This Is Not News

Two warnings:

First, I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this, but I think the journey is one I ought to take.

Second, parts of this are going to make me sound like an arrogant jerk. I promise to beat myself up a bit to make up for it, and I ask your indulgence because I think it’s necessary.

Another of my recurring arguments with myself boils down to my own ego. There are lots of truisms that talk about the value of our personal experience. There’s the old expression that writers should write what they know, and one can certainly see the logic of extending the advice to teaching. (I mean, discovering new things with the class is a great thing, but there’s a reason I’m not a Spanish teacher.) From the start of my teaching career, I’ve drawn on my experience as a student. The first semester I taught, I was assigned an Intro to Philosophy course, and got little to no advice on how I should structure it. So I went to my bookcase and started pulling down the books that I read in my first couple of philosophy classes at Fordham and built my classes around them. I still think back to my own high school experiences when I look for models of what I want to achieve as a teacher – my desire to be a teacher was inspired in large part by the credit I give to my own teachers for the person I am today.

But that path from student to teacher has included a number of experiences that make me critical of the status quo in education, so I don’t want to just copy what I did verbatim. The trick is, as I try to figure out ways to change the system, I am also a product of the system. Challenging the validity of the system also challenges the validity of my own accomplishments.

For starters, I am really, really good at standardized and objective tests. I don’t know why; this is one of those things where I don’t ask the centipede how it keeps all its legs moving. But whenever a standardized test has served as a filtering mechanism or checkpoint to an opportunity, I have not had to worry about the test blocking me, and I have known there was a good chance that the test would help me. From what I understand, it was my GRE score more than anything that got me into graduate school and is certainly the reason I got the aid that I did. On the one hand, I might criticize a merit pay proposal for teachers because I think it puts too much weight on standardized test results. On the other hand, I make sure I let people know about my own results if I think it would help me. On the one hand, I get frustrated when test prep becomes a focus in my lesson planning. On the other hand, I know that test-taking is a skill that affects my students’ future well-being even though it shouldn’t be, so shouldn’t I try to help them build that skill?

Even when you get past the tests, the bulk of my education wasn’t in the “progressive” mode that I discovered in Dewey and consider ideal today. From high school to grad school, I read books – some textbooks, some full books, some anthologies – and went to class, where I listened to lectures, participated in class discussions, and took notes. When it was over I took a test or wrote an essay or both. That’s how I learned about history. That’s how I learned about politics. That’s how I learned about Dewey, and let me tell you, reading Democracy and Education is no Deweyan experience, even though I wouldn’t trade reading it for the world. And those experiences still permeate my teaching today. I teach my students how to outline a chapter because I learned how to outline a chapter, and that’s how I took notes for almost 25 years of schooling so gosh darn it, it must be a good idea. And truth be told, I think that outlines, when done right, provide good practice at tying ideas and facts together, and it would benefit a lot of people to improve those organizational skills. I’m not just doing t because of tradition.

Of course, the guy in class next to me who never got the hang of outlines probably didn’t have as positive of a school experience as I did, so he doesn’t have the emotional reasons to be a teacher, so there we have the system perpetuating itself even if the system shouldn’t be perpetuated.

But if the system that produced me is so flawed that it should be overhauled, on what basis do I make my claim that I should be part of the new system?

To a certain extent, this is the self-examination that every society should be doing. What parts of my self, and my society, are worth passing along to the next generation? What parts are better left to pass away with my generation? How can we become something even better than we were? How can I become someone better than I was? (I swiped those ideas from Dewey, by the way. Told you all that reading was good for something.)

It’s just that sometimes it’s really hard for me to trust myself or my answers to these questions, and the arguments I have with myself leave me paralyzed. I have to hope that all of those essays and class discussions and tests also allowed me to build a skill for critically examining and understanding the world. I have to hope they give me insights on how I built those skills, and how the system might have impeded some of my colleagues from making similar progress. And I have to hope I have the chance to use those skills to build something even better than the system that produced me, even if that means taking a hammer to some of my own achievements – and even if it means doing some things the old fashioned-way. And to the extent that some of those skills and opportunities are the result of unfair advantages that I have had, all I can do is try to remain aware of my good fortune and do my best to turn it into good fortune for others. These days, I’m often finding that easier said than done.

