Speech Outline

If you just want to watch my recent keynote address in Australia — which, as farce would have it, turned into two addresses — just click on the screenshots of each speech below. But I hope you read the little mock-heroic back-story.

Learning Technologies 2009 Keynote, Part 1: Click image to view.

The Missing Link: Texas Politics Distorts US Textbooks
(watch before Speech Part 2. Slide to 5.15 for the kicker)

Learning Technologies Keynote Part 2 (click image to view)

~

Prologue: On Time and Other Thieves¹

Anybody as oblivious to the passage of time and calendar pages as I am knows it can be a source of both bliss and embarrassment: bliss because the hours and days are so damned interesting you don’t have time to notice them; embarrassment because some of those hours and days demand your notice — or else there’s hell to pay.

Common examples: birthdays, anniversaries, blasted holidays.²

Less common: the keynote speech I gave to the Learning Technologies 2009 Conference in Mooloolaba, Australia, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, recently — d’oh! — not so recently: last November. It’s time to share it, reflect on it, and say thanks. Where does the time go?

~

The Story of the Speech: A Farce

Exposition: Seth Godin as Textbook

I’ve given smaller presentations before at various schools, at the Apple Distinguished Educators Institute in Bangkok a few years ago, and so forth, but they were always in-house. But this one was by special invitation and, cooler still, for the keynote of the final day. I’ve never given a keynote before, and wanted to rise to the occasion with my best creative effort.

But I had other, more important reasons for wanting to do well: I wanted to use the speech to teach my students. The invitation came in September, at the very time that I had assigned my Western Civ and Chinese history students to give “creative speeches” of their own. As you’ll see if you watch the speech, I had tossed out the ’schooly’ approach to oral presentations — you know, the Death by Droning Powerpoint  — and replaced it with a different “textbook” for speeches.

That “different textbook” was online. It was TED Talks. More specifically, Seth Godin’s talk “On Standing Out.” Here it is:

I showed this Talk to all my classes in the first week of school and, in a nutshell, told them that the closer they got to Godin’s delivery and slide creativity, the closer they got to an “A.” It resulted in the best time I’d had watching student presentations in my entire decade of teaching. Not all the students rose to the challenge, mind you. But those that did proved the value of the attempt in spades.

Good for the Gander

So I figured I’d be a good egg and put my money (and reputation) where my mouth was for my students: I’d give my own “Godinesque” presentation³ in Australia and, knowing it was to be filmed and put online, share the link so they could learn, along with me, whether my TED/Godin evangelism had real-world merit, or was just the latest example of teacher BS. They’d get to see me walk the tightrope without a net, and judge for themselves.

Damned Clocks, Blasted Calendars

There was a small problem. I was already drowning in the waves familiar to all teachers in their first year at a new school — above all,  creating curriculum and syllabi from virtual scratch (I didn’t like the textbooks). I didn’t have a lot of mental space for crafting a speech on something as far afield from that teacher-head terrain as the conference’s theme: “The Power of You.” My head was in the Power of History.

I burnt the candle one night brainstorming an outline for the thing, wrestling the whole time with my confusion over that most important question for any communicator: Who, exactly, is the audience? I couldn’t tell if it was teachers, administrators, corporate types; if they were already techie born-agains, or phobic techie infidels. I muddled on anyway, and saved the file for later.

The next time I looked at the calendar it was the Friday a week before the conference. I didn’t have a single slide.

The Pleasures of Masochism

My long-suffering wife of a workaholic listened to another apology that I had to work through another weekend, and watched me slink off into my office/doghouse. I fired up the by-now old outline I’d banged out, looked at it, and promptly deleted that four hours of late-night work. My head was in the Roman Republic back then, and now it was in the Late Medieval period. I had other things to say now. Our classroom had long since moved on from the student presentations to discussions of the “key concept” of “civilization” and its textbooky “five characteristics,” and I wanted to prove to my 15-year-old charges that this bit of schooly knowledge could be put to good real-world use, done critically and creatively. Plus, our class time-travels, since I’d made that outline, had covered an additional 1,500 years of memorizing one damn fact and name after another for ninth-grade tests and essays, and I wanted to demonstrate ditto for those schooly testable items — wanted to show them that knowing history can be golden when arguing in public for a real cause.

The Madness of Blog-Mining and Flickr-Fishing

Then something beautiful happened.

If I was going to address “The Power of You,” I already had my outline: this very blog. It was all there: my years in Germany, in China, in Korea, in Singapore; my path “down the digital rabbit-hole” as a teacher, and my struggles to be a teacher despite working for schools. I looked at the archives page, so conveniently displaying titles and dates of my journey since starting it on New Year’s Day of 2007, and found a multitude of patterns to shape the speech. Better still, I realized I already had a huge amount of images in the posts themselves that I could use in my slides. That extra time searching Flickr for cc-licensed content to enhance my posts, and attributing the creators, turns out to have been time well-spent.

I went ape-shite. Clicking archive links, copying images to slides, animating them, coloring them, coddling them with my best designer’s care, adding “Godinesque” titles and captions and “chapter” headings, on and on, for hours and hours. I filled the gaps for the new ideas — civilization and its “complex institutions,” Jesus and Socrates and Luther and Gutenberg, Moodle and Blackboard and Ning, other Names and Facts — in this slideshow-cum-outline with new images from Flickr, searched for and found them, all in a life-loving delirium.

More seductions came: the speech would aim to play to the multiple audiences enabled by our Brave New Web — beyond the Aussies in the auditorium to my students, to my readers and Twitterverse, to my wife (See? All that work pays off!), and to you, Seth Godin, in playful tribute. You live right next door on the web, so why not invite you in? We’re all neighbors — and you’ll love the clip in the preso showing your influence on the student who explained Confucian philosophy via a Simpson’s slide.

More ideas pushed forward, nudged out old ones, gave a startlingly higher purpose to the speech than originally planned. The thing began to take on the shape of a major life-work, a symphonic summing up of all before and the unveiling, in the “fourth movement,” of a climactic new chapter in the War on Schooliness. It was nothing short of mystical, in the best combination of inspiration and gut-laughter. It was polite but subversive, pedagogical but political — “serious,” to quote Hakim Bey, “but not sober”⁴ – and it so raged against the edu-Philistines that Jesus himself would be proud. It was, in short, completely bonkers — and I had no doubt that it would work.

