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.
Most of the (take your pick) Democratic, liberal, progressive, and/or left leaning opinions I’ve come across on the web lately ascribe the Democratic party losses in this past election to either the Democratic candidates’ inability to connect with the country’s majority conservative values or to the Republicans’ dirty election tricks (again). But in my re-reading of Orwell’s 1984, and especially of Goldstein’s Book, I’m beginning to form a more pessimistic view.
Orwell (speaking for Goldstein, I presume) exposes the motives for unending war between the three superpowers. He posits that the superpowers have no intention of ever bringing war to an end because war provides a means of using up most available resources, thus keeping the standard of living low and leaving party members and proles no time for education, reflection, or action against the power hierarchies. If the standard of living were to go up, people would have time to invest in educating themselves, and would come to the inevitable conclusion that they were being duped and consequently, would rise up against their oppressors and take over their countries.
But Orwell later reveals (through O’Brien) that the party seeks power, not for the good of the people, but simply for the sake of power itself, which reminded me of Lord Acton’s warning that power tends to corrupt those who hold it, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So even in countries where the people are educated and intelligent enough to see through their leaders’ corrupt motives and take action to replace them, whomever does the replacing will likely become just as corrupt. My usually idealistic outlook is eroding and the future looks pretty dreary to me right now. I’m tempted to give up any hope of political redemption. I’m down to just one reason not to commit suicide, and that is, if I kill myself, God will probably make me come back and do my life all over again. Not a pleasant thought at all. Guess I’ll stick around.
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.
Many of us are familiar with Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s work on the stages a dying person might go through before accepting the reality of his or her death. I went through several of them yesterday.
DENIAL – I went to bed at 3:00 A.M. Tuesday night (or Wednesday morning, depending on how you look at it) thinking the votes in Ohio were too close to call. Kerry could still win it.
ANGER – After hearing that Kerry had conceded to Bush, I thought, “How could Kerry let us down?” Those dirty scumbag Republicans pulled another one of their dirty tricks to win.
BARGAINING – I skipped this one.
DEPRESSION – After watching Kerry’s wimpy concession speech, I collapsed like a building wired for controlled demolition. I took a warm bubble bath and wept.
ACCEPTANCE – Skipped this one, too.
DETERMINATION – I made this one up. It’s how I feel right now. Democrats need to pick a candidate now and start working on the next election. I propose John Edwards. I was disappointed by Kerry’s easy concession yesterday. I feel he let his supporters down. But Edwards said he would fight for us, and he said it like he really meant it. I believe him.
My husband keeps telling me to let it go. He’s way more cynical than me. He’s moving on to impeachment plans. He may have something there. When I think about it, a Kerry win could have been more disastrous. Kerry would have been blamed for not being able to stem economic recession/depression due to Bush’s deficit and for not being able to extricate our troops from Bush’s war in Iraq. Half the country thinks Bush is a good man. With an impeachment, we could expose the Bush administration for the evil empire it truly is, and purge our country of greedy, power-grabbling crooks and liars.
I don’t feel any better. Four more years.
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.
My first semester teaching at TCC was also the first time I had a deaf student in my class. I had had very little interaction with deaf people, and no experience teaching someone who was deaf or hard of hearing. I found I had much to learn. Fortunately, I had the help of a great American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter who probably taught me more about teaching deaf students that semester than I did teaching my students how to improve their writing.
Like many teachers working with deaf or hard of hearing students for the first time, I assumed that the interpreter would take care of all the student’s communication needs. We teachers often think that all we need to do is accommodate deaf students’ auditory needs. The interpreter informed me, however, that deaf and hard of hearing students have visual accessibility needs as well. I learned that any activity that requires hearing students to use their eyes and ears at the same time may cut off visual accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing students. I realized I would need to rethink everything I did in the classroom.
I describe myself as a chalkboard teacher because I often turn to the board to brainstorm topics for writing assignments. For me, it’s a way of getting the whole class involved in the generation of ideas. But I tend to talk while I write, so my deaf student was getting a great view of my ample posterior rather than my expressive visage. When the interpreter pointed that out to me, I didn’t understand why it was a problem. She explained that deaf students look at faces for communication cues. She suggested I write and then turn around to talk about what I wrote. I’ve since learned that deaf people focus their attention on another signer’s face, keeping the hands in their peripheral range of view. I’m not sure exactly why, but it makes sense to me because when I look at web pages with image and text, I’m more comfortable shifting my eyes from images at the top half of the page to text at the bottom, rather than vice versa.
I don’t lecture much in my class, but when I do, I usually provide students with hard copies of my notes. I also post anything I hand out in class on my course Blackboard site. This practice turned out to fit in well with teaching deaf and hard of hearing students, because the students have difficulty keeping their eyes on an interpreter and looking down to take notes at the same time. If we plan to lecture a lot, we should ask students if they would like to have a note taker. We can also make a point of writing note outlines on the board and giving students time to copy the notes. If you have copies of lecture notes, you can choose to provide students with a print, disk, or online copy.
While I learned a lot about teaching deaf students that first semester, I didn’t learn everything. Two years later, I had another eager deaf student and another great interpreter. I had made some changes that year to my course outline that required fine tuning to make the lessons accessible. I planned to show a video in class about American dialects, and assumed the video was closed captioned. When I went to the library a week before show time to reserve the tape, I discovered that the video was not captioned. I put in a rush order to have it sent to my campus’s Disability Services to have it captioned. Meanwhile, I checked the web site that distributed the tape to see if any text transcripts were available. Lucky for me, they were, and I downloaded a free copy online and gave it to my student a few days before I showed the tape. From that experience, I’ve learned to plan all my media needs well in advance.
This fall, I’m taking part in Project HEAR, a hybrid distance education course for deaf and hard of hearing students across the state. The Project offers interpreted compressed video sessions for Developmental Math and English delivered in real, synchronous time. Because our students will have differing levels of signing abilities, we may need to consider ways to overcome the limitations of one-size-fits-all interpreting. Some students may not be ASL users, so I’ve asked our coordinator at Disability Services for support with Computer-Aided Realtime Translation (CART). CART is a speech-to-text system that combines notebook computers with real-time captioning. Captioners use a laptop and special software to type abbreviated spoken language that is then translated and transmitted to either a student’s laptop computer or a wall screen. With a CART captioner sitting in on the video sessions, my deaf and hard of hearing students will be able to read anything I say at almost the same time I’m saying it. This can be helpful for deaf students who sign in Signed Exact English, which is a different sign system than ASL. Hard of hearing students who lip read and/or use assistive hearing devices could also benefit.
I have come a long way since my first semester teaching a deaf student, but the more I learn, the more I realize how little I know. So when I need advice and support, I rely heavily on the interpreters and counselors at my school’s Disability Services. It’s nice for teachers to know we’re not alone when we need support accommodating our deaf students.
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.
Here’s the reason why I don’t go to church anymore, despite twelve years of Catholic schooling:
St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke (no relation to Kenneth Burke, I hope) has said he would refuse communion to John Kerry for Kerry’s pro-choice stance. Bishop Michael Sheridan of Colorado Springs has gone even further, saying that he would deny communion to Catholic voters who back pro-choice candidates. I thought the voting booth was private. Oh, well, so’s the confessional.
In my home state of Virginia, The Diocese of Richmond has replaced Bishop Walter Sullivan with a new Bishop, Francis X. DiLorenzo, whose conservative views are already stirring protests from the faithful. According to a story in the Virginian Pilot, Bishop DiLorenzo believes that communion “symbolizes the fact that you are completely in union with the pope, you are in union with your bishop” and fully supportive of the gospel and Catholic church policies. Several Pilot readers have written letters to the editor critical of the new bishop, however, they shouldn’t be so surprised by the Bishop’s remarks, considering the regulations that have governed the reception of communion throughout Church history.
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, “Communion should be administered to all those who ask it reasonably, excluding, at least until they make sufficient reparation, public sinners and such as lead openly scandalous lives. So, too, it is not to be given to those likely to treat it with irreverence, or to the mentally deranged or those suffering from certain forms of illness.” There are even more ridiculous rules, such as what the priest should wear when dispensing communion, and how many candles should be burning on the altar.
Such rules seek to supplant God’s authority with the authority of the Church. If I remember my Gospels correctly, Christ denied the bread and wine of the Last Supper to no one, not even Judas. By the Church’s standards, though, I fear even Christ Himself may not be considered worthy enough to receive the Eucharist. After all, he consorted openly with notorious sinners, He threw the money lenders out of the Temple, He challenged the authority of the Sanhedrin, and some thought he was mentally deranged. I always thought communion was intended for the nourishment of souls, that receiving the Eucharist expressed a desire to be united with Christ in love, and not with the teachings and policies of the church or the pope.
“You never look at me from the place at which I see you.”
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, 103
Much has been written in the past month (by better writers than me) about the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and while I have nothing new to add, I have a few observations to offer. It struck me as odd that the guards put black bags over the prisoner’s heads. I suppose they did that to disorient the prisoners, and to create fear and uncertainty.
Another reason, though, may be that the guards didn’t want the prisoners to see them, for if they did, they could see their shame; the guards shame, not the prisoners’. Or it may be that if the guards could see the prisoners’ pleading faces, they would be forced to perceive their humanity, which would make the job of degrading and humiliating the prisoners more difficult to carry out. It’s easier to treat human beings like animals if you can’t see them looking at you.
But why then did the guards photograph their own abusive behavior? If they didn’t want the prisoners to see them, why show off for their fellow soldiers? Smiles and “thumbs up” gestures usually convey attitudes of confidence and victory. In this case, they conveyed a sick enjoyment of cruelty. To me, those photographs said, “See me acting like a sadist.”
What bothers me most are the claims that this was an isolated situation perpetrated by only a few bad apples. Others, myself included, believe this indicates systemic abuse throughout all or many Iraqi prisons. War creates conditions of extreme violence, which leads to atrocities being accepted as commonplace events. But it doesn’t have to be like that.
I came across a post from Mike at vitia about the Abu Ghraib fiasco, in which he explains why the soldiers involved deserve the harshest punishment. Mike writes, “Not only have they violated the military’s rules and international law, they’ve forgotten the reason why such laws exist, the moral imperative: whatever the horrors of war, the people on the other side are human beings, with families, with lives.”
Mike was a sergeant who taught training sessions on the Geneva Convention and the Laws of War. He believes the abuse was due to putting Reservists and National Guard, who don’t receive training in the treatment of prisoners, in charge of the prison. Add to that an administrative policy, from the president to the CIA to Military Intelligence, which views all opposition to American interests as suspect, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.
War is not the only situation which fosters such behavior. In an opinion column in my local paper (The Virginian Pilot), Tony McNair, a prisoner at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, VA, says that America has its own Abu Ghraibs. “It is common practice for (Virginia) prison administrators to allow despicable control tactics,” which according to McNair, include strip searches, use of lethal shotgun fire for minor violations, use of attack dogs, stun shields, three foot long batons, brutal beatings, and four point restraints.
McNair points out that one of the guards at Abu Ghraib, “Chip” Frederick, was also a guard at Virginia’s Buckingham Correctional Center, a place that’s been in the news for several years for allegations of abuse similar to what happened at Abu Ghraib. We like to think that such things can’t happen in America, but they do. What puzzles me is that we tolerate behavior at home that outrages us when it occurs abroad.
McNair says that prisoners’ complaints have long been ignored by the media and ruled unfounded by Virginia’s courts (one of the most conservative court systems in the country, by the way). McNair blames tolerance of the intolerable on the general public’s apathy. “Indifferent attitudes such as these give prison guards a green light to continue their mistreatment of prisoners with impunity.” McNair hopes that the attention given mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners will lead to exposure of mistreatment of American prisoners as well. I hope he’s right.
