Teaching and texting

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sherry Turkle writes about “How to Teach in an Age of Distraction.” She begins with an account of teaching a twenty-student seminar at MIT devoted to reading and writing memoirs:

The students seemed to understand each other, to find a rhythm. I thought the class was working.

Then, halfway through the semester, a group of students asked to see me. They admitted to texting during class, but they felt bad about it because of the personal material being discussed. They said they text in all their classes, but here it seemed wrong. We decided the class should talk about this as a group. In that discussion, more students admitted that they, too, texted in class. They portrayed constant connection as a necessity. For some, three minutes was too long to go without checking their phones.

So “a group” of students are texting, and then it turns out that still “more students” are texting. My question — and it’s a genuine question, not a bit of snark: how is it possible to teach a class of twenty students (a seminar, no less) and not realize that many of those students are texting?

The Chronicle has Turkle’s essay behind its paywall, but you can read an excerpt here.

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8:35 p.m.: The essay is online for all, at least for now.

Related reading
More posts about attention and distraction (Pinboard)

HTTPS here

Google is adding HTTPS support for Blogger blogs. I switched over this morning, fixed a minor problem (the sidebar search URL needed an https ), and all seems well.

A comment appended to Blogger’s announcement says, “Dang. I wake up and it’s like the 2010s out there.” In other words, there’s nothing new about HTTPS. I’ve been using the HTTPS Everywhere extension since 2010, first in Firefox, later in Chrome. There’s no extension for Safari.

If you have any problems reading Orange Crate Art in your browser, please, let me know.

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12:10 p.m.: Too many troubles. Back to HTTP for now.

Adieu, Arne Duncan

From The New York Times: “Arne Duncan, Education Secretary, to Step Down in December.”

Duncan will be <sarcasm>warmly</sarcasm> remembered as the man who started us on the Race to the Top. His successor will no doubt stay the course.

A related post
Arne Duncan on Colbert

[Fake HTML made with character codes from this handy page.]

Pomodoro One

Pomodoro One is free for OS X 10.8+ ($1.99 to remove ads), $1.99 for iOS 7.1+. It’s the nicest Pomodoro app I’ve used, though I still claim loyalties to an orange and an owl.

A related post
The Pomodoro Technique Illustrated (my review)

Not enough

President Barack Obama on the mass killing today at Umpqua Community College, Roseburg, Oregon:

“Our thoughts and prayers are not enough. It’s not enough. It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel. And it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted some place else in America, next week or a couple of months from now. . . .

“It cannot be this easy for someone who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun. . . .

“This is a political choice that we make — to allow this to happen every few months in America. We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction.”

The full statement is at YouTube.

[My transcription.]

Erroll Garner mystery phrase

It’s driving me crazy, and now it’s driving Elaine crazy too. Can anyone identify the source of this musical phrase? In my mind it says early twentieth century . I thought it might be from Felix Arndt’s “Nola,” but no.

Erroll Garner builds a chorus of “Lullaby of Birdland” from variations on this phrase. You can hear what I’m describing at the 1:00 mark.

Thanks to Elaine for writing out the music.

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3:14 p.m.: Elaine found the answer via Facebook: the phrase is from “Narcissus,” by Ethelbert Nevin (1891). Here is an amusing rendition. Nevin also wrote the music for “Mighty Lak’ a Rose.”

Thanks to Kevin Hart for identifying “Narcissus” and for pointing to one of its great turns in popular culture. In Our Gang Follies of 1936 the piece serves as dancing music for the Flory-Dory Sixtette: Spanky, Alfalfa, Buckwheat, and company. And that is why, I realize, I was able to recognize this musical phrase. Watch here. The dance scene begins at 15:53.

A related post
Erroll Garner, The Complete Concert by the Sea

Erroll Garner, The Complete Concert by the Sea

[Concert by the Sea had eleven tunes. The Complete Concert by the Sea has twenty-two.]

1 I first listened to Concert by the Sea as a very young child, standing alongside the hi-fi to hear Erroll Garner, when asked about his voice at the very end of Side Two, say, “It’s worser than Louie Armstrong.”

2 Like Armstrong, Garner can be mistaken for a (mere) entertainer. But the purpose of art is to teach and delight — or, to teach us to delight, to take delight in imaginative abundance.

3 Concert by the Sea was recorded on September 19, 1955, in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, and released as a Columbia LP in 1956. In 1969 the album was rereleased in fake stereo. Both album covers have a young white woman standing on a rock by the sea, her arms stretched out in celebration.

4 The new release has, for the first time, a young woman of color in that pose.

5 That the recording is available is a wonder. Like Duke Ellington’s November 7, 1940, Fargo performance, Garner’s performance just happened to be recorded. Jim Meagher and Will Thornbury were planning to play the tape on Armed Forces Radio. Garner’s manager Martha Glaser saw the machine running and got the goods.

