Dear Clusterflock
Of all the courses you took in school (any school, at any time in your life), which one has had the most significant impact on your life?
Michael DeBakey, MD
Dr. DeBakey passed away last week. What a terrible loss. Don’t know who Dr. DeBakey is? You or someone you know has probably benefitted from his work. Read more here and here.
Update: The World Ends This Friday, June 12
The incredibly normal, down-to-earth man in the video below says the world will end this coming Friday. Then again, he also said the world would end in 2000, and when that didn’t happen he picked 2006.
Anyway, this sorta sucks. The weather is supposed to be nice, too.
(thx Cyn-C)
Computer-Directed Learning?
Last night I had occasion to reflect on something I’ve pondered off and on through recent years. Around midnight I stopped by clusterflock and discovered a bizarro clusterflock in which posts I’d read a few hours earlier had vanished and at least one old post had merged with a brand-new one. So I stepped into the back office to see whether I could figure out what was up.
Turned out it was just a few extraneous symbols within a recent post’s code, and I managed to restore order. But that’s not what prompted my reflection.
Read more
Wild in the Streets
On the bus out to college some mornings, I would meet Dan Jones on his way to teaching practice. On one occasion he had a 6ft python wrapped round his torso next to his skin, to protect the creature from the cold. He said when lesson plans failed, the python always did the trick.
Read more from Ken Worpole on children’s play and social change.
(The Guardian via ReadySteadyBook and Booksurfer)
it’s only — a year — a-way!
Y’all. We’re a year away from clusterflockstock.
Life in These United States
Ah, Florida. Inspired by Deron’s post about the Land O’ Lakes (Florida) substitute teacher accused of wizardry, I pursued links that led me to coverage of the story by WLTX (Columbia, South Carolina). There I learned the Florida school district’s side of the story: the alleged wizard’s crimes were also said to have included “not following lesson plans” and allowing students to play on unapproved computers (circumstantial evidence, at the very least, of dabbling in the black arts).
And then I scrolled on down to “Today’s Top Stories” from WLTX, and that’s when I said to myself, “Ah, these here United States.”
• Deputies Search for Two Armed, Dangerous Men
• Man Arrested For Shooting, Killing Victim
• Teens Drown on Senior Skip Day
• 10-Year-Old Rape Victim Gives Birth
• Hulk Hogan’s Son Sentenced to 8 Months in Jail
• $5 Million Lottery Winner Killed; Ex-Boyfriend Charged
• Slight Risk of Severe Weather This Afternoon
High School Latin
Did I ever tell y’all about my high school Latin class? It was taught by a very sweet man, Mr. R, who wore the same suit every day. We knew it was the same suit because it always bore the marks where someone had pounded him on the back with a dirty eraser as he leaned over a student’s desk. He spoke five languages, four of them dead. He’d declined a Rhodes Scholarship because Oxford was too liberal. I took Latin as a freshman because I thought it would be interesting. Everyone else in the class–every single other person–was male, much older than I was, Hispanic, and was taking the class because it promised to be easy and fun. Here are some of the things that happened nearly every day:
1. Someone would give a signal, and we’d all change desks. Quickly. While Mr. R had his back turned. He’d turn around and get all flustered and tell us to move back. We’d do that very slowly.
2. Someone would give a signal, and fiery paper airplanes would fly across the room from every angle.
3. Someone would give a signal, and we’d all inch our desks forward. We’d do this several times, until finally our desks were huddled around Mr. R’s desk. He’d turn around and get all flustered and tell us to move back. We’d do that very slowly.
4. Someone would ask Mr. R if Cindy could go to the board and conjugate Puto. And Mr. R would say, why, yes. Cindy is good. And they’d all say, yes, Cindy is good. And I’d go to the board and write puto, putas, putat, putamus, putatus, putant.
5. On the day of the final, someone blew up a desk using a bit too much gunpowder, and we had to be evacuated.
I loved that class.
Students Freak Out When They Go Tech-free
For one week — five days, really — a class of college students was assigned to unplug and live a tech-free life.
No cell phones. No iPods. No computers, TVs or video games. It was enough to make a “millennial” weep.
sex skills for christian husbands
Barry’s praise of Lawrence Weschler’s book prompted a google search which led to this.
This is the same Robert Irwin, right Barry?
Training Session
Having just installed voice recognition software on the computer, I’m now teaching it to understand me and some of the hard words that I might say.
Here’s an instance. I was just now dictating a sample text of Jon’s and had to teach the program to recognize and spell “bugger” — or, rather, “buggering” (the phrase being “his actions guided by a set of well-defined if not indeed obsessive principles and beliefs which, alas, would seem to preclude the buggering of old beggars”).
Now I think I’ll teach it to recognize and spell “booger”.
Challenger Disaster
22 years ago today the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded after takeoff. I was in the 2nd grade and at my school, we didn’t watch it. I didn’t learn about it until when I got out of school. I was in shock, but at the same time, I hadn’t paid much attention to the Space Program. It was this event that got me thinking about it and how amazing ( yet dangerous ) it must be to try and make it to space. It’s sort of a sick irony that a disaster of this level, one that I think still cripples NASA today, is the thing that got me thinking about science and engineering and exploring beyond our grasp.
Sheila Asks (on Behalf of Mrs. Shields)
In the spirit of Aaron Asks: Any favorite expressions for the act of vomiting?
There’s a story behind this.
Direct Instruction
Contrary to what you might think, the data also show that DI does not impede creativity or self-esteem. The education establishment, however, hates DI because it is a threat to the power and prestige of teaching, they prefer the model of teacher as hero. As Ayres says “The education establishment is wedded to its pet theories regardless of what the evidence says.” As a result they have fought it tooth and nail so that “Direct Instruction, the oldest and most validated program, has captured only a little more than 1 percent of the grade-school market.”
Teaching Art
I sometimes said to students, “I could tell you everything I know, everything I could think of saying to you in a day or two. But it wouldn’t make any difference, because you’d understand all the words, you’d write it all down, it would all make sense, and it would be absolutely useless to you. The thing you have to do is you have to act it out.
Baby Einstein: Maybe not so much
Parents hoping to raise baby Einsteins by using infant educational videos are actually creating baby Homer Simpsons, according to a new study released today.
Kaspar
Children with autism are often described as robotic: They are emotionless. They engage in obsessive, repetitive behavior and have trouble communicating and socializing.
Now, a humanoid robot designed to teach autistic children social skills has begun testing in British schools.
How to deliver a speech
The first plate represents the attitude in which a boy should always place himself when he begins to speak. He should rest the whole weight of his body on the right leg; the other, just touching the ground, at the distance at which it would naturally fall, if lifted up to shew that the body does not bear upon it. The knees should be strait and braced, and the body, though perfectly strait, not perpendicular, but inclining as far to the right as a firm position on the right leg will permit. The right arm must then be held out with the palm open, the fingers straight and close, the thumb almost as distant from them as it will go, and the flat of the hand neither horizontal nor vertical, but exactly between both. The position of the arm perhaps will be best described by supposing an oblong hollow square, formed by the measure of four arms, as in plate the first, where the arm in its true position forms the diagonal of such an imaginary figure. So that, if lines were drawn at right angles from the shoulder, extending downwards, forwards, and sideways, the arm will form a& angle of forty-five degrees every way. When the pupil has pronounced one sentence in the position thus described, the hand, as if lifeless, must drop down to the side, the very moment the last accepted word is pronounced; and the body, without altering the place of the feet, poise itself on the left leg, while the left hand rises itself into exactly the same position as the right was before, and continues in this position till tine end of the next sentence, when it drops down on the side, as if dead; and the body poizing itself on the right leg as before, continues with the right arm extended, till the end of the succeeding sentence, and so on from right to left, and from left to right alternately, till the speech is ended.
Yes: the first set of instructions for delivering a speech, in the chapter “Elements of Gesture,” from The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Monitor, and English Teacher’s Assistant (1802), by John Hamilton Moore.
A Note Concerning Possibly Offensive Language Added to my Syllabi
I know that a number of my fellow flockers are or have been teachers, so maybe this disclaimer I have just now begun to add to my syllabi will be of interest to you. I felt compelled to add it after experiencing a definite increase, over the past few years, in the number of students who come to me with the news that they have found the language in some assigned works to be “personally offensive.” The works in question are not pornographic films or the works of obscure experimental writers seeking to shock readers. No, I am speaking of works by such writers as Mark Twain, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Barry Hannah, Mark Richard–and many others. Sometimes a student will be offended by language in one work while apparently not being offended by it in other works in which all aspects of its presentation are comparable. And sometimes students are offended by particular subjects being presented in a work. One student noted a personal objection to having to read any literature that described or mentioned lynching (this in a segment of a class surveying African American literature), and another found Cynthia Ozick’s story “The Shawl” to be “gross” and offensive, and “not really the sort of thing that should be presented in a college course.” Most of these objections came in spite of disclaimers mentioned by me on the first day of the classes, and this is why I have decided to put it in writing. As a teacher I always have to be sensitive to such issues, but my general impression is that “being offended” is often just a quick grab for leverage, made because it is there for the taking. Some complaints are simply easy to throw and are not likely to bounce back.
General Advice for Students who want me to read their Poems
I’m prone to be lavish in my encouragement, so even in classes that are not connected with the workshops I sometimes teach I often have students handing me thick batches of poems. “Be brutal,” they say, with great hope showing in their faces. I have a hard time being brutal, except when the writer has a huge ego and a preemptive disdain for all but the highest praise. Sometimes it all starts to wear me down, though, and I feel like I am having to say the same things again and again. So I decided to type up this sheet of comments to hand out before I accept the poems:
1. Read some first.
2. Stop a complete stranger on the street and launch right in with an intense, one-sided
description of your “feelings.” See how that works for you.
3. If all ambiguity is poetic, we have no need of poets.
4. Don’t put that word in there that you just saw for the first time a few minutes ago.
5. Get away from windows.
“Collage Students,” Part II: Curiosity and caring; or: Wheat from chaff
In Part I of this post, I said this of my students:
They’re looking every which way because they have so many places to look, but they don’t all have a place in common to look (and no, Google doesn’t count). Thus the absence of appositives and, as I’ve noted with my students, the difficulty they have in thinking about abstract ideas and in presenting the arguments of people who might disagree with them. All is here and now and/but centers around the individual. Indeed, I’d go so far as to argue that in our popular culture there exists an unconscious but active resistance to the idea of having a common place to look, as embodied by the idea of “coolness” as I understand that term.
I wasn’t/am not happy with the implications of that remark, though, seeming as it does to suggest a Cultural Literacy strategy for dealing with the problem of “collage students.” The whole question of the merits of determining “what every American should know” is a subject for another time; suffice it to say, though, that by the time I see freshmen in my Comp classes, it’s a bit late in the day to be engaged in culture remediation, especially in the 8-week versions of that class that I most often teach.
But even so, I was stuck as to how to continue this discussion. Although I say in that earlier post that information technology is both symptom and cause for this problem, I also think it might provide a means to a cure for it. And there was also in me a sense that perhaps my students, even as they appear to be engaged in ITianity, might also be just as overwhelmed by this profusion of sounds and images and words and so have taken to declaring their tastes, as opposed to sharing them, as a defense mechanism against all that’s out there. It’s simply easier to level out tastes and preferences than in assessing it all. Over at Clusterflock, where I left a link to the earlier post, commentor and Flocker-contributor Daryl Scroggins described that leveling out as “a homogenizing of difference as a means of sedation.”
And then, on successive days, I read a couple of posts on other blogs that seem to me to suggest, if not a cure, then a strategy to use in classes filled with “collage students.”
Teachers
For all the differences between the sexes, here’s one that might stir up debate in the teacher’s lounge: Boys learn more from men and girls learn more from women.
Oprah’s School
“The money means nothing to me,” Oprah continued. “When I look at these girls, I see me. That’s why I want to give them everything I didn’t have growing up. These are the leaders of tomorrow’s Africa.”
Stay Limber
Can’t see the forest, or have the Bushes got you down? Take to the trees and swing over to Treeclimbing.com for info. Don’t leave without perusing their links page.
Petals on a Wet, Black Bough
Teachers who stay at such work for any length of time learn to read faces. I’m sure the same is true of anybody who takes to a stage. It’s certainly true for comedians, for instance! But teachers look out upon the same batch of faces many times, and that makes it a little different.
I’m still amazed at how consistently students imagine themselves to be lost in the crowd and invisible, when I’m standing right there in front of them, with all of them in full view all of the time. A whole world of fleeting desires and anxieties passes over them, sometimes in coruscating waves — the way stray puffs of air will brighten embers banked in ash. Often they will behave in ways they never would if they understood that they were so exposed. They whisper jokes to each other and laugh, not realizing how predictable they become in the timing of such asides. They roll their eyes, chew their nails and adjust their underwear. They are like those people who, in the middle of a crowd, will look at the ground as they scratch their rear end, making the mistake of believing that if they don’t see anybody while they are taking such action, nobody will see them.