On and on I tinkered, on and on composed, some god alongside laughing with me all the while. So this was how it could feel to make a presentation of “an idea worth spreading”!  The clock on the desk withered away into air. Sun and moon rose and fell, rose and fell, measured by coffee-spoons that kept sleep at bay.

Centuries later, the clock re-materialized on the desk. The calendar said it was Sunday night. Time, then, for bed, and back to teaching tomorrow.

Mortal Combat, Round 2

After that mad marathon of 50-odd hours, I discovered a slight problem.

I had created a 300mb presentation containing 196 slides. The keynote was slotted for 45 minutes.

(If those figures didn’t make you gulp, you need coffee.)

But no worries, I said. I would arrive in Australia late Wednesday night, rehearse the timing in my hotel room, and be good to go by curtain time Friday morning.

Interlude: In the Classroom

The Chinese history class got interesting that week. It was the week of my war with the Google Fundamentalists in my classroom. Our online forum was heating up with controversy over whether a website I deemed a Mao-smearing disgrace was, or was not, a reliable academic source. Of all the weeks to leave the class to a substitute teacher, it had to be the one with the semester’s best and most  authentic teachable moment — with fiery debate, to boot.

But leave I did, flying off to Australia with all my war gear: my Macbook, my Keynote, my back-up and wireless router and cables and cameras, my kitchen sink. I was prepared.

Taming Time

I arrived in Brisbane, met the driver who took me to Mooloolaba, arrived at the hotel around midnight, found the hotel had no night staff and had left a code for me to get my key from the hotel safe. Front desk staff only worked daytime hours, would return the following morning. I’d never seen that before.

The room was perfect — wireless internet, balcony, ocean view, coffee and coffee-maker — and the night was quiet and balmy. Perfect for rehearsing my slideshow and cutting it down to size.

But since I had wireless, no harm in checking in to the class forum and seeing how that debate had unfolded during my seven-hour flight.

Moth, Flame

The forum was an all-out war of all against all — and quite a few of the students, more glorious still, against me. How delicious: they were pushing back against their teacher with their sharpest arguments and most defiant challenges, not yielding an inch to my authority. Thread after thread they raised their cry: “We’re not convinced — en garde!”

What the hell. It was only midnight. The keynote could wait.

I spent the next three hours on the battlefield, sometimes engaged in direct combat with this or that foe, other times combing through the arguments of student allies in the thread to marshal the force of their best moments in block-quoted volleys across the field. My travel-clock melted away in all the Homeric fun. It re-appeared three hours later, when my laptop warned me: “Your battery will run out in ten minutes. Plug in your computer to avoid losing your work.”

The interruption was annoying, but a good reminder. I needed to get to work rehearsing and timing the keynote.

I dug my adapter out of my suitcase, and then it hit me: I’d forgotten to buy an international plug adapter at the airport. I couldn’t plug my computer in.

The Holy Grail

3 a.m., and no front desk clerk to ask for an adapter. No choice but to strike out into the night.

I discovered Mooloolaba was a quiet little surfer’s resort town at this hour. All the shops were closed and streets empty, the stray and utterly useless packs of drunk teens notwithstanding. For the first time in my life, I prayed for a 7-11 (I usually wish for its destruction) that would have an electronics rack with an adapter, thinking I had decent chances of success. This was a tourist town, after all.

No luck at the first one. I was hungry, though, so I bought a loaf of bread and — “Wait, I’m in Australia, so put the peanut butter back on the shelf and buy the Vegemite next to it instead.” The cashier gave me directions to another 7-11 that I think she had hallucinated. I couldn’t find it.

So I went back to the hotel without the grail, forlornly chewing Vegemite on bread as dawn broke. Two hours later I was at the conference, sleep-deprived, introducing myself and meeting the organizers, begging them for an adapter. I got one.

The only problem was, the conference had started, and I wanted to watch the other presenters, meet the attendees, socialize. That, and I was dog tired. So I put off the editing for later that night.

A Tragic Ending

Of course I crashed that night without rehearsing. I think I even convinced myself that so many of the slides were meant to be rapid-delivery style that it would probably all work out within my 45 minute limit.

The next morning came, and I gave my speech without rehearsal — not a big deal for teachers, who do that every day for a living. It went swimmingly enough, I think — lots of laughs, occasional applause, an audience with great energy — until, halfway through my speech, weird music started playing.

I thought it was somebody’s cellphone, and ignored it as long as I could, but it started getting louder.

Then I was told it was the “wrap-up” signal. Farce had struck.

Have a good laugh at the last 5 minutes of Part 1. I laugh too. I speed through dozens and dozens of slides, saying wistful goodbyes to each as I rush to the end — because I had a new project to launch (I’d given a sneak preview of Students 2.0 to the ADE audience in Bangkok, and wanted to give a similar one to the new project, which is still getting its final pre-launch touches).

So the whole thing came to a crashing, and very awkward end — until.

A Comic Reversal

Teachable moment again: Show the students the value of assertiveness.

An unassertive person would have slinked off like the grandest of dorks, accepting defeat. I figured I’d risk being the grandest of dorks differently: I asked the host — after first asking the audience — if we could make time for the rest of the speech. Maybe out of compassion, maybe out of interest, the audience left him no choice. We scheduled the lunch hour for Part 2.

So we tamed time after all, by forcing our will on it.

Epilogue: The Most Important Thing

As for Part 2? I realized after watching it that I left out an essential piece of the puzzle by skipping the video of the Texas State Board of Education, and how it’s perverting US education by imposing a single, far-right ideology on US textbooks. Thus the Youtube video embedded above.

Luther took on a corrupt Catholic Church with the help of Gutenberg’s printing press, and brought it to its knees. We can take a page from his book and use the web to take on a corrupt textbook industry — by attracting students to find everything the textbooks leave out to please activist extremists dominating the Texas Board of Education.

I’ll be asking for help on that soon. In the meantime, thanks for stopping by.

