“When I become a teacher, my students are going to look at my syllabus and say, ‘You expect us to do what now?’” my friend D. said. “I believe in the multiple-intelligences theory.”

We talk about the freedom that the Digital Age has given us for self-expression.

But has it really? The Internet is, largely, a text-based medium. Yes, we do have websites that are visual galleries but, for example, the website of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — and even the galleries themselves — are filled with text.

Writing is becoming an ever more important skill. Kara Miller wrote an op-ed in today’s Boston Globe, “Failure to communicate“, in which she discusses how weak are the writing skills of incoming college students.

To some degree, it’s a mathematical problem. If it takes me all weekend to correct 40 papers, how can a high school English teacher begin to tackle 120 papers (four sections, 30 students per section) in a detail-oriented way?

–Kara Miller

I have thought about this problem myself as I pursue becoming a teacher. Robyn Jackson in her book Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching suggested if students are weak on developing opening paragraphs for essays, give them assignments just on opening paragraphs; if they are weak on topic sentences, give them assignments on topic sentences; if they are weak on the structure of an entire essay, give them assignments to write entire essays. I think of the hundreds of students I will have and how long it will take just those shorter assignments.

I admire D. She’s very passionate about challenging her future students and encouraging them to think for themselves. I admire that she wants to use a portfolio system — requiring tests, essays, presentations, and class participation — rather relying solely on one channel. In fact, that is the kind of assessment system that I want to use. But I wonder how much of our time employing that is going to require.

I have thought about giving students two grades per paper. The first for their grammar and the second for their arguments. Reading Kara Miller’s op-ed article, I wonder if I can really separate the two. If the student does not clearly spell out what he or she meant to say, then the teacher is just guessing at the meaning.

D., by her own admission, did not get the best grades in high school. She was not interested in the history she was taught and only rarely in the books. Her interests were more attuned to what she’s now studying, philosophy and psychology. She did not feel engaged with the work and as such did not care about the assessments she was given.

“Middle and high schools do not teach critical thinking,” she asserts.

I remember feeling that way as well. Disagreeing with the teacher in an essay was often a recipe for a bad grade, even in honors and advanced placement classes. And this was before the institution of high stakes testing in Massachussetts.

How can the MCAS assess critical thinking?

It cannot, and we should not expect it to measure that. The MCAS presents the items as if everything can be categorized as right or wrong. We can agree that Shakespeare wrote sonnets and plays, that his works were written in iambic pentameter, often rhyming; we can agree that Thomas Hardy wrote novels and poetry, perhaps we can even agree that it was the poor reviews of critics of his poetry that pushed him to writing novels; and we can call facts forms in which authors wrote, works that are attributed to them.

But on the meaning of the work, on the interpretation of the works, there is plenty of room for disagreement. You may think this passage was parody, was an ironic comment on something; I may think the author meant it as stated. The author cannot tell us and, in truth, I wouldn’t want him or her to clarify.

Ambiguity is good for thought.

You May Also Like

• Testing, Assessment, and Feedback
• Children Left Behind: Statistics and Abstractions
• Knowing and Understanding

In This Essay

“Do School Libraries Need Books?” from Room for Debate, The New York Times, February 10, 2010

“The Library, Through Students’ Eyes” from Room for Debate, The New York Times, February 14, 2010

“A library without books” by David Abel, The Boston Globe, September 4, 2009

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, by Nicholas Carr, The Atlantic, July/August 2008

I remember reading in The Boston Globe last September that a private school in Massachusetts had given up its collection of books. I was aghast.

That Cushing Academy gave away collection of books, turning its library into a digital media center, continues to bother me.

Since reading that article, I have thought a lot about the role of libraries in our society. I have library cards for three different library systems here in Massachusetts. I joined the Boston Athenaeum, a membership library, last December after writing about them in a December 11th’s Weekly Review.

Libraries are important places. Digital technology cannot yet replace — and I hope never will — brick-and-mortar libraries.

I love going to physical libraries. I love browsing the stacks.

One afternoon while wandering through the shelves, I came across The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke a collection of fragments from Rilke’s letters, collected into thematic chapters by Ulrich Baer. Without the serendipity of walking through the stacks, I would never have found the book because I would never have thought to look for it.

I walked into the Boston Athenaeum on Saturday to visit again the art exhibit I reviewed last week, An Artist + A Poet. Walking around the new acquisitions displays on the first floor, I found Young Rilke and His Times by George C. Schoolfield. Again, I never would have thought to look for this book but I’m glad to have borrowed it.

That’s one weakness I find in my own Internet research. There is so much information out there, that unless I know what I am looking for, I have trouble finding anything at all. Reading from the Internet encourages us to read shallowly and seek a particular piece of information and continue on.

We have become sifters.

But when we enter a library, we are looking for knowledge in a broader sense than we are when we begin an Internet search. When we begin an Internet search, we are looking for answers to specific questions. When we enter a library, we are looking for answers, yes, but I think we are open to letting those answers inspire additional questions in ways we aren’t on the Internet.

All the same, I am no luddite. I know that the Internet is changing the way that we think and organize information. Perhaps libraries will become obsolete.

But I hope that we continue recognize the value of books and libraries. There are no pop-up advertisements in books, nor banner ads in libraries. Just as online, there are other things — more books, though, rather than more sites — vying for our attention in a library. Yet, I find myself able to become immersed in a book in a way that I have never seen translated online.

I hope that we keep these quiet bowers.

What are your thoughts? Share them with us.

Do libraries hold any special memories for you? Have you moved completely online? Do libraries have a future, or only a past?

In This Essay

The Art of Sinking in Poetry by Alexander Pope

The Epistles of Horace: Bilingual Edition (David Ferry, trans.)

The Odes of Horace: Bilingual Edition (David Ferry, trans.)

“For poet, classics translate into success” by David Mehegan, The Boston Globe, July 7, 2005

The other day I found a copy of Alexander Pope’s The Art of Sinking in Poetry in Barnes&Noble. As I began to read it, I began to think of Horace’s “Ars Poetica”, how long it had been since I had read it, and thought about when it began to take on a special meaning for me.

I felt myself floating after finishing my undergraduate degree.

I found myself fighting against ideas that I did not want to accept. But I did not then have the strength to put them down.

I still don’t.

Then one day I was reading The Boston Globe — only good things come from reading The Boston Globe — when I came across a story about a translator trying to revive the classics of ancient Roman poet Horace.

Since I first read Aristotle as a freshman in high school, I have had a respect for the classics. Seneca is one of my favorite philosophers, which is odd when I consider my love for Romantic poet John Keats and lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke. I had read Horace’s Ars Poetica in college and remembered liking it.

