The 'Busy' Trap Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways. If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this; it’s something we collectively force one another to do. Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Brecht Vandenbroucke Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Our frantic days are really just a hedge against emptiness. I am not busy. Here I am largely unmolested by obligations.
Writing Blanks, Board Games and other Educational Games of the 18th and 19th centuries from the John Johnson and Harding Collections Since the acquisition of the Opie Collection, the Bodleian has become a centre for studies in juvenilia; this has led to increased interest in the games in the John Johnson Collection, with concomitant preservation and handling problems. Many of these games are housed in drawers, others in large folders. Because of their size they are vulnerable. All 18th and 19th century board games in the John Johnson Collection (mostly single sheets) and all Educational writing blanks (also known as school pieces) from the Johnson, Opie and Harding Collections were digitised, together with other games of the same period, selected for their educational content, from both the John Johnson and Opie Collections (Comic puzzles and scraps, models and paper dolls have not been included.) Subjects represented in the games and writing blanks include: Arithmetic, Art, Astronomy, Geography, History, Literature, Spelling, and Religion.
The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, by John Taylor Gatto Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn't what I do at all. Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where you belong." In any case, again, that's not my business. Nevertheless, in spite of the overall blueprint, I make an effort to urge children to higher levels of test success, promising eventual transfer from the lower-level class as a reward. The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no way out of your class except by magic. The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command.
Faux Friendship - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education By William Deresiewicz William Deresiewicz discusses the shaky future of friendship on New Hampshire Public Radio's Word of Mouth Wednesday, December 16 at 12:40 p.m. Listen to the episode here. "…[a] numberless multitude of people, of whom no one was close, no one was distant. "Families are gone, and friends are going the same way." We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at all. Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming? How did we come to this pass? The rise of Christianity put the classical ideal in eclipse. The classical notion of friendship was revived, along with other ancient modes of feeling, by the Renaissance. Classical friendship, now called romantic friendship, persisted through the 18th and 19th centuries, giving us the great friendships of Goethe and Schiller, Byron and Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau. Add to this the growth of democracy, an ideology of universal equality and inter-involvement. And so we return to Facebook.
Why America Can't Have It All - By David Rothkopf Anne-Marie Slaughter's article "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" in the current issue of the Atlantic has sparked a firestorm of debate. Drawing on her personal experience balancing her distinguished foreign-policy career with the demands of raising two sons, the piece exposes an internal struggle within Slaughter and other women aspiring to both career success and a rewarding home life. But in so doing, it may do something more than that. Slaughter, the former head of Policy Planning in Hillary Clinton's State Department, may have unintentionally -- or subconsciously -- offered up a powerful insight into the challenges faced not only by working mothers but those confronting America's top international and domestic policymakers as well. The article explores the conundrums successful women face in achieving work-life balance with the kind of candor and nuance it rarely receives but richly deserves. This is not to say that the American dream is not real. JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images
Why Are Finland's Schools Successful? | People & Places It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school’s principal, decided to try something extreme—by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher’s best efforts. The school’s team of special educators—including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist—convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame. So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it’s practically obsolete. Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. “I took Besart on that year as my private student,” Louhivuori told me in his office, which boasted a Beatles “Yellow Submarine” poster on the wall and an electric guitar in the closet.
Why Schools Don't Educate I accept this award on behalf of all the fine teachers I've known over the years who've struggled to make their transactions with children honorable ones, men and women who are never complacent, always questioning, always wrestling to define and redefine endlessly what the word "education" should mean. A Teacher of the Year is not the best teacher around, those people are too quiet to be easily uncovered, but he is a standard-bearer, symbolic of these private people who spend their lives gladly in the service of children. This is their award as well as mine. We live in a time of great school crisis. Our children rank at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic. At the very bottom. Our school crisis is a reflection of this greater social crisis. I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. Now here is a curious idea to ponder.
The End of Solitude - The Chronicle Review What does the contemporary self want? The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge — broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider — the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. I once asked my students about the place that solitude has in their lives. To that remarkable question, history offers a number of answers. Like other religious values, solitude was democratized by the Reformation and secularized by Romanticism. But it is with Romanticism that solitude achieved its greatest cultural salience, becoming both literal and literary. Modernism decoupled this dialectic. The Romantic ideal of solitude developed in part as a reaction to the emergence of the modern city.
Magazine - Why Women Still Can’t Have It All The culture of “time macho”—a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today. Nothing captures the belief that more time equals more value better than the cult of billable hours afflicting large law firms across the country and providing exactly the wrong incentives for employees who hope to integrate work and family. Yet even in industries that don’t explicitly reward sheer quantity of hours spent on the job, the pressure to arrive early, stay late, and be available, always, for in-person meetings at 11 a.m. on Saturdays can be intense. Indeed, by some measures, the problem has gotten worse over time: a study by the Center for American Progress reports that nationwide, the share of all professionals—women and men—working more than 50 hours a week has increased since the late 1970s. Revaluing Family Values
TeacherPop Thus begins a three-part series of guilty admissions, ahem, lessons learned, March 10, 2014, when I actually took a look at what I was doing and when. A while back, I decided to track my time in 30-minute increments over the course of a week, as recommended by Laura Vanderkam, author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think. I did it, painfully and mostly accurately. The week I chose to track was an interesting one as it involved travel, workshops for teachers, train rides, pediatrician appointments, a book proposal deadline, and a hair appointment.