6 What Meagher and Thornbury preserved is a great Garner performance but also a typical Garner performance: piano, bass, drums, a couple of original tunes, a blues, some jazz standards, and many selections from the Great American Songbook. Garner’s typical was great.

7 Thus there are no highlights, really. Every tune is a highlight.

8 Sound quality is much better than before but not all that good. Eddie Calhoun (bass) and Denzil Best (drums) are more audible but still submerged in the murk. The piano in its upper- and lowermost registers sounds thin and metallic. Applause sounds horribly shrill. The engineers have worked from with the original tapes, which are not great. But see no. 5: “That the recording is available is a wonder.”

9 Unlike, say, Earl Hines, Garner never gets lost in exploring a tune. (And to say that is not to fault him.) His performances are more like arrangements, with prepared key changes, moments of tension and release, and dramatic contrasts in volume.

10 Yet Garner’s unaccompanied introductions seem to be spontaneous abstract inventions. These introductions are said to have baffled sidemen as well as audiences.

11 My favorite: the introduction to “I’ll Remember April.”

12 My dad once told me the source for the introduction to “Where or When.” Was it the theme music for an old-movies-on-TV broadcast? I never wrote down the name.

13 The Internets have nothing to say about the introduction to “Where or When.”

14 Like Hines and Glenn Gould, Garner is one of the great self-accompanying pianists, grunting and exclaiming as he plays. One index of Garner’s popularity: the Beatles’ spoof of his mannerisms in “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).”

15 The elements of Garner’s pianism are brilliantly explained by Dick Hyman in two video clips: 1, 2.

16 I think of Garner as having three operating speeds: swoon, stroll, and sprint.

17 The twenty-two tunes from this performance include six swoons, eight strolls, and eight sprints. A well-balanced program.

18 Swoon: think “Misty,” which does not appear here. Or “Laura” or “The Nearness of You,” which do. They are baroque interiors teeming with cherubim and seraphim and all manner of clouds.

19 Stroll: think “They Can’t Take That Away from Me”: a jaunty, cool boulevardier.

20 Sprint: think “It’s All Right with Me,” with Garner’s left hand keeping double-time. Garner is a long-distance sprinter.

21 Garner’s absence from the PBS series Jazz (2001) is just one of Ken Burns’s crimes against music.

22 “Erroll, Erroll, Erroll, Erroll, Erroll, Erroll, Erroll, Erroll. Erroll Garner. Eddie Calhoun. Denzil DeCosta Best. Erroll, Erroll. Erroll Garner”: Jimmy Lyons, emcee, at the concert’s end.

[The Complete Concert by the Sea (Columbia/Legacy) has the concert as recorded, the rearranged, edited sequence of the original LP, and post-concert interviews with Garner, Calhoun, and Best. With extensive liner notes. List price for the three-CD set: $13.99. The bargain of the year and the reissue of the year.]

Mencken on professor

Professor , like doctor , is worked much less hard in England that in the United States. In all save a few of our larger cities every male pedagogue is a professor, and so is every band leader, dancing master, and medical consultant. Two or three generations ago the title was given to horse-trainers, barbers, bartenders, phrenologists, caterers, patent-medicine vendors, acrobats, ventriloquists, and pedagogues and champions of all sorts. Of late its excessive misuse has brought it into disrepute, and more often than not it is applied satirically. The real professors try hard to get rid of it.

H. L. Mencken, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, 4th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936).

Also from The American Language
The American v. the Englishman : “Are you a speed-cop?” : B.V.D. : English American English : “[N]o faculty so weak as the English faculty” : Playing policy : “There are words enough already” : The -thon , dancing and walking : The verb to contact

Nabokov’s orthodontia

In Berlin, orthodontia for Vladimir and Sergey:


Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (1966).

The wonders of today: here is Dr. Lowell or Lowen — real name, William Law — at one’s fingertips:


[The Dental Register 60, no. 6 (1906).]

There are other traces of William G. Law in Google Books. Maxillofacial Orthopedics: A Clinical Approach for the Growing Child (2004) notes that Dr. Law was a founding member and first president of the European Orthodontic Society (1907–1909). In the January 1909 issue of The Dental Cosmos, Dr. Law reported that in October 1908 he had been elected secretary-treasurer of the European Orthodontia Society.

If a descendant happens to be hunting, I hope he or she finds this post. To spell it out: William G. Law , dentist , orthodonist , In den Zelten 18a , Berlin . It would be easy to find evidence of this ancestor online by searching for his name. Not nearly as easy, though, to learn that Vladimir and Sergey Nabokov were his patients.

Wikipedia tells us that In den Zelten (“in the tents”) became an official street name in 1832 and disappeared in 2002.

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)