Empathy and Tenacity
Sarah Puglisi left a comment about the Reading Wars here last spring that I enjoyed for its critical punch. Here’s an excerpt:
I still find it ironic that I’ll use whole language phonics and build phonics and writing and get results…because it was so explicit, but so practical. We do need to do so much…individually but in script based proscribed programs which is my current mileu what we do really is chant…. Get in there and follow orders. Or I hear “teamplayer”, ”collegiality”, ”Same Page”, The importance of of every child getting exactly the same thing in “every room”. So it might be lots of the world needs to go work in schoolrooms and offer a practical way to survive in a script written for no child in particular.
Sarah seemed like someone I’d like to work with. Then last week I ran across this story from a teenager, named Sylvia Puglisi.
I may be a member of the rebellious teenage e-generation, but I’m not dense…when schools, in their enthusiasm for censorship, put up the Great Firewall of China around their internet connections, one begins to ask oneself why we even have computers at all. [read more]
Read the story she told. The effort she made to get her school work done despite the obstacles thrown in her path by the school administration is nothing short of heroic. Tenacity is an endearing quality in friends, guard dogs, and your attorney. This girl is going places.
I wondered if Sarah and Sylvia were related, since the last name was so distinctive. This evening I read a story written by a first-grade teacher who had a school lockdown during the first week of school.
Public school is a cross between inanity and war zone way too much in my career. . . but I do teach in South Oxnard which isn’t really Watts but it sure isn’t the Hampton’s. It’s a very poor neighborhood, 100% free lunch, and over these last few years I’ve seen some pretty sad poverty issues. It’s a barrio, has gang life, crime… I know I’m teaching in a place many would not drive into. [read more]
Sure enough - Susan Ohanian confirms my hunch. They are - a mother and her daughter who remind me that we do our best when we focus on the job we have to do, and step around the obstacles, though Sara makes a good point about normalizing the monstrous conditions that many kids have to live in.
Thanks to Sara and Sylvia, I’m feeling inspired.
Bill Kerr wrote,
If you check out the rationale for “filtering categories” in N2H2 filter, which we have in South Australia (it is in many places across the globe), you will find that Web Page Hosting is such a category and the rationale is:
[quote]
Web Page Hosting / Free Pages
Sites that provide Web page hosting for their users such as homepages that share a common domain. These sites include those provided by ISPs, University / education servers, free Web page hosts, etc. Although many of these Web page providers post rules and regulations for content, they do not always adequately monitor this content. Users often abuse Web page services by posting offensive content under multiple pseudonyms. Because this category contains hundreds of millions of pages, it is not practical to assign more granular categorisation to individual pages. However, any page can be added to your local block and allow list, enabling access to specific content even if the category has been selected to be blocked.
[/quote]
they say:
” it is not practical to assign more granular categorisation to individual pages”
my translation:
we will take your money and block good educational stuff along with bad stuff because it’s really just too hard to sort it out
In other words the read/write web is banned by default, not only for students but also for teachers. I don’t find this part of it inspiring.
Link | September 5th, 2006 at 10:28 pm
Doug wrote,
I agree with you! Neither do I find the existence of an urban war zone inspiring. In both cases they are unnecessary and unjust societal pressures on schooling.
Granted, the filtering issue seems a lot simpler to resolve since the decision to throw them up is made locally, and isn’t confounded by decades of poverty and racism.
To those who work and study in difficult and even impossible environments such as these, my hat is off.
Link | September 6th, 2006 at 3:55 am
Marco Polo wrote,
Just read both Puglisi stories. Sheesh. I am so glad I live in a civilized country. It ain’t heaven on earth, but kids are looked after, and no-one carries guns except the police, and they don’t shoot first and ask questions later. I’ve never understood why the police don’t just use tranquiliser darts to subdue violent, armed people, like they did in Daktari (except they were shooting rogue elephants and lions and stuff).
Link | September 6th, 2006 at 8:27 pm
Michael wrote,
Second comment - following what Bill Kerr had to say:
Now we’re cooking with gas! I won’t go through what Bill said in strict order. But it set off a chain of connections for me.
