#harrison is an amputee

[faofinn]

No. 2 "I'll call out your name, but you won't call back."

@whumptober-archive

Thermometer | Delirium | "They don't care about you."

A 'recovery' fic set some time after this

Harrison had gone from strength to strength in his recovery. Even despite the sepsis and pneumonia, on top of the initial gsw and opened chest in the field.

It had been a long, hard slog to get there, though, that couldn't be forgotten. After the chest drain, he'd ended up with a little delirium from everything, and everyone dreaded that it was going backwards. Somehow, he kept progressing, kept improving, kept defying expectations. 

It was several months later when he was finally allowed from the bed, graduating to being allowed to potter between there and the sofas. He was on strict instructions to not treat anyone, to not do anything stupid and outside of his current abilities. He still had a babysitter, though they denied that that was why they were there. It was obvious, but he didn't really mind; he enjoyed the company and conversation. 

Harrison had lost so much weight with it all, far too much, and that brought its own problems. His prosthesis no longer fit properly, the bone rubbing against the hard plastic. It put him off walking with it, choosing instead to use his crutches where he could.

Fao didn’t mind ‘babysitting’ Hars. He was still getting over his own chest infection, easily tired, and so sitting around in the basement doing paperwork and making sure Hars had what he needed suited him just fine. Besides, he liked Harrison’s company, and it was still just so nice to have him ‘back’ after all they’d been through. 

The past few nights, Harrison had been struggling to sleep. He just couldn't settle with pain and just wrongness in his bones. He'd tried to shake it off, busying himself in the basement to try and keep his mind active. The room spun each time he stood, but after a few moments of gripping whatever counter he was closest to, everything returned to normal. It was just tiredness, that's all.

Fao noticed as Harrison emerged from his room, somewhat unsteady on his crutches. Not unusual, and Fao wished he’d use his chair instead, but he wasn’t about to start that fight again. 

“Hey. Need anything?” Fao asked. 

He took a moment to reply, looking blankly at Fao before he shook his head. "No, I'm good."

“You okay?” He asked, frowning. 

"Been better."

“Need something? Meds?”

"I want out of the basement."

“Want some fresh air?”

"Yeah. But I want to stay out."

“I can’t let you stay out.”

"You can't keep me here."

“You’re still not well, Hars.”

"I'm late, Fao. I don't have time to worry about not being well."

Fao frowned, standing up and putting his book down. ��Late?”

"Yes, late. I'm trying to get ready."

“Late for what?”

Harrison turned to look at him, exasperated. "Work. Honestly, Fao. I don't get you."

“You don’t have to go to work, you’re off sick right now. You got hurt, remember?”

"I'm not stupid, I know I got hurt. I can fucking feel it."

“So you don’t need to go anywhere.”

"Yeah, I do." He turned back, swaying on his crutches. "I need to go."

“You don’t need to go to work, you can stay here. Why don’t we sit down, I’ll put the kettle on?”

"I don't want a drink. I want to go outside."

“Come on, it’s okay.”

"None of this is okay."

“I know, I know. But you don’t need to go out, you can stay here.”

He frowned. "I don't want to stay here."

“I know, but it’s for your own good.”

"It's obviously not."

“It is, Hars. I know it doesn’t feel like it.

"Where's Tai? He'll tell you."

“He’s at work today, he’ll be home soon.”

Harrison frowned at him. "Well where's Levi?"

“Your dad is with him.”

"He's my son."

“Nobody is saying otherwise.”

He huffed. "Right. Okay."

“I mean it, Hars.”

"Mean what?"

“Nobody’s saying otherwise about Levi.”

"Right. So I need to go."

“No, you don’t.”

"Whatever." He turned away, bored of the conversation and ready to do his own thing. 

The turn made him dizzy, but he figured it would go, it had to. He stumbled forward, managing a few steps before his crutch slipped slightly. He struggled to right himself, but the dizziness was only getting worse, the room darkening at the corners. 

Nausea rose too, only adding to the feeling that he was dying, but he didn't have the energy to do anything about it. His leg shook and he knew his knee wouldn't hold him, but the thought was quickly lost to the blackness.

“Hars? Harrison?” He called.

Fao spotted the way Harrison went blank, the stumble just another warning sign. He crossed the room quickly, aiming to help Harrison stay upright on his crutches, but his eyes rolled and he went down. He reached for him just as he went, stretching further than he should, and he staggered under the weight of him as they went to the floor. It was softer than it had been if he’d not caught him, but it wrenched Fao’s bad shoulder and he groaned, the pain already bad. 

Harrison was still in Fao's arms, his chest rise and fall all too shallow. It took a few moments for him to start to come to, screwing his face up. 

“Hey, you’re okay.” Fao said, running his fingers through Harrison’s hair. “Take a moment.”

He groaned, trying to get his bearings. He reached to rub his eyes, his head pounding. 

“You’re alright. You fainted.”

"Head hurts."

“Headache? You didn’t hit the floor.”

"I'm on the floor."

“I caught you, you fainted.”

"Oh. Okay."

“Let’s get you back to bed.”

[identity-library]

Disability (TV Shows)

A:

Action Pack (2022)

Eon (Down Syndrome)

Adventure Time (2010)

Finn Mertens (Amputee)

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013)

Akela Amador (Blind, Prosthetic User)

Daniel Sousa (Amputee, Crutch User)

Gordon (Blind)

Leo Fitz (Brain Damage)

Alladin (1994)

Mechanicles (Low Vision)

All The Light We Cannot See (2023)

Marie-Laure (Blind)

American Dad (2005)

Artemis (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

American Dragon: Jake Long (2005)

Peg Leg Pat (Amputee)

A Million Little Things (2018)

Eddie Saville (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Amphibia (2019)

Angwin (Blind)

Lysil (Blind)

Stumpy Stumpson (Multi-Limb Amputee)

Arrested Development (2003)

Buster Bluth (Amputee)

Jack Dorso (Paralyzed)

J. Walter Weatherman (Amputee)

Marky Bark (Prosopagnosia/Face Blindness)

Rita Leeds (Unspecified Intellectual Disability)

Arthur (1996)

Binky Barnes (Allergy - Food)

Buster Baxter (Asthma)

Carl Gould (Autistic)

Francis Haney (Dyslexia)

Fred (Colour Blind)

Fritz Langley (Arthritis)

George Lundgren (Dyslexia)

Jenna Morgan (Allergy - Food)

Jessica (Allergy - Food)

Keith Powers (Autistic)

Lydia Fox (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Maria Pappas (Stutter)

Marina Datillo (Blind)

Mr. Morris (Asthma, Allergies - Dust, Food, Pollen)

Nemo (Allergy - Food)

Nigel Ratburn (Hard of Hearing)

Pickles the Clown (Allergy - Animal)

As We See It (2022)

Harrison Dietrich (Autistic)

Jack Hoffman (Autistic)

Violet Wu (Autistic)

Atypical (2017)

Sam Gardner (Autistic)

Avatar: Legend of Korra (2012)

Ming Hua (No Arms)

Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005)

Combustion Man (Multi-Limb Amputee)

Teo (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Toph Beifong (Blind)

B:

Battlestar Galactica (2004)

Felix Gaeta (Amputee)

Big City Greens (2018)

Bill Green (Amputee)

Big Mouth (2017)

Caleb Linden (Autistic)

Lars (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Breaking Bad (2008)

Walter White Jr. (Cerebral Palsy)

Bluey (2018)

Dougie (Deaf)

Bob's Burgers (2011)

Courtney Wheeler (Congenital Heart Condition)

Rudolph "Regular Sized Rudy" Stieblitz (Asthma)

Bones (2005)

Zack Addy (Autistic)

Buzz Lightyear of Star Command (2000)

Zeb Nebula (Amputee)

C:

Call the Midwife (2012)

Sally Harper (Down Syndrome)

Chicago Med (2015)

Isidore Latham (Autistic)

Colin from Accounts (2022)

Colin (Wheelchair User)

Community (2009)

Abed Nadir (Autistic)

Jeremy Simmons (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Covert Affairs (2010)

August "Auggie" Anderson (Blind)

Craig of the Creek (2018)

Jackie (Deaf)

D:

Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood (2012)

Chrissie (Unspecified Disability, Crutch User)

Daredevil (2015)

Matthew Murdock/Daredevil (Blind)

Stick (Blind)

Dead End: Paranormal Park (2022)

Hercules (Unspecified Limb Difference)

Nora Khan (Autistic)

Zagan (Amputee)

Deca-Dence (2020)

Natsume (Amputee)

Dirty God (2019)

Jade (Facial Difference)

Doc McStuffins (2012)

Wildlife Will (No Legs)

Doug (1991)

Chad Mayonnaise (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Dragon Tales (1999)

Lorca (No Wings, Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

DuckTales (2017)

Black Heron (Amputee)

Della Duck (Amputee)

E:

Elena of Avalor (2016)

Cristina (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

Empire (2015)

Lucious Lyon (Amputee)

ER (1994)

Kerry Weaver (Congenital Hip Dysplasia)

Extraordinary Attorney Woo (2022)

Woo Young-Woo (Autistic)

Extreme Ghostbusters (1997)

Garrett Miller (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

F:

Fairy Tail (2009)

Gildarts Clive (Multi-Limb Amputee)

Family Guy (1999)

Ellen (Down Syndrome)

Joe Swanson (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Stella (Deaf)

Fear the Walking Dead (2015)

Wendell Rabinowitz (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Fireman Sam (1987)

Hannah Sparkes (Unspecified Walking Disability, Wheelchair User)

Josie Phillips (Amputee)

Fish Hooks (2010)

Chief (Amputee)

Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends (2004)

Wilt (Amputee)

Fullmetal Alchemist (2003)

Edward Elric (Amputee)

Fullmetal Alchemist (2009)

Edward Elric (Amputee)

G:

Game of Thrones (2011)

Bran Stark (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Jaime Lannister (Amputee)

Tyrion Lannister (Dwarfism)

Gargoyles (1994)

Halcyon Renard (Unspecified Illness, Wheelchair User)

Glee (2009)

Artie Abrams (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Becky Jackson (Down Syndrome)

Glitch Techs (2020)

Miko Kubota (ADHD)

Goldie & Bear (2015)

Marian Locks (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

Gravity Falls (2012)

Mr. Poolcheck (Amputee)

Grey's Anatomy (2005)

Arizona Robbins (Amputee)

Christina Yang (Dyslexia)

Lucas Adams (ADHD)

Nick Marsh (ADHD)

Virginia Dixon (Autistic)

Growing Up Fisher (2015)

Mel Fisher (Blind)

H:

Hailey's On It (2023)

The Professor (Partially Blind)

Hamster & Gretel (2022)

Gretel Grant-Gomez (ADHD)

Harley Quinn (2019)

Barbara "Babs" Gordon/Batgirl (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Sy Borgman (Amputee, Wheelchair User)

Hazbin Hotel (2024)

Lute (Amputee)

Vaggie (Partially Blind)

Hawkeye (2021)

Clint Barton/Hawkeye (Deaf)

Maya Lopez/Echo (Deaf, Amputee)

Heartbreak High (2022)

Quinni Gallagher-Jones (Autistic)

Heartstoppers (2022)

Felix Britten (Wheelchair User)

House (2004)

Gregory House (Limited Mobility, Cane User)

Human Resources (2022)

Alice Wong (Spinal Muscular Atrophy, Wheelchair User)

I:

Inside Job (2021)

Andre Lee (Tourette's Syndrome)

Reagan Ridley (Autistic, Amputee)

In the Dark (2019)

Murphy Mason (Blind)

J:

Jessie (2011)

(Future) Jessie Prescott (Partially Blind)

K:

Kim Possible (2002)

Betty Director (Partially Blind)

Felix Renton (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Sheldon "Gemini" Director (Amputee, Partially Blind)

L:

Land of the Dead (2005)

Charlie Houk (Intellectual Disability, Partially Blind)

Lilo & Stitch: The Series (2003)

Clyde (Amputee)

Locke & Key (2020)

Logan Calloway (Double Amputee)

Loudermilk (2017)

Roger Frostly (Limb Difference)

M:

MacGyver (2016)

Matilda "Matty" Webber (Dwarfism)

Mighty Ducks: The Animated Series (1996)

Baron Von Licktenstamp (Amputee, Partially Blind)

Duke L'Orange (Partially Blind)

Miles From Tomorrowland (2015)

Gong Gong (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

Milly Molly (2008)

Ellie Zelig (Blind)

Mixmups (2023)

Giggle (Spine Curvature, Wheelchair User)

Pockets (Partially Blind)

Mom (2013)

Adam Janikowski (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Mr. Munson (Blind)

Monster High (2022)

Bunny Earickson (Down Syndrome)

Deuce Gorgon (Dyslexic)

Finnegan Wake (Limited Mobility)

Meowlody (ADHD)

Twyla Boogeyman (Autistic)

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (2023)

Eli (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

My-HiME (2004)

Mashiro Kazahana (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (2010)

Kerfuffle (Amputee)

Scootaloo (Underdeveloped Wings, Limited Abilities)

Stellar Eclipse (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

Twist (Speech Impediment)

N:

NCIS (2003)

Carol Wilson (Dwarfism)

Delilah Fielding-McGee (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

NCIS: Los Angeles (2009)

Hetty Lange (Dwarfism)

Joelle Taylor (Amputee)

NCIS: New Orleans (2014)

Patton Plame (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Never Have I Ever (2020)

Rebecca Hall-Yoshida (Down Syndrome)

New Amsterdam (2018)

Elizabeth Wilder (Deaf)

Lauren Bloom (ADHD)

New Girl (2011)

Winston Bishop (Colour Blind)

Ninjago (2011)

Bob (Deaf)

Cyrus Borg (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

Jacob Pevsner (Blind)

No-Eyed Pete (Blind)

O:

OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes (2017)

Doctor Greyman (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

Red Action (Amputee)

Once Upon a Time (2011)

Blind Witch (Blind)

Seer (Blind)

Only Murders in the Building (2021)

Theo Dimas (Deaf)

Paulette (Wheelchair User)

Our Flag Means Death (2022)

Black Pete (Cleft Lip, Lisp)

Israel "Izzy" Hands (Amputee)

P:

Panic (2022)

Dayna Mason (Wheelchair User)

Parenthood (2010)

Max Braverman (Autistic)

Paw Patrol (2013)

Rex (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

Pelswick (2000)

Pelswick Eggert (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Peppa Pig (2004)

Mandy Mouse (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

Percy Jackson and the Olympians (2023)

Hephaestus (Unspecified Disability, Cane User)

Person of Interest (2011)

Harold Finch (Chronic Pain, Limited Mobility, Cane User)

Phineas and Ferb (2007)

Heinz Doofenshmirtz (Multi-Limb Amputee)

PJ Masks (2015)

Ivan/Ice Cub (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Polly Pocket (2018)

Lila Draper (Diabetes)

Rahim (Deaf)

Puppy Dog Pals (2017)

Lollie (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Pupstruction (2023)

Roxy (Amputee, Wheelchair User)

Q:

R:

Raising Dion (2019)

Dion (ADHD, Asthma)

Esperanza Jimenez (Osteogenesis Imperfecta, Wheelchair User)

Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja (2012)

S. Ward Smith (Blind)

Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure (2017)

Hook Foot (Amputee)

Hook Hand (Amputee)

King Edmund (Amputee)

Lord Demanitus (Partially Blind)

Roswell, New Mexico (2019)

Alex Manes (Amputee)

RWBY (2013)

Yang Xiao Long (Amputee)

S:

Sesame Street (1969)

Ameera (Spinal Cord Injury, Wheelchair/Crutches User)

Aristotle (Blind)

Julia (Autistic)

Katie (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

Linda (Deaf)

Tarah (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

Tyrone "Traction" "TJ" Jackson (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

Sex Education (2019)

Aisha Green (Deaf)

Isaac Goodwin (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Shake It Up (2010)

Cecelia "CeCe" Jones (Dyslexia)

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)

Entrapta (Autistic)

Tallstar (Amputee)

Silent Witness (1996)

Clarissa Mullery (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

Sofia the First (2012)

Cassandra (Blind)

South Park (1997)

David Nelson (Dwarfism)

James "Jimmy" Vulmer (Limited Mobility, Crutch User)

Kyle Schwartz (Asthma)

Nathan (Down Syndrome)

Ned Gerblanski (Amputee)

Philip Argyle (Diabetes)

Scott Malkinson (Diabetes)

Sophie Grey (Diabetes)

Stan Marsh (Asthma)

Thomas (Tourette's Syndrome)

Timmy L. Burch (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

Speechless (2016)

J.J. DiMeo (Cerebral Palsy)

Spirit Riding Free (2017)

Eleanor Kimble (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987)

Geordi La Forge (Blind)

Star Wars Rebels (2014)

Kanan Jarrus (Blind)

Station 19 (2018)

Robert Sullivan (Chronic Pain)

Stumptown (2019)

Ansel Parios (Down Syndrome)

Supernatural (2005)

Bobby Singer (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Eileen Leahy (Deaf)

Pamela Barnes (Blind)

Superstore (2015)

Garrett McNeil (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Nicki (Dwarfism, Wheelchair User)

S.W.A.T. (2017)

Dominique Luca (Dyslexia)

T:

Teamo Supremo (2002)

Larry/Laser Pirate (Partially Blind)

The Baby-Sitters Club (2020)

Stacey McGill (Type 1 Diabetes)

The Big Bang Theory (2007)

Emily (Deaf)

Sheldon Cooper (Autistic)

The Casagrandes (2019)

Carlos "CJ" Casagrande Jr. (Down Syndrome)

