Tag: literature

Language, Image, Editing, & Bias: A Quick Case Study

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Chuck Norris and his wife Gena recently published a video urging their fellow conservative Americans to get out and vote to end an “attack” on freedom during this “tipping point” election, because “quite possibly, our country as we know it may be lost forever if we don’t change the course in which our country is headed,” which is “the direction of socialism, or something much worse.” Action on the part of Christian evangelicals is urged by the Norris couple in order to head off disaster. Via a series of quotes from Edmund Burke and President Ronald Reagan, the couple paint a goal of fighting the “triumph of evil,” keeping “freedom” from “extinction,” and avoiding “the first step into a thousand years of darkness.” Pathos aplenty drips from this video, stoking fears among their audience of evil, the other, and left-wing politics. Check it out for yourself.


The language employed in this piece is inflammatory, and often delivered by proxy through out of context quotations. Apocalyptic at times, I thought. Which was why I was a bit surprised by the kid-glove treatment given Chuck Norris by Bill O’Reilly on his Fox News show. It is no surprise that the two share a common political condition, but the soft-serve question and lack of a follow-up question by O’Reilly are quickly subsumed by a series of images – boarded up houses and storefronts – flashed over Norris’s unsupported claims about Obama’s economic policies create a clear tone with obvious implications laid down over a discussion devoid of hard facts (insofar as they still exist today!). This could be the basis of an interesting deconstruction and comparison exercise a la the IB Language and Literature curriculum.

http://video.foxnews.com/v/embed.js?id=1834875062001&w=466&h=263

Watch the latest video at <a href=”http://video.foxnews.com”>video.foxnews.com</a>Some questions to guide students may be as follows:

  • What is the purpose of the “Chuck Norris’ dire warning” video?
  • Who is the intended audience of the Norris video?
    • What words or phrases inform your answers above?
  • How are quotes used in the Norris video?
  • How would you describe the relationship between Chuck Norris and the interviewer in the Fox News video?
    • What words or images support your answer?
  • Does the Fox News piece suggest a viewpoint on the part of the media maker for the topic being discussed?
  • How does the Fox News video use images with speech? Why?
  • What sorts of arguments are laid out in the two videos?
  • In a well-written response, support, defend, or qualify the following statement: The media makers behind these two videos hold independent views on the topic of the 2012 presidential election.

 

Badges?

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Yeah, it’s pretty obvious. I list toward Blazing Saddles as a cultural touchpoint for the unnecessary nature of stinkin’ badges, but it comes, apparently, from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I feel a little like someone must feel when they find out that the inspirational sayings so often misattributed to world leaders in fact are, rather obviously, misattributed.

Even so, I made badges.

Last year, my AP Literature and Composition course lacked fun. I’m not sure these badges are fun, exactly, but they could be a bridge to engagement. I think they’re definitely not an “addictive learning experience,” but they could be a tool for improving the learning community in the class or beyond. Today I even invited the entire faculty to partake in an Infinite School Year, which doesn’t mean a year of eight Februaries (teacher joke!). The deal for kids with these badges is that they offer a choice of doing something I believe is important in return for a reward that they value. All the students must complete one badge per semester. After the first badge, students get a grade boost per completed badge up to two more per semester, the criteria for which is laid out in a rubric for each badge. The rubrics are far from perfect, as is the lame grade connection. Also, the choice is limited. I can imagine offering a Mystery Badge that allows a kid to design a project, or others like a Context Builder Badge that prioritizes historical research behind a novel like Slaughterhouse Five or Beloved. However, it’s a start.

Toward what? I’d like to establish a different dynamic in this course. I feel compelled, of course, to provide a curriculum based on the AP Lit exam, which often feels like a walled garden. To that end, project based learning is quite difficult to design – or at least it’s hard for me to design. I wonder if these badge projects that give kids an opportunity to boost a grade are classic lipstick on a… not a pig, per se, but maybe a golden retriever?  Lipstick on a golden retriever. Or is this a step toward meaningful projects in this course?

100 Greatest Nonfiction Books

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The Guardian has released great fodder for argument: the 100 greatest nonfiction books. I’m a nonfiction addict – the creative essay, persuasion in all its guises, academic study, education research, society & culture, the arts, history. I have just finished The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson and am currently reading The Information by James Gleick. I often run fiction, poetry, and nonfiction texts concurrently, and the nonfiction generally turns over more quickly. This list is interesting because it runs from Herodotus to Clay Shirky, who is one of my favorite current thinkers. There are must reads from Sontag’s Notes on Camp to Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky’s arguably most excellent tome, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (outdone by his epic The Ancestor’s Tale, in my opinion), The Revenge of Gaiam and The Silent Spring in the environmental camp, In Cold Blood, Innocents Abroad, The Souls of Black Folk – the hits just keep on coming. Additionally, there are many titles like Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid that have reached cult status and which I have high on my list of what to read next. In literature The Uses of Enchantment and in journalism The Journalist and the Murderer caught my eye as unknowns, as well as The Story of Art, which shares a title with Simon Schama’s awesome BBC and much later produced television series all grabbed my attention.

