Signposts: Mardi Gras Irony

A sign at the entrance to the French Quarter in New Orleans tells people do not walk around with glass bottles (but you can put your drink in a plastic cup).

I found it ironic that this municipal sign is attached to a pole on the entrance to Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Louisiana.

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Trivial Pursuit, Sipping a Bordeaux

Trivial Pursuit is fun if you are competitive. If you want to win. One-On-One combat can be brutal. D and I played last night. We drank her bottle of Bordeaux from France (can you say that fancy style?). We shared the bottle, but for some reason, I have a bad headache this morning, slightly quelled by generous consumption of New Orleans style coffee. Question: Where did Tensing Norgay plant his national flag? Answer: On top of Mount Everest. Now you may think that was an easy question, but it is incorrect if you say "Mount Everest" because the correct, more specific answer is "on top of Mount Everest." Now, that is just pure-dee lame. Ugh. I missed an orange pie because of that, but don't worry, someone did not know who coined the phrase "between a rock and a hard place" but they did know Axel Rose was a member of Guns and Roses. M says I have way too much brain sludge. D has an incredible treasure chest of encyclopedic knowledge, but, both of us did not know the "Orphic Egg" was in Greek Mythology. Do you? It has to do with prophecy and an egg enveloped by a serpent (but nothing to do with Orpheus). Now, it is well known that you should use the spokes to move around the game board. Don't do the circle motion. You will lose. And it does pay off to PAY ATTENTION to the question. Question: What Yiddish word means mentally disabled or clumsy? Answer: Klutz. I heard the question and answered the first Yiddish word to come to my head, Shmuck. I was a shmuck in answering that question incorrectly. I did know, however, that shmuck is Alfred E. Neuman's favorite word. The trick at beating Trivial Pursuit is to get questions RIGHT. Who would have thought? I just thought it was the luck of the pie. Question: What country exports the most coffee? Answer: Brazil. By the way, I wonder how many new neuronal pathways are created in the human mind during one game of Trivial Pursuit. I have this odd hunch, that the game actually destroys pathways, but not as much as eating Ben and Jerry's and watching re-runs of Green Acres. Question: By the way, what Green Acres recurring gag features a passageway to the Douglass bedroom? Answer: "The Sliding Door" gag. Now, if you didn't know that question's answer, don't feel bad, there are loads of Trivial Pursuit questions just waiting for you to feel dumb. But, I don't think it matters. I wonder if the SAT or ACT tests are good for your brain. At least those questions are not based on instant recall of extraneous facts but rather force you to think through an issue. The game is called trivial for a reason. Wouldn't it be funny if you had to write an essay response to a Trivial Pursuit question? I always thought it would be funny if on Jeopardy! contestants had to write a 1,200-word essay on a pre-chosen prompt. Brutal!!! There is one thing to know instantly random factoids, but it is quite another thing to assemble all that brain sludge into a cohesive narrative that can sustain one's attention. Good luck America!

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Mardi Gras: Go to the Endymion Parade

The best way to know New Orleans is to traverse her streets during Carnival.

My friend's D's brother D.

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Repost: How to Survive a 35,000-Foot Fall - Plane Crash Survival Guide - Popular Mechanics

This article is a must-read for anyone who travels 35,000 feet in the air. I especially liked Dan Koeppel's sense of humor. If you don't have time to read the article, or if you need the abridged version, here are some brief factoids gleaned from the article:

• You are more liable to survive a 35,000 foot free-fall by landing in a haystack, snow, or a swamp!
• Landing in water, contrary to popular belief, is just as hard as landing on concrete (water does not compress): SPLAT!
• At six miles up, a free fall will take three minutes and twenty-five seconds. So, you have some time to contemplate your condition (at a terminal velocity of about 120 mph).
• For two minutes you'll be unconscious due to lack of oxygen. Hypoxia will settle in and you will lose your breath until you reach breathable air at about 10,000 feet.
• If you land on your face, you're more likely to survive (albeit in the need of a facelift) than landing on top of your head or the side of your head).
• Children, military personnel, and crew members are more likely to survive a plummet than anyone else.
• "Surviving a plunge surrounded by a semi-protective cocoon of debris is more common than surviving a pure free-fall"
• "118,934 people have died in 15,463 plane crashes between 1940 and 2008."
• 157 folks have reportedly survived a free fall, "with 42 occurring at heights over 10,000 feet"

Koeppel, David. "How to Fall 35,000 Feet—And Survive." Popular Mechanics Feb. 2010: n. pag. Web. 8 Feb 2010.

