Category: education

Categories
education politics

Jack Straw from Wichita

Jack Sawyer

I wrote a post a few weeks ago arguing in favor of abolishing the age limit on the right to vote. I want to follow up that proposal by arguing in favor of abolishing prison time for people under the age of 25.

Here’s what it means to work at a therapeutic school: never giving up on a child. A lot of the kids we get at our school are on their way down the drain of life. Their parents (or usually at least one of them) have abandoned them. Their schools have either asked them to leave or admitted that they don’t know what to do with them. Their friends have either never appeared or, in almost every instance, rejected them. They’ve been told in ways both verbal and nonverbal that they aren’t worth anything and that no one could ever love them; and like that, dripping wet with the sloppy shit of society’s refuse, they arrive at our door.

And the first thing we tell them is that we will never let them go. We’re like Robin Williams’ character in *Good Will Hunting*: “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.”

Today, the Vermont State Supreme Court agreed with over a hundred years of state precedent to declare that an 18-year-old boy (from my hometown) who had undeniably taken several positive steps towards enacting a mass shooting at a local school, and despite those undeniable steps, the state could still not hold him without bail.

The finding goes deeper than that, however, because the decision to overturn the lower court’s ruling registers a formal level of doubt regarding the state’s original charges against the boy. Due to legislative reasons and over a hundred years of precedent, to maintain the lower court’s ruling, the justices would had to have found, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the boy *was going to attempt* the shooting; fortunately or unfortunately, the justices were not able to do that.

Now, that same formal level of doubt called for by the justices will be in the instructions given to the jury when the state asks them to convict the boy to prison. But if several justices can’t convict him to be held without bail because all of the available evidence doesn’t support the state’s argument beyond a shadow of a doubt, then a jury shouldn’t be able to convict him of that either.

Essentially, today’s opinion explained all of the reasons why the boy should be declared not guilty: because he did not do the crime with which he is being charged. Faced with the climate that has arisen in this country in the aftermath of Parkland, the state’s prosecutors overreached and charged the boy with something that would make big headlines in terms of the story —— maybe not necessarily for selfish publicity, but maybe as a kind of warning to other potential shooters; unfortunately, they charged him with a crime that he, in all good conscience, did not commit. He did not yet *attempt* the mass murder; he had taken steps toward it, but there were plenty of steps left for him to take, and he was capable of changing his mind, for whatever reason, at any moment. He truly is not guilty of the crime for which is being charged.

But that’s not to say that this young boy belongs on the streets. In their ruling, the Justices suggested that, even if he did make bail, the lower court could reasonably keep him under watch for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, which, while not being prison, still registers in a real and formal way the Justices’ specific distrust of the boy.

This boy is eighteen years old. I know next to nothing about him except for what I’ve read in the papers, read in his journal (which he titled, “Journal of an Active Shooter”), and what people have said about him around town. I’ve never met him and I don’t know his family, but by all accounts, including his own, whatever caused him to want to do this had nothing to do with his family.

This is a boy who, for whatever reason, is sick, and he needs some real help. We — the real human beings who make up our community (town, county, state, nation, earth) — need to step in and give him some help, if not with our hands and hearts, than at least with our tax dollars (which ought to be considered just another way of saying “our charitable donations”).

We don’t need to exile this boy. He is eighteen years old. Everything we read and everything we see tells us that adolescence lasts longer and longer. This is not just a cultural reality; it’s become a biological reality. Americans reach puberty at earlier and earlier ages, and they’re dependent upon their parents for longer and longer amounts of time. Adolescence is no longer just the teenage years. It extends from 10 or 11 all the way to 23 or 25, and sometimes even longer. There’s a reason the Affordable Care Act gave children the right to stay on their parents’ health insurance for longer: today’s kids are dependents for longer.

This boy is eighteen years old. He’s not an adult. Just because we, as a society, can put a gun in his hand and send him off to war, that doesn’t make him an adult. It makes him young and vibrant and able to fight and march for longer periods of time than people who are in their thirties and forties. It makes him less attached to the next generation of kids and less burdened by mature responsibilities. We don’t send 18 year olds to war because they’re adults; we send them exactly because they’re *not* adults.

No one who is eighteen years old ought to go to prison for life, and I’m not sure they ought to be sent there at all. Prison is exile. Prison is society saying it’s done with you. Prison is saying, quite explicitly, “It *is* your fault.”

I want to make it clear that everything I say for this eighteen year old white boy from rural Vermont stands true for the eighteen year old black boy from urban California. Eighteen year old kids should not be sent into social exile, I don’t care what color their skin is, what societies they grew up in, or what their crime was.

Eighteen year old brains are still in development — socially, emotionally, intellectually, and physically — in ways that twenty-five year old brains are not. They are, in all instances, still works in progress, and they ought never to be abandoned.

This is not to say that this boy — or the eighteen year old frat boy who rapes a girl on campus, or the eighteen year old black boy who stabs a grocer for his cash, or the eighteen year old Latino boy who murders his girlfriend in a fit of rage, or the eighteen year old Asian girl who smashes her guitar into a club owner’s face — ought to be free. I think it is completely fair for society to tell these children that their behavior will not be tolerated and that their judgement cannot be trusted, and to then remand these individuals to a place of socially provided care where they can receive food, shelter, therapeutic treatment, and both a liberal and a specialized education. And it ought to also say to them, at every instance, “It was not your fault.”

