Get Glogging

Here is a sample assignment for how glogging might be used to learn about literature, specifically about Nella Larson's Quicksand:

Some big questions to consider about Helga's experience of the educational system at "Naxos" include:

What is meant by educational "uplift"? What about Helga and about the other students and teachers gets cut out by the school in Naxos? Why is James able to get "naturalized" (7) to Naxos but Helga cannot? Who are they uplifting at the school? What are they uplifting them to? Why does Helga feel she must leave? How would Helga prefer the school to be? How would she like to relate to her students and colleagues? Why can't she?

To develop your answers to these questions, I'd like you to return to the opening chapters of Quicksand. Find a metaphor that Helga uses to describe the school. How does this metaphor make her frustrations with the school clear?

I would like you to create your own glog about this metaphor, that helps explain your answers to the big questions above.

For an example of how you might work on this, please take a look at my glog about W.E.B. Du Bois and education. As you will see, I've taken a quote from one of his essays and added an image and some of my thoughts about his metaphor of a "lever" to describe education. Also on the glog is a photo of Booker T. Washington, whose approach to education Du Bois criticized. With the photo, I've included some text about one thing I think the photo shows. I've also included a link to a blog post by a modern student and my brief explanation for how it relates to Quicksand. Finally, I've linked this glog to another glog with several quotes from Du Bois about education. Please click through to that glog and select a quote you think compares or contrasts with Helga's experience at Naxos.

For your own glog, you may use any of the kinds of approaches I have mentioned (finding an illustration, analyzing a photo, comparing it to another article) to talk about the metaphor you find in Quicksand. I will expect you to include:

1)At least one quote from Quicksand that includes a metaphor about how Helga understands the school
2)Your analysis about how the metaphor you find helps answer the big questions above
3)A quote from Du Bois that you want to relate to Helga's experience
4)Your analysis or questions about how this quote compares, contrasts, or relates to Helga's experience
5) An image you want to relate to Naxos or Quicksand
6) Your thoughts about that image's importance

It's a Glog

A glog, apparently, is a multimedia, web-linked kind of fancy poster. Below is my attempt at one, meant to relate to Nella Larson's Quicksand as a jumping off point for thinking about or researching the cultural conversations, practices, and controversies related to the idea of education as a means to cultural/racial uplift (the Naxos section of Larson's novel).

What I like about Glogging:

1. It's creative (in both senses: artistic/expressive and productive). Even though it is digital, you produce something concrete (in a sense), which is share-able and which allows a kind of pride of accomplishment in the creation.
2. It's interactive, which invites you to think about your audience (how will you design your glog so that the links, images, sounds, and video are interesting, useful, informative, etc. to your audience?)
3. It's curatorial, which offers a sense of the active construction of knowledge and history, as well as a sense of changing meaning by changing comparisons or contrasts (i.e. a glog on Du Bois has a different meaning than a glog on Du Bois and Garvey).
4. It's research- and discovery-oriented. This offers the chance to construct knowledge and make (sometimes surprising) connections yourself. Discovering things can be fun, too, which has to be good for the classroom, right? I'll admit I was absurdly pleased to realize the reggae song I'd chosen to go with my Garvey slideshow (made with animoto) actually used the words "you lift me up from quicksand."

Questions about Glogging that I'm still thinking about:

1. Can you assess glogs? Based on what criteria?
2. Are they best used for introductions to material, concepts, etc.? Or how might they be used for intermediate explorations? Final projects?
3. How do you design glog assignments so that they are more bacon than sizzle? Like the Word Clouds I posted about earlier, making a glog could easily become a hands-on/minds-off activity (especially if you just post links to lengthy material that you haven't read or don't understand yet).

