This Week's Revolution in Education

This essay will be most meaningful, I imagine, to those who toil in the groves of Academe. Laymen may be unaware of the tremendous strides made with remarkable regularity in secondary education. One of the latest is the idea of "blended classes," which means classes that meet only twice a week or so. Students are expected to do much of the course work on their own. I do not see why this tremendous notion--that students learn as much by meeting with their teachers only occasionally--cannot be pushed to its logical conclusion; hence this article.
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NeverNeverLand Academy announces an addition to its many centers with the inauguration of the NO CLASSES AT ALL CENTER of PERFECTION (NCAACoP, pronounced “Baloney”).

This latest innovative, imaginative, ground-breaking, awe-inspiring, state-of-the-art, cutting-edge golly-gee gobsmacking it’s-so-brilliant-I-can’t-stand-it brainstorm of our Headmaster, Mr. Dick Pebble, a man already trumpeted throughout the nation—the continent—the world—indeed the entire cosmos—as the most brilliant pedagogical innovator since the people who said that filmstrips would change the face of education forever, involves the notion that in throwing out the bathwater you may as well toss the baby as well.

We know beyond argument that the traditional method used by high schools, “teaching classes,” is hopelessly obsolete. Expecting young people, in our frenetic age, to accustom themselves to punctuality, regularity, and listening, is obviously an anachronism, as of course is thinking that a “teacher” can actually get someone to “learn” something. Indeed, most of this traditional “learning” is mere accumulation of valueless “facts”. When all facts are easily available on Wikipedia and other websites, what possible point could there be in forcing young people to “master” such trivialities as punctuation, the grammar of foreign languages (or of English, for that matter), chemical formulas, abstruse mathematical concepts, or silly historical trifles such as whether the Civil War preceded or followed World War I?

Instead of forcing these young folks to go to “classes” where “teachers” dominate the room and use their decades of experience to instruct them, should we not allow “students” to organize their own schedules and pursue their passions? Who is to say that an intense interest in the welfare of whales or developing an app should not take predominance over Spanish verb forms?

Therefore, NeverNeverLand Academy has abolished all classes. Our Baloney Center will allow our young clients to do all their work “online” at whatever times they wish. Also, they will all serve as interns in local businesses (where they will be a useful source of unpaid labor in the least desirable activities). And they will all complete a Major Project, under the genial supervision of somebody, which will enable them to demonstrate poor grammar, inarticulateness, and the lack of basic knowledge they would have learned in traditional classes. They will also, of course, still practice their sports several hours each day.

There are a few trifling points yet to be worked out. The mighty brain of our Headmaster just scintillates with a myriad of brilliant innovations; you can’t expect every detail to be filled in until the Baloney Center actually starts to operate. Do not worry. Shortcomings will be covered up so cleverly that no one will know, or at least no one will admit, that they exist. Those “teachers” involved in the Center will tacitly understand that they are to lower standards, inflate grades, and generally ‘curate’ (i.e. reduce) content so everything seems to be working just fine.

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NOTA BENE:

Parents whose children are here primarily to take part in our grotesquely huge athletic development programs may rest assured that none of this innovative stuff will affect any sports teams. Athletes will continue to punctually attend daily exhausting practices under the watchful eye of autocratic coaches whose slightest word is law, and woe betide any kid who shows up a second late. (Indeed, since students will no longer have any mandatory commitments to attend classes, our enormous coaching staff will doubtless be able to schedule even more practices than before.)

 

Writing Across the Curriculum

At the start of each school year the Administration of most schools announces some great innovation or 'improvement' as the annual obsession. Naturally, this new program will make little work for the people who are mandating it, i.e. administrators, but much work for those expected to implement it, i.e., teachers. One such program is "Writing Across the Curriculum". If this brainstorm is your school's current hobgoblin, academic departments will need a large number of highfalutin expressions for use in various forms, tables, Moodle applications, etc. to assure their masters that they are accomplishing this integration.

Here, for your convenience, is the Writing Across the Curriculum Phrase Finder (WACPhraF). Simply choose one word from Column A or B and one from Column C—or, if an especially impressive effect is needed, one from each column—to get the desired level of pretentiousness. For an interesting random effect, just pick three numbers, e.g. 612, and write down the result. "Extended Comprehensive Discourses" sounds as good as anything, doesn't it?

Adjective	Adjective	Noun
Collins	Comprehensive	Compositions
Deductive	Critical	Discourses
Document-based	Deconstructive	Dissertations
Dynamic	Five-paragraph	Essays
Expository	Free-form	Papers
Extended	Imaginative	Paragraphs
Free	In-depth	Questions
Inductive	Research	Sentences
Introductory	Response	Summaries
Investigative	Type 1/2/3/4/ or 5	Theses
		Treatises

You will make a much better impression on the higher reaches of the pedagogical bureaucracy if, instead of saying something as jejune as “students will write essays” or “in the second term, we will practice descriptive writing,” you sonorously declare that “all Physics examinations will make use of Expository Free-form Dissertations” or “Collins Comprehensive Compositions form the basis of instruction in Algebra II.”

Having made the required genuflection to this year’s fetish by larding your required documentation with enough gobbledygook to placate the bees in administrators’ bonnets, you may resume teaching your courses as before.

Every Day A New Millennium

This little essay may seem obscure to those who are not teachers, and consequently are not constantly belabored by the phrase "twenty-first century skills", but you who have the privilege of being fellow members of the noblest profession should see what I'm getting at.
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Siena Superior Merit School -- Siena, Italy

                                    Prospectus for the Year 1517

Parents and students who wish to embrace the future and who realize that the traditional dull, stultifying rote learning of the Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy) do not prepare young people for the exciting world of the future should consider enrollment in Italy’s most innovative and creative educational institution, the Siena Superior Merit School.

 At SSMS, we strive to equip our scholars with SIXTEENTH CENTURY SKILLS, the skills they will need to succeed in the exciting modern era of the new century, a century that is so different from all preceding centuries that entirely novel educational methods are required.

We have instituted CENTRI DI ECCELLENZA (CdEs) to allow students to pursue their passions in areas of great importance for this dynamic new century:

E The ASTROLOGY CdE:  Advances in the highest celestial art make traditional astronomical studies all but obsolete. As sure knowledge of this science progresses, those who grasp it fully are assured of profitable employment. Why study the past when you can predict the future?

E  The ALCHEMICAL CdE:  What young man would not thrill to the exciting pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone? Turn lead into gold! Experiments in our newly-completed, ultra-modern facility, Farelli Hall, (a gift from an alumnus most successful in the manufacture of gun- powder), will not be without some danger, but the survivors graduates of this CdE will be fully equipped to lead the way in further advances in Alchemy, the Science of the Future.

E The THEOLOGY CdE:  Those students whose passion is for truth and certainty will surely thrill to the careful exegesis of sacred texts and close study of Canon Law. What can be more certain than that, as the Holy Catholic Church enters its 1,500^th year of existence, its eternal truths assure its unchallengeable domination of our continent, and eventually the world? We plan to open a branch school in Wittenberg, Germany, under the direction of Father Johann Tetzel, Europe’s foremost expert on indulgences.
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We have also instituted CLASSI MISCELATI (“Classes that are Blended”) to give students adequate time to pursue their passions. These classes meet just twice per week. By a magical process that has to be experienced to be understood, students will learn just as much as before, even though they meet 60% less than before, in those rather obsolescent areas—such as Italian, History, and Foreign Languages—that are really no longer as relevant in the dynamic Sixteenth Century as they were in the benighted twenty centuries that preceded our new, exciting age. 
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Note: Pedagogues needing further enlightenment should consult "Well, Hello," the post for 7 July 2013. 

On Institutional Advancement

In this latest ground-breaking essay--part of the series exploring innovative change in contemporary pedagogy--I turn from purely academic matters to the important issue of raising funds. Readers are encouraged to distribute this seminal brainstorm widely.
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                            ON INSTITUTIONAL ADVANCEMENT

Let us imagine that you find a family living in a dilapidated old house. The roof leaks; the windows are cracked; the carpets are threadbare; the furnace is erratic, often providing much heat in warm weather and little heat when it is cold. The stone walls are crumbling.

Let us also imagine that you—Mr. Hastings van Rensselaer Plutocrat—are wealthy and altruistic. You wish to assist this family. You leave your mansion in Palm Desert, California, and go to them. You smilingly announce that you are going to help them. You will construct in their yard a marble fountain that will send a beautiful spray of water fifty feet into the air; further, you will hang upon their living room wall—over the cracks—a genuine Gobelin tapestry depicting colorful scenes of medieval pageantry.

In proper recognition of your generosity, a fine bronze plaque will be affixed to the fountain designating it the Plutocrat Water Display and the tapestry will appropriately bear a small label: “Gift of H. van R. Plutocrat, 2013.” Your benevolence will be fittingly acknowledged at a public ceremony where you will be hailed as a modern Maecenas, a philanthropist extraordinaire. 

