Fin

We might hope someone else has the answer. 

Some other place might be better. 

It will all turn out. 

Well, this is it. 

Right now. 

No one else has the answer. 

No other place might be better. 

It has already turned out. 

It is the adventure itself that counts, 

not the hoped for consequences. 

***

Thank you, Gentle Readers, for your reading. 

See you on the home side of the Atlantic. 

The end of exams

Well that's all done, then.  I wrote the last two exams, and now I'm bored.  I'm old enough that it is a familiar boredom, the kind that accompanies the end of a great effort.  The difficulty with post-exam static is that there is not a concrete project to look at and say, "Hey, I did that!" unlike  a sewing project where you get to put it on, or cookies where you get to eat them.  I am throwing away my notes and saying, "I know all that!" by way of closure.  

The Irish exam was the one I knew least about and which had the most novel content for me.  At one point, I had to indicate the word "Artist" in the part where one identifies professions.  Not being able to remember the word, I wrote (in Irish, of course), "He used to be a farmer, but now he makes pictures."  I am certain it will be counted wrong, but *I* thought it was funny, and it makes me laugh even now.  

They have changed the exam schedule here at UL.  In the past, exams did not take place until the end of January so that people could read and prepare over the Christmas holidays (yeah, right), and this belief appears to be held mostly among the faculty.  One faculty member I was interviewing said she and her colleagues expected exam grades to drop because students do not have as much time to prepare.  In contrast, the majority, nay, every single one of the students I talked to said they much preferred to have the exams before Christmas rather than after Christmas, their response being, "It makes Christmas so much less stressful.  I mean you take your books home and there they are, but do you open them?"  I agree.  I would much rather have an exam after the course is over rather than go away, and then come back to it.  But I can see how it could be a good thing because the knowledge gets to be put aside and then revisited, such that it might "stick" better.  I will be interested to email the faculty member who predicted a drop and see if her prediction was born out.  

One thing I did not like about the exams was having to do handwriting for two hours straight. We are now a typing society, and I find handwriting at top speed, hunched over a desk, actually hurts after two hours straight of hunching and scribbling.  These exams are very very formal.  You have to sign in twice, have your ID on the desk the whole time, and you can't even have your coat with you.  People called "invigilators" (no really, they are!) constantly walk up and down the aisles of special exam desks to make sure one is not cheating or attempting to cheat.  You can't get up once you are done with the exam, you have put your hand up and get an Invigilator to come and take it from you.  I think they get Invigilators from the same pool of volunteers that show up for voting booths in the United States.  

Grades are not available until February.  How's that for feedback? 

EnJoycing Dublin

I had put it off too long. I had not done The Joyce Tour of Dublin. On the very last Saturday possible, I got up at 5:00 to start the long haul across the island. As I walked into town, it was still dark and the sun would not come up until 8:30. However, the street lights were very bright and birds were singing: thrushes and warblers -- in the dark! At 6:00 on a Saturday morning, the city was slowly waking up. Cabs and vans zoomed through the roundabouts at full tilt, which would not be possible in about 2 hours when the roundabouts would become parking lots. But at 6:30, people were out pulling the grills off the store fronts, and putting out the fruit. The "fresh" wind was making all the pedestrians very pink in the nose and cheeks. On the way to the cold train stations, people looked like snails, dragging their possessions along behind them and on the backs in large bags. My snail bag was full of books and a litre and half of water. Once I got onto the train, the sudden warmth after the chilly train station seemed to make the darkness feel even deeper.

Upon arriving in Dublin, I thought I would take the Luas (the new trolly system) because I had avoided it. It felt like the responsible explorer Thing to Do. So I dutifully bought my ticket, and jammed myself into the packed train. I mean it was packed like a sardines. Some clever young person, who I could not see as my entire field of vision was consumed by the waxed cotton jacket in front of me, kept up a running commentary of how she could not breathe, she was being crushed, and we were all going to die. When she and her crew got off a few stops later, the rest of the trolly's sardines breathed a collected sigh of relief.


