Poetry Scaffolding Seminar

I’m not going to say this one was a total waste of time…though I kind of want to.  Oh! but not for the reason you’d typically associate with me.  It was because…it was an exact duplicate of something we’ve already done in class.  It was the Cisneros poem, the exact same one, and the exact same idea of immitating the “such-and-so who” format.  That was it.  Almost an exact clone of the lesson we did.

On the plus side, I did meet an interesting first year teacher, and a dude too!  And what’s more, he said he was really enjoying himself, and he’s even teaching 9th grade.  So there’s hope for me yet, I suppose.

The lady who was holding the seminar did it pretty well, though.  The main difference between what we did and what she did was include a form sort of paper for the students to write their imitation on with the same prepositions as in Cisneros’s poem at the beginning of each line.  One odd thing was that she seemed to have, I don’t know, a different version of the poem or something—remember how we couldn’t figure out why the man in the poem “used to laugh and like the letter K”?  Well, in the version she had it was “used to laugh like the letter K”.  No “and”.  Plus, she had a commentary about the poem from some teacher who devised the lesson plan, and she specifically references the line—her students thought it meant that he “laughed like the letter K” because he was ill and his laugh was half a cough.  Well, that solves that mystery, I guess.

The Digital World in English Ed Conference…Seminar…Thing

This one was actually pretty good.  The things they had there were basically these sort of games where you can enter the world of some work of literature (they had ones from Things Fall Apart and A Midsummer’s Night Dream), sort of like what professor Rozema is I guess envisioning with his Thoughcrime thing for Second Life.  There was one guy there, too, who had a presentation on Angels in America, that play, but his deal basically seemed like an extensive website more than a “digital world”.  Later in the conference, the same guy said he didn’t like the role-playing/gaming aspects of the whole affair, I think because he thought it would lead the students away from the text and into something else.  We he said this, I wanted to say, “Snob.”  I didn’t, of course, but I wanted to.

Actually, it’s quite remarkable to me that there is this openness to something that is even vaguely like gaming, because the guy I just mentioned is quite typical of most many English profs.  This might border on invective, but the snobbery of most intellectuals against videogames is deeply entrenched.  I think a certain prof might have even said that most videogame plots are usually very thin, and although he is partially right, I think this might be based more on stereotypes of games than on actual experience.  Most games are very plot thin, but then again, so are most books if you consider how many novels Harlequin puts out.  Games, unlike books, are always judged by their worst examples, but such is the fate of a young medium of expression.

 Not that what they had here could be called a “videogame”, but it does have the bare bones of the gaming experience.  But it seems to me that they really do have a very good idea here…but they are a little lacking in ambition.  I think what they are aiming at is making these sorts of rudimentary game things more widely known, so that any schmuck will be able to slap one together.  And that is a great goal.  But if it were me, because I’m of a different mindset, I would want, instead of a thousand amature versions, for their to be one really pollished version.  Of course, I understand that Enlgish profs are not programmers and it would be ridiculous to ask them to be.  But there are, in fact, programmers out there who are interrested in literature, and would probably be really interested in what they’re doing.  And whats more, real games, not Halo quality but still good, can be made relatively cheaply using Flash—I mentioned at the talk about this student from the University of Southern California who made the addictive game flOw which now has a version on the PS3.  But it’s all a very exciting, and hopefully, one day, these can be used as a hugely affective hook for getting kids interested in literature.

Jacqueline Woodson’s Speech at the Bright Ideas Conference

One wonders how to approach this in an objective a way as possible.  Let me just say that Ms. Woodson was very affable and funny and candid, and that I’m sure she is a delightful person to be around.  Her talk was…well, for one it did seemed geared more toward writing than reading, like she was speaking to a room full of would-be writers instead of a room full of teachers.  But I suppose that really can’t be helped…I looked it up here, and the only thing in her resume that is really relation to education is work as a “children’s drama thearapist”, and…how shall I say this?…I’m not really sure what a children’s drama thearapist is.  But I can see the appeal of bringing a YA author to this kind of affair.

