Letter to the editor

Now let me tell you, I have heard about teenagers text speaking a lot, but never have I heard of a child doing it on their schoolwork. I usually keep my opinion to myself and instead of writing letters to editors I go on and on to my family for endless hours but your article ("Twtr?It's a majorly bad! Leading headteacher condemns 'text speak' for eroding schoolchildren's language skills) has left me but no choice to do so.

The title it is itself misleading, as most of it, opposite to what one can assume, this article does not talk about school children but rather teenagers. There is a big need to "protect standard english" and the suggestion to "make all students carry on with one subject at six form, why not English?". I don't think that putting the blame on social networking will explain with poor spelling. For the entire history of mankind, individuals are known to make mistakes in their writing, and the fact that educating children has been failed the easy blame is social networking.  If a child spends too much time on twitter or any social network in general , why don't you teach them how to use electronics with moderation? There is a statistic that 10% of text messages are done with abbreviation, and usually when a letter is missing it is most probable that the person knew it was there. The fact that young people have multiple ways of speaking makes them almost bilingual. Do all of you recall the myth about multilingualism increasing the risk of making the child confused ? Well now studies have shown that children that are multilingual do have advantages compared to unilingual children. The world we live in is in constant change, and pessimism is not the best way to dealing with change. If you think your kids are not exposed to enough reading, tell me that back in the day after television was invented and worked 24 hours the previous generation did not spend days without end with their eyes fixed on the screens. Is that generation considered to be idiotic? The attempt to make a link between social network and children's academic is absurd, as for one children do not use social networks it is teenagers and two overusing social media can be controlled if you teach them how to control it and three they know that it is not usable in normal writing.

Yasmine Abida,  Abu Dhabi

Rolling Stone interview with Kurt Cobain

(Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of band Nirvana, has done an interview for the Rolling Stone in the past, the work that is about to be read is fictional  and for educational purposes but is based on what Kurt could have answered to the answers, a few of his interviews and extensive research about grunge music and Kurt's legacy)

Rolling stone: A lot of people say that Nirvana is one of the first grunge bands to be popularised. How do you define grunge music?

Kurt: Well the grunge era started in the 80's and the generation that listens and makes this kind of music is influenced by Heavy metal, Punk and Hardcore. It emerged out of the club scene in the Pacific Northwest and it was also affected by economic regression in the early 90’s in Seattle .That gives a final sound with distorted guitar tones that may sound unusual, heavy drums, sometimes screaming vocals an anti-authority attitude and a hell of a show. The music tends to have dynamic shifts that also shows the frustration of youth. Grunge is loud or sloppy

Rolling stone: What about lyrics, is there a specific way you write your lyrics?

Kurt: Honestly, when it comes to lyrics I don’t give a s***. But the problem is that people tend to want to look in more into the deep meaning of it. So like before I would just put pieces of poetry, basically garbage from my mind, whatever that comes out of my mind. Most of the time I am writing lyrics at the last minute because honestly I can’t be bothered and I’m just lazy. So then I always find myself having to find explanation to my songs. Grunge lyrics is mostly about how you feel or story telling, it’s not to be political but rather poetic to be able to escape the reality in which you are.

Rolling stone: What about the “grunge” way to dress up?

Kurt: The art of dressing up grunge is the art of not giving a damn. I don’t care about fashion or social norms. I buy most of clothes made from inexpensive materials like denim ,flannel and whatever else I have under my hand mix and layer. But grunge isn’t ripped jeans or a plaid shirt it is a state of mind, so you want to get dressed grunge? Don’t buy the things society deems as right. I wear a lot of layers because I want to mask my skinniness but I also sometimes wear women blouses to challenge gender roles. Fashion can’t capitalise on grunge, there are no rules to mixing and matching, get dressed and come as you are.

Rolling stone: What is your objective as a band?

Kurt: We just wanna make the best music we can. That is more important than anything else. We just wanna write good songs.

