Lift Up Your Hearts!

You may remember Michael Merzenich as one of the major researchers mentioned in The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge.  Merzenich is no doubt a better researcher than a speaker; this lecture is not nearly as good—and certainly not as comprehensive—as the book.  But it will take less than 25 minutes of your time, and is worthwhile if only for his explanation of the dangers of white noise—continuous, disorganized sound—to an infant's brain, and for the hope he holds out to those of us who grew up with the depressing idea that once you reach adulthood (or perhaps early teens, or even age six, depending on who you believe), you are basically stuck with the brain you've got.

Michael Merzenich on re-wiring the brain

(Granchild warning:  I don't know if you consider "crap" objectionable, but there are a few instances between 17:00 and 18:30.)

Unlike many people, I never dreamed of visiting foreign countries.  I like being home.  If I have family around me and good work to do, why should I go elsewhere?

Well, God clearly intended to broaden me a bit.  Between having family now living overseas and the opportunities provided by Porter’s job, I’ve done a whole lot more travelling than I’d ever intended.

That’s a good thing—and not just because some of that travel has led me to valuable genealogical research opportunities.  Most recently I was struck by how personal it makes world events.

The tragedy in Japan has more impact on me because we were there.  Janet and Stephan each lived and worked in Japan for a year; we met Janet’s friends, went to her church, walked the streets of her town.  That may be why this video struck me harder than the more spectacular footage.  This is not where Janet lived, but it feels familiar, particularly the voice calling over the loudspeakers.  That makes the impact hit home.

I used to wonder why churches sent youth groups on week-long missions trips.  Sure, the kids do some good:  painting, some minor construction work, brightening some children’s lives for a few days.  It’s not that they don’t do work that needs to be done—but wouldn’t it be more cost-effective, and better for the community, to take the money spent sending American kids to places in need and instead hire local people to do the work?

I still think that would be a better use of the money, short-term.  But who can analyze the future value of creating a personal connection between young people and another place, another culture, another way of life?

Study can help build that connection; I still feel tied to Ethiopia because of a mammoth project I did in elementary school on that country.  But study and travel—if we can make it happen for our children, they and the world will be better for it.  I know of nothing more likely to erase false images (both negative and positive) than actual interaction with real people in real places.

How to Be a High School Superstar:  A Revolutionary Plan to Get into College by Standing Out (Without Burning Out), by Cal Newport (Broadway Books, New York, 2010)

If I could recommend two books to help a 12-15 year old student prepare for college, it would be Alex and Brett Harris's Do Hard Things and this one.  Some of the political and religious views expressed in the former set my teeth on edge, but it's well worth the effort to get past that reaction, because Brett and Alex write well, and what they are saying is incredibly important, not just for teens who share their beliefs, but for everyone, of any age.

How to Be a High School Superstar is altogether different in focus, but I can boil the best of both books down to this:  Life doesn’t begin when you graduate from high school. or college, or grad school.  You can do hard things, good things, amazing things, now.  Or, rather, in a little while from now, if you are willing to put forth some effort in the right direction.

The good news from Newport is that the first step in the process is to stop putting so much effort in the wrong directions.  The standard college-bound rat race that overfills schedules with extra-curricular activities and turns a grade of A- into a tragedy?  Forget it.  Far from being a requirement for getting into your top-choice school, this will actually hinder your chances.  The admissions departments of the best schools are awash in applications from students with 4.0 GPAs and bristling with sports, clubs, and volunteer activities.  So how does a student stand out?

By becoming an interesting person.

Face it:  It’s hard to develop a personality when you spend most of your time surrounded by people your own age, doing mostly the same things in the same places.  It is interaction with the diversity and unpredictability of real life that sculpts and polishes us.  So the first step on the path to high school superstardom is to clear large swaths of free time in your schedule.  Get rid of those elective classes you think you ought to take but in which you have no interest, and quit those clubs you joined simply to impress some college admissions officer.  Drop out of the race for the valedictorian’s laurels—it’s true that being first in your class gives a significant edge with the colleges, but there are plenty of other ways to catch their eye where the competition is less fierce.  Being willing to accept a B+ instead of an A can trade a minuscule diminution of learning for a significant increase in free time.

I know, I know.  You’re envisioning sleeping till noon, endless video games, hanging out at the mall, or getting into trouble.  The devil finds work for idle hands to do.

Not a bit of it.  There’s a point to carving out all this free time, and that’s what the rest of the book is about.  Newport never mentions homeschooling, much less unschooling, but his strategy for becoming a person interesting enough to impress the toughest colleges is remarkably similar to the unschooling lifestyle.  It still requires effort—but effort that is different, less stressful, and more interesting.   It’s also, Newport insists, within everyone’s reach:  it doesn’t take a genius to do impressive work.  It does, however, require thinking outside of the standard high school operating procedures.

