Tumblelog as bricolage: a collection of found objects, assembled into a whole, with semantic echoes of literary criticism, pedagogy, experiential education, music, anthropology, and cultural studies. The metaphor does not fit perfectly, of course, but it is a place to start.
Bricolage (brikoʊlɑʒ), as told by Wikipedia: the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things which happen to be available; a work created by such a process.
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'becca.
Sat
Oct
29
From “School ‘Reform’: A Failing Grade” by Diane Ravitch
“The [school] reformers like to say that poverty doesn’t make a difference, but they are wrong. Poverty matters. The achievement gap between children of affluence and children of poverty starts long before the first day of school. It reflects the nutrition and medical care available to pregnant women and their children, as well as the educational level of the children’s parents, the vocabulary they hear, and the experiences to which they are exposed.
Poor children can learn and excel, but the odds are against them. Reformers like to say that “demography is not destiny,” but saying so doesn’t make it true: demography is powerful. Every testing program shows a tight correlation between family income and test scores, whether it is the SAT, the ACT, the federal testing program, or state tests.”
“When test scores become the goal of education by which students and schools are measured, then students in the bottom half—who will inevitably include disproportionate numbers of children who are poor, children with disabilities, children who barely speak English—will be left far behind, stigmatized by their low scores. If we were to focus on the needs of children, we would make sure that every pregnant woman got good medical care and nutrition, since many children born to women without them tend to have learning disabilities. We would make sure that children in poor communities have high-quality early childhood education so that they arrive in school ready to learn. We would insist that their teachers be trained to support their social, emotional, and intellectual development and to engage local communities on behalf of their children, as Dr. James Comer of Yale University has insisted for many years. And we would have national policies whose goal is to reduce poverty by expanding economic opportunity.”
Sat
Oct
1
“A decade of college and grad school—boot camps of strategic fakery—immeasurably deepened my arsenal: Today I’m proficient in such feints as the stretched truth (“It’s funny, I’ve never actually finished that,” I’ll volunteer about War and Peace, of which I’ve read only the first paragraph), the misdirection (“Have you read Gravity’s Rainbow?” “You know what’s always bothered me about Pynchon?”), and, on very rare occasions, the enthusiastic flat-out lie (“Did you finish Brideshead Revisited?” “Yes! Yes, I really did!”). My signature move is a mildly orgasmic “Mmmmm,” which manages to suggest several things simultaneously: agreement, disagreement, ambivalence, and above all that my familiarity with the book in question is so deep it’s become muscular and sub-verbal, less a literary opinion than the visceral appreciation of a jaguar for the dawn.”
-Sam Anderson, from a book review of How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (by Pierre Bayard)
Fri
Feb
18
“All of this is to say that while Ken and Brad lost the battle, Team Carbon is still winning the language war against Team Silicon. The “war” metaphor, incidentally, had been playing out for weeks, stoked by IBM and Jeopardy! to build public interest in the tournament. The press gladly played along, supplying headlines like the one in the Science Times from Tuesday, “A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans.” IBM knew from the Kasparov vs. Deep Blue days that we’re all suckers for the “man vs. machine” trope, going back to John Henry’s mythical race against the steam-powered hammer. It certainly makes for a better storyline than, say, “Check out the latest incremental innovations that Natural Language Processing researchers are making in the field of question-answering!”“
-Ben Zimmer, “Is It Time to Welcome Our New Computer Overlords?” (The Atlantic)
(The whole article is worth reading. Zimmer has smart things to say about Watson, Jeopardy!, and what it means to understand language.)
![From “Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life in America.”
From the website: “Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life In America is a collection of 18 short films and 80 photographic portraits that represent and archive the varied lives of Queer America today. Photographs and videos will be released episodically online, accompanied by personal statements, throughout the next year. […] With this ever growing archive of words, images and short films, the artists intend to change the way queer communities are perceived, and offer queer people all over the country a chance to speak for themselves.”](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lr094rWSbs1qzzebvo1_500.jpg)
