The Non-Anglo-American Reading and Writing

"The island raises another question: Is it real? Is this whole story real? I refuse to ask that question. "Life of Pi" is all real, second by second and minute by minute, and what it finally amounts to is left for every viewer to decide. I have decided it is one of the best films of the year," Roger Ebert wrote in his review of the new Ang Lee film, Life of Pi.

holding on to the non-Anglo narrative in a way most films refuse to

"I refuse to ask that question," Ebert says... and this is essential. If you approach this tale in traditional, Anglo-American rationalist style, you end up writing the kind of nonsense produced by The New York Times' critic A. O. Scott, who writes...

"No problem! He will go on to embrace Islam and study kabbalah. Thousands of years of sectarian conflict, it seems, can be resolved with a smile and a hushed, reverent tone of voice.

“If you believe in everything, you will end up not believing in anything at all,” warns Pi’s dad, who is committed to the supremacy of reason and who is, as rationalists often are in the imaginations of the devout, a bit of a grouch about it. But this piece of skeptical paternal wisdom identifies a serious flaw in “Life of Pi,” which embraces religion without quite taking it seriously, and is simultaneously about everything and very little indeed. Instead of awe, it gives us “awww, how sweet."' 

Scott is so sure of his position as an authority on reason that he ends his review by stating,

"The problem, as I have suggested, is that the narrative frame that surrounds these lovely pictures complicates and undermines them. The novelist and the older Pi are eager to impose interpretations on the tale of the boy and the beast, but also committed to keeping those interpretations as vague and general as possible. And also, more disturbingly, to repress the darker implications of the story, as if the presence of cruelty and senseless death might be too much for anyone to handle.

"Perhaps they are, but insisting on the benevolence of the universe in the way that “Life of Pi” does can feel more like a result of delusion or deceit than of earnest devotion. The movie invites you to believe in all kinds of marvelous things, but it also may cause you to doubt what you see with your own eyes — or even to wonder if, in the end, you have seen anything at all."

Oh my, the very idea that one might actually, "doubt what you see with your own eyes." This is the startlingly disturbing concept which The New York Times cannot embrace in this film, and which prevents us from allowing a democracy of reading and writing into our classrooms and schools. 

"If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe? ... Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer." (Life of Pi, p. 297)

Six months ago I wrote about young students at Scoil ag An Ghleanna at St. Finan's Bay in County Cork, about how those six and seven-year-olds attributed the sinking of the RMS Titanic to (a) "it wasn't blessed," (b) "if you looked in a mirror, it said 'No Pope'," (c) "it was build by the Protestants in Belfast." And I wrote then that, well, who knows what brought that ship together with that iceberg at that moment in that way? "Wrong," is such an absolute word, because, who really knows the whole story?

"We," in that "Anglo-American" conceptualization of the world, crave certainties, as A. O. Scott does. One cannot share religions, because some stories are contradictory. One cannot create a tale based in uncertainty, because it makes the endings too difficult, and the "theme" too personal. One cannot be both moral and a Democrat even in much of America. We believe in hard lines of separation, in linear tales with the climax on page 278, in stories with a specific - instructed - point of view which we can all reconstruct in a summary and, of course, can "compare and contrast" with other similar narratives.

"Tigers exist, lifeboats exists, oceans exist. Because the three have never come together in your narrow, limited experience, you refuse to believe that they might. Yet the plain fact is that the Tsimtsum brought them together and then sank." (Life of Pi, p. 299)

But for most of the world, the certainties that come from being the favored race in either the British or American Empires remain elusive. The universe is unstable. Often our beliefs are unsure. And thus our stories cannot be linear, and can often simply observe and reflect. That "climax," that "turning point," that "transition where the protagonist changes," well, it just may not happen during the segment of life being reported - or the segment of dream being reported - or the mix of the two which it - any of it - may be.

Because the other thing about the uncertainty is our differing conceptualization of "facts." The English and the Americans - at least as those are understood by FoxNews - believe in the existence of the "reliable narrator," that, if we just find that person, be in Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow or whoever, we will "get the truth." But the rest of us, we cannot certain of that either. No one sees without lenses, no one sees without experiences and education, beliefs and fantasies. No one sees without having both needs and wants. So vision, yes, is always personal, and thus "unreliable."

Pi Patel is an "unreliable narrator" to The New York Times. Of course he is an "unreliable narrator" to both Roger Ebertand myself, but the difference is, The New York Times is troubled by this, and Ebert and I, perhaps our life experiences tell us that all narrators are unreliable, which allows us to listen to the story rather than to analyse it.

Akira Kurosawa's Rashoman. Truth? Where does that exist?