Neither Do Hard Things nor How to Be a High School Superstar has all the answers, but each presents a vision for encouraging ordinary students to become extraordinary human beings.

Don't leave middle school without them.

Don't you just love it when an otherwise obscure reference clicks in your mind?

First, one of my favorite non-family blogs, The Occasional CEO, has a post entitled Steampunk in Pictures.  Steampunk, Wikipedia tells me, is a subgenre of science fiction.  Wait—I cut my teeth on science fiction, and I'd never heard of it?  Turns out steampunk came of age during the 1980's and 90's, when our kids were cutting their teeth and I was too busy to keep up with that part of my former life.

But then, just this morning, I learned that my nephews' writing teacher will be leading a class on steampunk.

Then on the way home from church I heard part of A Prairie Home Companion^*, which was being broadcast from New York City.  Garrison Keillor, describing the crowds at Times Square, reported that city locals were not there, but rather were at—and here he named several other places, including "the Christmas shops at Bryant Park."  That would have passed by me into obscurity just like all the other places he mentioned, except that last December I had passed by Bryant Park twice a day while doing research at the New York Public Library, and had seen those very shops—along with the portable ice skating rink and other magical sights of the season.

This phenomenon, that the more we know, the more we are aware, the more we learn—and often, the more we like—is a big reason why I believe even very young children should have the opportunity to encounter as many of the good things in this world as possible, from hearing new languages to making pancakes to looking at pictures of great art to any number of other wonderful things.  When it comes to knowledge, from the vital to the trivial, "to everyone who has, more will be given."

I can’t quite bring myself to say directly that I’m thankful for television, because I believe it has done great harm in our society, but it would be wrong to ignore the enormous educational and cultural benefits this technology has conferred.  As strong a proponent as I am of the written word, some second-hand experiences are much better approached in a video format.  From African safaris to Wagnerian opera, video provides formerly elite experiences to the hoi polloi.  It’s not the real thing—but even the very rich cannot experience everything directly.

Thus I am also thankful for the technology that has enabled us to be masters of this medium.  In my early days we had no television at all, but it didn’t take long to become enslaved.  Life was planned around when favorite shows were on, because if you weren’t watching at that very hour, you missed it.  I remember (to my shame) being reduced to tearful anger because our babysitter wouldn’t change the channel from her favorite show to mine.

It's true that we are, as a society, still enthralled.  But we don’t need to be.  We have the tools to use the medium for good purposes and ignore all the rest.

You’re surprised I waited so long for this one, right?  I value home education so highly that my gratitude for that privilege almost goes without saying.  (But gratitude should never go without saying.)   Because my joyous thanksgiving for the legal protection that homeschoolers now enjoy cannot be overstated, I will understate it here.

Educational opportunities have expanded for everyone, not just homeschoolers, over the last 50 years.

When I was a child living in upstate New York, educational choices for most families were simple:  Your children went to the local public school after they turned five years old.  If you were Catholic, you had one more choice:  parochial school.

Later we moved to the Philadelphia Main Line, where there were several well-established private schools to choose from—if you were wealthy and willing to commute.

Today?  There still isn’t as much choice as I would like, as the system is heavily weighted in favor of public schools and against parents who choose another path.  But tremendous improvements have been made.

• Education is now provided for all children; in the past, “all children are to be provided a free, public education” often did not apply to children with handicaps.
• Homeschooling is legal in every state, albeit with varying degrees of governmental interference.
• Within the home education realm itself, materials and support (and with them, options) have exploded over the last 20 years.
• Private school options have multiplied:  non-Catholic Christian schools, Muslim schools, Montessori schools, unschools, specialty academic schools—if there’s an idea, someone has turned it into a school.
• Public school options have also multiplied, with magnet schools, charter schools, and in some (too few) places even the right to choose which regular public school to attend.  Even limited competition has encouraged public schools to be less complacent.

Would I call the system great?  No.  In some ways schooling is worse now than when I was a child, although to be fair that’s mostly due to sociological changes.  But overall the system is much better than it was 50, or even 25 years ago, because we have choices.  Whether in the end we choose public, private, or home education—or a combination thereof—we (and our children) are better off for having the opportunity to make these decisions, rather than passively accepting the status quo.

MMG is one of my Facebook friends. I've known her since before she was born, so technically she's more the daughter of our friends than my own friend.  Yet thanks to Facebook, in recent years I've had more contact with her, and know more about what's going on in her life, than with her parents.

