What Makes Us Moral

saw this article from Time online, titled "What Makes Us Moral." More class-related blogs coming soon.

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crazy bus folk, part two

As a sort of informal research project, I began listening intently to people on Cap Metro's southbound route 3 that takes me to school. Crazy interesting shit happens on the bus. Today's was the best in a while:

I boarded shortly after one pm after conferring times with some crazy dude with bandaids on his arms who was talking to a fairly normal looking guy about the location of a certain hospital. He didn't seem quite as normal when he pulled out a huge empty prescription bottle and said he was new in town, from Houston, going to go refill his friend's prescription of hydrocodone. Huh. Then Bandaid Man pulled out a similarly empty bottle, and they guffawed together for sharing a mission. Bandaid Man had just gotten out of the hospital for a staph infection, which he continued to describe in gruesome detail as we got on the bus. At this point I had trained myself to stop listening. Instead I focused on the bus driver.

Most female bus drivers are either so nice they'd bring you a cupcake if you told them tomorrow's your birthday or so mean they'll not only not let you take your water on the bus but berate you on your weight or hair at the same time. Today's driver was of the latter sort. She honked irratically and swerved like a Kennedy on a boat. At the Koening stop, an equally angry disabled lady got on the bus. "Are all these people disabled?" she barked at the driver, gesturing to Bandaid Man and a dorky girl suffering from a broken foot and acne.
"Ma'am, just get on the bus," the driver moaned.
"Don't boss me around!" she growled. Bandaid Man and seemingly normal guy continued their discussion in front of me, and seemingly normal guy gave him a few of the pills he had left. I continued reading Tom Robbins and tried not to laugh. Dorky pimply broken foot girl looked like she was going to cry, and angrily texted someone about the injustices she was suffering.

For the next five or so minutes, the driver struggled to get the wheelchaired lady buckled. Her habit of backing up sharply (as if in her walking life she constantly made sneak turns and scared people and had continued her aggressive moving into wheelchairhood) knocked the seatbelt out of the driver's hands twice. She had really worked up a sweat trying to reach around the lady to get that seatbelt, too. Any attempts at directing a collaborative effort were met with the warning "don't boss me around."

We finally got buckled and arranged and were about to lurch off when the man at the stop told us we were leaking antifreeze, which resulted in five more minutes of phone calls and head shaking, bitching and clock watching. I was glad I didn't have class til four. It was a beautiful day. Tom Robbins held me in the weirdness of the moment:

"Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route."

thank you, nice white lady

shape shifting

I found myself nodding my head and occasionally saying "yeah" outloud while reading chapter 9 at the coffeehouse (understandable as it was written by one of the Gee brothers), luckily there are always some weirdos at coffeehouses. Today it was the girl reading and talking to herself.

Hello? Life has changed. People can’t expect to stay in the same job moving ever gradually up in the ladder their whole lives any more. The age of computer programming (in terms of the model of mind being like a computer with certain formulas and projected answers to slotted outcomes) is over--now we use rapidly evolving technology to enhance the person side of us rather than the other way around. "Identities today take work, a person is expected to craft them out of available social and cultural resources. A person is expected to take on new identities through life, dropping some, changing others, and taking on new ones." (166) We know narratives, story-telling, collaboration, authentic questions, critical thinking, all these things should be making up our classroom practices. And I think technology addresses all these things, but isn't being connected to education enough.

Gee examines particularly the identity-forming potential of current media, despite reluctance and inability to give true equitable experiences with all available technology in the classroom. This would scrape too hard the scab of traditional schooling. Jazus, we can't be letting the kids carry their Ipods and cell phones around willy-nilly! We can't let them chat or look at music videos online, are you crazy? There are no TAKS questions on that kind of thing. Plus, hell, they might enjoy it, and we can't have that. Plus who has the time or the desire to sit around and try to figure out ways to tie personal technology and communication to learning? Certainly not a grad student, that's for sure. Har.

Taking that idea a step further, Brian and I discussed during break once all the components of symbolic interactionism and self-fashioning available via....wait for it.....Myspace. My boyfriend claims to have contracted myspace from a public restroom somewhere in Oklahoma. It has that effect on you. Of course the space that is yours has its limitations (its trendiness being the first), there are only a fixed number of ways to express who you really are, but still, your username, your song, your pictures, your videos, your groups, your quote, your layout, who your top friends are (and in what order, and dammit you better be careful about that), which comments you approve/deny, the comments you leave others, the 'about me' section, the interests section, the blog, etc...all these things attempt to present a digital version of you. You form yourself. You shape your identity, and continue shaping. And of course it's a playground for pedophiles, phonies, porno-hopefuls, and other losers, but you gotta take the good with the bad. More importantly, you have to teach people how to use the tools. But did anyone teach our kids to do myspace stuff? No. That's my point. If there's something a kid latches onto, almost innately knowing how and liking to do things, we owe it to him to connect it to his classroom. Not in a dissecting, scientific, TEKS aligned way, but to consider it knowledge and not playing around. Kids LIKE using technology--they're not scared of it like my parents, or unable to use it in a meaningful way that will enhance their lives.

