Alan
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alanallanallen.bsky.social
Alan
@alanallanallen.bsky.social
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alanallanallen.bsky.social
Dropping Sinykin and Winant’s 5 steps to close reading on my pre-AP students tomorrow and made a meme to go with it. All love to William Carlos Williams.
Meme featuring bored Winnie the Pooh and suave satisfied Pooh in a tux. Top text: Turn poetry back toward high diction and the literary past. Bottom text: Insist that art is not the exclusive property of the elite. imgflip.com
October 12, 2025 at 11:16 PM
alanallanallen.bsky.social
This Yale prof should read Carl Sagan’s book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, which came out in 1996:
At the University of Chicago I also was lucky enough to go through a general education program devised by Robert M. Hutchins, where science was presented as an integral part of the gorgeous tapestry of human knowledge. It was considered unthinkable for an aspiring physicist not to know Plato, Aristotle, Bach, Shakespeare, Gibbon, Malinowski, and Freud-among many others. In an introductory… …sea to be a scientist from my ear- I liest school days. The crystallizing moment came when I first caught on that the stars are mighty suns, when it first dawned on me how staggeringly far away they must be to appear as mere points of light in the sky. I'm not sure I even knew the meaning of the word "sci-ence" then, but I wanted somehow to immerse myself in all that grandeur. I was gripped by the splendor of the Universe, transfixed by the prospect of understanding how things really work, of helping to uncover deep mysteries, of exploring new worlds — maybe even liter-ally. It has been my good fortune to have had that dream in part ful-filled. For me, the romance of science remains as appealing and new as it was on that day, more than half a century ago, when I was shown the wonders of the 1939 World's Fair. Popularizing science-trying to make its methods and findings accessible to non-scientists —then follows naturally and immediately. Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world. This book is a personal statement, reflecting my lifelong love affair with science. But there's another reason: Science is more than a body of knowl-edge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time-when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay…
August 13, 2025 at 7:32 PM
alanallanallen.bsky.social
Uh this is what happens when you live in the country and take a shelf outside to clean it but don’t bring back inside right away.
I don’t know it’s a bunch of nasty alien-looking bugs crawling on metal
July 27, 2025 at 9:00 PM
alanallanallen.bsky.social
This is why Chicago is the best
Sidewalk, written in chalk is “Dad’s rule!”
June 16, 2025 at 9:32 PM
alanallanallen.bsky.social
From Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World. Published 30 years ago.
Popularizing science —trying to make its methods and findings accessible to non-scientists-then follows naturally and immediately. Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world. This book is a personal statement, reflecting my lifelong love affair with science. But there's another reason: Science is more than a body of knowl-edge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time-when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay…
March 26, 2025 at 12:04 AM
alanallanallen.bsky.social
Imagine
A passage from Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: “At the University of Chicago I also was lucky enough to go through a general education program devised by Robert M. Hutchins, where science was presented as an integral part of the gorgeous tapestry of human knowledge. It was considered unthinkable for an aspiring physicist not to know Plato, Aristotle, Bach, Shakespeare, Gibbon, Malinowski, and Freud-among many others.”
March 25, 2025 at 10:31 PM
alanallanallen.bsky.social
Came home from Arkansas to some nice book mail! (The Messengers by Georges-Chateureynaud and Hey You Assholes by @kylerseibel.bsky.social)
March 23, 2025 at 8:53 PM
alanallanallen.bsky.social
Every classroom should have a poem by @yoadrianididit.bsky.social on the wall.
nineteen minute supercut of tom cruise running You fall off a mountain. You fall off a terrace. You fall off a fire escape. You fall, or you let yourself go. You plummet five stories into a bathtub full of ice. You tire yourself fistfighting the carbine. You run across the carapace of every rooftop in France. You look down on the streets, where traffic, small and anonymous, still holds some memory of you. You climb onto a plane. You climb the light up to high-five the ionosphere. You tame a horse, then its cavalry. You outpace the generals. You outflank the tides. You hear the ocean applaud each time you deny it. You're awarded medals. You see your family one last time. You sing yourself to sleep. The words escape you. The melody turns on you like the fog. Dingy, soft, your voice cracks. There's little of it left. You save your strength. You fall out of love but you fall with grace, wired to the scaffolding of your confidence. You are ready for contact wherever it comes. You make peace with surfaces. You place your cheek on the lavish new marble countertop. It's cool, inviting. It offers you little. You ask it for less. How simple a surface is. How uncomplicated There's no room for despair. Between you or your thousand yard grin.
March 4, 2025 at 5:58 PM