Review: I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student May 13, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Actualite
University campuses have seen many changes in the last fifty years: digital technology, new teaching methods, ‘political correctness’… But the change that really matters has been the extraordinary growth in student numbers. Take the UK and the US. About 60% of young men and women now undertake third-level education in these two countries, whereas in the 1950s this number was well under 10%, and in some regions and among some classes it was substantially lower. The effect of this growth has been both catastrophic and beneficial: the standard of studies has fallen, but the number of those educated (albeit to a lesser level) has grown. What this means is that today most universities – with the exception of elite institutions – represent a continuation of high school rather than another kind of education (you need a doctorate program for that). For teachers there are two strategies. Either you accept, as Beachcombing has in his teaching, the reality of the situation and begin to do high-school ‘plus’ courses (with space for the best students to show their mettle); or you, like Cu Chuliann, fight the waves and continue to teach university level courses, a generation after universities, as our parents knew them, ceased to exist.
Patrick Allitt is one of the warriors who fights on. And, in his book, I’m the Teacher You’re the Student (Penn State 2005) he describes one semester at Emory University (Georgia) in a witty diary of his day-to-day pleasures and battles while sharing history with students. It is an outstanding read and articulates the experience of a ‘university’ level teacher, put together by someone who is clearly very good at what he does. (In a strange way Beach is an alumnus of PA. He once listened to an audio course the good professor had created and was absolutely charmed: even the sound engineer could be heard laughing at some points).
We have the exam howlers, the sociology of late homework (the shift from dead grandparents to broken computers), plagiarism, evaluations, reading assignments and the difficulty of understanding whether students have actually looked at these assignments. But this book also comes closer than anything Beach has ever read to, let’s call it, the metaphysics of teaching: the way, for example, that an unkempt rather intimidating bunch of late teens in the first lesson become a cohort of promising young men and women by the end of the course and the object of affectionate memories.
How precisely does PA fight the waves? Well, first of all he rejects the natural camaraderie of the classroom, a camaraderie which is open to anyone teaching American students. This is summed up in that title ‘I’M THE TEACHER, you’re the student’ (‘my station and its duties’).
Second, PA uses images and music and extensive readings to examine different periods of history, while demanding a certain standard of knowledge of maps, dates etc. In doing so he rejects text books and naff power points. But he also deprives students of a corpus that they can study: the hardest-working student will have no guarantee that they’ve effectively covered everything, notwithstanding lecture summaries handed out in each class. Here there is a bias towards ability rather than effort.
Third, PA cares about the execrable English of his students. This means explaining that not all books are ‘novels’, raging about tense sequence and daring to name the pluperfect. More about PA’s English lessons in a moment.
The result of this trio is that students get lower grades than they might expect from a history class. But, in recompense, they come closer to the essence of history and perhaps get to improve their written English into the bargain. Does this make PA a hero for the ages or an intolerable reactionary? Well, probably both. He certainly doesn’t qualify as a high-school plus teacher.
Let’s take now the example of English style, something that fascinates Beachcombing because it is the area where Anglo-Saxon education has so conspicuously failed; not helped by the insane orthography of our mother tongue. Beach has taught about six hundred American university students in the last five years. Of these perhaps fifty wrote good English. About two hundred and fifty could get by. And the other three hundred were an indictment of US secondary education: their high-school English teachers deserved a little gentle, non-therapeutic lynching.
In those five years Beach has never marked a student down for bad grammar or spelling. And, ever the pragmatist, he only troubles to correct English grammar and spelling when students hand in drafts for final papers (few do) as, in one-on-one encounters, he (believes he) can make a difference. He also had one experience of taking a student through a special studies paper, over a semester, where he was able to revolutionize said student’s prose: she’s now working in publishing…
PA on the other hand holds his students to far higher standards. The Saxon genitive is defended (the Germans do without the apostrophe so why can’t we?), tense sequence matters, good spelling is celebrated… But sometimes perhaps PA wades a little too far into the water in his sword-fight against the waves. Take this passage by PA’s student X and judge for yourself how well it is written.
