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2004-07-12 - 11:29 p.m. - a retro reader This one's for you, %%diary-seastreet%%. You might be a poor aim with bullets, but no gun-slinging dude has a chance against you with your rapid-fire words. A modern take on an old saying - "the keyboard is mightier than the bullet." I was reading the New York Times on-line - oh what horrors, %%diary-seastreet%%, for Mr. Goia! – me, a science teacher not reading from a literary classic. If I were to stick to the book medium in my field (unless perhaps it was some old science fiction), I would soon be teaching outdated material. In today’s, NYT magazine article they discuss the rising popularity of comic books – with the modern assemblage being called graphic novels (and we’re not talking porn, here). The article mentions that during poetry’s heyday, the literary form of the novel was seen as "entertainment suitable only for idle ladies of uncertain morals". Obviously that changed, but the article points out that the novel may soon be on the decline as a literary genre. It ponders what genre might replace it, and suggests perhaps the graphic novel. Hmm…now while I haven’t read any of these new modern forms of the ol’ comic book, it just makes me laugh at what Goia’s reaction might be. "Now today’s society needs to have pictures drawn for them instead of imagining them in their heads for themselves! It’s worse than the pre-reader’s picture books!!" An argument against that, though, would be that in this new genre, the pictures don’t just illustrate what’s going on but are an integral part of the novel. The article points out that you can’t skim a graphic novel and that it may even require MORE concentration than your typical soon to be archaic novel. I’d have to agree with seastreet that some of today’s mainstream electronic media do require you to think a bit – more so than a lot of the fluffy books out there on the shelves. In the NY Times article %%diary-seatreet%% links us to in his "reading rant" entry, it points out that reading books doesn’t necessarily make you a smarter person unless you wrestle with the author’s ideas and formulate some of your own. It’s funny, this year I taught a literacy class for our 9th graders to help them acquire skills that make them comprehend of the reading material better. Many students can decode text, but can they tell you a thing of what they read or formulate their own opinions about it??? As a high school teacher, I have to sadly respond a resounding NO to that question. Even if they’re on-line reading, I warn them of the filter they need to have in place to decipher what’s bogus and what’s legit. There’s a website called , Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide ,and I had a copy of the text which I gave to my 9th graders. The majority of them were ready to ban this colorless, odorless, tasteless killer – dihydrogen monoxide; it can cause severe burns, is used it nuclear power plants and is a food additive as well. They were appalled that a substance like this could be around in our lakes and streams and that no one is doing anything about it. I told them I would bet my house and life’s savings that every one of them had it in their house and that they had probably had contact with it that very day!!!! Well, my 9th graders obviously haven’t had chemistry nomenclature yet – dihydrogen monoxide is none other than H2O. After that lesson, you can sometimes catch a glimpse of wariness in their eyes when I tell them something. Good – "trust no one" as Fox Mulder would say. OK – maybe I don’t go that far, but at least they might now think of thinking and/or questioning what they read. Back to the comix (as they spell it now for this new form), maybe they’ll be the fall of civilization as we know it. But perhaps it’s just what we need. Tyler Durden says of his project mayhem plan, "we’re going to break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world." Oh, but I got that quote out of a novel. How retro of me….
30-something - 2005-03-01
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