Bluebird

Finlandia and education

From Finland, an Intriguing School-Reform Model

By JENNY ANDERSON

Published: December 12, 2011

Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish educator and author, had a simple question for the high school seniors he was speaking to one morning last week in Manhattan: “Who here wants to be a teacher?”

 

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish educator and author, with students at the Dwight School in Manhattan.

Out of a class of 15, two hands went up — one a little reluctantly.

“In my country, that would be 25 percent of people,” Dr. Sahlberg said. “And,” he added, thrusting his hand in the air with enthusiasm, “it would be more like this.”

In his country, Dr. Sahlberg said later in an interview, teachers typically spend about four hours a day in the classroom, and are paid to spend two hours a week on professional development. At the University of Helsinki, where he teaches, 2,400 people competed last year for 120 slots in the (fully subsidized) master’s program for schoolteachers. “It’s more difficult getting into teacher education than law or medicine,” he said.

Dr. Sahlberg puts high-quality teachers at the heart of Finland’s education success story — which, as it happens, has become a personal success story of sorts, part of an American obsession with all things Finnish when it comes to schools.

Take last week. On Monday, Dr. Sahlberg was the keynote speaker at an education conference in Chicago. On Tuesday, he had to return to Helsinki for an Independence Day party held by Finland’s president — a coveted invitation to an event that much of the country watches on television.

On Wednesday, it was Washington, for a party for the release of his latest book, “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn From Educational Change in Finland?,” that drew staff members from the White House and Congress.

And Thursday brought him to the Upper West Side, for a daylong visit to the Dwight School, a for-profit school that prides itself on internationalism, where he talked to those seniors.

Ever since Finland, a nation of about 5.5 million that does not start formal education until age 7 and scorns homework and testing until well into the teenage years, scored at the top of a well-respected international test in 2001 in math, science and reading, it has been an object of fascination among American educators and policy makers.

Finlandophilia only picked up when the nation placed close to the top again in 2009, while the United States ranked 15th in reading, 19th in math and 27th in science.

The Finnish Embassy in Washington hosts brunch seminars with titles like “Why Are Finnish Kids So Smart?” and organizes trips to Finland for education journalists eager to see for themselves. In Helsinki, the Education Ministry has had 100 official delegations from 40 to 45 countries visit each year since 2005. Schools there used to love the attention, making cakes and doing folk dances for the foreigners, Dr. Sahlberg said, but now the crush of observers is considered a national distraction.

Critics say that Finland is an irrelevant laboratory for the United States. It has a tiny economy, a low poverty rate, a homogenous population — 5 percent are foreign-born — and socialist underpinnings (speeding tickets are calculated according to income).

Its school system has roughly the same number of teachers as New York City’s but far fewer students, 600,000 compared with New York’s 1.1 million. Finnish students speak Finnish and Swedish and usually English. (Patrick F. Bassett, head of the Washington-based National Association of Independent Schools, a fan of what Finland has been doing, said one of the things he learned on his own pilgrimage to Finland was that the average resident checks out 17 books a year from the library.)

“There are things they do right,” said Mark Schneiderman, vice president of the American Institutes for Research, “but I’m not sure how many lessons we get are portable.” Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said Finlandophilia was “totally deified” and “blown out of proportion.”

But Linda Darling-Hammond, an education professor at Stanford, said Finland could be an excellent model for individual states, noting that it is about the size of Kentucky.

“The fact that we have more race, ethnicity and economic heterogeneity, and we have this huge problem of poverty, should not mean we don’t want qualified teachers — the strategies become even more important,” Dr. Darling-Hammond said. “Thirty years ago, Finland’s education system was a mess. It was quite mediocre, very inequitable. It had a lot of features our system has: very top-down testing, extensive tracking, highly variable teachers, and they managed to reboot the whole system.”

Both Dr. Darling-Hammond and Dr. Sahlberg said a turning point was a government decision in the 1970s to require all teachers to have master’s degrees — and to pay for their acquisition. The starting salary for school teachers in Finland, 96 percent of whom are unionized, was about $29,000 in 2008, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, compared with about $36,000 in the United States.

More bear than tiger, Finland scorns almost all standardized testing before age 16 and discourages homework, and it is seen as a violation of children’s right to be children for them to start school any sooner than 7, Dr. Sahlberg said during his day at Dwight. He spoke to seniors taking a “Theory of Knowledge” class, then met with administrators and faculty members.

“The first six years of education are not about academic success,” he said. “We don’t measure children at all. It’s about being ready to learn and finding your passion.”

Dr. Sahlberg, 52, an Education Ministry official and a former math teacher, is the author of 15 books. He said he wrote the latest one, which sold out its first printing in a week, in response to the overwhelming interest in his country’s educational system. It was not meant to claim that Finland’s way was the best way, he said, and he was quick to caution against countries’ trying to import ideas à la carte and then expecting results.

“Don’t try to apply anything,” he told the Dwight teachers. “It won’t work because education is a very complex system.”

Besides high-quality teachers, Dr. Sahlberg pointed to Finland’s Lutheran leanings, almost religious belief in equality of opportunity, and a decision in 1957 to require subtitles on foreign television as key ingredients to the success story.

He emphasized that Finland’s success is one of basic education, from age 7 until 16, at which point 95 percent of the country goes on to vocational or academic high schools. “The primary aim of education is to serve as an equalizing instrument for society,” he said.

Dr. Sahlberg said another reason the system had succeeded was that “only dead fish follow the stream” — a Finnish expression.

Finland is going against the tide of the “global education reform movement,” which is based on core subjects, competition, standardization, test-based accountability, control.

“Education policies here are always written to be ‘the best’ or ‘the top this or that,’ ” he said. “We’re not like that. We want to be better than the Swedes. That’s enough for us.”

Banning prevention in Texas

The Texas Tribune

Planned Parenthood Struggles After State Budget Cuts

By THANH TAN

Published: October 15, 2011

Hidalgo County, situated along the border that separates Texas and Mexico, is home to one of the country’s fastest-growing but poorest populations. Largely Hispanic and Catholic, the county also has one of the highest birth rates in a state where Medicaid finances more than half of all deliveries.

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Justin Dehn for The Texas Tribune

A patient's child at Planned Parenthood's clinic in McAllen.

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Justin Dehn for The Texas Tribune

A sign at the organization's Mission clinic.

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Justin Dehn for The Texas Tribune

Patients at the McAllen clinic to voice their concerns over the Legislature's family-planning budget cuts.

Not all of those new mothers and fathers are ready to be parents, and Patricio Gonzales, a former social worker in McAllen, the county’s largest city, has witnessed the consequences — case after case of child neglect and abuse. Convinced that family planning could be a solution, he became the chief executive of the Planned Parenthood Association of Hidalgo County, which was founded in a Methodist church in nearby Mission.

In 2010, the Hidalgo County network’s eight clinics provided family-planning services to 23,000 patients, many of whom are uninsured and cannot afford to pay. The services include contraception, breast and cervical cancer screenings, testing for sexually transmitted diseases, and wellness exams for both men and women — but not abortions.

“Basically, we are their doctors,” Mr. Gonzales said. “And for many of them, this is a way to help them get out of poverty.”

Operating in a region with a limited donor base and high need for health services, Mr. Gonzales said, the clinics have relied heavily on government financing. So when state cuts to family planning took effect in September, the Hidalgo County network lost a $3.1 million contract and was forced to lay off half its staff and shut down four of its facilities. (Another five clinics have closed around the state since the beginning of September.) Mr. Gonzales estimated that the closings would affect approximately 16,000 low-income men, women and teenagers in the Rio Grande Valley.

What is happening in Texas is emblematic of a national trend. Unable to overturn Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion campaigners have worked in recent years within Congress and state legislatures, many of which have become increasingly conservative, to make gaining access to the procedure as difficult as possible. Around the country, state legislatures from Arizona to Kansas have passed sweeping measures this year intended to make it more onerous for Planned Parenthood clinics to stay open.

In Texas, lawmakers approved a measure requiring doctors to perform sonograms on women seeking abortions and to describe to them what they see and hear. They also worked to strip financing from any organization that performs abortions or refers women to abortion providers, even if the majority of the organization’s services — or all of them — are primary and preventive care.

“Taxpayers should not be subsidizing the abortion industry,” said Elizabeth Graham, the director of Texas Right to Life.

Supporters of Planned Parenthood maintain that about 95 percent of the organization’s services consist of routine health care. Planned Parenthood clinics receive state aid in Texas by legally separating their family-planning services from their abortion services, which are off limits to tax dollars, but the distinction has never been enough to appease politicians who oppose abortion.

“Their interest is not in giving women options,” Representative Wayne Christian, Republican of Center, said during this year’s legislative session. “Their ultimate answer is, ‘The best we can do is an abortion.’ ”

Earlier this year, Mr. Christian and his colleagues cut the state’s family-planning budget by two-thirds, to $37.9 million over the next two years from $111.5 million. The money was diverted to other causes, including autism and early childhood programs. Budget analysts warned lawmakers that reducing family-planning access would affect at least 180,000 men and women each year and could lead to more than 20,000 additional babies being born at a cost of more than $200 million.

Planned Parenthood reports that 66 of its Texas clinics remain open, but hours and educational outreach efforts have been reduced. This year, 11 clinics received state support, down from 40 clinics last year.

Anti-abortion activists say the women who have relied on Planned Parenthood can go to crisis pregnancy centers — for which lawmakers increased financing — and other community health clinics that do not refer for the procedure. But community health clinics have faced budget cuts as well.

In late August, the Department of State Health Services enforced a new priority financing system that determined that 56 family- planning providers would receive smaller grants through November. But 15 organizations would immediately lose their contracts because of “lack of need” or because there was another agency “within the same service area.” Centers that lost financing included nine unaffiliated with Planned Parenthood, like the People’s Community Clinic in Austin and Haven Health Clinics in Amarillo.

Lone Star Circle of Care, a federally qualified health center with locations throughout Central Texas, received some financing but not enough to cover the demand for birth control and testing.

“We’re talking about basic primary things that everyone should be entitled to, and it really shouldn’t be attached to any political or religious agenda,” said Dr. Tamarah Duperval-Brownlee, Lone Star’s chief medical officer.

In Hidalgo County, the Planned Parenthood network received a one-time award of $113,000 from the state in September after two other agencies rejected the money — enough to treat about 650 patients, but not enough to keep its clinics open in Mission, Progreso, Rio Grande City and San Carlos.

Mr. Gonzales said he was most concerned that clients would have to travel longer distances for care — or would stop seeking treatment altogether.

