Friday Round Up

In the New York Times:

Russian soldiers who have died in Ukraine challenge the endorsed Russian narrative that Russian soldiers are not involved in Ukraine.

Another article about Why Poor Students Struggle that would work well with the articles I talked about in the text set this week.

Violence is what the NHL sells, so why are people surprised when players are also violent off the field?

From NPR:

Shonda Rhimes has been in the news this week because the NYT called her "angry black woman." I like Rhimes and her shows and I think Linda Holmes from NPR, who interviews her here, is an astute and careful writer. Her take on this situation is well done.

Bringing together two of my favorite thingsvolcanoes and Iceland.

Recommendation: A Few Seconds of Panic

My first experience reading a Stefan Fatsis book was truly enlightening. I picked up Word Freak on a whim or on a recommendation of a friend. I love words, I rarely play Scrabble, but I am compulsively competitive. Fatsis looked at this world of freaks and geeks and not just wrote his way in, but also played his way in. I was charmed.

When A Few Seconds of Panic came out, I had almost decided to give it a pass. Not my thing. I do not care about professional sports at all. But after hearing Scott Simon interview Fatsis I was intrigued. Like Word Freak Fatsis did not merely write about the NFL, he became a part of it.

Full disclaimer: my own upbringing taught me the basics of football from the sidelines. Friday Night Lights could have been about my town, minus the Texas-ness of it all. In college, I chose a school that had a weak sports program, nor did any of the schools near my alma mater field a football team at all. My antipathy towards football is, in actuality, more of an abhorrence. Yet this book was fully engaging to me.

What surprised me about this book was the nuanced and even-handed way Fatsis addresses professional athletics. He shows the pre-season training camp as grueling and the general player as a hardworking journeyman with only a few years shot at a career with pay that is not as great as billed. The portrait is extremely sympathetic.

For your students who are convinced that they will be a professional athlete, their minds will be blown by this account. Athletes are shown to be intelligent, hardworking, talented, and, for the majority, vulnerable to the vagaries of the marketplace. For the record, another way to blow their minds around this topic is to share the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook for Athletes and Sports Competitors. According to the BLS they will make on average $40,000 a year and there are fewer than 15,000 of them in the US. By comparison, High school teachers make an average $55,000 and there are 955,000 jobs according to the same data. Let them sit with that. High school teachers on average make more than professional athletes. Of course, the highest paid athletes make significantly more than the highest paid high school teachers.

For a taste of the book, check out the first chapter which is available at NYT.

Quick Bit: Yo-Yo Ma from On Being

I am finally catching up on some of the podcasts that I usually follow. Yo-Yo Ma's interview with Krista Tippet on On Being is absolutely fantastic. Of course he is a genius and fascinating; to hear the whole podcast go here: podcast

I did want to share this snippet from the podcast, though. Ma asserts:

"Yeah. Good music. Look, or any type of music can be part of good music in the sense that — but I'm not even saying good music. I'm saying good musicians would be able to, you know, to compose, to improvise, to be virtuosic in what they do, and can easily absorb other influences and make it organically their own. So that, you know, new influences are embedded. So there's the process of constant growth. And then, finally, the last quality would be the musician that actually is able to transfer — to inject all of their knowledge and give it to somebody else so that they can actually look at the world and figure it out for themselves without the first musician being there — so it's a process of birth. It's a process of constant cultural rebirth."

I love this! I love that for Ma, mastery is not about merely replicating but it's about generating. In other words, to be educated means to be a person who takes new information, allows it to influence what you already know how to do and transmits that understanding to others. I would love, as a teacher, to aspire to the same.

Recommendation: Stiff

Mary Roach's book, Stiff, freaked me out. I was teaching middle school at a K-12 span school, and the cover, with it is perfectly beautifully buffed foot and toe tag was just too much to handle. But one of the high school teachers at my school taught the book and recommended it. I didn't read it at the time because I was in the middle of a multi-year run of Young Adult work, but when I began teaching nonfiction, I remembered the teacher and picked it back up.

Mary Roach's books (and her website, which features a cockroach crawling along the page) are not for the faint of heart.

Indeed, Stiff is an examination of what happens to cadavers in our society -- what uses we have for bodies that only the dead can fulfill. In some ways, it's a love note to eccentric and the bizarre and it's definitely not for those easily squicked. It is laugh-aloud funny, though. You catch yourself giggling, perhaps in horror, at her description of maggots or of heads-in-trays. It might make you question your own taste.

Roach is part of the story, though definitely more of a periphery figure. This is a book that unfolds with information and you can treat it episodically. If the chapter on cadavers as medicinal food before lunch seems a bad ideas to you, skip it! No harm in reading around.

If you are teaching this book, consider talking about the modes of writing she uses, how she uses them, and the effect of transitioning between historical information, definition, classification and argument. The best non-narrative nonfiction deals with a variety of modes (narrative nonfiction tends to be almost entirely sequential or descriptive, much like novels). Why do the modes matter? For inexperienced readers, the writers' purpose. With nonfiction, it's not enough to recognize that an author's purpose might be to inform or to persuade. Apt readers also begin to recognize that writers may use definition or classification as a way to establish criteria or to clarify what is being discussed and how. They should also know that explanation, in a larger sense, supports a writer's ability to argue for or against something. Knowing the specific purpose of smaller sections allows students to create a filter to understand what they are reading.

Stiff lends itself to this modal analysis because Roach is so adept at interweaving modes together. Moreover, her entire book is an argument, albeit a subtle one. If you are teaching her book and would like some ideas on what questions to ask, the Norton Reading Guide gives you a general place to start.

Recommendation: "Will Portland Always Be a Retirement Community for the Young?"

Last week I was scrolling through what felt like the entire internet looking for a bit of entertainment. Does that ever happen to you? You feel like you've read or seen everything that there could possibly be of interest, that perhaps you have actually reached the end of the internet?

While I battled back that sense of boredom and despondency that follows this revelation, I reloaded the New York Times and saw Claire Cain Miller's, "Will Portland Always Be A Retirement Community for the Young?" With tongue planted firmly in cheek, this article examines some of the reasons why Portland is an outlier in how cities have grown and changed in the past couple of decades. (Spoiler alert: there is a surplas of college grads, unlike many other urban areas which actively try to seek the same in order to drive their economies).

What I love about this piece is the artful use of structure to help create Miller's argument. She starts focusing on a personal anecdote, then expands to a city-wide perspective, then to a national one. Then she zooms back in, going back to city-wide then back to personal, ending the first section with a rhetorical question. What I love about those first 6 paragraphs is the elegant and balanced way that such a structure emphasizes the problem, allowing for easy comparison. Often, emerging writers will create a point/counterpoint structure for comparison, but here we have the sense of spiraling, of sort of that medieval interlocking spheres as a way of highlighting how enmeshed the problems are.

The shift in the article occurs when Miller posits, "Portland’s residents may, as the saying goes, want to keep their city weird. But do they want to keep it broke too?" Emerging writers often rely on the crutch of starting with a question. They do so dogmatically and often artlessly often asking something as pat as "Have you ever wondered why...." Here, though, you have a writer in full command of how to use that question to turn the article on its heel as well as to advance her own argument.

The next portion of the writing concerns itself with historical trends, starting with national trends then looking at those relating directly to Portland by comparison. This structure is a more common way of handling comparison, yet it's well done here and definitely emphasizes her point that Portland may be at risk of the "the amenity paradox, [which] refers to cities where the same amenities that attract people end up eroding what made a city desirable in the first place."

The article then ends on a tonal note that is, as the College Board might say, complicated. Throughout the article, there is a sense of gentle mockery that Miller tries to lessen by parenthetical phrases admitting to her own personal experience having lived in Portland. While she uses the stereotypes of "designers and baristas" and "kombucha brewing" as coded language for hipsters, she generally sticks to the psuedo-academic tone that relies on studies, experts and statistics. This use of emotionally distant language slips in the last paragraph where she notes that as economic trends change people will be compelled to move to less cool cities, "the ones that people move to when it’s time to become an adult." The implication, obviously, is that for now Portland is a haven for, as her example shows, 35-year-olds playacting at adulthood while holding decidedly non-adult jobs. In some ways, she seems to buy into an argument that the hipsters she decries would inherently object, that is that adulthood comes with decent and steady incomes, health insurance and a tidy 401K.

Moreover, the last sentence which declares that when such a shift a happens, "Portland will find out who the true believers really are." Again the implication is that those who live in Portland now, who are intent on keeping Portland weird are cult-like, or at the very least, irrational in their devotion.

Definitely a fun article to teach since it is easily accessible while still full of examples of interesting rhetorical moves. Most importantly it might serve as a very nice model for student writing with some patterns that would be easy to replicate.

(As a footnote, as an avid nonfiction reader online, I often find myself reading things that elicit hundreds of comments. There is no quicker way to kill your kind view of humanity than to read comments on the internet. Why is that? And why do I still do it? I do find the comments at NYT and to a lesser extent NPR for the most part thoughtful, but at the end of the day, I still think what is wrong with people?)

Recommendation: Text Set on Life after Graduation

One of the units I have been teaching has been adapted from the CSU Expository Reading and Writing Course Curriculum. This course was originally intended to help produce students who are able to place into English 101 and to be otherwise ready for the heavy reading and writing demands that college places on matriculating students.

This unit is all about what comes after graduation. I won't talk about everything, but I do want to point out two long-form texts I teach and one short piece, as well as some other places to pull some interesting information.

If you are looking to get juniors and seniors to contemplate what makes college students successful, I'd highly recommend what Karen Lopez, a teacher in the William S. Hart Senior High School in Valencia recommended to us. Karen is a trainer for ERWC. She recommended the wonderful introduction of Jim Burke's School Smarts. Burke is a renowned and award-winning teacher, but in this introduction, he writes about his confusion and bafflement in school, where he grappled with understanding not only the purpose of learning, but the "culture, language, and customs of this strange new country called School." The voice in the piece is wonderful and there are couple of beautiful syntactical moves (including this great conditional sentence that starts with "I'd like to be able to tell you....") and students, or at least mine, immediately identify with it.

This piece is quite wonderful when paired with a New York Times article titled, Who Gets to Graduate? This lengthy but engaging article predominantly focuses on a program at University of Texas that works on retaining and supporting first-generation college students. One reason I find the article and the intro so interesting is that both deal with the idea that there are bigger reasons than just economics that make it difficult for kids from lower income families to graduate. It's not just college tuition, but there are some things that are not taught in the classroom the directly translate into school success in college. Leaning to navigate higher ed, in other words, is daunting and more difficult than learning to navigate kindergarten or middle school or high school. There is an entire culture of school that might look different than anything else you have experienced so far and you are expected to do it alone.

The charts in the New York Times piece are worth spending time on too. I spent several moments discussing what the first chart about SAT score and grad rates by income level really said and then we looked at the shorter text, which is an the October 2013 issue of Postsecondary Opportunities. I'm not sure where I found the original citation to this (perhaps the College Board's "Education Pays?" report?), but the chart on the front is striking. Only 8% of students from families in the lowest income quartile will graduate with a bachelor's degree before age 24, while over 80% of students from the highest income quartile will. Wonder about one of the roots of income inequality. BAM. There it is.

These are not the only articles I teach in this unit, but they are ones that I am interested in, sometimes for the quality of writing or the interesting ideas. I'll post more in the Faculty Lounge with ideas on what I do with all of this.

What do you all read about college that you find interesting?