I sort of left my Roadblocks series alone for a few days, although many of the little posts I’ve made this week have been beating around the bush. This is an argument that I get into with myself a bit, because it’s a situation where I have to have faith in something when the visible evidence doesn’t always support it.

My philosophical background is in John Dewey’s version of pragmatism, and the theories of democracy and education that he produced as a result. It’s a vision that says that human beings have the capacity to grow by using their intelligence to understand the world around them. It says that this capacity is best utilized in a free and democratic society, where everyone serves as a partner in the project of inquiry. When we can share what we have learned, listen to what others have to say about it, and add their contributions to what we originally figured out, we get a richer, clearer picture of the world around us. We also build skills and tools that we can use to solve the next problem that comes along.

I believe in this vision. The reason I have chosen teaching as a career is that I believe that I can use what I have learned to help students develop the tools to be good citizens. In the process I expect to improve my own skills as well.

But you know, there are days when my faith in the vision is sorely tested by reality. There are decades of data that suggest that Americans as a whole are not very well-informed about policy issues. Elections are frequently decided by a minority of the eligible voters because two-fifths or more of the eligible voters don’t show up. The voters who do show up often don’t really know who or what they’re voting for, so we get wild swings in policy direction and ridiculous forms of institutionalized gridlock. There’s a strain of anti-intellectualism in our society that suggests that people who do intelligently investigate the world shouldn’t be trusted (unless they’re figuring out how to get more channels into our TVs).

When I see the state of the world I wonder if we’re really the intelligent inquirers that pragmatism makes us out to be.

Now, part of my job as a teacher is to help change that. Dewey’s theory of education is built on the idea that as children we are naturally prone to inquiry about our world, and educational institutions should be built to harness, channel, and amplify that natural inquiry so that “our world” gets wider and wider as we grow older. But if adults aren’t always interested in inquiry, might it not stand to reason that not every student is going to be, either?

Inquiry-driven, performance-based learning demands a lot of work on the part of the learner. The independence that it offers leaves the students with less of a road map than some other models of education. I haven’t figured out the way to make that appeal to every student, to inspire them to take ownership of their own education. Some do because that’s who they are, and some don’t because that’s who they are. So the ongoing challenge for me is to figure out how to grow that first category, and that’s the argument I often have with myself at night.

My class wikispace isn’t working properly in school, so I’m using this page as a backup for a project we’re working on in ethics.

Presidential Project Phase 2: The Days Before New Hampshire

NPR: New Hampshire Boost or Bust

1. History suggests that if Mitt Romney wins the New Hampshire primary tomorrow, he will win the Republican nomination for president. Why is this so?
2. What did Pat Buchanan accomplish in New Hampshire in 1996? Why does Buchanan think he was able to accomplish this?
3. What challenge does Buchanan say that Romney will have to overcome if he does win the New Hampshire primary?

NPR: Debate Coverage

1. What advantages does Mitt Romney have in New Hampshire?
2. Why were his opponents attacking him anyway in debates on Saturday and Sunday?
3. Why do Romney’s opponents think that they will have an easier time beating Romney in southern states?
4. Summarize either Newt Gingrich’s or Rick Santorum’s attack on Romney, and Romney’s response to that attack.

CNN on Ron Paul

1. What is Ron Paul’s plan for Tuesday night/Wednesday morning?
2. Why does Paul say he wants to end America’s financial aid to Israel (and to other countries)?
3. What advantage does Paul think he has with New Hampshire voters? Does available data support or contradict that claim?

