Blog Review: My Public Education

If you're an educator of elementary school students, I recommend you ignore the rest of this blog until you click here and read the contents of My Public Education. It's just...wow.

Okay, if you took the time to read the site, you'll understand what transfixed me. I have so many thoughts and questions. I hope Sabine won't mind if I post them here. First, I must compliment the writing style, which is elegant, clear, and self-effacing. Sabine does not stint in her criticisms of herself or others around her, but she does so in such matter-of-fact prose that the reader just has to sit back and say, "Okay, I guess that's just how it is."

But at the same time, being a spoiled, suburban middle-aged white guy, places like the Calliope Projects anger and disturb me. We don't like to admit or think about the fact that such places exist in America, but they do. These are American kids and adults struggling with an environment of poverty, crime, and violence. They're not "somebody else's problem." I've got customers, neighbors, and peers who are worried about trying to get kids to study STEM subjects when we have teachers and students elsewhere struggling for basic literacy. And so the question becomes, "How does an educator, however, dedicated, teach in such an environment?" Sabine has provided some tantalizing glimpses into her style, as well as others', and I expect she'll share more.

The video hosted by Ice-T (a personal favorite of mine for his acting, not his rapping) was particularly compelling because two of the people shown in it were killed by the time it aired. So again one must wonder what it's like to be a student or a teacher in the midst of this:

While I did have firm rules and consequences which I enforced, to be quite honest, my students weren't phased by them at all. They had lived through much harsher situations out in the world like witnessing drug deals and shootings, so by giving them my textbook punishment, I was really instead rewarding them with the one-on-one attention which they craved.

Where does education factor into all that? Self-discipline? Love? Or, in my self-interested world, space exploration? A lot of folks in white America like to comfort ourselves with movies like Lean on Me or Stand and Deliver--tales of heroic teachers turning minority kids in tough neighborhoods into mathematicians or Harvard-level orators--but the reality is more like what Sabine experienced: teachers of varying skill sets making do with substandard equipment, textbooks, and sometimes educations. Never mind space exploration...or STEM...what the hell do you do to fix school systems where a lot of the graduates end up dead from street violence in a few years? Would bringing space-related materials to these places help? They couldn't hurt. Calliope is more or less within the area Marshall Space Flight Center serves for education purposes...or Johnson Space Center. Is it being served? Are we so rich a society that we can afford luxuries like space exploration and "at risk" schools and students? For how long?

Again: how do we fix this? I want a society that can produce rocket scientists wherever, whenever. But also doctors, teachers, and the other skills. One thing I'd like to hear from Sabine are student outcomes--good and bad. She's no doubt been scrupulous about changing names to protect the innocent and the guilty, and I'd like to know the results of her teaching time in "CP3." At the rate some of our suburban schools are declining, the lessons she learned there might (alas) become very relevant to the rest of the country.

Book Review: The Watchmen

My buddy Doc recommended that I read The Watchmen and see the movie that is based on it. Being a literary purist, I decided to read the comic book (ahem, sorry, graphic novel) first. Okay, so let's have it: what is The Watchmen all about? Well, if you've seen the commercials and haven't read the book, you know that it has something to do with costumed superheroes. Right. That's sort of like saying Star Wars has something to do with space adventure: that doesn't even cover the half of it. Just as George Lucas tried to reinvent the Saturday afternoon space opera matinee, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons took great pains to reinvent the costumed superhero story.

It is 1985, but it is a slightly different variant. Costumed heroes (regular people) and superheroes (people with superhuman abilities) have changed the world through their interventions in history. Eventually, they are hounded out of the business by the Nixon Administration in 1977, which passes a law all but outlawing "the masks." These are not the usual Batman, Superman, and other Justice League heroes I grew up with--sorry, fellow geek readers, I'm a DC guy, not a Marvel fan. These are just a new set of heroes that Moore and Gibbons created to show some of the silliness but also some of the outright danger of having costumed vigilantes on the street, fighting crime.

The golden age of the heroes in this timeline is from the 1940s to the 1960s. They fall out of favor despite helping to win the Vietnam War and bring down all the costumed supervillains. Some have become official agents of the U.S. Government, some have taken straight jobs, some have gone outlaw. The ones still operating are mostly right-wing sociopaths, extremely violent, and creatures to be feared rather than admired. I don't anticipate the movie being much different.

It took me awhile to realize how groundbreaking this book was until I started to realize how much impact it has had. Its habit of including newspaper clippings can be found in Batman: A Death in the Family and DC's The Golden Age. The licensing/agent provocateur status of the heroes can be found in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. The outlawing of the heroes can be found in The Dark Knight Returns and the Disney/Pixar film, The Incredibles. And so forth. So The Watchmen obviously changed a lot about how the traditional Marvel/DC comics portrayed their heroes, for better or worse. This new anti-heroic look at costumed superheroes can be traced to this book, which was originally a series.

Is it any good? That depends on your point of view. I found it dark, disturbing, and quite at variance with some comics I've read, very much the birth place of others. Do you want your heroes to be more "human," more "realistic?" I guess it depends on your definition of realism. Do I discount the dark side of human nature? Hardly. But what if you want your heroes to be brave, admirable actors for good? I happen to hold the latter view. In that case, The Watchmen is a paradigm shift, but it is a shift toward anti-heroism, which the comic book universes had, until the mid-'80s, tried hard to resist.

Perhaps I'm an idealist, but I still want my heroes to be good, to be people who, if not perfect, are at least a little better than myself to serve as an example of some better morality to strive for in life. After all, if your heroes are just as bad as the bad guys, why should you care if they win? What is protected? What is affirmed? What is gained? I might go see the movie, but I've already got a good idea of what it will be about--and it's not particularly good...at least as we used to understand the word.

I Guess Irony Can Be Pretty Ironic Sometimes

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090309/D96QFLO80.html

SILVER SPRING, Md. (AP) - Montgomery County police say 16 people were arrested after a fight broke out during a concert held to promote nonviolence and to remember a Silver Spring teen killed last year.

We Are What We Consume

In the freewheeling '80s, the Moral Majority started taking the matter of sex and violence in TV shows and the movies more seriously. There was a lot of sarcasm on the left, with people comparing the denunciations of American culture by Christian Coalition types with the mullahs in Iran (the assumption being, if the Iranians criticize America and they're nuts, the Christians must be similarly off their rockers). "Change the channel!" was a popular retort. Others believe that individuals are inherently violent or not violent, and so the content of what's on TV wouldn't affect them one way or another--the violent were going to end up evil anyway.

As in my previous entry, I can't help but marvel at the selective outrage, as Hollyweird is willing to self-censor on issues like smoking. Bad guys are now seen as smoking, not good guys. Smoking is no longer sophisticated or cool, but bad for you, and so must be portrayed as evil (Arthur C. Clarke even suggested that film editors could make a great deal of money digitizing out scenes of smoking from old movies).

So imagine my lack of surprise when I see that the dirtbag who shot five people at my alma mater was tossed from the Army, in part because of his obsessive fandom of movie murderers. Imagine my further lack of surprise when I hear that former President Clinton suggested reinstituting the "Fairness Doctrine." So apparently, only SOME things in the media can influence children and must be removed--and those things would be anything that conservatives think or do.