Beyond School

8 a.m. Sunday morning in Onyang, where Chosun era kings bathed in the local hot springs to cure themselves of all sorts of maladies, and I hope in a few minutes to do the same. (It ain’t all that great a place now, by the way, with its ugly commercial strips and other modern blights.)

Anyway, before I go, I want to quickly note that:

1. I wish there was a way I could keep the last post’s live puppy cam forever atop this blog’s homepage, and keep those six pups forever young, so I could spend as many hours watching them down the years as I have since discovering them a few days ago. They’ve so won me, I now check in with them first thing upon waking, several times during the day, and at night before retiring. (My wife and I had a rear-angle view of one of the pups pooping a couple nights ago, which warmed us almost as much as watching him and his siblings decide to eat it. It did look like a Tootsie Roll.)
2. When I embedded those pups in that post, my mind drifted to Michael Doyle and his science classroom in New Jersey, where I pictured monitors lined along a specimen shelf showing the live puppycam, and imagined live clamcams, chimpcams, sharkcams, and a vast 21st century menagerie of other biological wonders delivered live and free into his students’ lives via the wonders of Ustream.
3. I’ve already plugged Michael here before, and he seems as queasy about the weirdness of mutual admiration societies as I do (though I hope he also values the foundation of them, which is less biological than chemical and secularly spiritual), so I’ll just point to more recent (and excellent) testimonials calling for a wider readership of Michael’s Science Teacher blog at Nashworld and Barry Bachenheimer’s Plethora of Technology, and say that -
4. I follow Nash’s lead by nominating Science Teacher as Best Teacher Blog this year. (I wrote about issues I had with the Eddies last year, and I have issues with their open nomination process this year, but as I said on Nash’s post, in response to Michael’s declining that nomination:

[ Michael:] While I think the Eddies are dubious in many ways (and wrote a post biting the hand that fed me last year, which I linked to under my nomination banner for a few months), putting the damn thing (and Alltop badges, and anything else that communicates to first-time visitors that you’re not some tin-foil-hat-wearing…

Michael

oh, waitaminnit…some dog pawing a keyboard in human underwear) up seems to me worth it, in the balance, since anything that helps a writer’s ideas reach more readers is, um, sort of one of the things most writers want to do.

And I’m going to exit this fine post (it really is fine, Nash) so I can nominate Michael too. Deal, Doyle

I’m nominating Michael for several reasons: I look to science as the only hope we have for getting out of many fateful messes (that, yes, scientists got us into, but largely due to the greedy urgings of commerce and government and pretty much every one of us), so science teaching is important to me; Michael is an edublogger (vile term, said Polonius) who uses technology to write about science and education, not about technology (a meaning-focus, not a tools-focus); he’s whacked-out funny and roots-deep serious by turns, thank god; he is and is not an edublogger; he is and is a writer.

Fellow Army vet and English teacher Jan Seiter and I had a dialogue on a comment thread that I want to share on this post. It will mostly be of interest to English and history teachers, I think.

I hope some of you weigh in. In the meantime, it gave me an opportunity to list my favorite ways of using blogs for both Learning to Write and - a very different thing – Writing to Learn.

Here goes:

Jan’s Opening Question and Comment:

My First Reply:

Re: factual accuracy: maybe a sidebar disclaimer saying “I’m young and possibly wrong sometime.” (If only FOX would do that. Or me.)

Or maybe just trust to the two-way nature of this medium to allow people to push back/correct errors  in comments.

The whole accuracy thing can be skirted by doing more creative stuff – personal narrative and so on, too.

And maybe a wiki instead of a blog so students can correct their stuff.

Re: conventions and mechanics: I’m a six traits guy myself, and am more concerned with the first five – ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency – than I am with grammar/spelling/punctuation. So I grade far more heavily for notable attention to those first 5 traits.

I want students to write freely and ideally discover they enjoy it. Perfectionism and fear of errors won’t create the conditions for that to happen. We’ll talk about errors after I’ve read enough volume from you to do an error analysis of your most frequent _serious_ grammar/spelling problems, which I’ll prioritize and teach to you one on one down the road.

Then you can select your five or ten favorite posts – which maybe I’ll score as a single test grade – and _correct those errors on only those posts_ to apply what you’ve learned/I’ve taught you to look for and correct.

I know this is sloppy, but it’s 1.40 a.m. and I’m replying to your contact communication.

Afterthought: I think students should have the option of not publishing if their work is too sub-par.

But realistically, practically nobody will find and/or read their blogs beyond other students, will they?

–

(To Add More:)

Since you told me in a private email that you were looking at the French Revolution Ant Farm Diary (right?), I’ve got more to say:

That was a formative project using “Writing to Learn” pedagogy. The point of the writing, above all, was for students to learn the material in this active way, rather than listening to lectures, reading the textbook, or other passive ways of learning. So the writing in this approach is secondary to the learning.

The summative assessment was an essay that did hold accuracy and writing at a premium.

And every time I use WTL, I’m amazed at how much deeper and broader the retention, comprehension, and insight are, compared to when I lecture, they discuss, or just read or watch stuff.

Have you ever used WTL? I’d be interested to hear your (and everyone’s) experiences with it.

