We had a virtual day yesterday due to the snow. Since we were pretty sure it was coming, I sent my creative writing class (10-12 grade) home with cursive worksheets I printed from the internet. They said they wanted to learn/practice cursive for the poetry unit we have coming up.
Out of the six lessons I taught yesterday, it was the only one where every single student interacted live (all but one turned on their cameras, and that's because he was absent Friday and didn't get his sheet.)
We learned cursive when I was in second grade or so. In pencil. Pencils suck for cursive; cursive is for pens. (Correct use of semicolon!)
I'm pretty sure we learned D’Nealian, which is garbage. No one benefits from your wonky pseudo-cursive transition to full cursive.
As an adult, I've since learned that "cursive" isn't a real thing, and that you can connect your letters however you want.
Wikipedia has this cool Italian one, where the Z actually looks like a Z:
I'm also interested in the Palmer Method, which has a unique and pleasant lowercase r:
Apparently designing handwriting and training was a big deal back in the day. Companies competed to get you to buy theirs. Kinda wild to think about.
I mostly abandoned my own cursive until 9th grade or so, when a teacher suggested I try it since my print was so awful. It was much better. I like to tell my kids with bad handwriting to give it a shot. Also much better for note taking.
For short lists (like grocery lists) I often start in printing, then switch to cursive halfway through. It feels weird to write single items that way, but I do like it better, especially when I use my fountain pen (Kaweco Brass Sport).
Anyway, speaking of poems here's some literature for tonight. (Outside of the blog's normal focus, but I'm rolling with it.)
The Tiger
The tiger
He destroyed his cage
Yes
YES
The tiger is out
Much better than the Blake poem. I'm definitely going to make them read both. I just have to decide if I'm going to sarcastically overanalyze Nael's poem to show how much deeper it is.
I noted on the other blog yesterday that I missed the 25th. This is definitely my first miss in over a year, and possibly my first in over two. (There were one or two iffy ones near the beginning.)
I thought about what to do with that for a while. My wife suggested I just post something I did blog related yesterday. I have technically posted after midnight a few times (or posted filler and gone back and fixed it), but I feel like once I've gone to bed and woken up I forfeit that.
I considered just deleting the whole thing. That doesn't really serve any purpose other than self-flagellation.
A lot of "streak" activities on other sites or advice say you should do things like give yourself one cheat day every week or month, or that you can keep your streak if you miss one day but do something to make up for it (similar to my wife's suggestion). The one that I thought was most interesting was the idea that every time you break your streak you lose half the length, so if I was on day 500 it'd go back to 250. That or some kind of "punishment" make up (READ ALL OF MEDITATIONS IN ONE GO!) is definitely my favorite from a gamification perspective. But, I don't actually really like gamification. I considered making this my "penance" post and then doing a normal one today to double up and make up for it, but that feels like gaming the system instead of just doing the work. (Besides, I have like 50 "make ups" baked in from back when I did the weekly review and stuff.) I briefly considered posting the writing I did on Sunday. I plan to add an original fiction component to my blog rotation this year, but I don't feel like what I had was particularly good/sharable and, again, I'm not here to game the system with, "oops, I didn't forget, I just didn't post this other thing..."
I researched how long a "good" blog streak is. 100 seemed to be the minimum, with 300 or 50 weeks also popular. At least I was impressive before I went out.
In the end, I think the right answer is to reflect a little on it and move on.
It doesn't really change my goals. I still want to be more well read and better educated. I still want to write these little notes to myself, if no one else. I still enjoy doing the blog and think the current form is fairly good.
It does suck for these long line by line type entries. I tried not to get myself stuck in two at once and failed. (I kind of blame Eliot for that.) Like I said, it snowed a bunch the other day, which distracted me. That, and I was trying to play a bunch of game demos before a sale ended. I definitely spent too much time being fake-productive "testing" games, rather than real productive on this. I've talked before about how I think it's okay to do consume some amount of junk food media, but I definitely ate too much junk and gave myself a hangover on Sunday.
But, at the end of the day, the streak doesn't actually matter at all. It's cool to say I had a year+ streak (it's a nice round amount) I guess I can restart a definitive counter from yesterday, so I actually know how many for sure, instead of vaguely handwaving "I think". So those are both good.
Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus would tell me I shouldn't care. It's not bothering me, my reaction is bothering me. It nature wanted me to keep a streak forever, it'd make it easier. (Or maybe I'm not committed enough to philosophy. MA talks about that a lot too.)
What matters is the stuff I read, and learn, and think about. How it helps guide me to spend my time and my energy better. In a way, missing the day helped me refocus. I thought about it, considered dropping it, or going to once a week, and said, "No, this is a worthwhile use of my time every day, and this just shows me I need to make sure I pay better attention to it."
So, starting tomorrow, it's back to normal. I do think I need to do something about the readings right now. The double line summaries are a slog. Some Fruits of Solitude is great as a break from longer pieces. Meditations is good, but repetitive. Either way, doing them like this is a pain. I might just move off of both of them and relegate them both to backups while I dive into a longer piece. I might continue Meditations but more as a traditional entry instead of a line by line summary (I could move through it a lot more quickly and easily.) It might be fun to come up with a generic abbreviation for all the repetitive ones. "MM" for all the, "YOU'RE GONNA DIE!","DN" for all the, "DO NATURE!", etc.
Consider January 25th my Rocky V. It's bad, but I didn't hear no bell.
Summary: READ THE FUCKING BOOK WHEN IT'S ONLY 20 PAGES!
Commentary:
My wife had to read "A Nation At Risk" for a class recently. In short, it's the first big "America's schools are failing!" report from the 80s. It's not very long. The PDF linked there is about 70 pages, but the report itself (minus appendices, lists of meetings, etc.) formats to about 20 pages of standard text. For as short as it is, it's surprisingly malleable, easily vilified as the start of whatever the current evil in education (according to professors, though leaders, and the like) is currently at issue. As commonly presented, it was a partisan hack job, written by people with minimal relation to education, that exists primarily to blame teachers.
By most conventional measures (teaching kids to read, write, do math, etc.) it's fairly non-controversial to say the US education system is a failure. Depending on which study you look at, definition you use, etc. almost 90% of kids graduate high school, but ~25% are borderline illiterate, with another ~30% valiantly struggling up to a middle school reading level. Math usually comes out a bit worse, with around 60% making it to basic algebra on a good day.
There's a ton of factors at play here. Some totally out of the school's control (kids born with significant disabilities), but it's pretty hard to make an argument for success when more than half the kids graduating 12th grade are struggling (at best) to handle 8th or 9th grade level work.
Why is that?
If you actually read "A Nation At Risk", the reasons include: low expectations in curriculum, lack of incentives to meet even these standards, not enough time in school, poor textbooks and other materials, and lack of budget.
There is a section on teachers, and it does say that many teachers are drawn from the lower levels of their high school and colleges, poor teacher prep, not enough pay, and a shortage of qualified teachers.
Hardly a damning condemnation.
On the other hand, the recommendation section on teachers includes: Raising standards for teacher ed, improving salaries, peer review, more time for planning and development, better opportunities for advancement, greater input by teachers in curriculums, training, etc.
Obviously, not every teacher is going to love everything, but it's hardly a hatchet job. Despite frequent claims that teachers weren't consulted for the report, several sections directly reference publications by teachers unions and similar groups.
As a teacher, it's a continual source of frustration to me that it seems like 90% of education professors, leaders, etc. just don't engage with basic facts. The amount of presentations I've sat through where people didn't even know what was on their own slides, etc. is embarrassing.
There's a lot of whining about how teachers aren't respected enough as a profession, but if you can get a doctorate and write a whole book dunking on a report without actually presenting it honestly (or maybe reading it in the first place), you're the problem.
37. The face composes the mind, but the mind cannot compose itself.
38. Anger at external things is pointless.
39. Give joy to to us and the gods.
40. Some lives are ended, some remain.
41. If god neglects us, it is for good reason.
42. I keep justice and right on my side.
43. Do not weep for us.
44. Plato: Don't worry about living and dying. Just do what is right.
45. Choose the stand that is right for you, regardless of the consequence.
46. Better to live well than to save everything to try to avoid destiny.
47. What's your sign?
48. Plato: Take the long view on everything.
49. History repeasts itself.
50. Whatever comes from Earth returns to it.
51. I dunno, I think this is just a lost Macbeth Witches speech:
By meats and drinks, and charms and magic arts Death’s course they would divert, and thus escape. . . . . . . . The gale that blows from God we must endure, Toiling, but not repining.....
