Category Archives: education

Fall 2008 Evaluations

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I have previously written about my regular practice of having students evaluate me as their teacher at the end of each term. In an effort to encourage others at Manual to do the same thing, I am posting the entirety of the 19 evaluations I received this year. I realize this sample size is smaller than in the past. However, with the number of crossover students taking both my 11th and 12th grade classes, this number represents approximately half of the individual students I currently had enrolled. The prompt I asked students to respond to, once finishing their final was:

Evaluation: This is the end of your 2nd mester of English, you will not have any more English classes this year. Please write down what you think could be most improved about this class for future students. What do you think was least helpful in your development as a reader, writer, and critical thinker? What do you think was most interesting or most helpful? How can Mr. Garcia be a better teacher? Do you have anything else you would like to say? Please do not put your name on this evaluation.

I’ll also add that since many students were pressed for time, polishing off their final writing assignment, this too made the sample size what it currently is – something I will actively attempt to improve the next time around. I occasionally hear of other teachers wary of evaluations or visits from administrators or other visitors. My feelings on the matter are that my classroom has an open door for anyone willing to be a part of our class community. That being said, I hold myself most accountable to those I consider the true “boss” in the Ed. system: my students. I think if we’re really going to value their educational needs their voices and concerns should be listened to on a regular basis.

All of the samples can be found as a Word doc here. While I’m not attempting to offer any kind of rationale for the positive or negative statements some students made, I did want to reflect on some of the things I’ve learned from these evaluations. Yes some of these are positive and some are negative, but the point of this initial half of the post is to really offer up a transparent view of these evaluations. [Since this probably isn’t of interest to everyone, simply click after this section if you’d like to see these reflections.] Continue reading →

Humanities 2.0

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On Monday, I spoke briefly as part of a panel titled “Humanities 2.0: Participatory Learning in an Age of Technology” at the MLA conference in San Francisco. Along with Black Cloud collaborator Greg Niemeyer, the other panelists included Cathy Davidson, Howard Rhiengold, Todd Presner with Zita Nunes chairing the panel.

In addition to getting to hear updates about other MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition winners’ projects, the panel explored what kinds of educational opportunities are either afforded or compromised by technological advance (a distinction established by one’s individual disposition toward things like social networking … see below). Howard Rheingold (pictured speaking in the background above, his hat in the foreground) gave a useful overview of his Social Media Classroom. Meanwhile it is exciting to see the possibilities for collaboration with Todd Presner’s Hypercities mapping project. Aside from the collaborative aspects, I’m seeing direct in-classroom use with Hypercities; it is accessible enough for my students and can fit in nicely with the graffiti mapping they have done in the past.

Primarily, the time in the panel Greg and I had was spent discussing and describing the work done via the Black Cloud game. However, my thoughts wandered throughout the discussions. From a critical perspective, I imagine Humanities 2.0 as an opportunity to get things right for our students. In imagining a 1.0 version of the Humanities, I imagine a privileged topography not all that accessible to my segregated students of color. In this sense, I would hope for Humanities 2.0, and its laborious steps toward the embrace of technology, to actually treat these students respectfully. Literally, it is an opportunity to restore humanity in the Humanities. I say that not to be pedantic but from a Freirean critique of disenfranchised, static learning models. In her opening remarks, Cathy Davidson helped expand the notion of Humanities 2.0 beyond simply an endorsement or utilization of technology; she discussed “humanistic attention to race, class, and gender.” For us to think of a more inclusive Humanities, H2O will need to start here.

A few days prior to the conference, I sat in an airport plagued by holiday travel conditions and read two short texts, both appropriate to the discussion of the H2O.

Walter Mosely’s Life Out Of Context helps expand notions of genre and accessibility for the Humanities. For instance, Mosley turns to the often-overlooked value of science fiction as a place of possibilities:

This form of fiction has many different ways of pulling us out of our everyday mindsets and putting us into contemplative modes. For instance, a book of this sort might move your consciousness fifty years into the future or a hundred years back. From that point of view, we can look back (or forward) at ourselves with the imposed objectivity of a removed narrator.

