Literature&Literacy » NPR http://matthewkoslowski.com matthewkoslowski.com Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:52:58 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Weekly Review: January 8th to January 14th http://matthewkoslowski.com/2010/01/15/weekly-review-01-08-01-14/ http://matthewkoslowski.com/2010/01/15/weekly-review-01-08-01-14/#comments Fri, 15 Jan 2010 06:00:31 +0000 Matthew Koslowski http://matthewkoslowski.com/?p=961

Not much to say today that isn’t in the two articles below. They summarize much of my life right now.

These Things Caught My Eye

Sorry, I think I nodded off there…

When I begin to run a sleep deficit, I feel as if my mind begins to fall apart. After hearing Sacha Pfeiffer’s article on WBUR, I think that perhaps my neurons are suffering and perhaps starting to break down.

I’m starting to realize that at this rate, not sleeping enough is going to develop into a common theme here.

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No more carrots, thanks.

If I were to tell you that there was an area of human motivation that has been studied for about four decades, that has gotten consistent results within the social sciences, and is being completely ignored today, would you believe me?

If you’ve been reading my blog since the beginning, maybe you would. One of first essays written in August 2009 was about rewards and punishments. In one Weekly Review in the middle of December, I wrote On Whose Merit? because that week a lot of people discussed merit pay and included a TED Lecture by Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation.

And there was a lot in the news today and this week about the bonuses being paid to bankers. But I don’t want to give that more attention than I just have.

Neither carrots nor sticks work to get people to do better. Throughout all the studies of motivation, incentives, the so-called carrots, and punishments, the so-called sticks, only work to get humans to do simple, straightforward tasks faster. If the tasks require any amount of thought or if the tasks have any ambiguous components, the incentives actually hinder performance. Incentives inspire cheating and shortcuts in order to earn the reward. If you want people to do the minimum necessary and have them dissatisfied with the job, then by all means institute an incentive plan.

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]]> http://matthewkoslowski.com/2010/01/15/weekly-review-01-08-01-14/feed/ 0 Weekly Review: December 11th to December 17th http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/12/18/weekly-review-12-11-12-17/ http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/12/18/weekly-review-12-11-12-17/#comments Fri, 18 Dec 2009 06:00:46 +0000 Matthew Koslowski http://matthewkoslowski.com/?p=791

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!

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

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

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

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?

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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]]> http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/12/18/weekly-review-12-11-12-17/feed/ 0 Weekly Review: December 4th to December 10th http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/12/11/weekly-review-12-04-12-10/ http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/12/11/weekly-review-12-04-12-10/#comments Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:00:22 +0000 Matthew Koslowski http://matthewkoslowski.com/?p=763

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

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

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?

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 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

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?

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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]]> http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/12/11/weekly-review-12-04-12-10/feed/ 4 Weekly Review: November 27th to December 3rd http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/12/04/weekly-review-11-27-12-03/ http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/12/04/weekly-review-11-27-12-03/#comments Fri, 04 Dec 2009 06:00:52 +0000 Matthew Koslowski http://matthewkoslowski.com/?p=753

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

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

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

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

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

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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]]> http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/12/04/weekly-review-11-27-12-03/feed/ 0 Memorizing Poetry http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/11/25/memorizing-poems/ http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/11/25/memorizing-poems/#comments Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:00:31 +0000 Matthew Koslowski http://matthewkoslowski.com/?p=705

In This Essay

Complete Poems of John Keats
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Speaking of Faith: Learning, Doing, Being: A New Science of Education
 

In college I resolved to memorize Paradise Lost.

Not just “The Invocation to the Muse,” the first twenty-six lines. The entire work. All twelve books.

My inspiration came in part from watching The Crow. One of the villains, T-Bird, picks up a book and reads, “Abashed the Devil stood and felt how awful goodness is, and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely…” Wondering if he were reading from a real book, I searched Google and found that quote comes from Book IV of Paradise Lost.

I developed a plan, in fact, to memorize the poem. After letting this grandiose idea overtake me, I sat down with a copy of the poem and determined how many lines were in each book. Then adding them up, I figured how long it would commit to memory if I memorized a fixed number — I believe it was ten lines — per day. It was a project that was going to take years of dedicated work.

Expanded Minds

The desire to stretch my mind to the task originated in stories that I had encountered throughout high school and college. Stories of incredible acts of memorization.

  • The rhapsodes who had the entire epics of Homer committed to memory;
  • Some Jewish scholars who so loved the Torah that they memorized not just the entire Torah but the very ways the scrolls rolled so that if someone were to stick a pin through the Torah, the scholar would know which words were pierced;
  • Though I’ve not read it, the ending of Fahrenheit 451 in which people are circling a fire reciting the great works of literature from memory.

The story of the Jewish scholars so inspired me that I wanted to memorize book and line numbers of Paradise Lost to the point that if someone said, “What was the fifteenth line of Book X?” I would have been able to recite it without referring to the text.

Remembrances

I began thinking about all this again for three reasons:

  • first, I just finished memorizing the entirety of “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats;
  • second, amid memorizing “Ode to a Nightingale,” I listened to “Learning, Doing, Being,” on Speaking of Faith;
  • and, finally, because I watched The Crow again last night.

I did memorize the Milton’s “Invocation to the Muse.” I did not continue with the project past that.

The exercise of memorizing “The Invocation to the Muse” as well as thinking of the entire poem was helpful in memorizing “Ode to a Nightingale.” Four years out of college, I can still recite the “Invocation to the Muse,” albeit a little rough in a few places now because I rarely practice. I believe that four years from now, I will still be able to recite “Ode to a Nightingale.” Moreover, I hope that these will be but two of the poems I am able to recite.

Why Memorize Poems?

Memorizing poems is fun.

Before you doubt that is true, think of the number of songs you have memorized. If you listen to your favorite radio station, or increasingly your Pandora station, how many would you be able to sing? And of those who many could you recite the lyrics without the music?

There is no greater tribute to a poet or lyricist than to memorize his or her works.

Throughout human history, we have memorized songs and poems. This is a natural part of intellectual play and has long been instrumental in learning. Adele Diamond, the interviewee for “Learning, Doing, Being,” is a neuroscientist who thinks that we need to look back to the traditions if we want to think of ways to improve education. To support reintroducing memorization and other practices, she uses an argument pulled from evolutionary psychology: if memorizing poetry was of no value, our ancestors would have stopped doing it.

Memorizing a poem is an exercise not only of memory but of commitment. Although I broke my commitment to Paradise Lost — and who wouldn’t be daunted by the task? — I have kept my commitment to John Keats. And I intend to make similar commitments to other great poets.

Truly committing something to memory cannot be done in one sitting. Memorization is not an act of passing fancy. Requiring our children to memorize poems and stories helps them learn patience.

Pillars of the Temple of Thought

We naturally memorize works of art that are either fun or meaningful to us.

Above I asked you to think of how many songs you’ve memorized without putting in effort. Now think of from how many scenes from movies, or even whole films, you’ve memorized the dialogue. How many quotes have you committed to memory?

I believe that memorizing poetry changes our very minds. We know from neuroscience that the more we think about certain things the stronger the connections to those neurons grow. I know that things in my life have grown to seem to touch everything. This perception may reflect the reality of my neurons.

If this holds true, then memorizing poems will change the way that we think of those things discussed in the imagery and theme of poem. I know that when I first encountered “Separation” by W.S. Merwin, it completely changed the way that I think of loss and I committed the poem to memory because of its power.

We live in an age where everything is vying for our attention if even for moments. More than that, many of the advertisements are looking to change our minds, change the way we think. But the act of memorizing a poem takes time and deliberate, sustained attention. I believe that memorizing poetry counteracts the adverse effects of the beeping and squawking, all the noise that is clamoring for us.

By committing poetry to memory, you are controlling what ideals and images constitute the pillars in the temple of your thought. If you don’t decide what you want to think, the marketers are going to do it for you.

]]> http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/11/25/memorizing-poems/feed/ 5 Weekly Review: November 6th to November 12th http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/11/13/weekly-review-11-06-11-12/ http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/11/13/weekly-review-11-06-11-12/#comments Fri, 13 Nov 2009 06:00:58 +0000 Matthew Koslowski http://matthewkoslowski.com/?p=636

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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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]]> http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/11/13/weekly-review-11-06-11-12/feed/ 0 Weekly Review: October 30th to November 5th http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/11/06/weekly-review-10-30-11-05/ http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/11/06/weekly-review-10-30-11-05/#comments Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:00:01 +0000 Matthew Koslowski http://matthewkoslowski.com/?p=607

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

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

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

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.

]]> http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/11/06/weekly-review-10-30-11-05/feed/ 5 Weekly Review: October 23rd to October 29th http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/10/31/weekly-review-10-23-10-29/ http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/10/31/weekly-review-10-23-10-29/#comments Sat, 31 Oct 2009 05:00:10 +0000 Matthew Koslowski http://matthewkoslowski.com/?p=562

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

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

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

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 EinsteinTM

allows you to exchange the videos for other products, receive a coupon, or receive a refund of $15.99.

I know that parents want to give their kids all the advantages that they can muster. But buying the Baby EinsteinTM videos is not the way. If you are going to use Baby EinsteinTM, you should sit with the child and interact with the child while the show is on. Bring the concepts from the screen world to the real world.

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Reminded of Mortality by Eating an Apple

  • Tipton Apples, Michael Doyle, Science Teacher

    • 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

    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

    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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    ]]>     http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/10/31/weekly-review-10-23-10-29/feed/ 0     Weekly Review: October 16th to October 22nd http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/10/23/weekly-review-10-16-10-22/ http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/10/23/weekly-review-10-16-10-22/#comments Fri, 23 Oct 2009 05:00:41 +0000 Matthew Koslowski http://matthewkoslowski.com/?p=451

    Each week, whenever I’m reading The Boston Globe, The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal — almost exclusively online these days — I try to take note of interesting articles to share here.

    And each week, I find there is both too much and too little to share.

    I feel like my ability to filter which stories will be interesting and which won’t be is not getting any better as the weeks progress. I hope, though, that you are enjoying the pieces that I do choose to share.

    And, further, I hope that if you find anything interesting that I missed you’ll share it with me in the comments below.

    These Things Caught My Eye

    The Sparrow Takes Flight

    October 22nd, 2009 through November 8th, 2009

    A girl returns home after ten years. As she reintegrates into the school, her telekinetic powers appear. Why did she leave? And what does it mean to the community that she has returned?

    I saw the opening performance of this play. The staging was excellent. In one scene, when a woman is hanging from the rafters, to show the difference, the actors who were on the ground laid down on the stage.

    Pictures played a large role. When the town is gossiping, the actors would gather holding pictures of houses and talk and dance while holding the photographs.

    Dance also played a big role in the performance. Emily, the girl with the telekinetic powers, takes flight one night and the actress does a lovely ballet-like dance to express Emily’s joy at being in the air.

    If you’re in Massachusetts, do yourself a favor and go see The Sparrow.

    Happy 50th Birthday, Guggenheim!

    Apparently the 50th Anniversary celebrations started in May of this year. I just saw it on Digg on Wednesday night.

    As a Bostonian, I have very specific dislike of New York. Well more specifically, a very specific dislike of a very specific baseball team. I have never been to the Guggenheim. This is perhaps something I should soon remedy.

    Especially with a retrospective of Wassily Kandinsky’s work. Kandinsky wrote an amazing book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art that I read in college. I’ve been meaning to reread it and with this exhibition, I’m not sure I will find a better time.

    The retrospective is setup along the spiraling ramp that most people are familiar with when they think of the Guggenheim. The paintings were hung in chronological order through the various periods of Kandinsky’s life.

    The review by Sebastian Smee makes an interesting point that I would like to see. At one point, Kandinsky’s spiritual style seems to die. Around the time he joined the Bauhaus, the spiritual paintings that sought to paint symphonies and feelings, turn into angular graphic design projects. And you see that change as you walk up the ramp.

    What happened to him to provoke that change?

    The Danger of a Single Story

    I had never heard of Chimamanda Adichie until Wednesday night. I was on TED exploring and her talk was featured on the front page. And I’m glad that it was. I was so moved by it that I embedded it right into this post.

