Beyond School

In my third month of writing here about 21st century education, way back in March 2007, I put the pom-poms down, stopped cheerleading, and started thinking about all the ways schools can kill the learning that is possible when students have a simple laptop and a blog. This snippet from a post from back then says it all, and my views haven’t changed on this one. (Add “and laptop learning” whenever you see “student blogging”):

[My] last two or three posts–and the comments, thank you – have conjured depressing visions in my head at random moments. I’m a bit worried about the future of student blogging.

I fear we teachers are going to ruin it for the learners.

“Blogging is just another way to turn in homework.” That’s the sentence that scares me. Because that’s how non-blogging teachers, and perhaps those unfamiliar with literacy pedagogy – communication across the curriculum, writing to learn, authentic writing, and more – will probably use blogging in the classroom.

And it will become drudgery. And the students (not learners here, because “teacher” can’t let go of being “teacher,” dominating, squelching, and dictating to students) will bang out the minimum for “blog homework,” as in old days, and turn to something authentic. Like their MySpace.

Toward a solution (or at least mitigation): train teachers in the philosophy of blogging before letting them use it in their classrooms.

[Update 6 hours later: I misspoke when I said "my views haven't changed" since I wrote this. They have. I don't think any longer that "training teachers in the philosophy of blogging" (or 1:1 learning) is enough to make it work, if they're not also mentored by someone who is immersed in the 21st century learning movement - and that mentor is acknowledged and supported. Teacher training is no evidence of teacher learning.]

Since writing this, our school has become a 1:1 Apple laptop school. All the students have blogs. They have iLife, so they can podcast, make iMovies, the whole nine yards. One of the students in my PLN class, Younsuk (you may have read about his Basketball Without Borders project, in which he and another student have arranged Skype interviews – in class – with Asian college and pro basketball players, and podcasted them on their Wordpress.com blog), recently wrote the below on his “schooly” (required) blog. It’s just a snapshot, and I wish he’d have offered a possible solution for getting students to write on their blogs without somehow requiring it. I also wish he’d have the opportunity to learn that visual communication, the language of film, is a valuable (and not easy) skill to develop as well. But still, there’s much to learn from him. And he makes me wonder if my “prophecy” is coming true. Here it is:

[Our school] thinks we’re cool because the students carry around MacBooks. But carrying around a laptop doesn’t make a school cool, although it will certainly make the school look cool. Did [the school] get MacBooks so we can look cool? I hope not.

What are some of the cool things we do with our laptops?

[Most] students would be shouting, “iMovies!” right now. It is unique that we don’t write papers for our English final exam. Instead, we make movies using iMovie. But, is that really cool? Because I think there’s more potential to this than making a funny iMovie just to get grades for English class. I would understand it if it was for a movie making class. But does making iMovie enhance our skills in English…?

[Our school] is just trying to look cool by trying to use MacBooks whenever we can.

I’ve had too many teachers assign us to “make an iMovie” for this and that. I had to make an iMovie for my World Geography class and Asian Studies class. I was surprised when even my Spanish teacher told me to make an iMovie. It is obvious [our school] is trying too hard…to look cool.

And out of all my classes, Writing Seminar is one class that I think “is cool.” Yep, you guessed it right, it’s his class.

Personal Learning Network, or PLN is what we’ve been doing the whole semester in this class. We use our MacBooks to interact with people from all over the world, and learn how to write for [a] true audience. Not just that, we learn how to accomplish stuff through networking and meeting new cool people.

I have done some big things in this class. I have interviewed Asian college basketball players, uploaded the interview on our website to spread their words and break the stereotype of “Asians can’t play ball.” Some of them play professional basketball right now. I’ve interacted with some real people.

It’s much easier to see what I’ve done if you click here.

Now that’s the right thing to do with these laptops.

Macbook gives us “true audience.” In other words, it is real world out there.

While the MacBooks in the Writing Seminar classroom are shining, the other MacBooks in other classrooms are crying. They say, “what the hell am I doing here?”

