Jeff Kupperman: Category EDU 427/527: POOT

The Fox and the Hedgehog

Jeff Kupperman — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 22:42:47 -0500

So I'm reading Stephen Jay Gould's last book, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities. It's one of those books that's more interesting to think about than to read, so I'm not sure if I'll make it through, but the hedgehog and the fox from the title have been sticking in my mind.

They come from a proverb by Archilochus as quoted by Erasmus (and since I'm quoting Gould quoting Erasmus, that makes this a 4th generation quote):

The fox devises many strategies; the hedgehog knows one great and effective strategy.

Gould wants us to think of this as a metaphor for Science and The Humanities, but I like it on more of a personal level: Are you a fox or a hedgehog?

Pics from the POOT banquet

Jeff Kupperman — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 22:45:12 -0500

Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric interview Sultan Mehmet II

The Sultan, Queen Isabella, Trotsky, Meir Kahane, and Diane Sawyer talk with some famous artists.

Eleanor Roosevelt and Kurt Waldheim

Thomas Aquinas and Eleanor of Aquitaine spar with the Norse god Loki.

Art students

Jeff Kupperman — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 07:16:48 -0500

One of my master's students, Wendy Grosvenor, made this graphic as part of her COATT ("Consortium for Outstanding Achievement in Teaching with Technology") portfolio. C'est magnifique!

ICS skills in the global economy

Jeff Kupperman — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 10:34:52 -0400

If you're wondering how projects like the Michigan Student Caucus and Place Out Of Time are connected to skills employers are looking for in the real world (read: the global economy), check out this, excerpted from the New York Times today:

October 17, 2006
Skills Gap Hurts Technology Boom in India
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

TIRUCHENGODE, India — As its technology companies soar to the outsourcing skies, India is bumping up against an improbable challenge. In a country once regarded as a bottomless well of low-cost, ready-to-work, English-speaking engineers, a shortage looms.

India still produces plenty of engineers, nearly 400,000 a year at last count. But their competence has become the issue.

A study commissioned by a trade group, the National Association of Software and Service Companies, or Nasscom, found only one in four engineering graduates to be employable. The rest were deficient in the required technical skills, fluency in English or ability to work in a team or deliver basic oral presentations....

With the number of technology jobs expected to nearly double to 1.7 million in the next four years, companies are scrambling to find fresh engineering talent and to upgrade the schools that produce it....

This year, India’s largest software company, Tata Consultancy Services, plans to add 30,000 people to its current work force of 72,000. So it was that on a recent afternoon a four-man team from the company roamed the halls of a college founded by a local textile magnate in this small south Indian outpost.

The team came to Tiruchengode with the goals of selecting its next generation of software programmers and assessing how, in the short term, the company could help the college churn out more of what it needed. “These are the guys who are going to write my Windows 2010,” as one of the recruiters put it.

“We can’t afford to let talent go” was the verdict of A. K. Pattabiraman, a member of the team.

They grilled professors and administrators: How many faculty members have doctorates? Why did so many students have incompletes by the time they entered their fourth and final year? What software programs do they use for the class in mechatronics — a combination of mechanics, information technology and electronics?

They tested the students’ ability to reason and speak, tossing out debate topics, like democracy versus dictatorship, and science quiz questions, like what happens to an iron rod put in a beaker of nitric acid....

"There is properly no history; only biography"

Jeff Kupperman — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 11:53:55 -0400

Proving that Place Out Of Time has deep roots -- at least in it's approach to fostering historical empathy -- this is from a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay called "History," published in 1841. (Emphasis added. Complete text at The Literature Network, among other places.)

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has be-fallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

...

This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as much an illustration of the mind's powers and depravations as what has befallen us. Each new law and political movement has meaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets and say, 'Under this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself.' This remedies the defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions into perspective: and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance, and the waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.

...

...The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to those who do not respect themselves. I have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day.