NY Times on NH Debate

1. Summarize the criticisms of Romney by Gingrich, Santorum, and Jon Huntsman.
2. What concerns does the Romney team have, given that their candidate is seen as the leader in the race?
3. Why is Romney trying to convince voters that he understands what it’s like to be worried about losing your job?
4. What comment did Romney make during the debate that Gingrich is now using as the basis for an attack?
5. Why are some candidates starting to look ahead to South Carolina?

Washington Post on Jon Huntsman

1. How is Jon Hunstman’s campaign different from many of the other Republicans’?
2. What mistakes do political analysts believe that he has made?
3. What evidence does the article offer that Huntsman is a conservative candidate?
4. What evidence does it offer that he is not?

General – Use these articles and other articles at the news/politics sites to answer these questions:

1. Why do you think Romney’s rivals are focusing on Bain Capital? Do you think this is a good strategy for making Romney unpopular?
2. Given the comments by Pat Buchanan about his success in 1996, would you expect Rick Santorum to have a strong or a weak chance of success in New Hampshire? What about Ron Paul?
3. Do you think that any candidate other than Romney, Santorum, or Paul will do well enough in New Hampshire to have a good chance to win the nomination? Why/why not?
4. If you were on President Obama’s campaign team, how would you criticize the Republican candidates in order to increase Obama’s chance to be re-elected?

So this week in World History we’re starting a set of units that have revolutions as a theme. To help introduce the topic I ask my students to analyze the lyrics of The Beatles’ “Revolution” because I think John Lennon does a pretty good job of incorporating a lot of the themes we discuss. The worksheet we use is in my Google Docs collection; I need to do a double-check on the lyrics transcription.

Some time in the next month or two I’ll ask students to create a video for the song based on what we’ve learned. (Which I suddenly realize means I need to figure out what I’m going to do about the student acquiring the song and whether I’m condoning or even encouraging piracy, or whether I can justify this to myself as a fair academic use. But that’s for later.)

The funny thing is, today we were talking about the idea that revolution often involves destruction – not just physical destruction as in war, but destruction of old ways of life and doing things. We talked about a lot of technological revolutions, and all of the old businesses that have been destroyed by the digital era. We talked about cassettes and record stores and film cameras. And right after we had that discussion, what do I read? That the Kodak company might be filing for bankruptcy.

Never mind ripping from the headlines, the headlines are ripping from me.

Another roadblock that I encounter as I try to live up to the ideal of teaching that I have in my head is an ongoing conflict between two ideas. The first is my dislike of the idea that school should be a place where the teacher takes his or her knowledge and transfers it to the students; I am much more comfortable with the idea that students have to learn things for themselves and can’t just sponge it from another source. But the second, competing idea is that I see myself as an authority figure with certain expertise that should be used in the shaping of the learning environment. I don’t think it’s a bad thing for me to say, “Yes, you have to build the knowledge yourself, but right now you also have to listen to me tell you what knowledge to build and how to do it.” When I write that, part of me is turned off by the arrogance implied in it, but another part of me doesn’t see any way around the truth of it. When I look back at my own career as a student, I find numerous cases where a project that seemed utterly irrelevant at the time turned out to be quite important. In many cases, the teachers did know best.

I have the good fortune of being Facebook friends not only with a number of my high school classmates, but with several of my teachers as well. (It speaks volumes of my high school experience that my teachers and I each left enough of an impression on each other that we’d want to talk to each other almost 20 years later, but that’s another post.) Yesterday one thread evolved into a discussion of an assignment in my English class in sophomore year. We had to read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and write a reflection journal that was supposed to run about 50 pages.

Now I can still remember that this assignment was the bane of my existence in 1990. Invisible Man is a dense novel, and the longest paper I had ever written was 5 pages. Now I had to go up by an order of magnitude. I don’t think I actually made it . . . I got to around page 35 before I just ran out of things to say. I honestly don’t remember if what I had to say was worth anything – those assignments are long gone, consigned to the dustbins of 5.25-inch floppy history. But what I do remember is that I wrote that much.

