digital digs

more tales from the third grade writing classroom

As mentioned in the previous post, my daughter has been asked to write an essay about why she loves America. To begin with, the issue isn't patriotism, it's anti-intellectualism. Rhetorically, this is the same as being as to write an essay on "why I am a Yankees fan." Is it possible that someone might not love America? Is the intention here to teach our children than not loving America is some kind of Lyotardian differend, an unspeakable phrase?

Anyway, when my daughter says she doesn't love America, she isn't making some anti-American political statement. She is partly expressing a philosophical position--saying it is not possible to feel "love" for an abstraction. She is also expressing some eight-year idealism: she loves the world. Now those might seem contradictory positions, except the world is not an abstraction. As is not unusual for an eight-year old, she wants peace; she loves animals and the environment; she doesn't understand why other kids around the world have to suffer. Just b/c she doesn't want to wave the flag and shout "America is #1!" doesn't mean that she doesn't value democracy and freedom. Not to put a fine point on it, but I don't think there are many eight year-olds (or 38 year olds) who can articulate what democracy and freedom actually might be.

But of course the unsurprising conclusion of this episode is that when she expresses her position to her classmates, they suggest that she ought to move. Clearly they have already adopted the "America, love it or leave it" philosophy. The assignment has been successful in reinforcing the notion that not-loving America is not an option.

One more victory for "critical thinking" and literacy in public schooling.

more grist for the homeschooling mill

Today's 3rd grade in-class writing assignment: why I love America. Of course one must be sure to follow the format. I love America. The reason I love America is because... Add three examples; close with repetition. My daughter discovers that the answer to the question here is that she loves America because of "freedom." Huh? That's some pretty heavy irony, don't you think? You must write that you love America, you must write that you love America because of the freedom you experience, and you must follow this specific format in writing your response. I mean if it was a movie you'd be rolling your eyes that this was laying it all on pretty think, right?

What's next week's assignment? Why I am glad daddy stopped beating mommy?

Now some folks may be inclined to think this is just typical liberal whining. Whatever. My position is that I think it's mildly delusional to express love for an abstraction. I mean the idea here isn't to express love for the physical place of America or for the actual people who are "Americans." It isn't about loving the State either. Instead it's about expressing love for a concept, a complex and elusive concept at that.

But what does this have to do with 3rd grade? What do 8-9 year olds know about America? What conceptual understanding do they have of freedom to recognize whether or not they have it and what role "America" (whatever that is) might have in it? The oddest thing about this in the end is that kids don't actually have any freedoms. They don't actually have the right to make any decisions for themselves.

whither English revised

Read this recent article in The Nation by  William Deresiewicz (via Kairosnews) on the continuing demise of English *cough* I mean literary studies. Deresiewicz, a regular contributor to The Nation, is an associate professor in English at Yale. He notes the decline over the last decade in student interest in his own department from 120 to 90 majors a year and a corollary decline in faculty from 55 to 45. As he explains, "Student priorities are shifting to more 'practical' majors like economics; university priorities are shifting to the sciences, which bring in a lot more money."

But what is more curious, and quite amusing to me really, are the other explanations he offers for what he ultimately comes to characterize as the slow death of academic literary criticism. He begins with analyzing the MLA job list and discovers that more than a third of the positions are rhet/comp, communications, professional and technical writing. Another 15% are in creative writing.

Blasphemy!

As Deresiewicz observes "Apparently, kids may not want to read anymore, but they all want to write." Well I guess that might be the case after more than a century of teaching "kids" how to read but not how to write. Or wait, maybe the expectation is that this kind of logic doesn't swing both ways? That lit faculty can teach students to both read and write, where their writing colleagues are relegated to one side of this equation? 

eating locally

With spring promising to appear in the next few weeks in Central NY, we're going to make some real effort toward eating locally-grown food. This means the farmers markets here in Camillus and in Syracuse, as well as hopefully joining a nearby cooperative. There's also a farm about 30 minutes away where we can buy some meat for the kids. All that said, I'm sure that our supermarket, Wegmans, will still get a fair share of our money. I know there's a lot of eye-rolling at the presumed angst of being white and over-educated that supposedly drives this kind of decision-making. Add vegetarianism into the mix and one immediately assumes a holier-than-thou attitude is about to appear.

However, for me, the eating local thing comes more from curiosity and a desire to experiment. What would it mean to rely primarily on the what is nearby for food? Will the food be better? fresher? Will it be monotonous? (Looking at the list of produce at the local CSA, I'd have to say no to that last one. In fact, I'll be faced with figuring out how to prepare some new things.)

changing economics of classroom management

Like many of my colleagues I've been reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. Bottom line, it's a thoughtful and accessible book that I think I will use in my Writing in the Digital Age course in the fall. It looks at the activities that networking eases and/or enables in a variety of contexts--social, commercial, political, etc. Shirky doesn't directly investigate education, though many of the situations he explores involve students in one way or another. Of course education is my running interest, so I want to think a little about that here.

So here's the simple story. As Shirky details, our contemporary ideas about corporate management developed in the 19th century in the railroad industry as an effort to make the most efficient use of tracks by compartmentalizing management. Even more fundamental, corporations emerge where the collective management and institutionalization of certain business practices reduce the transaction costs of conducting those practices in an open market enough to offset the overhead costs of the institution. (Obviously that's an oversimplification, but you can see the general idea.) So a large part of what Shirky discusses begins with the ways that network technologies reduce the costs of forming groups and conducting certain practices.

