Literacy: June 2004 Archive Page

--No Train, No Gain

A great collection of short articles focusing on such topics as how to find an interesting story in a boring budget meeting, the basics of interviewing, and taking notes. For the first time this fall, students will be able to get credit for working for the student paper (of which I am the adviser). Blogging this so I can find it in the fall.

Those who complain loudly about how many jobs have been “exported” to other countries because of international free trade totally ignore all the jobs that have been imported to the American economy because of that same free trade. Siemens alone employs tens of thousands of American workers, and Toyota has already produced its ten millionth car in the United States. --Thomas Sowell --Low Taxes Do What? (Hoover Digest)

I'd never considered this perspective before. Here's another fascinating quote, an attempt to counter the meme that Regan cut taxes for the rich and soaked the poor, leading to defecit spending:

What Reagan’s “tax cuts for the rich” actually cut were the tax rates per dollar of income. Out of rising incomes, the country as a whole—including the rich—paid more total taxes than ever before.

As Sowell puts it, "Simple stuff like this is not very exciting for economists, and there is no payoff in one’s professional career for clarifying such things for the general public." That kind of explanation won't fit on a bumper sticker as easily as something designed to get you in the gut, like "AIDS: The Reagan Vietnam."

Sadly, I think that regardless of their political persuasion, this topic would probably put the average freshman comp student to sleep, so I won't bother Googling for a good counter-opinion to present as a pair of readings. Someday maybe I'll teach an upper-level rhetoric course...

blind users are finding that they are spending disproportionately more time sorting through their junk e-mail than their sighted colleagues. That's because sighted users can simply scan large batches of messages for that one important piece of mail, whereas blind users must listen to the subject line of each message before they know whether it's spam or not.

It's a process that has become so unbearable that some blind users say they are giving up on e-mail altogether. --Amit Asaravala --Blind Get Earful of Spam Daily  (Wired)

How did Eats, Shoots & Leaves land on the best-seller list? I'd like to think it reveals a late-blooming hunger for self-improvement by the ignorant masses. Somehow, though, I doubt it. Truss certainly doesn't seem to be addressing such people as her readers. "What happened to punctuation?" she wails. "Why is it so disregarded when it is self-evidently so useful in preventing enormous mix-ups?" This isn't what Henry Higgins would say to Eliza Doolittle. It's what Higgins would say to Col. Pickering, his linguist sidekick. Truss wants you to read her book not to learn the rules of punctuation but to join her in bewailing, as you review these rules, the sorry ignorance of those who don't know them. It's to feel superior, and smug, and, well, almost -- English. --Timothy Noah --Reads, Chortles, & Smirks: Why nobody's learning anything from Lynne  (Slate)

I've got this one on back order at the local library. I'm thinking of using it in "Intro to Literary Studies" next spring -- the course is a kind of sampler of the flavors of English major we offer (lit, creative writing, & journalism) and I'm trying to find a way to more nonfiction and grammar into the course.

Full disclosure: I played Col. Pickering in high school, and it was mostly the reference to him that made me want to blog this.

I would guess that people are either buying the book to give to friends who like writing, or they are buying the book precisely because they want to be spoken to as if they know this stuff already. If the book really is that basic, then maybe it's designed to flatter people who pick it up and tsk-tsk at all the examples of mistakes.

Children as young as seven in one British school are using weblogs as part of their normal routine, and are doing better than non-webloggers as a result, their teacher says.

Weblogs, easy-to-use personal journals published on the internet, get children more interested in school work they might otherwise have disliked, says junior school teacher John Mills. --Giles Turnbull --The seven-year-old bloggers (BBC)

Oxford and Cambridge interviews have long been the stuff of legend, or more probably, urban myth. Most people have heard the story of the candidate who is supposed to have set fire to his interviewer's newspaper when asked to surprise him, or the student who, when asked to describe bravery, said "this" before walking out of the interview.

Other questions asked of Oxbridge applicants included:

English: "How does the author use hay fever as a metaphor in Howard's End?

Philosophy and psychology: How do you test social stereotyping?

Philosophy and Spanish: "If everything is predetermined, should we punish criminals?"

English: What is the point of me teaching you?"

History: "To what extent is it possible to trace the history of the use of sound?

Social and political science "What do you think is the effect of the Japanese mafia on Brazil and America?"

--Sarah Womack --How Santa's reindeer can lead to Oxbridge (Telegraph)

When Sandy called to tell me that she had been fired over the essay she had written for class, I felt like Joseph K. in Kafka's The Trial?arrested without charge, guilty of something, but uncertain of what. I had been teaching writing since 1971, and to my knowledge a student had never before been fired for writing an essay for class. After the phone call, I tried to convince myself that I had done nothing wrong, merely given an open-ended writing assignment. I wanted to believe that my sense of having been arrested was caused more by moral outrage over an abuse of political and economic power than by anything for which I personally could be held responsible. Now, nearly a year after Sandy's phone call, I still feel a sense of outrage; but I also recognize that I was culpable, that in my teaching I had perhaps not committed a crime of commission, but that certainly I deserved to be charged with a crime of omission: in my naivety, I had failed to tell students the whole truth about writing. --Michael Kleine, in an article co-authored by Sandy Moore
--Toward an Ethics of Teaching Writing in a Hazardous Context?The American University (JAC)

Via This Public Address.

When young writers describe characters, they almost universally make them flat goodie-goodies who might have problems, but little psychological depth. Or they don't have enough conflict at all. Waggoner has students first write a character description, then pass that description to a neighbor. The neighbor is told to "do something mean to the character." Then they pass it back and the writer must work with the problem that's given -- often a violent one. --Mike Arnzen describes a talk by Tim Waggoner. --Waggoner on Teaching Creative Writing (Pedablogue)

In order to limber up brain-dead students (after they have turned in a major assignment) I sometimes use something similar -- a "tandem writing" exercise, modeled after what is almost certainly a fictional e-text that I first received in e-mail many years ago.

When I use it, I'm not so much intersted in what they do with their characters, but instead in getting them to see the value of having actual, significant opposition within their academic papers.

Ditch the reader and have students purchase a choice game or two, or perhaps an anthology of classic games (which are also available for free). Have students play games and reflect on their experience rather than work with print texts. I would like to say to an incoming class, "We won't be reading any novels in this class. We don't be doing any reading, as a matter of fact. Instead, we're going to play videogames." Is this insane? --Matt Barton --Videogames in Composition & Rhetoric (KairosNews)

Er... yes.

While I agree that it's not necessary to read novels in order to learn freshman composition, students have to read essays if they are being asked to write essays.

I'd say about half of college students consider themselves "gamers," though many of those who don't say they used to play games. If there's a meaningful selection process, by which students can select a section with an emphasis that appeals to them, then a games-focused freshman comp course sounds wonderful.

In passing, Matt suggests that Quake could help students learn how to drive the Martian rover. The distance between Earth and Mars results in such a great time delay (about 20 minutes) that the skills one develops in a twitch game really wouldn't help much. Chess would probably be better (as it forces you to see multiple alternatives and plan ahead for them).

But, as Matt notes, the purpose of a rhet/comp course is not to train people for specific jobs. I think he's much closer to the target when he mentions political simulations and other ideological games. I also like his observation that there is a demand for slide presentation skills, but that we aren't doing a very good job teaching those skills.

While my school requires all students to demonstrate basic PowerPoint skills, I actively discourage slide shows in my classes, since I find them typically to be of such low quality and I haven't the time to teach how to use a slide presentation effectively. I'll be teaching a "Writing for the Internet" course this fall again... maybe that will be the right place to tackle this issue.

I felt one paragraph called for a more detailed response:

Perhaps videogames are the last tool available to modern compositionists that can actually inspire students to learn to write. Of course we could allow students to "play games" with the texts they produce, constructing choose your own adventures. I see things on a deeper level; teach programming (or at least a game making software tool) so that students may express themselves in the language of their generation.

