cultural literacy

Before this morning's class, two students in the front row had a bizarre disagreement over pronunciation: is the first syllable of "waterfall" more similar to the "o" in "otter", or to the "a" in "father" (although they didn't put it that way)? After listening to a minute or two of this, I brought in the whole class and got into a discussion of language: different pronunciations, different word choices, and what they tell people about you. Is your soft drink a "soda", a "pop", a "coke", or something else? I asked how many students had ever seen the movie "My Fair Lady": zero (although one student had read the play "Pygmalion"). I asked how many had ever heard the song "On the Street Where You Live": nobody. So I sang the first few lines, and one student (not the same one) recognized it. Wow.

Then I went around the room and asked each student to describe, in a minute or so, what topic (s)he was working on for the research paper, and why the rest of us should be interested. Somewhere in the course of this, I mentioned this talk (which none of them had attended), and said something about how Dr. Bauerlein's hand-copying exercises might sound sadistic and Luddite -- wait, does anybody in the room know the word "Luddite"? No, not one. Anybody familiar with the "Ballad of John Henry"? One. So I summarized John Henry's story, and how he won by a nose, but then "lay down his hammer and he died," and suggested that technology putting people out of work isn't just a 19th-century phenomenon. Which led us back to the ostensible topic of the course, which is computer technology and its effects on people's lives. Not only costing them jobs, but changing the way they learn and remember things, hence the hand-copying exercise.