Good to see you again Ken. I find your posts and subsequent conversations very thought provoking. They linger in my head for days as I try and work out my arguments. Perhaps it is because I think we differ on so many fundamental levels, that I find our correspondences so valuable. But this time around, I do not want to come with an attack or break down your argument point-by-point. I have read all the other comments, but still do not feel the need nor have the energy to address each one individually.

I just want to express my thoughts on the concept of teaching as a subversive act. But before I begin, I think it is important to define the word subversive:

a radical supporter of political or social revolution
intended to overthrow or undermine an established government

Yes and yes. I am guilty on both counts. As an artist, a father, and a member of the human race I am a radical supporter of political or social revolution, because the world I see in front of me is not the place I want my daughter to live. I am well read enough in history to see patterns leading to the state the world is in, and I feel it is important to alter those patterns. I advocate the overthrowing not only of most current governments, but the very fundamental principles on which they are based. I advocate a new world vision, not of radical violent Marxist revolution, but a more synergistic, organic vision. I feel the revolution of which I speak is still be concocted by the very youth we are discussing. I feel it is my job to show my students that another world is possible, that they have the power to shape it.

So where does the subversion come into play? I agree with you that preaching, sermonizing and converting students to any ideology has no place in a classroom. Students should be allowed to weigh ideas for themselves and make informed decisions. The problem, however, is that we are not playing on a level playing field. Much of what young people ingest these days, from their text books, media saturation, advertising, and even moral values and life priorities are dictated by an uber-aggressive money making machine known as the new privatizing global economy.

The winners make the rules, and so they begin to market our children from the day they are born and create a race of apathetic consumers. Is it subversive to teach children to love and share and create outside the box created by a global economic system that teaches them to compete and one that measures success and happiness only through wealth?

As teachers we are told to ignore this elephant in all of our classrooms. I am not advocating teaching students that the current system is all bad, or that I have all the answers. I am simply saying that the system is not perfect, far from it, as it is sold to us. We must consider alternatives. The system itself does not like being criticized. See the tear gas and riot gear in all the anti-globalization demonstrations since Seattle 1999, but don’t students have a right to see alternatives to the history the system prescribes? Where is our history? Why are subversives forced to teaching under the dark of night? Why can’t we parade our heroes in our classrooms along with the Lincolns and Washingtons? Abbie Hoffman, Ken Kesey, Allen Gingsberg, and Hunter S. Thompson have every right to be heard in an objective classroom. Why aren’t Chomsky or Zinn on any major curriculums?

I entered teaching because as a teenager I realized that I couldn’t change the world alone. I needed help. As an adult, I am learning that this help is not coming from adults. So I look to the students in my classroom to look at the world objectively and make choices to help make it better. I am not subversive. I simply show them what I have learned. I share with them my life experience working in the third-world and inner city schools. I am a connector of worlds. I am a painter of pictures. I understand that the term make the world better is ambiguous and can be construed as neo-hippy blather, so let me put it in more simple terms. I believe in people who work to ease suffering. On all levels. In all places. At all times. That is why I teach. It is beyond politics, ideology, or subversion. It is my nature and I cannot teach any other way.

A few days ago, I was chatting with Lindsea on Skype about a variety of topics: music, education, and the need for adults to communicate more often and more in depth with students. We briefly brainstormed a few ideas we each had for the EduPunk challenge, when we arrived at the following slogan for her Street Art campaign: “Education everywhere. Take back your education.” We discussed the idea of Guerrilla Learning, and the idea that we realized was repeatedly emerging was this need for students and teachers/adults to meld their networks.

This is the first paragraph from my latest post for the students at Intrepid Classroom. I am reposting it here along with a link to the post in its entirety in hopes that any teacher or adult who is reading this blog will be motivated to come join us and add your voice to a growing community of teachers and students.

It is time that we join forces and stopping talking about our students and start talking to them, with them. I hope you will at least comment on the post or better yet, come join the Ning and be a teacher at the INtrepid Classroom! We are thirty something strong and growing. See you there.