I had been thinking about the apt choice of name for your blog, Doug. Borderland is about possibilities, yes? Yet unglimpsed ways of seeing present themselves constantly in the interface between the aboriginal world and us interlopers - and we ignore them at our peril. Whether it’s education or whatever, when we enter remote - and particularly aboriginal - domains, we have to reach a true understanding about where we happen to be. It’s no use clinging to what we know as the be-all and end-all. We have to learn that we cannot shape these borderlands to our liking or to fit what we think we know: rather we shape ourselves and what we know to where we have come to and the work we put ourselves to is therefore defined by that context.
We still have to respect the boundaries set by the aboriginal people who own the country we find ourselves in - cultural, social, political, economic and intellectual. But realsing that we don’t know everything and don’t have to is liberating.
Blogs link us, so geographical distance doesn’t matter any more. In these cases, they set up resonances and reinforce ways of thinking, while at the same time they may inspire us to ask new questions. But yes, they’re a way of connecting with like spirits and the beginnings of an exchange.
If we link up with other Borderlands, though, we’re looking at fresh perpectives which are created precisely by cultural and national differences. So it’s not exactly a globalisation of systems, so much as globalising exchanges. The wider we can borrow, the greater the support for our strictly localised efforts; and the more we stay sane.
I’m coming crabwise at the connection with the virtual newspaper concept. While it may be that the Net has opened up the possibility for everyone to have their own ‘newspaper’, it seems to me that that doesn’t have much force until and unless that ‘virtual newspaper’ sets up resonances and inspires exchanges like this one.
Which then takes it out of the realm of newspapers as such and into extended conversation. Yes, what we post might be ‘news’, but it enters an active, rather than passive, existence as it gains responses, in a way that a report - distributed or not - cannot.
But certainly there’s a democratisation of the exchange of information that is rapidly becoming extinct in conventional media thanks to the concentration of ownership in fewer and fewer hands. Australia, for instance, is just about to change its laws on media ownership - which have hitherto limited the growth of cartels - to allow for block ownership of different media (newspapers, radio and TV and on-line news services) in a very small market. While this may be capitalism at its purest, democratic it ain’t and local it ain’t any more.
Which I think is where we came in….
Link | September 9th, 2006 at 2:47 am
Doug wrote,
Michael, it’s interesting to explore the potential value in social media, and I don’t disagree with any of what you say. Thinking about what we might actually accomplish here is a fascinating topic. If perception forms the basis of social realities, then awakening echoes in like-minded others may bring forth new understandings. But the hate mongers are out here, too, confirming their prejudices.
Mostly, new ideas seem to suggest paths for me to avoid, rather than destinations to head for. You’re right. Borderland is about possibilities. Certainty seems a dead-end…I’ve said before that when the world is perfect, I’ll shut up.
Link | September 9th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
Doug wrote,
Maybe you could tell me where your writing about education is going? Susan Ohanian’s site? I’d link to it, comment on it, celebrate it, and probably learn from it.
You honor me with your visit. We can bask in each others’ mutual admiration.
Link | September 9th, 2006 at 4:41 pm
Doug wrote,
You sound like fun people. I’m happy to have made your acquaintance.
Just so you know, this blog is only a place for me to burn off steam, and try to salvage some meaning from a teaching career that seems to be imploding under the weight of bureaucratic oversight - while I’m refusing to either get in line or step out of the way.
The writing doesn’t come easily for me, either. I have to grit my teeth and push hard on the publish button to get it out there.
Link | September 9th, 2006 at 10:25 pm
Sarah Puglisi wrote,
I edited this and decided to say I sympathize with a summer piece from my blog. Starting school under complete scriptology my concern level is way high….but somehow I think I really must “tell someone”. It’s very hard to be effective as a talking parrot. And everyone knows I’m not that attractive in those colors.
Sarah Puglisi
Give a fish a test….
Likely no one wants to read a rant on testing…after all schools are now mandated into accountablity lockstepped into proving at any one moment any of us are doing anything and know anything…tests of course provide “evidence of learning” …….we need a lot of evidence evidentally in current culture to justify schools existing.
Anyway I’m a teacher that has to hold up my end of the the myth of testing, doing, meaning making, schooling ..in the current dialogs…. I’m persona non grata.
But being here (on a never read blog) I’m thinking about what I value more. A test result or a student affirmation…even years later….especially years later.
