40 Credits & A Mule, Part VII – Sleeping Giants

January 26, 2015June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal ~ 1 Comment

I gotta say, this blogging stuff was so much easier when Dr. Barresi was saying crazy stuff to local news stations for me to excerpt and mock. Of course, the #WTF? stuff is always more fun than the #WhatNow? parts – just ask any Middle Eastern country on the long side of revolution in the past decade.

It’s taken me awhile to get to the dramatic conclusion of this epic, so let’s review – “Previously, on Blue Cereal Education Dot Com…”

Part I – I made the case that land ownership was central to citizenship, suffrage, and participation as a ‘full American’. This seemed reasonable, and by the standards of the day was a huge expansion of democracy and the ability of the ‘common man’ to claim a voice in his government. It did not, however, include everyone we would consider appropriate today – it was a white man’s game.

Part II – Land ownership carried mythical benefits alongside the practical. In addition to being a source of opportunity, income, and republican (small ‘r’) participation, it promoted an agricultural lifestyle – hard work, responsibility, patience, and fortitude. I’d include ‘grit’, but I’d need a ‘trigger warning’ – people are touchy about that one for some reason…

Part III – The combination of practical needs, terrestrial benefits, and supernatural calling led an expanding ‘Merica to treat the Native populations and Mexico as obstacles to overcome rather than peoples to be engaged. The grand ‘us’ and ‘them’ of human history continued.

Part IV – Land ownership becomes a condition as much as an accomplishment. Because not everyone can ‘have’, those who do come to see themselves not as the most fortunate but as the most deserving. Those unable to procure land due to race (or gender, or whatever) were already categorized as ‘less than’ (hence their ineligibility), and this lack of opportunity became circular. Chickens and eggs – which came first, the unworthiness to be a full American or the lack of opportunity to fully participate in the republic?

Part V – Education is the new land. We advocate universal access. We extol it as the key to all things – fiscal opportunity, social advancement, moral purity, personal fulfillment. As with land, lack of access becomes lack of worthiness. Inequity leads to inequality leads to rejection leads to judgment – ‘us vs. them’ with a side of ‘what the hell is wrong with you people?’

Part VI – I suggested we’re doing with students and education what we spent a century and a half doing with various demographics and land ownership and a voice in the republic. I argue that we’ve conflated ability, opportunity, and values with personal worth and potential – to the harm of a substantial percentage of our kids.

I closed with a vague promise to resolve that in this final post.

But I can’t.

It’s just too big. Too many cultural, psychological, logistical, fiscal, emotional, and historical factors out of our control – some completely, others merely mostly.

I can shine some light on the nature of the problem. We may even find some consensus about what’s WRONG. The hard part is in the fixin’ – what we do INSTEAD. That’s the problem with revolutions – you may get enough people to agree about what to tear down, you just can’t get enough people to agree what to build in its place.

I have some more great analogies – one in which we demand coaches train their athletes in a wide variety of sporting events but we only measure races with hurdles, and we keep raising the hurdles for the kids who can’t jump them or who refuse to stay on our track. That’s a good one. There’s another in which some stuffy doctors present research showing the richest and healthiest people in the world eat mostly vegetables and pâté, so they push through legislation mandating a vegetable and pâté diet (without providing the funding to properly prepare either). That was fun, too – and it had the cutest clip-art.

The point of the first, of course, was that hurdles are an inadequate measure of all possible athletic ability, and that not everyone has the same athleticism or interest – for a wide variety of reasons. The second was about correlation and causation – the rich and healthy eat pâté; pâté doesn’t make you rich and healthy. Successful students pass stupid tests; stupid tests don’t create successful students. Like I said, I was pretty amused by them.

But I’ve already laid out six posts of historical analogies involving land and culture and race. These not only make it sound like I’m smarter than I actually am, but they correlate in a very real way with actual problems in education today.

It’s time to fix it.

Are the schools going to be a part of that? They’d have to, I’d think. But they’re not enough.

We need to change the way we think about race and poverty and culture and American values. I’m a big fan of our founding documents and ideals – heck, I even still like capitalism. But we’ve managed to maintain an ugly leavening of racism, elitism, and outright social Darwinism through too many eras to believe it’s not deeply entrenched in the problems we face today.