How happy this family will surely be! Even as they sit in their cold, drafty living room watching the rain drip into the buckets placed under the holes in the roof, they will hardly be able to stifle their cries of joy as they admire the intricate weaving of the tapestry and marvel at the loveliness of the fountain.

If this seems like an absurd flight of fancy, I have to suggest that, unfortunately, it is not. It is analogous to what can happen when a combination of generosity, self-esteem, and misplaced priorities, facilitated by faulty fund-raising policies, are brought to bear on an impoverished institution—such as, to choose a random example, a tuition-driven boarding school.

Would it not make more sense, if, before adorning a shack with golden gables, one first repaired the walls? If the roof leaks, should the construction of a magnificent garage be the first priority? When the heating system is antique and undependable, one might replace it before installing a jacuzzi, might one not? Should one not water the lily before gilding it?

Surely it does not strain credulity to assert that institutional advancement implies that the institution must have a sound infrastructure before more buildings are built and comparative frills added. That is common sense. Why then is it not done?

One reason may be that some potential philanthropists feel that to endow a grand building, to construct a statue, to equip rooms with huge tables that the users of those rooms neither want nor need, is preferable to repairing a heating system or tuck-pointing a crumbling wall, because building, constructing, and equipping offer more opportunities for recognition than repairing and replacing. Perhaps such people feel that little prestige attaches to renovating bathrooms or laying carpets, to fixing roofs or caulking windows. After all, the pharaohs are remembered for pyramids, not for sewers.

I suggest that it is the function of Development Departments not to take the easy way out by abetting such erroneous notions and soliciting money for secondary things, but to grasp the nettle and tell potential donors what is really needed. If Lorenzo the Magnificent, class of ’53, announces he will finance an air-conditioned, twenty-lane bowling alley, it is the job of the Institutional Advancement experts to tell him (politely but firmly) that the institution does not need such a thing, but does need—to invent an exaggerated, unlikely example—to prevent a dormitory that has visible cracks in its outer walls and whose windows are out of plumb from continuing its slow but steady descent into a ravine, so would he kindly write a check for these much-needed repairs to an already-existing structure even though it is not named after him?     

So, wealthy, public-spirited alumni: when your alma mater needs shoes and a dress, do not give her a feather boa. When she huddles in the cold, do not give her a painting of a fireplace. When her house is falling down, do not offer to build her a tanning salon next door.

And advancement officials: take the bull by the horns and insist that you have a strong, well-built cart before you get a horse, or a white elephant, to pull it. Repair the infrastructure before adding to the superstructure. 

For if this is not done, the eventual fate of institutions which do not do it might well be that so famously depicted by Shelley:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half-sunk, a shattered visage lies….

And on the pedestal these words appear --
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Maybe Ozymandias built an Arts Center when he really should have repaired his palace.

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For all those awaiting news of The Free Lands, I want to tell both of you that the book is completed and that I am awaiting the cover. If the artist finishes it on time, I am hopeful that Volume IV of Mercenaries will appear in November.

 

A Herculean Task

I have never been a fan of detective stories, except for those of Conan Doyle, but I recently became acquainted with the film series Agatha's Christie's Poirot. These 65 episodes (with five more to come) are excellent. David Suchet is Hercule Poirot. I highly recommend them.

Watching these fine productions led me to read some of Agatha Christie's stories. I will not be reading them all, but it was good to see how the author depicted her characters.

My fascination with the immortal Belgian detective led me to write my first piece of fan fiction: a  light-hearted detective story gently satirizing Hercule Poirot and his world.

I here present you with the opening of the story. If you would like to read it all--at 17 pages it's too long to post on a blog--you may find it at  https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9321353/1/The-Adventure-of-the-Surprising-Ending

I would welcome comments on The Adventure of the Surprising Ending.

              THE ADVENTURE OF THE SURPRISING ENDING

 On a bright, sunny morning in central London—very odd weather that many found disconcerting—the greatest detective in the world sat behind his large desk sipping his customary cup of tisane while perusing the Times.

The clock on the wall said 10:13:27 AM, Friday, May 28, 1937 A.D. (The detective, impatient with slipshod clocks that provide only partial information, had had this one custom made in Zurich.) He closed the paper, thinking that today’s lead article offered hope for the future: now that Mr. Chamberlain had become Prime Minister, maybe England would at last begin to take a firm line against Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini. It was high time.

