belligerence, aka adolescence

The other day I ate dinner with an enormous group of mostly strangers in a fancy-schmancy restaurant in Laguna Beach. Because our group was massive and the restaurant was fairly busy, our service took about 4 hours all told, from first drinks at the bar to the arrival of the bill and our (somewhat tipsy) departure.

At one point I excused myself to the bathroom. I had just stepped into a stall when the door opened and two girls came in, talking loudly enough that I could not help but listen to their conversation. (What happened to piped-in restroom music? Was that a ’90s thing?)

The weird thing about their chatter — and the reason it gets a post of its own — was that it was impossible for me to tell how old they were; not from their topic of conversation nor their tone of voice. While they sort of sounded like young teenagers, they also sounded a bit like drunk twenty-somethings.

Then came the revelation: There’s no difference.

Here are a few things that tipsy college students and hormonal adolescents have in common:

1. They have a very short attention span,
2. They experience unpredictable moodswings,
3. They are irritable,
4. They have minimal control of their extremities,
5. They may experience a loss of inhibition,
6. They are egocentric,
7. They are resistant to authority,
8. They should be discouraged from drinking (more) alcohol,

etc. Genius, right? I’m excited to test this theory on some of our more rambunctious middle schoolers by treating them as I would normally treat a drunk friend: with patience, humor, and firm expectations.

notes on illiteracy, part 1 of many

I am reading Jonathan Kozol’s “Illiterate America.” I have a lot to say about it, but unfortunately I don’t have much time before dinner, so I need to keep this brief.

In Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Tarzan of the Apes,” the character Tarzan learns to read from alphabet books and other children’s stories he finds in an abandoned house in the wilds of Africa. His aptitude for language makes for a great story, but not a particularly realistic one. Kozol’s work has opened my eyes to the possibility that a person can remain illiterate even while he is regularly exposed to spoken and written language. In fact, illiteracy prevails in the some of the most populated urban areas, where residents are surrounded by street signs, billboards, graffiti…

We expect literacy out of too many people who don’t have it. We judge people too harshly for being illiterate to any degree. I have been guilty of believing others to be stupid because they can’t read, or lazy because they are uneducated. But now that I understand the forces manipulating literacy in this nation, I can no longer feel anything but sympathy for the illiterate; and anger for those who perpetuate policies of inequity.

(nerd-gasm)

I desperately want to see this film. (thanks, Ella!)

words words words

Last week one of my assignments required a list of web sites that would be useful to English language learners. While browsing for possibilities, I stumbled onto Wordle (via Langwitches Blog, a fantastic resource for classroom tools and links). It generates word clouds from any text or website or RSS feed. Here’s an example from the first draft of this post:

I can’t get enough of this site. It is equal parts fun and informative, and it appeals to me on all the most important levels: namely literariness and visual aesthetic. I ended up going way overboard describing all of the potential uses of Wordle for ELLs, but I could also see it used in so many other settings. For example:

• even difficult texts become more interesting when you start paying attention to how words are used — and how often
• teachers could Wordle lecture notes to help students identify important concepts or terms
• advanced writers could use Wordle to detect overused words and build vocabulary

I could go on and on! Instead, I’ll post a Wordle from Chapter 3 of Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”:

Now go play!

primary sources are fun!

Here’s an update after a weekend of working my butt off to finish one course in time to start another. No life-altering revelations, but I did find some pretty pictures!

First of all, I came across The Cabinet of American Illustration while pursuing sources for primary sources. (That’s a fun one!) It is a keyword-searchable database of more than 4,000 illustrations from the turn of the century, all accessed from the Library of Congress’ typical outdated records template. I’m pretty sure they use this ugly homepage to deter people from using up bandwidth for meaningless pleasure browsing. …ahem.

Here are some fun things I dredged up as examples:

“Soldier drinking ice water offered by skeleton”
Oliver Herford, 1918?

(An early Jack Skellington, perhaps?)

“Frenzylogical Chart”
Oliver Herford, 1917

That last one is one heck of a primary source, if you can figure out what all the partitions represent. Notice especially: #6 (soldier feeding child “poison candy”) and #11 (baby impaled on bayonet)!

Secondly (and this one’s belated), I was recently introduced to The Millions, just in time for them to reveal the Best Books of the Millenium! They actually present two lists: one assembled by the panel of bloggers and the other from a survey of Millions readers. Each list shares interesting overlaps… and oversights.

I would prefer the Panel’s results, except that the mysterious omission of Murakami makes me hesitate. Yet I can’t quite endorse the Readers’ list because it includes “The Kite Runner,” which I detested, and “Empire Falls,” which I found so irritating that I gave up after 40 pages.

Call me a snob, but there are way too many good books out there to waste time reading 400 pages of something you don’t like. Usually I follow the 60-page rule, which was my camp-counselor-slash-babysitter Sarah’s method of giving a book a fair and impartial chance before giving it a toss. So if I give up on a book before achieving page 60, that means I really didn’t like it.

End rant. Either way, both lists include great books as well as books I’ve heard great things about, so I’ll be consulting them when I get to the bottom of my current pile. (Although it might  be a while, as the pile includes “Moby Dick” and “Gone with the Wind.”)