Just One Teacher

Joseph's Response, Part 1 of 5: Deadlines

2012-02-07T18:06:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to Joseph, who stepped up to my invitation as I knew he would. (Heh, heh. You know I'm lovin' the Occupy reference, right?)

When the words "blog school" came to me I was literally thinking a school for bloggers: anyone who blogs knowing for sure at least one person is on the other line ready to give feedback and writing tips. The influence of ears is great. The questions you asked on your blogs are keen; I haven't thought about it in depth like that.. but I'm ready; Not even metaphorically: let's Occupy this space virtually.

I'll return his brainstorming volley by zeroing in on a particularly pregnant point, referring to the Writing Assignments section of my class site (numbers and emphasis added):

Writing assignments- Like school where there are desks & pencils: some people come for the first few days and then never come back. Though this is not a traditional school I think discipline to dedication would be a motivation to write. This sounds harsh & definitely needs more expanding but example: 1. "If you miss more then 6 deadlines, I'm going to have to let you go." Never the less, 2. It's not the law to go to blogging school so I think it would be filled with people who just want to be there. I bet a great number of future seniors are worrying about their 3. college essays and such too, this would be a great way to offer assistance. Freedom of choice is good, 4. books would be an idea too: reviewing a book and keeping thoughtful logs through blogs and whatnot. 5. Feedback from other people to other people would be delightful.

There's lots to excavate in this passage—multiple posts' worth, it would seem. And the excavation has to do (as usual) with upending some traditional ideas about the roles of student and teacher and the meaning of the word "school." I'll dive in, taking the highlighted bits one at a time:

1. "If you miss more than 6 deadlines, I'm going to have to let you go."

Hmm. What deadlines? Whom do the deadlines serve? What are they for? Sometimes deadlines are extremely useful and necessary. On the other hand, I've recorded and published music for years now, avidly and with ever-deepening motivation and understanding, all for the love and without any schedule. (Let alone the hundreds of pages on this blog, none of which were on anybody's clock.) I'm not in the market for a music teacher at this point, but if I were I'm not sure I'd want deadlines for my next beat/song; I'd want dependable access to expertise in the craft from a trusted source.

And even if I did ask for deadlines (some folks thrive on the pressure), I might not want to be "let go" if I missed 'em. If I blow a bunch of deadlines, maybe that means they aren't working for me, rather than meaning that I'm just lazy and undeserving. If my creation takes a day, a week, a month, or a year to finish, who cares?

Let me imagine myself as a writing student, looking for a good writing teacher/workshop. Maybe I have the seed of a short story in mind, or of a novel. Deadlines could be optional. I might want to work my project out in "blog school" at a varying pace—sometimes getting tons done at once, sometimes getting blocked and working more painstakingly. When I'm finished, I graduate myself and stop subscribing to the school (unless I have another project in mind and want to keep going.) On the other hand, I might indeed want an ass-kicking deadline. In either case, I would want some choice in the matter. Blog School ought to encompass this, it seems to me.

Furthermore: Who lets whom go, and why? A student lets a teacher go when they've outgrown that teacher, or when their style isn't working. Or for plenty of other reasons. This can be hard to do, because we're used to thinking of teachers calling all the shots. (When I let go of my first piano teacher, for example, it was a very personal and emotional decision that had repercussions for both of us.) "I'm going to have to let you go" suggests an authority structure that is a bit more top-down than I'm aspiring to...

But if there's no set schedule, then how does a Blog School calendar look? I have some ideas about that which I'll find time to post here at some point soon—now that I'm enjoying early and temporary retirement. But next up: 2. "It's not the law to go to blogging school..." I'll return to Joseph's points tomorrow. Before I do, let it be clear: Inasmuch as I may differ, don't let me come off as "correcting" him. What he says is all legit, and greatly appreciated. It's just that I am hoping to help build something that addresses current educational dysfunction by sidestepping it, Judo-style, not by perpetuating it in an online forum. It is not the technology that makes a difference, pedagogically. It's a devotion to facilitating genuine relationships between teacher(s) and student(s), not constipated by outdated institutional norms.

Again, thank you Joseph for your help and good ideas! I can't think of a better pool of allies to share strength with than my students...

What Happened to Occupy Oakland?

2012-02-07T15:50:00.000-08:00

Now I'm going to do the very thing I used to bemoan when other people did, which is to talk about Occupy Oakland without having been there. Because I haven't, not for quite a long time at this point, and so I know that I don't know what the hell is going on. Meanwhile, the good folks I was working with earlier on some educational initiatives have, helpfully, been e-mailing and texting me to invite me back into the fold. And I've been "too busy" (or so I tell myself) busting out of my day job to pick the torch back up. So: Hypocrite alert! And with that, here goes:

My abiding impression of Occupy Oakland—the first phase of it at least—was positive. Over-the-moon positive, I might even say. While there were tough problems from the start, the first lesson that's lasted is that when people in a community break through surface differences, we can discover common ground we wouldn't have imagined before, and a motivation to get work done together. Yada yada yada and kumbaya, right? Sounds too granola to be true, but for a minute there it was. The early weeks of O.O. felt to me like peering through cracks in a wall that had blocked a much more empowering view of my neighbors and my city. Whole new ways of living together suddenly seemed possible if we were willing to keep the thing going somehow. Since those heady days, the focus has shifted onto anti-police actions—and not without justification. Robert Gammon nailed this in the East Bay Express recently:

The beginning of Occupy Oakland's downfall can be traced to October 25, 2011, the day that Mayor Jean Quan green-lighted the first police raid on the City Hall encampment. That brutal — and at the time, unnecessary — crackdown launched the transformation of the local Occupy movement from a protest over economic inequality to an ongoing battle against Oakland police. OPD's overreaction that day, firing teargas and other less-than-lethal projectiles at a mostly peaceful crowd, made international headlines and sparked global condemnation. It also polarized Occupy Oakland, empowering a hard-core group of protesters who embrace vandalism, so-called Black Bloc tactics, and seem to revel in violent confrontations with police. This group has enjoyed substantial influence over Occupy Oakland ever since.

Reveling, indeed:

Come on, folks. Does this really seem like a long- or even short-term strategy for addressing social inequities? Again—OPD does some shady shit and for those segments of Oakland's populace which are in much more constant and close conflict with law enforcement, this mass expression of rage might feel right on. (Quick question, though: How many of the people marching behind that sign actually live in the neighborhoods where the cops act their shadiest?) I for one cannot march behind such a banner and be true to myself, even if I hate the fact that I live in a prison state that can't even afford its own jails. So...I haven't.

Here is Chris Hedges in a recent post on truthdig:

The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property—is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state. [...]

Any group that seeks to rebuild social structures, especially through nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, rather than physically destroy, becomes, in the eyes of Black Bloc anarchists, the enemy. Black Bloc anarchists spend most of their fury not on the architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or globalism, but on those, such as the Zapatistas, who respond to the problem. It is a grotesque inversion of value systems.

Because Black Bloc anarchists do not believe in organization, indeed oppose all organized movements, they ensure their own powerlessness. They can only be obstructionist. And they are primarily obstructionist to those who resist.

And here comes one of my pet themes: Anarchism! It's these f-word abusing, non-showering, all-black wearing Black Bloc types who convince me that what anarchism needs to succeed is a total re-branding. Needlessly baiting cops and tossing bricks through small local businesses' windows gives anarchism a bad name and means that if we're to look for a truly egalitarian social philosophy people can actually unite around, we're going to have to scrap the name and find another. (Off the top of my head, I'd nominate "social ecology," although it's admittedly cumbersome.) Back to Mr. Hedges...An interesting thing about his post is that he quotes Derrick Jensen—on whose work I was recently OD'ing—about strategy and tactics for resistance to the global machine.

"The Black Bloc can say they are attacking cops, but what they are really doing is destroying the Occupy movement," the writer and environmental activist Derrick Jensen told me when I reached him by phone in California. "If their real target actually was the cops and not the Occupy movement, the Black Bloc would make their actions completely separate from Occupy, instead of effectively using these others as a human shield. Their attacks on cops are simply a means to an end, which is to destroy a movement that doesn’t fit their ideological standard."

"I don’t have a problem with escalating tactics to some sort of militant resistance if it is appropriate morally, strategically and tactically," Jensen continued. "This is true if one is going to pick up a sign, a rock or a gun. But you need to have thought it through. The Black Bloc spends more time attempting to destroy movements than they do attacking those in power. They hate the left more than they hate capitalists."

Though I did run into Naomi Klein at one point down at City Hall, it turns out I missed Jensen's appearance in Oakland. It's too bad, because I'd been wondering what his thoughts were on the movement and on its actions. Thank goodness for YouTube:

Let me finish this with a measured voice from recent Occupy actions—it seems only fair. Meet Jeb Purucker, who, with tougher cojones than I sport, got himself arrested and tossed into jail for a day:

For the most part, the atmosphere in my cell was not one of defeat, but rather of rigorous self-criticism. This is a necessary moment in the growth of any movement – coming up against the limits of the premises that underlie a practice – and it seemed to be getting underway just hours after that practice had collapsed on the streets of Oakland. This was decidedly not the unreflecting group of militants that Chris Hedges has recently accused of a pathological aversion to strategic thought.

[...] To focus on the brutality of the experience as though this is somehow exceptional is to misunderstand the basic function of jails and police forces in society. The violence that we came up against on Saturday is the violence that is required daily to maintain and reproduce society as it is presently constituted. What we experienced for a few nights, while awful, is simply daily life for the unpaid prison laborers who cleaned out our cells when we went home.

I know that this will not strike most of the people that were arrested on Saturday as a particularly controversial point. Many of them are no strangers to the penal system themselves. Indeed, Oakland’s radical edge within the Occupy movement largely comes from the fact that the quotidian violence that is required to reproduce capitalism is closer to the surface here than in many other communities.

But there comes a point at which these conversations can hinder further thought. I don’t want to normalize or apologize for the brutality of the system, nor do I want to lapse into a debate over what constitutes an “authentic” experience of this brutality. Nevertheless, we as a movement have to stop and ask ourselves what conversations are being displaced by this exclusive focus on police brutality. More than that, we have to look at this focus as itself a symptom of deep contradictions in our practice, which we have been unable to come to terms with. [...]

Worth a read in full. Meanwhile, Oaklanders continue struggling with how best to re-invent this city, and this world, by Occupying it. (Or not?) For myself, I long for those granola days of planning for guerrilla gardens, meeting other radical teachers, facilitating directly democratic assemblies, and the like. I'll either pull my weight to make it happen or I won't; the second abiding lesson I learned from Occupy boils down to one of those ever-useful Zen sayings...If not me, who? If not now, when?

Writer's Block Cure #17: The Quickwrite

2012-02-07T11:36:00.000-08:00

Another strong trend evident in my students' last reflective essays was the comment that "quickwrites" helped get through blocks. What's a quickwrite? It's when you decide on a period of time—say, 10-15 minutes—and write on a given or chosen topic as steadily as possible during that entire time. In other words, once you start writing, you don't stop.

So what happens when you get stuck while quickwriting? It sounds strange, but you keep writing anyway. Write about being stuck. Write about the topic your mind just wandered off to. Write down whatever the voices in your head are saying at that moment. Re-write the last sentence you just wrote, or start the paragraph over again. It doesn't matter; write anything. Ignore the block and just keep writing.

The best-case scenario is that after a few moments, the train of thought you had rolling on your original topic will pick up again, you'll re-focus, and presto—you've cured the block. (And if you've really got yourself on a roll, nobody's stopping you from continuing beyond your allotted time of course.)

But that might not happen. You might wander from topic to topic, never getting past a few sentences on each. Or you might just end up with a page of nonsense. Or you might write something really cool and useful, on a completely different topic than you started out from. You never know what you will end up with when you quickwrite. The good news is that it doesn't matter; in the long term, if you make a habit of practicing with quickwrites, you should notice yourself writing more fluently. It gets easier to produce raw writing in decent quantity, so that you can have more material to work with from the start.

A particularly dedicated writer might make quickwriting part of a regular practice routine for this reason, although this trick is still effective as an in-the-moment block-dissolver. Lots of times when I've coached students through moments of stuckness, we'll talk together for a minute or two about the basic ideas they're trying unsuccessfully to express, and then I'll say, "Treat it as a quickwrite. I'll be back in ten minutes—write about what we just talked about and don't stop. See ya." More often than not, this helps tons.

It's a trick I've long known students can benefit from—but what surprised me hearing about it again in this recent round of reflective essays was that it worked even though we hadn't done nearly as many quickwrites in class as I'd done with previous years' classes. So it would appear to be a simple and effective technique for de-blocking even if you haven't practiced it a whole lot...Which makes for a winner of a writing strategy, no?

Related: Writer's Block Cure #10

A flattering student portrait of me, doodled while quickwriting

The Samurai and the Socialite, Part 2

2012-02-06T13:30:00.000-08:00

The second of two autobiographies I've rather arbitrarily dipped into recently is from Senegal via Belgium, and takes place mostly in the 1970's. Unfortunately I can't find too many nice things to say about it, which begs a question about this reviewer: What is it that makes me finish books even when I don't like them?

Ken Bugul describes The Abandoned Baobab and other self-referential works she's written as "autobiographical novels," according to the afterword in the edition I've got, and apparently not everything she says about her life can be taken at face value. (This by the way is the only one that has been translated into English.) Fine. So we'll take this as the author's remixing of her own life into whatever statement about feminism, colonialism, Africa, history, and culture that this is meant to be. Alas, much of it was lost on me.

There is a brief opening section called "Ken's Prehistory," which I really liked. It describes a semi-mythical Senegalese village called Gouye, and sketches some generations of people who lived there. The resemblance in these few pages to the cyclical-history of Macondo is so strong I suspected it to be a sort of homage to Marquez's famous novel, but it stops short of direct allusion. Still, you get the same sense of a place where time loops and families give birth to themselves over and over, village disasters notwithstanding. (Gouye is destroyed when a cooking fire breaks out in one of the huts on a windy day. Which sounded familiar.) In this opening section, Bugul establishes the archetype of "the mother," who haunts the rest of the story...

...Which begins with her departure from the village where she was born. At this point, the poetic language and storytelling of the "Prehistory" section abandon ship completely. (This is the funny thing about that samurai book I read, too; the intro gave a very wrong first impression of what was to come!) Now we travel with her to Belgium, where she's an international student. But she quits school before long and takes up a bohemian lifestyle, schmoozing with artists, circulating through clubs and various social scenes, doing lots of drugs, and apparently enchanting everyone she meets.

Along the way we get some flashbacks to the village, and haunting memories of "the mother" (she's never called "my mother," and never named as I recall—the same is true for "the father") who was left behind. Also similar to Musui's Story, the events seem to pile on one after another with a fairly loose sense of direction—though there's probably more of a deliberate plot here than there was with Mr. Samurai. Things escalate to a feverish pitch towards the end, when she ends up on a bad acid trip...and then later, more or less on the spur of the moment, ends up prostituting herself for an expensive mink—apparently just because she can.

I'm sure I'm being unfair in this assessment, but given the vagueness with which so much of her story is described, it was hard for me to tell much better than that what her motivations were for going into that hotel room in the last few chapters. The trouble was two-fold. Firstly, sometimes characters are simply left unnamed, so you get passages like this:

After greetings and a meal, the mother told the sister that she had come to get me for the holidays. What a blow for the sister! [...] That same day I left with the mother and didn't return to the sister's house. The mother kept me with her.

[...] The brother in the city had remarried. He had a wife who took care of him, of his children, of his house. There was nothing left for me to do, especially at the time, since two or three divorced sisters were living there. When a sister was divorced, she'd go and live with her older brother until the next husband came along. As soon as a woman was faced with sisters-in-law under the same roof, I preferred to keep my distance. That's how I avoided having regrets about not communicating with the sisters. [...]

The saving brother arrived and once again I found myself in the little town where I'd done my apprenticeship through the good graces of the sister.

I'd have survived pages like this a lot better if I could keep these folks apart in my head. You get characters who are named, of course—but then the weird thing is that there seems to be no connection between whether they will have an important role to play in the story and whether they're named. So some folks who show up only briefly get identified, while others who return again and again aren't. What's up with that? It gives the whole dramatis personae a dreamy unreality which I found hard to follow.

Then secondly, there was Bugul's use of adjectives like "neocolonial," as in, "What irritated me most in him was the fact that he was the neocolonial subproduct which I unconsciously rejected." Perhaps thirty years ago (and in French), this kind of language made sense. And I suppose I have some idea what might be intended in a description like this, given that the whole book echoes with Bugul's lamentations about the fractured cultures of Africa left in the wake of Europe's oppression and exploitation. I still didn't feel the stories she was telling and the historical lens she told them through quite connected somehow. Here's more of the kind of thing I'm talking about:

We didn't manage to find a formula appropriate for emancipating ourselves. We were following the same procedure as Europe although we weren't living the same realities; we hadn't lived the same historical, cultural, social, or emotional process.

Fair enough, but passages like this sound like psychobabble to me without a deeper grounding in the narrative. And the narrative was, as I've said, quite vague to begin with. This book just never added up...

I have a feeling this crap review is more a function of my own cultural disconnect from the author and her time and place than necessarily a critique of her writing. I'm sure plenty of other readers have gotten way more out of this than I did. But if one were interested in reading autobiographical statements about feminism, colonialism, Africa, history, and culture, I can think of no better place to start than the two-volume masterpiece, Hustling Is Not Stealing and Exchange Is Not Robbery. (Which I've recommended before, but not in any detail. I still haven't reread them in a while...)

Schools a Third Way, Cont'd: What Is "Blog School"?

2012-02-06T11:07:00.000-08:00

In the last days of my tour of duty in the classroom, Joseph was among the students who approached me privately to ask what I was planning to do next. I didn't know for sure, and still don't. He came up with the phrase "blog school," as in, You gonna make a blog school? This idea was already somewhere in the back of my mind. After all, the last few years of my work were spent hybridizing online and in-person work with students, and I'd begun to see both how much mileage blogs can offer as educational tools and how my implementation and pedagogy is still gaping with room for improvement.

A perennially favorite writing topic for my students' semester final is about the medium of blogging itself. In rare instances, students will write about disliking it. Otherwise, the feedback is positive—often very much so. I sometimes wonder whether students are blowing smoke on this question; it's a natural teacher-pleaser and so frankly I take these results with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, it is clear not only from students' explicit comments but also from looking at the progress of their writing and thinking as reflected by their sites themselves: Blogs seem to help people think and write a hell of a lot better.

So can other media, of course. But as far as my own most effective teaching style is concerned, "Blog School" continues to feel like a good match. I still want to help people "do literacy" better—more than ever, in fact. Now that I don't have to give grades, administer standardized tests, plant people in desks, give permission to pee, and all the rest of the mumbo-jumbo, it would seem like the perfect opportunity to become the best writing coach I can be. So what would a working model look like? So far, all I've got is questions. Here are but a few, in no order.

I have an unfinished website up for my AHS classes...What's on it that could be recycled as a "hub site" for the blog school? What's scrappable?
How does a free agent teacher go about finding students?
To what extent is a blog school just online, vs. face-to-face? Does that just depend on the student and where they're located?
How does "curriculum" work? Do students show up with their own goals/projects pre-set, and then receive coaching from peers/myself?
More about curriculum: For set techniques/strategies for writing that I want to get across, to what extent can I get that curriculum up and onto a site? (Like this incomplete page.) And what's the best medium for that kind of stuff? Could it be videos?
What's the business end? How does payment work?
Who and where are teachers who are already doing stuff like this? How can I learn from them?
What questions should I be asking, which I'm not?

Once Joseph coined the term, I asked him if he'd be interested in helping establish a blog school. His face lit up. Still there, buddy? The invitation is open. In fact, any students who have some ideas on this are of course welcome to contact me. There is a lot of brainstorming to do. "Anyone?...Anyone?..."

I'd love to sculpt a teaching gig for myself somehow along these lines, even if only part-time. From my quiet perch outside the system, that elusive third way I've been looking for feels imminently possible.

Writer's Block Cure #16: Pick Your Gear Wisely

2012-01-20T12:20:00.000-08:00

Dear students,

Spending the last week and a half in non-stop one-on-one conferences regarding your finals has been a great finish. I can't yet link to anything, as the blog moratorium imposed during the second quarter meant that stuff isn't available out in the open, but a few patterns have come up which I thought I'd relate here. Some people might find themselves inclined, once next semester starts and their blogs become entirely their own (wink, wink), to post up their finals and have them in the same place as the rest of their posts. Until then, here's an outstanding writer's block cure which a student shared with me.

Zoom out: He told me that when he's typing, he likes to zoom out so that the text is too small for him to read. So he can see with satisfaction that his writing is growing, but he can't see it well enough to read it. This prevents him from second-guessing every word or sentence, which would otherwise slow him down. I thought this was quite a clever idea.

Go old-school: ...It reminded me of my friend Zak, who keeps a journal now and then. His tool is a typewriter, of all things. When I asked him why, he told me that backing up and fixing stuff on it is such a pain in the ass that it forces him to keep moving forward. Again...clever, right?

Change up: ...Of course, plenty of folks still need to go even more old-school than that, and get through blocks writing by hand. Whatever works, works. The point is that choice of gear—or perhaps a well-timed change of gear to a choice you don't normally turn to—can be a factor in unblocking. Hope this helps.

It's bittersweet, I might add, to leave the classroom with a shower of insights from kids about how writing works for them...I sincerely hope some folks will choose to share theirs with the world once we're on the other side of this semester. And anybody who keeps blogging even beyond that point will have me as a faithful audience member. Thanks for the memories, everybody!

QotD: School Was the Place of Ecstasy

2012-01-12T20:05:00.000-08:00

bell hooks, Teaching to Trangress:

Attending school then was sheer joy. I loved being a student. I loved learning. School was the place of ecstasy—pleasure and danger. To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else's image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself.

School changed utterly with racial integration. Gone was the messianic zeal to transform our minds and being that had characterized teachers and their pedagogical practices in our all-black schools. Knowledge was suddenly about information only. It had no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle. Bussed to white schools, we soon learned that obedience, and not a zealous will to learn, was what was expected of us.

As my days in the classroom draw to a close, I feel a tidal pull back to reading radical education lit. Once I'm out of the box, the taste of it will change. That bitter What sucks right now flavor of Holt, Gatto, Sarason, Jensen, et al., may draw back to reveal What could be better right now. Mark this: I'm not quitting education. I'm going to find a new way to join the struggle, more effectively. Today's QotD is from a book I haven't read, but feel I might soon...

And here comes a confession: I haven't even read this. (And claim to be a radical? WTF?)

I Missed the Memo, But...Nat'l Opt Out Day is Tomorrow!

2012-01-06T14:56:00.000-08:00

A bit sad I missed this news until now, especially since I've long been seething for a test boycott. It's about damn time!

Some related news here. Seems like this is associated with the Occupy movement(s), which makes sense and feels timely...

The Samurai and the Socialite, Part 1

2012-01-05T11:43:00.000-08:00

Along with a slackened writing pace, my reading habits have fallen off a bit recently. I guess it’s because of the doom and gloom I’ve been hammering myself with for so long. Endgame, Overshoot, Eaarth…The list goes on. Even watched this documentary, featuring a modern-day Jeremiah raving in a basement somewhere. Enough’s enough with the apocalypse overdose. I thoroughly get it by now: The world is in big trouble and the status quo is screwing us all. Next, please!

So on a recent trip, I reached to my shelves for something different to divert myself on the plane rides to and fro. Two autobiographies ended up in my backpack: Musui's Story was a text in one of my Japanese history classes in college, and The Abandoned Baobab I picked up during an African history/lit kick I was on in days of yore. I'd never read either, but books can hang out in silence, sometimes for years, before their time for reading comes. And the funny thing was that this odd couple, a low-rent Tokugawa samurai and a Senegalese ex-pat in Belgium, bore some odd and striking similarities. Fancy that!

