Beyond School

I’ve been a Diigo user for two years come July. Seems like everybody and their grannies have adopted it in a Twitter-induced stampede over the last two days (I think Will had something to do with it).

As I said on Twitter, the flood of emails requesting “friendship” on Diigo sort of shocked me (I despise email), since I wasn’t in the loop when the stampede started. I’m not sure I want to go Facebook with Diigo any more than I want to go Facebook with Facebook – I’m a fairly quiet person who tends to be happy roaming solo in his own flow, as taboo as that confession may be in these share-happy times (and it’s funny how manically I can twitter, and yet still feel uninvaded and uncrowded). So all these emails (which I’ve since turned off) make me feel my little secret reading cafe became trendy overnight, and too loud now to read in peace. Maybe I’ll come around to the social benefits in time.

That being said, I’ve been evangelizing Diigo on these pages since day one, as you’ll see in this compendium of three old posts showing how I used Diigo in the classroom over the last year and a half.

A caveat: for my own research, I love Diigo. It allows me to annotate, bookmark (and share automatically to del.icio.us), and highlight clips – all tagged, too. But just as I’ve had little luck getting students or colleagues to use feed aggregators, I’ve had no better luck getting them to switch on to the power of Diigo. So if you use any of these methods in your own classroom – or use Diigo in any other way with your students – I advise you to build in part of the assessment to be weighted toward demonstrated regular use of the tool. Schooliness is Web 1.0 (if it’s web at all), and our students seem to prefer schooliness over anything new every bit as much as their teachers do. A word to the wise.

That being said, here you go: Three uses of Diigo in the history and English classroom:

Screencast: Using Diigo on Student Scribe Blogs as Test Review “Sheets” (20 September 2007)

Here’s one more tutorial, 4 minutes, on using Diigo on Scribe blogs as test review sheets, with students as members of a Diigo Group. I just trained my students today in AP Lit, set them up on the class Diigo Group, and “shared” my highlights and annotations of the class scribe posts (it only works on permalinks, not on main blog pages) with the kisAP07 group. They use that as “test reviw.”

Here it is:

From Red Pen to Invisible Ink: Assessing Student Blogs with Diigo Groups (23 March 2007)

You are a young writer trying to experience what being a real writer is, because…your teacher is making you: sore spot one (but I can live with this one, for obvious reasons).

You are a young writer trying to have that experience by writing on a web-log (I’ve decided to outlaw the term “blogging” with students, and substitute the correct, grand old word: “Writing”), so that you can experience real audience, real feedback, real conversation based on your writing: blessing one.

You are a young writer who sees that someone has left a comment on one or your writings on your web-log (the word “blog” is a blighted thing as well, in the Language Arts classroom. From now on, we use “web-log”). What a delight–and a new one. You click the link, curious and expectant–how is the world responding to me as a writer?

But you see this:

You misspelled “frustrated.”
Is this a strong introduction?
Nice use of the appositive in Sentence Pattern 4, but your compound sentence in SP 3 is a comma splice because you forgot to include a coordinating conjunction after the comma.
B+.Your teacher.

“Well,” you say, “It was interesting. Thanks, but no thanks. Back to MySpace for some real conversation.”

Luckily, Chris Watson sparked an idea in one of our podcasted conversations about this problem: Somehow find a way to use Diigo to assess student web-log writing without defacing the students’ “intellectual property” and turning writing into “schooliness.”

So here’s my latest experiment, with thanks to Chris (and to Diane Quirk, who suggested this much earlier): using Diigo Groups (with a separate Diigo login for me, to keep my own bookmarks separate from my classroom bookmarks).

My students have joined the Group. Now when they go to their web-logs, after logging in to their Diigo account and setting “Show Annotations > Show Group Annotations” on their Diigo toolbar, they will see the highlights of specific passages from their writing that I have left (and I can start students doing this too, it occurs to me in a very attractive flash), and my annotations will pop up on their screen when they hover their mouse over the highlights.

Also good, our Diigo Groups Bookmarks page records all highlights and annotations I have made on one page. Students can use that to see all feedback I have given to specific strengths and weaknesses on all students writings.

And since they’re using anagrams instead of first-name usernames on their blogs, there’s less of a chance of any embarrassment resulting from this “public feedback”–with “invisible ink.”

The screenshot below is an example of what one student will see when she visits her blog with Diigo turned on.

How to Highlight and “Sticky-Note” Websites, and Save It All Online, Using Diigo (1 January 2007)

Here is an updated version of the Diigo tutorial. Your students will love you (not immediately, but only after they’re gone–they’re students, after all) for teaching them this great research tool!

And you’ll love being able to access your online notes of every website you’ve researched yourself, too–from any computer in the world.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6-1ZitmeDk[/youtube]

I’m browsing the comments on last week’s Open Thread: Your Favorite Teacher Blogs?, and want to thank Bill Ferriter for sharing upstate New York English teacher Dina Strasser’s The Line.

I’ve read Dina before, and was struck by her writing then, but life has been too fast recently to bring me back to it. The return trip just now blew me away.

I want to share Dina’s first attempt at digital storytelling. Like Education for Well-Being’s Bill Farren’s “Did You Ever Wonder?”, Dina’s “Do You Know?” is a riff on Karl Fisch’s “Did You Know?” “Do You Know?” is Dina’s vehicle for expressing her reactions to a recent trip she made to New Orleans. Just watch it:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWG7CBIpcN0[/youtube]

It’s an interesting thing, this trend of intertextual riffs on Karl’s and Scott McLeod’s “Did You Know?” If I were them, I’d be quite proud to have generated this type of connective and competing reflection on what education in the 21st century should mean.

And if I were Dina, I’d be proud indeed of such a powerful first outing as a digital storyteller.

Don’t stop here, by the way. Check out Dina’s blog. There’s much more waiting for you there.

Just sharing another quick writing exercise to follow up on the “titles and introductions” lesson using Alltop, since some writing teachers seemed to appreciate that one.

We did this lesson in my PLN/Networked Learning writing elective last week.  So many of my students, after 10+ years of writing in school, were writing post after post of the most monotonous, artless sentence structure – the basic Subject + Verb + Object or Complement – that reading them was like Chinese water torture.  Not good, when your classwork is a real-world blog project you hope will attract readers about your (presumed) passion, and will continue to be yours long after the school year is over.

So I adapted an exercise I learned from a Six Traits of Effective Writing workshop I  attended years ago in Shanghai by posting it on the class blog, and having students “turn it in” in comments to the post in class.  Here it is:

Leave a comment in which you write this sentence with as many sentence openings as you can – YOU CANNOT ADD OR SUBTRACT ANY WORDS. YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO MAKE AT LEAST FIVE DIFFERENT SENTENCES WITH DIFFERENT OPENINGS BY SIMPLY REARRANGING:

He was quickly and happily crossing the street eating a hamburger when the bus came out of nowhere and ran over him.

As in the titles and introductory “hooks” lesson, I had students revise their previous posts to vary their sentence openings.  Again, the differences after revision were evidence that this quick lesson helped students to see the monotony of their own writing styles.

It’s a pretty fun exercise, by the way.  Should we turn this into an open thread and see who can write the most variations, without changing the meaning of the original sentence, or adding to or subtracting from the original words?

(P.S. I dashed this sentence off spontaneously, because I lost the sentence used in the workshop. If any of you writing teachers out there have done something like this and have a sentence that works better, please share it for the good of all.)

Photo credit: martha madness on Flickr.

The following is rough transcript of my introductory remarks to two Advanced Placement Literature classes about a month ago.

I have two important announcements. Please pay attention.

One: I’m forming a Smoking on Campus Committee.