This is a particular blessing, not only because it keeps up a connection that would otherwise have been lost, but because I enjoy her perspective on life.  She and I differ and disagree in multitudinous ways, from thoughts about God to the importance of televised hockey games.  As Hercule Poirot is fond of saying, she "gives one furiously to think."  But best of all, she is adept at finding (and posting) links from all over the Web, some of which lead me down very interesting paths.  Here's a recent one:

A cool presentation of part of a talk by Sir Ken Robinson.

And here's one more by Robinson, a second TED lecture that also overlaps a bit with the above .  With all Robinson has been saying about education, this is the first time I've heard him mention homeschooling (very near the end of the lecture).  He's neither positive nor negative, but acknowledges it as a legitimate form, which is progress, anyway.  (This one is only about 18 minutes long.)

I've written about Robinson before, notably in:  Sir Ken Robinson, Creativity, and Education, and also a review of his book, The Element.  And of course I can't miss the opportunity once again to plug John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education, which confirms and elaborates on what Robinson says about the industrial model of education.

Here are a few side notes I've taken from the above talks.

• There are no school systems anywhere that Robinson knows of that teaches dance every day, giving it as much importance as mathematics—which he believes to be a mistake.  Long ago I concluded that music should be given that same importance; that learning music should be no more optional than learning to read or to brush one's teeth.  But I apologize to our dancing daughter for not recognizing the similar importance of dance.  Sigh—if only the value of dance had been separated from silly little girls in frilly tutus, I might have been more understanding.
• "We still educate children by batches.  We put them through the system by age group.  Why do we do that?  Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are?  It's like the most important thing about them is their date of manufacture."  Amen and amen.
• Since 1970 in America, spending on education has more than doubled in terms of real money, class size has steadily declined, but literacy has remained the same.  Robinson believes this supports his thesis that the education system cannot be reformed but requires revolutionary change.  John Taylor Gatto and John Holt gave much of their lives to reforming the schools, and in the end concluded it couldn't be done, instead throwing their support and work into alternatives.  Robinson still has hope that the revolution can occur within the public educational system.
• The paradigm shift Robinson recommends is that we discard the industrial model on which our current view of education is based, and instead adopt an agricultural model.  I believe he's right, but with all the diversions he took in his longer talk, I wish he had pointed out that many would claim our schools are indeed based on an agricultural model:  that of agri-business and the CAFO.  The agricultural model we need for education is that of Polyface Farms, in which the "pigness of the pig"—the individuality of the student—is respected.
• Robinson has many important things to say about schools.  But for all that I agree with him, he is working from a view of humans—of life, the universe, and everything—so fundamentally different from my own that it's a wonder we have so much in common when it comes to education.  He comes to his conclusions based on his belief that human beings are insignificant in relation to the cosmos, that people are basically good but wrong circumstances cause us to go bad, and that we have risen from a lower state and continue to improve.  My own conclusions come from the Christian belief that human beings are of infinite value (importance being unrelated to size), that we have within us the potential to be far better than we can imagine, but that the evil streak within us is innate and cannot be eliminated by improving our circumstances.  And yet those fundamental differences lead us to many of the same conclusions!  Maybe we're right. 

I am republishing my initial comments, made in December 2008, when I checked The History of the Ancient World out of the library then discovered I didn't have time to read it.  Now, nearly two years later, I have finally read the book, and my additional comments are added below.

The History of the Ancient World:  From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome, by Susan Wise Bauer (W. W. Norton, New York, 2007)

Despite having some initial negative reactions to Susan Wise Bauer, I've continued to find her work delightful and invaluable.  (See my reviews of The Well-Trained Mind, The Story of the World, and The Well-Educated Mind.)  I haven't read more than a small part of The History of the Ancient World, but borrowed it from the library in order to determine whether or not to buy it for myself.  I've so enjoyed—and learned from—listening to Jim Weiss read The Story of the World, which was written for elementary-age children, that I wondered if Bauer could bring as much delight into a history book for adults.

Time does not permit me to read through the book, much less review it properly, but let's just say I wish I didn't have to take it back to the library as soon as possible to remove temptation.  The History of the Ancient World is delightful to read.  Much of the delight, I think, comes from the philosophy of her approach, which she explains much better in the introduction than I have time to write, or even to copy, here.  Bauer is interested in people:  their lives, thoughts, fears, hopes, dreams, actions, and relationships.  She minimizes the general and the theoretical in favor of the personal, and includes the myths and stories of a culture as well as verifiable facts.  The stories that have come down with a people from before recorded time should inform our historical speculations as much as potsherds from an archeological dig.

This approach no doubt will anger many, some because she finds historical value in passages from the Bible, and others because she gives similar respect to the ancient stories of other cultures.  To me, it makes for great story-telling.  The History of the Ancient World has earned a place on my wish list, perhaps for the next time Borders offers me a 40% off coupon, and I certainly hope Susan Wise Bauer is working on a sequel.

UPDATE, 1 September 2010. Bauer was, indeed, working on a sequel, and managed to finish writing The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade  before I finished reading its predecessor.  I've already purchased it, and am looking forward to diving in.  But first, some thoughts on this one.

I enjoyed The Ancient World a good deal, though I expect to enjoy the Medieval book more because of the time period.  I find stories of kings and battles and political intrigue interesting up to a point, but ancient times take me to that point rather quickly, as often that's about all we know about them.  Bauer does a good job of trying to put flesh on the bare bones, but it's still pretty much "second verse, same as the first."  And third, and fourth, and nth.

I can't help feeling the same way about the Old Testament of the Bible at times, too.  One thing Bauer's book has done is to give me a much better feel for the context in which the Old Testament events took place, and the knowledge that as gruesome and cruel and bizarre as they sometimes are, it helps to know that the OT stories are nowhere near as gruesome and cruel and bizarre as stories from the rest of the ancient world.  There's a limit to how much improvement even God can make in human beings all at once, I guess.  Or, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, before you can judge where someone is, you have to know where he came from.

Speaking of the Bible, in parallel with Ancient World I've been reading the Chronological Guide to the Bible, as part of Thomas Nelson's review blogger program.  (So you'll see a review here when I'm done, but I've only just started the New Testament section.)  That was a brilliant move on my part, as the books dovetail and complement each other nicely.

But back to Bauer's book.  My head is swimming with dates and places and unpronounceable, highly forgettable names.  It will take a lot more learning before I can say I have a good picture in my head of the ancient world.  But I now have a good sketch, and that's better than any of my history teachers were able to give me.  I especially like Bauer's attempt to cover more of the world than just the Middle East and Mediterranean countries, though if I can't keep the Roman rulers straight there's no hope of remembering China's and India's.  Helpful parallel timelines attempt to provide mental links from one culture to another.

I'd give The History of the Ancient World an R rating for sex and violence, but anyone likely to be overly disturbed by reading what those ancient kings did to their enemies—and with their friends—probably won't be reading an 800-page history book.

How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, by Robert Greenberg; a Teaching Company lecture

I've said it before:  For accessible, serious, high-quality, adult-level educational materials (DVD, CD, mp3 download) it's hard to beat The Teaching Company.  Robert Greenberg is one of my favorite lecturers, and this—so far—my favorite of his courses.  

Here are the titles of the 48 lectures, as you can buy the course today.  It is now onto its third edition; our version, which is so old we bought it on cassette tapes,^* differs in minor ways.

1. Music as a Mirror
2. Sources—The Ancient World and the Early Church
3. The Middle Ages
4. Introduction to the Renaissance
5. The Renaissance Mass
6. The Madrigal
7. An Introduction to the Baroque Era
8. Style Features of Baroque-era Music
9. National Styles—Italy and Germany
10. Fugue
11. Baroque Opera, Part 1
12. Baroque Opera, Part 2
13. The Oratorio
14. The Lutheran Church Cantata
15. Passacaglia
16. Ritornello Form and the Baroque Concerto
17. The Enlightenment and an Introduction to the Classical Era
18. The Viennese Classical Style, Homophony, and the Cadence
19. Classical-era Form—Theme and Variations
20. Classical-era Form—Minuet and Trio: Baroque Antecedents
21. Classical-era Form—Minuet and Trio Form
22. Classical-era Form—Rondo Form
23. Classical-era Form—Sonata Form, Part 1
24. Classical-era Form—Sonata Form, Part 2
25. Classical-era Form—Sonata Form, Part 3
26. The Symphony—Music for Every Person
27. The Solo Concerto
28. Classical-era Opera—The Rise of Opera Buffa
29. Classical-era Opera, Part 2—Mozart and the Operatic Ensemble
30. The French Revolution and an Introduction to Beethoven
31. Beethoven's Symphony no. 5 in C Minor, op. 67, Part 1
32. Beethoven's Symphony no. 5 in C Minor, op. 67, Part 2
33. Introduction to Romanticism
34. Formal Challenges and Solutions in Early Romantic Music
35. The Program Symphony—Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Part 1
36. The Program Symphony—Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Part 2
37. 19th-Century Italian Opera—Bel Canto Opera
38. 19th-Century Italian Opera—Giuseppe Verdi
39. 19th-Century German Opera—Nationalism and Experimentation
40. 19th-Century German Opera—Richard Wagner
41. The Concert Overture, Part 1
42. The Concert Overture, Part 2
43. Romantic-era Musical Nationalism
44. Russian Nationalism
45. An Introduction to Early 20th-Century Modernism
46. Early 20th-Century Modernism—Claude Debussy
47. Early 20th-Century Modernism—Igor Stravinsky
48. Early 20th-Century Modernism—Arnold Schönberg

Forty-eight lectures of 45 minutes each sounds long and intimidating, but even at that length this is a brief, introductory, whirlwind tour of music history—and it never drags.  I find it easy to listen to while driving, and well worth hearing more than once.

