Beyond School

"Go, Tom, Go" (Clay, 2d from left, joins Redskin Cheerleaders to cheer Tom's latest post)

Look, I know I plug Tom a lot on this space, but it’s because he can make me laugh at the madness of public schooling like nobody else.  Ever since discovering Nietzsche 20 years ago, I’ve sided with laughter over solemnity, with gods that can and do dance over those that can’t or won’t.

Here’s Tom’s latest dance: “Do It the Right Way, not the Wong Way.” Send it to any first-year teacher who’s been force-fed Wong’s First Days of School.

It’s not unusual to be smart. It’s not unusual to be funny. But to be smart and funny? Not so easy. That’s why I like this guy.

–that, and that my heart goes out to any NY liberal transplanted to teach in a small Southern town in Virginia - Camp Joy territory in spirit, if not geography.  There should be a sitcom.

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Photo: littlerottenrobin

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Web Legacies Audience

1. Why I Like the Assignment

Again, this series was originally assigned by Dr. Tonya Huber, for a multi-culturalism in education class I took in Mallorca, Spain, five or six summers back. It was an intensely engaging project, so let me summarize the process for anybody interested in the pedagogy:

1. Select any personal belonging as an “artifact” of who you are - or were.
2. Write about it in the personal narrative genre, but connect it in some way to teaching and/or learning.
3. Identify key factors of culture represented by your artifact, and the experience for which it is an emblem. Touch upon those when you write.

That’s about it.  Though not part of the assignment, my own decision to select “artifacts” from early childhood to all later stages of my life made the assignment much richer.  At the end of the ten pieces I wrote over eight weeks (and I decided against publishing the last two here because they seemed sub-par), I’d sketched out a series of memoirs that formed a skeletal autobiography.  It’s not every class that affords an opportunity to write your entire life.  And this is why, I think, those papers didn’t suffer the fate of most of my college writings, which I’d never dream of inflicting upon general readers.  This assignment was different; it didn’t suffer from . . . what’s the word? . . . oh yes: schooliness.

2. How It Felt to Write Personal Narrative Instead of Edu-Stuff

Crickets aside, I have to admit it felt good. It raises an interesting dilemma for a guy who feels a bit cramped by the “edublogger” pigeonhole: Deliver what the imagined audience expects, or what the writer feels like writing?  Just writing that opposition makes the dilemma less interesting by far: it’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?  As soon as I begin writing for someone else, I lose the essence of writing.  So I suspect there will be more of these tangents in the future, and let the readers fall where they may.

Because I have to say:  More and more, I feel like we get the technology and 21st century skills thing, and it’s threatening to become old hat.  In a nutshell, with 30,000 or so new applications in development as we speak - and the number will surely only grow - it seems a fool’s errand to try to grab at them all. Further, all our tools seem reducible to a few modes  (visual, textual, aural, kinesthetic), and a few skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening, and info-finding, -evaluating, and -managing).  More and more I wonder if a few tools for each of these purposes aren’t easy enough to find at will, or simpler still, if most of us don’t already have a sufficient number in our tool-belts.  I feel like I do, anyway, at least somewhat.  And I feel a pull to pull back from the tools, and gravitate more toward meaning when I write.

I’m really much more interested in thinking critically about cultural factors that retard education than I am about tools that, used retardedly, enable us to learn conventional unwisdoms more efficiently. In other words, I want to fight the idols of the mind that we worship instead of question. Since I’ve quit education school-teaching and won’t work for schools again, I can speak the unspoken without fearing for my livelihood - which is the only explanation I can find for the deafening silences in educational weblogs about such idols as religion, patriotism, consumerism, workaholism, and the educational system itself.  It seems to me that “21st Century Education” needs to question ideologies from the Hebrews and Romans to the Cold War far more than it needs to teach the uses of Twitter.

Still, I do use technology when I teach - have been using it in new ways over the last two weeks in my freelance teaching, in fact - so I’m sure I’ll share the occasional item about tech from time to time.  But be warned: I have a box of old journals from the past 30 years. I suspect they’ll be fodder for more Web Legacies, more reflections of my history, and the roles of education and ideas in that history.

3. A Few Take-Aways I Offer from This Series

If you hadn’t noticed, I revealed in these posts that I was a pot-smoking, school-skipping, low-achieving high school student. For those of you who think punitively, that’s cause for suspension and a “bad boy” label. If you got nothing else out of reading this, just notice that that behavior was a mechanism for dealing with the hell that was life incarcerated in a public high school institution.  If I’d had the choice to escape the two-years’ bullying by simply absenting myself from that environment, I quite likely would have felt little need for the pleasures of sedation brought by that weed. (It’s also interesting to note that the popular kids were all heavy drinkers, but that was somehow morally less scandalous than smoking marijuana, though to this day I don’t get the double-standard. I’ve always argued that “stoned drivers” at worst are a hazard because they drive a little too slow, as opposed to your daredevil drunk drivers. And rarely do you find a belligerent stoner getting in your face and wanting to fight¹, the way our worst drunks do. Instead, you get a giggler or navel-gazer, who I’ll take, if forced to choose, every time.)

