LearningCurve, busted

[The correct answer is C: my patience.]

From an educational publisher: “Students love LearningCurve because it allows them to study using a game-like interface and master material in a less linear fashion than simply reading and re-reading.” That’s a sample LearningCurve question above.

I tried LearningCurve’s demo activity yesterday. Was I studying? Hardly. Was it game-like? I felt no fun. I read the questions (about, of all things, memory) and schemed the correct answers as quickly as I could. One was seventy: I picked it as the most reasonable choice of four — not too high, not too low. Seventy what? Couldn’t tell ya. Seventy letters or numbers or words that someone with a Russian name was able to memorize. Another correct answer: ninety, ninety percent of slides that someone showed. People could recognize ninety percent of 250 of them after some period of time. Who showed the slides? I dunno, some guy. All I was after was the right answer. I got every one of them. So much for mastery.

That leaves “less linear,” which seems to me an optimistic way to characterize the element of mindless, loop-the-loop repetition that makes LearningCurve feel miserably regimented. By the end of the demo, I was typing the same answer to different forms of the same damn question again and again — a question I’d been getting right all along. I would much rather have been reading and rereading something, anything, else.

And speaking of reading and rereading (or “simply” reading and rereading): when did they become subject to criticism for being “linear”? Yes, word follows word, and sentence follows sentence, because that’s how words and sentences work, even the words and sentences that form the rudimentary paragraphs of LearningCurve’s questions. But flipping among scattered passages in, say, a novel, offers far greater freedom of movement and far greater opportunities for complex thinking than LearningCurve’s dentist’s chair. (Drill, baby, drill.)

If this blog post were a LearningCurve activity, you’d now be reading the following message: “You’re more than half way through with the blog post!” Yes, LearningCurve feels like a race to get it over with — another way in which it’s different from a genuine game.

I just discovered by chance the following passage in an excellent though painfully dated book, The Lively Art of Writing (1965). Lucile Vaughan Payne now sounds downright counter-cultural in her insistence on education that makes room for invention and self-discovery:

Too often students let themselves become machines, ingesting the information their teachers offer them and then feeding it back, like ticker tape, in the form of rote recitations and answers to examination questions. But a student is no machine when he writes an essay; he is a human being — judging, evaluating, interpreting, expressing not only what he knows but what he is. Thus every attempted essay is a kind of voyage toward self-discovery.

Judging, evaluating, interpreting; reading, rereading, writing: they are the stuff of genuine education. It’s a sad sign of the times that it is necessary to say so.

[I will grant that a student for whom a test looms is likely to move through a LearningCurve activity more deliberately than I did. That student would be, I think, even more miserable. LearningCurve, however, has testimonials to the contrary.]

E. L. Konigsburg (1930–2013)

“Children’s books, she once said, are ‘the key to the accumulated wisdom, wit, gossip, truth, myth, history, philosophy, and recipes for salting potatoes during the past 6,000 years of civilization’”: E. L. Konigsburg, Author, Is Dead at 83 (New York Times).

Fellow blogger Bill Madison met Konigsburg in the 1990s. Read what he has to say about the writer and her work.

Related posts
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Q.: “Where are you going to get a typewriter?”

Richie Havens (1941–2013)

His performance kicked off the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, but he’s forever side one, track three. The New York Times has an obituary.

“A fully realized adult person”

John Churchill, Secretary of Phi Beta Kappa, in the Spring 2013 Key Reporter :

There is a powerful push to vocationalize college curricula and to measure the worth of a degree solely in economic terms. This tendency will magnify differences of access to transformative liberal arts experiences. Ironically, students who would benefit most from immersion in the liberal arts and sciences will be increasingly less likely to encounter them. This is a bad thing for America.

It is time to reassert plain facts. College is not only about training for jobs. It is about citizenship. It is about shaping oneself into a fully realized adult person. It is about learning to cope constructively with questions of meaning and value. In a democracy, we need to take as many of us, as far as possible, down that path.

If powerful and moneyed interests now seeking to reshape higher education have their way, “college” will soon become a two-tier system, with the real thing for a privileged few (MOOC stars have to teach somewhere, right?) and credits and credentials, haphazardly assembled, vocationally themed, for everyone else. If this prospect weren’t in itself appalling, the rhetoric of inevitability that sells it — get on board or be swept away — would be reason enough to object.

Kingsfield’s cup of tea

Elaine and I are making our way through our second year of law school. In other words, we’re watching the second season of The Paper Chase, Netflick by Netflick, and we just saw an episode we’d been giddy about getting to, “My Dinner with Kingsfield” (first aired July 24, 1984). The premise is wacky: a terrible snowstorm, and Charles Kingsfield (John Houseman) gets stuck driving to the airport. When he knocks at the nearest residence to use the telephone, who answers? James Hart, “Mr. Hart,” Kingsfield’s stellar student (James Stephens). Hilarity ensues, with broken plumbing, Bulgarian Beaujolais, and the spectacle of Kingsfield wearing Hart’s bathrobe as his own clothes dry. (“I just had it laundered,” Hart adds helpfully.) Later in the episode: a brief recitation from Bleak House and some memorable, even profound bits of dialogue about love and marriage and learning.

Elaine and I made some tea before sitting down to watch, and I chose Earl Grey. I said (and I have a witness) that if Kingsfield drank tea in this episode, it would be Earl Grey. So I went a little crazy when the professor set down his wine and asked Hart for a cup of tea, “anything that’s hot and sturdy.” Hart offers Earl Grey. Is that sturdy enough? Kingsfield says it will be fine. And as Hart calls to check on the whereabouts of a lady friend flying in from New York, Kingsfield stands and muses on a box of Twinings tea bags:

“Earl Grey tea . . . Charles Grey, the second Earl Grey, leader of the Whig opposition and largely responsible for the repeal of the African slave trade. He became prime minister of England in 1830.”

