American Teacher: A Personal Perspective

So, below you will find sound bites from the documentary American Teacher, below each sound bite is my personal perspective or thought...um, I don't think these sound bites are in order. I think this documentary is more about what teachers do every day in the trenches and how the agenda of others politicians, local governments don't really matter when it comes to the lives of students and those who teach them.

If you haven't seen this documentary I suggest a view, if only for the fact that it's narrated by Matt Damon.

I have watched it 3 times.

I've also read all the comments on IMDB, I'm probably sorry that I read all the comments on IMDB. I don't really think this documentary had an agenda. I think the six words on the cover say its agenda in a nutshell. Teachers are dedicated, brilliant and inspiring. They are also underpaid, misunderstood and scapegoated. I promise you those comments are evidence of the latter.

"Reading is not something that you either do or don't do well. You can actually transform and do it better. Helping [students] transform from considering themselves non-readers to considering themselves readers was like a high better than any drug I've never tried."
I find it interesting that all teachers from little people up until high school graduation are in some way responsible for the literacy of the children who come through their classroom doors. And, it is fun when you find that hook that shows students that it isn't the fact that they don't like to read, it's the fact that they haven't found something interesting to read. It's fun to use that hook to help students to reach their full potential as readers. No book is too low, as long as the book is seen as a gateway to bigger, more complex reads that expand the minds of the readers. Oh, and I've never tried drugs. 

"It really felt like a calling."
"Felt" is the key word...

"Having great teachers is the very key thing."
The 'very key thing' to all things...everyone, at one time, had to be taught what they know now, the person doing the teaching deserves recognition and praise. 

"Without great teachers we do not have a democracy. Our students cannot be successful without having great teachers in front of them."
True. What is a great teacher? If you are a teacher, are you aspiring to be great?

"Teachers in the United States are routinely undervalued that's the problem in the American education system..."
I know that we are undervalued. How do we get others to see the value in teaching? I have a friend who started teaching as a second career, she said she didn't know how hard it was to teach until she started doing it. Sure, there are other jobs that are hard, teaching is hard too.

"We still struggle to provide the status, the salaries the respect and the training that teaching as a full profession requires and deserves."
Why? Is it because our values, as a nation are out of whack? Is it because teaching used to be just a woman's profession?

"Anyone can teach a kid who gets it right away."
True teaching comes in teaching those kids, who because of their situation, need to be taught. They are the most difficult to reach.

"A lot of people think that teachers go into the job because of the vacations or the short hours or because they like kids and I don't think they understand that it's the intellectual rigor that's involved in presenting information in such a way that a child can understand it."
While those may be reasons initially, good teachers stay because they love the challenge of reaching kids on a daily basis. 

"Teachers are constant active decision makers. They make thousands of decision a day and they don't do it about an abstract idea they do it about the life of a child in that moment."
I read somewhere that the only people who make more split second decisions are air traffic controllers. I don't know if this is true, but there are some day when it definitely feels true.

"By the end of this year, I don't care who you are, this is what you need to do, this is what you need to learn..."
What it all comes down to is this! Who cares if it's written down or typed out or put in it's proper form if it's not conveyed to the students who are doing the learning.

"Nobody would question a lawyer getting paid, or a doctor getting paid, or a consultant getting paid and I think that skill set required to be a teacher is at least as complex, if not more complex. I think teachers are quick to get defensive about that because we are professionals."
I know I am. I know that I am intelligent enough to have done something else, but there is freedom in being a teacher, even with all this baggage.

"When you have high teacher turnover it creates a chaotic situation where kids don't have continuity, where the knowledge base of the school is continually flowing out like a leaky bucket, where the school is continually pedaling just to stay in place because it can't build the system of education that it needs to have to really ensure that kids are learning from year to year."
Yes, but how do we retain good teachers? Especially when we can't pay them what they deserve and it takes about five years before teaching becomes less of a challenge.

"It was like a $20,000 raise for me to go into administration after being in the classroom for 25 years."
I don't care how much of a raise I could ever get. I never want to go into administration. I never want to be in charge of anything. I don't see myself staying in this profession after 25 years anyway, if I make it to 25.

"They're not asking to make $300,000 they're asking to buy a house, to own a decent car, to live in a nice neighborhood, to have some comforts to maybe take a vacation every once in awhile and when you have teachers who have to have second jobs, when you have teachers that are living at the poverty level, then I think there's something wrong with that. And, as a society we really need to change that culture we need to flip it around to say that being a teacher is the most important job in our society."
Someone I teach with said to me that she only made ends meet after she got married and had two incomes in her household.

"The best anti-poverty program is a world class education."
Yes, yes, it is.

Some numbers and fast facts from the documentary:

1. 20% of teachers in urban districts quit every year.
2. 46% of teachers quit before their 5th year...this cost 7.34 billion dollars a year.
3. Teachers spend their own money on supplies for their classrooms.
4. Many who don't understand teaching want to tax and vilify it.
5. Newest teachers get the most difficult and largest classes.
6. Teaches don't have a lunch hour.
7. Teachers work straight through.
8. Teachers stay late and come to school early.
9. None of these are enough.
10. Women who now become doctors et cetera could only become teachers or nurses.
11. Very few top graduates want to be teachers.
12. A good teacher has a $400,000 economical impact per class.
13. There are very few teachers of color.
14. 50 hours at school +15 hours a week grading (that's if you only spend 5 minutes per kid per assignment)=65 hours a week; for some teacher's recess is the only prep period.
15. For many years people assumed that the teacher in the family was female and she, yes, she, was the 2nd income and was not really needed.
16. Many teachers have to work a second job (31%; counting extra teacher duties for pay that's 64%).
17. Many teachers are single, in unhappy marriages or divorced.
18. 70% of college freshman would go into teaching if money were no object.
19. The problem with teaching compensation is that the starting salary is the ending salary.
20. A man can't support his family on a teacher's salary and now only 16% of the workforce is male versus 22% in 2002 and 34% in 1970.

Finland, Singapore and South Korea are tops in education, why?

• They make it tough to get into the teacher program, the governement actually recruits top college students.
• They pay for teachers to get trained.
• Purchasing power of 2.5 times the USA.
• Teachers buy nothing out of their pocket.
• Teachers have prestige.
• Teachers assume it will be their career.
• They rarely leave the profession.
• Teachers think of school as their family.

One answer, according to the documentary
Increasing teacher compensation lowers teacher attrition and raises graduation rate.

One model
TEP School
$125,000 a year using public funds that have been purposefully reallocated

50 Books in a Year Book #2: Charlotte Temple

All the morality of Jane Austen without any of the fun, Fantine without all the wonderful singing. Vanity Fair lite...triple ugh. Dear Reader, I've decided I loathe being talked to directly by the narrator.

I'd like to write more, but you see, I'd start talking about this book out of context of its time period and I'd be bad-mouthing things about it that weren't really in its control...like the plot, the lack of character development and other things that make books worth reading. I'm glad it's the first successful American novel, blah, blah, blah. I'm not sorry that I read it, blah, blah, blah...I'd recommend it to no one. I mean unless your into seduction novels, full of crap whose sole purpose is to make girls afraid of their feelings, of living, of leaving their parents homes and going out on their own...

See, I've gotta stop.

50 Books in a Year Book #1: The Sun Also Rises

The first time I read this book I was a senior in high school. It didn't give me a lust for Spain, Paris or bullfights, but it did give me this itch to travel and explore the American Dream. This year I'm teaching this book in a separate unit with some Harlem Renaissance thrown in for good measure. I look forward to talking about it as a part of Modernist literature and as another aspect of the American Dream, our disillusionment, or the death of the dream as it were.

The second and third times I read it, I focused mostly on character development with emphasis on Lady Brett Ashley. I'm a sucker for guys like Jake Barnes (more about that later), truly he's the reason I love this novel, but he wouldn't be the totally flawed, screwed-up, believable man he is without Lady Brett Ashley.

You see, I think she's a pretty amazing look at the modern woman. I may not want to emulate her 100%, but there are aspects of her character that, like Wonder Woman and Laura Holt, are part of mine.

The traits I like are simple:

1] She does what she wants Drinking, yes please. Smoking, okie doke. A bullfighter, a count, Cohn, sign her up. During my first read I thought what my students always think about her (you know that she's a ho), but she really isn't. If she was a man doing what she's doing nobody would care. It would seem a lot of people can't get past this to realize that she is just coping with her unhappiness and it is just part of the drinking and the other stuff that they are all doing.

2] She is independent and what confines her is in her head. This is true of all women. Heck, this is true of all  people. In the 1920s I think this was just becoming the normal view of things.

3] She loves and wants to be loved Brett loves Jake. Jake loves her. Their lives are complicated. This is pretty real stuff.

