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Darwin’s theory of agency: back to the future in evolutionary science?

Was Darwin a one-trick pony? The scientists who most praise him typically cite just one of his ideas: natural selection. Do any know that his theory of evolution—like his take on psychology—presumed all creatures were agents? This fact has long been eclipsed by the “gene’s-eye view” of adaptation which gained a strangle-hold over biology during the twentieth century—and hence over sociobiology and today’s evolutionary psychology. Are current efforts to revise this view—emphasising “new” topics like the flexibility of phenotypes (an organism’s living characteristics) and the importance of development in adaptation—simply rediscovering Darwin’s approach?

How do members of a species come to differ from each other, thus furnishing the raw material for the struggle whose results Darwin subsumed under what he called the law of natural selection? In two ways, wrote Darwin in 1859. A creature’s parents transmit different characteristics to them as starting-points for their lives. And, over their life-course, creatures develop their starting-characteristics in different ways, depending on how they respond to the various challenges they meet. In 1942, Julian Huxley and his colleagues recast natural selection as a mechanism, not a law. Imagine twinned roulette-wheels: each individual’s evolutionary fate resulted from a random genetic provision of phenotypic traits being pitted against a lottery of environmental events. This new language of genes, genomes, and (from 1953) DNA, made Darwin look ignorant about how individual differences arose. Dying before genes or DNA were discovered, he never knew that mutations and chromosome-changes caused all variations (according to Huxley).

To retain Darwin as the figurehead of this gene-first take on nature, he was retro-fitted with twentieth-century beliefs. If DNA “programmes” what creatures are and do, genetic processes drive evolution forward, not creaturely acts. Hence, Huxley asserted, the “great merit” of Darwin was his proof that living organisms never acted purposively: everything they did could be accounted for “on good mechanistic principles.” Likewise, even when Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin spoke out against the way the cult of genes blinds us to the active role organisms play in adaptation, his first target was Darwin, who, Lewontin said, portrayed organisms “as passive objects moulded by the external force of natural selection.”

Lewontin’s vouch that organisms help shape their own fates is now gaining traction. Few genes behave as they should according to Mendel. So, talk about genes “for” a phenotypic character is rarely appropriate. Even when we know everything we can about genes and environment, we still cannot predict what characteristics will emerge in an organism—proving phenotypes are independent sources of plasticity in the genesis of adaptations. Organisms help cause their own development and destiny, which means phenotypes themselves have evolutionary effects. Never mind why a fly hatches from its pupa to be small: its unusually big surface to volume ratio cannot help but shape its remaining life-history. This point underlines findings from biologists who study animal behaviour. Beavers build dams, chimps and crows make tools, wolves hunt better in packs. All such feats alter the evolutionary prospects of phenotypes.

Darwin’s books herald all these emphases: the distinction between transmission and development when discussing inheritance; the “plasticity of organisation” in all creatures; and, importantly here, the tie between action and structure. Darwin saw nature as a theatre of agency. The roots of cabbage seedlings successfully improvised, after Darwin experimentally blocked them from plunging straight down into the earth. Earthworms “intelligently” grasped how best to tug his artificially-shaped “leaves” to plug their holes against the cold. And when newly-arrived finches were competing for food on the Galapagos Islands, it must have been the birds who first found the best new diets—not random genetic changes—who gained reproductive supremacy and consequently, over millennia, such new bodily adaptations as the skin-piercing beak of blood-sucking Vampire Finches.

Actions produce reactions, The Origin of Species repeatedly reminds us. Which means an organism’s actions inevitably render it interdependent with its habitat, animate and inanimate. Such ties may be competitive or cooperative—“mutual aid” being the hallmark of evolution in “social animals” like us. Hence, when Darwin published his views on human agency in The Descent of Man—first published 150 years ago this month—and its sequel, The Expression of the Emotions (1872), social interdependency took pride of place. Darwin argued non-verbal expressions to be purposeless by-products of functional habits—we weep because we protectively close our eyes when screaming, incidentally squeezing our tear-glands. Such unintended side-effects only come to signify emotion because others “recognize” their meaning as linked to suffering. When I blush, my inbuilt capacity for reading expressions has rebounded, leading me to read in you how I imagine you to be reading me. Such “self-attention” underpins sexual display, plus such quintessentially human traits as language, culture, and conscience.

Go back to what Darwin wrote about evolution, and you will hear him speaking from a place that the latest biology now renders prescient. Interdependencies of agency not only forge individual differences, and winnow the kernels of inter-generational success from the chaff of failure. They also compose Darwin’s unsung creation of the first naturalistic psychology.

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The Louvre and its environs

As promised, this is my third (and for the time being, final) post inspired by the questions I have recently received. The answers would have been too long for my traditional “monthly gleanings.”

What is the origin of the name Louvre? Dictionaries and websites say unanimously that the sought-for etymology is unknown or uncertain. Perhaps so, but we will see. First, a short note on the famous place may be of some use. Louvre is the name of a royal castle in Paris from, if not even before, the thirteenth century. It follows that the name is medieval (Old French). All the rest is intelligent guessing. John Minsheu, the author of the first “thick” etymological dictionary of English (1617), derived Louvre from Old French l’ouvert “the open space.” His conjecture, which survived him by several centuries, has nothing to recommend it. Initial l does go back to the definite article in quite a few French words (compare, for example, Latin hedera “ivy” and French lierre, from l’ierre, ultimately from (h)edera), but it would be impossible to account for the loss of final t in Old French, and the idea of calling a castle “an open space” would be hard to justify.

The names of some great buildings owe their origin to chance or a whim. Prado, as the great Spanish museum (Museo del Prado) is called, means “meadow.” La Scala (in Milan) is of course “staircase” (“scale,” as it were), and the Hermitage (a splendid building in St. Petersburg) was never meant to be a hermit’s cell. We can therefore expect that the name Louvre also has humble antecedents.

Old French furnishes only one clue to the etymology of Louvre, namely, lover “skylight,” and from it English has louver “the dome on a roof” and (a related architectural term) “a series of sloping boards to admit air and exclude rain.” The first sense has been known in English since the fourteenth century (thus, rather close to the time of the first attestation of the French word); the second is about two centuries later. The origin of the Old French noun and its English descendant has been discussed in detail and with a strong admixture of emotions (great reputations were at stake). More than a hundred years ago, some of the best specialists offered their conflicting hypotheses. Their greatest handicap was the existence of several similar-sounding words meaning approximately the same as louver. The words refer to roofs and openings in the roof. Yet one of them should probably be excluded from consideration.

These are the closest relatives of the louver. (Images by L: Vladimir Kudinov, R: ilya gorborukov.)

An active participant in the discussion was A. L. Mayhew (among his opponents we find Frank Chance and Ernest Weekley). Only Weekley’s name is still familiar to rather many, but the obscurity of the other two has nothing to do with their achievements. Nowadays, the history of English (or any other language for that matter) is rarely taught at our colleges. Naturally, those who wrote it are forgotten. The word made much of by Mayhew is Icelandic hlóð “chimney” (pronounced: hlowth, with voiced th). It did not occur in the old language, and from a historical point of view must refer to a stack of bricks, because Old English hlōð meant “troop; booty” (thus, “a pile,” something loaded, laden). The first edition of the OED mentioned Mayhew’s hypothesis but (wisely) did not commit itself. From today’s vantage point, his suggestion has little to recommend it. Conversely, Old Icelandic ljóri “a hole in the roof” seems to be close to lover, but its origin is not quite clear either. A medley of l-words and roots has been cited in connections with louver: English loft (and then of course German Luft “air,” understood as “the roof of the world”), German Laube “arbor,” English lodge, and English lobby. The suspicious Medieval Latin noun lodarium figured prominently in the research. Those words tended to travel between Germanic and Romance, changing their middle consonants along the way, but all vaguely referring to some upper structure (roof, hole in the roof, chimney, and the like) or light and lanterns on the roof. Conversely, German Laube “arbor,” English leaf, and Dutch luifel, the latter corresponding to English lobby and lodge, suggest that the structure had a roof covered with some foliage. Overchoice often kills etymology.

Is this the proto-louver? (Image by Philipp Pilz.)

Even lever has been brought into play: “A lever, when in use, forms with the plane surface against which it is pressed an angle very much resembling the angle formed by an open skylight” (Frank Chance). The lob– forms have more than once been associated with lup-, the root of Latin lupus “wolf.” What can be in common between wolves and skylights? The same Frank Chance, one of my favorite etymologists of James A. H Murray and Walter W. Skeat’s era, wrote in 1894: “…happening one day at Fontainebleau to look out of a window on to a roof with an open skylight, the connexion (sic) flashed across my mind in a second; for the angle made by the open skylight with the roof at once reminded me of the open mouth of a long-mouthed animal, such as a wolf, while the comparative darkness of the inner extremity completed the resemblance to a wolf’s open mouth with the gloom of his throat beyond it.” And F. Chance cited a few examples of the words meaning “wolf’s mouth” and “lantern”! Both suggestions (louver/lever and louver/lupus), coming from an eminent scholar, sound bizarre, to say the least, but a look at the history of our vocabulary across the globe shows that the most unpredictable associations may provide impulses to word-coiners. Fiddlers on the roof, lanterns on the roof… As early as 1845, John Parker, in his ever-popular A Concise Glossary of Architectural Terms, suggested that the Paris Louvre owes its name to a lantern of this kind but offered no evidence in confirmation of his hypothesis.

By this time, it must have become clear that a fully convincing etymology of English louver does not exist, though, whatever the word’s root, it probably referred to light, some opening admitting light, or a leafy covering. Lodge and lobby are related to it. Other similar words (such as those recorded in the Scandinavian languages) may also belong here. Louver reached Middle English from Old French, but it appears to be of Germanic origin. Words that sprang (or do you prefer sprung?) up in Germanic, migrated to France, and returned to the continent or to England are many.

Even though no dictionary gives the etymology of the French name, I believe the main thing can be said with some confidence: Louvre and English louver are, from a historical point of view, the same word. The place was hardly named because it had a lantern on its roof or resembled a wolf’s open mouth. The presence of leaves remains a riddle. I must only take issue with Skeat’s final statement: “Probably an opening over a fireplace; from Icel. hlōð, n. pl. a hearth.” The 1966 Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology does not mention Mayhew’s hypothesis. Be that as it may, the old discussion (1882-1894) of the English word, its French cognate, and its dubious Medieval Latin etymon, a discussion conducted in two excellent periodicals, Notes and Queries and The Academy, reads like a thriller. The references can be found in my Bibliography of English Etymology, but I also have copies of a few publications not mentioned in it (if someone happens to be interested). To conclude: Louvre, so famously French, is, most probably, a name of Germanic origin, with the reference being to the building’s roof.

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Ten empowering books to read in celebration of Black History Month

Anna J. Cooper once said: “the cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause of human kind, the very birthright of humanity.”

In observance of Black History Month, we are celebrating our prize-winning authors and empowering scholarship spanning a variety of topics across African American history, the civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter, the Harlem Renaissance, jazz, and more. Explore our reading list and update your bookshelf with the most recent titles from these eminent authors.

1. The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans by Jonathan Scott Holloway

Jonathan Scott Holloway considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the Black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called “the cause of freedom.” At a moment when political debates grapple with the nation’s obligation to acknowledge and perhaps even repair its original sin of slavery, The Cause of Freedom tells a story about our capacity and willingness to fully realize the country’s founding ideal: that all people were created equal.

2. The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights by Thomas C. Holt

Thomas C. Holt provides an informed and nuanced understanding of the origins, character, and objectives of the mid-twentieth-century freedom struggle, shining a light on the aspirations and initiatives of the ordinary people who built the grassroots movement. This groundbreaking book reinserts the critical concept of “movement” back into our image and understanding of the civil rights movement.

3. The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea, Updated Edition by Christopher J. Lebron

In this updated edition, Christopher J. Lebron presents a condensed and accessible intellectual history that traces the genesis of the ideas that have built into the #BlackLivesMatter movement. In a bid to help us make sense of the emotions, demands, and arguments of present-day activists and public thinkers, this edition includes a new introduction that explores how the movement’s core ideas have been challenged, re-affirmed, and re-imagined during the white nationalism of the Trump years, as well as a new chapter that examines the ideas and importance of Angela Davis and Amiri Baraka as significant participants in the Black Power Movement and Black Arts Movement, respectively.

4. The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart

Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive, Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award–winning biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of Locke’s life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. Stewart’s thought-provoking biography recreates the worlds of this illustrious, enigmatic man who, in promoting the cultural heritage of Black people, became—in the process—a New Negro himself.

5. Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America by W. Caleb McDaniel

The unforgettable saga of one enslaved woman’s fight for justice—and reparations—by Pulitzer Prize-winning author W. Caleb McDaniel. This book tells the epic tale of Henrietta Wood, who survived slavery twice and who achieved more than merely a moral victory over one of her oppressors. A portrait of an extraordinary individual as well as a searing reminder of the lessons of her story, this book establishes beyond question the connections between slavery and the prison system that rose in its place.

6. Straighten Up and Fly Right: The Life and Music of Nat King Cole by Will Friedwald

One of the most popular and memorable American musicians of the 20th century, Nat King Cole is remembered today as both a pianist and a singer, a feat rarely accomplished in the world of popular music. In this complete life and times biography, author Will Friedwald offers a new take on this fascinating musician, framing him first as a bandleader and then as a star. This chapter explores the musical output of the King Cole Trio in the peak years of 1943 to 1946 and breaks down the different kinds of songs they favored.

7. The History of Jazz: Third Editionby Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia’s The History of Jazz has been universally hailed as the most comprehensive and accessible history of the genre of all time. Acclaimed by jazz critics and fans alike, this magnificent work is now available in an up-to-date third edition that covers the latest developments in the jazz world and revisits virtually every aspect of the genre, bringing the often overlooked women who shaped the genre into the spotlight and tracing the recent developments that have led to an upswing of jazz in contemporary mainstream culture.

8. Play the Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film by Kevin Whitehead

Author and jazz critic Kevin Whitehead offers a feast for film fanatics and movie-watching jazz enthusiasts. Spanning 93 years of film history, this book is a comprehensive guide to films (and other media) from the perspective of the music itself. Explore this chapter to learn more about jazz in film, from early talkies through the birth and development of the swing era.

9. Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong by Ricky Riccardi

Utilizing a prodigious amount of new research, author Ricky Riccardi traces Armstrong’s mid-career fall from grace and dramatic resurgence. Featuring never-before-published photographs and stories culled from Armstrong’s personal archives, Heart Full of Rhythm tells the story of how the man called “Pops” became the first “King of Pop.”

10. Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multi-Racial Jewish Familyby Laura Arnold Leibman

While their affluence made them unusual, the Moses’s story represents that of a largely forgotten population: families of mixed African and Jewish ancestry, that constituted as much as 10% of the Jewish communities. This story of siblings sheds new light on the fluidity of race—as well as on the role of religion in racial shift—in the first half of the nineteenth century.

 

Explore the full Black History Month collection here.

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Isaac Newton’s London life: a quiz

Isaac Newton is known as the scientist who discovered gravity, but less well-known are the many years he spent in metropolitan London, and what precisely he got up to in that time…

How well do you know the latter part of Newton’s life? Test yourself with this quiz from Patricia Fara, author of Life after Gravity: Isaac Newton’s London Career:

Featured image by Luke Stackpoole

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John Rawls: an ideal theorist for nonideal times?

Fifty years ago, the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice started a conversation in political philosophy that continues today. Rawls’s voice remains central in contemporary philosophical debates across a wide variety of topics—from arguments about principles of economic justice to questions of fair policies for international relations; from basic philosophical methodology to the grounds of democratic legitimacy.

Despite the enduring significance of Rawls’s work in contemporary political philosophy, some critics question its relevance to pressing issues of injustice such as racial inequity and health care disparity. Critics like Amartya Sen and Charles Mills argue that Rawls’s theory is either unnecessary or misleading when it comes to addressing real injustices in our world.