One of those clients, Nidia Torres, 62, of San Juan, started going to Planned Parenthood when she was 15. Ms. Torres said the organization helped her plan five pregnancies and treated early signs of cervical cancer in 1985.

Though she is staunchly opposed to abortion, Ms. Torres said she supports prevention. She is concerned that a desire to punish Planned Parenthood could have unintended consequences for the health of those in the community.

“If someone comes in and she’s pregnant? She’s pregnant. There’s nothing we can do,” Ms. Torres said. “We’ll be worse if they take away that money for Planned Parenthood. The hospitals will be filled. We will have more children. We will need more food stamps. This is not what the Valley needs. This is not what our community needs. This is not what Texas needs.”

ttan@texastribune.org

Snakes and scorpions in the Mojave

The science of the Mojave, and scorpions that glow in the dark

Cal State's Desert Studies Center, a 1,200-acre field station near Soda Springs, is one of the world's few desert research facilities. It gives students a close-up view of life at 100-plus degrees.

Snakes and scorpions in the Mojave

By Carla Rivera, Los Angeles Times

October 8, 2011, 5:23 p.m.

Darkness cloaked the desert, pierced only by a canopy of stars that provided a glittering backdrop for 20 college students treading cautiously over the cracked, dry landscape. But a soft hiss stopped them in their tracks.

Mudassar Haq heard the rattlesnake and shouted to alert the others as classmate Thomas Parker shined a flashlight on a large sidewinder slithering away under a tuft of salt grass.

"I immediately knew what it was, that's something you don't think twice about," said Haq, 20, a Cal State Fullerton junior. "My instinct was to run."

PHOTOS: Mojave Desert studies

But neither student did. Their calm response allowed for an unexpectedly close look at a staple of the Mojave and Sonoran deserts. "This is an unusual treat," Fullerton associate biology professor William Hoese told the group. "We're going to give it room."

The biology students were spending a recent weekend with 40 classmates and two professors at Cal State's Desert Studies Center, a 1,200-acre field station in the Mojave that is one of the world's few desert research facilities.

The center, 60 miles east of Barstow near Soda Springs, has a colorful past as a 1940s-era health spa founded by Curtis Howe Springer, a radio evangelist. Springer built dormitories, created mineral baths in the shape of a cross and sold potions he claimed would cure everything from hair loss to cancer.

He named the resort Zzyzx, so it would be "the last word in health," as he put it. But he had set up his business on federal land without authorization and it was confiscated in 1974, although the sign for Zzyzx Road between Los Angeles and Las Vegas still puzzles motorists on Interstate 15. A man-made oasis, the site is now part of the 1.6-million-acre federally owned Mojave National Preserve.

The Cal State facility is run by a consortium of seven campuses and managed mainly by Cal State Fullerton. About 2,300 people visit annually, including day-trippers and those planning multi-night stays. For a $16 nightly fee ($8 for Cal State students and staff), guests can use the center's library, lab, Internet access, cots and hot showers.

Some expenses at the center have been trimmed because of state funding cuts but overall operations have not been threatened, said its director, Cal State Fullerton professor William Presch. This year, it received $56,000 for operations from the Cal State system and another $50,000 in fees that pay for major equipment and upkeep. The center will soon install a 40-kilowatt solar plant that will power most of the facility.

The National Park Service owns and maintains many of the older buildings and submitted Zzyzx, its original buildings, landscaping and other features for National Historic Registry status. A lake on the property is home to the Mohave tui chub, an endangered fish once thought to be extinct.

The center attracts researchers from around the world to study geology, climatology, astronomy and other fields and it has been used in feature films and documentaries. NASA uses it as a base camp for its Spaceward Bound program, which trains students and teachers to live and work in harsh environments that mimic surfaces of the moon and Mars.

It's also a place where Cal State and other students learn firsthand about desert plants and animals, and where many have a first encounter with the natural world in an unforgiving environment.

"It's a big thing for them to think they might not shower for a night," said Fullerton associate professor Danielle Zacherl, who brought 240 members of her introductory biology class to the center over two recent weekends. "Being in the desert is a physical and cultural challenge."

That point was emphasized by site steward Jason Wallace, who briefed the students on a few basics: The nearby springs attract bighorn sheep, foxes and other desert creatures; leave a door or window open and you can expect some interesting visitors come morning.

Some students had no trouble acknowledging they were out of their element and occasionally uncomfortable, on a weekend when the temperature topped 112 degrees.

"I don't like bugs, I stay away from them," said Sweta Babaria, 17, a biology major who is interested in marine life and had to be coaxed to get close to a fluttering dragonfly and other insects during one lesson. "I hate the wilderness. I'm a germ-freak. But I had to come, otherwise I'd fail the class."

After dark, the students set out over the flat, sandy plain with ultraviolet lights to search for scorpions, whose exoskeletons contain a chemical that makes them fluorescent under the black light. About a half mile out, they could be found lurking in the underbrush, an ethereal, prehistoric presence.

"The scorpions, that was kind of cool," said biology major Chelsy Bognot, 18, who said the weekend was better than she anticipated. "I've been dirt bike riding near Barstow but I've never experienced anything like this. You have an understanding that there's more out here than just shrubs and snakes. There's a lot more life, a food chain."

In the morning, the students rose early for a drive to the foothills of the Soda Mountains to see the Mojave's plant life — creosote bushes, honey mesquite trees, cactus and other species — and watch lizards sunbathing on the red, yellow and black rock beds.

Rudy Macias worked his way up the hills taking notes.

"Being in the desert is something I'll probably never do again, unless it's Las Vegas," Macias, 21, a health science major, said jokingly. "But it's neat. Grabbing bugs and looking for scorpions, it's like being a boy again."

A better bake sale

October 7, 2011, 1:14 pm

Fordham Holds Bake Sale in Response to Berkeley’s

By REBECCA R. RUIZ

In rebuttal to last week’s controversial bake sale protesting affirmative action in college admissions at the University of California, Berkeley, students at Fordham University in New York staged their own sale on Friday.

A Fordham professor of African American Studies, Mark Naison, is leading the charge, mobilizing students in his senior seminar on affirmative action to peddle pastries priced according to research they conducted on various groups’ advantages in admissions.

As Mr. Naison wrote in a piece Thursday on The Huffington Post, the counter-sale reflects “frustration at the misinformation about affirmative action that prevails among large sections of the American public.”

He continued:

Preferences given recruited athletes and children of alumni are far more powerful than those given underrepresented minorities and affect a far larger number of students.

The Fordham students’ price list, below, turns much of the Berkeley list on its head.

Women (General Admission): $1.30

Men (General Admission): $1.25

Under-Represented Minorities: $1.00

Legacies (Children of Alumni)” $1.00

Recruited Athletes: 50 cents

Children of the Very Wealthy: 25 cents

“I loaf and invite my soul.”

Opinion

Super People

By JAMES ATLAS

Published: October 1, 2011

James Atlas is the president of Atlas & Co., a publishing company. He is at work on a book about biography.

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Mark Todd

 

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Mark Todd

 

A BROCHURE arrives in the mail announcing this year’s winners of a prestigious fellowship to study abroad. The recipients are allotted a full page each, with a photo and a thick paragraph chronicling their achievements. It’s a select group to begin with, but even so, there doesn’t seem to be anyone on this list who hasn’t mastered at least one musical instrument; helped build a school or hospital in some foreign land; excelled at a sport; attained fluency in two or more languages; had both a major and a minor, sometimes two, usually in unrelated fields (philosophy and molecular science, mathematics and medieval literature); and yet found time — how do they have any? — to enjoy such arduous hobbies as mountain biking and white-water kayaking.

Let’s call this species Super Person.

Do we have some anomalous cohort here? Achievement freaks on a scale we haven’t seen before? Has our hysterically competitive, education-obsessed society finally outdone itself in its tireless efforts to produce winners whose abilities are literally off the charts? And if so, what convergence of historical, social and economic forces has been responsible for the emergence of this new type? Why does Super Person appear among us now?

Perhaps there’s an evolutionary cause, and these robust intellects reflect the leap in the physical development of humans that we ascribe to better diets, exercise and other forms of health-consciousness. (Stephen Jay Gould called this mechanism “extended scope.”) All you have to do is watch a long rally between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal to recognize — if you’re old enough — how much faster the sport has become over the last half century.

The Super Person training for the college application wars is the academic version of the Super Person slugging it out on the tennis court. For wonks, Harvard Yard is Arthur Ashe Stadium.

Or maybe it’s a function of economics. Writing in a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, John Quiggin, a visiting professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, argues that the Great Academic Leap Forward “is both a consequence of, and a contributor to, the growing inequality and polarization of American society.” Nearly 25 percent of the annual income in America goes to 1 percent of the population, creating an ever-wealthier upper class. Yet there’s no extra space being made in our best colleges for high-achieving students. “Taken together,” Professor Quiggin points out, “the Ivy League and other elite institutions educate something less than 1 percent of the U.S. college-age population” — a percentage that’s going to shrink further as the population of college-bound students continues to grow.

Preparing for Super Personhood begins early. “We see kids who’ve been training from an early age,” says Charles Bardes, chairman of admissions at Weill Cornell Medical College. “The bar has been set higher. You have to be at the top of the pile.”

And to clamber up there you need a head start. Thus the well-documented phenomenon of helicopter parents. In her influential book “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety,” Judith Warner quotes a mom who gave up her career to be a full-time parent: “The children are the center of the household and everything goes around them. You want to do everything and be everything for them because this is your job now.” Bursting with pent-up energy, the mothers transfer their shelved career ambitions to their children. Since that book was published in 2005, the situation has only intensified. “One of my daughter’s classmates has a pilot’s license; 12-year-olds are taking calculus,” Ms. Warner said last week.

REMEMBER the Dumb Kid in your math class who couldn’t understand what a square root was? Gone. Vanished from the earth like the stegosaurus. If your child is at an elite school, there are no dumb kids in his or her math class — only smart and smarter.

Even the most brilliant students have to work harder now to make their nut. The competition for places in the upper tier of higher education is a lot tougher than it was in the 1960s and ’70s, when having good grades and SAT scores in the high 1200s was generally sufficient to get you into a respectable college. My contemporaries love to talk about how they would have been turned down by the schools they attended if they were applying today. This is no illusion: 19 percent of applicants were admitted to my Ivy League school for the class of ’71; 6 percent were admitted for the class of ’15.

Graduate and professional school statistics are just as daunting. Dr. Bardes told me that he routinely interviewed students with perfect or near perfect grade point averages and SATs — enough to fill the class several times over. Last year 5,722 applicants competed for 101 places at Weill Cornell; the odds of getting in there are even worse than those of getting your 3-year-old into a New York City private school.

“Applicant pools are stronger and deeper,” concurs Stephen Singer, the former director of college counseling at Horace Mann, the New York City private school renowned for its driven students. “It used to be that if you were editor of the paper or president of your class you could get in almost anywhere,” Mr. Singer says. “Now it’s ‘What did you do as president? How did you make the paper special?’ Kids file stories from Bosnia or El Salvador on their summer vacations.” Such students are known in college admissions circles as “pointy” — being well-rounded doesn’t cut it anymore. You need to have a spike in your achievement chart.

AND it doesn’t hurt to be from an exotic foreign land. “Colleges are reaching out to a broader range of people around the world today,” says William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate admissions. “They go to Africa and China. If you want first-class mathematicians, try looking in Bulgaria.” In case they miss someone, many colleges now have recruiting agents in other countries who are paid commissions — by both the parents and the college — to help “place” those students. Globalization comes to the college admissions world.

Just as the concentration of wealth at the very top reduces wealth at the bottom, the aggressive hoarding of intellectual capital in the most sought-after colleges and universities has curtailed our investment in less prestigious institutions. There’s no curricular trickle-down effect. The educator E. D. Hirsch Jr. has pointed to a trend he labels the Matthew Effect, citing the Biblical injunction: “ ‘For unto every one that hath shall be given and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.’ We’ve lifted up rich kids beyond their competence,” he says, “while the verbal skills of the black underclass continue to decline.”

Affluent families can literally buy a better résumé. “In a bad economy, the demographic shift has the potential to reinforce a socio-economic gap,” says Todd Breyfogle, who oversaw the honors program at the University of Denver and is now director of seminars at the Aspen Institute. “Only those families who can help their students be more competitive will have students who can get into elite institutions.”

Schools are now giving out less scholarship money in the tight economy, favoring students who can pay full freight. Meanwhile, Super People jet off on Mom and Dad’s dime to archaeological digs in the Negev desert, when they might once have opted to be counselors in training at Camp Shewahmegon for the summer. And the privilege of laboring as a volunteer in a day care center in Guatemala — “service learning,” as it’s sometimes called — doesn’t come cheap once you tote up the air fare, room and board.

Colleges collude in the push to upgrade talent. “It’s a huge industry,” Mr. Breyfogle says. “Harvard has a whole office devoted to preparing applicants for the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships.” At its worst, this kind of coaching results in candidates who are treated as what he calls “management projects.”

“They’ve been put in the hands of makeover experts who have a stake in making them look better than they are, leveraging their achievement,” Mr. Breyfogle says.

“We are concerned about that,” confirmed Jeff Rickey, head of admissions at St. Lawrence University, whom I tracked down at the National Association for College Admission Counseling conference in New Orleans. “If they joined a club, when did they join it? Maybe they play 15 instruments, but when they list them out, the amount of time they spent on each isn’t that much.” Mr. Breyfogle is also on the alert for résumé stuffing. “They’ve worked at an orphanage in Katmandu, but it turns out it was over Christmas break,” he gave as an example. “It’s easier to be amazing now.” All you need is money.

O.K., so maybe some Super People aren’t so Super. But the fact is, they do a lot of good. When I read about a student who has worked at a mental health clinic in Bolivia or founded a farmers’ market in a low-income neighborhood in Washington, I’m impressed. (All we did in college, I seem to recall, is smoke dope and play pool.)

And it’s not as if the Super People get to slack off when they graduate. There’s too much competition.

In the end, the whole idea of Super Person is kind of exhausting to contemplate. All that striving, working, doing. A line of Whitman’s quoted by Dr. Bardes in our conversation has stayed with me: “I loaf and invite my soul.”

Isn’t that where the real work gets done?

Scary things my 11-year old says to me...

Which desert accumulates the least amount of rain in August?

Homework + decimals = ugh!

She's so waiting for her papa to come home and help!

Thou shalt not kill, but thou shalt commit adultery

Exhibition Review

400 Years Old and Ageless

Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

Detail from the “Wicked Bible,” a version of the King James that contained an unfortunate error in the commandment against committing adultery.

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Published: September 29, 2011

WASHINGTON — The race, we know, is not to the swift. And we are well acquainted with the fate of a kingdom divided against itself. We may tell it not in Gath, and publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon, yet that still, small voice will be clearly heard. We reap far more than a whirlwind from the phrases and rhythms left to us by the King James translation of the Bible, whose 400th anniversary is being commemorated this year.

Pay close attention to the major new exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library here, “Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible,” and you will see not only manuscripts going back to the year 1000, an early translation from the 14th century, Queen Elizabeth I’s copy of the Bible, and imposingly bound versions of the King James; you will also sense the gradual birth of the modern English language and the subtle framing of a culture’s patterns of thought.

In honor of the occasion, the Folger joined forces with the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, which mounted its own exhibition earlier this year before lending the Folger important artifacts, and also published an impressive catalog that chronicles the evolution of early Bible translations. The subject also inspired the National Endowment for the Humanities, which became a major sponsor of the enterprise, including a smaller traveling exhibition mounted on 14 textual panels that will be seen at 40 locations in the United States during the next two years.

The Folger show’s curators — Steve Galbraith, the library’s curator of rare books, and Hannibal Hamlin, who teaches English at Ohio State University — have added a slightly American twist, paying attention to the text’s migration to the New World. They even display what is probably the first King James translation to make its way here, in 1620, brought by a carpenter, John Alden, on the Mayflower.

