Pardon a personal rant: I have been well-known (at least around my own house, and among my own children) as a dedicated hater of homework. It wasn’t simply the fact that a kid of seven or eight had to spend all day in a classroom, and then bring home work designed specifically to extend school hours into the evening - though I have a few ideological issues with that, too. Rather, my problem is with the nature of the work, which is all too often not a review of ideas and lessons gone over during regular class-time, but rather entirely new lessons, meaning that parents get to play teacher to children already worn out and sick of listening to people trying to teach them. Also, the lessons being taught are often based on some nu-education model, meaning that kids are encouraged to “discover” the underlying lesson themselves, rather than being given a few tools they can then practise using. Math is the worst for this. I have occasionally spent five minutes explaining some nifty trick of addition or multiplication or whathaveyou that my son was being asked to work out himself and then sum up in two sentences. Usually, I just skip the “discovery” part, tell him what he needs to do, and then get him to repeat it a few dozen in times until it he can do it without thinking. Repetition and memorization gets a bad name.
So I could only feel a familiar rising of blood pressure when I came across this post at BoingBoing.net, which offers an example of some first grade math homework, and then asks commenters to figure it out. I only sorta could, and I was not alone: teachers and college-level math tutors confessed to being baffled by the assignment, too. (I challenge DRIVENmag.com readers to try it, too.)
My favourite comment, the one that hit all-too close to home, was this one: “Teach in class, homework is reinforcement.”
Amen. So endeth the rant.
(Top image by H McKenna used under a Creative Commons license.)
Various dates until Nov. 21, Victoria: The Rake’s Progress is your typical boy-meets-girls, boy-dumps-girl, boy-hangs-out-in-big-city-with-the-devil, boy-ends-up-in-the-nuthouse, boy-dies kind of story. Igor Stravinsky based his opera most famous opera on a series of 18th-century paintings by William Hogarth, and so the tale is appropriately sordid. W.H. Auden co-wrote the libretto, so it’s both sordid and poetic.
Pacific Opera Victoria is mounting a production of Stravinsky’s opera in five performances, with the first happening last night, Nov. 12. Four more chances left to catch it! (Check out the stage and costume design.)
While hockey and football get most of the non-UFC attention as far as violence in sports go, it’s high time to salute the orgy of thuggery that is girls’ soccer.
The big breakout bad-girl – the “Vinnie Jones with the double-X chromosome”, if you will – is the Univerisity of New Mexico’s Elizabeth Lambert, who recently punched and kicked and tripped and slapped her way through a NCAA west conference semi-final game against Brigham Young University.
Though all she received during the game was a yellow card, Lambert has been suspended indefinitely by her team, and been dubbed (albeit cheekily) “America’s Greatest Villain” by Deadspin.com.
Obviously, the video is a lot of fun to watch, and some of her hits are just shy of out-and-out assault, but the reaction to her antics has more to do with people’s ignorance of the realities of soccers (and perhaps of young women).
Blogger and soccer dad Tbogg adds some perspective …
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At this point, I think it’s fairly obvious that the fatted cats who run Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment spend much of their time devising ways to piss people off. Raising ticket prices for losing teams has long been their best trick, but once in a while they really get creative …
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Walls make for very powerful symbols, as many devout Jews, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Roger Waters can attest.
Today, of course, marks the 2oth anniversary of the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the most visible symbol of the Soviet Union’s freedom not-loving ways. The memories of that moment are thick on the ground, and many in Berlin are reliving that night when they were first able to cross deadly no-man’s land between East and West.
And so, to mark this highly significant occasion, we offer you John Cougar Mellancamp:
Personally, I think too little attention has been given to the role played by Cougar’s dancing in the fall of the Soviet Union. After all, people in East Berlin could barely buy jeans at all, never mind jeans that tight…
(Berlin Wall juggler photo by Yann Forget, used under Creative Commons license.)
November 5-14, Toronto: Here’s the challenge I am giving myself: to write about the Rendezvous With Madness Film Festival, which examines how issues of mental illness and addiction are represented onscreen, without using the words crazy, nuts, daft, demented, sick, cuckoo, barmy, tetched, mental, psycho, berserk, bonkers, cracked, delirious, schizo, out to lunch, or wig out.
The festival, now in its 17th year and is put together by Workman Arts, a not-for-profit arts organization that works out of Toronto’s Centre of Mental Health and Addiction, presents more than a dozen screenings over its nine days, along with panel discussions, and even an evening of comedy. The full schedule is here. Last night’s opening night gala was sold out, but there are still tickets left for other events.
Missing it would be… ah, disappointing.
First, he was accused of pursuing an alternative lifestyle (nothing wrong with that, and he wouldn’t be the first celebrity to do so); now it appears that, according to the London Free Press, Tinky Winky has really hit the skids:
Halloween took a bizarre and frightening turn in London this weekend when a man dressed as a children’s television character, a purple teletubby, robbed a woman at gunpoint near the city’s core.
London police say a costume-wearing, gun-toting teletubby confronted the woman near the intersection of Talbot and Mill streets just after midnight and demanded cash.
The woman, in her 20’s, gave an undisclosed amount of cash to the robber, who then ran south on Talbot.
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“All I can do is be me, whoever that is.” – Bob Dylan
It’s very, very late in the day to make a fuss about Bob Dylan’s voice, though whole flocks of second-rate comedians and online jokesters are still making damp hay about it. At this point, nearly a half-century into the man’s singing career, pointing at that Dylan’s pipes lack the range of Judy Garland and the sweetness of The Beach Boys is not exactly going to set the collective jaws a’dropping. Notions of “authenticity” in pop music are often only reductive, snobbish constructs, but there is a kind of music lover who, in part thanks to the work of Mr Dylan, both as a singer and as a lifelong proponent of oldey timey music, prefers a throat full of frog than a velvet fog.
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Guelph, Ontario, until Dec. 20 – Mug shots, especially those of miscreant celebrities, are endlessly fascinating, and can be analyzed for all kinds of emotions, like shame, regret, disinterest, defiance (nay, puckishness), and even, well, whatever it is that Nick Nolte was feeling.
This is the thinking behind an ongoing exhibit of Ontario Provincial Police [Yeah, you know me--ed] mugshots at the Guelph Civic Museum, most of which are a century old. These aren’t celebrities, obviously, but rather plain-old “pickpockets, confidence men, escaped fugitives, shoplifters, horse thieves, and even murderers.” The fascination is the same, however. (And Nolte probably stole a horse or two in his time.)
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was born on this day (October 28 – same day as Bill Gates, by the way) in 1956, has never exactly been a friend of the Jews (he has vowed to wipe Zionism off the map, and has come very close to denying the Holocaust, among other things), so there seemed to be an imminent irony overload in the making when it was alleged that Ahmadinejad was part-Jew himself. After the jump, we trace the controversy, and reveal the authority that has settled the question for good.
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