Maybe it's all a "multi-threaded drama"...

Steve Johnson's notion of a media "Sleeper Curve" in both content and "intellectual labor" demand of TV is pretty cool. It's certainly a sleeper in that it seems to have come in as we were tsk-tsking the content violence, banality and dumbing down of media. "...(T)o keep up with entertainment like '24,' you have to pay attention, make inferences,track shifing social relationships." I'm struck that this is happening in pop culture more than (I think) in schools which is kind of ironic as the standards talk a whole lot about developing in students critical thinking skills like the ones Johnson identifies. With high stakes testing, it tends to get left by the wayside. This kind of learning seems to come --definately not from the conservative center -- but from the pop and pedagogical edges. If central to our teaching and the learning of our students is the asking of a lot of tough questions that don't necessarily have answers (see Johnson "What's happening right now?") around, say, the literature canon, then we do end up reading and writing the world differently and hopefully more productively.