a funny thing happened on the way to the suburbs

Yesterday when I was on the El on the way to my parents' from the city, a person who I think was homeless thought that I was homeless.

I came up from Champaign Friday night and stayed with Didi, so I had my ratty old duffel bag full of clothes for the weekend. I also had a shopping bag with a pair of shoes I'd picked up near the station and my purse/handbag, which is rather large. I was wearing jeans, a blouse, and a cardigan, and I hadn't taken a shower.

The man had a black garbage bag full of stuff and a bike. He was wearing jeans with a cowboy-style vest and no shirt.

I was sort of day-dreaming when I made eye contact with him, so I smiled. He looked at me with concern and asked me if I needed help finding a place to stay. Confused, I said, "No, thanks. I'm good." Then he asked me if I needed any fare money. "No, thanks. I'm good." Then he asked me if I needed any coffee. Again, I told him I was good. Before he got off he checked again that I had someplace to stay, and then he gave me a slip of paper with his name and phone number on it "in case [I] need anything."

This was altogether a very strange experience.

bad marketing

Here's the logo for the conference I'm attending in a couple weeks with three other new teachers from my school. I'm super psyched about it; don't get me wrong. But I think Lisa Frank designed the logo. Mine is not a butterflies and rainbows kinda classroom.

They're milking this presidenial-race stuff for all it's worth; "and I'm reaping all the benefits."

Two articles I found thought-provoking:
Lose the BlackBerry? Yes He Can, Maybe

But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive. Mr. Obama, however, seems intent on pulling the office at least partly into the 21st century on that score; aides said he hopes to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American president to do so.

At the risk of sounding like some young and naive "digital native," um, what? The president doesn't have a computer in the Oval Office? What in. the. hell. does he do? I mean, if that's the case, then fuck all these technology-laced lesson plans I'm writing for my kids so as to better prepare them for 21st Century careers. They can be President of he United States and not have to type, apparently. Apparently, that's even the rule.

Diana Owen, who leads the American Studies program at Georgetown University, said presidents were not advised to use e-mail because of security risks and fear that messages could be intercepted.

“They could come up with some bulletproof way of protecting his e-mail and digital correspondence, but anything can be hacked,” said Ms. Owen, who has studied how presidents communicate in the Internet era. “The nature of the president’s job is that others can use e-mail for him.”

I'm wondering if maybe he can keep his BlackBerry, just for messages like these that help him maintain his awesomeness:

“How about that?” Mr. Obama replied to a friend’s congratulatory e-mail message on the night of his victory.

and

Mr. Obama used e-mail to stay in constant touch with friends from the lonely confines of the road, often sending messages like “Sox!” when the Chicago White Sox won a game.

and the other article is The Wild Wordsmith of Wasila

I suppose it will be recorded as among political history’s ironies that Palin was brought in to help John McCain. I can’t blame feminists who might draw amusement from the fact that a woman managed to both cripple the male she was supposed to help while gleaning an almost Elvis-sized following for herself. Mac loses, Sarah wins big-time was the gist of headlines.

Again... um, what? Just FYI: Feminism is not about "crippl[ing]" men. Not even a little bit. Honestly, I think it would be more difficult to locate a feminist who supported Sarah Palin's candidacy for VP than it would be to find one who sees Palin as participating rather loudly and proudly in the dominant mysoginist ideology. I'm one, for example.

He continues,

What on earth are our underpaid teachers, laboring in the vineyards of education, supposed to tell students about the following sentence, committed by the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High and gleaned by my colleague Maureen Dowd for preservation for those who ask, “How was it she talked?”

My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.

And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”

It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.

(A cynic might wonder if Wasilla High School’s English and geography departments are draped in black.)

There's nothing more annoying to me -- hyperbole -- than people whose first response when I tell them I'm a high school English teacher is, "Ugh. I hate grammar." Except maybe the not-so-few-and-far-between people who say, "Oh good! We need people teaching kids to speak English, and not Spanish! This is America; they should speak our language!"

