Here are the links:

Yale:

http://oyc.yale.edu/

UC Berkeley

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php

MIT

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

The Flamenco Academy by Sarah Bird is a book about  a love triangle and how to find your own story rather than living someone else’s.  The story is about two best friends, Rae and Didi, who are essentially opposites.  Rae is pale, smart, shy, and always takes the back seat, uncomfortable with attention.  Didi is dark, exotic, and her whole life is spent in practice for being a star, whatever that takes.  They meet in an oncologist’s office where both their father’s are dying of cancer.  After her father’s death, Rae’s mother goes off the deep end and joins a religious cult.  Rae is left to fend for herself, moving in with Didi, and her strange, sad mother.  After Rae meets Tomas, a prodigy in the flamenco guitar scene, she becomes obsessed with him after just one night, changing her entire persona molding herself into the girl she thinks he would fall in love with.  This leads her to flamenco.  The girls graduate from high school and go to college, majoring in flamenco dance.  Both Rae and Didi fall in love with flamenco; Rae perfecting the Campos, but lacking the passion necessary to be truly good; Didi, unable to keep the beat, but capturing the passion of the dance in its essence.  Eventually both girls become well-known in the flamenco scene.  Rae spends her time obsessing over Tomas, and Didi obsesses over becoming famous.  Finally, they end up in a love triangle filled with betrayal. 

The strength of the book lies in the description of the setting of New Mexico, the descriptions of dance and the flamenco scene, and in the sub-plot of the story of the gypsies in Andalusia where the dance originated as told through Dona Carlota’s stories, Tomas’ great-aunt.  The language is also interesting: Bird alternates between the voices of a young-adult novel with some beautiful lyrical passages of description.  Of course that’s when she is at her best.   She does a wonderful job describing music especially—the music of the flamenco guitar, for example.   It was a fun read in terms of learning about flamenco, Spain, and gypsies.  There is a lot to relate to especially for readers who have ever taken a back seat to someone who shines brighter than they do, for readers who have ever been obsessed with someone or something without knowing why, or for readers who end up finding their own light and seeing that it shines just as bright, but perhaps in a different direction than they originally thought.

Downtown Ojai

I love Ojai in the fall.  This is my fourth year in Austin, and I never can make it back to Ojai in the fall.    It’s funny how nostalgic you can get for a place.  When I was going up in Ojai, I felt like it was such a small town and I couldn’t wait to experience the world.  Now, I would do anything to be able to afford a home there and move back.  Maybe one day….

For now, I daydream about beautiful Ojai in the fall:  pumpkins patches and Bocalli’s, the pink moment and brisk weather, so warm directly in the sun.  Yes,  one  day I have to move back.

However, today in the training, my colleague asked the curriculum specialist about where literature fits in the curriculum..  His response was basically that it doesn’t.  There’s no room for whole class novels.  You can teach excerpts of novels, or students can study novels in lit circles, but there is no place for whole class novels.  One of his responses was that the word “novel” was nowhere to be found in the new TEKS.   In addition, SSR was missing.  He mentioned if you do SSR then make sure you do metacognitive strategies with it (we already do this when we ask the students to write reader responses using reading strategies).

My biggest concern is where is the literature for the love of reading?  Where is reading for pleasure?  How do we create life-long readers when they are only reading instructional texts and nonfiction texts?  What about the story?  Is there no place for the love of reading to learn about life, people, human nature, to make us more human.  I have concerns– students will be prepared for the workplace, but at what cost?  What kind of people are we creating for the future?  How do students learn about the world?  What does this mean for the future of reading, writing, books, and the story?  What will happen to our readers who have the imagination to think out of the box, to our future Stephen Kings or Amy Tans?

This scares me.  I may not be in education forever; many of the changes directly impact everything I love abut the profession, therefore, the changes will be an impetus for me leaving.  However, it scares me more for  my kids.  My kids will be going to school in a culture that values the dollar and career more than humanity.   They are our future.  And what does that future look like for them?  It’s sad.

