For me, when it comes to languages, the deader the better. I know Ancient Greek and Latin very well. I tried to do Egyptian hieroglyphs on my own and came to appreciate my students’ struggles more. I did ancient Hebrew as an intensive course (even read the Book of Jonah in the original), but would need to start from scratch if I picked it up again (which would be great to do). I have Akkadian, Sumerian, and Hittite on my language bucket list. But my current one is Sanskrit.
I had done an intro the Sanskrit alphabet and culture as an intersession class. I was just barely ahead of the students. Then I did a more serious self-study of it during a couple of summers. But each fall, as school started up, it would drop by the wayside. This year, however, I have a student who’s doing an independent study of it with me, so I am thus externally motivated not to let it be pushed aside.
While my knowledge of Greek and Latin really help, I do highly recommend The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit, which has some great video resources to accompany it (which I really should use more, to help my pronunciation). My goal is to read the Ramayana in the original. One year when I was teaching “Heroic Epics” in the Classics Department and a colleague was teaching South Asian Epics in the Religion Department, we did some cross lectures and I read up on the Ramayana as part of that and was hooked.
I’m reading Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses (the craft in question is writing, especially the writing of fiction). It has long been on my to-read list, but that’s a pretty deep pile. I discovered it through this review in the NYTimes (the sharing link should get you by the paywall for a few weeks after my post goes up). As the review says, “In this new book, he dismantles a number of assumptions that underpin the teaching of craft in workshops.” Salesses is seeking a more inclusive way of teaching/workshopping writing and, along the way, encourages us to make explicit the expectations of our craft (what other’s might call the rules of writing) and the reasons for them so that we are making explicit choices. As he notes writing/the craft is meaningful precisely because it is of the world (both influenced by and influencing) and thus never neutral (ideologically speaking). So far, it is a fantastic read (and has some wonderful exercises in the appendix). I’d highly recommend. I’ll probably be posting snippets of it along the way.
I’ve used this TedTalk with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with my students over the years (it’s an oldie, but a goodie from 2009). She speaks elegantly on the influence of stories on our worldview. She brings up the importance of representation in literature, not just for members of the group represented but for us all. That without diverse representation, we end up with a “single story,” a very narrow view of peoples, that the incomplete story becomes the definitive story. She speaks of adding the “and” to the single story. And also the importance of where you start a story – in writing history, if you start with the reaction and not the cause, you paint a completely different and warped view. The whole thing is marvelous and she brings such a wonderful sense of humor to her talk.
It’s about that time of year when I share this Alan Watts video (below) with my seniors who are in the middle of the high-stress college application season. I thought I’d put it here too. Animation by the guys who brought you South Park.
As a teacher and a writer, I am of course concerned about the state of readership in our country. Reading has great value in its impact on persons – and citizens – throughout life. Thus I was interested in WaPo’s recent piece “Why are kids are not good readers” (no paywall). It was written by a developmental psychologist who founded a teaching program at Williams College and a linguist who teaches cognition and education at Harvard. It examined the drop-off in reading proficiency as a student advances through education.
I liked how they looked both at fiction/poetry and non-fiction reading. On the fiction side, the authors note:
When reading fiction or poetry, deep comprehension involves using subtle cues in the text to make inferences about the characters’ underlying emotions. It requires understanding the genre and connecting the material to the era in which the writer lived. It also involves identifying common themes between texts.
This highlights why reading is so important for developing empathetic human beings. Moreover, I once heard a speaker at a conference reference some study that linked kindergarteners’ ability to form theory of mind (i.e. putting yourself in others’ shoes, specifically by describing the POV of various characters in a simple story) with future success in math of all things! (A quick search turned up this possible source for the speaker). The kind of intelligence developed in fiction reading should not be underestimated.
On the non-fiction side, they discuss the importance of knowledge acquisition to reading comprehension and note, as an example,
When reading in the sciences, deep comprehension consists of calling up relevant background knowledge and integrating it with information from the text.
I have often felt the current pedagogical tension between skills building and knowledge acquisition. So often one hears that you can look up anything on Google, so why do you need to know it. As this article’s authors note, having something in your mind for the new information and ideas to connect to and integrate with makes comprehension and retention more effective.
Indeed, so much of our ability to judge things, to make connections, to build and synthesize, to create relies on what’s already in our brains, not what we can search for out on the web. We might not even know what we need to look for. Nor recognize potential connections.
Dare I say look at the Barbie movie? The choice of stylish pump vs. Birkenstock can only be full appreciated if you know The Matrix. Or the opening scene if you know Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sure, you can look up easter-eggs on the internet afterwards, but movies, literature – and indeed non-fiction – is so much richer when you recognize and make connections from your own foundational knowledge.
