"Since Ulysses was by that time published, Joyce was embarking on Finnegans Wake and plotting out its systems. TheBook of Kells
would remain an abiding influence on his work; he would refer to one of
its pages explicitly in his new novel. When his friend Arthur Power
needed advice about how to write, Joyce suggested that he study The Book of Kells.
"In all the places I have been to," he wrote, "Rome, Zurich, Trieste, I
have taken it about with me, and have pored over its workmanship for
hours. It is the most purely Irish thing we have, and some of the big
initial letters which swing right across a page have the essential
quality of a chapter of Ulysses. Indeed, you can compare much of my work to the intricate illuminations."' -Colm Tóibín in the Guardian
Where in the American "Common Core," or in Michael Gove's reductionist ebacc, is the space for linking an illuminated initial to a literary chapter? Where is the ability to delve into the page shown above? Where is the frenetic joy of playing with language that might be found in Finnegan's Wake?
Hark!
Tolv two elf kater ten (it can’t be) sax.
Hork!
Pedwar pemp foify tray (it must be) twelve.
And low stole o’er the stillness the heartbeats of sleep.
White fogbow spans. The arch embattled. Mark as capsules. The nose of the man who was nought like the nasoes. It is
self tinted, wrinkling, ruddled. His kep is a gorsecone. He am Gascon Titubante of Tegmine — sub — Fagi whose fixtures
are mobiling so wobiling befear my remembrandts. She, exhibit next, his Anastashie. She has prayings in lowdelph. Zeehere
green egg-brooms. What named blautoothdmand is yon who stares? Gu — gurtha! Gugurtha! He has becco of wild hindigan. Ho,
he hath hornhide! And hvis now is for you. Pens‚e! The most beautiful of woman of the veilch veilchen veilde. She would
kidds to my voult of my palace, with obscidian luppas, her aal in her dhove’s suckling. Apagemonite! Come not nere!
Black! Switch out !
Where is the art of creating the wholly new? Or in understanding that which neither your teacher, nor your state legislature (nor Michael Gove, nor Pearson) is familiar with?
"As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are
spending considerably more time than children from more well-off
families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos,
play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show."
Both The New York Times and "reporter" Matt Richtel are at it again. The Times in their battle against technology in education, Richtel in his war against poor children. [see Class War at The New York Times]
Technology is "not a savior" says The New York Times... except for their own kids
The general idea is that while rich kids will use technology well, poor kids - a dangerous alien population - will not, so rich kids should be connected to the world and this century, while poor kids need to be carefully watched and trained to "be white."
Let us tear apart one key section of Richtel's reporting on this so-called "Digital Divide" crisis:
The study found that children of parents who do not have a college
degree spend 11.5 hours each day exposed to media from a variety of
sources, including television, computer and other gadgets. That is an
increase of 4 hours and 40 minutes per day since 1999.
Children of more educated parents, generally understood as a proxy for
higher socioeconomic status, also largely use their devices for
entertainment. In families in which a parent has a college education or
an advanced degree, Kaiser found, children use 10 hours of multimedia a
day, a 3.5-hour jump since 1999. (Kaiser double counts time spent
multitasking. If a child spends an hour simultaneously watching TV and
surfing the Internet, the researchers counted two hours.)
It doesn't take an "expert researcher" to see the nonsense in the above. First, the kid with the TV on and the mobile phone in hand is not spending 11 hours a day, but 5.5 hours doing... um, whatever they may be doing because these categories are absurdly broad. At the moment, in this hour, I am spending 3 hours "wasting time on media." The television is on - HGTV, I'm writing on my computer - this post, I'm tracking mail on my mobile. In just a few hours I'll have used up more than my full day, and jump right to tomorrow.
Second, the giant gap? It comes to 1.5 hours a day - which might actually be 45 minutes, or 30 minutes, or - to be honest - who the f--- knows? Richtel has built a career out of misusing third-rate statistical analysis (he has a Pulitzer Prize for "proving" what is provably untrue - that mobile phone use has made driving in America much more dangerous), and here we go again.
Then, using the "anecdote as fact" structure which has defined Richtel's education reporting, the "reporter" finds the most connected poor child in America:
Policy makers and researchers say the challenges are heightened for
parents and children with fewer resources — the very people who were
supposed to be helped by closing the digital divide.
The concerns are brought to life in families like those of Markiy Cook, a
thoughtful 12-year-old in Oakland who loves technology.
At home, where money is tight, his family has two laptops [obviously with broadband - IS], an Xbox 360
and a Nintendo Wii, and he has his own phone. He uses them mostly for
Facebook, YouTube, texting and playing games.
He particularly likes playing them on the weekends.
Ummm, Matt? I've worked with a lot of poor kids, most are almost completely disconnected at home - except for their phone. When New Rochelle, NY began their 4G laptop initiative in their poor neighborhoods, they could barely find anyone with broadband, much less other laptops at home or connected video games. When I ask, whether in Michigan or Virginia, I find the poor with very little access, outside of the (often shared) smartphone. So Markiy is quite the "thoughtful" find for The Times, a find who makes "poor" parents look lazy, and poor kids - even those described as "thoughtful" poor kids - look irresponsible. This is the - please excuse the racist expression here but I believe the connection is valid - "Lazy Darkie" theory, the idea, still expressed by the Republican Party in the United States, that African-Americans fail to succeed because they are only interested in "lazing around," dancing, and eating "fried chicken 'n watermelon" (which, honestly, has been expressed more, ahhh, bluntly in the circles of American power).
James Gee on how gaming supports learning
You know Markiy is irresponsible because he plays games on weekends and he isn't doing well in school. I could suggest reading James Geeto Matt Richtel, but information on how children develop and what they need in terms of interactive language, is not The Times goal here.
James Paul Gee, a professor of literacy studies at Arizona State
University who grew interested in video games when his son began playing
them years ago, has written several seminal books on the power of video
games to inspire learning. He says that in working through the levels
of a complex game, a person is decoding its ‘‘internal design grammar’’
and that this is a form of critical thinking. ‘‘A game is nothing but a
set of problems to solve,’’ Gee says. Its design often pushes players to
explore, take risks, role-play and strategize — in other words putting a
game’s informational content to use. Gee has advocated for years that
our definition of ‘‘literacy’’ needs to be widened to better suit the
times. Where a book provides knowledge, Gee says, a good game can
provide a learner with knowledge and also experience solving problems
using that knowledge.
Once again The New York Times could be looking at educational funding equity, or providing technology access in real ways, or about making schools function as relevant learning spaces instead of as worksheet factories... but they choose not too. Once again they have turned their most anti-poor reporter loose on American schoolchildren and their parents, to degrade them, to attack them, and to help ensure that the legislators The Times influences will not give these "irresponsible" kids what they need.
"Skill in reading is desirable. However, the importance of reading may be
overemphasized in schools. Reading skills are determined relatively and
not absolutely. Thus, relatively poor readers will persist. Schools
cannot eradicate individual differences. Biological makeup and societal
pressures are the important factors in determining reading skill.
Present methods of reading remediation are of questionable efficacy and
are traumatic to some children. Time with its associated normal
development succeeds in remediating the majority of children with
dyslexia. Most poor readers eventually attain reading levels that enable
them to comprehend the types of printed materials commonly encountered.
If a child finds reading difficult or distasteful, that child should be
encouraged to read but should have the right not to be forced to read." - R.D. Snyder, 1979
I have been introduced, more than once, as, "this is Ira, he's against literacy."
It's a funny introduction. I think of myself, in some weird ways of course, as a "prophet" of literacy, bringing the love of stories, yes, of books, to many who have grown up without it, but when I run into your typical "literacy advocate" I often fly into a rage.
My rage now has been created by two things, first, this "What if everyone could read" campaign by Pam Allyn and her organization "LitWorld and LitLife," and a Guardian article somehow mixing Dickens 200th Birthday with government mandated phonics ("Please sir, may I have another Pseudoword?"), and the British government's desire for all students to visit the libraries the British government is closing as an austerity measure.
Allyn is perhaps less ironic, and more hateful, fully demonizing me and all others who struggle with decoding text - she actually extends this generationally, choosing to bash our children. "When a child cannot read or write at an appropriate level for her age,
it affects her ability to understand other subjects. Struggling readers
connect learning with embarrassment and frustration, which puts
stumbling blocks in their way and prevents them from reaching their full
potential. Later in life, struggling child readers become struggling
adult readers who are far less likely to vote and secure jobs than their
literate counterparts. In addition, literacy levels correlate with
health outcomes, both for the individual him or herself as well as his
or her children." Thank you dear, I feel all better. May I now psychoanalyze a person who chooses to make their living describing others in pathological terms?
I like to read sci-fi and mysteries as I fall asleep...
The Decoding Obsession
Who reads? Who reads well? What does "reading well" mean? "In the hypothetical “average school,” 50% of the students will read at or below grade level when grade level is defined as the class median. This statistical fact is generally not recognized. Educators and parents tend to view below average performance as unsatisfactory. A student performing below average in a classroom should not necessarily be considered an adverse reflection on either the parent or the teacher." - Snyder, 1979. Actually, "below" is the "norm." 67% of American fourth graders fail to read "proficiently" for their imagined "grade level," along with 66% of eighth graders, raising questions about that "grade level" concept. According to "KidsCount" from the "Annie E. Casey Foundation," in all of the United States, only Massachusetts has 50% of fourth graders reading "proficiently." This is no doubt due to the individual health insurance mandates, and required services provided by religious hospitals, of RomneyCare.
So, if so few are reading well... how the hell are people getting information or working?
If you listen to this, you simply will not know anything of Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales
The argument made is that our failures, whether "our" means the United States or the United Kingdom, lie in the failure of schools to beat more children into submission via phonics. If only our kids were better at decoding alphabetical text into tiny fragments of words which are tiny fragments of ideas, we'd beat those damn Chinese, Germans, Brasilians, Singaporians... whoever. Then the argument accelerates, abetted by educators who talk to human resources mismanagers. You can't do any job anymore unless you can decode alphabetical text and prove that by answering multiple choice questions on trivia included in the text.
"Although this is a common argument today, it ignores the fact that modern science and technology create many jobs in which literacy demands go down, not up, thanks to human skills being replaced by computers and other sorts of technological devices (Aronowitz & DiFazio,i994; Carnoy, Castells, Cohen, & Cardoso, 1993; Mishel & Teixeira, 1991). This is true not just for service-sector jobs, but also for many higher status jobs in areas like engineering and bioscience. Indeed, there is much controversy today as to which category is larger: jobs where science and technology have increased literacy demands or those where they have decreased them." - James Gee, 1999.
Of course Gee, here criticizing the general "Educational Industrial Complex" belief system, is talking about the narrow definition of "literacy" adopted by way too many, rather than the broad definition of "reading," "Reading is defined as getting information from a recorded source into your head, Writing is defined as getting information from your head into a form which others can access," which I, and Gee, advocate. People like Pam Allyn of LitWorld, and the current British and American governments, believe in an untruth: "Is it intrinsically incorrect to learn from audiovisuals or even from actual experience?"Gee asks. "Why should a student be forced to take written notes or written examinations when a recorder or a direct personal dialog might be used equally well? For many students with severe reading deficits, the oral-aural route is the major alternative route for education." And I will add that, since Gee wrote this, the ability to convert text to speech and speech to text has become not just absurdly inexpensive, but completely ubiquitous everywhere except in schools. Gee goes on to make the key point...
"Remedial reading programs may be emotionally damaging to a child. These programs focus not on the child’s strengths and accomplishments but on his failure. With our present methods of remediation, a child with dyslexia can very rapidly become a child receiving special attention to reading during school, remedial instruction after school, and special tutoring from his parents at night. A large percentage of the child’s waking day can be occupied by the very thing he cannot do and often finds distasteful. Childhood can thus be marred by systematic humiliation. Any interest the child may have in the reading process can be abolished."
Obviously, its not just literature which can be transmitted - and learned - without "decoding literacy"
So, every day "we," led by politicians of dubious education and intentions, and by self-enriching dogooders like Pam Allyn, label children as pathologically diseased because their brains don't work exactly like "our" brains. And then, we administer daily doses of humiliation because we somehow forget that someone like Socrates managed to know a whole hell of a lot without being "literate" at all - and, in fact - opposing literacy in every form. We forget that almost nothing comes with instruction manuals anymore - unless its from Ikea - because when "we" need to learn to do something, we go to YouTube, or we ask for help - in person or perhaps via Twitter. We forget that storytelling - that critical transmission of culture - occurred long before alphabets were created and continue to occur in this Post-Gutenberg age.
We also forget that the tools to switch media, as I said above, are everywhere. Right from the post below: "Read the book on paper. Listen to it via WYNN (the tool which changed my life), via Balabolka (Free), via WordTalk (Free), via FoxVox (Free), or via an audiobook,or watch the video, or talk with someone, it makes no difference cognitively."
As I said, I love books, I've written books. I've "read" tons of books. I want to share this with kids. And I want to tell all those who will unwittingly support Allyn's "Forced Reading Day," or other sad initiatives, that I'd much rather you help kids learn how to use Kindle for PC and Balabolka (or some other combination) to let them access the books they want than do any or all of your "reading interventions."
What we need to get better at is accessing information and expressing ourselves. And if that is what we want to do, and decoding - or handwriting - is likely effective for us, the evidence suggests that we will learn it. And that evidence is a hell of a lot stronger than any evidence you can present for your "teach me to read" programs.
"The media you use make no difference at all to learning," Clark,
director of the Center for Cognitive Technology at USC, is quoted as saying. "Not one dang
bit. And the evidence has been around for more than 50 years." Which is all quite true, and I do not know here if Clark's statement is being used completely out of context here or not by Hiltzik, because Clark is not heard from again.
And Hiltzik leaps to a different academic, and a different argument immediately. "Almost every generation has been subjected in its formative years to
some "groundbreaking" pedagogical technology. In the '60s and '70s," he writes before another quote,
'"instructional TV was going to revolutionize everything," recalls Thomas C. Reeves,
an instructional technology expert at the University of Georgia. "But
the notion that a good teacher would be just as effective on videotape
is not the case."'
Then Hiltzik rushes back 16 years, back to when I was integrating technology - I believe very successfully - into both high school and university classrooms (full, up-to-date research tools in every room, simulations in science classrooms, interaction in learning second languages), and writes, "Many would-be educational innovators treat technology as an end-all and
be-all, making no effort to figure out how to integrate it into the
classroom. "Computers, in and of themselves, do
very little to aid learning,"
Gavriel Salomon of the University of Haifa and David Perkins of Harvard
observed in 1996. Placing them in the classroom "does not automatically
inspire teachers to rethink their teaching or students to adopt new
modes of learning."'
Typewriters can be beautiful, they can be nostalgic, but what exactly does one do with text typed on a typewriter? How do you share it? publish it? have it edited?
There are a ton of media choices, the point is not to choose just one.
Yes, this might be one more attempt by the elites of the publishing world to maintain the socioeconomic status quo. The column seemed designed to confuse and frustrate parents, teachers, and students. But... hang on... let's go back to the top... to what Dr. Clark said: "The media you use make no difference at all to learning. Not one dang
bit. And the evidence has been around for more than 50 years."
Again: "The media you use make no difference at all to learning. Not one dang
bit." In other words, those who have tried, and keep trying - albeit without any evidence - to convince us all that decoded alphabetical text is somehow cognitively superior to any other way of bringing information into your brain, might be completely wrong.
Read the book on paper. Listen to it via WYNN (the tool which changed my life), via Balabolka (Free), via WordTalk (Free), via FoxVox (Free), or via an audiobook,or watch the video, or talk with someone, it makes no difference cognitively. The brain processes the information into memory, and that's the story.
Many of us have been arguing about this for years. People have routinely told me that, for example, listening to a book isn't hard enough (?!), or that the blind don't actually ever read, unless (maybe) they read Braille, then its OK, or that, as I was told on Twitter today, "I think allowing kids to grow up text-illiterate is a real disservice to them." I responded to that Tweet, which I listened to via Vlingo, by speaking into my phone as I sat in a parking lot.
Well, if there is no real evidence that print is superior, if we now have the tools to let all choose the information gathering tools and communication tools most effective for them at the moment, what's the issue with "technology" in schools?
For me, I have two responses: Short answer - we need tools in schools which allow students to learn to make those choices. This is what "Toolbelt Theory" is all about. Printed books cannot do this, but "Bring Your Own Device" plus a "Tool Crib" will offer every student the access path they need.
Technology: The Wrong Questions and the Right Questions
"A black board, in every school
house, is as indispensably necessary as a stove or fireplace; and in
large schools several of them might be useful."
"Slates are as necessary as black boards, and even more so. But they
are liable to be broken, it will be said, as to render it expensive to
parents to keep their children supplied with them."
"But are not books necessary at all, when the pupils are furnished
with slates? I may be asked. Not for a large proportion of the children
who attend our summer schools, nor for some of them who attend in the
winter. To such I believe books are not only useless, but on the whole,
worse than useless. As they advance in years, however, they may be
indulged with a book, now and then, as a favor. Such favor will not be
esteemed a light thing; and will come in time, to be sought more
frequently, and with more and more earnestness."
"At first, it will be well for the small portion of each day in which
very young pupils are allowed to have slates, to let them use them much
in the way they please. Some will make one thing, some another. What
they make is of comparatively little consequence, provided they attend,
each to his own business, and do not interfere with that of others."
In 1842 William A. Alcott, a now forgotten member of that legendary American family of letters, wrote a series of articles for the Connecticut Common School Journal,
asking teachers across America to make use of the newest educational
technology - the black board and the student slate. Well, it wasn't
really new. West Point had been using these for instruction since at
least 1820, but then, as now, schools were slow to adopt new ideas.
But in the 1840s everything in communication was changing. Wood pulp based paper and the rotary printing press had created the penny newspaper, an entirely new way of spreading news - and often gossip.
The telegraph had arrived creating the revolutionary concept of
instantaneous communication across great distances. And the world itself
was shrinking as steamboats and railroads rushed humans from place to
place at unheard of speeds.
William Alcott's ideas, handheld - "1:1" slates, the chalkboard, individual seats (allowing children to leave without disturbing others), kids moving around, good heating, big windows...
These new technologies spawned new forms of writing. Authors such as Charles Dickens began serializing fiction for the masses
- one no longer needed to buy expensive books and sit in that big
leather chair. Writers even created the first blogs - think of American Notes. Others, people like Horace Greeley, were redefining journalism.
The world was changing, and certain people, led by Alcott, were desperately trying to drag the schoolhouse into the present.
The Question
Then, as now, there was furious opposition. Alcott admitted that he
was seen as being "against books." He was perceived as disruptive. He
was already forcing schools to buy costly new furnishings (individual
student desks and chairs, to replace tables and benches), and now he was
advocating a radical change in how teaching took place.
Then, as now, the wrong question was being asked. In 1842 the
doubters wondered what these new technologies could do for schools as
they existed. Today, educators and policy makers constantly wonder what
computers, mobile phones, and social networking will do for a curriculum
largely unchanged since 1910.
That was the wrong question then, and it is the wrong question now.
The right question is, what can schools, what can education, contribute
to these new technologies?
Just as in 1842, just as in Socrates' time when literacy appeared,
the technologies of information and communication have changed
radically this decade - the ways in which humans learn about their world
have changed radically, and schools will either help their students
learn to navigate that new world, or they will become completely
irrelevant.
How you learned doesn't matter at all
If you are a teacher, a parent, an administrator, or the President of
the United States, I do not care how or what you learned in school. Or,
let me put it this way, your experience in school, or in sitting with
your mom studying books in the wee hours of the morning, is completely
irrelevant to any discussion of the education of today's students.
Maybe worse than irrelevant. Maybe dangerous. The belief that "your"
experience is relevant leads to a nightmare loop. Students who behave,
and learn, most like their teachers do the best in classrooms. Teachers
see this reflection as proof of their own competence - "The best
students are just like me."
And thus all who are "different" in any way -
race, class, ability, temperament, preferences - are left out of the
success story.
Choosing everything: A student listens to text while creating his own seating and desk... (Michael Thornton)
The majority of our students do "poorly" in school, do not achieve
their potential in school, do not enjoy education. Doing it "the old
way," utilizing the old tools, ensures that they never will.
Mobile phones, computers everywhere, hypertext, social networking, collaborative cognition (from Wikipedia on up), Google, text-messaging, Twitter, audiobooks, digital texts, text-to-speech, speech recognition,
flexible formatting - these are not "add ons" to the world of
education, they are the world of education. This is how humans in this
century talk, read, communicate, learn. And learning to use these
technologies effectively, efficiently, and intelligently must be at the
heart of our educational strategies. These technologies do something
else - by creating a flexibility and set of choices unprecedented in
human communication - they "enable" a vast part of the population which
earlier media forms disabled.
Back in Socrates' time it was all about the information you could
remember. With this system very, very few could become "educated." In
the ‘Gutenberg era' it was all about how many books you could read and
how fast you could decode alphabetical text; this let a few more reach
that ‘educated' status - about 35% if you trust all those standardized tests to measure "proficiency."
But now it is all about how you learn to find information, how you
build your professional and personal networks, how you learn, how to
learn - because learning must be continuous. None of this eliminates
the need for a base of knowledge - the ability to search, to ask
questions, requires a knowledge base, but it dramatically alters both
how that knowledge base is developed, and what you need to do with it.
This paradigm opens up the ranks of the "educated" in ways inconceivable
previously.
Technology is NOT something invented after you were born
Technology is everything humans have created. Books are technology - a
rather complex and expensive one actually, for holding and transmitting
human knowledge. The schoolroom is technology - the desks, chairs,
blackboards, schedule, calendar, paper, pens, and pencils. These are not
"good" or "bad," but at this point, they are simply outdated.
Yes, we still have stone carvers. Yes, we still have calligraphers.
But we no longer teach students to chase the duck, pluck the feather,
and cut the quill. We no longer teach Morse Code. We no longer teach the creation of illuminated manuscripts.
Now we must give up teaching that ink-on-paper is the primary
information source. It is not. We must give up insisting that students
learn "cursive" writing. Instead, they must learn to text on their mobiles and dictate intelligibly to their computer. We must toss out our
"keyboarding" classes and encourage students to discover their own best
ways to input data. We must abandon much of Socrates' memorization and
switch to engagement with where data is stored. We must abandon the
one-way classroom communication system, be it the lecture or use of the
"clicker," and teach with conversation and through modeling learning itself. We must lose the idea that "attention" means students staring at a teacher,
or that "attendance" means being in the room, and understand all the
differing ways humans learn best. We must stop separating subjects
rigidly and adopt the contemporary notion of following knowledge where
it leads us.
And we need to start by understanding that we are preparing students
for the world that is their future, not the world that is our past.
Telling stories without words. George Méliès, 1902
"Enough is enough. No more computers, cameras or consoles. No more watches, neckties or perfumes. Heck, no dead tree, no annoying lights, no overstuffed duck, either. I’m casting an ink-and-paper pall over the holiday, whether Christmas, Hanukkah or Kwanzaa: This year we’re going to give each other a book.
"A real, hold-in-your-hands paper book. Nothing more, nothing less. Already, the book edict has gone out on paperless email to the two key recipients of holiday love: my children. Noses have been turned up, derisive shrugs have been given: What a downer the old man is. A book? Come on."
The above was the holiday missive from International Herald-Tribune "senior editor" Kyle Jarrard, who went on to describe how all the folks say about digital devices and distraction are nonsense, "I’ve been known to drive the car while reading. Reading is the answer to
everything, I’m fond of saying. More long stares have been given in my
direction for years regarding my inability to not read," and finally to describe himself as absolutely and completely clueless about literature in general...
"A book allows you to time-travel, or just plain travel to real and imagined places, a not un-neat trick considering the price of airline tickets or space tourism. It allows you to meet evil, wonderful, mysterious, odd, crazy, fun, and not-fun people who often end up being more “real” in your life than real people. A simple tome of paper links you back, for instance, to the age of François I, Renaissance poet and book collector supremo, when the printing press and its wild spread across Europe was as exciting to us all as are e-books today."
Mr. Jarrard is, of course, the kind of easy target I enjoy beginning an argument with. His argument is so patently ridiculous that it creates its own parody, but, as I hope you know, if he was alone in his self-deception, and probably if he wasn't a powerful personage in the world of news distribution, I wouldn't bother.
