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conceptualliteratureblog · 5 years

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Language Profiles: student agency & multilingualism

This post is relevant either to language A/B teachers or to educators looking at whole school literacy implementation ideas.

Thank you, Yi Shen (Sandy) for showing me the power of a language profile in our workshop in Hong Kong (Sha Tin College, September 2017)! This is something any of you can try with your teaching staff or your classrooms to make language a truly dynamic part of the learning process at your school and help people become aware of the power and challenges that come with personal language knowledge.

Some schools will already have a language profile for each student. Often, this only lists the home language(s) and level of English (or language of instruction) of the student. We can do more! Also, sometimes the level of English listed is from an application filled out by parents trying to impress the school. Find out where the information comes from to really understand what it means. Essentially, there are many ways to get more information that can help gain knowledge for the student’s personalised learning strategies, but likely the best person to create this portfolio is the student, at least in secondary schools.

In order to understand how this works for students, try to do it yourself:

Think back to your infant development and schooling: what is your language story? Where and when did you learn language(s)? What dialects do you speak? What slang do you know? Especially if you live away from where you grew up, this dynamic has probably changed over the years. Even if you only speak English, you have probably had exposure to different kinds of English and use a certain type with friends, family, and students. You probably also at one point learned a second language in school. What was this experience of language learning like for you? What excites you about (other) languages? What scares you? How does language give you power? How does it make you powerless?

There will probably be a wide range of responses to these questions from colleagues and students alike. Sharing your language story with a colleague or two can help you to express what language is for you and to have empathy for others who may find difficulty with language.

Try drawing a map of the language(s) you use today. With whom and for what purposes do you speak different languages, dialects, or slang? Maybe your register simply shifts; that is ok as well. Maybe you speak some languages for fun and others out of a need.

I was raised an anglophone. Hailing from Boston, I avoided the accent and local dialect due to the nature of the transplant and immigrant town of Lexington that I grew up in. My parents came from Minnesota and Texas, and each had lived in Boston since just after their university years. We had a blended American English at home.

My mom also studied French extensively at school, so when I started lessons at age 7 in our school system, the fit felt natural. Half of my mom’s family is French and with Québec not that far away, schools in the area at that time all taught French to students as a ‘second’ language. I took French all through grade school until the AP exam when I feel out of love with the language. Suddenly, I had teachers who just cared about correctness and memorisation rather than taking us to see the Impressionist exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts or teaching us how to make crepes. The joy was killed.

So at university, I took Spanish for a year. It was fun, but I wasn’t quite in love with it the same way. And then there were all those other courses on the syllabus and I wanted to double major…so…no language B study for a couple of years. But then, Latin the last year. I had wanted to take Latin as a first-year but my advisor said it was a dead language. What was the point? I found the grammatical structures a fun puzzle and our tiny class of five a fun classical oasis.

After college, I went straight into my MAT to earn a teaching degree. I hadn’t studied abroad like so many US students mostly because of sport with the plan to somehow do it later. My MAT programme allowed you to do your student teaching abroad, but you had to find the school. It was much of the reason I had chosen the program.

I had decided I wanted to give French a go again. After writing to many schools in Switzerland and France, I finally got a positive response from the Lycée International American Section director, just outside of Paris. Paris! What a dream. They wouldn’t pay me, of course, but I could work with several of their teachers and live with one of the school’s families in exchange for some babysitting and tutoring.

That year was bliss. But I could digress for ages about my love affair with Paris…back to the language! I had to take intensive French courses again as part of my visa. It was also a great way to meet people from other places. I had very good, slow, correct French, I was told time and again. But it was slow. Part of culture is how you speak, and the French, at least the Parisians, don’t like to speak slowly. I was given the advice to just spit it out and not worry about my mistakes. So I did that, time and again, until I felt comfortable in French. I felt like a different part of my personality came out in French.

Fast forward three years: I had moved back to the states and then to Italy. My French proved very useful in learning Italian and the locals were even more encouraging about just trying the language out. Within a few months, I was comfortably having conversations. Sadly, a lot of that is lost now after more than a decade without much exposure, but I think I could reclaim it in a month or so if given the opportunity.

Similarly, when I moved to Hong Kong, I took Mandarin Chinese lessons. But though I loved it, I found it difficult to practice the language in a place that is mostly Cantonese and English. Cantonese was trickier to learn and ‘not as useful’ once you move away. I never knew how long I would stay…if I had known it would be eight years, I probably would have learned right away. In any case, learning some Chinese helped me to at least understand what it’s about and is something I would go back to as well with a longer stay in the mainland or again in Hong Kong.

