marking time

I'm finally watching the Aaron Swartz documentary.   Sitting next to N[athan], one of the four kiddos who started CSCL, with H[alley] who's back from Germany and D[ina] whose kid gave me his Easter candy to help ease the tax burden.  Last day of my first class teaching kids about mass incarceration, tax day, when we'll make it through yet again at all odds.   Today I am feeling good about the world.

I'd like to think that Aaron would like Parts and Crafts, and would hang out here on his vacation time, hacking camera stuff or running github workshops or teaching kids how to use IRC.  In the meantime, we keep on keepin' on, making tool libraries and running free schools and building up freedom schools, making education an open access project.  Insisting on existing, being licensed, occupying spaces, and making shit happen.   I didn't die two years ago, and I'm pleased about that,

It took me a long time to get here, and I'm so very pleased about the ride so far.   Here's to you, Aaron, for making the world a better place.

sliding backwards

It all seemed like it was going so well.

This is the year that Parts and Crafts became real.   We hired two staff, sold out camp at 50 kids a week, and successfully ran the Center for Semiconducted Learning, a school alternative that has doubled in size in the past six months.   We became an LLC and signed our first commercial lease.   We moved out of the basement of the Clarendon Hill Presbyterian Church and into a storefront on Somerville Ave.

Great, right?   All that aside, what a fucking nightmare.

At the moment, we're on hold (again) from ISD, who, having inspected the building and given us the OK, has decided that maybe there *is no* use code for our type of building, and has indefinitely put our certificate of occupancy on hold.   It's all probably fine, of course, though possibly not.    And then we'll go another month without space, writing apologetic emails and slowly going broke.  

I'm not mad about it.

Instead, I'm sliding into days full of sleep, emails going unanswered, spending time that could be going toward projects reading suicide prevention blogs.   The deadline for Salt is coming up and will likely pass unimpeded.   CSCL will continue somewhere, but no plans can be made for the future.

Swartz.dismissal by Ars Technica

Visiting my friend, who is in jail

First thing you do is take off all your stuff.   Jewelry, bandanna, coat, hoodie.    Empty your pockets, put all your shit in a tiny locker.    There are twelve or thirteen other people, mostly women, mostly Hispanic, one with two little kids -- everybody gets into a line to go through the metal detectors.  Throughout the process, I am reminded at every turn that I should have come earlier, that I just barely made it in, that I'm lucky to get into this round of visitors.

I'm visiting my friend D****, who is in jail for no good reason.   "Stupid shoplifting stuff" -- stuff you can pretty much still laugh about, even though the context is pretty grim.   Sitting on the other half of a plate-glass cell, it's hard not to think about Aaron Swartz, hacker extraordinaire, who I only knew second-hand through friends and housemates.    The internet is on fire this week after he hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment, faced with 30+ years in prison for downloading academic papers from behind a paywall.   We talk about that a bit, but it's hard -- inside the room, the sound is completely fucked up, and you have to yell to hear each other.    There are no phones, just the tiny grate, no touching, just glass.   Like having a cup of coffee in a sensory deprivation chamber.  

D**** says there are a handful of people on the other side of the wall who are political organizers.   "Most of the rest of them are here because they killed someone."    He laughs, then puts his head in his hands.   "It's kind of the wrong place for me.   But there are some pretty famous people in here."    I tell him it could be worse.    Better to be in jail, after all, than to be dead.    I ask him what it looks like on the other side.    On my side, the hallways are reminescent of Terminator 2 --- with the exception of the views, each time the elevator door clicks open, spectacularly hazy views of the Boston skyline.    He describes an atrium, a little room with a bed and a window.   "It looks out on a wall," he says, grinning, "but you can see people as they come in and out."

The weirdest thing about my side of the glass is that there are no other people.    From entrance to exit, after filling out my initial intake form, I have no direct interaction with any of the jail staff.   The halls are completely empty --- when our time is up, nobody knocks.   The lights flicker on and off, and as I head back toward the elevator, our line forms up again -- slow, think ranks of slightly cheered people, heading back out into the world outside.   

Knowledge is Power -- but only for the gifted under twenty

In his book "How Children Succeed," Paul Tough talks a lot about KIPP, which is successful and highly vaunted in educational reform circles.    When Josh was teaching at Roberto Clemente, it was all the TFA set talked about.    Friends talked lovingly of quiet lines of kids walking down the hallways, of silent classrooms, of perfectly lined paper, of a single-minded focus, all steering towards the ultimate goal of college admission. 

KIPP is the anti-free school --- a highly rigorous environment, aimed at college success, but also crucially designed to foster a strong sense of community   (to recreate the classroom as a safe space).    That's a good premise, but doesn't work if kids continue to need the highly structured environment in order to succeed.     Tough talks about how KIPP students struggle, once they get into college, and lack the full context and community driving them to keep up in a new and different context.