Whitman Sells Pants

One of Levi's new ads features the voice of Walt Whitman reading from his poem "America" (at least, the voice recorded on the wax cylinder is thought to be Walt's). I was stunned when I saw (and heard) this ad. Although I'm not too keen on peddling jeans, I think you should watch it. (And this one with lines from "Pioneers, O, Pioneers" if you're curious) 


I'm conflicted. If this mini-movie didn't have a Levi's label slapped on the back of it, I would think this was a beautiful translation (illustration? re-imagination?) of Walt's poem - a heart-stirring, patriotic vision of America as resilient, and equal, in the face of hardship and struggle. I'm impressed at how current they've made the poem feel - I like the choice of the rustic, scratched font that emphasizes Walt's words as he says them and echoes the scratched quality of the audio. In fact, I love how the terrible audio quality comes across as modern, electric, and almost rustic-apocalyptic, instead of old-fashioned or unintentional. It sounds quite a bit like a train, rolling onward...


And yet, Walt's voice is resurrected here to sell jeans? to sell an ideology of save-America-by-shopping? my heart aches a bit at this. 


Seth Stevenson has some interesting things to say about it on Slate... 


What do you think?? 

Wordle me this

After reading this post on Blogging About the Web 2.0 Connected Classroom, which listed a lot of enthusiastic ideas for using word clouds (which you can generate at wordle.net, like the ones I made below, and at other places, I'm sure), I started to wonder about what I could do with them.

Here's my blog as a word cloud (minus "Whitman" and "Egyptian" and the most common English words):

I'm curious to see what my blog will look like as a word cloud in a few months, as I write more, and on different topics. Will "museum" grow even though "hieroglyphics" will undoubtedly shrink?

For a different look, here's the 1855 "Song of Myself" in a word cloud (again, without the most common English words. if you leave those in, not surprisingly, the cloud is mostly one big "I").
Could we use a word cloud like this in a productive way in the classroom? I enjoyed making these two word clouds, but I think this is a tool which is easy to accidentally turn into a hands-on minds-off activity. How do we use the word cloud thoughtfully?

From the post I read (see above), I especially liked one teacher's idea of using a word cloud to start an analysis of her school's mission statement and website. For the literature classroom, one place to start could be to take one surprisingly frequent word (perhaps "night" in "Song of Myself"), and explore what re-considerations it might encourage you to make about the poem. On the flipside, you could also defend a frequent word, explaining why it is essential to your understanding of the poem. What else might be productive?

Translating Whitman into the Classroom

First, returning to Whitman and the "uniform hieroglyphic" -

In "A Backward Glance O'er Traveled Roads" (available in Prose Works 1892: The Collected Works of Walt Whitman, Vol. II), Whitman compares his years of work on Leaves of Grass to the work of Jean-Francois Champollion, the "father of Egyptology," who is most famous for  beginning the unlocking of Egyptian hieroglyphs using the Rosetta Stone. Studying the Rosetta Stone, Champollion recognized that some hieroglyphs are alphabetic, some are syllabic, and others are determinative (representing an entire idea). He began to record and publish translations in the early 1820s, but his Egyptian grammar and dictionary were not published until after his death. On his death bed, Champollion is said to have given the corrected proofs of the grammar to the printer, saying, "Be careful of this. It is my calling card to posterity." It is this story that Whitman references in "A Backward Glance" - he writes that he looks upon Leaves of Grass as his "definitive carte visite to the coming generations of the New World" (Prose Works 1892, 712-13).

The Rosetta Stone itself is a massive stone slab (3 feet tall x 2.4 feet wide x 1 foot deep), with inscriptions of the same text (a decree) written in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphics, demotic Egyptian (ancient everyday Egyptian), and Greek. The opportunity to compare these three scripts proved to be the key to translating ancient hieroglyphics. These close-ups (thanks, JonesBlog!) of the Rosetta Stone show demotic Egyptian on the left, classical Greek in the middle, and hieroglyphics on the right:

So, the classroom assignments I'm considering for "Song of Myself" and the universal hieroglyphic are:


1) free write (5 min.) on connection(s) you might see between Whitman the poet and Champollion the translator/historian/explorer/surveyor and/or what you think might interest Whitman above the carved/drawn symbols of hieroglyphics


2) then find at least 5 instances in the poem where you think Whitman is touching on issues/ideas of translation. Include these in a blog post with your thoughts or answers to the questions below. You can either incorporate the quotes/instances into your writing, or post them as a kind of found poem. You will also need to include in your post a (brief) explanation of the reading strategy (or strategies) you've used to think about or answer these questions.
What is Whitman translating/interpreting/reading? In other words, what are his "texts"? How are his "texts" like hieroglyphics? How does he imagine himself (or poets) to be like Champollion, the historian/explorer/surveyer/translator? Who is he translating for? What role does Whitman imagine for readers? 