I kept up the French, though, with long, frequent stays in France, lots of films, and a long-term French beau along the way. Now, I have friends with whom I speak French in Vienna, I read in French when I can, and I have that dream of living there….

But most of my life is still lived in English. I’ve learned some German living in Vienna. I took a class and did some self study. But there’s always that time factor, and I decided to have a baby and do some writing instead. Maybe I’ll go back to it. Let’s see how things shape up in a year or two. The little I’ve learned is certainly helpful and shows a sort of respect in trying, I think. When I travel I also like to learn a few phrases for this reason. We who speak English are privileged to have the ‘international language’ at our fingertips. But we are only denying ourselves if we limit the other languages we can learn.

Now I also have a baby boy who is learning language every day. We speak American and British English at home. We try not to swear around him. I sometimes speak with him in French. He will attend a mostly German speaking nursery school soon. It makes more me aware of how and why we learn these languages.

That’s my language story in brief. I’m sure you can find links with geography, emotions, work, and more to understand even more where it all comes from. I have students with much more dynamic backgrounds. Some speak three languages at home with their parents, a different one at school (English), take a foreign language, and speak in some kind of multilingual slang with their friends. When students go through their language journeys, their stories, they find ways to use language for learning. They acquire agency. In asking teachers to also go through the process, they can connect with the student’s learning as they make reflections on their own journeys, connected also to emotion, place, people…the list goes on. These associations help us understand the way we use languages as well as our motivations or fears connected to language.

One of my students studying three language A at school (English, German, Italian) for a trilingual diploma (wow!) conducted her Extended Essay research on the topic of multilingualism and cognition. She narrowed it to bilingualism since little research has been done beyond this, even though, as she noted, many people speak more than two languages. She always felt her languages were a hindrance, which really shocked me. Most of the recent research I had read showed the cognitive power of having more than one language. This is why so many people try to get their kids in immersion programs if there is only one language at home. She was aware of this, but sometimes felt like words escaped her or she couldn’t understand something she read. She realised that even though she reads a lot, the time is divided among these three languages. Her vocabulary development could be limited in that way. Research supported this, but this was the only area she found to be a hindrance. The way she uses language can be more creative and the development of her brain allows for code switching that goes beyond language and into experiences.

Are any of you doing research in this area? I would be interested to hear about any current work with multilingual speakers and happy to post a link to your published work on my blog.

#multilingualism #languageprofile #translanguaging #studentagency #codesign #ibdp #ibmyp #ibpyp #language #literacy

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solia-dreams · 7 years

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X-Files fanfic: unused material for chapter 37 of ‘This Is How The World Ends’

Author’s note: Wrote 4,000 words of the next chapter before I realised it was going nowhere. I’m cutting all this - some exceptions, perhaps, but most is going in the trash - and thought “I know some people who might appreciate access to it, even if it’s not going in the actual fic” and so here it is :)

Harsh orange sunset illuminated the drawn faces of the Johannsson children as the car dropped its speed coming into town. Mulder rolled his shoulders uncomfortably and blinked his eyes hard, glancing quickly up at the mirror again to give his vision a break from the relentlessly dull street view. They weren’t his children, but seeing them safe and alive and together brought him a sense of comfort all the same, and he was sure the man in the passenger seat felt that on an even grander scale. Erik Johannsson had lost his wife in senseless and sudden tragedy, and had been thrust into both single parenthood and homeless fugitivity within a day.

“This is it,” Mulder said softly, disturbing his companion from his doze. Erik startled himself awake and sat forward, scrubbing his face and staring through the windscreen at the burnt-bright surroundings. “Welcome to your new home.”

Modest and unexciting, a newish and characterless neighbourhood of a characterless town in eastern Idaho, with identical boxy houses lining the wide straight streets. Mulder would never have chosen this place to settle down, and he doubted the Johannssons would have, given a better option. No single house stood out as architecturally unique; no charming front garden invited an admiring wandering eye. A far cry from the lovely family neighbourhood in Leominster with the tyre swing and the big trees lining the sidewalk, this area had been planned off only two or three blueprints, and every house was just a copy, with blank front yards and empty porches. No stamp of individuality identified one family’s house from another.

Anyone could blend in here – the new Collins family would go easily unnoticed.

Erik Johannsson didn’t share Mulder’s lacklustre disinterest in the neighbourhood. His crinkled, tired eyes lit up and he turned in his seat to shake his son and daughters awake, delighted. The kids were as sick of sitting in the car as the men were of driving it by this point, and had long surpassed the limit of their preteen patience, but even through their sleepy ill-temperedness, they joined their dad in his enthusiasm as he pointed new landmarks out to them, and they pressed their noses to their windows. Their chatter and noise helped Mulder focus on this last ten minutes of driving.