So I hopped off at Abbey St. and headed up O'Connell street to see the James Joyce Center. It was just like the Jane Austen Center in Bath, except, of course, that it was about James Joyce. What I mean is the location and design were strikingly similar to the Jane Austen Center. It was a genteely decaying Georgian town house in a neighborhood that had seen better days about a hundred years ago. It was pretty cold outside, but the door was wide open in a freezing cold hundred thousand welcome sort of way. I paid my requisite four Euro to the young person who seemed to doubt I was a student but did not ask to see an ID. Just think what I could get away with if I used Oil of Olay...
There was a mural commemorating Ulysses painted on a wall. There was a cow with quotes by critics carved into it. If you click on the picture of text, you can read what they carved onto the cow's udder.  There was also the 'original door' for the Bloom's house on Eccles street. How can you have an original door to a fictional house?


Upstairs where it was only slightly less freezing cold were some interactive computers and a video. The interactive computers told Joyce's biography and publication timelines and the video talked about why he was the greatest author of the 20th century. They also had his death mask! Even more interesting than the mask itself was its story which was pasted on the corner of the wall near it where it told about the original mask, a mysterious pirated mask (!), and what happened to all the copies. Imagine! Priscilla and I went to see Rudoph Steiner's death mask, and that was just as creepy as this one. Here is a picture of the death mask with me as a ghost in the case with the mask.
Then I went down a floor and looked at all the books they had out on a big table. There were big coffee table books full of shiny pictures, and little critical books full of texty text. The best map book was this one:
James Joyce's Dublin: a topographical guide to the Dublin of Ulysses by Ian Gunn and Clive Hart, London: Thames and Hudson, 1975,1981,2004.
This book has great maps on where each character went and when. I copied a few down and set off to follow them.

I first went up to Eccles Street. Here is the 'new' door for the Bloom's house (the yellow one). Here is the street context.

Then I went and walked through what had been the prostitute's district where Stephen and Leopold went which is now government housing and China town. (You need to click on the picture to get the full Chinese effect.)There was a motorcycle ralley of the Wexford Mortocycle club taking place outside a hospital in the area. On the street were a number of Triumphs, one BMW, and bunch of Hondas. The bikers were all decked in their cracked leather and jeans that were more grey than blue. It was unclear why they were gathered in front of the hospital. They did not look cheery. I wondered if maybe one of their members was in that institution for some reason and if this was a show of solidarity of some sort.

I walked back to O'Connell and was accosted by a person who might have been born in India (or Dublin, of course), who assured me of something I could not understand for which I thanked him. I hiked over to take a look at the Abbey and to get a little documentation in case I had to do a powerpoint presentation. There were a lot of Eastern European women sitting on the sidewalk outside the Abbey Acting school with paper cups out for change and stiffly bundled (apparently) sleeping babies on their knees. I put money in the cups, as Ralph has taught me to do, and I asked, "Do you have somewhere warm to stay tonight?" One woman looked blankly up at me and only said, "No." I walked on wondering what I could do with this information. Pathetically nothing, it appeared.

I marched across the street past Tara St. Station, avoiding the bone crush on the bridge of O'Connell street, and circled Trinity around Westland Rowe. There I found The International Aikido Center and Natural Healing Center down an alley. Who knew?

Emerging out into the shopping area of Nassau Street, I hit the crowds of supplicants to the Church of Mammon. Shoulder to shoulder it was, full of people dressed in black coats with pink faces and be-bagged by GAP, T.K. Maxx, and Penny's. The day was dark and damp, so that the canopy of lights over Grafton Street was all glowing. There were musicians every 20 feet, and I don't know how they kept their hands limber enough to play. The busker who drew the biggest crowd was a young man in a Texas broad brimmed hat, sitting on a stool, playing a dobro guitar as if it were a roaring campfire in the wilderness. He was that good.

I was beginning to go into Crowd Shock, so I elbowed my way out of the top of Grafton and went back through 'the labyrinth' to the Avoca Cafe. Should to shoulder it was, people in black coats and pink faces. On my way up to the cafe, I found a book entitled How to Do Good Deeds. I opened it randomly and read, "How to Hold a Baby on Your Lap: face baby outwards, hold your legs together, and grasp the baby around the middle." Right.

The cafe was full of people in black coats with faces slightly less pink than those on the street, so I went down to the basement to sit at the counter and have scones and coffee. After a long, cold, grey walk, the warmth, the pink and yellow walls, the food, and the drink were paradise. I wanted to live at that lunch counter. I knew that as soon as I finished my snack, the flaming sword of commerce would drive me back onto the street, so I made my snack last as long as possible. The lunch counter is under a glass block section of the sidewalk above. I watched the feet of shoppers passing overhead. There were a lot of women about my age, by themselves, eating the same snack as I was: coffee and scones. I felt part of a tribe.

So do I understand Ulysses or Dubliners any better? Did I feel closer to Joyce? As Don Benander wrote, a novel is not to be confused with a guidebook. I was reading Ulysses on the train on the way home. I have this feeling that the actual landscape is important, but I am still utterly at sea with Joyce. I read Ulysses, and intellectually I can understand its historical importance, but I am not feelingthe greatness. I read Dubliners, and I want to shake Eveline into consciousness and push her onto that boat. I want to get the poor kid in "Araby" to just go join the Big Brother program. I want Gretta to just get over herself and Gabriel to just get on a bus and go to Tralee. It doesn't have to be Galway, fer crissake. I think the place is enhanced by the text, not the other way around. Or at least, I found it harder for Dublin to give Joyce meaning than for Joyce to give Dublin meaning.

Limerick Community Orchestra

Oh, I have to tell you about the Christmas concert put on by the Limerick Community Orchestra, she said, leaning forward and tapping the Gentle Reader on the back of the hand. It was hysterically funny, very earnest, and utterly enjoyable. First, it was a juxtaposition of conflicting talent and an orchestra that played in multiple accents. The orchestra itself was made up of community members (town and gown) who were clearly very earnest about the music. They played Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony for the first half. I feared for them, and I think they were none too sure of it themselves. The clarinet honked early in the piece, and the french horns were playing in a parallel universe. There was a point later in the concert during "Hark the Herald Angles Sing" that I think these guys actually warped the space time continuum when they burbled in on the chorus. The rest of the orchestra spent a lot of time trying to keep up with each other, but they made it to the end of each movement more or less at the same time, which was bravely done. Concepts of flat and sharp needed to be discarded early in the piece by the audience as it would appear that the players had already done so, but after a few notes, whatever section happened to be looking for the key did find it. As a result, the whole piece had a certain element of suspense that made it quite interesting.

The second half of the piece revealed the different native music accents of the community. There were several 'Christmas Favorites' medlies. On the parts that would swing, the very earnest trombones just let loose and the trumpet player turned so red I thought he might explode. The percussionist played a drum set for these bits, and he was clearly in his element. Based on sections of 'Oh Holy Night' I would say that the triangle is not his favorite. So I think there were some members of a swing band in the community orchestra. There were also clearly quite a number of traditional music fiddlers in the violin and viola sections. As the concert progressed, the instruments began to drift in front of the players and down, and their hands crept up the bows as their wrists bent more and more. Only two gentlemen maintained the classical violin position (up, straight wrist, and 90 degrees from the front of the body) and they appeared to have at least parents from India, if not being originally from India themselves. The tuba players were great! You could count on those big guys to come in right on time and on notes that a person in the audience would expect. Do any thin people play tubas? Maybe one needs that girth to get the sound out.

And then the community choir came out. Clearly, they had received instructions to wear black and red, but I think they needed a little more direction. The choir mistress was quite lovely in a little black bolero over a red gorgette dress that came to the knee, with low black heels. The dear young lady standing next to her was in a short black organza tutu like skirt with a polyester red wrap around blouse that did not quite meet the tutu. She had on argyll print black stockings and red knock-me-down espadrilles that had rather large red bows on the toes. I am not making this up. Next to her was a young lady in a black twill mini skirt, a red t-shirt with a black shrug, and blue tinted reading glasses. The large bow on top of her mousse spiked hair was nothing less than very red. And it continued down the line. And they sang very very well.

For this concert they also got a soloist. Regina Nathan is an Irish soprano who has sung at all the big international venues as well as in Verdi and Gluck operas. She is a big voice! She wore a black pillar skirt and a sequined tunic: oh so very chic. She sang some opera and drowned out the orchestra, which was okay because they were just trying to keep up. Her powerful voice and presence did more for that orchestra than their conductor in his black frock coat and red satin waistcoat. Ms. Nathan really pulled them together into quite a confident sound. There was a little girl of about eight sitting in front of me in the front row (I was in the second row), who would look in astonishment at her mother every time Ms. Nathan belted out a fortissimo section, which was blowing back the hair of the whole first three rows. At the end of the concert, where the community choir came out, Ms. Nathan joined the soprano section. Woo hoo! The orchestra played, the choir sang, the audience chimed in, and Ms. Nathan sang a descant that made dust fall from the roof. At one point in Hark the Herald Angles Sing, she was so amazing that the choir almost forgot to sing and the choir mistress was working hard to remind them that they were singing *with* Ms. Nathan. It was at this hilarious point that the french horns thought they might warble something that may have been indicated in the music in their universe, and I almost laughed out loud because there was so much going on all at once. The drama! The sheer drama of this concert is unmatched in my experience.

