Literature and the Internet

I have been attempting to clear out the backlog of un-listened to podcasts. Last week, I decided to work through On Being, which I love 50% of the time. Krista Tippet had interviewed Maria Popova, the woman behind Brain Pickings, which is a blog that I need to read more often because it challenges my thinking whenever I do read it. There are so many ideas worth discussing that Popova brings up, but the one that really blew my mind was around literature.

MS. TIPPETT: I mean, I wonder — someplace you said, “Literature is the original Internet.” And I wonder if that image of your grandfather is precisely what you're describing.

MS. POPOVA: Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. And I mean, in this — I guess, seeing these books of his added a different layer of understanding to this thing which I've been saying for a while. And originally, I meant it in the sense of — you know, you look at a book and then, in it, every footnote and allusion and reference is essentially a hyperlink to another work. Except it only works backwards. It only goes back in time, you know? And marginalia or this sort of — it goes back and forth because it is the present mind conversing with a past mind. So it's a different kind of hypertext, I guess.

I have struggled at times to explain why allusions expand a text. In one way, they are ideas building on previous ideas from, what Popova calls, the common record. Perhaps one of the greatest difficulty that inexperienced readers have is that they don't have enough experience with the common record to see how the ideas are building. The corollary is that students also have difficulty building their own ideas within their writing.

This idea of allusion as hyperlink and literature as the internet is one that has been intriguing me all week. In fact I was so excited to share it with co-worker. She also pointed out that "allusions were what you HAD to do as author -- it was about how you established your credibility to even write your work." Oh my! (Did I mention that my coworkers are amazingly smart?). Allusion then becomes a part of rhetoric, which is forcing me to reconsider some what I know about ethos.

The podcast is definitely worth an hour of listening. Another intriguing part:

POPOVA: I think a lot about this relationship between cynicism and hope. And critical thinking without hope is cynicism. But hope without critical thinking is naïveté. And I try to live in this place between the two to try to build a life there because finding fault and feeling hopeless about improving our situation produces resignation of which cynicism is a symptom and against which it is the sort of futile self-protection mechanism. But on the other hand, believing blindly that everything will work out just fine also produces a kind of resignation because we have no motive to apply ourselves toward making things better. And I think in order to survive, both as individuals and as a civilization, but especially in order to thrive, we need to bridge critical thinking with hope.

Yes. This is giving me food for thought because I've been reading Peter Elbow's work on Believing and Questioning and I'm in the middle of pondering an article around doubt for a Writing Project piece.

Serial

Okay. I absolutely admit it. I'm a Serial addict. I've loved This American Life for years and I'm loving the longer format of Serial. I won't retread all of the ground that the internet has already covered this week about how great this is (see Reddit, Slate, Vox, and pretty much any pop culture blog).

One of the things I am most struck by is that Sarah Koenig's reporting is how her journey maps onto the learning. Without fail, she talks about how she is constantly probing, looking for information that will confirm or debunk what her theories are. She exists in a state of confusion

ETA I originally started this post in November and never finished. Today the last episode of Serial was posted and I am now ready to think about teaching it. Instead of trying to sell you on why you should listen or teach this, I am going to just create a link repository of commentary I want to come back to with my students.

About the Justice System

• Serial's Big Confession My favorite explanation of why this podcast is an indictment of the justice system.
• Matt Thompson weighs in on the Justice System component
• WaPo on how Serial should have gone further in showing what's really wrong with criminal justice

Is Serial Racist?

• The Awl article that started the debate about white privilege and SK's perceived prejudice in journalism.
• The Atlantic pushes back against that claim and addresses is point by point.

Parody

• Sesame Street got into the Serial/Cereal action

Narrative Work

• An opinion piece from the Boston Globe positing why the narrative works so well. In fact, this captures what I was trying to say back in November.
• Linda Holmes on what is really an ending as it pertains to Serial

A benign review NYT Review of the ending.

Slate's podcast about Serial on the ending. Mike Pesca earlier interviewed SK and asked her not to have a lame ending and he weighs in on what he thinks about the ending. I definitely agree that it was a very satisfying ending which is tricky in a serialized nonfiction piece.

Anyhow, if you are so inclined and you have links to think pieces that you think would make good fodder for students, please comment with ideas on other companions to this for my class.

Sports and Education

I think I may have inadvertently crushed some kids' dreams this week.

The text set we worked with focused on sports and education. It started with the NYT Room for Debate set on Taking Sports Out of High School. (If you've never heard of Room for Debate, it's part of the Op-Ed section where various writers weigh in on a question). This text set turns on the question "Should high schools eliminate sports program?" Without even beginning the reading, students were inflamed by this question.

My students worked with a chart that asked that they record the writer's particular argument, the type of evidence presented with examples of the evidence. Once they had read all eight pieces, they also ranked them in order from the most enthusiastic supporter of sports in schools to the most skeptical. For the most part students were in general agreement about where writers landed on that spectrum. What I also loved about this set is how wide-ranging the reasoning for a writers' support or ambivalence was. One author focused on the positive benefits of Title IX while another author did not deride the importance of sports, but instead of focused on how sports have become overly central to school life.

These texts provided some basis for thinking about the role of sports in school and allowed students to see the diversity in thinking on this topic.

The next text, though, blew them away. Students wrote descriptive pieces on The probability of continuing in organized sports after high school. My co-worker taught an excellent lesson on how to write a graph description. She used Julie Groves' work as a basis for understanding how to translate data to text. This provoked some phenomenal thinking because this is the other piece of what we have been teaching around justification. While we spend plenty of time teaching how to attack prose work, we rarely dig in deep to think about how to read data.

What was heartbreaking, though, was how surprised students were about these numbers. For them, working hard at a sport should lead directly to fame and fortune and a professional contract. What we didn't read due to time, but I did summarize for my students was this wonderful piece in the Toronto Star about the shockingly low salaries of minor league players in Major League Baseball. The infographic midway through the page is excellent. Spoiler alert: the 5 month contract for a Class A player is $6250. Not a month, mind you, but for the entire contract. Given that, perhaps even being a professional player is not exactly renumerative either.

But of course, many who want to play at the NCAA level are not thinking about going pro. They talk of leveraging a sport into a college scholarship. This article, which I reformatted when I printed and would be happy to share if you plan on using this, from the Houston Chronicle provides a look at the myth of the college scholarship for athletes. There are many more articles like it, including one from CBS that also talks about the average dollar value of athletic scholarships that are equally accessible.

I think what my personal takeaway from this is not that schools should not have sports, but that sports participation fills a need that is separate from financial considerations. The writing we will do will look at whether the benefits of sports outweigh the limitations and costs of such programs.

As a side note, this text set would be an excellent precursor to Stefan Fatsis's book, which I write about here.

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.