I would say that hearing from kids that are grown, that in my 20 year career I affected, is a very wonderful thing. Better still when they talk to me about what they recall from our experiences-so far the shocker is that it is not grades nor tests nor even a particular love of test prepping, which now is our consumptive drive. Which of course is no shocker is it…we know teachers , really great ones, connect to your inner core and give you something to live with and weave through your life. I’m pretty much convinced that the great teachers, life altering ones, see your capacities and abilities and develop them maybe most strongly by listening, encouraging and framing days around doing interesting things together.
All the rest seems like play acting.
But of course we are getting away from that simple nugget of truth …..moving the experience into one where you are judged by a test, loaded with memorization, and then of course, found wanting. This is the “prescription model”. You need to be fixed and the teacher assesses your wanting , plugs the holes after diagnosis with her tools..and off you go.
I so recall when working his magic in Texas Bush recounting his visits to parent conferences saying he had no idea where his girls stood and needed all that test data so he’d know “what they knew.” Yeah, that kind of quality parenting, that kind of view of the educational experience, probably does explain why NCLB flew from his brilliant mind aided by beings that think alike. (Let’s get some real proof my girls aren’t just bar jumping ….as of course we knew they were). That’s mean but what I’m doing to kids in my class is way meaner and they require it of me everyday….. Somehow I want learning in my own two girls to be less imposed and more self generated…I want not proof of what they know but opportunities to interact with their knowing. I don’t want to proscribe a course of study that exists independent of them and their interaction, but I do want to delight in listening to their thinking. I’m much more interested in seeing their capacities developed than in learning they missed an assignment on a sick day and their grade dropped a letter as the teacher couldn’t figure out how to get it recorded in later. I’m not a points person. It’s a complete miss….Bush went to a conference on his children so unevolved and uninvolved evidentally that he mistook it for a “report” on them needing corrective responses, when it is fairer to look at it as an opportunity for home and teacher to connect and bond. What a statement on test based ed. Now you know your kids are doing something.
…………..Take writing. More good writing is going on via internet cultures than I can believe. Kids write poetry, songs, rants, grumbles, mood pieces, elegies, hommages, banes, philosophies, giggles, debates…on and on, fan fics…yet we hear the lament of the outrage of “poor student writing”. Your’re not looking in the right places and in the ways people want to write. Such is the big miss going on. Or hung up on the grammar-always hung on the grammar . Tests aren’t assessing the volume of any of this cultural phenonomen. Schools are locking assess. And that’s stupid. Because reading, accessing info, writing, it’s a rapidly developing, indu-vidualizing empowering thing …Noesphere …I’m rather awed by it. And not worried.
What does worry me however is access. Money, power, test driven access and its correlation to family money and real estate-let’s just say in education now you “buy your way in”. That’s a very defining thing, completely accepted in culture today. That is, I’m afraid chimera like. And it’s where I spend my career working. Here in the land of poverty/immigration/American Dreaming I did not see, hear, or get a Bush able to articulate with sophistication and clarity really why some of my kids were behind (bad schools and teachers his party rant) and what might close the divide. Called of course the achievement gap which under this testing of NCLB is clearly widening, so now we know that you can’t test a kid into higher achievement unless they are affluent…hum. Oh yes, they have access. And they have something else too….
Maybe it’ll come as no surprise when “motivation” is trolled out here in a few years…
…..and hope and possiblity and finding how to work out of talents and the importance of a concept like fairness and the corruption of corporation and money in capitalistically based thinking when it dictates school models to a nation that once used public education as a place to bring hope and opportunity to all. One day it might be that instead of desiring things, and being gorgeous and getting sexual, botoxed and being all that…….it is slowly seen as shallower than finding a way to help all of man, Africa to Istanbul to next door in Alameda into less stressful, more wholesome opportunity to live a life in harmony. Maybe one day schools will test our capacity to listen, cooperate, create concern for another, find uniqueness in every child and use our resources not to “have it all” but to give it all. Because this is where children are left behind in that race to be first in line, we have forgotten public education’s ability to provide equal opportunity for all , this essentially test based culture has left our planet with no vehicle for mutual survival and mutual success or understanding of why that matters.
And of course….if you take something to its end point you can see more clearly…would you really want to see you child tested or your child prove they are worthy of a college or an opportunity or like them to be in a context where it is driven by allowing them to find the pure joy and drive in learning and discover they can construct a world where everyone wins….hum.
A rant complete.
Link | September 10th, 2006 at 6:39 am