I have been reading, with some bemusement, the calls from several (most? all?) of the Democratic candidates for free college for all. I’m bemused because I just don’t see this as a Federal issue. An issue nationwide, to be sure, but that's not really the same thing.
Let me be clear, I absolutely agree that the cost of college has gotten totally out of control. To my mind, someone attending a state college/university (whether Land Grant or otherwise) ought to be able to cover their costs, including tuition and room-and-board, with a half time job. That’s half time at something not much over minimum wage – say washing dishes. It was possible in the late ’60s when I was in school, which I know because I did it. It wasn't easy, but it definitely was possible. It should be possible today.
That said, it isn’t obvious why the Federal government should be involved. After all, we already have universal (free) public education for grammar school and high school. Funded (over 90%) by the state and local governments.
Free (better yet, cheap) college for all would doubtless require the states to make some changes. Tax increases probably -- but it's a better investment that tax breaks to (theoretically) attract companies. Deciding that funding college athletics isn’t really a reasonable priority would be a good step as well. Quite possibly other things also. But it could be done. (Let me add a caveat that charging more for out-of-state/foreign students is a whole different discussion.)
So why are the candidates pushing this? Besides it being a feel-good issue, of course.
I’m reading a book called “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” by Jenny Odell. Perhaps ironically, it was brought to my attention via the weekly email newsletter from hello hello books in Rockland, Maine, which is owned by one of our old babysitters.
I’m only a little way into the book, but I bought it because it seemed likely to feed into, and help me flesh out, my increasing dissatisfaction with the way the internet, the phone, and the computer screen dominate my life. I’ve been hanging around here at ObWi, and everywhere online, less than before, and although it’s a struggle, I’m kind of amazed at how different it feels to get a whole raft of chores and duties out of the way before noon. (Don’t forget, I don’t get up early...and I work mostly at home.) I still haven’t broken the habit of checking my mail and a few headlines as soon as I get up, but I’m keeping it to a minimum, with hopes of getting back to a far older habit, which is to write three “morning pages” before I am barely out of bed.
So, yesterday I spent the day in the ER for a problem that has been extremely debilitating and painful, but thankfully not life-threatening. The Jenny Odell book seemed a little heavy for the ER, and for the condition I was in, so I pondered my bookshelves for a while and took something to re-read: “One Man’s Meat,” by E. B. White. There was a time when I might have taken a laptop with me, but those days are if not gone, at least in abeyance, and since I use my phone only as a phone (well, as an alarm clock and a camera too, but not for internet access), I was fairly free of electronics.
Here’s a passage from White’s first chapter, dated July 1938 and titled “Removal,” in which he muses on his decision to move from New York City to North Brooklin, Maine:
Clearly the race today is between loud speaking and soft, between the things that are and the things that seem to be, between the chemist of RCA and the angel of God. Radio has already given sound a wide currency, and sound “effects” are taking the place once enjoyed by sound itself. Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and near in favor of the secondary and remote. More hours in every twenty-four will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images—distant and concocted. In sufficient accumulation, radio sounds and television sights may become more familiar to us than their originals. A door closing, heard over the air; a face contorted, seen in a panel of light—these will emerge as the real and the true; and when we bang the door of our own cell or look into another’s face the impression will be of mere artifice. I like to dwell on this quaint time, when the solid world becomes make-believe, McCarthy corporeal and Bergen stuffed, when all is reversed and we shall be like the insane, to whom the antics of the sane seem the crazy twistings of a grig.
When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.
My emphasis. From very early on in the cell phone era, I was commenting to my friends that people are no longer where they are. But E. B. White said it better, of course, and in 1938!
I’m reminded of a passage from “The Fellowship of the Ring,” an interlude in the tale of the hobbits’ first meeting with elves while they're still in the woods of the Shire:
Sam could never describe in words, nor picture clearly to himself, what he felt or thought that night, though it remained in his memory as one of the chief events of his life. The nearest he ever got was to say: ‘Well, sir, if I could grow apples like that, I would call myself a gardener. But it was the singing that went to my heart, if you know what I mean.’
I first thought of this passage because reading E. B. White makes me want to say, “If I could write sentences like that, I would call myself a writer.” (Just the rhythm of White's sentences is a balm to my soul.)
But now that I’ve copied out the LOTR passage, I see that it also touches on questions of seeing and hearing, which are, loosely speaking, my subject matter today.
The eight final-round words were: auslaut, erysipelas, bougainvillea, aiguillette, pendeloque, palama, cernuous, odylic. Of those, I'd only seen 3 before, and 4 of them are unknown to my spellchecker.
Six of the 8 finalists appear to be from South Asian families. One is white, and one (Christopher Serrao) may be Filipino-American, Hispanic, or have ancestors from Goa, I don't know.
More striking to me than the dominance of South Asians (which has become the norm in recent decades) is that not all the contestants are using the same methodology. Shruthika Padhy (#307) and Christopher Serrao (#427) both do something distinctive: writing on themselves with a finger as they spell. I have done something similar myself on an ad hoc basis, but I've never seen it in such a formal context.
Both of those kids are from NJ, though from different parts of the state. I wonder if finger-writing is a method that's been developed in this region and is mostly used here (I'm in NJ, too), or if it's part of the arsenal of spelling methods nationwide, and it's just coincidence that the 2 kids for whom it happens to work well are in the same state. Either way, it proves that the spelling bee community is experimenting with a variety of methods, to find ones that work best in general and for particular individuals.
The amazing 8-way tie suggests to me that they've made a pedagogical breakthrough: they've "cracked" English spelling, at least in this format. They've developed methods for teaching memorization and recall that work, that can repeatedly solve this particular problem, and train talented children to have lexical arsenals on the order of 100,000 words.
I don't think these children have "superhuman" talent, just a couple of standard deviations above the mean talent. But their parents and grandparents come from a culture with an array of mnemonic techniques developed for word-perfect memorization of extremely long texts (the Mahābhārata is almost 2 million words). The problem of English spelling is different, of course, but the idea that rote learning is a teachable skill using an arsenal of methods was there to guide experimentation.
In the discussion at Language Log I said perfect English spelling reminds me of the 4-minute mile: people used to think it would take a unique talent to do it, but after it was done, improved training methods made it accessible to a wider pool of talented runners. Another commenter wrote, So you're saying that someday English spelling might be as easy as climbing Mount Everest? It's not a bad analogy, in that Nationals can expect to see a traffic jam at the top:
A long queue of mountain climbers line a path on Mount Everest on May 22, 2019. 11 climbers died on Everest last week, most while descending from the congested summit during only a few windows of good weather. Nimsdai Project Possible/AP; cropped & resized by me
There's still a lot to know about how this collective brain-hacking process has worked, but even the outline I've given here should give plenty of ideas for fantasy (like Earthsea) and science fiction (like the Mentats of Dune). Not to mention that the New York Times' list of spelling bee books and films doesn't include ANY fictional media centered on a South Asian character, wow.
I don't know if *all* of that neglect is racism--some of it may be an American storytelling convention that wants to focus on heroic individuals, not supportive communities and cultures. But there are rich and distinctive stories to be told, here.
Recent Comments