I recently posed a challenge to my Intrepid Classroom. And now I am making the same challenge to you web savvy educator:

Do a bit of research about DIY and the punk ethics and see what you can produce to show you understand the concept of punk as it relates to learning and education. Use any tools you have at your disposable both digital and old school, then present your work on the Ning, the wiki, youtube, or your own blog. Don’s ask for clarification, don’t ask for what is acceptable; don’t ask anything just do it. Create! We have been mired in the past by too much discussion and collaboration, so this is an independent project and it is due by the 26th of June.

Come join our Ning, add to the wiki, share your voice with the young people you say you teach. Stop talking about these tools and use them. What will your Edupunk Project look like? June 26th, spread the word let’s see what happens!

School is all but out for most people very soon, but you can still invite your students to take on this project on their own. Have you taught them enough over the course of the year so they can?

I sit armed with a play list swarming with Fugazi, a chip on my shoulder, and a need to vent. Like many of you, I saw the term EduPunk for the first time on Twitter yesterday and took the bait. I followed a few links, googled some names, and by the end of the night I had added about ten new people to my network that seem to be more on my level than anyone in my pre-Edupunk network.

I am not here to out punk anyone or defend terms I had no hand in creating. I am also not here to cheerlead a group of people who could articulate their ideas much better than myself. This post is already one of many, probably too many, posts trying to attach meaning to a label. The creators of the term are probably sitting back and laughing at the direction their idea has taken. Some students are already angry that adults without their input are once again hijacking their movement.

But what I hope students like Lindsea will understand is that teaching is a political act. Whether you like it or not, every time you speak with, engage, instruct, interact with young people in an effort to promote their learning you are either consciously or subconsciously steering them toward the status quo or away from it. As our society becomes more and more global, at least for those of us lucky enough to be living on the comfortable side of the digital divide known as the first world, citizens are either becoming aware of their role as consumers in a resources depleting, imperialistic, war-mongering, poor exploiting, global economy or they are waking up to the idea that there are alternatives.

As educators we have a duty to either promote this brave new world, ignore it and stick to our curriculum, or to awaken young people to alternatives to the way things “just” are. With the birth of colonial expansion in Europe, then the industrial revolution, and ending with the rise of global capitalism “defeating” communism, we are constantly being told that since capitalism won the cold war, it is the best and only option. Never mind the constant state of war necessary to maintain it, or the depletion of unrenewable resources, or the unsustainably built into a system that exploits a large percentage of the global population for the benefit and profits of a tiny sub-group of ultra rich. We are constantly told that this state of globalization is the only game in town.

Teaching is a political act. So if we truly want change we must use any means necessary to break free of the chains being imposed on education. Enter EduPunk? Sure why not. Enter anything you can think of that will help us. The terms and labels are secondary to our primary concern, which is rethinking our educational institutions to reflect our revolutionary spirit, for both students and teachers.

Wikipedia tells us that punks sometimes participate in direct action such as protests and boycotts. These acts are committed in an effort to create social change when it is felt that the normal channels for change have been proven ineffective.

Let me repeat that: These acts are committed in an effort to create social change when it is felt that the normal channels for change have been proven ineffective. I am here to say that normal channels for change have been proven ineffective.

I leave you with a few questions:

What actions are you taking to help foster change in your classroom?
Are the normal channels proving difficult to overcome?
What new (call them whatever you want) techniques do you use?
Are you willing to not lead but listen and follow your students into the unknown

Listen and follow your students into the unknown? That is where you may find the meaning of Edupunk!

Salutations, memorials, bromides: let us commence.

I want to talk about love — not romance, not love l-u-v.
I want to talk about a particular kind of love, this love: classroom teaching.

I have my posse of gaily clad classroom teachers behind me.

They like to be called college professors.
And we can’t all work for the government.

We gather together because of classroom teaching.
We have shown you our love in our work in the classroom.

Classroom teaching is a physical, breath-based, eye-to-eye event.
It is not built on equipment or the past.
It is not concerned about the future.
It is in existence to go out of existence.
It happens and then it vanishes.
Classroom teaching is our gift.
It’s us; it’s this.

