Matching Tracksuits

Fun in Fours

Results For "Month: September 2010"

Potential

My English 1 Honors class is about to start the Odyssey. For their weekly short essay assignment, I asked about heroes and heroism. Commenting on the usual association of “hero” with super powers, one student wrote the following:

In fact in the real world having superpowers would make you a villain sooner than it would a hero because though the idea of superheroes saving the world on a regular basis is nice and all, name one superpower and there are probably more than ten different ways to exploit it for personal gain and in a world where “look out for number one” is a personal motto for most of the world it is no long shot that with real superpowers there would be more villains than heroes in the world.

Getting these kinds of results is a real boost: such potential in this kid’s writing. The problems are purely cosmetic: nothing a few mini-lessons on sentence variation, punctuation, and voice can’t buff out.

Riots and Revolts

What is a riot? What is looting? Are these merely subjective terms that one could apply, willy-nilly, to whatever one wanted, or do they have fairly standard definitions, like “diamond” or “apple”?

Some definitions Google found of “riot” are:

  • a public act of violence by an unruly mob;
  • to belly laugh: a joke that seems extremely funny;
  • to carouse: engage in boisterous, drunken merrymaking;
  • an orgy, a wild gathering involving excessive drinking and promiscuity.

Certainly one could use “riot” in a subjective, biased manner. If one were to call a group of people loudly talking while waiting in lines for tickets a “riot,” that would be somewhat hyperbolic. It would be more troubling if those queuing were of one race and the commenter was of another. At the same time, these exaggerated uses of the word doesn’t alter the standard definitions. If a group of people are protesting violently, if there is clearly no one in control, if there are large enough numbers that ordinary citizens can neither take control nor avoid being affected by the group, this is a riot.

What about “loot“?

  • to take illegally;
  • goods or money obtained illegally;
  • to plunder;
  • to steal goods;
  • to take as spoils.

The word has Sanskrit and Latin origins that mean “rob” or “steal,” so when someone breaks a window of a store, rushes in with several others, and takes away merchandise none of them paid for, “looting” is a fairly factual description of what happened.

In any reasonable sense of the words, both “looting” and “rioting” are apt descriptors of what happened in Los Angeles in 1992 after the acquittal of Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno and Rolando Solano for the alleged incident of police brutality against Rodney King.

John Ambrosio, in his essay “We Make the Road By Walking,” however, refers to the rioting and looting differently:

The day after the rebellion began in South Central Los Angeles in 1992, I walked into my class at Brooklyn College and raised the issue for discussion. Without realizing it, I had unleashed a firestorm of clashing perceptions between students of color and the mostly working-class European American students in the class.

The European American students tended to view the rebellion as an irrational explosion of rioting and, as a communal act of self-destruction. Students of color saw it as a righteous response to the persistence of racism and economic oppression. In the heat of the debate, African American students revealed their deep-seated anger and resentment toward White power and privilege, and their furious rage at having to endure the daily insults and humiliations of living in a racist society. (32)

This was not rioting or looting but “rebellion”? Googling “define: rebellion” provides these insightful definitions:

  • refusal to accept some authority or code or convention;
  • organized opposition to authority.

One could argue that the L.A. riots were an enomous “refusal to accept some authority or code or convention.” But one could also make an argument that such a definition applies to most anything.

The key word in these definitions is “organized.” What happened in Los Angeles nearly two decades ago was hardly organized. As I watched coverage on the news, I got the distinct impression that the news producers didn’t know which live feed to air, such was the chaos throughout that part of the city.

“Rebellion” is certainly less negative — not to mention less judgmental — than “rioting” or “looting.” It is certainly a “different perspective” on the matter. Yet to what end are we going to take this insanity of not calling things by their name in the name of tolerance and adaptation of a multicultural perspective? We might as well call the American soldiers during the Revolutionary War terrorists and Osama bin Laden a misunderstood freedom fighter. Indeed, the fact that Ambrosio writes that the “work of Antonion Gramsci, the Italian Marxist political theorist[ and considered by many to be the father of Italian Communism], had a profound effect on [his] thinking,” it wouldn’t be at all surprising to find Ambrosio seriously considering such absurdities.

What is rebellion?

A slave uprising in the Antebellum South would certainly qualify. While it might not originally be organized, slaves would quickly organize themselves and work toward the common goal of liberation.  Indeed, one of the most famous slave uprisings, aboard the Amistad, was highly organized.

The Jewish uprisings of 66-70 CE in Iudaea Province were highly organized and carefully planned, as was Bar Kokhba’s revolution some fifty years later. While it started locally and in an unorganized manner in Caesarea (over non-Jewish sacrifices in front a synagogue), it spread quickly, and the Jews organized.

The greatest rebellion of the last century, the Warsaw Uprising, took months of planning and was so organized that additional German troops had to be called in to crush the uprising. Had it not been for the Soviets’ conspiratorial lack of support as they sat on the other side of the Vistula river, letting the Germans clear out the Polish intellegensia so they wouldn’t have to, the uprising would have been successful.

The revolts at the Treblinka and Sobibor concentration camps were highly organized and represented the most successful uprisings in staged against the Nazis.

In each and every example of what most individuals call “rebellion,” there was great organization and a single goal.

Is that what we saw in Los Angeles? Truck driver Reginald Denny was beaten so badly that he still has problems walking and talking. Korean shop owners had to organize in order to turn back rioting mobs. Chaos reigned, and yet it was a rebellion.

Ambrosio’s concern seems to be that by calling it a “riot,” we are disenfranchising those participating in the riot/rebellion. We are declaring their anger to be illegitimate and misplaced (as opposed to “righteous”). Calling it a “riot” in no way suggests that the underlying anger is unjustifiable. Calling it “looting” in no way implies that the feelings they felt is somehow immoral.

Referring to it as a “rebellion” that’s inspired by “righteous” anger takes it to the other extreme.

Expectations and Challenges

"Teacher Appreciation" featured phot...
Image via Wikipedia

Bonnie Davis writes in How to Teach Students Who Don’t Look Like You,

In searching for the causes of the achievement gap, [Haycock] and her research colleagues ask adults why there is a gap. They hear comments from educators that the children are too poor, the parents don’t care, and they come to school hungry. The reasons, she adds, are always about the children and their families. Yet, when she talks to the students, she hears different reasons. Students talk about teachers who do not know their subject matter, counselors who underestimate their potential and misplace them, administrators who dismiss their concerns, and a curriculum and expectations that are so low level that students are bored.

I’m curious about the methods of this study. Were teachers simply asked to share their assumptions, with researchers later collating and categorizing them? Or was there a questionnaire? Either way, there is an element of interpretation necessitated by such research that might make it far from objective.

I’m particularly curious about the claim that students find the curriculum so low-level that they’re bored. I don’t doubt their claim to be bored, but I’m skeptical about the cause of that boredom.

In my own classroom experience, I’ve found the state-mandated curriculum to be too challenging for many of the students placed in on-level classes (students who, generally, actually read two to three grade levels lower than their actual grade). I often feel my expectations are too high.

But is this why children are bored in the classroom? Is there a societal element? I believe there is. Contemporary entertainment media — games, television, the Internet — have taught students to expect short, entertaining bites of information.

The question is obvious: are we competing with the new media?

We might be in competition for students’ attention, but to that I’m tempted to say, “Well, that’s at least equally the students’, parents’ and teachers’ fault.” I agree that teachers should be interesting and engaging, but the point of the classroom is not entertainment, and the defining criterion of an effective twenty-first century teacher should not be their ability to entertain students.

Literacy, On the Fly

We began a new unit on Nightjohn and literacy in the English Studies class today. Just as the students were starting the kick-off, which was to answer the essential question, “How does literacy change lives?”, I had remembered William Meredith’s “The Illiterate.” It’s always been one of my favorites, a sonnet that takes all the rules about sonnets and bends them slightly. Cursing (internally only), I was frustrated that I hadn’t thought of it earlier. It was one of those moments where the teaching-as-an-art kicked in. I thought about it for a moment, Googled the title, and, finding it available online, decided to improvise.

I thought I’d try a technique I’d learned at the South Carolina Middle School conference at Myrtle Beach last year, but not having printed copies, I had to improvise.

I projected the poem on the whiteboard and read it aloud to the students.

The Illiterate

By William Meredith

Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think that this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.

His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
that keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?

“Turn to a partner,” I said when I finished, “and select the five to eight most important words in the poem.” As they finished up, we went though the poem line by line, and I circled important words students called out from behind me. In the end, with a few suggestions from me, it looked something like this:

Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think that this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.

His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
that keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?

“That’s more than five to eight words,” one student pointed out.

“True, but this was what I was aiming for in the long run, so it worked out well.”

I read the poem again, and then we talked about its meaning based on the highlighted words. They quickly saw that the letter contains three options: riches, sadness, and love. We jumped to the last line and reread it.

