I am aware that New years resolutions are rarely actualized. So why make them at all? Well perhaps the reason that they are rarely realized is they are either unrelated to the individuals life, or at worst just completely grandiose and unrealistic.

So my advice to myself this year is to make changes with an eye to how I live, what I really want, and what is most important.

In my life my family and my teaching career are pretty competitive for top billing. So the changes I would like to make are less grandiose than ones my 20 something self would have made.

1. I want to read more, and not on a computer. Laptop life has made me less of a reader, which I was avidly before I entered into a committed relationship with my Powerbook. So I want to read more, I still buy books like an avid reader, but I read much less( my husband now reads and claims most of the books I buy as his own)  and I don’t thing that is good for me period.

2. I want to write more. Here and other places. Responding to blogs, and NYT editorials which I love to do, write my own response and then read what everyone else has written.  I have to admit as much as the blogesphere and it’s self important bloggers have begun to turn me off. The thing is the shared conversation really is something special. I like to read what others have written and see how they think and then express myself. The beauty of the blog or Web 2.0. is in the shared comments. So I want to write more. Here at least 1 a week.

3. I intend on being a more effective teacher.  Now I realize that is  a vague statement. But it means something different  to me In this stage of my career It means being willing to mentor younger teachers as well work directly with students.  I work in the same system as everyone else in New York City  and it plainly sucks.  There is little to no attention to things I believe in passionately , Project Based Learning , utilizing technology to  create learning networks or even simply have students publish work.  I have to be a force of change to some extent, because archaic  policies of the NYCDOE are not. No matter what Klein claims in Australia.

That is all  have for now. I have a few other resolutions but they are more personal and this is not  the place to discuss weight gain. Just lets say Oprah is not the only one with that problem.

Happy New Year.

That sometimes interesting fun filled rag The New York Times has posed another question about the digital shifts: Does Reading online, count as reading?

God not another debate created by the digital shifts. I am too worried about the housing crisis, gas prices and what their meteoric rise will do to food prices, and wrapping my mind around the thought of Barack Obama as Commander in Chief to think about all these questions.

Are photographers really photographers if they digitally alter images in Photoshop?

Is it really a relationship if we have never met anywhere but through Chat?

Do the 4 thousand people listed on my Myspace page as friends really have my best interests at heart?

And Now does reading online count as reading?

These questions are quite simple to me.

No to the Myspace friends question, and a big No to the relationship question ( jesus christ get out a littlle will ya? ) , and as for the photography question, well you may not be Robert Capa, Ansel Adams or Ed Weston or Sebstian Salgado, or Cartier Bresson, but then who the hell is ?

So yes you are still a “real” photographer if you use the clone stamp.

But perhaps you are an artist, just availing yourself of the tools of the day , to express yourself. Anyway for ions photographers have gotten the short shift in the art world, in the beginning of the last century there was an ongoing debate about whether photography was art at all, so at least this is step up for photography, arguing about the tools you use to make an image, rather than whether or not the medium is a valid art form or not. (BTW photography is a valid art form, great photographs even hang in New York’s fabulous Cathedral to ” Real Art” the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for 20 years or more matter of fact, so there!)

But back to the questions, Does reading online count as reading? Simple answer: yes? Simple answer; Not exactly. Depends what you want to glean from reading.

Thing is photography is not painting, though they are both visual arts, relationships in the flesh are vastly different than online relationships though they both connect humans to one another in important ways, and reading online is not like reading Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, or the Sound and the Fury, or Dicken’s Great Expectations (three books that completely altered the way I saw adult life, the way the world worked, and human relationships when I was 14 or so) or any truly great book, but then what is?

The gist of the NYTimes article states that of course online reading is different than reading a book, but the important question for them and the educational world , the crux of the matter if you will is, does it help them score higher on the “Test” ? Ugh!!! Always comes back to the “Test:”

I am going to guess yes reading online does help them score higher on the “Test” but it does not change their life the way Faulkner’s, Dickens’s and a host of other author’s writing changed mine.

One interesting piece of the article:

Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

Brings up something I see in my teaching when we are reading together using remote desktop in my lab, we decide where we want the learning to go. If we are reading about a shipyard in Staten Island that built ships for WWII,( this happened the other day on our SI Northshore blog) we can then search more about the WWII, or submarines, specific types of ships. Learning is not confined by the authors conceived idea of what we need to know.

Another important point the article skates around istthat we need to teach this stuff,

Some Web evangelists say children should be evaluated for their proficiency on the Internet just as they are tested on their print reading comprehension. Starting next year, some countries will participate in new international assessments of digital literacy, but the United States, for now, will not.

In my classroom the when we read the article on Bethelam Steel I modeled for them what I do at home when I read an articles on the Internet.. I go to the hyperlinks, ( I hyperlinked WWII in the blog article) and I search for other terms I want to know more about using tabs on my browser. We need to teach/learn how to navigate the Internet for information.

I don’t care about evaluation. I care about teaching. Evaulation is just a fancy word for test, and if educational history has taught us anything it is that if you test for something, some slick grifter like McGraw Hill will figure out how to make a quick buck on products to help “pass the test”.

The big message is that it is changing, schools are not, at least not in pace with the world. No surprise there either.

Small pieced of advice; by all means encourage your kids to be smart avid internet consumers and producers of information. Teach them what a “good ” source of information is and try to give them the skills so they can do this for themselves.

In conclusion, reading online is important and like photography in art a major, viable shift that undoubtedly will prepare kids for an increasingly digital world.

Reading books is food for the soul, and in my estimation part of becoming human and cannot be replaced, and should not be missed.

I assert there is no reason to see either as mutually exclusive of the other. But I know how it works in education. This is exactly what will happen

Can I bring up Whole language Vs Phonics/Skill Based approach to teaching reading debacle that has been going on for 40 years or so? . A cadre of dolts have insisted for years that there is one “best way” to teach reading and these two approaches to reading can never be invited to the same party, as if their names were Capulet or Montague, or Hatfield or McCoy.

Rubbish, but many smart con artists have sold billions of dollars of products based on this pointless debate with the promise of the real “best way to teach reading” so the kids can pass the “Test”. Because it is all about the kids.

Ugh!!!!

In short read everything, everywhere savagely devour as much as your ape brain can manage and don’t miss Faulkner.

First , I am the least faithful blogger, so I can’t complain about lack of readership. I blog rarely or never. Even when I have gotten some readership, good people like Ewan MacIntiosh and Noon and others I don’t blog for 3 months. So no complaints here. There is no consistency.

Anyway this year was great in some ways, we had this cool grant from the S.I Foundation which brought Alan November to our school several times, and gave me a boat load of money to work with teachers to encourage literacy and 21st century skills in the classroom. Some good fruit. We had a fabulous film festival this year with some great efforts by teachers. 18 films in all. Took 2 days to run the festival, but the work was teachers and students purely. I think the thing we got out of Alan and Co. visits was a new shared language. People have a greater understanding of all that Google has to offer, how easy it is to podcast/or screen-cast. How much kids dig these technologies and that the Apps of Web 2.0. are the new pencils, crayons and chalkboards so to speak.

Some of my less tech-savy colleagues that have children in elementary schools (3 to be exact) expressed exasperation that the grades for “writing” on their children’s report cards were mainly talking about hand writing, then made comments,” they are going to be working on keyboards, I would rather a grade in keyboarding skills” or something to that effect. A small shift, but I think our professional development plan clearly made the point, ( helped along by the digital world encroaching around us) that it is essentially a digital world we live in, and perhaps, keyboarding, not handwriting is the new penmanship.

I am a little disillusioned, politics where I work are Machiavellian at best, and incestuously Borgian at worst, and this has sucked some of the life out of me. I am not brimming with enthusiasm right now. However, I am hoping to “get my groove back” this summer. Number of reasons for this, 1. We get a new principal, 2. We are doing a summer literacy cooperative with The Staten Island Foundation. and 3. I am making another pilgrimage to the holy waters of Boston for November’s BLC 08.

High hopes for our literacy project. We have already created a blog, about the North Shore of Staten Island, and have funds to take numerous trips to all the hot cultural spots on the North shore of Staten Island.

