Beyond School

In recent years, postmodernists have challenged the validity and need for the study of history on the basis that all history is based on the personal interpretation of sources. In his book In Defence of History, Richard J. Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge University, defended the worth of history. –Wikipedia: “History“

–the logic of the above quote is sloppy, in my view. Both sides are right: How can we argue with the Postmodernist insight into the basic “constructedness” of all (yes, all) texts? Textual narratives are written by individuals with biases, blind spots, no direct experience, limited sources, and other imperfections. So any historical or biographical narrative, from Gilgamesh to the Gospels to Tacitus to Thomas Friedman, is indeed, as the postmodernists claim, “based on the personal interpretation of sources,” and thus should be read with a healthy dose of skepticism and the need for evidence and logic.

But Evans is also right to “defend the worth of history.” It’s silly to think otherwise. That historians are neither omniscient, neutral, or infallible does not mean that history is unknown or unknowable. The evidence from the past - those letters, journals, books, artifacts, ruins, buildings, maps, and all the rest that we call “primary sources” - attests to the basic facticity of a person or event. Socrates existed and was executed in Athens: this seems safe to say, based on evidence from various sources of the time. But the person of Socrates, his character? Plato says “hero,” Aristophanes says “charlatan,” and a modern philosopher says “anti-democratic villain.” One person, Socrates, is defined differently by three different narrators’ personal (and “scholarly”) interpretations of him. And thinking about those interpretations, and ideally creating our own, does have value for us. Pity any democracy, for example, that is ignorant of Hitler’s fear- and anger-mongering manipulation of German voters to get himself legally appointed dictator. (In other words, pity Bush/Cheney’s United States?)

Again, the point: We need history, but we also need to understand the methods and practices of the historian - the search for evidence, its evaluation and selection, its literal “weaving” into, or omission from, narrative “text.”

Schools, as usual, generally score an F-minus in teaching students this “constructedness” of history. They’re too busy stuffing their victims’ heads with the names, dates, and summaries - the “facts” - that those victims will then be tested on. (In most cases, said victims will remember their test grades far longer than they’ll remember the content, since schools largely teach that grades are more important than learning.)

Anyway, this is a round-about intro to a comment thread I’ve been enjoying on Will Richardson’s recent “My Blogging Legacy” post. In that poignantly mind-bending post, Will imagines his children, after he himself has passed away,

. . . . turning to the computer and accessing an avatar representation of me who carried in him the compilation of all my writing, blogging, photos, movies, oral histories and more that I had created while I was alive. And that avatar was able to sort through all of that information and answer their questions, have a conversation with them in fact, in my voice. At some point in the dream, I realized that the avatar was not only feeding back historical data, but was also using the sum of my work to offer advice and counsel in ways that I most likely would have offered were I alive. Even though I wasn’t there physically, it’s like a piece of my brain lived on, one that was able to provide for my kids a richer understanding of their histories and legacies.

At a certain point, I riffed off Will’s idea, then Christopher Sessums chimed in with this:

I’ve been reflecting on the notion of ghost blogs, i.e., blogs of users who have died. I imagine this phenomena will begin to take on “new life” as the first wave of bloggers move on to that “undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns–” (Shak. Hamlet).

I think about how in meatspace we have a place to go to, to mourn, remember, reflect, pay our respects. What will this look like online?

Your post provides a wonderful vision of how it could be.

Given my own sense of mortality, it makes sense to start thinking/planning now, if only in a brainstorming-sense.

I shot back,

And Christopher, to throw the irresistible local flavor from East Asia in: how will these “ghost blogs” meld with Confucian ancestor worship? The laptop (or holograph) next to the photo of the deceased blogger-ancestor on the altar, behind the incense and candles?

Then Chris wrote:

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Where do blog posts go when we die? They never cease (provided your ISP is still in business).

. . . . I also like the fact that my identity is dispersed in tiny bytes across the ether. Being a puzzler, i.e., one who enjoys puzzles, I like the idea of searching across multiple forms of representation to create a picture of a person’s life. So I’m not sure I would want my identity isolated in one space, but instead distributed thus requiring those interested in me to explore and put together their own picture of me.

