comp lit and mediaphilia
This book! It’s a good one, folks. I fully admit I am like two thirds of the way through and already writing this review, just because I think the book is cool.
So I started reading The Learning Brain: Memory and Brain Development in Children by Torkel Klingberg all the way back in August, which is both good and bad. The good: I need lots of time to absorb neuroscience, since science is not my field. Bad: reading over a long time means you have time to keep forgetting things. I recommend that you pick this book up when you have a longish period of vacation so that you can give it the attention it deserves but also put it down from time to time in favor of some lighter fiction, assuming you are like me and not a scientist. Continue reading →
Posted in books
Tagged books , education , learning , librarianship , neuroscience , review
Dec · 18
I’m not convinced that my to-read list is always 2394870329478 titles long (okay, about 300) because I like reading. I do like it, but I think I often feel dissatisfied with the fiction I’ve been reading, and I get bored with it easily. And my reading interests have changed greatly since I was a child, when I really did just enjoy getting lost in a book. I don’t list reading as one of my pastimes because narratives draw me in. That’s why I like television, but it’s no longer the primary reason I read.
I do still like getting lost in a good story now, but it’s not my biggest reason for reading, I think. If I look back to the point in my life when I stopped reading voraciously and just, well, read books sometimes (roughly 7th grade to freshman year of college), it came around the same time that everything in my life was frustrating and dissatisfying. To avoid talking about my angst and my mental health problems and my physical health problems, let’s just move to how it was frustrating academically. I hated school, and I hated even more the idea that everyone around me thought I loved it, just because I did well in it. If I look back at my blog posts and journal entries and yearbook messages and penpal letters from that period, I think it’s pretty clear that I was one of those gifted kids who, instead of seeking out challenges and creating her own, largely took a lack of interesting or challenging ways of getting into what she was learning as a reason to be angry and to disengage.
I don’t want to place blame, because I used to do that a lot, and it was only somewhat founded. Continue reading →
Posted in adventures
Tagged books , creativity , criticism , education , grad school , high school , learning , reading , school
Jul · 02
It has come to my realization that I could actually have pursued a more lucrative career in the health sciences like my mom hoped I would. Oops.
So last month and over a bit of February (remember, I had vertigo, so my brain fried itself and I spent 10 days not being able to comprehend more than three written sentences at a time), I read Reading in the Brain , which, while dense, is pretty awesomesauce. It’s about exactly what the title says, duh. I read it at a very convenient time, since I’m taking a class titled Literacy and Services to Underserved Populations. One of the things I keep realizing in library school is that, for someone who considers herself rather enlightened and attuned to social justice issues, it really hadn’t occurred to me that there were so many issues surrounding illiteracy, like learning disorders, the obvious social structures and issues that keep children from finishing school, and more. So coupling my natural interest in how social politics perpetrate inequalities with the actual science of how reading works was interesting, because it made me worry for a minute that I would take a stance that teachers don’t know what they’re doing, and being a progressive Democrat who is the daughter and sister of teachers, I DO NOT DO THAT. EVER. Because teachers, generally speaking, super duper know what they’re doing. But I digress. Dahaene described the entire neural process of how the brain, fascinatingly enough, has basically two simultaneous processes, one for recognizing letters and one for recognizing full words, even if that word is actually written incorrectly or includes typos . Fascinating stuff. I can’t really explain it to you as well as he did, and at times he got slightly too technical for me, but given that this was not my first time in the neuroscience book rodeo, I think it was probably due to my overtaxed brain. Continue reading →
Tagged books , criticism , education , neuroscience , science , wishful thinking
Apr · 03
Tonight at dinner, in the most offhand way (probably the best way to be reminded of important things), I realized how people like my dad struggling in the past have made my life so easy peasy and lucky in the future. My dad was talking about the time he cut himself in shop class and how he was scared he would look like his shop teacher, who had multiple stubby fingers. This isn’t a very extraordinary story, except that anyone who has met my father would probably laugh at the idea of him doing anything related to sawing, welding, or anything vocational. I asked my dad why he had taken shop class in high school, and he said it was his senior year and they wouldn’t let him take the Shakespeare class.
Why?
“That was for the college bound.”
My dad has a Master’s degree. He was certainly college bound, and what’s more, was already trilingual by his senior year of high school. And he took some French classes, so he knows a little bit of French in addition to English, Spanish, and Portuguese. And he was really excited to take the Shakespeare class (he went on to get two degrees in literature and be a teacher of English, Spanish, ESL, and history), because at his old school in New York he had been taking tons of classes in the classics, and that’s what he loved. But it was San Pedro, California, and it was 1968, and Chicanos were not college bound.
I don’t even think about stuff like that, and that’s kind of terrible. I went to a college prep school that, rather than consider a multiethnic, biracial girl not college bound, basically told me I was a failure if I gave up my Ivy League acceptances for a state school, which I did. That was wrong in other ways, but arguably it’s better to be told you’re failing for not shooting for the stars that have been offered to you than it is to be told that you don’t have a chance. 2007 was certainly a different high school time for me than 1968 was for my father. It’s not like I didn’t know I was lucky. I still wasn’t a member of the socioeconomic class that populated my school. But I had the parental support to go there, I had the “anonymous” financial support to go there, and none of my teachers–at least not to my face (except one time when one of my teachers accidentally told me that she hated Mexicans)–ever acted like it wasn’t completely appropriate for me to be a student there. I very often forget that there are lots of people who fought for the things I have to seem normal and less than extraordinary.
