Reading a lot...
Jan. 26th, 2011 09:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpThere was an excellent piece in today's Wall Street Journal by John McWhorter, on the teaching of foreign languages in the US. I don't agree with quite a bit of his thesis, but the piece is thought-provoking, and when I have a bit more time, I shall have more to say.
I have begun to work my way through an old Dover edition of A. A. Troitzky's 360 Brilliant and Instructive Endgames while walking on the treadmill. My walks are generally short, but intensive, and generally just long enough for me to absorb the theme of any given position.
Such positions are more properly called "studies," and I've always found them to be harder to "solve" than traditional problems that call for a mate to occur in x moves. On the other hand, there is generally more that can be learned from a study, just by going over the solution. (Problem solutions generally have a an impact that is more aesthetic than educational, in my opinion.)
In other news, something somewhere put a bug in my ear to pick up Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, but after reading the Amazon sample, it occurred to me—while I was at the library donating three boxes of books—that they might have the book on the shelf. They did. I'm about 180 pages into it, and keep turning the pages, though I cannot put my finger on exactly why that is the case.
The obvious answer would be to say that I'm interested in what happens next, but for the life of me, I cannot imagine why that would be the case. Perhaps I keep turning the pages in the expectation that something wild—or a series of wild somethings—will, eventually, occur.
Cheers...
I have begun to work my way through an old Dover edition of A. A. Troitzky's 360 Brilliant and Instructive Endgames while walking on the treadmill. My walks are generally short, but intensive, and generally just long enough for me to absorb the theme of any given position.
Such positions are more properly called "studies," and I've always found them to be harder to "solve" than traditional problems that call for a mate to occur in x moves. On the other hand, there is generally more that can be learned from a study, just by going over the solution. (Problem solutions generally have a an impact that is more aesthetic than educational, in my opinion.)
In other news, something somewhere put a bug in my ear to pick up Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, but after reading the Amazon sample, it occurred to me—while I was at the library donating three boxes of books—that they might have the book on the shelf. They did. I'm about 180 pages into it, and keep turning the pages, though I cannot put my finger on exactly why that is the case.
The obvious answer would be to say that I'm interested in what happens next, but for the life of me, I cannot imagine why that would be the case. Perhaps I keep turning the pages in the expectation that something wild—or a series of wild somethings—will, eventually, occur.
Cheers...
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no subject
Date: 2011-01-27 10:49 am (UTC)I also wouldn't be so quick to write off French either. Quite a segment of Africa and the Arab world speak French as either the primary foreign or one of the official languages.