Beyond School

Life is physically and mentally too cramped for me to write the posts I’ve been planning about Pink’s Whole New Mind and Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.  I’m tutoring three days a week, finishing up my change of visa status (I never thought I’d need a Green Card, but there it is), and moving into our new apartment on Tuesday – after which I hope to be able to think clearly.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying simply sharing some of the amazing free resources I’m discovering these days. Today’s offering:  Celtx (click screenshot for full view).

From the Celtx site, a partial overview of the scriptwriting, storyboarding, collaborating, production scheduling, and on-and-on-ing it performs:

Celtx is the world’s first all-in-one media pre-production software. It has everything you need to take your story from concept to production. Celtx replaces ‘paper, pen & binder’ pre-production with a digital approach that’s more complete, simpler to work with, and easier to share.

Multi-Media Friendly: Celtx helps you pre-produce all types of media – film, video, documentary, theater, machinima, comics, advertising, gaming, music video, radio, podcasts, videocasts, and however else you choose to tell your story.

All-In-One: Unlike scriptwriting software, you can use Celtx for the entire pre-production process – write scripts, storyboard scenes and sequences, develop characters, breakdown & tag elements, schedule production, and prepare detailed and informative production reports for cast and crew.

Fully Integrated: Celtx is designed to help your entire production team work together on a single, easy to share project file – eliminating the confusion of multiple project files, and the need for ‘paper and binder’.

There’s more, too: a Project Central community site for global Celtx users, and more beyond that. Check out the site for the goodness – and don’t miss the screencast tutorials to get the full effect.  Just wonderful – hats off to Celtx.

It’s cross-platform, by the way, so goodness for all, PC, Mac, and otherwise. (h/t to Ostatic for the excellent Six Essential Open Source Apps for Mac Videographers post. Go there for five more goodies beside!)

Supporters:
Looking for US History textbooks? Visit ValoreBooks, a marketplace that aims to provide cheap textbooks.

Now that I’ve left schooling, it’s wonderful to explore things for teaching. Case in point: Annenberg Media / Learner.org’s A Biography of America series.  It’s an astonishingly media-rich 26-part series – count ‘em, 26 half-hour PBS episodes featuring leading US historians, plus transcripts of each episode, plus interactive maps, photos, primary sources, and more for each episode – that covers US history from pre-Columbian times to the present.  And it’s free.

(Click screenshot for full-size view, including “chapter” headings.)

Can somebody remind me why, with free online resources like this, schools are spending tens of thousands of dollars on short-shelf-life textbooks, often dumbed-down and intellectually neutered (or worse, downright propagandistic)  due to the textbook industry’s fear of alienating their biggest markets in conservative Texas and California?

[Update: I should have mentioned that the US History resources are only one example of Learner.org's offerings. They have full-year courses in just about every subject area imaginable, k-college, plus professional development courses for teachers. Browse them here. Amazingly good use of US tax dollars at work via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.]

Just doinking around with Mystudiyo. They say they’ll never make me pay for this when they leave beta, which is cool – but I always wonder what will happen to this sort of work if the company goes out of business. Is all my labor lost?

That being said, I love the ease of use. [UPDATE: Two things: h/t to Steve Dembo for sharing this tool; and note that you¹ can add their own quiz items to this quiz.]

Have at thee, geeky wordsmiths. Fastest guns score highest.

1. and students [↩]

[UPDATE 2: 10 Nov. 2008: Downloading the AirPort Extreme Update 2008-004 (1.0) did the job for me.  Two days in and no drops, much faster load speeds.

From the Apple Downloads site: "This update is recommended for all Intel-based Macintosh computers running Mac OS 10.5.5."

NOTE: I don't have Airport Extreme. I have an old Airport Express and a Linksys. But it still fixed the problem.

Good luck! Let us know if this did or did not work for you! ]

[Update: See comments for more news on this.]

Is anybody else experiencing Airport Wireless “airport scanning” weirdness in OS X Leopard?  Since upgrading to Leopard, my wireless disconnects constantly to scan for other networks – when the network I’m on works fine. My Airport signal is also lower since the upgrade.  I know it’s a problem because it’s affecting four – that’s right, four – separate Macs I’ve been using since Leopard came out. And I’m not the only person having this problem, as a quick glance at Apple’s support forum shows.

