Showing posts with label Kurt Vonnegut. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kurt Vonnegut. Show all posts
Sunday, October 28, 2012
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Monday, December 12, 2011
Sunday, December 4, 2011
The CQ Researcher Online
The CQ Researcher Online
Should schools use as much digital technology as they can afford?
"No"
Should schools use as much digital technology as they can afford?
"No"
PAUL THOMAS
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION,
FURMAN UNIVERSITY
WRITTEN FOR CQ RESEARCHER, NOVEMBER 2011
Technology represents the essence of American consumerism by feeding our popular clamor for acquiring the current hot thing. Yet the ever-increasing significance of technology in our daily lives and its contribution to powerful advances as well as a widening equity gap place education in a complex paradox.
Author Kurt Vonnegut quipped, “Novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.” As with novels, so with schools, I believe, but we must take one step beyond “whether schools should address technology” to “how.”
Two experiences from my 18 years teaching high school English inform my belief that schools should not incorporate as much digital technology as finances allow. I began teaching in the 1980s during the rise of MTV and witnessed my field make a claim that text was dead, and thus English teaching had to shift to the brave new video world-failing to anticipate instant messaging, email, texting, blogging and the text-rich social-media boom.
The intersection of technology’s unknowable future, its inflated costs, and its inevitable obsolescence must give us pause as we spend public funds. Let me suggest simply looking into the closets and storage facilities at schools across the United States, where cables, monitors and other artifacts costing millions of dollars lie useless, replaced by the next-best thing we then had to acquire. In fact, just think of one thing, the Laserdisc video player (soon to be joined by interactive “smart” whiteboards in those closets).
Chalk board, marker board, interactive board-this sequence has not insured better teaching or learning, but has guaranteed greater costs for schools and profits for manufacturers.
In Walden, Henry David Thoreau offered two warnings that should guide how we approach technology: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate,” and, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”
The foundational principles of public education for democracy and human agency must not fall prey to preparing children for the future by perpetually acquiring new technology because we can never know that future. Thus, we must not squander public funds on ever-changing technology but instead focus on the human interaction that is teaching and learning as well as the critical literacy and numeracy every child needs. We can anticipate only one fact of our futures — change.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Sunday, August 21, 2011
New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut: paperback edition
Edited by David Simmons
"Together the essays stand as an introduction to rereading Vonnegut, demonstrating that his canon may be worth reexamining. Secret lovers of Vonnegut (and sci-fi) will use this book to defend their affections for an artist whose pop fame and pop forms dismay some critics. And one can almost imagine Vonnegut's crooked smile at essays that seek to reserve a place in high-toned literary debates for his works."--Choice
"Together the essays stand as an introduction to rereading Vonnegut, demonstrating that his canon may be worth reexamining. Secret lovers of Vonnegut (and sci-fi) will use this book to defend their affections for an artist whose pop fame and pop forms dismay some critics. And one can almost imagine Vonnegut's crooked smile at essays that seek to reserve a place in high-toned literary debates for his works."--Choice
“This collection offers a timely re-engagement with one of the most enigmatic, deceptive, and misunderstood of American authors…Through a comprehensive interrogation of Vonnegut’s early and late novels, his short stories, and his relationship to predecessors such as Hemingway and his ‘post-9/11 heirs’ such as Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Ian McEwan, the contributing scholars establish beyond question the continuing relevance and necessity of reading Vonnegut.”—Will Kaufman, Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of Central Lancashire and author of The Comedian as Confidence Man
“Whether describing the uniquely warm personal relationship many literary critics shared with Vonnegut (Todd Davis), exploring the evolution of a feminist vision in his work (Susan E. Farrell), bringing fresh insights into the function of science fiction elements in his novels (Lorna Jowett), or detailing Vonnegut’s ambiguous but important relationship to other writers such as Hemingway (Lawrence Broer), these one dozen essays offer convincing arguments that Vonnegut should, and will, remain a canonical American writer—at least until we humans manage to destroy the world.”-- William Rodney Allen, author of Understanding Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut's darkly comic work became a symbol for the counterculture of a generation. From his debut novel, Player Piano (1951) through seminal 1960's novels such as Cat's Cradle (1963) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) up to the recent success of A Man Without A Country (2005), Vonnegut's writing has remained commercially popular, offering a satirical yet optimistic outlook on modern life. Though many fellow writers admired Vonnegut-Gore Vidal famously suggesting that "Kurt was never dull" -the academic establishment has tended to retain a degree of scepticism concerning the validity of his work. This dynamic collection aims to re-evaluate Vonnegut's position as an integral part of the American post-war canon of literature.
978-0-230-12097-6 || 250 Pages || $28.00 PB || September 2011
This email was sent by David Simmons on behalf of Macmillan
175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010 USA
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“Whether describing the uniquely warm personal relationship many literary critics shared with Vonnegut (Todd Davis), exploring the evolution of a feminist vision in his work (Susan E. Farrell), bringing fresh insights into the function of science fiction elements in his novels (Lorna Jowett), or detailing Vonnegut’s ambiguous but important relationship to other writers such as Hemingway (Lawrence Broer), these one dozen essays offer convincing arguments that Vonnegut should, and will, remain a canonical American writer—at least until we humans manage to destroy the world.”-- William Rodney Allen, author of Understanding Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut's darkly comic work became a symbol for the counterculture of a generation. From his debut novel, Player Piano (1951) through seminal 1960's novels such as Cat's Cradle (1963) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) up to the recent success of A Man Without A Country (2005), Vonnegut's writing has remained commercially popular, offering a satirical yet optimistic outlook on modern life. Though many fellow writers admired Vonnegut-Gore Vidal famously suggesting that "Kurt was never dull" -the academic establishment has tended to retain a degree of scepticism concerning the validity of his work. This dynamic collection aims to re-evaluate Vonnegut's position as an integral part of the American post-war canon of literature.
978-0-230-12097-6 || 250 Pages || $28.00 PB || September 2011
This email was sent by David Simmons on behalf of Macmillan
175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010 USA
We respect your right to privacy - view our policy<http://us.macmillan.com/splash/policy.html>
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
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