A couple of weeks ago he’d checked out the warehouse address left under a Volkswagen windscreen wiper and found this family hiding, hungry and afraid, unseen by anyone bar their one contact, ‘Sally’, since before Christmas. Rebecca Rose Johannsson’s husband and children, unaware of much of their circumstances except that their mother was murdered and they were next if they were found. The kids hadn’t been to school all year; Erik hadn’t been to work or attended the fake funeral undoubtedly arranged for his wife. Mulder felt deeply empathetic for the family. Not only had he experienced life in hiding from essentially the same people (new names, new faces, maybe, but ultimately, the same cruel agenda) first alone for a year, and then for many years with Scully, but he had also seen firsthand what had happened to drive them into their reclusion. He had unzippered the body bag containing Rebecca Rose. He had watched Scully cut into her chest and perform her autopsy. Her death had been Mulder’s door into this conspiracy. For the Johannssons, her death had been a thrust through the door and out into the unexpected wilderness with no supplies and no map.

“Is that the school?” the younger daughter, Lily, asked, pointing. Her siblings watched the building pass them by. “Is that where we’ll go?”

“Looks like that’s the elementary school,” Erik agreed, squinting to read the signs in the overbright afternoon light. He reached down to his feet where his only bag, scuffed and dirty after so many months, lay between his feet, and retrieved the thick envelope of paperwork Mulder had arranged for him. He leafed through the false birth certificates, the renamed dental records, the freshly opened bank account and made-up school reports. He found the list from Benny of facilities local to their new home. The schools. The hospital. The dentist so poor Zach could have his aching braces adjusted, finally. “That’ll be your school, Lil.”

It felt good to be facilitating this family’s renewal, to see their relieved excitement over things that mattered so little to normal, unafraid families, especially after so many weeks as ‘Steve’, Mikhail Levin’s steadily improving car washer and errand boy. Life with the Russians was insightful and crushing at the same time – the more he knew about what this conspiracy was really about, the more he wanted to run from it, back to DC to gather up the only people who mattered to him now and off to the hills somewhere. In unzippering Rebecca Johannsson, in drawing in Scully, in meeting Henry Gray and now in assisting Levin’s international agenda, Mulder had put his foot in something he wasn’t sure he would be able to pull out of, even if he tried. It was big. It was cosmic. What he’d long feared, and worse, because no one else could see it.

He understood now why Sixty-Four, or Sally, or whoever she was, had warned him about the Hosts, that they’d taken note of his interferences, however minor, and had discussed how to rid themselves of him. They had a secret to hide, a secret so huge it should come as no surprise that their plan did not exclude the option of killing Scully if it meant discrediting and discouraging him. They’d murdered Rebecca, hadn’t they, to shove Dr Gray back into line when he overstepped his role, and had threatened to come after her family next. The Worldwide Family of Hosts and their partners knew no boundaries, and would suffer no consequences.

“This is your street,” Mulder advised brightly, turning across the road through a gap in the lethargic afternoon traffic and into a long, straight side street. The town was the victim of uncreative and meticulous town planning, everything laid out in dull grids. He squinted out at the mailboxes. “Number twenty-seven.”

He would have loved for it to be number sixty-four, thinking that would have been perfect considering the lengths the pledge had gone to in her attempts to protect the family. She had risked her life to smuggle them out of their house at Christmas, and had been sneaking them supplies for months, keeping them alive long enough for her tenuous connection with the Russians to secure so she could ask the favour she needed: a home, unquestioned and unsuspicious, for her tragic charges. Mulder gathered she didn’t get much contact with people outside the Family, and the communication she’d had with Daniil Lenkov before Levin had sent him home had been apparently hard-won and shaky. Mulder, taking Lenkov’s place as the contact point between Gray’s Sixty-Four and Russia’s Levin, had been more forthright. “Dr Gray needs a safe house for someone significant to the case. It’s not negotiable.”

Levin’s wide network of outwardly average model citizens included a few small-time property investors, and so it was that Glenn Collins had taken over the lease at number twenty-seven. A furniture truck full of second-hand furniture had arrived earlier in the week and unpacked into the house, and Mulder, fresh back from a visit to Boston, had serviced his crappy but reliable old car and picked the family up for a road trip. Levin hadn’t questioned the request from his inside man; Gray was an irreplaceable, unrivalled resource, and though the ask was obscure, it was not unreasonable given his willingness with privileged information at the risk of his own position and life.

