Teachers Ideas and Resources
Stephen Colbert and James Loewen on FOX News' "War on History Textbooks"
Published May 01, 2009 @ 11:20AM PT
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| I's On Edjukashun - Textbooks, AmeriCorps & Strip-Search | ||||
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Fox News wants schools to teach nationalism. I'd rather we teach patriotism. The two aren't the same.
Better still, let's teach recent history more, and distant history less, so high school graduates aren't unleashed into the real world with an understanding of history that ends with, say, the Vietnam War.
In Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Yout American History Textbook Got Wrong, James Loewen shares a useful way to think about history, compliments of African cultures. "Many African societies," he writes,
divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. Many, like George Washington or Clara Barton, can be recalled by name. But they are not living-dead. There is a difference.
Loewen applies this schema to an all-too-familiar peculiarity about how U.S. history is taught:
Authors of American history textbooks appear all too aware of the sasha - of the fact that teachers, parents, and textbook adoption board members were alive in the recent past. They seem uncomfortable with it. Revering the zamani - generalized ancestors - is more their style. By definition, the world of the sasha is controversial, because readers bring to it their own knowledge and understanding, so they may not agree with what is written. Therefore, the less said about the recent past, the better. (2d ed., 259-60)
Loewen spends the rest of the chapter documenting how U.S. history textbooks shy away from any analysis of events in the sasha period - Vietnam, the Iraq invasions, 9/11, social movements like feminism and gay rights - that may anger parents and other adults. He also documents how little coverage, in terms of total number of pages, each decade from 1960 onward receives in comparison with pre-1960s decades. He also notes that many teachers lack deep knowledge of these years, and so treat them to a superficial skim.
The upshot? Loewen:
The sasha is perhaps our most important past, because it is not dead but living-dead. Its theft by textbooks and teachers is the most wicked crime schools perpetrate on high school students, depriving them of perspective about the issues that most affect them. The semi-remembered factoids students carry with them about the Battle of Put-in-Bay or Silent Cal Coolidge do little to help them understand the world into which they move at graduation. [...] Leaving out the recent past ensures that students will take away little from their history courses that they can apply to the world (279).
FOX complains that too little is said about Islamist terrorism in chapters about 9/11. I might meet them there, if they'll meet me on this: more needs to be said in those textbooks about the background of U.S. Middle East policy from, say, 1900 to the present. Maybe a quote like this:
Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. None of the reasons have anything to do with our freedom, liberty, and democracy, but have everything to do with U.S. policies and actions in the Muslim world (Loewen 266).
Before FOX rejects this as the anti-Americanism of some left-wing hack, they should digest the quote's source: Michael Scheuer, first chief on the CIA's bin Laden unit.
If we can handle a "fair and balanced" approach to the sasha, our students might graduate into democracy more than "bookful blockheads" who, come their moment in the voting booth, are frighteningly clueless.
Why Teachers Should Blog: An Example
Published May 01, 2009 @ 05:50AM PT
Just a quick share about an exchange with a couple of readers on an earlier post, "Calling Bullsh!t on Textbooks," that is a great example of how blogging can help teachers develop ideas for teaching - through the conversations that happen in the comment threads. I closed that post with this:
Nothing turns students on to a textbook like a teacher who starts the year by saying, “As we learn the material in this thing, we’re also going to talk back to it, criticize it, ask why it left these facts out while including those, and what sort of person it’s trying to mold you into. We’re going to reward anybody who comes up with a good case for calling bullsh*t on the textbook.”
Calling BS on any authoritatively packaged knowledge is mere slang for “critical thinking.” It keeps students awake, makes the knowledge more interesting, and the future less ripe for demagogues.
Then Claus von Zastrow, who writes on the excellent Public School Insights blog, commented:
Of course, Calling bulls**t on a textbook requires you to know more than is in the textbook itself.
I replied:
True enough, Claus, but don't you think the resources for supplementing textbook knowledge abound now more than ever?
