Beyond School

Second draft:

On Two Ways of Reading: Slavery reads on its knees. Freedom reads on its feet.¹

So a high school teacher’s job: to teach students to find those feet?

I’m just looking for snappy first principles here. Ones within the 15-year-old attention span.

1. I know, I know — wannabee Nietszchean aphorist indulgence. But cut me some slack. Time is slow here on this beach. [↩]

Nothing like seeing a friend from three decades ago, when you were a new and very green adult in the world, to stir up the mind.

John and I also talked a bit about Gilgamesh today. Me talking about Gilgamesh is nothing new. I do that with anybody and everybody who’ll listen. But talking about it to the guy who knew you way back when when you so naively embarked on a conscious search for “Truth” — especially when that same guy joined you, and with exactly the same naivete — that is something new.

It’s like our 20-year old selves were sitting on that beach with us two 47-year-olds all day.

False Starts in the Search for Truth

That 20-year-old me was such a lousy seeker for Truth. He read all the Old Books devotedly — the Greek, the Hebrew, the Vedic, the Christian, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Taoist, the Gnostic, the Transcendental, “Yak yak yak.” He read them all, underlined passages, filled margins with scribbles, exclamation points, interrobangs. He started (and rarely finished) journals devoted to only copying the choicest of those words of Wisdom — quotes only. The Things to Remember. These were the words of Wisdom and Truth, and they were going to teach him Truth and Wisdom, by god. If he read them real closely to be sure he understood, then he’d find Truth and Wisdom. And life would be better because he’d have those things.

All I could do today while thinking about him was laugh at him.

Because I think I know now that that’s exactly the wrong way to read the Old Books.

If I had read Gilgamesh back then, when I was him, I would have been expecting it to teach me too. Another Old Book that was supposed to be Wise. That’s not how I read it now, thank goodness.

How Moderns Read

Anyway, I sat there on that beach wishing I had my iPod so I could record  what I was trying to aphoristically sum up about what I know about reading now — and wish I’d known well before 20, at your age, my students. I didn’t want this little stab at something essential to slip away. It went something like this:

It’s not what we learn from the Old Books. It’s what we see in them.¹

That mental shift in relation to reading, I want to say, comes close to a definition of the modern reader. A traditional reader gives up his authority to the author. A modern reader takes that authority back. Copernicus did it to Aristotle and Ptolemy, for example — he doubted their scientific authority based on his own observations. Voltaire and Nietzsche did it to the religious authority of popes, preachers, and the Bible.

A modern reader, in a nutshell, doesn’t read on his knees.

The scary thing? It seems that a large number of Americans are not modern readers at all.

And the sad thing? They all went to American schools — which doesn’t speak well about American education.

1. And yes, this is probably true of all books. But moreso, I think, for pre-scientific books. [↩]

I’m a 21st Century Education Rip Van Winkle with a twist: I only went to sleep for a single year’s sabbatical, but the changes over that year make 2008 seem like 1808. This post is long, but I hope some of you will plod through it and advise me on what helpful solutions I’ve slept through. I put my pleas along those lines in red.

Feel free to skip to section three for what’s really the meat of this post. I’d love feedback there especially.

I told my students in the just-concluded semester-long Chinese History course that I gave myself a B/B- for the way I taught it this first time out (call it the Beta version). This post will return to my early “teacher think-aloud” habit on this blog to reflect on ways to raise that grade for the second semester

Since a B supposedly signifies “above average” without signifying “excellent,” I’ll justify that grade first by listing what I thought were the course’s strengths and weaknesses. Then I hope I’ll have enough steam left to dump the brainstorm of how to re-figure the course — using Diigo to heighten the academic rigor, and an “in medias res” narrative structure to heighten the engagement and provide the essential purpose for studying Chinese (or any) history at all¹ — that’s been brewing in my mind over the last (typically post-midnight) hour.

Strengths, Weaknesses, and Future Improvements

1. Replaced the textbook

Strengths: A week before the course began, the returning teachers arrived to work and I was finally able to see the resources and scope of the course. The textbook, to put it generously, was great for 12-year-olds, but not my 16-year-olds in this supposedly “rigor”-driven school — so I tossed it and replaced it with the China chapters from an introductory Asian History college textbook (Rhoades Murphey’s excellent A History of Asia).

Weaknesses: Murphey’s text led to an embarrassment of riches: there was simply too much information in it for a brief survey course. I was also concerned that its readability level was too challenging for some students, but I did a Poll-Daddy poll and found 33 of 36 responded from “It’s a bit challenging, but I can handle it” (my definition of the Zone of Proximal Development for reading) to “It’s just right for my reading level” to “It’s easy.” Still, for the three who couldn’t handle it, alternate texts or resources were necessary, and I didn’t have them.

Another weakness was in the photocopied packet I made of the Murphey readings. I didn’t include the Index in the copies, so it was surely difficult for students to be able to locate information from the text for review purposes.

