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Waste in education With more from Caroline Pratt.

Zippy Brooklyn

[Zippy , July 28, 2016.]

Only the zippy know Brooklyn. And only those who Zoom In (or keep a magnifying glass by their newspaper) can appreciate the detail in Zippy’s Brooklyn. In today’s Zippy , Zippy narrates, as a Brooklyn pharmacist sets off “on a quest to find stationery supplies & some pickled herring.“

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All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Only the zippy know Brooklyn? See here.]

“Everything is new”

Joseph Joubert:

Everything is new. And we are living among events so singular that old people have no more knowledge of them, are no more habituated to them, and have no more experience of them than young people.

We are all novices, because everything is new.

The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection  , trans. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review Books, 2005).

Also from Joseph Joubert
Another world : Brevity : Form and content : Irrelevancies and solid objects : Justified enthusiasm : Lives and writings : New books, old books : ’Nuff said (1) : ’Nuff said (2) : Politeness : Resignation and courage : Ruins v. reconstructions : Self-love and truth : Thinking and writing : Wine

Domestic comedy

[The bride wanted to time her entrance for a particular point in the Pachelbel Canon. A very difficult thing for the musicians to work out .]

“Just loop it.”

“The whole piece is a loop.”

“Loop the loop.”

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All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

A joke in the traditional manner

Why did Fred Astaire never drink bottled water?

No spoilers. The punchline is in the comments.

More jokes in the traditional manner
The Autobahn : Did you hear about the cow coloratura? : Did you hear about the mustard-fetching dogs? : Did you hear about the thieving produce clerk? : Elementary school : A Golden Retriever : How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect? : How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling? : How do amoebas communicate? : What did the doctor tell his forgetful patient to do? : What did the plumber do when embarrassed? : What happens when a senior citizen visits a podiatrist? : What is the favorite toy of philosophers’ children? : What kind of dogs do scientists like? : Which member of the orchestra was best at handling money? : Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels? : Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies? : Why did the ophthalmologist and his wife split up? : Why do newspaper editors avoid crossing their legs? : Why does Marie Kondo never win at poker? : Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?

[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad. Today would have been his eighty-eighth birthday. He gets credit for all but the cow coloratura, the mustard-fetching dogs, the produce clerk, the amoebas. the scientists’ dogs, the toy, the squirrel-doctor, Marie Kondo, and Santa Claus. He was making such jokes long before anyone called them “dad jokes.” I am now the custodian of his pocket notebook of jokes, from which I’ve chosen this one.]

Justified enthusiasm

Joseph Joubert:

Nothing is better than a justified enthusiasm.

The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection  , trans. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review Books, 2005).

Also from Joseph Joubert
Another world : Brevity : Form and content : Irrelevancies and solid objects : Lives and writings : New books, old books : ’Nuff said (1) : ’Nuff said (2) : Politeness : Resignation and courage : Ruins v. reconstructions : Self-love and truth : Thinking and writing : Wine

Waste in education

Caroline Pratt (1867–1954) founded Manhattan’s City and Country School in 1914. She was a teacher at odds with established practices:

I once asked a cooking teacher why she did not let the children experiment with the flour and yeast, to see whether they could make bread. She said in a shocked voice, “But that would be so wasteful!”

She was no more shocked by my question than I by her answer. That materials used in education should be considered wasted! Ours must be a strange educational system, I thought. And, of course, the more I studied it, the more convinced I became that it was very strange indeed. It was saving of materials, ah yes — but how wasteful of children!

Caroline Pratt, I Learn from Children: An Adventure in Progressive Education . 1948. (New York: Grove, 2014).

*

8:15 p.m.: And now I remember that City and Country figures in the documentary Nursery University (dir. Marc H. Simon and Matthew Makar, 2008). Yearly tuition at the school ranges from $24,200 to $43,500. What would Caroline Pratt say?

*

July 28: I didn’t have to read many more pages to get an idea of what Caroline Pratt might think about those numbers. As a young teacher in New York City, she worked three jobs, one in a private school, two in settlement houses. Here is what she says about that work:

The work with [children of privilege] was easier — but it never seemed quite so important as with the others. There was no satisfaction in the private school which compared with the harder accomplishment of offering new opportunities to children who needed them so desperately, and who used them with such intelligence and joy.

I should acknowledge that City and Country does offer need-based financial aid: “A significant portion of our operating budget is dedicated to tuition assistance.”

Joe Gould’s Teeth

Jill Lepore. Joe Gould’s Teeth . New York: Knopf, 2016. 235 pages. $24.95 hardcover.

From a 1945 Harvard Crimson article, quoted in Joe Gould’s Teeth :

One of these days, someone is going to write an article on Joseph Ferdinand Gould ’11 for the Reader’s Digest. It will be entitled “The Most Unforgettable Character I Have Met” and it will present Joe Gould as an unusual but lovable old man. Joe Gould is not a lovable old man.

Joe Gould (1889–1957) is best known as the subject of two New Yorker pieces by Joseph Mitchell, “Professor Seagull” (1942) and “Joe Gould’s Secret” (1964). Flea-ridden, often homeless, possibly autistic, forever losing eyeglasses and false teeth, Gould was a New York Bohemian who claimed to be writing the longest book in the world, an assembling of words he had heard spoken, entitled The Oral History of Our Time . The secret that Mitchell revealed in 1964: as he had long suspected, The Oral History did not exist. But letters that Mitchell received after the publication of “Joe Gould’s Secret” suggested that The Oral History did indeed exist. Readers claimed to have seen and read the composition books in which Gould wrote it. Jill Lepore decided to look into the question.

The result is a scrupulously documented journey down a rabbit hole, or rather, a journey through whole warrens of archival material. Lepore places Gould as a fellow traveler in the world of modernist writing and little magazines, where his associates and patrons included E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. (As late as 1946, Pound was asking Cummings if together they could get Gould’s work into print.) More disturbing elements in the Gould story include his grim sojourns in mental hospitals (in one, his teeth were removed) and his obsession with the African-American sculptor Augusta Savage. The Harvard students had it right: Gould was not a lovable old man. And it makes a certain sense that Lepore gives up her hunt. Could The Oral History be in the possession in one of the hospitals in which Gould did time? “Shouldn’t someone check?” Lepore asks. Her answer: “Not me.”

Joe Gould’s Teeth is best borrowed from a library. It should prompt any reader to read or reread “Professor Seagull” and “Joe Gould’s Secret,” both of which appear in Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel (1992).

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All OCA Joseph Mitchell posts (Pinboard)

[The book’s title comes from an untitled E. E. Cummings poem: “little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn’t know where / to find them.” Why the library? The book is short and fast (151 pages of text, 84 pages of back matter), and it’s unlikely that I’d have reason to read it again.]

Awkward metaphor of the day

David Gregory on CNN earlier today, speaking of the need for Hillary Clinton to appeal to both progressives and possible Trump voters: “She’s straddling both ends of this.”

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Wildness

Verlyn Klinkenborg:


“July,” The Rural Life (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002).

We live in town, emphatically in town. But we’ve had a fox sun itself in our driveway, looking like it was waiting for us to serve the iced tea. Deer in the backyard. A possum knocking at a ground-level window. A mouse in the kitchen. A bird in the downstairs. A dead rat in the toilet bowl. And a family of raccoons once chased Elaine across the driveway. It’s their driveway too.

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All OCA Verlyn Klinkenborg posts (Pinboard)
Bear in/on tree