We need to ask ourselves why so many kids from so many backgrounds find so little of value in the curriculums we push, or the values we demand they share. At best, much of what we prioritize seems pointless to them; at worse, it contradicts who they believe they are and the things they value. Ask your best students their honest opinions about what they’re learning in school – some find parts they really like, but I’m horrified how many confess they’re just doing what they’ve been told to do. They endure, and they get the grades, but that’s all.

It’s like being at the dentist for 13 years straight.

If we can look in the mirror and tell ourselves with conviction they’ll thank us someday because we know what’s good for them and they don’t, OK. Maybe so. But what did YOU carry away from High School that changed your life? Improved your world? Gave meaning to some part of your existence? If you CAN think of something, was it in the curriculum, or did it come from somewhere else?

It seems like most of what we do in school serves only to prepare students to do more of it in more school. That’s not just pointless – it’s unethical and abusive.

And stupid.

The title “40 Credits & A Mule” was inspired by several blog posts by P.L. Thomas about our American myth that students from poor families – especially students of color – who do well in school can overcome their background to the extent they’ll end up economically and socially on par with white peers. They don’t. Their circumstances improve, but you’re better off being a white high school dropout than black with a few years of college in terms of lifetime earnings.

The promise is there, you see – but it’s not substantiated by reality.

I don’t know how we fix it, but I think it begins when we refuse to perpetuate the lie. We refuse to give the tests that rank our kids by ZIP Code while claiming to rank them by accomplishments.

We refuse to follow the outdated factory structure mandated by our states and our expectations.

We refuse to continue forcing so many kids into a choice only between rejecting our system and everything it stands for OR accepting themselves as failures – unworthy players in the only game in town.

We refuse to turn our best and brightest into cynical rule-followers forced to seek ways to escape the reality of their daily grinds rather than embrace the many wonderful ways life can be lived productively and meaningfully.

We make them fire us and justify it. We make them cut our funding and explain it. We let them try to find someone to replace one of us, ten of us, a hundred of us, because we won’t do this to our kids anymore.

Let the State tell the papers why our entire graduating class doesn’t get diplomas. Let the universities explain why they won’t admit any of the thousands of young adults whose value we refuse to measure with a single number between 0 and 4 any longer.

I think I’m advocating revolution. Starting with you, and me, and like, one other guy who’s already pretty weird and we may not actually want on our team. If we were to win, I have no idea what we put up in place of what we’re doing now, but I know this has to stop.

That will probably be a non-issue for us, anyway. We’ll be early casualties, not heroes or leaders. And when we go down, I’m not sure anyone else is picking up this flag. Still… could be fun, don’t you think?

Wanna get in trouble with me?

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Related Post: 40 Credits & A Mule, Part I – This Land

Related Post: I See The Difference In Educational Privilege Every Day… (From the Washington Post / Daily Kos)

Happy New Mirrors!

December 28, 2014June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

I’ve long loved New Years. It may be my favorite holiday.

I’m not much of a drinker, and rarely up past 11:00 by choice. I am, though, a sucker for fresh starts, for rebooting. It’s why I actually prefer Monday to any other day of the week.

I know – it’s like a sickness, right?

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions anymore. I’m convinced most important changes are evolutionary, torturously slow and staggering as we claw incrementally forward. It’s not that I expect much to be so very different in the next calendar year… I suppose it’s more of a symbolic thing – this idea of perpetual re-creation.

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It’s why we celebrate spring, yes? And birthdays? Part of the meaning non-believers bring to Christmas, so they can still have lights and presents without feeling they’ve completely sold out?

I think, too, that there’s an inherent human love of rebirthing the familiar, rather than seeking the completely foreign, the truly unknown. Sometimes we want to be entirely different people, but mostly we just want to be better versions of ourselves.

It’s why we like to tell the same stories again and again, varying them over time – revealing as much about a changing us as about events themselves. It’s why a good cover of a familiar song can make it alive in a whole new way, while the original improves through the contrast. It’s why we respond to familiar characters, lines, or plot tropes in new contexts – note the popularity of Breakfast of Champions or The Bone Clocks among fans of their respective authors, or the ‘insider’ enjoyment of Star Trek or Planet of the Apes reboots. Recall the public backlash when Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes in favor of other literary pursuits, and the praise from that same public when he varied narrator or tone within the Holmesian universe.

