TO:  SOUNDFIELD SYSTEM TECH SUPPORT

We have about 25 systems. One of them is possessed (and by “possessed” I mean in the technical sense).  When the wall unit is turned on, it intermittently emits a wailing sound like a small child got a hold of the mic and was pulling our leg – but that is not the case.  It plays music when we want it to correctly, but when all inputs are turned off, it emits sounds like the underwater mating call of a sperm whale, or perhaps the amplified whimpering of a child ghost from the Victorian era who died tragically of diphtheria.  I’ve done all the usual stuff, rebooted it, dusted the equalizer, tried other mics and input devices (including direct wiring).  Got any ideas?

[audio http://www.whaletrust.org/audio/HIJ1704.mp3]

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”  Less often quoted, King followed that line by uttering, “Where there is no consensus, there is no leadership.”

The ITRT’s job has grown at the exponential rate of technology.  As Moore’s law has it, doubling every two years.  The job description is intentionally left vague.  Each school is different, “custom”, so our individual jobs should be molded to the needs of the school.  So we are left to act as independent consultants without independence.

A snippet from Seth Godin on April 17:

“Part of the challenge of selling custom work is that it sometimes seems that everything is up for grabs. You should stay up all night for a week. You should rearrange the orchids in order of smell, because even though it’s not in the spec, hey, that would be good service…Promising perfect is actually not nearly as useful as promising what the rules are.  Boundaries eliminate the temptation to bully. State them early and often and don’t alter them and believe it or not, the client will be happier as well. They didn’t sign up to ruin your life. They signed up to get the most they could from you and your team, and the limits are the limits.”

Seth is talking about folks offering custom work and getting bullied by their customers.

Three ways ITRTs have dodged the bullet and are hiding:

1) 5% of us have just gone into the lab serving TTT-time so the service we are providing is clear to all.  Giving up so much opportunity in instructional technology for job clarity is something even I can understand–some bad days.

2) Some of us have hidden behind excel, using the ritual flags of “data,” “datasorter” and “datawall” as voodoo incantations, cast to obfuscate and confuse.

3) Heck, half the time we are toting around laptops for the standardized weighing of the children.

Needless to say, none of these are solutions for the tsunami of new (as yet unseen) responsibilities pushing our way over the next 24 months.  TTT-time doesn’t integrate the technology into the classroom (where it belongs), sorting data is not helping integrate technology into instruction (where it belongs) and standardized online testing is not integrating technology into instruction (where it belongs).  All of these things are our job, we’re not arguing that.  All are important to the functioning of the school, we’re not arguing that either.  And all three amount to about 8% (in today’s list of duties) of the overall duties of an ITRT in a small elementary school.

So with our job duties about to double in the next two years, how do we manage the limits without the independence to quantify them?  How do we market what we do to our client base to assure we surf the dawning tsunami of new responsibilities and not succumb to the deepness of the waters?

1)      Common Pacing can’t be defined as a rote act, and you’ll never get a schedule of how to common pace from any teacher worth their salt.  Because the act of Common Pacing includes the whole “act of teaching” which defies a day-to-day lock-step schedule.

1. But the whole “dialog” piece we keep hearing about is an attempt to get more ideas being swapped amongst a team and their specialists.
2. For that to happen the team needs to be discussing the same things.   At least within a window that it makes sense to go back to the students who need help and fix things.
3. So common pacing is a nebulous concept.  An MBA might define common pacing as all teachers teaching the same thing at the same time and testing at the same time allowing team discussions of the data results of those tests to be discussed in a timely way so remediation can happen at the same time.   That would work great if there were no students involved.  And if it didn’t snow from time to time.  And if half of one of the classes on the team didn’t get the flu on Monday and Tuesday of a given week.
4. They say no battle plan ever survived coming into contact with the battle field.  Common Pacing is like that.  So sure, we want useful data.  Sure we want as many teacher brains focused on coming up with creative solutions—together.  We want those creative ideas to get focused back on the kids in a timely manner so it makes sense and “flows” with the year.  However putting a strict timing on Common Pacing would never work.  The idea is to all be teaching in or around the same window so data generated from common assessments can be discussed by as many people as possible in a window sensible enough to go back and address student needs in a reasonable manner.
5. The timing of that window depends on the subject matter being taught, the time of year and the hundred other elements we manipulate or play off of as professional educators to make learning happen.

1)      More data is not necessarily a good thing.

1. Useful data is given to teachers about their students in a time frame that allows them to do something with it to help students learn.
2. Navel-gazing about SOL data from last year is not very much help in a school with a 25 percent student mobility rate and the fact that the 75 percent of the student who actually stay change so much in 6 months the data is almost useless.
3. Useful data comes to the teachers during the window the stuff is still being taught, and the data should reflect what the kid is supposed to know, and should be delivered in a manner that doesn’t take a lot of effort to analyze.

Here’s an email I sent the staff today …. activating “Little Brother” the most disturbing of all dystopian visions…

By calling it a Teacher Work Day, they diminish the rest of our work the rest of the year. Are those other days “Teacher Not Working Days?”

Perhaps they should call them “Professional Development” Days.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788 – 1860)

In a meeting today, a group of elementary and high school teachers were asked to list the attributes we looked for in student who were thinking about their learning.

A list of 16 items came up on the board and the one thing lacking was “creativity.”

We discussed why.

“Creativity is not valued by our society,” said one high school teacher.

The elementary school teachers were shocked it was a subject for discussion. Frankly, everything in elementary school is fueled by creativity and fun. In K-5 we can’t demand students do their work. Yelling at a student to finish a worksheet only ends in tears and a meeting with the parent.

Apparently, one can give a boring assignment to middle school and high school students and simply demand they do it and threaten punishment (letter home, referral to principals office) if they don’t comply. “This works?” I’m thinking.

Apparently, in high school, creativity is reserved for GT, International Baccalaureate and other high-end endeavors.

A really good school based technology support person, a laptop cart and a good Internet connection are all one needs to create a significant online learning environment.

Blogs, wikis, discussion boards, photo sharing, wikipedia, research resources, photostory, youtube, teachertube, vimeo, flickr, library of congress online, google are all free.

The problem is, nobody can get a job after they retire from the school system with a free resource built up by a social network.

With this blog post, three things are going to happen. First, as a history teacher it will open up vast stores of media you didn’t think had any use in teaching history. This is important, because there isn’t a lot of news video of the Revolutionary War. Second, it will make you one of the most powerful visual creators and communicators in your building. And third, (and I’m sorry about this) you’ll probably stop watching television for entertainment, except in small bursts, in about three weeks time.

Before I became a teacher 7 years ago, I was a different person. A television producer and writer. Life’s funny that way.  I worked for NBC, CNN, Associated Press Television News and other organizations. I would like to pass along a big secret, the hidden gem, the under-the-table truth on how to produce eye-popping, emotion-grabbing, communicative media. It’s the Visual Metaphor.

Easier to explain than to do, the Visual Metaphor makes up most good media.

DEFINITIONS:

A metaphor is:

1. A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.

2. A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, esp. something abstract.

( source: http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/metaphor )

In the vernacular of the peasantry, a metaphor is “comparing two things without using like or as.”

