What Are You Reading/Watching?

Things have been been pretty mellow around here even though we are sure that Lola has begun teething. She's only had one rough night where she screamed for about two hours non-stop. Currently I am letting her watch Sesame Street. I'm sure tv is alright like everything else, in moderation. It's just that I see so many students with conditioned "ADD" or "ADHD" and they have lived a life of constant stimulation and non-stop entertainment.

I still have to set up my classroom and figure out how I'm going to teach my honors classes without textbooks. "Budget shortages" have forced my department to cut our budget from about $40k to $10k. The only books that I have available to teach with are standard textbooks from about 2000 which were written at about a 5th grade reading level. I'm gathering articles and pulling from multiple sources. As difficult as this may be, I'm actually excited about doing it this way. It's just that it would have been nice to have had this information about the shortage back in May.

As far as reading, I'm about to finish Neil Postman's, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman wrote the book about 20 years ago and argued that electronic media (he focused on tv) has conditioned us to expect to be entertained. If information is not presented in an entertaining fashion then the information is not worth receiving. He looks at contemporary journalism, education, and religion as forms of show business. He also argues that Huxley's vision from Brave New World is more relevant today than Orwell's nightmare. Orwell argued that, in the future, information will be kept from the people and that they would be controlled through pain. Huxley argued that the truth would be lost in a sea of irrelevance and that people would be controlled through endless pleasures, wants, and distractions.

I also picked up a comic book, er, graphic novel called the Pride of Baghdad. The guy who wrote it, Brian Vaughn, had also written Y: The Last Man which was amazing and Ex Machina which is pretty good. The Pride of Baghdad follows a pride of lions that had escaped from the Baghdad zoo during the American invasion of Iraq. Vaughn gave the animals voices and the story has broader meaning than just the wanderings of the animals. The art is incredible and the character development is outstanding.

Here is an entertaining clip from the Youtube Miracle: