Studying for finals

[Yorick and friend.]

Unscrewing the top of your head and pouring in information doesn’t work that well: the tidying up is terrible. Better strategies in this post: How to do well on a final exam.

In some corners of the world, final examinations are already in the near near future.

[“A young boy studying the human skull.” Photograph by Nina Leen. New York, New York, 1948. From the Life Photo Archive.]

Oscar’s Day today

I think that Geo-B and I are living parallel lives today, even if his cup holds coffee, not tea: Oscars’s Day No. 249.

6:24

I snoozed this morning in eight-minute increments all the way to 6:24. It felt pretty transgressive.

And so I’m a little late getting to the rest of Thursday. See you tomorrow.

Naked City Mongol

Yes, it’s a Mongol pencil in the social worker’s hand. The above images are from “Golden Lads and Girls,” an episode of Naked City that aired May 22, 1963. It tells the stories of two married couples, one living at 715 Park Avenue, the other in a tenement a few blocks away. The two husbands are alcoholic and violent; each man’s wife is his target. The parallels between the couples’ lives are heightened when the story cuts back and forth during their interviews with social workers, with questions put to one husband or wife answered by the other.

“Golden Lads and Girls” is a Naked City episode with a tremendous variety of ingredients: trips to Manhattan’s Home Term Court (an institution created in 1946 to address non-felony domestic cases); Tom Bosley as a judge; a quick stop at Toots Shor’s Restaurant; a group meeting at “Alcoholics Clinic” (that is, Alcoholics Anonymous); marital counseling; a nightmare-tormented, pyromaniacal child; and, for comic relief, a scene in a delicatessen with Lieutenant Mike Parker (Horace McMahon), Detective Adam Flint (Paul Burke), and Adam’s girlfriend Libby Kingston (Nancy Malone). Adam has ordered pastrami on white. On white?

Libby: “With Adam it's a matter of principle — nonconformity.”

Mike: “On rye bread, yes. On a hard roll, yes. But never on white. Have you no respect for the cultural heritages?”

Adam: “I like it on white. . . . Mike, you have to believe that pastrami won’t always come on rye.”

Libby: “Oh, I take it you’re using cold cuts as a symbol.”

Adam: “On white. It’s a symbol of hope.”

Libby describes the Park Avenue couple as “rich and very fashionable,” “part of the success culture, the golden lads and girls.” (Note: she knows no details. Adam has maintained confidentiality.)

Adam: “That’s from something, isn’t it?”

Libby recites: “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”

Adam: “Shakespeare, Cymbeline.”

Mike: “You know, when I have lunch with you two, it’s like being with Bennett Cerf.”

That last line is the punchline, Bennett Cerf being Mike Parker’s idea of an hifalutin intellectual.

Back to those screenshots. The pencil’s identity is obvious. But do you recognize the actress? First prize is an all-expenses-paid week in the Naked City. You are responsible though for furnishing the time machine. Leave your answer in a comment.

Related reading

Other Mongol posts: Harry Truman with pencil : Jimmy Hoffa’s Mongol : Molly Dodd, Mongol user : Mongol No. 2 3/8 : “Sound-testing a MONGOL” : Stolen Mongols

Other Naked City posts: GRamercy 7–9166 : GRamercy again : MUrray Hill 7-3933 : Naked Bronx : Nearly plotzing : “Old Rabbit Ears” : Poetry and Naked City : Positively Naked City : TW8-4044 : “WE DELIVER”

[Orange Crate Art is a Naked City-friendly zone.]

Fran Lebowitz on voice

From the documentary Public Speaking (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2010), Fran Lebowitz, taking questions from an audience:

Q: “Do you think there’s a difference between a female voice and a male voice in literature?”

A: “Even on the phone there’s a difference between a female voice and a male voice.”

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum

Gunther at Lexikaliker pointed me to an item I’d have missed otherwise: a brief tour of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State. At 1:39: glimpses of a Sunday installment of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy. Thanks, Gunther.

[How wonderful to see an educational URL with the word cartoons in it: cartoons.osu.edu.]

Recently updated

Adjunct teaching and health insurance The Chronicle of Higher Education continues to follow the story.

When clichés collide

“There’s no free lunch at the end of the day”: Congressman Chris Van Hollen (D, Maryland-8), as heard on MSNBC a few minutes ago.

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.

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