Culture: February 2008 Archive Page

Bennett Gordon, Science and Technology blog (Utne Reader):

Every diorama in the Home School Science Fair, which took place inside a shopping mall in Roseville, Minnesota, had a biblical quote attached to it. A young woman whose project involved teaching her dog how to run circles between her legs decorated the words: "If you love me, you will obey what I command." (John 14:15) in pink lace fabric. This quote got to the crux of the science fair, in my opinion: parental commandment. These parents pulled their children out of school, away from their peers, and said, "Now prove that Darwin was wrong."

This blog entry gives the impression that one particular homeschool group's Creationist science fair is "the 2008 Home School Science Fair," perpetuating the meme that all home school families are the same.  I left a comment on the site that said, in part, "I understand and appreciate your desire to protect the name of science from those who misappropriate its terminology. I hope you'll also respect my desire to address misunderstandings about home schooling."  (My reasons for choosing home schooling are not religious; my wife and I simply don't want to entrust such an important task to strangers -- we want to be a part of it.)

Update: Gordon e-mailed me to thank me for the comment I posted on his site. He said he had thought that the word "Creationist" in the title of his blog entry was enough to contextualize this particular science fair, but noted that the comments his blog attracted have already made a pretty good case for correcting that. I suggested that he do a profile on a homeschool family that doesn't fit the stereotype.

Aardvarchaeology has a fascinating piece on abandoned suburban treehouses.

These sites and their formation processes reflect children's psychological characteristics. Kids have little sense of order, short memories and strange rationality. They also have no idea that childhood is brief and transient. They will happily fill their treehouses with junk without any thought that they might one day stop coming there. When adolescence strikes and the hormones get going, old childish haunts like these suddenly become the last places they want to visit. So everything is left wherever it dropped the last time someone came to play in the house.

Grownups hardly ever leave their sites that way: we keep any useful stuff and tidy up the place before we leave. Often we will even tear the house down and bring the building materials to our next place of habitation. The grownup type of site most similar to abandoned treehouses is the homeless substance-abuser camp, which is also inhabited by people with thinking impairments. Such sites may be abruptly abandoned when their inhabitants die of overdoses, get thrown into jail or find someone with an apartment who's willing to take them in.

And the treehouse sites are hardly ever cleaned up. In fact, the children's parents often have only a vague notion of where the treehouse is. They may help to build it, but they don't feel responsible for it. It's out in the woods where only children and mushroom pickers see it: out of sight and out of mind. The mess there would never be tolerated in the back yard, just as most Westerners of today feel really uncomfortable in the stench and litter of Third World villages.

Politico:

Wolfson made the explosive charge in an interview with Politico after suggesting as much in a conference call with reporters.

On the call, Wolfson said: "Sen. Obama is running on the strength of his rhetoric and the strength of his promises and, as we have seen in the last couple of days, he's breaking his promises and his rhetoric isn't his own."

"When an author plagiarizes from another author there is damage done to two different parties. One is to the person he plagiarized from. The other is to the reader," said Wolfson.

Obama closely echoed a passage from a speech that Deval Patrick, now the Massachusetts governor, used at a campaign rally when he was running for that office in 2006.

NPR's In Character treatment of Willy Loman (from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman).

"I can tell you anecdote after anecdote after anecdote of men -- men, 50-year-old pinstripe-suited men dissolved in tears and shaking," Dennehy says. "And telling me story after story about themselves, about their relationship with their sons, and so forth."

I rotated this play off of my syllabus this year. I'm sure I'll bring it back.

Christian Science Monitor:

During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company.

Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in his family. But by then he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved close to $5,000.

The effort, he says, was inspired after reading "Nickel and Dimed," in which author Barbara Ehrenreich takes on a series of low-paying jobs. Unlike Ms. Ehrenreich, who chronicled the difficulty of advancing beyond the ranks of the working poor, Shepard found he was able to successfully climb out of his self-imposed poverty.

Ehrenreich's book was Seton Hill's summer reading selection, so I'm teaching the book later this term. And I'm particularly interested in this item. Shepard's youth and strength (and probably gender) gave him access to a moving job that the middle-aged Ehrenreich wouldn't likely have landed.

Up Right Down already features over a dozen versions of the same story. What's yours? (Via)

THE PLOT: In a bistro in Paris a young woman (A) tells her three girlfriends (B, C, and D) about the affair she had with an American tourist, who returned home promising to write, and hasn't. It's been over two weeks; something must have happened to him. (She has just learned she is carrying his child, but she doesn't tell her friends.) B tells her to call him; C to e-mail him; D to forget all about him. Enter a fat American couple; each of them has a different speech impediment. They order food. The man chokes. A performs the Heimlich maneuver on him, and saves his life.

A great series hosted by Heidi Ruby Miller, a recent graduate of Seton Hill's Writing Popular Fiction program. She has asked writers of genre fiction (fantasy, crime, etc.) to tell the story of their first publication. I'm just starting a career track unit in Introduction to Literary Study, and several of the students want to be professional writers.

Every writer follows her own path within the publishing industry, which makes for entertaining and inspiring stories off the page. Paths to Publication offers some of those unique perspectives. I hope it also gives us all comfort knowing that our journey as writers is not just the breaks we get, but also the opportunities we take.

Good literacy news from the Washington Post:

The share of kindergarten students in the county who can read simple books has risen from 39 to 93 percent in six years, according to school system data culled from reading assessments given each spring. Achievement is so high, and across so many demographic groups, that school officials plan to test future kindergartners on more challenging text.

The article credits the change from half-day kindergarten to full-day kindergarten. One of the main reasons we started homeschooling is that we weren't really ready to send our son away for a full day, and there wasn't an option to send him for a half-day -- the teachers assured us that he would miss out on far too much. We thought that we would miss our son far too much.

I took a little break from evaluating a close reading assignment in order to look into the online chatter about George W. Bush's interpretation of a painting called "A Charge to Keep."  Bush hung it on his wall because he identifies with the guy out in front, whom he sees as leading a tough climb over rough terrain.