curiosity and deep learning

Granny Priscilla left a very interesting comment a few posts ago about how teachers lead students into caring about things they might not want to care about in order to learn. I think this is a very important point. I'm sure Robin Lightner has articles on this in the ed psych area of motivation, but I was thinking about what helps me study for these recitative exams. I am very curious about these topics. This curiosity makes reading interesting, it helps me make connections among topics, and it helps me find new sources as a result of those connections. If I am bored, angry, not curious, or disengaged then I don't learn well. I'm thinking of that wretched test we had to take for the Internal Review Board. I was all of those things, and I had to force myself to take their little quizzes. I only remember the parts that made me mad, and those were all rhetorical parts, so even though I was mad, I was curious about their choices. Curiosity: wanting to know. It seems like such an essentially primate quality.

So, of course, my mind then turns to, how can I help my students be curious about what I am trying to teach. How can I create narratives about literature (oh, how hard could *that* be?!) so I can get students curious about what happens next or why something happens. This is something Teresa Pica was studying in the 1980s: information gap tasks seemed to help students learn a second language more effectively because they had to figure out what was going on. I suppose this all boils down to being engaged with the topic, but when I think about 'engagement' it seems pretty diffuse, but when I think of curiosity, I feel like I have a better grip.

The other issue I was thinking about as I was studying for exams was that undergraduate life (and maybe graduate student life. Debbie is this so?) is about maximizing resources of time and effort in an overwhelming sea of novelty. This is why 'they don't read' or 'they don't come to lecture' or 'they wait to cram for exams'. These young people are such sensation seekers! and they are so young that it is all so new. Newness and constant change is stressful. The stress researchers place Change as high on the stressometer of life. It is not surprising that we get kids seeming to be 'lazy': they are in a stressful situation, and they're maximizing results for minimum effort. Who wouldn't? So why read if you know the stuff on the exam is just what you got in lecture? why go to lecture if the lecture notes will be provided? Why should I read a novel for which there are no consequences if I don't read it? Curiosity? Well, only if you're some kind of geek.....

Tea and Wine Parties

As things wind down here, there are little ‘end of exam’ parties and ‘farewell’ parties. One ‘end of exam’ party that I went to was actually a tea party. It was, bar none, the best lemon green tea I have ever had the pleasure to drink. It was quite the erudite tea party complete with sweet biscuits and references to Derrida. The talk was cheerful and wide ranging on lots of topics. One fascinating project that a young man is working on is tentatively called ‘Reporting Realities’. He is working on a multiple encryption program with lots of technical rerouting of information through anonymous servers which would allow journalists in Eastern European countries to report what is happening completely anonymously and uncensored. He would put the system on a flashdrive, so nothing at all would be left on the hard drive or browser history of the actual computer that the journalist was using. It seems that the computers of Eastern European journalists are often confiscated. Then this daring young person would receive the reports, translate them into English and publish them in both the original language and English. He would also send them as press releases to UNESCO, UNICEF, you know, The People Who Would Like To Know what is actually going on. I suggested to this young person’s partner that Kevlar might be a nice holiday gift. Also at one point as the conversation veered off in another direction, someone unearthed (on the computer) an archival article from the New York Times with the headline ‘Jazz Scares Bears’. This article reported that villagers in Russia would protect themselves from marauding bears by ‘forming a tin-pan orchestra’ and banging the pots, pans, and samovars (I am not making this up) which would frighten the bears away. Funnier than the whole ursine problem was the fact that the reporter was calling banging on a pot jazz. That was one good tea party.