And thanks to all the wonderful folks in Australia, and to the people I give shout-outs to in my address: Karl Fisch for first blowing my mind, Jeff Utecht for teaching me the tools, Dean Shareski and Scott McCleod and William Farren, and to too many more to ever fit in a list. It’s been a wonderland indeed.

1. “Time and other thieves” lifted from lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s “Furry Sings the Blues,” from the (near-perfect) Hejira album
2. David, one of my all-time favorite students — whose work you’ll see featured in the speech — told me last week he’d found the perfect coffee mug for me from the Onion website. The cup reads, “I hate whatever today is.”
3. I actually use that phrase in class
4. If you think that means alcohol was involved, you’re tragically way off. Go read some Nietzsche for a year.

17 Comments

• At January 31, 2010, ShellTerrell wrote:

  Must read for all presenters! RT @cburell: My Australia Keynote Speech: A Serious Farce, in One Thousand Acts http://bit.ly/cniGXD

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At February 1, 2010, Dean Shareski wrote:

  You're such an awesome storyteller and then to see my name somehow attached to it was a nice bonus. But seriously I look forward to the presentation but the backstory stands on its own. Well done.

• At February 1, 2010, Miguel Guhlin wrote:

  Great job, Clay! Thanks for sharing!

  .-= Miguel Guhlin´s last blog ..DiigoNotes - Phoebe Prince, 15, Commits Suicide After Onslaught of Cyber-Bullying From Fellow Students =-.

• At February 1, 2010, Jodi wrote:

  Shalom from the last leg of our trip here in Israel, Clay, where we have a "down" day and I'm treating myself to catching up on RSS feeds, including this post AND the accompanying videos (plus a couple of extra TED talks for the hell of it). NB: I don't know if it's just on my end, but the second segment of your speech got all skippy somewhere at the 3' mark, then slow and stretchy, and finally out-of-synch. :( But it was still fun to watch!

  I'm hoping to use the next few months of my own sabbatical to figure out how to re-invigorate my own teaching, even given the constraints of working for my school. :) Though I don't know how you manage it all -- even though I'm pretty handy with the tech tools I still find it takes an inordinate amount of time to get them set up for classroom use and then follow them, too.

  And then there's a certain "Creepy Treehouse" factor that seems to prevent my students from REALLY buying in to the things I set up, even when I've tried to make the work more authentic -- as you point out, exhausting and disillusioning. So I have to re-examine that, particularly how to work within the required confines of my school's program and my province's curriculum, too.

  Sometimes I wish that all us like-minded teachers could just start our own little internet-based school. But then who would fill our bank accounts? :P

  Yeah, yeah... back to being on non-school-related sabbatical. Cheers!

  .-= Jodi´s last blog ..Bunch of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger =-.

• At February 2, 2010, Sandra wrote:

  Hi Clay,

  I was wondering if you had another version of your speeches where we didn't have to download the microsoft programme to watch it. Thanks!

  .-= Sandra´s last blog ..Mi nueva página de inicio. Google se quedó corto al lado de... =-.

• At February 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Sandra,

  Unfortunately, all I've got is what the conference published. Wish it were otherwise.

  Clay

• At February 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Jodi,

  The tech problems in part 2 are not on your end, unfortunately.

  I'm hoping to make each part of the preso -- all four of them, in other words -- separate "TED"-like talks of high enough quality to do justice to the original idea, instead of the high-speed train-wreck it became due to my lack of rehearsing the timing.

  Not that I cared too much. It was still great fun, warts and all.

• At February 4, 2010, What Did They Tweet? | Teacher Reboot Camp wrote:

  [...] to use the tools we should support and see what they can do. I encourage you to visit his post, My Australia Keynote Speech: A Serious Farce, in One Thousand Acts, with the video links to parts I and II of his keynote. Here is an excerpt from his post: Teachable [...]

• At February 4, 2010, Jonathan Chambers wrote:

  That was a wild ride down 'collective memory lane', Clay. I enjoyed it, and I appreciate the fact that you still have your spirit and your voice. Your discussion of experimentation that you've rethought and reinvented is what I appreciate most.

• At February 5, 2010, roadster5555 wrote:

  My Australia Keynote Speech: A Serious Farce, in One Thousand Acts http://bit.ly/drvpuj – powerful message re authentic teaching

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At February 5, 2010, Cindy wrote:

  Hey Clay, I also enjoyed it and great to hear about your reflections on the rabbit hole and beyond. Hope you enjoyed your first visit to Australia.

  Cindy

  .-= Cindy´s last blog ..Portal to Media Literacy =-.

• At February 5, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Miguel, just a quick thanks not only for the kind words, but for all the help and fun you've provided along the road. Enjoyed seeing you on the list-serv I recently joined. It's a big, small world now.

• At February 5, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Cindy (you did hear your name pop up in the preso, I hope?). I loved Australia -- as friendly irl as it is in the virtual one. Hope you're well.

• At February 5, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Dean, you're somehow attached to so much of the last three years. I'll be in touch re your email after returning from a school trip to India next weekend.

• At February 5, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Nice to see you, Jonathan. Now get me a job in Shanghai so we can start Chapter 2. Hope you're well.

• At February 8, 2010, Cindy wrote:

  Sure did! I'm great, loving Ho Chi Minh City.

  .-= Cindy´s last blog ..Portal to Media Literacy =-.

• At February 17, 2010, Bill Farren wrote:

  Hey Clay: thanks for sharing this. It was nice learning more about your journey, the learning that comes from success as well as failure. Nice to see how you don't sugarcoat what it is, like too many tech evangelists seem to be doing. But on the other hand, you do a great job showing how anyone (who is curious) can improve their craft by connecting students to real people and real situations.

  (also, thx. for the shoutout).

  Be well.

  .-= Bill Farren´s last blog ..What’s Your Learning Attitude? =-.

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Just a quick share: I’m giving my Chinese history / China studies students this “starter kit” of RSS feeds about contemporary China from Asian and Western sources to start them on their self-directed explorations (and small group blog reports) about whatever they want to learn.

It’s the cream of my own Google Reader “China” folder, which I created and populated over winter break. If anybody has more feeds to suggest, please add them in comments. Otherwise, I share them to spare any other China studies folks out there the necessity of re-inventing the wheel. Here they are, from our class Ning:

Blogs in Asia (China, Hong Kong, etc) About China:

1. China Digital Times:

It’s my main source of up-to-the-minute news about all things China. Like CNN.com, it covers China-oriented news on all subjects: politics, culture, society, arts, human rights, economics, law, diplomacy and foreign relations, books, law, science and technology, the whole nine yards.

The best thing about it: it’s what we call a “curator” blog. Its writers scan all the important presses — magazines, newspapers, academic and political journals, on and on, for significant writings on China. Then they write a brief intro of the article, give you an excerpt, and a link to the whole article elsewhere on the web. So they do the searching for you, and consolidate the best content across the web each day in one place.

2. Danwei: Chinese media, advertising, and urban life.

3. ChinaGeeks

4. ChinaSMACK

5. The People’s Daily

6. The People’s Daily: Opinions and Editorials

US Sites About China: The Capitalist/Liberal-Democratic View

These sites are from the more mainstream US media outlets. They, too, will have their biases, so read them with equal care. They’re often written by Westerners with little deep knowledge of China and its history, so respect yourself and your own knowledge about China as that knowledge grows. You should be able, increasingly, to find blind spots in these Western views.

7. The Wall Street Journal: China RealTime Report Blog

8. The New Yorker Magazine: Letters from China

3 Comments

• At January 26, 2010, anderscj2 wrote:

  [from scottmcleod] A Starter Kit of China Studies RSS Feeds: Beyond School http://url4.eu/1DyQm

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At January 28, 2010, Brian H. wrote:

  Thanks for this list. I've got two friends who just applied to teach English in China and I think they'll find this list handy. I'll be checking these links out too even though it may be years before I can get to China. But I can dream, can't I?

  .-= Brian H.´s last blog ..10 Days European Motorhome Hire from Just Go (a great way to experience Europe) =-.

• At March 2, 2010, Chuck wrote:

  Love this post. Great stuff as usual, Clay

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217 years ago last week, Louis XVI’s head rolled from a Paris guillotine. One of my students emailed me to tell me that, because we’d discussed that event on the very day of its anniversary. A few years after that bloody blade gave death to feudalism and birth to modernity, the French Revolution became so radical it tried to uproot the Christian church in France and replace it with what it considered a better alternative. This reminds me, sidewise, of a story I heard years back, and want to embellish in the telling. I’ve been using this space too much lately to merely blog, and tonight I feel like writing. It’s hard to get back into that swing, but harder not to swing in it.

Pride and Prejudice, Revisited

He was lower-middle class economically, above most of the “upper” class culturally, and long past much belief in, or need for, most things church-related.

But he was engaged now, and meeting his future family-in-law for the first time. They were opposite him in almost every way, but in two ways, above all, that made him nervous: they were unimaginably wealthy, and they were regular church-goers.

During their first meeting the day before, through several subtle signs — their exchange of glances when he told them he’d never golfed, and when he had to ask how to mount that horse at their estate; his future mother-in-law’s quick scold of her husband’s questions about his (non-existent) investment portfolio, followed by her pained change of subject — he had gathered that he had little hope of overcoming their disappointment in his lack of silver-spooned pedigree.

(Truth be told, he wished his girl lacked it too, so that they could leave this Jane Austen re-run, dispense with the class difference dramas, rely on their own talents and hard work for any future success, and just live and love more simply — as, when they were on neutral turf, they did. Like that day at the river the week before, when she was just her, and he was more than enough for her. She’d dropped her gold ring and watch, heirlooms both, off the rocks and into the river, and given them up for lost beneath the rapids. He told her to keep the faith, found a long branch in the forest, and told her to hold it straight down from the rock to the river-bottom. He dove in, followed the branch down, and felt his way along the silt in the dark, then rose fist-first from the depths, exultant and beaming, jewels in hand and glowing gold in the sun.

They’d told that story to her family later that day, but none of them seemed to think it mattered. He knew it didn’t either, but also knew it very much did.)

His friends didn’t believe him, but he really did regret that she came from wealth.

But if the wealth gap was spilt milk, he still had a fighting chance, he knew, to overcome that other difference. He told himself he would be a good sport about his in-laws’ faith, and go to their Sunday morning service with the open mind he prided himself on, and with his own version of faith: “good faith.” He would withhold judgment, and give their church the benefit of the doubt.

At the same time, he was honest enough with himself to recognize that he fully expected the service to be a pained, “smile until your lips bleed” affair.

Sunday

The colonial red-brick church was exclusive, for Virginia’s bluest bloods. Several of America’s Founding Fathers, who had lived in the neighborhood over two centuries earlier, had worshiped in these very pews. The Sunday morning parking lot was filled with the Saabs of the Old Money families, the Lexuses and Mercedes of the less secure and more self-conscious nouveau riche. His clothes and shoes were a couple of notches below the apparent Sunday standard here. He smiled through the doorway handshakes, the class inspections posing as introductions; then he smiled down the aisle and into the pew. His mother-in-law’s perfume seemed a thing made in heaven. He never knew perfume could so intoxicate, and could only imagine how dear the price tag.

To the podium came the pastor, a powerfully-built but kind-faced old man. He liked the old man instantly — naturally mild and at ease, much the mold of old man into which he hoped he’d ripen himself.

The opening remarks told him he’d come on a special day for this church: it was the old man’s last sermon. He’d given his first one in this church a full four decades ago, a much younger man with a long future ahead of him. The old man spoke of his imminent departure, and of the passage it marked to his life’s Final Stage, and all the while spoke like a man at peace with life’s impermanence, with the natural cycle of life and death that spins us all. Only the slightest sadness could be sensed; more palpable was the old man’s obvious concern that he’d chosen a suitable topic for his final performance on this sunny morn.

The Sermon

He’d chosen, the old man announced, to speak of a story surely known to all the faithful in the house, a story that had surely gripped them all in childhood, such were its wonders and beauties, such its gifts of wisdom and hope.

And that story, he said, was this: the Tale of the Frog and the Princess.

The groom-to-be scanned the faces of his in-laws-to-be and others in nearby pews for signs of scandal. Surely the congregation would find this choice inappropriate — it wasn’t from the Bible at all, and worse yet, it was a childish fairy tale! But all he saw on the all those faces was soft smiles and eyes aglow with an anticipation both childlike and mature. He smiled too, and with no lip-bleeding grit. While he fully expected the old man to somehow, by the end of the sermon, tie the fairy tale to the predictable narrative he’d heard so often when small, he nonetheless adored the idea of letting the old man lead him, along with the rest, back to those days of childhood.

In this return to the “teachings of childhood” — his favorite line from Gone With the Wind, and his favorite silver moment in all of Clark Gable’s celluloid immortality — what meanings would he hear in this story now, as an adult, that he couldn’t hear as a child? He’d forgotten much of the story. What were the details?

He was ready to listen to the old man with the best of his own “good faith.”

The old man eased into his tale. “You remember the story,” he said. “How the Princess had a golden ball she loved to throw into the air and catch — how it so glowed in the sky she imagined she was catching the very sun.

“And you remember,” he continued, “how her parents told her never to go beyond the palace walls into the forest. It was full of dirt and, worse than dirt, of the lowly people of the realm — the ‘commoners.’

“But we know how the old tales work,” he went on. “Of course the Princess was fated to transgress her parents’ boundaries.

“One day, she threw the ball too high, and over the palace wall it went, with her in hot pursuit. She exited the gate just in time to see her golden ball bounce down the hill, bounce high once, and again, and then plop into a deep, dark well. Of course that well was dirty — too dirty for our Princess. All she could do was kneel there by the well, the silly bird, crying and crying over that stupid golden ball.

“She was at least lucky in one respect,” he added with a pause long enough to look a good half of the congregation in the eye: “There were no dirty poor people around.”

A faint laugh came from the faithful.

“You remember too, I’m sure, that the Princess stopped her blubbering when a frog approached her, all slimy and wet and, in a word, dirty — and she recoiled from it in disgust that soon turned to wonder. Because it spoke to her.

” ‘What are you crying about, Princess?’,” it croaked.

“She answered it the way a Princess should answer a dirty thing: dripping with disdain. ‘I’m crying because my golden ball fell into the well, you dirty frog.’

“But the frog’s next croak caught her attention: ‘What if I can get your ball for you? What will you give me?’

“The Princess’ life was so stuffed with gold, she knew she could give him a small fortune without noticing its absence. ‘I’ll give you my golden crown,’ she said.

“Now it was the frog’s turn for disdain. ‘What would I do with a golden crown? All it would do is drag me to the bottom of the pond and drown me.’

“The King’s little girl was dense enough to follow with an offer of a perfect pearl necklace — she surely had dozens of them, so no worries there,” he added. “But the frog explained they’d just tangle around his legs and, again, cause him to drown. No thanks, said he.

“The Princess huffed and, like our friend Mr. Pooh — Of Very Little Brain — said, ‘What about my ruby ring, then?’ And again the frog croaked out a snort: ‘It would fall off my finger and I’d be left with nothing at all.’

The old man stopped the story to observe that so far, the girl had failed to recognize the frog as a “person” at all. It was just a thing to be bought off, a laborer to do the dirty-work and get her back her gold. It never occurred to her to ask the frog what he needed; never occurred to her to think of the frog as another living “person” at all. He sighed and shook his head, and as he took a breath to continue, the groom thought, “Here comes the pivot to the preaching.”

He was wrong.

“But in the classic ‘Rule of Threes’ pattern so common in stories, it seems our Princess, after hearing the frog three times try to tell her that what she valued for him had no value, finally — though probably dimly, for our dear princess is a dimwit  — finally, I say, she begins to catch on: she’s talking to another living soul. How do I know? Because her next offer is different: ‘I’ll give you one of my silk slippers,’ she says — wait for it, now….ready? — ’so that you may sleep in it and keep warm.’”

Another gaze into the pews, then: “That’s more like it,” he said. “There’s always hope. A warm place to sleep is something we all need. It’s a lot more important than jewels to our cold, clammy frog. Our Princess is waking up.” His eyebrows arched above his bifocals, and he smiled.

The groom smiled back.

“Mr. Frog still wasn’t sold, though, but — if you’ll pardon this old man for saying so — the offer seemed to bring out his kinky side: ‘I don’t want your slipper,’ he says. ‘But it gives me an idea. What I do want,’ Frog continued, ‘is…’ — and pardon me, ladies — ‘to sleep in your bed. With you.’”

[I hate to do this to you, but it's late, so: to be continued. Soon.]

1 Comments

• At January 25, 2010, TonySearl wrote:

  TBC soon I hope! …left hanging by The Frog & a princess RT @cburell Sunday – a Story at Beyond School http://tinyurl.com/y9dewsx

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

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An example worth sharing to students of a kid who figured out the power of simple blogging — combined, of course, with quality thinking and writing — and blogged his way to stardom by age 27. In China.

From the excellent China Digital Times, with emphasis added:

Han Han was named as the ‘Person of the Year” in 2009 by two influential publications: Guangzhou-based newspaper Southern Weekend（南方周末) and Hong Kong-based magazine Asia Weekly (亚洲周刊). Here are some excerpts of the relevant articles in both publications, translated by CDT:

By Asia Weekly: Han Han: Youthful Citizen vs Power 亚洲周刊二零零九年度风云人物韩寒——青春公民VS权力.

Han Han is a 27-year-old author and race car driver, and his blog has generated nearly 300 million visits since 2006. He follows and is concerned with public rights defending events. On the Shanghai “Fishing” incident, Hangzhou “70 yards” incident, forced eviction incident and other events his clear and powerful writing has generated an enormous influence on public opinion. As a member of the post-80s generation, he lives authentically and freely, and demonstrates the energy of China’s youthful citizens and the hope of civil society in China.

韩寒，二十七岁的作家和赛车手，博客浏览量近三亿，他关注、跟进公共维权事件，在上海「钓鱼」事件、杭州「七十码」、强拆民居事件中，言论清醒、有力，产生巨大舆论影响力；作为「八零后」一代，他活得真实、自由，展示中国青春公民的能量和中国公民社会的希望。

From Southern Weekend: The Name of Han Han Means to Offend [the Establishment]

In the public eyes for ten years, he is now a household name, and still young, he is called by his supporters “Young Master Han.” This nickname is flattering and lighthearted, saying that he has style and quality, and is not a boring person. Young Master Han is an author, the only National Champion of in both field and rally car race, is an idol, and owns a blog which has the highest traffic in the world. He is so famous, that people often forget how extraordinary it is that one person has all these different titles. But Young Master Han became the Han Han that is now widely respected after he started a blog, and began writing social commentary which resonates with our time. His self-styled commentaries caused controversy, but were also widely popular. One day, even the most conservative people started to realize that this young man was not full of nonsense. Behind the 300 million clicks on his blog posts was a fresh humanist radiating the wave of freedom. [read the rest]

Regular readers will know I’ve become somewhat of an elitist when it comes to urging the young to blog, only wanting to “attract” those rare students who have the gifts but don’t seem to understand the tools we now have to manifest those gifts to the world — and this example is a case in point: Han can write well and think critically, “follows” (surely via RSS?) issues he “is concerned with” and writes about them. In other words, he’s got the gifts of curiosity, passion, a drive for socio-political engagement and reform, and an apparently wicked mind and pen. And a “humanist” to boot.¹

The most delicious detail in this young man’s delicious life? His secondary school held him back a year, and he dropped out of school without graduating.

Han Han was born on September 23, 1982. He won the first class award in the first “New Concept” writing contest in 1999, and was held back in his first year in the Songjian Number 2 High School in Shanghai the same year. He dropped out of high school in 2000, and published his first novel “Three Gates.” This book has sold 2,030,000 copies since then.

{…}

In 2008, he published a selected collection of his blog posts, “Random Texts.” In 2009, he published a novel, “His Nation,” a collection of essays, “Grass,” and a collection of blog posts, “Lovely Predators”…. Also in 2009, he announced he would publish a magazine “A Chorus of Solos.” [Han Han originally planned to name the magazine Renaissance, but the name was not approved by authorities.]

P.S.–To any students at my school: if you think you have this kind of talent, and want me to help you learn the simple blogging tools, come see me. I’ll work overtime with you, and it will have nothing to do with grades, homework, or GPA’s.

1. I’m teaching the Enlightenment right now in European history, alongside my Chinese history course, and Han for all the world sounds like a Chinese Voltaire to me. And good god, just think if Voltaire could have blogged.

2 Comments

• At January 13, 2010, Jenny wrote:

  The idea of Voltaire blogging has made my evening. Thanks!

  .-= Jenny´s last blog ..Confession =-.

• At January 13, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  I <3 people who read footnotes.

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Second draft:

On Two Ways of Reading: Slavery reads on its knees. Freedom reads on its feet.¹

So a high school teacher’s job: to teach students to find those feet?

I’m just looking for snappy first principles here. Ones within the 15-year-old attention span.

1. I know, I know — wannabee Nietszchean aphorist indulgence. But cut me some slack. Time is slow here on this beach.

4 Comments

• At January 26, 2010, Emile wrote:

  I have been enjoying the posts at Beyond School quite a bit, so I raise this concern with some trepidation. From my perspective (mostly Holt/Gatto inspired unschooling) I find this painfully ironic. School as an institution is invested in students "reading on their knees."

  Do you see it differently, or just feel that good teachers should subvert the system?

• At January 26, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  The latter. Institutions are made of individuals, and this individual, at least, thinks a critical understanding of history is a valuable service that schools, warts and all, can provide.

  Search "unschooling" or "deschooling" on this blog, and you'll see I'm sympathetic to it in general. But I also have concerns that it can deprive students of discovering interests they wouldn't arrive at without guidance. Not a simple position, I know.

  Thanks for popping in.

• At January 28, 2010, Emile wrote:

  Again, I want to emphasize that, all other things being equal, I would rather have engaged and thoughtful teachers in school than not. Such engaged teachers can make a real difference in the lives of their students, and I continue to comment with no disrespect intended. But...

  I don't think that "a critical understanding of history" is the same as "Slavery reads on its knees. Freedom reads on its feet. So a high school teacher’s job: to teach students to find those feet?"

  As I read you, the valuable change in perspective for a modern reader is in the critical approach to a text. We should not accept argument from authority; we should evaluate claims for ourselves in light of available evidence and take responsibility for our own beliefs. I agree with this whole heartedly.

  But then the natural question arises; what should I read? What should I do with my time? And suddenly we are right back to argument from authority. I don't know of any serious advocates of unschooling that believe it should be learning "without guidance." Holt devotes a large chunk of "Instead of Education" to teasing out the difference between "natural authority" (ie. people listen to you because you know what you're talking about and they want to hear what you have to say) and coercive authority (people listen to you because otherwise they will suffer consequences.)

  School as it is currently constituted cannot function without coercive authority. And more painfully, individual good teachers cannot escape wielding coercive authority when acting as its agent. At best they can focus on developing a parallel natural authority.

  Inasmuch as you are saying that the definition of a modern reader is that rejection of coercive authority I don't see how you can say that a high school teacher's *job* is to help their students reject coercive authority.

• At January 29, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Emile, in theory most of what you say (and what unschoolers and such advocate) is right up my alley. In practice, the several hundred kids in my high school aren't part of that world, and neither am I. So we do the best we can with the situation we're given.

  Sorry no time for more. Guess I need a more pragmatic grounds to justify it. Know what I mean? Feels like the world-changing talks we used to have in college: easy to talk, but next to impossible to execute.

  So: proposals?

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Nothing like seeing a friend from three decades ago, when you were a new and very green adult in the world, to stir up the mind.

John and I also talked a bit about Gilgamesh today. Me talking about Gilgamesh is nothing new. I do that with anybody and everybody who’ll listen. But talking about it to the guy who knew you way back when when you so naively embarked on a conscious search for “Truth” — especially when that same guy joined you, and with exactly the same naivete — that is something new.