At the house, the turn of the key and the resultant quietening of the engine sounded like the car’s mechanical equivalent to a sigh of relief, after three days of near-continuous driving, Erik and Mulder taking it in turns to cross the country with three bickering, miserable, cramped kids in the back. Now those children tumbled out, crumbs scattering to their new driveway, which otherwise matched the driveway of every other house in the street, but to this family, it might have been built of yellow bricks. They ran up it to their new front door, and Erik turned his new key and they rushed inside. Mulder followed, taking his time, glad for the feeling of ground beneath his shoe instead of pedal, and of muscular contractions typical of movement as he walked around and stretched. Never. Driving. Again. He liked driving but right now he’d be happy to walk for the rest of his life if it meant never having to sit back in that seat. At the very least, he would be taking Erik up on his offer of a night’s sleep on the house’s couch. Erik was the kind of guy you’d call lovely – you wouldn’t hesitate and wonder if he’d be offended by that, you’d just say it, because that was just the truth – and he’d actually tried to insist Mulder should stay the week out, sleep in the master bedroom, claiming he’d be fine with his new couch and it was the least he could offer Mulder in exchange for all he’d done. It was quite an effort to convince Erik it wasn’t necessary, and even more of an effort to make him believe he actually preferred sofas over beds. Besides, he’d ended up reminding him, they had no idea of the condition of the furniture Levin’s friend had arranged. The beds could be riddled with fleas, and then all five of them could be fighting for the couch.

Mulder collected his backpack from the car and went inside. The furnishings turned out to be perfectly adequate, if mismatched, and boxes of likewise uncoordinated basic household items – cutlery, picture frames, toys, DVD player – were stacked in the middle of rooms with no apparent system. When Mulder walked in, Lily was delightedly waving about the frying pan she’d found in the box in the bathroom on her zippy tour of her new home, shouting, “We can have pancakes again!” He couldn’t help his tired smile as he stepped aside to let the girl whizz past on her way to her dad, but the smile hurt. Erik caught her and picked her up, like dads do. Like other dads get to, anyway.

Family is comfort, and this was a comfort Mulder hadn’t felt in a lifetime.

“We’re never going to be able to thank you enough for this,” Erik told him, honesty and graciousness making his voice solid and whole. “You’ve saved us. Thank you.”

“I hardly did anything,” Mulder insisted again. “You’ve got people in high places who care a lot about you and your children, and I’m only carrying out what they arrange. The house, the accounts, the papers, the furniture…”

“But you put it into motion, and you’re the one who gave up three days to drive us here,” Erik Johannsson said sincerely, as his older daughter Laura came back from the hallway and squeezed past Mulder to get outside to the car, citing going back for her bag. “We would never have made it on our own. It would have taken me all week driving, and I would have gotten us caught for sure. I know you kept us under the radar with all those funny country roads and backwater roadhouses, and I know what a risk this was to your safety, too. I hope Sally and her boss are paying you well.” Erik paused, shifting his little daughter to his other hip. “You haven’t heard back about that email from Sally, have you?”

“No, I don’t expect to,” Mulder answered, but heard a faint tone at his back as though getting a message even now. Swinging his backpack off his shoulder, he brought it around to his front, digging through it for his current phone. Sixty-Four’s unexpected contact with Erik halfway through their drive had prompted a flurry of activity – Erik worriedly reading aloud her instructions to pass the attachment to Mulder and to delete any hint of it, and to definitely not download it or open it with the internet turned on in case it was being traced, and for Mulder to get it to the Bureau where something could be done about it, for the benefit of Rebecca’s case. So that was what they did. Mulder was burning to know what he’d had, but he knew the discouragement from opening the attached file was a good idea, and so forwarded it to Gerard with the same instructions, except to make sure it got to AD Walter Skinner, without question and untraceably.

There was no telling whether it had.

The tone was still chiming, a ringtone rather than a message notification, and Mulder had his phone in his hand. It wasn’t ringing, and its screen was blank. He looked around, tired brain not computing, but the sound was definitely coming from inside the backpack. No. A stupid possibility occurred to him, and he dug in again, frantic and disbelieving. Under the map at the bottom was another phone.

It was vibrating with each ring. Alive.

He grabbed it and wrenched it out, letting other artefacts rip free as well, falling out onto the floor while he stared at the old phone he charged up once a week and never turned off and never used.

It had never rung before. Now it was ringing.

“Excuse me, I have to take this,” he muttered vaguely to Erik, recognising the number as the only number that had this number programmed into it. His thoughts felt slow. Why? Why would she call now, after all this time? His stomach filled with lead at the potential reasons. He almost didn’t want to answer.

But he’d promised.

He forgot to swallow his fears before speaking. “Scully?”