The door to the outer office opened as there entered a tall, lean, handsome gentleman of perhaps fifty years, attired in a neat grey suit and a regimental tie. This man by his very presence radiated all that was fine in the British upper-middle class: honesty, plain dealing, bravery, trustworthiness, dependability.

“Cheerioh, old bean! I say, what a simply spiffing morning, what?” he called out as he tripped on his own feet and went sprawling on his face. Fortunately the inch-thick pile of the fine mauve carpet prevented any injury.

The great detective contemplated this through his pince-nez and said, “Eh bien, mon pauvre Captain Waterloo, vous êtes bien maladroit comme usuel, n’est-ce pas? Please, arise and adjust your garments. Your cravat she has been much disorganized.”

The former officer was spared further contumely by the rapid entry of a lady in early middle age, her dark blonde hair tied in a severe bun, her not unattractive figure mostly concealed by her modest blue dress. She proffered a handful of mail. “The first delivery, Mr. Greycelles,” she said. “And there was a very urgent call from Viscount DeLuxe. He seemed to think he could speak to you at once, but I explained that you never accepted calls before 10:18½, after you finished your tisane. I told him you would return his call.”

“Quite right, my dear Miss Kumquat,” said her employer. “One must have order and method in one’s life or it becomes like the existence of the wild beasts of the field. Did his Grace hint at whatever petit problem troubles him?”

“He said that an explosion has destroyed the entire staff wing of Garrish Manor, his ancestral home, killing eleven retainers, including Mat Grubb, his Chief Gardener for forty years.”

“Ah, these trifles,” said Greycelles. “Call his Grace and ask if his senior under-gardener survived. If, as I suspect, he was not even there—probablement he said he had to make a sudden visit to a sick great-aunt or other superannuated relative—then voilà! Gardeners know all about fertilizer, a prominent component of which, the nitrate of aluminum, is most useful in the making of the objets explosif such as the bombs of time. As for motive, the man surely wished to supplant his senior, whose long tenure of office must have annoyed him.”

As the efficient secretary hurried to make the call, Capt. Waterloo, now seated on a sofa, exclaimed, “By Jove, Greycelles, aren’t you jumping to conclusions? I mean…”

The soigné detective raised a plump hand. “Doucement, mon vieux. Énée Greycelles, he leaps not to the conclusions rash. Did I not just read in the Times that a hundred pounds of fertilizer was stolen last week from a warehouse in Little Rotting, a village not far from Garrish Manor? Eh bien, the under-gardener took it for the construction of the bombe gigantesque used in the up-blowing of his so-hated rival the chief gardener. So now we have solved two cases. Remind Miss Kumquat to bill both Viscount DeLuxe and the Little Rotting constabulary. But now let us peruse the mail and discover if any real problems await us, mon ami.”

The mail apparently contained nothing unusual. The bill from the cleaners for £150—the detective always had a suit cleaned after wearing it once—and the confirmation that four pallets of the finest tisane were en route from Brussels, were routine, as were the advertisements from three manufacturers of moustache wax and eight clothing stores. But upon reaching the last item Greycelles exclaimed, “Tiens! Voyez, Waterloo, a coronet on this so-expensive envelope.” Hastily he ran his Damascus-steel letter opener under the edge and withdrew a magnificent sheet of paper. “Mon cher ami, we are bidden to see the Duke of Worcestershire at Daggerthrust House, his summer residence in Kent. His Grace recalls fondly how I found his missing cuff link two years ago and now has another matter about which he wishes to consult us.”

“A bit of all right, that,” said the captain. “I can run us down in my new Bugatti 57T. I’ve installed patent feeder gaskets on the supercharger and chromed the reverse valve injectors so the gidgit pump maximizes the superflow. Goes like smoke, old chap.”

The detective peered over his pince-nez. “I have no idea what you just said, but from your animation I infer that you can provide adequate transport to St. Anspeth-on-Sea-by-Marsh, the village where Daggerthrust House has its location. Excellent. We leave in three days. I shall have just time enough to groom my moustache.”

Before Greycelles and Waterloo left for lunch, Miss Kumquat reported that Viscount DeLuxe’s senior sub-gardener had been arrested and had confessed to both the bombing and the theft of the fertilizer. “His Lordship sends his undying thanks for your miraculous insight,” she said. “And the Little Rotting police are eternally grateful, especially since they had grown very tired of interrogating every tramp they could find.”

“Mais naturellment,” replied her chief. “But fail not to send the bills promptly.”