School

A View From the Trenches, by Jacqueline Goldwyn Kingon. “A new teacher recounts her year at a New York City failing school, where clocks never tick, the mantra is ‘cover yourself’ and students teeter on the ledge.”

From the New York Times, free registration required.

Photography

There’s a thread on MetaFilter about colour photographs from the beginning of the 20th century:

The Empire that was Russia – The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated. Prokudin-Gorskii took three sepearate photos with a red, green, and blue filter, and the images have been combined so the result is a colour photography. (The whole process is described here.) They are really impressive!
(Here’s a direct link to the image directory. It seems that not all the photos are linked to from the main pages.)

The photos are really impressive, and it adds to their authenticy that the clouds have coloured edges on some photos – showing that they moved between the three shots.

Community

Craig announces that BookNotes is going on hiatus, indefinitely. Wie schade…

Hope to see/read you again soon, Craig!