Uriel in ChinaAll Movies All The TimeDecember 6, 2000by Uriel Wittenberg (uw@urielw.com)
You may recall that Natalie, of my B group, proposed an alternative to our usual New York Times fare some time ago, a simple little story from Reader's Digest called "The Sixth Diamond." I took her up on the suggestion, we did the story in class, and then afterwards I asked the class what kind of reading they preferred to do in future. They opted for more Times stuff rather than more short stories like "Diamond." A week or two later I spotted Natalie before class and asked her whether she was satisfied with how I'd elicited the class's reading preferences. This girl has been quite inert lately. I honestly don't know what's with these kids. She didn't seem to know what I was talking about and, as I persisted, seemed to have no recollection of the discussion at all. Yet she'd been there -- I clearly remembered that. (A Western reader might be forgiven for thinking a lot of my kids are totally whacked out on drugs or something. But if it's drugs, no hint of it has reached me. Maybe it's what some call "Chinese culture." Certainly the confusion is non-stop.) Natalie was also extremely fidgetty, apparently dying to get to class. I told her: "Class doesn't begin for another five minutes, but anyway, I'm the teacher, it won't begin without me." As I forced her to focus on the issue for a moment, she said: "Maybe you should ask Dean Meng what the students prefer." Was she perhaps fidgetting because she'd bad-mouthed me to Meng and was feeling guilty and embarrassed? But what struck me was the possibility that I hadn't truly established student preferences. So I fetched my pseudo-assistant, Jim Wu, and had him pose the question as I waited outside the classroom: The Times, or "Sixth Diamond"? He emerged some minutes later. They didn't want short stories. They wanted interesting readings. But they wanted readings that did not have so many difficult words. Of course. They wanted to have their cake and eat it too. I pulled Jim back into the classroom and explained to the class: That wasn't a choice. You can choose Times; more stories from the same anthology containing "Sixth Diamond"; or anything else that you come up with. I couldn't go searching for them for readings satisfying contradictory criteria. Generally, I explained, good, interesting English writing for adults was liable to have a number of words that they didn't know. That was the tradeoff. (In fact, I'd already looked in a large local bookstore together with Dean Meng for suitable readings and, despite the large ESL selection, hadn't found anything. Frankly, I think the Times is an ideal source of short, self-contained, interesting and well-written reading selections.) The resolution was that Jim would select something that seemed to fit what they were asking for. He came up with five readings. We've so far done the two that the students chose to do first. One is a one-page description of Eastbourne, the small resort town on the south coast of England that a portion of the students will be going to in March (for the second half of their one-year, pre-university program). The page is apparently copied from the literature of one of the ESL schools there. It actually makes Eastbourne sound quite nice. It makes one wonder .... Wouldn't it be a shock for my students if I materialized at the front of the class in their new school in March? With, say, new reading selections from the Times? The next Jim-selected reading -- actually, it seems he just got a couple of students to come up with readings from somewhere -- was about "Safe Computing." It opens with the italicized line: "Your data are the most valuable things you own!" It then talks about how one's computer data should be kept "duplicated," "isolated," and "transferable. " The article is absolutely deadly. After a brief discussion on the awkward sound of "data" when used as a plural noun, I surveyed the students: "What is the most valuable thing you own?" As I'd foreseen, not a one of them felt it was their "data." True, these may be very unusual students. More likely, the article was written by a narrow-minded technocrat -- which served as a springboard for recounting how Bill Gates has discovered just lately, to the irritation of some of his fellow movers and shakers in the computer industry, that a "computer on every desktop" is not the final answer to the world's problems:
As the "Creating Digital Dividends" conference drew to a close in Seattle recently, the final speaker arrived and started asking skeptical questions. The premise was that "market drivers" could be used "to bring the benefits of connectivity and participation in the e-economy to all of the world's six billion people," according to conference materials, but the speaker would have little of it. Mr. Li's proposal to do a script with the A's arose on a day when the B group and I were still discussing the importance of data. Once doing Total Recall occurred to me, it seemed too good to let the B's miss out on it, so I had copies of my 17-page screenplay excerpt made for all students in both groups. We had quite a fun time Monday reading aloud the scene from the Rekall Memory Studio. No one seemed to be pining for The New York Times. "Ernie" (Chris), the hyperactive lab technician, amusingly botched his line about five times in a row before getting it right:
(hysterical) Excuse me, someone? We're talking the fucking Agency! As for me, I enthralled the class with my McClane:
What the fuck is going on here?! You can't install a simple goddamn double implant?! Of course, I am still persevering in my old goal of 100% comprehension. I've labored to rectify many serious omissions in the students' educations. They actually knew zilch about schizoid embolisms, Ego Trips, and double memory implants -- but they seem at least as receptive to this stuff as they are to my attempts to implant insights about the three branches of the U.S. government.
I began feeling pity for the freshmen, whom I was still abusing with those New York Times readings. Was it fair to let them miss out on the fun? I put the question to them: Did they feel like a bit of a change? A little bit of Terminator action, perhaps? I explained the basic premise of Terminator: It's the year 2020, and war is raging -- between men and machines. The humans have a potent leader whom the machines would like to track down and kill, but they can't locate him. The machines conjure a plan of almost human-like brilliance: Send a terminator back in time to kill his mother before he's born. The terminator role, as I hope you all know, is what made Arnold Schwarzenegger a major superstar. He makes a delectable robot ... 'scuse me, cyborg. Since historical records are fragmentary, the terminator has only the mother's name -- Sarah Connor -- and city of residence, nothing more specific. But no problem. He scans the addresses of the city's five Sarah Connor's from a phone directory and begins killing each in succession. Before he gets to his target, word of a crazy killer randomly killing women with the same name is on the news. Sarah ends up in protective custody in a police station. This leads to the scene where Arnie immortalizes the words, "I'll be back":
INT. POLICE DEPARTMENT FOYER - NIGHT Fans like me derive thrills from several aspects of such scenes. First, the absurd gratuitousness of this logical machine telling the policeman "I'll be back" is just inexpressibly funny. Then there is Schwarzenegger's famously unique manner of speaking. They build this unbelievably sophisticated humanoid, then stick it with a thick Austrian accent. It's a scream -- but understandable, of course. There is no substitute for Schwarzenegger. The cup of coffee is a laugh too. Like Tiffany's "Bob, the client's gone!" in Total Recall, it's a hoot when people completely fail to seize the seriousness of a situation, and it accentuates the drama. And that implausible line, addressed to the indifferent cop: "I'm a friend of Sarah Connor. I was told she is here. Can I see her, please?" (Do you like the "please"?) The incongruousness of the words, spoken without human inflection by the grim, expressionless killing machine, provides an additional blast of delicious absurdity.
The freshmen were definitely up for this. Yes, they told me, we're ready for a change. I have two groups of freshmen. For the other group, I selected something perhaps even more fabulous:
Morpheus: Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain. But you feel it. You've felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?
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