4] She can run with the best of them She's pretty darned honest about who she is and what she does. Sometimes strangely so...she's not going to let anyone or anything get past her. Sure, she doesn't really have any dreams or goals, but none of them do really, and I'd pick her over Daisy Buchanan any day (honestly, can you read both novels without comparing the two).

This time around I read it as a person past her 20s enough that I can remember them fondly with only a tiny hint of nostalgia.

There's a review of the movie adaptation on IMDB, and while I don't recommend watching the movie if you love this book, it is only a shadow of the book, even if it does have some great name actors and in that respect reminds me of the movie for The Fountainhead, I do love this review for the following:

the 'Lost Generation' Hemingway wrote of were disillusioned young Americans, who, shattered by the horror and brutality of a meaningless 'Great War', lost their innocence, and became a 'live fast, die young' crowd of expatriates, settling in Paris. These were men and women in their twenties and thirties...

As a person now in my late thirties I understand the feelings of these characters, and while I've never been to war, I understand what it means to be lost...in some ways we are all at one time or another lost. In this novel we see Hemingway's understanding of that. We see, that although he must not have felt this hope himself, he wants us to see that we don't always live in this lost moment in our lives. He also wants us to see that this hedonistic time helps mold and shape us. It is one of the many pillars that hold up our foundation. Yes, foundation. I'd even go so far as to say that it's part of that stereotypical American journey.

I can't wait to read this book again.

Ethan Frome in the Honors Sophomore Classroom

[Isn't this just the most delicious cover ever!? Source]

Ethan Frome

I read Ethan Frome for the first time in college and immediately fell in love. This book is written unlike any of Wharton's other books, but still contains some of the same themes of isolation and redemption. We read it with Our Town. Over the years I've taken to called this unit the Small Town Unit, as we explore the plusses and minuses of small town life and the gloriousness of being alive through these two works. I've read that a lot of 9th graders read this book. While they can read it and probably get it on some level, I enjoy teaching it to my honors kids at the 10th grade level. I think you need to have at least dated or experienced a little heart break of some sort to truly get into this novel.

Classic American Novel
Ethan Frome

• Delicious love triangle
• Individual vs. Personal Happiness
• the color red

Projects used:
Sadly, I have no idea where I got any of these sources, if you know or if the core of one of them is yours tell me...I love to give credit for things I don't totally create from my head. I do know that I've used the study guide from Glencoe McGraw Hill.

Ethan Frome and Edith Wharton notes
FOILS in Ethan Frome
Understatement
Frame Story
Agatha Christie writing prompt
"Man of the Hour"

Why I love this book: 
When I first read this book a million years ago it was Winter, and I've got to tell you reading a book about a man trapped in a small New England town as stark as its name just made that winter day all the more wonderfully bleak. I love that every year I teach this book I really can't decide who's responsible for Ethan's downfall...naive and desperate Ethan, love-torn and forlorn Mattie or cold and pathetic Zeena. This book can and should be read in one sitting and after you read it I dare you not to be upset with all three characters and I dare you to not look at a winter day a little differently.

Sample calendar with poems and short stories I pair with it:

The Automat

Ok, so I need to tell you an interesting story about my search for Americana.

During April's A-Z challenge I wrote about paintings I want to take my kid to see and then asked if there were any others out there that I should try to visit, FBT of Kill Me If I Stop suggested two paintings, one by Pollock and I love Pollock and one I'd never heard of (and, I thought I'd looked at all the Hopper's), a painting titled Automat.

Here's what she said:

"...I would love to see Automat by Edward Hopper because there are so many stories to be told from that one instant in time. That's what I particularly like about Hopper; he makes my imagination expand. Is she waiting for someone who never came? Is she just on her own drinking coffee? Does she look sad, pensive, maybe just weary? All of his works are just so suggestive."

Of course, I had to find the painting immediately and when I did something puzzled me. First, of all if you don't have "Diamonds Are A Girls' Best Friend" immediately in your head at the mention of the word 'automat' let me put it there now and second, um, I realized that an 'automat' is not in any way a laundromat with food, as I had previously thought.

This painting does invoke all that FTB mentions and it also had me puzzled...what in the dickens was/is an automat? And, how could I be missing this important piece of America? The answer, of course, is that I've never seen "That Touch of Mink" (when I asked my mother what an automat was she said she didn't have a clue, but when I describe them to her, she said "Oh, like that cafeteria in that scene with that movie starring Doris Day, where the guy keeps trying to get the food, but every time one is set down, someone else takes it and then there's a ruckus in the back with the food service." I said, "Sure."--I really need to see that movie!)


My friends had a few suggestions, as you can see. And, all the things I found suggest that automats (especially those of the Horn and Hardart variety) are no longer in existence. I even checked the Smithsonian as I'd read this lovely article about them from Smithsonian.com and, well, I was in the DC when I found out all of this information. I made my family go all over the National Museum of American History. GUESS WHAT!? The pop culture section is closed for renovations and, according to the lovely older gentleman at the information desk there used to be one to use (can you believe it?...actually my sister and I think we may have eaten at it one time when we were there...but, it was before I knew what it was and I didn't take a picture!), but they closed it and then he told me to search on Google if I wanted to find one. The horror!

Then BAMN closed, well actually it closed several years ago and I'm left with my itch to eat at an automat...and, boy, I want to, perhaps alone on a dark night wearing only one glove.

Do you know where I can find one? I would really like to eat some processed food or the like or fresh food, I suppose, from a big metal box.

Guess what I'm listening to as I type this...I'll leave you with it.

The Gettysburg Address...148 years later...

I don't know if you all can tell, but I really love myself some United States of America...really. So, when my friend told me it was the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address I had to take some time to write about it.

When I was in 4th grade I had to memorize this speech. I remember sitting in the living room, at the kitchen table, lying in the tub reading the words from our Encyclopedia Britanica over and over and over. At the time I didn't really understand why we had to memorize it, frankly, I didn't really even understand all of the words, but now, as the words echo in my mind, I can't help but think about how important the words of this speech are to all of us.

In this 2 minute speech we begin to see the makings of our modern America. No matter what we say or what we do, we believe and fight for the fact that all men are created equal...and, we do not/cannot forget those that sacrifice their lives to insure this equality.

     Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.   

    Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

     But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

~Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863

50 Books in a Year: Book #41 Watermelon Man

     Herman Raucher wrote The Summer of '42, a book I picked up on accident for a quarter at a garage sale. It is beautiful and tragic and real. I've never seen the movie and I'm not sure I want to, since I love the book so much...that isn't exactly how I feel about this other Raucher book Watermelon Man. Written in 1970 a year before The Summer of '42, it chronicles the life of this incredible bigot named Jeffrey Gerber and his inability to find any  substance in his life...that is until he wakes up one morning and he's 'black as night' and getting blacker by the minute.
     In the beginning I found the premise of this book to be quite clever and enjoyed some of the old racial slang being made fun of in a way that must have been totally unexpected and fresh in 1970. By the end of the book, however, I was tired of the jokes and looking forward to watching the movie. Frankly, everything about the book is probably predictable to a modern audience there's jokes about class and race stereotypes including a black mans' prowess in bed, his ability to run a good race and his ability to make light out of just about anything (you know the old Sambo complex). There's a lady at the office who's only interested in him after he's black and while he feels used, he likes the attention. His kids, who are young, don't understand what the big deal is and his wife, who watched the race riots religiously and wanted to help everybody get along is actually, you guessed it, so racist she really can't be seen with or married to him anymore. What I found interesting, however, were all the ways Mr. Gerber tries to get rid of his skin tone there are long steamy showers, creams and powders and lotions...this has to play out quite humorously on film.
     I gotta tell you though, I really wish the book had been stereotypical until the very end, and since it isn't I'm not sure what lessons I'm supposed to have learned. It seems that the only characters who come off as having grown are the kids, and even then I'm not sure if that's true as Jeff, rich and divorced, only talks to them on the phone.
     This book is funny when I think it should be serious and just when I started laughing for real...it pulled the rug right from underneath me.

3 Stars
 

50 Books in a Year: Book #35 The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf

I was a little apprehensive to read this book 1] because I thought the first book How to Flirt with A Naked Werewolf was so funny and delicious I didn't think this book could possibly be as good and 2] I didn't really like Maggie as she was portrayed in the first book and thought that Harper would have to do a lot of work to make me like her while still being loyal to Mo and Cooper.

By gosh people she did it!

We see Maggie grow up a little at the end of How to Flirt with A Naked Werewolf, I can guess that it's just enough that we want to read a whole book about her. But, in this book, we truly see her transformation. She puts aside some deep seeded prejudices, recognizes that it's these prejudices that almost got her and her whole pack killed, and even accepts the faults in others when an encroaching pack tries to take over her land. In this respect, I think that Maggie may be a stronger character than her predecesor Mo. Maggie doesn't do what she doesn't want to do, Maggie communicates (which means those silly misunderstandings that happen in all romance novels don't last long) and the reason why she comes off as a bully in the first book and sometimes in this books is because she is so passionate about her love of family, her people and her wilderness.

In a believeable way, Maggie bumbles around trying to make the right choice of who to marry, while not understanding why she's drawn to a man who should be anything, but her type. There's a hilarious scene were Nick suspects Maggie, in werewolf form, of being Mo and in a fit of crazy jealousy, she bites him on the rear and then regrets that decision everytime she sees him limping around. She makes fun of baby showers and other kinds of girlie rites of passage (my kind of girl). She is honest and sincere (almost to a fault). She is the kind of female hero that I'd like to see more often in any book I read.

Cool things I like about this series:
1. If I hadn't read the first one, I would have still understood what was going on in this one. She tells us just enough that we get whats going on and, as a person who read the first one, I didn't feel like I was being beaten over the head with the information.
2. You aren't going to find a sex scene until page 230 of this book and, yes, that's a cool thing, as it lends to plot and character development. There is sexual tension, but it's of the cute romantic comedy variety and it seems that in werewolf land, once you've mated they're yours for life...so sex and biting (the werewolf kind) are taken pretty darn seriously.
3. All of the characters in this series seem attainable. Nick, who is the love interest in this book, is a nerdy werewolf hunter who has to be saved, at least once, by Maggie because he's too dorky to realize he's in danger. And, he sounds just yummerrific in glasses, carrying a load of books on the extraterrastrial. Maggie, too, possesses typical, but not redundant and cliched, and likeable strong female lead attributes.

I am in love with this series and will definitely be reading all that Molly Harper decides to write, especially if they are books about Alaskan werewolves.

What Makes Superman So Darned American? (Or, is he?)

For years I have assigned Gary Engle's essay What Makes Superman So Darned American? early on in my Honors Sophomore English class. They have to write a response essay to it and for the most part (because it's such an interesting subject, full of allusions most of them get or are easy to research) it makes for an interesting bellwether of things to come. I can determine which of my students are good writers, have a commanding voice, hate/love The current President, love pop culture, love comics and I can usually approach the year with a firm grasp of the identies of my classrooms. I love this essay assignment, just as I love this essay.

I don't know where I was in April, but I did not know that Superman renounced his citizenship, so did not know how to react when one of my students said in response to the essay title, "But, he's not. He gave up his citizenship." I spent a couple of "I should be doing something else with this time" hours researching his citizenship. Was he ever a citizen to begin with? The answer, according to the articles I read is "No". It was only after the 1950s (and, I could wax on about why this decade is so important for such a movement) television show that "the American way" was added to "Truth and Justice". Superman has just gone back to his globalized roots. As GEORGE GENE GUSTINES of the New York Times notes, “'Superman is a visitor from a distant planet who has long embraced American values,' said DC Comics co-publishers Jim Lee and Dan DiDio in a statement. 'As a character and an icon, he embodies the best of the American Way.' And though Superman will 'put a global focus on his never ending battle,' the statement continued, 'he remains, as always, committed to his adopted home and his roots as a Kansas farm boy from Smallville.'”

The question I guess I'm asking is, what kind of United States do we live in that Superman feels he needs to publicly renounce a citzenship he never had to be able to fight for 'truth and justice' all over the world? I don't have an answer to that question. I'm still trying to figure out what Engle would think of it all! Superman and Clark Kent are two separate entities that make one figure. What happens when one entity (and, don't think I didn't notice it's the meek, mild, mannered reporter/broadcast journalist) is clearly American and the other (the stronger, more handsome and revered of the two) is Universal? And, you have to have them both in order to have the super hero. You have to have the man who is tied to the culture of one nation in order to have the alien who is tied to many.

How does this play out in my classroom? Clearly, it just makes Engle's essay even more poignant. Here are some wonderful things that Engle says about the Man of Steel, things that do not change even if he says he isn't a US citizen and, while we claimed him as our own, he truly could fit into any nation as a culture hero and into any nations' idea of 'truth and justice'.

