Out of Egypt:

now i'm studying for the gre

Sarah, as if she were looking out for me, found a site called FreeRice which has finallly gotten me studying for the GRE. It tests you on vocabulary and also supports hunger relief through ads. So far the highest I've gotten is vocab level 48 (out of 50), though only very briefly. Highly recommended. (Although I wonder how much the ads pay if people's click-through rates are as low as I imagine they might be.)

Now I need to find an equivalent for math problems... (Especially since that's the area where I really need work.)

UPDATE: I just made it to level 50! w00t.

why the arts are so important

"While students in art classes learn techniques specific to art, such as how to draw, how to mix paint, or how to center a pot, they're also taught a remarkable array of mental habits not emphasized elsewhere in school.

Such skills include visual-spatial abilities, reflection, self-criticism, and the willingness to experiment and learn from mistakes. All are important to numerous careers, but are widely ignored by today's standardized tests."

-Art for our sake - The Boston Globe

[Via Arts & Letters Daily]

This discussion is getting interesting...

We don't need more jobs, we need more workers, or so Ryan Davidson writes, in his critique of the send-everyone-to-college American educational system.

Some prior reading that might give his argument context: Life (near) Minimum Wage, my thoughts on the demoralization inherent in low-paying jobs and people's inability to maintain a decent standard of living on the pay. Ryan wrote back saying training was the solution, essentially what he's saying now, but I (and John Dagen) replied that they'll always need to be someone to mop the floors. And, as I said in my follow-up post, unless we want to live in a welfare state, those people need to be able to live on the pay too.

About a month later, Bob offered some brief thoughts on How to End Poverty (Yeah Right). And that about brings you up to the present.

So, then, what do I think about all this? Well, I'm not exactly sure what I think, but I probably agree with Bob more than anyone else, as he seems to be striking the mediating position. Extremes scare me.

I hope Ryan was being hyperbolic when he suggested that we abolish inner-city high schools. Perhaps we should give everyone one year of high school education and we can evaluate their interest and potential at that point. Then those who decide they aren't suited for traditional high school (got to give people a say in their own outcome; we don't want people to feel like pawns and simply live up to others' expectations) can go to vocational training in a field which seems appropriate and in which they have some interest.

Definitely I think that the current system has problems. Perhaps high school teachers wouldn't spend so much time babysitting, answering again and again the quite-relevant question "When are we going to use this in life?" if people who weren't going to use it in life weren't there.

On a deeper level, the question is, How comfortable are we, as a society, with inequality? As Americans we confess that all people are created equal, but we know that in reality we can only be equal in our standing before the law, not in our abilities. To be equal in opportunity would be nice, but perhaps unachievable - David Brooks wrote an excellent editorial about America as a meritocracy based on education. This would be fine as long as people have similar circumstances controlling their access to education, but, of course, this is not the case. I don't want to keep people in the inner city from going to university simply because that's not what we expect of them, but on the other hand, I see Ryan's point as well.

Maybe Plato's myth of the metals has more truth to it than we'd like to admit. For social stability, are we willing to say that, when it comes to ability (in this case, intellectual), some people are gold, some silver, and some bronze? I have no problem with saying that - as long as people are given a chance to reveal their own ability through their work, rather than being locked into one of those classes through the chances of birth, wealth, and place.

learning is fun again

Had my first Microeconomics class today with Dr. Fikkert. He seemed as good as people say he is. Might end up in my upper echelon of Covenant professors, along with Davis, Macdougall, Foreman (most of the time), and Macallister (in non-core classes).

I like the idea of me taking Microeconomics P/F, though I do worry about the difficulty level for someone who hasn't taken math since 11^th grade. But I think algebra and geometry, as he described it, will be something I can do. I especially like how we spent most of our first class period together actually taking notes intensively, acquiring concepts. That's what I wanted to do in college. I've done far too little of it. Perhaps that's what I get for being a wishy-washy English major, dwelling in the shadow-world of opinion.

it feels so good to be done...

Yeah, no more papers, websites, etc. My Boethius site that I created for Dr. Davis' class should be online soon...

Guess there are still finals to worry about. But I'm not going to worry about them. I will study for them, though. Particularly CHOW Art & Music...

So it's the end of an academic year, and I'm feeling generous. I feel like you all need to be rewarded with something. How about this? Check out some of the links farther down on this page for some more good old-fashioned New Age geometric fun. It's sort of like Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum except these people actually believe it.

Will Minich's Dr. Hesselink Impersonation

"Yes, I do like semicolons sometimes."

Check out the Writer's Reference. It has cool stuff, like about why Strunk and White don't like "however" at the beginning of sentences. However, I do.

primal death scream

Yes, I've decided that preparing a bibliography in Microsoft Word is the most frustrating task imaginable. I refuse to do it anymore. That program is completely counterintuitive. AutoFormat does exactly the opposite of what I want it to do, whether I'm writing poetry, creating a bulleted list, indenting text, formatting, or making a table. I'd rather compose my documents in straight HTML. If I saw Bill Gates right now, I'd be tempted to punch him in the face.

This is the night before the day of my first SIP deadline

And I'm doing it, man, I'm doing it. I am researching that beast. Or, in any case, looking up names of books that intrigue me and come well-reviewed and well-referenced. Oh, Amazon, I love thee. Oh, citations, I do not.

Citation ruins lives

I've been looking for the past twenty minutes for a JavaScript citation creator that does MLA and APA. NoodleTools apparently has one, but it costs money, as all good things do, I suppose. Till then, there's WebCite.

Refocusing the SIP

So research is starting to be fun again. Probably having a topic that I enjoy helps. So, anyway, I wanted to write my SIP on how hypertext changes the way readers approach texts, making intertextuality more explicit and integrating them into new discourse communities, possibly transcending the word culture/image culture, hot communication/cool communication dialectic identified by Marshall McLuhan. But that's still too general for a paper that can only be 20 pages long.

I've been on JSTOR tonight finding a motherlode of papers that discuss how hypertext is transforming education. I initially was thinking about focusing on the Web and how most users of the Web just find isolated links off Google, as if it were some kind of Sybilline oracle, rather than linking from one thing to another in dense allusive, semantic structures. I wanted to offer a proposal on how to reform the Web, so to speak. But I think that might be too difficult to write about, at least in this space. Perhaps focusing on hypertext in education, or simply on hypertext proper (hypertext as it ought to be) would be better.

What do y'all think?

reflections of a grammar nerd

I'm not a SNOOT, as defined in David Foster Wallace's essay for Harper's, Tense Present which we read for Philosophy of Language, but I do have certain hang-ups. One of these is the great comma series rule debate. Perhaps my interest in such things goes back to my childhood, when I asked my dad to buy me a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style. (And he did.)

In that work, on the topic in question, it says:

In a series consisting of three or more elements, the elements are separated by commas. When a conjunction joins the last two elements in a series, a comma is used before the conjunction . . .:

Attending the conference were Farmer, Johnson, and Kendrick.
We have a choice of copper, silver, or gold.

Chicago Manual of Style, 14th Edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, Chapter 5.5

This rule, as stated above, is the comma series rule I learned (or internalized through my reading - I'm not sure if I actually ever read that part of the Manual - I was never a big enough grammar nerd to do more than glance through the book). However, whenever I proofread articles for the Bagpipe, I see the final comma omitted. This to me looks like an error, but since it's a ubiquitous error, I never have changed it.

Until tonight, the reason for this error (as it is - at least according to the descriptivists, the school of linguists and language experts represented in the public eye by a diverse group of scholars and popular writers, from Fowler to Safire) was mysterious to me. Thankfully, this little essay cleared it up for me. "...[M]y further research [has] revealed this," the author writes. "The only authorities who advocate omitting the final comma are newspaper style guides (which wish to save column space) and some English writers (who waffle on the rule)." So there it is - we at the Bagpipe are saving column space. Not like it's ever been at a premium...

the implied superiority of the English major

or, "Guess I Did Learn Something from Science in Perspective"

I was thinking today about how easy we have here in the humanities. Our subjects (literature, especially) are inescapable. No one can completely avoid books, music, and film. But plenty of people (me being one of them) are comparatively ignorant about mathematics and the sciences. Nor do they come up in casual conversation hardly at all.

I've been concerned lately about whether this constitutes marginalization of those who are part of the "left-brain" half of the the two cultures. I guess that was pretty much Snow's original thesis, though, or at least part of it. I hadn't even read the article until just now, as I write this, but I think this part is particularly salient:

But what about the other side? They are impoverished too-perhaps more seriously, because they are vainer about it. They still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of 'culture', as though the natural order didn't exist. As though the exploration of the natural order was of no interest either in its own value or its consequences. As though the scientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man. Yet most non-scientists have no conception of that edifice at all. Even if they want to have it, they can't. It is rather as though, over an immense range of intellectual experience, a whole group was tonedeaf. Except that this tone-deafness doesn't come by nature, but by training, or rather the absence of training.

As with the tone-deaf, they don't know what they miss. They give a pitying chuckle at the news of scientists who have never read a major work of English literature. They dismiss them as ignorant specialists. Yet their own ignorance and their own specialisation is just as startling. A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

I'd like to take Snow's point one farther: isn't it not just our understanding of the natural world that is "beautiful" and "wonderful" but the natural world itself? As a Christian, I'm convicted of my ignorance of the mechanisms by which God's created order operates, the "creational norms" to borrow a Dooeyweerdian term. I need to start appreciating the works of nature as much as I appreciate the Goldberg variations.

But it's just so hard. My high school teachers, even my middle school teachers, did such a good job of turning me off to the whole thing. In order to rectify this gap in my education, which I just now am beginning to fully recognize, I plan to buy myself Wolfram's A New Kind of Science for Christmas, which I remember from the New York Times Book Review at least a year back and which looks like it pretty much rocks the world. (Or at least for those people, like me, who find the coolest thing about science to be the pictures and the diagrams - mainly because we don't speak math.)