The Line

“The spring over there takes you by the throat, the flowers blooming by the thousands over white walls. If you strolled around for an hour in the hills surrounding my town, you would return with the odor of honey in your clothes.” — Albert Camus

My students know this instinctively, and I’ve been in a bit of awe this week at the teacher-class relationship which has apparently also so blossomed, in spite of my multiple missteps this year, that instead of dragging in and disengaging in favor of honey in their clothes, they throw their cards right on the table: “Ms. S, can we go outside?”

Truthfully, they know they have a sympathetic ear. I try to honor this request whenever I can justify it academically, which is fairly often– one of the joys of teaching English. Nothing like honing the powers of observation while outdoors. Additionally, by happy accident, the novel we are about to embark upon, A Day No Pigs Would Die, begins and ends in April. We are tracking its content under the essential question Why was this novel 17th on the list of Top 100 Books Banned for the decade? as a continuation of our unit on the First Amendment.

The unit I’ll try next, as it turns out, is going to really offer my throat to Spring: it’ll be based on a workshop I’ll take in August through the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, called the Leopold Education Project.

For more and more I am convinced that this is a fundamental need of children that I am (frankly) morally bound to address immediately: In content, to be able to negotiate decent scientific nonfiction with confidence. In communal responsibility, to understand the finite, fragile, and internconnected nature of our resources. And in plain ol’ to get the heck outside– especially in the face of continued and ever-widening acceptance of physical digital isolation.

Such a unit cannot be solid milk chocolate sunlit meadows and daffodils, though. One of the first “wilderness texts” I read and loved was Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and it comes to mind with a vengeance now. Its first image is one of a frog being liquidated from the inside by a preying water bug. Yummy.

I have to square this with the inimitable sense of belonging I can find nowhere else but out in the woods– the same impulse that drives my kids to bombard me with “Can we go outside?”I struggle with it, as Annie does throughout the entirety of Tinker Creek. The late Stephen Jay Gould, the brilliant Harvard biologist, terms this aspect of nature “non-moral” in an essay that uses similar gruesome examples of predator and prey– I don’t know about you, but bugs seem to have cornered this market.

It’s what causes me to balk when folks suggest that a complete moral code, or system of meaning, may be found entirely with nature or nature’s metaphors. Sorry– I can get with cycles and our bodies being made of elements that are only created within stars, but the bugs. You’ve got to explain the bugs. CS Lewis had to write several whole essays on the problem of pain in the animal kingdom to try and do it.

Beyond that, I know well that if I break my ankle in the Adirondacks backcountry winter with no survival equipment, the mountains will look upon me in their loveliness, unmoved, as I fade away. Funny, perhaps, that this might also be the source of my sense of peace. The trees will never say anything as mean-spirited or abusive to me as I will to myself. Such as how I overphilosophize about my units.

Anyway. These are the things I will somehow have to repackage for profitable consumption for 7th graders. Maybe in a pill? Nah– someone’s tried it already.

So at TMAO’s Teaching in the 408, I stumbled over his bludgeoning of a recent San Jose Mercury News article on how the attitude of “school is uncool” may be culturally transmitted, specifically by Latinos. And I said to myself: now here’s a nice, relaxing topic to blog on over Spring Break.

Some disclaimers before I continue. I have some experience in this area– I teach in the most racially and economically diverse district in our county outside our city, and have been an ESL teacher for some years—but I’m not even going to pretend this compares to TMAO’s teaching situation. So there’s that.

Nevertheless.

So someone says: it’s not cultural. It’s not in our students’ DNA, or in their baseline assumptions, or transmitted through Cinco de Mayo.

And someone else says: of course it’s culture, you idiot. What else do you call a communally and generationally propagated set of beliefs?

The blows begin, and the conversation ends. And I find myself wishing heartily that Socrates were around.

In his spirit, let’s start with a challenging statement from Gloria Ladson Billings, the former president of AERA and an educator I revere: that most teachers (and by extension, news reporters?) use the word “culture” as a catchall explanation for any anti-school behavior they cannot explain from their students. Dr. Ladson-Billings goes on to suggest elsewhere (and TMAO and his commentator Rebecca Bell agree) that the domino effects of socio-economic status should not be defined as “culture.” And it’s useful, and in many ways accurate, to narrow the definition of “culture” in this way, I think.

However, I now think about European Jews coming out of the unspeakable evil of the Holocaust. To say that such an experience did not become a part of Jewish culture, uniquely shaping their shared sense of history, priorities, and challenges, would be patently ridiculous. And while I would never wish to generalize the Holocaust’s unique horror, I don’t think it’s going too far to say that aspects of what many of our poor minority kids experience are analogous: the socioeconomic deprivation, the ghettos, the pervasive violence, the discrimination. Is it possible to state that the effects of a mass, long-lived injustice such as this are not, or don’t become, cultural for them? I wonder.

Next, consider TMAO’s important point in his post that culture is not a monolith, has dozens of facets and overlapping layers, and can not be treated as a singular thing via one or two quotes from kids who say what you want them to say so you can print your newspaper article. Right on.

However, now consider the flip side: the theory that among these many overlapping cultures, the young people we work with do have, in fact, an undeniable culture that is all their own. What is the community, after all, in which they physically spend most of their waking hours? It’s their peers– in school. (Linda Perlstein’s Not Much, Just Chillin does a lovely job of investigating a particular local kid school culture in Maryland.) Is it inaccurate, then, to suggest that kid-driven microculture—particularly ones in disadvantaged schools– might propagate school-negative attitudes? I wonder.

And I keep wondering. I wonder if the question is not, in fact, whether the attitude that “school is uncool” is “cultural”. For twist the arbitrary lens one way, and it is cultural; twist it another, and it isn’t. Given this, I wonder—truthfully, for the first time—if the whole debate of “what is cultural” is at base merely rhetorical slight of hand. And as such, with all due respect to the brilliant minds involved, I wonder if it is a waste of time.

I wonder if it begs for reframing: the asking of a much deeper, broader, harder question.

I wonder if the deeper question is this: whether the students and/or the communities who might take such anti-school attitudes are doing so by choice— and if so, whether that choice is justified.

The axis of that question, of course, being one of responsibility. And isn’t that the heart of hearts of any question of social injustice? Who is responsible?

Simple questions. Massively complex answers, involving a rubric several miles deep and wide. Getting into it would take a whole other conversation, involving a multiplicity of cooperative disciplines, each willing to pull no punches– especially on themselves. But I guess that’s my point.

For just one example, instead of throwing their muckrakes around, I’d like to see the San Jose Mercury News take on the American mythology of individualism, “hard work”, and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-against-all-odds success, and how that crashes up against the daily lived truths of our poor kids– especially non-native ones.

I’d like to see TMAO, in turn, take on the idea that this very mythology might inaccurately color his perspective on what might be accomplished for these kids by decent schools– or a talented, caring teacher such as himself—independent of much more sweeping socioeconomic change.

I’d like to see Gloria Ladson-Billings write a book specifically on whether there’s any truth at all to this dominant paradigm mythology, and where and how demanding its fruits of our students—and ourselves– is warranted.

And I’d like to see all of us junk any conversation that smacks of a soundbyte or a silver bullet, and talk about how we in public education might address, fruitfully, the entire nexus of influences that make up our children: individual responsibility; media; family; community; ethnicity; economics; nationality; history.

It ain’t pretty. It sure is harder than deciding whether “school is uncool” is “cultural.”

But it’s the only way we’re going to get anywhere.

Dear Lupe,

Did you ever wish that you could save the world?

Awhile back a student of mine, in seventh grade English, turned in an assigned poem. I loved its simplicity, its rhythm, the way the lines broke on the page. What made my heart even more glad was that it was from a kid I’ve been trying to reach for several years now.