Primarily, what connected these two for me was their inconsistency, or one might say disjointedness. Both have introductions a few pages in length which suggest that what follows will be way different from what actually does. Both feature loose, ambling narratives which never seem to add up to much in terms of traceable development, at least not for me. But perhaps I'm missing the point because both stories come from times, places, and values vastly different from mine.

Katsu Kokichi (Musui was the name he adopted in retirement) begins his autobiography with a somber warning to his children and grandchildren not to follow his wicked, hell-raising ways...But then proceeds for several chapters about how much fun he had hell-raising, and what a badass he was in his youth. The fondest parts of his memories seem to be when he has enough money scraped together to spend as much time as possible in the red light district of Edo (the former name of Tokyo). There's not much detail here, though; I guess what happens in the Yoshiwara stays in the Yoshiwara.

Katsu devotes much more of his writing to action sequences. He and his roughneck underlings' performances in street brawls get lots of ink. Sometimes these fights are about some insult or dishonor that's been dished out and requires a can or two of whoop-ass in return, and sometimes they fought just for fun. Here's my favorite (especially in light of the "do as I say, not as I did" sermon he slapped on the beginning of his memoir):

"Kokichi-sama," Genbei said, "I understand you are rather wild at times and get into scrapes. But have you ever been in an honest-to-goodness fight? If I may say so, that takes real guts."

"Oh, plenty," I answered. "I've been in fights ever since I was a kid, and I've enjoyed every single one."

"Splendid. Because Hachiman Shrine [...] is having a festival the day after tomorrow, and there's sure to be a big fight. Why don't you come with us and test yourself?"

[...] On the way to Hachiman Shrine we discussed what we would do if we ran into any trouble. All those who crossed our path hardly seemed worth fighting, but once we entered the shrine precincts, a couple of sharp-looking characters sauntered up to us humming a tune.; Without warning, [a member of our posse] spat in the face of one of the men. Outraged, the man lunged at us with one of his wooden clogs. I punched him right in the jaw. At this the other men came at us swinging their fists, but when we hit back in a blind fury, they took to their heels.

It escalates from there; the four of them end up with swords out, slashing their way through fifty guys with long pikes. Boo-yah! And guess where they escaped to? The Yoshiwara again. A few pages and a few more brouhahas later, Kokichi's reputation as a swordsman around his district of Edo had grown. "Yes," he says, "you could say that I was responsible for the new vigor and popularity of other schools of fencing." There is a lot of ego-stroking in this book, and narrative-wise it's just one damn thing after another. Protection rackets, sword trading, youthful attempts to run away from home...These mid-level samurai led some pretty wild lives if Musui's Story is an even halfway-accurate reflection of the period. Something tells me that these stories are pretty exaggerated, though. Nevertheless, it's fun to read in a slice-of-life kind of way, and the translation by Teruko Craig goes down easy.

I'll approach The Abandoned Baobab next...first I have to finish the last couple chapters. It's not a reading experience I'm having much fun with, but it's at least getting me back in the habit and giving me some grist for the brain-mill...[Update: Part 2 is up.]

My Final, Part 4: Surprise Hits

2012-01-04T11:57:00.000-08:00

The students are doing my favorite assignment, the reflective essay, a process that’s always fun to watch. I like to participate in this one, too…But this time it feels different. My last reflections were more about teaching than writing, and I'm not sure there's much more for me to say along those lines at the moment. Instead, I'll speculate about one of those fun little side-effects of blogging: Posts which mysteriously get way more views than you'd expect. It's funny the way that in writing (or, I suppose, in any creative medium), the pieces you slave over and imagine to be masterpieces sometimes get passed over, while stuff you dashed off gets all the love.

Blogger's built-in stats feature, or the more hard-core Google analytics, puts this tantalizing data at your fingertips. I like to know when I'm scoring traffic from faraway places, though of course one can't always tell whether these readers are sticking around to peruse at leisure or just clicking right past...Without some familiarity with terms like "bounce rate," the statistics you get can be pretty misleading. And I'm none too familiar with such terminology myself, so whatever lessons drawn from my readership data are well-sprinkled with grains of salt.

Still, even if I can't interpret the numbers properly, outliers are outliers. And a post I wrote back in September called "The Spotlight" certainly qualifies. I don't know why, but that one's been getting lots of steady attention in the months since...kind of cute, since steady attention is the topic of the piece. "Meditation" never appears in it, as I've noticed that teenagers' first reaction to that word tends to be discomfort. ("I can't do it," "It's boring," that type of thing.) But of course that's exactly what I was talking about:

I have long wanted to start figuring out how to talk about some simple mindfulness practices with my students, and hope to get some conversations started this year in some or all of my classes. The fact is that you can train your mind (i.e., develop your control of the spotlight) with very simple practices, in much the same way that systematic weight-lifting makes your muscles stronger.

Alas, this goal never got farther than a single talk I had with a group of about eight students. We were sitting in a park where we'd been celebrating the fact that their class was the first to turn in all their "walking field trip permission slips," which freed us to get outdoors. And how quickly I discovered my woeful unpreparedness to explain the first thing about meditation! (Our talk moved on to much more fruitful territory soon enough, mercifully...In fact, where the discussion went next was one of my fondest memories from this semester.)

So what, if anything, to make of the big audience for this post I wrote? Why are so many folks stumbling across it? And what reactions does it provoke? The comment thread is empty, so it's tough to tell; somebody might have tweeted a link to it as an example of really shitty writing, for example, and folks are simply rubbernecking at my ineptitude. Or perhaps I've unwittingly gotten more folks interested in the topic, and now they're off having a fling with the dharma. Here's where we whip out that salt-shaker...After all, there's no way we can know what ripple effects our words have once other people encounter 'em, right?

If nothing else, heavy pageviews on "The Spotlight" affirm that I still ought to be paying more attention to attention. It's a topic I initially raised out of desperation at how out-of-control my own "spotlight" is, and approached a number of times since. There are really only two purposes to continue writing about meditation, though. One is to encourage people to try it out and see if it improves the quality of life, and more particularly to get folks in schools into the habit. (Here I should mention that Alameda High school has a meditation club that meets weekly during lunch, run by a very kind history teacher and attended regularly by about six kids. Too bad English department meetings are at that time or I'd have been there way more often. In any case, Mr. Gross is quietly performing one of the best services this school can offer, and I give him credit for it.) But I'm not so sure it's possible to "convince" someone to meditate, although you'd think so with all the self-help literature on the subject which packs the bookstore shelves. Most meditators probably got started for their own reasons, not because some Californian blogged about how great it is.

And let's be clear: It's not all incense and bliss once you really come to grips with the process of calming the "mind"...whatever that is. This brings me to the second purpose for writing about Spotlights. I find it useful to keep a journal about my practice...but I can't imagine this stuff would either elucidate or encourage meditation for anybody else. To wit, here's an excerpt from an entry written almost exactly a year ago:

Over the holiday, I now discover, all I had to pay attention to were mostly subtle "background" phenomena. It's good that I got the chance to tune into my body sensations under those conditions, because if my hunch is correct I'm now going to have much more dramatic stuff to pay attention to. It wasn't hard to drop into a concentrated state in yesterday's sit because the sensations were hard not to concentrate on.

I'll spare you any more. There's no link to that 'cuz it's a private blog, and I'm sure you can see why. At least as far as writing is concerned, the point is that once you are meditating, there are plenty of changes to keep track of and a journal can help. But I'm getting ahead of myself; I'm still no meditation teacher, and had better not start acting like one. (Fortunately we have the mighty Shinzen Young to fulfill that role.)

Before I get any more distracted from my original purpose, let me try to tie off this installment of my final. The data I get on who's reading what may mean nothing at all, but affords plenty of food for thought. My first reaction upon noticing the numbers for "The Spotlight" spike was to think, Gee, I should write a follow-up. (And in a few more sentences, I will have accomplished exactly that.) However, thinking through the nature of this topic and my purposes in writing about it more carefully, I find myself wondering whether the keep writing about it impulse is all that smart. If people liked a post here, great. But before I start getting all egotistical and writing to convince other people to do a thing, I should be doing a lot more of it myself. Onwards and inwards!

Time To Go: Why I'm Leaving the Classroom

2012-01-04T08:18:00.000-08:00

Dear students,

Now it can be told. 2011 has not been my year, and the toll which events have taken on my mental and emotional health is getting high enough so that I’m leaving this job. After first semester finals, I’ll be saying good-bye to eight years of classroom teaching. Obviously this is not how or when I envisioned my public school career ending. It only ends this way after a lot of soul-searching and consultations with loved ones, friends, and colleagues. And perhaps it’s crazy, considering I don’t have another job in the bag. Nevertheless, my body and mind are daily making it clear that this environment is no longer for me. To stay on would be to stay for the wrong reasons, and I have too much respect for my students and myself to do that. Furthermore, my struggles with anxiety are already spilling over into my students’ lives, stressing them and their families out. Not cool.

I've been wrestling with a good explanation for how I've come to this decision, since I feel I owe one. But for the life of me, I can't figure out what to leave in and what to leave out. Then I realized that most of what needs to be said is already on this blog, here and there. So for anybody still wondering, I'll simply suggest poking around Just One Teacher...Between the lines, the explanation for my departure is not too mysterious. (Hint: Gatto was right.)

Many thanks to students, colleagues, friends, and family who've shown me so much patience and understanding. Also, my apologies for inconveniences my decision causes. Will I continue teaching in the future? I certainly hope so. I’ve grown to love helping people read and write better, and with a decade of experience under my belt I feel more confident than ever about how to do it well...Just not under present circumstances. With a little luck and elbow grease, I'll be able to find (or build) a better niche for my teaching work to grow in. I do not know what will happen next, but enough chunks of my life have lately given way that I can only move forward with faith that something good will soon arise. Lots to give, lots to learn. Time to go.

Sometimes Words Aren't the Business

2011-12-06T12:07:00.001-08:00

Hello, blog. It's been some time. What can I say? Sometimes words aren't the business.

Student blogs are down for the count, as well. I was asked to terminate the blogging assignments until further notice, did so, and haven't gotten a green light to keep them going yet. (This major and sudden shift in my classes' modus operandi came about because of a student's short story which rang some alarm bells when admin found it.) We've been reading some plays aloud in class in the meantime, and without the steady stream of student writing flowing in, I've found my creative energies ebbing elsewhere. It's good to have music-making to turn to, for example.

Also, I've really lost some threads I was writing and thinking about recently...In particular, my participation in the Occupy Oakland scene has nearly evaporated. How to balance the day job with the global proletariat revolution? It's a dilemma.

I'll have more to write here soon, though. As usual, things are changing...

What Can't You Build With, Cont'd

2011-11-08T22:34:00.000-08:00

Remember the bottle-brick schoolhouses in the Philippines? Here comes some follow-through from the BBC:

The bottle houses are also ideally suited to the hot Nigerian climate because the sand insulates them from the sun's heat, helping to keep room temperatures low.

And because of the compact sand, they are bullet-proof - which may also prove another attraction in more insecure parts of the north. [...]

"I don't want to be a beggar, I want to work and get paid - that is why I am doing this job," says 15-year-old Shehu Usman, who is working on the building site.

"When I grow old I want to build myself a house with bottles," he says.

After the 25 houses have been completed, the next construction project for the Development Association for Renewable Energies will be a school on the estate, which street children like Shehu will be able to attend.

Remarkable Things I Read on Wednesday

2011-11-04T18:48:00.000-07:00

Wednesday's general strike in Oakland—a nice day if ever I saw one. Marched in the morning and it was a bit like dancing slowly in a spiral around some sunny blocks...In the evening, thought about shutting down the port but decided to swing down and check out the plaza again instead. The police raid on Tuesday was a big help—we're now looking at Occupy Oakland 2.0, with bigger turnouts and a better-organized tent system for first aid, kitchen, children's play area, etcetera. Rebuild stronger, baby!

Wandered around and throughout a few times, then got in line for some food and thought to myself, This is exactly the type of scene that the architect of this plaza sketched in the proposal drawings, or even better. Here was a thoroughly diverse cross-section of the city gathering for discussion, music, time with families and neighbors, food, solidarity, education, and civic engagement. For what higher use or purpose could you envision the space in front of your city's seat of government? Yet just over a week ago, cops tore up the first version of Oakland's new civic center. I've steered clear of all scenes of potential tear-gassings and night-stickings so far, but even having watched the videos and heard the gnawing sound of the choppers, it's hard to imagine that a social phenomenon so beautifully pregnant with deep change would be subject to such a swatting. I feel naive sometimes, and hopeful.

Here is a selection of remarkable things I read on Wednesday:

Catching Up with O.O. (and the QotD)

2011-10-30T20:42:00.000-07:00

Busy days in Oakland. How to keep up? When I contrast the reactions of students who've gone to O.O. themselves (and/or with me) to visit against the reaction I see from a student who's been reading some of my accounts, it makes me question whether I should be putting my version of events up here at all. Students who go return with their own perspectives on a movement that's open, diverse, rough, ready, and sweetly chaotic. Readers of this blog get a small version of my small perspective on something way bigger than I can begin to express. In general, this Occupy movement doesn't lend itself well to summary. Whatever I say on Just One Teacher shouldn't be taken as a news report, but as an open diary of whatever iceberg-tips of my experience make it as far as written words. So please don't take my word or anyone else's; if at all possible, go downtown and see it for yourself. With this caveat in mind, here comes a jumbled and incomplete account of the last few days of my involvement...Nothing more.

Who's that handsome revolutionary in blue?

The first "off-campus" initiative which I've taken part in as an offshoot from Occupy Oakland was a march with parents, teachers, and students to keep five Oakland elementary schools open...to no avail. For a savings of two million dollars, OUSD's school board voted to close them. I was present for the first hour or so of the meeting and what struck me was the number of charter petitions submitted to the board. One after another, folks stepped up to the mic, calmly stated the name of the school they proposed to create or renew, dropped off thick binders with plans for their urban edutopias, and left. Say whatever you want about the charter school movement (whatever that is), it's alive and kicking in Oakland, slicing the district apart. Many of the parents and educators who had come to the meeting to protect their own schools took the opportunity during public comments to speak out against Oakland's "charterization." Which makes perfect sense, since school closings and charter openings are two sides of the same federal scheme to privatize education.

The weapon is #Solidarity.

And speaking of two million bucks, that's the low-ball estimate I heard as to the cost of Tuesday night's disastrous crackdown on Occupy Oakland, which says a lot about our city's budget priorities. The mayor was humbled by events, and Egyptians marched in solidarity with Oakland from Tahrir Square...Pretty cool! As I noted a few days ago, the population of O.O. exploded as soon as the tear gas dissipated, and although I haven't been spending too much time downtown in the past few days, I hear that campers are returning despite simmering tension with police. And I can certainly vouch that the facilitation of General Assembly meetings has improved remarkably with the increase in numbers. Meetings still take a long while, but they run smooth, get things done, and engage participants in fruitful discussions with one other.

Up next: a general strike, approved at last Wednesday night's GA for this coming Wednesday. That's a single week to organize a shutdown of Oakland's port and city services! Seems like an impetuously quick timeframe—and to be sure some folks at that night's meeting suggested a rally first to test local unions' and workers' support. Surely a reasonable concern—but no...In the heated aftermath of the police's display of force, over 95% of a GA bursting with thousands of participants voted to go ahead. To me the idea of a strike is appropriate, but the timing is tricky. Strike while the iron is as hot as hell, or wait until you can spend a few more weeks publicizing and gathering strength? We'll see how many turn out and how effectively O.O. can paralyze the city's operations. This bullshit capitalist system can't continue to defraud the 99%, after all, without the continued consent and participation of the 99%. We need not only to reach out to neighborhoods and continue to build self- and community-reliance, but also to show the strength of our numbers. I'll be participating.

Again, don't take me at my word. Nobody knows what's really happening. Nobody knows where it's going. This movement is no more or less than a platform for autonomous action, and a laboratory for creative and communal living. Global and systemic miscarriages of economic justice aside, I think that this revolution is ultimately less about tearing down the old than building something new from scratch—less about what shouldn't be than what could. Along these lines, here's a quote to gnaw on from my new O.O.-related reading project, Ken Knabb's Public Secrets:

We can comprehend this world only by contesting it as a whole...The root of the prevailing lack of imagination cannot be grasped unless one is able to imagine what is lacking, that is, what is missing, hidden, forbidden, and yet possible, in modern life.

QotD: This Is Not a Game that Someone Wins

2011-10-27T09:08:00.000-07:00

The police backed down for at least the first part of yesterday evening. I went to the General Assembly to get my mind blown: After weeks of GA attendance floating around in the hundreds, the amphitheater in front of City Hall was packed with several thousand. The proposal was for a general strike one week from yesterday, and it passed...We'll see how that goes. One still hears plenty of concerns that this movement is not specific enough in its demands, that it's too much of an unfocused show of rage to accomplish much. I maintain that waiting for this movement to deliver a menu of talking points misses the game entirely. Douglas Rushkoff is onto this pulse:

But “Occupy” is anything but a protest movement. That’s why it has been so hard for news agencies to express or even discern the “demands” of the growing legions of Occupy participants around the nation, and even the world. Just like pretty much everyone else on the planet, occupiers may want many things to happen and other things to stop, but the occupation is not about making demands. They don’t want anything from you, and there is nothing you can do to make them stop. That’s what makes Occupy so very scary and so very promising. It is not a protest, but a prototype for a new way of living.

[...] This is not a game that someone wins, but rather a form of play that is successful the more people get to play, and the longer the game is kept going.

They will succeed to the extent that the various models they are prototyping out on the pavement trickle up to those of us working on solutions from the comfort of our heated homes and offices. For as we come to embrace or even consider options such as local production and commerce, credit unions, unfettered access to communications technology, consensus-based democracy, we become occupiers, ourselves.

Oakland on the Edge of a Helicopter Blade

2011-10-25T19:57:00.000-07:00

Police preparing to gas Occupy Oakland marchers tonight

The sound of choppers, present for hours now, is getting louder. Occupy Oakland, encampments busted up before dawn this morning by cops from over a dozen different law enforcement agencies, is on the march...somewhere downtown. It's grown.

At the General Assembly yesterday evening, I'd heard announced that no matter what happened overnight (a city official had tipped off the camp that the raid was imminent), the next day there'd be a meeting in front of the Oakland Public Library on 14th.

The cops later called the library and asked them to close and keep us out. The library said no. Praise be to librarians! Incidentally I had a banking errand before I showed up at O.O. 2.0, and my bank had a sign on the door saying it was closed due to "emergency." Guess the 1% know what to do when the cops drop a hint.

O.O. @ the library this afternoon

When I rode up after work (and after the banking errand fail), there were several hundred already on the library steps. That number quickly grew. So did the police presence, on both ends of the block. "San Jose PD's here too," I heard from a crowd member.

As usual, I spoke to some folks there whom I knew, and met a few more. The plan was to wait for another half hour or so for the number of demonstrators to grow even more, then march straight back to Oscar Grant Plaza (Frank Ogawa got renamed). I chickened out and slinked home to watch the hummingbirds visit the feeders. But the sound of choppers this evening has been quite a constant reminder.

According to a representative of the National Lawyers Guild (over the phone to somebody repeating him phrase by phrase into a megaphone on the library steps this afternoon, to be echoed by the "human microphone" system—example), 105 Occupy Oaklanders are in jail. Most will be cited and released. A few will be charged with something like "resisting arrest at the scene of a riot." A few apparently have had their hands broken, somewhere in the process. Something about a head injury was said, and something regarding people getting arraigned perhaps by Friday, but it was hard to hear even the megaphone because of the sound of choppers.

The choppers have gotten softer over the last few paragraphs of writing this post, as it happens, but now another crescendo...

And still, it's growing. They marched back to the plaza only to find it blocked off, and then set off like a giant snake through downtown. Along the way, more were arrested and riot police threatened and employed chemical aids.

Whenever I've been at the encampment, I saw a place not near fully peaceful, but with the greatest sense of fertility for peace that I've almost ever encountered. Call me naive—but this is the city's response? It's been even more hours, and I can still hear the choppers.

My buddy Zak says, "What's the bill for having all these police there? Why couldn't they have contributed a legal catering truck and an ambulance, and whatever other issues they were complaining about, to the frikkin cause?" President Obama is across the Bay right now at a $7,500/plate fundraiser. And the mayor of Oakland is out of town.

The people marching right now are far braver than I am. Twitter blows up with reports of tear gas and severe injuries. This is the city's response!

"All those inside Frank Ogawa Plaza are officially arrested. Please submit. Please submit." —Oakland Police.

LAUSD Gets a Taste of the 99

2011-10-22T12:23:00.000-07:00

We're starting to catch up to the Chilean student movement, step by step:

Previously: 251 Schools

Uh-Oh...Google Reader in Peril?

2011-10-21T22:55:00.000-07:00

Dayum. Is Google Reader—my favorite way to read the Web and the vehicle I've taught my students to use to read each other's work—getting somehow axed? The double-edgedness of cloud computing is that updates to online apps just happen, whether you want them to or not. Got used to the way Facebook, or Google Docs, or Reader looks? Ka-plow! Now it's different. Deal with it, puny users...

Whilst on the subject: Some teachers at my school have begun asking me more about how class-wide blogging works and how to set it up. This is really exciting and I look forward to helping out colleagues who want to try out a more paperless pedagogy. Our school spends approximately one teacher's salary on paper and copying costs per year—and given how many sheets vanish crumplingly into student backpacks every day, never to be found again, given swelling class sizes, and the trees that could photosynthesize instead of being crushed into worksheets, this is a crying shame.

I've been migrating more and more of my work routines online for about three years now and there's no turning back. But in the last year or two I've learned a tough lesson: Respect your technological limits. Many of the teacher-blogs I subscribe to are from schools blessed with much awesomer tech rigs than Alameda High's...I've read many posts about how you should arrange your room in awesome ways and set up Twitter backchanneling, etcetera. Nice work if you can get it, but my own room is so small that rows are the only seating arrangement possible. All we have are a few computer labs, so outdated that when Google upgrades itself, our computers freak out as they can't support the latest versions of the browsers necessary to enjoy the improvements.

We make do, and I'm not complaining—just stating the inconvenient facts. (Bullshit. I'm complaining.) I have to respect these limits because given how broke the district is there is no hope of tech improvements anytime soon. But that's not even the sad part. The sad part is: Although I'd love to share the online techniques which succeed for my students with all the teachers who want to learn about them, there aren't enough computers in the school to enable more than a scant few of us to do it.

Say what you will about ed tech‚ even if you're Steve Jobs...kids need decent computers if we expect them to become literate nowadays, and school systems that can't keep up with Google are frankly embarrassing.

Anarchism, Part Six: All Bark, No Bite?

2011-10-21T21:08:00.000-07:00

I'd never heard of Ken Knabb or the Situationist International before today. But he was speaking in front of Oakland City Hall this afternoon, and when an occupier-acquaintance told me a bit about who he is and his experience, I thought I'd check out his talk. Glad I did!

He introduced himself as a Berkeley resident of considerable decades, and a participant in that whole revolutionary business in the '60s. Whatever you've heard about it, he said, "it was great." Then he became an anarchist (here's where my ears perked up)—and then he found out about the "Situationists," these French dudes who helped spark the May 1968 awakening in that country. The Situationists, he claimed, had a more effective, flexible, and incisive strategy than anarchism. So he proceeded to learn French, travel there, and translate their stuff into English.

