principles of teaching and ZZZZzzzzz

Here's funny and observant blog post from a teacher in a low-income school in Chicago.

The sleeping student body phenomenon would be oft repeated in my literature class for years to come. “The Scarlet Letter”? Snoozers. “The Catcher in the Rye”? Can’t relate zzzzzz! “The Old Man and the Sea”? Counting sheep. “1984″? Like eating ribs before bed. And don’t even get me started on the whole of British literature. Dickens, Shakespeare? Imagine a roomful of students simultaneously entering REM.

I think this post really illustrates the need for seeing and teaching to the conditions of the student. If one can't do that, they are not really reaching the student.

Bjork music video on recursion

I recently saw a wonderful Bjork music video, bachelorette, directed by Michel Gondry, who also directed one of my favorite movies, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The video cleverly illustrates some of elements of recursion that I also see in the Lotus Sutra (there's a recursive loop into the book, the book about being about the spontaneously about the reader). Not bad for a 5 minute music video.


http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8700243660640496152

One of the glaring difference is the melancholy unsustainbility of the recursion is the base case. Since each loop is more artificial than the next. The recursion eventually collapses, and that is the base case for popping out of the loop.

Lamentations of the decline of American culture

Harold Bloom, Yale literature professor and cultural critic, laments the state of the Country.

"I am 77 years old and I have never seen this country in such a bad state. It is madness. What we are seeing is the fall of the Roman Empire, only now it is the fall of America, the glory of our Empire. This war is what Parthia was to Rome....

In this kind of climate, nobody is interested in the critical voice. You ask about the role of the intellectual in America today and I have to say: What role? What intellectuals? There is no room for them in the simplified and dumbed down world of today's media. We used to play a role, and there are still a few left, but we are a dying breed. Nobody seems to be interested in nuance anymore."

How do we educate the future generation to be better participants in democracy? Is it possible to roll back the anti-intellectualism brought around in the 60s? Food for thought.

Keeping up with the Jones

A few years ago, Bill Cosby set off a firestorm with a speech excoriating his fellow African-Americans for, among other things, buying $500 sneakers instead of educational toys for their children....

But notably absent from the Cosby affair have been the underlying economic facts. Do blacks actually spend more on consumerist indulgences than whites? And if so, what, exactly, makes black Americans more vulnerable to the allure of these luxury goods?

Economists Kerwin Charles, Erik Hurst, and Nikolai Roussanov have taken up this rather sensitive question in a recent unpublished study, "Conspicuous Consumption and Race."

The geist of the study is homogenity of income level of one's peers is what causes the upward spiral of conspicuous consumption.

link