Tag Archives: education

The Sound of Words Change, Reading Courage, and Jargon Demo

It doesn’t take much to raise questions about the English language that the casual user can’t answer. Why do we pronounce bury and berry the same way? Fury and jury look like the way they sound, but not bury.

In Old English, the word for bury was byrgan, and that “y” was pronounced like a short “oo” or “ew” as in took and few. Many other words used “y” and were converted to an “i” spelling. Bridge and kiss are two examples, but bury didn’t follow the normal route and retains, I gather, something of its historic sound. I suppose berry from Old English berie always sounded like we pronounce it today with bright and shallow 21st century American accents.

I learned another thing while looking this up. No, two things. First, the Internet isn’t great at teaching you how to pronounce certain types of words. Ask it how you pronounce the Old English gecyþnisse, and you’ll get this link, which is good. Ask it how to pronounce dryhten. Oh, it’s “driç.ten.” But I want to hear it, not read another spelling of it. And what about the “oo” sound for y’s?

Second, the words apple and berry are the original words for fruit. If the fruit in your hand isn’t a berry, it’s an apple, even as late as Middle English. Bananas in Middle English were “apples of paradise.” Dates to “finger-apples.” Cucumbers were “earth-apples,” and, yes, cucumbers are fruit. Melon developed in Greek from a word meaning “goard-apple” and was used generally for fruit.

Anyway, what else we got?

Crime Novel: A new comedic crime novel is “morbidly funny” and “lighthearted literary entertainment at its best.” City of Angles is playwright Johnathan Leaf’s first novel. You’ll be reading more about it in days to come.

Downgrading Education: What worries today’s administrators about [great books] is not their purported irrelevance, nor the allegedly harmful language or controversial arguments they contain. It is rather the example they provide of characters like Huck Finn, who preferred eternal damnation to snitching on his friend Jim.”

Favorite Novel: “Simply put, Tristram Shandy is a novel I love, one I’ve reread more often than almost any other. It never wears out . . .” I remember one of my English professors loving it too.

And finally, a brief presentation of Rockwell Automation’s retro encabulator in easy to understand, common sense jargon.

Breaking News: A sequel demo was released last year, “living proof that leveraging existing assets is not plagiarism.”

Photo: John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

What Everyone Should Read, Thanksgiving Americans, and Swordplay

I’m almost done reading Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, and last night I thought, “Everyone should read this. They should assign it in schools or colleges. It should be something that young people should be expected to read before they are thirty.” Hundreds of churches would benefit from reading of the unmerited grace God shows the whisky priest, his duty and that of the lieutenant, and sparks of faith you can see here and there. It would stir up the pious in a way they need to be stirred.

Patrick Kurp’s son may have a better idea. He suggests making The Gulag Archipelago required reading in high school. Kurp replies, “This simple idea is too commonsensical ever to be adopted. The historical memory of many Americans has almost evaporated, leaving it eminently inflatable with hogwash.” Education, he says, is being trivialized.

Thanksgiving: In Barry Levinson’s Avalon (1990), Titus Techera writes, “Thanksgiving has a double character. On the one hand, it’s a kind of nonreligious expression of gratitude—ultimately, a form of patriotism. These are not religious people, and it seems that, without religion, Americans don’t know who is especially deserving of their thanks. They love America, but it seems no different than loving themselves. . . . On the other hand, Thanksgiving is supposed to save Americans from this individualism by forcing them at least to stop busybodying and rekindling the love of their own family.”

Paperbacks: “Around about the 1950s, the American literary establishment—never exactly nimble on its feet—noticed its world had changed a decade earlier.” And somewhat related, here are 30 fantasy book series with brief introductions.

Rings of Power: Still joking about convoluted story mess in the first season of Rings of Power. There’s a lot of material there. I’ve watched several of Ryan George’s Pitch Meetings skits and feel there’s a cumulative effect to several of the jokes. If this is the first one you see, you may that watching a few more adds to the humor of the whole.

Swords: A swordsman reviews his blade, one styled after a 14th century bastard sword.

Faithful: Pastors remain in Ukraine, leaning on the Almighty every day.

In the second tweet, Lee writes, “The 5th day, he woke up alone in bed at 5 am, and began weeping for an hour, for no obvious reason other than a sudden realization of his new reality. 9 months have passed. What did he learn? ‘God is good, all the time. It’s not just a slogan for me— it’s a deep conviction.'”

God have mercy on us and string Ukrainian streets with peace.

First Thanksgiving in Virginia, Elite Evangelicalism, and Everything Decays

Phil Wade

I hope everyone here, there, and elsewhere has had a happy Thanksgiving. I realize this is an American holiday, but it’s just one more way you should allow America into your hearts and lives for your own and your country’s flourishing. I’m talking to you, United Kingdom. You never should have let all the good people leave your empire, you sick tyrant.

Okay, what else have we got?

