Reading for school

I'm fairly impressed with my daughter's reading list for school, and it's only natural that she's more excited over some titles than others (and that goes for me too).

When she told me a few months ago that they were reading The Giver (Lois Lowry) in English class, I wanted to read along. I should read everything on the curriculum!

Sadly, I dropped the ball before I'd even picked it up. They finished The Giver eons ago. Although in a way, I feel I didn't miss a thing; Helena shared her experience of reading it with me in excruciating detail. That said, it's her clear favourite of the required reading this year (so far), and I would like to see it close up. It's finally available at the library — I plan on digging in this week.

Meanwhile in French class, it was Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes) (in French). (She's in grade 8 in the French school board, everything's in French [except for English class].) I started near the time she was wrapping up. We came to pretty much the same conclusions: interesting concept but on the whole boring. (We both like the rap though.) But I appreciate the teaching opportunities in it, and I'm glad I read it. What impresses me is the skill of the translation that ensured Helena had an equivalent experience reading the opening chapters (grammatically awkward and spelled phonetically, kind of) in French as I did in English.

The other novels covered in French class, both Scholastic publications, one a time-travel story, the other a mystery, don't particularly interest me. I don't want to read them so I'm not going to. (Why are the books for this class translated from English?)

English class has moved onto The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton). How is it that I never read The Outsiders in my youth? Wow, what a crazy book. It's melodramatic, to be sure, but it's so sincere! I cried. The kid still has a couple chapters to go before we can compare notes, though she tells me it doesn't feel at all dated.

In Latin, they've been reading The Iliad. In Latin. I'm skipping this one. For now.

Notebooks, neckties, and homework

For one and half school years, between sixth and seventh grade, Mevlut worried constantly about where to sit in the classroom. The inner turmoil he endured while grappling with this question was as intense as the ancient philosophers' worries over how to live a moral life. Within a month of starting school, Mevlut already knew that if wanted to become "a scientist Atatürk would be proud of," as the principal liked to say, he would have to befriend the boys from good families and nice neighbourhoods, whose notebooks, neckties, and homework were always in good order. Out of the two-thirds of the student body who, like Mevlut, lived in a poor neighbourhood, he had yet to meet anyone who did well in school. Once or twice in the school yard, he'd bumped into boys from other classes who took school seriously because they, too, had heard it said, "This one's really clever, he should be sent to school," but in the apocalyptically overcrowded school, he had never managed to communicate with these lost and lonely souls who, like the quiz team, were belittled by the rest as nerds. This was partly because the nerds themselves regarded Mevlut with some suspicion, as he, too, was from a poor neighborhood. He rightly suspected that their rosy worldview was fatally flawed: deep down, he felt that these "clever" boys, who thought they would become rich one day if only they could learn the sixth-grade geography textbook by heart, were, in fact, fools, and the last thing he wanted was to be anything like them.

— from A Strangeness in My Mind, by Orhan Pamuk.

The MOOC experience, continued

I recently completed my second massive open online course (MOOC). This time the course was User Experience for the Web offered by Open2Study. The course was self-paced.

It was completely different from my first MOOC.

The differences are attributable to three main things:

• subject matter: User Experience for the Web vs Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony, and the Crisis of Modernity
• platform: Open2Study vs Coursera
• course format: self-paced vs weekly assignments

Details and observations
While the recent course was self-paced, mostly what this means is the material is already canned. You don't have to wait until the following week for the next block of videos and quizzes to be released.

This course does actually have some structure, 4 modules that could be consumed over 4 weeks. (Quite likely this course may actually have been first introduced with weekly releases.)

The course information for User Experience indicated that the material would require 2-4 hours a week. I'd say it's significantly less. (For Kierkegaard, I'd put in more time than indicated.)

(One could at this point access the Kierkegaard material and consume it at one's own pace, condensing it all into a week or so. But I doubt many people would want to do so, given the intensity of the subject and the time commitment for an 8-week course.)

Each module consisted of 8-10 topics presented in videos ranging in length from about 2 to 7 minutes. There is a 1-question quiz at the end of each video segment that reinforces a key point.

I did most of the coursework (that is, watched the videos) over my morning coffee. With the videos at about 4 minutes a pop, they're bite-sized and it's really easy to say, just one more. I did about 2 modules a week (with a break for Christmas between weeks). I can easily imagine that one might complete the entire course in 1 day.

This setup really did motivate me to keep going.

The videos show the instructor talking, and writing key points on a clear-glass whiteboard. It's all shot against a black background; he uses pink, yellow, green, and blue pens. The presentation is very clean and minimal. While it doesn't compare to the production of the Kierkegaard course videos, it is well suited to the course material.

No required reading. No essay.

Because the course is self-paced, the forum has the feel of a static archive more than of an ongoing and dynamic discussion. The discussion is filtered by module, but this wasn't obvious to me. The setup does not encourage participation.

Class stats indicate that 8,386 students have taken this course and that there are 1,316 classroom posts. (Less discussion and fewer students than Kierkegaard, but no organization. Invisible yet chaotic.)

