the art of writing is discovering what you believe
Why I should care about what a guy who went to private school (Lakeside) then dropped out of harvard thinks about public schools eludes me. Bill Gates thinks he can replace dedicated, committed passionate teachers with DVDs? That all kids are motivated and ready to learn from such a sterile medium?
Diane Ravitch (@DianeRavitch)
10/14/10 9:18 PM
Read this great letter to Bill Gates, by NYC teacher http://tinyurl.com/2fseghd
What if schools/districts could deny service to kids they were unequipped for or just didn’t want to deal with? That boy who can’t stop his mouth, no matter what consequences are applied? Send him home. The girl who never follows any of the instructions and chats with her friends, dragging their performance down as well? Gone.
Now this is obviously a bad idea for all concerned. The children affected by this would be worse off. And parents have an expectation that when their otherwise healthy children reach school age, they’ll be in school.
But are there no expectations, other than an arbitrary number of birthdays, that determine eligibility for school attendance? If a child is interfering with other students’ experience — holding up the whole class for parts of the day, preventing lessons from being taught in an orderly, damaging materials — what recourse does a school or teacher have? At what point does the burden of failure point to the home and the lack of preparation/socialization there? Bearing in mind that students are only in school 6 hours a day, the same kids don’t get to school until they’re five years old. What work has been done to prepare them for
I’m not arguing for expulsion of the students who need school most: that would be cruel, both now and down the road. It would have consequences for the rest of their lives. But by the same token, what kind of shared responsibility can be forged between parents and teachers to help those who need it most? No expectations can be put on the students. But what of the parents’ responsibility to their children, to make them ready for the challenges ahead? Who knows them better on that first day? Who knows how they’ll react to the many new stimuli — bells, new routines, room changes, new faces and voices — better than their parents? And how do they pass along that information? I’m sure every teacher loves hearing how special little Johnny is or how Jane is surely gifted and will be moving on to a more challenging classroom/better teacher in no time.
But what practical issues of routine and ritual are shared? What kind of hours does little Johnny keep? Is he accustomed to sleeping til 9 and staying up til 10 or later? Does he eat meals or just graze through the day? How prepared is little Jane, academically: is she reading at all, writing, does she like to sing, does she know her colors or letters (the underlying question here is: how much time have her parents spent on these areas? How much will she be behind the other kids whose parents have done some of this?)?
The idea of a partnership between parents and teachers is one that doesn’t get a lot of attention. I think it should. When I realize my neighbors have declined to show up for curriculum night two years running, I wonder if they know what message that sends to the teachers and their only child? The teachers put a lot of work into their short but dense presentations, on top of a full day’s work, and with the promise of more work via the various online methods available today. We specifically went to see the teachers and get any insight we could into materials and subject matter, grading policy and other expectations. We came away pleased and prepared to work with them. Who wouldn’t want that?
[I]f you set out to raise children, that’s exactly what you end up with — children in adult bodies, with the judgment and mental capacity of elementary-school kids. The goal should be to raise functional adults who will be capable of taking care of themselves when you’re no longer available to do it for them.
Maybe this is what Warhol meant when he said “Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they’ll just have to learn how to be babies longer.”
Republicans have gradually been losing the egghead vote. I wonder how that translates into their ability to recruit strategists and “thought-leaders” who can work on the campaign, policy and media sides and help to lead them out of their current slump.
[From FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: The Decline of The Conservative Intellectual]
If you need any evidence, here’s something from something that calls itself “American Thinker:”
One image alone was released from the expensive photo op that terrified New Yorkers last month. Out of God only knows how many images taken during the mission, only one was chosen. It speaks powerfully to the American public — in symbolic language.
The ominous and imposing aircraft dominates the scene in such a way that, in gestalt parlance, no one could mistake the figure for the ground. The figure is an aircraft that serves as Air Force One, representing the Messianic omnipotence of the Obama presidency. Below it, part of the background — a small and less relevant thing in comparison to the aircraft — stands the Statue of Liberty, representing the individual freedoms that Americans have come to treasure and enjoy.