First Thanksgiving: “After a rough two-and-a-half months on the Atlantic, [the Margaret, a 35-foot-long ship with 36 settlers and crew] entered the Chesapeake Bay on November 28, 1619. It took another week to navigate the stormy bay, but they arrived at their destination, Berkeley Hundred, later called Berkeley Plantation, on December 4. They disembarked and prayed.”

Ben Franklin: In a new biography, D. G. Hart presents Benjamin Franklin as an example of a “spiritual, but not religious” American Protestantism. “As much of a cliché as pulling himself-up-by-his-bootstraps is, his wit and striving say as much about Protestantism as it does about American character.”

Cultural Elites: Carl Trueman is thankful for David French‘s articles supporting the Respect for Marriage Act. “Elite evangelicalism is clearly making its peace with the sexual revolution and those of us who will not follow suit are destined for the margins.”

The Ends of History: Michael Bonner has written a defense of civilization. “All this is to say that the ‘whole new world’ we were promised in the 90s is much like the old one, only worse. The theory of irreversible progress seems increasingly implausible. It seems that anyone of any walk of life or partisan stripe could agree with Livy that ‘we can bear neither our vices nor their remedies’.”

Education: Can Christian Higher Education Stay the Course? “I could rattle off a litany of universities that remain under the auspices of Mainline Protestant denominations but where an effort to think Christianly beyond the bounds of theology is foreign to its educational mission and has been for a long time.”

New Cambridge Fellow focus of Academics’ outrage

A new research fellow at St Edmund’s College of Cambridge has riled 300+ professors who think he earned the position unethically. The Guardian offers a review of the complaints, which are not based on what Noah Carl has actually written but on characterizations of his research. 

“A careful consideration of Carl’s published work and public stance on various issues, particularly on the relationship between race and ‘genetic intelligence’, leads us to the unambiguous conclusion that his research is ethically suspect and methodologically flawed,” states the letter, which is signed by seven Cambridge professors and more than 700 other academics.

If Carl’s work has been carefully considered, then citing offending arguments and data shouldn’t be a problem. But when Quillette Magazine reviewed the work, they found nothing that aligned with the complaints. They asked one of the signatories to spell out his complaint and received a broad assertion that certain concepts have “at best questionable scientific validity” and cannot be taken in stride by anyone. Again Quillette couldn’t find these concepts in Carl’s work and are arguing for the public rebuke of the professors who appear to have signed a letter grounded in nothing by hearsay.

“Accusing a young scholar of ‘psuedoscientific racism,’ and claiming his work is ‘ethically suspect’ and ‘methodologically flawed,’ is not something that should be done lightly, given the likely impact on his career,” Quillette editors write. “Anyone who cares about intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity should join us in denouncing this witch-hunt.”

They asked many other academics for comment and received responses like this from Jonathan Haidt, a professor of ethical leadership at New York University Stern School of Business

Greg Lukianoff and I open chapter 5 of The Coddling of the American Mindwith a Durkheimian analysis of witch hunts. It works beautifully to explain the otherwise inexplicable and shameful open letter denouncing Rebecca Tuvel and calling for the retraction of a philosophy article that hardly any of the hundreds of signatories had read. That whole affair was an embarrassment for the academy and those who signed the open letter. Here we go again. If hundreds of professors think that Noah Carl conducts bad science, let them make the case, with quotations and citations. The “open letter” denouncing Carl is just a list of vague assertions and charges of guilt by association. If the signers think we should condemn anyone who gives ammunition to “extremist and far right media,” they should write a new letter condemning themselves.

Maybe the review process proposed by Susan Harlan in “A Poem About Your University’s New and Totally Not Time-wasting Review Process for Tenure and Promotion,” would help curtail these open letters. While a mob of professors is not funny, this is.

Christian Smith: Higher Ed is Full of BS

You’ve probably heard Christian Smith quoted in a sermon or lecture within the last decade, even if you don’t know who he is. He’s the one who gave us the label “moralistic therapeutic deism” as a descriptor of what is commonly taught in American churches. Earlier this month in a piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Smith describes the state of American higher ed in words I don’t expect pastors will quote so freely. He lists 22 things that are worthless in our university system.

Calling out the BS is not about my personal experience, limits, or feelings. It is not even only about the unconscionable fact that countless millions of students are receiving compromised and sometimes worthless college educations, as sickening as that is. Ultimately, we must grasp the more dreadful reality that all of this BS in the academy is mortally corrosive of our larger culture and politics.

It’s tragic, he says, but his contemporaries have probably lost all understanding of that concept.

No, the idea of tragedy is incomprehensible in institutions drifting in a Bermuda Triangle marked by the external-funding addictions of the STEM fields, the obsequious scientism of the social sciences, and the intellectual fads, ideological doctrines, and science-envy that captivate and enervate the humanities.

Exploitation in Humanities Departments

There’s an idea that college professors should be free to pursue whatever interests them, to go wherever their professional curiosity takes them without concern for the market, but that’s close to the fantasy of fan-fiction, stories written for the fun of it without an eye on their publication (even though that too is changing).

