Camping Construction Cables: The Taut Line Hitch

 The first knot in this series that I'd really say everyone needs to know, the Taut Line Hitch works like one of those adjustable buckle-straps they put on packs and binoculars and stuff. One end has a loop, the more rope you put into the loop, the "shorter" the overall rope will be. This is most famously used for tightening the guy lines on tents, but you can also use it for things like hanging a clothesline or protecting the Hubble Telescope

Thanks, chair!

I think the version I tie is technically a midshipman's hitch, but it works more or less the same (with minor trade offs in security, slideability, etc.) outside of some edge cases.

To tie: Make a loop. Put the end of the rope through the loop at least twice (more will help if rope is wet, slippery, etc.) Then make a second loop on the rope "outside" the main one.

Yay, theknotmanual.com

Quick and easy to tie, I think the taut-line is the knot that I've forgotten the least over the years. 5/5, an easy one to add to the challenge.

Cloves Cinch and Cleave (The Clove Hitch)

 The clove hitch is used mostly for one of two things. First, to tie in the middle of a length of rope to attach something. The fact that it's somewhat adjustable is useful for this (say you want more or less slack on the line holding your tool bag). Second, as a start/end for lashings which is an arrangement of rope to hold spars, scaffolding, etc. together.

Possibly excessive photo editing.

It's a pretty simple knot: Wrap your rope around whatever you're tying to. Cross the end over the rope (it makes an X). Then go around again under the X.

theknotsmanual.com

I don't know why I struggled with it so much the other day and rated it too difficult. I think I was overthinking it, or maybe looked at a bad set of instructions to brush up. 5/5, quick, easy, and hard to mess up.

Combining Coils Constructively: The Square Knot

 The first knot on dad's list is the square knot, AKA the reef knot. Popular and easy to tie, this is often the first knot taught in Scouting, camping groups, etc. The shoe-lace knot is considered a variant, and the first "formal" knot a lot of people learn.

HAND REVEAL!

DON'T use the square knot to attach two different ropes to each other (that's what a sheet bend is for), it's not stable (especially if the ropes are different sizes, slippery, etc.) Also, be careful not to accidentally tie a granny knot, which tends to either untie itself or over tighten and jam up. 

Bad Granny

Basically, it's a quick and easy way to attach two ends of the same rope together. Historically, it was used to "reef" (partially roll up) sails. Today, it's occasionally used on packages and the like.

The steps for tying the knot  can easily be remembered as "left over right, around and through; right over left, around and through." It's important to note that right and left "change" (which is how you avoid the granny knot). A lot of people over think this and try to remember the original left, and mess it up.

credit: theknotsmanual.com

Not the most useful knot in the world, but fine for light work and easy to tie. The square knot is a 5/5 on my knowledge scale. I can tie it quickly and reliably, and won't need to practice it much for the minute challenge.

Classic Cordage Combinations 1: Introduction

 This blog is mostly here for me. It's a reading journal, more or less. But, I do confess that seeing those vie numbers (assuming any of you are real and not just bots) drop off makes me kind of sad. Around this time every year, I have my students do a project where they set a goal, research it, try to do it, write about it, etc. I do something with them every year, and this morning I decided I wanted to try to relearn some of the knots I used to know as a teenager in the Boy Scouts. My dad did a challenge where we had to tie... some number (it was at least six, but he wasn't sure) of knots in a minute. I poked around a little online and found other knot challenges (as fast as 14 in 1 minute or as slow as 6 in 2), lists of knots everyone should know, etc. and the list he gave me seems fairly representative. So, between now and St. Paddy's day, I'll be practicing six knots, and trying to get to the point where I can tie them all in a row (correctly) in under a minute. The knife posts seemed pretty popular, and this seems kind of along the same vibe.

The six knots are:

1. Square (reef) knot

2. Two half hitches

3. Bowline (THE KING OF KNOTS!)

4. Clove hitch

5. Tuatline hitch

6. Timber hitch

I suspect the sheet bend was on his original list (he was a big fan of it, always used to say the square knot was useless once you learned it), but those are the six he gave me.

This image from Art of Manliness has almost the same list, but with a Figure-Eight added in:

7 knots every (wo)man should know

Today, I looked up and practiced (I hope) correctly tying all of them. On a scale of 1 to 5 (1, I can't tie this thing at all; 5, I can tie this well enough for a speed challenge) I rate them as follows:

Square: 5 

Two half: 2

Bowline: 2

Clove: 3

Tautline: 3

Timber: 1

I'll spend the next couple days talking about each knot, and go from there. 

HtRaB: Ch 7 X-Raying a Book

 More of the same, really. Kind of losing interest. Like I said last night, I feel like I'm reading a lot of the same stuff over and over again. More rules that (Adler admits) are basically restatements of other rules. He gives a terrible summary of The Odyssey, talks about how titles used to be longer (like a webnovel title or something now), and suggests outlining the constitution. Maybe I'll make that tomorrow's post. For tonight, I will be starting another subseries for a bit. I don't want to drop these (unless I drop the book entirely) since part of the point here is to collect my thoughts more than to be marketable or whatever.

