Repeated Reading Project: Metadiary, entry 1.5

So, it turns out that I'm really bad at keeping up with something unless I have a due date involved.

I have continued with this project, just not as much as I should.

And the longer the gap is between my "repeated reading" activities, the more I forget from what I read last time.

The moral of the story is:  this repeated reading thing is more effective when you don't allow large gaps of time to occur between readings.

Repeated Reading Project: Metadiary, entry 1

Monday 22 July, 2015

My original plan with the learning diary was to type it up and put it on my blog.  Perhaps I’ll do that too, but I started writing it by hand in a notebook, and I’ve found the fact that I’m too lazy to “undo” (with an eraser) anything beyond a few spelling mistakes may actually be a benefit in this case.  When I type, I re-process what I’m going to say and go back to change it to match what I’m currently thinking, rather than what I thought at the time.  I’ve already done this several times with this paragraph.

When I write by hand, however, I don’t erase my previous jottings when I think better of them, I just cross them out and make a note to skip down to the point where I’ve recast what I’m doing.  This means my previous mistakes are still there to be read – and we all know how much information about the learning process can be gleaned from mistakes.

So, theoretically, I’m going to try to keep the learning diary going as a hand-written thing and type up my reflections on the process (this “metadiary”) to go online.  My original idea was to have the whole thing go online – just to really push the “Open Access” side of things.  Forget being able to access and use whatever papers I may or may not produce as a result of this project – my raw data will be available for other researchers, if they know where to look.  And, heck, let’s face it – I’m hardly the best person to analyse what’s happening here, am I?  I’ll do my best, but I think the best thing I can do is let other people play too. 

I’ll probably scan the hand-written notes at a later time and put them up somewhere.  I’m hesitant to type them up at this point, as I’m already double dipping in the diary idea by writing this reflection on the diary writing process.  Typing up the notes will just be compounding the observer’s paradox even further, and I’m pretty sure I’m already at a point where the data is highly compromised by the design.

Just to give myself a decent skeleton to work with for the learning diary, I’ve given myself a series of questions to answer after each session.  I’m also quite deliberately not answering them immediately afterwards, but a day or so later.  This is because I’m trying to avoid tiring myself out so that I can put more effort into it.  After reading a passage of text with a dictionary to help me with every third word (for some sentences, much more than that) I’m not ready to do something with a high cognitive load.  If I wrote in the diary immediately, I’d probably do a very poor job of it.

On the same track, I’m also making sure the questions I ask myself aren’t too onerous.  I want to eliminate possible excuses for avoiding the dairy in the future.

The questions are as follows:

·         What did you read?

·         How many words did you need to consult?

·         What’s the story so far?

·         Note two things you had to look up again

·         Note two new things that caught your eye

·         Have you learnt anything since last time which explained something you read or reread?

·         Are there any outside influences which may be affecting your perceptions or understanding?

·         Choose a sentence and dissect it.

I can see a number of “issues” arising from this project.  For one thing, my learning diary is part exploratory and part reflective.  That may be really useful for learning, but it’s probably going to be a nightmare for analysis.  For another, this metadiary is likely to be having a strong influence on what I remember/notice/process, so the double diary thing is also going to make analysis terribly awkward.

Oh, well, these things can always be discussed in the Discussion section.  Isn’t that what every paper ends with – telling the readers what the major issues with the paper where and why we “need more research” to confirm any findings?

So far I haven’t actually reflected on my learning diary entries.  Well, there’s only one so far, and I wrote it over a couple of days, and to write it I went back over the pages I’d already read a second time, so I’m actually reading each section more often than I thought I would originally – I’m repeating it for the preparation for reading the next section, and I’m repeating it for the journal.

However, I have noticed that the number of words I had to consult for the first passage I read practically halved the second time.  I also noticed that I had completely forgotten about postpositions and about the fact that particular prepositions and postpositions go with particular cases.  It was only when I started to dissect my sentence of choice and consulted Tuldava (my grammar text book) that I remembered this.  Having remembered it, I began noticing it in other instances throughout the text.

So far, I think both the repeated readings and the diary are helping me process some vocabulary and syntax that I would previously have skimmed over and forgotten.

The Repeated Reading Project: Estonian children's books

In my last post in this series, I mentioned that I was going to start a project in which I keep a learning diary to eventually use as the basis for a diary study.

The project itself is deceptively simple:  I'm going to read Estonian children's books (as in, books that are written in Estonian for children).  I'm going to read them rather slowly.

