Beyond School

After watching the following video on Dean Shareski’s blog (thanks to Kate Tabor for the alert):

Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

–and then watching this immensely disturbing clip from the Uncounted documentary about election theft in the 2004 USA elections:

–and in the 2006 elections:

–it should be no wonder that I fantasize that, on election day 2008, students and teachers take cellphones and video cameras to the voting centers, and show what a smart mob can do to defend democracy.

You can see ten more clips from Uncounted here, and order the DVD here.

I never had a civics class in school. Are they still taught in the US? And are educators either practicing or modeling politically engaged behavior in their own lives? What’s our ratio of communicating to our elected officials in proportion to tweeting our networks, for example? Do we need to reflect on that?

The elections are just around the corner. What a learning opportunity for our students and ourselves - especially if we act to ensure our votes are counted.

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1. Pew News IQ Quiz: America’s college graduates score a D- (61%) on basic news knowledge.

(click for larger image)

Take the Pew quiz here. It’s only 12 questions.  It raises a few questions, among which these interest me most:

a)  I haven’t lived in the States since ‘98, and haven’t consumed any mainstream US news or TV as a habit since then.  I get my news primarily from political and cultural blogs.  Yet I scored 11/12 correct, compared to 7.4/12 correct for US college graduates.  The question:  What does this say about the US mainstream media’s performance in contributing to an informed citizenry? (I assume most Americans still watch and read mainstream US news.  Maybe I’m wrong.)

b) How does our e-blogosphere and -twittersphere measure up against these results?  If we educators are similarly uninformed, are we connecting at the expense of staying informed?

The State of the Republic reflected in these results makes the following two entries a bit more understandable:

2. Texas Board of Education Approves Bible Study Elective Class

Here’s FOX News on the story

(Historically-informed people will notice that the blond “expert” perpetuates the fallacy that America’s founding fathers were Christians, when many of them were either partly or fully Deist, believing little of the miracle stories or other magical claims of the Church. And she’s going to be teaching the classes )

The New York Times adds this bit of research, to pre-empt the “there’s nothing wrong with teaching it as history” argument:

Mark Chancey, associate professor in religious studies at Southern Methodist University, has studied Bible classes already offered in about 25 districts. His study found most of the courses were explicitly devotional with almost exclusively Christian, usually Protestant, perspectives. It also found that most were taught by teachers who were not familiar with the issue of separation of church and state.

Since Texas shares with California the biggest sway in national education issues, this bit of nose-thumbing at the Constitutional separation of Church and State is not trivial - instead, it’s a retreat from the third millennium to the first.

Secular and non-Christian parents in Texas must be thrilled to pay for religious indoctrination in their schools.  And perhaps the money should go instead to basic geography and geopolitics, as the next item shows:

3. McCain Looks at “Struggle” on the “Iraq-Pakistan Border”

So okay, forgive him on his internet illiteracy, his fifth-from-the-bottom GPA from the Naval Academy, his admitted “need for education” on economics.  As he says, he’s still better at foreign policy, right?

I hate to say “wrong,” but jeez, watch this 20-second interview clip and tell me how not to?

McCain: We have a lot of work to do. It’s a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq-Pakistan border.

–what else can I say, as a social studies teacher, but sheesh: wrong.  There is no Iraq-Pakistan border. (Unless he plans to create one by occupying Iran - surely the most justifiably nervous country on the planet. Sandwiched between the US occupation of Iraq on the west and of Afghanistan on the east, and sitting on some massive oil deposits, wouldn’t you be paranoid about your defense?)

Defenders will say this was maybe a slip-up, or his advisers are there to save us from his “knowledge”-base, or whatever, but I don’t buy it for two reasons: first, we’re seeing a pattern and a history of what I’ll politely call “deficient understanding of basic things” in this candidate; and second, we ignored similar warning signs from the last president and elected him based on his persona instead of his intelligence - and look where that got everybody.

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More on McCain. Whatever your loyalties, suspend them for a minute to just listen to what McCain says about his lack of understanding of basic - and vital - tools for our century.  In his own words, he’s “illiterate.” (And yes, the video is cheesy and a bit mean, but the real footage doesn’t lie.)

What has McCain been doing with his spare time over the last 20+ years? Hasn’t he been curious at all about this stuff? It’s like ignoring the telephone because morse code works just fine for your purposes.

If it’s not lack of curiosity, then what other logical explanations do we have? Lack of motivation to learn? Or fear of learning things that seem hard?

Whatever way you slice it, it’s not a comforting quality for a person who wants to steer us back on a good path into the 21st century.

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Real-time Twitter Search - Tweet Scan

Education for Well-Being gets my vote as one of the most important educational sites on the web, period. Bill Farren makes the videos he posts there, writes lucid and relevant discussions of them, and links to supplementary resources for possible classroom use. His written posts are as well-crafted as his videos, drawing on a wide body of literature about environmental and social well-being. I’m a hack in comparison. Unsubscribe to me, if that’s what it takes to get you to subscribe to him. I really think he’s that vital to education and the future.

Bill describes his latest video, “Peak Air: Charge It,” as an “attempt to visually define “unsustainable’.” As visual definitions go (and Bill, you should have added “audio” as well, because your soundtracks always impress), it’s first-rate. See for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w9Qbz3T2Js

Go to the post itself for the written discussion and supplemental links. It’s a full (informal) lesson plan with a great visual aid, just waiting for you to push “play” to start the learning.

Related: Beyond School Posts about (and by) Bill Farren / Ed4WB

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[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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