Who wants to be a history professor?
Richard Harter
bit of the game show, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? For the $32000
question, a college student, was asked "Who won the battle of
Hastings." Three of the choices were Harold, William the Conqueror,
and Edward the Confessor; I don't recall the fourth choice.
One might suppose that anyone who is sufficently advanced in the
education cycle so as to be a college student would have found this a
"snap" question, but it was not so. She had no idea as to the answer
so she used one of her "lifelines", the option to call a friend and
ask him (or her as the case may be but in this case it was a him) the
question. Her friend was a history professor.
Our hapless contestant read the question to her friend. He said, "I'm
not really sure; I'm in American History; but I'm about 60% sure that
it was William the Conqueror."
Fancy that, a history professor that was in doubt about who won at
Hastings in 1066. I do wonder if he has read Foucault.
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net,
http://www.tiac.net/users/cri, http://www.varinoma.com
Love, no matter how pure, is the most selfish of gifts.
For that reason it is the one gift that must be given.
--
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
Michael S. Morris
Sunday, the 10th of February, 2002
Richard:
Fancy that, a history professor that was in
doubt about who won at Hastings in 1066.
I do wonder if he has read Foucault.
You took the words right out of my mouth.
It's interesting. I remember defending
E.D. Hirsch's little book on _Cultural
Literacy_ in a lunchtime conversation at Caltech
in the 80's. I was trying to convey that it
really wasn't a right-wing conspiratorial
prescriptive set of facts for everyone to
have to memorize, but more like a descriptive
lexicography---a list of the allusions which
are considered so familiar that a New York Times
editor wouldn't pause to explain them. We got
on the subject of dates, and my friend
touted the "party line" that making kids
memorize dates is outmoded pedagogy, what kids
really need is to "understand" historical
causes, and I was saying that knowing some dates
is a good thing, that it gives you a "frame" without
which historical narrative doesn't stick in the
brain and that it helps you to reject vague
and mushy historical causalities. I said I
wished I'd been made to memorize a whole lotta
dates back in school, but that this was all
really irrelevant to Hirsch, who in fact lists only 6
dates that any culturally literate American would
know, and that this was far too few for building
any "frame" like I meant, but was only a list of
those few dates a newspaper editor might mention and
not explain. The dates are 1066, 1492, 1776, 1861-1865,
1914-1918, and 1939-1945. My friend balked
immediately because, he said, he didn't know
1066. I was simply shocked. Here was a
smart guy, an American from a suburban school
system and the University of Washington, now
a graduate student in theoretical physics at
one of the premier institutions of learning in
the world, and not knowing *that*? I think he
won the argument by a knockout.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
David Latane
>Once of an evening, not long ago, I turned on the telly and caught a
>bit of the game show, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? For the $32000
>question, a college student, was asked "Who won the battle of
>Hastings." Three of the choices were Harold, William the Conqueror,
>and Edward the Confessor; I don't recall the fourth choice.
>
>One might suppose that anyone who is sufficently advanced in the
>education cycle so as to be a college student would have found this a
>"snap" question, but it was not so. She had no idea as to the answer
>so she used one of her "lifelines", the option to call a friend and
>ask him (or her as the case may be but in this case it was a him) the
>question. Her friend was a history professor.
>
>Our hapless contestant read the question to her friend. He said, "I'm
>not really sure; I'm in American History; but I'm about 60% sure that
>it was William the Conqueror."
>
>Fancy that, a history professor that was in doubt about who won at
>Hastings in 1066. I do wonder if he has read Foucault.
>
>
This comes from over-specialization in graduate school. In ye olde days
the thought was, gee, 99% of all humanities PhDs will be teaching a wide
range of courses in teaching institutions, maybe they better read
widely. Now the PhD is granted after exams in which one reads a tiny
sliver for a dissertation, the theory behind the dissertation, and
something connected to the dissertation that sounds interdisciplinary.
Hence one comes across specialists in 19th-century American lit, for
instance, who know all about Fanny Fern but are a little vague on
Hawthorne beyond "Scarlet Letter" and think Paradise Lost was written in
couplets in the 18th-century.
D. Latane
Web Gypsy
"Richard Harter" <c...@tiac.net> wrote in message
news:85dc55479de02bbe98...@mygate.mailgate.org...
jimC
[On a common cultural literacy]
> I said I
> wished I'd been made to memorize a whole lotta
> dates back in school, but that this was all
> really irrelevant to Hirsch, who in fact lists only 6
> dates that any culturally literate American would
> know, and that this was far too few for building
> any "frame" like I meant, but was only a list of
> those few dates a newspaper editor might mention and
> not explain. The dates are 1066, 1492, 1776, 1861-1865,
> 1914-1918, and 1939-1945.
Wha...?! And how about 1756-1763? Or 1803, 1804-1806?
Or the recurring sequence 1788, 1792, 1796, 1800, ...?
Other than the Spanish Peripatetic Court's banishing
of Jews from Spain and Columbus' voyage to America
in 1492, two events which are not unrelated,
can anyone name a 19th century novel by a
British author that opens in 1492 and makes no
mention of the other two events?
--
jimC
http://www.geocities.com/jimcolli92625/
Official Web pages of the Crystal Cove Lunchtime Hikers. Updated 06 Feb 02
0815 GMT. See what Clyde Tombaugh saw in Flagstaff. See Calico Systems
Computers' West Los Angeles store on a warm December day in 1983 in the
neighborhood where computer stores started, now visited by flying saucers.
Don Tuite
<c...@tiac.net> wrote:
>Once of an evening, not long ago, I turned on the telly and caught a
>bit of the game show, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? For the $32000
>question, a college student, was asked "Who won the battle of
>Hastings." Three of the choices were Harold, William the Conqueror,
>and Edward the Confessor; I don't recall the fourth choice.
>
>One might suppose that anyone who is sufficently advanced in the
>education cycle so as to be a college student would have found this a
>"snap" question, but it was not so. She had no idea as to the answer
>so she used one of her "lifelines", the option to call a friend and
>ask him (or her as the case may be but in this case it was a him) the
>question. Her friend was a history professor.
>
>Our hapless contestant read the question to her friend. He said, "I'm
>not really sure; I'm in American History; but I'm about 60% sure that
>it was William the Conqueror."
>
>Fancy that, a history professor that was in doubt about who won at
>Hastings in 1066. I do wonder if he has read Foucault.
It *is* the sort of mental lacuna that would make _Ivanhoe_ a little
hard to follow.
Don
Michael S. Morris
Sunday, the 10th of February, 2002
I said:
I said I
wished I'd been made to memorize a whole lotta
dates back in school, but that this was all
really irrelevant to Hirsch, who in fact lists only 6
dates that any culturally literate American would
know, and that this was far too few for building
any "frame" like I meant, but was only a list of
those few dates a newspaper editor might mention and
not explain. The dates are 1066, 1492, 1776, 1861-1865,
1914-1918, and 1939-1945.
Jim:
Wha...?! And how about 1756-1763? Or 1803, 1804-1806?
Or the recurring sequence 1788, 1792, 1796, 1800, ...?
Yeah. See, that's my point---Hirsch was not being prescriptive,
he was being descriptive (*). A newspaper editor would
pause to explain that 1756-1783 referred to the Revolutionary
War, that 1803 was the Louisiana Purchase, that 1804-1806
was Lewis and Clark, or that the sequence 1788+4n refers
to presidential election years. But he might not well insert
an explanation for 1492.
(*) Except for the 1/3 of his list made up of
science terms, which he *was* quite
openly being prescriptive about.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Marko Amnell
> The ideal may very well be the history professor who knows about
> Hastings _and_ has read Foucault, but let's continue on the basis of
> people as they are, i.e. knowing some stuff, not knowing other stuff.
> A meaningful comparison between the Hirschean literate Professor and
> the Hirschean illiterate Professor would have to bare its assumptions
> -- which knowledge is crucial, indispensable, productive, important,
> and which is, say, optional. Say we have two professors: one knows
> when Hastings was and who won it, the second knows when the
> Phenomenology came out, and what's in it. The first doesn't know what
> the second knows, and the second doesn't know what the first one
> knows.
>
> Which knowledge is likely to generate a more interesting
> conversation? If we really had to chose between a student who's taught
> the date and the winner and perhaps a bit of context but is happy to
> assert that sense-certainty is a secure form of knowledge, and a
> student who's never heard of Hastings (etc) but can tell you about one
> of the most important and influential arguments of modernity, which
> one do we prefer?
>
> Surely, you'll claim that this is a false alternative, and in an
> ideal world, you'd be entirely correct. As things are, you'll continue
> to run into people who've read philosophy and don't know dates and
> people who know dates and haven't read philosophy. The day that we're
> all called upon to chuckle about the guy who hasn't read _Negative
> Dialectics_ with the same glee we afford the guy who doesn't know who
> won at Hastings, you'll be entitled to the great satisfaction you
> evince above (Morris gives out the licenses, I hear).
This reminds me of something E.M. Cioran said. He said that he read
very little history before the age of 30. Before 30 he read mostly
philosophy, poetry and literature. History, he said, was just a
collection of cold hard facts, and a good historian was someone
who could be happy finding, compiling and connecting together this
massive collection of facts. Philosophy, poetry and literature, on
the other hand, were full of emotions, and arguments and imagery--
in short, the stuff of life. I would certainly think that it is
better to read Hegel and Adorno (and poets and novelists) while one
is young, and only know some basic history. The full details of
world history are something one can fill in later, when one is
older. Cioran himself did end up knowing a lot of history
eventually, which shows in his later books like _History and
Utopia_. My own experience tells me that anyone who reads mostly
history in his youth is usually a very dry and superficial person.
To occupy one's mind with the compilation of thousands of isolated
facts at the exclusion of arguments and interpretations and
artistic expression is a sign of a peculiarly underdeveloped
imagination.
Michael S. Morris
Sunday, the 10th of February, 2002
Silke:
Fancy that! appears to be the correct response.
A history professor who doesn't know who won the
battle of Hastings! And how wonderful and deeply
satisfying that I know and he doesn't! "I do wonder
if he has read Foucault," then, the ultimate
put-down. But, in fact, that may well be the right
thing to wonder -- if he doesn't know "a," what does
he know (we'll call it x)? And is knowledge of
a more important than the knowledge of x? Under
which perspective is it more important, and more
important for what?
Knowledge of "a" in this case *precedes* knowledge of
"x". Foucault, and indeed all of at least 20th-century
"continental philosophy" is revisionist. It cannot be
understood critically *without* prior knowledge of what it
revises. So, a history professor knowing Foucault, but
not who won the Battle of Hastings is comicly shameful.
It displays what is wrong with the humanities at present.
It's like if you read Dee Brown _Bury My Heart at Wounded
Knee_ for the *Indian* side of US westward expansion
and yet never read any of what Dee Brown revises. You'll
get a totally false impression of what people knew and
thought about it. You'll think everybody went around
with a racist platitude like "The only good Indian is
a dead Indian" on his lips (when in fact the guy it
is attributed to denied he'd said it, and if he did
say it, he said it in the middle of a war he was commanding
against Indians), and that never a massacre of whites
by Indians occurred to provoke any mistreatment of
Indians by whites. I guess if you want not history, but
propagandized gits who are ignorant of history, but
who can spout some historical facts to support your
ideology, then its good. But, I don't understand how
anyone gets to be a history professor without knowing a
whole lot more of elementary facts about history than
who won the Battle of Hastings, one the most pivotal
and consequential events ever.
Silke:
The ideal may very well be the history professor
who knows about Hastings _and_ has read Foucault,
but let's continue on the basis of people as they
are, i.e. knowing some stuff, not knowing other stuff.
Of course. So, again, knowledge of the Battle of Hastings
is in every way *prior* to knowledge of Foucault.
In exactly the same way that knowledge of differential
calculus is prior in every way to meaning of quantum
mechanics. If you don't have the solid foundation *before*
going out to the theoretically important, then you are
reduced to the popular science-level of understanding,
explanation, and treatment. And guys like Alan Sokal
can make fun of your transparent ignorance and ideological
gullibility.
Silke:
A meaningful comparison between the Hirschean
literate Professor and the Hirschean illiterate
Professor would have to bare its assumptions
-- which knowledge is crucial, indispensable,
productive, important, and which is, say, optional.
Foucault is optional. Hastings isn't.
Silke:
Say we have two professors: one knows
when Hastings was and who won it, the second knows
when the Phenomenology came out, and what's in it.
The first doesn't know what the second knows, and
the second doesn't know what the first one
knows.
Which knowledge is likely to generate a more interesting
conversation?
The first. You can do absolutely nothing with the second.
He can't converse about anything.
Silke:
If we really had to chose between a student who's
taught the date and the winner and perhaps a bit
of context but is happy to assert that sense-certainty
is a secure form of knowledge, and a student who's
never heard of Hastings (etc) but can tell you about one
of the most important and influential arguments of
modernity, which one do we prefer?
The Battle of Hastings any day. Of course. There isn't
even a question about this. And it's because the student
who rattles on about this "important and influential
argument" is parroting Professor Weineck's opinion,
and really knows nothing about influence *or*
importance. For that, he'd have to have some sense
of history, of dates, of mundane facts, which, ex hypothesi,
he doesn't. He's merely memorized some gobbledegook for
an exam. At least the other knows one fact.
Silke:
As things are, you'll continue to run into people
who've read philosophy and don't know dates and
people who know dates and haven't read philosophy.
Actually, no. What you find is people who have know dates
and usually have read some philosophy. And you find
people who have read more philosophy, but without the
dates. And the latter kind of people, you invariably find
have nothing to anchor their opinions with.
S: The day that we're all called upon to chuckle
about the guy who hasn't read _Negative
Dialectics_ with the same glee we afford
the guy who doesn't know who won at Hastings,
you'll be entitled to the great satisfaction you
evince above
No, because there *is* an order to knowledge that
you are eliding.
S: (Morris gives out the licenses, I hear).
Morris thinks that a New York Times editor
might not explain an allusion to the Battle
of Hastings but probably would feel obliged to
explain an allusion to _Madness and Civilization_
(to mention a revisionist historical work by
Foucault which I have read).
Please note that I *do not* accuse Foucault of
not knowing about the Battle of Hastings. I think
he writes assuming his readers do know about it,
is the point.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
jimC
>
> Sunday, the 10th of February, 2002
>
> I said:
> I said I
> wished I'd been made to memorize a whole lotta
> dates back in school, but that this was all
> really irrelevant to Hirsch, who in fact lists only 6
> dates that any culturally literate American would
> know, and that this was far too few for building
> any "frame" like I meant, but was only a list of
> those few dates a newspaper editor might mention and
> not explain. The dates are 1066, 1492, 1776, 1861-1865,
> 1914-1918, and 1939-1945.
> Jim:
> Wha...?! And how about 1756-1763? Or 1803, 1804-1806?
> Or the recurring sequence 1788, 1792, 1796, 1800, ...?
>
> Yeah. See, that's my point---Hirsch was not being prescriptive,
> he was being descriptive (*). A newspaper editor would
> pause to explain that 1756-1783 referred to the Revolutionary
> War,
I should hope not! The dates I gave refer to the Seven Years' War
(England, Saxony et al vs France, Austria et al, or Prots vs
RCs for short) which in the New World was called the French and
Indian War. Virtually none of the American founders were
pro-independence yet, although there were some pro-French in
northern New England and in the West, that is, west of
the Ohio. In the north, Upper and Lower Canadians
are accountably quite affected by it today.
> that 1803 was the Louisiana Purchase, that 1804-1806
> was Lewis and Clark, or that the sequence 1788+4n refers
> to presidential election years. But he might not well insert
> an explanation for 1492.
>
> (*) Except for the 1/3 of his list made up of
> science terms, which he *was* quite
> openly being prescriptive about.
Pax.
jimC
>
> "Michael S. Morris" wrote:
>
> [On a common cultural literacy]
>
> > I said I
> > wished I'd been made to memorize a whole lotta
> > dates back in school, but that this was all
> > really irrelevant to Hirsch, who in fact lists only 6
> > dates that any culturally literate American would
> > know, and that this was far too few for building
> > any "frame" like I meant, but was only a list of
> > those few dates a newspaper editor might mention and
> > not explain. The dates are 1066, 1492, 1776, 1861-1865,
> > 1914-1918, and 1939-1945.
>
> Wha...?! And how about 1756-1763? Or 1803, 1804-1806?
> Or the recurring sequence 1788, 1792, 1796, 1800, ...?
>
> Other than the Spanish Peripatetic Court's banishing
> of Jews from Spain and Columbus' voyage to America
> in 1492, two events which are not unrelated,
> can anyone name a 19th century novel by a
> British author that opens in 1492 and makes no
> mention of the other two events?
Well the book I have in mind is _Romola_ by
George Eliot.
Steve Hayes
wrote:
>Once of an evening, not long ago, I turned on the telly and caught a
>bit of the game show, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? For the $32000
>question, a college student, was asked "Who won the battle of
>Hastings." Three of the choices were Harold, William the Conqueror,
>and Edward the Confessor; I don't recall the fourth choice.
>
>One might suppose that anyone who is sufficently advanced in the
>education cycle so as to be a college student would have found this a
>"snap" question, but it was not so. She had no idea as to the answer
>so she used one of her "lifelines", the option to call a friend and
>ask him (or her as the case may be but in this case it was a him) the
>question. Her friend was a history professor.
>
>Our hapless contestant read the question to her friend. He said, "I'm
>not really sure; I'm in American History; but I'm about 60% sure that
>it was William the Conqueror."
>
>Fancy that, a history professor that was in doubt about who won at
>Hastings in 1066. I do wonder if he has read Foucault.
I have an impression, which may be wrong, that American education tends to
specialise very early, and so I can quite belive that.
I told my wife, and she remarks that she had been on an overseas tour in
Scandinavia, and one of the people on the tour was an American art student,
who amazed everyone (and not just the Australians) by not knowing what a
wombat was.
Such are the perils of too-early specialisation, i suppose.
--
Steve Hayes
E-mail: haye...@yahoo.com
Web: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/litmain.htm
Don Tuite
wrote:
>
>I told my wife, and she remarks that she had been on an overseas tour in
>Scandinavia, and one of the people on the tour was an American art student,
>who amazed everyone (and not just the Australians) by not knowing what a
>wombat was.
I wonder if he knew what a fungo bat is.
Don
Charis Quay Huei Li
Steve Hayes (haye...@yahoo.com) wrote:
> I have an impression, which may be wrong, that American education tends to
> specialise very early, and so I can quite belive that.
Really? Compared to whom? It seems you are from South Africa. I grew up in
another Commonwealth country (Malaysia) and came to the States for
undergrad and post-grad. I think we specialise much earlier. In America,
law and medicine are *second* degrees. At home, people decide between age
17 and 19 about these things. We stream people in Form 4 (15-16) into
arts, science and business and have them apply to university *departments*
for undergrad. Americans apply to the university and decide halfway
through their undergrad studies on their department. I really don't think
they specialise early.
Could it be that the contestant/prof didn't know because the event didn't
happen in America? :-P
*running and ducking*
cqhl.
Paul Ilechko
> "Michael S. Morris" wrote:
>
> [On a common cultural literacy]
>
> > I said I
> > wished I'd been made to memorize a whole lotta
> > dates back in school, but that this was all
> > really irrelevant to Hirsch, who in fact lists only 6
> > dates that any culturally literate American would
> > know, and that this was far too few for building
> > any "frame" like I meant, but was only a list of
> > those few dates a newspaper editor might mention and
> > not explain. The dates are 1066, 1492, 1776, 1861-1865,
> > 1914-1918, and 1939-1945.
>
> Wha...?! And how about 1756-1763? Or 1803, 1804-1806?
> Or the recurring sequence 1788, 1792, 1796, 1800, ...?
So you know American history. How about 1215 ?
j...@radidelmex.net
> Our hapless contestant read the question to her friend. He said, "I'm
> not really sure; I'm in American History; but I'm about 60% sure that
> it was William the Conqueror."
Well, it's not like it was American History! :) I saw the same gaffe, too.
Paul Ilechko
> I would certainly think that it is
> better to read Hegel and Adorno (and poets and novelists) while one
> is young, and only know some basic history.
I think the original point was that 1066 should be *basic history*
> The full details of
> world history are something one can fill in later, when one is
> older. Cioran himself did end up knowing a lot of history
> eventually, which shows in his later books like _History and
> Utopia_. My own experience tells me that anyone who reads mostly
> history in his youth is usually a very dry and superficial person.
> To occupy one's mind with the compilation of thousands of isolated
> facts at the exclusion of arguments and interpretations and
> artistic expression is a sign of a peculiarly underdeveloped
> imagination.
You have a weird idea of what history is, or can be.
Paul Ilechko
I have an impression, which may be wrong, that American education tends to
specialise very early, and so I can quite belive that.I told my wife, and she remarks that she had been on an overseas tour in
Scandinavia, and one of the people on the tour was an American art student,
who amazed everyone (and not just the Australians) by not knowing what a
wombat was.
Michael S. Morris
Sunday, the 10th of February, 2002
I said:
I said I
wished I'd been made to memorize a whole lotta
dates back in school, but that this was all
really irrelevant to Hirsch, who in fact lists only 6
dates that any culturally literate American would
know, and that this was far too few for building
any "frame" like I meant, but was only a list of
those few dates a newspaper editor might mention and
not explain. The dates are 1066, 1492, 1776, 1861-1865,
1914-1918, and 1939-1945.
Jim:
Wha...?! And how about 1756-1763? Or 1803, 1804-1806?
Or the recurring sequence 1788, 1792, 1796, 1800, ...?
I said:
Yeah. See, that's my point---Hirsch was not being prescriptive,
he was being descriptive (*). A newspaper editor would
pause to explain that 1756-1783 referred to the Revolutionary
War,
Jim:
I should hope not! The dates I gave refer to
the Seven Years' War [etc.]
Brain glitch, my fault. I read you as 1775-1783, which
is probably why I typed 1783 where I did.
In fact, I know this war and dates around at least
its American phase. I confess, though, I get pretty confused at
the War of the Grand Alliance, War of the Spanish Succession,
and War of the Austrian Succession, and their American phases
(King William's War, Queen Anne's War, and King George's War),
and which is which and when, and where and how exactly Jenkin's
Ear fits in.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Mike South
"Paul Ilechko" <pile...@att.net> wrote in message
news:3C67089D...@att.net...
Tamurlane?
But this discussion *is* limited to American history.
>
>
jimC
Certainly most South African kids have fungo bats.
A South African immigrant, I think in Irvine (Irvine teems with South Africans
of all colors, and who somewhat significantly are here and not in South Africa),
somehow managed to get a coyote that she thought was a stray dog into
her car and took it to the Orange County Animal Shelter. (Read about
this in Tuesday or Wednesday's paper.) I begin to see a rationale for
the warning to visitors to Pretoria not to stop for bodies in the road.
Apparently South Africa is a nation of extremely stupid people, and sensible
caution has to overrule valor.
--
jimC
http://www.geocities.com/jimcolli92625/
Official Web pages of the Crystal Cove Lunchtime Hikers. Updated 10 Feb 02
3:30 pm, PST. The Midwest is bathed in green from Texas to the Dakotas.
Enter a curious cat! Yet to come: Churchill, Manitoba, where polar
bears saunter (yes, saunter) down Kelsey Blvd. and residents try not
to think of fast food pizza which is 24 hours away by slow train.
Michael S. Morris
Sunday, the 10th of February,
2002
Paul Ilechko wrote at Jim:
So you know American history. How about 1215 ?
I'd think King John and Magna Carta and probably
1588, too, ought to be common enough currency in
the US. Maybe I'm a generation out of step, though. And maybe
1066 is going the same way. It half already
connotes "esoteric dates we had to memorize back in school",
ala _1066 and All That_. Of course, nobody's
really had to memorize dates in American schools
in at least 40 years, so the common complaint about
having all been victimized by memorization is more
vicarious than anything else.
I had read a fair amount of history of ancient Greece a few
years back, and after a while, well, significant dates
stood out. Off the top of my head now, and without looking
anything up:
490 BC Marathon
480 BC Thermopylae, Salamis
479 BC Plataea
431-404 BC Peloponnesian War
399 BC Death of Socrates
371 BC Leuctra
335-323 BC Campaigns of Alexander the Great
That's probably somewhat shorter than I could have done
several years ago. But, as a frame it helps. For instance,
if you ask me, I don't know when Plato lived offhand, but
thinking about these dates---he had to have been alive in
399, and must have flourished thereafter. Aristotle I
think survived Alexander the Great, which meshes with him
being the generation after Plato, and Plato following
Socrates. Athens dominant after Salamis, knocked down
by Sparta by 404, Sparta dominant until knocked down
by Thebes at Leuctra, then Thebes dominant until Chaeronea
and the hegemony of Macedon.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
jimC
Isn't that when King Jack got the trots from some
runny mead?
--
jimC
http://www.geocities.com/jimcolli92625/
Michael S. Morris
Sunday, the 10th of February, 2002
Steve Hayes wrote:
I have an impression, which may be wrong,
that American education tends to specialise
very early, and so I can quite belive that.
I don't think you are right, Steve. Umm, I spent
my first postgraduate year at Churchill College,
Cambridge, and the common impression was that Brits
specialized much earlier than Americans.
A physics major in Britain would be doing all
math, science, and especially physics in the last
two years before university. Then, 3 years at
university as an undergraduate taking exclusively physics
courses. At which point, he's ready to do a 3-year
reserach PhD. In the States, the college-bound
kid will be taking a "broad" course schedule of
English, Math (maybe or maybe not he'll get to
calculus by the end of high school), Science
(Physics, Chemistry, Biology), Band, German or French,
maybe History. As a physics major at university, he'll
do 4 years, and he may see one physics class his first
year while he is taking English and Chemistry and
elective History and Computer Science and the like.
In his second year, he'll be doing about half physics,
and then 3/4 physics in his last two years. So, in grad
school in the US, he starts on a 5-year PhD program, with
the first two years as advanced classwork in physics, after which
he takes a "qualifying examination" which is where they decide
if they'll keep him, and launches into research for his
last three years. I.e., it looks like the Brit specializes
earlier.
However, what I think is that what the American public schools
actually teach is so very minimal, that a British physics major
as a first-year at university is probably far ahead of his American
counterpart in well-roundedness, too. They come out about even
by the end of PhD's, though the American student is older.
I think the wombat story is indicative of the very poor
quality of the public schools, and the dominance of
*theory* about how to teach over knowledge of what to
teach in Schools of Education which produce teachers
for the public schools.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Sol
the Danish invasion in the North, Godwinson and his army marched three days
straight back down south to meet William the Conqueror. The Saxons grimly
hung on, withstanding charge after charge and appeared set to claim the
field, when on the fourth and final charge by William, the already wounded,
and possibly even dead Harold's body was fought over, hacked to pieces and
his standard fell. The Saxon's retreat turned into a route.
I seem to remember reading all this somewhere, but I make no guarantee as to
the accuracy of the facts.
I don't know about you, but I always felt it was wastly unfair to Harold to
have lost, after such a great effort.
"Web Gypsy" <webg...@psy.gyp> wrote in message
news:2A9512B007D946E3.E6A8ACD1...@lp.airnews.net...
Sol
remember the old TV miniseries.
"Don Tuite" <don_...@hotlink.com> wrote in message
news:18bd6uodci0djf1i0...@4ax.com...
jimC
> I have an impression, which may be wrong, that American education tends to
> specialise very early, and so I can quite belive that.
(sigh) It is the opposite, old boy. The exact opposite.
jimC
That would be unfortunate. I suppose _Ivanhoe_ makes a nice cultural
backgrounder, even if the setting is more than a century after the Conquest,
and it was written in the first half of the 19th century.
As a historical novel, it kicks ass over TV! Some say Scott invented the
modern form. (But what are folk sagas if not "historical novels" and what
do Anglophones read first: Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" or Suetonius's
version?) The historic novel proliferates because of Scott.
My 2c.
Leonardo Dasso
[snip]
> Fancy that, a history professor that was in doubt about who won at
> Hastings in 1066. I do wonder if he has read Foucault.
>
Your final comment reminds me of somebody I met at my college in Cambridge
a few years ago. He was doing his PhD in History. His thesis concerned the
biography of some obscure English bishop who lived during the middle ages.
Once I asked him a question about the Renaissance. "I only know about the
middle ages", he replied. Some time later I asked him something about the
Knights Templars. "I only know about this vicar", he replied.
When he was about to finish his PhD he went to a job interview. He came back
from the interview absolutely furious. The first question fired at him was
concerning Foucault's influence on historiography. "Who's Foucault?" He
asked. The interviewer shut her laptop and told him that the interview was
over.
regards
leo
Kater Moggin
> Fancy that, a history professor that was in doubt about who won at
> Hastings in 1066. I do wonder if he has read Foucault.
I think there's more to wonder about in cases of unspotted
confidence. "Perhaps about the beginning of this century, a
young curate declared to his congregation, 'If the King
James version was good enough for Saint Paul, it is good enough
for me'" (David Norton, _A History of the English Bible as
Literature_ 124n, citing A.E. Newton, _The Greatest Book in the
World and Other Papers_).
-- Moggin
Kater Moggin
> I told my wife, and she remarks that she had been on an overseas tour in
> Scandinavia, and one of the people on the tour was an American art student,
> who amazed everyone (and not just the Australians) by not knowing what a
> wombat was. Such are the perils of too-early specialisation, i suppose.
Or the peril of consorting with snippy tourists.
The Wombat
The wombat lives across the seas,
Among the far Antipodes.
He may exist on nuts and berries,
Or then again, on missionaries;
His distant habitat precludes
Conclusive knowledge of his moods
But I would not engage the wombat
In any form of mortal combat.
Ogden Nash
-- Moggin
Kater Moggin
> I think the wombat story is indicative of the very poor
> quality of the public schools, and the dominance of
> *theory* about how to teach over knowledge of what to
> teach in Schools of Education which produce teachers
> for the public schools.
Damn right. Teachers ought to be taught to teach students
about wombats so citizens of this great nation won't be
laughed at on group-tours of Scandinavia when talk turns to the
fauna of Oz.
-- Moggin
Don Tuite
Mm. Sounds a bit too reminiscent of Lucky Jim.
Don
Steve Hayes
<msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote:
>It's interesting. I remember defending
>E.D. Hirsch's little book on _Cultural
>Literacy_ in a lunchtime conversation at Caltech
>in the 80's. I was trying to convey that it
>really wasn't a right-wing conspiratorial
>prescriptive set of facts for everyone to
>have to memorize, but more like a descriptive
>lexicography---a list of the allusions which
>are considered so familiar that a New York Times
>editor wouldn't pause to explain them. We got
>on the subject of dates, and my friend
>touted the "party line" that making kids
>memorize dates is outmoded pedagogy, what kids
>really need is to "understand" historical
>causes, and I was saying that knowing some dates
>is a good thing, that it gives you a "frame" without
>which historical narrative doesn't stick in the
>brain and that it helps you to reject vague
>and mushy historical causalities. I said I
>wished I'd been made to memorize a whole lotta
>dates back in school, but that this was all
>really irrelevant to Hirsch, who in fact lists only 6
>dates that any culturally literate American would
>know, and that this was far too few for building
>any "frame" like I meant, but was only a list of
>those few dates a newspaper editor might mention and
>not explain.
Learning dates in history is like learning the multiplication tables. It's not
outmoded pedagogy, but it's equipping kids with historical bullshit detectors.
Sure, one needs to understand historical causes, but without a chronological
framwork one would not be able to distinguish a cause from an effect, not
notice the fallacy of an argument based on an effect that preceded a cause.
Angie SCHULTZ
> However, what I think is that what the American public schools
> actually teach is so very minimal, that a British physics major
> as a first-year at university is probably far ahead of his American
> counterpart in well-roundedness, too. They come out about even
> by the end of PhD's, though the American student is older.
My single data point contradicts your theory. In my second year of
grad school we acquired a British student. One of my friends was
very excited; he was a British history buff and really looked forward
to discussing history with the new guy.
The new guy, however, didn't know beans about British history. He
explained it as a case of burnout---in school they were required to
learn a long list of dates and battles and kings, and whatever interest he
had in the subject had been leached out long ago. Understandable.
However, turns out the new guy didn't know beans about much else,
either, aside from physics (and classical music). Sixteen years on, I
still get great pleasure in taunting him for an aliterate barbarian.
He doesn't seem to regard himself as atypical of Britons in this regard.
He did graduate in record time, though.
> I think the wombat story is indicative of the very poor
> quality of the public schools, and the dominance of
> *theory* about how to teach over knowledge of what to
> teach in Schools of Education which produce teachers
> for the public schools.
Huh. And here I was thinking it was because wombats were harmless
and somewhat uninteresting animals living in a remote land.
This just in: one out of one Australians surveyed says that he did not
know what a beaver was for many years, and was always puzzled by the
expression, "busy as a beaver". He claimed to know what a muskrat was,
but I think he's faking it.
Angie Schultz
Michael S. Morris
Sunday, the 10th of February, 2002
Steve Hayes:
Learning dates in history is like learning
the multiplication tables.
Right, though I think *story* ought to precede
dates. I mean, it *would* be boring and awful to
just do dates. Though true, I also would have thought
memorizing the characteristics of hundreds of Pokemon
would be boring and awful, too, and my kids did that
one on their own.
Steve Hayes:
It's not outmoded pedagogy,
I'm pretty sure that it is in the States,
and has been for at least 40 years.
Steve:
but it's equipping kids with historical
bullshit detectors.
Sure, one needs to understand historical causes,
but without a chronological framwork one would not
be able to distinguish a cause from an effect, not
notice the fallacy of an argument based on an effect
that preceded a cause.
Hmm. I'm not sure I'd grant knowledge of dates this
much recommendation. I would doubt that much bullshit
is out there to be dismissed merely by knowledge of
dates. But, I *do* think dates can be a memory shorthand,
a way of turning significant events into a chronology,
and thereby giving you a mental frame on which it is
easier to assimilate historical narratives, perhaps
gotten into the brain from reading multiple books.
Larisa
What I tend to dislike about the insistence on memorizing dates is
that all of them have to do with wars and politics. Newton's
invention of calculus had a tremendous effect on the world of
mathematics and physics; why can't we remember that he created it in
1666? Why not remember 287 BC as the year that Archimedes was born?
Why not remember 1842, the year that general anesthesia was first used
for surgery? Why not remember 1810 as the year that Frederic Chopin
was born? And why isn't 1791 remembered as the year that Charles
Babbage came into this world?
LM
M J Carley
>Your final comment reminds me of somebody I met at my college in Cambridge
>a few years ago. He was doing his PhD in History. His thesis concerned the
>biography of some obscure English bishop who lived during the middle ages.
>Once I asked him a question about the Renaissance. "I only know about the
>middle ages", he replied. Some time later I asked him something about the
>Knights Templars. "I only know about this vicar", he replied.
Anthony Sampson described the typical PhD candidate as `crawling along
the frontiers of knowledge with a magnifying glass.'
--
`The question of whether Wittgenstein ever entered a Dublin pub cannot
be answered definitively.'
Joan Marie Shields
>>Once of an evening, not long ago, I turned on the telly and caught a
>>bit of the game show, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? For the $32000
>>question, a college student, was asked "Who won the battle of
>>Hastings." Three of the choices were Harold, William the Conqueror,
>>and Edward the Confessor; I don't recall the fourth choice.
I hope you were watching it because nothing else was on, that was the
only channel coming through, the on/off button was broken and you were
tied to a chair.
>>One might suppose that anyone who is sufficently advanced in the
>>education cycle so as to be a college student would have found this a
>>"snap" question, but it was not so. She had no idea as to the answer
>>so she used one of her "lifelines", the option to call a friend and
>>ask him (or her as the case may be but in this case it was a him) the
>>question. Her friend was a history professor.
>>Our hapless contestant read the question to her friend. He said, "I'm
>>not really sure; I'm in American History; but I'm about 60% sure that
>>it was William the Conqueror."
>>Fancy that, a history professor that was in doubt about who won at
>>Hastings in 1066. I do wonder if he has read Foucault.
Actually, he probably has read Foucault, just not nearly enough pre-
American history. Either that or he's really really old and read it
many many years ago or really young and only glazed over it in highschool.
David Latane <dla...@vcu.org> wrote:
>This comes from over-specialization in graduate school. In ye olde days
>the thought was, gee, 99% of all humanities PhDs will be teaching a wide
>range of courses in teaching institutions, maybe they better read
>widely. Now the PhD is granted after exams in which one reads a tiny
>sliver for a dissertation, the theory behind the dissertation, and
>something connected to the dissertation that sounds interdisciplinary.
This happens quite often in the sciences as well - except in the case
of engineers (I exclude civil) but in that case it's scary - to some,
they're apparently qualified to do anything except style hair.
> Hence one comes across specialists in 19th-century American lit, for
>instance, who know all about Fanny Fern but are a little vague on
>Hawthorne beyond "Scarlet Letter" and think Paradise Lost was written in
>couplets in the 18th-century.
And hence you come across scientists who don't understand about land use
and sample site locations or exactly what can be used as a carbon source.
yiwf,
joan
--
Joan Shields jshi...@uci.edu
http://www.ags.uci.edu/~jshields
University of California - Irvine School of Social Ecology
Department of Environmental Analysis and Design
David Latane
D. Latane
David Latane
>
>What I tend to dislike about the insistence on memorizing dates is
>that all of them have to do with wars and politics. Newton's
>invention of calculus had a tremendous effect on the world of
>mathematics and physics; why can't we remember that he created it in
>1666?
>
Now that was 1 date where 666 was appropriate.
D. Latane
Toast from Keats: "Confusion to mathematics"
Francis Muir
Larisa wrote:
> And why isn't 1791 remembered as the year
> that Charles Babbage came into this world?
Because he did not come into this world until
about 1801 - about the time Jane Austen was
getting in her stride. Birth dates have no
meaning - who remembers April 27 1926?
Francis Muir
Angie SCHULTZ:
> This just in: one out of one Australians surveyed says that he did not
> know what a beaver was for many years, and was always puzzled by the
> expression, "busy as a beaver". He claimed to know what a muskrat was,
> but I think he's faking it.
Did you ever know a quokka?
Francis Muir
Angie SCHULTZ wrote:
> This just in: one out of one Australians surveyed says that he did not
> know what a beaver was for many years, and was always puzzled by the
> expression, "busy as a beaver". He claimed to know what a muskrat was,
> but I think he's faking it.
Did you ever know a quokka? If you've never visited Rotto probably not.
j del col
> In the referenced article, "Leonardo Dasso" <Lda...@btinternet.com> writes:
>
> >Your final comment reminds me of somebody I met at my college in Cambridge
> >a few years ago. He was doing his PhD in History. His thesis concerned the
> >biography of some obscure English bishop who lived during the middle ages.
> >Once I asked him a question about the Renaissance. "I only know about the
> >middle ages", he replied. Some time later I asked him something about the
> >Knights Templars. "I only know about this vicar", he replied.
>
> Anthony Sampson described the typical PhD candidate as `crawling along
> the frontiers of knowledge with a magnifying glass.'
If only that were true. It's more like they are looking through the
wrong end of a telescope. Come to think of it, a telescope can be used
as a magnifier that way, but you have to know something
about the real world to do it.
J. Del Col
Michael S. Morris
Sunday, the 10th of February, 2002
Larisa:
What I tend to dislike about the insistence
on memorizing dates is that all of them have
to do with wars and politics.
I have theory about that. It goes: Dates are basic,
elementary-school information, and any memorization
ought to be kept at that level. And wars go over better
than almost anything else. Maybe this is more of a
boy thing, but with my children, and even with Helen,
wars and battles make more of an impression, there is
a more immediately understandable *drama* or *story*
to wars and battles and who led which side.
Larisa:
Newton's invention of calculus had a tremendous
effect on the world of mathematics and physics;
why can't we remember that he created it in 1666?
I would have marked 1685 for Principia and 1876 for
Maxwell's Treatise and 1905 for Special Relativity and
1916 for General Relativity.
But the reason why is that kids are not going to
be "in" to these kinds of things. It takes many
years, I think, before one can consider calculus
significant.
Larisa:
Why not remember 287 BC as the year that
Archimedes was born? [...]
I think it would be better to remember his
death in 212 BC. That can then be tied into
the destruction of Syracuse and lenses to burn
ships and the kick-ass military career of
Marcellus and the expansion of Roman power.
It's like you're asking for a chick-flick when
a Bruce Willis movie is what is called for.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Joan Marie Shields
>Most ordinary people today would not read Ivanhoe. At best a few might
>remember the old TV miniseries.
It's a wonderful adventure story (as is THE TALISMAN) - I read them both
when a child. BEOWULF is another wonderful adventure story, hell, it's
got a higher body count than the latest Schwartzeneger (sp?) flick.
Personally, I think it's more a matter of marketing.
Joan Marie Shields
>>Your final comment reminds me of somebody I met at my college in Cambridge
>>a few years ago. He was doing his PhD in History. His thesis concerned the
>>biography of some obscure English bishop who lived during the middle ages.
>>Once I asked him a question about the Renaissance. "I only know about the
>>middle ages", he replied. Some time later I asked him something about the
>>Knights Templars. "I only know about this vicar", he replied.
M J Carley <ens...@bath.ac.uk> wrote:
>Anthony Sampson described the typical PhD candidate as `crawling along
>the frontiers of knowledge with a magnifying glass.'
And for the most part, he would be right. It's easier to be that way -
less hassle and more rewards.
Larisa
> Sunday, the 10th of February, 2002
>
> Larisa:
> What I tend to dislike about the insistence
> on memorizing dates is that all of them have
> to do with wars and politics.
>
> I have theory about that. It goes: Dates are basic,
> elementary-school information, and any memorization
> ought to be kept at that level. And wars go over better
> than almost anything else. Maybe this is more of a
> boy thing, but with my children, and even with Helen,
> wars and battles make more of an impression, there is
> a more immediately understandable *drama* or *story*
> to wars and battles and who led which side.
Hmm. I always had trouble memorizing dates of wars. It might be
dramatic, but it's always the same drama: A attacks B, B bravely
defends itself, A bravely attacks, and either A or B is victorious.
After a while, it gets boring and starts to blur together in the mind.
And as for what makes an impression on children - children are
infinitely brainwashable. If the teacher pretends to be, or actually
is, genuinely and intensely interested in, say, archeology or
chemistry or number theory or Coptic literature, the children will
pick up on that interest. And if all that the teacher is interested
in is war, the children will also be only interested in war. (I never
had a good history teacher; maybe that's why I find wars boring)
> Larisa:
> Newton's invention of calculus had a tremendous
> effect on the world of mathematics and physics;
> why can't we remember that he created it in 1666?
>
> I would have marked 1685 for Principia and 1876 for
> Maxwell's Treatise and 1905 for Special Relativity and
> 1916 for General Relativity.
>
> But the reason why is that kids are not going to
> be "in" to these kinds of things. It takes many
> years, I think, before one can consider calculus
> significant.
...
> It's like you're asking for a chick-flick when
> a Bruce Willis movie is what is called for.
No, I am asking for an artsy, intellectual movie when all that is
offered are mindless chick-flicks and action flicks. Kids can very
well appreciate mathematics (as I have seen in my mother's math
classes - she always paid a lot of attention to the history of
mathematics, and her class was very interested). Maybe not calculus,
but some of the more interesting mathematical ideas. Fractals,
definitely; graph theory or topology, too.
I always thought history was quite boring, until I started reading
about the history of science. That was much more exciting - not just
the same boring struggle for the same little plot of land over and
over again, but new ideas, new ways of understanding how the universe
works, new inventions. It can be very interesting to a child, but no
one ever teaches such things in history class.
Larisa
Don Tuite
post was on who won at Hastings, not when it was. It's possible to
understand something about General Relativity without knowing 1905.
Don
j del col
Let's hope you do.
J. Del Col
Dylan Bryan-Dolman
> > I have theory about that. It goes: Dates are basic,
> > elementary-school information, and any memorization
> > ought to be kept at that level. And wars go over better
> > than almost anything else. Maybe this is more of a
> > boy thing, but with my children, and even with Helen,
> > wars and battles make more of an impression, there is
> > a more immediately understandable *drama* or *story*
> > to wars and battles and who led which side.
A group of friends and I were sitting around the other day remarking on how
cool we thought the old Cosmos show was when we were kids. I don't think
kids are infinitely brainwashable, but I do think that they are capable of
being interested in genuinely interesting things if they're taught in such a
way as to activate the imagination. Think of the geekage quotient in
wormholes and such.
The "dates of battles" mode of teaching tends to be deadening to the
imagination, although of course battles *can* be made dramatic. I'm sure
your children like it because you like it, Mike -- the best thing a teacher
can do is communicate his own enthusiasm. My parents communicated their own
scorn, so I did a lot of eyerolling in history classes, and today have no
idea what Runnymede was, although I do know Hastings of course because it
marks the entrance of Latinate vocabulary into English.
smw
Don Tuite wrote:
>
> We may be over-focused on "to date or not to date." Harter's original
> post was on who won at Hastings, not when it was.
And perhaps the guy knew who won (and why, and with what consequences)
but not what the bloody place was called...
s
smw
...
> When he was about to finish his PhD he went to a job interview. He came back
> from the interview absolutely furious. The first question fired at him was
> concerning Foucault's influence on historiography. "Who's Foucault?" He
> asked. The interviewer shut her laptop and told him that the interview was
> over.
Sensible of her, too. Not knowing how to fake knowledge of Foucault if
you haven't read him and not anticipating that the ability to fake
such knowledge would be crucial to interviewing, the guy must have
been entirely clueless regarding his chosen profession, would likely
make a lousy colleague, and probably couldn't get tenure anyway.
s
Don Tuite
A link to Marriott Edgar's "The Battle of Hastings -- 1066"
("On 'is 'orse with 'is 'awk on 'is 'and."
http://www.rijhwani.org/raj/boh.htm
Think of it as a historical mnemonic.
Don
David Latane
I think not sensible. While perhaps a moron, he might also have been
somebody for whom uncalled for arrogance and rudeness was a provocation
that required reaction--from taking the laptop and tossing it out the
window, to secret harassments, to pursuing one's career until given the
opportunity to put in one's oar on an NEH panel etc. The above behavior
would certainly be an offense that one should never forgive or forget.
The behavior also shows that the interviewer herself was a nitwit when
it came to reading dossiers, as it should have been rather easy,
presuming one found Foucault a sort of litmus test, to have chosen only
to interview candidates from advisors and programs that guaranteed a
knowledge of Foucault.
D. Latane
tejas
> It's like you're asking for a chick-flick when
> a Bruce Willis movie is what is called for.
Christ on a crutch, Morris. Get a grip. Just because Bruce Willis was on the
cover of the Sunday PARADE tabloid yesterday, you don't have to mention
him, do you?
ObBook: DON'T LET'S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT by Alexandra Fuller
smw
Oh, come on, we're just shitting around here -- it couldn't have
happened that way. If you've ever hired (and you must have), you know
that it's rather unlikely that there was one interviewer in the first
place; and the regulations on interviewing have become so specific and
so restrictive that the story simply doesn't pan out. Awful candidates
are shushed with "how interesting! and where do you see yourself five
years from now? you'll be sure to hear from us by..." and gently seen
out the door.
s
>
> D. Latane
tejas
"smw" <s...@umich.edu> wrote in message news:3C683195...@umich.edu...
You don't care for place-oriented-T-shirts as souveniers, do you?
ObShirt: WHERE THE HELL IS UNCERTAIN, TEXAS?
(It's near Karnak, Texas)
--
Ted Samsel
tbsa...@infi.net
http://home.infi.net/~tbsamsel
smw
tejas wrote:
>
> "smw" <s...@umich.edu> wrote in message news:3C683195...@umich.edu...
> >
> >
> > Don Tuite wrote:
> > >
> > > We may be over-focused on "to date or not to date." Harter's original
> > > post was on who won at Hastings, not when it was.
> >
> > And perhaps the guy knew who won (and why, and with what consequences)
> > but not what the bloody place was called...
>
> You don't care for place-oriented-T-shirts as souveniers, do you?
on the contrary, I've been looking for "Detroit -- Where the Meek are
Killed and Eaten" for months now.
s
Paul Ilechko
> "Paul Ilechko" <pile...@att.net> wrote in message
> news:3C67089D...@att.net...
> Tamurlane?
>
> But this discussion *is* limited to American history.
>
Really ? So the Norman invasion of Britain is now American History ?
Paul Ilechko
> Sunday, the 10th of February,
> 2002
>
> Paul Ilechko wrote at Jim:
> So you know American history. How about 1215 ?
>
> I'd think King John and Magna Carta ....
Which I always remembered because it was lunch time at school.
Paul Ilechko
> Please don't use rab to arrange lunch meetings.
Fortunately Jim C. is on the other coast.
Richard Harter
> Richard Harter wrote:
> >>Once of an evening, not long ago, I turned on the telly and caught a
> >>bit of the game show, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? For the $32000
> >>question, a college student, was asked "Who won the battle of
> >>Hastings." Three of the choices were Harold, William the Conqueror,
> >>and Edward the Confessor; I don't recall the fourth choice.
>
> I hope you were watching it because nothing else was on, that was the
> only channel coming through, the on/off button was broken and you were
> tied to a chair.
I take it that that is your very favoritest of TV shows, one that you
wish everyone would watch, and that you are shocked that someone like
me would watch such a good program.
>
> >>One might suppose that anyone who is sufficently advanced in the
> >>education cycle so as to be a college student would have found this a
> >>"snap" question, but it was not so. She had no idea as to the answer
> >>so she used one of her "lifelines", the option to call a friend and
> >>ask him (or her as the case may be but in this case it was a him) the
> >>question. Her friend was a history professor.
>
> >>Our hapless contestant read the question to her friend. He said, "I'm
> >>not really sure; I'm in American History; but I'm about 60% sure that
> >>it was William the Conqueror."
>
> >>Fancy that, a history professor that was in doubt about who won at
> >>Hastings in 1066. I do wonder if he has read Foucault.
>
> Actually, he probably has read Foucault, just not nearly enough pre-
> American history. Either that or he's really really old and read it
> many many years ago or really young and only glazed over it in highschool.
Er, well, I would have supposed that a history professor would have
been
interested in history. Now it is quite understandable that a history
professor in Buda Pest would be more interested in the history of
Eastern
Europe than that of Western Europe, a professor in Tokyo would be more
interested in the history of Eastern Asia than that of Europe, and so
on.
Still one might suppose that a professor of history, a person
professionally
interested in history might have some modest knowledge of the bones of
the history of western civilization. You might suppose that he would
*care*,
at least just a little bit. Then again, he is an American and
Americans
are notoriously parochial and self-centered in their culture, so much
so that
they suppose that they are unique in that regard.
> David Latane <dla...@vcu.org> wrote:
> >This comes from over-specialization in graduate school. In ye olde days
> >the thought was, gee, 99% of all humanities PhDs will be teaching a wide
> >range of courses in teaching institutions, maybe they better read
> >widely. Now the PhD is granted after exams in which one reads a tiny
> >sliver for a dissertation, the theory behind the dissertation, and
> >something connected to the dissertation that sounds interdisciplinary.
>
> This happens quite often in the sciences as well - except in the case
> of engineers (I exclude civil) but in that case it's scary - to some,
> they're apparently qualified to do anything except style hair.
>
> > Hence one comes across specialists in 19th-century American lit, for
> >instance, who know all about Fanny Fern but are a little vague on
> >Hawthorne beyond "Scarlet Letter" and think Paradise Lost was written in
> >couplets in the 18th-century.
>
> And hence you come across scientists who don't understand about land use
> and sample site locations or exactly what can be used as a carbon source.
Even so.
R.A. Leonard
Larisa wrote:
>
> "Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote in message news:<3C671273...@netdirect.net>...
> > Sunday, the 10th of February,
> > 2002
> >
> > Paul Ilechko wrote at Jim:
> > So you know American history. How about 1215 ?
> >
> > I'd think King John and Magna Carta and probably
> > 1588, too, ought to be common enough currency in
> > the US. Maybe I'm a generation out of step, though. And maybe
> > 1066 is going the same way. It half already
> > connotes "esoteric dates we had to memorize back in school",
> > ala _1066 and All That_. Of course, nobody's
> > really had to memorize dates in American schools
> > in at least 40 years, so the common complaint about
> > having all been victimized by memorization is more
> > vicarious than anything else.
> >
> > I had read a fair amount of history of ancient Greece a few
> > years back, and after a while, well, significant dates
> > stood out. Off the top of my head now, and without looking
> > anything up:
> >
> > 490 BC Marathon
> > 480 BC Thermopylae, Salamis
> > 479 BC Plataea
> > 431-404 BC Peloponnesian War
> > 399 BC Death of Socrates
> > 371 BC Leuctra
> > 335-323 BC Campaigns of Alexander the Great
> >
> > That's probably somewhat shorter than I could have done
> > several years ago. But, as a frame it helps. For instance,
> > if you ask me, I don't know when Plato lived offhand, but
> > thinking about these dates---he had to have been alive in
> > 399, and must have flourished thereafter. Aristotle I
> > think survived Alexander the Great, which meshes with him
> > being the generation after Plato, and Plato following
> > Socrates. Athens dominant after Salamis, knocked down
> > by Sparta by 404, Sparta dominant until knocked down
> > by Thebes at Leuctra, then Thebes dominant until Chaeronea
> > and the hegemony of Macedon.
>
> What I tend to dislike about the insistence on memorizing dates is
> that all of them have to do with wars and politics. Newton's
> invention of calculus had a tremendous effect on the world of
> mathematics and physics; why can't we remember that he created it in
> 1666? Why not remember 287 BC as the year that Archimedes was born?