Open2Study gives you badges for "accomplishments" (like linking a social media account). I hate this kind of thing (I wonder who likes this kind of thing). The alerts are distracting, not motivating. (The alerts are probably configurable, but I'm lazy.) (My skepty-sense is tingling: badges are less to do with motivating a user than generating soundbites that are sharable on social media for the purpose of product promotion disguised as individual accomplishment.)

The final grade is based on the module "assessments" — multiple-choice tests consisting of 5 or 10 questions. (I suspect the format may have been changed from 5 to 10 questions sometime during my enrollment, as for the first three modules, 10 questions now appear, 5 of which I have not answered.)

This course was not affiliated with any university or other learning institution (other than Open2Study itself). The instructor was a professional consultant.

Intangibles
For Kiekegaard, the course page felt like its own place, with discussions, assignments, resources all handy and centralized. I felt engaged and immersed in the course material. I felt like a student.

For User Experience (ironically) I felt very much like a consumer; the classroom is just a slight corner of the Open2Study brand.

I felt less invested in the User Experience course, partly because of the subject, but the whole of the presentation of the course contributed to my not taking it too seriously.

This was reflected in my grade, an easy 88%. A perfect score would be in easy grasp for anyone, but because of both online and real-life distractions, I didn't care enough to make it happen. Contrast this to the 92% I scored for Kierkegaard, of which I am immensely proud and I feel I worked hard for.

I don't feel that I learned anything; rather it served to consolidate what I already know from business experience, editorial instinct, and common sense. (This is still worth something.)

The User Experience course felt very lightweight. That's definitely due to a combination of factors: the subject and my attitude towards it, as well as the course design.

Summary
It's probably fair to say that you get from MOOCs what you put in to them.

I took the User Experience course because I have a mild interest in the subject as it relates to my work; it's not a deep personal interest or an academic curiosity as I felt with Kierkegaard. And I was curious to see how other types of courses in different MOOC environments operated.

Also, I think I may be somewhat addicted to MOOCs, the rush of the combination of learning, discipline, and achievement.

This week I start 2 more courses: Content Strategy for Professionals: Engaging Audiences for Your Organization and Writing for the Web. They are a little more closely related to each other in terms of subject matter (and I'm taking both because of how they're related to my work, rather than purely for personal interest), but they are on different platforms, so they should be easier to compare.

See you on the other side.

Watching you

World Book Day has not yet caught on in Canada, but I celebrated in my own subversive way by sending my child off to school wearing her new doubleplusgood proletarian t-shirt. (World Book Day is actually recognized by my daughter's school, which today hosted an open house to display bookish projects and such things.)

Out of Print recently offered limited edition t-shirts featuring Paul Bacon's dust jacket design for George Orwell's 1984. I ordered some for the whole family! And in so doing I exacted a promise from the girl that she would read it within the next five years.

It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

The colour of infinity

— No-one's trying to kill him at all. He's just paranoid, isn't he? Nora says irritably. He's just a red herring. And the old people — I bet they're just paranoid as well.

"Ah, yes, but that doesn't mean that someone's not out to get them."

— You'll never make a crime writer.

"This isn't a crime story. This is a comic novel."

Emotionally Weird, by Kate Atkinson, is a weird novel. There's a story within a story, and it took quite some time for me to figure that was the case (and not that we were simply jumping forward or backward to another time period). And it took me a while longer to determine which story was inside which. Further, throughout the inner story — Effie's college life — we are treated to excerpts of a few more manuscripts (one of them more prominently). So structurally it's a bit weird, but fun.

It does not hold together as crime story, or mystery, but then it's not one (see above) — despite the mysterious goings on, the dog, the woman, and other red herrings. So if you're familiar only with Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie stories (as I was), check your expectations at the door.

The language is often breathtaking. At times it veers off toward becoming a parody of itself, but even this is somewhat fitting as the protagonist of the inner story is struggling to complete her creative writing assignment, and even though I had to look up a lot of words (a lot of them being very Scottish), the language is always light.

From the framing story, generally more serious and (intentionally, I think, maybe even mockingly) capital-L Literary in tone:

I have my mother's temperamental hair — hair that usually exists only in the imagination of artists and can be disturbing to see on the head of a real woman. On Nora it is the colour of nuclear sunsets and of over-spiced gingerbread, but on me, unfortunately, the same corkscrewing curls are more clownish and inclined to be carroty.

From the inner story — the college novel — that story intended to be "comic":

The old woman had skin that was the texture and colour of white marshmallows and in a poor light (which was always) you might have mistaken her hair for a cloud of slightly rotten candyfloss. Although fast asleep, she was still clutching a pair of knitting needles on which hung a strange shapeless thing, like a web woven by a spider on drugs.

Reviews
New York Times
Salon

These and other reviews can't fully agree on what Emotionally Weird is all about.

One of Effie's assignments is an essay on Middlemarch, and the criticism Henry James levels against it: "Middlemarch is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole." Henry James was wrong, of course. And I get the feeling that this entire novel is intended as a response to James, an exercise in Eliot's realism, a defense of it, but in its execution at once proof that ultra-realism is no longer suited to narrating today's realities.