My recommendation for this course is as high as I can give, with one small caveat.  Greenberg gears his lectures to adults, specifically college students, and he has obviously learned how to keep the attention of the teenage boys in his classes:  his brief composer biographies sometimes include their sexual proclivities, and if there's musical reference he sees as orgasmic, he doesn't hesitate to mention it.  (He also describes musical stomach rumbles and heartbeats.)

As music history, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music has received the endorsement of our favorite graduate of the Eastman School of Music, so I know it's good.   

Gabriel Kron. Of all the amazing people who have intersected with my life, he is probably the safest to write about, since he died more than 40 years ago.  So I will; he deserves to be better known.

I knew him as my father's friend and mountain climbing partner; my father knew him from their days together at the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York.  Dad, a Tau Beta Pi engineer (like his father, two of his children, and a grandchild), was no intellectual slouch, but he never pretended to understand anything of Gabe's work. 

It didn't matter.  I myself joined the Kron Klimbing Klub at age seven, and was mighty annoyed when I later learned that some other organization had usurped the acronym, "KKK."

One firm rule of the Klub I remember distinctly:  No eating until you reach the top.

Unfortunately, I don't remember much about this brilliant and unusual man, other than that I enjoyed climbing with him. Here is one memory from Dad's own Remembrances Along the Way.

Beginning in August 1959 Linda went with me on nearly all my climbing trips, her first climb being Buck Mountain on Lake George. There were three trips in 1960 and 1961 up Hunter Mountain, a 4000+-foot peak in the Catskills.

We climbed as members of the Kron Klimbing Klub. Gabe Kron was a mathematician of considerable note who worked for General Electric and who liked to climb mountains that were close enough at hand that he could leave Schenectady at 8 o’clock, drive to the mountain, climb it, and return by 5:00 p.m. Hunter was one of his favorites but such things as inspiring views meant nothing to him. He would get to the top, get out his lunch, sit on a rock and eat lunch and read the New York Times. Then he would go down and home. Ted Dietze and his son Rick also went on these trips and Gabe was infinitely patient with the children.

They were very enjoyable trips. Everyone who climbed with Gabe was a member of the Kron Klimbing Klub. One day we planned to climb Snowy Mountain. We left Schenectady with decent weather that turned to rain before we arrived in the town of Speculator. The children were not shod for wet weather so we bought them overshoes in Speculator. As we started to climb the weather turned cold and the rain turned to snow. The snow began to build up, the trail became slippery, and the climbing became very difficult because of the slipperiness. We turned around and headed back down well below the summit. Linda was so cold that all she wanted to do was to sit down and rest. Of course I would not allow that and I practically dragged her down the trail for several minutes until she warmed up and all was well for the rest of the way down.

The trip up Snowy Mountain I remember for three things:  (1) my new boots may have kept my feet dry, but they did nothing to stop them from getting very, very cold; (2) I was determined not to give up before Ricky Dietze did, as he was older, stronger, male, and thought he could beat me in everything; and (3) my chief fear in turning around before reaching the top lay in believing I would then not be entitled to lunch!

For much more about this remarkable person, read The Evolution of an Engineering Scientist, by Philip Langdon Alger (no relation, that I know of).  You must scroll down a bit to find the beginning.  I'll add some tempting excerpts below.

[T]he youngest child in a family of eight children, [Gabe] was born on July 23, 1901, in ... a town of about 10,000 people in a remote region of the Carpathian Mountains of Hungary. ... A boyhood friend described Gabe in elementary school as plump, always lively, always joyous, always having something to tell.  [P]eople who knew him well understood quite clearly that for him the environment of his home town was too confined and that a day would come when he would act to broaden his horizons."

Before he could escape, however, he needed to learn English.

"Being subjected during my life time to several inoculations with a new language, I gradually developed a technique of my own; that proved to be quite practical for acquiring a reading knowledge of a new language in a place which offered no contact with people speaking it. As young children we had been instructed in Hebrew ... In the Gymnasium we were taught Latin for eight years, German for six, and Greek for four years, each with the aid of the most elaborate grammar the human mind could devise. Under the guise of classical education the professors crammed our heads with an infinite variety of useless rules, exceptions to the rules, and exceptions to the exceptions, so that languages were the most lugubrious subjects taught...."

