8 things

i have a friend who's a way more consistent blogger than me, a fantastic writer and a very good human, and he has just involved me in what appears to be a game of blog tag. which requires me to write 8 things about myself. (you can read his awesome blog at www.grammarpiano.blogspot.com)

i am a very inconsistent blogger, and i may not have any readers, but i know that you don't shirk a game of tag. even if it is a weird internet version.

this will actually give me the opportunity to write down some things i've been thinking about trying to post about here the past couple of weeks:

1)i went to hear the writer stephanie grant read from her new novel _the map of ireland_ the other night. its a pretty interesting book narrated from the perspective of a white girl growing up in the projects in south boston during the anti-busing protests of the mid-1970s. grant is very articulate about the history piece of the novel, she says quite clearly that part of her intention in writing the book was trying to set a girl's story in specific against the backdrop of historical events-- that usually its only boys' stories that get placed in historical context, that girls' stories usually get placed only in the realm of the private, the domestic. which is right, but i've never thought about it that way before. the book is a really interesting approach to trying to understand the psychology of racism. her main character is not only a very sympathetic baby dyke, she's also really clearly rendered as a person who's struggling to understand what's going on in her family, her town, and her other contexts. and yet: she's the sort of person who, if we read about her crimes in the newspaper, we would probably just dismiss as a typically violent racist. the fact that she's from southie, the fact that southie's such an iconic working class irish neighborhood might make folks dismiss her even more easily. and the fact that it took place during this historical event that we have all learned very little about but which we know we want to condemn-- well that makes it even more easy to dismiss this girl. which makes me think: sometimes, i think, knowing a little historical information actually ENABLES, sometimes, a quick, unthinking dismissal of human complexity.

hmmm.

anyhow, stephanie grant does a very interesting job of trying to understand the various layers of this moment in US history and in one girl's life. and i thought: hmmm.

2)woah, that number 1 was long. i wont keep that up. number 2 is this: great small works' spaghetti dinners are very important. to me. to community. to public tellings of history. check out great small works, if you're interested, at www.greatsmallworks.org. at last saturday's spaghetti dinner, at judson church, a few of the regulars did a metaphorical performance about the denying of tenure of jon bell, the great puppet historian. and in the midst of this piece, jon bell himself gives a lecture about the historical and theoretical uses of objects to tell stories, and it was beautiful and accompanied by an evocative video edited by jenny romaine. it made me want to sit down and eat the air for hours so i could possess all of the feeling and ideas i was having inside me forever.

3)i will begin a new job at SUNY new paltz in the fall.

4)thus i need to buy a car. thoughts on the connections between buying a car and history: you need to know a lot about the history of a vehicle before you purchase it. also you can never know for sure if you are getting the full story, and thus you have to just hope that the vehicle has had a calm history, and that its current human is narrating that story accurately enough. enough that you don't get screwed. history, here, becomes financially consequential. also you want a car that was produced at exactly the right time in history: people tell me that if youre going to buy a volvo, don't buy one that was made after '96. cause thats when they changed the engine they were using. & its more expensive to pay for a post-96 trained mechanic. or if you want to buy a hybrid, you wont necessarily know how its engine holds up over the long term-- because it hasn't been around long enough. history and cars: a potentially rich subject. who'da thunk it.

5)i also have to rent a place upstate. i will refrain from talking about history and rentals in the hudson valley. don't worry. i will not begin blogging about the revolutionary war and whether george washington slept in the room that i'll be renting.

6)i am looking forward to seeing "traces of the trade: stories of the deep north"-- a film that was produced by a new acquaintance of mine, elizabeth delude-dix. its about how northern families were enriched by and helped shape, deeply, the african slave trade. www.tracesofthetrade.org.

7)oh! i saw michel gondry's new film the other night, "be kind, rewind." a very good film. best line in it for our purposes (spoken by mia farrow, ps): "history belongs to us! we can change it if we want to!" (then she and her pals do.)

8)i'm thinking a lot about two upcoming events: "28 condos later: a zombie purim"-- this saturday march 22 at the workman's circle. and circus amok's gala benefit: may 12, 2008.

phews, there. now i'm going to go vacuum up the history of my cat's hair that's taking over the apartment.

back on the bus; kozol takes on ted kennedy, kinda

a person should post things to her blog. a person wants to but a person, at the moment, isn't capable of writing something coherent and meaningful herself. a person can, however, post a piece by jonathon kozol which is a nice indictment of no child left behind. for the readers' (or reader's?) edification.

:

Why I am Fasting, By Jonathan Kozol
from The Huffington Post -- September 11, 2007

This morning, I am entering the 67th day of a partial
fast that I began early in the summer as my personal
act of protest at the vicious damage being done to
inner-city children by the federal education law No
Child Left Behind, a racially punitive piece of
legislation that Congress will either renew, abolish,
or, as thousands of teachers pray, radically revise in
the weeks immediately ahead.

The poisonous essence of this law lies in the mania of
obsessive testing it has forced upon our nation's
schools and, in the case of underfunded, overcrowded
inner-city schools, the miserable drill-and-kill
curriculum of robotic "teaching to the test" it has
imposed on teachers, the best of whom are fleeing from
these schools because they know that this debased
curriculum would never have been tolerated in the good
suburban schools that they, themselves, attended.

The justification for this law was the presumptuous and
ignorant determination by the White House that our
urban schools are, for the most part, staffed by
mediocre drones who will suddenly become terrific
teachers if we place a sword of terror just above their
heads and threaten them with penalties if they do not
pump their students' scores by using proto-military
methods of instruction -- scripted texts and hand-held
timers -- that will rescue them from doing any thinking
of their own. There are some mediocre teachers in our
schools (there are mediocre lawyers, mediocre senators,
and mediocre presidents as well), but hopelessly dull
and unimaginative teachers do not suddenly turn into
classroom wizards under a regimen that transforms their
classrooms into test-prep factories.

The real effect of No Child Left Behind is to drive
away the tens of thousands of exciting and high-
spirited, superbly educated teachers whom our urban
districts struggle to attract into these schools. There
are more remarkable young teachers like this coming
into inner-city education than at any time I've seen in
more than 40 years. The challenge isn't to recruit
them; it's to keep them. But 50 percent of the glowing
young idealists I have been recruiting from the
nation's most respected colleges and universities are
throwing up their hands and giving up their jobs within
three years.

When I ask them why they've grown demoralized, they
routinely tell me it's the feeling of continual
anxiety, the sense of being in a kind of "state of
siege," as well as the pressure to conform to teaching
methods that drain every bit of joy out of the hours
that their children spend with them in school.

"I didn't study all these years," a highly principled
and effective first-grade teacher told me -- she had
studied literature and anthropology in college while
also having been immersed in education courses -- "in
order to turn black babies into mindless little robots,
denied the normal breadth of learning, all the arts and
sciences, all the joy in reading literary classics, all
the spontaneity and power to ask interesting questions,
that kids are getting in the middle-class white
systems."

At a moment when black and Hispanic students are more
segregated than at any time since 1968 (in the typical
inner-city school I visit, out of an enrollment that
may range from 800 to 4,000 students, there are seldom
more than five or six white children), NCLB adds yet
another factor of division between children of
minorities and those in the mainstream of society. In
good suburban classrooms, children master the essential
skills not from terror but from exhilaration, inspired
in them by their teachers, in the act of learning in
itself. They're also given critical capacities that
they will need if they're to succeed in college and to
function as discerning citizens who have the power to
interrogate reality. They learn to ask the questions
that will shape the nation's future, while inner-city
kids are being trained to give prescripted answers and
to acquiesce in their subordinate position in society.

In the wake of the calamitous Supreme Court ruling in
the end of June that prohibited not only state-enforced
but even voluntary programs of school integration, No
Child Left Behind -- unless it is dramatically
transformed -- will drive an even deeper wedge between
two utterly divided sectors of American society. This,
then, is the reason I've been fasting, taking only
small amounts of mostly liquid foods each day, and,
when I have stomach pains, other forms of nourishment
at times, a stipulation that my doctor has insisted on
in order to avert the risk of doing longterm damage to
my heart. Twenty-nine pounds lighter than I was when I
began, I've been dreaming about big delicious dinners.

Still, I feel an obligation to those many teachers who
have told me, not as an accusation but respectfully,
that it was one of my books that diverted them from
easier, more lucrative careers and brought them into
teaching in the first place. Some call me in the
evenings, on the verge of tears, to tell me of the
maddening frustration that they feel at being forced to
teach in ways that make them hate themselves.

I don't want them to quit their jobs. I give them
whatever good survival strategies I can. I tell them
that the best defense is to be extremely good at what
they do: Deliver the skills! Don't let your classroom
grow chaotic! A teacher who can keep a reasonable sense
of calm within her room, particularly in a school in
which disorder has been common, renders herself almost
inexpendable.

At the same time, I always recommend a healthy dose of
sly irreverence and a sense of playful and ironical
detachment from the criticisms of those clipboard
bureaucrats who come around to check on them. (Teachers
call them "the curriculum cops" or "NCLB overseers.") I
urge them to develop mischievous and inventive ways to
convince these gloomy-looking people that whatever they
are teaching at that moment, no matter how delectably
subversive it may be, is, in fact, directly geared to
one of those little chunks of amputated knowledge,
known as "state proficiencies," they are supposed to be
"delivering" at that specific minute of the day.

But I've also felt the obligation to bring this battle
to its source in Washington. I've tried very hard to
convince a number of the more enlightened Democrats who
serve on the Senate education panel to introduce
amendments that will drastically reduce our
government's reliance upon standardized exams in
judgment of a child, school, or teacher, and attribute
greater weight to factors that are not so simple-
mindedly reducible to numbers.

Sophisticated as opposed to low-grade methods of
assessment would not only tell us whether little Oscar
or Shaniqua started out their essays with "a topic
sentence" but would also tell us whether they wrote
something with the slightest hint of authenticity and
charm or simply stamped out insincere placebos. (A
child gets no credit for originality or authenticity
under No Child Left Behind. Sincerity gets no rewards.
Endearing stylistic eccentricity, needless to say, is
not rewarded either. That which can't be measured is
not valued by the technocrats of uniformity who have
designed this miserable piece of legislation.)

On a separate battlefront, I've also tried to win
support for an amendment to the law that will take
advantage of one of the loop-holes in the recent
segregation ruling, an opening that Justice Kennedy has
offered us by his insistence that criteria that are not
race-specific may be used in order to advance diversity
in public schools.

There is a provision in No Child Left Behind that
permits a child in a chronically low-performing school
to transfer to a more successful school. Up to now, it
hasn't worked because there aren't enough successful
schools in inner-city districts to which kids can
transfer. The Democrats, I've argued, have the
opportunity to make this option workable if they are
sufficiently audacious to require states to authorize a
child's right to transfer across district lines, and
provide financial means to make this possible, so that
children trapped in truly hopeless schools could, if
their parents so desired, go to school in one of the
high-spending suburbs that are often a mere 20-minute
ride from their front door.

I was surprised that none of the senators with whom I
spoke rejected this proposal as too controversial or
politically unthinkable. More than one made clear that
they enjoyed the notion of helping to "improve" a
flawed provision that the White House had included in
the law for reasons that most certainly were not
intended to enable inner-city kids to go to beautiful
suburban schools with 16 or 18 children in a room,
instead of 29, or 35, or 40, as in many urban systems.

It was, however, on the testing issue that I received
the most explicitly unqualified and positive response.
Several of the senators made a lot of time available to
think aloud about the ways in which to get rid of that
sense of siege so many teachers had described and to be
certain that we do not keep on driving out these
talented young people from our schools.

The only member of the Democratic leadership I have
been unable to get through to is the influential
chairman of the education panel, Senator Ted Kennedy,
who, one of his colleagues told me flatly, will
ultimately "call the shots" on this decision. I've
asked the senator three times if he'll talk with me.
Each time, I have run into a cold stone wall. This has
disappointed me, and startled me, because the senator
has been a friend to me in years gone by and has asked
for my ideas on education on a number of occasions in
the decades since I was a youthful teacher and he was a
youthful politician.

Senator Kennedy is, of course, a very busy man and has
many other issues of importance he must deal with. But
it's also possible, aides to other senators suggest,
that he does not wish to contemplate dramatic changes
in the law because he co-sponsored the initial bill in
a deal with the Republicans. He is also renowned as a
gifted builder of consensus in the legislative process.
Lending his support to either of the two proposals I
have made would almost surely guarantee a knockdown
battle with conservative Republicans and, perhaps, with
some of the Democratic neoliberals as well.

Still, Senator Kennedy has displayed a genuine nobility
of vision in defense of elemental fair play for low-
income children many times before. Is it possible that
he may rise to the occasion once again? If he does, I
may finally listen to the worries of my friends and
decide it's time to bring this episode of fasting to an
end. If not, I'll keep slogging on. It's a tiny price
to pay compared to what so many of our children and
their teachers have to go through every single day.

how to read primary sources-- a teacher-developed lesson

Here's a solid lesson on How to Analyze Primary Sources developed by Lisa Jaffe and Suzanne Tallarico with help from Thea Krumm, Terri Ruyter, Rachel Mattson, and Nikki Newton at our Teaching American History workshop yesterday. They used a backwards planning "understanding by design" template.

for the 5th grade, adaptable for other grades.
10 Days of 45 minute lessons

Goals/Standards: Reading & WritingReading & Writing Standards:
Standard 1: Language for Information and Understanding
1. Listening and reading to acquire information and understanding involves collecting data, facts, and ideas; discovering relationships, concepts, and generalizations, and using knowledge from oral, written and electronic sources
2. Speaking and writing to acquire and transmit information requires asking probing and clarifying questions, interpreting information in one’s own words, applying information from one context to another, and presenting the information and interpretation clearly, concisely, and comprehensibly. Social Studies

Historical Content:
Understandings
Historians study documents and artifacts to present their version of a particular story. Essential Questions
How do historians know about the past?
How do primary source documents tell a story?


Knowledge
A primary source document is…
Differentiating between fact and opinion Skills
Analyzing a document
• Describe (through words, drawing, etc.)
• Analyze documents by asking the following questions:
S--- What kind of source is this?
O—What’s the occasion?
A--- Who is the audience?
P--- What is the purpose of the document?
• Using information around the text (caption, author, date, etc.)
• Comparing different topics on the same topic.

Assessments
Writing a Small Moment Story about a primary source
Document Analysis Sheet
Test on analyzing a variety of primary sources
Unit Plan
See below
Still need to create graphic organizer students will use to analyze primary sources. Organizers should be differentiated.

Resources
Field Trip: “New York Unearthed” through South Street Seaport Museum, Museum of City of New York (from Dutch to New Amsterdam workshop)
Primary document analysis sheet
Primary document “mind walk” activity (based on resources from the library of congress website)
www.politicalcartoons.com

Strategy Charts: Social Studies
How to Be a Historian
How to Analyze a Document
Strategy Charts: Writing
How to Write a DBQ
Phrases I use to explain a document
(i.e. according to, in Document A it states, etc., I think X because…)

Unit Plan
Day 1
Aim: How do we know about things that happened a long time ago?
Mind Walk:
Write down everything you’ve done in the last 24 hours.
What kinds of evidence did you leave behind? (wrappers, schoolwork, etc.)
If 100 years now, someone was trying to learn about you, what could they find out from this evidence?
What couldn’t they find out? (who bought it for you, how important that person is to you)

Day 2
Aim: How do we look at a primary source?
Bring in class picture and have students describe what they see.
Give each group a primary source from teacher’s life and have students list what they see, and what they know about the teacher from looking at the source.
Homework: Students will bring in a primary source from their own life (photo, letter, receipt, religious object, flag, article of clothing)

Day 3
Aim: What do we learn about people from looking at their sources?
Students will swap primary sources with each other and answer the following questions:
What is it?
Where did he/she get it or find it?
Why is it important to him/her?
What do you learn from the object?

Day 4
Aim: How do we look at a print primary source (i.e. photo, article, etc.)
Teacher will show photo of a child from long ago. Teacher will guide students through process of analyzing a document:
S--- What kind of source is this?
O- What’s the occasion?
A- Who is the audience?
P--- What is the purpose of the document?
Students will analyze similar type sources independently.
Day 5 Aim: How do we look at a print primary source (i.e. photo, article, etc.)
Teacher will show an advertisement (broadside) from long ago. Teacher will guide students through process of analyzing a document:
S--- What kind of source is this?
O- What’s the occasion?
A- Who is the audience?
P--- What is the purpose of the document?
Students will analyze similar type sources independently.

Day 6
Aim: How do we look at a print primary source (i.e. photo, article, etc.)
Teacher will show a political cartoon. Teacher will guide students through process of analyzing a document:
S--- What kind of source is this?
O- What’s the occasion?
A- Who is the audience?
P--- What is the purpose of the document?
Students will analyze similar type sources independently.

Day 7
Aim: How do we look at a print primary source (i.e. photo, article, etc.)
Teacher will show a different political cartoon. Teacher will guide students through process of analyzing a document:
S--- What kind of source is this?
O- What’s the occasion?
A- Who is the audience?
P--- What is the purpose of the document?
Students will analyze similar type sources independently.

Day 8
Aim: How do we look at a print primary source (i.e. photo, article, etc.)
Teacher will show a map (natural resources). Teacher will guide students through process of analyzing a document:
S--- What kind of source is this?
O- What’s the occasion?
A- Who is the audience?
P--- What is the purpose of the document?
Students will analyze similar type sources independently.
Day 9 Aim: How do we look at a print primary source (i.e. photo, article, etc.)
Teacher will show an excerpt from a newspaper article. Teacher will guide students through process of analyzing a document:
S--- What kind of source is this?
O- What’s the occasion?
A- Who is the audience?
P--- What is the purpose of the document?
Students will analyze similar type sources independently.

Day 10
Assessment Piece
Students will demonstrate their ability to analyze different types of primary sources: photograph, advertisement, map, newspaper excerpt, and map by answering a series of questions about 5 different sources.

yesterday, i felt a lot of hopeless

the changes that the NYC Department of Ed is putting into effect for next year are starting to really get me down. a person needs to fight against it, but a person also wants to run very far away. yesterday i listened to a middle school teacher spiral out in fear, going on and on about how little information the DOE was providing her and the other teachers in her school about the ways that these changes are going to affect her work and her classroom. for about 35 minutes she went on and on about how she and her colleagues and the parents of her students have all been kept in the dark. only her principal seems to know anything; only her principal is empowered to make any decisions and purchase the required "assessments" and "curricula" that they'll have to use next year. meanwhile, my colleagues, the ones with whom i work to coordinate the teaching american history workshops with elementary teachers in region 9, they know virtually NOTHING about what will happen to their jobs post-june 30th. if they are fired, who will i work with? who will be my liason to the public schools? how will i continue to do this work?

when i got home last night i was feeling eroded. just, you know? like, how in hell are we ever going to make the change in this world, how will public education ever come anywhere near to meeting its mandate, if the capitalist bureaucrats continually eviscerate the thing and mandate testing and require schools to purchase services from small companies, over and over and over, changing the rules and handing more power over to the crap marketing departments of kaplan and princeton review?

oh, that's the other thing: students will now, as of next year, be tested EVERY 60 days. woo hoo! lets go hog testing wild.

i am having a hard time remembering the long view.

subway graffiti

on the subway, tuesday night, i saw this sign. the graffiti, written in between the print that says, in spanish, "reward for information leading to the arrest of anyone in posession of illegal firearms, call [this number]": "Why don't you talk about providing enough materials for the schools. Does Manhattan Comprehensive Day and Night High School have enough books for the students? Closing the low-rate graduation schools is not the solution."

its followed by the usual "Daniel is gay" "jeff was here" type graffiti. which only reinforced the surprise and excitement i felt seeing someone else's objections to the insane public policy of this city expressed in public. which makes me less inclined to scream and rage. but only by a little.

anyhow, thought i'd let my one reader (hi lee!) see this.

xo

petition against NCLB

i got this today from Jean Anyon.
sign it, distribute it, live it.

happy new year. here's to making good shit happen in it.

+ + +

A Petition Calling For the Dismantling of the No Child Left Behind Act

We, the educators, parents, and concerned citizens whose names appear below, reject the misnamed No Child
Left Behind Act and call for legislators to vote against its reauthorization. We do so not because we resist
accountability, but because the law's simplistic approach to education reform wastes student potential,
undermines public education, and threatens the future of our democracy.

Below, briefly stated, are some of the reasons we consider the law too destructive to salvage. In its place we call
for formal, state-level dialogues led by working educators rather than by politicians, ideology-bound "think tank"
members, or leaders of business and industry who have little or no direct experience in the field of education.

THE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT:

1. Misdiagnoses the causes of poor educational development, blaming teachers and students for problems over
which they have no control.

2. Assumes that competition is the primary motivator of human behavior and that market forces can cure all
educational ills.

3. Mandates data driven instruction based on gamesmanship to undermine public confidence in our schools.

4. Uses pseudo science and media manipulation to justify pro-corporate policies and programs, including
diverting taxes away from communities and into corporate coffers.

5. Ignores the proven inadequacies, inefficiencies, and problems associated with centralized, "top-down" control.

6. Places control of what is taught in corporate hands many times removed from students, teachers, parents, local
school boards, and communities.

7. Requires the use of materials and procedures more likely to produce a passive, compliant workforce than
creative, resilient, inquiring, critical, compassionate, engaged members of our democracy.

8. Reflects and perpetuates massive distrust of the skill and professionalism of educators.

9. Allows life-changing, institution-shaping decisions to hinge on single measures of performance.

10. Emphasizes minimum content standards rather than maximum development of human potential.

11. Neglects the teaching of higher order thinking skills which cannot be evaluated by machines.

12. Applies standards to discrete subjects rather than to larger goals such as insightful children, vibrant
communities, and a healthy democracy.

13. Forces schools to adhere to a testing regime, with no provision for innovating, adapting to social change,
encouraging creativity, or respecting student and community individuality, nuance, and difference.

14. Drives art, foreign language, physical education, geography, history, civics and other non-tested subjects, such
as music, out of the curriculum, especially in low-income neighborhoods.

15. Produces multiple, unintended consequences for students, teachers, and communities, including undermining
neighborhood schools and blurring the line between church and state.

16. Rates and ranks public schools using procedures that will gradually label them all "failures," so when they fail
to make Adequate Yearly Progress, as all schools eventually will, they can be “saved” by vouchers, charters, or
privatization.

thinking about war & history

In September, the Journal of American History published a really fantastic roundtable discussion, featuring some of the most prominent historians of the U.S. war in Vietnam. There were several bits that i thought were just exceptionally interesting, and potentially useful to folks who think about how to teach history in a time of war. in one section, the group explicitly takes on the question of what we might learn from the history of the war in Vietnam that might relate to our understanding of contemporary events. here are some excerpts from that discussion, featuring the thoughts of Mark Philip Bradley and Christian Appy.

JAH: ...Why or why not is Vietnam an appropriate historical analogy for thinking about current U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Mark Philip Bradley:
I am most struck by how little we know as Americans and American historians about Afghanistan and Iraq as real places with complex and contingent histories, and how much this parallels American understandings of Vietnam. Maybe seven universities and colleges taught Vietnamese history and language during the war. A handful of scholars produced work on Vietnamese history, society, and culture informed by Vietnamese sources. And many of those who did had to look beyond American shores for employment and venues for publication during the war. When we consider the field of United States–Middle East relations in the academy, the parallels to the Vietnam situation during the war are distressingly similar. How many of us have a real sense of Afghan history and society? Or of Iraq's? Or of the complex interplay of relations—political, economic, and cultural—between the Middle East and the United States? For myself, my honest if embarrassed answer is very little. I suspect the same might be said for many American historians and the public at large.

There are also problematic parallels in what passes for "culturally informed" understandings of the Vietnamese and Afghan pasts, suggesting a little local "knowledge" can be a dangerous thing. Frances FitzGerald's 1972 Pulitzer Prize–winning Fire in the Lake quickly emerged as one of the leading popular interpretations of Vietnamese history and society. Whatever its virtues, FitzGerald's book was organized around a concept of Vietnam that obscured as much as it revealed. FitzGerald argued that the "traditional" notion of the mandate of heaven continued to shape Vietnamese political consciousness into the twentieth century and helped explain why Ho Chi Minh rather than the leadership of South Vietnam enjoyed Vietnamese popular support. In doing so, she borrowed from earlier French orientalist scholarship and its static notions of Vietnam as a smaller and reified China, a set of assumptions that ignored the heterodox character of premodern Vietnam (and China!) and the political, social, and cultural transformations that shaped urban and rural Vietnamese societies during the colonial and postcolonial periods…

One could simply decry all this. Or put it down to a more general American parochialism about the wider world. But as historians we can and should pledge ourselves to recognize that these are serious problems and work toward redressing them. Those of us who have learned Vietnamese and French may not be the right people to now take on Arabic, Kurdish, Farsi, or Pashto. But we can encourage our undergraduates and graduate students to do so. And to cast their reading and research in the capacious ways that have increasingly allowed us to explore the complexities of American engagement in Vietnam, ways that depart from exceptionalist notions of United States history. At the graduate level in particular, if we are to encourage such work, we need to give our students some space, time, and institutional support to learn languages and to master multiple local, national, and regional historiographies. These tools will enable a new generation of scholars to craft a richer, more sophisticated narrative of American relations with Iraq, Afghanistan, and other states and peoples in the Middle East.

…

Christian Appy:
There is a danger that any effort to compare current events with historical antecedents will badly distort both past and present. I agree that Iraq and Vietnam are vastly different, and as Mark rightly argues, comparing those histories in any depth is beyond most historians, never mind commentators and policy makers. But surely there are commonalities, at least in a general sense, in the way U.S. officials justified their policies in the two countries, and these analogies can serve public debate. After all, as David indicates, one important connection is that U.S. policy makers then, as now, believed detailed local knowledge was largely irrelevant except in narrowly tactical terms (that is, where are the "bad guys"?) because Washington clung to the hope (in spite of massive contrary evidence) that U.S. technology and military firepower could hold the line long enough for modernization (or nation building) to draw each country into a stable global system amenable to U.S. economic and political power.

At the risk of gross oversimplification, I'd like to list a few linkages. Then as now, the president claims:

—We face a global threat (Communism/terrorism).
—The enemy we fight is part of that global threat.
—We fight far away from home so we won't have to fight in our own streets.
—We want nothing for ourselves, only self-determination for them.
—We are doing everything possible to limit the loss of civilian lives.
—We are making great progress, but the media isn't reporting it.
—Ultimately, the war must be won by them with less and less U.S. "help."
—Immediate withdrawal would be an intolerable blow to U.S. credibility and would only embolden our enemy and produce a bloodbath.
—Antiwar activism must be allowed but demoralizes our troops and encourages our enemy.

Then, as now, the president does not say:
—The enemy in Vietnam/Iraq actually does not pose a threat to U.S. security, but we're fighting anyway.
—We do indeed have geopolitical and economic interests in the region and will never tolerate a Communist/radical Islamist government.
—We are using weapons and tactics that don't distinguish between civilians and combatants.
—We will stretch and break the law to spy on and sabotage antiwar critics.
—We won't ask the nation as a whole to make a major sacrifice but will continue to send the working class to do most of the fighting.
—The progress we report is contradicted by our own sources.
—Troop morale is going downhill.
—Most of the people over there don't want us in their country.

(from “Interchange: Legacies of the Vietnam War,” a roundtable discussion. Journal of American History, September 2006.)

NCLB and the cutting of social studies

i'm posting, here, a NYT article from last March about how No Child Left Behind strips social studies, arts, and other critical thinking skills-building subjects from public school curricula. its becoming old news, this. and every day, there are new developments developing on this front, new reports, new critiques, new efforts to push back against the de-thinkification of public education that NCLB encourages. but i want to put excerpts from this article here because it captures something heartbreaking.

more soon, on this and other topics. i promise.
++++

NY Times March 26, 2006
"Schools Cut Back Subjects to Push Reading and Math"
By SAM DILLON

SACRAMENTO — Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President Bush's signature education law, by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some low-proficiency students, eliminating it.

Schools from Vermont to California are increasing — in some cases tripling — the class time that low-proficiency students spend on reading and math, mainly because the federal law, signed in 2002, requires annual exams only in those subjects and punishes schools that fall short of rising benchmarks.

The changes appear to principally affect schools and students who test below grade level.

The intense focus on the two basic skills is a sea change in American instructional practice, with many schools that once offered rich curriculums now systematically trimming courses like social studies, science and art. A nationwide survey by a nonpartisan group that is to be made public on March 28 indicates that the practice, known as narrowing the curriculum, has become standard procedure in many communities.

The survey, by the Center on Education Policy, found that since the passage of the federal law, 71 percent of the nation's 15,000 school districts had reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and other subjects to open up more time for reading and math. The center is an independent group that has made a thorough study of the new act and has published a detailed yearly report on the implementation of the law in dozens of districts.

"Narrowing the curriculum has clearly become a nationwide pattern," said Jack Jennings, the president of the center, which is based in Washington.

At Martin Luther King Jr. Junior High School in Sacramento, about 150 of the school's 885 students spend five of their six class periods on math, reading and gym, leaving only one 55-minute period for all other subjects.

About 125 of the school's lowest-performing students are barred from taking anything except math, reading and gym, a measure that Samuel Harris, a former lieutenant colonel in the Army who is the school's principal, said was draconian but necessary. "When you look at a kid and you know he can't read, that's a tough call you've got to make," Mr. Harris said.
The increasing focus on two basic subjects has divided the nation's educational establishment. Some authorities, including Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, say the federal law's focus on basic skills is raising achievement in thousands of low-performing schools. Other experts warn that by reducing the academic menu to steak and potatoes, schools risk giving bored teenagers the message that school means repetition and drilling.

"Only two subjects? What a sadness," said Thomas Sobol, an education professor at Columbia Teachers College and a former New York State education commissioner. "That's like a violin student who's only permitted to play scales, nothing else, day after day, scales, scales, scales. They'd lose their zest for music."

But officials in Cuero, Tex., have adopted an intensive approach and said it was helping them meet the federal requirements. They have doubled the time that all sixth graders and some seventh and eighth graders devote to reading and math, and have reduced it for other subjects.

"When you only have so many hours per day and you're behind in some area that's being hammered on, you have to work on that," said Henry Lind, the schools superintendent. "It's like basketball. If you can't make layups, then you've got to work on layups."
...

Since America's public schools began taking shape in the early 1800's, shifting fashions have repeatedly reworked the curriculum. Courses like woodworking and sewing joined the three R's. After World War I, vocational courses, languages and other subjects broadened the instructional menu into a smorgasbord.

A federal law passed after the Russian launching of Sputnik in 1957 spurred a renewed emphasis on science and math, and a 1975 law that guaranteed educational rights for the disabled also provoked sweeping change, said William Reese, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of "America's Public Schools: From the Common School to No Child Left Behind." But the education law has leveraged one of the most abrupt instructional shifts, he said.

"Because of its emphasis on testing and accountability in particular subjects, it apparently forces some school districts down narrow intellectual paths," Dr. Reese said. "If a subject is not tested, why teach it?"

The shift has been felt in the labor market, heightening demand for math teachers and forcing educators in subjects like art and foreign languages to search longer for work, leaders of teachers groups said.

The survey that is coming out this week looks at 299 school districts in 50 states. It was conducted as part of a four-year study of No Child Left Behind and appears to be the most systematic effort to track the law's footprints through the classroom, although other authorities had warned of its effect on teaching practices.

...

At King Junior High, in a poor neighborhood in Sacramento a few miles from a decommissioned Air Force base, the intensive reading and math classes have raised test scores for several years running. That has helped Larry Buchanan, the superintendent of the Grant Joint Union High School District, which oversees the school, to be selected by an administrators' group as California's 2005 superintendent of the year.

But in spite of the progress, the school's scores on California state exams, used for compliance with the federal law, are increasing not nearly fast enough to allow the school to keep up with the rising test benchmarks. On the math exams administered last spring, for instance, 17.4 percent of students scored at the proficient level or above, and on the reading exams, only 14.9 percent.

With scores still so low, Mr. Harris, the school's principal, and Mr. Buchanan said they had little alternative but to continue remedial instruction for the lower-achieving among the school's nearly 900 students.

The students are the sons and daughters of mostly Hispanic, black and Laotian Hmong parents, many of whom work as gardeners, welders and hotel maids or are unemployed. The district administers frequent diagnostic tests so that teachers can carefully calibrate lessons to students' needs.

Rubén Jimenez, a seventh grader whose father is a construction laborer, has a schedule typical of many students at the school, with six class periods a day, not counting lunch.

Rubén studies English for the first three periods, and pre-algebra and math during the fourth and fifth. His sixth period is gym. How does he enjoy taking only reading and math, a recent visitor asked.

"I don't like history or science anyway," Rubén said. But a moment later, perhaps recalling something exciting he had heard about lab science, he sounded ambivalent.

"It'd be fun to dissect something," he said.

Martín Lara, Rubén's teacher, said the intense focus on math was paying off because his math skills were solidifying. Rubén said math has become his favorite subject.

But other students, like Paris Smith, an eighth grader, were less enthusiastic. Last semester, Paris failed one of the two math classes he takes, back to back, each morning.

"I hate having two math classes in a row," Paris said. "Two hours of math is too much. I can't concentrate that long."
...

process drama & social studies ed/october 12 follow up

OK. I promised on October 12 that i'd post notes from the october 12th workshop. Here's the first installment, notes on the drama-based work we did that day--from the warm ups and team building we did at the outset, to the longer drama work we did based on the narrative of a young immigrant from India.

But first, some thoughts on certain important concepts for using drama to teach socials studies topics (with thanks to Dr. Jay Pecora):

PROCESS DRAMA: is an improvisational educational technique for use in the classroom. Less concerned with re-enacting specific plot lines than with exploring the relationships, conflict, and the meaning of key historical events and processes.

ROLE: taking on a voice that isn’t your own, enacting a character from a different time and/or place.

TEACHER-IN-ROLE: The teacher sets up the dramatic world up in character, modeling the method of participation, and inviting students to dialogue.

TABLEAU/TABLEAUX: frozen pictures.

QUESTIONING: should be done in an attempt not to seek specific answers but to generate meaning.

TENSION: drama creates it. It is an important element, motivational.

DISTANCE AND PROTECTION: Process drama allows for it. Very useful for difficult emotional material. But how to make the most of it? Remind your students to focus on the external activity; emphasize that this work is about trying to represent emotion, not the real thing, and; and explain that they can pick characters who are entirely different than they are, that what they say in character isn’t representative of their own actual opinions.

REFLECTION: is essential.

EVALUATION: Also essential. Beware, though: results not always predictable.

FURTHER READING on drama in the social studies classroom:

•Augusto Boal, _Games for Actors and Non-Actors_ (2nd ed., Routledge, 2005)
•Anita Manley and Cecily O’Neil, _Dreamseekers: Creative approaches to the African American Heritage_ (Heinemann, 1997)
•Viola Spolin, _Theater Games for the Classroom_ (Northwestern University Press, 1986)
•Philip Taylor, _Redcoats and Patriots: Reflective Practice in Drama and Social Studies_ (Heinemann, 1998)


NOTES FROM THE OCTOBER 12TH WORKSHOP:

•PHYSICAL AND VOCAL WARM UPS
Shake out
Big face/Little face
Yawn—Let out sound
Clasped hands, shake together, and let out sound
Tight/Loose/Round/Crooked—Physicalization.
Tongue Twisters

•THROWING OUT SOUND AND MOVEMENT. In a circle, each student will throw a body movement which is accompanied by a sound into the circle. The first time around, everyone in the circle can echo the movement and sound as each student goes. The second time around, you can do it “wave” style, with each person doing the sound and movement which the first person started in a “wave” around the circle.

•COUNTING. The group will count in order starting with one, and anyone can call out a number whenever they want to (there is no designated starter or set students calling out numbers). If two people say a number at the same time, the group must start over counting at one. The goal is to sense the energy of the group and get to a high number.

•HEE YAH. The group, as a unit, tries to say and move at the same time. A leader can be chosen by the facilitator (with the participants keeping their eyes closed) for the first couple of rounds. After a while, the group must try it without a designated leader. The goal is for the group to come to a silent agreement about when they will move together. Each group member must look, listen, and be aware of their partners, and their partners in this activity is the whole group.

•STEAL THE SPACE. A person stands in the middle of the circle. Those students who make up the circle will make eye contact with another member and negotiate when they will switch places. The person in the middle tries to get the empty space before they switch places.

•HERO/VILLIAN/SHIELD—Walk through the space. Stop. Look at one other person in the room but don’t make it obvious to others who it is. This is a person you want to be like. Mimic whatever they do—even if it’s subtle. Notice their breathing, stance, etc.
Okay, now walk around the space. You want to be near this person—this hero. GO
Stop—notice someone else in the room who is someone you don’t want to be near. This person is an enemy, or villain, to you. Again, don’t make it obvious to others who you chose. Imagine this person has a bomb as you walk walk through the space—GO. You want to stay away from that person but you must keep walking—
You’ve got your villain and your hero—now you want to act as a shield in order to keep your hero away from his enemy. GO!

•STOP/GO/CLAP/JUMP, and opposites. Instruct the group to move about the room at will. At certain random intervals, command them to: a) stop; b) go; c) clap; or d) jump. They must respond to the commands. Then do the opposing actions to what is said---so that stop will mean go, go will mean stop, clap will mean jump, and jump will mean clap.

•HUMAN MAP. This chair represents New York City, and the far side of the room represents Japan. Place yourself where you were born and raised. Now move to where your father was born and raised. Where your mother was born and raised, your mothers' mother, your mothers' father, etc.

•WORD EXCHANGE. Each student thinks about a word or sentence associated with immigration. They then walk around the room, and one person tells another person their word. The second person takes the first person's word, and vice versa. With the new word, each person exchanges words with another person and so on. After several minutes, the teacher asks the student to stand in a circle, and say the last word received. This is a way of stimulating associations with immigration.

•THROWING OUT SOUND AND MOVEMENT REVISITED. Each person can take the word they ended up with (in the last activity to do with immigration) and create a gesture to express that word as it is said. So that this time they’d throw out their words and movement (wave style) based on some of the words they exchanged in the last activity.

•A SERIES OF EXERCISES, BASED ON THE ORAL HISTORY OF AMITABH
using text from _New Kids in Town: Oral Histories of Immigrant Teens_ (Scholastic, 1991)

GOALS: Students will examine the reasons why immigrants left their countries and the challenges and successes they faced in coming to America through looking at the Oral history of a teen and dramatizing pivotal moments of his experience. The story of Amitabh is from New Kids in Town: Oral Histories of Immigrant Teens: edited by Janet Bode (1989)

Hand out section of Oral history of Amitabh. The class reads the following passage aloud, with each participant taking one sentence. (5 minutes)

"I couldn't always understand why we had come here. Why would my parents leave a country where they had been born, where their children had been born? Bhaunagar was a modernized city on the northwest side of India. It had a lot of factories, apartment houses, and private homes. Our home was three stories high and we lived together with my uncle, my aunt, and my grandparents. My grandparents had another house in a small city called Mehsana. Every summer and during other vacations we'd go there.

"The weather was very warm. In the winters it would get cool enough to wear sweaters, but that was it. No snow. It also used to rain quite a bit. There was a dry and rainy season, with monsoons that occurred every year at a certain time. We had a good life there.

"I know that people think that in India everybody is poor, that everything is backward. It's not that backward, and probably improved since I've been here. We had electricity and running water and traffic jams. I went to a good school. They taught the same subjects as over here, like art, general science, and math and also some of the different languages of India. I think there are fifteen or sixteen languages. At home we spoke Gujarati and I learned how to speak Hindi too. I was happy. I knew the way things were done in India. I knew the food. I loved cooked okra, the vegetable, and pouri, the bread. I had a favorite kind of curry. I knew my future. My parents said, though, that we were going to move to America because…"

TURN TO A PARTNER: Why do you think Amitabh's family decided to come to the United States? Participants will discuss possible reasons based on the morning lecture; i.e. lack of opportunity, financial hardship, and the pursuit of better living conditions. (3 minutes)

The facilitator reads two sentences about what really happened to Amitabh's family: "My parents said that we were going to move to American because us kids would have more opportunities for the future. This was a long time planning."

PAIRS are grouped with another two other pairs to form a group of six. Because they have discussed possible reasons why the family left India, they should have enough information to improvise the following scene:

GROUPS IMPROVISE the moment Amitabh's parents tell him and the rest of the family they are going to move to America. In a group of six, there will be the mother, the father, Amitabh, and two more brothers. Groups improvise simultaneously for 3 minutes. Stop. Decide on 10 to 30 seconds of the improvisation you just did to share with the rest of the class. Each group shares their 10 to 30 seconds. This entire section should last no more than 7 minutes.

Give a second hand-out which we read aloud with the following bit of information from Amitabh on it:

"It was really bad for us in the beginning. We were six in a two room apartment. Every day my parents would get up and go out to look for jobs. They knew they had to start all the way at the bottom, that people here didn’t count experience from India. But my father had been a biologist. My mother was a chemistry professor at a University. In India they were both making good money. Now, though, they would come home every evening and they wouldn't have found anything. They would be very, very sad. They didn't know the bus systems or the subway systems here. They'd get lost. They'd get to some place and it would be too late. The job would be gone. They'd go another place and the answer would be no. One day my parents said, "This is a dead end. We can't find jobs. We don't have any more money. Nothing. We're going to have to jump into the river." I want to think that they were not being serious, but I still would feel so sad for us." (5 minutes)

BRAINSTORM what kinds of jobs Amitabh’s parents might be able to get in NYC? Elicit conversation about what factors go into the task of finding and getting a job. Altogether go through the information we have about their educational status, their ability to speak English, and various other things we know about the world at large that might affect the sorts of jobs they might seek and find.

JOB INTERVIEW. In Pairs, (A and B) --- Amitabh's mother or father (A) apply for a job. B is the interviewer. Afterwards, ask the A’s of the pairs to stand up while the B’s remain seated. Ask the A’s to walk to the next seated B partner and sit down next to them. Now, B will be the Amitabh's mother or father applying for a job, while A is the interviewer.

Facilitator says: Eventually both parents got a job. Can we see how this happened? Improvise for another two minutes, and then decide on 10 to 30 seconds to share with the class. This entire section should be no more than 15 minutes.

Discussion—what did it feel like to be interviewed. What were some of the themes or issues that emerged? (5 minutes)

The participants receive a third hand-out and read about what really happened to Amitabh's family:

"My father worked as a messenger, more a job for a boy than a man. He delivered letters and carried packages all over the city. Again, he would get lost the way he had when he was looking for work. He lasted about three or four months doing that until he found another job and another job. All small jobs. Then he met an Indian man who owned a laboratory who hired him. Now he's sort of back in the area of biology, where he used to work. My mothers started working at a store. She had to fold clothes, mostly. Then she got a better job watching patients at a senior citizens' home. Eventually, she became the dietician there. Now we live in a house with four bedrooms. I have my own bedroom and my middle brother and I have a computer. I'm in the tenth grade, and my older brother is in college the University of Maryland. He wants to be a surgeon. My father wants to become a U.S. citizen. My mother wants to stay Indian. Still, we are all changing…." (5 minutes).

How are they changing? Discuss. (5 minutes)

IN GROUPS, CREATE A TABLEAU to show how your group thinks they are changing. Share. (10 minutes)

Afterwards, facilitator hands out a fourth and final passage to read aloud:

"Still, we are all changing. When we lived in Bhaunagar, my mother wore a sari. She used to put a bindi, that little dot, on her forehead. Now only when we go to some festival, like every August 15 is Indian Independence Day and there's a big parade, then she will wear her sari and have a bindi. Mostly, she just wears pants and a blouse. I'm more Americanized than my parents. I still speak Gujarati at home, but now there's English mixed in a lot. I'm trying to get out of my accent as much as possible. And now I have what I guess you could call an American mouth. I have braces. I'd never seen braces in India. I hate wearing them!!! Just like American kids." (5 minutes)

Final reflective discussion (10 minutes).

a little shout out to Region 9 teachers

More to come, but for the moment here are some pics from yesterday's "Becoming Historians" elementary educators' workshop at Legacy High School. The workshop consisted of a talk by Dr. Madhulika Khandelwal (Director, Asian/American Center, Queens College) -- “Thinking about Citizenship through Asian American Histories” -- and a series of exercises in using process drama to teach immigrants' stories, designed and led by David Montgomery (PhD Candidate, Educational Theater Department, NYU).

Stay tuned for notes and other followup materials, which I'll post in the next couple of days.

Flushing, Queens

A few Thursdays ago I took the 7 train to Flushing to meet with Madhulika Khandelwal. I had invited Khandelwal, the director of the Asian/American Center at Queens College and author of Becoming American, Being Indian: An Immigrant Community in New York City (Cornell, 2002), to come to give a talk to a group of public school teachers at one of the fall Teaching American History workshops that its my job to organize. In this talk, which isn’t happening until mid-October, Khandelwal will give a teacher-friendly primer on Asian American history, reflecting, as she goes, on the ways in which this history sheds light on the meanings and history of citizenship in the U.S. context. Its going to be a smash-up. Can’t wait. So but we needed to meet in advance of the workshop to work out various details—and she asked that we hold this pre-meeting in Queens, and so on Thursday I went. It had been over a decade since I’d been to Main Street in Flushing because it 14 years ago my maternal grandparents moved from Flushing to Fort Lee, New Jersey. Already deep into their seventies, they couldn’t hack the five floor walk-up anymore, and plus they wanted to live closer my Great Aunt Fina.

Going out to Flushing after 14 years of not-going gave me the familiar sort of alienated, unresolved, grandchild-of-Croatian-immigrants feeling that I’ve grown accustomed to over the years. It’s a feeling I’m very interested in, it’s the feeling, in fact, that originally inspired me to start thinking about the question of how history feels. I’m still working my way towards being able to write comprehensively about that feeling; and going to Flushing brought a rush of ideas and memories back that I thought were interesting, given the fact that I was going to a meeting to talk about the history of post-1965 immigration to the neighborhood. Given that some of the people I love most in this world are South Asians who moved to Queens (and environs) post-65, right as my family was transitioning from immigrant to native-born types—and doing it in Queens (and environs).

Flushing, in specific, was a central geographical marker and identifier for me in the first 20 years of my life. It inhabited especially large portions of my imagination when I was a small child: it felt like it was a part of me that I had left behind before I was born, before I was moved to the suburbs, where, more often than not, I found myself playing Kick The Can with the neighborhood bullies, or something equally (un)enjoyable. Back then, the word “Flushing” bewitched me. No: “bewitched” is the wrong word. Really it just confused me, and some days this confusion was consuming. I’d sit in the back of my dad’s 1975 Ford Something and say the word over and over in my head. I just couldn’t figure it out. Flushing. Flushing. Flushing. That’s a verb!, I’d think. Not a neighborhood! Moreover, it was the sort of verb you definitely didn’t want to live inside of; it was the sort of verb you barely wanted to think about even when you were enacting it—better just to do it quickly and then get back to the dinner table or the math homework you were doodling on. Why, I wondered, would someone name a place after something unpleasant that happens after you’ve done your business in the bathroom? Why? And then, why did my relatives have to live there? I must have lost hours and hours pondering these questions. It felt like the idea of flushing a toilet soiled all of the neighborhood’s inhabitants—and, by extension, me.

Back then, I wasn’t knowledgeable in the ways of historical research, and we didn’t have Wikipedia. But even if we did, I don’t know that it would have occurred to me to look up the history of the place’s name there. The question itself was only ever half-formed, more a feeling than a thought, as most important things often were in my youth. But it turns out that the reason for the neighorhood’s name lies, as it always seems to in North America, with the history of empire, and displacement, and mispronunciation. In 1645, the Dutch West India Company pushed the area’s existing inhabitants—the Algoquins—aside, renaming the place Vlissingen, after a spot in the southwestern Netherlands. When the English settlers arrived, sometime later, they in turn pushed the Dutch out, and found themselves unable to pronounce the place’s name correctly. “Vlissingen” thus became “Flushing.” This, of course, was before indoor plumbing was invented.

I don’t remember what Flushing was like in my early life, although I’ve heard it said that even into the 1970s and early 80s, at least in the immediate few blocks around my grandparents’ apartment, you could do all your business entirely in the languages of Croatian and Italian, the only two languages that my grandparents spoke fluently. This has to be at least partly true, because until the day they died, neither of my grandparents spoke much English. But in the early 1990s, during their final years in the neighborhood, I remember that driving around we’d always comment on how many Korean signs and businesses were going up nearby.

So I went to my meeting with Madhulika feeling curious. How would it feel now to walk the same streets I hadn’t haunted since my early 20s? How exactly has the neighborhood changed? Madhulika’s work is actually in large part about Flushing and the transformation that it underwent since the 1970s, when large numbers of South Asian immigrants began inhabiting it. But Flushing is now, I think, predominantly neither Korean nor South Asian—its largely Chinese. You can get Chinese produce on every other block and there’s a dedicated group of Falun Gong practioners that has set up a semi-permanent protest table outside the library. And its constantly in flux. The Punjabi-Gujarati restaurant Madhulika had intended to take me to, on Main Street, just past Kissena Boulevard, had just been converted into a nail salon. (But no problem; there was an equally excellent Punjabi-Gujarati establishment two doors down!)

Madhulika has a lot of very interesting things to say about these changes, and in two weeks she’ll be giving a talk about them—and about the history of South Asians in New York, and just what their experiences suggests about the limitations and meanings of citizenship in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries—to a group of NYC public school elementary teachers. After which I intend to post, here, highlights from the talk and the Q & A. And therein, perhaps I will also take up the very important questions of: Why Should NYC Public School Elementary Teachers Be Teaching about South Asians in New York City? There is, after all, the all-important reading test coming up soon! And will this information be on the fifth grade social studies test? And aren’t grade school children too young to be able to understand the complexities involved here?

These are the questions that have to be addressed when one plans a talk for NYC elementary teachers on almost any historical subject other than a round of The Erie Canal Song. Indeed, The Erie Canal Song holds a shockingly large place in NYC official elementary social studies curriculum. Why? No one has yet been able to tell me. Its a fun song, for sure. But its not a social studies curriculum.

Anyhow, for the moment, I’m just going to sit here for a bit, thinking about the sweep of time, and about the way that Flushing seems to be the epicenter of so many important pieces of 20th century US history and my own personal American story. I’ll let you know when I figure something out.

historians against the war

ok, they've got a terrible acronym-- but, then, how many of us can really say we've never belonged to an organization with a sub-par one? and anyhow, they've got a good plan. and for a bunch of academics, they've managed to put together a decent collection of resources and logistical suggestions. they're trying to get folks to organize

TEACH-INS AGAINST THE WAR

i realize that i have like 6 readers for this blog, but spread the word, y'all: October 17, 18, 19 are days designated as teach-in days. a whole range of university professors and veterans and writers have agreed to make themselves available to come and speak at schools and other groups nationwide, and HAW (yup, there it is) has put together a list of available films, collaborating organizations, and suggestions for advertising and oprganizing an event of this sort at your institution.

in the new york area, some of the people who might agree to come and talk to your group include: Zach Lochman, professor of Middle Eastern Studies at NYU; Ellen Schreker, who has written fantastic stuff on intellectual freedom in the McCarthy era; Bob Vitalis, who's brilliant on the history of oil and geopolitics; folks from Iraq Veterans Against the War and September 11 Families for Peaceful tomorrows; and etc. go to:

http://www.historiansagainstwar.org/teachin/

for more info. and pass the word.

i heart public school teachers

This morning the sky is grey, the rain is streaking down, and I’m preparing to run off to a day of meetings and puddle hopping. Perfect setting for the main thing that’s on my mind this a.m., which is: the NYC Department of Education. It’s a gloomy subject, ladies and gentlemen. Doesn’t matter what angle you look at it from. Today I’m thinking about the angle of how many just unaccountably enthusiastic and genius teachers I’ve met over the few years that I’ve been working in the world of public education in this city. And how they get dragged through the mud by the bureaucracy and administration of the Department of Education. I’m thinking about this today mostly because I got an email from a teacher yesterday that practically broke my heart. And definitely made my blood boil. (Sometimes, yes, I feel rage.)

Here’s the story: my roommate works at the U.N., and among the various things he’s working on right now is the development of an educational project directed at youth in the U.S. He asked me if I could recommend any teachers that he might consult as he begins to put this educational project together, and I suggested a few of teachers I know. One of them, a teacher that I’ll call R., wrote him back, saying that she’d be happy to talk to him about the project. R. is an enthusiastic middle school teacher with almost a decade of experience. I’ve worked with her for several years, and in that time, I’ve seen her in action: she barely sleeps, she’s always interested in learning new stuff, and she’s capable of translating complex historical ideas into challenging but fun classroom activities. Most remarkably: even after years of working for the city, she’s got a positive attitude. Not to overstate the case, but I touch her feet in reverence. No way I could do what she does. I’m cranky—and misanthropic. And other things. So anyhow, last week my roommate took the subway to R.’s classroom, and met R. there, among the metal desks and not-too-large chairs that you find in NYC middle schools. They talked. And before my roommate got back on the subway, he pulled out his phone and called me, leaving a message on my voicemail, gushing about R. She’s so smart, she’s got such creative ideas, she totally transformed my understanding of this project. Etc, etc, etc. He elaborated later, over some food in the kitchen. Like me, was struck by her ability to translate complex historical and social ideas into consumable lesson ideas for use with young people.

A few days later, I wrote her a short email, thanking her for being so generous with her time, and telling her just how jazzed my roommate was to talk to her. And yesterday she wrote me back; she wrote the email that almost broke my heart. It was great for me too, she said. “I’m not used to being treated like an expert,” she said. “It's just so great when someone wants to hear about what I do as if it's so important, and [treats me as if] I have knowledge rather than being told what to do.”

Wh-what? I’m not used to being treated like an expert. Its possible that if I hadn’t worked with public school teachers for the past few years, I would have just been confused by that sentence—instead of enraged. How could a fully licensed, enthusiastic, smart, dedicated teacher with years of classroom experience not be treated as an expert? How, you ask. Why. The answer is complicated, probably more complicated than I’ll ever understand, but I think the core of it lives at the Tweed Courthouse, where the bureaucratic power of the DOE resides, and emanates out from there. The bureaucracy that is the NYC DOE is a complicated, labyrinthine mechanism, one that suffers as much from racism and corporate politics as it does from electoral grandstanding and the presence of scores of deadened, cynical hangers-on. Each of those features of the DOE has a hand in creating a climate wherein teachers are treated as if they are simply gears in a machine. They are made to go to professional development seminars where they are either handed scripts dictating what they are to say in the classroom, or monotonically lectured at on subjects of no relevance to their work. They are talked down to by administrators who are often barely qualified themselves to teach or inspire young minds. They are used as pawns by high-ranking officials on all sides of the debate.

Its true that there are bad teachers. There are, indeed, people working as teachers in this city who actually should not be permitted to go within 100 feet of any young person with the spark of life in them. I have met some of these teachers, and I’m here to say: yes, correct. Some of them don’t know what they’re doing. But this is not true of the majority of the teachers I’ve met. The majority of teachers I’ve met are either a)young and enthusiastic (if a little under-prepared for the work they’ve taken on—especially in the area of history education, which gets short-shrift from teacher ed programs, a subject I’m sure I’ll write about at some point on this blog), or b)all-around fantastic people whose dedication and smarts defy explanation. But all of them are used to being treated like they don’t matter, like they aren’t invested, imaginative, hard-working, intelligent souls.

When I told my roommate what R. had written in her email, he said, you know, when I was saying goodbye to her, I said: I want to say goodbye in a way that demonstrates the respect that I feel for you, and for the work you’re doing. I was raised to believe that there is no more important profession than teaching. And R. replied: you weren’t raised in the U.S., huh?

(Nope, he wasn’t.) OK but that gets into a whole other set of things, and that I don’t have time for, people. I gotta get back to work.

Dear R., if you’re reading this: you ROCK. I have no idea how you do it. And I have no idea how to remedy it.

Damn. That’s not an upbeat note to end on.

and another thing: Circus Amok & public history

Another thing I want to do herein is to open up a space for thinking and talking across the various worlds and disciplines that interest and compel me. And hopefully to encourage more collaboration and more dialogue and more experimentation among my various co-conspirators and role-models and inspirations—teachers and performers and scholars and writers and activists and rif-raf of many sorts alike. Also to:

--create some fuel for a real movement to bring critical, engaged, complicated, and comprehensible history into the streets; and to

--consider those places where this is already being done.

Can I be any clearer, you ask? For sure. I'm all about clarity, and anecdote, and specificity. So, now, let me see, what do I got in my bag of tricks?…

OK, here: lets all go to the Circus together, for a minute. C’mon, don’t be scared. The clowns are all very, very, very nice, they’ll buy you a beer if you help them load up the truck… and the elephant is made out of papier mache. The scariest thing about this particular circus is how freaking HOT it is, and how little funding they’ve got.

Those of you out there in blogland whose phone numbers are saved inside my cellphone will know that I’m talking, here, about the great Circus Amok. (www.circusamok.org)

This year, I had the immense privilege and joy of working with the Circus in the role of what Jennifer Miller calls a dramaturg. "Dramaturg" sounds a little too dramatic and a whole lot too turgical, and anyhow, I know very little about any of that. Actually, I was much more of a historical advisor. (If you are reading this post during the month of September 2006 and you’re anywhere near NYC, get yourself to the nearest park to watch the Circus during its one-month all-NYC parks tour. See the website—above—for schedule and details. You won’t be disappointed.) A one-ring extravaganza of the most glittery and grassroots kind, this year’s Circus was organized around the twin themes of immigration and Latin American politics. It was called “Citizen*Ship: An Immigrant Rights Fantasia in 10 Acts.” Miller called me up and said: can you help me figure out some way we can fit something about the history of immigration and naturalization into the Circus this year. And I replied: it just so happens, Ms. Miller, that several square feet of my PhD dissertation was devoted to the history of U.S. immigration and naturalization law. So I actually feel qualified—licensed, even—to speak professionally on such subjects. The result was that one afternoon in—what was it, Miller? June?—of this year, I went over to her place, and we sat around talking history. After that, we exchanged several thousands of emails and I visited Circus rehearsal a few times, and boom, before I knew it, there were professional acrobats and dancing teacups and glittery performers jumping around on pogo sticks and doing flips and standing on their hands to illustrate complicated features of the history of immigration and naturalization law in the U.S. I’m talking about ideas that came right out of books like Ian Haney Lopez’s brilliant work of critical race theory, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race. And in no time, audiences in parks from Coney Island to the South Bronx found themselves watching performer after performer step up to a microphone and talk about the racism embedded in the history of U.S. citizenship laws. And it worked—or at least, audiences didn’t stream madly out in frustration and boredom during these pedagogical moments. This, I think is in part because Miller choreographed it, and Jenny Romaine musicalized it, so smartly—and in part because it was wedged between an insanely hilarious fake-Heidi-themed juggling routine and a glittery acrobatics act. And in part because—what? That New Yorkers are ready to hear that the history of U.S. citizenship law was racially coded? I have no idea. But I am studying it. And I am trying to learn how public displays of history of this sort can be so powerful.

Now, I don’t have any illusions. I don’t think that the Circus is going to singlehandedly change the world, or that the brilliant combination of politics and history and entertainment that it features will mean that immigrants won’t continue to be attacked in the streets, at work, or in state and federal legislatures in the coming year. But I did watch something kind of beautiful happen at the Union Square performance last Thursday afternoon.

Because it was the middle-ish of the day, a fair portion of the audience for that performance consisted of West Indian domestic workers—nannies—with their charges, white children, in their arms. The central narrative thread that organizes this year’s Circus’s is a story about a West Indian nanny who abandons the white family that employs her. Lupita, as she is called, has joined together with a group of her friends and created a circus act. And together they have all decided run away to Argentina—where, as Lupita says, “You can be a circus performer and have health care!” It was impossible not to notice, throughout the totally bold scene in which Lupita tells her boss off, the surprised and delighted laughter coming from a section of the audience where a group of West Indian domestic workers were standing. I don’t know what sort of lasting effects this kind of encounter between circus and audience might have, but it certainly felt a whole lot different than it feels to watch some reality TV absently over a beer at the local bar. And ok, yes. It suggested the possibility of alliances across occupation and class and neighborhood in this city that so often feels hard-core and impossible.

And that's what I mean when I say "public history."
Are you with me, my fellow university-trained and -based public historians?
Etc.?

Holler.

back-to-school and hi

Hello and welcome to how history feels. I hope you’re not expecting me to solve the riddle for you, or to explain, in each post, just exactly how history does feel. Today history feels like a cup of tea without sugar, sucked through my teeth at 8 am. Yesterday it felt like a phone call. The day before it felt like the screech of fingernails dragged across a blackboard. Its true that I am interested in figuring out how the migrations and labors of generations of my ancestors shapes the way I feel and what I do, what I’m able to imagine and how my body moves and takes form. And probably, or anyway, I think, I’ll write some on that question in this here blog at some point in the near future. But that’s not, in fact, what I consider to be its central purpose. No, its central purpose is to stage a series of collisions between history + education + contemporary life + politics + culture.

There will be observations about history education and the New York City Public schools; there will be interviews with artists who make history-based critical work; there will be tiny investigations into the way memories live on a streetcorner. Stuff like that. There will be links; there will be reports; there will be photos. I feel certain that at some point I will complain about some bureaucracy or other. (I have a hunch you’re feeling me on that one.)

My aim, in part, is to provide resources, ideas and support to the public school teachers that I work with in NYC public school Region 9, and their colleagues. There will be times, I’m sure, that I won’t be able to help myself from getting a little whimsical and poetic on your ear. But I do hope that you’ll find in here good and useful information; resources; and provocations as well. Your comments are MOST welcome.

Happy back-to-school.

See you on the blog, and in the streets.