Beyond School

My homey Dean Shareski, whose name fits Saskatechewan perfectly, tagged me for some sort of meme about something like “7 Things You Might Not Know About Me.”

Like Dean, I already did a similar meme about eight things, so pardon me for fiddling with this one for the sake of self-pleasuring.

I’m going to give it a musical bent.

7 Things You Might Not Know About My Musical Tastes

1. Joni Mitchell Slays Me

Blue Goddess.

I’ve been listening to almost nothing but Joni Mitchell’s Blue on my drives to and from my weekend work at the radio station for the past two months. I would marry Joni in a heartbeat for the mere pleasure of looking over her shoulder as she wrote her lyrics. They stand right up there with Keats and Shakespeare, *hrumph-hrumph*, mutatis mutandis,  in my book. Add to that the purity of her voice as it navigates the crushingly brave but fragile melodic lines of her songs, and you can add me to the list of those who are, to quote Keats in the “Ode on Melancholy,” “among her cloudy trophies hung.”

God, Blue is perfection. Where to start? “All I Want” should be sung at every wedding:

All I really, really want our love to do
Is just bring out the best in me and you, too….

I want to talk to you
I want to shampoo you

(–that “talk to you” / “shampoo you” rhyme slays me in rhyme, image, and whim.)

I want to renew you
Again and again
Applause, applause,
Life is our cause.
When I think of your kisses
My mind see stars.

I could go on and on, and will a bit more. (But you’ll have to click to read it below the fold:

Read the rest of this entry »

Talk about a "tragic fall."

Andrea Hernandez tagged me for this Wordle Meme:

1. Create a wordle from your blog’s RSS feed.
2. Blog it and describe your reaction. Any surprises?
3. Tag others to do the same.
4. Link back here and to where you were first tagged.
(I don’t know what “link back here” means, but Technorati is dying anyway.)

My reaction? It’s funny what a single 15-page literary essay that you decide to post does to the results of a Wordle. Any guesses on the topic of that essay?

The most interesting thing I see above, besides the nicely serendipitous “falling Oedipus,” is the little word, “Furthermore.” It’s only there because that Oedipus essay was a scholarly study. I avoid “furthermore,” “however,” and all other constipation-indicators in my writing voice today like I avoid, well, constipation (and academic writing). Instead of utilizing “furthermore” and the dreaded “however,” I use “also” and “but.”

This member of the Temple of Reason is glad to see that “science” and “education” elbowed their way into the Oedipal complex (and for the record, I love my Dad and my Mom – but not that way). He’s also glad to see the words “religion” and “gods” with no Abrahamic example in sight.

Okay, who (I know whom, but reject it) to tag?

I think some of the next generation:

21-year-old whiz Post-Punk Nerd S.P. Greenlaw.
High school whiz Teny Eurdekian (of Weltanschaaung).
And let’s throw Old Guy Michael Doyle, the Science Teacher, in there for good measure. (“Clam” will be his biggest word.) He’s younger at heart than most of us.

Feel free to decline, of course. And thanks, Andrea. (Did you notice the Obama change.gov website used Wordle last week or so?)

John Larkin in Oz nudged me to consider playing with the idea he so creatively played with on his own site: “How Far I Roamed as a Child.”

John’s post gives the full background of the idea, and a nicely visual guided tour of his own childhood using personal photos and satellite imagery from Google Maps¹. But this excerpt from John’s post brings out the historical and educational thrust of the idea:

[An] article in the Mail online, ‘How children lost the right to roam in four generations‘, is particularly telling. It sets out quite clearly how from one generation to the next children are not roaming as far as their parents and grandparents.

Firing up Google Maps and revisiting my elementary and junior high years’ stomping grounds in Tennessee was a blast – and as John seemed to understand by inviting me to play with his idea, it has all sorts of engaging applications for the writing classroom. One example is all I have time for at the moment, and it’s this:  By typing in my childhood home address on Google Maps, then clicking “street view” and zooming and panning around a bit, I found, of all unremarkable things, the street-drainage ditch in front of my house, with its tunnel under the street to the other side, which I crawled through as a child surely hundreds of times – and up the hill from that, in what was once my yard, the grandest hickory tree you could ever imagine, whose autumn leaves I and my brother and sisters and parents and dogs raked into piles (okay, the dogs didn’t rake), dove into, splashed around in like leafy surf, on and on.  Here’s a screenshot:

The Ditch, the Hickory, the Memory Flood

Wouldn’t This Work in the Writing Classroom?

The photo above may not do anything for you, and it shouldn’t.  But me?  I can hear the flung rocks echoing from the tunnel, smell the algae in its puddles, remember the sense of mystery of the world opening out at tunnel’s end.  For autobiography and personal narrative, again, this beats the utter hell out of brainstorming with pencil and paper about my childhood.  Never in a hundred years would I have even remembered that ditch and tunnel. But now that I do, the related memories wax exponential.  That ditch, for example:  after a heavy rain, it was a child’s river, and so, with my best friend Gary (who drowned with his father a few summers later), we named that “river,” in a bit of blood-brother name-combining, the “Clary.”  Again, just an example of how this goes beyond brain-storming to brain-flooding.

How Far I Roamed

Anyway, like John, man did I roam as a child.  I must have walked four or five miles a day on average.  Here’s Google Maps, with my first attempt to use Adobe Illustrator for labels and arrows, to show the details (click image for larger view, and note the key in the lower left corner):

How Far I Roamed: Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1960s and '70s

(And for the students out there who read this, let me know: do you roam as far these days? Or have you “lost the right to roam”?  And Dad: you can comment too, you know. How far did you roam as a child, on a daily basis?)

If you decide to play with this meme, by the way, please link it to John’s original post. It’s his baby, and it’s a good one.

1. including the astonishing “street view” which, as the name implies, puts you in the perspective of a photographer standing on whatever spot of road you choose, and allows you to pan 360°, tilt up and down, zoom in, “walk” up or down the street [↩]

I always tell people who tell me that I’m going to hell for being decidedly skeptical about myths from pre-scientific times that a) I’ve read the Bible in its entirety three times, and studied world religions and Church history enough to feel 99% certain the myths are simply myths (and that 1% of doubt is simple intellectual honesty, since I know there’s no absolute proof any god does not exist); and I tell them, b) “If Jesus knew me, he’d think I was a pretty okay guy, because I’m typically not an ass, try to help people, and agree with him that ‘the kingdom’ is already within us, if we’d just wake up to it (not a far cry from most religious messages, read metaphorically instead of literally).”

I’m pleased to announce that I was just told by the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz,

Your sin has been measured. Happily for you, your sin profile leaves room for forgiveness. Your full sinful breakdown below shows you the areas that you must improve, to save yourself from an eternity in hell.

In the spirit of spiritual transparency then, dear reader, I will now share with you a view into the window of my soul, and the degree to which each of the Seven Deadly Sins has possessed it:

Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz

A naturalist at heart, I’m actually proud that good old natural “lust” – what science and my old dog Fritz would understand as a healthy reproductive instinct, an innocent enough thing when the super-ego* is stronger – is my greatest “sin.” I’m pretty proud – oops! – of the rest of the results. I can forgive myself for them, since I’m human, animal, and naturally far from perfect. (In fact, if I recall correctly, “sin” is based on a Greek word for “missing the target” and thus making a mistake, being imperfect, which has nothing to do with “demons” or “ee-vil,” damnation or salvation, and everything to do with being simply human. In that respect, the results above actually get it pretty right. I do screw up sometimes.)  [UPDATE: Be sure to check out Larissa’s corrective comment on the origins of the word “sin” for an even more interesting twist, and call for philological help from Biblical scholars on the Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek story of the word ulitmately translated as¹ “sin.”)

Another “fluff and fun” voluntary meme for our idle summers in the devil’s workshop. If you play along, please drop us a line with your results.

–

*Pre-emptive snarky-comment-prevention strike: I’m not a card-carrying Freudian. Just playing around. Call the super-ego “conscience,” “social decency,” or “humanism” instead, and I won’t protest.