In discussing educational inequality with my students, our community of learners often gets to a place of increasing frustration and finds difficulty finding the steps toward actually changing the reality of unequal schooling. The notion of projection is one that I think helps unravel the limitations within the present day. The Ecotopias that the students created at the end of the LA iteration of the Black Cloud, for instance, remind students about actions they need to take now in order to realize their role as agents of change.

The second text read in the Burbank airport, Charles Homer Haskins’ The Rise of Universities traces the 12th and 13th century lineage of the modern-day higher education system. An entertaining overview, I am drawn to the role that students were placed within these early academies and parallels to their role in schools today. Describing the text of a student manual for early German university students, Haskins writes:

When the young man arrives he registers for Ulm; his parents are in moderate circumstances; he has come to study. He is then duly hazed after the German fashion, which treats the candidate as an unclean beast with horns and tusks which must be removed by officious fellow-students, who also hear his confession of sin and fix as the penance a good dinner for the crowd.

As we generally think of the networks of people and information made more readily accessible when discussion all things 2.0, I continue to dwell on the fact that this gate continues to remain shut for my students (I realize this issue is making me sound like a broken record on this blog); their cell phones and MySpaces the horns and tusks to be removed by “officious” schooling professionals. Yes, the Black Cloud members temporarily jumped over this obstacle via Twitter, but I get nothing but raised eyebrows and annoyed huffs when discussing cell phone use and social networking with the skeptics in the secondary education world.

A general curmudgeon-ish comment that was voiced at the end of the panel was in regards to the lack of “critical thinking” that is sacrificed in exchange for online, social activities. That is, ‘Those blogs and forums and videos and images are neat, but kids aren’t really thinking all that hard, are they?’ I get frustrated by comments like this as they feel like they come from a person only limitedly, skeptically experiencing what these new medias are offering. A brief analysis of this discussion as it took place in the panel can be found here. Jame Paul Gee’s breakdown of Pokemon in Situated Language and Learning helps demonstrate the complex systems and thinking involved by video games and networking and all of those things some educators see as wastes of time. Similarly, when addressing this question at the MLA conference, I mentioned that the educational system in general – at least in my context as a high school English teacher – doesn’t promote critical thinking skills. Standardized testing, high school exit exams, and the general low expectations our school system places on students encourages a minimum of critical thinking.

Finally, another commentor at the panel mentioned that in a college course she taught, she found limited success in implementing forums. Students simply weren’t posting regularly without it being a course requirement. This, too, is a challenge answered by Gee. Forums are “affinity spaces” for a community with an invested interest in furthering expertise. As a student, I’m not going to post on a forum unless I have a personal interest in giving and taking away from the discussion. Even if your course is about popular culture students will not participate unless they are actively engaged in the material. This is one of the key problems with the occasional classrooms I observe: just because you, as the teacher, are bringing in hip-hop or a popular TV show does not mean your students are going to engage beyond the minimum amount that they do on a regular basis. Unless students see themselves as participants with a specific purpose and motivation, forums, blogs, and other social networking becomes simply another hoop to be jumped through.

McKenzie Wark points toward the “Hacker Class” as including anyone involved in creating intellectual property. I imagine this as the critical and “legitimate” route for my students to become participants in humanities and academia in general. However, I also think of the multiple definitions entailed in “hack”: to gain both illegitimate access to something as well as to be seen in a pejorative light as creator of lowbrow work. Sure, both of these are definitions beyond the intentions of Wark’s original label. They are, though, useful in seeing the way a larger stream of poor students of color will be viewed in the post-secondary landscape.

