To justify their campaign, ed reformers repeat, mantra-like, that U.S. students are trailing far behind their peers in other nations, that U.S. public schools are failing. The claims are specious. Two of the three major international tests—the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Trends in International Math and Science Study—break down student scores according to the poverty rate in each school. The tests are given every five years. The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in U.S. schools where the poverty rate was less than 10 percent ranked first in reading, first in science, and third in math. When the poverty rate was 10 percent to 25 percent, U.S. students still ranked first in reading and science. But as the poverty rate rose still higher, students ranked lower and lower. Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average ranking of American students reflects this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty.
It’s been almost a year since I posted the first of my grandfather’s letters and I still haven’t posted any of the rest. I still plan to write them out in English and post them, however late. In the meantime, I have video.
I just had several hours of old 8mm video digitized (in 1080P!). Some is from Argentina, and as early as 1966 or 1967, and some is from California in the early 1970s. Tonight I put two videos on Vimeo, since they are mentioned in the first letter from my grandfather and part of their contents described in it.
You can watch them here if you like, but fuller descriptions are on Vimeo.
My grandfather comes to the U.S.: Argentina to San Francisco, 1968 from Robert Pollack on Vimeo.
My grandfather comes to the U.S., 1968, Part II from Robert Pollack on Vimeo.
The iBooks app for iPad and iPhone is now a great place to keep a library of books in PDF, but some folks have been complaining on Twitter that getting the books onto the device is not particularly convenient. Using iTunes to transfer them is probably not worth the hassle. Emailing them to yourself works. But this is better:
- If you don’t use DropBox, sign up for a free account. It’s great. If you sign up by following this link, we’ll both get some extra storage space. It’s worth it, even if you’re not trying to add PDFs to iBooks.
- In your DropBox folder, create a folder for PDF books (or documents of whatever sort). Put your books in there. This is a fine place to store them, since you can keep access to them on your desktop but won’t lose them even if your computer dies.
- Download the free (and excellent) DropBox app on your iPad or iPhone, and link it to your account.
- In the DropBox app, navigate to the folder you created in step 2, open a PDF, tap the “send this to another app” icon (it looks like an arrow coming out of a box), and select iBooks.
And you’re done.
A good police dog has not only a large vocabulary but also extraordinary social skills. He understands many forms of human culture and has his being within them. He can be taken to the scene of a liquor-store robbery and asked to search, with the handler trusting that he won’t molest the customers or other police officers or the clerk behind the counter. He knows what belongs and what doesn’t, sharing our community and our xenophobia as well. He can take down a criminal who is attacking his handler on Monday and on Tuesday play with the patients at the children’s hospital. These dogs, then, are glorious, but for anyone familiar with working dogs they are not surprising, any more than your pet dog is surprising in his or her ability to distinguish between your friends and strangers.
But someone might say that a dog’s courtesy with guests is surprising, or that it ought at least to be remarked on that such profound connections between two species can happen at all. (It should be surprising, perhaps, that we can talk, and, of course, some philosophers have been surprised.)
Consider, for example, what happens when you train a wolf, or what happens at least when I train a wolf. The wolf, or coyote, may sit, heel, stay, come when called and so forth. But a wolf doesn’t respect our language, and his behavior can be accounted for pretty well with a stimulus-response model, from our point of view if not from the wolf’s. The wolf may also become fond of me in some fashion or another, but I can’t use him as a guard dog. Not only will he not distinguish particularly between family, criminals and guests, he will not have the courage of a good dog, the courage that springs from the dog’s commitments to the forms and significance of our domestic virtues. The wolf’s xenophobia remains his own. With other wolves he may, of course, be respectful, noble, courageous and courteous. The wolf has wolfish social skills, but he has no human social skills, which is why we say that a wolf is a wild animal. And since human beings have for all practical purposes no wolfish social skills, the wolf regards the human being as a wild animal, and the wolf is correct. He doesn’t trust us, with perfectly good reason.
From Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name, by Vicki Hearne. (And I’m reminded somewhat of Wes Anderson’s take on The Fantastic Mr. Fox.)
When I started studying Sanskrit I made flashcard sheets in Apple’s Pages app, printed them out, and cut them by hand (PDFs are archived here). I stopped doing that when I discovered ProVoc.
ProVoc is free software for OS X. If you have a Mac and you need or want to memorize things, I recommend it. It is, basically, smart flashcards, and it is very customizable: quiz yourself from either “side” of the card, make it multiple choice or not, change the number of choices, make a delay before the choices appear, and so on. It will keep track of which cards you consistently get right and which you consistently get wrong, and you can adjust your studies accordingly. It will keep shuffling the cards you get wrong back into the pile until you get them right some given number of times. It’s really excellent. And it will let you print paper flashcards if you really want to.
I stopped bothering with paper flashcards altogether when I discovered iVocabulary for the iPhone. It replicates all of the major functionality of ProVoc in an iPhone app, and it can take all of your data directly from ProVoc. All your flashcards, all the time, in your pocket. Have a minute in line or in a waiting room? Quiz yourself real quick. It’s currently $5.99 on the App Store, and it’s a steal.
And in case anybody out there wants to use my Sanskrit materials:
The following files are viewable with ProVoc or iVocabulary, and they follow the order of introduction in Beginning Sanskrit: A Practical Course Based on Graded Reading and Exercises, second edition, by Dermot Killingley.
First, all of the vocabulary, with Sanskrit in Devanagari.
Second, I created a transliterated version (IAST) for use with iVocabulary, since the implementation of Devanagari on the iPhone—which renders the characters beautifully—is just flawed enough to be maddening. I hope Apple fixes it soon. (I also put up a test page to check quickly if a system is making this mistake or not.)
Lastly, I made one just with the Devanagari characters (no words) as a sample, which might be useful to anyone just learning the script.
I do emphatically recommend the software regardless of what you’re studying.
UPDATE: New versions of iOS have fully implemented Devanagari, which is now rendered as it should be. If your iPhone or iPad or iPod Touch is messing up Devanagari, do an OS upgrade through iTunes. I’ll leave the transliterated file here in case anybody has further use of it, but it’s no longer necessary as it was.