P.S. 131 for the win

Michal (Mike) Khafizou, a fifth-grader at Public School 131 in Brooklyn, recently won first prize in an essay contest sponsored by Hamilton Parkway Collision. From the New York Daily News:

Borough Park auto body shop owner Brian Nacht has come up with an interesting assignment for students that combines a love of cars with good essay writing.

For the past 15 years, Nacht, owner of Hamilton Parkway Collision on Fort Hamilton Parkway, has asked public school fifth-graders to write an essay: “If you were a part of a car, what [part] would it be?”

Brian Nacht sounds like a good guy. And Michal Khafizou sounds like a creative student with a great attitude toward learning. Excerpts from Michal’s winning essay:

When I first came to [my teacher’s] class, I felt disappointed in myself . . . so if I was a part of a car I would be the GPS. . . . The GPS is a part of a car that guides you if you are lost. . . . The work is not too hard; you just have to see what is in front of you.

Congratulations, Michal, from a former P.S. 131 student.

P.S. 131 class pictures
1962–1963 1963–1964 1964–1965 1965–1966 1966–1967

More P.S. 131
P.S. 131 on television
P.S. 131 in 1935 and 1979
The P.S. 131 fence (A photograph)

[Fort Hamilton Parkway is a Boro Park thoroughfare. Boro Park is a section of Brooklyn. For residents, it’s usually Boro, not Borough. I’d be a rear-view mirror, looking into the past. How about you?]

The benefits of handwriting

From a Chicago Tribune article about the benefits of handwriting:

“For children, handwriting is extremely important. Not how well they do it, but that they do it and practice it,” said Karin Harman James, an assistant professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University. “Typing does not do the same thing.”

James’s research suggests that writing by hand helps preliterate children to recognize letters. Other research mentioned in this article suggests that writing by hand aids memory and leads to greater fluidity in composition. These claims seem intuitive and obvious to me, but it’s nice that there’s data to lend support.

A related post
Cursive writing in Indiana (Planned obsolescence)

[I’m reminded of the Field Notes slogan: “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”]

CopyPasteCharacter

CopyPasteCharacter is a helpful webpage if you need accented characters, currency symbols, manicules, snowmen, &c. (via One Thing Well). Also useful: HowToType.net.

[In some fonts the snowman sports a top hat; in others, a fez.]

Cursive writing in Indiana

Handwriting is in the news in (or out of?) Indiana. As of fall 2011, the state will no longer require public schools to teach cursive writing:

State officials sent school leaders a memo April 25 telling them that instead of cursive writing, students will be expected to become proficient in keyboard use.

The memo says schools may continue to teach cursive as a local standard, or they may decide to stop teaching cursive altogether.

“Keyboard use”: that’s the skill formerly known as typing.

The news from Indiana doesn’t help matters, but I continue to think that reports of the death of handwriting have been greatly exaggerated. The 2008 Pew report Writing, Technology and Teens includes this observation:

Most teens mix and match longhand and computers based on tool availability, assignment requirements and personal preference. When teens write they report that they most often write by hand, though they also often write using computers as well. Out-of-school personal writing is more likely than school writing to be done by hand, but longhand is the more common mode for both purposes. [My emphasis.]

One thoughtful student, quoted in the report:

I type so much faster than I write. But if I want to make a paper much better I have to type it out first, then hand write in the changes, then type the good copy. And it makes it easier to think things through if I can handwrite it. And I think my worst work is when I just type it and don’t handwrite it.

Between handwriting and typing, there’s no necessary either/or. It’s smart to be able to do both well.

[Thanks to Sean at Blackwing Pages for pointing me to the Indiana news.]

Related reading
Archaic Method? Cursive writing no longer has to be taught (Tribune-Star)
Typing Beats Scribbling: Indiana Schools Can Stop Teaching Cursive (Time)

Two related posts
Writing by hand
Writing, technology, and teenagers

Cy Twombly (1928–2011)

My responses to modern art are typically as immediate and unreflective as my responses to food: I really like, or I don’t. Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell: I really like. Hans Hoffman, Jackson Pollock: I don’t. The lists could go on.

I really like Cy Twombly, who died yesterday at the age of eighty-three.