Second Exchange:

Jan replied:

Clay,
Your approach is terrific and I am not questioning intent.

I teach high school & college English, media literacy, speech & debate, and have taught in all grade levels. I have used 6 traits and don’t think of myself as a grammar nazi.

Lately, I have been concerned with the declining (even by current standards) level of writing and content information that seems to be fostered by the web. Blogging, IMing and texting encourage stream of consciousness-type of writing; with no regard for logic, facts or conventions. I think this is fine for drafts and, well, this conversation.

I often tell my students, “Remember, you are writing for a college graduate, NOT your girlfriend,” in an attempt to make them slow their thoughts and process their communication. Still, I get final drafts that need additional editing, presentations with missing capital letters and assorted other errors that, when I point them out, they say, “Yeah, well, you know what I mean…”

I find this attitude in college writing, too. I have students of 20-30 even 40 years old who write without thinking of editing, who think that whatever they write should be accepted as their ‘best’ and who have little sense of thinking about WHO will read their work.

For me, it’s even become about respect. If I respect you, I will do all I can to make sure that my communication is clear and accurate. but if I don’t care who reads this, I can spel anway i want sdo touy will no whut i mean…

Don’t misunderstand that I am critiquing your projects, nor the work of your students. It’s that your projects got me thinking about this issue, and I used it as an example.

When we publish something, especially to the web, as a teacher, do we have the obligation of editing, or do we just post ‘as is’? Your comment (But realistically, practically nobody will find and/or read their blogs beyond other students, will they? ) begs the question of who is the audience?

My reply:

I sympathize with your concerns, Jan, and hope I didn’t sound defensive when I, oops, defended Writing to Learn.

I’ve seen the chatroom-ese on student work on blogs, forums, and wikis when I introduced them, but didn’t have much problem rooting them out with discussions of the respect you mention (and self-respect, since using “cuz”, e.g., in a public writing is like going to a job interview in dirty clothes). Most students got it and met the standard after that, and those that didn’t woke up after a few shocking bad grades.

But that could be specific to my private school students, whose moms rip them new orifices at the first A-, much less C-.

Online writing is definitely no silver bullet for writing, as I’ve argued a million times. Over time, though, and – crucially – in conjunction with 6-traits rubrics that set the standards for their writing from the quality of Ideas on down the line to Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, Conventions and Mechanics, AND Presentation, I really have seen marked improvement in quality in all those traits, overall, AND in engagement. Wake-up grades, again, given early, were also key.

But we’re talking students here, so I’m not claiming miracles (and not suggesting you’re implying I am).

It’s the “over time” thing that’s key, to me.

I do think students who write because they’re forced, and probably see no lasting value in most cases to what is still, in the end, mere homework to most of them, will have a different attitude about what they publish compared to people who, like us, write voluntarily about things we care about.

And since it’s 9.24 a.m. this brisk Saturday morning, and I’m enjoying my first cup of coffee as I start the day thinking with you (which I enjoy too), I’m going to ramble a bit more.

There are so many different approaches to assignments, we both know, to inculcate whatever habits of mind or skills we’re working on in a given week. So I just want to toss off a few that come to mind:

1. The “comment on the teacher’s post” assignment:

Rather than students writing on their own blog, they do a specific task in the comment thread to the teacher’s. That way they see their work standing alongside that of their peers, and may be more motivated to look better and work harder, in order to avoid looking weak. I’ve done that with:

a. Syntactical variation exercises (sentence openings, e.g.): “Take this sentence and re-write it, using only the words in the sentence, in as many ways as you can.” If you moderate comments, they don’t see other students’ work until all have done the assignment. Then they can see and learn from other students’ responses. That’s a wickedly powerful affordance of online writing that is hard to duplicate offline. I posted about it here.

b. Introductory paragraphs (hooks): Copy and paste your “hook” from your first draft, and the revised version from your latest draft, into the comment thread, and briefly explain your writer’s decision that guided your revision. (There’s an entire class discussion of authentic writing right there, which my students enjoyed, because they were seeing what others had tried. The few successes were great cases of student modeling, and the weaker ones were great cases of cliche or otherwise dead introductions.) (You can see my Seoul and a flat world teacher’s Hawaii students doing this here.)

c. Titles. (Titles are a pet peeve of mine. “My Essay” from high schoolers makes my blood boil.)

2. Critical Thinking:

My latest Diigo Daily Reads auto-posts feature highlights (basically copy-pastes, though Diigo does that work for me by publishing only what I highlight from a web page) that I then respond to with sticky notes that do NOT summarize the reading, but instead either “challenge, extend, or qualify” the point. That’s an “ideas” sort of assignment that simply forces students to THINK about what they passively read. (See this post for a screencast on this approach.

3. Trait-based assessment of x number of student blog posts per unit for a test grade:

The biggest bear, for me, about student blogging and wiki work is the sheer volume. When I assign regular posts, I normally can’t assess them all with any depth. But I still want regular writing in the same way a PE teacher wants regular running to keep his/her students fit. So to allow students to self-select 3, say, while you randomly select 2 (whatever you work out, obviously), to grade by the rubric – either for all traits, or just one or two un-disclosed ones (since they won’t know, they’ll ideally give more care to all the traits), is the best solution I’ve come up with for this dilemma. The “teacher choices” keep them from shamming on the posts they won’t self-select.

Closer, for now: I haven’t taught long enough to be able to compare this generation of student writers from previous ones, so I don’t know whether their skills are any better or worse than in the past.

I do know that the elitist side of me wants to use student blogs in a highly selective writing elective class – see For the Roses: My Latest Position on Classroom Blogging for more – to simply rid myself of the headaches of dealing with the bums, so I’ve got my Delta Force of real writers who want to train.

I guess that’s my way of saying, “I hear you.”

I share this simply because I think Jan asks good questions, and I’m sure others have valuable input to add. Here’s hoping they do.

Last week, Wikispaces invited me to give a Wikispaces in Education Webinar about four wiki projects I’ve done in high school English and history classes: The Broken World Wiki Textbook, a student-made textbook of modern world history from WW1 to WW2, featuring text, images, and embedded videos and student video lectures (and linked to a companion reflective class blog); the French Revolution Ant Farm Diaries, an historical fiction Writing-to-Learn unit in which student-created fictional characters interracted with their classmates’ characters in interlinked diary entries; King Lear Street Talk, a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, forcing the close line-by-line reading of 16th-century English necessary to adapt it to “Sopranos”-style modern English; and the 1001 Flat World Tales, a global creative writing workshop using the Six Traits of Effective Writing and a peer-reviewed Writing Workshop joining students from Hawaii, Colorado, and my classroom in Seoul.

The first three projects listed above were “local” collaborations, the fourth one global. I discuss in the webinar my thoughts on the relative merits of both approaches in the webinar. (I posted about those reflections most fully here.)

Thanks to Wikispaces for the opportunity to look back over two years of experiments in wiki pedagogy and introduce them all in one fell swoop.

If you want to read the “think-aloud” posts I wrote when designing these projects, check January to June or so of the Archives.

Here’s the event (it should start when I do, at almost 26:50, and finish a half hour later. The first 30 minutes are a tour of Wikispaces for beginners. The black blob on the screencast will disappear within a few seconds.):

Come on in, Ned. And bring your kids.

[This post had major problems in its original draft. I heavily edited it for all you stumblers. Later posts in the "Unsucky Gilgamesh" series: 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good and Evil, Nature and the Hero - Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Birth of the New Man ~ 7. A Goddess Prays ~ 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets 9. The Original "Original Sin"]

To My Few Student Readers: Please Stay

I’m bored writing for adults these days, and most of my readers are adults. If you’re a student, can you send this link to your friends, put it on Facebook, Stumble it, etc? I want students as my audience for this series, because I want to share with you all a series of posts, beginning today and continuing for years, probably, about:

Why the Classics Only Seem to Suck

I don’t blame students who think classic literature sucks.¹

They have millions of good reasons to think that. They may, for example, have:

1. teachers who aren’t that great at reading, writing, or teaching, or
2. great teachers at not-so-great schools that are afraid to let them read the most controversial literature (almost all schools are really afraid of students and their parents), or
3. English worksheets that turn literature into anatomy tests (“Identify which phrase below is an example of onomatopoeia” and similar dentist drills), or
4. five-paragraph essays to write in which the teacher in #1 tells them that they “must not use ‘I’, must have a topic sentence in the first line of each paragraph,” and a million other rules that real writers (we just excluded most teachers there) ignore altogether, or
5. a lack of time to read the books assigned in English class, what with all the other homework (they want to have a little time of their own to just live their life, after all, to maybe read stuff they want to read – so why not just read the Sparknotes summaries?), or
6. over-their-head levels of language complexity or adult content that they really shouldn’t be expected to comprehend (language) or care about (a middle-aged housewife’s psychology) until they’re well out of high school, or
7. dry lists of words and terms to memorize for that most ultra-sucky thing of all – that thing which more and more schools and parents seem to think education is now – the S.A.T.

My Promises for This Series

I promise not to bore you with trivia or showy diction – to use “use” instead of “utilize.”  And I promise to try to give you enjoyable ideas of why, despite the pain of many English classes, this thing called literature, played with naturally, gives pleasure.  Much classic literature is wonderful.  I get more pleasure out of a used one-dollar copy of a Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde play than I do out of my $5,000 home theater.  When I want a buzz, I choose books over booze and bongs. Good literature is the best drug out there.

Added Bonus: I’ll throw in a “big picture” tour of the history of literature from the earliest story ever told – today’s post – forward through the centuries to the Greeks, the Hebrews and their Bible, the Romans, the fascinatingly whacked Middle Ages and the lovely Renaissance, the supremely dangerous Shakespeare and the often-kinky Romantics, straight on up to a few choice books from our modern times. (That’s another thing that annoys me about so many English classes I’ve had to teach: they rip all books out of their historical context, and disconnect them from their times and each other. It’s like studying butterflies pinned under glass instead of watching them fly among the flowers.)

I’ll also avoid constipated scholar-talk in favor of the conversational, occasionally dangerous style of a teacher who can tell you the truth, as he sees it, about these books without fear of being fired for ruffling the feathers of the fearful “three P’s”: parents, principals, and preachers.

