Beyond School

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

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

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

False Starts in the Search for Truth

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

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

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

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

How Moderns Read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Otherwise this future old man is screwed.

Jeez, That was Heavy

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

Image by piwaen

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

I mentioned in my “back from the dead” post that I’ve been swimming, on alternating days throughout this closing semester, in the history of China and the history of “Western Civilization” (irony quotes due to the fact that it really starts in Mesopotamia, Persia, the Levant, and Egypt, none of which are “Western”), and what a mind-party it’s been for the constant pricking of our so-often over-inflated opinion of Europe. I just want to throw a couple of examples that have been the life of that party — for this teacher, at least. My students haven’t had the good fortune of taking both classes, so they missed these lovely juxtapositions.

1. Myths of Pre-History

The Monotheistic West: The world was made in six days. A man and woman were created in a garden with magical trees and talking snakes. They didn’t have to work until they broke a rule that made all of us die in the end. Then they had to start farming.¹

Non-theistic China: Long before the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600-1150 bce), during which the Chinese invented their writing and Chinese history begins, there were five dimly remembered “Pre-Xia Emperors” (the Xia is a so-far legendary dynasty due to the lack of solid evidence it existed; the same was said for the Shang until the last century, so we may be in for a surprise if an archaeologist gets lucky in the future). Those legendary emperors just ruled, and presumably they had even more dimly-remembered ancestors stretching back into oblivion. What these emperors did to make them remembered, according to legend, was to give the following “gifts” to Chinese civilization: “fire, agriculture, animal domestication, calendrics, writing, and flood control.”²

The party moment? Those five legendary emperors are some seriously impressive, reality-based myths. They commemorate nothing less than the major accomplishments of our species that brought us out of caves, into farming villages, and finally into civilization. Call them the mythological history of the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages. Then ask if Western monotheism’s foundational myth comes even remotely close to that sort of scientific accuracy.³

2. Moral Frameworks

The West: Zoroastrianism and Christianity (and later Islam) both posit a Manichean, dualistic moral framework. The universe is a “cosmic battlefield” between the forces of a “good” god and the forces of an “evil” one. Humanity’s job is to choose sides in this war, and suffer the punishment for choosing wrongly. It’s a black and white world.

China: There’s the Yin, and there’s the Yang. While the Yin is primarily black and the Yang primarily white, they each contain a seed of the other in their cores. They also merge in a harmonious whole. Humanity’s job is to behave in harmony with both of those forces, neither of which is “good” or “evil,” but merely natural. There are no gods outside of this order and no sides to choose. There’s just a Way — a Tao — to follow to try to keep things balanced. There’s a lot of gray in this world. I think they must scratch their heads at the easy moral and metaphysical certainties of many Westerners.

The party moment? One of the most remarkable aspects of life in Asia — for this Westerner, at least — is the absence of holy wars, holy warriors, suicide bombers, abortion doctor assassinations, and so forth. Airports in East Asia are much easier to travel through, with few-to-no soldiers patrolling for terrorists.

3. Political Frameworks

Obama is surely thinking, “At best, I’ve got eight whole years to make my mark and turn this country around.” The Chinese response to the Tiananmen Square protesters, by contrast, was to say, in essence, “Don’t be impatient. The Party has had only eight years to turn this country around.” The Chinese see politics from the perspective of their 3,000-year dynastic history, in which it was not unusual for rulers to hold the Dragon Throne for decades. To them, eight years is just getting started — and that’s what Deng Xiaoping seemed to want the protesters to understand when they were demanding radical (for the Chinese) political reforms after “only” a decade or so of China’s economic reforms.

Maybe the Chinese taxi drivers I chatted with in Shanghai during my six years there were trained to say, after learning that I’m American, “We’re a 4,000 year old country. America is very young.” Training or no, what they say is true, and Westerners don’t get this. Because of that history, in which the average age of a single dynasty is 300 years — longer than the entire age of America, in other words — the Chinese have the Long View. Deng Zhou Enlai gave us an example of that when, asked if he thought the reforms brought on in 1789 by the French Revolution had worked, he answered — 200 years after that event — “It’s too soon to say.”

It’s all just so hen hao….

1. Though this might offend some, it really is the basic plot of Genesis, looked at objectively. [↩]
2. Rhoades Murphey, A History of Asia, p. 45. 1996 edition, I think. [↩]
3. I’m aware of the myth of Pan-Gu, of course — the cosmic giant whose corpse morphed into trees and rivers and mountains and so forth, and from the maggots infesting which evolved human beings. But I don’t think most Chinese, outside of the most back-water peasant old wives, ever believed that. And even if they did, it just shows, among other things, that the Chinese have a sense of humor about the importance of humanity. And we could stretch it and note there is a hint of evolution in that “maggots to man” detail. [↩]

I just stole a moment from grading the stack of research papers and semester exams to watch the first few minutes of the TED Talk embedded below on “The Art of the Interview.” The speaker discusses the importance of having interviewees  who have not only intellect,  but also “energy” (what he even called “Life Force”), and moreover, who throw “modesty” out the window in favor of the desire to acknowledge the extraordinary  and to unabashedly try to illuminate it. And all of this connected, in this teacher’s head, to an experience I had last week in my classroom.

So let me steal a couple more minutes from my gradebook deadline and share it. It’s this:

Single semester courses at my new school give Academic Excellence awards at semester’s end. One award is given per 50 students or so, and I have only 36 combined in my two Chinese history classes — a semester course.

So: given that a good six or seven students from those two classes all qualified as “academically excellent,” how choose one over the other?

Highest grade point average wasn’t the magic bullet, since the few tenths of a decimal point separating several of the students were surely as attributable to the performance of the grader — me — as to the performance of the students (that will be a revelation or a scandalous idea only to those who have never taught, read the research on, or thought for five unbroken minutes about the imprecision of grades as a measurement of student quality).

Long story short, I looked at the little canned script the school gave us teachers to read (optionally, bless their hearts) when presenting the award. It had a blank list of “five accomplishments” we were encouraged to fill out. I played along: 1) likes history; 2) good thinker; 3) good writer; 4) good speaker; 5) reliable and accountable, yadda yadda. Again, that still described at least five or six students.

Then it hit me.

Our Past is not Your Future — And Why That’s Bad News

What separated one from all the others was this: social intelligence. Call it “energy” or “life force,” if you will. It’s what the vast majority of “academically excellent” students are lacking. As  I tried to explain it  to the class when presenting the award:

The Dow topping the 10,000 mark aside, many economists are arguing that the U.S. economy may take years to recover to pre-crash levels in terms of something more important to most people than stocks — I mean jobs. Employment and production continue to decline, and many say those jobs may never come back.

High school students are so stuck in the myth that grades will lead to jobs — and so stuck in the textbooks about yesteryear — that they’re oblivious to this. The evidence for it pervades the classroom daily in the “I’ve done my work and I’ve got a high GPA, and that’s enough” attitude. I can slouch in my chair during class, use my mouth during discussions only as an oxygen-intake port, foul the collective sound- and vision-scape with complaints and sighs and sour looks, promote complacency by refusing to put any imagination or energy into improving the group experience, on and on. Again, my GPA is enough. It will get me into college, and college will get me into a job, because I have no inkling how much more difficult my future may be due to the several gathering clouds on the horizon — have no inkling, for example, that for every single vacancy in the professional job-rolls today, there are between five and six very qualified people seeking and needing that job.

The Only Thing Worse than a Suck-Up….

So in deciding how to give that award, I gave it to the person I wouldn’t only hire for being academically capable, but would promote for qualities of character: a person whose body language said “I’m awake and alert,”  whose facial language said “I’m not sour,” whose actions said “Let me help improve the class” instead of shirking that option — who was, in short, “energetic,” positive, constructive –  neither a “suck-up,” as I put it in class, nor, as importantly, a “suck-down.”

In a sense, by giving that student the award, I did “promote” her. That honor might, after all, be the tipping point in a favorable college application decision down the road.

I don’t know where I read it — and now that I think about it, I believe I saw it on a TV interview — but somewhere I saw a headhunter or executive type respond to a question about how the new economic landscape was affecting his hiring decisions, and his response should be posted above the gates of all schools for the privileged (such as mine): He didn’t care, he said, about an applicant’s academic pedigree, regardless of how ivy-covered it was; in fact, he went on, such a pedigree can even be a red flag and a demerit. Because the last thing he was looking for, he said, was people whose backgrounds led them to believe they were entitled to the best things in life. He wanted people who see  privilege as a thing to be earned.

This is something American students, especially, may need to hear, since they’re less able to compare themselves to their English-speaking peers from India and Asia — perhaps India especially, since it has two advantages over both East Asia and America: the presence of native English literacy skills equal or superior to those of American students, and the absence of the Confucian submissiveness and rote learning habits of many East Asian countries.

(The short version: watch out for India. It’s confident, it’s capable, it’s talkative; it’s hungry, it’s not spoiled, and it’s socially intelligent. This is made abundantly clear in my international school classroom every day.)

Psst…Your Code is Showing

In any case, in this age of the interwebs, this teacher once again shares with the rest of the world what he shares in his classroom, hoping it’s of value to students anywhere, whether they’re in his gradebook or not. What I hope you’ll take away:

First, your grades might get you in the door, but they won’t get you up the ladder. (And in this Age of Defining-Down “Success,” even getting in the door shouldn’t be taken for granted. Having a job at all, in other words, may be the “new” success. Just ask the 1-in-5 Americans currently unemployed or under-employed.)

And second, we don’t see you as a GPA, because we see the rest of you daily. How you walk and who you walk with, how you sit and how you compose your face, where your eyes go and don’t go, what comes (and doesn’t come) out of your mouth — all of things things are very obvious codes that we decode daily. And when you leave us, others with the power to pull you up or keep you down will take our place, and they’ll read those same codes.

I know this sounds crazy authoritarian, and that maybe one or two of you might be possessed of the type of genius that can beat the odds and conquer the world without an ounce of social intelligence or maturity of character. But — to share a dirty secret — I, like most teachers, really do want you to succeed. And I write this because I think it may help some of you.

Now here’s that TED Talk:

wrote Mark Twain, “have been greatly exaggerated.”

True here as well, but only slightly.

Autopsy

The lines from Nick Cave’s song, “Hallelujah,” sum it up:

My typewriter had turned mute as a tomb
And my piano crouched in the corner of my room
With all its teeth bared

Change “piano” to “Gilgamesh” and there’s not much more to add.

Since moving here to Singapore from Seoul in July I haven’t written a word on this space. This is due to many factors: enervating humidity (we’re about 1 degree from the equator here), an hour-long (and offline) subway commute to and from my new teaching job each day, the time demands of familiarizing myself with a new curriculum and school (the “two days ahead of the students” syndrome), on and on.

And then there’s the burn-out from the writing job last year, when two posts a day on US education policy taught me that mandatory writing on a prescribed topic grows toxic — a lesson that has informed my classroom blogging policy this year, which is so minimal as to be almost non-existent.

