Only Connect

"What do you need?": Buy Nothing Day 2001 Revisited.

2011-11-27T17:08:00.000-08:00

On my facebook page, I just linked to a news article that questions, "How did Black Friday come to this?"--referencing pepper spray, pushing, shoving, etc. that occurred this year (and many other years for that matter). In 2001--egged on by a president who told us that, in order to get back to normal after the 9/11 attacks, we had to get back to shopping ('cause, um...that's what we do, right?)--I went off the deep end and launched my own attack. The rationale and lengthy explanation for this protest is found below, but in short, I was sickened to the point of action. Picking up on the culture jamming ethic I'd been introduced to by a group of high school students I'd worked with in an after-school arts/writing seminar, I armed myself with a series of poems emblazoned with the brilliant logo of our group (see picture above), designed by Jesse Miksic, a wicked smart kid who's an even more intelligent and thoughtful adult (read him at his blog and you won't be sorry), and I sat myself, and my wife of two weeks, outside the King of Prussia Mall "Lord and Taylor" entrance. The rest? Well, if you want to read it, it's below. Suffice it to say that I do not shop on Black Friday. I do not protest any longer. Not in the way I used to. Say what you want, question the motive, argue for the bargains...whatever. I've heard it all. The more you defend the day and the unquestioned consumption upon which it feeds, the more you feed my argument and motive. There is a branch of science that has been growing over the past few decades. Some call it complexity, some chaos, some emergence. In nature, it's more or less the study of "swarm mentality." (And those of you who will be clamoring that this is all about personal responsibility? Yeah, go read up on Swarm Mentality and check out Stephen Johnson's Emergence.) Whatever you call it. It applies quite clearly to the actions of shoppers on Black Friday. Sharks in a feeding frenzy or shoppers on Black Friday? Ain't no difference to me.

Here's what I wrote about my first experience in culture jamming, back in 2001. I did it one other time, in 2002 in a different fashion. I'm sorry to say I could do it again...things haven't changed.

(Understand that this e-mail was originally targeted for the teachers in my district, thus the ending paragraphs.... Also, I had to edit out the line breaks because I pulled it from an old e-mail and I don't have a text scrubber, other than myself, handy.)

Last year, on Black Friday, I arrived at the King of Prussia Mall around 6:30 AM and sat on a round concrete object whose purpose was, for allI could tell, to be a round concrete object. But is served well enough as a bench, and so I sat upon it. In my right hand was a large, two sided sign, some 21X 37''. The sign asked a simple question, "What do you need?" All I wanted to do was sit there the whole day and ask this question. I had heard my president, in a post 9/11 speech tell us that America had to get back to business, and that we shouldn't be afraid to do the things Americans do, like shop. (That's almost a quote, but not quite.) That turned my stomach. Being an American means a hell of a lot more to me than shopping and I'll be damned if I'll let any president, democrat or republican, insinuate that part of my expression of patriotism should be to shop. So there I sat. About 15 minutes later four mall security men stood like the famed "four horsemen" in front of me asking me what I was doing. Well, after no discussion whatsoever, I was told that if I wanted to take up my case with the police, they would be happy to oblige me. ('Seems I was trespassing on private property.) So I asked if I could talk to someone about what I could do. They directed me to the mall manager. Well, I took my big sign and, quite happily, walked into the mall, searching for the manager. When I found him, I asked if I could sit with my sign. He said I could not, that if they allowed me to do so, they would have to allow everyone who was soliciting to do so. I pointed out that I was not soliciting. He still said no. I said, "What if I just stand outside and ask the question to all the people who walk by?" He said I couldn't do that. "What, I'm not allowed to ask a question?" I said. "No," he replied, "it ruins their shopping mood."

Well, I had no comeback for that, so I walked out, dumbfounded. The manager of the mall had, quite openly and shockingly, admitted to me the mantra the King of Prussia mall--and, I suspect, all malls--want their shoppers to repeat: "Don't think, just shop."

I want to note here that I am not against consuming things...I'm not against buying things. I fully understand the integral part I play as a consumer in this country. However, as an American I represent less than 5% of the world's total population (according to 1999 estimates), but I am part of a world minority which consumes over 20% of the world's natural resources. I have a problem with that. When we buy simply because we are told to, when we buy because it makes us feel good, when we buy because we are, consciously or not, trying to fulfill some image, then we are blind consumers, and we are robbing wealth from the rest of the world for our own indulgences. My conscience leads me to believe that there is something wrong with that. To buy just because I can and because I want/desire to...there's something wrong with that. Even Christmas has been changed by these market forces. What was once a celebration of the hope and joy represented by Jesus Christ (and you don't have to believe in the Bible to understand the mythic import of hope and joy to a civilization), has been perverted into the hope and joy that buying can bring. One joy is existential, other worldly, and nourishment for the soul. The other is ephemeral; it disipates like breath in a chill wind.

What's more is that as educators, we are in a perfect position to get students to question their consumption, to question the cultural forces at work that mold them into the kind of blind consumers whose idea of a good time is a day out at the mall. Henry A. Giroux, Penn State professor of secondary education, writes that "if democracy is to carry us forward into the next century, surely it will be based on a commitment to improving the lives of children, but not within the degrading logic of a market that treats their bodies as commodities and their futures as trade-offs for capital accumulation. . . . Critical educators . . . need to create a cultural vision and a set of strategies informed by 'the rhetoric of political, civic, and economic citizenship.'"

And so it begins...

2011-09-05T06:21:00.000-07:00

The start of every school year finds me the same as every other day of the year...searching for new ways to think about and practice education.

This year finds me prodding my colleagues, entreating them to reconnect with their own passions and the passions of their students for compulsion only leads to coercion which rarely produces any kind of positive, long-term results.

Here's my plea to start the year, sent to all the members of my school e-mail list:

The other day I ran across this quotation:

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author and aviator (1900-1945)

I've read a lot of books on creativity and creative thinking and about how it helps students develop flexible, adaptable habits of mind--a key component for success in an ever changing world. Quotations by Antoine de Saint-Exupery fill those books.

One might argue that they ought to fill the minds of all the adults who work in our schools as well, for we are, in a sense, engaged in building a ship--the ship that will bear us into the future. If we wish to be successful in that endeavor, we ought to heed Saint-Exupery's words.

I'm not saying that students don't need work and assigned tasks. We all need those things. But they must be meaningful. They must be things that, by knowing, will create in the child the confidence and freedom to explore the immensity of whatever seas she wishes to navigate.

Of course, many of our students don't know what seas they wish to explore. For too long they've been told what seas to explore, how to explore them, and how to report out on the results of their explorations, which, by and large, are the exact same reports that generations of children before them have churned out.

Let us strive to listen to our students' passions and inspire our students towards the immensity of their future...even if, in such striving, we must (together with our students) fight against currents that seek to bear us ceaselessly into the past.

Bon Voyage!

WWMD? (What would the Muppets do?)

2011-04-16T16:09:00.000-07:00

I'm just positing the question. I've got nothing else to say on this. Really...

The Tragedy, The "Shirt", And Fires of the Mind

2011-03-24T17:17:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, March 25, 2011, will mark the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City. The fire killed 146 workers, mostly immigrant women. The horror of the event cannot be understated (see these photos) and the effect of the tragedy on labor rules and workers rights in America ranks the fire among the most important events in the labor movement.

But if you ask most Americans about the fire, they won't know what you are talking about.

Such is history. Stories can be forgotten, and history is nothing but stories. And we know what they say about those who forget history....

So here's a tale about my own history with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, poetry, and the magic of connections.

Somewhere in my past I learned about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. I don't know where or when. But I knew enough that when, in 1996 I heard Robert Pinsky (soon to become the Poet Laureate of the US) read his poem "Shirt" at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, I knew exactly what he meant when he referenced the "infamous fire". Immediately my mind opened and somehow my knowledge of that fire flooded back to me.