I’m not sure I have a point here. I do at times wonder if we are headed towards an aliterate society. I’ll admit that since the pandemic, I more frequently myself listening to audiobooks (rather than reading). And I have noted that on-line newspapers more and more offer the option to listen to their stories (I realize they’re trying to compete with podcasts and the like). So it was with a twinge of irony that I noted at the top of a story about how the next generation are not good readers this button (highlighted in yellow):
I’ve been trying to find an old story that I heard years ago on NPR, but haven’t been able to. I even resorted to Chat GPT (as I have heard it’s good at identifying vaguely recalled books and movies), but apparently while AI will scrape copyrighted fiction without the author’s knowledge and consent, it can’t help with NPR:
I’m sorry, but I don’t have access to specific NPR stories or their archives. Additionally, my knowledge is based on information available up until September 2021, and I don’t have access to the internet to browse for recent articles or stories.
But here goes my general memory of it (showing that my failure to find it is ironic):
Before the days of calculators and computers, there was a large number that was theorized to be prime. At a mathematics conference, one of the speakers walked up to a blackboard at the front of the room and, without saying anything, wrote out this number. And then wrote a number below it. And then began to divide the top by the bottom number.
Everyone knew what he was going for. His silent work was dramatic and exciting (for the audience of mathematicians). Audience members worked along with him on their own paper, checking his work as he went. When he was done and had a whole number product of the equation, thus proving that the number was not a prime, he got a standing ovation.
The storyteller went on to say the presenter was asked afterwards how long it had taken to figure it out. He said that he had worked on it every Sunday for three years (I think – I can’t clearly remember) and thus for well over a hundred Sundays, basically he had done nothing but fail to prove what he was trying to prove.
The moral of the story was that failure is an integral part of discovery.
Similarly, I recall the words of a tennis coach I worked with: you can be a good tennis player without making any mistakes, but you can’t be a great one.
To quote Natasha Bedingfield,
Sometimes my tries are outside the lines We’ve been conditioned to not make mistakes But I can’t live that way.
Unwritten, the song which is source of the quote above
I tell my students this sort of thing all the time. Making mistakes is part of discovering, part of creating, part of growing. Resilience, of course, has to go hand in hand with this. When I say I’m pro-failure, I’m not suggesting stopping in the morass of failure. Rather I am encouraging the intellectual courage to take chances, get things wrong, and learn from them.
Back in spring, 2005, I was in my final semester of NC State’s creative writing MFA program. I took a novel-writing workshop in which several spots were also made available to non-degree-seeking students. One of those spots was filled by a woman named Sharon Kurtzman. Like me, she was an aspiring novelist. Unlike me, she wouldn’t have as easy a time getting her foot in the door. To cut straight to the chase: over the next 18 years, she would complete six novels and endure scores of agent rejections for several of those; then, after gaining an agent, endure a dozen or more editor/publisher rejections; she would lose two agents in that lengthy process; then she’d gain a third agent and, as of early this year, celebrate the sale of her debut novel to none other than Pam Dorman of Pamela Dorman Books. A person might be tempted to say Sharon spent 18 years failing. She says she spent 18 years learning.
That was a tangent to Fowler’s own story about going from a failed novel to her best-selling Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald. Her path included ignoring advice given to her and taking risks. And Fowler says,
At the time, I didn’t know whether I was saving my career or killing it. What I did know was that I’d recovered my joy in the act of creating, and because of that, I regained my optimism that somehow it would work out for the better. It did.
That really touched me. Frank Herbert would say, “Fear is the mind-killer” but fear is also the joy-killer. Hemming in your creativity in an attempt not to fail, sticking to familiar, safe paths to avoid potential pitfalls of the unknown – these will kill your joy. Your focus will always be on limitations, on what could go wrong. Avoiding the small pains of getting things wrong will cause to you miss out on the greater joys that could await you on the path not yet trodden. When Fowler refused to let her previous failure hem her in, she “recovered [her] joy in the act of creating.”
In a similar vein of all this, I’m now thinking of one time when I was describing an assessment to my students. I said the essay prompt would be of the sort they tended to dislike because there was no clear, right answer. Rather, they’ be assessed on how well they argued their point and how well they grounded that answer in the text. One student asked, “If you know we dislike it, why do you give us such questions?” I said, “Because growth doesn’t come in your comfort zone. Growth comes when you stretch yourself.” The stretch zone moves you beyond comfort but not into an unproductive, deer-in-the headlights, anxiety-filled situation. There’s a nice discussion of it here on this “forest bathing therapy” site. As that say sites, working in your stretch zone also builds your confidence and self-efficacy:
Self-efficacy is a kind of self-belief that usually refers to the confidence that you have in your ability to achieve things.