“Mulder,” replied the low voice not hers, and a face came to mind from four years in the past before the confirmation came in words, “it’s Assistant Director Skinner.”

A beat, a million thoughts. This was her phone. Skinner was an ally but why would she give him her phone to make a call? She didn’t want to speak to him and would only call in a dire emergency – of that, he was quite sure, since she hadn’t found cause to use this number in more than three years – and if she were able, wouldn’t she surely make the call herself? His brain immediately overloaded with improbable and horrific scenarios.

“Where’s Scully?” Mulder demanded, pulse accelerating in fear. “Why do you have her phone?”

“How quickly can you be in Wyoming?”

Oh god, she had been in an accident, hadn’t she, an accident in lame-ass Wyoming of all places, and Skinner wanted to tell him face-to-face. Or they’d gotten to her, taken her again, and Skinner had only just found her, dragged out to fucking nowhere and dumped, and he needed Mulder to identify the body. But he should be able to do that himself. Unless she was totally mangled. Maybe there were only birthmarks from under her clothes with which to identify her, marks only Mulder or maybe her mother would know about.

Or maybe he was overreacting and postulating ridiculous paranoid thoughts. He tried to push them down, get control of them. Maybe she wasn’t in Wyoming at all, but after those thoughts, wherever she was, that was where Mulder planned to be next.

“Depends,” he said flatly. “Where is she?”

“She’s here,” Skinner replied, words which should have been assuring except that his voice was hurried and low, like someone with a secret. “I’m with her now at what passes for a hospital outside of Thayne.”

“Thayne?” The thud of his heart smashed his attempt at reason, and a whole new flurry of disjointed, highly specific visions swept through him, in which Scully was no longer dead but gravely injured, or maybe dead, or maybe sick. Her cancer was back, and she was being treated in Wyoming where no one would know she’d been weakened. A case had naturally led her to Thayne, and in investigating an alleyway a delusional runaway had jumped out and slashed at her with a broken bottle. She was lured there by an agent of the Family of Hosts posing as a contact, or worse as Mulder, and had come under fire and taken a bullet, and was lying in a hospital bed awaiting brain scans to tell her doctors if she was still viable. Shit – calm down. Skinner. He knew, he could clarify, he could explain. “What happened?!”

Erik Johannsson lowered his daughter, expression appropriately concerned for Mulder’s reaction, but Skinner on the phone was far from sympathetic to Mulder’s spiralling overdrive of panicked thoughts. “Nothing happened. She’s fine.” She’s fine, she’s fine. The spiral slowed, and Mulder turned away from Erik to keep his relief to himself, pacing unhurriedly toward the door. Skinner elaborated. “We’re investigating a case and she’s in the restroom, alright? She doesn’t know I’m making this call.”

Mulder froze. She didn’t know Skinner was calling. Because she wouldn’t have made the call. Because she didn’t want to talk to him. A rude reminder, because in the golden relief that she was alive and fine, he’d forgotten that she was still not talking to him and they were still uncomfortably on the rocks. She wasn’t his to worry about. She wasn’t his to fly to. Not that it would have stopped him if she were in danger, but for anything less…

“Then why are you?” He heard the temperature of his own voice and knew it was childishly chilled, the same tone he used with Scully when she hurt his feelings or made him jealous. He was overwhelmingly grateful to know she wasn’t sick or hurt or dying, no hospital gown and thin pale sheets and whirring machines plugged into her ailing body like the nightmarish instances of their past, but the sudden fear of that and then the assurance it wasn’t a fact had thrown his emotions about and left him vulnerable.

“We’re about to go into an interview,” Skinner answered, now almost whispering, eliciting a curiosity in Mulder. Tempting him on multiple fronts, testing his resolve. “Agent Scully is not going to handle it well. She’s already shaken. I think you should be here for her.”

Mulder kept his feet firmly planted where he stood in the Johannsson family’s new foyer, but it took effort. Whose side was Skinner on? Stupid question. Hers, always hers. “I’m sure she appreciates your concern, but trust me, I’m the last person she wants to see.”

“Trust me. You should be here.”

With an irritated sigh, Mulder stepped back outside into the greying orange of the freshly set evening. Skinner still didn’t get it. He knew they were divided, didn’t he? Hadn’t Mulder told him, four years ago when they’d last spoken, to expect this? Weren’t Skinner and Scully close enough that he would have to know where she stood with her former partner, even if she probably didn’t really talk about it? Or at the very least, was Skinner not insightful enough to note that they were very deliberately not seen together, which should insinuate – if he wasn’t personally up-to-date with their relationship status – that they were avoiding each other for a reason?

“She doesn’t want to see me,” Mulder insisted, leaving no room for further argument, an early breeze sweeping past him. He watched as Laura Johannsson finished tossing all her siblings’ things from his backseat onto the driveway, and went to close the door for her. “Our last conversation was… strained.”

Laura had grabbed her own backpack but now turned to the scattered mess she’d created on the ground in the name of organising her brother and sister and respectfully clearing most the mess they’d made in Mulder’s car. Responsible, thoughtful beyond her years: the typical nuclear firstborn only to the highest power, because she’d suddenly become mom as well when hers had been taken away. She slung the coats over her shoulders and gathered all the activity books and pens and toys, while Mulder knelt beside her to pick up the handfuls of food packets and bottles and drink straws the children had burned through. He tucked the phone between his ear and shoulder to free his hands, though really, he should just hang up. He had nothing to say to Skinner, and nothing to offer Scully right now. Sixty-Four had been quite clear – their mission and her life could be in danger if she was further associated with him, and an emotional interview was not worth that risk.

“If she’s upset by the case, there’s nothing I can do to help,” he said finally, preparing to end the conversation and go back to Erik’s family, some people he actually could help. “Having me around will only make it worse.”

That should have been the end of it, but Skinner hadn’t forgotten the days of being his boss, and still had the authoritative voice to prove it. “Mulder, listen to me. This is bigger than you two giving each other the silent treatment.”

Mulder turned his eyes skyward, exasperated. The man was insufferable. One of his most trusted friends, yes, but insufferably impatient and blunt. Of course Skinner would reduce Mulder’s current complicated arrangement with Scully as simply reciprocal spite, and be tactless enough to actually say it.

Regardless of whether it was true, it wasn’t meant to be said, especially between two friends who hadn’t spoken in near on half a decade.

“Whatever you’re doing, drop it,” Skinner continued, his voice an impatient growl, and Mulder eyed his armful of garbage ironically, following Laura back to the new house. “Whatever it takes you, just get here. I don’t want to tell you why on the phone. I don’t want anyone to overhear.”

The email. How could he have forgotten? It had reached them after all, and it was as big as Sixty-Four had implied. When the message tone went off on the phone Sixty-Four had smuggled to Erik halfway through their epic cross-country road trip, the topic of Rebecca had inevitably come up between the men, and he and Erik had discussed Mulder’s connection to the topic and Erik’s extra information on the topic at disjointed length, whenever his kids weren’t eavesdropping in the cramped quarters. “Something about the case?” he asked, shouldering through the front door after the teenager’s loose ponytail.

“Yes, but not specifically,” Skinner confirmed cryptically, meaningfully, wilfully, sounding even more paranoid than he had when they last met. He’d said he was in a hospital, hadn’t he? So who did he think was going to be listening in on their conversation? What exactly had Sixty-Four let his friends in on, and why was Skinner so intent on involving Mulder? “And not something, someone. Someone I think you would very much like to meet, even if you still won’t admit your connection to him or his mother.”

The implication was sickeningly clear, and Mulder dropped everything except the phone. The Johannssons in the main area of the house all jumped at the sound of empty Coke bottles hitting the floor, and they looked over in concern. Laura Johannsson stopped where she was and turned to see if he was alright. She had the eyes he’d seen sightless and cloudy in Berkshire County Morgue in December, her mother’s daughter. The same eyes again, reincarnated in the offspring.

Like William. His son, with Scully’s eyes. Their perfect child, who’d settled so warmly and perfectly into the crook of his arm the first time she passed the tiny bundle over to him to hold, and looked up at him with her eyes, bright and round. Love and hope and faith and magic all rolled into one flawless being. But…

But his son was gone, lost to the big wide world, and those eyes were just another pair in a crowd of strangers, unrecognisable unless taken aside and viewed in isolation. Skinner had to be wrong. Or Mulder’s interpretation had to be wrong. Someone you would like to meet. It could be anyone. Even if you won’t admit your connection to him or his mother. There were plenty of people Mulder pretended not to know, for their own sakes or his – undercover and covert informants, sympathisers, whistle-blowers. Maybe some had mothers. There was no way Skinner was referring to William, no way he was about to interview William. William wasn’t in goddamn Wyoming, one state away from where Mulder’s own feet were currently touching the same planet. It was a ridiculous fantasy to entertain. But the words kept playing in his head, and he heard them a thousand times on fast-forward before he managed to speak, hope seizing his heart and hurting inside his chest, and he knew what he’d heard when he managed to utter only, “Walter…”

“You need to be here,” Skinner reiterated forcefully, voice low and close. “I think we found him.”

