Beyond School

I’m filching my comment on Will Richardson’s NECC reflection and putting it below for whatever weird archival reasons:

NECC is pretty far away from Korea (and air travel for a tech conference is a wildly ironic eco-no-no anyway, but I digress), and I was moving into a new apartment the very days it was held, and so couldn’t even attend online, but I had the feeling it would generate weird vibes from all the hype preceding it and the massive size (and also from a lot of generally weird social snarkiness in the eblogger boomtown in the past few months).

If I have anything to add to this thread, it’s this:

1. Tools don’t fix a rotten building. Maybe Shirky’s “platform” should be entertained as a replacement for schools, and the idea of schools themselves abandoned. I’d be much keener to contribute to wikis and networks to those ends than to devoutly schoolish ones. (To switch metaphors, you don’t waste a good defibrillator on a long-dead corpse. Let Lazarus lie.)

2. Whether tools are used in classrooms is pretty unimportant, compared to what type of learning is expected in the classroom. Most classroom learning doesn’t deserve the budget outlay for increased technology. Extra cash would be better spent on redefining what’s worthwhile for the young to learn. I’m a techie too, somewhat, but find educational philosophy far more vital than technology.

3. Is it me, or is the silent majority in education even more invisible this year than last, in all of these NECC talks? I mean the end-users - the students. There has to be an army of educational malcontents, volumes of witness testimonials to the farce of current schooling, and brigades of compelling material witnesses in high school student bodies around the world - all untapped. 18,000 adults at NECC is good - but 18,000 students on YouTube would be better, IMHO. Why is it so difficult to see student-centered educational activism, when it’s talked about so easily? Or am I missing something?

(I’m closing comments to this post to keep Will’s thread from splintering. Please comment there, if you’re so moved.)

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Yes, I’ve been following Clay and know exactly what he means. I too want to do away with all of the fluff and wasting of time in a public classroom.

Trouble is, I have this pesky student loan to pay off. And I absolutely love to share the joy of learning with kids, so I don’t want to lose that. I don’t know where I would go, if not the classroom. I’m watching to see what Clay does next.

I’m not quite as brave as him…yet.
Mindy | 06.13.08 - 7:01 pm | (comment on a fantastic defense of unschooling on The New Unschooler web log)

* * *

David Warlick was live blogging and I was intrigued by this that appeared:

Hummm! so what has to start getting closed down for educators to start realizing that education business is in jeparady?

Thinking about Virtual High School, as more and more students start signing up for online literature, or online history, and principals are going to be coming around and say, “Ms Johnson, our enrollment is down, as you know, and we’re going to have to let you go.”

Hmmm -made me think. Just what is Clay Burell up to??? (You’ve been so tight lipped couldn’t help but think this is where you’re headed!!)
–Jenny Luca, reflecting on NECC from Australia

–since people are talking and wondering….

It’s a bit after 8 a.m. Tuesday. Eunjeong is still asleep, and I’m enjoying my first cup of coffee in the enclosed little balcony off of one of the four bedrooms in our new apartment in Seocho-dong, a pleasant area in Seoul’s Kangnam district on the southern bank of the Han River.  The view I see as I type is the view you see in the photo I just took with my Macbook’s Photo Booth.

The story of our decision to find a new apartment is not unconnected to the story of why I left school-teaching.  Regular readers will know that Eunjeong and I married on March 8 of this year (and a wonderful percentage of those readers beautified that day by being “virtual guests” on the live uStream.tv webcast of the wedding).  The apartment we lived in at that time was provided by the school, and it was far too small for this new family’s tastes.  Had Eunjeong been a teacher in the school’s employ, we would have qualified for a larger apartment - but she wasn’t.  Had the school agreed to include better housing to accompany the new administrative job I’d accepted as Tech Coordinator, again, things could have turned out differently.  School administrations have their own agendas, their own reasons for doing and not doing the things they do and don’t do, so there was no need for sourness here. Negotiations simply didn’t work out.

This left Eunjeong and me with a classic dilemma: decent job without a decent home, or a decent home without a secure job?  It’s a common enough problem for international school teachers, whose packages include school-provided housing.  It’s all or nothing.  And all not being enough, we chose nothing.

