Reading Lost

I've been hooked on Lost since its inception in 2004. While I think the show has had some valleys (all of Season 2 and the first half of season 3), I have been fascinated by the show not only as a fan but as an English teacher and a new media scholar. The show's writers have taken very old formulas and morphed them into a strange new hybrid. While I still think The Sopranos gets the prize for taking episodic television to a new level, I have to say that Lost wins the prize for using multiple levels of new media storytelling. The creator of Lost, J.J. Abrams, has been quoted as saying that a series as complex as Lost would not have survived in a previous analog era. The show has a symbiotic relationship with its iPod-carrying, blogging, fan-fiction obsessed viewers. (Just another example making Steven Johnson's point.)

Anyway, I know this isn't anything all that new, but thanks to a borrow from my in-laws, I've recently been looking at the complete Season 3 of Lost, with all the extras included, and I was interested to see that one of the extras is a featurette devoted to the show's ties to old fashioned book literacy. First, they (show's executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse) mention the obvious ties to Dickens, not only the plotting but the process--Dickens wrote his books in serial fashion and often reacted to fan feedback as he wrote the remaining chapters of his books, just as they do writing Lost. They mentioned Desmond's saving of Our Mutual Friend, so that he still has one Dickens book to read towards the end of his life. And they mentioned their various homages to Stephen King.

I began jotting down all of the literary references they made throughout this featurette, and then I've written down some that have appeared this year in Season 4.

Carrie (Ben and Juliet's book club is reading Stephen King) and The Stand
The Fountainhead (Sawyer)
The Lord of the Flies (the entire series)
Of Mice and Men (Ben and Sawyer)
Catch 22
The Turn of the Screw
Alice in Wonderland
Watership Down
Evil Under the Sun (Nikki and Paulo storyline)
The Wizard of Oz (Ben as Henry Gale, "The Man Behind the Curtain")
A Brief History of Time (various physics phenomena including time travel)
A Wrinkle in Time
The Third Policeman (doubt over whether certain characters are alive)
The Brothers Karamazov (various criminals on the island being pursued)
The Invention of Morel (set on a mysterious island)
Valis (the nature of divinity)

It's interesting that when I looked up some of these titles on Amazon that they are linked to some of the other books in the above list. Book club, anyone?

Get your Turf Here!

I thought this recent story in the Akron Beacon Journal was one of the most depressing education stories I've read in a long time. It's about the current trend for private citizens to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for schools, on their own time, and for no compensation. What's bad about that, you ask? They're raising money so the school can buy artificial turf for the school football field. Of course, we educators have to accept some of the blame, as our school day has become filled with so many irrelevancies and so much tedium--hours to count down as the price to pay for being involved in a team or the band or the high school musical. It reminds me of this classic article: Seventeen Reasons Why Football is Better Than High School by Herb Childress. How can we educators make the school day so compelling that total strangers will raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to support its endeavors?

Teachers and MySpace?

I've been asked by the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy to write a piece as a guest columnist, and I'd like to write about teachers and social networking sites such as myspace.com or facebook.com. In my state (Ohio) the Department of Education has strongly warned teachers not to take part in social networking sites. (See this Plain Dealer article.) But I'm hearing from my students that there is no way they will give up their MySpace/Facebook pages upon graduating. They intend to keep their pages private (if they aren't already), and not add students as "friends," and they feel this protects them. I'd be interested to hear from any educators out there who are still active on social networking sites (or who have an opinion on this topic.) Email me at: wkist@kent.edu