Reading Log Audit

I ended up being somewhat overwhelmed by having to take four summer classes and constantly struggled to fit in readings in addition to other courses' demands. Not a valid excuse for any perceived shortcomings to my reading log, I know, but even as I write this audit I have multiple demands upon my time. For this class I think I have written 19 entries altogether. I think the average length is approximately 600 words, and that most of the entries are about this length. The shortest entry I have counted was just over 400 words. The log can be found at this web address: http://esolninthreadinglog.blogspot.com/

In many of my entries I respond to the rhetoric of integrating digital media and technology into English language arts, somewhat skeptically. I came into this class with almost no productive/creative experience of the read/write web and found Richardson’s enthusiasm somewhat off-putting. The reading reinforced our classroom activities and discussions to such an extent that by the end of the semester I was pushing back against my first pushback text (I have just started another, seeing as I bought all three) and largely because of the class assignments, I am now receptive to Richardson’s ideas and to the importance of visual literacy in general. It takes a bit of getting over the textbooks that are integrated into the Cobb County School District’s ELA curriculum (I served on the textbook adoption committee) and I recognize now how visual literacy and other new literacies can complement what I regarded as the traditional ELA curriculum.

To be honest, I don’t really like having to respond to readings in this manner. When I was an MAPW student I had one class that required a similar such learning/assessment process and I just completely took it over in the way I wanted to. I think that the quality of my writing then, shined compared to my logs for this course. I don’t write well to rubrics ever (when I read them) and this fact more than any other informs me about what practices in the ELA classroom might be detrimental to students developing their own writing skills. For example, I think my writing for the assignments is of a higher quality. I just think I don’t synthesize information well and it’s usually my writing ability that gets me through assignments like this.

In practical terms, I think that six weeks is insufficient time to come to grips with such a large volume of information. But seeing as that is only my subjective opinion, I am prepared to take whatever hit I’m going to take to my grade for this class, should my reading log fall short. As far as I’m concerned, I consider myself a convert. I really didn’t see the application of blogs and wikis to the classroom in the beginning, but now I see them as essential tools. I used to assert the primacy of text based literacy over all others to their exclusion, but, again, I have come to modify my opinion. To this extent, I feel that whatever my grade for this particular assignment, the lessons have been learned and I am looking forward to beginning to integrate my newfound knowledge with whichever curriculum I am required to teach in the fall. Some samples of my log follow (I am still not sure how or where to submit this assignment). I have chosen to present my three entries for the pushback text because they so clearly represent the progression of my thoughts as the semester advanced. They were all published about the same time but the first two existed for a while in different stages of completion on my hard drive:

Sample 1.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future

Mark Bauerlein

Part 1

Mark Bauerlein’s book, utilized as a “push back” text for this 7741 course, is the main reason I felt so ambivalent about Richardson’s text. It has taken me some time to balance both the texts and our class instruction in my mind. Bauerlein served with the National Endowment for the Arts at the time that organization issued its report, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, which was issued about one month before I began my MAPW program at Kennesaw State University.

Naturally, the report was big news for us in the program, all being writers and wondering how small the audience of readers would have shrunk by the time we got our first works published. Still waiting on that one. Also about the same time, and before the collapse of the economy in the waning W. years, I recall having learned that either Borders or Barnes and Noble (I can’t remember which) had  surveyed the reading demographics of Paulding County (next door to where I live) looking at things like percent of population with four year degrees and such, and decided, based on the results of obtained to NOT attempt to open a bookstore in the county, even though it was, at the time, recording some of the highest rates of population growth in the country. A sad, sad testament to the lack of intellectual curiosity and the loss of basic literacy.

My home country, New Zealand had, when I left it, more bookstores per capita than any other nation, much like Iceland which has one of the highest rates of writers per capita. When I left New Zealand (to borrow slightly a tongue-in-cheek comment by one of NZ’s former prime ministers) and came to the United States, I raised the average or median IQ here. Joking aside, I later worked in the KSU Writing Center and met students who quite openly and shamelessly volunteered that they had never read a single book from cover to cover. And yet they expected me to help them improve their writing which provided ample evidence to the loss of basic literacy skills that comes with not reading. It was in this context that I began reading Bauerlein’s book, as if I didn’t need any further encouragement to push back against the ideas of Richardson.

