Three Trivial Curiosities

Nobody knows for sure where the term ‘Indian Summer’ comes from.

The word ‘hippocampus’ refers to three different things:

The hyphen distinguishes between the mythological creature and the fish.

In Agatha Christie’s Murder At the Vicarage the term ‘shemozzle’ appears in the following dialogue:

“I expect you’d find her in the studio in the garden — sitting to Lawrence Redding.”
“There’s been quite a shemozzle about him,” said Lettice. “With father, you know. Father’s dreadful.”

‘Shemozzle’ is borrowed from the Yiddish ‘shlimozel,’ usually meaning ‘misfortune.’

Straightedge and Compass

16th-century-compasses-BM-1344603001.jpg

John Donne’s A Valediction Forbidding Mourning ends with two lovers compared to the arms of a geometric compass over several stanzas:

Our two souls therefore, which are one, 

   Though I must go, endure not yet 

A breach, but an expansion, 

   Like gold to airy thinness beat. 




If they be two, they are two so 

   As stiff twin compasses are two; 

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show 

   To move, but doth, if the other do. 




And though it in the center sit, 

   Yet when the other far doth roam, 

It leans and hearkens after it, 

   And grows erect, as that comes home. 




Such wilt thou be to me, who must, 

   Like th' other foot, obliquely run; 

Thy firmness makes my circle just, 

   And makes me end where I begun.

I came across this in Stephanie Burt’s book Don’t Read Poetry. She writes:

Each lover “leans and hearkens” after the other, as if Donne and his intimate friend, lover, or wife heard each other across the sea. The balanced eight-syllable lines, with their alternating rhymes, depend on each other too. Their closure seems “just” both mathematically and morally; in their mutual response, one or both of the lovers stands up, or becomes “erect” (yes it’s a penis joke).
If you yourself have ever felt unique or confused or confusing to others, especially in matters of the heart; if you have ever felt that your connection to somebody else–whether or not it is romantic, or exclusive, or recognized by the law–requires some explanation of deserves a passionate defense; if you have friends in a stubborn long-distance relationship; if you have been in any such situation, you might see Donne’s elaborate, challenging metaphors not as barriers to sincerity but as ways to achieve it, ways that take advantage of the tools–metaphor, indirection, complex syntax, rhythm–that we can find in poems. You might even, at least if you are looking for them, see in Donne’s great love poems, this one among them, defenses of what we now call queer relationships, relationships not sanctioned by custom or law, relationships most people in your own society can’t quite understand.

That image at the top, by the way, is a set of compasses held by the British Library from Donne’s time, the 16th century.

Encore!

Another school year: done.

I love the dismantling that happens after the kids leave. For months this place has been made just so, and it takes just moments for the entire accumulation process to be set in reverse. Posters are first in the line of fire, but sooner or later everything is headed either to a drawer or the trash. The recycling bins were stuffed with homework this afternoon.

I’ve never been involved with anything theatrical (ok fine once) but I imagine it’s similar to what it feels like to strike the set the day after everything closes. Everything of significance has got to go. It’s all trash now, but just a few hours before the whole thing was whatever it is you call trash’s opposite. This stuff was indisposable by mutual assent. Now: nah.

And what that made me think of was the artifice of this whole enterprise. School is such a weird performance of the strangest kind of pretend — they call me ‘mister’! People sometimes point to the artificiality of schools as a critique: this isn’t what learning looks like in its natural state. And of course that’s exactly right, it’s not. It’s all fake. And that guy up on the stage — did you know he’s not really a wizard?

Teaching is weird, it’s fake. Teaching is not medicine. Medicine is someone is sick and you can help them, the most natural thing in the world. Driving a cab is not weird. People want to get to x, they pay you to take them there. Natural. Getting paid to cook people food is a reasonable transaction, it is not a weird. Lawyering, on the other hand: super weird. And as long as we’re on the topic: basketball player, musician, researcher, middle manager, writer, actor, teacher, weirdos all.

So it’s summer and the show is over and all but, come autumn, let’s do it again! I’ve got a school I love working at and I’m ready to play pretend for another year. Year nine is over.

Don’t ask “does it work?”

From Larry Cuban:

Do Core Knowledge Programs Work?

As for many school reforms over the past century, answering the “effectiveness” question–does it work?–is no easy task. The first major issue is answering the question of whether Core Knowledge was fully implemented in classrooms. If not completely implemented, then judging outcomes become suspect. Many of the early studies of Core Knowledge in schools were mixed, some showing higher test scores and some showing no positive effects (see herehere, here, and here). The Core Knowledge Foundation has a list of studies that they assert show positive outcomes. What is so often missing from research on reforms such as Core Knowledge are descriptions of the contextual conditions in which the reform is located and researchers saying clearly: under what conditions does this program prove effective? That is too often missing including the research on Core Knowledge schools.

The primary job of education research shouldn’t be to figure out what works, or to put it another way we shouldn’t expect the have a yes/no answer to that question. How does it work? When does it work? When it didn’t work, why didn’t it work? When it’s not used with fidelity, why wasn’t it used with fidelity? Education is not served well by the way research on program efficacy seems to frequently be done.