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."