RSS
Commenter Mike Sylwester writes:
My wife and I go to garage sales on most weekends, and I often see grade-school reading books for sale. Browsing through them, I often see stories written for the purpose of “including” ethnic minorities, and these stories are sprinkled with such useless foreign words.
I recommend a book titled Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction is Undermining Our Children’s Ability to Read, Write, and Reason, written by Sandra Stotsky, a research associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
One of her criticisms is that multi-cultural reading books provide stories with useless vocabulary and even phonetic letters. Here is an example from a sixth-grade reading book, a story that is inclusive for Native Americans:
Tahcawin had packed the parleche cases with clothing and food and strapped them to a travois made of two trailing poles with a skin net stretched between them. Another travois lay on the ground ready for the new tipi.
Chano was very happy when Tasinagi suggested the three of them ride up to their favorite hills for the last time.
As the three of them rode along, Tasinai called Chano’s attention to the two large birds circling overhead. They were Waŋbli, the eagle. Chano knew they were sacred to his people and that they must never be killed.
He looked at the eagle feather in his father’s hair, a sign of bravery and wondered why it was that the Lakotas as well as many other Indians held Waŋbli, the eagle, in such great respect. Someday he would ask his father about this.
So, this reading challenges sixth-graders to learn the French-Canadian-Indian words parleche, travois and Waŋbli. And, yes, the last word’s third letter is ŋ.
Here’s how I read this:
Tawhatever had packed the parchesi cases with clothing and food and strapped them to a trawhat made of two trailing poles with a skin net stretched between them. Do I have to finish this? Another trasomething lay on the ground ready for the new tipixnay. My eyes are glazing over.
China was very happy when Ta-Nehisi suggested the three of them ride up to their favorite hills for the last time. When is there going to be fighting?
As the three of them rode along, Tasmania called Guapo’s attention to the two large birds circling overhead. They were Waŋwhatthehell, the eagle. Chapo knew they were sacred to his people and that they must never be killed. Hey, kid. You know you want to. Kill the eagle. Do it.
He looked at the eagle feather in his father’s hair, a sign of bravery and wondered why it was that the Lakotas as well as many other Indians held Wombley, the eagle, in such great respect. Someday he would ask his father about this. But he knew deep in his heart that the answer would be as skull-crushingly boring as everything else in my reader.
And you just know that by the time today’s kids have kids, that the People Who Decide These Things will have decided by 2040 that “tipi” is a totally racist way to spell that word and have gone back to spelling it “teepee” to be sensitive. So today’s youth will grow up to be just as clueless as today’s adults at helping their kids with their homework.
“Hey kid. You know you want to. Kill the eagle. Do it.”
I choked on my drink.
Wow, that’s bad.
When I was in elementary school, they would just put a “Juan” or two into word problems.
Is this like saying “squashes”?
I thought the plural of Lakota, is, Lakota?
I can’t tell you how much 12-YO me would prefer Steve’s writing to the original. As a class of 2002 (high school), I’d say I was close to the bleeding edge of this bullshit; probably half what we were assigned was complete multi-cult indoctrination. I even realized it at the time (though it was, as I think is fair, inchoate). I can only imagine the hell that it is today.
In fact, as I recall, sixth grade is precisely when this garbage starting at the elite k-12 preparatory school I attended. I stopped giving money last year after witnessing a small portion of the garbage.
Did anyone else laugh at this post?
America has become a truly ridiculous country, but there’s a lot of comic value in this. This country is just so funny in so many ways. It’s sad, but it’s humorous too.
Regardless of the ridiculous names (Tawhatever) and nonsensical words (travois) there is something else wrong here. This passage is simply boring and devoid of any sort of genuine action or emotion. I had a hard enough time getting through a few paragraphs. Who could read a book like this? Not a kid. Maybe a pretentious, annoying adult.
I’ll contrast this with what happened when I recently bought my 6-year-old nephew some books I used to love by authors Roald Dahl and Beverly Cleary. When the books arrived in the mail, I thumbed through them and found myself engrossed in them — much to my surprise. These authors could write! No wonder that as a kid I loved to read. The characters came alive on the pages and the situations seemed real. And when the situations weren’t real (like the fantasies in the Dahl books) they had an undercurrent of emotional reality.
The book quoted above seems less like an actual book and more like a propaganda piece, designed not to entertain or enlighten but to force someone into a specific mode of thinking. It’s the literary equivalent of lecturing about eating vegetables. I’m thankful in grew up in an ear when we got to read real books.
Except it's worse. A child might eat its broccoli in the hope of getting ice cream afterwards. But in this case there's no promise of literary ice cream after the broccoli. If's just broccoli followed by more broccoli.
But I liked our host's cheerful realization that kids will inject their own minds into the texts.
The point he missed is that the young reader would also be enthusiastically text-foraging for a Propagandon elementary particle/apple to offer Teacher, who as he reads is speaking in the background.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss2hULhXf04
Even by the time I got to high school, we still read books from the English Canon without the overlay of Leftist critical theory, including plenty of George Orwell and Flannery O'Conner. The obligatory reading of To Kill a Mockingbird was the worst it ever got, and even then we weren't white-guilted to death.
I find it hard to believe that so much has changed in such a short time. I would like to know what really is going on in these schools on a day-to-day basis.
Exhibit A of why popular libsoft publications like Slate, New Yorker, The Atlantic, that actually have to compete for readers and clicks, are as bad as the tech companies that they routinely bash when it comes to hiring NAMs – actually worse, since writing for the Internet requires no special training or credentials and these magazines can recruit anyone they want.
Not just to keep the editorial meetings from devolving into turf battles, not just because gifted, mass-appeal NAM writers can spark bidding wars, but also to keep the content lively.
Was that character nasal n?
Anyway, this could be a good story to give actual Lakota kids. Black kids could read passages about slavery and MLK and white kids something about regattas.
I also cracked up (unfortunately not all the way out loud) at the 2nd version of this. I have a kid who'll be starting school soon, and I wonder if homeschooling is the only way that isn't a version of child abuse. We had to read PuddingHead Wilson in high school, but that was the worst of it that I can recall.
We think that Soviet children were indoctrinated with their ideology but I’ve seen some Soviet children’s TV from the ’70s and ’80s and there’s a lot less agitprop in it than there is in this stuff.
The reviews of “Hidden Figures” , the movie about how black women sent us to the moon, have been more adulatory and less skeptical than what might have run in Pravda back in the day:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/22/movies/hidden-figures-review.html?_r=0
Not one review expresses any skepticism about the movie’s version of history. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Simon Legree was a more full rounded human than some of the white characters in this movie. But saintly black women, assisted by a few rare goodwhites, overcame all obstacles and sent us to the moon. You KNOW that blacks will be demanding that this film get every Academy Award this year – anything less is racism.
John Derbyshire has a good name for these kind of movies: "black grievance porn."
http://takimag.com/article/the_romance_of_american_blackness_john_derbyshire/print#axzz4Ukt3FfGo
If black women really got us to the moon, we'd have already heard so much about it we would be sick of it. What is the explanation for why these women haven't been all over every Wheaties box, black history month poster and Jeopardy 1600 dollar clue since 1969? We're supposed to believe that the government kept it a secret for like 50 years because what NASA was run by the KKK?
But I predict that the film will make money overall because every library and school will buy a copy (just like BoaN) because Raaaaacism.
Books for young children are crap. Period.
To learn to read you need scientifically designed books that will cover, say, the most common 100 words in the English language, the most common 500 words, and so on.
Alternatively, you need stories and illustrations that children and their parents can enjoy reading together, like Winnie the Pooh, or Peter Rabbit, not politically correct multiculti propaganda.
It seems to me that all the good books for children were written by British authors like Edith Nesbit, Enid Blyton, Daniel Defoe, George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, H. Rider Haggard, Ian Hay, A.A. Milne, Beatrice Potter, Rudyard Kipling, and so on. OK, I grew up in Britain, so I am highly prejudiced.
But there is a huge difference between Animal Farm, which can be enjoyed on at least three levels, as a satire on the Russian revolution, a general commentary on human nature, or as a charming and amusing tale of farmyard animals suitable for children, or Robinson Crusoe, and this kind of propaganda about the nobility of native American lesbian transgender single parents which nobody is going to find interesting or inspiring.
But US schools seem to avoid the classics, often for quite absurd reasons, like the first chapter of Peter Rabbit mentions his father having been caught in Mr. McGregor’s garden and put into a pie, raising themes of murder, cannibalism, and goodness knows what else in the minds of our delicate children.
By the way, my eight-year-old daughter today reported a terrible nightmare. It wasn’t about eating rabbits, but she dreamt that she was in Walmart and had a huge cart of toys, but no credit card. I hope she will get over the trauma, but I suspect it could get worse before it gets better.
Now you can say "You've read the book, you've seen the movie, now eat the cast"
Very good in a mustard sauce.
When I was growing up, “tipi” was just “teepee.”
Apparently, it’s offensive to use the term “Eskimo.” The new correct term is “Inuit.”
Seriously, what’s the obsession with changing names? I just don’t get it.
“Brontosauras” are now “brachiosauras.”
By the way, here’s a funny blog post from Steve Sailer about this.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/06/dinosaurs-of-bronto.html
"Dino of Bronto."
Peking - Beijing
Which is what is happening now. I notice more and more people pausing to search for words because they're afraid of offending someone -- which can possibly lead to being socially ostracized or worse. This wasn't happening in the '80s and '90s. I blame Jesse Jackson and his demand that people say "African American." That opened the floodgates.
As for "Brontosauras," there's a great old song by the UK rock band the Move with that title. In the effort to beat back political correctness, I urge everyone to find the video on YouTube and crank up this proto-metal/glam rock tune LOUD!
On the subject of the Red Indian being called a "Native American". Owing to the films I watched when I was younger I had the impression that Red Indians were brave, if not reckless, honourable, men of their word, who valiantly fought the white settlers and lost no-one's respect in defeat, and their squaws were strongindependentwomen. Native Americans, according to the media stereotype, however, are lazy, unemployed, and alcoholic. The Left don't want Red Indian people to feel proud about who they are which is why they want to remind them that they're Native Americans and not Red Indians.
Apparently, it's offensive to use the term "Eskimo." The new correct term is "Inuit."
Seriously, what's the obsession with changing names? I just don't get it.
"Brontosauras" are now "brachiosauras."
By the way, here's a funny blog post from Steve Sailer about this.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/06/dinosaurs-of-bronto.html
How about this.
“Dino of Bronto.”
You don't hear much about them anymore. I often wondered why, but I think Steve Sailer might have the answer.Remember the Native American war cry? You don't see that much on tv anymore.
Except, apparently, from Trump supporters.
Watch this. Funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCUyVrukN6M
Well, I completely agree with the premise, although I note that looking up the word “travois” was essential to properly enjoying books like “Kit Carson, Mountain Man” which I read in grade school in the 1960′s.
You’ll find much more instructive examples in middle school math books (like the ones my kids were forced to use) that start each chapter with vocabulary words in Spanish! Yup. Math is its own language, and it’s bad enough to try to use English words to teach it, but to introduce Spanish? Are you kidding me?
It could be worse – your kid’s teacher might be reading the “Social Justice Math” website:
http://www.radicalmath.org/main.php?id=SocialJusticeMath
The Saxon Math textbooks were really good. But in order to get adopted by states they needed more diversity. Because it was just straightforward math with no pictures or other fluff, Saxon put these ridiculously ethnic names into his word problems. That was his answer. Kind of a great FU
We used to buy up as many used ones as we could because they got bought out by Houghton Mifflin and began changing into normal bullshit textbooks
To learn to read you need scientifically designed books that will cover, say, the most common 100 words in the English language, the most common 500 words, and so on.
Alternatively, you need stories and illustrations that children and their parents can enjoy reading together, like Winnie the Pooh, or Peter Rabbit, not politically correct multiculti propaganda.
It seems to me that all the good books for children were written by British authors like Edith Nesbit, Enid Blyton, Daniel Defoe, George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, H. Rider Haggard, Ian Hay, A.A. Milne, Beatrice Potter, Rudyard Kipling, and so on. OK, I grew up in Britain, so I am highly prejudiced.
But there is a huge difference between Animal Farm, which can be enjoyed on at least three levels, as a satire on the Russian revolution, a general commentary on human nature, or as a charming and amusing tale of farmyard animals suitable for children, or Robinson Crusoe, and this kind of propaganda about the nobility of native American lesbian transgender single parents which nobody is going to find interesting or inspiring.
But US schools seem to avoid the classics, often for quite absurd reasons, like the first chapter of Peter Rabbit mentions his father having been caught in Mr. McGregor's garden and put into a pie, raising themes of murder, cannibalism, and goodness knows what else in the minds of our delicate children.
By the way, my eight-year-old daughter today reported a terrible nightmare. It wasn't about eating rabbits, but she dreamt that she was in Walmart and had a huge cart of toys, but no credit card. I hope she will get over the trauma, but I suspect it could get worse before it gets better.
Plenty of great American books for children to read: Call of the Wild, Little Women, Tom Sawyer, Have Spacesuit-Will Travel, A Wrinkle in Time,Johnny Tremain, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Edward Eager’s Tales of Magic, Howard Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, etc, etc
"Riding Down from Bangor"
http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/bangor/english/e_bangor
"Dino of Bronto."
By the way, have any of you noticed that hardly anyone talks about Native Americans these days. In the past, they were glamorized by academia, and media. They were also highly glamorized by tv and movies (Cowboys and Indians, the Crying Indian, Bonanza, Peter Pan, Dances with Wolves, Lone Ranger and Tono, Lewis and Clark, Squanto, Pocahontas, etc).
You don’t hear much about them anymore. I often wondered why, but I think Steve Sailer might have the answer.
Remember the Native American war cry? You don’t see that much on tv anymore.
Except, apparently, from Trump supporters.
Watch this. Funny.
It would invite too many favorable comparisons with the Palestinians. Native Americans have receded from popular view roughly in tandem with the increase of jewish colonists in the West Bank.
Somewhat related, did you know the Constitution was inspired by Indians? I read that line of BS from my universtity alumni newsletter. I still don't regret my decision to stop donating.
One reason is that nowadays the worthiness of a group for SJWs and their areas of influence is directly proportional to the group's perceived distance from, and the perceived threat that it poses, to mainstream American and Western culture. That's why Muslims are currently way out on top in SJW and media concern. Various other groups are way behind them and register slightly, but the ones that are stoic, tragic, and just need some help, like Australian Aboriginals, Native Americans, etc. absolutely don't register.
Try some of African stories, that’s where the real fun begins.
Johnny Tremain was a good book.
I don’t think this is a very big mystery. The object is to be able to scold people, and you can’t do that when they’re using the right words. So you change them up from time to time. It doesn’t hurt that the people driving this stuff are (((linguistically gifted))).
Orwell wrote a rather interesting essay about American Children’s literature:
“Riding Down from Bangor”
http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/bangor/english/e_bangor
Anyway, this could be a good story to give actual Lakota kids. Black kids could read passages about slavery and MLK and white kids something about regattas.
“… and white kids something about regattas.” Or, we could just tune it all out with tiny little near-invisible ear buds and listen to Regatta de Blanc by The Police. If I were that kid I would want ear buds with decent woofers though for Sting’s pounding bass, but that’s just me.
I also cracked up (unfortunately not all the way out loud) at the 2nd version of this. I have a kid who’ll be starting school soon, and I wonder if homeschooling is the only way that isn’t a version of child abuse. We had to read PuddingHead Wilson in high school, but that was the worst of it that I can recall.
My son just signed up for an English class at the local JC. This is a writing class and it has 3 books for the semester. One by Judith Butler called Precarious Life, another by Michelle Alexander called The New Jim Crow and a third called Voices From Chernobyl.
I looked them up and discovered that Judith Butler exemplifies everything that is wrong with the world, everywhere. Alexander is an ACLU lawyer/professor who thanks young, black men in prison is a racist conspiracy. The Chernobyl one sounds interesting, but mostly just a shock/horror/conspiracy feast. All three female, BTW.
So this is what your kid will be training to read and understand. Oh, and these courses are REQUIRED for graduation. He may get a different class ultimately, but he still has to fulfill certain English credits.
The inclusion of the French-Canadian-Indian words is contrived, and your revision of the text is very funny, but I don’t find the content that boring. I think many kids would find this a palatable reading assignment. Or is the point that the language is too difficult?
One of her criticisms is that multi-cultural reading books provide stories with useless vocabulary and even phonetic letters
That sounds reasonable for muddling young children’s reading comprehension skills, but the provided example is for 6th graders. Have their average reading skills fallen that low, or are you perhaps underestimating them? Many kids at that age can (or used to be able to?) handle books like The Hobbit, the Chronicles of Narnia, and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea; surely they can handle some useless vocabulary and awkward syntax.
“Old Yeller” is a really good book for kids (adults, too).
You don't hear much about them anymore. I often wondered why, but I think Steve Sailer might have the answer.Remember the Native American war cry? You don't see that much on tv anymore.