The Dragon Prince (2018)

Amaya (Deaf)

Claudia (Amputee)

Leola (Autistic)

Sol Regem/Anak Araw (Blind)

Villads (Blind)

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021)

James "Bucky" Barnes (Amputee)

The Flash (2014)

Hartley Rathaway/Pied Piper (Deaf)

The Ghost and Molly McGee (2021)

Juniper "June" Chen (Autistic)

The Good Doctor (2017)

Shaun Murphy (Autistic)

The Lion Guard (2016)

Ono (Low Vision)

The Little Mermaid (1992)

Gabriella (Deaf)

The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1888)

Papa Heffalump (Allergies)

The Office (2005)

William "Billy" Merchant (Wheelchair User)

The Owl House (2020)

Dell Clawthorne (Partially Blind)

Eda Clawthorne (Amputee)

Hieronymus Bump (Low Vision)

Luz Noceda (ADHD)

The Proud Family (2001)

Bebe Winans (Autistic)

Johnny McBride (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

The Rookie (2018)

Tim Bradford (Unspecified Learning Disability)

The Secret Saturdays (2008)

Solomon "Doc" Saturday (Partially Blind)

The Sex Lives of College Girls (2021)

Jocelyn (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

The Simpsons (1989)

Anton Lubchenko (Amputee)

Bart Simpson (ADHD)

Carl Carlson (Diabetes)

Charles Montgomery Burns (Limited Mobility)

Dia-Betty (Diabetes)

Dubya Spuckler (Partially Blind)

Duffman (Dyslexia)

Gary Coleman (Dwarfism)

Hans Moleman (Limited Mobility)

Herman Hermann (Amputee)

Jasper Beardsley (Amputee, Diabetes, Limited Mobility)

Jitney Spuckler (Scoliosis)

Joe C. (Celiac Disease, Dwarfism)

Kearney Zzyzwicz (Dyslexia)

Krusty the Clown (Heart Disease)

Ling Bouvier (Diabetes)

Maya (Dwarfism)

Melvin Van Horne (Lactose Intolerance)

Milkhouse Van Houten (Allergies, Asthma, Lactose Intolerance)

Monk Murphy (Deaf)

Ralph Wiggum (Intellectual Disability)

Rod Flanders (Diabetes)

Sideshow Mel (Lactose Intolerance)

The Suite Life of Zack & Cody (2005)

Bob (Dyslexic)

The Walking Dead (2010)

Connie (Deaf)

Hershel Greene (Amputee)

The Wild Thornberrys (1998)

Bethany Gibson (Cerabral Palsy, Wheelchair User)

The 100 (2014)

Raven Reyes (Chronic Pain, Nerve Damage)

This Close (2019)

Kate (Deaf)

Michael (Deaf)

Thomas and Friends: All Engines Go (2021)

Bruno (Autistic)

Total Drama (Franchise)

Cody (Allergies)

Jay (Allergies, Lactose Intolerance)

Mickey (Allergies, Lactose Intolerance)

Hezekias "Zee" (Limb Difference)

U:

V:

Voltron: Legendary Defender (2016)

Takashi "Shiro" Shirogane (Amputee)

W:

X:

Y:

Years and Years (2019)

Rosie Lyons (Spina Bifida, Wheelchair User)

Yuki Yuna Is a Hero (2013)

Sonoka Nogi (Paralyzed)

Togo Mimori (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Z:

#:

101 Dalmatians: The Series (1997)

Tripod (Amputee)

101 Dalmatian Street (2019)

Da Vinci (Autistic)

Dawkins (Autistic)

Delgado (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

9-1-1 (2018)

Christopher Diaz (Cerebral Palsy)

9-1-1: Lone Star (2020)

Mateo Chavez (Dyslexia)

[pixeljade]

Should we not also arm the populous because some people are physically stronger, or study martial arts? What about amputees and people with disabilities? At what point does the 'Superheroes are ubermensch' bullshit become unironic Harrison Bergeron?

Unironically everyone should have access to the means to defend themselves, ESPECIALLY the disabled! As for your idiotic second point, click here. Nobody's saying we gotta cut down those who are good at a thing, I am saying that all people have their strengths, and we should set up society so each can play a role. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need! If you're ready to move on from Vonnegut I suggest picking up some Malatesta

[dear-indies]

Hello cat and mouse! I was wondering if you guys had any media (TV shows, games movies, etc.) you'd like to see more static icons of? You don't seem to reblog too many!

Hey anon! Thank you so much for asking! Sadly people don't seem to make 100px or larger static icons as much anymore. Please note that I'm mainly going to be focusing on casts with people of colour, disabled folk and/or queer folk. They don't have to be from said roles but icons in general for any of these people / casts would be absolutely amazing.

This is a very long list but please don't feel pressured to do these!

Mortal Kombat cast, Lewis Tan who has already been iconed but more the merrier which also applies to everyone I've noted has icon resources already!

Blood Quantum cast!

Sweet Home cast!

The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass cast because some of the cast carries over! Kate Siegel has already been iconed in Hill House as has Rahul Kohli in Midnight Mass.

Squid Game cast!

Blood & Water cast!

Power cast minus 50 Cent because he's a gross humanbeing!

All American cast!

The Irregulars cast!

Candyman cast!

Rutherford Falls cast!

Get Out cast!

Mayans MC cast!

What We Do in the Shadows cast!

Narcos cast!

Pose cast minus Janet M*ck Indya M*ore and Billy P*rter!

Shrill cast!

One Night in Miami cast!

The Last Black Man in San Francisco cast!

Mudbound cast!

It’s a Sin cast! 

Watchmen the show cast!

Sound of Metal cast!

Parasite cast!

The Intruder cast! 

The Forever Purge cast! 

Roma cast!

John Wick cast!

The Harder They Fall cast minus Z*zie Beetz!

Trickster cast minus Griffin P*well-Arcand.

Burden of Truth cast!

Coroner cast!

Folklore cast from HBO Asia!

Army of the Dead cast minus Dave B*utista!

Altered Carbon cast minus Joel Kinn*man!

Vida cast minus M*lissa Barrera!

Huge cast but please note that’s there’s conflicting sources about a 2008 altercation involving Nikki so icon at your own discretion! 

Special cast specially Ryan O'Connell (is gay and has cerebral palsy) who created the show. I've suggest him to so many people since 2019 and sadly no one has made anything for him so far!

Sex Education cast especially George Robinson (is paraplegic) Ncuti Gatwa (Rwandan) Kedar Williams-Stirling (Afro-Jamaican) Patricia Allison (Kenyan) Jemima Kirke (part Iraqi Jewish) Dua Saleh (Tunjur Sudanese and is non-binary) Sami Outalbali (Moroccan) Simone Ashley (Tamil Indian) Chinenye Ezeudu (Black) and Rakhee Thakrar (Indian)!

Titans cast especially Anna Diop (Senegalese), Damaris Lewis (African-American), Savannah Welch (is an amputee) and Chella Man (Hongkonger and Jewish, is deaf and non-binary genderqueer) but minus Br*nton Thwaites and C*rran Walters!

People!

Storme Toolis (has cerebral palsy) most notable role has to be New Tricks but she's also in Dalgliesh which would be great for people wanting disabled period fcs as that's set in the 1940's!

Abigail Spencer (part Cherokee), Mena Massoud (Egyptian) Rodrigo Santoro (Brazilian) Lea DeLaria (is a lesbian), Craig Tate (Black), Gilbert Owuor (Kenyan) from Reprisal.

More no specific roles but: Jacob Scipio (part Indo Guyanese) Rebecca Ablack (Indo Guyanese) Ebonée Noel (Afro-Guyanese) Shaunette Renée Wilson (Afro-Guyanese) Gabourey Sidibe (Senegalese and African-American), Patti Harrison (part Vietnamese and is trans), Deborah Mailman (Bidjara, Ngati Porou Maori, Te Arawa Maori) and I'd he happy to list more people if you'd like but anyone from my trans, non-binary, and disabled masterlists would be incredible.

Also please excuse anyone that was a minor at time of filming! 

[softrobotcritics]

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-020-00615-7

References

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[embodiment-of-sloth]

saraditty‌:

harrison-osterfield-appreciation‌:

Some heroes with disabilities (feel free to add more) :

Luke Skywalker, from Star Wars (prosthetic hand).

Barbara Gordon/Batwoman/Oracle, from D.C. (paralysed from the waist down).

Cassandra Cain/Batgirl, from D.C. (deaf).

Cyborg/Victor Stone, from D.C. (basically entire body of prosthetics).

Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier/Captain America, from Marvel (prosthetic arm).

Thor, from Marvel (missing an eye, in some comics and the MCU).

Odin, from Marvel (missing an eye).

Clint Barton/Hawkeye/Ronin, from Marvel (deaf, in the comics).

Matt Murdock/Daredevil, from Marvel (blind).

Charles Xavier/Professor X, from Marvel (paralysed from the waist down).

James ‘Rhodey’ Rhodes/War Machine/The Iron Patriot from Marvel (paralysed from the waist down, in the MCU).

Cable/Nathan Summers, from Marvel (mechanical prosthetic eye and arm).

Tony Stark/Iron Man, from Marvel (implant to save his heart, briefly paralysed from the waist down in the comics).

Doctor Mid-Nite/Charles McNider, from Marvel (blind).

Misty Knight, from Marvel (prosthetic arm).

Madame Web, from Marvel (blind).

Jubilee, from Marvel (dyscalculia, a numbers-based learning disability).

Stephen Strange/Doctor Strange, from Marvel (extensive nerve damage to his hands).

Wade Wilson/Deadpool, from Marvel (chronic pain).

Flash Thompson/Agent Venom, from Marvel (double amputee).

Nebula, from Marvel (multiple mechanical prosthetics).

Makkari/an Eternal, from Marvel (deaf, in the MCU, played by a deaf actress).

Jake Sully from Avatar (paralysed from the waist down).

Geordi La Forge from Star Trek. (blind).

Imperator Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road (prosthetic arm).

Quasimodo from The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (physical abnormalities).

Captain Barbossa from Pirates Of The Caribbean, arguably a hero or villain or generally neutral but definitely chaotic and badass (leg amputee).

Alastor ‘Mad-Eye’ Moody, from the Harry Potter series (prosthetic eye, prosthetic leg).

Xander Harris, from Buffy The Vampire Slayer (partially blind, at the end of the television show and throughout the comics).

Augustus Waters, from The Fault In Our Stars (prosthetic leg).

Peeta Mellark, from The Hunger Games (prosthetic leg, in the books).

Hiccup, from How To Train Your Dragon (prosthetic leg, and his dragon, Toothless, also has a prosthetic tail part).

Jean Pierre Polnareff, from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures (prosthetic legs, two prosthetic fingers, partially blind since he lost his right eye)

Joseph Joestar, from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures (prosthetic hand)

Captain General Genryusai Shigekuni Yamamoto, from Bleach (missing arm)

Captain Shunsui Kyoraku, from Bleach (missing eye) 

Kyros, from One Piece (missing leg) 

“Cyborg” Franky/ Cutty Flam, from One Piece (basically entire body of prosthesis, save for his back) 

Tensei Iida, from My Hero Academia (paralyzed from the waist down)

Ectoplasm, from My Hero Academia (double amputee, double prosthetic legs) 

Admiral Aokiji/ Kuzan, from One Piece, unknown if whether a hero or villain as has done both good and bad things, but definitely neutral (missing leg, uses an ice prosthesis)

Admiral Fujitora/ Issho, from One Piece (blind) 

Roranoa Zoro, from One Piece (missing eye) 

Yoshimitsu, from Tekken and Soul Calibur (prosthetic arm) 

Jackson Briggs, from Mortal Kombat (prosthetic arms) 

Kabal, from Mortal Kombat, at least in the MK9 timeline (severe burns and requires equipment to continue breathing) 

Johnny Joestar, from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures (paralyzed from the waist down) 

Granny Chiyo, from Naruto (prosthetic arm) 

Arthur Curry/ Aquaman, from DC Comics (missing hand in some storylines)

Scorn/ Dr. Tanis Nieves, from Marvel (prosthetic arm) 

Arsenal, from Young Justice (prosthetic arm) 

Some heroes with disabilities (feel free to add more) :

Luke Skywalker, from Star Wars (prosthetic hand).

Barbara Gordon/Batwoman/Oracle, from D.C. (paralysed from the waist down).

Cassandra Cain/Batgirl, from D.C. (deaf).

Cyborg/Victor Stone, from D.C. (basically entire body of prosthetics).

Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier/Captain America, from Marvel (prosthetic arm).

Thor, from Marvel (missing an eye, in some comics and the MCU).

Odin, from Marvel (missing an eye).

Clint Barton/Hawkeye/Ronin, from Marvel (deaf, in the comics).

Matt Murdock/Daredevil, from Marvel (blind).

Charles Xavier/Professor X, from Marvel (paralysed from the waist down).

James ‘Rhodey’ Rhodes/War Machine/The Iron Patriot from Marvel (paralysed from the waist down, in the MCU).

Cable/Nathan Summers, from Marvel (mechanical prosthetic eye and arm).

Tony Stark/Iron Man, from Marvel (implant to save his heart, briefly paralysed from the waist down in the comics).

Doctor Mid-Nite/Charles McNider, from Marvel (blind).

Misty Knight, from Marvel (prosthetic arm).

Madame Web, from Marvel (blind).

Jubilee, from Marvel (dyscalculia, a numbers-based learning disability).

Stephen Strange/Doctor Strange, from Marvel (extensive nerve damage to his hands).

Wade Wilson/Deadpool, from Marvel (chronic pain).

Flash Thompson/Agent Venom, from Marvel (double amputee).

Nebula, from Marvel (multiple mechanical prosthetics).

Makkari/an Eternal, from Marvel (deaf, in the MCU, played by a deaf actress).

Jake Sully from Avatar (paralysed from the waist down).

Geordi La Forge from Star Trek. (blind).

Imperator Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road (prosthetic arm).

Quasimodo from The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (physical abnormalities).

Captain Barbossa from Pirates Of The Caribbean, arguably a hero or villain or generally neutral but definitely chaotic and badass (leg amputee).

Alastor ‘Mad-Eye’ Moody, from the Harry Potter series (prosthetic eye, prosthetic leg).

Xander Harris, from Buffy The Vampire Slayer (partially blind, at the end of the television show and throughout the comics).

Augustus Waters, from The Fault In Our Stars (prosthetic leg).

Peeta Mellark, from The Hunger Games (prosthetic leg, in the books).

Hiccup, from How To Train Your Dragon (prosthetic leg, and his dragon, Toothless, also has a prosthetic tail part).

[theivorlegov1]

Amputee Harrison’s dream London drive return video

[juliaroleplays]

Under the cut you will find 51 comic book characters who have a physical disability, inspired by prompt #41 by @tasksweekly​. In addition, there are 12 characters I could think of off the top of my head or I came across while compiling this masterlist who have canonically stated mental illnesses, but you can find an extensive list of DC characters who have or are believed to have mental illnesses here, and for Marvel characters, here. 

Please remember that because comics are often being rebooted or switching writers, some authors have different takes on a character and their past, therefore, depending on the universe or writer, some of these character may not be disabled or may only have been disabled for a short period of time, however each of them have been disabled at one point in their history.

If you have any suggestions for characters who belong on this list, please feel free to send me a message and I’ll be more than happy to add them!  

Physical Disabilities:

DC

Roy Harper/Arsenal (amputee: right arm uses prosthetic [Pre-Flashpoint & Young Justice])

Slade Wilson/Deathstroke (blindness/missing right eye; uses eye patch & occasionally false eye)

Rose Wilson/Ravager (blindness/missing left eye; uses eye patch & occasionally false eye )

Barbara Gordon/Oracle (paraplegia; uses a wheelchair)

Victor Stone/Cyborg (amputee; half human/half robot)

Hartley Rathaway/Pied Piper (deafness; uses hearing aids)  

Felicity Smoak [Arrowverse] (paraplegia; temporarily uses a wheelchair)

Harrison Wells/Eobard Thawne [Arrowverse] (fake paraplegia; uses a wheelchair)

Charles McNider/Doctor Mid-Nite I (blindness in sunlight)  

Beth Chapel/Doctor Midnight II (blindness in sunlight)

Pieter Cross/Doctor Mid-Nite III (blindness; able to see in pitch darkness using infrared vision)

Freddy Freeman/Captain Marvel Jr. (crippled; has a wheelchair in Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam!)

Blind Faith (blind; member of the Aryan Brigade)

Niles Caulder/The Chief (paraplegia; uses a wheelchair)

Count Werner Vertigo & Count Werner Zytle/Count Vertigo (partial deafness due to Meniere’s disease; uses hearing aids as weapons)

Destiny (blindness)

Frankie Charles (muscle weakness; often uses crutches or a wheelchair)

Edgar Cizko/Dr. Psycho (dwarfism)    

Donovan Caine (double amputee; is also dying of radiation sickness)

Drew Fisher/Vengence Moth (uses a wheelchair due to muscular dystrophy)  

Kay [Fables] (blindness/missing both eyes)

Jericho/Joseph ���Joey” Wilson (mute; all vuniverses but the New 52)

Marvel

Charles Xavier/Professor X ( paraplegia; uses wheelchair)

Matt Murdock/Daredevil (blind)

Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (amputee: left arm; uses a prosthetic)

Nick Fury (left eye blindness; uses an eye patch)

Clint Barton/Hawkeye (deaf)

Eugene Judd/Puck (dwarfism)

Tony Stark/Iron Man (weak heart, paraplegia (briefly))

Alicia Masters (blind)

Artie Maddicks (mute)

Irene Adler/Destiny (blind)

Maya Lopez/Echo (deafness)

Forge (amputee:  right leg and right hand; uses prosthetic)

Eddie McDonough/Hornet (cerebral palsy; little to no use of his right arm)

Höðr/Hoder (blindness)  

Xi'an Coy Manh/Karma (amputee; left leg; uses a prosthetic)  

Melati Kusuma/Komodo (amputee when in human form: both legs)

Gustav Brandt (blindness)

Dr. Curtis Connors/Lizard (amputee when in human form)

Misty Knight (amputee: right arm; uses a prosthetic)

Cassandra Webb/Madame Web (blindness)

Izo/Master Izo (blindness)

Milla Donovan (blindness)

Harvey Rupert Elder/Mole Man (dwarfism & blindness)

Maximillian Quincy Coleridge/Shroud (blindness)

Silhouette Chord/Silhouette (paraplegia; uses crutches and leg braces)

Snowblind (blindness)

Stick (blindness)

Talia “TJ” Wagner/Nocturne (used a wheelchair for a period of time) thanks to @hanrps

Image

Bob Stookey (amputee: right leg)

Other

Department of Ability — an independently published comic where all of the heroes are disabled  

Mental Illnesses:

please note that there are many headcanons regarding characters having various mental disabilities based on how the character acts, but for this list, I stuck to character who have had a disability that has been explicitly.

DC

Roy Harper/Arsenal (recovering alcoholic [Red Hood & the Outlaws]; alcohol abuser [Young Justice])

Slade Wilson/Deathstroke (insanity)

Rose Wilson/Ravager (psychosis)

Jericho/Joseph “Joey” Wilson (insanity)

Kay Challis/Crazy Jane (dissociative identity disorder) edit thanks to @kumahelps

Drew Fisher/Vengence Moth (recovering substance abuser)

Cassandra Cain/Black Bat/Batgirl (dyslexia) thanks to @herorps 

Marvel

Tony Stark/Iron Man (alcoholism [Comics Only])

Maya Lopez/Echo (believed to be mentally disabled and was sent to a school for individuals with learning disabilities)

Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch (depression)

Jubilee (dyscalculia)

Mister X (addiction to killing)

[identity-library]

Disability (Books)

A:

A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)

Tiny Tim (Unspecified Disability)

A Different Kind of Beauty (Sylvia McNicoll)

Kyle (Blind, Diabetes)

All Our Broken Pieces (L.D. Crichton)

Kyler (Facial Difference - Scarring)

American Girl (Series - Various Authors)

Blaire (Food Allergy)

Gabriela (Stutter)

Josie Myers (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Joss Kendrick (Deaf)

Joy Jenner (Deaf)

Maryellen Larkin (Limited Mobility)

Sam Walker (Amputee)

A Step Toward Falling (Cammie McGovern)

Anthony (Down Syndrome)

Belinda Montgomery (Low Vision, Unspecified Developmental Disability)

Douglas (Unspecified Developmental Disability)

Eugene (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

Francine (Down Syndrome)

Harrison (Autistic, Blind)

Sheila (Autistic)

All The Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr)

Marie-Laure (Blind)

Animorphs (K.A. Applegate)

Collette (Paralyzed)

Craig (Unspecified Disability)

Erica (Unspecified Disability)

James (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Jessie (Unspecified Disability)

Judy (Unspecified Disability)

Julio (Unspecified Disability)

Kelly (Cystic Fibrosis)

Liam (Unspecified Disability)

Ray (Unspecified Disability)

Timmy (Cerebral Palsy, Wheelchair User)

Tricia (Unspecified Disability)

B:

Blind (Rachel DeWoskin)

Emma Sasha Silver (Blind)

Blindsided (Priscilla Cummings)

Natalie O'Reilly (Blind)

Blind Sighted (Peter Moore)

Callie (Blind)

Blind Spot (Laura Ellen)

Roswell "Roz" Hart (Blind - Macular Degeneration)

Bruised (Tanya Boteju)

Caihong "Cai" (Deaf)

C:

Catching the Light (Susan Sinnott)

Cathy (Unspecified Learning Disability)

Cemetary Boys (Aiden Thomas)

Julian Diaz (ADHD)

Connection Error (Annabeth Albert)

Josiah Simmons (ADHD)

Ryan Orson (Multi-Limb Amputee)

Crown of Feathers - Series (Nicki Pau Preto)

Sparrow (Blind)

D:

Daughter of the Deep (Rick Riordan)

Ester Harding (Autistic)

Dear Mothman (Robin Gow)

Noah (Autistic)

E:

F:

Finding Phoebe (Gavin Extence)

Phoebe (Autistic)

Frankie's World (Aoife Dooley)

Frankie (Autistic)

Sam (Wheelchair User)

Future Girl (Asphyxia)

Piper McBride (Deaf)

G:

Gifted Clans (Graci Kim)

Sahm (Limb Difference)

Girl, Stolen (April Henry)

Cheyenne Wilder (Blind)

Good Kings, Bad Kings (Susan Nussbaum)

Joanna Madsen (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

H:

Handle With Care (Jodi Picoult)

Willow O'Keefe (Osteogenesis Imperfecta)

Hello, Universe (Erin Entrada Kelly)

Valencia Somerset (Deaf)

Highway Bodies (Alison Evans)

Jojo (Amputee)

House Rules (Jodi Picoult)

Jacob Hunt (Autistic)

How to Speak Dolphin (Ginny Rorby)

Adam (Autistic)

Zoe (Blind)

I:

J:

Jerk, California (Jonathan Friesen)

Sam Carrier (Tourette's Syndrome)

K:

Keep This to Yourself (Tom Ryan)

Junior Merlin (Partially Blind - One Eye)

L:

Learning Curves (Ceillie Simkiss)

Cora McLaughlin (ADHD)

Light a Single Candle (Beverly Butler)

Cathy Wheeler (Blind)

Love and First Sight (Josh Sundquist)

Cecily Hoder (Facial Difference)

William "Will" Porter (Blind)

M:

Maximum Ride (James Patterson)

Iggy (Blind)

N:

Nestlings (Nat Cassidy)

Ana Greene (Paralyzed, Wheelchair User)

Not If I See You First (Eric Lindstrom)

Parker Grant (Blind)

O:

On the Edge of Gone (Corinne Duyvis)

Denise (Autistic)

P:

Percy Jackson - Universe (Rick Riordan)

Amphithemis (Short Term Memory Loss)

Ben (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

Ethan Nakamura (Partially Blind)

Halcyon "Hal" Green (Mute)

Hearthstone (Deaf)

Hephaestus (Facial Differences, Limb Differences)

Leo Valdez (ADHD, Motion Sickness)

Phineas (Blind)

Thalia Grace (ADHD, Dyslexia)

Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes (Jonathan Auxier)

Peter Nimble (Blind)

Planet Earth is Blue (Nicole Panteleakos)

Nova Vezina (Autistic)

Punk 57 (Penelope Douglas)

Ryen Trevarrow (Allergies, Asthma)

Q:

R:

Rainbow Magic (Daisy Meadows)

Camilla (Deaf)

Elsie (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

Harper (Down Syndrome)

Riley (Limb Difference)

Remember Dippy (Shirley Reva Vernick)

Remember "Mem" Dippy (Autistic)

Retina Boy (Ben Shaberman)

Doug Anderson (Blind)

Marcy (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

S:

Sadie (Courtney Summers)

Sadie Hunter (Stutter)

Sal and Gabi Break the Universe (Carlos Hernandez)

Floramaria Vidón (Diabetes)

Salvador "Sal" Vidón (Type 1 Diabetes)

Scholomance (Series - Naomi Novik)

Dinesh (Facial Scarring)

Hideo (Unspecified Tic Disorder)

Jowani (Stammer)

She is Not Invisible (Marcus Sedgwick)

Laureth Peak (Blind)

Six of Crows (Leigh Bardugo)

Kaz Brekker (Chronic Pain, Cane User)

Wylan Van Eck (Dyslexia)

Song for a Whale (Lynne Kelly)

Grandfather (Deaf)

Grandmother (Deaf)

Iris Bailey (Deaf)

Wendell (Deaf)

T:

Tall Story (Candy Gourlay)

Bernardo (Gigantism)

The Good Hawk (Joseph Elliot)

Agatha (Down Syndrome)

The Heart of Applebutter Hill (Donna Hill)

Abigail Jones (Blind)

The Idiot (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

Lev Myshkin (Epilepsy)

The Locked Tomb (Tamsyn Muir)

Cytherea the First (Cancer)

The Luis Ortega Survival Club (Sonora Reyes)

Ariana Ruiz (Autistic, Situational Mutism)

The One Thing (Marci Lyn Curtis)

Ben Milton (Spina Bifida)

Maggie Sanders (Blind)

The Storm Runner (J.C. Cervantes)

Renata "Ren" Santiago (Allergies, Epilepsy)

Rosie (Amputee)

Zane Obispo (Leg Length Discrepancy, Cane User)

The Tragedy Paper (Elizabeth LaBan)

Tim Macbeth (Albino, Blind)

The Wheel of Time (Robert Jordan)

Mat Cauthon (Blind)

The Window (Jeanette Ingold)

Mandy (Blind)

Things Not Seen (Andrew Clements)

Alicia Van Dorn (Blind)

Thousand Worlds - Series (Yoon Ha Lee)

Myung Juhwang (Amputee)

Quartermaster Yang (Deaf)

Tristian Strong - Series (Kwame Mbalia)

Jessica "Jess" (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

U:

V:

W:

Warriors (Erin Hunter)

Berrynose (Amputee)

Briarlight (Limited Mobility)

Brightheart (Partially Blind)

Cinderpelt (Limited Mobility)

Deadpaw (Limb Difference)

Fallowfern (Deaf)

Finleap (Amputee)

Halftail (Amputee)

Jayfeather (Blind)

Leopardstar (Diabetes)

Lilywhisker (Paralyzed)

Longtail (Blind)

Moth Flight (ADD)

Oddfoot (Limb Difference)

One-Eye (Partially Blind)

Petalfall (Epilepsy)

Shadowsight (Epilepsy)

Snowkit (Deaf)

Whitewater (Partially Blind)

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the East (Gregory Maguire)

Nessarose Thropp (Unspecified Disability, Wheelchair User)

Wings of Fire (Tui T. Sutherland)

Addax (Limp)

Battlewinner (Fantasy Disability)

Chameleon (Facial Difference, Limited Abilities)

Clay (Limp)

Dune (Amputee)

Jerboa ||| (Amputee)

Mayfly (Amputee)

Onyx (Limited Mobility)

Osprey (Blind, Paralyzed)

Peregrine (Partially Deaf)

Sapphire (Amputee)

Scarlet (Facial Difference)

Sequoia (Amputee)

Snowflake (Limited Mobility)

Starflight (Blind)

Stonemover (Limited Mobility*)

Tamarin (Blind)

Tau (Limb Difference, Limited Mobility)

Vengeance (Facial Difference)

Wasp (Facial Difference)

Wonder (R.J. Palacio)

Auggie Pullman (Facial Difference)

X:

Y:

Z:

#:

100 Days (Nicole McInnes)

Agnes (Progeria)

100 Sideways Miles (Andrew Smith)

Finn Easton (Epilepsy)

13 Gifts (Wendy Mass)

Angelina D'Angelo (Facial Difference)

[newstfionline]

Why Don’t You Donate for Syrian Refugees? Blame Bad Marketing

Charles Duhigg, NY Times, June 14, 2017

This summer, as you’re watching television or sifting through mail, you’re likely to come across charities asking for your money. And at some point, you’ll probably dig into your pocket to help victims of last year’s Ecuadorean earthquake, the continuing drought in Yemen or some other worthy cause.

It is statistically unlikely, however, that you’ll write a check to help Syrian refugees. Though the Syrian crisis is a huge and heartbreaking story, it has translated into relatively little charitable giving. One large relief organization, GlobalGiving, found that people were three times as likely to donate to victims of the 2015 earthquake in Nepal or the 2011 Japanese tsunami as to those fleeing the war in Syria. Other refugee causes fare even worse.

Which is surprising, because while you have probably never experienced an earthquake, visited Yemen or Nepal, or been personally affected by many of the causes you support, it’s quite likely you have ancestors who were refugees or migrants themselves, and odds are good that you’re working or living near émigrés and their families.

So why does one of the most important and heart-wrenching issues have so much trouble attracting donations?

Blame bad marketing.

A few years ago, a pair of social scientists in Britain began wondering why some charities were more popular than others. The researchers, the wife-and-husband team of Jennifer van Heerde-Hudson and David Hudson, had spent years studying the ways charities solicited donations. Conventional wisdom held that the most effective appeals emphasized innocent victims.

“Children who have lost their homes, starving families, the heartstrings thing,” Mr. Hudson told me. ��Ads that convey ‘If you don’t donate, people will die.’ That’s what everyone believes works.”

But when the researchers looked at nonphilanthropic industries, they saw the opposite. Nike doesn’t tell people to exercise because otherwise they’ll get fat and have a heart attack. Instead, the company uses stories of amputees running marathons to make you believe you can transform your life, if you just buy the right pair of shoes.

So Ms. van Heerde-Hudson and Mr. Hudson created two marketing campaigns for a charity in Bangladesh. The first showed an image of a sick and malnourished child and slogans like “Please donate before it’s too late.”

The other hardly mentioned which problem the charity was trying to solve. Instead, it showed a smiling child holding a “Future Doctor” sign, and proclaiming that “all of us sharing a little more can make a big difference.” It sought donations to “educate the next teacher, farmer or doctor.”

“The second ad was a huge success,” Mr. Hudson told me. “The data was clear. If you can trigger a sense of hope, donations go up.”

Put differently, it’s not entirely your fault you aren’t giving to Syrian refugees. You just haven’t been manipulated properly.

To figure out if there’s a better method, I began asking charitable organizations who they thought was the most innovative marketer in philanthropy. Everyone pointed to a group named Charity: Water.

Charity: Water, which raises funds to deliver clean water in developing nations, began a decade ago by deliberately modeling itself on companies like Apple, Nike and Silicon Valley firms. “When we started, the biggest problem was that my friends said giving to charity was really depressing,” said Scott Harrison, who founded Charity: Water in 2006 after a career promoting nightclubs. “So we came up with some rules: No pictures of crying children or people with flies in their eyes. No using guilt or shame. Only use mottos that people would want to wear on T-shirts.”

One of Charity: Water’s most successful marketing appeals tells the story of a 15-year-old named Natalia, the president of a water committee in her village in Mozambique. In ads, Natalia stands in front of a well built with Charity: Water funds, arms crossed defiantly and explains how she previously walked long distances to get water, which meant she often missed school. Now, with a well in the center of her community, she makes it to school every day.

“Every piece of marketing has a hero,” said Lauren Letta, Charity: Water’s chief operating officer. “Maybe the hero is a girl in a village. Maybe it’s a drilling rig operator. Or, maybe, if you make a donation, the hero is you.”

Marketing is the art of telling stories so enthralling that people lose track of their wallets. And every marketer knows such stories can’t be too complicated. So another tenet at Charity: Water is that solutions need to be presented in simple ways. “Our approach is that water is binary,” Mr. Harrison told me. “People are either drinking clean water, which is good, or they aren’t, which is bad. We want to present an easy choice.”

That strategy--which the group propagates through online ads, social media campaigns, direct email solicitations and even the occasional billboard--has been remarkably effective. Over the past decade, Charity: Water has raised $252 million and has supported 23,000 projects in villages and rural areas across Africa, Asia and elsewhere.

It has become a cause celeb among tech entrepreneurs, Hollywood stars and the Twitterati. Unusually, 47 percent of its donors are millennials (most charities struggle to hit 10 percent).

That said, it can be hard to see how to apply some of the group’s lessons to really complicated issues, like Syrian refugees.

“With an earthquake, it’s easy; everyone is an innocent victim, and they have a problem that will eventually end,” said Amanda Seller of the International Rescue Committee, who notes that even the phrase “innocent victim” unfairly segments philanthropy. “Wars and man-made disasters are really hard,” Ms. Seller said, “because sometimes you can’t tell the victims from the perpetrators or how long it’ll last.”

What’s more, when it comes to companies like Nike, we’re comfortable with half-truths. We know that buying sneakers isn’t really going to transform us into marathoners.

But we’re less forgiving with charities, which we expect to be both philanthropists and educators, untainted by marketing sleight of hand.

However, I think that’s a mistake. We need more philanthropies that raise funds by mimicking the tactics of Madison Avenue.

I went to the headquarters of Charity: Waters a few weeks ago and asked a few of its leaders to critique some Syrian refugee fund-raising campaigns. With the acknowledgment that they are not expert on this topic, they saw a number of things they would change, focusing not on the message, but the way it’s delivered.

“These are all pictures of sad kids, crying women, scary statistics,” Mr. Harrison said. “What kind of success stories can I tell? And what is success? How do we know when things are getting better?”

If Charity: Water were to start a campaign for Syrian refugees, it would most likely feature a photo of a child who has carved out a successful life in the chaos. It would be hopeful and optimistic. If you donated to Charity: Refugee, you would be told precisely what you’re buying--two blankets, say, and 12 meals, as well as three picture books--and then you would receive photos of those exact supplies in refugees’ hands, something most charities don’t do because they don’t want to be constrained in how funds are spent.

The Charity: Refugee campaign would not try to educate you about global politics, or Syria’s complex tribalism. It would, instead, make you feel as if you’ve made the world a better place with just a few dollars. It would help you sleep at night, instead of giving you more to worry about.

