My Eighth Grade Book Club Wiki and Resources

Here is the link to the wiki I put together for the eighth grade book club at Cortland High School.  Hopefully the teachers will pick up the torch and really start using the wiki, rather than letting it atrophy completely.  Even though I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it to any more of the book club meetings due to student teaching in the spring, I’m going to try to send out one more encouraging e-mail and continue to monitor for updates and hopefully contribute a bit too.  Even if the wiki for the book club hasn’t become a completely satisfying experience yet, I’m still hopeful that the teachers and students might use it more in the coming months with future meetings.  Some of the students did genuinely seem interested in the wiki, these things do take time though.  And with them only meeting once per month, there isn’t much opportunity to get them hooked.  Regardless, in the process I learned for myself how easy and potentially useful wikis could be in the ELA classroom.

In my research on wikis, I did find a few useful resources that I’d like to share.  First, I found a great podcast on David Warlick’s blog that is titled “Exploring Wikis in Education with Vicki Davis and Adam Frey,” which is not only a great introduction to wikis and their potential in classrooms, but also interesting because Vicki Davis gives firsthand account of her experiences using wikis in her own classes and plenty of useful advice.  Second, I found a ReadWriteThink lesson plan idea titled “A Collaboration of Sites and Sounds: Using Wikis to Catalog Protest Songs.”  The lesson is essentially a collaborative discovery, examination, and sharing of protest songs which is an engaging way of introducing young students to the idea of working toward social justice, which we’re all concerned with as idealistic ELA teachers.  As the lesson explains, “In 2005, hip-hop artist Kanye West released the single ‘Diamonds from Sierra Leone’ to bring attention to the issue of conflict diamonds. In this lesson, students research and analyze contemporary and historic protest songs and then as a class catalog their findings in a wiki.”  Now, personally I don’t care for Kanye West, but I know that my preferences don’t matter so much.  Kanye West as an introduction, or a partial introduction along with some others, to the art of the protest song will get the attention of probably 75% of the average class at this point in time.  I think this lesson is worthwhile for the same reason that more closely examining all texts that students are already immersed in is worthwhile: students need to be able to read the world around them, and if the music of their world has a message or an agenda, particularly an activist agenda, which much of it doesn’t in the popular realm, then it is worth taking up.  If I’m standing up there blabbering about everything that’s wrong with the world, they’re not going to get as interested as if one of their favorite music artists is singing about it.

I know that some teachers think that examining music in English class, whether it be for poetry or media or musical elements, is lame or has no place or is cliched, but I still like the idea of building opportunities for critical thinking, discussing, and writing around the primary discourses which students are most familiar with.  And no matter what you’re producing, being able to place the end products on a wiki for collaborative editing, organizing, and further examination has to be more useful and inspiring than the typical research paper which is handed in to the teacher and forgotten about, which has no real audience outside the teacher.  I don’t imagine myself ever devoting large portions of the curriculum to analysis of music, but it seems like a great thing to do from time to time in order to get to know your students more and to help them continue to develop a functional, everyday critical awareness of the world.

Wired’s Geekipedia is Weakipedia. NOT!

I just spent a fair amount of time browsing Wired magazine’s Geekipedia, which is good fun. It reminds me of a presentation that Amanda, Joe Fox, and I saw novelist Barry Lyga (author of The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl) give at the Rochester Teen Book Fest last spring. Lyga’s novel is mostly about being a teenage geek, and he had a great power point slideshow on “geekdom” that lasted a good twenty minutes, maybe. He started out by providing various definitions for the word geek, which are really quite funny. Here’s what the American Heritage Dictionary says:

n.

1. 1. A person regarded as foolish, inept, or clumsy.
   2. A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept.
2. A carnival performer whose show consists of bizarre acts, such as biting the head off a live chicken.

Doesn’t it seem strange that dictionaries haven’t labeled that second entry as “archaic usage” as they do for most word usages which have been outmoded for a long time? He also showed the first entry for geek on urbandictionary.com, which is “The people you pick on in high school and wind up working for as an adult.” Great. Anyway, Lyga had a great presentation on the pervasiveness of “geekdom” from politicians like Bill Clinton to… Oh, I can’t remember, but it was good.

