Posts tagged as:

books

Pomp in Circumstance

by Jose on August 28, 2008 · 4 comments

in life

A few notes:

- A few days ago, I mentioned how one of my favorite teachers / mentors / friends left my present school of employ. Today, I found out that another teacher, who was an icon in the building, passed away. It hurt my soul to see him go, because he was a staple for the school and like the first teacher I mentioned, contributed positively to the school environment. The one thing I can say about this man is that he always had a style about him that, no matter how outlandish or rough it may seem at first, you knew he had the soul of a gentleman. He had an energy unparalleled by most men I knew.

- Shout-outs to Slant Truth for giving me a “Brilliant Award.” As always, humbled.

- Blogs are not books. In Twitter, someone recently mentioned a statistic about how much the average book sells a certain amount of copies, and the person in question have quadruple that number in page views. OK, so let’s get this straight: if the number of books sold, hypothetically is 5000 (NY Times Best Seller number), and you get 4 times that, we’re looking at 20,000 page views. But that’s fuzzy math. After all, a book is on average, a good 2-300 pages, so we’re looking at anywhere from 1 million to 1.5 million page views. Is that really equal? Plus, if we subtract all the accidental views, all the views based on mistaken searches, aggregators, repeat visits, and people who are really just there because they didn’t know what the tinyurl was about, in reality, we’re looking at anywhere from 5-10,000 really. In other words, it’s a bad argument.

Plus, any author can tell you that, even if they had a high selling book that’s been recommended by tons of people, it doesn’t make you a celebrity. It makes you well known, and if you have a niche of people who really care about what you write, then that’s great for you. But celebrity is a whole different echelon where people actually post gossip about you, people want to follow anything with your name attached to it, people go out of their social norms just to have a little interaction with you, and you actually hang out with people who others would also call celebrities, not just celebrities in their own minds.

What blogs can do well is that they can give a really good writer a chance to express themselves in a public forum without the red tape of editor, publisher, funding, etc. The problem becomes, though, when the writer becomes so excited about his or her work that he or she lets his or her avarice speak for him or herself and thinks he or she can make ludicrous equations. What’s more, because of that perceived popularity, people support the ideas rather than truly analyzing what’s being said. People can have really popular blogs but never write anything of substance (here, I separate the bloggers from the writers).

As I am with school business, I don’t have any personal problem with other bloggers / writers. Yet, when I see absurdities like the aforementioned analogy between blogs and books, I need to speak up. With all the people reading blogs these days, though, it’s no wonder they’re not reading books anymore: we can’t count page views on any book until we read it from cover to cover …

jose, who loves getting letters from prospective teachers wanting to know more about NYC teaching …

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Crazy Eights

by Jose on August 3, 2007 · 4 comments

in life

Borrowed from J. Dakar:

The Rules:
1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged write their own blog post about their eight things and include these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged and that they should read your blog.
5. 8 is a magic number. Though three is the magic number. (I changed this line.)

Eight Obscure Things About Me:

Derek Jeter

1. Derek Jeter’s my favorite baseball player. I love the heart and determination he shows on and off the field. From baggin’ every chick most dudes want to to baggin’ awards and stats left and right, he’s the epitome of awesome. That and the media gives him a pass for everything he does. He’s one of NY’s true kings. Plus, I got his home and away jerseys.

AlexRodriguez2.jpg

2. Alex Rodriguez is now a close second, surpassing just about anyone I can think of. I think the fact that he’s been playing with a “chip on his shoulder” really endears me to him more than anything. Despite the little blond streaks and the cheating sprees, he’s still a fantastic player on both ends of the field, so give him his crown already people. If he stays in NY, give him his “true Yankee” label already. ::rolls eyes::

2. If something were to ever happen to my favorite city ever (NYC), I’d move to either D.C., Chicago, or San Francisco. Let’s not let that happen, though.

3. As a math teacher, I gotta say: I didn’t choose math; math chose me. When I filled out the application through the NYCTF process, I don’t even remember what I wrote in, but they figured since I have a computer science degree, I must be good at math. I’m good, but if I had a choice, I’d teach … everything. Math, ELA, and social studies. Then again, maybe not. Math it is.

4. I have a slew of books I haven’t read yet, and that are waiting to be read. By my estimates, it’s a good 25 of them. I’ll get to them eventually …

Common’s “Finding Forever”

5. I sing along to my favorite songs on my iPod (Common’s Finding Forever currently on rotation), no matter what song it is or time of day. I don’t care how people look at me; I’m going to sing and/or rap, f******.

6. I search for myself on Google just to see if my name is inappropriately associated with anything … and usually run into very interesting things. It’s mostly positive now, but wow.

