say what one more time, I dare you

Holy shit I love this book. At least the first chapter anyway, we'll see how it goes. Even though I had my doubts when the author said one of the kids in the study was her son, the way she interviewed El and David about the influence of text and media in their lives and development into people in high school then 8 years later was brilliant. What an interesting time--we graduate having jumped through all the necessary hoops and then start living our lives and come to find out what was really important to have learned in the safety of those early years. Ironic that my Halloween costume is Uma Thurman's character from Pulp Fiction...

Incidentally, I met Quentin Tarrantino once--he's a big dude, and kinda scary.

I often bemoaned the fact that great thinking and learning could be done with popular media, and should be, as it's relevant and interesting to kids' lives. Why force them to read shit deemed "classic" if they don't care? Not to say that the classroom should be a movie theater or that we should leave classic texts out, but why be so scared to incorporate them? Especially when, as the interviews with El and David show, they are so formative to identity and social relationships?

I connected with these two kids/people on a number of points -- I consider myself to be a moral dissenter: I use plastic but I protest the hell out of Walmart. I take moral stances. I'm a critical thinker. I swear a lot. I read books and watch movies and talk and act them in my normal life, with friends. Like David, I enjoy living in a city rather than the tiny town I grew up in. I love to jam culture, and used to use adbusters in my classroom as much as I could get away with. David says, "I'm not part of Generation X, but I think these guys are sick of always having a plot line, or sick of things always having an inner meaning. I think every show has a point. But I don't think that it has to be a big one. I think life is like that. It doesn't always have a big point. Just lots of little ones." David and El seem to have a good grasp of what could make schools better and more real--teach differently, first of all. And use the media. Teach media literacy. El knows that for us, nowadays, "everything is presented in sound bytes, and black and white arguments, images, numbers--the death toll for the tsunami is rising, we see how horrific it is but we have no real sense or consequence of that, we're still here, whining..."

Am I a GenX kid? The lines are hazy. I was born in 79 but have two older siblings a decade ahead of me, and older parents (early 60's). I had not really considered the impact of what generation you are in terms of how you approach literacy and identity--boomers, GenX, hippies but obviously this makes a big difference--what the world is like when you begin and continue reading and viewing and discussing with others from the same (and different) eras. Wiki says "Generation X is generally marked by its lack of optimism for the future, nihilism, cynicism, skepticism, alienation and mistrust in traditional values and institutions." Huh. It adds that some relevant GenX movies include Singles, Reality Bites, Clerks, the show Friends, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Pump Up the Volume, all of which are rad except Friends.


David makes a good point about personality development--"you just change according to your surroundings, your age, your experiences, but that core personality that you start out with is still there..."

Another thought on travel, as both kids did some of that and reflected on it accordingly (and I'm trying to save up to go to Thailand, my first trip out of the country, and already live a good thousand miles from my hometown): "I can't live my life not knowing wht I would do on my own, completely, by myself. That's why I think travel is important...it allows us to invent ourselves outside of any context."

in the heart of the city

So I'm only a little ways into Tatum's Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males and already I am struck by his straightforward and common sense style, firmly rooted in his own personal experiences. I'm only on Chapter 3 and already he's brought so much up...but in my head I'm hearing a song as I read, "Heart of the City," which I thought was only a Jay Z song, but come to find out that Whitesnake did it first. Interesting to hear the two versions:




I also just recently heard Chris Rock's piece on welfare (thanks to Sirius Radio), and one line stood out to me (and this is right before I sat down to read): you get more respect as a black man coming out of jail than you do coming out of school.