Great books are often door-openings to dangerous places, places polite society fears and deems off-limits.  When those doors open in a classroom, teachers often refuse to enter.  There’s always the student who can’t handle it, who complains to one of the three P’s, and forces the conversation to remain, safe and proper, in the well-lit hallway.

Not so here where, away from school, we can touch the taboos, and experience how literature can be a threat and a danger to who we are, to how we’ve been conditioned to see life, to our culture’s status quo.

Doris Lessing really nails the connection between schools and the status quo better than I could dream of doing, so I’ll close this section with her:²

“You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself – educating your own judgment. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being molded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this society.” – Doris Lessing

Now here goes.

Starting at the beginning – literally: c. 3,000 BCE

Let’s start with the oldest story ever told (or at least that we have written down), the first story in the history of our species, the story whose title, tragically, will make your eyes roll and your feet head for the exit door the minute you hear it, because it’s associated with your lifetime of aversion to classroom classics.

I’m talking about Gilgamesh.

Don’t leave.

Gilgamesh - the Earth's Oldest Epic - in Stephen Mitchell's brilliant 2004 translation.

It’s one of the coolest books you’ll ever read.  It comes from one of the earliest cities, literally, on Earth – but it’s so alien to everything we Judeo-Christian types have been conditioned to think of as “good and evil,” “right and wrong,” that it seems a work of science fiction or fantasy more than anything else.

Really, don’t leave. You’ll miss the part about a religion that sees sex as a good and holy thing.

I’m not making this up.  Here’s the background:

Gilgamesh is the story of a Sumerian king who actually lived and ruled around 2,700 BCE. That’s almost 5,000 years ago. The city itself was a thousand years old when the story was written, so we’re talking a story from a civilization 6,000 years ago.

Stop and let that sink in.  The Bible is only half that old, with the “Old Testament” reaching its final form around 400 BCE, and the “New Testament” not being slapped together until around 330 CE (or A.D., if you’re out of touch with proper scholarly conventions).  So Gilgamesh is more than twice as old as the Bible. The Bible’s a pup compared to this story, and as I’ll argue, the Bible is less wise, in many deep and fundamental ways, than this Sumerian book as well.

Moving on:  The king’s city, Uruk, was such a walled and templed and terraced wonder that the citizens themselves were blown away by it.  Since the story is from an age close to the agricultural revolution, when we stopped wandering around as nomads and living more like herd animals than humans, we get a sense, when we read this story, that the people who wrote it are totally aware of what a cool thing they’ve accomplished by making one of the world’s first grand cities – first, do you hear?

Looking out from Uruk’s walls across the sandy plains of what is today Iraq (Uruk was not far from later Babylon and today’s Baghdad³ ), you would have seen no other cities.  Cities, to repeat, were new, and Uruk was one of the first.  When you read this story, it’s like the story-teller remembers the days before the city was invented, the days of wearing animal skins and being goat-herders or hunter-gatherers.  And you can clearly tell he loves his city all the more for the different kind of life it makes possible – the civilized life.

It’s a story, then, of humanity basically crowing its pride over creating civilization by creating that Most Needful Thing for civilization to exist at all: a city.  If someone were to have written a blurb on the back of the book back then (which he couldn’t have done because the “pages” were actually baked clay tablets stacked like bricks in the library, all covered in reed-imprinted cuneiform), he would have written something like,

Unlike our neighbors in every direction, we aren’t hunter-gatherers, goat-herding nomads, or farmers in country villages.  We’re civilized. We built a city.  And we’re damned proud of that.

Luckily, since Uruk was civilized, it had court poets instead of flag-waving idiots to tell the story a bit more gracefully, and to tweak it and revise it over a couple thousand years to make it just so.

On Sex, Good and Bad

I have to be careful about sex here, because the story itself is.

Rendering of a ziggurat in Uruk (PD-self from Wikicommons)

On the one hand, the city had temples (like the ziggurat pictured right) dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, the goddess of love, fertility, procreation, and – strangely – war. (Aphrodite is basically the Greek version of the much older Ishtar, and Venus the Roman version. You knew that.)

We’re so blind today to the seeming magic through which sexual intercourse leads to pregnancy, and pregnancy to the creation of life from the womb of woman, that it takes a bit of imagination-work for us to appreciate how much sense it would make to pre-civilized and first-civilized humans to consider sex, pregnancy and birth, and above all women, as magical, sacred things.

That the Sumerians did consider sex sacred is clearly shown by this fact:  the temples of Ishtar were staffed with priestesses whose role was to have sex there, in the temple – whether only with the king or other elites, or with everyone, I don’t know.  These temple prostitutes were not “sinners,” were not “immoral”; they were respected every bit as much as Pastor Teds and Imam Abdullahs in churches and mosques around the world today.

And sex was not a “sin.”  It was a holy thing.  Check out “heiros gamos” on Wikipedia for the juicy (but deep) details.  (And stay tuned for my own theory, when we get to the Bible one of these days in this series, of how Ishtar and the Sumerians influenced the Jewish priests who wrote the Bible’s Genesis to make Eve such a bad character in the story, and sex – everybody’s favorite hobby, to riff off Woody Allen – such a bad, guilty act.)

