HW 45 - More Big Thoughts on Schools

In watching the Super-Educator films we've seen a collision between what I've called "transcendent" and "immanent" educational paradigms. The transcendent mode is about verticality, about the future, about the content - by teaching important knowledge and skills students will be able to "rise above" their present circumstances to future success in the dominant culture. The immanent mode is about spirals, about the now, about the students - by using the classroom as a site for students to learn to make sense of their own situations - the teacher enables the students to experience meaningful and crucial intellectual understanding of their own lives, emotional validation, and personal growth.

In some ways this same collision played out in the 80s and 90s in the US - between E.D. Hirsch & Ted Sizer.

Sizer was a founder and a leading thinker of the Coalition of Essential Schools - which SOF has always been a part of - and focused especially on the student's development of Habits of Mind. Hirsch was widely known for insisting on the crucial role of a thoughtful and coherent core content - so that students would learn the knowledge that would provide building blocks for their understanding.

Often the theories of the two were considered in opposition to each other.

Please examine some of the following texts. Create a one paragraph summary of the main argument of each of the two thinkers. Using quotes from the text make arguments of your own that address (in a paragraph or two each) one or more of the following angles:

1. Do these theories contradict each other? Intellectually, emotionally, practically? In what ways do they? Could they be adapted to work together?

2. Which of the two theories do you find more resonant in your own experience? Has your education at one of Sizer's schools (he not only inspired SOF, he also came and visited) taught you to use your mind well, to be intellectually alert, to be able to think about important aspects of your life and society? Have you had any teachers that seemed inspired, now that you know about it, by Hirsch? For instance, would you say that the chemistry class's focus on molarity and ions and the periodic table of elements create an emphasis on knowledge?

3. What additional points does reading these theorists make you think of, about your own education and philosophy?

If you feel like you care about this and you are a strong reader, please make use of most or all of the texts. If you feel less interested or find it hard to make it through the texts, please read at least the texts in blue. Due Friday, March 18, 8:30am.

Wikipedia makes a good entry point for Hirsch & the recent NYT obituary works for Sizer.

For a very short and easy comparison of the two thinkers - you can click here.

For a longer article that examines the debate over "school choice" in terms of the two thinkers, sympathetic to Hirsch, click here.

For a longish article by Hirsch, on the central role of background knowledge in reading comprehension, click here.

For a medium sized speech by Sizer, from around the time SOF was formed, click here.

For a conversation with him, click here.

A right-wing essay in favor of Hirsch.

Feel free to consult Dr. Google on your own, as well.

Due Friday, March 18, 8:30am.

HW 44 - Big Expectations for School

In class we've discussed the tendency for institutions to become the battlefield for cultural wars. School, in particular, serves as a focus of these struggles as one of the few institutions that involves virtually all members of society as public citizens - as we the people - rather than as individuals, as consumers, as solitary internet clickers.

Other institutions (marriage, media, transportation) are experienced privately - the public institutions (Congress, courts) tend to involve minimal participation by most members of society. School combines massness and publicness and therefore serves as a battleground for most every public controversy in society.

The functions, purposes, and benefits that people claim for schools also highlights the key role of schools as a public institution. People say that if schools did X, every kid in the US would have a better future, less racism, less poverty, more creativity, more Google-type businesses, be skinnier, love poetry, better gender training, etc etc.

President Obama has spoken often of the importance of education. Please consider his speech, at the beginning of the school year this year, and note the benefits Obama claims will result from school success. Note how Obama offers a vision of school (our biggest public institution) as essentially a stage for each individual actor to achieve success.

Obama schools speech video (20 minutes)

Obama schools speech transcript

Consider this argument about the benefits of a liberal arts education - what benefits are claimed? Or this Thomas Friedman column - which at the bottom argues that schools provide crucial support for decent and prosperous societies. The Friedman article, in part, speaks from a long tradition of efforts to capture schools - essentially democratic public institutions for citizens - as tools for indoctrinating and training youth for capitalism. Others have always focused on the benefits of intellectual and social awakening that schools can enable.

Please respond in a 2-4 paragraphs to at least 3 of the above sources. Criticize or celebrate the arguments made in those texts in terms of your own perspectives (tentative or solid) of "What school is primarily for." Address the issue of what schools can plausibly accomplish and limits to the change that schools can make. What should be the top priorities of schools, who should get to decide that, and what can we reasonably expect from schools?

Please post by Friday, March 12, by 8:30am.

HW 43 - Journaling About School

While lying in bed before sleep with the lights low - earliest memories, strongest images, primary and secondary feelings, etc. Bring in notebook or typed version on Friday for "Cultural Code" exercise.

HW 42 - More Research and More Thinking

Part A:

Please add another three to four relevant sources to the research from 41. Add them directly to HW 41's post by editing that post. At least two of the new sources should be added to the annotated bibliography section - giving you at least five of those two-paragraph-each entries. Remember - the sharper you identify your major interest/question the better your research will be.

Part B:

First write, in 1-3 sentences, as sharply as you can, the question/accusation/insight that forms the heart of your exploration. Then write 2-4 paragraphs about the significance of your topic/interest/question. Please consider one or more of the following questions and also any other significance that you can address:

A. Why does it matter to you personally given the experiences you've had in your life - in terms of your feelings, hopes, memories, daily life?

B. How does your topic matter existentially - in terms of the meaning of your life, of knowing who you are, of whether you live well before you die?

C. How does this question matter functionally - in terms of what society requires, how institutions interact, international capitalism?

Part B can be labeled HW 42 - Significance and is due Wednesday at 9pm. The additional entries in 41 are due at the same time.

HW 41 - Initial Internet Research on Schooling

Maybe you've locked in on one very specific topic or angle during your interviews or maybe you're still exploring among several general perspectives. This assignment is intended to cause you to enhance your understanding of one or more aspects of school that you find particularly bizarre, wonderful, awful, +/or crucial.

Identify five or more internet sites related to your topic(s). Please make an annotated bibliography of 3 or more sources - each should include correct MLA citation, a very brief summary of most important points (2-4 sentences) and a very brief analysis of the utility of the source for particular topics or arguments (3-5 sentences).

Any sites you identified that you don't write up as annotated bibliography entries can be tabulated in an "Additional Works Consulted" list.

For those of you interested in education as tool of oppression/empowerment - here's the entry I started on Wikipedia.

Use the following as a model for each of the 3 or more entries in your annotated bibliography -

Andy's Model:
Viren, Tom et al. "How To Be Cool." http://www.wikihow.com/Be-Cool. WikiHow, n.d. Web. 2 December 2009.
This article, compiled and edited by many authors, attempts to provide advice of how to become cool. It contains a list of suggestions, additional tips, and warnings. Many of these tips will be familiar - "Be yourself" and "Be confident" - and others less so "Find a way to love learning."

This short guide deserves reading for its helpful simplification - in the introduction it reduces coolness to being confident, unique, and on friendly terms with everyone. The copious suggestions, tips, and warnings also reflect a variety of the dominant perspectives about coolness - which seems to primarily be understood as being admired and liked by the masses as an authentic and friendly and socially-adept human being.

Your goals with this annotated bibliography include tightening your focus on an aspect of school, understanding that aspect, and identifying resources worth coming back to (or not worth coming back to) for yourself and your triangle partners when presenting your research synopsis and writing your end of the unit papers.

Due Wednesday, February 24 at 9pm.

HW 40 - School Interviews x 5 & Synthesis

Part A - Please interview five diverse people (self, family, friends, acquaintances, etc) about a particular aspect of school.

Some aspects that we came up with in various sections include:

• Making school better
• The experience of being a student
• School as a sorting machine
• School as machine for conquering and puppeteering a population
• Pedagogic techniques - grading, testing, etc.
• The motivations of school - for the student, parent, teacher, system
• The functions of school - both actual and claimed/rhetorical
• The historical development and transformations of US schools

Please make your interview questions high quality - they should evoke real thinking, non-predictable responses, and insight.

After transcribing notes from each of the interviews, please turn to Part B.

Part B:

Please synthesize insights from your interviews (that you figured out or that someone said) to write a paragraph or two about a particular aspect of school that you find important and interesting.

Parts A & B should be posted on your blog Sunday the 21st of February by 9pm.

HW 39 - First School Assignment

Please complete parts A & B by Tuesday, February 9, 9pm.

Part A:

Please write 3 each of the most interesting, fascinating, powerful questions, ideas, and experiences you've encountered about school. So please make three lists of three items each.

Part B:

Please explore one aspect or moment of school in a 2-4 paragraphs. Show us what's strange or great or awful about it. Talk about how you feel about it - how do you think it came to be - what consequences it produces.

HW 38 - Art Project Cool

Due Sunday, February 7, at 9pm -

Please post on your blog a video/image/textual version of an art project that integrates insight into cool. I encourage you to consider uploading a video you've made about cool at school. See here for inspiration.

Together with the digital representation of the art project please address, in a few paragraphs, the following questions.

