From the SOTU, something I just had to bring up. The president says:

By passing the No Child Left Behind Act, you have made the expectation of literacy the law of our country. We’re providing more funding for our schools — a 36-percent increase since 2001. We’re requiring higher standards. We are regularly testing every child on the fundamentals. We are reporting results to parents, and making sure they have better options when schools are not performing. We are making progress toward excellence for every child in America.

I enjoy the subtleties here. What does the expectation of literacy the law of our country mean? Is it the law that we must have an expectation or does the President mean to suggest that illiteracy is a crime? Theres also a problem with the question of performance, as if a kid gets a bad grade its automatically the schools fault, when there may be no fault to find except in the concept of education that we currently have in service. I find statements that suggest excellence in absolute quantities pure demagoguery. Logic says that if all are excellent, then excellence becomes mediocrity.

But the status quo always has defenders. Some want to undermine the No Child Left Behind Act by weakening standards and accountability.

This is a classic either/or logical fallacy, a fallacy that sets up a trick dichotomy. This the way it goes: if you disagree with NCLB, then you must be against high standards and therefore agree with the status quo by default. This, of course, misses the notion that there may be better responses than the original proposal or that the problem is more complicated than the proposal articulates. The same logic is applied in the Iraq war against people soft on Saddam and his ilk: that if youre against the war, youre for Saddam and his brand of violence and style of governing. Totally false.

Yet the results we require are really a matter of common sense: We expect third graders to read and do math at the third grade level — and that’s not asking too much

This is fine but misses the nuances. At worst it smacks of status quo. Does anyone know what a third grade reading level is? Theres some sort of DNA reading device out there that judges what a third grader should know. Lots of kids are well beyond the Lets read about Farmer Tom and his cows today stuff thats common fare in the third grade. Grades are arbitrary. Check what publishers call young adult market novels out there and prove that this should be young adult fare, the kind of thing that young minds can take: romance, jealousy, and teen angst. At least Buffy has edge. In my mind, seventh and eighth graders should be able to find the thesis of Aristotles Poetics. Weve targeted too much in education already. A third grader is this and not that, and anything else is just strange, or a failure. NCLB sets up even more of a pressure cooker scenario for 3rd graders. We can put a big smile on this if we wish, but, as with all smiles, watch out for the hands working behind it. But now to the weirdest statement:

Testing is the only way to identify and help students who are falling behind. This nation will not go back to the days of simply shuffling children along from grade to grade without them learning the basics. I refuse to give up on any child — and the No Child Left Behind Act is opening the door of opportunity to all of America’s children.

I know what these tests look like; I also know how much they cost in both money and time. Really, what the President means is conventional standardized tests, oh, and dont we love those. Testing is not the only way. As far as shuffling students along to the next grade, spare me.

Ultimately I think about words like accountability and performance and all the baggage that comes with the perverted assumptions behind them. I can still see one of my kids’ teachers almost in tears for having to explain to me and my wife why she was having students glue stuff to white boards rather than giving them speeches and thinking problems to work on. Because they said I had to do it this way. This is a teacher with thirty years of experience who knows how kids learn better than her superiors yet couldnt act on her own knowledge because someone else wanted students to glue beads onto a board and probably thought that would be fun. This meant the teacher had to work double time to get done what she felt she needed to get done: having her students solve problems. The teachers that I know work themselves to the bone to teach, to help, and to advise, and are always learning how to do things better. Accountability and performance in this context assigns laziness, an anything should be fine attitude, a passing description for liberalism, to an entire class of people. We gotta get all those lazy, pro-status quo, low-standard-loving liberal teachers in line. Just incredible. I work with students every day who have difficulty with the fundamentals. Most of them got tired of bureaucracy a long time ago and dont want any more of it. Get them excited and they catch on quick.

This semester I’ll be running through freshman composition, Modern British Literature, Creative Writing and an online Intro to Literature course. The materials for the first three should be going up on the lettuce head website beginning next week. I’m considering linking a CW course syllabus to the Narratives weblog, but we’ll see. Students should have access to the online lit material by the end of next week, the 23rd of January.

The semester should also be covering prep for Neha and co’s. writing conference, interacting with the Narratives group, prepping for the summer IF course (and summer teaching), finalizing issues having to do with New Media Communication (and teaching in the Fall), such as a website and courting the professional community, academic duties related to the college and the department, the composition portfolio initiative, and completing the hypertext novel, which I never don’t whether I am in or out of at the moment. There’s a lot to do. Lots to keep up with.

