Beyond School

Jaeho and Younsuk were gracious enough to give me a half hour of their time this Monday night for this Skype interview about the Basketball Without Borders blog and podcast project. I’ll go ahead and re-embed the video interview I shot with them directly after their Skype interview with their college basketball hero KJ Matsui a month ago (see the original post here):

A month later now, they discuss with me how having their own real-world, self-selected blog project for our English Seminar elective feels (click here for all posts about this “networked learning” class). As I say in the podcast, this class is far from perfect, but Jaeho and Younsuk give some very interesting feedback on how this real-world project-based learning approach has improved their speaking and writing skills - and motivation - differently than what they’ve experienced in a traditional “writing and speech” class.

Again, this is my first attempt for this type of teaching. Listening to Jaeho and Younsuk makes me want to stick with it beyond this “beta” version next time around. I can’t urge Language Arts teachers strongly enough to give these guys a listen. It’s a half hour, edited, with nice music for you and everything.

A request: I begged these guys to let me link to their site for a preview - they want to finish editing and post a couple more interviews with basketball stars they’re working on before unveiling it to the basketball world - and they gave me permission to give a sneak preview to you educators. So go ahead and take a look at Basketball Without Borders (love that alliteration!), listen to their podcast with K.J. Matsui, and show them some comment love.

The podcast is enhanced with chapter headings for easy navigation in iTunes (right-click here and “save as” to download). Click the player below to listen to it here:

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Extending my last post on why I think Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita should be required reading at some point in high school language arts classes:

In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Oedipus kills his father, then marries and impregnates his mother: we teach this parricidal, incestuous, antique “classic” to 14-year-olds.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the prince’s uncle murders his brother and marries that brother’s wife, enjoying her in “incestuous sheets“: again, we teach this 400-year-old Renaissance “classic” to 15-year-olds.

And let’s not forget the sentimental favorite about a 12-year-old whose father is trying to marry her off to a prize bachelor of at least 25, and in which instead the 12-year-old heroine elopes with her maybe 14-year-old lover, and spends a night of tender love-making a few paces away from her iconic balcony. Their pillow-talk the morning after their love-making is something we have 13-year-olds recite by the millions in our annual, usually painful, front-of-the-classroom recital days. Yes, I’m talking about Romeo and Juliet. Juliet would be a middle-schooler today - and her father would be in jail for pandering her to his cellmate Paris, the noble pedophile.

In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a 40-year-old pedophiliac professor of literature marries an over-sexed 12-year-old’s mother, who shortly thereafter dies in a freak accident, plunging the professor and the 12-year-old in a morbid love affair that ruins both their lives. Often brutal, as often tender, more often laugh-out-loud funny, but never vulgar or graphic, this acknowledged masterpiece and “classic” of modern, 20th century literature - “the only convincing love story of our [20th] century,” according to Vanity Fair - sends educators running for the hills.

It’s a tragic irony and a very telling double standard: teach controversy from old, safely removed times? No problem. (Well, maybe just skim over Paris’ age, Juliet’s loss of virginity, Oedipus’ and Gertrude’s incest.) But teach the same issues about modern schoolgirls? No, no, no. That hits too close to the real world. Let them learn about that, if at all, from their sensationalistic prime-time TV’s at home: To Catch a Predator, anyone? School is not the place for unsafe subjects. We only think critically about safe ones here.

That we should think about these subjects in our classrooms - our young females, in particular, but our young males too, as is shown below - can be supported by a few statistics (USA only):

• Teens 16 to 19 were three and one-half times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault.
• According to the Justice Department, one in two rape victims is under age 18; one in six is under age 12.
• While 9 out of 10 rape victims are women, men and boys are also victimized by this crime. In 1995, 32,130 males age 12 and older were victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault.
• Nationally, nearly one million young women under age 20 become pregnant each year. That means close to 2800 teens get pregnant each day.
• Approximately 4 in 10 young women in the U.S. become pregnant at least once before turning 20 years old.
• In the U.S., 1 in 4 sexually active teens become infected with an STD every year.

Some comments from my last post, and from the thread on Bud Hunt’s post that splintered this discussion (not your fault, Bud - you asked them to come here), give us some main reasons we choose to be (un?)witting accomplices to daily contemporary tragedies by only teaching the ancient, irrelevant ones. PaulC, who started the meme, commented:

Do I want to take a chance and have the Parents’ Club down my neck for teaching an ‘inappropriate’ novel? The principal has enough fires to put out.

Of course, the censorship debate arises occasionally for many different reasons, sometimes over trite reasons. It’s worthwhile to take a stand, but is it worth it for the study of Lolita? For that reason I think the novel should be left for post secondary study.

As the above statistics show, the damage is too often done by the time of “post-secondary study.” The principal might be enjoying a no-alarm day in the fire department, the parent enjoying a nice day in denial-land, and the teacher enjoying a nice cool neck, but at what cost to the latest quiet statistic sitting at one of the classroom desks, trying to make sense of this thing that happened last night, and that her school never warned her about in the daytime? This latest example of “fear and irrelevance in education” gives one tragically twisted twist to the term “hidden curriculum.” (Update: But Paul, I hear you: other ways than Lolita exist to educate about this - but are principals and parents using any ways at all, by and large?)

Charlie Roy gives an interesting angle in his comment, largely sympathetic to the idea of teaching the realities of over-flirtatious teens playing with fire and getting burned by unseemly adults via Lolita, when he writes,

I don’t think Lolita would fly at my school. At far as age appropriateness goes it is a hard one to nail. Some argue adolescence has been extended into the early 30’s. If that is the case then it might be an inappropriate read.

I can only respond that, if adolescence is now delayed into our 30’s, as Charlie states, isn’t that because schools perpetuate the situation by infantilizing teens? (See Dr. Robert Eptstein’s The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen)

New York librarian and teacher Diane Cordell nails an irony by now cliche, but no less pernicious, about American “family values,” I want to say, when she comments:

Re. teaching Lolita: about 5 years ago, our HS (grades 11-12) English teacher used “In Cold Blood” as the basis of a class unit. The principal asked me to find examples of other schools using this book, and I did so. No parents objected to the choice of text. When we get back from Spring Break, I’ll ask the present teacher and our HS principal what the reaction would be if “Lolita” were listed as required reading. I can almost guarantee that murder would be deemed more suitable subject matter than sex!

–and Corrie Bergeron, the “crunchy conservative” foil to my own more liberal viewpoint, does the conservative view a good deed with this bit of fresh air:

5th graders are having sex. 1 in 4 American teen girls has an STD. (1 in 2 if she’s African-American.) Not that this is a good thing, but it’s reality, today. Literature deals with the human condition, makes it accessible, gives you a proxy to explore ideas. A safe place to talk about things without getting too personal.

Teach Lolita in high school? Maybe not such a bad idea.

Oh-and-by-the-way… worldview-wise, I have a fair amount in common with the Puritans. But ignorance makes poor armor.

Meanwhile, over on Bud’s offshoot from my post, Joe, a principal, weighs in against my view:

Clay - we are public servants. We work for an elected school board, under the twin rubrics of the state and federal governments. You said: “I shouldn’t have to ask a parent’s permission to teach it any more than I do to have students read James Joyce, Huck Finn, or D.H. Lawrence.” I disagree with that line of thought for the potential pitfalls it could cause. We have an adopted curriculum for a reason. A process exists. Obviously you have a set of values that are important to you. I have a set of values that are important to me. I can almost garuntee that you would not want some of my personal views taught in the classroom. Public education should not be a free for all!

Miguel Guhlin joins the discussion over there with too many interesting lines for me to snatch, but this remark is noteworthy for a connection I want to make to Joe’s, above:

Far better the teacher who, like the local Fireman’s Halloween Haunt House, enjoys the trust of the community that nothing found in that House will be judged objectionable by anyone….

–and that connection, namely, has to do with notions of democracy, and of “public values.” With all due respect, Joe’s invocation of public education being no space for a “free for all,” no place for conflicting “values” to come under the scrutiny of critical thought and inquiry, just strikes me as un-democratic. Miguel’s ideal of ideas not “judged objectionable by anyone” seems (though I think unintentionally) similarly contrary to what democracy is. The public, to state the obvious, consists of wildly divergent and often conflicting viewpoints. If nobody finds an idea objectionable, then how relevant and engaging - at least in a humanities classroom - is that idea? And why are we devoting time to safe ideas, when the health of a democracy consists of citizens informed about those uncomfortable but real controversies demanding civic resolution? Those viewpoints can, and I would argue should, in a healthy democracy, receive scrutiny and debate in our schools. That authentic critical thinking is the remedy for the biases and prejudices that plague every democracy.