Will Hunting was worth saving not because he was a genius, and not because he was white. He was worth saving because he was just a kid.

And so is the boy who wrote, “The journal of an active shooter,” who had recently purchased a shotgun and documented his plan to purchase both an AR-15 and a deadly handgun, and, on top of that, had documented the ever-approaching dates for when he planned to carry out the shooting.

Because as guilty as he is of planning to commit mass murder, it is still, at bottom, not his fault, and more than anything, we need to show him, in every way possible, that we are here to help.

XXX

Nihilism. That’s what we are fighting.

John Goodman had it right: “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”

Nihilism feels no connection to anything, and it has no answer to the problem of suicide. If nothing matters, you don’t matter and I don’t matter, and then what’s the matter with a little mass shooting before I check out, you know, just for the thrill of it; plus, think of the publicity!?

Everyone who is not a nihilist knows that that way of thinking, that way of feeling, is wrong. We don’t even need to be convinced of it, and frankly, we’re a bit scared of people who feel that we ought to be convinced it, as if there were some plausible reason we ought to doubt it.

Of course walking into a room full of people and shooting them without mercy and without even really any passionate sense of anger is wrong. Of course it is. Why would anyone want to even discuss it, except to maybe make a joke (because, hey, for real, even jokes about school shootings can be funny)?

Arguments in favor of nihilism serve no point — literally, they are *in service* to nothing, to non-existence, to the real and true sense of an absence in the face of an everything.

It’s like pointing behind you at a giant emptiness and screaming at everyone in front of you, “Look at that! Don’t you see!?” and we follow your finger to find *the point* and we don’t see anything at all. And you say, “Yes! Yes! That’s the point!”

At which point, most of us turn to look at each other, and in each other’s faces we see, you don’t understand it all.

“Come here, my child. It’s not your fault. Society hasn’t done a good enough job with you yet. You’re still a work in progress. And you still deserve nothing less than our love.”

XXX

The name of the school where I work is based on the idea that a child is like a gemstone of jade and that society ought to be like a jade carver. Faced with any individual piece of jade, a jade carver knows she cannot bring any intention to the stone other than to help it become a socially-pleasing version of itself, something that other people can look at and allow themselves to be amazed by. If the carver tries to make the stone anything other than what it seems to want to be, the jade will crack and all of its potential will be lost, its destiny to now become less than what it oought to, by its own accounts, have become.

As the adults in a place where society sends its most challenging children, we do what everyone else has refused to do — we let the child become the adult he or she wants to be, and we do it while being caring, trusting, challenging, and non-threatening in every way we can imagine.

My school would not be able to handle the boy who has been accused of attempting to commit mass murder. Our model depends on trust, and this boy has demonstrated he cannot yet be trusted.

But I hope that there is a place where the spirit of our model can thrive while keeping the children within it wholly contained, much like the way plants can thrive despite being kept within a properly maintained and properly cared-for greenhouse.

My school is more like a raised-bed garden: there’s some structure, sure, but it tries to stay as open to nature as possible — which means it also lays itself open to attack.

My school couldn’t foster a nihilistic weed without choking off the oxygen to a garden’s worth of other plants. If the weed is going to be *allowed* to grow, it will need to be kept in its own roomy and healthy pot — until, that is, it can evolve into something else, something capable of existing within the larger ecosystem of the garden.

(Sure, I murdered the metaphor, but that doesn’t make it any less true).

Just because my school can’t handle him doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve all the positive things my school’s model can do for him, and I sincerely hope the state considers caring for him in my school’s specific kind of way.

To want anything less for this boy — or for any child convicted at his age — is to live a life without a sense of mercy, and for anyone who lives life like that, I simply feel sorry, because true mercy — *Jesus-level* mercy — is a beautiful sense for each of our spirit’s to feel.

May society help this boy’s — and all accused children’s — still-forming spirit to heal.

Categories
education

An Open Letter to Julie Piering, at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Hi Julie,

I just read your article on Diogenes of Sinope at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and I just wanted to say thank you. I knew little to nothing of Diogenes before reading your article, and now I feel like I’ve got a decent idea.

So…just wanted to say thanks 🙂

I’m usually a Wikipedia person, and it’s too hard to figure out who to say thank you to on there. As I was reading your article, I forgot that I was reading something in an encylopedia. I became deeply engaged with the stories you recounted of Diogenes, and appreciated your take on why certain philosophers look down on Diogenes with scorn and why they really shouldn’t.

It felt balanced between what we “know” of Diogenes and what we’ve “heard,” and it left the door open for your reader to continue their exploration of Diogenes’ life and thought. It felt summative while also inspiring a feeling of deeper curiosity.

As I got to the bottom of the article, I kept scrolling, not realizing that I’d come to the end, and there, at the bottom of the page, was your name.

I don’t know anything about you. I haven’t Googled you. And I’m not about to send you a personal email, because that would be creepy.

So instead I’m going to do this. I’m going to write you an email and post it as an open letter, because more people should know of your good work.

Thanks again.

Categories
education

Curiosity, Passion, and Drive

Imagine different schools. Imagine them not as a thing that adults do, but as a place where children go.

Stop there.

