The Teacher Power

I had an unexpected bonus conversation with my friend C.T. today, which revolved around some of my favorite topics: magic and the ability to change consciousness; the passion for creating art; the mysteries of saints; and the power of teachers.  During this last part of the conversation, we segued to a discussion of the challenge that some teachers put forward — which is that, in an effort to advance their own work and career and power, they wind up trampling on the capacities and capabilities of their students. Indeed, the teachers reap the rewards of the students’ labor, and the students take on the negative consequences of the teacher’s own bad work.

This rocked me back on my heels for a bit.  I’m still thinking about it.  We were talking about it in a magical/spiritual context. We’d both read a book recently in which a magical society’s inner circle of adepts was teaching rituals to their outer members which made the members feel powerful, but was in fact transferring power to the adepts… and shifting a lack-of-power onto the the students… not merely lack-of-power, but in fact negative-power.  A learned helplessness.

Which really rocked me back on my heels.

I mean, the nominal goal of teaching is to make our students more powerful than they already are.  Ideally, at the end of a year of teaching, when students go on to their next class, I want them to feel empowered and capable of doing work at a higher level than I am.  I mean, ideally, after a year or two in my classroom, they should never need me again, except maybe as a voice speaking to them out of their memories, “what would Mr. Watt do or say about this problem?”  If that voice ever comes up in their heads, though, I want that voice to be giving good advice, rather than bad advice.  I want them to feel empowered by memories of me, rather than disempowered.

This issue has been coming up a lot lately, actually.  Commenting on a friend’s Facebook wall earlier today, I noted that I hadn’t realized that he (much younger than me) had gone to a school where one of my college classmates taught.  This younger friend acknowledged that the college friend of mine had been a great teacher, because he taught critical thinking — but at the same time, this friend also acknowledged that the critical thinking he learned was a byproduct of my college-friend’s rants on a subject other than his official classroom subjects.  My young friend heard my old friend’s rants, and had to think about them: is this really true?  And the answer was often”yes, it is,” as often as it was “some yes, some no” and just as often as it could be “no”.

This is a serious complication in the work of teaching.  I mean, if I teach students what they need to know about history, simply in terms of facts, and fact-finding, great.  But what it means is just as important.  What are the overall themes of history? Are there patterns?  Is there some Hari Seldon-esque wisdom to be found in Nate Silver’s prognostications about the last election?  Are we empowering students by sharing resources with them, and making them fill out worksheets and take quizzes? Or are we disempowering them by doing the same?

C.T. and I spoke specifically about two magical teachers whose material we’ve worked with recently.  One of the things that magical teachers do (which exoteric/ordinary teachers like myself and many of my readers do not do) is give their students rituals to perform for their empowerment and spiritual growth.  C.T. had attended a workshop in which one of the presenters pointed out that some of these rituals do what they say they do — they empower the performers of the rituals so that they experience spiritual growth.  But, C.T. said that the presenter also warned about the opposite — rituals that disempower those who perform them, such that they think they’ve made spiritual progress, but in fact they have actually inflated their egos and empowered the teacher who has given them nothing of real value.  Meanwhile, the teacher gains power from the ritual performed — they get a toehold in the mental and emotional framework of the student, and the student is more inclined to treat further ‘empowerments’ as worthwhile and valuable, even as they are disempowered to seek further growth elsewhere.  Insidious.

And even as I think about it, I realize that this is something that many of us as exoteric teachers — in the everyday world of seventh grade classrooms and fifth grade math worksheets — have just as much temptation to do as teachers of esoteric systems of learning like Western Occultism or Tibetan Buddhism or Shaolin K’ung Fu. It’s easy to make students need us.  It’s easy to make students rely on us for the answers, or to make meaning of history or mathematics. Who among us has watched a student come back to our school, time and again, to seek advice from an old teacher or an old coach… the person that helped make sense in their lives when nothing else did.  I’ve had a few students continually return, until they saw through my veils and saw me as a human being; I know other students who continue to return to the same mentors, over and over again.  Which are stronger — the students who left us behind, and need us no longer? Or the students who keep returning to the same well, to drink of the same lessons?

I like to think that it’s the students who no longer need me that I’ve helped the most — after all, they can stand on their own two feet without me to carry them along any more.  And the ones who keep coming back, well… I help them, too, in my own way, and retailor my lessons to fit what they seem to need right now.  But part of me also wonders…

I’ve taught something like 75 students a year, directly, in my classes since I started teaching 16 years ago.  So I’ve had well over a thousand students (something closer to 1400 once I start calculating more precisely how many kids I taught in each year).  Yet I’d have to say that there are a fewer than a dozen who maintain any sort of regular contact with me. And I have to wonder — did I made them stronger?  Or did they recognize that I made them weaker in some way, and drop me as soon as they could?

It’s one of those deep imponderables that can really roil the soul of a teacher and make them question the validity of their career.

Schools under Attack

Found this story on Twitter: an opinion piece from Aj-Jazeera about the attack on American schools by private corporations: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/2012521114853681761.html

This is the looting of the American school system, and the local treasuries of states and municipalities. Already well under way in Philadelphia, as this article describes, it’s coming soon to a state or town near you. It’s one of the side effects of rampant capitalism that any wealth center that exists, public or private, must sooner or later come into someone’s eye as a source of potential profit. The only difficulty is, though, that education is inherently unprofitable: it involves wasted paper, wasted pens, wasted markers, wasted books, wasted building materials, wasted computers, wasted time, wasted equipment…

Some of my readers may object that education isn’t inherently wasteful — that it’s about turning kids into productive members of society and engaged citizens and… Blah, blah, blah.

From a capitalist perspective, though, none of that matters:

There’s a computer lab at my school that sits empty a lot of the time. Those computers are being wasted — they’re on, and they’re depreciating in value right this very minute, and we’re not getting any use out of them! Think about all the books in that library down the hall: how many of them will not be taken out of the library this year? And what about that librarian who has to manage and care for all those books, and who sits idle whenever there isn’t a class in that library? And she wants the heat on? Outrageous! What about that kid who needs extra support and tutoring? Get rid of him quick — it’s wasteful to give him one-on-one support. What about art, and music? Inherently unproductive and wasteful. That art room requires expensive supplies and tools and materials. That music teacher needs expensive equipment that none of the kids will learn how to use properly or completely in the three, four or five years that they’re in this school — so parents should pay for that kind of service, and pay for the equipment, so that it becomes an externalized expense, not one intrinsic to our business model…

Outrageous.

There is no model of education at all anywhere, ever, which will allow profits to be sucked out of a school system and permit the education of the next generation. Whether it be my recent learning experiments with spagyrics or my painting work, or my students’ papers, none of these activities are wealth-producing in a way that allows a capitalist to extract wealth. Not without impoverishing the kids, or the parents, or the teachers.

More likely, all three.

Lo and behold, the “job creators” are not job creators at all, nor white knights: they are horse thieves and villains, black knights of the worst kind.

Banned Books in Arizona

So… apparently, according to these stores, officials from Tuscon, AZ, marched into schools last week to remove banned books. Among the books removed was The Tempest, by William Shakespeare, because it deals with themes related to “race, ethnicity, and oppression.”

It occurs to me, of course, that The Tempest is about the legitimate ruler of a place, cast out and cast down, using magic to restore his rightful place in the world and achieve justice.  (Gabrielle Giffords is recovering but she may never sit in Congress again).

Article IV, Section 4 of the United States Constitution declares:

Section. 4.
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence.

I genuinely have to wonder… at what point does the Government of Arizona become a non-Republican form of government? Because there is a definition of fascism, and the current government of Arizona is doing a great job of signing off on the items of that definition like they were a checklist.

Krugman on the Euro

In today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman holds forth on the hubris of the Euro.

And we discover that the world economy may be really farther up the creek than previously imagined.  Because Krugman warns that the the Euro is too big to fail. We’ve heard this before, and it turned out to be false.  Yet Paul warns that trying to re-introduce the national currencies that make up the Euro will only trigger the “mother of all financial crises,” and that the only way out is for Europe to forgo national soverignty in favor of greater and deeper union. That Spain and Greece are only going to navigate their current financial crises by coming to rely on Brussels to a greater degree than they do already.

