Turkin’ Back and Forth

July 14, 2016June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

I previously asserted that History is, by definition, a written record of the past. By that definition, the history of Oklahoma began in 1540 and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado was its first historian.

He set out to find untold riches by following rumors of lavish cities inhabited by wondrous people. His exact route is debatable, but he seems to have started north from what is now Mexico and traveled into New Mexico and/or Arizona in search of these “Seven Cities of Cibola.”

He got into a few scraps with the locals, but his journey was otherwise unexciting until he encountered a young man the Spanish quickly nicknamed “The Turk.”

The Turk, most likely a Wichita or Pawnee, assured Coronado that the real treasures were to be found in “Quivira,” far to the east. He offered to lead them there, and each time they encountered other tribes the Turk would communicate with them briefly before they, too, would eagerly insist that “Quivira” was totally the place to be and begin using signs and making other vigorous efforts at communication to indicate that the riches there were impressive indeed – in a no-sense-waiting-‘round-here-you-prolly-wanna-get-going kinda way.

What follows is a fairly accurate transcription of my total guesswork as to what these conversations must have been like – never before published on a major education blog.

Turk (to NewTribeGuys): Hey, I guess you probably noticed the, um, conquistadors and hundreds of soldiers and thousands of ‘allies’ just behind me here…
NewTribeGuys (to Turk): Why are you pointing? Are you trying to trick us into looking behind us? That’s completely lame.
Turk (to NewTribeGuys): I realize you don’t know me, but you’re gonna want to trust me on this. These guys are looking for Quivira, a city of gold and other untold riches and topless virgins and whatnot. Now, turn and point the same direction I am so it looks convincing. Maybe nod a bit and tell me with enthusiasm that we’re on the right track.
NewTribeGuys (to Turk): The hell are you talking about? There’s no ‘city of gold’ or whatever in that direction, or any other for that matter. Why did you bring these people here?!
Turk (to Cornado): He says we’re on the right track and honors the great Coronado on his amazing journey!
Turk (to NewTribeGuys): Look, you see how many tense foreign-looking fellows are behind me? Think about them eating your food. Taking your goods. Forcing themselves on your women. It’s not pretty, brother – I’ve seen it. Several times, actually. Now either get all excited about how close we are to Quivira or go ahead and bring out your daughters and stew because they’re starting to get restless.
NewTribeGuys (look at Coronado and his men, back at Turk, at Coronado and his men, back at Turk, and murmur briefly to one another)
NewTribeGuys (loudly, to Turk, Coronado, the rest of their tribe, and most of the neighbors): Ooohh, yes – Quivira! The one (gesturing dramatically) way over that way! Yes, yes – you’re very close! We thought you’d said you were looking for, um… Chi Berra, the famous atlatl maker. He, of course, is the other direction entirely. But not Quivira – nope, that crazy city and its golden virgins or whatever are ACTUALLY RATHER NEAR! (more gesturing)
Turk (to Coronado): They say it’s this way.

This worked for a ridiculously long time, despite being a rather obvious ploy. Unfortunately, it relied heavily on the cooperation of strangers. Eventually, one of the tribes they encountered – the Teyas, an intriguing name later given to a future state whose name escapes me at the moment – started letting Coronado know that they had no idea what this Turk lad was talking about, and that he wasn’t even translating properly.

Despite his suspicions, Coronado let “The Turk” lead him all the way to what is now Wichita, Kansas, where they found Quivira. That part, at least was true.

It was not a city of gold, however, so much as a village of farmers living in grass huts. They were alarmingly tall for Indians, and very close to naked most of the time. Untold riches, though? Not so much.

Coronado spent several weeks hoping perhaps they were, somehow, close to some cities of gold if only he’d poke around a bit more, but finally reconciled himself to the truth – he’d been had.

Coronado ordered that the Turk be garroted – the thing you see in action movies when they strangle someone with wire. To be fair, he had fibbed rather extensively and wasted months of their time, not to mention substantial resources. His sacrifice had not been in vain, at least – he’d led Coronado and crew far, far from his own people and their homes.

Coronado took a different route back to Tiguex in what is now New Mexico, where he wrote a letter to the King of Spain, dated October 20, 1541. It’s arguably the first written record of Oklahoma, and rich in both tone and detail. As primary sources go, it’s golden.