1. Old English [↩]

I received this comment recently on my podcast post, “My Suicidal High School Years: A Happy Ending Bullying Story.” The comment is from a teen named Jack, who is experiencing now what I experienced 30 years ago. I’m sharing it because it’s evidence that the meme I’m about to propose – voluntary, as usual – could have more social value than the bevy of “Stop Bullying!” messages we most often see in response to this ugly subject. Here’s Jack:

Clay,

I googled bullying stories because I wanted something to help me through troubles that I am currently facing in ninth grade. “Stop bullying!” sites really didn’t help me. This was just the kind of story I was looking for. I get called names feverishly because I didn’t make the best impression first semester. I try not to care what other people think of me but it feels like I am always watching my back.

Anyways, this story was very interesting indeed. Thanks a lot for sharing. It helped substantially. [Emphasis added.]

I’ve already thanked Jack, but I want to thank him again. He confirms that for him, at least, “Stop Bullying” messages may be nice and all, but they don’t do much to comfort those trying to cope with being bullied.

I’m not saying anti-anything messages have no positive value. I’m just saying they often fail to help the victims of the thing being opposed. Telling bullies not to bully may be worth the effort, though it’s apparently predicated on the dubious belief that it’s effective to appeal to the compassionate side of bullies, who in my experience have almost always been a pretty heartless bunch. Bullies enjoy psycho-social benefits from bullying – profits, in a sense – in the same way arms dealers do from selling weapons. Appeals to delicate instincts require delicate audiences, and delicacy is a thing usually absent from these hardened types.

But as Jack testifies, just hearing Bullied Success Stories – that survival is worth it and life gets better? That’s a speech-act worth performing.

So the Meme: Share Your “Bullied Then, Successful Now” Stories

I did it in my podcast, a 30 minute story – literally, a story – of my experience of three years of bullying in high school. It’s actually just an mp3 of the class session in which I told the story to my students (there was bullying going on in that grade). I just fired up GarageBand and recorded it as I shared it with my class.

That’s one way to do it. Other ways:

• a blog post
• a webcam video
• a Skypecast
• a Comic Life or photo-essay
• a VoiceThread
• [your idea here]

If none of those work for you, but you have a story to tell, you can also leave a comment or drop me an email volunteering for a Skype conference call, where we can take more of a group story-telling session. I can do the editing and turn it into a podcast.

I hope this makes sense to you. It does to me. Jack’s comment strengthened my belief that, short of somehow stopping bullying – and come on, it’s been with us as long as war – one of the most helpful things we can do is offer ourselves, and our stories, as living proof that the nightmare can be survived, and this dream called life can become sweeter as it moves into adulthood.

I often throw dreamy ideas like this out on this blog, and they land with a thud. This one seems a likely candidate as the latest in that series. But I hope not. My bullying podcast gets a surprising number of visits from people googling “real life bullying stories” and such, and it gets downloaded quite a bit too.

So there is a need.

And instead of putting more energy into “stop bullying” sermons (which I’m not saying we should stop), we can maybe devote it to stories of hope.

I know it’s a busy time, so if you can only get around to it later – this summer, even – that’s fine. Just link here whenever it’s done. If we get enough of these, we can make a permanent site for them on a wiki, or even a dedicated blog.

And by the way: this offer is open to any students out there with anything to say as well. I’d love to host a Skype conference call about this topic.

Photo: Locker by Steven Fernandez

[Update: I added a complete novel you should be able to guess, just to give you an idea of what this would look like (h/t to Adrienne for the spark).]

Going Deeper with Post-Clouds

Since a lot of people seemed to enjoy the TweetClouds as Windows of the Soul meme, I thought this bit of serendipity snagged from some tweeted link might interest you as well. It might even have some classroom use as a reflective tool for student bloggers.

It’s called TagCrowd. In a nutshell, it takes any text and creates a tag cloud based on the text’s word frequency.

I decided to make a Tag Crowd of all posts on this blog for this month of April. I think I’ll make it an end-of-month ritual from now on. It will serve as a visual snapshot of my month’s obsessions. So here’s

April ‘08 on Beyond School*:

–at a glance, I can see this was the month of Ali, Lolita, Project Global Cooling, Diigo, Speech v. Talking, Twitter, and a Debate about Writing. That pretty much sums April up. Kind of cool. (What would REALLY be cool is feeding all posts and comments from an entire blog, but I know of no easy way to generate a text doc from an XML export. Anybody?)

The site suggests more uses – including educational ones – here:

TagCrowd is taking tag clouds far beyond their original function:

• as topic summaries for speeches and written works
• for visual analysis of survey data
• as brand clouds that let companies see how they are perceived by the world
• for data mining a text corpus
• for helping writers and students reflect on their work
• as name tags for conferences, cocktail parties or wherever new collaborations start
• as resumes in a single glance
• as visual poetry

The list goes on and continues to grow.

Update: Here’s that novel, complete 100-odd pages of text (but see Adrienne’s comment for a better idea).

It’s a voluntary meme, like the last one. No poetry involved.

*FYI: I couldn’t get the embed code to work on WP 2.5, so I just took a screenshot.

It’s almost 6 p.m. here in Seoul, and that’s bedtime for this nocturne. Before curling up in Morpheus’ arms, I want to throw this screenshot of my Tweetcloud up here (thanks to Cathy Nelson for sharing that one). It’s an interesting little thing, this tag cloud of your most frequent tweet words. The largest words are most frequent from your tweet history, the medium fairly frequent, the smallest less so, but apparently still frequent enough to gain a space on your cloud.

The temptation to see it as a window to your soul – or your Twit-soul, anyway – seems a respectably objective hypothesis that, better still, opens up a bit of fun. So here’s the cloud, followed by a little playful (but sometimes pregnant?) poetasting:

The “self-promoter” (i.e., guy who likes to share his thoughts and seek yours in reply) inevitably tops the cloud with “New Post.” (Shamelessly) Guilty. (But note: We can promote others too, as below )

But I’m happy to see the next most frequent tag is “Thanks,” next to the thanked-for “@dmcordell.”

There’s lots of poetry there too. I especially like:

From the obsessive AP Lit teacher:

Check classroom – college coming.

From the secular naturalist mystic:

Day’s delicious design.

From the army veteran who ain’t above a little spicy naughtiness now and then:

Doing @dswaters? Easy.

(Sue, I think I know you enough to know you’ll ROFL at that one! )

From the 1001 Flat World Tales and Project Global Cooling guy:

Getting global, going google.

From the best teacher in me:

Learn learning.

From the guy who loves passionate students worldwide:

Life, @lindseak! Look! Love!

From the guy who likes the virtual cocktail parties:

Need network! Play, pln!

From the blogging evangelist:

Post posts, ppl!

From the Church of Poetry acolyte:

Reading real right.

From the guy who pines from Korea for his life’s love, China:

Send Seoul Shanghai.

From the guy who reads Dean:

Share @shareski.

From the guy who reads Sylvia’s tweets from late-night jazz clubs:

Sleep, @smartinez.

From the guy who tried to pull his network into his classroom:

Sorry, @sschwister: story (student stuff). Sure.

From the guy who knows a true teacher:

@taylorteacher, teach teachers teaching.

From the guy who knows a smart librarian of the futur(a):

@technolibrary: tell.

From the guy who knows mashups:

Things think.

From the guy who blogs (almost) daily:

Thinking time today.

From the guy looking for young fires wanting kindling:

Wait. Want. Watch.

From the lonely groom in exile:

Wedding week.

From the guy who Will makes chuckle:

Weird wiki, @willrich45!

From the wannabee Whitmanesque bard:

Wish! Wonder! Work, world!

From the guy who just passed 500 posts in 16 months, after 25 years of writing almost nothing:

Write years.

If you want to play likewise, call it a voluntary meme. Link back here so we can also see your “twit soul.”