That’s an important memory, because when I got to Fordham I was admitted to the honors program, where I had to write and defend a 50-page senior thesis on the topic of my choosing. It was hard work, and the bane of my existence in 1996, but throughout the process I could look back at high school and know that I had done this, or something like it, before. So I had every reason to believe that I could do it again. In the end, I did, and while I have not really pursued any further research into artificial intelligence theory, I had to spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that human beings learn (and how they’re different from the ways that machines learn). That’s certainly information that’s come in handy in my current career.

Once I knew I could write a 50-page philosophy paper, I moved on to other academic mountains. When it came time to write a 200-page dissertation, I figured out how to divide the thesis up into chapters. Each chapter would be a chunk of about 35-50 pages. While those chapters were the banes of my existence from 2003-2006 (I have a very baneful existence, if you haven’t noticed), I did finish. Without that graduate research and dissertation, I would not have the grounding in philosophical pragmatism that I do, and I think I would be a poorer person, citizen and teacher as a result.

So 35-year-old Dave in 2010 could draw a line straight back to work that 15-year-old Dave did in 1990 and see how the 1990 work had made 2010’s successes possible. But if you had asked me as a 15-year-old to explain why I was doing that journal, the only thing I could have told you was, “The teacher told me to do it and I need to get a good grade.” The book and the reflection did not connect with my own experiences, and I was too young to realize how limited my own experiences were and how much more there was to understand in the world.

One more example that doesn’t paint me in such a flattering light: In my junior year, we had a religion class called Social Justice. I was very fortunate, and through a combination of my mother’s efforts, my own talents and hard work, and some meeting-the-right-people-at-the-right-time, I was able to attend a private Catholic high school in the suburbs. There were many advantages to this education, but one major drawback was that we were a very homogeneous group. Again, my own experiences didn’t tell me much about what people in different social or economic groups lived through, so issues of poverty or class were abstract notions. The Social Justice class was meant to help us look beyond our lives and think about the obligations that we have to our fellow people.

I am putting it mildly when I say we were a reluctant audience. We watched videos about how agribusiness companies affected the economies and environments of countries around the world. We discussed the Bretton Woods financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary fund. We read books about the life of families on welfare in the 1970s or the Catholic Church’s notion of a “preferential option for the poor.” And when we weren’t pushing back against the idea that we had some kind of unfair advantage in the world, we were bored. We doodled in the margins or made jokes after class about agribusiness, agribusiness, agribusiness. Around the time that we were discussing the IMF, the teacher saw some rather unkind doodles in my binder and gave me a talking-to about making a positive contribution to the class. The next day I gave my notes the subtitle “Contributing Positively.”

Yeah, feel free to give 16-year-old me a metaphorical slap. He deserves it.

The point is, in 1997 I was working in a PR firm whose client made financial planning software. So during this time period, I was trying to understand a lot of stuff about how the financial world worked. And right about this time, several Asian countries saw their economies run into major trouble. Suddenly I was seeing the World Bank and the IMF all over the news. Now why did they seem familiar?

Oh, yeah.

A few years after that, I’m married and trying to rely on something other than takeout and premade taco dinner kits to eat. Pattie and I start learning about the food industry and the influence of big agricultural companies over what we eat and how we eat it. Large agricultural companies. I feel like there was a term for that. What was it?

Oh, yeah.

Now, do I think that my English teacher or my Social Justice teacher could predict exactly which classroom experiences would provide me with useful insights or skills in the future? Of course not. If they could predict the future that well, I’d be disappointed if they were spending all their time teaching high school when they could be out making a fortune in the stock market or reshaping world culture. But they had pretty good judgment about what might be useful, and when I trusted that judgment, more often than not I was better off for it.

I believe that we learn things, and think about things, because knowledge is useful – it helps us make our way through the world and accomplish what we set out to do. But that doesn’t mean that everything we learn has to be obviously useful right now. William James wrote

[T]he advantage of having a general stock of extra truths, of ideas that shall be true of merely possible situations, is obvious. We store such extra truths away in our memories, and with the overflow we fill our books of reference.