I replied to Younsuk on his post, and will share that here as well:

I have a fantasy that, because you and others honestly express yourselves about your educational experience on your blogs, you eventually have an influence on how your classes are conducted – in other words, you teach your teachers and admin how it feels to be their student.

It’s delicate. You shouldn’t attack individuals or be too harsh, but at the same time shouldn’t mute your criticisms out of fear.

This medium can be powerful. Student voice can be powerful if it uses it. I’m thinking you and Soojin Lee and a few others could intentionally create change by focusing your efforts on starting discussion online about what changes you’d like to see.

I’ve read your entire blog tonight. I’ll be using some of your quotes in an upcoming post, and possibly in a book I hope to write this summer.

One last word, in defense of teachers: they’re new at this. Many of them don’t get it at all. So patience is only fair. They’re trying. But you can help them get it through good-willed criticism and instruction. You can teach them.

Stay in touch, Younsuk. You know where to find me.

I share this for many reasons, but primarily this: it’s not enough to “give professional development workshops” to teachers about 21st century education, and equate that teacher seat-time with effective training. Let’s be honest about that. We all know seat-time and certificates are no surer proof of learning for teachers than they are for students.

Younsuk’s situation brings up another important issue as well: laptop schools that don’t truly, really, really have true, true, true “coordination” of instruction risk burning students out with “three iMovie final projects,” as is Younsuk’s case, all due the same week. A good movie takes an hour of editing for every minute of the final product. I wonder how many minutes these students are expected to produce for their finals. It’s scary. And the solution is a real tech coordinator who monitors the load of production the same way a bus coordinator coordinates a workable bus schedule. You can’t leave this up to chance.

Finally, Younsuk’s mention that Macbooks help learning by allowing students to connect and network with the world is something no teacher or administrator is going to understand without doing it. It’s 20th century education with a shiny bell and whistle otherwise. Just a new way to turn in homework. The immigrants in power will think it’s cutting edge, but the students will think otherwise.

I’m curious what all of you read into this. I give credit to my school for trying to pioneer this territory, and expect that things will improve. But it’s not an easy task.

—

You can see all those old “Saving Classroom Blogging from Teachers” posts from Spring ‘07 here. The ideas there are arguably more relevant, now that blogging and digital storytelling and all that are spreading, than they were a year ago when I wrote them. The comments, as usual, hold the gold:

• On the Uses and Abuses of Student Blogging
• Teacher Think-aloud on Student Blogging (a Fresh Start)
• Post-script on Student Blogging Think-Aloud
• On Classroom Blogging 3: Sucking It Dry: Teachers as Vampires
• Blogging 4: Seeking Stakes for Dracula’s Heart–Moodle for “homework,” blogs for “real work”?
• The Conversation Begins: Saving Learner-Bloggers from Teacher-Vampires
• More on Protecting Classroom Bloggers from Teachers
• The Silver Bullet? One Idea for Saving Blogging from the Werewolf
• Phoenix, Blogging: Writing Beyond School
• “Teachers as Blogging Vampires” and “Blogging as Conversation” Gone a Bit Surreal

Photo credit: “Portrait of a Monkey” by s-a-m

A quickie: A couple weeks ago, I posted about the fatal weakness of RSS readers – their exclusion of a feed’s comments. Derrick Kwa replied with an offer to send me a no longer available WordPress plugin that shows a post’s comments underneath it. Derrick was kind enough to follow through (and by the way, check this post for an amazing example of how hyper-linking saved Derrick from the Singaporean Army and got him an internship with Seth Godin, if I understand it correctly – a literal case of how life-changing writing online can be).

I’ve installed the plugin, and noticed that it works in Google Reader, but not in and Bloglines. I don’t know about other readers.

Here’s how it looks on one of my posts in Google Reader:

–I’m ambivalent about the plugin right now. Is it too inconvenient for readers when the rare post generates 50 or 75 comments? Or is that a price worth paying for elevating the conversations to the higher status they deserve? I lean toward the latter right now.

If you want me to send you the php file, just comment below, and I’ll shoot you the plugin file in an email.

