“The Writing Revolution”

In the October 2012 Atlantic, Peg Tyre reports on an effort to reimagine the teaching of writing at one Staten Island high school: The Writing Revolution. One brief sample:

“We spent a lot of time wondering how our students had been taught,” said English teacher Stevie D‘Arbanville. “How could they get passed along and end up in high school without understanding how to use the word although?”

This article should be required reading for anyone who cares about public education.

[Students also end up in college without understanding how to use although, which is a subordinating conjunction, not a conjunctive adverb.]

Recently updated

New York in fifty objects And now fifteen more, including the subway token.

“Bushmiller Country”

[Zippy, September 24, 2012.]

The fact of a doorframe. The fact of a flight of stairs. The shading. And those paintings, one of which is a painting of three rocks (i.e., “some rocks”). It’s Bushmiller Country. You can see the strip at the Zippy website.

Other Nancy and Zippy intersections
Hommage à Ernie Bushmiller
Nancy + Sluggo = Perfection

Van Dyke Parks in Chicago

Van Dyke Parks at the Riverfront Theater
September 22, 2012

Van Dyke Parks, piano and vocal : Janelle Lake, harp : Donna Miller, cello : Jason Roebke, bass : Don Heffington, drums

“I don’t need Clint Eastwood sitting here for what I’ve got to say tonight!”

Van Dyke Parks, from the stage

Elaine and I had the wonderful opportunity to hear Van Dyke Parks in Chicago this weekend. The setting was Brilliant Corners of Popular Amusements, a three-day arts event at the Riverfront Theater, a modified circus tent. Parks was opening for Conor Oberst. Yes, the audience was young. Elaine and I seemed to be the oldest members, doing our bit to make the occasion a genuine all-ages show. I’m not sure that many of the attendees were familiar with Van Dyke’s music. And I doubt that more than a handful might have known that “Brilliant Corners” is the title of a Thelonious Monk tune. But the audience was respectful and often enthusiastic.

And with good reason. Van Dyke and company were inspired. They tore the roof off the sucker, with grace and precision and heart. The set (all Parks compositions except as noted):

Jump! : Opportunity for Two : Come Along : Orange Crate Art : Wings of a Dove : Delta Queen Waltz (John Hartford) : FDR in Trinidad (Fitz MacLean) : Danza (Louis Moreau Gottschalk) : Cowboy : The All Golden : Sail Away

Van Dyke’s between-song commentary touched on everything from Lawrence Welk to Pussy Riot to rivers (the Chicago, the Cumberland, the Mississippi) to the five-day work week. My favorite line: “As Lawrence Welk once said, ‘I want a close-up of the whole band.’”

Even when Van Dyke is on our turf, it seems that Elaine and I end up being the recipients of his hospitality. Thank you, Van Dyke. Someday we will make it go, like the Chicago River, the other way around.

Related reading
All Van Dyke Parks posts (Pinboard)

Autumn Rhythm

[“James Rorimer, head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, closely examines a painting by Jackson Pollock entitled Autumn Rhythm.” Photograph by Walter Sanders. 1959. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

The best of seasons. Hello fall.

A related post
Odes to autumn

Telegram (Easy Living)

A telegram, as seen in Easy Living (dir. Mitchell Leisen, 1937). You either find this sort of thing inspired and funny or you don’t. I do. Easy Living has a great Automat scene with Jean Arthur and Ray Milland. The screenplay is by Preston Sturges.

Thanks to Paul Harrington for recommending this film.

Related posts
Automat beverage section
How to send telegrams
“Lunch Hour NYC”
New York, 1964: Automat
One more Automat

[725 West 112th Street? Somewhere in the Hudson River.]

The new Blogger interface on the iPad

The new Blogger interface is better than it was: one now can at least edit existing posts on an iPad. But it’s difficult to see this barely readable text as an improvement. It’s difficult to see this text at all.

Related posts
Blogger interface on the iPad
The new Blogger interface, unliked

[So difficult that I didn’t catch the lowercase i at the beginning of the third sentence.]

Close reading and the brain

Stanford researchers are looking at the effect of close reading on the brain. It’s all good.

Matthew Crawford on making judgments

Exactly right:

The experienced mind can get good at integrating an extraordinarily large number of variables and detecting a coherent pattern. It is the pattern that is attended to, not the individual variables. Our ability to make good judgments is holistic in character, and arises from repeated confrontations with real things: comprehensive entities that are grasped all at once, in a manner that may be incapable of explicit articulation. The tacit dimension of knowledge puts limits on the reduction of jobs to rule following.

Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin, 2009).

Notice that Crawford is not saying that the reasons for a judgment may be beyond articulation: it’s the manner in which one grasps things “all at once” that may be beyond articulation.

In my line of business, the reduction of work to rule-following is probably best seen in the mechanical process of filling in squares on a grading rubric. Judgment can certainly be arbitrary or faulty, but a rubric is no guard against faulty judgment. And I would suggest that no rubric can so detailed as to account for every feature that might (and ought to) make a difference in one’s judgment. The rubric is a device that minimizes — or better, pretends to minimize — the necessary work of judgment. The rubric is a product of the same mindset that identifies rather than chooses a student to receive, say, a scholarship.

Other Shop Class as Soul Craft posts
On higher education
On problems

[It was this item that prompted me to get around to writing this post.]

Word of the day: phony

Teaching a Sappho poem (the fourth poem on this page), I showed my students the first stanza in Greek. It’s a fun thing to do, even for the Greekless: at least a handful of words in transliterated Greek will immediately suggest English descendants, reducing in some small way the distance between the ancient world and our own. For example: φωνείσας, phoneisas, a form of φωνεῖν, phonein, to produce a sound. After we hit phonics, phonograph, and telephone, I wondered: could phonein explain phony — something that sounds plausible, but isn’t?

Uh, no. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary suggests that phony may derive from an “alteration of fawney gilded brass ring used in the fawney rig, a confidence game, from Irish fáinne ring, from Old Irish ánne.” The Oxford English Dictionary has a citation from Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1823) that explains the game:

Fawney rig, a common fraud thus practised: — a fellow drops a brass ring, double gilt, which he picks up before the party meant to be cheated, and to whom he disposes of it for less than its supposed, and ten times more than its real, value.

M-W suggests that the Old Irish ánne is “perhaps akin” to anus. Which seems to make sense if we’re speaking of phonies.