Anyway, as Wired purports, browsing Geekipedia is fun, and with the newfound pervasiveness of a necessary geek knowledge also is somewhat essential. Navigating Geekipedia is a bit tedious, since sometimes you can’t find the alphabetic listing on certain pages, but once there I found that I was familiar with a fair amount of the terminology relating to the internet, but not the more scientific stuff, and not the names of many of the innovators listed. For instance, it was interesting to see entries for two dudes who have changed the face of the blogosphere that I’d never even heard of: Nick Denton and Robert Scoble. I’d also never heard of this intriguing entry: Godwin’s Law, which notes “a feature of online discussion groups: As a thread gathered steam, members would start hurling insults and inevitably someone would be compared to Adolf Hitler. Thus Godwin’s law: The longer an online conversation continues, the greater the probability of a reference to Nazis.” I’ve been a member of a few online message boards, mostly music-related communities, for the past five years, and I’ve never once encountered Godwin’s Law in action. Then again, I don’t frequent the large public forums that are known for rampant douchebaggery and probably lead to these kinds of insult-laden discussions. I frequent a few forums that are online sanctuaries for record geeks and fans of obscure subgenres of music like Japanese psych-rock, New Zealand jangle pop, or post-everything acid folk, for instance, and while we’re all a bit real-life socially inept, we’re at least civil to each other for the most part because we’re happy to encounter other people that share in the same geekdom.

Another entry that I appreciate is the one for Obscolescence Management – “It’s tempting to live on the cutting edge, but rushing out to buy the latest and greatest can lead to frustration, depleted funds, and a growing pile of digital doorstops. The rational approach is to choose gadgets that keep you productive and efficient while early adopters thrash out tomorrow’s features, standards, and form factors.” Hmm, remind anyone of Amazon’s Kindle? Don’t put it on your Christmas or Hanukkah lists yet unless you’re ridiculously wealthy and are going to be purchasing one every year.

Personally, from my experiences with adolescents in schools and those from my own family, such as my teenage cousins, I’m finding that I’m a way bigger internet geek than most kids. I’m addicted to fantasy basketball, my music forums, bloglines, checking my email, delicious, stumble upon (thanks to Ray), last.fm, Facebook, Rate Your Music, Dinosaur Comics (which should definitely have an entry on Geekipedia!), YouTube, etc. etc. etc. I really have no idea outside of social networking and YouTube, though, what typical teens are tuned into on the internet. I think setting up a Geekipedia with my students in order to take inventory and survey what exactly people are familiar with would be extremely helpful, not only to see what they know, but why they think it’s important as Geekipedia set out to explain. Beginning of the year icebreakers seem essential with new classes of students, and a run at making a customized version of Geekipedia would be a good introduction to everyone’s internet tastes.

“The Lines between Ersatz and Authenticity”: Carrie Brownstein on Video Games

I have a bunch of music blogs plugged into my bloglines, most of which don’t update too often, but are always great when they do. One of my favorites is published as Monitor Mix on the NPR website and written by Carrie Brownstein, a founding member of the seminal “riot grrrl” (whatever that means) punk band, Sleater-Kinney. I always considered Sleater-Kinney to be one of the smartest bands, but I guess I had no idea because Brownstein’s blog for NPR is consistently brilliant and thought-provoking. Strike another one up for NPR!

Anyway, the reason I mention her blog here is that her most recent post is about the role video games play in our contemporary society. She wrote a review of the new video game Rock Band for Slate magazine, and she continued the discussion of gaming on her blog. Brownstein points out that “The line between gamers and non-gamers is clearly diminishing, if not already obsolete,” citing the fact that some are hardcore online gamers, some are social gamers playing participatory games like Guitar Hero or those for the Wii, and others make a game out of social networking: “isn’t compulsively checking and updating your Facebook page just another form of gaming? In other words, few of us are immune.” With all of the trivia challenges and zombie tags that are infiltrating Facebook, I have to agree.

