I always like reading Beyond School–not because I agree with his ideas (I usually don’t) but his ideas are ones I want to believe in. He is of the semi-anarchist anti-coercicion school of teaching which I find very appealing. I’ve always had dreams of an utopia wherin all grades were banished, students were there because they wanted to be, and we learned what we wanted based on what interested us. Kindof like I learn now. Although I thihnk my Utopia had me traveling with my students across Europe as well.

Burrell suggested that we don’t need buildings and when I asked him about face to face communication, he responded that “We get together f2f when we want, where we want. “flash ed-mobs.” And again, logically, that’s crazy talk. We’ll have 100s of thousands of students wandering around with their iPhones looking for an eduMob to drop into. Can you imagine anything else more designed to strike terror in the hearts of adults (although that may be a vote in the positive column for the idea).

Still, doesn’t it sound fun? You could just go to the library and text out “All y’all up for a little creative writing come on down” and then scores of hirsute teens would or wouldn’t show up. Kids would get points for every mob they attended (or not! too much like grades…maybe any certification we’d be interested in would be solely attached to actual work they created. A portfolio).  The teacher might get paid according to his/her draw and the evaluation of his customers.

Sometimes drawing lines outside of the box creates ideas that are more helpful than being logical. What if I had 2 weeks in my essay fundamentals class where we didn’t meet at all.  We all wrote wherever, whenever and met up or didn’t by checking in on a chat or other social network.  Still impossible…but closer. Would the absence of coercion make up drive more learning or would it allow more slacking?  That’s always the question, no?

While I was away at lovely Cama beach with my kids and LOML, I read two books about ineffectual men obsessed by woman: All about Lulu by Jonathan Evison and All the Sad Literary Men by Keith Gessen. Both of them had something going for them, but I’m not going to finish either.

Lulu is about a boy named Will growing up frustrated and vegetarian in a house full of carnivorous bodybuilders–his Dad Big Bill who constantly falls short of Mr. Olympia and two meathead twins Doug and Ross–until his Dad remarries and Lulu enters the house. Will falls not smitten but unhealthily obsessed.  The writing has a great undercurrent of humor and absurdity, but I wasn’t able to care about Will and whether or not he would capture the heart of his stepsister.  The character was venal and sarcastic but without enough of a wit to make it better. This may be my fault as I’ve always had a hard time following and caring about sad sack characters.

Literary Men is completely different. This is a series of connected short stories that revolve around hyper-educated Harvard twentysomethings canoodling on the Right Coast.  I had a hard time telling them apart except based on what major work they were writing or failing to write: Mark wrote about Mensheviks, Sam Zionists, and Keith liberal political essays.  Strangely, even though I  didn’t enjoy these stories–they felt self-absorbed and  cramped–I read them quickly and kept on reading. I think the fact that the characters are similar to me attracted me despite the lack of other qualities. Jonathan Yardley liked it better than I did.

I’m glad I read what I did, but I’m not going to finish them.

That used to be a big deal. I remember being 14 and reading Camus’s The Myth of Sysiphus and not understanding word one, but still reading the whole thing because, you know, that’s what you do.  I’m not sure if I got the irony of that.  My students too are surprised when I tell them they don’t have to finish a book.  We get so locked into the idea that the books we assign are to read in full so that we can have a multiple choice test on them that we forget that the books serve us and not the other way around.  We have the power to put them down and find another one, one who will treat us better.

Maybe there are a few books in a classroom where we’ll want the students to read it all so we can talk as a community about the entire enchilada and have everyone munching along the whole way.  But reading doesn’t have to be a Bataan Death March.  We/I should remind ourselves that when we stop reading a book we’re making a decision to take our limited reading time and filling it with the best we pages we can find.

What if we let kids apply the Nancy Pearl-ian Rule of 50 in their own writing? Lots of readers/bloggers struggle with this a bit, but I think it would be healthier if we admitted that we’re not always ready for even the greatest books?  How can we make the classroom flexible enough to accommodate this?