3) Then, in class we'll discuss the students' ideas about "Song of Myself" and translation, moving toward a discussion of the imagined reader's role in the poem, and questions like these:
What strategies does Whitman use to encourage this role, or recruit his readers? What is the relationship between poet and reader? Reader and "text"? How do we read poetry? What does Whitman think (in "Song of Myself")  that poetry can do? What might the heroic quest (for knowledge? for self? for truth?) have to do with writing/reading/poetry?


4) We'll read and discuss the Norton Anthology of Poetry's "translation" or curation of "Song of Myself" (which uses the 1881 version and includes section 1 (I celebrate myself...), section 6 (the grass), section 11 (28 bathers), section 24 (through me many voices...), and section 52 (barbaric yawp and bootsoles)). We will focus on questions of curation, of what this version emphasizes, and in essence, argues about "Song of Myself."


5) Students will be assigned to curate their own version of "Song of Myself" and post it to their blog. They will be asked write an explanation of the choices they made and the effects they hoped to achieve with those choices (a more formal written piece that will be turned in to me). Finally, they will be asked to read and comment on at least 2 of their classmates' curations.

a uniform hieroglyphic

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;

How could I answer the child?....I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,

Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark,           and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child....the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic

(Leaves of Grass, 1855, pg. 13)

Another intriguing piece of historical context to consider with "Song of Myself" is this image of the "hieroglyphic," or more broadly, Egyptian imagery. It turns out that in the same year Whitman published the first edition of leaves of grass (1855), he also published "One of the Lessons Bordering Broadway: The Egyptian Museum," in Life Illustrated. In this article, he describes his own interest in all things Egyptian:


"The great 'Egyptian Collection' was well up in Broadway, and I got quite acquainted with Dr. Abbott, the proprietor—paid many visits there, and had long talks with him, in connection with my readings of many books and reports on Egypt—its antiquities, history, and how things and the scenes really look, and what the old relics stand for, as near we can now get. . . . As said, I went to the Egyptian Museum many, many times; sometimes had it all to myself—delved at the formidable catalogue—and on several occasions had the invaluable personal talk, correction, illustration and guidance of Dr. A. himself" (Walt Whitman, New York Dissected: A Sheaf of Recently Discovered Newspaper Articles by the Author of Leaves of Grass, (New York: Rufus Rockwell Wilson, 1936), 28.)



For more on this, take a look at New York Dissected (1936), which not only features the Life Illustrated article, but also other articles Whitman published on architecture, opera, and slavery. You could also take a look at Stephen Tapscott's article, "Whitman's Egypt in 'Song of Myself,'" which makes a case for reading the poem in terms of Egyptian imagery and mythology. 


What I think I'm most interested in is the specific image of the hieroglyph and how I might use that in a consideration of poem's focus on translation/reading and its recruitment of the reader. Most likely, there'll be more on this shortly...

(This 1853 poster advertisement for the museum comes to you courtesy of The Brooklyn Museum)

Party like it's 1855?

Celebrations might be another "outside the poem" topic which we could pursue with "Song of Myself." It looks like the "celebration" in the opening line of the poem is the only time Whitman actually uses that word, but he also includes a catalog of contemporary types of celebrations (pg. 36 of the 1855 edition):

Upon the race-course, or enjoying pic-nics or jigs or a good game of base-ball,

At he-festivals with blackguard jibes and ironical license and bull-dances and           drinking and laughter,

At the cider-mill, tasting the sweet of the brown squash....sucking the juice           through a straw,

At apple-pealings, wanting kisses for all the red fruit I find,

At musters and beach-parties and friendly bees and huskings and house-raisings;

Could research into the cultural context of celebrations help us better understand what he means by celebrating himself? What does Whitman see in American celebrations?