Plus, it’s too darned cold. I’m not made fro this weather. I can deal with twenty and teens, but below zero is just too much. Someone turn up the outdoor heat, will ya!

This post over at Matthew Kirschenbaum’s weblog got me thinking about the choices people make about teaching matter. John, Bill, and I have talked at length about materials for new media and what we and students should experience as we work through the new media core over the course of two years.

New Media 1: Perspectives is, in my view, a forum for exposing models, a course that introduces students to what people are doing and have done with media to tell stories, store information, build community, exchange goods, communicate ideas, and much more. Our concern is how these activities “can” come together in digital form and how this synthesis changes the way we think about community and so forth. So we want to give students a lot to think about. We want to give them a lot of things to read, manipulate, and play with. We’ll watch a film and consider how it was made. We’ll read a comic book and consider how a film and a comic are similar and different. We’ll read a story and consider how it’s held together then consider how a piece of IF is held together.

For me it’s an interesting question to ask: what do you need to read a book vs what do you need to read an example of Interactive Fiction? The book? The writer? The publisher? The illuminated manuscript? A computer network? Light? Physics? How does the thing shape ideas, action, experience, perception, the market place, the future, the past?

It could be argued that the book is invisible. That is, we’re so used to it, it lacks weight. In Contemporary Fiction I threw a few nails in the reading list by including Photopia and Watchmen, going against the trade as I was taught it: in school, prior to public network space, we were total print people: we didn’t really have cause to question. There was a time when I believed that computers would destroy western culture. I don’t now. I began teaching an online writing course because I wanted to prove to myself and others that this method just wouldn’t work. Talk about a radical shift in personal thinking. I understand now that what I had once demonized as destructive and false had been based on a generalization or conflation of the meaning of difference, “distance,” and “designed space” in learning environments.

When people walk into a sophomore lit course, they think “book.” Thus the comment: how can it be a story, it’s on the computer? A person who claims this will not think that they are saying something false or inaccurate; they’ll be concluding based on their circle of knowledge. Next year in CF it’s going to be a hypertext: either afternoon, a story or Victory Garden. I don’t know which yet. Maybe something else.

The choice doesn’t necessarily have to do with age or critical authority. These things matter, of course. A student who is reading Hawthorne for the first time encounters something new to them (indeed, I’ve had this story in me now going on three decades, or thereabouts, and I’m still not done with it). My students in brit lit are reading Paradise Lost and wow is the newness of this work hitting them like hail (this one I will never be done with). For some reason I keep going back to Anywhere because I’m not done with it. Students came away from Photopia with lots of ideas and reactions. Some have explored other examples of the form, which is what I hope comes of exposure. Some even want to download TADS and get to work.

In CF we think about form and meaning; we’ve also been thinking and speaking and writing a lot about relationships and where story shows up and the forms that people use to tell it. In a way in new media story is always asserting itself. I think afternoon, a story is a good story with loads of craft. I’m reading a hypertext now that is a better hypertext than a story. So I probably won’t be assigning that one.

As good fortune would have it, and as I now seek the consolation of philosophy to attend to that fortune, every one of my courses had papers due last week, which meant a negotiation between the themes of evaluation– fairness, seeking clues that things are happening, that the tricks of repetition are getting into sentences, and that those that should know better are doing what they should know to do, like place the period in the right place after crediting a source–and the pull of other concerns, such as Tunxis’ New Media program, more writing on space, Gawain, and graphical adventures, and life’s other great possibilities.

I like student writing, but often have to remind myself that writing is an act of disclosure and revealing through a particular form: the essay. And this form can be difficult, especially when students are ppressured into “learning” what they may not be given to learn on their own outside the abstract space of school.

One of the best things I can think of is talking to people and reading what they write. The papers hadn’t come on the same week by design. I had to delay some things, so there you go.

In brilit we will be transitioning from Wyatt to Shakespeare’s Lear, my favorite play. In Contemporary Fiction we will be heading into the worrisome space of violence and war, the irrational, terrifying spaces of the human lifeworld. In writing we will keep writing and in online lit we will be talking another of the great plays, The Tempest.

We don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Water pools on the leaf edges. Life is great.