7. I’m somewhere in between obscure and easily found. I have a MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo, AIM, MSN, GMail, my own site, an NYCDOE e-mail, CCNY, Syr, and a few other accounts out there I haven’t taken into account. I’ve had most of the social networking sites even before they became trendy. With that said, people always say how hard it is to reach me. Please …

Joe Budden

8. The five contemporary famous people I’d like to meet are: Common, Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Jay-Z, and Joe Budden. There it goes. The Rock would be cool, and I’ve already met Talib, Rakim, and Chuck D, so I’m fine.

Tag. You’re it:

You, you, you, you, you, you, you, and you …

jose, going to New Orleans this weekend …

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New Words

by Jose on July 8, 2007 · 8 comments

in Uncategorized

mausendakreading.jpgMy first day in my middle school literacy course has already made me reflect a little bit. We were discussing what it means to read. At first, it was hard for these grad students to get around the idea that, even though all their life, they’ve been looking at texts and had the ability to say out loud what those combinations of symbols meant, if they’re not able to understand or process what that means, then they’re not reading.

Definition: read – v. tr. – to attach a meaning to something

It completely made sense to me because, as many texts as I’ve read, I can honestly say there’s a good 10 – 20% of stuff I had no understanding of, and the overwhelming majority of that 20% were items like textbooks and books I didn’t want to read. Fortunately for me, I had the capacity for taking a text, memorizing a bit of it, and answering the appropriate questions on the tests administered, but it didn’t mean I fully got a depth for what I saw.

lordsofdiscipline.jpgThe professor in our class, then, shed a little light on how we read. For one, when we look at literature, reading becomes easier when we have a motivation or point of view, similar to an actor. I agree. Let’s take The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. For most of the people in my class during high school, they thought it was a good book. I disliked it mainly because I had no motivation nor could I grasp anything that was going on. However, a book like Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy was a book I definitely got into. I could relate to the storyline in a few ways: I understood what it meant to be young, have friends that turned into enemies, and be in an all-boys school.

Then, someone in the class makes a really good analogy: the difference between looking at these words and actually reading them is like hearing and listening. “I could be hearing you talk while I’m doing whatever it is I’m doing, but it doesn’t mean I listened to anything you just said.” And that’s when someone who was thus converted to the “understanding” said,

“But wait, my issue right now is that we don’t really have a word for what that means.”

Ah. Thus, our language, as much as it lets us describe an enormous range of situations and experiences we have in our lives, restricts us from finding a word that says we can take a series of words, look at them, know what each word means in the sequence, memorize them, and maybe even understand a few sentences within that passage, but not gain any meaning from the passage as a whole. Wow.

And in a room full of potential masters in education, a few writers (such as myself), and a doctor in education, we still couldn’t piece it together. That has to bode well for the kids we teach …

jose, who’s looking for new words as we speak …

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100 More Years of Solitude

by Jose on April 22, 2007 · 1 comment

in Uncategorized

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been reading 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez (great book, just takes some getting used to), and the central theme of the book is the idea that life simply works in cycles: it doesn’t just move forward, but plays hopscotch with its past.

While that may not seem like a detriment in the general sense, the characters might have had a better chance of preventing the tragedies that occur in their lives if they actually took the time to learn the lessons form the past. As this town of Macondo changes, the family Buendía develops a pattern of misfortunes that only give credence to the last one. The matriarch of the family, Úrsula, observes that the many characters in in her family are really doppelgangers of their ancestors. (Won’t spoil the rest for you, really. Just go read it.)

It made me wonder how the past entraps us as a society, especially in light of the recent Virginia Tech tragedy. Unfortunately, not only did the killer fit the “suicidal and ostracized loner” profile, he also laid his plans out for the media to see. I have to ask, when will we come to a consensus on the way to make sure these events don’t happen? Unfortunately, the shock factor has died amongst some of this country’s citizens for various reasons, and it will only continue to dissipate …

Not only do I see this as a security issue, but also student development issue. If, for instance, institutions of (any level of) learning took a hard look at themselves and decided to take preventive measures against these incidents from happening, we would most likely see a change for the better in the student population as a whole, not just those who are at risk for passive-aggressive behaviors.

More importantly, though, those of us who aren’t part of the infrastructure of these institution (as in people like you and me) need to become aware of ways to prevent our loved ones from becoming a Cho Seung-Hui or one of the Columbine shooters. Unfortunately, the hateful speech made against Cho spurs on the very violence and isolation that begot this incident to begin with.

Somewhere, Márquez must be observing us the way he observes Macondo …

jose, who wishes the families of the tragedies his deepest condolences …

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