So far so good. I found his talk encouraging and clarifying—if a guy with Knabb's track record says, "These last few weeks of public occupations have been the happiest days of my life," then you know you're in unprecedented revolutionary territory. He dropped a bunch of great ideas which I hope to follow up on here soon (I bought a couple of his books from him, so that's my new reading homework), but let me bring this back to the topic of anarchism...

In the Q&A after his talk, I asked if he could say more about why the Situationist International was so much cooler. Anarchism, he responded, is an ideology but nothing more. It's a slogan, or a poster, or a sign you hold up at a rally. It's some awesome rhetoric. But it's hollow on the particulars of its own execution. Down with the state and down with hierarchy, says anarchism. But how? What about the particular demands of the situation at hand, moment by moment and place by place? Communal life is complicated, especially in the shadow of industrialism's global trauma. There may be occasions when coercion is necessary. What would an anarchist—ideologically opposed to coercion in any form—say then?

In fact, coercion has already become necessary at Occupy Oakland. There was a man called Kali who was extraordinarily aggressive and intimidating—and had the shortest fuse on any human being I've ever seen. He was just uncontrollably angry, and the tiniest things would send him into a screaming fury. I'd seen him around last week and noticed what a time bomb the guy was, but on Tuesday it came to a head. He was threatening people, yelling and spitting in faces, taking any excuse to pick a fight. Pretty soon he was brandishing a chef's knife. Kali endangered the entire encampment, and was a cop-magnet to boot. Everyone could see he had to go, but how to get him to leave? Some suggested taking down his tent...some suggested calling the cops on him and getting it over with...some suggested a citizen's arrest...some others managed to get the knife off of him peaceably...some, like myself, stood by paralyzed. I learned later that he eventually picked up a wooden pallet and started swinging it around at people, and had to be sucker-punched from behind for him to take the hint and leave. He's gone now.

And the whole incident is fucking sad. I remember vividly somebody saying, This is the problem anarchists have been grappling with for years. If you reject police authority, then how do you police your community without becoming the police you deplore? Hell of a question.

So yeah, down with the state and down with hierarchy. Of course. But if the present reality demands action at odds with anarchist philosophy, then does the philosophy trump the reality or the other way around? Again: Hell of a question.

Apart from some trouble in paradise, Occupy Oakland does feel like a true taste of the anarchism I've been wondering about for some time. Imagine a nexus where anybody—homeless, transgendered, white, infant, unemployed, socialist, ex-con, college student, disabled, professional, parent, Native American, anybody—could come and participate in a reboot of society and culture. Nobody's really in charge and all are encouraged to initiate any social change they see fit. Surely this is the best of anarchism—and it's in full display in front of my city's City Hall. You have to see it and participate in it to believe it. Once you do, much more seems possible than you dreamed just a few days ago.

From Mr. Knabb, I got the book pictured above and also this one. Currently I'm immersed in another Derrick Jensen hot-bath, but Knabb's next. The man has some impressive ideas to consider...I'm grateful to have learned about and from him today!

QotD: The Least Segregated Neighborhood in Oakland

2011-10-21T18:53:00.000-07:00

Just got back from another after-school visit to Occupy Oakland; things are peaceful now (and yes, still expanding) but the city is getting serious about kicking the occupiers out. Arrests and confiscations may be imminent—unless tons of people show up, or other resistance is somehow organized quickly. We'll see what happens...

This quote of the day comes from an awesome rebuttal to sloppy coverage of the occupation in the Oakland Tribune. Here's my favorite part of this epic rhetorical smack-down, by Oakland resident Aaron Bady:

And even if the author of that Tribune article spent more than the hour or so that most journalists spend, in order to get their pictures and move on, he doesn’t seem to have noticed much while he was there; the only thing he heard or saw appeared to have come to him on City of Oakland stationary. So he doesn’t let you see that the net effect of removing the camp from Ogawa plaza, if they do “clean it up,” will be to make it back into a pristine-looking and unused park, at the expense of shutting down “a permanent and round the clock food creating infrastructure, which would hydrate and feed all who came.” and this can only seem like a loss if we remember that all of those people down there being all homeless and undesirable — all those “rats” and “flies” that we don’t have to explicitly call them — will still be out there no matter what. We just won’t have to see them, or even know about the people who are actually down there feeding them and being fed by them. Frank Ogawa plaza might now be the least segregated and most economically diverse neighborhood in Oakland, but if we can get rid of it, we can go back to being blandly assured by city hall officials that Oakland’s economically devastated human infrastructure is under control, well and adequately policed by nice men in nice clean policeman uniforms. And we won’t have to know otherwise.

Student Reactions to the Occupations

2011-10-20T08:46:00.000-07:00

As my involvement in the Occupy Oakland phenom has continued, I've seen so much to document that it's hard to know how to keep writing about it all. Fortunately some students have picked up the torch.

Lina's getting the message:

Mr. Manno, among many more of my teachers, have expressed their concern with our generation's future. His words were "Unless we have some sort of revolution, you guys are screwed. So good luck..."

Alas, right here in front of us, a revolution is here.

After hearing a few of my classmates input on the situation of Occupy Oakland, I don't think very many people understand what is going on here. Many feel as if we (the 99%) are so insignificant that it is impossible to produce change. History has proved that the so-called insignificant are the catalysts of change. Clearly, the Occupy Movement has spread around the country, and will continue to do so. Does anyone know the process of raising taxes for the rich? If so, please let me know.

Marissa also sounds a bit despairing:

Corporate officials hold so much power that it is almost impossible to do anything against them. That is why it is so hard to get anything done. America is practically run by these corporate people. America is NOT a business. It is a country so it should not be run like a business. America has the largest difference in salaries when you compare the salary of a CEO to the salary of a worker. In Japan and Germany, the ratio between company official salaries and worker salaries is about 11 to 1. However, in this country that we call home, the ratio is completely skewed at 475 to 1. It is obvious that something needs to be done about this, but with the way that government is today, it is practically impossible. Money corrupts.

Zac A. is not holding out much hope yet:

To be honest, i dont really understand these movements that have been going on every where. I understand that they want to end the influence that money has over representatives in Washington. I understand they want to end government corruption and the influence big buisness has on laws and policies. However i dont understand how these protests will reach these demands. [...]

I think a reason these protests arent as effective as they can be is because half of the people there are just attracted by the loud sounds and the big masses of people. If people where more educated on the problem they would be more useful in fighting the problem.

Actually he's on to something; in the first week of Occupy Oakland there was too much partying going on and the organizers realized that it was draining the movement. (The late-night raves have chilled out now.) Meanwhile Alvin piles on, looking for clearer demands and a cleaner image:

I personally find several problems in movements and protests that are to this scale. First of all, there isn't really a clear and defined message that people are trying to get across. I mean, sure, people are mad about the distribution of wealth in our society, but it seems like people have more to say than just that. They talk about healthcare, the educational system, social security, etc. It's clearly become something more than just the 1% vs the 99%. Also, when you protest, people should act in a professional manner. This means demonstrating peacefully, and dressing up like a professional. The point of this is to get your message across to the people an build up supporters. I feel like a lot of people aren't giving the protestors support simply because they believe that they're just unemployed college graduates with nothing better to do. Wear a dress shirt and tie, slacks, look like you're actually there to be professional about your cause, not just because there's nothing better to do. Other than that, I have my full support towards this movement, and I am anxious to wait for what might become out of this nation wide phenomenon.

Ian visited the plaza himself a couple of days ago and left some observations:

When visiting the occupy oakland main protest, I was amazed at the organization and seemingly organic ordering of a micro community in this main plaza in the city of Oakland. There was tent for laptops and electrical outlets powered by a bike machine who's use was encouraged. I observed a library, information centers, a first aid post, and even a corner for children to occupy with crayons and toys. There seemed to be quite a good system of how to self sustain this movement.

To dive deeper into this movement in perhaps a more political and philosophical angle however I also observed a lot. First is the actual movement itself, where I saw it as a puddle that drops of water kept trickling in on, slowly growing and growing. I noticed however that this puddle was still shapeable, it's just a force and I am waiting to see what the funnel will be for this water, in a sense what will the message be? If you needed to write what exactly it is that the occupiers demanded, I think it would take a quite a while.

[...] I do think that capitalism on paper is good, but has many fundamental flaws that have been exploited by the corporate and financial world. So in a way I've drawn the conclusion that capitalism really is sort of immature, and it's self destructive. The real problem I see is the six billion people that occupy the earth and how are we going to provide for everyone. Problems I think many people have idealistic approaches to solving.

To me, this is what O.O. is really about: Before making "demands" of the current political and economic system (a problematic notion to begin with), communities need to come together and learn how to support each other. We don't feed each other so we can stage a revolution once we're ready; feeding each other is the revolution. But that's just my take on things.

Trevor T. points out that sacrifice will be required:

I am very aware that joining such a movement can prove costly to the attendee as well. [...] Many people are taking a risk by becoming dedicated members to such a campaign, and many others are scared or hindered by their jobs or sacrifices they may need to make to join such a movement. I say, in order to get such a large message across, as the movement does have a monumental message, its an all or nothing kinda deal. If corporations and our government begin to see their economy hinder on the participation and uprising of these campaigns, then maybe we will have some hope in progress (liberal progress that is). Hoping for the best though.

And TJ brings it home...

Why this was so important is because my dad has been out of work for over a year. Now this has been the longest time he has ever had this problem and I am not saying he does not do much looking because he does a lot, I mean a lot. At one time he was on the computer for maybe 8 hours at a time while I was at home. And of course he is trying to make it seem like it is not that bad, but I know it is and now it is really worrying me. Also I can't really do anything and that is a huge problem.

But onto what I think of this event. This is actually a very very important thing to happen here in the bay area and I want to be a part of it.

"Our" "Demands," Cont'd: Occupy Oakland's First Week

2011-10-14T21:54:00.000-07:00

Reflecting on the first week of this city's Occupy Wall Street sister-protest, I came up with a joke: A drug addict goes to his dealer and demands lower prices and purer dope. Ba-dum, ching! Get it? 'Cause dealers don't have to pay much attention to what addicts want. (Pause, wait for laughter...)

Hilarious, I know. Point is, this one-liner overlaps with what Alan Watts meant when he wrote (in a more spiritual context), "our age is one of frustration, anxiety, agitation, and addiction to 'dope.' [...] This 'dope' we call our high standard of living." Everyone's still asking about what the "Occupy ______" demonstrators' demands will shape up to be...but as long as "the 99%" remain hooked on consumerism, we'll hardly be in a position to make demands in the first place and expect to be paid attention to.

However, our dealers won't be able to ignore us if it looks like we're serious about kicking the habit. This is why the most exciting thing for me about O.O. is simply the way people from all walks of life are down there at City Hall, living working sleeping talking listening feeding reading voting together, and generally taking care of each other. We'll have to build and rebuild these community bonds over a long haul and take the lessons we learn back to our neighborhoods; it's is the only foundation I can see that will empower the 99% enough to make demands in the first place. And we'll need to maintain this foundation long after the day comes when our demands are met.

This idea is echoed below by a representative from 350.org (see also Mr. McKibben). Also in this video—some micro-urban planning...Occupy Oakland is swiftly turning into its own village with wood-pallet roads and tent-circle minicompounds behind the main hub of the kitchen, info, library, supply, and media tents:

The village keeps growing. I didn't go today, but checked out my first General Assembly meeting last night. Turns out, voting is hard. It appeared the protocols for running meetings, tallying votes, etc. had already seen some evolution since the first nights' assemblies—but things were still frankly a mess. People had to repeat their proposals endlessly and then respond to crowd push-back by making up amendments to their proposals verbally and on the fly. Then a ton of people got on stage to discuss pros and cons, and often repeated each other. Then when it was finally time to vote, and they repeated the proposals and amendments again, they were worded differently than when they started. There was impatience in the crowd of several hundred, and you could feel it. But watching part of tonight's GA on livestream, it appeared that the procedural stuff is improving, moving much more efficiently. Like much else at O.O., order is emerging from chaos more swiftly than I would have thought possible.

Guess what? I even met a heroine of mine, Naomi Klein. No joke.

Chilean Student Movement's Latest Tactics

2011-10-11T21:09:00.000-07:00

In California we call it a "referendum"...

Found a few recent stories about the encouraging student movement in Chile; thought I'd clip a few more notes here.

The fightin' Santiagans are fanning out for international support and setting up a national vote on their core demands—which boil down much more succinctly than "ours":

"high quality, free education at all levels, funded by the state"
"municipal management of schools [...] a decentralized public education system headed by the Ministry of Education"
"The third question relates to the issue of profit in the public education system" [How? Wish this were more specific...]
"a fully binding national plebiscite on education"

And in a related detail which I happen to love, Chile's equivalent of the SAT got postponed—too many schools are still occupied!

Notes from Occupy Oakland Day Two: "Our" "Demands"?

2011-10-11T20:56:00.000-07:00

Stopped by after school and didn't stay long—Bit of conversation, bit of music (a samba band appeared!), some people-watching. A quick walk around the plaza to count the tents...I'd say there were forty or more. The camera didn't work today, or I'd have shot more footage—here's a slideshow instead. General Assembly meeting is happening as I write this from home; I'll try to make one later this week and see more of what the real "meat" of the protest tastes like. Might even get up and speak my truth to my fellow 99%ers. No students went with me today, but that's fine...Just hit 'em with last night's video today and some would have gone but for after-school commitments. In the next few days, my fondest hope is to occupy Oakland with more (and more? and more?) pupils in tow.

When I rode up today, there was a ring of fifteen or twenty people talking plans, politics, jobs, banks, health care, trillions, capitalism...A bit unfocused. Some folks were adamant that we protesters need to "Ram it down the Democrats' throats," and there erupted heated exchanges over whether the Democratic Party was any more trustworthy than the other guys. There was talk about solidifying "our" "demands," to "our" "government," but I found this tough to chew on. Two reasons:

1. "We"?

First, "our" suggests that there's a definite "we" somewhere, and that's not true despite all this We are the 99% rhetoric. This seems like the type of movement which cannot achieve both massive scale and a standardized message. Yes it's possible and even energizing to identify emotionally and ethically with tons of people who might not look at all like you...But within this ninety-nine, there are just too many peoples, sub-groups, regional and local differences, and even conflicting interests, to boil the movement down into media-friendly talking points. Alas, the criticism keeps raining, as in this take on day one of O.O.:

The group behind Monday’s protest has met several times but was unable to reach a consensus about Occupy Oakland’s purpose, according to participants.

The apparent weaknesses of this system were on display. Members of a working group tasked with reaching out to the press were present were not allowed to talk to reporters. The reason, according to organizers, was that Occupy Oakland was unable to agree on a common message or purpose.

Actually I think this diversity of people and purpose may be a hidden strength, and not a weakness. But whether and how this movement can capitalize on its own rainbows, only time can tell. (And yeah, I kinda stole this point from Derrick Jensen.)

2. "Demands"?

There's also the question of making "demands" to begin with. This doesn't convince me as a viable option, and hasn't for some time. (Witness my long-winded catharsis of total disillusionment with the two-party system. It contains a sentence I'm proud of, relevant here: "To the extent that our votes lose their influence, we have lost the right to vote.") I won't try to convince anybody else of this, but: In order to dismantle capitalism—or even reform it—sovereign national governments are not where to look for help and leadership. Making "demands" of "our" "government" means that "we" are still submitting ourselves to its "leadership," despite voluminous evidence that capitalism couldn't give a steaming shit less about anything but profits. Here's the most exciting thing I am learning from Occupy Oakland: We may actually stand a chance of getting "our" "leaders'" attention—once we convince them that they are not our leaders anymore.

When I see people in the heart of my city feeding each other, entertaining each other, arguing with each other, preparing medical attention for each other...without almost any institutional intrusion, it's cool. And when people profess the intention to continue participating like this indefinitely, it's beyond cool—it's hopeful.

If I were an elected representative, and I began to feel irrelevant because my supposed constituents were working and living for each other rather than relying upon my vote on some diluted, poorly-enforced legislation meant to re-engineer their society and culture from afar, then I would panic. That is the point at which I would start paying attention to the public's demands. Until that hour, it's perpetually lobbyist-o'clock.

Call me naive—but that's exactly the name I'm calling anybody who thinks that the purpose of this nationwide occupation is to make demands of a government or political party. Go home and write a letter to your damn senator. See what happens. Meanwhile let's occupy Wall Street, Oakland, Ann Arbor, Roanoke, Seattle, Lexington, Houston, Alabama, DC, and wherever else, for as long as it takes to learn how to care for each other and become real neighbors again.

Like a fool, I predict that if enough communities can do this then governments will start asking, What are your demands? We'd love to work for you.

The Occupation of Oakland Begins

2011-10-10T21:51:00.000-07:00

With obligatory apologies for crappy focus and audio, here goes:

These occupations are a matter of participation—sustained participation. Corollary: If you do not participate in the movement, you are unlikely to benefit from it. It's by being there, learning how democracy actually looks by doing it, instead of having it "done for you," that the magic works. Who knows what we can learn from each other, or how many ways we can find to rebuild a community from the ground up? The "99%" have less and less to lose by trying self-governance and self-reliance out for ourselves. Sooner or later, we'll have to. And there's no time like the present.

Zac G. and mom, Pat

Thanks to Zac G. for coming out...I saw an ASTI student there, too! My goal from here is to keep going back and meeting as many students as possible, and bringing along as many from my own school as care to join. (Bus 51A takes you straight from another school day at Alameda High to Oakland City Hall, peoples. Who's riding with me?)

My favorite thing about this town—its diversity—was of course well in evidence today. Hopefully the low-rent video I've spliced up tonight hints at that; meanwhile, here's a salient quote from occupyoakland.org:

This occupation is a beginning, and we have a long way to go. And while we have much in common, we believe the people are stronger united behind many banners, rather than a single one. We want to make it very clear that Occupy Oakland is not putting forward leaders, tactical or strategic directives, or a uniform message or political platform.

Well then. Let's see where this path goes.

How to Occupy a Monday Afternoon

2011-10-09T16:34:00.000-07:00

I'm torn about all this. Would I like to see equity for all people, an end of poverty, total renunciation of war in all forms, a de-schooled society...peace, in short? Desperately, I would.

Do I know that these things are ideals to be applied as thoroughly as possible to the realities on the ground we all live with—but that in sum, they constitute a utopia that will either never appear or will only do so many generations after I'm gone? Desperately, I do.

Shall I go tomorrow to sit with fellow idealists and gain some energy from collective resistance, shared consciousness, and unfettered exchange of ideas? Desperately, I shall.

Or at least I'll stop by for a visit, stand on the sidelines, snap some photos, and ride home. I'm really not too much for huge crowds; they make me claustrophobic. (It would be great to run into some students there; any takers?)

The "Occupy ______" protests suffer plenty of criticism for a lack of specific demands. So what if you're the "99%." What do you want? If you don't have talking points, you don't exist. I bought that criticism myself, at first, until I tried thinking about what demands I would suggest if I were camping out with fellow citizenry at that end of Manhattan where economics trumps politics and war put together. What I came up with was just about as chaotic and amorphous as the current protestors have, which makes sense given the complex interpenetration of injustices currently flushing us all down the shit-hole.

Then you read stuff like, These protestors are hippies with dreads! They should dress nicer if they want to be taken seriously! Seriously?

Regarding the occupiers, most of the political class says...Nothing of substance.

But then I was reading today (in Adam Hochschild's latest, which as a fan of his earlier books I would have laid hands on even if my interest in World War One hadn't already been piqued by Dos Passos) about how sometimes, in the unlikeliest of circumstances, peace can break out:

[...] Christmas morning dawned cold and foggy. Looking at one section of German trench, British soldiers noticed that a wooden board had been hoisted with the words "You no fight, we no fight." From another trench farther down the line, a German officer emerged with a white flag. On the British side, some soldiers [...] climbed out of their trench, waved, then jumped back in. When no shots were fired, they emerged a second time and began a cautious, unarmed advance into no man's land. "Suddenly from the enemy hurrahing was heard," a German soldier wrote to a socialist newspaper in Berlin, "and, surprised, we came from our mouse-holes and saw the English advancing towards us...They had no rifles with them, and therefore we knew it could only be a greeting." Soon a German NCO hauled a Christmas tree into no man's land.

These forward multiplied along more than two-thirds of the British-held section of the front. By that afternoon, thousands of British and German soldiers were trading cigarettes, helmets, canned food, and other souvenirs, taking pictures, and singing carols in both languages.

So far, this is the only galvanizing way I've found to look at the mushrooming "Occupy" protests. Let's not judge this incipient movement by its stated goals or ultimate results any more than we would judge a person's career prospects when they are fresh out of the womb. The point is, democracy is breaking out of the trenches. How strongly or weakly democracy manifests is up to all of us who choose to participate...or not. How long it lasts, how it's structured, what rules it breaks, and what ends it achieves are all, again, up to the participants and not for outside commenters to judge, whether from big media outlets or commonplace bloggers like myself.

I won't be at school tomorrow to issue a personal invitation to students to join me tomorrow in Oakland, but if anybody catches this and wants to join, I'll hope to see you there.

QotD: Amazing and Uninteresting Human Beings

2011-10-08T17:36:00.000-07:00

Upon his passing, I encounter many interesting words floating up to the surface of our memory. In fact on Monday, my sophomore classes will be writing in response to a passage from a speech of his. And now I've just found this Steve Jobs quote from 1996:

I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I've had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent ... Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology. It's not as simple as you think when you're in your 20s - that technology's going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won't.

(h/t Nicholas Carr)

Connectin' Dots, Santiago-Manhattan Edition

2011-10-07T16:34:00.000-07:00

Student leader Camila Vallejo, Santiago, Chile
Image pinched from the Guardian

This is the thing about social change: It just comes when you least expect it. All you can do is be ready—and it will surprise you.

That is intrepid Naomi Klein on the uncanny parallels between recent protests. She wrote the book which, I once remarked, "Had me panicked for weeks. I haven't been the same since"—and described it as "the scariest book I have ever read." Zac G., currently in possession of said manuscript, has more:

Occupy Wall Street is an ongoing series of protests opposing what participants view as negative corporate influence over the politics of the United States and a lack of legal repercussions over the global financial crisis.The aim of the demonstration is to begin a sustained occupation of Wall Street, the financial district of New York City, to draw attention to Wall Street’s apparent misdeeds and call for structural economic reforms.

And more (in response to Trevor T.):

9/11 has everything to do with Chile because of the fact that the overthrow the Chilean government happened on the date of September 11, 1973. The event was Chile's 9/11. It is absolutely ignorant to state that there is only one 9/11 since the prior event had such a deviating effect and had taken place 28-years before the more recent one.

The socialist leader in question was the democratically elected President Salvador Allende, who was overthrown in a coup d’état organised by the Chilean military and endorsed by the United States. The CIA inserted covert operatives in Chile, in order to prevent a Socialist government from arising.

In Ms. Klein's words, my favorite payoff:

You don't know how big you can dream until you know how big your movement is.

QotD: We Come and Take It Back Again

2011-10-07T12:01:00.000-07:00

14-year old Angelica Alvarez, participant in the ongoing Chilean education protests:

"It was the most beautiful moment, all of us in [school] uniform climbing over the fence, taking back control of our school. It was such an emotional moment, we all wanted to cry," Alvarez said. "There have been 10 times that the police have taken back the school and every time we come and take it back again."

She and her classmates are hardly alone:

With hundreds of public high schools still occupied by 15- and 16-year-old students and weekly marches drawing up to 120,000 students, the movement has shattered two decades of political consensus in post-Pinochet Chile.

A series of violent attacks at schools and threats of expulsion have hardened positions on both sides in the past week. "I have doubts about whether or not there is a real willingness [on the part of the government] to resolve this conflict," said Vallejo, the student leader who accused President Sebastián Piñera of provoking students by proposing laws that would allow for up to three months' imprisonment of protesting students.