• Superman is the great American hero. We are a nation rich with legendary figures. But among the Davy Crocketts and Paul Bunyans and Mike Finks and Pecos Bills and all the rest who speak for various regional identities in the pantheon of American folklore, only Superman achieves truly mythic stature, interweaving a pattern of beliefs, literary conventions, and cultural traditions of the American people more powerfully and more accessibly than any other cultural symbol of the twentieth century, perhaps of any period in our history.
• Superman is an orphan rocketed to Earth when his native planet Krypton explodes; he lands near Smallville and is adopted by Jonathan and Martha Kent, who inculcate in him their American middle-class ethic; as an adult he migrates to Metropolis where he defends America–no, the world! no, the Universe!–from all evil and harm while playing a romantic game in which, as Clark Kent, he hopelessly pursues Lois Lane, who hopelessly pursues Superman, who remains aloof until such time as Lois proves worthy of him by falling in love with his feigned identity as a weakling. That’s it.
• It is impossible to imagine Superman being as popular as he is and speaking as deeply to the American character were he not an immigrant and an orphan. Immigration, of course, is the overwhelming fact in American history. Except for the Indians, all Americans have an immediate sense of their origins elsewhere. No nation on Earth has so deeply embedded in its social consciousness the imagery of passage from one social identity to another: the Mayflower of the New England separatists, the slave ships from Africa and the subsequent underground railroads toward freedom in the North, the sailing ships and steamers running shuttles across two oceans in the nineteenth century, the freedom airlifts in the twentieth. Somehow the picture just isn’t complete without Superman’s rocket ship.
• He stands out among the hosts of comic book characters (Batman is a good example) for whom the superhero role is like a mask assumed when needed, a costume worn over their real identities as normal Americans. Superman’s powers–strength, mobility, x-ray vision and the like –are the comic-book equivalents of ethnic characteristics, and they protect and preserve the vitality of the foster community in which he lives in the same way that immigrant ethnicity has sustained American culture linguistically, artistically, economically, politically, and spiritually. The myth of Superman asserts with total confidence and a childlike innocence the value of the immigrant in American culture.
• Individual mobility is an integral part of America’s dreamwork. Is it any wonder, then, that our greatest hero can take to the air at will? Superman’s ability to fly does more than place him in a tradition of mythic figures going back to the Greek messenger god Hermes or Zetes the flying Argonaut. It makes him an exemplar in the American dream.
• On a human scale, the American need to keep moving suggests a neurotic aimlessness under the surface of adventure. But take the human restraints off, let Superman fly unencumbered when and wherever he will, and the meaning of mobility in the American consciousness begins to reveal itself Superman’s incredible speed allows him to be as close to everywhere at once as it is physically possible to be. Displacement is, therefore, impossible. His sense of self is not dispersed by his life’s migration but rather enhanced by all the universe that he is able to occupy. What American, whether an immigrant in spirit or in fact, could resist the appeal of one with such an ironclad immunity to the anxiety of dislocation?
• The shape-shifting between Clark Kent and Superman is the means by which this mid-twentieth-century, urban story–like the pastoral, nineteenth-century Western before it–addresses in dramatic terms the theme of cultural assimilation.
• Though a disguise, Kent is necessary for the myth to work. This uniquely American hero has two identities, one based on where he comes from in life’s journey, one on where he is going. One is real, one an illusion, and both are necessary for the myth of balance in the assimilation process to be complete. Superman’s powers make the hero capable of saving humanity; Kent’s total immersion in the American heartland makes him want to do it.
• In America, cultural icons that manage to tap the national religious spirit are of necessity secular on the surface and sufficiently generalized to incorporate the diversity of American religious traditions. Superman doesn’t have to be seen as an angel to be appreciated, but in the absence of a tradition of national religious iconography, he can serve as a safe, nonsectarian focus for essentially religious sentiments, particularly among the young.

If comicbooks and their heroes are signs of the times in which they live, what does this say about the world today? And, is it a good or a bad thing?

Here's an interesting review.

50 Books in a Year: Book #28 Ragtime

          So, I've been meaning to read Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow for about two years now. From the moment that I realized that Ragtime the Musical was based on a book, a book, that from what I understand is out of time and hard to follow. It's suppose to follow the lives of three families (a white upper middle-class family, a Jewish immigrant family and a poor black family) as they struggle with the progressive era.
          I've also read that this is the first book that is the first of its kind in the sense that Doctorow is putting his characters inside the first 20 years of the 20th century and, includes factional information within the lives of his characters. Most of his fictional characters don't have names and are called by their family station there's Mother, Father, Tateh and so forth depending on which family.
          It is a little dry so far, but I've already met Harry Houdini and a murderer, I'm looking forward to getting to the meat of the action, of course, knowing that there is no meat (or, that it's all meaty and worth my attention?) and that these characters go in and out of time in the Progressive Era teaching me what it was like to be an American so I can appreciate this concept as a Post-Modern American, way past the Progressive Era, and not waste any of the precious time I have.
          I miss the music.