Gaughan

Reinventing English stretches the mind. We've all been saying for months the benefits that would follow if we were to somehow take the traditional structure of English education, with all its inequities and shortcomings, throw it up as high as possible, and put the pieces back together. But in a better way. Practical, no.

But Gaughan is teaching me to change what I can change, in the smallest of ways--a mindframe, a conversation, a question. Just the simple questions he asks in the first chapter, designed to examine the underlying assumptions that make up our kids, are brilliant. Too much of the time, we throw pre-packaged lessons their way, one size fits all, denying room for identity construction is in its most developmental phrase. Watch a John Hughes movie. Kids who don't like school are the ones stuck in Saturday detention. It doesn't mean they don't want to learn, just that they don't want to play the game. I don't blame them sometimes, depending on how anarchist of a mood I'm in.

Subbing gives me the chance to check out other teachers' rooms and meet different classes of kids, and I like talking to them about their lives and what they think about things. A lot of them sound like Billy--"the familiar suck continues to populate his language and his emergiving identity. No one wants to 'suck.' But if everything around you 'sucks' (at least, as you perceive those things), it is difficult to find the flowers of hope." (16) The 6th grade class I subbed for today was plagued with conflict--we had all the stereotypes present: a fat kid, a dumb kid, a funny kid, a non-verbal kid, a follower kid, a big girl, a popular girl, and a gay kid. That's not me labeling, this is how they viewed each other. And they all viewed each other as dumb, even themselves. From the moment the bell rang, I struggled to make them understand how mean their comments about each other were and prayed a fight didn't break out.

"But I don't like him!" the gay kid screamed about the fat kid.
"Darlin, don't you think you're going to have to work with people you don't necessarily like sometimes in real life?"
"It's ok," said fat kid, "I hate him too."

Sigh.

Life is harsh. It can suck, and often does. Why keep presenting learning as a sterilized desk-filled room and a scantron? Teach kids how to deal with life, to examine their culture and upbringing and how it affects them, to understand what things mean, who they are, what do they think. In the very least, don't ask them to check the horror stories some of them live everyday at the door so they can try really hard on your worksheets.

Ok. Down a notch. Back to Gaughan. Is anyone else putting this on their syllabus? I'm thinking about it.

"As teachers, I believe we silence too many conversations, in our fear of stepping out of the politically neutral perspective assigned to us by society."

I particularly like Gaughan's ideas on leaving our mark.

By the way, Mary Pierce Brosmer apparently opened a school for women writing for change.

"pure mind-stuff"

I realized lately how much our perceptions of writing, creating, connecting, etc, centered around the internet, and how they've changed, and how screwed we'd be if it shut down somehow. As I write this, my brain is working out ways to incorporate more information in various formats (pics, links, tags, vids) to make for a better blog. I've become obsessed with del.icio.us and don't know what I'd do without texting (I have unlimited texts with tmobile for $15 a month) and blogging. When encountering an unfamiliar reference, I've got Wiki on my drop-down. But I didn't know about all the cool stuff that you can do as Rheingold describes in Smart Mobs, and now I'm a little scared. I thought the cell phones that pinpoint your location were a little creepy. I hear you can also put a thing in your kid's car and track them around town like a damn dolphin. I recently received a text from a random number on April 20 encouraging me to celebrate 420. There's no doubt our tech-savvy is bursting with usefulness at the sacrifice of privacy. I actually feel a little sorry for Alec Baldwin these days, after his voicemail ranting became public property. Seems like we could do something about malaria in third world countries before perfecting real life gaydar, celebrity stalker alerts, and dating services that beep you when a potential mate is within striking distance.

It also seems the availability plus the instantaneousness (yes that's a word, I just created it) plus the sheer volume of information in our world is going to require a lot more discernment on the part of the sheep, I mean, people.

These words will be worth remembering when millions of people carry devices that invisibly probe and cloak, reach out, evaluate, interconnect, negotiate, exchange, and coordinate invisible acts of ad hoc cooperation that create wealth, democracy, education, surveillance, and weaponry from pure mind-stuff, the way the alchemy of inscribing ever-tinier patterns on purified sand invokes the same forces from the same place."

The discussion about threshold models of collection action and emergent behavior was also interesting--I used to talk to my 7th graders about the difference between a crowd and a mob before reading "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street." "Decades ago, computer scientists thought that someday there would be forms of 'artificial intelligence' ...they never thought in terms of computer-equipped humans as a kind of social intelligence." This certainly holds a lot of promise for anarchists and revolutionaries, all in their Palm Pilot.

Click here to read a fantastic online chat between a guy named Remy and Dell Customer Service. You won't regret it.

Query (especially for writing teachers)--is the pen mightier than the sword?


Simpsons episode about WOW

more of the same

I couldn't help but think about the maniac at V Tech as I read through the mountain of text for this week. It was inescapable as I waded into the part about social skills being part of the New Media Consortium's 21st century literacy, and participatory cultures. Earlier this afternoon, unable to fight off morbid curiosity, I watched the media package he sent to NBC the morning of the shootings--pictures of himself (many of them with guns), short clips of him talking crazy into the camera about random life problems, etc. I heard over the weekend that Nikki Giovanni is a prof at V Tech, and wouldn't allow the psycho into her class. Like those other kids who shot up their schools, this kid had been tormented and picked on all his life. In no way does past bullying justify the massacre of dozens of people, but it got me thinking about how many hurting kids are relying on public schools to teach them how to live and cope and communicate, and how they're falling short.

I was tempted to link Cho's video but didn't, to make a point. I will say that youtube has some interesting video responses, 2 cents, and personal stories to share about V Tech.

"Corporate cultures and their discourses of familiarity are frequently more subtly and more rigorously exclusive than the most nasty - honestly nasty - of hierarchies. Replication of corporate culture demands assimilation to mainstream norms, and this really works only if a person already speaks the language of the mainstream...these new workplace discourses can be taken in two very different ways - as opening new educational and social possibilities, or as new systems of mind control of exploitation...market-directed theories and practices, even though they sound humane, will never authentically include a vision of meaningful success for all students." (New London Group)

Most schools haven't really changed dramatically in a general sense, kids and their situations have. You can't keep teaching the same way for fifty years and expect the same results. I feel like the grading/testing/ranking effects of mass public school hurts us overall, as does the small box it forces everyone into. And I'm not saying that in a "no more teachers, no more books" kinda way, I'm taking into consideration what I've read about authentic assessments versus standardized testing, the psychology of learning, multicultural curriculum, arts-integrated curriculum, the plethora of stupid rules in place, the micromanaging of teachers, etc. I think it's kinda funny in a sad way that the New London Group article claims the most important skill students need to learn is to negotiate regional, ethnic, or class-based dialects, when in real life it seems like learning the white middle-class way to do, say, and think things is really what we're after. For the most part, attempts to validate and even respect other cultures or styles of expression are met with polite tolerance at best and fear/avoidance/persecution at worst.

"Schools regulate access to orders of discourse...the role of pedagogy is to develop an epistemology of pluralism that provides access without people having to erase or leave behind different subjectivities." (NLG) Yet we base nearly everything on a multiple-choice test. I still have nothing but admiration for teachers, but I won't be going back to the classroom myself until there are significant changes and a new administration. I appreciate the changes that some brave teachers and faithful districts are trying, using the new skills of our 21st literacy. But in real life, teachers lose their jobs if they don't do what districts and superintendents tell them to do, even if it's in the best interest of their kids, and it's the same at the administrative level and above. There are future educators who need jobs too. We need a change up at the top, someone who will follow through with what has shown to be successful.