So when I recommend you take chances, I’m talking reasonable risk – putting yourself in your stretch zone, not just jumping off a cliff -unless it’s merited; and now I’m thinking about that wonderful cartoon from xkcd about bridge-jumping:
If you are ready to try stepping further outside of your Comfort Zone and into your Stretch Zone, here are some tips to help you get started:
Start Small Begin with small challenges that push you just slightly out of your Comfort Zone. For example, if you are afraid of public speaking, start by speaking in front of a small group of friends or colleagues before moving on to larger audiences.
Set Goals Identify specific goals you want to achieve and create a plan to achieve them. Write them down and track your progress. This will help you stay motivated and focused.
Take Calculated Risks Taking risks is essential for growth, but it’s important to do so in a calculated way. Evaluate the potential risks and benefits before taking action.
Embrace Failure Failure is a natural part of growth and learning. Don’t be afraid to fail or make mistakes. Instead, use them as opportunities to learn and improve.
Surround Yourself with Supportive People Seek out people who encourage and support your growth. Avoid negative people who discourage you or hold you back.
Practice Self-Compassion Stepping out of your comfort zone can be challenging and uncomfortable. Be kind to yourself and practice self-compassion. Treat yourself with the same kindness and understanding you would offer a friend.
Celebrate Your Successes When you achieve a goal or overcome a challenge, take time to celebrate your success. This will help you stay motivated and confident as you continue to push yourself outside of your comfort zone.
Remember, stepping outside of your Comfort Zone is a process that takes time and practice. Be patient with yourself and don’t give up. With persistence and determination, you can expand your Comfort Zone, achieve your goals, and experience personal growth and development.
Thinking of world-building has me thinking of one of my old professors, Douglass Parker, brilliant classicist, translator, teacher, poet, and jazz musician. He suggested his epitaph be, “But I digress…” And nothing was a straight line with him. I remember passing his office door one day and noticing a shape poem. I stopped to read it and it told the students of one of his classes, in beautiful poetry, that he had not yet had a chance to grade their tests. I thought that in the time it took for him to create the poem the tests probably could have been graded, but then the world would never have received that poem. His “Zeus in Therapy” poems were a scream.
One of the classes he offered was “Parageography,” the study of places that exist only in the imagination. The list of books his students read would vary year to year, but they would all represent excellent examples of world building in a very physical, geographic sense. And the students would read such works as The Odyssey, to Gulliver’s Travels, LotR, and onwards to Oz and other worlds, but they didn’t just stick to the page.
For example, back then there were things called “shopping malls” (link for anyone too young to remember). Prof. Parker would send students, as an assignment, to a mall of their choosing. They were to consider themselves space aliens landing for the first time and figure out the values and goals of the “society” just from the layout of the place. I remember one student noting that Pea in the Pod (a maternity store) was right next to Frederick’s of Hollywood (a “sexy lingerie” store) and decided one of the main goals of the society was to encourage sexual reproduction.
The main impetus of the course for Parker was making students draw on their own creativity. In a NYTimes article on his class, he said:
“It seems to me that people who are getting their undergraduate degrees have to deliberately stifle whatever creative faculties they may have,” Professor Parker said. “You may not need creativity to get a job, but it is something that is important.”
Even before the pandemic, young people were struggling with anxiety and other issues of emotional self-regulation. In 2019, I was at a Learning and the Brain conference on “Educating with Empathy.” One of the speakers was refuting the argument that stats on such issues in young people are up just because people are more open about seeking mental health help and more open talking about such problems. They pointed out that the staggering increase in suicide deaths among adolescents indicates the overall rise is, sadly, not just a matter of reporting. The pandemic has only aggravated that. Social and emotional learning thus is more important than ever (though sadly in some circles has become a political buzz word).
When I help students move their stories to “show, not tell,” one side benefit is to help them increase awareness of their own physical reactions to emotions. Such self awareness is a first step in improving their self-regulation. I experienced something similar in a racial literacy workshop by Howard Stevenson, who walked participants through what they were feeling in various parts of their body as part of his method to help “people learn how to read, recast, and resolve racially tinged episodes.”
So as the student-writer moves from tell (“She was absolutely furious as she thought about what he’d said.”) to show (“Her hands trembled and she balled them into fists at her sides as his words rolled around in her mind.”), they are reflecting on how emotions live in the body and on their own emotional experiences. They can then employ this greater awareness and use it to respond to those physical reactions as a way to calm the emotions that underlie them (unball the fists – indeed, start at your head and feel for tension in each part of your body and try to relax those muscles). And thinking about how to describe emotions through the physical responses rather than open exposition makes them better writers.
Ramblings 