So, I read through the article. I was struck by this statement:

Some literary lights grumble darkly about the low profile of poetry in our time, but Ferry said its status is no better nor worse than it ever was.

What could he possibly mean? Was poetry always so marginal as it is today? Or is our — my — definition of poetry too narrow? Horace himself writes of the importance of poetry in his own age. I wrote “poetry” in high school, but had not then bothered to study it. And my verses, if I am allowed to call them that, were at their best only hints of something possible with more study. Did he know studies of the prominence of poetry that I did not know?

A few quick searches and I found Dr. Ferry’s email address. And with not a little trepidation, I set out to ask him myself.

The article about him, the few emails I exchanged with him, and his translation of the “Ars Poetica” in The Epistles of Horace, though I could not see it then, helped send me down the course towards my own serious love of poetry.

So, who do you want to contact? Why haven’t you?

Form your own opinion. Buy these books from Amazon.com.

• The Art of Sinking in Poetry by Alexander Pope
• The Epistles of Horace: Bilingual Edition (David Ferry, trans.)
• The Odes of Horace: Bilingual Edition (David Ferry, trans.)

May I also suggest…?

• “The Prestige in Poetry” by Matthew Koslowski, Literature&Literacy
• “On Dying Young” by Matthew Koslowski, Literature&Literacy
• “Memorizing Poetry” by Matthew Koslowski, Literature&Literacy
• “Living through Literature” by Matthew Koslowski, Literature&Literacy

I am ambivalent when there are too many good things over the course of a week.

My attention is caught among trying to sift through all these different news articles and bring you some of the best that I can find. I want to share all the interesting things that I found but if my attention is strained trying to find them, your attention is just as strained because of the information with which you are trying to keep up yourself.

I hope that you will enjoy the articles that I have included here.

Do you have suggestions on how I can make the Weekly Review more interesting or more useful? Please comment below. I want you to enjoy the Weekly Review and get something out of it. I don’t want to be another aggregator that you ignore.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Ready for Take-Off!
• School Reforms
• How to Think
• Edgar Allan Poe and the Frogpondians
• On Whose Merit?

Ready for Take-Off!

• For Octogenarian Pilot, Sky Is The Limit: an Interview of Anne Osmer by Melissa Block, All Things Considered, NPR

Anything is possible, and you are never too old. If you don’t believe me, ask Anne Osmer. She began taking flying lessons after she turned 80. Yes, you read that right she began flying lessons after 80. She’s now 83 years old and took her first solo flight.

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School Reforms

• Why Tests Make Me So Angry by John Spencer, Musings from a Not-So-Master Teacher
• Ban Homework and Lengthen School Days by John Spencer, Musings from a Not-So-Master Teacher

The other night, I sat out a dance to talk with Erin, a teacher’s aide for the deaf, who I met recently. We talked about school reforms and she had some interesting insights. She suggested, since we are no longer a predominantly agrarian society, that we should eliminate summers and instead institute six weeks of school followed by two weeks of break, or some similar rotation. After each six week segment, kids who did not fully understand the concepts could receive remediation — literally, a remedy for their misunderstanding — much sooner than having to wait until summer school an having failed once.

My friend John Spencer writes in these two essays about what he sees wrong with education. I don’t agree with everything that he says. For example, he thinks that we should lengthen the school day but I disagree. I’m more inclined to agree with Erin about altering the school year and keeping the days short. I remember seeing an article a while back that said the schools in the foreign countries that we are constantly pointing to as beating our students have a different schedule for breaks but less hours each day.

The human brain is like a muscle. Repeated practice of certain skills strengthens those areas of the brain. But, the brain can also suffer fatigue which makes its attempts to retain less effective. We need to make sure we take a balanced approach.

I just picked up two more books by Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities and The Shame of the Nation. Perhaps after I read them I will have a few more ideas on school reform myself.

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How to Think

• Critical thinking? You need knowledge by Diane Ravitch, The Boston Globe
• 10 Surprising Books That Will Transform Your Writing by Demian Farnworth, Copyblogger
• How to Read by Brian Clark, Copyblogger
• Reading Practice Can Strengthen Brain ‘Highways’ by Jon Hamilton, All Things Considered, NPR

While I thought I would find information relevant to improving my blog on Copyblogger.com, I did not think that I would find articles applicable to a classroom.

I am glad that I was wrong.

In “10 Suprising Books That Will Transform Your Writing,” Demian Farnsworth mentions one of my favorite books, Letters to the Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, and another I’ve wanted to pick up, The Complete Odes and Epodes of Horace. Some of the other books on the list are the kind of business books that you would expect to find on a site about blogging and turning a profit from your blog.

At the end of the article, Farnsworth writes

The more you have in your brain — both from study and from direct experience — the more fresh, new, killer ideas you’ll come up with.

And that reminded me of an article I read back in September in the Boston Globe, which I linked to in one of my longer posts, Children Left Behind in which I tried to cover too much and everything got diluted. But Ms. Ravitch reminds us “Critical thinking? You need knowledge,” that the ability to draw conclusions requires us to synthesize our direct experience alongside our indirect experience to what currently analyzing.

Have you ever met someone who knows everything about a particular topic, the minutest of details, stuff that only real adherents would know, but who knows nothing else? Those people are a little boring, aren’t they? They also cannot see beyond the scope of their interest.

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Edgar Allan Poe and the Frogpondians

• The Raven in the Frog Pond: Edgar Allan Poe and the City of Boston, an exhibit at the Boston Public Library
• Claiming Poe: An Interview with Paul Lewis by Kathleen Burge, boston.com
• The Death of Edgar Allan Poe by Robin Young, Here&Now, NPR
• Quoth the Poet by June Wulff, The Boston Globe
• Embracing Poe by Jan Gardner, Shelf Life, boston.com

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston. He would not have been happy to admit it.

For a long time we Bostonians have not wanted to admit he was a son of Boston. I think we are still upset that he called us “frogpondians,” after the Frog Pond in the center of the Boston Common.

Dr. Paul Lewis, curator of the exhibit “The Raven in the Frog Pond,” thinks that Poe was referring to the writers and publishers around Boston when Poe spoke of “frogpondians.” Dr. Lewis conjectures that

…when he thought about those writers, he thought that they were cause-driven in their writing. So they were constantly croaking out in defense of their causes.
–Dr. Paul Lewis quoted in “Claiming Poe” in The Boston Globe

Now, 160 years after the author’s death, Boston is trying reclaim Poe as their own. With the talk of Boston Noir that I’ve seen in the pages of the Boston Globe — a new genre name for Boston’s rough and tumble, tragic stories of working class city dwellers that includes work such as The Friends of Eddie Coyle to The Departed — I can understand why we would be giving Poe a second look.

