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A heads up for Open Culture readers: This spring, Stanford Continuing Studies has a rich lineup of online courses, and they’re offering a special 15% discount to our readers. Just use the promo code CULTURE during checkout.
Serving lifelong learners everywhere, Stanford Continuing Studies will launch its spring curriculum next week (the week of April 3), letting you choose from over 100 courses. Among the courses, you will find some notable mentions:
Defending Democracy at Home and Abroad features three Stanford scholars (including the former US ambassador to Russia Mike McFaul) who will examine the uncertain state of democracy at home and abroad. Together, they will explore 1) the merits of democracy compared with the alternatives, 2) challenges to democracy both in the US and across the globe, and 3) solutions for protecting and advancing democracy everywhere.
With Stanford Monday University: 2023, five Stanford scholars will focus on important trends currently shaping our society, especially after the pandemic. What’s the future of working from home, and how will remote work affect the economy of the United States? Why have addictions—including to devices and screens—skyrocketed in the US, and how can a dopamine fast help bring them under control? Why has the modern economy left behind so many working-class communities in America, and how can investment in these communities help address the wealth inequalities in our country? These, and other questions, will be explored in the course.
Finally, in The Book of Change: Ovid, Art, and Us, art historian Alexander Nemerov–voted one of Stanford’s top 10 professors by Stanford students–will examine Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the great works of art inspired by the Roman classic. Along the way, he will explore paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Diego Velázquez, and Nicolas Poussin, plus sculptures by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
Stanford Continuing Studies also offers a large number of online creative writing courses and online business courses. See the complete lineup of courses here. And remember to use the promo code CULTURE during checkout to get your 15% discount. The code expires on April 30.
The documentary filmmaker and sports editor Paul Devlin has won five Emmy awards, but he may well be better known for not getting into Harvard — or rather, for not getting into Harvard, then rejecting Harvard’s rejection. “I noticed that the rejection letter I received from Harvard had a grammatical error,” Devlin writes. “So, I wrote a letter back, rejecting their rejection letter.” His mother then “sent a copy of this letter to the New York Times and it was published in the New Jersey section on May 31, 1981.” In 1996, when the New York Times Magazine published a cover story “about the trauma students were experiencing getting rejected from colleges,” she seized the opportunity to send her son’s rejection-rejection letter to the Paper of Record.
It turned out that Devlin’s letter had already run there, having long since gone the pre-social-media equivalent of viral. “The New York Times accused me of plagiarism. When they discovered that I was the original author and they had unwittingly re-printed themselves, they were none too happy. But my mom insists that it was important to reprint the article because the issue was clearly still relevant.”
Indeed, its afterlife continues even today, as evidenced by the new video from Letters Live at the top of the post. In it actor Himesh Patel, well-known from series like EastEnders, Station Eleven, and Avenue 5, reads aloud Devlin’s letter, which runs as follows:
Having reviewed the many rejection letters I have received in the last few weeks, it is with great regret that I must inform you I am unable to accept your rejection at this time.
This year, after applying to a great many colleges and universities, I received an especially fine crop of rejection letters. Unfortunately, the number of rejections that I can accept is limited.
Each of my rejections was reviewed carefully and on an individual basis. Many factors were taken into account – the size of the institution, student-faculty ratio, location, reputation, costs and social atmosphere.
I am certain that most colleges I applied to are more than qualified to reject me. I am also sure that some mistakes were made in turning away some of these rejections. I can only hope they were few in number.
I am aware of the keen disappointment my decision may bring. Throughout my deliberations, I have kept in mind the time and effort it may have taken for you to reach your decision to reject me.
Keep in mind that at times it was necessary for me to reject even those letters of rejection that would normally have met my traditionally high standards.
I appreciate your having enough interest in me to reject my application. Let me take the opportunity to wish you well in what I am sure will be a successful academic year.
SEE YOU IN THE FALL!
Sincerely,
Paul Devlin
Applicant at Large
However considerable the moxie (to use a wholly American term) shown by the young Devlin in his letter, his reasoning seems not to have swayed Harvard’s admissions department. Whether it would prove any more effective in the twenty-twenties than it did in the nineteen-eighties seems doubtful, but it must remain a satisfying read for high-school students dispirited by the supplicating posture the college-application process all but forces them to take. It surely does them good to remember that they, too, possess the agency to declare acceptance or rejection of that which is presented to them simply as necessity, as obligation, as a given. And for Devlin, at least, there was always the University of Michigan.
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Gertrude Stein Gets a Snarky Rejection Letter from Publisher (1912)
Meet the “Grammar Vigilante,” Hell-Bent on Fixing Grammatical Mistakes on England’s Storefront Signs
Steven Pinker Identifies 10 Breakable Grammatical Rules: “Who” Vs. “Whom,” Dangling Modifiers & More
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Some real talk from retired geometry teacher Wendy Lichtman, above, the author of several math-themed YA novels:
Not many 15-year-olds care that two parallel lines are crossed by a transversal.
“But right here are two parallel lines,” she continues, pointing to a pink and orange quilt. “and these are transversals, and they are at a 90º angle and it feels real. You’ve gotta get it to look right.”
The teenaged participants in the Oakland, California program she founded to demystify geometry through hands-on quiltmaking get it to look right by plotting their designs on graph paper, carefully measuring and cutting shapes from bright calico of their own choosing. (Licthman has committed to buttoning her lip if their favored print is not to her taste.)
Lichtman came up with this creative approach to help a bright student who was in danger of not graduating, having flunked geometry three times.
She details their journey in How to Make a Geometric Quilt, an essay formatted as step-by-step instructions…not for quiltmaking but rather how those in the teaching profession can lead with humility and determination, while maintaining good boundaries.
Some highlights:
6. Sometime after the sewing has begun, and the math notebook is ignored for weeks, begin to worry that your student is not really learning geometry. She’s learning sewing and she’s learning to fix a broken bobbin, but really, geometry?
7. Remind yourself that this kid needs a quilt as much as she needs geometry.
8. Remember, also, the very, very old woman who taught you hat-making one night long ago. She had gone to school only through 5th grade because, she said, she was a Black child in the deep south and that’s how it was back then. Think about how she explained to the hat-making class that to figure out the length of the hat’s brim, you needed to measure from the center to the edge with a string and then do “three of those and a little bit more,” and remember how you sat in awe, because three radii and a little bit more is the definition of pi, and this hat-maker had evidently discovered for herself the formula for circumference.
As the two become better acquainted, the student let her guard down, revealing more about her situation while they swapped stories of their mothers.
But this was no easy A.
In addition to expecting regular, punctual attendance, Lictman stipulated that in order to pass, the student could not give the fruits of her labor away.
(Solid advice for creators of any craft project this ambitious. As Debbie Stoller, author of Stitch ‘n Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook counsels:
…those who have never knit something have no idea how much time it took. If you give someone a sweater, they may think that you made that in an evening when you were watching a half-hour sitcom. It’s only when people actually attempt to knit that they finally get this realization, this light bulb goes on over their heads, and they realize that, “Wow, this actually takes some skill and some time. I’ve got newfound respect for my grandma.”)
Ultimately, Lichtman concludes that the five credits she awarded her student could not be reduced to something as simple as geometry or quilt-making;
You are giving her credit for something less tangible. Something like pride. Five credit hours for feeling she can accomplish something hard that, okay, is slightly related to geometry.
Examples of the current cohort’s work can be seen on Rock Paper Scissors Collective‘s Instagram.
Once completed, these quilts will be donated to Bay Area foster children and pediatric patients at the local Children’s Hospital.
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Via Boing Boing
– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
ChatGPT, the system that understands natural language and responds in kind, has caused a sensation since its launch less than three months ago. If you’ve tried it out, you’ll surely have wondered what it will soon revolutionize — or, as the case may be, what it will destroy. Among ChatGPT’s first victims, holds one now-common view, will be a form of writing that generations have grown up practicing throughout their education. “The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations,” writes Stephen Marche in The Atlantic. “It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up.”
If ChatGPT becomes able instantaneously to whip up a plausible-sounding academic essay on any given topic, what future could there be for the academic essay itself? The host of YouTube channel EduKitchen puts more or less that very question to Noam Chomsky — a thinker who can be relied upon for views on education — in the new interview above. “For years there have been programs that have helped professors detect plagiarized essays,” Chomsky says. “Now it’s going to be more difficult, because it’s easier to plagiarize. But that’s about the only contribution to education that I can think of.” He does admit that ChatGPT-style systems “may have some value for something,” but “it’s not obvious what.”
As the relevant technology now stands, Chomsky sees the use of ChatGPT as “basically high-tech plagiarism” and “a way of avoiding learning.” He likens its rise to that of the smartphone: many students “sit there having a chat with somebody on their iPhone. One way to deal with that is to ban iPhones; another way to do it is to make the class interesting.” That students instinctively employ high technology to avoid learning is “a sign that the educational system is failing.” If it “has no appeal to students, doesn’t interest them, doesn’t challenge them, doesn’t make them want to learn, they’ll find ways out,” just as he himself did when he borrowed a friend’s notes to pass a dull college chemistry class without attending it back in 1945.
After spending most of his career teaching at MIT, Chomsky retired in 2002 to become a full-time public intellectual. The University of Houston’s Robert Zaretsky, who still teaches, recently offered his own, grimmer take on ChatGPT and education. “The college essay died years ago,” he argues. “It’s a mug’s game in which a student sends me an electronic file that, when open, spills out a jumble of words that the sender propounds to be a finished paper” — to which, presumably, the output of a machine-learning system would actually be far preferable. Most technological “disruptions” leave both positive and negative effects in their wake. If the college essay is indeed unsalvageable, perhaps ChatGPT will finally bring about its replacement with something more interesting.
Related content:
Noam Chomsky Explains Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong
Noam Chomsky Defines What It Means to Be a Truly Educated Person
Noam Chomsky Spells Out the Purpose of Education
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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