Then I riffed back with a fantasy history or non-fiction writing assignment - biographical writing, specifically. Since Chris then offered - threatened? - to “kiss” me in response (and though I virtually slapped him, I was flattered), I figure I’ll post that assignment idea here. I do think it’s cool enough, honestly, to pass on to any history or non-fiction writing teachers out there. Here it is:

A History Assignment I’d Like to See:

Chris, A belated Eureka-riff re: your “distributed identity”: a creative, project-based biography-writing or historiography teacher or professor could do some cool stuff treating our already-distributed online personae as “primary sources” from which student historians or biographers had to draw to construct a representation of us.

*INHALE*

What I mean is, like, “Write a biographical sketch of X in which X’s public blog represents his/her public life, but X’s comments on others’ blogs represents his/her (more) private life. Construct a narrative of X’s personal life, tastes, and thoughts by analyzing their Flickr photos, LastFM playlists, YouTube favorites, etc.”

I know I’m freer in comments than I am on my blog posts, for example. And that a good reader could infer a lot about me from those other “primary sources” listed above.

It would be even more interesting, from a literacy perspective, to have more than one person construct a biography or history of the same individual. If you and I, for example, had to sift through the same “legacy” Will has confetti’d the web with, odds are we’d construct significantly different identities due to our different selection/omission choices and subjective bents.

Interesting, anyway. Just playing around, whiling away the writer’s block.*

Wouldn’t that be cool? And wouldn’t students learn just how slippery history and biography are by comparing their different narrative constructions? And wouldn’t they learn, sidewise, about how revealing they can be with their online identities, when others decide to sift through them like this, and possibly think twice about what they reveal in all future posts?

—

(*Speaking of that writer’s block, it’s due to many factors: the Project Global Cooling concert went off quite successfully in a downtown Seoul nightclub last weekend, but was exhausting to pull off; I’m in the midst of moving into a new apartment; the last-weeks-of-school madness is full swing; my Airport Express wireless is wonky in my apartment; I’m changing my immigration status; my mother-in-law is still recovering from her stroke; and I’m leaving my school to take a year’s sabbatical, without pay, which necessitates its own host of preparations. Can you say “full plate”? But life is full, anyway, and I’m excited.)

Image: Quite Puzzling by Cayusa

Carolyn Foote wrote this week about the new Pew study on the effects of technology on teen writing. An article about the study in eSchool News (free subscription - well worth it - required) pulls out a few details that for me, at least, suggest some weird thinking. The “news” that

[t]eens who communicate frequently with their friends, and those who own more technology tools such as computers or cell phones, do not write more often for school or for themselves than less communicative and less gadget-rich teens

seems hardly news at all, doesn’t it? Is it me, or does it imply that some people think that The Vast Percentage of Teens Who, Like the Vast Percentage of Adults, Do Not Enjoy Writing will suddenly, because somebody plops a laptop, tablet, or cellphone in their hands, have some Road to Damascus experience that magically converts them to the Cult of Writing?

That implication seems embedded in the “finding” above, and it’s about as silly as expecting people to all become economists when they’re given their first checkbook.

If you go into a 1:1 program with fantasies that all students are going to become writers because of it, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Nothing makes a writer but the self-compelled need to write. And that’s a limited commodity now as always.

The eSchool news article continues with this further bit of non-”news,” which this time, though still making me chuckle, also quickens my pulse and gets my dander up a bit:

Teen bloggers, however, write more frequently both online and offline, the study says.

–check that language out, that loopy logic: “Teen bloggers,” we’re told, are teens who write frequently “both online and offline.” I’m no expert, now, but why are we calling teens who write a lot, with and without blogs, “bloggers”?