"Realizing that the manner in which languages were taught was one of the hundred possible ways that should not be employed, I started out to use just the opposite tactics. Instead of memorizing grammar, I memorized the German dictionary. Our school dictionary had about twenty thousand words in it, a hundred words on a page; so, I tore out a page a day and committed it to memory. Then the page was thrown away. When there was no dictionary left, I considered myself an expert in the language. I could sit down, open up a French or German book anywhere, and proceed. Slowly and painfully at first, but nevertheless I could make headway in understanding the text....."

"[Finding no suitable English dictionary available, what] I did was to borrow an English book, which happened to be H.G. Wells' The Food of the Gods, and beginning with the first page I wrote out a hundred words each day and committed them to memory. After eight or ten pages the text began to assume more human form, and past the first chapter the content even became enjoyable."

In 1921, Kron and his brother came to the United States, ending up at the University of Michigan, a school which met their criteria:  "an engineering school that would cost no more than $150 for tuition, located far enough inland to be away from the flood of immigrants."  Gabe graduated in three years despite working to support himself.  He wasn't a typical UM student.  In his words,

"As always happens when a free spirit is obliged to undergo a prescribed routine, I wanted to study everything except what the curriculum called for. How to find time to study what one wishes, and not what the teacher thinks best for one's own good, must be a perennial problem to many an anxious pupil. Finally, I hit on the idea of arranging my schedules so that by Friday noon the classes would be all over. Three full days then each week from Friday noon to Monday morning I was free to pursue my own private schedule of study without the interruptions of regular classwork. The rest of the week I considered as a sacrifice on the altar of mechanized education." 

After securing American citizenship in 1926, he rode a tanker from California to Tahiti.

He lived as a guest in the family of a native in Tahiti for some weeks, then sailed to the Fiji Islands. He walked through the back country, shared native hospitality, swam rivers, and admired the tropical forest. ... In all his travels, his custom was to spend the usual siesta hours under a tree, studying mathematics.

Then he took ship to Sydney, where his money ran out....  After working long enough to clear £35, be bought [another math book] and took to the road again ... On the way he spent many nights in the company of the "sundowners," the Australian tramps who lived without working, with the aid of free food tickets handed out in police stations to anyone who needed them.

Kron sailed from Townsville to Borneo, and thence to Manila, Hongkong, and Saigon. Here, he started out on foot to Angkor Vat, and walked on to Aranha, where he took a train for Bangkok, then joined a caravan that followed the ancient trade route to Cockrake in Burma. He walked to Rangoon, took a boat to Calcutta, walked on to Agra, where he admired the Taj Mahal. He crossed the Indian desert to Karachi by train, took a boat across the Persian Gulf and went on by train to Baghdad, stopping to see the ruins of Ur on the way. He spent $5 for a truck ride across the Arabian desert to Damascus, then set out on foot again to Gaza. He hastened on to Cairo by train, saw the Pyramids, sailed from Alexandria to Constantinople and went by train to Bucharest, arriving at midnight at the home of a friend, with just small change left in his pockets. After an all-night talk, the friend financed his ticket to Baja Mare, where his parents welcomed him. The neighbors wanted to know why he had come home from America with his toes sticking out of his shoes, while every one else came home rich. No one asked about his travels.

Eventually he ended up, as stated above, working for General Electric in Schenectady.

Kron was a puzzle to the company executives who were responsible for his assignments. They wanted to tell him what to do, and to put him in a place where his talents would yield immediate, commercially useful results, and to adjust his salary accordingly. This was difficult, because Kron's value was largely in the inspiration he gave to others and in distant objectives that seemed to business managers to be merely dreams. As they tried to make the best use of him, he was shifted hither and yon. ... Kron had to pursue his own ideas outside of office hours.

This was no real hardship, however, as the company did give Kron complete freedom to publish his ideas, and to maintain contacts with a wide circle of interested men, outside as well as inside the company. Some commercial men, who did not like the engineers to talk about new developments, said that it would do no harm for Kron to write, as no competitor would understand him anyway.

What a dinner guest he must have been!

Exposure To Two Languages Carries Far-Reaching Benefits  From this article at ScienceDaily, you can follow links to many other articles on bilingualism and language learning, some of which I'll also include below.

People who can speak two languages are more adept at learning a new foreign language than their monolingual counterparts, according to research conducted at Northwestern University. And their bilingual advantage persists even when the new language they study is completely different from the languages they already know. ... And they believe the bilingual advantage is likely to generalize beyond word learning to other kinds of language learning, including learning new words in one's own language and a very basic ability to maintain verbal information. ... Previous research already indicates that individuals who have formally studied two or more languages as adults more easily acquire a new language than monolinguals. New research even indicates that the onset of Alzheimer's disease in bilinguals is, on average, delayed by four years compared to monolinguals. ... The Northwestern researchers chose to study bilinguals who learned a second language at an early age and in a non-classroom study to avoid suggestions that their subjects simply were exceptionally talented or motivated foreign language learners.

Bilingual Babies: The Roots of Bilingualism in Newborns  It's never too early.

Children who hear two languages regularly in utero can not only recognize both languages after birth, but can distinguish one from the other.

Babies Raised In Bilingual Homes Learn New Words Differently Than [sic] Infants Learning One Language

An important part of language development is the ability to pay attention to native speech sounds to guide word learning. For example, English learners expect that the nonsense words "bih" and "dih" refer to different concepts because "b" and "d" are different consonant categories in English.  ...  [B]ilingual infants failed to notice the minimal change in the object's name until 20 months of age, whereas monolingual infants noticed the change at 17 months. ... This later use of relevant language sounds (such as consonants) to direct word learning is due to the increased demands of learning two languages, the researchers suggest. Ignoring the consonant detail in a new word may be an adaptive tool used by bilingual infants in learning new words. Outside the laboratory, there is little cost to overlooking some of the consonant detail in new words, as there are few similar-sounding words in infants' early vocabularies. By paying less attention to the detailed sound information in the word, bilingual infants can devote more cognitive resources to making the links between words and objects. ... Extending this approach to word learning for a few months longer than monolinguals may help bilinguals "keep up" with their peers. Indeed, previous research has shown that bilinguals and monolinguals achieve language-learning milestones (such as speaking their first word) at similar ages and have vocabularies of similar sizes when words from both languages are taken into account.

Words Influence Infants' Cognition from First Months of Life

Northwestern University researchers have found that even before infants begin to speak, words play an important role in their cognition. For 3-month-old infants, words influence performance in a cognitive task in a way that goes beyond the influence of other kinds of sounds, including musical tones. ... Three-month-old infants were shown a series of pictures of fish that were paired with words or beeps. ... Then infants were shown a picture of a new fish and a dinosaur side-by-side as the researchers measured how long they looked at each picture. If the infants formed the category, they would look longer at one picture than the other.  The results, say the authors, were striking. The researchers found that although infants who heard in the word and tone groups saw exactly the same pictures for exactly the same amount of time, those who heard words formed the category fish; those who heard tones did not.

Use It Or Lose It? Study Suggests The Brain Can Remember A 'Forgotten' Language  Give your child the gift of multiple language exposure, even if you think he'll never use it.

Many of us learn a foreign language when we are young, but in some cases, exposure to that language is brief and we never get to hear or practice it subsequently. Our subjective impression is often that the neglected language completely fades away from our memory. But does “use it or lose it” apply to foreign languages? Although it may seem we have absolutely no memory of the neglected language, new research suggests this “forgotten” language may be more deeply engraved in our minds than we realize. ... [E]xposing young children to foreign languages, even if they do not continue to speak them, can have a lasting impact on speech perception. The authors conclude, “Even if the language is forgotten (or feels this way) after many years of disuse, leftover traces of the early exposure can manifest themselves as an improved ability to relearn the language.”

Bilingual Children More Likely To Stutter  The news isn't all good.

Children who are bilingual before the age of 5 are significantly more likely to stutter and to find it harder to lose their impediment, than children who speak only one language before this age, suggests new research.

There's much more at that site, which I found more addictive than YouTube.  For example, Russian Readers Learn To Read More Accurately And Faster.  Must...Stop...Now....

I'm attacking my dauntingly long backblog again, applying the delete key ruthlessly on articles that are merely interesting.  Whatever the inverse of to decimate is, that's what I've done, killing off nine of every 10, and putting Li'l Writer Guy to work on what remains.  Casting the Net—which I'm reviving after a layoff long enough to have taken a baby from conception to the time most obstetricians would insist on induction—will pick up the ones of heightened interest that aren't compelling enough to demand a full post.

The good news?  It's getting a lot easier to look good in school:  Be on time, dress neatly, look interested, interact with the professor, do the homework—and the professor will love you, if you don't shock him into a heart attack.

Blunting the American Edge  Kara Miller, who teaches at Babson College in Massachusetts, reports that, as a rule (there are always exceptions), her foreign students are far more knowledgeable, engaged, and ambitious than her American students.

