Beyond School

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.

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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*

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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. [↩]

[In my Web Legacies Wrap-Up post, I said I'd decided against publishing the ninth and tenth "Culture Clip" pieces I wrote that summer in Spain a few years ago. I changed my mind.  I didn't like the Vet piece, but readers seemed to, more than they did the ones I preferred over it (to which replied one cricket): Shirky's "publish, then filter" principle in action.

I'm equally unhappy with the piece below, but not so much because of the idea as of the writing, which just seems to miss. But in the spirit of Shirky, and of "fluff and fun," here it is anyway. Since the readership on this space is international, I'd be curious to hear any multi-cultural testimonies to the travel habits of your own countries. Are they similarly "blind"?]

~ ~ ~

Artifact: International Boarding Passes
Dates: 1998-present
Elements of Culture: Ethics; Traditions; Surface Cultures

Am I the only person who has noticed how easy, perhaps even normal, it is for us to travel or live in other countries—and never see them? Or worse yet, to confirm in our travels our stereotypes of the places we visit, because . . . those stereotypes were what we looked for in the surface culture in the first place?

We go to China, for example, and choose to experience it how? By lodging in Western hotels and taking tours designed for herds of Western tourists.

And am I crazy, or are the locals at the tourist shops strangely savvy at knowing what stereotypes we Westerners hold about them? In Mexico, for example, you can find, at any tourist market, shop upon shop in which the merchants, who look as if they’d never seen or worn a sombrero in their life, sell dolls and puppets of Mexicans wearing nothing but sombreros!

The more I think about it, the more absurd it is:

1. I go to Mexico to explore a different culture;
2. I want a souvenir to commemorate that exploration;
3. My stereotype defines what is most distinctive or essential about Mexico;
4. so I buy a puppet in a sombrero playing mariachi (and looking faintly drunk?); that

A Mexico of the Mind?

5. doesn’t represent a single Mexican I’ve seen in Mexico (outside of the tourist restaurants that hire depressed Mexican musicians to dress like Disney Mexicans from an American’s childhood memories); but
6. must have some truth in it because why else would the Mexicans themselves sell them? when really
7. they sell them because that’s what these crazy Americans always get off the plane/out of the tourist bus and ask for; so
8. back goes the American to America with his drunk, sombrero-wearing mariachi-playing puppet, where
9. s/he puts it on the shelf to collect dust; and
10. show it to the kids/grandkids/neighbors/etc who
11. years later go to Mexico and
12. remember that damn puppet and
13. return to 3), above.

(–ad infinitum and ad-freaking-nauseum. I’ll never shop again.)

–
Photos: blind distortion by bashed; mexican puppets by abhijit

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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

–

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.

—

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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