“The way to stop discrimination…”
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race”. So wrote Chief Justice Roberts in the majority opinion of today’s landmark ruling regarding Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1 (PDF of the justices’ opinions here), while Justice Breyer, disturbed by the implications of the 5-4 decision, lamented, “It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much”. Here’s more on the details of the decision from the International Herald Tribune, “U.S. Supreme Court rejects school diversity plans that take race into account” and “U.S. Supreme court votes to limit use of race in integration”, and some additional thoughts on the decision’s possible local impact from the Arizona Daily Star, “Justices rule out race in schools’ diversity“.
Additonally, less dramatically, but no less important, the justices upheld students’ freedom of politiial speech in Marineau v. Guiles, “Court Allows Student’s Anti-Bush T-Shirt”.
Juan Williams, NPR correspondent and FOX contributor, offered his opinion of the former decision, and the NewsHour analyzed recent trends ofthe Court under the leadership of Justice Roberts.
Important to know and understand. Leave a comment by clicking the link above.
Presidential Scholars Take a Stand
These students made sure their meeting with the president counted for something more than a photo opportunity, a handshake, and a nice memory: “Students explain why they handed Bush letter urging ban on torture”.
What do you think? Would you and could you have done the same? Would you have addressed some other issue given the same opportunity? Leave a comment by clicking the link above.
Supreme Court Does “Bong Hits”
The Supreme Court of the United States released it’s decision today in Morse, et al. v. Frederick (PDF of the justices’ opinions here), and it’s one that high school students should pay close attention to. The case centered around student Joseph Frederick who unfurled a banner that read “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” during an informal school-sanctioned event, and it snowballed into an exploration of the limits of free speech in schools. The proceedings and its implications are ably summarized and analyzed in TIME magazine and also on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (RealAudio from the NewsHour).
Some teens maintain the belief that they enjoy all of the same rights and privileges of citizenship as others who’ve already reached the age of majority. At the same time, and I’ve discussed this with students before, many teens and post-adolescents are quick to declare youthful innocoence in defense of some of the choices they or their peers make (Monica Lewinsky’s decisions made at twenty-two, or some graduates decisions to join the military at 18, etc.). I don’t think you can have it both ways. You gotta choose: accountable adult or indiscreet youth?
TIME writer Holding comments further that “Making a Supreme Court case out of it [the offending banner] was all but frivolous, a move emblematic of how students and their parents are rushing to court to vent their smallest grievances with schools”. What think you? Leave a comment by clicking the above link. And check out “A Nation of Wimps”, from Psychology Today, 2004.
Jane Austen, Still Hot after 200 Years
If you’re like me, you can’t get enough Jane Austen! (Sarcasm.) Actually, it seems the world, particularly America, can’t get enough of the author either. David Gates asseses Jane Austen’s appeal to American audiences,
[She] caters to Americans’ perennial Anglophilia—as does that odd preoccupation with the royals. With that, she offers Regency variants of the Cinderella story—the oldest work of chick lit, and the central fable about class, and about marriage [. . . .] The motor of all her books—courtship leading up to marriage—has a strong resonance in the socially conservative 2000s, when young women who might once have been feminists aspire to be Bridezillas, starting their marriages $20,000 in debt. Still more creepy, a version of Austen’s world has become the American Dream—at least as dreamed by advertisers and the entertainment industry. Her “charming” country villages, in which even the most financially precarious upper-class people amuse themselves while surviving on the labor of invisible servants, look like our aspirational world of guilt-free leisure and nonstop entertainment, with illegal immigrants mowing the lawn and building the new deck.
Oh, snap! Really, this may seem harsh, although Gates is actually kind and complementary—if not effusively apologetic—to Austen-the-novelist in her important place in world literature. I’d tend to agree with his assertion though, that Jane Austen, ”literary fashion accessory” and writer of (in my opinion) the most popularly over-read, over-analyzed book in the Western English canon, Pride & Prejudice, ”seems to offer middlebrow entertainment with an upmarket sheen”.
What think you? Leave a comment by clicking the link above. And for some deadly serious Austen scholarship, check out the Jane Austen Society of North America.
Military Recruiting on Campus
Here’s an interesting item from Seattle (one of my favorite cities on the planet): “Protest briefly halts School Board meeting” and here’s some video of the protest from KING TV news. It’s interesting that the students appear to be protesting military recruitment on campus solely because the United States is currently engaged in an unpopular military campaign in Iraq and that any graduate recruited would be sent to certain death? Are the protesters attempting to make a statement in favor of students’ futures or are they using expedient means to merely protest the war in Iraq? Would they be so vocal were we living in peace-time? If military recruiters aren’t allowed on campus, should college recruiters still be allowed to speak with students about their futures on school property? The answer, most likely, would be, “Don’t be ridiculous. Mr. Girard. Of course college recruiters should still be allowed on campus”. Would that mean then that college is always the only and best option for high school graduates under all conditions. Not all would assent to that idea, (see “College for All?”), and some would view it as elitist.