> Why not remember 1842, the year that general anesthesia was first used
> for surgery? Why not remember 1810 as the year that Frederic Chopin
> was born? And why isn't 1791 remembered as the year that Charles
> Babbage came into this world?
>
> LM
Ob book: Timetables of History : A Horizontal Linkage of
People & Events
by Bernard Grun
--
__________________________________________
R.A. Leonard
Ottawa Canada
http://www.raleonard.com/
Arindam Banerjee
> haye...@yahoo.com (Steve Hayes):
>
> > I told my wife, and she remarks that she had been on an overseas tour in
> > Scandinavia, and one of the people on the tour was an American art student,
> > who amazed everyone (and not just the Australians) by not knowing what a
> > wombat was. Such are the perils of too-early specialisation, i suppose.
>
> Or the peril of consorting with snippy tourists.
>
>
> The Wombat
>
> The wombat lives across the seas,
> Among the far Antipodes.
> He may exist on nuts and berries,
> Or then again, on missionaries;
> His distant habitat precludes
> Conclusive knowledge of his moods
> But I would not engage the wombat
> In any form of mortal combat.
>
> Ogden Nash
Good idea, Ogden.
Imagine a cushion, brown and square
With sleepy eyes, you want to hug.
But even if it does your heart ensnare
Beware the claws! The wombat's no rug
For mortal feet, or dingo's den.
It may dig deep, or it may not.
If not, it's rear's exposed, why then,
Here's a juicy meal, so easily got!
But hey! This skin's tougher than leather!
No matter, I'll over this stupid creature slither...
Help! Claws go down, hard arse rises to crush me -
One arrogant interfering unwanted coyote.
Arindam Banerjee
Melbourne, Feburuary 2002.
>
>
> -- Moggin
Ron Hardin
was the first to call him William the Bastard. After William
beat her up, she married him. It's suspected that William beat her
to death finally when she had one of his girlfriends drawn and
quartered.
--
Ron Hardin
rhha...@mindspring.com
On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.
Louis Katorz
>Larisa wrote:
>>And why isn't 1791 remembered as the
>>year that Charles Babbage came into this
>>world?
>Because he did not come into this world
>until about 1801 - about the time Jane
>Austen was getting in her stride. Birth
>dates have no meaning - who remembers
>April 27 1926?
Cor blimey, a fellow Taurean? I rather suspect that this might be your
birth-date.
lk
Louis Katorz
>Actually, he probably has read Foucault,
>just not nearly enough pre- American
>history. Either that or he's really really old
>and read it many many years ago or really
>young and only glazed over it in
>highschool.
My guess would be that he is young. The dumbing-down of education on all
levels in the US (and perhaps elsewhere?) in recent years is appalling
as is the tendency to give everyone a passing grade whether it was
merited or not. IIRC a while back I saw on the telly a similar
discussion about this. A Professor at an Ivy League college (forget
details) said that he had two sets of grades: the student's actual grade
and an up-graded, un-merited one that would be of more help in the
business world.
Many years ago I took a college-prep program in high school. It included
4 years of English, 4 years of Science, 4 years of Math. Also World
History, Civics, Geography. No one was given a passing grade unless
they merited it. This made my first year in college much easier.
lk
Michael S. Morris
Monday, the 11th of February, 2002
Larisa:
What I tend to dislike about the insistence
on memorizing dates is that all of them have
to do with wars and politics.
I said:
I have a theory about that. It goes: Dates are basic,
elementary-school information, and any memorization
ought to be kept at that level. And wars go over better
than almost anything else. Maybe this is more of a
boy thing, but with my children, and even with Helen,
wars and battles make more of an impression, there is
a more immediately understandable *drama* or *story*
to wars and battles and who led which side.
Larisa:
Hmm. I always had trouble memorizing dates
of wars. It might be dramatic, but it's always
the same drama: A attacks B, B bravely defends
itself, A bravely attacks, and either A or B is
victorious. After a while, it gets boring and
starts to blur together in the mind.
See? Your problem *is* with Bruce Willis movies.
Larisa:
And as for what makes an impression on
children - children are infinitely brainwashable.
If the teacher pretends to be, or actually is,
genuinely and intensely interested in, say,
archeology or chemistry or number theory or
Coptic literature, the children will pick up
on that interest. And if all that the teacher
is interested in is war, the children will also
be only interested in war. (I never had a good
history teacher; maybe that's why I find wars boring)
In my case, in American public schools, I probably had
American history at a very superficial level in grade school,
with one year (4th grade maybe) mandated for Indiana history.
And then, there was an 8th grade American-history requirement.
I.e. there was no world history at all and no history out
of anything better than a committee-written textbook.
It was pretty boring.
When I set out reading the Will and Ariel Durant
set on my own as an adult at age 26, I was just thrilled
at how wonderful history could be. Throw in since
then Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Plutarch,
Livy, Caesar, Sallust, Prescott, Parkman, Morison,
and Churchill (I'm listing favourites) and I guess
I think anyone who teaches history out of textbooks
should be taken out and shot.
I can say what our homeschool approach has been.
We have concentrated on reading first, getting each
kid to the point where he might be trusted to read
history written by historians. Then, at about age 7,
we started a first pass through American history
by reading to them aloud Joy Hakim's lovely and
praiseworthy _A History of US_ (*not* written by
committee!). There was a year in there (after Zan
finished Hakim and before Helen started) where we
divvied the year up into 1/3 each of Egypt, Greece,
and Rome, using a Dorling Kinnersley volume (lots
of pictures) as a unifying "text" and reading to
the kids a book on each of the three civilizations
(I remember we did Michael Grant's _History of Rome_
for the Roman part of this. Grant is very dry as a
writer, so maybe this was not an ideal choice.) OK, then
child reads two years of American history using Samuel
Eliot Morison's "Oxford History of the American
People". Parent has to read along, and each day's
reading is discussed each day. We then divert away from the
main text after Morison has covered a topic and we
want to do it better. Mostly, this has been wars---
we did the American Revolutionary War, the drafting of
the Constitution, The US-Mexican War,
slavery, the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Korea, and, now we
are doing Vietnam. Probably we will also do the space
program, and, if I can locate the TV series I'm
thinking of on DVD (or VHS) we'll do civil rights.
For instance, for the Revolutionary War, after finishing Morison's
section on it, we read _A Short History of the American
Revolution_ by James L. Stokesbury. After that for an overview,
we stepped through the descriptions of each of the battles in
the _Encyclopedia of Battles_ by David Eggenberger.
We use that as a final "refresher" for each war.
For the Constitution, we read _Miracle at Philadelphia_
by Catherine Drinker Bowen, for the US-Mexican War we read
_The US-Mexican War_ by Carol and Thomas Christensen,
for slavery we read Frederick Douglass, for the Civil War,
we read Stokesbury's _Short History of the Civil War_,
for WWI we read Stokesbury, for WWII we read Stokesbury
and _The Ninety Days_ by Thomas Carmichael and _Okinawa_
by Robert Leckie and _Battle: The Story of the Bulge_ by
John Toland, and for Korea again we read Stokesbury's
book, and finally for Vietnam we are reading Stanley
Karnow's _Vietnam_. And then, especially for visualization,
we watch as many films as we can, including, say, the PBS
documentary on the US-Mexican War, and the Ken Burns
Civil War and the Ken Burns Lewis and Clark, and, well,
whatever comes to hand.
Probably this is heavy on war, but the Great Depression
just doesn't cut it as well for holding my kids' interest.
Although we did have them keep spreadsheets for a month and
track an imaginary $1000 invested in 10 companies they
picked, and it happened to coincide with the technology
crash last year, so they saw how one could lose money.
Next year, Zan will start the Durant set, and we plan to
have him choose one topic out of each volume to magnify
with extra reading in the same way. Helen will start Morison.
We did dates for the Civil War, after we'd pretty much
finished reading Stokesbury and were going back through
the sequence of battles in Eggenberger. We made flash
cards with the battle on one side and the date on the
other, and the kids were expected both to memorize those,
and to be able to tell what happened and why (I mean what
each side was trying to do). That went pretty well, but we
haven't really done dates per se since, except we set up a
timeline database on the computer for each kid, and they
enter a date of *their* choosing each day.
**********
I said:
It's like you're asking for a chick-flick when
a Bruce Willis movie is what is called for.
Larisa:
No, I am asking for an artsy, intellectual
movie when all that is offered are mindless
chick-flicks and action flicks.
Umm, in my parlance "artsy, intellectual
movie"=chick-flick. (I know, they aren't really the
same, and you mean Peter Greenaway where I
contrasted something like Merchant/Ivory with "Die Hard".)
Anyway, with my daughter Helen, any film with
adult dialogue and fine acting (whether
Greenaway *or* Merchant/Ivory), and
she falls asleep. She stays awake for an action
film. Or a cartoon.
Larisa:
Kids can very
well appreciate mathematics (as I have seen in my
mother's math classes - she always paid a lot of
attention to the history of mathematics, and her
class was very interested). Maybe not calculus,
but some of the more interesting mathematical ideas.
Fractals, definitely; graph theory or topology, too.
Well, both Samuel Eliot Morison's history of the US
and Will and Ariel Durant's world histroy emphasize
cultural history alongside the political and military
history.
Larisa:
I always thought history was quite boring, until
I started reading about the history of science.
That was much more exciting - not just the same
boring struggle for the same little plot of land
over and over again, but new ideas, new ways of
understanding how the universe works, new inventions.
It can be very interesting to a child, but no
one ever teaches such things in history class.
I wouldn't try teaching it to kids
until I had the political/military frame
down first.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Larisa
> > "Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote:
> > > I have theory about that. It goes: Dates are basic,
> > > elementary-school information, and any memorization
> > > ought to be kept at that level. And wars go over better
> > > than almost anything else. Maybe this is more of a
> > > boy thing, but with my children, and even with Helen,
> > > wars and battles make more of an impression, there is
> > > a more immediately understandable *drama* or *story*
> > > to wars and battles and who led which side.
>
> A group of friends and I were sitting around the other day remarking on how
> cool we thought the old Cosmos show was when we were kids. I don't think
> kids are infinitely brainwashable, but I do think that they are capable of
> being interested in genuinely interesting things if they're taught in such a
> way as to activate the imagination. Think of the geekage quotient in
> wormholes and such.
Oh, I loved astrophysics books when I was a child. I think I went
through my father's entire popular-science library on the subject
(which was of considerable size), and all the quantum
mechanics/relativity books I could find (even though I couldn't
understand most of what I was reading, what I did understand was
fascinating).
As for the "infinitely brainwashable" comment - when my mother was
still teaching, I had a lot of opportunities to observe her
brainwashing techniques in action. Within a month, all the kids
(maybe all but one or two) considered math their favorite subject, to
the point of being horribly annoyed when a field trip interfered with
math class. And all she was teaching was arithmetic - simple,
straightforward arithmetic.
