What’s the point of having a blog if you don’t post anything on it? When I started this blog, I was hoping that having a place to publish my writing would motivate me to write more often. I have been motivated to write more, but not for the blog. I’ve been doing most of my writing in a small notebook I carry with me everywhere. And most of what I write there has been too personal to put in a public space. And I’m not going to go into a long discussion about the nature of each kind of writing, supplemented by an analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of each. That topic has been exhausted elsewhere.
What is interesting to me is the kind of writing I tend to do in different places. I have a nice little home office that my husband built for me when he put an addition onto the back of our too-small-for-two-adults-and-three-teenagers house. I do most of my on-the-computer writing there, mostly class assignments, emails, and a couple of articles for various publications. I post to discussion boards occasionally, and shoot off a letter to the editor of our local paper. When I grade papers for my on-campus classes, I move to the kitchen table and write long formative comments at the end of their essays. This shift from office to kitchen has an effect on my feelings which then affects my thoughts, which in turn affects the kind of writing I do as well my voice and tone. I construct a different kind of self in the kitchen, a more comfortable, personal self.
I’ve been keeping a private journal for about 30 years, I guess. Lately I’ve been using a Moleskine notebook. I admit I bought my first Moleskine because of the blurb about how Hemingway and Matisse used them, but also because I liked the size (fits right into my hand), the texture (feels like leather), the construction (sewn pages), and even the smell. I’m now on my fourth notebook and will probably continue using them for as long as I can pick up a pen or pencil. I carry the notebook around in my purse and pull it out in restaurants and coffee houses to jot down whatever I’m thinking at the time. What I find puzzling and/or ironic is that I do most of my public writing in a private place, and my private writing in public places. I wonder why that is.
As I mentioned back in August (two posts ago), my students and I are reading George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty Four, as part of the 1984 + 20 Project sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English. Most of our activities were planned for October, for we anticipated a wealth of Doublethink and Newspeak flying around during the time leading up to the election. But given the outcome, I’m not expecting a decrease of Doublethink from the government any time soon. And so our work goes on. Lately, my students have been participating in an online writing project with two other teachers’ classes by contributing to a drupal (which is kind of like a content management systems with weblogs). The other teachers (Michelle Marits, who got the drupal started, and Donna Reiss, who has provided much sensible advice to Michelle and me) are from the Virginia Beach campus of my college (Tidewater Community College) and are teaching mostly online courses this semester. I’m at the Norfolk campus and my students are in my face-to-face first year Composition course. We’ve put all this together through an exchange of emails and a couple of in-person meetings. I’ve been having a great deal of fun with this, too much for an English teacher. I’ve got to make an effort to stop that.
I like to build assignments around appropriate themes, and for this semester’s work, the themes come directly from 1984:
War Is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
I’ve been working through the slogans in reverse order, having already covered “Ignorance is Strength” in an analysis of propaganda techniques, and then “Freedom is Slavery” in a persuasive paper on issues relating to the tension and balance between freedom and security. We’re now on “War is Peace,” and I’ve asked students to analyze the rhetoric of war. The choice of topics comes from Traci’s 23rd List of Ten: Ten Rhetoric of War Writing Projects, written by Traci Gardner, who, according to her bio, is “an educator and writer currently working as Online Content Developer on ReadWriteThink for the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in Urbana, Illinois, where she writes lesson plans, designs online curricular materials, and manages the Web servers for the project.”
The topic that interests me most, and which I would choose to write about were I one of my students, is the topic on Evasion, which asks writers to choose a speech or statement by one of the groups involved in a war, take a close look at what’s NOT being said, and then try to explain the absences and account for the writer’s motives for avoiding particular issues. What is not being said or shown, and/or is actively suppressed by the government, the military, and some media corporations are the number of Iraqis killed or wounded in the war, the number of refugees who can’t return home due to the ongoing fighting or destruction of their homes, flag-draped caskets of American soldiers killed in Iraq being off-loaded from airplanes, the names and photos of soldiers killed in the war so far, and real soldiers’ real opinions on the war.
I suppose the government is taking a lesson from the Vietnam War, when television coverage of the fighting fueled anti-war reactions. I was a teenager then, reading a lot of existential philosophy and trying, as Camus suggested, to find one good reason not to commit suicide, and I remember my growing awareness of the absurdity of a struggle to “win democracy” for a country and culture we did not understand.
I’ve had a long dry spell for blogging. But the fact that I haven’t been blogging doesn’t mean that I haven’t been writing. Here’s an idea that surfaced recently.
The Orwell Project: sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English, this is a national reading and writing project that revolves around George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. This is a good year for reading that book. With an important election coming up and political rhetoric running rampant across our tv and computer screens and morning newspapers, Newspeak abounds. We’re doing a cross discipline, cross campus version at my community college (tidewater cc) and had a planning meeting today. So far, we have history and English teachers and women’s center staff participating, but we’d like folks from other disciplines to join us.
I must admit, I was hesitant to do this at first. Adding texts can throw a wrench in the monkey plans of accommodating new content. And it’s so close to the start of fall classes. But I teach Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” midway through my first year comp course, and figured I could work the book in by dropping my first assignment.
Then I worried about the effect of Orwell on my students and me. When I first read the book, it scared the hell out of me. And depressed me. But there’s a positive thought in the novel, or at least a brave one, in that no one can make you think what they want you to think. They can do things to your life and your body. They can make you say things you don’t believe. But they can’t make you change your thoughts.
We’re looking for theme ideas and would welcome any suggestions.
Yesterday was Bloomsday, a celebration of that fictional Ulysses day in June 1904, when Leopold Bloom wandered around Dublin searching for . . . what? Home, family, wife, son, love? Who knows? Joyce’s Jewish Everyman, an alien in his own Irish Catholic country, signifies the cycle of love, loss, longing, and reconciliation central to the human condition. The last and first words of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake symbolize the cyclical journey of human history and the circular path all human beings tread. “A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”
More Circular Logic
I’d like to continue on the topic of deaf use of email. In my previous post, I wrote about how writing can be a way for deaf and hearing people to communicate without the need of an interpreter. Email can also be a way for deaf people from English speaking countries to communicate with each other because deaf sign language in America is not the same language as BSL in Britain or Auslan in Australia. All three sign systems developed independently of each other—they have different sign lexicons, grammars, and syntaxes. They are as different from each other as French is from German. The one language that deaf Americans, Australians, and Britons have in common is written English.
Written communication, however, doesn’t remove all barriers between deaf people from other English speaking countries or between deaf and hearing people. And it’s not possible to eliminate all communication barriers. Misunderstandings due to communication breakdowns occur among hearing people from the same communities or even the same families. But one communication barrier I can think of between deaf and hearing people and deaf and deaf people arises from differing levels of proficiency with written English. Most deaf people are born to hearing parents who don’t know how to sign and are not exposed to the full complexity of ASL until long past the time that hearing children and deaf children of deaf signing parents are, which puts them behind the language skill norm by the time they enter school.
Not all ASL instruction is equal. Some deaf children go to deaf schools where they are immersed in exposure to ASL, the language in which all subjects are taught; some deaf children are mainstreamed in schools where all subjects are taught in written and spoken English and translated by an interpreter into ASL. Some deaf children aren’t exposed to ASL until later in life. In some schools, they’re taught to lip read and speak, which puts an enormous burden on the deaf to assimilate to hearing expectations of “normal” language.
Sometimes deaf students are taught Sign Exact English (SEE) which is not a natural language—it’s an artificial language of signs in which each sign represents an equivalent English word. SEE grammar and syntax are the same as spoken English. Communicating in SEE takes more time than communicating in ASL. When an interpreter is involved, translating every word spoken by a teacher into SEE can take much longer that it does to translate English into ASL. And of course, it takes longer for students to sign in SEE and for interpreters to translate what the students sign.
Some people believe SEE helps deaf students develop their skills in written English better than ASL, though I’m not so sure. If it takes twice as long to say something, people might tend to compensate by using fewer words and shorter, simpler sentences. This seems to be the problem with most artificial human languages—they don’t meet the needs of the people they were designed for. (This doesn’t apply to computer languages because time means nothing to computers. It’s the users who get impatient with long processing waits.) This issue of language and education gets discussed on every deaf listserv I’ve visited and opinions vary but the one thing most deaf people agree on is the importance of exposing children to a complex language early and often—whether that be signing, reading, speaking, or writing—in this respect deaf people have much in common with hearing people.
This fall I’ll be teaching a hybrid composition course developed specifically for deaf and hard of hearing students. Part of the course will be delivered online, and part via synchronous compressed video sessions. As a way of gearing up for the course, I’ve been reading everything I can find on deaf culture, teaching deaf students, and teaching English composition to deaf students. As a way of working out my thoughts on these subjects, I’d like to use this blog to discuss some of the information I’ve come across.
I found an archived post on the Association of Internet Researchers listserv that asked if anyone knew of any special ways that deaf people use email. The poster, Dr. Ken Friedman, said that he had read a post on another list that suggested “the Deaf may use email in a way that has something to teach the hearing.”
Dr. Friedman raises questions about possible differences between Deaf and hearing uses of email. He wonders if there is some special cultural use of email that enables effective social communication, relating in some way to the development and use of sign among the Deaf. He imagines that deaf people may use email in a way that involves some cultural phenomenon or social pattern of written communication by the Deaf that does away with dependence on sign or face-to-face meetings.
I’m not Deaf or hard of hearing, so I can’t say with any certainty if there are any differences in the way deaf people use email, but it seems to me that deaf people might use email for different reasons than hearing people. Email would allow deaf people to communicate with one another without having to rely on text telephones which have small screens that aren’t easy to read. Email also makes communication between deaf and hearing people easier, reducing dependence on Telecommunications Relay Services, which requires a Communications Assistant to place the call and type the hearing person’s spoken words for the text telephone user to read.
Anything that allows for unmediated communication between deaf and hearing people looks like a good thing to me. I’ve taught two deaf students in past semesters, and run into them on campus from time to time, and always feel frustrated that I don’t know how to sign so I can talk to them. Without an interpreter present, I’m lost. Email won’t solve my face to face communication problems, but it does offer an avenue of communication between deaf and hearing people that is more direct and less dependent on intermediaries.
