Tools and Literacy

I.
The picture that popped up in my head when I set eyes on the notion of pivot developed by Vygotsky was the one of adults learning to function socially somehow at the expense of creativity. As noted by Dr. Bomer, children tended to be creative and as such pivot meanings to tools in a number of different ways depending on their prior contacts with the tools. And the teachers usually would go out of their way to externalize their mental processes into tools and in turn to persuade children to assign meanings similar to theirs (Bomer, 2003). And, in all likelihood, the purpose is to put students in a better position to participate in the culture/society collectively constructed to help every member in it to harbor standardized meanings of accessible tools/signs. Well, I do appreciate these standardized ways of pivoting meanings to the tools/signs we share because, after all, it is these standardized meanings that render the social functioning possible and keep the world spinning. In fact, I could barely imagine surviving in a world where everyone looks at the traffic signs in different ways, e.g. looking at the “No U-Turn” sign below as meaning “Must U-Turn.”







* This sign comes from the website at http://www.street-signs-usa.com/8/cat8.htm

However, these standardized meanings somehow prevent us as social beings from embracing different interpretations towards tools in the manner we find fit. In other words, when we mature into adulthood and are conditioned to see tools/signs in certain ways, we stop thinking and probing about other possibilities of appropriating these tools/signs, something that we are passionately enthusiastic about as we are kids. This reminds me of the drawing I saw from Le Petit Prince, a drawing that grown-ups interpreted as a hat (picture 1) while it was intended by the author to portray a boa constrictor digesting an elephant (picture 2). To be socially functioning entities, I guess losing track of creativity may be the price we grown-ups need to pay.



[Picture 1]


[Picture 2]



* These drawings come from the website at http://www.fairydream.net/html/littleprince/

II.
As revealed by Dr. Bomer (2003), children learned to manipulate the tools in ways that progressively approximated those intended by the teacher. However, some pivot problems came to present themselves in this process, viz., robust materiality, unintended affordances, and surpluses of meaning. As a teacher, I tried to bring back to mind if any of these had ever been observed in my students (college ones). And I noticed that while robust materiality and surpluses were almost absent, my adult learners were not so different from the children in terms of unintended affordances. In other words, my students would also use the tools in the way differing from what I intended for them to be used. For example, when put into groups to work on certain tasks, say, analyzing an essay for problematic statements, there were always students making the best use of this time by chatting with their friends (the tools here were the psychological tools of speaking and writing). This may well be taken as the support for what Dr. Bomer in his article referred to as transgressive uses of the tools. That is, students came into the classroom equipped with an idea about how to use the tool that unfortunately differs from what the teacher had in mind. In my classroom, students’ idea about how to use the time spent with their classmates was shooting the breeze (unintended use of the tools) whereas I would like to see the time invested on the discussion of the tasks at hand. In short, college students of mine seemed to appropriate tools in unintended ways as much as children did.

Yet, I think there still exists some differences between children and adult learners with respect to unintended affordances, the major one consisting in the fact that adults have relatively more control over whether to use the tools in the undesirable way in the classrooms. That is, adults might be more aware of their inappropriate use of the tools but consciously choose to do so whereas the children might simply misuse the tools without knowledge of their being appropriating the tools in an unwanted manner. For instance, my college students chatted with one another, clearly knowing that they were not following what was required of them while children might use spoken language to plan as opposed to communicate because this was how they came to develop this skill.

Reflection on Olson Ch 6-12

As Olson (1994) noted, interpreting the oral or written utterances both involves the management of 3 basic linguistic structures, that is, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. While syntax specifies how words relate to one another, semantics touches on how subjects and referents are co-indexed and pragmatics centers on how the speaker or writer intends the discourse to be taken. And as he went on and pointed out, to tackle rhetorical forms (genres) such as stories, letters, poems, sermons, readers/hearers need to be aware of the concept of the form as well as “to understand something of the mind of the writer and of the writer’s assumptions about the mind of the reader.” (p. 135) An example popped up in my head when I set my eyes on this part, that is, my experience of interpreting the Sonnet, Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day? , by William Shakespeare, which goes as follows.