Adler's Rules for Analytical Reading:

1. Classify

2. Summarize

3. Outline (not necessarily on paper, in your head can be ok)

4. Identify the problems the author is trying to solve/discuss.

HtRaB Ch 6 Pigeonholing A Book

 I get the feeling people don't love these (not that this was the world's most popular blog before, but the numbers really dropped off). Maybe I'll come up with some kind of filler while I finish this book until I dive into "actual" books again.

To be fair, I'm not the biggest fan of the last couple chapters either. They've been fairly repetitive (this one is mostly elaborating on doing the title/chapter preview thing) and over long (which is saying something when they're only like ten pages). I really liked the initial premise, "People need to be taught how to read at a higher level" but I think there's been maybe 15 pages of teaching in the 70 I've read (~20% is not a great ratio). Going to stick with it a bit longer, but I hope it picks up.

This chapter deals (besides repeating other parts) with classifying books. Fiction vs nonfiction, practical vs theoretical, etc. Maybe it's my creative writing major coming out, but I've always found trying to "pigeonhole" books as a wasteful endeavor. Most books will contain elements of several categories (which he does acknowledge, though he never really reconciles it with the rest of the chapter), and those categories are often poorly defined or unhelpful anyway. He sort of acknowledges this critique, but doesn't really respond effectively. He just makes an awkward metaphor to different teachers teaching different subjects differently.

How To Read a Book Ch 5: How To Be a Demanding Reader

Active/demanding/whatever you want to call it requires several different skills to help you pay attention, understand the book, and interact with it. Marking (basically the same as the article I read earlier), asking questions, etc. He compares learning to read well to skiing or art. You need to learn a bunch of different rules/skills, practice them individually, and then learn how to use them automatically together.

It starts with a great line, "The rules for reading yourself to sleep are easier to follow than the rules for saying awake while reading." (Which involve not enough light.)

He lists four key questions:

1. What is the book about as a whole?

2. What is being said in detail, and how?

3. Is the book true, in whole or part?

4. What of it? 

This was a pretty overviewish chapter. Hopefully more detail later. 

How to Read a Book: Ch 4 The Second Level of Reading: Inspectional Reading

 After Elementary Reading (what is the main idea of this sentence or so?) Adler moves to "Inspectional Reading." This is basically made of two parts. The first is "Systematic Skimming" which I think most people learned about under one acronym or another (SQ3R, PQRST, etc.) in middle school. Basically, look at headings, chapter titles, table of contents, and other text features. Adler recommends picking a few random pages and skimming them as well, which I think is a good addition. The idea is to figure out what the book is about and how interested you are in it. 

The second part, he calls "superficial reading", basically reading to the end with minimal stops as quickly as you can comprehend. If you're reading a challenging (but semi-comprehensible) book and stop every time you struggle you: A. won't finishing and B. will lose the forest for the trees (as the saying goes). 

This is good advice for a lot of things in life. The first time you try to learn something, I think it's often best to just push through and play that crappy game of Chess, make that ugly pot, etc. than worry about having a great first one.

The last chunk of the chapter is about speed reading. He gives a very general introduction to a few speed reading techniques (avoid subvocalizing, use your finger as a pacer), but the bulk is about how a good reader should master reading at different speeds and learning how to find the right speed for a piece. Most people could probably benefit from learning how to read faster, but some texts need to be read slowly. (The ol' Francis Bacon: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested") The most interesting thing he points out, in my opinion, is that your speed should actually vary across parts of the same piece. One paragraph might be dense and valuable, so you read slowly, but the next might be mostly puffery (he uses The Declaration of Independence as an example) that you can read quickly. Obviously most people do this while reading, but I don't think I've ever thought about it specifically before.

Finally, I learned the name for pseudo-royal we that authors use sometimes. It's, easily enough, called "The Author's We' or "pluralism modesties". I try to avoid it on the blog, it's not a construction I love. Why should I speak for you? But Adler uses it sometimes and I wanted to know what it was called.

How to Read a Book: Elementary Reading Part 2

 Not a ton here that I hadn't already read in the introduction or other Adler articles. I think the thing that was most interesting is when Adler talks about what you need to be ready to learn to read, and talks about speaking and hearing. I guess this refers to needing it to be able to be taught to read, since there are obviously people who are deaf but learn to read. In 1971, more than half the incoming class of CUNY students needed remedial reading (when CUNY discontinued their remedial program in 2023 it was around 78% across reading and math for incoming associates degree students). People whine about grade inflation, but I don't think that we, as a country, have ever really grappled with what a high school diploma should mean (hurray for local control of education)/what it means to be college ready. I guess it's not surprising. We went from less than a third of the country having high school degrees to pushing 90% in about 50 years (see here). That's an incredible reshuffling, and it doesn't seem there was a ton of serious consideration to go with it. Just get more kids in school and find a way to push them through.

