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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Mark Smith

Mark Smith

The Wisdom Deficit in Schools - The Atlantic - 4 views

  • I get it: My job is to teach communication, not values, and maybe that’s reasonable. After all, I’m not sure I would want my daughter gaining her wisdom from a randomly selected high-school teacher just because he passed a few writing and literature courses at a state university (which is what I did). My job description has evolved, and I’m fine with that. But where are the students getting their wisdom?
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    "I get it: My job is to teach communication, not values, and maybe that's reasonable. After all, I'm not sure I would want my daughter gaining her wisdom from a randomly selected high-school teacher just because he passed a few writing and literature courses at a state university (which is what I did). My job description has evolved, and I'm fine with that. But where are the students getting their wisdom?"
Mark Smith

What do 'right-to-work' laws do to a state's economy? - 5 views

  • Similarly, one 1998 study by Thomas J. Holmes found that companies in heavily unionized states often relocated just across state borders to right-to-work states. But is that due to the right-to-work laws or other policies?
Mark Smith

It's Official: Watching Fox Makes You Stupider | The Nation - 9 views

  • According to a new study by Farleigh Dickinson University, Fox viewers are the least knowledgeable audience of any outlet, and they know even less about politics and current events than people who watch no news at all.
Mark Smith

The Case for Breaking Up With Your Parents - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Hi... - 5 views

  • More than love, sex, courtship, and marriage; more than inheritance, ambition, rivalry, or disgrace; more than hatred, betrayal, revenge, or death, orphanhood—the absence of the parent, the frightening yet galvanizing solitude of the child—may be the defining fixation of the novel as a genre, what one might call its primordial motive or matrix, the conditioning psychic reality out of which the form itself develops.
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    "This is the play-date generation. ... There was a time when children came home from school and just played randomly with their friends. Or hung around and got bored, and eventually that would lead you on to something. Kids don't get to do that now. Busy parents book them into things constantly-violin lessons, ballet lessons, swimming teams. The kids get the idea that someone will always be structuring their time for them."
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    A great article, worth 15 minutes.
Mark Smith

We Can't Teach Students to Love Reading - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Highe... - 14 views

  • My hyper-attentive habits were alienating me further and further from the much older and (one would have thought) more firmly established habits of deep attention. I was rapidly becoming a victim of my own mind's plasticity, until a new technology helped me to remember how to do something that for years had been instinctive, unconscious, natural.
Mark Smith

SpeEdChange: The Big Lies (Part Two) - 9 views

  • Why is a second grader "comparing and contrasting"? Because the Common Core is designed to preserve education as a self-contained hazing ritual for wealth and power maintenance. From the start we are preparing students to write the worthless five paragraph essay, so that those who comply best succeed best.
  • It is, of course, within those "extras" that the human spirit lies. Why learn to read if you cannot read about the things which matter most to you? Why learn to write if you can not write a song? Why learn to count if you do not appreciate the value of what you are counting?
  • The reason we must abandon "core subjects" and embrace Passion-Based Learning is that today we give students absolutely no reason to learn anything. We have turned school into a series of chores with no purpose. Eight-year-olds hate books and reading because they've spent three years drilling in decoding - literacy is pointless effort, not a path to passions. Sixteen-year-olds hate mathematics because they've spent eleven years drilling with numbers, x-s and y-s - maths are totally irrelevant, not a link to a magical world of real and virtual construction.
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    Tell it, brother!
Mark Smith

Google Plus for learning | Scoop.it - 14 views

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    A veritable cornucopia of ideas and tips.
Mark Smith

How to Land Your Kid in Therapy - Magazine - The Atlantic - 8 views

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    "college deans have reported receiving growing numbers of incoming freshmen they've dubbed "teacups" because they're so fragile that they break down anytime things don't go their way. "Well-intentioned parents have been metabolizing their anxiety for them their entire childhoods," Mogel said of these kids, "so they don't know how to deal with it when they grow up." "
Mark Smith