Rolling stone: How do you think grunge may have impacted the community?

Kurt: I don’t know man, I mean I can’t really assign a specific community that listens to grunge. Grunge has many inspirations, from rock music to blues, and by that it has a large group of people that listen and appreciate the music. I feel like the generation, and the ones to come did learn a lot about how to heal and express themselves and through my music I was able to do so and I hope anyone making grunge music or listening to it can either express themselves or enjoy it and relate to it. As music makers it makes us fight back against this messed up music system and have this “screw society attitude” people can look up to. You don’t need to conform, you don’t need to succeed to society’s expectations. Be yourself who cares? Grunge music is about being who you want to be and pushing the limitations that society puts on you. 

Rolling stone: You talk a lot about sensitive topics and distressing situations, have you ever actually wanted to kill yourself?

Kurt: For the years I had stomach problems yes I did want to kill myself almost everyday. That wasn't a way to live life but I love to play music so I decided to dedicate myself. I talk about these sensitive topics and sometimes songs can hit a nerve. A lot of kids out there for god knows what reasons do feel suicidal. I feel like our band is satirical and serious at the same time. Slowly talking about these subjects that are sensitive and making it acceptable to talk about these things that nobody talks about because well apparently they aren’t acceptable starts making them more normalised. I used to do drugs and that was pretty bad but now I’m clean and all those bad experiences I put into lyrics that may or not make sense. Yes I talk about feeling depressed, being gay, rape, suicide, feminism and a bunch of other stuff. But this is what I enjoy, making music, I don’t care if I have 10 fans or a million I just want to get music out there, challenge society norms and get my music out there. I used to be a school janitor, now I'm living the dream and it's all I could ever ask for.

My opinion on culture

Does culture define who we are?

The word culture has many meanings and definitions, depending on what the person’s own view of culture is. I think that culture designates the artificial productions in which humans distance themselves from nature, or many their own nature. In different areas of the world you will find different culture and although it shapes our identity it does not define who we are as individuals.

Culture defines people as it does shapes them. It is the base of their master identity, as that is their ethnicity and a few of their morals and beliefs that may come from their culture. Human are who they are today by the result of the process of evolution in their region and that is culture. Humans have the capacity to transfer, accumulate knowledge, techniques and values. 

Culture is first a social need, as human beings are social animals with the need to belong ( I am pretty sure I have said this in a previous blog post but psychology is so relevant to the subject of culture). If mankind transforms the nature around him, by technique notably, it is first because mankind is incapable and unable to survive in nature without it’s tools. Mankind is not originally able to assure it’s own survival individually without using tools from the culture. The whole essence of humanity is to set aside from nature and extract from nature what it needs to make it’s own nature. 

What we can notice in the different texts we have studied is how culture indeed has an important role in our lives, but that does not define fully who we are. In the essay Mother Tongue by Amy Tan, she talks about how her mother has these issues with communicating in English because it is her second language and she is not fully fluent in it, yet Amy Tan speaks it a lot better because she was raised in an English speaking country. Now surely she was raised on the culture that her mother was raised on, but that definitely does not fully define who she is because she found a balance between what she was raised on and what she is surrounded by on a daily basis by an environment that does not belong to the same culture as she does. 

Now you cannot disagree that language indeed is a big part of culture. It is the way we communicate our ideas, thoughts and feelings to people that speak the same language as we do and that are most probably in the same culture or a similar one (this does mean you cannot speak to people from different culture, but the idea that people speak the same language instantly gives them a thing in common) . Once we acquire a language, we also start to learn about the country/countries that speak that language, their customs, mindset beliefs etc… This does not mean that once I start learning Russian, I will become a full Russian once acquiring the language, but when you are constantly being exposed to it and you consider yourself bilingual or trilingual you realise that your interactional identity is different from the one in your culture or at least the one you identify to the most. It is possible to have many cultures and if something defines you it cannot be in a plurality which is another reason that I think that culture does not define who you are.