Works in Translation

Awhile back, Ryan Bloom wrote an article in “The New Yorker” about what the first line in Camus’s The Stranger should be.  I found it interesting and plausible (albeit long-winded).

As my “Philosophy and Literature” class has been discussing “meaning” (and reading The Stranger), I thought back to Bloom’s article and decided to do my own take on it.  If you’re into language or the difficulties in close reading in a translation, you might be interested.

————————————————–

The first line of L’Etranger

<<Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.>>

Common translation: Mother died today.

Google Today, Mom died.

Literal: “Today, Mama died.”   OR  “Today, Mama is dead.”

One step more formal: Today, Mother died.

Matthew Ward and DLR: Today, Maman died.

  ————————————————–

« Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. J’ai reçu un télégramme de l’asile : « Mère décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingués. » Cela ne veut rien dire. C’était peut-être hier. »

 Google: “Today, Mom is dead. Or maybe yesterday, I do not know. I received a telegram from the asylum: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Distinguished feelings. ‘” It does not mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday. ”

DLR:  “Today, Mama died.  Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.  I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased.  Burial tomorrow.  Deepest condolences.’  It doesn’t matter.  Maybe it was yesterday. “

Matthew Ward: “Maman died today.  Or yesterday, maybe.  I don’t know.  I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow.  Faithfully yours.’  That doesn’t mean anything.  Maybe it was yesterday.”

Some notes from the class presentation:

Not just word placement or familiar expression:

French used to have a passé simple tense that was roughly the preterit, but it fell out of use years ago.  Now, they have only the passé composé , equivalent in form to our past perfect.

Hence, the phrase Maman est morte is “literally” translated as “Mama has died today.”  And there is no simple way to express in French “Mama died today.”  Yet, in English, “Mama died today” and “Mama has died today” are not equivalent in meaning.

And, as if that weren’t enough, French still preserves a distinction lost in English many hundred years ago: some common intransitive verbs that give rise to a state of being are still conjugated in French with a form of “to be” rather than “to have.” (An analogous form in English is still retained in certain old hymns such as “Jesus Christ is Risen Today” and in the second line of “Joy to the World”—“the Lord is come.”)

So, Maman est morte could also mean “Mama is dead.”  That meaning, with a past participle turned into an adjective denoting a state of being is quite different in meaning from either of the past tenses in English.  Yet, in French, the three possible translations are indistinguishable from one another without further words added to the sentence.  Context is not sufficient to distinguish them unequivocably.

(I then pointed out we weren’t going to get into that level of analysis of L’Etranger, but nonetheless there’s a limit to close reading in another language even for one who is bilingual.)

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“Look it up”

I follow Seth Godin’s blog, and he often has posts that apply well to education (although his audience is people trying to market a business).    I sent one of his posts–on the power of “looking it up”– to some colleagues.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2017/01/you-can-look-it-up.html

I prefaced his post with the following commentary:

If we’re in some sort of independent work or leadership position (for which we’re presumably training our students), we need to know what questions to ask and how to evaluate the responses we get.  There’s a tendency to think that whatever software *we* use (or the first response on a Google search, I guess, is the educational equivalent) is the best.

And part of being able to evaluate the answers we get, I would argue, is having enough basic knowledge at our command.  We can certainly look up a lot more than we could when I was a kid, but some things still need to be at our fingertips….

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Teaching 2015 (review)

Below is a set of notes to myself at the start of the last school year.  The start of this year seems an appropriate time to review them.

This document is an attempt to put together some things I know about student engagement, collaborative learning, and “education for the 21st century.”  Some of the observations seem to me to stem in significant part from basic human nature; others seem to me to reflect how we have taught our students to behave.

In the last part, I will note some potential problems I foresee with implementing certain aspects of such a program in St. John’s Upper School.

