Speech to Edison High School NHS Induction Banquet, 26 May 2010

31 May 2010 Leave a comment

The four core values: Service, Scholarship, Leadership and Character.
    Of these, I think I came to scholarship the soonest. Early on, though not in high school, I took pride in being smart and knowing more than other people. I wasn’t very smart though; most of what I knew more than other people wasn’t very useful to know, and I didn’t catch on that knowing more than someone else didn’t mean much anyway. As I look back now, I realize that I had kept right on learning because learning felt pretty good. I enjoy the ah-ha! And I like how knowledge leads to more knowledge and understanding to more understanding. Scholarship is about life long learning, and intellectual humility – understanding that the more you know, the more your will realize how little you know. I know I still have a lot to learn. Like Faust, I want to know everything. I just hope I don’t end up like Faust.

    In the second half of my life, I realized that I could lead. My leadership didn’t come from a role as a leader, or any fame or celebrity, or any strength or power that could compel people to follow. I discovered that leading was just believing that a thing could be done and then setting about doing it. When I did that, people followed and helped. Leaders inspire others, and leaders listen. Leading is serving. Leadership is helping others get where they need to go; it’s building the bridges so that others can cross. If you lead for yourself, you go alone and all your accomplishments with fade when you leave them to move on. When you lead for others, you get support and fellowship, and your work lasts against time.

    These days, as I listen to you talking about the service projects you do, I think I’m not doing enough to serve other, to meet needs, to fill the gaps in life. I should be serving, volunteering, helping. Service builds community. It is not the work of an individual, but of the whole, and it is a kindness. Kindness of itself is a reward. But it increases because as each one contributes, we all win. I see now that I have lived a life of service as a teacher. I understand now why teaching has been so satisfying to me. I could not have been more fortunate. My life has been so rich because I have made a few lives a little better.

    I hope that my life as been lived with character, yet I know how hard it was to come to a place where I could say that I try always to act with integrity and honesty to others and to myself, understanding and accepting everyone for who they are and accepting myself for who I am too. Of all the values, character is the hardest to come to. It must come from within. It must be the core value that shapes all the other values. It is the standard by which we judge even our thoughts. There is probably no greater praise than to hear that one has been a woman or man of character.

    A friend once said to me that he believed that everyone else was his responsibility. I thought about that for some time, and I too came to see that all of us, now or ever, have this one chance here on Earth. All of us now, all of us who have gone before and all of us who come after.  All of us together, one humanity, one big, interconnected life. All of us must take responsibility for one another. We all depend on one another. We are just many parts of one being—humanity.

    I have given a lot of thought – over the fifty or so years that I have given thought to anything much worth thinking about – to this idea of being responsible. And what has it meant?

   • It has meant out with the in’s – injustice, inequity, insensitivity.
   • It has meant teaching, because teaching is giving, and giving makes this a richer world for everyone, including me.
   • It has meant taking care of myself, forgiving myself for failures and caring about myself enough to try again, so that there is always something there to give.

And this is my advice for you as you participate in the National Honor Society, and in your life in the world beyond.

   • When you serve, you serve yourself. When you leave someone in need, you have abandoned a part of yourself.
   • When you learn, you learn more about yourself. Failing to learn, thinking you already know enough, you abandon yourself to ignorance, to fear and too often to hatred.
   • When you lead, we all go together. When you try to get ahead of the others, you just isolate yourself from some of the best parts of our greater self.
   • You are most yourself when you stand with others. You are at your best when you are part of the whole.

    More and more we are moving into an era of One World. Will it be the story of globalizing a society of greed and need, haves and have-nots? Or will it be the story of understanding that we all live in this world, together, not alone among the billions. We will make it in this world all together, or we will have lived for nothing.

    The story of humanity depends on all of us together. And so many will depend on you to know that, and teach that understanding, and lead them to a better life, through Service, Scholarship, Leadership and Character.

Thank you.

Filed under Philosophy, Reflections

Cultural Neural Network

24 May 2010 Leave a comment

In recent years, I have grown aware of a newish way of people’s separating themselves out from and above others, a newer form of elitism. In the past, educated people were rather legitimately accused of elitism as they held themselves above the uneducated, unwashed masses. Those masses had the good sense to retaliate with a much more pervasive anti-intellectual movement. Long Live Homer Simpson! This making the elite look silly had to stop, of course. In an effort to recover some dignity from the ignominy of dummy-bashing in the PC era, the educated elite embraced those less favored in a new way—through their “studies.” Gay studies, women’s studies, cultural studies…, something like crosses between sociology and natural science. The result of this superficial shift in perspective is that the modes of discourse preserve the cultural disparity between haves and have-nots.

By studying discrete social groups, those who are educated can show some level of respect for “marginalized” people, much as we would identify an endangered species, but they still identify such others as not-themselves. “Othering”—assuming a position of power that allows one to say who is outside the circle of power and privilege—identifies and labels people who differ from an educated norm as “marginalized,” at once creating a category of people to study, award rights, offer respect, and in the same breath placing them at the margins of main-stream society. Marginalization can only occur from the center, after all. Liberal academics will tell you that it is other empowered elements that have placed such people at the margins of society. But privilege is privilege and power is power. The academics comply with this othering when they study the marginalized, not the process of marginalization. Were it any less the educated empowered, they would have set the conversation differently. As it is, academia accepts and supports, even thrives on, an axis and rim vision of society and its relationships to its people, one center, many margins.

