Roger Ebert: I ain’t a pretty boy no more
Wednesday, April 25th, 2007
Roger Ebert, film critic, has cancer in his salivary glands and jaw and has had disfiguring surgeries to remove the cancer. He can’t talk. Yet, his spirit is still very much alive and he’ll attend his Ninth Annual Overlooked Film Festival in Chicago.
Inspirational.
(Source Signal vs. Noise.)
Richard, thanks for posting this piece. I’ve been a fan of Roger Ebert for a long time (I’m a big movie buff). I don’t always agree of course with his opinions but always appreciate how he looks at movies. Reading his commentary about his illness, I felt sad for his current plight but totally appreciative and inspired by his plucky attitude.
His comment about (my paraphrase) ‘being ill is not fun, but you can have fun while you’re sick” is great and reflects a perfect attitude towards finding opportunity within challenges.
The article also reminded me how you can’t judge a book or anything else solely by its look. In education adults and other kids for that matter, too easily make snap judgements about kids based on looks (symmetrical face or physical disability). Take the time to see and hear who someone is within the wheelchair or whatever…what a concept!
Learning disabilities have been called the hidden disabilities for good reason I suppose. Yesterday I was having a conversation with a 20 year old young man who has some learning differences (some struggles at times with attention, reading comprehension and working memory). Anyway it was fascinating to listen to his description of how he sees words as pictures and sometimes colors; how it’s not always a quick process to recode back into words (for writing or talking). The point is that although he definitely has some things to learn (strategies for writing, reading, how to get out of his own way
, etc), his intelligence and unique processing style is buried under the surface but potentially a source of good stuff.
For me, Ebert’s reminder that looks, while important, are not everything was also a co-incidental reminder for the rest of us to slow down enough to appreciate the variety (and look) of various learning styles.
The source of the Ebert thread “Signal vs. Noise” looks pretty cool as well.
Sandy: The Ebert piece is inspirational and a nice kick in the butt for all of us who forget how good we have it.
37 Signals is one of the most creative web design agencies around and one of their free collaborative tools is Writeboard which I posted about a while back here:
http://www.ldresources.org/?p=1167
They have many others but WriteBoard is particularly meaningful to people with learning disabilities: collaboration is a great way to learn how to write and the versioning tools in WriteBoard are fantastic.