Now, the 64,000 dollar question is, of course, would I consider teaching some of her novels based on what I heard.  The answer is…um…no.  I wouldn’t.  I didn’t think what she read was “bad” per se…but its just not my cup of tea, and I don’t think I could teach book whose style I don’t care for.  And yes its the style that I don’t like.  And yes, I’m pretty aware that that style which I don’t care for is based on a the writer trying to convey her own African American voice.  I…I don’t know what to say.  But then again, maybe its not that her style is African-American, maybe its just that it felt so…emotionally sloppy.  What she read, it sort of reminded me of a piece of French Toast that’s been left in syrup for too long and turns into a square of French Toast soup.  The taste is pretty good, but the texture is a bit, well, unsavory.

Well, I suppose you all saw that coming from the guy who said if you don’t like literature it must be because you’re dead inside.  I’m really trying not to be too contravertial here, and I really should say that, althought like I said I didn’t care for what I heard, I didn’t here much, so maybe she’s written something that I might find a bit more pallatable to my tastes.  Mabye I’ll look into her more…maybe.

And now for something completely different…

As you might have guessed from the, ahem, tone of the end of my last blog, I am often a bit amused by professors who talk about the deplorable situation of minorities in this country and the evil of the white power structures that keep minorities down, while they themselves live comfortably in a loft or ranch-style house in an all-white neighborhood of suburban Grand Rapids. 

 In a way, there has only been one teacher I ever had (and he was a high school teacher back where I used to live, not a professor) whose liberal political philosophy I could respect as having some basis in the way the man lived.  Mr. Jagger was his name, and he was my AP History teacher in Sophomore year of high school; he taught at Lakeshore High School, in my quiet little rural town of Stevensville, but he lived (and did so by choice, not because he couldn’t afford to do otherwise) in Benton Harbor, and in the heart of that town.  If you have ever heard of Benton Harbor, you may know that it is an almost entirely black community, one directly across the river from the almost all-white city of St. Joseph.  The St. Joseph river, which the divides the towns in two, acts as a kind of miniature Mason-Dixon line, seperating whites from blacks.  St. Joseph is middle-class to affluent, but Benton Harbor is lower-middle class to poor.  Mr. Jagger chose to live there, I think, because he really did believe that the black community in Benton Harbor was in a deplorable situation, and he really did want to help improve it; and not just by theorizing, but by doing.

This leads me to the topic of todays bjournal, which was inspired by a reading of the ”blog” (if you can’t tell, I don’t much care for that word), “adventures in inner-city education” by a certain Ms. Sweetland (her first name isn’t listed anywhere that I can find).  The introduction to the page pretty much says it all: “Dedicated and over-educated teacher leaves the pampered comfort of a Stanford PhD program to teach at a small, stereotypically ‘inner city’ elementary school in Washington, DC. And blogs about it.” 

 (I will have more later…for now, studium me vocat)

“The White Anti-Racist is an Oxymoron”

Here is my follow up to my previous bjournal entry.  When last we met, I had just been explaining Ms. Smiley’s views on getting rid of Huck Finn.  From other recent information I’ve gleaned, this position is not all that uncommon.  Apparently, the NAACP has called for a ban on Huck because “tax dollars should not be used to perpetuate a stereotype that has psychologically damaging effects on the self-esteem of African American children.” You can read more about it on this article at the Jewish World Review.

Ahem.  But enough on Huck proper.  I will now continue narrating the event from my last article.  What happened when I saw these acccusation’s of Twain’s racism, I thought of the old slander on Alexander Pope not being a poet, and Dr. Johnson’s reply “If Pope is not poetry, where shall poetry be found.”  This lead me to think “If Twain is a racist, where shall non-racism be found”, at least among white people.  I thought about it a bit, and I came up with John Brown.  Who, I thought, could consider John Brown a racist?  Then I recalled the axiom I started off with from my last post, that every white person before the baby boom is probably going to be called a racist at some point it history has bothered to remember them, regardless of what they said to the contrary.  So I typed in “John Brown was a racist” into Google in quote, and came up with this article, wherein I found a comment that the author of the article apparently thought John Brown was indeed a racist.  So I typed in the author’s name “Tamara K. Noppers” and “John Brown”, and I came to this article, which in many ways spurred this whole entry.  Ms. Noppers states:

I recently finished the biography of John Brown by DuBois. The biography was less of a biography and more of an interpretation by DuBois about the now-legendary white abolitionist. Now while John Brown’s practice was problematic in many ways–he still had to be in control and he had fucked-up views that Blacks were still enslaved because they were too “servile” (a white supremacist sentiment)–what I took from Brown’s life was that he realized that moral persuasion alone would not solve racial problems. That is, whites cannot talk or just think through whiteness and structures of white supremacy. They must be committed to either picking up arms for other people (and only firing when the people tell them so), dying for other people, or just getting out of the way. In short, they must be willing to do what the people most affected and marginalized by a situation tell them to do.

I don’t really know much about John Brown, but…I mean, the guy killed some white people and himself died because he thought race-based slavery was wrong.  Noppers answers this with:

Additionally, white activism, especially white anti-racism, is predicated on an economy of gratitude. We are supposed to be grateful that a white person is willing to work with non-white people. We are supposed to be grateful that you actually want to work with us and that you give us your resources. I would like to know why you have those resources and others do not? And don’t assume that just because I have to ask you for resources that it does not hurt me, pain me even. Don’t assume that when you come into the space, that doesn’t bother me. Don’t assume that when you talk first, talk the most, and talk the most often, that this doesn’t hurt me. Don’t assume that when I see you get the attention and accolades and the book deals and the speaking engagements that this does not hurt me (because you profit off of pain). And don’t assume that when I see how grateful non-white people are to you for being there, for being a “good white” person that this doesn’t hurt me. And don’t assume that when I get chastised by non-white people because I think your presence is unnecessary that it does not hurt me. Because all of these things remind me of how powerless non-white people are (albeit differently) in relation to white people. All of these gestures that you do reminds me of how grateful I am supposed to be towards you because you actually (or supposedly) care about what is happening to me. I am a bit resentful of economies of gratitude.

I guess you can make up your own minds about this.  When I reread this article, my position began to soften a bit.  I think there are probably some valid points—I’ve been told my many professors and text books that the African-American community is still marginalized as hell.  And white people do have a lot of advantages that other races don’t.  But still, the rhetoric of this piece is a bit unsettling.  Look at this paragraph, for instance:

Further, it is also rooted in the idea that white people are not racist or do not benefit from racism. Rather, white people at meetings will often discuss how they feel “silenced” by non-whites, or that they are being “put in their place.” Let me make one thing clear: it is impossible for a non-white person to put a white person in her place. This is not to say that non-white people cannot have a sexist or homophobic attitude towards a white person. But to say, or even hint at that as a “WHITE” person someone is being put in their place–whoever says this just needs to shut the fuck up because that is some bull. It is impossible for whiteness to be put in one’s place, because that is a part of whiteness, the ability to take up space and feel a prerogative to do so.

It’s not the swearing or the all-caps “WHITE”, that bugs me.  I always get the feeling when I’m reading something like this (and yes, that is a generalization, I admit) that there is a only barely supressed “I rather dislike all white people” in there.  Then again, this could be just my own ignorance, but still—”Further, it is also rooted in the idea that white people are not racist or do not benefit from racism.”  While I’ll concede the second, I can’t agree with the first.  Not all white people are racists.  As for myself, I’ve been told, again by profs and textbooks, that I (or at least people like me) am pretty much programmed by society to be a racist (among other things), but I at least try not to be a racist insofar as I, as a white male, am capable of doing.  But I am sure that there are cases of white people who have completely purged themselves of all racism.  Nancy Pelosi, for example.  Also, I think all of our white profs here at GVSU (er…at least in the English department) have managed to remove the effects of the great brainwashing machine of society from their uncorrupted brains.  So, again, I think Noppers goes just a bit to far.  Not much, just a bit.

The Case of Jane Smiley v. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Just as a preface, I guess this entry is sort of diverging from my topic of inner-city education—so, perhaps I’ll expand my category to “Racial Issues in Education”, since that was, essentially, what I was aiming at in the first place.  Now for the entry proper.

