The Comic Strip Library has high-resolution copies of Little Nemo in Slumberland. Winsor McCay was one of the great founding fathers of modern comics and animation. Seventy-five years after his death, his experiments in animation, entirely hand-drawn, frame by frame, have aged badly, but they still have a particular whimsical charm.
I just felt that this was important enough to share.
Over at ErosBlog, Faustus has started a discussion about the way porn – Internet porn in particular – can influence children’s lives and development. I doubt there are any really easy answers. Children mature at vastly different rates, in vastly different ways. They encounter different kinds of porn and respond to different pressures.
Some of the commenters are taking the opportunity to share their experiences growing up, and the ways porn affected their lives (good and bad alike). I’d like to share my take on it, and I’d like to hear yours as well.
I’ve mentioned, before, a young friend and her indecision over college. She’s graduated high school, yesterday or today I think, so the question is substantially less abstract now. I still think that she should do it. For me and for almost everyone I know, university education was an unbelievable chance for us to learn about ourselves, discover who we wanted to become, and grow into those frames.
I think she deserves the same chance. Really, I think that everyone deserves the same chance (that teaching urge is hard to forget), but my friend seems particularly important right now. She’s endearingly quirky and I believe she doesn’t give herself enough credit for how bright she is. Sometimes I wonder how she might change in the experience; I can’t imagine that she wouldn’t make the most of it, but how is anyone’s guess.
I’d like to meet that hypothetical future-self, whoever she might be. I bet she’d have a lot of interesting, compelling things to say.
It’s time for me to put some money where my mouth is.
This is my open gift to her, my promise before all of you. I hope you get to hold me to it.
For the past month or so Adrian has been preparing for a very big exam. He took it on Saturday (it took all of Saturday) and will start posting more again when his brain has finished congealing.
So, please excuse the lack of posting lately, and maybe for another few days.
Thank you,
~Catboy! =^.^=
Two years ago, faced with my graduation from the University, I began looking for work. I care a lot about education, so I applied to Teach For America, along with the usual group of tech companies and the startup where I work today.
While I think that Teach For America’s mission is tremendously important, parts of the program do concern me. As one friend put it, a lot of the program’s teachers just want their requisite nonprofit time before moving on to Senate appointments, and it really does show. I’ve always been a bit more of a craftsman than a politician, personally, and I worry sometimes about whether students suffer as people for the sake of good-looking news stories. They talk about “dynamic teachers who had not only a command of the curriculum but also the ability to connect with children,” but one US News story they shared described an academy founded by former TFA teachers:
Running or yelling is forbidden; students walk in straight, quiet lines. Though classes average more than 30 students, they are so silent you could hear an eraser drop. If a child speaks without being called on, the teacher stops in midsentence. If a child’s attention strays, the teacher warns: “I’m missing one person’s eyes.”
This doesn’t feel like “connecting with children” to me; it feels like a show of force rather than compassion or outreach. The teacher isn’t saying Look at me, because this is important; he says Look at me, because I can humiliate you. The academy even spends the first week “KIPPnotizing” new students to behave that way. I almost expected the example student to snap to his feet, ramrod-straight, and shout “I am sorry, Mein Herr! It shall not happen again!” Discipline and academic rigor have their places, of course, and I’m an advocate of both, but too much of either can be a socially crippling thing.
We are more than our grades and test scores.
Saying this out loud was probably not the smartest thing I have ever done.