@ArchivistsAlley Yeah, that’s definitely a thing. And also, like—just reacting to a thing and not really caring how others react to the same thing, or to your reaction to it. And just getting really invested in things, without worrying about if it’s okay to do so. @ArchivistsAlley Thanks to an old book, he stumbled on Prehistoric Park (2006). I’m quietly, “Hm, Jurassic Park TV knockoff…”
He’s like, “Nigel is going to save mammoths next and the poor mama mammoth needs help and wouldn’t it be nice if we could time travel to save animals from extinction?”
@ArchivistsAlley I’m not sold on the art, but he demanded the revisions. “That lion… make it a mammoth.”
“It’s gonna look terrible…”
“But papa…”
“Okay…”
…
“Oh, that mammoth is terrible. Do another one here…”
“It’s also gonna be terrible.”
“Looks good to me.” @ArchivistsAlley I also learned that he wants shield handles attached horizontally, which… well, his wooden shield is otherwise. Hmmm.
@ArchivistsAlley @JustinHowe And it’s on Youtube…
@ArchivistsAlley @JustinHowe I haven’t seen any of those (as far as I can remember) but from his list of composers I’m not surprised he was able to make weird ones. 🙂 @ArchivistsAlley @JustinHowe Oh my God. I have to see this.
@ArchivistsAlley @JustinHowe But anyway, poor guy met a terrible end, seeing things and hearing voices and terrified. 🙁
But the Erl King (from years earlier) is a pretty amazing song. I mean, it’s basically a horror story set to music:
https://t.co/mh4b9ypOke @ArchivistsAlley @JustinHowe “A week into his musical hallucinations, Schumann began experiencing a new, more bewildering phenomenon—he began hallucinating ghosts who dictated music to him. According to Becker, Schumann believed the spirit of Franz Schubert came to him one night and gave him a melody”
!!!!
@ArchivistsAlley @JustinHowe He was composing even when he was losing his mind. Our prof played an example of a late orchestration to demonstrate a common bad habit of novice orchestrators (over-doubling). Bernstein re-orchestrated a lot of his work so it sounded less soupy and over-doubled. @ArchivistsAlley @JustinHowe (Though some people have disputed that, and just said it sounds like that to modern people but wasn’t necessarily unusual for the time. But the fact it was so unusually dense does stick out, to a lot of people. I dunno what to make of it, to be honest.)
@ArchivistsAlley @JustinHowe Robert Schumann. It’s actually pretty tragic. The version of the story I told Justin was what my morbid music history prof told us, from a book titled HOW THEY DIED (about composers).
https://t.co/QO6cydxpDU
Apparently his skull grew spikes that pierced his brain. @ArchivistsAlley @JustinHowe (Or that’s what our prof explained.)
Looking around, it seems the consensus is that it was likely a mix of syphilis and some other kind of mental illness, and the weird stuff seen inside his skull was not related?
I dunno.
@JustinHowe @ArchivistsAlley Do you mean… Robert Schumann? (I’m so confused.)
(I mean, The Erl King is pretty amazing, but I’m not a massive fan of him or anything.)
@JustinHowe @ArchivistsAlley That’s actually pretty cool! I am a pushover for a capella folk tunes. Live show:
Now I’m just curious how this is the same group that put out Tub Thumping. I guess don’t judge a group by their debut big-label album’s most-pushed track…
@JustinHowe @ArchivistsAlley Ha, no insult intended. I actually just listened to this:
… and it’s not for me, but also isn’t what I thought Chumbawumba was.
(I clicked expecting some mid-90s Eurotrash *bad* techno music like what used to blare when I worked at HMV.)
@ArchivistsAlley @JustinHowe (And in this case, who knows. The venn diagram of often drunk/high + rich + tasteless enough to want that album might somehow justify pricing it that way.)
Well, and I guess they’d need not to know about Ebay:
@ArchivistsAlley @JustinHowe Yeah, I mean, at least on Amazon (and sites like Abebooks) I think at least some of it is people setting up automated pricing with screwed up settings or rules, etc.:
https://t.co/mZFXlDjPeN
(But occasionally the seller really is setting a crazy price for something.) @ArchivistsAlley @JustinHowe I did once email a seller and ask, “Hey, is this price an accident? It seems unrealistic,” and the seller replied that he does indeed sell one copy a year of that book at the crazy, inflated price, and storing it cost him nothing, so it was worth it to him to do so. *shrug*
@JohnKucek2 @DanSvensson77 @DrKittyGirl Oh, and… I’m more passionate in my frustration. It sucks seeing how counterproductive the grading system we’re stuck using is, and knowing admin will never, ever consider changing it in a positive or helpful way during my lifetime, or likely my kid’s lifetime either. @JohnKucek2 @DanSvensson77 @DrKittyGirl Education could be so much better, if we weren’t so trapped in dated systems and dated approaches. But… we allowed admins (including many who know nothing about teaching) take over, and now universities are mostly trapped. Sigh.
@JohnKucek2 @DanSvensson77 @DrKittyGirl Thank you.
I think it’s less a case of “passing out 100%” than of “canceling the exam but not wanting to re-weight everything else being evaluated because that would be fundamentally unfair to someone.” @JohnKucek2 @DanSvensson77 @DrKittyGirl There’s been times when I had to cancel planned projects because the school changed the schedule or added holidays or whatever and there was no time for them. I always give everyone 100% on them because anything else would unfairly re-weight things to more than originally stated.