Facebook: Something about Putting One’s Money Where One’s Mouth Is

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Having maintained a MySpace page for my students for nearly three years at this point, updated a blog on an occasional basis, toyed with twitter, and tinkered with wikis, I’ve been long overdue to join Facebook. My reluctance, primarily, comes from the fact that Facebook still hasn’t tipped with my students. They still rely on MySpace – only one of my former students has been spotted on the site. That being said, it feels way too hypocritical to be spouting off about the values of social networking without actually … you know dabbling in it. I’m already interested in the possibilities of “groups” on Facebook – made one for future class use. Of course, Facebook is blocked by our district, but we’ll find a way to get kids on the site.

“Within an avalanche of glory hallelujah skybreaks”: The Beyond Pedagogy Epilogue

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“The game as I conceive it,” Knecht once wrote, “leaves (the player) with the feeling that he has extracted from the universe of accident and confusion a totally symmetrical and harmonious cosmos, and absorbed it into himself.”

    – Magister Ludi, Hermann Hesse

Abstract
This lengthy document begins with a discussion of the political act of conversing. It offers a meek-mannered confession and detailed explanation of said confession. It reviews the interactions of a reading group and then veers into another more stodgy confession: that the entire document is actually a call to action. By the end of this document, readers are encouraged to continue the work that stands Beyond Pedagogy and to pick up pens (or pound at keyboards) to find authentic educational change beyond the unhygienic standing water language pools that we so constantly wade through in today’s professional development models. You’ve been warned.*

*For those wary to jump into the entire document below, the Beyond Pedagogy group is now concluded. Future iterations of similar groups will commence in the near future. Those individuals interested in participating are encouraged to contact me (I’m not necessarily organizing new groups but can encourage and connect interested participants).

On Conversation
There’s something to be said for conversation removed from explicit purpose. That, in sitting down with a regimented agenda, a series of protocols beyond social niceties, and a timeline, there is a very definite loss in productivity. This may sound counterintuitive, however, think about the way a conversation unfolds with colleagues at lunch, in the car with a friend, over wine and starters at a restaurant; our natural inclination is of waywardness. We – as dialoguers – meander from point to point. Yes, these examples are ones without specific goals set in mind; however, they are the ways we develop, critique, and experience understandings and ideologies of the world around us.

Further, it is important to point out that such conversations, though void of standard meeting procedural paraphernalia, are not without vision. For all of us, a conversation is a moment of contention, of ideological territory being sniffed out, a moment of invested interest. We gain and procure through dialogue – a deafening yet invisible economy. Like the act of teaching, each discussion, each joke passed, each question echoed, is a political act. In voicing an “um,” a “like,” an ill-tempered or sardonic guffaw, we put ourselves on the line for judgment.

This rumbling of verbosity leads me to “an overwhelming question” (to quote Eliot): “Why not?” That is, why not remove the walls and pillars of organization from professional discourse? Even temporarily? As mentioned, we are all clearly invested in a common interest that arrives en masse on our campuses each morning (some members being tardy) and strives for some sort of decency in its education. Continue reading →

“‘Cause everybody hates a tourist, especially one who thinks it’s all such a laugh”

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So in my occasional reality TV binging, I stumbled across a monstrosity. It’s on Fox (surprise!). It’s called Secret Millionaire and it makes me genuinely uncomfortable to watch. Of course I plan to use it in my classroom!

The premise is simple: get rich, privileged folk to mingle with those in “extreme poverty” for a week and then give to those individuals that they feel are most in need. Here are the actual lines displayed at the beginning of each episode with a couple of quotes from one episode:

For one week So and So will live undercover in poverty.

They will leave their possessions and identities at home.

People will be told that So and So are involved in a documentary about poverty.
They will have to survive on a welfare budget of $107.

“I’m really nervous about the story I’m going to tell people because it’s not true. I am a multi-millionaire trying to pose as an average Joe.”

“I guess my biggest fear is about safety.”

Maybe it’s the “scary” and the “sad” music that’s played when these millionaires first visit their temporary new homes. Maybe it’s the way that the poor are a sob story and two or three families become aw-shucks-feet-washing-idolaters for deceitful benefactors with open checkbooks. Maybe it’s the horrendous, stereotypical formula of the ghettoized neighborhood that reveals a few beautiful gems that deserve reward.

