When they begin proposing that libraries be closed in Philly, I’ll remember this article, particularly these two quotes:

I have been discussing libraries as places and in the current struggle to preserve public libraries not enough stress has been laid on the library as a place not just a facility. To a child living in high flats, say, where space is at a premium and peace and quiet not always easy to find, a library is a haven. But, saying that, a library needs to be handy and local; it shouldn’t require an expedition. Municipal authorities of all parties point to splendid new and scheduled central libraries as if this discharges them of their obligations. It doesn’t. For a child a library needs to be round the corner. And if we lose local libraries it is children who will suffer. Of the libraries I have mentioned the most important for me was that first one, the dark and unprepossessing Armley Junior Library. I had just learned to read. I needed books. Add computers to that requirement maybe but a child from a poor family is today in exactly the same boat.

Of the boys who worked in the reference library a surprising number must have turned out to be lawyers, and I can count at least eight of my contemporaries who sat at those tables in the 1950s who became judges. A school – and certainly a state or provincial school – would consider that something to boast about, but libraries are facilities; a library has no honours board and takes no credit for what its readers go on to do but, remembering myself at 19, on leave from the army and calling up the copies of Horizon to get me through the general paper in the Oxford scholarship, I feel as much a debt to that library as I do to my scho

So I’d been reading Colin a book from my childhood — Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World — and on the inside front cover was a bookplate. I didn’t recognize the handwriting of the person who’d written my name on this plate, but I liked the sketch of Don Quixote and the quote:

“The man who fights for his ideals is the man who is alive.”

Being a historiandork, I wanted to make sure that this was indeed the source of the quote so that I could, well, dorkily put it in my email footer. My researchgoogle search revealed two things:

one, lots of people like this quote enough to put it in their email footer, particularly people who write into various tech listservs.

two, this quote is ascribed to Miguel Cervantes but without documentation.

So I loaded up google books and searched a copy of Don Quixote. No luck for the exact quote. Google books through up a bunch of other folks who’d cited this quotation none of whom had offered documentation. Hmmm…to be continued.

Can all your worries add a single moment to your life?
Luke 12:25

“I don’t worry about nothing because worrying’s a waste of my time.”
Axl Rose, Mr. Brownstone

John Bennet, here.

Favorite Section:

All you big thinkers, please don’t try. As bards go, Bob’s a vatic. He just mumbles gibberish—at times quite tuneful gibberish—that somehow works its way into your bones, and into legal decisions. If you try to come up with a unified field theory about it, you sound like a dumbass.

“ideology makes it unnecessary for people to confront issues on their individual merits. One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formulae.”

Daniel Bell

You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.

I’d only heard this translation:

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

(This sort of thing the Wikipedia does very, very well.)

Week 36: 3 runs, 8.1 miles. Quit drinking coffee (subtract about a quart of half-and-half and 28 tbls of sugar a week). WAS:221.4;WAE:219

Week 35: 3 runs, 9.2 miles, embarrassingly slow. Colin has ridden both Sundays with me (3.4 miles). WAS:219; WAE 216.4

For all those supervising tests for three weeks in March:

Imagine the school basketball season consisted of one game, played on the last day of the year, and the players do not know which of the hundreds of plays they have learned will be tested. Imagine further that this one game is not basketball as the adults play it, not basketball as professional players and coaches see it, but consists instead of a series of drills (a different selection of isolated moves and plays each year) devised by measurement experts and valid only to them. Imagine a scoring system therefore fully understandable only by the assessors, not by the student players and coaches. Finally, imagine further that students do not know until weeks later which plays, which have been taken out of game context and isolated from the shotting and making of baskets, have been judged successful. Who would improve at the game under these conditions? Who would understand the game and his role — the purposes at work — in such an assessment?

Grant Wiggins, Educative Assessment : Designing Assessments to Inform and Improve Student Performance (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998),44.