Perhaps there is a mean streak of arrogance in me that questions the point of the curriculum of the nation’s schools, commanded by the mandates of NLCB, that every child should be reading at grade level by 2012-2013. No other nation that I know of tries to do so with the same insistence. Other countries may have higher literacy rates, but they also do not engage in selling the dream of a college education to every child, either. I don’t think enough attention has been given to the concept of functional literacy, which is the level of literacy required to perform the tasks necessary at a level of satisfaction to each individual. By necessity, a journalist should be more literate than a plumber, not to say that plumbers needn’t be connoisseurs of literary fiction, for example, but it’s not necessary for them to be so in order to replace a main water line.

But America has got itself in a tizzy over reading and literacy and now we find out why: the rot is deep and deepening, because of the shift from reading in a linear fashion to “screen time.” The cultural value of reading has dropped and those on the receiving end of this shift, college professors forced to teach remedial classes to freshmen and employers forced to hire workers lacking basic, lower-order thinking skills (like being able to read manuals from cover to cover), may complain about it, but to no avail. Schools are somehow supposed to be able to reverse the tide, and English language arts teachers are supposed to be able to teach non-readers how to write. Bauerlein paints a glum picture. And he found a nodding audience in me. Richardson didn’t have a chance once I was in the grip of The Dumbest Generation.

Sample 2.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future

Mark Bauerlein

Part 2

A good portion of the 7741 course has had us viewing images, statues, videos, logos and other numerous visual “texts.” My take on the process and the purpose of these exercises is that we were being taught to make overt or to articulate normally unspoken assumptions about visual media, because these are the “texts” that our students are most interested in. I really became of two minds about this during the course of time and due to my concurrent reading of Bauerlein’s book. One of my sticking points was this question: If our students are already struggling with basic literacy skills, why jump to interpretations that require more advanced literacy skills?

Bauerlein paraphrases the kind of justifications put out by the techno-literati in this manner:

No longer should we worry whether kids read enough books or not. Instead, we should recognize a new order of reading and text in the world, a newfangled cognition and knowledge. They don’t read books? Well, they read other things. They don’t know any history? Well, maybe not history recorded in books, but they know other kinds.

Bauerlein goes on to debunk this notion, with aplomb, asserting that corporate America has to “spend approximately $3.1 billion annually on in-house literacy tutoring.” I could go on and quote Bauerlein a lot more but his book has already been written. The so-called “new literacies” are on the rise, we are led to believe, but the examination of “e-literacy” reveals instead that both a-literacy (the habit of being able to read and choosing to not do so) and illiteracy are what is really ascendant. It’s a struggle I now find myself part of, daily, as I order my two younger children to turn off the TV, put away their iPods, and pick up a book, finish that chapter. The attractions of “screen time” are irresistible and alluring. I no longer wear a watch, myself, utilizing instead my own iPod touch, which brings wit it more music than I was ever able to choose from when I drive, a movie or two, some games to while away a moment of boredom, my email (when I’m in a WiFi zone), a camera and photo album in one, a calculator, a voice recorder (yes, I use it when I do interviews), and my favorite newspapers.

The interesting things about my iPod use is that it is constant and that it supplements but does not supplant my traditional literacies. My mind has already been trained to access information in a particular way, so I am constantly referring to Wikipedia, calling up written texts, and reading electronic letters, more than any other use. Not so my children. If anything, I feel that they need to reduce their dependence on visual mediums. I have a YouTube account, but once the initial novelty wore off, I barely visit the site now. My kids are constantly streaming movies and other content from Netflix, so much so that we are considering upgrading our internet bandwidth so that the adults can get their work done online.

It is a war: a cultural war, and as teachers we are both in the thick of it, and biased observers aghast at the casualty rate. It is no wonder that I became so ambivalent about the 7741 course. However, what changed me, a little, has been my direct experience with digital media processes and products through our assignments. At the same time, I am aware that I bring to visual literacy and digital media, skills that were honed the hard way and according to Bauerlein, the only way. I served my time in the trenches and can now command a view of the battlefield that I don’t believe my students will ever have if the new literacies are the only ones they acquire. And I know already that getting my students to read the way I do is a challenge that no one in their right mind would tackle. Then again, I prefer long odds.