Unlike, say… Quivira.

Coronado went home frustrated and weakened after several armed conflicts and a serious fall from his horse along the way. He lost his fortune and much of his honor and died in 1554 – which I get is a total downer.

But while he’d hardly draw much comfort from it, he was the first Oklahoma Historian and a generally fine observer and record-keeper of much of the geography, the people, the wildlife, and the tribulations of the American Southwest in the 16th century.

There’s no record whether he ever got back that nifty copper necklace.

Coronado (Why Don’t You Come To Your Senses?)

July 13, 2016June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

History, by definition, is written down. This is not an knock against archeology, anthropology, oral histories, or any other efforts to unravel the past – it’s just a definition.

Consequently, prior to European exploration, everything we know about what is now Oklahoma is technically “pre-history.” This is important because I’m about to insist that the History of Oklahoma began in 1540 with the arrival of a conquistador by the name of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, and I don’t want to sound, you know – Eurocentric or dismissive of pre-literate peoples or anything. I like to think of myself as quite culturally sensitive and stuff.

There are other places we could begin, of course. Unlike with people, the “birth” of Oklahoma is not an objectively established event. We could place its beginnings way back with the earliest fossil records, although that leaves us with a rather broad range of possible dates – as in, “the earliest Oklahomans settled the land sometime between 50,000 and 100,000,000 years ago…”

So, that’s unfulfilling.

Indian Removal (1830s) is arguably the beginning of Oklahoma as we now know it, despite the massive changes which followed only a generation later. That’s not where we begin in class, but it’s where we slow down enough to start paying attention.

The first Land Run (1889) is certainly one of the more colorful events in our collective past, and far less depressing than most – at least if you don’t look too closely. This is when the first ‘Oklahoma’ lands were legally opened to white settlement, so claiming it as our “day of birth” has a certain logic to it. Then again, that would mean coming to peace with the suggestion it’s not really history until white people show up.

Which I can’t.

Statehood (1907) would be an obvious choice, I suppose – but again with the white guys. Economically one might argue that for all intents and purposes Oklahoma truly began with the oil boom, another “date range” event – although surely we could agree the Glenn Pool (1905) was the catalyst for all the rest. But the 20th century? Really? That would make us babies, historically speaking.

So I choose to be literal and insist that the History of Oklahoma began in 1540 with the arrival of a conquistador by the name of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado. He led an expedition which wandered through part of what is now far-western Oklahoma. Significantly, for our purposes, he and some of those with him left written records of their thoughts and experiences as they traveled – the first recorded “history” of the area.

The Spanish may have been the first to write about this little section of the universe, but they were hardly the first to encounter it. Various Amerindians had lived in or traveled across the Great Plains for centuries – maybe millennia. There were hundreds of different tribal identifications, and a far greater variety of cultures than we usually acknowledge. It’s really quite fascinating, if you’re into that sort of thing.

And they all came from somewhere else.

Based on the evidence we have now, mankind – such as it is – started far away from here. If the Lord created Adam and Eve and placed them in a tangible Garden of Eden, He did so WAY across the world – probably in Iran or thereabouts. If man evolved from single-celled protozoa, into a fish, then a goat, then a monkey, etcetera, he did so WAY across the world – most likely the Middle East and/or Northern Africa.

There was spawning and diffusion, like there always is, and at some point a bunch of them walked across the Bering Strait (the ancient land bridge between Russia and Alaska) and spread across the Western Hemisphere. It would have taken a while. There may have been multiple cultures arriving over time, or they may have diversified over the centuries once here. In any case, the Amerindian tribes covering this half of the world before the Europeans showed up were quite a diverse bunch.

Again – good stuff if you’re into that sort of thing and wish to study it further. People do.

One of the big questions among American historians is just how many Amerindians were here before Columbus showed up and brought all of Europe as his ‘plus one.’ War and disease and such killed, well… a bunch of the native population, but whether that means a quarter, a third, or ninety-nine percent is in serious dispute.

The answer matters, and not merely for statistical precision – historians are still trying to figure out if the arrival of white guys simply sped the decline of cultures who’d have eventually evolved or vanished anyway, or whether 1492 marked the onset of not-entirely-unintentional genocide. It’s an ethical question as much as a historical, political, or social issue.

Not that Coronado was wrestling with such abstractions in 1540.

