Joseph C. Phillips talks about the failure of public schools and the need to ask hard questions. He points to last years scores on student performance.

These are not students failing because they do not have access to the internet or don’t have Olympic sized swimming pools. The sad fact is that the report demonstrates that middle-class black boys are scoring about as well as poor white boys. These are students who are not proficient in the basics of math and English.

With education experts always calling for more money, is it evident at last that the experts either don’t know how to educate children or more likely have conflicting goals which practically hinder education?

Our friend Loren Eaton, of the I Saw Lightning Fall blog, sent me this link from Tor.com, an article by Ryan Britt on the new BBC Sherlock series (which you may recall I liked), linking it to Science Fiction.

The notion of Sherlock being a sort of cerebral superhero came up a lot. He does seem a lot like Mr. Spock or The Doctor when viewed through a certain lens. However, there might be something even more alien about Holmes than Data, Spock, or The Doctor put together. Doctor Who show-runner and co-creator of Sherlock, Stephen Moffat explains in this brief interview below.

First Thoughts, the First Things blog, links to this article on a remarkable educational phenomenon going on in Kurdish Iraq. In a piece called “Something Terrible and Wonderful,” Joseph Knippenberg tells of a new university, where westerners teach in the old western liberal tradition.

From what I can tell (having visited the institution some months ago), the American University of Iraq-Sulaimani is unique in Iraq, where higher education emphasizes rote learning, large lectures, and high-stakes testing. By contrast, at AUIS, classes are small and discussion-oriented. The students understand and appreciate the difference, as this press release about auditions for a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth seems to indicate:

I don’t even like poetry,” said Khende Asaad, an International Studies major from Erbil. “But when I hear Shakespeare, I feel like this big door is opening, and something terrible and wonderful is about to happen.”

I didn’t sleep well last night (not unusual), and I expected today to be kind of lousy, as they so often are, for some inexplicable reason, when I’m half asleep all the time.

But it was a good day.

First, deep background. I spent most of last Saturday tinkering with my snowblower, because we’d gotten about 10 inches of dense, heavy snow overnight. I’d planned to do housecleaning that day, to prepare for the upcoming holidays, but clearing the driveway took priority.

I never did get the driveway cleared (fortunately mild weather since then has melted most of it off now). I’m new to snowblowing, and wasn’t aware of the arcane things you have to do to get one of those suckers running again after its summer vacation.

I finally gave up, and decided I’d take it back to Sears for service one night this week. But this was the first night I’d had clear to do that. Continue reading Multiple hooplas, plus a likely historical exaggeration →

Your cultural taste may, in fact, be conditioned by your education, profession, father’s profession, and aspirations to a certain social class. Mark Greif writes about unmasking hipsters and what taste really says about us.

“Bourdieu set out to show the social logic of taste: how admiration for art, appreciation of music, even taste in food, came about for different groups, and how ‘superior’ taste was not the result of an enchanted superiority in scattered individuals,” states Greif.

This is a tough subject. How do we define ourselves? How can we live content with our place in life while aspiring to something better? What does an authentic, unpretentious person look like? Or to put it another way, does anything really matter? (Thanks to Mark Bertrand for linking to this.)

I promised you a review of The Identity Man tonight, but I’m not feeling very well. Left work early, and am devoting myself to rest.

Look at this outdoor art installation: Work No. 700. From the London museum’s site: “According to the critic Martin Herbert writing about this piece for Art Monthly, ‘There is deep pleasure in this confluence of discipline and forgiveness, the admirable lunge for perfection offset by a recognition that we cannot reach it in real life’.”

Like the recognition that this steel I-beam won’t forgive you for stumping your toe on it. I think this work is better appreciated with a martini or three.

And now for something completely different. Two dark-side illustrations by Ben Fleuter reimagining two Warner Brothers characters

Wabbit Season



Here’s the Kaboom

One more: A cover image from The St. Canard News

This site has a lot of impressive illustration and photography on anything imaginable as well as unwholesome–no, let’s say perverse–subject matter. So if you choose to browse, be careful.

From another site on this theme, here’s a post on a book Disney has published about their princesses. I love what Maria Elena Naggi did with Belle from Beauty and the Beast. I think she’s my favorite Disney heroine, and this painting suits her perfectly.