Beyond School » language arts

Mark Twain’s Posthumous Bombshells

Clay Burell — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 08:54:30 +0000

Why is Mark Twain’s autobiography only coming out now, 100 years after his death? Because he stipulated so before dying.

What he expresses in these screenshots from a PBS Newshour clip of the manuscript suggests why he might have wanted these thoughts to stay silent for a century. And they’re strangely resonant in our own day.

Exhibit One: Twain as the Fifth Horseman

This reads like something straight out of Dawkins, Dennet, Harris, or Hitchens:

Transcribed:

There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is — in our country, particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree — it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime — the invention of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor his Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt.

Exhibit Two: Twain Against the Neocons

This snippet, if you look at the top, picks up after quoting Pres. Theodore Roosevelt’s apparent statement concerning a US Army massacre of Philippinos during or after the Spanish-American War.

Transcribed:

[TR's] whole utterance is merely a convention. Not a word of what he said came out of his heart. He knew perfectly well that to pen six hundred helpless and weaponless savages in a hole like rats in a trap and massacre them in detail during a stretch of a day and a half, from a safe position on the heights above, was no brilliant feat of arms — and would not have been a brilliant feat of arms even if Christian America, represented by its salaried soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles and the Golden Rule instead of bullets….

Who wants to place bets that teaching Twain in American high schools is going to become an even dicier idea once this book filters out into the mainstream?

And who else notes that Twain’s objections both to American religion and American politics are based on simple morality — that standard so important to so many free-thinking heretics?

5 Comments

At July 11, 2010, Laura Gibbs wrote:
Twain's weird story The Mysterious Stranger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Stranger) gave many clues as to these thoughts... I was surprised and amazed when I stumbled across Mysterious Stranger some years ago completely by accident, and it definitely made me appreciate Twain even more. Excerpt:
Satan laughed his unkind laugh to a finish; then he said: "It is a remarkable progress. In five or six thousand years five or six high civilizations have risen, flourished, commanded the wonder of the world, then faded out and disappeared; and not one of them except the latest ever invented any sweeping and adequate way to kill people. They all did their best - to kill being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the earliest incident in its history - but only the Christian civilization has scored a triumph to be proud of. Two or three centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians; then the pagan world will go to school to the Christian - not to acquire his religion, but his guns. The Turk and the Chinaman will buy those to kill missionaries and converts with."
At July 12, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:
Wow, Laura, nice find.

Interesting that he wrote this from 1890 to 1910. That perfectly bookends the Boxer Rebellion in China, during which Chinese locals got fed up with missionaries and their Chinese converts ("rice Christians") and went on, as your Twain quote pegs it, "to kill missionaries and converts."

Unfortunately for them, they didn't have the cash to buy the Western guns, and believed their own superstitious magic would protect them from the Western armies (always ready to back up beleaguered missionaries via the infamous "Gunboat Diplomacy"). It didn't. Instead, the West used it as a pretext to invade Beijing, storm and loot the Forbidden City and Imperial Library of much of their treasure, and finally to force more concessions to Western imperialist nations than they'd already forced after the Opium Wars of the 1840s and '60s.

It amazes me that Westerners know so little of their crimes against China a short century ago. China certainly hasn't forgotten it.
At July 13, 2010, Laura Gibbs wrote:
So true about Chinese history! One of the things that really struck me about the Robert McNamara documentary Fog of War was the his admission that during the Vietnam War he knew nothing at all of Vietnamese history and only later, as he learned about it, did he gain some insight into the dynamics that he was oblivious to during the war itself!
About Mysterious Stranger: I was listening to a bunch of public domain audiobook stuff five or six years ago and stumbled across this book. It had me completely mesmerized. I could definitely see myself teaching a course on folklore and literature about the devil - what a device he is for intense thought experiments! This book would definitely be on the reading list for such a class...
At July 14, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:
@Laura, Fog of War is a great film, and so are so many other documentaries by that filmmaker (whose name senescence hides from me at the moment).

McNamara's a great example of an expert who knew next to nothing about Asia. If he'd looked into Vietnamese or Chinese history, he'd have quickly found that China tried to conquer Vietnam -- as a neighboring state with far larger forces -- for 2,000 years, and never could. The Vietnamese never say "quit."

The Twain story is on my reading list.
At July 16, 2010, Harold Jarche » From Mark Twain to the Future wrote:
[...] Mark Twain’s Posthumous Bombshells by @cburell Why is Mark Twain’s autobiography only coming out now, 100 years after his death? Because he stipulated so before dying. [...]

What China Can Teach Writing Teachers

Clay Burell — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 14:00:46 +0000

[A fun little conversation I'm having with Laura in this comment thread includes her question about differences between Chinese literary types and Western ones. It reminded me of this post I wrote last year on Change.org, and planned to cross-post here eventually anyway. I hope you agree that its quotes are lovely things.]

~ ~ ~

I just read a passage so striking I have to share it. It’s from Lin Yutang‘s 1936 book on China called My Country and My People, and is quoted in Richard E. Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why (another keeper):

In Chinese literary criticism there are different methods of writing called “the method of watching a fire across the river” (detachment of style), “the method of dragonflies skimming across the water surface” (lightness of touch), “the method of painting a dragon and dotting its eyes” (bringing out the salient points). (p. 18)

Nisbett’s whole point in this book of “cultural psychology” is to show that modes of thought differ from culture to culture, that Enlightenment universalism is belied by the evidence, etc, etc. The point of the passage itself is to illustrate how unlike our abstract and essentialist Greek way of thinking is the Chinese, which resists hard categories and prefers, as Nisbett puts it, “expressive, metaphoric language.”

I’m going to follow the dragonfly method and leave it to you to watch the ripples of that quote, or not. Just two quick impressions before I go:

First, it somehow ties to the notion of Core Knowledge, and underscores to me the need for that “Core” to be wordly, and not ethnocentric, in order to avoid a sort of in-bred genetic shallowness. We can learn much by trying to see through Chinese eyes, for example, and see our own cultural “core” differently, and surely often benefit from that. (Hell, the Greeks learned from traveling to Egypt, Crete, Asia Minor and the Levant, and North Africa anyway. Their knowledge came less from the core than that far-flung periphery, and it’s the synthesis they performed with it all that was the thing.)

Second, as a writing teacher, I cannot wait to share the above with students. Our Western language for teaching writing does seem, as Nisbett claims, abstract and categorical and, when you think about it from the Chinese angle, mind-numbingly dull: “expository,” “persuasive,” “argumentative,” “analytical,” and so forth are not words to inflame a young mind. But “watching the fire from across the river”? “Skimming the water like a dragonfly”? “Dotting the dragon’s eyes”? Oh, yes.

(Third: point two illustrates point one.)

Image by I’mBatman

Originally posted 4/12/09 on Change.org’s Education blog.