Joe, I would argue, mistakes indoctrinating students - teacher teaching what to think - with teaching students to think. Uncomfortable? Yes. But so is the uncritical, prejudiced alternative. And call me idealistic, but the possibility now, with online forums and other ways to include parents and communities in classroom debates about real-worldly issues instead of unreal schooly ones - that possibility, to me, points to schools as true centers of learning, not just for students, but for communities.

Back to Lolita. Most people, first of all, probably haven’t read it, and so are arguing from a position of misinformation, at best, or at worst, of ignorance. I just finished it for the fourth or fifth time. It is every bit as disturbing as it was the first time. It shows the dangerous consequences of young girls not conscious of the effects of their fashions and attitudes; it shows how deceptively normal and respectable pedophiles can be; it uses no curse words, no vulgarities, and generally does not dwell on carnal scenes. More interestingly, though, its fictional editor, in the preface, claims the novel contains a “moral apotheosis,” while Nabokov himself, in the cagey Afterword, claims his novel has no moral at all. That contradiction alone opens up a discussion.

And in the meantime, our students, increasingly out there blogging and tweeting and face(book)ing the ever-more-porous public world, are learning, in the safety of a modern classic, a few lessons that might save them from becoming an addition to the statistics above.

I suppose I could stick to the safe, and teach them to identify oxymorons so they get higher SAT scores. But I’d rather help them learn not to be world-ignorant morons period. Significantly, the word “moron,” according to my Leopard dictionary, originated in “the early 20th century (as a medical term denoting an adult with a mental age of about 8–12): from Greek mōron, neuter of mōros ‘foolish.’” We can keep ignoring the realities of life after age 12 in our schools at our own - and our students’ - peril.

The funny thing? My students are a matter of months away from being legal adults. Doesn’t that underline how weird it is to treat them like children until the very last minute of their minority? And doesn’t that set them up to be quite the naive young adults when they walk, all vulnerable, into the real world after graduation? It’s all so unreal - and we’re talking schools here, so that’s hardly surprising - but sheesh, it’s bewilderingly surreal.

Photo by macropoulos

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I just got off a live webcast with Teachers Teaching Teachers - permalink forthcoming when they post the podcast - that was entitled, I think, “How to Make YouthTwitter Less ‘Schooly’.”

The really cool thing about it?  There were as many students on the episode as teachers. “Students Teaching Teachers”?  I like it.

I learned a lot, seriously, by listening to them discuss how blogging, Twitter, global collaboration, and the whole nine yards felt to them.  What worked, what didn’t.

Kudos to TTT for making it happen. I hope it’s the first of many more.

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I’ve been a Diigo user for two years come July. Seems like everybody and their grannies have adopted it in a Twitter-induced stampede over the last two days (I think Will had something to do with it).

As I said on Twitter, the flood of emails requesting “friendship” on Diigo sort of shocked me (I despise email), since I wasn’t in the loop when the stampede started. I’m not sure I want to go Facebook with Diigo any more than I want to go Facebook with Facebook - I’m a fairly quiet person who tends to be happy roaming solo in his own flow, as taboo as that confession may be in these share-happy times (and it’s funny how manically I can twitter, and yet still feel uninvaded and uncrowded). So all these emails (which I’ve since turned off) make me feel my little secret reading cafe became trendy overnight, and too loud now to read in peace. Maybe I’ll come around to the social benefits in time.

That being said, I’ve been evangelizing Diigo on these pages since day one, as you’ll see in this compendium of three old posts showing how I used Diigo in the classroom over the last year and a half.

A caveat: for my own research, I love Diigo. It allows me to annotate, bookmark (and share automatically to del.icio.us), and highlight clips - all tagged, too. But just as I’ve had little luck getting students or colleagues to use feed aggregators, I’ve had no better luck getting them to switch on to the power of Diigo. So if you use any of these methods in your own classroom - or use Diigo in any other way with your students - I advise you to build in part of the assessment to be weighted toward demonstrated regular use of the tool. Schooliness is Web 1.0 (if it’s web at all), and our students seem to prefer schooliness over anything new every bit as much as their teachers do. A word to the wise.