Back to reading.

unpredictable

So now I'm attempting to write a hopelessly abstract and complicated philosophical post about prediction, reading strategies, and...uh, life. I'll ease you into it:


Myspace Layouts - Get This Widget

It began with an hour's worth of talking about the why/how of teaching reading strategies such as prediction and inference to reluctant readers, and how these skills play a role in reading, and, neccessarily, interpreting, which has a lot to say in terms of how we see life and other people (and since visualization is also an important skill in creating meaning, I want you to picture an aerial shot of our classroom in Sanchez and a quick pan out and up, pulling back from our city, our lives, our countries, all the way out).
The point of real-life application is (or should) always an issue for educators. Currently most of my papers and readings are directing me to think about authentic questions in curriculum and real learning. Unfortunately real-life assessment is more about evaluate-able items, such as: cause and effect, main idea, inference, etc, although these things too are open to bias and interpretation. I became interested in the usage of "predict" and "inference," and a quick Google search showed prediction's ties to the emotive, the mystic, the unexplained (but accessible if you just click on the right pop-up) while inference brings up several easy-to-use websites to practice making inferences from info in the text (and only in the text, dammit). A void seems to exist, at least in connotation, between the terms' relation to the unexplainable.

Listen to Miss Cleo:

I don't have to tell you what a big business prediction and prophecy is for us uncertain folk. Besides the consumer appeal of quick card-readings, we constantly think of (or assume, and you know happens when you do that) what's coming next anyway, it's what makes us human. In fact, I imagine animals do it too. When I woke up today I predicted the water in my shower would be hot after a few seconds, that when I turned the key my car would start. But that's experience, routine. I take what I see happening and apply it. Kids can do that. Kids know when they cry they'll get fed or changed or whatever. Kids know what it means when someone in a horror movie says "I'll be right back." They know if they act the fool they might be able to hide their embarrassment of having a reading problem. That's common sense with a side of symbolic understanding. But we have to teach them, for the benefit of being allowed into academic discourse, to do that from text alone.

One last thing. As a person who tries to see the irreverent/flip side of much of life, I realize how much of our humor is produced simply from predictions being wrong. A joke, a comedy, something that proceeds differently than we expect causes us to laugh. Misdirection. This technique is also popular among our politicians and presidents, with much less funny consequences.

As the TV drones, I am aware of how predictable things are in pseudo-life, in sitcoms and cop shows. Not so in real life. I wonder how many people predicted they would be where they are now.

my horoscorpio

"Dear Rob: Three and a half weeks ago, I had a dream that I was an archaeologist excavating hell. I took comfort in the fact that I was just a visitor, not a permanent resident, but my stay there was . . . well, hellish. Whenever I found an interesting artifact buried in the hot dirt, it would spontaneously ignite. I narrowly avoided getting burned again and again. Anyway, my actual waking life has pretty much felt like that ever since the dream. Yesterday, though, I felt the torment lifting. And then last night I dreamed of floating in a fireproof boat along an underground molten river of lava that eventually took me out to a green meadow under blue skies. Whew! -Sizzled Scorpio." Dear Sizzled: Your journey parallels that of many of your fellow Scorpios. Welcome back from hell!

Cheers to Beers (the author and the liquid)

Derek Zoolander School for Kids Who Can't Read So Good and Want to Learn How to Do Other Stuff Good, Too.


So Beers' book is a new kinda thing--it's not really theory, it's definitely not a novel, it's more of a handbook jampacked with strategies to use in the classroom for struggling readers. So many strategies, in fact, that my notes for this book consist of what strategy appears on what page. I appreciate the notes between chapters written to George, the student she failed (not just by retaining him either), because I feel my own guilt of students I let slip by because I really didn't know where to begin to help. Beers is damn organized too--each chapter features the pragmatic "step inside the classroom" segment, a Q and A section, copyable charts and doodads, debriefing of the strategy and instructions on how to make it work. All very helpful, and needed, the kind of thing that would go over well at professional development. She is clear to say in the beginning that no one answer is the right one, but that there are answers, and her personable voice along with the case studies presented makes this a pretty straightforward read, I'm on pg. 160 after only a few hours of reading. The fact that she thanks Ed Farrell in her dedication and quotes from Rosenblatt and Cazden offsets the somewhat self-gratifying pictures of Beers in action (I like pictures in books, but it seemed a little unnecessary).