So in Uruk, it may have been your duty as a good, gods-fearing citizen, to go to “church” occasionally to have sex with a temple prostitute.

In class, this point would get giggles from the immature or freak-outs from the ever-present class prudes, and the following idea would never sink in – which is sad, because it could lead to possibly deep and beautiful ideas such as this:

Think of how different it must have been, as a young person entering puberty, not to be shamed for suddenly discovering sexuality, but to instead, I imagine, be congratulated by family and society, maybe brought to “church” – the temple – to have that sexual awakening honored and instructed through some religious initiation.  To be welcomed into this magical new stage, rather than met with the silence and denial puberty is usually met with in our own culture.  “Abstinence-only” sex education would be laughed at in Sumer, and priests, parents, and schools would be comfortable with this natural thing.  There were far fewer locked doors, hidden materials, and guilt-burdened consciences for boys and girls back then, I suspect.

But it could also lead to less “beautiful” but still “deep” questions like this: For the “prostitute,” how was “temple prostitution” then different from prostitution now? Since sex wasn’t shameful then, was prostitution also not shameful?  Were the temple prostitutes abused and frowned upon the way many prostitutes are today?⁴  Or were they protected from abuse by the temple, and by the reverent treatment of those they served there – treated less like today’s “whores,” in other words, than like today’s preachers?   Since they surely thought of sex differently than we in the West do in the Judeo-Christian framework – and we inherited much of that framework whether we’re religious or not – it’s not an easy question to answer.⁵

(Do you see the “science fiction” side yet?)

But on the other hand, there was such a thing as “bad sex” in this story – and it’s what gets the plot rolling.

King Gilgamesh was a bit of a jerk when it came to sex.  Because he was king, and above the law, he had more choices than his wives or the temple prostitutes.  And the choice he made struck everyone involved – even the gods, who looked on from heaven – as really, really wrong: Gilgamesh chose to treat himself to the bed of every new bride on her wedding day – before her husband did.

So the people of the kingdom get understandably offended by this cocky king, and their complaints finally make it to the ears of the gods: the big-daddy god in particular, Anu (think Zeus and you’re close enough).

And here’s another place I think it gets deep and beautiful – but first let me take a detour to mention a couple of important things that connect to the beliefs of Jews and Christians and Muslims today.  The “deep and beautiful” stuff won’t work unless you know this.

On God, His Leadership Style, and His Fore-Fathers

First, the Gilgamesh epic is from a culture⁶ that spoke a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, and that dominated the Middle East for thousands of years before Judaism, the religion of the Bible and of Jesus, even existed.

Second, the Hebrews who first settled Israel over a thousand years after the Gilgamesh story knew this dominant culture, and included many Sumerian myths in the Bible; two well-known examples are the Six-Days’ Creation and Noah and the Flood in Genesis (the Sumerian Noah, Utnapishtim, will be a major character by this story’s end, by the way – and will tell the original and much older Sumerian version of the Flood later adapted in Genesis). You can read the Sumerian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, yourself to see the similarities.  It’s only a few pages long.

But the differences between the Sumerian and Judeo-Christian gods are even more interesting.

The most interesting difference to me is that the Sumerian religion had male and female gods and, more importantly, that the main Sumerian “god the father” type was, like most fathers, married. It’s always seemed weird to me that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god is alone, unmarried.  Zeus had Hera, the Sumerian Anu had Aruru, but Yahweh, the “God” of the Bible?⁷  No female for him.  You have to wonder why the Hebrews took the female from heaven, who did it, when, and how.  I do, anyway. But I’ll share those thoughts down the road.

The other interesting difference is in the morality – I almost want to say “leadership style” – of the two father gods. To see the difference, let’s do a thought experiment:  pretend Gilgamesh did his wife-stealing stunt in Jerusalem, that Gilgamesh was a Hebrew and his god was not Anu but Yahweh, the god of the Jews and Christians.

When that God hears that Gilgamesh is deflowering all the wives of all “His people” – “coveting” more than his neighbors’ (and subjects’) “asses” and therefore breaking one of the Ten Commandments – how do you think that God would react?

People will argue with me here, but I don’t see how they can win: that God deals with sinners, rebels, and others who disobey him with this “leadership decision”: punishment.  He’s an “angry God,” as he says himself. ⁸ It’s hard to see that God doing much but using angry force to punish Gilgamesh and make him change his ways.  Human obedience is what matters to that God, as I read him; human wisdom comes a distant second.  You want evidence?  God’s instructions for dealing with people who disobey his laws, over and over (in Deuteronomy especially), is to simply kill them. And Adam and Eve received one hell of a punishment because of their disobedience, too.

Back to the Story: “What Would Jesus Anu Do?”

But the earlier Sumerian god, Anu?  His reaction to Gilgamesh’s adulterous outrage is totally intriguing, and in my view, totally cool.  I like this god.

He doesn’t say “Punish him.”  He doesn’t say “Kill him.”  Instead, he turns to Aruru, the goddess who the Sumerians believed created humanity from earthly clay, and tells her to do it one more time.

He tells her, more interesting still, not to create any old human, but instead a special type. “Now go and create,” he tells her,

“a double for Gilgamesh, his second self,
a man who equals his strength and courage,
a man who equals his stormy heart.
Create a new hero, let them balance each other
perfectly, so that Uruk has peace.”

