Beyond School

A permanent present – what a haunting phrase. How bizarre and surreal it must be to serve a life sentence in the prison of the moment, trapped forever in the perpetual now, a world without end, a time without later.  — Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, p. 14

Call me crazy, but I couldn’t help but think of students when I read this earlier tonight.  A particular kind of student, anyway.  The Korean kind, for sure, and possibly, from what I read, more and more American ones too.

I mean the ones who are so over-scheduled with schoolwork, homework, SAT test-prep cram schools, and all the other madness that keeps them focused on memorizing the data and pounding out the grunt-work, one assignment and one GPA-increment at a time, year in and year out – from what, grade 9? Or is that too late to begin worrying these days? – that they rarely have time to pull back and reflect on anything at all. ¹

“A permanent present.” Isn’t that what the overload of content, testing, homework, and extra-curricular bullet-gaming for college applications is creating for our young?  It makes me wonder if school itself is not the cause of “A.D.D.”: when attention is constantly hurried in seven different disciplines from unit to unit, no option to pull the cord and get off the train, is it any wonder attention is deficient and understanding is, to quote an old Bowie line, a series of “one-inch thoughts”?

Maybe I’m wrong. I know I am with some teachers, bless ‘em. The ones that choose thought over coverage, choice over prescription.

That permanent present, by the way?  It’s a description of people who have had lobotomies or other traumas to the frontal lobe.

*     *     *

American college students expect to live longer, stay married longer and travel to Europe more often than average. They believe they are more likely to have a gifted child, to own their own home and to appear in the newspaper, and less likely to have a heart attack, venereal disease, a drinking problem, an auto accident, a broken bone  or gum disease.  Ibid., p. 18

Kids, I hate to break it to you, but my experience of you college-bound grade-junkies is one, overall – again, let’s bless the exceptions – of pity and disappointment.  You’ve got great grades, yes, but so little else. No driving passion for anything unique or original, no budding genius.  It’s more schools’ fault than yours, but you’re not completely free of blame.  You’re the ones allowing yourselves to be turned into carbon copies of “competitive college applicants.”  You can choose else-wise.

I hate to break this to you too:  the college of your dreams is no guarantee of happiness. You may already be decreasing your chances of future happiness by your daily compromises to get into those schools.  It’s hard to have a soulful life, if you sold your soul before graduating high school.  Souls are hard things to buy back.

*     *     *

Genius Defined (It’s not what you think):

Let’s take a quick detour into the meaning and origins of that word, “genius.”  Most of us don’t know what it means when we use it. Apple’s dictionary gives us a good etymology:

ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin, ‘attendant spirit present from one’s birth, innate ability or inclination,’ from the root of gignere ‘beget.’ The original sense [tutelary spirit attendant on a person] gave rise to a sense [a person's characteristic disposition] (late 16th cent.), which led to a sense [a person's natural ability,] and finally [exceptional natural ability] (mid 17th cent.).

Wikipedia gives us a little more:

In Ancient Rome, the genius was the guiding or “tutelary” spirit of a person. . . .

In Roman mythology, every man had a genius and every woman a juno. . . .

Originally, the genii and junones were ancestors who guarded over their descendants. Over time, they turned into personal guardian spirits, granting intellectual prowess.

Wikipedia closes with this intriguing gem:

Sacrifices were made to one’s genius or juno on one’s birthday.

And that gem strikes me as crushingly ironic today, because today, we don’t sacrifice to our genius at all; instead, we sacrifice that genius itself  - to our schools.

Look at the emphasized words in the passages above, and tell me if I’m wrong when I say: the essence of genius is precisely what schools exclude.  What does that essence consist of?

1. Individual Inclination, Innate Ability

Note the root “gen” in “genius.”  Genius is present in our origin (same root), our genes, our genesis – our nature.  These shape and determine our individuality.  In this sense, “genius” is not about being brilliant, but about having a cognitive-emotional-creative fingerprint that is entirely unique from the moment we’re born.  To get homespun for a second, it’s just that thing that makes us tick, that piques our individual interest or curiosity.

Sir Ken Robinson tells the sad tale of the researchers asking six-year-olds if they were artists, and all of them saying yes; but asked four years later, deep into the assembly line of generic curriculum and one-size-fits-all learning, only a fraction of hands go up; and by adolescence, almost none do.  You may quibble with the difference between artists and geniuses, but to me they’re deeply related in this simple fact: artists pursue their own “individual inclinations and innate abilities” – their own genius.