John Rawls describes the “main concern” of A Theory of Justice as being “ideal theory”. Although there is some ambiguity in his use of that term, at least part of what Rawls means by “ideal theory” is theory aimed at identifying the ideal principles of justice that should be used to evaluate our political and social institutions. If a society were completely to satisfy these principles, it would be fully just. A second part of what Rawls means by “ideal theory” is that it involves certain simplifying assumptions about society—most notably, that citizens will fully comply with the rules. In focusing on these standards of evaluation for ideal conditions, Rawls has very little to say about their application to real-world injustices and the question of how to overcome these injustices on the way to a more just society. Yet Rawls ultimately thinks ideal theory should serve as a guide for theorizing about how to overcome injustices in the nonideal world. Rawls writes, “the reason for beginning with ideal theory is that it provides, I believe, the only basis for the systematic grasp of these more pressing problems [of nonideal theory]”. Critics challenge the claim that nonideal theory depends on ideal theory in this way.

“Rawls ultimately thinks ideal theory should serve as a guide for theorizing about how to overcome injustices in the nonideal world”

Amartya Sen argues that identifying ideals of justice is neither necessary nor sufficient for identifying and eliminating actual injustices. He argues that we do not need to know the principles of a perfectly just system in order to recognize the many injustices in our current systems. We can discern that racial discrimination is wrong, for example, without developing a complete theory of justice. Going even further, Charles Mills argues that doing ideal theory is not merely unnecessary, but inimical to the project of rectifying real injustices. He argues that the standards of justice for ideal conditions are not the same as the standards of justice for nonideal conditions. As such, using the ideal standards as a guide in the real world could lead us to more injustice. He points to the example of colorblind policies. In an ideal world, just social policies would not take into account a citizen’s racial identity. Yet, in a non-ideal society characterized by racial injustice, such a colorblind principle risks ignoring and perpetuating existing inequality.

Surely Mills is right that just policies must recognize and respond to existing racial disparities and other injustices. The policies one should enact in the real, unjust world are different than the ones one should enact in a world without racism and sexism. These are important points. What’s less clear is the implication of these claims for ideal theory. Does this show ideal theory is an inappropriate guide in the nonideal world? There is not space here for a comprehensive discussion of the ideal theory debate, but it is worth noting that defenders of Rawls have responded by arguing that in nonideal conditions, we should evaluate policies based on the likelihood of moving a society in the direction of ideal justice. If a colorblind policy is likely to perpetuate injustice given actual historical conditions, then whatever we might hope for in the ideal, Rawls’s theory would not support such a policy. The point is that one must have a grasp of the ideal towards which we are aiming in order to tell whether a proposed response to existing injustice would move us in the direction of a more just society. Of course, ideal theory by itself won’t tell us the likely effects of various policies. That requires the specialized contribution of political scientists, sociologists, historians, economists, and others. But ideal theory has a role to play, as well. It helps us to think systematically about the values used to evaluate these policies.

No doubt Sen is also correct that one can identify and address many injustices without having worked out a full theory of justice. In fact, Rawls does not claim that ideal theory is necessary for the identification of each and every injustice. Rawls’s own methodology is to begin with our considered convictions about particular cases of injustice, such as the injustice of racial discrimination and religious intolerance, as well as abstract principles, and to attempt to work out a theory that reaches “reflective equilibrium” between them. Rawls argued that working out an ideal theory was necessary for a “more systematic grasp” of injustices and to extend our understanding of what justice requires in more difficult cases. Matthew Adams defends this claim, arguing:

When we are confronted with easy cases such as whether slavery should be abolished, we do not need the best theoretical account of why slavery is wrong to know that it is wrong. With respect to such easy cases, therefore, ideal-content theory plays no essential guidance function. Non-ideal theory, however, does not just consists of such easy cases. It also encompasses difficult—greatly contested—cases such as whether certain affirmative action policies would be adopted and how progressive rates of taxation would be determined. With respect to such difficult cases, one may well not be able to know how to act justly without the guidance of ideal-content theory. For such vexing and contested cases will plausibly require the long-term and complete picture of political values that ideal-content theory provides.

Rawls’s ideal theory of justice is perhaps particularly relevant in these divisive times. His entire approach is about how people who have different conceptions of the good, comprehensive doctrines, world views, and religions, can share just institutions without denying their differences or compromising their values. In their own ways, this is the point of both the original position and the idea of public reason. As Rawls observes, “one of the aims of moral philosophy is to look for possible bases of agreement where none seem to exist.” In other words, the question at the center of Rawls’s life work is a question at the center of public political debate today: what values ought to guide the terms of cooperation in a divided nation? Ultimately, Rawls argues that a just pluralist society must ensure that all citizens have a fair chance to pursue their own diverse conceptions of the good life. This requires strong protections for basic liberties, special attention to the needs of the least advantaged, and fair equality of opportunity for all.

It is true that Rawls wrote very little about how to address real-world injustices and move toward a more just system. But this is because Rawls views the project of understanding and addressing real-world injustice as a collaborative, interdisciplinary project. Philosophers have an important role to play, but so do many others, including, of course, politicians and citizens generally. The distinctive contribution that philosophers can make is to develop explicit understanding of the underlying standards to be used to assess the justice of various institutional arrangements. But there is much more work to be done than identifying guiding principles. Rawls himself did not think that his theory would or should be the last word on this matter, and his work certainly does not relieve us of the burden of thinking carefully about real-world injustice for ourselves, both individually and collectively. He aims to help orient our approach to these issues and to contribute to the public debate rather than to solve them for us.

