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.

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.