Wikipedia

Maxwells.plum

Joined 19 April 2009
Andrew Maxwell
OccupationStudent

My name is Andrew Ross Maxwell, but people usually refer to me as Max. I'm 22 years old, and I reside in Presque Isle, ME, with my wife, Allison, and my cat, Felix. I'm enrolled in the teacher certification program at the University of Maine at Presque Isle. I'm just wrapping up the second semester, and then going on to do student teaching. I plan to teach English in Fredericton, NB. The rest of my family resides in St. Andrews, NB.

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Pages Created

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Pages Improved

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Pages Improved A While Ago, But Now Changed Beyond Recognition

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Pages I Keep Trying To Create That Get Deleted By, Well, Deletionists

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  • All Of Green
  • The Olympic Symphonium

Views on Wikipedia

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I am a hardcore inclusionist and I feel that Wikipedia is far too strict in its attempts to gain credibility. It seems that every time I make an edit these days, it gets reverted, or some sort of flag is placed on it. And the notability rules are draconian at best. Here's the deal: Wikipedia could be as good as the Encyclopedia Britannica (currently, its featured articles have an average of four errors per page, whereas the EB has three average per article), and indeed, it is improving, i.e. the page for The Canterbury Tales was recently cited in a print version of that work published by The Modern Library. But no matter how good it gets, professors will never let you cite it in your bibliography. It's Wikipedia, dudes. The cool thing about it is that it has info on "trivial" things like, say, individual Pokémon, two-bit garage bands, and the like. Making Wikipedia "credible" in the academic sense (i.e. cloning a serious encyclopedia) destroys the appeal of the site, and is the worst possible editorial direction in which to go.

Sadly, I'm fighting a losing fucking battle, methinks. But, as George Michael maintains, "You gotta have faith."

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Educational Views

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I am a little to the left of things, but not quite '70s left. I still see a lot of value in the rote, in memorization; in learning grammar, punctuation, and usage; in spelling, even by drill; in learning to write cursively; etc.; I also fall somewhat within the boundaries of the perennialist camp, that is, I believe in teaching the classics—however, I'm hardly a stodgy old conservative. In fact, there's precious little about me that can be called conservative at all. I believe that children bring their own beliefs to the table, and that they construct meaning from the information we provide for them as educators, something borrowed from the cognitivist school of thought. We aren't supposed to make children into good, upstanding adults, but rather to help them find the good, upstanding self within them. We provide the tools; they do the learning! But I do believe that education should result in children becoming upstanding members of a democracy as adults. It's just that I don't think that the faults of modern children (widespread functional illiteracy, heavy dependence on computers, a lack of familiarity with cultural touchstones) can be blamed on the children, or the parents: we as educators are at fault. The school system fails more kids than it aids at this point. Yes, I do fancy myself as a both-guns-blazing reformer. Ironically, though, I just want to bring my classroom back to a time before it got screwed up originally...

My views are best put forth in Paolo Freire's book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which he discusses the "banking concept of education." He says that educators think as though information is money, and children are banks, and all we have to do is just deposit the money for things to work out. Not so. Kids need to interact with information, and it needs to be made relevent to their lives.

OiNK, Waffles.fm, What.cd

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I was a prominent member of the OiNK community, with the username transylvanian. I was a Power User+ and I put together OiNK's Top 100 Albums of All Time List. After OiNK got shut down, I joined Waffles.fm and What.cd as trnsylvanian. I am pretty active on Waffles, where I am a Donor and a Power User+, and I organized the Best of 2007 and Best of 2008 lists. I tried to do the same for What for 2008, but I didn't get it done in time for people to still care, if you know what I mean.

Interests

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I can't sum up my interests here, at least, not with any semblance of brevity (I have been described as a renaissance man, though I might add that I reject the label).

Literature

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My cat, Felix, feeling pretty relaxed appparently

A big one is literature. I am a bookworm, or bookslut, if you prefer; I read books, I buy books, I find free books to keep, I take books out of libraries, I collect books, I know about different archaic publishing houses and defunct series. I am an old-school intellectual. I certainly don't fancy myself well-read (as Owen reminds me, I'm not), but I would like to be someday. I like taking in new ideas and mulling them around the old noggin; I like discussing ideas with other intellects. But I am not pretentious. I avoid thinking I'm better than anyone else with a ten-foot pole, and I don't mean in the falsely modest sense expressed in the midrash about the Rabbis competing over who's the most worthless. Specifically, I like Greek drama (i.e. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes), post-modern literature, modern literature, Canadian literature, all sorts of stuff. See list of Top 10 Favorite Books below.

Science

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I also like science a lot, particularly evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. I enjoy reading books by authors like Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Ellis, Gary Marcus, Ken Miller, and many others. I am a skeptic, i.e. I believe in reason and the evaluation of evidence, and in freethinking. I fall on the nature side of the nature/nurture debate. I think that it's ridiculous to deny our genes' importance to the way that we function, or to place mankind above the rest of the animal kingdom. However, it's just as ridiculous to assume that biology is destiny. A lot of people assert that saying that human beings have any innate characteristics is like throwing in the towel, but not so. For centuries, Christians believed in original sin, but also believed that one might overcome original sin. Same with genetics. Each of us has specialties and shortcomings in grain, but smart people know that they have shortcomings, and also know that they can overcome them if they put their minds to it. Anyway, I like evolutionary psychology so much because I think that human beings must be understood as having developed over millions of years of history, not just popping into existence.

I love reading Pharyngula. Religiously, ironically enough.

Music

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Music is my life, simply put; without it, I'd die. People always ask that hypothetical question, "Would you rather be blind or deaf, if you had to be one or the other?" I could say blind with a very high degree of confidence, knocking on wood in either case. I'm mostly into the emo movement, bands like Jimmy Eat World, Say Anything, Thrice, Brand New, Glassjaw, that sort of thing. All the waves of emo, I guess I mean to say, as well as metalcore and post-hardcore and screamo.

But also all over the map. I don't have time or space here to list all the music I listen to, even on a regular basis.

Top 10 Favorite Books

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  1. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
  2. Stranger Than Science by Frank Edwards
  3. The World of Ripley's Believe It Or Not! by Julie Mooney and the Editors of Ripley's Believe It Or Not!
  4. The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White
  5. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
  6. The Age of Fable by Thomas Bulfinch (specifically, the 1958 Heritage Press edition)
  7. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker
  8. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
  9. Not Wanted on the Voyage by Timothy Findley
  10. 100 Things You're Not Supposed To Know by Russ Kick
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Here are the links to my accounts on the following websites:


 This user is a participant in WikiProject Post-hardcore.
This user is a member of the Association of Inclusionist Wikipedians.

The motto of the AIW is conservata veritate, which translates to "with the preserved truth".
This motto reflects the inclusionist desire to change Wikipedia only when no knowledge would be lost as a result.

 
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