It would, in other words, be a great piece of marketing. It might even have a catchy phrase that looks great on a T-shirt. And it would persuade more people to donate. Which, right now, might be what matters most.

[agentvencm]

       Character “About” Sheet:

QUOTE

“Think happy things. Mom? Ugh... no. Betty? Swing and miss. Uh... High school? God, no... Do I have any happy thoughts?”

BASIC

NAME:  eugene thompson NICKNAMES:  flash (and variations of this, such as; flasharoo, flash-man, etc.) AGE:  29 BIRTHDAY:  march 24 SPECIES:  human GENDER:  cis male PRONOUNS:  he/him

FAMILY

MOTHER:  rosie thompson FATHER:  harrison thompson (deceased) PARENTS:  didnt i just  FAMILY:  leah thompson (aunt), eugenia thompson (aunt), tom thompson (uncle) SIBLINGS:  jesse thompson (sister)

PHYSIAL ATTRIBUTES

FACE CLAIM:  luke mitchell (alt fc: sam worthington) RACE/ETHNICITY:  white NATIONALITY:  the most american HEIGHT:  4′1″, formerly 6′2″ WEIGHT:  160 lbs (73 kg), formerly 185 lbs. BUILD:  athletic, muscular built, endo-mesomorphic.  HAIR:  on the longer side of short, often floppy haired, sometimes cut short. i think he just forgets to get a haircut for months smfh  FACIAL HAIR:  a good stubble. a clean shaven flash ain’t no son of mine.  HAIR COLOR:  strawberry blonde, but more on the blond side. the red shows up in certain lighting.  EYE COLOR:  a clear blue SKIN COLOR:  white, pale, usually with a bit of a tan.  DOMINANT HAND:  right ANOMALIES:  sth to do with his legs hm........ SCENT:  cheap 2 in 1 shampoo,  ACCENT:  nu yawk PHYSICAL DISABILITIES:  double lower leg amputee LEARNING DISABILITIES:  he wasn’t the best in school, but no learning disabilities.  ALLERGIES:  bees DISORDERS:  substance abuse disorder NERVOUS TICS:  nail biting, knuckle cracking.  QUIRKS:  good at lying about serious matters, bad at lying about fun and light subjects.  doesn’t like to have to volume on odd numbers.  

LIFESTYLE

BORN:  Queens, New York City, New York RAISED:  Queens, New York City, New York VEHICLE:  n/a PHONE:  probably the most worn down samsung you’ve seen in your life LAPTOP/COMPUTER:  he sure has a laptop dont ask me what kind  PETS:  n/a

HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION:  Mid Town High School graduate COLLEGE EDUCATION:  Empire State University, football scholarship, dropout CAREER:  former U.S. army soldier, current high school gym teacher EXPERIENCE:  three tours of duty, years of training RANK:  corporal EMPLOYER:  uncle sam? ??  YEARLY SALARY:  about  $29,185 formerly, as a soldier, now probably ?? ?  $21,535 according to google. but he gets extra money just for having earned a medal of honor so it’s probably more  BADGE NUMBER: n/a TRAINED IN: ?? probably West Point, US Military Academy  OTHER: /

POLITICAL AFFILIATION: my boy will never support trump if thats what u mean RELIGIOUS BELIEFS:  okay look,, in the marvel universe it’s general knowledge some gods exist. ares is out there, thor and the gang. flash knows this. but the capital-g God people speak of, and actually praying and Believing? no sir.  MISDEMEANORS:  are we counting beating up various kids while in high school bc b oi FELONIES:  has gone AWOL, theft of military property, a few murders TICKETS AND/OR VIOLATIONS:  well i mean it’s not like he’s parking anywhere DRUGS:  nope SMOKES:  no ALCOHOL:  no longer drinks after overcoming his alcoholism DIET:  sometimes sticks to a muscle building diet for a little while, but never really takes it too seriously. he eats a lot though. definitely one of those guys that go “wow!! i eat so much!! three peoples worth of food, and i never get fat!! and i dont even do anything for it!!!” while they exercise like 6 times a week. 

ROMANTIC ORIENTATION:  heteroromantic SEXUAL ORIENTATION:  heterosexual MARTIAL STATUS:  single CHILDREN:  n/a AVAILABILITY:  single LOOKING FOR:  betty

LANGUAGES:  english

PHOBIAS:  becoming like his father HOBBIES:  name any sport and he’ll love it TRAITS:  hotheaded, athletic, blunt, (self-)destructive, courageous, addictive, loyal, protective, good-natured, social, independent, competitive, disciplined, selfless, headstrong, aggressive. SOCIAL MEDIA:  not a very big social media user. definitely on facebook, used to be on twitter years ago but never touches it anymore. has a snapchat and instagram but scarcely uses them. 

FAVOURITE

LOCATION:  what SPORTS TEAM: New York Giants GAME:  i haven’t quite figured out what his favorite video game would be. but i do think he enjoys them. first person shooters, zombie shooters, horror games MUSIC:  not too picky with his music, his taste ranges somewhere between EDM and classic rock SHOWS:  idk i hc him to really enjoy shows like NCIS MOVIES:  definitely a fan of action movies (rumoured not to watch any movie that lacks explosions), thrillers, horror.  RADIO STATION:  do i look like i know shit about american radio stations FOOD:  my red meat son  BEVERAGE:  let’s not  talk about that  COLOR:  red

CHARACTER

MORAL ALIGNMENT:  chaotic good MBTI:  ESTP MBTI ROLE:  the entrepreneur  ENNEAGRAM:  type 8 ENNEAGRAM ROLE:  the leader  TEMPERAMENT:  sanguine WESTERN ZODIAC:  aries CHINESE ZODIAC:  dragon (tiger fits him better but dragon is his year so ? ???) PRIMAL SIGN:  tyrannosaurus rex (i couldnt make this up if i tried im sc r eaming this is the most predictably flash thing) HOGWARTS HOUSE:  gryffindor  ILVERYMORNY HOUSE:  wampus TAROT CARD:  the chariot TV TROPES:  jerk jock, handicapped badass, good is not soft, don’t you dare pity me!, super soldier SONG:  fuck u im adding more than one              — “diary of a deadman” by five finger death punch             — “east” by sleeping at last         ��   — “nobody praying for me” by seether

IDEOLOGIES: Anyone who mocks Spider-Man will be punched. 

[joannrochaus]

Double amputee wins modeling contract

Daisy-May Demetre was born with underdeveloped fibular bones in both legs. Her parents chose to have her legs amputated below the knee. After being fitted with prosthetics, she can walk, run, and jump and is an avid gymnast.

She is also a model.

Daisy-May has appeared on the catwalk at London Fashion Week. Now the seven-year-old has been awarded a contract with British fashion brand River Island. The company explained: “We required a model who has lots of energy and who looked great in activewear. Daisy-May Demetre fitted this brief perfectly.”

Her parents aren’t shocked that their daughter is inspiring so many people. Her father explained: “The support we get through Instagram from other disabled and non-disabled people is what we are about–helping to put smiles on faces and inspire people to push and follow their dreams.”

Woods and Mickelson will play for $10 million

Material success can be used for significant purposes.

Consider yesterday’s announcement that Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson will play a $10-million showdown match Thanksgiving weekend. The two golfing legends will compete against each other in the Las Vegas area on November 23 or 24.

They hope the match starts a series of events of a similar nature, pitting people or teams against one another with a high purse at stake.

Neither needs the money. They lead all active golfers in career earnings (Woods with more than $112 million and Mickelson with more than $87 million). Woods has made an additional $1.4 billion and Mickelson an additional $50 million in endorsements.

I hope the winner donates the $10 million to charity.

Yesterday, Apple became the first publicly listed US company to achieve a $1 trillion stock market valuation. CEO Tim Cook has made significant donations to hurricane relief and other causes and plans to donate his fortune to philanthropic projects. But imagine the impact if his company made a tithe of $100 billion to charity.

Success is more than wealth. In fact, when we measure success by prosperity, three dangerous results follow.

We spend time and money on what is less significant

The jacket worn by Harrison Ford when he played Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back will be auctioned in September. It is expected to sell for $1.3 million.

Imagine the good if the buyer donated that money to feed hungry people instead.

Scripture warns: “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evils” (1 Timothy 6:10). Solomon, who should know, observed that “a good name is to be chosen rather than great riches” (Proverbs 22:1).

We measure spirituality by success

The “health and wealth” gospel is perennially appealing because it cloaks materialism in the veneer of piety. The more we have, the more we must be blessed by God, or so we convince ourselves.

This despite the poverty of the Lord Jesus (Matthew 8:20) and the suffering he predicted for his followers (John 16:33). This despite the biblical warning: “He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income” (Ecclesiastes 5:10).

Jesus observed, “You cannot serve God and money” (Matthew 6:24). One must serve the other.

We see adversity as an enemy rather than an opportunity

Judges 3 finds Israel in their Promised Land. Here we read this surprising statement: “These are the nations that the Lord left, to test Israel by them, that is, all in Israel who had not experienced all the wars in Canaan. It was only in order that the generations of the people of Israel might know war, to teach war to those who had not known it before” (vv. 1-2). The narrative then lists several pagan nations in the land.

God knew that his people would have to defend their nation, so he left Canaanites in the land to give them an opportunity to learn war. Small conflicts today would prepare them for greater battles tomorrow. “If you have raced with men on foot, and they have wearied you, how will you compete with horses?” (Jeremiah 12:5).

The Lord also left Canaanites in the land to show Israel her continued need to depend on his protection and provision. God told his people, “I spoke to you in your prosperity, but you said, ‘I will not listen'” (Jeremiah 22:21).

Our Father wants us to see temptation as an opportunity to seek his help and experience his victory. He wants us to see suffering as an opportunity to seek his healing and experience his presence. He wants us to see persecution as an opportunity to demonstrate our love for him and experience his strength.

What adversity is your opportunity today?

The post Double amputee wins modeling contract appeared first on Denison Forum.

source https://www.denisonforum.org/columns/daily-article/double-amputee-wins-modeling-contract/ source https://denisonforum.tumblr.com/post/176585228287

[netunleashed-blog]

World sport: 10 photos we liked this week: 9-15 July

http://www.internetunleashed.co.uk/?p=9669 World sport: 10 photos we liked this week: 9-15 July - http://www.internetunleashed.co.uk/?p=9669 A selection of some of the most striking sports photographs taken from around the world this week: Tampere, Finland, 13 July: Great Britain's Niamh Emerson collapses in the rain after becoming world junior heptathlon champion with victory in the 800m, clocking a personal best of two minutes 9.74 seconds (Stephen Pond/Getty Images for IAAF) Kidderminster, UK, 11 July: Fast bowler Sher Ali Afridi celebrates with his team-mates after Pakistan beat England by 45 runs in the Vitality IT20 Physical Disability Tri-Series match (Nathan Stirk/Getty Images) Wimbledon, UK, 14 July: The Venus Rosewater Dish is held aloft for the first time by Angelique Kerber, after the German beat seven-time Wimbledon champion Serena Williams 6-3 6-3 in the women's final (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images) Chamonix, France, 13 July: Slovenian climber Domen Skofic competes in the semi-final of the 2018 IFSC Climbing World Cup, with the stunning scenery of Mont Blanc as the backdrop (Jean-Pierre Clatot/AFP/Getty Images) Gaza Strip, 12 July: Palestinian amputee football team 'The Heroes' take part in a training session at Municipality Stadium in Deir Al Balah in central Gaza. The team was formed to give hope to young people injured during conflict and violence (Muhmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images) Hamburg, Germany, 15 July: Yuko Takahashi of Japan and Italy's Verena Steinhauser dive into the water during the swim leg of the ITU World Triathlon Mixed Relay World Championships. France would ultimately be the victors, by 40 seconds from Australia, with the United States in third (Alexander Koerner/Getty Images for ITU) Dreux, France: 14 July: Stage eight of the Tour de France gets under way as riders set off on the 181km flat route from Dreux to Amiens. LottoNL-Jumbo rider Dylan Groenewegen was victorious with a powerful sprint to claim his second stage win in as many days (Tim de Waele/Getty Images) London, UK, 15 July: At the Athletics World Cup at London Stadium, United States captain Queen Harrison kisses her winner's medal as the US top the overall standings at the inaugural event. "We are a diverse country and to see this team be so diverse, I am proud to be American just now," Harrison said. (Marc Atkins, British Athletics/Getty Images ) Wimbledon, UK, 13 July: Centre Court was treated to the second-longest match in Wimbledon history as Kevin Anderson and John Isner slugged it out for six hours and 35 minutes before Anderson won 26-24 in the fifth set. Isner holds the record for the longest game at SW19 after his 11-hour epic against Nicolas Mahut in 2010 (Ben Curtis/PA) Paris, France, 15 July: French fans party long into the night on the Champs-Elysees as France beat Croatia 4-2 in Moscow to lift the World Cup for the first time since 1998 (Ian Langsdon/EPA)See more images from the World Cup, and some of the best news pictures from the week. All photographs are subject to copyright. Where next? Source link

[latestnews2018-blog]

'The Proposal' Injects Your Favorite 'Bachelor' Tropes Straight Into Your Veins

New Post has been published on https://latestnews2018.com/the-proposal-injects-your-favorite-bachelor-tropes-straight-into-your-veins/

'The Proposal' Injects Your Favorite 'Bachelor' Tropes Straight Into Your Veins

Jessica — a 30-year-old Steelers fan who loves partying, whitewater rafting and science — makes her way center stage. She’s one of 10 women vying for an engagement with a stranger on national television.

In the first official challenge of the “soul mate pageant,” she and her competitors are required to “bare their souls and their bodies as they reveal what’s most important to them, in their finest beachwear.”

Welcome to “The Proposal,” a new ABC show that takes the “Bachelor” franchise’s recipe for instant love and grinds it into a powder you can rail.

The whole thing takes place in front of a live studio audience, on a set that’s part “Bachelor” mansion, part “Miss America” stage. The mystery man Jessica hopes to wife sits inside a futuristic pod, a curved, cagelike structure shielding him from view. He can see her, but she can’t see him. None of us can. 

“So the first thing I want to do is —” Jessica says to the audience before pausing. “Dad, I’m sorry, but I want to be vulnerable.” She then removes the sarong around her waist, revealing a white, ruffly swimsuit as the audience cheers wildly. The camera zooms in on Dad in the audience. His glazed-over grin seems to be saying, “My daughter’s a hoot!” 

Freshly vulnerable, Jessica takes out a collage she prepared, featuring photos of her parents’ “love story” that culminates with her birth. She flips the piece of cardboard over to reveal a blank side. “This is where I want our adventure to start,” she says, to heightened applause. “I want to fill this scrapbook with memories of us.”

“Bachelor” fans will recognize this move ― the family scrapbook left unfinished ― a classic gift that contestants bestow on the lead the night before they hope to wind up engaged. Except Jessica hasn’t even seen her suitor’s face, and she’s not even waiting 24 hours to become his fiancée. 

The hourlong (shit)show that is “The Proposal” premiered Monday night directly after “The Bachelorette,” appealing to viewers who think the beloved reality show’s procedural 10-week-long courtship is 10 weeks too long.

No longer must viewers toil through seemingly endless rose ceremonies to reach the orgasmic climax of the grand proposal and the sweet release of happily ever after. Now “Bachelor” junkies can jump to the finish line week after week for the ultimate grotesque love rush. 

ABC

Mike waits in the pod, shrouded in darkness on “The Proposal.”

The nightmarish spectacle, something right out of “Black Mirror,” takes the now codified “journey to find love” imprinted into the brains of “Bachelor” fans and boils it down to its essence. Physical attraction, check. Trauma porn, check. Teary speech about “finding your person,” check. Father’s approval, check. Neil Lane diamond ring, check. 

Our host is Jesse Palmer, a Chris Harrison type who has undergone a mandatory system upgrade. “What you’re about to see has never been attempted before on television,” he says, welcoming those in the audience and at home and congratulating us all for “making history.” Palmer, who was the Bachelor himself in 2004, seems to have dutifully observed the melodramatic yet monotone ways of Harrison, the veteran master of ceremonies, and adopted them as his own. 

We then meet the groom-to-be … well, kind of. One of the show’s strange twists is that neither the contestants nor viewers see the man’s face until the very end, as if the hourlong competition courtship weren’t worrisome enough.

A large screen rolls video introducing Mike, a 29-year-old police officer from Bakersfield, California. (The city has one of the most corrupt and racist police forces in the U.S. Hello, Prince Charming!) To prevent viewers from seeing his face, Mike’s physical form is obscured by an inexplicable, Alex Mack–style silver goo, yielding a sight as horrific and uncanny as Kevin Bacon in “Hollow Man.”

can’t believe no one told me that ABC’s “The Proposal” takes place in the Annihilation cinematic universe pic.twitter.com/p2asNvUUPQ

— Caroline Framke (@carolineframke) June 19, 2018

We learn that six years ago, Mike was in a motorcycle accident and lost his right leg. He’s still mobile and athletic, and he loves CrossFit. A woman in the audience wipes away a tear. 

Next we meet the women, including Jessica, who parade down a staircase in cocktail attire as batshit descriptions of them play over the speakers.

When Havilah “isn’t writing or speaking, she’s tending to her massive collection of dolls.”

Before medical student Rihanna started studying emergency room medicine, “she was a flight attendant, and she’s very proud of her calves.” (The camera then zooms in on those gloriously shaped gams.) 

Kendall, introduced as a baton twirler, has “been twirling batons her whole life … and sometimes those batons are on fire. Kendall is also a neuropsychologist.”