Anyway. I was so proud of him that I posted the poem on my teacher blog earlier this week. And that’s where I found out he hadn’t written it at all. He had plagiarized “Kick, Push,” and confirmed that he had done it deliberately when I asked him about it. And not knowing your rap until this week, I had no idea.

It’s been an interesting journey, these past few days. I’ve cried once or twice. I’ve rethought how I give and support assignments for second language kids. I’ve been surfing your sites, pulling up your stuff on Youtube. I’ve fallen in love with your work. And I’ve rejected completely the punitive coercion that could serve as the consequence for plagiarism in my school. That stuff won’t work. This kid is too smart.

The only thing that will work, I’ve come to realize, is if, somehow, he talks to you.

This might strike you as overkill. What is plagiarism, after all, next to cheese heroin addiction, or teenage pregnancy, or gang bangs? But I would argue that it’s just this kind of tiny, critical choice, and how it’s handled by the adults involved, that can tip the balance in a pre-adolescent kid. Towards a life that is ruled by a living sense of the dignity of human beings, or suffocated with the stale mediocrity of selfishness. Towards a life fortified against amorality, or one that invites it in—in small ways now, and perhaps much worse ones later.

So now is the time.

I don’t really know what I am asking you for. Five minutes on speakerphone would do it. Perhaps a letter. Something that makes you real to my kid. Something that it is not yet, or may never be, within my power to do– try as I might.

Because you see, it’s not enough that you’re like a god to him; it’s not enough that he listens to you constantly and can recite your raps with passion and accuracy from memory in the middle of class. None of it matters—not the poetry, the positive role model, or the message—unless he internalizes it enough to know that in the destructive habit of taking the short, easy way out, he cheats everyone. You. All of us. And most importantly, himself.

I can’t guarantee that this will save the world. Maybe not even this kid. But it might. Will you bank on hope, with me?

Please give me a call.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I’ll be sending this via snail and email to Lupe’s production company, 1st and 15th Entertainment. Anyone else got any bright ideas? Contacts I can use? How much does a full page ad in the Chicago Times cost?

Thanks to both old friend Linda and new friend Patrick for these two tags. The topics are so closely related for me that I can’t really separate them. A couple of these are quotes, but I’ll leave them unattributed as brain teasers.

1) For every person in the world, there exists one perfect book waiting to be found.

2) It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

3) It’s important to know what the t-shirt you’re wearing is really saying.

4) Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.

5) A monkey with a computer is still a monkey.

6) And perhaps this sums it all up for me:

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

— Gary Snyder

Tagged, with absolute permission to decline (I abhor chain letters), for both or either the Passion Quilt (follow Linda’s link for rules) and This I Believe (Patrick’s):

Joe Henderson

H.

Bill Farren

Mr. Chase

S.C. Morgan

Again, I can’t really express my gratitude for the quality and quantity of comments on “Seven Questions.” Thank you.View this Post

Here’s a few points that jumped out at me.

So…Um…What Was That Content Standard I’m Supposed To Be Teaching Again?

Responding on her fine group blog and at a sister post, Alice Mercer worries that teachers don’t know that tech can actually fit beautifully into their content standards– and you’re absolutely right on that, Alice. Your example of the Listening and Speaking standards grabbed me because I taught ESL for eight years prior to going mainsteam, and ESL folk often joked about Listening and Speaking being “mythical”– that is, completely overlooked. I don’t think there is a state Speaking assessment anywhere in the US outside of ESL, come to think of it. (Anyone? I’d love to know.)

Without a doubt, the massive potential of Web 2.0 in the classroom is precisely this– the marriage of voice and authentic audience. However I have to say that if you’re working with teachers who don’t even know what their content standards are, my impression is that the central pedagogical problem to be solved has nothing to do with tech.

Anything that Fred Astaire Did…

Arthus and others think that an absence of tech in a school is suffocating. Similarly, Bill Ferriter, who is graciously assisting me while I develop my classroom’s first blog, feels that much of tech’s promise is in its inherent motivational factor for kids. While I have witnessed this and agree, I also think that it’s a red herring. A sparkling, glitzy herring in high heels dancing backwards, but a herring all the same. If I scan a page of a vocabulary workbook into the computer, convert it to PDF, and add digital fill in the blanks, my kids may be “motivated” to work on it– but it’s still the same workbook that has no basis in effective teaching practice, flexible problem solving, or language acquisition research.

And let’s not forget the infinitesmal puddle in which this motivational herring is swimming: novelty. Kids tell me they love using tech in school in large part because, admittedly and sadly, its effective integration is still so limited. But trust me– this won’t last for long. What do we have when we all get our 1:1 laptops in the end (as we will), and this novelty wears off (as it will)? Without decent tech that passes the Seven Questions, we have eight-track cassettes. Cue Barry Manilow.

Cortez and the Lost City of Student Investment

This what was bugging me, I finally figured out, about the logic of the several who pointed out the need to have kids invested in their own learning (ostensibly via tech). I mean, heck, yes– this is the El Dorado, kids invested in their own learning. I can’t agree enough. And surely tech provides an avenue to the Golden City. But folks– and I can’t emphasize this enough– I will not buy my kids’ investment with podcasts and then pretend that I’ve helped them care about poetry. That’s cheating.

In otherwords, enthusiasm for the former (tech) may be a powerful vehicle for the latter (understanding the transformative power of good reading and writing), but it sure ain’t always the same thing. If I can’t create a path to investment via the only path there is– a meaningful, personal connection between content, community, and self– then I’m not doing my job.

Could Someone Please Consider the Spotted Owls?

I did notice an absence of comments on the observation that tech has profound effects on the environment and our interconnectedness within it. This is not going away, guys…

And You’re Just Plain Wrong About This Next One, Dina.

And finally, I got some seriously thought-provoking comments on what a “digital kid” actually looks like (thanks Jeff, Jeffreygene, and Tom.) They prompted me to do a little digging, and a little asking, and a lot of rethinking. So next up: What the Heck Is a Digital Native, Anyway?

There is, of course, plenty of precedence for discontinuing a clinical trial in the middle (as I did when I blearily stumbled in last night from the Adirondacks and did one thing before falling into bed: deactivated my Twitter account.) It’s generally a result of “reviewing interim data.”

My interim data came about three hundred feet above Heart Lake on Sunday, where the Director of Education for the Adirondack Mountain Club, Ryan, had led me on my first snowshoe trek. I had the nearly surreal amazing luck to have his expertise all to myself, as he announced cheerfully in the dining room of the lodge that morning– “Just you and me today. Everyone else bailed.” Apparently this happens every eon or so.

And so we tromped around, crunching more than usual, Ryan told me– only an inch or two of powder over a frozen crust. We tracked: moles, squirrels, snowshoe hares, grouse, their three-toed hieroglyphics swept out by their own tails. He taught me about the heat of trees melting deep holes that then paper over with drift, called “spruce traps.” I fired off every stupid beginner hiker question I had. And munching on dried fruit and a ham sandwich over the lake, I realized:

Anything (Twitter)– that takes me away (my extra Yahoo account) unnecessarily (Facebook) from this (the golden aspen leaf against the snow)– is something I can do without.

Now, can our students live happy and fulfilling lives without learning to snowshoe? Yes. And no. An experiential, sensual awareness of nature, however it is nurtured, is something none of us can spare, and such educators as David Orr and Richard Louv are making that increasingly clear.

But this line of argument is a whole other post. For now, it suffices to consider how it casts light over the question of tech I should be using in the classroom. For every moment that I tether a child indoors to a hard drive and strip her senses down to two out of five– my own little tech spruce trap– what are we getting in return?

I had a five hour drive home from the mountains to tackle this with every ounce of cold-blooded logic I’ve got. So coming up: my thoughts on how technology may–or may not– answer the ultimate English teacher’s question: Does technology help our students become better readers and writers?

