Third Grade Graphs Things Out.

     Today students in Mr. Ferrero's class were busy gathering, organizing, and displaying information. 

       Students thought of questions that they wanted to ask their classmates.  Then they surveyed them.  After that they recorded the answers on a tally table to organize the data. Finally they took this infomation and created bar graphs so that the information was clear and easy to read. 

 

Sunday Radical Roundup: The Power Of The Purses In Tudor England, More Conference News, and A Fond Farewell To Howard Zinn

Book of the Week: Those of you jonesing for Season 4 of The Tudors will be able to make do temporarily with 2009 Man Booker Prize winner Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (Henry Holt, 2009; 532 pp.) Praised by Washington Post reviewer Wendy Smith as "a brilliant and deft antidote to the otherwise trite and shopworn" retellings of Henry VIII's six marriages, it is truly one of the best historical novels I have ever read.

Of course, as constant readers of this blog know, I find virtually no recounting of this story trite or shopworn, and one might have to ask Smith: what do you think brings readers back repeatedly to the events of 1531-1535, when a sexy little nobody succeeded in changing the history of the western world forever? There are plenty of subplots in this bloody tale that seem to recur in our political and cultural life -- not to mention in countless, anonymous, personal lives. What is greater -- our empathy for the discarded Queen Katherine, or for a vain king who justified his middle-aged lust for a canny woman with a dubious insistence that England required a male heir? Do we admire Ann Boleyn for using the one bit of power she had (as Shakespeare would put it, the purse) to deny the king the fulfillment of his lust until he brought her and her scheming family to power? Indeed, one of the more interesting and subtle questions Mantel raises in this novel is whether the male heir that Henry Tudor claimed was his sole desire was truly necessary. The extent of the king's folly is pointed up by the fact that he not only already had a female heiress, the Princess Mary, who was the descendent of a powerful reigning queen of Spain; but a healthy bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, who would have been more easily legitimized than Katherine was divorced.

In fact, in Wolf Hall what is at stake is a form of legitimacy that we are far more familiar with in the modern world: the political legitimacy of the state. Thomas Cromwell, usually the scheming villain of the tale, is the hero of this one as he carefully pries the state away from an increasingly dissolute nobility and towards its modern foundation in capitalism and the law. Why is this a different Cromwell? The answer is linked to previous authors' dedication to his villainy. In Wolf Hall, Cromwell is a template for what the English middle class (it was Napoleon, following Adam Smith, who would fatally underestimate the state born at this moment as a nation of shopkeepers) would become, as it first seized the reid of credit, and then power, in the face of the solipsism, hypocrisy and vanity of its nobility and the Catholic Church. As Christopher Taylor of The Guardian writes:

Mantel's Cromwell is an omnicompetent figure, "at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury." Fluent in many languages, learned, witty and thoughtful, he's also an intimidating physical presence; Wolsey fondly compares him to "one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes". This makes him an ideal emissary for Wolsey's project of liquidating some smaller monasteries to fund a school and an Oxford college. But self-advancement isn't Cromwell's only motive. He's disgusted by the waste and superstition he encounters, and takes a materialist view of relics and indulgences. The feudal mindset of Wolsey's rival grandees seems equally outdated to him: jibes at his lowly origins bounce off his certainty that noble blood and feats of arms now count for less than lines of credit and nicely balanced books.

As Henry Tudor steers the ship of state unthinkingly towards political and economic disaster (egged on by the Howards and and Ann Boleyn who steers the monarch's reason southwards), Cromwell steps in to guard England's borders, keep the country solvent, rein in the nobility by literally putting them in his debt, and become the architect of a new secular law that reins in the King's worst excesses. The interior Cromwell is beautifully drawn by Mantel, as is his strategic insinuation into the King's confidence following the death of their mutual mentor in statecraft, Cardinal Wolsey. In her search for a new political story, Mantel also links Cromwell to the revolution of the domestic sphere that the break with Rome would unleash. A skillful sub-theme of the novel is Cromwell's dedication to a new kind of shared authority within his family, to female autonomy and intelligence, and to the importance of love in marriage, all hallmarks of the political consolidation of the bourgeoisie. Cromwell, more generally portrayed as a political despot by historians and novelists, is perceived by Mantel as a nationalist who worked behind the scenes to relieve the effects of despotism, in public and in private, and lay the groundwork for the future of enlightened government.

And have I said it is an outstanding read? In other news:

Extended Deadline for submissions to World History Association Annual Meeting, 24-27 June 2010, San Diego: Why do I know this? Because the WHA would particularly like more LGBTQI submissions. Go here for the CFP. The dual theme is "Gender in World History" and "The Pacific in World History" (extra points for intersections between the two, I imagine.) The deadline has been extended to February 28th, 2010. In fact, while you are at it queer historians, help take our work to the next level and re-imagine those nationalistic conference proposals that compare three lesbian bars in three different United States cities (sometimes changed up with a paper on a Chicana softball league in San Francisco) for all your submissions to Meetings of Learned Societies. Just an idea.

Margaret Fuller Conference: "Margaret Fuller and Her Circles, April 8-10, 2010, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA." OK, I'm such a sap that I go to the MHA just to drink in the atmosphere, but I also have to say that they do a great mini-conference. I went to a New England American Studies Association Meeting there a while back and it was one of the most fun conferences I ever attended, with small groups of people meeting in an intimate setting and carrying over an increasingly more complex conversation from session to session.

Just Received in the Mail: NYU Latin American historian Greg Grandin has the cover of this week's issue of The Nation on The Pentagon's New Monroe Doctrine that maps US military deployment in the Caribbean basin and the eastern Pacific.

And of course, if you think as I do that Grandin's combination of political savvy, scholarly acuity and ability to write for a general public is of star quality, you will also have spent a moment this week saying:

Farewell to Howard Zinn: A historian who was the essence of cool in a generation of pretty cool historians. Once again, The Nation has a nice obit with some video of the man.

