When the hurly-burly’s done

ENG213 students: for the Monday following midterms (January 22nd), please write a blog post in which you reflect on what you did and learned in the first semester, and what you hope to gain from the second semester. I’ll be doing the same thing.

In case you’re missing anything from this week:

Huck Finn essay assignment

Midterm review sheet

One of my favorite working musicians is a guy named John Zorn. What I like about him is that he’s so restless–he composes everything from mellow chamber music to game-theory-based noise pieces, and pretty much everything in between. There are dozens of musicians in New York he can call on to play his pieces, and he shows up as a guest artist on other peoples’ albums as well. In addition to all of that, he runs a record label and a performance space. Not too shabby.

All of that is kind of interesting, I guess. But the main reason I’m such a Zorn fan is his Masada project. Working, as always, within a set of self-imposed rules, Zorn has written about 500 tunes that can be played by nearly any combination of instruments (or solo instruments, or even solo voices). In other words, the same song can be played by a traditional jazz quartet, a string trio, a rock band, a solo pianist, or any kind of group. Add to that the fact that all of the Masada tunes have enormous spaces for improvisation, and you’ve got pretty much infinite variations x five hundred starting points.

Here’s an example. “Karaim” is a typical Masada tune: it uses a vaguely “Jewish” sounding scale (based on liturgical music, Eastern European klezmer or gypsy music, or Middle Eastern folk music–I can’t figure it out). This is Zorn’s piece “Keraim” played by the original Masada quartet (Zorn (alto sax), Dave Douglas (trumpet), Greg Cohen (bass), and Joey Baron (drums). The sound isn’t too crazy–it reminds a lot of jazz fans of Ornette Coleman’s old quartet–and it’s pretty easy to listen to.

After a while, though, Zorn got restless (again) and started forming some new groups to play his Masada tunes. There’s the Masada String Trio, the Bar Kokhba Sextet (which is basically the string trio plus guitar, drums, and percussion), and my personal favorite, Electric Masada (Zorn (alto sax), Baron/Kenny Wolleson (drums), Marc Ribot (guitar), Cyro Baptista (percussion), Jamie Saft (keyboards), and Trevor Dunn (bass)). Electric Masada has a tendency to stretch the original Masada tunes waaaaaaaay out–whereas a typical original Masada quartet song will last anywhere from 3-8 minutes, it’s not unheard-of for Electric Masada to play that same song for up to 20 minutes. Here’s Electric Masada doing “Karaim,” the same song that we just heard: (part one) (part two).

So what’s the point of this? Why did I just tell you all about a musician I like, and invite you to watch some videos of his performances? When did my blog get so durned random? Simple. Let me try and explain it.

I’m fed up with the way my students are working, and the way I’m working. We spend a lot of time blogging, my students and I. We’re excited about the whole Web 2.0 thing (some students today, though, started calling a blog a “newt,” which is just weird). We’re just not doing anything with it that makes it worthwhile. I get excited when a student writes something interesting or has an epiphany (which the student probably isn’t really having, but writes about just to make me feel better about myself as a teacher). For example, I like what Megan wrote after she finished reading some of the slave narrative of Isaac Mason:

Well I am going to keep on reading, but this is what I have gotten for now. Reading a first hand account is much different from learning statistics in a textbook. Reading about a real persons life makes you really see through their eyes and think. It’s a totally different experience.

Now, I immediately felt great when I read that. Megan got it. She understood the main reason for reading a slave narrative, which is a primary source, over a textbook excerpt. She showed some empathy for Mason’s situation, and she made a connection to Huck Finn. As an English teacher, I am happy to see all of this. I probably should ask Megan to edit her blog post for syntax, grammar, and spelling, and maybe even assign an essay that continues on that theme. She then can hand in the essay, I can read it and write some comments in the margins, I can give her an A, and we can both be happy, secure in the knowledge that education happened. I then can pass that good news along to my learning faciliator, program administrator, and housemaster, and they can recommend that I be awarded tenure for the 2008-2009 academic year. I then can purchase a house in Fairfield County, confident in my job security. That house will have plenty of room for me to read and grade papers just like Megan’s hypothetical one, and a nice big bed upon which to cry myself to sleep out of frustration.

I mean no offense to Megan, or to any of my students, past or present. They are fine people, and will grow to do great things, and hopefully will run the world better than it is being run now. I am confident in their collective ability to read books and write about them, to make presentations using PowerPoint, to conduct mock trials and produce graphic novels and pretend to be Transcendentalists and sing labor ballads and perform Scottish plays and shoot documentaries and even pass standardized tests. They can do all that and keep smiling and being wonderful human beings who are concerned about genocide, racism, poverty, and the lasting effects of short- and long-term environmental disasters.

But that’s not enough. There’s no way it’s enough. There has to be more to English class than reading a book, writing about it, and getting a grade (or an opportunity to rewrite). Where’s the emotion? Where’s the communication? Where’s the humanity? I was talking to Olmstead last night and we realized that he and I went to high school at the end of the old way of teaching, and our students are enrolled at the start of the new way. None of us, teacher or student, know what we’re supposed to be doing, how we’re supposed to be using all of these great new tools to enhance our learning and to connect people and ideas to each other, but we know it’s what we need to do.