A Visual Metaphor simply replaces the words for one of the two things compared, with a picture or video.

IMPLEMENTATION:

When using metaphors for teaching, we choose two things, one is something our students know (prior knowledge), the second is some concept we are trying to teach.  The second is usually not “literally applicable” and is usually “something abstract” as noted in our definitions above.  When creating a Visual Metaphor, one wants to use the visual piece to communicate the second, abstract, something.

Watch this video:

Uncontacted Amazon Tribe: First ever aerial footage from Survival International on Vimeo.

We see here long-bows, longhouses, and any number of artifacts we are trying to teach children about in K-5 environment. We have standards to cover about Native Americans which are contained in this video. Of course the video is not about Native North Americans. It’s about Native South Americans and was shot this year.

What is an underlying theme in the video is the uncontacted tribe‘s reaction to seeing the plane.  They are scared.

OK, that was pretty easy, let’s try another:

When teaching slavery, we have limited visuals with which to work and the subject is both disturbing and difficult. This video compares slavery to a cattle auction. Every kid who’s been to a county fair knows what a cattle auction looks like.  They’ve seen the pen.  The video is talking about modern slavery, not the period in U.S. history 100 years ago.

Clearly both these videos are not proper for some groups of students and even the cattle market would need to be stopped at the high school level before the last bit about the modern sex slave trade.

But what is critical is both of these videos speak to the emotion of the participants in similar situations.  Universal emotional truths.  People caught up in a trade as slaves would have certain emotional reactions and it isn’t too much of a stretch to paint the picture.  Since we are using these videos as metaphors, we aren’t saying this is exactly how the African slaves felt when they were brought to North America.  Nor are we saying this is exactly how the Native Americans might have felt when they encountered european settlers.  However it’s important for getting information across.

People use the framework of emotions to organize information, at the gut level.  They use emotional intelligence as a wire frame on which to hang facts and figures.  It’s what drives most media.  It’s the most difficult piece to bring to teaching history — making it real on the gut level.  Great history teachers have been able to do this.  My favorite history teacher did.

So much of the traditional teaching of history is the accumulation of facts. The parsing and organization of huge amounts of empty data.  It’s the stellar history teachers that make it all come alive.  It’s not a big secret, they speak to the emotional intelligence, and use that as a scaffold on which to organize the data.

Neither of these two videos are mock-ups. Neither of them are “infotainment” with the types of historical inaccuracies inherent in using sources like Disney movies or Williamsburg to teach facts about history. As Visual Metaphors, it’s made clear they are not representations of historical fact. What they communicate is the gestalt of the historical issue. They are great writing prompts and discussion starters that allow students to place historical issues and the facts that surround them in an emotional context, without a lot of words and analysis. The information is transferred quickly and visually at an emotional level, and the syntheses comes from  analyzing and working with the information.

Conversely, what torments many students in history class is the lack of context from the start.  It is only at the end of a unit, when a diorama is complete and can be studied, that the gestalt of the historical issues are internalized.  Syntheses is rarely achieved in such circumstances.

Using Visual Metaphors at the beginning, to provide context for the facts and figures, short circuits this teaching challenge.

FINDING VISUAL METAPHORS:

There are many sources of video, audio and still pictures: Discovery Education, YouTube.com, Creative Commons.  All of these online sources have key word search.

Here’s the trick.  When searching for visuals, don’t search using nouns (common or proper) for the actual thing you seek to teach.  Search using adjectives, for the attributes of what you seek.  You’ll find a hugh array of metaphorical options.

Find a storage place for your good visual metaphors.  They hold over time.

SEEING VISUAL METAPHORS:

I said after reading this, you’ll probably stop watching television for entertainment.  What happens (to people who work in television) is they start recognizing the use of Visual Metaphor.  In every commercial, drama and movie, you’ll start to deconstruct the production process.  And that’s, unfortunately, a side effect of becoming aware of this phenomenon in media.

The “slope of ineffective efficacy” is at a point just after the bulk of the planning process is completed, and after the “implement” order from required managers has been achieved.  It is at this point at which one can bring in that throng of “must have buy in” mid-level managers with the most positive and least negative impact.

It’s too late for them to scuttle the project politically in the planning stages.

It’s too early for them to claim it’s somebody else’s project, and scuttle it because one is not getting any credit.  In fact it’s just in time for them to claim credit themselves, which is critical.

Most important, it’s too late to scuttle the project by “adding value.”

During the period in a project life-cycle I term the “slope of ineffective efficacy,” mid-level managers can be brought on board, claim some ownership, not have any direct hands-on impact, and they can benefit themselves by gloaming onto the success, while not really being in a position to try and kill the project.

http://edudemic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/changingusa.gif

As in, “The solipsistic ranting of histrionic and proudly biased evening hosts on Fox News and MSNBC.”

Solipsism ( /ˈsɒlɨpsɪzəm/) is the philosophical idea that only one’s own mind is sure to exist. The term comes from the Latin solus (alone) and ipse (self). Solipsism as an epistemological position holds that knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind is unsure. The external world and other minds cannot be known, and might not exist outside the mind. As a metaphysical position, solipsism goes further to the conclusion that the world and other minds do not exist.

Here’s the text of a 2012 commencement speech from David McCullough Jr., (yes son of historian David McCullough) an English teacher at Wellesley High School in Massachusetts:

Dr. Wong, Dr. Keough, Mrs. Novogroski, Ms. Curran, members of the board of education, family and friends of the graduates, ladies and gentlemen of the Wellesley High School class of 2012, for the privilege of speaking to you this afternoon, I am honored and grateful. Thank you.

So here we are… commencement… life’s great forward-looking ceremony. (And don’t say, “What about weddings?” Weddings are one-sided and insufficiently effective. Weddings are bride-centric pageantry. Other than conceding to a list of unreasonable demands, the groom just stands there. No stately, hey-everybody-look-at-me procession. No being given away. No identity-changing pronouncement. And can you imagine a television show dedicated to watching guys try on tuxedos? Their fathers sitting there misty-eyed with joy and disbelief, their brothers lurking in the corner muttering with envy. Left to men, weddings would be, after limits-testing procrastination, spontaneous, almost inadvertent… during halftime… on the way to the refrigerator. And then there’s the frequency of failure: Statistics tell us half of you will get divorced. A winning percentage like that’ll get you last place in the American League East. The Baltimore Orioles do better than weddings.)

But this ceremony… commencement… a commencement works every time. From this day forward… truly… in sickness and in health, through financial fiascos, through midlife crises and passably attractive sales reps at trade shows in Cincinnati, through diminishing tolerance for annoyingness, through every difference, irreconcilable and otherwise, you will stay forever graduated from high school, you and your diploma as one, ‘til death do you part.

No, commencement is life’s great ceremonial beginning, with its own attendant and highly appropriate symbolism. Fitting, for example, for this auspicious rite of passage, is where we find ourselves this afternoon, the venue. Normally, I avoid clichés like the plague, wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole, but here we are on a literal level playing field. That matters. That says something. And your ceremonial costume… shapeless, uniform, one-size-fits-all. Whether male or female, tall or short, scholar or slacker, spray-tanned prom queen or intergalactic X-Box assassin, each of you is dressed, you’ll notice, exactly the same. And your diploma… but for your name, exactly the same.

All of this is as it should be, because none of you is special.

You are not special. You are not exceptional.

Contrary to what your soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you… you’re nothing special.

Yes, you’ve been pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble-wrapped. Yes, capable adults with other things to do have held you, kissed you, fed you, wiped your mouth, wiped your bottom, trained you, taught you, tutored you, coached you, listened to you, counseled you, encouraged you, consoled you and encouraged you again. You’ve been nudged, cajoled, wheedled and implored. You’ve been feted and fawned over and called sweetie pie. Yes, you have. And, certainly, we’ve been to your games, your plays, your recitals, your science fairs. Absolutely, smiles ignite when you walk into a room, and hundreds gasp with delight at your every tweet. Why, maybe you’ve even had your picture in the Townsman! And now you’ve conquered high school… and, indisputably, here we all have gathered for you, the pride and joy of this fine community, the first to emerge from that magnificent new building…

But do not get the idea you’re anything special. Because you’re not.

The empirical evidence is everywhere, numbers even an English teacher can’t ignore. Newton, Natick, Nee… I am allowed to say Needham, yes? …that has to be two thousand high school graduates right there, give or take, and that’s just the neighborhood Ns. Across the country no fewer than 3.2 million seniors are graduating about now from more than 37,000 high schools. That’s 37,000 valedictorians… 37,000 class presidents… 92,000 harmonizing altos… 340,000 swaggering jocks… 2,185,967 pairs of Uggs. But why limit ourselves to high school? After all, you’re leaving it. So think about this: even if you’re one in a million, on a planet of 6.8 billion that means there are nearly 7,000 people just like you. Imagine standing somewhere over there on Washington Street on Marathon Monday and watching sixty-eight hundred yous go running by. And consider for a moment the bigger picture: your planet, I’ll remind you, is not the center of its solar system, your solar system is not the center of its galaxy, your galaxy is not the center of the universe. In fact, astrophysicists assure us the universe has no center; therefore, you cannot be it. Neither can Donald Trump… which someone should tell him… although that hair is quite a phenomenon.

“But, Dave,” you cry, “Walt Whitman tells me I’m my own version of perfection! Epictetus tells me I have the spark of Zeus!” And I don’t disagree. So that makes 6.8 billion examples of perfection, 6.8 billion sparks of Zeus. You see, if everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless. In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another — which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality — we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the point — and we’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole. No longer is it how you play the game, no longer is it even whether you win or lose, or learn or grow, or enjoy yourself doing it… Now it’s “So what does this get me?”

As a consequence, we cheapen worthy endeavors, and building a Guatemalan medical clinic becomes more about the application to Bowdoin than the well-being of Guatemalans. It’s an epidemic — and in its way, not even dear old Wellesley High is immune… one of the best of the 37,000 nationwide, Wellesley High School… where good is no longer good enough, where a B is the new C, and the midlevel curriculum is called Advanced College Placement. And I hope you caught me when I said “one of the best.” I said “one of the best” so we can feel better about ourselves, so we can bask in a little easy distinction, however vague and unverifiable, and count ourselves among the elite, whoever they might be, and enjoy a perceived leg up on the perceived competition. But the phrase defies logic. By definition there can be only one best. You’re it or you’re not.

If you’ve learned anything in your years here I hope it’s that education should be for, rather than material advantage, the exhilaration of learning. You’ve learned, too, I hope, as Sophocles assured us, that wisdom is the chief element of happiness. (Second is ice cream… just an fyi) I also hope you’ve learned enough to recognize how little you know… how little you know now… at the moment… for today is just the beginning. It’s where you go from here that matters.

As you commence, then, and before you scatter to the winds, I urge you to do whatever you do for no reason other than you love it and believe in its importance. Don’t bother with work you don’t believe in any more than you would a spouse you’re not crazy about, lest you too find yourself on the wrong side of a Baltimore Orioles comparison. Resist the easy comforts of complacency, the specious glitter of materialism, the narcotic paralysis of self-satisfaction. Be worthy of your advantages. And read… read all the time… read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life. Develop and protect a moral sensibility and demonstrate the character to apply it. Dream big. Work hard. Think for yourself. Love everything you love, everyone you love, with all your might. And do so, please, with a sense of urgency, for every tick of the clock subtracts from fewer and fewer; and as surely as there are commencements there are cessations, and you’ll be in no condition to enjoy the ceremony attendant to that eventuality no matter how delightful the afternoon.

The fulfilling life, the distinctive life, the relevant life, is an achievement, not something that will fall into your lap because you’re a nice person or mommy ordered it from the caterer. You’ll note the founding fathers took pains to secure your inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness–quite an active verb, “pursuit”–which leaves, I should think, little time for lying around watching parrots rollerskate on YouTube. The first President Roosevelt, the old rough rider, advocated the strenuous life. Mr. Thoreau wanted to drive life into a corner, to live deep and suck out all the marrow. The poet Mary Oliver tells us to row, row into the swirl and roil. Locally, someone… I forget who… from time to time encourages young scholars to carpe the heck out of the diem. The point is the same: get busy, have at it. Don’t wait for inspiration or passion to find you. Get up, get out, explore, find it yourself, and grab hold with both hands. (Now, before you dash off and get your YOLO tattoo, let me point out the illogic of that trendy little expression–because you can and should live not merely once, but every day of your life. Rather than You Only Live Once, it should be You Live Only Once… but because YLOO doesn’t have the same ring, we shrug and decide it doesn’t matter.)

None of this day-seizing, though, this YLOOing, should be interpreted as license for self-indulgence. Like accolades ought to be, the fulfilled life is a consequence, a gratifying byproduct. It’s what happens when you’re thinking about more important things. Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you. Go to Paris to be in Paris, not to cross it off your list and congratulate yourself for being worldly. Exercise free will and creative, independent thought not for the satisfactions they will bring you, but for the good they will do others, the rest of the 6.8 billion–and those who will follow them. And then you too will discover the great and curious truth of the human experience is that selflessness is the best thing you can do for yourself. The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you’re not special.

Because everyone is.

Congratulations. Good luck. Make for yourselves, please, for your sake and for ours, extraordinary lives.

My Anti-Creativity Checklist from Youngme Moon on Vimeo.

Somebody constructed this video explaining SOPA.  It’s a great teaching tool for something few understand.  It is also crafted in such a way that if SOPA were passed the distribution company of this movie would be able to pull down my site, and remove referenced to my entire site from all search engines.  I would, and do, have a legal basis for using it because it is fair use and is definitely parody by being paradoxical (using copyrighted content as a social meme to explain how the law is wrong).  However, if SOPA is passed, my site would be taken down first, then I would have to hire a lawyer and go to court with a major Hollywood studio to make that point and get my site re-established.  And I didn’t even make or post this video, I just have a link to it.

SOPA is a shoot-first, ask questions later law, which is why it would cripple the Internet.

In today’s Washington Post, Jay Mathews writes:

You’ve missed the mark. Teaching has to start with the students sitting in the class – their abilities, challenges and attitude. It doesn’t start with a lesson plan. Great lesson plans are drafted by skilled teachers to best broach the subject to their specific students in their specific class on that specific day.

It would be like you asking for journalistic story model on which you can base all your writing. They might help, a little, but as you got to be a better journalist, they would be almost worthless. That’s why you can find story models in journalism 101, but not in an online sharing site for the top reporters at the Washington Post.

Teach For America has a lot of good-hearted amateurs, trying to do the work of professionals. Unfortunately for us professional educators, journalists like you put too much credibility to the gripes of some TFA newcomer months into their new career. I’m also a career changer – 25 years in journalism at the highest levels and 7 years in teaching. I might have said the same thing about lesson plans my first year or two, of course, I didn’t know anything about teaching then.

Words, in education, to live by.

Ayn Rand  writer and philosopher,^[2] playwright, and screenwriter. The Fountainhead &  Atlas Shrugged and developed a philosophical system she called Objectivism.

Che Guevara wrote about popular uprising and one of the main tenants is, one can’t win a battle against a major organized military force.  One can create a climate of fear within the establishment which prompts violent and unwarranted backlash, and such force when seen by the general population is galvanizing for the great sea of populace which makes up the support and force of the rebel vanguard.

I guess nobody’s read anything about popular uprising lately.

So the media lampooned the Tea Party, and nothing was done about them.  Jokers in hats.  Nobody in the group really stood for anything.  Ignore them and they’ll go away, peter out, become irrelevant after their 15 minutes of attention.

Then they came back in the mid-terms and kicked everybody’s ass, especially the Republicans who thought they had cooped the group.

Fast forward to Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Everything.  Nobody’s taking that chance.  They are forcibly removing them, just before the freezing cold can set in and Winter gets the job done without any show of force.

And at college campuses, the type of decisions that lead to the shootings at Kent State (May 4, 1970) are being made, again.

Here’s a letter by a University of California, Davis professor about the recent non-violent protests there and the violence that was used to break them up:

The youtube links tell the story.

—————————

Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi

18 November 2011

Linda P.B. Katehi,

I am a junior faculty member at UC Davis. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and I teach in the Program in Critical Theory and in Science & Technology Studies. I have a strong record of research, teaching, and service. I am currently a Board Member of the Davis Faculty Association. I have also taken an active role in supporting the student movement to defend public education on our campus and throughout the UC system. In a word: I am the sort of young faculty member, like many of my colleagues, this campus needs. I am an asset to the University of California at Davis.

You are not.

I write to you and to my colleagues for three reasons:

1) to express my outrage at the police brutality which occurred against students engaged in peaceful protest on the UC Davis campus today

2) to hold you accountable for this police brutality

3) to demand your immediate resignation

Today you ordered police onto our campus to clear student protesters from the quad. These were protesters who participated in a rally speaking out against tuition increases and police brutality on UC campuses on Tuesday—a rally that I organized, and which was endorsed by the Davis Faculty Association. These students attended that rally in response to a call for solidarity from students and faculty who were bludgeoned with batons,hospitalized, and arrested at UC Berkeley last week. In the highest tradition of non-violent civil disobedience, those protesters had linked arms and held their ground in defense of tents they set up beside Sproul Hall. In a gesture of solidarity with those students and faculty, and in solidarity with the national Occupy movement, students at UC Davis set up tents on the main quad. When you ordered police outfitted with riot helmets, brandishing batons and teargas guns to remove their tents today, those students sat down on the ground in a circle and linked arms to protect them.

What happened next?

Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students. Students remained on the ground, now writhing in pain, with their arms linked.

What happened next?

Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

This is what happened. You are responsible for it.

You are responsible for it because this is what happens when UC Chancellors order police onto our campuses to disperse peaceful protesters through the use of force: students get hurt. Faculty get hurt. One of the most inspiring things (inspiring for those of us who care about students who assert their rights to free speech and peaceful assembly) about the demonstration in Berkeley on November 9 is that UC Berkeley faculty stood together with students, their arms linked together. Associate Professor of English Celeste Langan was grabbed by her hair, thrown on the ground, and arrested. Associate Professor Geoffrey O’Brien was injured by baton blows. Professor Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, was also struck with a baton. These faculty stood together with students in solidarity, and they too were beaten and arrested by the police. In writing this letter, I stand together with those faculty and with the students they supported.

One week after this happened at UC Berkeley, you ordered police to clear tents from the quad at UC Davis. When students responded in the same way—linking arms and holding their ground—police also responded in the same way: with violent force. The fact is: the administration of UC campuses systematically uses police brutality to terrorize students and faculty, to crush political dissent on our campuses, and to suppress free speech and peaceful assembly. Many people know this. Many more people are learning it very quickly.

You are responsible for the police violence directed against students on the UC Davis quad on November 18, 2011. As I said, I am writing to hold you responsible and to demand your immediate resignation on these grounds.

On Wednesday November 16, you issued a letter by email to the campus community. In this letter, you discussed a hate crime which occurred at UC Davis on Sunday November 13. In this letter, you express concern about the safety of our students. You write, “it is particularly disturbing that such an act of intolerance should occur at a time when the campus community is working to create a safe and inviting space for all our students.” You write, “while these are turbulent economic times, as a campus community, we must all be committed to a safe, welcoming environment that advances our efforts to diversity and excellence at UC Davis.”

I will leave it to my colleagues and every reader of this letter to decide what poses a greater threat to “a safe and inviting space for all our students” or “a safe, welcoming environment” at UC Davis: 1) Setting up tents on the quad in solidarity with faculty and students brutalized by police at UC Berkeley? or 2) Sending in riot police to disperse students with batons, pepper-spray, and tear-gas guns, while those students sit peacefully on the ground with their arms linked? Is this what you have in mind when you refer to creating “a safe and inviting space?” Is this what you have in mind when you express commitment to “a safe, welcoming environment?”

I am writing to tell you in no uncertain terms that there must be space for protest on our campus. There must be space for political dissent on our campus. There must be space for civil disobedience on our campus. There must be space for students to assert their right to decide on the form of their protest, their dissent, and their civil disobedience—including the simple act of setting up tents in solidarity with other students who have done so. There must be space for protest and dissent, especially, when the object of protest and dissent is police brutality itself. You may not order police to forcefully disperse student protesters peacefully protesting police brutality. You may not do so. It is not an option available to you as the Chancellor of a UC campus. That is why I am calling for your immediate resignation.

Your words express concern for the safety of our students. Your actions express no concern whatsoever for the safety of our students. I deduce from this discrepancy that you are not, in fact, concerned about the safety of our students. Your actions directly threaten the safety of our students. And I want you to know that this is clear. It is clear to anyone who reads your campus emails concerning our “Principles of Community” and who also takes the time to inform themselves about your actions. You should bear in mind that when you send emails to the UC Davis community, you address a body of faculty and students who are well trained to see through rhetoric that evinces care for students while implicitly threatening them. I see through your rhetoric very clearly. You also write to a campus community that knows how to speak truth to power. That is what I am doing.