Piñera's approval ratings have dipped to as low as 22% – the lowest recorded in Chile.

Previously: A guest post from someone who should know...

Tell It, Jelani

2011-10-05T22:24:00.000-07:00

Jelani, Occupy Wall Street from adele pham on Vimeo.

Regarding Jazmine: Confessions of a Noob Gardener

2011-10-05T22:00:00.000-07:00

Recently Jazmine told me that she was a vegan, so I suggested Lierre Keith's mind-bending The Vegetarian Myth. (Let it be noted about my purpose that I'm not trying to pressure anyone to eat any other way than how they think is best.) Bravely she took up the challenge and is now in the thick of it:

This book contradicts everything of which changed me to become vegan. It tells me that we vegans/vegetarians kill more species than a normal carnivorous person. We encourage agriculture work. Agriculture kills more species than animal farms. People have to go and find more fertile land to create more wheat, corn and such. The extinction of the forest and such kills/puts those species out in exile with no where to go. The kill animals that later become food for decomposers. Those species killed together with animals in food mills too. Oh the irony! The complication of trying to be a truly fair judge is now a more complicating this. This is no white and black picture.

Now here is a case where a student's confusion makes me happy to see; it is indeed confusing as all hell to confront the difficulties of eating right these days. The moral, nutritional, and political dimensions of nearly any conventional source of food, vegan or otherwise, are hardly as simple as we usually think—which The Vegetarian Myth demonstrates with devastating impact. So to me, Jazmine's confusion reflects a heightened awareness of our food system's high stakes. Good for her, and good for the rest of us too.

From front to back: rosemary, thyme,
basil, kale, green onions, parsley

Keith's book hit me pretty hard when I first read it as well...But what's got me flummoxed more than anything at this moment is the little garden my friends and I started. Bumpy liftoff thus far. In any event, here's The Mission:

Grow food and stop patronizing supermarkets quite so much. How much food? As much as possible—but this is a looooong-term mission. If I had to live on the garden I've kicked off so far, I'd starve before Trader Joe's closes tomorrow. But you gotta start somewhere. Gardening seems intuitively like one of those things that takes a lifetime to master, so the sooner this mission gets underway, the better.

Maybe I can get some help in a few weekends. This event seems like it could be cool, and I hope I'll make it. Lord knows my plants would love a bit better TLC from me, if only I knew the first thing about how to help 'em get big and strong. First questions: How to prune stuff, and how to handle the damn caterpillars that are having their way with the kale.

—But this is no black and white picture, either. Why don't the caterpillars deserve to eat too? As my friend put it, "We're growing butterflies!"

Cheaper Cupcakes, Cont'd

2011-10-02T22:23:00.000-07:00

Just came across more student posts on Cal's recent affirmative action brouhaha.

Stephen wrote a two-parter, first about racial discrimination in academia, in which he addresses the stereotype of the "model minority":

Coming from an Asian background, my race has often been stereotyped to have high academic success and achievements. However, there are people who still harbor hateful feelings towards Asians because of their apparent ascendancy and increasing presence in Western media. The model minority American news media promotes has given the impression that Asians are geniuses and score amazingly high on SAT. UC Berkley has been rumored to provide an unfair admittance for Asians considering a majority of students who go there is Asian. Students are discouraged to enroll in Berkley because they are afraid Asians have set the grading curve too high. This stereotype has been over hyped in that the media doesn't include that many Asians have taken community college courses or specialized courses to get to the prestigious colleges they attend now. It is from this gross estimation, that Asians students and especially those who don't meet the stereotype aren't offered as many opportunities.

For part two, he zooms out:

Because we live in America we have a class system consisting of an upper class, middle class, and a lower class. Inevitably, a percentage of America's population must fulfill these classes.

[...] there will always be people at the bottom of the totem pole and it's not limited to specific races. It's a harsh truth, but it's also the foundation of which our government is founded upon in which every citizen of the U.S. is affected by.

Adam's response brings a lot of insights and should be read in full, but here's my favorite paragraph:

I think it is important for people to be surrounded by a diverse people. Being inundated with a variety of races is vital to keeping stereotypes down, and to allow people to realize just how similar we all are to one another. We just learned this in [AP Environmental Science class], without biodiversity an ecosystem will fall apart without many variations. Without being introduced to different races a person may become closed off and weirded out by being around a large numbers of X race.

I appreciate my students' honesty and open-mindedness in writing publicly about this hot button. And now, Good Night.

Solar Bangladesh

2011-10-02T19:11:00.000-07:00

The awesomeness of this story speaks pretty much for itself. What gets me about it is the bit about how the light from two bulbs for ten hours makes such an immense difference. Pharmacies at night, schoolchildren studying after-hours...Seems small but it ain't. It may be hard to get our minds around this lifestyle, since a couple of light bulbs' difference would be hardly noticeable in our electricity-soaked lifestyle. But there you have it. Cheap solar = night life!

As a matter of fact, a bit of unplugging at night may be in order in my immediate future. I was on the phone with my parents today, whining about how California winters really mess me up. (Yes, it's pathetic...especially since I grew up in Michigan, where one has to endure snow and ice—what a softie I've become in my near-decade of West-Coasting it!) Dad suggested as a remedy for my annual struggle with seasonal affective disorder that I consider lighting my home during the Bay Area's rainy season with candles. (Others have experimented with this.) What a great idea! Somehow intuitively this seems wise, and I plan on trying it...

Previously: Solar Mali

Rare Heroes, Cont'd: Subcomandante Marcos

2011-10-02T15:30:00.000-07:00

Yet another huge trend on the student blogs: Mexico, Mexico, Mexico. I've been wanting to drop some thoughts here on the horrific violence tearing our southern neighbor apart, especially in light of an excellent book I've been reading on and off for a few months now, Our Word is Our Weapon. I'll return to this volume in a moment, but first to point out the catalyst for today's long-simmering post: a recent comment by a republican presidential candidate that he'd consider military intervention in Mexico as a precaution against that violence spilling into the United States. I try not to pay too much attention to the absurd theatrics of American politics any more, but that is just nucking futs.

Meanwhile, my students' compassion for people in Mexico has overflown on the blogs for weeks:

TJ: Why this is very important to me is no one should ever lose their life for a reason that has no meaning. [...]since America is not involved with this our government will never care.
Brigitte: [...] when they have no where else to go, the people of Mexico turn to church for sanctuary, which is not uncommon. Now I'm not religious and I mean no offense to religion when I say this, but wouldn't turning to a god for support seem more or less like a last resort? People have every right to be religious, but when it comes down to violence and crime, the blame should be put in the hands of officials and the police before it's put in the hands of a higher being.
Kevin: If I were to see a pile of 35 bodies in the middle of a street, I would either think I'm having a nightmare, or I'm living in hell. I cannot begin to imagine the amount of anger that many residents of Mexico are feeling. [...] My heart goes out to the families of the murdered.
Katherine: No wonder so many Mexicans sneak across the border. Since Americans do not like Mexicans coming over and doing unfavorable things such as taking away jobs, some that want a better life cannot pursue one. However, it is ironic because I read in a Time magazine that the U.S. is considered a supporter of the Mexico's drug industry because it is a large purchaser of those drugs. I also read tat there is a lot of corruption in the Mexican police force, with officers cooperating with drug sellers.
Edwin, on a subplot of this war which strikes close to my heart: In Acapulco the teacher are in strike because the drug cartels are threatening them, they ask for half of their pay check and for them to work for the drug cartels to be able to distribute easier, and the teachers have had enough. They say that they will not go back to their job unless the Mexican government assures them that they will be safe.
Jazmin: My family is from Guadalajara, Jalisco. My grandma and grandpa, along with a few uncles and aunts live back in Mexico. Every summer since I was little I went to Guadalajara to go visit my grandma, but due to the rise in violence, I have not been able to visit since seventh grade. [...] I also live in fear wondering if my relatives are at risk of being victims of the cartel's work.
Trevor T.: Drugs and crime in Mexico is a real problem ultimately fed by the U.S....big surprise. The DEA is fighting an inconclusive battle against drugs and I believe it is a complete waste of time and money. The U.S. is spending so much of its own budget, not to mention costs of illegal immigration and damage due to drug runners in America. It is however, a necessity of anti-drug forces to protect our citizens from the effects of all this illegal activity. As long as there is a demand, the U.S. will continue to be plagued by illegal drugs, and Mexico will continue to fall as a country.
Vanelly, thinking practically: I believe its smart to legalize Marijuana in the US and in Mexico because it is the biggest cash crop and the government will be able to get itself out of any recession if they tax it. The main cause of this violence is because of the black market. There will never be a decline in marijuana. It takes up a very big percent of the illegal drug trade, Marijuana is safer than alcohol and tobacco. There are millions of people smoking it already. So it will be smart to do so. Marijuana is also proven to be less addicting then caffeine. It also does not cause serious heath problems. This will solve many problems in both countries.
And Max: All I can do is offer my blessing to the innocent.

You get the drift. I'll only add a few thoughts: 1. It's dumb to talk about America's response to this chaos in terms of preventing drug violence from crossing our southern border. Drug-related violence has plagued our country for a hell of a long time; by now our governments should (but apparently don't) have enough hindsight to see that addiction is not a problem to be solved militarily. 2. Mexico is complicated. In The Untied States of America—previous thoughts here and there—author Juan Enriquez re-conceptualizes Mexico as four potential countries, not one: Northern (aka, "NAFTA Country"—and if I may interject, NAFTA matters a great deal in these stories), Central, Maya, and Southern Mexicos. Enriquez outlines how each of these regions is large enough to be its own country, and has enough critical "proto-national" interests distinct from (or even in conflict with) the other three regions. This makes Mexican governance a proverbial maze of thorns. And maybe it's why there is so much leeway for drug cartels to corrupt so much of the place.

This may be a ham-handed transition from drug violence, but...back to the book I'm reading. Way down in Chiapas lives a rebel army of indigenous peoples called the EZLN. They are known for sporting masks as an integral part of the uniform marking them as insurgents, but as their leader Subcomandante Marcos points out, they "take off their ski masks to hide from the enemy." (Maskless, they look like just some more Indians which the Mexican government has been happily ignoring for a long, long time.) Actually one reason to bring this apparently separate topic into the discussion is because I have an enormous question myself which I haven't figured out yet: What are the connections between the Mexican drug war and the war on the indigenous?

Unable to answer, I'll defer to Mr. Enriquez again for a unique perspective on the history of the EZLN's uprising and its significance for the rest of the world:

And as long as we're surfing YouTube, why not spend another ten minutes or so with Marcos himself, explaining eloquently the "virtual world" we think we live in, but don't...

Blogger Upgrade = Sexeh

2011-10-02T13:56:00.000-07:00

These new dynamic views they've introduced are fun to play with. This blog doesn't have a whole lot of images, so some of the view choices are not too flattering, but I like this "Timeslide" business. It's cool how you get presented with clusters of posts instead of just one big chronological index. I miss having that big cloud of labels on the right side, though...Guess you can't have it all.

Students: if you want to play with this, go to your blogger dashboard and click the "Template" option on the left—you'll see a bunch of options available.

Affirmative Action (and Cheaper Cupcakes?)

2011-10-01T15:32:00.000-07:00

Ah, the things you see in Berkeley...

Now here's a thorny issue. Two students got a good conversation started this week about affirmative action in college admissions by highlighting a protest at UC Berkeley a few days ago. From the article:

A face-off on the UC Berkeley campus Tuesday pitted Democrats versus Republicans, pro-affirmative-action students versus those favoring race-blind policies and, ultimately, cupcakes versus brownies.

None other than former UC Regent and affirmative-action opponent Ward Connerly showed up at Sproul Plaza to help campus Republicans sell frosted cupcakes priced according to the race of the buyer - a stunt intended to mock legislation before the governor that would allow universities to consider race and ethnicity in admissions decisions.

"The point is, the people of California have said we don't want to see race and color in admissions," Connerly told angry students and faculty who crowded around the table.

"Go to hell!" yelled Ann Callegari, an African American student. "Are you the overseer?"

Yikes. Read a few paragraphs further for the skinny on Prop 209 and SB 185, the legislation in question. Governor Brown has until October 9 to sign or veto SB 185, which would restore affirmative action in college admissions. Or you could watch this insane cartoon, but I hesitate to include this—the stereotype of the underachieving black kid is here in spades. The not-so-subtle implication is that the animators think that lazy black people are just itching to steal spots from sad, crying Asians:

Yikes again. (Also: why the hell does the guy pull his acceptance letter out of a laundry machine?) Understandably, given the delicacy and complexity of the issue, most students in our class discussions were unable (or unwilling publicly) to come out clearly for or against affirmative action on principle. Hell, neither can I. Here is a clip from Terrace's post:

On one side being an African American I think that this is stupid and offensive to people of the black race. Mainly because African Americans are constantly being looked down and with having such a negative light it is hard for us to break apart from all the stereo types and having people just respect us as a normal human being. With colleges accepting a black person just because they are black is giving African Americans a step back from respect but at the same time I feel that it in a way is sort of comforting. Depending on the way you look at it you can say that it is offensive and disrespectful, or you can turn the way and look at it and say that it is sort of helpful. One of the stereo types African Americans have are that they are associated with being "school drop outs" and giving black people a chance get an education from a high quality school is great but then there is the downfall with choosing them because they are black and not because they have the right grades. Personally I think that when people apply for colleges you should not even have to mark your race and that it should be solely based off of what truly matters and that is a students academic achievements, that way a college cannot be sued or looked down on for being discriminative.

Courtney W. says there should be a flat rate for tuition but implies that she's OK with admission based on racial quotas:

In a world where we all want to be considered equal and TEACH about equality, the cost of education should be equal [...]

I put down that I am Latino on apps and things because it is factual and colleges must leave a percentage for certain races. I get that leg up BUT I BELIEVE I should pay a baseline price that is equal to all for college tuitions in full regardless of being latino or a woman...

Hmm. I'm pretty stumped on this one. What makes things so confusing to me is that the folks on both sides of the affirmative action debate have good points to make about fairness and equality—but the entire debate is based on ideas that are myths in the first place. Race is one of those things that exists only because we all agree it exists. Similarly, a student's academic achievements can only be boiled down to a few numbers (GPAs, SATs, and the like) because we all agree to measure what's unmeasurable with these crude labels.

I'm not denying the hard reality of racism and discrimination in this country and I want to give credit to all the folks, for or against SB 185, who are trying to make things fairer for all. But from a certain perspective, it looks like a debate about which is better—unicorns, goblins, elves, or pixies? In other words, fairness looks unachievable until we rise above the concepts that keep us locked in the cycles of racism in the first place. How do we get there? I don't know.

More Dress Code Violations...And the Revenge of the Hat Rule!

2011-09-30T18:45:00.000-07:00

Discussion of the new French policies on Muslims' religious expression continues.

Marissa invokes John Locke and asks some questions about the long-term. Andrew has no problem with France's new policy. Jazmin can see both sides, but thinks the street-prayer ban is "only trying to balance the rights of people in the community." France (the student, not the country) also thinks the ban on public prayer ought to be ok—it's not a curb on religious freedom, just a "relocation." On the other hand, Ian is fed up with governmental interference in stuff that shouldn't be a big deal in the first place, and Ben also stands up for freedom of religion and thinks the prayer ban is another signal that "we as humans cannot even obey the rules that we put forth."

Then there's that other new French rule—the one about not wearing veils. Regarding the women who got fined for wearing them anyways, Lauren says the veil ban goes too far:

People are always going to have different beliefs and cultures, and I think that no matter what, they should have the freedom to express that as long as it does not impose on someone else. Like, if those women wearing those veils tried to force other women into wearing them, then that wouldn't be okay. But the thing is, is that these women aren't doing that, they aren't hurting anyone or anything by wearing those, so why have a problem?

Terrace agrees and demands some answers:

Telling someone to hide who they are you are basically putting yourself on a higher pedestal and if you are going to do that then you need have a real good reason on what makes you better than the rest. You do hear to much about governments or people in a community cracking down on people who are Christian's or Catholic's its usually Muslims cultural and I want to know how come people have people problem excepting something different.

I think that this law is a waste of the French government's time actually sit down and banned something as harmless has people cherishing their own religion, they should start focusing on real issues.

And speaking of a waste of time, guess what one of the new administrators at my school brought up to me the other day? The good ole' hat rule! Man, it's been many moons since this came up. I couldn't believe it; he asked me not to wear mine, since I should model obeisance to school rules for my students. He said he didn't "want to make a big deal" out of it, and of course it's not...but I still took the opportunity to ask him, "Why do we have this rule?" Here were his reasons, paraphrased:

If students are using their hats to "hide" from the proceedings of the class (by hiding their own faces), then it's harder for teachers to tell what their mental state is, if they're engaging with class, whether they're high on drugs, etcetera.
It's a tradition to take hats off when entering buildings.

I see no need to respond to these arguments here, having spent more than enough time on the topic already. Obviously this policy at our school is not as far-reaching or deeply-rooted as the French veil ban. But it struck me as so funny that this issue came up again at the same time my students were mulling over these Al Jazeera stories that I couldn't resist plopping the latest exercise in arbitrary authority here...I'm with Terrace; let's focus on real issues.

E Pluribus Human

2011-09-27T20:13:00.000-07:00

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Max’s thought process made me want to delve deeper into what makes humans human with more students. So what the hell—for my sophomore’s first full-length essay this year, we’ll do just that. The question: What does it mean to be "human"?

Naturally there's no answer. We'll just see where people take it and hopefully get some good cross-talk. In early classroom brainstorming discussions on Monday, folks were split about evenly on whether or not a human's definitive characteristic has to do with evil, sin, or other deep flaws—very moralistic stuff. Other students began talking about human social behaviors, which seemed like another promising angle—our teeming cities with online social technologies exploding all over the place. Taylor and I talked about social stratification and how complex human hierarchies are. (Yep, they sure are.) Others got to thinking about humankind's emotional lives, and how our actions are so often driven by feelings. Some said it was our curiosity and innovation that marks us. All of this seemed like a good start to a tough question. As for my best guess: the definitive characteristic of human beings is diversity, both across our species and within individuals.

This is easy enough to see in my city. Oakland (and the whole Bay Area) has a long history as an international crossroads—a whirlpool, you might say, of immigration. We hear many languages walking and talking down these streets, and I find that having such diverse neighbors is a constant and comforting reminder of how small our globe has gotten, and how much the billions of us share in common. A list of countries, regions, or cultures would be needless here; we all know there are a bunch, and that’s great, Kumbaya. But there is a deeper level of diversity which bears examination.

California and Japan, say, differ greatly of course. But in fundamental ways these two places (and countless others) are not “diverse,” and haven’t been for a long time. Whether you live in Oakland or Tokyo, you’re probably buying your food from a grocery store instead of harvesting or hunting it. You’re probably living or at least working in “permanent” buildings made from stuff like glass and concrete—and plenty of the architecture in Oakland and Tokyo is interchangeable. You probably drive or take some other fossilly-fueled transport to your work or school. If these sound like strange points to bring up in a discussion of diversity, then you’re probably taking the marks of our modern and almost-totally-globalized civilization for granted—a mistake I’ve made countlessly myself.

Think life in Oakland and Tokyo are different? Try living the way the Ohlone did. They spent (and some still spend) their lives right here on the same land I walk and talk today. But inasmuch as they weren’t “civilized,” they were diverse in ways most of us can hardly imagine after so many generations of Industry.

Ishmael and My Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn (presumably along with other books of his I haven't read), are ass-kicking revisions of many holy-cow assumptions about human nature. Quinn boils us down two basic cultures: Takers and Leavers. Takers operate on the basic life cycle of Produce Stuff, Consume Stuff, whereas the Leavers' formula is Give Support, Get Support. (That's a paraphrase, by the way. Happily, both my Quinn books are in student hands right now, so I don't have the exact quotes handy.) Between the modern industrialized or the indigenous, which people would you guess were the Takers? Whoa—don't all raise your hands at once.

(And here, I can't resist a Hello to those students who are writing this same essay about the definitive characteristic of humans being our "greed," our "sin," our otherwise-wickedness. Y'all especially should hit up some Quinn. It will challenge you and you might feel strangely happier after reading.)

Although we’ve grown all too accustomed to the “First World” standard of living, its comforts can only come at the cost of human diversity. As usual for the last ten-grand years or so, humanity's diversity is under threat as Takers continue to take out Leavers:

I quite like the term "ethnosphere" that Mr. Ward contributes here...A splendid concept! But now let's talk about a sphere of diversity even deeper than the Taker/Leaver divide. Walt Whitman wasn't kidding—there is astounding diversity inside each one of us. "I contain multitudes" is a literal statement, and applies to all humans.

Firstly, the diversity we see across geographies and cultures is mirrored in our own blood. Everyone’s multi-ethnic to degrees we probably don’t realize. (Had your DNA checked recently? Neither have I, but I’m dying to since there are undoubtedly cool surprises in store.) Then there are multiple intelligences within a single person, multiple personalities we display over time and even simultaneously (are you "the same person" in front of your friends, your teachers, your parents, and a cop?)...People are hella complicated—diverse strikes me as a good adjective for damn near anybody.

I'm speeding up here because there are just too many examples to get into. Typically we think of ourselves as "a" person, conveniently labelled with a name, perhaps a social security number, one or a few ethnicities, our job, social status, sexual orientation, and a meek constellation of other labels we use to try to keep track of ourselves. Why do we do this? In reality, we’re a galaxy of identity, of history, of migration through vast spaces and times, and still constantly changing. And as we look more and more deeply within, the edges of our selves start to melt...But—ahem—don't let me get too Buddhist on you.

So upon asking myself what makes folks folks, I say the answer is diversity. Why reach for such a vast and amorphous question in the first place? Partly because if we can get some clarity on who we think we are, then maybe we can also think more clearly about where we’re headed. Surely any human with two brain cells to rub together can tell that our species, and our planet, is heading for some serious turbulence. As I’ve written here before, we’ll be unable come together and untangle the chains that bind us to our destructive status quo unless we learn to think more openly and let go of obsolete ideas about ourselves. And our diversity remains one of the very qualities that can help salvage our future.

A final perspective on human diversity: What about the hominids who’ve come before us, and who knows how long the current draft of “human” will stick around? What if this version of our species is about to upgrade itself into something entirely new?

Here's to my sophomores' upcoming views of this many-faceted jewel of a question...

Another "Third Way" Model: Studio Schools

2011-09-27T17:00:00.000-07:00

Having rebooted some conversations with friends and family recently about schools a "third way" (previous thoughts here, there, everywhere, and elsewhere—and if you know me you know nothing rebooted at all; I talk about this stuff constantly, shamelessly, and uncontrollably), I was pleased to see this new TED talk show up:

It's awfully short on details, alas. What is the day-to-day student life like? What are these "projects" of which the man speaks? What's the difference between the "coaches" and the "teachers"? More questions than answers, and I'm too lazy to Google at the moment.

One of the most promising aspects I saw here was the idea that these schools can either lead kids to university entrance...or not. It sounds like these schools are well-connected with local businesses—I wonder if there's anything like an apprenticeship model that goes on in these places? In my experience, it seems too often that the only option kids dream of or, or are allowed to dream of, is college immediately after high school. But I repeat: This is lemming-off-cliff thinking, especially when higher ed gets less affordable (and the degrees less valuable) by the semester. Came across a blog post about the future of the job market recently that really resonated:

Increasingly, perhaps, a job is something that we each have to create. We can’t count on someone else to create one for us. That model is disappearing. We have to carve something out for ourselves, something that the machines won’t immediately grab.

