To Teach is To Sometimes Be Amazed (The Thor Post)

Okay, before I start writing, I must acknowledge that one of the awesome parts of teaching in Thailand is having a student named Thor.  It's not his name-name, of course, but instead it's his incredible nickname.  Unlike the mead-swilling hero of Marvel comic lore or the god of Norse legend, this Thor is calm in temperament and would use words long before he lifted a hammer to solve a problem.

The Thor I know personally is an incredibly well-spoken and insightful student who often makes incredibly meaningful comments out of the blue.  While most students use youtube to find something to laugh about, Thor seems to find things to ponder.  He recently sent me the following email.

Dear Mr.__________ 

I know that this is not Homework but I have a video I found about some of the negative parts of human nature, i just want to show it to you maybe you want to share it with the class but it's up to you. It's about how people abuse their power. 

Thanks Thor

Now it took me a while to get over the daily thrill of getting email from Thor, but I will never get over the thrill of emails like this.  [Seriously, imagine looking at your inbox and seeing email from THOR.]  Thor had been reading Animal Farm as his book club novel and contemplating the question of essential human nature.  His pondering took him to the internet which took him to youtube which took him to this.  

Thor and I share some rather pessimistic views of human nature, but we also share a deep and abiding hope that we can overcome the negative aspects of our human nature.  We start our year with a study of what makes humans unique from other species, and one of the traits we look at is our ability to choose.  We are not bound by our instincts or impulses; we are shaped by them.  Thor's video led to a fantastic class discussion in which we all talked of many things but kept coming back to the end of the video.  Is our species' destruction by our own hand an inevitable result of our selfish and careless nature?  

Tragically, many of my students think it likely is.  Beautifully, they all know it doesn't have to be.  As Thor pointed out, "It all comes down to how we use our power."  If only my Thor had a mighty Mjolnir to shape the world, I know we would be in good hands.  

House of Cards (Parody) - I love you, Sesame Street

Need to Stop Extremist Recruitment? Just get schools to do it!

The story of three young British students who essentially ran away from home to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is shocking.  It's tragic on the personal level; the parents of the three young women must be devastated at the thought of what could happen to their children. They have essentially volunteered to join a war and may never return home.  On the level of national conscience it must raise for many the incredibly complex question of what has gone so wrong in the Britain that teenagers leave home to join a war of religious ideology.  As an educator, though, I have to say that I am appalled, though not surprised, by David Cameron's initial reaction.

The British Prime Minister has called on schools to help curb the recruitment of young people to join extremist causes. Cameron announced that, “The fight against Islamist extremist terror is not just one that we can wage by the police and border control. It needs every school, every university, every college, every community to recognize they have a role to play.”  

What exactly does that mean?  

Does that mean that schools are supposed to begin profiling students to predict which ones might want to join an extremist cause?  Are teachers supposed to report students to authorities when they think a student is overly religious?  

Or does it mean that schools in societies around the world are supposed to take on the role of educating young people about secular societies?  Oh wait, I forgot, schools are pretty much the only institution doing so in most countries.  That said, does it mean that governments are going to start allocating more funding to schools PK-12 and into university so that teachers can work with smaller numbers of students and thereby know their students better?  Maybe we will be better able to 'spot' potential extremists.    

Forgive the bitterness, but we live in a time in which schools and teachers are both blamed for perceived shortcomings while also asked to take on more societal responsibilities.  Cameron's call on schools to combat 'extremist terror' is in addition to the very long list of things that teachers are already asked to do.  This includes:

• teaching everything from reading and writing to arts and sciences
• prevention of pregnancy
• fostering healthy active lifestyles
• teaching about healthy diets
• prevention of drug use
• prevention of sexually transmitted diseases
• fostering creativity
• encouraging collaboration with peers
• preparation for university
• teaching the appropriate use of social media
• identifying and preventing abuse
• use of and digital tools to help create the workforce of the future
• helping students become caring global citizens
• teaching correct posture while using computers (yes, we have been asked to do this)

The list above was what came to mind in about 2 minutes of stream of consciousness typing.  It's by no means meant to be complete.  What's most important about this list, however, is that schools and teachers willingly take on these responsibilities.  Teachers know that we are lucky to have the chance to work with young people and to help them take their rightful place in society.  But more and more of us feel that society seems to basically be in a constant state of complaint about our failure to 'fix' all the problems that come our way.  

The thing is, whether it's safe sex or 'extremist terror', these are societal problems.  Reflexively saying that schools need to take on the responsibility of dealing with them hasn't really worked so far and probably won't in future.  Governments has many tools at its disposal to reach into and shape society.  It just seems to be easier to ask schools to do something than it is to support community programs that engage youth, to foster arts and film projects that encourage youth participation, fund social welfare programs that benefit young people and their families, or provide opportunities for youth to work and be productive members of their communities.

Schools and teachers will do just about anything, in part because the people who work in them care AND because they know that if they don't do something no one else will.  But let's be honest with politicians like David Cameron, the problems schools deal with did not start in schools and they can never be fixed solely inside them either.