The idea is for the kids to create an online travel brouchure extolling the many pleasures, and educational opportunities offered from Howland Hook to the Verazzano Narrows above Forest Avenue to Richmond Terrace. Some history pieces, GoogleEarth, photogaphy and dozens of real reasons for kids to read and write. All crammed into 6 weeks. Should be good.

No other great words of wisdom right now. I do however have a new out look on being politically correct in education. I think it is the equivalent of a severe diabettic eating a box of dough nuts. What is needed is brutal honesty to cleanup the current mess.

Small turn out March 1st for what turned out to be a good workshop, in spite of some technical difficulties. The entire network at our school had two complete outages, due to a major problem at Verizon. We had Jim Weinzloff from November Learning. For those of you who have had the pleasure of Alan November as presenter you are familiar with how ” big” he can be in his thinking, and his presentation style. He is an idea man as he stated last year at the conclusion of BLC 07.

This year Alan spent several fruitful Saturdays with about a third of our teachers .  Jim’s style was smaller, but very warm, friendly, and informative. He did some nice work with Google Maps ( which has some cool new features), Sketchup and pod-casting. Our staff really seemed to “get it” that morning. I don’t know if it is because they have been exposed to more of this stuff thanks to a literacy grant from SI Foundation which has footed the bill for this high quality Pd this year, but our teachers followed him with good understanding, and a few of them applied what they learned in their classes the next week.

As I said we had Alan come to our school several times this year, and I have to admit we are seeing small  shifts, mainly in language. Our staff has added the terms blog, podcast, google apps to their professional vocabulary. A portion of them are blogging and many are using del.icio.us and skype at least in their personal lives, and about a third of our staff has been introduced to and use Google apps (some have created their own Google search engines, and use Google docs as a collaborative word processor).

Now as pessimistic as I can be, and have been in the past, I admit it is beginning to sink in and there are small measurable changes.

A few years back when I started blogging coming back from my first BLC conference, filled with piss and vinegar, I also came back speaking a slightly different language then my colleagues. Now many of them are at least familiar with some of the terms and tools like Jing, and pod-casting software such as Audacity and Garageband( we are a Mac environment for the most part)So all and all, a good start.

As an aside, I had the good fortune to be in attendance with Will Rich Yesterday at District 75’s main digs, and he was beyond wonderful. He reminded me resolutely that this is about learning networks, not just cool tools. Connections that make you grow professionally, and personally, often delivered with amazing immediacy. (Case in point MIT Opencourseware,all of MIT’s courses are now available online with video, all kinds of supports for FREE!)Which gives me some direction for next year. Our staff has begun to tentatively sip the from the Cool-tool Koo-laid. But that is just the first step, now the challenge is greater. How can we get them to see that building online learning networks of their own will empower them beyond their imagination? I will blog about Will Rich in the next few days.

So we are crawling forward towards the 21st Century.

I am not a big fan of expensive scripted teaching programs. Our school is an Every Day Math School (The Wright Group) . Our classes departmentalize and we do it for 2 periods a day. We spend a bloody fortune on Every Day Math’s ” expensive supplies” . The first two periods of the the day is dedicated to Every Day Math, a decision made by our administration.

I have noticed that the people who make these decisions , high level/ low-level administrators were usually not , ” master teachers” themselves (if they were they would have stayed in the classroom). Often they were adequate teachers, but the classroom was not where they wanted to be, or where their talents lie. They are good communicators, good at managing people, but few of them has a love affair with the classroom or curriculum. Not completely true in my building, one of our administrators after the fact I think is becoming ” a master teacher” , and has a post classroom love affair with all things curriculum based. You know the geeky stuff real teachers are made of, getting excited about “real learning”, designing an assignment, the execution of that assignment, the creating projects, and observing how that lesson changed the classroom culture, how the classroom culture impacts the lesson, and how the entire encounter impacted it’s participants, both students and teachers..

The thought that you can ever “script” an encounter that complex is ludicrous. It is like trying to script modern dance . Though I admit that great modern dance executed by someone trained in the Russian Ballet can reach dizzying heights. Modern dance is about freedom, a four-way dialogue; between the dancer, his body, the music and the audience. Modern Dance is about true honesty of expression, the fact that you cannot predict outcomes, or would even want to, and ultimately the fact that the body never lies.

The Russian Ballet, historically is a strict, even rigid disciplined dance. Where the “scripted ” technique understands and celebrates the possibility of movement to such an extent, that highest achievements of “personal expression” can only be reached by total submission to the ” Script”. Following the script frees the participant to reach his or her potential, create that magical 4 part dialogue.

That said, I have seen both Michail Baryshnikov and Rudolf Nureyev ( I know I am old) perform both modern dance pieces and classical pieces. The classical pieces were beautiful, elegant if predictable, and particularly in Nureyev’s case often thrilling. However all of the moves could have been replicated, taught, and followed. Sort of like “best practices” in dance.

The modern pieces were explosive, sometimes beautiful, as well as horrifying at points, unpredictable, inventive, and I as an observer had to participate. This was not Swan Lake, but something I had never seen before, Modern dance demanded my participation.

Now I love Classical Ballet, ( I will purchase Tickets to the Nutcracker which I have seen 20 + times performed after I finish this blog piece) but Modern dance requires my presence, it does not exalt the script to a level where, diversion is seen as anarchy, and anarchy is always bad. (Often met by a strike with a thin stick across the dancers legs in Russian Studios)

Ok, so I digress. Why compare teaching to Ballet? Or more far fetched, compare the current scripted teaching programs to the classical ballet. Well Ballet is so difficult, having befriended some professional dancers in another life in a Universe far, far away , when I was trying to be an actor in NYC in my teens and very early 20’s, I learned that Ballet on many levels was the most difficult things I think you can do.

A choreographer the one who creates the “scripts” in the ballet must have complete command of the dance and be a genius. A dancer must be dedicated, disciplined, practiced, intuitive and sensitive to all the elements that make the dance; body, mind, audience, and music. A dancer like a teacher is a communicator, and the communication is highly complex.

I think as we flop around like fish in this nation trying to figure out how to create a fool-proof instant out of the box answer to education, we should remember that teaching like dance is a complex art-form. We would find it ridiculous if you they sold “instant scripted programs ” to teach ballet. We should find it equally ridiculous that we think a communication as complex as teaching can be scripted. Teaching/learning can never come out of a box, or be completely predictable.There are always unintended outcomes. Often teaching/learning may benefit from rigorous discipline, but only if this discipline is based in something thouhgtful and brilliant. As in the case of dance it is the dialogue of many elements that give it it’s potency. not a script.

“Today every citizen is a war correspondent,” said Phillip Knightley, author of “The First Casualty,” a classic history of war reporting that starts with letters home from soldiers in Crimea in the 1850s and ends with the “living room war” in Vietnam in the 1970s, the first war that people could watch on television.

“Mobile phones with video of broadcast quality have made it possible for anyone to report a war,” he said in an e-mail interview. “You just have to be there. No trouble getting a start: the broadcasters have been begging viewers to send their stuff.”

“There are fewer and fewer events that we don’t have film images of: the world is filled with Zapruders,” , referring to Abraham Zapruder, the onlooker who recorded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. ”

The above quotes are from are from an article in the NYT 10/4/07

I have been watching the goings on in Myanmar, which will always be Burma to me, with painful interest. I have an affinity or at least a respect for Buddhist monks. Seeing images as the one below from the New York times.

showing a Buddhist monk fleeing the scene of a demonstration gone explosive is an attention grabber for me. That, and knowing monks carry neither explosives or gasoline, unless they intend to demonstrate by burning themselves. I assume the Military Junta that runs Myanmar is responsible for the flames engulfing what appears to be a bicycle( one wonders if a monk was riding it at the time of the explosion).

The reference to gasoline and monks , memories from my early childhood; I remember the monks burning,dousing themselves with gasoline and then wush up in flames in protest of the Vietnam War.

Images such as the one above bike in flames, fleeing monk, are moving to me and many.

