Beware the cult of interaction

Here's this week's article, "Beware the Cult of Interaction" and some questions to consider when posting:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/02/interactivity-cultish-blogging-twitter

If you're a QHSS student you might explain why Twitter is so popular. Unfortunately, I don't really see the interest so I had great difficulty explaining it to my students. Help us out!

As cited in the article Thoreau wrote, We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate." If that's true than maybe people in Queens and Fort de France have nothing to communicate either! What would you like to know about each other and what might you hope to get from this exchange?

According to Malone a lot of the communication that occurs on the blogosphere and on social network sites are meaningless. Do you agree? Why are people so attracted to sites like Facebook? Why might someone be interested in "Facebook stalking"? What if anything do we learn about ourselves and our society? Or is learning besides the point?

Is Malone right that in all areas beyond family and friends all we want is to be treated fairly and thus impersonally and anonymously?

Is it possible that being bombarded with too much information can hurt democracy?

What are your reactions to this article?

Race in The Age of Obama

Today we finished talking about this article from The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/books/review/Patterson-t.html?_r=1&scp=5&sq=race%20in%20the%20age%20of%20obama&st=cse
My students would like to know how rampanent is racism in America?
We you read in the article that 25% of blacks in America live in poverty it is a shockingly high number but you can't walk around Jamaica for long without seeing that there it is not pure hyperbole.
Odile asked what is racism like in NY? If you have an answer or a part of an answer I'd be so grateful for your ideas.

Are we Americans a bunch of gun packing Nazis?

When I went to Paris I read this article from Le Monde perhaps the best French newspaper. I can't seem to find a copy online but here is a similar article from Le Figaro
http://www.lefigaro.fr/elections-americaines-2008/2008/11/10/01017-20081110ARTFIG00279-la-victoire-d-obama-dope-les-ventes-d-armes-personnelles-.php
Last week a kind colleague showed me an article about a tv show examining the gun use of Americans.
If you read and watch mainstream media you might think every American has a gun. No one I know owns a gun so it seemed to be a complete distortion of the reality I know. After having watched Romeo+Juliet (1996) by Luhrmann we discussed gun violence in America. We are studying the following article in class next week.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/sep/29/gun-violence-death-us

I would like those of you living in America to read the article and post your opinion. Am I the one who has a distorted view of America? Are guns really as prevalent as these articles make them seem?

So maybe I'm just a big complainer

Or maybe not.

I've spent more time than I'd like to admit wondering how Mme Sureau could live in Martinique and then knowing how it's hotter than hades how she could propose someone take her place. I've spent a lot of time asking how the people in the Fulbright organization could send me to a place where it's too hot to think much less do anything else. And then I remember Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721) and the letter where someone asks Usbek who has newly arrived in Paris,"Comment peut-on etre persan?" The point of the letter is that the Parisians are so ignorant about other cultures they cannot even conceive of being a Persian. I mentally chide myself and figure I'm obviously displaying the same ignorance and lack of sensitivity towards this new culture that I've yet to figure out.

Alex said that the people who made the sidewalks (that are only about 6 inches wide in some parts) are mean and cruel and stupid. In our world stupid is an 's' word that isn't supposed to be used but I couldn't think of admonishing him when he was so clearly speaking the truth. Why make a sidewalk if a 3 year old's feet don't even fit on one part of a high traffic road. But along with all these questions my mind readily supplies the answer. If I had to build a sidewalk in 105 degree heat than I too would have made it as narrow as possible. And this is, of course, just one of hundreds of indications that the infrastructure in Martinique seems to be completely lacking or falling apart.

And today it all became clear. I'm not a complainer. Ok well I am but it's justified. Mme Sureau is not a torturer. It's just the hottest September Martinique has ever experienced. Theo's principal said it was the hottest Sept she's known in her 60 years and indeed 60 is the number. Today I was reading Meteo France and it has never been this hot since 1946. What's most noticeable for the meteorologists is that even at night it doesn't get any cooler. On Sept 28 it never got cooler than 28 degrees which has only happened once before. http://www.meteo.fr/temps/domtom/antilles/pack-public/alaune/cmp_ma_oct09.pdf
Eureka! I am a complainer but it's not just complaining for the sake of complaining.  We're not just suffering because we're used to NY where it's cooler. We're suffering because it is hotter than ever before.