But he is not alone, and his is a powerful voice, and so there is a problem.
Faith in a medium. A scroll made of sheepskin, lettered by hand. No vowels, no punctuation.
Now, I can "show" Mr. Jarrard how he might travel to space or even back to 1954 New York City without touching paper, without even opening his eyes. Or how he might travel to space or back to the 14th Century without decoding a single letter, but is this really necessary in this second decade of the 21st Century? Really? Must we point out to an educated, responsible, journalist that one can read and understand Genesis even if it is printed on paper made from cotton or wood-pulp, and printed mechanically? Must we point out to someone like this that blind people managed to understand books even before Braille was developed? Or - perhaps more significantly - must we explain to a senior staffer in The New York Times organization that Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were great literature long before anyone had ever written either of those "books" down.
visiting space without the smell of paper and ink
Mr. Jarrard, like too many in education, has a faith-based belief in a medium. Actually, his - their - belief is much narrower than that. It is a faith-based belief in an industrial process, in paper-making machines and rotary presses, for it is a belief in "print," not even in "text." To this group Homer and Socrates were illiterate morons, incapable of experiencing literature, the Blind are a sad, pathetic group forever banished from the corridors of knowledge, and anyone who accesses a newspaper on-line is exchanging depth of understanding for convenience.
And that is very sad. Or worse than sad. It is a kind of evil, an insistence that one's preferred medium, or in this case, textural and olfactory experience, is superior to any other. It is the worst kind of cultural imperialism.
All tell stories, all take the "reader" places they perhaps have never been, just as the stories included on our #ccGlobal St. Nicholas' Workshop Christmas Site do. There is no actual hierarchy of information delivery here, no matter how anyone, Mr. Jarrard or otherwise, wishes there were. Stories are told well or badly, effectively or ineffectively, entertainingly or boringly, imaginatively or not, in ways accessible to the many or the few, no matter the medium. Poor Shakespeare does not rank below Tom Clancy because he worked in the Elizabethan equivalent of television rather than print. Socrates is not a lesser light than Malcolm Gladwell because he spoke his words and never had them printed and bound. Charles Dickens, that "blogger" of the penny-paper era is not less important than Jack Kerouac even though Kerouac chose to write, like those ancient rabbis, on a scroll.
Brian Selznick, author but child of film-makers, has worked out a literary mix of comic book, cartoon, and text for himself.
It is essential that we understand this now. It is essential that we stand up to those, from Mr. Jarrard to those who push "Common Core" standards, who seek to rank media in a hierarchy according to their personal preferences and in order to preserve their own status, wealth, and power ("I am important and intelligent because I am highly literate.").
Our students can, and will, tell stories in many, many ways. They will read stories in many, many ways. Sometimes they will read certain ways because that is how their brains work - which is neither, I need to tell you, neither better nor worse than the way yours works - and sometimes they will read certain ways because that is their preference, and thus their human right. And sometimes they will read certain ways because that is the way the author offers access to the story, and sometimes they will need help to convert media because the author's preferences and their needs do not match up - I understand - I have witnessed professors and teachers reading Shakespeare, and though this seems odd to me - the performances are routinely available via YouTube - I do not criticize them. Perhaps they can not hear well, or perhaps they cannot easily sit through a whole performance.
So give your students stories this year. And give them the freedom to tell stories. The medium may matter, but the medium is only the message if the message can effectively be received through the medium chosen. Otherwise, an unreceived story, is, well... not much at all.
The New York Times continues to pursue their war against American kids. Oh not all kids, of course. The Times wouldn't put the children of their editorial staff or of their big advertisers at risk, just the poor kids, the kind of kids they so happily sent to Iraq in 2003 with their phony reporting of Dick Cheney's propaganda, the kind of kids who attend all the schools in New York City that Times reporters would never consider entering.
Rich kids. If they are up-to-date, just the two encyclopedias on the shelves in the foreground cost more than a set of 20 tablets or netbooks, plus wireless access points, would have cost. (New York Times photo by Jim Wilson)
Jonathan Martin, a Waldorf School parent, already wrote a fabulous response to The Times, and I won't go over all the he covers, but I do have a few things to say...
As Martin indicates, "this is not journalism that belongs on the front page of the Sunday New York Times. I think it is a very disappointing bit of snarky journalism that
informs readers, a little bit, about Waldorf practices, condescendingly,
but has as its primary purpose a not-so covert agenda to advance the
paper’s ongoing attack on the use of computers in learning." Furthermore, he points out the absurdity of the piece which describes a school used by a handful of uber-rich technology execs (just outside the single most expensive college town in America) - "an anecdotal and almost entirely meaningless report: after all, every
industry has among its many employees a wide diversity of educational
philosophy" - as representing anything of significance, about Waldorf education (and its controversies), or anything else."When Richtel and his Grading the Digital School series discusses schools
with technology that don’t raise performance on standardized tests,
standardized testing is treated as a near absolute be-all, end-all of
educational success," Martin continues, "but when celebrating a school approach without
technology (serving then the anti-tech agenda), the importance of
standardized testing success is happily set aside. This is not
journalism, this is hatchet work."
But this is not an article, or a series, about education. It is part of a class war on those not wealthy enough to be part of 'The World of The New York Times.' The Times, after all, is hardly against technology in education. Times folks send their kids to some of the most wired schools in the nation, from Scarsdale, New York public schools to Green Farms, from St. Bernard's to Stuyvesant High at Battery Park City, or from elementary schools in Larchmont or Greenwich Village. What The New York Timesis against is for anyone to think that spending public money on "technology" for "our" kids makes any sense.
Why would they be against that? Simply because they want nothing in place which might even begin to tilt that infamous educational playing field toward anything close to level. If "our" kids... not the 99% of Occupy Wall Street, but the 95% of those outside the social circles of New York Times editors and executives, get anything close to an equal opportunity, they might challenge the children and the grandchildren of Times executives and friends for both places in elite universities, and then, maybe even, for jobs. So, The New York Times, the standard-bearer for American wealth, cannot allow that to happen.
