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Oct. 9th, 2024 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatI probably don't need to be posting in this thing daily? Hopefully, if all goes well no reason why it shouldn't, I'll be gone next week. Visiting Mother for her birthday next week in Hilton Head Island, SC. And working Columbus Indigenous Peoples Day Holiday Weekend into the mix.
Back hurts, heating it up. Also digesting a bunch of pills, I just took - which appear lodged in the old esophagus. A fat lot of good the Magnesium Citrate and Vitamin D will do there.
Tried. Got maybe 5 and a half hours of sleep the night before. According to my watch it was 5 hours and 42 minutes. The device breaks it down into deep, core, and REM, with most of it falling under Core.
So, overall goal is to get to bed earlier tonight. Maybe by 10 at the latest?
Lack of sleep makes me irritable. As does boredom. And I tend to get myself into trouble on social media platforms when I'm bored. I've many to choose from now, so it's usually one of them? And people can be annoying when one is sleep deprived and bored. Well, they can be annoying anyhow, just more so, when one is sleep deprived and bored.
I should go to bed now, but can't - heart-burn and digestive issues. Have to wait a bit. Frigging internal plumbing is not being cooperative. My father used to complain about the plumbing and how they needed to root it all out - I think he was talking about his own.
***
On Facebook, someone introduced an "Atlantic" article in a misleading manner.
FB: In the Atlantic, a Professor discusses how his students told him that books will soon go the way of vinyl records.
Me: Well, considering Vinyl Records are making a come back, and being sold at B&N now. Also there are at least four book stores that have popped up in my area, with extensive children's literature sections. And various people are reading them on the trains...I'm not worried. Although I continue to be concerned about serious journalism and our educational system...
Read or skimmed the article? And honestly, I was right. It's not about what she said it was about. It's about...
Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books
"Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
Explore the November 2024 Issue
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to."
I think part of the difficulty is the Humanities Lit Professors insist on assigning the same books. Folks? Assign something other than 19th Century and 18th Century and early 20th Century literature.
Let's face it most high school and college kids are not going to understand The Great Gatsby, or get through Pride and Prejudice or Moby Dick. There are other novels you can assign. Such as "The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison" or "Kindred by Octavia Butler" or "Dubliner's by James Joyce" or "Neuromancer by William Gibson" or better yet Pattern Recognition.
When I was in college - I got a much broader spectrum. And if I were teaching literature? I'd pick from a slew of different writers, and centuries, decades.
My impromptu list of literary works:
1. The Ghost Stories of MR James
2. The poetry of Dorothy Parker and Sylvia Plath
3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
4. Twelth Night by William Shakespeare
5. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
6. Member at the Wedding by Carson McCullures
7. Dubliner's by James Joyce
8. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
9. Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
10. Bram Stoker's Dracula
11. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein
12. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
13. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
14. Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
15. The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell
16. Murders in the Rogue Morgue and The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe
17. Curtain by Agatha Christie
18. Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
19. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
20. Dune by Frank Herbert
I never understood people who don't love books, or reading. I had to work hard to learn, and once I did, I devoured. I wonder sometimes if something comes easily to someone, and they don't have to earn it - they take it for granted and don't bother?
Also, I'd expand the above list to include foreign translated works and graphic novels. Along with YA.
Such as:
1. Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
2. Persepolis - Graphic Novel
3. 100 Years of Solitude by Gaberiel Garcia Marquez
4. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
5. Candide by Voltaire
6. Kafka on the Shore
and so on.
Off to bed.
Back hurts, heating it up. Also digesting a bunch of pills, I just took - which appear lodged in the old esophagus. A fat lot of good the Magnesium Citrate and Vitamin D will do there.
Tried. Got maybe 5 and a half hours of sleep the night before. According to my watch it was 5 hours and 42 minutes. The device breaks it down into deep, core, and REM, with most of it falling under Core.
So, overall goal is to get to bed earlier tonight. Maybe by 10 at the latest?
Lack of sleep makes me irritable. As does boredom. And I tend to get myself into trouble on social media platforms when I'm bored. I've many to choose from now, so it's usually one of them? And people can be annoying when one is sleep deprived and bored. Well, they can be annoying anyhow, just more so, when one is sleep deprived and bored.
I should go to bed now, but can't - heart-burn and digestive issues. Have to wait a bit. Frigging internal plumbing is not being cooperative. My father used to complain about the plumbing and how they needed to root it all out - I think he was talking about his own.
***
On Facebook, someone introduced an "Atlantic" article in a misleading manner.
FB: In the Atlantic, a Professor discusses how his students told him that books will soon go the way of vinyl records.
Me: Well, considering Vinyl Records are making a come back, and being sold at B&N now. Also there are at least four book stores that have popped up in my area, with extensive children's literature sections. And various people are reading them on the trains...I'm not worried. Although I continue to be concerned about serious journalism and our educational system...
Read or skimmed the article? And honestly, I was right. It's not about what she said it was about. It's about...
Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books
"Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
Explore the November 2024 Issue
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to."
