For a while now, when I’ve recommended a book to a friend, I describe it with a food analogy. “It was an entertaining story,” I say when describing a light-hearted fantasy I’ve just finished, “but it’s really just candy.” Or perhaps, I say, “This is a great book; it will make you do some mental chewing, though, kind of like carrots.” (To clarify the analogy, I like carrots when they actually are sweet and taste like carrots; I don’t, however, like carrots when they taste like dirt. At any rate, whether sweet or dirt-flavor, carrots require a lot of chewing.) After hearing this for a bit, my friends have now started reciprocating with their own food-themed analogies, letting me borrow candy books, steak books, and salad books.
Wouldn’t it be convenient if books came with nutritional content labels like cereal boxes do? Instead of reading some other writer’s one-sentence cliché review on the back of the book (do publishers know how annoying those are?), we could get a label breaking down different mental skills that the book will require us to us. In this world, we pick up a potential read and find out before reading The Hunger Games that it will (i.e. should) challenge our ideas of entertainment, government, responsibility to mankind, and such like, and that we can reasonably expect to use our ability to juxtapose these fictional events with history and our potential future, to judge what is right in dealing with government and rebellion, to empathize with characters caught on both sides of the conflict, and to question our choices in entertainment. Of course, different people may see this book requiring other mental skills. Many consider The Hunger Games an engaging story about a love triangle and rebellion against corrupt government that resonates with their own feelings of being neglected and oppressed. Perhaps instead of categorizing books by genre, we could put them into food groups based on their actual value to the mind. Fiction genres are rather wishy-washy at best. This summer I invented a game that my students now play in which they get points for arguing how a given book could fit into as many genres as possible. (Yes, we conclude by agreeing on which one fits the book best before shelving it in our new library.) Other than letting us know whether we are getting wizards or aliens, historical figures or ordinary people, broad genres don’t communicate how vastly different a sci-fi steak book like Ender’s Game is from a sci-fi candy book like Cinder. The one challenges our ideas about war, its causes, its training, the Self, the Other, and so many other ideas that can resonate with the reader long after the book has been re-shelved. The other is a retelling of Cinderella and, while having the potential to challenge our ideas about humanity, the tug-of-war between public responsibility and personal inclinations, the story is merely an entertaining fairy-tale-turned-sci-fi novel.
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I am always amazed at how restorative a good afternoon with friends can be. After my summer travels, I invited some friends to be my guinea pigs as I tried to recreate one of the communal meals I had enjoyed abroad. (No, the meal was not guinea pigs, a Peruvian delicacy, although we did have that years ago in Peru.) I served one of the Asian meals with a plethora of small side dishes and the fun of serving food to each that builds a camaraderie around the table.
As wonderful as the food was (and, even though I was the chef, the food was delicious), the meal was far greater because I was sharing it with others. Strange, isn’t it, that eating food with others enhances the experience, making it greater than what eating that same food alone would be. (I know this because I practiced making the meal three times before inviting company, which, considering the utter flop of the first attempt, was a good thing.) It’s tempting in our modern busy world for me to forget that we were created to be social. An afternoon of fellowship with trusted friends and experimenting with foreign cuisine (and, of course, a long sobremesa) was certainly as restorative to my spirit as a whole night of sleep. Having so recently been in a community-centered culture, I see more how isolated the American notion of The Individual can make us. While every culture certainly has its strengths and weaknesses, I enjoyed visiting a culture that welcomed us without reservation and helped us realize that we were part of something far greater than any one person. And because of that connection, we could be stronger than any one person. As un-American as this may sound, sometimes independence is not as freeing as it may seem. With independence, the weight of the burden becomes too much; community—interdependence—lightens the load and shares the burden, even it’s just the emotional burden. That’s why I so appreciate the chance for true heart-level fellowship with good friends. I come away encouraged, knowing that the burden of the world’s problems do not rest on just me and knowing that I am not alone. Lately, I’ve been contemplating cultural trends. Not surprisingly, these contemplations arise during two activities: watching commercials on TV and driving through traffic. While I’ve read some studies about the role that movies and shows have played in the critical literacy of our nation’s youth, only one theorist has addressed the role of commercials in society. (Neil Postman’s The End of Education includes an interesting discussion of commercials as parables, for example, “Parable of the Person with Rotten Breath.”)
