Does it seem sometimes that your fantasy life is more important than your real one? That your virtual self is more real than your living, breathing body? Today I want to touch upon some aspects of psychology that are generally neglected by education assessment and measurement specialists.
Those worthies, though I'm sure they have childrens' best interests in mind, have learned to treat the world as something to be measured. In measuring it, they reduce its reality to a series of questions to be interrogated through hypothesis, measurement, analysis, and confirmation or disconfirmation. I'm talking about hardcore quantoid researchers, here, people. Please understand, I don't have a problem with statistically based research. I'm a big fan of using descriptive statistics to get a sense of the reality in which we live. However, a focus on the "empirical" can both obscure reality and neglect questions essential to the understanding of human cognition.
On the one hand, many educational researchers, especially those whose specialty is assessment, tend to try to make their jobs seem more simple than they actually are. When people assess student achievement, for example, they are primarily concerned about only two sources of error: reliability and validity. That is, can the same instrument produce the same results over time and it is actually measuring what it claims to measure. Noel Wilson (1998) suggests that there are at least thirteen sources of measurement error that can creep into such assessments (e.g., standardized tests, exit exams, etc.). So even there, researchers tend to assume a reality that is less chaotic, less messy, and, thus, more controllable than might actually be the case. Further, much of educational assessment tends to rely on a version of human psychology that pays a lot more attention to what we consciously think about and do than the darker, deeper, more occulted elements of the human psyche. Thus, it's important to think about fantasy and identification as two key elements of subjective life.
Think about it this way. Freud and Jung and Marx, among the various European philosophers who have located human motivation and consciousness outside of cognition, as such. While they have been critiqued by many, and for good reasons, we should not so easily dismiss a key element shared by their varied philosophies: We may not be completely in control. What we think and do may be based in part on volition and perception of empirical stimuli that guide that volition. It also, in many ways, is dictated by processes outside of our control or even awareness.
Freud, for example, introduced the notion of the unconscious, interpretation of dreams, and tried to explain how one's upbringing can result in conflicting elements within one's psyche, some of which is always outside of our knowledge and control. Certainly, he may have gotten a lot of things wrong, but at least he realized that we, as human beings, have a lot more going on in our brains that what we are aware of. Jung, similarly, tried to look at the bases of the human unconscious in symbolism and archetype. His approach, compared to Freud, was almost literary in its methods, relying heavily on the notions of narrative and symbolism. Both these theorists attempted to go beyond what experimental or behavioral psychology have attempted, rejecting the raw empiricist impulse, at least in part, in order to explore the deeper wildernesses of human thinking and motivation. Marx, in his own way, tried to do the same. In his case, he attempted to link individual consciousness with a kind of mass consciousness by applying poltical-economic elements to his understanding of society, its development, and its likely path. Note here, that Marx attempted to show the ways in which the material conditions of people's lives, and not just what was inside their heads, produced some elements of their consciousness of reality, whether they were aware of it or not.
My hero, Kenneth Burke, attempted to do this in a way that fused elements of Freud and Marx, among others. Let me add, here, the wikipedia article on Burke, as it makes as clear (or clearer) than I can, Burke's contributions:
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Kenneth Burke (1897 - 1993) was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and aesthetics.
Burke, like many twentieth century theorists and critics, was heavily influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche. He was also significantly influenced by Thorstein Veblen. Burke resisted being pigeonholed as a follower of any philosophical or political school of thought, and had a notable and very public break with the Marxists who dominated the literary criticism set in the 1930s. The political and social power of symbols was central to Burke's scholarship throughout his career. His political engagement is evident, for example, at the outset of A Grammar of Motives in its epigraph, ad bellum purificandum -- toward the purification of war, with "pure" war implying its elimination. Burke felt that the study of rhetoric would help human beings understand "what is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it." Burke called such analysis "dramatism" and believed that such an approach to language analysis and use could help us understand the basis of conflict, the virtues and dangers of cooperation, and the opportunities of identification and consubstantiality.
Burke defined the rhetorical function of language as "the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols." He defined "man" as "the symbol using, making, and mis-using animal, inventor of the negative, separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, and rotten with perfection." For Burke, some of the most significant problems in human behavior resulted from situations in which symbols used human beings rather than human beings using symbols.
In Burke's philosophy, social interaction and communication should be understood in terms of a pentad, which includes act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. He proposed that most social interaction and communication can be approached as a form of drama whose outcomes are determined by ratios between these five pentadic elements. This has become known as the "dramatistic pentad." The pentad is grounded in his dramatistic method, which sees the relationship between life and theater as literal rather than metaphorical: for Burke, all the world really is a stage. Burke pursued literary criticism not as a formalistic enterprise but rather as an enterprise with significant sociological impact; he saw literature as "equipment for living," offering people folk wisdom and common sense to people and thus guiding the way people lived their lives.
Another key concept for Burke is the terministic screen -- a set of symbols that becomes a kind of screen or grid of intelligibility through which the world makes sense to us. Here Burke offers rhetorical theorists and critics a way of understanding the relationship between language and ideology. Language, Burke thought, doesn't simply "reflect" reality; it also helps select reality as well as deflect reality.
His principal works include:
* Counter-Statement (1931)
* Permanence and Change (1935)
* Attitudes Toward History (1937)
* Philosophy of Literary Form (1939)
* A Grammar of Motives (1945)
* A Rhetoric of Motives (1950)
* The Rhetoric of Religion (1961)
* Language as Symbolic Action (1966)
So Burke, similar to Jung, locates human consciousness in the human being, in the human being's symbol system(s), and in the human being's material and symbolic environment.
Of particular interest to me in all of these theorists of human consciousness is the idea that some things about human consciousness are quite hard to measure, if not impossible. More importantly, human motivation is incredibly complex, and not so simple to understand and control, even in the case of the young.
Sela (Pause and reflect)
What meanings, then, should we give to children's and teenagers' fantasy lives? How important are they? How important are their encounters with art, literature, and music? How does, as I suggested a few days ago, a lust for power and control result in the creation of a vivid and lived fantasy life? How does causing them to sit, learn, and obey virtually assure that they will find a place in their minds to go and be free. In some of my recent writing, I observed that:
... policy is one based not on humans as natural beings, with all that implies in terms of virtues and sins; instead of recognizing the elements of chaos and hope inherent in the enterprise of learning and living, [policy] views it much like a layman’s conception of a laboratory situation, where everything is known or knowable and everything under control. Real learning, like real science, is messier, and good policy, like good science, recognizes the potential for chaos, indeterminacy, and unexpected results.
One key element left out is the heart, the "gut music" as my friend Matt used to say, that drives us to do what we do. And where that comes from depends on the person. Freud, Marx, Jung and Burke each had an idea that it may not come from where we think it does. I agree.
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Very Sick Today
Sorry I'm not posting today (all three of my readers). I've got some kind of horrible hacking cough thing going on today. It makes it really hard to think of anything useful to say. I'll try again tomorrow.
Monday, November 28, 2005
Okay, I lied. I'm back
I was over on the Misled Youth Network Forums and kid_prototype, one of the co-founders of the organization posted some really cool stuff, especially the kid's latest self-portrait.
It really made me start thinking about another place I had been, The National Vietnam Veterans' Art Museum. It's in Chicago, and if you ever get a chance: Go! You won't regret it. Incredible. Click on the Our Artists link to see some of the works.
Gone, now, from the museum is Ned Broderick, a brother Marine and one of the most incredible painters I've ever had the chance to see. I really wish I knew where he was...
Anyway, check it out. Think about how art education can be a path to healing, self-discovery, and, at least potentially, greater happiness. Then think about why school music and art programs are chronically underfunded. Football, but no painting? Cheerleading, but no creative writing? Tests, but no graffiti.
It's a poor world we're busy creating here, isn't it boys and girls?
It really made me start thinking about another place I had been, The National Vietnam Veterans' Art Museum. It's in Chicago, and if you ever get a chance: Go! You won't regret it. Incredible. Click on the Our Artists link to see some of the works.
Gone, now, from the museum is Ned Broderick, a brother Marine and one of the most incredible painters I've ever had the chance to see. I really wish I knew where he was...
Anyway, check it out. Think about how art education can be a path to healing, self-discovery, and, at least potentially, greater happiness. Then think about why school music and art programs are chronically underfunded. Football, but no painting? Cheerleading, but no creative writing? Tests, but no graffiti.
It's a poor world we're busy creating here, isn't it boys and girls?
Meditation for Today
I'm really starting to get into Kenneth Burke. Once in a while, there comes along a thinker of such nuance and subtlety that people ponder his or her work for ages. I think Burke has become such a person.
I find that KB is one of the ways I try to ground my theoretical work on subjectivity. He does a really good job of explaining, in symbolic terms, how human cognition works.
For those of you not familiar with KB, I encourage you to investigate the following:
KB Journal
Virtual Burke Parlor
Biography
Not much to post today. Too much teaching. I may be back, but probably not today.
I find that KB is one of the ways I try to ground my theoretical work on subjectivity. He does a really good job of explaining, in symbolic terms, how human cognition works.
For those of you not familiar with KB, I encourage you to investigate the following:
KB Journal
Virtual Burke Parlor
Biography
Not much to post today. Too much teaching. I may be back, but probably not today.
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Education and Power: What's a Boy to Do?
I've been thinking today about how power is an important part of education. Having it. Getting it. Using it. A lot of adults wonder why young people do the things they do, thinking them weird or fucked up or whatever. I think maybe it's a power thing. In the absence of any kind of formal control over the spaces of their lives, people (and not just the young) create spaces for the formation of control, self-sufficiency, identification, and so forth. Let me give you an example of what I mean.
I don't talk about this very often, but I think it needs to be said. When I was younger, I flirted with a lot of things that many adults would think of as dangerous: drugs, petty crime, satanism, white supremacy. Basically, I was a nerdy kid who wished with all of his heart that he was someone. Someone respectable. Someone of consequence. Someone nobody could fuck with.
It's hard to say where that comes from in my case. I suspect it has a lot to do with being an introvert and with moving around a lot. I went to a lot of different schools after my mom and dad divorced in 1974. My brother and I lived with my mom and she had... poor taste in men, shall we say. Never really any abuse, but a lot of domination games, and tough guy BS from them. In any case, when I was in school it always seemed like I was on the outside of a lot of what was going on. Worse, I don't really think I understood sociality. I didn't really interact with other kids very well, I suspect. I had some very intense friendships, but they seemed to go wrong in the end. Too intense for my friends, I think. Sort of clingy, maybe. I think that kind of rejection is what led me to punk rock. It's a lot easier to live with yourself if rejection is self-delegated, and if you have a bunch of other losers to hang out with.
Moreover, you have power. People are forced to notice you. Some fear you. That's heady stuff if you have an overwhelming sense of powerlessness in most cases of social interaction. School, generally, was not a place where I felt powerful. I was not "in with the in crowd," or at least not often. I was good at school, because, mainly, my reading level was pretty high. I thought "older" than I was. Emotionally, probably I was not nearly so well developed.
Later, when I got out of high school and started college a year early, I lost my edge. I was no longer among the smartest kids. I mean I was smart, but I was too lazy or distracted. I dropped out and eventually joined the Marine Corps at 17. While this was going on, my friends, a group of guys colllectively known as the Southeast Dicks (We're not a gang, we're a club!), started drifting into the skinhead movement. I wasn't far behind. In the Marine Corps, it's pretty easy to be a racist. There's lots of them there. I was a pretty cowardly one, because on some level I think I knew I was wrong. But that's the thing. Combine powerlessness with illicit power, and you are able to shift the frame of self-reference to some extent. You become... more than you were. You are, in the words of Josef Goebbles, a small part of a large dragon.
But I was more or less a pussy about the whole thing. I ended up, most ironically, saving myself from my racist self because of Ice T's music. Imagine that. I could see myself in his words. I could recognize his and my humanity. I got out of the Marines shortly thereafter, and was able to a large extent to leave those things behind. Before that happened, though, two of the Dicks, then known as East Side White Pride, Ken Death (Mieski) and Kyle Brewster killed a black man from Ethiopia. It was not something I could find any triumph or joy in. Some poor guy, Mulugeta Seraw, was killed with baseball bats outside of his house. What for? For not moving his car out of the way. For talking back to a "white man." What bullshit.
I was a thousand miles away and the brutal killing of an innocent man still stains my heart. I am still ashamed for ever having wanted to be like that. I constantly watch myself, and make sure I don't fall into the trap of easy power again. I live my life differently now. I try to be honorable and not just powerful. More than anything, I want to make up for it somehow. I especially want to help young people who have no power. I know why they want it. I know how some of them try to get it. Some of it is not such a bad thing. So you freak out a few prudes or religious zealots. Big deal. Fuck 'em anyway with their smug superiority. But when you hurt, slander, kill and maim for the sake of feeling better about that weakness you carry deep in your heart, then you have failed to act as a real human being. When people become tools to make you feel powerful, then you are running a con game on yourself. You think you're a warrior, but you have no honor. None. Honor takes a long time to come back. The scars of knowing you were a fool last forever. Confession doesn't heal you by itself. You must do penance as well. Even then, you still wonder, "Is it enough. Is it ever enough?"
So, when adults wonder why kids join gangs, or get stoned instead of going to class, or hang out with thugs and dealers, I think I know what they don't. In the absence of power, people do what they think they gotta do. They lie, they steal, they cause fear, they use other people for sex and other things, and generally dehumanize everyone not exactly like themselves, and even some of those folks as well. In the process, they slowly kill their humanity. Some never get it back.
When a system of education does not recognize the importance of power to young people's development, particularly their self-development, then it does them a disservice. It can be dangerous to them. It helps no one. Kids need power, self-directed action, autonomy. Sometimes it can be dangerous to grant them what they want. I think it's even more dangerous to make them steal that power. That's what I did.
I don't talk about this very often, but I think it needs to be said. When I was younger, I flirted with a lot of things that many adults would think of as dangerous: drugs, petty crime, satanism, white supremacy. Basically, I was a nerdy kid who wished with all of his heart that he was someone. Someone respectable. Someone of consequence. Someone nobody could fuck with.
It's hard to say where that comes from in my case. I suspect it has a lot to do with being an introvert and with moving around a lot. I went to a lot of different schools after my mom and dad divorced in 1974. My brother and I lived with my mom and she had... poor taste in men, shall we say. Never really any abuse, but a lot of domination games, and tough guy BS from them. In any case, when I was in school it always seemed like I was on the outside of a lot of what was going on. Worse, I don't really think I understood sociality. I didn't really interact with other kids very well, I suspect. I had some very intense friendships, but they seemed to go wrong in the end. Too intense for my friends, I think. Sort of clingy, maybe. I think that kind of rejection is what led me to punk rock. It's a lot easier to live with yourself if rejection is self-delegated, and if you have a bunch of other losers to hang out with.
Moreover, you have power. People are forced to notice you. Some fear you. That's heady stuff if you have an overwhelming sense of powerlessness in most cases of social interaction. School, generally, was not a place where I felt powerful. I was not "in with the in crowd," or at least not often. I was good at school, because, mainly, my reading level was pretty high. I thought "older" than I was. Emotionally, probably I was not nearly so well developed.
Later, when I got out of high school and started college a year early, I lost my edge. I was no longer among the smartest kids. I mean I was smart, but I was too lazy or distracted. I dropped out and eventually joined the Marine Corps at 17. While this was going on, my friends, a group of guys colllectively known as the Southeast Dicks (We're not a gang, we're a club!), started drifting into the skinhead movement. I wasn't far behind. In the Marine Corps, it's pretty easy to be a racist. There's lots of them there. I was a pretty cowardly one, because on some level I think I knew I was wrong. But that's the thing. Combine powerlessness with illicit power, and you are able to shift the frame of self-reference to some extent. You become... more than you were. You are, in the words of Josef Goebbles, a small part of a large dragon.
But I was more or less a pussy about the whole thing. I ended up, most ironically, saving myself from my racist self because of Ice T's music. Imagine that. I could see myself in his words. I could recognize his and my humanity. I got out of the Marines shortly thereafter, and was able to a large extent to leave those things behind. Before that happened, though, two of the Dicks, then known as East Side White Pride, Ken Death (Mieski) and Kyle Brewster killed a black man from Ethiopia. It was not something I could find any triumph or joy in. Some poor guy, Mulugeta Seraw, was killed with baseball bats outside of his house. What for? For not moving his car out of the way. For talking back to a "white man." What bullshit.
I was a thousand miles away and the brutal killing of an innocent man still stains my heart. I am still ashamed for ever having wanted to be like that. I constantly watch myself, and make sure I don't fall into the trap of easy power again. I live my life differently now. I try to be honorable and not just powerful. More than anything, I want to make up for it somehow. I especially want to help young people who have no power. I know why they want it. I know how some of them try to get it. Some of it is not such a bad thing. So you freak out a few prudes or religious zealots. Big deal. Fuck 'em anyway with their smug superiority. But when you hurt, slander, kill and maim for the sake of feeling better about that weakness you carry deep in your heart, then you have failed to act as a real human being. When people become tools to make you feel powerful, then you are running a con game on yourself. You think you're a warrior, but you have no honor. None. Honor takes a long time to come back. The scars of knowing you were a fool last forever. Confession doesn't heal you by itself. You must do penance as well. Even then, you still wonder, "Is it enough. Is it ever enough?"
So, when adults wonder why kids join gangs, or get stoned instead of going to class, or hang out with thugs and dealers, I think I know what they don't. In the absence of power, people do what they think they gotta do. They lie, they steal, they cause fear, they use other people for sex and other things, and generally dehumanize everyone not exactly like themselves, and even some of those folks as well. In the process, they slowly kill their humanity. Some never get it back.
When a system of education does not recognize the importance of power to young people's development, particularly their self-development, then it does them a disservice. It can be dangerous to them. It helps no one. Kids need power, self-directed action, autonomy. Sometimes it can be dangerous to grant them what they want. I think it's even more dangerous to make them steal that power. That's what I did.
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Some resources
I've been reading The Daily Howler for some time now. Often what is posted has to do with the intersection of media and poltics. However, lately I've been seeing quite a few articles related to education. Today for example this article deals with how the U.S. system ignores its own history in international comparisons of teaching and learning. Briefly, Finland, Japan, and the U.S. are not comparable, because of the differences in languages used, ethnic and cultural group belonging, and the inconvenient fact that, for example:
American schools get good results from middle-class, majority-culture students; on any measure like the TIMSS, the American average is brought down by the very low achievement levels which exist in substantial pockets of the US student population—among second-language kids, Hispanics and blacks. No, Finland never enslaved one-tenth of its population, then spent centuries denying literacy (by force of law) to that oppressed subgroup. Today, we Americans deal with the deadly effects of our ancestors’ benighted conduct.
The current round of standards-based reform and strong accountability places the burden of displacing the effects of that whole part of our history onto the schools, especially teachers and students. Sound like an impossible task?
American schools get good results from middle-class, majority-culture students; on any measure like the TIMSS, the American average is brought down by the very low achievement levels which exist in substantial pockets of the US student population—among second-language kids, Hispanics and blacks. No, Finland never enslaved one-tenth of its population, then spent centuries denying literacy (by force of law) to that oppressed subgroup. Today, we Americans deal with the deadly effects of our ancestors’ benighted conduct.
The current round of standards-based reform and strong accountability places the burden of displacing the effects of that whole part of our history onto the schools, especially teachers and students. Sound like an impossible task?
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Why I'm Listening to Goth on Thanksgiving
Generation of Death, or Why I’m Listening to Goth on Thanksgiving
I’ve believed for some time that I will die young. I just keep revising the meaning of “young” periodically as I continue to survive. I also worry for the world, for my daughter, for the future. I’ve been wondering, today, on Thanksgiving, as an atheist, as a punk, as a cultural and historical critic, as… a whole bunch of things not known for their gratitude, why I celebrate Thanksgiving when I feel this way. I love holidays, birthdays, and the like, but one that passes seems like one more step toward the end: For me, for the world. That sounds awfully depressing, but that is true only if you greet doom with surrender. I do not.
But I can’t help but think that my parents’ generation, riding the coattails of the “Greatest Generation” comprised by my grandparents, have left us in a game that is unwinnable. I grew up under the threat of nuclear war and rumors of environmental disaster. I grew to the age of majority in the Reagan years. Kids today grow up with the threat of so-called terrorism (stupid, messy term) and the emergence of a frightening ecological juggernaut headed their way. They grew up in the Bush years and the Clinton years. My parents grew up believing that the world was theirs, the final war was won, and then Vietnam happened. In the midst of material abundance and spiritual and intellectual complacency, they took what was offered, little realizing that their way of living carried a burden to paid in gold by the next generations. So, now, every time I see some grandfather type driving an RV, I long for a civilian model Stinger missile. There you go, old man, might as well burn a little bit more of the commonwealth. Might as well consume just a little bit more. Might as well go out in style and leave your kids and grandkids the bill.
I don’t believe in god. I don’t believe in the afterlife, as such, since it sort of relies on the existence of a spiritual realm. At the same time, I believe in ghosts, so let’s just say I’m conflicted. Jesus, though, I’m not so sure about. So this leaves me in a peculiar place. I’m pretty sure things are fucked up, but not so sure if they can be fixed. I fear for my life, but I hope for my daughter’s future. It’s hard to say why I’m not more depressed, but I still cling to hope that striving for life, for all that is good and honorable and worthy and free and human and flawed and true and absurd, actually means something. I want my death to be bought dearly, if you get what I mean. When the eagle swoops down to get this little mouse, I want to be giving it the finger. Have you seen that poster? It’s stupid, really, but it stays with me. A mouse, middle finger extended, looks up at an eagle. The eagle is swooping down to kill and eat him. The caption reads, “Defiance.” I don’t own a copy, but it’s sort of a long-term goal for me. The image is inscribed on my heart, as is the sentiment.
So, embracing doom, I am free to live. Do you ever feel that way?
So, today’s playlist includes Collide, Christian Death, Sisters of Mercy, Lords of the New Church, The Misfits, AFI, Front 242, Elvis (Blue Moon of Kentucky), Lords of the New Church, The Fuzztones, and others. The death of seasons, doom and gloom, an the freedom to hope.
Bare trees, falling leaves, winter’s breath upon my neck. In my heart, forboding is intertwined with love and hope. If you’re doomed anyway, then best to die dancing on your own grave, a sword your hand and your child held close in the other arm.
I don’t often put my poetry out in public, but just this once I will. Here’s one I call “Is There Life in the Universe?” Published this freeverse poem in 1995:
Is There Life in the Universe? (1995)
What if there were aliens? No, I mean really, what if there were? Imagine them parked in orbit, like a '72 Olds Cutlass sitting at the gates of the universe's largest trailer park, looking down at us. And here we sit in our planetary double-wide, with genetically-engineered pink flamingoes and a polluted wading pool on the dying lawn. Eve's sickly, inbred children are locked up inside, each one in its own narrow closet of beliefs and experience. There's a fat man on the porch, wearing a spaghetti-stained Armani suit over a gut that no amount of creative accounting could hide. He's got a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a twelve-pack of Lite-Dry-Ice-Genuine Draft sitting next to his Lazy Boy. From above, it must be funny to see the crack of his ass hanging halfway out of his pants each time he reaches for more. He lets out a belch and tosses his scraps to the five billion starving mongrels on the lawn. They fight, a life-and-death battle, tearing at each others' throats for a piece of the pie. Some say it's evolution in action.
Some of the dogs have given up; they are too old, or too weak, or too disillusioned to fight. One of them is dying underneath the porch. His ribs are prison bars for a heart that once chased warm and fuzzy cat-dreams. But that was long ago. . . He is dying. And maybe the little green men wonder how he, without hands, can tie off the vein and get a needle in it one last time. Dogs don’t have thumbs and fingers, but perhaps he doesn't really believe that. Artificial warmth suffuses his body, numbness settles in, and he is a statistic like the rest, clocked out forever.
From above it must seem distant and unreal because the actors no longer care for their parts. From sterile, airless space, it is only entertainment, a soap opera with real sex and violence. But maybe somewhere, underneath the porch, among the vast piles of history's dead and dying dog's bodies, is an altar where they pray. The thirsting pray for rain, the violated pray for a cleansing, the lost pray for a way. And even mad dogs pray: for a tornado to come and blow it all away.
Oh. Happy Thanksgiving, by the way. I’m thankful for you reading this. I’m thankful to be alive. I’m thankful to have food. I’m thankful for my family. I’m thankful for how my life has gone. If I died today, it would have been a good life, much better than most.
Hope and despair. There is no real choice. Embrace them both and be free.
I’ve believed for some time that I will die young. I just keep revising the meaning of “young” periodically as I continue to survive. I also worry for the world, for my daughter, for the future. I’ve been wondering, today, on Thanksgiving, as an atheist, as a punk, as a cultural and historical critic, as… a whole bunch of things not known for their gratitude, why I celebrate Thanksgiving when I feel this way. I love holidays, birthdays, and the like, but one that passes seems like one more step toward the end: For me, for the world. That sounds awfully depressing, but that is true only if you greet doom with surrender. I do not.
But I can’t help but think that my parents’ generation, riding the coattails of the “Greatest Generation” comprised by my grandparents, have left us in a game that is unwinnable. I grew up under the threat of nuclear war and rumors of environmental disaster. I grew to the age of majority in the Reagan years. Kids today grow up with the threat of so-called terrorism (stupid, messy term) and the emergence of a frightening ecological juggernaut headed their way. They grew up in the Bush years and the Clinton years. My parents grew up believing that the world was theirs, the final war was won, and then Vietnam happened. In the midst of material abundance and spiritual and intellectual complacency, they took what was offered, little realizing that their way of living carried a burden to paid in gold by the next generations. So, now, every time I see some grandfather type driving an RV, I long for a civilian model Stinger missile. There you go, old man, might as well burn a little bit more of the commonwealth. Might as well consume just a little bit more. Might as well go out in style and leave your kids and grandkids the bill.
I don’t believe in god. I don’t believe in the afterlife, as such, since it sort of relies on the existence of a spiritual realm. At the same time, I believe in ghosts, so let’s just say I’m conflicted. Jesus, though, I’m not so sure about. So this leaves me in a peculiar place. I’m pretty sure things are fucked up, but not so sure if they can be fixed. I fear for my life, but I hope for my daughter’s future. It’s hard to say why I’m not more depressed, but I still cling to hope that striving for life, for all that is good and honorable and worthy and free and human and flawed and true and absurd, actually means something. I want my death to be bought dearly, if you get what I mean. When the eagle swoops down to get this little mouse, I want to be giving it the finger. Have you seen that poster? It’s stupid, really, but it stays with me. A mouse, middle finger extended, looks up at an eagle. The eagle is swooping down to kill and eat him. The caption reads, “Defiance.” I don’t own a copy, but it’s sort of a long-term goal for me. The image is inscribed on my heart, as is the sentiment.
So, embracing doom, I am free to live. Do you ever feel that way?
So, today’s playlist includes Collide, Christian Death, Sisters of Mercy, Lords of the New Church, The Misfits, AFI, Front 242, Elvis (Blue Moon of Kentucky), Lords of the New Church, The Fuzztones, and others. The death of seasons, doom and gloom, an the freedom to hope.
Bare trees, falling leaves, winter’s breath upon my neck. In my heart, forboding is intertwined with love and hope. If you’re doomed anyway, then best to die dancing on your own grave, a sword your hand and your child held close in the other arm.
I don’t often put my poetry out in public, but just this once I will. Here’s one I call “Is There Life in the Universe?” Published this freeverse poem in 1995:
Is There Life in the Universe? (1995)
What if there were aliens? No, I mean really, what if there were? Imagine them parked in orbit, like a '72 Olds Cutlass sitting at the gates of the universe's largest trailer park, looking down at us. And here we sit in our planetary double-wide, with genetically-engineered pink flamingoes and a polluted wading pool on the dying lawn. Eve's sickly, inbred children are locked up inside, each one in its own narrow closet of beliefs and experience. There's a fat man on the porch, wearing a spaghetti-stained Armani suit over a gut that no amount of creative accounting could hide. He's got a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a twelve-pack of Lite-Dry-Ice-Genuine Draft sitting next to his Lazy Boy. From above, it must be funny to see the crack of his ass hanging halfway out of his pants each time he reaches for more. He lets out a belch and tosses his scraps to the five billion starving mongrels on the lawn. They fight, a life-and-death battle, tearing at each others' throats for a piece of the pie. Some say it's evolution in action.
Some of the dogs have given up; they are too old, or too weak, or too disillusioned to fight. One of them is dying underneath the porch. His ribs are prison bars for a heart that once chased warm and fuzzy cat-dreams. But that was long ago. . . He is dying. And maybe the little green men wonder how he, without hands, can tie off the vein and get a needle in it one last time. Dogs don’t have thumbs and fingers, but perhaps he doesn't really believe that. Artificial warmth suffuses his body, numbness settles in, and he is a statistic like the rest, clocked out forever.
From above it must seem distant and unreal because the actors no longer care for their parts. From sterile, airless space, it is only entertainment, a soap opera with real sex and violence. But maybe somewhere, underneath the porch, among the vast piles of history's dead and dying dog's bodies, is an altar where they pray. The thirsting pray for rain, the violated pray for a cleansing, the lost pray for a way. And even mad dogs pray: for a tornado to come and blow it all away.
Oh. Happy Thanksgiving, by the way. I’m thankful for you reading this. I’m thankful to be alive. I’m thankful to have food. I’m thankful for my family. I’m thankful for how my life has gone. If I died today, it would have been a good life, much better than most.
Hope and despair. There is no real choice. Embrace them both and be free.
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
A Bit More About the Book
Okay, so I promised someone (that's you Soul Riser) that I would try to get a bit more up tonight. I don't know about the rest of you who do this, but if I don't post every day I might disappear for a while. Must maintain the momentum! And always alliterate. But I digress...
I just got done with a paper, one that will probably become two chapters in the book. In the first part, I talk about the National Education Summits, and some documents produced for them, called briefing books. These are more or less propaganda pieces for those attending the Summits. They state the policy, and spend a lot of time rationalizing and justifying it. I'm interested in how they think about students. How do they imagine what students do? Who do they think students are? How they act? What motivates them? More or less, how do these policy makers, as they construct policy, create a space in which students are supposed to be, act, feel, think, socialize, and so forth. Why care?
Well, for those of you who don't know me, I'm a rhetorician. I'm a theorist and critic of language in service of power--ideology (as I believe John Thompson put it in his book, Theories of Ideology--not sure on that cite), and how language is used in the process of creating a person's subjectivity. To make it a bit more clear, if human beings are biological, they also are a conglomeration of biological systems, one of which is the nervous system. I think about the "software" for this biological system. That is, to extend the metaphor, in perhaps the same way a computer uses electrons, hardware, and software to proces information, humans use neural impulses generated by stimuli, wetware, and, particularly important to me, language to process information, and to get work done. Some of this processing is conscious and some of it is unconscious. Some of it relies on the particular person, his or her particular "software" which includes languages, dialects, material-cultural environment, social knowledge, and many other elements of the languages that help us to think. With me so far?