It had been less than a half-century since Columbus sailed the ocean blue and stumbled across this little roadblock to India. The British seemed in no hurry to settle the new continent – Jamestown was established in 1607, Plymouth in 1620, and the Puritans started arriving around 1630. Spain, however, wasted little time making their presence felt across Central America and Southwestern North America.

In 1520, Hernán Cortés led the overthrow of the Aztec Empire in what is now Mexico. By 1532, Francisco Pizarro helped bring about the destruction of the Incas in Peru. In both cases, Spanish conquistadors had discovered complex civilizations and unmeasurable wealth. In both cases, the reality of their experiences dramatically exceeded rumors or expectations.

It was thus not particularly ridiculous for Coronado to go looking for untold riches or follow rumors of lavish cities inhabited by wondrous people. He set out in February of 1540 to do just that.

Conquistadors didn’t like to do anything on a modest scale, so Coronado took along 400 armed men and over a thousand Mexican-Indian “allies”. That many people meant livestock, food wagons, and innumerable other supplies in tow, making for quite the logistical monstrosity.

His exact route is debatable, but he seems to have started north from what is now Mexico and traveled into New Mexico and/or Arizona in search of the “Seven Cities of Cibola.” He got into a few scraps with the locals, but his journey was otherwise unexciting until he encountered a young man the Spanish quickly nicknamed “The Turk.”

RELATED POST: Turkin’ Back and Forth

Training the Voices In Your Head (Slightly Less Awkward Practice)

July 4, 2016June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal ~ 1 Comment

A slightly less awkward way to promote awareness of those ‘inner voices’ is to use a movie clip of some sort as our temporary substitute for a reading selection. We’ll watch a bit of it, then stop and practice some of the types of questioning and thinking we want to inculcate in our reading voices as well. Ideally it’s something high-interest but which most of them haven’t seen before.

Let’s start with this:

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I choose random people around the room and ask things like…

What’s any question you have about this clip or anything in it so far? (If you have none, pretend you do and ask that one instead.) {We always start with this and do at least 3 or 4 people.}

What does this remind you of – in history, fiction, movies, your personal life, anything? In what way? {Keep prodding until you get a couple of different responses.}

What’s the mood of this excerpt so far? How do you know? {Dramatic? Humorous? Action? Scary? Dry?}

What’s going to happen next? {I like to wrap up each ‘color thinking’ segment with 3 or 4 of these predictions.}

OK, let’s see if any of our questions are answered or how we did with our predictions:

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We repeat the process, making sure to include students who haven’t participated yet. I vary my prodding as seems appropriate, but try to avoid ‘leading’ answers – I’m not needing them to be ‘correct’ about anything; I’m wanting them to practice interacting with the ‘text’ (which in this case, is a movie clip).

If you didn’t do so the first time, you should answer some of these yourself before moving on. Make some predictions and such. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.

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More ‘color commentary’ type prodding.

This is a good time to remind participants or students that what we’re doing is very much like what we should be doing when we read. When we’re genuinely interested in something, we do this anyway – sometimes out loud. It’s why old people don’t like to be in theaters with teenagers, or why you (er… or rather, why this one guy you know) accidentally threw buffalo wings across the room because SOME people can’t seem to hold on to the ball even when it’s a CRITICAL 4TH DOWN and it hits you RIGHT IN THE NUMBERS!!! It’s what’s fun about watching singing or sex partner competitions together – you question, predict, challenge, associate – both internally and with one another.

The more boring, difficult, or tedious a reading assignment is, the more important it is to PRACTICE interacting with it in this way so we can become more effective at understanding, processing, and remembering it. The more we PRETEND to be super-interested, the more kinda-sorta-interested we’ll manage to be. The better we get at understanding and analyzing what we read, boring or not, the less we’ll hate it and the more we’ll remember – meaning less time spent forcing ourselves and more time spent just reading it and ‘getting’ it.

At least that’s the goal. Last clip:

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You may, of course, use something more educational as your sample. I’m a fan of learning new skills with non-threatening material – either something fun or something review-ish.Ideally we then learn new content with comfortable skills – stuff we at least kinda already know how to do.

You could, for example, immediately follow this exercise with a passage of some sort which you actually care about, broken into appropriately-sized ‘chunks’. After each chunk, they could ‘interact’ – either with each other, as a class, or on paper. Eventually this builds into annotations, dialectic journals, Cornell notes, or whatever.