You also might notice that the only hero in the bad high school years was a closeted gay athlete. Yet another “bad sinner” to punish or, goodness help us, “convert” - or good young man to understand.  Your choice.

I also revealed that I became an above average language user during my teens not by doing homework or assigned readings - I rarely did either, though it was easy enough to get that “A” on that Iliad paper by writing an essay on the Classics Illustrated Comics version of the epic - and that my literacy grew instead by reading (stolen) comic books and sci-fi/fantasy - and later, after high school, literature - with my friends, outside of school. So again, I’m left questioning the value of mandatory high school. I still lean toward the position that it retards growth, rather than accelerating it.

That’s about it for now. Finally:

4. Links to the Entire Web Legacies Series

1. Fear and Trembling at Camp Joy: Unborn Again
2. The Hulk Leads to Hamlet: Reading Despite Teaching
3. Of Jocks and Fags: The High School Bullying Years
4. In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males: The Beatnik College Years, pt. 1
5. Human Sacrifice: The Academic College Years, pt. 2
6. Learning the Enemy’s Language: The Army Years, part 1
7. Teaching Killing: The Army Years, part 2
8. Stereotyping Soldier-Students: The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Classroom

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Photo credit: bramblejungle

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1. or alternately, get a cheap lay [↩]

[I wasn't going to post this one, because I don't care particularly for the tone. But a comment on the earlier "Learning the Enemy's Language" post made me think I should post it anyway. If I seem like I'm slamming veterans as a whole in my recent posts, let this veteran put that appearance to rest with this one. Especially if you deal with veterans in your classroom, this might help. I think people who've only lived school lives are particularly prone to the type of prejudice I describe below. I experienced it myself when I took post-graduate courses during and after my army service.

It's no secret that schools generally fail to produce an informed citizenry. Military experience, on the other hand (or life, in other words, instead of books and teachers), has a funny way of suddenly making one want to learn politics, history, current affairs, and such.  That's a preview of the below.]

*    *    *

Your script when you see a veteran may read something like this: This person is probably pro-war, thoughtlessly patriotic, Republican, Conservative, Christian, an unreflective robot, a racist, sexist, culturally deprived, unfeeling and uneducated individual.

I shared that script in my academic/civilian days. Then I challenged it by spending five years in the US Army. Based on that experience, here is my advice:

If you ever have veterans in your class (or anywhere else), their pacifism may surprise you. Don’t assume that you know about them based on their military background. You have only thought about what they have lived. You have never faced deployment to a conflict, never wondered if you would return from it to see your family, friends, and loved ones. You have never grappled on the ground with the political reasoning that put you there. You have never hopped into a humvee with a map showing you the suspected minefields you have to drive through to perform your mission. You have never experienced situations in which the unconscionable behavior of your fellow soldiers toward non-combatants or enemies perhaps transformed your value system on a deep cognitive-emotional level. You have never lost someone to war and wondered why.

Don’t assume your white male veterans are racist, sexist, or classist. You have probably never experienced as diverse, egalitarian and, yes, socialist a society as the US military. Men and women of all ethnic, regional, religious, and cultural backgrounds—even privileged ones—are forced on a daily basis to transcend their differences and bond into effective teams for their very survival. Soldiers’ stereotypes of those different from them are quickly shattered when they observe these others in action. Americans (and resident non-Americans) share quarters, classes, camps, duties, and recreational activities. Interracial relationships are common.

Don’t assume that veterans know less than you do about political and world events. What you have only studied, they have often lived—and, because they were living it, independently read about and studied - possibly as much as you.

Don’t assume that veterans are thoughtless patriots. The Vietnam generation is not the only one that emerged from military service critically politicized.

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The Web Legacy Series So Far:
1. Fear and Trembling at Camp Joy: Unborn Again
2. The Hulk Leads to Hamlet: Reading Despite School
3. Of Jocks and Fags: The High School Bullying Years
4. In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males: The Beatnik College Years, pt. 1
5. Human Sacrifice: The College Years, pt. 2
6. Learning the Enemy’s Language: The Army Years, part 1
7. Teaching Killing: The Army Years, part 2

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

Artifact: Key-Chain awarded for Honor Graduate at Army Non-Commissioned Officers’ School
Date: 1996-2000
Elements of Culture: Rights and Duties; Military Values

The professional development workshop that day was on how best to blow people up.