For the past week images like these have been coming at an alarming rate in the U.S. news services . I begun to wonder what our government was up to. Why all this access to a misery in lands thousands of miles away, in a poor country that has not that much to offer?

I mean I get Iraq interest, Oil and Israel, and yes Alqaeda. (now that we swung opened the borders along Syria and Iran to them). That and the fact that about 4000 of our troops have perished there in the past 4 years.

But why Myanmar?

So much coverage, pictures, a flood-gate of news detailing all the , sufferings and shootings of innocents, willing to stand up against a military Junta that has seriously mismanaged Myanmar’s natural resources . Natural ressources that innclude a large untapped deposit of natural gas, leading to a 30 -60 % increase in inflation since 1997, and starvation for about 25% of their population.

So last April things got ugly when the government voted all a large raise for all government workers, driving prices on consumer goods even higher. Protest, arrests, then more protests and on it went. Until the Junta said playtime had ended , it was tolerating no dissent.

That is what you have been seeing pictures of sent from cell phones and laptops, a world away of monks, (they have as many Buddhist monks as they have soldiers by the way) dissenting in the face of no dissent, no tolerance. Pretty ugly stuff.

Now to tie it to what we talk about here? Why so much coverage? So immediate. I am always skeptical when I am told something more than 5 times a day. Like in 2003 when I heard the phrase Weapons of Mass destruction, until I was ready to puke.

This time nothing so sinister, I think. Though perhaps we don’t mind showing up China/Russia who still trade with Myanmar ( we do not) with out hesitation, In spite of serious human rights violations and the recent violence that has greeted the monk’s peaceful protest of raised prices and deteriorating economic conditions .

It seems nonviolence is in action in vein of MLK/Gandhi with a 21st century twist. Think India Salt March or Bull Conner in all his racsit glory brought to us by that brown-eyed handsome man from Atlanta, Mr. King. Just imagine what these two hellraisers, Gandhi and King, could have done with cell phones, laptops and rss feeds.

This time the monks are using Tmobile and the Internet to get their message across the world. Quite successfully I might add. So successfully that the Military Junta that controls Myanmar shut down the Internet last night.

Wow.

First Iran outlaws DSL (only dial up in Tehran) to control people’s consumption of and the flow of information, and now this. The old adage “if you control information, you control the world” seems applicable here.

On my first post on this blog I wrote about a “wave” coming . The “informaiton wave” is here. Not original I know but I wrote then,

“Resistance to a wave of this magnitude however is pointless, it is going to happen no matter what. This wave, a creative/destructive force, will tear down old worlds and build new ones. Not since the horseless carriage have we seen a wave this big, (as I said resistance is futile, and just so you know the horseless carriage wasn’t actually embraced at its inception either. ”

We see the information wave in action Myanmar, and the response, (shut down the information flow, not forever I hope. )

It bears repeating that teachers had better get a handle on this stuff as best they can, and I am not so sure anyone has the instruction manual on just how to do that.

Above Photo By My Husband, R.J. Formica

This year the weather is rainy, far from the idylic weather that morning six years ago, Tuesday, September 11th 2001 .

Well another tuesday falls on September 11th this year 2007 and I am watching Oprah. I know I said I don’t watch Oprah, but she is doing a special on September 11th, and no one else seems to really remember just how much the day that changed the name of the World Trade Center forever to Ground Zero changed our world forever.

I checked the T.V. listings, no specials, save for PBS, normal programing. Most of the kids I teach are too young to remember that day clearly. We had a moment of silence, not the 5 moments we observed last year to remember the times the planes struck buildings, planes crashed into the field and exact time when each building fell.

Attendance at the Ground Zero site memorial was smaller than any other year. I guess people have moved on.

I feel profoundly sad. I don’t know if there is another emotion that would be appropriate for this day. I always thought everyone would always remember, but this year, the sixth anniversary, it is apparent to me that they do not, they have forgotten. No judgement here, just an observation.

Two of my older classes blogged about it. Some of them remembered the day. We talked, and shared our memories. It was the only time I felt right all day.
I do remember that day, it was a day of no answers, but so many questions, many still left unanswered. It was like no other day I had every lived through. It changed my world, and I know my world will never be the same.
Six Years ago on that other tuesday I watched the 2nd tower go down from the waterfront of Staten Island. It just fell and was no more. A building I had once worked in as a clerical worker, that I shopped in the lower level of at least once a month. I remember going to a bank that had a piano and player, there when I was sixteen with my first boyfriend to cash checks from my first job.
I know the world is different. I know it, no matter if any else does.

Before 9/11 New York, the United States, my world was one of innocence. Six years ago on another tuesday in September the World Trade Center became ground zero and we lost more than we realize or remember.
Technorati Tags: /Septembr 11th 9/11,

This is going to be a pretty disjointed post. I am in a strange place, and it is the first week of school in New York City.
Forewarned as they say, you know the rest, so read on only if you are in the mood to cope with a lack of structure and more than a bit of chaotic rambling.

I have had 24 first weeks of school as a teacher and another 10 as a student (dropped out of High School in the 10th grade).
That is 34 first weeks in the NYC school system. Mind-boggling.
Ramble 1. I think George Carlin is brilliant and funny and pinned the tail on the donkey in this piece.
Chris Sessum mentioned it on his blog. It is profane, (much of Carlin is, and in my book anyone who is that sharp can curse till the cows waltz in the wheat fields) but dead on when it come to the failure of the American Education system. It is interesting to me how accurate his observations are about education, NCLB and our present psychotic fascination with testing.

Ramble # 2. I am also Simpson’s fan. No clip here, so I will try to set the scene: A group of T.V. executives in a “creative” meeting all sitting in front of their own T.V’s trying to come up with an “original” idea for a reality show starring Homer. They all kept feverishly surfing channels on their personal t.v.s, watching shows on other networks saying things like,
” Wait I think I am getting an idea”.

I think this is what the T.V. executives must really do to come up with the idea for these some of the shows . How else can you explain that as of last week I count 3 “new” shows on different networks where the premise of the show is to see whether some dolt can win big bucks by finishing the lyrics to Abba’s Dancing Queen?
Back to the Simpsons, they show the “creative genius” of T.V in formula: replicate a show that has a modicum of success again, and again, and again until all the life is beaten out of it, and T.V. veiwer suicide/murder rates skyrocket. Bottom line they never replicate the initial show, it is usually just a watered down imitation, lacking any substance or entertainment value.

An example of this is Oprah and daytime T.V. Think back when Oprah did a tabloid like shock show,( she did you know in her beginning she was not always discussing the philosophy of “giving” with Bill”the rock star” Clinton.)
In ancient times, before Google and YouTube around (1984) she did the kind of show that was closer to Jerry Springer Or Maury Povitch. Hell she is the mother of Springer and Povitch’s daily misery fests. And if you don’t remember, or believe me that Oprah the Good Witch once rode her broom in a more seedy neighborhood, well, as the popular rant on these shows say, , go ahead Oprah “take the test, take the test” you know their your children!

After Oprah’s show became popular the other T.V. executives had “a creative brainstorm” and daytime talk T.V. with a penchant for Freak show suffering was born. Oprah changed her show’s format. ( But Oprah is the mother of this mess no matter how many schools for girls she finances in Africa. )

This desperate insistence on replicating anything that has had slight success runs rampant in the American Education system as well as in T.V. land. We even have a term for it in education, “Best Practices”. “Best Practices” lets replicate their ” Best Practices”.

That is like saying lets replicate William Faulkner’s writing in Absalom Absalom, or ” The Sound and The Fury”.
Fool, you can’t replicate great writing, you can be inspired by great writing. If you try to repeat brilliant writing you will just write a bad book. There are hundreds of books written by the way trying to “replicate” Faulkner’s “best practice” in his writing and not one of them has.
Good if not great writers on their own terms, wearing their own pants and thinking their own thoughts like Cormac McCarthy have been inspired by Faulkner. (As an aside the Oprah The Good Witch “did” McCarthy and his latest book The End on her book club as the first book of last year, maybe their is hope for Springer and Povitch yet.)
You can’t replicate “brilliant teaching” probably for the same reason you can’t replicate T.V. or books. The players, setting, and time is different. I am no Oprah fan but even I know Jerry Springer is no Oprah, and no one will ever be Faulkner, ever!
Teaching is the same, when I see great teaching and I do in my little brick school house in New York City, believe it or not I do. I don’t copy it, I get excited by it . The thought to do exactly what they have done never occurs to me. Yet “Balanced Literacy, Reading First, and Every Day Math are built on this premise that you can “script” and replicate great/ good teaching and learning.
Ramble # 3: As my final ramble on testing I came across a peice written by a guy name Bruce A. Jilk. He plans schools all over the world.
He has some great things to say

“There is something that learning, because of it’s nature, is not the display of a packaged product. Learning is an inner process that is manifested as continual discovery”
Also this:”Nearly all children are born with creative potential. The drawings, singing, play, and place making of young children is in evidence everywhere. As they move through their years of “development” many seem to lose this creative propensity. We have all seen it when we visit schools. The delightful, spirited kindergarten classroom seems to diminish, year by year until you get to the more somber rooms of the 6th grade and beyond. What’s going on here?

For many reasons the teaching process in the US becomes more focused and controlled as students move ahead. This certainly is done for significant reasons. And with the fed’s passing laws that require testing this will become even more evident. The problem is that this also is limiting the creative channels of children. Typically we, planners and designers, respond to our clients by developing teaching environments that are supportive of this emphasis on focus and control. Recent security issues even push those concerns further. I believe this is what we are expected to do, but we can do so much more.”

To recap: I have spent too many years in school buildings, George Carlin is on to something , I watch the Simpsons, I don’t watch Oprah because I know where she comes from, Cormac McCarthy is a good writer, William Faulkner is a great writer (if you have time stop reading blogs and read them), you can’t replicate or package a creative process, ( and teaching/learning Bozos is a creative process) , You can be inspired by the creative, I am all the time and enough with spending billions of dollars on testing as you don’t fatten a cow by weighing it.

Welcome to the 2007-2008 school year.

Chow!

There is a saying that the way to hell is paved with good intentions. My grandmother, Nana Broderick, used to say it a different way usually to my father when he was trying to fix something, ” please don’t fix it if you are just going to break it “. If you look at American history there are plenty examples of “fixing things only to break them”. One is the failure of Public housing, another is a little piece of legislation called NCLB.

Public housing began (as a result of the National Housing Act of 1937) as apartments for middle and working classes. The Great Depression was in full swing and the corner had not been turned to more prosperous times. It’s early advocates believed the private market would fail all but the most affluent third of the population. Over time, however, those with means have departed public housing, leaving behind what amounts to a modern-day version of the 19th-century poorhouse, dominated — except in those projects reserved for the elderly or handicapped — by single mothers and children. Nationwide, only 8 percent of public housing households are two-parent families with children.

Laudable ideals started public housing. However in truth it was a product. In this case “affordable housing” sold to the American public utilizing tax dollars ( my grandmothers tax dollars she worked two jobs in the 20’s, 30, 40’s and 50′, Schraffts downtown Manhattan and Con Edison) . Public housing offered affordable housing to the poor. People who moved into public housing would be given - houses they could afford. The problem was this had not been thought out carefully. They were fixing one problem while creating a host of others. ( I remind you of the words of Nana Broderick)

Sure they had a place to live and tore done functioning poor neighborhoods to build these “places to live “. What they forgot was the neighborhood. There was no plane for a neighborhood to support the buildings. No local jobs for it’s inhabitants, schools, shopping districts, hospitals, churches, police stations, firehouses, recreation centers etc… Yet millions , the equivalent today of billions tax of dollars today went into making these “prisons for the poor”.

Remember this rule, When millions/billions of dollars are spent in the U. S. there is always big payoff for someone. Sometimes these days it is Haliburton in Iraq or New Orleans, or corporate welfare to McGraw-Hill’s Direct Instruction/Reading Mastery program to the tune of 4.8 billion dollars.

Anyway those of us who have taught inner-city kids who grew up in public housing in the United States are quite aware what a failure and incredible waste of my grandmothers tax dollars public housing has been for the past 50 years. In my own city a city planner named Robert Moses raised “successful” lower income neighborhoods to create these “prisons”

I see a parallel between this and the NCLB standards movement. I realize it is a stretch, but again the American public has been sold a “product” to correct a social ill. Testing, testing and more testing. But it doesn’t end there. They have lots of very expensive educational products They are going to sell you to make sure children do well on these “tests”. That coupled with the not so thinly veiled threats from NCLB that your children better do well on these tests and you have a national disaster in the American Education system comparable to the Public housing disaster of the last 50 years.

Now in schools in this changing 21st century instead of looking at how the world is changing, what new skills the 21st century demands, we are stuck following very expensive pre-packaged educational programs that are after all “researched based” and promise us the only thing that NCLB respects — better test scores. So what if these educational tools are offered at exorbitant prices and completely curtail teacher devlopment,and student thought and creativity, it meets the requirements of NCLB. C.Y.O. A. so to speak.( or as Nana Broderick would have said “Cover your own ass”.

Public housing for all it originators good intentions sentenced generation after generation to a form of “apartheid poverty” that still exists today. I fear the fate will be just as bleak if NCLB ’s testing craze is allowed to go unchecked in the near future. What is worse is this is happening at a time when U. S . schools should be undergoing a revolution based in the demands of globalization, and needs for different kinds of skills, to take center stage in the classroom.

Anyway I return to school tomorrow, and I have the luxury of creating blogs , teaching, film-making, and thinking with our kids. I am not stuck following scripted programs like Every Day Math. In a lot of ways I really feel sorry for our kids, teachers and our country.
Technorati Tags: Web 2.0 NCLB,

Public housing began (as a result of the National Housing Act of 1937) as apartments for middle and working classes. The Great Depression was in full swing and the corner had not been turned to more prosperous times. It’s early advocates believed the private market would fail all but the most affluent third of the population. Over time, however, those with means have departed public housing, leaving behind what amounts to a modern-day version of the 19th-century poorhouse, dominated — except in those projects reserved for the elderly or handicapped — by single mothers and children. Nationwide, only 8 percent of public housing households are two-parent families with children.

Laudable ideals started public housing. However in truth it was a product. In this case “affordable housing” sold to the American public utilizing tax dollars ( my grandmothers tax dollars she worked two jobs in the 20’s, 30, 40’s and 50′, Schraffts downtown Manhattan and Con Edison) . Public housing offered affordable housing to the poor. People who moved into public housing would be given - houses they could afford. The problem was this had not been thought out carefully. They were fixing one problem while creating a host of others. ( I remind you of the words of Nana Broderick)

Sure they had a place to live and tore done functioning poor neighborhoods to build these “places to live “. What they forgot was the neighborhood. There was no plane for a neighborhood to support the buildings. No local jobs for it’s inhabitants, schools, shopping districts, hospitals, churches, police stations, firehouses, recreation centers etc… Yet millions , the equivalent today of billions tax of dollars today went into making these “prisons for the poor”.

Remember this rule, When millions/billions of dollars are spent in the U. S. there is always big payoff for someone. Sometimes these days it is Haliburton in Iraq or New Orleans, or corporate welfare to McGraw-Hill’s Direct Instruction/Reading Mastery program to the tune of 4.8 billion dollars.

Anyway those of us who have taught inner-city kids who grew up in public housing in the United States are quite aware what a failure and incredible waste of my grandmothers tax dollars public housing has been for the past 50 years. In my own city a city planner named Robert Moses raised “successful” lower income neighborhoods to create these “prisons”

I see a parallel between this and the NCLB standards movement. I realize it is a stretch, but again the American public has been sold a “product” to correct a social ill. Testing, testing and more testing. But it doesn’t end there. They have lots of very expensive educational products They are going to sell you to make sure children do well on these “tests”. That coupled with the not so thinly veiled threats from NCLB that your children better do well on these tests and you have a national disaster in the American Education system comparable to the Public housing disaster of the last 50 years.

