Liveblogging World Cup Game Italy vs Ghana
I was able to do a bit of work while watching the US get trounced by the Czech Republic. Why couldn't we have managed our expectations a little better? The US played as if they were afraid of the ball, or at least as if they were very, very tired, despite the commentators desperate praise of the youthfulness of the US team..If you think I'm not working, you are much deceived!!! It's finals week and I am collecting finals even as we speak and calculating student grades while reading Stephen Jay Gould!
Ghana is actually challenging and attacking Italy. They are AMAZING! They have strength, speed and guts. Italy's uniform has unfortunate dark blue patches under the arms, making them all look very sweaty. They should have had Miuccia Prada consult on the unfortunate two choice of two tone blues, producing the sweaty underarm patch special effect...I am so glad that we can hear something about Africa that has nothing to do with a disaster or Brangelina!!!
Go Ghana!!! This is an INCREDIBLE game!
Ghana is actually challenging and attacking Italy. They are AMAZING! They have strength, speed and guts. Italy's uniform has unfortunate dark blue patches under the arms, making them all look very sweaty. They should have had Miuccia Prada consult on the unfortunate two choice of two tone blues, producing the sweaty underarm patch special effect...I am so glad that we can hear something about Africa that has nothing to do with a disaster or Brangelina!!!
Go Ghana!!! This is an INCREDIBLE game!
9 Comments:
Why are you reading Stephen J. Gould? Let's see . . . I think one of his books contains something about a mismeasure of . . . of . . . two-legged, bug-eyed cyclops.
I'm sorry Catherine. I'm probably just tired.
I can't believe you haven't mentioned Australia's spectacular come-from-behind victory over Japan! ;-)
While on the US team, don't under-estimate how good the Czechs are too!
Oh! Well, (yawn) I did happen to notice the hubbub over . . . uh . . . saucer cups, no, I meant soccer cup-a-world. Geez, why can't I get it right? I meant World Cup Soccer. I must really be out of it. I think that my problem is that I am becoming a hermit. Arising only to read, write, and eat tuna fish sandwichs (one day I ate some potato crumblies),then I sleep again.
I really should increase my awareness of things, like soccer. This is important--an event with the poetential to bring peace and goodwill to the nations. Geez, I'm so, like, out of it. Lethargic. Must be the weather or something.
Catherine, it's a good thing that you are aware enuf for the both of us. Have a great summer.
Do not trash Stephen Jay Gould !!-- the mismeasure of man is the best denunciation of intelligence testing I have read and I was a budding paleo-biologist in fifth grade.
Reading about racist biology gives thickness to the context in which Freud wrote as well as a kind of insight into 19th century bourgeois thought!
It's better than cultural studies embrace of pseudo-science!!! Why make fun of Gould. What hath Gould wrought? A readable history of bio-metrics!!!
And see new posts for more sporadic world cup coverage!
I wasn't exactly trashing Gould. I'm just so tired of this ages old controversy centered on IQ testing. Every year a new text, study, or report graces the world on IQs. Why can't educators, others, including racists get it right? What I mean is that test after test provides the so-called measurements to IQ. However, these tests have been proven to court bias. Certain normative experiences do not apply to everyone. But the tests are useful too, they say, for targeting the need for new educational methods. Sounds good, but in the back of mind, I know that really means they are tools for EXCLUSION, not inclusion.
I wonder, too, about the swing to pseudo-science, an embrace of (un)reality as fact.
I don't know why, but I've no problem seeing you as a "budding paleo-biologist in the fifth grade."
Obession with testing and ranking is the bread and butter and academics and educational institutions. As mother and professor, this is the stuff of my everyday life. I have to understand its shortcomings as well as its rationalization of human potential for my own intellectual projects, for my child's confrontation with this increasingly hierarchized world -- in order not to defeat it with one stroke, but to increase critical thinking's resistance against the temptations of the test!
Of course, by necessity, tests and mass education are inseperable and inevitable, but we may need better tests and better modes of evaluation!
Apart from the World Cup - & the amazing Australian victory - I couldn't agree with you both more about these issues - both their importance, to keep up to date on these debates, & to maintain critical vigilance abotu how tests & measures are used.
I give an example:
In Australia, last year a law academic proposed that the country should return to a racially discriminatory immigration policy due to the influx of Sudanese refugees. He based his proposition on 2 factors: the American experience (migration & the state of the cities) & IQ tests that "reveal" that sub-Saharan Africans rate low on IQ tests (70 to 75) & therefore are more prone to crime.
If you want to check this out:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2005/1424337.htm
Tiresome as it may be to denounce intelligence testing, we must repeat ourselves over and over and over again to insist that while 'accountablity' and mass education must be married in some way, we don't have to resort to the flawed model of the IQ test in order to evaluate any population.
The IQ test as Gould says, assumes that human intelligence is one dimensionally measurable. It emerges from the Binet tests that were meant to be given individually and to evaluate learning disabilities. The Scholastic Aptitude Test in the US is the feared rite of passage that all college bound high school students think they have to ace in order to rise to the top of the oligarchy!
Early 20th-c testers in the US were very eager to us IQ tests to regulate immigration. It just shows that we are not really ready for post-modern, as we continue to revive early 20th-c paradigms for reactionary purposes.
Good points, though not sure what the resort to the post-modern means here. Sounds like some appeal to a refuge beyond modernity, which still includes mass education & accountability, stronger governmental processes of control, yet dissent as a governing norm (one of those reisdual Enlightenment things!), sport.
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