For those of you who don't know me, here's an autobiographical sketch that might fill in some gaps and help you understand where I'm coming from.
Autobiographical Sketch by Richard B. Speaker, Jr.
Some Thoughts on My Personal Literacy:
A Literacy Self-Portrait
in Four Sections
Reading
Ahh, the smell of it, the structure, the allure, the content -- whether it's B. Dalton, Blackstone, Bookstar, Waldenbooks, City Lights, The Book Store, Herget's, Kodansha, or some other, I am drawn and cannot leave without finding some book. It's a compulsion. It's expensive. It's a search, a quest. My collection continues to grow haphazardly: children's books here, literary novels there, foreign novels, popular novels, science fiction, adolescent literature, mysteries, biographies, memoirs and autobiographies, travel, art, poetry, photographs, histories, romances, erotica, comics (mostly Japanese manga), music (piano and symphonic), textbooks, language books and dictionaries (the usual: French, German, Spanish, Latin; the unusual: Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiian, Arabic, Vietnamese, Swahili; and then there are ones I still desire: any version of Mayan, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Native American languages), journals, magazines, newspapers, short story collections, cookbooks, technical manuals. There's always something for me, intriguing, demanding, providing images, tantalizing, magnetizing -- something to read, everywhere, always at hand, beside my bed, near the computer, in Ben's room, in the music room, in the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, the bathrooms, and the shed -- and, of course, in the office: shelves and shelves and stacks and boxes. A room isn't complete without books. The only limit is my budget, but credit cards can extend even that when I must have a particular book.
In almost every city, there's a bookstore for me, and a trip isn't complete without a book -- or ten: Tintin from Nice and Quebec; sumo from Kyoto; manga from Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka; children's books and Maupin from San Francisco; Ann Rice (under a variety of pseudonyms and her own name) from New Orleans; Austin from Bath; Shakespeare from Stratford-on Avon; pamphlets from Avesbury, Glastonbury and Tintagel and a hundred other sites; Durrell from The Book Store in Modesto; Anasazi from Mesa Verdi; guidebooks from Beijing and Hong Kong; museum stores in the Smithsonian; a library of 263 titles on CD to read on the computer; Genjimonogatari and dictionaries from Matsue; used books from Fort Walton Beach; the e-libraries of the Internet; tourist shops in Athens, Nafplio, Delphi, Vergin, Thessaloniki, and the Temple of Poseidon in Suonion; and Lonely Planet Guides from wherever I find them about places I would visit. I seek them out -- those bookstores and music stores, big and little. I need something to read!
Writing
I look over my portfolios and notebooks, hardcopy and electronic: ideas -- fragments, lists, flashes; incomplete works -- waiting for further thoughts, reworking, reconceptualization, resensing; complete works -- resting stories to be revisited, rethought, pondered, shared some day, maybe to be moved back into the previous category; published artifacts -- gone from my control, shared long ago, research and essays, public, frozen in their formal forms. What's there? Professional writing, short stories, science fiction, children's stories, part of an adolescent novel, essays, poetry, a mystery (incomplete), persuasive pieces, letters, erotica, recipes, a five-act play which needs a few more scenes, some piano music (a suite, two sonatas, a waltz, miscellaneous pieces) and then cutting, and fragments, fragments, fragments. Many of these are abortions which should never be reconsidered; others are there for future development, when the moment strikes. I must work to write every day, just as I work in playing the piano every day.
The twists and turns of writing extended forms is where I must concentrating my efforts now. I've edited two journals for the Japan Studies Association on incorporating Japan Studies into the college curriculum, worked on a book about Social Studies Fair projects and tried to finish a draft of a book on teaching middle school writing. Now, I'm working on a book for teaching literacy and technology. My thoughts about the writing process are evolving rapidly so the middle school writing book keeps changing form and structure.
My most active teaching of writing is at the doctoral level. I advise approximately thirteen doctoral students every semester and am on the committees of many more. Since my doctoral students develop a portfolio of professional papers and activities as the written portion of their general examination, and then dissertation proposals and dissertations, I am constantly reading and responding to sophisticated writing in writing. The final major form of professional writing is curriculum design. Since I have been graduate studies coordinator of Curriculum and Instruction, I was responsible for drafting and editing graduate policies for faculty consideration. Actually I had a faculty committee which developed all proposed policies, but in practice, as with most committees, one person must draft policy statement for reaction and revision by the committee and then the faculty at large. We recently revised our master's comprehensive examination policy and aspects of the doctoral program so that these programs are more efficient and allow students a wider range of graduate experiences. In Fall, 2003, I stepped out of the position as Graduate Studies Coordinator.
