Arlo on Teaching Methods

From the album Precious Friend, by Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie. Arlo introduces "Garden Song" with some thoughts on how we learn. I wish I'd had Arlo to fall back on in grad school, because by the time I got there, they figured the "boring method" (i.e., some rote memorization from which you can draw new conclusions, create new ideas) was very much looked down upon. I think there's some middle ground.

This’s a kinda easy song, let’s hold one second, let’s learn this song, ‘cause this is, I mean, I know everybody likes singin’ with Pete, but I learnt this song from Pete, an’ it’d be almost the same thing. So, now I know, I mean, the difference, I know, I’ve been watchin’ Pete now for a few years, and he does somethin’ I can’t do, which is, he sings the songs twice at the same time. That’s what we were talking about before, celery consciousness, an’ Pete can do it. It’s the same –it’s – he sings the song once in front of the song and then once with everybody. That’s hard. So, I’m gonna try it, but first, let’s do it the normal way, which is the way we all learnt stuff in school. Now I know, people wanna forget about that, because you don’t figure you can learn anything that way, but it’s wrong; you’ve been learnin’ new ways to learn stuff an’ it don’t work. Right? So. Go back to the old way. It’s the old, what they call the “borin’ method.”

Plagiarized Rice

I'm trying to copy Qalmlea's "Free Rice" dohickey because I think it's neat, and, as Pete Seeger's professor father said, "Plagiarism is basic to all culture." So, if you click on the button below, you can play a neat vocabulary game in which your score contributes rice to the hungry:



And while I'm at it:

Here's to Bill

My great uncle Bill has been saying I should start a blog for, well, I didn't mark it down on my calendar, but for a long time now. I'm pretty sure that his suggestion was a defense mechanism to keep him from being the target of my every thought, but he put up with my e-mail for a good long time. Now he is eighty and cites that as an excuse for every little teensy thing, like not answering my e-mails every twenty minutes. I don't know that that's a good excuse, but I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt, never having been eighty myself. When he doesn't answer my e-mails, I really get annoying and call him. Usually he's doing something like scraping scrambled eggs off the ceiling. How they got there in the first place is something I never even bothered to ask. I mean, I try to give the man some space. I figure if you've got scrambled eggs on the ceiling, you don't need an inquisition on top of it. Now when I call, I often get an answering machine that's set not to take messages. I try not to take this personally. I just never heard of an answering machine that didn't take messages. So with tears in my eyes, I set off to think of someone else to bug with my new problem, that Bill won't even take a message from me because he has set his answering machine against me. I still have things to say. My cat, James, sleeps through half of what I say to him and my imaginary friends go play with someone else when I start to talk to them. So you can see my problem.

Hence, this blog. Someone besides me will benefit from my pontifications. I will notify Bill of its existence so that he can continue to experience my every thought.

Tomorrow night at 8:00, I will be seeing Arlo Guthrie in concert. Solo. No Pete, no Oklahoma Swing Band, just Arlo. Pete's great, but I figure he's probably scraping scrambled eggs off the ceiling and can't come make everybody sing. It's up to me and Arlo. People who haven't experienced Arlo past the "City of New Orleans" have really missed the boat. That's a great song, but not his strongest suit. He is an interactive act, like Pete, and, more important, he's smart and funny. Funny is important when your imaginary friends start forming cliques that you aren't part of. And this is a big deal, because I am actually paying to leave my house, whereas normally you have to drag me away from my desk. In all my life, I have gone to two concerts, both in the 80s: James Taylor and Joan Baez. They are major events for me, unlike my brother, Chris, who I swear went to a different concert every other weekend from seventeen to thirty, often driving hundreds of miles for the privilege.

So good morning America, how are ya? I'll be trying to learn HTML and JavaScript and all that kind of stuff that makes blogs sexy, but right now, I'm just saying hello.

And you can get anything you want at Alice's restaurant.