Emotionally Weird is very realistic: a lot of nothing happens. There are many conversations — some interesting, some boring — with too many people. A lot of what happpens, as in life, has nothing to with anything else. It shows just how difficult it is to tease the narrative thread out of real life.

Emotionally Weird also has some wonderful details, especially to do with colour, and clothing, and how academics talk, but, despite how the Doctor Who references made me smile, it — and not Middlemarch — leaves me indifferent.

I wouldn't recommend this book to most readers I know, except to some who've had a particular kind of college experience.

"Today the Tay was the colour of infinity and made me feel suddenly depressed."

Conrad and me

"Drop this! I won't fight with you. I won't be made ridiculous."

"Ah, you won't?" hissed the Gascon. "I suppose you prefer to be made infamous. Do you hear what I say? ... Infamous! Infamous! Infamous!" he shrieked, rising and falling on his toes and getting very red in the face.

My grade 11 history teacher wore a brown leather jacket, Lennon specs, and a beard. He was a Harley-riding born-again Christian. Mr Osgan encouraged all sorts of strange ideas. For example, we did a unit on Ancient India, which may not sound so strange in these enlightened times, but back in my day, the classes of my peers were essentially limited to the big three: the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.

Naturally, the course material lent itself to discussion of philosophy and religion, and really, that's all your typical hormonal teenagers really want to talk about. I don't think it was just me; most kids thought he was pretty cool, laid-back, like, he got it, man.

He'd go off on all sorts of interesting tangents. It seemed to me they were all about road trips, and meeting hippies and drinking tea and playing sitar. No, he probably didn't tell us any stories quite like that, but he may as well have, man, that was totally the aura he exuded.

For some reason, Mr Osgan seemed to think I was pretty bright, and he gave me A++s (that's double pluses) on my essays. I wrote something on Lucretius and Epicureanism. Then there was this thing on Pythagoras's Table of Opposites and how Pythagoras was clearly(!) influenced by Eastern philosophy. I had to present that to the class. Mr Osgan told me he was giving me bonus points for having conducted the whole seminar barefoot, that it somehow enhanced the material. But I hadn't given it any thought. I was just reckless that week. That was the week my mom went to visit my sister, and I stayed home alone with my big brother, though you can't really say my brother was very present. I had friends over, and stayed out late, and didn't prepare for my project at all. I just left my shoes somewhere, or my feet hurt or something. It was spring, and warm and sunny.

Anyway, before all that stuff, on the very first day of class — history was my home room — Mr Osgan had us fill out some basic information about ourselves, things related to culture and language and religion, I think, and we had to respond to something like, I dunno, "How would you describe yourself," or "What do you want me to know about you?" — something like that. And I remember I wrote that I was "a prolific reader" and I think I was going through my Somerset Maugham phase and I said something about that, but then I worried a long time, for days, about whether I'd used the word "prolific" correctly.

So Mr Osgan notes that I'm Polish, and he starts to tell me, and the whole class, about Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, aka Joseph Conrad, and how remarkable it is that he should write so remarkably well in a language (English) other than his mother tongue (Polish), and, really, I should read him. I'm pretty sure he noted Nostromo as being particularly good. And then he went off on a tangent about some commune where they drank tea and read Conrad or something.

Shortly thereafter I had my very own copy of Nostromo (did our rinky-dink local bookstore actually have it in stock? did my mother special order it for me?). I'm sure Mr Osgan noticed me carrying it around for a while, but he had the sense never to ask me about it.

I still have that book somewhere. Dogeared at page 17. It bears the distinction of being the first of very few books I never finished.

University was a lot harder than high school. In first year, I was a math and philosophy major, but everyone still had to take English. Everyone was tested and placed according to their abilities. I was exempt from all the basic grammar and composition stuff, and ended up in a lit survey course, which was one of the very few lit courses I took in university.

Of course, Heart of Darkness was on the syllabus, and nothing in the world could convince me to read it. I'm not sure I even tried. Maybe I tried. Maybe I read a page. I'm pretty sure I didn't even try. I totally faked it. I hadn't even seen Apocalypse Now.

And I've felt this gaping lacuna in my literary education ever since.

I tried to read Nostromo again later, in my twenties, which served only to grant it the the distinction of being the only book I never finished twice.

Enter The Duel. I received my e-book for free when I subscribed to Melville House's mailing list (offer no longer available).

Conrad's Duel. It's funny! And absurd — the extent to which honour may be insulted and defended. I'm not quite finished, but finish it I will. I may even try Nostromo again.

Thank you, Melville House, for reconciling me to Joseph Conrad. Otherwise this standoff might've lasted to the death (mine).

Congratulations, Frances, for all the extraordinary reading you accomplished this month — the Art of the Novella reading challenge — and thanks for the nudge in this direction.

Sorry, Mr Osgan, that I never appreciated Conrad the way you hoped I would. But look at me now.

Saying these words the chief spun round to seize the truth, which is not a beautiful shape living in a well, but a shy bird caught by strategem.