Sample 3.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future

Mark Bauerlein

Part 3

A simplistic reading of the later chapters of Bauerlein’s book would instruct me to reject the allure of digital media and technology. It is interesting that as I approached the end of this book I started to come around to the point of view that my role as a classroom teacher is one of considerable power. I can take these young unformed minds and guide them to a happy point where they can appreciate, no, more than that, inherit their language, and use it to connect with the read/write web in productive, informed ways. Bauerlein challenges the mentors of the young and that is what I am about to become: so I intend to take up the gauntlet and run with it. If my classroom is going to be the only place where some of my students will ever hold a book, let alone read it, then we are going to hold books, the original artifacts of intellect.

My students are going to hold the books, read them, respond to them, build their vocabularies, develop their abilities to articulate ideas meaningfully in different contexts, and then they are going to take on the web as the new literati, as readers and translators and interpreters, even information managers. Well, some of them at least. Then they are going to become skilled at harnessing the power of the read/write web to their own ends for the good of all. Sigh. The dream bubble just burst. I remembered that those students, who I inherit, who couldn’t read at grade level in third grade, are unlikely to ever read at grade level despite my best efforts so I have to adjust my grandiose vision to meet reality. Okay…some of my students are going to rise up and become the new literati….

It’s a heck of a challenge to be an English language arts teacher in an age in which language is so threatened. The idea that some of my students may never ever be able to understand what I have been writing about in my blog is depressing. But the knowledge that some will, and may well go on to do better than I at articulating the angst of their generation, is uplifting. SO I am still of two minds about digital media and literacy. Obviously my students are going to need a guide, and I realize that I have to come down off my lofty perch and spend some more time in the trenches, learning the ropes again, or rather, learning some different kinds of ropes. Bauerlein serves a warning to educators who decide that the fight is not important. Richardson points toward the frontline and tells us to get going already. It’s kind of exciting. I would love to be one of those secret superweapons who is going to turn the tide of battle. And perhaps doing so for some of my a-literate students will be enough.  And for some of my others who may struggle the most in my class—perhaps I will sow the seeds of their future success. I hope so. 

Roblyer, M. D. Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching. 4th ed. Columbus, Ohio: Pearson, 2006.

 After reading the texts prescribed for the ENGL 7741 class, I cast around for something that might be immediately relevant to an MAT candidate like myself who will actually be teaching an ESOL 9^th grade lit. class in August. Naturally, overwhelmed by the surfeit of information about integrating technology into the classroom, I thought this book would be a refreshing change. I actually picked it up because it has one chapter dedicated to “English and Language Arts Instruction” and one to “Technology in English Language Learning and Foreign Language Instruction.” I was hoping to find some useful information for integrating the two disciplines.

Having been of two minds about some of the things we’ve learned this semester, due in large part to my sympathetic reading of the “push back” text, I was extremely interested to read the following, which I quote in full because it has so much bearing on this course’s syllabus:

According to the IRA [International Reading Association], students have the right to:

·      Teachers who are skilled in the effective use of technology for teaching and learning,

·      A literacy curriculum that integrates the new literacies of technology into instructional programs,

·      Instruction that develops the critical literacies essential to effective information use,

·      Assessment practices in literacy that include reading and writing with technology tools,

·      Opportunities to learn safe and responsible use of information and communication technologies, and

·      Equal access to technology.

This text turned out to be more general and broader in scope than I expected and its content does not lend it easily to cover to cover reading. But it is filled with ideas that reinforce the syllabus and information to help teachers access technology for classroom use, although the content is somewhat dated, like the Richardson text. But I was extremely impressed by the ideas quoted above. They reinforce the philosophy that I have reached at the end of this course and which I express in my course reflection as follows:

In class, we have examined different modes of expression that now permeate society and which students themselves also need to access and respond to. Videos on YouTube, and web sites calling for attention like sirens, amongst others, now feature prominently in the mindscapes of teenagers, and as a teacher I recognize that I have to join my students in navigating visual and digital texts and negotiating meaning across contexts in a manner that would not only have been impossible just fifteen years ago, but also meaningless. However, my readings during this semester have presented me with a significant caveat to such engagement: the traditional foci of content in English language arts (ELA) needs to complement such non-print texts, otherwise students will be unable to meaningfully articulate their own interpretations, either in person or across time (i.e. in writing). As instruction in the “grammars” of English brings students to both print and non-print texts, these texts in turn should inform students’ own understanding of how the study of English language arts can both empower them and engage them in meaningful discourse with multiple audiences across multiple platforms and networks.

