What I Learned Today

In Profiling a Book Collection, middle-school librarian Julia B. Chambers discussed a content survey she and some volunteers did of the school’s collection, along with some preliminary results. I wasn’t terribly surprised by her observation that

“Our protagonists are mostly Caucasian and more likely female, with only three in the entire collection demonstrating gender questioning or ambiguity. Two-thirds of our collection feature characters from middle- or high-income families (of which almost all are nuclear in structure). And most of our literary characters are straight (only 13 books featured LBGTQ characters.)”

I don’t know whether these demographics are representative of The Athenian School in Danville, California, where Julia serves as librarian, or whether it’s representative of the available books out there, or whether any of that really matters. Selecting books for a library collection is a non-trivial task, with any number of competing philosophies urging one heuristic or another.

But then she started talking about race. And race in the context of fantasy:

“At quick glance, most of our titles featuring African American characters are historical fiction with themes of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, or Civil Rights struggles. The black Harry Potters are simply not there.”

Who *are* the black Harry Potters? I racked my brain to try to come up with any non-Caucasian wizard-type protagonists in any books I’ve ever read. I came up with two, neither of whom are black:

• Kit Rodriguez (Hispanic) from Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series
• Ged (“red-brown skin”) from Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series

Do magic-wielding youth from other cultures and ethnicities truly not exist? Or are they chronicled in books written in other languages, enjoyed by those with the ability to read them, but locked away from those who can fluently read only English, until the glittering hand of some translator should set them free?

Do share the non-Caucasian wizarding books I’ve overlooked, forgotten, or not yet encountered.

When are you most engaged and inspired to learn something new? Thomas and Brown, in their book “A New Culture of Learning,” argue that play is a powerful setting, and motivator, and facilitator for learning. Sitting down to a new board game, exploring an online MMORPG, experimenting to find the best baseball swing — these are all settings that push you to integrate new information and also to explore the limits of what’s possible. What happens if I click there?

These are also settings that seem incompatible with the form that our public education currently takes.

Thomas and Brown sing the praises of the “new culture of learning,” which they define as unlimited access to information (i.e., the Internet) combined with an environment that allows for “unlimited agency to build and explore within boundaries.” Agency enables exploration and discovery, and the boundaries serve as spurs to imagination. Similarly, constrained art forms like the sonnet or haiku can provide boundaries that inspire new creations. Thomas and Brown also use the word “culture” deliberately, and not in the sense that probably first came to mind: think bacterial culture in a petri dish, something that grows through cultivation.

And in Chapter 2, something more radical emerges.

“For most of the twentieth century our educational system has been built on the assumption that teaching is necessary for learning to occur,” Thomas and Brown assert.

Wow. Yes! If a teacher is absent from the classroom, we assume that learning grinds to a halt, and that it is only through the teacher’s intervention that the students will learn anything. Yet a moment’s consideration raises a multitude of counter-examples. Have you ever read a wikipedia article out of curiosity? Watched a Youtube video to learn how to make mitered borders on a quilt? Tinkered with Legos to see how tall a tower you can build? Tried a new route to work to determine whether it’s a shorter commute? Invented a variation on a recipe? Read this blog to Learn Something New?

We are learning all the time, with or without teachers.

Thomas and Brown characterize our current view of learning as “mechanistic” in that “learning is treated as a series of steps to be mastered” in which “the goal is to learn as much as you can, as fast as you can.” That doesn’t sound so bad. In fact, the idea of an organized curriculum, a progression of easy to hard, sounds quite attractive to me. But it rests on some unstated assumptions that just might not be valid:

1. That all knowledge *can* be organized in a logical series of steps. Is this true of every field?
2. That the same organization of knowledge works equally well for everyone.
3. That knowledge doesn’t change much over time. (Otherwise the curriculum would be in constant need of revision.)

Thomas and Brown discuss #3 in their book. The first two are mine, and I think both assumptions are suspect.

What can we do instead?

Thomas and Brown suggest viewing learning in terms of an “environment” (the boundaries mentioned before). The learning culture emerges from the environment in which people operate, and they learn through engagement in that world (not by being externally instructed). Learners are not constantly required to prove that they “get it” but can instead embrace what they don’t know and keep asking questions and exploring.

I am reminded of the critique of education levied by Sir Ken Robinson in 2010, brilliantly illustrated by RSA Animate (“Changing Education Paradigms”):

It gets especially relevant around 6:30 when he discusses the historical evolution of our approach to public education and how influenced it has been by the industrial revolution. What was most striking to me was the point about how we educate children in “batches” by age. Really, does this ever make any sense?

Moving to an emphasis on the environment and play opens up entirely new approaches to learning. It also places more responsibility on the learner: to be active, to explore, to prioritize his or her own learning. This is a natural outcome to reach as an adult, free of the pressures of obligatory schooling — yet so often we are consumed with life maintenance that we do not carve out time for learning or for play.

Thomas and Brown suggested that this is, or at least has been, a natural shift in priorities. They argue that historically, as children grew up, the world seemed more stable with age. People figured out how the world worked, and then could settle into a mostly static view of the world and the best strategies for interacting with it. But they argue that today, the amount of change (driven by technological advances) renders this strategy less successful.

It’s certainly not new to claim that today’s citizens experience a higher rate of change than those in the past. However, this is the first time I’ve seen a prescription for coping that encourages, effectively, more play. “Embrace change,” Thomas and Brown advocate. Open your arms, and your mind, to a rich environment that provides endless chances for learning and growth.

