Digits in the Digital Realm

It's been a long time since my fingers tapped the keyboard, hoping to share a thought or two with the digital world.  This does not necessarily mean that the woman who claims to live forever suddenly died.  No chance.  

One wonders how long a blog can sustain its original intent. I notice many of my friends from a year ago are either gone totally, or, like I, have lost the ability to maintain regular postings.  I can't speak for them, but for me, I must say the inspiration hasn't left me, but I have been suffering, acutely, the demands placed upon anyone who works in an industry (ha! Education. ha!) where the employer is trying harder and harder to get fewer workers to do more work for less.  End of excuses.  The intent of my blog isn't gone either; it was and is to talk about life and eternity.  Well, what the hell, there has to be more to say about that, though it may come through a different perspective now.  Here's what tumbled out of my fingers today.  It's not a prophecy.  It's not my best work either.  But I think it's funny, in a way.

*

We've lived past the end of time,

and into a time when days are endless;

when pain stabs so deep that it is

painless, and you and I 

live in the digits

of a realm ethereal.

I'll meet you at the cyber cafe

at the intersection of Mars

and Lars (a lusty

sailor who came into port one day

only to get lost

in the stars) .  There

I'll sit drinking vodka, wearing a 

retainer designed to keep my 

knees from dropping.  It's best that way.

I know you came

to my door and rang and knocked

more than once, you even shouted, and I hid

on the third floor and watched you

from my window walk away.  You 

should know better.  Don't

come back another day.  Instead, book

mark me on your smartphone; in this domain,

don't go away.  Here, I linger always,

answer feedback, 

and replay.

Tomorrow, yesterday, and today.

Labor Days Ahead

Alas,

the garden goddess is overwhelmed by the height of summer,

and I,

am returning to teaching

after a long sabbatical.

Tomorrow.

Alas.

Much of my word energy over the past few months has gone

to an article I am writing about

how No Child Left Behind

and other educational reforms

have created a generation of American college students

who are way far behind.

Tomorrow, I head back to classrooms full of 'em again.

My particular focus is on student writing.

Believe me, it's very difficult to teach writing

when you'd rather be writing.

I can theorize away about the problem,

but when faced with a class full of angry young people,

my words, and skills, wain.

Because these students are ANGRY.

Our youth KNOW they have not been educated.

They KNOW it's all been a farce,

and they are amused by teachers 

and administrators

who perpetuate it.

By their first year of university, in fact,

they expect all teachers to be overworked to a point that the students simply are spoonfed

what they need to know to pass the test.

So these dear untutored and undisciplined students get angry

when a teacher actually asks them to be responsible for their own learning.

ehow-college stress

I don't blame them,

or their teachers,

but I sure have my theories

on who to blame.

Hold on tight --

I may vent here.

Tonight,

this Labor Day night,

my thoughts and prayers go out to all

the teachers in the world,

burdened by testing and assessments so overwhelming

that they get in the way

of teaching.

Dear Karen Klein, Please Retire

via bullyingproject

I'm writing this off of the top of my head, so it may be messy,

but today I saw some of the video of the bullying that occurred

on a school bus in Rome, NY  (outside Rochester), and I felt the need

to write something about it, and post it, if only to join in the outrage

against it.

Now if you haven't seen the video, 

and you feel like being sickened,

go on YouTube;

it seems to have gone so viral

that people are reposting it 

for the attention it brings.  

I will not post that video on this blog.

Or you can read this story, from CNN 

The basic details are these:

Four or five middle schoolers on a school bus

taunted, swore at, jeered, made fun of, 

were absolutely nauseatingly awful

to a 68 year old woman named Karen Klein, 

who was on the bus as a monitor.

Someone took a video of it,

and posted the video on You Tube, and it "went viral."

I watched about 30 seconds of that video,

and it made me sick.  Now, the questions bound up in this video

and its "popularity" are many.  To begin, there's the horrifying question

of who raised kids who would act that way?  Yes, I will also blame the kids; I

like so many others who have commented on this, feel they should be

disciplined, severely.  But, as the saying goes: "the apple doesn't fall too

far from the tree."  I'll come back to this thought in a moment.

I also can't help but wonder who took the video?  That person

was sitting right next to the elderly victim, and the video captures

that woman's reaction: she cried; yes, she cried, as her assaulters

commented on her weight, her glasses, her ears (and then I stopped watching).

Why would someone want to capture that woman's reactions to this,

and then post it on YouTube?  Whatever the

motivation, as one You Tube commenter said,

the internet works fast, and no matter what the poster's intent,

within hours there were people all over the world responding to it with horror.