Time to think a bit bigger, Mr. Prime Minister.

Mutant Massacre (or, thank God comics have changed)

A few days ago I finished reading Mutant Massacre, one of the first big Marvel Comic crossover 'events' that came out in 1986.  With all the issues collected into one volume, the whole thing comes in at about 300 pages, so it's a pretty big story arc.  I actively read comics in the 1970s and only occasionally picked them up from the 1980s to 2000s before starting to read them again actively in the past seven or eight years.  There are some seminal comic book events from that big interval that I figured I should read because they had an impact on current storylines or characters.  Mutant Massacre was one of them.

The overall plot doesn't really matter that much, but certain plot elements stand out.  First and foremost, there is a lot of death in Mutant Massacre.  With this plot line, Marvel was turning the corner to a more adult-oriented (don't laugh) comic universe.  Dozens of minor characters are actually murdered in this storyline.  When I read comic books in the 1970s, there was a lot of punching and kicking, but there was little deliberate killing.  Even the death of Gwen Stacy was as much a failure on the part of Spider-Man as a result of the actions of the Green Goblin.  Somewhere along the intervening line (that I missed), Marvel made its villains nastier and its heroes a bit angrier.  Now villains like Bullseye or Sabretooth actually revel in murder and death - just part of comic books' evolution but interesting because I never saw the slow change.

I owned this way back when.  A quick search today shows it going for USD 250-350.

The thing that stands out the most in reading, Mutant Massacre, however is how comic books still had one foot in the world of serials while also trying to be somehow au courant.  The narration in Mutant Massacre still reeks of that deep manly voice speaking in an overwrought, reverent tone to tell you a story.  I picture Stan Lee reading something like Lord of the Rings to his grandkids as Gandalf casts some powerful spell.  At the same time, though, all the characters are decked out in outfits from a Cyndi Lauper video as if the artists were looking around trying to decide what all the cool kids of the day were wearing.  I can't help but thinking of Top That from Sabrina the Teenage Witch; it's some suburban guy's vision of what's popular these days.

Comic book artists also seemed to only have one or two faces to give to female characters.  All the women basically looked the same with only variations in hairstyle.  Betsy Braddock/Psylocke (who has since become a serious bad-ass) looks like some demure Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched.

Thankfully comics have changed in some ways.  They are still silly, but I wouldn't describe them as hokey.  Maybe in twenty years, I'll look back and think they are, but it seems that comics today are more firmly rooted in the present.  Sure it's a present where people wear weird costumes even when they are just hanging out, where people die and come back to life all the time, where New York is regularly levelled by some kind of extra-dimensional invasion and where every woman does battle in a sexy outfit revealing a ridiculously proportioned body, but at least everyone speaks like a regular person.  Thank God comics have changed.

Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres: 5 of 5

With Jesus Land Julia Scheeres created one of my favourite novels in a long time - except it's a memoir.  The book languished on my shelf for quite a while because the whole title is actually Jesus Land: A Memoir.  I'm not a huge fan of the memoir; I can appreciate the writing and the stories, but the story arc of a novel is generally, for me, far more engaging.  Perhaps that's one reason why I liked Jesus Land.  It reads like a novel with real characters and a 'plot' that details Scheeres's arc from teenager almost crushed by monstrous circumstances to the first steps towards happiness as an adult.

But that's just the beginning of why I liked it.

Julia Scheeres officially became the bravest writer I have read in a long time with this book.  Not because she reveals the traumas of her early life - abusive parents, sexual abuse, a bad relationship to alcohol, or a longing to be loved.  Those are deeply personal, of course, and require a huge risk to publish a book about, but to some extent those are things that happened TO her.  In revealing to the world that you survived those episodes you are also saying, 'You didn't break me. Here I am.'  

Where Scheeres's courage shines brilliantly is when she writes about being the white sister of adopted African American brothers in the racist milieu of Indiana.  She shows us how her brothers, particularly David, suffered as the only black kids in a school full of hostile white racists.  And she also shows us how, when given the opportunity, she sometimes chose to distance herself from David to better survive the cruelty of high school.

Scheeres shines the spotlight on her own shortcomings, showing us how her choices hurt the one person who had been true to her.  She emphasizes time and again how much David Scheeres wanted to be loved and accepted as part of a family just to let us know, deliberately, how much she likely hurt her own brother.  The decisions may not be admirable but they are understandable, the normal choices a lot of teenagers would make in a struggle to find a shred of acceptance in a truly unwelcoming and terrifying environment.  Throw in all the other elements of a torturous household and you, the reader, can see why her betrayal of David happened.

But it's still a betrayal, and Scheeres unflinchingly tells us what she did, baring to the world her own failure of loyalty.  Disclosing what happened to you is one thing, but to tell the world your shortcomings is a rare act of valour.

Julia Scheeres, thank you for your beautiful, tragic story and, truly, your bravery.