On the other side of the socioeconomic spectrum, the Thiel Fellowships!   "Intended for students under the age of 20, [Thiel Fellowships] offer them a total of $100,000 over two years as well as guidance and other resources to drop out of college and pursue other work, which could involve scientific research, creating a startup, or working on a social movement."    Selection is tight -- it's harder to get one of these fellowships than it is to get into Princeton.   

As excited as I am about motivating students to think critically about whether college is right for them, monetizing self-directed learning seems like, well, kind of an asshole thing to do.    As Will said to me the other day, "You don't need money to drop out of college -- you need money to go.   That's the whole fucking point."

Both programs make me incredibly angry -- KIPP, because it misses the point that middle-schoolers are themselves autonomous, thinking humans, and Thiel, because it uses venture capital as the benchmark for success.   The high-profile "success" marketed by both programs makes assumptions about kids, and how kids learn, that seem deeply troubling when thinking about diversity, access, and equal opportunity.      

What does an alternate world look like?    It takes that $100,000 and divides it between 10 kids, giving half to gifted dropouts, half to first-year college students --- with the explicit goal being to fund students who would otherwise be getting shitty service jobs to pay for their education.    It would involve making KIPP less about gifted teachers, more about creating environments that teachers want to teach in --- not holding their jobs hostage to outward-determined measures of success.    It would involve focusing on mental health, rather than academic success, and trying to create safe spaces in classrooms, where kids and grown-ups can work on being full humans, before they work on being "successful" ones.  

Letter to Paul Tough on "Why Children Succeed"

Hi Paul,

I read your book over the winter holiday and really enjoyed it.    It was incredibly refreshing to read a literature review that didn't focus primarily on Gates-funded proposals.  

As the owner / operator of a free school, I'm going to ask the obvious question -- why no mention of self-directed learning in your literature review?     A lot of the research you point to about stress in early learning made me think about how students  (and, hell, teachers and parents) experience stress every day in schools.    I work in a small alternative school, and one thing parents say over and over again is, "I just want my kid in a place where he/she can experience success."    

By and large, these are pretty well off kids, white children, or children of  professional immigrants who aren't lacking for educational resources or support --- they are kids who should be doing well in school, but instead, they're basket cases.    They're stressed out, they can't sit still, they freak out if you suggest that they sit down and work on math together.   Pitching it to kids and families, we deliberately introduce "school" as a community that is highly interested in learning, but where grownups don't give a shit about how they do by standard academic metrics ---where  they place, at what level they read, how they score on X, Y, or Z test.   The goal is to reduce stress, rather than maximize outcomes --- kids come to us because school is making them crazy.     We spend a lot of time talking to kids, having conversations, playing video games together, trying to work out what they're stressed out about, and create friendly alternatives to help them deal with it.    

The ideas is, if we can reduce the level of stress --- by making "school" a safe and friendly space -- then they can have space to be curious and interested in things again, and they can do it in their own time.       Free schooling has its problems -- it certainly results in a class / race stratification, serving overwhelming white and upper-middle-class   (exceptions abound, of course, but that's my own experience).    That said, I wonder if, embedded, in old-school free schooling doctrine  (John Holt et al), whether there are some insights here about how school itself -- and certainly, the policy context around high-stakes, well-funded reform initiatives -- itself creates the kind of stresses that make it impossible to succeed.    

If licking, comforting, hugging, is the strongest marker of success for infants, why wouldn't we also assume that stress -- maintaining school as a low-stress, friendly, safe learning environment -- is just as important for 16-year-olds?        If teachers are terrified of being fired, or are so tied by curriculum and higher administration that they cannot be themselves in the classroom, it's hard to imagine how you're going to have a learning space that feels safe enough for kids, in turn, to relax and be themselves.    If kids are regularly told that they're stupid, or tracked into classes where their assignments are irrelevant and meaningless -- and then told that they *have to be there* -- that grinding their teeth and working through it is the key to their success -- why not let them hang out and destress for a bit, try to lower the stakes?

Free schooling literature tends to focus on political autonomy, but the more pragmatic aspects -- above all, creating low-stress, friendly, collegial learning environments --- seems just as important here.   Linking your first chapter to your last one --- if licking is more important than Baby Einstein videos, why wouldn't we assume that playing video games and being able to curse in the classroom might also be just as instrumental to creating safe, friendly, cheerful environments for teenagers?     

That might sound utopian --- but if we're talking about stress as a central inhibitor to successful learning environments, it's worth thinking about creating work environments that grown-ups and kids actually want to be in, and look at how current policy goals are inhibiting those instances.  

Those are some of the initial thoughts I had, at least.   There was a lot of food for thought in your book, and I'm grateful to have had the chance to read such a comprehensive review of the literature.     Thanks for writing such an engaging and useful book!

All best,

Katie

it's vacation time!

"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." ~ E.B. White

Week 6 of mentally decamping from Occupy -- not going to GA, not responding to email, hiding out in the virtual presence of Facebook, heading 3000 miles west to Portland to drink coffee, hike about in the rain, go shopping, and hang out with friends and their babies.    Hippie-comfort!   Here's a video that seems appropriate to the times: