Let Tyranny Ring: Notes on Eggers, Part One
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:
–
*Our thoughts are with Marc with hopes for a quick recovery.
- Let There Be Light!
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Clay - I love your blogs and congratulations on your new life as a married man.
I believe that this blog is a lot like how you and I teach. It is passionate, we move around alot and try to fit a lot into a very short time, but this post jumps around way too much even for me to keep up with you. These are subjects that I followed in this blog:
1. Twitter
2. David Eggers
3. Passion, Pressure, Repression
4. The Clock
5. Religion
6. Poetry
7. Timed Units/clases
8. Newly wed.
I just get ready to comment on subject and you have taken me somewhere else - not that i am complaining too much, but my response would be almost as long as the original :).
So while I agree with 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8. and believe you said it better than I could.
Number 2, I am still having trouble with Twitter…I just can’t wrap my head around it…I will keep trying though.
Number 6, As soon as I see poetry, I shut down passively and skip over it…it comes from a dry and boring poetry teachers in grade and then high school. Forced rote poetry memorization. I know that there is some great stuff (Poetry) out there…but my past causes me to glaze over.
But I am glad you are back and I look forward to your next post, because I have learned by reading your blogs. - Harold
Harold Shaw’s last blog post..From the Quick Hits Dept.: Transferring Feeds Between Accounts
Harold Shaw
20 Mar 08 at 2:37 am
Eggers’ TED talk is great, and his work is inspiring AAARRRGGGG!
Wondering if flooding public schools with more people, and more money is really THE answer to the bigger problem?
I love the enthusiasm, I love the energy, I love the creativity, I love the spirit of giving (back). Wondering if there isn’t a better use of these resources for kids and learning? And a better use of the hell of a lot of money Public Ed. receives? Maybe some of those appropriations might be funneled to fund Eggers’ writing studios all over the country, and world perhaps. That seems to be making a difference, sans test scores!
Just wondering…
Derek Brandow
20 Mar 08 at 2:37 am
I’m reminded of Van Morrison’s Philosoher’s Stone and Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. Both feature the perennial idea of turning lead into gold.
I’m a retired teacher, 65 years old, and have come to similar conclusions as yours about schools, education and the like. I’m working on a website soon to go live that proposes that we forgot that our job is learning, not schools.
Eggers video is wonderful. I’ve emailed the link to the folks in my learning network, many of whom probably won’t take the time to look at it because of their crushing schedules–THE CLOCK!
As for Spender’s poem, I love it. So here’s one for you that may serve to cheer you a bit.
Thanks for writing thought provoking ideas.
What We Need
The Emperor,
his bullies
and henchmen
terrorize the world
every day,
which is why
every day
we need
a little poem
of kindness,
a small song
of peace
a brief moment
of joy.
—David Budbill
While We’ve Still Got Fee
skip olsen
20 Mar 08 at 4:46 am
Clay,
I had to drag myself away from the lovely imagery of the poem to contemplate the video of one man who” wore at [his heart] the fire’s center” and was rewarded for it, and two others “who in their lives fought for life” only to face censure.
You ask us to consider “how much of of what TED celebrates would be vetoed by parents or schools?”
Al Upton’s transgression was allowing his students to interact with international mentors. Most likely, Eggers’ call for hundreds, thousands of adult volunteers to interact with students would be rejected by Upton’s district unless there were a cumbersome, possibly/probably ineffective screening process.
“Always let the teachers lead the way”? Jabiz taught with passion and inspired his class to respond in kind. Although he never directed or linked students to his personal page, Jabiz was forced to resign when a parent discovered one of his completed art projects online and deemed it unsuitable.
I would like to believe that “affecting change can be fun” but, sadly, I haven’t seen that happen too often in the everyday world.
In education, we are more apt to experience forces that “allow gradually the traffic to smother With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.”
diane
diane’s last blog post..A Heavy Armor
diane
20 Mar 08 at 7:53 am
@Harold, thanks for bearing with me. I know this post grew like the wild vine it wanted to be, and was writing, too, under the pressure of both the clock and of a backlog of things to say due to my absence.
What amazes me is that somehow blogging has made me a person who no longer wants to write, like all wannabees, but who needs to. I myself was smothering from too much time away from keyboard.
As for Twitter? I think the key is following a good hundred or 200 people, and having a browser-based client like my Twitbin for Mac. The volume of tweets cascading down my Firefox left sidebar from the 400 thoughtful people I follow is a waterfall of information and wonder. It’s easy to sip from as I do all other web-based work. If I only followed a handful of people, it wouldn’t work.
@Derek: more adults (not “schoolteachers”) mentoring the young and integrating them, habituating them, familiarizing them with authentic adult interaction - that’s such a natural remedy for the walls schools have put between the young and their societies. More money? Eggers’ approach doesn’t seem to require it, any more than my networked learning elective class - the Twitterverse as adult “teachers” - or, for that matter, Students 2.0, with its dozens of adult comments to each student’s post.