OK.  I don’t follow this stuff too regularly, and I’m probably wrong on a lot of things. But I do know my history.  And I know Galbraith’s rule, which is that whenever someone begins suggesting that a particular model is a sure thing, it’s time to head for the exits.

And I wonder which European Union state is going to make a break for the exits first.

The Poverty Trap

A lot of the things that happen on my Twitter feed concern me not at all. It’s a broad but not particularly deep stream of information.  I dip my fingers in every so often; I pour some things in every so often.  But then again, every so often I find a piece of information that I know has circled to my mind from the deep Ocean of truth out there somewhere.  And I wonder how to communicate this to my students.

Pieces of information like this nugget: If you make less than $40,000 a year, you’re stuck in a kind of poverty if you live in the United States.

A graph of the Poverty Trap

Here’s the thing… If you and your family of three earn less than $20,000 a year here, you get assistance from the Federal government and from the states, because you are — you know — poor.

But after you earn more than $20,000 a year, those subsidies in the form of food stamps and housing assistance start to go away; and frequently those sorts of businesses have substantial side-costs: transit, perhaps clothes or uniforms.  And the subsidies that made life possible beforehand go away, too:  You lose access to subsidized health care, and child care.  Your rent support vanishes.  And so your expenses jump, to eat most of the extra that you may have earned… up to about $20,000 more above $20,000.  Or $40,000 a year, which works out to $19 or $20 an hour.

I don’t make $20 an hour.  Am I in poverty?  Well, no. But I certainly have subsidized housing, in the form of an apartment in one of the school dormitories.  I eat subsidized food in the school dining hall.  And while I DO pay my own health care costs, the’ve climbed (reliably) in unpredictable ways for years now.

Should we teach this in schools? How? When?  And more importantly, how do we as a nation fix this problem?

Jeb Bush on Milk

The Tampa Bay paper reports that Jeb Bush thinks education in America should be more like milk.

The event: an education summit sponsored by his Foundation for Excellence in Education, which Bush formed after leaving office in 2007. Big-name wonks and policymakers from around the country are on hand, digesting panel discussions on everything from teacher quality to national standards.

Education should be more like milk, Bush told them Thursday. It’s all about options.

“You can get flavored milk — chocolate, strawberry or vanilla — that doesn’t even taste like milk,” he said. “Most of the time, there is a whole other refrigerator case dedicated to milk alternatives — like soy milk, almond milk and rice milk. They even make milk for people who can’t drink milk.”

“Who would have ever thought you could improve upon milk? Yet, freedom, innovation and competition found a way.”

Milk? Seriously?

OK, Mr. ex-Governor & Mr. Bother-of-ex-President…. I’ll drink.  I’ll take my milk locally milked, organically grown, BGH-free, and sustainably produced, on a small, family-run dairy farm, with access to the Internet for regular information feeds on the health of the cows, the price of milk, and demonstrable evidence that the cows live in a pasture where they can learn to do their own thing instead of being cooped up in an industrial building mired in their own urine and manure.  With fresh strawberries in season, and fair trade chocolate, thanks very much.  And standardized testing to ensure they’re free of Mad Cow Disease and Scrapie, but otherwise free do do cow-like things in the appropriate time.

Seriously, though.  Who thinks up these dumb analogies?  Maybe the same people who make standardized tests that don’t test anything.

I asked one of my students about this, and he said, “maybe milk is public education. And Strawberry, Vanilla and Chocolate are elementary, middle, and high school.  And 2% is vocational, and fat-free is talented/gifted.  And the alternatives to milk are different kinds of private and theraputic education.”

Wow.  He didn’t get that from prepping for a standardized test.  But he frowned too.  “It doesn’t make sense,” he said.  “You don’t grow up preferring one type of milk to another, or grow up to move from one kind of milk to the other.  And some people don’t even like milk, or are allergic. And ice cream, and the various kinds of cream and butter aren’t even in his analogy.”