The sergeant teaching the workshop was Thai-American. His tattoos and skater fashion signaled a person who had long since been assimilated into the American macroculture¹.

The young soldiers all took a knee as the sergeant demonstrated how to lay Claymore mines for maximum kill-power in an ambush on enemy troops. He was hip, he was cool, he said straight-faced ironic things that made all the new soldiers laugh. The ‘new’ army was so much better, now that they let cool people in.

I took a knee too. I had gotten to know this sergeant a bit in a couple of conversations around that time. He was a Berkeley graduate in philosophy who liked to talk about critical theory and deconstructionism.  At the moment he was talking about something else.

“Have you ever seen ten real Claymores in a line detonated?”

The new recruits all shook their heads ‘no.’

Instructions on a US Army Claymore Mine

“Man. It’s awesome. Done right, they won’t leave a trace of anybody in the blast zone. They just disappear.  Awesome.”

He gleamed. The recruits oooh’d.

War is war, and people die in it. It’s unfortunate. I liked to tell myself that my job in military intelligence was to provide information soon enough to prevent war from breaking out—and even if that was my oxymoronic way of trying to square my current vocation with my values (not so far-fetched in the Clinton years), it was still a far cry from advocating war as “awesome.” So I spoke.

“Sergeant. Have you ever killed another human being or seen it done?”

I was surprised to see him react to this symbolic punch like it had caught him squarely in the stomach, but he did. His head instantly bobbed down and back up—I think because I was a reminder of his Berkeley script because of our talks.

“No,” he said.

“So how can you say it’s awesome? Vets have nightmares over the people they’ve killed.”

"All Services Free of Charge" - Cambodia Trust poster

“You’re right,” he said. “I meant to say that the explosives are awesome because of their power.”

Pedagogically, this was simply an example of the student’s role to shape the construction of knowledge in the classroom. As a teacher, ideally I would want my students to challenge me when they catch implications of my words or actions that contradict their values. This does not mean that I will always tell them they are right when they do; rather, it offers teachable moments for teaching and learning to occur for everybody in the classroom—teacher included. As our textbook observes, we, as teachers, “are always emerging in our understanding; we never arrive; we are always on our way” (Huber, p. 9).

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Photo credits: Claymore Mine by Seadling; Cambodia Trust poster by Cambodia Trust

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The Web Legacy Series So Far:
1. Fear and Trembling at Camp Joy: Unborn Again
2. The Hulk Leads to Hamlet: Reading Despite School
3. Of Jocks and Fags: The High School Bullying Years
4. In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males: The Beatnik College Years, pt. 1
5. Human Sacrifice: The College Years, pt. 2
6. Learning the Enemy’s Language: The Army Years, part 1

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

1. if you accept the premise that the youth macroculture has been decentered from WASP-ish norms—though not from WASP-ish economic interests—for at least ten years: the young went ‘alternative’ during the ‘90s, and . . . non-conformed together. The WASPs controlling the music, film, and apparel industries gladly mass-produced the talismans and icons showing membership to the commodified youth culture for all the young to buy. While the WASPs gladly pocketed the profits, with which they probably, among other things, reinforced the security systems around their estates to protect them from their young consumers [↩]

Dates: 1996-98
Surface Culture: Arabs as ‘the Enemy’
Deep Culture: Language; Culture; Religion; Society; Values; Proxemics; Diet
Knowledge Bases for Diversity: Foundations of Racism; Socio-cultural Contexts

Salaam Alaykum: Peace be with You

I graduated with a B.A. in (Eurocentric) Humanities in 1996. Though a liberal secular humanist at heart, I had experienced increasing disenchantment in my final university years with the radical, theory-based dogmatism (for so it seemed to me) of my very left-wing academy: besides the aversively confrontational, shrill, divisive, and often uncivil tactics used by the radical community, I also harbored skepticism toward the theoretical basis of the ‘knowledge’ I was taught by an overwhelmingly white, middle class, existentially sheltered faculty. I wanted direct experience of life as a standard of comparison with the theories dominating my education. I was particularly alienated by the academic attack on the traditional literary canon, which I had devotedly studied and treasured for the prior fifteen years (an unwitting subject of/to the traditionalist philosophy of curriculum). Suddenly this new breed of professors seemed determined to demote Homer and Shakespeare and all my other heroes to politically suspect or simply irrelevant authors. I was so aghast at the prospect of becoming a professor who loved this canon among an intellectual community that didn’t that I abandoned my plans to earn my doctorate in literature and become a professor.

