Bloomsday and the value of alternative paths

Is it the greatest novel written in English? That's open to debate, of course, but there is no doubt that James Joyce's Ulysses is an essential book. It's deep exploration of narrative forms alone makes it crucial to the study of literature. It's invention on top of ancient narrative makes it vital reading for writers. And rarely has a piece of literature been so wholly 'of a place' as Ulysses is 'of Dublin.'

But Ulysses is a very difficult read. "YES BECAUSE HE NEVER DID A THING LIKE THAT BEFORE AS ASK TO get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathing-suits and lownecks of course nobody wanted her to wear I suppose she was pious because no man would look at her twice I hope I'll never be like her a wonder she didnt want us to cover our faces but she was a welleducated woman certainly and her gabby talk about Mr Riordan here and Mr Riordan there I suppose he was glad to get shut of her and her dog smelling my fur and always edging to get up under my petticoats especially then still I like that in him polite to old women like that and waiters and beggars too hes not proud out of nothing but not always if ever he got anything really serious the matter with him its much better for them go into a hospital where everything is clean but I suppose Id have to bring it into him for a month yes"

from the tower, where "STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air."

Ulysses challenges "great readers," adult readers, the way the texts you hand out in school challenge struggling readers.

Today is Bloomsday - the 16th of June, and Bloomsday is when the literary world and the Irish celebrate this book. The novel is set in Dublin on the 16th of June, 1904. The novel follows the wanderings of Leopold Bloom and his friend Stephen Dedalus on that day, in a modern recreation of Ulysses' journey in Homer's Odyssey.

Now, on Twitter, CESNational asks "am curious: why should we read Ulysses?" And I can say, it is an essential part of our literary canon. It is a basic guide to narrative techniques in the English language. It teaches - quite effectively - the differences between the oral and written traditions. Few books have ever mastered the art of recreating a text so well. It will liberate you from the confines school writing courses often encourage.

Plus, it, perhaps combined with Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy, will explain how modern writing broke away from artificial writing norms and embraced a new paradigm for working with human communication. Joyce begets Dos Passos. Dos Passos and Joyce beget Kerouacet al, Kerouac, et al, beget the kinds of fiction and narrative we find online today. Those who bitch about the loss of what they perceive as language skills - if they were well read - would know that blaming technology is ridiculous - Joyce started it.

But, as I said, it is very difficult to read. So, what do you do to access this difficult text? You do what you should have your students do. You should find the right path.

The first three times I read Ulysses I listened to a remarkable reading of it on cassette. I think there were 48 or 60 cassettes. Oh, but it was beautiful. The next few times I have listened to it on CD, via LibriVox download, or, for more detailed study and interaction, via Text-To-Speech, either a WYNN version I've created, or a Microsoft Reader version, to using Click-Speak with on-line text versions.

I've supported that through period recordings, through online tours, through online criticism.

In other words, I have found my supported text which has enabled me to read and work through one of the 20th Century's essential books, even though I could never read it on paper. And you can too, and so can your students.

Joyce is the perfect author to use to describe why digital text is superior for most learners, for even most teachers have trouble accessing the ink-on-paper version. And so, even if you doubt it's ranking among English-language novels, if you are in education, please give it a try, if only because you might engage a bit of empathy with your students, and you might discover the true value of the flexible text delivery which technology offers.

"O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Happy Bloomsday to one and all... - Ira Socol

Evaluate that!

My son went to a great high school. Among the things they did was combine grades with long narrative evaluations. This allowed me to see the great conundrum of educational evaluation in a unique way.

For at the end of his 9th grade year his Latin Class evaluation read (in part) this way: "[He] was the best student in the class, he completed both Latin I and Latin II this year. He will need to take future courses at [a nearby] college in order to continue his advancement. Grade C-"

"What grade," I asked the teacher, "did the second best student get?"

I was told that my son got a bad grade because he did not do his homework. "Apparently," I said, "he didn't have to." But, you see, this teacher had a rubric. Homework was 25% of the grade, and apparently there was no block in the rubric for doing two years of work in one.

I didn't really fight. I didn't care. The next year he was sitting among college students reading Ovid. That's what matters.

Except, that is not what matters.

"Can I write "Dear parent, your son has greatly improved on things not considered important by the school [reporting] system"?" Tomaz Lasic asked on Twitter today. Mr. Lasic is a teacher in Western Australia dealing with "troubled" children, and a brilliant observer of the system. He followed up: "in my 'low achievers' class. Where's "halted [self]abuse", "began to smile" box to tick?" And: "Every time a particular kid (totally socially inept past) walks in our office and says please, or gives a hi-5, we say: "Evaluate that!"
What is our national standard (whatever nation you are in) for getting a child to smile? For getting a child to publicly ask a question? For getting a child to confidently present an idea? For getting a child to be willing to ask for help? Or to ask to play with another child?

What is the national statistical trend line for feeling safe in school? For picking up that first book of interest? For solving an interpersonal problem for the first time? For absorbing an unfair call in athletics without going off?

There are so many things we hope children get from their education, but when we discuss "data driven decision making," or "accountability," or "standards," or "merit pay" for teachers we become complete reductionists, assessing (very badly) a tiny fragment of all that expected learning. And in doing this we tell children they are worthless, and we assure that success in school is a matter of socio-economics and playing the "those-in-power" game, and nothing else.

See, it does not matter if a child is rushing ahead or struggling to keep up. We do the same thing to anyone who doesn't measure up to our fictional "average." We crush them, demean them, and sneer at their accomplishments. And in doing so, we prove our worthlessness and lack of credibility to virtually all students.

So when people talk about measurement in education, I always get angry, because I know that neither Arne Duncan nor Michelle Rhee would give a dime of merit pay to Mr. Lasic for helping that kid learn to smile, nor even to that Latin teacher for letting my son rush ahead. And I know that schools which must spend years making their children simply feel safe will always be rated below those in wealthy suburbs. Because you can not discuss "standards" or "evaluation" or even "accountability" until you adopt some kind of legitimate sense of what counts in the education of each individual child. And we are nowhere close to even having that conversation.

Perhaps, as usual, The Simpsons says it most coherently...

"These tests will have no effect on your grades. They merely determine your future social status and financial success. " Edna Krabapple tells Bart Simpson's class in a legendary Simpsons episode in which the essential indifference to 'direction from average' in schools is demonstrated. "Do you often find yourself bored?" the school psychologist asks, "All the time" replies Bart.

- Ira Socol

The Reading List

What if everyone in a literature class didn't read the same book? What would happen if, say, during Great Gatsby month, a third of the class read that, a third read Dos Passo's 1919, and a third read Sinclair Lewis's Dodsworth?

What might the class discover? What kinds of discussions would develop?

It's not that I have anything against The Great Gatsby. In fact, I think it might be the best written American novel ever. And there is surely no clearer refutation of the myth of 'The American Dream' ever put on paper.

And this isn't just about fixing terrible teaching. Sure, I read in shocked horror as supposedly "top" high school students misread the novel so badly that a whole New York Times article could be devoted to their complete missing of Fitzgerald's point, '"My green light?” said Jinzhao, who has been studying “Gatsby” in her sophomore English class at the Boston Latin School. “My green light is Harvard.”' (say goodbye to Harvard, Jinzhao). Bad teaching is bad teaching no matter what you read.

But it is about suggesting an alternative to our basic pedagogy. It is about creating student choice. It is about empowering peer teaching. And it is about exposing students to far more literature.

Two of the basic components of Universal Design are student choice, and the empowering a wide range of expertise among students, so that a classroom becomes a community of learners rather than one leader and a roomful of passive receptors.

We can start doing this by allowing alternate learning tools - this students reads the book on paper, that student listens to the audiobook, this other student uses text-to-speech. We can continue by allowing one student to sit in a chair, another to sit on the floor, and a third to stand. And we can even allow one to express their knowledge through writing, another through creating a painting, a third to create a video. And all those things are good, but I do not think we are quite there yet.

Getting there requires distributed knowledge and community cognition. And distributed knowledge and community cognition means we offer truly different paths to the knowledge we hope to share.

So when we teach Gatsby, what are we teaching? We should be teaching language, yes, and the structuring of thought and image. We should also be teaching the role of literature, how fiction shapes what we know. And we should be teaching a social history - what did Fitzgerald capture in Gatsby? What did he challenge? Why did he challenge those things? or my favorite... Would an American high school English teacher have assigned Gatsby to his/her class in 1928? Why or why not?

If we mix a room of students reading the other two books, how might these lessons change? The three writers are all inventive - all rule breakers - but they all break the rules in radically different ways. They are all angry, but they are angry in different ways. They all doubt the basic myths of America, but they attack them in different ways.

Imagine the conversation as students compare the end of Gatsby to the "Body of an American" end of 1919? Where does the Gatsby character come from? Surely not just Princetonian frustration.

Given all these options, I would imagine that students might compare, debate, challenge, doubt, and, in every way be less prone to seeking the "right for school" answer. They might even want to read one of the books they hadn't read - maybe outside of school.

This isn't just an idea for lit classes. Spreading out the research, spreading out the work, letting peers teach peers, seems a way to expand both the knowledge base in the classroom, but also the number of experts in the room, and I think that's always a good idea. The best classes I have been in are those where students carried in significant, relevant outside knowledge, and the "not completely common curriculum" approach might just help you get to that in every class.

Just a thought as you start your summer, and start dreaming about what your classroom will look like next year.

- Ira Socol

Great Schools: 3. Profession without Competition

I'm going to discuss two schools here, post-secondary schools. Intense, professional training schools. Radically different schools.

These two schools both had incredibly high standards, both had very demanding professions, both needed to train an amazingly level of personal responsibility because doing either profession irresponsibly created a real risk to the lives of others.

Both also had no interest in fostering traditional academic competition among students.

The New York City Police Academy and the Pratt Institute School of Architecture might seem like odd institutions to link together, but since I attended both, I can, and will...

They did things very differently. At the Police Academy we all wore uniforms. At Pratt we wore anything and on occasion nothing. At the Police Academy punctuality was a big issue. At Pratt, ummm, not really. At the Police Academy we called instructors "Sir." At Pratt we called them whatever we wanted to. At the Police Academy we had a rigid exam schedule. At Pratt, the one time I remember an exam being given, a friend of mine locked the prof out of the room and we did it together. And, counterintuitively, at the Police Academy we went to school is a beautiful Manhattan neighborhood, on a block shared with the School of Visual Arts. At Pratt we lived in a despairing neighborhood that would later be immortalized by Spike Lee in his film, Do The Right Thing.

Perhaps most dramatically, at the Police Academy we were constantly aware of our grades, while at Pratt's School of Architecture we had none. Yet, I will argue here, that both had excellent assessment systems.

