-
How William Shakespeare changed the way you talk – in pictures | Children’s books | The Guardian
Beautiful illustrations!
Category Archives: Of Interest
Of Interest (weekly)
-
List of destroyed libraries – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
-
The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation – Jonathan Rose – Google Books
-
The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania | YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
-
Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, Jews browsing in the ghetto library. – Yad Vashem Photo Archive
-
Jewish Libraries in the Polish Ghettos during the Nazi Era on JSTOR
-
List of libraries damaged during World War II – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
War is not healthy for children and other living things including libraries.
-
Germans burn Belgian town of Louvain – Aug 25, 1914 – HISTORY.com
-
An odd sort of place named after Borges’ essay The Library of Babel where the writer imagines a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set. There is a copy of Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions here that I found via google search. Browsing and Searching seemed to get me to gibberish but the Reference Hex has suggestions for what to do with the gibberish.
-
Of Bibliophilia and Biblioclasm > Theodore Dalrymple
I learned a new work reading Battles: biblioclasm:
“One of my treasured books is a little classic of which I should never even have heard had I not browsed in so many bookshops. It is William Blades’ The Enemies of Books, first published in 1880. The frontispiece is an engraving of John Bagford, described as ‘shoemaker and biblioclast,’ and another of the delightful pictures is of a furtive charwoman feeding pages of a Caxton Bible to feed a fire. The enemies of books are ranged in chapters in a great chain of being: first come inanimate forces such as fire and water, rising to the lower animals such as bookworms and other vermin, and finally rising to the pinnacle of biblioclasm, that is to say the conscious book-destroyers, the bookbinders and book collectors. (John Bagford tore out the first pages of hundreds of rare volumes and bound them into a single folio volume, which is now in the British Library.) “
Of Interest (weekly)
-
Gustave Whitehead: First in Flight? | ConnecticutHistory.org
” A reporter from the Bridgeport Herald also claimed to be present, though his account provoked some skepticism, since newspaper hoaxes, which helped sell papers, proved quite common at the time. “
-
Editor/Aviation Historian Fails to Fly
“Lost in much of the discussion and debate over who was first to fly is the simple fact that the evidence for Gustave Whitehead is extremely thin to non-existent, while the work of the Wrights is evidenced by volumes of notebooks, numerous diaries, piles of photographs and reams of letters. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that those who believe that Whitehead actually flew sustain themselves on “a hope and a prayer” — faith in that supposed fact — because the absolute proof of that claim is nowhere to be found.
“
-
Education as a Political Institution – The Atlantic
Every teacher should read this every day:
“The man who has reverence will not think it his duty to ‘mould’ the young. He feels in all that lives, but especially in human beings, and most of all in children, something sacred, indefinable, unlimited, something individual and strangely precious, the growing principle of life, an embodied fragment of the dumb striving of the world. He feels an unaccountable humility in the presence of a child—a humility not easily defensible on any rational ground, and yet somehow nearer to wisdom than the easy self-confidence of many parents and teachers. He feels the outward helplessness of the child, the appeal of dependence, the responsibility of a trust. His imagination shows him what the child may become, for good or evil; how its impulses may be developed or thwarted, how its hopes must be dimmed and the life in it grow less living, how its trust will be bruised and its quick desires replaced by brooding will. All this gives him a longing to help the child in its own battle, to strengthen it and equip it, not for some outside end proposed by the state or by any other impersonal authority, but for the ends which the child’s own spirit is obscurely seeking. The man who feels this can wield the authority of an educator without infringing the principle of liberty.”
-
The man who has reverence will not think it his duty to ‘mould’ the young. He feels in all that lives, but especially in human beings, and most of all in children, something sacred, indefinable, unlimited, something individual and strangely precious, the growing principle of life, an embodied fragment of the dumb striving of the world. He feels an unaccountable humility in the presence of a child—a humility not easily defensible on any rational ground, and yet somehow nearer to wisdom than the easy self-confidence of many parents and teachers. He feels the outward helplessness of the child, the appeal of dependence, the responsibility of a trust. His imagination shows him what the child may become, for good or evil; how its impulses may be developed or thwarted, how its hopes must be dimmed and the life in it grow less living, how its trust will be bruised and its quick desires replaced by brooding will. All this gives him a longing to help the child in its own battle, to strengthen it and equip it, not for some outside end proposed by the state or by any other impersonal authority, but for the ends which the child’s own spirit is obscurely seeking. The man who feels this can wield the authority of an educator without infringing the principle of liberty.
-
If good relations between states were desired, one of the first steps ought to be to submit all teaching of history to an international commission, which should produce neutral textbooks free from the patriotic bias which is now demanded everywhere.
-
Of Interest (weekly)
-
Wyoming Toad 3 :: Western Soundscape
The Western Toad, part of the Western Soundscape collection
-
Be as you are — Life Learning — Medium
As someone who is pretty judgmental, this is a great approach to just lettin go and a whole new way to approach Facebook 🙂
“We have this microscopic amount of time on Earth where our hearts continue to beat in our chests and our bodies allow us to move and create and love. Who has time to waste on things they don’t really like? And even more — time to waste worrying about what other people do like?
Try this — every time you find yourself starting to think something judgmental, think this instead: Good for you.” -
“Like other Civil War photographers, Alexander Gardner sometimes tried to communicate both pathos and patriotism with his photographs, reminding his audience of the tragedy of war without forgetting the superiority of his side’s cause. Sometimes, the most effective means of elevating one’s cause while demeaning the other was to create a scene — by posing bodies — and then draft a dramatic narrative to accompany the picture.”
-
“This photograph became the subject of controversy because later analysis revealed that Gardner had staged the image to intensify the emotional effect it would have on the viewer—a practice not uncommon at the time. Gardner moved the corpse of the dead solider and propped up his head to face the camera. The rifle next to the soldier’s was not his own, but rather a gun that Gardner carried with him.”
-
The False Heroism of a Civil War Photographer – The Atlantic
“And Brady, the celebrated war photographer, never again deliberately put himself in harm’s way.”
Of Interest (weekly)
-
for the love of learning: Abolishing Grading
A list of Joe Bower’s blog posts about assessment and abolishing grading
-
Why the Raspberry Pi 2 is my main computer | SQLGene – Learning SQL Slowly
Trying to figure out the Pi and my life
-
For Some Schools, Learning Doesn’t Stop On Snow Days : NPR Ed : NPR
“But he admits there is a point of diminishing returns, which he noticed during a recent string of snow days.
“You know, the first day we had about 100 percent of the kids involved in e-learning,” Walker says. “Well, then, after the fourth day, we were down to about 55 percent of the children.”
On the fifth snow day, Walker gave kids and teachers a free pass: No e-learning today.
“
-
Snow day? – Jonathan D. Becker, J.D., Ph.D.
Musing about snow days and learning