June 2012
92 posts
We’re working on a segment about political parody accounts on the internets — any favs?
Top Five EarthFix Stories This Week
“You have to realize that one thinks one sees with one’s eyes, but the reality of is it that you see culturally. Your culture tells you what you’re seeing. You think if you see something that it’s permanent. It isn’t permanent. It keeps changing.”
— Artist Alex Katz on the Callie Crossley Show, 6/11/12. Listen. (via wgbhnews)
“My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don’t want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either.”
- Michael Lewis’ commencement address to the Princeton class of 2012, in which he said his writing career and fame were more a product of fortune than anything else. (Watch his speech)
PBS introduces its new Coping With Climate Change Webpage →
pbs.org
We’re also eager to hear stories from different communities on how folks are dealing with climate change - whether it be early blooms in your garden or, for farmers, how crops are being affected. If you’ve got a climate change story, send them our way!
This looks promising!
Coping With Climate Change, introduced by PBS, features videos, reports, blog posts, and slide shows on how American communities are dealing with climate change. The page has kicked off by highlighting communities in Texas that have been dealing with record high temperatures, wildfires, and severe droughts, which have depleted groundwater supplies and lakes. In dealing with these issues, some Texas residents are beginning to adapt to the changing climate by exploring alternative approaches.
Visit the Coping With Climate Change webpage to find out more about the climate challenges these Texas communities face and how they are addressing their issues.
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Today in #whatshouldwecallme...
Hey, Tumblr!
We’re looking for suggestions on what we should call Judy Woodruff’s weekly NewsHour blog. She usually shares her reflections and observations on how issues inside Washington resonate across the country.
Some of her recent posts:
Does Emotion Ever Have a Role in Foreign Policy?
How Civically Engaged Are Millennials?
Why Are Some GOP Voters Just Not That Into Romney?
PS: Best suggestion gets some nifty NewsHour swag
Any ideas?
'Watcher'
— After Katrina, 2005
At first, there was nothing to do but watch.
For days, before the trucks arrived, before the work
of cleanup, my brother sat on the stoop and watched.
He watched the ambulances speed by, the police cars;
watched for the looters who’d come each day
to siphon gas from the car, take away the generator,
the air conditioner, whatever there was to be had.
He watched his phone for a signal, watched the sky
for signs of a storm, for rain so he could wash.
At the church, handing out diapers and water,
he watched the people line up, watched their faces
as they watched his. And when at last there was work,
he got a job, on the beach, as a watcher.
Behind safety goggles, he watched the sand for bones,
searched for debris that clogged the great machines.
Riding the prow of the cleaners, or walking ahead,
he watched for carcasses - chickens mostly, maybe
some cats or dogs. No one said remains. No one
had to. It was a kind of faith, that watching:
my brother trained his eyes to bear
the sharp erasure of sand and glass, prayed
there’d be nothing more to see.
— Natasha Trethewey, the new U.S. Poet Laureate. Her book “Beyond Katrina” chronicles the personal accounts of how people of the Gulf Coast region, including her family, have lived with the treat and consequences of natural disaster for generations.
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Testing, testing
Diane Ravitch on teacher evaluations and teaching to the test:
First of all, should teachers be evaluated? Yes. Should they be evaluated by the test scores of their students, as Race to the Top, the Obama program, requires? Absolutely not. That is an unproven and actually a very harmful way to evaluate teachers.
Should teachers be paid more if the test scores go up? No, they should not be, because that puts too much emphasis on very poor tests. It causes teachers to teach to the test, which everybody agrees is a terrible thing to do. It also leads to narrowing of the curriculum, so that schools will drop the arts. They will drop history. They will drop civics, foreign languages. And they will focus only on what’s tested.
Are teachers too easily caught in crossfire over student achievement?
