Two how-to books about scenery and dioramas

 Cody Grivno, ed. How to Build Realistic Scenery (2010)
Hal Miller, ed. Model Railroad Scenery Step by Step (2018)
 

These two books both fill a need, or rather, two. The first is encouragement. Many modellers feel adding scenery is beyond them. Scenery is artistic, not technical, and while we North Americans aren’t fazed by technical challenges, art appears to be beyond us. For that, you need that mysterious something labelled “talent”. Technology merely needs skills, which can be learned. Well, most of them can be learned by any one of us. We each suffer from some technical phobia and clumsiness.

The other need is for clear descriptions of the techniques and technologies used to “build” scenery. (Note “build” instead of “create”, which soothes the anxiety many modellers feel when they contemplate adding trees and such to their layout.)
 

Both books consist of articles that appeared in Model Railroader. They cover a wide range of scenic problems and their solutions. Some can be applied as is to any layout, others can be adapted. Each article includes enough information that, once a modeller has gained some experience, they can suss where and how to modify and adapt alternative materials and methods. The covers display the range of topics covered. Both books are still in print, along with many others. Useful not only for model railroaders, but also for anyone who wants to make dioramas. Available online at Kalmbach's online store
Recommended ****

More tasty chips from Binchy: Chestnut Street (2014)

Maeve Binchy. Chestnut Street (2014) A posthumous collection, and like all Maeve Binchy works, a potato chip book. Binchy, like Munro and others, shows how people’s character flaws, quirks, ill-considered decisions, and willingness to believe anyone who offers what they wish for, in short, the common human weaknesses, cause the troubles that hurt them. She has the gift of sketching a whole life in a few paragraphs. Unlike Munro and others, she tends to provide happy endings, many enabled by some lucky coincidence, or some necessary but somewhat improbable insight. This comforts the reader, but doesn’t fully satisfy. So one (me, that is) reads the next story, and the next, and the next. The stories are tasty, flavoured with ironies and poetic justice, confirming popular notions about psychology, with enough realism to soothe the critical faculties.

Binchy’s stories take place in the borderland between fantasy and realism. She knows the contours of her talent, and has adapted her vision to her market. I enjoyed reading these stories, and was happy to suspend disbelief. ***

Dylan Thomas as a Young Dog

 Dylan Thomas. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) Thomas was two years old when Joyce published his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I’m pretty sure Thomas’s title is an allusion to Joyce’s novel (which to me feels more like a group of linked short stories). Thomas doesn’t attempt a coherent time-line, though some of his characters appear in two or more of the stories.

The stories themselves, like Joyce’s novel, don’t have much of a plot. Both writers tell us about epiphanies, some large, some small, which trace the development of the artist’s awareness of self and place in the world. The difference, I think, is that Thomas takes religion, respectability, and customary morality less seriously than Joyce, who tends to pomposity. For Joyce, the artist must resist and rebel. For Thomas, the artist should observe and enjoy whatever presents itself to them. Joyce resists moral judgements of the artist's life and work, Thomas ignores them. I think I prefer Thomas. ***

Why grades and scores are bad incentives

 

An edited letter to the New York Times in 2019. The paper had run a story about Alfie J Kohn’s campaign against standardised testing.

Alfie Kohn [https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/fighting-the-tests/] is right. "People respond to incentives" is true, but when the incentive is a letter or number in a little box on a report card, the incentive is unlikely to produce learners.

Anecdote: Early in my career, one of my students achieved 19/20 on a short-answer test. I saw this student in the hall, and explained the incorrect answer. The student's eyes glazed over, the first time I'd ever seen that cliche operate in real life. The student didn't care about knowing the right answer, they cared only about the score. 19/10 = 95%, that's A+, that's all that mattered. I found out later that too many of my "best" students had exactly the same attitude.

Tests and exams are at best diagnostic. For the student and teacher, they may tell how far the student has come since the last test, and may provide guidance for future learning. For other people, such as college admissions officers, they provide some data (mostly over-rated and misunderstood) about the odds that the student will continue learning.

You might as well grade students on their height. Tall ones worked hard to add an inch or two, the lazy ones just sat around and shrunk. Silly? Sure, but that's how people too often think about students. In a typical class, there's about a one year range in chronological age, and usually much more than that in psychological age, which includes cognition. We humans develop at different rates, and development is never uniform. To expect grades to show that some students are "better" than others is asinine.

The supporters of grading, significantly I think, are mostly academics, whose working life consists of grading students. It's difficult to accept that a tool you've been using all your working life is not fit for purpose.

Unfortunately, people treat grades as rankings. They look on them like scores in a game. Winners score high, losers score low. That is no way to incentivise learning.

The only real regret I have about my teaching career is that I didn’t oppose the misuse of tests and exams.

 

Christopher Smart Loves His Cat Jeoffry

 Martin Leman. Christopher Smart: My Cat Jeoffry (1992) One of the pleasures of a course in 18th century literature was discovering Christopher Smart’s poem about his cat Jeoffry. It’s a hymn, listing all the ways in which Jeoffry shows us the glory and love of the Creator. Smart rejoices in his cat, and anyone who likes cats will share his joy. But Smart’s poem celebrates any and all of God’s creatures, and the joy of loving connection between us. Martin Leman has made a lovely little book illustrating the poem. Recommended. ****

One of many links to the poem: https://interestingliterature.com/2020/08/christopher-smart-my-cat-jeoffry-analysis/

Old Ideas: John Grant on Discarded Science

 John Grant. Discarded Science (2006) A survey of superseded science, some pseudosciences,

and the occasional deliberate scam. Some, such as astrology and homeopathy, have continued to the present day. A few, such as continental drift, turned out to have a kernel of accurate insight which was developed into more or less settled science.
     Grant traces how later scientific inquiry corrected many of these early ideas. However, I don’t think he fully acknowledges the role of the human desire for explanation and understanding. We feel uncomfortable when faced with the inexplicable. So we concoct comforting theories, based on whatever evidence we have, and always informed with whatever assumptions about reality make sense at the time. He does once in a while show how discoveries in one area prompt new ideas in other areas. For example, Mesmer’s notions of “animal magnetism” made sense at a time when magnetism was not well understood, but experiments had begun to reveal how it worked.
     An entertaining survey. I’m keeping it for reference. Recommended. ***

What it's Like To Be Someone Else: An Anthropologist on Mars (Oliver Sacks)

 Oliver Sacks. An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) The title quotes Temple Grandin, one of seven people whose brains function outside the range now labelled “neurotypical”, a term Sacks never used.
     The book begins with “Jonathan I”, an artist whose suffers a high fever, and wakes up unable to see colour. He’s even unable to remember colour. Being achromatic (lovely word, I think) is barely imaginable by anyone who grew up with black-and-white films. But being unable to recall colour, that’s impossible for us to imagine.
     Sacks’s gift is to convey something of the feeling of what it’s like to be the persons he describes. In doing so, he provides evidence that we perceive only what the brain can construct from the inputs of the senses, and that perceptions will vary with differences in the brain. People who are born with unusual brains, or who suffer lesions in the brain, are natural experiments in the range of possible human existence.
     For Sacks also sees that we are what we perceive. Changes in our perceptions are also changes in our selves. Our sense of self, our self-awareness, is part of the totality of perceptions that give us the experience of reality. Sacks’s case histories show that while we cannot fully imagine another person’s experience, we can know where and how our experience differs from that of others.
    Science is the attempt to describe, and the arts are attempts to share, our common experience. Sacks is one of the rare people who can combine these two modes of insight. Any of his books are worth reading. ****