I have been thinking about this paper for almost a month now. I have not touched the paper really. I did edit the third chapter and will do more on it today. Mostly getting rid of the unneeded things like the observation piece.
I attended a conference this weekend, only for one day, it was more than enough. I did however get some good ideas for the student project, which I think will work best if I can get Robin's friend to help me a bit. I might do a hip-hop workshop. I have had a lot of days where I feel like I can't really do this and that I am pretending to be an academic. I have come to realize that I really want to be an author, but am having a hard time justifying it to myself, and without that I can't do much. I think that is what bothered me about the prospectus meeting. It felt like a bit of an attack, even though it was not intended as one. It was just a matter of defining my subjectivity in connection to the fact that Thorkell and I have had some odd experiences and I have developed a distinct distaste for the American (US) education system, which seems to be failing students left and right.
Here in MN we have the highest achievement gap between white and non-white students. Just yesterday Mikey told me that his high school is reconstituting this year, which means it failed to meet NCLB standards for "three" years running. All of the staff has been fired and there will be new teachers in the fall. As far I know Arlington is predominately a minority school, and like north in Minneapolis, because of underperformance on national measures like No Child Left Behind. It is hard not to be subjective when you keep seeing students fall through the educational cracks.
On Sunday I attended Ben, Carl, Jordan, and Tyrone's graduation ceremony. They do it differently, usually having a smallish grad class, this year it was 43 students (their biggest ever), they have family an friends stand up and testify. This year only one person could stand up and it still took a full two hours. It was very moving, from students who were first generation to students who had academic parents and students with small children to Somali students who immigrated and needed documentation of high school graduation for work, and higher education. Some of the speeches were very moving. In some ways I think the school falls down on a few things, but that may just be JP, with Kelli belli. Part of my issue is that much of what he sees and learns he has already learned at least in the area of history, english, current events. Although this is a bit over statement, he has learned a lot, and just takes time off when he has already 'seen the movie.'
In someways I think I have fostered his anathema toward school with my disappointment with education and learning. When I look back on his experiences, I realize that first, my mother's opinion on education trumped everything else for a good while. But over the years I have developed a critical eye toward how she and dad understood education. In many ways most people think of education in elitist terms. Education is about having a key to what is sometimes called the ivory tower, by reading the right authors and answering the right questions with the right keywords. And even in CSCL this happens.
Mom did not believe in charter schools I can see why as they do operate outside of the larger school district in which they are situated, having a separate school board, and not answering to the larger board. This can distort the power in favor of teachers or certain parents can hog tie the schools and through this create schools that are exclusionary to students. I am thinking of how the board at GRS was manipulated from being a Montessori to and IB program, without really talking to the community as they did it. This is the danger of a charter school. The other primary argument leveraged against charter schools is that they fail to graduate students that measure up to the state and national standards. This however is always argued from the perspective of large schools where data a plentiful for the success of the school, yet even most of these large schools are failing the students if the recent numbers about the Twin Cities are to be believed. For a long time I believed in the "canon" in fact in some instances I still do. There are things that students need to know. However, I limit that to part of the learning process and don't want to enforce the fact based kind of learning, that leaves out the analysis and critique of what is being taught. I don't mean that students should be able to argue every point i.e. their grades, but they should be able to discuss a relevant topic. I would like to say logically and "coherently", but those notions are culturally subjective and should not be used as a unique measure of learning.
Back to mom's influence. I used to believe that the teachers were right, that my instinct and my son's voice were not as valid. Certainly neither of us was trained as educators. In fact to my dismay I let this go on for far to long. The year Thorkell was 13 was when I woke up, realizing that Hrafn and I were "going after" Thorkell in a way that mom and dad had done with Hrafn. I knew all along that Thorkell was and is a very bright, much brighter than his classmates. It took me a long time to realize that the boy I knew as curious, analytical, and philosophical was still that same child in school, but that those traits were not what they were looking for. They wanted complacence, quietness, absorption and unquestioning working on repetitive tasks. I am not writing about anything new John Taylor Gatto, Frank Smith and even Paolo Friere talk about it. It has been called the banking model of education. The elite (not necessarily the smartest or most educated) choose the content that is deemed valuable, and it regardless of relevance or need gets taught to the next generation.
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