==pla|\|ing lakes==

Saturday, October 11, 2003

Philip Pullman on how schools are killing reading and exsanguinating writing [Undernews]

My second point concerns the brutal, unceasing emphasis on testing and marking. It leads to a superficial way of working and a very limited way of responding to it. I recently judged a short story competition run by a charity, and what dismayed me about the entries was they were all superficially bright and competent, correctly spelled and punctuated, and all absolutely lifeless.

They all bore the marks of having been drilled into the children: this is how you open a story; here you need some dialogue; you must have a punchy final paragraph. They would all have scored highly on a test. They were all empty, conventional and worthless.

The things you can test are not actually the most important things. When teachers are under pressure to get so many pupils to such-and-such a point, in order to meet an externally imposed target, they have to do things - for the sake of the school - that might not be things they'd do for the sake of the children.

My last point concerns reading. I recently read through the sections on reading in key stages 1 to 3 of the national literacy strategy, and I was very struck by something about the verbs. I wrote them all down. They included "reinforce", "predict", "check", "discuss", "identify", "categorise", "evaluate", "distinguish", "summarise", "infer", "analyse", "locate"... and so on: 71 different verbs, by my count, for the activities that come under the heading of "reading". And the word "enjoy" didn't appear once.

11:01 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Heir to Johnson fortune lenses Born Rich doc on upper class heirs & their money (HBO, Oct 27th)

4:09 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Friday, October 10, 2003

RIAA Stupidhead file:

Princeton student hits "Shift" key to defeat new copyguarding software, sued under DMCA

10:42 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

"Dogging" -- sex in public with or without strangers -- is a fad in the UK

While acknowledging doggers are a determined breed, Byrne said he had proposed several ways to prevent the behaviour -- including more police patrols -- but he has already ruled out one remedy.

"We thought better lighting in parks might prevent it but it actually allows them to see what they're doing better," he said.

12:35 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wednesday, October 08, 2003

Museum show of Allen Ginsberg's photo portraits in Allentown PA

4:59 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

New software for TV-recording on PCs trumps TiVo?

4:57 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Monday, October 06, 2003

College as pleasure prison for the rich

Ohio State University, in Columbus, is spending $140 million on what its peers enviously refer to as the Taj Mahal, a complex featuring kayaks and canoes, indoor batting cage, massages and a climbing wall big enough for 50 students to scale simultaneously. On the drawing board at the University of Southern Mississippi, in Hattiesburg, are plans for a water park, complete with slides, a meandering river and a wet deck - a flat, moving sheet of water that helps students stay cool while sunbathing.

To finance the boom, universities are borrowing money at an escalating pace. According to Moody's Investors Service, public and private universities issued $12 billion worth of bonds in the first three quarters of 2003, a 22 percent increase from last year and almost three times as much as in the same period in 2000.

9:18 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

New trends in corpse culture: triple-wides & the mausoleum as culture center

But although the older mausoleums tended to be somber and foreboding, the most recent ones are a lot more welcoming, decorative and high-tech. Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks and Mortuaries in Glendale, Calif., is planning a three-story community mausoleum complex in Renaissance style. It will feature a 2,700-crypt mausoleum; a statuary garden; an 800-seat auditorium for religious services, lectures and films; a cafe serving coffee and light sandwiches; a space for exhibitions by local artists; and a museum displaying a permanent exhibit of artwork owned by the cemetery. The crypt area will feature technology that lets visitors press buttons on hand-held devices to retrieve photos, history and even a recorded message from the deceased via computer chips affixed to individual crypts.

9:14 AM - [Link] - Comments ()