Beyond School

Did you ever notice that we have no holidays in which we revere history’s true - in the sense of “backed up with evidence” - miracle-workers, those hard-working saviors we call “scientists”?

Think about it: scientists, through the “miracle” of human reason, have eradicated diseases for literally billions of people through medicine, created light and warmth in winter through electricity, bread for the hungry through improved agriculture, knowledge of “the heavens” through astronomy, knowledge of creation and generation through biology and genetics. They’ve literally given man the “miraculous” power to fly around the earth and to the stars; to speak face-to-face from opposite ends of the earth (and from the moon); they’re close to creating life itself, and have already created a doubled average lifespan for all of us in a mere century.

Why we don’t give thanks at Temples of Science, and donate our tithes there to promote more Good Works, is a question for future historians - if our future is not cut short by nuclear- or bioweapon-armed religious fanatics in the name of one authoritarian book or another (and it’s funny that Buddhists, of all world religions I’m aware of, are the only ones not to claim knowledge of any god at all, and also the only ones not to be engaged in violence in the name of their creed). Why we take our children to hospitals when they’re sick - we used to take them to priests - but turn around and attack the teachings of science in our schools….this saddens and frustrates me to no end.

As a history teacher and humanist, as a simple human amazed at the changes over time in human history - women’s liberation, civil rights, the triumph of modern science and reason over medieval and Iron Age ignorance, and so forth - I’m keenly interested in the rise of the “new atheists” in Western culture (again, “atheism” makes no sense in Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian Asia, since it was never “theist” to begin with). Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others have led a fascinating movement to challenge one of the last unreasoned taboos - the desirability of religion in modern civilization.

Yesterday, I was reading the Science Blogs in my Bloglines, and came across a post that had the following 2-hour “coffee klatsch” conversation of four of the earth’s leading contemporary “heretics” (in Latin, this simply means “ones who choose”) and champions of science. While I’ve seen them all featured in the media in one place or another, it has usually been in situations in which they argued their positions from an editorial soapbox, or else engaged in a somewhat sensationalistic debate with a proponent of one faith or another.

In the videos below, though, things are remarkably different: they’re among friends and fellow-travelers. No name-calling, no thumping of Darwin or Moses here. Instead, they unwind into a wonderfully intelligent discussion of their motives for attacking superstition, their fears of its untrammeled progress in the future, their frustrations at our culture’s ignorance of the basic principles of science and scientific “knowledge” and “truth” and, perhaps most remarkably, their own misgivings about both what they are doing, and how they are doing it.

In this setting, we see different sides of these men. Richard Dawkins, author of the best-selling The God Delusion, who has often seemed peevish and combative in discussions with such religious leaders as the fallen “cocaine-with-male-prostitutes” megachurch preacher and Bush-adviser Ted Haggard (here) (and to be fair, Haggard castigated Dawkins with all the self-righteousness of the best of our American Elmer Gantry’s) and with a Jewish convert to Islam in Jerusalem (here), emerges in the videos below a much milder, more humble and likable man.

Similarly, Sam Harris, whose The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason is a masterpiece of style and rhetoric in its arguments against religion, but at the same time threatens to alienate the very audience it hopes to reach through that very force, poses in the talks below some exquisite questions about these rationalists’ own assumptions of their “righteousness.” It’s scientific humility in action, and at its best. (Harris gave a brilliant speech in 2005 at Canada’s version of TED Talks, “Idea City,” here, but thankfully seems since then to have reconsidered the efficacy of calling religion “bullsh*t,” as he does in an ill-advised moment at the end of this speech.)

Daniel Dennett is Professor of Cognitive Studies at Tufts, author, and a staff writer of my favorite intellectual science-and-culture blog, The Edge, (don’t miss his “Thank Goodness” post for a beautiful paean to the good works of scientists worldwide working together for a universal good, rather than against each other for a tribal one. Dennett wrote it after surviving

a nine-hour surgery, in which [his] heart was stopped entirely and [his] body and brain were chilled down to about 45 degrees to prevent brain damage from lack of oxygen until they could get the heart-lung machine pumping

–and it is a truly beautiful, inspiring piece of writing from a man recently back from the final precipice.) Dennett comes off as warm and civil as his Santa-white beard suggests he should (and I just discovered he gives three TED Talks here).

Finally, Christopher Hitchens, author and staff writer at Vanity Fair, contributes his own spice to the mix. He frankly annoys me by dominating so much of the conversation, ignoring others’ attempts to weigh in, and otherwise showing a lack of social intelligence. But his discussion of the fateful event which Hannukah celebrates, and his argument that it was actually an unparalleled disaster for the future of civilization, was one of the high moments, intellectually, for this history buff’s experience of the film. It’s in the last ten minutes or so of the second video.

Before embedding the videos, I’ll add the following caveat: as an educator tasked with inspiring critical thinking abilities to the next generation, and as a person who simply stands up for advancing the Good as he sees it, I hope I don’t have to apologize to anyone for asking valid questions like this. I’ve said it before in these pages, and I’ll say it again: the problem with schools, generally, is they only practice critical thinking about safe subjects - and that’s an increasingly tragic oxymoron for our world.

I hope you’ll find a couple hours to be entertained by some sorely needed, very civil, conversation about one of the chief questions in our shared historical moment.

Hour One:

Hour Two:

Best holiday wishes to you all, by the way. You’ve enriched my life (with the aid of this scientific miracle called the read-write web) over the past year in ways for which I am truly thankful.

Last week, I mentioned reading Jeff Wasserman’s post about how schools teach bad writing (the 5-Paragraph Essay and other abominations). I mentioned how it made me “want to make my AP Lit class Ning public. We’re having forum discussions about Organic Form v. Mechanical.”

The more I thought about atomizing those Ning walls and welcoming the world of people who like to talk about reading, writing, and how schooliness creates lifelong non-readers and non-writers, the more attractive the idea became.

So whoever you are, if conversations such as the one below entice you to share your thoughts with my students about literacy in schools versus the literacy so many of us adults managed to grow into despite them (okay, maybe you were lucky and had good teachers, which would be interesting to hear about), then come on in. My students gave me permission to invite you.

Here’s just a taste from one forum on how practicing the organic essay form for five weeks improved (or didn’t) these students’ writing - I hope you don’t take it as self-congratulatory, because that’s not the point:

Reply by Shim Sep 17:

Well, when I first came into the classroom, I really didn’t know if I belonged in this class or not. After my first mock exam I realized that it was really different from what I expected, it was HARD. But after a couple of classes and more mock exams I guess I found my own way of writing and letting out my thoughts, unlike the schooly ways that education has locked us up in. So far I believe that I’ve started to write faster and think faster, as we practice more and more, and realize more and more. I’ve also found out that, rather thinking to the “educational” way that I’ve been living up with for the past 17 years, just letting out my ideas felt more better and more reasonable (which I guess is organic writing).

Reply by Clay Burell Sep 30:

Jeez, that was nice to read. Schools try, but for some reason, usually fail, to make students love reading great stuff and trying to write great stuff about their own responses. You give me hope that maybe I’m not failing.

Reply by Shim Oct 1:

Yeah, I mean I never knew that I was able to “ENJOY” literature, because of the ideas that schools all over the world put into students like me. Literature is HARD, “Do it this way that way”, “great interpretation, but WRONG”.

I really hope some of you will browse and add your thoughts to those of my students. They’re really interesting people.

I’m catching up on grading and assessing on my AP Literature Ning - that’s where most assignments are posted, so student-people can see each others’ work, and my replies to everybody, not just to them - and was wowed by JungHee.

