"Grit" - Part 3: Is it "an abundance of possibility" our kids need?

Note: Clearly, I will need a "Part 4" here, but I will publish this today, to support the ongoing conversation...

Dave Meister left a comment on my last post which included this story:

"Days like today remind me of my first year as an elementary administrator and going to school and finding a student in the window well of the school on a sub zero morning. She had a horrific life at home that the authorities (and I) failed to save her from. Her progress through school followed my mine ascension to a high school position. She became a very angry high school student that eventually dropped out. As far as I knew she never had any slack. She was smart in her own way...avoiding the worst of her world, but she became pregnant and dropped out. I have lost track of her, but know that we as a community failed her, but I know this, she had grit. It was ground into her by life experiences and she could not get past the scars."

The discussion of "grit" heated up across the Twittersphere in fascinating ways, and with that discussion a deeper conversation began about the components of "grit" and the origins of Angela Duckworth's theories.

Nancy Flanagan: Kiss My Grit 
Grant Lichtman: Does Grit Need a Deeper Discussion? which has become, perhaps, the conversation on the topic.
Josie Holford: Grit Hits the Fan 
Joe Bower: Let them eat grit - 4 reasons why "grit" is garbage  
Grit: Part One 
Grit: Part Two
and Vicki Davis: True Grit 

There are two key questions to get to, but first, maybe we should define "grit" if we're going to argue about it. And because of her deep role in "the selling of grit," let us use Angela Duckworth's definition as expressed in her "Grit Test" (pdf):

"Author Rose noted the key elements of the Protestant ethic to be “diligence, punctuality, deferment of gratification, and primacy of the work domain”' (Rose 1985, 102).

• I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge.  This is good according to Duckworth, and perhaps, to all of us.
• New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones.  This is bad according to Duckworth, but certainly might be debatable for many of us, and for many who work in what is called, "the creative economy."
• My interests change from year to year. Also bad according to Duckworth, but also quite debatable. 
• Setbacks don’t discourage me. This is good according to Duckworth, but, really? We do not get discouraged by repeated failures? What would we need to accomplish that?
• I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest. Again, bad according to Duckworth, but also highly debatable.  
• I am a hard worker. Of course, the very heart of "good" according to Duckworth and the essential belief behind the "Protestant Work Ethic." But what if someone said, "I'm a good caregiver" instead, or "I'm a deep thinker"? Why aren't those statements here?
• I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one. Very bad in the world of Duckworth, which makes everyone from Steve Jobs to Paul Allen, Thomas Edison to Sergei Brin, a loser on this grit scale.
• I have difficulty maintaining my focus on projects that take more than a few months to complete.  Another bad one on the Duckworth scale, keep your noses to your grindstones, lads.
• I finish whatever I begin. Of course, this is what Duckworth wants, and why anyone who drops out of any school-based thing is a failure in Paul Tough's How Children Succeed. But is giving up on a task really a sign of weakness?
• I have achieved a goal that took years of work. Another Duckworth "gold star"- you can see the type of personality being prized here. In school this is the single-minded pursuit of all As and graduation.
• I become interested in new pursuits every few months.  Bad, how could it not be here? People who have wide-ranging interests make poor drones on the assembly line.
• I am diligent. Ah, yes, like "hard worker," this is another Duckworth code word for "compliant" and "self-sacrificing to white middle class expectations." It is another "good" on the scale.

Note: if you use the PDF those questions with an asterisk are "bad" - they're marked to make it easier for us to judge our students.

Let's put this together - anything at all like ADHD is very bad, those "renaissance" types are bad, kids with high-level street survival skills are bad, but compliance with the expectations of "white" "western" society is very good. Leonardo da Vinci, Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak, Bill Clinton, John Kennedy are all in the problem mode. The winners on Duckworth's measuring stick? The guys who spend their lives hunting for Big Foot in all kinds of weather, the Unibomber, the person spending 30 years in the same job.

If you read through Duckworth's "scale" you will see a pattern. Everything she sees as "good" is about scarcity - scarcity of time, scarcity of resources, scarcity of attention, even scarcity of support - her "good" is relentlessly independent, single-focused, and committed to whatever is expected. Everything "bad" is about abundance - many ideas, many projects, many interests, a belief that there is time to get things done.

This is not a "scientific" divide. Rather, it is a religious divide, and division created by whether one believes in Social Darwinism or not. Angela Duckworth believes in Social Darwinism, the root of the reprehensible eugenics movement of the 20th Century. She extensively quotes Francis Galton, "the father of eugenics," in her work, and, one tends to believe than an Ivy League professor knows who she is quoting and chooses to quote someone for a reason. 

But Angela Duckworth is also fierce in her religious convictions, a true believer in what I call "American Calvinism" - a secularized version of the Calvinist Protestantism which mythically arrived in North America with the early Massachusetts settlers.  

Let's see how Duckworth and the Puritans line up:

"[T]he key elements of the Protestant ethic [are] “diligence, punctuality, deferment of gratification, and primacy of the work domain” (Rose 1985, 102)"... "[John Calvin] believed that people could serve God through their work. Professions were useful, and work was the universal base of society and the cause of differing social classes, every person should work diligently in his own occupation and should not try to change from the profession into which he was born. To do so would be to go against God's own ordination since God assigned each person to his own place in the social hierarchy (Lipset 1990, 61-69)."