My point here has something to do with learning, something to do with poetry, and everything to do with our freakin' awesome brains. How did I remember this fire and why? And what's it got to do with poetry? Everything. If we are to read poetry well, we must allow ourselves two things. First, we must allow ourselves to actually hear it out loud. Robert Pinsky is, perhaps the most vocal proponent of poetry as an art of the body. I once heard him define poetry as "The art of the sound of the language", and his book, The Sounds of Poetry is one of the finest, most concise books on the subject. So to "read poetry"we must hear it aloud. Pinsky is a master of reading, gifted with a deep, resonant voice. You will not forget the experience. You will learn, if you listen to him, the importance of the best words in the best order, and how poetry can teach you in a way nothing else can.

But I said that if we are to read poetry well, we must allow two things...and so to the second. That to read poetry well, we must open ourselves to connections. That is, we must allow our minds to reach out to all that we know and have experienced in order to make connections, for the content of poetry is nothing if not an attempt to connect the way words "mean" things with the felt meaning that is our life.

Pinsky's "Shirt" is a masterful example of this act of connecting. As a whole, "Shirt" is a musing on material culture, on how the objects in our lives have histories. Pinsky is tracing the history of the shirt in much the same way James Burke (of PBS's "Connections"series and such books as The Pinball Effect ) has done in his wide ranging riffs on the histories of things as varied as a particular shade of green in a woman's dress to the carburetor. But where Burke is detailing the histories, Pinsky is using the tropes and techniques of the poet, rhythm, alliteration, allusion, to weave a web of connections. Where Burke's work reveals the incredible coincidences and connections that make our things possible, Pinsky's poem reveals the genius of the human mind at work as it leaps from one word to the next, one association or synaptic connection to the next, pausing to expand on an interesting fact (the Triangle Factory Fire, the kilt) and then listing again until a new association occurs.

While Pinsky's poem is remarkable for the histories he chooses and the manner in which he arrives at those stories, such associative discoveries are not unique to his poetry. In fact, the way one arrives at meaning in most poems is by following the association, the allusions, the connections (both literal and metaphorical) within the text, its sound as well as its sense. I think here of Billy Collins' "The Lanyard" in which he makes an overt bow to Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (and the infamous madeline that started that cascade of memories) as a way to define his own mind being sent into the past by a word ("lanyard") and the flood of memories the word triggered.

And the examples wouldn't stop there: Robert Frost's "Birches", Yusef Komunyakaa's "My Father's Love Letters" are just two more that come to mind.

And while, yes, this is a post about a tragic fire and a poem, even more it is about the power of poetry to ignite memory, and the manner in which we recall things. And finally, as a teacher, this is my philosophical musing (only one of many) on learning and teaching. It's all poetry, all associations and allusion. It's all about "the back, the yoke, the yardage...the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt."

Language and Reality--Taylor Mali and the Word

2011-02-12T09:16:00.000-08:00

I've been out of touch with poetry for a while. I missed last year's Geraldine R. Dodge festival for the first time in over 16 years and I've not patrolled the web for the hip, spoken-word poets as much as I want to. Three kids, teaching, union responsibilities and all manners of other things that make the world too much with me late...ly.

But I have been thinking about language, focusing intensely on what my words say and how I say them. And I realize something.

I'm a lexicographers pornographic partner. I'm so in love with words and their meanings and their histories that I trot out new words as though they're the bling around my pimp-daddy neck.

In more proper terms, I'm a word snob.

I blame William F. Buckley, Jr., William Safire, and Mr. Mark Rupple. The former could have given a rat's ass about you. He used all the words he knew, and he knew many, and he used them correctly...with authority. I know some people think he showed off. But me? Hell! If English has more words than any other language, I say you ought to use them, and you ought to use the right ones in the right places. Buckley impressed me that way.

Safire always intrigued me with his encyclopedic knowledge of the language. While I never read many of his columns, the fact that such a job even existed fascinated me, made me think of language as a treasure.

Mark Rupple was my 11th grade American Literature teacher. He impressed me immediately with his intelligence and knowledge of language. At some point during that year he told us how he carried around a small notepad so that whenever he encountered a word he didn't know, he wrote it down and taught it to himself.

I've done the same for a long time.

And so I use words, lots of them, and I often have disdain for those who refuse to make themselves understood clearly by using the right words, or who criticize others for "using big words." I know that's wrong. I hear Mark Twain telling me so--"The works of the great masters are like fine wine. My works are like water. Everybody drinks water." And yet, I'm still using "big words", still spelunking in the Latinate depths of the English language for the roots of meaning that go back so far into the past.

And so, to come to it, finally. . .

Taylor Mali's poem, like, resonates with me. You know?

Reading the World

2009-11-22T18:59:00.000-08:00

I'd like to continue here with the discussion of William Cronon's list of qualities of a liberally educated.

The second quality of a liberally educated person: They read and they understand.

One would, it seems, have to have been beaten with the idiot stick to even question the presence of this item on the list, and Cronon admits as much (see the excerpt below). However, and this is why Cronon bears a wider audience than I think this piece has received (and I would urge every school district administrator in the nation to read/reread this piece), he makes it clear that he is not speaking merely of the ability to read words. He believes liberally educated people apply skills similar to those employed in reading words to how they look at and move through the world. In a sense, liberally educated people read the world and construct their own understanding of it. Here's Cronon:

They read and they understand:

This too is ridiculously simple to say but very difficult to achieve, since there are so many ways of reading in our world. Educated people can appreciate not only the front page of the New York Times but also the arts section, the sports section, the business section, the science section, and the editorials. They can gain insight from not only THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR and the New York Review of Books but also from Scientific American, the Economist, the National Enquirer, Vogue, and Reader’s Digest. They can enjoy John Milton and John Grisham. But skilled readers know how to read far more than just words. They are moved by what they see in a great art museum and what they hear in a concert hall. They recognize extraordinary athletic achievements; they are engaged by classic and contemporary works of theater and cinema; they find in television a valuable window on popular culture. When they wander through a forest or a wetland or a desert, they can identify the wildlife and interpret the lay of the land. They can glance at a farmer’s field and tell the difference between soy beans and alfalfa. They recognize fine craftsmanship, whether by a cabinetmaker or an auto mechanic. And they can surf the World Wide Web. All of these are ways in which the eyes and the ears are attuned to the wonders that make up the human and the natural worlds. None of us can possibly master all these forms of “reading,” but educated people should be competent in many of them and curious about all of them.

Certainly reading books and the printed word is key to academic and life success. But look at how Cronon extends those skills. This is "reading the world" and it is a full body experience. Thus, the liberally educated person uses all her senses to experience the world. What Conon is suggesting is that liberally educated people live fully conscious lives, that they are the embodiments of Plato's statement: "The unexamined life is not worth living." To read the world as Cronon suggests, one must continuously ask questions, must search for patterns, must understand different standards of quality and be able to identify them within the world's many texts. All of this, and more, all good teachers model for their students.

"They Listen and they Hear"

2009-09-29T20:26:00.000-07:00

I've read the William Cronon article from which I've taken the new name of this blog at least seven times. Each time I come away from the article as a teacher with a deepened and renewed sense of purpose. So, I thought it might be a good idea to pull the ten qualities Cronon lists as characteristics of a liberally educated person and deal with them in ten or so short blog entries. In each I'll summarize the point as it exists in Cronon's article and offer some observations as to how one can achieve such goals in a contemporary public school classroom.

