do is push our kids into as many sports at Central as possible. Our goal is to develop well-rounded athletes,” Spease said.

"It was hard not to think of all this—of the Iliad with its grand funereal finale, of the Odyssey..."

Tue, 28 May 2013 07:41:30 -0700

“

It was hard not to think of all this—of the Iliad with its grand funereal finale, of the Odyssey strangely pivoting around so many burials, and of course of “Antigone”—as I followed the story of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s unburied body over the past few weeks. I thought, of course, of canny politicians eyeing the public mood, and of the public to whom those politicians wanted to pander. I thought even more of the protesters who, understandably to be sure, wanted to make clear the distinction between victim and perpetrator, between friend and foe, by threatening to strip from the enemy what they saw as the prerogatives of the friend: humane treatment in death. The protesters who wanted, like Creon, not only to deny those prerogatives to an enemy but to strip them away again should anyone else grant them—to “unbury the body.” I thought of Martha Mullen, a Christian, who insisted that the Muslim Tsarnaev, accused of heinous atrocities against innocent citizens, be buried just as a loved one might deserve to be buried, because she honored the religious precept that demands that we see all humans as “brothers,” whatever the evil they have done.

This final point is worth lingering over just now. The last of the many articles I’ve read about the strange odyssey of Tsarnaev’s body was about the reactions of the residents of the small Virginia town where it was, finally, buried. “What do you do when a monster is buried just down the street?” the subhead asked. The sensationalist diction, the word “monster,” I realized, is the problem—and brings you to the deep meaning of Martha Mullen’s gesture, and of Antigone’s argument, too. There is, in the end, a great ethical wisdom in insisting that the criminal dead, that your bitterest enemy, be buried, too; for in doing so, you are insisting that the criminal, however heinous, is precisely not a “monster.” Whatever else is true of the terrible crime that Tamerlan Tsarnaev is accused of having perpetrated, it was, all too clearly, the product of an entirely human psyche, horribly motivated by beliefs and passions that are very human indeed—deina in the worst possible sense. To call him a monster is to treat this enemy’s mind precisely the way some would treat his unburied body—which is to say, to put it beyond the reach of human consideration (and therefore, paradoxically, to refuse to confront his “monstrosity” at all).

”

- Unburied: Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the Lessons of Greek Tragedy. A profound essay by Daniel Mendelsohn. (via ayjay)

"If Obama commits to making responsible fatherhood a central theme of his second term, he could have..."

Tue, 28 May 2013 07:41:25 -0700

“If Obama commits to making responsible fatherhood a central theme of his second term, he could have a deep and durable effect on American culture. Any legislative achievement would pale in comparison.”

- Reihan Salam (via ayjay)

"I’m always glad to see a null finding reported, so I liked this paper by Robert Fairlie and Jonathan..."

Tue, 28 May 2013 07:40:40 -0700

“

I’m always glad to see a null finding reported, so I liked this paper by Robert Fairlie and Jonathan Robinson about what happened when they gave computers to randomly selected California schoolkids whose families had no computer at home. The short answer is nothing.

The slightly longer answer is that the kids reported an almost 50 percent increase in time spent using a computer, with the time divided between doing homework, playing games, and social network. But there was no improvement in academic achievement or attendance or anything else. There wasn’t even an improvement in computer skills. At the same time, there was no negative impact either. The access to extra computer games didn’t reduce total time spent on homework or lead to any declines in anything. They broke it down by a few demographic subgroups and didn’t find anything there either. It’s just a huge nada. Nothing happening.

”

- Matt Yglesias (via ayjay)

"In Nagy’s “brick-and-mortar” class, students write essays. But multiple-choice questions are almost..."

Mon, 13 May 2013 17:28:20 -0700

“In Nagy’s “brick-and-mortar” class, students write essays. But multiple-choice questions are almost as good as essays, Nagy said, because they spot-check participants’ deeper comprehension of the text. The online testing mechanism explains the right response when students miss an answer. And it lets them see the reasoning behind the correct choice when they’re right. “Even in a multiple-choice or a yes-and-no situation, you can actually induce learners to read out of the text, not into the text,” Nagy explained. Thinking about that process helped him to redesign his classroom course. He added, “Our ambition is actually to make the Harvard experience now closer to the MOOC experience.””

- Nathan Heller: Is College Moving Online? : The New Yorker. Fewer essays, more multiple-choice tests: the wave of the Ivy League future. Can’t wait to get on that train. (via ayjay)

I do a good deal of lecturing in my classes, but most of my lectures are to some degree improvised...

Mon, 13 May 2013 16:08:57 -0700

I do a good deal of lecturing in my classes, but most of my lectures are to some degree improvised and circumstantial. When I walk into a classroom where students have just read a work of literature that’s new to them, most of my excitement comes not from the opportunity to tell them what I know but from curiosity: What do they want to know?

