Lainey's Open Salon Blog

We've Come a Long Way, Baby (First Post)

Tue, 9 Aug 2011 23:08:17 -0400

“‘Bye baby,” a mischievous Emmett “Bobo” Till tossed out to the pretty white woman as he left her family’s small-time grocery store—and then, full of the bravado a fourteen-year-old knows when surrounded by a dozen friends egging him on, he whistled at her and ran away. Almost immediately, it seems, the fearful reality of an entrenched but recently besieged Southern racist code sank in, and Bobo retreated to his great-uncle’s shack to hide out and hope his transgression went unanswered. Though most accounts of the events leading up to Emmett Till’s death have him defiant and unbowed to the end, they come from his murderers. Moses Wright, Bobo’s uncle and host for his summer getaway, always maintained the kid was scared and wanted to go home, back to the urban world of Chicago that he better understood, where, apparently, boasting about dating and even “having” white women was something black kids did, out of nothing more sinister than idle fantasy, in the way of kids passing the time imagining all manner of things they can’t have.

Given his propensity for both stuttering and pranks, Bobo’s actions that day remain a bit unclear: Did he touch Carolyn Bryant’s arm? Did he actually mention dating? Was his faux flirty behavior genuinely frightening to the young woman alone in the store except for this group of rowdy teenagers, or was she merely outraged at the breach of respect and tradition? But given the intimidation tactics of rural, racist Money, Mississippi, in 1955, it was clear that a single truth would never really emerge except for this: Emmett Till paid for his impudence with his life.

*****

When I looked at Joan Walsh’s recap of the Denver convention I was struck by the kiss between Barack Obama and Jill Biden—awkward and accidental, to be sure, but provocative nonetheless given the history of racism in America. I kept going back to it, stopping the frame, seized by emotion. Perhaps it’s the graduate history class I just completed at Hiram College with an enormously talented professor for whom race is central to life and work, but I felt, quite physically, the poignancy of this image of a black man, poised to be the leader of the free world, puncturing the ultimate racial barrier--public affection for a genteel white woman.

As it turns out, I’m not the only one so moved: The kiss is all over the internet, albeit with boatloads of blather accompanying its replay. Curiously, much of the commentary lacks focus, dwelling along the vein of “Well, I saw this and I don’t know what it means” or “Isn’t this cute (or funny or sweet)” or, mostly, “What’s the big deal?” On a Hannity thread and even in the darkest cyber corners of reductive right-wing politics, the sentiment starts with “Sure, Obama is the worst candidate ever” but reassures us with “So he kissed Biden’s wife—what’s the BFD? There’s nothing wrong with that…” as if to knock down in advance any challenges to its proclaimed harmlessness. I’m exceedingly grateful for that small contribution to racial progress.

Because progress it is. According to my professor at Hiram and the historians quoted at the PBS American Experience website, much of the resistance to integration in the South was about protecting white womanhood. In fact, purity and motherhood and femininity were conflated with Southern culture, so that white women personified the South itself. At the heart of white male culture was a desire to protect the virtue of women, and therefore of life as they knew it, from the certain lasciviousness of every black man ranging toward their mothers and daughters and sisters. Indeed, in a book published the year Till was born, white Southerners made clear that what they believed blacks wanted most from integration was “intermarriage and sexual intercourse with whites,” while blacks ranked that category last (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/timeline/index.html). That women were thought to need this kind of protection, by the way, is profoundly demeaning, an exquisite intersection of racism and sexism.

And Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, that landmark Supreme Court ruling just prior to Bobo’s grisley murder? All about sex, apparently. Southern white men were convinced, according to historian Stephen Whitfield, that the aim of the civil rights movement was racial intermarriage and that mixed classrooms were just a step toward the bedroom. And here I thought that case was about equal rights for all American school children.

*****

It’s no small thing that on August 28, 2008—53 years to the day that Emmett Till was dragged from uncomfortable slumber on his uncle’s back room floor, kidnapped, tortured, shot, and drowned for intimating, however symbolically, a shared humanity between himself and a white woman—Barack Obama in full view of upwards of 35 million people bounded onstage in Denver and fumblingly kissed the lovely Jill Biden without an attendant crash of the social order. I might venture to say that's one BFD.

(The killers' confession in LOOK magazine, just a few months after their acquittal by an all-white jury, is here. Notice the pervading sense of responsibility they felt in maintaining the social code. It's evident in some of the letters to the editor that followed as well.)

How To Raise National Merit Scholars

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 21:04:40 -0400

1. Marry a smart man. (If it is too late for this, then have an affair with a smart man who looks just like your husband).

