Ben Vore > Recent Status Updates

Okay, one more: “Any teacher who tells you precisely what his students learned during any lesson, unit, or semester quite literally does not know what he is talking about.” (Regrettably, these are never the teachers who volunteer to lead PD sessions.)

"If the learning process must be visualized, perhaps it is most authentically represented in a Jackson Pollock canvas -- a canvas whose colors increase in intensity as intellectual power grows (for learning *is* exponentially cumulative)."

“It is the thesis of this book that change — constant, accelerating, ubiquitous — is the most striking characteristic of the world we live in and that our educational system has not yet recognized this fact.”

This book cracked something open in me.

“The bureaucratic obfuscation and semantic games had reached the point where Rachelle and Matthew were starting to feel as if they were trapped in a Kafka novel.”

“It was if the Yankees, facing the Oakland A’s in the World Series, had announced they would be buying their opponent.” C’mon, man, get an editor who knows these teams are both in the American League.

Can’t help but think of The Atlantic c. 2026 when I read passages like, “The absence of real women in a news account that is allegedly about real women is a hallmark of 80s backlash journalism. The press delivered the backlash to the public through a series of ‘trend stories,’ articles that claimed to divine sweeping shifts while providing little in the way of evidence to support their generalizations.”

“In the two weeks allotted, almost half the kids had done some of the reading, well above the norm [ok, so far so good, Ian, sounds about right] though none had managed the full ninety-six pages [aaaaagggh, YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO TWIST THE KNIFE LIKE THAT, IAN. WHYYYYY].”

We’re up to five “peroration”s.

"The people who believe in teaching machines rarely evince any real understanding of what it means to teach and learn."

"She wanted to know with whom I exchange correspondence, and I told her: anyone! ... I showed her a few of the more remarkable letters -- the one from Jackie Kennedy, the one from Walt Disney. She was *astounded* that people write back, and of course I told her: people are just people. Famous or not."

"When a book arrives somewhere emotionally moving, it's because the reader has helped put it there." -- Hilary Leichter

Oof. From the chapter “Hank Aaron”: “The Cincinnati Reds front office asked how they could accommodate [Hank Aaron] on his special day. It was April 4 — the sixth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King. A black man and a civil rights supporter, Aaron asked that there be a moment of silence before the game. They refused.”

Find me someone who loves me like Rick Perlstein loves the word “peroration” (four appearances through 188 pages).

“Textbooks, it seems to me, are enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning.”

Umbridge is one of the most vile characters ever to appear on the page, a magical Nurse Ratched. I hated her the first time I read this, and that hasn't changed. What has changed is how many real world characters -- particularly those running our government and education -- have got that Umbridge in them nowadays. (For example, the Ohio legislators who wrote and signed H.B. 190.)

“He rewrote the past to control the future, because that is what authoritarians do.”