And thus, they send a reporter with a Pulitzer Prize in suspect use of data out to find the kind of "proof" that school boards and state legislators can embrace. "If Google execs (well, at least one of them) send their kids to a school without computers, we surely shouldn't be buying them for poor kids."
And so tech for the poor gets cut, which means they lose all access to global information, to accessibility, to open communication. All the kids at the Waldorf School of the Peninsula go home to houses filled with technology and families that travel with them and buy them whatever supports they need. Waldorf schools traditionally "pass" on kids with disabilities and tuition usually keeps the poor away, so, the biggest issue, according to Richtel, is parental disinterest. "The students say they can become frustrated when their parents and relatives get so wrapped up in phones and other devices." But in schools which cannot buy new Britannicas every other year at $2,700.00, which cannot afford hundreds of hundred dollar skeins of yarn for each student or $54.96 boxes of pencils, issues of connectivity and knowledge base may indeed come up. So might issues of differing capabilities, issues of home resources, issues of up-to-date texts, etc.
But The Times is making a sale here, which you can see reflected in comments made just outside New York City, where the City School District of New Rochelle is trying to equip its most disconnected, impoverished students with 4G laptops for school and home. "None of them has Internet access at home," the article points out. "Pierre [one student] leaned over from a neighboring seat to add, "I'm going to take
good care of it. I'm going to play math games and use it for reading and
writing."' But the commenters, mostly from New Rochelle's New York Times-reading wealthier "North End" (think Dick Van Dyke or Ragtime), see it The Times' way: "games and circuses. Put a monitor on 99% of these "free" computers, and
you'll find that 99% of the usage will be entertainment and
game-related." "Let's see how many of these computers will be usable after one school year, or come back at all. many will "disappear."'
Jefferson Elementary School (New Rochelle, NY) students being branded by Verizon, but also getting access to information and communication in school and at home. (Journal-News photo by Carucha L. Meuse)
I, having been one of those "wrong end of town" kids long ago in that city, tried to fight back, even including William Alcott's 1842 quote about the "new technology" which Richtel's Waldorf School does embrace, "Slates are as necessary as black boards, and even more so. But they
are so liable to be broken, it will be said, as to render it expensive
to parents to keep their children supplied with them." But The Times is having its effect, the idea that, "I fundamentally reject the notion you need technology aids in grammar school,” Richtel quotes one of Eric Schmidt's speechwriters as saying. And Richtel finds Dr. Paul Thomas of Furman University (a long reach from Silicon Valley but you've got to hunt the supporting quotes down), who says, "Technology is a distraction when we need literacy, numeracy and critical thinking.”
So, projects like what New Rochelle is trying to do in their poorer elementary schools, will remain rare, and the children of The New York Times family will continue blissfully without real competition.
In creating this vision - denying to the poor what the rich already have - The Times depends on the essential cluelessness of the population, and unfortunately also way too much of the educational community, about what "technology" is.
"Technology," to quote (nervously, because he was pretty much a Nazi)
Heidegger, is the "art of manipulating the world." A "physical book" is
one way of manipulating information and getting it into your head. A
print newspaper is another. So is a telegraph key, or a black-board. For
me, none of those work well. OK, I was good at Morse Code at one point,
but I've never done well with the others, because I'm just not good at
reading alphabetic text. Sorry, call me illiterate or stupid or
brain-damaged, as people have, but its the way God (or genetics) made
me. So, I need different tools to manipulate that information world:
Film, for example - I like to share how NWP's Paul Oh and I both seem to have learned the art of writing dialogue by watching Channel 9's Million Dollar Movie back in New York. Or audio, whether LP, or cassette, or TTS.
When Alcott wrote his book, he found that the key to kids
manipulating the world for writing lay in the slate. With the slate
erasing was easy so making mistakes was easy (same argument made regarding computers by Englert, Manalo, and Zhao (2004))
and so kids did better with spelling, grammar, and composition. For
some kids telling a video story is the way (this is easier now than in
the days of Super 8 film
- cheaper, faster, way better for editing, although, yeah, I did Super 8
stuff). For others, yup, a pencil and a blank book is what its all
about.
But it is important for Messers Richtel, Eagle (of Google), and
Thomas to know is that, despite their claims, the old technology is
neither superior nor more natural than anything which has come after. For years now
I've had to point out that every time new ways of "manipulating the
world" appear, those who hold power tend to oppose them. Socrates
opposed both writing and literacy. The Catholic Church opposed
Gutenberg's printing press. Alcott had to beg those funding Common Schools to install black-boards and give kids slates, even though the private schools of the wealthy and places like West Point had had them for years.
When different tools for manipulating the world appear, different
people are given the chance to succeed, and when different people are
given the chance to succeed, those in power are always threatened.
And none are threatened more than a group which has derived its
status from being able to perform certain tasks which others cannot. So
teachers and education profs and newspaper editors - the "always gotten
As" kids who thrived on reading and writing faster than the rest of us,
who thrived on memorization and correct spelling and understanding the
Dewey Decimal System - they fear for their status if I can listen to a
book, or dictate a letter, or use spellcheck, or use Google.
In a Waldorf School like the one Mr. Richtel and The New York Times
celebrates, I was no threat, nor are millions of other kids. But if
they let us have the technology, we might get to college, we might
write
books, hell, we might get elected Governor.
So, The Times front page Sunday wasn't about education, or
"technology," or Waldorf Schools. It was about power. It was another
shot in the class war being waged daily in America.
- Ira Socol
1 - I sure don't advocate texting while drive, but despite vehicle miles traveled increasing by over 20% since mobile phones became widely available, fatal auto accidents have dropped by over 17% in the 15 years between 1995 and 2009. These actual statistics directly contradict Richtel's claims about distracted driving. http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
Is it the greatest novel written in English? That's open to debate, of course, but there is no doubt that James Joyce's Ulysses is an essential book. It's deep exploration of narrative forms alone makes it crucial to the study of literature. It's invention on top of ancient narrative makes it vital reading for writers. And rarely has a piece of literature been so wholly 'of a place' as Ulysses is 'of Dublin.'
But Ulysses is a very difficult read. "YES BECAUSE HE NEVER DID A THING LIKE THAT BEFORE AS ASK TO get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathing-suits and lownecks of course nobody wanted her to wear I suppose she was pious because no man would look at her twice I hope I'll never be like her a wonder she didnt want us to cover our faces but she was a welleducated woman certainly and her gabby talk about Mr Riordan here and Mr Riordan there I suppose he was glad to get shut of her and her dog smelling my fur and always edging to get up under my petticoats especially then still I like that in him polite to old women like that and waiters and beggars too hes not proud out of nothing but not always if ever he got anything really serious the matter with him its much better for them go into a hospital where everything is clean but I suppose Id have to bring it into him for a month yes"
from the tower, where "STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air."
Ulysses challenges "great readers," adult readers, the way the texts you hand out in school challenge struggling readers.
Today is Bloomsday - the 16th of June, and Bloomsday is when the literary world and the Irish celebrate this book. The novel is set in Dublin on the 16th of June, 1904. The novel follows the wanderings of Leopold Bloom and his friend Stephen Dedalus on that day, in a modern recreation of Ulysses' journey in Homer's Odyssey.
Now, on Twitter, CESNational asks "am curious: why should we read Ulysses?" And I can say, it is an essential part of our literary canon. It is a basic guide to narrative techniques in the English language. It teaches - quite effectively - the differences between the oral and written traditions. Few books have ever mastered the art of recreating a text so well. It will liberate you from the confines school writing courses often encourage.
Plus, it, perhaps combined with Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy, will explain how modern writing broke away from artificial writing norms and embraced a new paradigm for working with human communication. Joyce begets Dos Passos. Dos Passos and Joyce beget Kerouacet al, Kerouac, et al, beget the kinds of fiction and narrative we find online today. Those who bitch about the loss of what they perceive as language skills - if they were well read - would know that blaming technology is ridiculous - Joyce started it.
But, as I said, it is very difficult to read. So, what do you do to access this difficult text? You do what you should have your students do. You should find the right path.
The first three times I read Ulysses I listened to a remarkable reading of it on cassette. I think there were 48 or 60 cassettes. Oh, but it was beautiful. The next few times I have listened to it on CD, via LibriVox download, or, for more detailed study and interaction, via Text-To-Speech, either a WYNN version I've created, or a Microsoft Reader version, to using Click-Speak with on-line text versions.
In other words, I have found my supported text which has enabled me to read and work through one of the 20th Century's essential books, even though I could never read it on paper. And you can too, and so can your students.
Joyce is the perfect author to use to describe why digital text is superior for most learners, for even most teachers have trouble accessing the ink-on-paper version. And so, even if you doubt it's ranking among English-language novels, if you are in education, please give it a try, if only because you might engage a bit of empathy with your students, and you might discover the true value of the flexible text delivery which technology offers.
"O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
A couple of Twitter conversations merged. With @gippopippo I was discussing ink-on-paper v. digital. With @derrallg I was discussing teaching kids the media skills they will need to survive.
@gippopippo bemoaned the loss of the ability of students to read books and newspapers. @derrallg noted how colleges search FaceBook as part of the admissions process, but schools rarely teach this (see @willrich45).
Another issue from that day, if you teach students that they can not blindly "trust" the internet, must you not also teach them that they can not blindly trust textbooks, libraries, books of any kind, newspapers, teachers?
A bit of history: In the lead up to America's invasion of Iraq, The New York Times unleashed a torrent of false information. Fiction spun from the mouth of Dick Cheney as effortlessly as if his wife was writing her soft-core porn. Now, many blogs were telling the truth. But if, thirty years from now, a historian were to go back to "the newspaper of record" from that time, they would find almost nothing true.
Other things The New York Times has gotten wrong? A couple of years ago they repeated a joke from a cartoon on The New Yorker's cover as a front page news story. Just this week they declared a big difference between "practicing" and "non-practicing" Catholics on the issue of President Obama addressing the commencement at the University of Notre Dame. 46% of "practicing Catholics," The Times said, opposed Mr. Obama speaking. 55% of "non-practicing" Catholics favored his giving the address. Now, I'm no math major, but...
In other words, The New York Times can be wrong. Yes. Print can be wrong, despite John Calvin's firm belief in the societal value of fixed text. We all know that information on the "internet" can be wrong, and we warn our students about this. If we are good, we tell them to check authorship, credentials, the source of the website, the motivations, and we ask them to find corroboration and/or dissent. But do we do this as actively when a student pulls a book or newspaper off our school library shelf? What about when a student reads a textbook? What about when a student listens to a teacher?
The technology of communications and the forms of communication are symbiotic. Without the development of charcoal and ink writing would never have taken off. Stone carving being very slow and difficult and writing in the sand is, well, writing in the sand. Without various paper technologies (be it papyrus, sheepskin, or paper), reading would not have taken off, since only so many people can crowd around a single temple reading hieroglyphics.
Similarly, the novel is a development which could only have followed the technology of Gutenberg. Prior to this easing of publication problems, stories had to be in memorable form for oral transmission - thus poetry or song or drama. And without the popularity of the novel, press technology and paper technology would not have advanced to a point where journalism could begin. No Ben Franklin or Thomas Paine without Thomas Malory and Daniel Defoe. And without the growing popularity of journalism there might never have been the call for steam-powered rotary presses and machine-made wood-pulp paper which allowed the "penny newspaper" to become both popular and highly profitable, and thus allow journalism to reach the masses.
In each case, an emerging communication form creates a demand for a new medium or method of publication. The new medium or method of publication, in turn, creates an opportunity for new communication forms. When Samuel Morse introduced the telegraph with "What hath God wrought?" he was using new technology to send an old phrase. But his technology, and the way in which it was paid for, quickly created, "Meet in Phila Tue Noon at Sta Stop" - and how far away are we then from "C U 2nite"
Still, at every point, old forms adapted. When literacy was introduced to Greece Homer's tales were written down. Yes, this changed them. They no longer flexed with the time and place, the armaments described became set at the moment of writing - they are completely inaccurate for the time of the Trojan War - and the vast library of locally associated characters - what my son describes as the 8th Century BC's equivalent of the "How you doing Pittsburgh?" in today's concerts or political speeches - also became locked in. But the stories spread more widely than the original poets ever might have imagined.
All these technologies give and take. Gutenberg's destroyed many European languages, and enforced all sort of evils. But it also spread knowledge and literacy and allowed thought to flow in remarkable ways. We can imagine that post-Gutenberg technologies will do the same.
