I was always impressed when I saw a poem in the place of an ad in the New York City subway. Now Boston has caught on.
Martine Powers wrote recently at the Boston Globe, “Finally, Bostonians will have the chance to experience the pleasures of poetry on the MBTA.
“Mass Poetry [is] bringing poems to advertisement spaces on subway cars. The initiative, dubbed PoeTry, is part of the organization’s Poetry in Public Spaces initiative, which began last year, said Mass Poetry program director Laurin Macios…
“ ‘Contemporary poetry is barely taught in schools, and often when it is, it is taught in a very scholastic sense instead of an artistic one,’ Macios said. “People often grow up without ever realizing there is poetry out there that can speak to them, or that they can speak back to. …
“Each appearance of a poem includes a tearsheet on the corner of the sign, allowing passengers to take a copy of the poem with them if the spirit strikes them.”
One poem in the series, says Powers, “What Travels,” by Joseph O. Legaspi, takes place on a subway car. “What travels beneath their secret faces? What is train but transport to other lives?” More at the Globe.
The independent bookstore where I live is assuming the whole town knows that the publisher Hachette is fighting with Amazon. I say that because it has devoted a whole window to Hachette books, with a statement about carrying any book you want but no statement about the Amazon fight.
Amazon may finally have gone too far. People are fighting back against its absolute power. Asakiyume, for example, is practically a one-woman campaign to get its warehouse staff better working conditions.
And there are other initiatives. Jennifer Rankin writes at the Guardian, “Independent booksellers are being sent reinforcements in the battle against Amazon …
“My Independent Bookshop, a social network for book lovers from PenguinRandom House, [is] an online space where anyone can review their favourite books and show off their good taste on virtual shelves.
“Crucially, readers can also buy books from the site, with a small proportion of takings going to support scores of local independent book stores. …
“A reader’s nominated home store – which doesn’t have to be geographically close – will get 5% of the revenues from every physical book they buy and 8% on an ebook. The site is a tie-up with the e-commerce website Hive, which has been offering a similar service to local shops since 2011.”
Read more at the Guardian, here. Check out the lively comments there, too.
Photo: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
The new Penguin Random House may give independent booksellers a boost in online sales.
My, but we work hard at the office. At 4 today, everything stopped and we went to the break room to watch the World Cup. A co-worker from Ghana called his brother. Everything had stopped in Ghana, too.
In honor of the world’s fascination with soccer today, I am posting a futbol story from Bill Littlefield’s radio show Only a Game.
At the show’s website, Ellis O’Neill describes an encounter he had with homeless soccer: “It’s 9 p.m. and the sun went down long ago, but that’s not stopping this group of about 20 young men from playing soccer under the bright lights of a turf field in Puente Alto, a poor suburb to the south of Santiago, Chile.
“Homeless Soccer aims to offer the benefits of sports to Chile’s homeless. It’s been so successful that, over the past eight years, it’s grown from one team that practiced in one Santiago park to almost 100 teams all over the country.
“Domingo Correa is a longtime participant in Homeless Soccer. He first joined back in 2011, and his nickname is Jack Sparrow. With his long dreadlocks and beard, his piercings and rings and his high, sharp cheekbones, he lives up to the name. But Correa doesn’t have a pirate ship, much less any treasure. For 15 years, he lived on the streets of Santiago.
“ ‘There’s no way out, you know?’ Correa said. ‘You think everything has been lost. You have no hope of finding stable work. Also, I had been involved in crime, so I had “stained papers,” as we say here: I had a criminal history. The distance between society and living on the street is enormous.’
“One day, while Correa was watching a Homeless Soccer practice in a Santiago park, the team’s psychologist invited him to join in. He decided to take a stab at it, and he liked what he found. For the first time, there was a group of people that was always there for him – every Monday and Wednesday evening on the soccer field.”
My friend Jean Devine is always up to something interesting. A Brown U grad, with an MBA from Simmons, she used to work in investor relations but in recent years has been testing the waters of social entrepreneurship.
Her latest initiative, with Barbara Passero of Sandpiper Creative, is called meadowscaping and is intriguing on many levels.
With access to a Waltham church lawn for a summer youth program, Jean and Barbara will work with kids to convert the yard into a meadow that uses native species from Garden in the Woods and provides a habitat to the bugs and other small creatures that make a healthy environment.