LM
David Latane
Could too. I once had an interview at SAMLA which turned out to be with
one person, who turned out to have mistakenly summoned me without
actually looking very closely at my c.v. -- upon discovering, though,
that I was completely ill-matched for the position, he stopped the
interview and broke out a flask of Jack Daniels.
That of course is the Southern way of doing it; snapping the laptop shut
after a pre-emptory question about Foucault sounds very N.O.M.D.L. to me.
D. Latane
Leonardo Dasso
"smw" <s...@umich.edu> wrote in message news:3C684753...@umich.edu...
You are more than welcome not to believe in my little story. However, it
happened exactly that way. The interview was not at a University Dept,
though, but it took place IIRC at the University Center, where once a year,
a number of companies and institutions hold a sort of "fair" where they
interview prospective candidates that are close to completing their studies.
The interviews are usually brief and people queue to have one.
regards
leo
smw
Oh, so you were at the interview as well?
> The interview was not at a University Dept,
> though, but it took place IIRC at the University Center, where once a year,
> a number of companies and institutions hold a sort of "fair" where they
> interview prospective candidates that are close to completing their studies.
> The interviews are usually brief and people queue to have one.
For a faculty job in history? Get out.
s
smw
Yeah, I had one of these once. I think I was the first to decide that
this wasn't to be, so I claimed a deep and abiding interest in mineral
rights,which then threatened to emerge as a new sub-discipline.
> That of course is the Southern way of doing it; snapping the laptop shut
> after a pre-emptory question about Foucault sounds very N.O.M.D.L. to me.
If I understand Leo correctly, it wasn't an interview for a faculty
position in the first place (though I'm trying to imagine what kind of
non-academic employer would ask for Foucault's effects on
historiography). Not that this should keep us from all clucking about
the sorry state of the humanities.
s
Leonardo Dasso
"Steve Hayes" <haye...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:3c668db6...@news.saix.net...
> On Sun, 10 Feb 2002 06:51:30 +0000 (UTC), "Richard Harter" <c...@tiac.net>
> wrote:
>
> >Once of an evening, not long ago, I turned on the telly and caught a
> >bit of the game show, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? For the $32000
> >question, a college student, was asked "Who won the battle of
> >Hastings." Three of the choices were Harold, William the Conqueror,
> >and Edward the Confessor; I don't recall the fourth choice.
> >
> >education cycle so as to be a college student would have found this a
> >"snap" question, but it was not so. She had no idea as to the answer
> >so she used one of her "lifelines", the option to call a friend and
> >ask him (or her as the case may be but in this case it was a him) the
> >question. Her friend was a history professor.
> >
> >Our hapless contestant read the question to her friend. He said, "I'm
> >not really sure; I'm in American History; but I'm about 60% sure that
> >it was William the Conqueror."
> >
> >Fancy that, a history professor that was in doubt about who won at
> >Hastings in 1066. I do wonder if he has read Foucault.
>
> specialise very early, and so I can quite belive that.
>
> I told my wife, and she remarks that she had been on an overseas tour in
> Scandinavia, and one of the people on the tour was an American art
student,
> who amazed everyone (and not just the Australians) by not knowing what a
> wombat was.
>
> Such are the perils of too-early specialisation, i suppose.
>
> Steve Hayes
I wonder if it is that the system is too specialized or that many people
just slip thru the holes in the system. I spent some time in the US (Mass)
and I was often amazed at the level of ignorance of some people.
Once I was at a furniture store and this salesman noticed my accent and
asked where I was from. "Uruguay", I said.
"Uruguay? I've never heard of it",came the reply.
"Between Argentina and Brazil", I added. That didnt help, either.
"South America", I said then.
"Ah, South America, yes", he said. "So you're coming from South America?" he
asked.
"No, actually I'm coning from England; I spent a few years there", I said.
"Did you learn French?" he asked, "They say it's very hard to learn".
"French? Why should I have learned French?" I asked.
"That's what they speak in England", dont they?
"No", I said, "they speak English, like here -- in fact they invented the
language", I said, very matter-of-factly.
"They speak English? like here? Wow, man, that's amazing; wow...", he said.
During my two years in Nastychussetts I collected quite a few of these
pearls of wisdom, but I think this is one of the best.
regards
leo
Don Tuite
<Lda...@btinternet.com> wrote:
>
>I wonder if it is that the system is too specialized or that many people
>just slip thru the holes in the system. I spent some time in the US (Mass)
>and I was often amazed at the level of ignorance of some people.
>
>Once I was at a furniture store and this salesman noticed my accent and
>asked where I was from. "Uruguay", I said.
>"Uruguay? I've never heard of it",came the reply.
>"Between Argentina and Brazil", I added. That didnt help, either.
>"South America", I said then.
>"Ah, South America, yes", he said. "So you're coming from South America?" he
>asked.
>"No, actually I'm coning from England; I spent a few years there", I said.
>"Did you learn French?" he asked, "They say it's very hard to learn".
>"French? Why should I have learned French?" I asked.
>"That's what they speak in England", dont they?
>"No", I said, "they speak English, like here -- in fact they invented the
>language", I said, very matter-of-factly.
>"They speak English? like here? Wow, man, that's amazing; wow...", he said.
>
>During my two years in Nastychussetts I collected quite a few of these
>pearls of wisdom, but I think this is one of the best.
>
That was probably McGuffin. I'm afraid you were had on. In
Massachusetts, they also try to trick out-of-towners into wearing
silly-looking plastic bibs when they eat lobster. I hope you didn't
fall for that one too.
Don
Leonardo Dasso
"smw" <s...@umich.edu> wrote in message news:3C687817...@umich.edu...
I never said it was for a faculty job. I dont think it was. The careers fair
in Cambridge usually attracts a number of private companies, such as
accountancy firms, publishers, management companies, banks, engineering
companies, etc etc trying to recruit new graduates. I have no idea what was
the company that held the interview.
regards
leo
jimC
We all have our comeuppance. More than one Bay Stater newly arrived out West
has been sent on a snipe hunt. (I having been a sender would know.)
And that reminds me. I know of a porteno (a person from Buenos Aires), which is
practically the same thing as an Uruguayan (well, maybe not to a Uruguayan), who
had never heard of Louis Gottschalk, composer of "Montevideo". What're they
teaching them in schools down there, anyway? He owns a liquor store in
Santa Ana called The Gaucho. This might be a clue to why he and Louis
Gottschalk haven't connected. I bought a two-dollar lottery scratcher from him
that paid $100. (I hardly ever make lottery bets.) But in my euphoria, I
completely overlooked that the radio in his store was tuned to a lowbrow
musica nortena station, where the lyrics usually concern la Migra or indignant
lovers, rather than KUSC-FM.
Does anybody beside Dasso know that Uruguayans used to drive on the left?
I think they switched in the early 1950s.
--
jimC
http://www.geocities.com/jimcolli92625/
Official Web pages of the Crystal Cove Lunchtime Hikers. Updated 10 Feb 02
3:30 pm, PST. The Midwest is bathed in green from Texas to the Dakotas.
Enter a curious cat! Yet to come: Churchill, Manitoba, where polar
bears saunter (yes, saunter) down Kelsey Blvd. and residents try not
to think of fast food pizza which is 24 hours away by slow train.
Steve Hayes
wrote:
>delurking...
>
>Steve Hayes (haye...@yahoo.com) wrote:
>> I have an impression, which may be wrong, that American education tends to
>> specialise very early, and so I can quite belive that.
>
>Really? Compared to whom? It seems you are from South Africa. I grew up in
>another Commonwealth country (Malaysia) and came to the States for
>undergrad and post-grad. I think we specialise much earlier. In America,
>law and medicine are *second* degrees. At home, people decide between age
>17 and 19 about these things. We stream people in Form 4 (15-16) into
>arts, science and business and have them apply to university *departments*
>for undergrad. Americans apply to the university and decide halfway
>through their undergrad studies on their department. I really don't think
>they specialise early.
Here those who study medicine usually do a general science degree first.
>Could it be that the contestant/prof didn't know because the event didn't
>happen in America? :-P
Quite possibly. But that is surely the point. He was a specialist in American
history. Now no one would expect him to have a knowledge of world history at
the doctroal level, but one could expect that at some point in his study of
history he would have come across that one, unless it was entirely
specialised.
--
Steve Hayes
E-mail: haye...@yahoo.com
Web: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/litmain.htm
Steve Hayes
>Don Tuite wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, 10 Feb 2002 23:22:36 GMT, haye...@yahoo.com (Steve Hayes)
>> wrote:
>>
>> >
>> >I told my wife, and she remarks that she had been on an overseas tour in
>> >Scandinavia, and one of the people on the tour was an American art student,
>> >who amazed everyone (and not just the Australians) by not knowing what a
>> >wombat was.
>>
>> I wonder if he knew what a fungo bat is.
>>
>> Don
>
>
>Certainly most South African kids have fungo bats.
>
>A South African immigrant, I think in Irvine (Irvine teems with South Africans
>of all colors, and who somewhat significantly are here and not in South Africa),
>somehow managed to get a coyote that she thought was a stray dog into
>her car and took it to the Orange County Animal Shelter. (Read about
>this in Tuesday or Wednesday's paper.)
Steve Hayes
<msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote:
>
> Sunday, the 10th of February, 2002
>
>Steve Hayes wrote:
> I have an impression, which may be wrong,
> that American education tends to specialise
> very early, and so I can quite belive that.
>
>I don't think you are right, Steve. Umm, I spent
>my first postgraduate year at Churchill College,
>Cambridge, and the common impression was that Brits
>specialized much earlier than Americans.
That too.
At university level, Brits generally begin by going for an Honours degree, in
only one subject. A general or pass degree is regarded as inferior.
In South Africa most universities have 10 courses for undergraduate studies.
Two must be majors, which means one takes them for all three years, which
leaves four other subjects to choose from. Honours is a fourth year, after one
has graduated, which specialises in one of the major subjects.
I get the impression that American universities allow even more choice, in
that the course units are smaller, and one can take even more of them, but
many seem quite specialised. So one might end up with a series of cross
sections with fairly specialised knowledge, without really seeing the thing
whole.
As I said, it;s just an impression, and could be way off. But the story about
the history prof tends to reinforce it.
>A physics major in Britain would be doing all
>math, science, and especially physics in the last
>two years before university. Then, 3 years at
>university as an undergraduate taking exclusively physics
>courses. At which point, he's ready to do a 3-year
>reserach PhD. In the States, the college-bound
>kid will be taking a "broad" course schedule of
>English, Math (maybe or maybe not he'll get to
>calculus by the end of high school), Science
>(Physics, Chemistry, Biology), Band, German or French,
>maybe History. As a physics major at university, he'll
>do 4 years, and he may see one physics class his first
>year while he is taking English and Chemistry and
>elective History and Computer Science and the like.
