Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy
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Sally asks in the Comments section in “Poetry illiterate”: “Here’s a ? for your journal — in whose presence have you sensed that special immortal genius for personality?”
This is a good question. One I would like to answer, I just haven’t the time to do it right now.. Feel free to post in the Comments section if you have such stories.
Actually, if anyone else has any questions for me you’d like me to answer, feel free to post them. (Let’s keep it rated PG.)
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Yes. Civilization is now at an end. Why do you ask?
If there weren’t two crisp twenties under the bun, I couldn’t imagine what would make this worth it. But if you live long enough in a city where a first-grader’s birthday party can cost $3,000, you must remain sanguine in the face of absurdity.
I had started on a Saturday night with a $41 burger. By Sunday night, two miles on the treadmill later, I was at another restaurant uptown, face to face with a $50, 4-inch-tall tower of beef and bun, 2 inches higher than my black French pumps. This was not the launch of my Atkins diet. Rather, I had resigned myself to covering a competition between restaurateurs over who could reinvent the great American hamburger and charge the most for it.
Even though the bubble has burst and the country is facing an international crisis, New York City is fully engaged in a war over turning a low-rent food into something ineluctable.
This all heated up shortly after New Year’s.
For the first time, one of the oldest steakhouses in New York added a hamburger to its menu. Located in the meatpacking district since 1868, the Old Homestead offered 20 ounces of beer-fed Kobe beef on a bun for $41.
A few days later at DB Bistro Moderne, a top-rated French chef with a yen for publicity raised the stakes. Daniel Boulud began shaving $350-per-pound black truffles onto his regular DB Burger, raising the price from $29 to $50. This offering was good only for the four short months of the truffle season.
There’s a wonderful bit later on in the article about how
“Everyone has $41,” Sherry said. “Or everyone can raise $41.” After all, he bragged, he sold 200 burgers the first day, 140 of them takeout orders from the nearby financial district. So much for the bear market.
Man. Now that’s disposable income.
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According to a story in today’s LA Times (sadly, registration required):
Today’s college freshmen got more A’s than ever in high school while studying a record low number of hours in their senior year, according to a national survey by UCLA. But they may not be any smarter than those of past generations.
Instead, frenzied competition for college admission has inflated grades and trained students to become experts at winning A’s, say the survey’s director and college students and officials in Southern California.
“Students are more savvy about what it takes to get an A,” said Linda J. Saxon, the UCLA education professor who directed this year’s American Freshman Survey, which has been tracking students’ opinions and habits for 37 years.
In the classes she teaches, students now “focus more of their energies studying what it takes to get a grade.” They might be able to study less if they focus on that as the outcome, rather than on learning, which would take more time, she said.
Well, is anyone surprised? Christ, everything is so high stakes today, of course you need an A in everything you do. Competition for grades is killing any desire on the part of children to learn, as has been so well described by Alfie Kohn in Punished By Rewards, a book I cannot recommend highly enough. If you’ve ever wondered what’s wrong with incentives like grades, Kohn will explain it for you.
One change Kohn recommends to our system of grading is changing to a system where you get an A or an incomplete. You’ve either done the work, or you haven’t.
Of course, a great many people would howl bloody murder if their kid can’t have a much better GPA than the next kid. The current grading system enforces the notion that some children must be left behind. As the article in the Times goes on to say:
At one prestigious Los Angeles prep school, which he asked not to be identified, Poch said he had found every student in an English class earned either an A or an A-minus.
Well, you know, maybe everyone in the class did the work to get an A, you know? Should we have a system where some kids are forced to fail?