I've done the scripted approach, had to as a reading teacher for the Institute of Reading Development, and I agree with Beers' point about delineating between "direct" instruction vs. "scripted." But I will say the scripted approach does produce results as well, mostly for those students who already have a good grasp of school culture and don't have negative attitudes about reading. Beers says the negative attitudes, a lack of cognitive confidence, and an inability to choose books they like are three foundations for reading problems. She emphasizes connections, listening, and being explicit among many other strategies....I don't find myself having many questions or emotional reactions to this book, it is what it is. Very practical, and very organized. So I guess one way to write about it is to ask, which of these ideas have ya'll tried in the classroom, and how'd it work out for you?

president evil

They say you shouldn't talk about sex or politics. I've already talked about sex.


I have the luxury of no classes on Wednesday so I'm watching this horrible abortion of a press conference. The issues of culture, education and democracy are woven into most of the books and discussions I've been into lately, all tied in by language, and I'm gritting my teeth to listen to Bush right now. I was raised in the buckle of the Midwest Bible Belt and my mom's basement is decked out in Americana decor, and I'm disgusted. He's spent a third of the speech so far dissing Congress for not doing anything and excusing himself from all governmental practices or knowledge, another third not answering legitimate questions by making excuses and heading off into tangents held together with cliches and reactionary talk, and the last third not answering questions by simply refusing to answer them and accusing the press of trying to trick him. This is our president. If I had a tank, I'd be headed southeast, and I don't even like politics. Even his speech patterns inspire doubt, full of pauses and qualifiers, completely void of confidence or direction, all delivered with a maniacal smirk. He's pulled a political Britney Spears, and I bet his speech writer feels like her management company.


I don't want to get into a whole big thing about current events, but it struck me that our government no business screwing around (I use that term loosely as some exchanges and relations are beneficial but others damaging) with other countries, simply because we don't really know how to understand them. Or maybe we do on some levels, but not the general public, and even still there's an entire culture's difference when it comes to ideas like "democracy" and "peace" and "normal." Crissy's been back from Japan for the last couple weeks and told me about all the cultural differences she's experienced in the various countries she's visited. We have no idea. Yet we're suppose to support these governmental actions carried out by people and causes who don't know how either and have their own ideological interests and agendas, filtered through a red-taped ridiculous process hampered by power struggles and personal scandal. And read this! This is bullshit. I know in real life it's not this simple, but George? Help the people and countries who need help, and be really careful about how you define "help."

In case you missed it, this is a similar press conference, where Bush suggests the danger zombies present to the US.



Top 10 Bushisms, more can be found here:
10) "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream." —LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000 (Listen to audio clip)

9) "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family." —Greater Nashua, N.H., Jan. 27, 2000(Listen to audio clip)

8) "I hear there's rumors on the Internets that we're going to have a draft." —second presidential debate, St. Louis, Mo., Oct. 8, 2004 (Listen to audio clip)

7) "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully." —Saginaw, Mich., Sept. 29, 2000 (Listen to audio clip)

6) "You work three jobs? … Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that." —to a divorced mother of three, Omaha, Nebraska, Feb. 4, 2005 (Listen to audio clip)

5) "Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country." —Poplar Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004 (Watch video clip; listen to audio clip)

4) "They misunderestimated me." —Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000

3) "Rarely is the questioned asked: Is our children learning?" —Florence, S.C., Jan. 11, 2000

2) "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." —Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004 (Watch video clip; listen to audio clip)

1) "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." —Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002 (Watch video clip; listen to audio clip)

Push

I read Push in a few hours, and I don't say that to brag. After four books on lit theory, a novel was a breeze. But it was a cold, shitty breeze that make me feel a lot of yuckiness inside. I know that's what everyone will touch on in their posts, how hard it was to read the story of a girl sexually abused by both parents, mother of two kids by her own father before high school, suffering from extreme confusion, depression, poverty, illiteracy, and HIV. Heavy. I know why we read it, what we were supposed to do--gauge our emotional reactions a la Rosenblatt. At the same time we could look at Precious' experiences with reading and writing. I did a little searching on Sapphire and the book, here's an interview. I thought this statement about purpose was interesting: "There's a blues song 'What's Been Done In the Dark Has to Come to the Light' and I think that's something that stays on my mind. I always want to bring out what's been hidden or marginalized. In Precious she is more misunderstood than invisible, we hear about her everyday. Every time Newt Gingrich opens his mouth it's about a welfare mother. I wanted to shed additional light. I wanted to show something behind the statistic. So yeah, I'm on a mission."

These things sparked me -- Precious' descriptions of feelings and people and places are child-like, very low-level from a professional standpoint, and yet they are more wisely phrased and profound than established professional writers, at least in provoking an emotional reaction:

"Can't he see I am a girl for flowers and thin straw legs and a place in the picture."

"There eyez is like far away spaceships."

"I'm alive inside. A bird is my heart."

"...I am sick of the walking dicks of Harlem."

"So my mother--one eye, no man, two children and the Bible."

"Sometime I wish I was not alive. But I don't know how to die. Ain' no plug to pull out. 'N no matter how bad I feel my heart don't stop beating and my eyes open in the morning."

Other strong themes I picked up on were the power of narratives (especially in the support group scene where Precious learns there are others like her, who have suffered like her), the bullshittiness of bureaucracy (the tests and reports and welfare trouble), and Precious' metamorphosis, best described by her list of what's important to her on pg. 109. Precious walks through Harlem and describes the filth and desperation of the ghetto, her hatred for crackheads and the ironic injustice of being considered one of their lot. Most of all I felt the worst seeing her struggle through the horrible confusion of the sexual abuse at such a young age, by her father. That was the worst. Luckily the love and acceptance she finds in friends and herself leads me to believe that she turned out ok after the last page was turned.

"Ms. Rain say one of the criticizsm of The Color Purple is it have fairy tale ending. I would say, well shit like that can be true. Life can work out for the best sometimes. Ms. Rain love Color Purple too but say realism has its virtues too. Izm, smizm! Sometimes I wanna tell Ms Rain shut up with all the IZM stuff. But she my teacher so I don't tell her shut up. I don't know what "realism" mean but I do know what REALITY is and it's a mutherfucker, lemme tell you."

de gustibus non disputandum

“A specific reader and a specific text at a specific time and place: change any of these, and there occurs a different circuit, a different event—a different poem.” (14)

The central importance of this factor of the reader’s focus on attention is assumed in Coleridge’s famous statement about poetry: “the reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasure activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself.” Buy the ticket, take the ride, in other words. (Thanks Doc) 28)

“The reader responds to the verbal stimuli derived from the text, but at the same time he must draw selectively on the resources of his own fund of experience and sensibility to provide and organize the substance of his response. Out of this the new experience, the literary work, is formed (43)

“The writings of a Hitler might arouse powerful emotions of hate in a reader, but this would still be an efferent reading, which might, for example, lead him to rush out and engage in mob action.” (45)

“We are not vicarious or substitute Juliets…we are living in the world of the work which we have created under guidance of the text and are entering into new potentialities of our own natures.” (68)

“In our schools, the emphasis in the teaching of reading is almost entirely on the efferent stance. Comprehension in reading tests is assumed mainly to be of this type. It is not possible here to detail the methods of the teaching of literature in school and college that tend often to develop an efferent attitude, even toward the literary work of art." (79)

“We must recognize that the reader brings to or adds to the nonverbal or socio-physical setting his whole past experience of life and literature.” (81)