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft' is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

As I perused this sonnet, I felt like there were 2 conflicting interpretations inside my head fighting, one with a harsh and unbearable woman while the other a mesmerizing and irresistable girl. I got the first idea from the very first sentence where Shakespeare compared the girl to a summer’s day which in my country is usually characterized by unbearable heat and non-stop sweating. As such, I took it to mean the woman might be an annoying and unbearable one. Yet, as I kept on reading, the girl seemed to turn into this mesmerizing and irresistible one, which totally contradicted the picture of the girl I painted at the very beginning. Therefore, I came to the weird conclusion that Englishmen back then might have a soft spot for harsh and unbearable women. Shortly after, my teacher portrayed the preciousness and mildness of the summers in England vis-à-vis the sweating and baking ones in Taiwan as we went over the sonnet. It was until then did I start to see the light and laugh away that preposterous conclusion I formulated for Englishmen. :P

In this example, I, the reader, was fully aware of the genre of poems and thus perused each sentence and each word with care in an effort to recover the picture embedded in the sonnet. However, due to the cultural/geographical differences, I ran into difficulties while attempting to understand the mind of the writer and his assumptions about the mind of his readers. That is, I could not crack the code as to why he referred to a beautiful girl as some kind of annoying weather (the summer in Taiwan) and how he intended this piece of message to be taken. From this example, we might say that the cultural/geographical difference might also function to complicate the interpretive process of written and oral discourse.

Reflection on Olson Ch 1-5 (2)

As noted by Olson (1994), Vygotsky and Luria (1976) conducted a series of psychological studies in attempts to bring to light the strategies 3 groups of participants with varying literacy skills employed to deal with formal reasoning tasks (syllogisms). And they revealed that non-literate participants tended to respond to these tasks either by not drawing any inference when they knew nothing about the facts or by drawing inference based on what they knew about the fact, not the premises. On grounds of these findings, they arrived at the conclusion that literacy and urbanization did contribute to individuals’ formal reasoning skills. When I set my eyes on this part, the picture conjured up in my head was my niece bombarding me with questions in a conversation we had when she was 5. The conversation centered around the reason why I served in the army and went like:

Ting: Uncle, why are you not home on weekdays?
Danny: Because I serve in the army.
Ting: Why did you need to serve in the army?
Danny: Because every boy over 18 years old needs to do so.
Ting: Then, why doesn't A-hua (a guy living across from my house) need to serve in the army?
Danny: Really?
Ting: Yes. He is a boy. He told me he is 20. But he is home everyday. Why?
Danny: I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him yourself?

At the time the conversation occurred, my niece had not received any formal education; that is, she was illiterate. However, as can be seen above, she somehow possessed the reasoning skills necessary to make the plausible inferences (syllogism). The reasoning embedded in the conversation goes as follows.

All guys over 18 need to enlist in the army.
A-hua is a boy and he is 20.
A-hua should serve in the army.

Drawing on the fact that my illiterate niece demonstrated some reasoning skills normally seen only in literates, I could not help but wonder whether the reasoning skills, among others, are innate skills that we bring with us at birth. The reason why they seem to be missing from some people might be they are fast asleep in them, waiting to be awaken. Viewed in this light, literate individuals learn to reason more formally and confine their inferences to stated premises because literacy “activates” the built-in reasoning skills for them. As I read further, it came as a pleasant surprise that this idea echoes Olson's (1994) proposition that literacy and urbanization might not so much develop new resources for us as bring the old resources already there to our attention.

Reflection on Olson Ch 1-5 (1)

Olson (1994), when delineating the history of thinking, brought about the idea of primitive thinking indicative of the first age or stage of mankind. He cited metonymy as one of its major features. That is, primitive thinking does not differentiate between signifiers and signified and as such embraces the belief that signifiers (representation) carry some of the properties of the signified (represented) (Levy-Bruhl, 1923). This and the concept of metonymy taking signs, symbols, or images to embody the things they are representing somehow prompt me to conjecture the possible impact of Chinese writing system on ancient Chinese people.

Chinese writing system employs characters comprising lines or points to symbolize objects/concepts, as opposed to the alphabetic one adopted by western cultures. And all the characters were coined following the principles of the 6 categories of Chinese characters. Among them, pictographs (象形字) obtained their shapes by imitating the real objects in reality. For example, the pictograph, “水”(water), imitates how the water in a river looks like (or how the ancient Chinese thought it looked like). And the character“日”(sun) imitates the real sun. The speculatory original pictures of these 2 characters go as follows.




[(Original picture of the pictograph “水” water) ]










[(Original picture of the pictograph “日”(sun) ]



As can be seen, Chinese characters carry with them the physical properties of the signified objects. Therefore, parallel to what Levy-Bruhl (1923) reported about man from Bechuanaland worried that the letter might open up and talk to him, I guess ancient Chinese people might’ve also come to look at writing as sacred and magical because the real-world objects were embodied in such a way that they seem likely to come to life and dance on the papyrus (or bamboo strips) any minute. Plus, some of the characters were among the mystic forces they entertained great fear for, such as the Sun, water, fire, and the like. As such, they might worship, honor, and respect the characters (signifiers) as they did to the forces/objects in reality (signified). In turn, I guess this might also explain why literates in ancient times were better respected and looked up to – because they mastered something astonishing in the eyes of the general public.