I've already got a unit in mind for Singapore next year that involves students making an online supplement/critique of whatever textbooks we read. Should be fun.
To expand a bit more, I'd just say that:
a) a 21st C Skills response might be that students may, instead of already knowing more, need to know how to learn more through smart search and website evaluation skills; and
b) a critical thinking response might say they can criticize textbooks with no extra knowledge of facts, by simply knowing how to ask critical questions (e.g., "To what degree, and in what ways, are women/minorities/other nations or cultures/working classes, etc covered in this text?" "Are characters and events overwhelmingly painted in positive lights, with little or no acknowledgment of mistakes, shortcomings, weaknesses?").
Know what I mean?
Reader Alan Cooper chimed in:
It is quite possible to disprove one claim in a text without knowing everything else in the book.
You could say that "Calling bulls**t on a textbook requires you to know better about at least one item." But knowing more has nothing to do with it.
Then Claus returned with a comment that articulated both the process and the benefits of the project idea better than I did (emphasis added):
I do agree with you that we can equip students to approach textbooks critically even when they don't have extra knowledge. We should all be sensitive to propaganda--even in areas we know little or nothing about.
You describe a wonderful learning process: Read a textbook for what it is worth; Call bulls**t when it seems facile or exclusionary; Do research online or elsewhere to verify/challenge the textbook's assumptions, or to discover a fuller account. At the end of this process, you know enough about the textbook to render a critique, you know about ideas/facts/perspectives not presented in the textbook, you know a bit more about how and where to find information, and you have a more fully refined bulls**t sensor. And you've broadened your body of knowledge considerably.
This goes well beyond the argument (or perhaps straw man?) that we don't need to know facts because we can look them up online.
Your approach, it seems to me, values both knowledge and skills. Yes, it's a truism, but neither can survive without the other. The Singapore unit sounds great.
Without this conversation, it's possible I would have entertained the idea one idle day, but forgotten it the next, and never brought it into the classroom. But Claus' comment has cemented the idea for me. I'm going to apply it when I re-enter the classroom teaching Western Civ and Chinese history in the fall.
So thanks, Claus and Alan, for helping me evolve as a teacher. I'd already done what I thought was a pretty cool wiki-based, student-created history textbook a couple of years ago. But all that class did was re-write the content in their own words, focus on accurate reading while neglecting critical reading - on knowing more than thinking (yeah, they reflected on it on a group blog, but that made it seem, it occurs to me now, an extra step instead of an essential one). Now I see how that can be taken further.
What "The Wire" Teaches Us About Education
Published April 30, 2009 @ 09:12AM PT
I'm one of those non-TV-watchers who discovers great shows years later than most people. Case in point: The Simpsons. I didn't discover that show's brilliance until around 2003. It took word of mouth through trusted friends to lead me to those waters.
I'd never watched HBO's The Wire, either, until last week. This time the word of mouth was not through a friend, but through a post by change.org contributor Sharon Higgins on her always-excellent Perimeter Primate blog. On "Oligarchs, Crime, the Underclass, Neglected Schools, and more," Sharon wrote:
Watch a new interview with David Simon, former Baltimore Sun journalist and creator-producer-writer of The Wire, on Bill Moyer's Journal. He discusses a variety of things such as America’s abandoned underclass, our current oligarchy, and the high level of national apathy. In the mix, he talks about inner-city education issues and crime.
Let’s just say...he gets it.
I followed Sharon's post to the Moyers (must-watch) interview, and followed that with a week-long marathon watching every season of The Wire. The short version: not only do Simon and his co-writer Ed Burns, a former Baltimore police detective and Baltimore city public school teacher, "get it." They deliver it. In my dreams, I'd teach an entire semester-long course using The Wire as the leaping-off point to explore politics and government, poverty, the war on drugs and criminal justice, white-collar crime, the contemporary labor movement, education politics, human trafficking, LGBT issues, mainstream journalism, and more. For my money, it would be time as well-spent as spending the same number of hours reading War and Peace in an English course. The entire five seasons form more of a novel than a series of short stories, unfolding and complicating the plot through over 50 hour-long episodes. Walking students through it would lead them, I'm convinced, to wanting to understand the complexity of all these issues more.
Here's what it has to say about the politics of high-stakes state achievement tests (it's in Season 4, I think). As you watch/read the fictional Baltimore mayor meeting with his campaign managers, tell me which mayors or other edu-politicians come to mind:
You can buy individual episodes of The Wire for $1.99 on iTunes. What a world.
How to Write Timed Essays That aren't Crap
Published April 27, 2009 @ 11:28AM PT
For the record, I despise the timed essay tests students have to write for such high-stakes tests as the AP English exams and the SAT, but like death, taxes, and acne, they're a fact of life for teachers and students.
The worst thing about the tests is that they promote the opposite of writing, since they tempt teachers and tutors to train students in such abominations as the five-paragraph essay. You know, upside-down triangle intro (trite generalization narrowing down to cookie-cutter thesis sentence), followed by three body paragraphs (three rectangles, each with topic sentence first, supporting examples after, then conclusion and transition), and then wiped clean with a snorer of a right-side-up triangular conclusion ("restate your thesis, then generalize out to close").
"Then flush," we should all add, if honest.
Because that kind of writing is crap. Nowhere does it exist except in classrooms, AP exams, and SATs. Most horribly, students get the idea that this mechanical form is good essay writing generally, even for take-home papers. To me, it's the job of the high school teacher to unteach the mechanical form, and grow students into the organic approach.
Better still is the challenge of teaching students to write organically on those damned timed essays themselves. Anybody who thinks a mechanical five-paragraph essay is going to stand out in a two-foot stack of five-paragraph essays on an AP or SAT scorer's desk, and gain the highest marks, should go to rehab and dry up. Or maybe read real essays beyond school.
So let me share with you a way to teach writing that was never possible before about two years ago - a way that allows the students to literally watch and hear their teacher read an AP Exam prompt, read the exam poem cold, and then write the exam. All under test conditions, within the 40 minute time limit. (The same thing could be done with history or other subjects - anything with an essay prompt.)
All it takes to do this is a computer microphone and an internet connection to such free screencast sites as screencast-o-matic.com.
Here's the first fifteen minutes of a lesson I gave to my AP Lit students last year. Since AP exams are coming up soon, it might come in handy for some classrooms or, better still, prompt teachers to make their own. Students need teachers to put themselves out there as writers, instead of adults who only talk about how writers should write.
From an old post, the background:
A few days ago, I had my AP Literature students do a timed writing of an old AP Lit essay question under exam conditions – 40 minutes to read a challenging poem and write an essay that could make or break their opportunity to get college credit for our course.
Many students had a hard time with it. Many didn’t manage to write more than half a page, hand-written – two small paragraphs – for the assignment. (The poetry essays are apparently always what they do worst on in the real AP exam, which is why we’re starting the year with six weeks of poetry.) So I did the assignment myself, with headphones and mic on, talking through each stage of my own approach to taking timed essay exams on poetry.
Here’s how it looks (but you really should take a glimpse at the AP Lit channel on Screencast-o-matic itself, because it allows comments, time-stamped notes, downloads, and more. It’s a great tool.)
(Click here for a larger, clearer version. It's a beautiful poem, by the way.)
Part 1: Attacking the question, annotating the poem:
Here are the second and third parts, in which students get inside this writer's head as he talks through and composes his essay. They hear the thoughts, they see the sentences form, all in real time. (Don't tell me technology can't improve instruction.)
Note the student feedback under part three. They suggest, among other things, that filming the process being hand-written instead of typed might be more effective. I may try that next fall. (Or I might decide they were at their whiniest adolescent worst and just need to suck it up.)
Finally, this isn't supposed to be entertainment. Asking students to sit quietly at home, listening to the teacher talking through his ideas as he reads the prompt and writes the essay for 40 minutes is asking a lot. But making them do it at least once, and reflect on what they learned about real, organic writing - and more importantly, about spending a full ten minutes or more thinking and annotating before beginning the essay at all - that's an investment most of my students said they thought paid off.
