I stopped by my classroom on the weekend and did this:

Goodbye Chairs

All tables and chairs, pushed to the side.

Man you shoulda heard the kids as they walked in on Monday. “Mr Pierce, who DID this? Where do we SIT?” An atrocity, truly.

Open Space³ is beautifully simple. “You have five minutes to create a a space where you can be comfortable and finish your warm up activity.” And we end every lesson ten minutes early, which gives us enough time to reset the classroom back to square one, clean up the whole place, and wrap up what we learned that day.

Amazing stuff happens. Kids are free to hide under the window ledge, lay on the carpet, huddle in a circle with their friends, or pull four desks together to create a fort-type structure.⁴

My students are finally being good stewards of our classroom. They get to start every lesson exercising a choice about where they feel like sitting. They get to end every lesson helping everyone out and cleaning up our space.

And to be honest, I don’t want this experiment to end after a week. To paraphrase a wise beyond her years 8th grader: “Well Mr Pierce, Open Space is great, but we couldn’t do it for a lecture. Actually…no, why not? We could do it anytime! Except for maybe a test…”

I’m already thinking ahead to Open Time. I want these kids to need me less and less.

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Eating the Dinosaur

This section below, from page 19, hooked me. I know that even if the rest of the book is total rubbish, I have to finish it.¹ The opening essay explores the question “Why do people take part in interviews?”, and this bit expands on a quote from Chris Heath, British music critic.

>>>>>begin excerpt<<<<<

“We are used to the idea of giving witness to one’s life as an important and noble counterpoint to being /unheard, especially when applied to people in certain disadvantaged, oppressed or unacceptable situations. But in a slightly more pathological way, I’m not sure that we aren’t seeing the emergence of a society in which almost everyone who isn’t famous considers themselves cruelly and unfairly unheard. As though being famous, and the subject of wide attention, is considered to be a fulfilled human being’s natural state – and so, as a corollary, the cruelly unheard millions are perpetually primed and fired up to answer any and all questions in order to redress this awful imbalance.”

There’s a lot of truth in that last bit. I fear that most contemporary people are answering questions not because they’re flattered by the attention; they’re answering questions because they feel as though they deserve to be asked. About everything. Their opinions are special, so they are entitled to a public forum. Their voice is supposed to be heard, lest their life become empty.

This, in one paragraph (minus technology), explains the rise of New Media.

>>>>end excerpt<<<<<

I have two thoughts on this. Not as well written as Klosterman’s, but hey.

1) This articulates the fuzziness and messiness of blogs and how they relate to self-identity, which I haltingly explored in some posts earlier this year.

2) Klosterman leaves out a huge bit with that paranthetical remark on technology, so big as to misrepresent the real process going on with what he terms New Media. There’s a feedback loop going on between technology and culture. Without the possibility and new frontiers that the new technology opens up, in particular the ability to speak to Anyone in the world, is what even lets you think in the first place that you deserve to be seen and heard by millions.

My Studies

Is it weird that I love this book?

A long awaited Amazon shipment arrived last week, and I’ve started reading through material for my Master’s course on Multiculturalism in Education. First up, “English and the Discourses of Colonialism”, by Alastair Pennycook, 1998. A fascinating discussion on how English language and policies in East Asia intersect with colonialism, from an Australian who taught for some time at the universities in Hong Kong.

Sound bite takeaway from the first sixty pages: the past is not so simple, and the present is not so complex.

In Pennycook’s own words on page 29:

“…there is a tendency to view colonial history as a simple tale of old-fashioned bigotries which are very different from the complex liberalisms of the present……[the simple image of the colonizer leads to] an inability to see that discourses of the present may have direct lineages to the colonial past”.

This quote is challenging what I thought I knew and changing what I think about as I walk through the city.

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My Cosmopolitan (Neocolonial?) Life

Lung Wah

Last Friday, I had dinner at Lung Wah Hotel – an institution in the Sha Tin district of Hong Kong. Their specialty, roast pigeon. I ate it by ripping apart the bird with my bare hands. An amazing meal. After dinner I attended an event celebrating Spanish National Day. A live band and over a dozen professional tango dancers performed in a sold out concert hall.