And that dovetails nicely with one of Adler's other points: We basically stop effective reading instruction in late middle school. Once a student is hypothetically capable of doing high school work (which basically means being able to read a couple sentences and say the main idea) that's it. I think there's been some effort to correct this recently, but not nearly as explicitly as it needs to be. It doesn't help that English classes have been largely coopted for social justice and what not. I think it'd probably serve the huge swaths of disadvantaged kids to be able to read better than to stumble through an audio book about how much being poor, black, gay, etc. sucks, (because they wouldn't know anything about that themselves...) but what do I know?

"Of Our English Dogs and Their Qualities" from "A Description of Elizabethan England" by William Harrison (1577)

Dawg

"Of Our English Dogs and Their Qualities"

Summary: They sure like all the different kind of dogs in England.

Commentary: I read an excerpt of this for 15MAD and wanted to go back to it. I did a little poking at Adler today, but I wanted to pick up a quick stand alone for tonight. I know nothing about dogs, so this was somewhat enlightening (though I doubt I'll remember much.) People who treat their dogs better than their kids were still a thing back then.

How to Read a Book: Elementary Reading

 Started reading this chapter tonight, but didn't finish. Several interesting thoughts here.

1. Teaching the masses is very different from teaching a small, interestedish, affluent group

2. We are moving away from whole language back to phonics. IN 1940.

3. Americans have always complained about education. For at least a century. In 1940.

MORE TOMORROW!

"Observations on Transfusion of Blood" by James Blundell

 Give Blood

Couldn't find any decent OCR copies of this paper.

Summary: Body horror steampunk blood transfusion apparatus. 

Commentary: Dr. Blundell made the first successful human to human blood transfusion in 1818. I enjoyed reading the science essay/lecture sections in 15MAD, so I decided to try and find one relevant to giving blood, since I donated today. It involves something called a GRAVITOR, so already awesome.

GRAVITOR!

Interestingly, Blundell points out that this whole transfusion thing is kind of new/risky, and only recommends doing it for people who are in fatal need. If you're only "sick" because you lost a lot of blood, but not actively dying, he advises against it (mostly for the safety of the donor). 

The process sounds pretty uncomfortable. You slice the receiver's vein open about half an inch, and insert a silver tube. I guess that's not so different from a needle, but he makes it sound worse. You have to wriggle it in and out "with all gentleness" to make sure it fits. Ick. 

How to Read a Book: Levels of Reading

 Back on this. I'd like to try to get through the whole thing before I dive into more heavy classics reading. We'll see how long it takes.

Adler's levels of reading are popular blog fodder already, and I don't think I can add a ton to the conversation from this short intro, so I'm going to just copy my notes in here and see if I want to be the 9001st blog post on them in depth once I finish the whole book.

1. Elementary: "What does the sentence say?"

2. Inspectional: "What is the book about?" Skimming Systemically

3. Analytical: Active understanding (no question :()

4. Synoptical: Compare and connect to other texts.

Leading Private Citizen and Top Educator

 Short post, almost entirely to keep the streak going. Eliot is referred to repeatedly in the readings I did this week as something like "America's Leading Private Citizen" and "Top Educator." Do we even have a top educator anymore? Is Elon Musk our leading private citizen? Disappointing. We can do better. Who do you think our LPC and/or TE are?

Who Is Charles Eliot Part 4: The New Education Part 2: The Organization

 That's a title.

Nice of Eliot to have a shorter article tonight. I played games with my wife when I'd normally have started blogging. The beginning of the article establishes what Eliot thinks a boy (not many girls in college yet) should learn up until about 17 (the colleges he's looking at generally admit between 16 and 18). He raises a point he's made several times in some of his other readings, that it's good (both academically and for pleasure) to memorize quotations from great authors you like. "Committing memory choice bits" as he calls it here. I like that he's not super prescriptive about it. (And, in fact, makes an argument against that kind of thing at one point.) No, A REAL MAN MUST BE ABLE TO QUOTE 600 LINES OF SHAKEPEARE. NO SONNETS! I certainly have some amount of that kind of stuff rattling around in my head, but it'd be cool to try to do more. I think I've talked before about trying to do one book or scene or something from The Odyssey, Beowulf, etc.

"It is sometimes said that nothing is worth teaching which is not worth remembering,"

That's a good saying. Maybe I'll try to remember that one.

The worst taught of the three subjects is usually arithmetic. Many a boy of seventeen, who has studied arithmetic ever since he was seven, is unable to divide a whole number by 0.2 with ease and confidence.

 Just multiply by 5, bro.

He says most of science is too hard for young boys. That surprised me. He does think some instruction is appropriate, but mostly practical demonstrations (example, watch the rain erode a road). He advocates learning to draw, for the dexterity practice if nothing else. I'd like to learn how to draw better. Maybe I'll do a drawing challenge on here one day.

According to Eliot, it would cost 300,00 to 400,000 dollars to set up a good school. That's 9 mil or so today.

I'll leave Eliot's last paragraph without comment:

Americans must not sit down contented with their position among the industrial nations. We have inherited civil liberty, social mobility, and immense native resources. The advantages we thus hold over the European nations are inestimable. The question is, not how much our freedom can do for us unaided, but how much we can help freedom by judicious education. We appreciate better than we did ten years ago that true progress in this country means progress for the world. In organizing the new education, we do not labor for ourselves alone.

Freedom will be glorified in her works.

 

Who Was Charles Eliot? Part 3: The New Education

 The Atlantic will let you read the poorly scanned PDF for free, but not the OCRed article. Sure, whatever.

This is the first of a pair of articles that Eliot wrote for Atlantic Magazine in 1869. I found it very enlightening on a lot of his theory on "fixing" colleges, and cleared up some of the questions and misconceptions I have. I'm just going to copy in the whole first paragraph to start:

What can I do with my boy? I can afford, and am glad, to give him the best training to be had. I should be proud to have him turn out a preacher or a learned man; but I don’t think he has the making of that in him. I want to give him a practical education; one that will prepare him, better than I was prepared, to follow my business or any other active calling. The classical schools and the colleges do not offer what I want. Where can I put him? Here is a real need and a very serious problem. The difficulty presses more heavily upon the thoughtful American than upon the European. He is absolutely free to choose a way of life for himself and his children; no government leading-strings or social prescriptions guide or limit him in his choice. But freedom is responsibility.

Eliot's basic issue, it sounds like, is that there's no such thing as what we'd call a technical school today. He compares what he's looking for to the German Realschule, which is generally secondary, not post-secondary education. Basically, there needs to be somewhere for people to go to get a specific education in a field they want to work in professionally. 

He makes an interesting point here:

“We must begin our survey with the institutions of highest grade, because from the parentspoint of view the higher school necessarily determines in large measure the nature of thelower school, just as the shape, weight, and bearings of a superstructure determine the formand quality of its foundations. The foundation-plan is the last to leave a careful architects office.” 

Normally, we think of the foundation being made first, but it makes sense that you'd design it after the rest of the structure, even if you have to pour it before you build.

One thing I think was interesting, as he analyzes various colleges and universities, is that a lot of them admit relatively young. Quite a few regularly admitted 16 year olds, and some even went as low as 14. I wonder what it would be like to go to college at 14. I think I'd have gone for it, if I could. That's about the age level most of my professors seemed to think we were at anyway. 

Most of this article is him looking at the rough curriculums of different schools around the country. This one, for Yale, is pretty representative (it's a somewhat repetitive article):

“The two departments of chemistry and engineering were entirely distinct. A student might take the degree in either department without knowing anything of the studies pursued in the other. As there was no examination for admission, and only a narrow, one-sided, two years course of study in either department, it is not surprising that the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy soon came to be slightly considered; it really stood for very little culture.”

This sounds more like what we'd call an associates degree today. 

“The fact is, that the whole tone and spirit of a good college ought to be different in kind from that of a good polytechnic or scientific school. In the college, the desire for the broadest culture, for the best formation and information of the mind, the enthusiastic study of subjects for the love of them without any ulterior objects, the love of learning and research for their own sake, should be the dominant ideas. In the polytechnic school should be found a mental training inferior to none in breadth and vigor, a thirst for knowledge, a genuine enthusiasm in scientific research, and a true love of nature; but underneath all these things is a temper or leading motive unlike that of a college.”

“The student in a polytechnic school has a practical end constantly in view; he is training his faculties with the express object of making himself a better manufacturer, engineer, or teacher; he is studying the processes of nature, in order afterwards to turn them to human uses and his own profit; if he is eager to penetrate the mysteries of electricity, it is largely because he wants to understand telegraphs; if he learns French and German, it is chiefly because he would not have the best technical literature of his generation sealed for him; if he imbues his mind with the profound and exquisite conceptions of the calculus, it is in order the better to comprehend mechanics. This practical end should never be lost sight of by student or teacher in a polytechnic school, and it should very seldom be thought of or alluded to in a college. Just as far as the spirit proper to a polytechnic school pervades a college, just so far that college falls below its true ideal. The practical spirit and the literary or scholastic spirit are both good, but they are incompatible. If commingled, they are both spoiled.”

 “Secondly, to make a good engineer, chemist, or architect, the only sure way is to make first, or at least simultaneously, an observant, reflecting, and sensible man, whose mind is not only well stored, but well trained also to see, compare, reason, and decide.”

He goes on in this general vein for a while, and I think it gets to the problems I've talked about with the current US college system.

For 90% of people, college is trade school. You go to get a shiny piece of paper that will let you get a better job. That's totally fine. Most technical schools and community college are even honest about it. The problem is once you get to the four year level. Something I noticed over and over in the article is how little time students spent in their major (or elective as Eliot calls it). It's often only one year, with the other three being the "gen eds." I can't speak for anyone else, but I would've loved to have jammed out my major in a year. I went back and looked over my transcript, and there were so many courses with almost the same name (that I know covered almost identical content) that we had to take every semester. Combined with the low standards in gen eds (I took a comp sci course that covered less than a semester long high school elective), it's no wonder people complain about how padded their degrees are, and what a waste of time and money it is.

Eliot is right that threading the needled between an almost "finishing school" type traditional college (knowledge for knowledge sake) and a simple vocational program is difficult. If anything it feels like we might have gotten even further than we were 150 years ago. I think it could have a lot of value, but you've got to make the "base" courses actually relevant, instead of auto-pass lecture hall bullshit so they can rush you into (not really any more rigorous, just more pretentious) major classes.

Who was Charles Eliot Pt 2: University Reform and Religion

 Charles W. Eliot, University Reform, and Religious Faith in America, 1869-1909

Found another good article, this one on Eliot's efforts to reform Harvard when he was first hired as president, with an emphasis on religion. Eliot was a Unitarian (not the same as a Unitarian Universalist), which is broadly in line with what I figured (some kind of non-fundamentalist Christian). He worked hard to keep Harvard non-denominational, but didn't make much effort to curb religion in general. He seems to have firmly believed that science would help advance mankind's knowledge of God.

“They can show how physics, with its law of the conservation of energy, chemistry

with its doctrine of the indestructibility and eternal flux of atoms, and

biology with its principle of evolution through natural selection, have brought

about within thirty years a wonderful change in men's conception of the universe.

If the universe, as science teaches, be an organism which has by slow

degrees grown to its form of to-day on its way to its form of to-morrow, with

slowly formed habits which we call laws, and a general health which we call

the harmony of nature, then, as science also teaches, the life-principle or soul of

that organism, for which science has no better name than God, pervades and

informs it so absolutely that there is no separating God from nature, or religion

from science, or things sacred from things secular”

 Harvard actually maintained mandatory morning prayers longer than most other universities (though this was more the desire of the board than Eliot's, he doesn't appear to have fought it too hard.)

A couple other religion quotes by Eliot:

“A really learned minister is almost as rare as a logical Sermon.”

“millions of thoughtful men" believed "that ministers, as a class, and as a

necessary consequence of the ordinary manner of their education and induction

into office, are peculiarly liable to be deficient in intellectual candor...."

"Nobody has as yet shown how to teach morality effectively without religion."

“Religion should have its roots in the family and be nourished in the Church.

To this sacred keeping the public School and the public University should entrust

it. Our University is first reverent, and then free,-

Reverent of whatever shrine

Guards piety and solace for our kind,

Or gives the soul a moment's truce of God

and free, remembering that "Nothing that keeps thought out is safe from

Thought”

If he were alive today, I think he might've fallen into the "spiritual, but not religious" camp. He appears to genuinely believe in some higher power, and think some kind of faith is essential for good moral character, but isn't particularly attached to dogma, and unenthused by organized religion.

The paper also includes a couple of interesting quotes from others discussing Eliot and his reforms:

Theodore Lyman (Eliot's cousin, and an alumni board member):

Look here, you very young man: I know you! You are a chemist; therefore you have a powerful tendency to be an Atheist: because all scientifics are very bad Atheists; and yet that won't keep them from dying, and therefore they don't get ahead of us very pious persons.

What makes a good versus bad atheist?

Finally, I've written before about the weird duality of Eliot's influence on education. On the one hand, he studied in Germany, and was instrumental in replacing the old "classical" curriculum in American universities with an "elective" based one like he found in Europe (the meaning of elective seems to have changed significantly, and sounds more like what we'd call a major. I suppose any choice at all was elective back then). On the other hand, his work on T5FSOB, among other projects, positioned him (alongside Adler) as one of the most important figures in brining a traditional classical/liberal education to the masses. 

At the time Charles Blanchard (president of Wheaton College) said:

Early specialization which shuts men up to one small corner of the world and bids them delve, is not only a cause of narrowness and intellectual paralysis, but of infidelity and spiritual death as well.

    Which, I'd argue, is exactly what happened. We cram students into majors, let them dip their toe in other stuff just enough to pretend their well rounded, and turned college into a glorified vo-tech. Thus churning out endless streams of STEM-bros with no ethics, liberal arts majors who can't handle 8th grade math, etc., etc. (This could be a whole post unto itself. Maybe another day.)

Who is Charles Eliot Pt 1: Religion of The Future

 Don't forget to register for your free JSTOR account!

Video on the wrong line!

Summary: In the future, religion will just be being nice to people.

Commentary: While I was doing 15MAD last year, I collected a bunch of articles by and about Charles Eliot. One of the big questions I talked about was Eliot's views on religion. Quite a few of the selections in 15MAD were these very negative, illiberal passages that painted Christianity in a negative light. At first, I wondered if maybe he was secretly trying to convert people away from Christianity by just reprinting the worst of the Bible.

But I did some reading, and the consensus seemed to be that Eliot was probably at least nominally Christian, in the same way that a lot of upper class intellectuals were for hundreds of years. Not a hardcore "Bible thumper" but at least appearing to broadly believe in some something resembling the Abrahamic Deity.

