Character Development in Real Life

On the subject of The Submission, the "book of ideas" by Amy Waldman, someone said that it had been criticized for lack of character development, which led me to thinking of the characters.  The novel certainly had the forward movement a novel is supposed to have, but did it have character development?  Didn't they all remain basically the same?

But that made me wonder about people I know--and even about myself. 

What character development do we show?

Being Mean Coaching ESL Speech Presentations

Today I really felt great—all kinds of energy I was missing when I was weakened by the common cold this past weekend—and I directed the energy towards some good things like talking with a leader-colleague about the ESL Department’s  speaking –listening courses and handing out flyers on The New Priority Campaign (www.NewPrioritiesCampaign.org ).  But I also directed it towards being imperious and demanding in one of my classes, and I was mean.    First of all, I insisted that they listen.  I insisted that they put away the preparation they were supposed to have done at home and listen to me and then to the speakers.  But this is a class that never listens.  I’ve taught on and off--mostly on-- since 1970, and this is the most passive-aggressive group of students I’ve ever met.  So I was aggressive, with no passivity at all. 

               

I told them that, above all else, I wanted them to make their presentations interesting by speaking to us, not reading.  So when someone started reading, and I really couldn’t understand what she was reading, I interrupted her to ask.  I almost never do that.  I just let them drone on and give them a D.  But I had hope of getting the message across early—on our first day of presentations—so I interrupted her.  The problem was that she couldn’t really put the reading into her own words because she didn’t understand what she was reading.  This is what it was:  

Mexico has one of the world's largest economies, and is considered both a regional power and middle power.^{[14][15] [16][17]} In addition, Mexico was the first Latin American member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD (since 1994), and considered an upper-middle income country by the World Bank.^[18] Mexico is considered a newly industrialized country^{[19][20][21][22]} and an emerging power.^[23] It has the thirteenth largest nominal GDP and the eleventh largest by purchasing power parity. The economy is strongly linked to those of its North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) partners, especially the United States.^[24][25] Mexico ranks fifth in the world and first in the Americas by number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites with 31,^[26][27][28] and in 2007 was the tenth most visited country in the world with 21.4 million international arrivals per year.^[29]

Straight from Wikipedia but all highlighted in a dazzling yellow.  This was a presentation assigned on March 22nd.  She hadn't mastered that downloaded section in those three plus weeks.  She hadn't done anything with that information except color it yellow.

The student who hadn’t prepared at all did better than she did because he spoke, and even though he gave us only what five minutes of work on his iPhone had provided (at the beginning of class after he’d come in late as usual), he understood what he was saying about the President of Mexico—his name—and he understood the meaning of the not-quite-accurate information he was giving about Jalisco, Michoacan.  (He said the rich people there help the poor.)  He didn’t know how to pronounce Catholocism.  

 I showed them how to Google pronunciation of Catholocism.  Pronunciation of economies.  After the presentations (and I don’t think it was my imagination that the students were glaring at me with the “mean teacher” stare), I let the other students work on their upcoming presentations with their teams and I sat down with the student who had read her Wiki.  That paragraph she understood not at all was full of a lot of good information.  I suggested that she give just a little bit of it.  Mexico

                One of the world’s largest economies

                Economy linked to NAFTA

                                She could make an 8 ½ x 11" sign with NAFTA and explain that it’s the North American Fair Trade Agreement

                (We’ve studied continents so that would bring in the continent of North America:  Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.  Never mind that some of us are critical of NAFTA)

                31 UNESCO World Heritage Sites

                Places listed by the United Nations as of special cultural or physical significance

                                Show pictures of some of the 31 UNESCO World Heritage Sites

                Mexico—1^st in number of UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Americas

                                5^th in the world in number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites

The best-prepared of the three speakers today said that Mexico was to the North of the United States, but I know he didn’t mean that.  We’d worked on North, South, East, and West.   We'd even turned our bodies in those directions.

I asked the student evaluators to take notes, and of course they didn’t.  That would mean having to understand something that was said.  I remember when I first began teaching ESL 79, the most advanced speech course for ESL students, the evaluators would say “Great.  Clear and strong.”  But when I asked them what the speaker’s main idea was, they’d say, “I didn’t quite get that.”  They really didn’t quite get anything at all. 

Today I had too much energy to be defeated by their faking it.  I made demands that they say less but say it clearly.  My non-negotiable demands weren’t met, but I’m not sorry that I made them.  I don’t want them to fake it, and I don’t want to fake it for them either.

Now, in closing, I acknowledge that public speaking is what people fear more than death.  After all, if we're dead, we don't have to do any public speaking.  I'm not unsympathetic to the nervousness.  But there are ways to deal with the nervousness that don't involve reading uncomprehended downloaded sentences, which is what I fear more than death.

YMCA Journal from Liverpool November 8, 1918 Armistice

My grandfather (Perry W. Robison) wrote from Knotty Ash Camp, Liverpool, on November 8, 1918:

1st night in a mud hole.  Bunked with Mr. Long (a preacher)  November 9th we moved from the mud hole into some wooden barracks.  Messed at the officers mess and oh boy but it was fine.  One shilling for meal.  Real U.S. Army grub cooked by U.S.A. boys and served by some mighty husky lads in O.D. They were a cheerful lot. 
Armistice was signed while we were in camp and Liverpool went wild with joy.  1/13 orders came to move.  We left on 10:40 train.

