subversive

Bullsh*t Tie by The American Necktie Co - Black Microfiber
$30.00
Keep your frustrations subtle and stylish with this fun and subversive men's necktie. Featuring a sly red pattern that swivels and swerves to say not so pointedly -- Bullshit -- this necktie gives you the perfect medium to let those around you know just what you really think of their ideas.

The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself) (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)
$13.00
Editors break rules. How liberating! Carol Fisher Saller's "Subversive Copy Editor" confirms what I learned as a scientist: The more you know about a subject, the less dogmatic your opinions. Rules can be broken; editors do make stupid mistakes. Saller brings great common sense and, yes, sharp business acumen to her profession. The book reminds you that if an author--consistently--has styled his 985 references in a totally nonstandard, but logical style, what's the point in undoing all the painstaking work? Having enjoyed this "Chicago Manual of Style" editor's online Q&A page for years, I loved reading more about the crazy questions she gets about editing (and sometimes other topics, like fashion, when someone mistook "The Chicago Manual of Style" for a fashion advice book) and the clearheaded, sometimes funny answer she gives. But beyond her approach to editing and her invaluable hints on how to stay organized as an editor, the book includes invaluable lessons in modern business etiquette: ways to work with difficult co-workers and authors, the importance of answering e-mail promptly, even if you don't know the answer; how to defer a decision; the importance of keeping the big picture (in this field, the big picture is the reader and book sales); rules of etiquette not only in your own e-mails but especially with how you handle others' messages; and so on. The book can be read from front to back, almost like a novel (well, I am an editor, so perhaps I found it especially compelling), and Saller's self-deprecatory humor had me laughing out loud. Editors, writers, students, and businesspeople who handle any sort of communications will enjoy this book.

Subversives for Lucifer
$29.49
Hell's hordes overrun the earth and the world is plunged into the unending fires of eternal unholy battle. From the wilds of Australia (okay, downtown Melbourne), Abominator assault us with the soundtrack for this blood-drenched apocalypse.

This is probably the heaviest and most brutal album I have ever heard. Think of it like what the Incredible Hulk would sound like if he overdosed on a cocktail of steroids and angeldust, dedicated his soul to Satan and started an Extreme Metal band.

Tracks like "As God of A Heretic Tribe" and "Ignite the Ceremonial Burning" evoke the hard, warlike ethic of the dark tribal warrior. And the closing title track in particular is absolutely outstanding. Amazing, pounding drumming -- totally relentless. A definite must-hear.

Yeah, in their lyrics some Yoda-speak there is. But hey, maybe that's the way they all talk out there in the war-ravaged depths of the Chaos Wastes.

"Subvert your flock to our battlegrou~nd!" -- I dunno know exactly what it means, but I like it!

Abominator are one of the most fearsome beasts lurking out there in the field of Extreme Metal. If you like your Metal HEAVY and dark like Belphegor, Behemoth, Krisiun or Marduk you MUST hear Abominator. And this is my favourite Abominator album of all.

Buy or die!

Teaching As a Subversive Activity
$15.00
Most reviewers seem to like Teaching as a Subversive Activity. I am not among the book's fans.

The book's authors, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, score a number of points. They manage to "nail" educators for relying too much on the lecture method in which students copy, then memorize, the teacher's opinions. This is a very valid criticism; teachers do little to teach students how to think; we settle for teaching them what to think. The authors make another good point about the tyranny of testing, which has become far worse since the early 1970s.

Beyond these points, I found the book to be lacking. I think that the authors meander too far from their original point - that teaching needs to be reformed. They discuss an incredible array of topics in just over 200 pages, but the discussions are superficial due to the book's excessive breadth. And their digressions are not engaging and are often only tangentially related to teaching. For instance, the long list of quotations at the end of Chapter 7 is mind numbing.

The authors' arguments remind me of the old saw that it is easier to tear down a system than it is to build a new one. Many of their suggestions are quixotic, or just laughable. Consider what the authors suggest administrators do if students write graffiti about their teachers in school bathrooms; in this case, Postman and Weingartner state that the administrators should chisel the students' words on the front of their schools. Are they joking? Did the authors ever actually attend high school?

Some of the other ideas have the sound of bad 60s hangovers. For instance, Yale University adopted the authors' idea about eliminating grades in the early 1970s - with disastrous results. The authors hold that there is no such thing as a shared reality - and that, therefore, the students should define the entire curriculum. (If there is no shared reality whatsoever, how did everyone interested in Teaching as a Subversive Activity end up on this page?). Student-directed learning might be interesting in some contexts, but it would be disastrous in others. For instance, I don't want to be a patient of the physician whose class decided that they weren't interested in learning about human anatomy. I don't want to drive across a bridge designed by the person whose civil engineering class decided that they didn't want to learn about bridges. Sometimes schools do have valuable content to teach students - whether they want to learn it or not.

Finally, since Postman and Weingartner published this book, there has been a wealth of research into the inquiry-based and active-learning methods the authors favored; the results have been mixed. We still have much to learn about exactly which methods produce superior student learning. These authors have some intriguing ideas, but they did not find the "Holy Grail" that will cure education of all its ills.