But that's just part of the story. Both excelled by being radically different than most US post-secondary institutions. Both really worked to bring out the best in diverse people. Both utilized surprising faculties, which were highly effective. Both combined comraderie and very high expectations, in a way which created communities of learners.

What Worked (Police Academy)

The New York City Police Academy is an unusual program in this field. It is worth a ton of SUNY credits, all earned in six months, including three hours of law, five days a week, for those six months, half of it Constitutional Law (yes, I know it does not seem like that from, say, actions during the Republican National Convention in 2004, or during Critical Mass bike rides, but NYPD cops have every reason to be a lot closer than most to being 'constitutional scholars'). There is a lot of psychology and sociology, and diversity training, in addition to what you'd expect - procedures, physical fitness, weapons training, self-defense, etc.

That's a wildly demanding academic program for a very diverse group of students, and yet, almost every incoming cadet graduates. It is a stunningly successful operation.

Why? First, think, "whatever help you needed" was always there. I needed books on tape, and they instantly provided me cassettes which, dumped into an early generation Walkman, read me to the Academy on the subway every morning and back every night, read me through lunches, and read me to sleep every night. If you needed tutoring, you got it, from peers or faculty, you just had to ask. I know I ran remedial swimming sessions and second, third, and fourth chance CPR certification testing - the stuff I was good at. If you failed something the first time, you got a chance - or two - to do it over. Most people there had never studied law before, or used a gun, some had really never driven before. Which is second, they seemed to understand that we might not all learn all of this at the same rate.

Third, no one seemed 'ahead at the start.' One of my good friends at the Academy had a father who was the Chief of Bronx Detectives. This meant nothing in terms of how he was treated. Others came with significant knowledge, they might have worked for the department in 'civilian' capacities. That made no difference either. It was not just the sameness of the uniforms, it was a sense that we all had a way to go.

But fourth, and maybe most importantly, it was a community of learners. I did extremely well there - I finished second in my class (why didn't I finish first? funny story) - but that was never a focus of anything. The guy who barely passed the exams had no less status. He was a really good friend too. Our goal, company by company of cadets, was to make sure everyone succeeded. Competition did not exist.

None of this is to imply that standards were ever lowered. They weren't. But different things had different standards. You could pass most exams with a 75% mark. Except for one, on the use of deadly physical force. Passing for that was 100%, as it damn well should be.

What Worked (Pratt)

"How can you have an engineering course without grades?" an anxious parent asked at a School of Architecture information night. He was addressing the question to Y.S. Lee, who taught the steel structures and concrete structures courses, and not an engineer to mess with - among his works, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and Madison Square Garden in New York. "It is simple," Lee responded. "No one leaves my class knowing 95% of what makes a building stand up."

There were no grades in design studios either, how, exactly, do you grade a design?

Yes, Pratt's Architecture School now has grades, but it didn't then. Everything was pass/fail and that worked, one way or another, for all courses.

There was also a lovely flexibility. On the first day of a landscape design course I decided that I could not handle the mix of students, professor, and room. And I never came back. But I had the syllabus, and I worked with the course information, and I did the final project. I did it big, and left it in the professor's mailbox. My evaluation said, "I have no idea who this student is as he never came to class, but he did hand in a magnificent design as his final project which clearly indicates that he has mastered the content of this course. Pass." Thank you.

And in a Concrete Materials course, fed up with books, we, as a class, decided instead to build a pre-cast concrete structure. We designed panels which could be used vertically (for walls) or horizontally (floors/roofs), designed connector systems, created forms in a basement storeroom, where we tried and rejected a number of reinforcing schemes before settling on one which provided sufficient strength. We scaled the 8'x24' panel design down to 1/3 size, and went to work, casting about 48 of these things. Then we carried the panels out to a sunny campus lawn, and assembled a gigantic structure. Believe me - I know concrete. And as I watch a classmate spec a massive concrete building in New York, I know he does as well.

And in design studios we went wherever we wanted. I tended to craft either Prairie designs based on the work of Marion Mahony or Beaux Arts work, which I illustrated with vast drawings in which the building was inevitably presented against a storm sky. People admired the contextualist approach and the craftsmanship even if they knew I was making myself unemployable. Others were modernists, still others post-modernist followers of architects like Robert Venturi. Didn't matter. We all sat and drew and argued together, and pulled inspiration from each others work.

The other component was that almost all "instruction" was via projects. You worked on buildings which taught you skills. You didn't learn skills, and then work on buildings.

In Common

In professional training the relevance is easy. And these schools kept learners engaged through relevant experiences. But, the key things, the comraderie, that creation of the learning community, was every bit as strong at Pratt as it was at the NYCPA. And that is what ultimately brings these stories together. Both gave students what they needed. Both treated students equitably, not equally, and both developed intelligent assessment structures designed to support, rather than rank.

- Ira Socol

Some of the colleges I think are America's best...
St. John's (Annapolis and Santa Fe)
Evergreen State College
Bard College at Simon's Rock
Landmark College
College of the Atlantic
Prescott College
University of California Santa Cruz
Empire State College
Hampshire College

Finding the Learning Network

For a few years at the start of my doctoral level education I attempted to engage the widest range of conversations with the widest range of people in my College of Education.

On both my course websites, and on college-wide lists - Education Grad Students, and International Education Students - I posted links (or full copies) to (of) interesting articles I had found. I asked provocative questions. Eventually I began making outrageous statements, all in a series of increasingly desperate attempts to get the conversations to expand beyond the narrow limits of our classrooms.

