| Monday,
April 9, 2007 The California Sixth Grade Reader in .pdf format is now available to
subscribers in the subscriber area of
Chaos 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 both
View and
Mail 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.
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