…and yeah, I’ll publish my Twitter data eventually. I’m actually hoping to make that my first stab at real information design, one of the powerful ways tech does help develop our kids’ literacy. But more on that next post.

So what do you do when virulent pinkeye keeps you out of school for a day, but you otherwise feel fine?

I took a long walk in the early evening– couple of hours tromping in the mud at a local nature preserve.

I’ve made a conscious decision to blog periodically about more personal adventures. A mentor educator once told me that if you don’t nurture your loves outside of school, your teaching becomes about…well…teaching. A bit like the serpent biting its own tail. Joe puts up “Your Sunday Muse” Youtube music clips (I think I will pickpocket this idea shortly).

As for today, I made a couple of discoveries. One: the seduction of ice.

The marshland borders of the pond where I walked, usually mud two feet deep, were frozen and walkable. Winter is fast becoming a favorite season for me to hike in. Ice allows for exploration that isn’t possible otherwise; and the naked trees give up treasures.

Two: the park people have done a nice bit of trail work over the fall, including a recent infusion of wood chips. I found that it tickled me to be walking on the remnants of what was likely other people’s Christmas trees. Go, recycling symbols of rampant first world commercialism! Cough.

Three: it is very dangerous to read Thoreau while in the midst of the Twitter experiment. He talks of how difficult it is to subdue “a few cubic feet of flesh.” I, reading on a bench at the north end of the pond, reflected then on how I have not yet managed to subdue (in a positive sense) the few cubic feet of my classroom. Twitter may be useful or not, but one way or the other its pedagogical incorporation may be simply extraneous to where my focus needs to be at the moment. We will see.

So what feeds you in your off-duty hours?

Bill Ferriter, complimenting me most graciously, framed his most recent post around some comments on Twitter I left on his blog (and he also commented here). Rebuttal follows.

First of all, let’s clear up our terms. When we say “connection” between people, I think it’s probably not accurate to represent that as solely “deep” connection. Surely I can agree with you that Twitter ain’t for discussing Schopenhauer. So let’s call what we’re talking about “authentic connection”: that is, something beyond merely utilitarian, but not necessarily soulmates meeting. I think I might argue, however, that even narrowing our terms in this way, Twitter and other Web 2.0 tools are still more limited than they are being portrayed.

Sure, Twitter can work wonders. But I wonder if it works only if you have a strong social sensibility (not to mention language abilities) already present.

For example, I find it fascinating that despite agreeing that Twitter is not for deep connection, the metaphor you have chosen to discuss Twitter is FAMILY– one of the deepest connections there is. Why is that? I would wager that it’s because you already feel connected to people there. You spoke in deservedly glowing terms of Clay’s blog, for example, which you had started to read long before getting on Twitter. You also started peopling your Twitterverse with TLN folks you already knew– as I did I, through Linda at my school.

So (speaking of metaphors) Twitter as a”gateway” may be a misleading metaphor. It implies that Twitter leads us to authentic connection. I wonder if Twitter may be better seen as a tollbooth. It only lets you onto the road if you already have the fare. In this case, the fare would be having the capacity for authentic connection in the first place.

This might go a ways towards explaining why my colleague Joe feels that Twitter is redundant in his life. He’s got the fare already– that is, a deep, admirable capacity for authentic connection– so he has the ability to pick and choose which Web tollbooths are useful for him. In contrast, you’ve gone through the Twitter tollbooth– but again, like Joe, you’ve got the fare, and so you can make the tollbooth work for you. You are a talented communicator, a thoughtful and educated person, and obviously loving (and loved) adult. Your foundations are firmly in place.

So, to bring it back to ground zero, my question seems to be evolving as this: is Web 2.0 equally useful for our students, who are mainly still in the thick of developing their foundations? Do they have the fare?