[From American Thinker: The Visual Subtext of the Statue of Liberty Fly-by Photo]
The House of Representatives will vote this week on the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act. The Senate will vote next week. These bills will help make pay equity a reality, not just a theory. Let’s make sure the House votes FOR fairness to women and FOR helping American families.
[From I Am Progress: I Make – Get Out of the Way of Fair Pay Campaign]
My response, added to their canned letter:
Please vote YES to pass the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act. As I look around our community, I see my neighbors, your constituents, working hard to make ends meet. In these tough times, it is especially important that women, especially moms, are paid fairly for their work.
Of course, what is really needed is a linkage between Congressional pay and the minimum wage. Currently, a congressmember makes about 14 times per hour what a minimum wage worker makes, and that does not include the various other benefits of office a representative or senator can claim. I would like to see one of my national representatives make this connection, between the compensation paid to those at the bottom of the ladder and those who speak for them at the top of it.
The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act are two important steps needed to make sure women are paid fairly in the workplace. These proposals will help to make equal pay for equal work real, not just in theory, but in practice. Your YES vote on these proposals will show your commitment to fairness and to American families.
Thank you.
As of two minutes ago, it appears you can now buy music from iTunes from your iPhone over EDGE and 3G, not just Wi-Fi.
Even better: all the music in the store appears to be DRM-free now [emphasis added]. I’m guessing Phil Schiller will announce it later on in the keynote. Maybe this is the “one more thing”?
[From Daring Fireball Linked List: DRM-Free Music at iTunes Store]
I found a gig on Craiglist for a “mystery shopper” assignment, one of those deals where you visit a local business, complete some transaction, and report on how it went. I wasn’t 100% convinced I was comfortable with it, but that soon changed once I got the store list: Wal★Mart and one of those check-cashing outfits.
Hmm, I won’t set foot in a Wal★Mart, and certainly not to act as a spy for their less than stellar employee policies. And those check cashing joints give me the creeps: they take advantage of people who can ill afford it, and I don’t want to be part of that.
It was never so clear what these companies — the mystery shopper outfits — are about: they enable absentee owners to keep an eye on things without having to actually be in the store. The whole customer experience is boiled down to some reports on how fast things move, how accurate, and in some cases how patient (one of the later assignments is to try to get the employee to lose their cool: how uncomfortable would that be?). Some holding company in a distant state or country is hiring these companies and making decisions based on those reports.
You would never see a locally-owned and operated business using these services, as the owners are there. You can assume that the money paid to an outside consultant is money that doesn’t go to training or raises or any incentives to make the experience better: it’s really about finding the lowest cost per transaction, with a certain standard of quality. One more dehumanizing aspect of capitalism, perhaps?
Not for me. I’d rather dig ditches.
find your Music folder/directory where these files live: you are looking for iTunes Library and iTunes Music Library.xml The XML file is a backup of the other file, which is the one iTunes uses: iTunes Library: data iTunes Music Library.xml: XML document text Move the iTunes Library file aside (rename it, put in your home directory, whatever)…. An example: <key>Location</key><string>file://localhost/private/Network/Servers/shuttle/usr/local/share/mt-daapd/media/Abbado_Berliner%20Philharmoniker/Mahler_%20Symphonie%20No.%205/01%20Trauermarsch.%20In%20Gemessenem%20Schritt.%20Streng.%20Wie%20Ein%20Kondukt.m4a</string> A quick and dirty way to do it on the command line, ie, in the Terminal?
I see some discussion about fixing busted iTunes libraries, either when moving one on the same computer or migrating to a new one. Here’s what I have found works for me.