I think part of the difficulty is the Humanities Lit Professors insist on assigning the same books. Folks? Assign something other than 19th Century and 18th Century and early 20th Century literature.
Let's face it most high school and college kids are not going to understand The Great Gatsby, or get through Pride and Prejudice or Moby Dick. There are other novels you can assign. Such as "The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison" or "Kindred by Octavia Butler" or "Dubliner's by James Joyce" or "Neuromancer by William Gibson" or better yet Pattern Recognition.
When I was in college - I got a much broader spectrum. And if I were teaching literature? I'd pick from a slew of different writers, and centuries, decades.
My impromptu list of literary works:
1. The Ghost Stories of MR James
2. The poetry of Dorothy Parker and Sylvia Plath
3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
4. Twelth Night by William Shakespeare
5. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
6. Member at the Wedding by Carson McCullures
7. Dubliner's by James Joyce
8. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
9. Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
10. Bram Stoker's Dracula
11. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein
12. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
13. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
14. Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
15. The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell
16. Murders in the Rogue Morgue and The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe
17. Curtain by Agatha Christie
18. Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
19. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
20. Dune by Frank Herbert
I never understood people who don't love books, or reading. I had to work hard to learn, and once I did, I devoured. I wonder sometimes if something comes easily to someone, and they don't have to earn it - they take it for granted and don't bother?
Also, I'd expand the above list to include foreign translated works and graphic novels. Along with YA.
Such as:
1. Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
2. Persepolis - Graphic Novel
3. 100 Years of Solitude by Gaberiel Garcia Marquez
4. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
5. Candide by Voltaire
6. Kafka on the Shore
and so on.
Off to bed.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-10 02:15 pm (UTC)An old college friend, who taught honor's English in high school (this was back in the 1990s) and did her thesis on F. Scott Fitzgerald, asked me to explain the plot of the Great Gatsby to her. We'd both read it. She had read it more recently than I had. But she didn't understand what it was about and was confused as to what had happened.
The difficulty with the Great Gatsby isn't the length. There are very long books such as say any number of Stephen King novels, that are breeze to read. You can skim half the book and still know what happened. There's no precision of language. This isn't true of The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald was at the top of his craft at the time he wrote it - and is precise. You can't skim that book, or you will miss what it is about. It's not like the Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, where you can legitimately jump over bits here and there and still be fine.
It is told in a confusing manner, with a lot of misdirects, and Fitzgerald doesn't help the reader by choosing an obnoxious and kind of remote narrator. It's told in first person, but not by the protagonist (Gatsby), but by the protagonist's friend/neighbor/hanger on, who is a bit of a cypher of a character. To such an extent, that I no longer remember his name. We see the entire story through the unreliable gaze of the neighbor. Who is a wealthy, somewhat spoiled cousin of Daisy, Gatsby's lost love. Throughout the book - Fitzgerald holds up a mirror to his readers via his narrator. The antagonist in the novel is the class social structure, and the narrator is such a cypher because he's a stand-in for Fitzgerald's readers. Gatsby is a biting social satire about the American Class System in the 1920s, and it still resonates today, because that Class System is still in effect in a different way.
But not everyone will get that. Most people won't get past the plot, which is confusing and I can barely recall it now. (I think Daisey, while driving Gatsby's car, runs over a lower Middle Class woman, and Gatsby takes the blame - resulting in his eventual suicide.) But Fitzgerald wasn't interested in the plot - and a lot of readers won't get that. One of my cousins, a nuclear physicist
couldn't understand the Great Gatsby. He didn't think metaphorically, he thought literally. Poetry, and fictional prose were lost on him. (He died in a hiking accident in 2022). And my former college friend didn't get it either - she thought more literally. She switched out of Honor's English to help the Reading Impaired and Special Needs Students, which worked more to her liking.
But my niece says they don't have lockers at school any more because they do everything on tablets, so they are not thought to need anywhere to keep books!
They can read all their books on the Tablet. It's actually cheaper and easier to do so? You can enlarge the words, highlight, and save paper. My niece did that too. Heck, I read most of my books now digitally - on e-book or tablet, I can enlarge words, it has a light, and it's easier to travel with than a huge book.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-11 09:14 am (UTC)I remember it very well, in fact - I still have the copy I studied at school, but hadn't seen the film until a couple of months ago. A couple of my favourite quotes ever are at the beginning and the end of the book. Plus, something like that Daisy's voice was "full of money." I honestly don't see what's so difficult about it.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-11 01:06 pm (UTC)I get why you did love it - you relate to the subject matter, and it is about a world that makes sense to you. The metaphors work for you, and you clearly think metaphorically not literally. So when the writer states Daisy's voice was full of money - you don't think, oh, WTF? Is money coming out of her mouth? This makes no sense.
When we read a book, watch a television show, a movie, listen to music - we experience it differently. We do not hear, read, see or visualize the same things. Our brains focus on different items. We process it differently. Some people when they listen to music see notes, some see colors, some feel the energy, some feel things, some see a movie...and so on.
People do not think the same way. And that's a good thing.