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Five years ago we bought a house built in 1988 in the town of Bedrock, Indiana — a town that met all of our qualifications of having a drive-up restaurant, a stone quarry where I could get a job, and very lenient laws about street legality of vehicles. When we moved in, there was an electric fridge in the kitchen: We sold that as soon as we could. Now we have a period-appropriate bird that waves a fan at our food to keep it cool. Before the first wave of that fan I had to spend two weeks teaching the bird to look a guest in the eye, shrug his wings, and say, “It’s a living.” Most of the time he just makes car alarm sounds and plucks out his own feathers.
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In a fascinating article called “The Japanese Preschool’s Pedagogy of Peripheral Participation,”, Akiko Hayashi and Joseph Tobin describe a twofold strategy commonly deployed in Japan to deal with preschoolers’ conflicts: machi no hoiku and mimamoru. The former means “caring by waiting”; the second means “standing guard.” When children come into conflict, the teacher makes sure the students know that she is present, that she is watching — she may even add, kamisama datte miterun, daiyo (the gods too are watching) — but she does not intervene unless absolutely necessary. Even if the children start to fight she may not intervene; that will depend on whether a child is genuinely attempting to hurt another or the two are halfheartedly “play-fighting.”
The idea is to give children every possible opportunity to resolve their own conflicts — even past the point at which it might, to an American observer, seem that a conflict is irresolvable. This requires patient waiting; and of course one can wait too long — just as one can intervene too quickly. The mimamoru strategy is meant to reassure children that their authorities will not allow anything really bad to happen to them, though perhaps some unpleasant moments may arise. But those unpleasant moments must be tolerated, else how will the children learn to respond constructively and effectively to conflict — conflict which is, after all, inevitable in any social environment? And if children don’t begin to learn such responses in preschool when will they learn it? Imagine if at university, or even in the workplace, they had developed no such abilities and were constantly dependent on authorities to ease every instance of social friction. What a mess that would be.
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Books don’t change your life. At most, if they are good, they can hurt and bring confusion.
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[gallery] deckerlibrary:
Believe it or not, these vibrant images are not silkscreened, instead they are examples of pochoir, a refined stencil-based printmaking technique popular in the late 19th century through the 1930’s originating in Paris.From Kaleidoscope: Ornements Abstraits by Ad Verneuil (NK1535 .V47 Cage).
To see anything in our special collections, please ask a reference librarian for assistance.
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Indeed, the Post article is really a critique of Hillary Clinton for not doing enough to supply fellow Democrats with thoughts not their own to parrot on national TV. She’s shirking some of the basics of public deception! Is she really ready to run? Had Team Clinton acted to supply political allies with typical talking points, the article wouldn’t have been written. No one would’ve thought it newsworthy.
This post by Conor Friedersdorf is especially interesting because of the way it points out, brings to consciousness, a nearly-universal betrayal of responsibility that almost everyone knows about but — and this is Conor’s point — rarely considers.
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[gallery] I don’t yet know what I think about hypothes.is, but this drawing of Vannevar Bush’s Memex in their video is great.
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Religion Comes
Religion comes from our pity for humans They are too weak to live without divine protection. Too weak to listen to the screeching noise of the turning of infernal wheels. Who among us would accept a universe in which there was not one voice Of compassion, pity, understanding? To be human is to be completely alien amid the galaxies. Which is sufficient reason for erecting, together with others, the temples of an unimaginable mercy.
— Czeslaw Milosz
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What we learned from USA's friendlies with Brazil and Peru
What we learned from USA’s friendlies with Brazil and Peru
Not sure how much we learned, but we received further confirmation that the USMNT has made zero progress in the Klinsmann era and had probably regressed a bit. Has U.S. men’s soccer, as a much larger and more complex endeavor, improved? I see no reason to think that it has. I think we may well be looking at a significant period in which the USMNT sinks deeper into mediocrity.
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[gallery] Images from a newly illustrated edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
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But this is not an argument for Trump as a serious presidential candidate. It is really no argument at all. It is catharsis masquerading as principle, venting and resentment pretending to be some kind of higher argument. Every principle used to defend Trump is subjective, graded on a curve. Trump is like a cat trained to piss in a human toilet. It’s amazing! It’s remarkable! Yes, yes, it is: for a cat. But we don’t judge humans by the same standard.