Change in higher education:
Across the country, there is growing evidence that final exams — once considered so important that universities named a week after them — are being abandoned or diminished, replaced by take-home tests, papers, projects, or group presentations.Related posts
Final exams are quietly vanishing from college (Boston Globe)
Not by me, by a friend who passes it on from afar. A teacher to students:
“A preposition simply tells the location of something. In the sentence ‘The boy is under the table,’ the preposition tells you where he’s at.”Note that the other prepositions in these sentences — at, by, from, in, of, to — all work in exactly the same way!
[“James Hoffa fingering pencil while testifying before senator [sic] Rackets Committee.” Photograph by Paul Schutzer, August 1958, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Via the Life photo archive.]
Yes, that’s a Mongol.
Related posts
Mongol No. 2 3/8
“Sound-testing a MONGOL”
The New York Times reports that Verizon Wireless will be paying up to $90 million in refunds to customers who have mistakenly pressed the infamous $1.99 key.
Related posts
Verizon’s $1.99 typos
Pogue v. Verizon, continued
Verizon data charges
Google CEO Eric Schmidt, on the future:
“We don’t need you to type at all, because we know where you are, with your permission. We know where you’ve been, with your permission. We can more or less guess what you’re thinking about. Now is that over the line? Is that right over the line? Is that right over the line?”This model seems to confuse the unpredictable play of idea and association and memory (what I would call thinking) with a crude stimulus-response model, in which restaurants mean eat and stores mean shop. I begin to wonder: what sorts of humanities courses did Schmidt take in college? Someone who’s read Emily Dickinson or James Joyce or Frank O’Hara would have more complex ways to think about what it means to think.
From his stage patter: “Be kind to one another. Or I’ll kill ya!”
Van Dyke Parks Threatens Violence At The Bell House (Village Voice)
Related posts
Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (1)
Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (2)
[“Movie stagehands pushing a 400-pound pair of gigantic scissors on a dollie next to two men carrying a 21-ft. pencil, just some of the props that created the illusion of a dwindling hero for the movie The Incredible Shrinking Man at Universal Studios.” Photograph by Allan Grant, September 1956, Hollywood, California. Via the Life photo archive.]
It includes breakfast:
“I usually have a pickup breakfast. I could have cereal and milk, fruit. Sometimes I simply finish up whatever leftover is in the ice box. You can tell my age; I still use the words ‘ice box.’”
Letters to Answer, and Logs to Split (New York Times)
Word comes from North Carolina that the writer Clifford Hicks has died. Clifford Hicks wrote sixteen children’s books, one of which, Alvin’s Secret Code, was the most important book of my childhood, the book that taught me to love reading, and re-reading, again, and again. I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about rediscovering Alvin’s Secret Code in adulthood and writing a fan letter to its author. I still have Mr. Hicks’s reply, framed, hanging on a wall about ten feet from where I’m typing. That letter is the only piece of correspondence I have ever framed.
Last year came the announcement of a new novel, Alvin Fernald’s Incredible Buried Treasure. That Clifford Hicks had one more Alvin novel in him — at the age of eighty-nine — was a piece of great good fortune for his readers. My children gave me the book as a gift. (Thank you, Rachel and Ben.) The chance to write about a new Alvin book in adulthood was another gift, and a modest way to honor the gift that Clifford Hicks’s work (via the Boro Park Public Library) gave me. Thank you, Mr. Hicks.