CAUSE Grants for Macdonough School!

Congratulations to the following Macdonough staff members who received 2013 CAUSE (Community and University Services for Education) Grants: 

 

· Sarah Jakiela was awarded $360 for High Interest, Low Reading Level Books. The project will fund children’s books geared toward children in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades with reading disabilities.  The books are written about high interest topics, yet use lower level vocabulary.  Perfect to engage students in the intermediate grades!

 

· Michelle Currier was awarded $230for Preventing Bullying and Mean Behaviors Through Literature. The project will fund children’s books with messages about the importance of preventing mean behavior in school.  Each of the books will help students to make a connection to SURFS Up Behavior!

 

 

 

Due to the efforts of Mrs. Currier and Miss Jakiela, an additional $500 worth of books are coming to the students at our school!

CAUSE:  Commmunity andn University Supporting EducationEstablished in 1967 by Mrs. Marjorie Daltry Rosenbaum, CAUSE has existed to identify and facilitate the implementation of cooperative programs and projects between Wesleyan University, the Middletown community and the public and private schools in the Middletown area. Focus of these programs has been on intellectual and cultural enrichment. Thousands of students have benefited over the years.

The National Theatre for Children

Macdonough School has been selected by The National Theatre for Children for a special performance in April called “The Energized Guyz.”  NTC uses professional actors who perform an action-packed adventure combined with high energy comedy to teach students educational messages through a fun experience.      

The Energized Guyz features two actors who play a variety of characters in a 25-minute program. Students learn about energy efficiency while cheering on the play’s hero, an apprentice super hero who needs to stop an evil villain who is wasting all the energy in town. Kindergarten, first, and second grades will view the show at 9:15 a.m.  Third, fourth, and fifth grades will see the show at 10:15 a.m.

If A Student Essay Falls In The Woods And No One Is There To Read It, Does Anyone Care?

They're B-A-A-A-a-a-ck!

A while back, I assigned two papers in one of my classes.  In the first, I gave a straightforward "assignment" that asked students to think more deeply about the reading they had done up to that point and use what they had learned to analyze a primary document.  In the scale of things, this is a standard history assignment. I gave the class three documents to choose from, and awaited the papers.  When I began to read them, one thought came to mind:

"GAAAAH!"

Now, let me emphasize:  they weren't bad papers.  Many of them were A-worthy; only a few received grades thought ought to have been worrisome to the recipients.  And yet, as I paged thorugh them, I dreaded grading them.  Why?  They were dull.

Subsequently, I did a little informal research among the students, and most of them admitted that they, had been uninspired and uncertain about the point of the paper.  Several things were at work, as it turned out.  Many students, especially those who were new to college, had become anxious because there was no "prompt."  It's took me years to figure out what they are talking about when they used this word, because I never assign a paper without some guidance or question, a significant difference from the practice of my own college and high school teachers.  I know this will seem strange, but back in the Stone Age, at Oligarch, professors would say that a paper was due, and you would have to figure out what to write about all by your lonesome.  We never expected to be told what to write about.  In retrospect, some people thrived and others suffered under this system.  I had one friend who, because s/he never did the reading, and was usually stoned in class, never knew what to write about either.  This made the whole semester quite a challenge, but it made picking a paper topic an impenetrable mystery.  If we were in the same class, I would eventually sort of drop a lifeline of sorts a few days before the paper was due:  "I was gonna write about this, but I decided to write about that instead."  Then we would chat about this for a while, and s/he would get by.  Not excel, but get by.

So anyway, I discovered this fall that the "prompt" is yet another product of a testing culture that strives to make all students nicely mediocre thinkers before they get to college.  When a high school teacher gives a "prompt" it means that students are supposed to answer a highly direct question, for which there is a right answer, that will demonstrate their mastery of what they have been taught.  Needless to say, not being directed towards a formulaic answer can cause the kind of anxiety that undoes our finest students, because the last thing someone educated in a testing culture should do is think critically or get creative.  What the anxiety produced in this case was a set of papers that were, to a greater or lesser degree, workman-like, safe, and all used the same f*#@king document.

Whose fault was this?  My fault, that's who.  I had given a highly conventional assignment that signaled to the students (correctly) that they were being tested (without being honest about saying so), and so the vast majority of them stayed in the right-hand lane and drove slightly under the speed limit (metaphorically speaking.)  Furthermore, I had failed for years to attend to this whole business of what students were talking about when they referred to a "prompt":  hence I had given one assignment, and they had essentially received a different one than I intended.  So the next time around, lest I should be tempted to drive a pencil into my ear while grading, I gave them complete and utter freedom.  I asked them to choose their own document and to choose it based on something they were passionate about now.  I asked them to compare their own enthusiasm for this topic to the enthusiasm expressed in the document, and to use the document to understand better how their own passion was rooted in a history of other people who cared about this thing too.  When students asked me if it was OK to write about something they didn't really care about, I said no.  Then I took the time to talk with them about what they did care about, and urged them to write about it.

This second set of papers was more or less spectacular.  They were interesting; they varied over a wide range of topics; they were far better written; and many of the papers themselves were preceded by interesting meetings in office hours during which students let me know something that helped me teach them better.

This experience prompted me to think (again) about how we actually assist in producing student work that we do not want to read through ordinary acts of pedagogy that we take for granted, and how it might be possible to change that.  Here are a few thoughts and questions as we move into the semester together:

How do you return papers?  Do you hand them out at the end of class or do you put them in a box outside your office door, where many of them sit, dolefully, for days, weeks or months?  I am very much against the latter practice, which many people I respect adhere to, for several reasons.  I think handing a paper to a student signals a two-way exchange. It is personal, and in a large class it helps me learn their names and how the people sitting in front of me actually think.  I think putting them out in the hall, on the floor, unintentionally signals:  "I am done with this.  It is trash."