    This past summer I met Sandi, a poet, at a writers’ conference. When I first asked her where she was from, she was a little dodgy in answering the question. She explained that if she tells people she was born in Africa they bring all this baggage and all these expectations. By being dodgy about where she was from, she freed me from having those expectations.

    Though, I do try to enter situations with as little in the way as possible of preconceived notions. Each of us develops heuristics, mental bridges that allow us to travel quickly without having to go deep into the valley of the unknown, that allow us to assess a situation quickly. We are able to say to ourselves, “OK. I know this, I am familiar with this. Let’s go.”

    But in some situations ignorance is power. When using heuristics, we can fall victim to the fallacy of familiarity. One thing that I have found incredibly liberating in my own life is having the strength to say to someone, “You know what, I don’t know the answer. But I am sure I can find it out.” I would rather admit my ignorance than demonstrate it.

    Is This the Bar to Raise in Public Education?

    Tuesday night and Wednesday morning I was thinking about my blog and expanding it to be more useful. I am thinking of adding of Resources Page that will include links to interesting sites and I thought immediately of Project Dropout a joint production of WGBH, Boston’s PBS station, and WBUR, Boston’s NPR station.

    Project Dropout was an interesting investigation of the dropout problem in Massachusetts. They spoke not only with administrators and policy wonks, but found actual dropouts and discussed the choices they had made.

    Anyone considering dropping out should listen to and read through Project Dropout. Give weight to the reports.

    On my drive into work on Wednesday, I heard a segment on WBUR by Monica Brady-Myerov, one of the principal reporters from Project Dropout. She was reporting on a new proposed law that would raise the dropout age in Massachusetts from 16 to 18.

    I am not sure how effective this law will be unless a structure is built around it. And I am glad that I am not the only one who is thinking along these lines.

    My gut instinct tells me keeping students in school until age 18 is the right way to go if we can address underlying reasons that cause them to drop out and create programs that address their need. – State Representative Martha M. Walz (D-Boston), quoted in “Law urged to make teens stay in school” by James Vaznis, The Boston Globe

    I would like to thank Representative Walz. Without addressing the underlying reasons that causing students to dropout, the problem will persist even if the dropout age is raised. If kids do continue to be physically present in the classroom, they could already have dropped out mentally and intellectually, the education equivalent to the living suicides Herman Hesse talks about in Steppenwolf.

    The full proposal, which I would like to read if I can a link to it somewhere, recommends that caseworkers be brought into the school to discuss options with children considering dropping out and re-engagement centers to address the concerns of people who have already dropped out.

    What I don’t hear is people clamoring for more teachers and smaller class sizes. If a teacher has to address 40 students per class and has five classes per day, that is 200 students each day that filter through the door. If we are going to have to hire people at all for this proposal, no offense to the caseworkers, but I would rather see that money go to hire more teachers.

    Snow on Rilke

    Although the review was published on my birthday, I did not see this review until this past week.

    If I have not said this before, I am amazed at the arts and lifestyle coverage I have discovered in The Wall Street Journal. If I have written it before, my incredulity has only grown.

    I am a passionate devotee of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.

    While I can tell you, for example, that I discovered Elena Ferrante by walking past a row of her books in Barnes&Noble one day and found the cover of The Days of Abandonment intriguing or that I discovered Andre Gide because I was assigned to read The Immoralist in my Modern and Postmodern Philosophy course, I cannot tell you how I came to first discover Rainer Maria Rilke.

    If I dig back in my memory, I have faint memories of reading that August Rodin had a poet for a secretary, that August Rodin’s emphasis on Things came to poetry through Rilke. Perhaps I have more to thank my art history professor for than I first realized. Though it is equally possible that I remember those references because I was already reading Rilke when I read those biographical details.

    Most of the Rilke I have read has been translated by Stephen Mitchell, but I have read translations from Edward Snow. I have never sat down and compared the two translators.

    This book is going to be another survey of his work, poems chosen from his different works but not a translation of his complete works. Which disappoints me: I want to read every poem that Rilke published. “Farrar, Straus and Giroux is publishing what it hopes will become the definitive English-language edition of Rilke’s poetry,” writes Weigel in her review. Her statement here is too broad in light of the limited scope of the collection. How can any survey hope to be the definitive edition?

