News from my home town

Apparently, the terrorists have discovered Westport:

Both flyers invite recipients to contact “NEWP.”  That’s North East White Pride — I had to google it, because (I’m guessing) whoever made the flyers knew the full name would be incendiary.  A link to NEWP, a Massachusetts address and a phone number were provided.  (The NEWP website says it’s been “supporting white, working class communities since 2003.”

I guess it’s great that white people finally have someone standing up for their rights in these United States.  And they’re looking out for me!

Wait, no they’re not.

NEWP was started in 2003 as a way to promote White Unity and organization. At the time there were several individuals all involved with different gorups [sic], not working together in a very organized way. members and many others around New England were active at home and abroad protesting the Israeli Independance Day in Boston, going to NJ for an anti-immigration rally hosted by Hal Turner [sucks to be you... --ed] and driving all the way to PA for Hammerfest.

Anti-immigration?  Protesting Israel Independence Day?   Being really into Hal Turner?  I can see why leaving anonymous fliers stuffed into little bags in suburban driveways would make you feel like a big man.

Look, if you’re going to be some sort of neo-Nazi or neo-Fascist, stop hiding behind some sort of working-class unity facade.  Come out and say who and what you are.  Be like the kid on my bus in high school who was really excited about the Nazi flags he supposedly had at his house–at least he wasn’t hiding anything.  Get yourself onto a talk show.  At least sign your name to your dumb, poorly-edited* literature.

Dan is right.  Man up.

* “Illegal” isn’t a noun, jackassses.

Filed under: Matters Political

Iran

As I write this disclaimer, the one that says that I’m not looking to draw any sort of parallel between the Islamic Republic of Iran’s current media crackdown and the filtering policy employed by the school district in which I work, I realize that you, the reader, are probably going to assume that I, as a teacher who works in a school with a really dumb strict filtering policy, am going to draw such a parallel. If you see it, it’s your problem, not mine. You savvy?

 

Once again, there’s massive political turmoil in a country in which I have good friends.  I remember the protests in Serbia in early 2008, and the worry I felt for my friend Alek, whom I’d met in Scotland the year before.  And the violent demonstrations in Greece later that year, during which I hoped fervently that Ioanna would keep her head down.  Now, in June of 2009, with Mahmoud Ahmedinejad apparently the victor in a very fishy looking election, I hope that Kasra and Amir and their friends and loved ones are safe.

I think, though, that the current situation in Iran represents the danger of insisting that your way of doing things is the only correct way, to the exclusion of all other opinions, methods, or beliefs.  In any human endeavour, there has to be communication and empathy.  Hardliners in any situation–whether it be a theocratic dictatorship or a family squabble–prevent reason from prevailing.  Shutting out the other side’s views can’t work.

We see that in Iran right now.  The government has blocked a lot of internet traffic, as well as disabled text-messaging and cell-phone transmissions.   It can’t shut everything down, though.  As stupid as Twitter seems to be–and that would be plenty stupid–it might have found its niche as a way to disseminate otherwise-censored information:

Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, says Iran — like a university campus — pipes the Internet into the country through a central, controlled gateway. That allows the government to block Web sites and do other kinds of filtering.

But, like resourceful American students in search of Facebook, many Iranians can get around blocks, using proxies and other methods. Complicating matters for the authorities, Zittrain says, is the fact that social networking services tend to be decentralized.

Twitter and other proxy-accessible social networking sites are great for calling the world’s attention to what’s happening as the regime attempts to impose a national blackout.  The current state of Iran + Twitter offers some very interesting educational possibilities, too, according to Will.  Even more importantly, though, the voices of dissent online remind the regime that their claim to the only official reality is shaky.  It is important to remind those with whom we disagree that we disagree–not necessarily in a violent confrontation, but in a respectful way.

My parents will celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary later this year.  I didn’t grow up in a calm family; however, we generally were good at letting each other know when we disagreed with what was happening.  There were screaming matches, of course, and tantrums and silent treatments and that sort of stuff.  But under all of that was an undercurrent of constructive criticism that, when I look back on it, has led to a pretty strong bond between the five of us to this day.  My sister and I were talking yesterday about how, despite our definite lack of family perfection, we are in a much better place than a lot of families we know, where the adult children now don’t speak to each other or their parents, let alone acknowledge their existence.

Conflating a repressive regime with the comparative insignificance of suburban American family dynamics is kind of silly, I admit, but my head’s been in this space for the past few weeks.  Since Erica and I got engaged in early May (and even before that) one of the things I’ve been trying to figure out is how our two very different immediate families will become one.  Her family is more traditionally welcoming, I think, than mine–it could just be because I’m still a guest when I go over there, but they’re quicker than my family is to do the traditional host/hostess stuff.  My family is mostly quieter and less protective, but when things blow up, they blow up pretty big.  Both families are capable of holding grudges (I still don’t know why my parents and one of my aunt/uncle sets didn’t speak for years when I was in middle and high school) and both families are capable of astounding demonstrations of love and affection.  

When we try to imagine what our family will be like, we naturally gravitate toward the environments in which we each grew up.  I foresee myself as a parent the way my parents were (and are) parents, and Erica does the same thing for her family.  The reality, of course, is that neither of our families will be the exact model for the new unit that we’re creating.  All we can do is try to emulate what we admire and attempt to avoid the negative examples that have been set.  It’s not going to be easy, but I know we’re both up to the challenge.

Filed under: Matters Political, Thing of the Day

The great disconnect

The writer behind Post-Punk Nerd once described a big problem.  His/her writing had become terrible.  It was

usually short, no more than a few paragraphs…and add[ed] very little to the public discourse. I have, once, tried to write a piece deeper than the typical blog fare, but in review I find the results to be poor: the language struggles, the sentences enjamb unnaturally and it reads as if I were a mumbling street preacher. What I am trying to say is important, I don’t doubt that, but I lack the skills to say it.

I bookmarked that post and have come back to it time and again.  It almost always leaves me feeling a little empty–not because it doesn’t say anything, but because the solution it poses is simultaneously elegant and impossible in my line of work.  Post-Punk Blogger has decided that rather than write a whole lot of short blog posts, s/he will now focus on writing longer, deeper, harder-hitting pieces.  They will be published less often, but will be of a higher quality than the typical blog writing one often sees around the Internets.

This is a great idea.  Twitter and whatnot have their places, I’m sure (though I still can’t figure out why I’d want to limit myself to 140 characters about a sandwich), but my professional concern is with writing.  Real writing.  The kind of writing that examines and develops and spreads ideas.  The kind of writing against which current school practices seem almost diametrically opposed.

Let’s take timed, in-class writing assignments as a particularly easy example.  And let’s ask a very simple question: What’s the point?  What is the possible educational merit behind having a roomful of students write something until the bell rings, something that will be assessed as evidence of skill at writing, or formulating ideas, or something like that? 

I guess you could make the argument that it’s the kind of writing students have to do on standardized tests like CAPT or the SAT.  Fine.  Respect.  But what else is it for?  Aside from exams (in college, perhaps, or in civil service or the military), when will students have to do this kind of writing?

I know, I know, the tests exist.  But where is the movement to change the tests?  Rather than bitch and moan about having to prep the kids for various state exams, college entrance exams, &c., why not push for tools that actually assess skills that students will need when they enter higher education or the workforce? 

I don’t know a single instance in my professional life when I’ve achieved more with the very first rough draft version of something I’ve written or created than something I’ve labored over.  From budget-nag emails in my first job out of college to software manuals I’ve written to lesson/unit plans to grad school admissions essays to songs, the experience has been the same.  Pushing something out for the sake of pushing it out leads to, at best, mediocre work.  If we’re about teaching students that it’s better to hand in some kind of crap rather than nothing at all, we deserve what we get.

This week, my colleagues have been into talking about Turnitin.com, a very expensive subscription website that schools use to make sure their students aren’t cheating when they write papers.  And fine, whatever, I have no problem with teachers who want to use it.  I won’t go near Turnitin, though.  The one semester I did have my students was a psychological hellride–rather than spending my time getting to know my students’ writing, I found myself hunting down every single highlighted passage in their work, rubbing my hands together with glee when I discovered an unattributed source.