This included a blogger starting a collection to send this woman, Karen Klein,

on a trip.  I sure hope she just retires.

Now, bullying has been around for a very long time,

especially among children.  There's garden variety bullying,

I think, like my sister as a child teasing me because I was fat

(or so she said) or because I had a lazy eye.  That 

often comes from sibling rivalry.

But bullying has become such a huge issue

in the United States in particular.  A few months ago, just down

the road from Rochester, in Buffalo, NY,  a 14 year old boy

became famous because he committed suicide; he could no longer

tolerate the bullying against him. 

This caused a national campaign against bullying,

but did it make any difference?  

The common feeling about the Karen Klein case is that

these young people should be punished,

but would punishing these kids make any difference?

These kids have no respect for authority --

this woman was on the bus as a monitor,

and they attacked her, so punishing them might just

roll off them like water off a spaniel.

Furthermore, it's only a matter of hours before

their parents and other family members start

posting videos about how their poor, innocent child

is so misunderstood.   Which, let me say immediately,

is just a load of bullshit.  Those kids are perfectly understood

to be messed up.

I tend to think that whatever system

produced kids who felt it was ok to harass

an elder needs to be 

examined very carefully, and changed, immediately  --

and that includes calling to task their parents,

or anyone else who led these kids to feel

that they could gain popularity or respect

by harassing other human beings.

I do tend to feel parents are a huge part of

this sad equation of dysfunction: 

what I hear in these young peoples'

jeers are the jeers of an immature father or mother

who bullied their children with similar insults.

The U.S. education system is at fault, too:

it so wrapped up

in teaching kids to pass a test that it

isn't really paying attention to teaching

human dignity.

And then there's the entertainment industry:

the glorification of bullying and ridiculing through figures

such as Gordon Ramsey, Charlie Sheen, or even cartoon

characters (like those on Family Guy) who ridiculously

become models for human interaction.

The problem is very very deep, and it's only going to get worse

unless we all take responsibility for it now.

I'm going to have to teach some of these kids in university,

and I will say right here and now that it's already happening:

a year ago, I had a young woman in a university level English class

who took great delight in taunting me, calling me "stupid" in front of her peers,

and writing on her final course evaluation that I was just ugly

and she hated coming to class and looking at me.

Of course, she never did her classwork, and also

wasted precious class time by asking me, over and over again,

to repeat the requirements of any given assignment.

What gives me the chills is that she is now a year away

from graduation,

with an education degree no less. 

This type of behavior should not be validated

in any way, shape or form. They should not be allowed

to graduate from high school.

They should not be admitted into a college or university.

I'm not sure how to fix this system as quickly

as it needs to be fixed.  So I add my voice to the chorus

of online distress over Karen Klein's sad experience.

Perhaps shame, as this gets broadcast all over the world

by countless bloggers just like me, will be what it will take

for every person in this country to stop being preoccupied

with an election that is costing way too much already,

and put that money into teaching people how 

to be humane, and how

to live in the world.

A Purge on Education in the U.S. of A. (to William Cronan)

Is it Armageddon yet?

As you may know, if you read my blog,

(and if you read this blog, I thank you

for your patience!)

that is my current refrain.

washingtonexaminer

Every morning I wake up listening to the news on 

National Public Radio

(that nasty radio station that the U.S. Government recently voted

to cut funding from (see link above)

and every morning I hear another story

that makes me think,

before I even get out of bed:

"is it Armageddon yet?

I mean, really, 

what do we need to have happen before

we realize that it's time for us

to take responsibility for

the human race, as it sits at this

this challenging historical juncture

we currently are experiencing?

This morning the story was this:

guardian

This friendly looking gentleman,

a certain Professor William Cronan,

a historian at the University of Wisconsin,

was asked by the New York Times

to write an op-ed 

on the history of the State of Wisconsin's Collective Bargaining laws.

And he did.

A day or so later,

he launched a blog that he had been thinking

about for some time, called

Scholar as Citizen,

And there, he wrote an entry on,

to use his words,

"the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in influencing recent legislation in this state and across the country"

(please see the link above for his own

description of, again as he puts it,

"the strange circumstances in which [he] finds [him]self as a result."

Fundamentally, the State of Wisconsin

did not like was Dr. Cronan wrote,

and "request[ed] to view the contents of "Professor William Cronon's state email account from 1 January 2011 to present which reference any of the following terms: Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union [and 12 prominent Republican state senators who supported Walker's bill]".  (this quote is from the Guardian article

from which I snagged the above picture.  Please follow the link above.)