I also think there is a serious problem with leaving student papers out where anyone can get to them:  it makes every student's grade available to every other student, which is a violation of privacy.  I also think that for a group of people that is always searching for new ways to police cheating, we are more or less clueless about the fact that many of those papers will be, shall we say, recycled, for other classes or other sections of the same class, in other years.

Do you write comments on the paper?  Or just grade it? Do you make yourself available to discuss students' work with them after you hand the papers back?   I can't tell you how many of my advisees show up in my office hours with a paper in their hand that has no comments on it at all, just a grade, students who also can't get the professor to met with them.  Rarely do they express anger or resentment at the grade:  they want to do better and they don't know how.

Do you write lots and lots of marginal notes on the paper, spending hours correcting everything and re-diagramming their sentences?  The truth is, although you are trying to be the opposite of the teacher I describe above, this freaks students out.  Although you have spent maybe an hour on this, feeling like you are a really caring teacher, the student may see them as a blur, as grammatical correction collides with interpretive questions, typos, basic misunderstanding of the text and long-winded attempts not to utilize the first person or appear "biased."  If a paper is really muddled, it is a waste of your time to do this:  far better to sit down with the student, ask a couple questions about what s/he intended, and describe how s/he might have gone about writing such a paper.

One common grumble I hear from faculty is:  "I bet I spent more time grading it than s/he spent writing it!"  While that probably isn't technically so, it may well be so that the paper was written at the last minute, and that the student had not done the work necessary to write the paper of which s/he might be capable.  How much better would it be to find this out in the course of a conversation?  Better yet, to take the opportunity to underline in person that a better effort over the long term would produce better written work.  A fair number of students think they "want to work on [their] writing," as if writing were disconnected from the other work in the course.

Do you actually care what they think -- and do your paper assignments encourage them to tell you?  If writing papers is just about testing whether students have completed and understand the intellectual content of the course, why not just give quizzes instead?  We have come to fetishize college writing, organizing all activities around the idea that this is the litmus test of good teaching, when in fact it isn't always necessary to write an essay to demonstrate competence.  This study, forwarded to me by a colleague, argues that testing-taking, in and of itself, "actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques."

Good paper assignments, in my view, ask students to  make an intellectual choice of some kind and commit to them.  But not all knowledge acquisition is about committing to intellectual choices:  a great deal of important work in a course is about basic mastery of a field of study that will given them a platform for creativity and/or critical analysis.  

Do you talk to students about your own writing, and testify to the ongoing vulnerability of putting your own writing out there to be criticized by others? One of the most effective things I ever did in a class was to hand out a couple pages of an article that had just been returned full of possible edits.  There were probably about twenty per page.  I then pointed out to the class that what they were reading was probably in its seventh or eight draft, had been commented on by three people already, and was still perceived by a peer as worthy of drastic improvement.  I did it on impulse, but you should have seen the shocked looks on their faces, and heard the many questions this provoked about how I learned to write, how I would respond to these criticisms, and well, how did this make me feel?  Numerous student evaluations pointed to this discussion as having made a huge impression.

Do you ask students to rewrite? OK, so it's not always possible to go through a stack of papers twice, but it is well known that the way anyone becomes a better writer is by redrafting, and rethinking, what s/he has already done.  Here's an effective trick:  have them bring papers to class.  Have them exchange papers with another student.  Give everyone ten minutes to mark up the paper s/he now has for typos, spelling errors and other grammatical errors and give it back to the writer.  Give everyone ten minutes to talk, but this time have each person tell the other person what s/he did or did not like about the paper s/he wrote and get advice on how to strengthen good parts and fix the less good parts.

Then tell them the paper is actually due in the next class and send them home to take another crack at it.

****************
 Any other ideas out there?  Leave them in the comments section!

Pasta Dinner

Macdonough will be hosting a Pasta Dinner on

Thursday, February 21st from 5:30-7:00. There will be a book giveaway as well as a bike giveaway.

It's an event you don't want to miss!

We hope to see you there!

The Rainforest Comes to Macdonough

Today, Macdonough students enjoyed a presentation about the Rainforest with real live animals that we would see in the Rainforest!

Students learned about saving the rainforest and were introduced to animals such as various kinds of birds, snakes, and even a couple monkeys! Our own teachers, Miss Morello and Miss Claffey were participants and got to hold the snakes and Sadie from first grade was called on to feed a toucan.

On Behalf Of All Wimmin: An Open Letter To Steve Jobs About The iPad

Dear Steve Jobs,

For months I have been looking forward to the release of Apple's new tablet computer, as I look forward to every new product released by your company. I have put off buying a Kindle, even though all of my friends have them; or even speaking to my sister about her beloved Sony Reader, for fear that I will become so envious that I will have to go into therapy about why she gets everything nice even though she is the youngest. So imagine my dismay when I heard that you were naming this new product the iPad.

Now, this ill-chosen, sexist name did not immediately make me think of a menstrual pad, but since other women have begun to make this obvious connection between a personal computer and a personal hygiene device, I have not been able to get over how crushed and mortified I am. I don't know if you have ever tried to write something on a menstrual pad, but believe me, it is not easy: the pen sticks constantly, little bits of fluff stick to the point, and there is really no room for more than a paragraph anyway. And because I loathe my body completely, well, anything that makes me think of vaginas or menstruation disturbs the creative process. I can't even imagine taking the iPad into a faculty or department meeting. There I would be, trying to work on curriculum or responding to the latest dictat about the budget, and thinking vagina, vagina, vagina. How can I work in an environment where I am being sexually harassed by my own computer?

What is worse is that I have now begun to imagine all your products, formerly beautiful to me, as the gross, sexualized items you have secretly intended them to be all along. It's so upsetting I can't tell you.

For example, there is the iPod, which makes me think of seed pods, which makes me think of testicles. Ee-yew.

Or the iBook, which makes me think of the Book, which makes me think of Leviticus, which inevitably leads to thoughts of bestiality. Double ee-yew!

You see the problem, I am sure. As a committed and long term feminist, I have learned many things about the condition of women from the kinds of critique that are being aimed at this new product of yours: I have learned about patriarchy, the ownership of my own body, and the work that gender does to distribute power in society. This latest insight -- that a personal computer could fix in my mind, indelibly, visions of menstrual pads and vaginal walls at their most unattractive has been more distressing than I can say. On the other hand, hearing from my sisters everywhere on this matter has also been a critical step in what it might mean to move to the next level of consciousness as a feminist. I intend to spend the rest of the day writing manufacturers of bed pads, pads of paper, paddles, paddleboards, paddle wheels, padlocks and pad thai noodles, demanding that they immediately remove their products from the market and rename them, or face a feminist boycott of unprecedented proportions.

Sure, I have other things to do. But feminism is a commitment that goes beyond the self to our responsibility for a collective sisterhood. Since the battles for equal pay and women's right to the integrity of her own body are already won it is time to address the oppressive patriarchal impulse behind the naming of consumer items that is holding women back and shaming them in the workplace.

Thank you for your attention,

The Tenured Radical

Our new FRC Director

Macdonough warmly welcome Mrs. Amy Waterman to her new position as the FRC Director!

Mrs. Waterman recently changed positions from our third grade teacher to the new Family Resource Director here in Middletown.

We are so excited for her!

Macdonough School on WCNX Radio!

Four Macdonough School students will be featured on WCNX radio this week reading the district's school lunch menu.

Congratulations to our fifth grade students! For those who miss the radio broadcast, visit http://www.cnxradio.com/ for the audio clip

Friday Guest Posting: Katrina Gulliver, "In Olden Days, A Glimpse of Blogging"

A French blogger, circa 1900. 

Katrina Gulliver is a historian based at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. Her current research focuses on urban identity in colonial cities. You can see her website here, or follow her on twitter @katrinagulliver.

I have been blogging in various venues for over ten years. Aside from some early experiments, it has been under my own name. In that time, the history blog world has changed plenty.

The chorus used to be: "Not if you're on the market!", "Be careful if you're untenured."Some departments are toxic, and people are right to be afraid of some things. But to fear having a life online is merely to perpetuate the paranoia. Academics seem more paranoid than others about being unveiled online, and yet seem compelled to create such forms, tempting fate that they are discovered. Perhaps the solo lifestyle of academic research (particularly in the humanities) lends itself to this outcome. The panel on blogging at the 2006 AHA meeting featured audience members who were willing to stand up and be counted as bloggers, but unwilling to name their sites. Since then, the prospect of being "outed" has over the years led some to shutter their blogs, and others to self-reveal (as Tenured Radical herself did.)

Now, in this post-Facebook age, attitudes to online privacy have changed rapidly. The idea that googling job candidates is unethical or nosy (yes, people thought this) is fading away. Among blog authors there is a greater willingness to own their online identity, and see blogging as a useful adjunct to their professional, public lives (rather than a private hobby or potentially embarrassing secret). As Jennifer Ho has suggested, the blog process may not be a distraction or detraction from academic work, but assist with the drafting process. By the same token, a blog is not a private space you have a right to feel invaded if it is found by your boss, a hiring committee, or anyone else.

Therefore, Rachel Leow's notion of blogs featuring half-formed thoughts “whipping round in surprise” is disingenuous. A blog is not a personal notebook. It is a form that exists for the purpose of broadcasting one’s thoughts (fully-formed or otherwise) to an audience. It's now fifteen years since Jennifer Ringley first showed us how a woman could perform "herself" online, for a blog author to frame this (desired) audience as voyeurs invading a private space is like a stripper on stage, coyly saying “oh, silly me, I’ve dropped my clothes”. And it's a particularly disempowered imagery for a feminist blog.

Blogging has increased the profile of women historians, and helped create networks internationally. Sharon Howard was a pioneer in blogging for history, and building not just a personal blog but a web portal for resources on Early Modern history. As she has progressed through her academic career, she has offered advice to grad students, links to job ads - the kinds of career mentorship that more recently Tenured Radical and Historiann have also offered. This aspect has been an under-examined element of academic blogging: in a field in which women are a minority, and aspiring academics may lack senior female mentors, these women sharing their wisdom online has been crucial to the development of the history blog community.

Few bloggers have provided such a comprehensive service to the field as Sharon, who also initiated the History Carnival - a monthly compendium of the best history blogging. But these kinds of things are also in a transitional phase. With the immediacy of twitter, the relevance of a monthly showcase is perhaps diminishing, although the Carnival model does offer a wonderful archive (and historians LOVE archives!). And she did it all under her own name.

I don't think online pseudonymity is inherently wrong or cowardly - it can serve a purpose, of which I have availed myself occasionally. Ann Little has discussed in the latest Common-Place some of the strengths and heritage of pseudonymous presentation. But the pseudonymity of the internet allowing for gender imposture is not one much explored (for all of Marilee Lindemann's dogvoice blog). Are these bloggers really female, and does it really matter? On some level it does. Voice appropriation is not mentioned in the framing of pseudonymity as a shield, by presumably honest brokers of the blog world. For every online Silence Dogood or Currer Bell, there will be a Forrest Carter, Binjamin Wilkomirski, or Helen Demidenko. The persistence of pseudonymity in some cases seems more like an egotistical pose: much like someone who is in no danger hiring a bodyguard. And it only serves to perpetuate the (irrational) fears in academia about the dangers of the newfangled interwebs.