He actually gave a speech at the conclusion of Harvard's summer session about how he thought religion would evolve in the future. As I've discussed before, Eliot was believed that it was important to look at the overall progress of civilizations, ideas, etc. I think this is something many people don't tend to do very well with regards to religion. For traditional religious conservatives, progressing in religion is anathema. The whole point is to get as close to the "authentic" original version (which varies depending on your religion, denomination, etc.) as possible. They only way you could progress is if someone found an older manuscript or something, which is sort of progression by regression. On the other end of the spectrum, there's the endless chorus by anti-theists that all religion is, at best, a bunch of superstition made by "stupid bronze age goat herds" and that the only progress possible is reducing it.

It's worth pointing out that Eliot does kind of flirt with a "god of the gaps" version of this, discussing how we understand more things and don't turn to religion for as many problems as we used to. He says, "The general impression you have received from this comprehensive survey must surely be that religion is not a fixed, but a fluent thing."

Now the nineteenth century immeasurably surpassed all preceding centuries in the increase of knowledge, and in the spread of the spirit of scientific inquiry and of the passion for truth-seeking.

I think we can generally say the same about the 20th century now.

 The new religion rejects absolutely the conception that man is an alien in the world, or that God is alienated from the world. It rejects also the entire conception of man as a fallen being, hopelessly wicked, and tending downward by nature; and it makes this emphatic rejection of long-accepted beliefs because it finds them all inconsistent with a humane, civilized, or worthy idea of God.

I think this prediction was largely correct. It seems that the further you go in time, the less popular the "fire and brimstone" Old Testament ominicidal maniac God is.

Every age, barbourous or civilized, happy or unhappy, improving of its own conception of God within the limits of  and imaginings. In this sense, too, a human religion wait for a humane generation.

Don't pat yourself on the back too hard, Eliot.

The workman today, who gets cut [...] goes to a surgeon, who applies and antiseptic dressing to the wound [...] The surgeon is one of the ministers of the new religion.

Knowledge and care of the cornerstones of the "new religion." If you look at religion as something that can, should, and does evolve, then Eliot's inclusion of Job and other readings make a lot more sense. It's not a value judgement on Old Testament Christianity, merely an early step on the path that will continue into the future towards a better understanding of religion, morality, etc. 

Adleramma 7: "The Activity and Art of Reading"

 I don't know that I'm going to blog every chapter of this or whatever, but I'll get tonight's at least. Adler's most important point here is that reading is an active process. We don't just absorb information from a text but "catch" it, like a baseball catcher. He talks a lot about how newspapers are relatively easy to read, and don't require as much engagement as books. I think at least some people back in the 40s/70s probably needed to work to understand newspapers.

That was a very boring post. It's like one of those crappy discussion prompts for college.

Adleramma Day 6?: "The Defeat of Schools" by James L. Mursell

 Failure and/or Defeat

Apparently The Atlantic doesn't care if you just read their old stuff.

Summary:

Commentary: Despite a slightly different title, this appears to be the article Adler referenced (the quote is in there).

The Iowa test you may have taken evolved from Every-Pupil Testing Program. They hadn't invented good propaganda names like EVERY STUDENT SUCCEEDS NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND yet in 1939.

'Write a formula for the perimeter of the rectangle. Write a formula for the area of the rectangle. A dealer sold a suit of clothes for $42, making a profit of 20 per cent on the cost; how many dollars did he make?' Simple enough, one would say; yet genuine problems, because they require not the mere recalling of knowledge, but its application to the analysis of situations.

 I feel like the rectangle one is pretty basic recall. I did do the suit one correctly (it's 7).

I do think Mursell draws some questionable conclusions. He complains that students who passed high school chemistry, college chemistry, and both were at about the same level. But if both courses teach similar material, that doesn't really reflect anything other than curriculum overlap. He does poke fun at Latin education a bit, which seems to have been a hobby of education writers in this era. He does discount the value of learning a language to a level below "mastery". He doesn't really define mastery, and I think there's probably some value in the process of learning/practicing a language, to say nothing of learning the basics of being able to shop, ask for directions, etc. even if you can't read a novel or carry on a full conversation or whatever.

In this day of encyclopaedias, World Almanacs, and public libraries, a large stock of miscellaneous information for ready reference does not seem particularly vital. Even professional scholars can and do look up specific data when and as needed. It is far more important to know where to look for facts, and what to do with them when found, than to be able to produce them from under one's hat at a moment's notice. 

Look, just replace libraries with smartphones and it's just like today!

He complains that no one reads for pleasure, as people do today. I wasn't able to find firm numbers back to the 40s, but the number of people who read a book in 1940, but the number hasn't changed much (~55%) since the 80s (depending on the survey, the spread was pretty wide even in the same year on different sources). It's nice to know we haven't actually become a nation of illiterate dullards, or at least not any worse.

Overall, besides the style, this article sounds like 100 that are written every year, even today. I've talked a little before about how I find that comforting. People have had the same complaints about education, society, etc. for 100+ years. By most measures, life has improved for most people in those 100 years. Therefore, if we're failing, we're failing succesfully.