Now in schools in this changing 21st century instead of looking at how the world is changing, what new skills the 21st century demands, we are stuck following very expensive pre-packaged educational programs that are after all “researched based” and promise us the only thing that NCLB respects — better test scores. So what if these educational tools are offered at exorbitant prices and completely curtail teacher devlopment,and student thought and creativity, it meets the requirements of NCLB. C.Y.O. A. so to speak.( or as Nana Broderick would have said “Cover your own ass”.

Public housing for all it originators good intentions sentenced generation after generation to a form of “apartheid poverty” that still exists today. I fear the fate will be just as bleak if NCLB ’s testing craze is allowed to go unchecked in the near future. What is worse is this is happening at a time when U. S . schools should be undergoing a revolution based in the demands of globalization, and needs for different kinds of skills, like to take center stage in the classroom.

Anyway I return to school tomorrow, and I have the luxury of creating blogs , teaching, film-making, and thinking with our kids. I am not stuck following scripted programs like Every Day Math. In a lot of ways I really feel sorry for our kids, teachers and our country.
Technorati Tags: Web 2.0 NCLB,

Public housing began (as a result of the National Housing Act of 1937) as apartments for middle and working classes. The Great Depression was in full swing and the corner had not been turned to more prosperous times. It’s early advocates believed the private market would fail all but the most affluent third of the population. Over time, however, those with means have departed public housing, leaving behind what amounts to a modern-day version of the 19th-century poorhouse, dominated — except in those projects reserved for the elderly or handicapped — by single mothers and children. Nationwide, only 8 percent of public housing households are two-parent families with children.

Laudable ideals started public housing. However in truth it was a product. In this case “affordable housing” sold to the American public utilizing tax dollars ( my grandmothers tax dollars she worked two jobs in the 20’s, 30, 40’s and 50′, Schraffts downtown Manhattan and Con Edison) . Public housing offered affordable housing to the poor. People who moved into public housing would be given - houses they could afford. The problem was this had not been thought out carefully. They were fixing one problem while creating a host of others. ( I remind you of the words of Nana Broderick)

Sure they had a place to live and tore done functioning poor neighborhoods to build these “places to live “. What they forgot was the neighborhood. There was no plane for a neighborhood to support the buildings. No local jobs for it’s inhabitants, schools, shopping districts, hospitals, churches, police stations, firehouses, recreation centers etc… Yet millions , the equivalent today of billions tax of dollars today went into making these “prisons for the poor”.

Remember this rule, When millions/billions of dollars are spent in the U. S. there is always big payoff for someone. Sometimes these days it is Haliburton in Iraq or New Orleans, or corporate welfare to McGraw-Hill’s Direct Instruction/Reading Mastery program to the tune of 4.8 billion dollars.

Anyway those of us who have taught inner-city kids who grew up in public housing in the United States are quite aware what a failure and incredible waste of my grandmothers tax dollars public housing has been for the past 50 years. In my own city a city planner named Robert Moses raised “successful” lower income neighborhoods to create these “prisons”

I see a parallel between this and the NCLB standards movement. I realize it is a stretch, but again the American public has been sold a “product” to correct a social ill. Testing, testing and more testing. But it doesn’t end there. They have lots of very expensive educational products They are going to sell you to make sure children do well on these “tests”. That coupled with the not so thinly veiled threats from NCLB that your children better do well on these tests and you have a national disaster in the American Education system comparable to the Public housing disaster of the last 50 years.

Now in schools in this changing 21st century instead of looking at how the world is changing, what new skills the 21st century demands, we are stuck following very expensive pre-packaged educational programs that are after all “researched based” and promise us the only thing that NCLB respects — better test scores. So what if these educational tools are offered at exorbitant prices and completely curtail teacher devlopment,and student thought and creativity, it meets the requirements of NCLB. C.Y.O. A. so to speak.( or as Nana Broderick would have said “Cover your own ass”.

Public housing for all it originators good intentions sentenced generation after generation to a form of “apartheid poverty” that still exists today. I fear the fate will be just as bleak if NCLB ’s testing craze is allowed to go unchecked in the near future. What is worse is this is happening at a time when U. S . schools should be undergoing a revolution based in the demands of globalization, and needs for different kinds of skills, like to take center stage in the classroom.

Anyway I return to school tomorrow, and I have the luxury of creating blogs , teaching, film-making, and thinking with our kids. I am not stuck following scripted programs like Every Day Math. In a lot of ways I really feel sorry for our kids, teachers and our country.
Technorati Tags: Web 2.0 NCLB,
Technorati Tags: Web 2.0 Public Housing,

Chris Sessums posted this video from Youtube from an old Alan Watts talk.. Thoughtful and timely in these data-driven, bottom-line days. So much of teaching is a musical, intuitive, serendipitous affair. Not quantifiable at all. Yet we are always completely concerned with attainment and the bottom-line. Indeed a hoax. Good Stuff.

I am trying to get my tech-sensitive assistant principal to blog. No he does not break out in red blotches when near computers. (Well perhaps Windows platform PCs)

Tech-sensitive: meaning to have an understanding and sensitivity to the fact that technology in education is no longer about infusing tech into a curriculum that is a separate entity. Indeed tech (what a horrible word) is the curriculum. The two are inseparable the way books were to tribal knowledge, oral history, and religious thought after Johann Gutenberg in 1440 started fooling around with movable type and ink.

I have some good ideas but they may not be enough to convince him. The main reason I want him to blog is we bought as a school, November blogs for September and I think the only way I am going to move the initiative forward is to get him to blog, as a leader, as a teacher. He is what many people in the NYC DOE are not, consumed with ideas about teaching kids. He is not consumed with watching the Educational Data-driven Indy 500 sponsored by NCLB, the Everyday Math Company and the Reading First people. Not that he doesn’t know everything about our school numbers and data, he does. He knows how to play that game; he just is not consumed by it.

So why do I want him to blog?

Reason 1. He will inspire others. Well, people honestly respect him, I do too. If he blogs he will move others to take blogging seriously. He will move communication off the bulletin boards and memos that no one except a few kids and teachers see, to the world.

Reason 2. Audience. I want him to blog because of audience. I think Ewan McIntosh says it best when he says, “the average audience for student work is one (two for a conscientious student who bothers to read their own work). ”

Now we have the possibility of hundreds, thousands, to view student work and teacher thought. Amazing.

We were talking about it while we watched an army of movers on the last day of summer school, move one buildings belongings to another and the reverse for September start up. (Don’t ask but suffice it to say our Autism spectrum classes are moving into our smaller building, and our standard assessment classes into the main building) Not a decision that he made, or my principal even. (Who wants to worry about setting up 25 classrooms the first days of school, instead of thinking about the direction the school is taking?) These were their marching orders from NYC DOE. This is one of the main things administrators do, try to respond to the ever-changing demands made by a pretty faceless and heartless bureaucracy. Then do damage control so as to not completely destroy the educational experience for the kids and teachers.

Anyway he said quite seriously, I would have to write. Meaning he rarely gets time to go to the bathroom with the demands of the job now, how could he possibly make time to write thoughtfully about his job or education. Bingo. Here is one of the best reasons to blog. It makes you stop and think about what you are doing as a teacher, as a leader, as a student. Of course this ties into the father of education’s most famous line, (no not John Dewey) Socrates,(” the unexamined life is not worth living”)

Reason 3. Blog for self reflection and record. Know where you have been, and what you thought while you were there, this will give you a better idea of where you want to go.

Not that I meant that as a slam on John Dewey.

Just this morning over at 21st Century Collaborative there was a great quote by Dewey that indirectly contains some reasons to blog.

The quote was:

“”The world is moving at a tremendous rate. Going no one knows where. We must prepare our children, not for the world of the past. Not for our world. But for their world. The world of the future.” Learning by doing. Learning through real and authentic experiences. ”

Add the words global and connected to the lyrics and it sounds like the song Will Rich is forever singing rather well over at Weblogged, on behalf of blogging and other social media, or an article at Edutopia, Not something over 75 years ago about how education must reinvent itself to meet the demands of a world that was about to explode politically and economically after we all finished killing each other across the globe in WWII.

