10. A student knowing how to decode is not the same as one who can really comprehend; and sometimes it can be hard to tell from the outside.
9. Mastery over a Discourse, Mastery over a Discourse, Mastery over a Discourse Mastery -- hmm, how about Practice...ery? I can get behind that.
8. I am inspired and in awe by how smart the teachers and the people entering the teaching profession really are. To that end...
7. ...I love feeling inspired.
6. I will be going back again and again to these writtings...not only because so much of what everyone has written is enthralling to read but...I'mstillalittlefuzzyonsomestuff - There! I said it!
5. Morning, noon or night, a hot cup of caffeinated beverage is perfect for that familiar run down feeling...even if it is 100 degs out, in the shade, with sandals on, this side of the Rio Grande, walking up-hill both ways...er, lost that one.
4. Grad school is going to be way, waaaay, waaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy, harder than I thought; but somehow I think it's going to be more amazing than I ever could have imagined.
3. Note to self: read about So Cray Ts.
2. Our brains are the most amazingly complexly beautifully organized systems of tissue and electric current that...wow.
1. Collective knowledge is so
incredible
it is
contageous
bonus: Slow thought is best
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Dsylexia aixelysD
I had to skim through this chapter; the first of three on dyslexia. There, I said it. I will go back to it though, because it, like all of chapters in Ms. Wolf's book "Proust and the Squid" it is fascinating. And I do have this book until December. Its just, its Saturday night. I'm tired, my two boys are tired, my wife is tired and class is over as of tomorrow at noon. Despite my tiredness, my friend from Chicago is coming over because he's visiting his parents in town and I don't get to see him too often...funny thing is, he has dyslexia (or a reading disorder, because dyslexia is a catch-all term that covers a broad spectrum of symptoms).
I don't remember much about his having dyslexia except that after school he had to go to tutoring to help him read better. I do remember that he had a tougher time than me and my other friends did with his studies...I assume it was because of his dyslexia. So often he would sit in his desk and ask questions and try his butt off to understand the concepts we would be going over in class. Funny thing is, we were good kids who got good grades, well, really, we were nerds. You know the dorky, glasses wearing, no girlfriend having, video games on a Friday night kinds of nerds. My friend was as much as I was; only he had to work so much harder to do it. He studied all the time. He woke up early, he stayed up late. Long after the rest of us were finished and had moved on to more fun things, he was still there, plugging away. Working. Hard. He wasn't any less smart, I know he is much smarter than I am; it's just his brain does not process reading very well.
Ms. Wolf says that is typical. Most people with dyslexia are incredibly smart and she goes to great lengths to name incredible minds who had dsylexia (Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein -- to name two among CEOes and Entrepeneurs). But unfortunately because those who do have dyslexia have a terrible time learning to read and more importantly comprehending what they read, they often feel failure and rejection.
Unless they find the other things that they are good at (apparently dyslexics are great with spacial reasoning). My buddy found acting, it's his lifelong passion and is pretty damned good at it too, but he had to work at it. What blows my mind about it is, he can read, comprehend and deliver his lines with power and emotion and understanding no problem. He even says he can read subtitles in a foreign movie no problem, even though if he probably read the same lines in a book, he would have difficulty.
We don't know much about dyslexia, but we know more than we used to. On pg.187 of Ms. Wolfs book she has drawings that illustrate the differences between a normal and a dyslexic reading brain. The illustrations are amazing. From the moment one starts reading at zero milliseconds to 500 milliseconds at semantic processing (word comprehension) nearly every single step of the way the normal human brain literally looks different from the dsylexic brain. Meaning what areas of the brain that show the most activity during the reading process in a dsylexic brain are not the same as in yours and mine. They actually rely much more heavily on the right side of the brain for everything that they do. They also tend to be more creative. No wonder my friend is in acting.
At the end of the chapter, Ms. Wolf tells of her teenage dsylexic son drawing at the kitchen table. He's just completed a detailed drawing of the leaning tower of Pisa. "...upside down. When I asked him why, he said it was easier for him to do it that way." pg. 196.
And now ideas worth spreading (Willard Wigan; extreme miniature sculptor and childhood dyslexic)
I don't remember much about his having dyslexia except that after school he had to go to tutoring to help him read better. I do remember that he had a tougher time than me and my other friends did with his studies...I assume it was because of his dyslexia. So often he would sit in his desk and ask questions and try his butt off to understand the concepts we would be going over in class. Funny thing is, we were good kids who got good grades, well, really, we were nerds. You know the dorky, glasses wearing, no girlfriend having, video games on a Friday night kinds of nerds. My friend was as much as I was; only he had to work so much harder to do it. He studied all the time. He woke up early, he stayed up late. Long after the rest of us were finished and had moved on to more fun things, he was still there, plugging away. Working. Hard. He wasn't any less smart, I know he is much smarter than I am; it's just his brain does not process reading very well.
Ms. Wolf says that is typical. Most people with dyslexia are incredibly smart and she goes to great lengths to name incredible minds who had dsylexia (Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein -- to name two among CEOes and Entrepeneurs). But unfortunately because those who do have dyslexia have a terrible time learning to read and more importantly comprehending what they read, they often feel failure and rejection.
Unless they find the other things that they are good at (apparently dyslexics are great with spacial reasoning). My buddy found acting, it's his lifelong passion and is pretty damned good at it too, but he had to work at it. What blows my mind about it is, he can read, comprehend and deliver his lines with power and emotion and understanding no problem. He even says he can read subtitles in a foreign movie no problem, even though if he probably read the same lines in a book, he would have difficulty.
We don't know much about dyslexia, but we know more than we used to. On pg.187 of Ms. Wolfs book she has drawings that illustrate the differences between a normal and a dyslexic reading brain. The illustrations are amazing. From the moment one starts reading at zero milliseconds to 500 milliseconds at semantic processing (word comprehension) nearly every single step of the way the normal human brain literally looks different from the dsylexic brain. Meaning what areas of the brain that show the most activity during the reading process in a dsylexic brain are not the same as in yours and mine. They actually rely much more heavily on the right side of the brain for everything that they do. They also tend to be more creative. No wonder my friend is in acting.
At the end of the chapter, Ms. Wolf tells of her teenage dsylexic son drawing at the kitchen table. He's just completed a detailed drawing of the leaning tower of Pisa. "...upside down. When I asked him why, he said it was easier for him to do it that way." pg. 196.
And now ideas worth spreading (Willard Wigan; extreme miniature sculptor and childhood dyslexic)
Thursday, July 15, 2010
So What's Up With This Whole Reading Thing Anyways? And Why Should I Care?
This is the last chapter of the first two-thirds of Maryanne Wolf's book "Proust and the Squid...Science...Reading Brain." It is kind of a culmination of the normal reading brian (er...brain) before Ms. Wolf switches gears a little bit and focuses on what is obviously near to her heart: The reading brain of a dyslexic (her son has dyslexia, as she noted earlier in her book). A buddy of mine has dyslexia, he says it's minor and I never really gave it much thought other than the fact that it took him longer to learn stuff in high school and he had to work harder to learn it than anyone else in my circle of friends. THAT guy has perseverance...it will be interesting to find out more about how his brain works differently from others'.
But back to the current chapter, since I borrowed this book from UNM's library (I have it until freakin' December; gotta' love being a grad student...) I can't highlight passages in this book and I've been forced to take notes as I read - that must be one of my reading for comprehension strategies because I definitely feel like I've learned more from reading this book than from a lot of others I've read to date...Anyways, my notes say that on page 141 (it's part of chapter 6 in case anyone is curious) Ms. Wolf says that fluent readers feel-. On page 142 she says that an expert reader is efficient and on page 143, an expert reader has time to wonder...
This chapter is pretty much dedicated to the brain of the fluent comprehending and expert readers. First, as I stated just moments ago(we're talking literally fifty three words ago)I mentioned that my notes said fluent comprehending readers feel...well, duh, of course they do...but wait! According to Ms. Wolf, feeling is a key and may even be the most important key to reading comprehension "...the three major jobs of the reading brain are recognizing patterns, planning strategy, and feeling. Any images of the fluent, comprehending reader shows this clearly through the growing activation of the limbic system-the seat of our emotional life-and its connections to cognition...the limbic region also helps us to prioritize and give value to whatever we read. On the basis of [a book's ability to make us feel pleasure, disgust, horror, and elation etc..], our attention and comprehension processes become either stirred or inert." (pg. 141) Holy Honkin' Molly! Did you get that? If a book gets us to feel emotions when we read it, we comprehend what it is saying much more completely!!! Ok, we're all teachers here right? So that means if we want our students to comprehend what they are reading, we have to help them care about it, we have to help them feel passionate about what they are reading...I'd like to stop there. But there is so much to this chapter. I will touch on a few other points and then back to the emotions.
The brain is FA-AST (if I could use a cool zooming text there I would it's that fast). Everything that we do when we read happens from 0-500 milliseconds (assuming we are fluent comprehending readers by now). Everything. We're talking ten pages worth of information of everything. Everything we learned about de-coding words, making meaning of them connecting them to our emotions 144 pages of information before this point...Everything. 500 milliseconds is 0.5 seconds; just a hair slower than the blink of an eye. That is fast.
And because it is so fast and incredibly efficient at what it does, our brain gives us time to wonder when we read; not think...wonder. That's no small thing. And that is what changes a reader from fluent comprehension to expert (assuming I understand correctly of course). Wondering implies poetry, it's not just information gathering, wondering connects our past experiences to our present contemplations. Wondering lets us leave where we are and go someplace previously unimagined. Wondering and by extension being an expert reader, means that books affect us, they change us...literally; not just emotionally but biologically: "Ultimately, in the expert reader there is greater left-and right-hemisphere involvement [of the brain]...the expert reader's comprehending brain presents a beautiful change from novice reading: by using many parts of the brain, the expert reader is living testimony to our continuously intellectual evolution" (pg 162) Ms. Wolf contends that it is the exchange of ideas between the reader and the text that allows a person to become an expert reader; that and the reading a lot of quality text. She says that if we read the same book at 17, 37, 57 and 77 we will read it differently, we won't come away from it the same way as before. Well, of course...but, wow. Reading is so beautifully complex, yet our experience of it is so simple; strait forward. I love that.
To end, a few notes:
A fluent decoder is not a strategic reader (one step prior to fluent comprehender). In order to get kids from decoding to strategic reading they need to learn to self monitor their comprehension. Ms. Wolf gives some specifics to help people move kids beyond decoding. "Engaging in dialogue with their teachers helps students ask themselves critical questions that get to the essence of what they are reading. For example, in reciprocal teaching, a meathod introduced by Annemarie Palisncsar and Anne Brown, teachers explicitly help students learn to question what they don't understand..." they can:
-summarize the content
-identify key issues
-clarify
-predict and infer happens next
If students do the above successfully, "...this variation on the Socratic dialogue provides students with a lifelong approach to extracting meaning from more and more sophisticated text."
...I've gotta' start reading some Socrates (So-crAY-tes)...
Just in case we're all getting high and mighty about our brains:
and then...
Pretty crazy huh?!?
But back to the current chapter, since I borrowed this book from UNM's library (I have it until freakin' December; gotta' love being a grad student...) I can't highlight passages in this book and I've been forced to take notes as I read - that must be one of my reading for comprehension strategies because I definitely feel like I've learned more from reading this book than from a lot of others I've read to date...Anyways, my notes say that on page 141 (it's part of chapter 6 in case anyone is curious) Ms. Wolf says that fluent readers feel-. On page 142 she says that an expert reader is efficient and on page 143, an expert reader has time to wonder...
This chapter is pretty much dedicated to the brain of the fluent comprehending and expert readers. First, as I stated just moments ago(we're talking literally fifty three words ago)I mentioned that my notes said fluent comprehending readers feel...well, duh, of course they do...but wait! According to Ms. Wolf, feeling is a key and may even be the most important key to reading comprehension "...the three major jobs of the reading brain are recognizing patterns, planning strategy, and feeling. Any images of the fluent, comprehending reader shows this clearly through the growing activation of the limbic system-the seat of our emotional life-and its connections to cognition...the limbic region also helps us to prioritize and give value to whatever we read. On the basis of [a book's ability to make us feel pleasure, disgust, horror, and elation etc..], our attention and comprehension processes become either stirred or inert." (pg. 141) Holy Honkin' Molly! Did you get that? If a book gets us to feel emotions when we read it, we comprehend what it is saying much more completely!!! Ok, we're all teachers here right? So that means if we want our students to comprehend what they are reading, we have to help them care about it, we have to help them feel passionate about what they are reading...I'd like to stop there. But there is so much to this chapter. I will touch on a few other points and then back to the emotions.
The brain is FA-AST (if I could use a cool zooming text there I would it's that fast). Everything that we do when we read happens from 0-500 milliseconds (assuming we are fluent comprehending readers by now). Everything. We're talking ten pages worth of information of everything. Everything we learned about de-coding words, making meaning of them connecting them to our emotions 144 pages of information before this point...Everything. 500 milliseconds is 0.5 seconds; just a hair slower than the blink of an eye. That is fast.
And because it is so fast and incredibly efficient at what it does, our brain gives us time to wonder when we read; not think...wonder. That's no small thing. And that is what changes a reader from fluent comprehension to expert (assuming I understand correctly of course). Wondering implies poetry, it's not just information gathering, wondering connects our past experiences to our present contemplations. Wondering lets us leave where we are and go someplace previously unimagined. Wondering and by extension being an expert reader, means that books affect us, they change us...literally; not just emotionally but biologically: "Ultimately, in the expert reader there is greater left-and right-hemisphere involvement [of the brain]...the expert reader's comprehending brain presents a beautiful change from novice reading: by using many parts of the brain, the expert reader is living testimony to our continuously intellectual evolution" (pg 162) Ms. Wolf contends that it is the exchange of ideas between the reader and the text that allows a person to become an expert reader; that and the reading a lot of quality text. She says that if we read the same book at 17, 37, 57 and 77 we will read it differently, we won't come away from it the same way as before. Well, of course...but, wow. Reading is so beautifully complex, yet our experience of it is so simple; strait forward. I love that.
To end, a few notes:
A fluent decoder is not a strategic reader (one step prior to fluent comprehender). In order to get kids from decoding to strategic reading they need to learn to self monitor their comprehension. Ms. Wolf gives some specifics to help people move kids beyond decoding. "Engaging in dialogue with their teachers helps students ask themselves critical questions that get to the essence of what they are reading. For example, in reciprocal teaching, a meathod introduced by Annemarie Palisncsar and Anne Brown, teachers explicitly help students learn to question what they don't understand..." they can:
-summarize the content
-identify key issues
-clarify
-predict and infer happens next
If students do the above successfully, "...this variation on the Socratic dialogue provides students with a lifelong approach to extracting meaning from more and more sophisticated text."
...I've gotta' start reading some Socrates (So-crAY-tes)...
Just in case we're all getting high and mighty about our brains:
and then...
Pretty crazy huh?!?
Saturday, July 10, 2010
A exercise in reading...and perseverance
This happens to me every time...every freakin' time. I start a book, I get excited about it, enjoy reading it...then, somewhere in the middle, I get bogged down. It doesn't even matter how good the book is. For some reason, towards the middle of every book that I can remember ever reading, I hit this point where finishing it becomes somewhat of a chore; an exercise in pushing on and forcing myself to finish the book I am reading.
Ok, here's an illustration of what I mean (beyond the obvious one of my being on page 133 of a 229 page book called "Proust and the Squid" by Maryanne Etc...): I've been reading Giant by Pulitzer Prize winning author Edna Ferber (according to the Wiki about her she wrote the original novel for the musical Showboat--music by Jerome Kern, lyrics and book by Oscar Hammerstein II). INCREDIBLE book! So well written, fascinating characters, huge sweeping story; but I got stuck mid way through about a year ago and have yet to finish it. It has gotten so bad in fact that I've started to ask my wife where that book I've been reading is "you know, that one by that female author that you should read next...Big!", I ponder. "You mean Giant?" she asks with just the right amount of sarcasm. "Yeah, Giant; do you know where it is?" "So you lost it?" "No, I just don't know where it is.." This usually continues for a bit before I either find it or...ahh who am I kidding, I lost it; maybe it will turn up sometime within this next year. Besides, you get my point. Sometimes it takes an amazing amount of perseverance for me to finish a book. Fortunately, I have an outside influence (this class) to provide added perseverance in helping me finish "Proust..." so...I press forward.
Chapter five (of nine) introduces some interesting terms and information as well as continues to pound home ideas about the brain.
First the terms, there are five of them of interest and they can be found on page 113 (in case anyone wants to happily follow along). These terms are used to describe the various steps a child needs to take towards becoming a "fluent comprehending reader" (more on that later on) and are all important developmental stages, or developments.
-Phonological development: "how a child gradually learns to hear, segment and understand the small units of sounds that make up words". According to Ms. Wolf, this is critical.
-Orthographic development: "how a child learns that his or her writing system represents oral language". Talk about an aha moment!
-Semantic and Pragmatic development: "how children learn more and more about the meanings of words from the language and culture around them". Sounds like Gee theory to me...
-Syntactic development: "how children learn the grammatical forms and structures of sentences" essentially learning sentence structure like I went to the store as opposed to I to the store went.
and...
-Morphological development: "prepares the child to learn the conventions of surrounding how words are formed from smaller, meaningful roots and units of meaning" Ms. Wolf's example is the word unpacked; it is one word with three parts: un-pack-ed. Once kids learn how to recognize these smaller 'morphemes', their reading comprehension accelerates.
