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Goodreads has partnered with First Book, a charity group whose mission is to make sure children who reside in low-income communities are able to have access to books. Together, these two organizations will be fighting illiteracy using the Goodreads Book Club.
Every time 10,000 Goodreads members add A Visit From the Goon Squad to their shelves, the organization promises to donate 1,000 books. So far, 25,000 members have added the book. If another 5,000 members follow, then Goodreads will provide 3,000 books.
Here’s more from the site’s blog post: “Our initial goal is to donate 5,000 books—which means we need 50,000 people to add A Visit From The Goon Squad by August 2, when the Book Club concludes with a live video chat with author Jennifer Egan. If more than 50,000 people add the book before the end date, we will honor our pledge and donate up to 10,000 books!”
In case you missed it, I wanted to post my podcast conversation with 18 year old author and global literacy advocate, Riley Carney (www.rileycarney.com):
I absolutely HATE text language. Nothing in the world annoys me more than seeing someone type in text language. Okay, I do use the occasional text language phrase like ‘you’ becomes ‘u’ and ‘are’ becomes ‘r’. I do use the occasional acronym like ‘to be honest’ becomes ‘tbh’, ‘laughing out loud’ becomes ‘lol’ and ‘by the way’ becomes ‘btw’. I think a text language vocabulary of up to 20 words should be tolerated. (Mine only reaches like 5 which is better but…! ) But when situations worsen to a point where you see someone write ‘I am busy right now’ in text language and it looks like ‘i m bc ryt nw’, at that point, you really want to bang your head on the nearest wall until your eyes pop out and even Homer Simpson seems as attractive as Brad Pitt.
Here is my list of why text language spelling should officially be allowed to get a criminal record (or better still - imprisonment) if exceeded by 20 words in its vocabulary list:
It makes you sound like a 2 year old. 2 year olds can’t type and when you type text spelling, it looks like you can’t type, thus making you look like a 2 year old.
It makes you sound illiterate. It feels like your mum and dad denied you the basic education you should have deserved.
It makes you look like you are so poverty stricken that your keyboard has been bashed by a cow but you still won’t replace it.
Text spelling seems to worm its way to exam papers and other official pieces of papers and THAT is despicable.
It looks like jumbled letters. It really looks like you are trying to teach little Molly how to read and write.
Using text language is denying other people the right to read. When they look at random letters, no punctuation and no use of the teensiest bit of decent grammar, then their mind goes into delirium whether what they are reading is proper or not, thus corrupting their minds.
Children will become weird because of text language and will take over the world with signs and posters and literally everything sounding that way.
Teachers won’t be able to correct exam papers because if the students use text spelling and the teachers can’t (I’m pretty sure half the teachers think ‘lol’ means lolling about because we find something funny, which really, makes no sense at all) that’s illiteracy stepped up a notch and a waste of doing exams anyway. As it is, the British government education folk are worried exams are getting easier by the second.
On a much more realistic note, text spelling is going out of fashion. More and more people shun it and funnily enough shun those who still use it, so if you use it, stop. Or you’ll find yourself tied to a pole near the bus stop getting thrashed by a bunch of geekily cool teenagers.
I know that was a pretty angry rant but, let’s face the facts, text language spelling isn’t great! If anything at all, it is wasteful. People say it reduces the effort to type but it increases the effort to read. Let’s all type decently and read decently and not become slaves to ‘txt lngage splng’ (or for normal people, text language spelling).
I absolutely HATE text language. Nothing in the world annoys me more than seeing someone type in text language. Okay, I do use the occasional text language phrase like ‘you’ becomes ‘u’ and ‘are’ becomes ‘r’. I do use the occasional acronym like ‘to be honest’ becomes ‘tbh’, ‘laughing out loud’ becomes ‘lol’ and ‘by the way’ becomes ‘btw’. I think a text language vocabulary of up to 20 words should be tolerated. (Mine only reaches like 5 which is better but…! ) But when situations worsen to a point where you see someone write ‘I am busy right now’ in text language and it looks like ‘i m bc ryt nw’, at that point, you really want to bang your head on the nearest wall until your eyes pop out and even Homer Simpson seems as attractive as Brad Pitt.