‘In a time when the United States was vying to be a colonial power and prove supremacy in the western hemisphere, Cuba’s cry for freedom from Spain was prefect. At the first sight of risk for Americans and their property, McKinley consented to send in the troops. Roosevelt, Secretary of the Navy, having been steadfastly urging the war and craving to fight in it, rather quickly organised a team of skilled volunteers to fight under his command. When called, they joined the regular cavalry and infantry units in embarkation in Cuba. Some units were, to their disappointment, denied leave for lack of room.
If we could create an education system where the average student was able to write to this standard then it would be time for fireworks and champagne. PA is, however, damning.
‘It could be worse. [The student] covers a lot of points quickly and is grammatically sound – he even uses the apostrophe correctly. But like most students’ writing it shows every sign of inexperience. There are too many participles (‘vying’, ‘urging’, ‘craving’). There are too many adverbs and adjectives (‘steadfastly’, ‘rather’ [in rather quickly], and ‘skilled’ should go). The first sentence should begin with At rather than In, and he should tell the reader when this ‘time’ was by using a date. [There follow another eleven sentences of critique!]. I do not write any of this nitpicky criticism of the paragraph on the paper – I can’t possibly devote that much time to every paragraph, nor do I want to crush students to the ground with impossible high demands and my own sometimes quirky editorializing. On the paper I write an ‘S’, for satisfactory, mark a couple of grammatical infelicities further on, and leave it at that.
An ‘S’! What must be remembered is that most academics in the humanities and particularly in the social sciences write prose that is little better than the passage quoted here!! Fifty years ago it would have been worthwhile taking student X to one side and giving him some advice (while complimenting him) because, back then, there were only ten students in the class, and they were all bright and motivated. You might even slip your arm in his and invite him over to the hall to take some port and discuss Roosevelt’s opportunism. Today, the high-school plus teachers have other battles to fight: the wyrms of administration, the dragon heads of mandatory courses, not to mention the thrashing snake tails of indifference.
Beach is always looking out for unusual books: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
***
13/05/2012: KMH has a radical suggestion. ‘The university concept must continue to change and change profoundly. Here is one future change I think will eventually happen at the undergraduate level: separating the teacher from the tester. Real learning occurs in an environment friendly to learning. This is where the teacher is the ‘friend,’ mentor, and advisor for his students, rather than also acting as a final judge in assigning grades to those in his courses. Imagine a separate testing facility for each university where students go to be given the standard tests (several per course) appropriate to the courses they are taking. The testing faculty does not teach these courses but it does make up the tests (or acquires them from outside sources) and grades the papers. The standards for grading are set in advance and there is no grading “on the curve.” It is then possible for everyone in a class to get a higher grade. This separation allows the teacher to gain better rapport with his students, and because grading on the curve is not allowed, students can also be more helpful each other. The final grade is based on testing results with accompanying remarks by the teacher attached to the grade itself describing classroom participation, general attitude, the student’s potential, etc. I hope I am making the grade.’ Thanks KMH!
Freedoms Fliers by J. Todd Moye April 15, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary
Wars have the habit of shaking up the social order in a way that a hoary old conservative like Beachcombing finds rather disturbing. Children join militias: think the moving photographs of fourteen and fifteen year German ‘soldiers’ guarding the Atlantic wall or ‘that scene’ in Doctor Zhivago. Gender relations are bent in knots: women are removed rudely from households and thrown onto tractors and into factories. And racial and ethnic respect is burnt like kindling on the barbecue: see every war in the last two hundred years in the Balkans. But let’s say that gender or race relations are no hot shakes to begin with, perhaps war does everyone a favour? Certainly many women recall new freedoms that the World Wars offered them (in their tractors and factories). While for Afro-Americans the pre-war status-quo was hardly worth defending: cue J. Todd Moye’s Freedom Flyers: the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II the book that Beachcombing has devoured most readily in the last month and its moving story of the first black combat fliers.