One thing that Sarah Palin has in common with my students, btw: Ask about Africa and receive some well-intentioned but problematically under-informed "Let's save those poor people... :(" rhetoric.

----
UPDATE: I'm feeling pretty cool because one of my favorite profs just blogged about the no-BlackBerry thing, too. He says:

"George W. Bush gave up the chance to digitize the White House by giving up email when he took the oath of office – something to do with executive privilege, the imperial presidency, and not being able to type and chew gum at the same time."

Um, what.

WTF. Check out this story, which was the main focus of the front page of the Daily Illini today: Abnormal student behavior could lead to meetings for help.

According to James Finkle, junior in LAS, a student sitting eight rows back near the isle caused a commotion. He said the student was carrying on a conversation with his Teddy bear.

"Somebody shouted something like, 'Oh, I love you Mr. Bear. How are you Mr. Bear? You went and saw roses with another bear? I thought I was your bear,'" Finkle said.

Kathryn Clancy, professor of anthropology and leader of the lecture, confirmed this report.

"I started hearing a student clearly talking to a Teddy bear," Clancy said. She said she made her way down the stage towards the student to deal with the situation.

"I wanted to encourage his performance to end sooner," Clancy said. "Clearly there was some sort of tryst between the student and the bear."

Finkle said he agreed.

So, if it's a student joke, then why is this news? Why is this front-page news? We're electing a new president in five days. There's no way this could be considered a slow news week. UHS' student newspaper just put out an extra edition, for Chrissake. If it's a student joke, the prof deals with it in office hours. It doesn't get campus-wide media coverage. I mean, why would it?

If it's not a joke, then the student in question probably has some kind of mental illness. So why are we gossiping about it in the DI. And if the student is mentally ill, then why the jocular lead, "Teddy bears never felt so hurt." Mental illness isn't funny.

There's also a weak attempt to link the incident to the threatening note found in the undergrad library earlier this month. I can kinda make that connection, but if I do, I still don't see what's funny.

And I mean, look at this accompanying photo. A reenactment? Seriously? How is that not meant to be funny? In the print version of the paper, it was the largest element on the front page. What. the. hell.

"Is your question about what we're talking about right now?"

We're reading Night by Elie Wiesel in my classes. For some of my students, especially those with learning disabilities, it presents a challenge to their ability to connect what they know about the Holocaust (which is a lot) to the "hard" words in that text. So to help ease them into the story, we watched Oprah's interview with Wiesel in Auchwitz in class today.

One of my students (A hilarious kid: he does all his thinking aloud, which, as you can imagine, is pretty distracting for his classmates. One day I made him keep a tally of all the times he caught himself doing it and he got up to six in that one class period. He showed me the tally marks with this big, shit-eating grin. And somehow I found it completely adorable.) raised his hand, and whispered to me, "How did Hitler die?" I told him that I was pretty sure he shot himself, but that I would look it up. I checked it out real quick on my classroom computer, and went over to let him know. The student seemed pretty satisfied to know that he shot himself and swallowed cyanide simultaneously.

So when he raised his hand and silently beckoned me across the room to him a few minutes later, I was expecting some kind of similarly tangentially related question. This time, he asked, "You know that dude who got a picture of the Lock Ness Monster? Didn't he say that it was fake before he died?"

Here in Champaign County,

we operate on an eye-for-an-eye justice system. (Or ear-for-an-ear, I guess, in this case?)

An Illinois judge has sentenced a man to listen to 20 hours of classical music as punishment for playing hip-hop music too loudly out of his car stereo. The judge offered to reduce Andrew Vactor's $150 fine down to $35 if Vactor agreed to spend 20 hours listening to works by Brahms, Beethoven, Chopin and other classical composers.

Champaign County Municipal Court Judge Susan Fornof-Lippencott claimed that her decision did not imply that listening to classical music qualilfies as punishment, but by making Vactor to listen to music he might not prefer, he would feel the same way the public did when he blasted rap music from his car stereo.

Um, what. Say it ain't so.

Question.

