Links for 2012-01-26

That [Quaker abolitionist John] Woolman was so miraculously persuasive suggests to me that he likely wasn’t as monomaniacally focused on a single subject as the old preacher in the story I shared in the previous post. And the more I think about that story and Woolman’s, the more I want to qualify my commendation of such a single-minded relentlessness. Woolman certainly was single-minded and relentless. He did one thing for decades, obsessively. Yet he also convinced people to change — he convinced hundreds of people to change radically. I don’t think he could have been so convincing unless all those people who encountered Woolman were convinced that he cared about them. And I don’t think that they could have been convinced of that unless he took a real interest in more than just the one issue he had come to discuss with them — as vitally important as that one issue was.

[T]he purpose of most of the resources that I discuss below is to deliver some initial content to the students so that class time can be spent building on the ideas presented by that initial content. With this in mind, I don’t think that getting them to read the textbook is the most effective use of their time and can actually do some damage to any sort of buy-in that you have managed to generate toward the learning before class process. I say this because at their best textbooks attempt to be all of the following: (A) a resource to students on their first encounter with a topic, (B) a resource for students when working on their homework or studying for exams, and (C) a reference for students after they have completed a course. I have yet to see a textbook that is structured in such a way that use (A) is clearly and consistently delineated from uses (B) and (C) so that it can be truly useful for use (A). I’m not saying it is not possible, but it would require a very targeted effort.

A great post taking a close look at dubious arguments about alternatives to ending slavery in the US that would’ve avoided the Civil War. And, being the kind of nerd I am, I just look at the graph and wonder what happened in 1839.

THIRTY THOUSAND FEET ABOVE AMERICA — To all of you down there, to the flyover country I’m currently flying over? Sorry. To the fine sporting folk of Northern California, to all of your West Coast brethren, to those of you down South and up North and everywhere else south of South Amboy, N.J., and north of Northampton, Mass., and west of Eastchester, N.Y.? Yeah. Sorry to all of you, too. Because these next 12 days? They belong to us again, to New York and New England, to Gotham and Olde Towne, to New York and New Jersey, to Massachusetts and Maine, to that great DMZ of Connecticut that finds itself betwixt and between.