I perform a persona on my blog too, although it is "me", my blog identity is obviously unidimensional. I only write about my work, or history topics. Twitter however is a different beast. In its stream of collective consciousness form (which I find intoxicating), I drop comments about a variety of aspects of my life, or my thoughts on current events. Is the persona I perform there "me"? In some way - although I think I present a sunnier disposition online than I do in the flesh. Since joining Twitter, I have met many more historians, the vast majority using their real names. I have found conference contributors, editorial board members for a new journal, and made real friends through my online roles. Because I have lived in several countries during my academic career, I have found the online realm an invaluable network.

Yes, operating under my own name perhaps puts the brakes on some of the things I might say, but it also means I am operating without a net, without the retreat path of deleting a pseudonymous blog, with plausible deniability. Partly because I came away bruised from early rough and tumble in the electronic sandpit, I am pretty conflict-avoidant. I just don't have the patience or stamina to be fighting with internet idiots. I weakly confess I leave that to stronger broads like Sady Doyle. But I am proud to add my voice to feminist issues online, and to participate in debates that would not be taking place if it were not for the internet.

Kevin Levin wrote about the importance of having an online identity, asking Can you afford not to use social media? and for academics the answer is increasingly no.  His description of building an audience has been my experience too. I know that people have become aware of my work through my blog, I've received emails and tweets about my research, which would not have happened had I not been open about my real id.

Nothing exemplifies the value of social media to a historian more than the case of Lucy Inglis, who created Georgian London. An independent scholar and consultant, she went from starting a blog to being offered a book contract in under a year - having been found by agents and editors on twitter. Lucy conveys a breezy style (which is true of her in person) - and her blog would not have found such an audience if she were not also drawing readers on twitter. Perhaps because she is freed from ivory tower politics (or job anxieties) she is able to interlink the personal and professional on her twitter feed, and give people more of an insight to the life of someone engaged in historical research than any "academic" historian I know. That she was engaged as a "blogger in residence" by the Museum of London, the perfect outreach position for someone with such a desire to share history with the public.

The democratic levelling of blogs is something we should reach out towards, rather than shy away from. As Tony Grafton described the challenges faced by history as a discipline, being able to explain ourselves to the public should be a key focus. And as someone who works on transnational as well as gender issues, I am keen to discuss themes and ideas from historians working all over the world. Any historian who works on society should welcome a readership outside academe, and for feminist historians: I am woman, read my blog.

Want to be a guest poster at Tenured Radical?  Write with a suggestion to tenuredDOTradicalATgmailDOTcom.

On The Idea That Merit Is Actually A System: An Intervention On Behalf Of Affirmative Action

These remarks were delivered on Saturday, January 22, at the Third Social Justice Leadership Conference, organized by students at Zenith University.  I appeared on a panel about affirmative action policies and academic admissions with colleagues Alex DuPuy (sociology); J. Kehaulani Kauanui (American Studies and Anthropology); and Sonja Manjon, Vice President for Diversity and Strategic Partnerships.  The panel began with remarks by Theodore M. Shaw, Columbia School of Law and formerly head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.  The conference followed a keynote by Geoffry Canada, of the Harlem Children's Zone, given the previous evening.
 

On left, a self-identified "victim of a hate crime."  Credit.

The analysis that follows was shaped by what I observed in the fall of 2009 during a conflict provoked by some of our students over Zenith’s affirmative action policies; it was also shaped by the impressive response of other students to that provocation. As I watched these discussions unfold,  I wondered:  Which students were put in the position of justifying themselves as merit-bearing subjects entitled to an excellent education? Which students assumed that their merits were obvious, and that their presence at Zenith was not subject to debate?

As a result of these thoughts, I want to examine a word, as it relates to the role affirmative action plays in education. That word is merit, a thing we are told is part of something called "the merit system."  Merit is a word I particularly dislike. Every time I hear it, I am quite sure that something dishonest is going on that needs to be attended to.

The thoughts and analysis that follow are grounded in the following experiences and beliefs:

• Reflections on my life’s journey as a white woman, a beneficiary of affirmative action and a person whose accomplishments have grown over time in a way that does not always correlate with the assumptions of others about my merit;
•  A grounding in queer studies that causes me to question all systems – like the merit system -- that codify and normalize us;
•  My familiarity with critical race studies and feminist theories of intersectionality articulated by scholars like Kimberle Crenshaw, Derrick Bell and Lisa Lowe. Such work, I argue, helps us to understand a long American history in which “merit” is attached to some bodies and not to others. For example, Asians ineligible for citizenship were de facto outside systems of merit to which only members of the national body politic were entitled.  Enslaved people in the nineteenth century United States were not judged by whites to possess merit, honor or wisdom – any of the qualities that might have qualified them as having “rights a white man must respect.” (Dred Scott v. Sanford, 1857), a stigma that attaches itself to African descended people in the United States to this day.

 I am not the only person who thinks merit is a funky concept. In 1996, Susan Sturm and Lani Guinier wrote, in response to escalating attacks on affirmative action from the right, and the failure of liberals to defend these policies with sufficient vigor:

The present system measures merit through scores on paper-and-pencil tests. But this measure is fundamentally unfair. In the educational setting, it restricts opportunities for many poor and working-class Americans of all colors and genders who could otherwise obtain a better education. In the employment setting, it restricts access based on inadequate predictors of job performance. In short, it is neither fair nor functional in its distribution of opportunities for admission to higher education, entry-level hiring, and job promotion.  