Any of you adult bloggers out there, are you with me in wanting to correct people who call you a “blogger” - some person who “makes blogs,” apparently, like a designer makes designs and a reporter makes reports - by telling them: “Actually, I’m a freaking writer. I just publish my own writing online on a blog. I don’t buy those daily word-counts on my blog at Wal-Mart. I write them.” Such sloppy language!

(Note that I didn’t say “good writer.” Mediocre and bad writers fill the ranks of bloggers as much as they do of newpapers, magazines, and books.)

It’s been a pet peeve of mine for a long time, this word “blogging.” The label cheapens the practice. Writing bloggers are writers, photo-bloggers are photographers, podcast-bloggers are audio producers, vloggers are video artists, etc, in teenhood as it is in adulthood.

So let’s revise that last excerpt for clarity:

Teen writers, however, write more frequently both online and offline.

Talk about a report from Captain Obvious. Give any writer a journal and pen, s/he’ll scribble away. Give him or her a blog, s/he’ll type away. There’s no mystery here.

Things get weirder here:

Forty-seven percent of teen bloggers write outside of school for personal reasons several times a week or more, compared with 33 percent of teens without blogs.

What, exactly, does that unidentified fifty-three percent of “teen bloggers” who do not “write outside of school for personal reasons” actually write on their blogs, then? Wait — hold it – I think I’m getting a whiff of something. Do you smell it?

Bad air! Bad air! It’s a homework blog! Another moronic oxymoron brought to you by Schooliness, Inc. Let’s cross this 53% off the Book of Writing, and focus on that lovely, remaining 47% who blog write on blogs, not because schools make them, but because they’re writers. Breathe in the perfume, folks - we’re in the rose-garden now of flowering young writers.

They’re the ones I want to teach - because they’re the ones who probably want to be taught about ways to improve their writing.

There. I said it: I’m an elitist as an English teacher.

I’m not a democrat when it comes to teaching writing. Just as Thomas Jefferson believed that all people are born equal, but natural differences create a “natural aristocracy” - one having nothing to do with money and everything to do with spirit (and I mean that naturally) - I believe the same is true in the classroom. A rich kid can’t pay me to want to help him become a better writer if he doesn’t show me, through the evidence of steady, self-impelled production, he has a writer in him. A working-class kid who does have a writer in her - who can point to hundreds of blog posts or journal pages having nothing to do with homework - will find not only my door open during lunch and after school, but also my Skype and Twitter at home. As I said in a comment on Carolyn’s blog, it’s

the bloggers mentioned in the survey above . . . who interest me, . . those who have the will to write, the seed of a writer, in them.

Those “kids” aren’t mere students. They’re writers.

Let’s keep looking at that Pew Garden, and try to find the prize roses. I think I see them hidden in this statistic:

Sixty-five percent of teen bloggers believe that writing is essential to later success in life.

Pop Quiz: Who are the “teen bloggers” who are the true writers?

a. the 65% of “teen bloggers” who “believe writing is essential to later success in life”

b. the 35% of “teen bloggers” who do not believe this.

If you answered “a,” I give you a zero.

To me, the answer is “b.” Because it implies that these young writers are writing not, as most of the consumerism-drugged “school is for money” customers in our classrooms do (and as the students in answer “a” seem to do), “to get a better GPA, go to a better college, get a better job, so I can buy a better house, car, and handbag.” This 35% in “b” wins my vote. They’re the prize roses. They write for the pleasure in the present, not the payoff in the future. [Update: Freshman Arthus trumps me in his comment. He gets an A+, I get a B.]

They’re writers.

A Revised Position Statement on Classroom Blogging, Two Years into the Fray:

And this brings me to the latest position-statement in my evolving views, after two years of experimenting with it in the classroom, of the value and place of blogging to teach writing in schools:

It should only be required in an elective “advanced blogging” class. But we need a better word than that tuneless aural trainwreck of a word, “blah - geeng.”

“Advanced writing,” though I’ve restricted this article to writers because the Pew study does the same, is no better a title, because “blogging” invites the natural talkers and interviewers, singers and raconteurs through podcasting; the natural symbolic and visual communicators through photo and computer graphic, fine arts and video blogging. So “advanced digital communication,” then?