When the power is all yours, or you believe that power is all yours, you can, you will, feign certainty. And that certainty will allow you to easily split the world between "fiction" and "non-fiction." That certainty will allow you to easily categorize and label and summarize and simplify. That certainty will lead you to the simplicity of introductions, bodies of content, and conclusions. It will allow you to write five-paragraph essays and believe in hard lines between citation and plagiarism, just as you believe in hard lines on a map of the world.
The "rest" of the world might find all this too simple to be true at all. Memory is memory after all. It is "unreliable." It is always fiction and yet, it is also our only "truth," as Norman Mailer made it clear in that essential explanation of the writing of history, The Armies of the Night.

"She is in my memory her own avatar," John Banville writes in The Sea, which I just finished hearing. "Which is the more real, the woman reclining on the grassy bank of my recollections, or the strew of dust and dried marrow that is all the earth any longer retains of her? No doubt for others elsewhere she persists, a moving figure in the waxworks of memory, but their version will be different from mine, and from each other’s. Thus in the minds of the many does the one ramify and disperse. It does not last, it cannot, it is not immortality. We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations." 

We are uncertain and we are unreliable, and, as Banville adds, we are uncertain. “Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him," Banville's narratorinsists.

“A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” - James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake

So that other "we," that non-"academic," that non-white-protestant-power-owning, non-Anglo-American, non-imperial "we," need that democracy of reading and writing which allows our voices, our world views, and our uncertainty to exist fairly and equally within "your" school's walls. For without our voices being truly welcome, "your" schools have nothing for "us."

"You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see any higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality." (Life of Pi,p. 302) 

- Ira Socol

"Fried Chicken 'n Watermelon" at The New York Times

"As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show."

Both The New York Times and "reporter" Matt Richtel are at it again. The Times in their battle against technology in education, Richtel in his war against poor children. [see Class War at The New York Times]

Technology is "not a savior" says The New York Times... except for their own kids

The general idea is that while rich kids will use technology well, poor kids - a dangerous alien population - will not, so rich kids should be connected to the world and this century, while poor kids need to be carefully watched and trained to "be white."

Let us tear apart one key section of Richtel's reporting on this so-called "Digital Divide" crisis:

The study found that children of parents who do not have a college degree spend 11.5 hours each day exposed to media from a variety of sources, including television, computer and other gadgets. That is an increase of 4 hours and 40 minutes per day since 1999.

Children of more educated parents, generally understood as a proxy for higher socioeconomic status, also largely use their devices for entertainment. In families in which a parent has a college education or an advanced degree, Kaiser found, children use 10 hours of multimedia a day, a 3.5-hour jump since 1999. (Kaiser double counts time spent multitasking. If a child spends an hour simultaneously watching TV and surfing the Internet, the researchers counted two hours.) 

It doesn't take an "expert researcher" to see the nonsense in the above. First, the kid with the TV on and the mobile phone in hand is not spending 11 hours a day, but 5.5 hours doing... um, whatever they may be doing because these categories are absurdly broad. At the moment, in this hour, I am spending 3 hours "wasting time on media." The television is on - HGTV, I'm writing on my computer - this post, I'm tracking mail on my mobile. In just a few hours I'll have used up more than my full day, and jump right to tomorrow.

Second, the giant gap? It comes to 1.5 hours a day - which might actually be 45 minutes, or 30 minutes, or - to be honest - who the f--- knows? Richtel has built a career out of misusing third-rate statistical analysis (he has a Pulitzer Prize for "proving" what is provably untrue - that mobile phone use has made driving in America much more dangerous), and here we go again.

Then, using the "anecdote as fact" structure which has defined Richtel's education reporting, the "reporter" finds the most connected poor child in America:

Policy makers and researchers say the challenges are heightened for parents and children with fewer resources — the very people who were supposed to be helped by closing the digital divide.

The concerns are brought to life in families like those of Markiy Cook, a thoughtful 12-year-old in Oakland who loves technology.

At home, where money is tight, his family has two laptops [obviously with broadband - IS], an Xbox 360 and a Nintendo Wii, and he has his own phone. He uses them mostly for Facebook, YouTube, texting and playing games.

He particularly likes playing them on the weekends. 

Ummm, Matt? I've worked with a lot of poor kids, most are almost completely disconnected at home - except for their phone. When New Rochelle, NY began their 4G laptop initiative in their poor neighborhoods, they could barely find anyone with broadband, much less other laptops at home or connected video games. When I ask, whether in Michigan or Virginia, I find the poor with very little access, outside of the (often shared) smartphone. So Markiy is quite the "thoughtful" find for The Times, a find who makes "poor" parents look lazy, and poor kids - even those described as "thoughtful" poor kids - look irresponsible.  This is the - please excuse the racist expression here but I believe the connection is valid - "Lazy Darkie" theory, the idea, still expressed by the Republican Party in the United States, that African-Americans fail to succeed because they are only interested in "lazing around," dancing, and eating "fried chicken 'n watermelon" (which, honestly, has been expressed more, ahhh, bluntly in the circles of American power).