Also — and students, skip this part — I’ve been suffering a health issue that reminds me, to compare a worm to a dragon, of Keats being told by his physician not to write any more poetry because his health was too fragile to withstand the excitement. For Keats, tuberculosis was the issue. For me, it’s merely smoking. Since college, coffee and tobacco have been my study-and-writing enablers, and successfully kicking the habit months ago coincided with an inability to sit still, focus, and write. I can’t help but suspect Keats was tempted to decide, “Screw it, life without writing is no life at all,” and I’ve fallen to that temptation myself. To push the Keats trope further, my own

…fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain

have prompted me to choose an early death with a higher word-count, if that’s the choice. I’m hoping I’ll be as lucky as my Scots-Irish grandmother, who puffed her corncob pipe well into her eighties, thus having her vices and beating them too. Sure, those last few emphysemic years were no fun, but a life should be judged by more than its feeble final years. So yes, I’m enjoying this writing because I’m enjoying a smoldering clove-stick and cup of coffee as I write. Let the bodies fall where they may. (And though I know the logic is flawed, I’m still compelled to add that yes, I smoke, but I’m constitutionally and philosophically disinclined to those just-as-deadly but socially-sanctioned killers known as alcohol and junk food, so before you condemn my lungs, dear moralists, check your livers and your waist sizes.)

Then there’s this blog itself.

First, my RSS feed was, and may still be, broken because of a WordPress plugin I was using. I couldn’t fix it, and the plugin developer’s offer to fix it for me may or may not have been carried through on, I’m not sure. (If any kind soul out there can reply and tell me if they got this post in their feed-reader, I’d appreciate it.)

Second, I’ve been conflicted over the evolution of this blog from teacher-geek stuff to personal narrative writings to “unsucky” literary lectures. It’s become such a hodgepodge I’m probably going to make a couple of new sites: one for the unsucky lectures, one for the personal narrative, and keep this one as the ramblings of a teacher-geek. I don’t know.

So that’s the dreary side.

“The Bright Side of Life”

(Yes, that’s Monty Python’s Life of Brian on the right. My Wordpress captions aren’t working, blast it.)

1. Rediscovering the Book

On the upside, my hiatus from the web has turned me on to the beauties of something I’d almost forgotten: books. My reading habits before my web-hiatus were almost totally dominated by my Google Reader. And while the subscriptions to blogs and newspapers and magazines and journals and whatnot were certainly enjoyable, I can’t say I’ve missed them as I’ve enjoyed the flow through hundreds of physically-bound pages of this writer or that: Gwendolyn Leick’s fascinating study of the first Sumerian and Babylonian cities in Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City (yes, dear Unsucky readers, I’m burrowing into the scholarship of the worlds of Gilgamesh), Richard E. Rubenstein’s Aristotle’s Children, a magnificent story of the rebirth of Aristotelian philosophy and natural science in the theology and liberal arts departments of late Medieval universities, and, currently, John Gribbin’s gripping Science: A History: 1534-2001, which picks up admirably where Aristotle’s Children leaves off.

2. The Mental Party of Teaching Chinese and European History

I’ve also had the intellectual joy-ride of my life this semester in my teaching duties, where I teach a survey of Western Civilization on one day, and a survey of Chinese Civilization on the alternating day. Since I began both courses where all histories of civilization should start — with Adam and Eve dropping from the sky (–oops, wrong century) Ardi and Lucy evolving from earlier forms, and their descendants migrating out of Africa and into Eurasia — each course stayed pretty much in sync, chronologically, with the other. This means that Monday would pull my head into the Roman Empire, and Tuesday into the roughly contemporaneous Han Dynasty. I can’t tell you how hilariously this mental tour pricked European pretensions to “high civilization” compared to China — particularly in the thousand years between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, when Europe was a disgrace fully deserving the “barbarian” label the Chinese affixed to it. (In fairness, though, while China wins the “long view” award, Europe wins the Palm for the brief miracle from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. That China couldn’t discover over its 3,000 years of fairly stable and unbroken civilization what Europe did discover in a mere couple of centuries says something precious, its Mephistophelian implications aside, about Western culture.)

3. Notes on the New School (and a Teacher-Geek Heresy)

Teaching itself has been somewhat interesting. The students at my new school are generally the most literate of any school in which I’ve taught. The ninth-graders (14 and 15 years old) write uncommonly well, and the boys are especially delightful for being, in general, more mature and mentally turned-on than the girls (it’s usually the other way around at this age, in my experience). The school is going mandatory laptop for each student next year, but this year it’s only optional, requiring laptop cart check-out and other aversions. So I’ve avoided any ambitious digital projects, for the most part. (I’ll be sharing a couple of exceptions soon enough, and launching a new website I’m very excited about that bubbled up with the help of my best students.) Some of you will cringe to hear that I’m leaning toward traditional teaching anyway, simply because I don’t have the energy to try to de-program students who want school to remain traditional, and can’t be bothered to notice their future won’t be the paper-based world of their school — in other words, I’m tired of casting digital pearls before the lovable young piglets who just want worksheets, and to heck with all this Diigo nonsense. Maybe that will change next year, when they all bring laptops to school. Right now, the web is too beautiful to waste on the young. (Go ahead, teacher-geeks, set up your stakes, gather your faggots, and send your Inquisitors for this heretic. Ecce homo! But I’m using Ning for both classes, if that will soften your ire at all.)

Shocking Crisis of Classroom Faith: “Google is Dead!”

(or, “No, Virginia, There is no Santa Claus”)

Speaking of Ning and my “minimal classroom blogging,” I may as well add this tidbit. To ameliorate the misery of having to grade millions of heartlessly perfunctory blogposts by students only doing it for the grade, another teacher and I worked out a rotating “four bloggers per week” routine. All the other students not blogging that week only have to reply a couple of times to the posts of the week that caught their fancy. Long story short, one very bright student decided he would investigate the glowing characterization of Mao Zedong during the Long March in a PBS documentary we’re watching in class. He wrote a post with all sorts of questionable claims and characterizations that made Mao out to be far less impressive than even Western historians and academics admit him to have been in this period. And he didn’t cite or link to his source.

I found the source easily enough, and was aghast at its quality: riddled with weasel-words, blazing with bias belying its “FactsandDetails.com” title, a train-wrecked “Works Cited”, red-stained with cherry-picking the bads and omitting the goods. It would take a page to count the ways this site failed as a credible source. Turns out it was written by a guy with no authority, either academic or algorithmic (have you seen Shirky’s latest on this?). So I assigned all the students to read and reply to two student posts: one, a good exemplar that would play Trojan Horse for the second one, the uncited Mao smear piece. I wanted to see how many students would read the smear and reply skeptically.

Almost none did. Even the best students, with very few exceptions, swallowed it whole: “Wow! Your post shows how biased the PBS documentary we’re watching in class, and the textbook, are! Now I realize what a monster Mao was.” Et cetera and ad infinitum. A perfect “teachable moment” about media literacy.

Or so I thought.

Long story short, when I showed this class everything dubious about this site, they pushed back something fierce: the “A” students fiercest of all. I opened it up for debate on a Ning forum, saying “persuade me this source is valid for academic research,” and the push-back continued.

Discussing that second debate in class, I was gob-smacked to hear, again, the “A” students draw conclusions that if this site was not credible, it logically followed that no site was. “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” One student pushed back against my example of peer reviewed academic journals with an alleged case of the tobacco industry publishing “smoking is healthy” research in peer-reviewed journals, and seemed to glower at my request that she substantiate that claim — I had no doubt that the tobacco industry funded and published “scientific” studies of this sort, but did doubt whether she was correct about them being published in peer-reviewed journals — and also at my response that she was only confirming, if correct, my position that several evaluative criteria must be satisfied in order to judge a website credible.

I can only hope the quick demo of the “link:url” Google search, which showed that no site linked to this page but other pages on the same site, by the same author, brought home to some students that there’s something to be learned. But they’re at that dangerous age, and due to the imperative to cover the content, I can’t spend time taking this lesson any further. I can only hope the seed was planted and they’ll remember it differently in the future — hopefully not after a professor reams them for using a website written by a dog in its underwear.

Anyway, the take-away: students shouldn’t reach age 16 or 17 and still be shocked that Google can be wrong. It seems to have hit them worse than the news that there is no Santa Claus.

Piano image by poportis
Life of Brian image by tnarik

[I thought this post would be a farewell to Seoul. Instead, it wanted to be something I should have written three years ago, when I ended my six years in Shanghai. It won. I'll say bye to Korea later. And isn't writing a wonderful thing.]

*     *     *

It’s probably normal to hit a “regrets” stage when you close out your time in a foreign land. All the things you didn’t do, didn’t appreciate, didn’t explore. I’m certainly there. I leave Seoul for Singapore in a month, the next strange chapter in this stranger’s life.

I’ve made no secret over the last three years about my luke-warm to icy feelings regarding Korea. But really, Korea never had a fair shake with me. I came here after six years in Shanghai, for crying out loud, one of the most friendly and colorful and dynamic and blessedly cheap metropolises in the world. I learned enough Mandarin while there to be able to engage the Shanghainese in surprisingly meaty conversations, with the added entertainment value for my Chinese interlocutors that I carried them out with the vocab and grammar of a four-year-old. Learning babyspeak made it fun to be a stupid foreigner there.

And then there’s the fact that for China, a swarm of foreigners is a new experience. The Chinese borders were closed to the world until very recently, so we foreigners are items of extreme exoticism and curiosity there. And Shanghai and the other big cities have also seen an influx of migrants from the under-developed central and western regions of China – peasants who have never seen a weiguoren, a “white devil.” Bonus points if you’re of African descent: I’ve known such people who’ve told me the Chinese walked up to them and, without a word, touched their skin and hair in wonder.

All of this, in a word, makes living in China as a foreigner a constant form of play.

And then there’s the flip side: China’s 50-year isolation after the Communist Revolution means that it’s blessedly non-Westernized. Away from the tourist and shopping districts in the cities’ shiny new centers, in the traditional city neighborhoods, the city outskirts, the small towns and villages, and the countryside, there are no signs of Western civilization consumerism. No Starbucks or Burger Kings or damnable WalMarts or Gaps. Instead, there are mom-and-pop markets, farmers’ markets, noodle shops, karaoke bars, fabric markets full of tailors, foot-rub and massage parlors. There are as many bicycles as cars in this purer, disappearing China – and these bicycles, often ancient, battered, rickety and wobbly, are a breed far removed from the status-conscious Treks and whatnots that would cost many Chinese a full year’s salary. Grandmas and grandpas ride these old bikes as their primary form of transportation, their “cars.” Young couples ride them tandem, the beau pedaling and his girl sitting primly sidesaddle on the rear rack, on sunny days topped by a lovely umbrella to shield her fair skin from the sun. They ride slowly, often well-dressed, and you can hear them conversing as they go. They often stare or doubletake at you as they glide by. “Weiguoren….hallo!” Toothy smiles. Play.

Grandmas squat on the sidewalk with their squatting grandchildren, steadying them so they can pee on the sidewalk without mishap. It’s normal – and really, foreigner, relax. How dirty can baby-pee be? Mothers carry their babies in jumpers designed to expose their bottoms, a daily parade of babies’ butts. Barber shops full of migrant peasant girls staring out the windows, almost never working, instead watching TV or chatting and eating together, or napping. They’ll take you upstairs and give you an hour’s massage for ten bucks. Sometimes “massage” is more broadly defined than it is in the West, without seeming seedy at all. The moral world is different here too,  much more accepting and far less ashamed of Nature. If massages are to relax all of the body, the thinking seems to go, then it only makes sense that the whole body be massaged.

And the wonder of the public parks in China: already at six a.m. they’re alive. Grandmas in military formation under a willow, led by a grandma with a ghetto-blaster playing traditional Chinese folk songs. They dance with swords, red fans, red scarves that fly in synchronous arcs as the old gals twirl. Grandpas carry their pet birds or crickets in bamboo cages, hang them on low tree branches, and sit under them with other grandpas on portable stools. Rainbow bridges arc over their upside-down reflections in the canals. The willows rustle, the birds sing. Peasants beat the sun to lay their daily harvest on the sidewalk, barter with the locals buying their daily vegetables. They weigh them on notched bamboo sticks suspended by a string, with counterweighing stones on one end. The big smiles, the missing teeth, the bowed backs from decades in the fields. The thatched hats.

The neighborhood park is also a free gym. More grandmas and grandpas, fathers and mothers, teens and children swarm the simple machines for their daily workout. They wear leather dress shoes with cheap gym suits or pajamas – pajamas, you’d been told, are a status symbol, since owning a pair means you have money to spare. They wear dress shirts and pants, they wear anything and everything as they do their sit-ups and back-stretches and presses. You see your neighbor – the one who had the chicken tethered to his front patio for several days until yesterday, when you happened by as he was wringing its neck in preparation for the night’s dinner – doing pull-ups. The sun is still not yet up.

After the sun goes down, these people fill the park for different activities. Young couples sit on its hillocks in the dark, next to the reflective pond and mechanical waterfall, away from their crowded apartments, to feast on their privacy together. Young and old alike fill the park’s circular center plaza, where yet another grandma with a boom-box fills the twilit sky with ballroom dance music. Old and young waltz, foxtrot, tango; they do it man with woman, man with man, woman with woman, young with old. They do it with four-year-olds. They see the weiguoren and pull him out to shake a leg, laughing at his baby-talk with those smiles, those missing teeth, those other perfections.

Looking at all of these people – the ancient ones most of all – it dawns on you that you, of all the foreigners teaching at your school and living in this neighborhood at the edge of Shanghai’s sprawl, may be the luckiest. Unlike you, they’ve been teaching algebra, or physics, or literature or phys. ed., while you, blessedly, have been teaching the history of China – the history of these very people dancing around you, dancing with you, at the park. Looking into the old folks’ bright and wizened eyes, at the lacework lining their faces, you’re struck by the fact that these very same people so happy around you now lived, decades ago, through the hardships of the Civil War, the Japanese Invasion, the Great Leap Forward, the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution. How many of them have seen starvation, war, re-education, labor camps? How many loved ones have they lost – or been betrayed by? And yet here they are now, leading you in a dance whose steps finally, after a century-long nightmare, are light and joyous. Christ, the presence of old Chuang-tse laughing down the Tao,  and of the imperturbable old Buddha mindful that this too shall pass – both are palpable in them all.

All of this, in a word, makes living in China as a foreigner a constant encounter with a truly different world. These people, with their cramped, dingy apartments and their dates on their battered old bicycles, with their bad teeth and their conspicuous pajamas, with their $100 a month incomes – they are poor, looked at with one set of eyes. But looked at through different eyes, that see wealth in terms unrelated to income, they’re among the richest people I’ve ever known.

If I ever have the chance to live there again, I’ll probably take it. No country – America included, America especially – has ever suited me like China has. If that luck doesn’t come my way, I count myself among the blessed for the experience. I know that’s sentimental, but it’s no less true for that.

The dance.

A simple grace.

A natural thing.

Morning Tai Chi at the Bund.

A storied face.

Primary transportation.

More photos below the fold… Read the rest of this entry »

Oof. It’s Sunday afternoon. Since returning Friday night from a skipping-rock of a flight home from Koh Samui, Thailand – departed 6 a.m., layover and transfer in Bangkok, another layover in Hong Kong, a refueling layover in Taiwan, an arrival at Incheon (Korea) at 9 p.m., and an airport bus and taxi to enter the door at 10.30p – we gasped at the two-week-old dust bunnies bounding across our apartment, unpacked, and then I slept a few hours before driving through the brutal cold (oh Thai sun, please shine up here) to my radio job at 6.30 the following morning. Home again, write a post for Education.Change.org, sleep, more radio this morning, and finally, though sleepy, here to write a bit – *inhale* – about….

The Wonderful World of International School Hiring Fairs

It was wonderful, in a weird way. Talking for hours for four straight days to school leaders around the world about our views on teaching and learning (and most interestingly, though probably most damning for many of my job prospects, about technology in education) is an interesting way to spend the time.

Without naming names of schools or interviewers, here’s a random and sleepy-eyed report of lessons learned from the experience.

1. Bad interviews are good things

No matter the reputation of the school, the people sitting across from you in the hotel room asking you questions in that school’s name are a stronger indicator of how it would feel to work at that school. I talked to English department heads whose questions – and my answers – made it clear to both of us that we would, or would not, make a happy marriage. There was an unsurprising correlation between this marital element and the offering or non-offering of a position at each school. Schools touting themselves as “21st century schools” and banging their laptop program drums – and during interviews with which I expected flower petals to descend from on high – on an occasion or two turned out to instead voice sentiments belonging to, um, people who’d obviously never experienced the literacy magic that happens after a few months writing and conversing behind the wheel of a blog. No rose-petals there – instead, many mental leaves of wet cabbage fell, probably, in both our imaginations. Marriage for the next two years? We think not. Thank goodness for the bad interview, and for the “We’re sorry we cannot offer you a job at this time.” No apology necessary, really – good luck.

2. “Energy is eternal delight” – so its opposite is….?

(h/t to William Blake who, though dead, deserves eternal credit for the eternally delightful maxim.) If, like mine, your own heart seems to pump more espresso than blood, then it may be important to consider the energy coming from those interviewing you. I’m not saying interviewers need to be manic or anything; I’m just saying a lack of excitement, of a sort of buoyancy – of even a decorously restrained intensity – when discussing educational vision while courting for a temporary professional marriage may be, well, a screaming red flag. Granted, the interviewers are stuck in their hotel rooms interviewing candidate after candidate for many more straight hours than the candidates themselves, but still – we’re all teachers, current or past, so we should be pretty good at keeping our energy level up whenever a professional client enters the room, be it classroom or hotel room. The short version? Beware the droopy interviewer, and put a gold star by the inspired/inspiring one. You are, after all, bound to be sitting in many more meetings with them if you sign the contract to work with them. If they’re sleepy, chances are you’ll be a sleepy worker with them. But if they’re exciting – in a way that rings true (and we all have what Hemingway calls a “shock-proof sh!t-detector,” don’t we, to distinguish real from fake excitement, yes?) – then consider fishing your pocket for that ring, and dropping to your knees on the spot.

3. Interview questions make the interviewer.

By the end of the first of my four days of interviewing, it struck me how different interviews are based on the questions asked (and not asked) by the interviewer. Some of them seemed as stilted and scripted as the worst end-of-chapter questions from the worst textbooks (redundant?). They felt less like interviews than exercises in checking off the questions boxes. It wasn’t quite “schooliness,” so can we call it “interviewiness”?

The best interviews, on the other hand, were more free-flowing and responsive, characterized by give-and-take expansiveness as one party or the other heard something no script could predict.

4. Being yourself is better, come what may, than trying to be someone else.

Think about it. Not only does pretending to be what you’re not cheat your interviewer – it also cheats you. Show your true colors now, so you’ll know whether it’ll be okay to show them over the length of your contract. I love the fact that, at my second interview with the two interviewers for the school I chose, Singapore American School, I replied to a question by saying something to the effect of, “There’s no denying that people’s first impression of me is often, ‘Damn, Burell, you’re too intense!’ But after a while they see the rest of me, and realize I’m also mellow in my own way.” “Damn” is a soft enough word these days – and I certainly don’t toss out higher-level potty words like rhymes-with-fit or ends-many-limericks-about-Nantucket or leads-to-supposedly-eternal-damnation in professional company – and I wondered about the wisdom of the utterance after it escaped my mouth (and this was in like the middle of the second hour of the interview), but somehow the fact that the offer was still made left me feeling even happier than otherwise about accepting it when it came in hour three.

5. Check your ego at the door.

I got about an even mix of offers and rejections from the schools I talked to. One school in particular seemed so right after two interviews that getting the rejection note broadsided me with the force of a turbo-powered school bus. I bumped into one of the interviewers later, and he told me that choosing my competitor over me was the hardest decision they made the night before, and that it took them over an hour of group deliberation to make it. A rejection can happen for all sorts of reasons – maybe they needed yearbook experience you didn’t offer, or needed that administrator whose spouse happened to be a less-qualified candidate for the position you want. So don’t take it personally.

6. Remember to research.

I’m sure I blew one interview by expressing my desire to get experience in a program they didn’t offer, and expressing my distaste for the one they did. Oops. I’d mistakenly thought they did offer that program.

7. Benefits, preps, class sizes, and student mix.

You don’t offer a flight home after the first year? You don’t cover dependents? 70% of your student population is Korean? You laugh off the notion that four preps is too much for new (or old) teachers?

8. Courtesy is cool, good will is good stuff.

When it came down to thinking I’d be choosing between two very attractive schools, I told one of them how I hoped that saying “no” this time, if the decision went that way, wouldn’t close the door to a “yes” next time in years to come. The gentlemanly answer of the man I said this to was so winsome, I don’t know what to say, other than that it made me want to work in this man’s school even more. The answer was no less impressive for its simplicity, which was, simply, “Your saying no to us will offend us no more than we’d want to offend you if we said no to you. It’s the nature of the beast, and we understand that, so no doors will close at all.”

9. Remember to check yourself in the mirror before you leave your hotel room for the day’s interviews.

I can’t believe I forgot my belt. At least my fly wasn’t down.

That’s about it. Hope it helped, and fyi, Mr. Utecht, consider the assignment done

[Update: Oh my goodness. Seems the student writing below is, shall we say, not entirely original. I'm still thankful for the gesture, oddly.]

Call me slow. I’m spring cleaning in December. Old papers may as well follow old leaves.

And I come across this, which a 15-year-old student,  who never said much of anything (in a “still waters running deep” way) during his year in my Asian history class in Shanghai, gave me at mid-year.