I want to look at an entirely different model for thinking about cultural difference. This assumes that cultural difference is significant in some meaningful way and not just as a means of elevating some folks over others. Culture can be considered as a group of people who share characteristics that make them identifiably different from others. Members must understand membership in the culture at some level. A gang will have a culture, but a random group of criminals will not, unless perhaps, they share an extended period of incarceration. Cultural groups should empower themselves by coming together for the purpose of defining themselves in some significant and presumably justifiable way as different from others. Such self-defined groups should examine their defining characteristics and determine how their group identity serves the needs of their members. Cultural groups should be self-defined and purposeful; otherwise, there is no reason to separate themselves, or be separated from the herd.

Such self-defining places a cultural group at the center of its own wheel with relationship to other cultural groups each of whom is at the center of its own wheel, each spoke representing a unique perspective. There is no need for a cultural “norm” that defines those at its margins. With no central power, there are no margins. The visual image of the wheel becomes increasingly less useful as we picture many groups sharing spokes with many other groups. Taken all together, these self-defined groups and their tangle of perspectives and relationships becomes a sort of cultural neural network. With the greater society viewed as a sort of brain, studying itself becomes just that—studying itself, not one part getting to study all the others, but a collaborative effort that results in a vastly more powerful understanding of who we are and how we fit together in the world.

Academia may not like this arrangement, as it dislodges them from privilege and asks them to share power; although sharing it could increase their power. The educated do not need to define any group but their own. I count myself in this group, while others may count me out. So be it. Academia is able to define itself, e.g., diplomas, publication, or perhaps simply demonstrable facility with knowledge. Without its privilege of othering, it might be hard to see the usefulness of a culture of educated. And the educated would have to redefine their relationship to other groups, no more Us and Them. Group identity must be about defining ourselves, not excluding others. So with a network of cultural study groups, we could study and be studied by other cultural groups. We must first study ourselves, however. We must first know who we are, if only to answer others’ questions about us. Within each group, would almost certainly be members who are also members of other groups. Much could be gained by learning from this intra-group diversity. Once we know ourselves, there would be learning and sharing dialogues between and among groups where inter-group relationships exist. These dialogues must be two-way conversations that ask, “Who are you?” and answer, “This is who I am.” No more is there a single source that says, “This is who they are,” or worse, “This is who you are.”

What does this say about the universities and colleges courses of study? Cultural Studies becomes Intercultural Studies with academia serving as a forum and occasionally as moderator. The content of such programs would not be the content of the cultures, but the perspectives among selves. New questions would be studied:

“Who am I?”

“What do I see through my eyes?”

“Who is he?”

“What does she see through her eyes?”

“How do our perceptions matter to us?”

“How do our perceptions define us and how are we defined by our perceptions?”

“How does it feel to me us or them?”

“What are our dreams and fears, shared and at odds?”

“How can or should we change how we look at things and ourselves.”

This may not be the ultimate goal, and it will require new thinking and a reorganization of some deeply vested resources. But it can greatly improve how we could get along, and it could greatly increase our potential for making real and sustainable progress in social status and material wellbeing.

 

Filed under Racial Issues, Social Commentary Tagged with , ,

Be True to Your School?

27 December 2009 Leave a comment

28 December 2009

Members of the Minneapolis Board of Education,

I live in Minneapolis Park Board District 6, as do some of the Board members. I attend caucuses and I support candidates who are trustworthy and work for the people of this city where I have lived for 33 years and taught for 28. I have dedicated my life to the young people of this city. In the past few years, I have been sadly disappointed in the decisions of the Minneapolis School Board to ignore promises it has made to its citizens and its employees. Has this board taken its lead from the Wall Street scammers, to promise great things it never intended to honor? How does this help the children? What is your word worth?

I struggle every day to improve the chances and lives of some of the city’s most neglected students at Edison High School. Mine are students who need hours of individual help and small group, interactive time to get caught up with their age-mates elsewhere. Yet day after day, I lose the time to meet individually with students or parents, because I am in meetings intended to improve my performance. The meetings are keeping me from performing at all. And while my performance scores are more than proficient, I am denied the pay increases my good work was contracted to earn through TAP and ATPPS, pay structures for which the district receives millions of additional state dollars.

“The School Board now refuses to pay teachers what was rightfully earned through traditional means as well as the through the ATPPS MOA and supported through the continuing contract language in Article I, Section C.1 of the MFT 2007-09 Teachers Contract which states ‘This Agreement shall remain in full force and effect. . . until a new agreement is reached,’”  states a recent teachers’ union petition.  Business as usual? Promises never meant?

A similar conflict between teachers’ learning and students’ learning surrounds the time spent learning AVID—the same skills but with different names, the adoption of which brings more money to the school. This conflict hobbles us with the days we are pulled out of class to learn the very same skills again in IB training, and again in IFL Disciplinary Literacy training. Small wonder the students leave. They see what’s happening. For many whole days, students are deprived of their teachers. Their education suffers because the District pays millions of dollars to hire reserve teachers, while “training” the regular teachers to be better educators in a vacated school building.

Students do not learn in the absence of their regular teachers. Meetings, training and testing pull me away from my students more than ten percent of the time. MPS policy is depriving its students by “improving” its teachers.

Yet the focused training teachers get on their own, often at their own expense, that meets the real and everyday needs of teaching the students in their rooms –students who may be the first in their family to graduate high school, students who are taking college prep classes with three and four years of English experience—this training that we know helps goes unrewarded, in fact uncompensated.

If you see no need to compensate me for improvement, I see no need to improve, especially since the MPS model of improvement hinders our teaching and our students learning. Are your interests politics and public finance, or Minneapolis children and their education?

Break with the past; be true to your word.

Jay Ritterson
Edison High School, English Dept.
Minneapolis, Minnesota

Filed under Education Policy, Social Commentary Tagged with , ,

In education, broke or not, fix it different

21 December 2009 Leave a comment

All right. I know it’s another rant, but hey! this is edumacation……  It’s really part of my individual growth plan for the year—a bastardization of merit pay where they withhold the pay part. Well, whaddaya know?

In trying to advance the reading of my students, I have taken to heart the writing of Frank Smith, the research of the Institute for Learning and the concepts of using existing knowledge and understandings to comprehend what is being read and expanding that foundation through guided effort.

Reading is a cognitive process, the visible manifestations of which are measurable–factual recall and recognition of text, inferential conclusions, and even stylistic connections between text and some notion of author’s intent. But in this last manifestation, I see questions of the validity of these “measurables”.  As I write this, I am vague in my own mind about the intent–certainly to complete a task for TAP, probably to clarify my own thoughts about a lingering conflict, and possibly to take a stand in opposition to authority, thinly veiled as recommendation. In sum, my conclusion is to use the manifestations to reveal the areas of process that need development.

If identifying factual matter in the text is not happening, then I need to determine what lexical knowledge and syntactical habits need development and redirection. Both of these are slow to happen, but respond well to direct instruction and multiple repetitions. Many poor readers are in this predicament.

If inferring conclusions is flawed or absent, then the neural patterns that carry this process can be developed, again with well structured direct instruction–modeling leading to frequent, applied practice–learn it from a worksheet and immediately begin applying it to reading. At least once a week throughout the year, year after year. And this is easy to apply to all the reading that is going on in rooms.  Verbally annotated read alouds help students understand how to understand texts in discipline-specific ways.

If stylistic features are as yet unlearned, they need to be taught and demonstrated and the students need then to practice finding examples. Formal style is the realm of criticism, not composition. Personal style is the coloring (and clarity) of composition and may not yet have been codified by the scholars. Certainly, our students’ styles have not been identified. This is all by the book learning, and only appropriate in preparing students for post-secondary literature studies. Realistically, we’re wasting our students’ time if we are trying to teach them all to be English majors.

Author’s intent is most often questionable and seldom clear enough to be apprehended by the vast majority of readers. How many of us simply avoid the discussion of this point, much like the discussion about the definition of a sentence, leaving it to others to believe they understand? Probably much more important (to the reader at least) is a impact the piece or writing has on the reader, and that is what is actually most often tested for in our dumb-data driven education culture.

And herein is the conflict I have with the current trends in education policy: the powers, driven by politics and public finance, measured in votes and dollars, have the desire of raising the numbers of “passing” students on large scale tests. All very measurable. A who’s-better-than-whom competition that will always have a top and a bottom. And all tied tightly to public dollars–taxes. We have pit the common good against common greed, and in this, I am on the wrong side of winning.

I am not interested in raising a number; I do not care so much how many pass a test devised to further divide people into haves and have-nots. I care about every student who passes through my room, even those that our leaders, national, state and district, are willing to consign to penury and hopelessness. I don’t want to manage them or control them or change them; I just want to give them enough to have hope and the ability to scramble over that line into a life worth having happened. Am I not obligated as a fellow human being to serve “even the least of these my brethren”?

So what I’ve learned again is that someone will tell me to stop what I’m doing even if it’s working, and do what they want because they know better and have a well-made package to show it, and I will agree as faintly as possible, and keep doing the best I can for the students who need my help.

Filed under Education Policy, Reflections

The Nature of My Truth

22 November 2009 Leave a comment

I’ve been reading The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien, 1990), which is a sort of Viet Nam war novel, but of O’Brien’s own admission, not really. I agree with that. I’ve also been reading On Writing Well (William Zinsser, 30th anniv. ed., 2006). Both of them are really writers writing about writing, and both are writing about truth. The first questions the unquestioned understanding of truth, while the second promotes the clearest presentation of that same unquestioned truth—well maybe not the same unquestioned truth, but an unquestioned truth all the same.

Questioning truth is perilous. However, it seems to me that a solid fundamental belief such as the existence of truth should bear up under serious scrutiny. Trouble is that pinning done “truth” is pretty hard. Bit like proving the existence of God. Truth is after all a belief and axiomatic. We believe we can recognize truth by assembling facts that we consider true themselves. We really extend and create truth from accepted truth. Connecting facts using reasonable logic we consider as representing true relationships. We use truth to define truth. Think of a trial. The factual evidence, considered true, is connected and thus extended to arrive at a truth about a crime from which truth we create a verdict.