And so she does.

I’m going to stop here for the moment, and just share why I think Anu is a god worthy of the title.  Because by creating a “double” for Gilgamesh instead of simply killing him on the spot, he shows that to him, “sin” is a lack of wisdom.  As you’ll see, he creates this double so that Gilgamesh may have the experiences he needs to grow wiser.  I also think he’s just plain smooth for not freaking out and throwing a temper tantrum, but instead coolly coming up with this mysterious idea:

“Make a double for him. That should do the trick.”

What a wtf plot twist. Love it. Suspense accomplished.

And it’s a wonderfully optimistic view of man for a God to have: not “fallen” and in need of salvation, not infantile and in need of a list of Commandments to unthinkingly obey, not tainted by any “original sin,” but instead: capable of growing through experience, of learning and finding his own way, of finding “balance” that brings “peace.”

That “double,” by the way?  His name is Enkidu – and he’s Gilgamesh’s double in a curious and fascinating way: Gilgamesh is two-thirds divine, one-third human; Enkidu, on the other hand, is – get this – two-thirds animal, one-third human. Gilgamesh is the king of civilization; Enkidu is a wild-man living naked in the wilderness, alone with no human companionship.  But this animal-man is actually innocent and good – shades of some pre-Biblical Darwinian understanding that, hello?, humans are indeed animals in the animal kingdom, and that that bit of natural obviousness is nothing to freak out about?

Before Closing:

Challenges, corrections, extensions, additions, and anything else are welcome. More on Gilgamesh soon.⁹

Next: 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good and Evil, Nature and the Hero – Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Birth of the New Man 7. A Goddess Prays ~ 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets 9. The Original “Original Sin”

~     ~     ~

1. thanks to Tom, by the way,  whose post partly inspired this and who turned me on to that article. [↩]
2. and thanks to R. Greco for this gem [↩]
3. that’s right: the US military is occupying and bombing the earliest civilization in the Middle East, and for any of you familiar with Mosul, that’s where the clay tablets holding the Gilgamesh story were uncovered, after two thousand years of sand-buried silence, by a British guy in the late 1800s [↩]
4. And – are there prostitutes today that don’t feel ashamed, aren’t abused or frowned upon, and actually find fulfillment in their profession?  Aren’t the questions endless? [↩]
5. Thanks to the Salon.com forum that mentions this post for pointing out this angle. [↩]
6. it’s complicated: the earlier Sumerians, whose language was not related to the Semitic Hebrew and Arabic, were overthrown by other races, including the Akkadians and Babylonians, whose languages were both dialects of Semitic Assyrian, and who kept the story alive [↩]
7. Yahweh is a Hebrew name for what English-speaking Jews and Christians call “God” [↩]
8. And boy, I just opened the floodgates to a million evangelists to explain how Jesus marked a change in God’s law, a new covenant, with mercy replacing wrath, et cetera. But I’m going to side with the Jewish people on this one, for the sake of argument, and stick only to their original, non-Christian texts. The Torah above all.  I’m talking about that God as the literary character we read about in Jewish religious literature. [↩]
9. and if you decide to buy the book, be sure to buy the Mitchell translation pictured above. All the other ones I’ve seen are pretty crappy in comparison. This one’s fantastic. [↩]

In my perfect America, the evangelical radio stations choking out the dial are spreading the gospel of Science, not that of a religion of the downtrodden classes of the Roman Empire.  Yes, science has its dark side, but so do the evangelicals’ “gods.”¹  In my book, churches and laboratories are close to tied on the scoreboard of Good and Evil.²

In my perfect past, the high school English teacher in Tennessee, whom I called from Los Angeles years after graduating to share with her that I had discovered literature and declared it my major in college, would not have answered that long-distance announcement with, “But Clay, the only thing I want to know is if you have accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior” – she would have instead answered, “But Clay, be sure to take a lot of science too. In its own way, it has as many wonders as poetry and mysteries as religion.”

In my perfect k-12 years, I would have come to admire science then the way I do now, and would have dedicated my life to becoming a scientist.  Too late for that now.

But if I’d had Doyle as a science teacher – or even been able to just read Doyle’s wonderful stories and thoughts about science – chances are strong that I would have seen that light before it was too late.

In other words, Doyle is a science teacher whose writings about that subject are addictive. Half Steinbeck, half uncle you’d always wished for, the voice and perspective just do me right. He makes his back yard, his New Jersey coast, the trees outside his classroom window come alive like only a good science-storyteller can.  Do yourself a favor and check him out.

1. sorry, but I count “God” and “Jesus” as two, and Christianity as polytheism. Nobody gets the Trinity thing – not even the theologians. Which makes sense, since it doesn’t make sense. [↩]
2. Just read Deuteronomy or Revelation, or study history or current events. [↩]

John Larkin in Oz nudged me to consider playing with the idea he so creatively played with on his own site: “How Far I Roamed as a Child.”

John’s post gives the full background of the idea, and a nicely visual guided tour of his own childhood using personal photos and satellite imagery from Google Maps¹. But this excerpt from John’s post brings out the historical and educational thrust of the idea:

[An] article in the Mail online, ‘How children lost the right to roam in four generations‘, is particularly telling. It sets out quite clearly how from one generation to the next children are not roaming as far as their parents and grandparents.

