Literature&Literacy » Wall Street Journal http://matthewkoslowski.com matthewkoslowski.com Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:52:58 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Racing to the Test http://matthewkoslowski.com/2010/03/31/racing-to-the-test/ http://matthewkoslowski.com/2010/03/31/racing-to-the-test/#comments Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:46:38 +0000 Matthew Koslowski http://matthewkoslowski.com/?p=1062

In This Essay

“Only Two States Win Race to Top” by Neil King, Jr., The Wall Street Journal, March 30, 2010
On the surprising science of motivation by Dan Pink, TED, August 2009
Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us by Daniel M. Koretz, Ph.D.
 

I think the “Race to the Top” initiative by the Obama administration is as wrongheaded as “No Child Left Behind”.

Do not get me wrong, I believe that both President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have the best interests of our children at heart. And, I believe that President Bush and Senator Ted Kennedy, who people forget co-sponsored the legislation in the Senate, had the best interest of our children at heart. But I think they all are gravely mistaken.

I have worked at banks for the past three years. I have a pay-for-performance incentive plan, based on how many checking accounts, savings accounts, home equity loans and lines of credit, and investment referrals I make.

And it does not motivate me.

The Science of Motivation

When I go into work, I want to help people who want my help. I want to provide them with a service that they need and want, that will benefit them without putting them at too much risk.

But that mindset is not rewarded by an incentive plan. The metrics of the incentive plan do not take into account the risk that people could default on their home equity loans; that they could make a mistake, bounce one check that leads to a spiral of overdrafts that they cannot repay, and damages their ability to get a bank account for years to come; or that the person was put into the best account for them.

Volume. All that the incentive plan measures is volume.

At first, when I didn’t feel motivated by the incentive plan, I thought there was something wrong with me. But I realized I saw clearly after reading about the science on motivation and watching Dan Pink’s TED Lecture.

Dan Pink’s lecture is so important that although I’ve mentioned it before, I have decided to embed it below. Please take 20 minutes to watch it.

Dan Pink on Motivation

Even business people, unless they are solving simple problems, are not motivated by incentives. Public education is much too complex a problem to be solved by paying teachers for their students performing well on one high-stakes test.

Race to the Test

People who say that teaching to a test is good education, as long as the test is valid, are wrong.

Before the flood, I was reading Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us by Daniel M. Koretz, Professor of Education at Harvard University. Testing is Dr. Koretz’s area of expertise. He has studied the impact of teaching to the test. The results haven’t been good.

Although the scores have gone up, Dr. Koretz attributes much of this to score inflation rather than to increased learning.

When I was preparing for the SATs, I took an SAT Preparatory Course. And I am sure many of you reading this did too. Did the SAT Course teach you anything new? And, no, “test taking strategies” do not qualify as something new. If my score was higher because of the SAT Course, it was not because I knew more for taking it, but because I was gaming the test.

Taking the time in our classes to teach “test taking strategies” for the high stakes testing takes away from the time that we could actually be teaching our children content of value. If you teach above the level of the test, children will be able to take a test.

The way to properly use tests is as assessments. Students who are tested in April do not get their scores back until June or July. Their teachers get the scores no sooner. How can a teacher adjust his or her lesson plans and pedagogy for the takers of the test without the results of the test? Tests need to be targeted and timely.

We need to put the direction of our education system back into the hands of teachers and principals. I heard recently that there is not a single teacher on the Texas Board of Education, which is creating waves with its rewriting of its curriculum standards. Imagine if the American Medical Board had lawyers and teachers and politicians, but no doctors. Imagine if the American Bar Association had doctors and dentists, but no lawyers.

The free market model is not the proper answer for every question. Education is not a commodity and should not be subject to the free market forces.

]]> http://matthewkoslowski.com/2010/03/31/racing-to-the-test/feed/ 1 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.

    Top of Page | These Things Caught My Eye

    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: September 25th to October 1st http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/10/02/weekly-review-09-25-10-01/ http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/10/02/weekly-review-09-25-10-01/#comments Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:00:23 +0000 Matthew Koslowski http://matthewkoslowski.com/?p=284

    Today I’m launching a weekly link review, in which I’ll publish newspaper, magazine, and radio stories related to literature, education, psychology and neuroscience. Bear with me as I get the style down and while work out a few bugs, like how to link items in the table of contents to the full page so that you can jump right to any title that catches your fancy.