I will probably continue to refer to this text as the year progresses, and as questions arise. I recognize the importance of the ideas that Richardson espouses in his book and feel better having come to terms with my initial biases towards traditional texts and print media.

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future

Mark Bauerlein

Part 3

A simplistic reading of the later chapters of Bauerlein’s book would instruct me to reject the allure of digital media and technology. It is interesting that as I approached the end of this book I started to come around to the point of view that my role as a classroom teacher is one of considerable power. I can take these young unformed minds and guide them to a happy point where they can appreciate, no, more than that, inherit their language, and use it to connect with the read/write web in productive, informed ways. Bauerlein challenges the mentors of the young and that is what I am about to become: so I intend to take up the gauntlet and run with it. If my classroom is going to be the only place where some of my students will ever hold a book, let alone read it, then we are going to hold books, the original artifacts of intellect.

My students are going to hold the books, read them, respond to them, build their vocabularies, develop their abilities to articulate ideas meaningfully in different contexts, and then they are going to take on the web as the new literati, as readers and translators and interpreters, even information managers. Well, some of them at least. Then they are going to become skilled at harnessing the power of the read/write web to their own ends for the good of all. Sigh. The dream bubble just burst. I remembered that those students, who I inherit, who couldn’t read at grade level in third grade, are unlikely to ever read at grade level despite my best efforts so I have to adjust my grandiose vision to meet reality. Okay…some of my students are going to rise up and become the new literati….

It’s a heck of a challenge to be an English language arts teacher in an age in which language is so threatened. The idea that some of my students may never ever be able to understand what I have been writing about in my blog is depressing. But the knowledge that some will, and may well go on to do better than I at articulating the angst of their generation, is uplifting. SO I am still of two minds about digital media and literacy. Obviously my students are going to need a guide, and I realize that I have to come down off my lofty perch and spend some more time in the trenches, learning the ropes again, or rather, learning some different kinds of ropes. Bauerlein serves a warning to educators who decide that the fight is not important. Richardson points toward the frontline and tells us to get going already. It’s kind of exciting. I would love to be one of those secret superweapons who is going to turn the tide of battle. And perhaps doing so for some of my a-literate students will be enough.  And for some of my others who may struggle the most in my class—perhaps I will sow the seeds of their future success. I hope so. 

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future

Mark Bauerlein

Part 2

A good portion of the 7741 course has had us viewing images, statues, videos, logos and other numerous visual “texts.” My take on the process and the purpose of these exercises is that we were being taught to make overt or to articulate normally unspoken assumptions about visual media, because these are the “texts” that our students are most interested in. I really became of two minds about this during the course of time and due to my concurrent reading of Bauerlein’s book. One of my sticking points was this question: If our students are already struggling with basic literacy skills, why jump to interpretations that require more advanced literacy skills?

Bauerlein paraphrases the kind of justifications put out by the techno-literati in this manner:

No longer should we worry whether kids read enough books or not. Instead, we should recognize a new order of reading and text in the world, a newfangled cognition and knowledge. They don’t read books? Well, they read other things. They don’t know any history? Well, maybe not history recorded in books, but they know other kinds.

Bauerlein goes on to debunk this notion, with aplomb, asserting that corporate America has to “spend approximately $3.1 billion annually on in-house literacy tutoring.” I could go on and quote Bauerlein a lot more but his book has already been written. The so-called “new literacies” are on the rise, we are led to believe, but the examination of “e-literacy” reveals instead that both a-literacy (the habit of being able to read and choosing to not do so) and illiteracy are what is really ascendant. It’s a struggle I now find myself part of, daily, as I order my two younger children to turn off the TV, put away their iPods, and pick up a book, finish that chapter. The attractions of “screen time” are irresistible and alluring. I no longer wear a watch, myself, utilizing instead my own iPod touch, which brings wit it more music than I was ever able to choose from when I drive, a movie or two, some games to while away a moment of boredom, my email (when I’m in a WiFi zone), a camera and photo album in one, a calculator, a voice recorder (yes, I use it when I do interviews), and my favorite newspapers.