It did not work at all. Oh sure, people would whisper to me in the hallways or men's rooms that they loved what I posted. A few times conversations began, but were quickly silenced when some wondered if we "should be talking about this." Most often I was admonished for (a) being controversial, (b) wasting people's in-box space, and (c) using a list designed for announcements in the "wrong" way.

I haven't posted to either college-wide list in more than year. In the few remaining courses I have taken, I am much more reluctant to bother to begin online discussions. My personal learning network has shifted.

Harnessing the Power of Social Networks in Teaching & Learning

View more Microsoft Word documents from Alec Couros.

Social Networking in Education from Dr. Alec Couros

Now that network stretches from Israel to Ireland, from Australia to Saskatchewan, from The Bronx to British Columbia, from Virginia to Scotland. It does indeed include many grad students and education professors, but they are no longer principally (or even significantly) at the university I attend. These vaunted "face-to-face" relationships failed me, and the world stepped in to solve my problem.

Now I debate my big questions, collect my reading lists, struggle with research issues, with a world of people similarly interested and similarly passionate. They might disagree with me 90% of the time, they often call me on my language or extreme conclusions, they may be in education or another field entirely, but they are engaging with me, and my intellectual development.

This network leads me to fabulous online conference presentations, to books I need to read, to research I must evaluate, to opinions and actualities that I have to struggle with. they challenge, inform, inspire, doubt, demand, ask, and answer.

Twitter and blogging, UStream and SlideShare, Elluminate and Skype, Google Docs, and Diigo, have opened my education, allowed it to stretch much further than even the very best doctoral program possibly could.

Consider that when you wonder if you should bring social networking into your classroom.

- Ira Socol

Summer Reading

Summer book lists are always interesting. I could recommend books in many different interest areas, but for this blog, I'll make them "education important" titles:

Fiction

Peter Høeg's incredible novel of inclusion gone wrong Borderliners is equally fascinating and terrifying. It is also a must read for every teacher who works with students, "on the borderline."

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon's novel of Asperger's and aspiration is the kind of stunning view of a difference I think only fiction can offer.

I'm "probably" biased, but I think The Drool Roomhas a lot to say about special needs education, dyslexia, and attention issues. Plus, it's a pretty easy read.

Education

Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Cultureis a truly essential book, which won me over in the introduction when the author talks about, "Somewhat counterintuitively, I enrolled in graduate school i education. I was trying to crack - at least in my own mind - the genetic code of the institution, one that seemed so stubbornly, intractably resistant to change..."

Surely the recent book most quoted (the title) without being read, James Gee's brilliant What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacyexplores how games teach vs how schools teach, and why one method engages why the other typical chases students away. (You could also read my blog on this, but Gee has much more to say)

More than a debate about a single technology, David Crystal's Txtng: The Gr8 Db8is a fascinating look at technology, communications, politics, and generational battles. Plus, he explores the structure of texting linguistically, in English and other languages.

John Willinsky's Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire's Endis that kind of essential look at the purposes of education in a capitalist/imperialist world.

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorderby David Weinberger is one of the best descriptions of how learning is changing.

And Clay Shirky will tell you why those changes are so important in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

Theories

Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (October Books)might make you re-think many things: how you see, your understanding of history, among them. Not an easy read, but well worth it.

Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disabilityseems like important stuff to me. Great essays on difference and what that means.

Challenging everything about education, Teaching As a Subversive Activityby Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner remains the crucial manifesto about changing schools, 40 years later.

Free

Finally, free downloads:

Norbert Pachler and the University of London assembled this fabulous look at Mobile Learning: Towards a Research Agenda. A must read for educators.

And from FutureLab

Transforming Schools for the Future

Designing for Social Justice: People, Technology, Learning

Perspectives on Early Years and Digital Technologies

Social Software and Learning

- Ira Socol

Great Schools: 2. Environment and Choice

The little Lincoln Park neighborhood of Michigan's City of Norton Shores is known for two amazing things - Marcel Breuer's brilliant Saint Francis de Sales church, and Lincoln Park Elementary School.

Now, I have not checked in on Lincoln Park in a few years, but I want to describe the school I knew.

The school serves a strange neighborhood. Million dollar Lake Michigan homes, small postwar tract homes, and a couple of the poorest trailer park communities I have seen. It is located just south of Muskegon, Michigan, a community whose economy has never recovered from the collapse of the auto industry in 1973. (The county once had two of the three largest auto parts foundries in the world, and built tanks until Vietnam ended.) It is just one public school in a district which spans urban, suburban, and rural communities. The students are racially and ethnically diverse. There is even a Catholic elementary, a very good Catholic elementary, about five blocks away, competing for students.

But Lincoln Park Elementary was (I'll use past tense for academic certainty, but I'm guessing things haven't changed much) a great school. It is great for the students, and it tends to score as well as any primary school in the state on standardized tests.

Environment and Choice

Lincoln Park did two things right from the very start. First, it controlled the school environment long before any student entered the building, and created a very safe, controlled building in which student academic freedom could be maximized. Second, it created different options for students beginning in first grade. Traditional age-based grade classrooms, two-year looping classrooms, and a 1-5 multi-age program.

Environment

I can go all the way back to Henry Barnard's 1848 book describing multi-classroom school design to see that observant educators understand that the school environment starts long before a student reaches the classroom, and Lincoln Park Elementary made this obvious. Clothes which indicated the great wealth disparities among students were not allowed. No student could ride a bicycle to school without a helmet. Behavior on the sidewalks surrounding the school was monitored by the principal and teaching staff every morning and every afternoon.

This matters. At Lincoln Park students were getting into "school mode" from the moment they dressed in the morning. I find it hard to believe that I am about to say this - given my childhood attitudes - but this is one reason I have come to favor school uniforms, it establishes the school day from the time you walk out of your bedroom. Now, Lincoln Park didn't have uniforms, but it enforced a pretty comprehensive dress code, and yet, never made that dress code Anglo-Centric or the enforcement abusive (I was in a high school two weeks ago when girls with "skirts too short" were called down to the office by PA announcement, to show the other side).

Behavior in general was expected to be really good. And this was so consistently maintained, with all students regardless of social status, that the school simply functioned really well. No, it was not at all silent. All through the building you'd find groups of students working on projects in the halls. Students went to the library whenever they needed to. At first glance, in fact, it appeared noisy and chaotic, but it could be that because the social structure, by being clear, allowed freedom.

Choice

I always know a terrible school when I see classes which seem to be the same. Why, if you had two third grade classrooms, or two 11th grade English courses, would these be, in any way, similar? The only reason would be that you have bought in completely to the idea of education as industrial processing, and the idea of students as interchangeable raw material waiting to be stamped into pre-ordained form.

If you have more than one of anything in a school, you should be creating choices for students and parents. Meaningful choices. And helping students make those choices. Would this child be better with this teacher? or that? With this reading approach? or that? With this classroom environment? or that? With this syllabus? or that?

Lincoln Park created those choices, and helped students and parents make intelligent decisions. The wildness of the MultiAge room, 120 students and five teachers in an immense open space, was fabulous for many, but surely not for all. So students could be in relatively traditional environments, or in fully "open classroom" environments, with teachers who had also chosen their environments. It was quite amazing how well all these rooms seemed to run.

Multi-Age

The school's "star" was the multi-age room, with it's fully inclusive, grow-at-your-own-rate structure. But the whole school embraced flexibility and peer mentoring. Literacy projects, such as plays based on books, were created and performed by teams which included students from every grade. Fifth graders provided math help for younger students, playground times allowed different age groups to mix. In that situation far fewer students are ever "behind."

Celebrating all kinds of achievement

You played on the basketball team? That was very exciting and celebrated. You played in the orchestra? That was very exciting and celebrated. You were part of one of the 20 or so Odyssey of the Mind teams? You got a giant pep rally to send you off to the event. Whatever you did well, Lincoln Park was behind you, whether a school thing or something else. This created a sense that everyone could learn from everyone in this building.

A Model

Lincoln Park Elementary had no more money than any nearby school. It was not a charter, "freed from bureaucracy." It did not pay teachers more. It did not screen out any students - directly or indirectly. It was not at all without competition. It succeeded, succeeds, because it created an effective and open place which welcomed all students and encouraged them in their differing paths to learning.

As I always say, great schools are hardly impossible. They exist all over the place. We just need to expect more. Everywhere.

- Ira Socol

Great Schools 1: Changing Everything

Great Schools: 1. Changing Everything

People ask this all the time, “What would a great school look like?” They do exist you know. All over the place there are isolated schools doing fabulous things. This is why listening to fake reformers like Arne Duncan, Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and the KIPP/TFA folks is so maddening. We actually do know what works, we just have to be brave enough to embrace real, systemic, change.

This is a story about one great school, one I was lucky enough to attend.

“The Program for Inquiry, Involvement, and Independent Study,” the “3Is” sprung from the minds of three brilliant educators: Neil Postman, Charlie Weingartner, and Alan Shapiro. Postman and Weingartner were the authors of the book on radical educational reconceptualization, Teaching As a Subversive Activity. Shapiro was a frustrated junior high school English teacher and leader of the local American Federation of Teachers. They came together in a struggling old “inner suburb” of New York City called New Rochelle.

New Rochelle, about 75,000 people in 10 square miles, might be best known as Rob Petrie’s home on The Dick Van Dyke Show, but it was (and is) a complex old east coast city, with vast wealth disparities, a troubled core, and an extremely diverse population. It had, in the mid-1960s, been the first northern US city to experience court ordered school desegregation.

It did have some unique advantages at the time. It did not, for example, have an elected school board and it did not have public votes on taxation. Schools were a part of the city government, the board was appointed by the mayor (the state legislature later changed this). It also fed all students, rich, poor, black, white, etc., into one enormous public high school, meaning the school had much of the full diversity of the city, despite the existence of four Catholic High Schools and two private high schools within the city’s borders. And it had a brilliantly enlightened union.

So, when the schools seemed in crisis, the union fought for educational change – briefly went on strike for educational change – and the board, not having to face voters, decided to go along with teacher demands. This meant a vast increase in open classroom and multi-age efforts in elementary schools. In the high school it meant the creation of separate schools-of-choice (or, yes, perhaps recommended choice would be a better description, this was somewhat European in strategy) within the building – including nursing, cosmetology, construction trades, performing arts, and, the “3Is.”

The 3Is was designed as the alternative school, the place for the kids who were not functioning within the standard school environment. But the first brilliance lay in the idea that "not fitting in" could be described as almost anything. There were geniuses. There were crazy dyslexics. There were those with "behavioral issues." There were those who'd been suspended, etc. There were those who had simply been bored. this was true inclusion. There was no special ed at all, or rather, it was special ed for everyone.