    These Things Caught My Eye

    Barring Books in Harvard

    Citing thefts and need to inventory rare books, the books are quite literally behind bars. Without warning, Harvard installed metal bars on bookshelves in the Dunster House Library to keep the books on the shelves.

    Bright Star

    John Keats is one of my poet-heroes. “The Ode to a Nightingale” is one of my favorite poems and one that I intend to memorize. I am excited to see Bright Star, a movie about Fanny Brawne and her love affair with John Keats. I put Fanny Brawne first because according to Ty Burr of the Boston Globe and what I have gleaned from the trailer the story makes Fanny Brawne the focus while Keats remains somewhat mysterious.

    Becoming Teachers

    Although education is not President Obama’s top priority, he is not ignoring it either. Our Great Recession has encouraged many people to think about their goals and the direction of their lives, both for recent graduates and career changers.

    The Wall Street Journal reports that as the outrageous monetary rewards of working on Wall Street disappeared, people who had been drawn to the money are considering jobs elsewhere in the economy and are willing to take less pay to make a difference.

    NPR is starting a new series, that seems to be called “Lesson Plans”, that will spend the next year exploring education. “What is a good teacher and what goes into making one?” reads the Series Introduction, “Over the next year, NPR will examine how teachers are evaluated, rewarded and disciplined.”

    The Craft of Writing and Inspiration of Mentors

    Among my other goals, I aspire to be a novelist. I write when I’m not busy working my day job, commuting between home and work, writing for my blog, dancing, sailing, cooking, cleaning, socializing, reading, or studying. Which means that I don’t work on my novel as much as I should.

    Lou Ureneck wrote a piece in the Boston Globe called “The writing craft, from hand to hand”. What he wrote about the differences between his freshman writing teacher and his sophomore writing teacher and mirrored what Mike Rose writes in Why School? about how to be an effective teacher who offers assessment and encouragement, who designs a curriculum around exercises that build on the ones that came before, who judges based on mastery of material and skills as opposed to grading to rank students. Mr. Ureneck writes:

    “I could use this gift – this encouragement to write – to deepen my appreciation of the aspects of the world that I found remarkable or beautiful by reliving them in language. It gave me the pleasure (as the poet Robert Pinsky has put it) of attempting something difficult. It set before me the aspiration toward mastery.”

    I still remember one of my middle school English teachers, Mrs. P–, who encouraged me. She was the first teacher to make me feel as though I really could be a writer, who encouraged me to continue writing. She’s the kind of teacher I aspire to be and who I thought of as I read about effective teachers.

    As I am trying to return to my writing, I have been thinking of Elizabeth Gilbert’s lecture that I saw on TED, “Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity”. Recently I received a fountain pen as a gift from my mother, bought a second fountain pen that I intend to use only for writing stories. I bought a special pen holder, a little statue of a seated figure with raised arms. Thinking about what Elizabeth Gilbert says about genii and the spirits of creativity, I have decided to think of her as a Muse and call her Calliope.

    Metaphors and the Way We Think

    I have been interested in George Lakoff’s theory of metaphors since college. Bodily, concrete metaphors are fundamental to how we think. The brain is part of our bodies and the mind is a function of our brains.

    I have not thought about this theory in a while. But I began thinking about it again this week when I read the essay in the Ideas Section of the Sunday Boston Globe called “Thinking literally” by Drake Bennett. Psychologists who have began studying just how grounded the metaphors are and if they impact behavior. One interesting study found that subjects gave more careful consideration to a set of questions when the clipboard the questioner presented the subject was heavier. A few other tests are described. This is research I would like to see in detail.

    Does Education Protect Someone from Dementia or Alzheimer’s?

    I saw this on Digg when I searched for “Education” the other day. Physorg.com published a short piece “Education may not affect how fast you will lose your memory”. Education does seem to postpone the onset of dementia or Alzheimer’s. Once someone exhibits signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s, however, the level of educational achievement does not slow the degeneration of cognition according to the results of a research study published in the February 3rd, 2009 issue of Neurology, the print journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

    Taking Things Serially

    I have seen a lot of articles and heard several radio stories over the past month — actually a little longer than that — about a convergence of research on brain function. Our brains are designed to process items serially, rather than concurrently. Translation: our brains are not built to multitask. People who think they can multitask well were shown in psychological tests to perform more poorly while multitasking than those who thought they could not multitask well.

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