If writing, especially school writing, is about playing gotcha with students, I need a new job.  I don’t have the temperament for that kind of work; if I did, I’d be a detective, which would at least get me out of having to go to faculty meetings.  But is it possible that there’s a way to rethink student writing, even at the high-school level, that increases students’ ability to write clearly and stylishly and makes it far less likely that they’ll cheat?

Filed under: Matters Educational, Matters Literary, Matters Political, Matters Technological

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them

Happy 1/20/09, everyone!, originally uploaded by One Ping Only.

The day is here.
1.20.09.
I sat, as did, I’m sure, most of the nation, if not the world, speechless, a little teary-eyed, as Barack Hussein Obama took the Oath of Office (patiently allowing Chief Justice Roberts to correct his own mistakes before repeating after him) on a frigid high noon. I watched from the Greenwich High School Media Center’s classroom, the one equipped with the plasma TV and seventies-licious speakers, with a couple dozen colleagues and a few students.
I listened to the speech, sure to go down in history as one of the better Inaugural addresses, and thought about the new President’s first set of words after taking that office.

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

And I realized that an era has come to an end. I don’t know if Obama’s going to fulfill the huge hopes we all have for him, but I do know that his ascent to the Presidency means that something fundamental has changed. It means that we–young people, post-Boomer people–have finally wrested control from the generation or two before us.
A lot of ink has been spilled about the significance of an African-American family moving into a White House that was largely built by slaves. A lot of ink has been spilled, too, about Obama’s humble origins. And yes, those topics are huge and important and worth far more words than have already been written about them.
To me, though, the Obama Presidency means that we have a chance, as a nation, to work with a President for whom the divisions that we set up for ourselves–divisions of race, religion, sexual orientation, etc–don’t really matter so much. I have to think that as our first post-Boomer President, Obama brings a new outlook to the office. His talk of unity and cooperation is so stirring to me because, for the first time, I feel like he actually believes it.
There’s a good chance I’m just projecting myself onto this very public figure. I’m 16 years younger than our new President, and come from a very different set of circumstances. But I feel a kinship with him, a sense of the possible, and I wish him all the luck in the world as he tries to lead a very tired nation into a future of which we can all be proud.

(t-shirt, by the way, by Bryan Shaffer)

Filed under: Matters Political

Thing of the Day: Inauguration Celebration

VOTE, originally uploaded by Ben Kimball.

So I was sitting in my soon-to-be-tableless livingroom watching Full Metal Jacket in preparation for my brand-new Film as Literature class. I marveled at how joyless the recruits seemed, and how willing they were to put up with the abuse of their drill sergeant in order to become Marines. And then my mom called, telling me to put on HBO, which apparently is free today so that the Inauguration festivities can be watched everywhere.
Right now, all I can think about is the joy that so much of the country and the world is going to feel on Tuesday at noon. It’s more than just having your guy win the election for the first time in three campaigns. It definitely goes deeper than the almost-too-sweetness of will.i.am, Sheryl Crow, and Herbie Hancock performing the most bizarre version of “One Love” that you can possibly imagine.
I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the Obama victory since it happened. I remember when the election was finally called for him, late on that Tuesday night. I still have the text messages saved:

“Yessssssssss!” (my friend Megan)
“Mazel Tov! Yasher Koach! now we dont have to move to canada” (my sister Hannah)
“Happy best election day ever!!!” (my friend Kirsten)
“We just made history. All of this happened because you gave your time, talent and passion to this campagin. All of this happened because of you. Thanks.” (Barack Obama)

And now, watching Garth Brooks performing “American Pie” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, with the President-Elect watching, slightly bobbing his head, a huge grin on his face, I’m beginning to feel something like hope. I’m seeing the reflecting pool surrounded, even in crappier weather than you would expect, by happy Americans and, I presume, foreign visitors. There’s a festive air that I haven’t seen in TV images of Washington in a very long time.
I can’t help but worry about what might happen, though, if Obama doesn’t solve all of the problems that he inherits. I’m not talking about immediate solutions. I’m just wondering about what happens if, by around 2011, our economy’s still in the crapper, we’re still involved in a wasteful foreign war, our national education system still turns out ignorant students who can answer multiple choice questions but can’t think critically. Will the people who already think Obama is the Antichrist blame those problems, the ones he failed to mop up completely, on him? Will his Presidency really bring us all together, or at least more all together than the divisive politics of the past few decades have done? Am I, at the age of 31, about to be prouder and happier to be an American than I’ve been since, well, ever?
The question is, then, how much of this is really about Barack Obama himself, and how much is about ordinary Americans finally getting together to see through some–not all, but some–of the lies that have been foisted upon us by cynical political operatives for so long? I feel now the same way I do when I read a book by Dave Eggers or listen to the Flaming Lips–that so much sadness and pain can give way to hope, a wise hope that we can learn from and progress and become better people.
When my grandmother died, almost two years ago, I was devastated. The older I got, the more I wanted to know about her, and I felt, when she passed, that I was losing a major connection to my personal and family history. Grandma knew stuff that I’d never know, but that I hoped to glimpse. When I got that call that she’d died, I knew that everything had to change, and that I had a responsibility to keep moving forward and only do things that would make her, and my entire family and circle of friends, proud.
Tonight, the Terryl Lee Band plays at the Inauguration Funk Fest at Toad’s Place in New Haven, CT. Tonight, we hope to take the stage and bring our very best to a hopefully-crowded room of people who are ready to get down TOGETHER. Tonight, we want everyone smiling and dancing and toasting and not stopping until they throw everyone out of the club.
Tonight is our night. And the day after tomorrow, it becomes our world.

Filed under: Matters Musical & Artistic, Matters Political, Thing of the Day

One day after

Picture 038, originally uploaded by The Takeaway.

How long do you think it’s going to take for it all to sink in? This was the first time my guy won an election–my guy since the 2004 Democratic Convention, when he made that now-famous speech, my guy since the beginning of primary season, my guy who was the impetus for my Democratic registration (giving up my longstanding Independent status).

And what, really, do we do if/when he turns out to be just another politician and a disappointment? How do we handle that?

Filed under: Matters Political

I voted

Self-portrait, Election Day, originally uploaded by One Ping Only.

Did you?

Filed under: Matters Political

Common sense

Umm…is this that William Ayers we’re all supposed to be afraid of?

There’s an alternative to acceding completely or whining constantly, and it begins with thinking through and naming the commitments you bring with you into the classroom, your values, your pledge. These are not pure abstractions, but rather standards to hold in mind. A fundamental commitment might involve taking the side of your students, affirming the humanity of each and resisting anything that constrains or reduces them. Another might be to create in your classroom an environment that is a kind of republic of many voices, allowing every student a space to be seen and heard and known well as a person of worth and value.

Because teachers work in a fluid, complex, idiosyncratic world, and because there’s much beyond our immediate control, it makes sense to focus on these things that you can control. First, you can see your students as whole human beings, three-dimensional beings much like yourself with hopes and dreams, bodies and minds and spirits. You can see with your own eyes, your own curious and critical mind, your own generous heart. And you can resist the alphabet soup of deficits and the toxic habit of labeling kids that infects most schools. No one can make you see kids as creatures with labels clinging to them like barnacles, sharp and ugly. You have a mind of your own, and you can become a student of your students in spite of everything. This gesture alone can be full of surprise, and deeply satisfying.

Ayers writes almost poetically about the main point I took away from yesterday afternoon’s CWP-sponsored workshop with Jeff Wilhelm.  Classrooms are places where students should be engaged with learning what’s important to them, and what they see as useful.  The inquiry model, about which more at a later date, seems to be a good way of starting to begin to make that change part of daily practice.

As far as “teachers work[ing] in a fluid, complex, idiosyncratic world” goes, few people can say it better than Doug Noon.  His latest post, “Teaching for Change in a Culture of Compliance,” gets at the Ayers controversy (kind of) and the notion that teaching for social justice is somehow dangerous or subversive:

Test-based school reform and the politics of accountability has pushed classrooms further away from discussions about social issues than at any time in the last two decades. Teachers and administrators have been all too willing to embrace the authority of test scores, standards, and “research-based” reading instruction, minimizing and forgetting the value of community, intuition, genuine motivation, and common sense….Inquiring into our history, sources of power in society, current events, and discussing race and stereotyping does not preclude observing high academic standards. And there’s nothing subversive about such discussions unless you admit that the moral order has already been undermined.