From the Meadowscaping for Biodiversity website: Meadowscaping “is an outdoor, project-based, environmental education program that provides middle school youth with real-world experiences in STEAM learning (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math), while inspiring and empowering them to address challenges to the environment and our society.
“Today, few children spend time experiencing Nature and the benefits of outdoor recreation, education, and contemplation. Founder and former Director of the Children and Nature Network (C& NN) Richard Louv coined the phrase nature-deficit disorder to describe the negative effects of reduced outdoor time on children’s development. …
“Children who spend little time outdoors may value nature less than children who spend time outdoors in free play. Similarly, children who feel part of something bigger than themselves may … understand their dependence on a clean environment and know that they are responsible for caring for the Earth as their home.” More here.
The idea behind the meadowscaping summer program is that children, both at a young age and as they become adults, can actually do something about the environment.
Remember our post “The Doctor Is In” about the woman who sets up in a Providence park to listen to your worries about global warming (here)? Stop worrying and do something, say the meadowscape entrepreneurs. Give up lawn chemicals, plant a meadow, provide a home for tiny necessary critters, and work to make change.
When I was a teacher in Pennsylvania hoping to get accreditation, a supervisor from the teachers college where I took classes came to observe me at work. It was quite a long time ago, and the only thing I recall is that he remarked that I needed to do more with my classroom bulletin boards.
There I was, trying to do creative things with 11-year-olds in language arts (the play within the play from A Midsummer Night’s Dream springs to mind), but his checklist required him to observe the bulletin boards.
So imagine my delight when I saw an article today about a study suggesting teachers may be putting too much emphasis on bulletin boards and wall decorations.
Jan Hoffman writes at the NY Times, “That bright, cheery look has become a familiar sight in classrooms across the country, one that has only grown over the last few decades, fed by the proliferation of educational supply stores. But to what effect?
“A new study looked at whether such classrooms encourage, or actually distract from, learning. The study … found that when kindergartners were taught in a highly decorated classroom, they were more distracted … than when they were taught in a room that was comparatively spartan.
“The researchers, from Carnegie Mellon University, did not conclude that kindergartners, who spend most of the day in one room, should be taught in an austere environment. But they urged educators to establish standards.
“ ‘So many things affect academic outcomes that are not under our control,’ said Anna V. Fisher, an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon and the lead author of the study, which was published in Psychological Science. ‘But the classroom’s visual environment is under the direct control of the teachers. They’re trying their best in the absence of empirically validated guidelines.’ ” Hence the impetus for the study. Read more here.
Photo: Psychological Science In a new study, 24 kindergartners were taught in two classroom settings: one unadorned, the other decorated with posters and artwork.
Here’s an unusual approach to art. Christopher Bollen at Interview magazine has the story.
“Since 2005, the 41-year-old [Marie] Lorenz has been navigating New York Harbor in her handmade plywood-and-fiberglass boat, taking friends, artists, and willing participants on nautical odysseys of the city’s rivers and islands.
“The project, Tide and Current Taxi … has its roots in multiple artistic practices — from traditional Romantic seascape and marine painting to more radical iterations of performance art …
“It helps that the Brooklyn-based artist, who could command a boat by the age of 6, is an adventurer at heart — the kind of avant-garde pioneer more often found on Manhattan’s dry land than in its surrounding waters. Lorenz has extensive knowledge of the city’s waterways. ‘When I got to New York, I realized that the tides were significant,’ she says. …
“Lorenz uses the tides like a motor to propel her boat, as well as the time-trusted manual labor of paddling. She usually sits at the stern, with passengers facing forward at the bow and in the middle. …
“The boat trips themselves are often captured on video by a waterproof digital camera fixed to a metal pole jutting up from the stern. The camera’s eye is in the position of fellow traveler or a Charon-like ferryman through the derelict metropolis. Perhaps what is most arresting about her work is the way it destabilizes our usual perception of the city itself — specifically the hypnotic rocking of the Manhattan skyline.
” ‘You usually see the city on solid ground,’ Lorenz says. ‘I think when you’re floating, you see differently, your vision expands. You get to see the city from an in-between zone.’ ”
I love reading about and sometimes seeing offbeat and experimental theater. You may recall a couple recent posts on Iranian productions, for example — one play performed in a taxi, and another featuring a script the actors aren’t allowed to see until it’s time to go on stage.