>In his second year, he'll be doing about half physics,
>and then 3/4 physics in his last two years. So, in grad
>school in the US, he starts on a 5-year PhD program, with
>the first two years as advanced classwork in physics, after which
>he takes a "qualifying examination" which is where they decide
>if they'll keep him, and launches into research for his
>last three years. I.e., it looks like the Brit specializes
>earlier.
>
>However, what I think is that what the American public schools
>actually teach is so very minimal, that a British physics major
>as a first-year at university is probably far ahead of his American
>counterpart in well-roundedness, too. They come out about even
>by the end of PhD's, though the American student is older.
>
>I think the wombat story is indicative of the very poor
>quality of the public schools, and the dominance of
>*theory* about how to teach over knowledge of what to
>teach in Schools of Education which produce teachers
>for the public schools.
Here the quality of education varies enormously. In some places one comes to
expect that the most literate people will be the over-60s and the under 20s.
Black people who were at school between 1955 and 1995 were deliberately given
an inferior education, because of government policy. I once did a series of
reading tests with people to see how ready they would be to study a particular
course. A Grade 7 Maths teacher had a Grade 6 reading level, and that was not
exceptional.
But I also knew a family who had moved from South Africa to Britain, and one
of the kids was in the equivalent of 6th grade in a London school. He had
learnt far more history and geography in 4th grade than they were learning in
6th grade in England.
When I was his age (10-11) at school we often had tests of "General Knowledge"
-- which is basically what "Who wants to be a missionnaire?" is. The aim of
this was not to test what one had learnt in class, but to encourage the kids
to be "well read". And that was the problem of the 7th grad maths teacher with
the 6th grade reading level. The breakthrough comes when one switches from
learning to read to reading to learn. And many people, even teachers, had not
reached that point. That suited the government of the day, because part of
their policy was to keep people ignorant.
But one would expect history professor and other graduates to have got beyond
that.
Steve Hayes
>"Richard Harter" <c...@tiac.net>:
>
>> Fancy that, a history professor that was in doubt about who won at
>> Hastings in 1066. I do wonder if he has read Foucault.
>
> I think there's more to wonder about in cases of unspotted
>confidence. "Perhaps about the beginning of this century, a
>young curate declared to his congregation, 'If the King
>James version was good enough for Saint Paul, it is good enough
>for me'" (David Norton, _A History of the English Bible as
>Literature_ 124n, citing A.E. Newton, _The Greatest Book in the
>World and Other Papers_).
That has all the marks of an urban legend. It has been repeated with so many
variations of time and circumstance that I doubt that it ever really happened.
Twas said, wqhen the Bible was frist translated into Afrikaans, that some old
backveld farmer said that if the Hollands version was good enough for Moses,
it was good enough for him.
Steve Hayes
wrote:
>
>"Richard Harter" <c...@tiac.net> wrote in message
>news:85dc55479de02bbe98...@mygate.mailgate.org...
>
>
>[snip]
>
>> Fancy that, a history professor that was in doubt about who won at
>> Hastings in 1066. I do wonder if he has read Foucault.
>>
>
>Your final comment reminds me of somebody I met at my college in Cambridge
>a few years ago. He was doing his PhD in History. His thesis concerned the
>biography of some obscure English bishop who lived during the middle ages.
>Once I asked him a question about the Renaissance. "I only know about the
>middle ages", he replied. Some time later I asked him something about the
>Knights Templars. "I only know about this vicar", he replied.
>
>When he was about to finish his PhD he went to a job interview. He came back
>from the interview absolutely furious. The first question fired at him was
>concerning Foucault's influence on historiography. "Who's Foucault?" He
>asked. The interviewer shut her laptop and told him that the interview was
>over.
Wasn't he that fellow with the pendulum?
Don Tuite
I like the way Borges portrays Uruguay as the Wild Wild West of
Argentina.
Don
Lewis Mammel
Angie SCHULTZ wrote:
>
> Michael S. Morris (msmo...@netdirect.net) wrote:
>
> > I think the wombat story is indicative of the very poor
> > quality of the public schools, and the dominance of
> > *theory* about how to teach over knowledge of what to
> > teach in Schools of Education which produce teachers
> > for the public schools.
>
> Huh. And here I was thinking it was because wombats were harmless
> and somewhat uninteresting animals living in a remote land.
Well, yeah, but that's what makes them so interesting, plus
they're called "wombats". I remember wombats being a great joke
when I was a kid. I always thought they were part of popular lore.
Lew Mammel, Jr.
Lewis Mammel
"Michael S. Morris" wrote:
>
> Sunday, the 10th of February, 2002
>
> Steve Hayes wrote:
> I have an impression, which may be wrong,
> that American education tends to specialise
> very early, and so I can quite belive that.
>
> I don't think you are right, Steve. Umm, I spent
> my first postgraduate year at Churchill College,
> Cambridge, and the common impression was that Brits
> specialized much earlier than Americans.
When I was at Brown in the sixties, some friends of mine had a
Brit for TA in engineering. This TA used to tease them about how
late we started calculus etc. and "haven't you had that
yet?" and so on. Then by chance they found out he didn't
know what a paramecium was ( when someone referred to something
as "shaped like a paramecium" IIRC. ) Well, they had him then.
From then on it was "at least we know what a paramecium is."
Lew Mammel, Jr.
Don Tuite
I dunno about "harmless." Personally, I wouldn't go near one without
a wombat helmet.
Don
Dylan Bryan-Dolman
> I always thought history was quite boring, until
> I started reading about the history of science.
>
> until I had the political/military frame
> down first.
See, I really don't get why that's the "frame" for you. It's not the
simplest part, and there are a lot of things it totally fails to provide a
context for. On the whole I dislike modern teaching, but I think the
fashion for starting with a social history of daily life works very well --
it's very colorful, far more so than the hundredth interchangeable battle,
it's specific enough to give the kids a handle on the period, and it can can
be taken in absolute any direction -- political, economic, scientific,
religious, whatever -- that the teacher likes or that the students want to
explore.
Kater Moggin
>>> Fancy that, a history professor that was in doubt about who won at
>>> Hastings in 1066. I do wonder if he has read Foucault.
Kater Moggin <mog...@mediaone.net>:
>> I think there's more to wonder about in cases of unspotted
>> confidence. "Perhaps about the beginning of this century, a
>> young curate declared to his congregation, 'If the King
>> James version was good enough for Saint Paul, it is good enough
>> for me'" (David Norton, _A History of the English Bible as
>> Literature_ 124n, citing A.E. Newton, _The Greatest Book in the
>> World and Other Papers_).
haye...@yahoo.com (Steve Hayes):
> That has all the marks of an urban legend.
Um, no. It has the marks of a scholarly citation. And so
it is. The scholar is David Norton, author of the book I
named; I also gave the title and author of the book he referred
to. You didn't notice?
> It has been repeated with so
> many variations of time and circumstance that I doubt that
> it ever really happened.
The old woman who's supposed to have said, "If English was
good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me" may be
apocryphal, but the above is literally a different story. I'll
try to find Newton and see what's to see.
-- Moggin
Angie SCHULTZ
> Angie SCHULTZ wrote:
> >
> > Huh. And here I was thinking it was because wombats were harmless
> > and somewhat uninteresting animals living in a remote land.
> Well, yeah, but that's what makes them so interesting, plus
> they're called "wombats". I remember wombats being a great joke
> when I was a kid. I always thought they were part of popular lore.
It's fun to say, isn't it? Wombat wombat wombat. Like quagga.
And quahog. Did you know there are numbats? Here's a picture of
a numbat: http://www.mpc.wa.gov.au/emblems/numbat.html
"...one of Western Australia's most attractive marsupials..."
I suspect this is not a crowded field.
Angie Schultz
Angie SCHULTZ
> Angie SCHULTZ wrote:
> > This just in: one out of one Australians surveyed says that he did not
> > know what a beaver was for many years, and was always puzzled by the
> > expression, "busy as a beaver". He claimed to know what a muskrat was,
> > but I think he's faking it.
> Did you ever know a quokka?
Is this a music hall standard from your distant youth, Fido? If
not, it should be.
I seem to have confused the quokka with the quagga. There are very
different beasts. (I feel an Ogden Nash fit coming on. I shall
attempt to suppress it.)
My dictionary does not have "quokka", although it does say that a quohog
is the same thing as a quahog, which is good to know.
No, I have not known (in any sense of the word) a quokka, nor even
seen a live wild wombat. I've seen wombat roadkill. I narrowly
avoided an echidna once, which was lucky (both to see and avoid).
Angie Schultz
jimC
"Tippecanoe and Tupamaros, too!"
Leonardo Dasso
"Don Tuite" <don_...@hotlink.com> wrote in message
news:5lvg6u8thk2ck8poo...@4ax.com...
By Jove, I should have realized it was another display of the
internationally famous East Coast irony!
(Do I need an ;-) ?)
regards
leo
Arindam Banerjee
> bit of the game show, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? For the $32000
> question, a college student, was asked "Who won the battle of
> Hastings." Three of the choices were Harold, William the Conqueror,
> and Edward the Confessor; I don't recall the fourth choice.
>
> One might suppose that anyone who is sufficently advanced in the
> education cycle so as to be a college student would have found this a
> "snap" question, but it was not so. She had no idea as to the answer
> so she used one of her "lifelines", the option to call a friend and
> ask him (or her as the case may be but in this case it was a him) the
> question. Her friend was a history professor.
>
> Our hapless contestant read the question to her friend. He said, "I'm
> not really sure; I'm in American History; but I'm about 60% sure that
> it was William the Conqueror."
>
> Hastings in 1066. I do wonder if he has read Foucault.
We have a book titled "1066 and all that" published by the Folio society.
According to the author two dates, and two dates only, are remembered
by the English. Even the not very bright ones.
One is 1066, and the other is 55 BC.
1215 comes a distant third.
Would the USAn history prof. know what happened in 55 BC? I wouldn't bet
on it.
Arindam Banerjee
>
>
> Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net,
> http://www.tiac.net/users/cri, http://www.varinoma.com
> Love, no matter how pure, is the most selfish of gifts.
> For that reason it is the one gift that must be given.
>
>
> --
> Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
Francis Muir
If you're going to throw wa.gov.au about, take a peek at:
<http://www.calm.wa.gov.au/plants_animals/mammal.quokka.html>
Francis Muir
I never met a Sidneysider yet who knew beans about Woz. The quokka,
as every child born West of the Nullarbor knows, is a diminutive
marsupial that can be found exclusively on Rottnest Island, just West
of Perth. Islands East of Perth include Fiji and the Sandwich Islands.
David Latane
D. Latane
Michael S. Morris
Tuesday, the 12th of February, 2002
Steve:
But one would expect history professor and
other graduates to have got beyond that.
That's the thing. It's hard for me to imagine
a general reader who hasn't encountered the story
of the Conquest in such a way that "1066", "Hastings",
"William the Conqueror", "the Norman Conquest" wouldn't
signify. I mean, say, Borges riffs several times I think
on the ironies in Harold's win at Stamford Bridge just
three weeks prior to Hastings.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)