That sounds difficult, maybe even a little dangerous. We’re all comfortable with the idea of “finding” a job. We search for them; we hunt them; we land them. All of these images assume the job already exists.

But to create something new…what does that even mean? Do we all become entrepreneurs? (I think the answer to that question is yes, although many of us will have to learn to be entrepreneurs within existing organizations.) Ultimately, it means we have to find something useful to do, something so useful that others are willing to pay for it.

I've been thinking along these lines myself recently—and it still scares me to hear my students parrot the "good grades good college good job good money" myth. If a model like "Studio Schools" can help people create work for themselves, I'm all for 'em...

QotD: "I Simply Got Tired of Being Unreal"

2011-09-26T20:09:00.000-07:00

More on the "What is Poverty?" thread...I've seen this before but wanted to look it up again—the blog of a guy named Suelo, who's totally renounced the use of money for about a decade now. The site's called Moneyless World; here is a clip from his profile:

I don't see money as evil or good: how can illusion be evil or good? But I don't see heroin or meth as evil or good, either. Which is more addictive & debilitating, money or meth? Attachment to illusion makes you illusion, makes you not real. Attachment to illusion is called idolatry, called addiction. I simply got tired of acknowledging as real this most common world-wide belief called money! I simply got tired of being unreal.

What Can't You Build With?

2011-09-26T09:52:00.000-07:00

It seems every week with the current events post, one or two clips go viral. Happily, this week saw tons of students picking up on these bottle-brick school buildings:

Thoughts from Peter, Mei, Andrew, Marissa, Courtney, Vicky, Adam, Vanessa, Sarina...

I love this story too (and those little kids are hypercute), and just wanted to add this TED talk I remember from a while back:

What is Poverty, Cont'd

2011-09-26T09:33:00.000-07:00

I've been focusing my reading efforts on some specific writing assignments I gave to my sophomores and seniors recently...and I'm still way behind. Keeping up with the amount of writing pouring onto the students' blogs ties my mind in thick knots; it's a problem I need to find better solutions for, and quick.

Meanwhile, I wanted to follow up on a few recent threads which, happily, have provoked further discussion. First, some more student thoughts about the meaning of poverty.

Joseph skewers the value of all that paper we call cash:

Money is scraps of paper. If you were stuck in the Amazon with a couple of bills along with the need to defecate, who’s going to sell you toilet paper? Benjamin Franklin of course, with a smile on his face.

I'd like to hear more specifically what Robert means by this:

Sometimes money creates a person. Even though money cant talk, it can lead you. I believe that your conscious works with your mind. It knows what you have and what you want. You have money and therefore you want certain things. So, your conscious leads you to do whatever you want.

Stephy is skeptical:

When people are rich, they usual to use money to buy goods to cover their loneliness and pretend they are living so good, but really, how many people are knowing what the rich people's life really are...

Similarly, Alvin questions the supposed benefits of financial wealth:

I believe that since we are considered a first world country, our idea of poverty itself is much different than that of second and third-world countries. I mean, we have so many liberties and rights that we take for granted all too often, whereas people in other parts of the world are risking their lives for, hoping that future generations would have these "privileges" that we already posses. Just from the fact that we have everything so readily available to us, it has made our generation a very lazy one as a result. The term "first world problems" is often used to describe this phenomenon, frustrations and complaints are only experienced by privileged individuals in wealthy countries.

(Alvin is also getting close to a parallel stream I've noticed across several blogs concerning how privileged and entitled the current generation of young folks is, including the best post title of the week: "If you suck, improve yourself.")

Katherine piles on with a few more points:

Money also comes with emotional problems because you never know whether the people around you really like you or is just treating you as a friend with benefits. I think that people should focus more on being satisfied with what they have. It is the most beautiful thing when people give a lot of charity even though they do not have much. The reason that those kinds of people are not recognized is because the amounts they give is little in comparison to people who give millions. But if people have alot and still do after they give, that means they have made basically no sacrifice at all.

I'll wrap this up with an example from Amir about where wealth really comes from:

[...] the time I went to Iran really changed my life. I was about 12 years old and saw the good warm people of the country and understood the cruel unreasonable people that ran the government and practically the lives of the people under them. It was a great experience and it really made me have respect for my elders and people in general. The feeling of people loving you and having so much family around you makes you happy, and the simple things over there made you really happy too.

It made me see life in the light that things are a lot better than we know, and that we need to enjoy what we have and appreciate things.

...But What Is "Poverty"?

2011-09-22T09:28:00.000-07:00

I am enjoying my students' multiple interpretations of the news clips we're watching and blogging about, as part of the new "current events" writing assignment I'm piloting this year. (See also French prayer-ban reactions.) In recent days, I've noticed this clip getting some commentary; let's see if we can keep the conversation rolling:

Ian says our entire paradigm on this issue is out of date, and I am inclined to agree:

Let's be objective, I don't understand how anyone my age has a grasp about politics and what really goes on in washington and how people can have such narrow minded and polar opinions on who is to blame and how we got here. "Obama is doing nothing for unemployment" responded by "Well Bush gave him a big mess to clean up" is things I hear way too often to the point where I think taking account most things people are saying to be obsolete.

Kelsey points out how often we think "poverty" is something that happens somewhere else, when it's right under our noses:

I think one of our problems is that when we think about giving back or doing something good, we always think of other countries. Everyone talks about their spiritually moving experiences in third world countries all across the world, and I am not saying that there is anything wrong about that but maybe we should start by helping our impoverished. I love the quote "You can't help others until you help yourself," this very much applies to the United States. We are obviously a struggling country right now, with a high unemployment rate and low economy but we are not broke enough to help our own people. Maybe the next time you decide you want to go help save the world, you think locally. Go to a local food bank, volunteer at a homeless shelter, or donate money to a local charity. And even if want to travel, go rebuild houses in hurricane areas. There are many things in this country that should and need to be fixed as soon as possible.

This struck me in particular because of an amazing and gratifying conversation I had with a group of eight or so students yesterday, which was in fact all about "spiritually moving experiences in third world countries all across the world," to which my contribution was about the poverty I saw in Biko...Funny thing was, Biko really made me wonder what "poverty" means in the first place. Materially the place was poor, for sure. But life in Biko seemed to me, in some non-material ways, to be much "wealthier" than the life I experience in Oakland for example. The village had a much stronger sense of shared community and connection to the natural world, as far as I could tell, than our big urban jungles do. It may sound corny, but I think there are forms of wealth which we in the "civilized" world tend to ignore or devalue, much to our own detriment.

These days I am reading draft after draft of my seniors' college entrance essays. It's fun, but it gets bittersweet to read, over and over again, how many folks are still wrapped up in the myth of financially-based happiness. But as this clip suggests, we may need to take a hard look at what scarcity is going to feel like for the foreseeable future. (Casandra is already doing this.) Maybe it would help if we could open up our perspectives a bit on what we think wealth is in the first place, so today I would like to get beyond less than such-and-such dollars per year definitions and ask:

What is poverty? What is wealth?

The Spotlight

2011-09-20T10:48:00.000-07:00

Use it or lose it.

You have a spotlight. It can into a tight beam or spread out across a wide area. It can shine in any direction and from any vantage point. The intensity of the light it shines can also change. Your spotlight can move or hold still. The question: To what extent do you know how to control your spotlight?

I'm not talking about a literal light here, of course. The spotlight is your attention.

Think about the quality and "shape" of your attention, as if it were the shape of a beam of light, in the following circumstances:

You are watching an engrossing movie.
You are in class with five minutes before the end of the school day.
You are in the first quarter of the first game of the championship, scared shitless.
You are on a date with someone you've had your eye on for a long time.
You are on stage performing in front of a large audience.
You are on a crowded subway train.
You are looking for a contact lens that you dropped onto the floor.
You are lying in bed, trying to fall asleep.
You are playing a video game with friends.
You are singing along with your favorite album.
You are on your bike, hurtling down a long steep hill, and your brakes are out.

Probably most of us experience these different forms of attention kicking in more or less automatically most of the time, if we stop to think about our own attention at all. Certainly there are also plenty of occasions when we try to get a grip on the spotlight and make ourselves concentrate on something. But this brings us back to the question; how well can you control your attention? Or, asked another way: How easily do random thoughts pop up and distract you?

It seems culturally that we don't think about attention very well. Mostly the only dimensions that folks think of is long or short attention spans. Furthermore, people make statements like, "She has a short attention span," as if that were a permanent feature and not something that can be worked on...And in particular when we talk about students' attentional strength or weakness, we should remember that it would be hard to design a more fully distracting environment than your typical public school.

I have long wanted to start figuring out how to talk about some simple mindfulness practices with my students, and hope to get some conversations started this year in some or all of my classes. The fact is that you can train your mind (i.e., develop your control of the spotlight) with very simple practices, in much the same way that systematic weight-lifting makes your muscles stronger.

As you can imagine, life improves with a more agile spotlight at your command. Anybody interested in pursuing this?

Update, 1/4/12: Why do people read this one?

Student Reactions to French Prayer-Ban

2011-09-19T09:59:00.000-07:00

Quite a number of folks have chosen this story to write about. I will start by highlighting Gary's post because he asks some pertinent questions and displays an anti-authoritarianism which I always love to see:

Has praying harmed anyone physically in the streets? Should you not continue to worship in what you believe in? Does the government have the right to tell you what you can do or cannot? Reporter says that these protesters are really battling out their identity of France. [...] Its human nature to force yourself to disagree in what you think is wrong. I guess some rules were made to be broken.

Especially, I would add, rules that are really really hard to enforce. Here is Angela, summarizing the debate well:

In my opinion, the government should not ban the public prayers. Everyone has the freedom to assemble and express. These are the unalienable rights every human being deserves on this world. Islam is a religion that has a long history; government should respect its practices. However, I can understand the intentions of those who have created this law since they (the French governors) also want their descendants to carry on their own French traditions. They do not want their schools’ education or social phenomenon to become similar to those of the Muslims. The French people are merely trying to avoid a “take over” by foreign culture practices.

But what happens when you have a large and growing number of Muslims, both immigrants and native-born, in your country? At what point does Islam stop being a "foreign take-over" and simply become French?

Contra Angela, Courtney takes the other side and sees the whole situation as a hopeful compromise:

As much as I'm all for supporting your own religion and doing your own thing with it, I do believe that the people of France did the right thing with this situation. Although there is freedom of religion in places like France and the United States, not everyone is comfortable with seeing an open practice of other religion. [...]

I like hearing about situations where there is compromise. It's nice to see people working together to make everything better for them and the world they live in. This was a best of both worlds situation in the end. I believe that all peoples of every religion should have sufficient space and plenty of places to go to practice their religion and to worship.

Brigitte also notes the earlier French crackdown on the dress-code front:

If someone walked into a store wearing a full-faced veil I’d probably expect to be robbed. I’m not discriminating against them at all, I’m just wary because it covers their face. Anyone, they don’t have to be religious, can get a full-faced veil and use it to their own advantage. It’s like if a certain religion justified wearing a ski mask with holes cut in it. Even if it was religious, it’d still be a threat to be seen with one.

The question of masking is a deep one indeed. According to some "justifications," women should cover their faces and bodies because if they don't they'll drive men sex-gaga. (As insulting as I find that idea to women, it doesn't speak too highly about men either.) On the other hand, maybe it's not a bad idea if you are female to deny guys the opportunity to ogle or sexualize you by covering parts of your body so that you can get some respect up front. Speaking of ski masks, I'm currently reading an amazing collection of writings by this guy, who brings a whole separate set of purposes into the act of hiding his face:

Subcomandante Marcos

So there are lots of ways to look at the "mask question," not the least of which is, can and should governments have anything to do with the clothes we wear? Or where and how we pray?

This new current events post assignment I've tossed at my classes this year is getting quite interesting...I hope folks are having fun with it.

Max Digs Deep: What's a "Human?"

2011-09-15T21:32:00.000-07:00

Among many questions that came up the other day in the computer lab, Max asked what I thought it meant to be "human." Here is the first follow-up question he's starting with:

They are obviously not what a "normal" human needs to stay alive, but does that make them any less human than they are considered to be? They do not talk, sleep, or even walk around. What I wonder is, what is the major difference that makes it not human, and what if that one difference separates humans from each other? So tell me, what do you think separates humans from trees?

Here's to an ongoing series of posts...

Our First Master Classes

2011-09-15T19:35:00.000-07:00

The dilemma: To write better, a student needs (among other ingredients) a lot of practice. So this year I'm assigning more writing than I ever have. But: Blog-commenting help from my capable and good-hearted teaching assistants aside, I'm overwhelmed in reading and providing my own feedback to the blizzard of student work that's piling into twelve-foot drifts in my feedburner. And it's only been a couple weeks.

But today came an insight—and like many insights, it feels obvious and head-slappingly late. I owe it to the seniors who volunteered to break some ice today and read their college essay drafts aloud in the first of hopefully many writing "master classes."

I wrote earlier:

The plan now is to de-emphasize anything in my teaching practice that takes away from time I can be spending coaching my students directly on their writing projects. This is tricky with 170 kids or so, but with the right tools it is doable. For '11-'12, I want to define the measure of my success as the proportion of time I spend giving direct feedback on student writing.

(Haven't made an official tally yet, but I'm closer to 150-160 than 170 it turns out.) The folks who put themselves out there to be heard, despite the pressure of classroom silence as I stood there waiting out the dead air until the first hand went up, did a commendable service to everybody today. You know who you are; thanks tons.

I'm totally with Justin's advice that we set aside time for it every week; the more we do it, the easier it will feel and the more voices we'll start hearing. Look at your readers, folks: we are a diverse crew and there is much in our little garden-blogosphere of words to observe, nourish, and ponder. I know plenty feel self-conscious about their writing skills, but if you think about it—this is a writing class. We're here because we have something to learn, both about ourselves and from each other, and not to perform on trial.

So today was a major win-win. Master class volunteers got to test their writing out live, with me and with an audience of 30 or so, I got to leverage my feedback (and therefore my time) to way more than one student at once, and any listeners in the room absorbed their own nutrients from whatever they heard, however they heard it. And that's today's insight in a nutshell.

Sophomores, prepare thyselves.

Rare Heroes: Aung San Suu Kyi

2011-09-13T00:38:00.000-07:00

It's sad how many students hate history or simply don't understand what it's for. But given the names-&-dates way it's typically presented, I can't blame them too much. Talking to Andrea yesterday about education protests, she suggested analyzing historical models as a way for current students to find a path forward. I disagreed. "It's true, of course, that the past contains all sorts of lessons for our present, but given the attitude most students I meet have about history," I said (in so many words), "it would be a non-starter to think of getting kids riled up about a movement for educational change by talking about history first."

What is needed now? How can we bring powerful collective action to pressure points that matter presently? For once, let's forget about Gandhi and MLK and look to our own struggles, our own day and age, with the soberest view we can. Only then do I think history will stop seeming like facts to memorize and start looking like what it is: an ocean of stories that can nourish us and help us understand our way—or at least the way we got ourselves into the fix we're in.

Again I say, as irreverently as I can: I'm sick of Gandhi, and MLK is boring too. These guys have been "textbooked" utterly to death, such that now their names conjure up happy feelings of safety and peace. To hell with that. In their day, they were among the most dangerous people on the planet as far as The Man was concerned, nonviolent rhetoric be damned, and it's a shame they aren't remembered that way more often. To the extent we forget the existential threats they (and others in history) posed to established power systems, we might as well forget them altogether.

Which brings me to some rare heroes of the present day...This may be little better than invoking great anti-authoritarian activists from history, but I would like to highlight some present-day struggles in spots we don't normally think about. Burma (or Myanmar) may seem a totally different place from our own—but in a civilization as globalized ("metastasized," perhaps?) as we see it now, I think our interconnectedness makes just about everyplace equally relevant.

I clipped a bit of a great speech by Aung San Suu Kyi before, but I'd like to revisit her work in light of this Al Jazeera story following up on the democracy movement in Burma since her release from house arrest:

There's a lot here, including a very brave young Burmese hip-hop artist, a very old activist unnaturally accustomed to solitude, an HIV clinic hanging on by a thread, and other stories. Also it's good that the difficult question of international sanctions against the country gets raised here, although the responses seem a little one-sided. Still, there is a message Aung San Suu Kyi brings up in this video which strikes me particularly:

Democracy is something for which everybody can work in their own way. And they must bring about the changes that they want. They must accept the responsibility for the society in which they live and not just expect a political party or politicians to do their job for them. [...] When people ask me, especially Burmese people, when they ask me, "When will we get democracy?" I always say, "You ask yourself what you've been doing for the democratic process, and if you're contributing a lot, then you have the right to think it will come sooner than later. But if you're doing nothing, then I don't think you have the right to expect it to come soon." So everybody must try to make his or her own contribution. And what I have discovered is that those who work hardest are the ones who are least likely to say, "It's taking too long."

Skillful Protest vs. The Voice of Despair

2011-09-09T22:17:00.000-07:00

File this one under Posts that will get me in trouble someday...Adam, who attended 3/4/10 and who's "been clearly brainwashed" by yours truly, now wonders where the fire-in-the-belly has gone:

I feel like Protesting is the main things someone like me would be able to do, and at this point I don't see how I could muster up the time and effort needed to be behind that. When I've asked a couple of my friends how they would feel to protest with me, they told that they felt as if they wouldn't make a difference. This constant reply has really brought my spirits down, and sadly I'm starting to agree with them. Unless we can muster up a nations worth of action, I feel as if my efforts will be easily squandered.

While I believe education is something that needs serious reforming, I am lost as to what I can do, without hindering my own educational competitiveness, to change our educational system for the better.

We've all had the piss taken out of our pet causes at one point or another, I suppose, and therefore Adam's despair is likely familiar. It certainly is to me at least. Also the fear of "hindering my own competitiveness" is well-spoken here—for sure, fighting back when you're getting screwed by folks higher in the pecking order carries risks and takes major spine.

Adam is right, people feel helpless. I guess it is because despite all the parades, rallies, strikes, and the like that we hear about often enough, the real victories that these tactics have scored (see Civil Rights Movement, The) seem to be in the oh-so-distant past. And ever since, the forces of avarice have crept back in and clouded many of our textbook heroes' greatest achievements.

Am I on the pulse of things, or am I way off? Probably I shouldn't try to speak for anonymous hordes as I'm doing here, but I can't help myself; our collective feelings of helplessness need to be acknowledged, analyzed, and bloody-well challenged.

Changing complex systems, cultures, stories, and minds is a game of chess and not connect-four. So we gotta get smart. We should follow Amir's advice and ponder our moves well before playing them. We know well enough what doesn't work. Very well then: What does?

One problem which it seems that quietly-oppressed majorities often have is a failure to envision what "protest" can look like beyond a few limited tactics, and a few targets for application. Imagine a list of basic forms of civil disobedience against rules that suck and don't work for anybody. Now imagine a list of places, times, organizations, or structures that might be susceptible to influence. The question for skillful protest (which I'd define loosely as the kind that leads to lasting and positive change) is how best to "match up" these two lists? Or, putting it a little more bluntly: How do you choose the right weapon and the right target to make things evolve the way you want? (Right weapon/wrong target, or right target/wrong weapon = fail.)

Pardon the militaristic language—that's really not where my heart is. But I hope I'm making myself clear: If we think carefully about how, when, and where we can leverage power against what is powerfully unjust, then damn it victory is still possible. Just don't let the textbooks tell you that the only way to do it is to go to a rally—or even that "a nation's worth of action" is entirely necessary. Disobedience can be creative, fun, and beautiful—think of the fightin' Santiagans!

Storytelling Secrets, Spilled

2011-09-09T16:51:00.000-07:00

Hey, this video looks like a darn good trick. I have aspired to storytelling myself before, but really never knew how to get much off the ground.

(It would seem this could work for nonfiction/essays too, right? A good essay should hold a reader's interest like a good story does.)

The Scattering Prism, Cont'd

2011-09-08T19:57:00.000-07:00

...More.

Courtney W. (in a post that packs visual punch):

Many say that the Government hid most of the information about the attacks and Bin Laden from the American public. The people were not informed at all about the activity. People love knowing information, facts and everything possible in the state of unease, fear, and vulnerability. Yet going back to how people's minds work and derived from animal instincts to make comprehensive decisions from information and analyzing things, more information is not always better. The media is not the greatest as one never gets the truth in the first place.

Katherine:

Obama is bringing back all the troops from Iraq, but 66,000 will still remain in Afghanistan, leading to many Americans thinking that Obama was not as progressive as we had hoped for. The war against terror has been over a decade so that even hardcore Republicans are starting to be swayed. [...]

Since threat from Afghanistan is dwindling, I think that the U.S. needs to go back to nation building instead of continuing its position as the police power in the world. This also reminds me that the U.S. should also not have involved itself in Libya, that Obama violated the War Powers Resolution, and that once Gadaffi is dealt with, U.S. troops should not stay there for peace keeping.

Andrew F.:

My dad believes that the government planned the 9/11 strike to raise national unity so they have approval from Congress and everyone else in the nation to attack and invade Iraq. But he also thinks that a lightning bolt sent from the United States with a virus in it caused a train crash in China. He says that because of 9/11, the government had the power to do anything with the support of the public, which I think is true.

Ken:

Actually, I really DID NOT know about [9/11] until a couple years ago. I am kinda ashamed of myself? (not really). [...] The truth is, I didn't come to the US until mid 2006 so it wasn't my fault for not knowing about it!

Kelsey:

I was 7 years old and I did not really grasp or understand the idea of terrorism and thousands of people dying all in one tragedy. If I was in high school during 9/11 I would have caught the first bus to New York City. I would have helped cleared out rubble, searched for people, or even feed the men and women working to clear out the mess. [...]

I remember I woke up around 5am that morning to say goodbye to my mother before she went to work (a Lieutenant in the San Francisco Fire Department). She laid me back down on the couch, turned on the television, and left for work quickly so I could fall back to sleep. I remember seeing a burning building on the TV and saying "Mommy could put out that fire."

September 11th, the Scattering Prism

2011-09-08T17:34:00.000-07:00

The challenge fellow educator Ira Socol put out for us to find ways to talk about 9/11 in our classes seemed apt to me:

What ultimately is vital, is essential, is that we help our students to become much better at being, "consumers, creators and distributors [of history, and] interpreting current events and building history." Because history and its implications are far too important to be left to "Hollywood" or those who control Hollywood, or to politicians with narrow self-serving agendas.

If we allow only those with power interests or financial interests to tell and preserve the stories of the past, the stories of our past will be limited to those which "sell" an agenda.

I struggled for a while trying to think how I might bring out some good discussions with my students, and came up pretty much empty. Got into a good (but all-too-brief) conversation with our school's librarian today and she made the point that because of the age difference between us and our students, it can be a tough topic to approach simply because of the cultural barriers inherent between folks who experienced those frightful days as a child or as an adult. (I wrote about this difference also when Bin Laden died.) Thankfully, among the new posts popping up in the past few days, some seniors did the ice-breaking for me. Among them:

Kristen: "It is almost like a vicious cycle. We cannot totally trust that homeland security is always there to protect us, we just have to trust them that they are doing all that they can to protect us."
Nathan: "Don't worry. . . USA is strong"
Brianna: "I know that even though the caught and killed Bin Laden there will always be questions about what provoked him and why he organized such a terrible attack. Yet again he wasn't called a terrorist for nothing. Right?"
Trevor: "Although I'm not set on what we should have done in the wake of 9/11, I am positive that we shouldn't have used soldier's well being as pawns in a game of politics and greed, and also we should not have hidden so many things from the American people."

At least one thing seems immediately clear: There's no "curriculum" for this. Such an event, with so many reverberations in histories before and since, is like a prism that scatters light in vastly different directions depending on where you stand to look through it.