I call for your resignation because you are unfit to do your job. You are unfit to ensure the safety of students at UC Davis. In fact: you are the primary threat to the safety of students at UC Davis. As such, I call upon you to resign immediately.

Sincerely,

Nathan Brown
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Program in Critical Theory
University of California at Davis

One of the things I do is work with the Education Study Group, an organization that supports teachers doing cheap and fast experimentation and data gathering on what works and doesn’t in their classroom and education as a whole.

This video explains the rational, from a Fortune 500 perspective:

Data should not be about Teacher Evaluation and Accountability, nor should it be another lever where the teaching relationship between teacher and student is managed from four levels above the classroom.

Keep this in mind when you look at the management of Education Policy.

“Happy Black Friday!” one hears repeatedly around Thanksgiving from the newly minted residents of the USA which make up the bulk of our Title-One students.

One hears it on the playground, in the hallways, the cafeteria and art room, “Happy Black Friday!” for the weeks leading up to our November break.

It’s apparently a national holiday, clearly, and these folks just want to fit in.

It’s not their fault.  They are using the information provided … in the media.  Searching the past week’s Washington Post Online, there are 65 articles about Thanksgiving, and 69 about Black Friday.

Stories about Thanksgiving are recipes and the other fluff journalism. Black Friday is about our national economic health.    Thanksgiving is relegated to inserts and the last 2 minutes of local newscasts.  Black Friday are headlines and top stories.

A recent CBS MoneyWatch piece, “Black Friday shopping: 5 reasons to stay home” did not mention Thanksgiving, which, in my book, is the main reason to stay home.

So what do the kids see as most important when processing their limited-English-proficiency-media-gestalt?

It’s all about Black Friday and how fast we can get through the fourth Thursday in November so retailers can start putting up (if they haven’t already) Christmas decorations.

Black Friday (not Thanksgiving) gets the media-hype building in the weeks before our November Holiday Break.  You know, the break for Black Friday.

So “Happy Black Friday!” everyone, and don’t eat too much so you’re in shape to head out to the stores at midnight, Thanksgiving night.

Thanksgiving, you know, “It’s the day before Black Friday.”

Related articles

• Most Toys R€ Us stores in Mass. will open at 1 a.m. on Black Friday (boston.com)
• Letters: Stores rushing Black Friday (knoxnews.com)
• Ask the Readers: Black Friday Shopping Secrets? (getrichslowly.org)
• Thanksgiving Black Friday Hours Have Retail Workforce Raging (inquisitr.com)
• Black Friday shopping: 5 reasons to stay home (cbsnews.com)

I’ve been managing change quietly under the radar so few have noticed the tremendous technical transformation our small Title One elementary schools has undergone in just a few years.

We’ve gone from people only doing email and most nothing with their class, to being on the forefront of technology — and our teaching staff is still at the frustration level.

It was in the Matrix when Agent Smith said none of the participants believed reality when it wasn’t a struggle.  And struggle we do.

This week three of our teachers were perplexed, and a bit outraged, that Voicethread had no methodology for dealing with multiple years of classes in a single teacher account.  For the past three to five years, many of these teachers have used Voicethread, and when they add students, the student go to the bottom of the queue.  So this year’s students have to scroll down through 90 users to find their icon and make a comment.

They don’t want to delete past year students, because they are building on the previous contribution and using it for models.   When they delete prior year’s students, all the students’ comments disappear.

They contacted Voicethread independent of me, and worked through the issue.  Voicethread, as a young company, hadn’t come across this issue (probably because they don’t have many other teachers who have been using it for that long) and didn’t have a work around.

The teachers then came to me and complained.  I didn’t have an answer, because our county has recently purchased Voicethread but truncated the feature set.  And reading over the correspondance with Voicethread, all the bases had already been covered.

My teachers were outraged.  ”Ridiculous!” was what one say (and only because it was the most outrageous she was willing to get in email).

Of course, what most of the teachers in my building don’t know is they are alone.  Most of the teachers in the county don’t know what Voicethread is, don’t have WordPress or many of the other things with which my colleagues are wrestling.

So as I said in Twitter this past weekend.  Thanks

Image via Wikipedia

There’s a small debate going on to decide if kids in grade school will be using QWERTY keyboards in the future. My bet, and the bet of most science fiction writers, is yes it will be a required skill.

If we’ve kept it until now – even though it was designed to keep the swinging mechanical arms of a manual typewriter from sticking together – we’ll probably use it into the future.

MSWord, PowerPoint, Excel are probably not going to be used.

They are already being usurped by wikis, blogs, google docs, WordPress, google wave-like things, all of which provide the basic functionality, but allow multiple people to edit a document simultaneously and keeping only one copy prevents the ridiculous organizational head-ache of making sure everyone edits the latest copy.

And the basic functionality of these options is getting more and more like Word, PowerPoint and Excel every day.

The new media is easier, cheaper, faster and has additional functionality like instant publishing and collaboration.

The kids in K-5 for the past five years have been Myspace- (at first) and now Facebook-ready. That’s their baseline. Learning Word and PowerPoint is extra, not a starting place.

Three years ago I was called down to a 4th grade classroom, because the kids were writing reports and “Didn’t know how to use Word.”

Upon arriving, I found the kids had inserted audio files in their word documents and were perplexed by the teacher who was demanding they “print their reports.”

They were making myspace pages about their reports using Word documents. They were using MSWord because the assignment had dictated which software to be used.

These kids were already multimedia. They are highly self-motivated by this new media, and that’s proved out by the hours and hours a day they spend publishing at home, after school, unassigned.

I asked the 4th grade teacher in the future to provide a rubric as to what media the students were not allowed to do with Word–problem solved.

Another teacher forces her students to do reports in PowerPoint. She’s aghast they don’t know how to use it. Why should they? They have Google Sites which allows multiple team members to edit a webpage with almost the same functionality as PowerPoint, and it is published and can allow (though we don’t allow this) for comments and global interaction. WordPress also allows for the same presentation as PowerPoint but with added functionality.

In that type of world, what’s the point of PowerPoint?

I realized this morning teaching Microsoft Office to K-5 students is like teaching Latin–something else that’s dead. They get certain skills, such as booting up, launching software, font and media placement. They learn to insert pictures and audio. All these skills learned using PowerPoint can be transferred onto the newer Internet-based media they work with 7 hours a day at home.

So, yeah, I guess there’s some benefit, but of course they learn those skills at home by 3rd grade without any intervention.

Seth Golden wrote, “Too often, we look at the new thing and demand to know how it supports the old thing.”

Perhaps that’s why Educational Management is having such a hard time adopting new technology.

So here’s the answer to that question:

All the skills students need to use the Microsoft Office Suite are learned in the K-5 environment using new media. They can easily pick up Word, PowerPoint and Excel in highschool if the workforce is still wedded to those stand-alone software options 15 years from now.

So, for now, let’s use the better, cheaper, faster technology they are motivated to use.

