Monthly Archives: March 2011

Dumb, Discussion

31 Thursday Mar 2011

Posted by in 1, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Movies, music, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Inspired by my friends Catherine Lugg (see her recent comments about the Obama Administration and their ignoring of the unemployed) and James Lee via Facebook (running a one-man crusade on our government’s daily hypocrisy), and my Twitter folk, the video above is for all of you. It is my montage to the past thirty years of obfuscation, dissembling, exaggeration, plausible deniability, and spittle-laden spin that is our everyday news and politics. Or, as the post-grunge band Live would say in their “White, Discussion,” (1994) the “decibels of this disenchanting discourse continue to dampen the day/the coin flips again and again and again and again, as our sanity walks away.”

So I put six minutes of video together from President Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech (1983), a YouTube video “A Tour of Detroit’s Ghetto” from camosilver, and a couple of pictures I took from the Rally to Restore Sanity here in DC back in October. Along with clips from:

  • The Daily Show (with Jon Stewart eviscerating Bernie Goldberg and FOX News via “gospel,” April 20, ’10)
  • Real Time with Bill Maher (one with Keith Olbermann from last year, the other from a couple of weeks ago calling Rep. Ellison’s religion [Islam] one “filled with hate”)
  • Glenn Beck’s insanity on FOX News
  • The O’Reilly Factor
  • Sarah Palin being interviewed by Chris Wallace on FOX News last year
  • ITN’s coverage of the tsunami in northeast Japan earlier this month
  • Protests in Egypt after January 25 (Russian TV)
  • The protests in Madison, Wisconsin at the end of February (Russian TV)
  • Rachel Maddow’s “Home of the Whopper” segment from the Fall ’10 election cycle (MSNBC)
  • The infamous Jerry Falwell-Pat Robertson clip accusing all left-of-center folk of causing 9/11 (CBN)
  • President Obama’s Libya speech from Monday evening, March 28 (PBS).

Now I’ve given credit where credit is due and claim fair use under US copyright laws. But if our American public discourse doesn’t look dumb after watching it with Live’s “White, Discussion” playing in the background, I’d dare say that you’ll need to see an optometrist as soon as possible. In fact, I think we all need to get our brains, ears and eyes checked after three decades of being dummied down.

P.S. Also meant to give credit to NBA and Derrick Rose for a clip of his dunk against the Phoenix Suns last year.

Teachers That “Demon”-ize History

29 Tuesday Mar 2011

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,


Qin Shihuangdi, China's 1st Emperor, book burner and scholar burier (except for historians of the Qin kingdom), 221-210 BCE. In public domain.

As I promised ten days ago in my “This…Is…Jeopardy?” post, this one continues my thoughts about the inability of most students and teachers to appreciate how to really teach and learn from history. To think that what most in the profession call social history has existed for a half-century, yet few outside of academia actually teach history in this manner. That between the schools of education that prepare them, the curricular paradigms adhered to by state boards of education and the rules and regulations at the district and school building level, few history teachers encourage their students to imagine. Or to think critically. Or  to ask “how” and “why” questions.

And we pay for these educational atrocities every single day, in our public discourse, in journalism, in international politics. Not to mention in our idiotic discussions of race, class, gender, religion, sexual orientation, in just about every endeavor that involves thinking beyond our selfish selves.

Michelle Bachmann Portrait, US Congress, January 14, 2011 - A case in point. In public domain.

The worst example of this for my money was my eighth grade US history teacher, Mr. Demontravel. Or as he preferred in the last three months of eighth grade in the spring of ’83, Dr. Demontravel (he had finished his doctoral thesis on the Civil War. Or as I liked to call him throughout that year, “Demon Travel.”

Beyond the trivia of him finishing his doctorate, Demontravel’s teaching style, while terrible, was also one that remains all too typical in our public school (and unfortunately, some of our colleges as well). His was a class that sucked the life out of history for most of the Humanities students at A.B. Davis. Like most teachers of K-12 social studies or history, it was an important and obscure dates, important names, and key places class.

Unlike most social studies teachers, his teaching methodology was the epitome of lazy. Every class, five days a week, Demontravel would put up five questions on the blackboard for us to copy down and answer using our textbook. At the end of every two-week period, we’d get a fifty-question multiple choice exam made up of those questions written out on the blackboard over the previous two weeks, helping Scan-Tron stay in business.

Demontravel rarely stood up to lecture or do anything else. Lectures for him might as well have been appearances by Halley’s Comet, only the lectures were far less memorable. This process went on unabated for forty-weeks, four marking periods, seventeen exams (counting the final), an entire school year. Calling this boring would only get you into the door of the intellectual famine Demontravel subjected us to in eighth grade.

Over the years, I’ve had hundreds of students complain about various versions of this kind of history teaching. That they hated history, didn’t understand its purpose. Many students have loved my teaching of social history off and on over the past two decades, and have told me so, that there interest in a particular issue or topic was peaked as a result of one of my courses. But there are some, perhaps as many as ten percent of my students (about 200 in all) who would’ve preferred the mind-numbing methodology of teaching history as trivia. For that group, Demontravel would’ve been a preference over being able to

Newt Gingrich, potential 2012 GOP candidate, at CPAC meeting, February 20, 2010. (Irony is that Gingrich, an opponent of social history, was a history professor for eight years before turning to a political career.) Gage Skidmore. Permission granted via Creative Commons and attribution to Gage Skidmore.

understand that, like life, history is full of irony, hurt, passion, hatred, and serendipity.

Maybe this is a losing battle, that most students will never have a teacher with the ability to inspire them to think beyond the trivial when it comes to history. Maybe this is a losing battle because there are far more demons traveling through K-12 as social studies and history teachers than there are people like me, or my late teacher Harold Meltzer, for that matter. I have a feeling, though, that generations from now, future students will look at this aspect of hypocrisy in American education and just shake their heads. They won’t understand why it was so hard to teach the truth of how and why good, bad and ugly things occurred in US and world history.

Christina Romer, Former Top Economist: Administration ‘Shamefully’ Ignoring Unemployed

25 Friday Mar 2011

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments



The Obama Administra­tion and the rest of the country ignores so much more to our detriment around the unemployme­nt issue. For more than 70 years, we’ve calculated unemployme­nt merely through looking at unemployme­nt claim and unemployme­nt check numbers. The actual unemployme­nt rate — all able-bodie­d people looking for work yet can’t find any — is close to double the official number (according to numerous studies over the past three decades).

But even more insidious is the issue of underemplo­yment. In times of serious economic distress, many of the unemployed or those under threat of unemployme­nt will work a part-time job or a couple of part-time jobs to maintain some level of financial and economic subsistenc­e. This is a murkier thing to calculate (and only been calculated since 1994), considerin­g how many of us may be willing to work part-time for a period of our careers. But there’s also the reality that most of us, if given a choice between full-time work and underemplo­yment, will choose the full employment­.

Even with this, the Labor Department and the Gallup folks have underemplo­yment between 16 and 20 percent, which explains why there are so many able-bodie­d adults with time on their hands. At least 40 million people without full-time work. It’s a shame, it’s pitiful, and its’ scary that no one in Washington really cares or can do anything about it.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Living in the Land of “No!”

23 Wednesday Mar 2011

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, race, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


People forming a "NO" to London's Heathrow Airport Expansion, May 31, 2008. Source: The Daily Mail http://bit.ly/hc0KSP

There was a time in my career and life when I was desperate to publish an article in a scholarly journal. Right after finishing grad school at Carnegie Mellon at the end of ’96, I set out to write a literature review essay on how folks in education foundations and education policy had covered multiculturalism and connected it — or, in most cases, not connected it — to the politics around this controversial topic during the 1980s and 1990s. Of all the things I’d written up to this point in my career, this was a bit ambitious.

I had submitted an article for publication with the History of Education Quarterly in March ’97 and had made several revisions at Richard Altenbaugh’s request. He was the new senior editor of the journal, as it had recently moved from Indiana University to Slippery Rock to be under his direction. Altenbaugh had also been my professor for my education foundations graduate class in the spring of ’92, and I’d done entries for his Historical Dictionary of American Education, which was published in ’99.

Historical Dictionary of American Education Cover, March 23, 2011. Donald Earl Collins

At Altenbaugh’s behest, I met him and a wildly bearded co-editor at an informal meeting in March ’98. We met at The Second Plate, an eating place on the second floor of Forbes Quadrangle at Pitt, where I’d spent my homeless days in ’88, my history major days, and my first two years of grad school. Over the course of a two-hour lunch that had little to do with the food, Altenbaugh and his assistant grilled me about the contents of my article, my writing in general, and about the publishing business. Now I knew that this essay would need more revisions, but a two-hour inquisition on why a twenty-eight-year-old was too young to make bold conclusions based on existing studies was just a ridiculous argument.