The next even I attended included alcohol. Gluhwein was the beverage of choice and there was much debate concerning the temperature. Hot or ‘blood-warm’? It was awfully sweet. Bulmer’s Cider was the other popular beverage, and I think a bottle of Baily’s got emptied in the course of the evening. This was a crew of sugar fiends, I’m telling you. Knowing this ahead of time, I had brought my own Cabernet, and they all laughed at the American who brought her own drink and served herself. I explained, in my best anthropological way, that in America, politeness is expressed by allowing the guest as much autonomy and choice as possible, hence the phrase, “Help yourself” or “Make yourself at home.” In contrast, Irish hospitality (and Scandinavian evidently) requires that the guest not be required to do anything for him or herself. A good host will anticipate the guest’s requirements and should be able to provide them before the guest knows that it is a requirement. I pointed out that in this system sometimes the guest gets something he or she is required to eat or drink that might be challenging. The Finn agreed that this was the case, but it is a politeness move on the part of the guest to just eat or drink what you get. She commented that she had always been sort of weirded out by the incomprehensible “Help yourself” when she had visited American homes, but now it made sense: it was a politeness move to not impose things on the guest. Ah, another job well done in the name of international peace and comfort by Anthro-grrl!

This particular party was attended by people who were all performers. There was a brilliant dancer, four ritual chant singers, a fiddle player, a piper, and me. Everybody sang a song for the group, there was dancing, some amazing Coptic chant, some Swedish cow calling that must be heard to be believed, some Norwegian folk tunes, some Sean Nós dancing, a blues song, an Appalachian folk song, and we danced the Salty Dog Rag to a reel. Now that was a party. Not only were people willing to perform, but the audience was interested and attentive. You need both: and the performer can be terrible as long as the audience is good. I am thinking of some extremely boring parties I have attended in the US where people just sat around and talked about martial arts and tv shows. Nobody would DO anything, and a huge group always ended up watching videos. How much more fun it is when people participate. I also think about Christmas with my ‘family of origin’ where there is lots of music and singing and some form of silly dancing of one kind or another (mostly jumping in circles with the toddlers, last Christmas). And that is also great good fun. My New Year’s resolution is to try to have more Fun Parties.

The function of exams in learning

This posting is rated PR for pedagogical rambling. On a non-specialist boredom rating, this posting could possibly rank 7.

At UL, there are two weeks set aside for final examinations. Most finals count about 50-60% of the final grade, from what I have seen and heard. There is a free ‘reading week’ before the exams, and then one has these two hour exam periods over the course of the next two weeks. So that is about three weeks dedicated to this project. In contrast, at UC, we have one week, bang, right after classes end. Exams at UC are also two hours, but one could have a few, one right after the other. Here they try to space them out more. At UC, I think we focus on just the course content on the exam. Here, you are expected to do outside research to supplement your exam answer. This is actually not specified anywhere in writing, that I have been able to find, but I figured it out by listening to people’s expectations. If it is an unwritten rule, then it must be a cultural rule so that is very interesting. I think in my own classes at UC, I specify in the last week what will be included on the final. Here, half of the lecturers did that.

So I spent last week preparing my exams. I went through all the readings, I read the past exam questions for ideas about what the content would be, and I made topic outlines that included the information from the readings. I then reviewed these notes, re-read my notes from the readings, and memorized specific quotes and dates. I spend a lot of time reading and ‘soaking’ in the information. In my style of learning, I try to make the information a sort of misty atmosphere around my thinking so that when the exact exam question comes up, I am ready to realign what I know to what the exam question is asking. I am also concerned with having the ‘misty atmosphere’ of information feel comfortable in my subconscious because then I feel like I really know it, and, more importantly, I will be able to retrieve it later, I mean much later, like a few months down the line. I know that I do not remember things if I cram them in through a state of high anxiety. I am finding that enough sleep, and a feeling of leisure as I read through the information to assimilated it, rather than memorize it, helps me feel like I really have it. The ‘suck and dump’ strategies never worked for me past the exam. I would remember the information briefly but it wouldn’t stay for later retrieval. It probably helps that I went to lectures and heard about it, and then read about it at a leisurely pace.