On the topic, I think the biggest issue in education is that we don't do a good job of defining what we actually want/need kids to learn or hold them accountable for it. (Mursell eventually gets around to something along these lines, though his solution is the elimination of curriculum altogether. I think that some base universal level have value.) Curriculum and standards are a hodgepodge between federal, state, and local, get rewritten seemingly at random (and not always finished when they do), and don't necessarily reflect the needs of students/society or an effective progression. Then we may or may not actually check to see if they learned whatever they were supposed to learn before shuttling them off to the next grade of stuff that they may or may not use or understand. 

We've spent decades supposedly raising the standard (EVERY KID NEEDS TO BE ABLE TO GO FROM HIGH SCHOOL TO A BACHELOR'S DEGREE!) but all we really do is drag down the middle by forcing the kids at the bottom "up" in the name of whatever the buzzword of the year for passing kids through is, instead of just admitting that some kids aren't (and may not need to) going to get past a middle school level in some areas. I would love everyone in the world to be able to get a well rounded and high level education, but it's not possible today (if ever). We'd be better off if we established a real minimum foundation (of things with universal value), made sure students actually reached it, and then let them hop off to apprenticeships or whatever is appropriate for them. And if they couldn't (assuming that floor was set to somewhere around 9th grade, as it seems to unofficially be) it should be okay for them to repeat, since they'd still have a couple years since they were "scheduled" to leave anyway.

Adleramma Day 5: "How to Read a Book"

 Probably Adler's most famous work, I'm going to spend the next week or so (I'm guessing based on length, a lot of it appears to be indexes, reading lists, etc.) going over this, following the mark up methods from his other article (plus maybe some in here, since that's got a section, assuming it's different. I've decided I want to try to do a bit more paper reading, so I got a physical copy. I find cramming the notes in the margins annoying (and detrimental to my already iffy handwriting) so I'm trying one of his tips and cut out a stack of paper slightly smaller than the book that I can take notes on and tuck in. This is similar to how I usually took notes in undergrad, just moving them from an external notebook to integrated pages. The notebook is probably easier to write in, but these will be easier to reference later (vs flipping back a week later to write an essay and then never caring about).

I only read the preface tonight (it's late, I had to go track down some mail I accidentally sent to an apartment I moved out of several years ago), but it had a couple interesting bits:

1. Adler mentions a shift in reading from fiction to nonfiction. My understanding is that this trend has continued today in two ways. First, men read more nonfiction, but women still read fiction. Two, schools have battered fiction mostly out of the curriculum. I'll have to look into it some more.

2. The Department of Education was still rolled in with Health and Welfare. One of those funny coincidences with how much it's been in the news lately.

3. He quotes an article about how we mostly stop reading instruction around 6th grade, and many people will never learn to read beyond this, even if they go all the way to college. This is pointed to as a failing, while I feel like today it's more often framed than there's no good reason for most people to learn to read past about an 8th grade level.

Adleramma Day 4: The New Lifetime Reading Plan

 

I'm pretty sure I bought this half by accident and half for free shipping this summer. I'm pretty sure I thought it was by Adler, or at least somehow Adler-adjacent. It's an interesting curio of the pre-internet days. It's literally just a list of 100-some authors with summaries and light commentary on a few of their books. I'm pretty sure if you tried to sell it today, it would at best get chucked in the bargain pile at Barnes and Noble for five bucks. But, in the pre-internet era, I can see it. "What shall I read tonight?" or whatever is in 15MAD. I feel like you could take it even further and have it be one of those magazines where you're supposed to take them all and put them in a binder. I don't know that I'm ever actually going to read this (like I don't have enough "what to read" lists already), but it's still kind of neat. Might be a good bathroom reader or something.

Adleramma (not really) Day 3: "Bartleby, The Scrivener" by Herman Melville

 The story is here, I'm annotating on paper, so no doc link.

    Bartleby is narrated by a lawyer "with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best." To that end, he wants to hire a third scribe to help with his business, since this is in the days when you had to literally copy contracts, etc. by hand. He hires Bartleby, and finds him good at copying, but Bartleby refuses to do anything "extra" (like helping proof the other scribes' copies). Anytime he's asked, he responds, "I would prefer not to" (thus starting Melville on the road to memery.) Over time, the lawyer and other scribes get more and more upset, eventually finding that Bartleby is staying there on the weekends as well. The lawyer tries to fire him (even paying him extra) but he just keeps showing up to work (but doing less and less). It gets so bad (and everyone else starts saying "prefer" since this is really just a long/weird old timey 4chan green-text) that he ends the lease and moves out. Bartleby does not. The new tenant asks him to come get rid of Bartleby, since he's just hanging around near the office all day every day. He can't convince him, so Bartleby is arrested, and starves to death in jail. The final lines of the story are "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!"

So, basically, a guy terrorizes his workplace via memes, ignores getting fired, commits suicide due to depression, and the narrator of the story (as far as I can tell) ends it by (as far as I can imagine it) yelling like William Shatner.

Seriously, if they had the internet in the 1850, this would be posted with Pepes or Wojacks or something.