Featured image by Ryoji Iwata

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Tips for adapting the elementary music curriculum to online teaching

Teachers of the performing arts are adapting their classes to go online. The problems and challenges range from ensuring enough physical space for movement around each student’s computer to overcoming audio and video syncing delays during the live feed. Some of the solutions include doing less movement during the class and turning off students’ video so there is less latency in the audio. But what about elementary music?

Young students are inspired by seeing others move with them. The teacher can assess comprehension by observing student movement. Moving to contrasts like fast-slow, loud-soft, and high pitch-low pitch helps internalize this knowledge. Movement helps for deeper understanding and engages the student in a richer experience. In Praxial Music Education, Heidi Westerlund and Marja-Leena Juntunen make the argument that movement demonstrates musical thinking. How then do we adapt this inherent part of the elementary music experience? How do we adapt movement for online?

This article offers tips for elementary teachers who want to include music in their online lessons on how to build a successful set up and lesson strategy.

Creating an online music environment

First, develop easy to follow guidelines for parents to setup their home computer area for limited movement. Suggest that the kids sit in a chair facing the screen with at least four feet open space behind them for standing and moving in place. It’s helpful if a parent or older person can stay with the child during the lesson and do the movements with them.

Then, structure your class schedule while keeping in mind the electronic issues. Feisworld Media recommends turning off your students’ video; their website says it helps reduce audio delay. Evaluate your own situation and notate the issues. How bad are the syncing issues with all students unmuted with video? Does it work better with half the students muted and off screen? Maybe just a few students at a time? While working this out, confer with your school to determine their flexibility. Karen Salvador and Rob Lyda from the NAfME Webinar: Teaching Elementary and Early Childhood Music in the Time of COVID-19 recommend writing a letter to your administration to clarify how you want to approach your music classes. Maybe instead of having an entire class at once, you could schedule several shorter classes with less students at a time. This may make it more manageable and the students can get more individual attention.

Adapting the lessons

Salvador and Lyda also suggest going back to the “anchor standards” during this extended online school year. Teachers can create lessons for all their different grade levels on the same basics but approach them differently for each grade level. A recent Frau Musik USA article suggests using the same songs for all the grades but adapt the learning level appropriately. An added bonus is that this will help parents with practice time if all their elementary age children are learning the same song. They include a great example of how to do this with the song “Hot Cross Buns.” Choir Directors Kathy Alexander and Bev Grant say that using vocal recorded music can make online singing more enjoyable, helping the students experience something closer to in-person classes.

The main idea is to teach the basic concepts in smaller “chunks” or “capsules” using simplified objectives and reduced activities. Here’s an example. Students learn the song “Lucy Locket,” but instead of playing the circle game, students can stand in place and march to the beat or clap to the rhythm. Have students make up their own “beat” movements like shrug their shoulders or dance. Play follow the leader. Practice the solfege (sol, la, sol, mi) with the hand signs, but save reading the notation for another time. Use pictures to help with the vocabulary words “pocket” and “ribbon.”

Other ideas are to reduce the amount of movement to what stays manageable. Include more call and response songs and taking turns. Another option is to do alternate activities. Elizabeth Caldwell from NAfME suggests use other types of music learning like interviewing family members, drawing instruments, using recorded music or creating lists of songs. This will inspire engagement and help get the most out of the online music experience.

Tips for adapting the anchor curriculumMovement: run, jog, skip, jump, hop, tiptoe, gallop, side-step (sashay), patsch (pat the legs), pantomime, and movement-in-space.TIP: Remove gallop and sashay. Retire any dance or partner dance moves for now. Adapt run, and jog to movement-in-place that can be performed in front of the screen.Beat and rhythm: beat, tempo (fast/slow), stop/go (sound/silence), rest, note duration (long/short), rhythm (feeling quarter, eighth, and sixteenth variations), inner hearing, increased subtlety in rhythmic changes, strong and weak beat, bar-line, reading rhythmic notation, identifying written songs using rhythmic notation, time signature.TIP: Retire percussion instruments for now except for making and using homemade instruments. All of these concepts are doable online by adapting your presentation to a small screen. For example, to demonstrate strong and weak beat, flip your hands palm to back, back and forth while singing or listening to music in front of the camera.Melody and singing: pitch (high/low), note duration (legato/staccato), dynamics (loud/soft), form (verse, chorus, phrasing), solfege (do, re, mi…), group singing, individual singing, reading pitch notation, identifying written songs using pitch notation, key signature.TIP: The main change will be less group singing. and more listening to each other. Retire melodic instruments like the xylophone for now. While learning the solfege hand signs, have students practice, demonstrate, and perform for each other. Work on music notation with melody separate from rhythm. Then later put them together to form songs to read.Other ideas: Do instrument families, classical music listening, composers, elementary acoustics, composition, and conducting. By using pictures, charts, and worksheets students can experience all of these activities. Preparation is needed for handouts and the teacher needs PDF files ready to display for students.TIP: Retire specific STEM activities like language arts unless there’s time. Focus primarily on music anchor objectives.

For many first-time online teachers, this will be a year of trial and error. Be kind to yourself and know that some things will work and others won’t. Keep on the look-out for resources online that will help.

Featured image: Kim Milai teaching a song to students online

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The skin of etymological teeth

Like the previous post, this one owes its origin to a reader’s question. Is English skin related to Greek skēnḗ? Skēnḗ means “a sheltered place; tent; stage; scene,” and it is from scene that all of us know the word. Its origin is obscure (Latin had scēna and scaena), but, in any case, skēnḗ and skin cannot be reduced to the same etymon. Regardless of this fact, the story of skin and some other words, partly synonymous with it, is worthy of attention.