We bring nothing into the classroom — perhaps a text or a specimen. We carry ourselves, and whatever we have to offer you is stored within our bodies. You bring nothing into the classroom — some gum, maybe a piece of paper and a pencil: nothing but yourselves, your breath, your bodies.

Classroom teaching produces nothing. At the end of a class, we all get up and walk out. It’s as if we were never there. There’s nothing to point to, no monument, no document of our existence together.

Classroom teaching expects nothing. There is no pecuniary relationship between teachers and students. Money changes hands, and people work very hard to keep it in circulation, but we have all agreed that it should not happen in the classroom. And there is no financial incentive structure built into classroom teaching because we get paid the same whether you learn anything or not.

Classroom teaching withholds nothing. I say to my young students every year, “I know how to add two numbers, but I’m not going to tell you.” And they laugh and shout, “No!” That’s so absurd, so unthinkable. What do I have that I would not give to you?

Bringing nothing, producing nothing, expecting nothing, withholding nothing –
what does that remind you of?
Is this a bizarre occurrence that will go into The Journal of Irreproducible Results?
Or is it something that happens every day, all the time, all over the world,
and is based not on gain and fame, but on love.

There are those who say that classroom teaching is doomed and that by the time one of you addresses the class of 2033, there will be a museum of classroom teaching.

Ever since the invention of wedge-shaped writing on a clay tablet, classroom teaching has been obsolete. It’s been comical. Why don’t we just write the assignments and algorithms on a clay tablet, hang it up on the wall, and let the students come who will to teach themselves from our documents?

Why, since the creation of writing with a pen on a piece of paper, do we still bother to have schools?

Why, since the invention of movable metal type, don’t we all just go to the library?

Why do we have to have class? Why do we need teachers?

Why, since the advent of the microchip, don’t we all stay home in our pajamas and hit send?

Technology is nipping at the heels of classroom teaching, but I perceive no threat.
How could something false replace something true?
How could a substitute, a proxy, step in for something real and alive?
How could the virtual nudge out the actual?

The other great threat to classroom teaching is the rush to data — data-driven education.
We must measure everything — percentages, charts, tables.

I’m not entirely opposed to this.
If data-driven education were a pie graph, I would have a piece.

But I was not educated and did not become a teacher to produce data.

I love the classroom.
I loved it as a student, and I love it as a teacher.
I can name every teacher I ever had:
Mrs. Mulshanok, Miss Williams, Mrs. Clark, Miss Bogan, Mrs. Johnson, Mrs. Muys, Mrs. Parker, Mr. Eldridge, Miss Bush — and that’s just through sixth grade.
I could go on, I promise.

I loved coming to class: the chairs, the windows, unzipping my book bag.
And I loved my teachers.
There was content, I suppose, but that’s not what I remember.
I remember my teachers.
I remember being in the room,
and no data and no bar graph will be assembled to replace that, or even to capture it.

This week my students worked on dividing a pizza between two people, and they realized that if you make the line down the center of the pizza the two sides will be equal. After much trial and error, they came to this conclusion on their own, and I welcome you to try it. I think it’s really going to take off, and let this be where it begins.

When they take a standardized test, they will be able to fill in the bubble next to the pizza that is cut exactly in half. Do they know that will be the correct answer? Yes. But I don’t care that much. What I care about is how they got there, how they figured it out for themselves.

This skinny little high school senior got herself into Smith College by writing an essay about Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s theme, “The journey, not the arrival, matters.” It worked for me.

Standardized tests measure the arrival, but they have nothing to say about the journey, about having wonderful ideas. Do you know it/do you not know it is second, and how do you know it, and who are you, is first.

The only way this knowledge grows inside a student is with a teacher, a classroom teacher. Of course, my students will insist they did it themselves, and I don’t try to disabuse them of that.

But the work you graduates have done was in the classroom with your teachers.
That’s the miracle of today.
Why don’t we talk about it?
Because it doesn’t show up.
There’s not a bar graph for classroom teaching. There’s no data for classroom teaching, and yet it persists this year and the next year and the year after that.

Telling tens of thousands of people what to do is not teaching, it’s shouting, and there’s a lot of that going around.