The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state of society or mode of action in history, to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Every thing tends in a wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person. He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography and all the government of the world; he must transfer the point of view from which history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens and London to himself, and not deny his conviction that he is the court, and if England or Egypt have any thing to say to him, he will try the case; if not, let them for ever be silent. He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signal narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences, avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome, are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign? London and Paris and New York must go the same way. "What is History," said Napoleon, "but a fable agreed upon?" This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization, Church, Court, and Commerce, as with so many flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not make more account of them. I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain, and the Islands, — the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras in my own mind.

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience, and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, — must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know. What the former age has epitomized into a formula or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule. Somewhere, sometime, it will demand and find compensation for that loss by doing the work itself. Ferguson discovered many things in astronomy which had long been known. The better for him.

History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, — see how it could and must be. So stand before every public and private work; before an oration of Burke, before a victory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson, before a French Reign of Terror, and a Salem hanging of witches, before a fanatic Revival, and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in Providence. We assume that we under like influence should be alike affected, and should achieve the like; and we aim to master intellectually the steps, and reach the same height or the same degradation, that our fellow, our proxy, has done.

All inquiry into antiquity, — all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis, — is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and the Now. Belzoni digs and measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the end of the difference between the monstrous work and himself. When he has satisfied himself, in general and in detail, that it was made by such a person as he, so armed and so motived, and to ends to which he himself should also have worked, the problem is solved; his thought lives along the whole line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them all with satisfaction, and they live again to the mind, or are now.

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us, and not done by us. Surely it was by man, but we find it not in our man. But we apply ourselves to the history of its production. We put ourselves into the place and state of the builder. We remember the forest-dwellers, the first temples, the adherence to the first type, and the decoration of it as the wealth of the nation increased; the value which is given to wood by carving led to the carving over the whole mountain of stone of a cathedral. When we have gone through this process, and added thereto the Catholic Church, its cross, its music, its processions, its Saints' days and image-worship, we have, as it were, been the man that made the minster; we have seen how it could and must be. We have the sufficient reason.

...

Tentative POOT scenario for Fall, 2006

Jeff Kupperman — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 15:11:57 -0400

POOT mentors and facilitators:

Recently (in the real world), a man named David Irving was imprisoned in Austria for violating that country's "Verbotsgesetz," or Nazi Prohibition Law. Our proposed scenario for the Fall POOT would connect with that news and the idea of forbidding the public articulation of certain ideas, by inventing an Austrian high school student who, as editor of her school's student newspaper, publishes an article in opposition to the letter and the spirit of the law that led to Irving's imprisonment. The student is then suspended from school until she makes a formal apology and retraction, but defiant, she brings the case to the Court of All Time.

Potential ideas and questions that could be explored include:

Thinking about what is "true" and how we decide what is true.
What do we need to know to make judgments?
The dangers behind what is said and what is not said.
What does it mean to be curious about things that people (polite society) would rather not talk about?
How do we...as individuals, or as a nation...make amends for our past?
How do we manage the (potential) dangers of ideas/movements generally found to be odious, hateful, etc?
How do we do honor to something catastrophic?

We also might do some more with requesting depositions from attendees:
"What insights could you share with the court about how you handled such issues in your time?"
"How can you draw upon your experience in a way that could help the court get to the core issues?"

It would seem that we could make easy jumps to issues like internet filtering, national identity and how we present ourselves as a nation, freedom of expression/misrepresentation, Danish cartoons, etc.

In any event, please let us hear your thoughts and suggestions....

POOT seminar (EDU 427/527) schedule and syllabus

Jeff Kupperman — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 13:59:02 -0400

UM-Flint EDU 427/527 will meet on campus the following days, 4:30-7:15:

Sept. 6, Sept. 20, Oct. 4, Oct. 18, Nov. 1, Nov. 15, Nov. 29, Dec. 6

Note that there is no class Aug. 30, and class meets every second week except Dec. 6, which is one week after the previous class.

Here's the syllabus (in pdf format):