View 461 April 9 - 15, 2007 (original) (raw)
Monday, April 9, 2007
The California Sixth Grade Reader in .pdf format is now available tosubscribers in the subscriber area ofChaos Manor Reviews.
I have sent a short letter to all subscribers. If you subscribe and did not get it, please let me know under what name and email address you subscribed and where you expect such mail in case those are different. I am not the world's greatest record keeper, but I almost never lose anything.
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Questions about Global Warming
Do any models of global temperature take into account vulcanism? Specifically heating of oceans by underseas volcanic activities? I have wondered how CO2 greenhouse heating could have a large effect on the seas: that it, trying to heat water by heating the air above it is rather difficult, but undersea volcanoes can do direct heating. I don't know the numbers here. I do know that volcanos are a significant source of greenhouse gasses. Do they heat the oceans as well?
We are having a new UN report on Global Warming while it is snowing on the Cherry Blossom Festival. I don't know if that's significant.
The conclusion of the late climate scientist Roger Revelle�Al Gore's supposed mentor�is worth pondering: the evidence for global warming thus far doesn't warrant any action unless it is justifiable on grounds that have nothing to do with climate.See Mail
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There was a fair amount of material in bothView andMail over the weekend.
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Regarding data entry:
Subject: PDF files
Jerry Why key in this material unless it is hand written. For me it is very easy to scan directly into Acrobat using its builtin scan utility and then OCR using the optional built in Capture utility. This allows 95% accurate text with minimal OCR artifacts. Then it is simply a matter of proof reading, correcting errors and re-kerning the text to uniformity as most artifacts are font changes because of dirty pages being scanned. This method produces a good example of the original document that will either print clearly on paper or be easy to read on screen. If I can help please advise as over the last 12 years I have gained a reasonable amount of experience with this process.
-- James Early
Long Beach, CA
For an old book not in good shape, scanning is traumatic. It is also time consuming. It may be that scanning and OCR are now reliable enough to trust, but at the time I started this several years ago that was certainly not the case. Actually the book sat here for a couple of years while I contemplated scanning it, but I don't have a big editorial staff. There's just me and Roberta, and whatever volunteer time I can con the kids and friends into; oddly enough there are not many people who think working with a scanner is a good way to spend a day.
Proof reading is worse. It's very difficult, at least for me, and copy editors aren't cheap either. Laura Sampson is an educated lady who can do both line and copy editing, and I've always trusted her judgment on getting stuff into electronic reading format.
It may be that OCR has progressed to the point of reliability, but that 95% scares me, and taking the time to do the cleanup is intimidating.
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Education and Imagination
The LA Sunday Times carried an article by Walter Isaacson, President of the Aspen Institute called "Patron saint of distracted students". I can't find a link to the LA Times copy, but http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2007/04/09/006.html is the same article.
The article contains this paragraph:
Einstein rebelled against rote learning, and that attitude helped make him the genius that he was. Likewise, a country's success will be determined not just by how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but by how well they promote imagination and creativity.
Being President of the Aspen Institute sounds like nice work if you can get it, but I hope this article isn't representative of its best work. As a critique of our school system it is far more part of the problem than a solution. It's not as if the schools were already teaching the basics through drill and kill and stultifying classes that pound the creativity out of bright students while teaching little to the dull ones. It's not as if they all learn the multiplication tables or that most of them know what the periodic table are in the first place.
There are two parts to education. One is learning what one must know to get along in life. This is often fairly dull work, but necessary. Among these are the ability to read, write, and cipher; the traditional goals of the first six grades of public school at a time when fewer than half the children were expected to go beyond six grades. We can have some debate on what "read, write, and cipher" mean, but not a lot. By read one means at least read and understand newspapers, job application notices, neighborhood flyers, and most popular books: in other words, to be able to read any word one already knows or has heard often. By write one we usually mean at least the ability to write coherent letters to one's friends and families, and we usually hope for more than that. By cipher we mean being able to make change and do simple calculations: in other words, to know basic arithmetic.
Seventh and Eighth grades were traditionally where one learned something of world and national history, something of literature -- see the 6th Grade Reader for examples of what 7th Graders were expected to have been exposed to -- and more math. Eighth grade graduates were essentially considered ready to be citizens, and those who could then went on to high school.
My point here is not that we ought to allow most students to leave school at eighth grade, but that at one time we expected a lot more of those in grade school. In California in 1916 there were places where not all children went through eighth grade -- this was still predominantly a mining and agricultural state -- but not all that many. The vast majority of all students went to school, and were expected to have read all the stories in the California 6th Grade Reader. They were also expected to know the addition and multiplication tables up through 12's.
When the schools get to that point, I will worry about teaching imagination and creativity. Until then, this Aspen Institute essay, however well meant, will simply serve as another justification for teaching the student nothing at all and pretending that we're being creative.
We went through most of this back in the days when John Dewey was restructuring the education system of the United States. The results of "progressive education" were not the liberation of imagination and creativity among the bright students; it was a disastrous decline of basic knowledge. Compare the 1916 California 6th Grade Reader to today's 6th Grade Reader and you will see what I mean.
We have run the progressive education experiment that Isaacson calls for. We know the result.
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A thought on polar bears: it is my understanding that the Inuit used to herd reindeer during the Medieval Warm period. When the cold came back, the Vikings tried to remain as dairy farmers and hunters. The Inuit learned to live on fish and blubber. I don't know what the polar bears did, but they seem to have survived for 600,000 years, so they have lived through both warm and cold periods.