It may cause surprise how many words we have for “the outer covering of the body”: skin, hide, pelt, fell, leather, to say nothing of fleece, while a specialist in skin diseases is a dermatologist (from Greek dérma). Skin surfaced in English texts only in the eleventh century and meant “the hide of an animal stripped off,” a sense that should not be overlooked. If we want to discover the etymology of this word, we should know whether the reference was to the covering of a human body or to a fell, or perhaps to the way animal fells were used. However, in English, skin surfaced late. The Old English for “skin” was hȳd (Modern English hide). Judging by its cognates (Dutch huid, German Haut, and others), this was the oldest West Germanic name for “human skin.” Hide is related to Latin cutis “skin” (its root is the source of English cuticle) and Greek kútos “hide; husk; pod.” Apparently, the word referred to “covering, integument.”

Wolf in sheepskin, as it were. (Image by Francis Barlow.)

Since English skin is a borrowed word, it will tell us little about the sought-for etymology. The initial group sk– in Middle English must have come from Scandinavian (the native sc– would have become sh), and indeed Old Norse had skinn, which meant only “the hide of cattle.” The Old Norse sense may be secondary, but the line between the words for “human skin” and “the skin of an animal” was easy to cross; we’ll see that such is the usual case. Skin has a few related forms in German dialects. They mean “bark; the skin of fruit” and add nothing to what we already know. But the Old High German and Dutch verb (scindan, etc.) meant “to peel off, flay”; Modern German and Dutch still have the verb schinden, even though its meaning has changed somewhat. The original sense returns us to the question: “Whose skin did our word designate?”

In everyday life, our skin interests us to the extent that we protect it from wounds, burns, and diseases and in general take care of it (for example, cover it with tattoo), while animal skins (and fur) have been used for clothing and other purposes since the earliest times. People did not need borrowed words for “human skin,” but, if they learned how to flay animals or tan skins from their neighbors, the special term might be foreign; such is, for example, English tan (from Old English, from Medieval Latin, perhaps eventually from Celtic: note this last detail). Is skin also a loanword?

The most famous fleece in the world. (Image by Marie-Lan Nguyen.)

Unfortunately, the answer lies hidden in the depths of civilization, and language shows only one thing, namely, that the words for “human skin” and “animal pelt” tend to be used interchangeably. Perhaps the most astounding example is Russian kozha “skin,” derived (such is the recognized opinion of all specialists) from koza (stress on the second syllable) “goat.” If some of our readers are aware of the family name Koziol, let them have no illusions about its origin: it means “billy goat” (from Polish; the Russian word sounds almost the same).  It follows that in Slavic, at one time, goatskin acquired the meaning “skin (in general),” even though a word for “animal skin” also exists. Latin pellis meant both “skin” and “hide,” and so do its reflexes (continuations) in the modern languages: French peau and others. English speakers use skin, while referring to smaller (and younger) animals: goatskin, sheepskin, and so forth. Even though some of the words mentioned above have broad Indo-European connections (Latin pellis is related to English fell, while pelt is directly from French; and English hide is a cognate of Latin cutis—I’ll refrain from listing other cognates), the question—human or animal skin?—usually remains unanswered.

We have seen that in Germanic, the root of skin can be detected in the verb meaning “to flay, peel off.” This is a common situation. The root of Greek derma “skin” corresponds sound by sound to Old English teran “to tear.” (I am not sure whether I should remind our readers that ancient Germanic consonants underwent a shift: the old Indo-European p change to f—hence Latin pellis but English fell; k changed to what is now h: hence Latin cutis but English hide; d changed to t—hence Greek der– but English ter-, and so forth; the t ~ d correspondence in cutis ~ hide needs a longer explanation, with which, in this blog post, we can dispense.) Tearing, like peeling off, again makes us think of processing animal skins.

Take good care of your skin. (Image by Jayson Hinrichsen.)

What then is known about the etymology of skin? The answer is: very little. This rather isolated word has been traced to the root skenþ– “to cut,” but, as usual, the ancient root set up by linguists tells us nothing new about the history of the noun skin or the verbs related to it. In another attempt, the ancient root has been reconstructed as sek– (also with the meaning “to cut”). If this is correct, English saw “a cutting instrument,” from Old English saga, and section, straight from Romance, are related to it. English shin, allegedly, goes back to skei-, again “to cut.” Were there once, we wonder, three synonymous roots: sken–þ, ske-i, and sek-? The first two look like variants of the same entity.

Outside Indo-European, only Celtic words resemble skin, and they mean approximately the same, but no one suggested that skin is a borrowing. The origin of the Celtic look-alikes is also unknown. Similar is the situation with leather: several Germanic cognates and a few Celtic words that match the Germanic ones. The attempts to explain how leather got its name (and this is of course the only question we want to ask) failed to bring convincing results, and I’ll let them be. No one knows whether the Celts taught their Germanic neighbors the production of leather (as happened to the use of iron and some niceties of jurisprudence) or whether the influence went in the opposite direction, or, finally, whether the word and the “thing” reached all of them from some outsiders. Skin does not seem to have an ascertainable Indo-European etymology. Yet our wanderings have not been quite fruitless. We have discovered that people tend to distinguish words for human and animal skin but constantly confuse them, and that the word for “skin” tends to be related to a verb meaning “to cut, to tear, to peel off.” Not much, but better than nothing.