So I was intrigued by a story in the Guardian about an experiment with one-on-one productions. Lyn Gardner writes, “Earlier this year I was lucky enough to take part in Whispers, a project created by the Exeter-based Kaleider, that takes the form of a co-operative gifting chain of performance, as a story and a metal tablet pass from person to person who each take responsibility for passing it on.
“At the Brighton fringe something similar is taking place with Host, a project created by the Nightingale Theatre that takes place in one of two bathing huts. Taking the form of a short text written by Tim Crouch … it works like this: You enter the bathing hut and somebody performs the text to you, and then you perform the text – reading from the script – to the next person.
“All participants subsequently get sent a copy of the script via email. This means that they can set off their own chains of reading and receiving, which creates in effect a tree that then has branches going off from it but which are all traceable back to that first performance by Tim Crouch in Brighton. It’s like a baton being passed.” More here.
This week, I’m having dinner with three other women who have at various times been active in the Concord Players. We meet up a couple times a year to indulge in theater talk as most of our other friends are not into that. I’ll be sure to pass along some of these experiments. The Concord Players isn’t a place that indulges in avant garde, but we all like hearing about what’s going on in the wider world.
“Host,” a one-on-one play at the Brighton Fringe Festival in England, is performed in this bathing hut.
I love the staircases from around the world that are posted at Catraca Livre. Wish I could remember where I got this link. Andrew Sullivan? Twitter? This Is Colossal? It’s been a while since I saw it.
I picked the staircase with the koi fish to show you, but there are 16 other amazing staircases at the site. The website is based in Brazil and run by Gilberto Dimenstein. I can’t read the Portuguese. If you can, let me know what it says?
“Muitas pessoas fazem o possível para fugir do esforço de subir alguns degraus. Mas para alguns artistas de rua, elas são fontes de inspiração para suas criações. O site BoredPanda listou 17 escadas ao redor do mundo que são verdadeiras obras de artes a céu aberto.”
OK. I guess the pictures originated at Bored Panda, a site we blogged about once before. You should check that, too.
Someone has finally recognized seaweed for the artistic creation it is.
That someone is Josie Iselin, whose book An Ocean Garden: The Secret Life of Seaweed was reviewed by Dana Jennings in the NY Times Science section Tuesday.
Jennings begins, “The secret to finding unsuspected beauty, artists and naturalists will tell you, is in knowing how to slow down and really look. The writer and photographer Josie Iselin certainly knows how to do that, as she shows in her beguiling new book, An Ocean Garden.
“In her introduction Ms. Iselin … writes, ‘I fell in love with seaweed at the kitchen counter.’ (She would bring back samples and study them there.) And it vexes her that others don’t share in her tidal pool crush. …
“The 100 color photographs here, though, just might convince some people … The book focuses on seaweeds found in Maine and California, both states she has lived in; the species names tickle the tongue in the same way that the seaweeds themselves can tingle bare feet: knotweed and bladderwrack, bull kelp and green scrap, pepper dulse and sugar kelp, Turkish towel and Irish moss.” Read more about the book, here.
We’re headed to the beach this weekend with John and his little ones. Maybe we will be able to identify some seaweeds there.
Photos: Josie Iselin
Clockwise from top left, seaweeds from Josie Iselin’s new book: Macrocystis, Ulva lobata, Calliarthron tuberculosum, Egregia menziesii, Gloiosiphonia verticillaris and coralline algae.
Schools are not putting as much emphasis on handwriting as they used to, given the growing use of electronic devices, and that can be a good thing in some ways. (As a teacher, I was bored witless checking penmanship workbooks.)
But guess what. The Law of Unintended Consequences is rearing its head.
Maria Konnikova writes at the NY Times, “Psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep.
“Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how. …
“A 2012 study [published in Trends in Neuroscience and Education] led by Karin James, a psychologist at Indiana University, lent support to that view. Children who had not yet learned to read and write were presented with a letter or a shape on an index card and asked to reproduce it in one of three ways: trace the image on a page with a dotted outline, draw it on a blank white sheet, or type it on a computer. They were then placed in a brain scanner and shown the image again. …
“When children had drawn a letter freehand, they exhibited increased activity in three areas of the brain that are activated in adults when they read and write … By contrast, children who typed or traced the letter or shape showed no such effect. ” More here.
Konnikova reports that even doubters of the study’s significance wonder if the act of writing by hand makes you think more.
Photo: Karin James
Samples of handwriting by young children.
Here are some photographs from Greater Boston this spring.
The first three represent the work of an exceptional landscaper in an office building downtown.
I also want to show you that the Barking Crab may be surrounded by construction in the Seaport District but is still open for business. There’s a tall ship in the Harbor. The blue whale in the Greenway carousel is ready to ride, and the Greenway demonstration garden is producing strawberries. The Dewey Square farmers market has plenty of produce and flowers.
Sindya N. Bhanoo writes at the NY Times about a surprising discovery under the waters of Lake Huron.
“A 9,000-year-old stone structure used to capture caribou has been discovered 120 feet beneath the surface of Lake Huron. Researchers say it is the most complex structure of its kind in the Great Lakes region. …
“The remarkable structure consists of a lane with two parallel lines of stones leading to a cul-de-sac. Within the lines are three circular hunting blinds where prehistoric hunters hid while taking aim at caribou. …
“The site was discovered using sonar technology on the Alpena-Amberley Ridge, 35 miles southeast of Alpena, Mich., which was once a dry land corridor connecting northeastern Michigan to southern Ontario.
“In their paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers suggest that the hunting structure was used in the spring, when large groups of hunter-gatherers assembled.”
Hard to imagine life 9,000 years ago. Anthropological archaeologists have the best fun. More here.
Photo: University of Michigan via Associated Press
As a child, I used to go to my father’s college reunions. All very rah-rah. Now I go to my husband’s at Haverford, which are more self-deprecating and lend themselves to funny stories about football players having to go through the cafeteria line and beg bookworms to come scrimmage.
I spent the weekend pondering whether the more-aged classmates got that way because they quit work or quit work because their health failed. And — amid conversations with people I never see, stimulating panel talks, green-green lawns and trees with nameplates, funny speeches and boring speeches, catching up with a friend who married one of the engineering majors, taking a campus tour, and attending a Quaker memorial service for the deceased classmates — wondering if I would go to my own when it comes around.
At my husband’s college reunion yesterday, we heard a former classmate talk about a wonderfully innovative school he founded in San Diego (High Tech High).
After hearing that a fairly typical class project was developing a genetic bar code to identify endangered species in the bush, my husband wondered how such an inventive school can function in today’s teaching-to-the-test world. I myself figured that whatever the kids absorb from meaningful projects and cutting-edge teaching they absorb deeply enough to pass tests if they need to.
And when I think of the lengths to which test mania is going, I think more schools should learn from High Tech High. Consider the latest testing aberration: robots grading essays.
Les Perelman at the Boston Globe gives examples:
” ‘According to professor of theory of knowledge Leon Trotsky, privacy is the most fundamental report of humankind. Radiation on advocates to an orator transmits gamma rays of parsimony to implode.‘
“Any native speaker over age 5 knows that the preceding sentences are incoherent babble. But a computer essay grader, like the one Massachusetts may use as part of its new public school tests, thinks it is exceptionally good prose.
“PARCC, the consortium of states including Massachusetts that is developing assessments for the Common Core Curriculum, has contracted with Pearson Education, the same company that graded the notorious SAT essay, to grade the essay portions of the Common Core tests. Some students throughout Massachusetts just took the pilot test, which wasted precious school time on an exercise that will provide no feedback to students or to their schools.
“It was, however, not wasted time for Pearson. The company is using these student essays to train its robo-grader to replace one of the two human readers grading the essay, although there are no published data on their effectiveness in correcting human readers.
“Robo-graders do not score by understanding meaning but almost solely by use of gross measures, especially length and the presence of pretentious language. The fallacy underlying this approach is confusing association with causation. A person makes the observation that many smart college professors wear tweed jackets and then believes that if she wears a tweed jacket, she will be a smart college professor.” More here.
Uh-oh. Sounds like the children’s book Petunia. Fortunately, a timely explosion taught the silly goose that books have pages you need to read, that carrying a book under your wing doesn’t make you smart.
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