Posts tagged jacobs
Posts tagged jacobs
“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.”
Most of what I now know that I consider worth knowing I learned not at school but at these libraries. By the standards of many cities and towns, including the one I live in now, they were not large or well-stocked; but they contained enough to keep a boy’s mind occupied and excited for many years. And when the schools let me down, the libraries did not. Perhaps I infer too much from my own experience, but I cannot help thinking that the health of a community is tied in significant ways to the health of its libraries.
- Alan Jacobs
(Source: theamericanconservative.com)
Surely part of the price we all pay for the privilege of teaching is to listen and try to respond fairly to the various complaints and suggestions and even demands of the people who pay our salaries. We may not always agree with them — we may have exceptionally good reasons for disagreeing — but the “shut up and leave this to the professionals” attitude is contemptible.
- Alan Jacobs
(Source: theamericanconservative.com)
People like Hirsch get stigmatized by the educational establishment as “reactionaries” because they want to establish stronger and more consistent standards for achievement.
It’s worth remembering that Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy appeared in the same year as Allan Bloom’s incendiary Closing of the American Mind and that the two were frequently lumped together as “conservative” responses to educational chaos. Bloom was a conservative indeed, of a highbrow and elitist stripe, but Hirsch has always been a committed political liberal: he has consistently stated that he wants a stronger educational system in order to address inequality and give the poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised a better chance to succeed in American society.
Hirsch’s preferred policies may be right or may be wrong — that’s a debate for another day — but to dismiss them because of some purported but fictional “conservatism” is to practice the kind of epistemic closure that paralyzes our society in those very arenas where we most need creative change. At the very least this article, like everything else Hirsch has written on education in the past twenty-five years, is very much worth reading in full and reflecting on at length.
- Alan Jacobs
(Source: theamericanconservative.com)
There’s a powerful moment in a very large book I have praised before, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, in which Rebecca West asks of a place in the Balkans, “And what has happened there? The answer is too long, as long indeed, as this book, which hardly anybody will read by reason of its length. Here is the calamity of our modern life, we cannot know all the things which it is necessary for our survival that we should know.” Not all stories need to be as long as the one West tells, but many of the “things which it is necessary for our survival that we should know” are complicated, entangled, interrelated, and for a society to thrive it needs to have many people — not all, but many — who have the patience and concentration to work through long narratives and arguments.
- Alan Jacobs
It’s often said that the current generation of twentysomethings are distinctively narcissistic, but the available evidence strongly suggests that that is not true: any narcissism that has set in to American society set in forty or more years ago, just as Christopher Lasch told us. But if they’re not any more narcissistic than their predecessors, these young people do often seem bereft of a moral vocabulary with which to assess their lives — and, perhaps equally often, they seem to be craving such a vocabulary. For that lack they have no one but their elders to blame.
- Alan Jacobs
(Source: theamericanconservative.com)
Writing about disconnection and loss is easier than writing about the nurturing, strengthening, consoling aspects of faith. Which, I suppose, was equally true of the stories of the mid-century titans that Elie cites. Faith, being the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, has never been easy to portray aesthetically. This is why Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling, has to throw up his hands in incomprehension when faced with Abraham’s trust in a God he scarcely even knows. In any time or place, a strong and vivid and truthful story about faith is a rare bird indeed.
- Alan Jacobs
(Source: theamericanconservative.com)
When I started teaching, way back in the 1980s, plagiarism presented a real challenge. I could read an essay and know that the range of its vocabulary and the subtleties of its syntax were beyond the reach of the student who had turned it in — but proving the point was usually another matter altogether. On rare occasions the book or essay whose words had been snatched was so well-known that I could identify it immediately; and occasionally a colleague could spot the source; but far more often I would realize, with a sinking feeling, that if I wasn’t going to let the cheating pass I would have to spend a good deal of time in the library poring over academic journals.
When the age of the Internet arrived, opportunities for cheating increased but so too did tools for discovering it. Especially delightful were those papers whose “authors” had pasted in passages from online sources without changing the font, so that every stolen passage announced its presence — ah, good times, good times. But the key development was the rise of Google: Once its spiders had crawled almost the whole Internet, it became trivial to search for the most uncommon phrases used in a suspicious paper and quickly pinpoint their sources.
But this just escalated the arms race, at least for students with enough pocket money to pay someone to write a paper from scratch for them.
- Alan Jacobs
(Source: The Atlantic)
Many academics are control freaks, and one of the most common ways that freakery manifests itself is in over-preparation for classes. That’s bad in a couple of ways. First, you spend more time than you can really afford, and second, once you’ve spent all that time you want to make sure that you squeeze it all in to your class time. So you end up talking more than you should, talking too fast, and shutting down potentially interesting conversations because you’re afraid that you won’t be able to cover everything you’ve prepared for. Over-preparation is thus not only time-consuming but has many bad pedagogical side-effects. You’ll do real damage to the classroom environment if you think getting through your outline is more important that allowing the students to pursue an issue that really fascinates them and gets them involved. Invest less time in traditional course prep and more time in thinking about how to manage the time in the classroom that increases student involvement.
- Alan Jacobs
(Source: ayjay)
The core challenge — the key question for educators — is this: Is there an acceptable substitute for an interest in learning? Yes, I know that that’s not how we usually phrase it: the typical question is, How can we get students interested in learning, or in learning my subject? Most teachers know that if you have a student who is genuinely interested in one subject it’s not unusual to get her interested in a different one. But the generalized indifference that people have who don’t really want to be in school at all — who are there because their parents want them to be, or because they see school as a ticket to a job — is extremely difficult to overcome. It may be even harder to change the students who are only interested in grades, since they are likely to believe, erroneously, that they’re good students, eager for knowledge.
So whether we want to admit it or not, when we educators turn to technology we’re hoping not to generate interest in learning but to substitute for it.
- Alan Jacobs
(Source: The Atlantic)