Then, though, Brownstein gets to a point about gaming in our society which Jerry would appreciate, and the more I think about it, I appreciate it too. She says, “Part of me feels that Rock Band is yet another example of our culture’s increased tolerance of phoniness, whether for the sake of simplicity or out of sheer denial. It’s certainly easier to pretend to make art or to speak the truth than to actually do either.” She mentions that not just in video games, but also in music nowadays, there is a “blurring [of] the lines between ersatz and authenticity.” And I guess that is where we as English teachers and media literacy educators come in. Our role is to bring this discussion of truth and authenticity to the forefront with our students who all love games, whatever genre they fall under.

Taylor Mali’s “The The Impotence of Proofreading”

Every “English torturer” should see this video. Plus, I figure we’re at the end of a semester and at a high stress point, so we could use a good laugh. Taylor Mali, the guy who is famous for the “What Teachers Make” poem, delivers some good laughs with this piece on proofreading.

What Should High School English Be?: The 21st Century Classroom

“What Should High School English Be?” is the question answered by eight prominent teachers, researchers, and writers in Don Zancanella’s article in the November issue of The English Journal. Honestly, this is one of the best pieces I’ve ever read on the subject of ELA in any journal, book, or newspaper–anywhere. As a grad student who hasn’t student taught yet, I’m aware of the fact that pretty much all I’ve done so far in three semesters is idealize my future classroom inconsiderate of the everyday demands and harsh realities as the contributors to the English Journal piece have done. Reading the piece, I found value in each writer’s vision of the H.S. English classroom. Despite the fact that a few of them are completely ignorant of the importance of new literacies, multimodal literacies, digital literacies, every day literacies, whatever you want to call them literacies, I still cannot deny that the vision of the English classroom as a place where students do lots of meaningful reading and writing is a wonderful thing. If your classroom is not “dripping with literacy” then you are not doing your job, but, ideally, and realistically, in the twenty-first century, we need to more closely examine what literacy means and how it has changed in order to fully address student needs. We all know this. Virtually every article and book about technology and education or progressive ELA education outlines the redefining and expansion of the word literacy.

The only vision of the English classroom from the article which I can wholeheartedly say that I subscribe to is Arthur N. Applebee’s though. In Applebee’s piece, the ideals of the old (“it is primarily in English class that students deal with the questions of what it means to be human” [73]) meet the literacies of the new (“embracing all of the tools and media available to express themselves in our twenty-first century culture” [73]). Applebee’s concise answer to the question of what high school English should be gets at the heart of language study: “The English classroom should be what it has always sought to become: the place where students learn to master the power of words and symbols—theirs and others” (73). Despite the fact that what it means to be literate is constantly changing, the vision has not changed, and critical thought and vigor won’t need to be compromised, but instead taken to newer, deeper levels in which students are not just digital media consumers, but also digital media creators.

This article got me thinking, and I’ve been trying to visualize how I specifically define what high school English should be. I’ve spent the past few months blogging trying exactly to answer this same question, and I’ve put down a great many words on the subject, so I thought I’d try to make an image of my vision. I spent a couple of hours in Adobe Photoshop, and above you can see the image that I produced. Reflecting on the image, I see its limitations, but in my defense, I’ll just say that I could only fit so many things in there. You should be able to figure out what most of the things are, though many people do not know The King of the Cosmos from the game Katamari Damacy who is in the bottom left corner. Oh, and the pencil sketch self-portrait is, of course, Vonnegut. I realize that this image may seem indicative of a vision of an imposing of canons of taste, such as Dinosaur Comics in comics and WordPress as a blog service and Vonnegut as a novelist, etc., but I’m not advocating an imposition of superior teacher taste. I guess when it comes down to it, my vision of high school English is too huge and messy to fit into a single image. I guess the image that I made above (click here for a larger version) is what I would hope to be allowed to study if I had to redo high school English.

