Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

Amy King‘s Men by the Lips of Women moves from a specific case to men and women in general before it finally brings both situations together with an echo of a title. In the process, the poem evokes a sort of possessing love, both harmful and desired, both certain and uncertain. It also implies the presence of duende, perhaps even the man’s identity with it in the lines

He sounds in the brain’s eagled hollows
of a soft guitar from a Spanish café
among the mountain peaks in nightshade.

More importantly, the poem covers the tension between how a single individual may construct or learn to view the world.

The title implies women speaking men into existence, but at the start, it is the man, the specific unnamed man, who has the book and the ink. This hints at an opposition of the oral and written tradition connected to gender. It is, however, not so simple. He sees, however, from the book; he, the specific man sees what someone else has written for him. Which gender wrote the book? “The mother of everyone calls him” suggests the power of women, or at least of a symbol of women, possibly a goddess. The speaker, probably female, has viscerally altered his body into a thing that frightens goat yet seems, when expressed in her words, aesthetically pleasing: “His toxins become a cherry blossom wine.”

These seem to place woman, or women, in an authorial role. Then, however, we come to these lines:

I am that love you light yourself with
and my gender is powerless in this.

She, the individual woman, is being used by the man so that he can see (or construct) himself. Her gender as a whole and as an identity can do nothing to change this.

In the last line, King resolves this tension while resisting the temptation to create a false certainty: “man reading men by the lips of women.” The men he reads includes himself, yet his power to construct identity depends upon the women, though how much power what they say has remains unclear, a highly realistic uncertainty.

I agree with most of Moran’s aims, especially this:

Despite the great differences, both teachers [previously described] are attempting to help learners make a transition from one world, one way of life, into another. This, as I see it, is our shared calling as language teachers.

It’s not enough to teach students to be spectators of another culture, and the knowing about/how/why/oneself framework seems to provide a useful way of going about achieving further goals without impinging on students’ cultural identities.

However, Moran advocates teaching language and culture through a cyclical process of guiding students through experiential learning opportunities and then encouraging them to reflect on these experiences, which is all well and good until you’re teaching students incapable of engaging in meaningful reflection. Any sort of meta-level thought is always going to be more difficult in a (relatively) new language, but this semester I found it virtually impossible to get my students to think about the activities we were doing and why we were doing them. Interpretation and reasoned response are an enormous stretch. My suspicion is that it has a lot to do with the culture and education system in China; this sort of thought has not been part of their life previous to this. Guiding them towards success in this area requires more than just appropriate language input and appropriate questions.

Also, a good portion of the text seems dedicated to presenting watered-down summations of sociolinguistic and other theories. While I recognize that I am, perhaps, overeducated in some of these areas, I have to wonder how necessary such summary is in a text aimed at language teachers.

All that aside, the text did give some good ideas for how to let my students lead the inquiry into American and other English-speaking cultures next semester (assuming I get a few classes of students who are willing to speak). I think I may also attempt to structure a course in terms of the five aspects of culture he identifies: products, practices, communities, persons, and perspectives.

This post is part of the 24-Hour Read-a-Thon. You can help by donating to Reading Is Fundamental.

008000;">My Running Totals
Books read: Teaching Culture: Perspectives in Practice – Patrick R. Moran, Part of the Furniture – Mary Wesley (in progress)
Pages read: 175
Mini-challenges: Introduction, webcomics

(via the PostSecret Facebook Page)

However, I thought this was a standard survival strategy rather than a secret.

I’ve just returned from a futile trip to Longhu’s newly opened CAAC window where I attempted to obtain tickets for a weekend trip since next week I won’t have class on Thursday morning thanks to the college sports festival. After asking me when and where I wanted to go, the woman behind the counter told me that they were not available; I didn’t understand her explanation, but given that she didn’t check her computer system, I’m assuming the problem wasn’t that they were sold out. Of course, I really shouldn’t have expected much from anything in Longhu. Despite the recently opened upscale hotel and the housing development that this new office is near, Dragon Lake (as the name translates to) is still a rural area where food peddlers on stand next to sewage grates that sometimes overflow. In other words, a lot of the people in this town (not to mention people in far-off territories controlled by the people’s empire of China) have much bigger things to worry about.

Normally, I wouldn’t let this sort of thing get to me. Besides the fact that it’s simply not a major problem relatively speaking, I can go into Zhengzhou on Saturday and try to buy (train or plane) tickets at offices that are usually much more useful. If that doesn’t work, there are still nearby towns of interest I can get to by bus and so take advantage of the long weekend. (Or maybe I’ll just save the money so I can do more this summer.)

I was, however, in a bad mood already. In my class this morning, I once again had students debate whether the character of Leslie in Bridge to Terabithia is brave or foolish. The group arguing for foolish (all but one of them female, which reflects the demographics of the English department) claimed that her joining a footrace for boys was foolish because it “hurt their esteem” when she won which made it more difficult for her to make friends with them. When I asked them if they thought that, in general, girls and women should avoid beating boys and men in competition in order to avoid injuring their pride, they answered in the affirmative without any hesitation. I don’t even know how to begin to address that.

I wish I could understand what it is that makes these young women different from those in my group from the ones who did so well with the gender-based analysis. If I could figure that out, it would be the first step towards helping them see how much they can be and have a basic human right to be.