Oh, funny thing from a book Lis bought for me

[xiphias]

So, Lis bought me a book called The Joy of Mixology.

It's got some chapters on the history of bartending. And it mentions that, in the American Old West, one of the slang terms for bartenders was from Greek mythology -- after all, bartenders give people alcohol, so why not use the name of Zeus's cupbearer?

So, bartenders were called "ganymedes."

Okay, I cracked up at that, as did Lis, and we were wondering how many other people would find that funny. Most of the people we know who we think would get the joke also read Lis's blog where she mentioned the same thing. . .

See, "ganymede" was ALSO a slang term in the late Rennaisance, and for quite a while on. It's a term for a gay man. And we just had this image of the confusions that could happen with this. . . images like that scene in Blazing Saddles where the brawl breaks through to the next soundstage, and one of the cowboys goes off with one of the dancers; just the general comment that we hadn't realized that THAT sort of bar was so common in the Old West. . .

We were imagining episodes of Queer Eye for the Cowboy . . .

Comments

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

Carson and chaps.

Need more be said?

[burgundy.livejournal.com]

Even without that (and yes, I got it before you explained it) I find the idea of Greek references in the American Old West hilarious.

And a little bit sad. Because bartenders from 150 years ago knew who he was, but not most college students today. Gah. Now I sound like an old fuddy-duddy. "Kids today..."

A little education is a dangerous thing

[(Anonymous)]

Not surprising at all when you consider the state of education then, and now. 1800's (and 1700's) education models were VERY heavy in cultural background. The study of Greek and Latin was very pronounced in the school systems of the period, as well as the use of classical literature. Even if the cowboy only attended a one room schoolhouse, you can be sure that he was introduced to the classics in some manner.

We may have more knowledge and a higher literacy rate now, but our ability to educate students now is highly inferior to years past. We have dumbed down many areas -- literature and mathematics to name just two. So, while we may graduate more students than graduated in the 1800's, the required level of knowledge in core subjects is highly diluted. Just for yucks, pick up some text books from the latter part of the 1800's or even the first part of the 1900's and see how much of the information taught was ever part of your education.

Re: A little education is a dangerous thing

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I guess the question is: what has replaced that information? Kids are spending more time in school than back then, and teachers are as, or, frankly, more competent than teachers then, and students haven't gotten any stupider.

So, what's taken the place of all of that? I mean, we've got copies of the McGuffy Readers, so I do know, a bit, of what people learned.

Re: A little education is a dangerous thing

[(Anonymous)]

Very good question, and one for the educators to respond to. Subjective opinions are that earlier education was much more grounded in "substantive" subjects necessary for a well rounded education -- emphasis on the three R's -- readin', writin', and 'rithmetic. I have "one room schoolhouse" math texts with problems that can't be solved by today's average college student -- compound fractions, logic problems, etc. Penmanship, spelling, reading skills. and for a well rounded education -- culture, including Latin or Greek and great literature. Also history - but there was less of it then. What do we have today? Remnants of the great Science and Math push of the 50's and 60's Cold War. More "feel good" subjects, and everyone graduates whether they've learned anything or not. Again, subjective comment -- we have more education but less knowledge. However, how much education do you really need to flip hamburgers at McDonalds?

Re: A little education is a dangerous thing

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

History, and, in general, all the subjects that could be lumped under "social studies", covered a more narrow range: some classical history, English history, then American history -- even general European history was rather skimped on, relatively, and Asia, Africa, and South America were not even touched on.

Now, this is relative, of course, and I'd like to see a lot more on all of those things than we get today.

I'm also wondering: we hear a lot about the "one-room schoolhouses" of the nineteenth century, but those were largely rural. What were urban schools like? Lis points out that Boston Latin was around then -- was that a typical urban public school? They haven't dumbed down their curriculum today -- and they're a test-for-entry magnet school. Did they have the same ability to be equally selective about their students a hundred years ago? Where did the rest of the children go?

Re: A little education is a dangerous thing

[burgundy.livejournal.com]

I think you've touched on something important. I don't pretend to know a lot about the history of education, but...