It is utterly important to note that I'm adapting (you decide if it's an improper adaptation) Cronon's article, which is written from a college perspective, into a secondary school classroom, not because I want to foist top-down management into our schools any more than it already is. Rather, I'm convinced that the current climate under which we teachers and our students must suffer is inimical to the most important goals of American public education, which are, in short: to perpetuate the democracy, the economic system, and humanize us all so that we endeavor to push the race forward rather than to destroy ourselves.

Furthermore, I don't want to assert that Cronon's goals are mutually exclusive of other, more measurable goals. Skills in math, reading, and some measure of scientific literacy are crucial to achieving the larger goals of American Public Education I list above. No, Cronon's goals are actually prerequisites for all other types of learning. More importantly, they are also not goals in the traditional sense. That is, they are not end states. One never achieves such a goal as "They listen and they hear." One can only ever get better and better at it. My bone of contention, then, with the current state of affairs is that we spend little time on developing these goals--on even letting students know that these goals are honorable and salable--because they are not easily quantifiable. The old saw applies here: Not every thing that matters can be counted; not everything that can be counted matters.

So, onto Cronon's list...

1) They Listen and they Hear.

Cronon states that this goal of a liberal education is something you'd think goes without saying. Essentially, it describes people who "work hard to hear what other people say. They can follow an argument, track logical reasoning, detect illogic, hear the emotions that lie behind both the logic and the illogic, and ultimately empathize with the person who is feeling those emotions."

I'll admit to a good deal of bias here. I'm a debate coach. Offering students activities that help them work towards this goal is easy. Engage them in structured controversies like debates and constructive discussions. There are any number of debate structures you might employ, with the more formal styles outlined clearly and fully at websites like the National Forensic League, The Pennsylvania High School Speech League, and other such leagues around the nation. Additionally, teachers can employ structured discussions. Programs like Paideia Seminars, Socratic Circles, Literature Circles, or The Touchstones Discussion Project all offer students opportunities to speak and listen and learn from each other in many different curricula (not just language arts or social studies).

My list is not exhaustive, but I am certain of the solid outcomes each of the different strategies I suggest can produce if a teacher buys into and believes in their individual processes.

And in the end, listening and hearing? Sure, you can't necessarily test for it, but you sure as heck aren't building a solid foundation for a democracy if all you focus on is computation and comprehension. At least by focusing on a goal like this one we'll have a chance to erase future episodes of The Jerry Springer Show from our airwaves and promote more civil discourse than what we saw in this summer's town-hall meetings.

"Drill, Baby, Drill!!!" (a hole in my head).

2009-09-28T14:37:00.000-07:00

So the other day this humble blogger was listening to Sean Hannity, on the way home from school. (Editorial note: I try to listen as much as possible to right-wing talk radio as I do to national public radio. Mind you, I don't believe that makes me some kind of centrist. No amount of listening to NPR will ever balance out the rhetoric of Mr. Hannity and the other "nattering nitwits of negativism" (that's my nod to William Safire, sans "nabobs", may he rest in peace).)

Anyway, Mr. Hannity was painting with his broad brush again, speaking of liberal environmentalists as the harbingers of doom for the American economy. You know, those tree-huggers block US access to the huge resources of oil in ANWAR, etc. That got me to thinking, "Is Hannity really that stupid, that in bed with the entrenched industries of oil and coal, to be that near-sighted Is he that deaf to the voices of liberals like Bill Clinton who, almost upon stepping his first foot out of the White House in 2001 announced that the future of American industrial dominance was in clean energy?

But I shouldn't lay all this on Hannity. He only gets it honest. I mean, look at how few businesses in America are really going all-in on environmentally sound energy production, or even hybrids. The American auto industry was years behind on alternate fuel innovations. Heck, over a decade ago my debate teams spent a year developing cases on just such a topic. As a country we're hardly any closer to long term solutions than we were then.

(Now, you may be wondering what this has to do with "a life of liberal education." Again, I'm not invoking the adjective "liberal" in the political sense. However, the adjective, placed as it is before "education", indicates a person whose worldview is at least open to alternate ideas and other perspectives. Thus, I'm not averse to those of Mr. Hannity's worldview... at least not so long as they are open to points of view different from their own. That I've yet to find such a person who actually lives such a credo (Hannity paid serious lip-service to such a supposed view he possessed at the beginning of President Obama's term...but it was only lip service) doesn't mean I'll give up. My liberal education leads me to believe those people are out their.)

But back to the original post, about clean energy and American economic health. I give you Sir Thomas Friedman, he of the flat world with lexuses and olive trees. Do you think he'd have any sway with Hannity and the nitwits? Well, maybe... especially if Friedman invokes the specter of communism? (It's a great article I've linked to here. In short, Friedman labels China's decision to go full-steam ahead on clean energy production to be the "new Sputnik.) Of course, that's the kinder, gentler, more economically liberal communism of Red China. Probably not close enough to the communism banished by Hannity's saviour and idol, Ronald Reagan, but I'd like to think that something could force Hannity and those who opposed Van Jones as the "green jobs czar" to see that they and their stagnant, status-quo worship is keeping us from entering into a world economy in a timely fashion. One wonders just what they think we'll gain from this waiting posture. All I can come up with is that they're waiting to gain back some political position in the US government so they can claim some role in doing the right thing.

Too bad. They had eight years of a republican president, and more than enough time with republican majorities in both houses to do the right thing. All they did was drive us to the brink of depressions and destruction.

That's What I'm Talkin' About

2009-09-13T15:21:00.000-07:00

If you were a reader of this blog in its original "Big Styrofoam Things" incarnation, then you might have read my posting on Daniel Pink's book, Johnny Bunko. While that book is fine for it's purpose, you might remember that I referenced another book by Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers will Rule the Future. I said I would write about it at a later time. Toward that end, I'll simply write this. If you are an educator, or if you care about education, you need to read this book. It is a tremendous act of synthesis, looking at trends in business, medicine, education, video games, and pulling them together into as coherent a thesis as you're likely to find in any such work of social criticism. In fact, I'd liken it to a modern day Future Shock. I actually took the book from my school principal several years ago after learning that she and all the other administrators in the district had been asked to read it by the district superintendent. I suppose this was to engender some sort of innovation in the buildings, though, truth be told, I see little in my district to indicate that we've embraced the ideas Pink champions.

I consumed A Whole New Mind over the course of a week, annotating most every chapter, continuously finding connections to my curriculum and ways that I could improve my own thinking and thereby my students' thinking. For the past 3 years I've been championing this book to my fellow teachers, to the teachers I teach in graduate education courses, and to administrators whenever I get the chance. Pink has been traveling and speaking about this book and the ideas he put forth ever since it hit the bookshelves. He's been interviewed in professional magazines dealing with the business world, education, and the arts. Of the books that have most influenced my work in the classroom, A Whole New World ranks in the top three with William Glasser's The Quality School and Thomas Armstrong's Awakening Genius in the Classroom.

So I just found Daniel Pink speaking at TED. While he's not speaking about A Whole New Mind, he is still trolling the same melody. If you'd like more links regarding A Whole New Mind, you can find them below.

Here's Daniel Pink on YouTube. There are more You Tube videos of him that you can find for yourself.

How about a blog radio interview with Pink?

How to Sink a Ship

2009-09-06T19:03:00.000-07:00

Below is the mission statement of the school where I work. It's really not much different from the statements you'll find at most schools around the nation. I copy it here because September is a perfect time of year to reflect on how teachers' actions in the classroom and their buildings are true to such generalized statements of decent human action, and how we often have to defend such statements against actions taken by adults outside the school environment. Sometimes such reflection helps us place our actions and the actions of others in a light that will make us better people, and sometimes it allows us to see the hypocrisy inherent in such actions, be they our own or the actions of others. Either way, we ought to think and use the historical moment to improve ourselves.

Mission Statement

In order to create responsible citizens,

it is the mission of Perkiomen Valley Middle School East

to provide a learning environment that utilizes all resources to enable students to reach their highest potential;

to foster respect for others and self;

so that students may excel independently and interdependently; and to ensure educational opportunities for all.

So it might clarify things if I were to place the above information in context. On Tuesday, September 8, 2009, the President of the United States, Barak Obama, is planning to address the students of America's public schools. Districts around the country (including mine), bowing to pressure from parents and others opposed to the President himself, have made the decision to deny students and teachers the opportunity to watch the speech live and will, instead, recorded it, decide upon it's appropriateness for certain curricula, and then allow it to be shown.

I bristle at such actions. It makes no difference whether the president is a black liberal or a white, fortunate son of the south. If the President of the United States wants to address the students of America with a positive message, students should see it, and teachers should be allowed to use the historical moment as a teachable one. Sure, I'm a teacher, I'm a believer in the enlightening and redemptive powers of education. So call me biased. I'd rather live in a world where we listen to and have the right to criticize all people than one in which we silence a leader because others paint him as a dictator, "racist", or the antichrist.

Below is a letter I've mailed to several newspapers, local and national, about the situation. I don't know if it will be published. But I'll do so here. Most of the information in the letter appeared in another, more detailed form, in a letter I sent to the administration in my district.

I encourage open discourse on this topic.

For almost twenty years I’ve taught a humanities class in the same school district. For almost twenty years I’ve enjoyed helping students understand the myriad ways that human beings have created to express themselves, their desires, their dreams, and their differences. For almost as long I’ve coached students on the district debate team where one must know not only how to rebut arguments of the opposition but they must also prepare arguments both for and against the given resolution. I do this because I believe in the power of human language to achieve consensus and community. I do this because I know that when my students enter college and the workforce, their abilities to listen to and persuade others will make them productive and prosperous members of a civil society. And thus, I work to achieve one of the primary ends of public education in America—the preservation and perpetuation of the democracy. At all points in my curriculum, I am open to assistance from the community in helping make my curriculum authentic and lively so that achieving this goal is somewhat easier.

And so, I’m turning to those citizens who have successfully blocked the live viewing of the President’s address to students to ask for their help in understanding the purpose of the lesson our national argument teaches. (Make no mistake, we are teaching a lesson.) Was the purpose to protect students from dangerous rhetoric and propaganda? Was it to exhibit the achievement of ends through fear and hatred and vocal disagreement without intellectual discussion? (Or is that a definition for racism? Sorry.) I’m just not sure, but I doubt it really matters. The kids won’t be paying attention to the lesson but rather to the manner in which the lesson is delivered. And to me, it seems what our children will take away from this event is what they always take away from watching adults argue: a heightened sense of the ridiculousness of the institutions created by adults, and of adults themselves and their utter hypocrisy. Here we are, in this historical moment every American a teacher, trying to maintain a democracy predicated on civil discourse, open access to information, and reasoned argument, and what do we do? We listen only to those with whom we already agree—that’s called prejudice. We show up to political speeches with weapons—in my book, while that may be an exercise of second amendment rights, that is an ignorant and dumb (in the sense that it is silent) exercising of rights. And we use the power of threat and fear to achieve our selfish ends--eg, “I’m going to keep my kids home if you show this, and you’ll hear about it at the ballot box.” Such ignorance teaches children nothing but that acting like a hurt child can achieve certain ends, that pouting and crying “foul” at the local baseball diamond and then taking your bat and ball and going home so that no one else can play is a productive way to react to perceived injustices. In the end, such actions engender a distrust of the very same public institutions we’re trying to promote through education and role modeling.

As someone who has been involved in pubic education for almost two decades, I know the importance of strong parents in a child’s life. Thus, I’m not deaf to the complaints being made at districts around the country. I, too, believe that some of the suggestions in the lesson plans accompanying the speech are ridiculous and should be ignored, regardless of whether or not you believe them to be worshipful adulation of “the anointed one.” However, these lessons are not reason to ignore the president, or even to record the speech for a later time. Doing so calls into question the professionalism and decision-making capabilities of the very teachers to whom we entrust our children each day. (Besides, no one is making teachers use the lesson plans.) But districts that are bypassing the teachers and taking the decision out of their hands communicate nothing so much as that teachers are powerless automatons, capable only of running scripted curricular programs designed for the least common denominator so as to leave no child behind.

In my own district, we were told that the president’s speech would be recorded and distributed on DVDs to teachers with appropriate curricular tie-ins. The assertion is that this “will provide a better opportunity to have an honest and educational discourse." Sure, that sounds good, but how is honesty born of silencing the voice of the leader of the free world (or anybody for that matter)? How is discourse educational when it will come predigested to a select few? In the end, what do we teach our students about civil discourse when we deny them authentic participation in such?

Of the ends of American Public Education, none is more important to me than the preservation and perpetuation of the democracy. But at the point that any district makes the decision that it's better to just ignore or, perhaps better stated, to "mediate" the words of a president with whom some disagree (which is the only way to read a district’s decision to “tape and show at a later date”)...at that point, those districts countenance an acceptance of all such actions, from screaming as a form of public discourse, to censoring access to information, to carrying a [insert weapon of choice here] as a means of silently, sinisterly announcing disagreement. Thus, because they have bowed to hatred and fear, these districts abdicate a central role of their institution and perpetuate the dissolution of the people's power to rule. And this, I suppose, is the lesson we teach: that government of the people, by the people, and for the people isn’t worth the intellectual struggle it takes to listen to those with whom we disagree.

Thomas Jefferson tells us that people always get the kind of leaders they deserve. Given the lesson we have taught them at this time, these children deserve much better than many of us.

Only Connect

2009-09-04T20:10:00.000-07:00

I've decided to change the title of the blog to signal a more focused experience. Yet at the same time, I do not want to limit the scope of what's possible to talk about. Thus, I borrow my title from an article of the same name which appeared in The American Scholar some years ago. Only Connect...: The Goals of a Liberal Education by Prof. William Cronon is one of those rare texts that has the ability to force the reader to change his/her perspective. Focused as it is on "the goals of a liberal education", I couldn't avoid this article when I first spied it in an abridged form in the Phi Beta Kappa Key Reporter. I consumed the article, copied it numerous times, distributed it to high school juniors and seniors, and it has become a seminal text in my education library.

The thing is, the article is not simply about education as something that happens within the walls of an institution. It's about living, growing, and learning to think freely and openly. And in that, I find the best description of what this blog will now be about. "Only Connect" means to live so that every experience is an opportunity to learn, to grow. It's what I try to instill in my students, it's an imperative that if practiced regularly leads one to find patterns and similarities rather than differences and distances. It's a way of seeing the world that is unsurpassed for clarity and understanding and appreciation of beauties of all sorts.

How, in the end, could education be more beautiful than that?

Healthcare Reform: "It's dejavu all over again."

2009-08-08T13:04:00.000-07:00

I recently wrote to a friend about the decline in the level of discourse in the healthcare-reform debate. Both sides in Washington, the administration and those opposing it (mostly conservative republicans) are at fault. Questionable republican tactics (organized disruptions at meetings designed to inform the public) lead to democratic name calling (disruptive "mobs", "brownshirts", "fascists") which helps to galvanize and rally more opposition against the administration doing the name calling. What gets lost, then, is any substantive discussion of the actual content of the damn thing that so sorely needs fixing--healthcare. One would think it's exactly what the republicans wanted in the first place. The president is seen as a failure, the status quo remains, and nobody has to take responsibility for the failure.

Look, I'm all about discourse. I'm a debate coach. I get the whole Hegelian thing: Thesis met with Antithesis=Synthesis. Democracy is supposed to work in a somewhat similar manner. But what's happening in America cannot lead to any real resolution because those opposing the thesis are simply not offering anything other than a "shoot the messenger" antithesis. What we'll wind up with, after all the acrimony and handwringing and self-flagellation and claims that we need to secede and dissolve the government is the status-quo. The broken thing itself.