I felt ambivalent, too, about that new job description as Tech Coordinator.  From the outside, it looked attractive enough: oversee the training and implementation of laptop learning in the 1:1 school, while still teaching one “experimental” class in multimedia communication, networked project-based learning, etc.  I’d worked in overdrive for four years to learn both the new tools and the new pedagogies for them. I’d spent a good number of hours, too, drafting the job description for the position that would make it worth the time. (We all know that office jobs alone don’t automatically mean “job satisfaction.”)  But when all was said and done, I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that I would be spending more hours trouble-shooting administrative software glitches (”Why aren’t the grades exporting with the comments?”) than developing laptop learning pedagogies with teachers, which was my calling and my hope.  In the absence of any conversations about that part of the job description - or about that job description in general - I kept having visions of the old Maytag Repairman commercial: you know, the guy sitting in the office flicking playing cards at the trash can (or drawing monkeys on a banana) because he had no opportunity to leave the office and hone his skills.  Yes, he still got paid; but he didn’t get much job satisfaction with that office job.  I suspect that’s emblematic of many Tech Coordinators in schools worldwide.

Again, this was all subtext, indirect, non-explicit. It was more than anything a gut feeling, inferred from absences more than presences - absences of suggestions to begin conversations with the next year’s new high school principal about how to shape the staff development, about how to structure the work-week, about simply having a plan in place before the year began.  Readers of my post announcing that new job in the form of a little sonnet (forgive me, reader: the Humanities teacher in me  wanted to practice iambic pentameter and Shakespearean prosody) may have noticed the less-than celebratory tone of that little ditty, especially in the sentence following it:

Silly Twitter Sonnet

I tweeted to my twitterverse last week
From high up on a twig on my lone tree.
From that frail height I sang of what I seek:
A future free of grinding schooletry.

I sang of learning far beyond the walls
of bricked-in class, and space, and time, and age;
and students heeding all creative calls
that cried to them from their own chosen page.

An echo back from that lone song I heard
from fledglings, faint from some barred far-off cage:
“We hear you, and would fly there in a word,
Were we but free to heed our inner sage.”

A bell rang then, and my frail twig gave way,
And down I plunged, to just another day.

–

I signed the contract for one more year, but in a new position: 21st Century Learning/Tech Coordinator.  We’ll see how that goes.

(I have to add one of my favorite and, it turns out, prophetic comments to that post from the best friend I’ve never met, Diane Cordell, who wrote an alternative couplet¹ that may have done its little part in changing the course of Eunjeong’s and my lives:

Or, in another universe:

So off I flew to seek a newer land
That hope and dream and promise ably spanned.

diane)

Prophetic it became. All those things converged - the housing, the absence of evidence of any teeth for the Tech Coordinator position, and my general rejection of the tragicomedy of schooliness - to bring me to my decision not to sign that Tech Coordinator contract after all.

It didn’t feel great. I’d put so much energy into the school’s decision to go 1:1, to go Macbook instead of PC, to adopt blogs and wikis and bears, oh my, the whole nine yards.  And now, after only one year, my unwillingness to be a Maytag Repair Coordinator living in a crackerbox was going to end that relationship.  Wasn’t there a third way, beyond either-or and win/lose (or lose/lose, in this case)?

For a few days, I thought I’d found a solution and a “Yes” - a third way - in another example, like Diane’s comment above, of how life-changing simple online conversations can be. This one involves my reading of a post on the web log of that loveable “bitch, hellcat, and absolute doll” Taylor the [ex-]Teacher’s web log.  Taylor’s guest-writer, Daphne, wrote an open letter to schools in which she suggested, under the heading, “Want Us to Stay?”, the following:

Give us the option to teach online or in a more flexible schedule.

If those things don’t fit in education today, then neither do we.

Long story short, that comment reminded me of my own posts’ evidence that teachers no longer have to come to the physical building to do their jobs so much - see the “teaching from home with Skype” post, or simply think about how much tech coordinating can be done from home, instead of sitting in the Repairman’s office flicking playing cards at trash baskets. It’s not like I need to be a full-time office-sitter in a Seoul school-building to administer a Moodle and WordPress MU server in Virginia, or to work on school calendars, portals, and info-management systems online.

So I made a new offer: let me drive to school the two or three days a week to teach that one experimental class, as a part-time employee. Pay me by the hour, forget the housing and benefits:  I’ll spend my newfound freedom in the other 36 hours a week creating other ways to pay my bills. As Daphne suggested, those things can fit in schools today, with enough outside-the-box thinking.  Pay me for the occasional tech work you need by the hour, too, instead of hiring a full-time card-flipper at a massively more expensive rate.

