Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Fun With Calendars
This is the last full week of October. In normal places, this would not hold any particular import. There are no federal holidays this week. Any religious observances are minor and will not interfere with the regular workday. But if there's one thing I've learned over the past few years, it's that schools, no matter how high up they are on the hierarchy, do not operate like anywhere else in the world. Consider the following three examples.
1. Underwood High School has a half day tomorrow and a professional development day on Friday. Due to previously scheduled professional developments there has only been a single full week of school in the month of October. November is also looking rather precarious because of another planned half-day plus Thanksgiving. And then it's only 3 weeks until Christmas.
2. Most colleges are about halfway through the semester. Midterm season has certainly arived at my alma mater, which if memory serves was always a time of bustling excitement combined with intense bursts of industrious panic. One of the ways that Old Ivy differs from my alma mater is that as of Friday, there is a fall break. A full week off for undergrads and grad students alike! Apparently back in the idyllic days of the 1960s, students demanded for a week off before Election Day to campaign for their candidates. But now it's devolved into just a week to laze about and do plenty of nothing. Except for graduate students with papers due the Monday immediately following. They will be writing with the same frenzied intensity of yore during their break. After all, if the grade is below an A-, they could kick me out...or so it has been implied. (Perhaps more on that later...)
3. So speaking of calendars, apparently both of the above scenarios are relatively sane compared to some of those adopted by the positivists in 19th century France. Submitted for your approval, the calendar of the twice-committed founder of sociology, one Auguste Comte. Comte thought the calendar system in use in France was not particularly logical...so he "fixed" it. His plan?: Increase the number of months by one, make all the months have the same number of days (28), plus one day added on at the end of the year to honor the dead. It does add up to the requisite 365, and it seems he also had plans for leap years to be dealt with properly. What's amazing about this system is that each month was named for an outstanding personality from the course of human history and each day had its own secular "saint" associated with it. So for example, today it is not October 25, 2006. It is really Descartes 18, 218. (Year 1 was equivalent to the start of the French Revolution.) Oh, and 18 Descartes celebrates Nicolas Fréret, an early 18th century French scholar. Don't worry if you haven't heard of him...the next few days feature more recognizable modern philosophers like Montesquieu and Leibniz.
If you want to play with the positivist calendar, check out this nifty converter. It's no more nerdy than figuring out how to spell your name in Morse Code or checking the stardates on a given episode of Star Trek. And if nothing else, it's yet another example of the interesting stuff one can learn in a history of science graduate program!
And for those of you scratching your head and wondering what this has to do with educational institutions and their relative chronological craziness compared to the rest of the world, Comte wanted to institute this system so as to improve the educational well-being of all humanity. It was part of his very detailed program. And if that explanation seems unsatisfying, I apologize...the last time I tried to write a thematically coherent blog post based around a specific literary conceit, people spent more time commenting on the theme then on the content, which was really not what I intended. At least, not in that case.
More ramblings later including an exciting tale of alkali theft at Underwood High and predictions of the apocalypse circa the 1830s. Happy Fréret Day, all!
This is the last full week of October. In normal places, this would not hold any particular import. There are no federal holidays this week. Any religious observances are minor and will not interfere with the regular workday. But if there's one thing I've learned over the past few years, it's that schools, no matter how high up they are on the hierarchy, do not operate like anywhere else in the world. Consider the following three examples.
1. Underwood High School has a half day tomorrow and a professional development day on Friday. Due to previously scheduled professional developments there has only been a single full week of school in the month of October. November is also looking rather precarious because of another planned half-day plus Thanksgiving. And then it's only 3 weeks until Christmas.
2. Most colleges are about halfway through the semester. Midterm season has certainly arived at my alma mater, which if memory serves was always a time of bustling excitement combined with intense bursts of industrious panic. One of the ways that Old Ivy differs from my alma mater is that as of Friday, there is a fall break. A full week off for undergrads and grad students alike! Apparently back in the idyllic days of the 1960s, students demanded for a week off before Election Day to campaign for their candidates. But now it's devolved into just a week to laze about and do plenty of nothing. Except for graduate students with papers due the Monday immediately following. They will be writing with the same frenzied intensity of yore during their break. After all, if the grade is below an A-, they could kick me out...or so it has been implied. (Perhaps more on that later...)
3. So speaking of calendars, apparently both of the above scenarios are relatively sane compared to some of those adopted by the positivists in 19th century France. Submitted for your approval, the calendar of the twice-committed founder of sociology, one Auguste Comte. Comte thought the calendar system in use in France was not particularly logical...so he "fixed" it. His plan?: Increase the number of months by one, make all the months have the same number of days (28), plus one day added on at the end of the year to honor the dead. It does add up to the requisite 365, and it seems he also had plans for leap years to be dealt with properly. What's amazing about this system is that each month was named for an outstanding personality from the course of human history and each day had its own secular "saint" associated with it. So for example, today it is not October 25, 2006. It is really Descartes 18, 218. (Year 1 was equivalent to the start of the French Revolution.) Oh, and 18 Descartes celebrates Nicolas Fréret, an early 18th century French scholar. Don't worry if you haven't heard of him...the next few days feature more recognizable modern philosophers like Montesquieu and Leibniz.
If you want to play with the positivist calendar, check out this nifty converter. It's no more nerdy than figuring out how to spell your name in Morse Code or checking the stardates on a given episode of Star Trek. And if nothing else, it's yet another example of the interesting stuff one can learn in a history of science graduate program!
And for those of you scratching your head and wondering what this has to do with educational institutions and their relative chronological craziness compared to the rest of the world, Comte wanted to institute this system so as to improve the educational well-being of all humanity. It was part of his very detailed program. And if that explanation seems unsatisfying, I apologize...the last time I tried to write a thematically coherent blog post based around a specific literary conceit, people spent more time commenting on the theme then on the content, which was really not what I intended. At least, not in that case.
More ramblings later including an exciting tale of alkali theft at Underwood High and predictions of the apocalypse circa the 1830s. Happy Fréret Day, all!