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In my 3 1/2 years of education in the English program at GVSU, one of the inviolable rules I have learned is that any dead white male (I want to say “writer” here, but I’ll extend it to include all of them) born before the baby boom is apparently ripe for accusations of racism.  And not just the ones you’d think, but the ones who said they were not racists when that was not really the thing to do, like Mark Twain.

When I read that little bit in the article from Thursday, it brought my experiences with Twain.  I first read it in sophomore year of high school.  My teacher, Mrs. Johnson, told us that is had been challenged because of the use of the n-word, and for not being sufficiently “literary”, but she never said that there were some people who thought it was a racist work because of the way it portrayed Jim (and just so you know, I’m pretty sure that Mrs. Johnson votes Democrat, in case your wondering, and I know somebody is).  I first heard this argument in my American Lit 2 class here at GVSU, when my prof contrasted the the way the black character’s in Their Eye’s Were Watching God to the way Jim speaks, praising Hurston’s character’s dialogue and calling Twain’s “possibly racist”.  I tried to say something back, but all I could get out was that maybe Jim was supposed to be talking in a way that more accurately reflected the 1830’s, and that this is why he talked the way he did.  I read a bit more on it, and I found that, like I said, some people think Jim is essentially a white guy in blackface, a character constructed out of white stereotypes, and that Twain is secretly laughing at him throughout the story.  I’m going to admit, I dismissed this argument out of hand: I remembered the scene where Jim realizes his daughter is deaf, and I decided that Twain wasn’t laughing at Jim, and that was that.

Which brings me back to Thursday.  I decided to look up Huck Finn again, to refresh myself on the arguments.  That was when I found this article by Pulitzer Prize winning author Jane Smiley, who points to a new attack on the book:

The sort of meretricious critical reasoning that has raised Huck’s paltry good intentions to a “strategy of subversion” (David L. Smith) and a “convincing indictment of slavery” (Eliot) precisely mirrors the same sort of meretricious reasoning that white people use to convince themselves that they are not “racist.” If Huck feels positive toward Jim, and loves him, and thinks of him as a man, then that’s enough. He doesn’t actually have to act in accordance with his feelings. White Americans always think racism is a feeling, and they reject it or they embrace it. To most Americans, it seems more honorable and nicer to reject it, so they do, but they almost invariably fail to understand that how they feel means very little to black Americans, who understand racism as a way of structuring American culture, American politics, and the American economy. To invest The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with “greatness” is to underwrite a very simplistic and evasive theory of what racism is and to promulgate it, philosophically, in schools and the media as well as in academic journals. Surely the discomfort of many readers, black and white, and the censorship battles that have dogged Huck Finn in the last twenty years are understandable in this context. No matter how often the critics “place in context” Huck’s use of the word “nigger,” they can never excuse or fully hide the deeper racism of the novel–the way Twain and Huck use Jim because they really don’t care enough about his desire for freedom to let that desire chance their plans. And to give credit to Huck suggests that the only racial insight Americans of the nineteenth or twentieth century are capable of is a recognition of the obvious–that blacks, slave and free, are human.

 So now, the idea attack is on what happens in the story is racist—Twain and Huck don’t really give a crap about Jim, so it’s okay to sort of forget about him while all the really interesting stuff happens.  But what’s really pertinent to our discussion here is Smiley’s view’s about what should happen to Huck in the school:

 would rather my children read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, even though it is far more vivid in its depiction of cruelty than Huck Finn, and this is because Stowe’s novel is clearly and unmistakably a tragedy. No whitewash, no secrets, but evil, suffering, imagination, endurance, and redemption–just like life. Like little Eva, who eagerly but fearfully listens to the stories of the slaves that her family tries to keep from her, our children want to know what is going on, what has gone on, and what we intend to do about it. If “great” literature has any purpose, it is to help us face up to our responsibilities instead of enabling us to avoid them once again by lighting out for the territory.

I’m only going to argue with Smiley here for a second—arguing is really beside the point here—is that Stowe basically made up Uncle Tom’s Cabin from what she had read about slave experience.  Twain, however, wrote from experience.  That’s all I’m going to argue about that part. 