What has not changed is the key question of cognitive authority. What allows us to begin to trust a source? This is essential for every level of education. But we are handicapped here, especially in northern Europe and the United States. As Protestant societies we have inherited a belief in "the book." Not just the Bible, but "the book" in general. Because Calvinists and Lutherans controlled the printing and distribution of books, it was logical that they would promote the notion of the truth of ink-on-paper. Catholic culture, of course, did something similar where they "reigned," but with a critical difference. Texts in Catholicism were not intended for the masses, and were always considered open to interpretation through localized debate and retelling.
So it is indeed, in the U.S., in Protestant Europe, an "article of faith" that text is true, "If we agree with this premise, (that the Bible is divinely inspired) we must then consider the fact that ‘these writers themselves, with considerable unanimity, agree in ascribing their religious insight to the grace of God’."
Over the half millennia since Gutenberg the imprimatur of authority has expanded from the church to the crown, and then to "crown authorities" - authorized publishers - and then to publishers which carried various forms of perceived authority - whether academic - Cambridge University Press - economic - think Pearson or Bertlesmann AG - or, and here we see the beginnings of our present world - those who have won their authority by being reliable - think The New York Times. The Times did indeed win its authority in a chaotic environment. Turn of the 20th Century print journalism was as wild as the internet seems now, but the giants fell because because they were not very good - consider The New York World and The Journal competing over fabricated Spanish threat stories - and The Times was better (there are those who will argue that the turning point was the sinking of RMS Titanic - only the NYT, of New York dailies - got the story right).
In other words, The Times built its reputation, its authority, as bloggers do today, as members of social networks do.They gave accurate, useful information when more "important" rivals did not. Then they re-inforced that authority, through years and years of "being better than..." But then, because of the nature of that Protestant culture, "we" began to think of them as right not because they were right, but because they were The New York Times. They had that imprimatur.
According to all our traditional understandings of cognitive authority, Ian Tomlinson died of a heart attack. Except, of course, he did not. He was killed in a random, unprovoked, police assault.
And non-traditional "citizen-journalists," and less authoritative sources, proved that. This is vital. If you fully subscribed to the traditional, the taught-in-school" understanding of cognitive authority - that is that reputations are won through approval of those who already hold authority (the PhD system, as an example), Ian Tomlinson would have died of a heart attack and The New York Post of Alexander Hamilton would be New York City's dominant information source - no matter who might manage to own that brand.
So what do students need to know? They need to know that cognitive authority does not come with a job title, or a publisher's mark. Just as they need to know that the actor wearing the white coat in a TV commercial may not be a medical authority. They need to be able to discover, in the non-linear form of real life (and the web) how to assess information - no matter the source. You can start in your classroom. If you aren't lying to your students, give them laptops or mobiles and let them look up what you tell them. True? Sometimes true? Debatable? Biased? Help them make the arguments.
You can do this with books, even novels. What can they discover about the world in which Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby? Why would he have described himself as "a member of the lost generation"? Why did he write a novel proving both the allure, and the fallacy, of what we call "The American Dream"? What did other writers of the time say? Was Fitzgerald particularly popular? A best selling author? Were English teachers requiring this novel in 1927 classrooms? Why not?
Need to build Fitzgerald's authority? Perhaps do this via his short stories. Build up his "street cred" for your students, just as he built it up with America's literati of the 1920s. No, let your students build up his reputation, by giving different stories to different students and letting them recommend them around the room. Don't think of this as "chaos." It is not. It is how humans construct both knowledge and society outside of imposed hierarchies.
You can do this with newspapers. Why would a story about the same thing read differently in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New York Post, The Daily Mail? Why might a search with Google's blog search produce differing things? How might they decide what's accurate? Listen, if you are not training this kind of information literacy, all your talk of an "educated citizenry" rings hollow. Without these skills, your students are in trouble.
Along the way, of course, you get to introduce your students to the wide world of literary forms. Every one has its purposes, its truths, its fictions, its powers, and its flaws. Why did Homer create the poetry he did? Who was he serving? Why? What counter narratives might exist? Aeschylus? Virgil? Ovid? Scott? Dickens? (Dickens, of course, was a blogger when it comes down to it). Who publishes Toni Morrison? And why? Why would that same company sell you Tom Clancy's books? Why would they hide that fact from you by using a different name?
And certainly, who is writing right now? And how? Can they find new fiction on line that they love? Can they share it? Why do they like it? Is it being "sold" to them in a variety of ways? Or are they discovering it? Novel, history, textbook, newspaper, blog... what motivates the author, the publisher? And what does that mean to them as readers, as consumers?
What this all means is that we're honest with our students, and that by being honest we create better readers, more engaged readers, more critical readers, and readers more appreciative of the best work of the writer's art. They'll know why, faced with same series of events, one writes poetry, another a novel, a third a news story, and how those all contribute to our knowing.
And I think they just might learn to love them all.
to Matt Richtel, but information on how children develop and what they need in terms of interactive language, is not The Times goal here.
. I've "read" tons of books. I want to share this with kids. And I want to tell all those who will unwittingly support Allyn's "Forced Reading Day," or other sad initiatives, that I'd much rather you help kids learn how to use Kindle for PC and Balabolka (or some other combination) to let them access the books they want than do any or all of your "reading interventions."
I gave to my "spousal equivalent" (a 
done for Playboy Magazine in the 1960s, to the 
Cookbook, to Brian Selznick's 
, to the first three Vertigo-Paperback installments of 
, a graphic novel.
, hell, we might 
, will explain how modern writing broke away from artificial writing norms and embraced a new paradigm for working with human communication. Joyce begets Dos Passos. Dos Passos and Joyce beget 
et al, Kerouac, et al, beget the kinds of fiction and narrative we find online today. Those 
, via 
. Now, many blogs were telling the truth. But if, thirty years from now, a historian were to go back to "the newspaper of record" from that time, they would find almost nothing true.
, and the way in which it was paid for, quickly created, "Meet in Phila Tue Noon at Sta Stop" - and how far away are we then from "C U 2nite"
? And why? Why would that same company sell you 
? Why would they hide that fact from you by using a different name?
, a third 
