Procrastadabbler

Much of my summer has been taken up by the Genesee Valley Writing Project, but I did manage to fit a few books in.

Micromessaging by Stephen Young. I read this at the beginning of the summer as part of the Fisher diversity program. It’s really conversation analysis (Sacks, Schegloff) taken into the corporate world. But Young takes the idea of how the micro in conversation, including body language, sends messages to the listener which position the listener to be successful or not. The basic message is that if you want the people you work with, or your team, or your work environment to be successful you need to pay attention to these small messages. By becoming cognizant of those messages you can shift your behavior to be more positive and thus bring out the best in people.

Serendipitously at the same time I was reading Micromessaging, I read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Both of these books are for the general market, but I’ve been able to cull some good stuff out of them. The thing that hit me about Blink is that we make these snap decisions–one could almost call them instinctive–based on past experience. The thing is, while many of these snap decisions are accurate, many are not because they are based on past experience that is not necessarily relevant. Specifically, we make snap decisions about someone based on their phenotype (race) and our past experience with people of that phenotype may be based on popular media depictions etc rather than on any real meaningful experience. As Gladwell points out, the work of Project Implicit shows that most people (of all phenotypes) have a preference for whites. This is because whites are typically depicted positively and thus we make snap decisions based on what we has been our past experience (even if that experience is a simulacrum – provided by the media). The only way to combat that, Gladwell says, is by exposure to explicit positive models about the other. Thus the need for antiracist/multicultural education. By broadening everyone’s experience with a wide range of people, we can actually change our implicit understandings of various people’s and thus change the micromessages we send, thus allowing people to achieve to their potential.

So antiracist/multicultural education is not about “tolerance” or “appreciating each other” it is more importantly about changing our implicit attitudes and thus our hidden interactions with people other than us so that all of us can achieveour potential and thus contribute in the most meaningful way to the positive development of our world.

I also read Al Gore’s Assault on Reason. To boil it down to a soundbite (which is one of the the things Gore hates), his argument is that television has made the American public too susceptible to manipulation. American people have lost the ability to interact with the government and have become the passive recipients of messages created to manipulate public opinion. He provides example after example based on the past eight years of our current administration. Critics of Gore focus on this aspect of the book and call it a diatribe against the Bush adminstration. It is in many respects, and unfortunately that takes away from Gore’s main message with is that the American people need to become active in our democracy. He has a rather romantic vision of the pre-television world. He claims that through literacy people were able to participate much more fully in democracy. Although he admits it, he somewhat glosses over the fact that prior to the television world, most people were disenfranchised from democracy anyway. The original U.S. democracy included only landed white men. Then that was extended only to men, finally it included black men, but then in many cases included a literacy requirement, only in the 20th century were women included. He also doesn’t mention that up until WWII, the majority of people did not graduate from high school, so education and literacy levels were actually lower than we see today. The difference is that prior to WWII, lower educated white men were able to find stable secure jobs in industry. The postwar economy shifted and required more education. The 21st century economy requires even more education for those who want to be fully franchised.

But regardless of the shortcomings of Gore’s book, he does make an important point that the American citizenry must engage in the political process and one way of doing so is the Internet. The Internet, Gore argues and I agree, has the potential for democratizing public voice. It allows for an interaction between the private person and the public servant in ways never before possible. Of course, one still needs Internet access and a certain level of competency with typographic text or computer software for creating podcasts or vlodcasts.

Now I’m reading the Accidental Mind. It’s a book about neuroscience and specifically the structure of the human brain. It’s about how memories are constructed, the roles of sex, religion and that’s as far as I’ve gotten. Thus far, the premise is that rather than being an elegant structure, the brain is actually a kluged together system of redundancies but it is that very construction that makes us human. One of the most meaningful pieces I’ve gotten out of it has to do with teaching. That the physical and the mental are intrinsically connected. When engaged in activities the firing of the neurons and the creation of new synapses are connected to acts and thoughts. I have to reread those sections again, but it has important implications for education — beyond the terrible “brain based learning” crap that’s being published lately.

All of these books will find their way into my teaching in some way.

And of course I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And I reread Ladson-Billings The Dreamkeepers and Delgado & Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory. Then there was the book Creative Nonfiction that I read for the Writing Project. And I read McCourt’s Teacher Man, which I am using in my teaching, but I’m not sure how yet. And I think I read a few other things, but I can’t remember now, so obviously they weren’t that important to me.

Next on my list is The Glass Castle. It was a birthday gift, but before I allow myself to dig into it, I have to get some article writing done. Which is why I’m typing away here. PROCRASTINATION!!!!