May I direct your attention to a very interesting project that Amanda is running? She is a classics professor and is sponsoring an online reading group to re-read the Iliad. She went to see the movie, Troy, and left thinking that not one single person associated with the film ever read the book! So, she started an online reading group to re-read this classic. She is posting: back ground information to put the epic in context; guided reading questions; and, hosting discussions on her comment boards. It is an extremely cool thing to do and I, for one, am very grateful that she is willing to volunteer her expertise. I admit to having fallen a bit behind, and I plead the all the normal quotidian pressures, but I am still enjoying it very much and plan to catch up this weekend. Go check it out. And then go either buy a translation or borrow a copy from the library!

Thanks, Amanda!

Posted by: Random Penseur at 09:19 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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How many of you remember Joyce Kilmer, the poet? I came across a very nice article about him that I recommend if you have a moment. He was much more than just the guy who wrote about trees.

I don't know abou the rest of you, but there is not enough poetry in my life.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 08:41 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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How many times have you heard a politician accused of being a hypocrite? I believe that this is an accusation I may have even heard levied at our current President. Well, guess what, it ain't nothing new in politics. I translated the following line from my Latin book:

"Fortunam et vitam antiquae patriae saepe laudas sed recusas." -- Horace.

Roughly, and for me, all Latin translations are rough:

"You often praise the fortune and way of life of the old fatherland, but you reject them."

In other words, while you praise the virtues of yore and the old fashioned life style, you don't live your own life like that. Sound familiar? Sound like, you talk the talk but you don't walk the walk? Interesting, I think, to see the same charges levied by Horace that you see repeated today. La plus ca change, etc.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 08:07 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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There was an article in the NY Times this morning about the opening of the new Maria Fareri Children's Hospital in Westchester County. The beginning of the article, describing how this new hospital came about and why it was named after Maria, made me terribly sad.

The parents of the dead girl, Brenda and John Fareri of Greenwich, Conn., helped build the new hospital after they found the existing pediatric department lacking in accommodations for anxious families.

When 13-year-old Maria was dying of a rare case of bat rabies in 1995, the couple felt she received top-flight care. But there was no way for them to sleep in her room, no place to shower, nowhere to share a cuddle.

"It was very difficult because she asked me to lie in bed with her, but her bed was too small," Mrs. Fareri said during a tour of the hospital earlier in the week. That moment of closeness "got taken away," she said. "So you would never want to think that that could happen to another family."

Holy sh*t. All that dying little girl wanted was her mother to lie in bed with her and she couldn't. If that does not touch you, deep, deep down inside . . .

I read this at around 5:00 this morning. Why was I up so early? My daughter woke me at 4:15 because she "needed an extra hug and a kiss". I gave it to her, of course, but was not thrilled to have that sleep snatched away. I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to go back to sleep. So I went downstairs and rode the recumbent stationary bike with the newspaper and kind of grumbled to myself about being awakened so early.

I bet Mrs. Fareri would give everything she owns to have traded places with me this morning at 4:15. I don't mind being up so early any more today.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 07:57 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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According to my little site meters, if my average number of daily unique visitors stop by today, I will hit and surpass 1000 visitors. I think that's really very cool. Seems like a milestone, of sorts, and I wanted to mark it. In the period since I started this blog, I've put up 149 posts and almost 30,000 words. I think I must be neglecting my day job!

Thanks for stopping by and reading the output of my fevered little brain.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 10:43 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I read two interesting posts the other day. The first, at Joanne Jacob's site, concerned how teaching about WWII has ceased to be about the war and is only about social history, including, inter alia, our crimes against the Japanese interned in California. The second, at Erin O'Connor's blog, Critical Mass, discussed how the teaching of history has suffered as schools concentrate on reading and math in the elementary schools to the exclusion of social studies.

Are we at the end of history? Or at least teaching about history?

I have no clear recollections of what I was taught in school about WWII history because I was largely self-taught. I devoured every book I could find in the school library on the topic in middle school and continued reading well into college. Any holes I had were self-filled.

History is not only critically important but it appears to be both undertaught and also the prisoner of ideological constraints. If we spend all our time in the class room learning about our horrid treatment of Japanese/Americans, we miss out on the good and the great that we as a country accomplished in WWII. The good and the great needs to be acknowledged so we don't raise a generation of children who think that the US is the greatest terrorist state or who think that calling for a "million Mogadishus" is civilized criticism of US foreign policy. After all, how do we know where we are going if we don't know how we got here?

That said, kids need to be able to read to learn about history. Math is obviously terribly important, too. The emphasis on these subjects, to the exclusion of history, in order to push up test scores, concerns me greatly though. The effects of a lack of historical knowledge will be seen as a cascade, it seems to me. Kids will be less prepared in history in high school and thus, probably, less prepared to do advanced work in college. They will be less prepared and less able to challenge historical error and deliberate distortion. In short, they will be less able to act as responsible citizens. That is probably my biggest fear. I hope I'm over-reacting.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 09:50 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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A press release from Penn State recently came to my attention. It seeks to explain, in part, why black children are performing less well on achievement tests in schools than white children.

Parenthetically, I think that the achievement gap is an issue that should concern us all. We as a society need to encourage all of our children to reach their highest potential because we all benefit.

The explanation tendered by Penn State is certainly controversial. It suggests that the answer is to be found in black v. white family dynamics: "recent research points to differences between African-American and White family interaction when children are very young."

According to the study, the problem is that there is a major difference in how often black parents speak to their children and how often they vary their vocabulary. I don't know where or how these figures were obtained, and you'll notice that all of a sudden the press release stops breaking the figures out in terms of race and uses socio-economic class instead, but: "[b]y the age of three, professional parents had spoken an estimated 35 million words to their children, working- and middle-class had spoken about 20 million words, and lower-class parents had only spoken about 10 million words."

The release picks back up on the racial difference later on: "'By 18 to 20 months, the vocabulary growth trajectories of the children of professional parents had already accelerated beyond those of other children,' Farkas adds. According to his research, there seems to be both a social class, and controlling for class, a Black-White difference in children's oral vocabulary growth from infancy to adolescence. Preschool vocabulary knowledge is a strong predictor of reading performance in early elementary school, and early elementary reading performance is a strong predictor of later school performance generally."

The study found that "greater verbal interaction between parents and young children improves students' performance on standardized tests". In other words, if you talk to your children a lot, and use a varied vocabulary, you are likely to have children who do better in school than their peers who did not have the benefit of the same interaction.

The study offers no explanation for how or why black family dynamics are different from white family dynamics. I know very little about family sociology. But, I wonder, did the authors control for whether the families they studied were single parent families? I understand, anecdotally from the NY Times over the years, that there are more single parent households among black families than white families. If this is wrong, feel free to correct me. If so, that would automatically halve the number of adults around to speak to the children. Further, a single mother (or father) is going to have less energy to spend with a child to begin with. Also, the more children you have the less time you can spend with any single child. Did the study look at multiple children families? Would that make a difference?

I spoke to my daughter, my first born, a lot. With both of my children, I use adult vocabulary and try to vary my vocabulary as possible. I do this partly because I love the English language and delight in its rich vocabulary, partly because I abhor baby talk in adults, and partly because I like nothing more than delivering a good monologue! My wife loves to tell the story of how she came out of the shower one morning to find me and the then under three month old daughter on the bed discussing evolution with me saying to my daughter: "vestigial, can you say vestigial?" Before she could speak, I treated her to the monologues on some of the following subjects: the rise of the merchant class in mediaeval Europe; social stratification in feudal Japan; and, the differences between English and French Renaissance landscape architecture. That last one, delivered while my little one was in the baby bjorn and we were standing in front of a florist's window looking at topiary garnered more than a few quizzical looks from passers-by. According to this press release, I have been doing exactly the right thing. My wife does the same thing, only she does it in Norwegian.

So, where am I going with all this? I'm going here: all the money in the world spent improving schools and paying teachers more and wiring schools up to the internet won't significantly overcome a lack of sustained, intelligent parental attention. You can pass all of the No Child Left Behind laws you want, but if you don't fix the problem at home, you may not be able to help the child catch up. We need these children to catch up, if for no other reason than the selfish reason that they will be paying our social security and pensions. But it sounds like first, we need to fix the family. How do you do that? I have no idea. Do you?

By the way, feel free to comment on this. I'm very curious about your reaction to this press release and this post.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 09:43 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Ever been to Poughkeepsie before? It's upstate NY. A Judge of the Bankruptcy Court sits there and I've got to go tomorrow for a hearing. It's pretty much a whole day adventure.

