Author: David Evans

better answers

David Evans2 Comments

Last week I was walking through Washington DC, and I noticed a shabbily dressed man as I walked down the street. A moment or two later, the man was walking next to me, saying, "I couldn’t help but notice you staring at me. Do you have a problem with the way I look?" I’m pretty sure I never stared at this guy, so I wittily retorted, "Excuse me?" He repeated, "I couldn’t help but notice you staring at me. Do you have a problem with the way I look?"

I answered, "I must have been thinking about something else. I don’t think I was staring at you." Which was true. But afterwards, I thought of several better answers:

1. Start singing Billy Joel’s "I love you just the way you are" and dancing around the guy
2. Say, "Why do you think I’m staring at you?! I want the $50,000 you owe me. I’ve been looking for you for months. Are you going to pay up or do I need to call the cops?"
3. Give the guy a big hug, saying, "I just need somebody to love" (a la Bill Murray with the insurance salesman in Groundhog Day)

Others?

dead writers don’t cheat on you

David Evans1 Comment

When I was a youth (ten minutes ago), I loved Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books: Beezus and Ramona, Ramona the Pest, etc.  I read them all, until I came to the last, Ramona Forever, published in 1984.  That was the last one, as it makes sense to have been, with a title like that.  I had finished the Ramona canon and moved on to Judy Blume and eventually – in my late 20s – to JK Rowling (I stay high brow at all times).

Recently I saw that 15 years after Ramona Forever, Beverly Cleary went on to publish Ramona’s World.  And I have to say, I felt a litte betrayed.  Really?  Another Ramona book?  And you didn’t even give me a call, Beverly?

I then discovered that there were sequels to Louis Sachar’s Sideways Stories from Wayside School (four sequels, in fact!).  Again, betrayed.  I was supposed to be master of a canon.

Maybe these days are limited.  We can now set Google Alerts to let us know if Ramona Quimby ever comes back to light.

And then again, I did move on from Ramona to Blubber, so now I see I’m just a literarily promiscuous dude complaining about my like-minded (but less) literarily promiscuous author partners.  Let it go, man.  Let it go.

airport reading

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I just heard, on the NPR Books podcast (8 March 2010), recommendations for airport reading from author Susan Jane Gilman:

  • Elaine Dundy’s The Old Man and Me – plucky woman protagonist
  • Miriam Toews’ The Flying Troutmans – Little Miss Sunshine in Canada
  • Daniel Everett’s Don’t Sleep; There Are Snakes – non-fiction story about going into the Amazon
  • Benjamin Nugent’s American Nerd: The Story of My People – nerds…
  • Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

And there are my next five trips…

reseña de La Traducción, por Pablo de Santis (narrado por Fernando Flores)

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suspenso, fieldades inconsistentes, y muertes misteriosas en el mundo emocionante (en serio) de traductores profesionales

Miguel de Blast, traductor profesional, es uno de los invitados a un congreso sobre la traducción en un pueblo pequeño en la costa de la Argentina. Algunos de los invitados están muy interesados en la traducción de los idiomas perdidos, como el idioma del mundo antes de la torre de Babel. Una serie de muertes sigue. ¿Quién es responsable?

La novela es muy divertida. Logra mantener un sentimiento de suspenso a lo largo del libro y crea una serie de pedazos de un rompecabezas sin el lector saber cuáles son los pedazos, y mucho menos cómo se juntan. Vale la pena leer. El libro era finalista del Premio Planeta en 1997.

Escuché el audiolibro íntegro narrado por Fernando Flores, de cuatro discos. La narración fue buena.

Nota sobre el contenido: Ocurren algunas muertes, y se alude al sexo sin que el lector lo experimente de primera (o de segunda) mano.

Si quieres un resumen más detallado y más análisis, Diego Bagnera escribió una reseña interesante, que se puede encontrar con una búsqueda sencilla: Diego Bagnera, “Extrañas Muertes”, Clarin, 20 de setiembre de 1998.

reseña de La traducción, por Pablo de Santis (narrado por Fernando Flores)

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suspenso, fieldades inconsistentes, y muertes misteriosas en el mundo emocionante (en serio) de traductores profesionales

Miguel de Blast, traductor profesional, es uno de los invitados a un congreso sobre la traducción en un pueblo pequeño en la costa de la Argentina. Algunos de los invitados están muy interesados en la traducción de los idiomas perdidos, como el idioma del mundo antes de la torre de Babel. Una serie de muertes sigue. ¿Quién es responsable?

Esta novela es muy divertida. Logra mantener un sentimiento de suspenso a lo largo del libro y crea una serie de pedazos de un rompecabezas sin el lector saber cuáles son los pedazos, y mucho menos cómo se juntan. Vale la pena leer. El libro era finalista del Premio Planeta en 1997.