Part of why I’m fascinated by reality television is because it’s so far away from actual everyday experiences. There are these amazing fictions being constructed in the mundane that are interesting to look at. I like knowing about this microcosm of infighting on some island in Survivor. Or if that hem will hold on Project Runway. Or if the flight will be booked on the Amazing Race.* The problem is, I feel really uncomfortable watching the caricature of “poverty” that is edited for the prime time Fox audience. Suddenly, this reality feels a bit less familiar and a bit less lighthearted.

Looking at the show on iTunes (I’m downloading the episode where a husband and wife dare to live in Watts for a week for class discussion), I’m even more concerned by the types of comments made on the show:


We’ll see what the kids of South LA think about Secret Millionaire next week.
*Speaking of the Amazing Race, after seeing Slumdog Millionaire (another Millionaire?!?), I’m pretty sure that the reason the Amazing Race spends at least two episodes in India each season is because it’s easy to show cultural practices that look “crazy” to us westerners. Similarly, the sheer density of the cities used makes even us Angelinos gape in amazement at the insane life “over there.” I’d imagine I’d have as visceral a reaction to these episodes (and their constant reliance on the country as the “crazy country” trope) as I do to Secret Millionaire if I actually lived in Mumbai.

When Critical Goes Too Far: Let’s Discuss

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This started as what was going to be an email to a colleague. However, I’m thinking that posing this as a discussion maybe a more fruitful dialogic exercise.

My situation is as follows: I have a class of upstanding and exceedingly bright individuals. These students regularly point the way toward large-scale change but hesitate at taking the small step (humongous dive?) toward action. In any case, I recently used the song “Police State” by Dead Prez as the beginning of a writing assignment. It’s a song I’ve used in the past and one that kids generally enjoy (though hip-hop is not at all the apriori musical preference of my students). However, after the experiences and reflections of the lockdown, of critical analysis of the election, and after a lengthy review of Critical Race Theory, I think something snapped … in a good way. The kids are way engaged and on-board the Critical Theory train. They regularly use the word “proletariat” (as it’s mentioned in the song) to describe the conditions of the campus. Students discuss if racism or classism is the bigger issue at hand. A student is writing an essay talking about how Obama is going to be a part of “the problem”.

So on the one hand, I’m thrilled – the kids are vocalizing their concerns from a clear, “Critical” (with a big “C”) stance. They’re bringing up their own topics for our daily discussions. They looked at this video, for instance, and were able to empathize and critique the key arguments made. One student is providing the class with additional resources, such as this video he’s asked to screen tomorrow.

And so my query for you is about this: It may seem odd, but I’m worried that my kids are a little too critical. They are heading toward being too one-sided in the dogma they endorse.

I plan to rectify this; I have had some teaching peers preaching the concepts of critical pedagogy but not quite executing them. Instead, I see their students as mindlessly unengaged in their thinking due to the totalism these “progressive” teachers impose. So, that being said, I have specific ideas on how to balance the theoretical base of my students. However (and although I will likely only hear from one or two of you), I’d like to open this post up as a collaborative space for discourse. Do you see a need to fix this situation? How would you approach it? What’s your take on the process of critical discourse in your classroom?

(As for the  picture – here are some anthropologists of the future – specifically the year 2158 – doing fieldwork and observations at the ancient site of Manual Arts High School circa 2008. Taking notes, these anthropologists were asked to stay as quiet and reserved as possible as the natives do not like being disturbed.)

“An Alchemical Transformation”: J.S.G. Boggs and the Convergence of Art and Money and Pedagogy

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The reason you need to read Boggs: A Comedy of Values is because it changes the way you see the world. That’s as simply as I can put it. It’s not a new book. It’s a slight tome, under 150 pages of narrative juice. However, the book and the artist at the heart of the account are too entertaining to simply pass on.