Another option is AideRSS, a Firefox extension that modifies Google Reader in a number of ways. John Larkin was kind enough to share it in the same comment thread. It’s invitation-only, beta, right now, and I haven’t looked into it. But I share the link anyway.

In recent years, postmodernists have challenged the validity and need for the study of history on the basis that all history is based on the personal interpretation of sources. In his book In Defence of History, Richard J. Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge University, defended the worth of history. –Wikipedia: “History“

–the logic of the above quote is sloppy, in my view. Both sides are right: How can we argue with the Postmodernist insight into the basic “constructedness” of all (yes, all) texts? Textual narratives are written by individuals with biases, blind spots, no direct experience, limited sources, and other imperfections. So any historical or biographical narrative, from Gilgamesh to the Gospels to Tacitus to Thomas Friedman, is indeed, as the postmodernists claim, “based on the personal interpretation of sources,” and thus should be read with a healthy dose of skepticism and the need for evidence and logic.

But Evans is also right to “defend the worth of history.” It’s silly to think otherwise. That historians are neither omniscient, neutral, or infallible does not mean that history is unknown or unknowable. The evidence from the past – those letters, journals, books, artifacts, ruins, buildings, maps, and all the rest that we call “primary sources” – attests to the basic facticity of a person or event. Socrates existed and was executed in Athens: this seems safe to say, based on evidence from various sources of the time. But the person of Socrates, his character? Plato says “hero,” Aristophanes says “charlatan,” and a modern philosopher says “anti-democratic villain.” One person, Socrates, is defined differently by three different narrators’ personal (and “scholarly”) interpretations of him. And thinking about those interpretations, and ideally creating our own, does have value for us. Pity any democracy, for example, that is ignorant of Hitler’s fear- and anger-mongering manipulation of German voters to get himself legally appointed dictator. (In other words, pity Bush/Cheney’s United States?)

Again, the point: We need history, but we also need to understand the methods and practices of the historian – the search for evidence, its evaluation and selection, its literal “weaving” into, or omission from, narrative “text.”

Schools, as usual, generally score an F-minus in teaching students this “constructedness” of history. They’re too busy stuffing their victims’ heads with the names, dates, and summaries – the “facts” – that those victims will then be tested on. (In most cases, said victims will remember their test grades far longer than they’ll remember the content, since schools largely teach that grades are more important than learning.)

Anyway, this is a round-about intro to a comment thread I’ve been enjoying on Will Richardson’s recent “My Blogging Legacy” post. In that poignantly mind-bending post, Will imagines his children, after he himself has passed away,

. . . . turning to the computer and accessing an avatar representation of me who carried in him the compilation of all my writing, blogging, photos, movies, oral histories and more that I had created while I was alive. And that avatar was able to sort through all of that information and answer their questions, have a conversation with them in fact, in my voice. At some point in the dream, I realized that the avatar was not only feeding back historical data, but was also using the sum of my work to offer advice and counsel in ways that I most likely would have offered were I alive. Even though I wasn’t there physically, it’s like a piece of my brain lived on, one that was able to provide for my kids a richer understanding of their histories and legacies.

At a certain point, I riffed off Will’s idea, then Christopher Sessums chimed in with this:

I’ve been reflecting on the notion of ghost blogs, i.e., blogs of users who have died. I imagine this phenomena will begin to take on “new life” as the first wave of bloggers move on to that “undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns–” (Shak. Hamlet).

I think about how in meatspace we have a place to go to, to mourn, remember, reflect, pay our respects. What will this look like online?

Your post provides a wonderful vision of how it could be.

Given my own sense of mortality, it makes sense to start thinking/planning now, if only in a brainstorming-sense.

I shot back,

And Christopher, to throw the irresistible local flavor from East Asia in: how will these “ghost blogs” meld with Confucian ancestor worship? The laptop (or holograph) next to the photo of the deceased blogger-ancestor on the altar, behind the incense and candles?

Then Chris wrote:

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Where do blog posts go when we die? They never cease (provided your ISP is still in business).