James Gee on how gaming supports learning

You know Markiy is irresponsible because he plays games on weekends and he isn't doing well in school. I could suggest reading James Geeto Matt Richtel, but information on how children develop and what they need in terms of interactive language, is not The Times goal here.

If it was, they might have reached back to their own paper two years ago:

James Paul Gee, a professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University who grew interested in video games when his son began playing them years ago, has written several seminal books on the power of video games to inspire learning. He says that in working through the levels of a complex game, a person is decoding its ‘‘internal design grammar’’ and that this is a form of critical thinking. ‘‘A game is nothing but a set of problems to solve,’’ Gee says. Its design often pushes players to explore, take risks, role-play and strategize — in other words putting a game’s informational content to use. Gee has advocated for years that our definition of ‘‘literacy’’ needs to be widened to better suit the times. Where a book provides knowledge, Gee says, a good game can provide a learner with knowledge and also experience solving problems using that knowledge.

Once again The New York Times could be looking at educational funding equity, or providing technology access in real ways, or about making schools function as relevant learning spaces instead of as worksheet factories... but they choose not too.  Once again they have turned their most anti-poor reporter loose on American schoolchildren and their parents, to degrade them, to attack them, and to help ensure that the legislators The Times influences will not give these "irresponsible" kids what they need.

Shame. Again.

- Ira Socol

Class War at The New York Times

The New York Times continues to pursue their war against American kids. Oh not all kids, of course. The Times wouldn't put the children of their editorial staff or of their big advertisers at risk, just the poor kids, the kind of kids they so happily sent to Iraq in 2003 with their phony reporting of Dick Cheney's propaganda, the kind of kids who attend all the schools in New York City that Times reporters would never consider entering.

Real kids. Our kids.

This month The Times is in the middle of one more of their dreary series of attacks on contemporary technology in education. This group by a guy named Matt Richtel who is famous for proving the provably untrue in a series of Times pieces about multitasking.1 I always wonder if their need to do this somehow coincides with their inability to make money from their website, but, that's for their Mexican creditors to determine, not me.

Sunday's piece, A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute, set a new standard for this Times meme, and indicated the depth of the newspaper's commitment to class war.

Rich kids. If they are up-to-date, just the two encyclopedias on the shelves in the
foreground cost more than a set of 20 tablets or netbooks, plus wireless access
points, would have cost. (New York Times photo by Jim Wilson)

Jonathan Martin, a Waldorf School parent, already wrote a fabulous response to The Times, and I won't go over all the he covers, but I do have a few things to say...

As Martin indicates, "this is not journalism that belongs on the front page of the Sunday New York Times. I think it is a very disappointing bit of snarky journalism that informs readers, a little bit, about Waldorf practices, condescendingly, but has as its primary purpose a not-so covert agenda to advance the paper’s ongoing attack on the use of computers in learning." Furthermore, he points out the absurdity of the piece which describes a school used by a handful of uber-rich technology execs (just outside the single most expensive college town in America) - "an anecdotal and almost entirely meaningless report: after all, every industry has among its many employees a wide diversity of educational philosophy" - as representing anything of significance, about Waldorf education (and its controversies), or anything else."When Richtel and his Grading the Digital School series discusses schools with technology that don’t raise performance on standardized tests, standardized testing is treated as a near absolute be-all, end-all of educational success," Martin continues, "but when celebrating a school approach without technology (serving then the anti-tech agenda), the importance of standardized testing success is happily set aside.  This is not journalism, this is hatchet work."

I think those are $50.00+ pencil sets, all looking brand new.

But this is not an article, or a series, about education. It is part of a class war on those not wealthy enough to be part of 'The World of The New York Times.' The Times, after all, is hardly against technology in education. Times folks send their kids to some of the most wired schools in the nation, from Scarsdale, New York public schools to Green Farms, from St. Bernard's to Stuyvesant High at Battery Park City, or from elementary schools in Larchmont or Greenwich Village. What The New York Times is against is for anyone to think that spending public money on "technology" for "our" kids makes any sense.

Why would they be against that? Simply because they want nothing in place which might even begin to tilt that infamous educational playing field toward anything close to level. If "our" kids... not the 99% of Occupy Wall Street, but the 95% of those outside the social circles of New York Times editors and executives, get anything close to an equal opportunity, they might challenge the children and the grandchildren of Times executives and friends for both places in elite universities, and then, maybe even, for jobs. So, The New York Times, the standard-bearer for American wealth, cannot allow that to happen.