Hart, on the phone, asks distractedly, “Who?” And Kingsfield, fiercely: “Earl Grey.” It’s all true.

Here’s a Kingsfield observation about marriage:

“Let me tell you something: all those years I was married, of course I kept thinking I should have spent longer sowing my wild oats, but the longer my marriage lasted, the more convinced I became that being married to someone, no matter how banal it might seem on the surface, was infinitely more satisfying and more exciting than the wildest of affairs.”

And here’s another moment, when Hart admits that Kingsfield’s lukewarm response to his recent paper has made it impossible for him to begin work on a new project:

“James, for God’s sake, stop sulking. You’re an adult. You’re one of the better students in this institution: you should not need to be told that. You know your work is good: that’s all that matters. Doing your best should be its own reward, and you shouldn’t need me to tell you about it.”

But students do need to hear about it when they do well (and when they don’t); even Kingsfield knows that. (Notice the repetition of should.) And yes, he now offers the praise that he withheld. If he were a different person though, he’d be intoning, “Stop . . . worshiping . . . me, Mr. . . . Hart.”

[“My Dinner with Kingsfield” isn’t the first takeoff on My Dinner with André (1981): My Breakfast with Blassie appearted in 1983. Kingsfield’s remarks on marriage are reminiscent of what André Gregory says about the shallowness of affairs and the mysteries of marriage: “Have a real relationship with a person that goes on for years: that’s completely unpredictable. Then you’ve cut off all your ties to the land and you’re sailing into the unknown, into uncharted seas.” Major props to the writers of this episode, James Bridges and Lee Kalcheim.]

Other Paper Chase posts
“Do the work”
How to improve writing (no. 42)
“Minds, not memories”

Record Store Day

[Click for larger stickers.]

Yesterday was Record Store Day, and I went to Exile on Main Street in Champaign, Illinois. The store is long and narrow, and the line of (mostly younger) people moving into and through the store and back up to the register never let up. Shopping was a matter of filing slowly, slowly, past the merchandise and stopping to browse when appropriate. (It made me remember filing past the Pietà at the New York World’s Fair.) I spent about an hour, a pleasant hour, to get what I had come for, a 180-gram vinyl reissue of Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle (a Record Store Day exclusive).

And there were stickers. In the second row from the bottom, on the right, Taj Mahal’s The Natch’l Blues (1968), reissued on 180-gram vinyl for the Day. I bought that album not long after it came out — I must have been twelve or thirteen. Still have it. Still works good.

A related post
Record stores

A post for the day

My day, today: meeting with two students, prepping and teaching three classes, responding to several e-mails. And what else? Watching the news on television early this morning and, later, reading the news online and hitting refresh, and hitting refresh. The post I planned to make this morning is still a draft: I just could not bring myself to put it online.

It is difficult to think of making a blog post — or at least one far removed from current events — in the face of horrific news. And yet the world is filled with horrific news daily, and life goes on. With Boston, the news is especially close to my heart. It stops everything. And everything I can think to say about it can be thought and said by countless other observers.

In a class this morning devoted to Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, I played some relevant music from Bessie Smith. There are people, I said to my students, whose work is to perpetrate suffering, and there are people whose work is to create joy. Musicians are engaged in that second endeavor.

Music I have found myself returning to again and again this week: Mavis Staples, Nick Lowe, and Wilco rehearsing “The Weight.” I watched a couple of times when it came online last year. I don’t know what made me seek out this performance now. You might like it too.

The post I had planned to put online today concerns an episode of The Paper Chase with some great dialogue about education, love, marriage, and Earl Grey tea. I will post it next week.

“Not the American way”

Gabrielle Giffords on yesterday’s Senate vote:

This defeat is only the latest chapter of what I’ve always known would be a long, hard haul. Our democracy’s history is littered with names we neither remember nor celebrate — people who stood in the way of progress while protecting the powerful. On Wednesday, a number of senators voted to join that list.

Mark my words: if we cannot make our communities safer with the Congress we have now, we will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress, one that puts communities’ interests ahead of the gun lobby’s. To do nothing while others are in danger is not the American way.

Sriracha ≠ mayonnaise

David Tran, founder of Huy Fong Foods Inc. and maker of Sriracha sauce: “Hot sauce must be hot. If you don't like it hot, use less. We don't make mayonnaise here.”

This post is for my son Ben, hardcore Sriracha user.

Word of the day: roach

The word of the day is roach:

Downstairs, on a bracket shelf next to a vase with hand-painted pink roses on it, there is a matching picture of him, taken at the same time. His hair is roached and he is wearing a high stiff collar, and hardly anything shows in his face but his Welsh ancestry.

William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980).

It’s an American verb. The Oxford English Dictionary explains:

1803: “To clip or trim (a horse’s mane) close to the neck so the hair stands on end; to give (a horse) a roach mane.” The verb derives from a nautical noun: “an upward curve cut in to the foot of a square sail," and later, “a curved or convex part of a fore-and-aft sail extending beyond a straight line between any two of its three corners, especially on the leech side.”

By 1833 the verb applied to human hairstyling: “To brush or cut (hair) in a roach.”

By 1872, there was a noun: “A hairstyle in which the hair is brushed so as to stand up or sweep back from the face; a roll or wave of hair.”

The OED citations include a great sentence from Langston Hughes (1950): “Her head was all done fresh and shining with a hair-rocker roached up high in front.”

Related reading
Other word-of-the-day posts (Pinboard)