* The pictures came from Dancing on Paper – Characters of China at http://library.thinkquest.org/C0126668/str_all.htm

Reflections on Telling Jokes

For this homework assignment, I picked 3 jokes from a book I bought in Taiwan, remembered them by heart, and “performed” them in front of 3 Taiwanese friends and 1 American friend of mine. To quote the ideas put forth by Bauman and Briggs (1990), I somehow entextualized the jokes from the old settings where they occurred (the book) and then reconstructed them in the interactions I shared with my friends. The jokes and the reflection are delineated as follows.

Jokes

1. The Lawyer Joke
One day, Bill went into a bar and ordered a cup of beer. After a few minutes, he grumped, “Lawyers are assholes!” Upon hearing this, a guy in the bar stood up and shouted out, “Hey, I resent that.” So, Bill questioned, “Why? Are you a lawyer?” The guy then responded, “No, I’m an ASSHOLE!”

2. The Campus Joke
“If there are any idiots in the room, will they please stand up?” said the sarcastic teacher. After a long silent, one freshman stood up. “Mister, why do you consider yourself an idiot?” inquired the teacher with contempt. The student answered, “Well, actually I don’t. But I hate to see you standing there all by yourself.”

3. The Doctor Joke
A man wasn’t feeling well, so he went to his doctor for a complete check-up. The doctor came out with the results, “I’m afraid I have some very bad news. You are dying. And you don’t have much time left.” The man said, “That’s terrible! How much more time have I got?” The doctor responded, “10.” Upon hearing this, the man said, “10? 10 what? 10 years? 10 months? 10 days?” Then, the doctor continued, “9…”

Lawyer Joke


*All of these jokes were adapted from English Jokes (笑呵呵學英文) by Jia-Shin Bao (鮑佳欣).


Reflection on Telling Jokes

As noted by Bauman and Briggs (1990), “a shift of genre evokes contrastive communicative functions, participation structures, and modes of interpretation.” (p. 64) Therefore, the genre of joke-telling, spanning a relatively sustained period of time during which the attention is focused on the joke tellers and the message-exchanging fall practically unidirectional, entail strategies different from those employed by their casual-talk counterparts. Drawing on this proposition coupled with the joke-telling experience, I noticed the following strategies/feature for this genre of verbal art.

First and foremost, the organization should be better structured for the audience to follow. Vis-à-vis casual chats whose meanings are more socially constructed, joke telling is usually characterized by the joke-teller taking care of all the talking, or alternatively, constructing the meanings for the audience. To put it another way, in casual talks, the interlocutors could toss questions around and as such negotiate the meanings of the conversation. Whereas in joke-telling where Q&As normally don’t have a place, the audience generally look to the speaker for better understanding of the show, a fact that underscores the importance of the organization of the jokes. Meanwhile, echoing what Bauman and Briggs (1990) pointed out about the content and structure of the performance being shaped by involvement and comprehension of the audience, joke-tellers should also constantly attend to the response of the audience and make adjustments accordingly. While I was telling the campus joke, my friends didn’t quite get it because the joke was somehow interrupted mid-way through the joke. What is more, I failed to make timely adjustments to the structure and content. Therefore, they found it difficult to follow what came next since the organization of the joke fell apart.


Secondly, vocal variety and body language play an even pivotal role in joke-telling. Speaking of vocal variety, jokes, more often than not, involve some conversations between the characters being talked about. So, it is crucial to apply certain skills to help the audience differentiate one from the other. When telling the jokes, I strived to vary my voice to signify to the audience who I was playing. For example, for the lawyer joke, I heightened the pitch for Bill and lower my voice for the asshole guy. But, I knew I was not always good in upholding a consistent difference, so I tried to add “so-and-so said (answered)” every time a different character took his turn. And this worked pretty well. As far as body language is concerned, it animates the joke and somehow contributes to the audience’s enjoyment and grasp of the joke. When I played the sarcastic teacher in the campus joke, I faced the audience with arms akimbo. And I pointed to one of the friends when I came to the point where the teacher questioned the mischievous student.


Additionally, pause for emphasis and for the punch line to come are all-important. I knew I am a fast speaker and could as such ruin the jokes, so I made a point to slow myself down and pause for emphasis when I told these jokes. In particular, I reminded myself of the necessary 3-second pause before I gave away the punch line. However, I still did not do well on the campus joke where I rushed through the latter part of it, leaving the audience wondering what the joke was really about. Also, for the doctor joke, I probably did not pause enough to give my friends the cue that it’s time they laughed, so they waited even after I gave the punch line, which was extremely embarrassing.


Last but not least, cultural difference is at work when it comes to jokes. It is known that people with diversified cultural backgrounds would embrace different ideas about “a funny joke.” And I have had numerous encounters in which jokes cracking Americans up did not cause a Taiwanese to move a single facial muscle. To take the lawyer joke as an example, my Taiwanese friend demanded some more explanations for the joke because we somehow look up to lawyers back in Taiwan.