Yet even that verdict is defined as being beyond a reasonable doubt. The truth upon which we might incarcerate or execute a person whose life is a truth contains an allowance for, and therefore a portion of, doubt. I assert that we arrive at truth then through doubt. Truth can only exist in contrast to the absence of truth, just as light is defined by not darkness. Darkness is not a lie. The absence of truth is not a lie. A lie is an avoiding of or denying of a truth that is recognized by the liar. No, the absence of truth is doubt. In doubting then, we bring truth into existence. O’Brien brings real truth, not Zinsser’s assumed truth into existence for his readers by firmly establishing doubt. When we doubt, we must process what we think we know to arrive at a truth that is all our own.

Yet, think of how we celebrate this understanding of the nature of truth. “Too good to be true.” We should doubt goodness? That’s coldly cynical.

  • If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. [Francis Bacon]
  • Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. [William Shakespeare]
  • Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it. [Andre Gide]
  • Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

Most of the writing that my students will do will need to adhere to Zinsser’s words. They will need to write about what many accept unquestioningly as truth, and they will need to reason those in a recognizable logic to an arguably and plausibly true conclusion. In this process, they will need to use good writing technique. Good technique is accessible, accurate, complete and assessable. Achieving these will get most students through most classes successfully, but not spectacularly. To get through spectacularly, a student would need to bring up the kind of writing that O’Brien espouses in The Things They Carried and in an interview with

So now the question I pose is whether the source of truth is outside of us as Zinsser might suggest or is it created through the doubts inside of us as O’Brien seems to be saying. Do we define truth by a set of agreed upon observations, representations and emblems? Or do we define truth by that look in the eyes of our fellow humans as we look into their eyes and know that they know as we know? Maybe truth is accessible to a sense we are little aware of, unevenly developed though varied exposure to truth as we grow and live. Maybe the truth about truth is exposed by memory and longevity.

I have an enduring truth in the memory of my father teaching me a lesson by allowing the Delaware ocean draw my 50 pound child’s body out to perish among the jelly fish and hammer head sharks. The image of my father standing ankle deep in the backwash of the wave that pulled me far away and made his fully grown image only two inches high. The awareness of an elastic bond of love stretched to the point of snapping before he moved. The truth is he never rescued me.

I have an enduring truth about the onset of true, deep love that arose in the moment of a kiss in the balcony of a darkened church in Evanston, Illinois in 1963. The surge of energy that ran through my body. The words, “You should have done that.” The truth was I should. “I know,” I said. That truth has remained in me for forty-six years, and that sixteen year old girl is still here with me as truly as she was then. Truth is that she died many years ago and with her took part of the truth of love.

I can’t think of one externally established, generally accepted hard truth. Maybe sunrise and sunset. Taxes and death, though I’m not always sure what is tax and what isn’t, and I have nothing concrete about life after death. Yet the truths I know are truths that none of you readers have ever known and never will. But they’re true.

I wonder how I would tell the true story of teaching in Minneapolis. Or the doubtful story of years of my life when I was people different than I am now.

Filed under Education Policy, Philosophy, Reflections Tagged with ,

In the “Race to the Top,” who gets left behind?

24 July 2009 Leave a comment

[This is a rambling hodge-podge. Maybe there’s something in here.]

Our obsession with competition as a solution has thrown us all into Life Lotto. So here goes. I have twenty ziglets. I need six ziglets to make my mortgage payment, two for utilities, three for food, and five for my daughter’s tuition. She’s majoring in ziglet management and will make lots of ziglets in a few years. So I have four ziglets left. I can buy two chances in the billion ziglet Life Lotto game!

Now let’s see: my two chances…one billion ziglets…the Lotto Commission keeps 50% of revenues…Hey! My chances of winning are 2 in 1,000,000,000! Imagine that if you can. I certainly can’t, but I understand this: To have a chance to be a winner of the big ziglets, I’d have to start with a lot of ziglets. What if I earned a lot of ziglets? What if I could give myself a billion ziglet bonus on top of the two billion ziglet salary I already earned? (I not sure earned is the right word there.) I could buy a half a billion two-ziglet chances, and still have billions left over, and my chances of winning are even! I’d hold have half the chance tickets! These are good odds. But all I do is win back what I paid half the time, and lose half the time. The commission is the only winner, pulling billions of ziglets out of the system, mostly from the hundreds of millions of people who buy few chances and always, always lose.

Okay, let’s get rid of the commission. Free Market Life Lotto. Now we’re ready to fly. I buy my two tickets at 4 ziglets. The pot is doubled; it’s now 2 billion ziglets. My odds are still 2 in a billion, but Ms. Golds-Sackman is loaded with ziglets. She could buy half the chances, and the odds would be that she would break even over the long haul. Hundreds of millions of losers would still feed the process, and a very few – about one every other year, if Ms. Golds-Sackman nullifies half the game – would win really big and lose most of it by investing in the Golds-Sackman Brokerage Bank. So really Ms. Golds-Sackman wouldn’t play Life Lotto, because she profits by having more one-time winners investing with her. She knows the principle of Life Lotto: some people get all the ziglets and the rest of us just gamble ours away.

Okay. Everybody knows that lotteries are just big shell games. So why do we insist on applying the principles to everything else we institutionalize? In education, we pay rewards to the success for the most advantaged while denying the least advantaged the additional resources they need just to keep up. We tilt the playing field – The New York Times article “Administration Takes Aim at State Laws on Teachers” makes clear that there is a belief that all children arrive the same and learn the same and that all content is taught the same and can be tested in an assembly line model. States must be allowed to pass laws requiring teachers to be evaluated on student test scores, i.e., pay for performance. That being the case, the teacher’s class list is their available ziglets in the “…$4.3 billion Race to the Top competition…,” as the Times calls it. And it is a competition indeed. Teachers will compete for the best, most able students, compete to teach in the most well endowed schools, and will teach to the tests, no matter how shallow the skills they assess. Their goal is not to better the students; it is to best their colleagues. And with limited resources, most will still lose in the long run.

Lose? What about the children left behind? The students who have already to suffer the indignities of not being native English speakers, not coming from a home with two college educated parents, not having had adequate prenatal care, not having adequate healthcare, not having access to healthy food, not having a home to go to after school? The Principle of Life Lotto tells us that the odds of being a biracial child, raised by a single parent and rising to the presidency are very, very long, so long that just the novelty of it at all substantially reduced those odds. But now it’s not even novel. One off.

The obscenity of such actions is depicted in the article “Professor’s Arrest Tests Beliefs on Racial Progress” also for The New York Times. In the United States, we, meaning empowered mostly white people, mostly men, are pathetically blind to the world we have created and now blame for its shortcomings. The election of a biracial president has rightly returned the spotlight to issue of race, but not back to the core of the issue. It was empowered white people, mostly men, who defined race in the first place to define what would be allowed privilege and what would not. In our “classless” society, we have formed and cemented “class-like” definitions into our psyches, on all sides of all lines, with such success that we simply assume that there is a real difference because for hundreds of years we have said, there is.

We have built the walls along the borders of our thoughts, and we all hold those walls up in our minds no matter which side of the walls we are on. Walls are our societal Frankenstein’s monster that will obsess us and drive us screaming into the frozen waste to wrestle to some end. Like Dr. Frankenstein, we have no way to uncreate this horrible force that in its rage ravages blindly. Perhaps we need to start by understanding that we too are on one side of these walls, as those across our walls have always understood.

Then we need to release the limited resource of power. It was power, not authority that put up the walls. It will take power to bring them down. In the giving up of power and the taking on of power, we need to end the competition. Power, like ziglets, is a limited resource. Deserved power is backed by authority, which brings with it responsibility. These are human rights: the basic rights to make decisions about ourselves, in our own self-interest, without impingement on others, and to continue our lives in the form of offspring for which you are then responsible and therefore over whom we have some authority. Nothing in this empowers anyone to define “other.” There is no need to define other, unless we assume authority we do not have by sheer dint of power and for the sake of disempowering, that is taking power from, others.

What we have done has been to focus our struggle, not one neutralizing the definition of race, but over who has power, because it is clear to the people on one side of their wall that they don’t have the power that the people on the other side of that wall do have. The struggle has been to get over the walls. The walls cannot be removed, at least not entirely, because they are part of who we are and have been.

The empowered people, mostly white, mostly men, don’t recognize or won’t acknowledge the unauthorized power they have. Furthermore, when they do recognize it, usually rarely and only slightly, they are at a loss as to how to give it back. Most of us have been somewhat disempowered in other power competitions anyway. Remember the principle of Life Lotto: some people get all the ziglets and the rest of us just gamble ours away. But that’s just it. The more power one has, the more one can acquire. The rich get rich, and the poor… But do the white get whiter? Well, yes. Especially if you view Whiteness as something collateral to color.

Let’s say I’m biracial, but was raised mostly by my white parent side of the family. This could be a perverse advantage of single parenting. I look black enough to get into everywhere black. I can be trusted. At the same time, I know white. I can jump across the wall and look black enough to capitalize on white guilt, people like this writer who are going to encourage “others” to get into the power. I’m truly bi-cultural, fully functional in two, competing cultures. And I can use my great intellect (God bless the DNA that built a brain that can form dendrites easily.) trained at white power-culture institutions to maneuver easily into considerable power. What cultural traits, common language and/or beliefs, have increased and which been diminished to get here? What culture defines who I am and how I am? What defines any success in this country? From infancy to wealth and power, who has the most changing to do? Why will lottery winners never become powerful, and will probably never stay rich? Because the white power-culture has been consolidated into a super-norm that even most white people can’t achieve. Whaddaya think? Pick the winner:

Image1

[1. Lost her identity, sorry; 2. Sgt. James Crowley who arrested Professor Gates in Cambridge; 3. Kenneth C. Griffin, 40 year old founder of the Citadel Investment Group, the $20 billion hedge fund; 4. Al Vivian, left, is a diversity consultant in Atlanta. images 1, 3 and 4 from The New York Times, image 2 from the Christian Science Monitor.]

In Life Lotto, is it hard to guess who has the power, just from the pictures? If you say yes, I’d wager you are way white, and are having a hard time getting what I’m writing.

Living in air doesn’t demand thinking much about air until the air starts to run out. It’s easy to see that those without enough air have the problem. It’s not easy to see that having so much of the air is the problem. It’s also easy to see why everyone is trying to get where the air is. It’s a privilege to be where the air is from the start. What percentage of your chances in this world is determined at the moment of conception? It may not make much sense when everyone, especially people who look and sound different from you, starts trying to get into your space, breathe your air, share your privilege. It may seem threatening. But here’s the real question: Who said it was your air? Whose air was it in the first place? Surely air wasn’t in the sole possession of the European aristocracy and subsequently spread throughout the rest of the world through benevolent colonization.

So as we race to the top, who gets left behind? Where isn’t there enough air? In teaching, it will be the teachers who need the most support to help kids learn, and are shoved aside to make room for new teachers. The first five years of teaching are the least productive, yet the Race to the Top will encourage churning. In learning, it will be the ones who start out behind. While the top is the target and the models are the Ken Griffins, we will never get those who start out farthest from that reality across the cultural wall into that game. If greed and avarice are deeply antithetical to your own heritage, it makes you a very poor competitor. And in life, it will still be the ones who are already gasping for air, playing Life Lotto, hoping and dreaming of getting across to a world they don’t “belong” in.

Who got to say what was top? Maybe we should just test the “best,” and forget the rest. We can define a new wall: education. Those inside the education wall will have most of the education, most of the ziglets, most of the air, most of the power. Real reform that will get us right to the top! We can build the wall on the foundations of classism and racism, maybe even sexism. Educationism!

Some people get all the ziglets and the rest of us just gamble ours away.

Filed under Education Policy, Racial Issues, Social Commentary Tagged with , ,

Biculturalism a code word?

24 June 2009 1 Comment

I was engaged in an unexpected, but interesting dialogue today. I’ll explain first why I call it a dialogue. It wasn’t just a discussion, that catch-all term for a wide range of various numbers of people talking. It wasn’t a debate, colloquially known as an argument, though there were two sides. It was two people talking on two sides of an issues, or perhaps two issues, as it was a lopsided dialogue. My other side dialoguer was asking questions in a faintly Socratic mode, but clearly trying to get my understanding of the validity or at least accuracy of her position…well, not position really. I had a position; she had a term that she had a definition for, and it seemed she wanted badly for me to embrace it…Well, really, I think she wanted me to say, ”Oh, I see. I’m wrong; you’re right.” As in my saying, “You don’t need to change what you have been saying or promoting or, for god’s sake, thinking…maybe even believing.” The problem with the dialogue was that I was in a different one than my counterpart. I was saying my belief, although I was sort of working it out as I was going, and I didn’t really care if she agreed, but I did expect her to do the academically honorable thing and agree to disagree. She is, after all, a college instructor, officially if not in practice, and I am too, in practice if not officially—mine being only adjunct.

Here’s what it was all about: newly arrived, acquirers of English in our mixed classroom (English language learners and native English speakers) who will not make eye contact. Her position was that we should develop the students into bi-cultural, bi-lingual individuals so they can succeed in mainstream culture. I can agree with that. She believes that if we have such a student in our class, we should gently and respectfully confront this behavior, statedly, because it will advantage them to know and be able to do this in our culture. We all acknowledge that eye-contact sanctions vary greatly across culture groups, and in many cases are linked to respect. I couldn’t see that bringing this to a student’s attention was my role, and I don’t see how it can be done either gently or respectfully. I’m not about setting up an impression that I, who have some interpersonal power over students to say noting of my culture group membership, devalue one of that student’s cultural standards.

My position was that such behavior, on the part of teachers, is in the category of cutting the hair of American Indian children who had been abducted and imprisoned in 19th century Indian schools to be turned into Americans. It is very different in degree, but I believe it is in the same category of abuse of power to impose one culture on another. It suggests, or may suggest to the student a state of right and wrong, good and bad, in reference to cultures and cultural values. I will not assume the right to do that to another human being.

I might have a conversation with a student of any culture who doesn’t seem to be getting the message from his peers, cultural or intercultural, about acceptable social norms, if two important conditions exist. First, I must have already earned a deep trust of that student, and I mean deep, virtually familial. Second, I must believe that what I am going to advise is truly necessary and in the best interest of the student. I already do this with my generic advice on Standard English and accurate spelling.

Another consideration I have on this subject is that we have as much responsibility for promoting tolerance in those of the mainstream of American culture as we do for preparing those NOT of the mainstream of American culture to thrive in it. Most of our New Americans, as has been the case with American Indians, will never be assimilated, and will never be accepted as bicultural, but will always be viewed as “other.” The same blind chauvinism that expects immigrants to become like the mainstream, will never allow them to do so, because it then redefines the mainstream. As long as one culture dominates American society, that shall be so. So efforts at assimilation and biculturalization appear to me as efforts to bring “aliens” into cultural compliance, thereby affirm the cultural dominance of the mainstream culture.

Now, I think my dialogue counterpart is well-intentioned. I am well-intentioned too, but even though I have been examining where I am in this dominant culture, and particularly where I am as a white man, I must admit that I find new facets and different perspectives that have been as difficult to recognize and realize as air. I make the effort. I intentionally surround myself with the unfamiliar. I still think I’m far from getting it. What must it be like for those who live in a cultural bubble? What what it be like to know you go anywhere, essentially, and do anything and be allowed to be first always? How does traveling as a privilege inform traveling as a refugee? And herein lies my conclusion. By what power do we tell? Telling implies a priory knowledge. What if with respect we strove more to simple ask? Asking implies incompleteness and an openness to becoming complete.