2. Genius as “Tutelary Spirit”

More fun with definitions and etymologies: “tutelary,” defined: “serving as a protector, guardian, or patron.”  Its etymology: “from Latin tutela ‘keeping’ (from tut- ‘watched,’).”

So to the ancients, our individually innate inclinations and abilities, our”genius,” was that thing that protected us, guarded us, “kept” us, “watched” us and, most interestingly – playing with the sense of “patron” – fathered us.

To be clearer, to the ancients, the only teacher you needed was your own “genius,” your own curiosity and drive to satisfy it – whatever “it” is, which depends on who you are.

Quit reading if you’re not into this line of thought, because I want to follow it down another linguistic byroad to the obvious and, today, ubiquitous derivative of the old world “tutelage”: you guessed it – “tutor.”  It’s another crushing irony: though derived from “tutelage,” the deep old word associated with letting our genius be our teacher, the word “tutor” today has nothing to do with inborn genius, and everything to do with its opposite: school-manufactured uniformity and anti-individualism, anti-genius.  Again, the dictionary is my witness:

tutor |ˈt(y)oōtər|
noun
a private teacher, typically one who teaches a single student or a very small group.
• chiefly Brit. a university or college teacher responsible for the teaching and supervision of assigned students.
• an assistant lecturer in a college or university. [emphasis added]

Goodbye, genius; hello, schooliness.  Gone is the language of spirit, of nature, of self-tutelage now, and in its place is the lexicon of schools: “teacher, student, university, college, responsible for, supervision, assigned, lecturer.”  Genius, the once-”tutelary guardian, protector, and patron” of “natural, innate inclination and disposition” is overthrown, and in its place now is the academic teacher, the master of a classroom, stuffing the headpieces of the young with the straw that will be transformed into golden grades.  To hell with your genes, your nature, your curiosity.  My job as a tutor is to help you advance to the front of whatever class you are forced to take.²

The Why of this Rant: To Students

flowers, drowning

College will not make you successful.  A degree that gets you a good job will not make you happy.  Unless: you remember your genius (if any has survived your schooling), and let it drive your educational choices.

I can’t tell you how many well-heeled parents I’ve spoken with at length in parent conferences over the years, parents wealthy, attractive, full of status and prestige and awash in luxury, who have nonetheless left me, again, feeling little more than pity and disappointment.  The sparkle in their rings and watches did not extend into their conversation, their wit, their eyes.  They had succeeded at the college game, made buckets of money, but with all of that success, had failed to find happiness.

The exceptions? Bless them, they seemed to choose an education in line with their genius – not their parents’ or their society’s wishes.

And all of this comes from a few pages from a book on that wonderful new field of psychology, “happiness studies,” and its wonderful news that, when it comes to making choices that steer us to happy futures, we’re our own worst enemies.  Check it out. It’s a good read – and hey, it will also impress your SAT essay reader, since it’s by a Harvard professor.

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Photo credits: Progress by ~BostonBill~ ; Roses by Tio

1. I read recently that the ETS is now floating a PSAT clone for the middle school years.  Great work, bastards. Rob even more living and learning from childhood by making them obsess on indelible test scores even earlier in their childhoods.  Pocket more profits from your stupifying study guides for tests that kill curiosity and implant the quest for the safe, right answer. [↩]
2. And let me tell you: my tutoring experience so far has been fun, but shocking too. The parents are generally indifferent to the growth of any passion or wisdom or skill in their children that is not related to helping them ace this or that class or test.  They seem no more concerned, in other words, with the genius of their children than schools are. [↩]

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

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Photo credit: bramblejungle

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

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’ve been up all night catching up on my reading, which these days means feed-reading, more than anything.

Two that struck a chord:

1. That LearnerBlogosphere Idea

Sylvia Martinez on the red-hot GenYES blog writes several posts about getting teens to use Web 2.0 independently – like we adult edubloggers do – to develop their literacy skills in ways that classrooms typically cannot match.

One reason I love Sylvia’s posts is that she references reports and data that I don’t have the will or temperament to seek out, but which speak almost always to my own priorities as an educator. A case in point: the goal of creating a “LearnerTalk” (but that sounds schooly) of student edubloggers to give us teachers lessons on how our Classroom 2.0 attempts measure up. Sylvia writes that this is already happening spontaneously, which encourages me to seek ways to harness and shepherd that trend into this arena. Here’s Sylvia:

Students report that one of the most common topics of conversation on the social networking scene is education. Nearly 60 percent of online students report discussing education-related topics such as college or college planning, learning outside of school, and careers. And 50 percent of online students say they talk specifically about schoolwork. (Read her “Web 2.0 – share the adventure with students” post as well)

Does anybody else read into this that the students are stuck, like we adults are, in their own separate echo-chamber? And that combining the student and teacher discourses in one truly universal “edublogosphere” has the potential to steer our shared enterprise into fertile territory sooner than the current “parallel echo-chambers” situation we seem to have right now?

Scott McCleod’s offer to host a “LearnerTalk” type thing a month or so ago has not been forgotten.* Life and work have been too fast to focus on generating interest in that. Last week, before we began our week-long Chusok holiday, I pitched blogging to my Web 2.0 activity club, and many of my students seemed to get a glimmer from that sermon of the power of real-world blogging. I think a few will bite.

2. The War on Teaching Bad Writing

Anybody who’s taught high school English should know why most students hate to write in schools. It’s because they’re taught to write badly.

If I assigned any of you to write about ideas that aren’t self-selected, in forms that aren’t self-expressive, for an over-worked audience of one that puts two or three words, random red hieroglyphs, and a permanently-branded number into a ledger that threatens to determine your fate, face it: you would learn to hate writing (and school) too.

Like Sylvia, Jeff Wasserman of When the Hurly-Burly’s Done shares some hard data and classroom anecdotes to help us teachers of real writing wage the war against teachers of the poisonously schooly 5-Paragraph Essay [*jeers and hisses*]. I replied to Jeff’s post,

Jeff, this makes me want to make my AP Lit class Ning public. We’re having forum discussions about Organic Form v. Mechanical (5PE and all that garbage).

I’ve been making them write timed essays without outlining, trusting that an organic form will come from simply responding to the prompt and writing from there.

I modeled it for them by writing an old AP Lit exam essay about a poem, under timed conditions, in a screencast here, for what it’s worth. Interesting to be able to let them into my interior writer’s monologue as I read, annotate, and write a response, recording voiceover all the while, to the same exercise they did.

My best student responded to watching it by saying, among other things, “I didn’t think you could make a one-sentence paragraph in the body of an essay.”

One last tidbit: I took an AP Lit workshop from UCLA this summer – a waste of time, mostly – but got this from the College Board/APL celebrity who taught it: AP Lit exam graders appreciate organic form, “as long as it has a beginning, middle, and end.”

I like that: beginning, middle, end. None of this “introductory paragraph, body, conclusion paragraph” drivel.

Then, instead of sleeping as I’d intended, my mind shifted into overdrive. Sylvia’s and Jeff’s post led to these fantasies of how we can teach real writing (based on real reading in this “infinite book” we call the internet) with web 2.0:

First, students would write self-directed blogs. No homework assignments allowed in terms of subject matter, though standards of style and conventions would be set;

Second, assessment would be based on readership, comments, subscriptions, visitor stats, Technorati authority ranking (with safeguards against fraudulent links, which are easy enough to spot), self-assessment, and other non-authoritarian, teacher-gives-grades assessment styles. (And yes, as usual, it’s the institutional but otherwise counter-educational imperative to grade everything that presents the biggest obstacle to this approach to learning.)

–Wait, you say. That’s not fair. Some students who are not blessed with verbal intelligence will not attract subscribers, visitors, comments, and so forth. But not so fast: the art of compensation with other intelligences is so much more possible on blogs. Not a great writer? Then compensate by communicating through images (see Diane Cordell’s blog), podcasts (see Wes Fryer), films (see Marco Torres and Mabry Middle School), graphic novels and comic strips (see ToonDo). Carve out a niche doing Google Earth productions (see Google Lit Trips) as your blog’s specialty. Find some skill you have, or some passion you want to extend, and adapt your blog to exploit that.

Really: What form of multiple intelligences does blogging exclude?

Third, grades would be weighted toward the end of the year or term, to allow for experiment, dead ends, learning – through – failure, and other writerly discoveries afforded by real-world blogging. (I’m more and more fascinated by the fact that my own blogging has been a real-world case of what we call “project-based learning” in school, and more and more convinced it’s the way to engage young writers to naturally want to hone their skills and excel.)

I shouldn’t have tried to write this right now. Too tired. But these holidays are short, and I love them for allowing this type of reflection.

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*I’ll probably just buy the domain and host it alongside the Project Global Cooling site anyway, since I’m already adminstering WordPress MU for my school – and soon will train students to administer these sites themselves. It’s so hard to let go of the reins and give them to the young, and so easy to forget that they’re more than capable. But I will ask Scott to boost, support, read, seed, reply

Photo credits:
Writing by oskay
Borg Drones by Dunechaser
Bible 2.0 by jeff w brooktree
Looking by eskimoblood
Fusion Festival 2005 by Udo Herzog

Way past bedtime, but it’s Chusok – Korean Thanksgiving holiday – and I have the week off. And I want to share this link to the prototype of the Project Global Cooling website, which we’ll migrate to its own URL next week, and permanently open up to global, student-created content for annual contributions.

I share it for two reasons: first, the theme design is an example of WordPress at its aesthetic and functional best. Refresh the page and watch the header change, for a taste of the aesthetic. And click the flags on the left, and watch – this is just magic to me – watch the language change, within the theme. This is ideal for a global collaborative project, though more than Euro-languages would be “more perfect.”

Second, a few minutes noodling around on the site should clarify the project idea for anyone unclear on it, or wanting a link to forward to others.

April 19 – Earth Day Saturday, 2008 – is still comfortably far away. Plenty of time to find a place for a concert in your area, book a few bands, and hook a few of your more visionary and creative citizen-students up with others like them around the world. Here’s the badge for our planning Ning – we’d love it if some of you could embed it on your own blogs, Facebooks, what have you. Just click for the embed code, and if you do – thanks

Visit The Global Cooling Collective

1. emotional reactions being the substitute for thinking among those who can’t think [↩]

Prison Exercise Yard: Photo by Jon’s pics

Student: “Ms. Stucco says I have to quit Project Global Cooling to go to the Class Council Representative meetings every week.”

Me: “And you explained to her you’d been volunteering on this project all summer, that you’re an important player in it, and that it’s community service in a big way?”

Student: “Yeah.”

Me: “And she said ‘No,’ pure and simple?”

Student: “Yeah.”

Me: “So what are you guys going to be planning in the Student Council that’s so important she’s forcing you to drop all other activities?”

Student: “The Haunted House for Halloween. And the next Student Assembly.”

Me: “The Haunted House….so, like, getting the pumpkins and doing some Halloween thing in the gym?”

Student: “Yeah.”

Me: “And the Student Assembly: what are you planning for that?”

Student: “Introducing the Sports teams. And raising school spirit.”

Me: “And how many people do you have meeting twice a week to plan a Haunted House and a 40-minute assembly to introduce the basketball players and give a few speeches and such?”

Student: “Seventeen.”

Me: “Seventeen?”

Student: “Yeah.”

Me: “Seventeen people meeting twice a week for the next 20 weeks to plan a haunted house in the gym, and an assembly to introduce sports teams? How long can it take to come up with a plan to introduce sports teams?”

Student: “I know.”

Me: “I hate school. Look at how trivial it makes you, even when you want to make a difference in the real world.”

Student: “I don’t have any choice. Ms. Stucco won’t let me out.”

Me: “And look how powerless you suddenly are. You’re 17. You’re a young adult. You know physics, calculus, and history far more than most of your teachers, but have zero power in school despite that. ‘She won’t let me.’ I hate school.”

So, your advice: I want to suggest he quit Student Council, since it’s clearly one very school-blindered, trivial waste of time for all these poor students seeking election in order to show they can handle power effectively – like adults do.

Another idea is to instead advise him to wage a bit of a rebellion inside the Student Council, by asking the very sensible question – “Is this the best we can do? Jack-o-lanterns and basketballs? Can we give the StuCo some teeth? Extend it into the real world? Isn’t it pathetically fay right now? Trivial? Irrelevant? Infantile?”

The sad thing is, it’s institutionalized. The Rat-Race for college admissions puts a high premium on silly bullets like holding a class office. College counselors, administrators, parents, students, teachers – the whole school culture – treat the Student Council like it’s an honorable thing. In reality, it limits the horizons of the 17 most motivated leaders from each grade level to the paltry world of the schoolhouse. It’s outrageously trivial and infantile.