    Certainly I could accept that Snow is aiming for the definitive introduction.

    The day after reading this review, I wandered, accidentally, through the poetry section of my local Barnes&Noble. And sitting on the shelf there were four books that called out to me. One I have forgotten already; one was Snow’s new Rilke; one was a collection of lectures that Robert Frost gave; and the last was The Shadow of Sirius a new collection from another favorite poet W.S. Merwin.

    More things for me to spend my hard earned money on, gentle readers. There never seems to be an end to new books I wish to read. I cannot even speak to the physicality of the book because I know if I had picked it up I would have been unable to have put it down.

    The Speed of Thought: Forming Words

    Of the two links, I heard the first segment, “In Milliseconds, Brain Zips from Thought to Speech” on the radio on the 18th. But the second link, which I almost find more interesting, I found as a related link at the bottom of the first article on NPR.org.

    One area of neuroscience I find particularly interesting is the study of neuroplasticity. The brain continues throughout our lives to change and evolve, to grow new neurons and rewire itself. That is what enables us to continue learning throughout our lifetimes.

    This is an exciting time for neuroscience. We are still figuring out what areas of the brain due what. Even as recently as ten or fifteen years ago the idea of neuroplasticity was dismissed, saying that we were born with a finite set of neurons and that was all we ever had.

    Beyond just building connections and deepening connections, we can also increase our raw ability to think. We can speed up our brains processing power and we can do it throughout our lives. One researcher, Dr. Richard Haier “says thinking is like running or weightlifting. It helps to have certain genes. But anyone can get stronger or faster by working out.”

    Maybe there is something to playing Brain Age after all.

    Et Tu, Brute?

    Caveat lector! Another fun article I found through Digg. Ten common Latin phrases. How many do you know, or think you know, before reading the little blurb under each?

    ]]>     http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/10/23/weekly-review-10-16-10-22/feed/ 0     Weekly Review: October 9th to October 15th http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/10/16/weekly-review-10-09-10-15/ http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/10/16/weekly-review-10-09-10-15/#comments Fri, 16 Oct 2009 04:00:48 +0000 Matthew Koslowski http://matthewkoslowski.com/?p=401

    Running a blog is a job in and of itself. Since starting this blog, my respect for journalists has grown because I have learned how much time it takes to craft a single post.

    My essays are pure opinion pieces. I read a book, a poem, an essay, or a news article. Then I think about what I’ve read and then look at my world and see if its relevant, judge if I think others might enjoy reading about my interaction with that work.

    And it takes me between two and four hours to write these essays.

    Yet I’m hooked. I love writing here because I feel more alive because I am again engaging the world in ways that I haven’t since college. Each essays calls upon me to look at my world and analyze it and reflect upon it.

    This is another great gift of literature.

    And, yes, I call even bad newspaper essays literature.

    These Things Caught My Eye

    Finger, Painting

    Known by many names this portrait of a woman in profile may be a Leonardo da Vinci. (Photocredit: Wikimedia Commons)

    A painting previously thought to be a 19th-century German work may be an unknown Leonardo da Vinci work.

    Da Vinci was said to use his hands and fingers to spread paint on his works. The experts who have examined the work found what seems to be a fingerprint and palm print on the work. Using sophisticated imaging techniques, they have isolated the supposed fingerprint.

    It matches known fingerprints of Leonardo da Vinci in 8 points, a respectable match. According to art collector Peter Silverman, the man who first bought the painting for $19,000, a match of 11 points is enough to convict someone.

    I have my doubts about this painting. Although I’ve not made an exhaustive study of Leonardo’s catalogue, the supposed work is not in the style that made him famous. A quick Google search turned up only one drawing of a woman in profile. His other portraits of women tend to be show the women in three-dimensions instead of two. Consider Lady with an Ermine and Mona Lisa.

    Fun fact about this style of painting. In the Italian nobility, this style of painting was passed from household to household as a sort of primitive dating service. Eligible males would be shown the painting and, if they were interested, would arrange to meet the woman pictured.