Imagine this place at the center of a community, and during the day, when all the adults are doing their adult things, the children are sent here, a public space, like a park, but with a roof and stuff for when it rains and snows, and a kitchen so they can eat during the day, and bathroom facilities so they can…you get the idea.

But then just stop there.

What if that’s all that schools were? A place where children go.

At a place like that, there would be one lesson and one lesson only: this is how you get along with other people.

Everything else, I think, comes naturally, and by everything else, I mean the only things that matter in education: curiosity, passion, and drive.

Children are (neurotypically speaking) naturally curious. They have to be if they want to survive. All emotions, including curiosity, are outgrowths of our evolution, and so to understand them, the best way to think about them is to ask, “How does life benefit from experiencing [curiosity]?”

Curiosity is a motivator, like fear, love, and lust. It drives life forward. Curiosity has its dangers. It causes life to approach the future with wide-open eyes instead of balled fists, but still, it drives life forward; it causes it to grow.

Curiosity starts from outside of us; we experience it as a *drawing out*. It is as if the unknown object of our curiosity is pulling at us, but is not just a movement towards the unknown; it is accompanied by *a desire* to learn more.

Because it originates from outside of us, curiosity is not something we can control. But it is also not something we *need* to control because it causes us to grow. All things being equal, curiosity is, to life, a net benefit.

Life benefits, too, from passion, and so passion, too, comes naturally (to neurotypical children). Passion is like a golden moment, when everything lines up perfectly and your intentions match your results, and they continue to for an extended period of time.

Passion calls attention to itself, and it creates in those whose attention it captures a strong sense of joy, sadness, and/or pain.

The power of passion can get out of hand, and when it truly takes over, it’s always a sight to see…regardless of the outcome.

The experience of passion is why life continues. It gives life meaning *to itself.* Life *wants* to survive; it doesn’t just *need* to. The reason it wants to is because life has experienced passion. Passion is what connects us to the world — the marriage of intention and result, of directed stimulus and desired response. Without passion, we are disconnected, alienated from that which *seems* to lay beyond us. Without passion, we would exist in a state of true solipsism. Life can not long exist in such a state; the world will have always its say.

*Drive* derives from evolution as well. Drive is “a negative state of tension” between life’s desire to survive and life’s ability to survive. This tension creates in us a purpose; it gives us direction: to return ourselves to *a state in which* a negative state of tension does not exist, a state in which we possess all that we desire.

Of course, such a state has hardly existed: life evolved more than once, and so life has hardly known a reality in which all its desired resources were secure. A lifeform without an innate sense of *drive* could not survive in a closed-loop system such as Earth, which means it, too, must come naturally.

With curiosity, passion, and drive, each of which come naturally (to neurotypical children), every child will grow up to find their own way.

Which means the only thing we really need to teach them is how to get along with other people.

I can hear the arguments now, but most of those arguments result in the school systems we have already, the ones where children are prepared to exist with the economic reality of capitalism.

And that’s fine, I suppose.

But a world that exists under an economic reality of capitalism runs counter to the desire to have every child learn to get along with other people.

Capitalism is one way life believes it can escape the closed-loop system. It is a mindset born from that desire to *escape.* Capitalism does not make life *reach for* something; it makes it push against others to get out of the system *first.*

The newborn capitalist is someone propelled by a severe negative tension, a state where *desire* transforms into *need*, creating, in the process, the *need* to consume: to escape the negative tension, life must ingest every resource it can acquire, fuel for its emergency propulsion out of the negative tension.

Capitalists are not born happy, and they rarely leave a community of happy neighbors in their wake.

But counter to their intentions, the capitalist can *never* escape the close-looped system that evolved here on Earth. Every capitalist who has ever lived is dead; and every capitalist who has ever lived has brought the Earth closer to ruin. There’s no escaping that.

If *the closed-loop system* is to survive, we don’t need to create an entire new generation of capitalists, nor do we need to create another generation of humans who are willing to live by the rules of the capitalists’ economic reality.

If we want to teach our children how to get along with other people, we have to start by teaching them that people are worth more than their labor, and that, as recyclable elements in a closed-loop system, all of us are worth as much as and as little as everyone — and everything — else.

That’s the main lesson. That all of us are equal: we all deserve everything and we all deserve nothing.

Everything else comes naturally from there. Mathematicians will be curious about numbers. Football players will be driven by the desire to push through something or to stop something from pushing through. Writers will be curious about words. Bankers will be curious about money. Biologists will be curious about life.

But everyone, everyone, will come out of school understanding that all of us — all of us — are equally deserving. That’s the wisdom founded in the ideals of America. That’s all we have to teach: the wisdom of our community.

Nature (and the wisdom of other communities) can take it from there.

Categories
education life politics

An Argument About Guns

I argue on Facebook a lot. I’m *that* guy. You got an opinion on something? Let’s start arguing, see where it takes us.

I have principles and values that I attempt to defend, but I don’t get angry if someone attacks them. After all, if they can’t stand up to an attack, then maybe they’re not worth defending.

One of my principles is that guns create deadly violence. They are not the only weapons to do so, but they are — in fact and deed — manufactured to create deadly violence. It may not be violence to a human being, but it is violence to a target, whatever that target may be.

The absence of guns, however, does not mean the absence of violence. Violence is a by-product of nature, and nature is everywhere and for all time, therefore, the potential for violence can never reach absolute zero.

I accept this.

