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?

Bonus track: The Brad Mehldau Trio doing Radiohead’s “Exit Music (For a Film).”

His first entry in the “Nuts and Bolts” series is about wikis. Back before I knew what a wiki was, I applied for a grant (which got rejected) for some tech items that would let my students create their own US History textbook, as the one we had at my old school was garbage. Since I was teaching both US History and English at the time, to the same students, I thought writing a new textbook that subsequent classes could add to would be a fabulous way for my kids to demonstrate both their history content knowledge and their writing skills. The way I’d envisioned it, committees of students would write and edit the narrative sections, create sidebars, curate primary sources, create maps and charts, and post the whole thing online. It seemed like such a good idea at the time, and still does.

I want to use wikis more this year. Evan had our ENG/AMH213 students using wikis all the time by the end of last year. Their sophomore research papers, for example, were wikified. Though there was the usual grumbling at the start (”Another online thing? You’re KILLING us.”), the students seemed to have taken to it.

Now I’m wondering if it might be worthwhile/interesting/feasible to set up a 212 wiki, sort of a collective notebook for everything students might need to succeed in the class. Research done to understand allusions in texts, vocab lists, interesting links, etc., all could be posted to a central wiki to which each student would have access. Clarence has an interesting system for giving credit to students for working on wikis (they need 20 points a week, from what I can tell, and earn 2 points for small edits/contributions and 5 points for doing something that strongly contributes to the class’s knowledgebase). I am definitely thinking along those lines right now–there’s got to be an incentive for contributing to a wiki, but dictating what needs to be done goes against the spirit of the whole enterprise.

The second Nuts and Bolts post is about RSS. I’m with Clarence on this: it’s probably the most powerful tool we have available, and yet we as teachers aren’t using it. Clarence has his students subscribe to a selection of blogs using RSS and uses that to generate classroom conversations about information and how it’s gathered, presented, and used. To me, this is very important–we should, as teachers, be helping our students to make sense of the huge amounts of information that come at them every day. RSS is an easy way to take on at least some of this challenge.

The fact is that RSS is different for kids. They are used to being spoon fed information from often outdated textbooks which they hate reading. But when it comes right down to it, textbooks are easy. They simply have to open them to a certain page when they are told and work with whatever they find. RSS requires them to be active and involved with the collection and evaluation of the information they work with. They need to find trusted nodes and work with their “information pipe.”

This morning, I caught an episode of Where We Live, which is broadcast on Connecticut’s main NPR affiliate. It’s usually a show about local politics and issues, and it’s definitely got limited appeal if you’re not in CT. But this morning’s show was very interesting. It was about how Facebook, MySpace, and other social networks are changing the nature of friendships and social order in high schools.

A phrase stuck out, and I’ve been thinking about it all day. One of the guests described high school as an “information-rich environment.” This is nothing new–high school hallways years ago were filled with conversation, and classrooms with notes passed back and forth. But now that students are using social networks outside of school, the guest went on to say, there are new sources and kinds of information to which our students are privy.

Is this a good thing? I don’t know. I use Facebook (students–don’t try to add me, because I’ll ignore you, and it’s amazing how potentially incriminating/embarrassing a lot of your photos are) to keep in touch with a large group of friends. I just got back from a summer program in Scotland with a lot of undergrads, and I was amazed at how natural it was for them to assume that everyone’d use Facebook for everything from sharing photos to making lunch plans. It’s part of their world, and definitely part of my students’ worlds.

But information comes from a lot more sources, and these are sources that we need to help our students to use. They’ll do Facebook stuff with no problem and no prompting, but will they read academic blogs? Will they set up RSS searches for research topics? Will they download podcasts of lectures and speeches? And, most importantly, will they know how to organize the information they find, and cull out the useless/spurious stuff?