Except, apparently, from Trump supporters.
Watch this. Funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCUyVrukN6M
By the way, have any of you noticed that hardly anyone talks about Native Americans these days. In the past, they were glamorized by academia, and media.
It would invite too many favorable comparisons with the Palestinians. Native Americans have receded from popular view roughly in tandem with the increase of jewish colonists in the West Bank.
So, if history repeats itself, in 150 years, the Palestinian-Israelis will be joining the IDF in droves.
hey, didja see that hot 19-year old Sunni Muslim girl from Tira that got killed in the Reina nightclub NYE shoot-up in Turkey?
Youse guys think she might have been shopping around for a Qatari or Emirati husband? They have a lot more money than Tira boys, believe me.
Classic. I love your arch humour, Steve; it is inimitable. I intentionally use terms like Peking, Bombay, i just to piss off leftists; I completely agree with your refusal to constantly change terminology, spellings, etc.
Because fuck ‘em, that’s why.
And even necessarily banal, simple readers can be made interesting. Dick and Jane running and playing with a ball; Mr. Fig and his animal friends—they did things. I could relate to the former and I was interested in the latter. What small child gives a shit about the alien nuances of the Japanese and the Lakota? Even Japanese and Lakotan kids don’t care about this corny stuff, I’ll warrant, just as Jewish kids notoriously hate Hebrew school and all it entails.
Small children don't enjoy folktales and myths?
Oh, man, Autochthon, I do exactly the same. How about Burma? True, I've never met anyone from there, but Myanmar - what the f.....?
Your first reason (don't want to write it, as I am being "moderated" at this point*) is a good one, but how about this: Do people in Burma make an effort to pronounce, say, Winnemucca or French Lick, the correct way? Mexicans say Nueva York, and the Chinese say whatever they can pronounce to sound somewhat like the name - at least they are not too lazy to make the effort. Chinese would say "See At Too" for Seattle because that's the closest they can come. More power too em all - it's their business what they call a place, but I'll also be danged if I'm gonna say Tai-freeking-Wan instead of the standard Formosa.
How about the Congo? What are they calling that now?
I mean, right??
* What does it take to become unmoderated - a real email address? I'll do it if I must.
I use them because they were in use when I was a child. And if they were good enough for Kipling, they're good enough for me.
With all due respect, I think it's a mistake to do anything deliberately to piss off leftists. That grants them more time and attention than they merit. If we view life from a traditionalist perspective, we will offend leftists naturally and effortlessly without having to spend time actually thinking about them.
To learn to read you need scientifically designed books that will cover, say, the most common 100 words in the English language, the most common 500 words, and so on.
Alternatively, you need stories and illustrations that children and their parents can enjoy reading together, like Winnie the Pooh, or Peter Rabbit, not politically correct multiculti propaganda.
It seems to me that all the good books for children were written by British authors like Edith Nesbit, Enid Blyton, Daniel Defoe, George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, H. Rider Haggard, Ian Hay, A.A. Milne, Beatrice Potter, Rudyard Kipling, and so on. OK, I grew up in Britain, so I am highly prejudiced.
But there is a huge difference between Animal Farm, which can be enjoyed on at least three levels, as a satire on the Russian revolution, a general commentary on human nature, or as a charming and amusing tale of farmyard animals suitable for children, or Robinson Crusoe, and this kind of propaganda about the nobility of native American lesbian transgender single parents which nobody is going to find interesting or inspiring.
But US schools seem to avoid the classics, often for quite absurd reasons, like the first chapter of Peter Rabbit mentions his father having been caught in Mr. McGregor's garden and put into a pie, raising themes of murder, cannibalism, and goodness knows what else in the minds of our delicate children.
By the way, my eight-year-old daughter today reported a terrible nightmare. It wasn't about eating rabbits, but she dreamt that she was in Walmart and had a huge cart of toys, but no credit card. I hope she will get over the trauma, but I suspect it could get worse before it gets better.
You must have an EdD.
It’s not just the multiculturalism. When I was in 6th grade I had to read a book about a near-sighted hillbilly kid who was made to perform in his family’s country band. It was such an awful slog.
Schools seem to revel in assigning stories about dysfunctional people.
I suspect kids would prefer stories where the characters have some agency and resourcefulness, (i.e. classic adventure stories).
Jerry Pournelle, who comments on this sort of thing frequently on his blog, recently re-released a classic reader to combat this problem. I wonder if it has had much success penetrating the market.
Kind of like the way there are millions of dollars spent on special ed but none on gifted and talented, because...well, the G&T crowd would be pale and jaundiced, and people might start to notice.
Sorry not buying the premise of this post.
My little 9 or 10 year old brain didn’t have a problem wrapping my head around this:
” We made a most imposing and awe-inspiring spectacle as we strung out across the yellow landscape; the two hundred and fifty ornate and brightly colored chariots, preceded by an advance guard of some two hundred mounted warriors and chieftains riding five abreast and one hundred yards apart, and followed by a like number in the same formation, with a score or more of flankers on either side; the fifty extra mastodons, or heavy draught animals, known as zitidars, and the five or six hundred extra thoats of the warriors running loose within the hollow square formed by the surrounding warriors. The gleaming metal and jewels of the gorgeous ornaments of the men and women, duplicated in the trappings of the zitidars and thoats, and interspersed with the flashing colors of magnificent silks and furs and feathers, lent a barbaric splendor to the caravan which would have turned an East Indian potentate green with envy.
The enormous broad tires of the chariots and the padded feet of the animals brought forth no sound from the moss-covered sea bottom; and so we moved in utter silence, like some huge phantasmagoria, except when the stillness was broken by the guttural growling of a goaded zitidar, or the squealing of fighting thoats. The green Martians converse but little, and then usually in monosyllables, low and like the faint rumbling of distant thunder. ”
Why to this day I still know what imaginary words like Jeddak, Thoat, Thern, Banth, Warhoon, and Thark mean.
I don’t think the kids are going to have trouble tracking tipi and whatnot. Heck my 7 or 8 year old brain happily mastered further imaginary words like kryptonite, cosmic cubes, adamantium, vibranium, inertron, and lots, lots more.
It's the alien vocabulary and the vapid writing (providing no incentive to engage with said alien vocabulary) which are together stultifying. Reread Steve's satire: it conveys this synergy perfectly.
I'm reminded of the internet chestnut about a boy and girl doing a tandem writing assignment in which they take turns writing paragraphs in a single story.
I think it's foul to feed children faux culture bullshit packaged as real, as an emotional support and jobs program for third tier writers and unemployable right-thinkers. If sixth graders are slow to read, give them more time to learn, not social lessons appropriate for a child several years younger. It is degrading.
Someone please explain the plot of The Girl in a Swing to me.
Not the meaning per se (but that is helpful), but even just what the basic events of the story are? Did Karin kill her baby? Why? Why is she into the nebishy Englishman?
Then there is the suspense part where it becomes supernatural.
Of course she doesn't get away with it, but I won't give the ending for the sake of those who haven't read it.
I found one part unconvincing: she is presented as beautiful, charming, etc. Random men admire her. The man she marries (after disposing of her daughter) is completely smitten.
My real life experience in these matters is that very few women would take a single offhand remark as a reason for murder. Sure, he didn't want the baggage, but he wanted her desperately and in real life he would have come around. Or she would have had her pick with one of these various other men who found her so attractive.
It's still a good read. But when I read it years ago when my own children were young I found it very disturbing.
Good to see I’m not the only one who saw the headline and thought of “Johnny Tremain,” the Newberry Medal-winning classic by the author of… “Oh Genteel Lady” and “A Mirror for Witches”—ah well, nobody bats 1.000
Considering that its writer was in fact one Esther Forbes — great name — I’m now wondering if the suffocating feminization of K-12 is the result of mixed-sex classrooms primarily, or just another downstream mutation caused by the multi-cult Will To Blandeur? Which of course has prospered & thrived under its puppeteer, globocapitalist corporatethink. “One World, One Market”
Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O’er the grave where our hero we buried.
We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning;
By the struggling moonbeam’s misty light
And the lantern dimly burning.
No useless coffin enclosed his breast,
Nor in sheet nor in shroud we wound him,
But he lay like a warrior taking his rest
With his martial cloak around him.
Few and short were the prayers we said,
And we spoke not a word of sorrow;
But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead,
And we bitterly thought of the morrow.
We thought, as we hollowed his narrow bed
And smoothed down his lonely pillow,
That the foe and the stranger would tread o’er his head,
And we far away on the billow!
Lightly they’ll talk of the spirit that’s gone
And o’er his cold ashes upbraid him,
But little he’ll reck, if they let him sleep on
In the grave where a Briton has laid him.
But half of our heavy task was done
When the clock struck the hour for retiring;
And we heard the distant and random gun
That the foe was sullenly firing.
Slowly and sadly we laid him down,
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,
But left him alone with his glory.
even poorer than we were, and it was tough
for us getting balls."
RE: Getting boys to read
In terms of fiction, give them the kinds of books that boys like:Johnny Tremain(AKA, the book that even Bart Simpson loved), Starman Jones, Robert E Howard’s Conan stories, Citizen of the Galaxy, The Lord of the Rings, the Sherlock Holmes Canon,Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter series, Jack London’s “To Build A Fire,” Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game,” etc. For that matter, there are hardcover omnibus editions of Silver Age Marvel superheroes available these days.I bought a used Lee-Ditko Spider-Man Omnibus for my grade-school age nephew a while back, and he went bonkers for it.According to my brother, he spent a whole weekend up in his room doing nothing except reading it.
In terms of non-fiction, hell, any number of popular works on science and history written back in the bad, old, pre-’70s America. I remember just poring over some popular history of the Roman Empire that was published in the ’50s when I was around 12.I just loved all the little facts about the legions, types of armor used ( lorica segmentata was my favorite, naturally), etc
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, multiculturalism doesn’t work.
Google trends says teepee is becoming more popular over tipi since 2004. Maybe tipi was a fad PC spelling that is now dying out.
Apparently, it's offensive to use the term "Eskimo." The new correct term is "Inuit."
Seriously, what's the obsession with changing names? I just don't get it.
"Brontosauras" are now "brachiosauras."
By the way, here's a funny blog post from Steve Sailer about this.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/06/dinosaurs-of-bronto.html
“Seriously, what’s the obsession with changing names?”
Peking – Beijing
Because fuck 'em, that's why.
And even necessarily banal, simple readers can be made interesting. Dick and Jane running and playing with a ball; Mr. Fig and his animal friends—they did things. I could relate to the former and I was interested in the latter. What small child gives a shit about the alien nuances of the Japanese and the Lakota? Even Japanese and Lakotan kids don't care about this corny stuff, I'll warrant, just as Jewish kids notoriously hate Hebrew school and all it entails.
What small child gives a shit about the alien nuances of the Japanese and the Lakota?
Small children don’t enjoy folktales and myths?
To learn to read you need scientifically designed books that will cover, say, the most common 100 words in the English language, the most common 500 words, and so on.
Alternatively, you need stories and illustrations that children and their parents can enjoy reading together, like Winnie the Pooh, or Peter Rabbit, not politically correct multiculti propaganda.
It seems to me that all the good books for children were written by British authors like Edith Nesbit, Enid Blyton, Daniel Defoe, George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, H. Rider Haggard, Ian Hay, A.A. Milne, Beatrice Potter, Rudyard Kipling, and so on. OK, I grew up in Britain, so I am highly prejudiced.
But there is a huge difference between Animal Farm, which can be enjoyed on at least three levels, as a satire on the Russian revolution, a general commentary on human nature, or as a charming and amusing tale of farmyard animals suitable for children, or Robinson Crusoe, and this kind of propaganda about the nobility of native American lesbian transgender single parents which nobody is going to find interesting or inspiring.
But US schools seem to avoid the classics, often for quite absurd reasons, like the first chapter of Peter Rabbit mentions his father having been caught in Mr. McGregor's garden and put into a pie, raising themes of murder, cannibalism, and goodness knows what else in the minds of our delicate children.
By the way, my eight-year-old daughter today reported a terrible nightmare. It wasn't about eating rabbits, but she dreamt that she was in Walmart and had a huge cart of toys, but no credit card. I hope she will get over the trauma, but I suspect it could get worse before it gets better.
I can never think of “Watership Down” without being reminded of a wonderful meal I had in Perigueux as the book was reaching peak hype.
Now you can say “You’ve read the book, you’ve seen the movie, now eat the cast”
Very good in a mustard sauce.
To the list of American children’s literature (well this is the stuff I read as a child):
H.P. Lovecraft (a lot of stuff here)
Conan
The Dying Earth books (Vance is a great wordsmith, as good as Lloyd Alexander to me)
Kull
Tarzan
Little House on the Prairie
E.E. “Doc” Smith
Lots, and lots of comic books (the brits were crap at this till Alan Moore came along)
Bud, I could fill up page upon page of this stuff.
Anyway all that is genre. Personally I think of all SF and Fantasy as children’s lit for the most part, though I never bothered to mature and read stuff like Evelyn Waugh that most of the posters here seem to like.
I find this to be one of Steve's "gratuitous criticisms of all things multiculti". Seriously, someone getting harmed by weird words? If the attentions span of the early 21st century youthful reader is on the level hinted at, it's over anyway. The only engineers will be hailing from asia (better brush up on that chinese lettering, son!) while locals will busy themselves "coding" banner ads for cheap tat out of Shenzen.
Also, Ritalin for everybody!!
I enjoyed reading my father’s old schoolbooks from the 60′s and 70′s when I was a kid.
There was still a pro-American tone to them that has disappeared now. There were also fewer glassy graphics and illustrations, but the ones that were included were more helpful and well though out.
Because fuck 'em, that's why.
And even necessarily banal, simple readers can be made interesting. Dick and Jane running and playing with a ball; Mr. Fig and his animal friends—they did things. I could relate to the former and I was interested in the latter. What small child gives a shit about the alien nuances of the Japanese and the Lakota? Even Japanese and Lakotan kids don't care about this corny stuff, I'll warrant, just as Jewish kids notoriously hate Hebrew school and all it entails.
But you still use terms like “reader”. Time to take your game to the next level and stop internalizing leftist, educational establishment ideas by uncritically using their jargon.
It’s dangerously close to “tippy”, so a slip of the tongue could cause a microaggression.
Pssst. Smart soccer mom’s and Tiger mothers are giving their kids classic books to read outside school. Dr Seuss, Alice in Wonderland, and Roald Dahl for the K-1 set; Anne of Green Gables, Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, and Indian in the Cupboard for the 2 – 4 set; Harry Potter, the Hobbits, and Lord of the Rings for the 5-7 set. By eighth grade smart kids are reading well beyond grade level.
I read somewhere that literacy levels after the creation of the US public school system remained unchanged from what they were before. Maybe what we should be getting bent out of shape over is the cost of this government baby sitting service. Not what it chooses to teach to its semi-comatose inmates.
Considering that its writer was in fact one Esther Forbes -- great name -- I'm now wondering if the suffocating feminization of K-12 is the result of mixed-sex classrooms primarily, or just another downstream mutation caused by the multi-cult Will To Blandeur? Which of course has prospered & thrived under its puppeteer, globocapitalist corporatethink. "One World, One Market"
Something has definitely changed, all right. James A Michener (1907 – 1997) has a passage in one of his books (Iberia) where he talks about how his grade school teacher (a woman) made all the children choose a hero to do a presentation on. And she emphasized that this task was particularly important for the boys, that they needed to pick an exemplar of manly character, etc. Michener chose Sir John Moore. For his presentation, he memorized and recited “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna”:
Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O’er the grave where our hero we buried.
We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning;
By the struggling moonbeam’s misty light
And the lantern dimly burning.
No useless coffin enclosed his breast,
Nor in sheet nor in shroud we wound him,
But he lay like a warrior taking his rest
With his martial cloak around him.
Few and short were the prayers we said,
And we spoke not a word of sorrow;
But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead,
And we bitterly thought of the morrow.
We thought, as we hollowed his narrow bed
And smoothed down his lonely pillow,
That the foe and the stranger would tread o’er his head,
And we far away on the billow!
Lightly they’ll talk of the spirit that’s gone
And o’er his cold ashes upbraid him,
But little he’ll reck, if they let him sleep on
In the grave where a Briton has laid him.
But half of our heavy task was done
When the clock struck the hour for retiring;
And we heard the distant and random gun
That the foe was sullenly firing.
Slowly and sadly we laid him down,
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,
But left him alone with his glory.