For Altenbaugh and the other editor, I was simply too young to write an essay that reviewed previous scholarly work. Their logic: “even a senior scholar with fifteen years in the field would have trouble pulling this off.” The editors also insisted that the only road to academic Nirvana regarding my work would be through publishing academic articles and books that met the approval of an exclusive scholarly community. Translation: “write something that is interesting to a few other professors — but not so exciting that it would catch the public’s attention — and by all means do not work on something as controversial as multiculturalism.” Oh yeah, they also recommended that get approval for my essay draft from two elderly, nearly-dead White historians before resubmitting to the journal.

Bottom line: my essay was rejected, given a “No!” Not because it didn’t have potential, or because the early drafts weren’t any good. But because I was working on a topic too cutting edge as a Black male who even now at forty-one would be too young — according to these guys — to work on a state of the profession essay on multiculturalism, much less thirteen years ago.

Did their “No!” matter? In one sense it really did. I knew that the topic itself was too controversial for most conservative-thinking (in a topical, not political, sense) editors in scholarly publishing. That there were few venues for me to address multiculturalism in an academic sense. I also knew that their “No!” was about much more than my topic. My age and my race also played a role in their decision to not publish my essay — they said as much by implication. Funny thing is, that in these weird times, I’d probably have a much better shot at publishing this essay now than I did when multiculturalism seemed more relevant.

But in the end, it didn’t matter at all. I was already in the middle of a five-year period of questioning whether I was an academic historian first and a writer second, or was it really the other way around? If the latter was true — and it’s turned out to be — then what did it matter that I pushed to publish on a topic that I cared about, but I was already beginning to lose passion for?

What I learned from that “No!” is that there are times to force a “Yes!” out of the land of “No!” And that there are other times when I should choose to take that “No!” and evaluate my own motives for wanting a “Yes!” In the case of my growth as a writer — both in academic writing and in other kinds of writing — there couldn’t have been a better, more bigoted “No!” than the one I received thirteen years ago.

This…Is…Jeopardy?

18 Friday Mar 2011

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Politics, Pop Culture, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


The first class I ever taught was as a guest lecturer my first semester of grad school at Pitt. Larry Glasco, my advisor, had me take charge of his History of Black Pittsburgh course one November Thursday in ’91. It was a task made easier by the showing of the documentary Wylie Avenue Days during the two-hour and twenty-minute class. With about a quarter of the class composed of adult learners, including several who’d grown up in the Hill District during the time frame covered in the documentary, it became a real conversation about experiences with racism and inter- and intra-racial relations in Pittsburgh in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. It was a great introduction to teaching.

In the two decades since, I’ve often wish that all of my classes had the kind of intellectual balance that my first class possessed and I as instructor helped provide. Sadly, many times in my journey as a teacher, instructor and professor, I’ve had students who showed as much interest in discussing the hows and whys of history as Glenn Beck of FOX News Channel has in science and the truth.

These students, about one out of every six I’ve taught over the past two decades (about 300 in all) have taken up an amount of my teaching time. They’ve groused about the assignments I’ve given them to do, the exam questions I’ve created to assess their knowledge. They’ve gnashed their teeth about my grading, about how tough I supposedly can be in assigning grades. With papers, short-answer exams, multiple choice tests, even fill-in-the-blank quizzes. There’s been no pleasing this group of students.

Until now. It occurred to me about a year ago. I was watching yet another episode of Jeopardy, and it swung to a history category, one that I would’ve swept if I’d been on the show that day or anytime since the show came back on the air in ’85. That then reminded me of something one of my Humanities classmates from Mount Vernon High School said to me soon after finding out that I was ranked fourteenth in the Class of ’87. “All you can do with history is play Jeopardy,” he said with derision.

That memory then reminded me of how teachers like our seventh through tenth grade social studies teachers taught us. Whether Court, Demontravel (who I’ll talk about later this year), Flanagan or Zini, the idea was to be able to spit out as many date-connected facts, names and battles as quickly and accurately as possible. With no thought about human nature, empathy with the struggles of individuals and groups, or any attempt to explain the processes behind why something happened, like slavery, Jim Crow or Indian removal, for instance.

To satisfy my students who want a high school version of history, I need to come to class next semester and draw a gigantic box on the chalkboard. In that box, I’ll draw six columns by five rows of smaller boxes within this huge box. In the top box of each column, I’ll write in a topic area, say, “Colonial America,” “Expanding Voting Rights,” “‘Eq’-words,” “Myths & Legends,” “My Founding Fathers,” and “Rebel Yell” (this on the American Revolution and the Civil War) across all six. There wouldn’t be any money values, just number values, from 1 to 5 from the easiest to most difficult questions. Daily Doubles would help struggling students make up points, while Double Jeopardy sessions would help the best students solidify their A’s.