If you’re having this problem too, this free download, AP Grapher, might help. Since installing it a few minutes ago, I haven’t dropped connection at all. Here is some guidance from the Apple Support forum:

Hi guys

I too have been going INSANE because Apple can’t seem to sort this out. Its enough to drive you mad – especially when they still aren’t acknowledging it as a problem.

Download AP Grapher from here: http://www.chimoosoft.com/products/apgrapher/

Run the program while you browse…In preferences, I set the scanner to refresh every 10 seconds, and the Grapher to refresh every second. Although I’m still experiencing dropouts, the constant activity means they aren’t noticeable at all. It really does seem to work well because it reconnects immediately

The Grapher is also helpful – the Tx rate (yellow) will show you what’s going on and how frequently the connection drops.

…and no – i don’t work for chimoosoft!

Happy camping, Owen

If you’re more tech-savvy than I am, and have a solution for me and others, please drop a comment and help us all out – thanks in advance.

That Networked Learning elective “English Seminar” class I taught last semester ended two weeks ago. (Sift through the archives for related posts.)

For new readers or simply people not tuned in here during the last six months, here’s a recap: Ten students of mixed grades (9-12, ages 15-18), each with a MacBook laptop (the school is 1:1), were given the most open, autonomous, swim-or-drown class experience they’d probably ever had, and are likely to ever have again.

The idea was simple:

This is a language arts course: writing, speaking, communicating.  If you spend this semester communicating about topics that “teacher” assigns, you will not be real writers. You will just be doing homework.  Writers write of their own interests and ideas.  That means you will have to find your own topics, in order to experience being a writer, speaker, film-maker, etc.

So you will develop a web-based project based on your interests; use whatever modes of communication you desire – writing, podcasting, screencasting, movie-making, etc; launch and grow your project over six months, and apply the principals of quality – in whatever “language art” mode you’ve chosen – from the mini-lessons and sitting together conferences we had; do your project singly or in teams; extra credit for using Twitter, Skype, Facebook, YouTube, and the rest to network, go global, and “imagine big.”

If you “try big” and fail, you can still receive an A, if you articulate and apply the lessons your failures taught you.

A six month project in absolute freedom will bring you to brick walls, slumps, quagmires, that may last for weeks.  As long as you push through them, and come out the other side, you don’t need to fear for your grade. I want you to experience the difficulty of not being able to quit in the face of adversity, the difficulty of freedom and responsibility, of keeping an idea alive.

If you’re lazy, unproductive, unimaginative, unconcerned about quality – you won’t do well.

You will be given almost the entirety of each 77-minute class to independently work on your project. I will occasionally give whole-class mini-lessons on authentically good writing, audio- and video-production, and will also check in with each of you by simply pulling up a chair next to you and talking about your progress, challenges, and thoughts. But the rest of the time will be yours to work. So you have no excuse for not getting that work done.

You will grade yourselves, by the way, based on your monthly production and reflection on lessons learned. You’ll have to justify your grades with evidence of your work.

Since it was the most “radical” (per Dean) “releasing of the hounds” (if I have Chris Harbeck’s gist right) and “edupunk” (if Lindsea is right, since I didn’t jump on that meme) thing I’ve done in my teaching career, and since I wrote about it regularly throughout the semester, I want to honor my contract with a final report to whatever readers out there wonder, “How did that ever turn out, anyway?”

The problem is, I’m overloaded right now. I just got back from Hong Kong yesterday, still have immigration issues to deal with, a career transition to navigate, and a new apartment to move into in ten days.

So I’m going to share with you excerpts from the final reflections some of the students wrote during the final exam, in a series. I’ll preface each student with my own summary of his/her project, and anecdotal impressions of his/her journey. A caveat, first: I wasn’t on top of my game in setting up these reflections. In the past, I’ve always created an anonymous user account on Moodle, and had students evaluate the course using that account in order to ensure maximum honesty via that anonymity. I didn’t do that this time. You’ll have to decide how much weight to give the following lines.

1. Younsuk and Jaeho: Basketball without Borders:

Younsuk, a sophomore, has been featured a lot on these pages over the last six months. He teamed with senior Jaeho to launch the Basketball without Borders project, which evolved into a beautifully networked series of podcasted Skype interviews with Asian college and professional basketball stars in the US and elsewhere. This project was the dark horse of the whole class, and it exploded in about month three to win the race by several lengths.  These guys astonished me with their ability to use their own personal and family networks to arrange interviews with players in Japan, Korea, and the US.  Nothing comes close, in my teaching experience, to seeing them enter the classroom so many times to say, “Mr. Burell, we have a Skype interview scheduled with [this or that player] for this class. Can we go to a quiet room?”  And then to see, at the end of the class, these successful audio producers come back in with grins wrapped so infectiously around their heads. (I videotaped them for Youtube in one such moment on this post.)

I had Younsuk as a freshman in English 9 the prior year – the first class I ever did classroom blogging with. I can tell you that his writing has gained impressively in ideas, in voice, in rhetoric, in style.

The irony? At the beginning of the class, Younsuk insisted, in no uncertain terms, that he had no interest in podcasting. Click here for all the posts on this blog with Younsuk and/or Jaeho.

Here are some excerpts from his reflection:

• This revolutionary course that I took this semester, revolutionized me as a person. I certainly became a better writer that cares. Through my project, I had real audience. In order to succeed, I had to have a good writing that catches people. I’ve learned to make the title catching, and I’ve learned to make sure the audience wanted to read. To do that, I had to think about the sentence styles, order of what I write about, and maybe throwing some nice metaphors. I’m starting to care about what I write a lot. And one can observe my improvement in writing if one reads my own blog. [note: this is not his PLN basketball blog, but his personal blog for his English class, now in its second year]
• As a thinker, I’ve learned to think. After doing a project about something I’m interested in, I’ve learned to think in my own way, that things  I like can turn into something like this [note: this is his basketball project blog]. After realizing this, I’ve learned to write about things that I like. And to me, writing is just like thinking. When I write about something I like, then I feel good. I’ve learned that ultimately, I would want to please the audience, but it all starts from pleasing myself with my own thoughts.
• I’ve learned that I’m a producer now.  I produce things. I’ve produced my website, I’ve produced the interviews, and I’ve produced the productivity. I never turned in anything. Everything I did in this class, was what I produced. I’ve learned that by producing, I can learn more.
• As a networker, I’m not a big user of twitter. But using our connection, we’ve reached three big-time interviewees. One of the tools that helped us was facebook. There are many “non-educational’ ways to use facebook, but it still keeps people in touch. It’s easy to contact people, and it’s easy to expand my network by becoming friends with my friends’ friends. This method led us to interview three big basketball figures in Asia. Connection is important, because with one, you can have a million.
• Again, I thank Mr. Burell for this revolutionary class. It was the only real experience I had at school.

Re: that last bullet: Man, if only students realized how much teachers need to hear that from their students. My morale would have been so much higher this semester if I’d only known he was getting what I was trying to deliver. Hear this, students: your teachers need positive feedback more than you realize. Give it to them, if you want them to stay in the classroom.

*    *    *

Jaeho was a senior, and Younsuk’s partner. As I said in a comment to Jaeho’s final reflection before graduating, “Thanks for making this vision worthwhile. It’s been amazing to know you as a student in this class, and as a different student in AP Lit. I much prefer this class.”

Because my wife just got home, and writing is a completely different endeavor as a married man (and this is light-years from a complaint, as I’m very, very happy), I’m going to simply paste Jaeho’s entire final post here (being on the school server, the entire pln blog will probably be deleted soon, so call this an archive):

Signing Off

Photo by: Jarrellish

“It is a small world after all”. The past five months truly taught me what this quote meant.

As with most other cases, the start was not so great. I did not want to make this into a academic, insignificant project. Deliberating desperately to figure out a way to make this work, I came up with a risky idea of focusing on the stereotypes about basketball. Due to the relatively long time that took us to decide on what we are going to do, the group went on a slow start.

Connecting to the world.. It was not so far away from us after all. After I chose the focus, things started to work out for us rather quickly. Luckily for us, the Columbia University basketball star Keijuro Matsui accepted our interview request. “Maybe this could actually work“, I thought to myself. Then Ko Yada, then Kelvin Kim. In approximately 4 weeks, we had interviewed 3 basketball sensations. The empty parking lot started to fill when visitors started coming to see the show and naturally the show began to flourish..

Writing… This was an inevitable part of the class. The primary problem was not knowing my weaknesses. It wasn’t too long before Mr. Burell pointed out that my sentence structures are always the same. (Subject verb object). Clearly, I had to change this style to make people want to read me. As time went, luckily for me, my writing improved to a level where Mr. Burell said “That was good!” I have not completely grasped the art of organic writing yet, but started to notice where to pause, where to put in the funny stuff. Looking back, my lack of confidence about writing was preventing me from trying out different things in my writing.

At this point, I can honestly say that the English Seminar Class has taught me two valuable experiences that I did not experience anywhere else. It has taught me the power of technology, and the techniques of creative writing.

For the ending, I want to thank Mr. Burell for having faith in us when we were lost in the Sahara Desert and helping us find something that can be extended into the world.  Thanks.

Stay tuned for a few more student reports.

Just spreading the love to my fellow Mac users by sharing Monolingual, a free open source program that saved me 4Gb of hard drive by removing the hundreds of languages localized on all my software, and by stripping the PowerPC files from my Intel MacBook.  (If you have Adobe Creative Suite, you’ll easily save 2 or 3 gigs with a single click. Bloated with languages. Sorry, Cyrillic, you had to go.)

Be sure to run both the “Languages” and the “Architecture” programs.  And buy me a beverage the next time you see me.  Better still, donate a few bucks (or Yuan, or Quid¹ ) to the folks who created this useful tool on the Sourceforge site.

1. what the hell is a quid? [↩]

[Apture rocks. Click the icon beside Shirky, and the one beside "addons", and then click each of the icons that I loaded, and watch the magic. I don't have to spell out how rich a tool this is for every use, educational and otherwise, you can think of, do I? It's in invitation-only beta right now, so get over there and get it before it runs out. ***UPDATE: A nice person from the Apture team left a comment saying the invitations are out, BUT--if you send an email telling them you saw it on this post, they'll make an exception for you. So leave a comment saying "I want one, please," and we'll try to make that happen. And don't I feel special? ]

Sitting in my Hong Kong hotel, dinking instead of reading more of the Shirky I bought today. Dinking, particularly, with Apture. To demonstrate its usefulness, I’m going to share a few lesser-known Firefox/Flock addons I’ve installed on my new MacBook this week.  Just click the little icon and see how Apture works.

A screenshot of the Apture popup and search editor (click image for large view):

Standing on a corner
in Hong Kong -
It ain’t so good to be alone
in Hong Kong.
–Screaming Jay Hawkins, “Hong Kong” (psst…do yourself a favor and click the little icon for a classic Screaming Jay number on Youtube, and a Wikipedia link, thanks to the very cool Apture tool)

Just a quickie to show the local flavor of Kowloon, Hong Kong, to Stacy Zheng of Students 2.0, who tweeted, “I’m insanely jealous of you right now. Hong Kong tops the list of my “places I want to visit”. Have fun! ” – and to show my wife the typical “I don’t speak your language so I’ll take whatever haircut you give me” ‘do I just got in a local barber shop across the street from my hotel.

It’s nice to be back among the Chinese people, among whom I lived in Shanghai for five years, and came to admire more than any people in the 25 countries I’ve traveled. It’s so crazy: they don’t have near the money to spend on English lessons the way Koreans do, yet they speak English so comfortably, with broken grammar but still so communicatively, they far outstrip the Koreans in this respect, who seem so fearful of making a mistake – the internalized grader at work in that so-grade-fixated culture – that they literally do not speak English at all, despite spending more per capita on lessons than any country in the world.

So here’s a bit of fluff from a Kowloon noodle shop [Update: I just discovered Youtube now allows us to annotate our own video uploads, and did that for the below. It's in beta and doesn't work in embeds yet, so you have to click through to the Youtube page to see it. Kinda cool. Think of the educational potential....]:

They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within.
–Leonard Cohen

The model of education from its earliest times was one of mentorship, starting with hunter-gatherers taking their children out on the hunt 100,000 years ago, all the way up to the teaching methods employed at the university founded by Thomas Jefferson. The teacher and the students got to know one another. They interacted constantly throughout the day. The teacher knew each child, had a clear vision of each child’s understanding of the coursework, and worked with each child (or encouraged them to work with each other) until the teacher was satisfied each child understood the material … or was hopelessly incapable of being educated. Because this latter was virtually an admission of failure on the part of the teacher, it happened rarely.

When a student graduated, the most impressive thing she or he could share with a prospective employer was not a Grade Point Average (GPA) or even the name of the institution attended: it was the name of the teacher. Students of the great teachers of history often became famous themselves because of the thoroughness with which their mentors had inculcated knowledge, understanding, skill, and talent in them.

This is how things went from 98,000 BC to roughly 1800 AD. Then came William Farish.

Source: Thom Hartmann*, Complete Guide to ADHD, quoted on Pathfinder Academy’s “Why Doesn’t Your School Give Grades?” (cached version)

I surfed into the above article while reading Charlie A. Roy’s “Grades, Grades and More Grades!” post on his Souly Catholic HS blog. (Theologically, Charlie and I couldn’t be more opposed; humanly, I feel very close to him, enjoying his thoughts and writings, and our dialogues. There’s something about that I like very much.)

The Hartmann excerpt seems to answer a question about which Doug Noon, Jennifer Orr, and I tweeted several weeks ago, as the above screenshot shows: What are the origins and history of grading in modern education?

If Hartmann’s research is correct, the bad smell of grading comes from its rotten historical roots: grading was invented by one William Farish, a lazy teacher who invented grading in order to increase his class size, decrease the necessity for teachers to have real relationships with their students, and fatten his income. Hartmann explains (emphases added):

Around the turn of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution was going full-bore. Piece-work payments were becoming increasingly popular, and many schools were beginning to pay teachers based on the number of students they had, as opposed to a flat salary.

William Farish was a tutor at Cambridge University in England in 1792, and, other than his single contribution to the subsequent devastation of generations of schoolchildren, is otherwise undistinguished and unknown by most people.

Getting to know his students, one may suppose, was too much trouble for Farish. It meant work, interacting and participating daily with each child. It meant paying attention to their needs, to their understanding, to their styles of learning. It meant there was a limit on the number of students he could thus get to know, and therefore a limit on how much money he could earn.

So Farish came up with a method of teaching which would allow him to process more students in a shorter period of time. He invented grades. (The grading system had originated earlier in the factories, as a way of determining if the shoes, for example, made on the assembly line were “up to grade.” It was used as a benchmark to determine if the workers should be paid, and if the shoes could be sold.)

• Grades did not make students smarter. In fact, they had the opposite effect: they made it harder for those children to succeed whose style of learning didn’t match the didactic, auditory form of lecture-teaching Farish used.
• Grades didn’t give students deeper insights into their topics of study. Instead, grades forced children to memorize by rote only those details necessary to pass the tests, without regard to true comprehension of the subject matter.
• Grades didn’t encourage critical thinking or insight skills, didn’t promote questioning minds. Such behaviors are useless in the graded classroom, and within a few generations were considered so irrelevant that today they’re no longer listed among the goals of public education.
• Grades didn’t stimulate the students, or share with them a contagious love for the subject being studied. The opposite happened, in fact, as the normative effect of grades acted as a muffling blanket to any eruptions of enthusiasm, any attempts to dig deeper into a topic, any discursions into larger significance or practical application of content.

What grades did do, however, was increase the salary of William Farish, while, at the same time, lowering his workload and reducing the hours he needed to spend in the classroom. He no longer needed to burrow into his students’ minds to know if they understood a topic: his grading system would do it for him. And it would do it just as efficiently for twenty children as it would for two hundred.

Farish brought grades to the classroom, and the transformation was both sudden and startling: a revolution as rapid and overwhelming as the Industrial Revolution from which it had sprung. Within a generation, the lecture-hall/classroom shifted from a place where one heard the occasional speech by a famous thinker to the place of ordinary daily instruction.

While grades didn’t help students a bit – and, in fact, had the now well-known effect of “dumbing down” entire nations – they vastly simplified the work of teachers and schools. So they spread across Europe and to America with startling speed, arriving here in the early 1800s.

Without grades, the assembly-line-classroom would not be possible. With grades, whole categories of children were discovered who didn’t fit onto the conveyer belt, providing an entire new realm of employment for’ adults who would diagnose, treat, and remediate these newly-discovered “learning disabled” children.

Responsibility for the success of learning shifted from teachers to students: when kids failed, it was their own fault, because they obviously had a defect or disorder of some sort.

A process of sorting and discarding the misfits began (just like in the shoe factory) which, to this day, rewards the “standard” and wounds the “different.”

William Farish gained, but something precious was lost to generations of students thereafter: the mentored learning experience.

Stop and think about all of this.

We’re so aghast at “the pointlessness,” as Jen puts it, of grading, that we don’t step back for a wider view of grading’s evil twin: over-sized classrooms. We’ve become so accustomed to the historical accident of large-scale factory schools that we take it as “second nature,” not contingent and therefore changeable artifice, that teachers are expected to adequately educate one or two hundred students each week. So complete is our acceptance of factory schooling, we consider classes of twenty “small” when, I would argue, even twenty students for an hour is a recipe for poor learning – come on, do the math: one teacher teaching twenty students for an hour equals three minutes of individual attention maximum. Multiply that “small class” by the typical five-class schedule, and you have one teacher expected to somehow know and mentor 100 individuals through daily and weekly learning.

I said much the same thing in the comment I left on Charlie’s post:

It’s eye-opening that the whole purpose of grades was to increase class size so teachers could earn more by “teaching” more students at a time.

To me, class size is the other damnable impediment to effective teaching-and-learning. As an acquaintance in California shared with me recently: “1 teacher, 30 students: You do the math.” It’s impossible to effectively teach more than a handful of students – I’d say five to ten – and grading doesn’t solve the problem.

We need to expand the “radical” critique beyond Kohn’s anti-grade crusade to include an anti-large class size campaign as well.

Large class sizes plus the GPA game transforms students into grade-junkies, and teachers into mere graders. My evidence: I’ve had about 50 students ask to meet to discuss their grade this year, and how they can raise it. I’ve had three ask to meet to discuss how to write better, read poetry better, or otherwise “learn from teacher.” My take-away: they see me as a grade-giver, and school as an instrument for getting them into college, not a place to learn.

In a second comment responding to Charlie’s attempt to “wrap [his] mind around what the typical high school experience would look like without grades,” I added this:

[Y]our cry for “help” seems hopeless because you say you’re trying to envision a “typical high school experience without grades.”

Any high school without grades is not typical, right? And any high school with teacher-student ratios below 1:10 also atypical.

So to me, the problem is that typical high schools can’t work. But the Kohn article you link to suggests otherwise.

This all connects to the decision I announced yesterday to “stop working for schools so I can teach.” Some of the comments I’ve received suggest that people have defined schools as a necessary ingredient in the definition of “teaching,” and I can’t say loudly enough that that is an historical error of the largest proportions: as Hartmann states above, teachers from Socrates and Buddha to Jesus and Abelard to modern times – until that damned William Farish invented grades – were occupied with the job of helping a manageable number of learners learn to think and do through human interaction, not through grading.

Things are so bad now that we call professional graders “teachers,” when the two couldn’t be farther apart. Another comment, this time from my “Saying Goodbye” post yesterday, in response to Vejraska, who (dubiously, I say in unfeigned humility) lamented, “Another outstanding force in the arena of formal teaching leaves, and may I say that the educational system will blink and move on, while many kids will miss out on something so special.” I replied:

The students will blink and move on too. And the loss is not great – I work at the most expensive school in Korea, for the very privileged only, so it’s not like I was playing a noble role as a life-saver for the needy, the way public schoolteachers do.

I like your phrasing, though, of the loss being to “formal education.” It made me latch onto the opposite – informal education – as a decent working title for what education has always been when it was good, and before grades came onto the scene 210 years ago and ruined everything.

Informal education – “Let’s talk about your writing.” “Let’s talk about history.” “What do you think about This or That? Why?” Socratic. Mentoring. Apprenticing. Talking. Trying this and that. Playing. No bells, no grades. Knowing each other for more than 9-month terms – because so much is only ready to be learned when the class comes to an end.

On and on.

Thanks again, all. I’m excited to try teaching for real, unadministered. When your students (or their parents) can fire you for unsatisfactory work, think of the improved service you’ll give. And double that, when you think of being able to choose your students, and fire them for similar breach of learning. Awesome prospects.

In closing, for now, I’ll add a huge irony: here in Korea, parents long ago demonstrated their loss of faith in mass education factory classrooms by sending their children to night and weekend schools for more individualized learning in smaller classrooms. Schoolteachers are literally considered less important than after-school tutors when it comes to their children’s learning. These tutors do not fill out report cards and gradebooks, but they do teach their students with dedication in these private classes.

The irony? I don’t blame the parents. They’ve done the math too. Small classes with real teacher-student interaction are surely more effective than large class sizes beyond the school-teacher’s means to intimately connect with.

This may anger a lot of people, but I’m outside the box enough to expect that: I think the parents are right, though I decry the over-scheduling of their children with these extra classes. In the past, I complained that parents should drop the night and weekend classes for their children, and let the day school do its job. Now, though? I think the opposite. It’s the 40-hour day-school week that seems the bigger waste of time.

And we have that revolutionary grading and too-large classroom charlatan, William Farish, to blame. Him, and the schools that adopted his method in order to create more business by bloating education with more paying students than they could ever classically teach.

So for the record: I’m not leaving teaching; I’m leaving schooling.

—

*Thom, if you read this, I’m definitely ordering your book. And your radio show looks golden.

Photo: Galleons Lap by zenitpetersburg

[Click here to read Part One.]

So despite the impending bell, the rush to the bus, the administrative fart in the Church of Wonder with that daily detention announcement over the intercom just when we’d arrived, in our Story, at the Enchanted Place – despite all of that, the children agreed to stay to the end. Even the half-gone girls, who had somehow already learned that it’s really Not Cool to listen to stories, to like teachers, to sit on the floor and steal a moment’s magic – to Do Nothing – even they agreed to stay.  For One Last Story.

That clock, servant of the bell, was, as usual, doing it to me. I strangled the unborn question, “What do you think the Enchanted Place looks like?”, and pushed ahead with the story.

I read to them of Galleons Lap, where the number of trees in the circle at the Forest’s top were sometimes 63, and sometimes 64, no matter who counted, or how carefully. (Why did I want tell them to remember these trees when, years later, in high school physics, they’d study Heisenberg, Uncertainty, Wave-Particle Duality, and the wonderfully more-than-one-answer-is-right world of quantum mechanics? No matter. There was no time.)

They heard how, “[b]eing enchanted,” the ground of Galleons Lap

was not like the floor the Forest, gorse and bracken and heather, but close-set grass, quiet and smooth and green. It was the only place in the Forest where you could sit down carelessly, without getting up again almost at once and looking for some where else.

“Don’t you love that?” I asked. “You know how, whenever you sit in the woods, there’s always a rock, or a pine cone, or a root, or thorns, or something that hurts your butt and makes you have to get up to find a better place?”

“I’ve never sat in the woods before,” said the Piece of Magic in front.

“You haven’t?”

“Neither have I.” “Or me.” “Or me.” “Me neither.”

“Who here has sat in the woods?”

Not one hand went up, or voice said “me.”

I pointed out the window. “What’s that green stuff on the on the other side of the valley?”

“Trees.”

“Right. Forest. Woods! Our school is in the middle of woods too. All of Korea is tree-topped ridges with narrow valleys. And you’ve never sat in the woods?”

“They’re dirty.”

“And my mother says they have germs.”

“And we go to school nights and weekends.”

“Already? I know my high school students do that, but you do too? You’re only ten years old!”

“If we don’t,” they explained, “we won’t get into a good university.”

“My oh my oh my,” I said. “Well here’s what you’re missing by not sitting in Galleons Lap:

Sitting there they could see the whole world spread out until it reached the sky, and whatever there was all the world over was with them in Galleons Lap.

“Now listen to this next part, and tell me what Christopher Robin is talking about:

Suddenly Christopher Robin began to tell Pooh about some of the things: People called Kings and Queens and something called Factors, and a place called Europe, and an island in the middle of the sea where no ships came, and how you make a Suction Pump (if you want to), and when Knights were Knighted, and what comes from Brazil.

One of the half-gone girls was quick to answer, without raising her hand, with an irony belonging to a voice twice her age: “School.”

They heard how impressed Pooh was that Christopher Robin knew these Things, and how he wished he had a Real Brain so he could know them too, and how, “by-and-bye,

Christopher Robin came to an end of the things, and was silent, and he sat there looking out over the world, and wishing it wouldn’t stop.

And we all watched as Pooh confused Knights with Afternoons, and as Christopher Robin, in one of the most perfect scenes in children’s literature, knighted Pooh with a stick, after which Pooh “sat down and said ‘Thank you,’ which is a proper thing to say when you have been made a knight.” And we listened to Pooh’s quiet alarm as

he began to think of all the things Christopher Robin would want to tell him when he came back from wherever he was going to, and how muddling it would be for a Bear of Very Little Brain to try and get them right in his mind. “So, perhaps,” he said sadly to himself, “Christopher Robin won’t tell me any more,” and he wondered if being a Faithful Knight meant that you just went on being faithful without being told things.

“Do you see what’s happening?” I asked. “Do you understand now where Christopher Robin is going?”

They did.

“And why is Pooh worried?”

This time one of the girls who got it wrong so right in our opening questions got this one right too: “Because Christopher Robin won’t bring Pooh.”

“That’s so sad,” said one of the half-gone girls.

I told them when I read this in the Army, on that mountain-top base-camp in Serbia, I almost cried at this part:

Then, suddenly again, Christopher Robin, who was Still looking at the world with his chin in his hands, called out, “Pooh!”

“Yes?” said Pooh.

“When I’m – when – Pooh!”

“Yes, Christopher Robin?”

“I’m not going to do Nothing any more.”

(And I swear to Goodness, my voice was shaking as I read this, and I had to stop and look up at them all.)

“Never again?”

“Well, not so much. They don’t let you.”

Pooh waited for him to go on, but he was silent again.

“Yes, Christopher Robin?” said Pooh helpfully.

“Pooh, when I’m – you know – when I’m not doing Nothing, will you come up here sometimes?”

“Just Me?”

“Yes, Pooh.”

“Will you be here too?”

“Yes, Pooh, I will be really. I promise I will be, Pooh.”

“That’s good,” said Pooh.

“Pooh, promise you won’t forget about me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred.”

Pooh thought for a little.

“How old shall I be then?”

“Ninety-nine.”

Pooh nodded.

“I promise,” he said.

Still with his eyes on the world Christopher Robin put out a hand and felt for Pooh’s paw.

“Pooh,” said Christopher Robin earnestly, “if I – if I’m not quite” he stopped and tried again. “Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won’t you?”

“Understand what?”

“Oh, nothing.” He laughed and jumped to his feet. “Come on!”

“Where?” said Pooh.

“Anywhere,” said Christopher Robin.

We’re almost finished, I said, and then finished:

So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.

“And that’s the story I wanted to give you.”

I told them that every story in the two books was as good, and that I’ve carried those books with me around the world as an adult – which means constant packing and unpacking, paying for extra freight, on and on – and that I’ll carry them with me til I die. And that I hoped one day they would read them too.

And several asked if they were in the library, and I hope some of them made the time to forget bells and clocks and buses and night schools to go check them out and find a quiet place to read them.

And their teacher told them to thank me, and they clapped and obliged.

And I said “Thank you,” which was a proper thing to say when somebody has let you read a story to them, and they have listened and stayed with you the whole time.

* * * *

So how, as I so grandly claimed at the end of Part One of this story, did this experience “quite literally change my life”?

It has something to do with the walk back from their elementary building to my high school building; something to do with the high school students in the detention room sitting, by regulation, Doing Nothing for an hour as punishment for Doing Something Wrong during the day.

It had something to do with entering my empty classroom, where a few hours earlier my seniors had had a quiz on Kerouac’s On the Road, and noticing a printout of Cliff’s Notes on the novel atop one of the empty desks.

And how did all of that change my life, as opposed to merely changing my mood?

It helped me decide to take a risk, and put my money where my mouth was when I wrote this line back in December:

I’m not sure how much longer I want to work for schools. I’d so much rather teach.

So I didn’t renew my contract. I’m going to continue (or is it, “finally start”?) teaching, but on my terms. More on that as it unfolds.