wapo on b’ton

favorable review. ht: m. needham.

a petri-disch community

florida school reform in WaPo.

now with bloglike pop-up commentation from users:
deschooling society (dot-digress.it).

my life in schools.

primary first.
i was… more than most people even…
the subject of an *educational experiment*:
at university elementary school in the sixties
many of us even as kids spoke of ourselves
as “guinea pigs” for indiana university,
its ed school in particular. there were
great big ungainly boxes like a filing cabinet
on wheels that ran remote controls for
closed-circuit-TV cameras following us
through our lessons. for example.
and we were tested tested tested
you’d better believe… the “iowa test
of basic skills” seems to have come up
pretty often (anyhow the name sticks).
but remember it was the sixties:
we were also getting “the new math”,
a from-the-ground-up approach based
on *set theory*. this approach allegedly
flopped nationwide because its teachers
didn’t understand its principles.
ours sure did and it was far the clearest
thing in school or life then or now
as far as i’ve been able to determine.
there was plenty of (what’s now called)
“discovery learning” going on too:
it was the very *age* of “do your own thing”
and our teachers had breathed in its spirit
at a rich source. (iu bloomington, as we
will see, was my very *garden of eden*,
the paradise i’ve been exiled from
[for my knowledge of good and evil]).

so there was a lot of best-of-both-worlds
and i was right at home. in fact, i was
pretty much at home *anywhere* in those days
and i knew it: my family did two years
(“kindergarten” and “4th grade” for me)
abroad with *lots* of travel time
in croatia and the rest of what was then
known as “yugoslavia”… slovenia, serbia,
bosnia, and so on… plus poland, czechoslovakia
(another name change for the present-day),
austria, and on and on. *we* were together
and it felt it would just naturally always
be so. we five: dad, mom, elder sister
hannah, me, younger brother nathan.

sixth grade was pivotal. i’ll have mentioned
it already in this very blog i think; anyway
i hereby promise to return to this subject.

dekist’s hot shelves

bible stuff, a shakespeare, books about books, math, and various reference and mostly-lit-but-quasi-random. there’s a *lot* more math stuff in the library here, natch, most of it downstairs. most of the dovers are at madeline’s though. i’ve been spreading around drafts of three different micro-zines. once you’ve made *one*, of course, the goal becomes to fill a *whole shelf*. it’s in delany somewhere i think.

Cagle’s Panorama

donna robinson’s got the original art evidently. ~1994 iirc.

until he stopped moving

bloomington mourns belton at microcosm.

comics will break your heart

marvel vs. kirby in USA today. the future: a dog biting a human leg. forever.

test post (a macbook for a camera).

timothy hittle’s the potato hunter (U-tube). (also: “gumby” creator art clokey dies at 88; RIP).

boxcar books doco; matt starr at vimeo.

don belton RIP

murdered in bloomington
justicefordonbelton.com
bibliography

words of the prophets

david ebbinghouse decloaks: tom cat spray at you-tube.

AHEM

M. Doyle on STEM.
MT@P #20. the failblog version.
Bloomington Handmade Market: Saturday.
Bribe to the flop.

comics links belonging in comments to a previous post

uslan at IU… dial b for blog…