At this stage, however – if we’re truly interesting in building a long-term, universally meaningful reading skill – it’s probably better to cover less and really ‘own’ it than to blow through more and not truly retain any of it. Better to practice often than long, in this case.

Or so I’d respectfully propose.

RELATED POST: Training the Voices In Your Head (Intro)

Training the Voices In Your Head (Awkward Practice)

July 4, 2016June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

One way to highlight the role of the Color Commentary Voice is to model it with students – both what it sounds like when it’s MISBEHAVING and what it might sound like when its’ COOPERATING. To do this, I ask for a volunteer with a strong reading voice to read aloud from something educational I want to cover anyway. I explain that they’ll be the Play-By-Play Voice, and should pause when I interrupt. When I shut up, the Play-By-Play should pick up where it left off.

The first time, I’ll model an uncooperative Color Commentary, and ask them if this experience seems at all familiar. It might go something like this:

“Excerpt from Democracy In America, by Alexis De Tocqueville”

Why do the French always use so many letters we’re not even supposed to pronounce?

“But in the United States the majority, which so frequently displays-“

What time is it? I wonder of Maddi’s texted me back yet…

“-the tastes and the propensities of a despot, is still destitute of the more perfect instruments of tyranny.”

I’ll bet I can slide my phone out enough to check while everyone’s reading. It will just take a second.”

“In the American republics the activity of the central Government has never as yet been extended-“

Nope. Crap – maybe I said the wrong thing. It’s stupid. If she can’t let a little joke go, who needs her? Is it lunch time yet? What time is this class over again?

“-beyond a limited number of objects sufficiently prominent to call forth its attention. The secondary affairs of society have never been regulated by its authority,”

Check that out. Lana in those tights. Or yoga pants. Whatever they are. Dang, girl! We should – oh, she’s looking back turn away look casual! Hmm hmm hmm… ‘regulated by its authority,’ yep.

“-and nothing has hitherto betrayed its desire of interfering in them. The majority is become more and more absolute, but it has not increased the prerogatives of the central government;”

I forgot to ask Mom if I could go to Jackson’s after school. I should tell her it’s for a Biology project or something… no, she’d never buy it. History, maybe? If my stupid parents would just buy me Targeted Zone: Eternal Brimstone, I wouldn’t have to deal with Jackson and his stupid snorting and dumb jokes.

“-those great prerogatives have been confined to a certain sphere; and although the despotism of the majority may be galling upon one point, it cannot be said to extend to all.”

I gotta pee.

STOP.

I’ll ask the room to tell me, without looking down at the passage, what my volunteer Play-By-Play Voice has just read. Usually they can tell me little or nothing. Maybe just the general subject? Anything jump out?

Mostly, of course, they remember the yoga pants and the video game and having to pee. Does this experience seem familiar?

Always.

We all do it sometimes. Some of us do it most of the time when trying to read something that doesn’t particularly engage us, or that we simply don’t want to read. Sometimes it’s difficult even when we DO want to read it – we just have trouble staying focused, especially if the passage is difficult.

We need to train our Color Commentator to work FOR us instead of AGAINST us. We don’t have to MEAN it when we begin practicing this – we just have to DO it. The more boring or tedious the passage, the more important it is to interact with it, focus intense interest on it, and intentionally do all of the things we’d do naturally and often unconsciously if we were really and truly engaged.

So we’re going to do it again – same passage, same Play-By-Play voice. But this time, I’m going to try to model what my Color Commentator SHOULD be doing.

“Excerpt from Democracy In America, by Alexis De Tocqueville”

OK, I remember this guy. Kind of. We’ve read other stuff from him – he travelled through the U.S. in, like, the 1830’s or so and wrote about what he saw. Seems to be considered a legit source of observation – with the perspective of someone ‘outside’.

“But in the United States the majority, which so frequently displays the tastes and the propensities of a despot-“

The majority – so, like 51% or more. We’re big on ‘majority rule’ in the U.S., but he’s saying sometimes that majority acts kinda like a dictator, which we DON’T like.

“-is still destitute of the more perfect instruments of tyranny.”

