I didn't sleep very well last night. No fault to the hotel. I
thought I was tired when I finally went to bed but I couldn't turn my
mind off. Always unwelcome. I eventually managed to fall asleep but
continued to wake up throughout the night. That made today feel just
a little bit longer.
Pretty much all of today was filled with group presentations. They
were all really good. I had read all of the studies before and
briefly thought of solutions to them when I was trying to decide
which case I wanted to sign up for. In the end that didn't really
matter because there was only one case left by the time I signed up.
But the point I'm getting at is that the solutions the groups came up
with were really well researched and thought out. As should be
expected. Several groups mentioned the various forms of research
they did and it made mine, contacting three librarians, seem inferior
in comparison.
I'm not sure how many groups we made it through this morning, maybe
four, and then we stopped for lunch. I did go with the change and
went to Jimmy Johns instead of Subway. I drove my it this morning
just to get a better idea of how far away it was, and it wasn't too
bad, but I decided to drive anyway because I wanted to get back and
finalize some presentation stuff with my partner. The staff at Jimmy
Johns was friendly, much like the local one, so that must be a part
of the franchise training. I found this out after I reached the
restaurant. Despite knowing where it was, I ended up having to take
a very roundabout route to get there. After turning on the road that
should have gone right by the corner that the restaurant was on, I
discovered that I couldn't cross the main road, I had to turn right,
even though the restaurant was just on the other side of the street.
I think maybe on the next block I couldn't turn left because it was
blocked off but I could be making that up. I ended up having to go
around a block or two but I finally made it. Had I been tracked by
GPS my driving route would have looked ridiculous.
Before going to lunch I ended up modifying one of our slides, and I
may have further tweaked it when I got back. I can't remember.
Either way, when I got back I divided up the presentation. This
whole project has really just been me doing stuff. I did the
research and made the decision on which solution we were going to go
with. I divided up the work, having my partner do the PowerPoint
because it was going to be easier and assigning myself the newspaper
because I knew it would be more difficult and I didn't trust my
partner with it. I then asked her for just two simple article while
I wrote the two main ones that formed the bulk of out paper, as well
as a small third article and all the little things to fill the paper
out. I edited my partner's articles so they made sense. I edited
the PowerPoint presentation and added one slide plus made a
significant addition to another one. And finally I decided how the
presentation was going to go. I told her to cover the first half of
the PowerPoint because that was all pretty basic stuff, then I took
the second half of the PowerPoint, introduced the newspaper and told
about the audience for the paper, passed it back to her so she could
read the little section I added about the Library Bill of Rights,
then I covered my two articles, let her talk about her two articles,
and I ended by covering the community events and the third article I
wrote.
I definitely did more of the speaking and it kind of felt like I was
up there alone. When I give presentations I kind of check out and go
on autopilot, and at one point I completely lost my train of thought
and blanked for a second, which is a first me. I don't think I'll do
that again because the awkwardness, at least in my head, was
palpable. In the beginning I tried to say 'we' a lot, acting like it
was a group effort, but towards the end I think maybe I switched to
'I', but again I can't be entirely certain because I am not really
cognizant of what I'm saying while I present. I do know that I got a
few chuckles throughout. The first while explaining the small
learning curve of how to use physical newspaper. Then again when I
was introducing our newspaper said I imagined out town to be like a
more conservative version of Stars Hollow from Gilmore Girls
because with only three newspaper subscriptions in the library it had
to be a pretty small community. I also got some laughs for my
reference to The Golden Girls
and my use of famous author names throughout the newspaper.
So all the little laughs were nice
but at the end of the presentation there were crickets when I asked
for questions. I can't tell if that was because our case was fairly
simple in terms of ethics or if because the presentation was so awful
that they were afraid to ask questions and contribute to the train
wreck. There were one or two other groups that also didn't have much
audience response after their presentations so at least we weren't
alone. It could have also been that we were the last group and our
classmates just wanted to keep things moving. I don't know.
Eventually a couple people asked questions and the professor asked a
couple, none of them were like the hard ones some of the other groups
got, which was good. I ended up answering all of them, not even sure
what I said, but I was fairly certain my partner wasn't going to jump
in so I once again took the lead.
There were also a couple cases where
the professor asked really tough questions to the groups. And one
case where he went on his soapbox for a bit and went off on how
people in poverty have a way of turning things so they aren't taking
handouts but they are taking advantage of those offerings. I think I
explained that poorly. In the case a large media corporation wanted
to donate hardware and equipment to a library media center but the
library had to put the name of the corporation on it and then there
were some other stipulations. The professor said that rather than
seeing it as the corporation taking advantage of the poor people, you
could say that the poor people were going to pimp the corporation.
They would take advantage of the things offered by the corporation
but they weren't going to become a slave to the corporation. They
weren't going to let it alter their view of the world. It was
interesting.
All-in-all, I have no freaking clue
how it went. From my point of view, it seemed fairly obvious that
our presentation was not on the same level as the other groups. I
would say the design of my paper was easily in the top three, maybe
even top two, but content-wise it probably doesn't even come close.
It didn't help that there were only two people in our group and most
of the other groups had three, but even the one or two other groups
of two did a much better job. I'm not sure if it came across as one
person trying to carry the project or two people slacking off. I
hope my effort wasn't canceled out by my partner. I also kind of
wish I was in one of the other groups because how they analyzed their
cases made the whole project seem a lot more interesting. I kind of
got screwed but I hope that doesn't reflect in my grade. I'm not
sure if we are going to get an overall group grade or if each person
is going to get an individual grade.