The last woman to walk the plank is Monica, a smiley, 31-year-old real estate agent from Southern California who “learned to surf even though she’s horrified by the ocean.”

ABC

Monica, the eventual winner of “The Proposal,” blows a kiss toward the pod.

After the women are introduced and before they utter a single peep, Palmer chimes in. It’s elimination time. “I know this is difficult. We’ve barely gotten started, but out of these 10 women, which seven would you like to see more of?” he asks.  

“Wow, this is a lot harder than I’ve anticipated,” Mike’s disembodied voice bellows from the general vicinity of the pod they’ve trapped him in. The show is a parody of itself. When he chooses which women he’d “like to get to know better,” each gives a little wave to the audience. Some blow kisses at the dark void where their future husband lies in wait. 

Next comes the aforementioned bathing suit competition, in which women can “be vulnerable” by exposing their dark secrets and sexy bodies for approximately 30 seconds. This is magic of “The Proposal.” It takes what “The Bachelor” says it’s about (finding love) and mixes it with what “The Bachelor” is really about (being hot and being on TV) and presents them both without pretense or apology.

Fans know the key to “Bachelor” glory is having a backstory that’s moving (I’ve been hurt in the past) but not too tragic (My parents are divorced), lest you be a cursed leper whose unromantic affliction will bedevil your future marriage. “The Proposal” contestants know these rules like the backs of their hands. One woman tears up recalling her battle with anxiety and depression, before running her hand down her slim figure suggestively and shouting cheerily, “Clearly I’m over it!” as the audience whoops. 

The depravity makes “UnReal” look quaint. 

After the bathing suit round, the women are whittled down to four. They then answer “deal breaker” questions that can be about anything — “politics, religion, even sex” — in 30 seconds or less.

First, Morgan’s up. “There’s no easy way to say this,” the voice from the pod roars. “How do you feel about dating an amputee?” After a moment of hesitation, Morgan replies that she is “not opposed” to it. “I believe the soul is what matters, not the physical appearance.”

Next is Jessica, the collage girl. “As a police officer, there are those dangers that we face in the field, in which we may not come home,” Mike’s voice booms like the Wizard of Bakersfield PD. “Are you able to live with that?” 

“I am,” Jessica responds without missing a beat, as if she cannot wait for her future hubby to be six feet under. “I definitely could live with that. I have strong religious beliefs, so I would believe you are always in God’s hands and he would take care of you and I know that you would be OK. I know our time is precious on this earth, and we would have so many moments, and I would hold those forever in my heart ―”

Palmer cuts her off. “Jessica, your time’s up,” he says. “Thank you.”

The camera zooms in on the starless prison keeping Mike captive. We cannot see his facial reaction but do see a slight movement from the right side of his head. Certainly he’s alive. Possibly he approves. 

ABC

A rare glimpse inside the “Proposal” pod.

In the next round, Mike’s best friend emerges from the audience to ask questions that only a best friend could. Kendall is cut for saying she doesn’t want kids — a rare reasonable moment amid the bananas display. The question of whether to become a mother is a complicated one, an issue that prevents many couples from committing to a life together. Fair! 

Before the final round, Mike emerges from the dark pod that has kept him captive to face his two potential brides. He’s cute, kind of like a meaty Wilmer Valderrama. “I’m glad I got to come here and see two amazing, beautiful, stunning women,” he says, putting to bed any worry that he doesn’t fully appreciate their complex interiority. 

Then the two finalists ― collage girl Jessica and smiley surfer Monica ― give last-ditch appeals to win Mike’s eternal love. They’ve both changed into glittery, floor-length gowns for the occasion. Jessica’s up first. She tells Mike she’s a “traditional woman” and needs Dad’s approval before taking the plunge. Camera jumps to Dad in the audience, whose eyes are welling with tears. For some reason he gives his blessing, assuring his withered 30-year-old daughter ― ancient by reality-TV standards of desirability ― will finally be dicked down.

Jessica takes a deep breath. “I can’t promise we’re never going to not have a fight or a disagreement or argue about what we’re gonna watch,” she says. “But what I can promise you is that I will love you and be there for you every single day, every step of the way. I’m your person.”

Holy shit. She starts crying, the sobs interspersed with eruptions of maniacal laughter.

She promises to love him when she’s “old and gray and 60 and can’t walk,” perhaps a Freudian slip about her future husband’s amputated leg. 

She closes with, “Let’s do the damn thing!” ― quoting the catchphrase of the current Bachelorette, Becca Kufrin. 

Then it’s Monica’s turn. She starts crying right away, and Jessica looks pissed. “I’ve yet to find someone that has as big of a heart as me,” she says between perfect baby sobs. “But you just seem to fit that really well.” Her speech is better less creepy. Jessica knows it. 

It’s time for Mike to close the deal. “I know from the very beginning I never thought I’d find somebody as special as you guys,” he says. “And I never thought I’d find love. But after hearing what you guys have to say, I feel like I have. And so … Monica.”

Mike gets down on one knee and pops out that sweet Neil Lane bling. Monica looks thrilled, as if this is everything she has ever wanted. The public performance of a fairy tale ending eclipses the value of an actual relationship with an actual partner. Monica and Mike eat each other’s faces. The camera zooms in on Jessica’s contorted grimace, giving its monstrous viewers just what they want: suffering. 

ABC

“Proposal” nation gets juiced up.

If “The Bachelor” is a simulacrum of the perfect love story, “The Proposal” is a simulacrum of that simulacrum. Yet there’s something freeing about the ludicrous spectacle, which, in a way, exposes the artificiality of the whole franchise. It also makes plain some of the unspoken assumptions at the root of “The Bachelor” philosophy that rarely see the light of day. 

For example, that women over 30 are tragic spinsters. And that love is something that blossoms between two hot people when they are “ready” and “open” and “here for the right reasons.” And most certifiably, that finding love on TV isn’t just *giggle* so unexpected *giggle,* it’s absurd. 

With “The Bachelor,” ABC has created a massive fan base, a “nation” addicted to love, humiliation and cruelty. Thus it’s the live studio audience upon which the “Proposal” camera loves to dwell — all those reactionary faces serving as a stand-in for our collective obsession.

We asked for this, all of us. 

Over 36 seasons, “The Bachelor” has perfected a reality-TV recipe as addicting as it is culpable. Every season, I swear I’m off the stuff, and yet every year, come the bios, I return. Glued to my seat, I watch the same story of love blossom, however impractically, offensively and inanely. And honestly, with two-hour episodes and an incessant programming schedule, who has the time? 

The McDonald’s to the “Bachelor” Cheesecake Factory, “The Proposal” offers the same giddy-guilty feeling on the cheap, in a fraction of the time. It’s a fairy tale romance and an all-American nightmare, packaged into an hour of cringeworthy, utterly engrossing, surreally dystopian TV. 

“The Proposal” is the final destination of “Bachelor” mania, infused with the disorienting pace of reality as we experience it in the year 2018. In its formula, aesthetic and (un?)scripted moments, the show out-weirds science fiction and outdoes satire. It’s the perfect reality show for a time when reality feels as if it’s sinking into the mud of an uncanny valley. 

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[declassroomedteach-blog]

One Size Never Fits All

By Gina Fournier

August 5, 2008

13, 595 words

               Writers like Jim Harrison, Joseph Epstein and Willa Cather have long known the damage English teachers can inflict on potential readers.  In the late sixties at SUNY, before he gave up academics and focused on writing, Harrison began to contemplate the ultimate master’s level writing program, which would include living both in the city and in the country, manual labor to clear the mind and intensive reading to feed it.  Notice the absence of a central authority figure in this plan.  Epstein comments in the introduction to The Norton Book of Personal Essays, “Few things are more efficient at killing the taste for a certain kind of literature than being forced it in schools.”  Apparently, Cather refused to have her books anthologized in student editions for fear students would never read her again.

               Of course writers never force readers, but unfortunately teachers tend to do so.  “Reading has been forced upon us every since we were in preschool.  Because of this most students dread to read outside of the classroom,” explains Josh, one of my Eng 1510: Composition I students in metro Detroit.       I can’t think of a worst indictment of my profession.  Teachers turn off students to learning.  Yes, aided by complacent parents and unresponsive institutions, but those problems require their own essays.  

               Signs indicating trouble abound.   Downturns in newspaper publishing, stagnancy in book publishing and the cultural shift away from words toward images all align with Josh’s testimony, as does the National Endowment for Arts (NEA) 2004 release “Reading at Risk” and the 2007 follow-up “To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence.” Although U.S. Census Bureau figures from 1940-2000 show huge gains in educational attainment (in 1940 under 1 in 20 adults 25 and older had earned a college diploma, while in 2000 nearly 1 in 4 had), Americans are reading less and less plus reading skills are worsening, says the NEA, even among college graduates.   A cable television commercial for Everest Institute, a college alternative specializing in certificate programs like medical billing, understands how to sell admissions, by promising hands on training over reading books.  The organization’s website relates, “You may have gone to high school cause you had to.”  The terms aren’t quite literate, but clientele may not be too discriminating.

               Asking every student in the classroom to read the same material is still the most popular approach used in English classes across all levels of study, the selections often chosen by committee and designed to somehow reach a substantial majority.   As I write that sentence in mid July when I really should be doing something else like taking a break or updating my coursepacks, a wave of boredom pins me down; as a teacher I try very hard not to forget what it was like being a student.  

               Why such a large and devoted following for such a limited approach?  In New Jersey this summer, The Star-Ledger reported that Butler High School picked a non classic, Kyle Maynard’s memoir No Excuses: The True Story of a Congenital Amputee Who Became a Champion in Wrestling and in Life for its summer reading program.  “One book, one city” approaches began catching on about a decade ago, the paper explained, in the steps of school-wide requirements for incoming college freshmen and the ruling classroom mainstay: one-size-fits-all reading assignments.   But why did this most traditional of all approaches pick up steam amid ongoing failings in education, when all methods, even time-honored—perhaps especially time-honored—should be assessed afresh for worth?  U.S. A. Today covered community colleges this July too, in “’Turning Point’ Arrives as U.S. Community Colleges’ Purview Grows.” The down-side of the picture cited a California report regarding the state’s 109 community colleges issued from the Legislative Analyst’s Office.  It discovered that teaching approaches “are not often aligned with students’ learning styles,” but are teachers listening and responding?  Though all indicators point to serious problems in reading and writing proficiency across many levels of education, few seem to question the central tie that binds most English instruction.  

               Meanwhile, average Americans in large numbers are stammering through literacy classes in their native language.  Nationally, people are concerned.  Recently, The Tampa Tribune added to this grim discussion with “Fewer Students Read Between the Lines,” which shared a sobering comment from Don Gaetz, a former county superintendent and current chairman of Florida’s Senate K-12 education committee: “The No. 1 problem in secondary education in our state and in the country is a decline in literacy in high school.”  That same deficiency stays with students who enter community college, nearly half of all college undergraduates, according to U.S.A .Today, who often carry the extra burden of financially supporting themselves and dependents.              

               As a community college English instructor, I think the “one city, one book” approach is a big part of the problem.   Alonso High School reading teacher Janelle MacLean was interviewed for the Tampa article and is an old friend of mine— but from dancing days circa The Turning Point not teaching days, so imagine my surprise running into her within an internet link supplied by my National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) (wordy title?) weekly e-mail newsletter.   Turns out she operates a special program sponsored by Scholastic, which allows her to tailor reading assignments to each student.  READ 180 is a successful program, according to MacLean, but she’s concerned. Speaking on the phone, she pointed to SpringBoard, a new program in English Language Arts and Mathematics for grades 6-12 designed by College Board, which is set to it hit Tampa schools in the fall, funded in part by the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation.  She fears the program will mean a loss of choice and fluidity in the classroom.  We agreed, though the bad grammar is all mine and designed for emphasis.  Pardon me if I sound frustrated, but if a program doesn’t include choice, it ain’t gonna work.  

               This past year, for its Great Michigan Read, the Michigan Humanities Council chose the reissue of Hemingway’s The Nick Adams Stories, simply because the collection is set in the state—“a literary masterpiece literally made in Michigan.” (“Imagine everyone in Michigan reading the same book.  At the same time.”)  However, despite widespread use, one-size fits all reading assignments apparently fail to turn students into life-long readers, or successful reading initiatives wouldn’t be in such high demand.  

               I don’t think I’m over-simplifying cause and effect here.               Instead of learning to appreciate the world of words, common book approaches turn students away—away from reading, away from books, away from the power of their own minds.   So please, let’s rethink this thing.  Especially with the internet’s easy access to everything, uniform assignments help students avoid actual reading and writing, which are too often successfully replaced with skimming, summarizing, mimicking lectures, consulting Cliff and Spark notes, surfing, cheating and guessing, especially throughout high school and college.   Shakespeare classes, online?  

               I’m very worried that we’re working against ourselves here.  Collectively over twelve to sixteen or so years, standardized reading and writing instruction demonstrate repeatedly why, after graduation, students might continue to “hate” reading and ignore newspapers, books, articles, poetry, plays, directions for Campbell’s soup, road signs, tax forms, mortgage contracts, primarily due to a perceived lack of relation to their lives.   Summer I semester, this past May and June, sitting in the back row, back corner,  Tucker entitled his Composition I entrance essay, which asks students to compare their music listening and reading habits, “Music-Easy, Books-Hard.”  Meanwhile, his friend Garrett sitting next to him explained, “I do not like reading” because he can’t “sit still for that long.”  Speaking for many of his peers, including his buddy from Central, Garrett believed at the beginning of class, “I feel that books are a waste of time.”  (University students take summer courses at community college looking for lower tuition and perhaps lower standards, too.)  However, by the end of class, after choosing to read The Lizard King by Jerry Hopkins about Doors’ lead singer Jim Morrison, Garrett changed his mind.  We later communicated by e-mail and he confirmed the earnest nature of his sentiments.   Before, “I thought that no matter what I was reading, there had to be something else I could be doing with my time, like go outside or hang with friends.  This all changed when I found a book that I actually liked.”  Describing just the growth I hope for in average students over a semester, he continued, “Of course I will never like reading the boring material like research and books for classes, but at least I will be able to find something interesting within the material and build on it.”  Students must first relate to reading on a personal level before they’re willing and able to read productively and proficiently as adults—reading when they must and should, even though they may not want to.

               I first heard word about what would happen when the world equated corn with oil two or three summers ago, standing in an Osceola County field, talking to a farmer.  Go figure. But more to the point:  go to the source.   Those of us are interested in education and literacy should listen to writers—professionals and students alike—because both groups understand reading, though of course in distinct ways.  In short, what this criticism means for the classroom is that reading and writing instruction should emphasize process—how to read and write— not content—that one book that will hopefully change the intellectual life of tenth, eleventh or twelfth graders for the better, which sounds so childish.  Yet this critical juncture is where preventable mistakes are being made.  

               My favorite example of what English teachers should not do comes with my personal bias intact, operating in full force.   A highly rated part-time instructor already on staff, I was not hired for a full-time position at this particular local community college (not even given an interview, which really unnerved me), so what follows is axe grinding but with a point.  Here’s who got a living wage and health care coverage instead:  an overweight, cigarette smoking out of stater, who planned one semester’s entry-level composition course around pornography. This stroke of brilliance, the kind of thing that gets David Horowitz going (and blowing bad teaching issues way out of proportion), came from an individual who self described the “foci” of his interest to be vaguely and sophomorically “everything” on the department website.  At the time, a Michigan company formerly called Weyco was making national headlines regarding their new policy of not hiring cigarette smokers, which launched a debate about employer rights, such as the possible right not to hire people—due to prohibitive healthcare costs— who are both obese and willing to kill themselves with nicotine.  Then as now, Michigan was ensconced in its post 9/11 economic woes.  Community colleges were demanding more money from the state, for very good reasons, but this one didn’t feel the need to help out the state’s employment figures or tax base in return.  Furthermore, the school is located within a city that is home to a large Arabic population, comprising a third of residents, including a disturbing number of female students who wear the hijab.  (As a female and feminist, even one figure under wraps evokes distress.)  Such radically conservative students might feel very uncomfortable studying pornography and might avoid taking gender studies or sociology courses, where the subject might be better located.    I don’t know what happen to the competition���s lesson plans because thankfully I split. Conventional wisdom turned out to be correct in my case.  Very gratefully, I was hired full-time at a local community college across town, one other than three at which I taught part-time and learned the craft.            

               To make students analyze pornography within an entry level college writing course is of course wrongheaded.  But to make students study any topic other than how to read and how to write in a course designed to cover process is wrongheaded.  This example just happens to nicely blare “bad idea,” but the idea remains bad even when the subject matter sounds more presentable, even more contemporary, like asking an entire program full of students to read and submerge themselves for entire semester into Lee and Bob Woodruff’s In an Instant or Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, which has been done at my institution in the remedial program.  I know because I hear about the titles when students who progress into Comp I talk about not reading the selections.  Don’t misunderstand.  Both books are fine reads, I’m sure.  I especially enjoyed Krakauer’s sidebar about father-son relations.   This year, I found that students who picked Krakauer’s 1996 investigation and tried to compare it to Sean Penn’s 2007 film encountered a far greater challenge than they had anticipated.  The point is that when students are inexperienced readers—inexperienced authentic readers—they are too often also inexperienced writers who have trouble developing an independent point.    In the simplest term, one size fits all turns out students who can’t think for themselves.

