New Zealand: observations along S.H. 25

Five years ago today, near the end of our second New Zealand visit,
we found ourselves driving north from Thames along State Highway 25.

I stopped several times along the shore to record photogenic things.

Photogenic for me often means patterned or textured.

 

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And three years ago today—oh, look how calendrically attuned I am—Quillette ran Lyell Asher‘s article “How Ed Schools Became a Menace to Higher Education.”

 

… Education schools have long been notorious for two mutually reinforcing characteristics: ideological orthodoxy and low academic standards. As early as 1969, Theodore Sizer and Walter Powell hoped that “ruthless honesty” would do some good when they complained that at far too many ed schools, the prevailing climate was “hardly conducive to open inquiry.” “Study, reflection, debate, careful reading, even, yes, serious thinking, is often conspicuous by its absence,” they continued. “Un-intellectualism—not anti-intellectualism, as this assumes malice—is all too prevalent.” Sizer and Powell ought to have known: At the time they were dean and associate dean, respectively, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

More than three decades later, a comprehensive, four-year study of ed schools headed by a former president of Teachers College, Arthur Levine, found that the majority of educational-administration programs “range from inadequate to appalling, even at some of the country’s leading universities.” Though there were notable exceptions, programs for teaching were described as being, in the main, weak and mediocre. Education researchers seemed unable to achieve even “minimum agreement” about “acceptable research practice,” with the result that there are “no base standards and no quality floor.” Even among ed school faculty members and deans, the study found a broad and despairing recognition that ed school training was frequently “subjective, obscure, faddish, … inbred, and politically correct.”

That could be the damning educational equivalent of Thomas Hobbes characterizing the life of man in a natural state as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Here’s another of Lyell Asher’s observations:

There might be nothing wrong with training students in equity and social justice were it not for the inconvenient fact that a college campus is where these ideals and others like them are to be rigorously examined rather than piously assumed. It’s the difference between a curriculum and a catechism.

If you’re concerned about education, particularly the way it has rapidly been morphing into illiberal indoctrination, check out the full article.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

Organic and inorganic

At Southwest Harbor in Acadia National Park on June 10, 2018, I photographed things organic and inorganic.

Jackson Pollock‘s got nothing on me:

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Southwest Harbor

On June 10th we stopped at Southwest Harbor on Maine’s Mount Desert Island.

That’s the island most of Acadia National Park is on.

You’re seeing some of the patterns, textures, and colors I photographed along the shore.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

Ovens Natural Park

On June 4th, after Blue Rocks had only two hours earlier finished providing my second sustained encounter with Nova Scotia’s seacoast, Ovens Natural Park gave me a chance to spend two more hours engaging with the coast.

Below is a closer view of that visually yummy rockweed (probably Fucus vesiculosus, according to staff member Ana):

Oh, those upturned rock layers:

And look at this seaweed on what I take to be granite or something akin to granite:

Imagine replacing the symbol in “I ❤ You” with a closeup of this seaweed. Okay, so maybe the only person who’d ever want to do that is a phycologist or somebody cozying up to one.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

Hopewell Rocks

In the recent post entitled “The Bay of Fundy,” the first photograph looked out over the water from a place called Hopewell Rocks. That spot is a popular destination due to its bayside rock formations made all the more picturesque by the great rising and falling of the tides. Below are six of the photographs I took at Hopewell Rocks on June 7th.

 

 

 

 

 

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

Peggy’s Cove

6566: that’s the number of miles our trip odometer showed on the evening of June 16th when arrived back home on the 25th day of a long drive that had begun on May 23rd. The vacation was a combination of visits to family, friends, and scenic places in the northeastern United States and the Atlantic provinces in Canada.

On June 3rd, our hosts in Halifax, Nova Scotia*, took us to a site on the Atlantic Ocean called Peggy’s Cove. While most visitors probably go there to see the lighthouse, you’ll understand that I found my joy in the rocks and the water and the plants. Here are seven photographs from that encounter.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

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* Did you know that Nova Scotia is on Atlantic Time? That’s one hour later than Eastern Time. Except in airplanes to and from Europe, I’d never been in that time zone.

New Zealand: Matakaea Reserve

A year and a day ago we continued north from the Orkokonui Ecosanctuary and stopped at the Matakaea Reserve, where we saw gulls and fur seals (Arctocephalus forsteri) sharing coastal rocks surrounded by bull kelp (Durvillaea antarctica or D. poha) darker than the yellow strain we’d seen at Stirling Point three days earlier.

Click for greater size and detail.

Most of the seals, like the one below, drowsed on the rocks. (Thanks to a 280mm focal length and some cropping of the image, you might think I was closer than I actually was.)

A few of the seals shook off their lethargy and mixed it up.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Stirling Point

A year and a day ago we reached the southern end of the South Island in a town called Bluff. At Stirling Point, which for my purposes should have been called Swirling Point, I watched the bull kelp (Durvillaea antarctica or D. poha) flowing in and out with the waves. Last year I showed one of the more than 270 (!) pictures I took of that. Here are a couple more. Because the kelp moved fairly rapidly in the water, I set my camera’s shutter speed to 1/640 of a second for closer pictures like the one below.

By the way: in addition to this New Zealand retrospective, you might enjoy scrolling back through the New Zealand series that appeared on the Fotohabitate blog in 2016. The text of each post there is in German first, followed by English, so you’ll be able to follow along. The photographs speak their own language.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: colors at Elliot Bay

A year and a day ago we visited Elliot Bay on the east side of New Zealand’s North Island, as you saw last time in two picture of inherently low-toned patterns on the beach. Today’s post shows you that we also saw colorful things there.

Flax (Phormium tenax) turning yellow

 

Magenta seaweed

 

Patterns in a vertical rock face bordering the beach

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: colors and textures at Moeraki

While the boulders themselves at Moeraki struck me as just so-so when I visited on February 27th, the textures and colors of other things there caught my attention. Reddish seaweed was common on the beach. And look at the patterns in the embankment that fronted the beach:

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman