Discussions you probably don't have at your job

I have been working in a self-contained middle school classroom for the last 6 weeks, working with emotional and behaviorally disturbed kids. Although this has provided many interesting stories, I haven't written about it much due to confidentiality issues. But today I just had to share.

It started with two boys (we'll call them Dustin and Kendrick) working in the room on separate assignments--Dustin had to write out some strategies to deal with his lack of verbal control (he told a bunch of classmates who wanted to jump him that he'd rape them if they touched him, possibly the result of living on the street for two years with his crackhead mom) and Kendrick was working on his science lesson. His reproductive system science lesson. I was complacently reading a book when he asked me for a synonym for "anus." Caught slightly off guard, I said, "Umm..." trying to pick a non-slang term while the rotund and religious TA gasped and the other kid pipes up--"ass!" Kendrick laughed and then said, "Oh, I know--penis." I looked at the other kid, who looked as puzzled as me. The TA turned five shades of red--she normally says "fanny." She urged us to move on conversationally but I stopped her. "No, Patty. They need to know the correct terminology." God only knows what kind of situational confusion confusing anus and penis might cause Kendrick in the future.

"Kendrick," I said carefully, "the anus would be referring to your rectum--there's a synonym. Your butt, in other words. Your penis, well..yeah."

"Nuh uh!" he yelled. Refusing to believe me and Dustin (Patty cringed at her desk), he went for a dictionary.

"Anus: The opening at the lower end of the alimentary canal, through which the solid refuse of digestion is excreted." He looked up triumphantly. "See?!?"

Dustin laughed. Patty began praying. I leaned in closely and said calmy, "Kendrick? Do you have solid refuse passing through your penis?"

He blinked once. Twice. "Oh. I get it." I ignored Dustin's hysterical giggles and resumed reading.

It was a long day. Dana and I drank a few beers and watched the spelling bee. That took me down a notch.

The Creek: a Crapshoot.

I've written several times about Bull Creek. Today Dana, Bella and I got there early, round 11am, before the onslaught of families, dog-owners, river rats, and stoners arrived. We got comfortable in our stone ledge castle, jumping into slightly smelly but refreshing water and climbing back up the rock wall to dry in the sun. These two signs made me laugh a little, the first for a missing parrot and the second admonishing us to keep Bella on a leash and pick up her poop.








Some days at BC are heaven--you meet the coolest people with the best dogs, share a beer, and relax. But sometimes you see things that make you doubt the inherent goodness of humanity. I sensed trouble when what appeared to be a pregnant man, two googley kids, and a miserable-looking woman stumbled up the creek bed. He had some of the worst tattoos I'd ever seen: baby footprints (presumably his own offspring, which if you think about it metaphorically is just said) on his chest, just off matching shamrocks on his "pecs." A paint splatter surrounded by the words "Got Balls?" on one shoulder, a Notre Dame leprechaun on the other. His back was covered with a horrible mess of green, orange, and black--nothing discernable. Now I'm not going to judge a person for getting bad ink...much. However, he was dragging a sweet and terrified puppy through the water--he later pushed the poor thing off the rock, its claws extended like a Halloween cat and panic in its eyes. His lumpy wife (who most likely wore baseball caps with pony-tails through the back and glasses with snazzy white sneakers to look "hot" in her pre-child years) carried a bag in one hand and held her cigarette aloft with the other as she yelled profanities to her hapless boys. Later when Dana and I jumped in again I commented on the shame of litterers, saying we always carried out twice as much trash as we came with, and she agreed wholeheartedly as she flicked her butt into the water. I growled, wanting to steal the poor puppy and give the children to Oprah.

Nevertheless, the sky was big and blue and full of sun, and we exulted in it. Bella drank some beer and we read Redbook, learning the secrets of happily married women, recipes, and 21 spicy sex moves we already knew. The creek banks began filling up, looking like shantytowns in some spots with large families with grills and chairs setting up shop. An older guy, probably early 40's but the kind that probably lies and says 30's, began jumping in next to us again and again, doing backflips and climbing up higher to show off, egging his 6 year old to do the same. I gasped when the back of his head skimmed the rock wall, and giggled inwardly later when he gulped a mouthful of pee/dog water.

By two, the place was packed, and my drinking was constantly interrupted by having to give two persistent and incompetent middle-school girls a hand in climbing back up the wall. We decided to split, slightly incredulous at what shitheads some people are but still in good spirits and happy the day was still young--only 2pm.

Keeping with the day's theme of recreation and leisure, PBS had on a documentary called Great Old American Parks. Here. Watch.

Moxie's Summer Entertainment Preview

Dear Blog,

Sorry I haven't written. Between graduation and the subsequent loss of student loan money plus the spiraling out-of-controlness of American society, I've found it difficult to get my thoughts in order. I graduated last weekend, the parents came down and met my friends and Mark--went better than I expected. I'll be leaving the ATX in a few more months to set up shop with honey in west Texas, something I'm deliriously excited about. The times, they are a-changin', but change is good.

Until I have some solid thoughts on anything solid, here what I think of the summer entertainment lineup. First, TV: TV by and large is total crap. Aside from a few worthy shows, it's insulting, especially the commercials (that's a whole 'nother post). Two upcoming shows have at least induced a quizzically raised eyebrow:

90210. Jebus. Has it been 18 years for real? I was 10 when the original aired? From the looks of it, Jennie Garth has fared the best by nailing a 3pm sitcom with the slightly cross-eyed Amanda Bynes, unless you count Shannen Dougherty's Charmed as success. From what I can tell, the only appeal to the show is that it signals a transition tv time between horrendous daytime court and talk shows before the news and primetime come on. The remaining members of Snobbery White High or whatever high school that is can be found on milk cartoons.

Try not to get distracted by the eyebrows or the asymmetrical eyes:


The new onslaught of CW teen "talent" have updated names--Daphne, Dixon, Annie, etc. There seems to be more of a multi-cultural inclusion as well. Before you start judging, keep in mind that I've been home by myself all night with nothing to do. And I'm grumpy, so shut up. What's next, Saved by the Bell: Redux? Melrose the Second Place? I'm all for recycling, but this is ridiculous.

Another show that intrigues me in a sick kind of way is Swingtown, from CBS: "From the director of "Big Love" and "Rome," SWINGTOWN peeks into the shag-carpeted suburban homes of the 1970s to find couples reveling in the sexual and social revolution that introduced open marriages and women's liberation." Here I thought we couldn't get any sluttier. Although I'm attracted to the 70's context (as I'm sick of shows set in nowadays, as nowadays is all janky), I have a bad taste in my mouth watching these commercials, which keep showing up on my five channels of television. It tastes kind of like latex mixed with salt and shame.

Movies I'm looking forward to:





1. Batman--starring the dead and beautifully tragic Heath Ledger. I bet I'll cry.
2. Get Smart--hell yeah. I love Steve Carrell, and I loved watching the original on Nick at Night as a kid, starring Don Adams. Here's a clip of it featuring another of my heroines, the great Carol Burnett:



Decidedly Stinkers:
1. Sex in the City, the Movie--I'm a devoted fan, don't get me wrong. But here's the thing: if she gets married, it's kind of a sell-out as to her character. If she "chooses New York," not a damn person will be surprised. If he runs out on her, I'll just be depressed. I've seen all the seasons many times over, I don't need to spend $8 to see a longer version of an episode.
2. The Strangers--I don't like movies that feature people with bags on their heads.


Boy, it feels good to write again. I'll cut things off there, 2 tv shows, 2 good movies (hopefully), and 2 bad. I'm out of mixer drink so I either need to drink the vodka straight or go to bed. As I am working tomorrow, I imagine the latter is better.

Happy long weekend, hope you don't have to drive anywhere...

Design

I like Smagorinsky, and liked his piece with Michelle Zoss and Patty M. Reed about vocational classes such as interior design or shop and the status they're given in schools, compared with more legit and brainy activities like reading and doing math. They spend some time discussing motive--a topic tragically overlooked in many classrooms. It was the same way when I was in high school--vocational ed kids were the ones who weren't good at doing school, and were unfairly considered academic losers. In reality, they were probably learning a lot more useful stuff and having a lot more fun than us nerds stuck in Calculus (which I have NEVER used and suffered considerable agony to half-learn), and most likely making a lot more money than I will be. Clearly schools need to get their priorities crooked and look at, as the authors say, the value of cultural and psychological tools as well as traditional literacies. Plus it was great to listen to students excitedly problem-solve and think through their projects, rather than the resistant attitude we often see from students.

Hmm, I wonder where these negative connotations come from:

I will be honest--I did not enjoy the Burn and Parker article, although the decisions, process, and editing of film is interesting to me, especially after working with the Alamo for several years and being part of the conversation on new and innovative flicks. An article dissecting the grammar of film seems unnecessary for some reason--maybe because the kids I work with have nothing resembling access to a production like this. Grammar of regular old print text is boring in of itself, especially when teased apart from language as a sentence-diagramming worksheet chore. I can't quite put myself in the right frame of mind to evaluate methods of studying "digital moving image texts." I don't know if it's because the authors are Londoners (seems like context is an important enough idea to be wary of research done outside America) but that was one of many terms and phrases used in Digital Inscription and Animation that sounded weird in my head. Thus, I couldn't really get it. Maybe it was because I read this article last or maybe I am just out of patience after working in a BD unit for the last week and broke for the last two, but phrases like synchronic syntagm, diachronic syntagm, spatiotemporal grammatical system, interpersonal metafunctionand spectatorial grammar just get on my nerves. I know that's not a very academic attitude, but it's my blog and that's my opinion. However: my interest was piqued by Eisenstein's theory of montage I think the idea of the montage is a more useful framework in approaching many aspects of life and education: a collection, the impact of connected images, peoples' thoughts and stories--a montage does more to capture the complex context of a seemingly-simple theme or idea.

Like the Brits' article, Jody Shipka's piece was...nice...no really, it was good. But again--for the vast majority of schools I've visited in this urban, diverse city are so far out from what she was able to do with her students: "I have been inviting students to chose [sic] (that's right, there's a typo) their mix of materials, methodologies, technologies and rhetorical strategies for the past nine years." That's great if you don't have to deal with TAKS testing and were allowed to do what you want as a teacher. It's a great article--I particularly liked the American Museum of Greed project, but I wanted to put it in Mr. Pat Forgione's hands.

Bezemer and Kess focus on the effects of text and image in curriculum from the 30's, 80's, and our current digital age. By starting out with a clarification of important concepts (mode, medium, site of display, frame), this piece becomes a good foundation for Shipka's and the Brits' type of work. The appealing and artistic vibe of this line of study is the emphasis on transformation--the changing and rearranging process, the unfixed-ness of the final product, the flux and flow of building and rebuilding one's world. The real education of adjustment, the shades of meaning, rather than a fixation on an absolute answer. Although this sounds like absolute hippie talk, the kind of nonsense coming out of a New Age Music teacher's mouth, these analyses of transduction/transformation and social repositioning were done on math and science textbooks, as well as writing.

frontline video I was talking about

je

Full story

"the productive pursuit of serious fun"

For the fifth time over the last year, I left my Macbook charger at work. Work meaning school, meaning not open again til Monday. No problem, I thought, pulling out the heavy Dell. I turned it on and frowned--the screen was all skittery and crazy. I panicked--I did not know if I could make it three days without internet. How would I know what's going on? Talk to people? Read random things? Write? Check things? Find new things? Then Roommate #1 told me to give it a little slap on the side, and sure enough, things straightened out. You know, like how you slap someone freaking out to calm them down. This anecdote serves to illustrate Thomas and friends' points about the ubiquity of digital literacies.

Angela Thomas takes on a lot of cool topics like cyborgs, cyberpunk, myspace, sexual identities, and Freud in her article, Digital Literacies of the Cybergirl. I've always been fascinated with the body/soul connection, and it was interesting to see how that plays out in cyberspace and in identity-construction. I was reminded of a 60 Minutes or Dateline or some such melodramatic program about the overwhelming popularity of Myspace and its effects on teens, some with tragic endings. I remembered this girl, who was kind of a loser at her school and very lonely, had a penchant for edgy clothes, hair, and makeup and picture-taking talent became an almost overnight cyberlebrity (I made up that word), with hundreds of complete strangers adoring, friending, and commenting on her Myspace page. It was edgy, but not over the line skanky like some profiles you'll run across. However school officials and parents were notified, undies were bundled, and the girl's parents made her delete her profile and her pictures. A tear slid down her face as she remembered how they stood behind and made her erase herself. In real life, she was the weird girl who wasn't skinny or mainstream enough to be liked, but online she was a queen.

Thomas uses some Freud (which you don't see much) to discuss our obsession with the visual, using the term "scopophilia," meaning pleasure in looking, to describe one of the most important of our human drives. This could explain why Martino's study found that young males like porn. And see here is where writing may or may not show the note of sarcasm in my voice right now. Thomas studies the choice of avatar used in girls' profile, and although I see what she's saying, I think she went to far in her interpretation and classification of her subjects' choices. That seemed a little too subjective. I think the influence of the Barbie and Bratz dolls lining our shelves and our Disney princesses and our adoration of cinema waif-ers should be included in any discussion of beauty and its interpretation.

Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto is now on my to-read list: "The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion." Returning to the ideas of the bodyembodiment, and reality, I am reminded of Dwight's Second Life from The Office:


Incidentally, I watched my friend Dana play Sims Bustin Loose over the weekend, as she made and lost friends, slept, forgot to go to work, and sat in a hottub--all of which she does in real life as well.

I noticed while reading the Lanshear and Knobel piece that I can't read linearly online. My eyes jump around, I click on links, I skip sentences, but eventually it all gets read. I totally love Adbusters. I love that the authors used two of my favorite words--gonzo and karma. Lankshear and Knobel spend the second half of the article thoughtfully discussing research approaches to new literacies after wowing readers with the possibilities they hold.






Culture jamming should be a national past time. It should be a required course, a degree program, a profession, an Olympic sport. We need to be asking questions, people. Getting to the bottom of things. Or at least making fun of them. An earlier post of mine features an Onion video of Bush giving a press conference on the threat of zombie attacks (check the tag 'zombies' to your right). I checked out Plastic and I like it. "Plasticians tend to be self-styled members of an erudite, ironic and humorous ‘plugged in’ crowd, interested in quirky takes on anything newsworthy—particularly anything connected with popular culture—as well as in serious and informed discussion of current events." That's me, ironic. I like blogs for making it easy to zoom around and link these things, to check sources, to organize the mountains of content, for incorporating visual, text, and video. And I'm very critical of blogs too--if I had a dollar for every proud mother's blog consisting of 5-10 daily pictures of her bliss-bundle and inane commentary on surbuban domestic whathaveyou, I could probably buy one of those babies. You can see for yourself, just click "next blog" up in the top left (after reading mine, of course) and blogger will take you to a random blog. There's actually a game where you do that and see how many blogs you can click through before stumbling upon a porn blog. I think the record is 10). From what I've seen, there is a big handful of intelligent blogs that concern themselves with provoking thought, asking questions, encouraging discussion. And there's a big old bucket full of, well, crappy blogs. I just hope that more attention is pulled towards the relevant stuff of life, and less toward celebrity gossip and silly wastes of time. As long as the blog serves its author's purpose, people can do whatever they want with it. In regards to their ability to cross-reference quickly, incorporate media, and allow for collaboration, blogs are rad.

The Hawisher and Selfe article was very long, because their point (I think) is the complexity of how one comes to digital or new literacies. Obviously inspired by Brandt's sponsors of literacy book, these authors draw some important conclusions about conditions of access to technology, literacies' life spans, personal agency, the role of school and family as gatekeepers, and generational transfer of digital know-how. As in many studies, the authors call for improved teacher training so that we may fully use technology to its most beneficial. Resource inequities are a tragic problem for underfunded, under-served schools, and really puts those schools' kids at a serious disadvantage as reliance on technology in the workplace only grows and grows and higher education becomes more and more expensive. Although, as the authors say, the schools are not necessarily the biggest or most important sponsor of literacy. I'm often reminded of the 8th grade student who gleefully confided in me about his ability to get around the firewalls set in place by AISD servers, thus accessing his precious Myspace account. That's real problem solving. Too bad there are no TAKS questions on that.

The rich keep getting richer, the poor continue to get poorer. But that's another post.

The end.

"Jender"

Wayne Martino really knows how to start out an article. You remember how your English teacher used to talk about having a attention-getting first sentence?

"Boys who enjoy reading or like English have been referred to as 'faggots', 'squids', 'spocks', 'try-hards or simply just as rejects by their peers."

Well. Ok then.

Incidentally, Martino also wrote a chapter entitled "Dickheads, Wuses, and Faggots: Addressing Issues of Masculinity and Homophobia in the Critical Literacy Classroom for a book. While I appreciate Martino's daring word choice and agree to the inclusion of this issue for research's sake, I contest his spelling of "wusses." Dictionary.com backs me up.

Not surprisingly, Martino finds that boys disengage with passive, "feminized" activities, into which they (a bunch of Australian boys) group reading--clearly these boys have not read any transactional theory a la Rosenblatt. Less surprisingly, Martino claims boys like...porn. Here Martino draws upon his gender argument, that concepts of masculinity and male literary practices blah blah blah--look, his "study" interviewed boys on their thoughts on reading, and they either said they didn't like it and it was boring, they like some types of texts (sci-fi or adventure or sports) or they liked it a lot and saw it as an escape from reality. I don't think Martino's telling us anything new or significant. All students at times express these thoughts (that reading is boring, that only certain books are any good), and during adolescents, they are constantly trying on new identities and attitudes to assert their independence and show they are tough--it was around this age that I first savored the full power of a well-delivered F Bomb. I applaud Martino for using the word "tits" in an academic article (in quoting a participant), but I'm not impressed by his "study."

Mollie Blackburn, on the other hand, study the out-of-school literacies and power held and experienced by LBGTQ youth while working for and researching literacy performances at The Loft in NY for a number of years. She knows that kids are only in school part of the time, and that away from school, they are both aware of the power dynamics at play in identity formatice and literacy, and work to change them. In this study, this is done by collaborating on a glossary of terms used to describe LBGTQ people, thereby taking the power of labeling out of the hands of outsiders and re-situating their own identities and definitions. She draws on queer theory, critical race theory, and critical feminism (all of which slightly contradict each other--queer theory seeks to suspend classifications of identity while critical feminism makes gender the center of issues studied, same with CRT with the concept of race) to approach the multiple identities working within this group and these performances. Moreover, she stresses the power of literacy performances for social justice and change. The Speaker's Bureau, a noted group within the Loft) works to disrupt power dynamics by educating others about homophobia and heterosexism (which assumes that everyone is straight). To be gay, a female, and a minority...Gloria Alzadua's writing continues to poke me in the back as I try to read other things (when I get home, I'll get out Borderlands to find the quote I'm thinking of).

Finally, Barbara Kamler looks at gender in early childhood writing, finding that despite being given freedom to choose their topics, children in Australia (what's with all the Aussies?!) typically wrote in the observation genre, reporting on what they've seen and done in their own lives. Boys in this study overwhelming wrote themselves into their stories as active do-ers while girls positioned themselves as passive experiencers (can't say I'd have fallen into that myself--the stories I used to write in elementary school were usually made up, and I typically made myself the superhero of the tale, so what does that say? Furthermore, I once pitched a fit at McDonald's because I wanted a Transformer in my Happy Meal and not a damn doll--I was the inheritor of a great collector of Matchbox cars from my older brother and a single Barbie with crappy clothes and a Ken doll whose head consistently came off from my sister). Anyway, Kamler's study (which includes only 2 children although she studied them for almost 3 years) argues that "children, as they learn to write are gaining control not only of the written mode of language, but also of the gendered meanings of their culture." I don't contest that point at all, but as with the Martino study, there are so many complex and variable influences on one's identity that work together and in juxtaposition with each other; gender and the context in which it's presented throughout childhood is only one factor.

Kamler argues that gender is often overlooked, but I pose a different question--if we are lending credence to the shaping concepts of gender on identity, what impact does the overwhelmingly female teaching population have on education? How do male and female roles play out in the minds of the young when they typically see female teachers and male administrators? What do they think of power dynamics when Mom does the cleaning and Dad has the job? When the plumber and the mechanic and the electrician are all men, and the waitress and the flight attendant and the maid are all women? All of these decisions are fine, do whatever you want to do with your life, but we should be providing narratives of "non-standard" or non-traditional gender roles as well.

Kamler's weakness (besides using a single pair for study) lies in attributing to particular writing behaviors and choices to gender, when little Peter and little Zoe were many things besides a little boy and a little girl--they were white (I'm assuming), Australian, members of a family and community and town, possibly little brother or little sister--all these things went into their choices, not just gender. Everything we know about how to act is a product of our socialization, and is socially reproduced when we reduce some behavior as a trait of gender. Hence the title of this post--I (Jen) am who I am, talk like I talk, write and read like I write and read because of who I am, not just because of my gender or race, etc.
Just in case gender confuses you, however, here's Zachary to clear things up:


Also, here is a sheik describe the difference between men and women:


We can laugh about it, and it's something we'll fight each other on til the end of time, and it provides much of the fodder used in sitcoms, but when it comes to discrimination and oppression, I will second Kiri's directive from Blackburn's article in saying, "suck my cock."