Interlude
A LURKER AT THE THRESHOLD
I am observation
Skilled and cunning watcher
Somber and fell am I
Proud of the way I am --
A chill, fogged mirror
Lurking in the background
Thirsting, hungering, watching
Waiting and seeing,
For I am invisible.
Silver-tongued and slippery
Hiding thoughts with words,
Making truths of falsehoods
By devious inflections
While telling yet the truth --
Beneath me hiding
Twisting convolutions
Weighted absurdities.
I will play the fool while
Glaring beams penetrate
Structures, societies
Slicing and dissecting:
Youth, age, lust, virtue
Compartmentalizing:
Words, intentions, actions
Acting selectively:
Stimulus and response
Believing and/or not
Saneness and psychosis
Trying, Laughing, JUDGING.
(I am the ravening
driven by cool white light of
dust from starry heaven
touching tenuous links
banding together the wildly darting forces
crudely frown of coldness
feigning natural warmth.)
How is it that I be:
I am what you will to see
For none, but that, you can.
What I see - I am.
Seeking Self
With postmodernism, the me-generation (to which I belong) has adopted multiple personality disorder as its major metaphor, moving from a positivist paradigm, laced with Cartesian dualities, through structuralism with its rigid crystallized essences, bounded by Capitalism, Fascism, Communism, Fanaticism and Terrorism, to an understanding of the multiplicity of voices interpreting any event, literary or otherwise. Although many yearn for simplicity of some past utopian dream, complexity has bloomed as a centerpiece of postmodern learned societies, and autobiography becomes an essential aspect of research because the pain of uncovering self and biases is integral to understanding and interpreting the lenses through which the researcher interprets data and the world. Here I pause amongst the collections that are myself and build this autobiographical sketch. Fragmentation and hate have developed their followers just as anarchy was a theme at the turn of the century. Some write apologies for their privileged lives while others revel in conspicuous consumption, but more and more we are driven, harried slaves of our social stances in a populated world which is not safe, and at times borders on chaos. I sense four major themes influencing my life and professional development: the intellectual/social life of a literate family, mathematics, the piano and its classical traditions, and travelwith a need to develop an understanding of globalism and other societies, ancient and modern.
So let me reflect on my life for a time, as a male, first-born son of a well educated, upper middle class, highly literate European-American family, of long-lived stock. This set of descriptors provides me with privileges and has imbued me with compulsions. Literacy is certainly one of them: I must read, I must write, I must learn, I must travel. But there are others. My maternal grandfather, Charles Benjamin Gass, had a doctorate in pharmacy from George Washington University. His heritage was Catholic, oyster and tobacco farmers on the Eastern Shore of Maryland who traced their roots back to the early English settlers of Maryland who came over on the Ark and the Dove. He ran successful pharmacies in Washington, DC, until just before his death at eighty-six from a major stroke.
My maternal grandmother, Rose Marie Grace Dashbaugh Clinton Gass, had a normal school education and taught a few years in a one-room school house before marriage. Her family was Irish-English Catholic, despite an attempt to hide the Irish side by constantly talking up the Clinton line which included a General (maybe) George Clinton who fought for the British against the colonies during the Revolutionary War. These myths were promulgated along with many others as part of my mother's family, but not by my mother. It's fascinating to me that such folktales should be important in my grandparent's generation. She died in her mid-nineties of pneumonia.
My maternal grandparent's house in Washington was the nexus of my childhood. The periods of my life are place-marked with individual incidents and with recursion and times that seem to be almost recursion -- perhaps it's a form of deja vu, perhaps not. My father was in the Navy, so we moved, but my mother's parents stayed at 3717 Livingston St., not far from Connecticut Avenue and Chevy Chase Circle. Some of those places recur in dreams where the flash of recognition comes at awakening or the lack of recognition haunts me throughout that period when I'm not yet awake, but no longer asleep -- sometimes it lasts longer than that, but my grandparent's house is a setting for many of those memories, the half dream, the images. There are strange transpositions, importations, revisualizations, vivid waking dreams that slip through the senses until their tantalizing fragments evaporate like wisps of fog rising from the embankment of ivy that lined the twelve, grey, gritty concrete steps to my grandparent's home. Sometimes the image shakes with the force of a dimly remembered typhoon from my infancy in Japan; sometimes the strong, sickeningly strong, honey-perfume smell of dying roses, peoneys and lilies in a moldy white wicker basket on that landing two-thirds of the way up buzzes with yellow-jackets about to sting the three-year-old child and real tears well with the memory. Sometimes the preparations for Christmas send chills even in the tenebrous mornings of July.