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On Whose Merit?

• In AP effort, students soar – and teachers unions flunk, Editorial, The Boston Globe
• It takes a village to educate a child by William Irvin, Letters to the Editor, The Boston Globe
• Merit pay unfair and divisive by Anne Wass, President of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, Letters to the Editor, The Boston Globe
• why merit pay is the wrong way by John Spencer, Musings of a Not-So-Master Teacher
• Obama Administration Pushes Merit Pay by Claudio Sanchez, All Things Considered, NPR
• Compromise can compensate for misguided merit-pay ruling, Editorial, The Boston Globe
• Merit pay forgets some factors by Bill Bell, Letters to the Editor, The Boston Globe
• Whose needs come first in schools? by Scot Lehigh, The Boston Globe

I have written about my disagreement with merit pay for teachers previously. This will be a contentious issue for some time.

The issue has been in the news a lot around Boston since August. A non-profit in Massachusetts won a grant from ExxonMobil to reward teachers for their students’ performance on Advance Placement exams. The Massachusetts Teachers Association said that the payments violated the terms of the teachers’ contracts and they could not take them.

I am on the side of the Massachusetts Teachers Assocation. I have read Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards and I have worked two sales jobs in which I could earn bonuses. The incentive of earning bonuses did not motivate me to work harder. And I have seen it cause co-workers to consider compromising on their ethics to earn the extra money.

I cannot more elegantly summarize why merit pay is a horrible idea than by recommending you watch this TED Lecture, Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation.

Here’s the big secret. All of our social science proves that incentives only work on clearly defined tasks. So, if the task is to get a student to pass a test, incentives would motivate the teachers to teach to the test.

If the task is to raise intellectually curious, independent minded, responsible adults, then incentives will not work.

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How do we provide equal access to education when one-third of households do not have Internet access?

In our fervor to embrace technology, we are leaving children behind. We are creating a two classes: the digital haves and the digital have-nots.

The idea of a digital divide had occurred to me before I read Annie Gowen’s article. But the full impact had not occurred to me. I had not thought of how stressful it would be for a child of eleven or twelve to try to juggle getting to and from school when is computer lab is open with getting to and from the library when its computer lab is open.

When I first moved back to Massachusetts after more than six years in Illinois and the Midwest, I lived something of the digital divide myself. My experience illuminates problems the students have.

Siren’s Song

At first I decided to eschew getting Internet at home, in part from budgetary concerns. Although the Internet is a powerful medium for communication and research, while in the Midwest, I had been using the Internet to waste time:

• I spent most of my time just dithering around on the same few websites;
• I spent more time on social media than being social;
• I spent more time on casual games than on learning.

Vast stores of human knowledge and opinion. And I was more interested in playing Bejeweled.

Something Had to Change

I knew something had to give.

I was worried that I would fall into my old habits in Massachusetts if I established Internet access at home from the start. I was worried that I fail to reconnect with old friends. And I was worried that I would fail to make new friends.

The public library system of the Merrimack Valley Library Consortium has many libraries that are open until 9:00pm Monday through Thursday, many with reasonable hours on Saturday and a handful with Sunday hours.

Home. Office.

I decided to make the public libraries my office.

I believe that I was more effective at the libraries than I would have been if I had established Internet access at home immediately. But I still was not very effective. Getting to the library was difficult: if I went home before going to the library, I usually did not want to venture out again; if I went straight to the library without taking any time to relax and unwind from work, I usually wasted time switching gears.

Plus there was the distraction of all those books. Why should I research teacher training programs when there are shelves of poetry to investigate? Why should I read teacher blogs to find out what teaching is like day to day when I could look through art monograms? Why should I write emails when I could be reading great and not-so-great works of fiction?

Failure

I established Internet access at my home after much hemming and hawing.

When I went to the library, I could not focus. Even the quiet that I hoped would help did not. I failed repeatedly to be effective at the library. These failures in spite of having many advantages:

• I have my own car so I could come and go when I pleased;
• I had full control over what I chose to learn;
• I was learning for pleasure, so I was under no deadline other than my desire to slack my thirst for certain subjects;
• I have my own laptop, so I did not need to rely on the public terminals;
• I am a grown man so I did not need permission nor have I a curfew;
• and I meditate, so I should, hypothetically, have better ability to focus than a student;

Struggling Students

Now, strip all those advantages away.

Without Internet access at home, some students are unable to get their homework assignments, participate in discussion boards, or collaborate with their classmates. As we move more our materials for schools online are we preventing our students from learning?

Some teachers, according to Ms. Gowens’s article, are unforgiving. Students who have trouble accessing the computer lab, whose work gets erased because the computer reboots after so many minutes, or whose libraries don’t have the proper software, are getting an inferior education and increased stress.

Is this our generation’s separate and unequal?

I don’t have any good answers on how to reduce or eliminate this problem. I am glad to be aware of it, so when I become a teacher I can try to find ways to compensate.

If you have thoughts on how to bridge the digital divide, leave me a comment below.

This has been the first week that I’ve managed to keep to a form my dedication, made some weeks back, and worked on my Weekly Review several nights rather than just one. I am still overwhelmed by the streams of information that I am trying to swim in. I am learning to manage, though, and I think the quality of the Weekly Reviews is only going to increase in 2010.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Food and Thought
• Of Great Interest
• Whose Great Books?
• Sticks and Stones
• “Innovative” Education
• What is that beautiful building

Food and Thought

• Food and mood by Bina Venkataraman, Boston Globe
• NH panel emphasizes better food choices in schools by Kathy McCormack, Associated Press, as seen on boston.com
• Dairy Groups Fight To Keep Chocolate Milk On Menu by Jeff Brady, All Things Considered, NPR

We have all heard the adage, “You are what you eat.” But it turns out that is true not only in terms of body composition, but of mental and emotional composition as well.

What you eat impacts your mood. And while those cupcakes I had a lunch yesterday may have made me feel better then, if I continue to eat fatty foods, new research suggests that I’ll be much less happy than if I eat a healthier diet. And my brain will function better if I cut the fat.

In order to learn, our children need to eat. In order to learn well, our children need to eat well. I know that some mornings at work I am so hungry that I cannot do much other than think about food. And I remember that I really enjoyed the opportunity to get breakfast before class. Rather than banning children from eating at the beginning of a class, we should encourage them.

As if I needed another social justice cause, I think healthy school breakfasts and lunches just got added to the list.

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Of Great Interest

• “The [Three] Great Interest of Man” by Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

I had never encountered the poem “Evening Without Angels” by Wallace Stevens before reading the post above in The Happiness Project. Gretchen looked for the poem because she remembered the lines of the epigraph by Mario Rossi, that she had attributed to Stevens and his poem. While the poem is intriguing, I am more interested in the quote by Mario Rossi:

“…the great interests of man: air and light, the joy of having a body, the voluptuousness of looking.”

Great literature reminds us of “the joy of having a body”; great art reminds us of “the voluptuousness of looking”; and great music reminds us of “air and light.”

Great literature reminds us of “the joy of having a body” because poetry is a sensual experience for me. Poetry and great novels look to take experiences and ideals and make them tactile, make them real. Great literature gives us access to the interiority of another person, real or imagined, and lets us see the world from their eyes, if only for a minute. You could tell someone that having great riches will not, of itself, make him or her happy, or you could hand him or her a copy of “Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson.

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Whose Great Books?

• Creating the Canon by Cynthia Crossen, “Dear Book Lover”, The Wall Street Journal

Once I picked up Harold Bloom’s book, The Western Canon, from the library. I didn’t read more than the first few pages of it and thumb through the list of great works in the appendix. At some point, I am sure that I will read his essays and consider in greater depth his lists.

That seems like a smart thing for a high school English teacher to do, right?

What I liked about Cynthia Crossen’s article was that she was humble. Whereas Harold Bloom wants to create the definitive list for all time, a very quaint and antiquated ideal, one that inspired the first encyclopedias but seems silly now, Cynthia Crossen wants us to read both good and bad books. She quotes Jane Smiley and I think it bears repeating here, as well:

…in order to understand the nature of the novel [as an artform], sometimes the reader has to read novels that don’t work for her and think about why they don’t work.

I do not think the writers that Harold Bloom canonizes are the exclusive holders of culture and excellence in the history of the world. I think about Chimamanda Adiche’s lecture, “The Danger of a Single Story” — which, if you haven’t watched, I encourage you to watch immediately — and how her first stories were about British and American characters because that is all she knew.

We need to include writers from many, if not all, cultures in our school curricula. We cannot use literature to learn about others if we do not read about others.

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Sticks and Stones

• Greg Mortenson on War and Peace interview by Tom Ashbrook, On Point, NPR
• Personal Take on Public Projects in Two Devastated Lands by Janet Maslin, New York Times
• Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Greg Mortenson

Greg Mortenson is not a man paying lipservice to the power of education. He is on the ground in dangerous parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan building schools. Tom Ashbrook interviews him and discusses his new book, Stones into Schools.

I have only just learned of Greg Mortenson and I am very interested in reading both of his books, Three Cups of Tea and his new one Stones into Schools. I like the summary of his work that I found in the New York Times review:

His great conviction, expressed to irresistibly inspiring effect in both books, is that the right kind of educational effort can bridge enormous gaps. Although he reiterates this point without describing exactly what the children in Central Asia Institute schools are taught, he is convinced that encouraging literacy is a way to promote trust and understanding.
–Janet Maslin

Right now, until I get into classrooms, I know that I believe in the power of education in an abstract way. I like to think that reading Mike Rose’s book Why School? and Jonathan Kozol’s books such as Letters to a Young Teacher bring me closer to that reality. Now, I’d like to see Greg Mortenson’s reality.

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“Innovative” Education

• In Search of Education Leaders by Bob Herbert, The New York Times

The title of Bob Herbert’s article, “In Search of Education Leaders” intrigued me. But the actual content of the article disappointed me.

Because Americans are falling behind in global standardized test scores, Harvard has decided to innovate in the field of education. For the first time in 75 years, Harvard University is going to offer a new degree: the Education Leadership Doctorate, or Ed.L.D. The stated hope is that students come out of this program ready to reform and reinvigorate the school systems.

Perhaps I am thoroughly jaded, but this sounds like a program that will churn out education consultants. The economic crisis happened because a large number of consultants were designing new financial instruments for the sake of being innovative. I am afraid that we are looking at a crisis in education.

The reform that we need is simple. We need to have small classrooms staffed by competent professionals. We need stable homes for students so that they have a place to study and work.

Simple is never easy.

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What is that beautiful building?

• Refined times by Alex Beam, The Boston Globe
• Boston Athenaeum: Bullish on the bookish, Editorials, Boston Globe
• Old Boston, new ways by Sarah Schweitzer, The Boston Globe

Since the middle of November, I’ve seen several stories about the Boston Athenaeum. I had not previously known that Boston had a somewhat secretive, private library in the heart of Beacon Hill. I imagine that I walked past it, not knowing what it was, when walking around Beacon Hill this summer at Community Boating.

The place sounds amazing. Yet another cultural institution that I want to join. Though, I think if I joined the Athenaeum, I might never be seen again. Heard from, yes, because they have WiFi, but only because of that.

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I had not realized just how many things come through my newsfeeds in the course of a few weeks. On returning to my newsfeeds after ignoring them to work on my application essays for the Boston Teacher Residency, I had over 1,000 items to review.

Even after clearing out almost all items prior to November 27th — a few of the headlines caught my eye and seemed worth reading — I still had in excess of 400 items to review. So, here are some of my favorites from that review.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Progress is so Retro
• Observation
• Chit-Chat
• Well, you could always teach
• Cheating School? The Pressure to Perform

Progress is so Retro

• The ancient ingenuity of water harvesting by Anupam Mishra, TED Lectures
• Demonstration of the 13th-century astrolabe by Tom Wujec, TED Lectures

Not everything that we create today is better than what has been created in the past. Here in Massachusetts, there is an ongoing debate about the Cape Wind Project which aims to build wind turbines — which are windmills, sophisticated windmills but windmills just the same — in Nantucket Sound. And whenever I hear that debate, I wonder how many modern problems we could solve by looking back at the past.

These two TED Lectures, while not specifically addressing that, are variations on that theme.

The ancient water harvesting projects technology of India’s Golden Desert “are often superior to modern water megaprojects.” Anupam Mishra works to preserve these water harvesting techniques.

In Tom Wujec’s talk on the astrolabe, he asks, “What have we lost with more advanced technologies?” Using the astrolabe to tell time, one knew the time but would also know when the sun was going to rise and when it would set, and would know that for all the heavenly bodies on that particular astrolabe.

