BUFFY: How do you get to be renowned? I mean, like, do you have to be ‘nowned’ first?
Giving thanks the week before Thanksgiving:
1. Thanks to all veterans, and to the families of those who served and are serving.
2. Rain. I know we need it, but it just makes me want to stay inside with a cup of tea and a cat or two.
3. Speaking of cats, junior cat has a new trick: sleeping on the heat/a.c. registers. When the heat comes on, he gets a nice warm breeze. The room gets…not so much.
This seems as good a day as any to borrow pages from fellow blogger Nikki Faith and Gratefulness.org and list things I’ve been thankful for this week:
I am grateful that it’s Friday. In my last class of the day, a student asked if teachers were as happy to get to Friday as students, and my honest answer was “Yes.” But then we both agreed that some weekends there was so much work to do that there wasn’t much to celebrate.
Not today. Although I do have some work planned (nothing new about that), I’m also looking forward to fellowship and inspiration tonight as my church sponsors a screening of the documentary As We Forgive:
Could you forgive a person who murdered your family? This is the question faced by the subjects of As We Forgive, a documentary about Rosaria and Chantal—two Rwandan women coming face-to-face with the men who slaughtered their families during the 1994 genocide. The subjects of As We Forgive speak for a nation still wracked by the grief of a genocide that killed one in eight Rwandans in 1994. Overwhelmed by an enormous backlog of court cases, the government has returned over 50,000 genocide perpetrators back to the very communities they helped to destroy. Without the hope of full justice, Rwanda has turned to a new solution: Reconciliation.
But can it be done? Can survivors truly forgive the killers who destroyed their families? Can the government expect this from its people? And can the church, which failed at moral leadership during the genocide, fit into the process of reconciliation today? (synopsis from film website)
Since my cousin’s family has been living and working in Rwanda for several years, I’ve become interested in this country and its struggles.
Best thing about Twitter? Updates posting automatically to this blog. That’s how busy this semester has been so far. But I have plans! Right after I grade a lot more papers, write a conference presentation, attend a few committee meetings, and feed the cats…
The medieval trivium consisted of grammar, logic, and rhetoric—the foundation of all higher learning, including the quadrivium: geometry, astronomy, arithmetic, and music. Now “trivial” means inconsequential, frivolous, scarcely necessary. But clearly its etymology is—beyond the basic “three”—the idea of something that is, well, basic. And it’s easy to ignore the basics, until you don’t have them. Milk, for example. I never think about it, until I pour a cup of coffee or a bowl of cereal and discover there’s NOTHING to put in it. Inevitably this disaster occurs early in the morning, too.
So heed the wisdom of my former student Abigail, pondering grammar to the glory of God.
As Christians in this time, we are compelled to set ourselves apart as fellow sufferers for the gospel–and if the gospel permeates us, it envelopes everything in our lives and causes us to yearn to glorify God in all things. Thus, we must hold on to the knowledge that we know to be true, and realize that through it we might glorify the Lord as we “set the believers an example in SPEECH, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (1 Timothy 4:12).
Nothing in our lives and work is too “trivial” to be offered to God, as Brother Lawrence learned:
“Nor is it needful that we should have great things to do. . . We can do little things for God; I turn the cake that is frying on the pan for love of him, and that done, if there is nothing else to call me, I prostrate myself in worship before him, who has given me grace to work; afterwards I rise happier than a king. It is enough for me to pick up but a straw from the ground for the love of God.”
“Pick up a straw,” or correct a comma-splice—the motivation is what makes it worthwhile—for the love and greater glory of God.
Research seems to be demonstrating that “people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world.”
Intriguing article! I’ve often said, as this writer does, that language is an essential element of our humanity, and I tell students yearly that gaining mastery over one’s own language (and at least one other) is vital for thinking and living effectively in the larger human community. Boroditsky’s research and other experiments are showing, for example:
How do we know that it is language itself that creates these differences in thought and not some other aspect of their respective cultures?
One way to answer this question is to teach people new ways of talking and see if that changes the way they think. In our lab, we’ve taught English speakers different ways of talking about time. In one such study, English speakers were taught to use size metaphors (as in Greek) to describe duration (e.g., a movie is larger than a sneeze), or vertical metaphors (as in Mandarin) to describe event order. Once the English speakers had learned to talk about time in these new ways, their cognitive performance began to resemble that of Greek or Mandarin speakers. This suggests that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think.6 In practical terms, it means that when you’re learning a new language, you’re not simply learning a new way of talking, you are also inadvertently learning a new way of thinking.
… Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.
(6 Ibid., “How Deep Are Effects of Language on Thought? Time Estimation in Speakers of English and Greek” (in review); L. Boroditsky, “Does Language Shape Thought? English and Mandarin Speakers’ Conceptions of Time.” Cognitive Psychology 43, no. 1(2001): 1–22.)
And these ideas about the pervasive effects of language and perspective also apply to reading poetry and any literature. If one can possibly encounter a literary text in its original language, that is best. An English translation of a Japanese haiku is not actually equivalent. Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf is not really Beowulf, though it’s a rattling good read. Buffy in French isn’t quite Buffy.
…OK, yes, my only sister, but I could not have asked for a better one. And look at this, her guest editorial celebrating the town that has become home (again) following her family’s relocation after Hurricane Katrina:
Scary? You bet! A high school senior son, a freshman daughter, their dad serving in Iraq, and each one of us trying to figure it all out and make a plan. Now, looking back, I’d like to share how it has turned out…
One thing she doesn’t mention (only because of limited space, I’m sure) is that it has also been a gift to me to have her and her family within easy driving distance. New Orleans is a great place to visit (still), but travel is expensive and/or time-consuming and I only managed the journey twice while they lived there—totally worth it, of course! Now we can meet for holidays, or milestone events like my niece’s high school graduation, or something trivial but fun like dinner and a movie.
My sister writes about the many members of the community who helped her family over the past four years. I have to point out that she has never stopped helping others herself—volunteering with MCEC an organization that supports “quality educational opportunities for all military children affected by mobility, family separation, and transition,” with the USNA parents’ group, and her church. She’s also been a great encouragment to me when I’ve gone through trying times. Best sister ever.
I cannot believe how many hits this blog gets from people looking for “what to do with an English major.” No, I can believe it—but seriously, folks—the answer remains what it was when John Henry Newman wrote “The Idea of an University” (I paraphrase): Anything you want to do—although, admittedly, you may have to pick up a few additional skills along the way, like money management.
Here’s John Milton on what to do with all that literary knowledge:
In the cultivation of literature is found that common link, which, among the higher and middling departments of life, unites the jarring sects and subdivisions into one interest, which supplies common topics, and kindles common feelings, unmixed with those narrow prejudices with which all professions are more or less infected. The knowledge, too, which is thus acquired, expands and enlarges the mind, excites its faculties, and calls those limbs and muscles into freer exercise which, by too constant use in one direction, not only acquire an illiberal air, but are apt also to lose somewhat of their native play and energy. And thus, without directly qualifying a man for any of the employments of life, it enriches and ennobles all. Without teaching him the peculiar business of any one office or calling, it enables him to act his part in each of them with better grace and more elevated carriage; and, if happily planned and conducted, is a main ingredient in that complete and generous education which fits a man ‘to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.’
Yes, you’ll probably have to do some tweaking of your resume, your application letter(s), and your interviewing skills to sell that to prospective employers, but according to the University of Delaware Career Services Center,
Approximately 25 percent of students majoring in English go on to graduate study in fields such as law, library science, literature or journalism. The skills that many English majors develop in articulation, written communication and analysis are valued by employers in banking, sales, insurance, lobbying, labor relations and social service fields. There are also job opportunities in journalism, publishing and editing, technical writing, advertising, teaching and public relations.
To find these opportunities, go to your college/university career services center and hold them down until they help you. Or, you could just do this, and hope for the best.
But remember that you have skills that may actually be more in demand than ever:
We’re living in complicated times, and I can’t help but think they’re going to get more complicated and more difficult before some light shines in the distance. Getting some idea what it all means depends, in part, on learning from people who have some idea (not “pundits,” by the way). The ability to read, really read, undaunted by complexity, turn of phrase or length of thought, puts you in a position of making some sense of convoluted, technical and controversial ideas and events
Add to your list of advantages: Clarity and reasoning (about complicated subjects), logic, expression and patience (with long passages). You don’t suppose we’d have any reason in work and in life to call on those abilities right about now, do you? (ForEnglishMajors)
I’ll be saluting a number of local English majors and others as they graduate today. Several are already bound for graduate school and other destinations. Others still looking. Here’s wishing each of them success and happiness as God guides them.
Gratuitous T.S. Eliot quote:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. (“The Waste Land” 1-4)
And that’s the best I can do to explain why there are no posts beyond some rather lackadaisical twittering. The short headlines:
Back to work!