I don’t know if it’s “consensus trance,” blind traditionalism, or winking condescension (“Let the kids play like they have power”), but it smells really bad to me.

(Luckily, we’re filming for a documentary of “Project Global Cooling.” The student above is going to interview next week as the first casualty in a conflict between “real worldliness” and “schooliness.” The documentary is shaping up to be about the psychology of schools as much as anything else.)

And I can’t help but think: if I were a college admissions officer, and I read a college application essay about how a student chose to sacrifice a prestigious but trivial office for the sake of one less prestigious but more substantial?

I would like that applicant. A real person, with real principles, instead of a budding careerist: what a concept.

The first half of this post is written in the (very real) voice of an angry student wanting to “quit school.” The second half is a preview of an upcoming podcast interview with the director-producer of the “unschooling” documentary, “Voices from the New American Schoolhouse,” that I wrote about recently in the “Four Convergences” post. It’s also an invitation for anybody out there to submit questions for that interview, or arrange to call in during it, in this post’s comments.

The two halves of this post belong together. Bear with me.

What Fresh Hell is This?:
When the Desks are Turned….

As regular readers know, I’m a “student” again in this (US) $500 online AP workshop.

I almost “hate” it. And that’s good.

It’s good to sit in the student’s desk and experience the exasperation, the time-wasting folly, the powerlessness, the absurdly arbitrary nature of it all.

Harsh? You decide. Another quick example (after the B+ for assigning a videochat / filmmaking poetry lesson instead of an analytical essay): Course started three weeks ago. Course book was mailed before that, but only included the AP Lit workshop book. No syllabus. On Day One of the course, Blackboard lets students in to see teacher bulletins. I must have missed the mention of reading Their Eyes were Watching God on one of those links. Even if I hadn’t, it takes three weeks for book orders to arrive in Korea. This was a Week Two assignment.

I went to two bookstores with foreign (English) book sections, but no luck. I emailed the teacher, asking for either an extension or a workaround by performing a similar analysis in a different novel. Seemed reasonable to me.

I emailed teacher the day the assignment was due – Sunday in LA, Monday in Korea. (I’d searched in bookstores the day before, so I sent this email within 24 hours of discovering the problem.)

Here’s where it gets interesting. Teacher told me “It’s too late at this point to deal with the geography issue.” Note the language: absolute as the Ten Commandments. And so arbitrary. It could easily be otherwise.

Think about that: am I supposed to learn “a valuable lesson” about punctuality here? Is that the teacher’s role? Is that what I’m paying $500 for? To be told, “No learning activity for you because you were tardy”? And “this is going to hurt your grade, young man?”

At 45, it’s absurd. Given the circumstances, it might be at 15 as well.

Compounding the mood is another maddening fact: teacher and I went round and round for probably two or three hours this week in private emails in which she told me I was participating too much in the forums. Forums participation is weighted 400 total points, while weekly work is weighted 100 points each week, so I spent silly energy trying to tactfully ask teacher to resolve the cognitive dissonance of the simultaneous “Talk / Don’t talk” commands she was giving. In a parallel universe with a teacher comfortable with student autonomy, I could have used that time to discover the problem with the upcoming assignment.

(That tact was hard because a forum, especially online and asynchronous, is open space when I teach classes, and I only interfere when there’s abuse. I still don’t get the pedagogy behind this control, and feel more and more like asking for a refund. I participate a lot, yes, and that’s no different from a fantastic AP Language workshop I took last year, in which much good conversation and good will happened. Why the difference now, with this class and this teacher? Where’s the pedagogy?)

Add to that: teacher publishes assignments for each week at a pace she controls. I’d finished the prior week’s assignment within two days, and had she set up the course for self-paced acceleration, would have seen the unavailable novel issue five days sooner. Why not publish all assignments up front, and assign only the feedback on a tighter schedule?

One last doozie: She requires class members to read every post in Blackboard’s primitive forums (proprietary software like that is so painful – you can’t expand a thread to see it all at once, so you click countless posts that say, “Thanks!” Worse, teacher has disabled all multimedia embedding, so we’re stuck with text only). It’s required for the grade.

