I’ll stipulate that I’m not wild about Natalie Portman, but her description of her character in Thor as a Jodie Foster in Contact-like passionate scientist who works on the fringes of her field makes me considerably more excited about a movie I was already enthusiastic about. Portman, of course, has a distinguished academic background in science, and I image that’ll help inform her character considerably. In between this and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which uses Alzheimer’s research as an origin story for a world in which humans are cattle on a world ruled by evolved simians, it should be a good summer of on-screen researchers.

I don’t know that there’s an optimal way to portray research scientists on-screen. I do worry, a bit, about Portman’s emphasis on emotion and being out there, and being proved right, which I think was a bit problematic in Contact, too, in the Emotive Lady Scientist Endures A Lot, Is Right, and Can’t Prove a Damn Thing sense. I don’t want a world where women scientists in movies excel because of their ladybits and tear ducts, but because they’re rigorous and smart, some of which can be driven by emotion. And I have some concerns about mad scientist stories, given the state of science education and scientific understanding in the country right now. I would really rather not plant any seeds about scientific inaccuracy or misdirection that flowers into the ugly blooms of denial of climate science, or evolution, or general distrust of the scientific community. Even and especially if the seeds are planted by James Franco.

TPM’s Jillian Rayfield notes that a Virginia teacher’s in trouble for including a mock slave auction in a Civil War unit. This is one of those moments when I wish I could make more people read the best of Young Adult literature, particularly Rob Thomas’s Slave Day. I’ve mentioned before how brilliant Thomas is at capturing high school on the page, mostly because he respects his characters enough to know that they’ll have significant insights and make large mistakes.

The best thing about Slave Day, which is set in a Texas high school which holds an annual slave auction, with students and teachers of all races and genders up for bidding, is that while it’s set in a frame of race, it uses the concept to explore multiple axes of oppression. Keene Davenport, the main character, is sort of a budding black nationalist—he wants to find a way to protest Slave Day, but the languages of rebellion, whether they’re cultural (he doesn’t listen to much hip-hop) or behavioral (he’s pretty bad at misbehaving) are kind of foreign to him, and ultimately, he’s not the reason Slave Day is shut down. The book follows a group of master-slave pairs from both points of view: the popular girl who buys the geek for the day, the working-class kid who buys a rigid teacher, only to find the guy giving him drama lessons, and a football star who gets a little too caught up in ownership of his cheerleader girlfriend. It’s the combination of race, class, gender, and the conflict between intellectualism and popularity that ultimately reveals the institution as untenable.

Obviously, this real-life situation is different: it’s something that a teacher set up rather than a school tradition, and the sellers and sold were divided along racial lines. Honestly, I wonder if something like this could have worked if the two groups were mixed up. An education on why it’s corrupting to sell another human and what it feels like to be sold as chattel, delivered with some sensitivity, could be a useful thing, and not only in remembrance of the Civil War.

I’m having a profoundly difficult time with some of the things in this post by Ta-Nehisi on the problems of picking books for kids to read in school, and of getting them to really read and absorb them. I think some of my difficulty comes from the fact that I’m exactly the kind of kid he describes at the end of this paragraph:

Some of us are poor students, and I’m not totally convinced that any form of mass education can fix that. That’s a statement of autobiography, not accusation. I simply wasn’t interested in the notion of sitting in a chair for an hour at a time and receiving information at a predetermined pace. I don’t even know that I’m interested in that now. I say that knowing that there are very good reasons for why this is the case. Moreover, there are children who excel at this model. I think a conversation like this should always remember that.

I don’t think, for example, that just because some kids are unlikely to absorb the books they’re given to read in school doesn’t mean that schools should stop trying. I do think some curricular flexibility would be a good thing. Reading books in tandem helps illuminate them, I think: there are books you could pair together at a chapter a night that wouldn’t be hugely demanding but that might help kids who are unlikely to relate to one relate to both.

And I guess I think the reason it’s important to never give up is there are things I was required to read in the classroom that I probably wouldn’t have read on my own that really lit the world up for me. I remember a period of profound junior-year obsession with The Song of Solomon, scribbling litanies of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, drunk on the poetry of the language. It was something my English teacher added to our curriculum, something that didn’t necessarily have a lot that would immediately resonate with a nerdy, white, half-Jew with limited experience in the world, but I was just in love with it.

This is what good teachers and librarians do—they find the books kids will want to read, and the books they need to read without knowing it yet, and they hook them up with them, they keep the idea of reading alive through the stuff that’s not engaging. I’m not saying everyone has a teacher or librarian like that, but that should be the ideal. Teaching is more than the work of teaching to the test: it’s profound, tricky, elusive. And it’s just as hard to encourage kids to meet educators half-way. I’m not saying this is easy, but I also think it’s a huge mistake to embrace the idea that it’s just not going to work for some kids. Not everyone who struggles with school is going to be self-directed and self-educated later.

I’m on a mild, vacation-induced, reading-about-the-seventies-and-eighties-art-world kick, so I polished off Phoebe Hoban’s Basquiat: A Quick Killing In Art yesterday. One of the things that stood out to me about the book (aside from its explications on the rise of the art market as a major financial instrument, which is a strong point) is the repeated observation that collectors and dealers and critics were sort of charmed by the fact that Basquiat and Kenny Scharf, among others of their contemporaries, were as influenced by television as they were. It’s kind of extraordinary that as long as it had been around already, TV was still a sufficiently low-culture medium that it could be novel and strange that someone would insist it was a serious subject for painting, at least as a source of incorporatable images.

I grew up largely without a television in the house, and my immersion in the medium has largely coincided with the critical consensus that television, particularly the standard and premium cable networks, has reached an artistic golden age. I wonder if the Neo-Expressionists (or at least those who drew on television for visual references) would have seemed so playful if television hadn’t seemed like an infant medium, if Scharf had been reproducing cartoons from Archer and Basquiat had painted portraits of Omar Little.