My grandparents decorated for Christmas. The six blue spruces in front of the porch wore blue lights. The fir in the front corner of the lawn had to have multi-colored lights which twinkled while lighting the 12 icy cement stairs from the street. The white hanging globe of the porch light was replaced with a three-dimensional, beveled star of clear leaded glass; my grandmother was ecstatic when a flame-shaped bulb replaced the round one some year and became the regulation shape even though it didn't produce very much light. The wicker furniture of the porch had long since been stored in the basement, but other shapes took its place: electric candle sticks which played carols, over and over and over and over; small trees or just frames with sprays of tiny white lights; and, around the corner, a view of another lighted fir, its red and green lights blinking in unison -- made the porch a wonderland for the three-year-old child, or anyone who could achieve that frame of mind (with or without the aid of the stimulating beverages which my grandfather kept in the house).
The door of my memory glides silently open to: dry heat as we tear off layers; pine scents, wood oils and dust; Persian carpets; the red, tufted Victorian sofa and heavy chairs that were easy to hide in or dainty ones with velvet and lace which seemed too fragile; the decrepit grand piano with its massive black legs, the varnish crackled, no two notes sounding in harmony, some keys producing harsh disharmonies of their own; crystal bowls filled with collected glass ornaments; and everywhere candles and greenery, even in the fireplace which never held a fire. We light all the candles after dinner; the new scent -- hot wax burning and melting in white, yellow and amber droplets to puddle on the bobishes or overflow and puddle on the floor -- leads to a game of watching the flames until you can't any more and collecting droplets into balls which later grew into new candles.
My paternal grandmother, Clare Auerbach Speaker, was a teacher most of her adult life with a master's degree from Columbia Teachers College. She taught in inner city Washington, DC, until the early seventies, starting with Latin and English, then adding reading as students needed different types of instruction. Her background was Austrian and Lithuanian, with grandparents immigrating through Ellis Island probably in the 1870's. She died in her mid-seventies of cancer.
My paternal grandfather, Charles Richard Speaker, was an unsuccessful businessman with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. His parents arrived from Romania or possibly Russian Lithuania around 1870. He died of heart failure in his mid-nineties. My paternal grandparents spoke German conversantly from their childhood, but never tried to have their children or grandchildren learn the language (I only learned this when we had German visitors in the early 70's). This linguistic heritage was not considered appropriate in the period starting with the 1930's.
My father's parents had various homes during my childhood, but their beach house in Bay Ridge, MD, is another deep memory, less haunting than my other grandparent's home, less hectic, more free, more open. The summer heat along the Chesapeake Bay, not far from Annapolis, was more bearable near the water where an occasional breeze chased the mosquitos from the yard and the outdoor showers. We climbed the apple trees in the back of the property, had hidden forts in the pines, cruised the bay on a motorboat borrowed from the Naval Academy, slept on sofas with fans blowing to keep the sweat evaporating, tinkered with the water pump, and dug up the leach lines for the septic tank in different summers, but every summer, my grandfather would be on the roof with tar and paper, trying, always unsuccessfully, to stop the leaks in the roof. Thundershowers with their cooling winds and downpours would have us manning bucket, bowl and mop duty, watching always for a new drip from some ceiling spot or a wind-driven spout from a window. This two-bedroom "Spanish" cottage in my memory is of mottled blue, mauve and yellow stucco with windows and doors framed in blue and massive hydrangeas. It was here I read Petronius and Aristophanes, and, since the grand piano in the living room was playable, spent much of my adolescent summers practicing.
My parents live in San Diego, California. My mother, Jane Gass Speaker, has her master's degree from Purdue University in Pharmacy and taught pharmacy at George Washington University until my birth in 1951. She married my father in a Catholic ceremony in 1950 when my father was a lieutenant in the U. S. Navy. She raised four children who all have college degree (plus 3 master's degrees and one doctorate -- me). My father, Richard Benjamin Speaker, now retired, has his M.D. from George Washington, is a Fellow of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and a retired captain of the U. S. Naval Medical Corps.
Books were everywhere in my family's life. Newspapers and magazines were necessary for a functional household. Significantly, I entered school during the heyday of Scott Foresman's series featuring Dick, Jane, Sally, Spot and Puff; as a child of Dick Speaker and Jane Gass, I was reading the most culturally appropriate material which could have been developed. Of course, we eventually had a dalmatian, although we called him Rip instead of Spot.