No, I guess biculturalism isn’t a code for assimilation. It is perhaps an effort to use language to escape the shame of assimilation, but they are only words. I think a better starting point than renaming an assumption of right is in respectful questions that seek to learn what is right. By learning we better and empower ourselves with our knowledge and understanding of ourselves through understanding others. By learning we show others the road to self-betterment and self-empowerment, and showing is better than telling. I want to say something pithy about being here, but I think that’s a different dialogue.

Filed under Education Policy, Philosophy, Social Commentary Tagged with , ,

Autonomy

19 June 2009 Leave a comment

gustave dore, the body of elaine from tennyson's idylls of the king

I had a dream last night that my principal called me in and told me that I couldn’t do my own thing in classes, but had to do as everyone was being told to do. We would all teach the same things at the same time. In response, I told her that she would have to come up with the curriculum for all four of my classes then, and went on to waking up.

Yet, here I am this morning, worrying about what I will teach next fall, how I will survive planning for four preps. I contemplated how I would get the writing in, and the reading. Half dressed, I’ve been looking through anthologies of short stories and essays. And I realize that I can connect the writing to the readings by pairing the genre – read persuasion; write persuasion, and I have a lot of short pieces I already know about and have used, so I can do this. I need to relax and plan it out by objectives and goals, plug in the texts, and recycle plans and Power Points and I can do this.

So why do I feel so intimidated by a dreamed threat? Why do I see following a curriculum scripted from above as a script. Because it threatens my autonomy, and my autonomy is now, and has always been of great importance to me. In high school, Marty Lunquist and I branded ourselves Rebels, we listed to popular music, AND jazz and folk music. We didn’t hang out with the popular set, much as we might have wanted to. Like them, we rolled our Gant shirt sleeves up, but we rolled ours to the inside. We stood apart, but only enough apart to make clear that we were not less in status or other qualities than the group, but apart enough to show that did not gain those things from membership in the Group. We could travel with the Group. We could be recognized as valid participants in the Group. We could even attain a level of leadership within the Group. But we were Autonomous. We were most completely us apart from the group. We were who we were because of who we were, not because of our membership.

I have carried and cherished that sense of autonomy in so many ways ever since. That I could determine for myself what was fair, right and equitiable became a sort of doxastic that could be construed to entitle a range of disrespect, defiance and debauchery. I could use moral and ethical logic, as did the laws and mores of society, to place myself outside of but no less than those laws and mores. Indeed, I rose above the social code; I was not a blind, mindless adherrent. That I had arrived at this Code Civil independently of, though of coursed based in, 3,000 years of thought made my code better. A horrendously arrogant display of self-entitlement? Well, maybe not horrendous.

Of course, it was only better or even acceptable in a local sort of logic. In a more, literally global sort of logic, one would ask what right had I to step outside the regimentation of society for no other purpose but to serve myself.

   “What if everybody threw paper out of the car? What kind of a world would this be?” Mom asked in the lilting semi-whine of maternal chastisement.
   “Everywhere would look like Arkansas,” I replied, but pulled my hand back into the car.

So, is my cherished autonomy really civil or moral litter?

Still, when someone tells me what I will think or what I will feel if they…, I am indignant. By what right or power can someone rob me of the opportunity to think and feel for myself? Does it suggest that I am ignorant of my own mind? That I cannot properly control my thoughts and feelings? That I am mentally or morally defective? What possible mental condition on my part could account for someone else knowing my thoughts and feelings before they can even happen? What pathetic mental state must I be in to have someone not only feel the power to predict my feelings, no matter the accuracy of that prediction, and then respond to my possibly, even probably, erroneously predicted feelings?

Wait. I may have abused my autonomy, even reached beyonds its legitimate limits, but it is still mine. It may be weakly founded and falsely elevated, but I have a full right to my own autonomy. Even if I choice to follow the dictates of a completely benighted state, and even if that choosing is flawed or unsound, it is within my power to choose, and anyone may challenge my choice, not never my right to make it. My autonomy is absolutley mine alone.

Of course to remain autonomous, I must survive.

Filed under Philosophy, Reflections, Social Commentary

How to get way rich…..!

11 June 2009 Leave a comment

All right. I’m sitting in a staff development that we are having because it was decided that we would be better off with more (unspecified) staff development. Oh, I know. I tell kids, “More is better,” but I think it usually means that fluency in writing is a good thing and will be rewarded.

So I spend time scanning the Times. I was reading this article earlier this morning,  “Treasury to Set Executives’ Pay at 7 Ailing Firms“, and it made me think.

I heard not long ago that Americans largely disapprove of the mega-bonuses paid to big bank and insurance exec’s who are using Federal money to keep the companies afloat. Americans think that’s wrong, BUT. Americans largely do not want weighty taxes put on big salaries. Generally, we don’t disapprove of huge incomes. Why? Because one day it will be our turn and we want it all. You know. When we win the lottery.