The interesting things about my iPod use is that it is constant and that it supplements but does not supplant my traditional literacies. My mind has already been trained to access information in a particular way, so I am constantly referring to Wikipedia, calling up written texts, and reading electronic letters, more than any other use. Not so my children. If anything, I feel that they need to reduce their dependence on visual mediums. I have a YouTube account, but once the initial novelty wore off, I barely visit the site now. My kids are constantly streaming movies and other content from Netflix, so much so that we are considering upgrading our internet bandwidth so that the adults can get their work done online.

It is a war: a cultural war, and as teachers we are both in the thick of it, and biased observers aghast at the casualty rate. It is no wonder that I became so ambivalent about the 7741 course. However, what changed me, a little, has been my direct experience with digital media processes and products through our assignments. At the same time, I am aware that I bring to visual literacy and digital media, skills that were honed the hard way and according to Bauerlein, the only way. I served my time in the trenches and can now command a view of the battlefield that I don’t believe my students will ever have if the new literacies are the only ones they acquire. And I know already that getting my students to read the way I do is a challenge that no one in their right mind would tackle. Then again, I prefer long odds.

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future

Mark Bauerlein

Part 1

Mark Bauerlein’s book, utilized as a “push back” text for this 7741 course, is the main reason I felt so ambivalent about Richardson’s text. It has taken me some time to balance both the texts and our class instruction in my mind. Bauerlein served with the National Endowment for the Arts at the time that organization issued its report, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, which was issued about one month before I began my MAPW program at Kennesaw State University.

Naturally, the report was big news for us in the program, all being writers and wondering how small the audience of readers would have shrunk by the time we got our first works published. Still waiting on that one. Also about the same time, and before the collapse of the economy in the waning W. years, I recall having learned that either Borders or Barnes and Noble (I can’t remember which) had  surveyed the reading demographics of Paulding County (next door to where I live) looking at things like percent of population with four year degrees and such, and decided, based on the results of obtained to NOT attempt to open a bookstore in the county, even though it was, at the time, recording some of the highest rates of population growth in the country. A sad, sad testament to the lack of intellectual curiosity and the loss of basic literacy.

My home country, New Zealand had, when I left it, more bookstores per capita than any other nation, much like Iceland which has one of the highest rates of writers per capita. When I left New Zealand (to borrow slightly a tongue-in-cheek comment by one of NZ’s former prime ministers) and came to the United States, I raised the average or median IQ here. Joking aside, I later worked in the KSU Writing Center and met students who quite openly and shamelessly volunteered that they had never read a single book from cover to cover. And yet they expected me to help them improve their writing which provided ample evidence to the loss of basic literacy skills that comes with not reading. It was in this context that I began reading Bauerlein’s book, as if I didn’t need any further encouragement to push back against the ideas of Richardson.

Perhaps there is a mean streak of arrogance in me that questions the point of the curriculum of the nation’s schools, commanded by the mandates of NLCB, that every child should be reading at grade level by 2012-2013. No other nation that I know of tries to do so with the same insistence. Other countries may have higher literacy rates, but they also do not engage in selling the dream of a college education to every child, either. I don’t think enough attention has been given to the concept of functional literacy, which is the level of literacy required to perform the tasks necessary at a level of satisfaction to each individual. By necessity, a journalist should be more literate than a plumber, not to say that plumbers needn’t be connoisseurs of literary fiction, for example, but it’s not necessary for them to be so in order to replace a main water line.

But America has got itself in a tizzy over reading and literacy and now we find out why: the rot is deep and deepening, because of the shift from reading in a linear fashion to “screen time.” The cultural value of reading has dropped and those on the receiving end of this shift, college professors forced to teach remedial classes to freshmen and employers forced to hire workers lacking basic, lower-order thinking skills (like being able to read manuals from cover to cover), may complain about it, but to no avail. Schools are somehow supposed to be able to reverse the tide, and English language arts teachers are supposed to be able to teach non-readers how to write. Bauerlein paints a glum picture. And he found a nodding audience in me. Richardson didn’t have a chance once I was in the grip of The Dumbest Generation.

It Takes a Village to Find a Phone

Clay Shirky

My natural instinct to respond first to this article about the repercussions of Evan Guttman’s ability to wield social media in a successful bid to retrieve a misappropriated cellphone, is to consider strategies to help prevent my students from inadvertently becoming future Sasha’s, the teenage girl upon whom the weight of the internet fell. My second instinct is to go online and scrub the read/write web of anything with my name on it, simply because the very idea that a potential audience of anonymous millions exists to scrutinize my writings or my image or my life is appalling.