Amazon’s Portable E-Book Reader: Print Media is Under Seige (Old News)

Amazon is currently amidst the launch of their new e-book reader, The Kindle, and Newsweek featured an extensive article, “The Future of Reading,” on the device, its book purchasing and internet service, and many of the implications for publishers, writers, readers, distributors, etc. etc. etc. I could speculate on The Kindle endlessly, but when it comes down to it, according to the article, the device will be shipping out soon, yet Amazon hasn’t released any videos of the Kindle in action. Judging from the news that the Kindle has a black and white screen which is only six inches, the books via Amazon’s service will cost $9.99, and their biggest one-up on other e-book readers is wireless connectivity, I’d guess that, though this is a step forward for e-books in the long-form read format, the Kindle isn’t going to revolutionize the reading world the way the iPod did with the listening world. At least not yet.

There are many attractive features of current e-book readers, despite the fact that they have a long way to go. “E-book devices like the Kindle allow you to change the font size: aging baby boomers will appreciate that every book can instantly be a large-type edition. The handheld device can also hold several shelves’ worth of books: 200 of them onboard, hundreds more on a memory card and a limitless amount in virtual library stacks maintained by Amazon. Also, the Kindle allows you to search within the book for a phrase or name.”

At $400 dollars though, and without a larger full-color screen, I don’t see portable e-book readers taking off just yet. And more generally, having a designated e-book reader just doesn’t seem practical when laptops keep getting smaller and cheaper and phones continue to get larger and more web-ready and computer-like. When hard drive technology improves every day and one inch flash drives can store more files than mainframe computers that once filled entire rooms, having a drive on a device exclusively dedicated to e-books seems like the pipe dream of a company that has succeeded in the book market, not the technology market. I love e-books, and I know that one day my physical library of books will become artifacts, but I just don’t envision e-books as something that should be limited in the way that Amazon envisions them.

E-books, not the portable reading devices, have vast implications for education. The possibilities for ease of access, searchability, organization and archiving, digitally organized annotations, and socially networked reading are huge upsides, but until e-book formats and computer/phone/device readers get better and significantly cheaper than acquiring print texts in schools, they aren’t going to become mainstream. There are also copyright issues with e-books. We all know that teachers are notorious for copying short stories, essays, poems, maybe even whole books when they can’t acquire copies for all of their students. With computers or smaller e-book devices, it will only be easier for teachers to pirate complete texts amongst themselves and their students. People tend to not think of digital file-sharing as criminal activity and feel anonymous and guilt-free, but in an age when the death of the novel is being talked about seriously and the death of the career poet happened long ago, royalties for great writers are crucial. Unlike musicians who can make a living off performing live, novelists require a certain amount of isolation. The status of the novelist has already diminished so much in our culture, but there is still a loyal market of consumers that makes deep connections to the physical texts which seem impregnable. We’ve already seen the way that the internet has changed the music industry. The major labels are suffering because the market has been flattened and people have more choice. I suppose this can be seen as a positive in the book world as well. Authors will get more exposure via digital book networks, but the major writers will bring in less money in royalties. There are upsides and downsides, and as much as I love my paperbacks and don’t want the book world to change, the shift is inevitable.

NYSEC & NCTE in New York City

Well, this is a bit of belated blogging about something more worthy of mentioning than anything else I’ve done in recent memory. Earlier in the week, at just about the last possible minute, I was invited to come along with Ray and Dave to the NYSEC Conference and NCTE Convention in Manhattan. The drive down was good fun. We stopped at the Pengiun/Putnam book sale in Binghamton on the way and bought a bunch of books at dirt cheap prices. I didn’t get as many books as Ray or Dave because I’m a bit low on muniats, but I still got eight books for nineteen dollars. I found the newer book by the guy who wrote Looking for Alaska, John Green, called An Abundance of Katherines, and a nonfiction book titled To Air is Human about a guy who becomes the World Air Guitar Champion. Those are the two titles I’m most excited about. Oh, and I’ve never read Ayn Rand, but I got this really nice Rand box set for five bucks (it goes for $45 in stores).

