The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Category: teaching

  • What I’m Reading: 2008 July

    This is the first in a regular series of posts meant more for myself than anyone else. I just want to keep a record of what I’m reading.

    So far in July:

    • Public Enemies: The True Story of America’s Greatest Crime Wave by Bryan Burrough (552 p)
    • Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning by Sol Steinmetz (258 p)
    • The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English by Mark Abley (233 p)
    • Steampunk edited by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer (347 p)

    Of these, the two etymology books were oddly disappointing, most especially because they in fact gave no model for how or why language evolves. Each was just a litany of words and trends in English. *Sigh*

  • Thespiatic

    Wow. It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything. Someday soon I’ll document what a blur my April and May have been, as explanation if not excuse. Meanwhile, let me share my tiny contribution to the recent play The Peter Pan Project, conceived as a community-written work. The prompt was, “Describe the moment you grew up.” My response is below the fold.

    But first, I have to say: I was not ready for the emotional punch of hearing someone else read my words to an audience. The staging was absolutely perfect (thanks, Aaron!) and the impact was overwhelming: A solitary actor, at the right edge of the stage, a forlorn spotlight piercing the otherwise pitch-dark room. And these words:

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  • Faith in an Age of Fear

    Today the Hun School had its second annual Convocation to commence the year. As the current holder of the Distinguished Faculty Endowed Chair, it fell to me to present a speech. (I did this last year, too; you can find that speech online.) The text of this second speech can be found below the fold.

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  • Old nuggets

    Anyone checking the frequency of blogging for this site need not be told that I am not a natural diarist. I keep trying to start a regular compilation of my thought but never quite get in the habit. I have a journal I’ve carted from DC to Stanford to Bensalem to Princeton. With my recent move still unfolding in slow motion in my new apartment, I came across that book, which I have not touched since (at latest) 1998.

    Only two pages have any writing, dating from late 1992(!) with the interesting heading “Thoughts on Teaching”. Since that means that those two pages were, in some way, the progenitor of these blog entries — that this little blue notebook is the ur-Mongrel Dogs, I thought it appropriate to record them here, before ditching the book that’s been dogging me for fifteen years.

    More below the fold.
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  • The Mongrel Dogs at Sea (11): Solar Sight

    I experienced something today that I’ve heard a lot about but never quite believed in: the infamous green flash. I’d read that, sometimes, during sunsets, just at the moment the Sun sinks below the horizon, it flashes green. However, the conditions are hard to meet and the occurrence somewhat rare. Tonight as the Regal Princess continued steaming east-northeast, I happened to be out on deck during sunset. (I’ve been missing these because I’m slated for “first sitting” dinner and usually it wraps up just a few minutes too late. But today for whatever reason we were done and gone five minutes before rather than after sunset.) The sky was crystal-clear and, though there were some low-lying clouds, they hovered a bit above the horizon. Knowing these were the conditions for the semi-mythical flash, I dug out my camera and took continuous shots of the sunset.

    Much to my amazement, I did in fact see the green flash.

    It’s not so much a “flash”, really. The sky doesn’t light up green or anything. Rather, the Sun momentarily turns green. The change, from the usual red of sunset, is unmistakable, although the transformation lasts only a moment. Now I’m really interested in what causes this. I suspect it’s a refractory phenomenon having to do with the atmosphere – perhaps something about the color of the Sun’s limb compared to the bulk. I really did not think the story was true; now I have to understand it. It goes to show you that the world is always ready to throw a surprise at you when you think you know what’s going on.

    Sadly, I didn’t get a picture of it. I had to choose between watching it on camera and watching it by eye. I was pretty sure that, if the effect was real, I’d still end up missing it in the camera. My camera is just too slow and awkward to capture an instantaneous elusive optical sprite. Also, although I love my digital camera, I’m beginning to worry that I am experience too many things through its mediation and missing out on the real events – as if preserving the memory of a thing was more important than actually experiencing it. If conditions are good again tomorrow or Wednesday, I’ll try to capture the flash, though I don’t have high hopes.

    Seeing the flash speaks to me, though I’m not sure what it’s saying. It’s another chunk of life to throw in the broth that is my Convocation speech.

  • Irksome metric

    Today, there’s a piece by Maya Jasonoff in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times on the Americans loyal to Britain during the Revolution, and it has me irked. It’s not the thesis, which I agree with, that we should be more aware that the “self-evident” truths were anything but, to about 20% of the population. It’s not the timing, the seemingly-obligatory article near July 4 warning us that it wasn’t all fireworks and oratory. That’s a useful exercise, too, especially in an age of unquestionable jingoism. No, what has me irked is the following statement:

    Yet in all, more than 700 people put their names to the parchment — 12 times the number who signed the Declaration of Independence.

    “The parchment” referenced here was a petition by the royalist Americans to their king, declaring their loyalty and dismay at the Revolution. Despite the inherent strength of her arguments, Ms. Jasonoff appears compelled (by insecurity?) to puff up the popularity of the Tory case by a specious popularity contest. She must know better: The Declaration was signed by members “in Congress assembled”; it was not an invitational and the grouping was by design small in number. To compare it to an open petition left out in a New York tavern for three days, is simply absurd. How many roaring patriots would have signed the Declaration (had it be a petition) is unknowable but certainly vast… more vast than 700, if one can judge by how rapidly and how widely it was reproduced.

    Ms. Jasonoff’s editorial choice doesn’t really undercut the article and in some ways it’s a tiny thing. But it’s another example of a growing carelessness we display with our rhetoric, a growing willingness to compare apples to oranges and act as if the comparison meant anything. It’s intellectually sloppy.

  • A complicated poster.

    Yet another in the series of posters for the newly-rechristened Second Interworld War. This one is inspired by the many different posters that had streams of planes passing overhead in a not-too-subtle V formation. The purpose was to impress with the sheer excess of Allied production. And of course, the exhortation to work hard and to invest in war bonds. My poster reads “Give them the Tools of Victory: Work to Win”.

    The Tools of Victory

    Executing this poster took quite a bit more work than the others; the gruesome details appear below the fold.
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  • Nothing But a Dream

    One of the things that goes along with advising Student Council at my school is orchestrating the annual Talent Show. For the past four years, that’s included performing as the first act — largely because I badger my fellow faculty into performing, and I feel I shouldn’t ask them to do something I’m not willing. Also, because secretly I am a ham. The song is always something of my own writing and always a capella, because I don’t know anything about playing instruments or writing music for them. I like this because it gives me a chance to demonstrate that I am every bit not a singer as I am not a songwriter. 🙂 This year’s offering was called “Nothing But a Dream”. Because I have no shame I’m including a Quicktime movie of it as well.

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  • more testing of subscribe2

    Let’s see what this does.

  • Quickie: Accidentally-hilarious writing

    I was flipping through the channels and came across FX’s presentation of The Day After Tomorrow. I’d never seen it before — movies like this make my teeth hurt, because the science is just so bad. But I decided to give it a go. My full opinion on the movie would likely bore you but I was struck by the following line:

    Reporter: … in the wake of the approaching storm…

    Think about that. Where, by definition, does a wake appear? Behind the object causing it. (Glad to find I retained something from Romani’s Fluid Mechanics class…) You can’t be in the wake of something approaching.

    OK, so maybe the reporter was trying to be metaphorical: People realize the storm is approaching, panic, and cause the chaos being documented. It’s still a stupid way of saying it…