How? I assigned Keats‘ stunning last sonnet, “Bright Star, Would I were Stedfast as Thou Art,” as a four-stage response exercise. Those stages were in four forums:

1. Read the poem and journal your first impressions.
2. Draw the poem’s imagery, then journal how your first impression changed.
3. Record and upload an mp3 of yourself reciting the poem - and read it as well as you can.
4. Journal how reciting and listening to your recital further changed your impressions of the poem.

In short: read it with the switched-off laziness that is par for the course with homework; SEE the imagery (and if you’re really sharp, discover that you can touch those images, hear them, smell them, taste them, too); sing the poem’s sounds (albeit atonally); and connect those sounds to the sense of the poem by hearing them.*

I’m really enjoying reading and replying to these forums. The reflections are so revealing of each student’s level of accomplishment in savoring poetry.

But JungHee threw me for a loop. He recorded his mp3 on a music editor, noticed the patterns of the “p” phonemes in his reading, and seemed to be able to notice sound more by seeing it in the digital soundwaves - doing a spectrographic analysis, basically - than by hearing it unaided by technology. So he shared by uploading his discovery, which I do here as well:

Here’s what JungHee said in his forum about this:

What I noticed in my sound wave was that there were frequent “high peaks”.
I posted the picture of this as attachment below for clarification..
All the “mountain looking” ones are the places where the “P” sound made the air go into the mic with too much force. So we can tell that there were some… “edged” words throughout the poem (?)

I don’t know what to make of this, but thought it was interesting to share.

Back to branding my student-people with tattoos for their permanent records….(*grrrr…*)

–

*This is all based on the conviction that one drawback of our multimedia age is that it has led to the atrophying of that mental muscle we call the imagination. That is not a good thing for our experience of the sublime and beautiful. And I love my student-people too much to deprive them of the opportunity to make the ascent to that plane.

I’m don’t run shrieking when students use certain taboo vowel-consonant combinations. The way I see it, 21st century moral “commandments” should focus on far more “evil” “sins” than cursing, coveting a neighbor’s ass (as in donkey), and other Bronze Age no-no’s. Instead of washing my own child’s mouth out with soap to make him or her “moral,” I’ll be preaching a new set of commandments about 21st century sins - things like as “Thou shalt not drive a gas-guzzler,” “Thou shalt not buy blood-diamonds,” and “Thou shalt not be a selfish and socially uninformed consumer-drone.” No combination of “f” and “k,” “sh” and “t,” or “g” and “d” phonemes is in the same moral ballpark as earth-destroying habits.

So that’s the relevance argument.

Then there’s the hypocrisy argument, which goes like this: the vast majority of adults curse. So does the vast majority of high school young adults, imitating their elders in this as in the “21st century sins” mentioned above. And I’m known to engage in the occasional use of what, in the U.S. Army, we called “colorful language” myself. (Let’s not even get started on our entertainment industry’s attitude toward all of this.)

I mention this because yesterday I read the first drafts of my AP Literature classes’ modern prose adaptations of Shakespeare’s King Lear. For those of you who’ve sinned against your own aesthetic lives by not experiencing the power of this greatest of Billy S.’s tragedies, you should know that cursing occurs repeatedly throughout it - and does so as high art. Here’s an example: Lear cursing the womb (!) of his treacherous oldest daughter, Goneril –

KING LEAR:
Hear, nature, hear; dear goddess, hear!
Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend
To make this creature fruitful!
Into her womb convey sterility!
Dry up in her the organs of increase;
And from her derogate body never spring
A babe to honour her! If she must teem,
Create her child of spleen; that it may live,
And be a thwart disnatured torment to her!
Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth;
With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks;
Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits
To laughter and contempt; that she may feel
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child!

Some of you cursing purists will say that the above is not in the same class as today’s more vulgar, four-letter word variety, and you have a point. Lear curses with style and grace, as befits a king. But Kent, his chief knight - Lear’s “Army Chief of Staff,” as it were - curses, as befits a career soldier, with much more salt and directness. Check out his classic “cussing out” of the slimy Oswald, servant of Goneril –

OSWALD:
What dost thou know me for?