My bigger concern had to do with the implications of his speech in terms of the humanities.  He discussed the need for students to be more successful in math and science, and to go into math and science-related fields because that was where the future, and the money, is.  In addition, teachers must follow career and college readiness standards; it is not enough to prepare our students to graduate and pass the TAKS tests, we need to prepare them for college.  Again, I agree.  All students should be prepared for college should they wish to attend at some point in their lives.   God knows, my high school education didn’t prepare me—I was in for a rude awakening in my college classes, and had to re-learn how to learn and think.

Lastly, the week before school started  we received the new TEKS and the new aligned curriculum.  The new TEKS reflect the emphasis on workplace skills—more research, more nonfiction, more presentation skills, more persuasive skills.  As such, the aligned curriculum reflects these changes.  What does it mean for what we teach? Less literature.

Here is my concern: what is happening to the humanities?  Is there a place for it in this future workplace?  Many argue that humanities, creativity, left-brain thinking, communication and writing skills, and critical thinking skills are exactly what the future workplace needs.  Employers can train people to think out of the box, think critically, and communicate effectively.   Moreover, many argue that the humanities teach empathy and compassion, a necessary skill for a future that will be globally connected.

Last year, at Southwestern University, Ken and I attended Azar Nafisi’s lecture on exactly this topic: the need for humanities.  She discussed the importance of art, literature, the humanities.  She said, “That is the triumph of art. … Literature enables us to celebrate the courage of ordinary people who want to live with dignity. That is why a Primo Levi at death’s door in a Nazi concentration camp, or an Osip Mandel shtam at death’s door in a Soviet concentration camp, remembers Flaubert or Dante and goes to death bravely.  At times when brutality is so hideous that people’s gold teeth are removed before they are sent to ovens, we all lose our faith—not just in our executioners, but in ourselves also. We lose hope in human beings when we see pictures from Abu Ghraib or when we hear about hostages being beheaded. We are all stained. The only way to retrieve our dignity or to retain our pride as human beings is to celebrate the highest achievement of humanity: individual dignity. Every great novel, from Stearns and Smollett and Fielding to Bellow and Roth and Morrison, celebrates individual human dignity. The individual is at the heart of all great literature”.   Nafisi continues, “Every democracy was built by those who could imagine what did not exist, and that is especially true of this country…what Bellow meant was that, in the West, we are threatened with atrophy of feeling. A country that has lost its love for its poetry and for its soul is a country that faces death. That is what we face today in our culture of sleeping consciousness, where religion and American values are discussed through sound bites”. Nafisi emphasized the importance of literature as a means of freedom, imagination and creation and most importantly, a vehicle for feeling and emotion.  She discusses literature as a place for us to awaken our consciousness, to awaken our feelings in the face of hopelessness, tragedy, and brutality.  It makes us human.

This is why I have concerns when we start cutting literature out of the curriculum to make more room for writing resumes at the 10^th grade level, creating persuasive brochures and creating multimedia presentations.  Yes, these skills will be valuable in the workplace.  Yes, we have to prepare our kids for college and the workplace.  It would be a disservice not to.  But what disservice are we doing our students when we cut literature, poetry, the arts and humanities from the curriculum?  What kind of human beings are we sending out into the world when they haven’t had the literature to build empathy, compassion, and feeling?  The loss of the humanities is the loss of the human-ness in all of us; it is critical to building the soul of our future.

Julie & Julia by Julie Powell

I picked up this book after seeing the movie trailer for the film, which will be released later this summer.  First of all, I loved, loved, loved this book.  I caught myself actually smiling to myself and laughing out loud on the treadmill at the gym, so caught up in the book that I had no awareness of my surroundings.

The story is of Julie Powell who decides on her 30th year to cook every recipe from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking within a year’s time.   This was one of those can’t-put-it-down books for me.  I highly recommend it, especially if you love good food and good wine, cooking, if you’re trying to figure out what to do with your life and how to not waste it in mediocrity, if you like a voice with a sarcastic sense of humor with a lot of cussing and references to sex, stories of being married and having angst over having babies, stories of the sexual lives of single friends, stories of trying to go from being a thankless secretary to becoming a well-paid writer who writes in her pajamas all day.  It inspires me to come up with a project to drive my writing and give it (and me) a purpose.