Here is my list of why text language spelling should officially be allowed to get a criminal record (or better still - imprisonment) if exceeded by 20 words in its vocabulary list:
It makes you sound like a 2 year old. 2 year olds can’t type and when you type text spelling, it looks like you can’t type, thus making you look like a 2 year old.
It makes you sound illiterate. It feels like your mum and dad denied you the basic education you should have deserved.
It makes you look like you are so poverty stricken that your keyboard has been bashed by a cow but you still won’t replace it.
Text spelling seems to worm its way to exam papers and other official pieces of papers and THAT is despicable.
It looks like jumbled letters. It really looks like you are trying to teach little Molly how to read and write.
Using text language is denying other people the right to read. When they look at random letters, no punctuation and no use of the teensiest bit of decent grammar, then their mind goes into delirium whether what they are reading is proper or not, thus corrupting their minds.
Children will become weird because of text language and will take over the world with signs and posters and literally everything sounding that way.
Teachers won’t be able to correct exam papers because if the students use text spelling and the teachers can’t (I’m pretty sure half the teachers think ‘lol’ means lolling about because we find something funny, which really, makes no sense at all) that’s illiteracy stepped up a notch and a waste of doing exams anyway. As it is, the British government education folk are worried exams are getting easier by the second.
On a much more realistic note, text spelling is going out of fashion. More and more people shun it and funnily enough shun those who still use it, so if you use it, stop. Or you’ll find yourself tied to a pole near the bus stop getting thrashed by a bunch of geekily cool teenagers.
I know that was a pretty angry rant but, let’s face the facts, text language spelling isn’t great! If anything at all, it is wasteful. People say it reduces the effort to type but it increases the effort to read. Let’s all type decently and read decently and not become slaves to ‘txt lngage splng’ (or for normal people, text language spelling).
The election of Barack Obama to the office of President of the United States revealed once again that American society is capable of revolutionary self-correction. The state survived a Civil War that brought an end to human-rights violations of the most dreadful kind. The Civil Rights Movement, a century later, completed a long-dormant cycle of American transformation on the basis of a Constitution whose terms, as Presidents Kennedy and Johnson proclaimed, had not yet been met. And now, two generations on, the unimaginable has happened. My mail from all over the world over the past several days has one common theme, amazement – and a second thread, admiration. People who usually went to bed before the polls closed in their own countries’ elections stayed up all night to watch the drama unfold in America. November 4, 2008 was Global Awareness Day – global awareness of America and its continuing importance to the future of this planet.
But from the American side, the two-year-long preoccupation with electoral politics took its toll on U.S. awareness of the world, and revealed some geographic illiteracy among the candidates that gave cause for concern. Even those news media still committed to some global perspective shrank their international coverage in the face of the demand for, as CNN put it, “all politics all the time.” And it was not just a matter of diminished attention to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other headline topics. Right next door to us, Mexico is becoming the Colombia of Middle America, but the drama – and it will have huge repercussions in the years ahead – barely makes it into print. In our hemisphere, enormous changes are occurring in Brazil, with China strongly in the picture, but the geography of this emerging superpower hardly makes the headlines. Even Russia’s growing belligerence (how soon Moscow’s portentous actions toward Georgia faded from view) only made the news when its president failed to congratulate president-elect Obama on his victory and used his acknowledgment of the event to threaten missile emplacement in Kaliningrad. Let us hope that National Geography Awareness Week 2008 will mark a renewal of attention to global concerns.
On the matter of geographic literacy, it was disturbing to hear one presidential candidate refer to the Iraq-Afghanistan border and another suggest that you can see Russia from Alaska (to be sure, there are places where you can, but not as her assertion intended). Anyone running for the highest or the second-highest office of the United States ought to know what NAFTA means and realize that Africa is not a country. As to Kaliningrad, let’s not even go there.
So long as we have national leaders (as has recently been the case) who are not adequately versed in the environmental and cultural geographies of the places with whose peoples they will have to interact, and which they seek to change through American intervention, we need to enhance public education in geography. Whether the world likes it or not, the United States still is the indispensable state of the twenty-first century, capable of influencing nations and peoples, lives and livelihoods from pole to pole. That power confers on Americans a responsibility to learn as much as they can about those nations and livelihoods, and for this there is no more effective vehicle than geography. It is a matter worth contemplating during National Geography Awareness Week.
0 Comments on Reflections on National Geography Awareness Week, 2008 as of 11/20/2008 7:45:00 PM