@JohnKucek2 @DanSvensson77 @DrKittyGirl And I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s just frustrating when someone who isn’t an educator barges in and starts telling people who’re in the trenches doing it that any change or reform to a creaky, broken, awful system is wrong because It’s Always Worked.
(Because it hasn’t.)
@JohnKucek2 @DanSvensson77 @DrKittyGirl Grading and grading systems are… broken, frankly. There’s countless indicators of this. We maintain it basically because we have it, because admins can’t grasp not having it, because some profs and admins are traditionalists, and because changing the system is a PITA. @JohnKucek2 @DanSvensson77 @DrKittyGirl There are countless better ways to teach and learn, but they’re less monetizable, less amenable shitty and shallow Taylorist metrics, and frankly too many people just take for granted the system we have. *shrug*
But hey, go be angry about someone not grading how you’d like. 🙄
@JohnKucek2 @DanSvensson77 @DrKittyGirl For example, Alverno College, in Wisconsin, IIRC, is a school that does not use grading. Every class is pass/fail. Profs don’t give you a grade: they give you assignments and feedback on the assignments, to help you learn more and improve your mastery of the subject. @JohnKucek2 @DanSvensson77 @DrKittyGirl At least this is what was described by me by a lecturer who’d worked there for decades. My students who attended as exchange students said the system helped them to them focus more on the subject and their understanding of it, and it changed how they thought about learning.
@JohnKucek2 @DanSvensson77 @DrKittyGirl And frankly it’s an incentive that shouldn’t be necessary: students shouldn’t prioritize grades over learning. But many do, because—ding, ding!—they’ve been trained to think that hierarchical evaluation results are the be-all and end-all of education. @JohnKucek2 @DanSvensson77 @DrKittyGirl The thing you don’t really seem to grasp is that the grading system we have is an arbitrary holdover from a time when we understood learning and the demonstration of learning a lot less well than we understand it now.
Some universities have indeed dispensed with it.
@JohnKucek2 @DanSvensson77 @DrKittyGirl And bear in mind, the value of those cumulative practice tasks toward their final grades can, in some of my classes, be significant. Like, half the grade or more. Probably more that @DrKittyGirl’s final exam is worth toward their students’ final grades. @JohnKucek2 @DanSvensson77 @DrKittyGirl But to me (and my students) the value of those tasks is that the more they practice the stuff we’re covering in class, the more they internalize it and improve. And they do tend to improve significantly if they do those tasks. The grade is just an incentive.
@JohnKucek2 @DanSvensson77 @DrKittyGirl No, but some of my students’ tasks where graded as complete/incomplete (and in effect, if they attempted the task, they “completed” it). Which is to say, there are tasks where my students were able to earn 100% for attempting things beyond their current abilities. @JohnKucek2 @DanSvensson77 @DrKittyGirl (I teach language in a place where students are risk averse and tend to clam up: part of the whole process is getting them to try because they cannot learn or improve if they clam up and worry about earning this or that grade.)
i.e. grading those tasks would be counterproductive
@marnyinMD @jayquintana_jr @Zalacoza @DrKittyGirl This. 100% this. IME history tests are hit and miss when it comes to figuring how how well a student has learned to think about and understand the history of a genre, medium, or art form. Anything they could demonstrate on exam, they can demonstrate better in a paper.
@JohnKucek2 @DanSvensson77 @DrKittyGirl The solution is that you have students do projects that progressively demonstrate understanding and ability to apply what they’ve learned. Like, five or six along the way, and they get a grade based on what they can successfully master by the end of the course. @JohnKucek2 @DanSvensson77 @DrKittyGirl It might shock you but memorizing temporarily is EASIER than internalizing and mastering and being able to apply. It’s a worse measure than specific, practical demonstrations of understanding are.
And exams are artificial demonstrations. Why not switch to less artificial ones?
@SeaSage @JesseKobe The sugar-rush of her outrage and horror at early Christianity in the book is fun, but unfortunately, it’s not a very historically accurate.
Here’s one helpful overview of why (by a well-read, knowledgeable atheist):
Equality* Bill.
*But not really *equality*.
If discrimination against people on the basis of beliefs is permitted, then can non-Christians discriminate against Christians? I mean, *equality,* after all.
When you pander to bigots, “equality” goes out the window entirely. https://t.co/7zOi8VDfCY I’m also a bit surprised at the mention of “the social order” since… anti-discrimination laws are normally understood to be redefining the established (unequal) social order. That’s basically the point of such laws, so “safeguarding” the social order here seems nonsensical.
First time: during a choral performance on a hot, brightly-lit stage—elementary school Xmas pageant. Tumbled from the risers onto the stage. I don’t remember but was told many times.
Second time: in my 20s, while doing dishes, probably stress + exhaustion? (Not heat or illness.) t.co/lQrnN6uuR1
Canadaland’s Commons series on policing in Canada is really good. Sobering, but worthwhile. The most recent episode is about horrific “Starlight Tours” that happened in my hometown. There’s still been no real justice for the crimes those cops committed.
@GeekinKorea Calls to mind a funny schtick from an ancient expat blog, featuring an encounter between Enforcement Droid 209 and a foreign English teacher.
(In the schtick, the bot is designed only to understand Korean, so it ends pretty much like in the film.)