If you were black and American in the 1930s the chances are that you would have mixed feelings about your country. If you lived in the southern states you had to bear the disgusting tyranny of Jim Crow and if you lived in the north prejudice was ingrained in society, in the economy and in culture. Come WW2 then black patriots felt understandably torn. On the one hand, they wanted to fight for the flag and American freedoms against some of the most ghastly regimes the human race has ever vomited onto the card table. On the other hand, the flag was oppressing African Americans at home with a uniquely American version of fascism. Not surprisingly many of these soldiers articulated their fight then as a double ‘victory’: against Nazi Germany and other monsters from the deep, but also against attitudes and regulations at home. ‘We find it hard to fight Tyranny in the midst of Tyranny’ as one contemporary put it.
This was all sharpened by the fact that the American armed forces were unquestionably and institutionally racist. For example, there is the incredible fact that blood taken from black and white servicemen was kept separately, though there was and is no scientific justification for such an absurd procedure. With this kind of nonsense we can trace attitudes but there were also actions: the reluctance to use black infantry in battle with the same being employed as something equivalent to Liberty’s navvies. Nor unfortunately did things change very much in the course of the war: one of the most striking passages in this book describes a black pilot being momentarily taken up in the patriotic joy of a welcome in an American harbour only to arrive at disembarkation and be told that he has to walk out onto the dock on a ‘black’ gangplank. This was one of those men who had served his country, risked his life and who had disproved the absurd notion that black men could not fly. And here was his spit-in-your-face homecoming.
Many Second World War books (pioneers in this regard) thrive on witness statements of battles. But Freedom Fliers offers a richer take on the same. As the author is not just tracing the experience of war but also backgrounds and aftermaths – an important part of the book are the changes in life for black Americans – the reader goes deeper. He or she will feel at the end that they’ve read a Russian novel rather than a trashy throw away murder mystery because so much more ground is covered. And Beachcombing should say that if the lives honoured here begin with intolerable domestic conditions they end with an invitation, as guests, to Obama’s inauguration. The Tuskegee airmen took that familiar road from outsiders, to heroes, to icons. And, on the subject of icons, those who enjoy the perversions of history will particularly relish a bit of cobblers in part exposed by this book: the notion that the Tuskegee fliers never lost a plane while escorting American bombers. This claim, which is simply untrue, is a nice example of a half truth becoming a useful lie. The author in one brilliant passage expresses the outrage in popular culture over challenges to this claim thus: ‘But they didn’t every lose a bomber! It says so right here on my T-shirt!’
Beach is always looking out for outstanding WW2 books: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
John Lukacs: The Legacy of the Second World War April 5, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary
John Lukacs’s The Legacy of the Second World War is, like most books by that brilliant and maverick historian, a bit of a mess. The chapter headings say it all. Chapter One, ‘Seventy Years Later’ and Chapter Two ‘the Place of the Second World War’ can pass muster. However, then everything is thrown off kilter. Chapter Three is about the carving up of the post-war world. Chapter Four is about Hitler’s personality. Chapter Five is about a meeting between two nuclear physicists (yes that meeting). Chapter Six, ‘Rainbow Five’ is about the American choice to finish in Europe before knocking out Japan. Then Chapter Seven discusses the origins of the cold war.
Usually run-around structures are not promising in a book: the ability to create a greater unity reflects on an author’s ability to be cogent, to the point and interesting from page to page. But in the case of JL the messier the structure the more interesting things seem to get.
The chapter, for example, on Hitler would justify the purchase of the book in itself. Again the arguments covered don’t always hold together: these are really three or four mini chapters strung one after another. But each section represents stimulating and sometimes taunting essays by a scholar who has refused to be cowed by contemporary ‘wisdom’ on the war.
