Started reading Bill Bryson’s new book about Shakespeare, but stopped. Not that it wasn’t any good, but my attention wandered a lot this weekend, and I just couldn’t give the attention it needed. I adore Bryson and am a sucker for books about Shakespeare, but I’ll have to get it from the library and finish it another time.
Played a gig at the legendary Bitter End in New York. Was surprised, at same gig, by a couple of former students. I hadn’t seen them since they were in 8th grade. They’re seniors in high school now. Do the math. Anyway, big shout to Justin and Calvin for making the trek and giving me the shock of my recent life.
I don’t think I’ll ever get over my dislike of hospitals and other institutional spaces. Especially when people I care about are in them. That is all.
New hobby:basement rehearsal space construction projects. Last Sunday, Pete and I spent the evening hanging the PA speakers from the rafters. Today, we bought about $200 worth of wood and built a false floor to keep the water from ruining everything.
Roger Cohen’s got a column in today’s New York Times calling for wider US availability of the Al Jazeera English news channel. It’s an interesting read. For me, though, the value of the column comes early on (emphasis mine):
America, and not just its front-line soldiers, needs to watch Al Jazeera to understand how the world has changed. Any other course amounts to self-destructive blindness.
The first change that must be grasped is America’s diminished ability to influence people. Global access to information now amounts to an immense à la carte menu. Networks escape control. To hundreds of millions of people accessing information for the first time, from central China to Kenya’s Rift Valley, the United States can easily look exclusive and less relevant to their future.
I don’t want to get all “Did You Know?” here–I’ve already presented the video, under official duress, to my colleagues. I do, however, want to challenge our district to actually live up to its admiration for the Partnership for 21st Century Skills and admit that things have changed, that the shifts have happened, and that we need to adapt or fail. There is no room for half-measures here.
In the middle of last week, I attempted to access Flickr from one of our office computers. I use photographs for a lot of activities, from asking my sophomores to brainstorm about segregation to inspiration for my writing students. I tend to get my photos from Flickr because it’s easy to use and I store my own photos there. Until the school district gives us enough online storage space for our own photos, I will continue to use Flickr.
Anyway, so when I tried to get to Flickr last week, I was presented with our district’s new filtering regime. We’ve had filtering in place for longer than I’ve worked in the district, but toward the end of last school year, the software they use was upgraded to something far more robust. Flickr was blocked because of, among other reasons, “photo storage” (which is exactly the point of Flickr, no?) and “nudity” (really? On Flickr?). Therefore: blanket ban on the site. I filled in the override form and am still waiting for a response, but I doubt I’ll get one.
Okay, okay. So one teacher can’t get to his photos from school. He should just print them out at home the night before, right? Yes. Absolutely. But what about all the other online tools that we can’t use from work? I can’t, for example, show my students any YouTube videos. Nobody reading this post from my school can watch any of the following, all of which I’ve wanted to use in my classroom in the past year or so:
And then there are the dozens of clips students have emailed me, clips that they have found because they were interested in what we were doing in class and decided to go a little deeper at home.
We have a new Acceptable Use Policy as of this year, and it’s one that finally makes sense (emphasis mine):
Despite every effort for supervision and filtering, all users and their parents/guardians are advised that access to the electronic network may include the potential for access to materials inappropriate for school-aged students. Every user must take responsibility for his or her use of the network and Internet and avoid these sites.
The bit about “filtering,” by the way, most likely refers to the fact that in any given classroom at any given time, you’ll find three or four or five students who know how to use proxy servers to get around our filters. If you’re one of my colleagues, or you work at a school with a similar fear of the internets, you should find out which of your students know how to defeat the filter. It’s useful information.
At any rate, the above excerpt pretty much sums it all up–responsible internet use (and our school’s motto is, if you can believe it, “Freedom with Responsibility”) means taking, umm, responsibility for your actions. To me, the rules should be simple: If you look at porn in the Media Center, you lose your network privileges. If you log in to Facebook when you’re supposed to be printing your Civics essay, you lose your privileges. Et cetera. That’s logical. What we’re doing, though, has as much do with teaching as it does with fishmongery.
I started this post with a bit about not being able to see Al Jazeera in the US. And I stand by that introduction. By blocking our students from being able to use the internets for useful things–for finding clips on YouTube that are directly related to the instructional program, for accessing scholarship (the filter blocked a literary biography of Eudora Welty a while back), for communicating (I’d love to have my students join up with Clay Burell’s students on their Ning, but, well…)–we deny our students a shot at relating reality to their education. Will some knuckleheads abuse the privilege? Most likely. And then we, as responsible and caring adults, will have to discharge our duty and work with them to correct their behavior. We can explain to their parents the nature of the offense, as all network actions are logged, and we can then justify the punishment. Case closed.
So who works at a school with no or little filtration? How does it work? What are some counterarguments? I’m trying to make a case for this in the not-so-distant future, so any input/feedback would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
So there haven’t been too many new posts here recently, but I’m not going to apologize. I try to keep my writing on this site relevant and readable, and I haven’t had much to address of late been able to formulate anything meaningful of late. There’s a lot on my mind–I started, and discarded, a post called “Our Failing Affluent Suburban Schools,” if that’s any indication–but I’m trying not to get all shrill and annoying here. So.
Yesterday I retreated to Manhattan with some old friends to get lunch and watch Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten. I’m a sucker for rock hagiographies–I was the biggest Behind the Music fan in my circle of friends–but for once, this is about a deserving subject. Joe Strummer is a fascinating person to know about. His posh background never prevented him from empathizing with people of other races or social classes (the film points to the Clash’s cover of “Police and Thieves” “Police and Thieves” as the moment when punk opened its arms to black people). And toward the end of his life, after some post-Clash depression that rendered him almost completely nonproductive, he formed a new band, the Mescaleros, that explored folk music from all over the world in service of Strummer’s always political, always optimistic lyrics.
Not everyone is going to change the world, or even give the world a couple of great songs, like Joe Strummer did. But there are plenty of people trying, and to me that’s really important. In the teaching profession, we tend to get stuck in our own rooms, hemmed in by state-mandated testing, intrusive administrators who just don’t get it, dumb committees we didn’t ask to be on, parents who are lied to by their children, children who are lied to by the television, colleagues who should’ve retired fifteen years ago, and all sorts of negativity. But there needs to be room for creativity, for idealism, for all that sort of thing. I’ve been down about my job recently, for rather personal reasons, but I keep thinking that someone in my classroom, if not a future Joe Strummer him- or herself, will at least get what he and his colleagues tell us.
Speaking of Strummer’s colleagues, do you know Billy Bragg? I’ve become a huge fan of his in the past couple of years. He and Strummer were friends. And even if they weren’t, they were. Know what I mean?