Win-win, it seemed to me.  But it didn’t turn out that way (schools are boxes, after all). So it was, after all, to be goodbye.  Beyond School, here I come.

* * *

Eunjeong is awake, now, and we have to go to the immigration office one final time, so I’ll answer the “what are you doing now?” question in a follow-up.  I’ll only add, before closing, this short version:  I’m already teaching.  Will Richardson’s post in the wake of my On Leaving Teaching to Become a Teacher post last January is relevant here.  Will writes:

….[D]espite what the system takes away from good teaching, few write about teaching as if it is something that can be done just as meaningfully outside of the system. That’s obviously what Clay is struggling with. And it’s what my brain continues to be chewing on. How can we start to think differently about teaching? How can we teach in meaningful, important ways outside of the current construct? How can we give good teachers the opportunity to teach without the  inconsistencies and constraints of the system? And how do we do it in ways that can still serve all of the kids the system currently serves?

That last one is the really tough one…

–and that last one is a tough one for me, too. I’ve dropped out of schooling, so traditionalists and other moralists have a wide-open target to shoot me as a sell-out - because I’m now a private tutor, for rates any self-respecting academic and educator with the knowledge, skills, and creds I have would demand.

Sticking with a bankrupt system to pay your bills is another form of selling ourselves, so by that logic, I can at least comfort myself that, either way I go, I’m still selling out.  I’m just trying to get - and give to my students - better terms in the bargain.

I have a lot more to say, and will, but in regards to that “tough one,” I’ll just point to the Eggers post I did a few months back as the direction that pulls me: teaching, like law, can include a pro bono arrangement. That’s what I’m looking at, in a very outside the box way.

And now, free of that same blasted school bell that stole so many potentially productive hours from me over the last decade, I’ll have hours and hours to freely play with tough questions like that.

A quick close: This post is shot through with how transformative the new world of writing and reading and conversing is. I’ve long meant to post about how, since starting this blog, my writing, reading, and conversing seem to literally create new futures for me. It started from the very beginning, day one, when I chose the title of this blog in December 2006. What was then hyperbole is now literal. It’s all still so very amazing.

Sorry for the length. Happy summer.

Photo credit: Monkeys on a Banana by furryscaly on Flickr (love it!)

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1. metrically spot on, the English teacher adds with a smile [↩]

In recent years, postmodernists have challenged the validity and need for the study of history on the basis that all history is based on the personal interpretation of sources. In his book In Defence of History, Richard J. Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge University, defended the worth of history. –Wikipedia: “History“

–the logic of the above quote is sloppy, in my view. Both sides are right: How can we argue with the Postmodernist insight into the basic “constructedness” of all (yes, all) texts? Textual narratives are written by individuals with biases, blind spots, no direct experience, limited sources, and other imperfections. So any historical or biographical narrative, from Gilgamesh to the Gospels to Tacitus to Thomas Friedman, is indeed, as the postmodernists claim, “based on the personal interpretation of sources,” and thus should be read with a healthy dose of skepticism and the need for evidence and logic.

But Evans is also right to “defend the worth of history.” It’s silly to think otherwise. That historians are neither omniscient, neutral, or infallible does not mean that history is unknown or unknowable. The evidence from the past - those letters, journals, books, artifacts, ruins, buildings, maps, and all the rest that we call “primary sources” - attests to the basic facticity of a person or event. Socrates existed and was executed in Athens: this seems safe to say, based on evidence from various sources of the time. But the person of Socrates, his character? Plato says “hero,” Aristophanes says “charlatan,” and a modern philosopher says “anti-democratic villain.” One person, Socrates, is defined differently by three different narrators’ personal (and “scholarly”) interpretations of him. And thinking about those interpretations, and ideally creating our own, does have value for us. Pity any democracy, for example, that is ignorant of Hitler’s fear- and anger-mongering manipulation of German voters to get himself legally appointed dictator. (In other words, pity Bush/Cheney’s United States?)

Again, the point: We need history, but we also need to understand the methods and practices of the historian - the search for evidence, its evaluation and selection, its literal “weaving” into, or omission from, narrative “text.”

Schools, as usual, generally score an F-minus in teaching students this “constructedness” of history. They’re too busy stuffing their victims’ heads with the names, dates, and summaries - the “facts” - that those victims will then be tested on. (In most cases, said victims will remember their test grades far longer than they’ll remember the content, since schools largely teach that grades are more important than learning.)