I understand that the read/write web has bought change to how we communicate. To some extent it allows communication to greatly exceed the worth of the information being communicated. If Sasha can be tracked  down or even tracked because of the tools that are now in the hands of all, then I, too, or my children could be similarly tracked down. It’s a horrid thought. Not that there is any reason why I or my children should be tracked down.

If there is any lesson to be taken from this story about the lost phone into the classroom, it is this: “You students are connected to the rest of the world whether you like it or not, whether you are aware of it or not, whether you want it or not. Be careful. Don’t threaten anyone or be abusive. And use spell-check, at the very least because you will be judged on how well you write pretty much anything. Remember that all of your texts and emails and blog posts are potentially forever, and that anything you say can/could/will be used against you in the event that something goes wrong.  Be prepared to have conversations with strangers despite what your parents told you, don’t divulge any information that could identify you, although it’s probably too late for that; use the highest privacy settings and even then be careful about who you share your personal details with. Play nice, have fun, and don’t forget to read a book once in a while.”

And that, really is all I have to say about that. If anyone wishes to comment on this posting, please note the time it was posted. You may like to read it to the sound of an automatic dishwasher in order to receive the same sensory/rhetorical effect, and it would help if you were in the last week of a master’s program in order to understand why I just can’t write anymore. Too much to do and not enough time. Please be nice. Thank you.

PS. It took less than five seconds to find the author of the book this chapter was taken from, using any seven word quote taken at random. Scary.

Mediated Memory: The Language of Memorial Spaces

L. J. Nicoletti

I don’t agree with Nicoletti’s assertion that “our cities, as well as our campuses, are memorial landscapes begging analysis.” I think he overstates the rhetorical value of memorials, because the experiential knowledge and received knowledge of all individuals inform how memorials are understood. Because of this multitude of potential and shifting interpretations of history, acknowledged by some of the designers of memorials themselves, the rhetoric of memorials can only ever please discrete audiences and provide partial truths.

Memorials, however, are not all created equal. Near where I live is a road named Richard D. Sailors Parkway. It is named for a former mayor of the city of Powder Springs. This named road “memorializes” the office of an individual who was living at the time of its naming, but will at some point also memorialize the individual himself. There might doubtlessly be some who would question the correctness of such a gift to memory but unless the road is one day renamed its name serves no more than an appeal to vanity, suggesting that the political office of this individual was worthier of memorializing than others in the community. It begs the question of how many roads need to be named after individuals, or bridges, or other common everyday constructs before the whole enterprise becomes ridiculous. The point I am making is that sometimes memorials, perhaps the majority of them, serve no rhetorical function at all other than, in the case of the Dr. Bobbie Bailey and Family Performance Center at Kennesaw State University, no disrespect intended, to state that this was an individual of means who one day decided to make a large financial contribution to a capital campaign. There is nothing else to interpret here.

Granted, many memorials are created to serve particular rhetorical functions. I acknowledge that such memorials can be a source of rhetorical analysis, visual, spatial and textual, but I question the purpose of such analysis in the context of the English language arts classroom. I think there is enough already to talk about without going looking for more elsewhere. Perhaps memorials just don’t interest me as much as place. A few years ago I visited Battle Abbey near Hastings in England. The abbey was built by William the Conqueror “out of gratitude for his victory.” The Battle of Hastings, perhaps the most famous date in English history took place in the fields that now lie below the abbey and one can walk around the site and note where significant events were said to have occurred. It’s an interesting place to visit, to see where the genesis of the English language as it now is, took place. But the abbey as a memorial has lost its significance. There are no longer any English nobles mourning their loss of power or French nobles relishing their newfound power. No relatives of the deceased visit with flowers on the anniversary of the battle. English nationalists do not parade and demand the return of true English autonomy. The rhetorical significance of the memorial no longer exists, even though the site is one of the most famous places in English history. And I think that in the space between the pointless memorial of Richard D. Sailors Parkway and the now irrelevant significance of Battle Abbey, lies a rhetorical white elephant, that could yield interpretations in the classroom, but at what cost? I just think there are more worthwhile things to study. History has a way of rendering the past obsolete. I think events post 9/11 have far more significance worthy of study than whatever construct will eventually stand in place of the Twin Towers, again, no disrespect intended.