Showing somebody how to do something exactly the way you’ve always done it is not teaching, it’s training. And there’s plenty of that, too.

But the reality that is neither shouting nor training is classroom teaching.
Nobody can touch it because nobody can point to it.
You have it forever.
When it grows inside you, it’s doing its work.

We can disappear.
We’ll never see you again, probably.
The chairs will be folded.
It will be as if we were never here.
There will be nothing we can count after today.
But not everything that counts can be counted.
Not everything that matters can be put into a pie chart.

The Board of Trustees has set a very great challenge for itself:
to educate us all for lives of distinction.
You are never going to be able to make a bar graph out of that.
That is immeasurable, and that’s what makes it so real.
I admonish you — because that’s my job — to think about the things that float away:
your love for your friends,
the smell of the lilacs,
the feeling your families have on this day.
You will have nothing to take with you.
The diploma you receive will be someone else’s.

Everything meaningful about this moment, and these four years,
will be meaningful inside you, not outside you.

I’ve been a classroom teacher for sixteen years–as long as you have been in the classroom. We started the same year. And I hope to go on for fourteen more years.
That will make thirty, and I’ll be done.

At the end of that time, someone will bring me a box, and I will put in it a ceramic apple somebody gave me thinking it would be symbolic somehow. I will have nothing, and that will be proof of the meaning of my work.

If you can point to something, you might lose it, or you might break it, or someone might take it from you. As long as you store it inside yourself, it’s not going anywhere — or it’s going everywhere with you.

This day is a day of love.
It’s a day of your family’s love for you,
your love for each other and your teachers,
and your teachers’ love for you.

In time, the bar graphs may tumble,
the clay tablets may crumble.
They’re only made of clay.
But our love
is here to stay.

Thank you.

Please pass it on to wherever it needs to go.

I want to take this time to talk about and reflect on the Intrepid Classroom experiment I am working on. The mission statement of the class is:

Intrepid Classroom is a place where students of all ages from around the world visit, meet each other, share ideas, and decide what they want to learn from each other. The goal is to focus on the following topics: conflict resolution, global sustainability, peace activism, music and art as agent for social change, technology as a tool for social justice causes, but we are open to any other topics the readers of this blog suggest.We can discuss any topic we feel important here at the Intrepid Classroom. The hope is to create a fluid, organic curriculum that engages all participants.

What does that look like? So far we have 28 members from all over the world. We are using a variety of web tools to help create and maintain a natural network of students determined to investigate and pursue their own interests. I am fighting every urge to micro-manage the daily functions of our Ning, which seems to be the actual classroom where students come almost daily to talk about books, the war on terror, best forms of governments, music, or technology.

It has been fascinating for me, because I have taught some of these students first hand, while others I have never met. I am watching students from Doha discuss books with students I had in Malaysia, only to have a complete strangers join them from Costa Rica. I am allowing the students the freedom to explore and investigate not only what they want to learn, but how they will synthesis any new knowledge or skills they acquire. I often find them participating late on a Friday night or discouraged because tools are blocked at their schools. I am hoping that they will discover and share which of these tools are best for each task that they choose to pursue.

The point, I suppose, is for kids to realize that their learning is more than a grade. Seeking truth and knowledge is a natural and exciting human action. Furthermore, I hope they will realize that the search for this new knowledge need not be scripted or found in “approved” sources only. I want them to work with strangers to find meaning in their individual investigations. I cannot think of a more student centered way of teaching. I am not the expert, but another member of the network. I use the blog as a platform to share my thoughts and knowledge. It is becoming a great resource for political conscious music and film. I look forward to seeing it grow, so that the members of the class can share it with others.

I am always amazed by how much we underestimate students. When given the freedom to produce innovative work based on their own interests most of them will often surprise us. I am very pleased with our progress at this stage in the game. We are working with very few rules or guidelines, but there seems to be a synergy building that I am looking forward to exploiting.

Besides the blog and ning, we have a youtube channel for storing any video we may produce as well as a place to document and store video resources. We have started a wiki for a collaborative writing project as well as a place for brainstorming and collaborating on future projects.

Kids today do care about the world in which they live and are looking for ways to have a say in its administration. If you haven’t already been to the Intrepid Classroom please come by and snoop around. Join the Ning, we could use a few more teacher voices in our growing network, or use our resources to talk to your students about instilling a sense of creative activism. Invite them to join us. This is a great post to get them started. You may have to loosen the leash, but you will be surprised by how far they can run.

Teachers are fighting to exclude their private lives - such as personal postings on Internet sites Bebo and Facebook - from falling foul of new serious misconduct rules. The Teachers Council wants to change criteria by which officials decide whether to refer complaints against the country’s 90,000 teachers to its disciplinary tribunal. The tribunal can censure or deregister teachers for serious misbehaviour. The council says the new clause - covering “any conduct
that brings, or is likely to bring, discredit to the profession” - would plug gaps in current rules. But teacher unions fear the “all encompassing” clause would put teachers’ personal lives under unfair scrutiny, even when it had no bearing on their ability to be good teachers.

As readers of this blog are aware, I have had my own troubles dealing with this issue of being asked to resign for my online behavior. For the last few weeks, I have often found myself saying, “This is a very grey area. Incidents like mine will occur more and more often as teachers and society at large start spending more time online.”

This problem is more than just a case of inappropriate applications on Facebook, the issue at hand is that as we enter a more open and global society with more and more people allowed to express themselves publicly on the internet, professionals especially those who work with children must decide how to best express themselves in a multi-cultural world.

Teachers already have to prove they are of fit character.

What does that mean? What is fit character is probably very different in New Zealand, or New York City, or the Middle East.

Post Primary Teachers Association president Robin Duff said current misconduct criteria were “perfectly adequate”. The new rule was too vague. “What’s creditable and discreditable these days? That sort of judgment is often based on your own social background.”

To what rubric are teachers being judged on appropriate online behavior. I think we can all agree that…

allegations of physical, sexual or psychological abuse of children; inappropriate pupil relationships; viewing pornography at school; using, making or supplying drugs; neglect or illtreatment of a child or animal in their care; or crimes punishable by at least three months’ jail.

…are unacceptable anywhere, but what about teachers who promote the theory of evolution over intelligent design, or teachers who have strong feelings about the war in Iraq? Suddenly, a teacher who is pro-active in politics can be deemed unfit by a school board, a principal, or a particular group of parents.Teachers are held to a higher standard for social behavior in nearly all cases. Which is fine to an extent. I understand the level of trust that is put in my hands on a daily basis. I will expect nothing less when my daughter goes to school, but as the 21st century really gets underway, we must move forward cautiously and not allow fear of unknown technologies dictate the level of freedoms we allow the men and women teaching our children.

The reality is that teachers are not robots. We function in the same social and intellectual spheres that govern the rest of the world. It is difficult enough to be everything to everyone else: the polite and professional coworker, the qualified and hardworking employee, the fair and kind role model for students, and the polished and respectful saint for parents.

I cannot think of another job, where a person is expected to always be on their “best” behavior. We are expected to remain blank slates that will somehow shape and build the future, without offering our own ideas so as not to improperly influence young minds, lest their parents’ opinions, or that of the school board or administration should differ from our own.

We live in an age where opinions and strong beliefs can be threatening to people in power. We are told from a young age not to discuss politics or religion in public. It is unprofessional we are led to believe. But as a language arts and social studies teacher how can I not? How are we meant to teach children that they can change the existing power structures and work towards a better world, if we are no allowed to discuss the flaws in the system?

Teachers are not meant to criticize a certain president or his policies, or question the global consumer culture, or suggest that perhaps capitalism is not the best system around. Some say this type of political criticism makes a teacher of unfit character. Don’t get me wrong. I whole-heartedly agree that this type of bias has no place in a classroom, especially at the middle school level. Teachers should not be sermonizing their religious or political beliefs in the classroom, but they shouldn’t be punished for expressing them on the Internet.

If we allow schools to start firing teachers for vague indications of inappropriateness, we are opening the door to weakened teacher’s unions and a generation of teachers afraid to take risks and be themselves.