Related articles

• Is Google Docs compatible with Microsoft Office (wiki.answers.com)
• Swiss Party Makes Dislike of PowerPoint a Political Issue | PCWorld (makeapowerfulpoint.com)
• How to send a Microsoft Office document from Windows Live Hotmail (theangleofthepoems.wordpress.com)
• A free substitute for Microsoft Office (atropregor.wordpress.com)

I’ve had one teacher say their goal for this quarter was to not drive home crying every day.

And another say their goal was to not drive to work crying every day.

But it was my bedrock friend Meghan S. who said, “I’m just going to help as much as I can, and not let what I can’t get done drive me crazy.”

It’s a hard year this year.  We are working 56% over capacity.  We are implementing new teaming initiatives.  We are implementing online testing.  We are working out of enough trailers we seem like a refugee camp.

Folks,

Please don’t be shocked when you find out during my Internet Safety class that all or most of your students have personal Facebook accounts.

Your class is not alone.

We want to foster conversation about how to stay safe online.  Admonishing your students that they must be 14 to have a Facebook account simply stops the conversation.  We need to have an open dialog about how to stay safe online.

Telling them not to use Facebook or Twitter simply doesn’t work.  Pointing out they lied to get an account doesn’t help during the lesson.  It’s something to point out later.

Over the past five years I’ve asked classes at all our grade levels what they do online.

There has been a general progression down through the grade levels of social media use.

Five years ago, the numbers looked like this:

5th Grade:  90%+ used Facebook or other social media

4th Grade:  40% used Facebook or other social media

3rd Grade:  One or Two students per class had myspace or facebook.

Last year:

5th & 4th Grade:  90%

3rd Grade:  55%

2nd Grade:  One or Two students per class

This year, preliminary results find nearly 45% of 2nd graders have personal Facebook accounts.  I’m doing my first 3rd Grade class this afternoon, but if the progression holds they should be above 90%.

We need to make sure teachers don’t react negatively.  When students feel they are doing something wrong, they won’t talk about it or get the help they need.

Thanks,

Well, the world sure has changed. Five years ago, when I started looking at social networking use in K-5, the numbers worked out like this:

If you were a heavy bundles user, you are a bit nailed. They deleted all bundles and started “stacks.”

Here’s a video about stacks.

Stacks makes sharing bookmarks with your class more visual.

Otherwise, your links are all still intact.
There are other enhancements to the look and feel. Creating an account is easier.
It’s nice the site was picked up with folks with deep pockets and a vision of what to do with social bookmarking.

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I can’t take much more of this,” he lied.

A Box You Want to Uncheck on LinkedIn

LinkedIn recently changed its settings enabling a “default” setting whereby our names and photos can be used for third-party advertising.

1. Click on your name on your LinkedIn homepage (upper right corner). On the drop-down menu, select “Settings”.

2. From the “Settings” page, select “Account*”.

3. In the column next to “Account”, click “Manage Social Advertising” .

4. De-select the box next to “LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising” .

5. In E-mail Preferences deselect Partner InMails

6. In Groups, Companies & Applications deselect Data Sharing with 3rd-party applications

This is the stuff that makes social networking scummy.

Related articles

• Facebook Privacy Settings (zzeem.com)

This video of uncontacted tribes in Brazil, shows long-houses and bow and arrow of tribes living now.

Uncontacted Amazon Tribe: First ever aerial footage from Survival International on Vimeo.

It’s worth a look even if you don’t teach this stuff.

Related articles

• Uncontacted Tribe in Brazil Missing (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• Uncontacted Tribe in South America Goes Missing (izabael.com)
• Indians Set Up Guard Posts to Protect Uncontacted Tribes (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• Uncontacted Brazilian Tribe Apparently Slayed By Peruvian Drug Gang (portugueseblog.org)
• Uncontacted tribe’s forest sprayed with chemical defoliant (feministphilosophers.wordpress.com)
• Reclusive Amazon tribe missing after attack (msnbc.msn.com)
• Reclusive Amazon tribe missing after attack (msnbc.msn.com)
• After Attack, Reclusive Amazon Tribe Feared Missing (livescience.com)
• Uncontacted Tribe in Brazil Missing After Drug Traffickers Invade Area (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• Satellite images discover uncontacted Amazonian tribe (theinformativereport.com)

Republican New York State Senator Roy McDonald is one of the few Republicans who’s said he will vote to legalize gay marriage in New York.

Reacting to pressure from the Conservative Party, anti-gay marriage groups, and religious leaders, McDonald gave a statement to the press which included a remarkable quote.

From The New York Daily News:

“You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything isn’t black and white, good and bad, and you try to do the right thing,” McDonald, 64, told reporters.
“You might not like that. You might be very cynical about that. Well, fuck it, I don’t care what you think. I’m trying to do the right thing.
“I’m tired of Republican-Democrat politics. They can take the job and shove it. I come from a blue-collar background. I’m trying to do the right thing, and that’s where I’m going with this.”

McDonald’s support for the gay marriage bill leaves it only one vote shy of having enough support to be made into law. Today, senate Republicans met behind closed doors and say they’re undecided if they’ll let the bill come to the floor.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg–an outspoken gay marriage advocate and the single biggest donor to New York Republican senators–visited Albany today to try to persuade a handful of undecided Republican senators to vote ‘yes’ on the historic measure. Bloomberg has publicly threatened to stop funding any Republican who doesn’t vote for gay marriage.

“Why is it,” he said, one time, at the subway entrance, “I feel I’ve known you so many years?”
“Because I like you,” she said, “and I don’t want anything from you.”

Click on video below:

This was at the bottom of a story in the Washington Post:

Both legal language to protect the copyright owner from redistribution, along with a dozen one-click ways to redistribute.

1 When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

2 When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

3 Don’t romanticise your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

4 Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.

5 Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.

6 Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.

7 Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.

8 Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

9 Don’t confuse honours with achievement.

10 Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.

Math is the only place I hear of someone buying 60 watermelons.

I’ve got 10 candy bars, and I eat nine of them, what do I have then?  Diabetes.

“Jimmy, Jack, and Joanna want to split the fare to fly to Africa for the day—”

In 10 Depressing Ways America is Number One by David Morris, one gets an understanding of why education isn’t really getting a fair shake. Thanks AssortedStuff for the link.

Click the slideshow below for a taste:

40 literary terms you should know

Aphorism: Short, sweet little sayings expressing an idea or opinion are familiar to everyone — they just don’t always know the technical term for them. Dorothy Parker was a particularly adroit user of aphorisms.

Apostrophe: Beyond a term for daily punctuation, apostrophe also pulls audiences aside to address a person, place or thing currently not present. O, Shakespeare! Such a sterling example of apostrophe use!

Applicability: The venerable Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien coined this term when badgered one too many times about whether or not his beloved fantasy series was supposed to be a World War II allegory. It wasn’t, but he thought readers could easily apply such an interpretation to the text without losing anything.

Bete noire: While not an exclusively literary term, many critics do use it to denote the idea of avoidance found in many narratives. Family dramas, for example, are almost obligated to involve some sort of elephant in the room.

Bildungsroman: Coming-of-age stories, known as bildungsroman, are the warm, cozy socks of the literary world. Every writer has one, even though some are kind of gross and full of holes. For extra bibliophile points, try tossing out the term “kunstlerroman” when appropriate. That’s a special kind of bildungsroman following the growth of an artist or other creative type.

Bowdlerize: Because of his numerous silly cuts and edits to Shakespeare (SHAKESPEARE!), Thomas Bowdler has become immortalized as the unintentional founder of yet another word for censorship and needless meddling. When American The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy editions replaced the f-dash-dash-dash word with “Belgium,” it found itself on the receiving end of a serious bowdlerizing.

Byronic hero: Popularized by romantic poet Lord Byron’s life and works, this jaded, flawed hero archetype typically exhibits highly emotional, erratic, disrespectful and self-destructive behaviors isolating him or her from the rest of the world. Basically, Byronic heroes were emo before emo was a thing.

Caesura: Typically found in ancient Greek and Latin poetry, caesura represent pauses after a word, though not at the end or foot of a piece.

Death of the author: As hair-rippingly awful as Twilight may be, this literary phenomenon has absolutely nothing to do with clunking Stephenie Meyer’s head onto a pike for her egregious crimes against books (which would be absurd and rather mean). Rather, it stems from Roland Barthes’ argument that an author’s ideologies and life story have little to no bearing on a textual interpretation.

Denouement: The denouement occurs shortly after a story’s climax, but before its end. This serves to wrap up any dangly bits the author wishes to resolve.

Didactic: Everyone knows didactic literature, even if they don’t know the fancy term. It takes on an academic tone meant to educate, carrying with it connotations of heavy-handedness.

Epigraph: Many writers like to include quotes or passages at the beginning of their works to reflect the overarching theme or message. Mark Twain and his warning about shooting anyone wanting to critically analyze Huckleberry Finn (oops) famously parodied this trope. Iron Chef’s use of a George Bernard Shaw quote before each episode is a notable non-literary example. Allez cuisine!

Epistolary: Frankenstein, The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Color Purple may have little in common on the surface, but they all share epistolary structure. Most or all of the narrative comes to readers through letters or other correspondence rather than a more traditional storytelling manner.

Fin de siecle: Put away the Ramones album and pick up some Oscar Wilde for a fin de siecle fix. Meaning “end of the century,” this phrase refers to creative works completed towards the end of the 1800s, reflecting Europe’s social and political mores.

Foil: Foils are characters meant to play off one another’s tics and quirks, like Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus in Ulysses or Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson. Or Batman and Robin.

Hamartia: Aristotle coined this word to describe tragedies, particularly those brought about by an aristocrat’s ego, gluttony or silly mistake rather than outright sin.

Heresy of paraphrase: New Critic Cleanth Brooks believes in the impossibility of discerning meaning in poetry, and that it’s entirely possible to just enjoy its mere existence at a specific point in space and time.

Hubris: Hubris, or raging ego with a heaping helping of overestimation on the side, oftentimes brings about hamartia — and not always in Greek drama!

Humours: Ancient Greeks and Romans believed the human body to be comprised of four humours — blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm — that corresponded with different personality types, seasons, organs and elements. It’s pretty much accepted as complete scientific doodie by now, but the concept has left an indelible impression on literary history all the same.

In medias res: More than literary narratives use the in medias res device, which drops audiences straight into the middle of the action and builds upon the recent past as the tale unfolds.

Intertextuality: Literary critics comparing different works to one another, especially as they relate to retellings and references, practice intertextuality — as do the writers using the device. Adapting religious or traditional stories remains popular in almost every nation’s canon.

Irony: It’s not about rain on wedding days, free rides after payment or 10,000 spoons when a knife is needed. Look at it as a situation where the outside and the inside exist in a dissonant state, though there exists a couple other interpretations Read O. Henry’s short story “The Gift of the Magi” for a particularly bittersweet, memorable depiction of irony.

Literary agent hypothesis: Bookworms with a postmodern bent will find the literary agent hypothesis fascinating. It posits that authors of fiction serve as “literary agents” to real events, changing around the reality to make for a more compelling narrative. Like the philosophy from which it stems, this critique style enjoys playing around with the nature of the known and unknown world.

Magic realism: Like the best surrealist paintings, magic realism blends the wholly terrestrial with the wholly oneiric to form one frightfully beautiful, emotional atmosphere. Anyone fortunate enough to have read Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel will know exactly how much it can punctuate a novel and make it something memorable and special.

Malapropism: When used properly, deliberately replacing words with different ones (usually homophones) can really make a humorous scene pop. This technique comes from the character Mrs. Malaprop, created by Richard Brinsley Sheridan for his play The Rivals, whose verbal quirks reflected such things.

Meiosis: Satirical works, particularly those hailing from Britain, will oftentimes use understatement to greatly hilarious effect. Impress or (more likely) annoy book club friends by using the technical term “meiosis” instead.

Meta: Though meta as a word and a prefix usually means an abstract offshoot of a concept, many critics today use it to mean a self-referential text. This list is meta because it’s aware of its list status. Also, it’s kind of scared of this newfound awareness, and its lack of maturity may cause a lashing out at those trying to help. Please teach it to love.

Mise en scene: While mostly used in cinema or theatre critique, literary aficionados can still (and often do) use “mise en scene” to describe the setting, mood and atmosphere of a text.

Picaresque: Swashbucking adventure stories with a scrappy, ne’er-do-well scamp of a protagonist are a beloved narrative staple. Known as “picaresques,” they’ve heavily influenced a diverse selection of authors and spawned some of the world’s most lauded works.

Purple prose: Authors oft-utilizing egregiously eloquent, ornate prose possessed of sterling caliber and astronomical romanticism may indubitably find themselves indicted for their “purple prose.” There’s a time and a place for eloquence and SAT words, but it definitely isn’t every time and every place. Any text referring to eyes as “orbs” without any sort of irony is automatically guilty of this linguistic sometimes-offense. No matter what. No exceptions. Also, every romance novel ever written. Even if a long-lost manuscript attributed to Bukowski ever materialized and proved a romance novel, it would still be made of purple prose.

Roman a clef: Real-life figures and adventures oftentimes end up thinly and not-so-thinly appearing as fiction in a device critics like to call roman a clef because it sounds fancy and stuff. Hundreds of examples exist, but some of the most popular can be found in Jack Kerouac’s oeuvre.

Scene a faire: Not all scenes a faire are always cliche, but all cliches are scenes a faire. This critical phrase refers to idioms and tropes audiences expect of a narrative and authors feel obliged to provide, particularly when it comes to genre fare.

Sobriquet: Sobriquets are nicknames almost everybody knows when they encounter them in speech or text, such as “The Big Apple” for New York City, where every American novel ever written takes place. Even the ones set in Texas.

Syllogism: Rhetoric buffs amongst the bookworm set need to know the definition of syllogism, lest the Ghost of Aristotle arise and get its poltergeist on. It involves a 3-part deductive, logical reasoning structure comprised of the major premise, minor premise and conclusion.

