reading aloud + used books = reading used books aloud

I've been thinking a lot today about what's going on when someone reads aloud, and specifically when one reads aloud and other people are listening. It keeps coming up today. In one class, while going through some hypothetical lessons to be taught in correlation with Moises Kaufman and The Techtonic Theater Project's The Laramie Project, a few of my classmates read from the play's Moments. Now, the lesson activity they were reading for wasn't necessarily about giving voice to the words or anything like that. But it was pretty powerful, even as a side note to the objective of the lesson.

Then in another class, we learned that students with learning disabilities tend to comprehend a text more adequately when they hear it read by a fluent reader than when reading it silently themselves or when they "sound it out." So there's another qualification to the kind of "reading aloud" to which I'm devoting this blog space: Not only am I talking specifically about reading aloud to (a) listener/s, it's also gotta sound good. What does "sound good" mean though?

Later in the afternoon, I happened to catch the first twenty-five minutes or so of a poetry reading by Natasha Tretheway who won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Now that woman can read aloud.

But I'm having trouble describing exactly what I think is happening when someone reads aloud to an audience, and does so well*, that I'm finding so exciting.

Whereas in the above paragraphs I was writing about reading aloud, in the rest of this entry I'm going to write about reading books that have been used by other readers**. I'm talking books that have been checked out of the library before I've checked them out specifically, but also books that are purchased "Used."

I'm currently in the middle of reading an essay from a book I got from the library. Actually, I'm reading a copy of the essay that I made today because I wanted to be able to take notes on the text, and it's impolite to write in library books. Except that someone already wrote in this one. And I'm having a lot of fun comparing what s/he underlined to what I think is striking enough to underline, seeing what s/he starred, etc. (The fascinating-ness of comparing our two sets of markings of what's important gets even deeper when considering the topic of the essay, which is a critical examination of evaluation and value; how do we decide that a text is valuable?)

I'm not sure what I make of this either. Other than thinking, "Coooool."



*well: a relative term meaning I'm not sure what
**This sentence is an example of something that writers call a transition***
***This clarification is an example of something writers call a footnote

Flattering!

I'm in love with his brain.

I'm in the throes of a pretty intense mind-crush on Prof. H. Samy Alim at UCLA who writes about, among other things, linguistic profiling, race and racism, education, systems of power, and (of course, right Didi?) Black Language and Hip-Hop Culture.

Seriously, he's so cool. I'm channeling Brian Johnson of John Hughes' The Breakfast Club in the scene where Bender's sitting on the railing in the library, methodically tearing pages out of a book. Andy accuses him, "That's real intelligent," and then Bender mockingly whines, "You're right. It's wrong to destroy literature. It's so fun to read. And... MO-LAY really pumps my nads." Claire corrects him, "It's Moliere." And that's where Brian's line comes in, and incidentally, where I end my gratuitous Breakfast Club quoting and get back to my original point, "I love his work."

Seriously. A favorite point of mine from his article "Hearing What's Not Said and Missing What Is: Black Language in White Public Space"? At the risk of over-simplifying his argument, I'd probably pull this series of poignant questions:

Why is it that, despite ample evidence from sociolinguistic studies and theory that different speech communities possess different, yet theoretically equivalent, linguistic rules and rules of language use, [Black Language] and linguistic practices continue to be denigrated and underappreciated by Whites, particularly in educational institutions? What is at the root of this denigration and misinterpretation? How is that ideology and practice of linguistic supremacy -- the unsubstantiated notion that White linguistic norms are inherently superior to the linguistic norms of other communities, and the practice of mapping White norms into 'the language of school,' 'the language of economic mobility,' and 'the language of success' -- persists, even within the subjugated group? What is the role of communicative misunderstanding in maintaining and perpetuating tensions between communities? How do we understand communicative differences not as the source of tensions but as a means of perpetuating and reinforcing those tensions? how do we move beyond searching for communicative mismatches to explain intercultural tensions and conflicts that already exist due to the larger and systematic social, political, and economic subjugation of a group? Or worse yet... will greater knowledge of communicative differences be used for or against justice?

And in close second:

'What are you saying, Alim -- are you proposing that teachers should not teach 'standard English''? Here's what I'm proposing. First and foremost, we must begin with an understanding that there is nothing standard about 'standard English.' Standard simply means that this is the language variety that those in authority have constructed as the variety needed to gain access to resources. What we have, then, for a 'standard' in the US is nothing short of the imposition of White linguistic norms and ways of speaking in the service of granting access to resources to Whites and denying those same resources to as many others as possible, including poor Whites (linguistic supremacy goes for varieties of a language as well as languages other than the dominating language, whatever that may be).

If I was in the habit of using emoticons, which I'm not, I'd probably use something with a kissy-face, or that's blushing, or sighing.

Also: Um, today's NatGeo Photo of the Day? Very cool.

odd.

Play them both at the same time, but hit play on the bottom one first.