“In the past two decades, the interest in educational technology has developed into a full-blown obsession,” notes Jack Schneider in Education Week. Citing evidence that all the bright shiny computers at every level of the American education system don’t seem to be improving anything, Schneider suggests that all the money goes to computers because

it can be easy to credit technology for what makes a class “work.” Head to a thriving school where every student has a tablet computer, and you might be tempted to think that you’ve stumbled on a solution: Tablet PCs help kids thrive! You are also likely, however, to be on campus at a well-resourced school with lots of other things going for it. Working to pinpoint a particular practice that makes a good school work, in other words, is to deny the deep complexity of the educational environment.

The other reason that the reform elite loves technology is that it can be taken to scale. Great teachers, after all, are also easy to credit for a school that works. But how do we get one in every classroom? The iPad, on the other hand, requires only a checkbook.

He concludes:

[M]oney that goes to technology could just as easily have been spent on other approaches that, though perhaps not scalable, are directly connected to the processes of teaching and learning. Funding projects to improve teacher training, development, and retention, for instance, is less sexy than cutting the ribbon on a lab full of lightning-fast computers. But it’s also more likely to help kids learn.

UD thanks Bill for linking her to the article.

Here are a few words about the just-named Literature Nobel recipient, Tomas Transtromer.

Two ideas about human beings recur in his poetry:

One, we are mentally and physically fragile beings, for whom existence itself is an immense, constant struggle. Just surviving in the world – the obdurate, difficult, indifferent world – is an incredible struggle. Periodically, we lose ourselves. Our very identities – so contingent, so frail – actually vanish, and in those long moments of not even knowing who we are and where we are, we discover our true underlying condition, our non-being (our being-toward-death, if you like) amid the baffles and brazens of personality. A certain discipline toward, a certain respect for, reality involves accepting, and thinking about those amnesiac moments as they disclose metaphysical truths, not just about our defensive, patched-up social being, but about the nothingness that preceded, and will succeed, us.

The Name is one among many Transtromer poems that make the point. I found it quoted here, in a review essay by Bill Coyle.

****************************************************

In an unpublished essay titled Come as You Are, Eve Sedgwick quotes the following passage – strikingly similar to the Transtromer poem – from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. She remarks that its description of amnesia “filled me with a comical sense of recognition.”

Imagine a person who suddenly wakes up in a hospital after a road accident to find she is suffering from total amnesia. Outwardly, everything is intact: she has the same face and form, her senses and mind are there, but she doesn’t have any idea or any trace of a memory of who she really is. In exactly the same way, we cannot remember our true identity, our original nature. Frantically, and in real dread, we cast around and improvise another identity, one we clutch onto with all the desperation of someone falling continually into an abyss. This false and ignorantly assumed identity is “ego.”

So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing us and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence. In Tibetan ego is called dak dzin, which means “grasping at a self.” . . . . The fact that we need to grasp at all and go on and on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist. From this secret, unnerving knowledge spring all our fundamental insecurities and fear. (116-17)

It’s a more radical idea than Transtromer’s, which at least has us returning – amid the indifferent grinding on of the nearby car lights – to a sense of I – I – I. And of course for the Buddhist this sense of self-loss isn’t “hell” — it’s simply the reality that “the self does not inherently exist.” For Buddhists, the choice isn’t between feeling you’ve been reduced to a panicky animal – “a cat in a sack” – and feeling fully and comfortably affirmed as a rosy rounded ego. But despite these differences, both writers evoke the basic fact of our shaky, constantly-needing-to-be-elaborated, selfhood…

The second idea predominant in Transtromer’s work is related to the first one. Contingent and slippery we may be, but one capacious and reliable thing we do have is interiority. Our consciousness, our memory, our imagination, enables our movement – such as it is – through the world. A cultivation of those vast inner spaces which are all ours can make existence easier. Here’s part of “Romanesque Arches”:

and inside each of them vault opened behind vault endlessly.

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Here’s another evocation of our precious vaults.

The Indoors is Endless

It’s spring in 1827, Beethoven
hoists his death-mask and sails off.

The gentle downward slope gets steeper
and imperceptibly becomes an abyss.

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Heavy breathing, staggering, rowing against the current: There’s the first idea, the immense difficulty of life — all aspects of life. But then, imagining a long-dead relative imagining him, the poet says that “all the surface action turns inwards… the future opens” to the present. Erik – the long-dead relative – uses his vast vault of imagination (“the indoors is endless”) to see the living poet walking today around Washington DC, where life isn’t difficult – where “only / every second column bears weight.”

Yet even here, in the white weightless contemporary city, “the dream of the poor turns to ash,” and the same abyss that threatens Erik, with his “bullet through the soul,” threatens his descendant.

The Nobel in literature goes to Tomas Transtromer.