Escuché el audiolibro íntegro narrado por Fernando Flores, de cuatro discos. La narración fue buena.

Nota sobre el contenido: Ocurren algunas muertes, y se alude al sexo sin que el lector lo experimente de primera (o de segunda) mano.

Si quieres más resumen y más análisis, Diego Bagnera escribió una reseña interesante para literatura.org, disponible aquí.

legos used to teach in Singaporean kindergartens

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from Singapore News

Two PCF kindergartens experiment with LEGO products for teaching

By S Ramesh, Channel NewsAsia | Posted: 06 March 2010 1949 hrs

SINGAPORE : Two kindergartens under the PAP Community Foundation (PCF) are piloting the use of teaching materials from LEGO.

The aim is to raise the quality of early childhood education.  Launching the programme at Marine Parade on Saturday was Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong, who is also the area’s MP.  Capitalising on pre-schoolers’ curiosity and enthusiasm about the world around them, the PCF centres in Marine Parade and Chua Chu Kang have started teaching programmes with LEGO materials.  Karen Goh Meng Choo, a parent, said: “Helping the students to be more creative, develop their brains, mathematics in all ways…LEGO is good for all the children.”

PCF said LEGO is being used in the teaching of English, Mathematics and Science, and the children achieve more than just learning.

Manpower Minister Gan Kim Yong, who is also chairman of the PCF Executive Committee, said: “Through LEGO, we also teach them soft skills like socialising, as well as creativity, because to build a good project, the children have to collaborate with one another so that they can build the project together. So through the LEGO play, we encourage teamwork.”

Children from low-income families will not be left out, assured Mr Gan. He said there are many schemes to help them join in these specialised programmes.  [and more in the article]

massive expansion with minimal evidence: nutrition in India

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“The Tamil Nadu Integrated Nutrition Project…is a growth monitoring, food supplementation, and intensive nutrition counseling programme. … In terms of the project’s impact, TINP was labeled a success by the World Bank. This followed the 1986 midterm evaluation, which found a reduction in rates of severe undernutrition. … The success of TINP was used as proof that a ‘silver bullet’ to address undernutrition existed. … The assessment at the end of [the second] phase was less glowing. The official TINP-I terminal evaluation showed a decline in the prevalence of severe undernutrition but an increase in mild and moderate undernutrition. … Interview with key Bank official revealed that there were major shortcomings with the baseline and midterm evaluations. … Other observers raised wider concerns…. The claims of successful growth monitoring…have been based on anecdotal and impressionistic evidence. … By 1999, the Bank had loaned over US$750 million to India despite the lack of substantive evidence that the design and implementation of TINP were effective. …

“Why does all this matter? … First, it matters for the potential beneficiaries of the nutrition program in question. Second… despite the lack of rigorous evaluation, TINP has come to represent the ultimate success story of the World Bank’s lending for stand-alone nutrition projects.” [Sridhar, The Battle Against Hunger, p2-5, 2008]

This isn’t a problem unique to the World Bank (but obviously the WB isn’t exempt). Billions go into programs about which all we know is “anecdotal and impressionistic.” Good evaluation is on the rise, though…

vocabulary DVDs may make your baby dumber

David Evans1 Comment

In various parts of the world, integrating technology with education is a new and exciting trend, trying to incorporate computers into the classroom, using DVDs to help when teachers are poorly qualified, etc. However, we might want to hold off on the DVDs until the children are a little bit older, from a randomized trial study published Monday in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, by Rebekah Richert and three other people.

This, from a nice summary of the work in the Guardian:

In the new study, researchers focused on the Baby Wordsworth DVD, which is part of the Baby Einstein series. It uses puppets, videos of children and parents, pictures, sign language, text, and speech to help children learn 30 words for common objects and rooms in the house. The researchers wanted to find out if regularly watching this type of DVD actually helps young children develop their language skills.

Children who watched the DVD regularly were no more likely to know the words featured in the DVD than those who didn’t watch it.

The study included 96 children aged 12 months to 24 months, half of whom watched the DVD regularly for six weeks. Parents were told to use the DVD as they would any other type of children’s media, giving them leeway to decide whether they would watch the DVD with their child.

Every couple of weeks, the researchers tested both groups’ knowledge of the 30 words featured in the DVD by showing the children pairs of pictures and asking them to point to the one showing the word. The parents were also interviewed about their child’s use and understanding of these words.

At the end of the study, there were no differences between the groups in the numbers of words understood, words said, or pictures identified.

The researchers found no difference between the DVD and no-DVD groups in overall language skills at the end of the study. They also found no link between children’s language skills and how often they watched DVDs in general. However, they did find that children who had first watched a Baby Einstein DVD at a very young age lagged slightly in their language development.