In Twitter conversations people have argued that the "work ethic" expressed above - and in the work of Duckworth and Paul Tough - is "not religious," and cannot really be seen as "racist." Those promoting "grit" are not "Calvinists" they say, and Duckworth isn't even "white," but in fact the nature of Duckworth's work, and the essence of Tough's reporting, are both fundamentally religious and fundamentally "racist" in terms of belief in what those back in the day might have called "Godly behavior," and in terms of group identities being "closer" or "further" from "God's plan."  

That the myths of the Protestant Work Ethic, and mythic identity racism, are embedded in the American power structure does not make them less religious in nature or origin, simply more troubling, because they have been used for all time to abuse those not wanted within that power structure. The Irish, as I noted in the last post, are lazy, illiterate, drunkards. African-Americans are lazy and uninterested in success. Italians are lazy and disrespectful of the law. Latinos are lazy, illiterate, and can't stay put and focus.

The myths of the Protestant Work Ethic and identity racism grew in America and has been carried forward for almost four centuries because it made those born to wealth and power feel good about themselves. How much better to describe your ancestors as having struggled alone against a brutal wilderness and wild savages than saying that your ancestors were "illegal immigrants" who stole a remarkably resource rich continent from its inhabitants. How much better to embrace Jackson's "Frontier Theory" than to worry about slaves and underpaid immigrants who built the early national roads, dug the Erie Canal, and built the railroads. How much better to celebrate "American Invention" than to discuss the wholesale intellectual property theft - from woolen mills to those railroads to the telephone debuting across those 1876 fairgrounds - which had enriched the American Republic's first hundred years.

Those myths continue to this day. How much better to say that your children get into the University of Pennsylvania, or Harvard, or the University of Virginia because they are smarter, because they work harder, because you, as a parent, have educated them better, than to discuss the advantages of race and class. How much better to say that you have succeeded in business because you speak correctly, or have the right "work ethic," than to discuss what you inherited.

This is "understood" so deeply that it has been "naturalized." To quote Edward Said (from his essay on Rudyard Kipling's Kim in his 1994 book Culture and Imperialism, in a way which describes Paul Tough's work quite well, “its author is writing not just from the dominating view-point of a white man in a colonial possession but from the perspective of a massive colonial system whose economy, functioning, and history had acquired the status of a virtual fact of nature.”

In other words, the myths of the Protestant Work Ethic and Identity Racism explain why we need not bother to build a fair and equitable society. And the myth of educational "grit" explains why we need not create fair and equitable schools. Life made easy for those in power.

But what if the key to resilience in school, in life, was abundance. What if "grit" was something which taught you the lessons of scarcity - of pure survival - but abundance offered you the "slack" you needed to get where you might want to go?

After all, would there be a Facebook if Mark Zuckerberg, from 18 to 21, had been working 40 hours a week at a mini-mart in White Plains while commuting to Westchester Community College? Where might Apple be if Jobs and Wozniak had not had that famous garage and food provided by parents? Where would I be if not for a fabulous high school teacher who gave me the time, space, and resources to keep going?

"Grit" - that response to scarcity - taught me to cheat. to lie, at times to steal (yes), to find any shortcut, to fight, to flee. Abundant moments, that opportunity for "slack" - those very Catholic "feast days for the soul" - taught me what I could aspire to.

This is not an idle, theoretical, conversation. In my "debate" with Paul Tough on Grant Lichtman's blog, I brought up examples of high schools which have provided "abundance," and Tough fought back by saying that these schools lacked the "concentrated poverty" of the schools he visited. But as I responded, that is the point. The schools he visited exist in school systems which have created a vicious level of socio-economic segregation, the schools I suggested exist in systems have done the opposite. New Rochelle, New York, or even Albemarle County, Virginia, could easily create significant sized high schools filled with nothing but poverty, as the City of Chicago has done. All it would take to do so would be for those places to mimic Chicago's school policies. But they have not. And the result of those political choices - even though both school systems do lose a good number of children to less inclusive private schools - are inclusive public secondary schools which offer abundant possibility and strong supports. Diverse academic and arts programs, strong counseling programs, and student-based choices.

creating "abundance" - time, space, choices, safety

Here are two examples. In Albemarle County, Virginia, in our most "at risk" high school - no, not a Fenger - we have not allowed that to happen, we added, a few years in response to student request, a music studio in our library.  This allowed a range of high poverty students, and we’re talking both black and white poverty, to come together around an existing set of community passions, from rap to hillbilly blues, and then to bring the middle class students, with rock, show tunes, and classical added, to join with them. We allowed these students to present their work, and to construct their core course learning via music, we did not impose our passions, our paths on them – rather we embraced theirs. From there we expanded an already inclusive theater program, including what we might call “street dance” and “street music” if we had real streets in that area. We kept kids in school. We kept kids in class. We kept kids engaged and involved in the positive. It changed, the students told us, the entire character of the school for the better. We have continued to build on those kind of efforts in that high school and others, because we have discovered the value of abundance.

"slack" generated by "abundance"

In our "at risk" elementary schools we have pursued a differing, but similar course. Our classrooms are now designed around what we call "choice and comfort," with kids able to discover what makes them comfortable in terms of learning environment and learning style. Kids lie on the floor, perch on stools, lean against high tables, sit on low tables. They write using differing technologies, from pencils to handhelds to tablets to laptops. They move when they need to. We no longer enforce Calvinist church behaviors, and so now we allow children to harness the full power of their cognitive energies on their learning. By providing an abundance of choice, an abundance of time, an abundance of tools, we have encouraged persistence in ways that "grit theorists" can only hope to emulate.

In other words, offering children abundance is a choice. It is a choice a community - a nation - can either make or not. And if a community, or a nation, chooses not to offer children abundance, I still find it remarkably unfair to complain that our children of scarcity lack character.

What Paul Tough ignores, from his perch at The New York Times, is the responsibility of organizations such as The Times to promote fundamental change. Tough does call for a better welfare system, which is lovely, I suppose, but not the equity our children need. In fact, The Times has waged quite the war for inequity in education through the reporting of Matt Richtel, an Tough, in a book which - whatever he says now - promotes the sense that what is primarily needed is "character," has done his own substantial harm.

Myth matters in the struggles for power. And understanding mythic belief matters even more. And as I have said on more than one occasion, education is the most political thing a society does, because it is a struggle for our future.

What Duckworth and Tough do in their, perhaps conscious for her, unconscious for him, unquestioning belief in the Protestant Work Ethic, is to give the power structure a pass, no matter how much either of them calls for more charity.

That is a a pass I will not sign on to.

- Ira Socol

_______________________________________________

I need to repeat, if necessary, those beliefs of mine which underlie my commitment to what I am writing. I was thrilled when @jonbecker (Dr. Jonathan Becker) called me a "scholar/advocate" in a tweet about my last post, because while some others would pretend otherwise, I never hide what drives me to tell the stories I am telling. So let me say again, I am the job-changing son of a job-changing father. I've given up on many things - attempts at school, careers, political efforts, writings, hobbies. I like to nap. I like to lie around and stare at the television. I cannot focus through a half hour meeting - none of which particularly matters. What does matter is that I am committed to the future of children who "fail to meet" societal expectations. I see ADHD as a positive, not usually a pathology requiring high levels of medication. I see social and cultural variety as a tremendous positive, and efforts like "the Common Core" as misguided attempts at homogeneity. I see age-based expectations and standards as an assault on the natural differences in children. And I believe that much which we take for granted in "white," "educated," "middle class," society needs to be questioned if opportunities are to be democratized.

"Scholars are often wary of citing such commitments, for, in the stereotype, an ice-cold impartiality acts as the sine qua non of proper and dispassionate objectivity. I regard this argument as one of the most fallacious, even harmful, claims commonly made in my profession. Impartiality (even if desirable) is unattainable by human beings with inevitable backgrounds, needs, beliefs, and desires. It is dangerous for a scholar even to imagine that he might attain complete neutrality, for then one stops being vigilant about personal preferences and their influences—and then one truly falls victim to the dictates of prejudice.

"Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference. Moreover, one needs to understand and acknowledge inevitable preferences in order to know their influence—so that fair treatment of data and arguments can be attained! No conceit could be worse than a belief in one's own intrinsic objectivity, no prescription more suited to the exposure of fools." - Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasurement of Man (revised), p. 36

Christmas, Zombies, the Common Core, Neoliberalism, and Democratic Voice

On the F train on Christmas Eve my spousal equivalent, born and bred in the Protestant American heartland, turned to me and said, "I'm the only blond in this car." "Probably on this train," I answered.

In New York City Subway art, tourists (and odd old women) are denoted by blond hair

And I recalled how, in the decade previous to this one (when the century was new) I asked - in front of a classroom full of young teachers to be - for all those students with blond hair and blue eyes to stand up.

"You know," I then told this Midwestern grouping, "it is more common today for a child to be born with AIDS than with blond hair and blue eyes." Then I paused, let them sit down, and we began to wonder about how we define "the other" and about how we define "normal."

I do not know if it is indeed, "more common today for a child to be born with AIDS than with blond hair and blue eyes," which I later indicated to the students and asked them if they might use their phones to find an answer, but, you probably get the point.

Which brings me to stories from my niece, a New York City schools teacher in an elementary school in the Borough of Queens. She told two theologic-confusion stories from her incredibly diverse student population:

At Christmas 2011 a boy from India asked why Christmas was such a big holiday. "You do all this because one god had one baby?" "Well, we only have one God," my niece replied, and there is only one child. This didn't really help solve the boy's confusion.

*****

At Easter 2012 a boy from China tried to figure out that holiday. When my niece tried to explain the resurrection, the boy said, "So he was alive, then he was dead, then he was alive again?" "Yes," my niece replied. "Ohhh," the boy said, holding his arms out straight in front of him and waving them up and down, "Zombie Jesus."

"You can't do that anyplace else in the school," my niece told him when she stopped laughing, "people really believe this." "Grown ups too?" he asked. "Grown ups too," my niece said. "Which grown ups?" he asked, wondering, of course, who in this American school he might be able to trust.

"Our" Anglo-American-Christian "core beliefs" are, quite often, a baffling mythology for others. As are "our" (essentially) religious commitment to market capitalism, "our" belief in linear - point A to point B - storytelling, and "our" (American) ignorance of history or "our" (English) refusal to acknowledge history. These accepted "norms," these structures of thought, which lie at the heart of the American "common core" and the English "e-bacc" of Michael Gove, and the "educational reform" efforts in the US, Canada, England, and Australia, are the very things which put our "Nation[s] at Risk." They are not a solution, they are the problem, and always have been, going back to the era in which public (or, in England, "state") education was created.

"America has long been known–despite our problems–as the country of freedom, innovation, and wealth.  There are several reasons for this, not the least of which is our democratic and free public education system.  Prior to NCLB in 2002 and Race to the Top eight years later, standardization was limited to SAT and ACT tests, NAEP and PISA tests, and graduation exams for Advanced Placement courses.  We valued music, art, drama, languages and the humanities just as much as valued science, math, and English (for the most part).  We believed in the well-rounded education.