Here's something I'm noticing.

I want my students to ask things like, "How can we make the classroom, this school, this community, this world more just for all those who live in it?" This week, I've been asked these questions:

1. "Can I stand up?" (Um, yes.)
2. "Can I turn my phone on silent?" (Um, please do. Duh?)
3. "Can I go over there?" (Uh..?)
4. "Can you tell them to stop filming their shoes?" (Yeah. I'll talk to them about that tomorrow.)

Schools can be lovely, hopeful places. They can also set up weird power structures where teachers find themselves, whether they actually care to or not, policing things like standing up or not standing up. I'm also supposed to take away any hats or non-religious head-coverings I see. I don't care about hats or non-religious head-coverings. That's so nineties; is it not?

shameful

I got out of bed at 5:10 pm today. Tonight, I should say. Seriously? I mean, to be fair, I woke up earlier, enjoyed a bowl of pasta salad, and then watched the last hour of Batman Begins. But I didn't really get up for the day until it was 17/24ths over. Also, I'm pretty sure that saying that I watched a movie in bed doesn't really hold up as an argument for non-ridiculousness.

Then I went to Bread Company, by myself, and had a glass of wine with dinner as I read something pretentious. Then, I got an iced, skim, no-sugar vanilla latte. And now I'm sitting on my porch, working on creating a new-and-improved version of KEOH.

Does it get anymore self-indulgent than this? I think not. (And unfortunately, I'm so self-absorbed that, I must admit, I've found today to be lovely.)


(In other news, the NatGeo photo of the day today is pretty cool, no?)

still laughing at this

"They believe... anything I say. It's amazing... it's incredible."

um, no

I did not like Dark Knight.


Now, I realize that I'm in the minority on this one, and I'm not just saying I didn't like it to be that annoying I'm-so-unique person. I just wanted to leave the whole time I was watching it. I found it to be a miserable experience. (Except for at the end when the Joker was done; I liked the anti-save-the-world message.)

If this makes sense, I think it was just too well done. Heath Ledger was too disturbing. That's the best acting I've ever seen, but I'm not impressed or entertained, I'm disgusted.

single women, NO

This sign was at the elevators in our hotel in Havana. In this case, I think, wordless diagrams are insufficient.

Was Moses stoned?

I'm reading a book my brothers recommended about Mormon Fundamentalists called Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. Very interesting. I've never heard the following suggested interpretation:

"When Dan became reacquainted with marijuana through his association with Knapp, he says that because he was no longer under the thumb of the LDS Church, 'for the first time I was able to get high with a clear conscience, and perhaps that is why, rather than just experiencing 'the gladdening of the heart,' I began to experience the 'enlivening of the soul.' I began to have what I would call wonderful spiritual insights.' Getting baked, Dan observed, was much like becoming a child and being introduced into a whole new world... I've concluded that the scripture which says, 'Unless you become like a little child, you can't see the Kingdom of Heaven' is another secret reference to getting high; as is also the mysterious account of Moses seeing God through the burning bush." (178)

chill the fuck out

Did anyone catch Anderson Cooper 360° last night? They were covering the breaking news that Obama and Clinton were meeting about they weren't sure what (but they guessed the VP convo) they weren't sure where (but they had live footage from Clinton's home in New York).

And then after about an hour of speculation by at least four commentators as to what he might be saying/she might be saying, an on-record source from the Obama campaign reported that the two had met at some point yesterday, but not at her house.

The commentators were all like, "Uhh.. well I guess we can stop showing you her house, and um, our bad, but uhh.. we did have sources, we swear..."

I mean, false alarm, it's cool, but isn't there anything else to report on while they're waiting to actually know what they're talking about on that story instead of creating these complicated storylines around what might-maybe-could-possibly-be-according-to-unconfirmed-sources. It's not news yet. It will be in an hour or so. In the meantime, chill the fuck out, and tell us about something else.

The sausage king?