You tell me. But I think you see what I mean, don’t you? Simply a workshop of the thirsty, the hungry to improve - the natural aristocracy of self-expression and communication.

Over the door I would post a big sign:

ROSES ONLY. NO STUDENTS ALLOWED.

Then we’d set to working - making perfume.

Images:

• De Petale, by Christiane Michaud
• untitled, by rosemary*
• rose for you…, by Lyubov

Relevant posts:

• 21st Century Education: Thinking Creatively by Anthony Chivetta, Students 2.0
• Dialogue with a New Student Blogger on the Question of Classroom Blogging

[Update 2: Goodness! A 75-comment debate exploded in less than a day.  Best sustained conversation among all commenters (not just responding to the post) that I've ever seen on this blog.  A true "cocktail party" about an important subject: Assessing with a bias toward writing, versus assessing to reward non-written communication skills equally in grades.]  [Update: Good comments in this one. Thanks to Adrienne Michetti (whose new team-blog looks promising), Claire Thompson, Sylvia Martinez of Generation Yes, and Arthus for rooting this post in the basics - which still aren't basic for so many. And do yourself a favor: watch the Ali video embedded below. It's the evidence of the argument, and a breath of fun to boot.]

I went into a restaurant downtown - you couldn’t do that back then, because things weren’t integrated yet - and I sat down with my [Olympic] gold medal around my neck, and the waitress came up, and I said, ‘Yes, I’d like, uh, a cup of coffee, and a hot dog.’ And she said, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t serve negroes here.’ And I got so angry, I said, ‘And I don’t eat them, either. Now bring me a hot dog!’ — Muhammad Ali, 1971 TV interview (YouTube embedded below)

You never could have made me believe years ago, when I got out of high school with a D- average - and they gave me the minus because I won the Olympics, 1960, I graduated in 1960 and I won the Olympics in 1960 - . . . . and if you would have told me that I would be offered a professorship to teach philosophy and poetry at Oxford, and speak at Harvard, I never would have believed it. — Muhammad Ali, Harvard graduation speech 1975 (YouTube here)

In 1964, [Muhammad] Ali failed the U.S. Armed Forces qualifying test because his writing and spelling skills were sub par. — Wikipedia

An Historical Argument Against Writing-Privileged Assessment

It’s been a sleep-in Saturday after a long week. I woke up and took a rare cruise through YouTube. It started with laughs with Ali G, and ended with inspiration from Muhammad Ali.

This post is for any student who, like Ali in the epigraph above, has a low GPA (and thus a low self-image), but a brilliant mind. It’s also for teachers of those students who wish they could do their part to make that GPA more accurately reflect that student’s abilities.

Listen, in this YouTube interview from 1971, to this “sub-par” English student’s brilliance with language*, and laugh at the limitations of assessing writing and spelling to measure verbal intelligence:

And teachers - English teachers, especially, but any teacher using writing to assess understanding and merit in your classrooms - ask yourself, in this age of user-created video and audio, if it makes any sense to keep giving the Muhammed Ali’s of our classrooms a D- because they can’t write well, when they can speak well enough to be honored, like Ali was, at Harvard and Oxford. The English teacher in me is uncomfortable with this question, but the history teacher in me thinks it’s justified: Writing is no longer supreme since the Digital Revolution. It’s now on equal footing with Speaking and Graphic Communication. Isn’t it?

If yes, then why, in most classrooms I’ve seen (and taught), is writing still weighted as around 75% of the final grade in the Language Arts classroom? And how can so many teachers who themselves are capable thinkers and creators, but horrible writers, justify this sort of assessment policy in their own practice?

Ali’s language could “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” and with it this man “shook the world” - but neither his high school nor the Army could reflect this in their assessments. Instead, they labeled him “below average” and “sub par.”

It’s been more than 50 years since Ali left high school. Can we leave that assessment philosophy now? (I hear the answers already: “Not until the SAT allows oral instead of written essays.” Just kill me.)

Story Time: When I Met Ali First, and Second

I met Ali in 1982 or so in a West Hollywood restaurant on Sunset Boulevard*, serving him as his white-boy waiter. I was about 20. I told him my name was Clay, and that when I was in first grade in the ’60s and he was still known as Cassius Clay, people called me “Cassius.”

When he heard that, this gentle giant smiled, put up his lethal dukes, dodged and weaved for a split second while he said,

“Oh. So you a fighter.”

Then he offered a handshake, into which my hand disappeared.

I was an English major in college then, but I didn’t take mental marks off of Ali’s performance for omitting the “are,” didn’t say, “You mean, ‘You are a fighter.’” And this wasn’t just because he could have lifted me over his head and snapped me in two. It was because his language, bad grammar and all, was far more electrifying than many a grammatically perfect professor I had at the time.

I was unschooled in Ali’s history at that time. All I knew was that he was a heavyweight world champion of my childhood, and now had some sort of neural disorder (he often fell asleep at his table, and his wife would wake him up). I wish I’d known then what I know now - that he was one of the great men of the 20th century - so that I could have told him that. Instead, I just laughed with the stupid giddiness people often have in the face of celebrities, and served him his pasta.

Only years later, after watching Leon Gast’s riveting documentary, When We were Kings, did I realize just how great Ali was - not only as a boxer, but also as a citizen and man of conscience for a nation adrift. Punished with the loss of his boxing license at the prime of his career for his political dissent and his refusal to fight in Vietnam, he became an American pariah.

Fifteen years after meeting him, I had another Ali moment. Having lost all desire to become an academic, but not having lost the lifetime of college debt I’d accumulated in that (for me) fool’s quest, I was in a personnel processing center at Fort Leonard Wood, Arkansas, with a freshly shaved head and a duffel bag, ready to start Basic Training. There was a wall-mounted TV in the corner of the room, with live coverage of some important-looking outdoor ceremony. I was out of all media loops that summer, and didn’t even know the Olympics were going on. It was the Torch-lighting ceremony on that TV that I was watching - and it was history. Ali lit that torch in his final, moral comeback. The audience and media adulation was for once justified. It brought tears to my eyes and gave me faith in America.

–

*The critical thinking about race in religion and in US history are not too shabby either. And yes, while Ali shows a lack of critical thinking in his wholesale swallowing of everything Elijah Muhammad preached to him, we shouldn’t be too hard on him. Lack of critical thinking about one’s own religion is the norm in most people of any religion, from what I can see. As I read somewhere - maybe Sam Harris, maybe Bertrand Russell - everybody’s an atheist when it comes to others’ religions. Full non-theists just take them one further.

**Los Angelenos, is “The Old World” restaurant still there? On the corner diagonal from Tower Records, across the street from Spago?

International School of Bangkok’s Justin Medved asked me to spread the word about their elementary and middle school Project Global Cooling events, both of which will be Ustreamed:

Middle School Concert for Climate Change - 12-2 pm Bangkok Time on Thursday April 24th

Elementary Earth Day Festival - 8am - 1pm Bangkok time on Friday April 25th

ES Event Guide

Justin, along with the stellar ISB edtech cast of and Dennis Harter, Kim Cofino and, soon, Jeff Utecht, deserve gobs of green credit for introducing sustainability and collaboration to the primary and middle levels.

Logo: Daniel Kim, PGC Seoul

The always-interesting Doug Noon of Borderlands wrote a post recently that’s worth a click, but here’s the gist:

This post is about the talking part of student presentations, and helping kids to develop an actual public speaking voice. I discovered last week, by accident, just how much my students have to learn about talking in front of people. I had them make science slide shows about global warming. The technology part came out good enough, no prizes for originality, though some were done fairly well. But the talking part….Oh boy! That part was rough. It’s probably been many a year since show and tell happened for them. I see now that what’s needed is an older kid version of the get-up-and-say-something drill.

