today is Blog for Choice Day

It's the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Go here and here to see and read.

"faith" = "woozy old man shriveled little thing"?

This explains where Monty Python got many of their ideas about the teaching and learning of other languages: read An Invented Language, staying until the end.

via mirabilis

carnival of the feminists, #7

over at Feministe.

And through the Carnival, Do you want your wife to work after the war? (via Philobiblon).

young female teacher?

Over at BitchPhD today there's a useful discussion -- with lots of concrete examples -- about teaching while female.

Be sure to read the comments. That's where the useful stuff is.

how research goes some days

X Ten Top Trivia Tips about Composition!

1. Louisa May Alcott, author of 'Little Composition', hated composition and only wrote the book at her publisher's request!
2. To check whether composition is safe to eat, drop it in a bowl of water; rotten composition will sink, and fresh composition will float!
3. If composition was life size, it would stand 7 ft 2 inches tall and have a neck twice the size of a human.
4. Without composition, we would have to pollinate apple trees by hand.
5. Four-fifths of the surface of composition is covered in water!
6. Composition was banned from Finland because of not wearing pants.
7. 99 percent of the pumpkins sold in the US end up as composition.
8. Composition is often used in place of milk in food photography, because milk goes soggy more quickly than composition.
9. It took composition 22 years to build the Taj Mahal!
10. If you keep a goldfish in a dark room, it will eventually turn into composition.

I am interested in - do tell me aboutherhimitthem

from The Mechanical Contrivium, via Boynton.

"Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness."

We are better for having had him here, and worse if we let the truths he spoke slip away.

King's legacy lives on through today's leaders (via pandagon) and The Biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., As Described by a Kindergartener.

thinking about 5931 -- and teaching

Since class on Thursday I keep going back to Yang's question about the readings -- about reading the whole book -- and to the comments of one person, from the final reflection, about the amount of work in the class. These matters circle around central issues for me in teaching, issues such as:

• Time -- and quantity. Ideally, for me, all classes would go very slowly. We would have time to savor and digest every reading, everyone could read at her own pace and still take happy part in the discussion -- and we wouldn't feel the need to move on until we felt we had completely satisfied ourselves with a reading or project.


• Authority. Also ideally, there would be no teacher and no class. The original home-schooling movement -- starting back in the 60s -- was a response to the numbing sameness and oppressiveness of elementary school classrooms. In his series of books meant to help parents figure out what to do if they made the decision to homeschool, John Holt describes how parents realized they could cover in 2 hours a day what a classroom would cover in 6; parents could also follow the lead of their children’s interests. I can't forget one description of a 9 year old child who got interested in plumbing and taught herself how to do it, to the extent that she replumbed her parents' whole house (learning along the way all the necessary math). I also remember how Tim Cahill (I think) in one of his travel books describes going to Timbuktu, at some point years ago when the infrastructure had fallen apart: the university was essentially shut down because no one was getting paid and so no one was coming in to teach -- but at a dry fountain there at the unviversity Cahill ran into a group of students who came together regularly on their own to hold a poetry class because they wanted to. In each of these cases, the authority about what and where and how fast to learn is in the hands of the learner.
  

So I place myself in a quandary: I am a teacher who wishes there to be no classes, either of students beholden to me in any way or of institutionally-delimited time. And as a learner, I like it best when I am, for example, in a reading group of friends where we meet regularly because we want to, we read as much as we can, and we do the reading because we've chosen it and it has use and interest for us.

As I read back over this, I see that I have -- sort of -- written myself into a corner: my use of "ideally" above implies a "but realistically..." retort. I could go off into a "But we are teaching and learning in delimited times blah blah blah and we have to give grades and there's academic-cultural expectations about what happens in classes and blah blah blah so forget the questions of time and authority."

Forget that.

I'd rather discuss with you all your take on these conditions. What would your ideal learning situation be -- both as a teacher and a student? In *your* classes, how do you decide what happens? When and how do you negotiate with people in your classes over these issues? (And do you negotiate at all?)