1. What insights about cool does the art integrate? What do you hope people will realize or question from their encounter with your art?

2. Describe the process of making the project - how'd you do each step? If it was a group project, what did you contribute?
3. Does making art seem cool to you? Why or why not?

Another Update

Ok - finished the grading for the semester. I have to drop the obligatory martyred teacher pose and confess that I deeply enjoyed reading most of the papers and also some of the triangle partner helps.

It probably helped that this marked my discovery of Pandora radio but the main factors were the quality of insight and writing and openness that many of you brought to your papers. I started planning our next book ...

Three quick spelling suggestions and a cursing reminder:
1. Definitely not defiantly (although makes interesting clinking noise in some sentences)
2. Rite (as in ritual) not right - when it relates to passage or initiation
3: Loose like jeans. Lose a game. Losing - what the Jets did Sunday.

Swear Words Reminder: Your blogs contribute to the insight of a worldwide audience. Please avoid unnecessary and unhelpful drama by finding socially accepted substitutes.

The list of kind souls who made my grading load lighter, who will be rewarded with a chance to shine on the exam on Wednesday at 9am - promptly. If you're pretty sure you failed but don't find yourself on this list, email me by 9pm Tuesday, in case I made a mistake.

Ultimate chance for semester credit:

1. Brendan B
   
2. Remy C
   
3. Paul P
   
4. Richard S
   
5. Paola Y
   
6. Andrew C
   
7. Lauren C
   
8. Chelsea G
   
9. Beatrice H
   
10. Sam K
    
11. Cindy L
    
12. Amanda M
    
13. Jace C
    
14. Ean M
    
15. Suoinnorra R
    
16. Russell R
    
17. Kareem T
    
18. Abe T
    
19. Katherine V
    
20. Kevin W
    
21. Juliette B
    
22. Jessica C
    
23. Yasmin J
    
24. Anias J
    
25. Granit
    
26. Elias N
    
27. Jin O
    
28. Victor S
    

To improve quarter 2 grade (currently below 65) and thereby semester grade by 5 points:

1. Aja H
   
2. Gavin M
   
3. Dinorah Y
   
4. Jenise L
   
5. Sam R
6. Ellen S
   
7. Stephanie A
   
8. Chris R
   

Tips for the exam - absorb the blogs of Yu-Xi, John L, and myself. Special attention to films & related essays, unit-ending essays (both units), art projects, stories, etc. And don't forget the orientation I offered earlier.

HW 37 - Cool Paper Done Draft

Please post your 1000+ word analysis of cool by Monday 8:30am.

Suggestions:

• Use sections, short paragraphs, bold, and italic to add readibility
• Use personal connections to make it more real and engaging
  
• Proofread repeatedly
• If you can't totally figure out a daring idea - name the idea and try to articulate what you can and also articulate what you think you're missing
• Include questions
• Benefit and quote from students - especially your triangle partners' blogs and suggestions
• Analyze a particular angle - make a focus - don't just give a couple random thoughts about each of the 15 aspects of cool we've discovered
• Address issues of authenticity and performance
  
• Puzzle through paradoxes
• Let yourself enjoy thinking and writing - even if its hard and frustrating and more work than texting "wat up" to your friends
• Make a little works cited at the end, even if it isn't perfectly MLA style
  

HW 36 - Triangle Partner Help

For this assignment, due by Friday 8:30am, please help your triangle partners make progress on their cool papers.

Let's try a different format.

1. Please re-write each person's main-idea/big-insight/thesis so that it is vivider, clearer, sharper. If you don't think your version is an improvement try again. If its still not, offer it anyway, with an apology.
2. Then write a paragraph for the person's main idea - some evidence, a story, a strong connection, some implications, etc. Write it really well, so that the triangle partner could just quote the whole thing, or a small part, in her paper.
3. Offer a short list - of 2-5 items that the triangle partner should consider for her next draft - specific spelling and grammar issues can be only one item. Other items could include particular questions to address, problems with the argument, evidence to include, etc.

As usual leave the comments on the triangle partners' blogs, and copy and paste to your own (HW 36). As usual if your partner lets you down, encourage them to step up. If you're still left in the lurch, abandon him/her and find new temporary partners.

I think this will be more fun, and more blue-skinned, than our usual way.

Cool Example Paper - Rough Draft - 1070+ words

What Cool Is & Isn't

Cool - a red-lined velvet boxy prison that we gladly sentence ourselves to - and flamboyantly throw out the key. Cool is not the ineffable mystery - the je ne sais quoi - that people claim. Its not just our consumer choices. Cool is a synthesis of an interior heroic narrative and exterior social approval. Our worldview - our received cultural maps contain sections - the "hero's journey" and "how should we live" and "getting along well with others"- that dictate our approach to cool. These cultural maps are usually provided to us based on our position in society - gender, race, class, nationality, etc - through core cultural institutions - family, school, media.

Thus - our aspirations, preferences, and self-understanding are very often the product of a crude enactment of a particular demographic. The white young man growing up in the farmer family in western Kansas will (simplified and generalized) watch Fox with his parents and wear a baseball cap and vote Republican and admire George Bush and listen to country music and collect rifles. Obama will not be cool to him. A particular 'cool' sensibility is not primarily the unique gift of a self-expressing creative spirit - it is a consequence of demographics and associated life experiences, values, and marketing.

Goffman (1959) phrased the unfreedom of cool in another way. He theorized that the 'scenes' we participate gloop together into one or more 'characters' which form the core of our 'self'. We aspire to successful and 'natural' performance of these roles - and collect props and bits of costumes and preferences to sustain the character. Falling down jeans were valued by urban youth 2002-2010 not because of creative desires to share boxer designs - but because the falling down jeans served as an effective costume bit for the cartoony character that the urban youth had learned to enact and thus to see himself as - oppositional, preening, conformist, and crude. We're all close captioned (Fugazi).

Why Cool?

Why do we lock ourselves in these well-decorated prisons? I believe we can identify two primary reasons (an 'inner' and 'outer') - the inner compulsion to imprison ourselves is an attempt to escape a sense of meaningless floundering confusion. The outer compulsion is the need to present an attractive consistent 'face' to the demanding performances of the world.

We all know (to some extent) that we're going to die (though we deploy various shields against this knowledge). What are we going to do until then? What can offer our life a narrative thread - a sense of literary cohesion?

And we're surrounded by others in complex social arrangements that demand from us that who we were yesterday should be strongly related to who we will be tomorrow. After all, for everyone else, we're bit players in THEIR drama - and imagine how Rihanna would react if a back-up dancer seized the mic? People like us to play a predictable person - a character - a dependable role player. In fact - they require it - there's lots of penalties for people who can't or won't do that.

So Now What?

The percentage of gringo lefty public school teachers who have been vegetarian and listen to Radiohead and believe that the meaning of life has something to do with deeper understanding and voted for Obama is probably pretty high. Thrift store clothing and uncombed hair typify my subculture as well (and some role distance). Though tattoos have become common among my subculture my family brought me up fundamentally Apollonian and the lack of tattoos goes along with the lack of drug use and having already been done with college by the time body alteration started getting common. I've been shaped into a cartoony character in many ways - by my social position and consequent roles and the scenes I play in.

(An important point to consider - as Foucault pointed out later in his career - is that these social pressures don't just limit us, they also construct us - they produce us - if it weren't for family/school/media I wouldn't be a free and natural organic soul able to dance as I want to - I'd be dead or non-human. Cut the strings and the puppet doesn't dance free!)

So how should I integrate the understanding of myself as performer - as character? Should I experiment with other characters - start wearing falling down jeans and collect some rifles and buy a TV to watch Fox? Maybe that wouldn't be too bad an idea - why do people go overseas to be exchange students when they could experience different positionality and associated cultural cues around the block?

Of course the truth is that I don't want to watch Fox, I can't stand the idea of having to hold my pants up with my hand, it'd be illegal (and I'm glad about that) to start a rifle collection in NYC.

I want to navigate my life by my cultural map - including my sense of cool - my hero's journey, my sense of what is worth appreciation and admiration. The new segments of my map that I gain will come as a result of me using my existing map to find them. I think learning German is cool - and so is philosophy - so now I'm reading Schopenhauer and he might alter my map - but it will be an organic/evolutionary development (a stream of consciousness rather than the interruption of a seizure, an epiphany, a cult).

Does it devalue my life to realize that I'm also one of the ones that Shakespeare was describing? "But a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

But isn't this realization - that we're performing according to particular cultural scripts - the only chance we have to choose another performance, to be aware of the meaning of our actions, to see our own contradictions, to glimpse our own absurdity? Isn't self-awareness the goal of philosophy (from the ancient Greeks' to the Matrix - "know thyself")? Doesn't this insight help us live a little lighter - a little humorously, taking ourselves a little less desperately seriously?

Despite the benefits the realization of our performedness - our shapedness - our absurdity can make it hard (or rather reveal that it's hard) to figure out what matters, what we should do, who we should become.