Now, the Common Core State Standards has one goal: to create common people.  The accompanying standardized tests have one purpose: to create standardized people.  Why?  Because the movers and the shakers have a vested interest in it.  It’s about money and it’s about making sure all that money stays in one place." - Kris A. Nielsen 2012

Do we want "common people"? or is this effort by those with money and power, from ALEC to Bill Gates to Eli Broad to Goldman-Sachs, "how democracy ends" as the teacher quoted just above says?

Venn Diagram by Kris A. Nielsen

Democracy, like invention, requires uncommonalities, requires difference. Invention comes from (a) discomfort, combined with (b) thesis (an idea of how to solve the discomfort) plus (c) antithesis (a challenge to the thesis based in differing views), which leads to (d) synthesis - that new idea. Democracy, of course, in order to be democracy, requires constant invention, based in constant discomfort with how things are, combined with radically differing competing world views. Democracy is essential for invention, because it allows challenge to ideas. Invention is essential to democracy, because it allows creation of new answers. And our educational reform concepts, our Common Cores and E-baccs, allow neither to exist. And those who embrace these "answers" without apology are opposing all that is good about our nations and our economies.

My Venn Diagram of forces shaping US public education in 1850, the "Prussian Model"
imported by Henry Barnard was originally developed to ensure consistent training in
obedience for future imperial troops, and to discover potential fully-compliant low level officers.

The British Empire version looks slightly different in 1860: "Democracy Doubters"
includes those preserving unequal voting and the House of Lords, and "wealth schools"
represents the English "public school" (private) system.

What these diagrams share is the commitment to compliance and a matched citizenry which is easy to sell to and easy to derive labor from. What the resulting schools share is a failure to allow human accomplishment. It is important to note that even the very "best" American institutions of education could not hold Sergei Brinn or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg - people of ambition with all the gifts of American wealth. Even the most "radical" of American colleges could not hold Steve Jobs. But this is not new, Alexander Hamilton could not gain admission to The College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) and dropped out of Kings College (now Columbia University). Scott Fitzgerald could not handle more than half a day of primary school and dropped out of Princeton. Frank Lloyd Wright never graduated from either high school or university. The education systems we have inherited from that mid-19th Century have consistently, and intentionally, restricted who is allowed to succeed. We can easily build long lists of dropouts who have found great success - often because family wealth or connections allowed them alternative paths - but the biggest tragedy are the millions and millions dumped by these systems who found nothing but despair, mixed with the even greater number of millions who "succeeded" in these systems only to find the meaningless of mediocrity and powerlessness.

If American education has been successful at all, as Yong Zhaoargues, it is because teachers and building and local administrators have subverted the system, not because they have followed or embraced it.

"Dr. Zhao grew up in China and immigrated to the US in the 1990’s. From his perspective he sees that China seems to want an education that America seems eager to throw away. This is one that respects individual talents, supports divergent thinking, tolerates deviation, and encourages creativity. At the same time, the US government is pushing for the kind of education that China is moving away from. This is one that features standardization of curricula and an emphasis on preparing students for standardized tests. He wonders why Americans who hold individual rights in high regard would let the government dictate what children should learn, when they should learn it, and how they are evaluated."

Yong Zhao at ISTE 2012

It is the rule-shattering schools, from Summerhill in England to the 3Is and Parkway School of the 1970s, to low-compliance schools like SLA and Monticello High School today which have always produced the most interesting, most culturally competent, most innovative students. Those schools have/had a shared cultural commitment to freedom and democracy, to difference and synthesis. They are focused on educating all kinds of students with communal support, not focused on the neoliberal ideal of creating an all-the-same population based solely on individual resources.

"Neoliberalism is an ideology and set of policies that privilege market strategies over public institutions to redress social issues (Kumashiro, 2008). Such policies champion privatizing formerly public services, deregulating trade, and increasing efficiency while simultaneously reducing wages, deunionizing, and slashing public services (Martinez & Garcia, 2000; Tabb, 2001). Neoliberalism defends the rights of the individual and uses the ideology of individual choice to promote the idea of a meritocracy “that presumes an even playing field” (Kumashiro, p. 37). Unfortunately, within education, these policies work to challenge the legitimacy of public schooling by promoting vouchers, charters, and other quasi-private schools while privatizing services that were once the domain of public institutions, such as curriculum development and testing (Lipman, 2005). By focusing on the rights and responsibilities of individuals, neoliberal policies have resulted in increasing accountability systems that place blame and punishment on individual students and teachers rather than on the inequitable school systems that have inadequately served them. Rather than improving quality of education, this vicious circle creates school climates characterized by compliance, conformity, and fear." Bree Picower 2011

"Compliance, conformity, and fear," the toxic mix which is product of the "common core," of the directives of Michael Gove, of "educational reformers" from Wall Street to Sydney. This is "the place" where kids who sit still in chairs for three hour long exams are the norm. Where everyone finds the the same plot and the same theme in the same stories, even if the plot is irrelevant. Where every kid always raises their hand before speaking and happily stares straight at the eyes of every authority figure. Where every child dreams of growing up to be a blond, blue-eyed, straight, protestant, just like the dolls we sell them.

2006 film, "The Water is Wide" from Pat Conroy's first (originally self-published) book.