    Do You Want Factory-Farmed Children?

    It would be, I think, a good deal more accurate to call it an art, for it grows not only out of factual knowledge, but out of cultural tradition; it is learned not only by precept but by example, by apprenticeship; and it requires not merely a competent knowledge of its facts and processes, but also a complex set of attitudes, a certain culturally evolved stance, in the face of the unexpected and the unknown. That is to say, it requires style in the highest and richest sense of that term.
    –From “Discipline and Hope” by Wendell Berry

    Where do you think the above quote came from? A book about education? This is an blog about education, after all, isn’t it? The quote comes from a book on essays about agriculture and culture.

    From the beginning of that quotation, I deleted an important sentence: “The fact is that farming is not a laboratory science, but a science of practice.” What Berry writes is applicable to a wide range of fields. Teaching, counseling, and selling all first come to mind.

    I found this quote at a blog I’ve discovered in the past week Science Teacher by Michael Doyle. He uses that quote in arguing that just as we have lost something by handing over our farms to large corporations — so-called “factory farms” — we risk losing something in handing our education over to what may become “factory schools.”

    His philosophy of teaching messes well with my own as well as the philosophies of Jonathan Kozol and Mike Rose. He reminds us of the purpose of education, writing “Historically, public education’s priority has been to create a functioning citizenry; the current trend is to produce careerists. The two have critical, but subtle, distinctions. A citizenry that cannot grasp subtle but critical distinctions will ultimately fail as a republic.”

    I look forward to exploring more of what he has to say.

    When the High Jump Becomes a Pole Vault

    I appreciate the editorial cartoons that I’ve seen from Signe Wilkinson. After some investigation, I learned that reprinting her comics here may be an infringement of copyright and will post links to her comics from now on.

    Mommy, am I Responsible Yet?

    A lot of our rules on when people are responsible enough to assume tasks are arbitrary: 16 for most to get a driver’s license; 18 to vote, enter into contracts and join the military; 21 to drink alcohol; and 25 to rent a car from most car rental places. Many of these rules came about in a hodgepodge manner.

    I know in Massachusetts in general and Boston in particular, with our large student populations, there have been some concerns about the drinking age. The drinking age is 21 because the Federal Government mandates that the drinking age in order for states to receive federal monies for highways. Some groups such as the Amethyst Initiative argue that the high drinking age just promotes binge drinking. Others quote statistics that show once the drinking age was increased incidence of fatal car accidents fell.

    Can we judge responsibility for these tasks in an age-based manner? I don’t know that we can, but I don’t know how we could do it any differently. License people to drink alcohol? That would have people up in arms and would not solve any problems. We can get into circular arguments about American versus European attitudes towards responsibility and drinking.

    According to neuroscience and cognitive science, the prefrontal cortex — that part of the brain that regulates decision making and self-control — continues to develop until around the age of 30. Should we prohibit the entering into contracts prior 30? Should we prohibit marriage until 30 so that executive function can fully grow and mature? Abuse of drugs including alcohol can inhibit the full maturation of the brain, how do we consider that?

    Judging Motives to Evaluate Blame

    I love TED Lectures.

    I have watched a handful of them and most of them have been fascinating and engaging. The title of this one, however, is inaccurate. The webpage file name is more accurate (”rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments.html”).

    There seems to be a specialized area in the human brain dedicated to the interpretation of people’s motives and assessment of moral responsibility. When we listen to stories of actions, we consider if what the person was thinking and intending when assigning blame.

    Rebecca Saxe designed an experiment. She told a story of a woman called Grace who was making coffee for her friend and sweetened it with a white powder. There were three versions of the story:

    • In one version of the story, the box was labeled poison, Grace believed it was poison but put it in her friend’s coffee anyway;
    • in the second version, the box was labeled poison, Grace believed it was sugar but it turned out to be poison;
    • and the final version the box was labeled sugar but turned out to be poison.

    Rebecca and her team measured brain activity in this region and saw that the amount of activity corresponded with how much blame the test subjects though Grace deserved in each case.

    But what if they used magnetic interference to affect the functioning of that part of the brain? They did that. Watch the presentation to find out if it made a difference.

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