There's a lot of talk these days about the "flipped classroom," the idea that we can use technology, specifically streaming video, to accomplish more of the "information download" of our curriculum at home, where students can learn at their own pace, their own way, re-reading or re-watching as often as they need to, without holding up the rest of the class, and then use more of our in-class time for truly interactive activities, such as working problems, doing experiments, or engaging in discussion and debate.
I love it. I think I would have thrived in that world.
Of course, there are a lot of assumptions built into that vision, from the obvious (do all of our kids have computers or hand-held devices with good broadband access) to the slightly less obvious (is there any quality control ensuring that these brilliant videos are, in fact, brilliant--or at least accurate?), to the maybe-not-obvious-at-all-unless-you're-a-teacher (if they didn't care enough to do their reading, what makes us so sure they'll care enough to do their watching?).
This last point is the focus of a blog post I just read, after following various links from a Twitter post this morning. For this author, the relevance is all--and the relevance is missing. As far as he's concerned, the problem is not the quality of the seeds we're planting, it's the fertility of the soil. You can have all the great videos you want, but if the kids don't want to watch them, you haven't accomplished anything.
I think this is actually a fascinating metaphor, if we unpack it a little. I just completed work on a survey that was sent out to readers of the books published by the Large Non-Profit Organization for which I work. The readers, all of whom are educators of one type or another, were asked (among other things) what their greatest challenges were, in terms of student achievement. It was an open-ended question, so they were free to write anything they wanted to. And they said a good many things. But the one issue that came up more often than any other in their responses was student motivation (or the lack thereof).
OK--so from this persepctive, the problem is the soil. The seeds are fine, but the soil is arid. We give them the good stuff, and they just don't care. This would be the more traditionalist view of education. We're trying to pass on our culture, our heritage, our history of learning, and Those Damned Kids with their videogames and their hip hop music and their tattoos and their [fill in the blank] just don't care. So....Not Our Problem.
But there are other people who take the opposite view, such as the writer of this blog post. "The curriculum in these classes is typically irrelevant to their lives," he says, "except for the need to earn grades good enough to placate their parents and impress college admissions officers." Clearly, for him, the problem is not the soil; it's the crappy old seeds we've been hoarding in our garden sheds for years, which nobody else wants. The soil is fertile, but not for these seeds. So....Totally Our Problem.
Unfortunately, this kind of attitude can lead to some lousy educational practice, such as teaching down to the kids, only giving them stuff they already know, or already know about. Our whole culture, and much of our economy, is already designed to entertain and please children; I'm not sure our educational system has to follow suit, just because it's easier. And I've seen plenty of teachers do just that.
Education is not supposed to be the least-engaging sub-set of Entertainment. It's supposed to be the intellectual pathway that leads us out of childhood and into adulthood. There's a physical pathway that we can't help but walk, where, sooner or later, we're not kids anymore. There's a communal/spiritual pathway that most of us, in the West, have abandoned, where rituals and rites of passage mark us, in some inescapable way, as adults in our community. And there's an intellectual pathway, where we lean the things that adults need to know: the facts, the skills, the stories of our history; the myths and norms of our culture. We can learn these in apprenticeship to a craftsman, or by working next to our parents in the fields or in the home, or we can learn them in school. Every culture has a different set of Things That Must Be Learned in order for the next generation to take the reins successfully.
Now, I'm all for making things relevant to students. ALL FOR IT. But that means finding a way to bring them to us, not bowing down and surrending to them. Our job isn't to leave them in the nursery to play with the toys they're already used to. Our job is to make our world relevant --to make the case that the world beyond their noses is important, and that learning about it, and how to navigate successfully in it, is the most interesting project avaialble to them. And I think we're doing a lousy job of selling that idea.
Maybe we're not bothering to sell the idea at all. Maybe we're just droning on and on in our classrooms, assuming our curriculum is so vital and important that it will speak for itself, without our help. If so, it's not working.
Or maybe we're doing a lousy sales job because some of us actually don't believe in the product. Too many of us don't believe the adult world is really worth inheriting. We're pissed off; we're disappointed and disenchanted. We mourn our own childhoods too much, and we can't ever escape what it is we had to leave behind. We watch the same teenage movies they watch, and listen to the same teenage music they listen to, and follow the same fashions that drive them to spend their money. It's the best game in town, and every year, as we age, we become less and less adept at playing it.
Or maybe we're doing a lousy sales job because the whole idea of history, or culture, or canon, or authority of any kind, has been cast in such disrepute over the last couple of generations that we don't feel we have the right to hold anything up as worthy of respect, study, or emulation. Everyone is corrupt, and everyone is a racist, and everyone is simply out for themselves, so for Christ's sake, don't listen to us. Follow your own hearts, and your own ethics, and be the generation that will truly revolutionize society and lead us back to the garden.
Which is fine, as far as it goes. I'm all for social justice. I'm all for empowering young people to respect their own vision and to fight for a better world. Truly. But doesn't that fight have to be grounded in knowledge of what has come before...and knowledge of why attempts to make things better have sometimes failed? Don't we want them to know that the baton is being handed to them, and that their lives are just a single segment of the Great Race of human history?
With all of the problems and possibilities facing us--us as a nation and us as a world--with all of the promise and threat of the years ahead, how could education possibly be seen by students as irrelevant?
If you've spent your life in a dark room, the concept of light might seem foolish, or worthless, or unimportant. But you don't need someone to lecture you endlessly on the importance of seeing. And you don't need someone to leave you in the dark because the people in charge have decided that there's really not much to see. You need someone to turn on the lights.
Monday, November 7, 2011
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Looking for Mysteries Where There Are None
There is plenty to wonder and dream and think about, where Shakespeare and his work are concerned, but whether or not the man called "Shakespeare" actually wrote the plays attributed to him seems to be the question of the hour, right now. Following in the glorious footsteps of Oliver Stone, who claimed to understand American History better than actual historians because he was...well, a famous guy in Hollywood, I guess, the eminent filmmaker, Roland Emmerich has decided to teach us all what generations of English and Theater professors have been too frightened or ignorant to reveal: that Shakespeare was a fraud, and that the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, wrote all of his plays.
In his defense, Emmerich isn't exactly the first person to believe in this theory. Not hardly. Even Mark Twain had trouble believing that some actor from Stratford, who left little written record of his actual life, and seemed not to have owned a single book of his own, could have produced the plays and poems we treasure. But even if we find it incredible to believe, that doesn't necessarily mean it didn't happen.
The New York Times Sunday Magazine has a nice piece about all of this, this week, as does the NPR/PRI show, "Studio 360" (it's the William Shatner episode, in case you're reading this at a later date).
On "Studio 360," an Oxfordian (that's what the de-Vere-ites call themselves) explains why his boy is a better candidate as author than Bill from Stratford. I'd heard some of the common arguments before: only an aristocrat could have had the breadth of knowledge demonstrated in the plays; only someone who had traveled extensively could have gotten the geographical details so right, etc. But one of the new arguments I heard really made me crazy. According to this guy, de Vere must have written the plays because there are countless correspondences between the characters and plots of the plays and de Vere's life, and none between the plays and the life of Mr. Shakespeare.
Well, that assumes we believe that authors in the Elizabethan era wrote their lives into their work, which is not something I've ever heard argued before, or seen evidence of. What I have seen, though, is writers throughout history making fun of other people's lives--especially the lives of public figures. So what's more likely: that de Vere, who already had a theater company of his own, wrote his best and most personally resonant work anonymously and handed it over to a rival company? Or that a smartass, upstart, middle class theater manager and writer would entertain his audience by poking fun at a snooty, aristocratic competitor, including well-known scandals and stories from the competitor's life as fodder for his plays?
Writers can be venal, petty, and vindictive, and often have no real power in the world with which to lash out at the people they believe have done them wrong. So they get revenge in their work, with their words. It's been happening forever. It happens still. Hip-hop pretty much depends on it for survival.
I think one of the reasons people have trouble reconciling Shakespeare's life with his work (aside from a deep and unpleasant elitism) is that they assume "writing" and "authorship" meant the same thing back then that they do today. We know that playwrights of that era collaborated with each other--sometimes formally, sometimes messily. Instead of the Romantic idea of artist-suffering-alone-in-the-garret, imagine instead a loud and boisterous tavern where a bunch of writers get drunk together and help each other hash out ideas. I have always believed that the reality of Shakespeare's artistic life was probably more like the old SCTV skit, "The Adventures of Shake 'n' Bake" than the purists want to believe, which is to say, chaotic, random, and full of the arbitrary happenstance of life. As I remember the skit (and I haven't seen it in over 20 years), we saw Shakespeare working in partnership with Sir Francis Bacon on Act V of Hamlet backstage, while Act II was being performed, and making on-the-fly changes to the play and the fate of the characters based on how the audience was reacting and how obnoxiously demanding his actors were being. (I think there was also something where he and Bacon were writing a play together while battling pirates. As I said, it's been a while.)
Life is chaotic, and in form and structure, it's a lot more like a comedy skit than a classical tragedy. Did Shakespeare really own no books? Or did he lose them, or give them away, or sell them? We don't know. Did Shakespeare really not go to school, just because there's no written record of it? Or is there simply no written record...or none that has survived? Just because we don't have evidence of something, 500+ years later, doesn't mean the something never happened.