Firing up Google Maps and revisiting my elementary and junior high years’ stomping grounds in Tennessee was a blast – and as John seemed to understand by inviting me to play with his idea, it has all sorts of engaging applications for the writing classroom. One example is all I have time for at the moment, and it’s this:  By typing in my childhood home address on Google Maps, then clicking “street view” and zooming and panning around a bit, I found, of all unremarkable things, the street-drainage ditch in front of my house, with its tunnel under the street to the other side, which I crawled through as a child surely hundreds of times – and up the hill from that, in what was once my yard, the grandest hickory tree you could ever imagine, whose autumn leaves I and my brother and sisters and parents and dogs raked into piles (okay, the dogs didn’t rake), dove into, splashed around in like leafy surf, on and on.  Here’s a screenshot:

The Ditch, the Hickory, the Memory Flood

Wouldn’t This Work in the Writing Classroom?

The photo above may not do anything for you, and it shouldn’t.  But me?  I can hear the flung rocks echoing from the tunnel, smell the algae in its puddles, remember the sense of mystery of the world opening out at tunnel’s end.  For autobiography and personal narrative, again, this beats the utter hell out of brainstorming with pencil and paper about my childhood.  Never in a hundred years would I have even remembered that ditch and tunnel. But now that I do, the related memories wax exponential.  That ditch, for example:  after a heavy rain, it was a child’s river, and so, with my best friend Gary (who drowned with his father a few summers later), we named that “river,” in a bit of blood-brother name-combining, the “Clary.”  Again, just an example of how this goes beyond brain-storming to brain-flooding.

How Far I Roamed

Anyway, like John, man did I roam as a child.  I must have walked four or five miles a day on average.  Here’s Google Maps, with my first attempt to use Adobe Illustrator for labels and arrows, to show the details (click image for larger view, and note the key in the lower left corner):

How Far I Roamed: Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1960s and '70s

(And for the students out there who read this, let me know: do you roam as far these days? Or have you “lost the right to roam”?  And Dad: you can comment too, you know. How far did you roam as a child, on a daily basis?)

If you decide to play with this meme, by the way, please link it to John’s original post. It’s his baby, and it’s a good one.

1. including the astonishing “street view” which, as the name implies, puts you in the perspective of a photographer standing on whatever spot of road you choose, and allows you to pan 360°, tilt up and down, zoom in, “walk” up or down the street [↩]

I feel a need to pull back from the tools, and gravitate more toward meaning when I write.
–Web Legacies Wrap-Up, 9 Aug 2008

The Jocks and Fags personal narrative was meaningful for me. In its original context¹ – written for a class whose professor read it, penned a glowing comment on the bottom of the last page, and gave it back to me – it was only meaningful for one other person besides me. And since it was nothing more than enjoyable homework grading for her, it’s hard to characterize that essay’s meaning for her as anything more than a pleasant diversion.

In its changed context – published a couple of weeks ago here, after a good four years of mouldering in a box stuffed with other orphaned writings – the character of its meaningfulness changed as well. It had different readers, reading it for different purposes. Especially the readers who found it because they searched for such stories on Google.

And look at how what was once homework that did nothing became, through the power of this new medium, a story that did something. The comments to that post tell the tale:

Barry Bachenheimer wants that post to do something at his school district half a world away in New Jersey, and I can only hope it will:

Clay – Our district has set a summer administrative discussion topic on the “At Risk Student”that we don’t know about.”  I’m sharing this piece with them, as it is illustrative of a larger issue in our schools as a whole.

Thanks for sharing.

Phil seems to want something similar in his context:

We all need to try to save one child, one day at a time. I too will share this with my teaching colleagues.

But look what happens next:

I was searching for something to help me out with my son. He is going into the 7th grade at a Parochial school and having some serious problems on his football team with kids he knew back when he went to public school. They gang up on him, tease him and generally make him feel like he is worthless. The problem is, he loves football. He has to play with these kids if he wants to play, as it is the only league in our area. He has a couple of friends from his current school, but they are now starting to avoid him due to the disease the other kids are causing. His coach is also starting to pretend he doesn’t exist, because it is hard to put forth an effort when you are teased incessantly, and the coach ignores everything. The issue is, he really is a great player. Please help, if you have any ideas.

I replied to JJ the way I expect most people would:

It’s hard to help from across the Pacific, and situations like this are tough anyway, with no easy solutions.

And I’m no therapist.

Obvious options, none guaranteed, are:

1. Parents talk to school admin/coach.
2. Parents involve kid in discussion of how to solve the problem. There’s a life lesson here.
3. Kid stands up against main persecutors, and fights back.

I wish I could help more. But the point of my post is, growth can come from this stuff. It’s just not visible in the short-term.

Then meaning seemed to create change:

JJ wrote back,

Thanks so much for your advice. We have since talked to the coach and another administrator. The coach acted fairly unconcerned, but the admin. was quite helpful. We found out that others were having problems with these same kids! They are splitting the team and he assured us the “bully” kids would be on a different team. Your story really helped us out. I read it to my son. He felt like he wasn’t alone. He felt a sort of relief, I could hear it in his voice.