. . . . I also like the fact that my identity is dispersed in tiny bytes across the ether. Being a puzzler, i.e., one who enjoys puzzles, I like the idea of searching across multiple forms of representation to create a picture of a person’s life. So I’m not sure I would want my identity isolated in one space, but instead distributed thus requiring those interested in me to explore and put together their own picture of me.

Then I riffed back with a fantasy history or non-fiction writing assignment – biographical writing, specifically. Since Chris then offered – threatened? – to “kiss” me in response (and though I virtually slapped him, I was flattered), I figure I’ll post that assignment idea here. I do think it’s cool enough, honestly, to pass on to any history or non-fiction writing teachers out there. Here it is:

A History Assignment I’d Like to See:

Chris, A belated Eureka-riff re: your “distributed identity”: a creative, project-based biography-writing or historiography teacher or professor could do some cool stuff treating our already-distributed online personae as “primary sources” from which student historians or biographers had to draw to construct a representation of us.

*INHALE*

What I mean is, like, “Write a biographical sketch of X in which X’s public blog represents his/her public life, but X’s comments on others’ blogs represents his/her (more) private life. Construct a narrative of X’s personal life, tastes, and thoughts by analyzing their Flickr photos, LastFM playlists, YouTube favorites, etc.”

I know I’m freer in comments than I am on my blog posts, for example. And that a good reader could infer a lot about me from those other “primary sources” listed above.

It would be even more interesting, from a literacy perspective, to have more than one person construct a biography or history of the same individual. If you and I, for example, had to sift through the same “legacy” Will has confetti’d the web with, odds are we’d construct significantly different identities due to our different selection/omission choices and subjective bents.

Interesting, anyway. Just playing around, whiling away the writer’s block.*

Wouldn’t that be cool? And wouldn’t students learn just how slippery history and biography are by comparing their different narrative constructions? And wouldn’t they learn, sidewise, about how revealing they can be with their online identities, when others decide to sift through them like this, and possibly think twice about what they reveal in all future posts?

—

(*Speaking of that writer’s block, it’s due to many factors: the Project Global Cooling concert went off quite successfully in a downtown Seoul nightclub last weekend, but was exhausting to pull off; I’m in the midst of moving into a new apartment; the last-weeks-of-school madness is full swing; my Airport Express wireless is wonky in my apartment; I’m changing my immigration status; my mother-in-law is still recovering from her stroke; and I’m leaving my school to take a year’s sabbatical, without pay, which necessitates its own host of preparations. Can you say “full plate”? But life is full, anyway, and I’m excited.)

Image: Quite Puzzling by Cayusa

I received this comment recently on my podcast post, “My Suicidal High School Years: A Happy Ending Bullying Story.” The comment is from a teen named Jack, who is experiencing now what I experienced 30 years ago. I’m sharing it because it’s evidence that the meme I’m about to propose – voluntary, as usual – could have more social value than the bevy of “Stop Bullying!” messages we most often see in response to this ugly subject. Here’s Jack:

Clay,

I googled bullying stories because I wanted something to help me through troubles that I am currently facing in ninth grade. “Stop bullying!” sites really didn’t help me. This was just the kind of story I was looking for. I get called names feverishly because I didn’t make the best impression first semester. I try not to care what other people think of me but it feels like I am always watching my back.

Anyways, this story was very interesting indeed. Thanks a lot for sharing. It helped substantially. [Emphasis added.]

I’ve already thanked Jack, but I want to thank him again. He confirms that for him, at least, “Stop Bullying” messages may be nice and all, but they don’t do much to comfort those trying to cope with being bullied.

I’m not saying anti-anything messages have no positive value. I’m just saying they often fail to help the victims of the thing being opposed. Telling bullies not to bully may be worth the effort, though it’s apparently predicated on the dubious belief that it’s effective to appeal to the compassionate side of bullies, who in my experience have almost always been a pretty heartless bunch. Bullies enjoy psycho-social benefits from bullying – profits, in a sense – in the same way arms dealers do from selling weapons. Appeals to delicate instincts require delicate audiences, and delicacy is a thing usually absent from these hardened types.