What other problems could be solved by returning to the knowledge of our fathers and forefathers? New does not always mean better. The strategies for living described by Seneca make more sense to me and give me more for which to strive than anything I have learned in my psychology courses.

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Observation

• An informal lesson by Michael Doyle, Science Teacher

The first step of the scientific method is observation. The first step of being a novelist or a poet is also observation. Though I know many people who would disagree with me, I like to pretend that being a writer is being a scientist of the human condition. But to understand the human condition, you need to understand the universe. Dante references stars and constellation and their movement through the sky in The Divine Comedy.

What is time? Is it simply a number on a dial or in a liquid-crystal display? Or is the whole placement of stars and planets in the universe? Does our sense of time change from looking at the stars? These are the questions I had while reading Doyle’s post, “An informal lesson.

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Chit-Chat

• Eight Tips for Knowing if You’re Being Boring by Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project
• Make Sure the “Fun” is Fun for YOU by Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project
• Let the small talk begin by Beth Teitell, The Boston Globe

When people ask me what I studied at college, I joke, “Literature and art history, with a minor in philosophy. I’m economically useless but great at a party!” With so much exposure to culture and ideas, you would think I would always have something to chat about.

Reading my blog, would you be able to guess that I hate small talk? My job requires me to make small talk to make a customer feel more at home or while doing routine maintenance on a customer’s account. I attend dances weekly and need to chat with the other dancers. And I strike up conversations with people on the street when I’m walking around Boston.

I don’t think I am very good at it. Which may be why I don’t like it. But with the holiday season in full swing and frequent holiday parties, it is a good skill to practice. And with the importance of social networks for getting jobs and for advancement, it becomes all the more important. Just because I’m passionate about books and paintings and sculptures doesn’t mean that other people are. To make successful small talk, I’m going to have to dabble a bit in everything. Perhaps one of my resolutions will to become more at ease with small talk and trying not to be boring.

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Well, you could always teach

• Teacher shortage gives way to teacher glut by Heather Hollingsworth, Associated Press, as seen on boston.com

I want nothing more than to be a high school English teacher in Boston. I want to share my passion for books and ideas with kids just as they become young adults. I want to help them find meaning in a chaotic world and mold who they become based on the literature they choose as their own.

But that seems like a daunting task. From what I’ve heard, there are more English teachers than open positions. The Boston Teacher Residency, a great internship-like program from people who want to enter the teaching field, had 600 applicants in 2008 for 75 spots. Of those 75 spots, only 5 to 10 of them were for English teachers.

The fact is that we need more teachers, even as we face declining state budgets. Teachers have too many students in their classrooms to effectively teach them all. If we want to remain competitive in this new century, we need to fully fund education and pay educators attractive salaries.

In my ideal world, teaching would not be viewed as a fall back career. Teaching would be viewed with equal respect as law and medicine, pay as well, and be as difficult to enter.

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Cheating School? The Pressure to Perform

• Mass. investigating a charter school by James Vaznis, The Boston Globe

I dislike many things about charter schools, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), high-stakes testing and our implementation the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), and the Race to the Top. I think all of these programs have a negative impact on public schools and on learning. And when all of the above are acting in concert, we multiply the problems without creating any solutions.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is investigating a charter school in Springfield, MA, for alleged misconduct in administering the MCAS. The school ran the risk of being closed if the students at the school did not improve their MCAS scores. I am afraid that in the era of high-stakes testing, this is only the first of these stories to break and that many other schools, both public and charter, may be manipulating testing to keep their doors open.

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I have implemented the first stage of my strategy, using a feed reader to manage my feeds. Consolidating all of the different streams of information down so that I just have to deal with the one website each day has been a blessing. I am still tinkering with this aspect of the strategy: I am thinking of moving to an offline feed reader because I’m not sure how long Reader saves all the posts I highlight with a star.

I failed this week to implement the second stage of my strategy, writing a little bit of the Weekly Review each day instead of all at once. There is always tomorrow to begin the Weekly Review: November 13th to November 19th!

Want to Learn Poetry from Matthew Koslowski?

I am developing a one session course to introduce adults to reading poetry for pleasure. The tentative title is, “Bawdy&Body: An Introduction to Poetry for Adults.” If you live in eastern Massachusetts, or around here, and would be interested in attending such a course, contact me.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Who is Allowed to Speak?
• Beaker Would Have Trouble in Danvers High School
• Karen Armstrong on the Core of Religion
• Zero Tolerance
• Biased by Design
• Sleep Your Way to Happiness

Who is Allowed to Speak?

• UMass-Amherst cancels talk by ex-radical leader by Abbie Ruzicka, The Boston Globe, via boston.com
• Canceled UMass talk teaches poor lesson by Arthur Dirks, Letters to the Editor, The Boston Globe via boston.com
• Former radical to speak at UMass after all by Mark Pratt, the Associated Press, via boston.com
• Ex-radical denied travel OK to Mass. for speech by the Associated Press, via boston.com

One night I shared with my then-girlfriend Jessica a radical idea: I think that schools should be forums for people to express all their ideas, no matter how outlandish we might view them to be, in a context of discussion and debate. To goad her a little bit, I said that I think it entirely reasonable to have a Knight of the Ku Klux Klan address a classroom one day and a member of the Black Panthers to address it another.

She asked me if I would let a jihadist radical address students. When I said yes, she asked me curtly, “Would you allow him to speak before or after you searched him for hidden bombs and weapons?”

I believe in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Ray Luc Levasseur, founder and former leader the United Freedom Front, was invited to speak at a forum at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts system. I did not hear about his invitation until it had been withdrawn amid a great deal of controversy in the Boston Globe. The forum was arranged by the UMass Libraries to openly discuss terrorism.

Mr. Levasseur was involved in criminal activities that did involve bombings. Yes, people died because of his activities. But I think that by villifying Mr. Levasseur and refusing to discuss with him his aims, his purposes, and his thinking we have lost an opportunity. What would Mr. Levasseur say of his activities? I wonder.

The head of the Special Collections and University Archives, Robert Cox, reflected on the hubbub in a Boston Globe article:

“The UMass Libraries developed this forum as an opportunity to focus on terrorism, one of the most difficult social issues confronting the country,” Cox said. “However, it is now clear that, given the strong reaction generated by this event, we can no longer achieve the kind of meaningful exchange intended.”

I can understand the fear and the hesitation to let someone speak. But I think that if the United States of America wants to stay true to its core principals, no matter how flawed our implementations of the same have been throughout our history, we need to allow people forums to speak.

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Beaker Would Have Trouble in Danvers High School

• Mass. school principal bans ‘Meep!’ by the Associated Press, via boston.com

A principal in Danvers, Massachusetts, a suburban town about 25 miles north of Boston, has banned students from saying, “Meep!” No, this is not a joke.

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Karen Armstrong on the Core of Religion

• The Freelance Monotheism of Karen Armstrong on Speaking of Faith
• Karen Armstrong | Profile on TED.com
• Karen Armstrong Wins the 2008 TED Prize
• The Charter for Compassion, the foundation started by Karen Armstrong after winning the 2008 TED Prize

Human beings can make a religion out of anything. By that I mean, adherants to any group — be it a band, an author, or a sports team — can become devotees and fanatics. In narrowing our focus down to the Truth of That Thing, we begin to create walls between us that are artificial.

Ask anyone wearing a Boston Red Sox cap walking down the streets of Boston how they feel about the Yankees, and you’ll hear, “Yankees Suck!” This has become ritualized. This response is as much an expression of devotion as the call and responses in a Catholic Mass.

Karen Armstrong, in her TED Lecture “Let’s Revive the Golden Rule” below, reminds us that religion at its heart is all about compassion. “Compassion” from the Latin “x” — meaning, “a” — and “y” — meaning, “b” — yielding “to feel together” or more starkly — and I think more meaningfully — “to suffer together.”

If we are not using our religion to strive for compassion, to strive for sympathy with our fellow human beings, we have forgotten a fundamental tenet of what it means to be human.

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Zero Tolerance

• The Trouble With ‘Zero Tolerance’, Editorial, The New York Times, via nytimes.com
• 25 Chicago Students Arrested for a Middle-School Food Fight by Susan Saulny, The New York Times via nytimes.com

There is a place for a Zero Tolerance Policy. A child bringing a gun to school should result in that child being expelled. But that child should also receive counseling to help the child become a healthy and productive adult.

But to criminalize behavior such as food fights in middle schools? That is taking the Zero Tolerance Policy too far. In a Chicago middle school, 25 students between the ages of 11 and 15 were arrested for participating in a food fight.

Not suspended. Arrested. Put in handcuffs, put in a police wagon, and forced to sit in jail for up to eight hours.

The New York Times editorial cited above says that some places have extended the Zero Tolerance Policy to include swearing or talking back to adults. Imagine: children sent to the juvenile justice system for swearing. How afraid have we become of our own children that we’re ready to arrest them for participating in childish behavior? What is a child going to learn for being arrested for swearing? Not that swearing is wrong, but that the system is corrupt.

I am thankful to see that some school districts are coming to their senses. The school system of Clayton County, Georgia, has developed a three-strike system. Although I doubt the wisdom of a three-strike system, it is certainly better than a one-strike system. But allowing the juvenile justice system to focus on high-risk children who need attention and counseling is a drastic improvement.

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Biased by Design

• An Unexplored Area of Bias by John Spencer, Musings of a Not-So-Master Teacher

John Spencer came up with an interesting experiment. He developed authoritative content and fictional content. He presented the content to two different classes in two different versions.

To the first class he presented the fictional content in slick, professional web design. Then he presented the authoritative content in ugly, amateurish design.

To the second class he presented the authoritative content in the professional web design. Then he presented the fictional content in the amateurish design.

He then asked the students which information was true and which was false. Which do you think they chose? Do you think it varied between classes? Read his blog post to to learn what he found out.

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Sleep Your Way to Happiness

• A Fundamental Secret to Happiness? Get Enough Sleep by Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project Blog

After the last two Weekly Reviews, where I said in both introductions that I’ve not been sleeping well, I saw this post on The Happiness Project Blog. Although the Ms. Rubin talks a lot about the virtues of sleep, I was heartened to read that she doesn’t like to sleep either:

“It’s strange that turning off the light is so hard. You’d think, ‘What could take less effort than going to sleep?’ and yet I find that it sometimes takes a lot of effort to put myself to bed, even when I’m actually feeling sleepy. It’s just so much fun to stay up — or sometimes I feel too tired to take out my contacts.”
–Gretchen Rubin

As long as I don’t miss work, I can keep burning the candle at both ends, right? Right?

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The Weekly Reviews are a lot of fun to write. I enjoy scouring the web for interesting articles and blog posts. But, all the same, the project had begun to become a unmanageable. There are so many websites and blogs to check out everyday. I had been afraid that I was going to miss something.

What I repeatedly missed was my own deadline. You may have noticed that the past two weeks I had postponed my Weekly Review until Saturday.

I have been working hard but I haven’t been working very smart. Then I remembered a quote from one of my favorite writers:

Novels are written in the same way that farms are made productive, or houses are kept clean, or baseball penant races are won: with steady work each day.
–Andre Dubus

Substitute “Weekly Reviews” for “Novels” and you get the same concept. Rather than gathering up work throughout the week and then trying to throw something together slapdash on Thursday night, starting this week I will be working on the Weekly Review throughout the week.

Thursday afternoon I spent some time setting up a feed reader through Google. Though I’m not quite sure how I feel about it yet — unlike Gmail, the posts disappear after you’ve read them unless you ask them to stay — but I am glad to consolidate many of my different websites into one place.

In addition to that, I’ve also setup Literature&Literacy on Feedburner.com. You can now subscribe to Literature&Literacy through an RSS Reader or through email.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Fixing Education
• Fighting What You Believe
• Failings
• The Humbling of Philip Roth

Fixing Education

• Teach Your Teachers Well by Susan Engel, Op-Ed, The New York Times via nytimes.com
• Grade the Teachers by Michael Jonas, The Sunday Boston Globe via boston.com
• Teacher Training Termed Mediocre by Jennifer Medina, The New York Times via nytimes.com
• How to Improve American Education by Charles Wheelan, Ph.D., The Naked Economist, Yahoo! Finance
• Subversive Elevator Music by John Spencer, Musing of a Not-So-Master Teacher
• Former NBA Coach Switches Gears At Charter School by Mike Pesca, All Things Considered, NPR via npr.org

There has been a lot about this since Arne Duncan came out and said that he wants to improve teacher training programs. Newly minted teachers come out of these programs and feel overwhelmed by having to manage a classroom.

Most actual training for particular jobs happens on the job. I have read that it takes a year to just begin to feel comfortable at your job. When I first began my job at the bank, I remember feeling overwhelmed. I know that many of my other friends felt the same.

It is quite easy to take potshots at educators:

• They work in a rarefied realm where they are not held accountable for their results.
• They don’t work very hard because they cannot be fired.
• They work only half a year! Every time you turn around they have another vacation! They get summers off!