I’m not sure where he’s going with this. The majority sometimes has the same desires and tendencies of a despot… but is destitute – lacks – doesn’t have? ‘the more perfect instruments of tyranny.’ Huh. I don’t quite get this last part, but maybe he’s going to say even the worst elements of majority rule aren’t as bad as tyranny. I’ll look for clarification as I move on.

“In the American republics the activity of the central Government has never as yet been extended beyond a limited number of objects sufficiently prominent to call forth its attention-“

OK, OK, think this through. The American republics – that’s gotta mean the U.S. and however many states there were in the 1830s. We’re before the Civil War still, so… 20? 25? Doesn’t matter. The central government is Washington, D.C. – the federal government. OK – the feds haven’t yet started worrying about anything except the big stuff – probably the stuff NOT covered by the Articles of Confederation… the Alexander Hamilton stuff – war, the economy, etc. Tocqueville is saying the central government only pays attention to big national stuff (although ‘as yet’ suggests it might eventually – wouldn’t HE be surprised today?)

“-The secondary affairs of society have never been regulated by its authority, and nothing has hitherto betrayed its desire of interfering in them. The majority is become more and more absolute, but it has not increased the prerogatives of the central government;”

OK, I was right. That is what he’s saying. Even with a… a… stronger, more homogenous majority (was the country becoming more the SAME in the 1830’s? I’m not sure about that…) the central government hasn’t started trying to control ‘the secondary affairs of society’. Not sure what they meant to Tocqueville, but it hadn’t yet started trying to control EVERYTHING in the name of the majority – just the most important stuff. There were plenty of individual rights – wait, no… plenty of states’ rights – left to be had.

“-those great prerogatives have been confined to a certain sphere; and although the despotism of the majority may be galling upon one point, it cannot be said to extend to all.”

I could look up ‘prerogatives’, but given the context I think he’s just restating what I said a second ago. The phrase ‘despotism of the majority’ is weird… it sounds contradictory, but reminds me of something… oh! Our teacher talked about the Founders fearing ‘mob rule’ – the ‘tyranny of the majority’! I don’t remember the details, but something in the Federalist papers somewhere talked about factions balancing each other so this wouldn’t happen. I wonder if that’s related to this… but I gotta pee.

STOP.

Now it’s time for the most awkward thing I’m going to ask them to do all year. We’re going to practice the process in pairs.

I’ll point out that the excerpt we’ve been using is divided into relatively short paragraphs (or chunks, or whatever). One partner will start as Play-By-Play, and the other as Color Commentary. At each paragraph (or chunk), they’ll switch.

And yes, they should practice doing it the cooperative, useful way. Someone always asks.

This part requires serious monitoring, and I stop them from time to time to make sure the Color Commentator voice is on topic and hasn’t simply fallen silent. It’s up to you how long to let it continue, but I don’t usually go more than 4-5 minutes.

I assure you, it’s a very long 4-5 minutes.

I only do it once, but for the rest of the year I can always refer back to it – “What are your inner voices doing?” It also leads nicely into annotating or ‘Marking Up’ the text – which is really just playing both roles yourself, on paper. Both support Cornell Notes, Dialectic Journals, or whatever other sort of ‘AP’ or ‘College-Style’ note-taking you might teach.

Of course, this can be a pretty chaotic, awkward process. Sometimes I’d rather do it slightly less awkwardly…

RELATED POST: Training the Voices In Your Head (Intro)

Training The Voices In Your Head (Intro)

July 3, 2016June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

Let’s talk about the voices in our heads.

We all have them. For some, they may become so pronounced as to become a distraction, or require some outside help to control, but let’s not fool ourselves – most of us have at least a few up there, vying for attention. You may remember the classic 90’s educational program on this subject, Herman’s Head:

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At the moment, however, I’d like to focus on the voices primarily involved in reading. I am NOT a ‘reading specialist’ – and my science is subject to challenge (you did notice I cited a Fox Sitcom by way of evidence just now, yes?) – but I DO have some experience working with students who think they’re poor readers (but don’t have to be) and modeling effective reading strategies with teachers who, well… didn’t sign up to teach reading.

Seriously – we didn’t know that was going to be a thing. We thought, you know… they’d come to us knowing.

But they don’t – at least not all of them. We can wring our hands and point our fingers and lament how wonderful students used to be in whatever our golden age of false memories happens to be, but for now let’s look at a few basics that might be helpful for US – with OUR students in OUR subject right now. The one we DID sign up to teach.