Somewhere out there we need more teachers, more administrators, more parents, and more citizens who, despite their own educations in compliance, will challenge this. Who will say that "we." like all successful human societies, need differences, need diversity of views, need creativity, need play, need imagination, need refusals to conform.

Somewhere out there we need more heroes. Educators, parents, citizens, humans, who will take the risks needed to create a better place for kids, rather than just 'going along' that path of least resistance.

Here, today, in the middle of the Twelve Days of Christmas, when we celebrate, yes, just one child of one god, is a good time to recall that building an earthly heaven requires risk and sacrifice, and not risk aversion and compliance.

- Ira Socol

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

Why do we read? Why do we write?

It has taken me some time to get words into pixels after a hurricane weekend at the School Library Journal Summit in Philadelphia.

At first I wanted to write about, "What are school libraries for? Who are school libraries for?" because that seemed to be an essential set of questions that appeared as Pam Moran and I presented our "unkeynote" - a challenge to the how, why, and what of the school library in this century. But then, sitting trapped in a hotel room, staring out a window at the magnificence of Philadelphia's Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, I watched some videos of students "reading and writing" in schools, and I found deeper questions.

Sometime after our unkeynote - a set of challenges to existing harmonies rather than a focus on one - and after Chris Lehmann's keynote the next morning, the SLJ Summit arrived at the business of the Common Core. And it was in that shift, from broad conversations on openness to mechanical conversations on closed processes, that the questions began emerging.

Why do we read? Why do we write? How do we bring reading to children? How do we encourage children to write?

Will we accept a true democracy of voices? Or do we continue to pursue the colonialism of conversion, the colonialism of standardization?

Umberto Eco, the brilliant European semiologist and novelist, says in the afterword to the English-language edition of his 2010 novel The Prague Cemetery that, well, first that he hopes that readers are not to derailed by his "fairly chaotic" non-linear narrative, and that second,he worries about readers - and in both cases this perhaps applies primarily to English and American readers - getting trapped by "the fatal imbalance between story and plot," or, he offers the Russian literary terms, "fabula and syuzhet," in Wikipedia's description, "The fabula is "the raw material of a story, and syuzhet, the way a story is organized."' If you read the linked New York Times review by novelist and professor Rebecca Newberger Goldstein you will find that fatal tension obvious. Goldstein reviews the plot, and in doing so, misses the entire story. Eco is not, of course, telling us the origins of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in The Prague Cemeteryanymore than he wrote a history of the 14th Century Church in The Name of the Rose, rather he is writing a highly contemporary tale of the methods of public opinion manipulation by governments and others, something incredibly relevant to all of us right now.

[I probably should have put a note similar to Eco's at the end - or at the beginning - of The Drool Room, but that I didn't perhaps explains why the book is more popular in Ireland than in the US...]

Goldstein, a very smart person, missed the story, but that's not surprising. She's an American educated academic, raised by "school as we know it," so to her, plot is what matters. We know this, it is the heart of how we read in school, of how we want kids to write in school, it lies at the heart of the Common Core, in all the standards in those documents, which are NOT flexible, because they form a rigid frame within which any reading must be jammed... That rigid frame which prevented Rebecca Newberger Goldstein from finding the story in Eco's writing.

What is the plot of Ulysses? or The English Patient? or Sophie's Choice? Sophie's Choice is one of the most powerful stories of the 20th Century, yet the plot? Well, it's - to be blunt - "how I first got laid." Ulysses? a walk through Dublin one day. The English Patient? You know the plot, in order to make a movie for Americans the story was stripped out of the book - leaving just the plot.

the stunningly rich tale of consent to imperialism in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient
becomes a simple love affair and cautionary tale about boundaries via Common Core arithmetic

"I grew up with traditions from my country, but later, more often, from your country.
Your fragile white island that with customs and manners and books and prefects and
reason somehow converted the rest of the world. You stood for precise behaviour. I
knew if I lifted a teacup with the wrong finger I’d be banished. If I tied the wrong kind
of knot in a tie I was out. Was it just ships that gave you such power? Was it, as my
brother said, because you had the histories and printing presses?

"Your fragile white island that with customs and manners and books and prefects and reason somehow converted the rest of the world.," says Kipp in The English Patient, as he damns the Common Core idea along with 'the way we teach.' "What do you think will happen next?" we ask our students, focusing on the Anglo-American plot rather than the rhythms, emotions, sensations, evoked memories which drive writing in so many cultures. Can you produce an "accurate and concise summary statement"? one of the teaching videos I watched asked. Really? Who wants the damn summary? What is that for? Why must you imagine what happens next in order to experience a story? What is wrong with the moment? What is wrong with taking something complex in, and not simplifying it?

"You write like a European," I was told early in my doctoral studies, and though i said, "Thank you," in response that was meant as a criticism to be corrected. "They" meant that I do not write in a simple linear form, they meant that I do not adhere to North American philosophies. They meant that my sentences were often crafted with rhythms, not just words. And they meant that all of that is wrong.

We are not usually so obvious in our stated biases, but every day in schools I see students punished for their voices, punished for their culturally ingrained reading styles, punished for refusing to over-simplify, because we teach reading and writing in the same way the English like to teach tea drinking.

So, school librarians, and teachers of the English language, here is a recent story of mine... Can we find an "accurate and concise summary statement"? What do you think will happen next? What is the plot?

Naked

In the summer when I turned thirteen I swam across Long Island Sound to the lighthouse on Execution Rocks.

At thirteen there are nights when you cannot sleep. Not because of actual reasons for terror in the house, nor because of worries or pressures. And really not even because the hot, humid Gulf Stream air swamping New York is too still and sweat coats your skin. But because there are so many things to hope for, so many wishes, that your brain cannot file them all away fast enough to let the silence come. This was the morning after one of those nights, and perhaps, not just for me.

Ten of us, maybe eleven - it is hard to count or even know all the faces now - mostly boys but not all, mostly members of the YMCA's Swim Team but not all, stood in the long gazebo at Hudson Park which overlooked the beach and the Sound. Late July, and the early morning light mixed with the incoming salt of the rising tide, and the seaweed and fish and the plants of the marshes. The flag in the park hung limp, only showing flutters of life around its edges.

It began with a dare, because that is the way stories of thirteen-year-old boys usually begin. Someone suggested we swim across Echo Bay, the small enclosure of the Sound which held the city's municipal marina and rowing club, and which, 280 years before, had seen Huguenot refugees of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre arrive to form a new home in a new land. But Echo Bay seemed both too easy - maybe somewhere between a quarter and a half mile - and too dangerous - the other side housed the rich, we'd be arriving on some rich person's lawn - and too familiar - we swam every day at the Hudson Park beaches here.

"We should swim out to Execution Rocks," I then might have said. The kind of crazy statement I could make at times like this. Execution Rocks, which had held a lighthouse since the early days of the American Republic, was the farthest outcropping of the City of New Rochelle, lying more than two miles across the Sound, much closer to the Long Island shore than to any point on this side, and marking the shipping channel through our rock-infested choke point where the Sound became the East River.

Decades later, I would stand in a gourmet food store before a shelf of various sea salts and wonder if I could season my foods with memories. Could I use the salt from this particular branch of the Atlantic Ocean? Or from the surf off Coney Island? From Lough Foyle or the Forty-Foot in Ireland? From Cape Disappointment where the Columbia finds the Pacific? What dreams might those meals awaken?

A thousand yards out, that's 40 lengths of the 25 yard pool we swam in under the Y gym, where the low ceiling held the chlorine captive so you could not smell the difference between air and water, my arms felt fine but my legs were beginning to drag behind me, and I let myself pause, coming upright in the pond-flat green water, my legs in a slow bicycle pump that stretched the muscles in different ways. I was still in coastal waters, tiny Huckleberry Island, legend told us of an old "Shore Club" and a great fire but who really knew?, still lay over a thousand feet away. But here, I breathed as deeply as I could now and saw the world from that exact point we call "sea level," was a wondrously safe spot. I could still see and hear my friends on shore, they were waving, and I waved back - slowly to indicate that I was fine, not frantically as in a call for help - and thought of not returning. And then I turned and began swimming toward the little island's rocky point.

They had said the swim to the lighthouse was "fucking insane," and "really stupid," and when I had argued that neither of those things were true they had dared me to try it. So we'd gotten on our bikes and ridden down the hill out of Hudson Park, turned left onto Hudson Park Road, then left again to climb the little hill at the start of Davenport Avenue - we could have ridden the flat route along Pelham Road and Church Street but it was not going to be that sort of day - and curved around the long reach of Davenport Neck until we tore down the vast grassy hill of Davenport Park and came to the giant tumbled rocks at the water. I'd swim it, but I wasn't going to start an extra half-mile away. We all knew this was not just the closest spot, but that it also had an island sort of halfway, a safety factor of importance.

Here, further out in the Sound, a slight breeze cooled us, but couldn't ripple the water. And the tide was reaching its top now, creating the calmest waters. I pushed my Keds off, pulled my socks off, and dropped my jeans, leaving just the purple Y Speedos most of us wore under our pants that summer. My shirt had been off and tied around the bike's seat post since I'd gotten on it that morning. "Scream if you're drowning," Billy said. "Yeah," I said, and walked to the one spot on the rocks we knew was safe for diving at this moment, and jumped in. "You're buying me pizza when I get back," I yelled after coming up to the surface. "Don't race," Peter said, kind of softly, "just go slow." I turned and headed south.

Three weeks or so later there was a meet at Saxon Woods, a huge county pool up near White Plains, with 50 meter lengths and teams from Ys and recreation programs from all over and the heavy smell of Coppertone and girls, lots of girls, even girls we knew. That day too was way too hot, and between heats the sun would weigh on our skin, pushing against us, driving us into the narrow strip of shade along the bathhouse. The girls, we understood, were there to see us, not to see us swim. They stared at our groins the way we stared at their rapidly growing tits, with not quite fully defined fascination. We then became completely aware of our own bodies, in ways that those of us who choose to hide in the water could not yet deal with. In September of that year, sitting in Cindy's bedroom on a Saturday afternoon, she put her hand on my thigh and asked, "What does it take to get you, you know, umm, excited?"

As she found out, I remembered her looking at me that day at Saxon Woods. How had she gotten there? What, exactly, had she been looking for?

When I pushed off the Huckleberry Island rocks I felt good, if vaguely thirsty. From here, a bit more than a mile maybe, maybe more, I guessed it would depend how far the current pulled me off course - a hundred little corrections adds up in distance, and the target now was a tiny spot in the water, still, at this moment in time, occupied by a lighthouse keeper, and home to deep-voiced steam foghorn which sang me to sleep on the stormy nights of autumn. And here, beyond that coastal zone, the water rose and fell, forcing a change in stroke to make breathing a conscious decision every time, and the smells of land vanished, and the water temperature dropped, and the world narrowed to just me and this sea, both my closest friend and my mortal enemy.