One of the things that teachers can do is use their knowledge to help students build up that extra stock of knowledge, to have it ready in years to come when it may prove useful.

Now, as I look at our curricula and the classes that we require students to take, I definitely think that we can do a better job of this. (I learned about calculus in high school math, but I learned much of what I knew about the importance of compound interest in an elective social studies economics class.) And we need to have some space for dialogue with the students, so that we can understand how they view this collection of information that we (possibly) find fascinating but they find frustrating. As I work to do that, though, I’m also going to try to forgive myself for thinking that sometimes the teacher knows best.

As I get ready for the new year, I’ve been having a number of conversations with myself about how to implement the vision of teaching I have in my head. In my head, students take their questions about the world and seek out answers to them, while I provide resources and guidance to help them use the lessons of history to answer those questions. This works perfectly between approximately 3 AM and 5 AM, and then the alarm clock goes off and I face a bunch of realities that serve as roadblocks to that vision. My own limitations are certainly among those roadblocks, but they’re not the only ones. So in an effort to widen the conversation beyond myself and I, consider this post the beginning of a short series.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is the idea of authenticity in education. I like the idea of projects as a form of assessment – have the students create something that requires not just memorization of facts, but thinking about those facts. If there’s creativity and room for individual analysis and expression, then you’re on to something. And if it’s something that the students connect to, that they care about for its own sake and not because the guy with the grade book is telling them to do it, then you have a project that’s authentic.

Now, the roadblock I want to talk about now is that completing a project that requires 1) factual knowledge about a subject; 2) critical analysis of that knowledge; and 3) creation of content is going to require a number of skills. Part of the goal of the project is to help students develop those skills, but one challenge for the teacher is to match the complexity of the project to the skills that the students have. Ideally, you want the project to be near the edge or even slightly beyond the edge of the comfort level, so they have to stretch and build a little bit to get there. Without that, there’s no challenge, and that can lead to boredom. But with too much of a gap, students won’t know where to go, and they won’t feel like they can solve the problem themselves.

This means that the teacher is almost certainly going to have to put some artificial limitations on the project, and those simplifications run the risk of taking the project further away from something that the students feel is authentically relevant to them. Is there a way to get around this? I’m not sure.

When I was in grade school, I played snare drum for the grade school concert band. If you have ever been to a grade school music concert, you are probably familiar with the song Hot Cross Buns. It is a very simple tune that many music students learn when they are first getting the hang of their instruments. Now, whatever goals someone might have when they start playing an instrument, giving a rousing performance of Hot Cross Buns is not likely to be one of them. But learning this song lets you practice reading the music and hitting the notes, and hopefully after a little while you’re ready for something more engaging. I eventually played a few John Philip Sousa marches and a barely recognizable version of the Beatles’ “Yesterday” before hanging up my drumsticks.

Now, is there a more authentic way of helping music students get those initial building blocks? Or is Hot Cross Buns (or something like it) just something you have to grin and bear to get on with the good stuff? I honestly don’t know. I suspect that a certain amount of grinning and bearing is necessary, but that could be my lack of imagination.

And to being this back around to the high school classroom, if I need a Hot Cross Buns to help students build their research or their critical thinking skills, how can I get beyond that phase as quickly as possible and let them loose on more complex, and hopefully more engaging, material?

One possibility would be to build out my start-of-year introduction. In World History, instead of starting with australopithecus and the dawn of humanity, I begin with the last chapter of the book and discuss the present day. The Internet and global warming are a little more accessible than cave paintings and the Stone Age. I could try to create a few projects based on researching personal history, and put the focus more on the thinking and the application than the content itself. I might hit other roadblocks, like the assigned curriculum and its associated schedule, but that’s a hurdle for another day.

Zac Chase of Autodizactic.com fame has been asking people to share their thoughts on the purpose of school. It’s one of those things I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and right now it seems like a task I can focus on.

I think school as an institution has two purposes, and sometimes they conflict.

