Word: avoiding
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...departed for the suburbs. The flight of middle-class residents and their tax revenues has placed increased demands on municipal services for the poor and made them that much less adequate. Hardest hit is the public-school system, which some real estate agents now frankly warn home buyers to avoid...
ALMOST unanimously the graduate students described their situation as "demeaning," and singled out examinations and grades as especially demeaning. . . . Giving grades, the students felt, allowed the teacher to avoid serious engagement with the student's ideas, excused him from making extended qualitative comments on the work done, and thus expressed his unwillingness to bother about the student as a person. As one student expressed it, "What we want is criticism, not grades. Talk...
Such anecdotes permit Ronald Clark to avoid one of the pitfalls of scientific biography-the depressing fact that the research that makes famous scientists famous in the first place is virtually incommunicable to the general public. Haldane's great, obsessive scientific passion, for instance, was the genetic structure of Drosophila, a particular variety of the common fruit fly, an absorption that only another scientist, or another Drosophila, could reasonably be expected to share...
...magic of the documentary is that it depends on something most films try to avoid--detachment. It sustains a tension between involvement and detachment which is very much like the normal tension of our lives. In life there are events and detached observations, actors and analyzers. The difference between talking and acting is more subtle than it seems. Comment, the willed use of the mind, demands distance--the commentator toys with his own responses and tries to isolate consciousness from living. This hurts very often because it is unnatural; you have to learn how to do it. And, by definition...
...Their lives are empty except for that of the ten-year-old girl (Kate Soloman) who--in a single half hour--alludes to Homer, the Bible, Milton, James Joyce, and Lewis Carroll. The play smacks too much of a kind of self-indulgence that the author, David Richman, should avoid in the future. The bits of naturalistic dialogue that he does include are biting enough to be further developed in his next...