A final weakness: It had been four years since I’d used the text, which means I’d forgotten most of it, and spent the semester “two days ahead of the students” in terms of content mastery. (Students seem to think teachers remember everything they’ve ever known, which is interesting, since a brief reflection on their own forgetting of content from courses from prior years should demolish that idea. They seem to think the adult brain is of an entirely different model, some new design inserted in the skull upon college graduation or something. So here’s a dirty teacher secret, kids: Our brains are at least as limited as yours.)

Future Improvements: I’ve ordered The Cambridge Illustrated History of China to be the textbook next year. An Amazon “Reader Reviews” and “Look Inside” perusal satisfied me that this is a reasonably solid high school China history text. (We’re looking at ABC-CLIO database as a possible digital replacement for paper textbooks altogether for next year, when we go 1:1. Anybody know how feasible this is?)

2. Replaced Blackboard with Ning

Strengths: I haven’t written about it yet because I’m waiting for the video to be released, but I gave a keynote speech at the Learning Technologies Conference in Australia last month, and during it I declared a “pox on Blackboard.” I meant it. It made my first month trying to get to know my students’ backgrounds, preferences, and literacy skills utter hell. First I assigned an “About Me” forum that most students put a lot of effort into, apparently….. “Apparently” because I never saw it. Some glitch in Blackboard didn’t save the things, so I never got to read them. That damned me to fogginess about the general skills of my class for the first couple of weeks. Later attempts to use the forums, once the glitches were ironed out, were still clunky due to Blackboard’s horrible user interface (in all fairness, my school is using an old version, and I think later ones have copied enough from Moodle to be more intuitive). Example: answering a forum in Blackboard confused most of my students because of the language of the User Interface. Instead of hitting “reply” after my prompt — no “reply” link existed — they had to somehow just know that to simply reply they had to click on “Start New Thread.” Talk about unintuitive.

Then there was Blackboard’s use of Frames, so cutting-edge in 1995, and its general “why click once when you can click ten times for the same task” workflow. The tool was as schooly as its name. It took way more of my time than necessary on Moodle to deliver a look, feel, and functionality less satisfactory than Moodle’s. A month into the course I’d had it. I left Blackboard for Ning. (I wasn’t about to install and manage my own Moodle. Been there, suffered that. Anybody have solutions along these lines I don’t know about?)

The strengths of Ning: It’s way more straightforward. The Main Page is a one-stop overview and link-list for all necessary tasks and documents for the week. Videos, photo slideshows, forums, blogs, RSS feeds of China News from Google News and from my Diigo China bookmarks in widgets on the sidebars for any advanced student wanting to read more. Hell, even student birthdays announced on the sidebar (it never hurts so sing Happy Birthday in class). So good riddance, Blackboard.

I kept things pretty minimal, as far as assignments went. Rotating groups of four or five students had to blog each week on the prior week’s content — open, whatever idea struck their fancy — and the others had to reply to two that appealed to them (authentic audience response awards students with the best ideas, hopefully stirs those whose posts elicited cricket chirps to reflect on how to do better next time). It was hard for me to participate in the blogs and forums as much as I’d have liked because of the afore-mentioned “two days ahead of the students” reading the textbook.

Weaknesses: Organization. I’m not going to beat myself up for this one, because I had to design the airplane while I was mid-flight in the semester. But I need to set all forums so that replies are threaded under the comments replied to, which isn’t the default, for one thing. Also, having 36 students on a single forum got unwieldy. I didn’t want to use groups because I wanted richer conversations between the two class sections, but this made navigation of forums difficult. I also need to figure out how to instruct students to subscribe to email notifications when somebody replies to their comment or post. I’m not sure this finely-tuned of an option is even available. If not, that means students are getting 40-odd notifications every time somebody replies to the forum they replied to — which means they understandably delete them all, as I do, without looking at them. Clunky. (Help?)

Future Improvements: Frankly, I’m still puzzling over this one. I‘d love to have students use Diigo to comment on other students Ning blogs and forum readings, but since the site is locked and the content is dynamic, I’m not sure Diigo highlights would be visible to other students visiting the pages. Anybody know? [Update: Well that was easy. Diigo told me on Twitter, while I was writing this, that the highlights will indeed show. They also set me up with an Education Account within 20 minutes of my applying for it, which will make class registration much easier. So cool.)

3. Content Organization: From "From the Beginning" to "In Medias Res" (or, "Teaching History Backwards")

Strengths: Covering the 4,000 years of Chinese history from the semi-legendary Xia Dynasty of 2,000 BCE to the present in a semester course was no easy task -- especially since China, unlike Europe, doesn't have any gaping 1,000-year Dark Age through which to conveniently fast-forward, but instead boasts an unbroken string of literate centuries across four millennia. Survey though it was, the students did receive an education in the broad (and with Murphey's text, often impressively deep) flow of Chinese history from the Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, and on into the 20th century's Nationalist and Communist regimes -- right up to the present day. (And though I know they couldn't know how skinny their "education" in Chinese history would have been had I just used the old textbook, and thus didn't have the perspective to appreciate just how superior their introduction to that history was in terms of depth and scope, I'm still pouting over the lack of a single expression of appreciation for the bang they got for their semester's buck. I know, I know: Cry me a river. Then send me to a shrink for expecting gratitude from teenagers.)

Weaknesses: The pacing was too fast. Again, I'm not beating myself up on this one because the textbook was new and I'd never used it as the primary text for teaching Chinese history before.

But more importantly, despite the oomph of knowing the highlights of all of China's major dynasties, at a certain point it starts feeling like a stuck record. Most of China's classical dynasties follow very similar "Dynastic Cycle" patterns in which a new dynasty begins, implements some impressive reforms in its first century or so, and over the next century or two becomes complacent and corrupt, and finally loses "the Mandate of Heaven" in the eyes of its subjects, and falls to whichever rebel or neighbor state emerges triumphant in Ye Olde and Verye Predictable Ende-of-Cycle Civille Warre or Forynne Invasionne. It brings to mind the title of an old Bowie song: "Always Crashing in the Same Car."

Most importantly, that almost-never-ending 3,000 years of dynastic cycles becomes, without a purpose for knowing it, an exercise in what Jared Diamond calls "history as one damn fact after another." Diamond insists on what most history buffs would assent to: that there are patterns in history that point towards essential understandings of who and what we are -- and those understandings, of course, separate the naive and ignorant from the educated. More importantly, they separate the citizen who you pray, for the sake of democracy, will not vote, from the one you pray will always vote.

Future Improvements: The course fell into the One Damn Fact Trap because I covered it chronologically: "In the beginning....." Tonight I think I arrived at a better approach.

I'm going to start the next course with the end of the dynastic era in 1911, when the Nationalists threw out the Qing -- more accurately, when the Qing just collapsed due to its own decrepitude -- and went through a painful and practically literal "crash course" in modern governance: nationalism, socialism, dictatorship, fascism, and democracy all in a stew from 1911 until 1949, and then totalitarianism and various shades of communism from 1949 to the present.

But before doing any of that, I'm going to assign the final exam essay questions in the first week of class, and have the students Diigo the hell out of our readings and forums on Ning for the rest of the course in order to arrive at their "answers." Here are the questions:

Essay Questions:

1.  Western Liberal Democracies in Europe and (especially) the USA typically criticize the PRC for its lack of human rights – freedom of speech, religion, and assembly – as well as for its one-party dictatorship. Based on your knowledge of Chinese history in the “long view,” how valid do you think these criticisms are? Give as many specific examples from Chinese history as you can to support your arguments.

2.  Mao Zedong waged the Cultural Revolution as a last-ditch attempt to prevent party Moderates (Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and others) from implementing capitalist reforms to China’s economic system; Mao believed instead that a planned economy relying on the social spirit of the people was the path to prosperity and justice for all.  Based on your understanding of the effects of the Moderates’ reforms from the rise of Deng Xiaoping around 1980 to the present day, to what degree do you think Mao’s resistance was justified? Use as many specific details from the successes and failures of the planned economy during the ‘50s and early ‘60s (the First Five Year Plan, the Great Leap Forward), and from the successes and failures of the Four Modernizations to the present, to support your argument.

Why Diigo highlights and sticky-notes (online, on-site, on specific segments of text annotations) instead of simple forum and blog responses? A discussion on a Diigo forum last year that Cliff Mims started -- see my highlights on it here -- sold me. Diigo's Maggie Tsai said it most succintly:

Fundamentally there is a difference between Diigo's annotation and traditional blog commenting. Diigo in-situ highlight and sticky note allows fine-grained discussion to specific part of a webpage - which opens up the possibility for more meaningful exchanges...

So in a nutshell, as students read, they'll be highlighting and bookmarking the evidence to answer our semester-long "essential questions" that traditionally I would have sprung on them as "surprise" cram-questions at the end of the course. This will very much raise the "rigor" bar, and provide a similar routine for individual research projects. But uh-oh: what about pdf files? How can students highlight, bookmark, annotate those? Any work-arounds, dear teacher-geeks? (Much of our content is in pdf format.) [Update: Re: highlighting and annotating pdf files: http://a.nnotate.com does with pdf’s what Diigo does for websites. A good find. (They tweeted after I called for help on Twitter.)]

The Beauty of a Real Project: Interpreting Modern “Communist” China, from an Historically-Informed Perspective, to China’s Historically Uninformed Western Critics

Wordy, I know, but that says it. China might not have made the finals for George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” award, but I’ve no doubt it made the short-list. Add to that the endless refrain, from at least the days of Ronald Reagan, of the evils of “godless Communism” and the blessings, historical and contemporary evidence aside (Iraq anyone? Or Afghanistan? or or or?) of one-size-fits-all “Democracy” and “Capitalism,” and you’ve got all sorts of articles of Western ideological faith to complicate with those lovely things called facts.