Observation

  •  Students tend to like problems or issues with which to grapple, and mostly they prefer the grappling to the preparation needed to grapple with them effectively.
  • For the greatest engagement, issues considered in class need to be things of interest to the students in some context.
  • Students need to feel supported in class—not necessarily comfortable, though.
  • Students need to feel comfortable to disagree with me or with other “experts” in order to facilitate the development of independent thinking.
  • For the greatest success of the greatest number, there needs to be a variety of permissible learning paths: some kids like to work together; others like to work independently; some want quiet; some want to feel free to walk about the room and argue; most want to hear what I have to say, whether from a desire for guidance or a desire to have something to challenge.
  • Students like a measurable outcome—they want to know if they “got it right.
  • Engaged students do their best work when they feel challenged but not overwhelmed.
  • Although extremely valuable, abstractions are difficult for students.  Moving between abstraction and reification—in either direction—is difficult.

Commentary and Implications of Observations

Preparing vs doing

In humanities courses, students often like arguing/discussing/debating more than they like doing the work necessary to prepare to be persuasive “arguers.”

In math courses, they’d usually rather do “find something out” problems than proofs; and in math and science they almost always want to use a theorem, property, or natural law rather than prove or derive it.

Issues of interest

In humanities courses, this term means things of interest to them.  Yet, in high school, they are rarely willing to verbalize things of too much importance to them in front of peers, probably for fear of ridicule.  Certainly, tying discussion points of literature and philosophy to the contemporary political scene is usually effective.  Tying highly emotional issues to their personal lives takes some level of trust and a supportive atmosphere and can be quite risky.

Supportive atmosphere

Teachers sometimes mistake “supportive” for “comfortable.”  Students (like all of us) perform best in an atmosphere that is supportive yet not too comfortable.  Just as some teachers won’t do new things until pushed, some students won’t try new ideas or skills unless pushed out of their comfort zones.  Once outside those zones, however, it’s important that students (again, like teachers) feel that when they stumble, they will be helped to rise.  It’s also important that they believe that failure at a task is not correlated with the judgment of “failed as a person” (or even “failed as a student”).

Students are (rightly) skeptical about an atmosphere wherein there is no judgment whatsoever.  If we seem to think “all opinions are as good as all other opinions,” students see that for the cop-out it is.  Misogynistic or racist opinions, for example, are not ones that should be treated as having as much merit as more inclusive ones.  However, discussion of such opinions can happen effectively.  We can even talk about them in some detail from the perspective of the people who hold them.  It’s important for students to realize that trying to understand something does not mean approving of it.  Neither they nor I believe that tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner

In math courses, “issues of interest” seem to be tied most commonly into “real-world problems.”  For instance, with vectors in Honors Geo/Trig, I not only have questions about sailing, but I use maps of Galveston bay, with realistic speed and winds in the questions.  Such an approach grounds the question in something at least some of the students can relate to: even if they’ve never been sailing, they’ve mostly been to Galveston.

Disagreement

While all the people in a class (students and teachers alike) are entitled to their opinions, they are not necessarily entitled to spout them without being willing to defend them intelligently (again, true for both students and teachers—“because I say so” is ultimately an appeal to coercion, and it should be used as sparingly as possible).   We say that we value critical thinking, but if we do, we have to be willing to have it turned on ourselves.  A colleague once told me that “no 16-year-old has anything to teach me about British literature.”  Even if that’s so, they had things to teach him about how to teach British literature effectively to them.

The 9th grade Geo/Trig book has a number of statements in it that have been simplified (presumably to make the ideas easier for 14-year-olds to understand) to the point wherein they are no longer actually correct.  I like taking such statements and having students critique them to determine under which circumstances they are and are not correct.  As they’ve told me, they love “showing the book is wrong.”

While I don’t deliberately make mistakes or mislead students, mistakes and miscommunications obviously happen, and they need to be made into learning opportunities when they do. Modeling how to recover from failures is a critical component of helping students learn how to develop enough self-confidence to take intelligent risks.

Different learning paths

I have always been a proponent of individualized instruction and independent learning. One thing that teaching 9th-graders this year has reinforced for me is that different people really do learn best in sometimes very different ways.  And whereas we should all be exposed to different teaching/learning styles, unless the School’s goal is enforced socialization or conformity, a classroom should as often as possible allow different learning styles to flourish.  Having a classroom in which some kids want to walk around during class, some want to argue with each other or the teacher, and others want to work quietly is a challenge.  Letting students who want quiet plug in to music is one way to help allow different environments.  The writing walls of the innovative classrooms should be another.   Letting some students read extra texts instead of being in class discussions is a possibility for those who learn better from independent reading or who have interests not shared by the rest of the class.

Measurable outcomes

Like all of us, students like to know “where they stand.” Sometimes that desire is expressed in wanting to know their grade at any given moment (regardless of how incomplete-and thus potentially misleading—it may be).  More realistically, they want to know how their work will be graded, but they don’t understand the assessment process. There are a number of consequences of such lack of understanding.  One is that they tend to think grades in math and science courses are more “objective” than grades in humanities courses.  They also tend to like “multiple choice tests” since those appeal for two reasons: they seem more objective and thus fairer; and in many cases (especially when such tests are ill designed), they either lead the students to the desired answer or allow students to “guess and check.”

Challenge

There are two aspects to this point, maybe more.

The first is the nature of the challenge: sometimes the challenge is simply to beat someone else.  In sports contests or courses or competitions in the arts, for some people the goal is to win.  Sports teams want to win SPC; a student wants to get the highest grade in a class, a violinist wants to be concertmaster.  Lesser goals are accepted as stopgaps or when reality steps in too strongly: maybe we can’t win SPC, but we can at least beat Episcopal; maybe I can’t be the best in the class, but I can at least get an A (or beat my friend/arch-rival); I can at least make All-State Orchestra even if I’m not First Chair.

Other times, the challenge is to do something worthwhile or interesting: instead of simply doing twenty math problems faster than anyone else or getting more of them right, I can come up with a computer  program that graphically shows how the derivative of a function is the limit of the slopes of the secant lines at a point.  Instead of writing another essay on color symbolism in The Red Badge of Courage, I can write an interior monolog for the protagonist to be interpolated at some point in the text.

  Instead of finding the pH of some solution my chemistry teacher gives me, I can get water samples from the effluent of an oil refinery and see if they are more acidic than those of the rest of the bay into which they are dumped.

Abstractions

Abstractions are powerful concepts—it’s the ability to abstract from specific individual experiences that allows us to formulate natural laws/scientific principles, mathematical theorems, philosophical ideas, and ethical principles (among other things).  But producing neat results from a messy world is unsettling and potentially harmful if we oversimplify in an inappropriate way.

Caveats and Challenges

Issues of interest

I mentioned under the humanities part how one has to deal with potentially embarrassing or explosive issues of race, sexuality, and power.  In the humanities, abstract questions are often easier to deal with than concrete ones:  “What should society do about racism?” is sometimes a much easier question to answer than “What should I do when I’ve just said something racist or tolerated racist behavior in others?”

Under the math part, I mentioned briefly “real-world problems.”  Yet, at some level, which I am better at addressing in math than humanities (perhaps because we differentiate math instruction here both earlier and more successfully than English instruction), I think that abstract questions become important.  It’s generally considered, by mathematicians anyway, that the concept of proof is critical to their profession.  And while we don’t produce too many people who will become math majors, let alone math professors, the concept of proof vs plausibility seems pretty important to me for an educated citizen to have.  Presumably, that’s the reason we teach it in geometry.  So, advanced math courses need to have an element of abstraction that, perhaps, other math courses do not.  These abstract components are not necessarily going to tie in easily to “real-world situations.”

Disagreement

Many students, especially younger ones, want certainty.  And most of their training before me has taught them implicitly if not explicitly that “the teacher is always right.”  And if not actually right, then right in the context of school or the classroom.  Our entire school is set up to reinforce this point, and the more we do so, the more we raise children to distinguish between school and life (where no-one is “always right”) or to see what goes on in class, especially when it’s presented as clear or already pre-determined—the way much math is taught), as divorced from the messiness that is life.

Measurable outcomes

As long as the school tolerates, and by some of its policies (such as quick turnaround on course grades at the end of the year) even encourages, such behavior, it’s unlikely that there will be a sustained movement towards having students produce more original work.

Many teachers use rubrics either to provide an illusion of objectivity or in the belief that by doing so they are actually being objective.  A joint grading exercise in 9th English several years ago, however, showed that different teachers armed with a commonly agreed-to rubric gave fairly different grades in the hands of different teachers to the same student papers. The phrase “a strong thesis” or “an arguable thesis,” whether in history or English, is simply interpreted differently by different teachers and, in fact, means (and should mean) different things at different grade levels.  Do we really, for instance, want to judge 9th graders by the standards applied to 12th graders?  Or vice versa?

But an overly specific rubric has problems of a different sort (though at least these issues are more obvious).  If a student needs citations to support assertions in a paper (say), is there any distinction in the quality of the sources?  Is a quote (as it is in debate) from a racist web site equally valid as one from a peer-edited article in a book from a University Press?  If a student needs 8 sources for an A and only has 7, what lesson is the student being taught?  I can tell you both from my own experience and listening to students:  a) quantity is more important than quality, and b) the paper is being assessed mechanically rather than thoughtfully.

Challenge

As a rule, students here may enjoy, but have little respect for, those teachers who do not challenge them intellectually.  

The other end of that spectrum is that few students have the self-discipline and fortitude (I suppose one could say “masochism” if one took that attitude) to continue to work at challenges that they believe (whether erroneously or not) to be ones they cannot surmount.  As a number of people have said, challenges need to be out of the immediate grasp of the student yet in a region that the student believes is ultimately achievable.  That range, in my experience, is elastic.   Students will often try something harder for supportive teachers, whose judgment about the achievability of the outcome is trusted.  And, of course, different students have different sizes of the “not immediately but ultimately achievable” area.

Abstraction

People often have strong opinions about what someone in a specific situation should do.  Generalizing those opinions into a self-consistent world view is often difficult.  Likewise, people who have fairly axiomatic systems of judgment often have trouble applying their principles in more complex situations.  As one of my students put it, “Society pretty much agrees that killing any morally and functionally competent member of society is wrong.  Where we disagree is over whom to include in that category.”

In a math example, students almost always (though it’s particularly obvious at the younger level) prefer to work on questions involving numbers rather than symbols.  As an example, the question “Show that the lines y = x and y = -x  are perpendicular” is almost always preferred by the majority of students to the question “Show that the line between the origin and (a,b) is perpendicular to the one between the origin and (-a,b) ” because the former is less abstract.

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Thinking mathematically

In an email exchange involving several former students (now at college) and a colleague, I said,

This discussion reminds me that one of the great challenges as a math teacher is to combine the necessary (at least in our current curriculum) skill-set with a wide-ranging mathematical curiosity and a systematic approach to helping people discover what it means to think “mathematically.”

A recent article from eSchool News caused me to think about that comment: what do  we teach in math classes.  And why?

I wonder how many mathematics teachers realize that one of the purposes of algebra is to enable people to take an arithmetic observation and answer more general questions about it.  Or, to use the eSchool News writer’s example:

We all learn early in life that two plus one equals three and that two times three equals six–that’s simple arithmetic. A natural follow-up question would be whether there are any numbers other than two that, if you multiply them by the number that is one greater, gives a result of six.

It’s algebra that lets you answer the latter question.  But it’s very rarely taught that way…

 

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Cum grano salis

One of the things my Latin II class provided was a list of pithy sayings we had to memorize.  Some I’d never heard of at the tender age of 13, but I still remember a few, and one of them is “cum grano salis”–take things “with a grain of salt.”  I am reminded of the continuing validity of this advice almost every time I read a post about education, especially education and things digital.  This morning I read the following statement in a post from eSchool News:

Students who resist typical writing instruction with pencil and paper may blossom as authors when given the opportunity to compose electronically on computers and tablets. Some that struggle with the fine motor skills necessary for producing legible print are liberated by the ability to type. Although pressing letters on a flat screen without being able to feel them may be awkward for an adult accustomed to typing on a keyboard, students that learn to type on these devices when they’re young are likely to be as skilled on them as they are on a traditional keyboard

Maybe.  And certainly St. John’s is not usually the target audience of most statements about educational posts.  But this spring, for the first time, I had a senior who wrote many of his in-class essays on his phone, even though laptops were available in the room.  He could type fast (for using a phone), I grant–but his essays were very short and hence more brainstorming sessions, perhaps more of the “here are some ideas on this topic,” than they were persuasive arguments.  His technical skill on the tiny phone keyboard was, perhaps, noteworthy.  His essays were not.