Why he decided to re-write me as a character who’d been a poor villager in Nazi-occupied WW II, I’ll never know.

Before tossing the paper, I had to scan it. Call this post part of an “open file cabinet.”

My question: Why can’t I show this to prospective employers as a recommendation letter?  And my caveat: I can only hope he was serious. It’s hard to tell.  And my mis-giving: how much “light-reflecting into dark places” can you do in school – especially if you shine that light in places too close to home?

"This is the meaning of my life."

Life is interesting.

"Old dogs" my mange-ridden tail. (I'm the guy with the receding hairline, inset lower left.)

I’ve been meaning to scratch this itch of a digitized reading/writing/speaking unit for any school with basic podcasting gear for a while, but have been too busy.

Busy with a new job, here in Seoul, writing and announcing radio news. I applied for it a good two months ago, and after a glacial hiring process, got the nod in mid-November. (Some of my fellow tweets know this.)¹

And while it’s obvious that I enjoyed the advantage of being a foreigner when it came to breaking into radio at my age, I want to add that it didn’t hurt to have a background teaching reading, writing, and speaking skills for eight years. The old joke I loved as a new Humanities graduate – “I have a Liberal Arts degree: Will that be for here or to go?” – seems less funny now, because less true.  The basic skills – reading, writing, speaking, listening, which really just mean communicating, in the end – have more value to them than we often credit.

That teaching unit I mentioned? I think about it most days as I drive home from work. In a nutshell, it’s this: invite your students to turn your content, whatever your subject matter, into five-minute “top of the hour” newscasts, applying the craft of writing for radio (great resource here), and then speaking for radio. Then have them follow up, at certain points, with “talk radio” in which they discuss and debate their “content news.” In addition to that work-flow’s simple progression from fact-mastery (identify the main ideas of each section of a chapter and distill them into a short, well-crafted précis) to higher-order thinking (analyze, synthesize, evaluate those main ideas in a natural discussion), there are two more bonuses: first, the technology slice is so simple it’s invisible (in live studio news broadcasts, you only get one chance to announce the news, so for students that means hit record, read for five minutes, then wrap by hitting “stop” and call it a day), and technology should ideally be as invisible as pen and paper; and second, the activity develops all the real-world skills that come with real journalism and broadcasting (or, as Wes Fryer puts it in regards to podcasting, “narrowcasting”).

Glancing back at my last post about Linda Darling-Hammond on performance-based assessment, this type of learning-while-doing workshop measures performance across a wide range of literacy skills: reading for main ideas, writing them with economy and accuracy (and no passive voice, mostly action verbs, citation of sources, distinctions between “alleging” and “charging,” and more), and best of all, speaking with proper pace, volume, inflection, emphasis, pitch variety, and all the other qualities radio announcers have to master to avoid losing their listeners to the next station on the dial.

It’s “real-world project-based learning” that uses the same skills as outlining, note-taking, and giving those schooly little front-of-the-classroom speeches.

The only glitch I can see is this: if you have 20 students that you put into pairs, they can’t all record at the same time in class, so they’ll have to do the actual recording outside of class. They can still have the class period as the workshop to read and write their news scripts, and practice announcing them to each other. They can also discuss and outline the questions and topics for the higher-order “talk show” piece.

Here’s the process we follow at my station. I really think it could be duplicated in an 80-minute block. At work, I do it as part of a team of two. Here it is:

7:30 to 8:30 a.m.: Read newswires (in class, this could be, say, a chapter from a history textbook), select ten articles (sections from the textbook) for the 5-minute 9:00 hourly, divide the labor, then condense those news articles – which read aloud would take two or three minutes each – into crisp little 20-to-30 second summaries of main ideas.

That means cutting about 90% of the length, without cutting the important ideas. (In other words, that means: critical reading for main ideas.)

8:30 to 8:50 a.m.: Practice reading the scripts, making last-minute adjustments where necessary. Focus on the oral skills here: breath control, pace and pause, acceleration and deceleration, words and phrases to emphasize (just consciously watch or listen to any TV or radio newscaster, and notice how different their speaking is from normal off-air speech).

8:50 to 9:00: Go upstairs to the studio, make sure your pages are in order.

9 to 9:05: Announce the news. No second chances.

Again, the reading, writing, and practicing take 80 minutes – a standard block period. The actual recording would have to be done outside of class (Skype, anyone?).

Now for the testimonial: When training for this gig, my first few attempts at speaking were disasters. Adrenaline would make me read too fast. I couldn’t control my breath, so you’d hear huge whooshing sounds as I came up for air after long sentences. My voice and hands shook. I couldn’t meet the 5-minute final out deadline. I couldn’t turn pages skillfully – you’d hear rattling paper or, worse, page one seque to page three because I’d lifted two pages instead of one, resulting in an economy article ending with a surreal sports score followed by a brain-frozen omigod pause. My vocal style would start strong, but during the underwater feeling of the third and fourth minute, I’d drop into a monotone without realizing it. And more.

But my partner’s constructive feedback and encouragement, and self-critique by listening to the performance, and imitation of newscasters online and on air, soon – within a week – led to massive improvement in both writing and speaking, by all accounts. I still have the job, so that must be the general consensus. My point here is that, done regularly, giving students time to stumble and fail, then try again until they succeed and become finally comfortable with all this literacy, will, I’m convinced, make them much stronger readers, writers, and speakers than ye olde schooly lecture-outline-take notes-summarize-give a speech drill.

It was the same with the reading and writing. My partner and I took forever, the first few days, to be able to hone in on the main ideas in all the articles we re-wrote, leading to no practice-time before going live and worse. But now, our speed has at least doubled. We’ve developed the skills, in other words, of skimming, evaluating, separating central from supporting information, and re-writing those quickly and clearly.

So, when I re-enter the classroom next year (yes, you heard that right), this performance-based workflow will be one I introduce early in the year, and sustain throughout it.

I know it’s not original, by the way, and I’m sure many teachers are doing this type of thing. I’m just struck by it because I’ve experienced it from the other (and real-world) end, as a learner.

1. The station is the first all-English radio station in Korean history, and launched December 1. La-de-da. [↩]

Annotations of Obama’s 2004 Interview on His Religious Beliefs

Obama is a year older than me, and that’s only the beginning of the list of ways I relate to him. Here are more things we have in common:

He didn’t grow up rich and privileged. When he got out of college, he drove a car with a rust-hole in the passenger side through which Michelle could see the sidewalk, but he didn’t seem to care: it got him from Point A to B. I had a ‘66 VW Bus in the late ’80s with rust-holes too, and loved it as much as the ‘68 Plymouth Valiant and ‘66 Mercedes 220S I drove in the ’90s. (I especially loved the Mercedes because I found it covered in moss under a tree, where it had sat for years, and bought it for USD $700. I washed it, pulled its engine, learned auto mechanics by rebuilding it [call it a reaction to too much book-learning and not enough manual skills], dropped it back in, and drove it cross-country from Oregon to Tennessee the summer before I entered Boot Camp and the US Army.)

He studied philosophy, religion, politics, history, literature in college. He was seeking wisdom. That’s what I did too. I took my sweet time getting my college coupon – my Bachelor’s Degree – because I wasn’t in college to get out of it, but to get as much out of it as I could. So I took 16 years between my freshman year and my graduation date, studying whatever looked interesting in each semester’s catalogue, and dropping out altogether when I needed a break, or wanted to study more deeply than college permitted. The best drop-out year came after a philosophy class in which we read only a few chapters of Nietzsche. I dropped out to read all 16 or so of his complete works, plus a few biographies and scholarly studies. That took about a year. Then I went back to college for more. Apple CEO Steve Jobs was the same way, describing himself as a “college drop-in.” Obama read the Bible, read Nietzsche, and more, as a young adult. So did I.

Obama smoked, read, and wrote. So did I. I hope his writings were better than mine, but that’s not the point. The point is all of that reading and writing (the smoking was a fix to stay seated, awake, and focused) were self-compelled manifestations of a desire to make sense of life, history, and the world. Others were frying their brain cells in frat-house keg parties and sailing through classes they hoped would make them rich. I know that sounds self-righteous, but there it is. At 46 years old, I am thankful for all of that seeking. It has paid off in a daily happiness I never would have had otherwise. And when I compare myself to the rich parents of my students, who seem to have chosen those get-rich college classes and succeeded in reaching their goals – but at the expense of having a reading, writing, and culture life at all – I become even more thankful. They have more money than me, but they also seem poorer. I wouldn’t trade places.

Finally – the wrong word, since I suspect I’ll be fascinated by this man for the rest of my life, and will never delete the Google News “Obama” feed in my RSS Reader until Life deletes me – Obama says, in the interview below, that his life-long quest for values he felt right to live by (call it his “quest for God,” if you will) did not reach solid ground until he reached his fortieth year. Same here, roughly, though my years teaching Asian history in Shanghai threw some Buddha and Tao headily into my own mix, and very influentially, when I was 42 or so.

But the point is this: We talk, in our edu-lingo, about the importance of constructing meaning from our studies, not just swallowing and regurgitating received information.  What I love about the interview below is the same thing I (humbly) love about my own path: It shows an understanding of questions about God, the Sacred, and the Good and Right that are eminently constructed. This interview is an example of critical thinking about traditional religion at its best. And while I don’t share Obama’s views about many things below, I do admire that he seems to have gone through the hard work of reflecting his way to those views, instead of just believing the things he was taught by parents, preachers, and all teachers of old dogmas in his life.

Put another way, the interview below is an example of that other (rightfully) sacred cow of modern education, project-based learning – with a vengeance. Because the project was a life-long one, and so authentic it had nothing to do with assignments and grades – nothing to do with school at all. It had everything to do with authentic learning for its own sake, learning for the highest purpose of all: a life of wisdom. And if that sounds high-flown to you, it does to me too, but that doesn’t make it untrue. The guy just made history, after all, by becoming the first mixed-race president of the still very racist United States. If that doesn’t suggest a wisdom, I don’t know what does.

Before I tell you to “enjoy,” note the format of the below: the hollow bullets are snippets from the interview; the square indented bullets are my occasional annotations.

Now: “Enjoy.” We’ve got a life-long learner as our next president. Happy days are here again.

• Obama’s Fascinating Interview with Cathleen Falsani – Steven Waldman – Annotated

  Full transcript of a 2004 interview Obama gave to a religion columnist about his religious beliefs.

• tags: obama, religion, christianity, politics, elections08

  • part of my project in life was probably to spend the first 40 years of my life figuring out what I did believe – I’m 42 now – and it’s not that I had it all completely worked out, but I’m spending a lot of time now trying to apply what I believe and trying to live up to those values.
  • My grandparents who were from small towns in Kansas. My grandmother was Methodist. My grandfather was Baptist. This was at a time when I think the Methodists felt slightly superior to the Baptists. And by the time I was born, they were, I think, my grandparents had joined a Universalist church.
  • • Universal/Unitarian is my favorite denomination. – post by cburell

    [Read the rest below the fold....] Read the rest of this entry »