The line died, and Mulder took his phone from his ear to stare at it. Overwhelmed. Scully’s phone had called. William. Not her voice. He knelt to gather the rubbish back up, stunned into rude ignorance as the Johannssons asked if he was alright and Laura returned to help him. William. Skinner, still an ally after all this time, a surprise voice out of the past calling on Scully’s phone. And Scully was unhurt. Alive. My son is alive. Skinner and Scully working together in Wyoming. I think we found him.

It was insane to believe it. How many other people could it be?? The odds were certainly not favourable that this find of Skinner’s was Mulder’s lost treasure.

But Scully believed it. Skinner said she was shaken. Not going to handle this well. She believed it, and she didn’t believe in anything.

“I’m sorry,” he said suddenly, interrupting Erik’s second tap on the shoulder and worried inquiry. “Yes, I’m fine. Thank you. I’ve…” He looked up and tried to focus his eyes and attention on his constant companion of two and a half days. Kind eyes. Lines from laughing. A dad, a good dad, with beautiful kids. Mulder looked at their faces. They all looked alike, in different ways – a family. What did his family look like? He hadn’t seen it together in almost fifteen years. But now… it was in Wyoming. “I’ve got to go.”

#x-files #fanfic #this is how the world ends

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28 February 2020

Drinks, data, discussion

We're giving Data Bites a break in March, but if you have 4 March pencilled into your diary, there's still an opportunity to discuss all things data, as we'll be going for drinks instead. If you'd like further details, drop me a line on gavin[dot]freeguard[at]instituteforgovernment[dot]org[dot]uk.

We're also on the lookout for:

Any reflections on the first octet (thanks, Giuseppe) for a short report we're publishing in April

Suggestions for future speakers, and any subject areas you'd like to see covered

Sponsors.

Please do get in touch!

Other things in brief:

A big thank you to Vuelio and an excellent panel for a fun discussion yesterday evening on the small matter of what 2020 holds in store. (No, we didn't stand up for the key change.) More on the hashtag.

A good discussion at the IfG yesterday morning on all things outsourcing transparency. Tl;dr: we need better data and more transparency. Some thoughts and links from me here.

I was quoted in a Times article on how civil servants are using Slack, revealed after a questionable deployment of an FoI exemption (more here, here and here on FoI).

And finally... another plea for help: we're looking for all sorts of frameworks about how to think about data, information, etc. Any suggestions very welcome - via Twitter or the email address above.

Have a great weekend

Gavin

Today's links:

Graphic content

You'll either love it or hate it

Marmot Review 10 Years On (UCL Institute of Health Equity)

Gains in UK life expectancy stall after decade of austerity, report says* (FT)

Austerity blamed for life expectancy stalling for first time in century (The Guardian)

UK politics, people and public services

Deprivation profiles for Welsh Local Authorities (Jamie Whyte)

School funding (Graham for IfG)

Housing (Ian Mulheirn on a BBC briefing)

Where are all the UK's new homes being built? (Centre for Cities for BBC News)

One in 10 new homes in England built on land with high flood risk (The Guardian)

Special advisers (IfG)

Migration Statistics Quarterly Report: February 2020 (ONS)

Study the biggest driver of migration to the UK, but overall levels remain stable (ONS)

Outer London most exposed to new immigration rules* (FT)

Electoral systems across the UK (IfG)

Labour partisans (strong identifiers) are now really distinctive compared with other groups (Paula Surridge)

More (Matt Singh)

GE2019: How did demographics affect the result? (House of Commons Library)

Capital Investment: why governments fail to meet their spending plans (IfG)

The trillion-pound question (Resolution Foundation)

Coronavirus

China fall in coronavirus cases undermined by questionable data* (FT)

13,000 Missing Flights: The Global Consequences of the Coronavirus* (New York Times)

Mapping the Coronavirus Outbreak Across the World* (Bloomberg)

US politics

What Defines The Sanders Coalition? (FiveThirtyEight)

Responses to our polling on the Democratic primary (G. Elliott Morris, via Ketaki)

What the Democratic Candidates Discussed During the Debates: Annotated Transcripts* (Bloomberg - and a bit behind the data, via Petr)

Sport

Alex Ovechkin is the eighth member of the NHL's 700-goal club* (Washington Post)

Liverpool have been in a winning position for... (Opta)

Uefa’s ban on Man City does not change football’s inequality* (FT)

Will Liverpool’s machine football conquer America?* (FT)

Globalisation has left lower-league football clubs behind* (The Economist)

How We Analyzed Allstate’s Car Insurance Algorithm (The Markup)

Everything else

Are there too many central bankers?* (The Economist)