               Outside of the classroom for the last six years, the world has continued to fight and turn, some days more gracefully than others. Meanwhile, inside the classroom, I’ve learned to appreciate the necessity of diversity.   Let student readers choose their own writers and the student’s regard for reading and writing is likely to flourish, or least develop more successfully than traditional teacher-centered models.   Teaching students to make good decisions like successful corporate officers or business entrepreneurs must do is much more desirable than proffering assembly-line, book report- style regurgitation.   A military veteran and single parent commented this summer, “Before this class it had been 5 years since my last English class and I had forgotten almost everything I had learned, even the fact that I like to read.”

               Because my students collectively enliven a cacophony of personality and experience, the notion that one book will suit the needs of a substantial majority with the help of one person’s perspective—the teacher’s, mine—is absurd.  Given the opportunity to choose, most of my students select worthwhile nonfiction reading and a substantial majority claim to actually consume their selections and improve their attitudes, even if only a little.  A survey of choices made during the recently concluded brief summer semester reflects a panoply of tastes too rich to be contained in a single or even thirty-two flavors.  

               A budding philosopher read Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic starring a character called Osho, who led a flock, accumulated Rolls Royce vehicles and was arrested on immigration charges in Oregon in the 1980s.  Osho’s teachings on the joys of sex and laughter were later collected after his death by followers.  The resulting selection is sure to never make even one recommended reading list, which is not to say that the student’s time was necessarily wasted.  A male who described being passed over routinely by his teachers throughout his entire educational career found solace in Keith Dorney’s well-received football memoir Black and Honolulu Blue.  A history major accustomed to academic treatises discovered the father and son basketball biography Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich by Mark Kriegel and a more personal approach to his future field.  David Sedaris and Chuck Palahniuk make many lives more endurable.  

               Got an obscure interest?  No problem.  Want to be a pilot?  Talk to your dad and discover Robert Standford Tuck.  Disgruntled by your education?  Gravitate toward Lies My teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen.   Both liberals and conservatives check out Michael Moore, as the NCTE advises, “to determine what is ‘real’” and “to make judgments about validity, objectivity, and bias.”  Memoirs are popular, with new reads continually popping up, such as Ashley Rhodes-Courter ‘s Three Little Words, about foster care, and Daoud Hari’s The Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur.  

               This summer, students challenged themselves with Bell Hooks, Michael Korda’s Journey to a Revolution about the little-discussed 1956 Hungary revolution, Zora Neal Hurston and Freakonomics.  Like minds converged, as in Kevin Mitnick’s Art of Deception, about a career in computer hacking.   Going into health care instead?  Atul Gawande’s Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance filled the prescription perfectly.  Forensics?  Mary Roach’s Stiff. Parent of an autistic child?  Spiritual sensibilities?  Autism and the God Connection by William Stillman.  The usual child rearing problems? Setting Limits with Your Strong Willed Child by Robert J. Mackenzie.  Recovering heroin addict?  Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymor on Hunter S. Thompson.  Ex-stripper trying to become a lawyer and/or media personality? Cupcake Brown.  Trying to make sense of the world around you, in which black males are best represented in prison populations?  Punishment and Inequality in America by Princeton Professor of Sociology Bruce Western, which is no doubt worthwhile reading (I’m putting it on my list) even though Taylor was one of few to report that he read only “a majority” of the book.  

               Patterns do emerge.  Lately, each semester, a few female students have been drawn to Alice Sebold’s Lucky and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted.  This past semester, at least two students closely related to Sebold’s rape experience: one as a Bosnisan war survivor who witnessed more evils than a person should be subjected to in a lifetime and the other as a rape victim who found the courage to tell her parents and report the crime to the police.  So far, I’ve found that most readers don’t come out of reading Kaysen as fans (students struggle to write a cohesive and clear review of a book that is neither), yet this semester the book was well-received by one young woman who had recently spent time in a mental institution and like Kaysen felt helped by it. A strong but reserved “A” student, Brittany shared her view that assigned reading is “very difficult.”  Clarifying her position about her past educational experiences, she added, “I am not saying that the books were bad.”  Instead, she has a problem with being told what to read.

It’s just when somebody tells me I have to read a certain book & take notes on it then eventually write a paper, I find myself on sparknotes.com looking up chapter summaries.  But this assignment was different.  I got to choose a book that interest me & had no weekly schedule of reading dates. With Girl, interrupted I found myself staying up to all hours of the night reading it + re-reading.  So yes, I actively read my book and enjoyed it.  

               Experience tells me that neither dictatorship nor uniformity is likely to hold the answer for addressing the nation’s reading crisis. Sure, within each group a small number of students make regrettable choices like Karrine Steffans’ Confessions of a Video Vixen and Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It, the most popular book in southeastern Michigan followed closely by Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie.  Books that lack ideas, analysis, art or craft wouldn’t be my first choice for students, but I already know how to analyze selections.  They don’t, and people learn by doing.   Each semester, a very small number of individuals do make regrettable choices, which require them to exercise their own critical thinking more than the author did, but at least writing about the material then becomes a challenging experience, if not reading it.   Meanwhile, other students watch this scenario play out, perhaps becoming more confident in their own better decisions.  

               As an adjunct with limited choice, in my first years teaching community college English I happily used Bedford/ St. Martin’s The Bedford Reader and it’s less-sophisticated cousin, Subjects and Strategies, both of  which I liked a great deal with their mix of canonical and more quirky pieces, but then I already love to read.   Now, for Comp I, I use Catherine Lattrell’s cultural reader Remix (same publisher), which calls on a world of music that allows for hip-hop and file sharing.   Nothing from traditional recommended reading lists here; more so the likes of Salon and Wired are well-represented.   To balance group selections,  students choose essays independently from a fresh variety that includes Diane Ackerman, David Brooks, Laura Bush, P. Diddy, Firoozeh Dumas, Malcolm Gladwell, Ira Glass, Barry Lopez, Steven Pinker, Jennifer L. Pozner, Katie Roiphe, and Sara Vowell, whose works are organized within themed-chapters such as Identity, Tradition, Romance and Technology.  Nothing from the last millennium, so no E. B. White’s “Once More to Lake” (1941), which has its place but not as mandatory reading within entry level college writing classes in America in 2008 if wanting students to actually read is a goal, and of course it should be.  

               When bored and pressed for time, students act like water trying to escape.  They take the easiest way out.  And who can blame them?  In the February and March 2008 edition of the University of Maryland’s Teaching and Learning News, assistant director of the Center for Teaching Excellence Dave Eubank related a classroom experience that transpired in ENG 241: Introduction to the Novel.  The article concerned a new technologically-based assessment tool, clickers, which bring, it seems (I look forward to trying them) a game show appeal to learning.  Clickers are what the name implies.  Each student holds one and pushes buttons in response to Powerpoint questions.  This system of instruction provides an opportunity for instructors to poll student learning and cull anonymous results about teaching effectiveness, but Eubank’s experiment revealed the elephant in the room: students easily avoid reading.  “Our discussion of the fact that nearly 60% admitted to not completing the novel about which each student was required to write in her final paper was less than comfortable,” he bravely relayed.   Though the goal of the article was to promote the use of clickers outside of the sciences, Eubanks admitted that answers to questions about how much of each novel students had actually read were “occasionally surprising and often disheartening.”    So, what should an English teacher do?  Make students take lie detector tests and fail non readers?  

               Certainly, White’s “Once More to the Lake” is worthwhile reading, but not something students can readily relate to, and I fear that’s true about far too many selections entrenched in classrooms and forced upon students today.   Uniform required reading operates like a sort of intellectual waterboarding-style torture using authors instead of liquid.  If students make it all the way through the White’s essay without losing focus, they encounter “the chill of death” and perhaps are engaged enough to reflect upon their own mortality, but in my experience most are unlikely to do so. Before the essay closes it thoughts about life passing from generation to generation, White’s reminiscing has him editorializing about how “the unfamiliar nervous sound of the outboard motors” interrupted his reveries about the past.   Unlike his son, who “loved our rented outboard,” the father prefers the past and the “old one-cylinder engine with the heavy flywheel, how you could have it eating out of your hand if you got really close to it spiritually.”  New agey perhaps, but a long way from Silicon Valley.  The average student can’t readily relate to dated, AARP reflections, or someone else’s idea of a good time.  It’s a vicious circle; they don’t read enough to empathize, yet empathy is learned through reading.

               Frank McCourt’s marvelous memoir Teacher Man gracefully shapes teaching’s true grit.  Over the course of the book, he calmly accepts his fate.  McCort taught English in New York City public high schools for thirty years before making it big with his first memoir about growing in Ireland, Angela’s Ashes.  Still, he mentions more than once that the young people in Greek drama murder the old people who get in their way.  Of course, one of the many reasons to read is to recognize the difference between art and reality.

               In teaching, separating good ideas from bad is important because ideas take so long to implement and, if institutionalized and they turn out to be bad, they take a very long time to undue.  A few years back, The Detroit Free Press published a dandy profile, “Outboards Got Started in Detroit,” about local inventor Cameron Waterman (great name, given his claim to fame), who utilized a Detroit boiler plant and the waters off Gross Ille to test his invention in 1905, after first hitting upon the idea for the outboard motor thanks to his participation in the rowing crew at Yale.  (In short, according to Waterman, rowing “stinks.”)  Turns out, the Great Lake State is not only the once revered motor car capital of the world but also responsible for spawning a large boating industry.  As a teacher, at first I thought, “Here’s a great unit waiting to be born!  E.B. White, outboard motors, the Motor City, up north in the Great Lake State!”  Great in theory, perhaps, as students in  southeastern Michigan should maybe be interested in these marvelous connections and the opportunity to discuss them in an invigorating college setting, but not in a classroom where I’ve got to teach writing process, including sentence, paragraph and essay structure, some awareness of the wide-range of approaches to writing essays, what I want in particular from student writers, as well as reading and research techniques, dreaded outlining in some form, how and why to use a dictionary, documentation techniques, the difference between a subject and a noun, distinctions between summary and response, and more, to students from the inner city who are less likely to go up north as well as suburbanite students who are more likely to return to familiar lakes for a week’s stay.  Want to talk about the time and energy it takes to teach revision to over a hundred college writers fall and winter semesters?

               Composition instruction entails a very long list of hands-on how tos and practical concepts. Not E.B. White nor J. K. Rowling nor any single author is bound to magically deliver all those lessons to 27 diverse students who would rather privately surf the internet, listen to their ipods or play with their cellphones (one in the same yet?), who well know how to avoid reading as they have been doing so successfully for years, for many learning to also dread writing in the process.

THE DISMAL STATE OF READING IN AMERICA.  According to the NEA data, nine year olds are more likely to read voluntarily than thirteen to seventeen years olds, a fact that surprises no one.   Imagine a precocious pre-teen, curled up with Harry Potter.  It’s a scene one can imagine happening inside an elementary school free reading period or during summer vacation.  Bob Wise of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington-based think tank, told The Tampa Tribune that major problems occurred when middle and high school teachers neglected to teach reading, assuming incorrectly that those lessons were over.  My understanding is the standardized tests of No Child Left Behind have only made matters worse.  The students I work with in the metro-Detroit area have all come from high schools that serve a steady diet of standardized forced reading, on which students are gagging and choking and dying of boredom.   Meanwhile, teenagers want to be social year-round, and they want to belong.  Even if reading material relates to them personally, many would rather hang out with peers or electronics.  

               Comparatively, college students may be ripe for the picking, but NEA figures suggest colleges are not turning students into readers but rather colleges are turning students away from books.  Citing UCLA’s Your First College Year and College Senior Year surveys, the NEA relates that reading for pleasure rates drop over the course of a college career.  Turning to the National Survey of Student Engagement conducted by Indiana University, NEA comments, “If we accept that voluntary reading habits are central to a liberal arts education, then surely it is troubling to find that the majority of freshman and seniors alike read only 1-4 books for pleasure throughout the entire school year or they read no unassigned books at all.”  

               But are students truly reading much of anything, assigned or otherwise?  And what about after college?  The NEA’s information about the habits of all Americans suggests that serious reading is slipping away as a pastime.  In 1982, 82% of college graduates were literary readers; by 2002, that percentage had fallen eighteen points to 67%.  

               We must ask: Where are we headed?

               Dana Goia, chairman of the NEA, describes the stakes in “To Read or Not to Read”:

How does one summarize this disturbing story? As Americans, especially younger Americans, read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they have lower levels of academic achievement. (The shameful fact that nearly one-third of American teenagers drop out of school is deeply connected to declining literacy and reading comprehension.)With lower levels of reading and writing ability, people do less well in the job market. Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement. Significantly worse reading skills are found among prisoners than in the general adult population. And deficient readers are less likely to become active in civic and cultural life, most notably in volunteerism and voting.

               Meanwhile, my profession appears to be deeply involved in the business of ignoring the obvious.  Recently a co-worker shared her philosophy.  In essence, students don’t have to like reading, they just have to do it. But the thing is, since many students don’t like reading, pragmatically, they’ve simply found strategies for avoiding it.  (For some, skimming is taught in high school.)  I figure that I’ve worked with over two thousand students and seventy class groups to date.  My candid conversations with students leave me absolutely convinced that vast numbers of students simply elect not to read more often than they do read, and for their actions they receive passing grades and diplomas.  Possibly, this ease presents a false picture regarding the amount of work required to pass life successfully too.  (Low standards certainly confused me.)  In the July/August 2008 edition of The Atlantic, in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr admits to having “troubles with reading” due to time spent zipping around online reading in short fragmented bits, and his “literary” friends agree.  “The more they use the Web,” Carr explains, “the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.”  If intellectuals and professional are skimming more and finding their reading skills diminished, of course busy college students who don’t love reading are too.

               Politics play a big part on campus, as in greater life, adding unfortunate complications to the mix.  When I arrived, I discovered that adjuncts and their students were forced to deal with (or perhaps pay for only to ignore) a dull textbook, which I could not read and sought to replace immediately.  However, doing so on probation as a new full-time hire meant risking tenure and contradicting all advice given to me.   Yes, over one book.   All voices inside and outside the institution, even the most progressive and dedicated, urged personal protection and counseled me to wait until “after”—after I achieved union protection, which I now thankfully enjoy, though the advice was right on.  Trust me, I’ve paid for my insubordination.  When I said, in effect, this textbook sucks, some of my peers evidently heard, “You suck.” Jennifer Haberling, a Baldwin Middle School English teacher and the 2008-2009 Michigan Teacher of the Year, as awarded by the Michigan Education Association, told the association’s newsletter that she felt embarrassed by the honor and that she enjoys collaborating with her peers.  Here’s what I think: First off, good English teachers don’t have much time for collaboration with peers (way too many students!), and secondly my guess is that being singled out among your immediate and statewide peers as the best teacher in the state may actually cause some discomfort, as some of those peers deemed less talented by default are bound to feel jealousy and act out any number of insidious ways.  Young children and Shakespeare can tell you: teachers are human and not necessarily nice people.  

               I’m not trying to agitate.  Waiting until I was safe among peers would have meant facing far too many deserving students— approximately a thousand individuals over three years—with my hands tied, holding inadequate materials.  And since something I call “The Honesty System” is my number one  tool for fighting plagiarism (though it’s imperfect), I had to tell each group that first year as a full-timer, “Your pricey required reading sucks, I’m sorry,” then launch a discussion about textbooks to give student’s a voice and let them know I feel their pain.   It’s terribly upsetting when you must ask people to spend forty to over a hundred bucks on a lousy textbook you don’t even respect, but this sort of thing happens all the time.   It’s too bad, too, because students could use that money to buy a few novels, some poetry and a collection of essays or two they might get more out of in the long run.  The way teachers use (or, as in the case of adjuncts and other department members not given a choice, don’t use) assigned texts influences student attitudes toward reading and book purchasing, for better or for worse. Each semester, savvy students with tight budgets ask, their enthusiasm long ago dampened, “Will you actually use Remix?”  Based on experience, some have a hard time believing my reply.  Forced to read Lord of the Flies one too many times (he claims four times in five years), Leroy struck back:

I chose to boycott the book report and formed the mentality that reading just isn’t for me.  I never looked back after that moment I would fight teachers tooth and nail in a desperate plea not to read.  The teachers however would fight me off and make me do work.  I would turn in half assed reports based on what they said the day before and the teachers would just push me along.    

GET YOUR READ ON.  Since composition courses ask students to write nonfiction essays, I help students find their own nonfiction book to augment Remix. Even better, as one of my students put it, I help folks get their read on.   Guiding groups of students as they make their selections is a nonstop thrill-ride in the amusement park of everyday life.   Don’t worry.   In class, I counsel students who’ve picked up the cliché not to describe their book as a “rollercoaster ride.”  

               However, I do want to purposely mix metaphors for a screaming neon effect because I so want people to see what I see.  Teaching composition in a free reading environment lets me spend valuable time in a garden of humanity, infinitely more rich than the jungle of coneflowers, coreopsis, the potted hibiscus we winter inside that needs transplanting, tons of black-eyed susans, some overpowering a small group of stinky Asiatic (?) lilies, rose of sharon, purple liatris, cultivated wild daisies (yes, preserved this late in the season due to deadheading), gladiolas, butterfly bush, yarrow, tiger lilies, a few tropical New Guinea impatiens and their annual friends begonia and coleus mixed into the perennials for ongoing color, amid the miniature old-fashioned Hollyhocks transplanted from Chris Allen’s grandmother’s house that do not attract ants, a few rather sickly white, orange and fuchsia dahlias I bought down the street (never again; Chris Allen’s mom never liked that place, I’m told), red rose, Russian sage, some struggling bergamot (bad location), sunflowers, some planted by birds, so located directly under the feeder beneath the apple tree, scented wild geranium, a weak strain of re-seeded cleome from last summer (welcome!), late planted but still appreciated cosmos, and even some lingering spring pansies all blooming in our yard and attracting monarch and swallowtail butterflies.  

