Author Archives: Steve

Time continued

While about today, I figured that I’d listen to a song I enjoy. I turned out of the hardware store’s parking lot, after noting a product called traction grit in bags, a beautiful name to remember for the story writer–He sanded the sidewalk with traction grit/the rear seat rubbed (felt, cut) like traction grit against his back/traction grit had been sprinkled (tossed) over the grounds where students had been slipping their way to exams and study halls.

Anyway, I started listening to the tune and then noticed that I’d been distracted (perhaps by the name “traction grit”) and had missed most of it. I clicked back to the start, reminding myself to remember to listen. Moments later, I returned to myself and remembered that I had been disregarding the tune once again. I also noticed that I was nearing my destination–a lighting store–and hadn’t really remembered riding the road. I hadn’t noticed my passage. Nor had I been listening to the song.

There’s a metaphor here somewhere, beyond the simple idea of the meaning of time.

(By the way, before someone critiques my driving habits or considers me a danger to others, you do this too).

Intelligent Design and the Lemon Test

Judge John Jones has found for the plaintiff in the Kitzmiller case. The order can be found on page 139 of the pdf.

A declaratory judgment is hereby issued in favor of Plaintiffs pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §§ 2201, 2202, and 42 U.S.C. § 1983 such that Defendants’ ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States and Art. I, § 3 of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Here’s more of the court language, whose tenor and force is plainly stated

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

To preserve the separation of church and state mandated by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and Art. I, § 3 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, we will enter an order permanently enjoining Defendants from maintaining the ID Policy in any school within the Dover Area School District, from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution, and from requiring teachers to refer to a religious, alternative theory known as ID.

For more go to The Panda’s Thumb.

Animals and the Constitution

The Eagle Forum’s Constitution Watch (I believe written by Virginia Armstrong Ph.D) writes this as a Fact vs. Fiction clarification for us dummies

Fact v. Fiction #2: Evolutionists claim that their battle against creation-science is primarily a “scientific” issue, not a constitutional question. But our treasured U. S. Constitution is written by persons and for persons. If man is an animal, the Constitution was written by animals and for animals. This preposterous conclusion destroys the Constitution. The Aguillard Humanists leave us with no Constitution and no constitutional rights of any kind if they allow us to teach only that man is an animal.

Well, garsh. Now that this has been cleared up, I can die.

Education Philosophies

Christopher Coonce-Ewing, a cool dude, provides his personal education philosophy on his weblog. Here’s the final paragraph:

I believe in an educational system which takes the ideals of the Platonic system, the suggestions of Adler, and uses these to help students attain a broad range of knowledge. This same system would embrace the findings of “A Nation at Risk” and would continue to self-evaluate with future reports to track changes in educational results. These national level reports would then tie into a national assessment system based upon a set of standards which would be created by a committee of educational professionals. Only by changing the system to ensure that all of the assessments and standards would be the same can educational equality be achieved in America.

Christopher’s philosophy is complicated and points to issues with inner-city schools, dynamic classrooms, and taking educational assessment seriously. I want to see him get to work on this stuff, even though I disagree with much of it.

What the Maya Did

The first part of the mural shows the establishment of order to the world.

The world is propped up by trees with roots leading to the underworld and branches holding up the sky, Saturno said.

Four deities, who are representations of the maize god’s son, provide a blood sacrifice and a unique offering before each tree.

“The story starts with this deity, who is patron of kings, standing in water. He’s running a large spear through his own penis, letting blood. Blood is squirting all over the place,” Saturno said.

See photo and story here.

What I find interesting here isn’t the visual sophistication of the Mayan mural but the time/space gap between it and the Dresden Codex (13th Century), which should open a significant path of research in history and archaeology. What does the mural invite not about what happened between it and the codex date but prior to its own time. What can we infer about the context of kingly rule for the Maya? It’s development of comology and expression, its mythology? The mural displays written expression, as well. So much more to think about.

Journeys

Garden State, I think, should be added to our examples of the journey. A weak and cliched ending, but still worthy of study in this context.

Nicely paced (much like Lost in Translation), solid character writing, visually interesting. But could we please redefine and reimagine “happy ending”?

Katamari and Consumerism

Ryan Moeller has added further comments to this entry on consumerism and Katamari Damacy. In addition to his comments, he points to the Learning Games Initiative, in whose work, and other initiatives like it, I have lots of interest.

But I want limit my use of the term consumerism to its pejorative context: in this sense, generally speaking, consumerism points to a direct connection between purchase and happiness and other related issues. This is what I meant by the allure and want comment in modern magazines. Fads, looks, styles, and poses–all these generate in an audience a want of those things for their own sake. “I want that lipstick,” Marv says, without knowing why, and having no other alternatives. But what does Marv himself produce or create?

In this sense, consumerism also infects education, in that people will take course after course only if they think it will get them a job (the job for its own sake is the key). Yes, we all need jobs, but the point is made regardless because we don’t often think about the undertow.

I am a consumer myself. I wanted Gran Turismo 4 no matter what. I played GT3 and had to have the next version because it had to be bigger, better, and badder. So I purchased it and it gave me a sense of “electricty” just to hold it. I know now that I had been taken for a ride: yeah, the physics had been improved, but nothing about the overall stimulus changed. The world of Gran Turismo just isn’t that interesting.

It’s a different story with Syberia. I wanted the next version to finish the story begun in the first. Was I satisfied? Sure. I wanted the story not the game for many reasons. I find that Katamri delights at many complex levels, one being the experience and design possibilities of its spaces. Delight in Katamari may be triggered by the desire to get more, but I disagree that this is a specific consumerist desire or impulse. Then again, I am also open to counter claims. Very much open.

My personal view is that we live in age of viscious consumerism (Christmas anyone?). I got an earful of this from students the other day as they detailed their complicated woes with the financial aid process, text books, and the future.

Compass Achievements

I’ve nearly completed my British Literature I finals and have been looking at journals and revisions of earlier writing by students. I think the final, a series of short answer questions, pin-pointed pretty well what I want students to know at the end (after lots of writing and reading), given the expectations and requirements of this mode of demonstration. The students pretty much got the prosody elements, showed more confidence in their responses, and knew where cited support was necessary.

But I’m thinking about something else: the knowledge structure of our British Literature sequence in relation to the college as a whole. Ideally, a student will enter the intro surveys with background in Composition and an additional semester of writing work in Composition II or Literature and Composition. Ideally, a student will have a pretty good grasp of textual analysis and critique, the fundamentals of argumentation, documentation styles for academic work, essay organizational structures, and the modern library. Ideally, the student will have followed this course of north to south/south to north study semester to semester so that the knowledge and practice is fresh upon entering the survey.

But what other elements form an ideal if we see the entrance into the course as a circle rather than a line of knowledge. A student might enter the survey with some degree of knowledge of historical analysis and some coverage of western history. Other elements could be mathematics and quantitative anlysis, an understanding of the analysis of instructions in a social, human context, psychology frameworks.

Case in point. Students in Brit Lit may also be enjoying Professor Timmons’ film course. In that course John covers elements of the hero’s journey and does so through viewings and lots of written analyses. These objectives compliment the study of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; they also compliment a student’s practice with styles of writing. Likewise, the study of the journey elements in British Literature compliment the study of film. In both courses, the journey constitutes a study of morphology, narrative, genre, character, history, social dynamics, and human culture and cognition. Beyond specific courses and their objectives, students in both courses should come out with a good sense of the journey as a big idea across the spectrum of human experience and in doing so learn something about film and literature.

It takes a lot of practice amd much thinking about it just to grasp the connections and significance of similar morphological elements in Star Wars and Sir Gawain. Mucho time spanned between the synoptics and Milton, and time can be deceptive. Milton had no ‘lectricity, right. If we are different and distinct from those who came before, then what could the similarities possibly be? Other discipline connections help to bust down this powerful barrier to creativity.