This multifaceted-ness was borne out in the class discussions we held throughout the day. Each period's was completely different, and more than once I wished that everybody could have heard what everybody else said, regardless of which bells bookend their time in my room. That's what the blogs are for of course, and soon I hope to see the first half-dozen or so 9/11 posts unfold into many more. (To what extent this will happen, though, is unclear; I didn't require it as a post topic, I just encouraged.) Here are a few highlights, paraphrased:

Nick asked whether we should commemorate 9/11 every year in the first place. It does seem weird to turn it into a "holiday" or "celebration" somehow. (How different is Columbus Day, for example, from Columbus himself? Very different.) He got a lot of push-back about the importance of remembering innocent victims, honoring fallen civil servants such as firefighters, etc. But he pointed out that, for example, a three-year-old boy in Oakland who gets hit by a stray slug doesn't have annual celebrations in his honor. Should he? Seems like a fair question. Where do we draw the line between a tragedy that's familial and one that's global? And then I came home from work to find an article by an anti-war writer I like called "Let's Cancel 9/11"...
In Amir's class, we did a quick-&-dirty "hands-up survey" about how many people believed that the U.S. Government planned the 9/11 attacks. (Conspiratorial thinking on this topic is fairly common among my students, I have found in the past few years.) 3 voted yes, 3 voted no, with a big majority voting don't know. Amir started out in the "yes, the Bush administration was behind it" column—and the room got a little hotter when Chris said that that was "insulting to the people who died." In the same class, Justin put himself and his family out there to talk about his relative's disillusioning experiences fighting in the Iraq war, and his own intention to join the Air Force. Justin also stressed that the kinds of terrorism and war-making we deplore are common all over the world right now, and he is all too correct about that.
Zac—while taking pains not to get too simplistic about his interpretation—marked 9/11 broadly as the beginning of a decline in American power and global status. Many seemed to agree with him. I appreciated his clarity on the point that 9/11 is not just a day. Plenty led to it, plenty flows from it. (This got me thinking about where the beginning and end points of any event are...from the epochal to the mundane. When did 9/11 start and end, for example? Or, to take the same question and apply it to a contrastingly tiny scale, when does me turning on a light switch start and end?)

See what I mean? A scattering prism. This is as it should be, I suppose. The reason it's hard to talk about and make sense of such a complex event is, I'm afraid, because it's simply hard to talk about and make sense of.

There may be more commentary here in the coming days, depending on what shows up on the blogs and how much time we can devote in upcoming classes to following these strands. I'll close with a link to the post about September 11 which I wrote back in 2001, just a few days after it happened. In case anybody is interested in my particular view through the prism when it wasn't a decade but only days old, here it is. A big thank you to the students who bravely piped up today and offered their thoughts on a difficult, sensitive topic. You are inspiring!

Week Two: Meet the New Blogs

2011-09-07T21:16:00.000-07:00

'11-'12 = Year Three of blogging as the medium for my English classes. And one pure moment of joy I get each year is when stuff first starts showing up on the new blogs. In the initial couple weeks, folks are a bit nervous to pipe up in class (and for some of them, this will last more or less all year) but when the writing assignments hit, new voices crop up everywhere and unexpected stand-outs are plentiful. As a celebration of our new start, here are a few highlights turning up—and I've barely scratched the surface of my feedburner so far, so there is much much more to look forward to.

Some items on Kevin's bucket list:

I want a job that I actually enjoy doing and not a job where I wake up in the morning and say "UGHH, work again!".

One of the things that I want to do is visit every continent in the world, I can honestly say I may find a passion in traveling the globe.

I also hope to skydive sometime in the next 5 years (although I'm scared of heights) just so I can get that adrenaline rush throughout my body.

This is obvious, but I want to reach a point in my life where I can say that I am truly happy, satisfied with many aspects of my life.

A student I won't link to (yet) describes some ambivalence about blogging:

I am a bit worried. I am not used to writing for a random audience. I cringed a little when Mr. Sutherland told us that the whole class would have access to the blogs. I like to focus my writing towards a certain reader, or in other words, it would be a lot easier if I chose who was allowed to see my blog. I feel like I am restricted to what I feel comfortable the whole world to see, therefore, I can never be myself. Perhaps with time will come relaxation. We will see.

Lucrezia gets hit by a coconut:

Some days it happens that I wake up in the morning and I feel like a coconut has hit my head. Today was one of those days. [...]

So for tomorrow, I think I will either pray ''the God of the good days'' to be nice to me or to pray ''the God of rock'n'roll'' to escape uninjured as Keith Richards did, when he fell off the coconut palm.

(I happen to remember this incident...how the hell is that man still alive, anyways?)

Steven hits up our brand-new current events assignment to touch on a topic I've been thinking about myself a lot recently—not that I know the first damn thing about it—computer hacking:

I never knew that hacking can be a job. I guess if your good at hacking, you get probably get a good job out of it. You might think hacking is done for fun, but now a lot of people are hacking for money. In my opinion hacking is fine if it is for a good reason.

Savannah, a student of Bok-Fu (stand back) would face tigers:

When first entering I was asked questions by my Sensei like " Do you what 'Bok-Fu' means" and " If there were two cages each with a case with a million dollars, but one had a tiger the other a kitten. Which one would you pick and why?" is what she asked. I had replied which surprised her but she soon understood, " the one with the tiger... because i would want to prove my worth like I want to prove it to the kids at school."

For my fellow teacher-geeks, the pedagogical take-home: Diversity is fun. If you have a billion students as I do, it is better in every way to have them write about a billion things of their choice, then to have them all write about the same thing. Some of my colleagues would make efforts to ensure that all students learn the same stuff so that their next year's English teacher can take for granted that they'll already know X, Y, and Z. What fun is that? And who are we kidding? The only thing we can ever take for granted is that in five classes of thirty-five, each student is their own universe. It's always been that way, and as far as I can see it's always going to be that way. So we might as well learn to teach so that we maximize and celebrate the diversity (or "diversities?") we encounter, rather than trying to rub them out...just a thought.

The Fightin' Santiagans, Cont'd

2011-09-07T08:37:00.000-07:00

Another Just One Teacher first...a guest post! Thanks to my good friend Andrea for following up on the news from Chile.

Thanks Charlie for spreading the word about the amazingly inspiring Chilean student movement to save public education from being privatized. I am a Chilean myself and lived the first 14 years of my life under a military dictatorship that messed up our souls forever.

It all started with a military coup on September, 11, 1973. That's right, Chileans have their own 9/11 and just as the American 9/11 it is a sad, sad memory to anyone who values humanity.

With the military in power, congress shut down, political parties and elections prohibited, and thousands of Chileans tortured, exiled, and killed, the FBI, CIA and Chilean right wing parties had no opposition for applying capitalism in all its brutality. Education as all other social services are still paying the price.

I went to a public high school in Chile and against odds I made it into one of the most prestigious universities. It was a cultural shock: I was 1 of 2 out of circa 70 students who had graduated from a public high school, all other students had graduated from expensive private schools. I was proud for having had made it into the university yet sick to my stomach beholding such atrocious social injustice.

I am now doing a PhD at UC Berkeley; again proud of having made it into a prestigious university, again against odds—I was the only Hispanic student accepted into the program—and yet again sick to my stomach because of the horrible inequalities of the U.S. educational system. Two examples: 1. My program has the grand total of 1 Hispanic professor and ZERO African American professors. 2. After 7 semesters teaching at UC Berkeley I can count my African American students with my hands. THIS IS INSANE!

In a country that seemed irremediably dormant, public high school and college students in Chile are taking the future of public education as their own responsibility. They are not just thinking about themselves but also about future generations and are willing to loose the whole academic year to make sure that the right to education for all is preserved.

And they are doing this in creative and pacific ways, fighting the system with passion, creativity and determination. They have marched in thousands under the cold winter rain. They have taken control of schools and universities, forcing classes to stop for months now in a historical national strike. They have also staged a massive Thriller dance symbolizing the death of public education. And they have kissed in masses!

Check out those links and whoever you are, a teacher, a student, a parent, follow the Chilean student movement example! Que Vivan los Estudiantes!

—Andrea Urqueta

Days Four and Five: Exhaustion and Distraction

2011-09-02T18:35:00.000-07:00

I'm not the only one. A few colleagues I ran into today volunteered the same info: "Damn, I'm tired!" I crashed right after work yesterday, woke up to raid the fridge and switch laundry, then crashed again. After such a long, slow summer, the new rhythm of work-life has taken my system by surprise. Shoulda seen this bump coming—didn't.

Also I am noticing that my attention is pretty shattered. Riding my bike to work in the mornings, my thoughts reel hither and thither at top speed and my legs tend to follow. If I'm careful to concentrate on the commute at hand, then I keep my riding pace moderated comfortably and don't show up at school a sweaty mess. Then of course the first bell rings and the distractions really start. The easiest way for me to grab onto a strand I can focus on is to work with one kid at a time; sometimes I do this with the peripheral knowledge that some shit is going down in some desks behind me somewhere which I'd put a stop to if it were worth it to break my focus...But every break makes regaining focus harder and trains my mind out of the habit of attention. Whereas every time I hold my attention despite the distractions, it strengthens my concentration muscle. Unbroken interaction also pays more respect to the student I'm talking to (who may well have attention issues of his or her own).

Three-day weekend now. Rest, some exercise, some deep cleaning of my place, my body, my mind...Hopefully I'll spend the weekend smoothing out some of the bumpy adjustment back to school.

Day Three: "How Do I Start?"

2011-08-31T21:54:00.000-07:00

...Bar none, that's the most common question I am asked as an English teacher upon dishing out a writing task, regardless of the prompt. Doesn't matter what you ask kids to write, doesn't matter how much prep you've taken them through, you're going to get asked this question. I got asked again today. And today I finally began to formulate a good answer.

Why do so many people get writer's block before they even start writing? The trick is the assumption that lies beneath the question. If you're stuck before the first word even hits the page, then there must be something about how you're approaching your writing process (approaching, mind you, before you're even through the door and the pencil moves) that constipates you. Here is that assumption: That the first words you start writing are necessarily the first words of the finished product. In other words, that you start writing a piece at the beginning and proceed in a linear fashion until the last word of your conclusion is done.

Horseshit. If I were a wagering man, I'd bet that at least 99% of human brains do not operate this way. (I know precious few people who do; interestingly, one of them is six years old and she has powers of concentration which far outstrip my own.) Minds wander; it is in their nature to do so. Thoughts skip and jump, then they return, then they mutate. Then they leap, leave, and make love, fart, shimmy, break apart, die, and turn into songs. They do so especially in environments which are full of distractions, such as cramped classrooms. If we imagine that we can write by forcing our minds to crank out words in order, then we are tying ourselves into knots. It's possible to write this way, but it is no fun and it makes writing way more difficult than it needs to be. Plus, the end product is something you probably won't care about, having been so unfulfilling to create.

Where does this idea come from, that we must begin at the beginning when we write? I'm guessing that kids who have been schooled into hatreds of writing (many, many, many) are so hell-bent on getting it over with that they are determined to write, when they're forced to, from start to finish, turn it in, get a grade, and move on. I hasten to acknowledge the students I've encountered over the years who are avid and joyous in their writing. There have been plenty, and you can imagine how happy they make me. Nevertheless, these kids turn out to be the exceptions that prove—I won't call it a rule. But it's one hell of a pattern.

Don't let me get all weepy though; happily, I've finally gotten close to a good answer to "How do I start?" You start wherever and however is easiest.

Let go of the idea that you begin at the beginning, and imagine that you can start anywhere; imagine furthermore that once you've written some stuff (in any order that arises in your mind), you can go back and move stuff around until it feels right. Give your mind ample space and follow its wanderings, instead of trying to stuff it into a box it will never willingly fit into. Turns out, it's easier to move sentences around after the fact than it is to constrict yourself to writing them into writing them in the final order from the get-go. Like, way easier.

I'd like to distill this advice into a pithy sentence or two that I can stick on my classroom wall. Few students will read and internalize this post without a quicker hook that they can repeat to themselves, mantra-like, when they have a new writing task on their plate. It may take a while for me to encapsulate this advice into such a Yoda-like phrasing...I am open to suggestions. What sounds like an invigorating answer to "How do I start?" Give your mind space is apt, but too cryptic. Start wherever and however is easiest might sound too pat if nothing about writing seems easy.

My answer to this important question is unfinished and I will have more to add in the future. Like most teaching insights I've had, this one feels embarrassingly late and obvious. Whatever; they come when they come. Still, it's nice to feel that the first few days of this school year are pushing me to become a better writing coach. It's been a fun three days of teaching and that's surely a great start to the new year. Activities other than writing will soon occupy us, but at the moment I feel like I could keep rolling my wheely-chair around my classroom and conference with folks as they struggle with pens, pencils, paper, and words, forever. This is real teaching.

"How do I start?" How do I answer?

Day Two: Just Say "Go"

2011-08-30T17:07:00.000-07:00

After a few more geeky tech demos on how to set up a blog, we were off to a good start on our first writing assignment, which is more or less the same for sophomore and senior classes. To wit: Introduce yourself. The seniors will be doing this through their college entrance essays—we shouldn't wait to get started, I figure—and the sophomores get a generic prompt which they'll have to tweak and customize to their own best self-introduction. I got to see them writing, and I started learning about folks. One rock, two birds.

Having coached folks through the college essay many times before, I know what traps lie in wait for my students' writing processes and how to help them overcome. But I've done this project exclusively with juniors-and-under before, as a "practice run." This time, it's not a drill, not a test, not a dress rehearsal. It's the real thing. Just about every single one of my seniors intends to go to college next year. (I'll keep my thoughts about a culture that assumes everyone has to go to college to myself—for now.) So I wonder how the "tone" of the classroom might feel different, and I am certainly dedicating more time than I normally would to the project. The basic goal is to work our butts off on a first set of drafts, then set the project aside and do some other stuff, then come back to it after a break with fresh eyes and start the revision cycle all over again. I hope that some time off will make the final drafts easier to arrive at and better on arrival. Spending classroom time on something that could hardly be more relevant to the huge and difficult decisions the seniors will soon be making feels good, too. Keep it real!

As usual, peeking at folks' writing processes in action was eye-opening. You get people who brainstorm by simply writing and seeing what comes out, whereas others list out ideas and focus in on the most promising entries. Still others make maps or diagrams. Some people get stuck right off the bat...and what's interesting is that they're usually way less stuck than they think, once they can talk through a few blocks or misconceptions. I gave no instructions about how to get started on the writing prompts today, although I did belabor the prompts themselves to make sure students understood what was expected. There was a time when I would have "scaffolded" the brainstorming process with various charts, templates, graphic organizers, or other doohickeys. Nowadays I find it better to just say "Go" and then see what kids do case by case.

Tomorrow, more writing, more conferences, and maybe a round of "Two Truths and a Lie." I suck at all those ice-breaker activities, but there remains ice to break.

Day One Back Home at Alameda High (Santiago, Cont'd)

2011-08-29T17:05:00.000-07:00

OK, so it might have been a strange choice to start the school year off with a video of students rioting. Maybe it was my anarchic tendencies getting the better of me—although if anybody asks I can legitimately say I posted it to show my students a brand new type of post they'll be writing this year, in which they'll respond to news clips of their choice. Figured I'd better provide one as a model off the bat, and use it as an opportunity to see what kinds of comments I could draw out of the new crop.

Day one is often pretty quiet, with even upperclassmen who've been through the rigmarole before typically being too shy to step up and speak out until it's shown to be cool enough to do so. We'll have to work on loosening up, but hopefully it won't be too long before the discussions start flowing. Meanwhile, here were a few interesting reactions to the Chilean protests, paraphrased...

To me the most interesting sequence of questions went like this: "How many of you would be willing to hit the streets to protest against the rising costs of education in this country?" Few hands; say 4 or 5ish. "How many of you imagine someday you'll raise families of your own?" Half the hands or so. "How many of you would be willing to hit the streets to fight for a cheaper education for your children?" More hands than at first...say 9 or 10? Obviously this is pretty rough data, but I was quite puzzled by the number of kids who'd advocate for children they don't have yet before they advocate for themselves. I hope to follow up on this...
One student asked me, quite appropriately, "If education protests broke out here, would you participate?" My cryptic answer: "I already have." (No water cannons involved; see March 4, 2010 for deets.)
Amir offered some cogent commentary on the validity of Al Jazeera as a news source when the conversation turned from Chile specifically to, "Who among you watches the news, who doesn't, and why?" We're going to start out the year exclusively using Al Jazeera as our source for simplicity's sake, but I hope to expand the news network menu soon. (My early thoughts on AJ here.)

But enough of rock-throwing and tear gas. There's a new year to kick off and I'm feeling really good about the writing we'll be doing together. The best news of all is the high number of seniors in my third and fourth periods whom I've taught before either as sophomores or, in fewer cases, as freshmen. It's great to see them again. Also, Grace and Irene are on board as teaching assistants, which is exactly what they'll do—increase the volume of feedback and writing coaching that everybody gets. Super grateful for all these developments! Being around the younguns has me itching to get back into my own writing, too...all good feelings. Let's rock.

Meanwhile, in Santiago

2011-08-27T18:41:00.000-07:00

This clip is a bit old, and I've seen some updates from other sources since then (such as this massive make-out session). Nevertheless, it bears viewing:

Having just written about "getting beyond" anger at the injustices of industrial schooling and suggesting I'd be writing about this topic less, I'd like to point out that Chile's educational system bears ugly similarities to our own. There are historical reasons for this having to do with the military/corporate takeover of Chile in the 1970's which I won't pretend I know very much about...Point is, you're looking at a system where the universities are so expensive that just about only the already-wealthy can afford them, while most public school graduates either can't get in at all or have to drown themselves in debt to do so. Beginning to sound at all familiar?

Here's why I want to highlight this clip...I've been thinking a lot about what I'm going to tell my 12th-graders this year if and when they ask me questions about what lies ahead for them. (Incidentally, I've never taught seniors before so this will be a big learning curve for me.) Tuition costs ascend at dizzying rates these days, with student loans becoming more and more of a trap. The number of college graduates is also exploding, which would already degrade the value of a degree plenty badly before we even throw in the abysmal state of the job market. There's more; shall I keep going?

Nah. Before this gets too depressing, let's refocus on the unfolding events in Chile. My question is, when are American students going to get pissed off enough to fight back? Ever? (Never?) I'm neither for nor against the extreme protest tactics we see in the clip above, but I am for fighting back.

I Go to Work

2011-08-27T15:11:00.000-07:00

The dance, the marathon, the circus, the lockdown, the party, the grind, or whatever metaphor you want to call a school year, begins Monday. This has been the longest summer I've ever enjoyed. ASTI started and ended early, which meant that I had two extra weeks of time to myself; believe me, I savored them. Last year was a tough one. The toughest, in fact, both in and out of school. Even so, at some point a few weeks back a tide turned inside me and I started feeling the itch to work again. Actually I was pretty scared that '10-'11 burned me out pretty badly for classrooms, but after a long summer to cool off, I'm now more determined than ever to get beyond the petty stuff that pisses me off so much about schools and just write with kids. We're going to write our asses off this year.

The plan now is to de-emphasize anything in my teaching practice that takes away from time I can be spending coaching my students directly on their writing projects. This is tricky with 170 kids or so, but with the right tools it is doable. For '11-'12, I want to define the measure of my success as the proportion of time I spend giving direct feedback on student writing. It may sound laughably simple, but the fact is that there are so many distractions from this goal in the day-to-day of school life that it's going to take a lot of focus on my part to keep this goal front and center.

Actually I've been at work all week already. I'll admit that the first three days of staff development meetings had me fidgeting, and at first I thought that my opening blog post of the school year was going to be yet another one of my laser-blasts about "the system." But I've written plenty of those at this point, and although that type of post has helped me clarify some issues for myself and learn a lot more about how and why the system operates the way it does, kvetching about testing-standardization-etcetera appears to be doing little good for the people I'm actually here to work for. (And there are plenty of other teacher-bloggers tackling these issues with much more panache than I do.) I can't promise that I won't be tempted to fire up the laser again over the course of this year, but deep down something in my stance on schooling is changing. I need to move forward in my perspective on the role I play bell-to-bell, day-to-day, year-to-year, and I think that's happening.

The feeling is really that of being through and beyond the anger that's had me raging for so long. I'm certainly still furious about what public schooling is and where it's seemingly headed. But somehow I'm standing on the other side of the fury now, and it operates in the background, rather than clubbing me over the head and distracting me. It feels like a turning point. The countless injustices of industrial schooling, big and small, are not going anywhere anytime soon. Neither, therefore, is the anger. But I'm learning to use that feeling as fuel to keep my work with kids alive and fresh, rather than dwelling on the stuff that burns me out.

In other words, bring it on, Alameda High School. It is very good to be back, among old friends among the staff and student bodies. And when I find myself in need of a boost this year, I'm going to turn to this song, which contains something of the spirit I'm feeling right now...

How Flightily Flies the Summer!

2011-06-26T18:30:00.000-07:00

And there went June. Wow.

Although the writing has entirely withdrawn from my output, the reading input has if anything increased since the end of the school year. At first it was voracious as I went along with Derrick Jensen for much further disestablishmentarianism. Much further. Endgame, taken as a whole (it's in two volumes) is probably 800-1,000 pages of eco-revolutionary mind-kickery. It's like giving your whole moral system a long, hot shower. Got halfway through volume two before I needed a break—guess who? Jane Austen, of all people. Persuasion, my favorite of the three of hers I've read. A "desert island" novel of mine, for sure. And I need to read more women writers, period.

There's much I want to write, and much I wish I'd written before the year ended, so it might be of more benefit to my students. But all those dreams proved a bit ambitious as the calendar collapsed all around us. Maybe this post will kick me back into the habit; meanwhile, instead of words it's been notes. The last weeks of woodshedding on my guitar have been of incredible benefit. ("Woodshedding" is a term we musicians use to denote long, hard practice. Now you know some jargon.) Soon I'll take a trip back to the homestead to see family, including nieces.

Then I'll have another month before the next marathon starts. But if August shall be anything as speedy as June has been, I'll need to watch that calendar carefully, which—blessed Summer!—I haven't needed to watch at all recently.

And by the way—I'll be remaining as a teacher in Alameda, but not at ASTI. It's back to Alameda High for me, although not the same AHS I left at the end of '09-'10. I know my schedule, I think (sophomores and, for the first time, seniors), and some thoughts about plans for the year etcetera have already arisen. I've entertained such thoughts and then let them pass without writing much down, but before too long I'll have some shop-talk to return to here...Including the final reflections about my year at ASTI which I still carry, unwritten.

The writing urge, though dormant for the moment, is only half-asleep. I hope the muses will bring me back to Just One Teacher soon. Meanwhile, it's back to guitar-pickin' and beat-samplin'. Hope readers have had a lovely June...

Gigatons, Shmigatons

2011-05-31T21:23:00.000-07:00

OK folks. Time to get serious.

I was lucky enough to meet up with my parents this weekend in Oregon of all places—technically on the border of Washington and Oregon. And along that border runs the Columbia river, which for the past few weeks has been running ten feet higher than usual, "swollen by snowmelt." In immediate terms, this was mostly resulting in pain-in-the-ass traffic between Portland and Vancouver, WA, because the drawbridge has to lift way more often to accommodate the boats that suddenly have ten feet fewer to sneak under. Where the bridge used to go up 2-3 times a day (according to my uncle), it now stops I-5 in its tracks about 9 times a day. Mostly an annoyance for commuters, currently, but what about that river? What size is it heading for? What strength? What course?

