Notes from West Egg

Tomorrow’s New York Times will publish an article titled “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?“ by Motoko Rich (posted online a day early– another in a long list of reasons why I love online news!). Apparently this is the first in a series of articles that the Times will publish in an attempt to explore how technology is changing the way people read.

Obviously, this is a great concern to newspaper publishers and journalists, because it seems pretty clear that print-based media is dissolving before our eyes. If they don’t or won’t fully adapt to a 24-7 online platform, these news companies will simply die. It’s not just a matter of environmental choices or economics or reader preference, it’s the expectation that readers today have for media that is interactive and highly flexible. The young people interviewed in this article aren’t satisfied with their parents’ ‘one-way,’ linear reading experiences; they want to interact with the news and/or manipulate the narratives. And once you’ve had a taste of that, it’s hard to go back to just reading or watching the news.

One anecdote that I found interesting appears on the last page of this article. The reporter interviewed a teenager who was diagnosed as a child with learning disabilities. He said he finds reading books difficult but excels in online reading:

In a book, “they go through a lot of details that aren’t really needed,” Hunter said. “Online just gives you what you need, nothing more or less.”

When researching the 19th-century Chief Justice Roger B. Taney for one class, he typed Taney’s name into Google and scanned the Wikipedia entry and other biographical sites. Instead of reading an entire page, he would type in a search word like “college” to find Taney’s alma mater, assembling his information nugget by nugget.

Experts on reading difficulties suggest that for struggling readers, the Web may be a better way to glean information. “When you read online there are always graphics,” said Sally Shaywitz, the author of “Overcoming Dyslexia” and a Yale professor. “I think it’s just more comfortable and — I hate to say easier — but it more meets the needs of somebody who might not be a fluent reader.”

Karen Gaudet, Hunter’s mother, a regional manager for a retail chain who said she read two or three business books a week, hopes Hunter will eventually discover a love for books. But she is confident that he has the reading skills he needs to succeed.

“Based on where technology is going and the world is going,” she said, “he’s going to be able to leverage it.”

Hunter’s mother’s comment makes me think of Ken Kay’s concern about whether or not we are teaching young people not only to find information, but to synthesize it and, yes, leverage it. Are we helping students use information to their own personal benefit? To advance their own agendas? 

As an English teacher, I will never give up on books as teaching tools and will expect my students to engage in literature’s one-way, “linear-ness” and possibly even to enjoy the experience. This year they will read Antigone, Things Fall Apart, Animal Farm, All Quiet on the Western Front and more. The authors of these works have important ideas that can only be found by plunging into them and dealing with the non-digital universe that exists when one mind speaks and one mind (can merely?) listen. But I’m also going to find or create online experiences that allow kids to interact with Orwell’s ideas, for example, and to hear multiple perspectives (rather than just the teacher’s). I’m reaching the conclusion that if we don’t work to better integrate literature into the Web 2.0 experience, books might gain a reputation of being so 20th century that — whatever form they take, print or electronic — they won’t matter anymore.

Information is powerful, but wisdom culled from literature provides the context and narrative richness with which to make meaningful decisions. 

(CC Photo credit: A.K. Photography )

Well, that may be going too far, but he’s certainly someone whose premise I hope and pray is right! According to his excellent book A Whole New Mind, the U.S. economy is transitioning from the Age of Information to what he calls the Conceptual Age, an era that will be kind to creators and empathizers. It’s an age that will reward imagination, joyfulness, social dexterity and humor. Cultural creatives comprise one-quarter of U.S. adults; they are right-brain dominant and are good at:

• seeing the big picture
• synthesizing information
• feeling empathy and sympathy by taking the viewpoint of the person speaking
• embracing an ethic of caring

My people! 

The Information Age rewarded reasonably priced and functional products; it required people strong in logic, calculation and sequential thinking. But now that the “left brains have made us rich,” says Pink, these qualities and people are no longer enough. With so many cheap products flooding the marketplace thanks to overseas labor, consumers have an abundance of choices (for example, cell phones) and are starting to crave items that are more aesthetically, emotionally or spiritually pleasing (as in the iPhone). And jobs that depend on routine skills are disappearing overseas, as well.

What cannot be outsourced or mechanized are those six very human, creative qualities above. And these are what we should incorporate into our teaching. As an English teacher these aptitudes make me very happy! The study of literature can easily incorporate the six areas. We can ask students to tell what makes a story emotionally engaging, what makes a poem beautiful, what gives a whimsical quality to that scene in a play: this is design. What about empathy? How better to understand character interplay, conflicts and motivations than to ask students to empathize with the characters, to map out their relationships and explain why they care (or don’t care) for each other. How about updating the characters of “Antigone” with their own Facebook or MySpace pages? What music would Creon listen to today? What would his mood be? What famous quotation would Haemon highlight? What gods would make his top friends? I will definitely be using my Ning page for this activity.

In fact, now that I think about it, the six aptitudes defined by Pink are probably what led me to major in English in the first place. Finding meaning in literature is one of my favorite things in the world, and applying that meaning to my own life IS my favorite thing in the world. 

How refreshing this is after eight years of drilling down into stories and poems and non-fiction with all those left-brain dominant standards, such as this one:

 ”3.2 – Evaluate the structural elements of the plot (e.g., subplots, parallel episodes, climax), the plot’s development, and the way in which conflicts are (or are not) addressed and resolved.”

I believe in the standards, believe they are necessary so that there is an overall scope and sequence to our students’ progression through the grades. I love organization and logical progress. So I will not be tossing the standards by the wayside. Rather, what I will try to do is balance them with creative, meaning-making opportunities. It’s not enough to evaluate structural elements since apparently we could outsource such tasks to our student friends in India or China!

Our students should also be asked to take those elements and create something new, unique or playful. For instance, with the 8th grade standard above, they could identify the parallel episodes and then — I’m totally making this up right now — try to discover “perpendicular episodes” (i.e. the parts of the plot that are most disparate, jarring or contrasting to each other) or they could take an episode in the plot that has no parallel and insert one of their own making, then evaluate how it adds or detracts from the meaning of the piece.

The possibilities are rich, or, as Pink says, ”meaning is the new money!”