               New arrivals in Comp I and Comp II are adults who have reached the end of the road, their last required English classes ever.   Imagine. Teaching literacy to grown- ups, I get to hang out among a non-stop gusher of individuals who each act in very interesting ways as they commandeer their individual projects and also mix with one another.  No two students or groups are exactly alike.   Though I want to savor every last nano-second of summer vacation (important for assessment, updates to lesson plans, preparations for the new school year and a well-deserved break), I am very much looking forward to classes this fall during the November election.

               Some of my findings:

1.       After a lifetime of forced reading, students need help learning how to choose reading material, which is a reasonable byproduct of assembly-line treatment.  Once teachers stop telling students what to read, students often stop reading (or stop approximating).  Too often, metro Detroit high school graduates don’t know how to find books to read on their own.  They don’t have an accurate idea about the available range of material, and they don’t know what they enjoy.  

               Fitted with narrow, rigid views of the world of books—one at a time, single file—students don’t automatically understand the difference between fictional literature and nonfiction stories, or the difference between “novels” and “memoirs” in particular.  Of course, they’re not alone.   James Frey and Oprah help get this conversation going.  And thanks to Augusten Burroughs, of course, for keeping it alive.  For some students, keeping “autobiography” and “biography” straight is challenging like keeping “me” and “I” under control, maybe not to the same degree, but all together equally repulsive.  Some have never tried commentary and find they like it (or hate it); others learn to love (or hate) true life stories.  

               Students don’t necessarily know how to navigate the world of information, in person or online.  The chance of falling into a discussion about the differences between Dewey Decimal and the Library of Congress systems of classification is remote in any busy classroom, yet bookstores organize differently from the town and school library, which may organize differently from one another, adding yet another layer of distance.   The mere act of going to a library or bookstore overwhelms students at the bottom, who are likely to take the most time making a selection.  Librarians have been typecast as mousy and boring, making them difficult to approach, especially for the unsure.  To the unfamiliar, searching for books at a bookstore can be a nightmare, especially if the student makes the oft repeated rookie mistake: asking for a “nonfiction book” without narrowing focus.  A tired clerk may snap back with sarcasm.  

               One thing that amazes me among many is the fact that many students are not much more tech savvy than I am, and they certainly aren’t automatically information and media savvy, either.  Online, the distinction between amazon.com customer reviews, a short blurb from Booklist and long scrolls of blog entries blurs for a steady stream of students, who can’t necessarily identify the NBC peacock.  Thankfully, as a full-timer, most of the time I can snag a classroom with computers to help facilitate the process of teaching all the processes necessary to reading, writing and thinking today.  (At our campus, adjuncts and their many students go without choice and computers.)  Learning how to look up the key to pronunciation in a print dictionary is important, especially if the power goes out.  Otherwise, the dictionary is online now complete with actual pronunciation of “taciturn” (soft “c”).  

 2.       Many students write vaguely about books at the beginning of the semester, without naming any books or authors, because they have not established literary relationships. Institutionalized students know few books and even fewer authors specifically by name. If specifics are shared, I may scan To Kill A Mockingbird referenced by title within student testimonials, but I’m less likely to spy Harper Lee next to her book. I regularly hear a very few big names like Stephen King and Dean Koontz, but very rarely encounter a literary writer.  And just about never an idiosyncratic choice.  The last ones I can recall are punk musician Henry Rollins and media observer Chuck Klosterman.  Even the best prepared students like Erin are likely to have “always hated” reading despite parental efforts (paying tuition for an upscale all-girl Catholic high school) until they find their own favorites.   Even though Erin discovered two novels she likes, Nappily Married and Nappily Ever After by Trisha R. Thomas, the nonfiction book assignment “was challenging initially” because she could not find anything she wanted to read within the confines of the assignment.  However, she “eventually realized that I love music and have started to love reading and decided to pick a book that related to the two,” so Erin read Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz and raved about it.

 3.    Coming into college, too many students cite Dr. Seuss and Dave Pelzer as their main literary influences.  The frequency with which I read about Green Eggs and Ham and Oh, the Places You'll Go! as most memorable and favorite books, particularly absent more substantive and mature corollaries, is remarkable and disconcerting.  A Harry Potter tale is often the last book read.  Amir elected to dual-enroll as a junior in high school and an entry-level college student in Comp I.  He mentioned loving books when he was a “little boy,” naming Clifford, Arthur and Dr. Seuss, but now that he’s older, he allowed, “I still like to read books every once and a while,” in other words, the J. K. Rowlings’ series.  Now, as a teenager, for Amir books must be “descriptive and have many scenes in the book where there is action in the books that just sucks me and makes me feel like I am involved in the story taking place. An example would be if the author said, ‘He stalked his enemy like a hungry predator ready to attack with his shiny silver dagger in his enormous hands.’”  During the last class meeting, the student congratulated himself and thanked me for an experience more challenging than high school, where he ‘wrote down’ to please the teachers.  Amir certainly seemed to enjoy a sense of mastery over babyish course work.    

 4.       There are many reason why students don’t read: they have little clue about what to read, lack confidence in their skills, haven’t the time, feel no inclination, miss a sense of mastery, but many react well to a strong nudge.  Unfortunately, students don’t necessarily grow up in homes with books or know reading mentors.   It takes time and practice to get beyond James and the Giant Peach, The Indian in the Cupboard and Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, no matter who you are, which makes the plight of the unwilling even more challenging.   Tabitha entitled her entrance essay “The Love of Music vs. the Agony of Reading.”  She recognizes the value in reading but simply doesn’t want to bother:

For some indulging in a 300 page book, is like escaping to a deserted island. However, for me personally, being handed a 300 page book and being told to read it is pure agony.  Every now and then, I will find a book that looks interesting to me and be able to finish it in a maximum of 3 days.  Although, if I am being handed a book by my professor, then told that if I do not read the book I will fail the class, I become that much more inclined to not read the book.  

To her credit, though her friend stopped attending class, Tabitha hung in there.  Despite troubles curbing her cellphone addiction, she wrote a nice book review and finished the class.  Likewise, John, a little edgy perhaps because he quit heroin and cigarettes simultaneously, admitted in his course evaluation, which he signed, “I have a new found like towards reading.  Not love don’t get ahead of yourself.”  Turns out, he hadn’t realized that making personal connections with books and writers was okay: “I always thought I was reading wrong.”

 5.       Reading material choices are critical.  Remix understands the central tenet of literacy instruction: the need to relate. Amy is extremely uncomfortable in groups.  Her therapist even called me about the student’s performance in class, which did suffer due to social inhibitions.  (I thought the therapist’s action was great, a network of service providers networking).  In her entrance essay Amy wrote, “I like stories where the characters have challenges and problems that I can relate to.”  However, in her exit essay she recognized that changes might occur in personality and reading habits as a person matures: “Today I like the band Silverpun Pickups and to read books that can relate to my problems, such as Perks of Being a Wallflower, but in the future that can all change.”  She continued, “Going from fairy tale books to a woman suffering with OCD is a big change. Just to think what I will be reading later on in my life.”  At the end of the semester, she connected reading to her major, architecture, and described a move from Cosmo to Architectural Digest and Designing Homes.   In her entrance essay, she said she didn’t like popular musician Eminem just because he’s popular.   His music, “does not appeal to me because of the way it sounds.”  By her exit essay, this painfully shy young woman looked forward to reading professional texts and the future when she can see herself “liking jazz.”  

               Clint read Black Like Me by John Howard Grifith because books are a “reflection of character” and his white family adopted an African American little sister.   He wasn’t thrilled when I urged him to research the science and commentary surrounding Grifith’s unusual experiment (about which there appears to be less written than I’d like), but it’s okay for students be a little uncomfortable.  The main thing is that students must build and maintain a personal connection to reading and writing in order to take the next step, reading outside of their interests’ increasingly more challenging material.  

 6.       Even students at the bottom show personal growth when individuals are encouraged to find themselves as readers and writers.   Students who don’t consider themselves readers often recognize reading as something they might do when they mature, at some point later in life.  But does later ever come?

               Jack, dead set against reading, became at least hopeful he may someday change his attitude.  Meanwhile, he said he pretty much finished the difficult text he chose, a 19th century treatise by Sir Benjamin Thompson, or Count Rumford as he’s known by followers.  I thought the kid was full of blarney until I left his e-mail and went to Wikipedia and Amazon.  Turns out Jack’s dad is a chimney sweep, Jack is set to take over the family business, and the Count had some important things to say about the nature of heat, which remain true today.  If not an honest accounting, at least the student made up a great story.  Paulus from Poland elected to read a few books during the semester, nothing I would approve of, but nevertheless he gave them credit for spurring personal growth and helping him with his goal: learning English and earning a college degree in the U.S.   A student who had troubling buckling down but was capable, Marge maintained she “can’t stand the quietness and the calmness of a library for more than a minute.”   She admittedly disdains reading, walks “straight to the C.D. and music isle” and refuses to “acknowledge any books” when her brother makes her go to Borders. By the end of the course, after reading Kabul Beauty School, she was still a stubborn reader at best, but she had mellowed a tad, perhaps just to please for a better grade but her testimony suggests limited improvement in attitude. She still claimed to “strongly dislike reading” because “my mind gets overwhelmed with all the words and it makes me exhausted.”  No huge turn-around there.   Marge still became “very aggravated and annoyed” with the pace of reading.  “Why sit through an hour of reading a book,” she questioned, “when the author could have just summarized it in one complete sentence?”  Yet she closed: “Sometimes I think that if there were no books, what kind of education and knowledge would I have?  Probably none.”  The rusty door may have creaked open just slightly, but at least it loosened up.

 7.       When students increase their appreciation for reading, they learn to become better writers.  In a free reading environment, opportunity and growth extend to student essays, where students also choose topic and point.  Personal narrations this summer threaded more one-of-a-kind squares into the quilt. Students opened up and told their stories about anorexia, Serbian pride, and finally attending school at age eleven and having a voice as a female in America.  (I like excitement, but I’m still actively thankful that the female Bosnian by mixed-marriage who immigrated after the war and the proud male Serb born in the suburbs enrolled in different sections.)  What to do when a wilderness adventure goes wrong at the top of the mountain, two reckless bicycle rides, the fear of flying, and going for broke on the streets of Miami, the budding philosopher’s tale, which included statistics from The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, a good deal of partying and some worthwhile reflections:

I went back to Detroit with no doubts that things would turn around if I make them.  Instead of stirring in my problems like sugar dissolving in water, I picked myself up and made some changes.  I enrolled back into school, moved back home, and got one stable job.  I had so much new found determination and drive.  And it was all because of one seemingly irresponsible poorly thought out decisions [leaving town on borrowed cash].  I went for broke and came out wealthy.

               This constant outpouring of one-of-a-kind student creations is fecund, not sterilized, and would wither if overly restricted. If I didn’t encourage  Tom to be honest about his passions—hating English classes and loving water—he might not have written about the joys of scuba diving told with Mr. Limpet-like day dreams of killing sharks and impressing the ladies.   His second essay on the power of water then grew out of the first and was influenced by the Greek sirens and the horribly tragic drowning death of a high school classmate Memorial Day weekend.   Had I not encouraged individuals to explore their own worlds, Tom’s classmates may have held back about bad parenting, good parenting, alcoholism, how to handle a lemon law vehicle, depression and alienation.

               “I wish I had a black box to put my nightmares in; I’d throw it out the window and never see them again,” Chelsea wrote, to which she added the comic comeback, “I really hate writing about my life because it always turns out sounding like a PSA on the timid and suicidal.”  Don’t worry about Chelsea.  Instead, support her with access to well-funded community colleges, tuition grants, affordable student loans, health care coverage, meaningful internships. “I like to believe,” she dared, “that I am not the kind of teenager that has finally had enough and says to ‘hell with it all’ and plunges myself over the Golden Gate Bridge because to state it simply, I have always thought that those kids just needed a bit of attention and they’d get it by any means necessary, in life or self inflicted death.”  Not incidentally, because writing is psychology, the student, whose brother died when she was young, hopes to pursue a career in forensic medicine.  

               Exhausted?  Wait! There’s much, much, much more!  Even this small taste from one abbreviated semester is nowhere near a satisfactory survey yet.  

               I’ve been hearing about autism a lot lately.  In the fall, one woman was inspired to write due to her young son’s poor health, which she believes was entirely preventable, and in the winter another parent countered with a strong argument for childhood vaccinations.   This summer delivered another variation or two on the topic, along with a disappointing surprise.   In her personal narration “The Perfect Miracle,” Isabel explained, “Sometimes unexpected things happen to our plan making it harder for people to deal. Keeping an open mind and enjoying what we have is what I learned from what happened to our son.”  Later, within her book review of Autism and the God Connection, Isabel had good reason to utilize personal narration.  However, in “Guidebook to Holland,” she plagiarized Emily Perl Kingsley’s poem “Welcome to Holland,” which I didn’t discover until after grades had been given.   During class, I asked the student about the metaphor. She said she borrowed it from an unnamed friend, to whom she gave credit, yet when I later checked the lines presented are without a doubt Perl Kingsley’s.  

               I don’t know why the student chose to lie.   Perhaps my direct question caught her off guard and she panicked.  Perhaps she had used up all her courage already that day dealing with her son.   I believe English was not the woman’s first language.   Her idea was good; she could have used the metaphor fairly by simply giving credit to whom it was due, but integrating outside sources is a concept students don’t necessarily understand especially since very few read newspapers or serious magazines.   Without her name of course (none of the names presented here are real), I may use Isabel’s work and story as an example to help other students more honestly approach their own work without sacrificing creativity—even if the creativity is someone else’s.  

               Teaching means learning for me too.  There is simply no way I could have guessed by looking at this mature individual, who attended nearly every class and listened attentively, though she was quiet, that she would try to pull off an intellectual heist, which she may not have thought was such a big deal, considering her own big picture.   Still, I would never attempt this lesson plan in an online course, which I don’t choose to teach for numerous reasons, for one because other cheaters do drop physical hints and reveal themselves through observable behavior.  From the students’ perspective, however, it’s easy to steal something you don’t respect.  I catch maybe one to five acts of plagiarism of varying degrees each semester and of course don’t know how many I miss.  

               Otherwise, students are innocent until proven guilty. And they write about some very heavy stuff, often with a surprisingly deft touch, such as a young mother’s tale of attempting to make plans but making God laugh instead, a phrase she picked up from her mother—now there’s a trustworthy source, right?— delicately referring to unplanned pregnancy, parenthood and marriage.   But mothers and fathers aren’t automatically trustworthy.  One student wrote about finally learning to stop bailing her mother out of financial quandaries and another didn’t blame her mother for taking off and leaving teenagers to fend for themselves.  

               This time around was not usual.   Student writers shared stories about the death of friend and sexual abuse, but also lighter yarns of first tattoos and perfect days, as well as a smattering of the usual car accident tales of terror.  (Word up: Think before you give your teenager a car.)  Stripping one’s way through college, a decision which the student regrets: “The embarrassment would not be the best thing, because perhaps one of my high school male teachers would walk-in.”  How to survive a stay in jail, romantic rejection, overcoming ESL barriers, dolma, adoption, selling weed to pay for medical bills, learning to smoke pot responsibly, bad decisions, young fatherhood, and choosing a lunch table in high school, influenced by Emily White’s selection in Remix, “High School’s Secret Life.”  

               Ideally, to lead a strong tomorrow, students can benefit from practice today composing original creations.   While personal narration begins the semester, the book review caps it off, putting all our lessons about process to the test.  Uniform book reports, which demand little actual thinking and no originality, are easier, said Tom, the scuba diver.  “It was difficult to add the commentary and personal opinions without using me, I or you in the paper,” he wrote of the book review. “The other assignments seemed to be telling stories and this one seemed to be reviewing someone elses.  I think the first step was the easiest and this one by far the hardest,” he explained, “even after actually reading the book.”  Yet in his review, he competently wrote, “For people wanting to be pilots, Robert Tuck is the type of man anyone could idolize.” Though he didn’t provide detailed documentation or talk about the author of Fly for Your Life: Robert Stanford Tuck, Larry Forrester, the student did build his capacity for analysis and empathy:  “Crashing in midair into another plane would be terrifying.”  

               My course design parallel’s my main writing direction to students:  pick a point and stick to it, beginning, middle and end. The exit essay serves as a final exam.  The directions ask students to return to their initial comparison and re-analyze their personal reading and music listening habits.   For students, it’s a last shot at making a good impression before final grades are calculated.  For me, it’s an opportunity to check for growth in skills and attitude when compared side-by-side with the entrance essay and the rest of the work in a student’s portfolio.   Budding beautifully, Olivia played the role of a writer more comfortably than she had all semester, a difficult one during which her car was stolen from the school parking garage, something that happens once every four years, according to campus police.  Inspired by my mention of Virginia Wolf’s “Death of a Moth,” Olivia wrote, “I watched as the spider just seemed to flow on a tiny web.  It was at that moment that I realized that reading and music most both flow smoothly,” she discovered, meaning they both must be well constructed.  Her final essay reviewed “structure,” the composing process, audience awareness.  “Writers write and then they revise and keep revising again and again until the finished piece is as smooth as the spider coming down the web.    In the end,” she related, “the writing will be something that the readers will want to read.”  Well put.  And good news! Olivia just e-mailed me to say hi, thanks and that her brothers bought her a new used Taurus better than the old one.

               When students take both Comp I and Comp II within this free learning environment, the opportunity for growth expands.  Comp I’s continuation, Composition II- ENG 1520, is all about research and writing argumentatively.  At this level, the nonfiction book assignment ideally helps students write a research paper.  The book and book review supplement research and provide additional, authentic Works Cited page listings.  Though my nonfiction book review’s design has grown over the years into a successful centerpiece, it remains fluid.  I made a note recently: “If your author is being held captive in the Colombian jungle by the FARC, make sure to mention that fact is your book review.”  Winter semester, in Comp II Marguerite did mention Ingrid Bettancourt’s capture while reviewing her memoirs, but the student could have stressed the politician’s ongoing ordeal more prominently.  Maybe if she had more time and fewer responsibilities as a parent, she might have realized this shortcoming.   Not helping matters, I read one line out of zillion too quickly in the first draft of Marguerite’s paper and thereby missed a teaching and learning opportunity.   As is, despite my shortcomings, the student writer did many things very well, like integrate news and opinion from The New York Times.  She simply showed room for further growth surrounding the inclusion of closely related news events, which is natural, especially during the span of a single semester.  Like musicians and athletes, writers need practice and time in order to develop.  

SEEKING THAT CONNECTION.  Students need direct engagement; literacy must be presented as a way of life. The goal is to find books and authors one loves, what I refer to as building a stable of authors.   After finding and holding true love, putting up with more mundane reading becomes easier.   But to reach that point, individuals need guided opportunities for discovering their own passions.  Liam eloquently described his yearning for a literary connection:

As a reader I have never been able to truly connect with an author.  Most people, when they are really reading a book, they zone in on the story. I always picture reading like jumping into warp speed in star trek, the words get bigger as they rush at your face with a blur of lines until, wham!  You’re stuck in the story.  Feeling as though you’ve just been dropped onto a new planet, I picture myself looking around, getting my bearing and then moving into scene like a camera man recording a movie, there, but not interrupting.  I’ve never experienced that feeling; never seen the lines blur and hit me right in the face.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read my fair share of books.  In school , I floated through the classics [at a very exclusive prep academy]  like, Beloved, 1984, A Clockwork Orange, The Color Purple, The Great Gatsby, all of these stories that I’ve read, and enjoyed, but I never really felt like I was experiencing the story.  People like the experience, good readers, and people who do it often, can look at a story and really see it.  I was in an Avis car rental shop about two weeks ago, and while I was standing in line, waiting, I noticed a woman reading her book in the corner. Sitting all alone, she had no idea of the world around her, and as I’m watching her frivolously turn the pages, while trying to focus my eyes on the title of her story to get a glimpse into her imagination, she burst into tears.  In the middle of this overly public building, in front of an entire line of people, she just stated sobbing as if no one else was around.  That is the type of emotion that people who really read want, it’s the connection that they are looking for.  

The student was likely influenced by an interview with Chuck Palahniuk that I play in class, thanks to NPR, in which the author makes clear the reason for his success.  In books like Fight Club, he moves people to feel something extreme, even if it’s shock or repulsion.  Otherwise, without that excitement, “Reading is something I do for school,” Liam resigned. “I plow through the words and try to focus on every little detail in hopes of finding that connection.  It hasn’t come yet, but I’m sure it will, one day I’ll find that connection, and who knows, maybe I’ll turn off my stereo.”  

               To address educational shortcomings, why don’t we listen to students more?  Where are the books, articles, documentaries, investigative reports and even reality television shows revealing what students think about the state education?  They have so much to tell and teach me quite a bit.   For those inside the profession who prefer data collection, why not look at actual reading rates and track student attitudes within English classes?

               Encourage students to exercise self agency and they will learn to teach themselves.  Not drastically, she cautioned, but Molly’s outlook about reading changed for the better—even though the Summer I semester is condensed into two demanding months—because she couldn’t stop reading Lucky.  “Relate” is again the key word, repeatedly used by students.  Part of an unsettled group reminiscent of The Breakfast Club, Molly explained, “I can relate” to Sebold’s story “because I too had been sexually abused and I know exactly how she was feeling.” After including U.S. Department of Justice crime statistics from the 2000 report “Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement: Victim, Incident and Offender Characteristics” in her book review, Molly analyzed:

When I was sexually abused, I was a teenager.  I would have been part of that statistic [of young people who are afraid to speak out].  I believe that the majority of teenagers don’t say or do anything because people rarely believe them and then start to look at you differently.  Sebold was also a teenager, but unlike myself and the majority of other rape victims she did prosecute.  

Directions regarding the book review purposefully adapt to circumstance. Most students are cautioned against appearing in their own essays, unless they have a good reason for doing so. Molly explained in hers:

After reading this book, I decided that I want to fight my rapist because maybe in doing so I will move past all my pain and problems.  This book also helped me get some ideas of how I can deal with all of my thoughts and feelings.  I did end up starting a journal after reading this book and I finally told my parents and I am taking a course of action to fight my abuse.  I believe that if I would not have read this book, I wouldn’t have had the courage to tell my parents about what I had gone through.  But, I also wouldn’t have had the bravery to file reports against the rapist either. So I believe that this book really does help the readers get by after they have been raped.

               Learning often involves discomfort, if not some pain, but also brings satisfaction and joy.  However, risks exist.  Once students open up, they may come undone.  Although I’m not a trained counselor, I sometimes feel compelled by a sense of responsibility to ask someone if they are suicidal or if they have been sexually abused.   Community college students live complicated lives and sometimes worry me but most show resilience.  Early in the semester, Chelsea’s resolve and writing were less developed, when she cared about “what is going on in others heads” and spent “the better part of my time wondering just that.”  At the end of the semester, in her practice journal she revisited these thoughts and revised them, exhibiting much greater self-confidence.  Although she finds her life depressing, she clearly stated that she does not contemplate suicide: “I don’t think that way, I have this life for a reason.  That reason is unclear to me rite now but I wont let anybody else define me while I try to figure it out.”  

               Although laziness is one by-product of our push-button society, students still appreciate a challenge and fresh learning methods. With steady command, Chelsea called Stiff “greatly disgusting and not for the squeamish.”  Perhaps explicating herself and the world, she wrote that the book “gives readers a cynical way of looking at the morbid inevitable fate for all that is death.”  Likewise, John, the young person trying to turn his life around— a colorful young man with much energy to burn— used metaphor in his exit essay like a pro. Like many of his peers, he improved his attitude, if only a little, and believed that reading might fit better into his life when he gets older.

Music is my wife and books moved up from being by my ex girlfriend from middle school to being my ex girlfriend from high school.  The like for books has increased and I feel that with time my like for books will turn into a love.  But for now bump that music.

Rather than relying on an outside source, the student refueled himself. “I did read my book,” he replied, later adding, “Hunter S. Thompson is one of my heroes so I felt it was my job to give him a good paper.”

               I don’t know for sure that students are being honest, but they sound earnest.  Peter and I didn’t really hit it off, nor did he feel comfortable among the students in his group.   During pre-class chit-chat, he and I had a tussle over politics, which became so lively we each had to take a time out.   However, to the student’s credit, he took our full exchange to heart, thought about things wisely, decided to go to work and accomplished much.   He expounded, taking on a professional tone:

As I sit here typing my last essay for English 1510, I can look back and the growth of not only me but my reading selection.  I do not have a lot of free time but if I did I am sure that I would read books outside of my college courses more often.  I see reading as a vital aspect to becoming a great historian. Being able to bridge the generation gap through writing might be the most important tool in education.  . . . Writing and reading are necessary tools to communicate not only with the present but also the future.  Without books we would not know where we have been, yet most important we would not know where we are going.  

               Highlighting the connection between music and reading, and ‘keeping things real,’ as one student commented years ago, works.  If a person loves favorite song lyrics, he or she can learn to love the written word.   Sitting among his peers at the top of the class, Peter’s writing is impressive and supportive from where I sit.  

The valuable lesson that I will take with me from this class about reading is that simply by reading anyone can draw new conclusions and look at different aspects of life that they may have never thought of before.  This is a valuable lesson for me because I am studying to be a history teacher.  Historians have to keep an open mind about other peoples perspectives .  .  . Now for the first time in my life I actually see the connection between my love for books and music.

The difference?  Peter explained, “Unlike my classes at Western, I had the opportunity to actually read a book of my choosing and not just skim through a random book and look for answers to my questions for my research papers.”  The implication is clear: skimming doesn’t allow for meaningful absorption of the material.

               Teachers make mistakes.  I am very confident but realize my classroom isn’t perfect.  As a teacher, I know that I’ve inflicted some damage and probably more than I realize, regrettably, since my motto mimics the Hippocratic oath.  

               It’s a rare student that says something strongly pro-reading outright in her entrance essay like, “Music cannot grab a hold of my attention the way books do.”  To Patty, a fan of Anne Rice’s The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, at the beginning of the course music was no more than the “flavor of the month.”  Unfortunately, Patty’s exit exam revealed regression, at least within the confines of the semester. By the end of class, she wasn’t “overly enthusiastic about either” reading or music.  Unlike Brittany, she didn’t like Girl, Interrupted, preferred the film version, and titled her book review “Girl Idiotic.”  Between my class and Kaysen’s book, together we deflated the student’s enthusiasm.   Kaysen’s memoir “could have been greatly improved,” Patty criticized forcefully, “if it had been written from an adult’s perspective that is aware of the writing process, rather than an adolescent, who is still learning,” which sounds close to an idea we discussed in class, about the need to reflect and analyze one’s own story for the benefit of readers.  She called the book “difficult to follow” and cites similar views from Entertainment Weekly and Time.  Her criticism went into overdrive, particularly in her final revision, where she labeled the book a “waste of time” and gave it an “F.”  Patty hated Girl, Interrupted so much, she read the book twice just to make sure.  

               Students spend so much time in school.  Why repeat the same lesson over and over?  Listen, repeat.  Listen, repeat.  Listen to what I say, all of you repeat.  Reminds me of step aerobics, which I detest.  No matter the variation, it’s just step up, step down, step up, step down, step up, step down, over and over.  There’s no way to get ahead, no new territory to conquer.

               Fresh out of high school, quiet but committed, Julie is a rare student to name a piece of canonical literature in her writing, Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice.   For her nonfiction book, Juile chose a biography of Audrey Hepburn, Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn by Donald Spoto.  “I actually read my nonfiction book selection,” she stated like most others, but what started out as an easy read soon reached rocky ground.  “Then it hit me,” she remembered, “the boring middle section of the book.  I literally had to force myself to continue reading the book at this point.”  Through trial and error, Julie learned about the shortcomings of an impersonal biography.   As a fan (and an engineering major), she pledged to check out Hepburn’s autobiography, a move she couldn’t see at the start of the project.  Still, she held no grudges, calling the book review assignment “more enjoyable than others” due to choice: “It was my choice and my fault the book wasn’t great.”  In class, we discussed vetting, but Julie was hard on herself.   She added that it was “nice not having to answer questions or do a worksheet after every chapter, as was the case in all my high school English classes.”  Despite the boring middle section, she claimed, “This experience reading was one of my better experiences.”  

               Julie is a success story.  For her, reading is “thrilling” and “fresh.”   Making good sense of Comp I, she analyzed, “People who lack the time to indulge in a novel look to music to fulfill their emotional satisfaction.” She elaborated about her first college semester, “The only problem I came across is that college textbooks take up most of my reading time. Although, I take pleasure in learning new material from textbooks, they provide facts, and no personal insights.” Calling herself an “avid textbook reader,” the student named one in her writing (perhaps the first to do so that I’ve witnessed), The Biology of Life by Peter Raven. Of it she said, “Since reading the book I can explain anything about the life cycles of any types of plants including angiosperms, gymnosperms, tracheophytes, seedless tracheophytes, bryophytes, hepatophytes, lycophytes, and psilphytes.  I can also inform anyone on all the types of animal phylums including, but not limited to, cnidaria, arthropoda, nematode, annelid, and chordate. This information on the essence of human life came from reading a textbook.”  Trust no other truth: the joy of reading is local.  

               The one-book-fits-all tradition has dominated for too long.   The common book approach, practiced by well-meaning teachers and organizations across the country, including the NEA and its version, “The Big Read,” is far too limited in scope to be successful in a plural society, like a one industry town lacks diversity and therefore strength.  (“Imagine everyone in Michigan foreclosing on their homes.  At the same time.”)  The Michigan Humanities Council event, The Great Michigan Read, looks like a good idea on the cover—whatever gets people reading more is perhaps worth a try—but covers can be deceiving.          

               Writers Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane and Richard Ford appeared together for a chat to close The Great Michigan Read July 10 at Michigan State University, where they all spent time.  The evening filled with anecdotes and an over-capacity crowd marked a truly great day for reading.   However, none of the lauded guests warmed to a question posed to each about favorite books, and for obvious reasons.  All this emphasis on ONE AUTHOR AT A TIME means two of the three would have to go, sort of a battle of the scribes, who in this case are otherwise friendly.  Ford responded that he didn’t have one favorite.  McGuane quickly produced a long list beginning with Don Quixote and said he had “lots” of favorites.  Book tastes change in a person over time, Harrison explained.   Finnegan’s Wake moved him when he was younger and impressionable, but now he has difficulty with James Joyce’s language.  

               I hope the Michigan Humanities Council event was recorded.  Students need to hear writers talking about a world of reading.  Realizing that English teachers and other professionals prefer and dislike various literary styles makes students feel more comfortable with their own preferences and dislikes.   Confession: I recently realized that I brought home a third copy of Wuthering Heights, which I have tried but cannot seem to read.                

               What’s important is not some mistaken notion of the one “best” book for all students, but rather finding an array of books that will form a field of personal favorites over a lifetime.  The goal is to find multiple books that will affect us each individually, to ideally make us all better humans together.

~*~

               Disclaimer:  Yes, for personal as well as professional reasons I have always adored the Steeley Dan song about never going back to my old school.  I’ve got an attitude and lots of stories.  There’s a post it note on my desk at home, somewhere in the pile, reminding me to kick off the semester with Pink Floyd’s The Wall:

We don't need no education   We don’t need no thought control No dark sarcasm in the classroom Teachers leave them kids alone

                Some ideas are better left alone, but my lesson plans are always in a state of slow growth, since one person multi-media events take much more time to create than old-fashioned lectures.  Mine are prone to constant fine-tuning and pruning.  The presentation currently includes, thanks to Youtube, Aretha Franklin singing “Think!” from The Blues Brothers and Disney’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarf (“Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go!”).  As well, in Comp II the first act of Crash, which is excellent for introducing the concept of stereotypes and logical fallacies, among others.   To get rid of any dead weight, including scam artists, for the betterment of the whole about a third of the way through entry level courses, I like to run what I refer to as the “community college” scene from the film version of Fight Club, accompanied by a reading, which definitely constitutes “dark sarcasm.”  

               To create my lesson plans, I’ve pretty much had to ignore just about every traditional approach I was raised on including mandatory midterms, multiple choice tests, and long lectures.  Thanks to Professor Stewart at California State University Northridge, as an English instructor I’ve kept reading a loud together and the injection of my own passion for reading as instructor.   From The Boston School of Adult Education and Cathy Slater Spence (I hope I’ve recalled her name correctly), as well Jim Krusoe at Santa Monica Community College before her (both costing just  50 bucks a class), I learned more about writing and teaching writing than I did in any of my graduate school seminars (which cost a whopping 900 bucks a class).   There are many reasons for this imbalance, including my own shortcomings.  Education is an art and a daily grind.  But I learned the basics of writing and research no better than I did in seventh grade, thanks very much to Mrs. Gardella at St. Mike’s, who didn’t get mad when future English teacher Barb Johnston and I respectfully called her Mrs. Gorilla because we liked the word play and she didn’t want to squelch our interest.  She actually looked more like a tropical bird.

               Reviewing my own education, as a writing teacher and a writer what stands out most is the glaring absence of instruction regarding how tos, particularly how to actually write that damn paper and how to become a life-long reader, so I try to provide my students all the things I didn’t get, just like a hopeful parent.   As I write this essay, an old student’s new girlfriend, who I met at dinner at the yummy thai food place across the street from campus, is e-mailing me for direction about her summer writing class at the community college closest to MSU.  She says, repeatedly, the teacher is only talking about himself and handing out low grades.  I simply report these details, which sound perfectly familiar.

               Forgive me if I sound pedantic, impatient or obnoxiously impassioned.  I do realize that most teachers are good people who try and that institutions change slowly, but one-size fits all reading assignments and the worse culprit of all, mindless regurgitation, must be dethroned.   “I learned that writing is whatever you make it,” one student commented anonymously, coining her own term, probably without realizing she did so, but maybe not. “Writing isn’t just a recitement and regurgitated answer to what a teacher wants you to think, feel, and believe. Personal analysis is everything.” Over-adherence to the one book method kicks students out of the learning process, which is not good.

               In the near future, thanks to academic freedom, I plan to adapt my methods.  I may use my E.B White lesson plan in a contemporary lit course as a means to catapult students into the world of fiction.  Showing a collage of old film footage with people taking lake vacations—before the motor car, during world wars, after we dropped the bomb, in Technicolor, wearing funny clothes—looking through the years basically just like those of us in class, though we would laugh anyway.   Like sound, images help tremendously.   Not incidentally, I went once more to the lake just last week.   Born and raised in the area, somewhere there’s some incredibly embarrassing sixteen millimeter footage restored on video tape that Eric in the Media department can probably transfer to DVD for me to use in the classroom, featuring a still chubby much younger me jumping in a lake and running up sand dunes.  

               But no matter how riveting a visual and auditory presentation I put on, eventually I must ask students to “take out their books and open to page . . .”  Afterwards, though, after reading and talking our way through a required essay or short story together,  I can free bored minds, instructing them to strike out on their own.