This is just one example of how I've been getting more or less obsessive about my ecological thoughtways recently...Everything—everything—seems to tie in, from post-anarchist theory to the HR department, somehow. What started with Overshoot has quickly pulled me into a reading trend that is urgent, if not addictive. I'm looking at stuff differently than I used to—where trees are and aren't, how much space is between the houses, how wide the roads are, how much it's raining, how many people are out cycling, where there are solar cells, how many species of birds I can learn to identify, how much plastic you throw away after shopping at Trader Joe's, how big is the parking lot, where are the empty lots that might otherwise grow food, and on and on—sizing my world up differently. Of course we've known about "environmentalism" for a long time; hell, way back in middle school I did a science project about it. But something's different now that I understand a key fact. Namely, "there is no personal solution." Nothing you or I do individually, even if everybody starts doing it in unison tomorrow, can offset the destruction industrial life wreaks. Not even close.

From As the World Burns, graphic novel by Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan

In this country, despite it all still among the richest ever, "only 14 states are even planning, let alone implementing, climate-change adaptation plans." How about a country like Pakistan, population 170.6 million or so, a fifth of which ended up underwater last year while we weren't paying attention? The UN requested 460 million dollars in aid at the time—that's million with an m, less than half a single b, although the damage was estimated at about a hundred times that much—and it took a while for Pakistan's allies to pony up, as folks struggled to find clean drinking water. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton actually had the balls to suggest that Pakistan pay for its relief by taxing the rich...What a great idea! Think it'll happen here at home?

Part of the India-Bangladesh border
Image via The Guardian

Another example: Bangladesh. Here's a fact I learned from Eaarth that shocked me...India is so freaked out about climate refugees that it's building a wall like the the one in Israel or, for that matter, between the US and Mexico:

[...] melting glaciers upstream, rising seas downstream, dengue spreading in the cities. It's the most densely populated large nation on earth, and already "climate refugees" are on the move, after floods drowned crops in recent years. Some pile into the slums ringing Dhaka; about half a million arrive each year, 70 percent of them for environmental reasons. Already neighboring India is worried they won't stop there; "if one-third of Bangladesh is flooded, India can soak in some refugees, but not all," the former commander of the country's air force warned recently. Worried enough, in fact, that India has spent the last five years quietly building a 2,500-mile-long wall, modeled on the West Bank barrier between the Palestinians and Israelis, portions of which will be electrified.

Get real. Electrified or not, borders will mean much less than they do now in a world full of refugees as hoards swarm past them with wasted homes at their backs. What if the day dawns when there are more refugees than you can shoot?

Maybe it sounds too apocalyptic—but I'm starting to think that there's more to Berkman's thesis that anarchy (or at least something closer to anarchy than we now enjoy) is "inevitable" than I initially gave him credit for. A central tenet of anarchism is that nation-states suck and should come to an end—well, if more and more borders start melting under overwhelming pressure from climate-driven mass migration, then we might hopefully expect to see nation-states evolving into some new, smaller, more adaptable, diverse, resilient platform for social organization. Again, maybe not anarchism per se, but maybe something closer. Maybe we'll be forced in the direction of equal rights...Is that crazy? I think that Bookchin is going to have some excellent ideas about this, but I haven't gotten there yet.

And here's where else I haven't gotten yet: If solutions are not going to be personal, then what kind of collective resistance is going to prove effective? What lengths will we have to go to if we want to slow the destruction? Here's a documentary I'm looking forward to:

Need it be said? I'm not endorsing anything you just saw there. But it is certainly interesting what passes for "terrorism" these days.

Am I way out on a limb here? Future posts will have to fill in plenty of blanks. And there's a long list of posts for me to write, from the fourth piece of my final to a bunch of catch-up on recent reading. Among other stuff, I finally slipped in Daniel Quinn like a knife after all this time, and thank goodness I did—Ishmael got swallowed on the plane to Oregon, and then I read it again on the plane back it was so damn good. There's a lot to it that ties in here to the climate change knot...Ishmael, like Brave New World, is not really a "novel" at all despite what it says on the cover; it's a philosophical kick in the teeth that does an astonishing job of explaining just why we humans might find ourselves in the position of trashing our own planet and not knowing how to stop. I dare not give away its secrets here in the last 'graf of this post...read it and see, just in case I don't get to dropping notes here for a while yet! (I'm talking particularly to you, Clint. Thanks for your note and gift. "Argue better," indeed...Was that a challenge? Take my copy when I get you guys over here to hang out.)

A Few Highlights from Freshmen Reflective Essays

2011-05-24T21:08:00.000-07:00

Here are the prompts; results are trickling in and I'm scouring for clues...

Checking her stats (Blogger builds in some audience-tracking features), Elizabeth comes to some realizations:

Another thing that surprised me is my readership...it’s mostly the U.S. (no big surprise there) but I’ve got a few from all sorts of countries too. twelve from Russia, seven from Slovenia, three from Germany and three from Denmark...and that’s just the top of the list. What’s more, less than half of the people looking at my site are leaving immediately...and the average time on the site is about seven minutes. Is this good news? No idea. But surely, at least this means someone must approve, and that’s my biggest concern about my writing. I know that I should just go with what makes me happy and not care about what other people think (or so my elders always say. Well. Most of them,) but most of the time I end up looking back and thinking “wow, this writing kind of...sucks! Did I really write THAT?” (I think I might have self confidence issues) so the extra assurance is well appreciated.

Jesse looks forward in light of his new strength:

I used to be unsure of what I should write, and when I was writing my first blog posts, I was constantly deleting what I wrote and changing it. Now though, I have confidence, in writing my blogs and I realize what a big help blog posts are to me and how much they may have affected my life. I think I will be writing blog posts for a long time.

Amen, brother! Keep the flame burning. Meanwhile, Kasia's final is an ode to revision:

Drafting is comparable to carving a sculpture. The first draft is like getting a fresh block of stone. The more you put in your first draft, the bigger the stone is, and the more you can do with it, the bigger and more sophisticated sculpture you can make. Then you print the draft out, and edit. Editing is like carving the block of stone because you take parts you don’t like out. However, unlike carving a block of stone, in editing you can put stuff in, and you can edit what ever you put in as well. Drafting gives you a certain sense of freedom- no matter how bad your first draft may be, you can always make it better later on.

"Freedom" was a theme many students talked about. Luis emphasizes it:

The main reason I like having a blog is freedom. I have the freedom to post anything, ANYTHING. [...] Another type of freedom that we got from this is to write in any style. We can write with a certain attitude, like using fragments to put out a way to read it. This brought me to have an original style, I guess. [...] Since we were able to have much freedom about what to write about and questions, it led me to be able to write prompts in very different ways. [...] The freedom that we had throughout the year was the best (I’m sorry if i am saying this too much). I will consider to keep on blogging, even if we don’t have to.

Jessica seconds:

Blogging had changed the way i think about writing because now i find my writings to have more freedom. I could write whatever i feel like writing. Blogging is all about freedom to me where i can talk about my recent status and other past experience i would like to keep as memories.

And Karisa says freedom feels better:

Usually when there is a writing assignment given in class there are a large set of guidelines that need to be followed in order to get a good grade. This sort of structured writing is good for practicing the more difficult types of writing we will have to do in college, but it can sometimes be very unpleasant and makes me not like writing. However, when we have blog assignments that are not book reviews or other strict writing assignments, it makes writing not as bad as I normally feel about it.

Take my word, there's plenty more of this type of stuff rolling in. Note to self: Free writing is good; keep assigning it. Meanwhile, and perhaps unknowingly, Meriam has hit on one of the profounder truths of being a writer:

Having this blog brought my perspective of things to a new light. I write to write about me, about how I feel, how something makes me feel, how my stories are a part of me. That is why i write and when my writing is the strongest.

Bassam uses his blog to summon assistance:

[...] when I have a paper I post it on blogger and see what people think of it and they tell me what I need to do in order to make my post better or what to change to make it sound more interesting. For example I wanted to improve on my work for [a colleague's] class and I posted a blog that was related to what I was trying to turn in to her. A lot of people gave me feedback on what I should do to make it a better piece. I revised the paper and it sounded like a paper that took me a month to do. Blogging helps a lot, whether it’s to clear the air of your emotion or to blow steam or even help you advance as a writer, blogging is very helpful and can be used when ever you want and people form all around the world can look at your work and help you with it.

And finally, Justice brings the heavy insight:

[...] rather than trying to become a different writer I come to realize that I just needed to perfect the writer I already was [...]

QotD: No Need to Worry

2011-05-24T14:22:00.000-07:00

[...] it’s reassuring to remember what the US Chamber of Commerce told the EPA in a recent filing: there’s no need to worry because “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.” I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re telling themselves in Joplin today.

That's Bill McKibben in the Washington Post today, connecting the tornadoes in Missouri to climate change. (I finished Eaarth and have some notes to drop when I get a chance.)

On the Sophomores' College Essay Project

2011-05-24T11:53:00.000-07:00

Dear Sophomores,

At the outset of our final project for the year, a "test-drive" of the UC college application essays, we talked about the possibility that some of you might in a few years return to the drafts you've now (almost) finished and use them for your real apps. This might turn out to be the case for some of you, and if so (and if the essays help you get in), then lucky you! The work you've done in the last few weeks will have saved tons of stress and headaches during your application process—which, as you'll discover senior year, is already full of more than enough of both.

Over the last week and half or so of working on them with you, though, what impressed me more than the products of your hard work is the process itself. I've read plenty of strong essays, and plenty of essays which will also clearly not be useful come senior year. But what's blown me away is how hard you guys have been working on them, and the extent to which many of you have shown a fearlessness in your revisions and rewritings. I've found myself having a similar conversation about this idea with three or four of you in independent conferences, and now I'd like to say the same thing to everybody.

Whether or not you use these essays again in a couple of years, what matters is that every one of you started a week or two ago with an initial chunk of writing and steadily pushed it in all the right directions that college essays need to go. I consider this a huge success for us, collectively, and I'm mighty proud of our last couple weeks as a result. If we had more time—or if this really were senior year—there is tons more work we'd do. But as long as you remember the process you've been through to get as far as you've gotten (however far that is), then it's not too important how "final" you feel your "final draft" to be; you will come away with a big head start when you do start applying for real.

As I hope has become clear by now, college entrance essays present a quite particular series of demands on the writer...Especially if you want yours to stand out from the crowd. Greatest hits from all the writing conferences we've been having? "Tell a story, with sensory details," "You, and not your parents who sacrificed so much yada yada yada, are the one applying, so keep it about you," "Cut out redundancy with no mercy whatsoever, so you can fill up your precious thousand words with the best possible material..." (Other hints you found helpful would be welcome if left in the comment section below, hint hint.) Still, writing them is ultimately like writing most anything else of importance. You just keep at it, using any dirty trick you can, even if you have to scrap everything you've done so far and start over until you get it where it needs to be.

Last thoughts: The non-stop conferencing and google-doc commenting has been a lot of fun and you've given me a lot to think about in my own work. So I also want to thank you all for teaching me how to do my job better! And it's been nice, even at the very end of the year, to get to know you all a bit better through this project. (I'm not an admissions officer, but in my book you're all college material if you choose to be.) The essays are due tonight and I can't wait to see them show up on the blogs. Congratulations, we are done!

Dodging and Changing, Cont'd (Some Connected Teaching Questions)

2011-05-24T11:08:00.000-07:00

All I'll say is that Walking on Water has got me excited and inspired for another year in the classroom after seven or eight or even nine, depending on how you count 'em. Given the state of mind described in the last installment of my so-called "final," that is no small feat. Derrick Jensen makes exactly the connections between mass schooling and mass consumption that I've been trying to box against blindfolded and puts a teacher's role into a perspective that is somehow humbling and ennobling. Any fellow teachers reading this: Read that.

In a good talk I had yesterday evening on the patio with a wise friend, I expressed something aloud that's been in my head for a while. And once I heard myself saying it, the idea acquired a concreteness it hadn't had before. Namely: The philosophy that informs my teaching—the real reasons I do this job—can't be taught directly with much effectiveness. But as my anti-authoritarian leanings have clarified themselves over the past several years, my first impulses have led me to attempt just such a misguidedly direct approach. Caricature: "The system is messed up, guys! Let's get free and do some real open-source learning! Get it? You get it, right? Like, naturally...Because learning just happens...Right?" Well-intentioned though this approach may be, the results break down roughly thus:

5-10% of students totally get it and use my class as an opportunity to rock out as hard as they can. But only because they were already there!—I just try to stay out of the way and help where I can. Y'all know who you are.
Another bunch like my class 'cuz it's often pretty laid back, and they do some cool playing-around with their writing. But if you ask what they learned they might not have a coherent answer.
A bunch more take my kindness for weakness and blow the class off with light consequences. They may "fail" my class, but they may not give a damn about that, either.

This is not optimal. I still stand by the philosophy, but the implementation could use some work. This is part of where the transition from dodging to changing comes in, as mentioned earlier...

And as my view of the landscape shifts, I'm finding some other questions I've often asked taking on different relevance. Two more ideas feel connected, loosely...Both warrant deeper exploration but for now here they are in nutshell form.

First, the old issue of faith in the results of one's teaching work. One hears versions of this a lot, that teachers don't often see the results of their work and have to content/comfort themselves with the faith that their students will enjoy a payoff, perhaps years or even generations from now. The metaphor I used to visualize a lot was that of a teacher on an island, tossing messages in bottles into the waves. Maybe your messages are reaching other people on other islands, but maybe some aren't. Every now and then, you get a direct reply washing up on your beach...Otherwise, you never get to know what effects your messages are having out there across the seas.

This is true to an extent, and there have been plenty of times when I've stopped and asked, "Is that faith going to be enough to sustain me in this profession forever? Maybe not. It's too hard to work for results you can't see. Now let me go cook a meal, or draw a picture, or fold some origami, so I can do something with a tangible freakin' outcome!" But lately this question has troubled me much less, and I think it's because I'm focusing (or trying to focus) more and more of my attention on the present moment of the work. What is important is the interaction I'm having with a student right now—if I can give more of myself to that moment, then it's easier to stop worrying and let the future take care of itself. This may sound obvious, or maybe it doesn't...in either case, there are many reasons it's easy to forget this priority. The chaos of the classroom and the school day is enough to addle anyone's attention, for one thing. Furthermore schools typically share a "production mentality" where what comes out at the end is the most important thing, whether it's an essay, a test score, a diploma, a project, a college acceptance letter, or what have you. This too tends to shift the focus to the future and away from the present. But the tangible freakin' outcomes turn out to be quite simple to find if I'm looking for them moment-by-moment. Who needs faith?

Second, there's the equally familiar question of where best to position oneself to reform a system: Inside the system itself or outside of it? If I really want to help along changes in our educational system, do I have to leave the classroom to be as effective as possible? This is another one that has kept my mind ping-ponging for a long time, but rather suddenly it's starting to look like a false choice. I don't have Jensen's book in front of me to pull the relevant quote, but he makes a very simple point which blows this question away for me. Namely, there is no getting outside of the system I'm trying to reform. Hierarchy, capitalism, authority...This and not just education is the big game I'm hunting. (Not that I expect to see their dissolution in my lifetime—so here is where I do need some faith in the future of my work.) Whether or not I'm in a classroom, I'll still be a party to all these exploitative human systems. That's just a fact. So under the circumstances, a classroom might be as good or better a position than most from which to work.

As usual, I feel myself dipping into the imponderably huge. I'll stop here, with a quick apology and a reading check-up. Because of a death in the family, I will be out of town for the end of the school year and there are some things I wanted to say to my students here on J1T which I might not get the chance to until after we've all scattered for the summer. Sorry about that. And once again, check out Derrick Jensen, stat. I got so geeked by Walking on Water that I dove in and got two more of his books; one's a graphic novel which I'm hoping might prove a good way to introduce hard-core ecological thinking to kids and the other is...gulp...the first volume of Endgame. More soon.

Nothing About Me Without Me, Cont'd

2011-05-17T20:43:00.000-07:00

Volume 2 is up. We're getting better at editing, incorporating music, and also letting the interviewee's narrative "breathe" a little with some still images worked in for breaks in the non-stop talking. This is, I'd say, an upgrade from the previous installment. All feedback is welcome either here or at the mother blog, where we're assembling more materials and ideas for the project.

My Final, Part 3: Dodging and Changing

2011-05-17T00:10:00.000-07:00

It's getting absurd to call these posts "finals." I guess the slip in terminology comes from the fact that I like to view "final exams" in my classes as neither exams nor final. If a semester or an entire class is closing, then it's just as valid to view that as a beginning rather than an end, and to take these moments as excuses simultaneously to reflect back and look forward. The final I wrote last year breaks down into two categories, goals I have as a writer and as a teacher, based on reflections on the preceding year of work. I'll follow that format again with another double-"final," starting with a meditation on this tumultuous year of teaching.

Power relationships between teachers and students in public schools are just impossibly fucked up. Do we need to count the ways? There are many, but they all boil down to one basic paradox: We claim we want to foster students' independence and freedom, but we try to do this through a system that keeps students dependent on an arbitrary parade of authority figures year after year after impressionable year. It doesn't work, and efforts at "reform" are almost always prescriptions for more of the same. Why? Because the assumptions we carry about what teaching and learning look like are at least a century out of date, and predicated on making money the good-old industrial way, with cheap compliant labor. Our parents and their parents and their parents were raised this way, so uprooting these assumptions is going to take a meltdown of biblical proportions to get the message through the thickness of our collective skull. Such a meltdown may or may not be too far off. Recently I've been thinking of an analogy with medieval medicine and wondering how long it will be before our culture will look back at the educational practices of this era with the same haughty mortification we feel about, say, bloodletting.

It's easy for my geeky ass to write all this, and I'm not the first to point it out. But of course we haven't transcended hierarchical consciousness yet—I still live in a world of anarchy only in my fondest dreams, and I can't responsibly pretend that's how the world operates when I wake up in the morning and hop in the shower, steeling myself for another day at the front of the class wielding powers I do not and never did wish to possess. By far the biggest problem I have with authority figures is being one. Yet acting like I'm not is cowardly, and makes for sloppy teaching. So I need to grow up and behave more in accordance with reality if I want to have any chance at changing instead of dodging it.

Unfortunately the power aspect of my job—the many contractual obligations (administering grades, multiple-choice tests, etc.) that make me feel like a charlatan with every paycheck—has been shredding my motivation. I learned a lot this year about the flavors of burnout. It was confusingly bitter at first, like a pill you didn't mean to taste that ended up on the wrong part of your tongue before you could wash it down—but it got easier to control the gag reflex once I learned to accept it and keep on moving despite the afterburn.

There were lots of uncontrollable reasons this happened to me, both within and without school, the details of which are unnecessary here. None of them had anything whatsoever to do with my students. But my students have shared in the suffering from my bitter pills this year, and that I regret. What I learned about motivation can be summed up thus: When your motivation to work is gone, it's gone. The concrete teaching outcome of this sad but valuable lesson? As I wrote in last year's final, the amount of feedback I gave this year was once again too small—but this go 'round it was way too small, and for reasons I'm unhappy about. Not everybody seemed to care (by high school, some students have been tasting burnout for years and have learned to show up mostly to manage their grades), but some were clearly and justifiably disappointed by my silences. Meanwhile I've been off in space trying to reconstruct Planet Sutherland after tangles with unanticipated asteroids. A pretty sad situation all around.

Spilled milk though, right? I know now what burnout tastes like, so I can better remember the next time it arises. For now, it's passing away. Life is much happier at the moment—this does wonders for one's mojo. More importantly for the long term, I'm beginning to see the problem of power in classrooms as something I can no longer try to dodge, but must instead come clean about and take more open steps to change.

These terms come from an inspiring teacher in Canada named Joe Bower—previously hat-tipped—who traces the development of a subversive teacher in three phases. His formulation fits; check it out if you'd like to get hip to some professional secrets. I'm well past the first phase (follower), though I remember it clearly, and now feel as though I might be wading out of the murky shallows of the second (dodger) and waking up on the morning of the third (changer). As Joe puts it, "I won't hide anymore." After all, what's the good of being a subversive if you're going to be sneaky about it? You end up again and again in situations where you're trying to act on your educational ideals but only to the extent you won't get caught out, so you won't have to be in the uncomfortable position of trying to convince an institutionalized parent or administrator (or even a student) that what looks like "bad teaching" to them is not what it first appears to be. After a certain point this is just cowardice.

Why should I be afraid of my own ideals, the very reasons I bother to go through these motions in the first place? I'll say this in burnout's favor: one thing it's burned out is my fear of speaking up (not just on this blog) about how I intend to redirect the path of education, at least within my tiny little sphere of influence. My sister warned me recently not to start thinking I can take the world of mass schooling onto my shoulders, and she was right to do so. But something's got to give, and for me it keeps coming back to the power paradox: I can no longer both possess authority and pretend like I don't. Among other great bits from the new book I'm reading about writing and teaching, Walking on Water, here is author Derrick Jensen's succinct solution to the problem of power as vested in us schoolteachers:

Someone asked me once at a talk why I so stress the positive with my students yet am such an unstinting critic of those who run our culture and who are killing the planet. I answered immediately, "Power. If I've got power or authority over someone, it's my responsibility to use that only to help them. It's my job to accept and praise them into becoming who they are. But if I see someone misusing power to harm someone else, it's just as much my responsibility to stop them, using whatever means necessary."

I need to get that tattooed on myself, somewhere visible and convenient...The back of my hand?

Writer's Block Cure #15: Retrace the Scent

2011-05-16T19:13:00.000-07:00

I'm finally getting over the fear of reading books by Derrick Jensen and starting with a natural fit for a writing teacher such as myself, Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution. It's really good in a Gatto sort of way—pissed off about the same stuff I am, only smarter and more articulate than me. Anyways, I just found this passage where he's talking about what he does when he gets writer's block:

Along these same lines, sometimes getting stuck means I've taken a wrong turn. I often liken writing to being a dog following a scent. Sometimes I lose the scent. Then I back up a sentence. Is this where I got lost? Then I back up another, and another, until I find the place where I no longer feel lost but as though I've once again found the scent. Then I can proceed. [...]

At still other times getting stuck means I'm not yet ready to write the piece. I wrote the first ten pages of this book a couple of years ago, found I'd lost the scent, backed up, couldn't find it, and decided the book needed to not be written right then. I wrote another book instead. Then I returned to this book a few weeks ago, backed up one sentence, and found the scent was now clean, the book ready to be written. Had I written it two years ago, it would have been a different book, one that was not very fun to write and probably not very good.

For My Students as the Summer Dawns

2011-05-16T09:59:00.000-07:00

Dear students,

As you know, we're rolling through our final writing projects. The freshmen are analyzing their blogs, and the sophomores are taking an early shot at college entrance essays. Neither of these assignments are meant as "tests"; hopefully they will prove to be more like gifts in one sense or another. For you ninth-graders, the goal is to walk away with a clearer sense of yourselves as readers and writers; such self-awareness can really empower you if you know where your strengths are and how to build on them. And for the tenners, though it may feel a bit early to be thinking about the labyrinth of college apps, here's hoping that the essays you write now can serve as a platform for future drafts in a few years' time when you are ready to apply. The worst that can happen is that you'll at least have had some practice with these prompts; the best that can happen—which of course I hope comes true for as many of you as possible—is that you'll be able to turn to your blog and use this final as a rough draft. Wouldn't that be handy?

So that's the spirit of these semester finals: Gifts you give to yourself. But there's more to say, because the year is about to end and we may have some good-byes to attend to before long. I'm a little sheepish about including the following quote because it's from one of the freshmen's unfinished drafts, but it jumped at me when I came across it a few minutes ago and it raises useful points. So I'll quote it anyway and leave it anonymous:

First off, I would like to say how much I love my blog. I do not want to let it go, but if Mr. Sutherland does not stay than I can not blog. I just wish the new teacher(if there is one) will let us use our blogs again. I probably will not find the time to blog and forget about it all, but I still will miss it completely.

(This student is referring to the fact that I do not know the likelihood of my returning to ASTI next year, having been pink slipped, etc. We've talked about this so I hope it's as clear as it can be...which, given the way these personnel decisions get made, is not very clear at all. Cough, cough. Moving on...)

Let me make this perfectly clear to anybody who might be feeling similarly: You can write (and blog) whenever you want, whether somebody is making you do it or not. Capiche? In fact, you'll almost certainly find that writing is a lot more fun when you do it freely on your own terms, without an assignment hanging over your head. Furthermore: If you keep blogging, I'll keep reading, whether I'm at ASTI next year or not. One of my favorite rewards of transforming my teaching work from paper to paperless over the past couple years has been the ability to stay in touch with student writers who choose to keep the torch burning. Case in point, here's part of a post entitled This blog was awesome from Chris, whose sophomore English class with me ended almost a year ago. As you might imagine, I was pretty overjoyed to see this pop up on my radar last week:

Looking back at all of this stuff I wrote during sophomore year is taking me back! It's a crazy feeling to reconnect with all that stuff I had in my head back then. It's like I really was writing with the intent of documenting how I was feeling and where I was at, for my future self to look back at. So all of this stuff now just hits me so profoundly. I read the stuff from a year ago about baseball, songwriting, and all of the stuff about the peaceful warrior. I took on some pretty weird and difficult angles on things. I don't know if any of my individual conclusions or points that I made are really valuable to me now, but now I definitely appreciate how and why I did this. The thought processes I had were really genuine. There was meaning for me in every single world, even though I may not have been able to convey it well all of the time. Feeling that again is incredibly awesome. It makes me feel...stable. It's like this stuff is part of my roots, who I am. And it is clear to me.

Behold what your writing can show you when you take a moment to step back and use it as a mirror. So here at the end of school with the summer dawning, please try to keep in mind these last goals for our English classes: 1. Use this semester final to give yourself a gift, and 2. Let it keep on giving whenever the spirit moves you. No matter where we all end up next year, we can still learn from one another!

I'll be writing my own version of the reflective essay assignment (as I did last year in two installments), and I have already gotten good inspiration from some of the freshmen's rough drafts. Also it's been a blast doing non-stop writing conferences with the sophomores about how to craft college essays, which call for their own special brand of self-reflection. So I'm enjoying my work with you guys greatly and it feels good to end the year on a high note. Keep writing, we're almost there!

Anarchism, Part Five..."A 'Queen' Bee Does Not Know She is a Queen"

2011-05-15T14:48:00.000-07:00

Who's in charge?

Back to Ecology of Freedom. Last time, we looked at first nature and second nature. Nutshell: from the nonhuman world (first nature) emerged humanity, and from humanity emerged a consciousness complex enough to develop a new world of social institutions (second nature). The trick is to interpret second nature neither as evidence that humanity is above, separate from, or in control of first nature, nor that first nature reflects and justifies the social structures of control and obedience we see in second nature. With that settled, the next critical piece to summarize from Bookchin’s science of social ecology flows from this understanding of first/second nature: What is hierarchy (and what isn’t it)?

At a simple level, we might say that hierarchy is the opposite of anarchy; stratified social control on the one hand vs. “no gods, no masters” on the other. In a hierarchy, somebody’s always more important than somebody else, but coercive authority vanishes in anarchy. But of course it’s not as simple as I’m making it out to be. Bookchin writes, “I doubt that the word can be encompassed by a formal definition. I view it historically and existentially as a complex system of command and obedience in which elites enjoy varying degrees of control over their subordinates without necessarily exploiting them. [...] Hierarchy is not merely a social condition; it is also a state of consciousness, a sensibility toward phenomena at every level of personal and social experience.” And the Big Goal is “for students of society to fully understand these forms and to eliminate hierarchy per se, not simply replace one form of hierarchy with another. [...] If human freedom is to be definitively achieved, this [...] must be exposed and understood in all its complexity and interactions.”

Again we’re looking at anarchism at a far more profound level than the political here. We’re not talking about socialism, communism, capitalism, or anything else; we’re talking about the characteristics of hierarchy deep in the roots of any and all of those systems so that we don’t “simply replace one form of hierarchy with another,” which, sad to say, is just about all humanity has managed to do so far in terms of our progress toward anarchism. Go take a nice clean shower and think about it.

But Bookchin makes a further, counterintuitive claim which I want to highlight—that hierarchy is a strictly human phenomenon. So although it may look like bee colonies or groups of monkeys or packs of dogs live in hierarchies, to ascribe that characteristic to animal communities is a big mistake. (And one I have often made, like the times I visited the Monkey Park.) Hierarchy is our “invention,” and it’s ours to transcend.

But how can this be? It seems all too obvious that “complex systems of command and obedience” exist all over the place in first nature. Here are some passages clipped from the first few sections of the book, strung together to draw out Bookchin’s main arguments about this point. (One of the things that makes this book so tough to read, as I mentioned before, is the way it slowly and non-linearly unfolding the reader’s understanding of social ecology. It takes lots of patience and I sometimes wish I weren't the one doing the work of isolating paragraphs like this so I can untangle the threads. But I think I get why he wrote it this way and it’s still easily worth my while.) Here goes:

Social ecology’s use of the terms first and second nature gains particular importance when we examine the specifics of the transition from first to second nature. [...] Moreover, hierarchy, a strictly social term, is exclusively characteristic of second nature. It refers to institutionalized and highly ideological systems of command and obedience. Etymologically, the word derives from the ancient Greek term meaning “priestly forms of organization.” The utmost havoc has been created by anthropomorphically applying the word hierarchy to various entities in nonhuman nature. As a social term, hierarchy cannot be applied to so-called “dominance-and-submission” relationships among animals, where these truly exist at all.

[...] Do ecosystems really have a “king of the beasts” and “lowly serfs”? Do certain insects “enslave” others? Does one species “exploit” another?

The promiscuous use of these terms in ecology raises many far-reaching issues. [...] By making such anthropomorphic judgments about natural phenomena, we deny the integrity of nature. Even more sinister is the widespread use of hierarchical terms to provide natural phenomena with “intelligibility” or “order.” What this procedure does accomplish is reinforce human social hierarchies by justifying the command of men and women as innate features of the “natural order.” Human domination is thereby transcribed into the genetic code as biologically immutable—together with the subordination of the young by the old, women by men, and man by man.

[...] A “queen” bee does not know she is a queen. The primary activity of a beehive is reproductive, and its “division of labor,” to use a grossly abused phrase, lacks any meaning in a large sexual organ that performs no authentic economic functions. The purpose of the hive is to create more bees. The honey that animals and people acquire from it is a natural largesse; within the ecosystem, bees are adapted more to meeting plant reproductive needs by spreading pollen than to meeting important animal needs. The analogy between a beehive and society, an analogy social theorists have often found too irresistible to avoid, is a striking commentary on the extent to which our visions of nature are shaped by self-serving social interests.

[...] The seemingly hierarchical traits of many animals are more like variations in the links of a chain than organized stratifications of the kind we find in human societies and institutions.

It seems to me that Bookchin's key point about the difference between humanity's hierarchical societies and plant/animal ecosystems, which sometimes appear hierarchical but actually illustrate anarchy with great panache, is the bit about hierarchy as a "state of consciousness." Queen bees aren't queens because they simply don't think in those terms, if they can be said to "think" at all.

So, there's hierarchy for ya: A game humans have learned to play with complex networks of power relationships. We have also learned to project our hierarchical vision onto the nonhuman world and see power relationships there too, when in fact there are none to speak of. (This is a connecting theme to the concepts of first and second nature as well, where Bookchin warned us that if we project our assumptions about second nature onto first nature, then we mistakenly reduce nature's complexity down to a human-like, second nature knock-off.)

The job for our species is to unlearn this stuff; otherwise, we'll stay stuck in the same historical feedback loops, until we finish the job of trashing this place. OK, I'm done for now. Bookchin gets the last word:

[...] Accordingly, given the emergence of hierarchy and domination, the divisions that beset society are crucially important issues that the modern ecology movement must sternly confront and challenge. I must emphasize that we have to know how hierarchy arose if we are to undo it. We must explore the extensive nature of domination in all its ramifications if we are to remove the pathologies of second nature [...] Without a clear insight into the nature of hierarchy and domination, we will not only fail to understand how the social and biotic interact with each other; we will fail to realize that the very idea of dominating first nature has its origins in the domination of human by human, and we will lose what little understanding we have of the social origin of our most serious ecological problems.

Welcome to Eaarth

2011-05-15T13:45:00.000-07:00

Bill McKibben, whom we met in a recent post, lives in Vermont. I broke down and picked up his book Eaarth today (no, that's not a typo) and a preliminary skim suggests that he uses Vermont to make lots of examples about how climate change makes an utterly different civilization than we now endure urgently necessary. To wit:

In our Vermont town, in the summer of 2008, we had what may have been the two largest rainstorms in our history about six weeks apart. The second and worse storm [...] dropped at least six inches of rain in three hours up on the steep slopes of the mountains. Those forests are mostly intact, with only light logging to disturb them—but that was far too much water for the woods to absorb. [...] A year later the signs persisted: streambeds gouged down to bedrock, culverts obliterated, groves of trees laid to jackstraws.

Our town of barely more than five hundred people has been coping with the damage ever since. We passed a $400,000 bond to pay for our share of the damage to town roads and culverts. (The total cost was in the millions, most of it paid by the state and federal governments.) Now we're paying more to line the creek with a seven-hundred-foot-long wall of huge boulders [...] where it passes through the center of town, a scheme that may save a few houses for a few years, but which will speed up the water and cause even more erosion downstream. There's a complicated equation for how wide a stream will be, given its grade and geology [...] It mathematically defines streams as we have known them, sets an upper limit to their size. You could use it to plan for the future, so you could know where to build and where to let well enough alone. But none of that planning works if it suddenly rains harder and faster than it has ever rained before, and that's exactly what's now happening. It's raining harder and evaporating faster; seas are rising and ice is melting, melting far more quickly than we once expected. The first point of this book is simple: global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It's our reality. [...]

We need to understand the world we've created, and consider—urgently—how to live in it. We can't simply keep stacking boulders against the change that's coming on every front; we'll need to figure out which parts of our lives and our ideologies we must abandon so that we can protect the core of our societies and civilizations. There's nothing airy or speculative about this conversation; it's got to be uncomfortable, staccato, direct.

So hopefully this book will have good suggestions for how we can become "Eaarthlings." (There's a meaning behind the extra "a;" it's McKibben's name for the "new planet" we live on, not to be confused with the Earth where we used to chill out, if you'll pardon the expression.) Meanwhile, tough negotiations with new climates and ecosystems still have to get made on a daily basis all over this country and the world.

I've got some more notes from EoF, but I think I need to take a break from that bombshell and read it chapter-by-chapter over months...It's just too hard and too slow for me to dedicate all my reading time to it. We'll see what McKibben is putting down here soon. Here's his online activism hub, 350.org, if anyone is interested. (And here's some more YouTube apocalypse, a clip of the flooding in Vermont. It ain't pretty, nor are the results.)

Witches, Conspiracies, and Death Worship, Oh My!

2011-05-14T23:17:00.000-07:00

My 6-year-old niece Julia was recently cast as a munchkin in her Montessori school's production of The Wizard of Oz. Remarkably, she's grown up thus far more or less screenlessly; no TV in the house, and when DVD's have been presented to her she has typically eschewed them after a few minutes of bored watching. Among other cultural tsunamis she's missed as a result, both to her benefit and hazard, the glorification of violence looms large. So at the dress rehearsal when she first saw her school's play all the way through, she was pretty freaked out. After all, somebody gets crushed by a house and everybody else ding-dong celebrates. If you didn't know any better, you'd also be freaked out: Why would people be so happy about a person getting brutally snuffed like that?

My sister Kate told me that Julia couldn't sleep for a few nights, dealing with the ramifications of the storyline. Poor thing! The school called her and said, "It looks like Julia is pretty conflicted about her role in the play; if she decides she's more comfortable opting out, that's completely fine. You can pull her if need be." She was just one of many munchkins. But Julia on her own decided she'd rather perform because "It's fun." My badass niece conquered her fears. On the one hand, that sounds like a victory. But over the phone this afternoon, Kate described this episode as a "loss of innocence." When a kid learns the reality of villain-death and the tainted celebrations that inevitably accompany, that's a whole new level of moral calculus which surely deserves sleepless contemplation on the child's part.

I replied that this reminded me strongly of recent conversations I've had with my students about Osama Bin Laden. It may seem like a long way from the Emerald City, but my sister chimed in that she'd made the same connection. Maybe it's no stretch at all; OBL's death is a raw emotional event for most of this country, if not the whole damn world. Ding-dong, we killed The Terrorist.

It was one of those days when a project with my classes was over, but the vagaries of timing-stuff-around-testing fluffed start the next big thing, so we had a limbo day. And owing to the imposed silence of the STAR tests (yep, here's the usual link to my epic rant on 'em), I hadn't yet had a chance to ask them for their thoughts about OBL, and I was genuinely curious. After all, when 9/11 happened, I was 23 and my students were roughly 7. Seven! That's a different level of consciousness altogether. Hence my curiosity: What's it like to experience the towers falling in the first fuckin' grade, and to develop your political awareness in a Bush/post-Bush America? What do they consequently think about Bin Laden's demise?

Although my students' thoughts were unsurprisingly diverse, two notable patterns emerged. The first was that many distrusted the celebratory reaction to OBL's killing. Here are some sloppily-paraphrased responses (I did my best, but the talk was happening too fast for me to collect exact words as I took notes in class), which hint also at the angles they had on the "to show or not to show" dilemma about the OBL death-pics:

Troy said: Even if he did do all that bad stuff, I still don’t think it’s right to celebrate his death.

Cristian: If my parents killed tons of people, I’d still love them. But it’s disrespectful to celebrate somebody’s death so openly.

Shannon: Even if somebody is a bad person, we should respect them after their death.

Meriam: How about justice for OBL’s family? They didn’t choose him as their family member. It’s disrespectful to show a mutilated dead body to just anybody.

Bianca: If the government shows a picture, then it’s like we’re saying, “Here, look at this picture. We killed this guy.” It seems unethical. Too much propaganda.

Constance: Because of all the conflicting information, there’s a lot of suspicion. The longer the gov’t holds out on showing photos, the more likely people are to disbelieve that he has actually been killed. [...] Releasing the pictures is not necessarily “celebrating” his death. Nobody will be forced to see them. It’s just a matter of the government furnishing simple proof for what it claims to have done.

So here's the first trend: 9/11 notwithstanding, the dead deserve respect. I can't tell you how surprised I was to hear these responses, when I was expecting to hear jingoism from a student body raised in the era of Cheney. But then I had to check myself: Do I feel this way? Do I care about paying respect to Bin Laden, or forgiving him?

I'll leave those unanswered. The next trend among my students was more disturbing—a tendency toward conspiracy theorizing and unhealthy skepticism. Not all, but plenty suspected that the U.S. government was somehow behind 9/11, or that the Bushes and Bin Ladens were all in cahoots about it, or that everyone and everything has been covered up. Several didn't believe that Bin Laden was dead in the first place. ("It's an election year," they said. Ouch.) I didn't take notes on this part, but trust me, it was a strong tide. To paraphrase myself, I said to several students in several classes that "Skepticism is good and I don't trust what the government tells me either—but if you're so jaded that no evidence from anybody at all about anything will prove anything, then you will simply live paranoid. Skepticism is a healthy balance, a way of life...Conspiracy theories are a misguided blame-game." At least, I said something like that. At least, I hope I did.

It's fascinating to learn more about my students' consciousness, but frankly what does any of this matter if nothing in our world changes now that he's gone? Seriously, are we going to stop warring? I am slightly—and I mean slightly—optimistic about the fact that a few more congresspeople are trying to use OBL's death as leverage to start a debate about pulling out of Afghanistan, but given Washington's gravitational pull toward the Pentagon, I don't actually see war shrinking; I only see it collapsing painfully when it can no longer be sustained. Despite the allegorical significance that we've now "brought you the broomstick" of Osama Bin Laden, the ostensible goal which has mired us in Afghanistan, the great and powerful Oz would have us "come back tomorrow" to hear more about ending the status quo. How sadly prophetic!

While I'm on the Oz parallel, allow me to indulge in an additional layer of irony. What would L. Frank Baum have thought about OBL and our imperial wars? For what it's worth, he's on record in early 1891 responding to the Wounded Knee massacre: "Safety depends on the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth."

Mind you, I absolutely loved the Oz books when I was a kid, and read them over and over. And I would have paid bank to see my niece as a munchkin. But wow. Scratch the surface and you find that if it's not OBL, it's Sitting Bull. By no means am I trying to equate him with Bin Laden. I'm just sayin'...Celebrating villains' deaths has a way of looking more subjective and less sensible in the sober hindsight of history than it feels in the ding-dong present. And as Kate put it, any time we find a nation in the position of killing someone, whether justified or not, it's tragic.

Nothing About Me Without Me

2011-05-09T11:52:00.000-07:00

The initial podcasting urge has lain dormant until recently, when I've gotten involved in a project to collect interviews with, for, and about undocumented students. The idea is to raise awareness and advocate for students' rights. Maybe we can share some stories that might open folks' minds up about a huge and complex issue that's right under our noses, but which we don't often talk about directly. The project is called "Nothing About Me Without Me," and for now it's in the form of a blog and a YouTube channel where my friend and I are just beginning to assemble materials and brainstorm. Anybody interested in participating is welcome!

We got lots of great material from our first interview, with a student named Edgar who was undocumented for 18 years. This first clip highlights the emotional anxiety of living as an "illegal" person; Edgar also explains the chain of events which led him to discover that he could go to college. It's a rough draft, mind you...Lots of work can still be done integrating music and possibly some other images, there are some edits that need smoothing out, I'd like to get some more "rhythm" to the story so that it's not just a long string of talking, and there are some technical a/v kinks we need to work out. Nevertheless, we've culled a powerful story here and I'm really happy that this project is getting on the good foot. Many thanks to Edgar for being our first interview subject; the hope is that by spreading his story around, we'll get more people to talk to and widen the circle. It's all for the cause...

So You Think You're an Anarchist, Part Four: First Nature, Second Nature

2011-05-06T12:54:00.000-07:00

Murray Bookchin's The Ecology of Freedom is one of those reading challenges which is simultaneously thrilling and exhausting. As a follow-up to Berkman's What Is Anarchism?, which was mostly limited to political theory, I couldn't have found a better book to answer my big qualm about anarchism, which goes way beyond politics. In fact it's almost too good. EoF is a wide-ranging introduction to social ecology, which is far more than the sum of its sociological and ecological parts. Bookchin does a lot of patient groundwork both in laying out concepts which are new to me, and in pointing out how some old concepts we're used to working with are often unwittingly misapplied, with unfortunate results. The reading is painstaking; so far (preface, intro, and most of first chapter), the pattern is that Bookchin circles around and around his main introductory ideas, emphasizing them from different angles. It's not as direct a lesson in human ecology as is Overshoot, but I find that Bookchin's patient, nonlinear approach is already building in me a more holistic ecological perspective, on top of the series of terms, population scenarios, and ecological "rules" I mostly took away from Overshoot. Still I'm just beginning, and barely hanging on at that, so what I'll try to do here is summarize some of the first terms, main ideas, and big questions I'm bumping up against so far in Bookchin. We'll start with...

First nature/second nature: Here is a way to make sense of humanity's unique spot on the planet. One of the earliest questions to be addressed in this book (which surprised the heck out of me) is, What is nature? Bookchin splits the answer into two inter-related layers and uses this model to discuss tons more issues in subsequent pages. Here's a quote:

Following a tradition that may date back to the beginnings of Western philosophy, nonhuman nature can be designated "first nature," in juxtaposition to the social nature created by human beings, called "second nature." Social ecology is almost alone these days in dealing with these two developments of "nature-as-a-whole" as a highly creative and shared evolution rather than as an oppositional and purely dualistic antimony. By contrast, [other ecologists]—with their "biocentric" notions—often disdain the problems of humanity and second nature; indeed, they tend to venerate first nature as "wilderness." These ecologies often view the human species as an evolutionary aberration—or worse, as an absolute disaster, a "cancer" on the biosphere.

Here we get an implication of the two kinds of mistakes we typically make when we think about humanity's unique spot on the planet. As Bookchin shows repeatedly (although without necessarily applying the first/second nature terminology to explain his examples), people look at second nature and think A.) Hey! We're so different and so special that we've managed to set ourselves 'above' nature, and we can rightfully dominate it, or B.) Hey! Look at the way first nature seems to mirror our human institutions...there are dominant species and hierarchical food chains, structured kind of like what we have in our own society. Cool, huh? No, not cool. Both of these lines mislead. A. helps us ignore the fact that we aren't actually in control of nearly as much as we normally suppose, which gets us into infinite mischief with our environment. And B. is too anthropomorphic, reducing first nature to a carbon copy of second nature and "projecting" our own way of life onto systems which are way more different from us than they may appear. The problem with B. is that it tends to justify a lot of the worst parts of our civilization—think of Social Darwinism as a particularly nasty example of this assumption taken to an extreme. Once again, the key here is that Bookchin doesn't just lay down concepts, he also unteaches the ways those concepts are widely abused.

One more quote that summarizes these two mistaken thoughtways:

Whenever we ignore the way human social relationships transcend animal-plant relationships, our views tend to bifurcate in two erroneous directions. Either we succumb to a heavy-handed dualism that harshly separates the natural from the social, or we fall into a crude reductionism that dissolves the one into the other. In either case, we really cease to think out the issues involved. We merely grasp for the least uncomfortable "solution" to a highly complex problem, namely, the need to analyze the phases through which "mute" biological nature increasingly becomes conscious human nature.

And how does this relate to anarchism? Apparently we'll get to that...the next concept to flow from this one is that hierarchy itself exists only in human society and not in nature, despite appearances to the contrary. This is one notable way in which "biological nature increasingly becomes conscious human nature."

Where, in this matrix, does commenter c. stand?

The one thing I think we always leave out of these discussions is that human beings are animals. For real. Not in some obscure abstract way, but in a very real we're-not-much-better-than-our-house-pets sorta way. It's only social pressure that keeps us in line, right down to cleaning up after ourselves. Our dogs don't, and if we didn't have neighbors or parents or friends surrounding us and applying a certain amount of judgmental influence to how we keep our homes or our selves we probably wouldn't either. Far more of us than not end up never getting out of our pajamas or not bathing for days when we don't have to go to work or school for a week, but we're mortified if a friend stops by and catches us in our sloth.

(I think I'm subtly going to try to work in not-bathing to every post about anarchism I write.)

What I'm most excited about with Bookchin's theory is that it addresses the problem of dominance and submission in human relationships as a function of nature, not class or politics. Social ecology goes way deeper to explain how and why we humans do the shit we do to each other than Berkman approached in What is Anarchism?, and although the reading is slow and tough, I'm glad I found this book. Next up: Queen bees do not know they are queens. What does this tell us about human society and the possibilities for freedom? It's almost like a Zen koan or something...

Meet Bill

2011-05-04T17:49:00.000-07:00

I've seen this book around store shelves recently, and I'm getting more interested in it as a future project. Looks like a tougher look at what's really going to be ahead of us this century than we normally allow ourselves to hear. Which, collectively, we need.

But The Ecology of Freedom comes first. And it is going so slow! I may have to take this one chapter-by-chapter with other stuff interspersed, in the end...