What I do not accept is the idea that adding a weapon to any situation will actually reduce *the potential* for deadly violence. The presence of a weapon *threatens* violence, regardless of whether the weapon is used. It increases, in every instance, the potential for deadly violence.

This is not an opinion. I understand it as a statement of fact, one hardly worth defending, since it seems so rock steady and impervious.

I do, however, note potential cracks, areas where, while suffering a direct attack, my pillar of an argument may — in fact and deed — require my direct support.

The constructing of an argument is the concentration of diverse forces upon a central point, and just as in the construction of a bridge, where the best way to channel forces is through a series of triangles, the best way to construct an argument is to triangulate a central point. That means one side of the argument must address the forces marshaled in favor of a counterargument.

The central point of my argument is that guns create deadly violence, but the counterargument I addressed defends the thesis that guns do not create *the potential* for violence.

I have committed the fallacy of a straw-man argument. Not even the biggest gun proponent would defend the position that guns do not create *the potential* for violence; instead, and more reasonably, they argue that guns are the best answer to *actual* violence.

And in that, we differ.

There will be another school shooting and dozens of children and teachers will die. We live in a violent world, and school shootings are one manifestation of that violence. I accept that.

But gun proponents do not think I ought to accept that. They believe that they truly cherish every *innocent* life, and they want to defend that *innocent* life with everything they’ve got. I respect that.

But I do not think it is possible to defend every innocent life.

We live in nature, and nature is a violent place that we can never escape. It *creates* in us the potential for violence in the same way that it *creates* in us the oxygen that keeps our bodies alive. The potential for violence is a condition of our *being*, the ground state of our existence.

That is why I argue about reducing the *potential* for violence; because we can never get *actual* violence to zero. Gun proponents, to their credit, argue about reducing *actual* violence, and they refuse to accept their failure.

I would like to respect and support both positions, but I cannot accept a reality in which there is never any failure.

I do not believe in utopia. I do not believe in perfection. This is a byproduct of my not believing in God. Because I do not believe in God, I am not required to defend any *one* position as perfect.

Christians believe in a triangular God because they believe that talking about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit best allows them to concentrate the weight of their wisdom on one central and holy principle: a single, perfect God. They believe that God’s righteous anger, as well as His infinite mercy, reveals the way we ought to live in moments small and large, and that this revelation is experienced through the grace of His Holy Spirit.

I don’t very much disagree with them; but in the end, I only accept their argument as wisdom, and not as fact.

Because I do not accept the existence of a single, perfect God, I do not have to accept any idea of perfection as a possible fact. I do not believe in nor feel I ought not to strive for the creation of perfection.

Instead, I believe in and feel I ought to strive for the best way to improve the potential for love and/or reduce the potential for violence.

That means, in this instance, I strive to reduce, while knowing we can never eliminate, the *threat of violence* to our school children.

Any positive argument I make from this position is therefore unacceptable to gun proponents, and perhaps it ought to be. With them, I am not willing to accept *actual* violence befalling my own child, or the children I teach each day, or my own wife, or the children she teaches each day. With them, I want our schools to be *free* from actual violence, and with them, I don’t deny that guns are perhaps the best way to confront *actual* violence.

But we can never free every child from *the potential* for violence, and so that’s where I choose to put my effort — to reduce *the potential* rather than to stop *the actual* (which, in all instances, we will *never* be able to do).

I do not believe that putting guns in our schools will actually reduce the potential for violence.

I can imagine, because we see it happen every day, armed authority figures killing *actually* innocent men and boys. It will be a single story on the news, perhaps lasting a month at most (depending on the circumstances), and then the authority figure(s) will be suspended, fired, and perhaps even convicted, and the story will go away.

And then, maybe a month or two later, an armed authority figure will kill a single armed shooter, preventing the body count in one attack from rising any higher (though almost definitely not reducing it to zero). The story will be incredible for its real and actual heroism, and the number of proponents for removing the guns from our schools will reduce.

And then another *actually* innocent man or boy will be killed, and the authority figure will be suspended, fire, or convicted. And then another, and then another, and then perhaps another school shooter will be stopped by an official’s gun.

And that will just become our reality.

The number of school shootings by armed and angry boys will eventually reduce, but never equal zero, and yet still, unencumbered, the number of dead *actually* innocent kids gunned down by armed authority figures will go on and on, and because the school shooters keep coming, even if in drastically reduced numbers, no positive argument will be heard that suggests removing the armed authority figures from the school will actually make every school shooter stop.

And actually innocent children will continue to die.

That cannot be helped. I don’t care how many guns you throw at the problem.

Gun proponents envision a future where every child accepts the presence of guns in both their personal and their public lives, but in that instance, the child becomes *conditioned* to a reality where there exists a drastically high potential for violence — violence in self-defense, perhaps, but still, and always, violence.

But I’m trying to envision a future where every child and every adult thinks of schools as sacrosanct. Shooters won’t stay away because they are afraid. They will stay away because of respect.

I teach in a school for students who have been diagnosed with emotional or behavioral disorders. Many of them have been expelled from other schools because their presence increased the potential for violence. The state does not know what to do with these kids, and so they send them to us.

Our entire school is based on the concept of respect. We respect the students, and in return, we expect them to respect us. They often don’t. But our response never changes. In this one place, they are not required to earn or maintain our respect. We simply give it to them. Every day. All day. Regardless of what they do. And through that experience, the students *witness*, every day, all day, what it means for one person to respect another, and we hope, through that experience, they learn to respect the place that we’ve built, and maybe, if we’re lucky, the people who continue to build it.

I don’t worry about any of my students coming to my school to shoot us up, and mine are the students virtually every other school is worried about.

I don’t worry about them because I trust they know I respect them.

Most gun proponents I have spoken with make a big deal out of respect, and rightfully so. But one does not earn respect by threatening someone with violence; a threat can only earn their fear.

The worst thing that could happen at my school is for an armed authority figure to show up. The state has sent these kids, over the course of their short lifetimes, to residential facilities that, in the minds of these kids, are little better than jails. They’ve been thrown to the ground and forcibly restrained by adults. Many of them have been handcuffed and taken to an actual jail.

To these kids, authority figures are, for very valid reasons, just triggers to a post-traumatic episode — sources of anxiety, anger, and fear.

We work to socialize our students to authority figures, but we also respect the experiences that they’ve gone through, not seeing in them any reason for blame or judgement, just respecting them for who they are and what they’re experiencing now.

We are able to do this because the discussions we have in our professional-development workshops value therapy above academic achievement. While it is true that we are a school, we believe that teaching them about respect, acceptance, anger, and coping will do them more good than teaching them to do their sums. We strive to provide them with skills for communications, empirical reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and social reasoning, but the primary focus is on the development of their personal qualities.

The students we traditionally receive have been so disobedient that they’ve, in almost all cases, been literally beat down by their families and society. Many of them have never known, since the moment they were born, a moment free from anxiety, fear, and pain.

They do not need to be *further conditioned* to a reality with a high potential for violence. They do not need to worry *more* that their disobedience may result in their death. That is already the only existence they’ve ever known.

I beg you, as a man who spends virtually every waking hour thinking about how to help the broken children in our communities, do not put armed authority figures in our schools.

Help me teach these children that, before anything else, and just because they are alive, they deserve our respect.

Because that is the only thing that will ever bring us closer to actually reducing the violence.

(Which, I accept, we can never reduce to zero.)

Categories
education politics

Teacher Advocates “Students, Go On Strike.”

PARKLAND, FL - FEBRUARY 14: People are brought out of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after a shooting at the school that reportedly killed and injured multiple people on February 14, 2018 in Parkland, Florida. Numerous law enforcement officials continue to investigate the scene. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Let’s not bullshit anyone. I’m the teacher in the headline and I’m advocating that every student in the United States go on strike until Congress takes decisive action on the issue of school shootings.

I am not advocating for one position or another. I do not have the solution.

But it’s not my job to come up with the solution. It’s the job of our Senators and Representatives in Congress. This is exactly what we sent them to Congress to do.

School shootings are a national problem. They are not a local problem or a state problem. They are a national problem, and there is only one place in America with the authority to address a national problem. It’s not Hollywood or New York City or even Fairfax, Virginia. It’s Washington D.C.

We send representatives to Washington D.C. to work together to address and solve the problems that beset us all. We understand that there will be disagreements as to a proper solution, and that the system will be corrupted by the current state of human nature, but we are also willing to accept the results of the American democratic process. We may not like the results, and we may continue to fight to improve them or change them, but we’ll also accept them.

But before we can get results, we need to have an open and honest debate, where all the cards are on the table and people of good will can persuade other people of good will to form a majority in favor of a specific solution or set of solutions and where the minority also accepts the solution (begrudgingly if need be) and neglects to force the majority to form a supermajority.

I say this knowing full well that the Republican National Party holds a majority of seats in Congress and that the platform of that party is antithetical to my values on virtually every issue, including this one, but I also say it knowing that this particular issue is one where every American truly wants their Congressperson to vote their conscience.

If every Congressperson is able to speak honestly and openly about their feelings and thoughts on this one issue, and every American, regardless of their party affiliation or their employer, is willing to accept that Congressperson’s position as, at the very least, open and honest, then I believe their vote on this particular issue would not dampen their ability to run for re-election. It would, regardless of which way they voted, do the opposite.

When people talk about being sick of the politicians, what we mean is that we’re sick of the liars. We don’t want our representatives to vote a certain way because it will help them keep their job. We want them to vote a certain way because they believe in it. It’s not their job to run for office. It’s our job to determine whether we want someone with their beliefs to represent us in Congress.

The politicians need to stop running for re-election and start doing the job we sent them there to do: use their conscience to do what they think is best.

—

More than any other public institution, schools should be a refuge from danger. They are where virtually every parent in the community sends their children for the majority of the work day. Yes, schools have other priorities, but they are also, and maybe primarily, our daycare.

Not one parent — whether they are an NRA member or a member of MoveOn.org — wants to go to work every day worried about receiving a phone call notifying them of the death of their child. As parents, we can deal with phone calls about suspensions and expulsions. We can deal with drug convictions, special education restrictions, sick days, a teacher’s concern about a lack of homework, the fact that our child has been bullying someone, whatever.

What we can’t handle is the phone call that tells us our child is dead.

If we trust schools with anything, we trust them with that.

But now we can’t, and we haven’t been able to for a long time. We now know, and we’ve known for a while, that our schools have become the most vulnerable institutions in our communities — the one public space where deranged individuals can do the most damage.

The politicians in Washington D.C. are afraid of this issue, and for good reason: there is no  answer that will satisfy everyone, and there’s a lot of money at stake when it comes to this particular issue. These politicians don’t want to touch it with a ten foot pole, not the ones who are there now.

More than anything, the lack of movement on this issue reveals our representatives’ inability to do the one job we sent them to Washington to do: participate in an open and honest debate and at the end of the day, vote their conscience.

If they are unable to do that, they should all, regardless of party, be replaced. Failure to move the ball on this one issue should cost them their seat, and they ought to stake their future on that.

Every student in every school in every Congressional district in the United States ought to stay home from school until their elected representative pledges to move the ball on this issue before the November election, and the students should continue to stay out of school until the majority and minority leaders agree that, on this one issue, any threat to filibuster or any act of filibustering be staged from the House or Senate floor. If they let the debate be open and honest, then Americans will respect the results.

Failing that, every student ought to refuse to attend school, and every parent in every district in every state in the United States will have to solve the problem of daycare. This will put such a screeching halt to the national economy that Congress will have no choice but to respond.

As a teacher, I hear every day from my students how children have no rights. I try to tell them that as human beings, they always have rights. But as human beings, they’re also vulnerable to having those rights taken away. Which means they have two choices: they can either stand up and fight for their rights, or they can give them away. But no one, no one, can just take their rights away from them.

As a human being on planet earth, you have the right to petition your government for a redress of grievances. The most polite way to do that is to write a letter. The most effective way to do that is to make a lot of noise until the entire head of the government is forced to turn your way and deal with you.

As individuals below the age of 18, you do not have the right to vote. But as human beings, you do have the right to make your voices heard.

As citizens, you also have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — all of which add up to the right to be free from fear.

Every day, your guardians are required by law to send you to an adult-managed place where contemporary events demonstrate your safety cannot be guaranteed, and where your life seems to be increasingly at risk. This should not be acceptable to you.

And you ought to stand up and do something about it.

Right now, to these politicians who refuse do anything about it, your deaths — your lives — don’t matter.

You have to stand up and make them matter. You have to hit these fuckers where it counts: in their wallets.

And by fuckers, I mean every adult who continues to let this happen.

Stop going to school and they’ll have to stop going to work. When they stop going to work, the money dries up. When the money dries up, that’s when adults turn to Washington. Which will mean that those fuckers in D.C. will have to do their jobs while the whole world is watching.

If they’re not able to stand up and vote their conscience then, then they’ll never be able to do it and they won’t be worth the title on their door: Representative.

I hear the liberal/cynical response to this: rich people can pay for daycare, and it’s the rich who are preventing any movement on this issue; all this demonstration will do is hurt poor people. While this may or may not be true, most people’s daycare depends, somewhere, on a low-income parent showing up to do their job. When that low-income parent is unable to find or afford daycare of their own, the pain will trickle uphill.

Meanwhile, the children of rich people ought to use their funds to fight this fight. If they can afford to get themselves someplace where an entire congregation of students can demonstrate, in the most public way possible, that they are, in fact, not going to attend school until this issue is addressed by Congress, then all the better.

Yes, there will be pain felt during this demonstration. There always is. Think of the men and women in the Civil Rights movement: the police dogs, the firehoses, the batons, the nooses. Yes, there will be pain. Single mothers will lose their jobs when they have no options for daycare. Fathers and mothers will scream and fight over who will stay home with the children, and women will be abused over their answers. Children will be beat for disobeying their mothers and fathers, and some will feel the wrath of the belt or the burn of the cigarette, the sting of the hard slap or the collision of the closed fist.

But will it be worth it? Is the right to go to school free from fear worth it?

If you think so, stand up and make your lives matter.

Stand up and go on strike.

I teach in Vermont, where every student goes on a week vacation starting on Monday. Use that week to plan, organize, and publicize. Talk to your parents about it. Let them know it is happening, and be willing to defend your position. If they make you go to the physical school on the Monday after vacation is over, make a sign and picket outside the front door. Get your friends to join you. Have someone call the news. Attract a lot of attention. But be deep and thoughtful. Stay somber. Remember why you’re there. Remember the dead bodies, the dead children, feel the fear of all those children having to run for their lives, the sound of gunfire coming from right behind them, the sight of their friends and teachers bleeding on the ground beside them.

They didn’t deserve that. No one deserves that. Refuse to become a victim.

Stand up. Stand up and go on strike.

Categories
education writing theories

The Art of the Sentence

I start teaching a class on the Art of the Sentence next week. In practical terms, it’s a grammar class, but kids don’t get excited about “grammar class.” They might get excited about art.

But the title is more than a trick; it’s not a misnomer. The class will consider the sentence as a work of art.

Kids don’t write sentences anymore. They write phrases. They type them into textland believing only their ideas will make it across. They don’t stop to consider their words.

Tweens and teenagers think words are transparent. Words are either windows on an idea, or else they blink and flash like a fire alarm, each blink and flash screaming into their minds terms like “racist,” “misogynist,” or “homophobe,” preventing any other part of the offending idea to make it across. They don’t understand that syntax, denotation, connotation, simile, and metaphor are active elements in the communication process; they don’t realize that words and phrases matter.