So anyway, they are splitting the teams in a few days. My son, after reading your story sacked the QB (main perp) at least 4 times last practice. The coaches cheered, the “bully” kids protested, and my son’s friends are all acting normal again. I don’t think it is over yet, but it is getting better. I want to thank you again. God/Goddess Bless You, Namaste’ … and a heartfelt hug across the Pacific.

What I’m about to say is another reader’s Rorschach Test. Sour types will roll their eyes and see this as self-congratulation, but types with purer eyes should understand:

Reading JJ’s story of the boy reading my “homework-cum-public-speech-act” was, in a quiet way, a high point in my writing life.

It fulfilled the hope of that essay’s final paragraph -

And he will come to understand, late one night in Spain while writing a story about a boy, that he owes it to that boy to always watch over the new student, and the one who doesn’t fit because he is too pretty or she is too large, and the one who doesn’t fight, and the one who doesn’t know how the present shapes the future. And he will try to help them learn what he was never taught.

- but it fulfilled it in a way unimagined when that essay was written, because I didn’t self-publish then. I could only think of my very circumscribed, fourth-floor-of the-schoolhouse and only-during-teacher-hours sphere of influence when I wrote that. But now, again, due to the change of context effected by the rabbit hole of this writing revolution we demean with the vile term, “blogging,” a piece I poured my heart into years ago was now pouring into someone else who needed the reading, because he was now going through something I went through three decades ago.

Insert your graphic of space-time warps here, and color it a warm red.

Coda:

It all brings me back to the power of this new medium. I tire of hearing people call it “transformative,” but I can’t find a better word.

I can find an analogy, though:  Superstitious people read everything from tea-leaves to stars to Tarot cards and whacked-out books of Revelation to try to discern their futures. I’m not superstitious, and don’t need to be to say this:  “Blogging” – which really just means daily writing² – has, for me, often approached the level of prophecy, in very personal terms, that I have again and again self-fulfilled.  Does it make it clearer by describing it as an act, when done at a certain depth, of writing one’s own future?

No superstitious woo-woo stuff is implied here. There’s a logic and causal explanation that we can very simply label a “reflective habit” – or maybe, to put it in Buddhist terms,  a “mindfulness” – that daily writing produces. That sort of habit surely works wonders with mere pen and paper, but those wonders multiply, as the story of JJ’s son shows, when they are shared.

Key examples of “writing my  future” on this space: I wrote my quitting school-teaching six months before I did it.  I wrote of launching a global student blog six months before I did that. The writing preceded the doing.

And key examples of the effects of this “quantum” online context:  Will’s snatching my off-hand paragraph about quitting teaching, and the discourse that swirled around that on both our spaces, and 500 good people around the world on Twitter lending their sinews to the Students 2.0 launch in an astonishing two hours one Seoul Saturday morning – that context, with its unpredictable and often wild instant feedback, has its own fateful force. It is the world taking notice of one small person’s words, and that notice, again, can transform.

And I am simply blown away.

To JJ’s son, I’ll just share that I wrote this other little thing, too, a few months ago, and his story connects to that piece of writing in ways I hadn’t imagined when I wrote it.  It went like this:

More and more I wonder: is school a good place for teachers who want to make a difference in the lives of their students, and to the future of the world? Is there a way to leave the daily farce of gradebooks, attendance sheets, tests, corporate and statist curriculum, homework assignments, grade-licking college careerist “students” (and parents), fear of parents and administrators, and fear of inconvenient socio-political truths – and at the same time, to make a far more meaningful impact on the lives of the young?

I’m thinking yes. I’m thinking, moreover, obviously. I’m not sure how much longer I want to work for schools. I’d so much rather teach. [Emphasis added]

So again, to JJ’s son, I hope I’m not wrong in seeing “blogging” as a way to continue teaching without working for schools, and to contribute to learning in a way other than, and more meaningful than, grades.

And I would love to hear updates from you, if you’re ever so inclined.

And to everybody else: Half of what I do, I realize, is with an expectation that when something worthwhile is modeled, others will learn that they can do it too – and will do so.  I’d hoped to see more momentum for student voice after showing that (the currently beleaguered) Students 2.0 was both possible and easy. If that momentum has happened, I’m unaware of it, and will thank anybody who chimes in with other examples of the elevation of student voice in our adult-centered discourse.

And now this personal narrative instead of edublogging thing, this pull to the meaningful instead of the technological: I’m sharing the above not only because I love the story, but also because I hope others might consider a similar pull. (Diane Cordell already does this wonderfully, by the way.)³

And now I sound preachy, so I’ll close by having a nice warm cup of shut-the-heck-up.  Thanks for reading.

–

(Beautiful) photo by *L*u*z*a*

1. Will’s post, and the link to George Siemens on context, was a flywheel for this post, though I drive the idea of context in a different direction here [↩]
2. okay, there’s more to it than that, but the habit is the thing [↩]
3. And Mark, I tried to comment on your post about feeling that, but quit after three tries. [↩]

"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.

–

Photo: littlerottenrobin

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

–

Photo credit: bramblejungle

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

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).

–

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

–

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

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 [↩]