I pulled myself up onto the rocks in full, but not panicked, exhaustion, and lay gasping for air and feeling like my shoulders could not rotate one more time. I closed my eyes and felt the sun, and the warm stone, and listened to the waves splash against those rocks. Those rocks, that was our Halloween story. It was called "Execution Rocks" our story went, because the British had chained prisoners to these rocks during the Revolution and then waited for the tide to rise. When I looked again, I was staring up at both the lighthouse and a man in a blue uniform, who held a large green thermos out to me. "Did you just fuckin' swim here?" there was no wait for an answer, "drink this you crazy moron."

He gave me a salami sandwich on dark brown bread and lots of water as we sat on folding chairs in the shade of the island's house. He asked about my swimming, where I went to school, what I knew about the currents here. He never asked my name, or where I lived, or why I had just swum two miles to his spot on the map. I refused the boat ride back, though there was no doubt that he would shadow me in his launch back toward Huckleberry. For reasons I could not name this seemed to be alright with me.

I climbed back out of the water at Davenport Park three or three and a half hours after leaving. Maybe it was four hours or more. Time is not a specific thing here. I pulled myself up the rocks to a lot of whoops and stuff from now impressed friends. And they wrapped their towels around me, and I looked out, and saw the lighthouse keeper in his boat, just beyond Huckleberry. He waved. I hope I waved back, and then I stumbled to the grass. And then I think I slept.

(c) 2012 by Ira David Socol

I asked the questions above this story for reasons both personal and professional. You see, first, though I felt that I really needed to write this story, I do not know why that was so. This is a story - in my mind it is one fully coherent tale - but I know neither plot nor theme. And second, I read and write stories 'like this' all the time. Not just "fiction" either, for I have found that "reality" - whatever that may be - often looks a lot more like this than the writing in any high school history book.

And so I wonder, (a) where does my communication fit into your school? your Common Core? your library? your classroom? and (b) where does that democracy of voice fit in? How do we embrace that and not squash it?

The First Supper by Jane Evershed

The world is a place of constant reinvention. If we all follow the rules, the paths, nothing changes. There is a reason the books of the colonials so often fill the Booker Prize shortlists, there is a reason Irish fiction and poetry are prized so much more highly than that of the English or Americans.The rules have never fully taken root away from "the Queen's English," and the paths begin in very different places, and it is the uncommon, not the common, which has extraordinary value.

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

"I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience." - Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

- Ira Socol

One Ethos, Open Culture, Many Paths, Many Tools

"Ethos is a Greek word meaning "character" that is used to describe the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize a community, nation, or ideology."

A Twitter conversation led me to this place. What does a place of learning need to welcome all, to offer all the kinds of paths to the future which our children need?

I settled on a set of four thoughts: One Ethos, Open Culture, Many Paths, Many Tools.

If that is the belief system, I think that the rest - the pedagogies, the spaces, the schedules, the ways we treat each other, and the kind of deep, inspired learning humans deserve - will follow.

One Ethos

High School Math Teacher (1996): "That damn kid, he's rather go to Saturday School than come to my class."
High School Librarian (replying): "Well, you'll have to think about that!"

Why would a student come to your school, if she/he were not forced to? This is a question you must ask every day, as every teacher ought to ask, Why would a student come to my class...?

What does your school, as a whole and in every space inside, offer children? Safety from unsafe families or communities? Food which otherwise be in short supply? A chance to hang out with their friends? Do they come for just one teacher, or only because of music or sport? Is that good enough for you?

These kids of questions are rarely asked in American education, though we fill millions of square feet of wall space with "mission statements" and "learning goals." We just don't ask, "What is this school for?" In fact, we avoid that question so deeply that last January the US President got up in front of the nation and actually suggested that the solution to high school dropouts was to make dropping out illegal. Talk about giving up...

So why? What do you - as an entire school - offer every student that would make them come if compulsory attendance laws and the parental need for babysitting disappeared? Would they come because they understand that your school is a safe and happy place in which they are offered a world to learn in a somewhat less-risky-than-real-life situation? Would they come because they are excited about what they invest in when they walk through your doors? Would they come because they find the push to discovery, learning, and growth to be inspirational instead of coercive? Would they come because you offer a great collection of paths to an independent future? Would they come because you offer a laboratory for democracy and life - that you are - all together - creating a future better than the present?

I cannot tell you why... but you must find this answer, and that answer is the ethos your school must embrace - universally.

Open Culture

I'm not against the"Common Core" because I'm a crazed postmodernist. There are other things I'm against because of that. And I'm not against the "Common Core" because I doubt the need for us to share some commonalities of knowledge.

I'm against the "Common Core" because it is neither "common" in my experience nor is it generally at the "core" of what people need. Instead it is part of a long history of education as Pygmalion - to use George Bernard Shaw's lovely mythological metaphor.

"None of this is new. "Established in 1914, the Ford English School taught the company’s immigrant workers more than just how to speak English. It taught them about American culture and history and instilled the importance of such virtues as thriftiness, cleanliness, good manners, and timeliness." There has always been a tension in the United States between the expressed ideal of a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society - you know, that brilliant combination of ethnicities in any World War II film - and the reality on the political ground, which is that "our leadership" would find things "much easier" if we were all "white, protestant, straight, northern Europeans,"' I wrote more than a year ago, while pointing out that even that belief is a lie, a cover for something else, that is, if school is about being a "white, protestant, straight, northern European," it guarantees that those now in power will watch their children begin school with an insurmountable lead on everyone else, thus assuring social reproduction.