Maybe the coolest thing about being a teacher is just this: Everything that’s worn and familiar to me is new to my students.

ayjay: My hero

Fri, 10 May 2013 07:46:06 -0700

ayjay:

My hero

Ramsey is particularly striking … since, for a moment at least, he put the issue of race...

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:49:27 -0700

Ramsey is particularly striking … since, for a moment at least, he put the issue of race front and center himself. Describing the rescue of Amanda Berry and her fellow captives, he says, “I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway!”

The candid statement seems to catch the reporter off guard; he ends the interview shortly afterward. And it’s notable that among the many memorable things Ramsey said on camera, this one has gotten less meme-attention than most. Those who are simply having fun with the footage of Ramsey might pause for a second to actually listen to the man. He clearly knows a thing or two about the way racism prevents us from seeing each other as people.

here’s what a new study from the Economic Policy Institute tells us about America’s...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:19:13 -0700

here’s what a new study from the Economic Policy Institute tells us about America’s education system: Every one of those common assumptions is simplistic, misguided, or downright wrong.

When you break down student performance by social class, a more complicated, yet more hopeful, picture emerges, highlighted by two pieces of good news. First, our most disadvantaged students have improved their math scores faster than most comparable countries. Second, our most advantaged students are world-class readers.

Why break down international test scores by social class? In just about every country, poor students do worse than rich students. America’s yawning income inequality means our international test sample has a higher share of low-income students, and their scores depress our national average. An apples-to-apples comparison of Americans students to their international peers requires us to control for social class and compare the performances of kids from similarly advantaged and disadvantaged homes.

I have tried for a long time to write academic works that are vivid, interesting, challenging...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:50:23 -0700

I have tried for a long time to write academic works that are vivid, interesting, challenging … Of course, I’ve tried to do the same thing in my nonacademic writing; in fact, I’d like to believe that as my career has gone on there’s been a kind of convergence on a similar impetus, a similar character, a similar style or feel.

What is it that all of my writing has in common, or that I would like for it to all have in common? I think primarily it’s that it should offer some of the same structural, organizational, and linguistic pleasures – yes, pleasures – that fiction has, or the personal essay. Even in my most theoretical work, I’ve tried to think of my task as that of attracting and keeping the attention of thoughtful readers, telling them stories, doling out fascinating details that make them want to read more, keeping them to some degree in suspense until the end of any given tale. Storytelling is, for me, the fundamental mode of writing; it’s the foundation on which everything else is built. In that sense I don’t think of writing works of literary theory as being different altogether in kind from writing a personal narrative. It’s all about trying to reach human readers, writing to them as their fellow human being. Insofar as I have had any success as a writer, I really do think that it is primarily due to my keeping that goal in mind.

- Alan Jacobs

The real skill you’re picking up from education is problem solving. You work in a lot of domains...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:09:29 -0700

The real skill you’re picking up from education is problem solving. You work in a lot of domains (some that you’re highly fluent in, some less so) and learn what strategies their practitioners have developed and add them to your arsenal or adapt them to your liking. And, as you learn so many different ways of thinking, you develop a kind of intellectual curiosity and compassion for other minds.

Even if a conceptual framework is poorly suited for the purpose at hand, you can be interested in how and why someone devised it. The lapses of the past make you wonder about your own blind spots, and the ideas you would have discarded but came to understand and love when you were stuck with them over a semester make you a bit less likely to kick over Chesterton’s fence.

Special artists worked fast, identifying a war scene’s focal point, blocking out the composition in...

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 20:25:38 -0700

Special artists worked fast, identifying a war scene’s focal point, blocking out the composition in minutes, and fleshing it out later in camp. They took great pride in making their renderings as faithful as possible. Writing from the front lines in northern Virginia in the spring of 1862, Edwin Forbes noted that his sketches had been made “at considerable risk for the country is overrun with small gangs of sneaking Secessionists, who are as blood-thirsty as [Confederate Gen.] Albert Pike. For one day I got an escort of ten men and made some sketches in comparative safety … All who have seen them say they are very accurate. I need hardly assure you that I do my best to make them so, as fidelity to fact is, in my opinion, the first thing to be aimed at.” …

Both Harper and Leslie did their part to shape public opinion, censoring images considered too negative or graphic and altering drawings to make them more stirring or upbeat. Harper’s editors, for instance, made Alfred Waud’s drawing of a leg amputation at an Antietam field hospital look less gory to accommodate squeamish readers. Engravers freshened another Waud sketch of exhausted horses dragging artillery carts, giving them lifted heads and spirited tails and making them kick up clods of mud—an animated portrait of teamsters racing ammunition to the front.

Nonetheless, by depicting scenes as realistically as they could, Waud, Lumley, Henri Lovie, and others undermined the popular myth of the war as a romantic adventure. As citizens grew accustomed to the violent imagery, censorship eased.

Photo

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 12:19:16 -0700

So if your phone doesn’t move from a single location between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. for say...