Book reports were also an important part of our grade. In fourth grade one of our book reports was on Columbus. (We also worked in groups of three to write a movie script.) In 5th grade I recall that I did it book reports on Leif Ericson and another one on the Wright Brothers and probably another two as well. All of our subjects had to be approved by our teacher and I highly doubt that he would have approved Rosa Parks. In any event nobody did it on Rosa Parks. All of our book reports were on Heroes whom we found interesting or admired.In 9th grade we read Julius Caesar, The Pearl The Old Man and the Sea, Haikus...In 10th Grade, A comedy of errors, Macbeth, Huckelberry Finb, Lord of the Flies...The way that we came to read Lord of the Flies was actually quite interesting. We were supposed to read Animal Farm and the books were distributed on Thursday. Apparently some parents complained, for reasons that I can't guess that, so on Monday, the first day of the week that we had secular studies, our principal came in, insisted that we all put the book on our desk, went around to see that everyone had it on his desk and then collected them one by one. Apparently, he was afraid that we would keep the book by claiming that we had left it at home and read it secretly. I of course had already read it over the Sabbath. Our teacher then distributed Lord of the Flies, which I think, considering as how Simon is a Jesus figure, the teacher had chosen as a fuck you to the school, I found it pretty funny.We also took the New York Regents, PSAT and SAT tests. On my own I enjoyed doing the LSATs and similar stuff.I don't recall ever being encouraged to read. I read for pleasure and wouldn't have understood the concept being "required" to read if it had been explained to me.So in this fanatically religious Jewish school we were never subjected to any kind of PC nonsense. It might have helped that there were no girls in the class. I suspect that a large part of the emasculation of school studies is based on catering to girls over boys.Anyhow, that's my experience.
Considering that its writer was in fact one Esther Forbes -- great name -- I'm now wondering if the suffocating feminization of K-12 is the result of mixed-sex classrooms primarily, or just another downstream mutation caused by the multi-cult Will To Blandeur? Which of course has prospered & thrived under its puppeteer, globocapitalist corporatethink. "One World, One Market"
Remember when Johnny burns his hand?
“A book? Pfft.” – Bart Simpson
“I think you might like this. It’s about a boy who goes to war, his hand is deformed in an accident.” – Marge Simpson
“Deformed? Why didn’t you say so? They should call this book Johnny Deformed.” – Bart Simpson
@JackD,
John Derbyshire has a good name for these kind of movies: “black grievance porn.”
http://takimag.com/article/the_romance_of_american_blackness_john_derbyshire/print#axzz4Ukt3FfGo
My little 9 or 10 year old brain didn't have a problem wrapping my head around this:
" We made a most imposing and awe-inspiring spectacle as we strung out across the yellow landscape; the two hundred and fifty ornate and brightly colored chariots, preceded by an advance guard of some two hundred mounted warriors and chieftains riding five abreast and one hundred yards apart, and followed by a like number in the same formation, with a score or more of flankers on either side; the fifty extra mastodons, or heavy draught animals, known as zitidars, and the five or six hundred extra thoats of the warriors running loose within the hollow square formed by the surrounding warriors. The gleaming metal and jewels of the gorgeous ornaments of the men and women, duplicated in the trappings of the zitidars and thoats, and interspersed with the flashing colors of magnificent silks and furs and feathers, lent a barbaric splendor to the caravan which would have turned an East Indian potentate green with envy.
The enormous broad tires of the chariots and the padded feet of the animals brought forth no sound from the moss-covered sea bottom; and so we moved in utter silence, like some huge phantasmagoria, except when the stillness was broken by the guttural growling of a goaded zitidar, or the squealing of fighting thoats. The green Martians converse but little, and then usually in monosyllables, low and like the faint rumbling of distant thunder. "
Why to this day I still know what imaginary words like Jeddak, Thoat, Thern, Banth, Warhoon, and Thark mean.
I don't think the kids are going to have trouble tracking tipi and whatnot. Heck my 7 or 8 year old brain happily mastered further imaginary words like kryptonite, cosmic cubes, adamantium, vibranium, inertron, and lots, lots more.
Glad to see another fan of Barsoom!
One of her criticisms is that multi-cultural reading books provide stories with useless vocabulary and even phonetic letters
That sounds reasonable for muddling young children's reading comprehension skills, but the provided example is for 6th graders. Have their average reading skills fallen that low, or are you perhaps underestimating them? Many kids at that age can (or used to be able to?) handle books like The Hobbit, the Chronicles of Narnia, and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea; surely they can handle some useless vocabulary and awkward syntax.
They’ve fallen as have their parents.
My little 9 or 10 year old brain didn't have a problem wrapping my head around this:
" We made a most imposing and awe-inspiring spectacle as we strung out across the yellow landscape; the two hundred and fifty ornate and brightly colored chariots, preceded by an advance guard of some two hundred mounted warriors and chieftains riding five abreast and one hundred yards apart, and followed by a like number in the same formation, with a score or more of flankers on either side; the fifty extra mastodons, or heavy draught animals, known as zitidars, and the five or six hundred extra thoats of the warriors running loose within the hollow square formed by the surrounding warriors. The gleaming metal and jewels of the gorgeous ornaments of the men and women, duplicated in the trappings of the zitidars and thoats, and interspersed with the flashing colors of magnificent silks and furs and feathers, lent a barbaric splendor to the caravan which would have turned an East Indian potentate green with envy.
The enormous broad tires of the chariots and the padded feet of the animals brought forth no sound from the moss-covered sea bottom; and so we moved in utter silence, like some huge phantasmagoria, except when the stillness was broken by the guttural growling of a goaded zitidar, or the squealing of fighting thoats. The green Martians converse but little, and then usually in monosyllables, low and like the faint rumbling of distant thunder. "
Why to this day I still know what imaginary words like Jeddak, Thoat, Thern, Banth, Warhoon, and Thark mean.
I don't think the kids are going to have trouble tracking tipi and whatnot. Heck my 7 or 8 year old brain happily mastered further imaginary words like kryptonite, cosmic cubes, adamantium, vibranium, inertron, and lots, lots more.
Agreed. But the difference is that Burroughs inspires kids to want to learn about these alien things, and he explains their meaning in the context of a thrilling story. Two kids hitching up a travois to their (dog or horse?) to visit the old hills one last time is hardly in the same league as John Carter and Dejah Thoris!
It’s the alien vocabulary and the vapid writing (providing no incentive to engage with said alien vocabulary) which are together stultifying. Reread Steve’s satire: it conveys this synergy perfectly.
I thought the plural of Lakota, is, Lakota?
It’s Lakotae, bigot.
“Bart, I’d like you to read this copy of Johnny Tremain, it’s a book I read as a girl.” – Marge Simpson
“A book? Pfft.” – Bart Simpson
“I think you might like this. It’s about a boy who goes to war, his hand is deformed in an accident.” – Marge Simpson
“Deformed? Why didn’t you say so? They should call this book Johnny Deformed.” – Bart Simpson
America has become a truly ridiculous country, but there's a lot of comic value in this. This country is just so funny in so many ways. It's sad, but it's humorous too.
You either laugh, or you cry. And if you start crying, you will never stop.
It would invite too many favorable comparisons with the Palestinians. Native Americans have receded from popular view roughly in tandem with the increase of jewish colonists in the West Bank.
Interesting speculation. Louis Brandeis used to write about how the Ashkenazi colonists in Palestine reminded him of the Puritan settlers in 17th century New England.
Because fuck 'em, that's why.
And even necessarily banal, simple readers can be made interesting. Dick and Jane running and playing with a ball; Mr. Fig and his animal friends—they did things. I could relate to the former and I was interested in the latter. What small child gives a shit about the alien nuances of the Japanese and the Lakota? Even Japanese and Lakotan kids don't care about this corny stuff, I'll warrant, just as Jewish kids notoriously hate Hebrew school and all it entails.
“I intentionally use terms like Peking, Bombay, i just to piss off leftists; I completely agree with your refusal to constantly change terminology, spellings, etc.”
Oh, man, Autochthon, I do exactly the same. How about Burma? True, I’ve never met anyone from there, but Myanmar – what the f…..?
Your first reason (don’t want to write it, as I am being “moderated” at this point*) is a good one, but how about this: Do people in Burma make an effort to pronounce, say, Winnemucca or French Lick, the correct way? Mexicans say Nueva York, and the Chinese say whatever they can pronounce to sound somewhat like the name – at least they are not too lazy to make the effort. Chinese would say “See At Too” for Seattle because that’s the closest they can come. More power too em all – it’s their business what they call a place, but I’ll also be danged if I’m gonna say Tai-freeking-Wan instead of the standard Formosa.
How about the Congo? What are they calling that now?
I mean, right??
* What does it take to become unmoderated – a real email address? I’ll do it if I must.
Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O’er the grave where our hero we buried.
We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning;
By the struggling moonbeam’s misty light
And the lantern dimly burning.
No useless coffin enclosed his breast,
Nor in sheet nor in shroud we wound him,
But he lay like a warrior taking his rest
With his martial cloak around him.
Few and short were the prayers we said,
And we spoke not a word of sorrow;
But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead,
And we bitterly thought of the morrow.
We thought, as we hollowed his narrow bed
And smoothed down his lonely pillow,
That the foe and the stranger would tread o’er his head,
And we far away on the billow!
Lightly they’ll talk of the spirit that’s gone
And o’er his cold ashes upbraid him,
But little he’ll reck, if they let him sleep on
In the grave where a Briton has laid him.
But half of our heavy task was done
When the clock struck the hour for retiring;
And we heard the distant and random gun
That the foe was sullenly firing.
Slowly and sadly we laid him down,
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,
But left him alone with his glory.
Reading biographies in elementary school and beyond used to be a rite of passage. Men of a certain age will wax nostalgic when remembering stories about any number of famous people, whether Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig (note recent baseball theme), Paul Revere, Ethan Allen (and his Green Mountain Boys, couldn’t forget them), George Washington, Abe Lincoln and numerous others. They also had dads, uncles and men in the community to look up to, when that was neither encouraged nor discouraged, it just was.
https://www.amazon.com/Giant-Book-Strange-Sports-Stories/dp/0394932870
I remember reading a biography of James Cook when I was about 10. For the next couple of years, he became my beau ideal.
You don't hear much about them anymore. I often wondered why, but I think Steve Sailer might have the answer.Remember the Native American war cry? You don't see that much on tv anymore.
Except, apparently, from Trump supporters.
Watch this. Funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCUyVrukN6M
I agree. The more they were eliminated as mascots, one of their few public embodiments, the more they faded from memory. They didn’t exactly build many monuments to themselves to be remembered by.
Somewhat related, did you know the Constitution was inspired by Indians? I read that line of BS from my universtity alumni newsletter. I still don’t regret my decision to stop donating.
You don't hear much about them anymore. I often wondered why, but I think Steve Sailer might have the answer.Remember the Native American war cry? You don't see that much on tv anymore.
Except, apparently, from Trump supporters.
Watch this. Funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCUyVrukN6M
Ironically the left mostly wants to purge them from pop culture nowadays, with all those evil and degrading sports mascots. Native Americans are only allowed to exist in the public eye nowadays as props for radical environmentalists and white guilt racketeers.
That way it's win-win for both SJWs and White Nationalists.
In other words, they exist as mascots for white people. But only the right kind of white people. It's funny that one of the enduring images of Indians that we have is of smoking the peace pipe. Doesn't it follow -- or precede -- that the reason why they're making peace is because they were previously making war?
I skipped over to Rotten Tomatoes and read through the pro and reader reviews: they were all clapping, with no intention of stopping; the negative reviews complained that they did not go far enough in portraying the Evil.
>Hidden Figures
If black women really got us to the moon, we’d have already heard so much about it we would be sick of it. What is the explanation for why these women haven’t been all over every Wheaties box, black history month poster and Jeopardy 1600 dollar clue since 1969? We’re supposed to believe that the government kept it a secret for like 50 years because what NASA was run by the KKK?
Now our self organized Ministry of Truth is discovering the real history of such things, and, surprise surprise, women and minorities did all the heavy lifting.
Apparently, it's offensive to use the term "Eskimo." The new correct term is "Inuit."
Seriously, what's the obsession with changing names? I just don't get it.
"Brontosauras" are now "brachiosauras."
By the way, here's a funny blog post from Steve Sailer about this.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/06/dinosaurs-of-bronto.html
You’re probably thinking of Apatosaurus / Brontosaurus. Brachiosaurus has always been a distinct sauropod. I remember as a kid the “Big 3″ Jurassic sauropods: Brachiosaurus, Brontosaurus, and Diplodocus. I forgot exactly why Brontosaurus was replaced by Apatosaurus. Something to do with forgery and mismatched bones.
The curators had to clear out an entire gallery and still couldn't fit the entire animal in.
The head and six feet of neck are sticking out of the entrance to the exhibit.
Today’s children will read about how Tim Cook discovered China.
I choked on my drink.
Kid? I was thinking that.
My little 9 or 10 year old brain didn't have a problem wrapping my head around this:
" We made a most imposing and awe-inspiring spectacle as we strung out across the yellow landscape; the two hundred and fifty ornate and brightly colored chariots, preceded by an advance guard of some two hundred mounted warriors and chieftains riding five abreast and one hundred yards apart, and followed by a like number in the same formation, with a score or more of flankers on either side; the fifty extra mastodons, or heavy draught animals, known as zitidars, and the five or six hundred extra thoats of the warriors running loose within the hollow square formed by the surrounding warriors. The gleaming metal and jewels of the gorgeous ornaments of the men and women, duplicated in the trappings of the zitidars and thoats, and interspersed with the flashing colors of magnificent silks and furs and feathers, lent a barbaric splendor to the caravan which would have turned an East Indian potentate green with envy.
The enormous broad tires of the chariots and the padded feet of the animals brought forth no sound from the moss-covered sea bottom; and so we moved in utter silence, like some huge phantasmagoria, except when the stillness was broken by the guttural growling of a goaded zitidar, or the squealing of fighting thoats. The green Martians converse but little, and then usually in monosyllables, low and like the faint rumbling of distant thunder. "
Why to this day I still know what imaginary words like Jeddak, Thoat, Thern, Banth, Warhoon, and Thark mean.
I don't think the kids are going to have trouble tracking tipi and whatnot. Heck my 7 or 8 year old brain happily mastered further imaginary words like kryptonite, cosmic cubes, adamantium, vibranium, inertron, and lots, lots more.
Sure, but you think you’re average?
Schools seem to revel in assigning stories about dysfunctional people.
I suspect kids would prefer stories where the characters have some agency and resourcefulness, (i.e. classic adventure stories).
Jerry Pournelle, who comments on this sort of thing frequently on his blog, recently re-released a classic reader to combat this problem. I wonder if it has had much success penetrating the market.
I think it’s the EdD people who want everyone to feel included and want stories where the underdogs have a chance to shine.
Kind of like the way there are millions of dollars spent on special ed but none on gifted and talented, because…well, the G&T crowd would be pale and jaundiced, and people might start to notice.
That sums it up perfectly!
Except it’s worse. A child might eat its broccoli in the hope of getting ice cream afterwards. But in this case there’s no promise of literary ice cream after the broccoli. If’s just broccoli followed by more broccoli.
holy hell.
But it’s not even accurate. No way a Lakota kid would wonder why “Lakota, as well as other Indian peoples” would think anything. That’s third tier social justice grad school framing, not actual Lakota child framing.
You'll find much more instructive examples in middle school math books (like the ones my kids were forced to use) that start each chapter with vocabulary words in Spanish! Yup. Math is its own language, and it's bad enough to try to use English words to teach it, but to introduce Spanish? Are you kidding me?
It could be worse - your kid's teacher might be reading the "Social Justice Math" website:
http://www.radicalmath.org/main.php?id=SocialJusticeMath
1. Milo has six cupcakes. Leslie has two. How many cupcakes have to be redistributed for both to have the same amount?
2. After the cupcakes are redistributed, Milo triggers Leslie and she sits on two of her cupcakes, squashing them. How many cupcakes should Milo give Leslie now?
3. Milo is unwilling to check his privilege and posts nasty things about Leslie on the Internet. Each hour he sends her two more nasty tweets than before. Leslie receives nine nasty tweets. How many hours has Milo been sending nasty tweets?
4. Finally, Leslie calls her friends who run Twitter and has Milo banned. Milo then tours college campuses and makes offensive statements. For each college campus he visits, he is able to sell 50 books. He sells 3550 books. How many college campuses did Milo visit?
OK, guys, now here’s how the story continues:
But Chano knew that the Great White Chief in Washington had made possession of an eagle feather a felony crime. He knew that his father could face up to five years in the white man’s prison for possession of Waŋbli’s sacred feather.
Chano’s worst fears materialized that night. A SWAT team Joint Task Force comprised of agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Department of the Interior, acting on a tip from an informant who had seen a cell phone picture of the sacred eagle feather in his father’s hair, stormed the tipi pointing AR-15s and shouting “Get on the ground! Get on the fucking ground! Lemme see yer HANDS!”
Quaking with fright, Chano lay on the floor of the tipi with a white man’s boot upon his neck while agents handcuffed his father and confiscated Waŋbli’s sacred feather…
You'll find much more instructive examples in middle school math books (like the ones my kids were forced to use) that start each chapter with vocabulary words in Spanish! Yup. Math is its own language, and it's bad enough to try to use English words to teach it, but to introduce Spanish? Are you kidding me?
It could be worse - your kid's teacher might be reading the "Social Justice Math" website:
http://www.radicalmath.org/main.php?id=SocialJusticeMath
When someone offers up multicultural math or other such stuff, recommend them this algebra textbook by my gg grandfather’s general, a math professor at Davidson (forward by his brother in law , a VMI prof.)
Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O’er the grave where our hero we buried.
We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning;
By the struggling moonbeam’s misty light
And the lantern dimly burning.
No useless coffin enclosed his breast,
Nor in sheet nor in shroud we wound him,
But he lay like a warrior taking his rest
With his martial cloak around him.
Few and short were the prayers we said,
And we spoke not a word of sorrow;
But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead,
And we bitterly thought of the morrow.
We thought, as we hollowed his narrow bed
And smoothed down his lonely pillow,
That the foe and the stranger would tread o’er his head,
And we far away on the billow!
Lightly they’ll talk of the spirit that’s gone
And o’er his cold ashes upbraid him,
But little he’ll reck, if they let him sleep on
In the grave where a Briton has laid him.
But half of our heavy task was done
When the clock struck the hour for retiring;
And we heard the distant and random gun
That the foe was sullenly firing.
Slowly and sadly we laid him down,
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,
But left him alone with his glory.
The heroic and mock-heroic in literature tends to go in cycles, and we’re long overdue for a swing back to the heroic. Like much else, Boomer solipsism has kept that cycle constipated, but things appear to be breaking loose.
I think his point was that if you engage the passions, the mind will follow. Some slower than others, to be sure, but you’ll see progress rather than regress.
I’m ’03 from Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s high school.
Based on what I’ve heard from other people we may have been, err, “ahead” of the curve. tranny stuff, black lives matter, anything SJW–none of that seems new to me.
In my 10th grade honors English class the first two assigned books were Black Boy and Woman Warrior. Pretty hilarious in retrospect–they made sure the powers that be (who presumably don’t actually read books) would know from the titles alone this stuff would be OK and NOT problematic.
I mean, books without titles referencing the powerful narratives of the Other? In 2001? Really? They just couldn’t right then. I mean wow.
Apparently, it's offensive to use the term "Eskimo." The new correct term is "Inuit."
Seriously, what's the obsession with changing names? I just don't get it.
"Brontosauras" are now "brachiosauras."
By the way, here's a funny blog post from Steve Sailer about this.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/06/dinosaurs-of-bronto.html
“What’s the obsession with changing names?” Control the language and you control thought. Control thought and you control the people. If the people constantly have to stop themselves and search for the “proper” word, you’ve succeeded in crippling their natural way of communicating.
Which is what is happening now. I notice more and more people pausing to search for words because they’re afraid of offending someone — which can possibly lead to being socially ostracized or worse. This wasn’t happening in the ’80s and ’90s. I blame Jesse Jackson and his demand that people say “African American.” That opened the floodgates.
As for “Brontosauras,” there’s a great old song by the UK rock band the Move with that title. In the effort to beat back political correctness, I urge everyone to find the video on YouTube and crank up this proto-metal/glam rock tune LOUD!
Of course it was, and it was happening long before that. In my lifetime, the most obvious example is the change from "colored people" to "black people".
This works wonderfully with old folks, who often possess dangerous knowledge. There are constant jokes in our culture about your "racist grandma," for instance. How convenient that they have built-in excuses not to listen to people who weren't raised at a time when the people in power now got to decide what kids learn.
Your grandma could've been a Stalinist for all I know, but odds are she isn't an SJW. Which is "problematic," as they say. Good thing she says "coloreds" instead of "people of color." That way you can humor her and ignore her instead of listen to her.
I read every biography in my elementary school library. Couldn’t get enough. My favorite was George Westinghouse. Only Strange Sports stories were better.
https://www.amazon.com/Giant-Book-Strange-Sports-Stories/dp/0394932870
Anyway, this could be a good story to give actual Lakota kids. Black kids could read passages about slavery and MLK and white kids something about regattas.
It’s the phonetic character for the velar nasal, i.e. the “ng” sound in “sing”. To be honest, I don’t see why they couldn’t have used “ng” in “Wangbli” rather than that character.
https://www.amazon.com/Giant-Book-Strange-Sports-Stories/dp/0394932870
Westinghouse was a favorite and helped spur a lifelong interest in tinkering and finding out how things work. Books opened up incredible worlds and sparked imaginations.
The Wright Brothers
https://www.amazon.com/Wright-Brothers-David-McCullough/dp/1476728755
That could lead in many great directions, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Gauguin, Darwin and many others.
Yes, this is the tricky part. What many of us remember as young readers are the stories so captivating they swept us up and out of the conscious process of reading itself.
The growing reader isn’t hindered too much by encountering unfamiliar words if he’s really into the story. But when such words are added intentionally in order to further an agenda, whether it be pedagogical or ideological, it’s almost impossible for them not to intrude. That’s what makes the passage Steve parodied so bad.
Teaching reading to the point of unselfconscious fluidity is mysterious and perhaps impossible. You can give the kid the tools — especially phonics — but there’s not much evidence that you can ‘scientifically’ design reading instruction to engineer the leap from being a competent ‘mechanical’ reader to one who loses himself in a story.
Sigfried Engelmann does the best job of presenting the tools of reading in a coherent, systematic way, but even his approach takes kids only so far.
That’s true. It’s the reason why they got rid of those old-fashioned boy books about pioneers and explorers, I think…wanted boys to hate reading so they wouldn’t get anywhere in life. (I am only half joking.)
It would invite too many favorable comparisons with the Palestinians. Native Americans have receded from popular view roughly in tandem with the increase of jewish colonists in the West Bank.
No because SJW’s and, flowing from them, the pop culture at large’s concern for a group is now directly proportional to that group’s perceived distance from, and hostility to, Western civilization.
That’s why Muslims are currently at the very top, by a huge margin, of favored groups in need of ceaseless promotion as far as SJWs and the media are concerned. Native Americans represent no threat to mainstream American culture and are therefore basically as ignored as Asians are these days.
The real situation is almost the opposite of your speculation. Muslims are prominently way out on top in SJW concern, and as part of that those same SJWs have largely swallowed the whole “Palestinian” narrative.
It’s another tax on poverty and stupidity, isn’t it. Rich and intelligent kids will come out ok, but to the rest, learning confusing crap is disastrous.
Our brains understand something that we don’t: from a darwinian point of view, increasing the distance to the competition is more efficient than making sure everybody does well.
Apparently, it's offensive to use the term "Eskimo." The new correct term is "Inuit."
Seriously, what's the obsession with changing names? I just don't get it.
"Brontosauras" are now "brachiosauras."
By the way, here's a funny blog post from Steve Sailer about this.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/06/dinosaurs-of-bronto.html
Eskimo is allegedly pejorative, but I just learned that this may not be the case. The account I was familiar with, and which motivated the Canadian government to officially change the name from Eskimo to Inuit in the 1980s, was that Eskimo comes from a Cree word meaning “eaters of raw flesh”. However, apparently the actual meaning in Cree (or some Algonquian language) is either “snowshoe makers” or “people who speak a strange language”. Also, Inuit is only standard in Canada, while the Inupiat in Alaska prefer to go by “Alaska Native” or (wait for it) “Eskimo”.
Read this book:
The Wright Brothers
https://www.amazon.com/Wright-Brothers-David-McCullough/dp/1476728755
You don't hear much about them anymore. I often wondered why, but I think Steve Sailer might have the answer.Remember the Native American war cry? You don't see that much on tv anymore.
Except, apparently, from Trump supporters.
Watch this. Funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCUyVrukN6M
One of my New Year resolutions was to start on Razib Khan’s list of “edifying books”, starting with “1491″ by Charles Mann. It’s focused on pre-Columbian American cultures, but I learned a lot of interesting things about how Indians see themselves. An important takeaway was that Indians hardly ever call themselves Native Americans, which is purely the invention of white guilt. Obviously, Indians did not have a single word to describe all the different nations before European contact, any more than whites did before encountering non-whites, but they seem content with “American Indian”.
Steve, when we were in school, if a teacher had foisted that kind of garbage on us at least we could make fun of it. Whereas today any kid that tried doing what you did here would end up in big trouble — multiple counts of bullying and hate.
Also for teens looking for stories about overcoming life’s problems:
My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_8?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=clarence+thomas&sprefix=clarence%2Cstripbooks%2C229&crid=6WI4CG5TSI8B
I'm not convinced that every page is great, and I found it dragged toward the end, but the part where young Clarence and his brother Myers move in with his grandfather is great. That part has good narrative drive and I wanted to just keep reading to find out what happened next. Many lawyers probably are good wordsmiths--Judge Thomas certainly is
Especially that line "The damn vacation is over"-and young Clarence is thinking to himself it wasn't seeming like much of a vacation to him.
I can't decide if Judge Thomas (as narrator) is full of paranoia and self-pity toward the end or not. Some readers think so (I noticed the self-pity more than the paranoia). I didn't think it was a book written just to grind an axe, or for money, and maybe he did harass Anita Hill. You can't help but admire judge Thomas's grandfather.
Also, if you read carefully, Judge Thomas asserts that by the time he was in about third grade he was reading better than his grandfather, who was good jack of all trades but couldn't read without effort and apparently hadn't seen the inside of a school room much, either.
“A book? Pfft.” – Bart Simpson
“I think you might like this. It’s about a boy who goes to war, his hand is deformed in an accident.” – Marge Simpson
“Deformed? Why didn’t you say so? They should call this book Johnny Deformed.” – Bart Simpson
It’s actually a pretty interesting book, especially from the perspective of a younger boy. I really enjoyed reading it back when I was 12.
You don't hear much about them anymore. I often wondered why, but I think Steve Sailer might have the answer.Remember the Native American war cry? You don't see that much on tv anymore.
Except, apparently, from Trump supporters.
Watch this. Funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCUyVrukN6M
I have definitely noticed. It is remarkable how little Native Americans figure in the popular culture and in SJW thoughts these days.
One reason is that nowadays the worthiness of a group for SJWs and their areas of influence is directly proportional to the group’s perceived distance from, and the perceived threat that it poses, to mainstream American and Western culture. That’s why Muslims are currently way out on top in SJW and media concern. Various other groups are way behind them and register slightly, but the ones that are stoic, tragic, and just need some help, like Australian Aboriginals, Native Americans, etc. absolutely don’t register.
Oh no you didn’t just type Tom Sawyer!
My little 9 or 10 year old brain didn't have a problem wrapping my head around this:
" We made a most imposing and awe-inspiring spectacle as we strung out across the yellow landscape; the two hundred and fifty ornate and brightly colored chariots, preceded by an advance guard of some two hundred mounted warriors and chieftains riding five abreast and one hundred yards apart, and followed by a like number in the same formation, with a score or more of flankers on either side; the fifty extra mastodons, or heavy draught animals, known as zitidars, and the five or six hundred extra thoats of the warriors running loose within the hollow square formed by the surrounding warriors. The gleaming metal and jewels of the gorgeous ornaments of the men and women, duplicated in the trappings of the zitidars and thoats, and interspersed with the flashing colors of magnificent silks and furs and feathers, lent a barbaric splendor to the caravan which would have turned an East Indian potentate green with envy.
The enormous broad tires of the chariots and the padded feet of the animals brought forth no sound from the moss-covered sea bottom; and so we moved in utter silence, like some huge phantasmagoria, except when the stillness was broken by the guttural growling of a goaded zitidar, or the squealing of fighting thoats. The green Martians converse but little, and then usually in monosyllables, low and like the faint rumbling of distant thunder. "
Why to this day I still know what imaginary words like Jeddak, Thoat, Thern, Banth, Warhoon, and Thark mean.
I don't think the kids are going to have trouble tracking tipi and whatnot. Heck my 7 or 8 year old brain happily mastered further imaginary words like kryptonite, cosmic cubes, adamantium, vibranium, inertron, and lots, lots more.
“Two hundred mounted warriors and chieftains riding five abreast and one hundred yards apart” is going to immediately grab any boy’s interest. A story about some people doing nothing in particular won’t.
I’m reminded of the internet chestnut about a boy and girl doing a tandem writing assignment in which they take turns writing paragraphs in a single story.
'The cactus plant next to the spider plant shuddered. It attempted to cover its small form with its small arms and small needles. "I am plant," it said wonderingly. "I am of Earth, but for the first time, I feel myself truly plantlike. On Earth, I w as able to control my watering. I often scorned those who would water me. But they were weak, and did not see my scorn for what it was, the weak attempt of a small plant to protect itself. Not one of the weak Earth waterers would dare to water a plant if it did not wish it. But on Gor," it shuddered, "on Gor it is different. Here, those who wish to water will water their plants as they wish. But strangely, I feel myself most plantlike when I am at the mercy of a strong Gorean master, who may water me as he pleases."
Not the Chinese and Indians. They ignore that shit and go straight for the 4.0+ GPA jugular.
Steve, have you ever read Heather Has Two Mommies (1989)? It’s a kiddie picture book about a little girl whose mother is a lesbian.
The book’s author has described her motives thusly:
Yeah, I guess that makes sense.
Nowadays, Jewish kids can see their heritage reflected in such fictional characters as Arthur the Ashkenazi Aardvark, Fievel Mousekewitz, and the Rugrats.
EDIT: Arthur is not Jewish, but his best friend Francine – also an aardvark – is.
Francine the aardvark is of “Polish-Jewish descent,” according to the Arthur wiki. “She can occasionally be bossy to her friends.” (Are all of her friends aardvarks? I don’t know.)
I love writing the word aardvark. It’s so … Afrikaans-ish.
I thought Lakota was the feminine form of Lakotus. Correct me if I’m wrong.
There are so many classic kids books that giving kids boring bad stuff is deplorable.
And you can tell about 3 pages in most of the time if it’s good or not. The Indian in the Cupboard might have taken me longer in that a lot of the excellence is in how it works so many variations within the rules of how the magic cupboard works. It’s kind of like “Groundhog Day” in that the numerous ramifications under the rules are impressive.
Small children don't enjoy folktales and myths?
When I was a kid, small boys were very interested in the Sioux: Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were glamorous names.
Maybe these exceprts get much more exciting in the story's entirety, but what I read here is dull as hell.
Is "reader" leftist jargon? I did bot know that. Primer, reader, and other synoynms have neen familiar to me since my childhood in a conservative school district. I'm not sure what the political overtones of such terms may be.
It’s great. I read it when I was 11, and it got on me on a Twain jag: Life on the Mississippi ( skipped the present day chapters, but I loved the stuff where Twain talks about learning to be a riverboat pilot), The Prince and the Pauper, Roughing It, etc
[…] 1. Why Trejohnny won’t read […]
The fact that Bart Simpson loved it marks it as the ultimate books for boys.
That only works if they’re wannabees. Real Indians can have the feathers.
Just replace ‘em all with mascots derived from Europe. So, the Redskins become the Visigoths, the Braves become the Cavaliers, etc
That way it’s win-win for both SJWs and White Nationalists.
The Wright Brothers
https://www.amazon.com/Wright-Brothers-David-McCullough/dp/1476728755
Thanks, will check it out. Flying is magical.
Twain’s descriptions of German piqued my curiosity and that helped me in studying the language. Motivation can come from anywhere.
Mark Twain
Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp. One is washed about in it, hither and thither, in the most helpless way; and when at last he thinks he has captured a rule which offers firm ground to take a rest on amid the general rage and turmoil of the ten parts of speech, he turns over the page and reads, "Let the pupil make careful note of the following exceptions." He runs his eye down and finds that there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it. So overboard he goes again, to hunt for another Ararat and find another quicksand. Such has been, and continues to be, my experience. Every time I think I have got one of these four confusing "cases" where I am master of it, a seemingly insignificant preposition intrudes itself into my sentence, clothed with an awful and unsuspected power, and crumbles the ground from under me. For instance, my book inquires after a certain bird -- (it is always inquiring after things which are of no sort of consequence to anybody): "Where is the bird?" Now the answer to this question -- according to the book -- is that the bird is waiting in the blacksmith shop on account of the rain. Of course no bird would do that, but then you must stick to the book. Very well, I begin to cipher out the German for that answer. I begin at the wrong end, necessarily, for that is the German idea. I say to myself, "Regen (rain) is masculine -- or maybe it is feminine -- or possibly neuter -- it is too much trouble to look now. Therefore, it is either der (the) Regen, or die (the) Regen, or das (the) Regen, according to which gender it may turn out to be when I look. In the interest of science, I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it is masculine. Very well -- then the rain is der Regen, if it is simply in the quiescent state of being mentioned, without enlargement or discussion -- Nominative case; but if this rain is lying around, in a kind of a general way on the ground, it is then definitely located, it is doing something -- that is, resting (which is one of the German grammar's ideas of doing something), and this throws the rain into the Dative case, and makes it dem Regen. However, this rain is not resting, but is doing something actively, -- it is falling -- to interfere with the bird, likely -- and this indicates movement, which has the effect of sliding it into the Accusative case and changing dem Regen into den Regen." Having completed the grammatical horoscope of this matter, I answer up confidently and state in German that the bird is staying in the blacksmith shop "wegen (on account of) den Regen." Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark that whenever the word "wegen" drops into a sentence, it always throws that subject into the Genitive case, regardless of consequences -- and that therefore this bird stayed in the blacksmith shop "wegen des Regens."
http://www.kombu.de/twain-2.htm
I'm reminded of the internet chestnut about a boy and girl doing a tandem writing assignment in which they take turns writing paragraphs in a single story.