They go on to explain that most attacks on affirmative action equate merit with test scores and, in the case of admission to institutions of higher education, grade point averages, class rank and other numerical indicators of academic achievement. Fairness, in this discussion, requires assessing whether “treating everybody the same” is truly fair.1

Sturm and Guinier articulate a familiar, and solidly liberal, critique of our current testing culture, one that has been influential in the admissions process at a place like Zenith since the 1970s.  They go on to suggest alternative forms of assessment that might make the system fairer, correcting the “uneven playing field” that Geoffrey Canada spoke about last night.   By doing so, assessment would rely less on the prior acquisition of what Pierre Bourdieu would call “cultural capital,” a standard that inhibits access for working class students, many of whom are of color and/or new immigrants, from exhibiting their talents or displaying the accomplishments that middle class and wealthy students have more opportunity and support in acquiring.  In other words, affirmative action continues to work because the values being affirmed have been adjusted to measure excellence more accurately across the lines of racial, gender and class difference.


Geoffrey Canada has a related critique, but a different solution. He objects to the power of merit systems because so many children are excluded from acquiring merit through no fault of their own. Mr. Canada -- whose masculinist metaphors, overwhelming concern for boys and explicit blaming of women unsettled me as I tried to attend to his remarks -- but believes in the essential correctness of conventional merit systems. They represent, he argues, the "high standards" to which all children should be held. His solution is to direct the same basic resources to all children, regardless of their economic circumstances,resources which do not come from the state but from private philanthropy and the business sector. This strategy “levels the playing field” and allows us to then have the same high expectations of all children. Children then succeed or fail on their own merits.

Canada's view of democratic inclusion might be characterized as a neoliberal compromise, and not a transformative solution. More generally, the private non-profits that work to ready a few children for higher education rely on the following premises:

·      That because our resources are limited, we need to direct them to children, who still have time to acquire merit;

·      That the multiple generations of adults related to these children are too damaged, have become part of the problem and do not merit saving;

·      That it is possible to create a more inclusive middle and upper class through projects that select some children for cultivation and then make them visible to elite institutions like Wesleyan;

·      That some children, sometimes the siblings and neighbors of those children who have been selected, cultivated and made visible to elite institutions, are left behind because they have no civil right to access private resources;

·      That the state has proven itself incapable of the task of assisting the poor, and people of color in particular, and that state transformation is undesirable or impossible.

And yet, when it bypasses the state and adopts a corporate framework for competitive excellence, community action raises some red flags. There is a reason why the rest of us don't rely on Bill Gates, Facebook and the Soros Foundation to guarantee our civil rights:  projects sponsored by the private sector are not required to be democratic in the larger sense that the Constitution might guarantee.  Projects like the Harlem Children’s Zone, which do a tremendous amount of good, nevertheless work within a very conservative value system.  This value system recognizes that merit translates into privilege, that it must be earned, and that in the end, the circle of privilege is a closed one.  Thus, in this model "progress" requires only widening the circle of merit -- not critiquing our idea of what constitutes merit in the first place, or understanding why certain bodies -- women, of color, queer -- have such a difficult time being perceived as meritorious even when they do meet the highest standards. 

Both the liberal and the neoliberal approach, however, by focusing on what constitutes merit and how one acquires it, are vulnerable from the left, a critique which I would like to outline below:

• That it is fundamentally unjust to withhold access to an excellent educational institution by creating hierarchies of merit.
• That affirmative action was, at its inception, a liberal compromise that allowed us to revise the racial order without talking honestly about racism; to revise the gender order without fundamentally disturbing patrairachy; and to not discuss homophobia at all.
• That radical experiments like open-admissions at New York’s City College in the 1960s were responded to by a liberal state, not by an effort to prepare and invest in all students in the Five Boroughs to receive an excellent education, but by creating barriers of cost.  This began a process of economic exclusion from higher education that has accelerated dramatically in the last two decades;
• that the blackening and browning of all public schools has loosened the commitment of policymakers to financing education, and strengthened the influence of private schools over educational policy.

Finally, I would like to say that I don’t think it really matters what happens to the admissions policy at private colleges like Zenith, although it is important to the future of the institution itself to continue to grapple with its contradictions.  But what happens to affirmative action as a national policy, and one that has a huge impact on access to public institutions of higher education, is terribly important.  However flawed it is, in a society that is not in any way post-racial, it is necessary.  Given the unequal distribution of educational resources along the lines of race and class -- not merit -- a distribution that becomes more unequal as public dollars devoted to education shrink, support for affirmative action measures that recognize the effects of inequality are imperative.
_________________
1. Susan Sturm and Lani Guinier, “The Future of Affirmative Action: Reclaiming An Innovative Ideal,” California Law Review (July, 1996).

NoRA Cupcake Company Field Trip

Three lucky students had the chance to enjoy a special cupcake treat with Mrs.Spaman and took a walking field trip to NoRA Cupcake Company! Students were selected for this special treat for exhibiting SURFS Up behaviors at school (Self-responsibility, Understanding, Respect, Fairness, and Safety). Yummy!

A Night of a Thousand Books

Thank you to everyone who made it to A Night of a Thousand Books last night!

We had such a great time!
A special thank you to our custodians, Antoinette in the cafeteria, and all of our teachers that volunteered for their help!

Click the box below to view a slideshow!
 

This free slideshow made with Smilebox

Sunday Radical Roundup: Spring Is Coming, The Scholars Are Blooming

If You Can Rip Yourself Away From The Political Train Wreck In Massachusetts: New Englanders, you may want to put the following event at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center (Ledyard, CT) on your calendar for Saturday, Feb. 27, 1 pm–4 pm: "Sovereignty and Indigenous Rights. Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui, associate professor of American Studies at Wesleyan University, moderates this important discussion. Panelists include John Echohawk, president and founder of Native American Rights Foundation; James Jackson, Mashantucket Pequot tribal councilor; Jackson King, general council for Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation; Betsy Conway, legal council for Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation; and Dr. Cedric Woods, director (interim) of the Institute for New England Native American Studies, UMass. Boston. For ages 16 and older. Free with Museum admission, free to Museum members. High school and college students receive $2 admission discount with student ID." Kauanui is the author of the extremely well reviewed Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (2008), part of the Narrating Native American Histories series at Duke University Press.