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 20:24:48 -0700

So if your phone doesn’t move from a single location between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. for say a week or so, Facebook can quickly deduce the location of your home. Facebook will be able to pinpoint on a map where your home is, whether you share your personal address with the site or not. It can start to build a bigger and better profile of you on its servers. It can start to correlate all of your relationships, all of the places you shop, all of the restaurants you dine in and other such data. The data from accelerometer inside your phone could tell it if you are walking, running or driving. As Zuckerberg said — unlike the iPhone and iOS, Android allows Facebook to do whatever it wants on the platform, and that means accessing the hardware as well.

A Borg Complex is exhibited by writers and pundits who explicitly assert or implicitly assume that...

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 20:23:30 -0700

A Borg Complex is exhibited by writers and pundits who explicitly assert or implicitly assume that resistance to technology is futile. The name is derived from the Borg, a cybernetic alien race in the Star Trek universe that announces to their victims some variation of the following: “We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile.”

A dozen jihadists, some of them children, had held off hundreds of Malian soldiers for a full day of...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 21:44:59 -0700

A dozen jihadists, some of them children, had held off hundreds of Malian soldiers for a full day of fighting, until the French were forced to intervene. The city center was a smoldering ruin. For all the politicians’ talk in Paris of a swift end to their campaign in Mali, it seemed unlikely to me that the French would be going home any time soon.

Alyssa Rosenberg argues on Slate that Romeo and Juliet “is full of terrible, deeply childish ideas...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 09:05:55 -0700

Alyssa Rosenberg argues on Slate that Romeo and Juliet “is full of terrible, deeply childish ideas about love.” She’s quite right … because that’s the point of the play. Reading the text, instead of assuming it represents the genre “perfect love that is tragically thwarted,” makes it clear that other characters and arguably Shakespeare himself see Romeo and Juliet’s love as gravely flawed.

“Maybe school is stupid, soul-crushing and irrelevant. But … how many of us are continually...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 09:04:00 -0700

“Maybe school is stupid, soul-crushing and irrelevant. But … how many of us are continually delighted by our work? … Maybe school is designed to acclimate humans to enduring long stretches of tedium.”

Buried in this snarky speculation is an important insight. “Socialization” encompasses more than developing high self-esteem or meaningful relationships. To quote one researcher, socialization includes “acquiring the [needed] rules of behavior.”

It is fashionable in pedagogy circles to deride efforts to instill workforce skills as neo-Taylorite, harking back to days when factory workers’ every move was scripted and designed to produce automatons, not thinkers. But not all of school’s more irksome lessons are useless. My Catholic high school requires students to wear uniforms, leave their cell phones in their lockers, and complete homework assignments even if they’re deemed stupid or unnecessary.

Soul-crushing? Sometimes, probably. But these rules do not only enhance learning by removing distractions; I’m convinced that my students benefit from learning to conform to expectations and, yes, even bow to authority.

One of the few negative studies that Murphy cites examined homeschool graduates’ record as enlistees (not officers) in the military. As the authors of the study acknowledge, their sample is small and almost certainly unrepresentative. Still, they found that homeschoolers drop out of the military before their enlistment period is over at a rate almost double that of public school graduates (41.5 percent versus 26 percent in the first three years of service), and often with unfavorable discharges.

I can’t help wondering if many homeschool recruits rebelled at what appeared to be petty, unreasonable rules. One of my own children, upon return to “real” school, actively resisted tackling assignments that he did not enjoy. Previously homeschooled children in my Advanced Placement classes embraced self-directed learning and read voraciously, yet struggled with the strict timetable and subject-matter regimentation that success on an AP exam demands.

Low-income children who are homeschooled often reach or exceed national academic averages, whereas...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 09:02:26 -0700

Low-income children who are homeschooled often reach or exceed national academic averages, whereas the average low-income children in public schools score “considerably below” the national norm.

Likewise, homeschooling seems to mitigate the negative effects of low levels of parents’ education on student achievement—a finding that’s especially intriguing since these parents are the educators—as well as the negative effects of family socioeconomic variables and race displayed in public schools. It’s easy to postulate that homeschooling parents are unusually committed, but these results still challenge the prevailing orthodoxy that societal problems inevitably hold education hostage.

ayjay: “The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 14:45:43 -0700

ayjay:

“The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period. Increasingly, what we do on the Internet is being combined with other data about us. Unmasking Broadwell’s identity involved correlating her Internet activity with her hotel stays. Everything we do now involves computers, and computers produce data as a natural by-product. Everything is now being saved and correlated, and many big-data companies make money by building up intimate profiles of our lives from a variety of sources. Facebook, for example, correlates your online behavior with your purchasing habits offline. And there’s more. There’s location data from your cell phone, there’s a record of your movements from closed-circuit TVs. This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it’s efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.”

— Schneier on Security: Our Internet Surveillance State