I’ll raise you: http://www.rdrop.com/~wyvern/data/houseplants.html
‘The cactus plant next to the spider plant shuddered. It attempted to cover its small form with its small arms and small needles. “I am plant,” it said wonderingly. “I am of Earth, but for the first time, I feel myself truly plantlike. On Earth, I w as able to control my watering. I often scorned those who would water me. But they were weak, and did not see my scorn for what it was, the weak attempt of a small plant to protect itself. Not one of the weak Earth waterers would dare to water a plant if it did not wish it. But on Gor,” it shuddered, “on Gor it is different. Here, those who wish to water will water their plants as they wish. But strangely, I feel myself most plantlike when I am at the mercy of a strong Gorean master, who may water me as he pleases.”
The Awful German Language
Mark Twain
Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp. One is washed about in it, hither and thither, in the most helpless way; and when at last he thinks he has captured a rule which offers firm ground to take a rest on amid the general rage and turmoil of the ten parts of speech, he turns over the page and reads, “Let the pupil make careful note of the following exceptions.” He runs his eye down and finds that there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it. So overboard he goes again, to hunt for another Ararat and find another quicksand. Such has been, and continues to be, my experience. Every time I think I have got one of these four confusing “cases” where I am master of it, a seemingly insignificant preposition intrudes itself into my sentence, clothed with an awful and unsuspected power, and crumbles the ground from under me. For instance, my book inquires after a certain bird — (it is always inquiring after things which are of no sort of consequence to anybody): “Where is the bird?” Now the answer to this question — according to the book — is that the bird is waiting in the blacksmith shop on account of the rain. Of course no bird would do that, but then you must stick to the book. Very well, I begin to cipher out the German for that answer. I begin at the wrong end, necessarily, for that is the German idea. I say to myself, “Regen (rain) is masculine — or maybe it is feminine — or possibly neuter — it is too much trouble to look now. Therefore, it is either der (the) Regen, or die (the) Regen, or das (the) Regen, according to which gender it may turn out to be when I look. In the interest of science, I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it is masculine. Very well — then the rain is der Regen, if it is simply in the quiescent state of being mentioned, without enlargement or discussion — Nominative case; but if this rain is lying around, in a kind of a general way on the ground, it is then definitely located, it is doing something — that is, resting (which is one of the German grammar’s ideas of doing something), and this throws the rain into the Dative case, and makes it dem Regen. However, this rain is not resting, but is doing something actively, — it is falling — to interfere with the bird, likely — and this indicates movement, which has the effect of sliding it into the Accusative case and changing dem Regen into den Regen.” Having completed the grammatical horoscope of this matter, I answer up confidently and state in German that the bird is staying in the blacksmith shop “wegen (on account of) den Regen.” Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark that whenever the word “wegen” drops into a sentence, it always throws that subject into the Genitive case, regardless of consequences — and that therefore this bird stayed in the blacksmith shop “wegen des Regens.”
http://www.kombu.de/twain-2.htm
My little 9 or 10 year old brain didn't have a problem wrapping my head around this:
" We made a most imposing and awe-inspiring spectacle as we strung out across the yellow landscape; the two hundred and fifty ornate and brightly colored chariots, preceded by an advance guard of some two hundred mounted warriors and chieftains riding five abreast and one hundred yards apart, and followed by a like number in the same formation, with a score or more of flankers on either side; the fifty extra mastodons, or heavy draught animals, known as zitidars, and the five or six hundred extra thoats of the warriors running loose within the hollow square formed by the surrounding warriors. The gleaming metal and jewels of the gorgeous ornaments of the men and women, duplicated in the trappings of the zitidars and thoats, and interspersed with the flashing colors of magnificent silks and furs and feathers, lent a barbaric splendor to the caravan which would have turned an East Indian potentate green with envy.
The enormous broad tires of the chariots and the padded feet of the animals brought forth no sound from the moss-covered sea bottom; and so we moved in utter silence, like some huge phantasmagoria, except when the stillness was broken by the guttural growling of a goaded zitidar, or the squealing of fighting thoats. The green Martians converse but little, and then usually in monosyllables, low and like the faint rumbling of distant thunder. "
Why to this day I still know what imaginary words like Jeddak, Thoat, Thern, Banth, Warhoon, and Thark mean.
I don't think the kids are going to have trouble tracking tipi and whatnot. Heck my 7 or 8 year old brain happily mastered further imaginary words like kryptonite, cosmic cubes, adamantium, vibranium, inertron, and lots, lots more.
From the brief text given it looks more like a third grade reader, very simple description and allusion to cultural totems. The strange words are not the hinder, the grate is the drill. A Plains Indian kid growing up 200 years ago would have integrated every feature of the religious and cultural lessons from that blurb many years before the age of eleven, assuming the lessons are reasonably tribe specific and not an oatmeal of native customs ‘whitesplained’ for easy digestion.
I think it’s foul to feed children faux culture bullshit packaged as real, as an emotional support and jobs program for third tier writers and unemployable right-thinkers. If sixth graders are slow to read, give them more time to learn, not social lessons appropriate for a child several years younger. It is degrading.
Except it's worse. A child might eat its broccoli in the hope of getting ice cream afterwards. But in this case there's no promise of literary ice cream after the broccoli. If's just broccoli followed by more broccoli.
At least there’s nutrients in broccoli. This is much worse. The goal of this nonsense is to install the completely non-intuitive mindset of multicultural sensitivity as the default operating system. To turn curious, lively, politically incorrect children (who can after all still notice the obvious) into culturally sensitive, goodthinking robots.
Of course kids like myths and Western adventure. Just as it doesn’t compare to Burroughs’ Barsoom, this drivel about hitching up a travois and seeing an eagle or putting on a ge and clasping a handful of yen doesn’t compare to Louis L’Amour’s tales or The Iliad.
Maybe these exceprts get much more exciting in the story’s entirety, but what I read here is dull as hell.
Is “reader” leftist jargon? I did bot know that. Primer, reader, and other synoynms have neen familiar to me since my childhood in a conservative school district. I’m not sure what the political overtones of such terms may be.
Or you can read Mencken and realize the ridiculousness is nothing new.
Maybe these exceprts get much more exciting in the story's entirety, but what I read here is dull as hell.
Is "reader" leftist jargon? I did bot know that. Primer, reader, and other synoynms have neen familiar to me since my childhood in a conservative school district. I'm not sure what the political overtones of such terms may be.
“Reader” is what we called our reading textbook at St. Francis de Sales in 1964.
Mark Twain
Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp. One is washed about in it, hither and thither, in the most helpless way; and when at last he thinks he has captured a rule which offers firm ground to take a rest on amid the general rage and turmoil of the ten parts of speech, he turns over the page and reads, "Let the pupil make careful note of the following exceptions." He runs his eye down and finds that there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it. So overboard he goes again, to hunt for another Ararat and find another quicksand. Such has been, and continues to be, my experience. Every time I think I have got one of these four confusing "cases" where I am master of it, a seemingly insignificant preposition intrudes itself into my sentence, clothed with an awful and unsuspected power, and crumbles the ground from under me. For instance, my book inquires after a certain bird -- (it is always inquiring after things which are of no sort of consequence to anybody): "Where is the bird?" Now the answer to this question -- according to the book -- is that the bird is waiting in the blacksmith shop on account of the rain. Of course no bird would do that, but then you must stick to the book. Very well, I begin to cipher out the German for that answer. I begin at the wrong end, necessarily, for that is the German idea. I say to myself, "Regen (rain) is masculine -- or maybe it is feminine -- or possibly neuter -- it is too much trouble to look now. Therefore, it is either der (the) Regen, or die (the) Regen, or das (the) Regen, according to which gender it may turn out to be when I look. In the interest of science, I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it is masculine. Very well -- then the rain is der Regen, if it is simply in the quiescent state of being mentioned, without enlargement or discussion -- Nominative case; but if this rain is lying around, in a kind of a general way on the ground, it is then definitely located, it is doing something -- that is, resting (which is one of the German grammar's ideas of doing something), and this throws the rain into the Dative case, and makes it dem Regen. However, this rain is not resting, but is doing something actively, -- it is falling -- to interfere with the bird, likely -- and this indicates movement, which has the effect of sliding it into the Accusative case and changing dem Regen into den Regen." Having completed the grammatical horoscope of this matter, I answer up confidently and state in German that the bird is staying in the blacksmith shop "wegen (on account of) den Regen." Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark that whenever the word "wegen" drops into a sentence, it always throws that subject into the Genitive case, regardless of consequences -- and that therefore this bird stayed in the blacksmith shop "wegen des Regens."
http://www.kombu.de/twain-2.htm
See now that would actually be great content for a reader to teach children how to read. Topical, instantly engaging, full of vocabulary words and interesting sentence structures.
I’m genuinely curious: My experience (in a rural, Georgian school) and Steve’s (in a presumably Catholic school) suggest “reader” is an innocuous, apolitical term for a textbook used to help kids learn to read. How do you figure it is leftwing jargon or some such?
The fact that you had one in Georgia or Steve had one in the 60s in Catholic school is irrelevant unless you are prepared to argue that these circumstances somehow define something virtuous or were resistant to trends.
Why do kids need a textbook to help them learn to read? Could kids learn to read before "readers"? What does "learn to read" mean in this context? Are you talking about literally learning how to figure out what words are and sentences mean, or are you talking about reading critically? If that's the case, what's wrong with letting the teachers assign what they like?
I object to the idea that "reader" is an established fact of our culture like "exam", "essay", or "experiment".
Because fuck 'em, that's why.
And even necessarily banal, simple readers can be made interesting. Dick and Jane running and playing with a ball; Mr. Fig and his animal friends—they did things. I could relate to the former and I was interested in the latter. What small child gives a shit about the alien nuances of the Japanese and the Lakota? Even Japanese and Lakotan kids don't care about this corny stuff, I'll warrant, just as Jewish kids notoriously hate Hebrew school and all it entails.
“I intentionally use terms like Peking, Bombay, i just to piss off leftists; I completely agree with your refusal to constantly change terminology, spellings, etc.”
I use them because they were in use when I was a child. And if they were good enough for Kipling, they’re good enough for me.
With all due respect, I think it’s a mistake to do anything deliberately to piss off leftists. That grants them more time and attention than they merit. If we view life from a traditionalist perspective, we will offend leftists naturally and effortlessly without having to spend time actually thinking about them.
She killed her kid because the man she was interested in said, not knowing she had a small child, that he would not be interested in a woman who brought such baggage with her.
Then there is the suspense part where it becomes supernatural.
Of course she doesn’t get away with it, but I won’t give the ending for the sake of those who haven’t read it.
I found one part unconvincing: she is presented as beautiful, charming, etc. Random men admire her. The man she marries (after disposing of her daughter) is completely smitten.
My real life experience in these matters is that very few women would take a single offhand remark as a reason for murder. Sure, he didn’t want the baggage, but he wanted her desperately and in real life he would have come around. Or she would have had her pick with one of these various other men who found her so attractive.
It’s still a good read. But when I read it years ago when my own children were young I found it very disturbing.
A physician friend once opined that if research in medicine was similar to that in education we would all have been dead for a long time.
Some time ago I presented my nieces with copies of “McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers.” The readers first appeared in mid-nineteenth century and covered grades 1-6. I was struck how advanced (and somewhat demanding) were the vocabulary. And how interesting were the stories! Of course some of the words were archaic but otherwise the Readers were very effective pedagogical tools.
Considering that its writer was in fact one Esther Forbes -- great name -- I'm now wondering if the suffocating feminization of K-12 is the result of mixed-sex classrooms primarily, or just another downstream mutation caused by the multi-cult Will To Blandeur? Which of course has prospered & thrived under its puppeteer, globocapitalist corporatethink. "One World, One Market"
I read JOHNNY TREMAIN in 7th grade. Another book was ACROSS FIVE APRILS, which I liked more. We also read CONTENDER, about a Negro boxer by Robert Lipstye.
In 8th grade, we read A SEPARATE PEACE. Herbie’s Ride, a chapter from CITY BOY by Herman Wouk is a riot. And the play RAISIN IN THE SUN.
And of course, a bunch of short stories. One of them was “Thank You Ma’am”. Good story. I think a story like that today would be called, “Git yo hand off me, biatch!”
http://staff.esuhsd.org/danielle/english%20department%20lvillage/rt/Short%20Stories/Thank%20You,%20Ma’am.pdf
One of the most memorable was Truman Capote’s “Christmas Memory”. I remember cuz it led to eruptions of laughter(with one kid literally falling on the floor) as it began “It’s fruitcake weather, it’s fruitcake weather.”
But the story that caused the bigger laughter(mostly among boys for beavis-and-butthead-like-reasons) was one called “Joey’s Ball”.
http://www.unz.org/Pub/Colliers-1945sep01-00034
“Most of the kids, T guess, were
even poorer than we were, and it was tough
for us getting balls.”
H.P. Lovecraft (a lot of stuff here)
Conan
The Dying Earth books (Vance is a great wordsmith, as good as Lloyd Alexander to me)
Kull
Tarzan
Little House on the Prairie
E.E. "Doc" Smith
Lots, and lots of comic books (the brits were crap at this till Alan Moore came along)
Bud, I could fill up page upon page of this stuff.
Anyway all that is genre. Personally I think of all SF and Fantasy as children's lit for the most part, though I never bothered to mature and read stuff like Evelyn Waugh that most of the posters here seem to like.
Hell yeah!
I find this to be one of Steve’s “gratuitous criticisms of all things multiculti”. Seriously, someone getting harmed by weird words? If the attentions span of the early 21st century youthful reader is on the level hinted at, it’s over anyway. The only engineers will be hailing from asia (better brush up on that chinese lettering, son!) while locals will busy themselves “coding” banner ads for cheap tat out of Shenzen.
Also, Ritalin for everybody!!
If black women really got us to the moon, we'd have already heard so much about it we would be sick of it. What is the explanation for why these women haven't been all over every Wheaties box, black history month poster and Jeopardy 1600 dollar clue since 1969? We're supposed to believe that the government kept it a secret for like 50 years because what NASA was run by the KKK?
We’re seeing a narrative shift here. Previously, the space program was presented as White people indulging a hobby at the expense of funding social programs; see the poem “Whitey on the moon” and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy leading a protest at the launch site of Apollo 11.
Now our self organized Ministry of Truth is discovering the real history of such things, and, surprise surprise, women and minorities did all the heavy lifting.
“Seriously, what’s the obsession with changing names? I just don’t get it.”
Please allow Dr. Dalrymple to explain:
In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, c. 2004
It would invite too many favorable comparisons with the Palestinians. Native Americans have receded from popular view roughly in tandem with the increase of jewish colonists in the West Bank.
> Native Americans have receded from popular view roughly in tandem with the increase of jewish colonists in the West Bank.
So, if history repeats itself, in 150 years, the Palestinian-Israelis will be joining the IDF in droves.
hey, didja see that hot 19-year old Sunni Muslim girl from Tira that got killed in the Reina nightclub NYE shoot-up in Turkey?
Youse guys think she might have been shopping around for a Qatari or Emirati husband? They have a lot more money than Tira boys, believe me.
My son’s teacher, who is a young woman, assigned book reports on either Call of the Wild or some girly book, slyly telling the students they could choose as they saw fit, with obvious results. Shockingly, it turns out that the boys actually could read and do book reports. They also like Where The Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls.
“A book? Pfft.” – Bart Simpson
“I think you might like this. It’s about a boy who goes to war, his hand is deformed in an accident.” – Marge Simpson
“Deformed? Why didn’t you say so? They should call this book Johnny Deformed.” – Bart Simpson
In a later episode of the Simpsons, after the show got usually shitty, Bart is tempted to convert to Catholicism in part because he is given a comic book about the lives of the saints that shows a saint killing a bunch of Roman soldiers. I joked about this with a RC priest, who laughed and said that the boys taking their confirmation names like to pick the saints with the bloodiest stories.
And now the biggest one of all is on display at the Museum of Natural History: Titanosaur!
The curators had to clear out an entire gallery and still couldn’t fit the entire animal in.
The head and six feet of neck are sticking out of the entrance to the exhibit.
Well put. It’s contrived, pretentious propaganda, the kind of thing a lesbian Unitarian Universalist Sunday school teacher (a very pretentions, annoying kind of adult) would assign to make sure that her young charges were amply catechized in Tolerance and Enthusiasm About Diversity.
But I liked our host’s cheerful realization that kids will inject their own minds into the texts.
The point he missed is that the young reader would also be enthusiastically text-foraging for a Propagandon elementary particle/apple to offer Teacher, who as he reads is speaking in the background.
My daughter’s AP English class liked to ask the teacher, “When does the killing start?”
