When two worlds collide.
So the two worlds are the novel, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, and the world of teaching.
I’ve just finished an online professional development course, which is not strictly speaking compulsory, but in a roundabout way is. It’s supposed to only take twenty hours. I have felt every minute, my friends. For relaxation this week, on breaks from the course, I decided to read Snow Crash. That was foolish, because strangely, Snow Crash decided to ramble on about many of the same things as the course, and unfortunately, sometimes, in pretty similarly dense language.
Between them both my head is wrecked. I seem to have spent large amounts of time googling word definitions just to get a handle on what various, extraordinarily abstract sentences mean. Bizarrely, some of those very same words keep occurring in the Neal Stephenson book. It’s strange how many words there are out there that I am not 100% certain of the definition of. When I read them in novels, I gloss over my confusion. Professionally, and in an arena where I must provide feedback, I have to go look it up. Do you know how many ways the word Meta, can be used? Too many, that’s how many. I’m still not 100% certain of that one. I saw it used yesterday in a blog and its context didn’t seem to fit ant of the definitions I’d come across. Also non-sequitur. In this case, I’m 100% certain that it was used incorrectly during one of the course presentations. Of course I hit Google trying to clarify it to myself and trying to find a justification for the lecturer’s use of it, but I do believe she was wrong. She used it wrong twice. I wanted to slap her.
Anyway, the course intrigued me because it concerned itself with the development of creativity via thinking skills and the promotion of a sense of wonder. Myself, I wondered why a course as potentially useful as this one had to be written in bullshitese. (Anyone who has spent any time at all in academia will recognise bullshitese immediately.) Honestly, the amount of time it takes to break down some sentences, just to realise, for example, that it actually means sometime as simple as, when children play they often imagine they are someone else. You wouldn't believe how that one was stated. There's no way my mind will even consider an attempt at recreating it.
Among other wonders of this sort was a ****** 48 page essay on how important it is consider if what you’re doing is working. And another 30 page one from a woman who successfully managed to convince some colleagues that she worked with, in the same school even, to hold meetings via a computer. She considered that a success, even though what they seemed to be doing was updating to a forum about once a week. Hello. Would they not bump into each other in the hallway more often than that? Actually those essays were weird, as because they both sought to show reflective practise in action, there was an awful amount of dark nights of the soul type self examination, admissions of failure and promises to do better. They seemed a little bit cultish actually, on reflection. J
Anyway, the bad bits aside, there were some good aspects, although it was a little frightening how much emphasis was put on group rather than individual creativity. However, one fascinating thing I have learned from this course is that thinking may actually occur as a part of speech, which sometimes gives rise to the ,” did I just say that” moment. Basically as far as I understand it, an articulated thought may actually be formed or clarified or altered in the moment of articulation, being as new to the speaker as to anyone else.
“Thought is not merely expressed in words, it comes into existence through them. “ Vygotsky 1962 page 218
It struck me as similar to writing when you write something you had no idea you were going to. So, a lot of what we say, particularly in relation to new concepts, is first draftish kind of stuff. In future I’m going to allow people who say dodgy things and then want to retract or modify them, much more of a benefit of the doubt. Well, maybe just kids. J
And what does this have to do with Snow Crash? Well, basically, as part of the story line, the hero, called Hiro Protagonist (bad joke much?) is investigating whether the story of the Tower of Babel is true and details the infection of human language with a virus which causes all languages to move further and further from their common source. Amongst random amounts of Ninja type action, the book is fairly heavy on research into language development, and a surprisingly interesting read so far, although sometimes I wasn’t sure whether I was having a break from my course and reading a novel or vice versa. ;)
As a test, where do you think this quote comes from, the book or the course?
“...relativists tend to believe that language is not the vehicle of thought but it’s determining medium. It is the framework of cognition. Our perceptions of everything are organized by the flux of sensations passing over that framework.”
Answer below.
Way below.
It’s from the book. The book has the virtue of not carrying on like that forever which the course did not.
But it’s over now.