The consequences, the exhibition recalls, are all around us: “One can hear the language of the King James Bible echoing from English cathedrals to rural American churches, from traditional Anglican hymns to Jamaican reggae music, from the poems of John Milton to the novels of Toni Morrison.” Displays also allude to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, to R. Crumb’s recent graphic version of Genesis, and to the 2010 film “The Book of Eli,” in which Denzel Washington’s postapocalyptic character must protect the world’s last copy of the King James Bible.

The ones shown here would have sufficed. Folger owns a first edition of the King James version; the Washington National Cathedral has lent a Bible that once belonged to King James I’s son, Henry. Frederick Douglass’s copy is on display. So is Elvis Presley’s.

The Bodleian has supplied the only surviving annotated copy of the earlier Bishops’ Bible, whose translation was used as a foundation for the King James. It has also lent the 1631 “Wicked Bible” — a version of the King James, in which the unfortunate printer Robert Barker and his associate, Martin Lucas, left a “not” out of the commandment against committing adultery; both were fined. Barker was later put into debtors’ prison, where he ultimately died. The Folger is also showing another example of his typographical mayhem in a 1613 printing: “Jesus” in Matthew, Chapter 26, was set as “Judas,” an error fixed, we see here, by pasting Jesus’ name over that of his betrayer.

Not all was smooth with the translation’s reception, either. One brilliant Hebrew scholar of the day, Hugh Broughton, had seen that a new translation was needed, but his abrasive manner apparently kept him off the six committees of scholars to whom the work was assigned. He took his revenge in a pamphlet in 1611. The work was “so ill done,” he wrote, that “I had rather be rent in pieces with wilde horses, then any such translation by my consent should bee urged upon poore Churches.” He added, “I require it be burnt.”

Later generations clearly thought otherwise. Because Shakespeare was still alive when the translation was published, many came to believe (without any basis in fact) that he was one of its creators. The show even displays publications arguing for his authorship using arcane analyses of secret allusions to his name in the King James text. (In Psalm 46, for example, the word “shake” is 46 words from the beginning and “speare” 46 from the end; Shakespeare was 46 in 1610 as the translation was being completed.)

There is, though, something more profound in the translation’s influence. In many ways its impact resembles the effect of the First Folio of Shakespeare, published just a dozen years later, and the subject of a recent exhibition mounted by the Folger. Both volumes transformed the English language, but also shaped ideas about human nature, freedom and responsibility.

The translators were also aware of their project’s ramifications. “Manifold Greatness,” like some recent books, traces how the very act of translating the Bible was controversial. We see here a 14th-century English version of the Old Testament produced by followers of one of the first translators, John Wyclif; like Wyclif’s own work, it was considered heretical and copies were burned. An image here from a late-16th-century “Book of Martyrs” shows Wyclif’s bones disinterred in 1427 and then burned just to emphasize the point.

A 16th-century translator, William Tyndale, many of whose phrases evolved into the familiar ones of the King James, recognized that “there was no place in all England” for Bible translation, so he worked in Worms, Germany, and smuggled copies into England. In 1532 Thomas More said Tyndale had discharged a “filthy foam of blasphemies out of his brutish beastly mouth.” In 1536 Tyndale was executed.

So much was (literally) at stake because once detached from its origins in a translation, a sacred text, it was believed, could be misunderstood, and break away from authoritative control. Of course, Latin Bibles were already translations, but at least they left interpretations in the hands of the Church rather than with a lay reader.

The Reformation, though, shifted emphasis from the religious institution toward the religious text. Translation shifted authority further, leading to dissension, disagreement and a democratization of debate. Differing translations even took opposing positions. The impact of the King James version was partly unintentional: its success helped strengthen a new culture of the book and weakened the power of the priesthood.

But part of that impact may have also come from the nature of the translation. Despite its deliberate archaic sound and its attempt to echo the original text’s peculiarities, the King James version was accessible. It told stories; it enticed readers; its rhythms encouraged memory and repetition. (Consider the change from an earlier translation — “God is my shepherd, therefore I can lose nothing” — to the King James version: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”) Narratives once heard formally declaimed from pulpits were turned into chronicles of individual lives facing moral decisions.

Could this have laid the foundation for the triumphs of the English novel, from Daniel Defoe through George Eliot and Thomas Hardy? Not only did these writers often invoke the biblical text or find inspiration in it; they also embraced its perspective, judging the behavior of their characters and meting out their fates. The writer Cynthia Ozick once referred to 19th-century English fiction as “Judaized,” and this is what she meant. Writers were concerned with conduct and its consequences. Characters were taught how to assess one another and judge themselves.

During World War II Winston Churchill wrote about “English-speaking peoples,” and their distinctive perspective on the world. Could some of that be traced to the heritage of the King James Bible, including an emphasis on individual liberty and responsibility? Perhaps, but you cannot survey the riches at the Folger without realizing that you are being given a glimpse of a culture’s birth.

The stupidity of conservatives

Op-Ed Columnist

Egghead and Blockheads

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: September 17, 2011

WASHINGTON

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

 

THERE are two American archetypes that were sometimes played against each other in old Westerns.

The egghead Eastern lawyer who lacks the skills or stomach for a gunfight is contrasted with the tough Western rancher and ace shot who has no patience for book learnin’.

The duality of America’s creation story was vividly illustrated in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” the 1962 John Ford Western.