Part of the reason is because, according to our current understanding of brain development, tweens and early teenagers don’t yet have the ability to cognitively care about their audience *as an audience*. They may care about the person on the other end of their text *as a person,* but they don’t yet fully understand that, as a person, that person is not *them,* and as such, that person must be coaxed into understanding the foreign idea that is being presented to them. The tweens and teenagers don’t realize that the other person’s sentient mind must be respected before it will allow their foreign ideas entrance.

Without that appreciation for their audience’s mind, they don’t consider whether their ideas are actually worth anything. They just assume they are.

This lack of linguistic self-criticism means they’ve never actually *worked* on their raw ideas, never tried to shape them into a series of communicable words and phrases, never exerted themself upon their ideas the way artists exert themselves upon their raw materials, shaping and refining them until the idea is of value to others.

The art of the sentence is, in some sense, the art of thinking.

This is not to say that one must be able to write a grammatical sentence in order to be capable of thinking, but it is to say that the art of thinking requires the ability to manipulate abstract symbols and to arrange them according to some kind of communally-based syntax.

Most of us tell ourselves and our children that what makes humans different from other animals is our gift for language, and while this is not untrue, it glosses over the fact that many animals possess some kind of communal-based language.

Researchers have even translated some of these languages into English (well, translated them in part). We know, for instance, the sound a particular species of monkey makes to communicate to its neighbors that a large predator approaches on the ground, “and so we should all climb up into the trees,” versus the sound it uses to communicate when a large predator approaches from the sky, “and so we should all climb down to the ground.” We know how to translate messages from dolphins, whales, chimpanzees, gibbons, bees, a variety of birds. Examples are endless (as is the controversy that surrounds them).

We use the presence of these languages to arrange species on the heirarchy of thinking. We look at the greater or lesser presence of this ability, this ability to process the world through an observing and intentionally reactive brain (the presence of what Kant would call *judgement*), and we deem the creature more or less worthy of our protection.

Stimuli enters the brain in one form and exits in another. This implies to any impartial observer that *something* in that brain *did work upon* the stimuli. Unable to see the mechanism for ourselves, we reverse engineer the changes from the original stimuli to the changed stimuli and find in it a message: “I am here, and this is my judgement.”

When we hear the monkey “screaming” in the trees, we see for ourselves how all the other monkeys look down (or up), and we note their synchronicity in the act. This cues in us the idea that an actual, decodable message must exist within that scream, a message more nuanced than “danger.” In that nuance, we discover a sentient being capable of receiving stimuli from the outside world, processing that stimuli into meaningful terms, judging those terms and refining them into as simple a code as possible, and then communicating that code using the right emotive note to signal its import to the sentient beings on the other end of the communication, a note that helps filter it through the universal field of stimuli the other monkey must be encountering and tell it in no uncertain terms, “Deal with this stimuli first!”

The art of the sentence interrogates this process, this transformation, interpretation, and judgment of reality (imaginary or not) by a sentient mind, and it explores the ways in which the judgement can be converted into meaningful stimuli to be fed into another person’s reality.

By teaching this process, by exploring its in and outs as a system, I hope to not only improve my student’s writing skills, but to improve the linguistic systems within their brains.

Later, I’ll teach them to dance in that system using poetry and puns, and open to them the slip-sliding joy of linguistic whimsy, but for now, I only want them to realize the system exists and to grow curious as to its workings.

If I can pull that off, I’ll consider this class an unqualified success.

Categories
education

Hot for Teaching

I am coming up on a new quarter at my high school gig and a new semester at my college gig. I recently received my finished schedules for both of them, which means I have roughly a week and a half to prepare for all of them.

Despite my desire this summer to reinvent my college-level creative writing class, once the school year got going, I found myself too busy to act on it, so the class I’ll be starting next week will probably look much the same as the one before. I may get inspired between now and then to implement some changes to my weekly lectures, but the general syllabus of the class will remain the same.

As for my high-school teaching duties, I have another section of *Dungeons & Dragons* this quarter, which though it takes a lot of prep, doesn’t require as much as it used to thanks to the number of times I’ve taught it now. I also have Creative Writing, which will run like a simpler version of my college course (this one will be one-on-one, just me and a fifteen-year-old student, so it won’t run — and can’t run — exactly the same as a college course designed for two dozen 20-year-old students).

I have a bunch of other classes that will require some significant prep time though. I’ve taught on similar topics in the past, but these classes really need to be designed from the bottom up if I’m to address the unique needs of this year’s crop of students.

The first new class is called *Talking Politics, Religion, and Sex: The Art of Difficult Conversations*. This class will meet three times a week and include five upper-level students (the youngest is fifteen; the oldest is nineteen). I’ve asked one of the older students to act as our facilitator so that she can develop and demonstrate her speaking and listening skills as per her graduation requirements. The other students and I will act as the interlocutors, sharing our understandings and opinions on various difficult topics of the day. The students will participate in the selection of the daily topics, but I will provide each week’s general theme (politics, religion, or sex, for example).

I don’t want the class to just be a bullshit session, however, so each week will also include direct instruction in the various strategies, styles, and norms that come into play when we engage in difficult conversations. This isn’t something I can pull off the top of my head. I will need to do some research if I’m to understand exactly what I need to teach and then some creative time if I’m piece it back together in a form my students will recognize. Finally, I’ll need to do some systematic thinking to understand how I can weave the direct instruction into the flow of an overwhelmingly dicussion-based class.

The second new class is *Women’s Studies, with a dose of Marginalized Communities*. I’ve taught a version of this before during a series of seminars on the historic waves of Feminism, but that was to a classroom full of eager philosophy students. This version needs to meets the unique needs of a single teenage boy.

I have one intention with this class: to get this teenage boy to not become a sexual assailant. As a teenage boy growing up amidst rural poverty and ignorance, he is, unfortunately, at risk. I’m creating this class solely for him, and I’m creating it as the father of a young girl, the mentor to dozens of other young girls, and the professor of over a hundred young women. I don’t do this to *protect* them; I do this to make their lives easier and to ensure their sexual experiences are more free from tragedy than those of their mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and so on back through eternity.

We see a lot of memes about the shotgun-toting father. I’d like to see one about the story-telling teacher, the one who can engender enough empathy in his male students that they begin to value their female counterparts not just for their bodies, but for their minds and their spirits, a teacher who turns his young male charges into boys and men who can see in girls and women the same struggles and desires that they see in themselves, and realize, when they look into their faces, that they’re looking at human beings, creatures with a right to just as much liberty as them, and not one iota less. Where’s that meme, huh?

So that’s the self-righteousness that I’m bringing into the class, which is obviously not a good thing. Self-righteousness does not a good teacher make. I need to tone it down and simply meet the kid where he is at…and then gently lead him into the future with the rest of us, a future where women are truly equal, not only in their opportunities, but in their estimations.

The “dose of marginalized communities” is included in the title as a tangential topic because it’s not my motivating force, but I do understand that the lack of empathy that opens him up to being a potential sexual assailant lies at the root of not only misogyny, but also of racism and nationalism, two more ideologies that lie like a curse across this country’s future. This understanding will be like a bass line beneath all of our discussions, but the class will focus more directly on his relationship to women; that is the fault line that will shake him to his core and loosen his ideologies up for a shift on everything else. I’m still not sure how to do that though.

Another relatively big class I need to teach is *Civics*. This particular class includes five students ranging in age from fourteen to nineteen, and all of them were assigned to it (i.e., this is not a class they’ve asked for). I’ve taught some version of civics in a variety of contexts, including a deep dive into the Supreme Court and others into some of the agencies subsumed under the Executive branch.

But this class is a little bit different. First, I’ve yet to teach this particular combination of students, and I’m unclear as to how well they can work together, let alone my reservations as to how each of them will work (or can work) on their own. Leaving that aside, I’m also unclear as to my overall objective with the class. When the class is all said and done, what do I want them to understand and what do I want them to be able to do?

Two of my five students are eligible to vote. The other three are not far behind. When it comes time, I want all of them to be able to do that — to vote — and to do it in as informed a manner as possible. I don’t want to shape the way they think about political topics (they can vote for whatever and for whomever they like), but I do want to shape the way they think about their role in our government.

I want them to see the entire tree of our democracy, understand its main branches (including the military), and feel their own standpoint as being deep down among the roots. I want them to understand how their actions and their decisions help feed the entire tree. I want them to have a sense of civics that is less “how a bill becomes a law” than it is “how a person becomes a country.” I think that could be kind of fun.

I’m also teaching a small class to two students about *The Art of the Sentence*. I haven’t taught this one before, but I’d like to make it a staple of my quarterly offerings.

The majority of my high school students hate to write, and most of them have been socially promoted throughout their education, leading to a situation where not only do they hate to write, but they flat out don’t know how to.

I haven’t ever addressed this question head on. I’ve focused more on the shallowness of their thinking than on their inability to write down their thoughts (neglecting, in the process, a major contributor to the cause of their shallowness). With so many of them hating to write, I concentrate a lot on their verbal skills (hence, *Dungeons & Dragons*), trying to get them to ask questions when they don’t understand something and to reiterate a speaker’s points when they think they do. When I’ve forced them to write, I’ve concentrated on the way they introduce, support, and transition through their ideas, focusing my instruction on the highest levels of their argument.

I’m hoping this new class will correct my error. By reducing their focus to the sentence (rather than to, say, the paragraph or the argument), I hope to change the entire game that they’ve been taught to play, and in the process, try to engender a new joy for writing.

I don’t yet know how to do that exactly. I don’t know what example sentences to provide; how much grammatical jargon to use, and whether to teach it and insist on its use directly; how much time to spend on punctuation; when to introduce each piece of new information; how to assess for their understanding and practice; etc. But regardless of how I do it, I know I have to do it, and for that, I’m excited.

The final class on my upcoming schedule is called *Technology*. It’s a one-on-one class with a graduating student who simply needs a quarter-credit in Technology to graduate. Essentially, I can make the class about anything, as long as it includes technology. I have a couple of ideas: podcasting; blogging; a conceptual breakdown of the Internet, supported by technical materials…but I haven’t spoken with the student about it yet, so I don’t want to make any assumptions. The podcasting thing could be fun, but we’ll see — it’s really up to him.

That may seem like a lot to prep before January 23rd, and the truth of the matter is that it is, but each of the topics are of real interest to me, so the prep is something I’ll enjoy. I’m sometimes too busy or exhausted for it, but I know that every moment I can give to it will pay me back in spades.

I guess one word for what I do is called *work*, but working is easy when you truly love what you do.