And please notice I said “complicate.” That’s the beauty of the idea: easy answers to the above essay questions, if pursued across a semester, with all evidence nicely aggregated on a simply-tagged Diigo page, will surely give way very quickly to the type of answers our future adults should have when considering modern China: and I mean nuanced answers.

Now my last two questions:

1. Assuming students will be able to offer valuable evidence and insight into the questions above — questions I’m convinced are relevant enough to the real world to deserve an audience — what’s the best way to present their findings to the world via the web?

2. How can I keep the project alive after its first iteration? Different questions for each successive class?

A million thanks for any who took the time to read and respond. If you see any beautiful ways to extend or enhance the idea further — Skypecast interviews from my students in Singapore with American students about their stereotypes of China and its government, for example? More? — please pitch those in the mix too.

1. it reminds me of David Warlick’s occasional pitch to “teach history backwards,” though my approach is a little more complicated [↩]

Reading Despite Teaching

or,

How the hulk led me to Hamlet

Artifact: 1976 Killraven Comic Book (final issue)
Date: 1969-1980
Cultural Element: Education: Standardized Curriculum; Aesthetics of Class: ‘High’ v. ‘Pop’ Culture
Commentary:

Old Skull (seated) and Killraven on Lookout Mountain

I was born to a middle class family of Tennessee and Alabama origins, and raised in a house with few books (okay, we had a family Bible on dusty display; a lonely edition of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet I found shoved out of mind in my father’s closet, and enjoyed; a set of Encyclopedia Britannica and another of The Great Books that I imagine some salesman twisted my parents’ arms to buy for the sake of their children’s educations and of 1950s middle-class respectability and which, oddly enough, we enjoyed rummaging through as children).

My schools had books in the library, which I recall using briefly in fifth grade to read a series of boys’ action mysteries and a few baseball dramas—but overall, school libraries meant homework, and homework meant no play, and play was fun and homework wasn’t. In short, I didn’t read books because I didn’t like what they were associated with: reports.

I did, however, read comic books. Devoured them. The X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, Thor, Spiderman…these and other titles constituted my first library. I started reading them in grade school, under my big brother’s influence, and evolved into a connoisseur. I knew the names and styles of the authors and illustrators, the colorists, even the letterers. I suffered when my favorite titles underwent changes in writers or artists. Would the new team maintain the character subtleties and personalities I’d come to love from their predecessors? Could the new artist match the galactic or subatomic vistas the old one drew me into? Would Valhalla still sparkle? Would Daredevil’s deltoids still look so cool?

The first of every month was an event to pine for, because that was when the new issues hit the racks. I made pilgrimages three miles on foot to the nearest convenience store to buy or, funds being unavailable, steal the latest installments. Keeping them in mint condition was important: I would roll seven or eight comics into a cylinder and slide them very carefully into my sock and under my pants-leg, carefully walk to the cashier to pay for one other one, then hobble stiff-legged behind the store and uncoil my loot from my legs, checking for damage.

The hours of reading these books in my room once back home were my earliest experience of that reader’s pleasure known as “flow.” Everything environmental disappeared, everything personal, emotional, physical. I recall one month reading an episode of an obscure but brilliant title based on War of the Worlds called Killraven, which happened to be set on Lookout Mountain…in Chattanooga, my home town. I was elated to discover that my locale was known to the authors, that it had significance, that I belonged to a larger world.

Better still, it was the only comic I recall ever reading that attained such aesthetic heights that I wept and wept: Old Skull, the bald, brawny, but kindly and simple sidekick to Killraven—very much a sort of loyal Kent to Killraven’s Lear—enjoys an idyllic moment appreciating butterflies and childishly chatting to squirrels by a mountain stream (my mountain!). It is lyrical perfection, it brings fond laughter, and the illustrations are so lovely…I remember the artist’s name, P. Craig Russel, and his ornate and elegant art nouveau signature on the title page of every issue, and I haven’t seen or discussed these books since the late ‘70s…and then there is a sound from the forest that breaks Old Skull’s reverie, and out steps a Martian who breaks all conventional comic serial rules by killing a main character. Old Skull died on Lookout Mountain, and I wept on its foothills.

My Favorite Artist in high school: Craig Russel, Illustrator of Killraven

My neighborhood friends (also Killraven fans) and I could not get over our amazement at all of this. We often discussed the stories from the Marvel Universe, but this was the high point. (It turns out Old Skull could be killed because Killraven’s circulation was so low, attempting as it did to pioneer new territory in comics, that it was discontinued with this issue.)

