Medieval Sex and the Penitentials: are we any less crazy?

This lovely flowchart from The Atlantic, entitled “A Sexual Decision Flowchart That Makes Everything Simpler for Medieval Men” made me laugh today. I suppose, without sin the church at that time would have had a difficult time raising all of that money.  Anyway, while sex isn’t as taboo a subject, or activity, at this point and time, it is still interesting how taboo of a subject it still is. I wasn’t sure, frankly, if I even wanted to bring it up here.

We are pretty inundated with sexual images, but not a lot of serious conversation about it.  Not that this is going to be a serious conversation, either.  I have just had it on my mind lately as I struggle to help one of my speechers decide what she can and can not talk about in her speech on fanfiction.  Just how far can she go without freaking out and alienating her audience? I am supposed to be her coach, but I myself am never quite sure.

For those of you who labor under the delusion that teenagers are a foolish, illiterate bunch with brains muddled by texting and Twitter, you might want to check that. This particular student came to me wanting to write a speech about fanfiction (particularly slash stories) challenging heteronormative culture.  Yep, that’s right.

As I delved into the world of fanfiction with her, I was reminded of one of my old professor’s comments that in certain parts of the world wide web you’d better have your asbestos underwear on.

In her speech she decided to go ahead and talk about slash and femslash stories, and I really hope none of her judges stands up and yells “STOP! SIN!”

I’ll keep you posted.

 

Reflection 1

For the past two weeks I have tried to blog and tweet at least once a day. That did not happen. I read blogs and tweets at least once a day, but realized anew what I already knew: time management is not my forte. Neither is generating a lot of writing in a short amount of time. I tend to ponder and let things percolate for quite awhile before I commit anything to paper, or in this case, screen. So, here I am. The trying was valuable, and I haven’t given up hope just yet.

As I drove home from teaching a bunch of grumpy students today, I listened to The Circuit with Kari Miller. She had on as a guest this morning Clive Thompson, who was making the case that rather than making us stupid, technology is changing our brains for the better. You can listen to the interview here. As I drove home pondering this post and listening to Thompson, I am glad I took on this challenge.

Anyway, the blog, though slowly moving and still finding a focus, has been rewarding. Twitter is a little less so. Too much of a blending of selves. As in, too many (high school) students out there following, retweeting, having no filters. It is not entirely comfortable for me. I honestly am still trying to sort that one out.

I also ventured into RSS universe via feedly. I have not become enamored of it, yet. We will see how that one goes.

SO, my plan for the next week:

• give up blogging once a day and work on a chunk of blogs during the days I have more open-ended periods of time.
• increase my comfort level on Twitter ever-so-slightly.
• download the Feedly app and see if that makes the RSS heavens open and light shine down upon, well, something.

What I did manage to do on this blog this week (in case you missed any of it):

• Disney, Fairy Tales, and Nazis
• Just How Important are those Hoops?
• Creative Commons
• Spreading the Love
• About Me

 

Spreading the Love

So, the daily blogging has yet to happen. I need to get the hang of the shorter post, I think.

Some of my favorite posts on one of my favorite blogs, Apt. 11d, are a series of links to articles and blog posts she finds interesting.  Here is my attempt to spread the love:

First, in homage to Apt. 11d, this post about this survey concerning PhD debt. Frightening.

From The Atlantic, a map of the United States revealing results of Google Autocomplete. That one is just fun.

I have been alarmed at the news from the Ukraine. Although, it seems a problematic time to be protesting in Cambodia, and probably elsewhere as well.

Because I have figured out how to imbed video (sad that it took me this long), a speech that continually impresses me, no matter how often I watch, read, or talk about it:

And finally, this post from Catnaps, Conversations, and Coffee just made me hungry.  It is a day for comfort food around here.