  

Adlerrama Day 2: (Marking up) "Bartleby, the Scrivener" by Herman Melville

 "I prefer not to"

The story is here, I'm annotating on paper, so no doc link.

Summary: Ah Bartleby! Ah Humanity! (He would prefer not to.)

Commentary: I'd been meaning to reread "Bartleby" for a while (I read it in undergrad) for a while. It seemed like a good choice to try Adler's method. Long enough that I might want to go back and look at notes, and could outline more than a sentence, and some other Melville is in The Great Books so it's at least tangentially related.

Overall, I don't think most of Adler's method is so different than my default. The big difference is the "outlines" at the front and the back. It's not entirely clear to me what each one is/how they're different. I went for a traditional outline at the back, and a snappy summary up front.

Keeping track of the numbers for the summary was a good exercise in keeping track of the plot. I think this method is mostly meant for non-fiction, and that he has fiction specific directions in his book. I had a copy of The Godfather that I got used once that had little hand written notes for every chapter. I liked it. I did something similar when I read the Odyssey last year. 

More on the story itself tomorrow. 

Adlerrama Day 1: "How to Mark a Book" by Mortimer Adler

Here I go!

 I'm doing this again!

Summary: Do you really own a book if you don't scribble in it?

Commentary: As I was doing side reading for the blog, there was one name that kept coming up: Mortimer Adler. 

He was a philosopher, professor, etc., etc. For the blog's purposes, he's most important for two things: First, creating The Great Books of the Western World and second, writing a variety of books and articles about making education accessible to more people.

TGBotWW (The Games Breath of the Wind Waker) is probably the only classics collection that can go toe to toe with T5FSoB, being a similar complete unit across time, versus just an assortment of classics by a publisher. I'm kind of annoyed with Norton at the moment (lack of good digital access, and tiny print on flimsy paper), so I might be drifting towards reading part of theme instead. As I was looking around, I found an article he published in the 1940s (I believe expanded from a chapter in his book) titled "How to Mark a Book".

That seemed like something worth reading for the project, and if I liked it I could dig into some of his other stuff. He starts with:

You know you have to read "between the lines" to get the most out of anything. I want to persuade you to do something equally important in the course of your reading. I want to persuade you to write between the lines. Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading. 

As far as this kind of article goes, that's a pretty clever opening. The contrast between read and write, the appeal to efficiency for the kind of person who reads fancy magazines, a good start.

He preemptively channels some Gandalf-burns with, "This deluded individual owns woodpulp and ink, not books." As well as "this guy fucks" with "This man owns books."

His mark up list consists of:

• Underlining (or highlighting)

• Vertical lines at the margin 

• Star, asterisk, or other doo-dad at the margin 

• Numbers in the margin 

• Numbers of other pages in the margin 

• Circling or highlighting of key words or phrases 

            • Writing in the margin, or at the top or bottom of the page

Along with some notes about dog earring, writing summaries, etc. He's pretty flexible though, telling people to use side paper, etc. if you prefer. All in all, I found him readable, a little funny, and insightful. I think I'll grab a short off the extras list tomorrow, print it out, and mark it up. I think, overall his technique is reasonably similar to mine (I'm definitely a separate notes guy, but that's just so I don't have to squish my handwriting). Digital is a little different, since you can just put whatever you want where ever you want with minimal fuss. I'll close with his own closing lines:

If your friend wishes to read your Plutarch's Lives, Shakespeare, or The Federalist Papers, tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You will lend him your car or your coat -- but your books are as much a part of you as your head or your heart.

This guy books. 

Choosing Chronologically Correctly: Time Management, Writing Output, and the blogs

    I think I wrote about this a little back in November, but I spent a lot of time writing this blog last year. Conservatively, I'll say half an hour a day. Fifteen minutes (that was the deal, right?) reading, at least five most days just to find the entry, format it, etc., ten minutes digesting, writing, pulling quotes, etc.

    I don't think I realized how much time all that was taking until I was trying to do more fiction writing, and I just couldn't find the time. I was a little frustrated at first. I wasn't gaming much, wasn't working a ton of overtime, wasn't going out, where did the time go? The answer, as it eventually became obvious, was the blog. And, to be fair, I think that was time well spent. I wish I'd written more fiction last year, but I do think I learned a lot, read a lot of interesting stuff, and feel a sense of accomplishment for what I did. But as I've moved into the new year (streak surprisingly still intact a month in), I'm torn between wanting to find a better balance and missing the way I did the blog last year. I liked reading and writing those little snippets. Star Wars Classics was kind of fun as a once a week thing, but there are a lot of bad Star Wars books out there, and I'm kind of tired of reading them. (On the plus side, once I get through 1995 I get to start the X-Wing series and do Shadows of The Empire.) I decided to make writing at least a little bit of prose a priority every day. Might only be half a page or something some days, but something. Long term, I would like to start rolling out some fiction on the blog (or maybe start another linked one), but that's probably not for a bit yet. Still enjoying the daily, just trying to find the right balance.