Well, rhetoricians, me at least, think about how the use of language is crucial for shaping perceptions, consciousness, and so forth. I mean this not just for individual human beings, but also social groupings of various sizes including families, organizations, political and class groupings, people of various cultures, and pretty much any other social grouping you could think of. Where these things are happening, you can find people using language to make it happen. Okay, so that's what I start with.
One idea that's important for my work is that of "subject-position." Think of it this way. If the language of policy tells a "story" of some sort, then it tells about characters like teachers, students, etc.; it has some sort of plot with drama, not so much comedy, and maybe a bit of tragedy and melodrama. It may even have a happy ending and a moral of some sort. More or less, all kinds of language, including statements of educational policy, help to create the ways in which we live, think about the world around it, imagine the people and situations that comprise our cultures, and pretty much make sense of things. A subject-position is a "character type" in language and other symbol systems. It not only describes how someone is, it prescribes how they should be. When policy makers use a term like "student," they mean it in a particular way. They means who you are, how you act, why you act that way, what the greater meaning of your life and efforts is, and the like. Having power means being able to tell others how they ought to be. That's what policy is: a statement of various "oughts" and "ought-nots" about how we might conduct ourselves in the world.
Policy makers, in this case the United States' governors, hold these Summits, and issue these policy statements, but they also have the power to cause others to implement them. So, it's very important that they do so in a way that deals with, in this case, education policy so that it provides a plan that solves problems instead of causing or perpetuating them, so that it makes the world a better place, so that it deals with the real world or at least something approaching it. In this case, with the governors and the Summits... mmm.... not so much.
Here are my basic assumptions (from the paper), which lay out a problem that occurs when policy makers don't have a clue as to, in this case, their audience. Please be aware that the text is followed by some endnotes that contain additional information from other sources. Be warned, it's a little bit academic in tone, but then again, I am an academic after all:
(1) The discourse of public education reform, as embodied in the NES events, constitutes a relatively stable discourse formation[i] that can be examined to determine the rhetorical basis for the material practices labeled “school reform”; (2) that within the discourse formation of school reform, one can find one or more subject-positions for students; (3) that the ways in which student subject-positions are conceived in the language of reform both reflects and affects the ways in which those who control the educational processes think about students’ roles and behaviors within the system;[ii] (4) that these presuppositions about the student constitute an ideal for appropriate student agency, a basis of comparison to which actual, living, breathing, fallible human beings will be compared; (5) that the subject-positions available to student in the policy discourse will always be insufficient to describe the full range of human behaviors, feelings, motivation, and attitudes of which students are capable; (6) that, as a result of the failure of the system to account for such variability in student subjectivity, some of those students will fail to meet the ideal, for whatever reason; (7) that students’ failure to meet the ideal, combined with the discourses of measurement[iii] that serve to rationalize that ideal in the first place, and to assess whether students are meeting it in the second place, will serve to justify: (a) scapegoating students for failure to fulfill the ideal, (b) implementation of additional means of control in order to bring those students back in line with the policy conception of ideal student subject-position, and (c) punishing or exiling any students so recalcitrant as to fail to fall in line.
[i] Cf., Laclau & Mouffe (1985).
[ii] Cf., Levin (1993).
[iii] This term comes from Cintron (1997). In his view, discourses of measurement are, “a broad metaphor to imply precision, the sort of precision that is often associated with numbers. Most simply, the discourses of measurement are ways by which a precise order (or the fiction of a precise order) gets made” (p. 210). He does not restrict these discourses to ordinary language. In fact, in Cintron’s view, “discourses of measurement… are practices but also ways of speaking and thinking that create order, coherence, and sets of rules to organize the otherwise random motions of everyday life (p. 211). According to Cintron, discourses of measurement have four primary characteristics:
1. They begin with “an identification of a kind of emptiness, formlessness, or ambiguity, and it is to this emptiness, now targeted, that the discourses address themselves” (p. 212). Note also, that this emptiness can be conceived as a kind of wilderness or disorder. Additionally, Cintron suggests, “There has also emerged, of course, an expert class” (p. 212) with specialized knowledge and technologies available to them, making them tamers of the void, of the wild.
2. “The discourses of measurement tend to belittle other knowing systems—implicitly, if not explicitly—or at least to make a prior discourse of measurement obsolete” (p. 213).
3. “Quite often, the discourses of measurement are aimed at the control of perceived death, decay, and instability… In a larger sense, the discourses of measurement are the actions of culture as they encounter wildness, which is sometimes symbolized as nature” (pp. 213-214). He notes that extremely tight control may lead to overcompensation against ambiguity, leading to additional problems: “…systems of prodigious control may be inherently more fragile and filled with crises than systems of less control” (p. 214).
4. “… they are thoroughly integrated into the economic sphere” (p. 214) This integration happens in a couple of ways: discourses of measurement tend to be caught up in general operations of capitalist economy (e.g., education of a workforce), but they also become professionalized, leading to occupations, practices, and products that serve to maintain, amend, and extend particular discourses of measurement (e.g., educational standards, assessment, and accountability). Further, there may emerge a hierarchy of specific economies serving differentiated roles in the processes of control (See pp. 215-216).
This leads to the implication that discourses of measurement must operate in a largely illusory realm in order to maintain their rationality and coherence. They seem, on their face, to make a great deal of sense, are of great utility in selling public policy to a given public, and purport to be adept at controlling those things they describe. However, Cintron suggests, and I tend to agree, that, “…public life can never be made into a neat and clean but must always coexist with its dirt. … the language of crisis results from the discourses of measurement, particularly its failed expectations, and so the many crises… cannot be understood outside that falsely manufactured world delivered to us by those many discourses” (p. 226). There is, in fact, the illusion of control, but never any real control. In cannot help but think SBR is the same sort of wishful thinking.
Works Cited
Cintron, Ralph. 1997. Angels' town: Chero ways, gang life, and rhetorics of the everyday. Boston: Beacon Press.
Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. New York: Verso.
Levin, Benjamin. 1993. Students and educational productivity. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 1(5). Retrieved August 5, 2005 from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v1n5.html.
I just got done with a paper, one that will probably become two chapters in the book. In the first part, I talk about the National Education Summits, and some documents produced for them, called briefing books. These are more or less propaganda pieces for those attending the Summits. They state the policy, and spend a lot of time rationalizing and justifying it. I'm interested in how they think about students. How do they imagine what students do? Who do they think students are? How they act? What motivates them? More or less, how do these policy makers, as they construct policy, create a space in which students are supposed to be, act, feel, think, socialize, and so forth. Why care?
Well, for those of you who don't know me, I'm a rhetorician. I'm a theorist and critic of language in service of power--ideology (as I believe John Thompson put it in his book, Theories of Ideology--not sure on that cite), and how language is used in the process of creating a person's subjectivity. To make it a bit more clear, if human beings are biological, they also are a conglomeration of biological systems, one of which is the nervous system. I think about the "software" for this biological system. That is, to extend the metaphor, in perhaps the same way a computer uses electrons, hardware, and software to proces information, humans use neural impulses generated by stimuli, wetware, and, particularly important to me, language to process information, and to get work done. Some of this processing is conscious and some of it is unconscious. Some of it relies on the particular person, his or her particular "software" which includes languages, dialects, material-cultural environment, social knowledge, and many other elements of the languages that help us to think. With me so far?
Well, rhetoricians, me at least, think about how the use of language is crucial for shaping perceptions, consciousness, and so forth. I mean this not just for individual human beings, but also social groupings of various sizes including families, organizations, political and class groupings, people of various cultures, and pretty much any other social grouping you could think of. Where these things are happening, you can find people using language to make it happen. Okay, so that's what I start with.
One idea that's important for my work is that of "subject-position." Think of it this way. If the language of policy tells a "story" of some sort, then it tells about characters like teachers, students, etc.; it has some sort of plot with drama, not so much comedy, and maybe a bit of tragedy and melodrama. It may even have a happy ending and a moral of some sort. More or less, all kinds of language, including statements of educational policy, help to create the ways in which we live, think about the world around it, imagine the people and situations that comprise our cultures, and pretty much make sense of things. A subject-position is a "character type" in language and other symbol systems. It not only describes how someone is, it prescribes how they should be. When policy makers use a term like "student," they mean it in a particular way. They means who you are, how you act, why you act that way, what the greater meaning of your life and efforts is, and the like. Having power means being able to tell others how they ought to be. That's what policy is: a statement of various "oughts" and "ought-nots" about how we might conduct ourselves in the world.
Policy makers, in this case the United States' governors, hold these Summits, and issue these policy statements, but they also have the power to cause others to implement them. So, it's very important that they do so in a way that deals with, in this case, education policy so that it provides a plan that solves problems instead of causing or perpetuating them, so that it makes the world a better place, so that it deals with the real world or at least something approaching it. In this case, with the governors and the Summits... mmm.... not so much.
Here are my basic assumptions (from the paper), which lay out a problem that occurs when policy makers don't have a clue as to, in this case, their audience. Please be aware that the text is followed by some endnotes that contain additional information from other sources. Be warned, it's a little bit academic in tone, but then again, I am an academic after all:
(1) The discourse of public education reform, as embodied in the NES events, constitutes a relatively stable discourse formation[i] that can be examined to determine the rhetorical basis for the material practices labeled “school reform”; (2) that within the discourse formation of school reform, one can find one or more subject-positions for students; (3) that the ways in which student subject-positions are conceived in the language of reform both reflects and affects the ways in which those who control the educational processes think about students’ roles and behaviors within the system;[ii] (4) that these presuppositions about the student constitute an ideal for appropriate student agency, a basis of comparison to which actual, living, breathing, fallible human beings will be compared; (5) that the subject-positions available to student in the policy discourse will always be insufficient to describe the full range of human behaviors, feelings, motivation, and attitudes of which students are capable; (6) that, as a result of the failure of the system to account for such variability in student subjectivity, some of those students will fail to meet the ideal, for whatever reason; (7) that students’ failure to meet the ideal, combined with the discourses of measurement[iii] that serve to rationalize that ideal in the first place, and to assess whether students are meeting it in the second place, will serve to justify: (a) scapegoating students for failure to fulfill the ideal, (b) implementation of additional means of control in order to bring those students back in line with the policy conception of ideal student subject-position, and (c) punishing or exiling any students so recalcitrant as to fail to fall in line.
[i] Cf., Laclau & Mouffe (1985).
[ii] Cf., Levin (1993).
[iii] This term comes from Cintron (1997). In his view, discourses of measurement are, “a broad metaphor to imply precision, the sort of precision that is often associated with numbers. Most simply, the discourses of measurement are ways by which a precise order (or the fiction of a precise order) gets made” (p. 210). He does not restrict these discourses to ordinary language. In fact, in Cintron’s view, “discourses of measurement… are practices but also ways of speaking and thinking that create order, coherence, and sets of rules to organize the otherwise random motions of everyday life (p. 211). According to Cintron, discourses of measurement have four primary characteristics:
1. They begin with “an identification of a kind of emptiness, formlessness, or ambiguity, and it is to this emptiness, now targeted, that the discourses address themselves” (p. 212). Note also, that this emptiness can be conceived as a kind of wilderness or disorder. Additionally, Cintron suggests, “There has also emerged, of course, an expert class” (p. 212) with specialized knowledge and technologies available to them, making them tamers of the void, of the wild.
2. “The discourses of measurement tend to belittle other knowing systems—implicitly, if not explicitly—or at least to make a prior discourse of measurement obsolete” (p. 213).
3. “Quite often, the discourses of measurement are aimed at the control of perceived death, decay, and instability… In a larger sense, the discourses of measurement are the actions of culture as they encounter wildness, which is sometimes symbolized as nature” (pp. 213-214). He notes that extremely tight control may lead to overcompensation against ambiguity, leading to additional problems: “…systems of prodigious control may be inherently more fragile and filled with crises than systems of less control” (p. 214).
4. “… they are thoroughly integrated into the economic sphere” (p. 214) This integration happens in a couple of ways: discourses of measurement tend to be caught up in general operations of capitalist economy (e.g., education of a workforce), but they also become professionalized, leading to occupations, practices, and products that serve to maintain, amend, and extend particular discourses of measurement (e.g., educational standards, assessment, and accountability). Further, there may emerge a hierarchy of specific economies serving differentiated roles in the processes of control (See pp. 215-216).
This leads to the implication that discourses of measurement must operate in a largely illusory realm in order to maintain their rationality and coherence. They seem, on their face, to make a great deal of sense, are of great utility in selling public policy to a given public, and purport to be adept at controlling those things they describe. However, Cintron suggests, and I tend to agree, that, “…public life can never be made into a neat and clean but must always coexist with its dirt. … the language of crisis results from the discourses of measurement, particularly its failed expectations, and so the many crises… cannot be understood outside that falsely manufactured world delivered to us by those many discourses” (p. 226). There is, in fact, the illusion of control, but never any real control. In cannot help but think SBR is the same sort of wishful thinking.
Works Cited
Cintron, Ralph. 1997. Angels' town: Chero ways, gang life, and rhetorics of the everyday. Boston: Beacon Press.
Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. New York: Verso.
Levin, Benjamin. 1993. Students and educational productivity. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 1(5). Retrieved August 5, 2005 from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v1n5.html.
Monday, November 21, 2005
More on my work
Alright, so I've made some allusions to the work I'm doing w.r.t. education reform. This work springs from my doctoral dissertation, so I'll start there. I begin by looking at the National Governors' Association's version of standards-based reform as framed in the National Education Summits. That's Chapter 1.
From there, I go on to talk about my experiences in Marine Corps bootcamp. Here, you have a "strong standards" environment," but one that changes two key elements. First, people actually want to be there in the first place. Sure, some leave, but ultimately they have the choice to disengage from the process. Kids in school have less choice in that regard. The other difference is that you actually are trying to become something quite specific, a Marine, and everything you do has to do with making the change (yeah, yeah, "the change is forever" I saw the commercials, too.). That is, they understand that you must be motivated by something internal, in this case a kind of growing identification with an object of desire--yourself as the Marine. It's a far diffent thing to earn a diploma and to pursue vague dreams of your future, than it is to go through a process that highlights and makes possible as series of specific changes that make you a Marine.
The next two chapters, 3 and 4, are about my experiences training in kung fu (ving tsun, moy yat family, for those who need details). Here, you have a much more self-directed and self-paced version of training. There is no "right" or "wrong." You are shown some things, you work on them alone and with others, and you get better. Again, it is a choice, and many people choose not to follow this path either, for a variety of reasons. However, I think it illustrates the extent to which assessment can interfere with the process of learning. Also, it blurs the lines between teacher and learner, basic and advanced, and many other dichotomies posed in much of regular educational processes.
From here, the post-doctoral life, I hope to do more with this. I've reworked the first chapter, and hope to keep most of the bootcamp stuff. I will probably turn the kung fu chapters into something a bit more limited and focused, but that depends on how it develops. I would also begin to look at the relationships between self-identity, self-inscription (a new idea I'm looking at), and power. I'm sort of trying to get to the idea that people who have been really fucked up in life, whether they do it for themselves or have it done to them or some combo of the these, can use the act of creation to get themselves back. Some may use writing as a way, some may use art, some may use some sort of physical training, some may use mental training of various kinds, including meditation. Whatever the path they choose, my hypothesis is that they are, at least in part, creating both a new sense of themselves (their subjectivity) and projecting that power onto their world. This is key for me. We can take power over self and the world. I'm talking here, first about the limited world of the specific thing that makes you feel most real (art, writing, skateboarding, or whatever). If one can find a powerful self in that, there is a potential for building a more puissant sense of self in other contexts. The goal here is self-knowledge that makes us better somehow than we were.
I'm not sure whether that's coming out correctly or not, but it sure is a lot different than what school is about, mostly at least. I'm not saying that people don't benefit from going through some trauma. It's good to go through some shit. It can lead to wisdom, if you can take the next step after trauma, and not fall into self-pity or self-loathing. I'm saying that we mostly don't give people the tools for making something of it, for the acquistion of wisdom. Take me for example. I've been through a lot of things that have made me feel weak, stupid, inadequate, or whatever (moving around a lot, not knowing how to fight, not having a lot of constant friends). I've also seized upon other things that have helped me grasp power (satanism, racism, sexism, scholarship, kung fu). I'm not particularly proud of what I've done in the past, at least in some regards. However, I feel pretty good about what I am now. Part of it was my scholarship, part of it was a lot of self-reflection about what it means to be a good person, husband, teacher, student, etc. Part of it was my kung fu. It's amazing, for me, the extent to which my anger was a product of fear and self-doubt. Notice though, what I've been able to personalize, and turn into a tool for self-making, has been useful as a ground for learning, understanding and ethical strength.
From there, I go on to talk about my experiences in Marine Corps bootcamp. Here, you have a "strong standards" environment," but one that changes two key elements. First, people actually want to be there in the first place. Sure, some leave, but ultimately they have the choice to disengage from the process. Kids in school have less choice in that regard. The other difference is that you actually are trying to become something quite specific, a Marine, and everything you do has to do with making the change (yeah, yeah, "the change is forever" I saw the commercials, too.). That is, they understand that you must be motivated by something internal, in this case a kind of growing identification with an object of desire--yourself as the Marine. It's a far diffent thing to earn a diploma and to pursue vague dreams of your future, than it is to go through a process that highlights and makes possible as series of specific changes that make you a Marine.
The next two chapters, 3 and 4, are about my experiences training in kung fu (ving tsun, moy yat family, for those who need details). Here, you have a much more self-directed and self-paced version of training. There is no "right" or "wrong." You are shown some things, you work on them alone and with others, and you get better. Again, it is a choice, and many people choose not to follow this path either, for a variety of reasons. However, I think it illustrates the extent to which assessment can interfere with the process of learning. Also, it blurs the lines between teacher and learner, basic and advanced, and many other dichotomies posed in much of regular educational processes.
From here, the post-doctoral life, I hope to do more with this. I've reworked the first chapter, and hope to keep most of the bootcamp stuff. I will probably turn the kung fu chapters into something a bit more limited and focused, but that depends on how it develops. I would also begin to look at the relationships between self-identity, self-inscription (a new idea I'm looking at), and power. I'm sort of trying to get to the idea that people who have been really fucked up in life, whether they do it for themselves or have it done to them or some combo of the these, can use the act of creation to get themselves back. Some may use writing as a way, some may use art, some may use some sort of physical training, some may use mental training of various kinds, including meditation. Whatever the path they choose, my hypothesis is that they are, at least in part, creating both a new sense of themselves (their subjectivity) and projecting that power onto their world. This is key for me. We can take power over self and the world. I'm talking here, first about the limited world of the specific thing that makes you feel most real (art, writing, skateboarding, or whatever). If one can find a powerful self in that, there is a potential for building a more puissant sense of self in other contexts. The goal here is self-knowledge that makes us better somehow than we were.
I'm not sure whether that's coming out correctly or not, but it sure is a lot different than what school is about, mostly at least. I'm not saying that people don't benefit from going through some trauma. It's good to go through some shit. It can lead to wisdom, if you can take the next step after trauma, and not fall into self-pity or self-loathing. I'm saying that we mostly don't give people the tools for making something of it, for the acquistion of wisdom. Take me for example. I've been through a lot of things that have made me feel weak, stupid, inadequate, or whatever (moving around a lot, not knowing how to fight, not having a lot of constant friends). I've also seized upon other things that have helped me grasp power (satanism, racism, sexism, scholarship, kung fu). I'm not particularly proud of what I've done in the past, at least in some regards. However, I feel pretty good about what I am now. Part of it was my scholarship, part of it was a lot of self-reflection about what it means to be a good person, husband, teacher, student, etc. Part of it was my kung fu. It's amazing, for me, the extent to which my anger was a product of fear and self-doubt. Notice though, what I've been able to personalize, and turn into a tool for self-making, has been useful as a ground for learning, understanding and ethical strength.
Sunday, November 20, 2005
I'm Back
I'm back from Boston. Got back last night, was completely exhausted. Unfortunately, I had to go to a birthday party for a friend of ours. I wasn't too much fun. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm kind of schizoid in terms of social life. Like this: I just spent about three days surrounded by 5,000 people. The only times I had alone were few, when I would go back to my room at night (late) and in the morning. But even that was weird, because it was in a hotel room, not my personal space, my comfort zone, surrounded with the things that make it my place. I got to see a whole lot of friends, but even that is a bit exhausting, because it's not like people you're around all the time. I felt the need to try a lot harder, if you know what I mean. So, I didn't get much sleep, and on top of that, I interacted a lot. I mean I like people and all, but I don't always find that being social recharges and energizes me. Instead, I feel the need to be silent and still, and alone in my head with something that reminds me of the different between me and the rest of the world. Maybe that's because I have a sense of self that is at once strong and weak. Strong in the sense that I manifest strongly, and weak in the sense that I have what may be a hyperrefined sense of the interpersonal. I manifest both as the me I know and as the me others remember and, especially, as the me that is most needed in the given situation. As a result, I think the boudaries between self/others/environment get sort of blurred and I need time to remind myself to act normally. It's draining. Does anyone know what I mean? Does this happen to you too?
The conference itself was fabulous. I loved Boston. Wouldn't mind living there if I had the money to do it (I don't). I managed to locate three or four potential publishers for my book. It's a lot easier for me to pitch my work than it was to pitch myself, like I did on the academic job search. It was fun to talk about the possibilities. Now I have to get some more stuff written, and then try to get a proposal and three or four chapters together.
I met a lot of new people there, particularly people who are working on some of the theoretical stuff I'm interested in. I'm a big fan of Kenneth Burke, an American scholar whose project was, more or less, to reconcile Marx and Freud. That is, to try to figure out a way to make the environment (material conditions of life, of production, etc.) and the mind (the conscious, unconscious, etc.) key elements of describing human cognition, intellect, subjectivity, action, motivation, etc. Hard to read, but ultimately worth it. I went to the KB interest group business meeting, met some folks, and volunteered myself to review papers for next year's NCA in San Antonio. They seem very cool.
I also had a chance to hang out with some old friends. That was the best. I've been in the academic game for about ten years now (since I started grad school) and it's cool to see how, over the long term, people get work done (or don't), find happiness in work and relationships (0r don't) and more or less to see how cool and weird their (and your) lives are. It really makes me think a lot about advising undergraduates. A lot of people at that stage think in terms of jobs and careers. I try to tell them that it's hard to plan life that way. You start off toward the goal, but you ultimately don't have much control over the specific outcome. Instead, to get a little Zen here, one should live in the moment, enjoy and work on a good process of living, and then find themselves in a good place, even if it's not quite what you expected. It's hard to tell that to people who've been told all of their lives that they are in control, that they can plan, that they are accountable for what happens. It's not that simple. It never is.
So, no big things to report beyond that. For those of you who have been following me, I have a request: Help me write my book. I would like to get a list of you who are willing to talk about school, learning, boredom, happiness, guilt, excitement, etc., in learning. I want to talk about how you manifest yourselves through intellectual and practical pursuits, work, play and life. The only thing is you have to be eighteen or older. I'd love to be able to talk to everyone, but it's hard to get that kind of research proposal through an institutional review board. You need parental permission, and so forth. Hard to do with your "virtual friends," no?
Let me know if you are interested.
The conference itself was fabulous. I loved Boston. Wouldn't mind living there if I had the money to do it (I don't). I managed to locate three or four potential publishers for my book. It's a lot easier for me to pitch my work than it was to pitch myself, like I did on the academic job search. It was fun to talk about the possibilities. Now I have to get some more stuff written, and then try to get a proposal and three or four chapters together.
I met a lot of new people there, particularly people who are working on some of the theoretical stuff I'm interested in. I'm a big fan of Kenneth Burke, an American scholar whose project was, more or less, to reconcile Marx and Freud. That is, to try to figure out a way to make the environment (material conditions of life, of production, etc.) and the mind (the conscious, unconscious, etc.) key elements of describing human cognition, intellect, subjectivity, action, motivation, etc. Hard to read, but ultimately worth it. I went to the KB interest group business meeting, met some folks, and volunteered myself to review papers for next year's NCA in San Antonio. They seem very cool.
I also had a chance to hang out with some old friends. That was the best. I've been in the academic game for about ten years now (since I started grad school) and it's cool to see how, over the long term, people get work done (or don't), find happiness in work and relationships (0r don't) and more or less to see how cool and weird their (and your) lives are. It really makes me think a lot about advising undergraduates. A lot of people at that stage think in terms of jobs and careers. I try to tell them that it's hard to plan life that way. You start off toward the goal, but you ultimately don't have much control over the specific outcome. Instead, to get a little Zen here, one should live in the moment, enjoy and work on a good process of living, and then find themselves in a good place, even if it's not quite what you expected. It's hard to tell that to people who've been told all of their lives that they are in control, that they can plan, that they are accountable for what happens. It's not that simple. It never is.
So, no big things to report beyond that. For those of you who have been following me, I have a request: Help me write my book. I would like to get a list of you who are willing to talk about school, learning, boredom, happiness, guilt, excitement, etc., in learning. I want to talk about how you manifest yourselves through intellectual and practical pursuits, work, play and life. The only thing is you have to be eighteen or older. I'd love to be able to talk to everyone, but it's hard to get that kind of research proposal through an institutional review board. You need parental permission, and so forth. Hard to do with your "virtual friends," no?
Let me know if you are interested.
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Off to Boston
I'm off to Boston early tomorrow morning. It'll be nice to see some of the folks from grad school. I haven't been to NCA as a presenter since 1999. Didn't go last year, and the year before I went on a job search. That's sort of like doing the same sales presentation for two days straight. I hate wearing a suit, and I think I spent about 24 hours in one over the course of two days. I didn't get a job out of the eleven or so interviews I had there, but I did get a lot of practice with my pitch. That's another good reason to go to the conference.
So, what's the paper all about? My argument runs something like this. Standards-based reform policy in U.S. public education is based upon a flawed model of human experience and motivation. Essentially, policy makers imagine students in an idealized fashion, and tend to believe that the best way to get them to learn is to establish "standards," test their learning of those standards, and then hold them responsible for the outcomes. I argue that the difference between students as conceived in policy, and students "for real" makes the outcomes of policy potentially devastating. By assuming that people will learned if threatened and bribed enough, the policy tends to ignore that different people are motivated in different ways. Moreover, it virtually eliminates the idea that student "audiences" actively interpret what happens to them, sometimes in ways that are reactive against the imposed policies. I address these points through some of the work in media, rhetorical, literary and cultural studies that touches upon audience, and attempt to use the notion of ideology to provide a central concept for understanding audience and critiquing policy makers' understandings of audience.
I tried to write something short and sweet, but was unsuccessful. I think I'm going to try to shop it as the first chapter in a book. We'll see if I find anything good at NCA, in terms of prospective publishers.
See you all soon.
So, what's the paper all about? My argument runs something like this. Standards-based reform policy in U.S. public education is based upon a flawed model of human experience and motivation. Essentially, policy makers imagine students in an idealized fashion, and tend to believe that the best way to get them to learn is to establish "standards," test their learning of those standards, and then hold them responsible for the outcomes. I argue that the difference between students as conceived in policy, and students "for real" makes the outcomes of policy potentially devastating. By assuming that people will learned if threatened and bribed enough, the policy tends to ignore that different people are motivated in different ways. Moreover, it virtually eliminates the idea that student "audiences" actively interpret what happens to them, sometimes in ways that are reactive against the imposed policies. I address these points through some of the work in media, rhetorical, literary and cultural studies that touches upon audience, and attempt to use the notion of ideology to provide a central concept for understanding audience and critiquing policy makers' understandings of audience.
I tried to write something short and sweet, but was unsuccessful. I think I'm going to try to shop it as the first chapter in a book. We'll see if I find anything good at NCA, in terms of prospective publishers.
See you all soon.
Monday, November 14, 2005
Out of Town Until Saturday
I will be gone to the National Communication Association conference in Boston from Wed (11/16) until Sat (11/19). I'll be presenting a paper (Reconsidering the Pedagogical Audience: Limitations of the Rational Actor Model in Standards-based Education) on Thursday, and spending the rest of the time seeing other panels, meeting up with colleagues from grad school, and seeing how many publishers I can quiz on getting my dissertation into print. The paper I'm presenting is an adaptation of one of the chapters of the dissertation. I'm hoping I can get a little bit more of it updated and then find a publisher for it.
In any case, I might have one more post before I go.
In any case, I might have one more post before I go.
Sunday, November 13, 2005
Welcome to Cooking with Children!
I'm Doc Johnson. What I will do here is talke about K-12 educational policy, educational theory, and different ways of learning and doing teaching.
I got interested in this area when I started graduate school I took a class called Politics of Literacy from Dr. Carol Severino at The University of Iowa. It opened my eyes. My relationship with education and its various institutions had been long and rough. I felt compelled to pursue more study of schools, how they're supposed to work, and how they actually do work. I did much of my graduate work on the topic, including my doctoral disseration (Rhetorics of Pedgogy: A Study of Three Models of Student Subjectivity).
I believe that the student is the most important person in any classroom. I also believe that schools, as they are, do not do a very good job of serving students. Unlike many so-called experts, policy makers, and others who think they know a lot about school, I don't blame that fact on students, but rather on how schools are forced to go about their business.
Schools, at present, are not about teaching students to be passionate about learning, nor do they give students much incentive to pursue this passion on their own. Instead, schools are designed to deliver a course of instruction that is easy to describe, assess, and use to hold people accountable for results. Right now, teachers get a lot of the blame, but students, ultimately, pay for this dynamic.
Moreover, people, particularly, politicians and administrators, use education and its reform as a way to curry favor with the public, to look busy and take up conceptual space, so that we feel their contributions actually matter. To do this, they use children. This is why the name of this blog is Cooking with Children.
More later.
I got interested in this area when I started graduate school I took a class called Politics of Literacy from Dr. Carol Severino at The University of Iowa. It opened my eyes. My relationship with education and its various institutions had been long and rough. I felt compelled to pursue more study of schools, how they're supposed to work, and how they actually do work. I did much of my graduate work on the topic, including my doctoral disseration (Rhetorics of Pedgogy: A Study of Three Models of Student Subjectivity).
I believe that the student is the most important person in any classroom. I also believe that schools, as they are, do not do a very good job of serving students. Unlike many so-called experts, policy makers, and others who think they know a lot about school, I don't blame that fact on students, but rather on how schools are forced to go about their business.
Schools, at present, are not about teaching students to be passionate about learning, nor do they give students much incentive to pursue this passion on their own. Instead, schools are designed to deliver a course of instruction that is easy to describe, assess, and use to hold people accountable for results. Right now, teachers get a lot of the blame, but students, ultimately, pay for this dynamic.
Moreover, people, particularly, politicians and administrators, use education and its reform as a way to curry favor with the public, to look busy and take up conceptual space, so that we feel their contributions actually matter. To do this, they use children. This is why the name of this blog is Cooking with Children.
More later.
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