A Parade of Disgrace
Hey, hey, hey! Hope you're doing swell. I've got some good stuff for you this time,
This week I added another research Q&A to my website, this one about grades and grading. I was surprised that grades were intended by Horace Mann to reduce competition among students, but I guess it makes sense given what was common at the time.
What was common in US cities at the time, by the way, was the Lancasterian (or Monitorial) model of schooling. Amazingly there is a school museum in England that puts on historical reenactments of Lancasterian teaching! And there's a video! Skip to around 2:00 to see a girl get something wrong and get sent to the dunce-end of the semi-circle. But skip to 7:55 and you'll hear, "Monitor of Order; conduct these children in a Parade of Disgrace!"
Much of my week was spent obsessing over Kelefa Sanneh's wonderful book "Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres." Here's an interview with him about the book: "The idea of people being loud-and-proud pop artists—like this is our genre, our genre is pop music—is a strange and relatively new idea."
"Here’s the dirty little secret about being a hack: It works." Comedian Matt Ruby angsts about how social media provides bad incentives for comedians. It pushes comedians to produce a constant stream of brief, hackish jokes to a global audience. I think his observations apply beyond comedy. (Pair this with Jack Hamilton's review of Sanneh's book, about how streaming has changed the way people listen to music.)
I like a lot of the videos on Mathematical Visual Proofs, e.g. this proof or this tidy argument. I like the videos where he talks more than the ones with music, make of that what you will.
More on the "school isn't just academics" beat: "The results suggest that the development of non-cognitive skills is central to the returns to education for crime and highlight an important dimension of teachers' social value missed by test score-based quality metrics."
From the August issue of Harper's, a bonkers little speech given by a Tennessee state senator that made me laugh (and then go hmm): "Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I haven’t given y’all a history lesson in a while, and I want to give you a little history on homelessness. In 1910, Hitler decided to live on the streets for a while. So for two years, Hitler lived on the streets and practiced his oratory and body language and how to connect with the masses, and then went on to lead a life that got him into history books. So for a lot of these people, it’s not a dead end. They can come out of these homeless camps and have a productive life, or in Hitler’s case, a very unproductive life. I support this bill."
This jangly piece of American country-rock from The Scrhamms -- "Out of The Earth" -- takes its lyrics from the French poet Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal: "who is the farmer, drives this round? // pull the farmer down."
"When does a working man go to Colorado? When he has one foot in the grave," A Young Widow collected in "A Bintel Brief."
A gripping and haunting essay about a student from the amazing Jenna Laib.
OK that's it from me, we'll talk again in August.
Signed,
Michael