Synecdoche: When readers encounter a part meant to represent a whole, they’ve come face to face with the synecdoche who sold the world. Moby Dick’s iconic albino tail, for example, symbolizes the entire cetacean.

Tranche de vie: Use “tranche de vie” in place of “slice of life” to sound all sophisticated and French when discussing Raymond Carver’s Cathedral.

Trope: Tropes actually have a few definitions, but are frequently used to refer to familiar literary devices, events and archetypes. A great many of the vocabulary words listed here, for instance. They can also be metaphors or other types of figurative language.

Ubi sunt: At some point in their lives, everyone reads a literary work (or its corresponding Cliffs Notes) about the transience of mortality and how people are really just ants, man, ants in this big cosmic soup. At some point in their lives, everyone reads an ubi sunt, they just didn’t know there was a Latin phrase for it because that language is dead.

Unreliable narrator: Humbert Humbert, that scumbag around whom Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, is one of literature’s most notable unreliable narrators. Readers can’t exactly trust everything these speakers say as what exactly transpired, especially since they usually only get one side of the story. Try layering an unreliable narrator on top of the literary agent hypothesis for hours of mind-bending metaedutainment!

Verisimilitude: An easy way to remember “verisimilitude” involves noting that unreliable narrators don’t practice it.

Found at OnlineClasses.com

In a meeting yesterday, somebody made a serious misstep. She said the truth. She said what was best. Apparently two very serious mistakes.

She said, out-loud, that all Google search engines in the county had been hard coded to default in “safe search” mode. The safe mode, together with the county’s Internet filter, brought Google searches to a level of safety, in which we should be teaching our kids in school how to use Google Search safely and responsibly.

Apparently voicing such wisdom, truth and technical understanding is a talisman of the type of fear and loathing which make up the technical world view of most educational managers.  It’s not their fault. Their ignorance has been cultivated by lawyers, vendors of Internet Safety products and the media which loves a salacious story.

Ignorance, fear and loathing though, are not good for building understanding.  They are really no good for making strategic decisions.

Most folks don’t really understand what a blog is. See Blogs in Plain English on youtube.com for a 3-minute explanation, which will de-fuzz your fuzzy definition.

The problem we face is as we move up the ladder of educational management, the definitions of these media types get fuzzier and fuzzier, until one gets to the point where one says the word “blog” and the only thing the manager hears is the word “porn.”

This is a disservice to our kids.  There is a need to educate teachers (and more importantly, Educational Management) about how to keep kids safe on the Internet rather than taking it away all together.  It’s like candy….kids are going to find ways to get it when their parents aren’t looking and this skill is learned at a very early age.

Research at a Title One school (that’s the poor folk who don’t have a laptop for every child at home) shows that 12% of 2nd graders, 67% of 3rd graders and 94% and 95% of 4th and 5th graders have their own personal Facebook page. And not just one, most of these kids have two or three Facebook accounts. (They make three additional fictitious accounts and make friends with themselves so they come out of the gate with friends.)

People don’t seem to understand the average 2nd grader spends 1 hour online after school each day. 3rd graders 2.5 hours. 4th and 5th graders 3 hours, online mostly unsupervised, doing Facebook, surfing youtube, google searching everything “randomly”. We are doing insufficient preparation of our students for this activity. In fact we do them a disservice, by having them on Blackboard where their name and student number are on anything they type. We then send them home and they do the same thing on Facebook and elsewhere. (see my other post on Blackboard here)

And educational librarians, normally the standard bearers of freedom of speech, are some of the worst at shining light on this new area of publishing.

It’s as though the leaders of educational librarians are trying to keep the validity of their expensive databases (which are great, don’t get me wrong) by limiting our ability to use Google.

That teamed with throngs of luddites padding the ranks of educational librarians, and they get to manage via imposing ignorance (a pastime of tyrants) while simultaneously singing to their choir of bibliotechnophobes.

Base fear and loathing seem to make up the bulk of their technical world view.

I have wonderful tech-savvy friends who are also educational librarians, and they rant coming home from every meeting about the level of technical ignorance which is pervasive and outwardly expressed without anyone raising their hand and saying “Now hold on now.”

The technical savvy librarians need to be given a voice – a legitimate voice — not just a brief moment to present to a bunch of librarians who’s only take away is, “Well, THAT will never happen.”

I guess all this is to say, we need to focus on educating these folks (some against their will) about the new age of publishing in which they are currently living, working and educating our children.

The more I read about Education Reform, the more I believe nobody in that “field” knows what they are talking about. Larry Cuban of Stanford is one historian who was also a teacher and superintendent. Most others have never, once, sat face to face with a nine-year-old and gotten something completely unfamiliar across to them.

It is a very rare occasion (like once or twice in a lifetime) in a family situation, that a parent teaches their child something completely unrelated to the child’s experience, and unrelated to immediate experiential need (meaning, “I’m going to teach you to fish because we are arriving at the lake and are going to be fishing for the rest of the day.” type of immediate experiential need). No, the parental “teaching” that goes on in the family is always immediately related to something.

Anything else (like sex education) is immediately farmed out to schools, where professionals can do the work.

So the vast body of “Education Reform” is touted by Politicians, University Professors, Think Tank Wonks, and Vendors with a financial interest. In other words, people who have never actually felt what it’s like to cause a child to learn something they are only learning because they have to. It’s harder than one might think.

Of course there’s the argument if you’ve been educated, you know Education. Which is as ridiculous as saying if you can drive a car, you can design and build a car. Or if you can eat a gourmet meal, you’re a great chef. Or if you’ve been sued, you are an expert in tort reform.

Many of the folks in Education Reform are looking to the intersection of online assessment and remediation as the key. Henry Ford’s model, for Education.

Many of us who are actually Educators, look at this video and shake our heads.

Click below to watch video:

The reason Education Reform rarely works, is because it’s usually a bad idea, badly implemented.

As we all move into a new age of data-driven Professional Learning Communities. Like all new product development marketing, we have two choices.

We can do it the wrong way, which includes a lot of Powerpoint-toting, suit wearing, acronym-spewing middle managers (to paraphrase Seth Goden) with process and no substance.

Or we can learn from the inventor of the digital camera. He could have made the first camera store thousands of images, but instead chose 30 images, because it was like film worked.

Twenty five years later, film was dead and mobile phones now store thousands of images. I think he might have had something.

Click below to watch the video:

Inventor Portrait: Steven Sasson from David Friedman on Vimeo.

The point of the new data-driven PLC regime is to do what we’ve been doing–better.

Let’s not lose sight of what teaching is, while we lose sleep chasing ghosts of some new fangled methodology.

The data is to put some social-scientific meat on the bones of the core scientific method of trial and error which is, and always will be, good teaching.

PLC is not some panacea to replace the fundamental process of connecting with a child and seeing what works (and doesn’t) and adjusting.

Cisco two years ago made a big splash by buying the maker of the Flip, the perfect-for-the-YouTube-age video camera that was then a tech geek accessory of choice. Now, Cisco is killing off the Flip.

Today, the company announced it will “exit aspects of its consumer businesses,” including shutting down Flip.