There seems to be no place left for us teacher/activists to express our ideas. It doesn’t seem fair that we cannot feel comfortable expressing ourselves on the internet, the very space we are painstakingly teaching our students to use.

It feels very hypocritical to teach students to use the tools that we ourselves are afraid to use. I believe in education more than anything else in the world. I believe that objective presentation of facts, logical thought, honesty, love, and communication are the keys to a more peaceful world. A peaceful world is my only goal. If this attitude makes me of unfit character than I suppose I have to search the earth until I find a school that agrees with my ideals. Which is what I am doing now. I have no hidden agendas. No matter what political or religious obstacles we may face, I want nothing more than to find a path toward peace. This is why I teach. This is why I write. This is why I exist. My blogs are nothing more than maps of my journey. There may have been times I have taken wrong turns, said things I shouldn’t have said, but they are meant to be read as a whole. I do not believe in sermonizing or preaching in the classroom. While my opinions may appear to take a one-sided stand at times, I work very hard to create and maintain an objective environment to teach kids to ask questions and search out the truth. That is all.

So remember that not only are…

there’s lots of other things that happen in people’s lives that have no direct bearing on people’s ability to be good teachers. Certainly not the private life of a teacher unless it impacted on the profession itself.

Personal factors in a teacher’s life often enhance their ability to better relate to and teach students. We cannot allow these freedoms to be taken away.

Day Five-Comment on a post you disagree with and Day Six- Comment to engage in conversation:

I left the following comment on The Science Bench. For personal reasons, I am very passionate about the idea of professionalism and online identities:

This idea of how teaches should or shouldn’t act online seems to be a popular topic these days, and one that I am personally very familiar with. I was recently asked to resign from a private international school because of a parent complaint about material on my Flickr page. Unlike the teachers from the Washington Post article, I feel I have a good grasp of what is on my various sites. I keep a clean Facebook. I actually invited parents to view my personal blog because I wanted them to have a fuller picture of who was teaching their kids; this brings me to my point:

I am a language arts teacher who is very interested in using technology and Web 2.0 in my classroom as a tool for student self expression. I use these tools myself as an artist, a writer, a photographer, and amateur filmmaker, and as a human being, so what happens if I don’t do anything “stupid” online, but a parent still finds fault with my taste in books, my politics, or religious views. I am an atheist, should I hide this fact to the world, even while I teach my students to be open minded about people’s religious beliefs. What do teachers who do not use these tools tell their students when asked, “Do you have a Youtube page, or do you have a Flickr page?|

It is one thing to judge young teachers who are being flagrantly “inappropriate” online, but who decides where the line is to be drawn. I am a grown adult who loves teaching, loves kids, and loves what I do. I don’t want to have to hide who I am because some parents may think that I am inappropriate. My point is that there will always be someone who doesn’t like who you are and what you stand for, so how do teachers who feel are doing right by their online identities react to being told to be careful, or worse to not engage in online activity.

I have lost my job and have since been re-thinking my stance on all of these questions, but I know that the day of the teacher being a robot of professionalism is dying. Teachers like all professions are made up of eclectic people; we should celebrate this diversity, rather than forcing the educators of our children to be forced into some strange homogeneous fake world of conservative expectations.

I teach my kids to use Web 2.0 to create, share, exchange, and build networks, how can I not be doing that myself…as myself?

Day Seven- What have you learn do far:

I have learned that I don’t like the pressure of this challenge. I am not sure if staying on schedule is good for the quality of my comments and subsequent blog posts. Take this last post for example. I was looking for a blog with which to disagree; I am not sure how natural this process is. I do, however, see the value in keeping these lessons with me as I move beyond this challenge.

The most important lesson I have learned early on, is that commenting is the most important activity for establishing and fostering online relationships, which will only strengthen one’s network. I have already met several bloggers with whom I am regularly interacting with on my blog and twitter, simply because we exchanged a few comments.

I hope that I will continue to comment frequently when the pressure of this challenge has subsided. I am off to find a blog outside of my niche. I’ll let you know how that went.