Post for February 6th, 2015: The Nature of Reading

The Importance of the Act of Reading (1981)

I love Paulo Friere. I respect his work, and his writing (albeit translated) is always beautiful and fascinating. That said, I’m not exactly sure what the point of this particular speech/article was. After reading through it multiple times, the only real substantial knowledge I’ve been able to glean is that Friere encourages a reading of the world, and a democratic interaction of the classroom with the student, in order to encourage creativity and growth. Unfortunately, this doesn’t particularly expand my understanding of Friere much beyond what I already knew. Can anybody explain the ghosts?

What is Literacy? (1989?)

Anybody familiar with my academic career here at SFSU is likely familiar with my adoration of James Gee (I once dressed up as him for a class presentation, although I suspect nobody even noticed that particular event). Luckily for me, Gee’s framework of “Discourses” is fairly popular within our composition studies, leading to a number of opportunities to examine his works. In this case, Gee addresses the nature of my fundamental opposition to formalized schooling. Although Gee takes a far more tempered stance than myself, he still notes that formalized schooling (“learning”) and meta-languages have more of an impact on meta-analytical abilities than they do on performance and skills. Some would perhaps scoff, but I consider myself an academic. I revel in the meta-discussions, and deranged over-analysis of minute details is my life’s blood. But, I’m a obsessive-compulsive geek who idolizes linguists and actively seeks out learned knowledge. But, this is because I am the kind of person who is interested in deliberately and actively measuring and shaping the discourse around discourses. Were I to enter another profession outside of the field, all of my Discourse-specific language would be a cheap novelty, at best. I find this to be evidence that formalized schooling should be limited to individuals pursuing specific learned knowledge. This is, of course, where my vision departs from Gee’s, as he still heartily encourages the use of formalized schooling, just a schooling system that puts acquisition at the forefront. So, my question regarding this piece would be- where should we draw these boundary lines? Is our learning system useful enough to warrant the multi-trillion dollar infrastructure we’ve devoted to it? If not, what needs to be adjusted in regards to acquisition skills and finances?

Postscript: As something of an aside, I laughed a bit when I came to “So-called Black Vernacular English is, on structural grounds, only trivially different from Standard English by the norms of linguists accustomed to dialect differences around the world (Labov, 1972a).” (p541). This statement called to mind one of my own experiences with “acquisition” and “learning”, an experience that occurred in one of my early Comp MA classes here at SFSU. Across varying dimensions, Black Vernacular English was referenced fairly frequently in the majority of the classes I was taking. Due to the somewhat hushed and concerned tone that discussions of the dialect took on, I assumed that it was some drastic, nigh-incomprehensible shift away Standard English Vernacular, and that I wouldn’t be able to decode it. Therefore, I was rather shocked when I actually looked up Black Vernacular English, and learned what exactly it entailed. It turned out that I already was already capable of speaking Black Vernacular English, as I had acquired the majority of its rules and structures, which were encoded in various forms of pop culture that I consume(d). These differences were so simple and easy to comprehend that it had never occurred to me that anybody would find aspects of the dialect problematic.

On the Importance of Reading (2006)

Within the opening paragraph, I’m not sold on the narrative that Gioia is presenting, for a number of reasons. He emphasizes that the survey is 20x the size of a traditional survey, leading to an improvement in margin of error. Although impressive-sounding initially, anybody with experience in statistics would admit that it’s a largely irrelevant change. The traditional statistical sampling size, while certainly flawed, is used for a reason- the accuracy is more than valid enough for assessment purposes.

Going beyond such a basic quibble, the criteria used for “reader” is questionable. By the standards presented, somebody who picks up a Reader’s Digest to skim the jokes is a “reader”, whereas somebody who plays through an expansive video game containing hundreds of thousands of lines of text is a “non-reader”. Pick up a pornographic book, and you’re a “reader”. Read through a literary journal, and you’re a “non-reader”. I could elaborate further, but the facts speak for themselves.

Of course, this embarrassing system of criteria isn’t particularly surprising when you realize that Gioia is an out-of-touch old man who has happily fallen into the trap of “back in my day”. When Gioia was born, rates of illiteracy were 30x higher than they are currently. Across the decades, literacy skills have improved in all demographics of United States citizens, including a noticeable boost in qualitative reasoning. (See the links at the end of this section. I normally would embed them, but I found I actually get better follow-through when I make the links separate.)

Before I start this next set of criticisms, I would like to remind the audience at this time that Dana Gioia is (barring some unknown hideous financial choices) a multi-millionaire who was serving as the Chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts when he produced this text. Criticizing the lack of sophistication in modern culture, Gioia notes that “[he] would see Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg on television — inconceivable nowadays for a network show”. This is a rather useful fact to note, as Sandburg and Frost both died when Gioia was a teen in the 1960’s- over forty years before he made this claim. Assuming Gioia is looking for new content from these poets, I can only recommend that he consider becoming a necromancer. Barring such a situation, it would likely please Gioia to know that archival footage of Frost and Sandburg are broadcast regularly on network television, and that each of these networks also have websites fully dedicated to these authors (and many others).

“If you went into a classroom of high school seniors or college freshmen and asked them… to name one living American painter, sculptor, poet, dramatist, architect, philosopher, historian, theologian, biologist, physicist, or mathemetician[,] you’d get nothing.” Assuming that this hypothetical student had never heard of Stephen Hawking or Bill Nye, it is entirely possible that such a statement might be true in some contexts. This is also somewhat absurd, in that what he is describing isn’t a dearth of intellectuals as much as it is a dearth of living intellectuals. I propose that if you asked one of Gioia’s hypothetical students the same question, but substituted in “living or dead”, you would, on average, get the most comprehensive and well-informed list in human history.

http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

Texts of Our Institutional Lives: Studying the “Reading Transition” from High School to College: What are Our Students Reading and Why? (2008)

This paper reminded me of this comic (WARNING: Potentially NSFW (Not Safe for Workplace Viewing), due to some “sexual” language (from James Joyce, actually)) 

http://xkcd.com/1414/

(I may return to xkcd some time later in the semester. If you hold your mouse over an xkcd comic, there is hidden alt-text that typically adds a secondary punchline. In this case, the alt-text is perhaps more important than the actual comic.)

Much like the comic, Jolliffe and Harl’s piece is a brutal indictment of the “back in my day” line of argumentation. The most powerful conclusion I was able to draw from this piece was something the authors seemed reluctant to admit- reading is so overwhelmingly fundamental to our modern culture that it is impossible to be a remotely functional college student without treating reading tasks as so inherently simple as to be inconsequential.

Bonus Thoughts on on gender-normative notions and the nature of assumptions

I am fond of pushing posts all the way to the deadline, especially so for any assignments that allow me to see what other people are saying on a subject. This allows me to adjust and develop my thoughts through their lenses of interpretation. What surprised me this week, however, was the nearly class-wide assumption that Dana Gioia was a woman (if you were one of the folks who made this assumption, don’t worry too much. I checked. Literally every blog that mentioned him made the mistake). Or, more importantly, it shocked me that nobody actually knew or cared who this man was. Honestly, even I only googled his name on a whim, and had originally wrote my draft using “she”, as well. But, then, I realized that I was trying to draw value from this essay, while lacking important contexts regarding the author. However, I also then began to wonder whether or not such a detail was actually relevant to my interpretation of the text*. If so, did that mean I was implying different gender-normative standards of writing on the authors? Were the others doing so? How would I be able to read such characterizations one way or the other without a broader context and base of knowledge? Thoughts?

*To note- I also discovered a lot of worthwhile background on the man by googling him, and I’d encourage others to do so too.