That being said, here you go: Three uses of Diigo in the history and English classroom:

Screencast: Using Diigo on Student Scribe Blogs as Test Review “Sheets” (20 September 2007)

Here’s one more tutorial, 4 minutes, on using Diigo on Scribe blogs as test review sheets, with students as members of a Diigo Group. I just trained my students today in AP Lit, set them up on the class Diigo Group, and “shared” my highlights and annotations of the class scribe posts (it only works on permalinks, not on main blog pages) with the kisAP07 group. They use that as “test reviw.”

Here it is:

From Red Pen to Invisible Ink: Assessing Student Blogs with Diigo Groups (23 March 2007)

You are a young writer trying to experience what being a real writer is, because…your teacher is making you: sore spot one (but I can live with this one, for obvious reasons).

You are a young writer trying to have that experience by writing on a web-log (I’ve decided to outlaw the term “blogging” with students, and substitute the correct, grand old word: “Writing”), so that you can experience real audience, real feedback, real conversation based on your writing: blessing one.

You are a young writer who sees that someone has left a comment on one or your writings on your web-log (the word “blog” is a blighted thing as well, in the Language Arts classroom. From now on, we use “web-log”). What a delight–and a new one. You click the link, curious and expectant–how is the world responding to me as a writer?

But you see this:

You misspelled “frustrated.”
Is this a strong introduction?
Nice use of the appositive in Sentence Pattern 4, but your compound sentence in SP 3 is a comma splice because you forgot to include a coordinating conjunction after the comma.
B+.Your teacher.

“Well,” you say, “It was interesting. Thanks, but no thanks. Back to MySpace for some real conversation.”

Luckily, Chris Watson sparked an idea in one of our podcasted conversations about this problem: Somehow find a way to use Diigo to assess student web-log writing without defacing the students’ “intellectual property” and turning writing into “schooliness.”

So here’s my latest experiment, with thanks to Chris (and to Diane Quirk, who suggested this much earlier): using Diigo Groups (with a separate Diigo login for me, to keep my own bookmarks separate from my classroom bookmarks).

My students have joined the Group. Now when they go to their web-logs, after logging in to their Diigo account and setting “Show Annotations > Show Group Annotations” on their Diigo toolbar, they will see the highlights of specific passages from their writing that I have left (and I can start students doing this too, it occurs to me in a very attractive flash), and my annotations will pop up on their screen when they hover their mouse over the highlights.

Also good, our Diigo Groups Bookmarks page records all highlights and annotations I have made on one page. Students can use that to see all feedback I have given to specific strengths and weaknesses on all students writings.

And since they’re using anagrams instead of first-name usernames on their blogs, there’s less of a chance of any embarrassment resulting from this “public feedback”–with “invisible ink.”

The screenshot below is an example of what one student will see when she visits her blog with Diigo turned on.

How to Highlight and “Sticky-Note” Websites, and Save It All Online, Using Diigo (1 January 2007)

Here is an updated version of the Diigo tutorial. Your students will love you (not immediately, but only after they’re gone–they’re students, after all) for teaching them this great research tool!

And you’ll love being able to access your online notes of every website you’ve researched yourself, too–from any computer in the world.

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This is the excellent foppery of the world.
–Edmund, in Shakespeare’s King Lear

Remember last summer those Korean Christian missionaries who came up with the bright idea of spreading their gospel in, of all places, Afghanistan? Sure you do. It was all over the news for a couple weeks. They were taken hostage by the Taliban, and a couple of their pastors were executed. Strangely enough, they were from a church in my old neighborhood in Seoul.

I don’t mean to be callous, but my reaction was: “Well, what did they expect?” Talk about “tempting the Lord.” Why not trust Him to protect a scuba dive in a lava bed? “What were these people thinking?” I asked.

They didn’t know what I want to call the First Rule of Evangelizing: Know Your Potential Converts.

I think we web 2.0 evangelists - at least this one - have to come to terms with a similar case of our own foppery: spreading the Gospel of RSS.

Even though we all use RSS readers - and even that’s a questionable assumption as the flood of feeds rises, and I, for one, find myself reading Twitter links far more than RSS feeds these days - can we all agree that our success rate at converting others to do the same is dismally low?

As a classroom teacher who has tried to convert students to the Good News of RSS Aggregators for almost two years now, the picture is even grimmer. All those hours walking students through setting up accounts, finding feeds, and all those additional hours of trying to guide them to the explosive learning that comes from the feed-reading habit? Fast forward a year later, and almost none of them have seen the Light.

Burn me at the stake, dear reader, and rail at this heretic if you must, but I must draw this conclusion: Maybe RSS is not The Only Way. We need a New Gospel.

Buddha is said to have advised seekers of Truth, faced with so many dogmas and doctrines and sects and claims, “Don’t mistake the fingers for the moon.” (For the metaphorically-challenged, the Moon would be the Truth, and the Fingers would be all mortal attempts to formulate it. Buddha is saying not to mistake the attempted answers with the ineffable reality they try to contain. Words can’t touch the Ultimate Truth, whatever that may be. It’s another reason I’ve always thought Buddha was cool. I’d love to hang out with that guy.)

So to riff off The Awakened One: if reading blogs and such is the moon, and RSS is a finger pointing the way to them that the vast majority of humans are too lazy and habit-driven to adopt, let’s be open to other ways.

I’ll share one that I found the day it was launched, and used in a writing classroom the day after. It’s called Alltop.

Guy Kawasaki, former Apple Evangelist, author, venture capitalist, Truemors creator, and Top 100 Technorati blogger, launched Alltop.com about a month ago. True to his mantra-making form, he describes Alltop as an “Online Magazine Rack.” It’s an apt description. As this screenshot shows, Alltop’s main page feels like an online version of the magazine section at a Borders or Barnes and Nobles. Click on the picture for full-size:

You see the main categories -Work, Living, People, Interests, Culture, Geekery, Good, News - that function as the “sections” in a magazine area of a bookstore. And beneath each category, you see the “subsections” - under “Culture,” for example, you have Design, Fashion, Movies, Music, and Photography (since he’s asking for suggestions, I’ve asked Guy to add “Books” to this work-in-progress).

By clicking on any of the subsections, you drill deeper into that subject by going to its subdomain page - for example, culture.alltop.com. Here you get a page of links “top” sites about the topic and, as the screeshot below of the “Interests > Crime” page shows, the latest five feeds from each site. Again, click the picture for full-size view:

I chose to screenshot the Crime page because I have a student in my Networked Learning/PLN elective class who chose to do a project on detectives in real life, and on TV and film. She’s writing crime humor scripts that she wants to direct and film, so she needed to find websites to research real detective life and find plot ideas involving funny crimes. The “Dumb Criminals” and CSI sites were just what she needed for these purposes.

But I had all of my students in this class do an exercise about the importance of titles and opening paragraphs using the main page of whatever Alltop site best suited their self-designed project - sports journalism, restaurant and bar design, comfort foods and recipes, political satire, game reviews - and the final feature of Alltop that has value for teaching writing. You see it in the screenshot below: the popup first paragraph of each feed’s post:

So here’s how the writing exercise went: 1) Go to the topic on Alltop that fits your project; 2) List the three best, and three worst, blog or website titles from the page, and explain why they shine or stink; 3) Select the three best and worst post titles, and explain the same; 4) Hover over the links of posts and find three excellent introductions from the popups, and three lousy ones, and explain your choices; 5) Post your analyses on the group PLN blog (here’s an example from a student: “The Difference a Title Can Make”).

Since doing that exercise - and then assigning students to re-title and re-write the opening paragraphs of all their posts - I’ve seen the evidence that the lesson worked. And I’ve also found that Alltop is a way for my students to find fresh information about their interests - without facing the tribulations of evangelizing RSS readers.

Full disclosure: Beyond School is featured in Alltop’s Education page. But I was using Alltop in class before that. I’d switched my homepage to Alltop from Popurls.com, which featured only social bookmarking hits from del.icio.us, Digg, and so forth, and thus was uneven at best (the Ron Paul crowd learned how to manipulate these sites to push their posts to the top, along with many other sensationalistic titles). Alltop is an improvement for this reason.

Finally, be warned: puritanical classrooms will not be comfortable with Alltop because it features topics like “BLTG” - bi-sexual, lesbian, trans-sexual, gay - and it also features posts with some taboo vowel-consonant combinations. Me? I find it the perfect opportunity to train my students in not freaking out over real-world realities and language, and to get over any hangups about them caused by schooliness - whether Monday-Friday schooliness, or Sunday-schooliness. Let’s be real. They’re in high school, and they’re not strangers to these things.

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