Filed on September 1, 2002 at 3:20 pm under by dcobranchi
HOW DO YOU GET TO CARNEGIE HALL? The NYT Magazine has a lengthy piece on a family that has crushed the National Spelling Bee for years. These folks are extremely dedicated in their pursuit of spelling excellence.
When she is among her siblings, J.J. does not seem especially unusual. But the rest of the time, she does — and not in a way that makes her life any easier. The social survival of a 12-year-old depends, to a large extent, on being like everybody else. J.J. is like nobody else, and so has developed the turtleback posture of someone who has learned to stay low in school. A year ago, Mona and Jonathan — a programmer for the Health and Hospitals Corporation in New York City — pulled J.J. out of her middle school after a three-year slide from contentment through boredom into unrelieved torment at the hands of packs of girls who, as Jonathan explains it, had I.Q.’s ”30 points lower than hers.” For the entire 2001-02 bee season, Mona home-schooled J.J.
In the weeks leading up to the national bee, mother and daughter hunkered down almost every day from 9 to 4 with a break for lunch, blowing off the rest of the school curriculum until after the bee, when they would make it up. Mona served words like tennis balls from a machine. Clepsydra, Gaullist, ducal, oxylophyte, bidet. Out on the lawn, J.J.’s only distractions from her task were divebombing bees and the comings and goings of neighbors, who as they drove by offered little waves of bemused encouragement.
Filed on at 2:50 pm under by dcobranchi
FIRST AMENDMENT IRONY I’m not sure how to play this one. An Arizona State grad student has received threatening phone calls for starting a petition drive to recall the student body president. The president had appeared in a pornographic film. Pornographers often attempt to hide behind a First Amendment shield. The irony here, of course, is that the porn star’s supporters are threatening a student for exercising his First Amendment rights.
Filed on at 2:37 pm under by dcobranchi
CLASSICS HSers employing a classical approach will appreciate this book review.
A New Apologia for Greek and Latin
By Tracy Lee Simmons
ISI Books. 268 pp. $24.95
Reviewed by Jim Bowman
“The better grammar schools” of John Colet’s day, 1527, used the direct method in teaching Latin. Latin speech came before rules of grammar, said Colet, founder of St. Paul’s School, London. Let his students speak good Latin, Colet said, and the rest would follow.
Students at St. Paul’s and other British schools did their thinking in Latin well into the 19th century. They memorized the masters, getting “the classic poets by heart,” gaining “endless matter for conversation and verbal amusement for their whole lives,” wrote Alexander Pope.
This didn’t last. The last generation equipped by “early exposure to classical rigors” to be “literary masters and gourmands” flourished during 1870-1920, writes Tracy Lee Simmons, a journalist with a master’s degree in classics from Oxford, in this defense of Latin and Greek studies.
