attention new teachers

I'm giving this blog a short, two-month sabbatical for two reasons. First, I am running out of relevant ideas and I want to rethink some metaphors, technology and paradigm shifts. I want to figure out what Philisophical Friday should be and how it can be a little more personal and practical. I realize how quickly blogging can get stagnant and I want to go beyond "writing for the sake of writing."

In addition, I will be co-writing a summer blog series called A Television's Guide to the First Year of Teaching. The first five blogs should be up on Friday. My friend Javi will be co-writing it and I'm really excited about some of our ideas. We'll try to blend practical ideas with our own stories.

As I take a break in this blog, I am posting book reviews. Feel free to comment on various book recommendations.

Culture and Imperialism and Rethinking My Own School

I realize that anything Edward Said writes has a tendency to lean toward the polemic. I've read blogs blasting him for lying about his heritage, for engaging in liberal indoctrination and for using sloppy research methods. It's not my place to defend Said's personal background, political beliefs or historiographical methodology (though this, in particular, seems solid to me).

The point for me is that before reading this book, I had never realized the methods of culture in creating, maintaining and justifying imperialism. I had already understood how Iranians would hate the U.S. and Britain for reinstating the Shah. Yet, when I realize the power and pull of culture in imperialism, it makes me understand Iranian rage toward Britanny Spears and Diet Coke. (I sympothize with the Iranians on the rage against American pop, though I'm not sure they would approve of my assortment of indie and classic rock)

Said analyzes older novels and demonstrates how works of fiction reinforce stereotypes and create unspoken metaphors among the general population. As he moves to various media, I kept thinking about the role of internet, television and newer "social media" and whether they would really create the "flat world" presented by Thomas Friedman or if they'd simply create a newer neo-liberal form of imperialism.

I realize here that I'm being a history geek. However, I'll take you now to my classroom. Because of Said's book, I can't see it as politically neutral. It goes beyond the content. I view the ethnic make-up of my school and compare it to the teachers and it's sad. I look at the language spoken in the neighborhood and the absolute absence of Spanish on any of our school bulletin boards and I see the remnants of imperialism. When I walk into classrooms, I notice that almost all the people in the novels, the textbooks and on the walls are white.

Our current model of education exists as a blend of the factory system, the need for assimilating immigrants and militarism. All three are strong components of imperialism. As long as we continue in the same system, I have to recognize the imperialism that exists in my own school. It's an agent of socialization and one that I would argue is as strong or stronger than pop culture and social media.

When I keep this in mind, I ask myself: Am I reinforcing stereotypes? Am I inclusive of all cultures? Is my inclusion simply an example of tokenism? Do the books, novels, decoration and other elements of my classroom environment represent the culture of the school's neighborhood? When we do service, am I careful to make sure I am not engaging in another white-man-fix-it task of imperialism?

None of these have easy answers. However, thanks to Said's book, I'm at least willing to ask them.

Ways to Subscribe

The first way you can subscribe (and the way that is most fun for me) is to become a friend/follower on the side of each blog. This lets your profile show up and it therefore gives me a chance to read your blogs. This will then show up in your Google Reader.

A second option is to read it in one of the feeds. The following are links to each of the feeds for each of my blogs:

Personal Musings

Musings on Education

Visual Musings

Multimedia Musings

Practical Musings

Classroom Musings

Interactive Musings

Class Blog: The Social Voice

TV and Teaching Blog

Book Review: Leo Tolstoy - How Much Land Does a Man Need? and Other Stories

It's hard not to see Tolstoy through the lens of hypocrisy of his own life. The man was almost abusive toward his wife (who was no jewel herself) and he wrote about social justice while never freeing his own serfs. He spoke loudly and boldly, but ran out of steam or got too distracted or whatever it means when a man makes great pronouncements with great intentions and then falls short every time.

I guess that's why I find him endearing. He's flawed. Not in the Hemmingway, rejoice in how screwed up I am, kind of way, but in the "I'm going to make it after all," but never making it method. At the best moments, I can read Tolstoy as good writing from a broken person and it's easier to relate. I can see way too much of Tolstoy in myself and I can cut the man a break. To me, "Master and Man" can be almost haunting in the questions it brings up. The "Kreutzer Sonata" is one of the rare works of fiction that captures the reality of lust. "How Much Land Does a Man Need" turns out to be a parable that changed how I view ambition.

Tolstoy is a master story-teller. At times, it gets into moralizing. However, it's a nice refrain from the tepid, contemporary, overly cautious post-modern stories I usually read. Perhaps the greatest benefit to reading these stories is that they cause me to remember that there is such thing as good and evil and that the choices one makes actually matter. Sometimes, in being a teacher, I begin to see every moral decision as contingent on the circumstances. I rationalize bad decisions by analyzing social circumstances. Then I read Tolstoy and it's like wearing a pair of glasses after being used to nearsightedness.

Book Review: Walking Since Daybreak

Ekstein offers four distinct narratives that seem entirely unrelated: the ancient history of Latvia, his family history, the present-day story or the former Soviet Union and post-war Eastern Europe. In doing so, he offers compelling, well-written prose that tails off into poetry at times. At his best, Eksteins fuses intellectual social commentary (always subtle, never preachy) with symbolic story-telling.

I consider it to be the greatest history book ever. Seriously, I'm shocked that Eksteins is not more popular in both academic and pop-market circles. The man is a genius who writes well and thinks well. If he wasn't a historian, he'd be a novelist and not a lame, summer read writer, but a deep, profound, literate kind of guy.

This book transformed my methods of teaching social studies. I now attempt to teach all units with layers (like he did):

1. Macrohistory (going back millenia)

2. Microhistory (how this particular subject connects to our neighborhood)

3. Personal history (how it connects to student lives)

In addition, I make use of literature, metaphor, poetry and I blend military, social, political, philosophy. In other words, I now teach social studies with a heavy dose of humanities.

An example would be globalization. I tell the story of cultural connections and how it's not new (macro) and the distinct forces that "created" globalization in the eighties and nineties. I use the Maryvale area as an example (microhistory) with students conducting interviews and then I connect it to a "my future" project with students. We read articles and post-colonial poetry and The World Is Flat. In other words, it's a blended approach that is not a lock-step, linear history.

Book Review: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I first read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in high school. At the time, I viewed it through the lens of a student. It sparked in me a sense of ideological rebellion. I wouldn't let the system indoctrinate me. I wouldn't allow myself to be doomed to a life of quiet conformity.

I re-read it about a decade later, as I finished my second year of teaching. Here, I still hated the standardized system. It still resonated with my libertarian views of education. I still hate the way the system will sell a child's mind to McGraw Hill and do it with a handshake a game of golf. I still hate the militarism and conformity built into most school systems. However, in the second reading, the book took on a newer meaning.

I saw a danger in the Red figure. If Nurse Ratched can be dangerous in her quiet, calm, smiling micromanaging, Red can be just as dangerous in his raw hedonism and rebellion for the sake of rebellion. In both cases, the figures are all about power - one in the name of order, the other in the name of freedom. Neither adhere to a deeper philosophy of life.

In my second reading, I kept thinking that I could way too easily slip into a Red-style rebellion against all authority (rather than one of principals) or I could blindly submit like Chief. I also thought about all the days that I had acted like Nurse Ratched in my classroom. In my darkest moments, I've been a mini-tyrant demanding absolute class obedience.

It was also in this time that I realized the answer to approaching the system is in paradox. It's in being a sage and a lunatic - crazy as hell, like Red but also silently subversive like the Chief. It seems the answer is in walking a mystery of directly confronting the system while working within it to transform it.

Wisdom of Crowds

I used to mock the Data Divas. I called them Data Whores, because it seemed that they sold a sacred profession for a numerical quantity and to me they were the equivalent of zombies using dead ideas to feast on brains of the living or vampires sucking the lifeblood out of authenticity in the name of accountability.

So, it was very reluctantly that I read The Wisdom of Crowds. Here, I found a few interesting trends. First, the group is often more accurate as a whole at predicting and describing than the "experts." We are so enamored in a Cult of Personality, though, that we miss the collective wisdom of the group. I realize this sounds so Stalinist and Jim Jones-ish but it's not at all what it looks like. It's not about groupthink or committees or cudlly conferences where we learn about synergy.

Instead, the idea is that one or two people (preferably those who develop an idea) should use the collective wisdom of the group in order to create solutions. Some of the experiments are fascinating. For example, in Who Wants to be a Millionaire, the most accurate contestant is the crowd in general. As I thought about this, I considered what it would look like in education. Here are a few thoughts:

• Getting rid of committees and instead empowering individuals with projects and then using surveys, needs assessments and then letting the decision-makers conduct quantiative data analysis followed by one-on-one interviews for a qualitative take
• Using data when measuring opinion and skills, but allowing for individual freedom for all else - in other words, avoiding the trap of becoming a "dracula" by knowing the proper place and time for data
• Creating a more wiki-like mechanism for collaboration and trusting staff for horizontal communication
• Being leery of experts who claim to have the solutions. This is these book reviews aren't about books by Ron Clark or Harry Wong
• Using this in the classroom - for example, I asked students to predict what would happen as society shifted from agrarian to industrial societies. The whole-class brainstorm occured on a shared Google Document and revealed a depth and richness that no one (including myself) could have created
• Showing a little more compassion toward the Data Divas. It took me awhile to realize that, in terms of prognostics and diagnostics, they have a place in the system.