Links for 2012-03-27

The paranoia of George Zimmerman had a large, race-specific fear component, but I’d say it also had elements of pleasure. I see this in what gun fans say all the time — they like thinking of themselves as besieged, and as people who have the means to defend themselves if attacked. They really want their paranoid fantasies to come true, because it turns what’s largely a matter of personal enjoyment (they like guns) into a matter of being heroes of society. They hope they get to stop scary hordes of “urban” marauders from committing horrendous crimes of violence. They hope they have the chance to defeat a liberal/fascist/gun-grabbing government.

Facing almost impossible delegate math and increasingly difficult fundraising challenges, the Santorum campaign took a bold move yesterday, attempting to hit the reset button through the scapegoating ritual described in the book of Leviticus. Staffers tied a red woolen thread around the neck of Josh Teagan, Brown University sophomore and intern for the Santorum team and pushed him out of a car at a Scranton-area Greyhound station to wander the region until he is consumed by Azazel, demon of the wastelands.

On Sunday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a Cox newspaper published the results of its investigation into “cheating” in American schools. The article was entitled Suspicious Scores Across the Nation, and you can read it by following the link. The article was subtitled “Cheating Our Children.” I was immediately suspicious of the report that the Journal-Constitution published. They have put into place an agressive team of watchdog reporters, database specialists, and investigative reporters. In whose interest motivates this team and this newspaper? After reading the report, I reaffirm my suspicions. Let me explain.

You probably think you know how to study. After all, you’ve made it to graduate school. You’ve successfully turned in homework assignments and passed exams for at least 16 years. And there’s a good chance that you have your study routine set, whether it’s a cup of tea and your textbooks in bed, or a quiet library carrel you’ve claimed as your own. But it may be that the study habits you’ve honed for a decade or two aren’t serving you as well as you think they are. Research has shown that some “common sense” study techniques — such as always reading in the same quiet location, or spending hours at a time concentrating on one subject — don’t promote long-term learning. And some habits that you might suspect aren’t so great, like last-minute cramming for exams, may be even worse than you thought. We’ve rounded up three principles, drawn from decades of cognitive psychology research, to help you get the most out of your studying hours.

Doing more at the present moment would mean untangling a frustrating and potent contradiction in residential higher education. Even if we don’t want to make community life a platform for some kind of intentional facilitation or learning, we might want to do a bit of untangling anyway. What I think we’re dealing with at the moment is a slow-motion collision between the comprehensive rejection of in loco parentis after 1968 and the increasingly comprehensive demand for managerial governance of community life within colleges after 1980. Where this leaves us is the contradictory demand, often from students themselves, that we should be everywhere and nowhere in the life of our community, that community life should be both totally controlled and completely free, that administrators should know everything about the lives of students and nothing at all about them.