The last tool? No, just the latest tool. And all that is playful is not games... that is, "playing games" with existing works of literature is completely different from what goes on when you interact with a computer game.

The narratological approach that Matt uses makes a great deal of sense in the particular branch of computer games that I study, namely interactive fiction. But I think it's probably too much, at this point, to ask the average student to learn a computer programming language and construct a game in a freshman comp course. At an engineering school? Sure! But at a liberal arts school? Sadly, no.

See also a recent blog conversation under "Theory vs. Craft in Computer Game Studies." Both kinds of scholarship are important, and I did spend one day introducing my upper-level English students to IF programming, but these were juniors and seniors, whom I could assume had already mastered the basic reading and writing skills that a freshman comp course is supposed to give them. But "user mods" and the "remix culture" are certainly valid and important topics to address, in terms of the attitude of today's youth towards the dissemination of intellectual property, and the open source philosophy (of which Matt is a devoted supporter).

A college writing class is a good place to get students to think about their own creation of intellectual property. And having a freshman comp class create and peer review wiki articles may be a useful way to get them to think about the function (and limitations) of peer review.

If videogames have not yet risen to the elite status of famous novels, it is no fault of videogames, but rather money-hungry developers, narrow-minded players, and traditionalist literary critics unwilling to replace their pen with a joystick.

Don't forget the importance of the cult of the author as celebrity. Modern videogames may be inspired by brilliant designers, but they are products of huge committees of highly-specialized workers and outsourced labor -- including many people who have no narrative skills at all, and whose daily activities aren't in the slightest comparable to what a novelist does. The people who do this work have to feed their families, so naturally a huge commercial videogame project is going to follow the corporate model.

Matt's doing some important work getting people to talk about the issues. He's not yet at the fist-shaking, "Fools! I shall crush them all!" stage, which is probably good for society in general.

I agree with him whole-heartedly when he writes the following:

It is of utmost importance that we teach people to see a videogame with the same critical apparatus they bring to bear on poems, novels, screenplays, and films.

You bet. But replacing the reader with videogames? That's going too far.

It seems that what we really need is a reader, geared towards college freshmen, that covers videogames intelligently -- along with reality TV, "cool hunting," weblogs, text messaging, and other cultural practices that our students know well.

''Students felt more empowered,'' said Frank Klapak, an education and communication professor at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Westmoreland County, one of the schools participating in the study. Klapak let his students help decide how to structure the course as a way of showing them the results of democratic involvement.

The study also found that by semester's end, students participating in the project showed greater improvement than other students in their ability to find compromises and make sound moral and ethical decisions. --Christina Gostomski --Cedar Crest looks to raise civic interest (The Morning Call)

Frank Klapak is a colleague of mine just two office doors away.

A 14-year-old Indiana boy mastered "autochthonous" to win the National Spelling Bee Thursday, outdueling 264 rivals, including one who fainted on stage but recovered to take second place. --Ben Feller --14-Year-Old Indiana Boy Wins Spelling Bee (AP|MyWay)

Also worth noting: the comment about the environment at the bee ("[c]ourtesy reigns"), and the story of Ashkay Buddiga, who fainted, hopped up to spell his word correctly, was escourted off to rest, and eventually won second place.

A survey of 1,309 pupils aged between 10 and 14 and from 24 different schools found alarming levels of ignorance about the invasion of Normandy 60 years ago. --Hastings and Henry --D-Day 1899 and President Denzel Washington is leading liberation of New Zealand from the Nazi's (Telegraph)

One teacher at Great Addington Church of England Primary school in Northamptonshire was amazed to find that one of his pupils had scored 100 per cent in the test.

He said: "I asked him how he knew material which we had not covered in school. He told me he had picked it up from a D-Day game he played on his computer."

Computer games: 1. Conventional education: 0.

Okay, that's an exaggeration, but you get my point.