Dear Commons Community,

Elaine and I leave Barcelona shortly for the eight-hour plus flight back to New York. It was a fine visit. There was much (culture, music, architecture) that was enjoyable and stimulating.  Barcelona is a modern city respectful of its past. It succeeds in moving forward  while preserving its centuries of history and tradition.  It is well-organized and getting around especially on the train system is intuitive and easy.

This Sunday, Catalans will be going to the polls for local elections for the Parliament of Catalonia.  Which parties win will have an important effect on Barcelona’s future.  There is a strong push for separation from the rest of Spain and one does not spend a day in Barcelona and its countryside without seeing the separatist flag and hearing the Catalan language which sounds more Italian or Portuguese than Spanish.  However this election goes, we wish the Catalan people well.

Adios and Adeu/Gracias and Gracies!

Tony

Update:  September 29th:

As an update to this post, on Sunday, September 28th, Catalan Separatists Won a Narrow Majority in Regional Elections.  As reported in the New York Times:  

“Catalan separatist parties won a majority of the seats in regional parliamentary elections on Sunday that they had billed as a plebiscite on secession from Spain.

Dear Commons Community,

This is our last full day in Barcelona.  In the morning and early afternoon, we visited the Museu d’Història de Barcelona (MUHBA), the City’s history museum.  Most impressive was the preservation of ruins that date back to the 1^st century B.C. and are completely underground.  A well-designed scaffold provides a path to the various exhibits.  (Each stop had English translations.)  The remains of a winery, laundry room, fish preparation workshop, bishop’s residence, and a Roman home were well explained with drawings of the actual ruin and what it possibly looked like in its time.

Above the ruins at street level were the count’s palace from the 14th and 15th centuries.

A fine history lesson.

In the afternoon, we did shopping.

Tony

A View of the Historic Quarter of Girona from Across the River Onyar

Dear Commons Community,

Today, Elaine and I traveled by bullet train to the historic city of Girona which traces its history more than 2000 years.  The most impressive structure is the Força Vella or fortress that was built by the Romans in the 1^st century B.C.  The Forca Vella completely enclosed what is now the historic district. While much of it has deteriorated to rubble, some of the fortress still remains.

The Cathedral of Santa Maria is located at the heart of the Força Vella. Built between the 11th and 18th centuries, it includes a series of walls and spaces in different styles, from Romanesque (the cloister and Charlemagne tower) to the baroque façade and steps. Its most singular feature is its large Gothic nave (15th-16th centuries) with a width of 23 meters.  One has to climb 86 steps to reach the main entrance of the cathedral.

A uniquely interesting feature of the historic city is the Jewish Quarter which consists of a labyrinth of narrow streets and small placas that have maintained their medieval atmosphere. It is one of the best preserved Jewish quarters in Europe.

A bit of a trip from Barcelona but well worth it!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,
Today we toured Montserrat, a mountain reaching over 4,000 feet about a one hour ride from Barcelona. It is home to Santa Maria de Montserrat, a Benedictine Monastery which hosts the Virgin of Montserrat, and the Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, a publishing house and the oldest press in the world still running, with the first book published in 1499.

The Virgin of Montserrat is a statue of the Virgin Mary and infant Christ and is also known as the Black Virgin. It is Catalonia’s favorite saint and is located in the sanctuary at the rear of the monastery chapel.

The monastery is also home to L’Escolania choir school, a boys’ choir of sopranos and altos.
In addition to the religious and cultural significance, the views on Montserrat are spectacular and reachable by walking paths that snake throughout the area.
An inspiring visit and magnificent place!
Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Elaine and I spent the morning and early afternoon on two tours:  one to Casa Batlló and the other to Sagrada Familia Basilica both designed by the architect Antoni Gaudi.  One of the best known architects of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, Gaudi was born in Catalana and is known for his natural designs employing curves and parabolas throughout his work which includes furniture, parks, houses, and the famous basilica Sagrada Familia (Holy Family) in Barcelona. For Gaudí, form and function were inseparable; one found aesthetic beauty only after seeking structural efficiency, which rules the natural world. “Nothing is art if it does not come from nature,” he concluded.