Philip Larkin, the Impossible Man - Magazine - The Atlantic - 3 views

  • In somewhat different ways, Orwell and Larkin were phlegmatically pessimistic and at times almost misanthropic, not to say misogynistic. Both also originated from dire family backgrounds that inculcated prejudice against Jews, the colored subjects of the British Empire, and the working class.
  • In somewhat different ways, Orwell and Larkin were phlegmatically pessimistic and at times almost misanthropic, not to say misogynistic. Both also originated from dire family backgrounds that inculcated prejudice against Jews, the colored subjects of the British Empire, and the working class.
  • In somewhat different ways, Orwell and Larkin were phlegmatically pessimistic and at times almost misanthropic, not to say misogynistic. Both also originated from dire family backgrounds that inculcated prejudice against Jews, the colored subjects of the British Empire, and the working class.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • In somewhat different ways, Orwell and Larkin were phlegmatically pessimistic and at times almost misanthropic, not to say misogynistic. Both also originated from dire family backgrounds that inculcated prejudice against Jews, the colored subjects of the British Empire, and the working class.
  • In somewhat different ways, Orwell and Larkin were phlegmatically pessimistic and at times almost misanthropic, not to say misogynistic. Both also originated from dire family backgrounds that inculcated prejudice against Jews, the colored subjects of the British Empire, and the working class.
  • In somewhat different ways, Orwell and Larkin were phlegmatically pessimistic and at times almost misanthropic, not to say misogynistic. Both also originated from dire family backgrounds that inculcated prejudice against Jews, the colored subjects of the British Empire, and the working class.
  • In somewhat different ways, Orwell and Larkin were phlegmatically pessimistic and at times almost misanthropic, not to say misogynistic. Both also originated from dire family backgrounds that inculcated prejudice against Jews, the colored subjects of the British Empire, and the working class.
  • In somewhat different ways, Orwell and Larkin were phlegmatically pessimistic and at times almost misanthropic, not to say misogynistic. Both also originated from dire family backgrounds that inculcated prejudice against Jews, the colored subjects of the British Empire, and the working class.
  • In somewhat different ways, Orwell and Larkin were phlegmatically pessimistic and at times almost misanthropic, not to say misogynistic. Both also originated from dire family backgrounds that inculcated prejudice against Jews, the colored subjects of the British Empire, and the working class.
  • In somewhat different ways, Orwell and Larkin were phlegmatically pessimistic and at times almost misanthropic, not to say misogynistic. Both also originated from dire family backgrounds that inculcated prejudice against Jews, the colored subjects of the British Empire, and the working class.
  • This is the world of wretched, tasteless food and watery drinks, dreary and crowded lodgings, outrageous plumbing, surly cynicism, long queues, shocking hygiene, and dismal, rain-lashed holidays, continually punctuated by rudeness and philistinism. In Orwell’s early fiction, all this is most graphically distilled in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, but it is an essential element of the texture of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and was quarried from the “down and out” journalism of which he produced so much
Mark Smith

Truthdig - Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System - 7 views

  • “For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.”
    • Mark Smith
       
      This is as profoundly true now as it ever was.
Mark Smith

Daily Kos: Notice to All Banker Types from a Teacher - 8 views

  • This is not meant in any way to be punitive. We realize that in some areas of the country it will be tough to get your depositors to the stated benchmarks due to unemployment, and poverty. But we must stress that there are no excuses. We believe in you as bankers and we believe in depositors' innate ability to grow their bank accounts.
Mark Smith

Reading and the Web - Texts Without Context - NYTimes.com - 14 views

  • We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.
  • People tweet and text one another during plays and movies, forming judgments before seeing the arc of the entire work.
  • Recent books by respected authors like Malcolm Gladwell (“Outliers”), Susan Faludi (“The Terror Dream”) and Jane Jacobs (“Dark Age Ahead”) rely far more heavily on cherry-picked anecdotes — instead of broader-based evidence and assiduous analysis — than the books that first established their reputations. And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.
Mark Smith

George Orwell - James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution - Essay - 0 views

  • Socialism, until recently, was supposed to connote political democracy, social equality and internationalism. There is not the smallest sign that any of these things is in a way to being established anywhere, and the one great country in which something described as a proletarian revolution once happened, i.e. the USSR, has moved steadily away from the old concept of a free and equal society aiming at universal human brotherhood. In an almost unbroken progress since the early days of the Revolution, liberty has been chipped away and representative institutions smothered, while inequalities have increased and nationalism and militarism have grown stronger. But at the same time, Burnham insists, there has been no tendency to return to capitalism. What is happening is simply the growth of "managerialism", which, according to Burnham, is in progress everywhere, though the manner in which it comes about may vary from country to country.
    • Mark Smith
       
      The misssing link between socialism (as it deforms and plays itself out) and managerialism, or "bureaucracy", as I might say, socialism's bastard son.
  • Burnham does not deny that "good" motives may operate in private life, but he maintains that politics consists of the struggle for power, and nothing else.
  • Lenin, indeed, is one of those politicians who win an undeserved reputation by dying prematurely.
Mark Smith

George Bush Book 'Decision Points' Lifted From Advisers' Books - 4 views

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    Hmmm..... an object lesson in how not to use sources.
Mark Smith

t r u t h o u t | "Value-Added" Assessment: Tool for Improvement or Educational "Nuclea... - 4 views

  • The growing enthusiasm over value-added assessment, however, belies what is actually a damaging policy for public education. Value-added assessment promises, rather, to dismantle teachers' unions, deintellectualize teachers' jobs, to refashion schools according to corporate-profit-making initiatives and to burn out experienced teachers at ever faster rates. What its proponents fail to realize is that value added contributes to the destruction of public education by 1) participating in a broader corporate reform scheme of privatization and 2) objectifying knowledge, or turning knowledge into "things," that is, units that can be measured, compared and transmitted at the expense of genuine learning.
    • Mark Smith
       
      Amen!
  • There are two basically different ideas of educational value at play in this debate. For proponents of value-added assessment, standardized tests contain certain, verifiable and numerically quantifiable knowledge. The tests are mistakenly thought to be objective.
Mark Smith

"The Blood of Thought": Zbigniew Herbert on Hamlet, first time in English  | ... - 5 views

  • The mad Ophelia and the mock-mad Hamlet expressed the poet’s many-sided rebellion against the world’s ordinariness. For there is a kind of normality that is unacceptable, a base, comfortable normality that submits to reality, forgets easily. It is universal because some inner law of economics doesn’t allow us to experience reality to the full, to the depths, at the level of the most profound feelings and meanings. The same instinct for self-preservation in the sphere of the mind protects us from an excessive sensitivity, from the ultimate why and wherefore. Hamlet is the contradiction of that attitude.
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    Brilliant essay.
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