Progress: 11/30 - #18. read 30 texts that will aid in my teaching

For those of you who do not know, I was blessed with an extraordinary talent for sleeping. I can fall asleep in bright light, to a backdrop of noise, on a bed barely comfortable. I often sleep for 16 hours at a time. I sometimes sleep for close to an entire 24. I fall asleep in minutes flat, and can easily fall back again if woken suddenly. I have fallen asleep on airplanes, buses, and suitcases; I have fallen asleep at the movies, baseball games, lectures, and tutorials. I once fell asleep on a computer keyboard and woke up with 90 extra blank pages on my assignment. I once fell asleep at the dinner table and my whole family just quietly ate dinner around me. I once fell asleep standing up in an elevator. Ad infinitum.

Therefore, it may surprise you to know that - save for the last one - the endless anxiety of summer's too-much-time-to-think has often brought me boughts of insomnia. I am not proud to admit this, but I went through a phase where I tried to remedy this with wee hour YouTube Dr. Phil marathons.

This is where I first encountered this memoir. Amanda Lindhout was the interviewee. As the former ransom-held prisoner of a militant group of young boys in war-torn Somalia, she has spent her time since being released writing this memoir and establishing a non-profit that supports development aid. I suppose I should have considered the interview source before adding this to my to-read list, but it sounded compelling in the case that I ever decided to start reading memoirs to help with 3U. (My interest was also heightened when I kept stumbling upon this book - as an Indigo recommended staff pick, when a fellow travel companion called it a "page turner".)

Before I launch on a tirade: This book was entertaining and readable. I don't know how much of the lovely prose to attribute to Lindhout, or her alleged "co-author" (who has no role in the actual narrative), Sara Corbett.

That being said, I have a lot of trouble mustering empathy for people who are intentionally reckless, without labeling themselves as being reckless. Call it what it is. Please don't attribute it to good intentions and an unwillingness to see negativity, or the potential far-reaching consequences of your actions. I can read narratives about self-injury, or alcoholism, or eating disorders, or drug addictions, or other similarly dangerous and self-consuming behaviours, so long as the authors don't act naive to the selfish suffering - albeit borne of deep sadness and longing - that they are inflicting on both themselves and others.

Like Into the Wild, this is not one of those memoirs. Any little self-reflection comes dangerously late. I am not in any way implying that the subjects of either of those texts were deserving of any harm, but to blindly hack through foreign terrain with good intentions and a lack of preparation is just, to me, not relatable.

Coupled with the following sentences, which are such offensive massive generalizations (again, under the guise of good intentions), I just - though I read it all - could not properly invest myself in the text:

"The Kuchis reminded me a little bit of the First Nations people back in Canada, independent and unintegrated and pretty much worse off for it." (82)

"She had the same angular face and elegant carriage as the Somali fashion model Iman." (317)

"He had a close-cropped beard and wide brown eyes and was the spitting image of the actor Morgan Freeman" (353)

Don't take my word, though. Feel free to read for yourself. It's actually won quite a few semi-prestigious awards. The review committee are entitled to their opinion - and, I, to mine.

On a more positive note, I'm back on track with book : time ratio. I will do my best to continue.

[Original goal list posted here.]

Completed: #1 - take French lessons

The amount of time I spend in my car pains me. It's literally almost 2 hours per weekday (10 hours per work week, 400 hours per work year, dear Lord.) In previous years, therefore, I have spent those 400 hours listening to sadbastard music on repeat. I figure this can't have been good for my psyche.

Now, I am an old person in more ways than, say, the love of making pickles and jam and hanging clothes on a laundry line. Please give me nothing for my car that does not involve a compact disc: no podcasts, no rigging my Samsung to the speakers.

Since my only language-learning/re-learning goals involved French and Mi'kmaq, I figured the former would be the more likely to find on an audio disc. Thanks to eBay, I snagged these mp3 lessons:

These audio recordings, by the late Dr. Christopher Kendris, operate on a whole language acquisition philosophy. It takes on the form of him teaching two students a basic conversational understanding of French through teaching verb tenses and sentence structure, while also providing historical context and tricks to grammar rules. It leaves space for the listener to also make attempts at sentence construction, before confirming the correct phrasing.