2. Don’t make your kids join activities they don’t care about, like swim team and Leadership Club, which will take up all their thinking time.

3. Let them mess with stuff from a young age, like electrical outlets, scissors, and whatnot.

4. Allow them to play Brick Factory in bare feet on the driveway when they are four. Even if you don’t really know what this means, you can tell by their delighted hoots that the dropping of bricks from increasing elevations (that is, from atop buckets, from atop buckets on strollers, from atop buckets on strollers in wheelbarrows) must be cognitively stimulating. Ignore the disapproving looks and organized parent-child baseball instruction going on across the street as you sit in your lawn chair and read.

5. Give them plenty of unsupervised basement time with their peers. While there is a 50% chance that they will turn out to be Trench Coat Mafia types rather than National Merit Scholar types, it’s a risk worth taking because there is so little effort involved on your own part.

6. Occasionally feel terrified that you should be more of a Tiger Mother, and hammer them with music lessons and chores and homework follow-up that lasts anywhere from a week to three. Then resume your normal position on the couch with a good book.

7. Support your local teachers because, frankly, they’re doing the heavy lifting.

8. Have interesting conversations about current events and all the cool stuff they are learning on the too-expensive laptops each of them owns.

9. Get into screaming matches with them about all the ridiculous ideas they’ve developed because they have somehow gotten the impression that they are independent creatures entitled to their own opinions.

10. Try to preclude your middle son’s expensive texting episode with the girl in Canada. That was just a waste of money.

11. Watch Star Trek.

Will Virginia Stay in the Union?

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 21:04:07 -0400

Sister Mary Paschal was a rogue. An energetic seventy-something nun, she ran her early middle school classroom like a laboratory, in stark contrast to the mean and military Mrs. Smolen of the year before. We worked in groups before it was fashionable and made messes and got into loud arguments and even cut pictures out of the Encylopedia to decorate our projects. I remember making a pamphlet called "Shipbuilding in Japan" and another called "The Wonders of Switzerland," where I pasted pictures of the Alps, cheese, and watches. And there was "The Treasures of the Middle East," in which I drew camels and copied verbatim next to a clipped picture of a mysterious Arab man the words, "Eyes fierce as a desert hawk's, ..." although I don't recall what came next or even what the point was. How I dearly loved those words! Sr. Paschal didn't give a whit if we copied stuff. I think she imagined that swimming in all those sophisticated words and glossy pictures would inspire us to love and absorb language and culture. It sorta worked in my case.

Sister Paschal also made us think. She is the one who ordained us editors of our own newspapers while we were learning about the influence of Horace Greeley during the Civil War. The catch was that each of us got a different state and she tricked us into picking it before we knew quite what was in store. Since we were in Buffalo, no one wanted boring old New York, and besides, Horace Greeley had that one down pat. I picked Virginia because that's where my handsome and oh-so-polite boy cousins lived, right across from the Rappahannock River, thick in Civil War country.

But then we got the news: We had to write an editorial about the pervasive Secesh talk, and it had to be true to form. If we had picked a Southern state we were stuck defending slavery. To be clear, there was no debate in any of our minds about the righteous side of this war. We were products of an entrenched Northern sensibility, a Catholic school focused on social justice, and a teacher so ancient and egalitarian that we thought she was herself an authentic abolitionist. I remember feeling sorry for my Virginia relatives, in that pitying way, wondering how on earth they handled their Civil War unit, given that their geographically connected ancestors were so vividly in the wrong.

No, this was an explicit promotion of what educators today would call critical thinking. Sr. Paschal wanted us to see--no, to be--the other side. This exercise of putting my mind--for real--into the thinking and circumstances of another has been invaluable to me.

Here is what I wrote. I had to think hard to come up with something, but I also had to do some reading. (That Sr. Paschal was a sly one.) I remember pecking it out on my mom's typewriter on that onionskin kind of paper.

I'm hoping you can read the words. The last paragraph says, "Our Constitution of 1787 was but a compact, or agreement, between the independent states. Therefore, when a state does not like the policies of the central government, it has the right to withdraw from this compact. I believe Virginia should secede from the Union and stay loyal to our South."

Some close-ups:

I think I was around 11 or 12, and this was in the 1970's. I found it a couple of years ago, along with a math pamphlet I wrote called "Let's Fidget with Digits."

Is it weird to say "Happy Anniversary, Civil War!" ?

Yeah, I thought so.

As you were.