I was also nagged by a feeling of educational incompleteness owing to my lack of a second language, of knowledge of any non-EuroAmerican history and culture, and of direct experience living outside the United States. Finally, being shouldered with over $30,000 debt in the form of college loans, I saw a future of economic insecurity—as a joke at the time had it,

I have a liberal arts degree…will that be for here or to go?

Lo and behold, I stumbled across a solution to all these nagging misgivings in the unlikely form of an army veteran who told me of the possibility of becoming a linguist in Military Intelligence. If I passed the linguistic aptitude test and the security background check, I could be sent to full-time language school in Monterey, California, then stationed in Europe or Asia, have my student loans paid off by the army, and have the direct experience of the most academically demonized institution in the United States. I would be able to climb into the belly of the beast only theoretically known by my professors and fellow-student ideologues. That experience would round out my formal education with an existential reality-check. (The prospect of experiencing military life itself was to me, with my romantic infatuation with Homeric epic, not unappealing at all. I saw it as an opportunity to compare the modern military ethos with that of Homer’s ‘Heroic Age.’ It was an anthropological opportunity to experience that very foreign culture we call the U.S. Military.) My academic friends and most of my professors thought I was either crazy or immoral or both, but I trusted the Clinton administration not to compromise my morality—and anyway, I reasoned, in a worst-case scenario, I could always disobey orders. I only hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

Three months later I had finished basic training (aka “Boot Camp,” which strictly should only refer to Marine Corps basic training, if I recall correctly), and my shaven-headed self was beginning his 64-week, full-time study of al-FusHa (fus-ha)– Modern Standard Arabic. My instructors were all native Arabs from diverse Arab nations, and they all had stories to tell. They also were walking cultural artifacts themselves, representing the civilization that produced them. Overall I found them intensely likable and fascinating.

Studying the language itself was a labor of love. Arabic is a largely ‘pure’ language, uncorrupted by loan-words and structures from other language families. Consequently, the language is itself an artifact of its ancient origins in the Bedouin tribes of the Arabian interior. The desert environment in which the language was born is literally perceptible in the language itself. The Arabic word for mustache, for example, shariban, is based on the verb “to drink” and given the dual suffix “-an”. In other words, the meaning of “two drinks” is embedded in the noun. The function of the “two-sided” mustache as a collector of water to “drink” (by sucking on it when thirsty) points to the presence of the harsh Bedouin life of nomadic travel across the parched deserts of the Rubb al-Khali, the “Empty Quarter,” from oasis to oasis. Similar  examples abound, to be discovered by the student of Arabic.

The irony of this experience is that I was being taught this language implicitly as the language of ‘the enemy.’ Yet the unintended consequence of introducing me to my Arabic professors and the beauties of Arabic language, history, and culture - its propensity, shared with the USA, to attribute the creation of the universe to a mythic superhero who “wrote” three conflicting and conflict-causing books several millennia ago notwithstanding - was to convert me into a person who greatly (yet in certain instances critically) respects, sympathizes with, and reveres ‘the enemy.’ ¹

Pedagogically this experience is relevant in many respects. Our Anglophile tendency to glorify the richness of the English language, while justifiable, should not blind us to the probable glories in other languages. Students of all cultures should have the opportunity to share their pride in their language with non-speakers of it, and to learn about other languages from those who speak them. On a more humanitarian level, the most important thing we as educators can do today is counter any national propaganda that tries to dehumanize ‘enemy’ nations with direct encounters with people from those nations. The best way to convert an enemy to a fellow human being is to give him or her a name and a story.

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¹Learning the history of that “enemy” since those days, from the Crusades to the Imperial politics of of Palestine and the birth of Israel in the WW I and WW II eras, and of the Cold War politics after that (especially concerning Iran which, while not Arab is still a Muslim Middle Eastern nation: the USA and Britain overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953 to impose the brutal Shah as a puppet serving the interests of Western oil corporations, which led to the anti-American Islamist Revolution under the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, and leads today to the Bush/Cheney administration’s eagerness to again topple an Iranian government for geopolitical advantage) — all of that has only increased my understanding that the Arab resentment against the West has deeply justified historical roots.  Here’s a nice little video lesson on that Iranian story, which all Arabs and Iranians haven’t forgotten, though most Americans (if they ever knew it at all) have:

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Photo credits: Soldier in Al-Anbar, Iraq by Jayel Aheram; Arabic Calligraphy by twocentsworth

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The Legacy Series So Far:
1. Fear and Trembling: Goodbye to Christianity
2. The Hulk Leads to Hamlet: Reading Despite School
3. Of Jocks and Fags: The High School Bullying Years
4. In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males: The Beatnik College Years, pt. 1
5. Human Sacrifice: The College Years, pt. 2

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)