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Note to a headmaster

My headmaster sent me a link to an NPR story that he thought I’d enjoy.  I sent the following response…

This reminds me of a story I may have told you before: one reason I enjoy teaching calculus and post-calculus courses is that math at Rice made little sense to me when I took it there because of the “math-major way” in which it was taught.  I ended up leaving my required math courses feeling as though I simply couldn’t understand higher math.

A number of years later, I decided I really wanted to learn quantum mechanics, which depends on math I “couldn’t understand.”  So, I spent a fair amount of time learning the math I needed by taking time, getting multiple perspectives, and working through stuff.  My motivation was not that it was a course, but that it was a means to something I really wanted to learn.

A by-product was that I learned I actually *could* do higher math albeit not when taught as Rice used to teach it to math majors.  So, one of my goals in math teaching (well, teaching in general I guess) is to present things from multiple perspectives, allow more time for students to work through things, and try to find interesting questions/problems in a variety of areas.  I also tell my advanced classes this story; and every year, several people come up to me to say that it really helped them to know that “this material was hard for you the first time, too!”

There are certainly some things a person who is brilliant in his college major can do well.  But there are other aspects of teaching wherein it helps not to have had success come effortlessly.

I may also have told you that I think part of my success as a teacher comes from not really having taught in my major field.  Hence, in every subject I taught, there was always a lot to learn.  I think experiencing that learning makes me more aware of how a student who hasn’t already majored in a subject in college might feel when encountering the ideas.

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“Close reading” aka “attention to detail”

A number of years ago, a colleague of mine from KIPP came to visit one of my classes (senior English) and was amazed that we spent an entire class period on one paragraph (I think it was a Borges story from Labyrinths that was incredibly rich in allusions).

I couldn’t help but think of him today in senior English when we spent nearly the entire class on a few pages from a Socratic dialog (the Meno for anyone interested) because a number of students had questions/comments from the 1.19.16 class that also arise in that dialog:

  • “I am still a little confused with the Socratic method”
  • “Is it possible to learn to ask the right questions without truly knowing a subject well?”
  • “How do I know how and what to question?”
  • “Explain more about Socratic questioning.”

A significant portion of the class was spent on rhetorical analysis: how does Socrates lead Meno to espouse the positions that he [Socrates] wants him to?  In one case, we drilled down to a sentence in which there was an apparently parallel structure in each clause of the compound sentence, but in one clause the verb was “think” and in the other one it was “know.”  Close reading, indeed.

We also talked about false dichotomies, pointing out the unstated implications of your opponent’s point, as well as the dangers in the use of rhetorical questions.

 

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“The right questions”

Zizek (a contemporary philosopher in Slovenia) has an interesting video clip (quite short) that you can find here on the importance of asking good questions.  While I think a better approach would be to talk about asking “good questions” as opposed to “the right questions,” nonetheless, he makes two good points.

The immediate one is that asking questions is an important skill, not thought of as frequently or valued as much as answering questions.  Later in the video, he emphasizes the importance of the question that’s asked.  His example is thought-provoking.  He says that many people want to address the problems of racism, sexism, and other -isms in society.  Yet, the prescribed solution is usually tolerance.  He then says we should read Martin Luther King’s speeches and look for the word “tolerance.’  As Zizek says, that’s NOT what King preached.

As I told my class today, I suspect they don’t want merely to be tolerated by those around them.  They probably want to be valued and appreciated…

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“Guides on the side” still need to use teachable moments

There’s a slogan that purports to capture the essence of student-centric learning: teachers should be a “guide on the side” rather than the “sage on the stage.”

But that shouldn’t mean they’re not teaching: they still need to teach, but what they need to teach has shifted somewhat.  Instead of teaching “things,” they need to teach how to learn well–assuming we teachers believe there are any shortcuts to trial and error, which process students already know by the time they get to high school.