A few years back you mentioned writing jokes for, I think, a play your wife was to perform, but it didn’t work out because your material was too sarcastic.
Kek.
Which is what is happening now. I notice more and more people pausing to search for words because they're afraid of offending someone -- which can possibly lead to being socially ostracized or worse. This wasn't happening in the '80s and '90s. I blame Jesse Jackson and his demand that people say "African American." That opened the floodgates.
As for "Brontosauras," there's a great old song by the UK rock band the Move with that title. In the effort to beat back political correctness, I urge everyone to find the video on YouTube and crank up this proto-metal/glam rock tune LOUD!
“Which is what is happening now. I notice more and more people pausing to search for words because they’re afraid of offending someone — which can possibly lead to being socially ostracized or worse. This wasn’t happening in the ’80s and ’90s.”
Of course it was, and it was happening long before that. In my lifetime, the most obvious example is the change from “colored people” to “black people”.
What I did was defend someone's free speech.
On some Muslim girl traveler blog she mentioned about how some Muslim men was giving her trouble for traveling. Someone there said that guy is acting like a fag. Someone immediately responded saying how can you use such homophobic words.
I responded by saying that it was a normal part of the English language until ten years ago and that people don't need to update their language every few months when SJW's come out with a new verboten work.
I was banned for 24 hours and warned that I could have my entire account deactivated.
These guys own the conversation and they can control it as they will.
The YouTube videos put out by Sinte Gleska University are awesome.
Btw the correct spelling is “parfleche”. I hope it’s correct in the original story!
“Native Americans are only allowed to exist in the public eye nowadays as props for radical environmentalists and white guilt racketeers.”
In other words, they exist as mascots for white people. But only the right kind of white people. It’s funny that one of the enduring images of Indians that we have is of smoking the peace pipe. Doesn’t it follow — or precede — that the reason why they’re making peace is because they were previously making war?
I thought the plural of Lakota, is, Lakota?
IM, Isn’t it Lakoten for males and Lakotex for females.
Fred Gipson wrote some great books including “Old Yeller.” I also enjoyed “The Great Brain” series as a kid. Not to mention Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew/Bobbsey Twins mysteries that my grandparents passed along to me.
Days, For adults who want to have fun reading to and reading with their children, I recommend any book of poems by Shel Silverstein. Probably won’t learn anything PC but the kids will love to read them.
My daughter’s preschool has a program where they send books home weekly called ‘Raising a Reader.’ We already read to our kid, so it’s mainly just more clutter to deal with. 95% of these books are new, and about a third are in both English and Spanish. Most of them are nothing more than multicultural propaganda, and they are indeed full of foreign words I’m not confident pronouncing or defining. While I admit I’m not a genius, I think my stumbling through the story without confidence undermines the point of having a parent model the importance of reading to a child. The main issue, however, is the lack of quality. Beyond the fact, as Steve points out above, these books will soon be considered dated by the standards of the propaganda agenda they were created to serve, nothing I’ve read from this collection (other than the occasional classic they slip in, which we invariably already own) is going to be considered a classic or well-loved in 20 years. The characters aren’t engaging enough, and neither are the stories. We’ve stopped opening the bags, and we now simply read from our collection. If we buy or are gifted a new book that isn’t up to snuff, it disappears.
Ivy, politically correct version would be the biography of George Westingtipi.
One reason is that nowadays the worthiness of a group for SJWs and their areas of influence is directly proportional to the group's perceived distance from, and the perceived threat that it poses, to mainstream American and Western culture. That's why Muslims are currently way out on top in SJW and media concern. Various other groups are way behind them and register slightly, but the ones that are stoic, tragic, and just need some help, like Australian Aboriginals, Native Americans, etc. absolutely don't register.
biz, Wait for the movie, “Hidden Figures, Part Deux”, the story of how a small group of genius Native Americans went from making arrows to inventing drones.
Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O’er the grave where our hero we buried.
We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning;
By the struggling moonbeam’s misty light
And the lantern dimly burning.
No useless coffin enclosed his breast,
Nor in sheet nor in shroud we wound him,
But he lay like a warrior taking his rest
With his martial cloak around him.
Few and short were the prayers we said,
And we spoke not a word of sorrow;
But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead,
And we bitterly thought of the morrow.
We thought, as we hollowed his narrow bed
And smoothed down his lonely pillow,
That the foe and the stranger would tread o’er his head,
And we far away on the billow!
Lightly they’ll talk of the spirit that’s gone
And o’er his cold ashes upbraid him,
But little he’ll reck, if they let him sleep on
In the grave where a Briton has laid him.
But half of our heavy task was done
When the clock struck the hour for retiring;
And we heard the distant and random gun
That the foe was sullenly firing.
Slowly and sadly we laid him down,
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,
But left him alone with his glory.
Not that long ago when I was in school we also read books that were not terribly boring.
I was in and all-boys ultra-orthodox Jewish school that sub-rosa opposed the secular education whatsoever.
Our mothers however insisted that we get some kind of secular education so in High School we studied ancient Hebrew and Aramaic law for about 9.5 hours a day and secular studies for 2.5 hours.
Of courses in grade school our school day was only seven and a half hours in total and a similar ratio of studies was in place.
Our Hebrew, Yiddish and Aramaic studies teachers actively opposed secular studies and supplied us with ways to get out of it. Around half of the class in fact give it no attention whatsoever and failed throughout.
Those of us who actually cared about doing secular studies however read short stories like The Lottery and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty in 4th grade. And The Cask of Amontillado and similar stuff in fifth grade.
Book reports were also an important part of our grade. In fourth grade one of our book reports was on Columbus. (We also worked in groups of three to write a movie script.)
In 5th grade I recall that I did it book reports on Leif Ericson and another one on the Wright Brothers and probably another two as well. All of our subjects had to be approved by our teacher and I highly doubt that he would have approved Rosa Parks. In any event nobody did it on Rosa Parks. All of our book reports were on Heroes whom we found interesting or admired.
In 9th grade we read Julius Caesar, The Pearl The Old Man and the Sea, Haikus…
In 10th Grade, A comedy of errors, Macbeth, Huckelberry Finb, Lord of the Flies…
The way that we came to read Lord of the Flies was actually quite interesting. We were supposed to read Animal Farm and the books were distributed on Thursday.
Apparently some parents complained, for reasons that I can’t guess that, so on Monday, the first day of the week that we had secular studies, our principal came in, insisted that we all put the book on our desk, went around to see that everyone had it on his desk and then collected them one by one.
Apparently, he was afraid that we would keep the book by claiming that we had left it at home and read it secretly. I of course had already read it over the Sabbath. Our teacher then distributed Lord of the Flies, which I think, considering as how Simon is a Jesus figure, the teacher had chosen as a fuck you to the school, I found it pretty funny.
We also took the New York Regents, PSAT and SAT tests. On my own I enjoyed doing the LSATs and similar stuff.
I don’t recall ever being encouraged to read. I read for pleasure and wouldn’t have understood the concept being “required” to read if it had been explained to me.
So in this fanatically religious Jewish school we were never subjected to any kind of PC nonsense. It might have helped that there were no girls in the class. I suspect that a large part of the emasculation of school studies is based on catering to girls over boys.
Anyhow, that’s my experience.
Did you do all this just to experience it?
All by design, my little Shegetz apprentice. All by design.
Goody Two-Shoes is a hell of a lot more entertaining than this, plus the main character is clever and resourceful instead of being a vehicle for multiculti agitprop.
The two orphan children seemed to be left entirely alone in the world, with no one to look after them, or care for them, but their Heavenly Father.
They trotted around hand in hand, and the poorer they became the more they clung to each other. Poor, ragged, and hungry enough they were!
Tommy had two shoes, but Margery went barefoot. They had nothing to eat but the berries that grew in the woods, and the scraps they could get from the poor people in the village, and at night they slept in barns or under hay-stacks.
Their rich relations were too proud to notice them. But Mr. Smith, the clergyman of the village where the children were born, was not that sort of a man. A rich relation came to visit him—a kind-hearted gentleman—and the clergyman told him all about Tommy and Margery. The kind gentleman pitied them, and ordered Margery a pair of shoes and gave Mr. Smith money to buy her some clothes, which she needed sadly. As for Tommy he said he would take him off to sea with him and make him a sailor. After a few days, the gentleman said he must go to London and would take Tommy with him, and sad was the parting between the two children.
Poor Margery was very lonely indeed, without her brother, and might have cried herself sick but for the new shoes that were brought home to her.
They turned her thoughts from her grief; and as soon as she had put them on she ran in to Mrs. Smith and cried out: “Two shoes, ma’am, two shoes!” These words she repeated to every one she met, and thus it was she got the name of Goody Two Shoes.
Little Margery had seen how good and wise Mr. Smith was, and thought it was because of his great learning; and she wanted, above all things, to learn to read. At last she made up her mind to ask Mr. Smith to teach her when he had a moment to spare. He readily agreed to do this, and Margery read to him an hour every day, and spent much time with her books.
Then she laid out a plan for teaching others more ignorant than herself. She cut out of thin pieces of wood ten sets of large and small letters of the alphabet, and carried these with her when she went from house to house. When she came to Billy Wilson’s she threw down the letters all in a heap, and Billy picked them out and sorted them in lines, thus:
A B C D E F G H I J K,
a b e d e f g h i j k,
and so on until all the letters were in their right places.
From there Goody Two Shoes trotted off to another cottage, and here were several children waiting for her. As soon as the little girl came in they all crowded around her, and were eager to begin their lessons at once.
Then she threw the letters down and said to the boy next her, “What did you have for dinner to-day?” “Bread,” answered the little boy. “Well, put down the first letter,” said Goody Two Shoes. Then he put down B, and the next child R, and the next E, and the next A, and the next D, and there was the whole word—BREAD.
As a kid I read Robb White ‘s World War II books ; Up Periscope, Torpedo Run, and my favorite, The Survivor. They still hold up today. Torpedo Run was made into a pretty good movie starring James Garner and Edmund O’Brien. I always wondered why The Survivor, which was about a slacker surfer sent on a dangerous mission by sub to a Japanese-held island wasn’t made into a movie. A great story.
My take is that a “textbook used to help kids learn to read” is of its nature prone to leftist political manipulation if not essentially leftist itself.
The fact that you had one in Georgia or Steve had one in the 60s in Catholic school is irrelevant unless you are prepared to argue that these circumstances somehow define something virtuous or were resistant to trends.
Why do kids need a textbook to help them learn to read? Could kids learn to read before “readers”? What does “learn to read” mean in this context? Are you talking about literally learning how to figure out what words are and sentences mean, or are you talking about reading critically? If that’s the case, what’s wrong with letting the teachers assign what they like?
I object to the idea that “reader” is an established fact of our culture like “exam”, “essay”, or “experiment”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGuffey_Readers
Just because something can be infected by leftism is not a reason for getting rid of it - get rid of the leftists instead. A reader is just a tool for teaching reading. If leftists use hammers to nail up their posters, do we get rid of hammers? If leftists turn movies into propaganda, do we get rid of all movies?
At St Mark’s in Saint Paul we had “Think and Do” books. We also used to order books through the Scolastic Book Service- they had a great selection of books. Random House also had a series of biographies for young people- read a lot of them, too.
Scholastic Book Service
Mark Twain
Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp. One is washed about in it, hither and thither, in the most helpless way; and when at last he thinks he has captured a rule which offers firm ground to take a rest on amid the general rage and turmoil of the ten parts of speech, he turns over the page and reads, "Let the pupil make careful note of the following exceptions." He runs his eye down and finds that there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it. So overboard he goes again, to hunt for another Ararat and find another quicksand. Such has been, and continues to be, my experience. Every time I think I have got one of these four confusing "cases" where I am master of it, a seemingly insignificant preposition intrudes itself into my sentence, clothed with an awful and unsuspected power, and crumbles the ground from under me. For instance, my book inquires after a certain bird -- (it is always inquiring after things which are of no sort of consequence to anybody): "Where is the bird?" Now the answer to this question -- according to the book -- is that the bird is waiting in the blacksmith shop on account of the rain. Of course no bird would do that, but then you must stick to the book. Very well, I begin to cipher out the German for that answer. I begin at the wrong end, necessarily, for that is the German idea. I say to myself, "Regen (rain) is masculine -- or maybe it is feminine -- or possibly neuter -- it is too much trouble to look now. Therefore, it is either der (the) Regen, or die (the) Regen, or das (the) Regen, according to which gender it may turn out to be when I look. In the interest of science, I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it is masculine. Very well -- then the rain is der Regen, if it is simply in the quiescent state of being mentioned, without enlargement or discussion -- Nominative case; but if this rain is lying around, in a kind of a general way on the ground, it is then definitely located, it is doing something -- that is, resting (which is one of the German grammar's ideas of doing something), and this throws the rain into the Dative case, and makes it dem Regen. However, this rain is not resting, but is doing something actively, -- it is falling -- to interfere with the bird, likely -- and this indicates movement, which has the effect of sliding it into the Accusative case and changing dem Regen into den Regen." Having completed the grammatical horoscope of this matter, I answer up confidently and state in German that the bird is staying in the blacksmith shop "wegen (on account of) den Regen." Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark that whenever the word "wegen" drops into a sentence, it always throws that subject into the Genitive case, regardless of consequences -- and that therefore this bird stayed in the blacksmith shop "wegen des Regens."
http://www.kombu.de/twain-2.htm
Thanks for a quick trip down the memory autobahn!
"Riding Down from Bangor"
http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/bangor/english/e_bangor
Hang on, George Orwell used the word “pirated” in relation to intellectual property theft in 1946? I had no idea its provenance could stretch back that far.
George Henty wrote about a bajillion books about plucky English lads overcoming adversity (I almost typed “diversity”!) in far flung corners of the globe, usually tagging along on some imperial expedition.
We are everywhere!
I think most of my reading was discretionary–that’s probably true of many of the people on Steve’s comment board.
I recall…
The Great Brain
Star Trek 1 – 11 (you could buy them at the drug store–each episode had been reduced to short story length).
Hardy Boys
Tom Swift
Rick Brant (?) on Spindrift Island–he had his own plane!. Tom Brant? These books were hard to find. In the first one the villain at the end was a rogue Nazi rocket scientist! He was foiled, but got away
Comic books to be read over and over
Danny Dunn
Judy Blume (weren’t her characters usually Jewish?).
Methinks by 6th grade some kids at my school were reading the Hobbit and the first volume of the Fellowship of the Ring. You would see some students carrying around shopworn mass market paperbacks of them. I didn’t get hooked on the Hobbit until the animated TV special, maybe in 8th grade.
Has anyone read Joe Queenan’s accounts of reading? He says there are the books we are supposed to love and then the ones we do love. His all time favorite was _Beau Geste_. He discusses this in _One for the books_ but it also is covered in parts of _Closing Time_ which may be one of his best book length works. Queenan has trouble hitting his stride in his Wall Street Journal column.
by 7th or 8th grade we had Easy Rider Magazine and Soldier of Fortune magazine floating around the house. Why? no comment
I delivered the afternoon paper for a year and a half but mostly just remember the headlines. Probably I started reading the newspaper at 13 or 14 (it was always on the table anyway).
= – = – = – =
More seriously, there is decent research out on reading and education. I like Diane McGuiness book _Why Johnny still can’t read_. E. D. Hirsch’s research is good, on the lack of any decent curriculum in US public primary / secondary schools. For example _The schools we need and why we still don’t have them_. E D Hirsch makes some useful points–I think he is on to something.
There are a variety of interviews here:
http://www.childrenofthecode.org
and there is the old study of “roadville and trackton”. Wikipedia says it’s by Shirley Brice Heath.
= – = – = – =
Robert J. Sternberg says that the upper middle class considers heavy discretionary reading to be normal, but in “ghetto” communities only weirdos read a lot when they could be doing anything else. In part for this reason, “ghetto” Blacks ofter have very good social skills for fluid, unstructured interactions–they socialize more growing up. But to generalize, they don’t read as much, so even intelligent Black Americans, unless bookish by nature, tend not to have the large vocabularies that are only built up by many hundreds of hours of discretionary reading. Probably neither does the white working class.
You can’t learn a vocabulary from the word lists you get in school. Probably you can only get it by seeing words “in the wild”–which is why any decent lexicographer wants attestations, not just an ad hoc definition, no matter how brilliant the person writing the definition
= – = – = – =
I thought Steve’s criticism was a tad gratuitous–if Trejohnny can read well enough, what will keep him turning the page is plot, pace and build, suspense, etc. Boys do like to read about conflict and struggle, and often war. If Trejohnny can’t read, it’s lack of phonemic awareness, no one ever read to him at home, he has no ability to control his attention, he had poor reading instruction, and maybe no one does anything in his house but watch TV and tweak on their phone–but I’m not convinced it’s the curriculum. I don’t think it’s the corpus of material in the reader. No matter how loathsome it is becoming.