So, why are those terms important? Apparently, those are all different steps that we all who are "expert readers" progressed through to mastered the art of reading. They are also places a person who is teaching another to read can focus on teaching that skill. Ms. Wolf is particularly interested in teachers helping students develop Morphological awareness. She contends that it is an important tool that helps kids learn to read very efficiently and shares a story about a child who was tutored in and intensive reading program her and her colleagues ran and how that child went from reading several levels below his grade level to reading above his grade level in a few short months. It is a touching story, but I don't really have time to go into it just now...
Anyways...Ms. Wolf continues to categorize children (and I would assume anyone who is learning to read for the first time)in the following ways:
1. Emerging reader
2. Novice reader
3. Decoding
4. Fluent comprehending
5. Expert
An Emerging reader is what was described in chapter 4 (and in my previous blog) that is when kids are exposed to reading by a loved one and it a warm and precious experience.
A Novice reader is where some really cool things happen and decoding of simple sentences begins. Kids discover that words like cat (her example) consists of three sounds: /k/ + /a/ + /t/. They learn things like 'ch' makes a totally different sound than a /c/ and /h/ do individually and all the other crazy idiosyncrasies of the English language that make it both beautiful and a pain in the ass to learn (I do believe that pain in the ass was one of her technical terms). Kids learn that often times words can have one, two, three or even more separate meanings depending on context. Her example was the word 'Bug'; it is an insect, can spy on someone, is an automobile, is a computer glitch...are there any others? Oh yes, can be a pain in the a-- (ok...hopefully that is the time I use that joke...). Kids begin to learn new words based on the content of a story. Etc...Essentially, all the stuff that we think about when we imagine a kid learning to read. Slow sentences, sounding out words, gradual comprehension. Ms. Wolf says that the key to getting to the next phase is TONS of practice and that some kids get quite stuck in this phase...necessitating intensive reading intervention.
A Decoding reader is beginning to become much more fluent. In this stage people (notice I didn't say kids?...AhHa...) start to read in chunks. Like: Be-head-ed. And recognize the differences in words like bear and dear. They also start to master suffixes like Sing, sing-er, sing-ing etc...
Fluent readers have mastered all of the above and one essential new tool: "comprehension monitoring", which is...just what it sounds, a reader monitors her/his own comprehension to make sure that she/he really understands or is just glossing her/his eyes over the words for the last ten pages or so...that's happened to me...I don't mind it when I'm reading, but don't really like it when I'm driving...but that's probably a topic for another blog at an entirely different time.
Ms. Wolf really didn't get into Expert reading. I assume that will be next chapter. She did include a few interesting/fun things though that I will include below:
1. A neat way to help kids learn Phonologically (which she contends is an uber-important step in learning to read well) is by doing those clapping hands for each syllable of a word games. Like SAM (one clap for one syllable) or volks-wag-en (three claps for three syllables). I remember doing those when I was a kid and always had fun with them; my wife and I are doing the same thing for our five year old and he gets a kick out of it too. C'mon good reader!!
2. A poem about the pain in the ass-ness (oooh, there's that joke again) of the english language:
I take it you already know
Of touch and bough and cough an dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead; it's said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother.
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there,
And dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose-
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Why, man alive,
I'd learned to talk it when I was five.
And yet to read it, the more I tried,
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five.
Good night.
Ok, here's an illustration of what I mean (beyond the obvious one of my being on page 133 of a 229 page book called "Proust and the Squid" by Maryanne Etc...): I've been reading Giant by Pulitzer Prize winning author Edna Ferber (according to the Wiki about her she wrote the original novel for the musical Showboat--music by Jerome Kern, lyrics and book by Oscar Hammerstein II). INCREDIBLE book! So well written, fascinating characters, huge sweeping story; but I got stuck mid way through about a year ago and have yet to finish it. It has gotten so bad in fact that I've started to ask my wife where that book I've been reading is "you know, that one by that female author that you should read next...Big!", I ponder. "You mean Giant?" she asks with just the right amount of sarcasm. "Yeah, Giant; do you know where it is?" "So you lost it?" "No, I just don't know where it is.." This usually continues for a bit before I either find it or...ahh who am I kidding, I lost it; maybe it will turn up sometime within this next year. Besides, you get my point. Sometimes it takes an amazing amount of perseverance for me to finish a book. Fortunately, I have an outside influence (this class) to provide added perseverance in helping me finish "Proust..." so...I press forward.
Chapter five (of nine) introduces some interesting terms and information as well as continues to pound home ideas about the brain.
First the terms, there are five of them of interest and they can be found on page 113 (in case anyone wants to happily follow along). These terms are used to describe the various steps a child needs to take towards becoming a "fluent comprehending reader" (more on that later on) and are all important developmental stages, or developments.
-Phonological development: "how a child gradually learns to hear, segment and understand the small units of sounds that make up words". According to Ms. Wolf, this is critical.
-Orthographic development: "how a child learns that his or her writing system represents oral language". Talk about an aha moment!
-Semantic and Pragmatic development: "how children learn more and more about the meanings of words from the language and culture around them". Sounds like Gee theory to me...
-Syntactic development: "how children learn the grammatical forms and structures of sentences" essentially learning sentence structure like I went to the store as opposed to I to the store went.
and...
-Morphological development: "prepares the child to learn the conventions of surrounding how words are formed from smaller, meaningful roots and units of meaning" Ms. Wolf's example is the word unpacked; it is one word with three parts: un-pack-ed. Once kids learn how to recognize these smaller 'morphemes', their reading comprehension accelerates.
So, why are those terms important? Apparently, those are all different steps that we all who are "expert readers" progressed through to mastered the art of reading. They are also places a person who is teaching another to read can focus on teaching that skill. Ms. Wolf is particularly interested in teachers helping students develop Morphological awareness. She contends that it is an important tool that helps kids learn to read very efficiently and shares a story about a child who was tutored in and intensive reading program her and her colleagues ran and how that child went from reading several levels below his grade level to reading above his grade level in a few short months. It is a touching story, but I don't really have time to go into it just now...
Anyways...Ms. Wolf continues to categorize children (and I would assume anyone who is learning to read for the first time)in the following ways:
1. Emerging reader
2. Novice reader
3. Decoding
4. Fluent comprehending
5. Expert
An Emerging reader is what was described in chapter 4 (and in my previous blog) that is when kids are exposed to reading by a loved one and it a warm and precious experience.
A Novice reader is where some really cool things happen and decoding of simple sentences begins. Kids discover that words like cat (her example) consists of three sounds: /k/ + /a/ + /t/. They learn things like 'ch' makes a totally different sound than a /c/ and /h/ do individually and all the other crazy idiosyncrasies of the English language that make it both beautiful and a pain in the ass to learn (I do believe that pain in the ass was one of her technical terms). Kids learn that often times words can have one, two, three or even more separate meanings depending on context. Her example was the word 'Bug'; it is an insect, can spy on someone, is an automobile, is a computer glitch...are there any others? Oh yes, can be a pain in the a-- (ok...hopefully that is the time I use that joke...). Kids begin to learn new words based on the content of a story. Etc...Essentially, all the stuff that we think about when we imagine a kid learning to read. Slow sentences, sounding out words, gradual comprehension. Ms. Wolf says that the key to getting to the next phase is TONS of practice and that some kids get quite stuck in this phase...necessitating intensive reading intervention.
A Decoding reader is beginning to become much more fluent. In this stage people (notice I didn't say kids?...AhHa...) start to read in chunks. Like: Be-head-ed. And recognize the differences in words like bear and dear. They also start to master suffixes like Sing, sing-er, sing-ing etc...
Fluent readers have mastered all of the above and one essential new tool: "comprehension monitoring", which is...just what it sounds, a reader monitors her/his own comprehension to make sure that she/he really understands or is just glossing her/his eyes over the words for the last ten pages or so...that's happened to me...I don't mind it when I'm reading, but don't really like it when I'm driving...but that's probably a topic for another blog at an entirely different time.
Ms. Wolf really didn't get into Expert reading. I assume that will be next chapter. She did include a few interesting/fun things though that I will include below:
1. A neat way to help kids learn Phonologically (which she contends is an uber-important step in learning to read well) is by doing those clapping hands for each syllable of a word games. Like SAM (one clap for one syllable) or volks-wag-en (three claps for three syllables). I remember doing those when I was a kid and always had fun with them; my wife and I are doing the same thing for our five year old and he gets a kick out of it too. C'mon good reader!!
2. A poem about the pain in the ass-ness (oooh, there's that joke again) of the english language:
I take it you already know
Of touch and bough and cough an dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead; it's said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother.
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there,
And dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose-
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Why, man alive,
I'd learned to talk it when I was five.
And yet to read it, the more I tried,
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five.
Good night.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
read to your kids...early
Maybe this will be a short blog for once…let me set the scene. I’m sitting on the speckled, red berber carpeting at the foot of my bed. My boys are crashed out and so are my parents. My wife is keeping me company, staying up much later than either of us planned. We’re all in a hotel together, recovering from our long but fun day of enjoying summer break.