After our presentations we watched a
video about a library sit-in that happened in the South in 1939. The
town had recently built a new library using taxpayer money, including
black taxpayers, but it was a white-only library. Or at least it was
implied to be a white-only library, even though there weren't any
signs up, because black people couldn't get a library card. When
they tried the library would come up with a reason why they couldn't
get one. The actually interviewed the library in the eighties when
this documentary was made, and her attitudes hadn't changed. She
said the library wasn't very big and could only hold so many people,
so that is why the black people couldn't use it. She said there were
nice libraries in nearby Washington DC, so if they wanted to use a
library the black people could go there. Once the town finally
agreed to helped build a black-only library (only offering half of
the money they offered for the white-only library) the white library
said it looked like a pretty nice library, even though inside the
collection was pretty poor, and the collection is kind of the most
important part of the library.
Anyway, the sit-in was organized by
a black lawyer who got together a group of eleven young black men,
although only five showed up on the actual day. They went into the
library, dressed in nice clothes, acting respectful, and took turns
asking for a library card, when they were refused, the walked over to
the shelves, grabbed a book, and went to sit at a table and read it.
This not only confused the white people in the library, it lead to
the librarian going to get the police. When the police came and
asked the boys to leave they asked why they had to leave. I can't
remember if the cops got around to saying it was because they were
black but in the end they were all charged with disorderly conduct
(which was a popular charge back in the day). When the case went to
court the cops were brought on the stand and asked several questions
about the boys conduct in the library. The cops replied that the
boys were following all the rules of the library and weren't being
disorderly. There were then asked if the boys would have been kicked
out had they been white, the answer was no, and if they were only
kicked out because they were black, and the answer was yes. It is
hard to believe how recent this sort of stuff actually is. And how
much some of those prejudices still exist today.
After the video the professor gave
his ethics presentation, which he came up with to go along with our
group presentations. He picked a case where a librarian overheard a
couple black kids in the library making fun of another kid for
“talking white”. He then showed a video of a girl saying there
is no such thing as “talking white”. Speaking clearly and
fluently and enunciating and whatever else were just things you
should do. Speaking well wasn't a white thing, it was a thing that
anyone should strive toward. The professor than gave the recent
example of Iggy Azalea getting a lot of flak for appropriated black
culture and their ethnolect in order to sell records and become
famous, namely in her recent song “Fancy”.
The professor said that not too many
years ago he would have agreed with the first girl, saying that there
was no such thing as “talking white”, there was just being able
to speak well. He now believes that the ethnolect of black
communities is an important part of black culture and not something
that should be praised above being able to speak well but also not
something that should be squashed out. He said that when he was
young and growing up in the rougher parts of town, he would have been
called a punk and gotten beat up if he didn't adopt the way his
friends and neighbors spoke to one another. But he also had to learn
how to speak well because when he got into the business world he
wasn't going to be able to use the same manner of speaking that he
utilized in his neighborhood.
It was a really interesting
presentation. I'm undecided on the Iggy Azalea thing, however. You
could take the stance that she is appropriating the language in order
to sell records. The vast majority of pop music is entirely
engineered to be catchy and pleasing to the ear. The lyrics don't
even make sense half the time but people will sing along with it
anyway (like Ariana Grande's song Break Free,
yikes). So it is entirely possibly that Iggy Azalea isn't authentic
and has been manufactured in such a way that will garner the most
radio plays and downloads. On the other side of the coin, there is
the possibility that Iggy Azalea grew up listening to artists that
had a certain ethnolect and she is basing her style on wanting to be
like them. Like kids who grow up listening to Van Halen or Red Hot
Chili Peppers and base their guitar sound on Eddie Van Halen or their
bass sound on Flea. Michael Buble sounds like an old standards
singer but that doesn't mean he is trying to appropriate Frank
Sinatra's culture. A big thing in music is finding something you're
into and copying it until you eventually develop your own style. I
don't think it is too far fetched that this is what is happening with
Iggy Azalea. But it is equally possible that it is all purposeful
and manufactured.
After class I stopped by Spangles to
get fries and a orange juice slush before heading out of town. I got
a medium orange juice slush this time because the last two times I
got a small and that kind of gets swallowed up by my cupholders and I
struggle to pick it up. The medium worked a lot better.
The drive back was uneventful. That
is good. When I got back I couldn't pull in the garage because there
were some boxes, or poor attempts at boxes, leaning up against the
house, partially blocking the garage. I soon found out they were my
desks. This was surprising because I wasn't expecting them for
another six or seven days. I was expecting boxes, however, but these
were basically just large sheets of cardboard taped at both ends.
This really increases the efficiency of packing a truck because they
were much slimmer than they would have been had they been packed
securely in a box. Tomorrow or sometime I will need to unpack them
to make sure they made it in good condition. I would have been a
little worried about the packing method had they been particle board
or something but they are solid wood, so hopefully that is more
resistant to damage when packed in such a way.
After dragging those downstairs, I
had a bit of dinner, talked to my mom about the weekend, and then
went downstairs to read. I made it about halfway through the
chapter. It is a chapter on cockfighting in Bali. At some future
date I might include a passage or some excerpts because it is pretty
funny, but right now it is almost two o'clock in the morning and I am
really freaking tired.
Tomorrow I need to finish reading
that chapter so I can write my discussion post for my research class,
which is due tomorrow. I also need to write my short reflection
about the case study presentations this weekend. Not focusing on our
own presentation, thankfully, but the project as a whole. I also
need to start writing my annotated bibliographies because those are
due next Sunday. I also think the assignment we talked about this
weekend involving the information cycle is due next Sunday, so I
should probably look into that. This weekend is going to be filled
with so much scholarly reading. I'm not looking forward to it.
Well, I'm not looking forward to the writing associated with that
reading. Oh, and I really need to start writing my reflective
journal entries. I've got about a month to do that and that is going
to be incredibly overwhelming. Only more so the longer I put it off.