Image by Arthae
Oy: "Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era"
Published April 24, 2009 @ 02:40AM PT
Let's take a quick laugh break with this disturbingly fun parody of an English/Language Arts syllabus by Web 2.0-in-education evangelists (like yours truly). Enjoy it while I'm trudging through some research for the next few posts (h/t to onegoodmove):
INTERNET-AGE
WRITING SYLLABUS AND
COURSE OVERVIEW.
BY ROBERT LANHAM
- - - -
ENG 371WR:
Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era
M-W-F: 11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m.
Instructor: Robert Lanham
Course Description
As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers.
Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new "Lost Generation" of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories. Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences. w00t! w00t! Throughout the course, a further paring down of the Hemingway/Stein school of minimalism will be emphasized, limiting the superfluous use of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, gerunds, and other literary pitfalls.
Prerequisites
Students must have completed at least two of the following.
ENG: 232WR—Advanced Tweeting: The Elements of Droll
LIT: 223—Early-21st-Century Literature: 140 Characters or Less
ENG: 102—Staring Blankly at Handheld Devices While Others Are Talking
ENG: 301—Advanced Blog and Book Skimming
ENG: 231WR—Facebook Wall Alliteration and Assonance
LIT: 202—The Literary Merits of Lolcats
LIT: 209—Internet-Age Surrealistic Narcissism and Self-Absorption
Required Reading Materials... (read the rest, including a priceless weekly course overview)
A Sports Writer to Motivate the Reluctant "Jock" Students
Published April 18, 2009 @ 12:26PM PT
I'm sure I'm not the only writing teacher who struggles to find examples of excellent prose that might appeal to the class athletes who don't like English class, and turn them on to that beauty that happens when a good wordsmith applies his skills to a good ball-player. It's stll a long-shot, sure, but maybe reading such a work will flip a switch in minds of the basketball or football players, and create a new appreciation for writing and, hope against hope, motivate them to try their own hand at it.
If you're one of those teachers, and in search such an exemplar, be sure to check out this week's Newsweek article by Joseph Epstein on Roger Federer: "The Federer Fade: How a Tennis God Lost His Topspin." From the alliteration of the title to the "tennis god" metaphor of the tagline to the Greco-Roman mythology motifs that play throughout the article, it's as good a piece of sports-writing as I've ever seen. Great rhythms, great voice, great sentence fluency and diction, just great all around.
Any sports writers you care to share? Drop 'em in comments.
Image by Lajabrac
More on China and 21st Century Skills
Published April 17, 2009 @ 06:35AM PT
More sharing from cultural psychologist Richard E. Nisbett's The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why. (The last two posts on it didn't get a lot of comments, but they got a lot of tweets on Twitter and backtracks on Technorati, so I'm assuming some lurkers liked. Regardless, I do. Once you get past the book's introduction, which seemed so full of obvious I almost put it down, it's quite an interesting read.)
One of the most rewarding experiences of my entire life was teaching Asian history - in an international school in Shanghai, China. I won't wax gooey about the history buff's pleasure I experienced almost daily during the Chinese history months, when I'd prep lessons and do refresher readings on such things as the great 4th C. BCE Taoist sage and laugh-a-minute philosopher Zhuang-Zi, who embodied the wisdom of humor in the face of suffering in a way the whole world could learn from, and then saw that 2,500-year-old smiling wisdom on the sidewalks of the peasant neighborhood I walked through on the way to and from work each day. Really, I won't wax.
I also won't wax about similar history-teacher-highs during the unit on Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution during the 1960's, which gave depth and cinematic significance to the elders in that same peasant neighborhood, practically all of whom lived through that nightmare, though you'd never know by their general good cheer. (If you haven't seen Zhang Yimou's film about it, To Live, by all means put it on your List of Things to Do Before You Die.)
