A library in my shoulder bag

Whenever I go to China, I miss my personal library. I can find English books in China, but they aren't always my favorites. In the evenings, I like reading novels from Oprah's book club, or browsing the dictionary, or reading Bertrand Russell, or the English romantic poets. I stuff my suitcase with as many books as I can, and I always get inspected by Homeland Security because books, like bombs, are heavy. When I come home, I leave dictionaries and other books behind as gifts for my Chinese friends.

Usually, I take no more than ten books overseas, and even that often renders my suitcase overweight. But this time, I'm taking forty-five. I now have a Kindle, a lightweight electronic reader that holds up to three thousand books. There are several competing devices of this type on the market. The IPad is probably the glitziest, but at the moment anyway, the Kindle has the clearest print. In fact, the print is generally clearer than hard copy, and it can be enlarged to a comfortable size.

Do I miss the feel of the pages? Not really. This is much more convenient. I imagine that when humans invented scrolls, some people thought of rocks with nostalgia. But scrolls were easier to carry around, and so they won out. This innovation may be similar.

Above: The Kindle

Below: Modes of writing the paper book has replaced

YES WE CAN... learn languages

None of my grandparents spoke English natively, but all of them learned. They came from four different countries: Austria, Latvia, Romania, Poland. Yet all of them spoke at least two languages in addition to English-- Yiddish and one or two of these others: German, Lettish, Russian, Polish, Romanian. My grandparents were not particularly well educated-- except for my father's father, none of them finished high school. You don't have to be hypereducated to acquire a foreign language.

Despite my training in applied linguistics, I often despaired of learning to speak foreign languages. It's not that I didn't try. As a child, I took Hebrew in an after school pogram. I made good grades in high school and college French and could even read Camus and Moliere at one time. I can read New Testament Greek, to some extent. But I could never communicate in any language I tried to learn, until now.

Slowly, painfully, I am learning to speak 汉语 (Chinese). For a speaker of English, it is extremely difficult. The language is tonal; this means that the relative pitch of pronunciation alters meaning. Chinese has no alphabet, but has thousands of interrelated symbols like this one （pronounced "ni hao") which means "hello": 你好。Its grammatical and idiomatic structure are very different from ours. But with persistence, one learns.

Languages are learned best through exposure and practical use. When I enrolled in a Chinese class based on rote memorization, my brain rebelled. I have been more successful working with software and weekly lessons with a Chinese graduate student. Ever so slowly, I am learning Chinese.

Joe does better with Chinese writing system than I, though I can discriminate some character's It's a question of learning style. We leave for 北京 (Beijing) on May 28, a week from Friday.

Below, my favorite software packages: Rosetta Stone and Communicate in Chinese by 大山 (Da Shan).

Go Greyhound!

I have grown impatient with airline travel because of the increasing costs, the delays, the extra fees for baggage, the cancelled flights and endless searches. I'm not all that fond of long distance auto trips, either, so on a recent trip back home from New York, I opted for Greyhound.

This year, we celebrated Christmas at my daughter's home in Cincinnati. Joe was planning to drive home afterwards, and I arranged to visit my Great Aunt Hilda, who lives in the New York area, on my own. I purchased a Greyhound ticket.

My children, who have grown very protective of late, were not too on keen this choice. In what can best be described as an intervention, Ben, Mike, Emily, and Steve predicted my death by specially trained marauders who execute senior citizens foolish enough to travel by Greyhound. So concerned was my son Michael that he drove me as far as Philadelphia where he lives and personally placed me on a train to New York. Always glad of additional time with my Michael, I agreed to this.

For the return trip, I did take the Greyhound and have lived to tell the tale. The buses are clean, and the drivers keep things orderly. There is twice as much leg room as one has on an airplane; things ran on time; and the mountain scenery was gorgeous. I got to nap now and then. But the trip was eighteen hours long. By car, it might have taken 10 1/2 hours; a little longer with rest stops. With security checks, the plane might have taken almost as long, because there is no direct flight from New York to our regional airport.

Buses make rest stops every few hours. The rest rooms are clean, but terminals are poorly lit in places, and in the largest cities like Washington D.C., a bit scary. The problem isn't the passengers. Bus terminals, especially in winter, serve to shelter the homeless. Panhandling is not permited, but one must vigilantly guard belongings, as one would on the New York Subway.

