Can’t recommend the book Airframe by Michael Crichton to help contextualize the typical kneejerk reactions to these kinds of things versus the usual culprits enough.
Edit: thanks for pointing out the typo. Good book still.
I think you have to give yourself the grace of realizing it's research. Nobody comes into the world with a manual, and even people with great intuition in taking care of themselves run into unexpected challenges
After all has been said about the ages of Biden and Trump, it’s ironic that having presidents with experience living through Vietnam and the Soviet-Afghan war has been so useful for their two terms.
I have thoughts about some kind of attributes for class fields and maybe classes. But such change isn't the first in the list of features to be done, there are more important things to do.
Is the problem participation? Or is it that entire years are devoted to reading ancient books with bad English and unrelatable themes simply because of tradition? Shakespeare wrote some neat plays but they’re not helping the reading epidemic.
Math teachers had the balls to radically revamp their curriculums with Common Core and now their teachings are no longer formulaic but instead stimulate original thought and creativity. It’s high time for English teachers to do the same.
> Is the problem participation? Or is it that entire years are devoted to reading ancient books with bad English and unrelatable themes simply because of tradition? Shakespeare wrote some neat plays but they’re not helping the reading epidemic.
Were Shakespeare's plays "relatable" 370 years after being published and then suddenly became unrelatable in the last 30? I think not. If students' participation in classes about them has changed, it's not because of the plays aging.
The ancient shadow puppet story tellers were good enough evening entertainment until books, radio, tv, and the internet and porn came out.
I would argue the last 30 years have had more attention-competition than most of the last 370. These kids are actually different by growing up in a very different world.
I'm a lapsed English teacher, and I don't completely disagree with you: some of the Old Standards could be removed without losing anything, and there are contemporary texts that aren't but should be included in high school and college curricula.
However, the value of the Canon° is three-fold:
1) There are stories and ideas that are culturally important. Students need to be made familiar with them, and know where they came from.
2) The themes in the Old Stuff are not unrelateable. Shakespeare wrote about sex and death and jealousy and power, and the tension between individuals and society. Those are all perfectly familiar to anyone. One of my favorite assignments, when I taught a college lit course, was to read Beowulf, and then (during mid-term week, to give them a break) watch Jaws, because they're the exact same story. It's important to recognize common humanity in people who look and dress and talk and believe differently than you do. Using The Old Stuff to expand that skill side-steps many of the reflexive reactions students bring to contemporary literature.
3) Students need to be challenged to read hard texts. You're on HN, so I expect you recognize the value and pleasure of understanding something that was previously beyond you. Yes, there is contemporary writing that also works - I assigned more than some of my colleagues - but reading the classics hits all three of these points, so it's still worth doing.
All that said, there are way too many Humanities teachers who are just awful, and put people off reading rather than the reverse. I suspect that you may have encountered some of them, and that's a damn shame.
°To anyone reading over our shoulders in this conversation: don't @ me over this. I'm well aware of the problems with the notion, but it's still the best layman's term for the idea under discussion. I'm a broad-tent guy, though: whatever you think oughta be included is probably fine with me.
Obviously my experience is a little dated (graduated high school in 1997), but Shakespeare was a recurring theme throughout my high school English classes. We read The Tempest, Macbeth, Hamlet, and a number of poems, some of which we had to memorize and recite. I didn’t mind the poetry; I still remember bits of the Whitman, Coleridge, and Lewis Carroll poems I memorized. In addition, we read The Odyssey (which felt like torture to me), various Dickens novels, Jane Austin (also torture), etc.
Despite being an avid reader, I did not enjoy all of the above. However, now that I am middle aged, I count myself fortunate that my public school teachers forced me to do it.
class of '23 here. Not exactly a Shakespeare-heavy curriculum, but was made to read Romeo & Juliet and Othello as well as various sonnets in high school.
I find the opposite to be true. It’s easier to curate YouTube than it is to vet Prime or Netflix because YouTube’s algorithm keeps recommendations pretty tight to what is currently being watched. If you seed it with benign enough content, it’s hard for your kid to get to the good stuff without effort that they may not know to apply.
They’ve done this to my workplace too. We have several domains for employee-concerning content and they’ve mirrored them and placed them at the top of Google’s search results. If you’ve forgotten the URL and go to Google it, you can get phished super easily.
I can see the elderly and the tech illiterate falling for similar schemes with mirrors of the NYT, CNN, FOX, etc.
I’m experimenting with serving different content to users based on the presence of an mTLS cert in their USB key.
The idea is that authenticated employees see the company logo but scrapers get an IIS welcome page. Prevents cloned content from showing up on squatted domains.
Pitch is the offset between the start of consecutive rows of pixels in the image, used to convert y coordinates into the start of any given row, so you access a pixel as buffer[y*pitch+x]. Often this is the image width, but can be greater depending on required alignment.
So at the end of each run increment the relevant pointer by (pitch - w) not pitch which I'm sure it's one of the bugs they saw all the time in this interview :)
Have you not seen Stand and Deliver? We’ve seen incredible teachers prove over and over again that no student is truly unreachable given enough time and attention.
Wouldn't excluding apartments therefore exclude Ken Griffin's 238 million dollar penthouse? That seems like exactly the kind of 2nd home that this should be targeting.
Yeah I hear you but I want to incentivize dense housing like that. If you live in Texas or Florida, it’s easy to see how second homes can entirely overtake acres and acres of land.
NYC is filled with apartments dedicated to the wealthy with token poor-doors for access to a few mandatory low income units in each building. All housing has to be subject to taxation for this to work.
Edit: thanks for pointing out the typo. Good book still.
reply