As for our experience at the conference, the obvious highlights were getting to hear Nancie Atwell and Jonathan Kozol speak. As everyone knows, those two are the biggest celebrity heroes in the English education world, and you’d have thought the Beatles were getting off the plane judging by the introductions and ovations they received. But they were deserved, since those two have done for education what the Beatles did for music. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to spend the whole weekend at the NCTE convention, but I think Mandy did, so hopefully she’ll be able to fill us in on what she attended over the weekend.

Oh, and on the way back Dave introduced Ray and I to geocaching. I think we found a cache in Newbourgh, NY. Ray and I even signed the log in the cache. I signed as Anathoma Andy because Ray taught me that word earlier in the day. I can’t remember what it means now, a day later, but it sounds good. Or maybe just pretentious. Anyway, I took plenty of photos during the trip, so check out the ole flickr.

P.S. I stayed with my friends Ricky and Liz in Manhattan and got to play Guitar Hero II for the Wii for the first time. It was truly an experience. The gameplay requires full concentration, but I couldn’t help being distracted by the brand name guitars and amps while I played, and my play suffered as a result.

Product Placement in Video Game Worlds

I just came across this NY Times article, via Bill MacKenty’s blog, about a recent deal that will put more embedded advertising into the new Sims game and seems likely to be followed by more of the same. “Marking a new form of collaboration between the entertainment industry and corporations seeking to highlight a social or political agenda, Electronic Arts, the No. 1 video game publisher, plans to announce today that it has collaborated with BP, the energy company, in developing the latest installment of the hit SimCity computer game series.”

Obviously, this news is incredibly disheartening. The video game industry has seen exponential economic growth over the last ten or so years. Now our subconsciouses have to be bombarded with clever marketing even when we’re playing video games? The most egregious part of this particular news concerning the deal with EA and Sims is the following:”One wrinkle in the game’s marketing is that relatively clean systems like wind farms, natural gas plants and solar farms are branded with the BP logo, while the dirty options like coal are not. Gas stations in the game also carry the BP brand.”

I have to admit, this is a very clever marketing scheme. Users are extremely loyal to the Sims franchise of games, and after seeing that nice green BP logo all over their favorite video game world, some intense lifelong brand loyalty in the energy market could be developed rather quickly and probably cheaply compared to other forms of advertising, who knows. But, as media literacy educators, we can’t just re-examine television and magazine advertisements with our students because the nefarious presence of advertising is infiltrating the video game worlds that many students spend large portions of their time immersed in. Renee Hobbs says, “As marketing techniques become more and more sophisticated and lines between marketing, entertainment, and information blur, the topic of brands and branding invites students to consider their own complex emotional relationships with consumer goods” (62, Reading the Media). When a company such as BP can monopolize the market in a video game world such as Sims and paint their logo all over renewable energies, while erasing their involvement in the coal industry, students need to closely examine the ways in which their favorite video game companies are aiding in the “[construction of] an association between a human value and a product, situating people in the social role of consumer” (Hobbs 62).

P.S. When I was a kid, my Mom and I used to drive down to Florida with one of her friends for vacations in a big Chevy Suburban with the other friend’s two daughters, and while on the road we’d always stop at BP gas stations. To this day, we still refer to BP as Better Peeing, instead of British Petroleum, because they always had the cleanest restrooms. Oh, and I got that image from an art project called Art Not Oil. If you click the image, the link should take you to their site.