“Impressionist critics were charge with forgetting the poem itself as they pursued the adventures of their souls among masterpieces” (102)…"given the fact that a poem is re-created each time it is read, can we validly speak of anything as being the poem itself?" (104)

“Probably no work of art can suffice as interpretation of another work.” (136)

“The solution, as I see it, lies in rejecting the preoccupation with some illusory unspecifiable absolute or correct reading or ideal reader. Let us look at the reality of the literary enterprise, or “literature” as a certain kind of activity of human beings in our culture…we need to stress the basic affinity of all readers of literary works of art. The general reader needs to honor his own relationship with the text.” (140)

“The solution, as I saw it, is the education of a reading public that would appreciate aesthetic values and accord the serious artist freedom and support." (142)

In light of some illusory unspecifiable absolute or ideal reading, all readings are failures. The emphasis should be rather on a creative transaction, a coming-together of a human being (with all that implies of past experience and present preoccupations) and a text (with all that implies of potentialities for participation)."(144)

“Literary judgments—on, say, “Byzantium” or “Middlemarch”—are actually judgments on the potentialities of those texts to enable readers to evoke an aesthetic transaction.” (153)

“Another consideration: the reader undertakes to see the work as a whole, yet in actual literary transactions it may sometimes be some minor part that had intensely personal reverberations. A poem may live in the memory through only one phrase that suddenly embodies for us the ‘joy’ and the ‘juice of life.’” (160)

Hopefully by ending on this note, the method of this particular post becomes clear. I’m also ending with this last quote in hopes that it will generate a bulletin board of sorts—what pieces of text, phrases of books, lines in movies, have sparked you? For me, one of the strongest was from "The Virgin Suicides" by Jeffrey Eugenides: We knew the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love, and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."

growling flowers

"these so-called avant-garde artists seem to be rediscovering the basic alphabet of aesthetics; though their works are often very minor indeed, they may be performing a function by educating a public largely wedded to the purely efferent attitudes to begin the slow development of aesthetic attention to an awareness of their own responses." (Rosenblatt, 82)

tell me do you feel it?

As I started to read Rosenblatt's The RTP, I was initially worried, as I wasn't getting into it as much as her other work. But I think that's between the first two chapters are essentially fluently rewritten ways to describe the interdependent triad of reader, text, and poem of meaning making. Chapter 3 was where I started to become more involved, particularly with her analysis of efferent and aesthetic reading. Beginning with one of my new favorite ideas of "burning through" a reading, living through it, she delineates the kinds of approach we take to reading between reading to remember or apply (more typically found in scientific reading) and the pure art, affective stance, like Keats writes about in "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again." In addition to the combined stance needed to read and make sense by use of referents or imagination, "different aesthetic transactions with the same text may also produce different or levels of experience, depending on the nature, state of mind, or past experience of the reader." So, not only can someone not read a poem for you, you can't read it the same way twice. This makes me wonder if the question of what classics are universal even matters.

Efferent-dominant reading is what we're teaching kids to do. Read for details, read to answer the questions right. There's no way to test on affect, on aesthetic, as it's particular to each person. I felt a pang of guilt, remembering my first year of teaching at HSA, first year with my own room, with no real supervison as it was a charter school, copying out worksheets from suggested workbooks that invited the kids to classify poem tones by their titles. Extracting democratic messages from decontextualized political speeches. No wonder my kids got great TAKS scores. But now I'm not so proud of it. Luckily they had enough experience and enough academic confidence to read for pleasure as well. But what if we could get kids to feel like this:

only slightly more intelligently.

Thought on the transformative power of the narrative--I've read the Bible, been to Sunday school and church all through my youth, and have taken classes in religion, yet what leads me to know/believe that there is a heaven is a story about a young man who was killed in a hunting accident, and as he bled to death, he looked around him and said, "it's so beautiful," before dying. This story might have left me somewhat nonplussed had I seen in a movie or novel, except that this was a truth story, and happened to my great uncle. Experience and culture does make a difference.