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Sure, the commercial side of the movie and publishing industries tend to squeeze profits from rehashes until even the originals are ruined, but that’s not the only reason common stories or characters or genres come ‘round again and again. There’s something analeptic about yet another space cowboy trek and its thinly veiled moralizing over contemporary events. It’s fascinating to see how many times Lizzy and Darcy can circle one another before falling in love – in yet another setting, genre, or medium.

We want the good guy to get the girl and overcome the darkness – but we want to doubt along the way, again, so that it’s new. But not too.

Ideally, of course, as we rewrite ourselves and our stories, rearrange our songs and rehearse our plays, we get a little closer to the ideal – to the “best” version. (It would be weird to try to do worse.)

For me, some sense of the past falling away – or any shot at ‘new and improved’ – may be a bigger deal than it is to a more balanced or reasonable person. My life has not been particularly onerous nor my sins so noteworthy, but I manage to carry varying degrees of despair and self-loathing almost constantly. There are days it’s more prominent, others more subdued. Please understand, I don’t claim to fathom the depths of clinical depression or other personal hells some endure – I’m not competing for most tortured soul or anything. But I have my issues, and New Years and Mondays and new semesters salve them in some way. Even reformatting my e-reader brings on the vim.

A student sent this to me a few years ago, and was a bit vague about its source. He may have written it or appropriated it from elsewhere – it doesn’t matter. At the moment he sent it, it was his:

For some of us, the devil is not a deceiver, subtle and coy. He does not argue with our reasoning, let alone our theology, or tempt and taunt us like a car salesman, a drug dealer, or a frat brother upon our initial inebriation.
For some of us, the devil is a tape recorder, a running loop of all of our failures, inadequacies, and foibles, playing continuously in the background. It hammers us not to make a case, but to bludgeon us softly, with truths out of perspective, until we carry a complete conviction of our own uselessness. Rejecting and despising ourselves on behalf of those around us, we are no longer able to act out of purpose, but only out of quiet despair.
For some of us, the buttons are broken and can’t be reached – especially from without. No wonder we are tempted to dash the entire machine to the ground, seeking solace in silence and tangled ribbon.

I don’t know if this is technically any good, but I get it. I hear and see this radiating from my kids in so many variations, it’s heartbreaking. I adore them, but I can’t help what they see in the various mirrors around them. I can’t turn off their tape recorders.

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It’s absurdly relative – some blaming themselves for tragedies and dysfunctions beyond all reason, while others self-flagellate just as intensely over that high ‘B’ they can’t quite push into an ‘A’. The reality of each situation is largely irrelevant. It’s the sense of shortcoming, of failure, of despair. It’s the idea they’re not good enough – may never be good enough.

Strangely, I also see this – in slightly more sophisticated variations – in some of the best teachers I know, or in others of strong gifting. I don’t know that it’s ubiquitous, but so often the most valuable carry the deepest sense of inadequacy. Maybe that’s the universe’s way of balancing things out. Maybe it’s some form of the Devil as Accuser trying to slow them down.

But a New Year is coming. A new semester. Fifty-two weeks of new beginnings.

I guess I could also reformat all of my electronics, but that seems like overkill.

If revolutionary changes aren’t available, maybe we could do a more conscious job of turning down our tape recorder, or at least arguing with it more loudly. Maybe we could occasionally help to pause the tape recorders of others, or help each other look into different mirrors.

You can’t bequeath self-worth to another, but you can invest in their reevaluation of themselves. We can ask for assistance shining different lights on our own assumptions and traps. Let’s not worry about making dramatic new people of ourselves or our darlings so much as finding recurring ways to keep stretching forward and cutting loose the weights of the previous year’s failures.

Despite the ready rhetoric, it’s a lot of work. You may need a hand.

I’m positive they will.

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Related Post: Absolution (Bring Me My Crosier)

Seven Steps to Personal and Professional Growth, Feat. Wild Cherry

October 4, 2014June 23, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

My ELA comrades are fond of discussing ‘universal themes’ and ‘common plots’ in literature and in life. I can’t speak to every book ever written, but I will confess I have a much better idea of who’s going to die and who’s going to betray the hero in any decent sci-fi or superhero movie now that I’ve sat in on a few literature classes.