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Re:”What Makes a Great Teacher”

An article in the latest issue of Atlantic Monthly on what makes great teachers revived my spirit a bit.     After reading the article, I realized that growing up I thought of my best teachers as magical beings, as if they had possessed something we didn’t and they were willing to pass that magic on to us. I know. I had a heavy infatuation with teachers as a kid. So I am biased. And now, I am a high school English teacher. So there is that.
Obviously, good teachers are not superheroes.
     They have foibles just like the rest of us. But, we have to stop thinking that “good teaching” is some mystery that lies in the realm of the unknown. As if the skill of teaching is an intangible thing that cannot be taught. There are qualities that one can detect in a teacher. When you meet a good teacher you realize they are never satisfied. Good teachers say stuff like this to visitors to their classroom: "' You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you — I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.'" Good teachers are constantly re-evaluating their methods and constantly looking for ways to make the learning environment better.

• Good teachers “avidly recruit students and other teachers into the process.” I know this to be true. Good teachers create a vibe that sends the message: “let’s be a part of this.”
• Good teachers maintain focus and ensure that everything they do in the classroom contributes to the learning process. I chuckle at this sign of a good teacher because it reminds me of a teacher I had who would always use every opportunity as a learning moment, to such an extent that we as students were not always aware of it. We might be collecting cool quotes to put into our notebooks, not realizing he was teaching us how to be better researchers.
• Good teachers plan exhaustively and purposefully, planning backward from the desired goal. Yes, I agree this is a good sign of a great teacher. They have broad goals they want their students to reach and make sure every lesson somehow inches toward that goal. The work is in the details. It takes a mammoth amount of creative energy to accomplish this feat.
• Good teachers seem not to complain about the system, but work relentlessly despite the combined efforts of budget, poverty, and budgetary shortcomings. The converse of this is those good teachers often are ground down by bureaucracy and quit due to burnout.

In a nutshell: Good teachers have grit.
      Here is a different video than what I originally had seen on the Atlantic's web site on the "Manager Teacher" (a model I would like to emulate). The original video was taken down and I cannot find it, but this video is sufficient for what I want to showcase. Notice two things: how the teacher has the students' full attention (that did not come out of thin air) and how from the beginning she demands from students to illustrate their understanding of what they need to do. But she is concise and she uses "economy of language" — and then the students get to work!

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A Mardi Gras Prosody: "The Night that Precedes Chaos"

I only had a twenty. Bought a coffee at Camellia grill. Got some change. Holla. Were the elections today?

Getting on a streetcar can only bring one as far as Napoleon avenue; every Carnival goer without a car knows that!

Here we go. The only information I don't have is the route. Saint Charles is blocked. We get off the streetcar. We're taking Freret street.

We are on La Salle/Simon Bolivar now, to Jackson avenue, to turn on Oretha Castle Haley Blvd.

I think we're on Loyola. Will be at Canal in no time. A handsome time to let loose. Now all I have to do is find Taryn.

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Book Review: The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts

Here lies a book review on the non-fiction tome The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts.
     I read the Gutenberg Elegies in 2006 back when books were still being read in print (har har). The statistics were grim for the written word, but new studies indicate that the written word may be back but will reading survive in the long run? The eReader phenomenon had not yet hit critical mass even a few years ago, but we had been facing a problem at the library: students were not coming into the library. But, hits on the library web site had increased. Students had stopped coming to the library and had instead started doing all their research on the internet; they were checking the library's catalog online, using databases online (an awesome tool, by the way).
Fast-Food Restaurant Library
     Students were not using the library to come and stay: we had become more of a fast-food restaurant: come and buy and go. I was working at the time with a colleague, B., and she was telling me how she predicted back in the 90s that book would eventually be replaced by flexible devices that would allow readers to peruse books as if they were "print." I laughed at the time, even though Sony had come out with eBook readers, and so had a few other companies - but these clunkers were expensive and not amenable to a large selection. So, I read Sven Birkert's book, which is a philosophical musing on reading, words, language, and the art of the medium. At the time I was very nostalgic for books - even though books had not yet left the party. I could not imagine a life without physical books: the smell, the binding. the print, the presence of an actual book. But, then, as time went on, and Google announced its Books service, Amazon announced its Kindle, and now Apple, the iPad, I have come to realize that it is not "books" per se that we should be championing but READING. 
     Will I read my child Where the Wild Things Are from an electronic device or from a book? Maybe both? What about WRITING. Or both: reading and writing. It is one thing to elegize on the loss of the book, but as Birkerts points out, it is a sadder thing to lament the loss of reading. Will the fast production of eBooks toss out reading? Probably not. Will blogs eliminate writing? Probably not? I think the divide is not necessarily due to books versus digital media, but rather, a divide between permanence and impermanence. Books represent permanence. Working in a library you come to know this especially when a patron comes in looking for a book he or she once read: they, panic-stricken, come to the circulation desk, "Where is the book I read twenty years ago?! It is not here. I remember it was right there," they say, pointing to a space in the library that is now reserved for computer terminals. Books are supposed to be permanent; they are supposed to be dogeared, yes, but they must persist; Sometimes people are not too happy to discover their book had been relegated to the basement, replaced by a PC - and some people even lament when their favorite book has donned a new cover art. The gods must be crazy. If the book is not to be found, a worker would have to be sent to request for the book at another location, have it sent by courier, and voilá here was the book, albeit a different jacket cover than they had remembered, but so what. Or better yet: let us say the book had been discarded?! If it had been tossed to the Friends of the Library book sale? What then? What if I had said, "Well, you can read the book on our eReader? Or you can print the entire book on a printer? Or, well, we have to inter-library loan that book from Fresno." The patron would have been unhappy. Maybe furious. We want our physical books like we want our web pages: now, and at this very moment. We want permanence but we want our permanent print like want our Safari to load: instantaneously. I am frustrated that people are so nostalgic for the superficial when they should rather be proactive for the right reasons. It is one thing to lament the loss of the physical book, but I find people are not putting their money where their hearts are. Is this an elegy for the book, or is it rather, an elegy for intellectual curiosity? What scares me more is not the loss of the physical book, but something deeper and scarier: the loss of critical thinking. If the book is only meant to be a fetish for nostalgia, then, it defeats the purpose. Books will be around for a while. Sure. As long as reading = pleasure. But, there will also be Kindles, etc., right alongside of them. What I worry about is access to new and interesting stories, information, words, language, pleasure. Will there be egalitarian places where people can read? Not everyone can afford a Kindle (and for that matter, not everyone can afford a book). Will libraries be places with free access to Google Books and usage of eBook readers? Google states once they open their databases of copyright and out of print in-copyright books by subscription, public libraries will be granted a terminal with free access. 
     What if I want to read the Chronicles of Narnia at home but cannot afford the twenty bucks? In America, access to reading is taken for granted. We forget that it is a mark of a democratic society that champions unmediated, free access to knowledge. Will there continue to be places where people can write out their thoughts (like here on Blogger, which infamously deletes blogs for no apparent reason). Will proprietary devices create an elite upper class? I think impermanence is what we are scared of. We are afraid the loss of the book is the loss of civilization as we know it. What scares me more than anything is the middle-class person who says: "I don't have time to read" when there are people who really cannot afford to read. That scares me more than, "I want an iPad." Or, when I give students a list of books to read, and one of them says, "None of these stories interests me." But, then again, what am I hoping for? Have things really changed? Are people reading less in 2010 as they did in 1956? As they did in 1888? Actually, people are reading more, just not in print. But, the strange paradox is the advent of choice: I am sure today there are so many options to choose from when it comes to reading: just look at the number of books published every year; the number of news blogs, websites, etc. But, is every class of society given the opportunity to read? Who are the people reading more? The next thing to gage is writing. Are Americans writing more? Now, it may come back to permanence and impermanence. Is it the loss of something we are afraid of? If it is, what is that something? That's what I want to know. I will not sing an elegy for the book, but I may begin to sing an elegy for thought. If we are reading more, what are we reading, and if we are writing more, what are we writing. 
Start Memorizing a Book Like the Book People in Fahrenheit 451
     Should I do a Fahrenheit 451 and start memorizing my favorite book or should I go out and buy an iPad? Maybe, I should do both. But, what I think should be done is this: people need to ensure that reading is always made available to everyone in society. Budgets for information centers, books in braille, one book one city programs, writing workshops, poetry circles, lending libraries, etc., should not be cut. I lived in a posh city where citizens voted to not approve the library budget? What were they thinking? People said they just buy their books. They don't need a library. As we speed into the information age, we cannot make the mistake of denying reading to the masses just because books are like an iTunes song: 99 cents.

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