Casa Batllo

Casa Batlló (1904–1906). Commissioned by Josep Batlló i Casanovas to renovate an existing building erected in 1875 by Emili Sala Cortés.  Gaudí focused on the facade, the main floor, the patio and the roof, and built a fifth floor for the staff. For this project he was assisted by his aides Domènec Sugrañes, Joan Rubió and Josep Canaleta. The facade is of Montjuïc sandstone cut to create warped ruled surfaces; the columns are bone-shaped with vegetable decoration. Gaudí kept the rectangular shape of the old building’s balconies—with iron railings in the shape of masks—giving the rest of the facade an ascending undulating form. He also faced the facade with ceramic fragments of various colours (“trencadís”), which Gaudí obtained from the waste material of the Pelegrí glass works. The interior courtyard is roofed by a skylight supported by an iron structure in the shape of a double T, which rests on a series of catenary aches. The helicoidal chimneys are a notable feature of the roof, topped with conical caps, covered in clear glass in the centre and ceramics at the top, and surmounted by clear glass balls filled with sand of different colours. The facade culminates in catenary vaults covered with two layers of brick and faced with glazed ceramic tiles in the form of scales (in shades of yellow, green and blue), which resemble a dragon’s back

Sagrada Familia

In 1883 Gaudí inherited the Sagrada Família from another architect, who had laid a traditional neo-Gothic base. Gaudí envisioned a soaring visual narrative of Christ’s life, but knew that the massive project could not be completed in his lifetime. For more than 12 years prior to his death in 1926—he spent his last year living at the site—he rendered his plans as geometric three-dimensional models rather than as conventional drawings. Though many were destroyed by vandals during the Spanish Civil War, those models have been vital to Gaudí’s successors.

“They contain the entire building’s structural DNA,” explains Mark Burry, an Australia-based architect who has worked on the Sagrada Família for 31 years, using drawings and computer technology to help translate Gaudí’s designs for today’s craftsmen. “You can extract the architectural whole even from fragments. The models are how Gaudí met the architect’s challenge: taking a complex, holistic idea and explicating it so others can understand and continue it after your death.”

Adrian Bejan, distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University, says the facades of the Sagrada Família are based on the golden ratio, the geometric proportion “behind all aesthetically pleasing art.”, whose “constructal law” states that design in nature is a universal phenomenon of physics. He calls Gaudí a forebear and a “tightrope walker on the line bridging art and science. He understood that nature is constructed by laws of mathematics. What is strongest is inherently lightest and most efficient, and therefore most beautiful.”

The sculpture and friezes on the outside are spectacular.  The colors especially the massive stain glass windows dazzle like nothing one has ever seen in a church. The basilica is unfinished and work continues on it today with a projected completion date of 2026 although skepticism exists as to whether this is realistic.  

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, Elaine and I walked the Old City of Barcelona.  Small winding streets and alleys hundreds of years old, all of which are very typical of many other European cities.

In the evening, we went to a Spanish Guitar concert at the Palau de la Musica/Orfeo Catala. The Palau’s art nouveau style is most impressive both inside and out. As described in a brochure, the Palau was built between 1905 and 1908 for the Orfeó Català, a choral society founded in 1891.   The intricately detailed stained glass windows, sculptures, and metalwork of the Palau are a feast for the eyes.  In 1909, it won the architect, Lluís Domènech i Montaner, an award from the Barcelona City Council. Between 1982 and 1989, the building underwent extensive restoration, remodeling, and extension.  In 1997, the Palau de la Música was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  I would add that the acoustics and atmosphere of listening to music in it are a delight.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an editorial (see full text below) on Mayor Bill de Blasio’s new school improvement agenda announced earlier this week.  It does not criticize the agenda harshly but considers it a modest proposal and expresses concern especially regarding reading instruction.  There are several legitimate comments in the editorial but I take exception to those about closing schools that are not performing and praising to a degree the actions that former Mayor Michael Bloomberg took  “to great advantage, closing schools that were essentially dropout factories and starting afresh with institutions that yielded higher graduation rates”. 

Michael Bloomberg was a good mayor for New York City but his improvement of public education particularly under the direction of Joel Klein was a disaster. Reading (which the editorial correctly mentions as most important) among NYC public school children did not improve much at all during the twelve years of the Bloomberg administration.  As for high school graduation rates, most of the increase can be attributed to pushing students through the system using questionable alternate programs such as credit recovery which in some cases were substandard equivalents to passing high school courses.  Many of these students upon entering college found they had significant remediation issues.  In fact, as the graduation rates increased, the number of students needing remediation at CUNY colleges increased in almost direct proportion. 

So  I would please ask the editorial staff to provide a more balanced point of view on public education issues in New York especially regarding the contributions of the Bloomberg years.  We have enough pandering to the corporate education agenda from Fox News.  We do not need it from the New York Times.

Tony

============================

New York Times Editorial Mayor de Blasio’s School Agenda

September 18, 2015

The education initiatives that Mayor Bill de Blasio outlined in a long-awaited speech earlier this week, though modest in scope, address some serious challenges facing the largest school system in the country. Collectively, they call for $186 million in new city investment, and in the abstract they appear wholly worthy. But the city has yet to provide details on how the initiatives will be rolled out or the benchmarks against which they will be judged. And for the reforms to fully realize their potential, some failing schools may have to be shut down and completely restaffed and restructured.