This is a great idea, isn’t it? My least interested students can then pretend that they’re learning history by being entertained and memorizing history trivia. My students who need to learn or sharpen their critical thinking skills will find themselves sorely neglected. And my most interested students would be ready to strangle me.

In the end, it’s not worth it to turn my part in this profession into Sony Entertainment, especially for a minority of the students I’ve taught over the years. Besides, I can’t afford to buy Watson to impress my students, or at least, have someone pretend that they have the artificial intelligence of IBM’s Watson by sounding like a teraflop supercomputer.

World Book Encyclopedia’s Insidious Effect

15 Tuesday Mar 2011

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


World Book Encyclopedia, 1978 Edition, March 15, 2011. Source: http://cgi.ebay.com

I’ve talked about how World Book Encyclopedia literally changed my life from a reading standpoint between December ’78 and April ’79. It was after running away from home to get away from my new stepfather, the now-and-forever abuser and idiot Maurice Washington. I talked about how after my mother gave me an ass-whuppin’ that seemed to last forever, I was forbidden from having any playtime for six weeks. I punished myself, my mother and my idiot stepfather by picking up the A volume of World Book Encyclopedia and began to read it. “I’ll show them!,” I thought.

I made a point of reading and reading. By the time I decided to go outside again, it was April ’79, well past my six-week grounding. And my SRA test for fourth grade confirmed that I had raised my reading score from 3.9 (just barely at the fourth grade level) to a 7.4 (the equivalent of an above average seventh grader). So much for punishing my mother and myself!

Many of my former classmates, and certainly a number of my closest friends, have heard parts and various versions of this story over the years. But I’ve hardly ever told the story of how I had access to the ’78 edition of all thirty or so volumes of World Book Encyclopedia in the first place. That started because of a teacher crush, the second one I had in my first four years of K-12. This one involved my third grade teacher at William H. Holmes Elementary, Mrs. Shannon. She was fun, funny, beautiful, and dressed like a young Sue Simmons from WNBC-TV New York did when she started working for Channel 4 earlier in

Sue Simmons, circa 1978, March 15, 2011. Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of low resolution of picture and relevance to subject matter of blog.

’77-’78.

Like most crushes I’ve had over the years, this one snuck up on my eight-year-old self and hit me in the head like a 90-mph fastball from Randy Johnson. And like the crushes I’d have when I reached Humanities in middle school and high school, I acted weird throughout February and March ’78. I became shier than I already was. I found myself daydreaming during reading time, not following instructions for assignments, just generally out of sorts.

Then there was the Easter play, the Peter Cottontail play. I wanted to play the lead role of Peter the Bunny, but all Mrs. Shannon wanted me to be was a stupid flower. I was mad, acted out, and she punished me by taking me out of the play all together. Following that, I refused to talk to her in class the next day. “You don’t have to speak,” Mrs. Shannon said as she sent me to sit in the corner until I was ready to talk again. I stayed in that corner the rest of the afternoon.

The following week, this week thirty-three years ago, Mrs. Shannon called for a parent-teacher conference with my mother and soon-to-be idiot stepfather. My mother, who had only been to two meetings at my schools since kindergarten, now found herself finding out that I was a bad student. Well, not exactly. Mrs. Shannon told them, “He has the ability. He has the potential. He just doesn’t want to concentrate.” Then she suggested that my mother could find a way for me to focus through World Book Encyclopedia. “It’ll draw out his imagination,” Mrs. Shannon said.

That’s all I thought and talked about on my way home with my mother. I brought it up so much that my mother said, “Alright already!” after two days of me constantly asking about it. We met a World Book sales person, and my mother wrote a check for $310, which was a lot of money for her. Within a week, four or five boxes reached 616, by far the largest order of books I’d see until grad school.

I didn’t start reading them immediately, and my mother complained about “spending all that damn money” on these books. But after December 2, ’78, my Saturday of running away from home, the investment began to pay off, and with it, the ability to think and imagine while being as weird as I wanted and needed to be, and others believed me to be as well. It’s a bittersweet memory, how I became a brainiac, how a teacher crush put me on a path of intellect and writing, of constant remembering and of painful transformations. How insidious knowledge — and the search for it — can be.