Now, all in all,

I find this to be tremendously 

disturbing,

for a number of reasons:

First, of course, there is that good ol' constitutional right we supposedly have

in the U.S. of A. called Freedom of Speech.  Yes, the same Constitution

that grants us the right to own a small arsenal, also grants us the right

to speak openly.  Indeed, that is our first

Constitutional Right, followed closely by

the Right to Bear Arms. 

 This very first amendment to the U.S. Constitution is one of the many reasons

that for a long time historians and social critics called the United States of America

one of history's greatest social experiments.

My Second Reason for finding this Cronan case

to be absolutely disturbing is because of what it indicates

about the attitude towards Education and the Educated

in this great old United States of America.

Of course, Wisconsin's current place in national headlines began

when their governor, Scott Walker, managed to pass a legislation designed

to disrupt the collective bargaining power of unions for public employees, including teachers.

(This has been followed by the Republican governor of Ohio, John Kasich,

launching a similar attempt to "bust the unions,"

something that my family and friends in Ohio claim he never campaigned on.

The rationale for breaking the power of these unions

that serve public employees is that these individuals

are overpaid anyway, and hey we have to balance
those state budgets, which are,
pretty much like the United States government,
flirting with bankruptcy.

This attempt to dismantle the pay structure, which includes threatening the retirement
funds for thousands of individuals who have been sweating over our youth for decades
is being fueled by an anecdotal public claim that teachers don't do their jobs well,

and get their summers off, so why pay them 

so much????  After all, look at the state of American education!
It's the teachers' fault our youth are doing so badly, right?

Well, I'll tell ya what:

some of my best friends are teachers

in public systems,

and those people work their hearts out:

facing increasing learning disabilities and disruptions in the classroom,
working in often poorly funded facilities,
up early to prepare and greet students who often come
from emotionally challenging family situations,
up until late, late hours doing assessment paperwork,

struggling to get students to pass tests on material that the students

rather rapidly forget . . . the list goes on.   We don't need to take money and job security

away from most of these teachers, 

we need to make them all saints.

Education is the sole most important industry in the United States right now,

if we are to produce intelligent, creative and open-minded global citizens for tomorrow,

and we are yanking money away from it,

and belittling those who do it,
and those who question the system
and want to make it better.

Sadly, those students who were impacted by the

No Child Left Behind Legislation,

which is largely responsible for the current emphasis

on assessment in our country, are now arriving in

colleges and universities, which of course,

is where I teach, and have taught,

since 1985.

The students themselves realize

rather rapidly

that their high school education did not prepare them.

(I have a student right now working on that topic

for the researched argument he is required to write.

His colleagues all agree with him.)

So if High School doesn't prepare you for college today, what does it do?

I asked him today.

It teaches you to take tests,

was his response.  And, he added It's a zoo!  Too much
of a popularity contest.   His classmates
all nodded in agreement.

The United States of America has, historically, housed the finest Higher Education system

in the world.  This is why we have attracted scholars from all over the world.

This is also why, for a time, American scholars like myself got jobs in universities

in other countries.  It was our job to import that unique brand of

"critical thinking" that has become the hallmark of the American system for over the past

thirty to forty years.

Recognizing that honing the ability to think critically and creatively

produces new thoughts and advancements in every branch

of thinking, scholars have come to our shores, and now

we are exporting our education, at a profit to our 

institutions of higher education.

nyuabudhabi

It is precisely in the spirit of good ol' American

critical thinking that the good Dr. Cronan

developed his blog,

and it is precisely that practice 

that the State Government of Wisconsin

is threatening by demanding his e-mails.

As my fingers move on this keyboard, I worry

even for myself.  I know from my own current

experiences, (I have taught abroad, and I am currently teaching
both American college students

and Chinese students who are here for their first

year abroad) that the rest of the world is surpassing us,

quickly, in terms of general knowledge as well as

critical and creative thinking, not to mention

a mastery of the English language.)  And we,

meanwhile, are busy creating a system that 

distrusts Academics and Educators on all levels.

And our young people are suffering from it.

Well, I say,

God Bless you, Dr. Cronan;

fight for your right

for personal freedom.

I will support you unabashedly,

and pray that we can all wake up

right now, and see

we've gone too far.

We have to give up these old
worn out partisan battles
and set our priorities straight.

Right?

Or may it is Armageddon,
at least for the U.S.A.,
now.