So, there are thoughts on Hitler’s extraordinary state craft; Hitler as a Judaephobe rather than an anti-semite (JL as a Hungarian Jew was himself lucky to survive the Second World War); Hitler’s bizarre hesitation at Dunkirk; Hitler’s understanding that Germany was losing the war; Hitler’s indirect negotiations with the Allies…
JL at one point speculates whether Hitler will not become, in our future historical imagination, a second Diocletian: a ruthless defender of civilisation just before the barbarians cross the frozen Rhine. It would be absurd if this happened. But there is something eerily convincing about JL’s sense of where the world will drift in the next century. We are, as he often reminds his readers, at the end of an age. We’ll have to see how Beachcombing’s grandchildren have Hitler introduced to them in their text books… That is if there are still text-books to pass out.
Reading the book the historian that Beachcombing is sometimes reminded of is, of all people, the young David Irving; something that will make JL froth at the mouth should he ever read this. But JL, now in his eighties, has the younger David Irving’s talent as a gifted outsider. Yet there is none of DI’s grand-standing (Hitler’s Diary) or perverse/obscene political positions (re the Holocaust) or unfortunate heroes (let’s leave it at that). There is wisdom and a bubbling but always sensible moral impatience with the world. This might not be an ideal primer on WW2, but The Legacy is certainly the best advanced commentary Beach has read.
Beach is always on the look out for good books on WW2: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Perrottet: Sinners’ Grand Tour March 23, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Ancient, Medieval, Modern
Tony Perrottet, The Sinner’s Grand Tour: Journey Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe (2011 in paperback)
Broadly-speaking all humans have three reactions to forms of sexual activity: (i) frenzy, (ii) comic indifference or (iii) disgust. Beachcombing, for example, has to (i) contain himself when confronted with sultry Mediterranean beauty. He finds it (ii) amusing that some of his fellow humans are excited by leather-bound or office-based fantasies. And he gags (iii) at even vague references to a whole series of activities from bestiality to zoophilia. (Yes, yes, these are the same thing, but this was the closest he could get to the alpha-omega of sexual grossness.) The tragedy is, of course, that these three categories vary from individual to individual: one man’s meat is another’s obscenity.
Now the beginning of sexual relations between two adults inevitably involves a degree of: are-we-compatible shuffling around the bedroom (or, for those so inclined, the office or stables). And so it is with a reader and a book on sexual history: including Tony Perrottet’s The Sinner’s Grand Tour: A Journey Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe. Unfortunately for Beachcombing TP’s book, though well-written and amusing, covers a series of Europeans – Byron, the Emperor Tiberius, the Marquis de Sade – with whom Beach is NOT in sympathy. Beach’s hands began to sweat with the six pages on pubic hair wigs, and he was close to retching by the time he got to the four on chastity belts.
Beach mentioned ‘history’ above, but this is not a history book per se. What we actually have is a ‘character’, the American author Tony Perrottet leading his family (wife and two sons) through sites with sexual histories in Britain and continental Europe. These range from the Hell Fire Clubs in Scotland, to a Pyrenean town with memories of a fourteenth-century inquisition – Albigensians did ‘it’ in front of church altars, to the search for the brothels of nineteenth-century Paris. In other words anything goes bar the Etruscans and, thank God, the Vikings.
The author reminds Beach of Bill Bryson – I bet he is sick of hearing that! – and some of his exploits such as his extraordinary attempts to get into the Marquis de Sade’s dungeon are well worth reading: particularly when you think of the efforts that some local virgins made to get out of the same. What Beachcombing found a little worrying was the running joke of trying to keep the purpose of the trip from the author’s ten and four year old sons. ‘Where’s Daddy going? [the elder son] started asking whenever I slipped out. ‘Oh, he’s got work to do’ [the wife] would mutter dryly pushing my copy of Juliette [by De Sade] under the bed with her foot. The cover displayed the heroine with a strap-on dildo brutalizing a gagged shepherd.’ Beach never quite decided what he made of this type of humour. But perhaps the discomfort comes close to why the book works: the whole point of this material is that it should, like a Haneke film, unsettle you.