Odd words inserted for PC reasons will slow the reader down–I’m not sure they will kill off interest. Sometimes the words are there for local color. In _Black Robe_ by Brian Moore the characters eat *sagamite* (acute e ). Corn gruel. and they paddle 16 hours at a stretch wondering if they will be killed by the Iroquois, so you have to keep reading. The dialogue is obscene–not safe for high school, which is a shame
http://www.sagamite.com/accueil.aspx
I also cracked up (unfortunately not all the way out loud) at the 2nd version of this. I have a kid who'll be starting school soon, and I wonder if homeschooling is the only way that isn't a version of child abuse. We had to read PuddingHead Wilson in high school, but that was the worst of it that I can recall.
Yes to homeschooling. The PC crap they give the little kids only turns into Commie crap as they get older.
My son just signed up for an English class at the local JC. This is a writing class and it has 3 books for the semester. One by Judith Butler called Precarious Life, another by Michelle Alexander called The New Jim Crow and a third called Voices From Chernobyl.
I looked them up and discovered that Judith Butler exemplifies everything that is wrong with the world, everywhere. Alexander is an ACLU lawyer/professor who thanks young, black men in prison is a racist conspiracy. The Chernobyl one sounds interesting, but mostly just a shock/horror/conspiracy feast. All three female, BTW.
So this is what your kid will be training to read and understand. Oh, and these courses are REQUIRED for graduation. He may get a different class ultimately, but he still has to fulfill certain English credits.
Same in 1944.
Book reports were also an important part of our grade. In fourth grade one of our book reports was on Columbus. (We also worked in groups of three to write a movie script.) In 5th grade I recall that I did it book reports on Leif Ericson and another one on the Wright Brothers and probably another two as well. All of our subjects had to be approved by our teacher and I highly doubt that he would have approved Rosa Parks. In any event nobody did it on Rosa Parks. All of our book reports were on Heroes whom we found interesting or admired.In 9th grade we read Julius Caesar, The Pearl The Old Man and the Sea, Haikus...In 10th Grade, A comedy of errors, Macbeth, Huckelberry Finb, Lord of the Flies...The way that we came to read Lord of the Flies was actually quite interesting. We were supposed to read Animal Farm and the books were distributed on Thursday. Apparently some parents complained, for reasons that I can't guess that, so on Monday, the first day of the week that we had secular studies, our principal came in, insisted that we all put the book on our desk, went around to see that everyone had it on his desk and then collected them one by one. Apparently, he was afraid that we would keep the book by claiming that we had left it at home and read it secretly. I of course had already read it over the Sabbath. Our teacher then distributed Lord of the Flies, which I think, considering as how Simon is a Jesus figure, the teacher had chosen as a fuck you to the school, I found it pretty funny.We also took the New York Regents, PSAT and SAT tests. On my own I enjoyed doing the LSATs and similar stuff.I don't recall ever being encouraged to read. I read for pleasure and wouldn't have understood the concept being "required" to read if it had been explained to me.So in this fanatically religious Jewish school we were never subjected to any kind of PC nonsense. It might have helped that there were no girls in the class. I suspect that a large part of the emasculation of school studies is based on catering to girls over boys.Anyhow, that's my experience.
What’s your take on the Hebrew of Genesis 11 in light of Steve’s Taki article today?
Book reports were also an important part of our grade. In fourth grade one of our book reports was on Columbus. (We also worked in groups of three to write a movie script.) In 5th grade I recall that I did it book reports on Leif Ericson and another one on the Wright Brothers and probably another two as well. All of our subjects had to be approved by our teacher and I highly doubt that he would have approved Rosa Parks. In any event nobody did it on Rosa Parks. All of our book reports were on Heroes whom we found interesting or admired.In 9th grade we read Julius Caesar, The Pearl The Old Man and the Sea, Haikus...In 10th Grade, A comedy of errors, Macbeth, Huckelberry Finb, Lord of the Flies...The way that we came to read Lord of the Flies was actually quite interesting. We were supposed to read Animal Farm and the books were distributed on Thursday. Apparently some parents complained, for reasons that I can't guess that, so on Monday, the first day of the week that we had secular studies, our principal came in, insisted that we all put the book on our desk, went around to see that everyone had it on his desk and then collected them one by one. Apparently, he was afraid that we would keep the book by claiming that we had left it at home and read it secretly. I of course had already read it over the Sabbath. Our teacher then distributed Lord of the Flies, which I think, considering as how Simon is a Jesus figure, the teacher had chosen as a fuck you to the school, I found it pretty funny.We also took the New York Regents, PSAT and SAT tests. On my own I enjoyed doing the LSATs and similar stuff.I don't recall ever being encouraged to read. I read for pleasure and wouldn't have understood the concept being "required" to read if it had been explained to me.So in this fanatically religious Jewish school we were never subjected to any kind of PC nonsense. It might have helped that there were no girls in the class. I suspect that a large part of the emasculation of school studies is based on catering to girls over boys.Anyhow, that's my experience.
took the New York Regents, PSAT and SAT tests. On my own I enjoyed doing the LSATs and similar stuff.
Did you do all this just to experience it?
The others however are School mandated. Some ignored them but they were a tiny minority. Everyone else took them because our mothers wouldn't send us to a school where we didn't.
To be clear, we were black hat wearing kids but mostly non-chassidic. Ultra-Orthodox but perfectly capable in the maths, englush, science and history departments. This was not the case however for most of the chassidic ultra-orthodox.
Of course it was, and it was happening long before that. In my lifetime, the most obvious example is the change from "colored people" to "black people".
I was just banned from Facebook for 24 hours and informed that I was risking having my account deactivated.
What I did was defend someone’s free speech.
On some Muslim girl traveler blog she mentioned about how some Muslim men was giving her trouble for traveling. Someone there said that guy is acting like a fag. Someone immediately responded saying how can you use such homophobic words.
I responded by saying that it was a normal part of the English language until ten years ago and that people don’t need to update their language every few months when SJW’s come out with a new verboten work.
I was banned for 24 hours and warned that I could have my entire account deactivated.
These guys own the conversation and they can control it as they will.
The fact that you had one in Georgia or Steve had one in the 60s in Catholic school is irrelevant unless you are prepared to argue that these circumstances somehow define something virtuous or were resistant to trends.
Why do kids need a textbook to help them learn to read? Could kids learn to read before "readers"? What does "learn to read" mean in this context? Are you talking about literally learning how to figure out what words are and sentences mean, or are you talking about reading critically? If that's the case, what's wrong with letting the teachers assign what they like?
I object to the idea that "reader" is an established fact of our culture like "exam", "essay", or "experiment".
The concept of a “reader” , i.e. a primer for the teaching of reading, is very old. The famous McGuffey Reader goes back to 1836 and there were “hornbooks” long before that, going back to at least the 15th century. The concept of a “reader” is probably almost as old as the teaching of reading itself. It’s very hard to take a child who doesn’t read at all and start him off on “real” books – that is like teaching swimming by throwing the kid in the water. It might work for some but most kids benefit from special books that take a structured approach to teaching reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGuffey_Readers
Just because something can be infected by leftism is not a reason for getting rid of it – get rid of the leftists instead. A reader is just a tool for teaching reading. If leftists use hammers to nail up their posters, do we get rid of hammers? If leftists turn movies into propaganda, do we get rid of all movies?
Using Latin (III) begins with excerpts from Sallust's Catiline
moves on to material from Cicero
then materials from Ovid
toward the end, "Glimpses of Roman Life" are materials from
Nepos
Livy
Tacitus
Seneca
Aulus Gills
Piny the Younger
and more Ovid.
A lot of times you don't want to assign the whole work, so you just assign excerpts. Eventually you end up with a reader.
Some things are short. For example, "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. It's brief. It has to be *in* something larger--or at least until the internet came along.
it is claimed that at the University of Chicago they never assign textbooks if avoidable--if you are studying philosophy you just end up reading the original texts. For many purposes, a reader provides useable excerpts plus commentary, summaries, glosses, etc.
Perhaps the way to remember how hard it is to read, what a learned skill it is, is to start again with a character set you don't know.
I've noticed that my mind shuts down almost immediately when confronted by pages of anything in Cyrillic characters, let along Arabic or Chinese. My mind has trouble actually noticing that Arabic letters are letters--at least Cyrillic jumps out in letters (like a child's blocks). my mind looks at Arabic and says "squiggles"--those can't be words, let alone sentences!
Which is what is happening now. I notice more and more people pausing to search for words because they're afraid of offending someone -- which can possibly lead to being socially ostracized or worse. This wasn't happening in the '80s and '90s. I blame Jesse Jackson and his demand that people say "African American." That opened the floodgates.
As for "Brontosauras," there's a great old song by the UK rock band the Move with that title. In the effort to beat back political correctness, I urge everyone to find the video on YouTube and crank up this proto-metal/glam rock tune LOUD!
There’s the Orwellian explanation, then there’s the plain, old In Crowd explanation. If you don’t use the proper terminology you’re not “one of us.” You don’t count, and no one has to listen to you.
This works wonderfully with old folks, who often possess dangerous knowledge. There are constant jokes in our culture about your “racist grandma,” for instance. How convenient that they have built-in excuses not to listen to people who weren’t raised at a time when the people in power now got to decide what kids learn.
Your grandma could’ve been a Stalinist for all I know, but odds are she isn’t an SJW. Which is “problematic,” as they say. Good thing she says “coloreds” instead of “people of color.” That way you can humor her and ignore her instead of listen to her.
Only will happen if Native Americans start converting to Islam or otherwise becoming more actively hostile to mainstream American culture.
Of course it was, and it was happening long before that. In my lifetime, the most obvious example is the change from "colored people" to "black people".
Cletus, I am in my 71st year, Negro was replaced by African American and then Black.
Then there is the suspense part where it becomes supernatural.
Of course she doesn't get away with it, but I won't give the ending for the sake of those who haven't read it.
I found one part unconvincing: she is presented as beautiful, charming, etc. Random men admire her. The man she marries (after disposing of her daughter) is completely smitten.
My real life experience in these matters is that very few women would take a single offhand remark as a reason for murder. Sure, he didn't want the baggage, but he wanted her desperately and in real life he would have come around. Or she would have had her pick with one of these various other men who found her so attractive.
It's still a good read. But when I read it years ago when my own children were young I found it very disturbing.
Frau Katze, I think the book was called “Small Sacrifices”, a true story of a mother who shot her three kids because her hoped for boy friend didn’t want any “baggage.” She shot them while listening to Duran Duran’s “Hungry like a Wolf.” Could never listen to that song without thinking of those three little victims.
I'm a true crime buff and it is not a common scenario.
In that case, the man didn't want her at all, he was just making excuses.
It was a pretty depressing true crime book, I'll agree. Both it and the novel I found very upsetting when I first read them when my kids were young. For a few days, I didn't want to be alone upstairs.
I wouldn't read "Small Sacifices" again. It wasn't just a novel.
You don't hear much about them anymore. I often wondered why, but I think Steve Sailer might have the answer.Remember the Native American war cry? You don't see that much on tv anymore.
Except, apparently, from Trump supporters.
Watch this. Funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCUyVrukN6M
It’s the great Howie Carr!
Including his cousin Westingwigwam? It is an intense story.
I recall...
The Great Brain
Star Trek 1 - 11 (you could buy them at the drug store--each episode had been reduced to short story length).
Hardy Boys
Tom Swift
Rick Brant (?) on Spindrift Island--he had his own plane!. Tom Brant? These books were hard to find. In the first one the villain at the end was a rogue Nazi rocket scientist! He was foiled, but got away
Comic books to be read over and over
Danny Dunn
Judy Blume (weren't her characters usually Jewish?).
Methinks by 6th grade some kids at my school were reading the Hobbit and the first volume of the Fellowship of the Ring. You would see some students carrying around shopworn mass market paperbacks of them. I didn't get hooked on the Hobbit until the animated TV special, maybe in 8th grade.
Has anyone read Joe Queenan's accounts of reading? He says there are the books we are supposed to love and then the ones we do love. His all time favorite was _Beau Geste_. He discusses this in _One for the books_ but it also is covered in parts of _Closing Time_ which may be one of his best book length works. Queenan has trouble hitting his stride in his Wall Street Journal column.
by 7th or 8th grade we had Easy Rider Magazine and Soldier of Fortune magazine floating around the house. Why? no comment
I delivered the afternoon paper for a year and a half but mostly just remember the headlines. Probably I started reading the newspaper at 13 or 14 (it was always on the table anyway).
= - = - = - =
More seriously, there is decent research out on reading and education. I like Diane McGuiness book _Why Johnny still can't read_. E. D. Hirsch's research is good, on the lack of any decent curriculum in US public primary / secondary schools. For example _The schools we need and why we still don't have them_. E D Hirsch makes some useful points--I think he is on to something.
There are a variety of interviews here:
http://www.childrenofthecode.org
and there is the old study of "roadville and trackton". Wikipedia says it's by Shirley Brice Heath.
= - = - = - =
Robert J. Sternberg says that the upper middle class considers heavy discretionary reading to be normal, but in "ghetto" communities only weirdos read a lot when they could be doing anything else. In part for this reason, "ghetto" Blacks ofter have very good social skills for fluid, unstructured interactions--they socialize more growing up. But to generalize, they don't read as much, so even intelligent Black Americans, unless bookish by nature, tend not to have the large vocabularies that are only built up by many hundreds of hours of discretionary reading. Probably neither does the white working class.
You can't learn a vocabulary from the word lists you get in school. Probably you can only get it by seeing words "in the wild"--which is why any decent lexicographer wants attestations, not just an ad hoc definition, no matter how brilliant the person writing the definition
= - = - = - =
I thought Steve's criticism was a tad gratuitous--if Trejohnny can read well enough, what will keep him turning the page is plot, pace and build, suspense, etc. Boys do like to read about conflict and struggle, and often war. If Trejohnny can't read, it's lack of phonemic awareness, no one ever read to him at home, he has no ability to control his attention, he had poor reading instruction, and maybe no one does anything in his house but watch TV and tweak on their phone--but I'm not convinced it's the curriculum. I don't think it's the corpus of material in the reader. No matter how loathsome it is becoming.
Odd words inserted for PC reasons will slow the reader down--I'm not sure they will kill off interest. Sometimes the words are there for local color. In _Black Robe_ by Brian Moore the characters eat *sagamite* (acute e ). Corn gruel. and they paddle 16 hours at a stretch wondering if they will be killed by the Iroquois, so you have to keep reading. The dialogue is obscene--not safe for high school, which is a shame
http://www.sagamite.com/accueil.aspx
Great book Black Robe, great movie too
1. Black Robe works for me.
2. Mister Johnson works for me, too. (the movie is also by Bruce Beresford--the novel was Joyce Cary, long ago. Africanists don't like it too much--it's too old, too colonial.
what else?
Heart of Darkness / Apocalypse Now didn't work for me.
War and Peace ? Too long. Read a 1200 page novel and get back to me...
Some of the movie / novel dyads are just lame, but with a good movie and a good novel you can iterate, and each time you feel like you've peeled the onion a bit.
The Warriors won't work--the novelist (Sol Yurick) hated the movie. They both work in their own way, but the novel is social commentary and tough going--the movie succeeds as a thriller with a good soundtrack and good cinematography (but the dialogue is mostly lame).
America has become a truly ridiculous country, but there's a lot of comic value in this. This country is just so funny in so many ways. It's sad, but it's humorous too.
You think you have it bad? You should see Canada, Here in Toronto schoolchildren have to do some kind of commemoration for Indians every morning and here about how ‘wonderful’ they were, “Chief whatever wandered in the woods and did his business behind some bushes” (ad museum). Anything so that the few white kids won’t feel like Canada was their country when they see all those brown, yellow and black faces.
I went to a run of the mill, public elementary school from the mid ’80s to early ’90s, and the teachers used to read to us (or have us read) Roald Dahl, Beverly Cleary, The Hatchet, My Side of the Mountain, and all those good, sturdy books. The closest we got to Native American, PC infused garbage was reading Ishi, Last of His Tribe and Island of the Blue Dolphins, although those were pretty engaging stories in their own right.
Even by the time I got to high school, we still read books from the English Canon without the overlay of Leftist critical theory, including plenty of George Orwell and Flannery O’Conner. The obligatory reading of To Kill a Mockingbird was the worst it ever got, and even then we weren’t white-guilted to death.
I find it hard to believe that so much has changed in such a short time. I would like to know what really is going on in these schools on a day-to-day basis.
Yep, I’ve read that book (along with every other book by Ann Rule). I didn’t say it NEVER happens, I said it wasn’t very common. I stand by that.
I’m a true crime buff and it is not a common scenario.
In that case, the man didn’t want her at all, he was just making excuses.
It was a pretty depressing true crime book, I’ll agree. Both it and the novel I found very upsetting when I first read them when my kids were young. For a few days, I didn’t want to be alone upstairs.
I wouldn’t read “Small Sacifices” again. It wasn’t just a novel.
Yeah sure. Because Brandeis was around in the early 17th century to see for himself.
What I did was defend someone's free speech.
On some Muslim girl traveler blog she mentioned about how some Muslim men was giving her trouble for traveling. Someone there said that guy is acting like a fag. Someone immediately responded saying how can you use such homophobic words.