What I will do, though, is share something new I learned in Nisbett's book about what, before reading it, was a social practice I'd thought unique to the Communist enforcers during the Cultural Revolution, and didn't realize was a general trait of East Asian cultures. I'm talking about "self-criticism." The Communists used self-criticism as a sort of half-shaming, half-brainwashing public ritual, it seemed to me, in which they'd force suspected "Capitalist-Roaders" and other non-orthodox types to stand before huge assemblies, sometimes wearing Chinese-style dunce caps, and criticize all their own short-comings as good communists. (Call it a Communist twist on Sunday confessionals.)
Nisbett, though, shows that the practice is much older than that, and also more widespread. It seems it's less a Communist thing than a Confucian one. Unlike the West's individualist premium on self-esteem, the East's emphasis on social harmony makes self-criticism seem less like the form of punishment I'd come to see it as in the context of Mao's time, and more like an important pedagogical practice to teach individuals to - irony alert - know themselves. (Call this one an Apollonian imperative with a Confucian twist.)
"The goal for the self in relation to society [in Confucian Asia] is not so much to establish superiority or uniqueness [as in the individualistic West]," Nisbett writes,
but to achieve harmony within a network of supportive social relationships and to play one's part in achieving collective ends. These goals require a certain amount of self-criticism - the opposite of tooting one's own horn.
Nisbett then gives one of two money quotes, for me, in the next sentence:
If I am to fit in with the group, I must root out those aspects of myself that annoy others or make their tasks more difficult. In contrast to the Asian practice of teaching children to blend harmoniously with others, some American children go to schools in which each child gets to be a "VIP" for a day.
This draws out the value of socialization and collaborative skills that are so central to proponents of the (horribly-named) "21st Century Skills" model. And it's precisely what the push for high-stakes testing of students and schools undermines schools' freedom to teach. (I read this over and over in comments here and elsewhere: the emphasis on tests means more time devoted to math and reading and, above all, test-prep, and less time to social studies, science, recess, group-work, on and on.)
A quick story: I took a year off from teaching this year to write a book. To keep from dipping into savings, I took a couple of part-time jobs. One of those jobs is writing and announcing news on the Korean government's English-language radio station. One of my co-workers on that job was a woman who was, I have no doubt, an A student. She read and wrote well, she announced well; she did both, in fact, better than most of the other bilingual Koreans at the station. And she lasted less than a month before quitting.
She quit because she apparently hadn't "root[ed] out those aspects of [her]self that annoy others or make their tasks more difficult": She was afraid of recording and editing the BBC international news feed. She was afraid of the computer printer. She refused to select the line-up of stories for her newscast, and to sequence them as she saw fit. Week after week, despite my own repeated offers (always the teacher) to help her learn these tasks in whatever way best suited her learning style, she refused to learn them, and continued to insist others do them for her. If she hadn't broken under the pressure and quit herself, it was surely only a matter of time before she would have been fired.
There's nothing particularly deep here, I know. This is just a story of a woman whose education gave her high marks for being able to read and write and speak, whose education succeeded admirably, in fact, in giving her strong literacy skills - but failed to give her the equally important life skills she needed to succeed.
Nisbett's book is helping shape some of my instructional practices when I return to the classroom in August in Singapore (to teach Asian history again!): this particular section has prompted me to add a "self-criticism" slice to my assessments, and maybe to tell a story that will make that ritual relevant to the students I make do it. Because I want them not only to know stuff, and to make good grades; I also want them to be able to fit in and succeed. I can't help but think that my ex-colleague wouldn't be an "ex," if only her school had allowed her to root out her annoying weaknesses before entering the workforce, instead of after.
Speaking of my old Chinese neighborhood, here it is: Zhudi Town, 10 miles outside of Shanghai:
(My ex-wife made this her last year in China. These are the people I was talking about above. It's a really good snapshot of contemporary Shanghai once she hits her stride at about the one-minute mark. You can see four more clips of the series starting here.)
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(As for that second "money quote," stay tuned. I've yammered long enough for one post.)