I've always struggled with reading in Estonian - much more than German.  With German children's books I have a fighting chance of nutting it out as I go along and getting some sort of flow happening, but not so much with Estonian.

English and German belong to the same language family, so they play according to similar rules.  Estonian is a completely different kettle of fish.  As a result, whenever I start trying to read in Estonian (particularly authentic texts) my brain gets really tired really quickly.  There's no flow.  So I tend to give up sooner... which means I don't read as much... which means I don't build up good reading muscles... which means it's hard for me to read in Estonian and my brain gets tired really quickly...

Its a vicious circle.

Plus, in spite of the fact that I've been learning Estonian for some time now, children's books never seem to get any easier.  My fluency in reading passages in textbooks is improving, but whenever I go to authentic texts I hit the same problem: too many unfamiliar words and too many unfamiliar forms of familiar words.

I can't select texts based on the Five Finger Rule, partly because I'm not in a position to look at books before I order them, and partly because I've yet to encounter a sentence in the wild where I'm 100% sure of every word, so I run out of fingers quite quickly.

So, what I'm going to do is a sort of Repeated Reading/Intensive Reading activity.  I'm only going to read short sections (say, one page) of a children's book, leaning heavily on my dictionaries to translate as I go (I know people say you shouldn't do that, but I haven't got much choice), and picking apart a couple of selected sentence with the aid of some grammar books.

BUT, and here's the bit that will hopefully make it interesting, I'll reread every section I've already read before starting a new section.

So by the time I finish the book, I'll have read some pages multiple times.  Especially the first page.  I'll have read that one a lot.

In my learning diary, I'll talk about what I noticed, what stood out for me and what seems to be getting easier.  I'll also pick a few sentences that tickled my fancy and dissect them.

Here's what I think that will achieve (my hypotheses, if you will):

1. I'll start to become so familiar with the words on the first pages that I'll pick up a bit of automaticity concerning them.  As I continue to encounter those words later in the text, I'll (hopefully) start to just know what they are, and gain a bit of flow.  When I encounter those words in other books, I'll won't need to consult the dictionaries so often to remind me what they are.

2. I'll also start recognising particular grammatical constructions and noticing morphological patterns, which will make those same constructions/patterns easier to identify and interpret as the project continues.

3. By the time I reach the end of the book, I'll be consulting the dictionaries and grammar reference books less often, and reading with more fluency.  This will (I hope) improve with each subsequent book I read.

4. As a sideline, I think this will also improve my ability to write in Estonian, as my understanding of the written language will improve.  I'm not sure how to pre-test and post-test, especially since I've already started reading and I didn't think to try to write a passage before hand.  I might do that over the weekend anyway.  At the very least, I'll be able to talk about how I "feel" about my writing ability.

I'm starting with Kust tuli pilv? by Epp Petrone because, of all the Estonian books I own, this has been the easiest one for me to try reading in the past.  I have attempted to read it previously, so it's not completely new to me, but I never *read* it in an "I know what those words actually mean" kind of way.  More of a "I've scanned it, recognised a few words and used the pictures to fill in the blanks in a hap-hazard fashion" kind of way.

My study is somewhat limited by the fact that my library is somewhat limited.  I can only use the books I have access to, and I live in regional Australia.  I'm going to order a few more books by the same author so I can at least do the "proper" Narrow Reading thing to an extent.

My ultimate goal is to magically keep this up as I progress through the books in my collection and get to longer works like Kunksmoor by Aino Pervik and Nukitsamees by Oskar Luts.  With the longer works, I'll have to think strategically about how I'm going to divide the books into sections and how many sections I'll reread before starting a new section, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

It may take some time.

Kassandra

After reading The Reader with it's short chapters and neat little sections, Christa Wolf's Kassandra was a heck of a change of pace. I started trying to read it side-by-side with the English translation, before quickly realising that a) stream-of-consciousness writing does not work in side-by-side mode, and b) the German version was far too dense.

So I switched to straight English translation (I tip my hat to the translator, Jan Van Heurck, who managed to take a completely delirious text and make it completely delirious). It's cheating, but I am trying to read other texts in German. Books more at my reading level (around about 8 Jahre alt, at present). Krashen (who likes to cite himself), Day and Bamford, Brown and a few other theorists would tell you it's better to read within my level or a little beyond it if I want to actually gain anything, linguistically. Too far out of my depth and it all becomes noise.

Kassandra came out at the same time as Bradley's Mists of Avalon and clearly shared a lot of the same Zeitgeist. Both took an essentially "masculine" series of myths and legends and plonked a priestess smack in the middle of it all.