It’s been blogged to death already, but I need to point out, once more, the Time article “How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century.” I think the opening paragraph sums the whole piece up very nicely (my journalistic friends will know the proper term for this sort of thing):

There’s a dark little joke exchanged by educators with a dissident streak: Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after a hundred-year snooze and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. Men and women dash about, talking to small metal devices pinned to their ears. Young people sit at home on sofas, moving miniature athletes around on electronic screens. Older folk defy death and disability with metronomes in their chests and with hips made of metal and plastic. Airports, hospitals, shopping malls–every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. “This is a school,” he declares. “We used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are green.”

Our schools are antiquated. That’s not a knock, at least not totally: there are plenty of things we do right. Students need to learn to read and write and speak in English and as many foreign languages as possible (though why schools offer Latin instead of Arabic is beyond me; I certainly don’t buy the “it’ll help with English” argument–German would be better), to solve math problems, to understand our physical world, to research the history of human civilization, and, most importantly, to interact with others productively and pleasantly. We probably don’t need to start school at 7:30am, and I kind of like the idea of a year-round school with longer periodical breaks, but we’re still tied in to the old agrarian system.

At any rate, scheduling isn’t the real problem. And I don’t know enough about what goes on in math and science and foreign language classes to write intelligently about them (though I suspect that a lot of this will apply there as well). But I do know this: what we ask students to do in writing-type classes (English and Social Studies) applies less and less to our students’ worlds. The internet, as you doubtless have heard a million times, has opened up a whole new way of communicating and sharing information, and students need to be trained to figure out how to do that effectively and safely.

Yes, “trained to figure out how.” The crux of the biscuit is right there, in that phrase. Students need to be given opportunities to explore, to play with ideas that might not work, to get away from existing structures and expectations of instant success and gratification. They need to be encouraged to experiment with different information sources, to figure out which are valid and helpful and which are useless at best and dangerous at worst. Technology is changing so quickly that we as teachers can’t hope to keep up with everything–let the students use what they’re comfortable with as a bridge to developing new tools and new methods of exploration and learning. They’re already writing messages to each other from across the room on their cellphones; why not gently nudge that desire for instant communication and publication into a unit in conjunction with some kids across the world?

This all brings me back to John Zorn. He’s someone who is not afraid to explore; in fact, he’s a great metaphor for how I think learners should act. Within some parameters, which he establishes for himself at the outset of a project, he tries his ideas again and again, in different permutations, never content to settle on a final product. Can’t we, as students and teachers (and we’re all learners, or we better be, or else we’re all sunk), try to use John Zorn as a model?

Imagine this: at the start of a semester, I welcome my students to my English class, give them a little background information (as a starting point), and then invite them to explore their own questions about American literature after WWII, for example, or the relationships between individuals and their communities, or the intersection of race, class, and ethnicity? The students would use their blogs, del.icio.us accounts, and whatever other Web 2.0 things I haven’t even played with, and even the good old library and the books I bring from the book room and create their own knowledge. They’d present this knowledge in well thought-out ways that are appropriate to the subject matter–short films, oral presentations, graphic novels, multigenre research, or even plain old essays. At the end of the semester, we’d all probably feel a lot more like John Zorn–like we’d taken some interesting ideas and worked with them until we got to the heart of the matter, and that we’d really learned something. It sounds a lot better to me than making sure that 54 high school sophomores all know that the main theme of Macbeth is about ambition.

I want to get electric. I want to plug in, stretch ideas, bend them around and see what happens. I want to feel like teaching involves learning for me, too, and that it’s more than just giving out a book, discussing it chapter by chapter, and winding up at the same end point each time. There’s something to be said for the old way of doing things (that’s how I got to where I am, after all), but there’s a lot more to be said for living here and now, electrifying our thinking, and making what we do for hours each day relevant again.

Megan hints at the kind of feeling I think we all need every day. She found something new and moving in Isaac Mason’s slave narrative, and it shocked her into raw emotion:

I had known that masters were awful and beat their slaves many times and very hard, but I could not get over that on his death bed, the DAY he was dying, that he still had so much hatred for his slaves that he made sure that the last thing he did was beat his slaves senseless. This was what he wanted to do; it was his dying wish. And I can’t get over that that is just so heartless.

We should all be so lucky as to encounter opportunities to learn for ourselves that move us that much. I’m not proposing a solution here so much as venting my frustration, but I hope to keep working toward my dream teaching world. For now, though, I need to go eat some dinner, go to a meeting, and get my midterm review sheets ready.

Everything I’ve tagged with “huckfinn” on del.icio.us.  Pretty high potential usefulness, I’d say.

You can set up your own del.icio.us account to keep your links in one place, share them with friends, etc. 

ENG213: Instructions for all racism blog posts (as well as the breakdown of how many racism and satire blog posts you need for the unit) are in the Huck Finn packet.  Sorry if you’re confused, but you have the information…