Here’s another way to put it. For us lucky adult educators, who came of age and learned to connect with others far before the Net existed, Twitter (and other Web 2.0 techs) are indeed just tools. But I wonder if for students, who increasingly do not have this cross-century perspective, these tools have the danger of becoming totalitarians.

On Twitter the other day you mentioned Wes Fryer’s post on false privacy. Although I’m branching out from just the Twitterverse here, I think this is a pivotal example of what might go wrong with an insufficiently critical Web 2.0 approach. Where would such a fundamental misinterpretation of the nature of the Internet come from in our students? I would argue that it springs from the nature of the Internet itself. Without a concerted effort to the contrary, we are intuitively convinced that on the Net we are acting in private– alone. This has been fairly well documented among researchers, and I myself have succumbed dramatically to this falsehood at times.

But perhaps the idea is so pervasive because it isn’t actually a falsehood at all. Aren’t we actually alone on the Net, no matter how many followers we have on Twitter?

You’ll see that I’m going at this differently than Michael Bugeja at the Economist debate. He’s concerned that Web 2.0 is fundamentally selfish in nature. I’m not interested in Bugeja’s moral condemnation here. But I do have concern about a way of being via Web 2.0 that is vastly different than anything else we’ve experienced before. I can sum up this new way of being by asking this: does a webcam count for a kiss, as your niece beautifully shows us? (My son is three too, by the way.)

So can we really teach kids to authentically connect through a medium which causes us to conceive of ourselves fundamentally as alone? Isn’t this an inescapable contradiction in terms?

And what will happen, therefore, if we– and they– continue to further integrate our human communication with that of Web 2.0?

You’ll note that I’m not suggesting that our students will give up all face to face interaction and transmogrify into cyborgs, a straw man argument if I ever heard one. And I’m no Luddite, as this very blog attests.

What I am suggesting is that even a little of the Net, tossed into the bubbling pot of our still-cooking kids, seems to be like cayenne– or mercury. Without substantial reflection, perspective, maturity and context, it can go a very, very long way– and in a way that I am coming to believe IS NOT ANALOGOUS to our experience of the Net as cross-century adults. (Bill, I have actually heard students say “LOL”– instead of laughing.)

But Bill, you’ve clearly had more experience with the intersection of Web 2.0 tools and the young developing minds in a classroom. Do you– or anyone reading this– see some, or all, or none, of what I see?

Check out this story on sleep from NPR. Had to post this– I’ve been struggling with this all year. Is it not a part of underground teacher culture to assume you (or someone else) is doing their job if they’re on five hours’ sleep or less? How true is this? Maybe we’re all just– well– dumb.

My favorite line on how to get more sleep: set up quality time “with a bed partner.” My amazing husband notwithstanding, this partner for me is usually the saliva-soaked teddy bear my toddler son has left on the pillow.

I got on Twitter this weekend. Wild stuff. Check out this nice synopsis in Newsweek for how it works. Bill Ferriter over at The Tempered Radical was also playing around at the same time I was, and went googly-eyed (justifiably) for how such a simple Web 2.0 tool holds such possibilities, particularly for educators and their students.

I have to tell you, though: although I am fascinated, I am not yet sold. Twitter, like any technology, is not value-neutral: it requires buy-in to certain ways of thinking about the world, and I am still figuring out just what those are for Twitter specifically.

Can you create a meaningful relationship with another in typed bytes of 160 characters? Does Twitter only yield value with a constant presence on-line? How much further does Twitter divorce us from our fundamental physical sense of self, never mind our local communities and environment? Is it always good to “go global”? And of course there’s the Language Arts teacher in me, who wonders very much (amongst other things) at the linguistic implications of a technology that does not allow revision– only deleting. (Hm!)

The Economist is running a high-quality debate on some of these issues (the pro speaker is, interestingly, on Twitter) …but for my own information, I’ve decided to give Twitter a month. I’ll make some very detailed quantitative and qualitative observations, and post my conclusions at the end of February.

Stay tuned.