I would hope that the pedagogical implications of my formative experience with reading are self-evident: My public school’s curriculum and pedagogy failed to make me a reader. I became a reader despite, not because of, book reports and assigned readings. This is the strongest personal confirmation I can offer of the value of free voluntary reading time at school, and of letting the students bond with whatever literature appeals to them—and I hope I’ve succeeded at showing that Killraven, for instance, was literature. The experience of flow is part of what lifelong readers read for; it constitutes one of the central aesthetic pleasures of reading (traditional aestheticians describe it as ‘absorption’ of the self by the work of art; politically suspect as this may be, I think its an essential stage of aesthetic development); and I believe it should be the primary aim of reading classes. Once students have experienced that, their desire to repeat that experience will motivate them to read for the rest of their lives. I soon graduated to science fiction in high school, and dropped comics altogether in college in favor of a new Valhalla containing my new gods: Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Wilde, and Nietzsche—all owing to my start in comics. Only after reading for flow creates the reading habit will exercises in critical reading and writing about/of literature be significant for them, as opposed to aversive exercises to be dashed off as quickly as possible in order to do other, ‘fun,’ things.

The fact that I remember the authors and artists of these comics, and was critically aware of their stylistic differences without ever doing homework about them, further suggests that even critical reading skills develop independent of instruction. The fact that I remember Old Skull’s death scene so vividly—more so than most books I was ever assigned in my education, college included—almost thirty years later is a revelation even to me. And traditionalists, take note: as a child, I very likely would have enjoyed writing a report on this scene, if only I’d been invited. I never was.

A multicultural note of a different sort—because pop culture could be seen as a multicultural category—is the significance of my personal-local connection to the story I described. This encounter in text with my own soil and sky—could this be why I haven’t forgotten it like I have practically all the other comics I read? This can’t be known. But there’s no doubting the intensifying effect this local-cultural connection had on my relation to the text. This points yet again to the vital importance of student choice and relevance in reading curricula.

Finally, my public school teachers probably had no idea that their desperate attempts to make us students engage in sincere reflection about books through book reports were so futile because we were naturally reflecting on our own cultural texts in authentic social reading groups—normally in the woods in our neighborhood. If my goal as a language arts teacher is to make good book-reporters of my kids, then I should keep assigning book reports; but if I want to make them lifelong readers who read like we adults do—we read books and discuss them with others—I’ll allow authentic book chats in class.

[Part 2 in the autobiographical "Web Legacies" series. Part 1: Ambivalent Apostasy (or, Fear and Trembling at Camp Joy)]

[Welcome to Beyond School's new home, by the way. This is my first post since leaving Blogger. If you subscribed to the old "BS," please update your feed by subscribing to this new home on my own WordPress install. I'm excited to learn more about customizing WordPress by administering my own blog. You can expect to see many new things in the coming weeks.]

It’s only natural that the K12 Online Conference presentations feel uneven to some of us. Each presenter has a different background, level of experience, set of priorities, agenda, audience. Some hit me, some don’t.

Dean Shareski hit me on this biting Seoul Saturday morning. If a lot of the more tech-oriented presenters are the Henry Fords of this Digital Revolution, Dean is more of a William Morris. Aesthetics is the focus of his “Design Matters” presentation, and if you only watch one K12 presentation, this is the one I’d recommend. It puts the ghost back into the machine.

Dean asked for feedback from his viewers, so I gave the below on the comments section of his K12 Online presentation page. I’m pasting it here because it’s the beginning of a new project for me: The Campsite Seminars, I’m calling it for now. Or maybe I like this better:

Walden 2.0

Here’s the comment:

Dean asked for feedback as we watched, and I assume that means feedback here, though it’s strange to be first. Anyway, here’s mine.

I like Dean’s opening point: much classroom-created content (the majority?) suffers from poor design – “cheesiness” in the worst sense (think Kraftt).

(Warlick’s keynote touches on the same idea with his “competitive information products,” though the worker-drone connotations of “products” still irks me, as it focuses more than I would like on economics and money-making, more than on aesthetics and character, I would argue – but anyway….)

Christian Long’s interview suffered from poor audio quality, so I couldn’t understand much of it (we’ve all experienced the wrath of the techno gods, so I sympathize). I did catch, though, the exploitation of simple walking distance and space between buildings as a learning opportunity, and that resonated. Our own campus is very restricted by its hilltop, woods-surrounded setting, which is the opposite of the example Christian used of having to walk a mile between buildings: we’re too cramped. But WE DO HAVE THOSE SURROUNDING WOODS. That’s fascinating in this new light. I’m picturing possibilities of assigning students – in small groups, so the discussions are not diluted by too many voices and not enough time – to take voice or video recorders of whatever sort into the woods to record conversations in that setting – I can’t help but hope that the setting would influence the discussions in interesting and more thoughtful ways. Have them discuss a theme from our reading of King Lear, for example, or whatever topic might benefit from the meditative openness of a wooded setting. Recording these discussions – video seems more desirable, when I think about it – would allay most fears of “unsupervised” students in the woods. Take the footage back into the classroom and quick-edit these “campsite seminars” into short films. I’ll have to try this. It’s literally “Beyond School”

Dr. Schwier: “Does it work? Is it beautiful? Is it powerful? Is it inspiring?” This is refining my “campsite seminars” idea above. I said “quick-edit” those seminars just now. Why rush? That way Velveeta lies.

Why not assign them to be voice-overs for iMovie projects that add BEAUTY and FORCE via film, stills, music, titles? Yes, yes, yes: let’s aim for brie and camembert.

In fact, I’m seeing now that two or three class sessions of this new mode of “class discussion” – sitting on the pine needles under the autumn trees – might be best, to give students time to adapt to talking in natural surroundings, in “nature’s temple.” Talk about “educational architecture” – how about the dome of the sky over a canopy of pine?

(I’m liking this very much, Dean. Thanks for this very innovative angle. Much of the K12 conference so far has been school-2.0-as-usual, if you get what I mean.)

At 12:00 now: Planning. I’ll play along with my Campsite Seminars whim above, and apply the rest of your presentation, when possible, to it. Consider this a “teacher think-aloud.”

So the Seminars – I think they’ll actually work better for something more relevant to my students than Shakespeaere (which they and I love). I think, instead, it will work for the classroom blogging “Capstone Project” I’m currently launching with them.

The idea of that project for my high school seniors – so close to the end of their 12 year sentence of infantilization in schools – is to help them learn about whatever their passion, and their possible future (a)vocation, is, by reading real-world bloggers who share their passion(s), and writing about what they read on their own blogs.

They’ve already created their blogs, and this weekend, are composing their “about” pages and searching for feeds about their passion(s)/interest(s) on Bloglines (I still haven’t found a better feed-searching engine than Bloglines’). They’ve claimed their blogs on Technorati, embedded Sitemeter and Clustrmaps. Now they’re ready to connect.

The problem I think I’m fighting, though, is that they don’t understand the magical potential this project offers them to make connections with people in the world of kindred passions. They’ve never linked to a writer in a blog post, and seen that writer turn up a day or two later in comments.

They’ve been too busy writing 5-paragraph essays – or homework-assignments-as-blog-posts, which is the New Abomination – about irrelevant subjects to tired teachers all their lives to write about what they love to real-world readers – so they just don’t get it. They don’t know how to dream, how to let themselves be visionary; and they don’t know how dreams and visions can become realities through connective writing.

So, in short, I’m trying to introduce them to the world beyond school, but they’re so “studentified” they seem unable to see this as anything but homework because, after all, I’m a “teacher,” and they are “students,” and all of this is happening in a “school.”

Sheesh.

So I think these Campsite Seminars are better suited to serving as a “retreat from school” in both the spatial and the psychological senses. I want them to think – possibly for the first time, since so many of them are so constantly addled by the pressures of “schooliness,” the homework, the SAT’s, the college applications, the school spirit jive, on and on – about which world they want to enter when they leave school forever – in seven short months.

So back to you, Dean: How do I plan for these 70-minute retreats into the woods to bear fruit? [Clicks “play”….]

“What’s the purpose of your movie?”
–Hm. In an attempted nutshell, to figure out:
1. What makes you tick.
2. What you want to become.
3. Which is what you will read about on blogs and other sites.
4. And what you will write about…
5. For an audience you want to attract.

Okay, that’s about as far as I’m going to take this here. I see Dean asks for feedback on his blog, and on the wiki he made for this, etc, and suddenly feel like my students when they’re dealing with my tendency to have a million sites for classwork

Dean, it was a very valuable presentation. You got beyond the tools and beyond the generic edublog talk.

Thanks for that.

For more on the quest for the student blogging grail, see these posts:

Photo credits:
Cheese Wrap by chrissam42
French Cheese by Zeetz Jones
Tokei-ji by Raiden256
Art Nouveau by Face It

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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.

[Update: By the way, the student comments in the first panel are quoted from our class Ning. So are my comments in the following two panels. I'm not making this up.]

Thanks to Diane Cordell, librarian/educator and word- and image-smith extroardinaire, for inspiring me to take my first stab at ToonDo. True to my worst nature, it’s way too wordy. But damn, I have a lot to say about this: so many of my students hate poetry – because of school.

I really love Screencast-o-matic (SOM), the free, web-based screencast creator. I’ve been using it to make short edtech tutorials for teachers (who aren’t using them, of course) for the last week. But this Saturday morning, I used it for my students in AP Literature.

A few days ago, I had them do a timed writing of an old AP Lit essay question under exam conditions–40 minutes to read a challenging poem and write an essay that could make or break their opportunity to get college credit for our course.

Many students had a hard time with it. Many didn’t manage to write more than half a page, hand-written–two small paragraphs–for the assignment. (The poetry essays are apparently always what they do worst on in the real AP exam, which is why we’re starting the year with six weeks of poetry.) So I did the assignment myself, with headphones and mic on, talking through each stage of my own approach to taking timed essay exams on poetry.

I’ll share their feedback on the value of this as a learning tool as soon as possible. Here’s how it looks (but you really should take a glimpse at the AP Lit channel on SOM itself, because it allows comments, time-stamped notes, downloads, and more. It’s awesome!) :

Part 1: Attacking the question, annotating the poem:

Part 2: Writing the essay (part 1)

Part 3: Writing the essay (part 2)

Pageflakes – your free student and teacher start page

• I am a complete idiot for not reading Will Richardson religiously. Pageflakes for students and teachers is powerful stuff.
  – post by cburell

Weblogg-ed » Using Pageflakes as Student Portal

• A gem from Will Richardson on classroom use of Pageflakes. I see a migration coming.
  – post by cburell

Extracurricular :: For technologists who do their homework : July 2007 : THE Journal

• From the article:

  The benefits of integrating technology into K-12 education are being demonstrated nationwide. Here is an illustration of the quantitative impact Texas’ Technology Immersion Pilot has had on the Floydada Independent School District. – post by cburell

Borderland » Blog Archive » Teaching the Controversy

• Note the “habits of mind” approach to ‘teaching the controversy” instead of “indoctrinating.”
  – post by cburell

It’s summer. Let’s enjoy a poem, and the “pleasures of the text,” as some theorist I’ve forgotten from college once said. Cross-posted from an AP Lit workshop Ning I’ve started with other workshop teachers. What’s interesting is that Leah and I read the same poem, but took away two radically different meanings. Would love you literary types to play along with your own opinions in comments.

And yes, I know. “How school-y.” Nobody’s saying that pleasure should be sacrificed on the altar of “citizenship”; my thrust lately is that the reverse should not continue to be the case in our schools, our culture, ourselves.

Here it is:

“Textual Openness” in Heaney’s “Clearances #5″: Two Teachers, Two Interpretations

Poem:

Sonnet by Seamus Heaney
From Clearances – 5

The cool that came off sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

Prompt:

Heaney’s sonnet is less obviously sonnet-like as we read it. How does the form work here? What is the effect of the rhythm? the imagery? How do they combine to create the tone?

Response 1: Leah

The Voyage That Never Set Sail

What a great poem!

Initially, the poem establishes the speaker’s hope for change and life within this relationship (imagined as the act of folding the sheet, a joint project that ties the lovers together). The repetition of sounds and words in the opening lines suggests the repetitive cycle of this relationship. Instead of rhyming, the first four lines end with words that are fragments of one another: “line/linen” and “them/hem.” In the first case, the word grows through their folding, and in the second, the words shrink, which shows that each moment of growth is followed by retreat.

He imagines at the outset that something will be different from what has always been, that the sheet will be wet instead of dry. He imagines the sheet becoming a sail, a vehicle of movement and change. That he imagines the sheet will be wet (water being like the ocean, a site of movement. water can also be seen as a source of life and renewal) also suggests the possibility of voyage. His hopes are thwarted with the realization that the sheet is dry with the onomatopoeic and aggressive “thwack.” Things are as they always were.

The syntax that follows is awkward: “For a split second as if nothing had happened /For nothing had that had not always happened/ Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,” which suggests that the condition of possibility motivating the poem is no longer available. It is difficult to read those lines, and the syntax forces the reader to slow down. He takes the phrase “touch and go,” which in the cliche suggests volatility, and ironizes it, referring to the action of coming together and moving apart inherent in folding the sheet.

I find the tic-tac-toe imagery particularly interesting. A game of tic-tac-toe is competitive, as any game is, but it is also predictable. When adults play this game, the moves are limited and predictable, and no one usually wins. That seems to be a fitting image for the aggression underlying this relationship. The sewn-together flour sacks, which can be seen as a synechdoche for the couple’s bed and therefore relationship, suggest their poverty and the impotent aggression of their relationship (I imagine that the sewn-together flour sacks might look like a tic-tac-toe board). What is the significance of the fact that she sews them together? What is her role?

I think Heaney is self-consciously playing with the sonnet form as love poetry and as a source of epiphany (what seems to happen here is a non-epiphany, if that makes sense). The first line suggests that the poem will be in iambic pentameter, but the substitutions starting with the first word in the second line immediately call the form itself into question. I find the substitutions make the flow of the poem halting, tentative, and uneasy, which might reflect the speaker’s attitude toward the relationship and toward encapsulating it in a sonnet. The only source of true unpredictability in this poem is in the speaker’s inability to use the sonnet form to describe the dynamics of this relationship.

Response 2: Clay

Heaney’s sonnet is less obviously sonnet-like as we read it. How does the form work here? What is the effect of the rhythm? the imagery? How do they combine to create the tone?

Beyond the 14-line trait, I’m hesitant to classify this poem as a sonnet at all.

The argument, if there is one, develops along neither Petrarchan nor Shakespearean lines (quatrains + couplet or octave + sestet), but instead seems to break down into these units:

• lines 1-7: the unknown persona, while folding linen with a nicely ambiguous “her,” expects “damp” linen, “but” finds it “dried-out”;
• lines 8-9: he and she, while folding, meet and retreat “as if nothing had happened”;
• 10-14: that “as if” is extended as an emblem of the relationship between the persona and, with clues from the final line, a “she” this reader assumes is the persona’s mother.

