There is one other resource that I would recommend. As additional protest groups spring up around the country, including the Stop the Machine and Occupy DC groups that have been protesting in Washington DC since Thursday, one can not assume that all these groups share the same goals, including the consensus-based decision making of Occupy Wall Street. However, they mostly share a commitment to non-violent protests. So when there was a confrontation with guards at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum on Saturday that ended with the museum being closed, I was surprised, because that didn't seem to be in keeping with the group's typical mode of operation.
However, the often-insightful Wonkbook blog in the Washington Post reported this interesting fact: one of the leaders in the charge through the guards into the museum was, in fact, an assistant editor of the conservative magazine, American Spectator. In his original story on this event, the journalist, Patrick Howley, wrote that he had represented himself as being in favor of the protests, saying “As far as anyone knew I was part of this cause — a cause that I had infiltrated the day before in order to mock and undermine in the pages of The American Spectator.”
I added the bold to emphasize that Howley had no intention to be honest, to represent himself as a journalist, to learn, or to report objectively, or even subjectively from his conservative viewpoint. Apparently even The American Spectator disapproves of such a blatant admission of bias, since it has since edited that part out of the story, which you can read on their website. However, you can read the unedited version of Howley's story here. Howley concludes his article dismissing the entire movement as being wimps, because he was the only one who evaded the guards after being pepper sprayed and entered the building. He doesn't seem to consider the fact that he was the only one who was breaking...I don't know if it is the law? but at least the power and the authority of the national government, and that maybe others didn't follow not because they lacked the courage, but because of their commitment to lawful and peaceful protests.
So I am not saying that this assault upon the museum can be blamed on Howley. I have no idea what happened, not having been there, and there hasn't been much coverage of the episode. But this is a great teaching point for students to not just accept everything they read or they hear. When something seems a little strange, like the attack upon the museum seemed to me, dig a little deeper. And it is a great reminder that we need to research our sources as we make up our minds about things.
I don't know about you, but I've been having a hard time explaining the Occupy Wall Street movement to my middle schooler because I haven't completely understood it myself. I don't think the mainstream media has done a great job reporting on what this movement is really all about, preferring to focus on the "sizzle" (growing numbers, celebrity drop-bys, the variety of issues and outfits among participants, etc.) rather than the substance.
However, I found an NPR podcast that I think gives a better background about what is really significant about these protests. Things may seem disorganized and unfocused to outsiders because while participants disagree about what the MOST egregious problems in modern American policy are, they all agree that we need an entirely different PROCESS to address them. So while they may all be protesting different specific issues, they are united in not only discussing, but in demonstrating, a different system for making decisions, setting policy, and even allocating resources in a fairer, more democratic, and ultimately better way.
But listen to the enclosed just over 20 minutes podcast to hear a better explanation, including the theory behind a different way to run our entire production system that is known as "participatory economics:"
Plus, come back tomorrow for a teachable moment around this weekend's protest news.
The leading contender so far for my top pick for the next Newbery Award for the best book for 10-14 year olds this year is Gary Schmidt's Okay For Now. This is just a lovely, lovely book that, to me, is all about making a difference in other people's lives. This is not the big, action-oriented "making a difference" of leading the charge against a repressive and brutal regime, or a gang of murderous vampires/werewolves/zombies/aliens/other monstrous creatures, or the dark wizard or whatever else wants to take over the universe, which is so popular among YA literature these days. No, this book deals with the difference we can make in small, quiet ways, with our friends, our neighbors, our colleagues, and especially for us teachers, our students.
The protagonist of Okay For Now was one of the characters in Schmidt's previous Newbery Honors-winning The Wednesday Wars, and is written in much the same style as that book, which was also wonderful. But I think Okay For Now is even better written, with even more interesting characters and a more compelling story. It is also darker, as it deals with domestic abuse and returning veterans having to deal with the aftermath of having been in combat (although there is little violence described in the text itself). However, it makes the story even more uplifting, as people find a way to work their way through such challenging circumstances.
The main character, 14 year old Doug Swieteck, begins the book as an unlikely hero. Although new to town, he is quickly judged by many of his teachers and customers of his once-a-week delivery services on the basis of his abusive father and thuggish brother, who is suspected of theft. But a kindly librarian notices his interest in a display in the library of a book of original Audubon plates of birds, and teaches the teenager how to draw each one. His analysis of each separate illustration, which he now views with an artist's eye, gives Doug an insight into the people and situations occurring around him. Eventually, they lead him on a noble but seemingly quixotic quest that has the potential to transform not only his life, but a number of the other people in his town as well.
Schmidt writes Doug in a way that sounds like an actual teenager, and sets things up so things never become preachy or sanctimonious. Rather, it is a series of small episodes where ordinary people can choose to do the right thing or to do the wrong thing, and most of the time, they do the write thing. In some ways, it is sort of like reading a modern teen novel equivalent of Norman Rockwell pictures, which glorified the average man/woman and captured common, everyday American life as something to be celebrated. And, of course, I was sure to be hooked because two of the institutions that contribute the most to this redemptive tale are libraries and schools--not today's quantitative data-driven schools, of course, but our ideal of old fashioned schools where teachers had the ability to know their students well enough to realize what each one needed, and the flexibility to adapt their curriculum to provide such individual attention. As I have written in a previous post, there is one passage that I think beautifully encapsulates what education SHOULD be, even if it seldom seems to be what it is these days.
Plus, the whole Audubon angle is just such an unique and beautiful device. You wouldn't think it would pull today's middle schoolers in, but Schmidt handles it just perfectly.
So I can definitely recommend this for a middle school audience, for an older YA audience, and for adults. I think it is a particularly great book for educators, because it demonstrates the potential we have to crush a student's spirit, or to help a student to grown wings and fly, which is a worthy choice to get to make every day we teach.
Among this year's recipients of the so-called "genius grants" by the MacArthur Foundation, which give promising unconventional achievers in diverse fields $500,000 with no strings attached to apply to their work, is education economist Roland G. Fryer, Jr. Fryer is the founder and director of Harvard University's Education Innovation Laboratory and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His work has concentrated on trying to explain and address the educational achievement gaps among minority students.
Clearly, that is an important topic worthy of funding. And Fryer has been involved in many different studies. But what I found really interesting about this grant is that Fryer's arguably most significant studies where two that showed that financial incentives (i.e., paying people for higher test scores) DID NOT WORK. In the first study, they tried offering more money to teachers for higher test scores; in the second, they did the same thing for students. In neither case, however, did the money do anything to improve educational achievement (as measured by test scores, at least).
Here is a great quote by Fryer in talking about how these studies have radically changed his ideas of trying to improve education by linking higher compensation to higher scores:
"Economists always assume people know how to produce something. Incentives work if you are lazy, not if you don't know how to do something. So that's spawned some new theoretical ideas for me. What if people don't know how to produce something? What do optimal incentives look like in that environment?"
I just think this is a great point to hear in our recent environment of blaming educational problems on bad teacher and evil teacher unions. As I've said often before, we need to stop trying to impose the business model on schools, because education is not the same as just trying to sell more widgets. Outstanding education, particularly during a time when more than one child out of every five is living in poverty, is a complex and ever-changing business. Tying teacher pay directly to test scores is only likely to exacerbate the situation, because it drives teachers who need the extra salary money to move from high poverty schools, where the test scores may depend on how many of the children taking the test even had enough food in the past day to be able to focus on the exam, to the schools they know kids are likely to perform better, just on their life circumstances alone.
In short, it is NOT that teachers are lazy (OK, maybe some are, but not most). It's that nobody knows how to consistently improve the many different factors that can inhibit educational achievement. Dangling financial carrots in front of them for higher test scores has been shown to be useless at best, and insulting, morale sapping, and counterproductive at worst.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out this is a failing policy.