“Turn back to your partner and come up with three words that might describe his “feeling for the words that keep him rich and orphaned and beloved.” The responses were varied, as I’d hoped:

  • concerned
  • worried
  • mysterious
  • curious

We went back to the poem once more, and I led them to see that the  majority of the poem is an extended simile to explain the poets feeling when touching the unnamed subject’s goodness.

Turning it back to the essential question, I had students write in their journal how literacy would change the narrator’s life. We shared a few, then moved on to the next portion of the anticipatory lesson for Nightjohn.

As I write this, though, it occurs to me that I missed a significant portion of the potential power of the improvised activity. The narrator is not illiterate in the literal sense of the word (pun not intended). He is, however, illiterate. It might have been worthwhile to see if the kids could pick up on the emotional illiteracy that the poem is expressing.

Still, not bad for ninety seconds of planning and another sixty seconds of preparation.

Photograph from September 11

By Wisława Szymborska

They jumped from the burning floors–
one, two, a few more,
higher, lower.

The photograph halted them in life,
and now keeps them
above the earth toward the earth.

Each is still complete,
with a particular face
and blood well hidden.

There’s enough time
for hair to come loose,
for keys and coins
to fall from pockets.

They’re still within the air’s reach,
within the compass of places
that have just now opened.

I can only do two things for them–
describe this flight
and not add a last line.

Skoczyli z płonących pięter w dół
– jeden, dwóch, jeszcze kilku
wyżej, niżej.

Fotografia powstrzymała ich przy życiu,
a teraz przechowuje
nad ziemią ku ziemi.

Każdy to jeszcze całość
z osobistą twarzą
i krwią dobrze ukrytą.

Jest dosyć czasu,
żeby rozwiały się włosy,
a z kieszeni wypadły
klucze, drobne pieniądze.

Są ciągle jeszcze w zasięgu powietrza,
w obrębie miejsc,
które się właśnie otwarły.

Tylko dwie rzeczy mogę dla nich zrobić
– opisać ten lot
i nie dodawać ostatniego zdania.

Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Baranczak.

Drowning in a Bathtub

It’s been an interesting day on the personal responsibility front at the Beeb.

First, the coverage of the Koran burning protest protests:

President Hamid Karzai said the stunt had been an insult to Islam, while Indonesia’s president said it threatened world peace.

Who’s doing the violence? Who’s threatening world peace? The protesting Muslims. Sure, it’s provocative, but anyone protesting and turning to violence made a choice to do so. Since when are we all robots? Since when are we all victims?

Many of Friday’s protests in Afghanistan were held after worshippers emerged from mosques, following Eid prayers marking the end of Ramadan.

Demonstrators burned a US flag and chanted “Death to Christians”.

They want to kill all Christians because some are burning Korans (or rather, were going to burn them)? Who exactly is being extremist and provocative?

In an Eid message, President Karzai said: “We have heard that in the US, a pastor has decided to insult Korans. Now although we have heard that they are not doing this, we tell them they should not even think of it.

“By burning the Koran, they cannot harm it. The Koran is in the hearts and minds of one-and-a-half billion people. Insulting the Koran is an insult to nations.”

The president of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, warned in a nationally televised address on Friday that Mr Jones’s plan threatened world peace.

In a speech marking the end of Ramadan, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said: “I’m of course aware of the reported cancellation of the deplorable act by Terry Jones. However, none of us can be complacent until such a despicable idea is totally extinguished.”

They shouldn’t even think of it? The idea is problematic? In other words, we’re talking about thought-crime here. Even to consider it is evil.

Now compare this to the reaction of to the Manhattan mosque proposal. Do we have masses protesting and suggesting all Muslims should be killed? Are protesters suggesting that such thinking should be “extinguish”?

And just how are we going to extinguish these thoughts? The most radical way would be to extinguish the thinkers. Surely that’s not what these protesters are thinking. Islam is a religion of peace. They don’t make threats.

In a related story, American Muslims talk of being warned by imams to keep their Eid celebrations low key.

Members throughout the area are being advised to keep their celebrations low-key and private.

Keep a low profile. Don’t offend anyone. With America in the midst of a debate about the literal and figurative place of Islam in society, this seems to be a time for caution.

But not everyone is happy about that.

But with rows over where and when it’s acceptable to build a mosque, and with a pastor threatening to burn the Koran in Florida, some of the worshippers here sound frustrated.

“It’s none of their business.”

“I think they should understand that just like they celebrate Christmas every year, we celebrate our Eid after fasting for a month and praying,” says 15-year-old Mim Sharna.

I think that’s good advice for those suggesting violence in return for the Koran burning protest. America is a free country; it’s none of their business, silly and even offensive as it may be.

