Reinventing the wheel

My friend Stefan Hagemann spotted a familiar metaphor put to new use in two articles in Monday’s New York Times. An article about teachers who buy and sell lesson plans online quotes Alice Coburn, a vocational education teacher, who explains her purchases like so: “I hate reinventing the wheel.” And an article about members of the House of Representatives whose House speeches on health care were written, in whole or in part, by corporate lobbyists quotes Stanley V. White, chief of staff for Representative Robert A. Brady (D, Pennsylvania-1): “There’s not much reason to reinvent the wheel on a Congressional Record entry.”

There can of course be great value in reinventing the wheel, in thinking through a matter and coming to conclusions for oneself. The saddest thing to me about Coburn’s statement: its unstated assumptions that such effort is of no value and that whatever a teacher might come up with would be mere repetition, no better than or different from what anyone else has done. As for White’s explanation, its implicit contempt for the Congressional Record is astonishing.

Says Stefan Hagemann, “I guess the next time a student hands me an essay lifted from SparkNotes, I can nod approvingly. No sense reinventing the wheel.”

Grad employees on strike at UIUC

From the GEO press release:

The strike committee of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO), American Federation of Teachers/Illinois Federation of Teachers Local 6300, AFL-CIO, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), has authorized a strike against the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois to begin at 8am on Monday morning. After six hours of negotiation on Saturday afternoon, the GEO and administration bargaining teams managed to reach mutually agreeable terms on all aspects of the GEO contract except tuition waiver security. The administration’s refusal to guarantee the continuation of its current tuition waiver practice not only means that the majority of graduate employees could be forced to pay thousands of dollars in additional tuition charges, but also indicates its plans to implement such a change. By making graduate education untenable for all but the most affluent students, the administration is abandoning its responsibility to ensure access to the highest level of public education for all. This is contrary to the University of Illinois’ mission as a public land grant institution. By calling a strike, the Graduate Employees’ Organization is holding the University of Illinois administration accountable to its stated commitment to excellent and accessible higher education.

The arrogance and contempt in the University’s refusal to guarantee tuition waivers might not be immediately evident to a reader outside academia. Briefly: a graduate assistantship typically provides a tuition waiver and a modest (or very modest) salary. To refuse to guarantee tuition waivers is to threaten that graduate employees may have to underwrite their studies with their salaries (and with their savings, and with loans, loans, loans). That refusal thus threatens to remove the very possibility of graduate study, as the GEO says, “for all but the most affluent students.”

The University’s latest effort in brinksmanship and intimidation follows months of stalling in negotiating a contract. (The stall is a favored administrative strategy at other schools too.) The GEO is fighting the good fight in its effort to make the University of Illinois treat its graduate employees with dignity and pay them a living wage. I hope the GEO wins.

[Update, November 17, 2009: GEO FTW!]

Further reading
UIUC GEO

Steven Pinker reviews Malcolm Gladwell

From a New York Times review:

The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. . . .

The reasoning in Outliers, which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle.

Another reason books are better than e-readers: easier to gnaw.

A kitchen girl and a restless corpse

Our son Ben Leddy and his friend Claire Johnson play a medley of the traditional “Kitchen Girl” and their own “Restless Corpse.”

Enjoy.

The Coen brothers and typos

Peter Stormare played Gaear Grimsrud in the Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo (1996). Here he comments on his second line in the film, “Where’s Pancakes House?”:

I said, “It’s gotta be Pancake House.” And then when we were doing the scene, I was saying "Where’s the Pancake House?" And Ethan: “Peter?” “Yeah?” “What were you saying there?” "Where’s the Pancake House?" “No, it says Pancakes House.” “Oh, I thought it was a typo.” “No, no, there’s no typos in our scripts.”

From Minnesota Nice (dir. Jeffrey Schwarz, 2003), a short documentary on the making of Fargo

Verizon’s $1.99 typos

Press the wrong key on your phone? That’ll be $1.99. David Pogue explains:

Verizon: How Much Do You Charge Now? (New York Times)

I’m really disliking Verizon right now.

[A simple way to fight back, as I discovered in the comments on Pogue’s column: go into your phone’s settings and change the behavior of the cursor keys, or whatever keys ring up at $1.99.]

Van Dyke Parks in Germany

Van Dyke Parks is playing Germany. Google Translate steps in to explain, sort of:

The U.S., as well as idiosyncratic legendary arranger, producer, songwriter, keyboardist and vocalist takes on his first ever Tour of Germany on 15 November in der Passionskirche in Berlin und zwei Tage darauf im Mousonturm in Frankfurt/Main auf. November in the Passion Church in Berlin and two days later in Mousonturm in Frankfurt on.

Seliger presents Van Dyke Parks ago (MusikWoche, via Google Translate)

“U.S., as well as idiosyncratic” is an excellent characterization of Van Dyke Parks. As is “ago.”

Sonny Rollins and golf

Tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, in an interview with The Guardian:

I do yoga, I eat right, and my enthusiasm and energy are still there. When I don’t have that, I’ll know it’s time to take up golf.

Rollins is seventy-nine.

Related posts
Sonny Rollins in Illinois
Sonny Rollins on paying the rent

Umberto Eco on lists

Umberto Eco, in an interview with Der Spiegel:

Q: Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can’t be realistically completed?

A: We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.

Two list-related posts
To-Do List
Whose list?

November 11, 1919

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, two minutes of silence:

[“All London Silent at Armistice Hour.” New York Times, November 12, 1919.]