I know that’s still not the case for tons of other people like me. But education is still a slightly different place than the blatantly racist place my father came from. Now prejudices are institutionalized, subtle, or at least hidden out of embarrassment or fear of being seen as someone with prejudices. Is that luck?
Posted in sociology
Tagged culture , education , history , race , sad , school
Jan · 17
This is the first college semester that I have felt challenged and educated. Truly. And it’s the first semester that I’ve really thoroughly enjoyed. It’s not that every class I’ve taken has been awful, but a lot of them have, and even the ones that were awful were not really challenging. Honors classes are generally shitty, except for my intro to ethnomusicology class and the honors contract I did in my literary analysis class. And there is a difference between a class being hard and a class being challenging, which is why I’m not counting music theory or neuroscience. Theory started out challenging and quickly turned into a place where I was completely lost and just maintained a B every semester by luck, and neuroscience was horrible, because everything we learned in this supposedly general education course was prefaced with “But you already know all this other stuff, so we’re just going to build on that,” when nutrition and weather gen eds in no way taught me anything about actual science.
Anyway. This semester I’m taking Spanish lit, which challenges me because my reading skills and my formal writing skills in Spanish are really poor. It drives me crazy that I don’t know conventions or rules about the tone to take, whether to say “we,” “I,” or “the reader,” etc. And even though many of the people in my class are terrible at Spanish and have no idea what’s going on, it challenges me to have to work out my ideas about literature in another language. I was finally getting to the point that I really felt like I had an aptitude for literary analysis and conversation in English, and now I have to find a way to do close reading in my second language and to find the vocabulary to discuss things. So that is good.
Then I’m taking three English classes: non-fiction prose, Victorian literature, and British literature through 1660. They are all going well, and it’s giving me the opportunity to finally read those things that everyone has read, like the Canterbury Tales and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I have a lot of homework, but not so much that I can’t handle it, and it’s keeping me on my toes.
But it’s also pretty sad that I’m 22 and have never read most of this stuff, even though I’m pretty well-read. There is a problem when you’re reading Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” for the first time and you think that one stanza is making the point that “it’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved before,” and that’s when you learn that this poem is where that freaking line is from. And it’s also sad that we read books and watch movies inspired by classic literature, or using things that are now cliche that originated in classic literature, before we read the actual works. I was disappointed when reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , because I didn’t know if I would actually be surprised at the twist at the end, because the whole effing world knows that they’re the same guy. It’s not a difficult book to read, and there’s no reason that you couldn’t study it in 6th grade instead of 16th.
Reading more classic works at a younger age would a) make you smarter and probably more apt to be a good reader on your own, b) make you less stupid when you enter college, c) leave you to discover more obscure works from historical periods once you’re in college, and d) give you a chance to also study contemporary literature in high school and college, because it’s just as valid to know what’s getting written now and what was written recently as it is to know literature’s foundations. I really hate that I know next to nothing about the 20th century post-WWII, because neither my history courses nor my literature courses, in high school and college, found them valid to teach. That, or they had no time to teach them, because my teachers were busy catching me up on Christopher Columbus.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t also read contemporary literature when you’re younger. I think it’s great that in elementary school and middle school I studied Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963 and Stargirl . But let’s be honest. Most of middle school is a waste of time, because it’s the worst time of adolescence, and you don’t even get to escape by actually learning things, because somehow administrators think that they shouldn’t make puberty harder on you by providing you with an education while you’re going through it. Honestly, you’d probably be better off being truant for three years than going to middle school, at least in Tucson. So I propose that middle school become the time when you start learning real things, so that other people don’t have to go to college and feel positively behind and stupid because they never got around to teaching themselves Middle English when they were 14.
Posted in rambling
Tagged "philosophy" , books , criticism , education , wishful thinking
Sep · 22
about things the ftc wants me to tell you
things the ftc wants me to tell you
internets i read foodie and health links friends library and information science links literature, publishing, and writing links socio-cultural-political-racial etc links style, design, pop culture, and everything else
foodie and health links
friends
library and information science links
literature, publishing, and writing links
socio-cultural-political-racial etc links
style, design, pop culture, and everything else
read me elsewhere book reviews
book reviews
special features resources pour vous
resources pour vous
Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
Join 868 other followers
RSS - Posts
RSS - Comments
I am going to start a side business in being everyone's bra fairy godmother. The world needs my help.| 23 hours ago
october nick hornby copycat wp.me/pkfk8-C3 | 1 day ago
Your Pinterest board is useless if you pin the same things repeatedly and don't curate.| 2 days ago
grammar kvetch (tumblr)
i read everything (tumblr)
if you want, you can buy me presents
my bookshelf
tweeter
« Oct
october nick hornby copycat
on rating books
september nick hornby copycat
the blog tour of miss k
august nick hornby copycat