Oh and there is also a little gripe: if you purchase a book called The Sinner’s Grand Tour you might reasonably expect, well, the Grand Tour. Beach bought this volume on the strength of ‘Grand Tour’ thinking that here we would have northern travellers making merry in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century southern Europe, something reinforced by Renaissance statues on the front cover and a man and woman in great-grandparent-clothes groping. As Beachcombing confessed above he has a thing about sultry Mediterranean beauty: the idea of an unbalanced Georgian licking his lips as he rode towards Naples was one Beach relished.
In fact, this volume sat, damn it, on his Grand Tour shelf, until he decided to read it today to get through a series of insane bureaucratic appointments. Now he can’t complain. He enjoyed the book and he wouldn’t have brought it had it been called Tony’s Sexual Safari. So both the publisher, author and Beach are satisfied with said act of mendacity. But still…
Beachcombing is always on the look out for interesting books and thanks Invisible for sending him the link to this one: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
On the subject of sex follow this link for extraordinary photographs of life among teenage prostitutes in a Bangladeshi slum
Review: Five Days in London December 19, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary
***Dedicated to Sword&Beast***
John Lukacs, Five Days in London, May 1940 (1999) has a simple thesis. The United Kingdom could not have defeated Hitler alone, but she could have lost the war before the Soviet Union and the USSR entered as Allies. And she never came nearer to this, according to Lukacs, than 24-28 May 1940 – the five days of the title – when Britain’s war cabinet broke into two factions: one determined to fight (if need be) to the death; the other prepared to negotiate peace with Nazi Germany should the opportunity arise.
So far so good. You have a thesis. You have May 1940, perhaps the most interesting month in world history, only ten days before Italy plunges into the fray. You have characters that novelists would struggle to invent: Churchill and Hitler, Chamberlain and Mussolini. You have unforgettable moments: Lord Halifax in the rose garden or Churchill telling his colleagues that ‘nations that fight to the death rise again!’, momentarily reducing Britain’s chief executive to a high school debating society.
But how do you actually write all this down? There are two obvious solutions. One is to put together a micro-history, using the war cabinet meetings as a skeleton key for understanding Britain in 1940. Alternatively, you could write a reconstruction in flawless prose in the style, say, of Rick Atkinson’s Day of Battle, going to the Met Office to find whether it rained on the morning of the 28 or looking through butler’s diaries to see how Churchill liked his boiled eggs.
Lukacs though does neither of these things. Instead, the book reads like a series of notes rather than a ‘proper’ work of history. Our author bounds from British public opinion, to the breakdown of the BEF in France, to Britain’s ruling classes and then over, dizzily, to Germany: and as if to underline the lack of order in the text he has the most eccentric footnotes Beachcombing has ever come across (and that's saying something).
Yet, not withstanding all this, here is the best history book of the thirty to forty that Beachcombing has read in the last twelve months. How is it that a rule breaker can be so good?
Beachcombing himself is confused on this point. But it is probably the quality and peculiar transparency of Lukacs’ thought. All historians have a backroom on the upper left hand side of their brains where they work through their views on historical truth, and other ‘theological’ issues relating to their discipline. Lukacs though, at least in this volume, does it on the page. Not only do we get lectured on the difference between public opinion and public sentiment and the British unwillingness to deal in abstracts, we also get hectored on the very nature of history itself. Coming from some jumped up history lecturer at a British polytechnic (tipo Beachcombing) this would be excruciating, but coming from a man of Lukacs’ stature it makes for a transforming experience and the gravity of those five days magnifies these issues rather than causing distraction.
Many books claim to touch on hinge moments: The Rock Concert that Changed History, How Tomato Ketchup Saved Western Civilization and the like. But this one really does. Though perhaps the war cabinet did not come as close as JL suggests to bending, Halifax (representing the ‘appeasers’) was fairly isolated, Churchill’s determination to fight on was not rewarded with consensus until the 28.
Beachcombing can’t help but quote as a taster of this remarkable book the final paragraph. It gives some sense of just how odd and yet how powerful Lukacs’ prose is: reaction's answer to Eric Hobsbawm. Remember as you read this that for most of the war the author - a 'Jew' - worked in a Hungarian Labour battalion… Remember too that his country would be condemned to almost fifty years of Soviet occupation afterwards.