The second brilliance was in the overall rejection of standard educational assumptions:

"Most school curricula are based on a set of assumptions which the experimental program rejects. For example, most school programs assume (1) that knowledge is best presented and comprehended when organized into "subjects," (2) that there are "major" subjects and "minor" ones, (3) that subjects are things you "take," and that once you have "had" them, you need not take them again, (4) that most subjects have a specific "content," (5) that the content of these subjects is more or less stable, (6) that a major function of the teacher is to "transmit" this content (7), that the practical place to do this is in a room within a centrally located building, (8) that students learn best in 45-minute periods which are held five times a week, (9) that students are functioning well (i.e., learning) when they are listening to their teacher, reading their texts, doing their assignments, and otherwise "paying attention" to the content being transmitted, and (10) that all of this must go on as a preparation for life. "This memorandum is not the forum for a serious and thorough critique of these assumptions. Hopefully, it is sufficient to say that contemporary educational philosophy disputes most of them, in part or whole, and that few teachers would deny the merit of experimenting with programs based on an entirely different set of beliefs."

A quote from Thoreau and the authors are off...

"we are assuming (1) that learning takes places best not when conceived as a preparation for life but when it occurs in the context of actually living, (2) that each learner ultimately must organize his own learning in his own way, (3) that "problems" and personal interests rather than "subjects" are a more realistic structure by which to organize learning experiences, (4) that students are capable of directly and authentically participating in the intellectual and social life of their community, (5) that they should do so, and (6) that the community badly needs them."

Let me describe the school they created. Most students were rarely there. If you were studying science you were probably at the City's greenhouses or the local hospital or at the heritage farm we created in a City Park. If you were studying journalism you were creating the school's weekly newspaper or maybe, spending nights chasing news with a local radio station's overnight news guy. If you were studying urban design you might be in the planning department at City Hall. Psychology? How about interviewing Grand Central's homeless population after midnight. Great literature? Sitting around a teacher's living room one night a week sharing tea and ideas. There were, of course, classes - but they were different kinds of classes.

UP THE HIGH SCHOOL AND DOWN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL An analysis of current responses to recent problems in education.
ENCOUNTER Survey of group technique with particular reference to methods of small-group therapy.
SCAPEGOAT: STUDY OF THE NATURE OF PREDJUDICE Psychological study of causes and impact of racial prejudice.
LANGUAGE AND REALITY To study how language influences our perception of the world and to determine the language "environments" of politics, black-white relationship, science, (etc.)
MATH SEMINAR Advanced math curriculum, including theory of functions, logic, calculus, non-Euclidean geometry, set theory, probability.

There was no required schedule, no required classes, no sense that you were in one "grade" or another. There were no grades, and there were no "failures." The grading system was "pass/no-record." You either got credit or the "course" or project did no exist anymore. At the end of each course or project the student wrote an evaluation of their own work, then a teacher wrote their comments.

There were no real administrators. Decisions were made in "Big Meetings" or by a student steering committee. Students interviewed potential teachers and voted on hiring. Students called teachers by their first names, argued with them, ate with them, played with them, helped them.

Yes, this was New York State, so your credits had to somehow (often quite creatively) match up with the required high school curriculum. You had to take the Regents Exams. Which we did, and which we passed, if not always with flying colors.

But the key thing was, students were known, in every way, by what they were good at. There was no deficit model at work. Not that most of us didn't really struggle with some things, but in this environment you led from your strengths. Everyone pretty much helped everyone in one direction or another.

Despite that we didn't just focus on our own stuff. You couldn't. You were around other influences. Did I, for example, read a book in high school? Well, part of Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's, for a history seminar remembered mostly for our field trip to see The Last Picture Show- which had something to do with a conversation about the 1950s.

Despite that, I played basketball with guys in Great Books and listened to conversations about Siddharthaand other masterpieces. I hung out at breakfast with musicians and learned both music and math. I got lectures about history and art in evening "social situations." We were told to engage in the world, and we did, and thus the world came at us at full speed.

The school changed "everything," and in doing so liberated us to learn. Stripped away our excuses. And turned us loose to make the world our classroom.

How did this school do by traditional measures? Very, very well. A 99% graduation rate with a wildly diverse population. Most went to four year colleges, including every SUNY campus, but also places like MIT, Brown, University of Michigan, Kenyon, Hampshire (of course). Years later we are lawyers and teachers, museum administrators and scientists, diplomats and artists. All from a group which might have seen a stunning drop out rate without this program.

It lasted over 15 years, and fell to conservative trends in education and budget cutting. Where once schools like this filled cities from Philadelphia to, at least, Ann Arbor, few now exist. Of our "Alternative School Basketball League" only one survives, the Village School in Great Neck, NY.

What made it work? First, choice. New Rochelle High School offered students real choices at the time. Vocational programs, traditional academic programs, arts programs, and this. Sure, paths were strongly suggested, but ultimately there were options. Students began each day knowing they had some level of control, they had put themselves into their situation. Second, a real belief in students. No 3I teacher ever looked at a student and saw "failure." They might have seen problems, but they also saw opportunities. Third, a belief in the power of adolescence. These adults knew kids would screw up, but they also knew that failure is how people learn - and that teenagers want to learn. So they dropped the cost of failure to almost zero. And people tried just about everything. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. But things were always learned along the way. Fourth, they embraced universal design before the idea had been described. "Do it the way that works for you," was the idea. If I sat in a chair and talked while my friend John typed newspaper articles for me, that was fine. If I didn't function well in the morning, I didn't do much until after lunch.

