Beyond Textbooks. Straight into the Void

Today's New York times has an interesting article about the way in which some school districts are attempting to save money and represent the wave of the future by going
beyond textbooks; encouraging teachers to cobble together learning experiences from the Web, or to invest their own time in creating open-source Powerpoints that would be available for anyone's use.

"Today's students are just wired differently," one of the experts in the article is quoted as saying. No, they are not WIRED differently; they just can't read, and so many of them will gravitate toward any interface that presents them with as little reading as possible. Instead of acknowledging that reading--and being able to read synthetically and critically--is a skill crucial to the next generation of citizens, superintendents who want to go "beyond textbooks" hope to replace classroom learning with its emphasis on coming prepared to discuss and work and even sometimes collaborate--with something more like a single-person-shooter video game.

I'm the farthest thing from a Luddite, but I find this ridiculous. The author of the article identified the digital divide as one of the major drawbacks of computer-based education, but even as someone who teaches web-based courses, I can tell you that at the elementary and probably the secondary level, it's an unsound idea.

Yes, the workplaces of the future will demand that students be innovative and computer-literate, but the best and most impressive computer of all is still the human brain, and to say "knowledge is out there, I don't need to know anything, I can just Google" is to let ours degrade.

If you find "textbooks" boring and dry, have students read and discuss articles, monographs, memoirs, diaries, letters, songs, poems, great works of literature, but allow them to develop the ability to really read. Integrate math and physics lessons by having students design and build things in the classroom. Have a "life lab" where students can combine what they learn in their science lessons with practical experience. The computer is good as an occasional supplement when a student has outstripped a school's offerings but it is no substitute for a multifaceted education.

Trip Postmortem

We arrived back in Las Cruces yesterday afternoon, having indeed broken our trip in Odessa, TX. While we were there on August 1, we saw the Midland petroleum museum--interesting mostly as a manifestation of what museums look like when they are funded by/tailored toward a particular point of view. They have a great collection of vintage pump jacks over there, but the interpretation of the discovery of oil/development of the oil industry, funded by Halliburton, was extremely celebratory.

We had dinner at the second-nicest restaurant in Odessa, which I can recommend. It's an Italian restaurant called Zucchis; in a strip mall but once you go in the decor is lovely, and the food was excellent (although why it was so expensive--over $20 for an entree--is a bit puzzling). We then saw Harry Potter and the Boring Half-Blood Prince and I kept falling asleep. It's very cynical of the Harry Potter franchise-holders to put out a movie that was THAT bad, knowing that people will still come to see it for plot purposes.

On Sunday, we set off bright and early through the rest of West Texas, reached El Paso at lunchtime due to the 80 MPH speed limit (unbelievable!) and found a great Chinese restaurant, Sam's Chinese. Go there, especially if you live in LC where the Chinese food is inedible. Fresh ingredients, tasty sauces, the hot and sour soup was wonderful, and it was inexpensive into the bargain. And then, finally, home.

My assessment of this experience is as follows:

1. Driving across country is worth doing once, especially at this somewhat relaxed pace and if you have more than one driver in the car.

2. Charlotte, NC is a beautiful city.

3. There are a lot of great things about Tennessee. The eastern mountains were amazing. I've already been to Nashville and thought it was pretty good from a historical perspective even though we didn't see it this time. I also really liked Memphis a lot. TN would have been a place that I could have lived other than NM.

4. I still really dislike Texas (sorry, Texas!)

5. Roadfood.com is definitely the place to look for restaurants, but always PHONE first before you head to a place. We were disappointed a couple of times to see that places had gone out of business.

6. A dash-mounted GPS is a must-have for cross-country travel, but you also still need maps and books, preferably from AAA. Also, it's a good idea to check places out on tripadvisor.com or some other similar website ahead of time.

7. There's no reason to make a hotel reservation ahead of time unless you are traveling on a holiday. We only made one reservation, and that was for Forth Worth, and I was able to get a reservation on hotels.com for half off.

8. Another GREAT thing to have is a satellite radio. We used ours every day, for news and talk shows as well as music.

I don't regret our choice to drive at all. Now I just have to clean out the passenger compartment of the car!

Two More Days to Go, I Hope!

We're in Fort Worth this evening, after the day that represented probably the shortest drive of our journey (just from Texarkana to here). We rolled into Dallas around lunchtime and went to the West End area, which Mike had fond memories of from his days at EPA; as it turns out, however, all the retail stores in the former cracker building are now defunct. The restaurants are still in the area.

Best of all is a WONDERFUL new zoo/aquarium called the Dallas World Aquarium. It's an indoor rainforest on multiple levels. We saw birds in free flight (including a Sadie but I didn't get a good picture), some toucans, spoonbills and other things; and lots of other creatures: sharks, manatees, little monkeys that look like lions (I forget what they are really called). Best of all was a giant octopus that was being fed at the moment we were watching the tank. Mike was taking about a 10-minute movie but I finally told him to knock it off because nobody, not even on YouTube, was going to be interested in a 10-minute movie of an octopus eating!

It was definitely the best aquarium I have ever been to, including the Monterey Bay one.

After the Aquarium we went to the Ripley museum. No matter how many times I go to one of those I still enjoy going to those. I used to like to read the Ripley books when I was a kid, along with the Book of Lists and the World Book Encyclopedia. My favorite thing at the Ripley museum was the two-headed baby, or, if you like, the one-bodied babies. I like to ponder how much of a person you have to have in order to count as two separate people.

