Beyond School

Just a quick bit of strategic advice if you want to pull or push your school into classroom blogging: become the English department chair. Failing that, bribe the existing one to adopt blogs as part of the writing component of the department.

I’m the English department chair for our high school this year. Next year, I’m handing it over to Lori.

I’ve worked with Lori for almost two years now. We’re both English teachers, lovers of language and writing and all that jazz, and yet: I have never read her Writing. (I capitalize that word to distinguish it from teachery emails.)

Lori is in her first month of blogging, alongside her students. I’d say she considers computers in the same class of technology as syringes, toilet plungers, and dental drills. Maybe even the class just beneath them. But she’s trying.

Without knowing she did, she pinged me yesterday (did you know that’s what you did when you linked to me, Lori?). It was on her class blog, wherein she shared what she took away from an hour’s walk-through of blog-management tools after school with me that day.

I know I loved reading her. It’s fun to discover the style of a person you’ve always only been limited to knowing by mere conversation. I saw a whole different side of her, and one I can’t see often in department or faculty meetings, and other such high joys.

Bloglines — Beta Style. Wow is this little tool going to make my life potentially easier. Mr. Media Guru actually mentioned Blog Lines in December 2006. He demonstrated the joys in February 2007. He made me sign up in September 2007. It is possible I am a hard sell.

The joys of understatement. And she is a hard sell. My odds are better peddling nudes to Puritans.

However, for those of you who are ready, for those of you that are becoming snowed under trying to access individual student blogs, friend’s blogs, and the daily recipe blog, Beta BLOGLINES is the answer.

Thank you, Clay. I frustrate you trailing snail gloop into the techno world. But today’s light came on.

The joys of imagery: teachers trailing Gutenbergian snail gloop into the third millennium. I picture them with scrolls and quill pens. And typewriters. I love the image. (But why does she call it “techno world”? I’ll have to nag her about that damn technology she uses - all those pen and pencil things, and whiteboards, and overhead projectors. Damn technology. ¹ ) She hits on the reason I’m pushing Bloglines Beta over Google Reader for student blog management here:

Bloglines — the place to keep track of student’s new blogs. If I check my bloglines daily, like e-mail, I can see what is new, rather than accessing each blog individually. Then in Beta, a person can even comment on the blog. [emphasis added]

That’s to keep you Google Reader groupies at bay. Try commenting 200 posts in Google Reader before you advise it as the reader of choice to teachers you evangelize to. It’s easy to do with Bloglines Beta.

Then Lori closes with this lovely bit of honesty:

Could I write a post cursing when Mr.-Loves-Computers-and-Can’t-Understand -When-I-Don’t pushes and pushes and keeps introducing more and more and more new? Yes.

But I thank him and all others out there for the constant shared excitement in the face of entrenched teaching habits, thinking, and frustrations.

I think that’s cool enough for me to close with too. After saying, “Welcome to your new legs, snail-girl.”

(English teachers and others out there - especially any new bloggers - drop over to Lori’s blog and compare notes in whatever grand styles you wish. Lori’s from Montana or Wyoming - I always mix those two up - and has never taught abroad until last year. Clearly an adventurer, and a wry one.)

Photo by zenera

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1. Lori, I really think of it as reading and writing and communicating - you know, all that English teacher and human stuff - but on steroids. [↩]

By Bill Farren on video

I’ve invited Bill Farren, who teaches at an international school in the Dominican Republic, and with whom I’ve become acquainted in our Project Global Cooling project planning Ning, to guest blog on Beyond School once a week for as many weeks, really, as he desires. My hope is to help us all learn more, through his posts, about his Education for Well-Being idea and website.

Before I hand this post over to Bill, I want to first point to my original post featuring Bill’s “Did You Ever Wonder?” video, particularly to note that Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod graciously took the time to comment, to correct some of my own misstatements, and to generate some dialog that allowed us all, I hope, to understand each other better. The upshot of those talks might be summarized to state: a) Karl and Scott are not opposed to sustainability as a plank in the platform of 21st century education, and b) I’m not in any way denying the validity and importance of the points they make in the “Did You Know?” video. They can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it’s safe to say they are as supportive of the idea of sustainability becoming a “viral” idea as I am.
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For background, I’m also going to post both the “Did You Know?” and the “Did You Ever Wonder?” videos here for everybody’s convenience. Ye olde schooly comparison/contrast essay might serve a valuable real-world purpose by watching the two back-to-back - or showing them back-to-back to others.

“Did You Know?” by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod

“Did You Ever Wonder?” by Bill Farren

Now I can hand the mic over to Bill. And I really hope the comment thread becomes as valuable a resource for us all. There’s certainly a lot at stake here.

Education for Well-Being, by Bill Farren

I’d like thank Clay for inviting me to guest post here. It’s quite an honor to be able to do so and to be able to share some of my (humble) opinions about education and well-being with such a thoughtful readership.

A couple of summers ago I stumbled across an article having to do with well-being called the Happy Planet Index. The HPI ranks countries according to how ecologically efficient each is at delivering well-being to its citizens. It was interesting to see the country where I was born, Colombia, ranked number two out of 178; Honduras, were I once lived, ranked seventh; the country where I currently live, the Dominican Republic, ranked 27th; and I was unsurprised to see the USA ranked at 150. My experiences overseas, in countries considered poor, confirmed to me what was in the report: nations where people have more stuff and are able to hire more services, don’t necessarily produce more well-being for their citizens. The well-being that wealthy countries produce comes at a high price to the planet.

This made me reflect again on the current state of education: Why are we subjecting kids to an educational system that, for too many, dulls the senses, erodes natural curiosity, and forces kids to choose grades over learning, all in the quest for a high-paying job that will not necessarily make them happier or healthier? If someone wanted to create a system to reduce well-being for all, they need look no further than the current educational approach found in most schools. Losses pile up, one on the other, as first students have to endure, instead of enjoy school. Consequently, their ability to learn is diminished as inquisitiveness is all but extinguished. Finally, having never been adequately equipped to appreciate or care for their natural world, they will diminish their chances of living well on a planet with a finite biosphere. To quote David Orr, “Students are fed through a conveyor belt of requirements, large classes, deadlines, and general busy-ness. What they learn seldom ads up to anything like a coherent, ecologically solvent worldview.”

But of course, there are many opinions about the ultimate purpose of education. Mine is just one against the many other louder voices politicking for higher standards and harder work in the name of job protection. While economic well-being is certainly important, to think of it without considering how it interacts with, and is dependent on social and environmental well-being, is to deny the importance of people and places as sources of both happiness and prosperity. One of the main goals of Ed4Wb then, is to try to get more people thinking about the direction of education and to help education live up to its potential as an agent of good change. I believe that, despite all the talk about wanting to produce critical thinkers, education has done very little to expose students to critical thought or to world views that are not in the mainstream. Most textbooks for example, are produced by large corporations, who by their very nature have an obligation to benefit their shareholders, not necessarily students. Expecting these companies to publish anything that challenges the status quo in which they profit, is simply unrealistic.

Below, with the help of interested people, are just some ideas that Ed4Wb would like to advance:

· Counter the idea that school, in order to be effective, must be hard, painful work for the student. I realize that probably everyone reading this here believes school should be enjoyable. However, I’m guessing we’ve all met too many educators, parents and policymakers who believe medicine must taste bad in order for it to work. Unhappily, for too many, it’s hard to understand that education is a remedy that works best when sweet.

· Debunk the belief that people have to choose between the economy and the planet. As the authors of Natural Capitalism remind us, “The environment is not a minor factor of production but rather is an envelope containing, provisioning, and sustaining the entire economy.” We would be wise then, to teach our kids how to protect their most important source of economic well-being.

There is plenty of innovative thinking happening right now that demonstrates how acting green not only is profitable in the long term, but also in the short term, often beating returns on investments from capital markets without the downside risks, all the while improving the environment. Why invest your money in stocks like gold mining corporations that will degrade the environment when instead, you could invest your money in items like efficient appliances, solar water heaters (or in companies that make them) which will not only improve the environment, but also give you great, risk-free returns?

The incredible amount of waste in modern society presents huge opportunities for wealth creation while at the same time increasing the habitability of the planet. Paul Hawken points out, “That inefficiency is masked because growth and progress are measured in money, and money does not give us information about ecological systems, it only gives information about financial systems.”

· Discredit current economic doctrine: “For all their power and vitality, markets are only tools. They make a good servant but a bad master and a worse religion. This theology treats living things as dead, nature as a nuisance, several billion years’ design experience as casually discardable, and the future as worthless.” (Authors, Natural Capitalism) We would do well to expose our students to innovative thinking like that found at New Economics Foundation whose motto is: economics as if people and the planet mattered. “Education as if people and the planet mattered” is Ed4Wb’s principal message.

· Put forward the idea that most of our biggest problems aren’t due to lack of technology, lack of resources, lack of knowledge or lack of intelligence, but instead, are due to a lack of congruence with what it is we are told to believe and with the way a planet with a finite biosphere actually functions. We are taught, through a half trillion dollar a year industry called advertising, to value that which isn’t needed at the expense of that which is. There is an uncritical acceptance of the belief that economies can grow indefinitely within a finite biosphere. At some point, we’ll have to start wondering if more, faster and bigger is really progress. Do we really need another artificial island off the coast of Dubai?

· Promote the idea of nature as teacher. Help eliminate the arrogant posture that what we humans create outshines what nature produces. We’re proud of our Kevlar, steel and plastics. However, we don’t mention too loudly that we require huge energy inputs and use various toxins to heat, beat and treat these materials into existence. Nature makes materials that are just as effective, if not more so, using very little energy at low temperatures, all the while, improving the environment in which they are made. 3.8 billion years of trial and error could teach us something.

· (The following idea was put forth by David Orr in his book Earth in Mind but has not been carried out yet.) Create, through a Wikipedia-like / sourceforge.net collaboration (you!) a ratings system to rank and rate schools according to how much well-being they help produce. The school ratings available today (i.e. US News and World Report) push an agenda of speed, elitism, testing, and consumerism, while in the process, stressing kids out and diminishing the kind of learning that will serve them and their planet. Something else is sorely needed that will give students better information while also acting as an agent to promote better education. The ratings would look at how ecologically responsible a school is in its daily operations, how beneficial its curriculum is at promoting wellness, how healthy and happy its students are while attending school, and finally, it would look at what kind of life work is produced by its graduates.

Changing institutions is never easy. However, I believe it’s worth trying. I also believe there are two important factors that should help us consider whether to act or not: 1) We are seriously messing with our chances to live well on this planet. Our numbers are huge. Our desires are infinite. Our ability to physically alter our biosphere is unprecedented. Our institutions of production and marketing are out of control. Actually, they are in control and answer to no one. 2) In a world of del.icio.us, Google, YouTube, Wikis, Nings, e-mail, blogs, Skype…different points of view finally have a chance. Call me naïve.

“Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who does nothing because he could do only a little.” Edmund Burke

I would love to hear your ideas on how to help education become an instrument of well-being. Thanks for reading and for helping expand the discussion. Be well, Bill Farren

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I’m about to go out to a Friday night teacher social, but feel compelled to share this dialog I’m having in a comment thread on a new student blog at my school.

I don’t know this student - don’t even know the gender - but he/she is in an English classroom on my floor, taught by another teacher (we just started high-school-wide blogging about 4 weeks ago). So this is novel for me.

It started with the student closing a post with this:

But from experimenting with this website and reading the blogs of my peers, I’m so far failing to see blogging’s potential as a teacher. I fancy myself to be quite a fan of the internet, and I definitely prefer this over writing a diary, but I don’t think blogging offers anything new to an extremely well-wired student body (especially not in the field of American Literature), at least none that I have found yet.

But I am definitely open to being proven wrong.

“Open.” I like that. I commented, he/she replied, then I replied, as follows:

1. Clay Burell

   You won’t be surprised to hear me say I love blogging. It’s opened all sorts of doors for me and hooked me up with people all over the world who I talk to professionally and may one day work with or for (or may work for me, if the dream school I’m planning ever happens).

   But this might surprise you: I don’t think blogging will help a large percentage of students (if that’s what you meant by “blogging’s potential as a teacher,” which was a bit unclear).

   Nothing will help a large percentage of students learn _or_ develop skills, because really, that’s pretty much up to the student.

   But my god, if you were writing about literature on this thing because it was homework? I wouldn’t read it.

   And I’m a literature teacher.

   I don’t want to read homework - do you? And do you think that’s what writing is? Doing homework?

   Writing is a very different thing.

   And a large percentage of students, to circle back around, will never understand just how different.

   But maybe a few will - especially when readers notice that they can write. And subscribe to them. And comment on what they wrote.

2. on 21 Feb 2008 at 11:09 pm 3eehoc09

   Mr. Burell-
   After having written a couple of blogs, I’ve become pretty fond of them myself.
   It’s refreshing to be able write without being given a topic or a rubric to use as a cookie-cutter.
   I feel like I have never felt before in school; I feel like I’m writing for fun.

   But I’m still a little bit skeptical on it’s relevance in literature classes. AP Literature, for example, is a class with a syllabus specifically outlined by the Collegeboard and in preparation for a generic standardized test. Blogging seems to be a little out of place there, and I think that internet communications deserves a separate course altogether.

   But whatever class it belongs to, I’m glad we’re blogging.

3. on 22 Feb 2008 at 6:51 pm 4Clay Burell

   Ahh, but if you do a bit of research, you’ll see that it’s “AP Literature and Composition.” If I weren’t feeling lazy, I’d add html to italicize that latter phrase.

   And don’t be fooled by the AP label. AP teachers laugh at the pretense of the whole thing: students taking it for all the wrong reasons, with no true love of literature or writing, with a few rare exceptions. They’d be writing mediocre paper journals if they weren’t blogging.

   An AP teacher in Virginia whose blog I read joked that AP should be called “All-Purpose” - I’d add, primarily for the purpose of college application bullets

   Any writer knows the best way to improve your composition is to write frequently, about something you care about communicating well. I can assign the frequency easily enough. But the passion and care? That’s a spiritual pre-requisite I can’t supply.

   I don’t blame the students too much, either. They’re too busy with hagwons and other thought-stoppers to find ideas to care about. And life requires a few years of freedom in order to become interesting - for the lucky, anyway. Which is another reason teaching deep literature in high school is a fundamentally flawed idea.

   In any case, you seem to be cluing in to a couple of things that only time can bring: first, that being a writer (as opposed to scribbling homework drivel) is something that evolves over time; second, that blogging is such a new form of writing that your impressions of it, too, will evolve over time. When you come back to your space in a year, you’ll see more, if you keep writing.

   I’ll add this one: blogging is not a silver bullet to create writers. I see it, at best, as a seed to plant in each writer. Whether it grows depends on the fertility of each writer’s soul. Some blogs will wither and die, some will be weed-patches. But some will flower - and gain more notice than that of their teacher only. In the best cases, they’ll gain readers from around the world. Readers who return for more, mind you.

   And comment, and start conversations that extend the writers ideas–like this comment thread (another word for conversation, really) should be doing?

   I’ve been writing on my blog for a little over a year. Since January, I’ve been getting emails offering to pay me for advertising space on my blog, and invitations to be flown places to speak at conferences. All because I make my ideas transparent, and write with frequency and care about things others find interesting (it helps to have a focus and not be random). I never dreamed any of this would happen when I started my own journey.

   Now I dream that, this time next year, I’m getting emails asking students at KIS to speak at conferences, be interviewed, etc. I expect that will happen with only a handful, though - you know, the fertile ones, with focus, and with passion, and care.

   I’m enjoying this. I’ll subscribe to you in my Bloglines.

I share this with you simply because I find it interesting. Making blogging work as writing instruction is, as anybody who’s done it knows, no easy thing. The launch is the easy part.

Feel free to join the conversation on the student’s blog. And give us both food for thought, because I don’t deny being a bit at sea about how to make this all work.

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Another Excused Absence:

I’m still planning

with

,

who will divorce me before we get to the altar for posting this picture.

The ceremony will be on March 8.

(Jeff Whipple says I should Ustream it. Since my parents, family, and friends can’t fly out to Korea to be there, I’m actually considering it. How whacked is that? I love it.)

If what I learned in high school biology is true, a stork might be delivering a

a few seasons later - that means more than nine months later, by the way*. (Or is it a cabbage truck? I failed that test in high school because, unfortunately, that bit of learning hadn’t yet become relevant to my repressed little adolescent soul.)

Because of that, I’ve been writing less. (And spending enough $$$ to make this grown man weep.

But she’s so fun, and her heart’s so good, that it’s worth it.)

But…

But I did drop in for a podcast with Jeff Utecht and Dave Carpenter on Jeff’s Thinking Stick last week, and Wes Fryer posted a discussion at the Shanghai Learning 2.0 unconference facilitated by Will Richardson.

The podcast with Jeff is about an hour, but the one with Wes is only about ten minutes.

I thank Wes for catching and posting that discussion, because it brought out in its flow the reasons I’m pessimistic about schools as places for learning the most important things, and as places that, in many ways, train us to fear learning - by training us to avoid failure.

We should be teaching learners to value failure as the great teacher it can be.

–

*This is to my students, who read an earlier post with the baby picture and showed very poor critical reading skills, which resulted in the widespread belief that our engagement was compelled not by love, but a shotgun.

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Silly Twitter Sonnet

I tweeted to my twitterverse last week
From high up on a twig on my lone tree.
From that frail height I sang of what I seek:
A future free of grinding schooletry.

I sang of learning far beyond the walls
of bricked-in class, and space, and time, and age;
and students heeding all creative calls
that cried to them from their own chosen page.

An echo back from that lone song I heard
from fledglings, faint from some barred far-off cage:
“We hear you, and would fly there in a word,
Were we but free to heed our inner sage.”

A bell rang then, and my frail twig gave way,
And down I plunged, to just another day.

–

I signed the contract for one more year, but in a new position: 21st Century Learning/Tech Coordinator.  We’ll see how that goes.

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