I’ve had enough of all the wrong-headed anti-smoking hysteria in our school. Smoking is not a social evil; it’s a social good. The world is over-infested with humans, and any habit that decreases our numbers is a long-term good for the planet. Further, any habit that saves us from the miseries of octogenarian decrepitude – dentures, incontinence, senility, and so forth – should be embraced, not shunned. Therefore, I’m announcing the Smoking on Campus Committee. Our platform consists of, first, promoting the sale of cigarettes and other tobacco products at the student store; and second, asserting students’ rights to smoke in the classroom, hallways, cafeteria, and anywhere else on campus.

Any students interested in applying for leadership positions in this committee are urged to see me after class.

Two: I’m offering One-on-One Conferences in Remedial Cheating

Cheating is an important skill for school. Done successfully, it saves you from wasting hundreds of hours of precious developmental time on mindless homework, and gives you the opportunity to devote that time instead to the pursuit of your own interests: music, sports, real reading and writing, friendship, navel-gazing, sleep, romance, whatever. As a teacher, it is my duty to equip you with the real-world skills you need to succeed. So I want to see the following students, whose plagiarism skills are not adequately fool-proof, for some remedial one-on-one lessons after school: [names withheld].

April Fool’s? Yes, for this post. But not for my class. I really did deliver something like this a few weeks ago, as an introduction to Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Rather than try to explain how Wilde’s characters utter the most outrageous, radical things – but with such straight faces that the humor and social criticism go right over the heads of switched-off audiences – I thought I’d attempt to give them a taste of Wilde’s method by making the above announcements with a straight face of my own.

I wish I’d filmed the students’ faces. Typically blank at first – another teacher yammering away – then the eyes get a little wider and more focused; then the glancing at other students with “are you hearing what I’m hearing?” looks. A few students nodding their heads in agreement with my “logic.”

A one-minute discussion of “Why did I make these announcements?” and “Were they entirely ridiculous?” (-”No.” -) “Why not?”, and they were ready to watch Wilde. Here’s a clip from the 1952 film adaptation by Anthony Asquith – as perfect a film as you’ll ever see. Enjoy the (not so) foolishness as the respectable Lady Bracknell interviews “Earnest,” a suitor for her daughter’s hand in marriage :

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oWBdIx9IQE[/youtube]

This is the excellent foppery of the world.
–Edmund, in Shakespeare’s King Lear

Remember last summer those Korean Christian missionaries who came up with the bright idea of spreading their gospel in, of all places, Afghanistan? Sure you do. It was all over the news for a couple weeks. They were taken hostage by the Taliban, and a couple of their pastors were executed. Strangely enough, they were from a church in my old neighborhood in Seoul.

I don’t mean to be callous, but my reaction was: “Well, what did they expect?” Talk about “tempting the Lord.” Why not trust Him to protect a scuba dive in a lava bed? “What were these people thinking?” I asked.

They didn’t know what I want to call the First Rule of Evangelizing: Know Your Potential Converts.

I think we web 2.0 evangelists – at least this one – have to come to terms with a similar case of our own foppery: spreading the Gospel of RSS.

Even though we all use RSS readers – and even that’s a questionable assumption as the flood of feeds rises, and I, for one, find myself reading Twitter links far more than RSS feeds these days – can we all agree that our success rate at converting others to do the same is dismally low?

As a classroom teacher who has tried to convert students to the Good News of RSS Aggregators for almost two years now, the picture is even grimmer. All those hours walking students through setting up accounts, finding feeds, and all those additional hours of trying to guide them to the explosive learning that comes from the feed-reading habit? Fast forward a year later, and almost none of them have seen the Light.

Burn me at the stake, dear reader, and rail at this heretic if you must, but I must draw this conclusion: Maybe RSS is not The Only Way. We need a New Gospel.

Buddha is said to have advised seekers of Truth, faced with so many dogmas and doctrines and sects and claims, “Don’t mistake the fingers for the moon.” (For the metaphorically-challenged, the Moon would be the Truth, and the Fingers would be all mortal attempts to formulate it. Buddha is saying not to mistake the attempted answers with the ineffable reality they try to contain. Words can’t touch the Ultimate Truth, whatever that may be. It’s another reason I’ve always thought Buddha was cool. I’d love to hang out with that guy.)

So to riff off The Awakened One: if reading blogs and such is the moon, and RSS is a finger pointing the way to them that the vast majority of humans are too lazy and habit-driven to adopt, let’s be open to other ways.

I’ll share one that I found the day it was launched, and used in a writing classroom the day after. It’s called Alltop.

Guy Kawasaki, former Apple Evangelist, author, venture capitalist, Truemors creator, and Top 100 Technorati blogger, launched Alltop.com about a month ago. True to his mantra-making form, he describes Alltop as an “Online Magazine Rack.” It’s an apt description. As this screenshot shows, Alltop’s main page feels like an online version of the magazine section at a Borders or Barnes and Nobles. Click on the picture for full-size:

You see the main categories -Work, Living, People, Interests, Culture, Geekery, Good, News – that function as the “sections” in a magazine area of a bookstore. And beneath each category, you see the “subsections” – under “Culture,” for example, you have Design, Fashion, Movies, Music, and Photography (since he’s asking for suggestions, I’ve asked Guy to add “Books” to this work-in-progress).

By clicking on any of the subsections, you drill deeper into that subject by going to its subdomain page – for example, culture.alltop.com. Here you get a page of links “top” sites about the topic and, as the screeshot below of the “Interests > Crime” page shows, the latest five feeds from each site. Again, click the picture for full-size view:

I chose to screenshot the Crime page because I have a student in my Networked Learning/PLN elective class who chose to do a project on detectives in real life, and on TV and film. She’s writing crime humor scripts that she wants to direct and film, so she needed to find websites to research real detective life and find plot ideas involving funny crimes. The “Dumb Criminals” and CSI sites were just what she needed for these purposes.

But I had all of my students in this class do an exercise about the importance of titles and opening paragraphs using the main page of whatever Alltop site best suited their self-designed project – sports journalism, restaurant and bar design, comfort foods and recipes, political satire, game reviews – and the final feature of Alltop that has value for teaching writing. You see it in the screenshot below: the popup first paragraph of each feed’s post:

So here’s how the writing exercise went: 1) Go to the topic on Alltop that fits your project; 2) List the three best, and three worst, blog or website titles from the page, and explain why they shine or stink; 3) Select the three best and worst post titles, and explain the same; 4) Hover over the links of posts and find three excellent introductions from the popups, and three lousy ones, and explain your choices; 5) Post your analyses on the group PLN blog (here’s an example from a student: “The Difference a Title Can Make”).

Since doing that exercise – and then assigning students to re-title and re-write the opening paragraphs of all their posts – I’ve seen the evidence that the lesson worked. And I’ve also found that Alltop is a way for my students to find fresh information about their interests – without facing the tribulations of evangelizing RSS readers.

Full disclosure: Beyond School is featured in Alltop’s Education page. But I was using Alltop in class before that. I’d switched my homepage to Alltop from Popurls.com, which featured only social bookmarking hits from del.icio.us, Digg, and so forth, and thus was uneven at best (the Ron Paul crowd learned how to manipulate these sites to push their posts to the top, along with many other sensationalistic titles). Alltop is an improvement for this reason.

Finally, be warned: puritanical classrooms will not be comfortable with Alltop because it features topics like “BLTG” – bi-sexual, lesbian, trans-sexual, gay – and it also features posts with some taboo vowel-consonant combinations. Me? I find it the perfect opportunity to train my students in not freaking out over real-world realities and language, and to get over any hangups about them caused by schooliness – whether Monday-Friday schooliness, or Sunday-schooliness. Let’s be real. They’re in high school, and they’re not strangers to these things.

As the title says, short and sweet: What are your favorite blogs for 21st century teaching, by subject matter? 

As a classroom teacher myself with a 3/4 teaching load plus unofficial tech coordinator duties for k-12 at my school, I don’t have much time this year to stay abreast of all the great teacher bloggers out there. I think this thread can be useful for others like me, for teachers looking for others in their subject area, and for professional development types looking for models to share in their workshops.

So real simple, again: At a minimum, list the blog name, blog address, teacher name, and content area, and age group they teach (primary, middle, secondary is fine).

I have a project in mind that will use your recommendations to, I hope, move things forward.

And if you’re a teacher yourself, don’t be shy: list yourself

It’s been about six weeks since my last update on the ten-week-old Networked Learning class I created with the help of so many of you in the initial Open Thread post and Twitter. Students are still grading themselves and justifying it – and showing the same fondness for grade inflation as so many of our colleagues. They’re also reflecting up a storm on how messy learning is when it’s yours to create and pursue.

Lesson One: Natives Can’t Tweet, and Twits Must Sleep

I’m learning a lot too. I’m learning that students aren’t comfortable with Twitter – another strike against the Digital Natives concept – and don’t adapt to it easily. I’m also learning that the Twitterverse is so much fuller of good will and idealism than it is of time and energy that it’s often unreliable (and I include myself in this charge). I pulled back from that angle when I realized the absence of network input could be an excuse for not generating your own content from good old-fashioned writing (or new-fashioned blogging and multmedia).

Lesson Two: Failure Can Breed Success

But the favorite piece of learning I’m having is this: there is no unit testing involved, no chopping up of learning into opened-then-closed chapters. Instead, there is a lot of time for confusion, drift, frustration, and failure – without the option of quitting. And to me, that’s pregnant with more real-world learning than most stuff on the SAT or AP Literature exam.

Lesson Three: Fall Down Nine Times, Stand Up Ten — Then Slam-Dunk

And here’s some evidence: Jaeho and Younsuk have gone through a lot of challenges as they’ve tried to launch their Basketball without Borders website (I’m withholding the URL until the tell me it’s ready to launch). They’d

had a lot of leads for interviews that fizzled out, were delayed, fell through, and so forth, and had to traverse some really windless seas for a few weeks. We kept busy with more schooly writing exercises and such while waiting for fresh winds, but still – “inspired” and “motivated” are the last words to come to mind when I remember those weeks with this project.

But today they had a slam dunk: K.J. Matsui (Washington Post feature article here), an NCAA basketball standout from Columbia University, agreed to a Skype call from Korea to New York – during our class – to record for a podcast interview for their site. Younsuk skyped me at about 2 this morning to give me the news, chat about his interview questions, and so forth, which is, ah, unusual from almost any student. Then today in class, Matsui was on Skype as promised. (How cool is that from a world-class athlete, by the way?)

How do “inspired” and “motivated” fit these project creators now? You decide. I filmed them just as the interview ended, and interviewed them myself. It’s 4 noteworthy minutes, especially to those who can read body and facial language.

And me? I’m inspired, as a teacher, to help them write as well as they can on this site. I want it to succeed and grow long after they leave me.

Just a quickie to share a new discovery: I just switched to Flock from Firefox – which I loved, but has been way too buggy lately – and I find it feels just like Firefox, but faster and more stable. Better still, I found a new addon called Split Browser (see a monster list of Flock addons here) that allows me to split my browser window. I know this isn’t new – I used a similar thing years ago when I was a PC user – but I’d somehow forgotten how useful this function could be.

An example: Say you’re reading a a long forum entry on Ning, and you want to be able to reply to it as you read. You can’t do that easily in one browser (and yes, you could simply open another window, but that’s clunky). By splitting my Flock window, it’s easy. See this screenshot for a glimpse of how, and click on the image for a larger view:

Added bonus: Flock seems to really take customer care to new levels via Twitter. See this post from John Larkin for the full, cool scoop.

One for the MiniLegends

[Update: I was out of the loop preparing for my wedding when Australian Al Upton's MiniLegends and Qatar's Jabiz Raisdana got hit by two shockingly reactionary hammers. Since this podcast features Noel Thomas, an Australian high school principal representing all that is most forward-thinking and impressive about Australia's educational system, I'd like to dedicate this podcast to Al, the MiniLegends, and Jabiz. Noel, I can't help but fantasize that you and Al discover each other and join forces. As you say in the podcast, most teachers will never get it. Al is a teacher who has impressed us all for years with how much he does get it. (h/t to John Connell for the miniLegends badge - John, I hope you don't mind me nicking it?)]

Love This Podcast, or I’ll Eat a Bug

As I say in the intro to this podcast, if you don’t find it the most interesting hour of podcasting I’ve ever done, I’ll eat a bug. (And yes, Los Angelenos, that is a quote from the old Cal Worthington used car commercials of the ’80s.) That intro was hard, by the way: I tried about 8 times to summarize why I’m so excited about the things happening in that podcast, but couldn’t, and did the “eat a bug” intro instead. In retrospect, it sounds silly. But I had to get the thing published.

Creative Destruction Abundant

What walls don’t come down in this hour-long talk? Bye-bye edu-caste system, bye-bye geographic and temporal barriers. My guests are from three continents and four levels of school hierarchy:

• High School Principal Noel Thomas, Toorak College, Melbourne, Australia
• High School Principal (and next year’s Director) Rich Boerner, Korea International School, Seoul, South Korea (my employer)
• Librarian Jenny Luca, Toorak College, Melbourne
• Lara H., high school student, Toorak College
• Lindsea Kemp-Wilber, Punahou High School student (and Students 2.o staff writer), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
• and me, high school teacher and tool-guy, Korea International School

(Quicktime free download required)
[quicktime]http://ia311303.us.archive.org/3/items/ClayBurellPodcast_ThreeSchoolsDiscoverthe21stCentury/PGCAustralia.m4a[/quicktime]

(right-click and “save target as” here to download enhanced podcast for iTunes)

Table of Contents

If you download to iTunes, you can navigate by these chapter headings:

• Intro: I’ll Eat a Bug
• Audio Snapshots
• Welcome
• Noel Thomas, Toorak College, Melbourne Australia
• Toorak’s Dilemma re: Web Access for Students
• Rich Boerner, Korea Internat’l School, Seoul
• KIS’ Open Web Access for Students
• Factors Favoring Relaxed Filtering at KIS
• Toorak Librarain Jenny Luca: Toorak Change Agent
• Jenny’s Views on the Value of Blogging to Learn
• Toorak and KIS Connect thru Project Global Cooling
• Lindsea Kemp-Wilbur, Intro (Hawaii Student)
• Student Lindsea Teaching the World
• Lara H., Intro (Australia Student)
• Sustainability at Our Specific Schools
• Broader Issues of Connecting Schools for Learning
• Lindsea on Youthnet: Student-Initiated Global Collaboration via Twitter and Wiki
• How Clay in Korea has Known Lindsea in Hawaii for Almost 2 Years
• Getting Teachers to Accept Student-Led Collaborative Projects
• Getting Students to Rise to the Challenge of Laptop Learning
• KIS Student Patrick Nam as Model of Networked Learning
• Noel’s Approach to Keeping Students Responsible Online
• Jenny’s Approach to Pulling Students In
• Clay on the Importance of Same Time-Zone Partner Schools
• Rich on Importance of Collab AT SCHOOL, not home
• Acceptable Use Policy
• Toward an Eastern Hemisphere Schools Network
• Spreading the Word to Students about Youthnet
• Lindsea as Model for Student Imitation
• Lara: PGC Should Be Easy in Australia
• Difficulties with Projects in Korea
• Media Interest in Project Global Cooling
• Clay’s Parting Shot: This Tech is EASY
• Parting Shots
• Closing Comments: Project Global Cooling Growing: Seoul, Hawaii, Australia in, and Beijing, Los Angeles, and Bangkok Nibbling – Add Your School This Year or Next
• (Name Your Bug)

Links Referenced in Podcast:

• Jenny Luca’s Lucacept (Australia)
• Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed
• Project Global Cooling
• Bill Farren’s Education for Well-Being blog
• Lindsea Kemp-Wilbur’s Love and Logic blog
• Chris Watson’s WatsonCommon blog
• Lindsea’s Youthnet post on Students 2.0
• Jabiz Raisdana’s Intrepid Teacher (stay intrepid, Jabiz)
• Jabiz’ Global Issues class blog
• Youthnet Twitter page
• “Natural” Global Collaboration (my networked learning elective class)
• Youthnet Wikispace
• The 1001 Flat World Tales global collaborative writing project
• KIS Sophomore Patrick Nam’s blog and podcast

Recorded on 3 March 2008

Prelude: Twitter as Teacher

Twitter has become a reading and watching adviser for me. The 400 or so people in my Twitter network tweet a TinyURL link and a succinct blurb, and if it catches me at the right time and place, BAM, I’m reading and thinking and learning and reflecting – and, as now, writing about the experience. All from a simple cybertweet of less than 140 characters from a stranger I know in a strange new way.

Pregnant with pedagogical implications as this new development in my own literate life is, I’m going to leave it to you (or to a future post) to midwife those. My point here is that somebody tweeted a link, and I followed and watched. Now, post-watch, I’m both encouraged and discouraged by it. And I want to try, despite being a bit worn out by the wedding and the school year’s third quarter stretch, to articulate why.

Passion, Pressure, Repression

I just finished watching David Eggers’ TED Prize Wish presentation, “Once Upon a School.” Before I embed it, first my own blurb: Watching Eggers – listening to him – made me uneasy on a strictly personal level because he speaks very much like I do in class. He’s passionate, he’s inspired, he’s visionary, he’s hopeful – and here’s where you have to take back the “isn’t Clay awfully self-congratulatory here?” thought that should have passed through your mind so far, because I follow it now with…. – BUT: I kept wishing he would calm down.

I suspect my own students often wish the same as they play audience to me. Like Eggers in this talk, I rush through sentences, I gesticulate, I feel the conflict of passion and self-consciousness about that passion. Normally the passion wins, and I repress any impulse to repress it. I tell myself the ideas and insights unburdening themselves might take root in the two or three students who really want ideas to chew on, and the rest of the students would shrug off any alternative mode of delivery anyway.

When class is over and I’m alone in my classroom, I sometimes feel plain foolish when I compare my own excitement with the dull looks on the faces of my audience. The looks in the eyes, again, of those two or three students who really seemed to hear and follow, though – they comfort me a bit. I imagine this is really just part of the territory for us teachers of poetry (which means teachers of so much more than poetry).

Stay with me. I haven’t forgotten Eggers.

Eggers, in this talk, has a moment in which he acknowledges his near-manic nervousness, expresses his self-consciousness about it, but then puts his finger on its situational cause. More exactly, he points his finger at it.

“I hope to have an interest in the English language, but I’m not speaking it well right now,” he says. Then he points to it: “That clock has got me.”

TED limits its speakers to teach their “idea worth sharing” in eighteen minutes.

Of course there’s a logic to it. Brevity is good, life is short, and all of that. But when your purpose is to share ideas that you believe have the power to transform? How can you not get manic? Moreover, how can you possibly do it in eighteen minutes?

Eggers at least had this advantage: he had TED’s megaphone, TED’s credentials, TED’s badge of credibility. Compare that with your humble classroom teacher.

Compare it, in fact, with this teacher’s experience in his last two English classes.

Greatness, True and False

I had an “idea worth sharing.” I believed, and want to say I knew, that it had the power to transform the depressingly smothered souls of my high school “advanced placement” literature students – most of whom took the class not out of an eagerness to learn, nor of a love of literature. Flat out, they took it to enhance their college applications. And that college application rat-race is the very thing smothering their souls, making them depressing to me and depressed themselves, by and large.

This class was school. School is a thing we do to go to a better school in college, which is a thing we do to get a better job, which is a thing we do to make better money, which is a thing we do to find happiness. Or at least, this is what the hidden curriculum of schools, with their college counselors, their SAT and AP manias, their GPA obsession, and that whole schtick, teach us – and this is what we believe and pursue until, if we’re unlucky, we find ourselves living this cartoon:

.

I’m a poetry teacher. I know poets at their best can serve as prophets and sages to higher paths in life. My job is to transmit that, a secular John the Baptist, to what Jesus wonderfully described as “those with ears.” (Again, to me, that means two or three students per class. I’m not a Christian any more, and haven’t been since reading the Bible the third time, and studying the history of Christianity and comparative religions, and just thinking about this stuff as clearly and honestly as I could – but I’ve always loved the sense in Jesus’ implicit recognition that not everybody has “spiritual ears” for higher truths. He was a street poet himself, that homeless dealer in parables.)

So here’s what I had to transmit this week. Read it twice, three times. Read it slowly. Read it out loud. You should see why I so wanted these learning-traumatized grade junkies to get its view of “true greatness,” and not forget the precious things all that homework, memorizing, night- and weekend-schooling, and Ivy League fretting so encourages them precisely to forget:

I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Truly Great

Stephen Spender

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

I’d planned a thirty minute discussion of the poem – “It’s that clock! It’s got me!” – but reality planned otherwise. It took us a full hour to even come to a basic understanding of the poem. The idea that “the traffic” could “smother” – in this classroom, is smothering, in many cases has smothered – that “flowering of the spirit,” and cause us – them – to “forget” that each of us are, in the truest and deepest sense, human “blood . . . breaking through” the lifeless “rocks” in this inert universe, and thus so rich already with the simple brains in our skulls and hearts in our breasts? This idea, “shared” in this poem, took that hour to tease from blank incomprehension, then to push through the cynical adolescent smirk of some of the smothered cool ones, and was getting close, close, close, it seemed, to sinking into some perhaps permanent and meaningful space, and opening out into a conversation about wisdom beyond grades and test scores, but then

***THE BELL RANG***

and all reflection and thinking stopped. Off they went for another timed injection from another humble teacher, until another bell rang and another injection started, ad nauseum.

So my first Eggers reactions come as questions: I really don’t understand why schools force adolescents – young adults – who don’t enjoy a subject to spend their time on it, when they could double their time on a subject they do enjoy instead. Again, I’m talking about high school here. How much longer are we going to follow this model? They have the basic skills (I swear I think they have those by age 15 or earlier). Why not let them hone those skills on something they do want to learn, or better still, to do?

Why are we still chopping thinking up into timed units? Isn’t there a way to liberate learning from the tyranny of a factory clock announcing the start and finish of “learning shifts”? Where in the real world does learning happen like this?

I know these are gnarly questions and don’t pretend to have answers. But I do contend that the bell schedule is not the answer by default. And I can imagine a four-subject schedule instead of seven, and each day being three hours on one subject, lunch, then three hours on another, as an off-the-cuff alternative that strikes me as an improvement. (If you haven’t read Marc Prensky’s “Turning On the Lights” from this month’s ASCD Educational Leadership, you really should. I don’t swallow Prensky’s “digital native / digital immigrant” metaphor – too much time with the alleged immigrants first-hand to buy it – but he’s right on in this article.*)

Breaking News / To Be Continued (Notes of a Newlywed)

Regular readers know I just got married less than two weeks ago. That’s changing my writing life (and this is not a complaint). The breaking news? My wife just got home. I’m going to continue this in a second post, because I’m just getting started. Much of what Eggers achieved to improve the learning of students in San Francisco, and “wishes” in this speech that others would do worldwide to help education, seems to me impossible to achieve within schools. And we can point to people like Jabiz and Al Upton as examples of why: they tried to improve things, but their systems shut them down.

Here’s Eggers’ talk. As you watch, ask yourself how much of what TED celebrates would be vetoed by parents or schools:

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*Our thoughts are with Marc with hopes for a quick recovery.