Featured image via Pixabay

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Five themes in Asian Shakespeare adaptations

Since the nineteenth century, stage and film directors have mounted hundreds of adaptations of Shakespeare drawn on East Asian motifs, and by the late twentieth century, Shakespeare had become one of the most frequently performed playwrights in East Asia. There are five striking themes surrounding cultural, racial, and gender dynamics. Gender roles in the play take on new meanings in translation, and familiar and unfamiliar accents expanded the characters’ racial identities.

1. What’s in a name? Everything!

Word choices in East Asian films and productions reveal, or conceal, how much power a character might have over others. In Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 film Throne of Blood, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth address each other with formal and informal gendered pronouns that betray their unease and desire for control.

What stands out in the film is how and when some characters choose informal language. When conversing with each other, Washizu (Macbeth) and Miki (Banquo) refer to each other with first names, deepen their voice, and use informal language and the informal, masculine “I” (ore).

Washizu attempts to create a similarly intimate bond with Lady Asaji (Lady Macbeth) in private, but she rejects his attempt and maintains verbal and physical distance. It is notable that when Washizu addresses Asaji, he does not use any honorific; he does not address her as tsuma (wife) or okusan (lady of the house). Meanwhile, Asaji uses the most formal, singular first-person pronoun watakushi, rather than the informal, feminine atashi, which would be what a private conversation between a husband and a wife normally entails. Asaji’s combination of the formal watakushi and usually more casual anata—the latter here spoken in a register that conveys condescension and rejects intimacy—creates another layer of the uncanny beyond the atonal music.

2. Shakespeare to the rescue? Not always

While the canonical status of Shakespeare’s oeuvre has led to admiration and deference, there have been many witty parodies of the tragedies. Some adaptations are built on the assumption that performing Shakespeare can improve one’s moral character, but other works mock the conviction that Shakespeare has any recuperative function in the society, such as Chee Kong Cheah’s Singaporean film Chicken Rice War (2000).

Built around the conceit of a college production of Romeo and Juliet, the film trivializes the feud in Romeo and Juliet by reducing the generations-old dispute, to the rivalry between the Wong and Chan families, who own competing chicken rice stalls. The film’s opening and closing scenes, narrated by a news anchor, simultaneously parody Shakespeare’s prologue, epilogue, and Baz Luhrmann’s film William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. Performing Shakespeare’s play fails, in the end, to resolve the hostility between the two families—both alike in dignity.

3. Transgender performance

In the late 1990s to help change the image of South Korea abroad, the government began sponsoring the production of films and theatre works.

Within this context of the democratization of the country, several South Korean adaptations of Hamlet recast Ophelia as a shaman who serves as a medium to console the dead and guide the living. Because female shamans exist outside the Confucian social structure, they have greater agency. Inspired by political and academic feminism, these works rethought the position of Korean women in society. Although Ophelia has often been appropriated as a feminist symbol, she is also a site of contestations over gender identities and roles.

The 2005 South Korean feature film The King and the Clown, directed by Lee Joon-ik, echoes several themes and characters of Shakespeare’s plays, including the revenge plot in Hamlet, the device of a bawdy play-within-a-play in Taming of the Shrew, and the love triangle in Twelfth Night. The film depicts the erotic entanglements among a king and two acrobat street performers: the macho Jang-saeng, who plays male roles, and the trans feminine Gong-gil who shares several personality traits with Hamlet’s love interest, Ophelia: an inability to express oneself, and a life largely determined by men. Gong-gil is neither in flamboyant drag nor struggling with gender transition. They are accepted by other characters as a feminine person. The transgender Ophelia-character draws on the local culture of flower boys, typically “effeminate” singers or actors whose gender is fluidly androgynous.

4. Sounding racial differences

Race and ethnicity are not only visible but also audible in the multilingual film. The aforementioned Chicken Rice War uses multilingualism as both a dramatic device and a political metaphor. The elder generation converse in Cantonese whilst the younger generation speak mostly Singlish, or Singaporean English. Fenson and Audrey, in a mix of English and Cantonese, perform the “balcony” scene, in which Romeo and Juliet meet after the masked ball. Meanwhile, their offstage parents become more and more impatient with their public display of affection, not understanding the boundary between play making and playgoing. The parents are emotionally detached from and intellectually excluded by the younger generation’s Anglophone education, symbolized by their (unsuccessful) enactment of Shakespeare.

Singapore’s propaganda emphasizes commercial cosmopolitanism and transnational histories of immigration in the service of economic growth. Chicken Rice War critiques the idea that “sounding white”—speaking standard English—conveys more authority.

5. Deep connections among different cultures

There are deep connections among Asian and Anglophone performance cultures. For example, the narrative structure of Akira Kurosawa’s films has provided inspiration for Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and George Lucas.

“One Husband Too Many” (dir. Anthony Chan, 1988), a Hong Kong parody of Franco Zeffireli’s film “Romeo and Juliet.” Juliet wakes up in the Capulet’s tomb in the final scene on a makeshift stage at a night market. The audiences are disruptive. (Image as featured in “Shakespeare & East Asia.”)

Kurosawa tends to begin his films in medias res and offers vignettes of epic history. Similarly, George Lucas begins Star Wars with Princess Leia battling the troops of Darth Vader, plunging audiences into action already unfolding before the start of the film. Lucas and Kurosawa share the same narrative strategy of reaching for the general through specific details.