I responded by saying that it was a normal part of the English language until ten years ago and that people don't need to update their language every few months when SJW's come out with a new verboten work.
I was banned for 24 hours and warned that I could have my entire account deactivated.
These guys own the conversation and they can control it as they will.
WOW! Just for expressing an opinion. What crazy times we live in.
Apparently, it's offensive to use the term "Eskimo." The new correct term is "Inuit."
Seriously, what's the obsession with changing names? I just don't get it.
"Brontosauras" are now "brachiosauras."
By the way, here's a funny blog post from Steve Sailer about this.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/06/dinosaurs-of-bronto.html
It might not matter to you girls what dinosaurs are called but to us men it matters a great deal. Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were found to be the names of the same Brachiosaur, and since Apatosaurus was the name it was baptised with first it therefore became the unique name. Christ my son could have told you that when he was seven, and you’re all proud of your ignorance of dinosaurs, a vital part of our natural history. I bet you couldn’t tell your Allosaurus from your Elasmosaurus.
On the subject of the Red Indian being called a “Native American”. Owing to the films I watched when I was younger I had the impression that Red Indians were brave, if not reckless, honourable, men of their word, who valiantly fought the white settlers and lost no-one’s respect in defeat, and their squaws were strongindependentwomen. Native Americans, according to the media stereotype, however, are lazy, unemployed, and alcoholic. The Left don’t want Red Indian people to feel proud about who they are which is why they want to remind them that they’re Native Americans and not Red Indians.
I got $10 that says this film makes no more at the box office than the $16 M Birth of a Nation made. Nobody, even blacks, wants to watch this tripe.
But I predict that the film will make money overall because every library and school will buy a copy (just like BoaN) because Raaaaacism.
I also cracked up (unfortunately not all the way out loud) at the 2nd version of this. I have a kid who'll be starting school soon, and I wonder if homeschooling is the only way that isn't a version of child abuse. We had to read PuddingHead Wilson in high school, but that was the worst of it that I can recall.
Try Catholic schools.
this (starts at 01:45 in), unfortunately.2) Classes are on split schedules from day to day - like college - which is not OK for kids and the amount of time spent out of the classroom for some other stuff (Mass, seriously?*) is high. I.E. I don't think that much learning goes on.3) Price is up to 10 Big Ones /year.4) A teacher who had been there many years got fired for showing a video about violence by Moslems - did I tell you this was a Catholic school. Very PC.I'll give you, maybe the reading material is better.* that was a joke.
H.P. Lovecraft (a lot of stuff here)
Conan
The Dying Earth books (Vance is a great wordsmith, as good as Lloyd Alexander to me)
Kull
Tarzan
Little House on the Prairie
E.E. "Doc" Smith
Lots, and lots of comic books (the brits were crap at this till Alan Moore came along)
Bud, I could fill up page upon page of this stuff.
Anyway all that is genre. Personally I think of all SF and Fantasy as children's lit for the most part, though I never bothered to mature and read stuff like Evelyn Waugh that most of the posters here seem to like.
How about Pathfinder or Deerslayer or almost anything by James Fenimore Cooper. Even the thin stories of Tom Swift or Nancy Drew would be better than this shite.
The odd thing about this story is that the mathematicians who worked on the space program were completely unreported, as unremarkable as any of the huge numbers of others who had bit parts in that great adventure.
Until somebody noticed that three of them were not white men.
Then computational mathematics was suddenly recognized as vitally important.
anon, And yet Canada struggles with their indigenous peoples to the point were the UN Human Rights Council takes notice. A reservation in Northern Ontario with no potable water comes to mind and the high rate of alcohol and drug abuse.
I'm a true crime buff and it is not a common scenario.
In that case, the man didn't want her at all, he was just making excuses.
It was a pretty depressing true crime book, I'll agree. Both it and the novel I found very upsetting when I first read them when my kids were young. For a few days, I didn't want to be alone upstairs.
I wouldn't read "Small Sacifices" again. It wasn't just a novel.
Frau, Not implying that it happens often or not, just giving an example of it happening in real life. A most disturbing story but a good read.
I’ve lived in the “black” and “African-American” span, plus whatever else they added since I stopped paying attention. (I think it went from black to African-American instead of the other way around, though it may have gone back and forth a couple times; I don’t know. I don’t want to nitpick.) I never knew anyone to say “negro,” but I know people inbetween your age and mine who say “colored.” So you may have missed a step or two.
Did you do all this just to experience it?
LSAT yes, just because I found the questions fun ( I never read any of the methodologies for answering the questions as that would take away from the fun).
The others however are School mandated. Some ignored them but they were a tiny minority. Everyone else took them because our mothers wouldn’t send us to a school where we didn’t.
To be clear, we were black hat wearing kids but mostly non-chassidic. Ultra-Orthodox but perfectly capable in the maths, englush, science and history departments. This was not the case however for most of the chassidic ultra-orthodox.
Nope, from experience of a family teaching at the local Catholic school for a few years, I can tell you:
1) There is no strict discipline and knuckle bashing with 1/4 in. thick yardsticks, such as
this (starts at 01:45 in), unfortunately.
2) Classes are on split schedules from day to day – like college – which is not OK for kids and the amount of time spent out of the classroom for some other stuff (Mass, seriously?*) is high. I.E. I don’t think that much learning goes on.
3) Price is up to 10 Big Ones /year.
4) A teacher who had been there many years got fired for showing a video about violence by Moslems – did I tell you this was a Catholic school. Very PC.
I’ll give you, maybe the reading material is better.
* that was a joke.
You don't hear much about them anymore. I often wondered why, but I think Steve Sailer might have the answer.Remember the Native American war cry? You don't see that much on tv anymore.
Except, apparently, from Trump supporters.
Watch this. Funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCUyVrukN6M
The reason Non Hispanic Native Americans are not the favorite pets of Social Justice Warriors is because most high profile people in the media who claim to have “Native American” ancestry like Val Kilmer and Kathie Lee Gifford would be called Crackas phenotype wise if they stepped foot in The Southside Of Chicago for example. There for they lose the exotic vibrant factor.
What I did was defend someone's free speech.
On some Muslim girl traveler blog she mentioned about how some Muslim men was giving her trouble for traveling. Someone there said that guy is acting like a fag. Someone immediately responded saying how can you use such homophobic words.
I responded by saying that it was a normal part of the English language until ten years ago and that people don't need to update their language every few months when SJW's come out with a new verboten work.
I was banned for 24 hours and warned that I could have my entire account deactivated.
These guys own the conversation and they can control it as they will.
Given the kind of vile, hateful posts that are accepted on facebook, that’s sickening and telling. A similar example is when radio stations play “Money For Nothing” with the word “faggot” scrubbed out. I don’t even mind when we transition to words after they become pejorative; it’s the way that it’s forced that irritates me. And I draw the line at pretentious BS like “people of color” that’s just another way of saying that which is no longer allowed: colored people.
““I intentionally use terms like Peking, Bombay, i just to piss off leftists; I completely agree with your refusal to constantly change terminology, spellings, etc.””
This is nitpicking, in a comment thread that is probably buried behind a gazillion new posts, but I find mistakes like this to be annoying.
The name “Bombay” was changed to “Mumbai”, against the wishes of most of the inhabitants of the city, by a right wing, almost to the point of being fascist, Hindu nationalist government. There was nothing leftist at all about the change.
Now the change from “Peking” to “Beijing” was at least done by Commies, but it was part of a reform of how Chinese is transliterated into English that is mostly regarded as having been long overdue. And the name of the city didn’t change, just how its spelled in English.
I would like to see working lists of movie / novel dyads where you could read the book and then watch the movie, and then read the book for the second time and then watch the movie for the second time, you could reach three or four iterations without wasting your time.
1. Black Robe works for me.
2. Mister Johnson works for me, too. (the movie is also by Bruce Beresford–the novel was Joyce Cary, long ago. Africanists don’t like it too much–it’s too old, too colonial.
what else?
Heart of Darkness / Apocalypse Now didn’t work for me.
War and Peace ? Too long. Read a 1200 page novel and get back to me…
Some of the movie / novel dyads are just lame, but with a good movie and a good novel you can iterate, and each time you feel like you’ve peeled the onion a bit.
The Warriors won’t work–the novelist (Sol Yurick) hated the movie. They both work in their own way, but the novel is social commentary and tough going–the movie succeeds as a thriller with a good soundtrack and good cinematography (but the dialogue is mostly lame).
The last third of East of Eden where Cal and Aron are teenagers also works beautifully as a dyad with the movie adaptation. So many rich layers are added when you've both seen the film and read the novel. And unlike many movie adaptations of classic novels, you don't resent the parts that the movie changed or left out (such as removing the Lee character), even though you miss their presence. East of Eden as a novel in its entirety is wonderful, but as you said, too long for the iteration exercise.
I cried so much during the end of Where the Red Ferm grows. It was freely available in junior high school–boys would recommend it by word of mouth, too, with no coaxing from the teacher.
_I am third_ was another boy friendly book I recall got rave reviews (even though I never read it personally), about an athlete who dies young from cancer.
The Happy Hooker was recommended by word of mouth too, as I recall.
My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_8?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=clarence+thomas&sprefix=clarence%2Cstripbooks%2C229&crid=6WI4CG5TSI8B
_My grandfather’s son_ is good. The reviewer at the London Economist (anonymous) said you will never understand Judge Thomas until you read the book, and it might be true.
I’m not convinced that every page is great, and I found it dragged toward the end, but the part where young Clarence and his brother Myers move in with his grandfather is great. That part has good narrative drive and I wanted to just keep reading to find out what happened next. Many lawyers probably are good wordsmiths–Judge Thomas certainly is
Especially that line “The damn vacation is over”-and young Clarence is thinking to himself it wasn’t seeming like much of a vacation to him.
I can’t decide if Judge Thomas (as narrator) is full of paranoia and self-pity toward the end or not. Some readers think so (I noticed the self-pity more than the paranoia). I didn’t think it was a book written just to grind an axe, or for money, and maybe he did harass Anita Hill. You can’t help but admire judge Thomas’s grandfather.
Also, if you read carefully, Judge Thomas asserts that by the time he was in about third grade he was reading better than his grandfather, who was good jack of all trades but couldn’t read without effort and apparently hadn’t seen the inside of a school room much, either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGuffey_Readers
Just because something can be infected by leftism is not a reason for getting rid of it - get rid of the leftists instead. A reader is just a tool for teaching reading. If leftists use hammers to nail up their posters, do we get rid of hammers? If leftists turn movies into propaganda, do we get rid of all movies?
“Readers” must be ancient. At a recent church rummage sale (Blessed Sacrament on Monroe Avenue) I got some old textbooks.
Using Latin (III) begins with excerpts from Sallust’s Catiline
moves on to material from Cicero
then materials from Ovid
toward the end, “Glimpses of Roman Life” are materials from
Nepos
Livy
Tacitus
Seneca
Aulus Gills
Piny the Younger
and more Ovid.
A lot of times you don’t want to assign the whole work, so you just assign excerpts. Eventually you end up with a reader.
Some things are short. For example, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. It’s brief. It has to be *in* something larger–or at least until the internet came along.
it is claimed that at the University of Chicago they never assign textbooks if avoidable–if you are studying philosophy you just end up reading the original texts. For many purposes, a reader provides useable excerpts plus commentary, summaries, glosses, etc.
Perhaps the way to remember how hard it is to read, what a learned skill it is, is to start again with a character set you don’t know.
I’ve noticed that my mind shuts down almost immediately when confronted by pages of anything in Cyrillic characters, let along Arabic or Chinese. My mind has trouble actually noticing that Arabic letters are letters–at least Cyrillic jumps out in letters (like a child’s blocks). my mind looks at Arabic and says “squiggles”–those can’t be words, let alone sentences!
The others however are School mandated. Some ignored them but they were a tiny minority. Everyone else took them because our mothers wouldn't send us to a school where we didn't.
To be clear, we were black hat wearing kids but mostly non-chassidic. Ultra-Orthodox but perfectly capable in the maths, englush, science and history departments. This was not the case however for most of the chassidic ultra-orthodox.
Thanks for the reply
1. Black Robe works for me.
2. Mister Johnson works for me, too. (the movie is also by Bruce Beresford--the novel was Joyce Cary, long ago. Africanists don't like it too much--it's too old, too colonial.
what else?
Heart of Darkness / Apocalypse Now didn't work for me.
War and Peace ? Too long. Read a 1200 page novel and get back to me...
Some of the movie / novel dyads are just lame, but with a good movie and a good novel you can iterate, and each time you feel like you've peeled the onion a bit.
The Warriors won't work--the novelist (Sol Yurick) hated the movie. They both work in their own way, but the novel is social commentary and tough going--the movie succeeds as a thriller with a good soundtrack and good cinematography (but the dialogue is mostly lame).
Does it really matter if the novelist dislikes the movie? Writers are understandably possessive of their work, and thus hypercritical of adaptations. Milan Kundera hated the movie adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, yet it is high-quality cinema, and makes for a great movie/novel dyad of the kind you describe. The novel is so cynical about love and sex, and the movie so sensual and romantic.
The last third of East of Eden where Cal and Aron are teenagers also works beautifully as a dyad with the movie adaptation. So many rich layers are added when you’ve both seen the film and read the novel. And unlike many movie adaptations of classic novels, you don’t resent the parts that the movie changed or left out (such as removing the Lee character), even though you miss their presence. East of Eden as a novel in its entirety is wonderful, but as you said, too long for the iteration exercise.
1. Black Robe works for me.
2. Mister Johnson works for me, too. (the movie is also by Bruce Beresford--the novel was Joyce Cary, long ago. Africanists don't like it too much--it's too old, too colonial.
what else?
Heart of Darkness / Apocalypse Now didn't work for me.
War and Peace ? Too long. Read a 1200 page novel and get back to me...
Some of the movie / novel dyads are just lame, but with a good movie and a good novel you can iterate, and each time you feel like you've peeled the onion a bit.
The Warriors won't work--the novelist (Sol Yurick) hated the movie. They both work in their own way, but the novel is social commentary and tough going--the movie succeeds as a thriller with a good soundtrack and good cinematography (but the dialogue is mostly lame).
Well, you can leave the philosophical disquisitions for later. The rest flows fine. The problem is that the movie is disappointing. Fonda’s Bezhukov acts like a child who’s lost his mommy.
The last third of East of Eden where Cal and Aron are teenagers also works beautifully as a dyad with the movie adaptation. So many rich layers are added when you've both seen the film and read the novel. And unlike many movie adaptations of classic novels, you don't resent the parts that the movie changed or left out (such as removing the Lee character), even though you miss their presence. East of Eden as a novel in its entirety is wonderful, but as you said, too long for the iteration exercise.
Philip K. Dick is a writer who owes his present classic status to Hollywood making much better movies and shows than you’d expect from his sketchy efforts.
A British television miniseries of War and Peace came out this year that I enjoyed very much. Haven’t read the novel myself, but my mom has and loved the adaptation, although she thought the actress who played Natasha Rostova didn’t do the character justice.
Never read him, but often weakly written or at least less esoteric and ambitious works make for the most hefty movie adaptations. Case in point, I was sooo underwhelmed by The Godfather book. High Fidelity and Bridget Jones Diary are both solid but ultimately lightweight reads, but delightful and unexpectedly poignant as movies.
The Maltese Falcon (1930) isn’t all that great of a work of literature on the page, but eleven years later when the third movie adaptation got it perfect by sticking extremely close to the book, it proved it was a great work of source literature.
My guess is that the movies had a big influence on literature. Hemingway comes along in the 1920s after generations of verbose literature with a show-don’t-tell style that presumably was influenced by the movies. Waugh picks up from Hemingway, and his second novel, Vile Bodies, is clearly influenced by his attempts at screenwriting. It reveals a lot of the problems caused by novels influenced by screenplay conventions. But when it was finally made into a movie “Bright Young Things” by Stephen Fry about 15 years ago, it works quite well. For example, a couple of the jokes that I hadn’t noticed on page due to Waugh’s attempts at screenplay-like terseness got big laughs as Peter O’Toole delivered them perfectly to bring out the inherent humor in the lines.
Let me guess, you saw the movie first and read the book later? It's the opposite for me. The book is great when the mystery isn't spoiled.
Dunno. I wouldn’t mind seeing a faithful adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the source for Blade Runner) one of these days.
“They ought to call this book ‘Johnny Deformed’!” — Bart Simpson
I think that The Maltese Falcon is quite good in its own right. But, yeah, I agree that it makes an even better film.Hammett was pretty good at writing novels that supplied films with top-notch dialogue and good plots
The Maltese Falcon (1930) isn’t all that great of a work of literature on the page.
Let me guess, you saw the movie first and read the book later? It’s the opposite for me. The book is great when the mystery isn’t spoiled.
I think diversity educators must be women, cuz they think that kids are sitting around sulking because someone isn’t paying enough attention to them. So put their name in the story and boom they love me now I’m gonna learn.
[…] [Comment at Unz.com] […]