In 1989 I wrote a book about the duel between Churchill and Hitler. Now ten years later, we can see that in 1989 not only was an entire century closing (the short twentieth century from 1914 to 1989) but an entire age was closing as well, an age that had begun about five hundred years ago and that was among other things, characterised by the struggle and increasing coexistence of Aristocracy and Democracy, with the latter gradually rising the former gradually weakening. Now we have begun living in a global democracy – unquestioned democracy, with its unforeseeable circumstances and conditions and perils – is beginning. This is neither the place nor the time to speculate about that. But what we must understand is that the history of the fifty years from 1940 to 1990 was inseparable from what happened in 1940, just as the Cold War too was but the result of the Second World War. At best, civilisation may survive, at least in some small part due to Churchill in 1940. At worst, he helped to give us – especially those of us who are no longer young but who were young then – fifty years. Fifty years before the rise of a new kinds of barbarism not incarnated by the armed might of Germans or Russians, before the clouds of a new Dark Age may darken the lives of our children and grandchildren. Fifty years! Perhaps that was enough.
Beachcombing, who shares most of Lukacs’ deplorable and nostalgic tendencies, finds the author’s conclusion here both credible and terrifying.
Strange history is always looking for strange books: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Case of the Cottingley Fairies December 2, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary
***Beachcombing should start by saying that he and his family are presently enjoying one of their periodic ‘breaks’ from the internet, courtesy of their incompetent provider. Communications and posts may be coming a little slower then. O Infracom, there is a place in hell…***
Joe Cooper, The Cottingley Fairies, 1990.
The story is a simple one. In the First World War a young girl named Frances Griffith saw fairies at the brook where she played in the Yorkshire village of Cottingley. In 1917 she and her older friend Elsie Wright were stung by their parents’ refusal to believe Frances. They, therefore, went out and photographed a number of cardboard cut-outs of fairies and challenged their elders and betters with the pictures that they had created. The pictures would have, should have sunk without trace but by chance they found their way into the hands of local theosophists who publicised them. The children were encouraged to take more photographs in 1920 and, in fact, under considerable pressure to perform, they produced a further three.
Here still the girls might have got off the hook had it not been for Arthur Conan Doyle. At the end of 1920 the creator of Sherlock Holmes wrote a long article for the Strand Magazine publicising the photographs and writing as if he very much believed they were genuine. The girls became nationally, even internationally known and it is sometimes said that the five photographs that they took are the most reproduced in the history of photography. After a long silence in 1965 the girls, now in their sixties were interviewed again by the press and they were interviewed again periodically until 1982 when finally the truth came out in painful circumstances.
It must be extraordinary for the single most important thing to happen to you in your life, for that thing to be, well, a lie. And yet from their teens up until when they finally confessed Frances (who always claimed that she had seen fairies) and Elsie lived that lie as best they could. By the time that Conan Doyle had made them famous, there was no way out except to go down the tunnel, looking neither left nor right, and hoping that they would not be turned into pariahs by the goading journalists and adulating groupies around them.
This book then is about a life-long ordeal: a multi-jawed, poison-edged monster trap that would have defeated most of us and that was quite too much for two little girls who strayed too far into the undergrowth. Who says that fairies are no longer frightening? The author, Joe Cooper, who, himself thinks that fairies exist and who for many years defended the photographs knew both women. It was he, in fact, who finally brought the truth out in circumstances that perhaps do not do him the greatest credit. Both Frances and Elsie cut all contacts with him after he went public.
By reading through JC’s sympathetic version of events we come as close as we ever will to understanding how people ever thought that these photographs of suspiciously Edwardian-looking fairies were genuine. When Beach showed Mrs B the photographs, she shook her head and noted that they were obviously cardboard cut- outs: she certainly could not understand why anyone would trouble writing a book about them. But many millions wanted them to be true, collectively answering the pantomime voice ‘do you believe in fairies’, trying to keep the fey alive in a world that was rapidly growing tired of them.