I went to an odd show last night. Picture this: Friday night, BYOB, bagel shop with tacky Ferris Bueller name (see below), florescent lighting, weird emo guy reminiscent of that weird guy in Wedding Singer, followed by a small string-symphony-type-deal, complete with conductor. Upon reflection, it was sorta cool; but at the time I was a tinse uncomfortable and not knowing how to act. Way to be, I guess.

Only on a university campus

can a guy sit around sipping a latte and chatting with colleagues in a brown suit and a red bowtie and take himself seriously. It's 20-fucking-08, guy.

the battle cry of my generation:

"Don't tase me, bro!"

Seriously, if we had a "Remember the Alamo!" I think it would be "Don't tase me, bro!"

I mean, someone even re-mixed it:



Andrew wrote about this when it was actually new news. I think he's particularly poignant with his closing, "So be warned, young Americans, we may participate in the democratic process, but only for 45 seconds at a time."

Why am I writing about this now? Well first, a couple weeks ago I read this article for Campus Progress in which Tim Fernholz rips into journalist Courtney Martin for her article "The Problem with youth Activism" that blasts American college-aged activists for going about things all wrong.

"[Typical youth socio-political activism today] is sweetly collaborative, mainly focused on raising awareness among students, very keyed in to particular dates (Love Your Body Day, Earth Day, Black History Month), and most of all, safe," she writes.

He responds, "Martin would like to see today’s young activists adopt the tactics of the 1960’s student radicals—protests, theatrics, and the like. Martin’s complaint is that young people today are too complacent, too safe, and too co-opted by 'the man.' We’re just not angry enough, she argues. But today’s young activists are angry—they’re just too busy attempting to create meaningful change to sit around waving signs." And he goes on to chastise her for calling it "Youth Activism" when really she only addresses activists on college campuses (campi?). Nice point.

Last night, in a totally unrelated conversation, a friend of mine quoted, "Don't tase me, bro!" Since we all got the allusion, we laughed knowingly and moved on. It's some kind of joke. But come on. "Don't tase me bro!"?

As much as I think it's funny, re-watching the video this morning made me sad.They seriously tased him. And I can't understand how he was in the wrong. And nobody responded to his cries of, "Will somebody please help me!"

For young activists like us, this seems to be pretty quintessential The-Man-is-so-fucked-up. But then at the same time, for The Man, it's probably quintessential these-kids-are-morons. "Don't tase me bro!" What the fuck?

Here's a silly piece I wrote for a class this semester,

and by silly I mean dead serious.

This one goes out to all the haters: the back-to-basics, the five-paragraph-essays, the your-not-you’res and the you’re-not-yours, to the SATs and the ACTs, to the canonical-texts, and to the Standard-Englishes and English-Onlys; this one goes out to the cartoons-are-Saturday-morning-kid-stuffs: y’all are missing OUT!

I call urgently for inclusion of comics in language arts classrooms because:

1. It allows language arts teachers to be language and art teachers.

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud maps out what he calls “the pictoral vocabulary," a comprehensive and multidimensional system of understanding how we represent what we’re thinking, feeling, seeing, being, wanting, needing, doing, etc (51-3). When classroom literacy gets isolated into one corner of Scott’s map, boringness threatens, but more importantly, students miss out on learning vital literacy skills. Go ahead and teach traditional text after traditional-ol’ text, and come crawling back to the graphic novel when you can’t peel your students away from the television and computer screen as they desperately seek ways to practice their visual literacy skills. The point is, whether we give students the opportunity to practice visual literacy in classrooms or not, they are going to seek out and encounter visual texts on their own anyway. Now, we could leave them to their own devices, and let them find and use their own strategies for understanding the visual texts that inundate their everyday lives, or we can guide them to critical readings and analyses of these texts, just as we guide them into critical reading and analyses of traditional texts. Why not show students that even a TV show is a text, a text ripe for questioning like any other text they’re used to seeing in English class? Take those close readings, those understandings of symbolism, irony, paradox, and ambiguity; take those deconstruction methods; take those contextualization skills, and apply them to Will Eisner’s texts as well as Will Shakespeare’s! That’s all I’m saying! (Except that I’m also about to say that reading comics takes those skills and more!)