I believe in Shakespeare, even if he didn't write every single word of every single play all by himself. I believe that the vision is singular, and is his. I believe the mind can be larger than the world, and can hold vastly more than what personal experience can fill it with. And I think a life like Shakespeare's challenges us to do more with our lives than perhaps we are doing. When a seemingly ordinary man can become a Shakespeare, or a Picasso, or an Einstein, then it forces us to ask what we are doing with the gifts we have been given.
Of course, if you don't like facing that kind of challenge, or looking at your face in the mirror and saying, "is this really the best I can do?" (and honestly, who likes asking such questions?), you can always let yourself off the hook by saying, "Only a nobleman could have been Shakespeare."
But that still leaves us with his work, whoever wrote it, and the work of Shakespeare will not let us off the hook. Ever. Whoever wrote the lines, Hamlet is still there, at the graveside, holding the dirty skull of a clown who used to entertain him as a child, and wondering, "Where be your jibes now?"
He will always be there, and the question will always be there, hanging in the air. And that is the mystery of life worth pursuing.
In his defense, Emmerich isn't exactly the first person to believe in this theory. Not hardly. Even Mark Twain had trouble believing that some actor from Stratford, who left little written record of his actual life, and seemed not to have owned a single book of his own, could have produced the plays and poems we treasure. But even if we find it incredible to believe, that doesn't necessarily mean it didn't happen.
The New York Times Sunday Magazine has a nice piece about all of this, this week, as does the NPR/PRI show, "Studio 360" (it's the William Shatner episode, in case you're reading this at a later date).
On "Studio 360," an Oxfordian (that's what the de-Vere-ites call themselves) explains why his boy is a better candidate as author than Bill from Stratford. I'd heard some of the common arguments before: only an aristocrat could have had the breadth of knowledge demonstrated in the plays; only someone who had traveled extensively could have gotten the geographical details so right, etc. But one of the new arguments I heard really made me crazy. According to this guy, de Vere must have written the plays because there are countless correspondences between the characters and plots of the plays and de Vere's life, and none between the plays and the life of Mr. Shakespeare.
Well, that assumes we believe that authors in the Elizabethan era wrote their lives into their work, which is not something I've ever heard argued before, or seen evidence of. What I have seen, though, is writers throughout history making fun of other people's lives--especially the lives of public figures. So what's more likely: that de Vere, who already had a theater company of his own, wrote his best and most personally resonant work anonymously and handed it over to a rival company? Or that a smartass, upstart, middle class theater manager and writer would entertain his audience by poking fun at a snooty, aristocratic competitor, including well-known scandals and stories from the competitor's life as fodder for his plays?
Writers can be venal, petty, and vindictive, and often have no real power in the world with which to lash out at the people they believe have done them wrong. So they get revenge in their work, with their words. It's been happening forever. It happens still. Hip-hop pretty much depends on it for survival.
I think one of the reasons people have trouble reconciling Shakespeare's life with his work (aside from a deep and unpleasant elitism) is that they assume "writing" and "authorship" meant the same thing back then that they do today. We know that playwrights of that era collaborated with each other--sometimes formally, sometimes messily. Instead of the Romantic idea of artist-suffering-alone-in-the-garret, imagine instead a loud and boisterous tavern where a bunch of writers get drunk together and help each other hash out ideas. I have always believed that the reality of Shakespeare's artistic life was probably more like the old SCTV skit, "The Adventures of Shake 'n' Bake" than the purists want to believe, which is to say, chaotic, random, and full of the arbitrary happenstance of life. As I remember the skit (and I haven't seen it in over 20 years), we saw Shakespeare working in partnership with Sir Francis Bacon on Act V of Hamlet backstage, while Act II was being performed, and making on-the-fly changes to the play and the fate of the characters based on how the audience was reacting and how obnoxiously demanding his actors were being. (I think there was also something where he and Bacon were writing a play together while battling pirates. As I said, it's been a while.)
Life is chaotic, and in form and structure, it's a lot more like a comedy skit than a classical tragedy. Did Shakespeare really own no books? Or did he lose them, or give them away, or sell them? We don't know. Did Shakespeare really not go to school, just because there's no written record of it? Or is there simply no written record...or none that has survived? Just because we don't have evidence of something, 500+ years later, doesn't mean the something never happened.
I believe in Shakespeare, even if he didn't write every single word of every single play all by himself. I believe that the vision is singular, and is his. I believe the mind can be larger than the world, and can hold vastly more than what personal experience can fill it with. And I think a life like Shakespeare's challenges us to do more with our lives than perhaps we are doing. When a seemingly ordinary man can become a Shakespeare, or a Picasso, or an Einstein, then it forces us to ask what we are doing with the gifts we have been given.
Of course, if you don't like facing that kind of challenge, or looking at your face in the mirror and saying, "is this really the best I can do?" (and honestly, who likes asking such questions?), you can always let yourself off the hook by saying, "Only a nobleman could have been Shakespeare."
But that still leaves us with his work, whoever wrote it, and the work of Shakespeare will not let us off the hook. Ever. Whoever wrote the lines, Hamlet is still there, at the graveside, holding the dirty skull of a clown who used to entertain him as a child, and wondering, "Where be your jibes now?"
He will always be there, and the question will always be there, hanging in the air. And that is the mystery of life worth pursuing.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
In Search of Hundred Acre Wood
When I was a kid--around 10 or 11, probably--I used to have a tree in our backyard that was my hiding place. It sat against our back fence, its trunk buried in hedges. It wasn't a very big tree, but it was easily climbable, and once you were up in its lower branches, you were invisible to the world. When I needed to get out from under Family and all the cares and woes of being 10, it's where I went. I could sit up in the tree and watch the world--or at least the three houses and yards near ours. Like Jimmy Stewart in "Rear Window," I could forget my own troubles while eavesdropping on someone else's.
Yes, 10-year-olds have "troubles." They may be smaller than the ones I deal with today, but back then, they didn't seem that way.
In the summers, when my family decamped for the mountains, I found my escape in an old, white rowboat, which I could take out by myself on the lake we lived near. I could bring a book with me, row out to the middle of the lake, and then just drift--reading or dreaming, listening to the water lap against the sides of the boat.
Those doing-nothing times are some of my happiest memories, and I wonder, looking at my own children--one of whom is now 11--where they can find some alone time, to just be--to just sit with their own thoughts, comfortable in their own minds, unafraid of the silence.
It doesn't take us long to get frightened of the silence. When I ran away to Eastern Europe, to teach English and escape my life for a few months, the first few weeks were horrifying. The sun set at about 4:00 PM, and then I just sat there, in my little room, alone. No TV, no music, and no one to talk to. I would go outside, in the bitter, January cold, and do laps around the small town, just to see if anyone was up and about. But everyone there had a home, and a family (all the things I was running away from), and they were all comfortably hunkered down away from the darkness and the cold. So I went back to my room, and I tried to read. But even that was difficult, in the roaring silence around me--the silence I was so unused to.
It's a terrible thing not to be comfortable with yourself, alone in a room. God knows, that's not a new observation. Blase Pascal nailed it, hundreds of years ago: "All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone."
And it's still true.
I stumbled across this interesting article on "sacred time and space," and thought it was worth a think. My wife and I have been talking about some of these things--like finding a way to honor the idea of a "sabbath"--if not by the letter of the law, then at least in spirit. Watching my boys watch TV, and play video games, and work on their computers, I know I need to do something.
I can't make them go sit in a tree, but maybe if I can give them more open, quiet time, that still, small voice in their heads will tell them to go find one on their own.
Yes, 10-year-olds have "troubles." They may be smaller than the ones I deal with today, but back then, they didn't seem that way.
In the summers, when my family decamped for the mountains, I found my escape in an old, white rowboat, which I could take out by myself on the lake we lived near. I could bring a book with me, row out to the middle of the lake, and then just drift--reading or dreaming, listening to the water lap against the sides of the boat.
Those doing-nothing times are some of my happiest memories, and I wonder, looking at my own children--one of whom is now 11--where they can find some alone time, to just be--to just sit with their own thoughts, comfortable in their own minds, unafraid of the silence.
It doesn't take us long to get frightened of the silence. When I ran away to Eastern Europe, to teach English and escape my life for a few months, the first few weeks were horrifying. The sun set at about 4:00 PM, and then I just sat there, in my little room, alone. No TV, no music, and no one to talk to. I would go outside, in the bitter, January cold, and do laps around the small town, just to see if anyone was up and about. But everyone there had a home, and a family (all the things I was running away from), and they were all comfortably hunkered down away from the darkness and the cold. So I went back to my room, and I tried to read. But even that was difficult, in the roaring silence around me--the silence I was so unused to.
It's a terrible thing not to be comfortable with yourself, alone in a room. God knows, that's not a new observation. Blase Pascal nailed it, hundreds of years ago: "All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone."
And it's still true.
I stumbled across this interesting article on "sacred time and space," and thought it was worth a think. My wife and I have been talking about some of these things--like finding a way to honor the idea of a "sabbath"--if not by the letter of the law, then at least in spirit. Watching my boys watch TV, and play video games, and work on their computers, I know I need to do something.
I can't make them go sit in a tree, but maybe if I can give them more open, quiet time, that still, small voice in their heads will tell them to go find one on their own.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Friday, September 30, 2011
Free Book!
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Cool for Cats
by Andrew Ordover
Giveaway ends October 16, 2011.
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