Jimmy Stewart is the young attorney who comes West to Shinbone and ends up as a U.S. senator after gaining fame for killing the sadistic outlaw Liberty Valance, played by Lee Marvin. John Wayne is the rancher, a fast-draw Cyrano who hides behind a building and actually shoots Marvin because he knows Stewart is hopeless in a duel. He does it even though they’re in love with the same waitress, who chooses the lawyer because he teaches her to read.

A lifetime later, on the verge of becoming a vice presidential candidate, Stewart confesses the truth to a Shinbone newspaperman, who refuses to print it. “When the legend becomes fact,” the editor says, “print the legend.”

At the cusp of the 2012 race, we have a classic cultural collision between a skinny Eastern egghead lawyer who’s inept in Washington gunfights and a pistol-totin’, lethal-injectin’, square-shouldered cowboy who has no patience for book learnin’.

Rick Perry, from the West Texas town of Paint Creek, is no John Wayne, even though he has a ton of executions notched on his belt. But he wears a pair of cowboy boots with the legend “Liberty” stitched on one. (As in freedom, not Valance.) He plays up the effete-versus-mesquite stereotypes in his second-grade textbook of a manifesto, “Fed Up!”

Trashing Massachusetts, he writes: “They passed state-run health care, they have sanctioned gay marriage, and they elected Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and Barney Frank repeatedly — even after actually knowing about them and what they believe! Texans, on the other hand, elect folks like me. You know the type, the kind of guy who goes jogging in the morning, packing a Ruger .380 with laser sights and loaded with hollow-point bullets, and shoots a coyote that is threatening his daughter’s dog.”

At a recent campaign event in South Carolina, Perry grinned, “I’m actually for gun control — use both hands.”

Traveling to Lynchburg, Va., to speak to students at Liberty University (as in Falwell, not Valance), Perry made light of his bad grades at Texas A&M.

Studying to be a veterinarian, he stumbled on chemistry and made a D one semester and an F in another. “Four semesters of organic chemistry made a pilot out of me,” said Perry, who went on to join the Air Force.

“His other D’s,” Richard Oppel wrote in The Times, “included courses in the principles of economics, Shakespeare, ‘Feeds & Feeding,’ veterinary anatomy and what appears to be a course called ‘Meats.’ ”

He even got a C in gym.

Perry conceded that he “struggled” with college, and told the 13,000 young people in Lynchburg that in high school, he had graduated “in the top 10 of my graduating class — of 13.”

It’s enough to make you long for W.’s Gentleman’s C’s. At least he was a mediocre student at Yale. Even Newt Gingrich’s pseudo-intellectualism is a relief at this point.

Our education system is going to hell. Average SAT scores are falling, and America is slipping down the list of nations for college completion. And Rick Perry stands up with a smirk to talk to students about how you can get C’s, D’s and F’s and still run for president.

The Texas governor did help his former chief of staff who went to lobby for a pharmaceutical company that donated to Perry, so he at least knows the arithmetic of back scratching.

Perry told the students, “God uses broken people to reach a broken world.” What does that even mean?

The Republicans are now the “How great is it to be stupid?” party. In perpetrating the idea that there’s no intellectual requirement for the office of the presidency, the right wing of the party offers a Farrelly Brothers “Dumb and Dumber” primary in which evolution is avant-garde.

Having grown up with a crush on William F. Buckley Jr. for his sesquipedalian facility, it’s hard for me to watch the right wing of the G.O.P. revel in anti-intellectualism and anti-science cant.

Sarah Palin, who got outraged at a “gotcha” question about what newspapers and magazines she read, is the mother of stupid conservatism. Another “Don’t Know Much About History” Tea Party heroine, Michele Bachmann, seems rather proud of not knowing anything, simply repeating nutty, inflammatory medical claims that somebody in the crowd tells her.

So we’re choosing between the overintellectualized professor and blockheads boasting about their vacuity?

The occupational hazard of democracy is know-nothing voters. It shouldn’t be know-nothing candidates.

Wine 101

Wine

Ten Things I'd Like To Tell People Who Don't Read Wine Stories

By W. Blake Gray Thu., Sep. 15 2011 at 10:00 AM

Grez Neuville/Trip Advisor

​I was tasting wine at my desk at 11 a.m. when a coworker asked why. Because I hadn't had time earlier, I said; it's best to taste early in the day when your palate is fresh.

 

That wasn't what he was getting at. He drinks wine, but never considered tasting as a separate event from drinking. That's because he doesn't read stories about wine.

Joe and folks like him buy the majority of the world's wine: they drink it, they like it or don't, but they don't obsess on it.

I'm not trying to convert anyone into wine geekery. But if I could get your attention for just three minutes, here are 10 things about wine I'd like to tell you. If you read only one wine story this year, please make it this one.

1) The package doesn't matter as much as the product
Don't avoid bottles with screwcaps or bag-in-box wines, and don't assume big heavy bottles are better, because those are just marketing.

2) You can spend too little, as well as too much
The jump to a $10 bottle from a $7 bottle is huge. The jump from a $35 bottle to a $350 bottle is often not as large. You'll drink better if you spend a little more every day, taking the money away from occasional big-money splurges.

3) Cheap wines from famous regions are not good value
If you're not spending at least $35, you're better off not buying from Napa Valley, Bordeaux (reds) or Champagne.

4) Supermarkets are the worst place to buy wine
Nobody knows anything about the wines, and the selection is usually more about the labels than the wine itself.

5) Try all your local wine shops
A good wine shop is the best place to buy wine because you can have a conversation and they'll help you find wines you like in your price range; you're not blindly grabbing bottles that look good. Go in and tell them you're having stir-fried tofu and mustard greens over brown rice for dinner, or whatever, and ask what they recommend. You might pay $1 more than you might have at Costco, but the consultation is worth it.

6) Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay aren't great with dinner
If you're having wine as a cocktail, they're fine. But in a restaurant you'll overpay for either, when the wines in the other sections of the wine list will be better and cheaper.

7) Drink more sparkling wine
Drink it when you get home from work, before dinner, with dinner, after dinner, in the bathtub, whatever. Don't wait for New Year's Eve. It's always appropriate. But don't expect anything good under about $15.

8) If you don't like a wine, it's not you, it's the wine
Just because a wine is expensive or highly rated doesn't make it enjoyable. I taste $100 wines fairly often that I just can't drink, and sometimes they have 98 point ratings from somebody whose taste differs from mine. Don't feel compelled to like a wine just because somebody else does.

9) Wine is food. Think of it that way.
Do you eat the same food every day? Do you expect every meal you eat to be great? Sometimes wine is brilliant, and sometimes it's meh. You don't give up on trying different hamburger joints after you visit a weak one. Go for variety in your wine just as much as you would in your dinner.

10) Drink wine made by a person
This one takes a little bit of work, but it's probably the most important. The world is awash in commodity wines bottled under private labels that have no identity. They're like buying a generic jar labeled "Fruit." Put the winery name into your smartphone and see what comes up. There are some very good wine brands owned by big companies, but every one of them has a real person in charge. If you can't find that kind of information in 30 seconds, buy something else.

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Amber waves of feathers

Feathers Trapped in Amber Reveal a More Colorful Dinosaur Age

Science/AAAS

Color is coming to the formerly black-and-white Mesozoic world of dinosaurs and early birds.

Not exactly high-definition color, and some formidable characters may show up in the same old drab and scaly wardrobes; they are dinosaurs, after all, with a reputation for resistance to change. But in time, you can look for splashes of color in museum dioramas of feathered figures from the age of dinosaurs.

For more than a decade, hardly a season has passed without more discoveries of dinosaur and bird fossils in China bearing impressions of feathers and traces of chemical coloring agents. Now, in Canada, paleontologists have found 70-million-year-old amber preserving 11 specimens showing a wide diversity of feather types at that time.

Science/AAAS

An isolated barb from a vaned feather, trapped within a tangled mass of spider’s web. Pigment distribution suggests that the barb may have been gray or black.

One specimen of so-called proto-feathers had a single bristlelike filament and some simple clusters. Others were complex structures with hooklike barbules that act like Velcro; in modern birds, this keeps feathers in place during dives. Still other specimens revealed feather patterns for flight and underwater diving.

Preserved pigment cells encased in the amber, along with other evidence, suggested that the feathered animals had an array of mottled patterns and diffuse colors like modern birds, scientists at the University of Alberta, led by Ryan C. McKellar, said in a report published Thursday in the journal Science.

Dr. McKellar’s team said the amber pieces, though small, “provide novel insights regarding feather formation.” The preserved filaments “display a wide range of pigmentation from nearly transparent to dark,” but “no larger-scale patterns are apparent.”

The amber was collected from mine tailings at Grassy Lake, near Medicine Hat in southern Alberta, and is housed at the University of Alberta and the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology. Dr. McKellar said that no body fossils of feathered creatures had been found near the amber, but that investigations of the site would continue.

In a commentary accompanying the report, Mark A. Norell, a dinosaur paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, noted that only now, with these amber specimens added to the Chinese finds, “are we beginning to understand just how diverse feather types were in the Mesozoic,” roughly the age of dinosaurs from 250 million to 65 million years ago.

Dr. Norell went on to point out that amber preserves “not only the microstructure, but the actual visual color as well — features not preserved in typical compression fossils.” In other amber 94 million years old, he said, the feathers did not appear to be as diverse.

Another research approach is being tested by a team led by Roy A. Wogelius of the University of Manchester in England. In the same journal, they report results of an early demonstration of an advanced X-ray method for detecting minute geochemical traces, including metals like copper, that are long-lived biomarkers of coloring agents in feathered fossils.

“This is an exciting technique, a powerful technique,” Dr. Norell said in an interview, “but it is in a very preliminary state and needs to be refined a bit.”

Asked why the common perception has been that dinosaurs and their kind were a sort of olive drab presence on the Mesozoic landscape, Dr. Norell said it probably arose from their association with crocodiles, their closest living reptilian relatives.

But he said that was fast changing, citing several colorful examples from recent research. In China, Confuciusornis and a few non-avian dinosaurs appeared to have had ruddy feathers; Sinosauropteryx, a reddish banded tail; and Anchiornis probably resembled a woodpecker, with a black body, banded wings and reddish head comb.

Although “research into fossil feathers is still at a nascent stage,” Dr. Norell wrote, evidence is mounting that feathers were part of the earliest stages of dinosaur evolution, and now “we are filling in the colors.”

It may soon be possible, he added, to “improve on contemporary fanciful dinosaur reconstructions by basing revisions directly on quantifiable results.” That is, fossils from China and Canadian amber.