Jacob Levy writes on the Volokh Conspiracy about a New Yorker article on the gifted & talented summer residential program at Johns Hopkins. I attended the Duke University program in 1989 and 1990, and had the same sort of euphoric experience Levy writes about.
It's only been recently, however, that I realize just how much effect the experience had on my later life, particularly informing my decisions about college. Levy describes it as one of the major mechanisms for my own social mobility, which I think is true for most of the students who attend these programs. We're not talking about people from severly disadvantaged backgrounds, but rather kids from small-towns and public schools whose default path probably leads to the local state college branch. Other options simply never occur to them:
I wouldn't have understood the range of possibilities that were really open to me, and would have had my sights set much, much lower than they were ultimately set. And I do think I would have ended up internalizing (what I perceived to be) the hostility to nerdiness among my peers.
The New Yorker article isn't online, alas.
Posted by Ben Brumfield at July 21, 2004 12:14 PMPersonally, I never had much problem being a geek. My problem has always been that my interest in a subject tends to grow the more apparently useless it is.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at July 21, 2004 01:59 PMHmmm. At least you're not illiterate in Akkadian!
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at July 21, 2004 02:04 PMHmm. Can one be illiterate (unlettered) in a language that doesn't have any letters to begin with? Unpictured, perhaps?
Yes, I know I have too much time on my hands.
Posted by: Alan Allport at July 21, 2004 03:30 PMBen, that's a great idea. Wonder how complicated the grammar is....
Posted by: Alan Hogue at July 21, 2004 03:51 PMIt's not that bad, though the verbs can be devlish. For example, "you (feminine) caused me to give it to him" is all one word.
The reason I mentioned it is that I took a year of Akkadian in college. All of it was taught in transliteration or transcription, which is the format that almost all scholarship is published in. I never ended up learning more than a half-dozen cuneiform signs. As a result, I know a dead language, but am unable to read anything written by the original speakers.
Can anybody top that for apparent uselessness?
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at July 21, 2004 04:07 PMYeah, I was just looking it up. Only three noun cases, not a whole lot of tenses far as I can tell.
But wow, that's all one word? How does that work? Is it some special form of the verb that indicates causation or something like that?
Posted by: Alan Hogue at July 21, 2004 04:27 PMWell, in all tenses, the verb is conjugated for 3 persons, two numbers. Second and third person both also get a gender inflection. The direct and indirect objects are easy -- just suffixes tacked onto the end. And causation is indicated by a shin infix (sh sound in the middle).
PIE had a causation inflection too - a "ya" between the verb stem and the inflection ending. The only relic we still have of it in English is through it raising the stem vowel in "lay" vs. "lie", I think, though some other verbs (like roast
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at July 21, 2004 04:48 PMSilly me to forget to escape < as <.
Roast comes from *rostyan, anyhow, and I can't remember the rest of the comment. Just make up something pedantic.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at July 21, 2004 04:51 PMNot sure I understand the above but I did once know a guy who became existentially fed up with being a professor of dead languages, chucked it all, and went to law school.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at July 21, 2004 06:56 PM