One last rumination. I'm reading Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. I would never claim to be as influential as the people who made Hush Puppies popular in the late 1990's but let me share these ideas and have you wonder what if it were always, everywhere getting hotter and hotter? At what point do we realize that we are ruining our planet and it's time to stop? 

Fun

In Martinique we have a lot of fun.  We play football otherwise known as soccer.  I play it a lot. Sometimes I play with my friend Alec. Last week we played a big game against his sister and another teenage girl who is our neighbor.  The score for the first game was 4-10 we lost. The second game was 2-6. We only played half a game because the sun sets at 6pm and by 6:30 we couldn't see the ball anymore.  We lost but the girls were twice our size.

My dad just bought me a new basketball. It was on sale so it only cost $15! Last week I went to the park and played basketball with my friend Manau. It was fun! Good thing because in order to amortize such an expense my dad did an excel spreadsheet and figured that we'll have to play another 256 times. Only kidding!

You can also have a lot of fun making new friends at the beach and swimming.

There are a lot of tropical fish that you can see with a snorkel.  But you better watch out for the sea urchins.  If you come I can guide you around them and show you how to stay away from the rocks because that's where they grow.





And one final warning - beware of con artists even if they are beautiful and only four years old. A few weeks ago we went to the beach in St. Anne. It was your typical turquoise Caribbean sea but strangely you could swim for a very far distance and never be in deeper than your waist. After a swim we were resting on the beach and this young tatoo artist came by with her machine that made the most beautiful invisible tatoos in either green or purple. Then for her arduous labors she asked for a euro. Alex and Theo each got two invisible tatoos and I offered her the .50 that I had in my pocket. I figured she well earned her money in resourcefulness and in the halarity of the situation.

Sunset at the beach

There are many moments when I wish my fairy godmother would arrive, wave her magic baguette (or wand as they say in English) and transport me back to a colder climate. Alex too has those wishes. The other night before going to sleep he told me, "I want to go up North, where it's colder, where it's not always hot, back to NY, back to Valley Stream, back to Orleans Rd." Let there be no ambiguity on just where he wishes he could be. And then every once in awhile there are those moments albeit brief when I also thank God for having brought me to this tropical, magical place. (Mind you the ratio of one thought over the other is something like a zillion to one.) Nevertheless, in an effort to be positive let me share with you some of those magical moments. Watch the sunset slide show below. Sorry that I couldn't figure out how to put it closer to this posting.

Vacation

In Martinique there are a lot of strikes. When we just arrived there was a gas strike where no one could buy gas. There's no self-service gas pumping in Martinique. It has to be pumped for you by a professional pompiste. The crazy thing about this strike was that it was a preventitive strike. What that means is that the pompistes weren't striking because their work conditions were so bad - they had already done that for 6 weeks last Febuary - they were striking because they anticipated that maybe some of the things they won in the last strike wouldn't be respected. They were striking just for the pure pleasure of flexing their muscles!

Then I went to school and in the middle of the second week there was another strike. The school tried to call home but the only person home to answer the phone was my grandmother who (no offense Grandma) doesn't speak that great French or at least doesn't have the cultural background that would allow her to deduce that of course schools might close at any moment because there was a strike. (It's kind of like Maureen's college level students who may or may not have understood when she said, "Stand up and talk to someone else in the classroom." The idea of standing and talking and not just passively sitting and taking notes made them think they couldn't possibly have understood what this crazy teacher from NY was saying). So I went to school for a little while but not for too long, not too long at all and then once upon a time the lunch ladies decided to strike. My dad fortunately met my friend's very nice father who picked me up and brought me home.

And then yesterday, I thought the cafeteria and after-school people were going on strike but I later discovered that all the aids and the custodians were also going on strike so the school could not fuction. No school today. It's like a having a weekend in the middle of the week because of course tomorrow, Wednesday, there's no school - except for my swimming and sailing lessons :)

Maybe there will be a long strike. Now's the time because in less than three weeks we have two and a half weeks off for vacation. So I hope that this school strike lasts for about two and a half weeks. Then my All Saint's Day vacation could become a summer vacation for me.

It's ok though because my learning in French is exponential. Yesterday, my new teacher told a girl that I had better handwriting than she did. That's quite the insult her for her because I'm still learning script but French students start learning it in kindergarten.