So, did I actually "cut" school every morning from ten to noon to have breakfast with my friend Bob? No, because no one cared that I wasn't "there," so we weren't really cutting. Did Glenn and I really design a massive idea for downtown reconstruction? Yes, we did, and now he's one of the world's leading experts in architectural restoration. Did we really spend all night in Grand Central interviewing the homeless? Yes, and while I became a cop others became psychologists. Did I really take a course called "Monday Morning Quarterback" and bet on football games? I did. I think I called it "Math." Debbie though, took it and became a sportswriter.

- Ira Socol

Merit Pay?

A decade and so ago I was a member of a sports club. We had a lot of football (soccer) teams. I coached youth teams for years and years. And I was thinking about this experience as I listened to one more sad attempt by one more US Secretary of Education to insist that merit pay for teachers is the most critical change we need in our education system.

When I was coaching we usually had enough kids to create two, three, or four teams at any given age class. Unlike many other clubs we did not try to create A, B, and C teams. Rather, we tried to create somewhat even teams where the "better" players might demonstrate their leadership.

Each year we'd split up these boys, and each year we'd end up with one team that seemed, ummm, "challenging." These kids were in special education services at school, or had families in trouble, or somehow just didn't fit in. We ended up with that team because every year I'd just say, when others complained about trying to coach "kids like that," I'd say, "put him on my team."

You know, usually, the other teams would do better in the league than we did. Sure we kept getting better, yes, we had a lot of fun, but problems perpetually struck, and we lost many, many games.

Now, none of us got paid, but in Arne Duncan's world, if we had been paid, I would have been paid less. This is because Duncan combines a terrible assessment system (the standardized test) with a terrible assessment period (a school year) to come up with a terrible way to assess. As if I would have been paid based on games won in a U-12 season.

See, in Duncan's world it would not matter that when they got to high school it was "my" kids who led the team to a conference championship. Nor that they stayed in school. Nor that they learned to work with other kids around them. Just as Lehman Brothers brokers walked away with massive bonuses without a thought regarding long-term results, my fellow coaches would have been rewarded, and I punished, based on short term nonsense.

And maybe I would have chosen not to coach "those" kids. Maybe "those" kids would have gotten scattered among other teams and forgotten. Maybe "those" kids would have gotten the least experienced coach every year. Maybe... because that is what is being incentivized if you create merit pay for teachers without completely re-thinking educational assessment.

We can laugh at Arne Duncan. Yes, he is the only person in Obama's cabinet who thinks that bonuses based on short-term results are a desirable "reform." But it is not funny. Merit pay creates all the wrong incentives. It will ensure that the kids who need the most help get the least.

I supported Barack Obama, and continue to. But he never indicated any real sense of what education in America needs, and his choice of a Secretary of Education has proven disastrous. Please email the White House and ask that Arne Duncan be fired. Please. Or we will remake our schools in the image of George W. Bush's Wall Street. And that is something America can not afford.

- Ira Socol

The Width of the World

Do new forms of social networking help us or hurt us as humans?

Larry Sanger wrote a blog on this, and sent out the link on Twitter. Larry notes his disillusionment with "web 2.0," with his concerns being (a) "Facelessness. Frequently, we find ourselves in conversation with people we don’t know. We have nothing invested with them socially", (b) "Groupthink. The second reason Web 2.0 is becoming obnoxious to me is that I really, really hate groupthink," and (c) "Such a godawful waste of time. The first time we see a shiny new Internet toy, we are all oohs and aahs. But, OK…isn’t it time to stop it with the “Which Star Trek character are you?” quizzes on Facebook? ... Seriously, to my way of thinking, there are worthwhile Web 2.0 projects — like, of course, the Citizendium and WatchKnow (not launched yet) — but it seems like the vast majority of the websites, and many attractive and popular features within more worthwhile sites, are a waste of time."

Larry sees the creep of technology as the essential problem. When I challenged him on this, suggesting a much longer term historical arc, he said he was dating his concerns back to the early 1990s.

Now Larry, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is no Luddite, but I suspect that Larry misunderstands the role of communications technology in humanity. He told me to answer him in a blog post, and so here I go...

Socrates was right

Socrates was right. When you start to write things down, when humans embraced literacy, they moved away from the natural forms of human connection. Literacy not only limited the need for memory, as Socrates suggested, it debased human learning by separating the content from the person transmitting that content, as he also suggested. [Orality and Literacy. Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. The Consequences of Literacy.]

In Socrates' world human communication was directly humane. You knew the speaker and you knew the listener. You had known them, most likely, forever. You looked in their eyes, you smelled their breath and their sweat. Your informational (and social) trust was built on a very complex, and very ancient, system of clues. Think of it this way, you know a lover is lying in ways very different than you know an author is lying. Socrates opposed writing and literacy because he didn't want to lose that intimacy.

This is a crucial human question, going back to the very beginning. The first time humans drew on cave walls, and thus created the possibility that some might see this description of the hunt who had not heard the first hand account, technology began to both support, and intrude on, human communication. Is looking at the description of an unknown person's hunting party a waste of time? Is it disconnected trivia or a way of understanding yourself as part of the world?

Today in History

165 years ago today Samuel F.B. Morse sent the first public telegram. And today when I woke up I sent this Twitter message, "Something remarkable, almost tidal, watching the flow of tweets from my friends around the world, as some wake while others sleep."

Morse's invention appeared at one of those moments in time when technologies were radically reshaping human communication. His telegraph, for example, combined with the new technology of the steam-powered rotary press and machine-made wood-pulp-based paper, to completely alter how humans received information.