Chicken Rice War pointedly parodies Luhrmann’s campy film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Michael Almereyda appropriates Asian spirituality in his Buddhist-inflected film Hamlet (2000), set in twenty-first-century Manhattan: the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh is featured in a spin-off of the “To be or not to be” speech. The Hong Kong comedy film One Husband Too Many (1988), directed by Anthony Chan, features costumes reminiscent of Danilo Donati’s doublet-and-tights designs for Franco Zeffirelli’s film Romeo and Juliet (1968) to the tune of that film’s “A Time for Us” by Nino Rota, with new Cantonese lyrics.

These adaptations break new ground in sound and spectacle. They serve as a vehicle for social reparation. They provide a forum where artists and audiences can grapple with the contemporary issues of racial and gender equality, and they forge a new path for world cinema and theatre.

Featured image by Lucas Santos

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What role does culture play in shaping children’s school experiences?

One way to think of culture is as a context in which we learn and develop. We share, live, perform, and experience culture through our participation in daily activities, customs, and routines with social others. Culture helps us make sense of our social worlds and shapes our actions, thoughts, and feelings. For example, culture plays a role in the way we experience emotions, construct our self-concepts, and learn and problem-solve.

With increasing migration and the movement of people in the twenty-first century, many children in the US and worldwide are attending school in formal settings where cultural norms and practices at home may conflict with those children encounter at school. This experience places children in the position of having to navigate two different social worlds—home and school. One broad question we can explore is: “what role does culture play in shaping children’s school experiences and academic success?” Let’s visit three specific areas: parental beliefs and socialization practices, teacher perceptions, and school curricula and children’s learning.

Parental beliefs and socialization practices

Parental expectations, beliefs, and attitudes about education shape children’s academic experiences. Many parents in diverse cultural communities view education as a path to future success. For example, as a group many Asian and Asian American children attain academic success. What role does culture play in these outcomes? Chang notes that as a group, Chinese and Taiwanese parents place a high value on education. Kim and Park  note the same is true for Korean parents. Parenting approaches in these communities highlight training and disciplining children, parent self-sacrifice, and devotion to children. Parents believe perseverance and hard work is the key to success and socialization practices reinforce these values and traits. These cultural practices help children internalize the values their parents place upon education and behaving according to social norms. Children acquire these values and are loyal, appreciative, and dedicated to their parents for their support and encouragement. In part, they attain academic success to honor their parents and the broader social groups to which they belong.

Teacher perceptions

Teachers play an important role in children’s academic success too. What practices work best to motivate children to do well at school? The answer depends upon numerous factors. For example, many teachers will be entrusted with educating children who may not share their cultural heritage. How might this cultural mismatch shape children’s school experiences and potential for academic success?

Most American school practices reflect dominant, mainstream American values, norms, and behavioral scripts. For most European American children who value independence and uniqueness, teacher praise and rewards can be highly motivating. However, for children who come from families that value humility and modesty, receiving praise in front of classmates might be an uncomfortable interaction.

Student engagement norms are another example. Many American teachers using a mainstream cultural lens, connect active student engagement with student attentiveness. Yamamoto and Linoted that for many Asian and Asian American students, knowing when to be quiet is a desirable skill which caregivers socialize their children to acquire. Teachers using mainstream, American cultural values and norms may perceive quiet students as disengaged and inattentive. These perceptions impact children’s motivation to learn and academic success.

School curricula and children’s learning

Dominant, mainstream American values tend to permeate curricular and teaching practices. Many American schools promote individual learning and problem-solving approaches rather than group or collaborative problem-solving strategies. The focus upon individualized learning connects to the cultural ideology of individualism and the independent self. These approaches promote the self as separate and unique from social others. Many European American children participate in cultural practices and routines that reinforce this worldview and values.

However, many Latinx and indigenous children participate in cultural practices and activities at home that value group and collaborative problem solving. These practices connect to the cultural ideology of collectivism and the interdependent self. At home children participate in practices and routines that emphasize the importance of the group, especially family. Thus, there is a disconnect between the approaches at home with the practices and routines the child encounters at school. Consequently, many of these children often have difficulty reaching their maximum potential in classrooms that promote individual problem-solving skills. Why does this happen and does this necessarily have be the outcome?

For many children from cultural heritages that promote collectivist values and an interdependent cultural model of the self, the cultural practices in which the child participates at home may conflict with those the child encounters at school. Often, teachers are unaware of these sources of conflict. However, this conflict between home and school does not need to impede students’ success or invalidate the child’s cultural heritage. One solution is for schools to meet students halfway and bridge the gap between the two contexts.

Two fine examples are The Bridging Cultures Project designed to assist immigrant and indigenous children in the US and the Kamehameha Early Education Program (KEEP) designed to assist native Hawaiian children. Both programs highlight how helping teachers become more aware, respectful, accepting, and inclusive of all their students’ cultural values and goals shapes children’s motivation and academic success at school.

Final thoughts

Numerous cultural forces connect to children’s school experiences and academic achievement. These include parental beliefs, socialization practices, and cultural worldviews. Cultural values, practices, and ways of learning at home both shape and connect to children’s formal school experiences. Educational initiatives such as The Bridging Cultures Project  and KEEP highlight the importance of cultural compatibility and connectedness in fostering children’s active engagement in school. Acknowledging and incorporating cultural knowledge, patterns, and ways of learning at home when they disconnect with those at school is one important way to ensure all children’s academic success.

Featured image: School children in India, by Richard Veit

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Which literary heroine are you? [quiz]

To best celebrate the online launch of the Oxford World’s Classics, discover which literary heroine you are most like with our quiz. Are you the witty and headstrong Lizzie Bennet? More of the steadfastly independent Jane Eyre? Or another illustrious literary heroine? Find out now!

Featured image by Jess Bailey

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