And thus, they send a reporter with a Pulitzer Prize in suspect use of data out to find the kind of "proof" that school boards and state legislators can embrace. "If Google execs (well, at least one of them) send their kids to a school without computers, we surely shouldn't be buying them for poor kids."

And so tech for the poor gets cut, which means they lose all access to global information, to accessibility, to open communication. All the kids at the Waldorf School of the Peninsula go home to houses filled with technology and families that travel with them and buy them whatever supports they need. Waldorf schools traditionally "pass" on kids with disabilities and tuition usually keeps the poor away, so, the biggest issue, according to Richtel, is parental disinterest. "The students say they can become frustrated when their parents and relatives get so wrapped up in phones and other devices." But in schools which cannot buy new Britannicas every other year at $2,700.00, which cannot afford hundreds of hundred dollar skeins of yarn for each student or $54.96 boxes of pencils, issues of connectivity and knowledge base may indeed come up. So might issues of differing capabilities, issues of home resources, issues of up-to-date texts, etc.

But The Times is making a sale here, which you can see reflected in comments made just outside New York City, where the City School District of New Rochelle is trying to equip its most disconnected, impoverished students with 4G laptops for school and home. "None of them has Internet access at home," the article points out. "Pierre [one student] leaned over from a neighboring seat to add, "I'm going to take good care of it. I'm going to play math games and use it for reading and writing."' But the commenters, mostly from New Rochelle's New York Times-reading wealthier "North End" (think Dick Van Dyke or Ragtime), see it The Times' way: "games and circuses. Put a monitor on 99% of these "free" computers, and you'll find that 99% of the usage will be entertainment and game-related." "Let's see how many of these computers will be usable after one school year, or come back at all. many will "disappear."'

Jefferson Elementary School (New Rochelle, NY) students being branded by Verizon,
but also getting access to information and communication
in school and at home. (Journal-News photo by Carucha L. Meuse)

I, having been one of those "wrong end of town" kids long ago in that city, tried to fight back, even including William Alcott's 1842 quote about the "new technology" which Richtel's Waldorf School does embrace, "Slates are as necessary as black boards, and even more so. But they are so liable to be broken, it will be said, as to render it expensive to parents to keep their children supplied with them." But The Times is having its effect, the idea that, "I fundamentally reject the notion you need technology aids in grammar school,” Richtel quotes one of Eric Schmidt's speechwriters as saying. And Richtel finds Dr. Paul Thomas of Furman University (a long reach from Silicon Valley but you've got to hunt the supporting quotes down), who says, "Technology is a distraction when we need literacy, numeracy and critical thinking.”

So, projects like what New Rochelle is trying to do in their poorer elementary schools, will remain rare, and the children of The New York Times family will continue blissfully without real competition.

In creating this vision - denying to the poor what the rich already have - The Times depends on the essential cluelessness of the population, and unfortunately also way too much of the educational community, about what "technology" is.

"Technology," to quote (nervously, because he was pretty much a Nazi) Heidegger, is the "art of manipulating the world." A "physical book" is one way of manipulating information and getting it into your head. A print newspaper is another. So is a telegraph key, or a black-board. For me, none of those work well. OK, I was good at Morse Code at one point, but I've never done well with the others, because I'm just not good at reading alphabetic text. Sorry, call me illiterate or stupid or brain-damaged, as people have, but its the way God (or genetics) made me. So, I need different tools to manipulate that information world: Film, for example - I like to share how NWP's Paul Oh and I both seem to have learned the art of writing dialogue by watching Channel 9's Million Dollar Movie back in New York. Or audio, whether LP, or cassette, or TTS.

When Alcott wrote his book, he found that the key to kids manipulating the world for writing lay in the slate. With the slate erasing was easy so making mistakes was easy (same argument made regarding computers by Englert, Manalo, and Zhao (2004)) and so kids did better with spelling, grammar, and composition. For some kids telling a video story is the way (this is easier now than in the days of Super 8 film - cheaper, faster, way better for editing, although, yeah, I did Super 8 stuff). For others, yup, a pencil and a blank book is what its all about.

But it is important for Messers Richtel, Eagle (of Google), and Thomas to know is that, despite their claims, the old technology is neither superior nor more natural than anything which has come after. For years now I've had to point out that every time new ways of "manipulating the world" appear, those who hold power tend to oppose them. Socrates opposed both writing and literacy. The Catholic Church opposed Gutenberg's printing press. Alcott had to beg those funding Common Schools to install black-boards and give kids slates, even though the private schools of the wealthy and places like West Point had had them for years.

When different tools for manipulating the world appear, different people are given the chance to succeed, and when different people are given the chance to succeed, those in power are always threatened.

And none are threatened more than a group which has derived its status from being able to perform certain tasks which others cannot. So teachers and education profs and newspaper editors - the "always gotten As" kids who thrived on reading and writing faster than the rest of us, who thrived on memorization and correct spelling and understanding the Dewey Decimal System - they fear for their status if I can listen to a book, or dictate a letter, or use spellcheck, or use Google.

In a Waldorf School like the one Mr. Richtel and The New York Times celebrates, I was no threat, nor are millions of other kids. But if they let us have the technology, we might get to college, we might write books, hell, we might get elected Governor.

So, The Times front page Sunday wasn't about education, or "technology," or Waldorf Schools. It was about power. It was another shot in the class war being waged daily in America.

- Ira Socol

1 - I sure don't advocate texting while drive, but despite vehicle miles traveled increasing by over 20% since mobile phones became widely available, fatal auto accidents have dropped by over 17% in the 15 years between 1995 and 2009. These actual statistics directly contradict Richtel's claims about distracted driving. http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

"Remembering" September 11, 2001

"Space may be the final frontier
But it's made in a Hollywood basement"

Red Hot Chili Peppers, Californication

The events of September 11, 2001 happened. They happened in lower Manhattan, they happened in Arlington, Virginia, the happened over Western Pennsylvania, they happened in the air outside of Logan and Newark airports. They happened everywhere that people watched, or heard, or reacted.

But September 11, 2001, like all events, then became history. And history is not what happened. History is what we believe happened. History is what we understand happened. Truly, history is what "we" say happened.

In a blog on The New York Times Learning Network site Monday, Pam Moran and I discussed the essentials of why and how we need to teach about "9/11." We have much to say - we had more before editing for space restrictions - but perhaps the essence is summarized in this paragraph:

"Today’s students will enter a world of adulthood in which information does not come curated by editors in large, downtown buildings. Rather, they are direct information consumers, creators and distributors, interpreting current events and building history."

Forgotten massacre: The British
killed over 11,500 American prisoners
of war during the Revolution
on Prison Ships in Brooklyn's
Wallabout Bay. Do your students
know about that?

What ultimately is vital, is essential, is that we help our students to become much better at being, "consumers, creators and distributors [of history, and] interpreting current events and building history." Because history and its implications are far too important to be left to "Hollywood" or those who control Hollywood, or to politicians with narrow self-serving agendas.

If we allow only those with power interests or financial interests to tell and preserve the stories of the past, the stories of our past will be limited to those which "sell" an agenda.

This might explain why very, very few Americans know about the Philippine-American War, or why, while "Juneteenth" (June 19th, 1865) is celebrated as the end of slavery in the United States, American students don't learn that in December 1865 there were still over 40,000 slaves in Kentucky, and thousands more in  Tennessee, Kansas, New Jersey, Delaware, West Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, Washington, D.C., and Louisiana. Those states, under "Union" control, waited for the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution to take effect before freeing their "African" slaves. It might explain why the Soviet Union, America's great ally of the 1940s, could be nothing but an "evil empire" from 1949 to 1989. Or why Woodrow Wilson was considered a failed President from 1919 to 1935, before he was "resurrected" via the FDR administration's contacts in the publishing and film industry. It might be why Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States is so different from our K-12 American history textbooks, or why many more Japanese planes are shot down in a film like Pearl Harbor than actually were.

Was Woodrow Wilson a progressive hero? Or a racist
meddler who guaranteed a second war in Europe?

The fight over the history of September 11, 2001 began on September 12, 2001, if not before. In New York's Union Square Park, which lay just outside the excluded zone of the city, peace vigils sprung up even as other voices across the nation demanded vengeance. That fight continued through the decisions to fight wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (with massive protests in New York City against the Iraq invasion) and continue today in debates about the presence of an Islamic Cultural Center near the World Trade Center.

In each case, people on both sides of an issue create, adapt, and deliver their own histories of that bright late summer morning. And in each case, those histories suggest paths into the future which very well might impact our students' lives.

So, our suggestion is to use this event, and the history constructed within the lifetime of our students, as a way to begin investigating how history is created, and why history is created.

One history of "9/11"... but not everyone's

Over the rest of the week lesson ideas will appear both at The Times Learning Network and here. The Times site, as always, is open to conversation, as is Edutopia. Please join in, and help make this "9/11" anniversary an important beginning to get students thinking deeply and critically about history.

"I am a student, and to be honest I really thought history was boring because all of the dates you had to remember for tests. But now by reading this learning network article I started to think about how you really need to deeply understand the history of something. And by understanding it you will realize that it is essential to human life.