Fort Worth has a pretty happening downtown, with a ton of restaurants and at least three theaters. We had barbecue, and I wish we could have seen an improv comedy show but unfortunately it was for 18 and up only.

Tomorrow is Mike's birthday, and we hope to make Odessa by evening!

Graceland: More Tasteful than I Thought

I've watched a few episodes of MTV Cribs in my time, and Elvis's spread was much smaller and less garish than the digs of many a rocker or rapper. Yes, he had a fake fur "jungle" room, and a pool room completely decked out in shirred curtain fabric, nd a TV room with three televisions in the wall, and his own raquetball court, but anyone who had that many gold records gets cut a little slack.

After Memphis came Little Rock and the architecturally interesting Clinton Presidential Library, suspended over the Arkansas River. IT was a fun exercise in personality cult construction with an orientation video so moving that it could bring burly men to tears. My favorite aspect of the library was the lifesized oval office. It made me want to celebrate with a good cigar.

Tonight we had dinner at another Roadfood special, Bryce's cafeteria in Texarkana, TX. Tomorrow, vast stretches of my least favorite state in the union await!

I heart Memphis

We pulled in to Memphis around lunchtime today and had lunch at A&R Bar-b-cue, which came highly recommended on roadfood.com. It did not disappoint.

After that, we headed for the downtown. Memphis has an attraction on mud island, right along the Mississippi River, which I'd heartily recommend. It's a river park with a huge--like 5 blocks long--scale model of the Mississippi, that you can walk and splash in, curated with as much as you'd want to know about all the headwaters and every little stretch. At the end there's a huge fountain, Lake Ponchartrain, full of splashing kids.

The park is accessible by monorail and there is also a museum of river history and an amphitheater with concerts.

I particularly liked the museum, despite the fact that it was obvious that the museum has not been updated since the early 1980s. My favorite was a "theater
of disasters," covering every eventuality from cholera to boiler explosions to the 1927 flood, all illustrated with contemporary woodcuts etc; i told Mike it was disaster porn. :) The museum covered every aspect of the Mississippi river and its people, from the Native Americans to the explorers to the shipping to the role of the area in the Civil War to the advent of the blues.

Because it was sunny today but is supposed to rain tomorrow, Graceland got put off until the morning. We did drive all the way over here from Cookesville listening to relevant XM radio channels, however. There is of course a blues channel (74), but did you know there is an all-Elvis, all the time channel (20)? It's better than it sounds.

Cookesville, TN

We arrived yesterday afternoon in the beautiful city of Charlotte, NC, which appears to be the banking capital of the universe. The AAA guide says that there are 9 major banks headquartered there. It's a lovely, new city, with neighborhoods full of little mansions, and lots of flowering trees.

We spent the afternoon at the JCC with my friend from college and her baby daughter. What a nice pool--with a big Jewish star painted on the bottom (funny!). It also had a playground full of splashing sprinklers and knobs to turn to make water come out, and Evan was walking around with a purple bucket on his head for a helmet, making the water spray everywhere.

My friend and her husband grilled us a great dinner and then hosted us overnight in their lovely home; then, this morning, we got to visit Imaginon, Charlotte's absolutely beautiful children's library/theater. I would be at that place every week if I lived in Charlotte.

After we left Imaginon, we headed toward Tennessee, and pretty soon I was forced to take the wheel for Mike's involuntary nap. There followed several hours of the windiest, greenest, granite-iest interstate that I have had the pleasure to traverse. It's only a two-lane highway through the Smoky Mountains. It was pretty exciting to drive it, plus we were listening to Obama's tele-press-conference on the XM Radio, so that made it even more interesting. :)

We finally emerged onto the flatter plains of Eastern Tennessee, and let our geek flags fly with a visit to the American Museum of Science and Industry at Oak Ridge, just above Knoxville. This was of course, like Los Alamos, a WWII "secret city," but this one was for the enrichment of the uranium that was used in the second atomic bomb. They had a great display all about the building and operation of Oak Ridge, and then they also had a little boxlike house that you could walk through, all kitted out like a 1940s house, just the same as the houses in which the Oak Ridge workers had to live.

When we finally left Knoxville, it was battering down, so we had to re-evaluate our plan to press on to Nashville. Cookesville, TN is a city with a very cute, old-fashioned downtown where we have stopped for tonight. Tomorrow we press on to Memphis and the obligatory cheese-fest that is Graceland.

On to Charlotte, NC

Our goal today is a shortish drive, to reach Charlotte, North Carolina. We're going to see and stay with a friend of mine from Tufts whom I haven't seen since we graduated back in 1990! It seems incredible that so much time has elapsed since college graduation, and I'm really looking forward to having an opportunity to catch up on everything that has happened over those many years, and to show off my family and meet hers.

I'm not sure what the wi-fi situation is going to be this evening, but just in case I don't get to update before tomorrow evening, our plan for Tuesday is to press on with another long day of driving (it should be about 7 hours, just over 400 miles), from Charlotte to Nashville. This route takes us up and over the Appalchians, and through the old stomping grounds of Mike's ancestors from before they migrated to Texas and subsequently Oklahoma.