Likewise, there’s no traditional sonnet rhyme scheme:

a
b
a slant
b

c
d
e
f
f slant (or is it c slant, or d slant? Fun.)
f

g
e
g
e slant

–this is fun, so I’m going to follow these rhyme divisions for a second to see if they add meaning. Hm. That’s interesting. To make it more visual, here’s the poem given stanzaic breaks according to rhyme:

The cool that came off sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem

And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened

Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

–does rhyme add meaning here? It certainly divides the “argument” differently than my original 1-7, 8-14 reading. Now the argument is:

• 1-4: “I” expected damp as I folded with “her”;
• 5-10: but there was no moisture; this dry folding brings “us” “hand to hand” “as if nothing had happened,” which characterizes “our” relationship;
• 11-14: “our” relationship is sadly paradoxical, a “coming close…by holding back,” apparently because “she” – his mother now, we imagine – has been “dried-out” by the poverty and hardship of her life.

“What is the effect of the rhythm and imagery, and how do they combine to create the tone?” teacher asks. What a nice, challenging question.

Let’s see. The first line is perfect (and lovely) iambic pentameter, but the next line breaks that spell, intentionally for sure, most notably in the trochee (?) ending the line (“IN them”). The third line adds an extra syllable to further destroy the perfection of the opening line. In this increasing rhythmic breakdown, sound enforces sense: all is not as perfect as the first line suggests it could (should?) be.

“Diagonally” (l.5) is interesting in the sound-sense connection as well. Rhythmically, it doesn’t fit the iambic well (Latinate words are so often anathema to verse). But it works to “cross,” as diagonals by definition do, the tone of this poem like the “cross-wind” in the simile in the next line, and the “x” in the penultimate one.

More examples like this abound: the broken rhythm of line 6 supports the image of the “cross-wind;” “as if NOthing had HAPpenned,” in lines 9-10, have no music at all, as full of “nothing” sonically as the sense of the phrase. Several more examples follow, but the final line is the most notable: again, an extra syllable ruins the basic meter, and the natural stress of “RIPPED-OUT FLOUR SACKS,” four in a row*, points to the sad root of this “crossed” sadness.

Perhaps the son himself is the deeper root of the mother’s sorry state, the heaviest “cross” for her to bear: he’s an “x,” after all (l.13), which is a cross of sorts; and that mysterious “she was o” metaphor might point to her maternal responsibility for him, the “o” being a classic symbol of the female and the womb. She “bore” him from her womb, and poverty makes him still her “cross to bear.”

You know, I didn’t care for this poem particularly after the first two or three reads. Now I do. Something to share with my students to try to take the “anal” out of the “analysis.”

—

*What are those again? Trochees? Spondees? Do students have to know the jargon to please the AP scorers?

Reflection Question:

What do you think about the differences between these two interpretations? Is one more “right” than the other? Is a third interpretation different from these two validly possible? What else do you notice or think?

Afterwords: Dialog b/w Leah and me

Me:

Wow, Leah. Nice!

In the first case, the word grows through their folding, and in the second, the words shrink, which shows that each moment of growth is followed by retreat.

–nice description of nice, close reading.

I just read the rest of your interp after pausing to quote that line above. How interesting the differences in our interpretations! And better still, how interesting that both are valid (well, I hope you agree mine is valid too; I certainly see the justification for yours).

I especially love the different directions we took the “x and o” metaphor, and also the identities and relationship of the two characters in the poem. This is a great example of textual “openness.” It made my day. I’m going to share it with my students, after having them do the exercise first.

It’s wonderful what happens when the reading is close and detailed, focusing on specific words, phrases, lines, patterns, as you do. Thanks for that!

Leah:

Thanks, Clay! I absolutely see your reading. The more I look at the poem after reading more your response, the more I wonder why I saw this relationship immediately as a relationship between lovers, not mother and son. I absolutely see that it could just as easily be mother and son, which would change the whole cast of the rest of the poem for me. The pain of the poem in that reading is so much more striking to me.

I love what you had to say with x’s and o’s, too. It just goes to show you how much your initial impression of a poem drives how you make sense of all of the details of the poem.

Me:

The funny thing is, though, that I’ve been daydreaming the poem as you saw it, and to me, _that’s_ more painful and poignant. Imagine being the husband whose inability to provide even basic bedding for his wife makes her so care-worn and dried-out.

This really has been one of the most enjoyable lit experiences I’ve had in too long, outside the classroom.

I look forward to more

It’s so cool. When you think of the potato sacks stitched together to make the sheets, the grid-like imagery supports _your_ tic-tac-toe interp. AND your interp of the relational identities, period.

That _doesn’t_ mean I don’t like the “cross” reading. Beware false disjunctives, saith the logician.