Girl Detective

In Hamlet, Polonius is the father of Laertes and Ophelia. Before Laertes departs Denmark for France, Polonius sends him off thus:

…There, my blessing with thee.
And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion’d thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledg’d courage. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear’t that th’opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell, my blessing season this in thee.

Several well-known phrases contained therein are deployed in common usage without irony. Many critics, though, regard Polonius as a clown, or figure of ridicule; this makes his advice likely trite and not meant by Shakespeare to be taken seriously.

Though later scenes in the book portray Polonius as foolish, the longer note on this passage in the edition I’m reading, with commentary by Harold Jenkins (NB: not the man better known as Conway Twitty), says it is a mistake to read the above passage as a joke:

Such conventional precepts are entirely appropriate to Polonius as a man of experience. It is a mistake to suppose they are meant to make him seem ridiculous. Their purpose, far more important than any individual characterization, is to present him in his role of father….by impressing upon us here the relation between father and son the play is preparing for the emergence of Laertes later as the avenger who will claim Hamlet as his victim.

So, is Polonius a good father, a pompous fool, or perhaps a little of both? Methinks ’tis the latter.

I visit NYC once or twice a year. That’s just enough time between trips for me to forget the basics of the subway. I may very well do it wrong the first time every trip, which is embarrassing, because I’ve lived in subway cities before! Perhaps the midwest, or motherhood, has dulled my city mojo. Here’s my attempt to reinforce what I learned yet again on this trip to Gotham:

(Sung, of course, to the tune of “Wheels on the Bus”)

The trains of New York run UP and DOWN, UP and DOWN, UP and DOWN
The trains of New York run UP and DOWN,
NOT just one way.

At Inside Higher Ed, “The Innumeracy of Intellectuals” by Chad Orzel. (Link from Morning News)

Intellectuals and academics are just assumed to have some background knowledge of the arts, and not knowing those things can count against you. Ignorance of math and science is no obstacle, though. I have seen tenured professors of the humanities say – in public faculty discussions, no less – “I’m just no good at math,” without a trace of shame. There is absolutely no expectation that Intellectuals know even basic math.

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, “How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science” by Peter Wood. (Link from Arts & Letters Daily)

At least on the emotional level, contemporary American education sides with the obstacles. It begins by treating children as psychologically fragile beings who will fail to learn – and worse, fail to develop as “whole persons” – if not constantly praised. The self-esteem movement may have its merits, but preparing students for arduous intellectual ascents aren’t among them. What the movement most commonly yields is a surfeit of college freshmen who “feel good” about themselves for no discernible reason and who grossly overrate their meager attainments.

The intellectual lassitude we breed in students, their unearned and inflated self-confidence, undercuts both the self-discipline and the intellectual modesty that is needed for the apprentice years in the sciences.

I had an experience similar to those that Orzel describes at a dinner with a group of liberal arts grad students and professors. When our bill came, everyone looked around, hoping someone would step up to figure it out. I was the only volunteer. I looked at the total, mentally added 20% for tip in my head, divided it by the number of people at the dinner, then collected money and gave change. One of the professors, who’d recently been awarded a Genius grant, thanked me for taking charge, and said she was hopeless at math. I was in a liberal arts program at the time, but I told her I’d been a business student as an undergrad. She nodded as if this explained it all.

Wood’s article ties the decline in math and the sciences to the rise of an esteem based education system, which has been much bruited about online, of late, which I’ve written about here and here.) I was reminded of an English friend. When she showed early promise in school, she was urged toward the sciences, and went on to a PhD in biology from one of the world’s premiere universities. If she had been a US student, might she have become one of the overeducated liberal-arts baristas that Woods decries?

It’s interesting to ponder, as I’ll decide within the next year which school to enroll 4yo Drake in for kindergarten. The open arts school that everyone in the neighborhood sends their kids to? The Math/Science/Technology magnet school down the street (whose deal breaker may be that it begins at 7:30am)? The German Immersion school?

Hamlet, on Facebook. (Link from Morning News and ALoTT5MA)

Guess what? White people love Facebook (link from my friend lxbean), which I recently joined. I’m discouraged by how many things I like that White People like–81 out of 106, right now. I don’t delude myself that I’m unique, but it’s a humbling reminder of how herd-like my supposedly independent thinking is.

A friend of a friend once theorized that people’s lives get busy at the height of summer because we’re creatures of the earth. Whether we’re aware of it, we’re attuned to the passage of time from the summer solstice to the autumn equinox, when our ancestors would have been busy tending and harvesting summer crops, fighting off pests and weeds, and storing things away for winter. We no longer live a hunter/gatherer lifestyle, but I know very few people who have lazy grasshopper summers. Most people, myself included, are busy with real or metaphorical crops and weeds.