Actually, this feeling of leisure and lack of fear seems to make a big difference in retaining exam information. I remember very clearly feeling anxious and uncertain about Big Tests, and I do not remember much about them. On the other hand, the adrenaline rush of fear and loathing resulted in a much greater euphoria when the Threat of the exam was over. I suppose there is something attractive to this emotional roller coaster of crisis and joyful resolution. I am guessing to young sensation junkies, this works for them. My style of leisurely ‘coming into knowing’ is not dramatic, and when the exam is over, it is over. Actually, after the last two, I was sort of sad because I had so much more to say than the two hours permitted. I was also sort of sad not to have copies of what I had written because I think it was interesting. Certainly I could reproduce it, but I am lazy enough that I regret the loss of that great effort I made.

So what has been the function of these exams in my learning. They were a prompt for me to go and read some more on the topics, and I suppose they served as a reward for doing that reading. But if further exploration is the goal of the exam, wouldn’t a proper paper be better where one had time to compose and be more coherent with (theoretically) less time pressure (although I am well aware that many students here write their essays in about the same amount of time it takes to do an exam, with about the same anxiety and fear). So if writing a formal paper and taking an exam both encourage and reward further research, and if they both involve the same amount of emotional stress, what unique learning function does the exam have? I suppose, first, it is an activity of closure. This final burst of expression of knowledge is a final performance of new competence in a compressed and formalized context. Just handing in a formal paper is sort of denouement. Also, one writes the exam without references and just out of one’s head, so it indicates how and in what form a student has internalized the course information. But the stress and anxiety of the exam might result in the ‘suck and dump’ approach to the information, so does a high pressure exam actually demonstrate how much I know in a longitudinal sense, or just how much I know at this single moment in time. Of course, it is just a moment in time, what else could it be unless I was able to give/take exams six months down the line. So I suppose I have to be satisfied with the moment in time. But if I want my students to learn information they can use later, integrate with what they know from other courses, make evaluative and considered judgments, then does the exam help me with that? I don’t think so. I think the paper might do that, but only if I help the students with the ‘leisurely’ part by spreading out the bits of the assignment so they don’t write the blessed thing at the procrastinatory last minute.

Ultimately, I think the final exam may not be an accurate picture of what a student has learned because of the pressure and the anxiety which promotes poor learning strategies and negative emotional contexts that do not promote later retrieval. On the other hand, they do provide formal closure, they help assign grades, and they indicate a student’s skill with in-class pressured writing. I think that learning is more effectively supported by short, repeated performances of knowledge, but the social and political functions of final exams are still important.

Convoluted symbols

Yesterday, while looking at my "Digestive biscuit post" Aidan O'Malley pointed out not only a spelling error (which of course I fixed, just as I fix the spelling errors K asiduously points out), but he also pointed out that there were quite a few Christian symbols in the desk picture I put in a recent post. 

On the right, you can see my Advent calendar, on the left you can see a St. Brigit's Cross, and on the wall you can see my flyer for the Messiah performance at the University Concert Hall. (You have to click on the picture and enlarge it to be able to see these things more clearly).  It does look awfully devout, doesn't it? However, through another pair of lenses, the Advent calendar is the nostalgia of the holiday 'count down', the St. Brigit's cross is not Christian (and it was a project from my folklore class), and the Messiah is way cool Baroque music. So, my desk is actually a rather synchretic place. I thought I would point that out only because when Aidan pointed these objects out, it scared me because I completely missed the religious reading of that picture!

Faculty Development workshops I'd like to see

"What to do when the power goes out"

"How to adjust the lights in a room not designed for media"

"How to regain the class' attention after a group work exercise"

or "How to peacefully get the class' attention to start class"

"How to deal with/prevent the rustle/bag zipping 5 minutes before the end of class"

"How to constructively deal with questions to which you do not know the answer"

"How to break the news that a paper is getting an F for plagiarism"

"What to do when phones ring in class"

"How to use pertinent graphics (and where to find them) in your Powerpoints"

"How to teach students how to do group work"

"How to avoid killer rhetorical questions" or "How to ask real questions in class"

"How to recognize learning disabilities"

"What are other kinds of homework to assign aside from reading and writing that will draw students into the content"

or "Sometimes the DVD is better than the book: how to use multi-media as homework"

"How to break through the cultural rules that dictate that students should not interact with the professor" or "How to get students to quit chatting and get talking"

"Coming to grips with student passive resistance"

Young People and Plots

This posting is rated PR for pedagogical rambling. 