The World’s Biggest Economies Get a Jolt of Government Spending* (Bloomberg)

Some lesser known visualisation techniques to show rankings when your data is just too big for a regular bar chart (Maarten Lambrechts)

Graph workflow

What is Complexity Science? (#ComplexityExplained, via David)

Meta data

Data

The Value of Data (Bennett Institute/ODI)

It’s Now or Never for National Data Strategies (Diane Coyle for Project Syndicate, via Graham)

How do we create trustworthy and sustainable data institutions? (ODI)

Data Dialogues' participatory futures projects announced (Nesta)

Three types of agreement that shape your use of data (Leigh Dodds)

Government rejects call for DCMS to audit departments’ data-sharing rules (Civil Service World)

How can data transform our health and care system? (Nesta)

AI, algorithms

The algorithm is watching you (London Review of Books)

Data Analytics and Algorithms in Policing in England and Wales: Towards A New Policy Framework (RUSI)

Rules urgently needed to oversee police use of data and AI – report (The Guardian)

Met Police chief defends facial recognition from 'ill-informed' critics (BBC News)

RUSI Annual Security Lecture

AI = “Automated Inspiration” (Cassie Kozyrkov, Towards Data Science)

Clearview AI hack is sweet irony for privacy advocates (New Statesman)

Suppose you have to choose... (Geoffrey Hinton)

Facial recognition is spreading faster than you realise (The Conversation)

Google AI will no longer use gender labels like 'woman' or 'man' on images of people to avoid bias (Business Insider)

Innovating responsibly with data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) (LOTI)

Digital government

Getting out early feels good: meet the Defra team building a new digital service for GB exporters (Defra)

A thread about UK digital government (warning: contains half finished thoughts) (Richard Pope)

UK digital government in the 2010s - what was it all about politically? (Bennett Institute)

Why Government Leaders Need to Become Digital Leaders (Governing)

Information

Inside the infodemic: Coronavirus in the age of wellness* (New Statesman)

How the Coronavirus Revealed Authoritarianism’s Fatal Flaw (The Atlantic)

Together at last – UK’s planning and housing statistics now in one place (ONS)

About the size of a London flat (ONS)

What Africa Check, Chequeado and Full Fact have learned about tackling bad information (Poynter)

Everything else

The Markup

Slouching towards dystopia: the rise of surveillance capitalism and the death of privacy (New Statesman)

Economists should learn lessons from meteorologists* (FT)

Robert Chote interview: OBR chief reflects on ten years as the nation’s top fiscal watchdog, and how he is still a reporter at heart (Civil Service World)

'I give fusion power a higher chance of succeeding than quantum computing' says the R in the RSA crypto-algorithm (The Register)

Oracle Reveals Funding of Dark Money Group Fighting Big Tech* (Bloomberg)

Katherine Johnson Dies at 101; Mathematician Broke Barriers at NASA* (New York Times)

Katherine Johnson: NASA mathematician and much-needed role model (The Conversation)

Democracy tech will be the next hot investment space (Wired)

The perils of opening the mind (Boston Globe)

Transparency

How can outsourced public services be made more transparent? (Institute for Government)

Grammar school scoring is wrong, says father – and hopes finally to prove it (The Guardian, via Nick)

Financial secrecy is the enemy in the fight against corruption (Thom Townsend)

Who uses WhatDoTheyKnow? (mySociety)

Opportunities

JOBS: NatCen

JOBS: What Works for Children's Social Care

JOB: Head of Information Rights (National Archives)

JOB: Delivery Manager (Convivio)

JOB: Artificial intelligence and algorithms reporter (Washington Post)

JOB: Partnerships and Community Manager – Understanding Patient Data (Wellcome)

JOB: Digital innovation (city) lead (Futuregov)

MoJ on the hunt for Head of Prisons Digital Services to help end reliance on ‘monolithic supplier owned systems’ (diginomica)

FELLOWSHIP: Google News Initiative (with FT, Guardian, Reach, Independent, TBIJ, Telegraph, First Draft News)

Building trust in how you handle data: a hierarchy (ODI)

EVENT: Data Trusts 2020: from theory to practice (ODI)

EVENT: Press Play: the power of data to transform physical activity (Ipsos MORI)

EVENT: FutureFest (Nesta)

And finally...

I graphed out my unaccepted Twitter DM requests (Katy Montgomerie)

The One With All The Polling (YouGov)

Duck (Terrible Maps, via Tim)

Sliding flaws: EU publishes misleading Brexit chart (Politico)

An actual chart from the 1998 Comprehensive Spending Review (via Sukh)

Civil servants discuss the politics of Love Island on Slack* (The Times)

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