… gets a fellowship to go to France and changes her mind about the burqa:

[A]ny feminist must realize the wearing of the burqa and niqab is something only women do. It may be grounded in centuries of tradition, but it’s blatantly sexist.

Muslim guys prance around Paris in super-tight jeans and slinky shirts. Why support something that only limits activities of women? That’s hard to support. Plenty of Muslims don’t.

… has died.

His Stanford commencement speech.

A young mountain lion sleeping in a tree on the University of Colorado campus has been captured and “will be fitted with a collar and become part of the Front Range Mountain Lion Study.”

… warns Bloomberg.

Pish posh.

The Bloomberg writers rehearse all the familiar outrages –

Rutgers University forgave $100,000 of the football coach’s interest-free home loan last year. The women’s basketball coach got monthly golf and car allowances. Both collected bonuses without winning a championship.

Meanwhile, the history department took away professors’ desk phones to save money and shrank its doctoral program by 25 percent. After funding cuts by the deficit-strapped Legislature, New Jersey’s state university froze professors’ salaries, cut the use of photocopies for exams and jacked up student tuition, housing and other fees.

Rutgers also increased funding for sports. The 245-year-old school spent more money on athletics than any other public institution in the six biggest football conferences during the 2009-2010 fiscal year, based on data compiled by Bloomberg. More than 40 percent of sports revenue came from student fees and the university’s general fund.

— that sort of thing… But no one cares. A few odd professors maybe.

The tension the writers are picking up on has to do with fans worrying about how their teams are going to do this year.

This is from a talk he gave at Berkeley.

Society’s attention to athletics, Nader said, has moved people down what he called the “sensuality ladder,” a theoretical scale of people’s interactions with the world…

“Your education is supposed to push you up the sensuality ladder,” he said.

One problem here is that Nader – known, when he ran for president, as “ascetic-in-chief,” is so far up the anti-sensuality ladder that he can’t really be seen at all. The most commonly used name for him is Saint Ralph.

Another problem is that your university education should feel perfectly free to push you down the sensuality ladder. Educated people – with some exceptions, like Nader – like to explore the senses, and indeed many of your humanities courses (like the one UD‘s teaching right now about beauty, in which we just read Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” with its famous concluding lines: In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art) feature artworks and ideas that celebrate sensuality.

Dylan’s the front-runner for the literature Nobel at the moment.

A kid from Wisconsin comments on all the green pumpkins available this year. Les UDs bought only greens – dark green, gray green – last weekend. Butler’s Orchard had tons of them.

They look right, paired up and down the brick steps to our little brown house.

… is science advisor to a new non-profit – Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care – which is trying to do something about the over-prescription of anti-depressants in the United States. Psychosprawl, as it’s known.

David Pollack was medical director of Oregon’s mental health program when he learned just how far psychiatric drugs had spread. About 250 kids between ages 1 and 6 whom the Oregon Health Plan tracked were prescribed antipsychotics and antidepressants, despite no proof of early-age safety for them.

… sends her this article by Allen Sanderson, who proposes a sin tax on

college football games. Yes, I am advocating that we impose steep taxes on all intercollegiate football advertising, television broadcasts, logo merchandise sales, and gate receipts.

… This money could be set aside to provide funding for the ex-players to return to earn a degree, enter a graduate program, and/or start a small business.

Fans and universities benefit enormously from [the] exploitation [of players]. It is no stretch to treat this as in the same category as smoking, drinking, gorging ourselves on hot dogs and nachos, most of which we do in the stands or our family rooms while these exploited workers toil for our entertainment and the coach’s yacht. As citizens we should be above having our entertainment whims sated on the backs of these youngsters. Will it put an end to the cesspools at Ohio State, Oregon, Miami, USC, Auburn, LSU and …? No…

Nice, the way he calls them cesspools. UD‘s been doing that for years, but no one at those schools seems to mind that multiple people call them cesspools. Strange.

… as they used to say on Sesame Street.

With the literature Nobel looming, people are talking about UD‘s beloved Don DeLillo (her work on him appears here, and here, and here).

UD‘s friend Jeff sends her this appraisal of him as insular and narcissistic. Read it alongside this (“The American Writer as Bad Citizen”), by Frank Lentricchia. (Scroll down.) It says the exact opposite. Decide for yourself.

UD has exchanged some emails lately with Laura Nelson, an anthropology professor at Cal State East Bay. Both UD and Laura were close friends of David Kosofsky, about whom UD wrote here.

Laura’s husband, Saul Perlmutter, just up and won a Nobel Prize.

Ohio State has had so many players suspended or in trouble that Smith, who spoke and answered questions for 18 minutes, has to differentiate between the tattoo-related violations — “the broader issue” as he calls it — and other suspensions.

No wonder Gee is the country’s highest-paid public university president. Keeping an eye on things.