Earlier I was reflecting about how lucky our boys are because my wife is a bookworm. I don’t know how many of you all read my introduction but she is a lover of literature and one of her many book related passions is children’s stories. I think she was amassing her collection all those fifteen years ago before we even met. The horde has grown over time as she’s scoured book stands at the flea market and eagerly attended library sales (I’ve never met someone get so excited over a dusty $0.50 set of cardboard pieces surrounding crunchy pages). I like the pictures, she loves the stories…it is starting to wear off on me, but it’s really impacting the boys.
Our oldest started his affair early. I think his one of his favorite stories at the beginning was good night gorilla. It is a story about a sleepy zookeeper and a precocious gorilla who releases each and every successive animal from their enclosure that the zookeeper says “good night” to. It is a sweet story and perfect for bedtime because not more than once, do the characters in the story go to sleep.
The text in the story was simple; “Good night gorilla” “Good night giraffe” “Good night lion” (I think that is the actual order in which the animals are put to bed; I’ve read that story too many times). Our son would love to say the animal’s names at each successive page; he loved to make the “boop, boop, boop…” sound effects as all the animals marched behind the zookeeper to go to sleep at his house. Then he would crack up when the wife’s eyes sprang open after all the animals said good night and she had to walk them back to their cages. That was his favorite for a very long time; our younger son likes it too, but it is funny that he responds to different parts in a completely different way.
According to Ms. Wolf our son was preparing to read every single time we opened that book together. In fact he has been preparing to read from the very moment he opened his first book as a baby. Chapter six of Proust and the Giant Squid by Maryanne Wolf is all about the young reader’s brain and the biological components that prepare a child to learn to read. Apparently the very act of sitting in the lap of a loved one and listening to a beloved story being read sets the scene for children to become successful readers themselves; the simple act of sitting in someone’s lap creates a love memory that endures in the subconscious that we all respond to when we curl up with a good book.
In chapter six, Ms. Wolf seems to list countless positives for a child to be exposed to reading at a very early age. In an effort to be concise, I will list some of them here. As I type these points, please keep in mind that when I say a child is reading, it most always means “when the child is listening to an adult read to them”. Thanks for that little side note.
-Kids learn to experience and practice different emotions by reading and empathizing with the characters they read about.
-Kids learn different kinds of language skill types, like “for no light ever touched his skin”…no one really talks that way…that is her point; even though no one actually does talk that way, kids still learn to not only understand it, but associate it with the magic of the imaginary world.
-There are some others, but mainly, it seems like common sense…reading at an early age is good…
But reading at too early of an age is bad. Have you seen those commercials on kids cartoon stations? They say that you too can teach your baby to read!!! Well, I know I’ve been tempted by them. Though I tend to be skeptical of tv commercials in general, it is real tempting, I mean, who wouldn’t want their kids to learn to read early right? Well, apparently most everyone should NOT want their baby to read early. Apparently it may actually compromise future comprehension. So unless a child shows that she or he WANTS to learn early, it is a bad idea to push them to do so…
So, I’m getting pretty tired. I need to post this blog.
I will leave with two thoughts:
1. It takes children roughly 2,000 days to learn to read, whereas it took human culture roughly 2,000 YEARS to develop reading as we know it.
2. Rhyming helps kids to learn to read more efficiently. It has something to do with identify like sounds and thereby identify the components of words and thereby recognize that components of sounds link to make individual words…
Good night everyone.
And....joyous randomness:
Earlier I was reflecting about how lucky our boys are because my wife is a bookworm. I don’t know how many of you all read my introduction but she is a lover of literature and one of her many book related passions is children’s stories. I think she was amassing her collection all those fifteen years ago before we even met. The horde has grown over time as she’s scoured book stands at the flea market and eagerly attended library sales (I’ve never met someone get so excited over a dusty $0.50 set of cardboard pieces surrounding crunchy pages). I like the pictures, she loves the stories…it is starting to wear off on me, but it’s really impacting the boys.
Our oldest started his affair early. I think his one of his favorite stories at the beginning was good night gorilla. It is a story about a sleepy zookeeper and a precocious gorilla who releases each and every successive animal from their enclosure that the zookeeper says “good night” to. It is a sweet story and perfect for bedtime because not more than once, do the characters in the story go to sleep.
The text in the story was simple; “Good night gorilla” “Good night giraffe” “Good night lion” (I think that is the actual order in which the animals are put to bed; I’ve read that story too many times). Our son would love to say the animal’s names at each successive page; he loved to make the “boop, boop, boop…” sound effects as all the animals marched behind the zookeeper to go to sleep at his house. Then he would crack up when the wife’s eyes sprang open after all the animals said good night and she had to walk them back to their cages. That was his favorite for a very long time; our younger son likes it too, but it is funny that he responds to different parts in a completely different way.
According to Ms. Wolf our son was preparing to read every single time we opened that book together. In fact he has been preparing to read from the very moment he opened his first book as a baby. Chapter six of Proust and the Giant Squid by Maryanne Wolf is all about the young reader’s brain and the biological components that prepare a child to learn to read. Apparently the very act of sitting in the lap of a loved one and listening to a beloved story being read sets the scene for children to become successful readers themselves; the simple act of sitting in someone’s lap creates a love memory that endures in the subconscious that we all respond to when we curl up with a good book.
In chapter six, Ms. Wolf seems to list countless positives for a child to be exposed to reading at a very early age. In an effort to be concise, I will list some of them here. As I type these points, please keep in mind that when I say a child is reading, it most always means “when the child is listening to an adult read to them”. Thanks for that little side note.
-Kids learn to experience and practice different emotions by reading and empathizing with the characters they read about.
-Kids learn different kinds of language skill types, like “for no light ever touched his skin”…no one really talks that way…that is her point; even though no one actually does talk that way, kids still learn to not only understand it, but associate it with the magic of the imaginary world.
-There are some others, but mainly, it seems like common sense…reading at an early age is good…
But reading at too early of an age is bad. Have you seen those commercials on kids cartoon stations? They say that you too can teach your baby to read!!! Well, I know I’ve been tempted by them. Though I tend to be skeptical of tv commercials in general, it is real tempting, I mean, who wouldn’t want their kids to learn to read early right? Well, apparently most everyone should NOT want their baby to read early. Apparently it may actually compromise future comprehension. So unless a child shows that she or he WANTS to learn early, it is a bad idea to push them to do so…
So, I’m getting pretty tired. I need to post this blog.
I will leave with two thoughts:
1. It takes children roughly 2,000 days to learn to read, whereas it took human culture roughly 2,000 YEARS to develop reading as we know it.
2. Rhyming helps kids to learn to read more efficiently. It has something to do with identify like sounds and thereby identify the components of words and thereby recognize that components of sounds link to make individual words…
Good night everyone.
And....joyous randomness:
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Writing is the Death of Knowledge
I think I'm still recovering from that last post. ...So...much...information... But in an attempt to press on, I will post about the next chapter in Maryanne Wolf's extremely well written and fascinating book, Proust and the Squid.
Chapter three is my favorite chapter so far. Up to this point, Ms. Wolf has hinted at what Socrates thought about the developing importance placed on reading and writing by the members of his ancient Athenian culture. Socrates is the ancient Greek philosopher of whom I sadly didn't know anything about before I started reading this book. (outside of the seminal early 90's teenage movie masterpiece: "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" all I thought of Socrates was a marble head in a museum...this is true people; I'm not proud of it...but it is true)
Socrates did not trust reading/writing. He was the inventor of...bum, bum bum!!! The "Socratic Method" - though I'm pretty sure that is not what he, himself, called it. He used the Socratic Method to challenge his students thoughts and presumptions about themselves and the society they lived in (ancient Athens). The reason he used it? To promote his absolute belief in the importance of leading an examined life and that through leading an examined life one will full fill one's highest calling as a human being...and, I assume, contribute to the betterment of society by thinking freely and resisting the status quo. Socrates thought out of the box. He was put on trial by his government and five hundred of his fellow citizens sentenced him to be executed because of it...for corrupting the minds of the youth in Athens...corrupting the minds of youth. I wonder if I could ever be convicted of that noble cause?
At his trial, Socrates famously said (as quoted by Ms. Wolf on page 71):
"If I tell you that this is the greatest good for a human being, to engage every day in arguments about virtue and other things you have heard me talk about, examining both myself and others, and if I tell you that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being, you will be even less likely to believe what I am saying. But that's the way it is, gentlemen, as I claim, though it's not easy to convince you of it."
Yeah, he really said that. So by now we can all see, Socrates was a pretty cool and deep dude.
So what did Socrates, this great orator, the originator of Socratic method, the vile corrupter of young and fragile minds feel about reading and writing?!?...He despised it. He thought it was the murderer of the examined life and of any hope of acquiring internalized knowledge; true knowledge...Primary Discourse (?) with a very capital 'D' as the case may be...
He hated reading and writing (apparently he wasn't alone because I guess the majority of educated Greeks felt that written language was inferior to their oral traditions). As Martha Nussbaum is quoted "...[Socrates] believed that books could short-circuit the work of active critical understanding, producing a pupil who has a 'false conceit of wisdom' ". We'll get to that false conceit later, but damn it's good.
I don't even want to summarize with an essentially here...Ms. Wolf breaks down Socrates disdain for the written word to three points, which she discusses rather effectively. --Seriously folks, pages 69-78, the parts of this book about how Socrates felt about reading and writing are worth the price of admission alone--.
1. The inflexibility of the written word.
2. The written word's act of destroying the importance of memory.
3. The loss of control over language.
The first I'll touch on briefly. Socrates did not like that when you read something in a book, you can't actively engage in an argument with that book...the book won't argue back (who knows, maybe it does because I know when I read that I started to have an argument inside my head that went back and forth for a while..."ahh, yes words don't argue back, but wait what if they do? I mean, I'm having an argument right now, holy crap, I am having an argument right now, but wait who am I arguing with? the book or my self? I don't know. Is this an argument too or am I starting to loose focus?...etc...) But Socrates liked to do argue, it was the basis of the Socratic method...to question and answer and question and answer and question and answer and question...with the emphasis on question because there always was another one of those. And each answer lead to further refining of the discourse...or Discourse...and back to the beginning: The inflexibility of the written word.
The second, I think is profound. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around it. It tickles me. It makes me want to cry. It is absolutely insane. Remember how I blogged (ooh, a verb) earlier that by choosing to read, we are actively re-wiring our brains to accomplish that task? Well, Socrates came from a tradition that didn't do that. He came from a tradition that had an extremely complex set of techniques, "mnemotechniques", to help a person memorize and recite VAST amounts of information. When I say vast, I'm talking oceans here. People are memorizing freakin' Homer's Odessey here...and more. And by memorizing that information, people are internalizing it...digesting it...enabling themselves to contemplate and analyze it. The act of memorization puts a great value on deep, contemplative thought. Which is really freakin' interesting because if we telescope to our society. The mighty USA, 2010. We don't memorize much of anything (well at least I don't and I think I'm pretty average and like the bulk of society on this one here). How many of us remember our ten most frequently called freinds' telephone numbers? Much less an entire book? Much less a single paragraph within an entire book? And that leads back to his statement of "false conceit of wisdom". We certainly read a lot of stuff; a LOT of stuff. But how much have we internalized? How much do we chew on and digest and...I think I'll stop with that metaphor...but I find myself agreeing with this "false conceit of wisdom". And what Ms. Wolf does is she extends this concept of lack of wisdom to our digital age and hints, doesn't really argue yet (though I think she will towards the end of the book) that with our digital age we are not only reading words but we are seeing images and hearing sound bites and being fed VAST (there's that word again) amounts of information...but how much of it is actually giving us wisdom? How much of it is being refined. I mean hell, I don't remember what was on the news this morning on Yahoo! and I'm plugged in all the time. I'm constantly checking that website to see what is going on next in Fergie's rich and famous lifestyle.
But you know what? A lot of people think that by focusing on reading and not on memorization (zooming back to the Greeks here) the Greeks enabled themselves to enter a cultural "golden era"; their Classical and Hellenistic periods when art and architecture and I assume drama and writing were at their peaks, are going on precisely when Socrates was teaching and precisely when there is a big shift happening from an oral (memorized) tradition to a written and read one. The argument goes that by creating an alphabetic writing system that focuses on the sounds they made as opposed to symbols to represent objects, the Greeks became incredibly efficient thinkers. They only had to remember thirty-some odd sounds as opposed to thousands of abstract images. And by learning not only to read and write as opposed to memorize, but to do so alphabetically, they enabled themselves...the argument goes...to enter a stage of extreme creativity. They freed up mental capacity. They allowed their brains to no longer focus on memory and enable it to focus on creative thinking...
But I don't know. As much as I am seduced by that line of reasoning, I don't really buy it. I'm skeptical. I think that argument is more of an argument by people who place a MASSIVE importance on an alphabetic language versus a logosyllabic language (pictures). Think western vs. non-western society here. I think it is an argument that is largely based on prejudices...the Chinese and Japanese have enormously complex reading and writing systems and they have incredibly creative societies...just look at their art, architecture...everything...And besides, it was the very same Greeks who learned to value memorization who developed an alphabetic writing system for transcribing their knowledge in the first place.
But, to get back to Socrates here (I'm almost done, I promise). I think his focus on the lose of deep thinking is extremely interesting. Because, when I think of it, I don't think our society, a society that has read and writ for generations upon generations values deep thinking much. We value NEW thinking. And perhaps new thinking is more a product of reading a writing. What, if anything, are we sacrificing?
A few closing thoughts: Socrates third objection is almost amusing to me: The loss of control over language. He was afraid that once something is written down, there is no controlling who gets to read it. There's no controlling who has access to the knowledge. Socrates was put to death for spreading dangerous thinking or knowledge, yet he was afraid of how writing/reading could spread thinking/knowledge even further; beyond his control.
A great irony in all this: we only know what Socrates said because his protege, Plato wrote it all down for us to read.
And now (i can't resist):
And (I love this) the amazing Black Eyed Peas featuring Fergie and flashmob:
Chapter three is my favorite chapter so far. Up to this point, Ms. Wolf has hinted at what Socrates thought about the developing importance placed on reading and writing by the members of his ancient Athenian culture. Socrates is the ancient Greek philosopher of whom I sadly didn't know anything about before I started reading this book. (outside of the seminal early 90's teenage movie masterpiece: "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" all I thought of Socrates was a marble head in a museum...this is true people; I'm not proud of it...but it is true)
Socrates did not trust reading/writing. He was the inventor of...bum, bum bum!!! The "Socratic Method" - though I'm pretty sure that is not what he, himself, called it. He used the Socratic Method to challenge his students thoughts and presumptions about themselves and the society they lived in (ancient Athens). The reason he used it? To promote his absolute belief in the importance of leading an examined life and that through leading an examined life one will full fill one's highest calling as a human being...and, I assume, contribute to the betterment of society by thinking freely and resisting the status quo. Socrates thought out of the box. He was put on trial by his government and five hundred of his fellow citizens sentenced him to be executed because of it...for corrupting the minds of the youth in Athens...corrupting the minds of youth. I wonder if I could ever be convicted of that noble cause?
At his trial, Socrates famously said (as quoted by Ms. Wolf on page 71):
"If I tell you that this is the greatest good for a human being, to engage every day in arguments about virtue and other things you have heard me talk about, examining both myself and others, and if I tell you that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being, you will be even less likely to believe what I am saying. But that's the way it is, gentlemen, as I claim, though it's not easy to convince you of it."
Yeah, he really said that. So by now we can all see, Socrates was a pretty cool and deep dude.
So what did Socrates, this great orator, the originator of Socratic method, the vile corrupter of young and fragile minds feel about reading and writing?!?...He despised it. He thought it was the murderer of the examined life and of any hope of acquiring internalized knowledge; true knowledge...Primary Discourse (?) with a very capital 'D' as the case may be...
He hated reading and writing (apparently he wasn't alone because I guess the majority of educated Greeks felt that written language was inferior to their oral traditions). As Martha Nussbaum is quoted "...[Socrates] believed that books could short-circuit the work of active critical understanding, producing a pupil who has a 'false conceit of wisdom' ". We'll get to that false conceit later, but damn it's good.
I don't even want to summarize with an essentially here...Ms. Wolf breaks down Socrates disdain for the written word to three points, which she discusses rather effectively. --Seriously folks, pages 69-78, the parts of this book about how Socrates felt about reading and writing are worth the price of admission alone--.
1. The inflexibility of the written word.
2. The written word's act of destroying the importance of memory.
3. The loss of control over language.
The first I'll touch on briefly. Socrates did not like that when you read something in a book, you can't actively engage in an argument with that book...the book won't argue back (who knows, maybe it does because I know when I read that I started to have an argument inside my head that went back and forth for a while..."ahh, yes words don't argue back, but wait what if they do? I mean, I'm having an argument right now, holy crap, I am having an argument right now, but wait who am I arguing with? the book or my self? I don't know. Is this an argument too or am I starting to loose focus?...etc...) But Socrates liked to do argue, it was the basis of the Socratic method...to question and answer and question and answer and question and answer and question...with the emphasis on question because there always was another one of those. And each answer lead to further refining of the discourse...or Discourse...and back to the beginning: The inflexibility of the written word.
The second, I think is profound. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around it. It tickles me. It makes me want to cry. It is absolutely insane. Remember how I blogged (ooh, a verb) earlier that by choosing to read, we are actively re-wiring our brains to accomplish that task? Well, Socrates came from a tradition that didn't do that. He came from a tradition that had an extremely complex set of techniques, "mnemotechniques", to help a person memorize and recite VAST amounts of information. When I say vast, I'm talking oceans here. People are memorizing freakin' Homer's Odessey here...and more. And by memorizing that information, people are internalizing it...digesting it...enabling themselves to contemplate and analyze it. The act of memorization puts a great value on deep, contemplative thought. Which is really freakin' interesting because if we telescope to our society. The mighty USA, 2010. We don't memorize much of anything (well at least I don't and I think I'm pretty average and like the bulk of society on this one here). How many of us remember our ten most frequently called freinds' telephone numbers? Much less an entire book? Much less a single paragraph within an entire book? And that leads back to his statement of "false conceit of wisdom". We certainly read a lot of stuff; a LOT of stuff. But how much have we internalized? How much do we chew on and digest and...I think I'll stop with that metaphor...but I find myself agreeing with this "false conceit of wisdom". And what Ms. Wolf does is she extends this concept of lack of wisdom to our digital age and hints, doesn't really argue yet (though I think she will towards the end of the book) that with our digital age we are not only reading words but we are seeing images and hearing sound bites and being fed VAST (there's that word again) amounts of information...but how much of it is actually giving us wisdom? How much of it is being refined. I mean hell, I don't remember what was on the news this morning on Yahoo! and I'm plugged in all the time. I'm constantly checking that website to see what is going on next in Fergie's rich and famous lifestyle.
But you know what? A lot of people think that by focusing on reading and not on memorization (zooming back to the Greeks here) the Greeks enabled themselves to enter a cultural "golden era"; their Classical and Hellenistic periods when art and architecture and I assume drama and writing were at their peaks, are going on precisely when Socrates was teaching and precisely when there is a big shift happening from an oral (memorized) tradition to a written and read one. The argument goes that by creating an alphabetic writing system that focuses on the sounds they made as opposed to symbols to represent objects, the Greeks became incredibly efficient thinkers. They only had to remember thirty-some odd sounds as opposed to thousands of abstract images. And by learning not only to read and write as opposed to memorize, but to do so alphabetically, they enabled themselves...the argument goes...to enter a stage of extreme creativity. They freed up mental capacity. They allowed their brains to no longer focus on memory and enable it to focus on creative thinking...
But I don't know. As much as I am seduced by that line of reasoning, I don't really buy it. I'm skeptical. I think that argument is more of an argument by people who place a MASSIVE importance on an alphabetic language versus a logosyllabic language (pictures). Think western vs. non-western society here. I think it is an argument that is largely based on prejudices...the Chinese and Japanese have enormously complex reading and writing systems and they have incredibly creative societies...just look at their art, architecture...everything...And besides, it was the very same Greeks who learned to value memorization who developed an alphabetic writing system for transcribing their knowledge in the first place.
But, to get back to Socrates here (I'm almost done, I promise). I think his focus on the lose of deep thinking is extremely interesting. Because, when I think of it, I don't think our society, a society that has read and writ for generations upon generations values deep thinking much. We value NEW thinking. And perhaps new thinking is more a product of reading a writing. What, if anything, are we sacrificing?
A few closing thoughts: Socrates third objection is almost amusing to me: The loss of control over language. He was afraid that once something is written down, there is no controlling who gets to read it. There's no controlling who has access to the knowledge. Socrates was put to death for spreading dangerous thinking or knowledge, yet he was afraid of how writing/reading could spread thinking/knowledge even further; beyond his control.
A great irony in all this: we only know what Socrates said because his protege, Plato wrote it all down for us to read.
And now (i can't resist):
And (I love this) the amazing Black Eyed Peas featuring Fergie and flashmob:
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Ms. Wolf, are you trying to seduce me? An open letter
Dear Ms. Wolf,
Am I wrong? Or are you just playing with my emotions? After starting your book I was intrigued. I admit that I wanted to be drawn in by something that could tickle my brain as well as my heart. And in chapter one, you were so good at mixing science and literature in just the right way to keep me wanting more. But, as I eagerly delved into chapter two, you sidestepped my lovers embrace and piled on so many facts about the history of ancient readers and writers and how linguists define different types of language that I felt like I was being smothered by a dancing two ton hippopotamus.
How was I supposed to fully comprehend the various diagrams of a human brain? Even though you explained that the difference between the person that looks at a jumble of recognizable letters like 'mbli' and the and then at those same letters forming the word 'limb' equals triple the neural brain activity so well, I was confused.
And can you blame me that I was dumbfounded when you explained that the neurons at the back of my brain reach out with guided synapses to create links between other neurons across the different parts of my brain so that when I learned to read the word 'cow', not only did the back of my brain recognize that I was looking at something with my eyes but five or so other areas of my brain were simultaneously de-coding the letters C-O-W to mean a four legged animal with large udders from which I get a healthy beverage perfect for dunking my chocolate chip cookies in?...etc... etc..?
AND can I really be expected to know that had I not learned to read; those same synapses that reached between neurons and across vast swaths of brain tissue probably wouldn't have made their epic journeys to reach out and touched someone; therefore not creating the necessary brain wiring to allow me to read the word cow as that previously mentioned four-legged animal?
Then, just at I was slowly digesting new information about brain function, you gave me all these different words on page 34 that break down languages into different types. Like: pictographic (pictures) and logograhic (abstracted pictures meaning...pictures) and logosyllabary (which I'm not really sure about, except that they somehow mix syllables and abstracted pictures to create some sort of hybrid written form. Similar to types of modern Chinese and Japanese written language). You said logosyllabary language "makes far more demands on the brain" when compared to the other two; and I believe it because my brain hurts Ms. Wolf, it hurts.
Then you talked about morphological words and how they allow people to add an 's' at the end of words like 'bear' and how without the invention of morphological words we wouldn't be as able to even think the many complex thoughts we do now.
I was crying Ms. Wolf, crying on the inside when you hit me with the Sumerians and Egyptians and how they both had similar languages but before them was this culture that made clay tokens with little scratches on them to tell each other who had more cattle and who had more sheep.
But you didn't care did you? You didn't care when you told me about how amazing the Sumerian language supposedly was...is...er, was...and how it developed and changed over several hundreds of years and how it was essentially one nail, pressed into clay tablets to create different patterns and how the written language consisted of thousands of different symbols that were both logographic and logosyllabary. You didn't care that I was exhausted by then.
I admit, I perked up and laughed when you explained that Sumerians taught students to read both semantically and phonetically which was a "metacognitive strategy to teach reading". I didn't laugh because I thought it was funny. I laughed because you said, today experts are debating whether it is more effective to teach kids to read semantically or phonetically. Apparently the Sumerians figured that one out for us, thousands of years ago. My laugh wasn't really an audible ha ha kind of a laugh, it was more of an inward snicker...more like a heh heh.
But, I cried again when I found out(to be perfectly truthful, I didn't really cry...I don't want to be overly dramatic here) that it took about 7 years to learn to read and write as a kid in Sumeria and that reading and writing was reserved only for the elite. I cried, Ms. Wolf.
Then I laughed out loud (for real this time, because dang it, it was pretty funny) after you explained how learning to write in Sumerian was so hard to do and that there are so many existing clay tablets as evidence of that difficulty. Apparently, students didn't always write as well as their teachers wished because the phrase "And then he caned me" was at the end of many error filled clay tablets.
I was tapped out Ms. Wolf, just about gone. But you kept going. You said Egyptian writing is more beautiful and more complex than Sumerian...You said that we don't know which written language came first. You said that even though the Sumerian culture died, it's writing style lived on for around a thousand years because some fifteen other cultures adopted it as their own. Apparently the Arkadians were one of the adopters and they used it to write books with titles like the "Epic of Gilgamesh" between 668 and 627 BCE and "Advice of a Father to His Son" and "All Things Known about the Universe" and even "Treatise of Medical Diagnostics and Prognostics"
And I was exhausted Ms. Wolf. Exhausted
My brain was pulsing with information that I couldn't possibly understand so quickly.
Then, somehow a thick honey like humidity filled my heart and mind and I felt warm inside. I floated. Just floated.
How expertly you broke me down, Ms. Wolf, with scientific images, linguistic vocabulary and ancient history. How delicately you lifted me with knowledge of far off and ancient written cultures developing completely different languages from those I just read about. Oh, how the thought of the poetic nature of human ingenuity made me smile when I thought how of so many people spread across time and space had the capacity to invent their own symbolic forms of writing. And that, for generations people would endeavor to master them. I was tickled to hear that we understand some ancient languages yet some remain a mystery.
I fell in love with sadness as I read of how Chinese women that were foot bound, developed and propagated their own secret language called nu shu, female writing. And that it was "drawn on delicately painted fans or sewn into beautiful fabrics in ritual letters". You told me, Ms. Wolf, that the last woman to speak and read nu shu died recently. She was ninety six.
So you leave me at the end of chapter two Ms. Wolf. Wondering which lover I will get next. The confusing one who leads me on with facts and words too big for me to understand at first glance? Or the gentle one who will speak tenderly with stories of mystery and human triumph? Perhaps it will be both; perhaps that is best.
Next, what will Socrates say?
Sumerian tablet
And...
Am I wrong? Or are you just playing with my emotions? After starting your book I was intrigued. I admit that I wanted to be drawn in by something that could tickle my brain as well as my heart. And in chapter one, you were so good at mixing science and literature in just the right way to keep me wanting more. But, as I eagerly delved into chapter two, you sidestepped my lovers embrace and piled on so many facts about the history of ancient readers and writers and how linguists define different types of language that I felt like I was being smothered by a dancing two ton hippopotamus.
How was I supposed to fully comprehend the various diagrams of a human brain? Even though you explained that the difference between the person that looks at a jumble of recognizable letters like 'mbli' and the and then at those same letters forming the word 'limb' equals triple the neural brain activity so well, I was confused.
And can you blame me that I was dumbfounded when you explained that the neurons at the back of my brain reach out with guided synapses to create links between other neurons across the different parts of my brain so that when I learned to read the word 'cow', not only did the back of my brain recognize that I was looking at something with my eyes but five or so other areas of my brain were simultaneously de-coding the letters C-O-W to mean a four legged animal with large udders from which I get a healthy beverage perfect for dunking my chocolate chip cookies in?...etc... etc..?
AND can I really be expected to know that had I not learned to read; those same synapses that reached between neurons and across vast swaths of brain tissue probably wouldn't have made their epic journeys to reach out and touched someone; therefore not creating the necessary brain wiring to allow me to read the word cow as that previously mentioned four-legged animal?
Then, just at I was slowly digesting new information about brain function, you gave me all these different words on page 34 that break down languages into different types. Like: pictographic (pictures) and logograhic (abstracted pictures meaning...pictures) and logosyllabary (which I'm not really sure about, except that they somehow mix syllables and abstracted pictures to create some sort of hybrid written form. Similar to types of modern Chinese and Japanese written language). You said logosyllabary language "makes far more demands on the brain" when compared to the other two; and I believe it because my brain hurts Ms. Wolf, it hurts.
Then you talked about morphological words and how they allow people to add an 's' at the end of words like 'bear' and how without the invention of morphological words we wouldn't be as able to even think the many complex thoughts we do now.
I was crying Ms. Wolf, crying on the inside when you hit me with the Sumerians and Egyptians and how they both had similar languages but before them was this culture that made clay tokens with little scratches on them to tell each other who had more cattle and who had more sheep.
But you didn't care did you? You didn't care when you told me about how amazing the Sumerian language supposedly was...is...er, was...and how it developed and changed over several hundreds of years and how it was essentially one nail, pressed into clay tablets to create different patterns and how the written language consisted of thousands of different symbols that were both logographic and logosyllabary. You didn't care that I was exhausted by then.
I admit, I perked up and laughed when you explained that Sumerians taught students to read both semantically and phonetically which was a "metacognitive strategy to teach reading". I didn't laugh because I thought it was funny. I laughed because you said, today experts are debating whether it is more effective to teach kids to read semantically or phonetically. Apparently the Sumerians figured that one out for us, thousands of years ago. My laugh wasn't really an audible ha ha kind of a laugh, it was more of an inward snicker...more like a heh heh.
But, I cried again when I found out(to be perfectly truthful, I didn't really cry...I don't want to be overly dramatic here) that it took about 7 years to learn to read and write as a kid in Sumeria and that reading and writing was reserved only for the elite. I cried, Ms. Wolf.
Then I laughed out loud (for real this time, because dang it, it was pretty funny) after you explained how learning to write in Sumerian was so hard to do and that there are so many existing clay tablets as evidence of that difficulty. Apparently, students didn't always write as well as their teachers wished because the phrase "And then he caned me" was at the end of many error filled clay tablets.
I was tapped out Ms. Wolf, just about gone. But you kept going. You said Egyptian writing is more beautiful and more complex than Sumerian...You said that we don't know which written language came first. You said that even though the Sumerian culture died, it's writing style lived on for around a thousand years because some fifteen other cultures adopted it as their own. Apparently the Arkadians were one of the adopters and they used it to write books with titles like the "Epic of Gilgamesh" between 668 and 627 BCE and "Advice of a Father to His Son" and "All Things Known about the Universe" and even "Treatise of Medical Diagnostics and Prognostics"
And I was exhausted Ms. Wolf. Exhausted
My brain was pulsing with information that I couldn't possibly understand so quickly.
Then, somehow a thick honey like humidity filled my heart and mind and I felt warm inside. I floated. Just floated.
How expertly you broke me down, Ms. Wolf, with scientific images, linguistic vocabulary and ancient history. How delicately you lifted me with knowledge of far off and ancient written cultures developing completely different languages from those I just read about. Oh, how the thought of the poetic nature of human ingenuity made me smile when I thought how of so many people spread across time and space had the capacity to invent their own symbolic forms of writing. And that, for generations people would endeavor to master them. I was tickled to hear that we understand some ancient languages yet some remain a mystery.
I fell in love with sadness as I read of how Chinese women that were foot bound, developed and propagated their own secret language called nu shu, female writing. And that it was "drawn on delicately painted fans or sewn into beautiful fabrics in ritual letters". You told me, Ms. Wolf, that the last woman to speak and read nu shu died recently. She was ninety six.
So you leave me at the end of chapter two Ms. Wolf. Wondering which lover I will get next. The confusing one who leads me on with facts and words too big for me to understand at first glance? Or the gentle one who will speak tenderly with stories of mystery and human triumph? Perhaps it will be both; perhaps that is best.
Next, what will Socrates say?
Sumerian tablet
And...
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
A note about sketchbooks.
I've been thinking...this blog, I want it to be more than a book report about Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of etc...
I want also want it to be kind of an experiment...a living breathing reflection of a mind's meanderings. A wide open window to a day dreamer's thoughts and artistic impulses...which is funny because Maryanne Wolf, the author of Proust and the Squid, pretty much gives me the permission to do just that.
In chapter 1, page 14 she says, and I quote: "In much the way reading reflects the brain's capacity for going beyond the original design of its structures, it also reflects the reader's capacity to go beyond what is given by the text and the author...you, the reader, automatically begin to connect what [an author like] Proust writes with your own thinking and personal insights." (--her tense was past, I changed it to present to fit what I am trying to say.--) Essentially what she tells me is this, and I paraphrase: 'just like our brains had to hot-wire themselves to learn to read we get to hot-wire the ideas presented in any given book and take them for a joy ride to wherever we might go.' And what is so cool about it is, that is the way it is supposed to be.
SO, besides being a book report place, this blog is also going to be my digital sketchbook place for a while...a place where I will share random drawings and seemingly disparate thoughts or inspirations. I will try to treat this sketchbook more gently than the hard cover ones I keep with me in my bag. I don't want this one to sail off the roof of the car it is resting on as the driver (whom will remain anonymous) speeds away with me in the driver's seat.
I shall close with:
And Philip Glass:
I want also want it to be kind of an experiment...a living breathing reflection of a mind's meanderings. A wide open window to a day dreamer's thoughts and artistic impulses...which is funny because Maryanne Wolf, the author of Proust and the Squid, pretty much gives me the permission to do just that.
In chapter 1, page 14 she says, and I quote: "In much the way reading reflects the brain's capacity for going beyond the original design of its structures, it also reflects the reader's capacity to go beyond what is given by the text and the author...you, the reader, automatically begin to connect what [an author like] Proust writes with your own thinking and personal insights." (--her tense was past, I changed it to present to fit what I am trying to say.--) Essentially what she tells me is this, and I paraphrase: 'just like our brains had to hot-wire themselves to learn to read we get to hot-wire the ideas presented in any given book and take them for a joy ride to wherever we might go.' And what is so cool about it is, that is the way it is supposed to be.
SO, besides being a book report place, this blog is also going to be my digital sketchbook place for a while...a place where I will share random drawings and seemingly disparate thoughts or inspirations. I will try to treat this sketchbook more gently than the hard cover ones I keep with me in my bag. I don't want this one to sail off the roof of the car it is resting on as the driver (whom will remain anonymous) speeds away with me in the driver's seat.
I shall close with:
And Philip Glass:
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Proust and the Squid part I
Blog 1 (I know the first one was really blog 1, but I don’t think it counted all that much)
First, the facts:
Proust and the Squid (she explains why in the first chapter)
The Story and Science of the
By Maryanne Wolf
Copyright 2007 by Maryanne Wolf
Published by HarperCollins Publishers
The author, Maryanne Wolf breaks her book into nine chapters and categorizes the chapters into three parts. While I won’t go into the names of each chapter ahead of time, I do think it is interesting to note the Part titles.
Part I: How the Brain Learned to Read
Part II: How the Brain Learns to Read Over Time
Part III: When the Brain Can’t Learn to Read.
Next some impressions:
Now, I know what you are probably thinking…
Now my approach:
Since I have to write ten blogs and this book is divided into nine chapters I will blog as I go. I will attempt to briefly summarize the main points of the chapter and relate it in some way to whatever framing questions seem to apply. I will also editorialize with my thoughts and feelings and generally attempt wit in my presentation.
Part I: How the Brain Learned to Read (that’s history people and it goes back some 4,000+ years)
Chapter 1: Reading Lessons from Proust and the Squid.
So I know you are all dying to know why Proust and why the Squid. Ms. Wolf lets us in pretty quick. She chose Proust because of his eloquent, lovely and intellectually deep writing (there are quotes from him scattered throughout) and the squid because in the 1950’s scientists studied squids’ brains in an effort to understand human brains and brain plasticity.
Ms. Wolf: The act of reading is a two part process; Biological and Intellectual.
The Squid represents Biology and Proust represents Intellectual…ness.
First the Biological (or rather Social): Essentially the mere fact that we can read and write is INCREDIBLE. The ability to read/write is not a foregone biological conclusion of every infant from birth. We have to learn it. And it is a social construct transferred to us starting at birth by our family and teachers as a reading/writing “Discourse” (ahhhhh, Gee theory, my brain hurts). The type of reading you and I are doing this very moment is based on the “alphabetic principle” and we owe that principle to the ancient Greeks some 2,000 years ago. The alphabetic principle basically says: there is an alphabet consisting of letters that represent sounds. Those letters are strung together in a categorized way to represent more complex sounds that become words. The words themselves represent objects or ideas and can, in turn, be strung together in even more complex ways to form more complex sounds that become sentences which can represent a whole slew of different meanings and systems of thought and theories and manifestoes and ideologies etc…etc… From what we understand, the Greeks owe their invention of the “alphabetic principle” to earlier more picto-graphic efforts by the Sumerians, Egyptians and Cretes, some 2,000 years before. And (to skip to the next chapter a little bit) the Sumerians etc…owe what they learned to tens of twenties of thousands of years of experimentation by other cultures before them.
NOW Biological: From birth, sight is programmed into our genetic makeup; we will see. Hearing is programmed into tour genetic makeup; we will listen. Even language is programmed into our genetic makeup; we WILL talk even if we have to invent our own words for things. But in order to learn to read and write, our brains have to adapt a slew of different and complex systems and mold them to the task of reading/writing (and the book goes into some detail about what those different processes are). But the main biological idea in a nut-shell is:
We actually physically alter our brains in order to learn to read and write –physically ALTER our own brains. We change our brains to make meaning of patterns of lines and dots on paper. If we didn’t learn to read when we were kids, our very own brains would be DIFFERENT brains today from what they are! WE CHANGE OUR BRAINS — AHHHHHHHH!!!!! CRAZY!
That obviously makes my head spin with wonderment.
Finally, Intellectually: There were some really cool things Ms. Wolf highlights in regards to the intellectual pursuit of reading. The main one, however, is that reading is an individual experience and that our minds wander when we read and that is a good thing. When we read, we bring all our own experiences and thoughts and ideas to the intellectual table and telescope the ideas in the book to create our own ideas. The act of reading becomes a process that opens our minds to new thoughts and broadens us to new experiences that don’t necessarily have to be ours first hand.
Ms. Wolf closed her chapter with some trepidation about how reading is changing in the digital age and stated her concern that with more information instantly at our fingertips, we are not cultivating the same kind of deep thought that reading books can facilitate. She made an interesting observation that perhaps kids now are altering their brains in a different way to learn a different type of reading that how people have been historically altering their reading brains.
I will close this blog with the same quote by Proust that Ms. Wolf opened her book with.
“I believe that reading, in its original essence, (is) that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude” – Marcel Proust
Saturday, June 12, 2010
A Blog about....Blogs.
Coming soon....oooooooh.
That was my post when I first set up this site in an attempt at circumventing the order of things. I thought, well, I could just write what I think about blogs first...then I could look for blogs that I find interesting later, perhaps tomorrow, or the next day or the next week... But as I sat and try to write my first "blog about blogs", I couldn't really think of much to say. There was no source material to comment on. So I went back to the original assignment and pursued things in the proper order. I searched out some blogs and tried to find some interesting ones before I actually wrote anything down. However, as a sign of mostly full transparency, I figured I would leave my very first effort at a blogging post up...for posterity sake.
I've never been a big blog guy. I know people who do, for sure; but haven't spent much time visiting anyone's blog and hadn't really dreamed to writing my own. I do have a pseudo blog that functions as a website for my art. But it doesn't work like a blog really works.
In order to really understand what a blog is I first set out to familiar territory. I'm an avid NPR fan and love Wait-Wait, Don't Tell me and Studio 360. "If the radio shows are so good," my brain told me, "their blogs must be brilliantly funny and insightful! (respectively)." Obviously that was set up to emphasize that while they weren't all that bad but they weren't totally amazing either. I was able to dig up this tasty tidbit (bad pun intended in retrospect) from Wait-Wait though and Studio 360's blog did have the following awesome you tube music video link with a song about the BP gulf coast oil spill featuring Mos Def, Trombone Shorty (who I had Never heard of before), Lenny Kravitz, Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Tim Robbins:
I love that song/video...
After some more searches that resulted in lukewarm results, I thought that I would check out a couple of blogs by some friends of mine. Radio Free Bannerglad and This is Africa. Both of these are well written and entertaining blogs by professional writers. Ty's, the first one, is about his home and family life and mostly intended as a peek into the life of a stay-at-home dad and his young year son and their trials and joys together. Despite what one may think of the over all subject, he usually weaves in some sweet and often humorous truths into his work. Chris' blog is incredible; not only because he is a gifted writer (he's been published in the NY Times) but because he is leading an enviable life (he has been spending the past 3-5 years traveling to far off exotic places, writing about it, getting recognition for it and making money doing so).
So I got to thinking; "Oh brain of mine, what have I learned from this trek into the blog-o-sphere?" Well, Ty and Chris make their living as writers and their blogs are good because the blogs themselves are their final forms; not derivatives of a brilliant original like those of the Wait-Wait Don't Tell Me and Studio 360 radio programs.
But I think there is something even more compelling to learn about blogs. They offer windows into others' lives and allows us all to connect to the world outside ourselves. They allow any author tell us what is important to her/him and to educate us about something we may never had even heard about. And whether is it a damned cool song and video about the BP oil spill or one featuring a man actually drinking a shot of gin and mayo it is pretty powerful to think that all you have to do get your ideas out is click 'Publish Post'. I think I will.
That was my post when I first set up this site in an attempt at circumventing the order of things. I thought, well, I could just write what I think about blogs first...then I could look for blogs that I find interesting later, perhaps tomorrow, or the next day or the next week... But as I sat and try to write my first "blog about blogs", I couldn't really think of much to say. There was no source material to comment on. So I went back to the original assignment and pursued things in the proper order. I searched out some blogs and tried to find some interesting ones before I actually wrote anything down. However, as a sign of mostly full transparency, I figured I would leave my very first effort at a blogging post up...for posterity sake.
I've never been a big blog guy. I know people who do, for sure; but haven't spent much time visiting anyone's blog and hadn't really dreamed to writing my own. I do have a pseudo blog that functions as a website for my art. But it doesn't work like a blog really works.
In order to really understand what a blog is I first set out to familiar territory. I'm an avid NPR fan and love Wait-Wait, Don't Tell me and Studio 360. "If the radio shows are so good," my brain told me, "their blogs must be brilliantly funny and insightful! (respectively)." Obviously that was set up to emphasize that while they weren't all that bad but they weren't totally amazing either. I was able to dig up this tasty tidbit (bad pun intended in retrospect) from Wait-Wait though and Studio 360's blog did have the following awesome you tube music video link with a song about the BP gulf coast oil spill featuring Mos Def, Trombone Shorty (who I had Never heard of before), Lenny Kravitz, Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Tim Robbins:
I love that song/video...
After some more searches that resulted in lukewarm results, I thought that I would check out a couple of blogs by some friends of mine. Radio Free Bannerglad and This is Africa. Both of these are well written and entertaining blogs by professional writers. Ty's, the first one, is about his home and family life and mostly intended as a peek into the life of a stay-at-home dad and his young year son and their trials and joys together. Despite what one may think of the over all subject, he usually weaves in some sweet and often humorous truths into his work. Chris' blog is incredible; not only because he is a gifted writer (he's been published in the NY Times) but because he is leading an enviable life (he has been spending the past 3-5 years traveling to far off exotic places, writing about it, getting recognition for it and making money doing so).
So I got to thinking; "Oh brain of mine, what have I learned from this trek into the blog-o-sphere?" Well, Ty and Chris make their living as writers and their blogs are good because the blogs themselves are their final forms; not derivatives of a brilliant original like those of the Wait-Wait Don't Tell Me and Studio 360 radio programs.
But I think there is something even more compelling to learn about blogs. They offer windows into others' lives and allows us all to connect to the world outside ourselves. They allow any author tell us what is important to her/him and to educate us about something we may never had even heard about. And whether is it a damned cool song and video about the BP oil spill or one featuring a man actually drinking a shot of gin and mayo it is pretty powerful to think that all you have to do get your ideas out is click 'Publish Post'. I think I will.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)