What is our purpose as teachers if it isn’t to help students recognize and understand the patterns that might need to be changed?

Oh!  And Bruce Fuller weighs in, too.  Man, this is a great day.

Politicians’ obsessions with making schools and colleges more vocational in character are unlikely to lift the economy. According to new research by James Heckman at the University of Chicago, today’s workers don’t need vocational skills, they need better “non-cognitive” skills — like the capacity to communicate effectively or to cooperatively solve problems.

Schools should be focusing on these human skills, as well as ethical reasoning. Wall Street’s meltdown, linked to shady lending practices, reveals the moral bankruptcy of huge segments of the market. Yet political leaders now urge our children to quietly fill-in bubble tests, seeking only to become productive cogs in a broken wheel.

Filed under: Matters Educational, Matters Political

Where are we going?

First, I read Jose Vilson, who has quickly become one of my favorite bloggers:

Whether it’s at the movie theatre or my schools, many of our youth have become more superficial, less integral, more belligerent, and more careless with themselves, more than anything.

While it’s easy to point at the parents, I’m of the belief that the village raises the child. When communities as a whole set a standard for how their neighborhoods like, for what their children should know, and how their offspring should behave in any given environment, I strongly believe that translates into higher success for the communities in general.

Hmm, I thought as I picked my way through the layer of trash on the floor of our student center, stepping around kids making out on tables and past the pharmaceutical trade show that clearly doesn’t, couldn’t exist in such an Affluent Suburb Where No Children Are Left Behind. There sure are a lot of things wrong here!

And when an entire section of sophomores rolled into my classroom five minutes after the bell, claiming they weren’t late “because nobody was there,” I thought, There sure are a lot of things wrong here!

And when, at a house meeting in the middle of the week, we were told that the reason why we can’t go to the Board of Ed with an Actual Attendance Policy was that not every teacher in the school consistently enters his/her grades into the attendance database after school every day, I thought, There sure are a lot of things wrong here!

I don’t want this to be a complaining post. Nobody likes reading those, for starters, and May is such a great time of year to try to be happy. So instead, I’ve been thinking about things I can do which will raise my ability to respect myself as a teacher, which should translate into improvements, at least in my immediate sphere.

It really comes down to one thing: I will not teach behaviors that I do not want to see in my students. Or, if you’re more of a positive person, I will teach by example the things that I think are most important. I think this is the only way to counteract what Jose points out.

Thing One: Environmental responsibility

I’m not dumb enough to believe that this high school is going to become even a little bit more environmentally responsible. Replace our non-opening windows and inefficient HVAC system with fresh air? Naaah. Stop allowing students to drive to school? Nope. Rising gas prices (we’re over $4.00/gallon in these parts already) aren’t going to have much of an impact on rich kids driving inefficient SUVs. The school-wide campaign to recycle clean printer paper and print on the other side hasn’t gotten much traction. They’re still selling Poland Spring bottles in the cafeteria line.

I don’t entirely agree with Michael H. Schneider’s comment on UnFogged that it’s not in the American character to change our consumption patterns:

I’m confident that life in this country will get steadily more nasty, brutish, and short. I expect that anthropogenic climate change will accelerate and wipe out most coastal communities and totally disrupt agriculture.

I’m not doing a thing to prevent it. Judging by the election results of the last few decades, people like me are in the majority. Sorry, kids.

However, there are days when I can’t help but nod when I read this bit:

I just hope it happens after about 2035, because that’s about as long as I think I can possibly live. People in this country like being ignorant and bigoted and selfish and stupid, and we’ll choose to stay that way until it kills all of us.

If we could see the impact of our bad decisions, if we could see the impact of our good decisions, I think we’d have a lot more people willing to work to curb their excesses and pitch in. But I also think we need role models for sound stewardship of the resources (natural and unnatural) we’ve got left. Because it’s not just about global warming and the impending fuel crisis; we’re running out of food and money and pretty much everything (except for blogs).