But as Jack testifies, just hearing Bullied Success Stories – that survival is worth it and life gets better? That’s a speech-act worth performing.

So the Meme: Share Your “Bullied Then, Successful Now” Stories

I did it in my podcast, a 30 minute story – literally, a story – of my experience of three years of bullying in high school. It’s actually just an mp3 of the class session in which I told the story to my students (there was bullying going on in that grade). I just fired up GarageBand and recorded it as I shared it with my class.

That’s one way to do it. Other ways:

• a blog post
• a webcam video
• a Skypecast
• a Comic Life or photo-essay
• a VoiceThread
• [your idea here]

If none of those work for you, but you have a story to tell, you can also leave a comment or drop me an email volunteering for a Skype conference call, where we can take more of a group story-telling session. I can do the editing and turn it into a podcast.

I hope this makes sense to you. It does to me. Jack’s comment strengthened my belief that, short of somehow stopping bullying – and come on, it’s been with us as long as war – one of the most helpful things we can do is offer ourselves, and our stories, as living proof that the nightmare can be survived, and this dream called life can become sweeter as it moves into adulthood.

I often throw dreamy ideas like this out on this blog, and they land with a thud. This one seems a likely candidate as the latest in that series. But I hope not. My bullying podcast gets a surprising number of visits from people googling “real life bullying stories” and such, and it gets downloaded quite a bit too.

So there is a need.

And instead of putting more energy into “stop bullying” sermons (which I’m not saying we should stop), we can maybe devote it to stories of hope.

I know it’s a busy time, so if you can only get around to it later – this summer, even – that’s fine. Just link here whenever it’s done. If we get enough of these, we can make a permanent site for them on a wiki, or even a dedicated blog.

And by the way: this offer is open to any students out there with anything to say as well. I’d love to host a Skype conference call about this topic.

Photo: Locker by Steven Fernandez

From my Quotiki sidebar widget:

Another limitation of RSS readers I’ve often griped about before: with a few exceptions (Bloglines for one), they exclude comment threads from the feed. This sends entirely the wrong message: that the posts are the main thing, and the writer of the blog is the expert.

I operate on the opposite assumption: I post my thoughts or questions, and expect the comments to lead to better and new understandings – and that’s what often happens. RSS readers miss all of that.

So just for the record, though I haven’t written a new post in four days, I’ve been busy reading and replying to the conversations in three recent posts – A Sunday Science Sermon (68 comments about what “knowing” means), Muhammad Ali: D- Student? Or F- School? (90 comments about whether schools sabotage the futures of smart non-writerly communicators), and For the Roses: My Latest Position on Classroom Blogging (45 comments on whether non-homework blogs should be pushed on all or pulled for the few).

I say this simply to invite those who never leave their readers to take a stroll into planet comment, where the real learning – dialogical, challenging, mutually sharpening – takes place.  It’s a fairly new development on this blog, this type of discussion, and I’m enjoying it immensely.

I’m dealing this week with all sorts of trips to embassies and immigration offices (the legal hangover of the marriage party), so no new posts. But you can catch me and many smart, engaged people in the comments.

Come on – don’t be an RSS potato. Get out and mix a bit.

[Before I launch into the statistics, I want to urge you to watch the YouTube video at the bottom of this post. It's a beautiful testament to the scientific method. In it, a scientist proves Darwin right on a hypothesis that, when Darwin was alive, earned him ridicule. The proof took 150 years to come to light - and it does so in that video.]

Damned Statistics

The crisis in scientific illiteracy should be a well-known fact to educated Americans, but just in case, a few statistics from the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center’s 1991-93 International Social Survey Program (ISSP):

• Percentage Saying “I know God exists and I have no doubts about it”
  • United States: 62.8% – ranks 3rd under the Philippines and Poland. (Britain, by comparison, ranks 13th at 23.8%, and even Israel is less certain about this “knowledge,” at 43%, than the U.S.)
• Percentage Saying They Definitely Believe “The Bible is the actual word of God and it is to be taken literally, word for word”
  • United States: 33.5% – ranks 3rd, again under the Philippines and Poland. (Again, Britain, by comparison, ranks 17th at 8%, and Israel ranks 6th at 26.7%.)
• Percentage Saying They Definitely Believe in “The Devil”
  • United States: a whopping 44.5% – ranks 1st, this time, right above the Philippines and Poland. (Britain, by comparison, ranks 10th at 12.7%, and Israel ranks 11th at 12.6%.)
• Percentage Saying They Definitely Believe in “Hell”
  • United States: a whopping 49.6% – ranks 1st, again, right above Northern Ireland and the Philippines. (Britain, with 12.8%, ranks 10th, while Israel ranks 5th at 22.5%.)
• Percentage Saying They Definitely Believe in “Religious Miracles”
  • United States ranks first, at 45.6%, above Northern Ireland and Ireland. (Britain ranks 13th with 15.3%, and Israel ranks 7th with only 26.4%.)

I frame these statistics in terms of “scientific illiteracy” because it seems clear that a basic understanding of what we mean by “knowing” (as opposed to “having faith”) is lacking among those saying they “know God exists.” Similarly, those who “definitely believe” in the ontological reality of “the Devil,” “Hell,” and “Religious Miracles” betray a lack of understanding of what, in the International Baccalaureate program’s “Theory of Knowledge” class, we call “Justified True Belief.” (How is “definite” belief any different, subjectively, than believing we “know,” since “definite” implies no doubt?). Finally, the fundamentalist belief that every word of the Bible is “literally” true, as I read it, suggests a belief that the contradictory creation myths in that book’s first two pages (Genesis Books 1 and 2) are to be taken as scientific, cosmological explanations on the level of contemporary physics.

The ISSP survey seems to corroborate my “scientific illiteracy” frame by including in its survey questions that measure each respondent’s understanding of basic evolutionary theory:

• Ranking of 21 Nations on Knowledge Question about Human Evolution:

The United States, as you can see, finished dead last out of 21 countries. A 44% grade on this national science test literally shows that America scores an “F” on its report card for science class. (Britain gets a C, and non-monotheistic Japan and then-Soviet satellite E. Germany score a solid B-. Remarkable, when you remember this is a survey of the general populace, and not just the educated elite.)

I know this data is 15 years old, but more recent data from 2005, as I’ve reported before, shows “that the United States ranks next to last in acceptance of evolution theory among [34] nations polled,” and “that the number of Americans who are uncertain about the theory’s validity has increased over the past 20 years.” We beat Turkey in that study, but Bulgaria beat us.

A Testament to Science and Darwin’s Prophecy Hypothesis Come True

Just watch it. Science teachers and Theory of Knowledge teachers, your students should love this:

[youtube]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=OMVN1EWxfAU[/youtube]

Two Short Stories: Why I’m Writing This

There’s so much muddying of the scientific waters from proponents of Creationism and Intelligent Design going on in America. Many of our edubloggers are guilty of that. In my book, no responsible progressive will stay silent and cede the battle for scientific literacy to the forces of medievalism out a sense of social niceness. The stakes are too vital. Call me a crusader for knowledge – or just call me a teacher.

Besides that, I had two recent experiences that struck me with enough force to mention them here:

One: The Neglected Healer

My mother-in-law suffered a catastrophic stroke last Sunday morning. My wife and I rushed to the hospital and joined her family in the Intensive Care Unit in what we thought was our final goodbye to that sweet woman. (She survived, thank goodness, though twice the doctors told us her chances were less than 20%.)

After saying the only words I figured this Korean woman, who speaks no English, would understand – “We love you. It’s okay. We love you. It’s okay.” – I stepped back to let the other family members in.

Two of them bent over her and started praying intensely in Korean. I listened to the “hallelujah’s” and “amen’s” with my ears as I watched the I.V. tubes and medical monitors with my eyes.

Right afterward, the surgeon who’d just operated on my mother-in-law’s brain spoke to the entire family. They hung on his every word. When he was finished, I saw no indication of gratitude or thanks to this man who, through the power of science, had just opened my mother-in-law’s skull and saved her life with science’s healing hands.

I don’t mean to attack prayer here. I simply mean to point out that science saved this woman. Her family didn’t take her to a priest for healing. Yet they gave credit to the priest’s paradigm instead of the scientist’s.

I wish I had a Korean translation of cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett’s beautiful essay, “Thank Goodness,” written after surviving

a nine-hour surgery, in which [his] heart was stopped entirely and [his] body and brain were chilled down to about 45 degrees to prevent brain damage from lack of oxygen until they could get the heart-lung machine pumping

so I could share it with that doctor. (See this post – one of my favorites on this blog – for more on that.)

Two: The Medieval “A” Students

My “Advanced Placement” seniors – 18-year-olds now, ending their K-12 education presumably ready to enter many of America’s “elite” (if you believe the hype) universities – and I recently had a class discussion about what scientists are projecting about the future of our planet. One of the students brought up the prophecies of Nostradamus, and how they’ve been “proven true” – according to something she saw on TV, I think. All the other students in the class chimed in with the same enthusiastic credulity about Nostradamus as the first student. There were no skeptical rebuttals.

I was aghast.

That moment was not uncommon. I’m tempted to say, when it comes to evidence that schools succeed in training students to think critically, that that moment was the norm. (Other teachers, please weigh in here. Is my case different from yours?)

It left me wondering how, after 12 years of daily incarceration and nightly homework, even the students with the highest grades show such an inability to think. The easy answer, as regular readers who know me will predict I’d say, is that the students aren’t thinking about learning all these years, but about making grades.

What answers do you have?

–

Photo: secular, non-secular, non sequitur by Dean Forbes

Related: All posts tagged “Religion“

Carolyn Foote wrote this week about the new Pew study on the effects of technology on teen writing. An article about the study in eSchool News (free subscription – well worth it – required) pulls out a few details that for me, at least, suggest some weird thinking. The “news” that

[t]eens who communicate frequently with their friends, and those who own more technology tools such as computers or cell phones, do not write more often for school or for themselves than less communicative and less gadget-rich teens

seems hardly news at all, doesn’t it? Is it me, or does it imply that some people think that The Vast Percentage of Teens Who, Like the Vast Percentage of Adults, Do Not Enjoy Writing will suddenly, because somebody plops a laptop, tablet, or cellphone in their hands, have some Road to Damascus experience that magically converts them to the Cult of Writing?

That implication seems embedded in the “finding” above, and it’s about as silly as expecting people to all become economists when they’re given their first checkbook.

If you go into a 1:1 program with fantasies that all students are going to become writers because of it, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Nothing makes a writer but the self-compelled need to write. And that’s a limited commodity now as always.

The eSchool news article continues with this further bit of non-”news,” which this time, though still making me chuckle, also quickens my pulse and gets my dander up a bit:

Teen bloggers, however, write more frequently both online and offline, the study says.

–check that language out, that loopy logic: “Teen bloggers,” we’re told, are teens who write frequently “both online and offline.” I’m no expert, now, but why are we calling teens who write a lot, with and without blogs, “bloggers”?

Any of you adult bloggers out there, are you with me in wanting to correct people who call you a “blogger” – some person who “makes blogs,” apparently, like a designer makes designs and a reporter makes reports – by telling them: “Actually, I’m a freaking writer. I just publish my own writing online on a blog. I don’t buy those daily word-counts on my blog at Wal-Mart. I write them.” Such sloppy language!

(Note that I didn’t say “good writer.” Mediocre and bad writers fill the ranks of bloggers as much as they do of newpapers, magazines, and books.)

It’s been a pet peeve of mine for a long time, this word “blogging.” The label cheapens the practice. Writing bloggers are writers, photo-bloggers are photographers, podcast-bloggers are audio producers, vloggers are video artists, etc, in teenhood as it is in adulthood.

