Beyond School

Just doinking around with Mystudiyo. They say they’ll never make me pay for this when they leave beta, which is cool - but I always wonder what will happen to this sort of work if the company goes out of business. Is all my labor lost?

That being said, I love the ease of use. [UPDATE: Two things: h/t to Steve Dembo for sharing this tool; and note that you¹ can add their own quiz items to this quiz.]

Have at thee, geeky wordsmiths. Fastest guns score highest.

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1. and students [↩]

Just spreading the love to my fellow Mac users by sharing Monolingual, a free open source program that saved me 4Gb of hard drive by removing the hundreds of languages localized on all my software, and by stripping the PowerPC files from my Intel MacBook.  (If you have Adobe Creative Suite, you’ll easily save 2 or 3 gigs with a single click. Bloated with languages. Sorry, Cyrillic, you had to go.)

Be sure to run both the “Languages” and the “Architecture” programs.  And buy me a beverage the next time you see me.  Better still, donate a few bucks (or Yuan, or Quid¹ ) to the folks who created this useful tool on the Sourceforge site.

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1. what the hell is a quid? [↩]

Standing on a corner
in Hong Kong -
It ain’t so good to be alone
in Hong Kong.
–Screaming Jay Hawkins, “Hong Kong” (psst…do yourself a favor and click the little icon for a classic Screaming Jay number on Youtube, and a Wikipedia link, thanks to the very cool Apture tool)

Just a quickie to show the local flavor of Kowloon, Hong Kong, to Stacy Zheng of Students 2.0, who tweeted, “I’m insanely jealous of you right now. Hong Kong tops the list of my “places I want to visit”. Have fun! :)” - and to show my wife the typical “I don’t speak your language so I’ll take whatever haircut you give me” ‘do I just got in a local barber shop across the street from my hotel.

It’s nice to be back among the Chinese people, among whom I lived in Shanghai for five years, and came to admire more than any people in the 25 countries I’ve traveled. It’s so crazy: they don’t have near the money to spend on English lessons the way Koreans do, yet they speak English so comfortably, with broken grammar but still so communicatively, they far outstrip the Koreans in this respect, who seem so fearful of making a mistake - the internalized grader at work in that so-grade-fixated culture - that they literally do not speak English at all, despite spending more per capita on lessons than any country in the world.

So here’s a bit of fluff from a Kowloon noodle shop [Update: I just discovered Youtube now allows us to annotate our own video uploads, and did that for the below. It's in beta and doesn't work in embeds yet, so you have to click through to the Youtube page to see it. Kinda cool. Think of the educational potential....]:

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They had already guessed, all wrongly (but that was okay), how old I was when I first read the book I was sharing with them. Their guesses ranged from five to twelve. When I told them that I was in my thirties, and was reading that book as a peacekeeper in Kosovo, where I carried first it, then Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz, and The Little Prince in my cargo pocket, and read it with an M-16 rifle slung over my shoulder and a helmet on my head, sitting at a mountain camp on the Serbian border doing Bush-league military intelligence work, I think they got what I was hinting at: this children’s book was not for children only. Soldiers read it too.

I asked them if they knew the characters, and they all did.

“Name them,” I said - and their arms became a field of sunflowers reaching, reaching at the high noon sun. I picked them all. Some were wrong, but so beautifully happy to answer, to share what they thought they knew, it made them also so very, very right. I meant it when I thanked them for answering. How much I meant it quietly surprised me as I thanked.

None of them knew the characters came from a book; they thought they came from Disney cartoons. So I straightened them out on that one, too, and shared some of the priceless original illustrations.

I began the story: “CHRISTOPHER ROBIN was going away,” I read,

Nobody knew why he was going; nobody knew where he was going; indeed, nobody even knew why he knew that Christopher Robin was going away. But somehow or other everybody in the Forest felt that it was happening at last.

I looked up from the book at the sea of eager eyes atop all those fifth-grade creatures. Seated Indian-style, they leaned forward so eagerly to hear the story this big high school English teacher of AP Literature (whatever that was) was visiting to share with them.

“You’re going away too, you know.”

“We are?”

“Yes. You’re going away from elementary school. Next year, you’ll be in middle school. That’s why I chose this as the story I wanted to read to you. You’re going away too, just like Christopher Robin.”

A couple of girls sitting at the back of the huddle were already half-gone. I struggled to pull them fully back, against the tide, for just the space of one last story, and a struggle it was. Their eyes broke contact often. The boy in the very front, though, leaning 30 degrees from the floor to read the excerpt from the back of the book as I held it - what a piece of magic he was.

The one on the back is the one you’re reading to us!

He hadn’t lost the Art of Noticing, and I found myself envious of his parents for having that rare company in their lives.

Reading Eeyore’s valediction - no need to teach that word, since nobody needs it but AP test-takers, who’ll forget it after the test, while the natural readers will find it on their own anyway - reading Eeyore’s poem, I was saying, in Eeyore’s voice was hard, “a little lacking in Smack,” as he would say - but I did my best, and they were forgiving. It’s a hard poem to ruin completely, anyway:

Christopher Robin is going
At least I think he is
Where?
Nobody knows
But he is going–
I mean he goes
(To rhyme with knows)
Do we care ?
(To rhyme with where)
We do
Very much
(I haven’t got a rhyme for that
“is” in the second line yet.
Bother.)
(Now I haven’t got a rhyme for
bother.. Bother.)
Those two bothers will have
to rhyme with each other
Buther
The fact is this is more difficult
than I thought,
I ought–
(Very good indeed)
I ought
To begin again,
But it is easier
To stop
Christopher Robin, good-bye
I
(Good)
I
And all your friends
Sends–
I mean all your friend
Send–
(Very awkward this, it keeps
going wrong)
Well, anyhow, we send
Our love
END

They heard how Christopher Robin showed up, and Eeyore and all the other animals lost their nerve, gave him the poem instead of reading it to him, and disappeared out of some weird sense of farewell before he finished reading the poem to himself. They heard - and I hope some of them saw it - how only Pooh remained then, in the Hundred Acre Wood, at Christopher Robin’s side. Trying to catch the sound of the Christopher Robin voice I’ve always heard in my mind when I read him was such a delicate task. Christopher Robin’s voice is as important as the nape of his neck, his knees, his socks in E.H. Shepherd’s icons of him. Their eyes told me I was doing okay.

I was excited. I knew what was coming, and how it ended, and they wanted to hear so they could know too. This was Literature; this was Culture - more than I’d experienced in a long time. I said,

“Come on, Pooh,” and he walked off quickly.

“Where are we going?” said Pooh, hurrying after him, and wondering whether it was to be an Explore or a What-shall-I-do-about-you-know-what.

“Nowhere,” said Christopher Robin.

So they began going there, and after they had walked a little way Christopher Robin said:

“What do you like doing best in the world, Pooh?”

“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best?” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called. And then he thought that being with Christopher Robin was a very good thing to do, and having Piglet near was a very friendly thing to have: and so, when he had thought it all out, he said, “What I like best in the whole world is Me and Piglet going to see You, and You saying ‘What about a little something?’ and Me saying,’ Well, I shouldn’t mind a little something, should you, Piglet,’ and it being a hummy sort of day outside, and birds singing.”

“I like that too,” said Christopher Robin, “but what I like doing best is Nothing.”

“How do you do Nothing?” asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time.

“Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it ‘What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?’ and you say ‘Oh, nothing,’ and then you go and do it.”

“Oh, I see,” said Pooh.

“This is a nothing sort of thing that we’re doing now.”

“Oh, I see,” said Pooh again.

“It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”

“Oh!” said Pooh.

They walked on, thinking of This and That, and by-and-by they came to an enchanted place –

I wondered what they thought the enchanted place might look like, so I paused to ask them:

“Sorry for the intteruption. Will the following students please report for detention to Room . . . .”

The intercom. So that happens to storytellers and magic-sharers in elementary school also: climax interrupted by the end-of-day detention-list litany.

The children started stirring.

“Can I please, please finish the story, even if it keeps you after school? It so funny, and so sad. You won’t regret it.” They all said yes - even the half-gone girls. Their teacher didn’t mind either. I liked him.

* * *

I’ll have to finish this later. It left a mark, and quite literally changed my life. But I’m tired right now, my Wordpress editor is buggy with formatting, and I’ve got to prep for a trip to the embassy and immigration office tomorrow. [UPDATE 9 JUN 08: Part 2, "In Which We Say Goodbye," is up.]

If you can’t wait for the rest of the story, though, you can read ahead on the Pooh. (And you-know-who, if you ever read this, things didn’t work, but your giving me Pooh was something I’ll always treasure you for.)

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