[Since my students just finished reading Nabokov's Lolita, I thought I'd give their responses to the notion that it shouldn't be taught in upper secondary. This is the third in the Why We Should Teach Lolita in High School series. See Number One here, Number Two here, with many interesting comments. If you want to comment, please read those posts - especially the comments - first. The 21st century, social media/web 2.0 context is important here.] Just one for the Long Tail: I posted the question below in a forum to my AP Literature students – all 17-18-year-olds, all, except one, ethnic Korean but Westernized anglophones:

I blogged about teaching this novel, and my readers were split on whether AP Lit students should be allowed to read it. What do you think? Should it be banned from high school “college level” literature classes? Why or why not?

Below is every response in the forum, in the order they were posted. I didn’t cherry-pick, and I only removed names. All said AP Lit students should be allowed to read it; two suggested making an alternate available for those uncomfortable with the premise; one expressed discomfort (not as bad a thing in a classroom as it could be elsewhere). Several addressed the benefit of exposure to this before they hit it in solitude in college. And many were plain puzzled that people think the book is any worse than nighttime television or movies. (A few made me scratch my head. Follow-up discussion time approaches.)

It just seemed right to put their voices here. Here they are:

Student Responses to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita:

3.1. I don’t think it should be banned. There is nothing to ban about really. I don’t understand why we have to protected from great literary works just because it has inappropriate concepts like sex. I think AP Lit students should be definitely allowed to read it though I’m not so sure about just the general seniors or other grades that aren’t mature to handle it. It really depends on the maturity level and how the students can handle that inside a classroom. Besides, for AP classes, which are supposed to be “college prerequisite” classes, should be handling students that are ready to take the advanced material for college and should level up to the college level. Out of the shell, I say.

More under the fold . . .

Read the rest of this entry »

{Update 15 April: After reading this and the comments, be sure to read this follow-up post and the comments there. Interesting stuff in those comments.]

Constance incarnate Diane Cordell tagged me for this literature-themed meme begun by Paul C. at quoteflections. It’s a fun one for me, for a couple of reasons. But first, here are the rules

• Select and briefly review one teen novel, classic or modern, which is a sure antidote to the daze of high school.
• Title your post Meme: High School Daze to Praise.
• Include an image with your post.
• Tag four blogger colleagues.

Why Fun #1: I Think I Wrote This Blurb Years Ago (A Pedagogical Parable)

Before I started blogging, I piddled around in an AP Literature list-serv. I wrote a little post to share with other teachers there, and somebody emailed me and asked me if he could add it to his Huck Finn resources site, because he liked it. Why fun? It was the first time anybody (outside of a teacher or somebody I’d written emails or letters to) ever noticed my writing. It was only around five years ago, so I find it both pedagogically pregnant and psychologically cute that I, a 40-year-old professional literature teacher, spent the rest of the day floating a couple inches above the earth like the tooth fairy had just slipped a million under his pillow. Somebody out there in the world plucked something I did with words, and told me it had value.

Do I have to spell it out? Phi Beta Kappa (okay, from a state university, but still , Magna Cum Laude (is that supposed to be capitalized?), Yadda Academy Yadda – all those “honors” didn’t hold a candle to this simple act of spontaneous recognition by a real reader whose bizness wasn’t grading what I wrote. When I saw the little thing posted on his website, I felt like maybe I could try being a Writer.

And this is why at least our excellent student writers should be blogging. End of Parable.

Now here’s the funny part: I searched for the Twain website that housed my little (weedy) rose, and it’s gone to Website Heaven, I guess. I couldn’t find it on Google, anyway (and yes, I tried Wayback Machine). But I searched a little more, and found this:

Some Passed-Over Classics
Rule Of The Bone, by Russell Banks

Arguably one of the funniest books in recent history. A contemporary retelling of Huck Finn, Banks has turned Huck (named Bone) into a 14 year-old stoner from upstate New York, who drops out of high school and eventually meets the Jim character (called the I-Man) who is a 40 year-old Rastaman living in an abandoned school bus in Plattsburg, NY. Together they make a pilgrimage to Jamaica where Bone believes his father is living, and where I-Man can resume his life as marijuana dealing shaman. Although the premise might sound a bit sophomoric, the story so neatly and creatively translates Twain’s classic into the modern world that you can’t help finding the time to read the whole thing in a day or two.