12 Comments

At July 3, 2010, Sui Fai John Mak wrote:
Thanks Clay for this very interesting post. We learn those metaphors when young, in fact in Grade 6 (around 12 years old).
May I clarify a bit on the “watching the fire from across the river”? “Skimming the water like a dragonfly”? “Dotting the dragon’s eyes”?
1. Watching the fire from across the river means to be detached from the problem, and be an observer. There are subtle meaning here, but when used in in real life setting, it means that you need to ensure your safety, and so don't get yourself into trouble, in case of conflict.
2. Skimming the water like a dragonfly refers to light touch on a subject, and has a philosophical tone - especially when giving a speech, where one wants to briefly mention about a topic, but not in depth. Another use would be its application in dancing, where one is dancing with such lightness who seems to float.
3. Dotting the dragon’s eyes - This relates to an old Chinese story. It was about an artist who drew a dragon, but then when the eyes were dotted, the dragon actually flied away. In the dragon dance, the dragon won't have her life unless the eyes are dotted, which is also part of the ceremony at the start of dragon dance. I think people might have then interpreted such dotted of the eyes as the symbolic meaning of drawing out of salient points in an artifact.
There have been lots of "interpretations" of those metaphors, analogies in Chinese stories, and sometimes, due to the translation from ancient Chinese colloqualism to English, the meaning might have been shifted, exaggerated, or used with a new context.
There are many versions of these translations, and I don't think there are universal versions which could provide unique explanation. The Lin Yutang Wikipedia entry is reliable.
As I learnt these at a young age, so it was based on my memory and interpretation.
Cheers.
John
At July 3, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:
Wonderful comment, John. If I can persuade you to write about where you were when you learned these as a child, and go more deeply into it, skimming-like, in a memoir piece on your blog, and then to drop a link here so I and others can read it, I'll be a happy man.
I just bought Lin's book, so I'll be looking into it soon enough.
Thanks for dropping in,
Clay
At July 3, 2010, Laura Gibbs wrote:
Oh oh oh, you are ringing my bells here... this is exactly the kind of thing I was trying to get at with the ability to let the metaphorical expression of a proverb and its analytical interpretation sit side by side in your mind, not just decoding the form in order to extract the abstract interpretation (and banish the image), but letting them both stand in your mind together and resonate - not forcing the firefly skimming the water to be "only" a firefly but at the same time not losing the firefly even as you let it lead your mind somewhere beyond to other ideas.
I think you are spot on to identify the Greeks as a crucial turning point in the abstracting and essentializing of things. The word "idea" itself is a great example: Greek eidos and the related word eidolon (whence "idol") were originally words from the realm of the visual, from the seeing of things ("idea" is related linguistically to the "video" we borrowed from Latin). But as the philosophical tradition worked its powers of abstraction and essentializing on the "ideas" they lost their sense of vision and became invisible. Poof: they're gone! Abstracted from the world into the uncertain terrain of our minds.
Have you read The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image by Leonard Shlain…? Fabulous stuff, I think - very provocative and useful whether you agree or disagree with the directions he goes with that. I learned recently that Shlain has died (http://leonardshlain.com/blog/?p=101)… very sad! I think he still must have had a lot of good books in him that he did not have time to leave behind for us to enjoy and learn from!
At July 4, 2010, Joan Vinall-Cox wrote:
Fascinating. I was lucky enough to write an Arts-Based Narrative Inquiry thesis and, although I like theory, that approach allowed me to be metaphorical, poetical, and visual, which was the only way I could truly dot (my) dragon's eye. I guess that's why I thoroughly enjoyed writing it.
At July 4, 2010, Sui Fai John Mak wrote:
Thanks Clay for your response. I was educated in Hong Kong and learned these in La Salle Primary School. I could elaborate these in my blog at a later stage, if you wish to know more about Chinese philosophy and how it is applied in our life.
I liked writings very much and you could find some of my writings here http://suifaijohnmak.wordpress.com and Ning Community Network http://connectivismeducationlearning.ning.com plus my postings on Facebook.
I like to write about different topics in my blog, and some of my posts relate to Chinese philosophy in education and learning.
If you are interested in Chinese philosophies, then may I suggest you check these topics out? I Ching, Tao Te Ching, and the Sun Tze 36 military strategies. There are plenty of artifacts on these on wikipedia, Google, Google scholar links, etc. I could also refer you to the officical website from Chinese education authorities if that is of intersts to you. Let me know if you would like to have them.
You could forward me with an email or via your blog post or mine for further connections. You could check out my other details on Facebook and Twitter too (under suifaijohnmak)
There are huge potentials in the use of Chinese metaphors - Yin/Yang that is part of Tao Te Ching in understanding nature (see the metaphors on my blogs - with tags of metaphors), in writings, or in education and learning.
Please note that I am a Catholic and so my belief stems strongly with a Christian belief. However, you may find many Chinese teachings and philosophies align with the teachings of Christ - in passion, in love, in personal integrity (trustworthiness, honesty), and altruism etc.
Finally, I have read a few of posts before and found them very intersting and inspiring.
John
At July 4, 2010, Sui Fai John Mak wrote:
Here is my combined response post with some links to site http://suifaijohnmak.wordpress.com/2010/07/04/a-response-to-what-china-can-teach-writing-teachers/
Cheers.
John
At July 4, 2010, Lewis wrote:
As an American writing teacher in China I can and cannot agree with the title of this post. My college students in Beijing must learn academic writing .While these academic styles may not be "words to inflame a young mind" it is a necessary style to learn for academic writing. For other writing styles such as creative writing or personal narratives, or novel writing , or children's books, etc, the above post title can fit and I will agree with the premise.
At July 4, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:
Hi again and thanks for the reply, JSF.
I'm pretty good on Chinese philosophy and history - I taught it in Shanghai, where I lived for six years, and I'm teaching it here in Singapore. I'm currently in the middle of quite a few books -- Oxford History of Ancient China (1180 pages!), Brooks and Brooks' Original Analects, Fung Yu-Lan's History of Chinese Philosophy, plus the Book of Documents, Book of Songs, Zuo Chronicles, and Sima Qian's works; and I hope to read the Three Kingdoms, Monkey, Plum in the Golden Vase, and Dream of the Red Chamber and other literary classics before the end of the year -- to dig deeper.
And while I'm not an adherent of any institutional religion -- I'm an ex-Christian who still has much respect for the teachings of Jesus, but few for the dogmas that Rome and the Protestant Church (not much different in terms of the basic creed) attached to his story -- I do find Zhuangzi and Confucius combined about as rich and credible as any ethical-metaphysical system has been on this planet.
So I guess we balance each other ;-)
Anyway, the broad strokes, and many of the finer ones, in Chinese history and culture I get. But the little peeks at such things as its rhetorical tradition and approaches that Lin points to above? These don't find their way into most historical writings. Thus the delight at bumbling across them in a book and wanting to know more.
All for now and take care.
At July 4, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:
Um, Lewis, I can't find any assertion in the post that college students shouldn't learn academic writing.
But the second half of your comment gets closer to what I did mean to imply.
Thanks for dropping in,
Clay
At July 4, 2010, Sui Fai John Mak wrote:
Thanks Clay for sharing your background experience. I greatly appreciate your intersts in the literary classis. When I was in my high school, we were free to study to Three Kingdoms, Monkey, and Dream of the Red Chamber. However, in our lessons, there were only selected chapters from these three classics, and since they were written in colloquialism, we needed more elaboration from other literature review and teacher's guidance to understand the genre, syntax, semiotics and pragmatics of such colloquialism. There were other rich themes in ancient poets (the 5 and 7 "narrative" poets).
Relating the Chinese literature, it was divided into the ancient and modern ones, which are based on the modern prose, which is more pragmatic and comprehensible. Nowadays, most communication in Chinese are based on plain simple Chinese syntax, that was all originated from the "evolution" of modernisation of Chinese language.
I think you could trace back lots of traditional metaphors, though the modern interpretation might be a bit difficult to comprehend, as one must consider the historical context, and why those metaphors were used.
Relating to religious belief, thanks for the great sharing. I respect your belief, and so I am delighted to see its significance in one's writings too.
Take care and best wishes from John
At July 28, 2010, Cristy wrote:
An interesting post. The native americans in our area describe their language as representative of their religion. I think that is often the case in other cultures. Ours represents the “expository,” “persuasive,” “argumentative,” “analytical,” because of our Judaeo/
christian heritage. Cristy
At July 30, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:
Hi Cristy,
Sorry to be so late on this, but I'd say those categories are far more Greek than Hebrew. Know what I mean?

