Primrose Road

Oy vey

noreply@blogspirit.com (PrimroseRoad) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:55:54 -0400

Two ultra-Orthodox newspapers in Israel have digitally altered a photo of Israel's new cabinet, blacking out the two women in the cabinet because viewing a picture of a woman would constitute "a violation of female modesty."

Reading material: authorshipping

noreply@blogspirit.com (PrimroseRoad) — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:28:35 -0400

The other day, as I was telling my Intro to Lit class about how Shakespeare became "The Bard," "The Best Playwright in the World!!!," "The First English Novelist," etc., one student asked, "Ms. P., do you actually *like* Shakespeare?"

Yes, it's possible to *like* Shakespeare outside the context of Bardolatry.

Irvin Matus' Shakespeare, In Fact (1994) presents an exhaustive amount of documentary evidence demonstrating that William Shakespeare of Stratford is the man behind William Shakespeare's plays and, perhaps more importantly, that the "authorship" question simply does not make sense in the context of Early Modern culture. Chapter 5, "Questions About the Writing of the Plays," clearly explains why the argument that one man wrote another man's plays is not valid in this context and also challenges those who would view Shakespeare as a story-inventing novelist.

He also suggests that those arguing for alternative theories of authorship have set up a straw man in the figure of the "orthodox scholar": so-called "orthodox scholars," he claims, are perfectly aware that William Shakespeare did not write every word that was attributed to him.

In a chapter on the dating of the plays (in which he does note that dating methods are not always ultra-accurate), he points out just how conspiracy-theory-like the Oxfordian view is, noting that

"According to the Oxfordians, the traditional chronology of Shakespeare's plays -- from 1589 at the earliest to 1614 at the latest -- is merely something tailored by scholars to suit the lifetime of the man they presume to be the author and nothing more -- a very strange accusation when one considers that the Oxfordian chronology is tailored to suit the lifetime of the Earl of Oxford" (145).

Yet, the sole purpose of this book is not merely to critique the Oxfordian view; Matus also discusses some of the ways in which the rise of this view and the fact that people are buying into it suggest problems with the ways in which scholars have (or have not) argued the case for Shakespeare.

This is worth reading alongside the more recent The Case For Shakespeare for those seeking an understanding of what "authorship" was in Early Modern English culture.

Acceptance letter fail

noreply@blogspirit.com (PrimroseRoad) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:29:56 -0400

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, the "wrong database of recipients" was selected when sending out acceptance letters to incoming freshmen at UC San Diego earlier this month, leading to 28,000 acceptance letters being sent out to students who had not been accepted.

I can't wait to hear about the lawsuits. ;)

Moses has taken the "Which God Are You?" quiz

noreply@blogspirit.com (PrimroseRoad) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 10:12:52 -0400

The Passover Haggadah, told in Facebook.

(I like God's "25 Things You Didn't Know About Me" list and the random Bernie Madoff appearance.)

Rambling about education and self-esteem

noreply@blogspirit.com (PrimroseRoad) — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 15:19:20 -0400

There's an article in this quarter's Skeptic magazine about some of the causes and effects of the "positive thinking" movement in American culture that for the most part rehashes previous arguments about self-esteem and The Secret but presents some interesting facts about the self-esteem movement in the classroom. Author Steve Salerno notes that psychologists found that while students in three Asian countries had stronger academic skills, students to whom they were compared in the United States "expressed much higher self-appraisals." The self-esteem movement may have simply made students feel more confident about poor academic skills and destroyed their ability to self-appraise, a skill that educational psychologists have shown is actually important to academic performance.

I remember several years ago taking a course within the composition program at my university's English department and students presenting unreflectingly positive reviews of a book that suggested that grading was akin to violence. At the same time, I was taking educational psychology courses and learning about research that shows that teaching is most effective when clear objectives are set and evaluated as quantitatively as possible. Though grading, when not used correctly, can indeed serve as a method of punishing students who do not enter the classroom with a certain skill set, I wonder if the grading-as-metaphor-for-violence idea instead comes from a concern that grading simply doesn't feel good.

Self-esteem feels good. Of course, as any competent psychologist will tell you, what feels good isn't always good for you; in fact, psychological treatment itself can often be unpleasant. While I think that we do need to eliminate the correlation between standardized testing and funding and socialize our public schools a bit more so that every child actually does have the opportunity to start from the same place, I at the same time do not believe that holding this view means that I must also buy into the idea that if it feels good, it is good. Policy in this case needs to be left up to educational psychologists, not self-esteem pushers and people with ideas about metaphors.

Posting again soon ...

noreply@blogspirit.com (PrimroseRoad) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:59:23 -0400

Many apologies, dear reader(s?), for the lack of updates. (Oddly, I've had over 2500 hits this month. Remind me to do a wacky searches post soon.) I had to travel to the West Coast for a conference and have had much to do teaching- and dissertation-wise.

More posts soon, I assure you.

Everyone tried to read me

noreply@blogspirit.com (PrimroseRoad) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:18:31 -0400

Tonight I went to Purim services (description for the uninitiated) dressed as my dissertation.

I pinned a title page to the front of my shirt and a few pages of footnotes to the back, then printed out random pages from drafts and pinned them to my sleeves and trousers. During the service, I kept turning around to find people reading my back!

Still, nothing beat the grown man dressed in a full Tigger suit.