It's expected now that every child will go to school. A teen who doesn't finish high school is the exception, not the rule. This is a pretty recent development. I think, if we're going to talk about changes in how things are taught, we also have to look at changes in who's learning. What percentage of kids regularly went to school 150 years ago? What percentage of them went for 12 years? If you go from having schools where only the kids whose parents value education and want them to learn attend, to having schools where every child must go regardless of other circumstances, then you're going to have a change in educational standards.

And let's not forget that, even if the bartenders knew who Ganymede was, most of the people who weren't white had a hard time getting someone to teach them how to read. So it's not as though all the changes have been for the worse.

Re: A little education is a dangerous thing

[(Anonymous)]

There is a more fundamental issue at stake here, the significant shift in the fundamental role of education in society. I am going to generalize a bit, but education (and the role of educators) changed considerably in the past 70 or so years, as the country changed.

Until the period between the two World Wars, America was still largely an agragrian and frontier society. Until then, education consisted largely of "common knowledge" -- the core understandings that someone needed in order to function in life, whether that was farming skills, housekeeping skills, or basic job skills (such as those required by the rise of industrialization). This was true in both America and Europe -- core educational requirements were intended to prepare the young mind for anticipated life experiences. In America an additional role of formal education was to assimilate immigrants into American culture. Higher education (high school and beyond) was reserved largely for the privileged, or those intended for social services like medicine, law, etc.

Education changed as the world changed. One of the catalysts was the unionization of teachers and the systematization of education. In the 1930's (?) teachers unionized and joined the AFL (I think, I'm reasonably certain they did not affiliate with the CIO). Now you have a professional class which has a vested interest in maintaining their status and protecting their position. To offset the unionized structure, school administrators became more professional (and more rigid). Now you had Management and you had Labor, and the focus shifted to negotiations and contracts. Students became somewhat of an afterthought as schools became factories. The role of education was minimized as the "process" was to churn children through the "system". Fueled by the Cold War and driven by the Baby Boom, educators were tasked with creating as many scientists and mathematicians as possible to compete with the Russkies. Shift forward a generation, to the "feel good" 80's and 90's, and the factory metaphor takes another shift. We are no longer compelled to churn out young minds to compete in the Cold War, we just need to churn out young minds -- EVERYONE graduates, whether they have learned anything or not.

Our country has shifted too -- from agragrian and frontier to service -- you don't need much of an education if you are going to flip hamburgers at McDonalds (or punch numbers into a cash register at WalMart). Culture? You can get all you want from the TV. With some exceptions, education is largely a ticket you need to punch so you can check it off on the resume.

Re: A little education is a dangerous thing

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

There are other parts to that. The American system of education, as it exists now, is largely taken from the German model of the late 19th century -- which was an authoritarian model designed specifically to turn out good factory workers. (Interestingly, the during the Meji era, the Japanese copied their educational system from the same source -- which is why Japanese schoolgirl uniforms look the way they do now. Weird, hunh? Anyway. . .)

The point of that educational system was, in large part, to quash originality and give everybody the same set of skills to make them more or less interchangable. I don't see unionization of teafchers as a particularly large player in the systemization of education: I see that as a direct effect of the efforts of the manufacturing powers to shape American education to their own needs. I agree that schools became factories -- but I think the reason was that factories wanted schools to become factories.

The Cold War years are interesting. The new focus on math and science did allow for high-performing youngsters to become achieve a greater portion of their potential. I think that's all to the good -- my father benefited from that, although my mother got fed up with formalized education, and refused to go to school for a couple years, instead going to the public library every day and teaching herself. (She then got a GED, on her own.)

And my father, like every other scientifically gifted person of 16 or older in the United States, worked on the Apollo program -- I think he was wiring circuit boards for a guidance program, something like that. Basic stuff, but nifty.

But that focus on letting the best and the brightest become better and brighter didn't help everyone else. And, for that matter, it was probably a factor in my father's nervous breakdown, which is why he flunked out of school, and went to Vietnam, where he got to meet lots and lots of other Americans of his age, most of whom were pretty poorly educated . . .

The "feel good 80's and 90's" are when I was educated. That's my entire educational history: I entered kindergarten in 1979, graduated from high school in 1992.