How does this relate to teaching? (if there was such a thing as "rhetorical question music" it would be playing right now)

bright flight and homeschooling

Rhonda and I continue to lean toward taking on the difficult task of homeschooling. There are a thousand different little reasons why. Once you start looking for reasons, you see them everywhere and everyday in the kids' schooling. But as I see it there's just really one fundamental reason why my kids don't below in school: it's the way we define the notion of a democratic education. Now when I say this, it's not meant as a criticism of teachers or school systems or anything else necessarily. All that I am trying to say, quite simply, is that schools are obviously not designed to teach kids like my kids. It's nobody's fault, and if it is somebody's fault, I don't care whose fault it is. We can work to change it if we want, but I know that whatever changes might come won't come in time to help my kids, so when it comes to thinking about their education, I've got to approach that challenge differently.

But let me be a little more clear about what I mean.

pedagogic koans

I've been reading an interesting collection of essays in The Best Buddhist Writing 2007 which includes Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, and Pema Chodron, as well as Gary Snyder, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Natalie Goldberg, and many other excellent pieces. Today I want to write about the final selection, which offers perspectives on Nirvana from different Buddhist schools--Theravada, Zen, and Vajrayana. In particular I want to focus on the Zen perspective, offered by Roko Sherry Chayat, who is the abbot of the Zen Center here in Syracuse.

Clearly many writers have found productive relationships between Zen and writing, but reading this essay I was thinking more in terms of teaching writing. Chayat writes

Despite what the Buddha says in the Diamond Sutra--"There is no formula for supreme enlightenment"--we long for some guidelines, some diagram, yes, a formula for quick success. We want what our teachers have, and we want them to give it to us without delay. And therein lies the problem in at least two of its guises: we think there is something to have; and we think it's good to get something for nothing--when, in fact, this practice of ours requires giving everything for nothing!

I don't really want to equate teaching writing with teaching Buddhism. However there are certain similarities. Both are about practice. The path to enlightenment is founded on daily meditation. Developing as a writer requires a daily writing practice.

academic bullshit and the art of writing more and publishing less

Interesting confluence today... In IHE, Lindsay Waters calls for fewer books, more articles, and an end to the overblown writing of academic prose (see Collin's comments on this as well).  As Waters notes "If words lose out, so do we all: We are in danger of losing our souls, our backbones, our bearings. We are in danger of losing the civilization that was created in the West in the Renaissance." Oh good, I was afraid we might fall prey to hyperbole.

By coincidence, in CCC, Philip Eubanks and John D. Schaeffer have an essay on bullshit, academic bullshit in particular. Eubanks and Schaeffer explain that

Frequently academic publication aims to create an ethos that will result in tangible rewards for the academic: tenure, promotion, grants, et. The academic knows that such rewards are distributed on the basis of reputation. Such a reputation is gained by publishing books and articles that have been peer reviewed before publication and positively reviewed afterward. Hence professional rewards come from academic reputation, and academic reputation comes from publication. This system seems to make academic publication a particularly rich field for bullshit.

Well there's some classic academic understatement to balance the classic web article hyperbole.

One of the problems, as both articles discuss, is that academics often feel compelled to bullshit in order to establish their ethos as authors. I know that over the last decade I've become a better academic writer. I've started to develop some sense of how my writing might fit into an academic community. Through the years though, I did struggle with figuring out how to say what I wanted to say, how to fit within the expectations of the genre and audience, and how to know what I could just say and what I would need to defend or argue. There are many times when I would think to myself, "Well I wouldn't choose to write this way or include this, but I think this is what the reviewers or editors would want." And they may have been right in the sense that writing that way does make for a "better" essay. It's just that it might come out as bullshit.

the future of "the book" and time for thought

My colleague Karen Stearns has brought the NEA Big Read project to our campus and Cortland country. We're reading Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and I've been asked to do a presentation on "the future of the book" with my librarian colleague Dan Harms. I'm imaging a general college audience, so on some level this will be fairly introductory but this is what I'm planning on discussing.

When we talk about the "future of the book" we have to ask what we are talking about. The surface response is the fear that the web, television, and other media are leading people away from reading books. Obviously this world is depicted, if not caricatured, in the novel. So here are some statistics that provide some context. The Association of American Publishers reports that in terms of dollars overall book sales increased 2.4% from 2002 to 2006. Adult paperbacks increased 5% during this period. The number of publishers has increased significantly since the beginning of the Internet Age from 52,000 in 1994 to 85,000 in 2004. There are also increases in new titles and overall number of titles.

This doesn't mean that people aren't spending more time doing other things, but it seems to indicate that by some measures the book industry is doing OK.

the bardo of composition

First let me say that I am far from an "expert" in Buddhism. However I've had an intellectual interest in Buddhism for some time and more recently some practical experience in adopting daily meditation (which has been fantastic but isn't what I'm going to focus on here).

Bardo is a concept that is particularly integral to Tibetan Buddhism. As Soygal Rinpoche writes in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, "the word 'bardo' is commonly used to denote the intermediate state between death and rebirth, but in reality bardos are occurring continuously throughout both life and death, and are junctures when the possibility of liberation, or enlightenment, is heightened." In approaching my thinking on composition from this angle, I need to be careful. I don't want to belittle this important spiritual concept. I also don't want to appear to be draping some kind of mysticism onto writing (I don't think of Buddhism in that way, but someone else might).

Anyway, in my view, bardo rests upon the foundation of Buddhism.

• impermanence (anitya)
• no self (anatman)
• no concepts (nirvana)

In each moment the world is made and unmade. This is not a mystical concept. It's not even about quantum physics. It is simply the observation that in each moment the world changes; birth and dying occur. Moments pass from a virtual future into an irretrievable past. The present moment is a kind of bardo itself, a liminal state between the birth of the future into the present and the death of the present into the past. Indeed Tibet Buddhists refer to life as a kind of bardo.