But listen to Dewey’s words: “The world is moving at a tremendous rate”. Certainly true today, we have to prepare for a world that does not exist, and don’t let anyone tell you they know exactly what that world will look like, because if they do they probably want to sell you a bridge in Brooklyn.

If anything has changed in our world at a tremendous rate it is connected communication. I mean the phone company as we know it can be effectively put out of business and is hanging on by redefining it self as an Internet provider and cable TV. So blogging and podcasting (if you have an ipod and italk that is a piece of cake) is the natural foot forward in education. Not because I know that our students will use blogs and pod-casting in their careers I am not making that claim. (I have no bridge to sell). But because the logical step forward for education is in the area of globally connected communication.

Dewey says we should learn by doing, authentic experience. Blogs are real. Blogs may elect our next president (or more importantly keep track of what Anna Nicole Smith’s baby is doing.) Bringing blogs into the classroom and the administrators’ office makes those experiences more “real” or “authentic”. Well perhaps that is a stretch.

I taught for 20 years before blogged. (Yes I am old, a little fat too) I used Project Based Learning for 15 of those years and did some terrific things but so much of that experience is lost. There is no publication of student work, or my thoughts as my students conquered ; the Civil War, Separatists in Holland” Dian Fossey, Mexico, D-Day and The Battle of the Bulge” Civil Rights, Anne Frank, Hiroshima, Child Labor, The life of bats, Zoos, The Founding Fathers etc… I could go on with this list of titles. But that is all that remains, titles that really tell me nothing. Even if I were a pack rat, (I throw everything out and I never taught the same thing twice in 20 years) the only person that would have seen what we had accomplished would be me.

Reason 4.Blog to share what you do and know.

Blogs also are a kind of progress report. A really fertile progress report that is living and can have interactive relationships. Blogs indeed could meet the goal of Data-driven education or what I like to call Educational Indy 500 . You have a real record with writing, photographs, self-reflection, podcasts maybe even videos of progress or lack of a student or a whole class. You also have teacher review and peer review of what has been created and presented. Real reflection. Not a number 1-4 that may tell you more about whether the child or the teacher was in a good mood on the day of the test rather than what kind of a job the teacher did, or how much the child has progressed. With a blog as opposed to a one dimensional score 1-4 , you have a picture of what and how the teacher taught, what the child did and thought. Very fertile stuff. You want an initiative that will give your real accountability Al Klein? Go for real public transparency with the classroom, instead of reading first how about blogging first? Take heart educational companies I am sure you can make fortune on this one too.

So, Reasons 4 &5 Accountability and public transparency of a public agency.

Any way I want my A.P. to blog. He is good at his job and I think it will only make him better. If you have any thing to add please do. Why should he blog? Tell me what you think.
[BloggingEducation]
[21stCenturyLearningskills]
[JohnDewey]

On this hot summer day in my special education elementary school I had a number of discussions with my students during lunch. Two of them in the 4th grade wanted to send pictures from one PSP to another. I don’t know if it can be done, at least not in my school because they can’t connect with our wifi. Password protected. God forbid the NYC DOE gave connection away for free. But they wanted to know how to get their Psp’s to ” talk ” to each other.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with a a fourth grader on a cold day this winter, he was telling me all about the Iphone this had to be January or December, and how he wants one. He knew it was going to be like the touch screen Imac in our lab. I was fascinated and not surprised. He actually said one day all computers will be phones. I had a little ahaa moment . This is their langauage. They speak it with ease. Technology is for them first nature.

I even think they hide their knowledge to an extent becasue they are not speaking to one of their own . It reminds me of growing up in the seventies and having a large arsenal of knowledge about certain rock performers in my case the Who, Frank Zappa, Clapton, Pink Floyd, Jimmy Hendrix, Muddy Waters, ect..

I would never have spoken openly with my teachers about my musical tastes because, well I was passionate about music. I knew my teachers would not understand, ” they did not speak my language and they were not “one of us”.

The astonishing thing is that criteria or the special knowlege that my inner city special education kids use to define or designate someone as “one of them” is not the knowlege of Rappers or Wrestlers like it was 5 years ago, but knowledge of Myspace, blogs, other social networks, Youtube, or how to pick up the local wifi to connect your PsP’s.

In direct contrast to my student”s mastery of this  specialized knowlege many of the teachers (and some of the administrators ) I work lack rudimentary tech knowlege , and have no desire or plan to change this fact anytime soon.

Amazing, I write grants that talk about “ 21st century learning skills” and my students need for instruction, curriuclum aligned with, and instructors prepared to impart these skills to them, and if you give me this money we will create students prepared for the present/future blah blah blah .

But it is a lie.

My students are getting the experience to create social networks, collaborate with others who do not share their physical space, utilize visual media to commuicate, ect…. . They are somewhat ready for the 21st century. They have some of the “specilized knowlege” they will need to traverse the 21st century. The thing is they are not acquiring any of this “special knowlege ” in their classrooms. Indeed this special knowledge these students have is making school and the boredom of teacher’s chalk and talk completely irrelevant to the students who fill the seats in their classrooms.

How do I change that? How can I get teachers to see that things have changed and the way they are teaching is not good enough or ok anymore? Don’t worry I don’t expect the answer, but it is a hell of a question.

Alan November the Koo l aid guy!

I am back. Back from the dead. Back from November learning. It has been 120 days since I blogged here. A little lax in my blogging don’t ya think?
Any way lots happened in that time. I wrote several grants, some I received, some I am waiting to here about. Two I am writing presently.

Penny finally died .

She was my father’s dog, I had her for 12 years after my dad died, she was 20 + years old. That was big for me. I worked hard for months making her comfortable and she finally said adios mi amigos on June 8th .

The next day was our, (373R’s ) film festival. Which are two reasons I did not blog. The film festival and taking care of penny was exhausting. That grant writing, teaching, graduation sideshow, yearbook production, and managing our school’s biogs, not much time to reflect on the state of education.

So 120 days after my last post and back from Cult November, the ed conference that gave birth to this log, and what do I think now? Well I am excited. Still. I got some great ideas from the conference. Things I can do . I have been playing with scratch for days. Mitch Resnicks from MIT’s invention with some other incredibly bright people from MIT, but if you want to understand scratch Ewan Mcintosh, ( one of my favorites at November’s tech soirée this year) describes what Mitch is doing and just about everyone else at the conference is doing rather eloquently in his biog . If you didn’t get to go the conference, well Ewan’s notes are pretty fabulous.

I also plan on organizing an on line film festival next year. Maybe if they will have me with Marco Torres students, as well as Ewan McIntosh and some  other people. My idea is we could create a mutual blog, submit films and have our kids review them from all over. Even see if we can get the ever elusive A. November to review some films. I will of course write a grant about this so any ideas about funding sources are appreciated.

Third idea I had is to have a small group of students participate in Dr. Yong Zhao Chinese second life site. One of the grants I wrote this year (if we are funded, come on Michael Jordan show me the money) involved an in school residency from our local Chinese scholar garden. Dr. Zhao site (not up yet as I understand it) teaches people about Chinese culture and how to speak Chinese if you would like, by immersing students in a second life in China. I thought the class who gets the residency with the Chinese scholar garden could create a blog about life in China via experiences on the second life site, what a great social studies experience that would be.

Speaking of Dr. Zhao he influenced my thought greatly, as did Ewan McIntosh. I am still processing a lot of what they said. Dr. Zhao’s take on Friedman’s ideas of just what a flat world will mean was less ominous than most, but his views of the new world order are still daunting. I think a lot of the November attendees were a little threatened by his assertion that teachers are a lot less important in the new learning equation than they may think. In his session I shared that in my own experience, I had learned mostly everything I know not in a class, or from a teacher, but on my own. He beamed at this and later thanked me for the comment when I met him at lunch.