“The New York Times is Always Right”: A Media Literacy Lesson

Clay Burell — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 09:39:39 +0000

Readers of George Orwell’s Animal Farm should remember Squealer, the pig whose “journalism” manipulated the entire animal society into unquestioningly supporting the dictatorial pig Napoleon.

When a democracy is tottering, should its schools care?

If they studied Animal Farm in the classroom, the depressing odds are they learned it as a good, all-American attack on socialism. The most simple-minded of our teachers make a travesty of the novel’s allegory along these breathless lines:

Napoleon, children, equals Stalin and Karl Marx all rolled up in one. And Squealer equals their propaganda machine, the communist newspaper Pravda. Write ‘Pravda’ in your notes, children, because you have to know it for the test. It’s very important. It’s an example of journalism in communism, and how it prints government lies instead of the truth that we get in newspapers in free democracies.”

Of course, Animal Farm was more than that. Orwell was a socialist, after all — but he was also a thinker. So he could condemn what Stalin had done in the Soviet Union as a perversion of the socialist vision, while at the same time condemning the capitalism of the United States and Western Europe with equal scorn.

That second part tends to get left out, I suspect, in discussions of capitalism and communism in most Western classrooms, whether English classes teaching Animal Farm or history classes teaching the 19th and 20th centuries. Instead, capitalism is trotted out in the white hat of “freedom and democracy,” and communism in the black hat of “tyranny and totalitarianism.”

Teachers and textbooks who frame the issue this way strangle the baby of inquiry in the cradle, and slip in its place a plump little bundle of propaganda to comfort the kids and teachers by cooing that they’re on the right side of history, and the enemy was on the wrong. But “Capitalism versus Communism” and “Democracy versus Dictatorship” aren’t simple “Good versus Bad,” “Right versus Wrong” stories. Both sides, the communist and the capitalist, have their strengths and weaknesses, their angels and demons, their moments of heroism and of villainy. Both sides.