Looking back at the 60's

It's almost midnight, and instead of a fable for tomorrow, I'm going to use these last three minutes of today to reflect a little on the 1960s--before 1964--when two watershed moments came.  Miss Purvis, my science teacher at Columbia High School, who word "old lady" black shoes, told us about someone named Rachel Carson, who had just written a wonderful new book that was going to change the world. The other was when Miss Pitts came into our room with new technology although we didn't use the word technology back then.  It was a machine that made it possible for her to project an image on the screen while she was facing us.  An overhead projector.

Forbidden Food Assignment for ESL Students, Speaking and Listening

Ah, the rewards of teaching!  My students wrote reports on their interviews on the subject of Forbidden Food, and I spent hours doing what might be called synthesizing. 

Who were their interviewees?  Present and past classmates, present and past teachers, an instructor at the CLAD (CCSF’s Center for Language and Academic Development), a relative born in the US, an ex-roommate’s girlfriend (any particular reason the interviewee is in touch with the girlfriend but the roommate is ex?), a teacher at a child’s school, a husband’s friend and part-time employer, a housemate, a co-worker.

How did they make the appointment?  Texting, running into someone who might be willing, knocking on a neighbor’s door.

Where did they conduct their interviews?  In Washington Park, at coffee shops or restaurants, at the interviewee’s home, at the interviewer’s home, at church, where the interviewee works, in the library (conference room).

What was their interviewee’s favorite restaurant?  Tomatora, House of Prime Rib, Oyaji on Clement between 32^nd and 33^rd, Park Chow in the Sunset, Outback Steak House, Sakana, Miller’s Deli, Elephant Bar, All-American Café at North Beach, Café Puccini in Chinatown, Sushi Rock on Grant, The Cheesecake Factory, Tay Gian, Burma Star.

Favorite food?  Sushi, Indian, Filipino, ice cream, Thai, fish, Thai noodles and taco fish, meat lasagna, chocolate, potatoes, noodles and grilled fish, clam chowder.

What food will they not eat?   Dogs or horse, food in Chinese restaurants just in case, foie gras, meat, tropical fruit, chicken, lima beans

What is the most unusual food they’ve ever eaten?  Cockroaches in a Korean restaurant in LA, mussels in Boston and rabbit at Stinky Rose, frog’s legs, crickets fried with chili powder, chocolate-covered ants, cow’s tongue, snake, pig’s blood, a live octopus, and asparagus.  Asparagus didn’t give us much to work with, and the student whose interviewee didn’t like snake tried to give him her favorite recipe, and he refused to hear it.

The special vocabulary I came across included sprouted brobiotic, viscera, grody (turned out to be gross), peziza, and some with which I was more familiar:  gluten, dairy products, mimosas, tripe, and “fat-food restaurants.”  (I did ask, “Is it fat-food or fast-food, or both?”)  After reading about an interviewee who wanted to have six-pack abs, I confessed to the students that when I first heard that expression, I thought it meant a bear belly.  I even printed out pictures to show them the difference.  It did appear that one interview was trying for the beer belly.  He said he drank beer every day to put on weight.

Interviewees were also asked whether they’d ever given up a food they liked, and some spoke of giving up meat for Lent or sugar for a diet, and an interviewee I recognized gave up meat because he thought he’d lose weight on a vegetable diet, but he gained.  My favorite response was the interviewee who said that, yes, he sometimes gave up the food on his plate to someone at the table who really wanted it.

It was nice to hear that some interviewees felt no need to diet.  “I’m sexy the way I am,” one of them said. 

Fasting was a different matter.  They did it before blood test, during “Famine” when Catholic, for spiritual reason, and during Ramadan. 

The interviewees, when asked about their best memory of a meal, mentioned an Arab restaurant where they ate with their fingers, eating in China with uncles, Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners, a grandfather’s 80^th birthday, cooking dumplings with Mom during childhood, eating homemade ravioli, a surprise 40^th birthday party in Florida.  Many seemed nostalgic about the years when they ate wither their families and “both your stomach and your heart are full of love.” 

We’re moving on to Burger Bacteria, so the students asked about food poisoning too.  One good sick from undercooked chicken.  “I guess she was just too hungry and couldn’t wait until it was done,” the student reporter wrote.  One interviewee was sure that it wasn’t the crab she ate but the mayonnaise and milk in the sauce.  Another got sick from a Burger king sandwich, a Mexican restaurant, a bad piece of steak oil in Vietnam that sent the oiled diner to the hospital, expired pudding, expired bread.  (I read that the same day I got “Buyer’s Choice” bread for two dollars off—with a date that had passed four days earlier.) 

Language challenges:  Has she ever fasted?  Yes, she has ever fasted.

The nicest part of all this was hearing the students react to what they heard.  One student felt very sympathetic to the interviewee who didn’t like tropic fruit “because it is so delicious.”  Another liked the description of her seventy-one-year-old interviewee when she spoke about her dinners at a child with a father who always talked about science.  “It look like so warm.”  That was the comment by a Chinese student who’d watched her neighbor play with children and give them trick and treat candy on Halloween.  The assignment gave her an excuse to knock on the door of this nice neighbor and get to know her better.

YMCA in World War I from Kansas to France

Granddaddy Robisons 1918 Travel Journal Kansas to France YMCA

I've been going to the Y to wimp out every other day since 1994, and of course I had contact with it before then.  But I only recently learned of the part it played in World War I, when it was already established in France and helped get supplies to soldiers in France and other places.    Now that I have Granddaddy Robison's travel journal, I'm going to share what I learn about that.

On the back of a picture of him in uniform he's written "Just an ordinary Y.M.C.A. secretary who is trying to do his bit in France.  For many of our solidier boys need more help in the battle of Paris than they needed in the Arregon (Arragon?) or at St. Michiel (Michael?) sectors.  April 26, 1919.

Perry W. Robison