(Yes, yes – we teach ‘students’ not ‘subjects’ and all that. You get my point though… don’t quibble.)

If you watch sports at all, you know there’s a minimum number of announcers necessary to properly call any event, match, or game. Sometimes you’ll get a half-dozen or so in the studio, and another three or four in the booth, but they’re extra. Look past the fluff, and at the core you’ll almost always find two main roles – Play-By-Play and Color Commentary.

The Play-By-Play guy tells you what’s happening on the field/court/ice, even though you’re watching it at the same time. Sounds redundant, yes? But if you’ve learned your favorite sport by watching it on TV, then someday go to a live game, you’ll miss this guy.

We apparently like being told what’s happening while it’s happening. The Play-By-Play guy helps keep things clear and focused on the narrative of this game, right now. It’s all about the play, ‘bout the play, no color…

Then the whistle blows, or the buzzer sounds, and the action is momentarily paused. This is where the Color Commentator guy jumps in to discuss the strategies recently employed in the contest – in the action just called. He talks about the players involved, their backgrounds, recent injuries, etc. He’ll explain what the coach is hoping to accomplish by whatever decisions he’s made, or otherwise fill in context and personality to the actual play occurring before and after his interpretations and insights.

The Color Commentator is why those of you watching favorite teams over a period of time begin to feel like you KNOW them, why each player has a personality to you, and you feel a connection to them. They’re why we’re able to believe we’re in some way connected to these athletes – like all that’s lacking for us to order a pizza and drink some beer together is opportunity. “Is that you, Antoine Roussel? Get your crazy French *** over here and have some of these chili fries! Waiter? Another Keystone!’

Color Commentary brings the game alive and gives it meaning. Then action resumes, and Play-By-Play is off and running again.

The roles aren’t quite that delineated in practice, but that’s the general idea. We find this basic setup in everything from Stanley Cup Playoffs to local high school football broadcasts on deep cable, so it must resonate across specifics. There must be something about it we find necessary to fully enjoy the game.

It’s the same when we read.

Most of us have a ‘reading voice’ that scans the strange scribbles on the page or screen before us and translates them into words, which it then ‘reads’ to us. The spoken word came long before the written in world history; alphabets are tools to echo speech – not the reverse.

You’ll sometimes notice young readers or those struggling with a passage or still learning a new language moving their lips as they read. That’s why.

The ‘reading voice’ we hear is usually our own. If you’re reading a book by Oprah Winfrey, you probably ‘hear’ it in her voice. When I re-read Harry Potter, I tend to ‘hear’ the characters from the movies when their antecedents have dialogue in the text. But most of the time we’re our own Play-By-Play voice – we read to ourselves without consciously recognizing it.

Then there’s the other voice. The one we have to watch out for. It can be an essential ally or our greatest distraction.

Have you ever finished a page only to realize you have no idea what you’ve just read? That’s because while your Play-By-Play was chugging along faithfully, it was drowned out by whatever your Color Commentator voice had on its mind. Those calls you were supposed to make, the laundry you’re behind on, what to have for dinner, whether or not the Bachelorette will make the ‘right’ decision… our color voice is a varied and fascinating creature.

The reason cell phones are the devil is that they appeal to the worst part of our Color Commentary voice – that inquiring, connection-seeking, narrative-forming, wondering-wandering voice. The constant, chaotic connection allowed by your average smart phone is Color Commentator crack.

Readers who struggle with Play-By-Play need specific reading instruction and assistance. We do our best to prop them up with vocabulary previews, anticipation guides, or whatever, but our bang-for-the-buck is going to be limited with them. We’ll keep doing what we can, but the Play-By-Play skill is a long time developing and only gets harder to ‘fix’ as we get older – especially without willing application.

But many of our readers can Play-By-Play just fine. They call out words with the best of them, although their inflection is usually lacking. They read with confidence, and assure you they are ‘DONE!’

When you ask what they’ve read, though, or probe for some detail or connection therein, they have no idea. What’s worse, they may not even recognize that this is a problem, or believe it’s in their power to address. Many wouldn’t know how to do so if they did. That issue lies with their out-of-control Color Commentator – wherever he or she happens to have gone while they read.

That’s what we’re going to work on next.