@Skip: Amen, amen. Was it Twain or Einstein who said “I never let my schooling interfere with my education”?
“The Philosopher’s Stone” is a song I could sing backwards and forwards under a posthumous morphine spell. I love that it emerged in your comment. Water seeks its own level Thanks for adding more poetry.
@Diane: You sum up the direction of my next installment on the Eggers talk so succinctly that I wouldn’t, if I had any sense, even write it now. As always, thank you for the care and thought of your comments.
It’s good to be back.
Clay Burell
20 Mar 08 at 8:11 am
How we crack the problem of using the industrial time clock with segmented education in high school will greatly impact student learning in the near future. I’d like to see us abandon the agricultural schedule as well. Why do we still take summers off? There aren’t too many of students at my school who spend their time working in the fields.
Some high schools have switched to a trimester model with 90 minute classes and they make the effort to connect the curriculum. Imagine the joys of actually reading Thomas Paine while you are studying the founding of America. Might help make the study of some subjects much more meaningful.
Charlie A. Roy’s last blog post..A Jott in Line and Saving Time
Charlie A. Roy
20 Mar 08 at 8:34 am
Hi Clay,
Good blog! I’m all for the abandonment of clock-watching, but I think it needs to come as part of a wider re-evaluation of what we do in schools, and at the heart of that is the curruculum. Our school has 120-minute lessons, expressly intended to introduce this relative freedom from time constraints; and what do we have to do? Deliver the same fact-laden crap for memorisation as before. Except now the kids have to wait 2 hours for a break rather than one! To combat the boredom that doing one thing for a long time inevitably engenders, we are encouraged to dream up ever-more inane methods of ‘making Shakespeare relevant’ and ‘engaging’. Y’know what? If we have to struggle THIS hard to make stuff ‘relevant’, maybe it’s time, as you seem to say, to accept that to many people, it just ISN’T relevant.
As for Marc Prensky, I agree with you that the ‘digital native / immigrant’ metaphor collapses immediately on encountering any of said ‘natives’ or ‘immigrants’ for any amount of time. However, I’d extend that to the essay you’ve linked to also. The more I read of Prensky’s stuff, the more I believe that much of what is said about the Web 2 ‘revolution’ and associated ideas is just mumbo-jumbo. Apparently, now, kids need to learn about the mathematics of space travel rather than basic maths? History is best delivered through ‘Civilisation’, to the point where any teacher who questions the facts as presented is crushing their spirit? Kids should report teachers for being ‘boring’? I’m sorry, but it’s too easy to confuse a radical agenda for improving education and a wholesale replacement of education with playtime. We need to rethink things, sure, but I don’t know that elevating edutainment as the new standard for ‘quality classroom experience’ is the way to do it.
It’s incredibly easy to turn people off considering more innovative uses of technology by being either too evangelistic or by being too unrealistic; I think that what Prensky habitually does (like many, many others in this debate) is to be so unrealistically, simplistically iconoclastic (’Change everything! That’ll work!’) that the half-decent (and commonsensical) ideas which he DOES have are lost.
Congratulations on the wedding, by the way.
Mr Chips
21 Mar 08 at 4:59 pm
@Mr. Chips,
Fascinating, excellent comment (and if the lack of a link to click on your name means you don’t blog, the quality of your writing suggests you should).
I say “fascinating” in part because your comment seems to reflect the same sort of ambivalence I have about curriculum. We don’t want historically ignorant, culturally illiterate, innumerate, and scientifically challenged youth inheriting the future from us - the argument for keeping much of the traditional curriculum. At the same time, first-had experience of my “advanced” high school seniors shows that 12 years of “elite” schooling in all those subjects have by and large failed to create cultured, numerate, literate, scientifically informed young people. They engage not with the ideas but with the testing of them, and then “garbage out.” So the traditional curriculum seems not to justify the time spent (again, they remember so little of what they learned in prior years that it seems they skipped school the whole time, when they didn’t).
But to throw it all out? Then what? Let them focus on some narrow interest and be ignoramuses otherwise? While it seems this is what’s happening anyway, I’m not comfortable with calling the mission of producing well-informed citizens quits.
If so many of the core subjects are irrelevant to them, despite our tireless efforts, then what?
This is unclear because I’m in a hurry, sorry for that. But you seem to be saying, on the one hand, it’s not working, and thus should be thrown out; and on the other hand, it shouldn’t be thrown out because they need the exposure.
Am I wrong? I certainly have no answers, other than again wondering if high school shouldn’t be an early specialization period.
When I think of my own understanding of history, politics, culture, science, and so forth, I have to say that it all took decades of adulthood to gel. And decades of self-directed, unschooled reading and thinking and talking.
But I think I’m weird that way. Most people my age were married with teenagers when I was finally figuring everything out. If I’d been one of them, saddled with work and family, I wonder if I’d have ever figured out anything.
So what does that say about the attempt to make teenagers understand the large canvas of human history?
Clay Burell’s last blog post..Let Tyranny Ring: Notes on Eggers, Part One
Clay Burell
21 Mar 08 at 7:50 pm
The Bells!!!!
The crushing of creativity!!!
The decision to move away from the “Bells to Cells format of schooling is just that a decision.
I work at a new inner city College Prep High School with no bells. Classes melt into one another, sometimes seamlessly and other times - not so much. I have followed the Eggers Valencia “network” for the last few years and it is a shining example of how learning can be focus, fun, and done without the traditional structure we find in todays school.
To do this, educators must bare the yoke of true unconditional love, fun, educational freedom, and focus.
Keep up the good fight.
John Franke’s last blog post..Fast Schools
John Franke
21 Mar 08 at 10:23 pm
[...] struck me about his presentation at TED was, aside from how nervous he seemed, much like Clay Burell (If you have not begun you need to start reading this guys blog), how excited he about this project [...]
Teach and learn
21 Mar 08 at 11:16 pm
Great discussion. I’ve got to be careful with my own thinking to avoid the either/or trap. What puzzles me to consternation is why the 15,000 school systems are so much alike. I think high schools work for some kids–they don’t work for others. Yesterday our local newspaper reprinted an article from the NYTimes about the growing drop out problem and how under reported it is. Add to that the kids that are just “doing school” and it becomes a major problem. Why can’t we throw it out for some kids and teachers? We’ve nothing to lose and we might gain incredible energy, creativity and fun again. Why can’t some schools become learning centers, open till 7 or 9, 6 days a week, all year long? Why can’t we invent courses of interest? Why aren’t kids working with carpenters, computer techs, artists, writers, etc. for at least some of the day or year? Why do we insist on dismissing their personhood when they walk through the doors having virtually no voice or hope of changing things? Until we “throw it out” we cannot get to the next step. The “engine” designed to deliver public education was created over a hundred years ago and is no longer able to deliver. We must follow our hunches and get on with creating many more experiences for our students and our selves that are worthwhile. Why aren’t there hundreds of Eggers-like experiences across the land? We are stuck and I weep for our collective lack of courage, creativity, energy and spirit. I end with a quote that I love because we must begin asking different questions: As the author Thomas Pynchon once wrote, “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.” from Pynchon’s book Gravity’s Rainbow.
skip olsen
21 Mar 08 at 11:52 pm
Clay, in your response to Mr Chips, you mention an earlier specialisation period in high schools. An interesting idea.
I wonder how that would be managed and I also think of the fact that our present generation of high school students will probably experience 4 or maybe more careers before they are 40. Should they specialise at high schools given that they may alter their career focus not long after leaving school.
Our seniors, in the last two years of high school can focus on a particular specialization in that they may undertake more humanities subjects as opposed to science subjects for example. Mathematics is not compulsory. They focus on the subjects that suit them best.
When I went through high school far more students left school at age 16 to go to technical colleges and pick up a trade, get a job and acquire a skill. Fewer went on to the last two years of high school and then went on to university or a teachers’ college.
Now, students rarely leave high school at the end of four years. They undertake two more years of study designed for students aiming to go to university. So many students are not ready or for this intense period of study. They struggle and it can be quite debilitating for them.
Our government is now considering raising the minimum leaving age to 18. That means all students will have to complete all 6 years of high school, including that grueling two years of pre-matriculation courses. I do not think that is the right approach to take.
There are options that allow senior students to attend technical colleges part time. There are also opportunities for our senior students to complete university subjects part time before they finish school. They complete these programmes instead of completing a full suite of school based subjects.
I think these are good programmes and should be encouraged. It allows students to get a taste of life after school, at least in terms of adult education. It allows the students the freedom to leave the school at various times and experience education in a different environment with a different cohort. That breaks things up for the students a little at least. They get to get out of the school and participate in a subject that does interest them and does meet their needs.
Cheers, John
John Larkin’s last blog post..A teacher responds ~ who taught the experts in the first place?
John Larkin
22 Mar 08 at 6:35 pm
Clay,
A terrific piece of writing. I comment on it here (http://www.affectedclapping.net/music-and-life/).
Dave Eggers has always been a difficult person for me to like. I remember him from my early days in publishing, and he was quite cocky and ego-centric. But Dave Eggers the Publisher is a different person altogether. I like this guy.
I can relate to your feelings of questionable enthusiasm. Not questionable in the sense of whether we should teach and talk to our students revealing our own love for what we’re doing, merely questionable in the effect it has on our students.
Please keep writing, I’ll keep reading.
Lee
Lee’s last blog post..Music and Life
Lee
24 Mar 08 at 4:53 am
[...] clock, servant of the bell, was, as usual, doing it to me. I strangled the unborn question, “What do you think the Enchanted Place [...]
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