I don’t believe that Mark Twain was a racist–in fact, I think he was kind of the opposite—but that’s beside the point.  I won’t defend the last twelve chapters of Huck Finn—but up till that, as a book, Huck pretty much blows Uncle Tom’s Cabin out of the water in terms of complexity, characterization, and all the other New Critical stuff that is so despised today.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin is probably a lot more important historically, and may even present a stronger argument against slavery, but it’s…well, the parts that I’ve read of it are…shall we say, a little maudlin.  I’m not going to cite any passages, but yeah, it’s pretty maudlin.  Pick it up yourself if you don’t believe me.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin is has huge value as a text but not as a book.  And I think the fact that Smiley thinks that Tom is superior to Huck as a literary work is really just absurd.  Stowe’s message was hugely noble, but about as subtle as a kick in the teeth.

Oh, and if this discussion has piqued your interest, there’s good news: this is really only half of what I wanted to write, but I’m really to tired to continue, so I’ll save the rest for my next post.  I guarantee it’ll be a good one.

My Comments

You can find my three comments here, here, and here.  Enjoy.

Is Desegration Just a Myth?

First of all, I just want to thank everyone who responded to my first post.  It’s nice to be read by other people…er, even if they are required to do so for the class.  Anyway, I also just wanted to make it clear that vouchers are not going to be my class-long topic.  I’m doing education in the inner-city—vouchers just seemed like an issue that was pertinent.  And I may well come back to it, but not today.

 The inspiration for this post comes from a personal experience from just today.  I’ve been volunteering with a group of special-needs young adults (20-26) in Grand Rapids with a program called Kent Vocational Options so I can get my neccesary tutoring hours before applying to the College of Education (and yes, apparen’t these students do count as secondary—I’ve asked).  Anyway, the focus of the program is to help the students be self-sufficient and responsible as they can, and part of that involves working at the cafeteria at Madison Middle School, which is just across the street and also in Grand Rapids.  Today was the first time I’d accompanied the students to their job, and the first time I’d been to Madison.  This is where the issue of segregation comes in.

I would say about 90% to 95% of the students at Madison are black from what I saw at lunch time (on a side note, I’m not trying to offend by using “black” instead of “African-American”—sometimes, though, I feel like “African-American” is a term white people, myself included, hide their insecurities behind when their confronted with issues of race that they’d like to pretend didn’t exist).  There were a handfull of white and Latino students, and the one’s there seemed to be accepted—but still, almost all of the students were black.

 There are probably a lot of reasons for this.  Maybe its just that Madison is in a mostly black neighborhood (I’m not sure that it is, but I could be wrong).  But it brings up the question—is desegration just a myth we’re told to give us warm fuzzy feelings about how much more tolerant and multicultural we are now?  Of course, legally, desegregation is a fact—there are no more schools official for white or black students only.  But is de facto segregation as much of a fact.

But one might say, Kevin, what’s wrong with schools being segregated if it’s self-imposed segregation?  Well, this article from the Dallas-Fort Worth Star Telegram offers a good explanation:

It’s not so much that brown and black students need to sit next to Anglo students in class — it’s that the Anglo children bring money and competition. If the Supreme Court found in 1954 that “separate but equal” schooling was not an acceptable practice, it’s still not acceptable to think that poor, minority children will learn successfully without middle- and upper-income classmates.

Senior research associate Richard Fry of the Pew Hispanic Center wrote in his study “The Changing Landscape of American Public Education; New Students, New Schools” that there’s been a rapid increase in student enrollment accompanied by the building of new schools. Between the 1993-94 and 2002-03 school years, Latino enrollment accounted for 64 percent, blacks 23 percent and Asians 11 percent of the national growth. Anglo enrollment fell by 1 percent.

School districts quickly built 15,368 schools during that time to reach an enrollment of 6.1 million students in the 2002-03 school year. Fry’s study found that 2.5 million Anglo students filled the new schools as their enrollment in older schools dropped by 2.6 million students. Two-thirds of the Latino students’ increase was accommodated in the older schools.

Fry discovered that despite population changes, “a substantial majority of white students attended schools populated primarily by other whites, and relatively few attended schools populated primarily by minorities.”

