Valutare gli insegnanti

Un articolo interessante sull'accanimento - che rasenta il fanatismo - con cui si valutano gli insegnanti negli USA. In questo caso i soggetti della ricerca non sono i docenti universitari, ma gli insegnanti della scuola primaria e secondaria. "Last week, the New York State Education Department and the teachers’ unions reached an agreement to allow the state to use student test scores to evaluate teachers. ... New York's education officials are obsessed with test scores. The state wants to find and fire the teachers who aren’t able to produce higher test scores year after year. But most testing experts believe that the methods for calculating teachers’ assumed “value-added” qualities—that is, their abilities to produce higher test scores year after year—are inaccurate, unstable, and unreliable. ... Of course, teachers should be evaluated. They should be evaluated by experienced principals and peers. No incompetent teacher should be allowed to remain in the classroom. Those who can’t teach and can’t improve should be fired. But the current frenzy of blaming teachers for low scores smacks of a witch-hunt, the search for a scapegoat, someone to blame for a faltering economy, for the growing levels of poverty, for widening income inequality". Diane Ravitch su nybook.

The Diagram Prize

Il Diagram Prize premia il titolo più bizzarro. Ecco qualche esempio, dalla shortlist di quest'anno: Cooking with Poo, The Mushroom in Christian Art, The Great Singapore Penis Panic: And the Future of American Mass Hysteria. thebookseller. 

The Iliad by Homer

Ho trovato molto bello - appassionato, appassionante, colto - l'articolo di Edward Luttwak sul perché continuaiamo a leggere l'Iliade (più che l'Odissea). Ecco alcune delle ragioni che Luttwak propone: "One reason, obviously, is that had Homer existed (in spite of his deconstruction by Wolf, and in spite of his substitution by Parry/Lord), he would have been the star pupil of any creative writing course. They teach a variety of tricks and techniques for different kinds of writing, but Homer uses absolutely all of them: the Iliad begins in media res with the action underway, and instead of a tiresome summary of the first nine years of the war, necessary context is supplied by scattered flashbacks ... On top of that, there are the production values, as Hollywood calls them: lots of special effects ranging from the habitual falling-star incandescence of the gods to the extraordinary revolt of the river god Scamander against Achilles ... it offers a vision of uncompromised human dignity which was very rare indeed over much of human history ... Another reason for reading the Iliad is the fighting, although the battles do not even start until Book 4." lrb.

New Ways to Kill Your Mother

New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families, di Colm Tóibín (Viking). In questa sua nuova raccolta di saggi Tóibín esamina la relazione di alcuni scrittori con i loro genitori. E anche la sua, con sua madre, "It mattered to her [his mother] that she could have, or might have, been a writer, and perhaps it mattered to me more than I fully understood. She watched my books appear with considerable interest, and wrote me an oddly formal letter about the style of each one, but she was, I knew, also uneasy about my novels. She found them too slow and sad and oddly personal. She was careful not to say too much about this, except once when she felt that I had described her and things which had happened to her too obviously and too openly. That time she said that she might indeed soon write her own book. She made a book sound like a weapon. Perhaps a book is a weapon; perhaps an unwritten book is an even more powerful weapon than one which has been published. It has a way of filling the air with its menace or its promise, the sweet art of what might have been. guardian.

To enchain syllables, and to lash the wind

Britain's fascination with its changing language is renowned. Unlike our neighbours on the mainland of Europe, we have resisted creating an academy to legislate over proper English. We each have our linguistic bugbear, but few of us would want to freeze our mother tongue. Even Dr Johnson realised that his hope of keeping pure the English he adored was a futile proposition: "To enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride."

Così comincia l'articolo di Susie Dent che cerca di spiegare preché i britannici siano tanto affascinati dalla loro lingua. Susie Dent è una nota linguista, che tra l'altro è l'esperta l'esperta del gioco di parole televisivo Countdown di Channel 4. independent.

La casa di Eudora Welty

Sono sempre molto incuriosita dalle case, anche da quelle degli scrittori. La casa di Eudora Welty, a Jackson in Mississippi, è descritta da Margaret Eby sulla Paris Review. "Miss Eudora, as native Jacksonites affectionately call her, was a fixture in the capital city of Mississippi from her childhood until her death in 2001. ... Welty's house, a Tudor-style revival tucked into a thicket of pines, is almost unbearably welcoming. Visiting feels like an intrusion on her privacy. ... Piles of books cram into shelves in almost every room and teeter in piles on most surfaces: dictionaries, collections of Greek myths, novels by Wodehouse, Thurber, O’Connor, and Pritchett. Her nieces used to complain that when they visited Eudora, they had to move a stack of books just to sit down". parisreview.

Going Solo

Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (Penguin Press), di Eric Klinenberg propone un'analisi molto interessante della società attuale. Ecco quel che ne dice David Brooks, "... we have gone from a society that protected people from their frailties to a society that allows people to maximize their talents. The old settled social structures were stifling to many creative and dynamic people (and in those days discrimination stifled people even more). But people who were depressed, disorganized and disadvantaged were able to lead lives enmeshed in supportive relationships. Today, the fast flexible and diverse networks allow the ambitious and the gifted to surf through amazing possibilities. They are able to construct richer, more varied lives. They are able to enjoy interesting information-age workplaces and then go home and find serenity in a one-bedroom apartment. ... These trends are not going to reverse themselves. So maybe it's time to acknowledge a core reality: People with skills can really thrive in this tenuous, networked society. People without those advantages would probably be better off if we could build new versions of the settled, stable and thick arrangements we’ve left behind. nyt.

Tim Parks on E-books

Tim Parks è un sostenitore degli e-books e fornisce delle ragioni molto sensate con la sua consueta eloquenza. Ma non mi convince del tutto, non saprei dire perché. Comunque ecco la fine del suo articolo pro-e-books, "The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

Add to that the e-book's ease of transport, its international vocation (could the Iron Curtain have kept out e-books?), its indestructibility (you can't burn e-books), its promise that all books will be able to remain forever in print and what is more available at reasonable prices, and it becomes harder and harder to see why the literati are not giving the phenomenon a more generous welcome. nybooks.

Tutto il mondo è paese

On Feb. 1, a funny thing happened in a U.S. district court in Manhattan: An intern complained in public.

Xuedan Wang, a 28-year-old former intern at Harper’s Bazaar, filed a lawsuit against the Hearst Corp., Harper’s parent company, for failing to pay minimum and overtime wages during her unpaid internship. Wang, who goes by Diana, spent August through December 2011 at the magazine, coordinating fashion sample deliveries, filing expense reports, helping with photo shoots, and supervising other interns. Her typical 40-hour workweek sometimes ran to 55 hours. ... Also, there are surprisingly few complaints by interns, because most don’t wish to bite the hand that may feed them someday. “Unpaid interns are usually too scared to speak out … because they are frightened it will hurt their chances of finding future jobs in their industry,” said Adam Klein, another one of Wang’s lawyers. slate.

Fact-Checking, Again

Jim Fingal and John D'Agata

Di nuovo sul libro di D'Agata e Fingal. Dan Kois, su Slate, si schiera dalla parte di Fingal, il fact-checker. Ma anche dalla parte della verità dei fatti, contro una supposta libertà artistica. Il linguaggio di tutti è molto colorito. "In my reading, I came to view Fingal as the hero of the book, desperately trying to protect the truth from a writer who didn't simply disregard accuracy but was openly contemptuous of it. Fingal looks the part of hero - he's big and muscular, with broad shoulders, a beard, and a deeply serious expression. Then a Believer intern, he's now a software designer in Massachusetts but still has strong feelings about the role of accuracy in writing. 'A writer's presenting these things as facts,' he said. 'I, the hypothetical reader, am putting my trust in him to give me the straight dope. What gives him the right to introduce bullshit as fact?'

D'Agata's response, when he heard Fingal's question? 'It’s called art, dickhead.'" slate.