 

Creative Commons

This is something I have been swimming around in for the past year.  Textbooks.  College textbooks are horrendously expensive.  I have a hard time justifying the cost of some of the Composition and Argument  textbooks that students are required to buy.  Especially when the binding falls apart two months into the semester.  I mean, really, Aristotle hasn’t come up with anything new in the past few years (okay, that was snarky and reductive. There is more that goes into these textbooks. I know that). Also, my disclaimer: I am pretty tough on books I am teaching out of:

Still, I think a textbook should hold up to some pencils, post-it notes, coffee spills, and wild gesturing.  I mean, really.

Anyway, this semester I just required a handbook, Writing with Sources, 2nd edition, by Gordon Harvey:

Or as I call it, How Not to Plagiarize. It is inexpensive — less than $7 on Amazon.

Beyond that I am using Open Source Textbooks in the class.  It is an experiment, so we will see how it goes, but so far so good.  I have spent quite a bit of time hunting around for chapters, essays, and texts that are useful for my particular purposes, but they are out there.  The concern I still have is that the readings will lack continuity. Cue the teacher.  I am just going to have to be the bridge between the stuff I am making them confront through the readings and the stuff I am asking them to confront through their writing.  We will see how effective of a bridge I can be.

Texts I have found, am using, might use (it’s all an adventure):

• Writing Commons’ Academic Argument, by Joseph Moxley, University of South Florida

• Claims, Claims, Claims, Courtesy of the Odegaard Writing & Research Center, University of Washington

• Finding the Good Argument, or the Importance of Logic, by Rebecca Jones

• Backpacks vs Briefcases: Steps Toward Rhetorical Analysis, by Laura Bolin Carroll

These are all open source texts, so you would think that I already knew something about Creative Commons.  Honestly, other than my understanding from reading the license information, I don’t know as much  as I should. This is what most of them have on the front page somewhere:

*This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-

Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License and is subject to the

Writing Spaces Terms of Use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://

creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative

Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105,

USA. To view the Writing Spaces Terms of Use, visit http://writingspaces.

org/terms-of-use.

I have read enough of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License to know that I can use the texts for class, as long as I am not selling them or using them in any other commercial way.  Also, I attribute the work to the author.  That is as far as I went.

So what is Creative Commons?

I started with this website:

The US Creative Commons Website

This describes what the creative commons is. Which is, according to their website:

“Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools.”

It includes a handy-dandy choose-your-own-adventure flow-chart to find what cc license works for you. From this, I found that for most of the work I do on the web, I want the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License.

They further state that they do not replace copyright, but work alongside copyright.  That is where things get a little muddled for me. So, what’s the difference?

I found something of use on this page: Fair Use, Public Domain, and Creative Commons:

… CC creates a zone inside copyright ownership for owners who want to be generous and give their works away. All CC licenses impose some conditions, and some impose more than others. (Some people ignore this; owners of CC licenses sometimes complain that people do not honor the conditions.) This makes CC a copyright-light zone rather than copyright-free zone, and of course it does nothing (and doesn’t pretend to) to loosen long and strong copyright policy—rather, it depends upon it.

I did try reading the government’s copyright information to try to figure out exactly what is going on there in light of web-based content, I really did.  They need to read their own Plain Language Guidelines.

The Frequently Asked Questions Page was much more helpful. This was interesting:

When is my work protected?
Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.

So, I guess what I got out of my information hunt is that fixed, tangible work is protected under copyright, and Creative Commons strives to give people more concrete information about how the work may be used, shared, modified, or not.  It seems like it is an ethical and legal guide to fair use, which is a rather ambiguous term.

What do you all think? I still feel a little muddled …

But! Here’s a useful site for anyone looking for Open Educational Resources.

 

Just how important are those hoops?

I just had a meeting with my twelve-year-old son’s caseworker at school. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, and often these meetings are about as much fun as going to the dentist. I found out today that he both tested out at an eleventh grade skill level on a standardized math test and is getting a D in sixth grade math. What does this mean, you ask? Well, it means he is not doing well at jumping through hoops.