I'm starting to think that educational equity is tied to the amount of opportunities and experience (with an emphasis on exploration) we can give students, but opportunities are tied not only to economic resources but also to trust. Do we trust that students can benefit from multiple literacies? Trust goes back to underlying beliefs and values. Chapter 12 talks about the differences in search skill (in analyzing the experiences students of different SES attempting to conduct online research) being due to difference in symbolic capital, number of opportunities, prior academic experiences and families' economic realities, and calls for deliberate instructional practices by teachers who understand reproduction theory.

Here's why we really need to be teaching digital literacy:

Cars

I had to laugh. "There are well-off people who buy neobugs from VW, others who buy Mercedes, and yet others who get Hummers. These are different types of people, displaying, reinforcing, and creating their identities through the objects and services they buy." (165) Having a mechanic best friend and a car salesman boyfriend, I've had this conversation before. For the record, I have driven (in chronological order) an 87 Nova, a 98 Cavalier, a 90 Geo Metro Convertible (Gawd, that car), a 2000 Focus, and a 2007 Fusion. The Fusion is by far the nicest thing I've ever driven, and the fact that I got it after blowing out a tire, spinning around on I-35, and crashing into the wall makes it even more important. That was a life-affirming day.
Cause I'm proud:






Something interesting from the half-bakery. More reading to do.

determined

It figures that Chapter 7 caught my attention the most, since that was one of the chapters we didn't have to read for class. Didn't realize that til after I read it. But I'm glad I did, because the concept of agency is one that's not only important to me as an educator but as a person just trying to live her life. But first, a word from the anti-NCLB movement, ala Alvermann: "Accountability-based reading reforms which emphasize high standards, clear expectations and strict consequences fail to address this important aspect of the literacies in adolescent's lives. These reforms portray adolescents as little more than passive figures for educators to control rather than as active independent and richly detailed human beings for educators to advise and assist."

The case of persuasive writing as described in the Nespor study reminded me of the book I'm reading for sociolinguistics where three studies were cross-analyzed to examine the role of identity in appropriating, resisting, or transforming classroom expectations. Sounds riveting, I know. It was the transformer students I felt drawn too, as they are exceedingly rare in a world where individual drive and choice is only superficially encouraged. These students knew how to play the game the teacher wanted played and got the grade but used the literacy practices in their classrooms to meet their own needs and agenda as well.

I've been looking for a way to incorporate a recent trip to Iowa for a wedding into a blog somewhere, and this is perfect. It had been a while since I'd been to a midwestern church wedding. I had forgotten all the rules you have to follow--how to act. Stand in this line, say this polite thing, meeting this person, sit at this table, wait in line, do this, do that. All draped over by a web of niceties and falsity that made me stabby. Add to this the agency-lacking ridiculousness of multiple airports--take off your shoes, wait in line, go stand in this line, arms out, nothing more than 3 ounces, be here at this time. Growl. It was alleviated to some degree knowing that my close band of a dozen or so friends had, like me, been anarchists from our freshman days of college together and were suffering as much as me--always the ones to cuss in inappropriate contexts, skip class and chapel, argue in class, be openly gay (not me but my roommate--this was a big no-no on our tiny conservative Christian campus), drink on the dry campus, smoke within 15 feet of the door, talk about inappropriate shit, consume approximately 65% of the booze available at the reception, and not get seriously involved in relationships or have the desire to be engaged by graduation. We are travelers, wonderers, non-conformists. It was nostalgic, the dirty looks we received from the good folk who follow rules and have happily/ignorantly constructed their lot in life by age 22. That's not to say we're Billy Badass or something, it's just that it was such a ideologically-strangling place to try to experience college. This is the center of predestination Reformation theology. As soon as I understood this concept as a church-going child, I didn't buy it. That's not to say I don't believe in God, either. Complex.

Here's the crew two seconds after the I Do's were did, rushing out to smoke on the corner.


I've always blamed my dissenting on my birth order--if you consider what we've discussed in terms of the social nature of learning and development, it makes sense that early childhood interactions with siblings and parents have a huge impact. I'm the baby. I want my way. That's how I'm wired after growing up the youngest and having to fight for a voice. I also have smackings of only child in me, as both siblings were out of the house by the time I was eight. And I know what you're thinking, but I was not spoiled. NOT. Click here if you like stupid quizzes.

Advocacy for human freedom includes a few concepts Alvermann explains: dismissing freedom means eliminating moral responsibility for human behavior (as people do what they're compelled to do), it eliminates hope of a better life, and it negates the concept that people can and do make decisions that could have been alternate decisions constantly. I had never thought of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, structuralism, and post-strucutalism as predeterministic vehicles of agency denial.

Viktor Frankl's home as a prisoner of the Third Reich:

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way...there were always choices to make, every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, you inner freedom." Viktor Frankl

So what does this mean? Alvermann: "these quotations illustate - people are free to interpret the events of their lives. This freedom of interpretation keeps peoples' past and current situations from determining their future. It is the essence of human agency." (135)

You know when you meet people with no agency. You will know them by the trail of anger and unhappiness, failed relationships, addictions, sketchy job history, and in some cases, criminal records. The inability to make decisions that benefit them. It's sad. We've all been there.

In any case, when it comes to what the world wants you to do, what you need to do to get by, and what you need to do to be happy, be a transformer. And not a Decepticon.