Since my father was in the Navy, we travelled. I lived in Washington, DC; Yokohama and Hayama, Japan; Bethesda and Bainbridge, Maryland; Charleston, South Carolina; China Lake, California; Norfolk, Virginia; Beaulieu, France; Potomac, Maryland; Camp Peneleton (high school graduation), San Diego (college at UCSD) and Costa Mesa (master's at UC, Irvine), California; Salt Lake City, Utah; San Francisco, Ceres (marriage) and Berkeley (doctorate), California; and New Orleans, Louisiana, in that order. Sometimes I attended several schools in one location -- fourteen schools in thirteen years, but I certainly achieved tastes for variety, travel and change. I have now lived in New Orleans longer than I have lived anywhere else in my life, but I continue to travel whenever possible: one month in England in 1990, three weeks in China in 1992, ten days in the Yucatan in 1993, a month in Japan in 1994 and again in 1995, six weeks in Vietnam and China in 1997, ten days in Kiev, Ukraine, in 2003, a week in Vancouver, Canada, in 2003, two weeks in Greece in 2000, six weeks in Greece, Paris, Dublin, Greece (again) and Istabul in 2001, and six weeks in Cyprus, Italy and Greece in 2003 and the entire summer of 2010. I offer this chronicle to explain some of my compulsiveness about literacy, collecting, technology and other aspects of my life, although from time to time my goals have shifted dramatically.
I have experienced one major unfortunate literacy experience. My junior English teacher killed American literature for me, and I have not overcome this problem, perhaps it's time. I'll see. The language of his classroom seemed to strive for deconstructing text into minute experiences, rending it into fragments of nothingness, eviscerating the experience of language and plot into impersonal icons to be discussed coldly, abstractly, removed for life's experiences and interpreted authoritatively. More than that I do not remember, except listening to Leonard Bernstein forwards and then backwards after he had left the room. Patterns and connections have lead me to mathematics and music all my life -- patterns of numbers, patterns of words, patterns of sounds, patterns of behaviors, patterns of society. The swirling patterns of chaos connect by drops of my experiences to make a reality which I accept. Mozart, Chopin, Liszt and Scriabin are partners in the interpretive process in a pianistic school which goes directly back to Beethoven who was my last piano teacher's teacher's teacher's teacher's teacher's teacher. Variation and number theory provide potent metaphors for writing and the essay because of the complexity hidden within an apparent simplicity. Thus, my view of writing, reading and literacy teaching in general fits this interpretation. When writers write, they interpret, orchestrate sweeping sensory languaging processes which are complex transacting intellectual mental entities, play with language, guide their thinking with their hands, ears, tongue and eyes. They make selections, choose tasks and topics, follow thoughts and patterns, audiences, goals, and use various aspects of their language knowledge from pragmatics to graphophonemics. They manipulate oral and written language and the interactions of language with other sensory processes. They use all their intelligences to make an artifact -- a cultural and personal artifact.
And then there's technology. I am a technologist. I believe that one of the essential human traits is to use of whatever technology is available and to seek out new technologies to solve problems. The computer with its increasing multimedia proclivities and connection to the World-Wide-Web has become essential to my daily activities; communicating, reading, writing, editing, listening, speaking, visually representing, sensing, thinking, and teaching all involve computer technologies. Web pages and the communications cloud (e-mail, BlackBoard, Second Life, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Wikis, Questia, Wimba, Adobe Connect, Eluminate, Webinars) are a natural part of my current curriculum planning, and I use on-line platforms to help organize my activities and for planning travel to conferences in Kiev and Cyprus in 2003, South Africa in 2004, Venice and Budapest in 2006, Vienna in 2008, Honolulu in 2009, and Greece and Ireland in 2010. I've begun posting my photographs and working on captions and map locations at: http://picasaweb.google.com/richardspeaker/. I’m directing a master’s program that include insternational experiences every summer.
My major goals in teaching are to communicate this complex range of behaviors which can be used effectively in the classroom and to stomp out the idea that there are unstructured classrooms. Classrooms are social structures, and managing their complexity is one of the things that teachers do; recognizing the nature of such interacting factors of tradition, beliefs, climate, technology, institutionality and the interplay of personalities requires an envisionment of classrooms as postmodern language settings which both learners and teachers interpret. So you have read about my collections, physical, virtual and mental, perhaps it's time to examine your own! Sometimes I think of this as my excuse for being who I am. What’s yours?!!!
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