I’d been planning a post on something similar, triggered by a recent experience of my own in the schoolhouse. But I pretty much wrote that post in a comment on Doug’s post, so I’m nicking it and putting it here:

This has been on my mind with my high school students. They all give oral presentations in their classes, many are heavily involved in Speech and Debate Club, etc. But when I told them to try out for giving a presentation to a local corporation for sponsorship for Project Global Cooling, I was dismayed at how incapable they were of simply and directly informing their audience of the project’s goals, methods, needs for sponsorship, and benefits returned if sponsorship was given.

Over and over I told them, “Don’t speechify. Don’t ramble. Don’t get preachy and don’t try to impress. Just make your point to these busy businessmen quickly, so we can get through the presentation as quickly as possible and move into the discussion stage. Clear, direct, natural, fast. Simple.”

What I got instead was either memorized stuff or high-flown homework-sounding stuff. It was so unnatural, I canceled the presentation (if this sounds harsh, realize it was our second appointment with this corporation after a, er, problematic first showing).

To me it really brought home how artificial speeches about canned subjects in front of a class are little to no preparation about talking to people naturally in a real-world setting. It’s like the students are only good at “pretend speaking” - and these were smart, capable students. Crazy.

Maybe we need to drop the word “speech” and replace it with the good old, demotic “tell us what you want to say.” I’m stumped, honestly.

There’s so much more to say about this. For example:

Are “speech” and “debate” two skills ready for the dustbin of pedagogy?

“Speech,” the way we do it in classrooms - speaker standing in front of audience, talking at it instead of with it - is a 20th century oral analog to the 20th century web, with the screen giving one-way content to a passive audience. (These types of schooly speeches also unconsciously perpetuate the teacher-centered model of 20th century classrooms, with students being trained to carry that largely stultifying ritual into the future.)  Ours is a century of sharing ideas, and sharing the stage, with the audience. (I’ll resist the Speech 2.0 label.)

“Debate” is similarly suspect for our century. In a globalized world, “score points talking against each other” is a suspect paradigm for multi-cultural conflict resolution. The last thing we need is another generation of Americans being trained to confuse “communication” with “winning debates” and “being right by proving others wrong.”

Are there any alternative school competitions that reward not “competitive speechifying” a la Speech and Debate, but instead cooperative negotiation and conflict resolution - both sides being rewarded for listening, conceding points, offering compromises? Both teams winning, else no winner at all? This is not a rhetorical question - if you know of one, please drop a comment.

And then there’s the whole formality of school “speech.” Sure, we see politicians giving state of the union speeches and such, but aren’t those the exception? Don’t we see something else rising - the idea of “Talks”? Just think of TED (and if you don’t know TED, leave here now and discover it): some of the world’s smartest, most creative, famous people, giving “talks” not from podiums, not in suits and ties, not in the formal oratorical register; instead, they’re in jeans and t-shirts, pacing around on stage, hands-in-pocket or seated front-porch-like, just talking to us about their ideas. And they’re wildly successful at being more stimulating than the suit.

But here’s the thing: they’re talking about their ideas. They have their own ideas. They care about them enough to want to tell them to us. They weren’t assigned some god-awful sleeper - “Should Students Be Forced to Wear Uniforms?” - to fake interest in.

And this is where we fail: We assign speech topics that replace idea-creation in students; then we put them through the sweatshop workshop of drafting and adorning these lifeless cliches with rhetorical window-dressing; then we suffer through the performance, give it a grade, and pat them on the head.

What’s the hidden curriculum?

1. Speech is a competitive tool that has nothing to do with listening.
2. Rhetoric is more important than invention.
3. It’s not okay to just talk to us about what moves you.
4. You have to wear a tie and be a suit.

Worst of all, the deepest hidden message: School is about pretending: Pretending to care, pretending to understand, pretending to speak, pretending to have ideas and convictions.

I know this is a straw man, and hope it’s a poor one. If so, straighten me out? Share how school “speeches” help students learn how to talk.

Photos by beny schlevich and practicalowl