The issues and the answers are not so clear cut, and ideas can never be divorced from people. It’s one thing, as an academic and civic exercise perhaps, to engage in a protest and practice our Constitutional guarantees and flex our democratic muscle, but it’s important to keep in mind that real people are at the center of the debate so it doesn’t devolve into crass showboating by uniformed ideologues. It’s an issue that is particulary close to me because a former student, Pvt. Damian Lopez, was killed in an IED explosion in Baghdad on Good Friday of this year. Damian was my student in sophomore English, and he was tough, stubborn, and good. He didn’t take the college option.
What think you? Are the protesters’ arguments sound? Should military recruiters be allowed on campus? Is college the best option for all? Leave a comment by clicking the link above.
Rhetoric Basics
For any AP Language students who have experience with or know about this site and who are checking in over the summer, here are some resources worth investigating. The first is Dr. Andrew Cline’s Rhetoric Primer. It’s a nice, bare-bones description of the discipline of rhetoric. The Critical Applications section is particularly noteworthy, I think, because of Dr. Cline’s brief overview of Speech Act theory, a sub-discipline of pragmatics which is itself a sub-discipline of general linguistics. Each of the applications though, is worth taking a look at just to get a distilled introduction to the subject.
The second resource is Dr. Gideon Burton’s Silva Rhetoricae. It’d be worthwhile to investigate the Trees links on the left of the page which offer introductory material similar to Dr. Cline’s primer. The right sidebar of the page, the Flowers in the forest of rhetoric, is an exhaustive list of rhetorical schemes and tropes, many of which we’ll be learning about and using in our writing throughout the year.
Don’t be put off by these sites. Some of the language and ideas may seem advanced, but isn’t that what you’re all about?
Teaching
The observation, however clichéd, that professional teachers play a unique role in shaping the lives of their charges is no understatement. And so I’m very conscious of the New Testament caution given in James 3:1 that, because of the power we wield, “We who teach will be judged more strictly”. There is vast opportunity for well-intentioned but poorly equipped educators to do irreparable damage to the students that depend on them for guidance. Some teachers, for example, believe it’s their duty to dump their brains’ contents into their students’ heads, teaching them what to think without question rather than how to think by questioning. Unfortunately, there are students have experienced classroom injustices such as these enough to believe similarly that it’s their duty to tacitly, trustingly receive the wisdom of the supposed sage adults who stand in front of them.
Certainly, there’s an equally vast opportunity for well-intentioned and very capable teachers to help facilitate students’ academic and emotional success. To that end, I believe it’s young people’s job to be the best students they can possibly be by exploring the limits of their knowledge and creativity, developing reliable methods of analysis, building their schemata to accommodate new models of understanding, and producing exquisitely crafted artifacts worthy of their efforts. It’s my duty as a teacher then to help young people in their endeavors by modeling the same behaviors and assisting their cognitive and affective growth. I encourage my students to think clearly and logically, but also, simultaneously, flexibly and creatively in their efforts to discover truth, and, likewise, I encourage my students to critically interpret all available evidence to effectively support and stylistically defend arguments for their discoveries. It’s my goal that once students leave my care, they’ll be discriminating consumers and producers of language, able to participate positively and productively in the agora.
I teach from established educational standards according to students’ needs; content material is a secondary concern. Some critics and skeptics are eager to decry standards-based education, but I’d ask them, without quality standards how could we be sure of the safety of the food we eat or the medications we consume? Without professional standards, how could we trust the expertise of our doctors or other professionals? Without engineering standards, how could we determine the reliability of the airplanes that carry us to our destinations? Our educational standards are baseline guides to creating instruction that attempts to build students’ basic skill sets in order that all students have at least an equal opportunity to succeed as citizens in the free-market after they graduate. Of course, these standards are only the minimum measurement of student ability; there’s nothing in the standards that proscribe teachers from helping students achieve higher.
I maintain exceedingly high but not unrealistic expectations of work and behavior for my students. I want my charges to be and do more than “good” or “good enough” work, for good is the enemy of great. So I encourage students to reach beyond their own and others’ estimations of their abilities; I respect students enough to offer them rigorous challenges and allow them to stumble if they need in the process of overcoming those challenges. If I didn’t create meaningful tasks for my students to complete, establish consistent procedures for them to follow, define clear boundaries for them within which to work, and set definite deadlines for them to meet, that is, hold them accountable for their learning, I’d be complicit in diminishing the quality of, even stealing from their educational experience.
My classroom is always open. All administrators, colleagues, and especially parents are invited to come and observe and question and even join in class interactions anytime. Most importantly, I’m available to work and talk with students whenever they need.
I used contractions as often as I could in this writing, and my prose is dense. Snap!