Suddenly news of the world, and eventually - via Steam Ships and less expensive telegrams and trans-Oceanic cables - personal news, could move rapidly around the globe unfiltered by the elites who had controlled this since the end of the 15th Century. Other things happened as well: photography began to appear. The railroads began to enable travel. The world, or, as Socrates might have suggested, a disconnected, unreliable, undefined sense of the world, was now available whenever people walked out of their doors, or opened their mail.

Something else was happening as well. People were flocking to cities. Suddenly people were surrounded by others they had not known all of their lives, by people they might never know. This altered social networks dramatically, and people began to organize themselves along somewhat superficial lines. The sports club and football club began to arise in England, for example, fraternal and service clubs in the United States. And social information thus began to spread differently, with a new communication level created between "back fence" and pub communication (on one hand) and news from the pulpit (on the other). People began to desire crime news and odd tales of strangers, things which would never have been deemed worthy of publication when publication was expensive. The first version of "blogging" began as writers penned serial stories or experiences which masses of people could waste time on, day after day.

All of these activities - all of these things - separated humans from the most "natural" communications experiences. Yet all of them also created new forms of human connectivity.

The Bookworm

When I was a child "the bookworm" was a commonly derided child. Why waste your whole day with your nose in a book? "they'd" ask, instead of going out into the world and living? Yes, parents - back then - told kids to put down their books and go out and play. Yes, they did.

This was one end of the spectrum. The other, as an historic echo of Larry's complaint about Star Trek quizzes (which I have actually never participated in), was the concern that students were wasting their time and their minds on inappropriate reading. "A closer look demonstrates that the concern was not so much to interest children in reading as to interest children in reading the books that parents, teachers, and librarians wanted them to read, books that would provide class- and gender-appropriate role models and instill socially acceptable values in both boys and girls," Suzanne Stauffer writes of the 1880s-1920s period when "sensational fiction" was seen as a critical danger.

The wrong reading could cause groupthink, apparently, "then" as now. In the 1940s Comic Books were blamed for juvenile delinquency. Stauffer again, "Again, librarians and others proclaimed that this type of reading was not only inferior to reading “good books” but was a corrupting and degrading influence."

So the media forms which arose between 1840 and 1950 were (a) disconnecting people from actual human touch experience, (b) creating groupthink in dangerous ways (think about the United States and the Spanish-American War), and (c) creating massive wastes of time - reading comics, watching movies, listening to crappy radio shows, reading true crime stories and trashy novels, sitting around playing records.

Of course that was also true of the media forms which arose before 1840, and those which came after 1950. As soon as Gutenberg created movable type it was being used to provide sensational stories of strangersto the public. And speeches in ancient Rome may have created groupthink on occasion.

The Flip Side

I don't really need to go all Clay Shirkyon Larry to make my point. Each revolution in communication technologies moves humans in two directions - away from the tactile human, yes, but also towards a global understanding, a global connection, a global knowledge.

So, no, I will not tell Larry about the people I've met online who've become close, personal friends in person. I don't really think this has happened for me. Most of my closest friends I knew as a teenager - in person. Yes, we connect constantly via online tools, yes, our relationships are stronger now than they have been in decades because of those tools, but that's not the point.

But I will tell Larry that my blog, Twitter, and list-serve relationships are not faceless, they do not create groupthink, and they do not waste my time.

"Something remarkable, almost tidal, watching the flow of tweets from my friends around the world, as some wake while others sleep."

These are real people. We agree and disagree. We share and we argue. I may learn their "group identities" first - teacher, technologist, politico - but then I discover more, be it their poetry, their children, their eating habits, their fears. It is a fully human thing that I help @jonbecker find a parking spot in Park Slope at 1230 one morning, and that I worry about his car parked in the dark alongside Prospect Park. It is fully human frustration when I can not get @chadratliff to understand my argument. It is fully human fun I have with @damian613 over the plight of Newcastle United. And it is fully human friendship which I feel for bloggers from Karen Janowski to Enda Guinan. Bill Genereux has become an important "classmate" though we've never physically met, and I worry about Goldfish's health. They are only "faceless" if we think it is impossible for, say, a blind person to know faces.

Power

More critically, we are a group - or groups. We have powers that humans have not had before. And we've been waiting for these technologies to offer us these powers for a long time. Humans have been trying to lower the costs of collaboration and knowledge transfer since time began. And now we can do that. Sure we waste time. Humans always "waste time." Sure we become "gangs." Humans always have. But we now have social choices - powerful social choices, which are shifting power in dramatic ways. Democracy could not have spread as it did in the past two centuries without the communications technologies of those times. And neither could knowledge. Both will spread further, faster - are spreading further, faster, even in the United States - because of Web 2.0.

Learning

But technologies take learning. It isn't easy. Early adopters look kind of crazy. "Really, you strung wire from Washington to Baltimore to send a Bible quote faster?"

So we need to learn these communication tools, and make them our own. And we need to help others, especially our children, find their own paths within these structures. Because it is indeed human, and is indeed humane.

I woke up this morning to birdsong outside the window and the smell of encroaching summer. And that tells me about the the preciousness of the planet. And I woke up with the Tweets of Aussies saying good night and Brits eating lunch and getting ready for the last day of the Premier League season. And that tells me about the width of the world.

I'm not wasting time. I'm as fully human as the people who came to read the cave paintings at Lascaux 20 years after they were drawn. I am engaged in humanity.

-Ira Socol