"I think 9/11 should be taught in schools across the world, and we shouldn’t neglect it, we should understand and remember the event."   — Rachel commenting in The New York Times.

- Ira Socol

fascinating view of the construction of "9/11" history by Frank Rich in New York Magazine.

Is all information equal?

"That Titanic hit the iceberg could be down to a misunderstanding. Because the ship sailed during the transition from sail to steam there were two different steering communication systems in operation: rudder orders for steamships, and tiller orders for sailing ships. "The two steering systems were the complete opposite of one another," said Patten. "So a command to turn 'hard a-starboard' meant turn the wheel right under one system and left under the other."

"The man at the wheel, Quartermaster Robert Hitchins, was trained under rudder orders – but tiller orders were still in use in the north Atlantic. So when First Officer William Murdoch first spotted the iceberg and gave a 'hard a-starboard' order, a panicked Hitchins turned the liner into the course of the iceberg.

'"The real reason why Titanic hit the iceberg is because he turned the wheel the wrong way," said Patten. By the time the error had been corrected, two minutes had been lost. Nothing could stop the iceberg breaching the hull." - The Guardian 22 September 2010

"Hard a-Starboard it is, sir" (A Night to Remember, 1958)

"Titanic was launched at a time when the world was moving from sailing ships to steam ships. My grandfather, like the other senior officers on Titanic, had started out on sailing ships. And on sailing ships, they steered by what is known as ’tiller orders’ which means that if you want to go one way, you push the tiller the other way.

"It sounds counterintuitive now, but that is what tiller orders were. Whereas with ‘rudder orders,’ which is what steam ships used, it is like driving a car. You steer the way you want to go. It gets more confusing because, even though Titanic was a steam ship, at that time on the North Atlantic they were still using tiller orders. Therefore Murdoch gave the command in tiller orders, but Hitchins, in a panic, reverted to the rudder orders he had been trained in. They only had four minutes to change course and by the time Murdoch spotted Hitchins’s mistake and then tried to rectify it, it was too late." - The New York Times September 22, 2010

"The Last Line" - The Titanic leaving Belfast

"During or right before the collision Murdoch may have also given an order (as heard by Quartermaster Alfred Olliver when he walked onto the bridge in the middle of the collision) of "Hard a'port"^[3] (moving the tiller all the way to the port (left) side turning the ship to starboard (right)) in what may have been an attempt to swing the remainder (aft section) of the ship away from the berg in a common manoeuvre called a "port around"^[4] (this could explain Murdoch's comment to the captain "I intended to port around it"). The fact that such a manoeuvre was executed was supported by other crew members who testified that the stern of the ship never hit the berg.^[5] Quartermaster Robert Hichens, who was at the helm, and Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall, who may or may not have been on the bridge during the collision,^[6] both stated that the last command Murdoch gave Hichens was "Hard-a-starboard!"."^[7][8]  - Wikipedia

Harland and Wolfe Shipyard, Belfast

 OK, I am a Titanic freak.

Before I was born, an aunt of mine worked as a secretary for Walter Lord, transcribing his recordings of Titanic survivors, sometimes making notes of the interviews in shorthand, as he researched the classic A Night to Remember. So I was raised on these stories.

So, of course, I was fascinated to see that the grand-daughter of Charles Lightoller, the Titanic's Second Officer (and highest ranking crew survivor), was proposing a new theory regarding that legendary 1912 accident.

But I was also a touch disturbed. As the story spread - to The New York Times and beyond - I wondered, where were the questions?

I wondered how officers on a line which had been all steam for 44 years in 1912, would make a mistake like this. And I wondered about the idea of "sail to steam transition" and what that meant for trans-Atlantic merchant seamen. And I wondered about what else was known about this moment in time, leading me to Wikipedia entries on "Tiller Orders" and First Officer Murdoch. It turns out that all British and American ships (the Titanic was British but was owned by Americans) used "tiller orders" in 1912, and would for decades (on British ships until 1933, on American until 1935).

That all took about seven minutes. So why did no one at The Guardian or The New York Times do this?

We have, in too many ways, become a community of "Noddies" - we see something, and we nod and agree.  Or if we do not agree we tend to consider "all information equal." As if, if someone says Barack Obama is an American on network news, the reporter has to indicate that this is controversial.

Now, I'm firmly (and often fiercely) post-modernist, but I still believe that all information must be analysed, whether it comes from The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News, or your teacher or professor or lecturer.

So I read these Titanic stories, and I wasn't transported back to childhood fantasies of being on board, but rather back to last night, when I was almost begging university seniors to disagree with my controversial statements.