2. Yeah, students need visual literacy skills.

I’m going to loosely define visual literacy as what it takes to make meaning of magazine ads, billboards, movies, facial expressions, hairstyles, flow-charts, tabloids, Picasso, and maps. More or less. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, in The Grammar of Visual Design, write about the ability to understand and produce “a complex interplay of written text, images and other graphic elements, and ... these elements combine[d] together into visual designs, by means of layout” (15). If you don’t teach students to read this stuff, and further, to compose this stuff, they’re not going to ask pressing questions about what they see in a world that requires them to take in and put out visual messages all day. Students who have practice with reading and manipulating visual texts will have an advantage over those who don’t. Let’s eliminate the “those who don’t” category. Students who are well-versed in visual semiotics, for example, will be able to look critically at a political debate before they vote, at advertisements for products they’re considering purchasing, at graphs they’re preparing for presentations, at their homes when they’re attempting to sell them, at clothes they’re considering wearing to job interviews, and at countless other nontraditional texts that nonetheless send messages. Pictures aren’t just for kids; they can be difficult and engaging – but not so difficult that students can’t learn their grammar. Kress and van Leeuwen observe that, “visual communication is either treated as the domain of a very small elite of specialists, or disvalued as a possible form of expression for articulate, reasoned communication, seen as a ‘childish’ stage one grows out of.” Word. (/Picture.) So comics can be eschewed from the language arts classroom as a way to ask students to grow out of their old picture books, or they can be held off as art teachers’ territory. Or, language arts teachers could embrace the opportunity that comics give them to draw on students’ prior experience with their childhood picture books and build into reading images using complex reading strategies. I’ll take what’s behind door number three, please!

3. All texts are visual, but comics are ultra-visual, and therefore better.

When we read any written text, we see the ink on the page, we process the arrangement of ink, and we make meaning from that arrangement. But check this out [image of traditional text], and check this out [image of Palestine]. Teach comic books and teach sequencing (McCloud 5), juxtaposition (7), iconography (26), closure (95), composition of space, time, change, and memory (115), synaesthtics (123), interdependency (149); give students the opportunity to think critically about what’s language and what’s art; what’s both (164). What could happen to students who don’t learn to read and write visually? I’d rather not think about it. But for the sake of going there, here’s what might happen:

4. Students might not learn to scrutinize essentialism if they don’t learn how to read comics.

Cat – it’s the ultimate classroom example for understanding deconstruction (Parker 54). When you have the word cat, Parker explains, "you can imagine a reference to the familiar domestic feline, or to a hugely inconsistent range of felines, domestic and wild, living and extinct. It can also refer to a bulldozer, a stylish man, any of several different colleges of advanced technology, the act of masculine philandering (catting around), a backbiting woman, a catfish, a CAT scan, a catalytic converter, and so on through a long and continuously evolving list of other meanings" (54).

In more technical terms, one signifier, cat, has multiple signifieds, all of the above. But when you’ve got [an image of “the familiar domestic feline”], the bulldozer possibility becomes a little less probable. A more problematic example? Signifer: woman. Signified: [image of a stereotypically feminine woman]. Now what? McCloud goes on and on about how cool the “universality of cartoon imagery” is because “the more cartoony a face is, for instance, the more people it could be said to describe” (31). Read: the more cartoony a signifier gets, the more we can make generalizations about the signified. Which would seem rather limiting. Except that I have this theory of the wink.

The wink: ;-)

The wink is a visual icon for “I’m kidding/I’m just playing/I’m being a little facetious here” (For the purposes of this text, I’ll refrain from deconstructing ;-) into “Come hither,” “Hey, kiddo,” “You know what I’m sayin, dawg?,” “My eye’s twitching,” etc. – or at least I’ll refrain from doing so outside of these parentheses.) So: given that the production of a text involves an innumerable set of choices (this-word-or- that, this-character-trait-or-that, this-event-or-that – or that or that or that), and given that comics bring together words and pictures and therefore multiply the range of choices by this-image-or-that, this-line-or-that, this-color-or-that, this-size-space-or-that (– or that or that or that), comics texts, even when they seem to send irreconcilably essentialist messages (i.e. This is what a woman looks like; this is what a Black person looks like; this is what God looks like), can wink at readers, can signify nuance.

