Rainy Day Travels

THE RAIN is raining all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea.
- Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Rain”

It was raining metaphorical cats and dogs this morning. Sarah had no interest in playing with them, so we had no big outdoor adventure with which to start our day.

Tuesday had its own frustrations, chief among them that of a technology challenge—specifically, knowing exactly what I wanted to do and attempting repeatedly and failing to achieve it. Do you ever want to scream, “Just give me paper, paste and scissors!”? That’s how I felt. This morning it was back to the drawing board--er, screen (damn!)--and success not nearly so elusive. Practice and experience do help....

Taking a break from frustration yesterday, I tossed away my semi-resolve to save the last chapter of the Jerry Dennis book for March and dived right into “The Scent of Spring.” Luckily for me, most of that chapter was still focused on winter, and I say “luckily” because the whole book has sharpened my anticipation for cold and snow, short days and long, dark nights, howling winds and drifts across the driveway. Crazy? It will all come, whether I anticipate or dread it, so why not welcome the season? The Windward Shore has blessed me in advance.

But I still wasn’t ready to return to the screen and the stubborn, demanding programs after one wonderful, last chapter of a beautiful book. Computer programs only speak their own language, you know. They make no attempt to understand mine. The HELP function can only help me if I know what the program calls what I want to do. It must be this way, I realize, and yet--.

What to do? I picked up another book. One of my customers had brought in a box of paperback books for trade credit and recommended Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, a novel set in Nigeria in the 1960s. My first job in Michigan in 1967 was at the University of Nigeria Program office at Michigan State University. All those bills of lading to Nsukka! A slide show by one of the visiting Nigerian professors! All of us wanted to go, but Adiche’s novel tells of the turbulence and violence of that period. She has, moreover, the gift of being able to get inside all of a diverse cast of characters and show us the world through their eyes: an intelligent young boy come to the city from a country village, a wealthy and beautiful young woman in love with a Nigerian professor, and a shy Englishman trying to find his place in the world. Through these multiple perspectives the confusion is not dispelled, but we see that it was (as it always is) part of the cultural and political situation. And we yearn for the safety and happiness of the characters as the story unrolls. I have only reached the beginning of Part II, so that’s all I will tell you for now, but I’ll give you a tiny sample of the author’s beautiful writing:

There was something polished about her voice, about her; she was like the stone that lay right below a gushing spring, rubbed smooth by years and years of sparkling water, and looking at her was similar to finding that stone, knowing that there were so few like it.

That is the character Olanna, seen through the eyes of her lover’s houseboy, Ugwu.

Well, then, later, at home, after dinner and our evening movie, “Iron and Silk,” set in 1980s Hangzhou, China, I picked up A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward and reached the end of that book of letters to the newspaper editor. Again, confusion, uncertainty, heartache—as you would expect from letter-writers asking for advice. What grief human beings give themselves and each other! And yet, I also think, with what courage do they go on, day after day, year after year!

Books and movies let me travel the world and travel through time, as well. David and I enjoyed the trip we took together to Hangzhou, and I was thoroughly involved with my temporary “friends” in Nsukka and New York. I feel tenderness for the people I meet in them, fictional or real, living or dead. They help me understand myself and those around me. They remind me how simple and fortunate my life is, too.

New at Dog Ears Books today: Adam Gopnik’s latest book, The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food; brand-new reprints of The Borrowers, The Borrowers Afield, The Borrowers Afloat, and The Borrowers Aloft; and, finally, an audio box set (12 CDs) of the new memoir by Roger Ebert, Life Itself, 14 hours of listening for your next long road trip.

What? You're going on a real trip? More real than my travels, do you think? Let's compare notes!

What Should We Teach, and How?

“One of the most common selling points for computers in schools, even in first and second grades, is to prepare youngsters for tomorrow's increasingly high-tech jobs. Strangely, this may be the computer evangels' greatest hoax. When business leaders talk about what they need from new recruits, they hardly mention computer skills, which they find they can teach employees relatively easily on their own. Employers are most interested in what are sometimes called ‘soft’ skills: a deep knowledge base and the ability to listen and communicate; to think critically and imaginatively; to read, write and figure, and other capabilities that schools are increasingly neglecting.” – San Francisco Chronicle, November 30, 2003

Read the whole article at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/11/30/ING8L39SIP1.DTL.
The article is over three years old, but in classic overdriving-our-headlights fashion, we as communities haven’t caught on yet. Years ago, at an academic party in a university town, a group of computer scientists agreed that banks of computers for public schools didn't make good educational sense; pomoting computers for schools, however, brought grant money to academic departments. Is further comment necessary?

I would be very grateful to anyone who could identify for me a book (title and author’s name forgotten; I think the author was a woman Ph.D. but can’t remember in her field) that I read two to five years back on the subject of reading, writing, thinking and computers. (Googling for this list of terms brings a googleplex of results and is no help whatsoever for anyone without infinite time.) The claim I want to review in the book has to do with reading print on pages vs. reading text on screen. The author cited research to show that while we lump these two activities together as “reading,” our brains are engaged in very dissimilar activities, and that while the first kind of reading strengthens the brain’s ability to follow complex narratives and argument chains, the latter actually erodes that ability. As I recall, this was not a consequence of paragraph vs. bullet style but something basic to do with brain physiology and kinds of light. Perhaps the bullet style even came about as a consequence of decreased ability on the part of screen readers to follow contextualized points of argument.

The other day I assigned my community college students a one-page, 200-word essay. “Can we use bullets?” one of them asked. “You may include them, but don’t use them for the whole essay,” I answered. “I want sentences and paragraphs!” If my blogging style starts showing signs of decaying into unrelated “points” that don’t add up to anything, I hope I’ll be aware enough to notice and call the whole thing off. No doubt one of my friends will be kind enough to let me know?

Meanwhile, to catch up to where I am now with books, I’ll backtrack to remind you that I set aside BEATRIX POTTER: A LIFE IN NATURE to pick up THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS, which I loved and finished quickly. Then CRUSADER’S CROSS tempted me, but that lost out (temporarily) to LIBBY: THE ALASKAN DIARIES OF LIBBY BEAMAN, 1879-1880 and Zadie Smith’s ON BEAUTY. LIBBY hooked me until the last page, and then I went back to ON BEAUTY, finishing that book this morning (having taken off some time for David Hume’s TREATISE ON HUMAN NATURE along the way). What can I say of ON BEAUTY? It isn’t a new release—I’m always “behind” on my reading when it comes to new books!—so it’s been sufficiently reviewed and doesn’t need my two cents added. Quite extraordinary. That such a young writer could portray with such depth and sensitivity her older, middle-aged characters is more than impressive: it’s downright frightening. I'll be getting back to BEATRIX POTTER, though, and finishing it long before spring arrives.

Tomorrow I’ll give a detailed activities and contests list for Saturday’s Winter Carnival. Promise!