We train compliance so strongly in schools that we make doubting difficult and uncomfortable, and that is a dangerous thing.

I don't know if Louise Patten is lying, confused by a childhood story, or telling some type of truth. No one on the bridge that night in April 1912 is alive to discuss it. But I do know that claims should always engender questions. And I know that if we do not start that training at the beginnings of school, we will continue to be a world which fails to process information in the ways we must.

The Time Tunnel, 1966

- Ira Socol

3 titanic.marconigraph.com - STOP Command / "Porting Around" Maneuver
4 ""Last Log of the Titanic" -Four Revisionist Theories - a "port around" or S-curve manoeuvre in which "the bow is first turned away from the object, then the helm is shifted (turned the other way) to clear the stern"". Archived from the original on 2003-10-28. http://web.archive.org/web/20031028123941/http://www.geocities.com/murdochmystery/Last_Log_of_the_Titanic.html. Retrieved 2009-03-12. 
5 titanic.marconigraph.com - STOP Command / "Porting Around" Maneuver “SENATOR BURTON: Do you not think that if the helm had been hard astarboard the bow would have been up against the berg? QUARTERMASTER GEORGE ROWE: It stands to reason it would, sir, if the helm were hard astarboard.”
6 titanic.marconigraph.com - Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall reported during the Enquiry that upon arriving on the bridge after the fact...
7 Encyclopedia Titanica http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/item/1485/
8 Titanic Inquiry Project - United States Senate Inquiry http://www.titanicinquiry.org/USInq/AmInq10Boxhall03.php
some links above may no longer be working, but you can find them via the wayback machine http://web.archive.org/web/20070808064427/http://titanic.marconigraph.com/ 

David Brooks: Fighting Words

David Brooks tried to write a column about education in today's New York Times. In doing so he made a number of statements which sound right:

"We’ve spent years working on ways to restructure schools, but what matters most is the relationship between one student and one teacher. You ask a kid who has graduated from high school to list the teachers who mattered in his life, and he will reel off names. You ask a kid who dropped out, and he will not even understand the question. Relationships like that are beyond his experience."

But is this right?

David Brooks is part of an American aristocracy which actually hates teachers. He is usually joined in this by the whole New York Times organization, by high profile school bosses like Joel Klein (NYC) and Michelle Rhee (DC), and of course by the Ivy League's darlings - the KIPP and Teach for America organizations.

if only the teachers were better...

They hate teachers and they blame teachers. They hate students too, and they blame students as well. If only teachers were better. If only students worked harder. Who escapes blame? Well, the system does. They system which actively opposes child development and human learning patterns. The system which prevents the necessary personalization of learning. The system which strips most teachers of the ability to support their students through an absurd, antiquated system of school organization, through withholding of essential resources, through a focus on the nonsense of standardized testing.

I've got news for you Mr. Brooks: When I was in schools with fundamentally different structures - a "School Without Walls" alternative high school, an ungraded (as in A, B, C) and collaborative university experience, all sorts of people became "great" teachers because they had room to be that. All sorts of students became incredibly hard working, because the work was relevant and appropriate. The simple fact is - it is the system - not the teachers or the students - which is failing.

Of course if David Brooks admitted that, if Joel Klein admitted that, or Michelle Rhee, or Arne Duncan, the responsibility would shift to themselves. And they no more want to held responsible than their friends at Citibank and AIG do.

A paragraph later in his column, Brooks falls off the reform cliff:

"Thanks in part to No Child Left Behind, we’re a lot better at measuring each student’s progress. Today, tests can tell you which students are on track and which aren’t. They can tell you which teachers are bringing their students’ achievement up by two grades in a single year and which are bringing their students’ levels up by only half a grade. They can tell you which education schools produce good teachers and which do not."

No, Mr. Brooks, we are not "a lot better." No, Mr. Brooks, these assessments can not "tell you."

What these assessments do - all they do - is eliminate the possibility of real reform. Oh sure, they might measure the ability to take standardized tests based in a specific oppressive world view. And certainly they measure socio-economic status and maybe - within socio-economic class - they might measure a teacher's test prep capabilities. But they say absolutely nothing about actual student progress, about the quality of teachers, or about the quality of schools.

The problem here is that David Brooks is part of the "faux reform" establishment. They talk reform but by ensuring that blame goes on everyone but the causal factors: American poverty, the lack of American social mobility, the lack of properly distributed educational resources in America, and - most importantly - the American structure of education - they ensure that nothing changes and that the elite hold on to their power.

Twitter friend Chris Harkness (@haretek) says, "Let's fight then. We have a smart president now and smart people around him. That gives us at least more of a fighting chance." And she is right. We have this opportunity , and we cannot let only David Brooks and his ilk have the ear of this new president.