One thing which I percieved as a significant potential problem is that I think that the median age of my elementary school teachers was fifty or so. . .

I feel that the education I got was . . . competent. Like all reasonably well-educated people, a significant portion of my education is self-education. But I never felt shortchanged by the Arlington public school system.

My friend undauntra has some pretty specific feelings about things that are wrong in secondary school math education -- she did it for two years, and, if I may summarize her point of view, felt that one of the big problems was that most of the math teachers just didn't have strong -- or even acceptable -- math backgrounds. I consider myself to be very weak in mathematics, but, apparently, I've got a better gut-level understanding of what calculus is than some of the people who teach it. And I FLUNKED calculus. Repeatedly.

I can't help but wonder if the tanking economy isn't going to improve our schools. One of the biggest problems we've been having is that teaching pays so incredibly poorly that you can't justify going into teaching if you can at all go into any other line of work. So, for a couple years there, the pool of teachers was really scraping the bottom of the barrel. You had a few people who went into it out of a sense of love of teaching, or of duty (that's why undauntra went -- she felt that, as someone who understood math, she had a responsibility to help turn out a generation of citizens who also understood math) -- but that only gets a few people, and they burn out fast.

Re: A little education is a dangerous thing

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

The general run of primary and secondary teachers in this area are completely unequipped to teach. There are several universities in this area that give (or gave until recently) unadorned B.Ed.s--and what this means is that people who got an Ed degree but had no interest in double-majoring or minoring in a specific discipline knew nothing. The math classes that fulfilled their math requirements were "Teaching math to fourth-graders" and such things. Ditto science, ditto English, ditto history.

I know people who came out of several different Midwestern universities with Ed degrees and 4.0 GPAs that took only art or PE courses outside the School of Ed. They are terrible teachers.

I don't want to say that people with Ed degrees are all ignorant slackers who couldn't make it in a real degree program, because there are a few people with Ed degrees who actually did take the time and energy to take courses in their concentration offered by a department other than the Ed school, but in my experience they are few and far between. The History Department undergrad advisor actually tells students who really want to major in history but simply can't make the grades in their history courses (and all you need is a C, people--I mean, come on) to switch to History Ed.

When you combine this ill-education on the part of the educators with schools that don't have anything like enough money to function well, with students who don't care because their parents either don't care or have too much trust in the institution, and with a social and political climate that claims to value education and then guts it first during a budget crunch...you end up with what we have: schools that don't educate filled with overpaid administrators and underpaid teachers.

My sister was promoted every year with her class--we noticed that she didn't read voraciously like the rest of us (parents and me, the older sibling) but thought that perhaps she just wasn't a reader. Mom asked her grade school teachers, and they always said that she was reading just fine and had a huge vocabulary. Then I graduated high school and moved away and my mom graduated from college and got a job in a different state, and when they transferred my sister into fifth grade there, the teachers were horrified, because my sister couldn't read. Fifth grade, and she was functionally illiterate. She was put into a remedial reading class and did learn to read--I remember noticing on a visit home a year or two later that suddenly her room was full of books and she spent a lot of time reading. Dad said that she told him years later that she knew she was in trouble when the school readers didn't have pictures anymore.

Had my parents not moved, it is entirely possible that my sister, who is very bright, would have been just another functional illiterate churned out by the public school system. This happened for a couple of reasons, and one of them was that the "whole word" method of teaching reading was being flirted with again while she was in first and second grade. The second was that my parents were reprimanded by her teacher for working on her reading at home during that period, because they were teaching her to sound out words, and rather than telling her teacher to take a hike, they did stop working on it at home.

What I have to wonder is how many of her agemates from the grade school she went to are functionally illiterate? It's sheer good fortune that they moved to a decent school district before it was too late. How many other kids never get that chance?

Shooting Stars

[(Anonymous)]

Could it be because when the bartender poured enough rotgut you started to see stars?

::zipping straight to post the comment::

[rosamund.livejournal.com]

::sprays ginger beer dangerously near the keyboard::

Never post things like that where I can read them without a warning.

Now I have to attempt not to have visuals to that.

Of course I got it ;)

Now, you tell me why I have to try not to crack up when a customer tells me their name is Ingle. Feel free to ask Lis.