Wuzzup, diplomatic historians? It is an oft-repeated complaint that graduate students specializing in the history of United States foreign relations are marginalized within doctoral programs more tuned to cultural history, gender history and the new political histories that these methods have produced. Well wise up, guys and dolls, and do what the women's historians did back in the 1970s and 1980s when they were on the margins -- find people who actually do give a damn about your work and will give you honest feedback about it in venues where what your field is privileged. In that spirit, I pass on this notice from the Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University: "Every spring, the John C. Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations hosts the Whitehead Colloquium at Seton Hall University (South Orange, NJ). The Whitehead Colloquium brings students from all across the the Northeast to present their research on topics related to international relations. Graduate students earning degrees in international relations, international affairs, diplomacy, economics, area studies, or other related topics are invited and encouraged to present their research. There are no limitations on the topics to be presented and there are no requirements on the length of the paper. The 2010 Colloquium is a day-long event scheduled for Thursday, April 15. Refreshments will be available, prizes will be awarded, and the winner of the best presentation will have the opportunity to be published in the Whitehead Journal. Students are responsible for their own transportation. Interested students are asked to send their papers to thewhiteheadcolloquiumATgmailDOTcom by March 1, 2010. Students will be notified whether they have been invited to present their research by March 15."

This week in women's history: Just in case you have wondered whether there is still a "women's history," given the important turns toward the history of gender and numerous interventions by theorists that suggest there are no "women," this week marks the 35th anniversary of New York Times reporter Robin Herman being granted access to the NHL all-star team locker rooms in Montreal. As Herman said when interviewed, at the age of 23 she became the first female-bodied person to be granted access to a North American professional sports team, making the game itself even more irrelevant than an All-Star game of any kind normally is. “I kept saying, ‘I’m not the story; the game is the story,’ ” Herman said, reflecting on the night. “But of course that wasn’t the case. The game was boring. A girl in the locker room was a story.”

Meanwhile, back in the girl's locker room: "The Boston Seminar on the History of Women and Gender invites proposals for sessions in its 2015-2011 series. Programs take place alternately at the Schlesinger Library of the Radcliffe Institute and at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The Seminar's steering committee welcomes suggestions for papers dealing with all aspects of the history of women and/or gender in the United States and will also consider projects comparing the American experience with that in other parts of the world.

"Each session focuses on the discussion of a pre-circulated paper. The essayist and an assigned commentator will each have an opportunity for remarks before the discussion is opened to the floor. Papers must be available for circulation at least a month before the seminar date.

"In developing its 2015-2011 series, the Seminar's steering committee will fill some sessions through invitations and others through this call for papers. If you would like to be considered for a slot, please send your CV and a one-page précis of your paper by March 15 to Conrad E. Wright, Massachusetts Historical Society, 1154 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02215,or to cwrightATmasshistDOTorg. In your proposal, please indicate when your paper will be available for distribution. If there are special scheduling conditions, such as a planned trip to Boston or an extended period when you cannot make a presentation, please so indicate in your proposal."

Want a notice included in the Sunday Radical Roundup? Send it to me, why dontcha?

It Gets Worse: Queer People "Volunteer" To Help To Ease The Tax Burden For Straight Families

Remember in my last post when I said it doesn't always get better?  A little bird down the street at Yale --erp, I mean, Oligarch University twigged me last week to a payroll error, because of which 61 employees will see a paycheck reduction of 33% or more for January and the subsequent two months.  Right before winter break, LGBT employees who had taken advantage of Connecticut's new freedom to gay marry received a letter telling them of a payroll error:  the university had ceased withholding taxes on the benefits received for domestic partners who had become spouses under state law -- but not federal law.  The upshot, for those of you who suffer temporary black out when taxes are mentioned, gay married people get to pay two years of taxes in one.

Homos are just more patriotic, that's all.  Photo Credit.

In many ways, this falls under the category of discriminatory behavior that allows universities to perform budget trimming immoral acts because they are perfectly legal, while insisting that it is not they who discriminate.  For those of you not familiar with what those of us who pay it call "the gay tax," homofolk whose marriages are not recognized under federal law pay federal taxes on benefits that are untaxable for  heterofolk, resulting in thousands of dollars of penalties that gay people pay.  According to Tara Bernard at the New York Times (January 11 2011):

A programming error failed to withhold income for taxes owed on the value of domestic partner health coverage....the value of those benefits are taxable (for nondependent partners) by the federal government. But in states like Connecticut, same-sex married couples are treated the same as opposite-sex married couples, and those benefits are not taxable on their state income tax returns.


“Unfortunately, the payroll system inadvertently treated those benefits as nontaxable for Connecticut and federal purposes for the entire calendar year of 2010,” said a letter, dated Dec. 22, from Yale’s payroll department to employees with same-sex partners who were affected by the error. To correct the error, the university went on to say, it would pay the tax and deduct the amount it paid from employees’ paychecks — in equal amounts over the first three months of 2011.


The university, which has extended health insurance to its same-sex employees’ domestic partners since 1994, typically withholds those taxes from employees’ paychecks over the course of the year. But due to the programming error, employees will be responsible for paying the taxes for both years in 2011.

Oligarch has offered "a more flexible repayment schedule" in the event that losing a third or more of a person's salary causes them any hardship. Gosh, do ya think? But honestly, you know what causes a hardship?  Being paid less for doing the same job than straight people are.  As Bernard pointed out last December, a provision of the federal health care bill that would have eliminated this tax on health benefits was dropped from the final legislation.  A very small number of employers (Google, Cisco and the Gates Foundation) reimburse employees for the cost of this discriminatory tax, a practice called "grossing up." Very few institutions of higher ed follow this practice (Syracuse is one -- commenters are invited to name names), and it is particularly shameful that one as well-endowed as Oligarch does not.

