When the hurly-burly’s done

Bottled water might be pretty bad for you.

The Portal is up and running now. I figured it’d never happen–logging in last year was nearly impossible, there was next to no functionality, and the whole thing was slower than institutional change. A few weeks ago, though, we were told that all teachers had to be fully Portalized by October 1st. And now, with just a few minor glitches (I can name a couple of colleagues who still can’t log in, which seems to be a problem that needs to be dealt with), we’re up and running.

Welcome to the desert of the real.

Of course, the local press is fawning over the Portal. Here’s Colin Gustafson’s lede in his article on the Portal for the Greenwich Time:

The days of the “dog-ate-my-homework” excuse may be numbered in Greenwich.

It’s probably not true, of course. There are plenty of reasons why students still won’t do their homework, and plenty of reasons why their parents will continue to get them out of it. It’s pretty much a high-tech version of the homework-monitoring sheets we give to students who are having trouble staying afloat–the week’s homework is written on a sheet that is signed by the student’s teacher, indicating that the assignments on the sheet are the ones the teacher actually assigned, and then the student shows the sheet to his or her parents.

My issue, of course, isn’t whether it’s a good thing for parents to know what their students are up to in school, or even what their homework assignments are. What interests me is the discussion that’s come up in pretty much every office at my high school, which focuses on the question of how we’re going to teach responsibility if our students no longer have to write their homework assignments down in their planners.

Really? This is the big question about the Portal? Whether we’re damaging our students’ potential to be productive citizens by not forcing them to take out their student planners, write down a few words, and put them away before they can start drawing all over them again?

I’m a member of our school’s Technology Working Group (TWiG), which might as well be called the Portal Support Committee. I’m the English department’s de-facto go-to guy on this thing, which is a thing I don’t entirely believe in.

I’m not anti-Portal per se. I love the idea of having a central online space for communication, file storage, research resources, etc. This is why I use the Web 2.0 tools that I do–Google (search, email, document storage, RSS aggregator, calendar), Delicious (bookmarks), and Flickr (photo sharing). Oh, and Facebook (everything else). But using those tools–and encouraging my students to use them as well–only points out the limitations of our very expensive Portal, and makes me a little nervous when I read cheerleading articles like Mr. Gustafson’s.

The big problem with the Portal is a very big problem indeed–it’s a top-down imposition of District authority on both students and teachers. The teacher problem is easy to see–we were told we had to start using the Portal on October 1st, whether we liked the Portal or not, whether it fit with our educational philosophies or not. That’s it.

But the effect on the students is going to be a lot more powerful. It’s not just that it eliminates the need for students to write down homework assignments–that’s nothing. That’s a smokescreen. What the Portal does is directly contradict Constructivist philosophy and pedagogy, which is the same philosophy and pedagogy that the CAPT test is based on. Yep, that same CAPT that is a graduation requirement for all Connecticut high school students, and the same CAPT that we’re getting hammered on because our scores have fallen somewhat.

Or, to quote Cypher in The Portal Matrix:

I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.

I’ve been reading more and more about constructivism, though my study is far from complete (there’s plenty of meaning yet to be made). To me, though, there are certain pieces of classroom-ready technology that support constructivist learning–RSS aggregators, for example–and plenty that don’t. I am saddened to report that our Portal falls into the latter category.

It doesn’t encourage two-way communication to make meaning. Yes, students now have school email accounts, but how many students check them? Leaving aside my inability to imagine a 17-year-old getting excited about something called “ePals,” I’d be willing to bet that only a few students would consider email to be their primary, secondary, or even tertiary mode of communication. Email is what grownups use. High school students use Facebook and SMS. Much more interactive. Much faster. Instead the Portal is more top-down communication, like the teacher who lectures and “gives notes”–it assumes that there is a person who possesses knowledge (in this case, what the assignment is) and several people who are competing to show that they have mastered that knowledge (in this case, what the assignment is). I wish I could post an open link to my teacher home page on the Portal (it’s password-protected, alas)–you’d see that the only RSS feed we can currently get comes from the–wait for it–Greenwich Time. I can’t even set up my Honors Am Lit I class page to display feeds from my own students’ blogs on Moby-Dick. Teacher-to-student communication, maybe, but certainly not student-to-student. And under “Professional Learning” we have links to our staff development registration system and the Paul Potts video. I’d think someone out there might want to, say, provide a capability for teachers to, like, share what they do in their classrooms. Like some way for professionals to learn how to be even more professional.

It isn’t flexible. Constructivism is less about demonstrating mastery of memorized facts than the ability to think flexibly about how acquired experience and information can be used to engage with new circumstances. The District’s technology focus has so far seemed to be on data collection and display–the best part of the Portal for me as a teacher is that it provides one login and password for all of our data services. We can get to students’ attendance records, grades, state test scores, and previously recommended academic interventions. This is useful, especially for those of us who have trouble remembering our District-assigned passwords.

But I have yet to have my requests to be able to add, as mentioned previously, student-generated RSS feeds to my class pages, taken. I can’t have the latest Delicious bookmarks added by my students show up on our class pages.  I’m not sure what sort of talking-to I might receive if I were to put a note on my class pages on the Portal telling anyone who wants to know what’s going on in my classes just to come here.

We have some District-wide staff development coming up this Friday. The District has selected “Checking for Understanding” and “Making Connections” as our year-long goals, which, I fear, might lead to several District-targeted wedgies in State educational locker rooms.  In all seriousness, these are things that need to be addressed, but they need to be addressed intelligently.  Last year, we had an all-day lecture (with a couple of too-short break-out sessions) about Differentiated Instruction.  The building resounded with complaints about intelligence insulted and time wasted.  Friday’s session has to be better.  I’m looking forward to listening for a while, then being That Guy–asking questions, finding out how, exactly, this speaker’s research, which “focuses on specific strategies that classroom teachers and schools can implement in the areas of curriculum, instruction, and assessment which lead to improvement in student learning,” will help me.  Hopefully he’s not going to recite lesson plans or tell me to do a Do Now.  I want to know how this guy’s strategies will help my students–from 300 to 212 to 500–seek deeper understanding of the material they are studying.

It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these, and for that I apologize.  Life’s happened, as have paper-grading, progress report-writing, and Back to School Night.  But here are some highlights from the past few nights of Am Lit I bloggery.

A few students were a little weirded out by the play-like chapters in the late 30s.  Moby-Dick is such a bizarre book that for me, as a reader, it would be surprising if Melville didn’t get all multigenre.  But then I think about how surprising it must’ve been for Melville’s contemporaries to read something like this, which flits between straight narrative, nonfiction, drama, and direct address.

ALSO:

Arturo wonders about motivation:

I also think that the people who went whaling had to be crazy, and especially the harpooners. Its just craziness to row a tiny boat to a whale and then stab it and then go on that “Nantucket sleighride,” which could end up in your death.

 Erin goes green (to which I say “right on!”):

On page 172 I came across a quote that I really enjoyed. It is Ishmael speaking/thinking and he says, “For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of a man’s blood was spilled for it.” He is very right when he is implying that we should not take for granted the luxuries that we have. Often, the public does not know what was sacrificed in order for them to enjoy the things that they use on a daily basis. This is especially prevelant in our world today. Americans are using up so many resources and not realizing what the effect is having on the earth. For example, oil or paper. We use so much of it but don’t realize that trees are being killed or that oil is a non-renewable resource. I like that Ishmael decided to throw in a lesson of common sense into the chapter.

Kanako gets medieval on us:

I found it interesting how Ishmael calls Queequeg’s sword hitting the loom and altering the overall pattern “chance”. This reminded me of Fortuna, the goddess of fortune in Roman mythology and personification of luck. I was introduced to this goddess when I read Dante’s Inferno last year in my Medieval Lit class. Fortuna holds in her hand the Wheel of Fortune, which arbitrarily determines what fortune or misfortune would come to individuals. The Wheel of Fortune is symbolic of the endless changes in life from prosperity to disaster, over which people have absolutely no control to prevent misfortune from coming to him or to keep the fortune he has now from leaving him. The discussion of the Loom of Time and chance must have reminded me of Fortuna; Ishmael’s emotional and psychological ups and downs, as well as the physical ups and downs of the plot, that we have seen from earlier on in the book are also related to the Wheel of Fortune, since Ishmael (or anyone else on the ship for that matter) doesn’t have any control on what is going happen next on the whaling voyage.

Valerie has a Broadway moment:

With all this singing I felt a sense of togetherness and a possible melting pot sort theme but I just feel as though everything is going to change as the men get more involved in hunting whales. How real was their singing anyway? I’m sure I am imagining it differently than it would be because it is in a play format and all I can see are some dressed up guys dancing in syncronization singing.

Nicole brings a lot of thought to her blog posts.  She might not like Moby-Dick, but she’s an excellent model for where these things need to go:

Why is it we think of nature, but we don’t consider ourselves apart of it? We are nature. We are evolutionary products of life. Nature raised humans to be what they are now. In that sense, we are simple harvests to her lifetime. So when I say that Moby is challenging humans and that represents nature challenging humans, I’m connecting us to ourselves in a way. We are not better than the idea of life. Therefore, battling Moby is battling human indecency and stupidity.  To go against another member of life in a cruel way is despicable. To go against that same member with ignorant confidence is asking for termination.

What I’m looking for with these student blogs is reader reponse with the beginnings of analysis.  They’re meant to be fodder for the Big Semester Papers, so they definitely need to be textually based, but they are also informal, meaning that the personal can insert itself into the posts as well.  I’m hoping that as the semester goes on more of my students become bloggers, not just homework-writers, but we’ll see.  Taylor’s on her way, too:

Lastly, chapter 37 reminded me a lot of the sunsets in cape cod. Probably at least 10 years my family and i would take vacations to cape cod. Generally we wound rent houses that were in walking or biking distance from a beach. After eating dinner my siblings and i would race to the beaches and watch the sun set. These sunsets were some of the most beautiful sights i’ve ever seen. When youre sitting there just watching the sunset a lot can go through your mind. Or nothing at all can go through your mind. It is a great feeling to me of relaxation and calmness. Knowing that no matter how bad my day could have been or could be in the future i know that i can look out my window, or if i’m lucky sit on a beach and slowly watch the sunset. i can relax and take in every second of it. I know that tomorrow there’s going to be another sunset, and the next day, and the next day. There will always be a sunset that i can look forward to.

Meanwhile, there also was a lot of writing about “The Whiteness of the Whale.”  Some students loved the chapter; others couldn’t even get through it.  But no matter the reaction, almost all had something to say about it.

Hayden uses it as an inroad to a discussion of symbolism:

It seems that many cultures have seen the color white as being a sign of good such as christianity with the white tunic that is worn by priests. In many cultures the color white is seen in a good sense. However, in other cultures such as the Incas the color white is somewhat dreaded because it means snowy mountian peaks for them. The color white seems to have taken on a darker meaning with Moby Dick. It seems that this whale is a symbol itself of danger and death.

James, meanwhile, sees the chapter as more of an indirect characterization of Ishmael:

It is the whiteness of Moby-Dick that terrifies Ishmael. He thinks that the color white increases to terror of anything. Ishmael explains that white symbolizes purity, the absence of anything. He says that nature covers everything up with bright colors, but white is the truth beneath it all. This deep analysis of the simple color white shows Ishmael’s description and obscurity. Only he would go on a tangent about the color white.

Oh, and we read a bit of Emerson.  “We” includes Shan:

Although the ideas that Emerson portrays are morals that people should live by, it’s not that easy. People just can’t pack up their things and take a train to any place they want to go. It’s hard for people to experience new things or do what they love if they don’t have the means or the opportunities of getting there. Not everyone has the freedoms and luxuries that others may have.

And Dale:

It is important to go out of ones community to find the way other people live, in order to find out what one really wants their life to be like. Exploring new horizons is nescessary in order to truely know what to do in ones life and where to be. When one has one idea of what life can be, they have no choice. When one travels and sees how humans interact in different environments, then one has a choice of which environment they care to live in.

Anne compares Moby-Dick to Big Fish (and, I think, she ought to read The Things They Carried, which gets at the same ideas about truth and storytelling):

In class a few days ago we talked about whether this book is the one Ishmael was writing…I really like having Ishmael as a narrator because it’s fun hearing a story from someone who doesn’t always tell the truth. And, when a story is good, I don’t think it matters whether it’s true or not.

James was one of several who brought up the Bulkington issue:

 Ishmael cannot believe after four years on a ship whaling, that a man would crave another dangerous voyage. He talks about all the safety a port should bring a mariner. Ishmael’s great description of comfort, hearthstone, supper, blankets and friends made me too question Bulkinton’s sanity.

And Valerie neatly sums up the importance of reading each others’ blogs:

Ahab seems more scary than I imagined him to be. I thought he would just be a guy on the boat and hide out depressed all the time. I didn’t even notice when he was described that his pegleg is a part of a whale until I was reading some other blog posts. That makes him have even more of an evil feeling that he’s half human, half the enemy. Soon we’ll see how Ahab runs the ship and if he is really as bad as he seems.

The point of doing this, of course, is to share information about what we’ve read, expand on some class discussions, etc.  Hopefully this is helping everyone understand Moby-Dick a little better.

“”I read,” I say. “I study and read. I bet I’ve read everything you read. Don’t think I haven’t. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.” My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with all due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you’d let me, talk and talk.”

David Foster Wallace has died. The one good thing that ever comes out of these events, the deaths of brilliant people way thirty or forty years too early, is that their work gets reexamined and discussed. In the case of DFW, that can only be a positive thing for our society.

Read some of his stuff, please, when you get a chance.