It’s like our 20-year old selves were sitting on that beach with us two 47-year-olds all day.

False Starts in the Search for Truth

That 20-year-old me was such a lousy seeker for Truth. He read all the Old Books devotedly — the Greek, the Hebrew, the Vedic, the Christian, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Taoist, the Gnostic, the Transcendental, “Yak yak yak.” He read them all, underlined passages, filled margins with scribbles, exclamation points, interrobangs. He started (and rarely finished) journals devoted to only copying the choicest of those words of Wisdom — quotes only. The Things to Remember. These were the words of Wisdom and Truth, and they were going to teach him Truth and Wisdom, by god. If he read them real closely to be sure he understood, then he’d find Truth and Wisdom. And life would be better because he’d have those things.

All I could do today while thinking about him was laugh at him.

Because I think I know now that that’s exactly the wrong way to read the Old Books.

If I had read Gilgamesh back then, when I was him, I would have been expecting it to teach me too. Another Old Book that was supposed to be Wise. That’s not how I read it now, thank goodness.

How Moderns Read

Anyway, I sat there on that beach wishing I had my iPod so I could record  what I was trying to aphoristically sum up about what I know about reading now — and wish I’d known well before 20, at your age, my students. I didn’t want this little stab at something essential to slip away. It went something like this:

It’s not what we learn from the Old Books. It’s what we see in them.¹

That mental shift in relation to reading, I want to say, comes close to a definition of the modern reader. A traditional reader gives up his authority to the author. A modern reader takes that authority back. Copernicus did it to Aristotle and Ptolemy, for example — he doubted their scientific authority based on his own observations. Voltaire and Nietzsche did it to the religious authority of popes, preachers, and the Bible.

A modern reader, in a nutshell, doesn’t read on his knees.

The scary thing? It seems that a large number of Americans are not modern readers at all.

And the sad thing? They all went to American schools — which doesn’t speak well about American education.

1. And yes, this is probably true of all books. But moreso, I think, for pre-scientific books.

9 Comments

• At January 7, 2010, hjarche wrote:

  A modern reader doesn’t read on his knees http://is.gd/5Ph7J via @cburell | yes, that’s the big shift!

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At January 7, 2010, Micah Sittig wrote:

  "Modern"?

• At January 7, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Would you take, "since the Renaissance" (okay, and before Theodosius, maybe)?

• At January 7, 2010, “On Two Ways of Reading” (Maxim) at Beyond School wrote:

  [...] comments Print This Post Second draft: On Two Ways of Reading: Slavery reads on its knees. Freedom reads on its [...]

• At January 8, 2010, Hellen wrote:

  How do I teach that? Or how do I know if what I am doing is facilitating "taking the authority back" for my students? Is this something that can only happen for an experienced, mature reader?

  More ques than answers.

  .-= Hellen´s last blog ..THIS I BELIEVE =-.

• At January 8, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Hellen,

  That it doesn't seem to be a habit of most (?) adults says to me that getting them while they're young and raising them to at least have an inkling that "mature" reading exists is a good idea. That's why I'm playing with aphorisms to point, bumper-sticker style, to what may be a mystery for them now, but through repetition may stick in their memory so they don't forget such a skill exists after they leave me.

  That most adults don't read at all beyond fluff (in America, anyway) tells me likewise that it's a good idea. Maybe they don't read because they were never introduced to liberated reading. Maybe that introduction will turn some people onto the pleasures of reading and thinking that seem endangered practices in American culture.

  On a simpler level, encouraging or requiring them to criticize the people, ideas, and events in their history or liberal arts classes -- to pass judgment on these things -- may be a good start. Then they can graduate to justifying their judgments with reason and evidence.

  I like the phrase "habits of mind." This is an unrelated stab at the general concept.

• At January 14, 2010, Chuck wrote:

  Sage words indeed. If the reverse of the Socratic method is provoking students' doubts, far as "truth", more precisely, facts, students can question you through that mechanical appendage permanently attached to the tip of their finger tips in the form of iPhones. I don't mind that they look for facts or doubt me but surf the phone for the facts while I'm lecturing is down right annoying ;-) Not legitimately lamentable as your point perhaps. I see your point; they have the facts but not the truths or thinking outside the box critical skills.

  I have to veered off a little from yoru path, although it`s more for EAP ``English`` English-class than adult EFL. I have always like the book ``How to Read a Book (Touchstone book) by Adler, Mortimer J. and Charles Lincoln Van Doren`.

  I still make notes on margins... How would you do that with ebook readers such as Kindle or ``iTablet``? I am ambivalent about the these new devices for future readers. (Obviously I`m a Kinesthetic learner :) ...The prospect of traveling with thousands, (maybe long 100s) of books in one little 4x10 plastic encasing is very seductive. Cheap too! The average novel is just below $10.

  Great post as usual. Looking forward to the next.

• At January 14, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Chuck,

  First, I feel your pain about the ereader bit. I haven't tried them out yet, but some are starting to integrate social highlighting and annotating, where readers can share and see each other's responses to passages on the "page," which is an interesting development. Somebody on Twitter shared this link with me: http://www.thecopia.com/

  In 10 years things should be interesting, but right now it's all primitive. I've read arguments that cost levels after purchasing a certain number of books because ebooks are cheaper, but again, I don't know.

  Time to plan the day's lesson. Thanks for stopping by.

  I love How to Read a Book and use it too.

• At January 16, 2010, tonnet wrote:

  Modern reading: “It’s not what we learn from the Old Books. It’s what we see in them.” http://is.gd/6kyX0

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

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This is a picture of the Pattaya Beach I wasn't at that I didn't take. Who needs a camera when you know there's a picture on Flickr?

So I’m somewhere in Thailand called Pattaya that I wouldn’t choose to come to except that John, my best friend from my “professional college student/Bohemian vagabond years” from age 20 to 34, is here — I wrote about him and those years of our knuckleheaded intellectual awakening in the In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males post last year — and it’s the first time we’ve seen each other in 15 years, which is really cool. It was only a two-hour flight from Singapore to make this quick reunion. I’m pleasantly surprised we both made it this close to 50. And ditto that the conversations are as comfortable as if we just had coffee yesterday in 1994.

Anyway, this post isn’t about John. It’s about thoughts I had with him as we lounged on an empty stretch of beach away from the tourist-infested area.¹

John went the Ph.D. route and is now a philosophy and religious studies professor in the States. He’s a big Buddhism head, but he also teaches logic and critical thinking.

I watched a nice white cloud float across a nice azure sky, right up there above the palm fronds shot through with sunlight, and asked John with my own big teacher head, “So how do you teach critical thinking, anyway?”

The part of his answer that interested me most was: “The hardest part for me, and the most important part, is getting students to see in what they’re reading what the real issue is. Texts and writers often don’t make that clear.”

I said “hm” and watched more clouds, listened to the same surf’s voice here in Thailand that John and I heard under so many conversations in Los Angeles in the ’80s and Oregon in the ’90s. And I listened to some thoughts that I wish an interior monologue recorder would have recorded so I could play them to my history students (doesn’t it suck that our students get to hear so few of our many — for me practically constant – random thoughts about what we want them to learn, see, understand? That they can’t join us in interior dialogues?).

So I’m going to try to pull those thoughts back up. They’re pretty simple, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to teach. It goes something like this:

You’re Learning Everything About European History Except What’s Important

I’ve tried to give you what we’ve called “the Big Picture” of how our species left Africa, populated Europe and Mesopotamia, started farming, made civilizations, spread those civilizations, got more complex, created institutions of politics and religions and economics and social organization and, as the Thais say, “Yak yak yak.” We’ve toured this pretty coherently, I think, in the first semester, all the way up to the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. I’ve tried to give you that coherent “Big Picture” framework because I never got it when I was in high school, and it took me way too long — into my 30s — to have it. That meant whenever I read or heard about a book or event or person from the past during the first decade-plus of my adulthood, I couldn’t “place it on the map,” give it a mental context — “Oh, that’s when the Reformation and the Age of Exploration and the Renaissance were going on all at once, so everybody was so confused with all the new knowledge when that happened” sort of thing.

Everything that happened before my life began, in other words, was something like an “historical orphan.” It had no relations with the other things going on around it when it was alive.

So I’ve tried really hard for the first half of our year together to make that story coherent, to make you see that A couldn’t have happened before B because B partly caused A, on and on. (I wrote about that a while back in Why History Isn’t Learned, and How Story Helps Change That.) I’ve tried really hard to give you that framework so you’re not the idiot I was for so many of my first college years.

And congratulations: Most of you, judging from your semester exam essays, seem to have got that hiStory in your heads.

But here’s the problem that I saw when reading those essays:

You Think “Western Civ” is About Learning “Western Civ.” It’s Not.

As John put it, you’ve read the text and understood it, but you don’t understand the issue.

And the issue, to put it in a nutshell, is this: Knowing all this stuff is worthless, if all you’ve done is learn it. You seem to think that we’re teaching you Western Civilization because gee, it’s a great civilization.

It’s not. Like all civilizations, it has its strengths and it has its flaws. Just because it’s part of the dominant culture today doesn’t make it good. Maybe the dominant culture today would be much better if certain aspects of Western Civilization were different — or even non-existent.

Most of your essays saddened me because they were so full of cheer-leading for the West. Civilizations, Western or Eastern, Northern or Southern, don’t need cheerleaders. They need critics.

So in the second semester, let’s up the game. You’re going to continue learning that Big Picture. But I hope you’re also going to start forming your opinions about it, embracing parts of it, rejecting others, arguing some parts are broken and need fixing, and proposing how, if you were in the position of power to fix it, you would go about doing that.

Because many of you, when I’m losing my last teeth and blogging through bifocals decades from now, may very well be in those positions of power. And I hope you’re exercising that power not with pom-poms, but with sharp-eyed solutions to the problems you’ll inherit.

Otherwise this future old man is screwed.

Jeez, That was Heavy

So I’m going to go get a massage now. That’s one of the beautiful things about Thai civilization. They understand that a trip to the massage parlor is just as important as a trip to the shopping mall. The West could learn from that.

Image by piwaen

1. Thailand travel tip: rent a scooter your first day, then take it 30 minutes minimum from where all the tourists are to find an out of the way place where you can have some peace, quiet, and authenticity.

6 Comments

• At January 6, 2010, William wrote:

  Being drilled to memorize facts don't exactly make you the smartest connector. It only let you win contests like "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader". We, SAS students, were never taught on how to think, lest critique, about society. We only learned how to comment and praise society's achievements. It was by luck I stumbled upon the Colbert Report and the Daily Show that I realized Huck Finn was right all along.

  Sigh, sivilized society. I wish there was a Being Aware 101 for us.

  .-= William´s last blog ..JudeMaverick: Checking e-mail for updates on my Nigerian prince. Says he needs another thousand US dollars to get a Ferrari to escape. =-.

• At January 7, 2010, Deb Culbertson wrote:

  When I was growing up, we lived as ex-pats in Vietnam. We vacationed in Pattaya Beach, Thailand. Seeing your picture of the beach sets the yearning for more travel in place. As a child, now I'm on the verge of turning 53, the memories of horseback riding on the beach and the Thai ceremonial dancing set my heart racing again! I wanted to thank you for being a blogger and sharing your experiences! Deb

• At January 7, 2010, How Modern People Read at Beyond School wrote:

  [...] comments Print This Post Nothing like seeing a friend from three decades ago, when you were a new and very green adult in the world, to stir up the [...]

• At January 7, 2010, Borderland › Critical Readings wrote:

  [...] of teaching history, noting that his students understood the text without understanding the issues. He says: And the issue, to put it in a nutshell, is this: Knowing all this stuff is worthless, if all [...]

• At January 8, 2010, akamrt wrote:

  Knowing all this stuff is worthless, if all u’ve done is learn it. http://is.gd/5UDBm (via @cburell) < Great piece! #rethinkschool

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At January 8, 2010, akamrt wrote:

  Knowing all this stuff is worthless, if all u’ve done is learn it. http://is.gd/5UDBm (via @cburell) < Great piece! #rethinkschool

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

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