Apology for homeschooling  No, not an "I'm sorry" apology, though there are some elements of adolescent shyness in this new homeschooling father's essay, but apology in the old sense of a defense.  Despite a slightly annoying "we're not that kind of homeschooler" attitude, it's an amusing presentation of "the best way to answer a curious stranger's questions" versus "the whole truth."

Mrs. GSP: Do you use a curriculum?
Me: Oh, sure! Absolutely.
Real answer: Give me a break! These kids are 5 years old. ... That said, you could argue that Leslie has developed a fairly demanding curriculum. But that word comes with certain expectations that don't fit here. It isn't written down, it doesn't run on a set schedule, and it isn't based on lesson plans, piles of worksheets or a fixed rotation from subject to subject....

Mrs. GSP: What do you do about socialization?
Me: Oh, we've got a nice support network. They have a circle of friends. They do lots of classes and activities. They go to birthday parties and stuff.
Real answer: My public answer is OK, as far as it goes. But hang on a minute, lady: What do you mean by "socialization"? ... Ordinary schools tend to socialize children by way of enclosed, age-homogeneous pods, while home schooling tends to socialize children through a wide range of interactions with older kids, younger kids and adults, as well as peers. ... Do we regret not exposing our kids to the intense cultural melting pot of New York's school system? Sometimes, sure. But we're also not exposing them to bullying, arbitrary systems of order and discipline, age-inappropriate standards of behavior, and the hegemony of corporatized kid culture. Desmond and Nini have never heard of "Transformers," and we're OK with that.

The follow-up article is better, a hilarious, yet serious look at the results of their homemade curriculum based on myths and other stories of the ancient world.

[The children] were playing on the floor with a random assemblage of building blocks, figurines and toy vehicles, like a zillion other 5-year-olds around the world. ... I made some wry dad comment: Hindu gods at a Greek temple, ha ha ha. Literally jumping up and down with excitement, Desmond set me straight: "We're playing ancient times, Daddy, when there was trade between Greece and India! They traded stuff, and they traded ideas!"  Now, I'm not vouching for the soundness of Desmond's scholarship. Ancient contact between Greek and Indian civilization is plausible, according to historians, but entirely hypothetical. Furthermore, if it did happen it almost certainly did not involve motor vehicles. See, the way elephant-headed Ganesh and blue-skinned Vishnu are incarnated in Nini and Desmond's game, they look an awful lot like little die-cast metal cars. ...

Like many kids their age, Desmond and Nini had developed a fascination with the world of the Piston Cup and Radiator Springs [from the movie Cars]. They had an encyclopedic knowledge of the movie's characters and personal histories ... Well, I thought, if they can have this complex connection to Lightning McQueen, Doc Hudson, and Tow Mater, why not to Isis, Osiris, and Anubis? Or Zeus, Athena, and Aphrodite? At a time when they were so clearly eager to learn about the world around them, might it be possible to introduce them to its history in an age-appropriate and systematic way? ...

Right now, I have to go watch the story of how Ganesh got his elephant head (after losing his human one in an unfortunate misunderstanding), acted out by a couple of little kids with toy cars.

I'm working on getting Li'l Writer Guy home from Switzerland, but in the meantime, enjoy this wonderful story of a three-year-old who saved her father's life by walking to a nearby fire station and asking for help.  Note both that young children can be much more competent than we generally expect these days, and that this competence did not arise in a vacuum, but had been nurtured by her parents.  It doesn't have to be, in the words of the reporter, "very un-three-year-old-like."

I can't embed the video, but you can find it on the right of the above-linked page, or here.  (H/T Free-Range Kids.)

The Dark Ages  (The History Channel, 2007, not rated)

Having worked for a number of months in New York City, Porter had the opportunity both to explore the History Channel on television and to observe throughout the city the advertising placards proclaiming, "The History Channel:  Where History Is Made Every Day."  If he were a vandalizing sort of person, New Yorkers would have soon seen a slight alteration in the slogan:

With my expectations sufficiently lowered, I found The Dark Ages not to be too bad.  (Thanks, Netflix.)  It's not my favorite approach to a historical documentary—Ken Burns set a standard that is hard to beat.  The tone is unpleasantly sensationalistic, and the re-enactments almost painfully unprofessional.  But the facts are consistent with what little I know of the time period (as consistent as historians get, anyway), and without doubt the show packs an amazing amount of history into 94 minutes.

I believe history needs to be taught using many sources, and many approaches.  Not only does this help balance out the inevitable bias each historian brings to his work, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who needs to hear a fact at least three times before it sticks with me.  The Dark Ages is not a great show, but it works well in this context.