This frosty slap to the face is courtesy our source deep inside Education Trust – West. For the record, I find this data overwhelming, and overwhelmingly depressing, and not half as insignificant as half my blogroll will claim it is.
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Josh Dean, NYT editor, explaining DFW’s particular literary gift:
But the thing that always struck me was that he could sizzle your synapses with intelligence and insight and literary pyrotechnics, but you didn’t need to read his sentences twice. They were brilliant and also colloquial. How he pulled that off is a literary voodoo I might never understand.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, DFW’s Pomona College colleague, letting me pimp my favorite author and my favorite tv show all in the same post:
He was, in fact, extremely fond of The Wire — he stopped me in the hall one day last year and said, look, I really want to sit down and pick your brain about this, because I’m really developing the conviction that the best writing being done in America today is being done for The Wire. Am I crazy to think that?
David Foster Wallace, himself, explaining his respect for and the essence of good teaching:
It might be that one of the really significant problems of today’s culture involves finding ways for educated people to talk meaningfully with one another across the divides of radical specialization. That sounds a bit gooey, but I think there’s some truth to it. And it’s not just the polymer chemist talking to the semiotician, but people with special expertise acquiring the ability to talk meaningfully to us, meaning ordinary schmoes. Practical examples: Think of the thrill of finding a smart, competent IT technician who can also explain what she’s doing in such a way that you feel like you understand what went wrong with your computer and how you might even fix the problem yourself if it comes up again. Or an oncologist who can communicate clearly and humanly with you and your wife about what the available treatments for her stage-two neoplasm are, and about how the different treatments actually work, and exactly what the plusses and minuses of each one are. If you’re like me, you practically drop and hug the ankles of technical specialists like this, when you find them. As of now, of course, they’re rare. What they have is a particular kind of genius that’s not really part of their specific area of expertise as such areas are usually defined and taught. There’s not really even a good univocal word for this kind of genius–which might be significant. Maybe there should be a word; maybe being able to communicate with people outside one’s area of expertise should be taught, and talked about, and considered as a requirement for genuine expertise.
Sorry if this place gets a little funereal or mushy as I push through a lot of interviews, a lot of eulogies, and his entire published body of work. You should start with Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise, recently made available free online by Harper’s Magazine.
I subscribe to eighty-something education blogs which push me several dozen posts per day and yet my reader goes these through long, arid stretches – nothing but conference session recaps, pie-in-the-sky tech idealism, policy wonks talking over each other, endless unedited malformations from people (teachers) who probably oughtta know better – where nothing manages to connect even loosely to my practice, where nothing manages to connect even loosely to my experience as a teacher.
Todd Seal’s post, No Idea, cut through all that blogospheric flotsam tonight like an arc torch and left me nodding my head, mumbling “yeah, uh huh, yeah,” at my iPhone as I waited in line for my wife to make a return at Urban Outfitters. Wherever you can find it, right?
Todd:
When I close that door, I’m on my own. I’ve got fifty-three minutes with a group of thirty kids who want entertainment if they want anything. I need to take those kids wherever they are and help them improve by the time they walk out the door. I need to give them at least one new idea today and one reason to come back tomorrow.
I have no idea what I’m doing.
The stuff that makes you believe in blogs again.
David Foster Wallace hanged himself last night. DFW did more for contemporary non-fiction, more for the travelogue genre, and more to ignite my own writing than any author I can recall. His commencement address at Kenyon College exactly summarizes how I try to live out my day-to-day, a fact which makes his suicide all the more puzzling, and tragic. I’ll miss his writing a lot.
Francesca Ochoa, retiring teacher:
The “new” focus is on `drill and grill’, test-taking skills and a largely prescribed curriculum. The classroom has become a training center reminiscent of the era of de jure segregation where Mexican-American and other students of color were expected to regurgitate memorized material, thus preparing them for jobs in the lower rungs of society.
Sir Michael Barber, education reform strategist:
if the implementation is poor, people will say the whole act was a bad idea and the true opportunity it provides will be lost. If that happened, it would be lost for a generation, and America can’t afford that. I think that’s the biggest risk to the American system in the next two to three years.