So you don’t have to be a communist to criticize capitalism, or a capitalist to criticize communism. Thinkers in both camps criticize not just the other system, but their own. (Politicians do this routinely when they craft legislation.) Any classrooms learning about these two systems should front-load their explorations with that truth — assuming, at any rate, that we want to produce thinking citizens in our classrooms instead of bleating farm animals. It sometimes seems we don’t want to.

Breaking News: War is Peace. Torture is Justice.

From the indispensable Plum Line blog’s Greg Sargent at the Washington Post:

Harvard’s school of government has released a study of how major media discusses waterboarding that really seems like it was done for Glenn Greenwald.

Click on “released a study” above and you’ll get the full report in PDF. The Greenwald link is a rich resource for the classroom too.

And they’re “rich” because they call into question America’s mainstream media — the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and all the rest of the “free” press — and the bald similarities of Squealer and Pravda to the editors of those trusted institutions and their newspapers. (Torches down, dear nationalists: you should agree we have to read newspapers on two feet, like free-thinking humans, and not four, like all the sheep in Orwell and too many sheeple in America. Remember the good old days when an “informed citizenry” was a national ideal in America, before it was replaced with “a productive consumer” — a patriotic shopper?)

Need a teaser? From the study’s abstract:

The current debate over waterboarding has spawned hundreds of newspaper articles in the last two years alone. However, waterboarding has been the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture. In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.

This type of study is not new, I know. But this particular one recommends itself for use in the classroom for several reasons: it’s current. It’s clear. It’s free. It’s from Harvard. Oh, and it’s about the survival of the rule of law and human rights in the United States. Almost forgot that one.

Or we could just give the lambs a handout about Pravda and follow it with a quiz.

Update: The New York Times responds to the study, finds its inner Squealer. Life imitates (Orwellian) art.

Update 2: Joan McCarter at Daily Kos puts the Times‘ explanation for its Squealerism in the larger context in a must-read post. A snippet:

A Times spokesman gave Michael Calderone this incredible justification

“As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture,” a Times spokesman said in a statement.

“When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves. Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture.”

So a rose is a rose until someone calls it a dandelion, for the purposes of a political point. The Gray Lady only prints what’s fit not to “take sides” over in a political dispute, creating, as Calderone puts it, “a factual contradiction between its newer work and its own archives.” And a factual contradiction between reality and Bush administration spin.

This is a very telling quote, because it shows just how easy it is to manipulate newspapers into exactly what they’re being constantly manipulated into–taking political sides by appearing not to take political sides. All you have to do to dispute a known physical or legal fact is to… dispute it. If you want to say that oil helps pelicans grow, you can just say it; the mere act of saying it will make it “disputed,” rendering the New York Times powerless to say flatly whether it is true or not. If it’s policy to not call a lie a lie in the name of “balance,” then the most basic function of that newspaper goes out the window. (read the rest)

Images:
(top) “All Animals are Equal” (detail) by Night Owl City
(middle) Animal Farm cover by Ben Templesmith
(bottom) USA Today truck by william couch

9 Comments

At July 1, 2010, Ric Murry wrote:
Clay,

It is good to have you back writing these kinds of posts. I mean no offense by that statement, but you (like many of us), took a needed break from the kind of writing you do best. This is it.