Why do I find this funny? Because the author is not attributed, and I’m not sure if it’s what I wrote – but I’m almost positive it is. If it’s not, is this plagiarism? You tell me.

I also find this interesting because of the name and thrust of this meme: “From High School Daze to Praise.” If I get that thrust right, it’s aimed at how soporific most assigned, schooly novels are for students (for students, mind you) who are living today and reading things their grannies read – and would still “morally” approve – in high school. Sanitized by either time or content, the novels we feel safe assigning are the ones that steer us clear of the rocks of parental complaint. Graphic depictions of sex? Challenges to Church or State (it’s okay if it’s a challenge to another country’s state, by the way)? We want to keep our job, so we keep these novels out of our students’ hands. And the upshot of this schooly bowdlerization of the taboo-probing nature of literature at its most powerful is this: “High School Daze,” to quote the meme. The students switch off of literature and switch on to pop culture, letting Marilyn Manson or Tupac, Quentin Tarentino or the Daily Show fill the shoes that real literature could fill for them. The Banks novel above? It’s a real depiction of teenage life for so many of our students – drugs, crime, a chilling pederast, a teen Hero’s Journey through that real world we so fear in our classrooms.

Why Fun #2: Case in Point

I took an AP Literature workshop from the queen of AP Literature – she wrote the book for the College Board – and the final assignment was an AP Literature syllabus that would win the approval of the College Board bureaucrats.

I included in the syllabus a novel that, besides being one of the most mesmerizing displays of prose artistry in the English language, was also guaranteed to pique the interest of that most difficult of audiences – high school seniors. I’m talking about Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

The AP Literature Queen’s reaction was predictable, but no less disappointing for that: “I advise you,” she said (and I paraphrase), “not to teach Lolita. Think about it. The protagonist is a 40-something literature teacher like you, and he becomes sexually involved with a school-girl younger than your students.”

I thought long and hard about that advice. AP Literature touts itself as a “college level course,” yet it’s advising me to teach it like my students can’t handle adult content. It’s encouraging me to perpetuate the Daze. So we’re reading Lolita this month.

I think I can say they all love it. I also think I can say they can handle it – and if they can’t, they should learn to, now more than ever.

Now more than ever, with social networking and blogging and Facebook and so many other global entryways into our students’ lives, Lolita is relevant. It raises the questions we need to raise. Are there predators out there? Should minors shut themselves off from all adults because of that? (I’m thinking of my introduction of my students to my Twitter network of educators who have been so helpful in their learning this semester.) Or should minors instead learn to distinguish the adult angels from the adult devils out there, and to conduct themselves wisely and react wisely to any bad apples among the barrel brimming with good ones?

And besides this tangential benefit, there is the purely literary one: by teaching Lolita and similar mature works, we introduce our students to the world of real literature – shocking, unsettling, disruptive, paradigm-complicating if not -shattering – and give them the opportunity to discover why we adults read it.

Or else we trot out the same old “safe” novels breaking the now-safe old taboos. The Scarlet Letter, anyone? AP Literature, were it alive when Hawthorne’s novel was new, surely would have advised against teaching it then. But we can teach that one now. In its exploration of now-quaint adultery, can’t we admit that now, in content and (archaic) style, this novel that once dazzled today only . . . . dazes?

I’d love to hear students in comments here.

Now who do I tag (I don’t believe in “whom”)? Okay: Nathan Lowell, Bud Hunt, Jeff Wasserman, Doug Noon.

h/t to @drthomasho on Twitter for this Gary Vaynerchuk tip and a nice change of focus. I’ll make it a voluntary meme. As Gary says, if we can make time for Twitter color wars, we can make time to prop a good person. A fun, lovely idea for the beginning of Spring.

My good person of the day? History teacher John Larkin from Oz comes to mind – generous with his comments (I see him all over the web), gentlemanly in tone, of a scholarly bent, but in a down-home way. A fine writer too, with good enough taste to put Nick Cave in his sidebar.

His shining “good people” moment for me this week: Offering some first aid to my iTunes when he heard I’d accidentally deleted my entire 18GB library.