What I’ve been noticing in commercials is their shift towards slogans that promote competition and getting product at the expense of others, as though we are experiencing a shortage on anything in America (although we do have a shortage of businesses that develop film with matte finish or meat counters with actual meat slicers, but that’s a different sort of shortage). One particularly awful commercial a few years ago showed a couple pull up to their home and start stripping in a frenzied race to be the first one to get to use the new showerhead because apparently life is not worth living if someone else gets what you want first. I see this same trend in traffic. My city is known for its bad drivers. I’ve lived here long enough that I’m no longer surprised when someone in the far right lane turns left in front of two other lanes of traffic or when someone jaywalks across four lanes of heavy traffic after dark. Last week on my way to work, I pulled up to the intersection and got behind a car in the right turn-lane. The light turned green. The car in front of me didn’t go. I waited a few beats, then beeped the horn (yes, my horn beeps just slightly more assertively than the roadrunner’s “Meep!”). The driver didn’t move, turn on hazard lights, wave me on—nothing. We waited through the entire light. When the left turn-lane turned green, the car turned left, cutting off the person in that lane. Has our culture become that averse to admitting that we made a mistake and accept the consequence of that mistake? In the grand scheme of things, getting in the wrong traffic lane is a small mistake that is easily fixed by turning around at the next intersection. Instead of doing that, a driver stays in the wrong lane but goes the “right” direction, backing up a lane of traffic and almost side-swiping another car. If we aren’t willing to accept the consequences of small mistakes, how will we become equipped to handle the consequences of larger mistakes? This parable began last year in an attempt to create an emotional mental picture for what I felt like I was trying to do. Although this does not capture the full picture, I think it begins to describe the struggle many teachers experience with each new year. For a parable with a different perspective on the issue, check out Chris Mattarazzo's parable at "Hats and Rabbits." Reluctantly looking up from my book, I realized that the ship was on fire. How embarrassing—I had been so engrossed in reading the last three chapters that I had not recognized the odd aroma I was smelling as smoke. And where there’s smoke . . . Oh, the fire was wide-spread. At first, I thought it was just a few small fires in my little corner of the ship, but a quick walk around the deck showed me that every part of the deck had dozens of small fires greedily eating the wood. Some of the fires had completely consumed enough boards that I could look down at the lower decks, allowing billowing smoke to warn me of a far larger problem than I first had guess. I glanced over at a friend faithfully trying to work in spite of the smoke and heat. She was blinking to regain focus after looking too long through her microscope. Casually, so as not to startle her, I asked, “Have you noticed that the ship is on fire?” Thoughtfully, she blinked a few more times before saying, “I thought I smelled smoke.” “It’s a big fire,” I said, starting to panic now that someone had confirmed my suspicions. “Yep,” she said. “What can we do about it?” I asked. She sighed, “I don’t know. We just keep doing our jobs the best we can. We weren’t trained to fight fires.” Resolutely, she slid a new slide under the lens of the microscope, clearly needing to get back to work. She was right: we weren’t trained to fight fires; we were trained to call the firefights. Our ship, already severely understaffed, couldn’t afford to hire anyone with that training. I looked around at the other workers. Surely someone else would have an idea and help me put it out. But everyone was busy. I could ask Ashley, but she was practicing the piano, and I didn’t want to interrupt. She had a concert to prepare for. Perhaps Barbara could help. The last time I had asked her for help, she had been sympathetic. When I found her, she was meticulously mixing chemicals in her beakers. I backed away from her workspace cautiously—we didn’t need an explosion in addition to a fire. She had been sympathetic in the past, but she was also adamant that we should do only the work we were hired to do. Cindy and Dani were working together on a complex problem, as we were so frequently encouraged to do and just as frequently unable to do. They agreed with me that the fire was a problem and promptly got back to work. I couldn’t ignore the fire any longer. It had been building probably since before I had come aboard. But because I had noticed it, I felt responsible to do something about it. But what? I hadn’t been trained in firefighting. Water! I remembered reading somewhere in my training that water was good at dousing fires. Resolutely, I filled a bucket with water and walked to the edge of a fire in my section of the deck, where the flames seemed smaller and manageable. Cautiously, I dipped my hand into the bucket and sloshed a handful of water onto the fire. The result was immediate. It was true—fire didn’t like water. It hissed and receded. But that handful of water wasn’t enough. The fire crept back into place. I understood—I needed more water. Taking a deep breath, I threw out my arms, sending a blanket of water falling down to smother the flames. And it worked. Giddy with success, I reasoned that if a bucketful was better than a handful, a flood of buckets must be better than just one. With the fervor of a hero, I drew and threw bucket after bucket of water. I didn’t need to interrupt the other workers—they were busy and I had found a solution that was working. Well into the night, I worked. My arms shook with exhaustion, but I refused to let the ship burn. Finally, I paused to evaluate my success. I looked around. No fire. No smoke. Not even a glimmer of a spark. I laughed, breathlessly. Then I noticed it: we were taking on water. |
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