Winter Interest

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 07:02:36 -0500

Every new gardener enters the universe of flora in the same way: through a narrow path of conspicuous performers. We fall in love with the profusion of color, bright and long-lasting, that annuals provide, and we cover every bare spot with blazing flats of oranges and purples and hot pinks. Then we move on to the pragmatic perennials, seizing the "proven winners" unique to our planting zones. It takes a while, I think, before we graduate to a more sophisticated and inclusive appreciation of all that's lovely outdoors.

When I got my first gardening book, The Well Tended Garden, by Tracy DiSabato-Aust, I was a little disappointed to see that there were hardly any pictures. And the text focused on boring stuff like pruning and planting techniques. She mentioned something called “winter interest,” as in, “Choose such-and-such a plant for its winter interest,” or “Wait until spring before removing the dead seedheads, which provide excellent winter interest.” The pictures that accompanied those statements were plain to my amateur eyes, and I suspected the very idea of “winter interest” was a lame attempt to oversell this seasonal hobby as something akin to year-round fun, much the way boating enterprises pretend our decidedly short Northeast Ohio summers stretch longer than they do.

That was a dozen years ago, and things have changed. I’ve started to thrill at such subtleties as a black and lacey elderberry juxtaposed against a succulent, lime green sedum, both plants stars for their foliage alone. And I adore my short-blooming forget-me-nots hidden in the scruffy bushes hiding my air conditioner. They are my little secret.

But mostly I’ve reconsidered that “winter interest” idea, which has stuck with me. There is a striking architectural beauty in garden structures stripped of their leafy filters, an elegance to the lonely copper wind chime attending an empty potting shed. And I finally see the comeliness of deciduous plants in their dormant state as they submit to the gracious reign of the evergreens.

I took these pictures yesterday. They are from my yard or from neighbors' yards. You can see how much snow fell in just a few hours.

How could I not start with the Redtwig Dogwood? (Cornus sericea). It is a stunner in winter. The following two pictures show it close and then closer still.

Here is my Nikko Blue Hydrangea (Hydrangea macrophylla). It never did well among my white pines, so I moved it to the sunnier patio and it took off! My friend cut some stems on the day I broke my leg, October 6, and put them in a vase. They remained full and glorious, albeit a Victorian faded glory, until just yesterday when I threw them away.

A close-up:

Is there anything prettier than a shiny white birch tree in the snow?

Here's a whole row of the river variety.

I have five Japanese Beautyberry (Callicarpa japonica) bushes along a fence in my backyard. They produce gorgeous metallic purple berries in the fall which linger throughout the winter.

If you're wondering why I had to use a commercial nursery photo, it's because all five of mine look like this right now:

Normally six feet tall, they are about a third of their normal size. The culprit? Deer I suppose. I am always amazed at the clean cut of a deer bite, like a little tiny saw attacked all those branches.

We have about ten white pines in the backyard, and they provide graceful winter interest as well as excellent cardinal hangouts. I still remember the day we planted them. I stood in the bedroom window and shouted down to my husband, furiously sweating as he dug holes and singlehandedly moved trees at my whim, "A little to the left," "No, I changed my mind, it was better where it was," "Oh, they're not equidistant; I think the two on the right need to be moved apart a bit."

If you like a splash of color to liven up your austere winter scenes, you can always purchase a bright blue wheelbarrow that you later discover doesn't fit into your shed. It dodges detection in the verdant summer months but flaunts its inappropriate self when the serviceberry and forsythia leaves are gone.

Tall, medium, and short grasses provide color and texture for winter interest. In fashion, camel is in this year, so embrace your tans!

I love the symmetry and formality of this little English garden, which I pass every day as I drive down the street. It looks pretty all year round.

My bunny is hardy. This little stool can handle a Zone 6 winter, so I leave it out for a little winter interest.

Hibernating trumpet vine on an arched arbor makes for a decorative winter scene.

Cold-hardy bamboo makes a great screen all year round.

I see these three beauties when I drive into my development after work. I move straight toward them before I turn left, and at Christmastime each is adorned with its own colored lights, one blue, one green, and one gold. I think of them as the Magi.

I suppose some might see this as a winter sculpture. I see it as the residue of an irresponsible 17-year-old who forgot to put away the hose after he washed his car in the unseasonably warm winter weather that lasted one day last week. It looks like a coiled green monster snake, frozen in mid-strike.

I don't know what these trees are called but I want one. They remind me of stooped, wizened, misshapen old characters in an epic fantasy world, ala The Lord of the Rings. Each has its own personality. I like most plants grouped en masse, but these are definitely specimen trees.

My jazzy frog enjoys contributing to our Winter Interest.

How We Learn

Thu, 2 Sep 2010 12:09:24 -0400

We learn what we think about.

Learning is the same thing as thinking (about something) and then remembering (it).

Learning = Thinking + Remembering

The remembering part happens automatically if we spend enough energy on the thinking part. That is, if we think deeply about something—and often this includes plenty of time—then we will remember it and, therefore, will have learned it.

* * * * *

Psychology, Neuroscience, and Education come together in the form of constructivism, a theory of learning that suggests individuals make their own meaning about the world around them. If this seems obvious, it’s not. During much of the last century, these disciplines relied on Behaviorism as a paradigm to describe learning. Remember Skinner’s “learned response”? Learning, back then, had nothing to do with inner cognitive structures (those mental models we create when we think about ideas big and small, that self talk that embodies thinking). It had only to do with measuring which behaviors resulted from which external stimuli.

Teachers know by now that learning is active. You’ve heard this, right? That’s why we’re called facilitators and coaches and other fancy nouns.[1] I’m kind of turned off by trendy pc talk, but these words are apt, because it’s the kids, not the teachers, who are doing the mental work that produces cognitive change. We now know that teachers[2] cannot simply transfer a body of knowledge into a learner’s brain. We can try, of course. But it won’t result in learning. Quick: What’s the capital of Oregon? If you live near there you might know. But if you, like me, grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., then you probably don’t know the answer[3], even though you undoubtedly were taught this. You also supposedly learned a lot of facts about historical events and grammar and chemistry. Which ones you know right now—that is, which ones you actually learned—has everything to do with which ones you thought about at the time. If you didn’t think about it then and you know it now, then you thought about it some time between then and now.

Back to this: We learn what we think about.

So what exactly does that think entail? All the active verbs relating to cognition that you can throw at me! Summarize, classify, analyze, distinguish, reflect upon, integrate, deduce, synthesize, evaluate, compare, imagine, generalize, etcetera.

Sometimes teachers mistakenly believe that the statement “Learning is active” means that students must be moving. They believe that putting a multiple choice question on the SMART board and having a kid walk up and point to the answer is a demonstration of constructivism in action. It’s not. That kid could be a boy who just two minutes ago heard the teacher tell him that Salem is the capital of Oregon, so he is now pointing to Answer C, Salem. He has not learned this fact any better than I did 25[4] years ago.

The activity implicit in the expression active learning comes from those energetic thinking words. The real action is on the inside![5]

Or a teacher will hear that group interaction promotes the kind of thinking that results in learning, so she will divide the kids into groups and give them questions to answer at the back of Chapter 15 in their Social Studies book. Depending on the questions, and most of them are simply asking for information that can be found word-by-word in Chapter 15, the kids will probably just race to find the pages that have the answers and copy them down. Things like “Federalism is a system of government in which power is shared between the central (or federal) government and the states.”[6] The fact that they are working in groups has no bearing on how much or whether they think about federalism.

Here’s where group interaction can play a role in the construction of knowledge: Maybe those questions are broad in scope and involve some synthesis of what they’ve read. Maybe the group is required to offer a collective response after they come to some agreement on it, and maybe their answer is to be put to the class verbally, when an even larger discussion takes place. Maybe the questions are along the lines of “Talk about the arguments in the 18^th Century between federalists and anti-federalists and decide if any of those arguments are still alive today.” Whew! Or this one: “People say that the brand new Americans offered George Washington the crown and he turned it down. What does this mean? Is this true? If true, what are the implications of the offer and the rejection?” Ain’t no way anyone is gonna get out of that question alive without actually thinking. And if kids end up arguing about whether the Civil War was about slavery or states’ rights, that’s a good thing. That means they’re thinking.