They can wink at readers, that is, if readers know how to and so wish to make eye-contact with the text, get intimately critical with that text. When the reader is aware of the text’s creation process, that is, the set of innumerable choices the creator made, s/he can look for and find instances of textual ;-)ing. Paulo Freire might have called this ;-)-search in the classroom a type of “problem-posing education [that] involves a constant unveiling of reality... striv[ing] for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality” (68). And when students do that, there’s nothing absolutely wrong with using a problematic text. In fact, it’s useful. In one of her many works on the importance of prioritizing critical literacy in English language arts classrooms, Hilary Janks “uses critical discourse analysis to show that [certain advertisements put out by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)], designed to dispose us kindly to refugees, are premised on a discourse of sameness that constructs difference negatively” (1). She goes on in this article to deconstruct this discourse of sameness communicated by both images and written text in one of the advertisements:

In Spot the refugee, an obvious place to begin is with the opening instruction, prominent because it is printed in capital letters in a large bold font. This is the only command in a text that is otherwise made up of statements. If you respond to this imperative by looking carefully at the lego figures, trying to find the one that stands out as a refugee, the text has already constructed you as someone who thinks of refugees as visibly different. If you refuse this construction, but are nevertheless intrigued by the juxtaposition of lego dolls and refugees, you may start reading the text. If you then look for the refugee in the Fourth row, second from the left. The one with the moustache, you will nevertheless have been reeled in by the text, only to discover that you have been cheated, because—

The unsavoury looking character you’re looking at is more likely to be your average
neighbourhood slob with a grubby vest and a weekend’s stubble on his chin. And the real refugee could just as easily be the clean-cut fellow on his left.

In addition, you will have been constructed as someone who assumes that refugees look like “unsavoury”, unshaved “slobs”. And because you are now someone who sees refugees as both different from and inferior to you, you need to learn that “clean-cut” refugees are just like you and me. But do not worry, the UNHCR is there to set us straight. (Janks 4-5)

In this example, what Janks implies but doesn’t explicitly state is how the images of the lego dolls don’t just reinforce the messages in the visual text, but are rather an integral element of the text as a whole. (Incidentally, same thing goes for comics.) The advertisement overtly commands viewers to read the lego images; this students can do, and do do, on their own every time they watch television or read a billboard. That’s where prior knowledge comes in; students are familiar with combinations of images and words. What Janks demonstrates, and what she later asks teachers to help students do, is to build on this prior knowledge by reading the advertisement critically, analyzing the ways that the lego images work with the words to alienate and stigmatize refugees even as the UNHCR purports to do the opposite.

If more students learned to look for and recognize ;-)ing texts in the ways that Janks proposes, then maybe those students would have less trouble deconstructing pervasive images like this [Bush with the Mission Accomplished banner]. What’s wrong with literacy education when students’ can’t or aren’t asking what’s wrong (or right?) with this picture? Nothing un-fixable; just teach comics!

Okay, wait. Sure, you could work to “unveil reality,” as Freire suggests, within a word-only text, but using comics to do so is way better because comics more obviously reinforce metacognition. The very form of a comic text challenges an alphabetic text in the way that critically literate persons challenge every text. When a comic means “woman” and draws a human figure wearing a dress, the comic lays down essentialist content in an essentialist form. Once students learn the grammar of visual semiotics (eg. how does one communicate “woman” with an image), then practicing that visual grammar by reading comics lets them practice their pointing and jeering at the essentialization of what it means, or looks like, to be, for example, a woman. Or if you prefer critical consideration to pointing and jeering, that could work, too. Word-only texts invite these types of critical considerations also, I know. But compared to comics that lay it all out there for the reader, for better of worse, in an image-laden and therefore familiar form, word-only texts start to seem a little dodgy. You get a text from your friend Keisha, for example, that reads “How’s it hangin?” and you might reply “Can’t complain. What’s up with you?” If Keisha clarifies her message, though, by sending a picture of the Matisse she just bought and mounted, you might more helpfully reply, “It’s upside down.” For students learning to read critically, comics are more accessibly interpretable because of the fact that they employ a pictoral vocabulary that more often than not shows the reader what they mean more statically and universally than do words with their multiple meanings.

5. Um, students are already reading comics (or comics-like texts) anyway. Use that.

And not just as a ploy to “make school fun.” No, play the game. Meet those standards. Remember at the beginning of this rant when I warned that your students are already taking in combinations of images and texts in infinite multiplicities? (Okay, well actually I said, “Go ahead and teach traditional text after traditional-ol’ text, and come crawling back to the graphic novel when you can’t peel your students away from the television and computer screen as they desperately seek ways to practice their visual literacy skills.”) Let me reiterate that. Students are interested in comics. In his introduction to Building Literacy Connections with Graphic Novels: Page By Page, Panel By Panel, James Bucky Carter cites study after study that affirms the use of comics in the classroom as valuable tools for practicing Freire’s reality unveil-ation with students who are reluctant readers, reluctant writers, English language learners, and also, um, any student who spends any time engaging with our visually-saturated pop culture. Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher, in the same volume, submit convincing anecdotal evidence to this accord: Comics, they write, “provided a visual vocabulary of sorts for scaffolding writing techniques, particularly dialogue, tone, and mood,” and that they “afforded [them] a space to provide students with instruction on the craft and mechanics of writing” (143). Finally, their students “not only became better writers, but also better consumers of ideas and information” (143). In short, by using texts, or textual formats, with which students already feel familiar, language arts teachers can affirm the knowledge and skills that students already have as a way of motivating them to learn and acquire more knowledge and skills.

So it goes that (1) if comics give teachers a way to teach language (and) arts as a broad system of representation that (2) build visual literacy which is (3) an essential skill that (4) invites students to practice critical literacy, and that (5) makes that type of literacy accessible to all students*, then not teaching comics disallows all of the above and therefore condemns students to the festering status quo.

* I'm not sure how to accommodate a graphic novel, nor therefore this text, to the literacy needs of students with visual impairments that inhibit their abilities to see a text. I'm not not thinking about this; I just haven't come up with anything yet.

tormented soul

The public transportation system in C-U has been running an ad campaign for a while now that features various bus drivers, each with a photo and a personal tidbit enlarged and slapped on the sides of the buses. I kinda like it; it feels really community-grounded, or something. Anyway, I saw one this morning on my way to class that said something along the lines of "Four years with MTD, father of three, writes jingles in his spare time."

Now, in his photo, the guy looks pretty well-adjusted. But I can't help thinking that with a little embellishment, this guy sounds like a great protagonist for a short story or something. Methodically driving around a relatively small town on the same route everyday, eternally tormented by catchy little diddies that run through his head incessantly. He can write them down and sell them and try to move on from them, but there's always a new jingle playing in his mind... "I gotta get to the autopark! The O'Brien Autopark" (People in C-U might know which jingle I'm referring to.) And he's good at it, so there's always some local company willing to pay him for a new one. And he hears his work on the radio as he's driving around, but even when he's not driving, he's constantly hearing radio jingles. He tries listening to other music, but once it's done playing, he remembers it cheesier. Like the KidzBop versions of already overly-catchy pop songs.

famous friends

A fellow former-dancer friend of mine called me a while ago to tell me that some of the girls from around here who are still dancing had filmed this commercial this summer. I mainly think it's hilarious. Irish dance in the year 2000. But impressive! Nice work, ladies!

WTF

I leave town for just a few months and come back to find this most ridiculous display of tax-payers'-money-spending I've seen in a while.

I mean, come on. There are not words for this: