Beyond School

Web Legacies Audience

1. Why I Like the Assignment

Again, this series was originally assigned by Dr. Tonya Huber, for a multi-culturalism in education class I took in Mallorca, Spain, five or six summers back. It was an intensely engaging project, so let me summarize the process for anybody interested in the pedagogy:

1. Select any personal belonging as an “artifact” of who you are - or were.
2. Write about it in the personal narrative genre, but connect it in some way to teaching and/or learning.
3. Identify key factors of culture represented by your artifact, and the experience for which it is an emblem. Touch upon those when you write.

That’s about it.  Though not part of the assignment, my own decision to select “artifacts” from early childhood to all later stages of my life made the assignment much richer.  At the end of the ten pieces I wrote over eight weeks (and I decided against publishing the last two here because they seemed sub-par), I’d sketched out a series of memoirs that formed a skeletal autobiography.  It’s not every class that affords an opportunity to write your entire life.  And this is why, I think, those papers didn’t suffer the fate of most of my college writings, which I’d never dream of inflicting upon general readers.  This assignment was different; it didn’t suffer from . . . what’s the word? . . . oh yes: schooliness.

2. How It Felt to Write Personal Narrative Instead of Edu-Stuff

Crickets aside, I have to admit it felt good. It raises an interesting dilemma for a guy who feels a bit cramped by the “edublogger” pigeonhole: Deliver what the imagined audience expects, or what the writer feels like writing?  Just writing that opposition makes the dilemma less interesting by far: it’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?  As soon as I begin writing for someone else, I lose the essence of writing.  So I suspect there will be more of these tangents in the future, and let the readers fall where they may.

Because I have to say:  More and more, I feel like we get the technology and 21st century skills thing, and it’s threatening to become old hat.  In a nutshell, with 30,000 or so new applications in development as we speak - and the number will surely only grow - it seems a fool’s errand to try to grab at them all. Further, all our tools seem reducible to a few modes  (visual, textual, aural, kinesthetic), and a few skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening, and info-finding, -evaluating, and -managing).  More and more I wonder if a few tools for each of these purposes aren’t easy enough to find at will, or simpler still, if most of us don’t already have a sufficient number in our tool-belts.  I feel like I do, anyway, at least somewhat.  And I feel a pull to pull back from the tools, and gravitate more toward meaning when I write.

I’m really much more interested in thinking critically about cultural factors that retard education than I am about tools that, used retardedly, enable us to learn conventional unwisdoms more efficiently. In other words, I want to fight the idols of the mind that we worship instead of question. Since I’ve quit education school-teaching and won’t work for schools again, I can speak the unspoken without fearing for my livelihood - which is the only explanation I can find for the deafening silences in educational weblogs about such idols as religion, patriotism, consumerism, workaholism, and the educational system itself.  It seems to me that “21st Century Education” needs to question ideologies from the Hebrews and Romans to the Cold War far more than it needs to teach the uses of Twitter.

Still, I do use technology when I teach - have been using it in new ways over the last two weeks in my freelance teaching, in fact - so I’m sure I’ll share the occasional item about tech from time to time.  But be warned: I have a box of old journals from the past 30 years. I suspect they’ll be fodder for more Web Legacies, more reflections of my history, and the roles of education and ideas in that history.

3. A Few Take-Aways I Offer from This Series

If you hadn’t noticed, I revealed in these posts that I was a pot-smoking, school-skipping, low-achieving high school student. For those of you who think punitively, that’s cause for suspension and a “bad boy” label. If you got nothing else out of reading this, just notice that that behavior was a mechanism for dealing with the hell that was life incarcerated in a public high school institution.  If I’d had the choice to escape the two-years’ bullying by simply absenting myself from that environment, I quite likely would have felt little need for the pleasures of sedation brought by that weed. (It’s also interesting to note that the popular kids were all heavy drinkers, but that was somehow morally less scandalous than smoking marijuana, though to this day I don’t get the double-standard. I’ve always argued that “stoned drivers” at worst are a hazard because they drive a little too slow, as opposed to your daredevil drunk drivers. And rarely do you find a belligerent stoner getting in your face and wanting to fight¹, the way our worst drunks do. Instead, you get a giggler or navel-gazer, who I’ll take, if forced to choose, every time.)

You also might notice that the only hero in the bad high school years was a closeted gay athlete. Yet another “bad sinner” to punish or, goodness help us, “convert” - or good young man to understand.  Your choice.

I also revealed that I became an above average language user during my teens not by doing homework or assigned readings - I rarely did either, though it was easy enough to get that “A” on that Iliad paper by writing an essay on the Classics Illustrated Comics version of the epic - and that my literacy grew instead by reading (stolen) comic books and sci-fi/fantasy - and later, after high school, literature - with my friends, outside of school. So again, I’m left questioning the value of mandatory high school. I still lean toward the position that it retards growth, rather than accelerating it.

That’s about it for now. Finally:

4. Links to the Entire Web Legacies Series

1. Fear and Trembling at Camp Joy: Unborn Again
2. The Hulk Leads to Hamlet: Reading Despite Teaching
3. Of Jocks and Fags: The High School Bullying Years
4. In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males: The Beatnik College Years, pt. 1
5. Human Sacrifice: The Academic College Years, pt. 2
6. Learning the Enemy’s Language: The Army Years, part 1
7. Teaching Killing: The Army Years, part 2
8. Stereotyping Soldier-Students: The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Classroom

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Photo credit: bramblejungle

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1. or alternately, get a cheap lay [↩]