Super Mario Galaxy for Wii: Mario and Media Literacy in the 21st Century

As some of you may know, I am the proud owner of a Nintendo Wii. I received the Wii as a gift from my friend Ricky for being in his wedding over the summer. Best groomsmen gift ever or what? I don’t own too many Wii games yet–so far I have Wii Sports (which comes with the system), Wii Play, and Mario Party 8–partly because the games are all still relatively new and the prices haven’t dropped yet to the point where I can afford to purchase them on a semi-regular basis, and partly because I don’t have enough time to play Wii and haven’t yet gotten sick of the games I have. Anyway, I regularly check GameSpot to look at the previews for the upcoming Wii game releases because the site has ratings, trailers, and video reviews conducted by staff experts who are ridiculously expert in the language of gaming and incredibly articulate in their comprehensive reviews (Sofia, check them out if you haven’t already. I’ve found that their reviews have changed my perception of the intellectual curiosities of gamers and given me an immense amount of respect for the passion gamers have, and I can only hope to try to tap into this passion in my future students via their writing of reviews and using the GameSpot reviews as wonderful models that hit all the points that a review should.), and tonight I saw that the top rated upcoming release for the Wii is Super Mario Galaxy, which will be released next week, November 12th. According to the review and the other critical hype, this game is going to far surpass any other game that has been published for the Wii. Watch the video review because it looks awesome. I might have to sell some old stuff on eBay so that I can get this game.

The reason that I bring the new Mario game up is that being reminded of Mario and his prevalence throughout hundreds of video games on the various progressions of the Nintendo consoles throughout the years and my lifetime reminded me of the referencing of employing close examination of the Disney characters in the media literacy classes detailed in Renee Hobbs’ book, Reading the Media. I’d argue that in the past twenty or so years the Mario Bros. franchise has been just as near-ubiquitous as the most popular of Disney characters and would be just as interesting and eye-opening to examine critically with students that have known the Mario Bros. characters their whole lives and probably on a deeper level than I may. I’m not yet sure, but I may want to develop my media literacy lesson plan idea on an examination of Mario. I find Mario to be very interesting, as he is so common and endearing that he probably is consumed and manipulated mostly without being thought twice about, but upon closer inspection is pretty interesting in the way that he has been crafted. He’s a plumber, wears overalls, is rather plump—not what you’d expect the hero to look like. He plays on the popular Italian-American stereotypes: he has a big mustache and loves to eat pasta and pizza. In many of the more nuanced multiplayer Mario-related games created from SNES, 64, and onward, Mario’s skill sets are the most average across the board, making him the average Joe-hero, the everyman. I think it would be interesting to examine the changes in Mario’s appearance throughout the years and the many games and track his development as the face of the Nintendo franchise.

The Mario Bros. franchise, especially the straight-up Mario games, are also ripe for classroom discussion because of the fact that most of the time Mario is rescuing Princess Peach or Princess Daisy. After noting this, a further examination of the “damsel in distress” in classic fairy tales and literature is almost obligatory, which will in turn lead to discussions on representations of gender in both games and literature and lead to an introduction to feminist criticism. It’d be interesting to see how Princess Peach compares to and was influenced by the classic “damsel in distress” and how contemporary students read these gender representations.

I know that many people see video games as diversionary or escapist or as maybe just a plain old waste of time, but there are narratives and points of view to be examined in games, and even though they are not explicit and text-based, they are present; they just need to be read in different ways. For instance, Mario and Princess Peach, due to the limitations of the early NES system, had only limited dialogue, but their characters are largely conveyed in image and their own limitations.

In the book that Dr. Stearns offered to let us borrow, Lesson Plans for Creating Media Rich Classrooms (Christel & Sullivan), there is a lesson entitled “Video Game Vigilance: Applying Critical Thinking to Video Games,” which aims to have students think about the progression of video games over the past thirty years and evaluate their positive and negative aspects, including violence and gender roles. I think that doing a close study of a particular character franchise, such as Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Bowser, etc., provides a game history just as ample and rich as any other game and which virtually spans the history of popular gaming. Anyway, I’ll leave it at this for now, but I’m interested in possibly developing this further for my media literacy plan. Let me know what you think. And sorry if I at all rained on Sofia’s video game project parade. I am in no way a video game expert, and I’m really looking forward to gaining access to her thoughts and resources. She started a great discussion of video games and Jenkins on her blog which I just commented on. Get in on that discussion.

In the meantime, I’m really hoping that I can get Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii in the next couple of weeks and see for myself how Mario fares in the 21st century in a non party-style Mario game. According to the video review, Mario ventures through a quirky series of celestial worlds. I wonder if Princess Peach is still needing rescue or whether there’s some updated save-the-world theme?

