L
by Alex
Banana yellow. And just as slippery. The flavor of that ‘banana flavor’ flavoring that tastes nothing like bananas.
There is an old saying — that I first heard one winter in college uttered by Jack Palance in his his strange baddie role in the movie Cyborg II — that if you want to dine with the devil, you will need a long spoon. I have never understood exactly what this meant until I first delved into the Ls. This is a section with call number. I learned this the hard way when I was looking for a book and jotted down the call number, LB 5000 .G4 figuring ‘how many LB5000 .G4s can there be?’ The answer: fifty linear feet. This call number is insane. It is perfectly feasible to head down to the stacks and search for LM3,247,564 .582752. I kid you not.
L is really also a haystack of a letter. As the ‘education and learning’ section it is difficult to find the needles. I spend a lot of time in this section since I have made a conscious effort to improve my teaching skills but man — you know you think that the anthropologists are way outnumbered by the historians, but they are both but a drop in the ocean that is the people who study education.
Some of the stuff in L is really really interesting and (which is the same thing for me) ethnographic. But a lot of it is… uh… not. And this is not an easy section to browse in. Have you ever seen the section on ‘teaching reading comprehension’? It’s mammoth. And a lot of the literature in education tends not to be very reality-based — abstract taxonomies of learning objectives, fiercely chauvistic lists of Great Books, Foucaultian intstitutional imperatives to drill and grade based on seemingly based in unreflective intuition about what learning is and ought to be or else on submicro level psychological studies of eye movements, extremely obvious things described in monograph form, but mostly just a lot of extremely vanilla institutional prose. This is an area that, like H, saw tremendous growth in the baby boom years, and is full of countercultural technocratic discourse in sans-serif font about how latest science shows chilling out is the way to go, man.
I tend to hang on by latching onto particular authors and presses, but even these are not hallmarks of quality. While there are small presses like Stylus, there are also massive behemoths like Josey-Bass. And then there are all the weird small-timey presses run out of high school printing rooms and university education departments printing primers on idiosyncratic teaching methods with cult-like followings that cost $2.50 each (the primers, not the cults). These are often my favorites.
There is something about education that tends to bring out the most formal in people, as well as to prompt even the least extroverted to share their life philosophy.