The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Category: teaching

  • More inanity from the author of “Ending Online Church”

    This piece (7 Thoughtful Reader Responses on Ending Online Church, NY Times, 2022 Feb 6) reeks of the same dismissive (and unimaginative) hubris as the first. With obvious great reluctance, the author admits – halfway through and fleetingly – that whole swaths of people are necessarily and deliberately left out by in-person worship. It’s nice to see that acknowledged, rather than blithely downplayed (“churches have been dealing with the homebound for centuries”), but the author is clear to inoculate her arrogance by first showcasing a convenient “we’re immunocompromised but agree 100%” story that gets paragraphs, before tucking away the counter argument in a short bit sandwiched between two “you’re so right” pieces. Seven insightful responses but only one that can be read as disputatious. But what struck me the most was the “insightful” response that the author chose to emphasize by putting first and at length:

    I am 76 years old … [and] not frightened by Covid, whose main harm is that it causes increasing community isolation

    7 Thoughtful Reader Responses on Ending Online Church

    Its main harm is increasing isolation? Its main harm? There are roughly 900,000 (and counting!) dead Americans who might disagree with your analysis, doctor, not to mention the literal millions who are “isolated” from their loved ones by having seen them die from this disease.

  • Crossing timelines: Revisiting the Sixth Season of Doctor Who

    Watching “A Good Man Goes to War” led me to re-watching “The Wedding of River Song“, and of course that led back to “The Impossible Astronaut” and the start of Season 6. So it’s out of order — so what? It’s a show about a time-traveling big blue police box. Watching it doesn’t have to be linear.

    I think Season Six is my favorite season, and Matt Smith is my favorite Doctor. They’ve all been great but Smith’s Eleven is the one whose Doctor seems to be having the most fun. Eccleston‘s Nine is haunted and gloomy, and Tennant‘s Ten is much too the wounded bird. I like Capaldi‘s Twelve but let’s face it — Clara Oswald drags him down, down, down the rankings. Not his fault but you can’t really separate a Doctor from his/her companions. Whittaker’s Thirteen is sharp, too, but just sometimes feels like she’s trying too hard, or rather the writers are — and Chibnall simply doesn’t have it together as much as Moffat (and let’s face it, Moffat was madly juggling plates thrown in the air by Davies).

    But Smith is having fun, and his Doctor is having fun, and Steve Moffat is beyond doubt having fun — he’s the showrunner/writer who most gets that this is a show about time travel and it doesn’t have to make sense but it all has to hang together (if you know want I mean).  Sure, a lot of the plot of “The Impossible Astronaut” / “Day of the Moon” doesn’t quite hold up and the motives and actions of both the aliens and the humans are slightly askew.  But some of the plot holes (like, why does the Silence keep letting Amy escape) turn out later in the season not to have been plot holes at all.  And the romance between the Doctor and River Song is, quite literally, one for the ages. (I know, I know, it’s a broken base issue but I like it.)

    I have to admit, though, that the coolest bit of “The Impossible Astronaut” / “Day of the Moon” — cooler even than the Moon landing or its use within the show — is, without a doubt, Canton Everett Delaware III. Alright, the name could’ve used a tweak, but the character is played by Mark Shepard and that pays for all. Mark Shepard is the link among dozens if not hundreds of sci-fi and genre shows, and he’s always something to watch — from Badger on Firefly to Jim Stirling (like the machine gun, not the engine) on Leverage. Heck, I’d probably watch Mark Shepard read the phone book.

    Actually, let me amend. Mark Shepard is the second-coolest bit. The coolest bit — and this runs throughout the whole season — is the score. Murray Gold hits it out of the park and into orbit. It’s extraordinarily listenable and memorable, even divorced from the particular episodes. Not many original scores can achieve that. Once you know the soundtrack, watching the episodes is even richer. In the moment, the score is subtle (usually), hovering in the background. But at the crucial times it soars, and Gold captures in audio exactly what adventuring with the Doctor would be.

  • Back online

    Quite possibly no one noticed but me, but this site has been down since August 2020, when my web hosting service altered the name of their database server.  It should have been a quick fix, and eventually was, but 2020-2021 were such crazy times that I couldn’t set aside the approximate hour I estimated it would take, until yesterday.

    The fix came just in time for the blog-aversary of The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach, whose first post was on 2006 June 12 — fifteen years ago, believe it or not!

  • FB Recap: Seal and Eagle

    Interesting socio-cultural question: In this cover of “Fly Like an Eagle”, Seals sings “I want to fly like an eagle” but omits “till I’m free”, and changes “through the revolution” to “into the future”.
     
    These aren’t accidental changes — I wonder what prompted him and what does it say about the times in which the songs were released (1996 versus 1976). Or… was it because Seal’s version was for a major studio film (Space Jam, believe it or not) and the corporate overlords would brook no mention of the revolution?

  • Math Education and Pandemic

    {Editor’s note: Well, this ends up being quite the little snapshot of the early days of the pandemic, for me. I don’t know why I never quite finished it — probably it had something to do with the world igniting — but it’s OK as is, so I’m publishing it. Further years of teaching have only confirmed for me the soundness of the basic thrust.}

    The global COVID-19 pandemic has thrown into sharp relief a number of failings of the American system, and one of them is the thrust of math education. It’s been obvious for years that the current paradigm favors abstract symbolic manipulation over practical and intuitive math sense. The explosive propagation of the coronavirus, and the stumbling incoherent response by governmental and business leaders, makes clear that this choice has carried a real human cost.