I will quibble slightly with one of their claims. I don’t think it’s uniquely the Internet that makes this kind of endless learning possible. Some people manufacture a learning environment wherever they go, constantly wondering “how does that work?” and “why does it look that way?” and “could I make one myself?” It’s all already there, anytime you want it.

Play on!

The thesis of this book (“Reading like a Writer,” by Francine Prose) is simple, yet powerful: an excellent way to improve your writing is simply to read. Read those who’ve perfected particular skills and learn to emulate them.

The book tours through various aspects of writing (fiction), such as narration, voice, character, dialogue, etc. Each topic is covered like a mini-instructional lecture, and all of the points are illustrated with excerpts from great writers: Austen, Fitzgerald, Woolf, Chandler, and many others I did not recognize. In fact, reading this book is like being treated to an elite buffet: small samplings of absolutely stand-out writing, enough to make you hungry for more in a delightful way.

The down side of reading this book is that any other work you read concurrently suffers greatly by comparison. My apologies to Tad Williams, who is the unlucky author of the moment. :)

So far, here are some of the lessons I’ve gleaned:

• Put every word on trial. Cut away everything that you can, and leave the bones to gleam in solo eloquence.
• Employ “close reading”: consider each word that exists in the final version you’re reading. Why might the author have made those particular choices? Observe how, for masterful writers, each word conveys just the right information, and a slightly different word would have a different effect.
• Some people avoid “classics” because they fear such books will make them feel stupid. Prose says, “But I’ve always found that the better the book I’m reading, the smarter I feel.”
• With regard to the common advice to “show, don’t tell”: “This causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out . . . when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language.” That is, “telling” is okay if you do it in vibrant, precise ways.
• Grammar is like etiquette. The writer is the host, the reader is the guest, and the writer should make the reader feel at home.
• Keep a stack of books that contain, in your view, truly great sentences. Flip through them occasionally for inspiration.
• To shape a paragraph, and decide where breaks should occur, think of each one as inhaling at the beginning and exhaling at the end.
• When deciding on the point of view from which your story will be told, ask yourself not only who is speaking, but who is listening? Why is the story being told? (I found this quite intriguing and realized that for a lot of books, even ones I like, I couldn’t answer these questions.)
• Establish a personality for the narrator through voice, diction, opinions.
• Good dialogue always has a subtext. Those speaking may have multiple motivations, and these may not manifest directly in what they say.
• Conversation can advance the plot.
• In reality, conversation is plagued with inattention and miscommunication. Don’t let fictional conversation be too perfect.

A desire has been growing in me for some time now to pick up a little Latin. And now with the spring semester at a close, I jumped at the chance to browse some beginning Latin books at the library.

The one I took home with me is “Teach Yourself Beginner’s Latin.” It starts out very basic and has you reading simple Latin from the first chapter. (By “simple” I mean “Dick and Jane” level, but far more interesting, as it discusses the antics of a monk and his mule in the woods.) Despite its simplicity, the feeling of accomplishment is satisfying. Mulus equos non amat. “The mule does not like the horses.” The book jumps right in with declensions (nominative, accusative, and ablative) but, curiously, reserves introducing gender for a few chapters later. So far, it feels comfortingly similar, yet intriguingly different, from my previous studies of French, Spanish, and Italian.

Once I gain some basic reading ability, I will want something to read. That is, something within a beginner’s reach, which probably rules out Tacitus.

My local library contains, to my surprise, two children’s books that have been translated into Latin: Tela Charlottae (Charlotte’s Web) and Winnie Ills Pu (Winnie the Pooh). The former is in juvenile non-fiction, while the latter is in adult non-fiction, due either to inconsistency or some guideline I have not yet grasped. The Library School won’t let me take Cataloguing to find out, until I take some required database class this fall! The non-fiction designation alone puzzled me, until I realized that these books are next to annotated or scholarly versions of various children’s (fiction) literature, so I guess a translation is similar in spirit.

There are also some good pointers to online materials for beginning Latin readers. This list led me to a delightful 1933 text called Cornelia, which is designed with a progressive vocabulary that makes a point of encouraging you to learn words by context as they are encountered. From the Author’s “Foreward to Pupils”:

Salvete, discipuli. This is the story of a little American girl named Cornelia. Her life was different from yours, but not very different. You will readily understand the things that she did. I hope that you will like her and that you will enjoy the adventure of finding out about her in a language that is not your own. Valete, discipuli.

Benigne, magistra!

At sea for ten months. What would you take on your Kindle?

Sailors in the 1800s, of course, had no such luxury.

The American Seamen’s Friend Society, starting in 1837, took it upon itself to package up book collections and ship them out on as many sailing vessels as possible. By 1930, they had distributed 30,040 libraries, which could be exchanged for a new set when the content was exhausted. Each library contained about 40 books, mostly religious or focused on self improvement.

Sailors wrote back with reports on the libraries they received. Here is one example:

“No. 3,095. — Books all read; ‘Four Pillars of Temperance,’ ‘Laurence Monroe,’ ‘Light on the Ocean,’ ‘Blind Tom,’ and ‘Alcohol’ were most read. The last named book I read aloud to the crew, with delightful results. All signed the pledge. The books have been a great blessing; better send ‘Alcohol’ in every library. It is just the thing for sailors.” — A. Morrill, Capt. schr. W.H.Rogers.

Because they were commonly provided in a standard wooden box, painted red, the libraries came to be known as “Little Red Box Libraries.” One has to wonder if there is any connection to today’s DVD provider, Redbox. I wasn’t able to dig up any details on how the company selected its name to find out. I wonder!