People think the "Common Core" is inclusive because teachers can choose books, but in this, they miss the point. The "Common Core" is "white protestantism" because of the values it suggests while pushing all children to meet Middle Class Age "Appropriate" Learning Targets - or in their carefully crafted words - "provide teachers and parents with a common understanding of what students are expected to learn. Consistent standards will provide appropriate benchmarks for all students, regardless of where they live."

What if it doesn't really make a f---ing bit of difference to my kid's, or my community's, life, if my 7-year-old doesn't... "by the end of year, read and comprehend informational texts, including history/social studies, science, and technical texts, in the grades 2–3 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range"?

Pygmalion, why are you superior? 

Could my 7-year-old spend that year investigating physics with balls and paper airplanes and by building bridges instead? Or learn to speak the languages which might surround her in our community? Or learn measurement concepts by learning to cook? Or might he just want to listen to, and tell, stories? Or, as was the case of my kid at that age, was he far more interested in adult reading and music than in the "grades 2-3 text complexity band"?

In Finland, much of Scandinavia, kids don't even begin school until they're 7-years-old, and since the "Common Core" claims to be built on "best practices," and Finland tops those international comparisons, maybe the alphabet is the best cultural target. In Ireland I watched 7-years-olds from all over participating in classrooms with kids up to age 12, with all that subject matter, but mostly... participating by listening and talking.

A culturally diverse school is not about flags in the hallway or "welcome" written in a bunch of languages, its about being a learning space where kids get to negotiate how their culture meets the others around them. Where, say to begin, holidays are shared on equal terms, without pressure to either "opt in" or "opt out." Where time is respectful of cultural differences, whether it is Ramadan and Yom Kippur or "on-timeness" or "appropriate speed." Where communication is accepted and developed because it is authentic, not because it meets E.D. Hirsch's cultural expectations, and as it is developed, we all learn to communicate more widely, and we learn far more about communication choices.

A culturally diverse - a culturally "open" - school also refuses to grade by compliance to Anglo norms. It is not a question of why read For Whom the Bell Tollsinstead of The English Patient, but rather, the violence you will do to The English Patientif you try to analyze it and write essays about it "the common core way"?

Many Paths

Where is the student now? Where does the student want and need to go? What are the possible ways to get from point A to the much more nebulous point B?

There is really never one way to learn anything, to read anything, to write anything, to calculate anything. There are always choices, and there must be choices - unless we plan to never improve as a species. "Why is fastest better?" I once heard James Gee ask. "Why is the shorter proof better in Geometry? Why is it better to finish an assignment faster?"

Or why is a five paragraph essay better than a one paragraph argument? Or a ten page rant? If this were true Tom Clancy would be a better writer than James Joyce or Virginia Woolf or Colm Toibin, and (let me just assert this truth), he is not.

If all the rules were true, this wouldn't be great literature

Or, why should addition come before calculus? Or biology before physics? Or why is music composition less important than reading about Abraham Lincoln? Or why can't soccer practice count as math class? Is it about "rules," or is it because educators are not imaginative enough to help students pursue the world their own way?

It is way past time to stop imposing single solutions on our learners, Neil Postman and Charley Weingartnerrecognized the choices created by (then) new media in 1968 required teaching practice to radically change. You are now over 40 years late.

And that lateness has been horribly destructive. I am sorry to have to tell you this, but the majority of students leaving American schools at the end of 12th Grade (or before), will describe most of their education to that point as an irrelevant waste of time. That's because it is not "their education" at all, but something imposed on them by people who appear to have nothing in common with them.

Many Tools

"Most of us lack all kinds of powers. I can't lift my car by the bumper in order to change a tire. That's what jacks are for. I can't add long columns of figures in my head. That's what calculators are for. Tools give us the ability to make up for what we lack in native powers." John Perry in the Wall Street Journal.

I believe in Toolbelt Theory, which begins with the concept that we humans are, perhaps above all, toolmakers and tool users, and that thus, in the education of our children, the most important thing we can help them learn is how to be very good at both. "After all," I tell people, "without tools humans are a very long way from the top of the food chain."

It is human to make, choose, use tools

Schools need to stop limiting tool use and equating tool use with "cheating." The tools of today are incredibly powerful, incredibly diverse, and create never-before-seen opportunities for so many students failed, consistently, by our one-size-fits-all education system, that we must embrace these tools, and help students learn to get the most out of the technologies which sit - or will sit - in their pockets. We can't do that by limiting, filtering, and blocking.

Right now, right from the first day of school, every student can read from paper, from a computer screen, from a tablet screen, from a mobile phone screen, or listen to their computer, tablet, or phone read to them, or some combination of those things. Right now, right from the first day of school, every student can write with a pen, a pencil, a stylus, their finger, a big keyboard, a little keyboard, a touch screen, or just by speaking. Right now, right from the first day of school, every student can communicate through text or speech, audio or video, music or art, with much of the world. Right now, right from the first day of school, every student can pull in information from anywhere on the globe, at any time - and truly - that is a skill you must help them learn to do well. And we can't do that unless the tools are present every day, all the time, so that we can all learn what works for each of us.

One Ethos, Open Culture, Many Paths, Many Tools. Because if education matters, it matters enough to do the right things for our kids.

- Ira Socol