Usually, I have the students teach the short stories to each other.

I recently finished Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners (from a tip on Bookslut) and I want to try again. She has a difficult style for kids and offputting to some: whimsical with a hint of disaster, winding plots, evocative if strange descriptions, and a taste for the surreal. Her first short story “The Faery Handbag” starts with a description of the Garment District in Boston and tells the story of her Grandmother Zofia who has an immense handbag which contains an entire village, a slavering dog, and the Zofia’s husband. Obviously, there are elements of magic realism there where you’re never sure if the rules of the story are different than the “real” world or if the characters are just coo-coo.

Link has a breezy, quirky style which is fun to read.

We had this theory that things have life cycles, the way that people do. The life cycle of wedding dresses and feather boas and T-shirts and shoes and handbags involves The Garment District. If clothes are good, or even if they are bad in an interesting way, The Garment District is where they go when they die. You can tell that they’re dead, because of the way that they smell. When you buy them, and wash them, and start wearing them again, and they start to smell like you, that’s when they start to reincarnate. But the point is, if you’re looking for a particular thing, you just have to keep looking for it. You have to look hard.

It’s verbal in its rhythms and eschews SAT words but for kids, and I’ll want to test this out on a few willing victims. I’m worried that the way she plays with reality and fantasy might irritate kids who want to know what’s going on at all times. Later stories have zombies and stone rabbits that come to life, but they’re always literary zombies who are reflective of the consumerist society or literary rabbits who symbolize modern ennui. They never just haul off and munch on brains. Still…zombies are zombies. Here are a couple of other review to get a second and third opinion.

Magic would be a good book to have on hand for the quirky, misunderstood kid who has a bit emo radiating from his/her general direction. I’d love for this to work with a larger class and it might in the aforementioned short story student to student teaching. It would definitely stand out next to Hills like White Elephants or By the Waters of Babylon.

Any others have success in teaching short stories.

Still, Twitter is a mystery to me (nstearns).

If you don’t know what Twitter is…the basic idea is that Twitter is a micro-blogging program that looks a lot like a party line Instant Messaging board. You have 140 characters to write what you want and then anyone who decided to ‘follow’ you can see what you’ve written. For some people Twitter is like fried, sugary manna from Top Pots Doughnuts. They love it; they rave, they gnash their teeth when it’s down (which is approximately 42.3% of the time).

Why would you want to do that? For me, the Internets are like a big stack of newspapers. I surf and link to find out stuff. I check out Slate magazine or my Google Reader or the New York Times. When my kids tell me, “I spent 6 hours on Facebook last night,” I’m not horrified, I’m mystified. What do you do for 6 hours on Facebook. Do you just write “Whasssup” on 1000 friend walls? That sounds like my version of Hell.

Apparently, even on the Web, I’m not a people person.

But in the classroom, I could see Twitter working. A number of edubloggers have talked about backchannels and how they relieve the tedium associated with paying attention in a lecture. When I watched some of the uStream or CoveritLive NECC conference, I noticed the accompanying chat was pretty off topic, irrelevant, messy, and human. People were responding sincerely to what they were hearing. Even if what people were saying wasn’t always enlightening, it was an improvement to being glued to a chair and having no contact with the people around you beyond passing notes.

If kids were able to chat with each other using one of those tools, would it enhance the classroom experience? Let’s say I were to do a class discussion on Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Normally, people would take turns responding to my provocations or leading discussions in certain areas. In a Twitter-ed class, they could be discussing what’s going on on an entirely different level. I could even shoot the chat conversation behind me as we discussed. I’m worried that this violates an important Brain Rule (#4 Attention), but it might be worth it if I’m not able to maintain Attention anyway in a 30 minute discussion.

Anyone ever tried this in the classroom?

Image Credit: Screenshot from TwitterBlocks