Bonus: no slow AppleScripts or payments (donations cheerfully accepted and squandered). After
almost 3 1/2 yearsmore than four years, this continues to be a widely-read posting and still seems to work. I thought it was made obsolete with iTunes 8 or somewhere along there… As it’s been viewed more than 111,000 times and been found useful a few of those times, I wouldn’t object to a donation. But rather than spend your money, you could do me a favor and help yourself at the same time. Click that link and if you buy something at Amazon.com, they’ll send me a penny, maybe more. No obligation but also no cost to you.
As an aside, if you are going to comment along the lines of “I just moved my music from one Mac to another and nothing broke so why is this so complicated?” please don’t bother. The title specifically mentions a BROKEN library, you dig? Or perhaps your library has outgrown the current location and you want to move it but retain access to it as your primary library and keep all your playlists and history. That’s what this post deals with, not replicating a working installation, but changing one to suit a new environment or fixing a botch attempt at it. Peace.
And for goodness’ sake, read all the comments: some good stuff down there. Sadly, I had to throw away all the comments, as I disconnected them from the posts they were in response to.
First, what I have discovered about how iTunes manages music collections. There are two files it uses, one that is binary (ie, machine readable for faster performance on searching, sorting, add/edit/delete operations) and one that has the same information but in a human readable format (for a certain subset of humans who can read XML natively). The XML file is written from the binary file as a backup (check the dates to confirm).
iTunes will try to open the binary file when it starts up and if it’s not readable, it will re-create it from the XML file. That’s what we’re using to fix the damage or make any sweeping changes.
First, close iTunes. You’ll be working with files it uses/writes to and you’ll muck things up if you makes changes to files it has open and then your changes get clobbered, leaving the binary and the backup unusable. Don’t do that.
iTunes Library: data
iTunes Music Library.xml: XML document text [NB for Windows users: you will be looking for iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Music Library.xml.] touch(1), as in touch iTunes\ Library. You can also just open a file in whatever other editor you like and save it as iTunes Library.<key>Location</key><string>file://localhost/private/Network/Servers/shuttle
/usr/local/share/mt-daapd/media/Abbado_Berliner%20Philharmoniker/Mahler_%20Symphonie%20No.%205/01%20
Trauermarsch.%20In%20Gemessenem%20Schritt.%20Streng.%20Wie%20Ein%20Kondukt.m4a</string>
perl -pi -e.backup s|oldpath|newpath|g iTunes Music Library.xmlperl -pi.backup -e s|oldpath|newpath|g iTunes Music Library.xml
This will create a backup file (cleverly called “iTunes Music Library.xml.backup”)
This has worked for me more than once and if it’s reproducible, it should work for you. But note that I recommend a backup copy of the XML file. You can go back and re-do it from scratch if you get into trouble.
And I expect this is extensible in many interesting ways, like merging libraries from different users (something with diff and patch, perhaps?), switching from one repository to another (maybe a large home repository and a smaller traveling one). I’m not clever enough to figure those out, but if anyone else does, I’d love to hear about it.
[update] This looks interesting:
I had to do some more things with my iTunes library lately – like extracting all that ratings and exporting them into a new music player software I liked to test. I therefore wrote myself a little tool in C# that does the job of reading in the whole iTunes library and giving you programmatically access to that library. It only needs to have read access to the Mediathek.xml file iTunes stores in it’s music folder and you from there on can work your way through the bazillions of music tracks you may or may not have in your library. It even does the find-and-replace job a bit easier than the solution mentioned in the article above.
The author and proprietor of Big Contrarian just sent me an Amazon gift card for the simple act of noting a small error on one of his recent posts. A simple “thank you” would have done (he says, as he greedily lingers at Amazon.com) but I’ll make good use of this.
The author and proprietor of Big Contrarian just sent me an Amazon gift card for the simple act of noting a small error on one of his recent posts. A simple “thank you” would have done (he says, as he greedily lingers at Amazon.com) but I’ll make good use of this.
Thanks.