P.S. I put my other memoir from Mary Kennedy’s class last year on here so that the couple people that were interested in reading it that weren’t in that class can have yet another chance to laugh at me and have more names to call me.

Reading the Media with Robotic Consumerist Brains

Can it be done? Are human high school students (are there any other kind?) capable of thinking critically about the media? I don’t know. As one of the concerned parents of a student in the program detailed in Renee Hobbs’ Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English expressed concern about student examination of the media in English 11 building cynicism, and as I am somewhat critical/skeptical of mass media and mainstream culture and am also way more cynical than I’d like to be, I think I tend to agree with that parent. But, I’ll just hope that students will do more with their critical literacy skills than my cynical self has.  The two most telling parental concerns about the media literacy program at Concord High School in New Hampshire were about building cynicism and the class discussions being too political. Honestly, I don’t see how you can critically analyze the media in any environment inside the free states without the discussion becoming politicized and having students get engaged and excited. Isn’t a call to action the ultimate beginning to enacting social/global change and the desired outcome? Obviously, political discussion and action isn’t the explicit goal of a media literacy program, but it’s a platform for questioning the contemporary media, and it’s a great start.

I like that literature, particularly novels, can still have a place in the media literacy curriculum, but as Hobbs states, “Several people began to talk about the issue of relevance. And was it time for us to really face up to the fact that we were not here to make kids potential English majors. Instead, we were aiming to help students become critical thinkers in responding to the world they live in” (27). As many of my readers already know, I couldn’t agree more. I love The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It’s one of the greatest books ever, and I think it will always be important, but teaching it and other classic novels alone is not going to “help students become critical thinkers in responding to the world they live in” in a complete and contemporary fashion. Huck Finn’s social message is, unfortunately, still relevant, and there is a lot to be learned from it, but we also need to get our students thinking between the lines, behind the scenes, and past matters of clear cut black and white, not concerning just matters of racism, classism, sexism, but how they are portrayed in modern mass media and how these images affect their lives and their thoughts, as the media literacy program that Hobbs details is shown to do.

Building a media literacy curriculum seems taxing, among other things, but as the teachers interviewed by Hobbs reveal, their is a great payoff: gratification, pride, a sense of accomplishment. I tend to get bored with things pretty quickly, and honestly, one of my most pressing fears about student teaching in the spring concerns myself getting bored with teaching the same lesson four or five times per day possibly, especially if I’m required to teach my host teacher’s lesson. When the text studied remains the same and the possibilities for discussion are limited, to an extent, I can see myself getting bored. But, the idea of bringing media literacy into the curriculum and having students contribute media texts of many genres and many tastes about many subjects is invigorating and seems like it is likely to remain that way. Just today I came across this Human Brain Cloud, a site which has a word association game and plugs the words into a huge, searchable brain cloud for users to explore. It’s a social experiment, says the creator. The “game” is quite fun and interesting. You learn a good deal about the way your brain works in a short period of time, or at least you have the potential to. It’s very likely that many people play the game thoughtless of the associations they are making, but I’d love to create an environment where potentially a student could come in and show the Human Brain Cloud to the class and examine the way that mass media and, particularly, marketing iconography and slogans have taken over our consciousness. In fact, the creator of the cloud presented some of his own findings on the brain cloud blog:

“It is scary how certain words appear to trigger loyal marketing message recitation / product related association or whatever:

• lego -> my eggo
• tiger -> tony
• have it -> your way
• snap -> crackle pop
• subway -> eat fresh
• this is -> SPARTA!
• (there were a bunch more I’m not remembering – anyone see any good ones?)”

The game seems like a great place to examine the ways that media affects our consciousness and decision making. It also has the potential to be inappropriate and vulgar (the most popular word in the game is “sex” according to the creator), but it’s a great place to examine advertising and propaganda, and ultimately, it’s just another part of the seemingly boundless world that our students are going to encounter and which they should be able to “read.”