I have already completed the Level 1 & 2 audio course, finding it very useful, for someone who already has a basic understanding of French - though I don't know that I would otherwise find it as useful. I re-imagined myself on many a road trip to Gaspé, through small rural French towns, trying to order a Subway sandwich, and now feeling both capable of anticipating questions and providing answers in complete French sentences, as opposed to my usual combination of broken French words and pointing. I even noticed myself dreaming in bits of French, and silently understanding pieces of conversations from the immersion students.

I intend to continue on with Level 3 advanced, as it's nice to feel as though I'm doing something remotely productive with the 400 hours a year that otherwise fade into the ether.

[Original goal list posted here.]

Progress: 10/30 - #18. read 30 texts that will aid in my teaching

I've been steadily building a list of independent course texts for my grade 10 students, centered around the topic of culture. As a person who is very linear and structural in thought, I find it exceptionally difficult to mark an essay based around a text I did not even read - not to mention the lack of ability, then, to effectively answer any content-based questions. As such, I supply a steadily-growing list of books I have read.

Though the ENG2D0 course is infused with South Asian content (the course novel is Yann Martel's Life of Pi, and we watch either Jhumpa Lahiri's Namesake or Gurinder Chadha's Bend it Like Beckham for a group essay formative - comparing values in the filmmaker / author's own life with those represented in the film), I have found my own independent study list to not include quite enough South Asian literature. This, obviously, meant I needed to read more.

I picked up The Lowland at an airport in New Dehli in the summer of 2015. I had a 10-hour stopover, before boarding a flight to Toronto via Switzerland, so I figured I had some time to kill. As it turned out, I ended up using the last of my rupees to reserve a sleeping pod equipped with a shower. I napped for six hours instead, grabbing all toiletries for future use. Best $60 I ever spent. 

Anyway. The Lowland has been sitting on my shelf ever since.

I talk to my grade 10s, from day 1, about "ignorance" on its base level not actually being laced with negativity. It simply means a lack of knowing. If we intentionally ignore or reject the things we do not know, that is a different and problematic form of ignorance. Use those moments, I suggest, not as stumbling blocks but access points. I don't mean to sound patronizing, I say, but you have the entire world at your fingertips on a handy device in your pocket, backpack, desk corner, or glued to your hand. Use it for good. When I was a wee kid and we didn't know something, my mom would have to drag out dusty encyclopedias from the basement downstairs - and she would, always freely admitting when she, too, didn't know the answer.

Even with the best intentions, we can't know everything. If you come across a cultural / historical / religious term that is new to you in these short stories or ISU texts, use those devices. Regard those unknown terms not as reasons to be alienated, but as reasons to discover more.

I held up The Lowland. "Do you know about the Naxalite movement? Anyone?" No hands. "I hadn't either. I have been through 32 years of my life without knowing anything about it - and it started in the 1960s in Calcutta, it's still happening, and I've been to India. This book mentioned it, again and again, wanting me to know more than I did. Where did I look?"

"Google?"

"Yes sir."

This novel presents a variety of perspectives, hashing and rehashing these notions of right and wrong. I wondered, also, why it kept weaving the festival of Durga Puja into the narrative - until I read more to realize that, honouring the victory of the Goddess Durga over the evil buffalo demon Mahishasura, the festival itself greatly symbolizes the triumph of good over evil.

In its themes of inattentive motherhood, loss, abandonment, residual trauma, resentment, it greatly reminded me of a memoir I read in the late summer of 2015: Projection, by a former favourite professor of mine, Priscila Uppal. In its apparent emotional vacancy, the pain and resignation in wrong and hastily-chosen paths, it was reminiscent of John Williams' classic novel Stoner.

However, in its alternating viewpoints, historical content, transcendence of time and place, its ceaseless efforts to draft a rough cartography and then only fill in the small details in gradual piecework to present a full picture - well, The Lowland is something entirely its own.

And did I cry like a baby when it was over?

I cried like a baby when it was over.

[Original goal list posted here.]