People pay lip service to the idea that educators play a vital role in our nation. But I do not believe they actually believe that. Teachers are paid very poorly for the work that they do, especially as class sizes grow and resources are reduced. If people truly believed that teachers and educators were vital to our economy, they would pay teachers more.

There is no end to commentators and news writers who are willing to offer advice on how to improve our education system. Everyone has an opinion on this matter.

One idea that is being passed around is the idea of merit pay for teachers. I believe in what Alfie Kohn writes in Punished By Rewards that you can get diminishing results when you attempt to tie rewards to performance. And there are economists and business theorists who believe that as well. I remember seeing articles arguing that Golden Parachutes are necessary because CEOs who are not allowed to pursue ideas that may fail will not innovate and will not advance the economy.

I also fear that you will get unethical behavior. I have met salesmen and saleswomen who will do whatever they can to get a sale, tell customers whatever they want to hear. Do we want teachers and principals who are fighting to get rewards rather than educate our children?

We need to go back to basics. We need to have a national conversation about the why of school, its purpose.

If we decide public education is vital to the lives of our children and our success as a nation, we need to align our teachers paychecks with that belief. People choose careers in college based in part on what they expect to get paid after leaving school. There are some people who want to be teachers and would be excellent educators, but instead become engineers or computer scientists for fear that they will be unable to support their future families on a teacher’s salary.

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Fighting What You Believe

• Knocking Out the Beliefs That Hold You Back by April Dykman, Get Rich Slowly

Get Rich Slowly was one of the very first blogs that I started reading. Practical, down to earth financial advice for people who understand that there is more to life than earning money.

Much like Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich, Get Rich Slowly has a broad definition of rich. Rather than limiting richness to wealth, these blogs talk about living a rich life.

Granted they take it as a starting point that you cannot live richly if you are living in debt with no financial plans.

April Dykman is a new staff writer at Get Rich Slowly. And she never thought she would be able to make a living as a freelance writer. She had had this belief before she entered college. One of her professors reinforced that belief.

And for years she clung to that belief.

That belief became part of her personal narrative. Each of us keeps this personal narrative of who we are and what we can and cannot do. Many of these beliefs are locked away in our minds, invisible chains that restrict our realities.

Read through April’s article and ask yourself, what narratives are you carrying with you that are holding you back?

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Failings

• Analysis: College students need lessons in failure by Justin Pope, Associated Press via boston.com
• What If We’re Afraid of the Wrong Things? by John Spencer, Musings of a Not-So-Master Teacher

I found a fortune cookie fortune in the pocket of a pair of trousers the other day as I was cleaning:

The two hardest things to handle in life are failure and success.

And then I saw this article through boston.com. I think that it is timely, especially with all the talk of fixing education swirling around. But I also thought this so important that it deserved its own discussion.

I fear that my generation has been too mollycoddled. We grew up during the age of self-esteem and the idea that hurt feelings were too much to bear. Self-esteem means nothing. Self-respect means everything and the only way to gain self-respect is to earn it.

Throughout my life I have been told that I am a gifted mind, that I can do whatever I set my mind to, and a lot of other things that I believe are platitudes. These were fed to me to encourage me. I don’t know whether they served their purpose.

When I was in college, I shared some of my poems with a professor I admired. He thought my works were utter drivel and told me so. Afterward I discussed the conversation with my adviser, thinking he would keep the conversation to himself, and let vent to my feelings.

I had been hurt and because I was not used to being told that I couldn’t do something. I gave up. My adviser tried to encourage me to think of this time as an apprenticeship.

But I had never been given the tools to handle failure.

So rather than think of this failure as a temporary setback, as an assessment of where I was on that day, I became a failed poet. There is a world of difference between being a beginner with a handful of failed poems and being a failed poet.

And perhaps if I had had experiences with failing prior to that, I would have been able to see the difference. Perhaps I could have picked myself up and begun to work again.

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The Humbling of Philip Roth

• Darkness visible by Richard Eder, The Boston Globe via boston.com
• Roth on Roth by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal via online.wsj.com

As with John Irving, I am not familiar with the work of Philip Roth. And, again as with John Irving, after reading these two book reviews though I want to read Philip Roth as well.

The Humbling follows a down and out actor. The theme is the end of inspiration and the end of creativity. I don’t know Richard Eder’s taste in books but I can tell that The Humbling is not his cup of tea.

A great actor is suddenly unable to act; the misery and the humiliations to which this leads bring him to the verge of suicide. It is not the business of a review to be telling what happens. It is telling, though, that the reader rather wants him to go ahead with it.
–Richard Eder on The Humbling

Yet even that dismissive review entices me on. Philip Roth is considered one of our times’ greatest writers. I want to read the book for myself and see if I can detect Roth trying to convey the struggles of creativity after a life time.

What is the common phrasing of the Biblical proverb? “Seven years of feast, seven years of famine”?

Keeping in line with our rapidly shrinking sense of time and of being overwhelmed, when I look back on writing the Weekly Reviews, I feel like there are seven days of feast and seven days of famine.

This week has been a feast week. I emailed myself twenty-seven (27) stories for consideration for this week’s post. In fact, part of the reason why I did not post on Friday is because I had so much material to sort through.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Books Are Just Dead Trees
• The Lost Art of Reading
• Learning Takes Time
• Reminded of Mortality by Eating an Apple
• Single Parenting and Cognitive Development
• Mirror Writing

Books Are Just Dead Trees

• Openings, Jeffrey Hamburger, Boston University’s World of Ideas, WBUR via buworldofideas.org
• “My Kindle quandary”, Alison Lobron, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine via boston.com
• “The Book That Contains All Books”, Stephen Marche, The Wall Street Journal via online.wsj.com
• “Is this the end? : Some people think book publishing is in its final throes. The Boston Book Festival begs to differ.”, Joan Anderman, The Boston Globe, via boston.com
• Nook vs. Kindle: New Chapter In E-Reader Battle, All Things Considered, NPR, via npr.org

I love the physicality of books. The weight of one in my hands. The feel of my eyes moving across the page. The sound as I turn the page. Even, to some extent, the smell of a new book as much as that of an old, musty book.

And the Kindle, as well as other ereaders, are changing that.

I have been thinking about this for a while. In fact, the first two links above are from late September and mid October. But the news that the first annual Boston Book Festival was last weekend heartens me.

I believe there will always be a place for the physical book as we know it today. And I also believe that the ancient cultures that used scrolls said much the same. At some point, probably within my lifetime, ereaders will become the dominant way that most people interact with literature.