I am posting about this, not because I assume you are interested in my little travels, but because you may not be from NY and you may think that NY State is one big burnt out section of the South Bronx, repeated ad infinitum up to the Canadian border. It isn't.

Poughkeepsie is located in Dutchess County, a beautiful part of the State including some of the Hudson River Valley. The beauty of the Hudson River Valley inspired an entire school of painters in the 1800's. Frederick Church's home, Olana, while not in Dutchess County, is a grand place to visit if you want to learn more about that school of painters.

But, you may ask, what to do in Poughkeepsie when not attending hearings at the Bankruptcy Court? Well, Vassar College is there. If I have time, I'm going to nip over there to see the exhibit on Renaissance print making. The campus of Vassar is one of the most beautiful college campuses I've ever visited and I hope I get some time to walk around there. I may bring a change of clothes, come to think of it, so I am not imprisoned in my suit and tie all day.

But what about food? Surely, you ask, there is nowhere worth eating when you get that far from civilization? Well, among other things, you can eat at the Culinary Institute of America's restaurants. The CIA has trained some of America's top chefs and it's a short drive from Poughkeepsie in Hyde Park. Hyde Park is also home to FDR Museum and Presidential Library, the Vanderbilt Museum and House (a stunning house with exceptional Hudson River Views) and, just down the road in Rhinebeck, is the Old Rhinebeck aerodrome where you can see historic planes and other vehicles from the 1900-1935 era. After the planes and museums, you could also pop in to stay the night at the Beekman Arms, which claims to be the oldest operating inn in the country. I've had brunch there and at least can vouch for the brunch if not for the historical claims they make.

Upstate New York is beautiful. If I had more time before today's deposition, I'd post more about this terrific area. Hope it inspires you to travel there!

Posted by: Random Penseur at 08:32 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The last military leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising gave an interview on Polish television. It was published and translated by Chrenkoff. This is a strong voice, to borrow a favorite expression of the far left, for freedom and justice. Mr. Edelman is a realist. Go and read it. You know you want to.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 08:24 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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We have a live in nanny who takes care of our children because my wife and I both work full time. She is a lovely 19 year old young woman from Utah. She is also a twin. She misses her twin and her twin misses her. Her twin has decided that she wants to come out to be a nanny, too. Enter me, stage right. I have a train buddy and he and his wife recently had their second child and he told me that they were thinking about getting a live in nanny. They bought a new house with more room and his wife also works full time. I told him about my nanny and her sister. I passed along phone numbers and talked to him about our experiences and, voila, the twin arrives to begin work on July 15. I wish everything were this easy.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 08:03 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I hope I'm not the only one who thinks that a new Viking Ship excavation is a really interesting occurrence. Because that would be sad.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 08:03 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I've spent most of my day in deposition listening to a witness lie and perjure herself. The Court Reporter and the Videographer all agree that she was not telling the truth, that she was slimy, and that she was not reliable. She found out for the first time that the IRS had tax liens against her and her husband during the deposition on Friday and claimed, today, that she did not discuss that fact with her husband over the weekend. Credible? Hardly. We're taking the husband tomorrow. That's going to be very interesting. I can't wait to take this one to trial.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 04:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Buddy just reported in from his weekend. Success? I think so. Dinner and movie went well. They had a good time. And not only did they discuss getting together again, she actually called him last night to confirm their plans!

I am getting the warm, self-congratulatory glow that comes from the feeling that you did a good deed.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 08:47 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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There may be some limits after all, despite what I wrote about below. A man claimed too much in benefits and was prosecuted. He was not convicted. Why? Too dyslexic to understand, perhaps. However, it does appear from this that you can't just claim for whatever you want and keep it, regardless of your situation or income level.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 07:55 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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According to Aftenposten, the biggest Norwegian daily newspaper, a family has won compensation from the local welfare authorities to help pay for the effects of their 11 year old son's chronic bed wetting. They had to go to court to get it, but they are going to receive something like $1,100 a year. The article doesn't address this, but I imagine that they are also going to get their lawyer fees and court costs paid as well. The social welfare state will pay for just about anything, I think. Can you even imagine making an application for something like this?

Posted by: Random Penseur at 07:50 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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