links for 2009-02-21

"We listen to a LOT of children's music these days. Maybe a little too much sometimes. On the other hand, we're fortunate to live in an age of relatively listenable children's music with some adult appeal. Here's some stuff Jorie's been hearing lately:"

Another of Scott's really interesting shot-by-shot analyses of Batman movies.

"For those who did read the first book, this introduction highlights how very little actually happened in Left Behind. They've condensed that 468-page book into a three-page summary mainly by leaving out the phone calls and plane rides. And while they were at it, they've provided a few revisions and additions to the plot of Book 1. This summary diverges from the actual book enough that it might have been better titled "What I Meant to Have Gone Before," or "What Would Have Gone Before If I'd Bothered With Even a Cursory Rewrite After Rattling Off a Rough Draft and Sending It to the Publisher.""

"My personal sensibility shifts a bit from year to year. Iâm not terribly consistent in my internal understanding of what Iâm doing when I grade. In general, I tend to imagine the B as the default grade, and an A as a grade that says, âYou did something considerably better than ordinaryâ. The C means, âThis is really not as good as ordinary workâ. Failures are either, âThis is dramatically worse than the normâ or âYou blew this off, and I can see that you didâ. "

"âQuite frankly and simply Iâm going to try to deconstruct the notion we hear all over the place â that study abroad changed my life,â Michael Woolf, president of the Foundation for International Education, in London, said Thursday at the Forum on Education Abroadâs fifth annual conference."

"Endowments have plummeted, alumni will donate less, and students wonât be willing to pay as much. Because of all this financial trauma, colleges will inevitably expect more from their faculties. But I urge college presidents and trustees, in responding to this situation, not to make inflexible demands of professors, but to rather empower us to decide which sacrifices we shall bear."