In a similar way, our personal journeys often share common elements. That’s why disparate support groups can build their discussions around the same 12 Steps without discounting each member’s personal story, or church ‘cell groups’ can seek spiritual cohesion despite varied applications of the chosen text – every story is unique, but every story is the same.

We see this in history as well – it repeats itself, sort of, but never in quite the same ways. Universal themes and common plotlines seem to be, um… well – they seem to be universal. You know – common.

The ongoing kerfuffle over #edreform involves large-scale efforts to standardize curriculum, standardize tests, standardize teachers, and standardize kids. Good luck with that. In the meantime, while we decry the nonsense inherent in that approach, I’d like to outline the Seven Steps to Personal and Professional Growth which I believe apply equally well to educators and the common rabble alike. I’d like to suggest that a little personal reform, revival, or rebooting, is essential to break even over time – maybe actually grow.

Stay in place for long, and you’re suddenly all kinds of left behind.

If some themes are universal, as my ELA brethren suggest, any classic tale of personal revival should work as a launching pad. I choose as mine the timeless wisdom of Wild Cherry.

Step One: Recognize when you’ve hit a rut or lost your edge.

Hey, do it now. Yay-hey.
Once I was a boogie singer playin’ in a rock’n’roll band.
I never had no problems, yeah, burnin’ down the one night stands.
When everything around me, yeah, got to start to feelin’ so low…

The first step towards fixing anything or making a situation better is recognizing there’s a problem. Call stuff what it is. Many times that’s actually the most difficult part – identifying and admitting what we actually think, want, do, or feel. Accepting possible evidence that what we’re doing isn’t working, or isn’t working as well as it could.

This is true professionally as much as it is personally – sometimes moreso.

Step Two: Open Your Eyes & Look Around.

And I decided quickly (yes I did) to disco down and check out the show.
Yeah, they were dancin’ and singin’ and movin’ to the groovin’ –
And just when it hit me, somebody turned around and shouted,
“Play that funky music white boy; play that funky music right.
Play that funky music white boy; lay down the boogie and play that funky music till you die.
Till you die – yeah, yeah…”

Opening your eyes and looking around is harder than it sounds – that’s why there are so many songs and books about it. You’ve probably noticed how often major characters experiencing personal revelation are blinded or in pain from the sun or other sources of light, even when they don’t kill Arabs on the beach. Jackson Browne even had to go to the doctor after trying to keep his eyes open for so long. We’re all fighting the darkness, sure – but we’re equally blinded by the light.

But fight to keep them open. Don’t be vain, or narrow-minded, or fall back on what you “already know” every time you’re in a rut. You don’t have to like or understand what everyone else is doing, but whether the issues are personal or professional or some messy mix of both, you may be surrounded by talented people of various giftings. Don’t compare yourself to them so much as acknowledge and appreciate what they do well – whether or not it’s the same as what you do well.

And – by the way – I’m beyond certain there are many things you do well.

It is, though, strangely freeing to be comfortable with the talents of others. To allow yourself to learn from them. It often leads to a more energetic and creative you.

Seek wisdom and advice, but of course filter the responses. Those with the least to offer usually have the most to say. But don’t filter so much that you can’t hear common themes. Compare your head and your gut and see when they align – that’s when it starts to get promising.

Step Three: Allow Yourself Time to Digest New Ideas or Unexpected Directions.

I tried to understand this. I thought that they were out of their minds!
How could I be so foolish (how could I?) to not see I was the one behind?
So still I kept on fighting – well – losing every step of the way.
I said, I must go back there (I got to go back) and check to see if thing’s still the same…

Don’t beat yourself up every time you realize you’ve missed something, but don’t ignore it either. The more you don’t want to think about something – whether pedagogical, interpersonal, strategic, or even emotional – the more you should probably revisit that somethinguntil you can Step One & Step Two it properly.

Step Four: Seek Out People, Places, and Ideas That Energize & Inspire You.

Yeah, they were dancin’ and singin’ and movin’ to the groovin’ –
And just when it hit me, somebody turned around and shouted,
“Play that funky music white boy; play that funky music right.
Play that funky music white boy; lay down the boogie and play that funky music till you die.
Till you die – oh, till you die – come on and play some electrified funky music…”

Be a student. Also, shake what your momma gave you – sometimes metaphorically, sometimes quite literally.

Step Five: Initiate Conversations.

(Hey, wait a minute -) Now first it wasn’t easy, changin’ rock’n’rollin’ minds,
And things were getting shaky – I thought I’d have to leave it behind.
But now it’s so much better (it’s so much better) – I’m funking out in every way.
But I’ll never lose that feelin’ (you know I won’t) of how I learned my lesson that day.
Yeah, they were dancin’ and singin’ and movin’ to the groovin’ –
And just when it hit me, somebody turned around and shouted,
“Play that funky music white boy; play that funky music right.
Play that funky music white boy; lay down the boogie and play that funky music till you die.
Till you die – oh, till you die…”

There’s no substitute for going in questioning. This is equally true whether we’re looking to learn or seeking to transform. Share your enthusiasm with relevant parties, but stay grounded and realize your epiphany may not be their epiphany. Solutions are rarely universal, but the experiences which follow a willingness to learn and adapt should be memorialized, evangelized, and rebirthed from time to time.

Besides, while you idealistic types are always ready to stand apart and hold your ground in sacred isolation, most of the time you don’t have to figure it out all alone or move forward totally solo. Life is largely a group activity.

Step Six: Whatever You Do, Right or Wrong – Do It Hard. In Fact, Take It Up A Notch or Two

They shouted “Play that funky music!” (Play that funky music)
“Play that funky music!” (You Gotta keep on playin’ funky music)
“Play that funky music!” (Play that funky music)
“Play that funky music!” (Gonna take you higher now -)
“Play that funky music white boy! Play that funky music right.”
“Play that funky music white boy! Play that funky music right.”

One of the mantras in my classroom is that it’s better to be wrong than to be afraid. You don’t want to take this too far and simply become willfully stupid and annoying, but don’t let potential (or even actual) failure hold you back indefinitely. Personal and professional modulation doesn’t always mean being louder – it means if you’re going to do something, do it. If you’re not, don’t.

Step Seven: Live and Teach Like It Matters – Right Where You Are, Right Now. You might change the world or earn yourself eternal acclaim, although statistically that’s well-outside likely. You might some days barely nudge kids a bit further up the food chain only to watch them slide back down. But if all you manage is one hit from 1976, what the hell – that’s one more hit than most. Make it count.

And you never know what impact your efforts are having, or will have a year later, or five years later, or five decades later. Long after your stories are forgotten, your lesson plans filed – maybe after you’re, you know… dead and stuff – the time and effort you’ve poured into shaking things up and rocking things out might still be popping up on someone’s metaphorical playlist. You might fade, sure, or you might be forever part of their drive – windows down and music cranked up, singing along badly but with great joy. Because you did. Because you showed them how.

Play that funky music, child.

Revival

August 17, 2014June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

I’m from Tulsa. That means many things, but among them is an essential familiarity with Evangelical Protestantism in all its flaws and glory. I’m not a practicing evangelical, but neither do I find them so strange – they are my people, in warts as well as wisdom.

If you’ve never been to a proper revival meeting, you’ve missed a grand cultural experience. Some border on the bizarre, others can lean a bit quaint, but most are not so far removed from the weekly experiences of the faithy folks in attendance. It’s pretty rare in your typical revival service or tent meeting for the message to be something radically new.

You don’t generally introduce a host of new songs, or swap theologies with the church down the street, or even change the format of the service much without careful framing, smiling explanations, and a special insert in the bulletin. You certainly don’t introduce new doctrines or complicated thoughtways at such times. That would be completely missing the point.

Because the goal of most revivals isn’t to hear something new. The goal is to be reminded. Refreshed. Revived. Hence, you know, the name.

It is in that spirit I’d like to remind some of us of some things we already know. Stuff we’ve learned from both study and practice, in the classroom and out. Feel free to throw out an ‘amen’ or raise your hands, although if you’re more of the snake-handling variety, I’d appreciate a heads up first. Otherwise, please allow me to preach to the choir a bit…

(1) This year’s students are a different group than last year’s students. You are not (in most situations) picking up where you left off in terms of either knowledge or ability, and certainly not in terms of rapport or expectations. You have to start all over, because they’re new… even if you’re not. And that’s totally OK.