Nuts and Bolts III is about blogging. It seems like it’s been a long time, but I only started blogging, and having my students blog, last year. This site, for example, went live in July. Since then, I’ve become, it seems, one of the go-to people for my colleagues who want to get into classroom blogging. It’s flattering that people think I know what I’m doing, but I get the most joy out of just telling people, quite honestly, that they can figure it all out on their own. That’s the beauty of the technology–it’s by far the easiest to use of anything I’ve found.

I’ve given a lot of thought to how I want to continue to use blogs in the classroom. This past year, I used what Clarence calls the “mother and child” model–one central blog (mine) with links to each student’s individual blog. I read their blogs using my handy-dandy RSS reader, which enabled me to stay on top of their assignments and make sure that what they wrote was appropriate. I had to step in a couple of times and take down posts that violated the rules laid out in the beginning of the year, but I was able to do that in about five minutes from the privacy of my home. It was great.

My next step is to figure out how to award honest credit for blogging. I’ve thought of a couple of models. One way might be to require a certain number of blog posts per week, cycle, month, semester, whatever, and do it based on quantity. Part of me really likes this idea–if a student does all 10 (or whatever) blog posts for the unit, she gets full credit. If she slacks and does 6 of ten, she gets 60% credit.

But there’s also got to be some way of measuring quality, not just quantity. The blogs my students keep aren’t meant to be read in a vacuum–if I’m the only person reading them, they might as well be those old-school journals I collect from time to time. A blog is meant to be interactive, to generate conversation and debate from the community as a whole. And commenting on other people’s blogs (whether fellow students or total strangers) needs to be factored in as well, because that’s important. I wonder if there’s a way to create some sort of metric for online academic conversation, in which students present to me a combination of a) their own blog posts that demonstrate good, incisive writing; b) their own blog posts that generated a lot of discussion; and c) their contributions to discussions on other blogs. That combination, I think, would be a much more accurate way of measuring how well students read and write on the internet, and how well they are able to communicate their ideas and opinions in a public forum.

That’s a lot to think about, and something I’ll return to at a later date. Right now, though, I’m sick of sitting in front of this screen. There’ll be more posts as this week goes on and I continue to record my thoughts about what needs to get done.

Peace.

Mexico was great.

Photos here.

Right now, I want to celebrate.

Back in early May, 81 students learned that they’d be responsible for creating an original film based on The Odyssey. They were given skeletal instructions and turned loose to get the thing made in about a month and a half. They decided on a basic plot line and spent a couple of weeks writing a script (big shout to Star and Brad at Plotbot for their help) and storyboarding the whole thing.

Then all hell broke loose. There were casting, musical, location, wardrobe, and directorial decisions to be made. There were egos to soothe, shy people to draw out, budgetary concerns to overcome, and camera equipment to reserve. Students asked parents for permission to have an entire English class over to shoot at their houses. Ed’s class dumped my two classes, complete with an honest-to-goodness “It’s not you, it’s us” speech.

Editing hiccups happened. Fights occurred. There were a lot of suspicious looks from teachers in my corner of the building when they walked by. Snacks were eaten.

For a while, I didn’t think either of my classes would finish their appointed movie sections. It wasn’t until I saw all three movies this morning that I believed.

Let me assure you: there is nothing more thrilling than when your doubts are allayed. When the last strains of “Don’t Stop Believing” echoed in the auditorium at the end of the last movie, I finally realized what had happened: They did it.

81 sophomores.

3 fencing foils.

3 dance parties.

Innumerable (hopefully non-adult) shots.

1 dog.

Even the Download Beeping Song sounded good.

Was it a perfect project? Absolutely not. The feedback we’ve gotten has called for more structure, more definite due dates, more guidance. Totally fair. We sort of made this project up as we went along, no doubt. If I were to do this again with another class, say, maybe next year’s sophomores, I’d include strict dates for certain benchmarks to be met (first draft of script, final script, storyboard, shoot schedule, minutes of raw footage, etc). I’d also be much better at ensuring that students were reflecting every day on what had been accomplished, maybe through their blogs. I don’t know.

For now, though, I’m happy that it’s all done. The rest of the end-of-year wind-down seems anticlimactic.

Thanks, everyone. It’s been real.

Download Don’t Stop Believing.

Tom, I think you’re absolutely right about this only being news because it’s happened to privileged white kids. But I’m not sure where to go with that idea.
I guess one way is to take the approach I would’ve taken had I read this ten years ago, when I was an undergrad completely taken with the idea of a Rage Against the Machine-style Socialist utopian rebellion (complete with awesome riffage): let’s bury this story, ignore it, until we can convince the nation’s major media outlets to cover the same injustices as they happen to poor students of color.
But another thing to do with this is to use it as another example of how our schools and school policies are not in line with the reality our kids live with. I, according to the rules of the school where I work, do not allow my students to have their cell phones out on their desks during class. When a phone rings in my class, I ask the student to turn the phone off; if he or she refuses, I confiscate it until the end of the period.
If our school had better cell service (if you use Verizon and stand near some windows, you can receive calls–otherwise it’s pretty bad), though, I wonder if my thinking would change. Despite our school’s block of all social-networking sites (and, recently, most blogs, including ed-tech ones like Dy/Dan and a few others, I applauded my students when they made a Facebook group in order to better organize a class project.
We have to find ways to let our students use the technologies that enhance their lives, whether through enjoyment/leisure (social networking, videogames, etc), personal expression (digital camcorders, blogs, etc), or research (the internets), to drive the change we want to see in our classrooms.
Otherwise we’re still just dictating what students need to learn to deal with the world as it existed when we were their age. For me, that was ten years ago, and it’s incredible how much it’s changed since then. I eat lunch with a cadre of teachers in their mid-20s, and even the 24-year-olds can’t believe what our students know how to do online, with their phones, etc. The sooner we stop confiscating potentially useful tech items, the sooner we stop looking like idiots to most of these kids.

Let’s all say that together, shall we?

“June first.”

It rolls off the tongue. It shapes air pleasantly. It means that we’re in the home stretch, we who teach around these parts. Seven more class days before finals. With the block schedule that we have, it’s only five more days, at most, of each class.

Teachers are running around like crustaceans after the rock under which they’ve happily hid has been lifted by a curious little kid, who’s come walking down the beach and stumbled upon a tidal pool. The kid bends down, picks up the rock, and marvels at the activity he’s set in motion. The crustaceans, meanwhile, marvel at nothing. They flee.

At work, we crustaceans lament that we haven’t done enough this year, that we’re running out of time. At work, we crustaceans stop just short of wishing for more time to spend with our students. At work, we crustaceans are pretty sure that without us, the little ones will never learn anything and will be doomed to lives darkened by ignorance.

At work, we crustaceans delude ourselves.

DEAD PERSON:  I think I'll go for a walk.
CUSTOMER:  You're not fooling anyone you know.  Look, isn't there something
    you can do?
DEAD PERSON:  [singing]  I feel happy... I feel happy.
    [whop]
CUSTOMER:  Ah, thanks very much.
CART-MASTER:  Not at all.  See you on Thursday.

			(Monty Python and the Holy Grail)

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been walking a lot when the weather’s permitted. By “walking a lot” I mean walking anywhere in the area that I normally would drive to, with the exception of work (I wake up too early as it is, and I really don’t relish the idea of walking in the predawn hours). Why am I walking so much? There are a few reasons. One is that I hate paying for gas, and my car’s been getting lousy mileage recently (hopefully some recent tire maintenance will help). Another is that I got my iPod to work again. Another is that I’ve been wistful for the time that I spent living in Manhattan when I was in grad school and walked everywhere (it was just after 9/11 and I tried to spend as little time in the subway system as possible).

But the main reason is that I’ve finally figured out what I’m going to do in Scotland this summer before my class starts. For those of you who haven’t been following the minutiae of my life with the devotion of post-Goth shut-ins deciphering the clues on the latest Nine Inch Nails album, I’ll be at the Scottish Universities International Summer School this August studying creative writing and postmodernism, all thanks to a fellowship from the ESU and Lillian Butler Davey. The kicker, though, is that I bought a plane ticket that gives me an extra week of travel before I move to Edinburgh for three weeks. After toying with a few ideas (a whirlwind tour of everything Scottish; a week in Orkney culminating in a pilgrimage to Skara Brae; a ferry to Belfast), I finally figured out what I want to do.

The West Highland Way seems like just the thing. I’ve never travelled entirely alone before, unless you count going to a wedding for a weekend. I’m not concerned about being bored or lonely, since I’m pretty outgoing, but I decided that I need to take advantage of that fact that I can travel at my own pace to do something that requires me to travel at my own pace. Walking/hiking/backpacking 10-18 miles a day through little villages, across mountains, and around lochs seems like a great idea. I can bring my camera and a notebook, record what I see, curl up at night with the copy of Waverley that I’ve been putting off reading, lose some weight, learn something about my limits, and be ready to sit in a classroom for three weeks afterward. It’ll either be the best or the worst idea of my recent life. I can’t wait.

So I’ve been walking, trying to get used to the idea of going long distances. If the weather lifts a bit more today I’ll take a walk down to the beach and back, which’ll give me about 6.5 miles without walking around at the park. I figure if I do that a couple of times and build up a little bit of strength and willpower, I’ll be able to walk from my place to my parents’ house, which is about 15 miles, or an average day on the Way.

Meanwhile, Ed and I have been overseeing/facilitating/cowering in fear from the 81-writers-strong Odyssey Movie Project. Thanks to a remarkably easy-to-use Web 2.0 tool called Plotbot, and some great support from Brad Bouse and Star Rosencrans, our students have written a complete screenplay for a modern adaptation of Homer’s epic poem. Shooting will start this week.

At this point, it doesn’t much matter to me if the film gets made. That’s not true, of course–I want to see it as much as anyone else does. But this experience has been remarkable so far. 81 Honors-level sophomores, usually the most competitive and grade-concerned constituency in the high school, have figured out a way to work together to produce something brand new. There have been some arguments and disputes, yes–everything from whether to set part of the film in a prison to music choices for the final scenes–but they’ve been worked out civilly without anyone losing too much face.

And I’ve thought a lot about Plotbot in particular and how it’s a great example of how these new Web 2.0 tools can be used effectively in education. Plotbot is very easy to use–it took about 10 minutes to get most of my students up and running, and about 10 more minutes for them to be able to show each other very cool tricks and tips that they figured out without reading any of the online documentation–and is visually appealing. More importantly, it provides instant gratification (any changes made are applied instantly) and accountability (your username is attached to every change or comment your make, and everyone, including the teacher, can see who’s been doing what and when). There’s a cool social component to it as well, which should be even better when there’s a private messaging system.

While all this Plotbottery was taking place, a couple of my students told me that they set up a Facebook group about the project. I have no idea how that’s going–I’ve not been invited to the group, nor do I know if I want to be–but I think it’s great that the students have taken it upon themselves to bring this project into the space where they live. New technology allows us to break down some of the walls between the classroom space and the out-of-classroom experience. If you don’t believe that, teachers, check your work email from home.

When I’m home and reading, the first thing my roommate always asks me is if the book is for work or for fun. At this point, it’s hard to say. I’ve got a lot of books going right now:

• Slaughterhouse-Five, which is for the Am Lit II class I’m teaching, but which is also one of my all-time favorite books, and which I reread even when I don’t have to teach the course
• Jews, God, and History, which I’m using to set up a baseline for when I start working as the Youth Director/Hebrew High teacher at my synagogue in the fall and will be leading discussions about how Jewish teenagers can work ancient ethics into modern lives
• Lanark, which is for the SUISS course

I like all of these books way too much to start to make the distinction between “for fun” and “for work.” Everything I read, everything I experience, becomes fodder for school, and vice versa. New technology lets that happen for students, too.

At some point, when I have some time, I need to dig out my Dewey and Rosenblatt books and see if I can find a way to make them fit, too. In about a month I’ll be through my fifth year of teaching, and I think it’ll be high time to reexamine some of my older beliefs and see what can be done about them. Until then, though, the sun’s beginning to come out, and I think it’s time to go on a walk.

If you don’t get why this is funny, look at this.

Ellie, Ian, Heather and I saw The Namesake. The film’s been getting a lot of positive reviews, at least in my limited word-of-mouth world (my parents liked it a lot). I can see why. Despite some odd pacing, and a couple of anachronisms that make following the progress of time a little difficult (pay attention to the airport scenes), I found it to be an extraordinarily moving story. Now, I haven’t read the novel yet (though I plan to–I liked the stories from Interpreter of Maladies a lot), but if it’s anything like the movie, I’ll have a hard time reading it critically.

After the movie, we retired to a local public house to discuss what we’d seen, as is our custom. The consensus was that Mira Nair (and Jhumpa Lahiri, natch) absolutely nailed that awkward state between behaving how you think you should behave according to your parents and traditions, and behaving how you think you should behave according to your contemporary culture. Gogol Ganguli is quite literally trapped between his very intense desire to please his Bengali immigrant parents and his equally intense desire to live an American life. He winds up miserable no matter what he does. I couldn’t help thinking about events in my recent life, questions I’ve raised. I used to, for example, be embarrassed about my dietary choices (limited pseudo-kosher), telling people I was vegetarian when we ordered pizza.

Leaving the theater, my first thought was that The Namesake made me want to write. A lot. I’m working on a piece that might become a novel, but I’m really dissatisfied with it. I think I need to take a couple of the ideas I have (the grandfather with Alzheimer’s, the family spread across the country trying to hold on to their common points of reference) and scrap the cute literary tricks, the cloudiness, all of that. I need to be more honest and direct when it comes to the narrator’s emotions. I need to get out of the way and let the story be told.

By the time I got home I realized that I wasn’t going to get any writing done, so I decided to read until I fell asleep. I wound up finishing Six Memos for the Next Millenium, about which I’ve written before. The last lecture in the book, “Multiplicity,” made the whole reading experience worthwhile (”Visibility” almost made me swear off reading forever). Check this out:

[I]n our own times literature is attempting to realize this ancient desire to represent the multiplicity of relationships, both in effect and in potentiality.

Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function. Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various “codes,” into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world.

Calvino here is talking about the kinds of writers who use every possible piece of information and follow every digression (what Faye calls “birdwalks”) in the course of telling their stories. I haven’t read any of the authors Calvino discusses (as is the case for about 99% of his books), but I think I know the type. I’m thinking specifically of people like David Foster Wallace, who is sad when he can’t tell the reader everything in extreme detail. Or James Joyce, who found glee in explaning Dublin’s water system for pages on end.

The problem, though, for the reader and the writer, is finding the balance between extreme detail (when the protagonist starts his car, do we need to know the make and model of the car, as well as how cars work?) and pure impressionism (it’s nice to know where the story takes place, is it not?).  It’s a balance that our finest writers seem to achieve effortlessly.  In The Namesake, we get a lot of information about Indian customs (at least visually–there’s no real explanation, but we can figure it out) and why Gogol’s father chose that unusual name for his son.  But there’s also a lot of emotion, and that emotional weight isn’t dependent on the details of the story.  Gogol is simply trying to muddle through his life as a 20-something man, trying to find the middle ground between keeping himself happy and satisfying his parents.  And that little idea–Gogol’s situation–carries the whole thing.  Author Lahiri and director Nair transform this simple idea, one that nearly everyone can relate to in some way, and firmly ground it in the specific experiences of a specific group of people.  That, right there, is the film’s success, and what I hope to be able to do with my own writing.  Wish me luck.