Posts by Amy Gale
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My cat likes [to hide] inboxes.
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Capture: Colour is the new black, in reply to Carol Stewart,
For you book people .. Guardian obit of the much loved Russell Hoban.
For something nearly-photographic, YouTube yourself some Deadsy and the Sexo Chanjo and/or Door. Ok, Hoban didn't direct, but he did write and narrate. Feel him tasting those words.
picters on the wind, indeed
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Hard News: Name That Food Blog, in reply to Greg Dawson,
You could happily go down in history as "that spatchcock guy" though.
"spatchtwatcock", shurely...
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I mean, sure, the schools losing their cherries (ahem) may not like it, but what about the cherries themselves? When you're a cherry, you may want to be able to learn in the company of other cherries, even if you weren't previously being marginalised by all the apples and tomatoes (the latter being unsure if they're even fruit at all).
Well, for one thing, any cherries left behind are going to be even more of a minority, and thus even more marginalized, which cannot possibly be a good thing.
There are destructive aspects to cherry picking that are completely independent of the definition of a cherry. It doesn't need to be a bright kid - it could be a pure Aryan, or the someone deemed likely to believe that aliens visited the earth in DC10s.
One of the worst is resource erosion. From each of 6 schools, take 4 kids from each year level. Now you have a class at each year level and will be funded accordingly. On the other hand, each of those schools lost enough kids in total to fund one classroom+teacher+etc. But where can they drop one from their lineup? Nowhere.
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Up Front: Casual, Shallow and Meaningless, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Terrible plot by the way and who the F**k is Zylstra?.
Tell me you didn't just give away the ending.
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Up Front: Casual, Shallow and Meaningless, in reply to Sacha,
You said this was about literacy. Bad faith is unappealing.
Oh, for Pete's sake.
1) I asked if this was about literacy.
2) The linked article does in fact make literal reference to literacy in several places, as well as mentioning various issues that fall under that umbrella or are closely related.
But seriously? You seem to have a weird obsession with jumping on everything I say without any actual reference to the content. It's creepy and me and my greasemonkey are done with it. Feel free to have the last word. I won't even know.
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Up Front: Casual, Shallow and Meaningless, in reply to Sacha,
I can't decide whether my lack of interest in doing anything of the sort is because I never made a characterization or because I don't answer to you.
Oh, well, same result either way.
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Up Front: Casual, Shallow and Meaningless, in reply to Sacha,
That’s just the kind of article I was thinking about when I mentioned cliches. It takes some trends that might – might – be significant, but instead of examining them with any kind of rigor and telling us something worth knowing, it keeps throwing out numbers and hoping something sticks.
Let’s just have a look at a couple of these.
"The number of 17-year-olds who never read for pleasure increased from 9 percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004."
In less OMG CIVILIZATION IZ IN DECLINE terms: 81% of 17 year olds – a clear majority – read for pleasure at least some of the time. If you stop a random 17 year old on the street, your odds of getting a non-reader are low.
Does the decline need addressing? Absolutely, if it exists. But why look at tiresome things like error margin and long term trends when there are more numbers to list?
"Almost half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 never read books for pleasure."I see what they did there with the complete change of domain. I guess it just doesn’t count if you’re reading The New Yorker, or Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, or a self-published short story you bought off some guy on the subway?
"almost 40 percent of college freshmen (and 35 percent of seniors) read nothing at all for pleasure, and 26 percent (28 percent of seniors) read less than one hour per week"Kids reading a whole lot for school have no time left in the day to read anything else? Astounding. Can’t wait for the next journalistic insight into the world of undergraduates. “They like beer”, perhaps.
"The report notes that average annual household spending on books, adjusted for inflation, dropped 14 percent between 1985 and 2005, and that consumer book sales declined 6 percent from 2000 to 2006."Again, potentially interesting but currently useless.
- Are they talking about adjustment with respect to some index on the price of books specifically, or on the overall “value” of a dollar? Many of us are getting a great deal more book for our relative buck than we were in 1985.
- Do these numbers take the secondhand book market into account (bet they don’t)?
- Is library usage declining as well, or is it growing as people who don’t buy resort to borrowing instead? We don’t even get spurious numbers on this one, just a bit of anecdata from CT.
And then they are shocked, shocked, that people don’t read the newspaper as much as they used to. FFS. -
Up Front: Casual, Shallow and Meaningless, in reply to Sacha,
I rather like “what have you been reading lately?"
Does that work on many young people?
Yes, it does. We’re not going to get all tedious and cliched about illiterate yoofs are we?
Mostly it’s even paper books, not that there’s anything wrong with electronic ones. There’s also nothing intrinsically wrong with magazines, or with texts that haven’t gone through the traditional publication process at all.
Which reminds me, pro tip on the ‘what have you been reading’ gambit: make sure you have some way of noting anything that sounds interesting. Notebook, txt to self, whatever works.
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I rather like "what have you been reading lately?" because it's broad enough to encompass whatever item they actually want to talk about and because you then get to talk about books. And because if it doesn't work, that's ok too because I've still learned something significant, if negative. Like this one time, I was seated next to a reasonably-famous [field redacted] at dinner and his answer was along the lines of "I don't read books, I just write them".
I have another one but I might want to use it when I come to NZ in a week.