(2) The whole “this is a new group” thing also means some of what worked well last year may fall flat with this group. Maybe you’ve lost your touch, or maybe this group is just slow, or maybe it’s just one of those things that don’t make sense – it doesn’t really matter. Whatever the cause, some things will have to evolve.

Yes, it so very sucks when you finally get a lesson perfected over a few long years and then… it suddenly quits working for reasons you never quite understand. But it happens. You’ll find something else that works – you always do.

(3) On that note, it’s totally OK for you to do stuff that works in class, even if it’s not what works for everybody else. It may not be what’s trendy at the moment, or hi-tech, or flipped, or project-based. Some of you give killer lectures that suck kids in, while others work magic with a few markers and an unnatural enthusiasm for asymptotes. I know one lady who makes “foldables” a meaningful genre, which so never works for me.

Live it up, brothers and sisters. The fields are ripe for harvest – teach like the wind.

(4) Still, it won’t kill you to try some new things. I know that guy they brought in for that interminable PD day was boring, or irritating, or both, and that you’re cynical about these ‘fads’. You can (and do) tell innumerable stories of seeing them come and go.

I get it. People are scrambling to figure out what works – some with pure motives, others not so much. In that mess, though, are lots of things that work, and are good for kids. Find a balance between chasing trends and being that arms-crossed curmudgeon with your 48-year-old transparencies and mimeograph pages. You might learn something, and so might your kids.

(5) The smart kids need good teachers too. Before we quibble over my use of ‘smart’, feel free to substitute ‘successful’, ‘best and brightest’, ‘highest performing’, or whatever – you know the ones I mean. Let’s not forget amidst all the hand-wringing and standard-raising we’re doing trying to bring signs of life to the bottom 20% that there’s a top 20% as well, and that despite popular rhetoric THEY WON’T TEACH THEMSELVES.

We owe them challenge. Engagement. Time. Resources. Passion. Just because they’re not in discipline trouble or triggering Improvement Plans from the state doesn’t mean they’ll be excellent on their own. Let’s work our asses off trying to help them be amazing. To whom much has been given, much will be required.

(6) The bottom feeders need good teachers too. Before we quibble over my use of ‘bottom feeders’, I use the term affectionately for the most part – and you know who I mean. (If you really wish to be more politically correct, feel free to substitute ‘mouth breathers’.) The point is that we’ve got to keep trying everything we can come up with to reach and engage and inspire them, no matter how hard they work trying to convince us they are stupid, disinterested, or unreachable. Most of them are not.

Mind the gap between acknowledging factors beyond your control (don’t blame yourself for every miracle you can’t work) and justifying lethargy by blaming the kid and his or her world. It’s not their job to come from better backgrounds – it’s yours to overcome that background.

If you wanted a job that was possible, you should be selling shoes or doing accounting or something. This is education – reality is not an acceptable excuse.

(7) The ‘bubble kids’ need good teachers too. They make the least splash each day and they generally cause the least suffering – all the more danger they’ll pass unnoticed. Find them, notice them, grab them (not literally, unless you’re really really tenured), and find ways to help them be great. Or at least pretty good.

It’s hard more often than not, by the way. Tiring. Sometimes very discouraging. That’s OK. You know going in the range of emotions involved. Be ready for them.

(8) It won’t kill you to send a little good mojo to your teacher peers. Where two or more or gathered, there will be complaining about students – consider at least sandwiching every conversation in positives about our lil’ darlings and about one another. It’s like a giant, ongoing parent contact. (“May I start by saying what a bright, creative child Adolph is…”)

(9) Our kids have potential, even when they hide it rather well.

(10) You have potential, even when it hides from you rather well. You must not quit – the need is too great and the harvest too close. You just don’t see it every day – but you do sometimes. Look again – there it is…

Sight is nice, but mostly we walk by faith – in ourselves, each other, and the possibilities. Unlike the religious kind, it’s rarely enough – but it’s what we have, so we make it enough. Organist…?