KENT:
A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a
base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a
lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,
glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;
one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a
bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but
the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander,
and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I
will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest
the least syllable of they addition. (Act II, Sc. 2, ll. 14-24)

If your Elizabethan English is rusty, and you don’t hear the vulgarity and sexual insult sloshing in practically every line, download the free “Answers” Firefox addon, and click the unknown words while holding down “alt” on your Mac for an instant popup definition and more (PC users, you’re on your own - maybe “ctrl”?). Kent calls Oswald a pimp, son of a bitch, bastard, son of a whore, “wussy,” a suck-up, and more, and then says, in today’s language, “Deny one word, and I’ll kick your disgusting little donkey” (substitute the King James Bible word for donkey here).

It’s depressing, isn’t it, how the art of cursing has degenerated in our own modern age? Our four-letter words are so unimaginative and artless by comparison.

So if you were me, how would you guide students to translate these curses? Having Kent abuse Oswald by hissing,

You bad person, I’m going to kick your bottom.
You son of a bad woman, you sissy, you person born out of wedlock,
You big meanie, etc

just doesn’t strike me as a faithful literary adaptation. (It does strike me as schooliness, though. Some teachers, like Wilde’s classic Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest, would give such a bowdlerizing an “A,” I’ve no doubt.)

So I told the class, if they have a passage in which modern-day cursing seems the best choice for literary faithfulness to the original, then go ahead and let their character curse. I also warned them that they’d be assessed and graded based on how judicious and mature they were with their choices.

It’s only the first draft for these teams, and we’ve only adapted the first Act or so, but already there’s some interesting stuff happening. I share it partly for laughs, and partly because, pedagogically and socially, there are openings here for explorations into social contexts of using curse words - when to use them, and when not to.

I’ll shut up now, and paste a few passages of the Shakespeare first, followed by the translations. I’m curious to hear your reactions to these literary performances. Oh, one more caveat: my “Street Talk” and “Shakespeare in the Hood” unit name caused one student pair to do a sort of hip-hop, gangster translation. Which one will jump out at you as you read

CORDELIA (original)
I yet beseech your majesty,–
If for I want that glib and oily art,
To speak and purpose not; since what I well intend,
I’ll do’t before I speak,–that you make known
It is no vicious blot, murder, or foulness,
No unchaste action, or dishonour’d step,
That hath deprived me of your grace and favour;
But even for want of that for which I am richer,
A still-soliciting eye, and such a tongue
As I am glad I have not, though not to have it
Hath lost me in your liking.

CORDELIA (adapted)
But, let me say a word, Dad.
If you want me to suck up and say all the bullshit
You wanna hear, then
You just don’t understand me at all.
Its not all that fucking chaos
That made me break our bond,
And even without your dough, I’m still good.
I’m fine without the sucking up and
Attempting to steal your dough.
I do what I want, even if you care.

***

KING LEAR (original)
Thou hast her, France: let her be thine; for we
Have no such daughter, nor shall ever see
That face of hers again. Therefore be gone
Without our grace, our love, our benison.
Come, noble Burgundy.

KING LEAR (adapted)
Well she’s yours now, cause
I don’t have such as bitch as my daughter
And I don’t wanna see her again.
So just get the fuck out of my house.
Come here, Burgundy.

The above opened up an interesting discussion on that wiki page in which I asked (typing with one finger because I was eating a sandwich, thus unable to capitalize),

is cordelia’s f-bomb realistic? think about it - would a loving, good daughter use strong curse words to her father, or would she express her emotions with different, more respectful language? how does your dialogue change the characterization of cordelia in the audience’s eyes?

and one of the two authors replied with this, which I find revealing (he’s Korean, remember - and I’m adding the emphasis below):

well if it’s normal life English (like a typical American family English) we’re talking about, yes in my opinion I thought that it would be okay. I mean, after homestaying at an American house for 8 months, I had a feeling that from what I’ve seen from my past that it was similar and that the f-bomb was an okay idea.

Cordelia’s appearance, I guess to keep the same audience appeal as it did centuries ago, when Shakespeare first showed this play to his first audience, I think the dialogue did change the character in a more aggressive manner but still kept the same appeal that she had hundreds of years ago.

Not a bad beginning for these discussions as the unit continues.

This is getting longer than I’d intended, so I’ll close with a student paraphrase of the stunning soliloquy of the villain Edmund, bastard son to good Gloucester (and notice today we would agree with Edmund that society and conventional morality is criminal here, and he is an innocent victim of it - which I’m convinced Shakespeare realized as well, great social critic that he was):

EDMUND (original)
Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops,
Got ‘tween asleep and wake? Well, then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land:
Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund
As to the legitimate: fine word,–legitimate!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper:
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

EDMUND (adapted)
I will do whatever it takes to reach the top, just like all else in nature. Why should I let traditions screw me over? Just because I’m a year younger than my brother why do they call me bastard? Even when I am good as my brother, why does society treat me like shit? With shittiness? Shit? shit? At least I was born out of passion, unlike the losers like my brother. Well, then, brother, I’m going to take your land. Dad loves you more than me. Legitimate is such a good word. Well, so-called legitimate, if this letter works as planned and everything goes out fine, Edmund the Shit, will be more powerful than you. I’m going to get rich. God bless me.

Call me a knave if you will, but in my book, this is a pretty faithful and effective first draft!

In one of the great ironies of my life, I’m probably the only HS teacher at KIS not to have a 1:1 classroom, since I teach only AP Lit for seniors - the only grade level not required to buy MacBooks for school this year. But yesterday, I jumped in anyway with a project that incorporates the constructivist and 21st century literacy / web 2.0 ideas of having students create a “legacy product” for their assessment, instead of turning in stale homework to teacher.

Here’s the scoop: We’re reading Shakespeare’s greatest and most difficult tragedy, King Lear. The syntax and diction of the play are over the students’ heads, with a couple exceptions, but they have to become proficient at reading 16th century English for the AP Exam. So that’s the learning objective: give them practice at accurate comprehension of 16th c. English.

So here’s the “Constructivism 2.0″ project to work toward that goal:

1. I created a wiki on Wikispaces (free for teachers), entitled “King Lear Street Talk.” We’ll use this wiki to create a student-written modernized prose translation of Shakespeare’s play. (Setting up the wiki took only ten minutes, max. An eight-year-old can do it.)

2. In teams of two, students have to write a translation of one page of the play into today’s English. Accuracy counts, and so does the quality of the script they’re re-writing. If any team has a disagreement about how to translate any section of their page, they have to cover their butts by explaining, in the wiki page “Discussions” page, what they disagree about. Pedagogically, we all know that to translate archaic language into modern language, we have to comprehend that archaic language. So this is practice and close reading and comprehension on a line-by-line, focused level.

3. We’ll keep translating the play until we have the full 5-act play translated. We’ll publish that as a free e-Book using Lulu.com, which anybody can download to read.

4. We’re also going to record “radio performances” of our modern translation of the play on GarageBand podcasts, and upload them to Librivox.com, a literature podcast site that is a library of readings of copyright-free, public domain world literature. Senior citizens, blind people, and people who just like audio-books use this site to listen to 1,000’s of different titles. This can also be used by future classes as an intro to the tragedy - ESL students, younger students, and others can benefit by listening to these podcasts before reading the original version. So the students are becoming teachers of future students with this product.

So this will give students practice in all the AP Lit and Language Arts skills on our Standards and Benchmarks - reading, writing, speaking, listening, critical thinking (which comes when they debate opposing interpretations with their teammate, as well as when they decide how to act out different lines when they record their radio play podcast).

But instead of doing that in the old, stale way - handing in their translations to teacher, and performing a giggly mess in front of the class - they’re making a real product that they can share with the world, and - for the excellent performers - mention on their college applications as an example of their best work as part of their “digital portfolio.”