It has always been a struggle to try to figure out how to explain to him why it is important not that he get the right answer, but that he work the problem the way the teacher wants it done.  Why it is important that the homework get turned in after it is complete.  Why he has to do a worksheet when he already knows how to do that math, and proved he knew how to do that math two years ago.  Why he has to write neatly. We call it hoop jumping.  Sometimes to get by in the world of NTs you have to jump through some hoops.

But what is the balance?  How much hoop jumping is one kid expected to do? Why is this stuff so important to the world? Why is it so problematic that he does the math his way? What is the point of all of this, really? It’s so arbitrary.  At what point do we cross the line from socializing our children to creating a flock of sheep?

 

Disney, Fairy Tales, and Nazis

So, I always thought Disney was the worst thing to happen to fairy tales (Sorry, Jen’s Quill Pen!).  Then I read this book:

image from Google Books

As it turns out, the Nazis may have been worse when it comes to nefarious use of fairy and folk tales.  According to Zipes, in the Nazi era “folktales were considered to be holy or sacred Aryan relics.  Therefore, the classical fairy tales of the Grimms, Anderson, and Bechstein were promoted as ideal on recommended reading lists for children.” Yikes. He goes on to quote Christa Kamenetsky, author of Children’s Literature in Hitler’s Germany,  “The innocent folktale was transformed into an ideological weapon meant to serve the building of the Thousand Year Reich. Thus party official Alfred Eyd announced in 1935, “the German folktale shall become a most valuable means for us in the racial and political education of the young.”” Those bastards.  

Now we are getting to the part that makes me a little uncomfortable (instead of righteously indignant, which is a pretty  comfortable feeling for me):

If I understand Zipes correctly, to accomplish this they did not rewrite the tales stressing Aryan features and so forth, rather there was “an enormous effort made by educators, party functionaries, and literary critics to revamp the interpretation of the tales in accordance with Nazi ideology and to use those interpretations in socializing children.” The most popular tales of the time were used to stress the importance of large families and fertility, purity, an authoritarian male at the head of each family, and a young woman seeking salvation through her modesty, industriousness, and virginity.  Likewise, for the male protagonist to achieve his goal he must demonstrate strength, loyalty, and at times the ability to kill that which threatens the stability of the “rightful” order. There was absolute loyalty to the state, at the expense of even the family unit if need be. This socialization through interpretation was an explicit policy of the Third Reich.

Here’s the problem. This mutable ability of the tales, this capacity to be analyzed, interpreted, reinterpreted, to mean different things to different people at different times in their lives is one of the things I love about fairy tales.  It is a question of what the tale is essentially about.  Is Red Riding Hood about not talking to strangers, not straying from the path, staying true to yourself, the danger of being consumed by some elemental force in the woods, be afraid of the wolf, or sexual maturity, or something else all together?  The discussion is endless and fascinating. Who decides?

The fact is it’s the storyteller.  Every storyteller takes the tale, combines it with some social aspect of self and audience and produces something new.  Even the Grimms did this.  When you look for it you can see evidence of their desire for German unification and self-determination all over the place.  Frankly, this is the fun of telling stories.  When the storyteller is controlled by the state, or by the market, we have a problem. Because every storyteller has an agenda.

I guess I would rather the agenda be an individual one, rather than an institutionalized one.

I think what makes me uncomfortable about the Nazi agenda is that their interpretation of the tales that I love was based on the text, which has always been my defense as well — and ultimate question: Can it be supported with evidence from the text? It bothers me that their answer to that was “yes.”  They didn’t rewrite anything, just looked at them through a different lens.  The Nazis put themselves into the history of the discourse surrounding these tales, and the stories feel all tainted now.  Yuck.

Anyway, I guess the Nazis were worse than Disney.  But that doesn’t let Disney off the hook, especially when they do things like this.

 

‘Blog’ sounds like …

‘Blog’ sounds like a form of vomit.

Favorite Facebook post of my mom’s so far this month.