It seems that the young people in my classes (young=17-20) are very hung up on plot.  I find the same in my own classes.  It is really hard to get them to think past plot.  This is true also when you ask any person, young or old, about a movie.  When I ask, "What did you think?" I get a plot summary.  How can I work with this apparently quite natural predilection? How can I help my students be more comfortable with plot and then move briskly on to the much more interesting work of interpretation? 

When I ask them about this, they say they just can't see the symbols or they don't see where alternative readings are coming from.  I suspect it is lack of background and experience.  The don't have the discrete points available to make connections.  What I need to do is use the lecture to set up the points, and then use the discussion to make the connections.  Easy enough to say, but tricky in practice.  

The Functional Language Syllabus and a Gale

As a way of warming up to get back to the Irish Literary Revival, I thought I would stop in at the Blog.  A huge gale has blown up out of the Atlantic and has been thrashing the western part of the island.  Great buckets of rain and huge gusts of wind that shake the library and literally howl in the gutters. I walked to Jenny Wilhelms' house last night (lead singer of the band Gjarllarhorn (Anne, quick, go look it up gjallarhorn.com; you'll love this stuff)), and I put on my rainsuit for the 20 minute walk.  When I arrived at her house, I sloshed onto the mat and dripped a huge puddle while I peeled off the outer layer, she laughed and said she had never seen someone so wet before.  It reminded of another sopping Irish walk I made in Dingle once...anyway, today is the next day and it is still blowing away.  So here I sit, at 4:00 in the already pitch dark afternoon, with my digestive biscuits and tea working methodically through the present tense of regular verbs in Irish. 

This Irish language class I am taking has really surprised me pedagogically.  Because Irish is one of the two official languages of Ireland, it is not regarded as a foreign language but as a second language.  Now, Gentle Reader, I assure you, this is a big theoretical deal because it has a lot to do with *how* the language is taught.  One assumes in teaching a second language, that the language is all around the student in daily use so that the student is immersed in interaction using the language.  One assumes in teaching a foreign language that the language is *not* around for constant input, and there is a more abstract relationship to the language.  Ireland is a great place for conflict of policy and reality.  Don't get me started on the Gaelic League or the Dance Commssion, but this interesting conflict in a 21st century language is sort of the child of those 19th and early 20th century institutions.  

So, here is the 21st century, the European Union includes Irish as an official language of the EU, which is great institutional validity.  As a result the EU Test of Irish competency is based on the assumption that Irish is a second language for people in Ireland.  Therefore, the EU syllabus for the EU Test of Irish competency is what is known as a 'functional' and 'communicative' syllabus.  The student studies how to interact in common social functions, learning the social formulas with a strong emphasis on speaking and listening.  If one does any reading, it is in the context of the social situation.   The only writing on the basic syllabus is to know how to fill out forms appropriately.  So in class we memorize chunks and learn how to do role plays for business and simple social interactions.  We know how to identify ourselves, (Ruth is ainm dom), say where we are from (Is as na Stait Aontaith me), where we live (Ta me i mo chonai i Lumneach), and what we do with our days (Sa trathnona, buailim le caidre sa teach tabhairne).  But there is *no* grammar instruction.  We learn chunks of language and where certain nouns and verbs can be inserted.  Its a lot of memorization without rules.  

When the class first started three months ago, I was totally at sea!  I had *never* worked with a functional syllabus this way.  I wanted rules!  I wanted little texts to read, not computer dialogs to listen to.  I desperately read the license plates (Lumneach, Baile Atha Cliath, An Clar, Tiobrad Aran) and the little signs on the shop doors (Isteach! Slan go foill!)  Whatever.  By now, what with all the memorization of chunks, I can speak my little piece about who I am, where I'm from, who I live with, what sports I play, and what I do on a usual day.  Part of the final exam is to show a photograph and describe it.  It is fascinating to me that I am able to say an awful lot, but I really couldn't tell you what, exactly, I am saying.  I had always heard that the critic of the functional communicative syllabus was that you get people who can talk, but that's about all they can do.  They can't really create with the language outside the functional categories in which they were instructed.  So this is what that is like!  I sometimes figure out why a word is the way it is, and it is really cool when I am able to intuit a grammar rule from all the variations that I have memorized.  Maybe this is a good thing: if you memorize enough of the corpus of the language, then you have enough information to begin to figure rules out for yourself.  Still, I would have liked a few grammar rules to help me along.  