So that’s why I’m planning on going paperless with all of my classes next year. I don’t want to photocopy anything, because all those papers wind up in the recycling bins, which, because of cuts in the facilities department, wind up getting emptied into the same trash cans as everything else. The papers clutter my desk, leading me to discard them, and things get wrinkled and coffee-stained and meet all sorts of other fates. It’s not worth it.

I’m thinking that setting my students up with the Google online software suite would be the way to go: papers could be “handed in” by sharing them on Documents (and I can write comments directly on them). Homework could be posted on Calendar. Announcements via a group on Gmail. Etc, etc.

Thought: does having a computer on to do all this use more resources than using a copy machine to make handouts?

Thing Two: No More Timewasting

My mantra this year has been “another committee…another meeting…another hour spent doing something that doesn’t directly benefit my students.”  I’m on the Senior Internship Committee, which, while a good cause, is really inefficient; I’m doing something involving figuring out which non-special ed support services are available to which kids, which has so far consisted of brainstorming the same things over and over again and writing them on chart paper and yellow legal pads; I spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for students who aren’t in my classes to show up for CAPT test remediation, which nobody wants to deal with; the cringe-inducing tech committee.  There are more, of course.

Recently, I’ve been thinking more and more about my desire to refuse to go to these things anymore (especially because I wasn’t given much of a choice in the first place).   Why is it that I can complain about these meetings and events, pay little attention when I’m there, and not complete my assignments while if my students did that in my class, I’d come down on them?  Is not the behavior I’m modeling the behavior I’m getting?

The solution I’ve come up with here is not to start going happily to crappy meetings.  It’s time for someone else to pick up that slack.  But I want to focus on giving my students only meaningful work to do, only things that have a clear value to them.  the trick, I suppose, is to figure out what those things are.

Filed under: Matters Educational, Matters Metaphysical & Philosophical, Matters Political, Matters Scientific

More ecostuff

Convergence, of sorts.

I woke up this morning to a bunch of Live Earth-related news on NPR, including a history of the global warming “debate” and a report on how some senator (whose name I missed) blocked the DC Live Earth show from being held in front of the Capitol because it’s a “partisan” event. Kind of like, I suppose, obeying the laws of physics. Ugh.

And I thought back to my post of a few weeks ago about the ways in which GHS isn’t doing its part for the environment. I happened to come across a post on Anil Dash’s site this morning about the water bottle issue, which references the by-now-very-widely-read article in Fast Company about the bottled water industry. Read it before you proceed.

Now, a week ago today I was in Tecate, Mexico, helping to build a house for a family with no running water, tenuous electricity that’s supposed to be hooked up later this summer, and very few resources (they wear donated clothes and shoes; the kids’ entertainment consists of soccer when they have a ball and throwing rocks when they don’t). And they are considered well-to-do where they live, because the father has steady construction work. It kind of begs the question of why we weren’t building for the family down the road with a far worse house (they lived at and ran the scrapyard, where they used fire and chemicals to clean abandoned cars and resell the metal for US$0.50/kilo).

The thing these families all have in common, no matter their pesos, is that they have to pay a ridiculous amount of money (around US$15/week) for water that is neither clean nor cold. And remember, they live in the desert. It was over 100 fahrenheit every day that we were down there. It was so hot and so dry that nobody’s shirts got sweaty because it evaporated so fast. These were the kinds of days when you’re told to drink water all the time so you don’t get dehydration-induced diarrhea.

And we’re gladly paying for bottled water we don’t need? Yes, the container’s convenient. Buy a Nalgene or other reusable bottle. Yes, it’s nice to have cold water wherever you want it. But those plastic disposable bottles don’t have any thermal properties. Sigg bottles are metal and, from what I can figure out, will keep water cold. I might buy one to bring to Scotland.

I was thinking–if every time we wanted to drop a dollar (or three or four at the movie theatre) on a plastic bottle of water, we sent it instead to a family in Mexico or some other place without good water, maybe they’d appreciate it more than we do, we who live in the USA near reliable and tasty and clean and non-smelly water.

Clay’s still flogging his Teen Live Earth idea, too, and the more I think about it, the more right-on it sounds. Check it out if you haven’t already.

Filed under: Matters Political, Matters Scientific, Soujourns