In Bradley's book it was the Arthurian cycles, and she used Morgaine as the focal point. For Wolf, it was the Battle of Troy seen through the eyes of Cassandra. There are a lot of interesting cross-overs between those two books, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if someone has already written a thesis about it.

These days, all the stuff about priestesses and goddesses is a bit old hat, but back in the early 80s it would have been very much new shoes (oh, look, I've slipped into The Last Resort again). It's very strange to think that, if I were reading these books back when they were first released, I would be thinking about Feminism* - it would be foremost in my mind, and I would be seeing Feminist messages all over the place throughout both texts.

Having read them in the 2000s, though, I just enjoy the story - I have to be reminded that they are Feminist texts by reading other papers as it simply doesn't occur to me.

I think if I had been given a stronger education in "the classics", I would have found Kassandra terribly clever. I couldn't help shake the feeling that Wolf was using Cassandra's stream-of-consciousness ramblings and her role as an unreliable narrator to weave together various versions of the legends that might not be entirely complementary. However, my knowledge of Troy is sadly lacking. I never read The Iliad (well, who has?), or The Aenid, and I'd only read a little of Euripides. 

Besides that, I had a mild obsession with Greek myths in my childhood that lead me to read a few books about gods and things - but children's books never really go into much detail. So a lot of Kassandra was new and exciting and different... and confusing.

Now feel I need to find other works dealing with Troy in order to figure out what was going on half the time. You know - texts that have a beginning, middle and end.


 *I would also have been three years old, and thus a genius.

Epic Theatre... and Hitler Dancing

The thing about Brecht is that he was a man on a mission. Two missions, at least - as far as I can tell.

His primary mission was, originally, to shake up theatre. He wanted to take it out of it's fusty, late 19th/early 20th century 3-Act-Drawing-Room structure and make it magical. No longer would a play be penned in by some antiquated "form"! No longer would a playwright be required to use such antediluvian concepts as "beginning", "middle" and "end"! No longer would it be some academic exercise for the elite, but it would become fun - like sport! Throw open the doors and let anything be possible!

Quite admirable, really, and modern theatre owes so much to Brecht and his contemporaries that it's impossible to measure is influence.

His second mission came later but became equally as important, to him, as his first: to use theatre to "show the way". That "way" was, of course, Marxism. Brecht was one of the Bourgeoisie converts to Marxism who thought it was their duty to be the "voice" of the Proletariats until they could rise up and speak for themselves. Not that he really tried to speak for the Proletariat, but rather he wanted to be a beacon for the cause.

No longer was it enough for a play to be "free" from the constraints of the theatre of the past - it had to be a clarion call to the audience, teaching them how dire the world is, so that they would feel the need to change it.

"The word we know is deeply flawed - what are you going to do about it?" That was the drive of his plays in a world faced with the double threat of capitalism and fascism...

... which brings me to Hitler dancing.

I've been researching Brecht for an assignment (the first real literature assignment I've done for many long years), and I borrowed a book compiling his journals for the years between 1934 and 1950.

As I was looking for his comments on Der Gute Mensch von Setzuan, I stumbled across some pictures of what I first thought was a man dressed as Hitler on a film set.

Turns out these were actually stills from a newsreel featuring the man himself - dancing.

Hitler had just been given the news that France had capitulated, and he was so happy he danced a little jig.

Brecht had obviously clipped these pictures and some associated text out of a newspaper or magazine that had printed them, so they were included in his diary and therefore reprinted in this book.

I have to admit that I don't really watch any of the 350,567 documentaries on Hitler that seem to fill the viewing schedule on SBS of a Friday night, but I wonder how many of them show Hitler dancing. Most of the footage I have seen just seems to focus on him pointing a lot and spitting as he talks.

It should probably be noted that Brecht didn't particularly like Hitler. Nor did he like what Hitler was talking the German people into doing. He was so keen on Communism saving Germany from Fascism that he never quite noticed it tipped into Totalitarianism.

Or, at least, he tried not to. His diaries showed that he was reasonably aware that the new order of things wasn't quite right, but he had faith that it could be fixed if everyone just stuck at it.

I wonder what he would make of this new world, where most people remember Communism as a failed experiment that caused more harm than good? The Socialism he (and others like him) advocated was not the same Socialism that caused so much damage to Eastern Europe. The philosophy they dreamed of was hijacked and converted into something else. Would he still be trying to change the world? Would he still be using theatre to do it?