So let’s revise that last excerpt for clarity:

Teen writers, however, write more frequently both online and offline.

Talk about a report from Captain Obvious. Give any writer a journal and pen, s/he’ll scribble away. Give him or her a blog, s/he’ll type away. There’s no mystery here.

Things get weirder here:

Forty-seven percent of teen bloggers write outside of school for personal reasons several times a week or more, compared with 33 percent of teens without blogs.

What, exactly, does that unidentified fifty-three percent of “teen bloggers” who do not “write outside of school for personal reasons” actually write on their blogs, then? Wait — hold it – I think I’m getting a whiff of something. Do you smell it?

Bad air! Bad air! It’s a homework blog! Another moronic oxymoron brought to you by Schooliness, Inc. Let’s cross this 53% off the Book of Writing, and focus on that lovely, remaining 47% who blog write on blogs, not because schools make them, but because they’re writers. Breathe in the perfume, folks – we’re in the rose-garden now of flowering young writers.

They’re the ones I want to teach - because they’re the ones who probably want to be taught about ways to improve their writing.

There. I said it: I’m an elitist as an English teacher.

I’m not a democrat when it comes to teaching writing. Just as Thomas Jefferson believed that all people are born equal, but natural differences create a “natural aristocracy” – one having nothing to do with money and everything to do with spirit (and I mean that naturally) – I believe the same is true in the classroom. A rich kid can’t pay me to want to help him become a better writer if he doesn’t show me, through the evidence of steady, self-impelled production, he has a writer in him. A working-class kid who does have a writer in her – who can point to hundreds of blog posts or journal pages having nothing to do with homework – will find not only my door open during lunch and after school, but also my Skype and Twitter at home. As I said in a comment on Carolyn’s blog, it’s

the bloggers mentioned in the survey above . . . who interest me, . . those who have the will to write, the seed of a writer, in them.

Those “kids” aren’t mere students. They’re writers.

Let’s keep looking at that Pew Garden, and try to find the prize roses. I think I see them hidden in this statistic:

Sixty-five percent of teen bloggers believe that writing is essential to later success in life.

Pop Quiz: Who are the “teen bloggers” who are the true writers?

a. the 65% of “teen bloggers” who “believe writing is essential to later success in life”

b. the 35% of “teen bloggers” who do not believe this.

If you answered “a,” I give you a zero.

To me, the answer is “b.” Because it implies that these young writers are writing not, as most of the consumerism-drugged “school is for money” customers in our classrooms do (and as the students in answer “a” seem to do), “to get a better GPA, go to a better college, get a better job, so I can buy a better house, car, and handbag.” This 35% in “b” wins my vote. They’re the prize roses. They write for the pleasure in the present, not the payoff in the future. [Update: Freshman Arthus trumps me in his comment. He gets an A+, I get a B.]

They’re writers.

A Revised Position Statement on Classroom Blogging, Two Years into the Fray:

And this brings me to the latest position-statement in my evolving views, after two years of experimenting with it in the classroom, of the value and place of blogging to teach writing in schools:

It should only be required in an elective “advanced blogging” class. But we need a better word than that tuneless aural trainwreck of a word, “blah – geeng.”

“Advanced writing,” though I’ve restricted this article to writers because the Pew study does the same, is no better a title, because “blogging” invites the natural talkers and interviewers, singers and raconteurs through podcasting; the natural symbolic and visual communicators through photo and computer graphic, fine arts and video blogging. So “advanced digital communication,” then?

You tell me. But I think you see what I mean, don’t you? Simply a workshop of the thirsty, the hungry to improve – the natural aristocracy of self-expression and communication.

Over the door I would post a big sign:

ROSES ONLY. NO STUDENTS ALLOWED.

Then we’d set to working – making perfume.

Images:

• De Petale, by Christiane Michaud
• untitled, by rosemary*
• rose for you…, by Lyubov

Relevant posts:

• 21st Century Education: Thinking Creatively by Anthony Chivetta, Students 2.0
• Dialogue with a New Student Blogger on the Question of Classroom Blogging