[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?

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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.

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.

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From Zero Hedge:

Who needs a wartime nuclear exchange when you have peaceful countries nuking the gamma rays out of their own sovereign territories – now that the environmental theme is rather popular, the following video by Isao Hashimoto shows all the nuclear “tests” conducted by the world in the period between 1945 and 1998. Based on public data, the world’s peaceful countries have already nuked themselves at least 2,054 times, with the US nuking the state of Nevada and its immediate neighbors about one thousand times. And keep in mind – the fallout does not just miraculously “disappear.” Feel free to consider that next time you look at bargain properties on the strip. Anyway, as Idealist.ws asks, “How would your life be different if you were taught in school a small nuclear war already took place?“

.

(h/t Crooks and Liars)

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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.

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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 [...]

Related posts:

1. Add Your Classes and Favorite Tools to the Wiki (update)
2. A Mind-Bending Web 2.0 Way to DO History and Non-Fiction Writing
3. A Student Taps in to “Visionary Classroom Blogging”: JungHee’s Mission Moment
4. My Australia Keynote Speech: A Serious Farce, in One Thousand Acts

Teaching method 1:

Factories in the 19th century had no child labor laws. Children of all ages were made to work in sweatshops for long hours and little pay, with no protection from abusive factory managers and no safety regulations to protect them from the dangerous factory machines. Instead of going to school and learning for their futures, these children were stuck in the workplace, day in and day out, performing mindless, repetitive tasks for their bosses.

Yawn. Is it time for recess the test-prep-session-formally-known-as-recess yet?

Teaching method 2: Transform the classroom into a 21st century sweatshop for a day. For the whole day, have students sort coal and fabrics, tend machines or sew tiny beads into strips of cloth. Enlist parent volunteers to play the role of sweatshop managers, berating the children for slow or unsatisfactory work.

“Wrong. You are doing it all wrong,” shouts a parent volunteer, who then scoops freshly sorted gravel back into a pile and instructs all the young workers to ‘do it again!’”

Some students are reduced to tears during the day. None want to repeat it. All say it’s a lesson they’ll never forget that brought home to them the reality of others on this planet less fortunate than they are.

~

I nicked Method 2 from Amanda Kloer’s post on Change.org’s “End Human Trafficking” blog. That post, “Texas Middle School Students are Slaves for a Day,” recounts how teachers and volunteer parents transformed a classroom of sixth-graders, who had been studying child slavery in the 19th century, into the simulated 21st century sweat-shop described above.

That learning experience is an example of what I want to call “simulated trauma,” but should point out can be done in ways that inflict no more “trauma” than, say, the daily one of being labeled a “failure,” or being daily taunted or worse by bullies, on and on, so common to hosts of students in schools already – and without the psychological buffer of being a simulation. It brings to mind a couple of thoughts:

Simulated Trauma as a Required, Stand-Alone Class

I know this is gnarly from all sorts of angles, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. The idea is this: present such learning experiences programmatically to students over a manageable period of time — one year, two years, who knows. Design them to simulate all sorts of pressing issues that are excluded from education because they don’t fit the cookie-cutter departmentalization of the content areas. Simulate such things as fresh water shortages; refugee camps; genocidal pogroms; military invasions; homelessness; undocumented immigrant student life; bullying; LGBT discrimination; teen pregnancy and single parenthood; life with an STD or AIDS; religious conflict; life under religion-based laws; on and on. (We can quibble about what should be included if you want; my purpose is to toss out a suggestive brain-storm.)

Such experiences, done well, would surely impress upon children realities that textbooks will always fail to impart.

The Problem of “The Four P’s”

The problem, of course, is that these issues will raise a firestorm of parental or community protest because – paradox alert – they’re relevant, controversial, and they matter. Schools generally avoid critical thinking about anything but safe, irrelevant subjects. The Four P’s – parents, preachers, politicians, and the long-suffering principals the first three browbeat – make sure that students don’t learn to question the status quo teachings of childhood.

So how do we get around that? Off the top of my head, I know that whenever I teach a controversial literary work, I notify parents beforehand,  and give them the option to have their child read something else (I did it with Nabokov’s Lolita last year). Few parents actually take me up on it, if any. And even if they do, their children? – and let’s talk straight here: they’re usually the ones most in need of learning critical thinking, precisely because their parents discourage it most – those children still get the experience second-hand, in lunchroom talks with their peers about it all.

The Problem of High-Stakes Tests

“None of these issues will help students improve test scores for NCLB.” *Sigh* If that’s a problem, what’s the solution (besides scrapping NCLB)?

The Problem of Social Engineering Hysteria

While this is obviously a canard polished off by conservative forces to perpetuate the hidden social engineering called everyday life — commercials on school buses and classroom TV’s, junk food in school vending machines and cafeterias, conspicuous consumption in student fashion and accessories, anyone? — it still requires a good strategy to overcome. Your thoughts welcome. But again, since parents of more forward-thinking stripes would by-and-large support such experiences for their children, the option for others to abstain may be all it takes to make such things a go.

The Problem of Business Roundtables

Wait a minute. We want our kids to become economic competitors in their adulthood. That means having the thick skin to keep labor costs low and profits high. The strong will rise, and the weak won’t. We don’t want to confuse our future leaders with compassion, do we?

Closing Questions

I’ll be doing a follow-up post on the “Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes” racism simulation many know as the “A Class Divided” lesson. So besides that one, what other lessons similar to the sweat-shop simulation can any of you share? And what did I miss in the discussion above?

Originally published at Education.Change.org
Image by marissaorton

3 Comments

• At June 10, 2010, concretekax wrote:

  One of my favorite lessons I ever did was to make brownies for my U.S. History class. We were studying the muckrakers at the turn of the twentieth century. The students ate brownies while we read an excerpt from Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle."

  Oh, and when I made the brownies I mixed in long hair-like strings of celery. Perfectly harmless, but gross when you do not know what it is. It was great fun and the students definitely got the point.

• At June 10, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Just a quickie to say, "God, I love that."

  Have you seen the Yes Men Save the World? They posed as businessmen launching a new idea of alternative feul: candles made from the flesh of the poor. Passed them out at a conference, had the Chamber of Commerce types light them, talked up the economic brilliance of their Alternative Fuel "Soylent Green" solution.

  Scary part: many in the audience that it was a great idea and one seemed interested in investing.

  They put hair in the candles to make them smell like burning flesh when lit.

  You can google it.

• At June 16, 2010, Emile Snyder wrote:

  That said, I think that as an opt in program it sounds pretty interesting. I might do it. But not if I didn't really trust the teacher.

  You need safewords. Seriously.

Related posts:

1. Refining the Message: A Re-Post and Self-Check on Fear and Irrelevance in Education
2. Social Networks as a Political Force for Education (and, More Students 2.0 Sought)
3. Guest-Blogger Bill Farren: Education for Well-Being
4. My Wikispaces in Education Webinar Presentation Video is Up

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 Thieves

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.

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” presentation 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” – 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.

19 Comments

• 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, 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? =-.

• At March 22, 2010, Scot Aldred wrote:

  Hi Clay,

  I've directed my pre-service teacher students to your Blog for a few years now and I'm pleased to say that they find it very useful and are heartened by your honesty and courage to take risks.

  I have a question for you regarding your learning technologies keynote:

  How do you manage your assessment in projects like the Broken World WIKI? You spoke of being burned out--what are the alternatives? Peer assessment--validity? What would be your magic wand?

  Many thanks,

  Scot.

• At March 23, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Scot,

  Thanks for the kind words (on and offline). Re: assessing Broken World, it's been so long, I honestly don't recall how I did it then, so I can only weigh in on how I might do it now.

  But actually, you've given me grist for a new post, so let me try to bang that out now.

  Clay

• At March 23, 2010, On Student Genius, How Not to Grade a Wiki, and Making the World a Stage at Beyond School wrote:

  [...] Aldred asks how I assessed projects like the Broken World Wiki textbook, and I tell him I haven’t the [...]

• At March 23, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Scot, it's up. Thanks for the prompt to help break some serious writer's block. :)

Related posts:

1. On Student Genius, How Not to Grade a Wiki, and Making the World a Stage
2. Video Presentation: A 1:1 Laptop School Baby Book: How It Looks at Four Months Old
3. Notes on Warlick’s Keynote, Second Viewing
4. On the Art of Being Boring