Anyway, this is a round-about intro to a comment thread I’ve been enjoying on Will Richardson’s recent “My Blogging Legacy” post. In that poignantly mind-bending post, Will imagines his children, after he himself has passed away,

. . . . turning to the computer and accessing an avatar representation of me who carried in him the compilation of all my writing, blogging, photos, movies, oral histories and more that I had created while I was alive. And that avatar was able to sort through all of that information and answer their questions, have a conversation with them in fact, in my voice. At some point in the dream, I realized that the avatar was not only feeding back historical data, but was also using the sum of my work to offer advice and counsel in ways that I most likely would have offered were I alive. Even though I wasn’t there physically, it’s like a piece of my brain lived on, one that was able to provide for my kids a richer understanding of their histories and legacies.

At a certain point, I riffed off Will’s idea, then Christopher Sessums chimed in with this:

I’ve been reflecting on the notion of ghost blogs, i.e., blogs of users who have died. I imagine this phenomena will begin to take on “new life” as the first wave of bloggers move on to that “undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns–” (Shak. Hamlet).

I think about how in meatspace we have a place to go to, to mourn, remember, reflect, pay our respects. What will this look like online?

Your post provides a wonderful vision of how it could be.

Given my own sense of mortality, it makes sense to start thinking/planning now, if only in a brainstorming-sense.

I shot back,

And Christopher, to throw the irresistible local flavor from East Asia in: how will these “ghost blogs” meld with Confucian ancestor worship? The laptop (or holograph) next to the photo of the deceased blogger-ancestor on the altar, behind the incense and candles?

Then Chris wrote:

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Where do blog posts go when we die? They never cease (provided your ISP is still in business).

. . . . I also like the fact that my identity is dispersed in tiny bytes across the ether. Being a puzzler, i.e., one who enjoys puzzles, I like the idea of searching across multiple forms of representation to create a picture of a person’s life. So I’m not sure I would want my identity isolated in one space, but instead distributed thus requiring those interested in me to explore and put together their own picture of me.

Then I riffed back with a fantasy history or non-fiction writing assignment - biographical writing, specifically. Since Chris then offered - threatened? - to “kiss” me in response (and though I virtually slapped him, I was flattered), I figure I’ll post that assignment idea here. I do think it’s cool enough, honestly, to pass on to any history or non-fiction writing teachers out there. Here it is:

A History Assignment I’d Like to See:

Chris, A belated Eureka-riff re: your “distributed identity”: a creative, project-based biography-writing or historiography teacher or professor could do some cool stuff treating our already-distributed online personae as “primary sources” from which student historians or biographers had to draw to construct a representation of us.

*INHALE*

What I mean is, like, “Write a biographical sketch of X in which X’s public blog represents his/her public life, but X’s comments on others’ blogs represents his/her (more) private life. Construct a narrative of X’s personal life, tastes, and thoughts by analyzing their Flickr photos, LastFM playlists, YouTube favorites, etc.”

I know I’m freer in comments than I am on my blog posts, for example. And that a good reader could infer a lot about me from those other “primary sources” listed above.

It would be even more interesting, from a literacy perspective, to have more than one person construct a biography or history of the same individual. If you and I, for example, had to sift through the same “legacy” Will has confetti’d the web with, odds are we’d construct significantly different identities due to our different selection/omission choices and subjective bents.

Interesting, anyway. Just playing around, whiling away the writer’s block.*

Wouldn’t that be cool? And wouldn’t students learn just how slippery history and biography are by comparing their different narrative constructions? And wouldn’t they learn, sidewise, about how revealing they can be with their online identities, when others decide to sift through them like this, and possibly think twice about what they reveal in all future posts?

—

(*Speaking of that writer’s block, it’s due to many factors: the Project Global Cooling concert went off quite successfully in a downtown Seoul nightclub last weekend, but was exhausting to pull off; I’m in the midst of moving into a new apartment; the last-weeks-of-school madness is full swing; my Airport Express wireless is wonky in my apartment; I’m changing my immigration status; my mother-in-law is still recovering from her stroke; and I’m leaving my school to take a year’s sabbatical, without pay, which necessitates its own host of preparations. Can you say “full plate”? But life is full, anyway, and I’m excited.)

Image: Quite Puzzling by Cayusa

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