We are doing 20th century history this year, spending a month on each decade. So we are doing 1910-1920 during October. Something that occurred during that decade is one of my son's fascination for years now--the sinking of the Titanic.
So I was looking around, and found some rare video footage of the Titanic as it was being built in Belfast. As far as I can tell, this is the only video footage of the ship (at least before it was underwater) that we can find, at least via the Internet.
So watch the video below to see the ship that was to become the thing of legend, not for its technological prowess for the times (which it was), but for its failure and sinking:
I always think that a little "of the times" video helps these history topics come alive to middle schoolers.
C-SPAN is sponsoring another giveway to social studies teachers, including homeschoolers. They are giving away one free Electoral College Map poster to any teacher in the continental US who requests one (at least until supplies run out). I haven't received mine yet, but the previous ones I've gotten have been BIG and printed on thick, high-quality paper. So it should last you through the 2012 elections, which is its intended use.
The map reflects the 2010 census figures, and also includes some Election 2012 dates as well as some historic results. So it should generate a good deal of discussion on its own.
I plan to do a lot of education around the 2012 elections in the coming year, so this is a great resource for us. I hope it may be helpful to you as well.
I'm still on the Steve Jobs theme, because I'm afraid our world has just lost one of its creative lights. I've been telling bits of this story to different people all day, so I thought maybe I would just tell it all at once and put it out there for everyone to access.
Also, when I say it is MY story on Steve Jobs, that means that it is my interpretation of his life path. I don't have any particular or personal insight into the man, having never met him--although I did at least get to see him speak at a conference once. Rather, this is my telling of the story of Steve Job's trajectory, filtered through what I know and where I was as I, too, was encountering the new world of computers and networking and digital arts, etc. I do not claim it to be true. But I offer it up as one tale of a man who can teach us a lot through the way he lived, regardless of whether his technologies had ever worked out or not.
His life did not start off especially auspiciously. He was born out of wedlock, and given up for adoption by a middle class couple living in California. Like the other man who most shaped the computer environment through the end of the 20th century, Bill Gates, Jobs dropped out of college; in contrast to Gates, his reasons were largely financial (Gates came from a fairly well-off family). But he kept going to classes unofficially and for no credit (including his famous story of serendipitously attending a calligraphy class that, a decade or so later, helped him understand the need for beautiful computer fonts), and eventually started a computer business in his garage with his high school chum, Steve Wozniak, the computer geek who could bring to life Jobs' vision for a computer that would transform lives of the common people.
Jobs and Wozniak, drawing from experimental concepts from computer innovators of the time, developed a computer that people could use without knowing code, that people could point to things in order to make things happen, that included color, that included nice fonts, and that looked "cool," rather than just utilitarian boxes. The market rewarded their vision, and Apple Computer rocketed to a major player in the computer industry.
However, after the first few years of success, things were hard for the visionary Jobs. He was always dissatisfied with what we had now and was always questing for the next best thing, sure that we could always do better, faster, cooler, and more beautiful. But multi-million publicly-traded corporations are not built on constant reinvention. The young Apple Computer Corporation was not able to deal with its co-founder's insistence on abandoning what they had in order to create what he saw was the great next advance. Eventually, the board brought in a manager from Pepsi-Cola to stabilize the company and built up a traditional corporate structure, and less than a decade after it had started, both Jobs and Wozniak left the company they had founded.
So Jobs moved on and created NeXT Computers, which built the kind of ultimate computers that he had advocated, and had been rejected, at Apple. And sure enough, he created a computer that was a thing of beauty and power. The only problem was, all that fabulous performance ending up costing close to the cost of a cheap car....two, three, maybe ten times the cost of the "personal computer" of that time. So who would buy a computer like that? Mostly, it was Hollywood--digital artists who could see the potential of the way Jobs was heading, and who needed that amount of graphic power (it was always about the graphics and the visual for Jobs) and could easily justify the expense. NeXT became a niche computer, but the niche it filled fit nicely with a man with such visual, marketing, and even storytelling expertise as Jobs.
It was the NeXT/Hollywood connection that supported Job's next big leap. He bought a cast-off unit from George Lucas (another visionary who transformed the movie industry, but either couldn't see or didn't have the time to follow where computer animation would go), and turned it into Pixar Animated Studios, the most commercially and critically successful computer animation studio of modern times. He funded the operation through several lean years until the launch of Toy Story, and then ran the company until finally it was acquired by Disney, making him the largest stockholder of the company (and multi-billionaire), but also, in my opinion, saving the company's soul after years of substandard programming by managers whose decisions were driven by cost, rather than by art.
Before all that, however, back in Apple Land....former PepsiCo leader John Sculley had managed to stabilize the company as requested. It was so stable, however, that it was sinking like a rock. Apple had always been, and to this day continues to be, a bit player in the grand scheme of computer sales. However, it had acquired an ardent fan base in the early days. But bit player, with nothing new or exciting to entice people not to abandon it for the dominant players of IBM and Microsoft and such...well, it wasn't a winning market strategy. Which is not to say that Sculley was unsuccessful. He did a great job of building up the structures and strategies and corporate skeleton that Apple needed to survive in a business environment. But the company realized that they could not survive without an exciting alternative to the IBM/Microsoft/corporate dominate computers. They realized they needed the Jobs magic again.
In the interim, Jobs had also grown up a little, corporate-wise, at least. He had learned that he couldn't always abandon last year's work to pursue this year's possibilities. More importantly, perhaps, he realized that you couldn't necessarily create next year's vision without going through this year's reality.
Whatever, Apple bought out NeXT, Jobs was back in charge, and Apple started going gangbusters again (with an organization that could support the vision). The NeXT software became the new Mac OS X software. They created MacBooks, iMacs, and all the incredible software bundled with their computers for free. Then they branched out to iPod, iPhones, iPads. Jobs' vision about the potential of digital technology outreached computers themselves, and extended to the music industry, the movie industry, and the book industry. Apple was leading the charge to reinvent almost all of the popular media that we use today.
So, then, Steve Jobs' life is a great lesson to teach our middle schoolers, outside of his technology. When he had his big falling out with the company he created, he had enough money to go off and do nothing for the rest of his life but complain about how stupid Apple had been to (to be honest) kick him out. But all our lives would probably have been the poorer for it. Instead, he kept pursuing his vision for using computers to transform the lives, not just of the rich, corporate, or knowledgable, but of everyone. He was brilliant enough to see the potential in Pixar, and humble enough to learn about his own mistakes that enabled him to return to Apple. He could overcome his ego and his competitiveness enough to build a relationship with Microsoft that enabled Macintosh computers to read Microsoft documents (which, again to be honest, probably is what saved Apple from going belly up in the 1990's). In short, I think he learned the thin line between confidence and arrogance, and I think we are all the better for it.
The other lesson we can learn from Steve Jobs is the need for passion, or in the more personal vernacular, love. His graduation address at Stanford has been making the rounds, and I've included it below. In it, he talks about how there is nothing more important than living a life of love. And he is not only talking about relationships; he is referring to finding the love behind how we spend out lives every day. He says that he started each day looking at the mirror and asking himself that if this were his last day on Earth, would he want to spend it doing what he was going to do that day? He responds that if he found himself answering "no" for too many days in a row, then he found a way to change his life.
So there is much to learn from Steve Jobs. He teaches us about sticking to a vision, even when it is a lonely road. He teaches us about going through a public "defeat" and coming through it stronger and wiser. He teaches us about when one door is closed, find a new opening. And he teaches us about, when it comes down to it, it's all about love, even if it seems to be about computers.
Oh, and he just happened to foster the development of the some of the best digital tools of our times. But, like I said, that was a by-product of a life well spent.