Why is this list important? Any list represents a smattering of opinion at best, but this may spark conversation about nonfiction, which is a creative and under-appreciated genre, especially in high school English classes. Just today, I had five separate conversations with students who are abandoning advanced English coursework in favor of science and math. If we were teaching engaging, vibrant, creative non-fiction covering areas of student interest per student choice, perhaps we would be more likely to retain interest in more challenging English courses. Of course, higher level IB or AP English courses have debatable value, but I see value in students valuing the study of reading, writing, and communication. Students are not best served when they see English studies as an impediment to their scientific or mathematics careers. But, when they don’t get to see lists like this, how could they know what they’re missing? How could students know until they’ve missed developmentally essential time for developing their skills in examining writing for data, argument, and nuance and for writing fluently and vividly that the most famous and successful mathematicians and scientists are all great authors unless we have them read these books?

Literature includes nonfiction, which means literature is science, math, art, culture – haute and pop (Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, anyone?), philosophy, and so much more. When English teachers expand their literary choices to include excellent nonfiction, everybody wins and departmental barriers are transcended, exposing the teacher as learner and engaging students in areas of personal interest. Students and teachers deserve a healthy helping of nonfiction and this list is a good starting point.

Metaphors, Poetry, and Thinking – “Poetry for Everyday Life”

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David Brooks is continuing his incredible run of synthesis between the social and cognitive sciences with his latest piece in the New York Times entitled “Poetry for Everyday Life.” Brooks begins by paraphrasing data from a

fine new book, “I Is an Other,” [in which] James Geary reports on linguistic research suggesting that people use a metaphor every 10 to 25 words. Metaphors are not rhetorical frills at the edge of how we think, Geary writes. They are at the very heart of it.

Examples follow, building to the following conclusion:

Most of us, when asked to stop and think about it, are by now aware of the pervasiveness of metaphorical thinking. But in the normal rush of events. we often see straight through metaphors, unaware of how they refract perceptions. So it’s probably important to pause once a month or so to pierce the illusion that we see the world directly. It’s good to pause to appreciate how flexible and tenuous our grip on reality actually is.

Certainly, any good scholar of postmodern literature can appreciate this conclusion – language creates and defines our realities, a truth with deep political and personal implications. Whether it is to help with  “understanding new things,” understanding the ways our own brains work and function best, understanding how our personal affinities create the conditions and contexts in which we operate, understanding God or spiritual experiences, or discerning between what we believe and what we are manipulated through metaphor to believe, consciousness of the power of metaphor is a central awareness for successful thinkers. Brooks states

Most important, being aware of metaphors reminds you of the central role that poetic skills play in our thought. If much of our thinking is shaped and driven by metaphor, then the skilled thinker will be able to recognize patterns, blend patterns, apprehend the relationships and pursue unexpected likenesses.

Indeed, it is the recognition of patterns, blending of patterns (and subsequent creation of new ones), and mapping of relationships between patterns that lends heft to the study of literature in a world focused more on 140 characters than 140 pages. Metaphor is, of course, at the heart of poetry and fiction; Brooks doesn’t accidentally co-opt poetry for his discussion of metaphor. Through exploring metaphor – one – and connecting this understood metaphor to another, and another, and another within a text, or even between texts, we as readers build universes from the disparate clutter of words on pages. Ultimately, if this understanding of metaphor awareness is true in any fashion, then the resultant skilled thinking is transferable from literature  to life beyond texts, to other disciplines of study, to journeys of spirit, to any and all human endeavors. Behold the metaphor at work in the brilliant “Avocado” by Gary Snyder, electric scribe genius monk extraordinaire in his beautiful book Turtle Island:

Avocado by Gary Snyder

The Dharma is like an Avocado!
Some parts so ripe you can’t believe it.
But it’s good.
And other parts hard and green
Without much flavor,
Pleasing those who like their eggs well-cooked.

And the skin is thin,
The great big round seed
In the middle,
Is your own Original Nature –
Pure and smooth,
Almost nobody ever splits it open
Or tries to see
If it will grow.

Hard and slippery,
It looks like
You should plant it – but then
It shoots out thru the
fingers –

gets away.

Now, that ain’t pedestrian, but if you get it, or even a piece of it, this message will resonate through you somehow – maybe not in the same way it does me, due to my constellation of connections differing in altitude, amplitude, and assonance from yours – the next time you’re making guacamole (2 ripe avocados, 1 medium tomato, garlic powder, cumin, salt, paprika; mash and eat it all, quickly). To David Brooks, the last word:

To be aware of metaphors is to be humbled by the complexity of the world, to realize that deep in the undercurrents of thought there are thousands of lenses popping up between us and the world, and that we’re surrounded at all times by what Steven Pinker of Harvard once called “pedestrian poetry.”