The university has received public criticism from the Human Rights Campaign; you can go here to sign a petition to tell Yale how stupid they are on this issue.  But while you are at it, if you are an academic, tell your own university about the anti-gay discrimination that helps them pay for essentials like football, keeping the cost of Alumni/ae weekends low, Presidential salaries in the millions and giving iPods to every entering freshman.  Check out the schools you graduated from, and let them know how you feel about a practice that writes discrimination into the law and violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Hey, I've got an idea, Yale Law profs:  how about filing a big, fat civil rights suit on behalf of your colleagues?

New Recess Equipment for Macdonough School!

Wednesday, Phil Oullette from Eli Cannons, donated new recess equipment such as footballs, soccer balls, and hula hoops to Macdonough!

We are so incredibly thankful for his generous donation and can't wait to use these at recess!

Mr. Romeo presented him with a Macdonough t-shirt and a book to be donated to the library in his name.

Thanks Mr. Oullette!

SURFS Up at Macdonough!

Wednesday, students and families at Macdonough attended the SURFS Up Assembly. Students and families first enjoyed singing along to "Knowledge is Power," and watching a slideshow of all of our friends. We also listened to the third graders sing their own edition of "Macdonough is Made for You and Me", and afterwards we welcomed new students, teachers, and babies to Macdonough. Other students and classes received certificates and books, and won golden awards. Mr. Romeo also read aloud of one of the new books about bullying to the students. We ended the assembly by recognizing our SURFS Up winners.

A special thanks to all of the families that were able to attend our assembly today!

Game Center!

This week in first grade, students have been learning how to read words with the digraphs ch, sh, wh and th.  During center time, Mrs. Walsh's class has the opportunity to play a word game that helps them practice reading words with these letter combinations.

Guest Reader

Sade from first grade was a SURFS Up winner in her class. She choose to read to Mrs. Lenihan's class. We love guest readers.

What Time Is It? It's Exam Time! Ladies and Gentlemen, Start Your Blue Books!

Cowabunga, Buffalo Bob!

Truth be told, I am actually writing this post while proctoring my exam.  You would think a Tenured Radical like myself wouldn't even believe in exams, wouldn't you?

Wrong.  True, I think this generation of students comes to college so stressed-out, and so tested-out, that in many ways it is an act of mercy not to plan any kind of evaluation that awakens their anxieties (see this article for the use of therapy dogs during exam period at Tufts University.)  In fact, here at Zenith, students have been heard to complain that quizzes (particularly of the "Pop!" variety) and exams are "like high school" and unworthy of college-level scholars.  The desire to administer such forms of evaluation, it is implied, reveals the professor hirself as not quite cool for school. ("Like, man, if you really knew me, you would know what grade to give me!")

And yet I give exams, and here are the reasons why:

• Taking exams is a skill.  For the vast majority of professional careers, in graduate school, and for a variety of other occupations, these very same students will be asked to take exams.  Oh sure, some of them will be self-administered, but most of them will be taken in a large impersonal room, written by hand, and timed.  Any career -- from soldier, to lawyer, to electrician, to police officer, to medical doctor, to the State Department requires at least one exam -- and sometimes numerous exams, taken throughout one's work life.  Many careers require periodic re-certification; many others require exams for promotion.  The idea that graduating high school liberates most people, of any social class, from test-taking is a lie.

• As long as we teach surveys, making sense of -- and knowing what you think about -- a period, a field of study, or an area of expertise requires time set aside for comprehensive study.  The exam, in this case, becomes a means to an end.  Let's be honest:  even our best students prepare erratically for classes, and students of all kinds work in bursts that are in many ways governed by the many disparate courses and the work schedules to which they are responsible.  The act of studying, at its best, brings all of these pieces that have been acquired erratically (or not yet acquired at all) together in a whole, at the end of which (ideally) a student has a building block to go on to more advanced work, to research, or to simply salt away for whenever it becomes useful.

• In the humanities and social sciences, exams allow students who are not yet sophisticated thinkers, or particularly good writers, to work hard, do well, and be proud of themselves.  At all colleges, equally intelligent students enter with different capacities and with different skill sets.  Students who work hard and want to achieve deserve some reward and encouragement for their efforts: if every assignment that they are graded on requires excellent writing skills, or the capacity to structure a complex argument, this means that under prepared students will not get credit for what they are achieving even if they are growing as intellectuals through the act of diligent study.  In other words, there will be some lag time between the acquisition of sophisticated reading skills and the capacity to reproduce and build creatively on what has been read.  This means that many students who are learning and growing will have difficulty showing that unless they are given exams geared towards revealing what they have learned.

• Let's tell the truth:  many faculty don't give exams because it is a nice way to artificially shorten the semester.  A papers-only class, a series of short quizzes, a take-home or final paper due on the last day of classes -- all of these tactics send certain of our colleagues home a week, or even two weeks, early.  At Zenith this is illegal, but it happens anyway.  Little things reveal it, like the student who wrote to a colleague that but for a pesky exam in that class s/he would be able to leave town slightly before the end of classes to (and I quote) "maximize boy-friend time."  Why is this bad for students?  Well, two reasons.  One is the absence of any of the benefits stated above.  The other is that this puts heavy pressure on the final two weeks of the semester, and in fact, stresses students out more than if they had reading period and exam week to finish up in a more orderly way.

 On a final note, I attended a party the other night at which a number of colleagues and I waxed nostalgic about (wait for it) our "favorite exams, ever!"  This was, just to be clear, our favorite exam that we ever took.  Mine was an oral exam in eighteenth century French history with John Merriman, my sophomore year at Oligarch.  Feel free to contribute yours in the comments section

God it's fun to group up nerdy.