So …wait. We didn’t used to have lotteries all over the country and we didn’t have people earning 7 or 8 or 9 digit salaries. Look at the chart that’s attached to this article. Chart of salaries. What do you notice? That they’re almost all old White guys? No, that’s not what I mean. I mean Steve Jobs made about $100,000, and he’s doing okay. And Sanjay K. Jha had to struggle along on $104,400,000, probably because Apple switched over to Intel for processors. Jha made 1,044 times as much as Jobs!? Hm.

Okay. I get it. It’s about making the lottery legal.

You start with a going corporation…Sell lots of stocks.  Make a big name. Start making a lot of profit. Try to figure out how not to pay taxes on the profit and how not to distribute the profits among the stock holders. If the stocks look too good, the price goes up and your stock options aren’t getting you the controlling shares you want. Skip the stock options, go for the cash. That’s better because you don’t have to share.

So how do you avoid taxes and keep looking “good”? Find another way to pay for the things taxes pay for. Hey. Lottery! Start paying your lobbyists and well, your legislator. [Come on. I chair a political action committee. Wheels need oil.]

Get two things through – tax breaks for corporate profits – no corporate income tax. It would drive out companies, kill capital investment lead to layoffs, etc. Oh, and it would take money away from billion dollar giants. And a lottery.

How to pay for all those other things, the human services? Lottery surpluses. It sounds really good. Use the money from the lottery for schools. (Yeah, right.) No taxation. Let the poorest, most desperate believe that they can spend grocery money buying a lottery ticket or ten because her/his number is bound to come up, and now everyone can be rich. There’s money to pay for schools, health care, elderly, roads, bridges, parks, libraries, all paid for by the grocery money of the poor, nearly poor, and certainly deluded.

Meanwhile the middle class sinks toward poverty as its money goes into the impoverished cycle of poor, supporting the poor on the one hand. Meanwhile, the middle class is paying interest into the pockets of the financial system that can be swimming in cash, even when it goes sour. Whose houses are being foreclosed? Who are ever the victims of greed? But that’s another story. Poor people lose their home, and the middle class lose their retirement investments, and the small businesses fold up, but the moguls of finance walk away with the chips.

And it’s okay with Americans, because one day…one day…it’ll be my turn.

Filed under Social Commentary

Fresh start/Fresh stop

10 June 2009 1 Comment

Sitting at my desk, in my denuded Edison High School, Minneapolis classroom, at the end of the school year, reflecting on the past year. This year has been bad and good. Perhaps not the worst year; that would be 2002-2003 when I worked as the alternative compensation plan coordinator, a bureaucrat. Certainly not my best year; that would probably be one of the years at Sanford, maybe 1983-84, or Ramsey, 1988-89, or Seward 1996-97 or 1997-98. But these were all good for the students I had and classes I taught. If I calculate in administration and colleagues, the picture becomes more mixed. It becomes hard to say what are the best really, and it’s a pointless exercise.

The bad this year: As a school that has been “fresh started”, as in reconstituted, Edison was a wounded bird trying to rise. The damage was not as severe here for the remaining staff as at Washburn, but it was bad enough. “Most” is most in one’s perception, and for the survivors, this was probably the most painful experience. Whether that damage carried over into classrooms and to kids, I can’t really know, but if the relationships among teachers does impact the classroom and kids, it did have an impact.

Most pronounced in the relationships was the stationary front lingering between the high pressure zone of new faculty to Edison and the low pressure zone of remaining teachers. Certainly there were crossovers and even whole areas where the productive blending took effect, in the English department for sure and the social studies department apparently and perhaps in others. Between departments was a wholly different matter. I asked, suggested, advised and all but begged through the second half of the year for meetings between the English and social studies departments to discuss novels and other readings thus avoiding duplications. To date, no joint meeting. The physical education department’s passive/aggressive complaint about using a rarely used gym half way through the fourth day of our use of it. Walking up to a group of established teachers to ask a question and being invisible. The barrier becomes a little more solid.

The good this year: As a school that has been “fresh started”, Edison found many new teachers and a hopeful attitude among its students. That students at Washburn had walked out and demonstrated over the loss of teachers last year, I was probably leery and certainly unprepared when students complained about their teachers from last year. It didn’t help that they tried to paint me, as a declining returnee to Washburn, with the lousy teacher brush. Yet, by the end of the year, I liked even the most difficult of them, they seemed to like me, and many made good gains by the middle or end of the year.

I like kids, and I pull hard for the disadvantaged, marginalized and disenfranchised. I know that they may be ungrateful, unsuccessful and obnoxious, but I have to try and I don’t need much success feel rewarded. Not the best year, it was a pretty good year for caring about kids; they needed it. I am no less amazed at the love kids are capable of and their clumsiness in expressing it. Maybe I’m as bad. I am not at all amazed that the thing that makes teaching good is spending my time with kids. I am getting old though. I just don’t have the energy for it any more. I think it is only the kids that will bring me back here. The adults are too busy being about being adults together. Maybe I’ll just dub my room the Hermitage. Kids won’t get it; so they’ll come in. Adults…no they probably won’t get it either, but they don’t come in now.

None of this should be taken too seriously, you know.

Filed under Reflections Tagged with , ,

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