Yet lest anyone think I’m suggesting that this “oh, it’s not our fault; they made us do it!” mentality resides only in the Muslim community at the moment, the last quote, also from BBC:

An ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she will resign from a top party post after suggesting that Poland may have been as responsible as Hitler for the outbreak of World War II.

Erika Steinbach said Poland had mobilised its troops months before the Nazis invaded in September 1939.

Poland was massing troops, see? We were afraid we were about to be attacked, see? We were worried our panzer divisions would be overrun by the Polish mounted cavalry, see? We weren’t totally responsible…

Sources
Enhanced by Zemanta

Today’s Prompt: Delivery

Every morning, I have a student thumb through the myriad writing prompt books I’ve collected and choose a prompt for the day’s journal writing. While I’ve tried other starters (or kick-offs, or bell-ringers, or whatever one wants to call the activities intended to get kids actively productive from the moment they enter the classroom), I like journal writing the best. It ensures that, no matter what else happens in the lesson, the kids have done some writing.

As I prefer to teach by doing, I too take a moment to write a response to the day’s prompts, especially when kids choose a particularly thought-provoking one.

Today’s was one such prompt:

You answer a knock at the door and find a delivery guy holding a package for you. You open it up to find … what? Describe the best package you can imagine receiving.

What could I possibly want that would fit in a box? I want my daughter to grow into a self-assured woman. I want my wife always to smile when she thinks of me. I want my parents to stay healthy and active for many, many more years. I want my students to leave my class with skills and knowledge that will serve them for a lifetime.

How could I put these things into a box? Perhaps the box contains a photo album recording my daughter’s successes, my wife’s smile under gray hair, my parents standing with my daughter after graduation, my students holding college diplomas — a peek into the future that’s a reflection of the past.

Long Weekend

A three-day weekend allows us to do things we wouldn’t ordinarily do over the weekend. Trips and mini-vacations come to mind on Labor Day weekend, but we elected to stay at home. A hurricane brewing and a coughing daughter made us cancel our plans of camping at the beach, so we did things out of the ordinary.

Like go to Target.

IMG_0822

L spent her own money, which Nana and Papa (from whom else would she have received it?) had intended the money for our trip to Polska. She’d received so many gifts — from friends, family, and a particularly sneaky godmother — that we simply didn’t encourage her to spend it.

IMG_0827

Now the encouraging begins. What to buy? So much cash, so many princesses, so little parental support. In the end, she went with Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. The classics.

IMG_0838

We finished Saturday at the park, with K and I musing how much she’s grown since the first time we went to this neighborhood playground. Saturday she ran wildly, losing sight of us and popping up here and there giggling. Our first visit was cautious: no running without knowing where Mama and Tata are. No climbing without a protective hand on the bottom. No swinging without a toddler swing seat.

IMG_0871

The follower has become the leader. “Come on, Mama!” she cried out when we went to the empty baseball field. “Chase me! Catch me!” We can still catch her, but it’s not a question of three quick steps and swoosh! she’s in our arms.

IMG_0873

She’s become a moving target, with a sure, steady gait and a strong sense of independence.

IMG_0874

As she sat, talking to Nana and Papa, the “I can see her as a tween, as a teen, as an adult” moment washed over me all over again. The independence, the quick feet, the willingness to explore: all these things indicate the inevitable, but we so infrequently notice it.

DSC_5862

Sunday, we headed back to the park, but this time, a large state park with a couple of lakes, a few miles of trails, and plenty of rocks for climbing.

And boats.

Blue boats.

Blue glittery boats.

“The only thing that would make this more perfect,” I suggested as we neared the paddle boats, “would be for the sparkles to be pink.”

“Right!” came the response.

DSC_5872

Where did this love of pink come from? Pink is the stereotypical girl color, and we have in fact tried to avoid purchasing pink clothes for her. Yet pink remains the eternal runner-up in the “my favorite color” contest.

DSC_5890

The only way to make the day more perfect was a picnic. “A picnic!” L cried. “I’m so happy!”

DSC_5904

With a mayonnaise-cheese sandwich (what odd taste little girls can have) and all the watermelon she could eat, she certainly had cause for joy.

The walk that followed somewhat damped that joy. “I want to go home!” was a common refrain,

DSC_5907

until we reached a small clearing with plenty of rocks for skipping (“making ducks” in Polish) and general tossing.

DSC_5927

As might have been expected, L modified the previous refrain, adding a quick “don’t” when we suggested it was time to go.

DSC_5936

But we were all tired, and bedtime was approaching. Only the princesses were still on their feet.