Beyond School

[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.]

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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

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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

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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 [↩]

A little behind-the-scenes glimpse at the bridge-building I’ve been doing to market my tutoring service, and at the same time to share another Web 2.0 offering with teeth: the video-subtitling site called dotSUB.

One of the biggest challenges I face on this limb is communicating with Korean parents who I am, and how I’m different from most of the “I’ve got a college degree and speak English, but have no teaching experience at all” English teachers in Korea.  The parents, understandably skeptical about foreigners claiming to be teachers, have a million questions that bear on their decision to hire me.  But they don’t speak English, and I don’t speak Korean, so my poor wife is caught in the crossfire playing two-way interpreter.  Since she’s not a teacher-geek, it’s both hard on and unfair to her to shoulder her with explaining blogs, wikis, Skype, etc, to parents - or even to explain my background and experience as a teacher.

Enter the wonderful world of Web 2.0, and dotSUB particularly.

I’ve got so many movies on this space, on YouTube and Google Video and BlipTV and Archive.org, all explaining and demonstrating my background, character, skills and abilities, and all of them would serve admirably to put many parent questions to rest - if only they were in Korean.

Well, thanks to a full day’s work transcribing my own videos first, 3-second clip by 3-second clip on dotSUB, my wife is now plugging in her own Korean translation on the site under each time-stamped subtitle.  Here are the results of the first one, the first half of a teacher-training video I made a few years ago at Shanghai American School (where Jeff Utecht and Jonathan Chambers first served me the Koolaid) about collaborative team-teaching in the mainstreamed ESL classroom. (I was the ESOL department head and teacher-trainer then. Ignore the Southern Baptist look; I must have been feeling nostalgic for Camp Joy.)

Cooler still, anybody at dotSUB can freely add a translation in their own language - which others can edit, wiki-like. All translated languages would auto-add to the drop-down menu in the media player’s “languages” bar. Very cool.

I’ll show you a few more things as they come. But what do you think, I wonder, about applications of this site for foreign language classrooms? Food for thought there….

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I get a good number of emails from people asking me to plug their book, blog, project, etc, and normally I just delete them (okay, I save the doozies like, “I’d like to give you the opportunity to let me guest-post on your blog” for laughs on blue days).

But this one was hard to delete:

Hi. My name’s Joe Solomon & I’m a blogger and social media consultant for nonprofits (EngageJoe.com). I’m currently helping to spearhead Social Actions Labs (a grant funded, not-for-profit initiative) – where we’re building web applications that help people connect to actionable opportunities across the web.

More specifically, we’re about to launch a revolutionary DonorsChoose.org Wordpress Plugin. You know the WP feature - “Possibly Related Blog Posts”? Imagine “Possibly Related Classroom Projects.” Our plugin will match relevant classroom projects from the DonorsChoose database of 10,000+ projects – and enable you to share them with your readers below your posts.

As a leading education blogger who uses the Wordpress platform, would you be interested in test-driving this Plug-in? We would really appreciate your feedback and are eager to share your blog as one of the first to raise awareness for DonorsChoose projects using this new technology.

We set up a campaign on ThePoint – It would be awesome if you could pledge to test out the plug-in upon launch.

We think this could be *huge* and I hope you’ll make the pledge and help raise awareness of classroom projects that need help across the US.

I checked it out, expressed tentative interest, and then Joe sent me a screenshot of how the plugin would generate causes based on a McCain post I did recently.  Check out the “oops” factor:

Hi Joe,

It’s an interesting idea. I looked at the screenshot, and blast the luck, saw that I would be promoting Abstinence Education donation requests with that post you sampled.

That’s a red flag. Is there a way I can delete any causes for which I’m unsupportive? If so, I’m willing to play.

(Regular readers might remember my Friday Funny post about Abstinence-Only Sex “Education,” and its hilarious tendency to make sodomites of our virginity-obsessed teens - and let’s not even start to talk about the creepiness factor in the incest-tinged “Purity Balls” - no pun intended - these smarmy dads take their daughters to, complete with Hymen Pledges and other whacked insanities. So, um, support Abstinence-Only? Over my dead body.)

But Joe replied:

Hah.  Yes, our algorithm still needs some tweaking.  Many posts we’ve tested have had impressively spot-on results –  from political posts that then recommend projects that help students develop critical thinking skill for the election — to a post about Steve Jobs bout with cancer that then recommends classroom projects that cover the tough issues surrounding cancer.

Currently, though, our developer has added a feature that lets you add “%NORELATED%” and this will remove the classroom projects from your post. [emphasis added]

I hope this answers your question…

It did.

So, without further ado, I’m happy to help classroom projects find funding by matching donors and causes with this plugin. Check this bottom of this post to see how it works.

Oh. My. God. With all the scandalous words on this post, we might get some whacked results. But it’ll be an interesting experiment, and I should be able to delete the links if I don’t like them. We’ll see.

(And for the record, Joe allayed my reservations about any profit motive on his part with this info:

I totally understand about the making money.  Social Actions is a not-for-profit initiative and DonorsChoose.org (which supports this project) is a non-profit as well.  Check out my website to learn more about my work — engagejoe.com.

Finally, the method of using The Point website to encourage the “Collective Action” that Shirky mentions (and many of us have discovered) is so difficult is worth noting itself.  The idea is, you announce a cause campaign there, invite people to commit, and promise not to launch this campaign until X number of people do commit, giving you a “tipping point.”  (I notice Alan Levine of CogDogBlog is the only other e’blogger I know who’s also supporting this particular campaign.)

For more info about the plugin, this is from the WP Plugin page:

“Possibly Related Classroom Projects” enables you to share relevant classroom projects from DonorsChoose.org based on the content of your posts.

DonorsChoose.org is where teachers submit project proposals for materials or experiences their students need to learn and succeed. Anyone can then choose projects to help bring to life. DonorsChoose.org usually has over 14,000 active proposals.

“Possibly Related Classroom Projects” makes it super easy to connect your readers to relevant classroom projects in need of help.

You’ll be amazed at the relevancy of many of these classroom projects to your posts (as well as the awesome and imaginative projects that are happening in classrooms around the US).

“Possibly Related Classroom Projects” is a project of Social Actions Labs.

For more info about the WordPress plugin, please see our project page.

For more info. about DonorsChoose.org, please see their Help section.

Okay. I promised, I waited, I tipped. I hope some of you will consider joining the cause.

(Now let’s see if any kinky links turn up about hymens, sodomites, or other whacked “classroom projects.” :P)

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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

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