Because thinking’s the thing. Construction of knowledge is work. There’s usually conflict involved, because we have to replace our old conception of something with a new, revised one. Unfamiliar information can wreck the beautiful picture we have of an idea. We can get all caught up in the elegance of Thomas Jefferson, in his lofty rhetoric and exquisite architectural designs and excellent diplomacy skills, but that picture falls apart just a little bit when we hear that he owned slaves. But then we read his own words to John Adams and feel a little better about him when he explains that criminalizing slavery would have prevented the South from agreeing to sign the Constitution in the first place. His prediction of a future war over this slavery question and his justification for putting it off until a day when our democracy was less fragile make us think he was prescient and pragmatic. But then we remember that he personally held slaves and freed them only upon his death, and we go back to thinking he’s kind of a jerk. Finally, we can’t take it anymore, so we collect up all this conflicting information and stuff it into the Thomas Jefferson file in our brain, and now we have learned about Thomas Jefferson. We can talk about him later on, and we do it in a way that’s fluid and complicated and even uncertain when it comes to value judgments, but we are knowledgeable. And down the road we might discover yet a different fact about Thomas Jefferson, such as that he collected several bibles, used scissors to remove references to miracles and the divinity of Jesus, and combined the remaining parts to create his own “Jefferson Bible.” And so we drag out that old file, we assess our prior knowledge about his proclamations of Christianity, we wonder about and investigate the order in which his statements and actions regarding Christianity took place, and we conclude that he changed his mind over the years about religion.[7] Perhaps we start questioning the notion that America was founded as a Christian nation, and we wonder some more. Maybe we look for other Founding Fathers’ statements from later in their lives, or maybe we are fatigued and confused by Thomas Jefferson, so we put the expanded and newly organized file away again, perturbed by the messiness of our knowledge. Even as everything becomes muddier in our minds, we are in fact learning more.

We might spend years hearing about the wrongness of sentence fragments, and we might practice diligently making our sentences squarely parallel, and then we see in the world around us professional writers and, gasp, teachers using sentence fragments “for effect”! And we find out somewhere along the line that occasionally we have to sacrifice parallel structure for accuracy! And then we find out that there never was a rule precluding us from starting sentences with “and” and “but,” that those conjunctions are fine introductory elements as long as the sentence is complete! What?

If we’re thinking about it, if we’re arguing with others or ourselves about it, if we’re playing around with our old knowledge of it, then we are learning it. For real.

Back to this: We learn what we think about.

What’s in that what? It can be anything, of course, but during the school day it’s supposed to be the curriculum, all the stuff that society decided a kid should know.[8] This is where teachers come in. They’ve been charged with getting *this* curriculum down *that* throat. But they can’t just pry open the gullet and start pouring because we now know that students have to participate in their learning, remember? If they don’t play an active part, then the learning doesn’t stick. And if teachers aren’t careful, the what that kids learn becomes whatever they’re thinking about. A girl who sees a dragonfly on the windowsill and starts to imagine a filmy, iridescent dance costume and then wonders if she could move her arms the way the bug moves his wings and then notices his huge eyes and becomes curious about his vision—Can he see her? And why is he out in the day if he has those nocturnal-looking eyes?: This girl is learning, but she’s not learning the what of the curriculum for that class period. It’s awfully hard to keep kids thinking about the curriculum, but that’s a teacher’s job. If she does it well, then she is listening a lot and asking questions and conversing and challenging and demonstrating and guiding kids toward resources that might offer some insight. If the kids discover stuff on their own, they are by definition thinking about it, and so they are learning it.

* * * *

Every single thing you know right now has been thought about by you. Even things that seem mindless and automatic like reading and driving and walking. At one time or another, you gave these things some active thought. You put some cognitive energy into them, and now you know them.

* * * * *

Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of this post. It’s a big deal. And it’s not just about kids and teachers. We learn what we think about. If there is something that you know—that you are burning to have others know—figure out a way to get them to think about it. Don’t just lecture. Ask them some questions and see if this brings them around to your own thinking. Supply some examples or give them a picture that illustrates your point. Have a conversation about it. If, after an energetic and creative process that includes debate and good faith listening on both your parts, your “learner” still doesn’t understand or get it or agree, you might want to consider whether your own truth needs a little adjustment. Maybe you are the one doing the learning right now.

Think about it.

Further Reading on Cognitive Development:

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive and Affective Development, Wadsworth

Mind in Society, Vygotsky

Why Don’t Kids Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Your Questions, Willingham

The Schools Our Children Deserve, Kohn

[1] Occasionally we are called nouns that are something less than fancy.

[2] And parents and employers and coaches

[3] Unless you are my friend Carole Gonglewski, who grew up in Buffalo but then moved to Oregon. And she is a teacher, so she really knows the capital of Oregon! ;)

[4] 35

[5] Exclamation points and certain vocabulary choice do not connote condescension. Rather they represent my enthusiasm for this topic. I’m quite serious.

[6] McDougall Littell’s CREATING AMERICA: A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, page 218. (This is a real footnote.)

[7] Assess, wonder, investigate, and conclude are the thinking actions that lead to learning. Thinking is not passive.

[8] DO NOT OPEN! (Total can of worms here.)