To finish off the night I came home and watched the final episode of Noble House. A young Pierce Brosnan stars in an adaptation of James Clavell’s novel. Horrendously stereotyped Americans, British, and Chinese parade through an amalgamation of key events from the past forty years of Hong Kong history, spouting proverbs and sweeping statements about Asian and Western differences when it comes to love and rivalry.

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Can my own life be that far away from the White Man’s Burden? Am I cosmopolitan or am I just reliving, reenacting, reinforcing the tropes of colonialism? Can I draw a line connecting the recognized evils of colonialism through the admittedly racist and patronizing attitudes of the 20th century to my life and work today?

I don’t know if this is the kind of question that has a clear answer. It is definitely one to reflect on for some time.

A final quote from Pennycook, page 50:

“Thus, although in its language and style we may find nineteenth and early twentieth century writing distant and fairly amusing, I want to argue for the need to take it very seriously and to seek the connections with more recent views on language, culture and race.”

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Coming up – Pennycook writes about how language policies relate to colonial power. I know that will relate in many ways to my work as a teacher at an English medium of instruction school!

21C Learning Hong Kong, hosted by my school, HKIS, is happening this weekend. Big names from the blogosphere have been flown in, both in real life and in Second Life, and tech-savvy teachers and techevangelists from the Asia region have come to the city to swap ideas for tools and tricks to increase technology use and learning in classrooms.

I have gone to five of these now dating over the past two years. Two of them in Shanghai, and this is the third in Hong Kong. All of the conferences have been put on professionally and thoroughly. I am especially impressed with what my friend Justin has accomplished here in Hong Kong.

However, not to complain, but just to comment…I feel overloaded. Nothing sounds new. That is not to say that the speakers and ideas aren’t still inspiring at times! But what follows is an attempt to toss out some of these ideas…not a finished set of concepts below, but I would love feedback / pushback on what I think I’m thinking.

One pattern that I note is how easy it is to give lip service to the idea that “it’s all about how technology changes the learning” and yet spend the majority of the time in workshops looking at cool new tools. I know that I am as guilty as the next person about this, as I have given two presentations about wikis and blogs without much time spent talking about the transformative capabilities of these tools.

But it’s so hard. How do we have practical discussions about how to make drastic changes in the day to day experience inside of a school?  Surely the conversations need to be focused on something more than just the next cool Web2.0 tool. However is a classroom teacher in any position to implement anything radical? What I keep on hearing / coming back to myself is a frankly naive wish to simply “blow up” the current paradigm of education and start off afresh. I love the idea of a “Ten Man School” as Rob suggested today, take ten committed teachers and build the experience around student learning, with no concessions given for our preconceived notions of what a curriculum ought to be. I loved working at a new school for three years and feeling as if my energy could make a big difference in the way learning would happen for the students.

But what can I do now? Must I be testing out and tinkering with each new Web 2.0 tool? I’m supposed to be delivering Social Studies knowledge, concepts and skills, not teaching my students the next coolest slick looking online gadget like Prezi.

I know that I’ve grown as a teacher. I’m certainly leaps and bounds better than I was 2-3 years ago.

But I am starting to feel that I’m relearning the same things. I’d love to fine tune a curriculum, to go into a week knowing that this is the spot that the students are going to trip up.

But no. I am always up against the task of building the jetliner mid flight.

I feel like this little guy.

Okay. Pity party over. Sorry.

The sentence that stopped me in my tracks:

…Mohammed’s case [a tenured teacher in NYC charged by her administration as professionally incompetent] will probably have cost the city and the state (which pays the arbitrator) about four hundred thousand dollars.

Nor is it by any means certain that, as a result of that investment, New York taxpayers will have to stop paying Mohammed’s salary, eighty-five thousand dollars a year.

There’s a part of me that just wants out out out of teaching when I read about this.

So. Tomorrow we’re goin virtual for a week. No kids on campus, but plenty of online systems and support to keep some learning going on at home.

*Note – there have been very few confirmed cases of H1N1 in the student body. But there’s enough sick kids going around to have significant cause for alarm. Official school release here.

I digress. The definition fits: “a public declaration of intentions”.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/61683005@N00/565924862

In this first iteration of my attempt to define online professionalism I will simply expand on what I wrote earlier.

There were two guidelines I operated under:

1. Don’t use real names
2. Don’t post anything I wouldn’t want sent as an all-users email

I can see clearly how they stifled my last blog: they are “donts”, negative rules.

Let’s try this again:

1. Don’t use real names. Share my blog with people that I work with. Not that I expect to use this in any capacity related to my job, but because I don’t want to feel like I’m hiding anything from anyone.
2. Don’t post anything I wouldn’t want sent as an all-users email. I need to be excited about the fact that all-users can see what I write rather than cowed. When I post something onto this blog, I’m saying that it’s an idea worth sharing. If I post it here, I’m standing behind it (until someone comes along to show me, duh, why I’m wrong).

…is this enough? It doesn’t feel like it. I don’t like how open-ended and messy this sounds. But I can’t seem to find anything better anywhere else, yet.

I’ll have to come back to it. For now, thanks to all the blogs I’ve read, and in particular thanks to Karl Fisch and Konrad Glogowski, whose words seem to most match what I feel is appropriate.

my secret weapon

I don’t see any way that this post won’t come across as vain and elitist. However, if you knew me well, you’re probably rolling on the floor right now as you realize that JEFF is writing about FASHION. When I mentioned to my mother that I bought more cufflinks over the summer, she laughed. “Do you even have the shirts to go with them?”

But I believe that this is an improvement over the standard business casual. For me, it’s my uniform, and like everything else in my teaching I want my clothes to be a notch above. When I’ve got on a tie and cufflinks, I take myself more seriously. My students can tell that I look like I mean business. And lastly, I feel that it’s one part of my response to all those critiques of teaching as an “easy job”. It’s easier to say that I deserve to be treated like a respected professional when I look like it.

Of course I’m not saying this replaces lesson prep, or pedagogy, or that it applies the same in all school contexts. Appearance isn’t everything. But it does count for something.

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Tangent Number One, aka “Best Laid Plans”:

I started off my first day well-prepared…except that I left my work laptop at home. A bit of a flustered start.

Tangent Number Two:

A more valid criticism of this is that I’m playing to, and reinforcing, class stereotypes. I work at one of the oldest private schools in Hong Kong, and also one of the most expensive. Class and race are knotted up in Hong Kong, always lurking below the surface. They are much bigger issues that I don’t even know how to start untangling. For now, all I can do is to stay aware of their presence.

If you maintain an online presence in any way – I am including facebook in that – watch 17:22 – 21:18. Four minutes, that’s all. This section introduces and defines “context collapse”, my big takeaway, the phenomenon which is the cause of all my stops and starts venturing online. (see end note for more)

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“Context Collapse”

On this blog, I am not writing to anyone in particular, yet I am also writing to everyone in the whole world. And thus I have no context in which to set this text. Comparing blogs to emails is illustrative. Both are means of communication in which the authors of the ideas are clearly identified. But an email is highly contextualized since it is limited to a specific group of people, while a blog that is posted publicly on the internet is in a sense addressed to the whole world and therefore lacks a defined context.

For example, let’s look at my last post. Instead of putting my concerns online, I could have sent it to my school’s director of technology, Justin Hardman. Here’s what the email would look like:

Emailing Justin

But by putting it onto my blog, here is who I am addressing it to:

Blogging the Whole World

And it’s not like a normal “bcc” – in email, the people who are blind are the ones who actually receive the email, as they don’t know who else might be a recipient. But on a blog, I’m the one who is blind. I have absolutely no clue who is choosing to point their browser this way.

That’s the part that has me messed up. I am worried both about who specifically will come to view the blog – the wrong member of my school’s board, or the wrong overreacting parent. But I am also concerned with remaining authentic to whoever else in the world might come to view these ideas.

Not so worried that I won’t blog. But I find I can’t stop (over) thinking it.

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End Note: But I recommed the whole video. You can split it up into two manageable chunks – up until 14:00, the focus is on the philosophical ramifications of new digital media and how it is changing conceptions of self and identity. From 14:00 til the end, it summarizes Welsh’s ethnographic research into Youtube. Well worth the time!