But what’s in the forums? “Schooly” assignments in which we play high school and write literary analyses of teacher-selected works. We write our analysis, then we give feedback to others. Fine, okay. It can be fun, within limits. But this isn’t an AP Literature class. This is “Teaching AP Literature.” Why so much “playing the student,” instead of focusing on the pedagogy? Yeah, I get the idea of shaking off rust. But it shouldn’t be the major focus.

The more important assignment, though, is our lesson planning for AP Lit – you know, the “teaching” aspect that we teachers enrolled in the course for? Hold your hats, because here’s a bigger doozie: Teacher does not require us to read each others’ lesson plans, and give feedback.

Instead, she alone gives feedback on those – in an email, with a numerical grade.

I’m sorry, but that’s simply bad teaching in my book. I don’t care much if somebody finds fault with my interpretation of a Shakespeare sonnet. I do care if somebody finds fault with my lesson plan design. I’d love to see my classmates criticize that. I’d have 20 peer-teachers. My teaching, and my students’ learning, would benefit.

But no. I have one teacher only here: The capital T teacher, the expert who gives grades to fellow adults. Note the hidden curriculum. Again, absurd.

There’s no less pleasant feeling than righteous indignation. Who likes feeling self-righteous? But I’m burdened with it.

So cure me of this. As usual, dear reader, I beg you: tell me what I’m missing.

For the record: there’s no space on the forums for suggestions to improve the class. I have emailed suggestions, with little response. In the classic “park the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff instead of installing guard-rails at the top” move, those suggestions come only at the end of the course, with the end-of-course evaluation. By then, it’s (fittingly) academic.

Why This Bad Luck is Good Luck

If nothing else, I’m re-living the experience of all intelligent students who have to swallow their insights into how their teacher could foster better learning – and better morale.

And the convergence of this experience with my recent explorations of unschooling, of Illich, of Downes, and of the Sudbury schools couldn’t be more serendipitous.

Danny Mydlack, the New American Schoolhouse documentary director, told me in an email that he’d posted the full documentary in segments on YouTube. So I started watching it tonight to prepare for the interview.

I’m not finished yet. But so far, here is what I consider the film’s most powerful moment. Listen to this young man explain why – after a life in public schools – he did nothing in the full first year of his attendance at this self-directed “unschool.” (His clip starts at 4 minutes, and he hits his brilliant stride at 5.30):

Such power in those insights. One day, I hope student voices this honest and insightful are common posts in our edublog readers.

So here’s the invitation, again. If you want to watch the full documentary, it’s posted in ascending order – bottom to top – at Danny’s page at YouTube. It’s very well-done, and worth the hour.

And if you want your questions or comments included when I interview Danny – or if you want to join us on Skype – just comment below and have your say.

Interesting journey these days. More and more, the problem doesn’t seem to be “dropping out,” as much as “dropping in” – or being dropped in, in a perfect use of the passive voice – in the first place.

Treat a student like an infant – even a 45-year-old one – and you get an infantile student. This post is proof.

I look forward to “de-toxing” when it’s all over, and getting back to what I want to learn, for free, grade-free, and above all – teacher-free.

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*Sorry for the re-post. I want RSS readers to enjoy the epigraphs from the Greeks and Chinese – a stylistic touch I’m learning from Diane’s writing at Journeys. This is another thing I don’t like about aggregators – they don’t update revised posts.

A pleasant update or two, and more convergences.

Six days ago I acted on a whim to try to make more international connections. I saw subscribers in my SiteMeter’s daily stats from Russia, Belgium, and Turkey, and posted a friendly “shout-out” asking them to introduce themselves.

That two minutes of effort was so worth it. Belgium sent me an email, and we’ll be Skyping soon for a podcast; and the Reinventing Project-Based Learning website had a link that led to Tom in Turkey, who I invited to be my “friend” on one Ning or another, and who ended up being the subscriber in Turkey I wanted to “meet.”

Not only is Tom a PBL guy, he’s also blogged about Illich and unschooling on his Tryangulation blog.

Then the “Four Convergences” post with the “Voices from the New American Schoolhouse” Sudbury video resulted in a very nice comment from the video’s creator (including a complementary DVD of the full 80-minute documentary from which that clip was an excerpt), and after a couple emails, a decision to Skype again for a second podcast.

All from acting to follow up on a moment’s desire based on an attractive “what if?”

It all amazes me, this new form of “summer vacation.”

(Photo: 7.10.2007 Luggage by j-blocker on Flickr)