Another thing I want to mention is Marco Torres and his amazing students, who attended the conference and were more impressive than he was. These kids now in college are still in “class” with Marco, some 4 years after high school had ended. A. November is always going on about redefining what schools are , or mean. Well Marco has redefined school with this group of young people . They have graduated from high school,( quite a feat in itself if I understand correctly in the 5000 student high school in an poverty stricken area that they come from) and they are still learning together, teaching others, (hundreds of us at the conference.) . Now that is a good example of how a school should or could operate. Life long learners, learning together.

Well that is all for now, thank you to Alan and your staff for this years dose of Kool aid lets see what effect it has on my life at 373 R this year. I will try to blog before another 120 days go by,but no promises.

[BLC 07]

I don’t really watch T.V. very often. Last night I saw two pieces that made me reflect on the state of censorship in the U.S., controlling content that is fed to kids. I conclude perhaps I should watch T.V. more often.
“The people who are reacting to that word are not reading the book as a whole,” she said. That’s what censors do — they pick out words and don’t look at the total merit of the book.”

That is a quote from a NY Times articles about a book “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal. The book uses the word “scrotum” on the first page. Seems many Librarians across the country have decided that maybe another word, maybe lets say the word “pee pee” would have been more appropriate for 8 or 9 year olds so they are banning the book across the country. This piece was on the news.

OK so I flip the channel to a wonderful show Independent Lens and they are discussing the politics/sexism/homophobia of hip-hop music. The filmmaker Byron Hurt did a riveting piece on the state of the most popular music in the land, you know the music all the white and yes even some “black” kids love. (Hip-Hop).

Hurt starts the documentary by saying he loves Hip Hop and then deconstructs Hip Hop’s deconstruction devolving over the years to a violent, misogynist, homophobic cultural phenomenon.“The more I grew and the more I learned about sexism and violence and homophobia, the more those lyrics became unacceptable to me,” he says. “And I began to become more conflicted about the music that I loved.”  This young man created a wonderful hop-ummentary (for those of us old enough remember the use of the made up word rockumentary) HIP-HOP: Beyond Beats and Rhymes ,that effectively takes on the issues of hyper-masculinity, sexism, violence and homophobia in today’s hip-hop culture.

The film examines some of Hip-Hop’s biggest sellers, saying and acting out some pretty wild stuff.
• Nelly using the crevice of a woman’s backside during a video to swipe his credit card
• 50 cent in all his slicked armed glory seeming to declare himself a target and an assassin, a force to be reckoned with, and not for the emancipation of a black man, but for cash-money and lots of it.
• The depiction of women as less than objects, kind of like the bling the rappers wear with casual disregard on their necks, larger than life, plentiful, glitzy, naked and extreme, but never really objects of beauty.
• women are repeatedly referred defined as whores, (I refuse to spell it hoe) and bitches. In one particularly memorable segment one of the artists sings about “getting his rape on”.

While I can’t recall the last time I used the word scrotum or for that matter pee pee in class with my 9, 10, 11, or even 12 year olds (I also don’t use the word Bitches or whore) I know that “all” my kids have seen these videos and by the way, they love this stuff. Admittedly I teach poor inner city kids, but as the film stated their audience is largely white and under 16. So that includes lots of kids out of the “inner-city” and probably many kids who will not thanks to some diligent librarians be reading the word Scrotum on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky”.

I am not a fan of censorship. Like the republicans, I usually am opposed to intrusive measures of government that dictate or control culture (that was sarcasm for those who don’t pick up on it), but it seems to me we are censoring the wrong things as a teachers. While it would be accurate to say I don’t want my 9 year olds listening to some oiled, muscular fool rapping about getting his “rape on “, it would be equally accurate to say that as a citizen of this country I don’t want anyone to have the power to stop him.
You see it is more complex  and Hurt’s film makes the point clearly as he speaks to many rappers including the legendary Chuck D who plainly states “if you want to get signed to any recording deal, there is a prescriptive narrow element to what is salable and it does not include, socially thoughtful or reflective rap, like Fight the Power.”
My point is we are trying to control things we cannot, at least not through censorship.

Now why did I bother writing this post? I mean I mainly talk, and sometimes (whine) about edtech stuff in the classroom. This is a little off the mark from that.Well, censorship, plain and simple. It is not that it is always wrong, (though I am pretty opposed to it having read and understood the first amendment), it is just that when it comes to profit, it is never effective or applied. You can’t censor Nelly or Snoop Dog because they are too profitable. So maybe you can keep your kids from reading the word scrotum, but if they flip on BET or MTV well they will hear and see things more potent than the innocuous word scrotum.
Now for the tie in if thiere is one, to how this relates to the attempted ban on social-software in the classroom. Maybe you can ban blogs/social-software in schools but kids live outside the classroom most of the time. They will be exposed. They will be in chat rooms and on myspace/youtube/googglevideo/MTV whether you like it or not. Better to start thoughtful discussions (with kids) about how culture defines us, about just what is some rapper is saying, while he cradles his glock, or refers to some scantily clad women as a bitch, we better start talking about potential predators on the web, and a whole host of things that are dangerous and uncomfortable.

Perhaps it is time we talk to our kids rather than to pretend these things do not exist. Our approach to so many things in the classroom that are unplesant and controversial has been to block them out. This is certainly true of  violent rap music and it is still a pretty potent cultural influence on young kids whether we discuss it in class or not. Lets stop blocking and start talking with and to our kids, or we could just let them figure it out for themselves, either way they will be exposed.

A post by Chris Lehman was referenced by Rob Mancabelli at his blog which discusses how much control is necessary for schools to I suppose maintain, well the levels of control and safety they now enjoy.

Wow, is not this an old debate?

(Above a piecie of revolutionary technloogy that transformed society)

I think this gets to the heart of the matter of an age old dilemma in public education, what is public educations ultimate concern in a capitalist democracy? Creating controllable citizens that will help the social-political mechanism continue to function, or creating free thinkers who may challenge in disruptive ways the power structure albeit make great advances for society?

Since this is black history month lets take a look at the history of the evolution of equality in Black America in light of educational controls. Well to begin African - American’s were denied access to Gutenberg’s momentous technological invention of the 15th century, (movable type) the book.

This amazing piece of technology had the ability to connect people, and their thoughts managing knowledge in a new a profoundly efficient way. No wonder It was illegal to teach slaves to utilize this piece of technology. No reading or writing.

Then of course came segregation and the “separate but equal folly” which while a step up from no educaton still proved to be a powerful way to control knowlege and just what race would would have it.

I always find it fascinating how truly ” careful and fearful” we are that free thinking may one day enter into k-12 education.

Education and control, how much? Who owns knowledge? It reminds me of something an uncle of mine would always say.

I had an Italian uncle who was a piano maker. Uncle Dan (Cortaza) he was not much fun. He was pretty ancient when I was a kid, made wine, fought in World War I for Italy, and did not smile that much. One thing that I always remember was what he said every time I visited him without fail and in a commanding voice laced with a thick Italian accent ” Meridith the one thing no one can take from you is your knowledge, it the only thing you ever really own and it is the most powerful weapon. Read, and learn it is all you have and it may save your life” Dower words to say to a 7 year old. They however stuck with me my whole life. Uncle Dan taught me that knowledge is power and who controls it is an important question in any society.

So back to Chris and Rob’s problem, however you phrase the question, how high the walls? how much freedom? Who controls what is taught and learned, the government? the schools? the teachers? the parents? the students?

The read-write web is indeed shaking all of this up just about as much as Guttenbergs invention did 500 years ago. After the book life was never the same, and yes it was better. The book offered a dramatically increased ability to manage, and share information. This had a profound effect on the world and ushered in the Renaissance, the scientific revolution and led to the Age of Enlightenment. So the quesitons are old ones. How much control, perhaps that is not the question that teachers should be concerned with. Maybe the question is in an increasingly connected and yes transparent socieity is control possible the way it was tradtionally enjoyed?

Let me tell you before the book in feudal society a few Kings and religious elders controlled everything, and that was that. It was an autocratic world where power was closely guarded. The advance of the book began to organize men around ideas, and indeed eventually killed feudal society . After the book it was almost impossible to contol people as they had been before.