Orfield and Lee examined the country’s 24 largest central-city school districts for 2002-03 along three variables: graduation rate (the percent of students who graduated), poverty level (percent of students on free or reduced-price lunch); and majority-minority student enrollment (percent of students in majority-minority schools).

How do those criteria fare locally? Arlington school district students had a 60 percent graduation rate, with 41 percent of students on free or reduced lunch. Forty-three percent Anglo, 87 percent Latino and 81 percent black students attended majority-minority schools.

Fort Worth school district students has a 50 percent graduation rate, with 64 percent on free or reduced lunch. Sixty-three percent Anglo, 96 percent Latino and 93 percent black students attended majority-minority schools.

The article also gives some views on how this re-segregation started and is being propitiated:

Bennet, the Denver superintendent, faced angry faculty, students and community activists for the Manual school closing. Instead, the entire community should be outraged at segregated housing patterns, white-flight transfer policies, minimum-wage jobs, school district gerrymandering that leaves minorities isolated, and private-school escapes that leave minority kids behind.

The idea that most intrigues me, as well as most disturbs me, is the notion of gerrymandering—drawing school zones specifically for the purpose of keeping white students out of black schools.  In many ways, if the charge of gerrymandering is true, it would blow the lid off the idea that this kind of segregation is self-imposed—it would amount, essentially, to a conspiracy.  I’m not quite ready to say that this is what is going on at Madison, but…I would like to see a map of the school district all of the sudden. 

Vouchers

My hopes of pursuing topics on language variation have been dashed by the paucity of the news available.  So, I’m going to focus on education in the inner-city.  I’m picking this at least in part because, coming from the white-bread town of Stevensville, MI, I don’t have a lot of first-hand knowledge.  The closest I ever came to the inner-city was Grand Blanc Middle School, which is a suburb of Flint.  The main difference, and forgive my bluntness, was that at this school, there were black kids, and Latino kids at well.  At least one third of that school was non-white, and outside of that, I’ve never gone to a school where there were more than maybe 10 non-white students out of 500-1000.

 Today, I’m going to focus on the topic of vouchers.  You know—the thing where, if you want to send your child to a private school, the government will give you the money.  On the propents side, you have the fact that there are many schools, especially in the inner-city, that really aren’t very good—but if you decide to send your child to a private school to get them out of that environment, you lose the money that would have otherwise been spent on them by the government.  There is also the idea that competition would help public schools.  The Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman puts it thus on his website:

Public schools pay attention when school choice is on the table. For example, even in Florida, site of the country’s newest voucher program, schools identified as failing are already publicizing their efforts to improve by hiring more teachers, increasing funds for after-school tutoring and lowering class sizes. One superintendent, Earl Lennard, even vowed publicly to take a five percent pay cut if any of his county’s schools received a failing grade. . .

On the opposing side, you have the idea that vouchers are going to deprive schools of much needed funding, and that vouchers would just reinforce the failure of failure of failing schools.  There is also the notion that vouchers would essentially break the first amendment by giving government money to parochial schools who would use the money for non-secular purposes—a voucher proposal in Florida was struck down for just this reason.  There is also concern that private schools could simply ignore certain voucher students once admitted, as in this editorial from the Salt Lake Tribune in Utah, where there is currently a voucher proposal in the state congress:

While private schools are a rational alternative for many students, they are not the solution for the challenges facing the public’s educational system. It is more than likely that a private school wouldn’t bother with difficult, low-achieving or differently challenged students in the first place. Being private, they simply don’t have to.

Personally, I’m not sure what to think.  It seems that, when given the option, many inner-city parents do want the option, or will at least take advantage on it.  For example, in Milwaukee, where there is an extensive voucher program, over 100 million dollars has gone to vouchers, and, if the students in the program were counted as their own school district, they would be the 6th biggest school district in Wisconson.  I have seen varying opinions on whether the program works or not.

 That’s all for now.  I may return to this topic later though.

A First Post

Okay, I’m in.  Er…not a lot of time for introductions.  I’m Kevin.  Most people think I’m a little peculiar.  As far as my topic goes—I’d like to cover language variation in teaching English (i.e., BVA, dialect in general).  I’ve done this sort of topic before, and I’d like to do a bit more study, if I can.