Why do people who talk about education in the spotlight of the national and regional media always sound like such idiots?  It’s either “Our children are our most vital resource,” or “education needs to be more like _X_.”  (where X is milk if you’re from a southern state, or cotton if you’re from a dairy state [OH! Maybe that's it! Something produced somewhere else, and delivered to us by refrigerated truck, with the political and economic costs borne by someone else!].

And it’s neither one nor the other, neither fish nor fowl nor fruit.

Because education isn’t something to be consumed, in the same way that milk is.  It’s a process of self-training, interpersonal awareness, and fundamental connection with what it means to be human.  In milk terms, it’s the addition of the rennet and curds that transforms milk into cheese — something different, more mature, potentially more valuable — and in an utterly irreversible way. My friend Glenn might call it “wholly owned.”

It’s worth noting that the U.S., and many states, forbid in various forms the handling of milk in ways that produce the most unusual and flavorful cheese.  It seems that we forbid many of the most creative ways of training our children, too.

Because, after all, to some parts of our society, education should be like milk: highly processed, fungible, fumigated, clean, controlled, profitable, subsidized, sealed, closed up and protected from {en}light{enment}.

Yeah.  Excuse me while I try to find the path to the cheese aisle.  At my local farmer’s market.

State Department has a YouTube channel!

Holy Cow. The State Department takes questions by YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/user/statevideo

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/11/18/business/main4615623.shtml?tag=topHome;topStories

Right now it’s just a curiosity. A guy wearing a sandwich-board for a resumé, with the tagline “almost homeless”. Maybe it’s a gimmick. Maybe it’s a little cheesy. Yet maybe it’s a foretaste of things to come.

Yesterday the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed below 8,000. Everyone expected 8,000 to be a hard floor, but a floor nonetheless. You have to go back to October 2002 to find numbers that low. Now people are talking, quite reasonably, about 7,500 being the bottom (August 1988), but more realistic and honest people are talking 5,000 (November 1995) — maybe 4,000 (February 1995). The crazies, who predicted two years ago that we’d punch through 8000 on the way down, are now talking about 3,500 (April 1991) as the likely new floor. Or 2,000 (December 1988 or so). Go down to 1000, and you’re back to November 1972. Any lower than that, and you’re backing into the 1930s, to find a DJIA that low.

General Motors is currently trading at $2.79 a share — lower than it’s been ever, going back to 1968 and the company’s founding. It’s likely to go bankrupt by Christmas, even if they do get a $25 billion bailout from the government. Microsoft (MSFT) is trading at the levels it was in December 2001.

The Federal Reserve’s policy analysts believe that the current ‘shrinkage’ in the US economy will last until the middle of next year. So we’re talking about a million Americans out of work or without retirement funds between now and January, and further downsizing between now and June or July. And that’s based on a generally optimistic forecast.

Do you know where your oatmeal storage is? and your sandwich boards?

GOP Prescription: More Kool-Aid!

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/07/conservatives.election/index.html

(CNN) — A conservative leader Friday laid the Republican Party’s poor showing at the polls at the feet of moderates who, he argues, led the party away from its core principles.

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council told CNN that conservatives need to take back control of the GOP if the party is to return to its winning ways.

“Moderates never beat conservatives. We’ve seen that in past elections,” he said.

I voted.

I voted.
Originally uploaded by anselm23.

I voted, and then I carried a sign at the 100-foot limit for Mr. Obama for 30 minutes or so. The cars coming into the polling place were running about 6-to-1 wavers vs. not-wavers. The guy I carried my sign with turned out to be the town Democratic chairman, and we had a nice chat. He said that the real issue in town (and he thought across the country) was going to be the “cellphone vote”.

Pollsters can only call landlines, of course. Land line owners tend to be older, and as a group tend to lean Republican. They’re more likely to vote against a candidate on racial grounds. Younger voters tend to have only cellphones or to share land lines with multiple friends and house-mates. They use answering machines and voice mail services to screen calls. The Party Chair pointed out that here in town there were several hundred new voters, all of them under thirty, and all of them had cellphones rather than land lines. Most of them registered as Democrats. If this is the pattern nationally, then the polls may be wrong by a good 5% or more, favoring McCain over Obama.

It’s going to be an interesting day.