Of course, it's only broken if it doesn't work for you. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for those voiceless, powerless Americans: The working poor. It works fine for people like me (I'm a teacher), for those who are, generally, of a higher educational status and have secure and well-paying jobs. Oh, and it works for those entrepreneurs and business owners who have, through their own blood, sweat, and tears, created and grown a thriving company and are thus able to purchase their own coverage. For those people, health care works. That's all that matters. We don't want to change it because we don't want to have to suffer so that others can have some minimal amount of care. And so people take to the internet, to sites like freedomworks.com to learn what they can do to stop the government from forcing them to help solve a problem that doesn't really effect them.

Of course, it does effect them. But they don't know it, or refuse to think the government can solve it. And such ignorance is hard to remedy for it is the Sysiphean task of the teacher. Teachers have to get students to do something they know is good for their students, but the impact of which is hidden from them because they are so young. Similarly in healthcare reform, the government has to get people to do something they know will be good for them (help fix the healthcare system so that it doesn't bankrupt us all or at the very least sentence an entire segment of the American population to death by denying coverage) but whose true impact is hidden from a great deal of them because they are: a) unaware, b) uneducated on the system, c) comfortable (and thus unwilling to help others lest it make them less comfortable).

And so what have those opposed to healthcare reform done to help solve the problem of "ignorance" or "discomfort"? They've counseled their masses to yell down the senators and representatives at meetings designed to help teach the public about the healthcare reform possibilities. They've labeled the plan "obamacare"--a thinly veiled, sophomoric debater's ad hominem attack conflating existing hatred of the president with the plan to reform healthcare. And through it all, they've offered no real counterplan...no antithesis. Instead of being part of the solution, they deny there's any problem to begin with, they counsel that private enterprise and the invisible hand of the freemarket will solve the problem, and they foment fear by spreading lies and deceptions about the ideas coming out of Washington.

But here's the real kicker. Everything I just said, could have been written over 15 years ago. And it actually was. Ok, so it's a "left of center" magazine, but for christ's sake! History does repeat itself, and such a repetition as I note here only serves to validate the source.

Read it. If that isn't enough to force you to question whether the health insurance industry and conservative republicans cut from the same cloth as Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey have your best interest in mind, then I've got a doctor with a six-shooter 'sez he can cure your migraine before you can even blink.

Ah so, Ah so, Johnny Bunko

2008-04-15T15:56:00.000-07:00

From the mind of the man who brought you A Whole New Mind comes Johnny Bunko. And if you're a stiff stuck in a work-a-day world you just can seem to get out of, then Bunko's your boy.

Daniel Pink, whose book A Whole New Mind ought to be a must-read for anybody in education, regardless of level, has again hit the ground running with a terrific idea that's being sold as the What Color is Your Parachute for the naught decade's latter half. While I've not read it (it just hit the stores last week), I've read of it on Pink's Website, and if it's as forward thinking as it appears to be, Bunko could live up to all the hype. There's even a video:

If I get around to it, I'll write more about this book, but in the meantime, if you've not read A Whole New Mind, I can't recommend it enough. I know schools around the nation that have read it or had their administrators read it, and I've recommended it to the members of my own department.

There's a Hebrew quotation I live by as a teacher, something I encountered in my very first year: "Do not condemn your children to your own mode of learning, for they were born in a different world." Both of these books, but especially Mind, will open your eyes to the potential of treating your children/students differently, but more importantly, to the powerful impact of thinking differently about yourself and the way you think. It could, if recent neuroscience is correct, stop you from losing your mind, literally.

Restoration Hardware in my Pottery Barn

2007-12-30T17:26:00.000-08:00

Ladies, I know this will come as no surprise to you, but gentlemen, make no mistake...Size does matter. Regardless of what you've heard, it's quite obvious that if you are a true American, you must aspire to have really big furniture. I mean overstuffed, bloated, sofas...
Immense dressers...

And dining room tables capable of hosting an entire Viking raiding party...

I don't mean to suggest that there's anything wrong with this. Oh, I could try to connect the dots. You know...Mass mailings of catalogs from companies like those mentioned in this post's title create a desire for the opulance and splendor of "The Wellington" or "The Turner" collection to fill bedrooms or dining rooms and thus people buy huge homes outside their means in order to accomodate the huge size of this furniture using tricky lending packages they really don't understand and which eventually end in foreclosure creating a crisis of national proportion.

No, I won't blame that crisis on companies like those named above. Furniture doesn't drive home sales, obviously. However, the standard of living suggested in the catalogs published by these companies is certainly not middle class, and yet, well...that's what really gets me. I mean, how did I end up on their mailing list? One would think that with all the access to information we have these days, companies would better target their mailing of glossy, clearly expensive catalogs by accessing home sales records and mailing only to those homes of 3000 square feet or more. And yet, here I sit with over 30 catalogs a year from no less than five different companies all of whom manufacture furniture so large it wouldn't even fit through my front door.

Of course, the size of the furniture isn't the only thing disproportionate about these pieces. Take a look at their prices???!! $179 for a measly nightstand? Did I miss something here? I mean, these are mass-produced pieces of furniture, right?? And if it's really big, it's probably "Assemble it yourself" quality.

Or maybe I'm just looking at this the wrong way. Maybe the furniture isn't bloated, immense, or obese. Maybe it's comfy, homey, roomy, enveloping, ample...like a bosom. That'd make sense. Most of us would like to nestle our heads back there again. Maybe if they sold it to me that way I'd like it better. Instead of naming their furniture lines after the blue-blooded, landed gentry who traipsed the English heather a century or so ago, why not anthropomorphize it?

Look at this:Now, that's comfy looking, homey. Why not say this sofa is from the "Buxom Chest" collection and comes only in "creamy milkmaid"? That seems reasonable and certainly helps me understand why I'd buy this sofa more than "The Charleston Collection."

Or what about this one:

In a nod to Monty Python, I'd say this couch is from the "Huge Tracts of Land" collection and comes in a beautiful "Bloody Lipstick." Again, at least I can see that, and laugh at it as I max out my credit card.

Or it's just me, right? It's my problem. I'm just a miserable old curmudgeon. (Is that redundant? Doubly so?) Sure, I could be envious of those who have "Huge Tracts of Land" and "Buxom Chests", but I truly think there's something more here. It's an entire American obsession with size. In our bodies, we want to be thin, trim, fit, but our appetites deny us this. The land of plenty is too much for us. We succumb to its cornucopias. Plates of food large enough for two people and then some. Cars the size of small busses. Movie theaters large enough to hold 24 screens (though said screens are barely bigger than a large screen TV). Acres of parking lots at malls the size of small townships. We have it all. But think about it. What do we do? We complain about it. "It's too crowded." "The food is bland." "The blindspot is too big." Or my favorite, spoken by an employee at a local Movie-emporium, "I hate working here."

I guess what I'd like to suggest is the tired epiphany that, bigger isn't better. (This post, big as it is, is an excellent example of that truism.) It doesn't make us any happier, more satisfied, or better fed. Although, sitting here in my small sofa with my wife's feet contending for space with this laptop...I guess a bigger sofa would make things a bit more comfy.

I grow old, I grow old, /I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

2007-12-19T19:28:00.000-08:00

When I was much younger than my current measure of 4 decades, I berated the generation ahead of me for their sleeper hold on the culture. I was tired of Gilligan's Island reruns, Grateful Dead shows, and Abbie Hoffman running around telling me I had to stick it to the man (rest in peace, Abbie). I was part of the ascendent culture and felt smothered, out numbered as we were, by the vast mass of humanity spawned by returning GIs. I recall reading an essay in Time magazine wherein the BabyBoomers were described as a neurotic generation for whom every twig they step on becomes fodder for a therapy session. How vindicated I felt. I was part of a valid culture that needed to be heard, and someone was hearing us.

So now, here I am, some twenty-years later watching David Byrne, one of the idols of my young adulthood, grey-haired now, diminuitive, and far more sedate on stage, crooning his way through one of the most beautifully sublime of all love songs, "Naive Melody." And what am I feeling...? Old! I want to drag the past into the future, grab the youth of today and expose them to the amazingness of Jonathan Demme's collaborative masterpiece, Stop Making Sense. I want to show them the brilliance of Byrne's performance there, his sublime dance with a floor lamp. I want to deny the Byrne of now and conjur the big-suited Byrne, pencil-necked Byrne, champion of all cultured nerds of the 80s.

Ah but christ sake! What does it matter? And who am I anyway, to inflict my culture, fading as it may be, upon the progenitors of tomorrows visions and art?

So you take a look. Compare the two versions, 20 years apart (or so). And then tell me I'm wrong, or at the very least, point me to something new to get my mind off this....

Vs.

Oh, I should have been a pair of ragged claws/scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

I'm da DJ AND the Rapper

2007-10-18T15:38:00.000-07:00

So I went fishing today... searching through the deep pools of my musings and rants, just to see what I could catch that was worth keeping. I found this one. It's amazing what a little vitriol does for one's prose. Makes it all kicky and jumpy...full of energy, but not necessarily well reasoned arguments. Ah who cares! This is my entry into the world of hip-hop. Now I'm gonna go git me some old-school Adidas and a leather jacket. Run-DMC ain't got nothin' on me. Remember this is several years old, so you're going to have to go back to the memory banks for this one, circa 2005.

It goes a little something like this...

The president said something so profoundly stupid this past week as to make my jaw drop. So here goes. Hold on to your hats, cause...

"I'm gettin' ready to lay it down, whack the track
gonna blaze a trail to the truth they lack.
'Said I'm not bound in the red white and blue
Gotta be a part of the thinkin' man's crew, to
your father and to your mother
ride the wave of the evidence from one lie to another and
spinnin' words like I'm kickin' it, freestyle
a blaze of light, clearin' the haze for a thousand mile.
What I'm preachin' you shoulda gotten long agos
but the Media heads ' blowin' smoke out their assholes
consolidation good for the airwaves? etcetera
Easier to keep free speech in check that way, ha!
So I'm broadband-bringin' it, no holds barred
By ' time I'm done they'll be feathered and tarred.
Not enough to stop at excoriation
Gotta hold 'em accountable for the State of the Nation."

(Excoriation...State of the Nation--that's the best rhyme I've made in a very long time...just an aside.)

Yo

So if you watched the news, or read a paper this week, buried somewhere in all the reportage (that's the French pronunciation, please: re-por-TAJ) on Katrina was, probably, if your paper/news station isn't owned by Ruppert Murdoch or other FOBs (friends of Bush), a quote from the appointed president (yes, I'm still bitter about election 2000) about the good that will come out of this tragedy: "But out of this devastation we're going to make it [the gulf coast] even better than it was. Trent Lott's house was destroyed; it was a beautiful house. But we're going to build it back just the way it was and I look forward to sitting on the porch with him.

Here, on the gulf coast so thoroughly destroyed by the epic storm, George W. Bush reminds us once again of his pedigree. As if it were not reminder enough that his tax cuts benefit the rich. As if it were not enough that the head of FEMA (Michael Brown) and the heads of numerous other governmental agencies are members of Bush's circle of friends. As if his status as a fortunate son were not enough...here, in these words which, due to their utterly crass nature we can only assume were not scripted, he offered in his everything's-gonna-be-alright...Brownie's-doin'-a-heck-of-a-job voice, Bush finally lets us know, once and for all, where the common man stands in relation to him--far enough away so the president and friends won't hear us reminding them that their shit stinks, too.

Tens of thousands of poor and middle class American's lost their homes, utterly and entirely. And the good news from the president is that Trent Lott's gonna rebuild, better than ever (with money from FEMA??? Not that he doesn't deserve it, just asking. Though I hope it takes him just as long standing in line to get his $2000 handout. Ah cynacism.) and our president will be sitting right on "The Porch" with Trent when it's all done, grinnin' like a carpetbagger. Will Trent open his home to some of the people who lost their meager homes to the waters that spilled over and through the levees that received 35 million dollars less in funding than they were supposed to have received? (Where'd that money go...? Oh yeah, War.) Sure, I can see it now. Trent and the President serving over 1000 lemonades /hour to the poor and destitute who just want to share The Porch with Mr. Lott.

But I'm too sensitive. This isn't about the race card. Ok, so Trent and Bush are both rich, white southerners. And hey, I don't really have any evidence that either of them will turn away the poor and destitute who would like to share in the great good fortune of the privileged class. So let's look at the image from a symbolic sense. What meanings does the image of George and Trent kickin' back conjure??? Is it of two men relaxing after a day of "hard work?" Hardly. If you remember what the president told us during the last debates, "War is hard work," and George and Trent have not just returned from the streets of Falujha. Is it an attempt to harken back to a simpler time, the Rockwellian America where we all had front porches, where after the day was done we would gather with family and neighbors to share a sunset or watch the romping play of our next generation? Well, I'm guessing here, but I can't envision Trent's place being a simple single home on a tree-lined street where neighbors are just a "can I borrow a cup of sugar?" away. If they're on the porch watching the sunset, it's probably over acres of professionally landscaped ground secured by fences, walls, or other such means of privacy. Symbolically, all I can read in the image of George and Trent on the porch is largess, privilege, and a blithe indifference to the gulf that separates them from the common man.

Perhaps I'm being too hard on them. After all, this disaster touched so many. I should feel sorry for all of them. And I do, even Trent. I cannot imagine losing my home (even if it's not the only one I have). But I can't hold back. The flood of lies and deceit and bungled policies is just too much, and like an Orleanean levee, I'm broken. Because you see, what I'm talking about goes beyond Katrina. It goes to the heart of waging a war founded from the first on deception. It is the thing hiding in the shadow of the tax breaks for the rich. It lurks behinds the curtains of scripted press conferences and government manipulation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. What I'm suggesting here is that George W. Bush has done more harm to the American image in the world than any president since Nixon. Not only is this President's perspective of reality so off base as to qualify him as hallucinatory, but his vision is so skewed by nepotism, egotism, neoconservatism, anti " liberal--intellectualism " , religious fanaticism, and a host of other -isms as to make him a danger to our society and all we know. His poor planning has colored desert sands red with the blood of almost 2000 US servicemen and women and left thousands more fighting for a goal that is shifting and elusive. His hiring of officials is marred by graft, and his fiscal policy has turned him into the biggest spender in all US presidential history. Finally (and only so because I'm getting tired), because he has a tenuous grasp of the economic stratification that typifies urban America (which brings us back to the quote where this jeremiad started), he has widened the gap between the haves and the have nots in a Reganesque fashion, and given millions of middle-class Americans reason to doubt why we even try to move up a ladder withdrawing ever farther from our grasp.

But it is not enough to criticize with clever insight and pretty imagery. Something must be done. Ex post facto accountability will not suffice here. This government ought to be held accountable for all the lies, miscalculations, and doublespeak it has unleashed upon the public since the day it took office. The flooding in New Orleans aside, seeing Trent and George on That Porch ought to infuriate every single American who cares about justice, equality, due process, and our place in the world. The evidence speaks loudly. Write to your congress men. Rip into those who support the president. Destroy him on the grounds I list above (and all the acres of ground I left untilled (or maybe tilled in letters last year...or the year before)). Now is not the time for conciliatory attitudes or consensus. There can be no consensus when one party rules the Congress and is so thoroughly convinced of its monstrous philosophy of neo-conservatism. These neocons embody what Emile Chartier warned about: "Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it's the only idea you have." The danger here is that those who are possessed of the idea are the ones elected to rule over this great nation, and that danger reaches into every nook and cranny of our lives, our bodies and our minds. You should all be afraid. You should be very afraid. And the only way to relieve this fear is to fight it, to oust it from this Porch of noblese oblige.

So this evening if you have a porch, go out and sit on it, and look out into the night sky. In the context of the universe, your life is but a blip, an insignificant smudge of atoms brought together for an infinitesimal time. But in the history of human kind, you are an incredible conglomeration of atoms filled with a potential never before seen in the universe. You have a singular power and will whose limitations are only self-imposed. It does not matter if you write a congressman, post notes via e-mail, or organize picket lines and camp out at the president's vacation home. What does matter is that you do something. Remember Gandhi's sentiment: Whatever you do will, in the scheme of things, be insignificant. But it is very important that you do it. Let your porch be where it starts, and let "The Porch" be what you end.

Uh...Yuck!

2007-09-28T18:06:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I don't think I want to say too much about this other than...
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

You read it.

Just when you though it was safe to go back into the water.

Ann Coulter redux: How not to do journalism

2007-09-23T05:50:00.000-07:00

It's not that I think I'm terribly observant. I mean, it's awfully simple to fault Ann Coulter for her sloppy journalism. It's not even that I think those who hear "the truth" in Coulter's writings ought to be sent back to high school, or at least be required to take a test in which they are asked to clearly identify black and white. Rather, it's because I think Coulter deserves to be called on the carpet (along with those on the opposite side of the spectrum who practice shoddy journalism) that I point you today to a piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer's "Currents" section. Mark Bowden, coauthor of Blackhawk Down (originally a piece of outstanding journalism published by the Philadelphia Inquirer before being turned into a book), attempts to clear his name after Coulter printed factually incorrect statements regarding his statements on US involvement in Iraq.

As I noted above, such sloppy journalism is not the sole province of Coulter and the right. It is present, too much so nowadays, on the left as well as the right. Coulter, however, is a huckster of such rotten fruits of labor that one ought, at all costs, avoid puchasing any of her wares.

Umm...This is a sales pitch?

2007-09-15T20:06:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I really don't want to talk politics on this blog, but is it me, or is the new "plan" solve the mess in Iraq, which the president has referred to as "Return on Success". . . is this for real? "Return on Success?" The rationale is that the more success we achieve in Iraq, the more soldiers we can send home. Right...doesn't the same thing happen when you win the war or achieve victory over your foe?

So how does success differ from winning the war, and how does winning the war differ from victory? "Victory in Iraq," which was the prevailing rhetoric and defined the mission there, has disappeared from the administration's lexicon. Now, it's about "return on success."

God! I feel so stupid. I think there's an "Interminable Idiocy Field" that radiates from Washington, DC and it must be growing, because it's almost reached us here in a Collegeville, PA. This will all end soon, right. Tell me it will, please? Mommy?

Everlasting Life: To Sekou Sundiata

2007-08-26T06:23:00.000-07:00

Some eight years ago I took a rag-tag group of brilliant, rebellious, artistic, marvelous students to the Geraldine R. Dodge poetry festival at Waterloo Village, NJ. It was my third trip to the biennial event, but my first with students. In preparing the agenda for the day, some of my students noted the presence of a poet, muscian, and all around performer named Sekou Sundiata. (He was also a teacher at the New School for Social Research--students included Mark Doughty of Soul Coughing and Ani DiFranco). While we didn't get to see Sekou Sundiata that day, I soon after purchased a copy of his recording longstoryshort. I was hooked. His ear for the musicality of language, his rhythm and timing (is that "flow?") . . . if Jazz were words, this is what it sounded like. In his theater pieces, he mixed poetry, music, drama, and image into a carnival of histories, both personal and national. Indeed, his most recent theatrical work, The 51st Dream State was exactly that. (You may need to sign up for NYTimes website in order to read that article.) You can see a sample at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The last time I heard Sekou Sundiata was in September of 2006 during his appearances at that year's Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. In what was the most remarkable event I've ever seen at the poetry festival, Sekou teamed up with fellow poet and Kora player Kurtis Lamkin in an improvisational celebration called "Everlasting Life." To Kurtis's Kora playing, these men wove a tapestry of lines from their poems and improvisations. The atmosphere itself became a liquor of poetry, intoxicating all of us in the tent. What flavor it was only we knew. You had to be there because it was, as all things of supreme beauty, ephemeral. It is gone, and sadly, so is Sekou.

Sekou Sundiata died on July 18, 2007. He left behind him a body of challenging work in a myriad of media, and a voice that sounded of lazy city streets on humid summer afternoons . . . a voice that just won't leave my head.

In addition to those links above, check out:

The Blue Oneness of Dreams

Audio Clip

In Memorium

Sekou on Fresh Air--interview or Remembrance

From Poets.org

And then, these incantations from You Tube:

From Bill Moyers

And this one...

You'll also find him in Bill Moyers' book based about poetry at the Geraldine R. Dodge Festival, The Language of Life, which seems to be where most people found out about him.

Performances:

New American Theater

Come on and Bring on the Reparations

Gogol Bordello

2007-08-25T16:58:00.000-07:00

Ok, so only a few words here. Gogol Bordello rocks with the kind of smart, witty, punk sensibility that used to warrant the best of The Dead Kennedys, sans all the self-important political posturing of Jello Biafra. That's not to say that GB's front man Eugene Hutz doesn't have anything important to say. It's simply to note that he lets the music and his manic presence on stage speak. This is punk at its best. No didacticism, just ragged licks, wicked beats, and passionate performance...No! It's even better than that, 'cause it has accordion and gypsy sensibility. If you start to listen, you should listen all the way through, otherwise they might just curse you and your first born child.

NPR has a great interview with Eugene Hutz and you can download a GB concert at their "all songs considered" podcast. (There's a link off the NPR Summer Concert series story under the link to the Fresh Air interview.

NPR and Gogol Bordello.

Teaching, Learning and Jazzing on the Standards Movement

2007-08-25T08:32:00.000-07:00

(Here's another manifestino from my classroom blog. "Stop me, oh ho ho stop me/Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before." My apologies to The Smiths.)

I’ve chosen a title here that I’ve used before, and I’ll admit, it’s not original. I first encountered the analogy between teaching and jazz in an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer several years ago. I had just begun to sound the depths of Miles, Coltrane, Bird, Ella, Lady Day . . . all the jazz greats, and the analogy sounded so apt to me. In the years since, I’ve found nothing that can touch the appropriateness of that analogy, especially with the advent of NCLB and the standards movement. Jazz music has standards, too, but no one interpretation of a standard is the same as another. Jazz is rhythm--lively, original, pulsing, moving rhythm. Oh! if only the masters of the standards movement understood such a thing. But they don’t, and so instead of classrooms with teachers who devise themes, set tempos and then guide the students through improvisations on vital rhythms, we get monotone, mechanical, classrooms filled with the sounds and voices of neutered storm troopers--stillborn music, dumb, mute, ordinary. It’s the perfect tune for an outdated metaphor of education. This is the music of the assembly line model of education. I had hoped it had died after the revolutionary work of the 60’s, but it’s back. Now conducted by the maestros of capitalist conformity, education becomes the factory for standardized groupthink, churning out production-line models of a proletariat weaned on “proficiency." When we allow business and its drive for accountability to become the impetus for education, when success is measured in dollar signs, when we go to school to get a job and not an education...when we do those things, we bury our humanity, our opportunity to transmit what is good and right about our civilization. Certainly there is an economic purpose to education in a capitalist democracy. But economies are selfish, wanting only to feed themselves, and they are ignorant of the socializing, democratizing, humanizing functions of education. Fear of a US decline as a world economic power has given rise to a system of education driven by accountability, standardization, and false promises of wealth and independence for those wiling to play by the rules of a game whose goals they can’t even begin to divine. (Explanation for that statement would take too long. Understand it as yet another riff on the ulterior motives of the standardized test movement. If you want more, however, read Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind. It's a brilliant synthesis of just what the looming "conceptual age" has in store for us and why standardization and testing is, for the most part, wrong.)

I’ve been here before, and if you’ve read things I’ve written, you’ve been here with me, but few things need such a pounding as this. What we’re perpetrating upon students is the ruin of imagination, curiosity, wonder, and joy. There is a pleasure to finding things out, to discovering. Why else would we leave our homes in search of better lives, new lands, adventures, opportunities? ‘Makes me think of Miles Davis’ classic album, Kind of Blue. Miles and his band walk into a studio and start improvising, discovering, riffing, playing off each other, learning from each other, discovering where the music can take them. It is pure, unadulterated discovery. It is life. Where in school is there room for such opportunities when we are driven by standards, when joy takes a back seat to mandates, when the motivational drive of new discovery is stalled by the weight of what’s been discovered? (I’m mixing metaphors and catapulting new conceits--jazz, assembly lines, cars??? Forgive me...I’m improvising here.)

And what of us, the teachers? Where do we get off leading our students to the drudgery of the days spent advancing towards the ends already defined for them? Forget for a moment the crimes against humanity committed upon the future of this country. Why is there not an uproar from our ranks for the crimes committed against us? When teaching becomes standardized, we become automatons, our professional certificates worth no more than the paper on which they are printed. Wither our creative drive? We demean ourselves when we accept that we are merely robots who run programmed curricula. At that point, our presence, our knowledge is reduced to admonishing those who won’t “Buckle Down,” and to coercing compliance through fear of failure. Would that we had taken our own Hippocratic oath to do no harm, because I can’t find any good in the medicine we’re making these kids swallow. How many times have I heard, “Study Island? That’s just one less lesson for me to worry about teaching.” (Study Island is a test prep "drill and kill" computer program mandated for all students in my school.) I’ve said it myself, and now, in retrospect, I wish I’d been shot for it. Such abdication of my roll is treasonous to the cause of education.

I might be off the deep end in my thoughts, I know, and perhaps I’m spending quite a bit of time in left field. But the deep waters hold mysteries, and what emptiness and idle times left field affords in this age where all policy makers push the ball to right field brings a peace and clarity to my understanding which my vitriol belies. Still, shouting, screaming, why aren’t more of us doing it? NCLB, standardized testing...we are witnessing the murder of the art of teaching at the hands of these, their knives slipped slowly into the heart of each and every one of us...and no one screams. What horror when we assist our own murders? What horror when we ourselves silence the music of discovery?

If you’ve read this far, perhaps you’ll tackle this article.

The author delves deeper into the analogy between teaching & learning and Jazz. His insights should inform us all.

And finally, if you’ve not read it, get yourself a copy of Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s seminal text, Teaching as a Subversive Activity. We need more voices like their’s today. I’ll be writing more on that book in a later post. (Maybe)

As Sylvester used to say, "That's Dissssthpicabble": On Ann Coulter and Crititainment.

2007-08-25T08:29:00.001-07:00

Here's something I posted back around the beginning of August on the blog for my classroom. I'm moving it here 'cause I don't really think kids give a hoot about Ann Coulter...as it should be.

Now I hope you’ve had your breakfast a long time ago, ‘cause this piece by Ann Coulter is enough to make you chuck your Cheerios.

So let me first say that as a teacher of English and as a coach of debate, Ann Coulter has a distinct voice. That’s something I look for in good writing and something a debater has to have in order to sway judges sentiment. But let me also say that Ann’s writing is technically unsound, filled with unwarranted assertions and given to easy barbs and just outright mean-spirited attempts at humor. Some of her ilk might call that “satire”, but if that’s satire, then I know plenty of high school students who can easily sling the muck with more verve and panache than this tired and worn harpy. She stereotypes, generalizes, and otherwise uses a broad brush to paint her skewed picture of the world. You want satire, then go to Johnathan Swift. At least his barbs are secured to the polychromatic real world rather than the monochrome visage of an ideologue. I could go on, but it just gets ridiculous and I’ve not the energy nor the time to waste. Suffice it to say that I’m damned scared that there are people out there who say that Ann “speaks the truth."

"Remembering is just a great trick of the mind..."

2007-08-21T06:59:00.000-07:00

The title of this post comes from a great book for young teens called Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick. In the book, two misfits find each other, go on quests, encounter danger . . . basically all the motifs of American fiction you'd find in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . But it's new, and fresh, and, at least for boys, it's a great read.

Anyway, one of the main characters, Freak, tells his friend, Max, that "Remembering is just a great trick of the mind, and if you try hard enough, you can remember just about anything." I've always found that interesting, especially given that eyewitness testimony can sometimes be unreliable for just this very reason.

So here's the hard segue into today's topic--human memory. In terms of science, you really can't beat the lab of the modern neuroscientist for a place to find people searching for the holy grail of human existence, at least in a biological sense. What is consciousness? How do we recognize faces? Why do we react to music so profoundly? Such marvelous questions and all the study focused on this grapefruit sized organ encased in our skulls. You'll do yourself a world of good if you read this series of four articles from the LA Times.

Watertowers

2007-08-20T14:05:00.001-07:00

I like them...a lot. This one is about a half mile off the eastern bank of the Hudson river, about 2 miles south of Bard College.

I'm working on a book about them.

I'm working on a lot of things.

Aren't we all?

Another Blog O'mine

2007-08-20T13:14:00.001-07:00

About a year ago I started cooking up a website with iWeb on my powerbook. While I wish I could code html, it's been way too long since I took a course in html and I figured I'd avail myself of the wonderful products Apple has made available to make me a more productive person.

So here's my other website. It's specific for my class at Perkiomen Valley Middle School East and requires a user id and password. The blog is also specific, mostly to the arts, education, and the convergence of the two.

Creative Expressions

You'll need a username and password to access it. If you'd like that, just e-mail me. However, please be aware that any of the artwork on the site, especially that work contained in pictures of students at the Berman Museum of Art is covered by all appropriate intellectual property law and copywrites. No one may appropriate those images for their own use.

Big Styrofoam Things?

2007-08-17T16:16:00.001-07:00

So welcome to the first post in what I hope to be a blog that examines the small things in life as well as those things that just irk me. Just like big styrofoam things.

So you may be asking, "Big styrofoam things?" The explanation is simple. Purchase a new stereo, a computer, anything really that is in someway fragile and along with your purchase you'll receive big styrofoam things. On one hand, they're so important. Their purpose is obvious, and for the most part they perform their jobs admirably. On the other hand, they irk me. What do I do with them afterwards? If I give them to my kids, I find polystyrene fragments all over the place. Recycling them in my area is difficult (though not impossible). And then there's the fact that Dow Chemical has the trademark on the "Styrofoam" brand name of polystyrene. That irks me.

"Big Styrofoam Things" is also the name of the fictional band my college buddy and former roomate, David Wannop (aka "Dave Gold"), and I decided to form during a late night radio show we hosted at Temple University's Ambler Campus. The band remains imaginary, but if it were ever to come to fruition, it would probably look something like Hurra Torpedo.

And that should be enough to give you some idea of what I'm talking about here. If not, then check back. Something else is bound to show up.

Topics for this site include but would never be limited to:

Education (I am a teacher).
HS Lincoln Douglas debate
Poetry
Art of all types
Information about the human brain

and so....