When the hurly-burly’s done

Damian got me:

Christian Long’s summer vacation is off to a bang with the development of the first meme of the season, in which he asks:

What was the “worst job” you ever had that ironically helped prepare you to one day become an educator?

This one is pretty easy. I haven’t had a lot of jobs, but the year before I entered grad school to become certified as an English teacher, I worked as a technical writer for S——. I don’t want to cast aspersion on the company or the people who worked there (bygones are bygones, I say), but the job really wasn’t for me.

I’m not really a detail-oriented guy. I like to work quickly.  I like to write something and leave it and come back to it later.  I like to plow through my work as soon as I can, so as to enjoy the time after it’s done at my leisure.  I like to be left alone with my headphones on so I can block out all other distractions.

None of this really went down well with the people at S——.  I’d finish a week’s worth of writing assignments on Tuesday morning, then sit around not doing much of anything for the rest of the week.  When I was fired laid off, they tried telling me that it was because I hadn’t got enough done, which I easily disproved.  In fact, I’d gotten so much done so quickly that I had no choice but to sit around waiting for the engineers to program more stuff for me to write about.

So what did I learn?  I learned a lot about pacing, boredom, and assumptions.  I learned a lot about delegating tasks and trusts.  And I learned a TON about why I was the happiest boy on Earth when I lost my job and got to go to grad school.

–jw,

who thinks little hiccups are the key to future success

So I’d never heard of the term “edupunk” until I checked my RSS subscriptions this morning and found Dan Meyer’s parody. I spent some downtime today (sorry, kids, your homework’s coming back a day late) trying to figure out what exactly edupunk is. Stephen Downes’s post helped a little, but not much–I get the concept, but fail to see how it’s different from, say, regular old good teaching while not being a tool of The Man. Downes points to a post by Leslie Madsen Brooks at BlogHer that says

…edupunk is student-centered, resourceful, teacher- or community-created rather than corporate-sourced, and underwritten by a progressive political stance. Barbara Ganley’s philosophy of teaching and digital expression is an elegant manifestation of edupunk. Nina Simon, with her imaginative ways of applying web 2.0 philosophies to museum exhibit design, offers both low- and high-tech edupunk visions.

Edupunk, it seems, takes old-school Progressive educational tactics–hands-on learning that starts with the learner’s interests–and makes them relevant to today’s digital age, sometimes by forgoing digital technologies entirely.

So forgive me, edupunkers, but I totally came up with this first. I’m so anticorporate that I won’t even let my students leave my class to plunk down a buck for a bottle of water in our cafeteria. I forgo digital technology pretty often, including today, when we all went outside to work on our class graphic novel. And web 2.0? Shoot, I’ve been forcing my students to use blogs and wikis since autumn 2006.

Anyway, the “punk” part of the word kind of bothers me.  If we’re going to take a suffix from a musical/social movement that promised, but never really delivered, change, why not start the edubeat movement?  Afrobeat, after all, was an expansive, anticorporate, anticolonial, pro-community kind of music that had the added bonus of making anyone within hearing distance shake their collective thangs.

Terminology aside, yes, the whole edupunk thing makes sense, from what I can tell.  Creatively using internet tools and the offline world, including books and pencils and stuff, makes sense.  Suspicion of crappy and expensive panacea software makes sense.  Hands on, project-based learning makes sense.  Letting students use their interests to guide their inquiry makes sense.

This is what we call good teaching.  Now someone tell me why this is new.

From the New York Times:

School officials, who say they have worked hard over recent years to convey to students and their parents the dangers of electronic technology, said they now see that more work is needed.

(emphasis mine)

Via WestportNow:

Newsweek said its list [of the top high schools in the United States] was compiled according to a single metric–the proportion of students taking college-level exams: Cambridge, International Baccalaureate and Advanced Placement.

So a for-profit magazine is ranking public high schools based on their students’ participation in tests?  Is that all?
My school made the list, about halfway down, thanks, I’m sure, to students like the one who came to see me yesterday.  He’s signed up for five AP classes for next year and is afraid that dropping one in favor of two semester-long Honors-level classes will have a negative effect on his ability to get into a good college.   I did a little research on the College Board, who administer the AP exams, and was surprised to find out that they’re a not-for-profit organization; still, the amount of influence they wield over the anxiety of our high school students is really disturbing.

I know it’s impossible to measure things like school atmosphere, willingness to cooperate, student safety, etc–all things that we would probably get fairly decent marks on, but definitely wouldn’t place on Newsweek’s list for–but seriously, AP tests?  What about schools where kids can’t afford the $80 per test fee?

Someone set me straight here.

I don’t live or teach in Stamford, but I do both in the next town over.  And so I started reading Stamford Talk.

I never thought I was a material person, but now that my Civic and I are getting older, I find myself craving a BMW 6 series. I can’t afford that car, but I want that car, because I see some beautiful ones in my gym’s parking lot at 6am. That car has started to look normal- and, in my fantasies, attainable- to me. That car is not normal, and this area is not normal. We have some very, very, very rich people around here, and we have a lot of poor people. I’m in the middle and I feel pretty damn lucky about that.

If it’s hard for adults to keep perspective, it must horrible for kids. If I were a poor kid in Stamford, I’m not sure how I’d deal with seeing other kids driving nice cars, using their iPhones and talking about fancy vacations. If you have money, this area is awesome; there are so many ways to spend it. If you don’t… well, you’re stuck on 95, living in an ugly apartment, and unable to enjoy a lot of the activities around here. Thank goodness Stamford has some beautiful parks, the free summer concerts, and… uh, that’s pretty much all the free stuff around here, right?

Can you imagine living in this area with no money?

Valid points.  You can’t even imagine how valid these points are unless you’re in this particular part of CT, or something similar to it.  It’s crazy here (and I grew up in affluent Westport, just a few exits away on I-95).  It’s gotten worse, and it’s getting worse.

Meanwhile, we’re spending money on dumb things like water, which is a status symbol, a seemingly cheap manifestation of conspicuous consumption.  Check it:

This book looks really interesting (via Very Short List).

And have you seen Chris Jordan’s work? I can’t really explain it in any way that will make any sense, but he takes stats on American consumption and takes photos of the actual numbers.  His photo of the two million plastic water bottles consumed every five minutes, which is on the page I linked to, is staggering.

I’m never going to get people to stop thinking that having a lot of stuff is a good measure of their self-worth, but I’ll be damned if I stop trying to figure out how to discourage the sale of Poland Spring bottles in our school cafeteria.