I imagine this would be easier or more effective, if, in fact, Irish really was a second language in Ireland.  However, no matter what the policies say, Irish is actually a foreign language on much of this little island.  There is no immersion going on here.  One hears more Polish than Irish in this place, and in Dublin, one can substitute Italian for Polish.  I have been to parts of the Gaeltacht where you can hear Irish in daily use, but it is an 'insiders' language.  It is most certainly not used with 'outsiders' which would be the rest of the sasanach world.  Therefore, unless one is attending these specialized 'Irish only' immersion courses in Dingle, you will not hear Irish being used in the normal second language way.  It just doesn't work that way no matter what official policy might be.  

So learning Irish using the functional communicative syllabus has been very interesting because I can really feel what this is like.  I must say that as a language learner, I really prefer to have some generative grammar rules available to me so I can be a little creative with my language use rather than relying on sticking together different chunks in different orders.  The latter might *sound* more fluent, but it is really quite limiting.  

If you are interested in the EU functional communicative syllabus, they have a fantastic website with handouts and sound files at http://www.teg.ie

Musing on the Irish Literary Revival

This Posting is rated AR+ for severe academic rambling.  

From the writings of Yeats and Gregory, it seems that they both knew full well that they were functioning outside a cultural identity that they wanted to recreate to include themselves. There was a basic, indefinable Irishness that they gleaned from the people who lived closer to the land and in a different cultural tradition than they did, and from this context Yeats and Gregory felt a romantic sensibility that they wanted to be part of. As Anglo-Irish landowners who collected and lived on the rents from these people, they were also aware of their distance and yet, in their distance from rural Irish Catholic culture they may have had the outsiders meta-cognitive awareness necessary to begin to adapt it to their personal visions of an Irish cultural identity that could be more inclusive. Lady Gregory went so far as to learn Irish, but Yeats did not have time for that. This new identity had to be in English so that it could more naturally include the Anglo-Irish. The Conradh na Gaeilge did not agree with this perspective, and insisted that this identity could only be created in returning to Irish, but that’s what it would be: ‘returning’ to Irish as English had already outrun Irish in the world of economics and politics.

In contrast, O’Connell was working for basic emancipation and political rights with a political notion of what Ireland should be a sovereign nation. He was an Irish Catholic who spoke Irish and felt no identity crisis at all. As an upwardly mobile political person, he did not value Gaeilge as a an identity tag because in the political arena, it was worse than useless. It was a burden to be overcome.

The Irish Literary Revival ended up challenging the Irish people about what Irishness was, rather than confirming what people wished it was. Ultimately it was not a Utopian effort, as some of the early pieces might have seemed. This was an intellectual effort trying to educate as well as express. It’s rather like having modern blockbuster action films trying to challenge the cultural assumptions of the people who attend them. Clint Eastwood did exactly this when he made Unforgiven which at once challenged the assumptions of the Spaghetti Westerns but also confirmed them in the last cathartic hell-bent-for-justice ending. It’s no wonder O’Casey and Synge incited people to rampage. On the other hand, Unforgiven merely didn’t sell as well as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Therein lies the power of the Abbey: it got the word out to people who might not have wanted to hear it, whereas, in modern culture, people will just not go see it since the fantasy choices are so easily accessible. The power of the Abbey theatre was not only in the content of the plays, but the timing of the plays in the social and political development of Ireland in the early 20th century.

Yeats played up the heroic idea, but he did not invent any of these ideas. What one finds in Cuchulainn, one also finds in as far back as Beowulf and then further back in Gilgamesh. It’s all about immortality through renown. One gains immortality because one’s story is told after and about one’s glorious death. These stories emphasize the self-sacrifice of fighting for some kind of ‘greater good’. A modern critique of Gilgamesh is his apparent selfishness in his choices of fights, but the end of the poem is clear: it’s all about leaving a legacy which grants a person immortality. Shakespeare’s sonnets are all about this, too: If I write a poem about you, you will be young forever in the minds of readers. Now, this seems like a really Western, materialistic preoccupation, I mean, getting to keep this body forever. Thich Nhat Hanh says you already have immortality in each moment that you are alive. I wonder how often the concept of immortality comes up on Japanese and Vietnamese folklore? I know that in Chinese folklore, this is a whole set of Taoist stories about how you get to keep this body forever if you can just learn to breathe right.