Beyond School

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.

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*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 . . .

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