Jeez, what I wrote sounds terrible, but I hope our years of communicating and "debating" make it clear what I mean. There is a needed context for your other readers. So let me conclude by saying...THIS IS A GREAT POST, filled with thought-provoking, academically challenging, and multi-disciplinary information. That's what I like, and it is what you provide as well as any educator on the Internet.
At July 1, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:
Hi Ric,
Your comment didn't offend me. It made me giggle.
Because you're right about the "break," though the rest is up to question.
Anyway, it finally feels good to write again, and encouraging to get good feedback.
(And I'll probably always only write what I want to write, in the end, and leave it up to readers to filter. I miss the Unsucky Lectures most of all, but these little brainfarts like the one above keep nudging down the queue of things to finish.)
At July 1, 2010, Ric Murry wrote:
I always like the Unsucky Lectures too.
If this is a "brainfart" may you head be filled gas in the years to come.
Peace, my friend.
At July 1, 2010, laura gibbs wrote:
Thanks for sharing this piece! Made me think of this great piece here on euphemisms used by journalists and politicans, with some material in particular re: waterboarding and the term "abuse" v. "torture".
Euphemism and American Violence
April 3, 2008 - New York Review of Books
by David Bromwich
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/apr/03/euphemism-and-american-violence/
(if that URL is too long, here's a tiny one: http://tinyurl.com/24mzr4v)
Language. Very dangerous when it becomes the reality for us and we have nothing to compare it against...
At July 1, 2010, Stephen Downes wrote:
Anyone questioning Orwell's politics should read his diaries. They are being released one day at a time on the Orwell prize (where it is now July 1, 1940). http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/
Fantastic reading and great insight. I've been following since 2008 (1938) - which until a couple weeks ago was not so exciting as it sounds, his main passions being his farm and the infamous egg count. The the outbreak of the war, it has been gripping reading (and makes the two years of pre-reading well worth while).
At July 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:
That "when we have nothing to compare it against" is an intriguing touch. I've been fortunate to stumble across the world against all odds -- working class boy -- and the realities I've discovered versus the ideas I had of them when an ocean-locked American still stagger me today. Those oceans make good walls, but the keep Americans in at the same time they keep attackers out.
China's "godless Communists," to quote the Reagan mantra, are my favorite case in point. All in all, among the most wholesome "family values" types I've ever known, and the safest cities.
Thanks for the link, Laura.
At July 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:
Maybe it was you who initially tipped me off to the Orwell Diaries site, and I subscribed to it at least a year ago. But those mundane entries cluttering my feed made me grumpy, so I unsubscribed. At what date do they get interesting?
(If you haven't read his essay, "Shooting an Elephant," about his days as a colonial grunt in India, fly, don't run, to Google for a great read.)
Signed, C Burell (with one "r") ;-)
At July 2, 2010, Stephen Downes wrote:
> At what date do they get interesting?
It's just been since the last couple of weeks.
At July 2, 2010, Marie wrote:
I think my favorite thing I hear in high school, though it is not entirely related to this post, is when people conflate fascism and communism. I so often hear that "Hitler was a communist". Ironically, this ordinarily comes from people teetering the lines of fascism in my small, red-neck town.
I love your posts, by the way, and I wish my classes were as wonderful as yours appear to be. You sound like an excellent teacher who I would love to have.

William Burroughs’ “Thanksgiving Prayer”

Clay Burell — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 07:49:26 +0000

Lots of film-making skills to learn from — ironic soundtrack, archival footage editing, lighting and superimposition, on and on — in this staggering video. Oh, and the writing’s not shabby either: William Burroughs’ “A Thanksgiving Prayer”:

.(h/t Hullaballoo)

Education as “Aversion Therapy”: Watchmen Author Alan Moore

Clay Burell — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 07:06:46 +0000

Alan Moore, author of The Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and so many other comic book masterworks, has this to say about education:

All too often education actually acts as a form of aversion therapy, that what we’re really teaching our children is to associate learning with work and to associate work with drudgery so that the remainder of their lives they will possibly never go near a book because they associate books with learning, learning with work and work with drudgery. [A]fter a hard day’s toil, instead of relaxing with a book they’ll be much more likely to sit down in front of an undemanding soap opera because this is obviously teaching them nothing, so it is not learning, so it is not work, it is not drudgery, so it must be pleasure. And I think that that is the kind of circuitry that we tend to have imprinted on us because of the education process.

Bingo. Such a tidy summary of the Business Roundtable vision of education as preparing workers for the workforce.

Moore has more to say about how, for him, the counterculture and independent reading were his education. He was apparently expelled from secondary school for experimenting with mind-altering drugs other than alcohol, television, and consumerism, and never went to college either.

He seems to be doing okay despite that.

(I taught V for Vendetta in a literature class a couple years ago. It was a great counter-piece to Animal Farm, except this time dark regime was on the far right. So many connections to current events in the Bush-Cheney-Rove era, you’d have never guessed it was written in reaction to Thatcher’s England.)

Switching gears, check out this fantastic Moore video. From its YouTube page,

A comic strip film noir featuring hardboiled gangsters, double crosses and dead blondes. Written and animated by Alan Moore and Lloyd Thatcher. Music by The Sinister Ducks. Edited by Vile Balloon on a overcast Saturday as the rain pounded on the ground like a meaty fist into a face.

(Hat-tip to One Good Move for the video.) Reminds me of Tom Waits (the son of two school-teachers, I just learned by clicking on the link. Follow it for both a Wikipedia entry and a whacked video of his song, “God’s Away on Business”. I love Apture plugins!).

Article, without video, cross-posted from Education.Change.org
Photo by acb

A Real-World Mini-Lesson in Critical Reading and Writing

Clay Burell — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 20:20:29 +0000

I’m always looking for models of real readings to share with students. The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein gives us a good one with his reading of a recent opinion piece by conservative NYTimes columnist David Brooks.

At issue is Brooks’ argument that deficit spending during periods of debt crisis makes consumers insecure, and thus deficit spending at such times is bad.

After quoting a paragraph from Brooks, Klein gives students a textbook case of two essential acts of critical reading-and-thinking:

First, he concedes that Brooks’ argument is not entirely wrong by following his quote from Brooks with a paragraph beginning with a simple “That’s true, in a sense,” and moving on to explain why. Concessions are important when reading. They signal the application of a maxim I read somewhere long ago stating, “Before you can say, ‘I disagree,’ you must first be able to say, ‘I understand’.” Students often try to avoid granting that views opposing their own have any merit, because they don’t want to “lose” their argument by “giving points away.” It’s a widespread and understandable move on their part, but also a dishonest and mentally feeble one, so Klein’s move here, though common and pretty unremarkable to adult readers, is one teachers should show to those developing readers called teenagers.

Klein’s second move takes place in his next paragraph, and is less common and more remarkable even for adults: he “reads” what is absent in Brooks’ argument. A nicely written transition sentence from his prior concession — “That said, . . . ” — pivots smoothly to his criticism of what Brooks does not say:

“. . . Brooks walks by some of the difficult tradeoffs here without even stopping to look.”

Klein’s argument about deficit spending, by the way, is worth thinking about in the midst of all the media noise (normally in sound-bites too brief for argument and thought) about government spending not just in the US, but in Europe and increasingly around the “austerity-obsessed” world. For writing teachers, it also happens to be a nice model of compare/contrast organization and sentence construction (note the parallelism from sentence to sentence, and how clear it makes the argument):

Small businesspeople might be unnerved by deficits, but they‘re also unnerved by GDP contraction. A small coffee shop might not like government spending in the abstract, but they really don’t like closing because there are no more construction workers around to buy coffee, and so they may quite like the effect of deficit-financed tax credits for home buyers. Consumers might not like the idea of deficits, but nor do they like hearing that their kid is in a class that’s twice as large this year, or that the construction on the road they take to work is going to simply stop for a while while the local government waits out the recession.

Added bonus: after this paragraph, he performs a good move on the levels of both reading and writing:

The question, in other words, is not whether anyone likes deficits. it’s whether they like what would happen in the absence of countercyclical deficit spending even less.

–on the level of reading, Klein rejects the way Brooks’ text frames the entire issue, and suggests a more correct frame. On the level of writing, he uses this same sentence as pretty much his “thesis sentence,” delayed far into his piece and delivered after the arguments, not before it.

Probably more than most people cared to read, but again, little pieces like this can do worlds for talking about reading, writing, and thinking. In this case, the simple fact that Klein’s piece is a current events blog post gives students a window onto the reality that real writers don’t — as our textbooks so often imply — have to spend weeks revising drafts before the work is good enough, but on the contrary can bang out several not just publishable, but considerably polished, pieces in a single day’s news cycle. Add to that the immediacy of the post, and thus the real-world relevance, and you’ve got another advantage to using authentic stuff like this instead of the stuff from textbooks published in, say, the Clinton era.

On Inspiration Gaps and Ecstatic Bridges

Clay Burell — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:00:44 +0000

The Inspiration Gap: it’s 0ne of the weirdest things about teaching teens. This Gap yawns between the adult who knows this stuff — history, literature, science, whatever — is endlessly wondrous, and the majority of students who haven’t figured that out yet and, worse still, in so many cases are so educationally poisoned they refuse to entertain the possibility that the teacher might also be, you know, a real person. Someone who sincerely wants them to catch a lifelong contact buzz about the subject matter they’re being forced to learn during their one-year incarceration with him. It’s kept the teacher naturally high for decades, after all, so he knows he’s not peddling fake goods.

This teacher has dealt with that sad weirdness in varying ways over the years:

1. The Way of the Repressed Cynic:

Resigned to the hopelessness that anyone will see the beauty beyond the schooliness, the teacher withdraws into schooliness himself, refuses to cast his pearls before the piglets, and chooses instead the more dignified but soul-cheating route of schoolifying the magic rather than cheapen it (“They won’t appreciate this poem/historical interpretation/flight of fancy/whatever, so I’ll just have them do school stuff with it–a quiz here, a journal entry there–though I’m bursting to do more.”)

2. The Way of the Desperate Salesman:

A more optimistic approach, but a tragic one too: The teacher begs and pleads for the students to buy into the magic for their own good, and often loses more dignity in the attempt, after the pitch is met with dull stares from so many eyes, than Willy Loman on his most humiliating cold call. (“Please love this, please discover there’s beauty or wonder or gold in some form here that will make you richer for the rest of your life if you’ll just open the door and let me in so I can show you!”)

But this year, depending on the class, I’ve somehow discovered a new Way:

.
3. The Way of the Detached Ecstatic:

This approach overcomes the Cynic’s shyness and the Salesman’s groveling attachment to clinching the sale by simply not caring about audience reception, and not caring about the exposure of the teacher’s Inner Fool to possible ridicule by Those Not Ready. Instead, the teacher simply partners with the subject matter at hand and launches into whatever ecstatic dance suggests itself, Dervish-style. While it doesn’t have to be caffeinated, I find this helps. Nor, though I seem to be suggesting it (and it’s certainly an attractive and usually reliable choice), does the dance necessarily have to be manic. Seasoned ecstatics know that ecstasy, like Lester Young‘s saxophone solos, can blow cool as well as hot.

I’ll give an example of each, one hot and one cool, in Parts 2 and 3 — because I’ve been bursting to share these stories since April.

Update: Here’s Part 2.

Image Credits:
1. “Swirling Dervish” (top) by nosha on Flickr
2. “Wall” by MegaBuddy on Flickr
3. “Willy Loman” (unknown)
4. “mevlevi” (detail) by neil banas on Flickr

6 Comments

At June 10, 2010, Sue VanHattum wrote:
I. Love. This.

(I don't often do that period thing, but this made me do it.) ;^)

That's what I do. I might just direct my (community college) students to this post. I'm a fool for math, oh yeah.
At June 10, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:
Hi Sue,
Behind on responding to comments, but how can I not express the happiness at seeing you bust out "that period thing" over this one.
I expected a few fellow travelers would get it :)
And I'm jealous of Fools for Math. I was one of Those Not Ready in high school math classes. Have to pull of my socks to count from 11 to 20. Sad. "A Beautiful Mind" brought home what I was missing, and readings it inspired. That, and a Conceptual Physics (i.e., Physics for the Innumerate) class I took in college, which made me realize I was locked outside the Gates of the Kingdom of Physics because I couldn't read the math.
Boo.
At June 10, 2010, Sue VanHattum wrote:
That's the cool thing about being a grown-up - we can learn things we didn't get before. I think you'll like my book. (Not done yet.)
At June 10, 2010, Punya Mishra wrote:
The way of the Detached Ecstatic!! What a wonderfully evocative phrase. This is something I have been struggling with for a while now... But I completely connect with the idea of partnering "with the subject matter at hand and launches into whatever ecstatic dance suggests itself."
I can't wait to read the next two posts.
At June 11, 2010, monika hardy wrote:
cool. looking forward to this..
your description of detached ecstatic - sounds like a video i watched by sal kahn (kahn academy.)
http://vimeo.com/11731351
he said people told him that his videos resonated more with them than mit videos because his weren't about - or focused on - the messenger... but the message.
i haven't watched many of his videos - so i'm going off what he says... but he says ... his focus is on the screen and his thought process... detached from all else..like he's swimming (dancing) in the topic at hand - as opposed to presenting it.
hope i don't get so caught up in my dance that i miss your next 2 posts.
you mention beautiful mind - wondering if you've seen proof, with gwyneth paltrow..
At June 14, 2010, Ecstatic Teaching 2: It Helps to Get Drunk | Beyond School wrote:
[...] Part 1 here. And trust your friendly Salesman: this post can make you richer beyond your [...]