Pol Pot knew this in Cambodia when he attempted to recreate feudal society, and the controls it had by making the population leave the cities and forcablly recreating peasant farm life. Education had no place in Pol Pot’s plan and in fact an infamous school the former, Tuol Svay Prey High School, was used as a place of draconian torture known as S-21.

Back to the question of control in our world. Rob makes a good point when he says “Online interaction between students, parents and other members of the community have already started and will continue whether the school provides space for it or not. At this time, schools are not deciding if their students and parents will be online, they’re just deciding whether they will be central or peripheral to the online experiences of their community members”

I have no answers Moodle, or some other “safe, controlled service to manage the read-write web in the classroom” is probably beside the point. The issue is one of control and just like with the invention of the book, with the read-write web there has been a dramatic shift in who controls knowledge and it’s access. This is a revolutionary change. and I don’t expect anyone to be too comfortable right now, or”know what to do”. History teaches us that no one is very comfortable during a revolution.

This video I found where all good things are found on, Will Rich’s Blog. It is rather intense and in 5 minutes clearly communicates the essense of Web. 2.0. Something that many of the blogospheres sharpest pontificators attempt to do on a daily basis, but fall somewhat short in comparison.

Quick update, and a webcast from FETC . Our school has purchased the November blogging service. We will roll this out formally in the next few weeks. The interesting thing is that we have a few teachers who have already started their own blogs. Like new bloggers they seem excited. Our kids have also started their own Kidsnewsblog, which is just in its infant stages. The idea here is I make them blog about what I want and here they can blog about what they want. I was showing them how to navigate Wordpress dashboard yesterday and most knew how to use this technology because they all have My Space accounts. Not really surprised but again it brings home the point these children in my case ( 4th, 5th, and 6th graders) are using Web 2.0. technologies outside of the classroom. Now to try and get my colleagues to use them inside the classroom.

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Now the tie in between us beginning to blog and what Will and Rob have to say about Web 2.0. technologies . The podcast is interesting they take a look at some creative classrooms that are using blogging and pod-casts to connect students to the larger world. Valuable stuff. What struck me is the points that Rob makes about how to apply this stuff to a larger audience, systemic change whole school districts etc….

I can’t help but think we need leadership on high level for real change to happen. Something Will said about presidential hopeful John Edwards (not that he is a John Edwards fan) , using his blog to run his election in a participatory manner where he responds directly to bloggers queries made me think we need a president who understand this stuff. Elect a president who understands social technologies and their untapped power in education and creates a NCLDC ( No child left disconnected) act.

Rob makes it clear that a Field of Dreams approach will not jive here. The “if you build it they will come” approach to change will lead to nowhere.

He retorts “if you build it but do not convince, A.P.’s principals, Superintendents, etc…of its importance, if you do not make Web 2.0. technologies standards based with quantitative standards, nothing will happen. You will just be left with a green field populated by a few teachers, isolated silos of educational excellence, but no system change.
I can apply this to my own school, things are changing not as fast as I would like perhaps. I would love if our administration would make blogging a requirement, or at least reward bloggers, but things are changing. In part this is due to one of our A.P.’s is in the know about Web. 2.0. technologies, and he is dedicatd to bring about change in this area to our school culture.
Anyway click on the pic below to listen for yourself and post a comment if you like.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0 fetc07

I am excited, frustrated, and a little impatient.

We had Alan November at our School in Staten Island on January 13th, and as expected he was terrific. He really connected with our staff. With his permission I will be posting a pod-cast of that session in the near future. If you have never seen Alan speak I suggest you do. He is the ultimate teacher and does something all the really good teachers do, use their natural curiosity to drive their classroom/audience. Good teachers model learner’s curiosity for their students, unafraid of where that may lead . In essence creating the perfect classroom model, good teachers learn with their learners.

Okay so Alan was good.

Our teachers were inspired. Many are now playing with Skype, del.icio.us and Garageband.

Many are now open to seeing their classrooms, and how they teach in new ways. So What Now? How do we keep the momentum going, and just where do we want this momentum to take us?

Our plans are to contract Alan’s company as a blogging service and see where that leads. I myself am looking into some grant writing, to support our endeavors.

I will keep you posted as to how successful we are to try and get a good portion of our teachers running their own blogs, and just how this impacts our small special education school.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0 Alan November

Written January 3rd, not posted until the 22nd

Well Maybe not such a big Hello, just Happy New Year. As an educator, I have been faithful to my mission, as blogger less so.

I was just doing my bloglines self assigned reading.  I think I read about 70 tech-ed blogs a week or so.   I was reading what blog guru Will Rich saw as his most important posts of the year. One struck a cord as I look at how faithless I have been to edublogging, Reinvention: I Quit , It was Will’s post on how he quit teaching to write books, present and blog and spend more time with his family.

I don’t know if his post makes me feel better or not. I think in my gut that good teachers, need to be in the classroom, in the schools, etc… So many of them, the good ones leave the classroom, for out of classroom positions or even better district supervisory jobs. I guess we need leaders and perhaps it is impossible to be good at two things at once. Will discusses leaving his job just short of a pension. My cynicism leads me to think presenting must be “lucrative” in order to make such a move.

I met Will at Alan November’s conference (BLC06) last year and he was quite good, I got a lot out of him and his book.

In this coming week I have Alan November coming to talk to my teachers about what classrooms should, could or will look like and anything else that he wants for that matter.

This post is raw and disjointed at best.

A nagging question I have had increasingly is if blogging is so wonderful, and I think it is, and if it is as Will points at very time-consuming how do we get teachers to embrace and actively blog? )It is not like they have a lot of extra time on their hands.)

I am not a gamer at all. I don’t like video games. I could make a sarcastic comment here about how I always found my real life challenging (engaging) enough with unconquerable problems. I did not need simulated problems, that in truth, are easily conquerable. I am not a gamer. That said this is definitely an untapped avenue of learning I need to look at more closely.

Watch the video, I particularly like Henry Jenkins assertion that students” will go to bed not completing there homework because it is “too hard” , but stay up all night if they can’t get past a level on a game platform.” He asserts this is total ‘engagement”. I agree.

But this makes me think of something else we identify as a 21st century skill ’self directed behaviour”. We want self directed learners, citizens, (as we should always remember the real goal of education is to prepare students for citizenship in a democracy, not make a lot of money in a capitalist dictatorship, more sarcasm!!!). Anyway we to develop the trait of self-direction in our kids, who think for themselves, creatively, outside the box and all that nonsense.

But that is not the reality in my school and most schools. The number one trait we encourage for administrators, teachers, and of course students is blind obedience. I know why kids like games past the sexy graphics, lights, bells, whistles and the need for speed. Here what they do finally has power. They are powerful relevant beings in Sim City, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, etc….For a little while they are not kept in the claustrophobic and intellectual sterile confines of classrooms and homework. They get to have power and it might be messy and not be politically correct. What Fun!!

Never forget childhood was an 19th century invention, that protected children from unmentionable horrors , but rendered them completely impotent until they reach legal age. Kids like videogames certainly for the elegants designs filled with violence and speed, but also because there they finally have some power, what they do matters. In real life what kids do has little or no impact on the family survival, or classroom life except when they refuse to play by the rules and remain, obedient and impotent until adulthood sets in. There job is to wait like an indentured servant or apprentice before they can feel like relevant powerful beings. Before they can feel the fire in their belly. Video games make them feel like they and their actions are important.

Reminds me of when a friend of mine became an assistant principal in my school, this was maybe a month later after he started the job. It was cold and we were at dismissal in front of the school. He had I think begun to realize that the “blind obedience” rule applied not only to students and teachers but in many ways mainly to administration. We smiled and he whispered “I can’t wait to get home and play such and such a game”, with a rueful pirate smile. I think it was Grand theft Auto. He wanted power on that chilly day he had spent being a dutiful AP. Aand that is one thing video games give kids’ power’.

In conclusion I am still not a gamer but maybe what I take from this is  I should look at my own classroom, and design my assignments and classroom more like a video game, where students get to have some power, to make choices that have real consequences, maybe a little messy,  and a little less politcally correct.