Before jumping into why J. S. G. Boggs matters to you, I should probably say that Lawrence Weschler is one of my favorite non-fiction writers. He’s written about my favorite places in the city and his series of convergences strike at the heart of what the Beyond Pedagogy reading group was striving for. Weschler knows how to tell an entertaining story, even if it is occasionally a cerebral one. When I think favorably about the work in the New Yorker, it’s often that its one of the few mainstream places for long-form journalism to spread its wings; I think of that Professor Seagull account, of the early ‘90s two-parter on surfing with “Doc” in San Francisco, of Trillian’s description of Kenny Shopsin, of the magic that is Ricky Jay, and I think of Weschler’s work at large. As a writer, it was these long pieces that influenced what I wanted to write and how I wanted to approach a story. I also realized that my limitations in terms of patience and – frankly – skill in execution meant that such efforts should be largely left to more focused scribes. Nevertheless, sometimes while listening to the manic squabble of Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards, or maybe witnessing the frantic scratches for sound at one of the infinite Jon Brion shows I’ve attended, I imagine great unfolding profiles about looming personalities I hope to read (or, as Zappa said, “He not only dreams imaginary guitar notes, but, to make matters worse, dreams imaginary vocal parts to a song about the imaginary journalistic profession”).

With that out of the way, here’s what you should know about Boggs: he’s an artist. Mainly, he creates drawings and paintings of and about money. As a result, he’s been arrested and involved in numerous lawsuits for counterfeiting currency: U.S. currency, British pounds, Australian notes.

Actually, these drawings aren’t even what Boggs considers his art. Instead, he’ll take a drawing of, say, a ten-dollar note (of course only drawn on one side of paper) and attempt to “spend it.” For instance, he might take it to a restaurant and see if his meal can be bought with the ten-dollar picture. In exchange, Boggs expects a receipt and any change left from the transaction (an $8.45 meal would require the person involved in the exchange to actually pay Boggs $1.55). This transaction and its verifying documents is Boggs’ art. In the art market such Boggs paintings often go for thousands of dollars, but Boggs prefers making these transactions with people that aren’t familiar with his reputation.

Reading about this process was thrilling. I started thinking about long-term implications this can have on classroom practice, on replication and authenticity, on the palimpsest-ual allure of spending images of those things that are to be spent (palimpsest being a word I’ve been returning to in my thinking of late). I’m still thinking through these ideas and cannot offer any new insights, but Weschler offers a useful entry point:

Boggs had almost accidentally stumbled upon the terrain but then decided to pitch his tent there along the fault line where art and money abut and overlap – and his current work has definite ramifications in both directions. The questions it raises start out as small perturbations: How is this drawing different from its model (this bill)? Would you accept it in lieu of this bill? If so, why? If not, why not? But they quickly expand (as you think about them, as you savor them) into true temblors: What is art? What is money? What is the one worth, and what the other? What is worth worth? How does value itself arise, and live, and gutter out?

Later in one of the book’s closing sections, Weschler describes one of Boggs more ambitious extensions of his conceptual art. This too allows me to consider the role of participation and teacher-learners in a Freirean frame. It’s all too tempting, I suspect, to write off what Boggs is doing as purely theoretical or art-practice only. I am, however, now reviewing the education terrain in my class because of silly thumbprints and five-dollar notes in the Boggs-o-verse:

… Boggs informed me one afternoon toward the end of 1992, he’d decided to raise the ante considerably. He was about to embark on what he was calling “Project Pittsburgh.” He had fashioned an entirely new edition of Boggs bills – brand-new drawings in denominations ranging from one, five, ten, and twenty dollars on up through ten thousand. He’d laser printed a million dollars “worth” of these bills – enough to fill a bulging suitcase. Starting on January 1, 1993, … he was going to try to spend these bills in his usual fashion, by getting people to accept them knowingly in exchange for goods and services; only this time he’d be adding a new twist: he was going to encourage anyone who accepted his bills to keep them in circulation. This time, he was using the back side of the bills as well: an elaborate lacework design filigreed around five empty circles. Anyone accepting a bill was to immediately press his or her thumbprint into one of the empty circles (“just like being arrested,” Boggs noted, with evident satisfaction), and the bill would not be deemed to have completed its life cycle until it had changed hands five times, acquiring a full complement of thumbprints. “I want others to share in the fascinating experience of trying to get people to accept art as face value,” Boggs said, which expansive generosity. “And I, in turn, want to share in my collectors’ experiences of trying to track these pieces down.” Be that as it may, the practical consequence of Boggs’ experiment was that he was going to be creating five million dollars of value out of nothing – an alchemical transformation likely to provoke the Internal Revenue Service every bit as much as the Secret Service. (Boggs assured me that he stood ready as always to cut the IRS its own fair share of Boggs notes.)

As much as I feel inept about art and the art world, I’d be interested in applying these philosophical constraints to an educational cohort. From experiences during the Black Cloud game, it’s clear that the in-roads that art clears toward learning are ones that students access differently than what paths may be taken in traditional English classes. More than anything, projects like Boggs’ are about the individual’s experience. About being un-situated (in some sort of corollary to Lave and Wenger)and building a re-situated understanding of the world around you.

Rock Replica

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I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while and it’s gotten lost in the chaos that is the paper grading/paper writing shuffle (my dancing shoes were a but scuffled and I’m now getting my rhythm back). In any case, the picture above is not a picture of my attempting to slay at Rock Band. Instead, it’s a photo (and a blurry one at that!) of what I saw while watching MTV two weeks ago. That’s from a broadcasted Rock Band competition.

In the past, I’ve written about MTV’s strategies to move toward a more participatory model of entertainment. It’s interesting to see the simulacrum of this newer model of participation. Yes, you can still go online and interact with the contestants, discuss the show, and offer other online splatter to the digital mess. However, let’s think about this… Music? Check. Television? Check. Except that, oh yeah, no one is actually playing a real instrument. Sure, the drummer is drumming in time and the singer is fluctuating his or her vocal cadence appropriately (and the guitar and bassists are – like – thumbing that bar-button at the right time), but is there actual musical talent in this? Not necessarily. In any case, I’m fascinated by this latest development. It reminds me of the “Replica Replica, After W. R. H.” component of the Machine Project Field Guide to LACMA.

On a final note, you’ll notice from a few links in this post – like others – that I’ve been frequently linking back to my own previous posts. This isn’t necessarily a tactic of self-promotion or some weird meta-ones-up-manship. Instead, I’m interested in how I can network my own ideas together a running kind of dialogue. I’ve come to accept that I don’t write linearly (to this respect, adopting Scrivener to complete this quarter’s writing projects was an absolute life saver!). I remember taking the four-part English CSET exam while getting my teaching credential. Over the two or three hours I spent taking the test I randomly shuffled between the four different test booklets and corresponding answer documents. I recall clearly (which for me is a rarity these days!) finishing all four tests within minutes of one another: adding a sentence here, bubbling in over here, crossing off another option in this booklet, etc. I know that research proves one cannot multi-task. However, I’m not sure I can even uni-task all that well … parsing my thoughts out one blog post at a time and finding the line (thin as it may be) back to point of origin may be the best setup going for me at the moment.

Discussing Macbeth Today

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Me: Please make sure you’ve underlined the passage: “For none of woman born shall harm Macbeth.”
Student: Mr. Garcia, this has nothing to do with the play, but what is up with that pregnant man?
Me: … Actually, that question has a lot to do with what we’re reading…

And so began a great in-class tangent about how the progeny of the pregnant man pose a serious threat to Macbeth, just like his foe Macduff. Also covered in the discussion: differences between sex and gender, the significance of the play’s second apparition appearing as a bloody child, and speculation about if the pregnant man has a “peter-deter*.”

*Student term, not mine.