I wanted to take pictures, but did not want to call attention to myself. All sorts of people ride on the Greyhound-- senior citizens like me, college students, military people, people down on their luck. One seldom sees business travelers-- most people seemed to be visiting friends and family or returning home. People pull out their laptops, but this is more of a rarity than on planes. While one must attend to security, it is actually far more comfortable than air travel, though longer. Obviously, I cannot ride the Greyhound to China next summer, but for domestic travel, I will use it again.

Property Rights

Cultures have differing notions of personal boundaries and property. Western ideas about plagiarism can be difficult for Chinese students to deal with. Memorization figures so prominently in their education system that they sometimes reproduce other people's work from memory, believing they're doing their own. Outright copying is not allowed in China, anymore than it is in ours, but in practice it is not sanctioned as severely. The notion of words and ideas as personal property is less well established there.

Learning cultural attitudes and practices is part of learning a language, so I spend a lot of time on plagiarism rules when I'm teaching in China. To a Western academic, the notion of ideas as property seems perfectly natural; but it's odd, when you think of it. Ideas are mobile. They morph, collide, and mutate, so it's hard to say where they came from or who they belong to.

I started to say that ideas move about like wind, but realized the statement has other connotations. Then again, if you attend the same type of meetings I do, comparing ideas with wind will not seem farfetched.

On Plagiarizing Well

Plagiarism is the academic equivalent of theft, and in institutions of higher learning, it is deal with severely. Service in the plagiarism police is nothing I relish. Had I wanted to be in law enforcement, I would have a degree in criminal justice. But, I do my best to ferret out academic dishonesty and am suitably merciless with those who attempt it. Colleges of Education cannot tolerate plagiarism among their candidates anymore than a police academy could wink at shoplifting among theirs.

This morning at the American Reading Forum, the keynote speaker pointed out that effective plagiarism suggests a certain academic competence. To plagiarize, a student must do some research and isolate significant information.

Minor problems in citation of sources are technically plagiarism. These, I just call to students' attention, and they correct them But I recently "busted" a student for handing in a paper purchased online. Until I reviewed the submission and tracked down its source, I had never seen the relevant websites. Obviously, the student knew how to reference sources of information.

As one who loves writing and doing research, I used to feel sorry for students who plagiarized. I reasoned such students just needed help. As time goes on, I become less tolerant. Dishonesty, after all, is a choice.

Age grading the blogosphere

In class the other day, I assured a group of students that I don't just grade their papers-- that I actually write. I mentioned that like most professors, I write grants and journal articles. Then I added, "I also blog." They roared with laughter, and I wanted to know what was so funny.

One of the less inhibited undergraduates explained that blogging is not something they associate with people as ancient as I. "How old should a blogger be?" I inquired.

Another young lady spoke up. "Blogging is for people older than us, but not as old as you. You know, like maybe in their thirties." She added quickly, "I'm sorry, Dr. Gann. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. You can blog if you want to." Glad she gave me permission.

Apparently, these undergraduates don't blog themselves; they prefer to use Facebook, a picture-intensive social networking site which I regard as superficial and inane, though I actually belong to it so I can view the pictures my daughter posts of my grandchild.

The students did not wish to hurt my feelings, but it was clear they had trouble imagining that antediluvian persons like me would have things to blog about, any more than they could imagine their parents engaging in sex. It's hard for people of different generations to understand each other. In a certain sense, young people inhabit a different culture. Teaching undergraduates at ETSU may not be that different from teaching in China.

A rather large village

Daniel Zhang is a Professor of English at the University of Shandong at Weihai. He did some graduate work at our university last spring and needed to document it after his return to China. He requested a transcript from ETSU, but after nearly two months, it had not come. I was not surprised when he told me this in an email. Ordinary mail goes to China by ship and can take several months. The winter I spent in Weihai, I requseted an absentee ballot for the fall 2006 Congressional elections, but it did not arrive until April 2007, months after I had returned to the US.

I learned from the registrar's office that Daniel's transcript had gone out a few days after his request. Obviously, the transcript was lost-- or moving very slowly. The registrar's office released another to me after Daniel faxed his permission, I sent it out via priority mail. FED EX is faster, but it would have cost over a hundred bucks.

Just now, Daniel notified me that he'd finally received the transcript. It took three weeks by US priority mail. Daniel writes:

When we email to each other, I feel as though we were in a village, but this transcript experience brought me back to the reality that we live on two continents.

This is the paradox of international friendships. The global village is rather large.

Above: Post offices on opposite sides of the world.

Below: Pictures taken on an auto trip last March with Daniel Zhang and his family.