It has long been clear that the system is failing at its most basic function — teaching children to read. Students fall behind early and never catch up. Part of the problem is that teachers generally are poorly prepared to teach reading and to reach children who do not catch on automatically. Mr. de Blasio calls for hiring 700 literacy specialists and distributing them in elementary schools throughout the system. The mayor’s goal of having, within six years, at least two-thirds of students reading fluently by the end of second grade is a laudable one, given that currently only 30 percent of third graders are proficient in reading.

At the moment, more than 20 percent of the city’s eighth graders do not have access to algebra classes, which means that these students are essentially shut out of higher-level math and science courses that prepare them for college. The new program calls for fixing that problem and for strengthening algebra instruction generally. Another proposal calls for adding Advanced Placement courses, through which students can get college credit, in over 100 high schools that do not have them. Still another proposal calls for providing computer science education throughout the school system, paid for by a public-private partnership. Mr. de Blasio also promises to raise the city’s graduation rate from the current 68 percent to 80 percent within 10 years.

Yet these ambitious initiatives will fail or fall short if the quality of reading instruction is mediocre or if the program becomes a patronage boondoggle in which well-connected people are hired regardless of talent. Truly dysfunctional schools are unlikely to be helped by the addition of reading specialists, no matter how skilled the specialists are. To rescue children stuck in such schools, Mr. de Blasio must be willing to dissolve the schools and begin again with a new staff and new leadership.

Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, used this strategy to great advantage, closing schools that were essentially dropout factories and starting afresh with institutions that yielded higher graduation rates. The de Blasio administration has criticized this approach, preferring instead to give struggling schools what it describes as “supports” and using the shutdown option as a last resort. But given the pressing need for better education in poor communities, the city should not shy away from dissolving schools — either through outright closure or negotiated agreements with the teachers union — and starting again with a clean slate.

Parents and reform groups will be watching closely for further details, as will state legislators, some of whom have expressed doubts about the mayor’s ability to manage the 1.1 million-student system and its politically powerful teachers union. The Legislature’s opinion is important, since it must vote next year on extending the state law that gives the mayor control of the school system.

Dear Commons Community,

Elaine and I arrived at Barcelona yesterday early in the morning a bit jet-lagged. We are staying at the Hotel Colon in the heart of the Gothic Quarter just across the placa from La Seu Cathedral. 

La Seu was named after Barcelona’s patron Saint Eulalia; its official name – Catedral de la Santa Creu i Santa Eulalia – is Catalan for Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia. The commonly used name La Seu refers to the status of the church as the seat of the diocese.  Construction started in the 13^th century and was finished in 1448.

The inside of the cathedral has magnificent art and sculpture (almost all anonymous) throughout.  A catwalk provides magnificent panorama views of the city.

Last night we had dinner at 9:00 pm at an outdoor café on the placa where bands played until midnight.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I just arrived in Barcelona and will be here through next Thursday.  If you are interested in adult learning, I just had a piece published in Evolllution.  Drawing from Malcolm Knowles, I suggest several strategies for engaging adult learners.

If you have a chance, take a look and let me know what you think!

Tony

Barcelona

Dear Commons Community,

For three hours, eleven Republican presidential candidates debated their views on a CNN nationally televised program last night.  You can see the debate on youtube.   There was a good deal of bickering among the candidates mostly involving the frontrunner, Donald Trump.  However, it was also a chance for the TV audience to see lesser known candidates such as Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson. 

A number of issues were discussed including the Iran Nuclear Weapon Treaty, Planned Parenthood funding, and immigration but still a bit too much was about Trump.  New York Times columnist Frank Bruni provides a good recap of the evening:

“Trump had insulted Jeb Bush’s wife: Discuss! Trump had insulted Carly Fiorina’s business career: Respond!

So it went, somewhat tediously and surreally, for many stretches of the debate on Wednesday night and especially for the first half-hour, during which Rand Paul took the precise measure of — and raised the correct question about — the egomaniacal front-runner.

“Do we want someone with that kind of character, that kind of careless language, to be negotiating with Putin?” Paul asked.

“I think really there’s a sophomoric quality that is entertaining about Mr. Trump, but I am worried,” he added, and I nodded so vigorously at the “worried” part that I’m going to need balm and a neck brace tomorrow.

Paul went on to single out Trump’s “visceral response to attack people on their appearance — short, tall, fat, ugly. My goodness, that happened in junior high. Are we not way above that?”

No, we aren’t. “

Tony