Beyond School

Maybe it’s because I’ve been wearing too many hats lately: unofficial Tech Coordinator and adviser to our admin, English dept chair, classroom teacher, Moodle and WordPress MU administrator, significant other of a good girl who deserves a good Other;

Maybe it’s because that $100 Thai massage during Spring Break a couple weeks ago aggravated my spastic lower back which, coupled with the sneezing and croup-coughing fits brought on by a sudden and severe bout of bronchitis, led to paralyzing spasms with each–and there were dozens per hour–sneeze and cough (and this on a small, primitive island bungalow in the Andaman Sea);

Maybe it’s a simple and predictable onset, after my “radical” experimentation with classroom blogging, wikis, flat classroom collaboration, and so forth, of a “Thermidorean Reaction“–a period of questioning the Revolution, so to speak;

Maybe it’s because I’ve been teaching (and thus eating, drinking, and sleeping) the satires of Swift and Voltaire all month, and seeing Yahoos and Panglosses everywhere I look–including the mirror;

And maybe it’s the simple arrival of the spring.

Whatever it is, it’s kept me away from this weblog for two or three weeks. And I find this act of sitting back down to write a post strangely alien.

I’m thinking of Jeff, who seems to have been asked to “log off” for a week to experience life without blogging. I’m thinking of the “Secrets of Success” meme that he and Scott were both kind enough to tag me with before I disappeared to Thailand. (If you haven’t read Scott, you really should. Very nice style and substance, and a decent guy to boot, from the few emails we’ve exchanged. Writerly.)

There’s something about that meme that disturbs me (and really, about memes in general–remember, I’ve been reading satires by the masters lately, and they’re good at presenting us with unflattering mirrors). There’s something self-congratulatory about it, something about it that reminds me of all the reasons I refused to join a fraternity in college; there’s something plain vain about it. Me? Successful? Says who? And what does that have to do with improving teaching and learning?

(Jeff, Scott, I’ve read you both voice similar misgivings about this meme thing, and know you’re both just good-natured people with better things to do than cast a cynical eye at such a trivial thing. And keep reading to discover what an arch hypocrite I can be!)

There’s something about Technorati ratings, visit-counters, and such that I’m also beginning to feel Swiftean about.

There’s something of the Caste System in the edublogospyramid that says “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity” to me as well. Have you noticed how the admin edubloggers seem to sequester themselves in the admin edublogosphere, while the EdTech bloggers echo in their level, and rarely pipe in with actual teachers? Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s my impression. And it’s not surprising: institutional habits die hard, and transplant easy. It’s not much of a leap from the physical building to the virtual space for 20th Century power structures. The “democratic” nature of the blogosphere is illusory to some degree. There are exceptions, of course.

We see the term “echo chamber” tossed about a lot in this sphere, and my Bloglines edublog folder confirms it these days. It leaves me with a sense that we’re all trying to master the contours of an avalanche in motion. Web 2.0 tools are popping up and propagating like viruses in Hydra’s heads, and the pace is too exponential for classroom practitioners to handle in any sort of reflective way. The ICT and Edtech specialists have the luxury, it seems, of being paid to keep up with all of this because it’s their content specialty. But this English and history teacher can’t possibly integrate in any thoughtful way the tiniest fraction of the things being touted in the Edtech specialist blogs, I would argue. To even try to do so would lead to more and more instructional time being devoted to training in the latest widgets, rather than developing skills and content knowledge. And it would drive the kids crazy. (Trust me, I’ve found that line a few times in the last few months.)

And the often-written arguments against the necessity of “knowledge” in the age of instant access to facts–”Why do they need to know the causes of WW II when a Google search will tell it to them if they ever need to know it?”–has also set off alarms in my teacher’s head recently. I hope I’m misconstruing this line of reasoning and doing it an injustice, because otherwise, I am increasingly opposed to it. It seems to mistake factual knowledge with deep understanding; it also fails to take into account the simple intellectual pleasure of reflecting on, and making meaning about, all of that data so easy to dig up on Wikipedia. There is an aesthetic value to Understanding Content that can’t be experienced simply by using the web to “get the facts.” We shouldn’t rob students of that intellectual pleasure. It’s priceless, and makes me richer than many of the millionaire parents at my school who just can’t buy this pleasure–and it shows in the quality of their conversations.

I’ve been thinking about student blogging, too–from a teacher’s point of view. I’m no expert, so this is not a judgment, but rather an observation: student blogging in itself is nothing to cheer about. Lousy student blogging is just lousy writing–virtual graffiti of the worst sort. Lousy blogging assignments–blogs as new bottles for sour milk, just a “non-traditional way to turn in traditional homework”–are also nothing to cheer about (in fact, they make cheating dead easy for students, since they can mimic other student responses rather than do the reading).

And then there’s the grading load: how many other of you classroom teachers out there have assigned a quota of weekly blog entries to your students, and discovered that you couldn’t keep up with assessing and responding to that sort of volume? What are your solutions?

I really would like to have conversations with actual high school teachers about their take on the student blogging question–any takers? I suspect many are asking similar questions after venturing in to this world. If anyone knows any blogs, wikis, or (egad) Nings (this week’s Thing, which yes, I’m exploring) where such conversations are happening, please let me know.

I am not saying that student blogging is fruitless. I’m actually happy with a couple of new approaches I’ve implemented:

One is the whole-class history blog, in which all 50 of my history students are authors writing on self-selected topics relating to our class content. It’s much easier to manage and grade than individual blogs, and by and large the freedom of choice they have has made the readings quite interesting. It’s my first experiment with a whole-class blog authored strictly by students, and I think it holds promise. One area I need to improve is to build in student responses to each others’ writing. But really, the blog’s purpose is secondary to the companion wiki-textbook they’re making (I’m quite happy with this project, by the way). In a perfect world, they’d be selecting the top 5 posts per week in some well-managed process, but I haven’t had made the time to design that process. (You won’t see a lot of my comments because they’re posted as Diigo sticky-notes, which only my students can see.)

The other new wrinkle I’m trying is for the students’ individual blogs in my language arts classes. Two things have actually happened there: first, I got the sense that writing was becoming aversive to these ninth graders because I wasn’t prescribing the topics for them to write about. I wanted them to experience writing and develop the ability to find their own ideas. Maybe that expectation is too high for ninth graders generally, or maybe it’s a cultural thing in Korea, where many (most?) kids are burned out on education because their parents make them go to night and weekend school. No wonder they can’t find ideas: their culture doesn’t give them time to actually digest any of the ideas they’re forced to cram each week. (This is quite possibly the deal-breaker for me and Korea, in the long term.)

Anyway, because the “three posts a week” policy was having the opposite effect to what I intended, and most students (save the blessed Three Percent you’ll find in any country who just Have It) were not becoming Writers at all, but instead just Students Even More Negative About Writing, AND because assessing, responding to, and grading that many posts was too much for me, I reduced the load to once a week.

That made them happy. It also made them amenable to accepting the New Rules: for each weekly blog post (which had to be longer), each student had to leave a comment on their own post, explaining why, as writers, they chose the title, idea, image, opening “hook,” etc. If they won’t write a lot–and when they were blogging more, they were generally writing poorly–then they’re going to think more about writing as they write less.

So that’s the latest on that front.

As for that meme: Do I have ten “secrets of success”? No. I do have some things that tend to keep me fairly cheerful, interested, and centered. What the heck are they?

1. Realize that everything will change, and nothing will stay the same. It makes the tough times more of an annoyance and the good times more precious. (Gee, that’s Buddhism 101)

2. Know when you Know, and know when you Don’t Know. It makes you much easier to be around, and more interesting to converse with (and could end countless religious disputes and wars). (Gee, that’s Confucius 101)

3. Deal with the cheerless as little as possible. (Gee, that’s Nietzscheanism 101)

4. Hope for the best, expect the worst. (That’s the Army veteran speaking)

5. Think of the Rest of the World for a change. It’s full of Real People.

6. Laugh at the mirror, whatever direction it points.

7. Keep your mind alive (this is easy advice for a bachelor to give: all of my free time is mine to explore with).

8. Remember wonder. “The greatest miracle of all,” according to Chuang-tse, “is that we are sitting here, talking.” (Gee, that’s Taoism 101)

9. Don’t beat yourself up. Of course you screw up sometimes.

10. Explore Asia: 5,000 years of civilization can’t be that bad. It might account for the remarkable absence of war and violence there, compared to Western history.

11. Don’t be mean: Confucius, Seneca, Buddha, and others were saying it 500 years before Jesus. It’s less the “Golden” than the “Basic” Rule for good people everywhere. (Swift would simply say, “Don’t be a Yahoo, and don’t collaborate with them.”)

(And to raise Scott one:) 12. If Life’s not precious, you’re not rich.

So there it is.

Like my kids, I’m going to blog “less, but more.”