Adjunct professor Kevin Birmingham brings up this point among others in his talk on the native exploitation by college humanities and English departments. On the one hand, adjuncts aren’t paid well.

An annual report by the American Association of University Professors indicated that last year “the average part-time faculty member earned $16,718” from a single employer. Other studies have similar findings. Thirty-one percent of part-time faculty members live near or below the poverty line. Twenty-five percent receive public assistance, like Medicaid or food stamps.

These teachers are easily hired, easily dismissed. Funding for actual classroom instruction has been declining, but administrative roles are increasing. Apparently, teaching students is a declining priority for many of our universities, which makes news of another closure more tolerable.

On the other hand, graduate programs are milling out Ph.Ds at a rate that far exceeds the need. Universities, Birmingham explains, have the only job market for these graduates, but they produce roughly four times the number of candidates for the available jobs and availability is shrinking.

English departments do this because graduate students are the most important element of the academy’s polarized labor market. They confer departmental prestige. They justify the continuation of tenure lines, and they guarantee a labor surplus that provides the cheap, flexible labor that universities want.

Like a migrant worker system.

Many market principles could be learned here. One broad one would be morality cannot be based on market realities (or just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should). Colleges exist to teach, and qualified teachers should receive the honor and compensation they are due. When you have the money to pay them well, you should.

But another one may be that if some universities don’t care to teach, others should be able to pick up that slack and grow, keeping a focus on their students’ well-being in mind and not treating them like grist for the sake of the program.

We Can Burn Books, So Why Not Teachers?

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“We train as researchers but spend our days managing the emotions of late adolescents, haggling over budgets, and figuring out how to use Moodle’s gradebook,” writes Jonathan Malesic, who used to teach at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, before he burned out.

“Eventually, I came to dread every class meeting.”

He describes his experience and some lessons learned.

Chronic dislocation produces the three main components of burnout: exhaustion, cynicism, and a sense of professional ineffectiveness. Burned-out professors, then, are people who cannot muster the strength to do the intellectual labor of their job, who see students as problems, and who feel their work has no positive effect.

Introverted teachers and students appear to be at greater risk for burnout in increasingly social learning environments. English teacher Michael Godsey tells this story:

After 11 years of teaching English at a public high school, Ken Lovgren left the profession, mostly because he was drained by the insistent emphasis on collaboration and group work. Engaging in a classroom that was “so demanding in terms of social interaction” made it difficult for him to find quiet space to decompress and reflect. “The endless barrage of ‘professional learning community’ meetings left me little energy for meaningful interaction with my kids,” he told me.

The Freedom That Undermines Itself

“Universities are addicted to censorship, and the Department of Education is their partner and enabler.”

David French writes about Title IX and students who have sued to restrict the statements of their professor. There he explains the ramifications of modern liberalism, which is self-destructive in the sense that it undermines the principles at purports to celebrate. In another article, he explains what happened at Northwestern University when a feminist professor wrote in favor of student/teacher relationships.

“Two students filed Title IX complaints against her, claiming that she’d violated federal law with her essay and a subsequent tweet. In essence, they were claiming that her writings on matters of public concern constituted unlawful gender discrimination.” More than that, they complained when others shared their complaints and spoke in favor of academic freedom.

While there is a huge, stinking pile of liberalism in this squabble, one of the lessons is the real threat to students in American universities like Northwestern. If they want to believe that love is what you make it, then they’ll have to realize they have kicked down all of the fences. All of them. The students have no grounds for complaint against a professor who supports sexual license, but if they idea scares them, they need to get out and reconsider their own self-destructive ideas.

Hunter Baker on the Ruin of Christian Higher Ed

Dr. Hunter Baker observes, “All universities, and certainly Christian ones, face a landscape in which students have been largely replaced by consumers.” He says in his latest book, if Christian colleges try to be like their secular counterparts, they will fail on almost every level, particularly in their stated mission. On the other hand, if they integrate the worship of the Most High with every academic discipline, they will distinguish themselves and accomplish their mission. “Christian colleges can successfully argue that the best education connects with the mind, the body, and the soul.”

‘There Are No Jobs in Academia.’

Ryan Anderson is a grad student in anthropology (not the clothing store). “I realized how bad things were when I was about half way through my PhD program—and it didn’t help that the global economy was literally crashing right when I started. You know, the whole ‘Great Recession’ thing. After one year, I nearly dropped out. Looking back, maybe that would have been the better decision. But, for some reason, I kept going…in part because of a vague hope that things would somehow ‘work out.’ I too pinned my hopes on that imagined employer.”

The bottom line, he says, is this isn’t the 1960s and there are no jobs in academia. He points to data showing about 36,000 new PhDs for every 3,000 new positions created. Is this education making 33,000 better people or just dragging them and their families down? (via Anthony Bradley)