When the hurly-burly’s done

My comment at Weblogg-ed. (I just found out that this is the middle school that my mom and aunt attended. Go figure.)

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.

June first.

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.

This is really dorky, even for me. Enjoy.

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

Two extremely powerful literary experiences last night.

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.