The Books We Choose to Read

It has to do with a child's happiness, moral development and tenderness of heart. Entertainment does not merely gratify taste, after all, but creates it.

"Darkness too Visible"

War

Can anything be stupider than that a man has a right to kill me because he lives on hte ohter side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine?
--Blaise Pascal

Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks
p. 28
"You don't blame her for choosing a living of lustfulness and debauchery?" he inquired, his eyebrow raised in ock severity.
"May be I might," I replied. "But before I blamed, I would like to know the extent of her choices in the hard world that yo have described to me. If yo are drowning in a sewer, your first concern might be that you are drowning, not how vile you smell."

p. 29 I told him then that I had had it directly from our rector that knowledge is not itself evil, it is only the use to which one puts it that may imperil the soul.

This book is soo good. I need to read it again.

Mitch Says

Archive-URL: http://search.bikelist.org/getmsg.asp?Filename=internet-bob.11007.1747.eml
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 19:27:07 -0600
From: mitch harris
Subject: Re: [BOB] Motorist Keyboard Rage Against Bicyclists
On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 2:34 PM, chuck davis wrote:

"It takes two adverse attitudes to tango or otherwise engage in a pissing contest." Sounds like you're suggesting that Jared is becoming part of the problem by responding--however indirectly--to the guy who originally complained about cyclists on the road. If so, I'm not sure how you get there. Jared's comments showed lots of understanding of the guy's situation and difficulties and laid out a reasonable logic for challenging the idea that road taxes make the road belong to auto drivers and passengers. Measured and sensible. Your point is well taken too--that "owning the road" for any of us may be a provisional thing and less secure than people think when they say it.

--Mitch
Re: [BOB] Love Bike?

tree | flat

posted by mitch harris on May 8 2009 11:33P to Internet-BOB
That looks great--I'd get one in a flash. A kid could ride younger,
perhaps, because you could keep an eye on her and not have to trust
everything was fine back there. My kids rode stoker on the back of
the tandem pretty young, but it's nerve wracking when they're small
and strapped in.

My favorite kid carrier when not using the tandem (also had the Burley
trailer and a Danish bike seat on the back rack of bikes) was one I
bought it at a Belgian, I think, bike shop for a couple bucks. Just a
little padded seat that sits on the top tube with strap metal legs
extending to the down tube where they form foot rests. Like the
Europeans that use these, I put some short garden hose sections on the
foot rests to close them at top to keep kid feet in. My kid would
hold the handlebar with me.

The conversations we would have while riding were about anything, but
frequently were about traffic and riding choices I made--"why did you
turn early, dad?"--and lead to discussions about bike safety and
teaching riding. This only worked till age 4 or 5 for her, when she
was too big.

So imagine how great it would be to move to the tandem version where
you'd continue the conversation and effective cycling lessons.

--Mitch

Who has the right to punish electronic Bullies?

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Can a student be suspended for posting a video on You Tube that cruelly demeans another student? Can a principal search a cellphone, much like a locker or a backpack? Times

Grading--Marianne Baker

Only assign what helps students learn and what you can grade. Your time should be spent in assessment that drives instruction and results in learning.

Have students grade what they can.

Spelling, The IE Rule is just silly!

Oh, My. The erroneous things we are taught in school. How do we really learn to spell? That's what I'd like to know. I have been participating in the Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee every morning, and I have learned a few things, like we spell a lot from memory about what the word looks like. Or we associate a root word with the bigger word, or we think, "Oh, that's a foreign word, so it has to be --ette, et, oux--(I can recognise some French bits, and maybe a couple of Spanish bits)." By far and away the "ie" rule has given me the biggest challenge (or ous, or tion, or ly, and ALL of their various ways to say the exact same sound--honestly there are not a lot of rules you can extrapolate that hold up). So frustrated, I looked up the "ie" rule--in Britain recently they begged teachers not to teach that rule any more--here goes:

"Just when a "rule" is learned, such as "I before E except after C" there are exceptions put in: "or when sounding like A as in 'neighbor' and 'weigh'." Then, some aspiring novelist decides to put in a sentence like "Neither of the foreign sovereigns wanted either of the feisty heifers for protein, and they seized the weird kaleidoscope from the counterfeit poltergeist!" and the rule goes up in a puff of smoke.

"One of the best and most-overlooked techniques for learning both grammar and hard to spell words is simply reading – a wide variety and as much as possible. The more times the eye sees words spelled correctly, the more easy it is to spot mistakes. It becomes less a matter of following rules as much as gaining an intuition as to when a word simply feels "wrong.""