One thing that worries me about this is the stories and research that I’ve heard about, not cited above, that reading on a screen is more difficult than reading on a page. Do the ereaders with their e-ink technology address that? I remember one review of the Amazon Kindle that disparaged its dark grey on light grey interface. The Barnes&Noble Nook will have a color screen. But at the end, are they screens with refresh rates like computer monitors and screens?

Part of the experience of reading will be lost. I studied art history at Ohio Wesleyan University and I enjoyed altarpieces that opened. The church looked one way when the altarpiece was closed and no services were going on, another when services were provided. Jeffrey Hamburger in his lecture “Openings” talks about several medieval liturgical books and their meaning in religious art and religious services.

Professor Hamburger discusses the art of some of these books that encompassed the whole scene when a book was open, others that set things in opposition between right and left pages.

He also discusses how books engross us. When a book is open on my lap, it encompasses my whole field of view. There are no buttons on the bottom to distract me. I am afraid that just as multi-tasking on computers slowly erodes our ability to concentrate on longer works, so too will ereaders.

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The Lost Art of Reading

• “The lost art of reading” by David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times via latimes.com

Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.
–David L. Ulin

Not dissimilar to the articles I quote above, but I think deserving its own entry, is an article I discovered by David L. Ulin. I can’t quite remember how I found it, some Google search brought it up, perhaps when I was looking for articles related to the ones above.

I have been reading The 4-Hour Workweek, based on a review over at one of my favorite blogs, Get Rich Slowly. (Listen, when you work as a banker and spend all day with people who are working deals to make money quickly, it can be very relaxing to read about reasonable people who believe in budgeting, saving, and resisting impulse buying.) Timothy Ferriss in The 4-Hour Workweek argues that we micromanage our lives for the sake of feeling busy.

In some ways, David Ulin makes a similar argument. We have trouble immersing ourselves in books because our culture has become one of immediacy. We have lost the idea of cultivation. There is a meditative aspect of reading that brings us back to ourselves because of the space it gives us from the present, as well as giving us new thoughts with which to approach the present.

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Learning Takes Time

• “‘Baby Einstein’ Videos Ineffective, Study Finds”, Day to Day, NPR, via npr.org
• “Can You Make Your Baby Smarter, Sooner?”, Talk of the Nation, NPR, via npr.org
• “No Einstein in Your Crib? Get a Refund” by Tamar Lewin, The New York Times via nytimes.com
• The Baby Einstein^TM DVD Guarantee

You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.
–Warren Buffett

In the same vein, you cannot speed up the cognitive development of your child by sitting them down in front of a television. In fact, some suggest that doing so may actually have the reverse effect.

Human beings are social animals. We have grown and developed throughout time in families, tribes, and other groups. When we sit a child in front of a television, we are cutting them off from that connection and teaching them from a very young age that sitting in front of a screen is preferable to interacting with other people.

Disney is refunding money to people who bought Baby Einstein videos. The videos “have been discredited, redirecting emphasis on the importance of interaction between parents and babies for proper development.” The offer from Baby Einstein^TM

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Reminded of Mortality by Eating an Apple

Michael Doyle writes a very personal blog post here, about eating apples. I had never thought of apples, specifically, as a memento mori — another Latin phrase you think you know — but now I’m not sure I’ll ever look at an apple quite the same way.

I have linked to Michael Doyle’s Science Teacher previously, in a Weekly Review a few weeks back. He’s got an excellent blog on teaching and life. You should all take a look.

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Single Parenting and Cognitive Development

• This Is Your Brain Without Dad by Shirley S. Wang, The Wall Street Journal via online.wsj.com
• Wikipedia Article on Degus

A German biologist, Dr. Anna Katharina Braun, studied a Chilean rodent, the degu, which is normally raised by two parents. She removed the father degu and studied the impact on brain development of the pups.

She found that the pups deprived of a father had less dense neuronal brain connections when the pups were 21 days old. The fatherless pups did gain some density by the time they were 90 days old, considered adulthood in this species, but there were still differences in the brains.

Although I do not like the emphasis on the heterogeneity of parents in this article, I was intrigued by the findings:

• “A preliminary analysis of the degus’ behavior showed that fatherless animals seemed to have a lack of impulse control, Dr. Braun says. And, when they played with siblings, they engaged in more play-fighting or aggressive behavior.”
• “In a separate study in Dr. Braun’s lab conducted by post-doctoral researcher Joerg Bock, degu pups were removed from their caregivers for one hour a day. Just this small amount of stress leads the pups to exhibit more hyperactive behaviors and less focused attention, compared to those who aren’t separated, Dr. Braun says. They also exhibit changes in their brain.”

If I’m reading one sentence right, degu parents spend about equal amounts of time with their children and the single mothers did not compensate. The scientists are attributing the decreased neuronal density to the loss of time with a parent. If the degus were raised by two mothers or two fathers who spent equivalent amounts of time with the children, what would the neuronal density look like?

So, if the important factor is the amount of time spent rearing children, then different family structures can all raise healthy children. They need to compensate for any loss of time as they are able. I would love to see more research on this that included the role of extended families, such as uncles, aunts, and grandparents.

At the end of the article, they discuss the impact of single family parenting on IQ scores. I have written elsewhere, in a few different posts, that IQ is one metric but that there are other factors in determining a children’s success than their IQ scores.

Part of what determines success is impulse control and the ability to delay gratification. The research indicates that fatherless degu pups have trouble control. If we were sure that carried over to humans, we would have a lot to worry about.

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Mirror Writing

• Writing about writing by Floyd Skloot, The Boston Globe via boston.com

I have not read anything by John Irving. But now I want to read his 12th novel, Last Night in Twisted River.

One topic I touched on briefly in Sailing with Rumi — very briefly, in fact, I think it was just two sentences — is one of my personal interests: where was the writer end and the narrator begin? The review suggests that that is at the heart of this novel. John Irving writes enough parallels between himself and the novel’s Danny Angel that we are able to have this argument along with John Irving.

The metafictional, self-reflexive business is in part a tease. While inviting a reader to focus on autobiographical elements, it allows Irving, in the voice of Angel, to protest the way his “fiction had been ransacked for every conceivably autobiographical scrap’’ and “dissected and overanalyzed for whatever could be construed as the virtual memoirs hidden inside them.
–Floyd Skloot

What does it take for a man or a woman to engage the world through the written word? Writers take their individual life experiences and try to find the universals to which others can relate.

Literature is entertainment but equally connection. It provides us a sense of continuity, a sense of community through the opportunity to discover that we are not alone because others have either experienced or imagined what we have gone through.

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