American Artist Who Scribbled a Unique Path (New York Times obituary)
Cy Twombly (Gallery of images)

“Act V”

This week’s This American Life (first aired in 2002) is a must-listen: the story of inmates in a Missouri prison rehearsing and performing the final act of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Act V.”

Carbon cruising

In the mail, an envelope holding a seemingly exciting offer — a free Caribbean cruise. But I’ve read David Foster Wallace; I don’t need no stinking cruises. Besides, there’s a small catch involving the purchase of a time-share in Florida.

There are at least six details to enjoy in the scan above: the fake stamps, the fake handwriting, the fake highlighting, the fake smears on the first and third sheets (note that the smears are identical), the fake check (Ceci n’est pas un chèque), and best of all, the fake carbon paper. Yes, that’s fake carbon paper, just a piece of purple-black paper between the “original” and “duplicate” forms. Only the perforations allowing these forms to be separated are real.

This offer evokes the world of the imprinter (aka “the knuckle-buster”), the hand-operated machine once widely used to process credit-card charges by means of a bar pulled across a carbon-paper form. O nostalgia! I’m baffled and inspired that someone would go to such trouble to conjure up the past. But I’m still not signing up.

Also in the mail
The National Dean’s List (Sketchy invitations)

From the National Jukebox

Streaming music, from the Library of Congress’s National Jukebox:

Belle Baker, “I’ve Got the Yes! We Have No Banana Blues.” A novelty song about a novelty song: very meta. Here’s the original, from the Internet Archive.

Benson Orchestra of Chicago, “Ain’t We Got Fun.” Great for dancing.

Zez Confrey Orchestra, “Kitten on the Keys.” Piano wizardry.

Frank Crumit, “Cross-Word Mamma, You Puzzle Me (But Papa’s Gonna Figure You Out).” Yes, the cross-word craze.

The Duncan Sisters, “Cross-Word Puzzle Blues.” “Some demented nut invented / This way to stay discontented.”

International Novelty Orchestra, “Hey! Hey! and Hee! Hee! (I’m Charleston Crazy).” Another craze. With a great harmonica solo.

George Washington Johnson, “The Laughing Song.” It would appear that there was much to laugh about in 1903.

James P. Johnson, “Bleeding Hearted Blues.” Stride piano.

Harry Lauder, “Stop Your Tickling, Jock!” A “Scotch laughing specialty.”

Paul Whiteman, “Somebody Loves Me.” Said George Gershwin, “Paul made my song live with a vigor that almost floored me.” With doo wacka doo effect.

And here are ten more from the National Jukebox.

[The Gershwin quotation is from Edward Jablonski’s Gershwin (New York: Da Capo, 1998.) Thanks for Stefan Hagemann for pointing me to the cross-word songs. The National Jukebox uses Flash, alas.]

Romney Wordsworth, obsolete

The state has declared Romney Wordsworth obsolete. The Chancellor speaks:

“You’re a librarian, Mister Wordsworth. You’re a dealer in books and two-cent fines and pamphlets and closed stacks and the musty insides of a language factory that spews out meaningless words on an assembly line. Words, Mister Wordsworth, that have no substance and no dimension, like air, like the wind, like a vacuum that you make-believe has an existence by scribbling index numbers on little cards.”

From “The Obsolete Man,” a Twilight Zone episode first broadcast June 2, 1961. With Burgess Meredith (Romney Wordsworth) and Fritz Weaver (The Chancellor).

Fifty years ago, a world without librarians and libraries was the stuff of a totalitarian nightmare. Now it seems that we’re closer to living in The Twilight Zone. One recent New York Times headline: Schools Eliminating Librarians as Budgets Shrink.

You can watch the episode, in three parts, at YouTube.

A related post
Cutting libraries in a recession is like …

[I caught, by chance, a single episode of a Twilight Zone holiday marathon on the SyFy Channel. Yes, Rod Serling imagined a future sans Internet. And yes, I recognize the irony of relying on the IMDb and YouTube and not the library.]

The Fourth of July

[“American flag and tiny parachute after being released from a kite.” Photograph by Bernard Hoffman, March 1949. From the Life Photo Archive.]