    Put bluntly: It’s time to stop fetishizing the attainment of calculus as the epitome of math education. I taught Precalculus for two years. Looking back, I wish I had hit harder on the chapter on exponential functions. I wish I had done more with real data, more with spreadsheets, more with graphs and interpretations of graphs. I wish I’d spent a couple of months on it, instead of a couple of weeks.

    I’d claw the time back by jettisoning, wholesale, the utterly useless chapter on finding polynomial roots. Everything worthwhile in that chapter could be handled in, maybe, four days. I’d probably trim or skip conic sections, too.

    Given the chance, I’d lean hard into number sense, too. It’s becoming clear that people are dying because Americans can’t distinguish thousands, millions, and billions. They don’t understand rates-of-change or exponentials. They have no patience for numerical analyses. We make too many judgments using the hard-wired story-telling circuitry of our semi-evolved monkey hindbrain, and we don’t use the vast effective mental technology that’s been invented since 1600.

    Americans doubt experts, and why not? We’ve spent decades “educating” them that experts are high priests of a religion beyond their comprehension. When that false god proves fallible, why should they continue to believe? We as educators have failed (miserably) to de-mystify mathematics. We accept the narrative that there are math kids and not-math kids, and we adjust to the confines of that view. Mathematics is both the birthright and the duty of all humankind, and the structures we’ve accepted simply do not recognize that.

    My top-of-my-head new Precalculus course would be … well, first, I’d jettison that idea that there should be a precalculus class. A whole year in service of a later course that many won’t even take? Bah. Instead, this is what I’d like to see the mid-level high school math class cover.

    • First quarter: number sense and scale
    • Second quarter: graphs
    • Third quarter: exponentials
    • Fourth quarter: statistics

  • Looking for hive mind help on a course

    Actually, on two courses.  The school I’m at (Newark Academy) ends the year with a nine-day “June Term”, wherein students take one class for six hours a day.  June Term classes are supposed to be experiential and rigorous, and maybe a bit weird.  All teachers are supposed to suggest courses; I made three idea proposals and the committee liked two of them.

    Now I have to formalize my thinking and write an actual proposal for each.  I’m still (as of 2017 July) in the spitballing stage and thought I could benefit from some outside input.  If you have the time and interest, please follow this link to a Google doc where you can share your thoughts.  (NB: It’s an open edit document so please be civil to one another!)  I am particularly interested in ideas for field trips and for how to organize six-hour days when it can’t be lecture-and-response.

    The two courses, by the way, are The End of the World as We Know It: A scientific approach to catastrophe and Seven Days Plus Two: The Art and Science of World Building in Fiction.  The first will be a modified form of a course I ran at Hun, but I think it will need a fair bit of work.

  • Why I have trouble taking guns-rights advocates seriously

    Five Injured In Accidental Gun Show Shootings On ‘Gun Appreciation Day’

    From TPM.

     

     

  • Another reason we’re in so much trouble.

    For the first time in 23 years of polling.

    Source: The US military is the world’s strongest. Half of Americans think it’s not. – Vox

  • Chart of the Day: SCOTUS appointments in election years

    Chart of the Day: SCOTUS appointments in election years

    It is far from unprecedented for a President to nominate someone this far away from the election.

    Source: Presidents have appointed Supreme Court justices in election years. This chart proves it. – Vox

  • Regarding >> “America has a simple ideology”: how one of Russia’s top US experts tries to explain America – Vox

    A couple of observations:

    1. What might underlie this Russian perception — which I think is over the top — is something far more threatening to the Russian psyche than the idea that America is scheming and plotting to topple them.  Far worse indeed is the truth, which is that since the end of the Cold War we’ve more or less ignored them.  A lot of what Putin has done, seems to me, to be the geopolitical equivalent of a moody tweener screaming for attention from the once-idolized cool kid who nows ignores them.  Going from being one of two superpowers, where every time the Kremlin caught a cold, Washington sneezed, to a perceived backwater minor power, is bruising.
    2. Having said that, from one point of view, they’re not entirely crazy.  While I think they overestimate the coherence of any “American worldview”, there is a certain evangelizing tendency in American politics.  We’ve solved it, many Americans think, and of course everyone else should reap the benefit of our leadership.  It’s cloying and positive but threatening in its own way.  And the ongoing cultural ascendancy of American media — where our action films and pop fashions rule the world — can’t help anyone feel secure.
    3. It’s hard to see what to do about this.  You can’t convince someone you’re on their side by simply repeatedly telling them that.   And our actual attitude — dismissive neglect — is unlikely to generate either the evidence of a benign attitude or reciprocal respect.  The nigh-complete breakdown of the American political machine implies more neglect and drift, with sporadic and counterproductive engagement mixed with saber-rattling for domestic benefit.  It’s a bind.

    Regarding: “America has a simple ideology”: how one of Russia’s top US experts tries to explain America – Vox