[Sosfbay-discuss] Carol Chomsky has died

[Drew Johnson]

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: [usgp-media] Carol Chomsky has died
From:    "Scott McLarty" <scottmclarty at yahoo.com>
Date:    Mon, December 22, 2008 11:05
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Carol Chomsky; at 78; Harvard language professor was wife of MIT linguist

By Bryan Marquard
The Boston Globe, December 20, 2008
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2008/12/20/carol_chomsky_at_78_harvard_language_professor_was_wife_of_mit_linguist/


Brilliant and accomplished, Carol Chomsky taught for many years at
Harvard's Graduate School of Education and wrote oft-cited articles about
how young children learn to read. And yet, she possessed talents that
didn't easily fit on a curriculum vitae.

"She was a pretty remarkable person," said Judith Chomsky of Philadelphia,
who is married to the younger brother of Dr. Chomsky's husband, Noam. "She
was very athletic, and, until she was ill, she was fishing and water
skiing and doing things people wouldn't normally associate with her. She
played the accordion. She could fix a car. She was mechanical. I mean, she
was the one who fixed everything at the house."

Through her work in language development and psycholinguistics, Dr.
Chomsky also helped young children learn the mechanics of reading, and by
doing so gain greater social acceptance in their classrooms. Dr. Chomsky
died of cancer yesterday at her Lexington home. She was 78.

"She was a very upbeat, happy kind of a person," said Sylvia Schatz of
Burlington, who is Dr. Chomsky's sister-in-law. "She was also a very
giving person, of herself and of her thoughts, of her ideas, of her
suggestions. And she was very generous, both in material things and with
her support and help in many ways."

Among Dr. Chomsky's duties was, at times, acting as a de facto gatekeeper
for those seeking access to her husband, a linguistics professor emeritus
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose writings and political
activism made him famous in ways neither of them could have imagined when
they married in 1949.

Take two years ago, when Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, held up one
of Noam Chomsky's books during a fierce speech at the United Nations,
turning it into an overnight bestseller. Dr. Chomsky fielded phone calls
at their house and kept reporters at bay.

"Everyone wants to know what his reaction is," she told the Globe in
September 2006. "And that's on the level of gossip and of no consequence
at all."

Of consequence was her work, her family, and her friends.

Carol Schatz grew up in Philadelphia, and her mother taught at a Hebrew
school where Noam Chomsky's father was principal, she said in an e-mail
interview with The Pennsylvania Gazette, a publication of the University
of Pennsylvania. Because of the family connection, she met Noam when she
was 5, but they did not date until they were attending the university.

"I loved it there," she told the Gazette. "I found my interests; had many
excellent, even wonderful professors; and looking back, received a quite
satisfactory intellectual grounding."

A New Yorker profile of Noam Chomsky in 2003 noted "Carol was then, as she
is now, small and slightly built, though her hair was shorter - now white,
it grows nearly to her shoulders. She decided in her teens that she
disliked wearing lipstick, and she has stuck to that."

The Chomskys married in 1949, and she graduated from the University of
Pennsylvania with a bachelor's degree in 1951. A couple of years later,
they tried living on a kibbutz in Israel.

"When they were young and they were on the kibbutz, she wanted to drive a
tractor or be a mechanic," Judith Chomsky said. "Now, the kibbutz wasn't
quite ready for that. It was way before there were even words about
women's rights."

For various reasons, the Chomskys decided not to stay. They ended up in
the Boston area, where he joined the faculty of MIT and they raised their
three children.

As Noam Chomsky's political activism raised the possibility that he could
end up spending time in jail, he and Dr. Chomsky made a decision that set
the course of her professional life. Carol Chomsky went back to school and
received a doctorate from Harvard, writing a dissertation on early
childhood language acquisition.

Sylvia Schatz, who was a teacher, said, "We shared a lot of common
concerns about kids and their learning."

Dr. Chomsky's work helped children who were having difficulties learning
to read to experience life-changing moments in their classrooms, Schatz
said.

"Not only did it help the kids with their learning, but it also gave them
a great sense of accomplishment," Schatz said. "She not only contributed
the mechanics of how to read, but brought them out so they felt
accomplished and were recognized in the classroom, where before they had
been considered the low end. That is very hard for little kids."

Although Dr. Chomsky and her husband both taught in the field of
linguistics, she cautioned against assuming that their scholarship
intertwined.

"It's a very different sort of linguistics from Noam's pursuits," she told
The Pennsylvania Gazette. "I always have to laugh when people talk about
how interesting our dinner-table conversation must be since we're in the
same field."

During summer visits to Wellfleet, Dr. Chomsky taught her grandnieces and
grandnephews how to cook hamburgers on a rock that had been heated and how
to glide across the waves.

"One of my granddaughters," Schatz said, "found a picture of Carol
teaching her to windsurf on a pond in Wellfleet."

In addition to her husband and her sisters-in-law, Dr. Chomsky leaves two
daughters, Aviva of Salem and Diane of Mexico City; a son, Harry of
Albany, Calif.; a brother, J. Leonard Schatz of Burlington; three
grandsons; and two granddaughters.

Funeral plans were not immediately announced.