- Ira Socol

my response to Brooks on the Times blog: [an "Editors' Pick"? how remarkable]

Mr. Brooks,

I wish you understood anything about "measuring student progress," but unfortunately you continue to embrace an absurd attitude - that standardized tests based in the notion that all children learn at the same rate represent a logical way to gauge human learning. This will lead you to what might be called "CNBC" solutions - merit pay based in short term gains on meaningless assessments - school districts encouraged to lie (as I just read in the NYT) - and an absolute commitment to the 1/3 success rate in US education which maintains the social status quo.

Real education reform would begin with a fundamental re-thinking of our industrial model based in age-based grades and "objective" testing. http://speedchange.blogspot.com...
The UK is embracing "personalised learning" and cutting testing of younger students, strategies based in the kind of authentic educational research which the US has refused to fund in its fraudulent commitment to some "gold standard" "medical model" of research.

Let us hope that those of us who favor actual reform, those of us who want to give teachers the tools and resources they need, those of us who believe that students are individuals, get some kind of hearing in this process, and that the debate is not hijacked by the Joel Kleins and Michelle Rhees of the world.

Ira Socol East Lansing, MI

Teachers Against the Future, and their Students

Three comments from teachers on a New York Times article on mobile phones in the classroom.

"Not my classroom, not ever. My kids are on their own in class, not propped up by gadgets. And don't tell me they're a tech-literate generation: they're quite helpless, even at age 20 unable to change a single-spaced document to a double-spaced one, and unwilling to pursue any question or issue beyond the first screen of its Wikipedia entry."

— Real Teacher, Bloomington, IN

"Seriously? Are you kidding me? As a teacher I am engaged in a perpetual battle against this technology as students use it in an increasing variety of non-productive ways. From kids who are simply not paying attention, or who are engaged in personal, (but very public), phone calls in the halls, to kids who text each other or check the web to cheat, this technology only encourages the 'what is the answer' mentality and discourages any real learning."

— Augusta Johnson, Andover, MA

"How about using a brain for a change, instead of cell phone?"

— Taras, Hancock, NY

OK, one by one.

Is this "Real Bad Teacher" in Bloomington, Indiana? His or her students are incapable of research because they have mobile phones or because he/she has not taught them how to do research? His or her students can not change document formatting because of phones or because technology education in his or her school is so poor? And, oh my, "My kids are on their own in class, not propped up by gadgets." How positively Socratic. Get those books out of the room - memory only. Get rid of that chalkboard - that technological devil of the 1840s. Pens? Pencils? Paper? Just ridiculous gadgets which make communication easier. Maybe we should get rid of the alphabet as well. Just one more silly invention to simplify and improve human communication and data handling. "Technology is everything invented after I was born"? This teacher truly believes that. I'm glad these students are being firmly prepared for the world of 1970.

Ms. Johnson in Andover: You are in a "perpetual battle" against this technology and your own students. How's that working out? When I present I often hold up the back of my right hand, where the "lead" of a pencil still resides from a stabbing with a pencil by a friend at age nine. It is funny, the teacher's response that day was not to remove all pencils from the room. I also watched many students pass notes in class and doodle, but I've never seen a teacher respond by removing paper from the room. When I was thirteen a classmate threw books at me. The teacher let books remain in the room. I've even seen students cheat with pens, with paper, with notes written on their clothing - yet all those technologies probably remain even in your classroom. See, Ms. Johnson, you either teach and demonstrate the best uses of the technology of your time or you find another job.

And Taras, we are humans, we are tool users. It is tool use, and the progression of tool capability, which has allowed human progress. I can imagine "Taras" sitting around at the birth of the stone age, "How about using your hands for a change, instead of that stone hammer."

I am so tired of teachers who refuse to look at the world around them, who refuse to adapt to a changing society, who refuse to respond to their students' needs and their students' interests...

Ah well, The Times won't post my comment - I'm never sure why they choose to restrict debate, but they do - so I'm posting it here...

Ira Socol, Michigan State University: Of course these devices, the most powerful information and communication tools on the planet, belong in classrooms. Some of us have been arguing this for a long time, based on the dramatic successes we've seen in other nations (where "smarter" phones have long been the norm).

Don't Hang Up on Your Students' Futures
or
Liz Kolb's Cellphones in Learning
or
Handheld Learning

Imagine - every student holds, in the palm of his or her hand, the world's greatest library, and the ability to ask any question, and to collaborate globally. Plus, an efficient text-entry system, a reading platform, a calculator, and even strong supports re: "Learning Disabilities." Oh, sorry, we've banned these devices from our buildings...

- Ira Socol