But this is no longer the case. My job no longer zaps the will to live out of me, so I can listen to podcasts (as this is obviously the main purpose of life, no?). And boy do I listen to podcasts.
My current podcast roll:
Slate Political Gabfest
Slate Culture Gabfest
Slate Spoiler Special Podcast
Hang Up and Listen (Slate's sports podcast)
Manners in the Digital Age (also by Slate...yes, I will read/listen to/worship anything they create)
This American Life
Wait Wait Don't Tell Me
Start The Week
NPR's Intelligence Squared
The Week Ahead (an Economist podcast)
And my current favourite: The History of The World in 100 Objects
I listen to these when I walk to work, walk to school, walk to a bookstore, walk for funsies, sit on a bus, sit on a train, etc., and I always feel like a better person for it. Or at least like I can make a decent conversation with more people.
But the point of all this is to say that the most recent podcast I listened to was an episode of AHOW on an "early writing tablet" from Mesopotamia (#15 in the series) that shows how much a worker was to be paid in rations of beer. I think I know a few of my classmates who would happily convert to such a payment system. But anyway, this is one of the earliest known examples of writing, so the series took the opportunity to talk about how the ability to write did more than just open up worlds of literature - it allowed for more complex mathematics, philosophy, science, and perhaps more importantly, it allowed for a system of government. You could write down how much people were owed and how they should be paid and suddenly, some people had power and others did not and it was not based on whether or not they could hit you harder with a big stick. So obviously my mind flew to educational inequity. And actually it flew there from two different directions.
1. I am no luddite. I love technology (if you couldn't tell from my podcast obsession) and my mother taught me to value "whole new concepts", successful or not - we had many As Seen on TV products in our home. My favourite was the "Buttoneer", a thing that was supposed to attach buttons for you without involving any sewing, an activity that gives my mom anxiety. In reality, it managed to take one of the easiest tasks of all time and turn it into an overly-complicated process of plastic fasteners and hole-alignment. It also might have been my favourite because obviously it was buy one get one free, so we had one that I believe to this day is sitting in its plastic casing in a junk drawer somewhere in my parents' house. But goodness I have gone off topic. The point is, I love technology and think the internet is just fabulous and that technology should be integrated into every classroom. But I can't help but wonder, if writing in the first place was what opened up whole new worlds of complex thought, does dumbed-down writing produce dumbed-down thought? I think it does. And this worries me because, truth be told, suburban school are still, for the most part, producing kids who may have terrible grammar in their text messages, but they can put together an essay. High poverty schools are not. There was an attitude at my school in Newark that grammar and spelling etc were going going by the wayside anyway because of technological advancement (in 5 years we'll be doing state testing on computers! they'd say) so let's not focus on that.
But the thing is (and skip ahead if you get scared of a high levels of grammar nerdiness) a complex sentence is more than the sum of its parts. It shows an ability to see relationships between clauses - things depend on other things, semicolons serve different functions than colons and represent different levels of importance for different parts of the sentence. Knowing how to use an adjective versus an adverb and hearing the beauty of a well-crafted description shows an understanding and respect for language that just can't be conveyed in words that are half numbers and half letters.
So when we give up on teaching kids to spell because they'll use spellcheck anyway and we give up on anything more than basic grammar because language is constantly morphing anyway, I worry that we are giving up on complex thought for those kids.
2. Which brings me to direction #2 of my brain-plane. (I wrote train originally, and then realized I had written "flew" before, so that didn't make sense. See, someone along the way taught me to be consistent in my metaphors.)
Republicans make no sense to me. Granted, this is a thought that pretty much goes through my head all the time anyway, regardless of brain-planes, but this time it was tied to a specific context. They complain about rampant entitlement spending. About "welfare queens" and "victim mentality". And yes, we do spend over 60% of our budget on entitlements. Note: a huge portion of this is on Social Security and Medicare, most of which goes to white, older Americans, most of whom vote overwhelmingly Republican. But I digress. We do also have issues with welfare system abuse and fraud, and lots of people think of themselves as victims, I'm sure.
So how do you make that go away? You empower people. How do you empower people? Through education. Who wants to slash funding for education in inner-cities and at failing schools that most need it? Oh wait.
I don't see how out of one side of your mouth you complain that people are not taking enough personal responsibility, and then out of the other, deny the resources to move people out of a state of perpetual dependency. My kids, and I loved them to death and will never stop calling them "mine", are screwed. I tried to help, of course, but almost all of them will graduate with almost no reading, writing or mathematical skills. In other words, we are guaranteeing that they will have no choice but to be told how much they're owed and how they'll be paid, and some people will have power and others will not, and it's still not based on whether or not you can hit someone with a big stick. This time it's just based on your school district.
In related news, my peregrination: for Memorial Day weekend, I went to the Maryland version of the Jersey Shore. Ocean City was pretty fantastic - I got a great tan and ate some delicious crab. But after a weekend of these kinds of sightings, I think you see the obvious connection to lack of complex thoughts and beer rations.
I'm guessing that a defensive Newark-based teacher might counter that a child's respect for language necessarily begins at home - that as long as parents in impoverished communities don't value complex thought and correct self-expression, neither will children. While I absolutely agree with you that forfeiting the whole generation to text-speak is the wrong approach, I do believe there is at least some merit to this counter-argument that the kids' values will ultimately reflect their community's values, not their teachers'.
ReplyDeleteSo, how does one transform the values of a community? Can that process begin with the school? Is it even possible?
Where is that darn Buttoneer? I've needed it lately!
ReplyDeleteI remember when, as a Whole New Concept, I tried mixing numbers and letters in my text messages, and you very quickly nipped that in the bud....thank you. That was ridiculous.
@Aidan, you have hit upon a central problem of school reform: you can't fix schools without the communities, and you can't fix the communities without the schools. Some argue that Harlem Children's Zone-type solutions are the only way to go - programs that are interventions for both schools AND the community. Unfortunately, these programs are expensive. Worth it? Absolutely. But unlikely to be implemented on a large scale - in case you forgot, while as a nation we say education is our #1 issue, we don't actually want to pay for anything. But anyway, the point is, I think we have to start with the schools because 1. they are one of the only consistent ways to reach families; 2. it's the place we actually have some control; 3. most of the teachers at those schools come from the same neighbourhood so it all runs together; and 4. the influence between schools and families is two-directional.
ReplyDelete