But a second response to the slogan comes to mind as a result of an interaction a few minutes ago.  I stopped by a class, and the teacher had a question on the projector quoting Miss Bingley (from Pride and Prejudice) as talking about Elizabeth’s “abominable independence.”  The teacher asked the kids to discuss and then someone to answer.  I pointed out that that same sort of attitude was what the Nazis had had toward women: “Church, kitchen, and children” were their only appropriate spheres.  Everyone sort of looked at me stunned.  On my way back past the classroom again a few minutes later, while the kids were busy discussing another prompt, I stopped in again and asked the teacher if she’d pointed out to the class the irony that it was a *woman* who had so bought into the male power structure that she was putting down a fellow woman.  I was told that it was the kids’ discussion.

I agree that it’s important for the kids to come to some of their own answers, but when a teacher has something important to point out that applies to the kids’ own lives about the literature, I don’t think she should just avoid saying anything because “it’s the kids’ discussion.”

Teachers do have insight and guidance to offer.  There should be a balance, and I don’t think, for instance, that lectures do much other than convey information efficiently.  But if we’re dethroning “the sage on the stage,” we need to remember that the “guide on the side” still needs to give periodic advice and context about the path the kids choose as well as the implications of what they choose/say/discuss.

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Questions from 1.19.16 English class

And here are the students’ questions the next day.  I have printed a handout of these and will use them as a self-referential teaching tool since a number of the questions have to do with asking and evaluating questions.

  What question(s) do you have left over from yesterday’s discussion?
1 What is the merit to philosophical reading as compared to the “average” reading? What types of people read philosophically and why?
2 Sort of based on our discussion yesterday: given that education gives us the means to understand what questions to ask, why does that matter at all? If the axiom “Ignorance is bliss” is true, what’s the point of learning at all, especially if what we learn about is frightening, humbling, or shame-inducing?
3 I am still curious as to why we feel that Calvino chooses to alienate his readers by forcing the reader to take a male pose in reading. Why does he want this?
4 How do I know if I am deconstructing a question correctly? When Dr. Raulston asked what question we should ask when deconstructing question X, we came up with multiple answers, but one was better than the others. How do we know which one to ask?
5 Explain more about Socratic questioning and how Calvino wants the reader to question his writing style.
6 I am still a little confused with the Socratic method. I understand it but I want to see it applied more as an example.
7 How do you know you’re asking the right questions? I think that that is a personal, case-by-case thing. However, I’m not sure if part of philosophy is that everyone should ask several “correct” questions
8 I was wondering that with these new understandings of ideas such as engagement, what we need to do with them while reading. We can certainly be conscious of when we are engaged, but with that should we trying to understand why. In the Calvino novel, is that what Calvino is pushing for by abruptly cutting off engaging narratives? Would that make us less engaged? Is the experienced reader just subconsciously able to not such things, and it does not affect him or her at all? because for me i feel it would take away from my reading experience and as to why I enjoy reading.
9 I still feel that I’m missing something very important about Calvino’s work. Surely there must be meaning below the things he beats us over the head with.
10 I think what we discussed in class yesterday was something we had already covered last semester in Words Words Words.
11 Is there a way (other than everyday experience) to build on this kind of intuitive wisdom? Do some fields allow the mind to adopt new patterns of thinking more readily than other fields, or does the growth of wisdom depend on learning in multiple fields and connecting the knowledge?
12 does the “you”-character present only when Calvino is actively making assumptions about the reader? How does it present otherwise (if it does)?
13 Is it possible for one to learn to ask the right questions (using web-search) without truly knowing a subject well?
14 At what point does the analysis get to be too much? Is there a point (or does it depend/not matter?)
15 How do I as a reader know how and what to question? The idea of questioning sounds nice, but it doesn’t actually move me any closer to understanding how to do it, and how to discover that knowledge myself. I struggle with that.
16

 

 

17

Why do you give virtue/moral lessons? Have you seen your students grow more humble over the semester that they’ve had you? This is not supposed to be accusatory; I’m honestly just curious.

What audiences are Calvino reaching and engaging? Dr. Bellows mentioned that she gets sucked into the stories, but I was silently thinking… hm no I get distracted and overwhelmed. Is Calvino addressing audiences as narrow as people who have doctorates in English and also happen to be unnaturally wise/knowledgable/smart?

 

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