From the point of view of individual student, the school should be a place that provides resources, structures and opportunities for personal growth. When I say personal growth, I mean an increase in the student’s ability to conceive a goal, formulate plan to accomplish the goal, and then carry it out. Some of those resources are purely intellectual. Learning how to read opens up a vast set of resources. Learning how to write gives a student new powers of communication and outreach. Learning about government institutions tells the student what to read about and whom to write to in order to understand or even change laws. Learning about science and math opens up all sorts of other possibilities.

Some of those resources go beyond academics. Some of them are emotional, as students learn to confront and overcome challenges. They experience the benefits of teamwork and, hopefully, the experience of relying on others and being relied on by others. I hope they have the experience of authority figures showing trust and caring for them. I also hope they gain valuable social resources – friendships and relationships that they can call upon in the future to help them achieve their goals. All of these are worthwhile and important purposes of the school for the individual student.

Society at large also has a purpose in creating and maintaining the school. Bringing large groups of impressionable people together, demanding that those impressionable people develop and display certain skills and traits, and reinforcing certain values over others are all things that schools do in order to mold the next generation and perpetuate the society in question. The way that I have phrased that may sound nefarious, but no matter how much individuality you want to foster, we need some level of conformity or society falls apart, and with it most of human beings’ potential.

Ideally, schools can provide a reflective environment in which social norms can be adopted and re-evaluated at once . . . even if that is an uncomfortable experience for many students, or one that asks them to rethink or even abandon some goals that they may have set for themselves. To reach that ideal, I think it’s necessary to give people permission to disagree. That raises a whole host of questions along the lines of “Can I tolerate someone else’s intolerance?” I don’t have the brainpower to pursue those questions tonight . . . but it would be great if our schools routinely provided the space to do so.

Some of the big news in Philadelphia education this week is the unveiling of the latest draft of a Facilities Master Plan to close some schools and reconfigure others in order to deal with population changes and the departure of many Philadelphia public school students to charter schools. The proposal would close nine schools over the next few years, including the high school that shares a building with the one where I teach. The proposal is much less ambitious than the draft of options that was leaked last June, and high schools in particular still have another study coming on how they should be structured. So part of the much anticipated news is that we should keep anticipating.

One thing that strikes me is how hard it is to juggle the needs of different parts of the city. The news is full of stories of “empty seats” and “underutilized schools,” but there are also a number of schools that are overcrowded because their particular neighborhoods are still relatively stable in terms of student population. It’s not a realistic solution to have kids from the Northeast part of the city commute to a building that has extra classroom space in South Philadelphia. But it’s also not realistic to expect the district to be able to spend a fortune in this political and economic climate to build new classroom space in the Northeast when every headline will talk about the “wasted space” elsewhere. Different areas have different problems, but because they’re part of the same district it’s much harder to solve either.

I was thinking about this in the context of the textbook and curriculum I’m using for 9th grade World History. It’s not a terrible textbook as textbooks go, but I don’t think it’s right for my students. The language and vocabulary are presenting an obstacle to the ideas and content, and when you’re already struggling to make the 6th Century Frankish kingdoms relevant to a hundred 14-year-olds, you really don’t need another obstacle. But this is the book that every school in the city uses, because the district decided to standardize textbooks and curricula for logistical purposes and to accommodate students who may move from one school to another during a school year. Neither of those are bad goals, but the result is a bad fit for my particular students. So once again I’m wondering if my district’s size forces it to adopt solutions that don’t quite work perfectly for anyone in the name of not failing miserably for anyone. And I’m not sure that’s an approach that’s going to create a major change.

Of course, it’s easy for one blogging teacher to say all of this. I don’t have a solution that’s politically and economically feasible for creating smaller, nimbler decision-making units that can better address specific needs. All I can say is that as a citizen I’ve starting thinking about how we need those solutions and I’ve started to try to think about what they might look like.

We spent some time thinking about free will and determinism in my ethics class, and watched a couple of movies that hinge on the idea. To wrap up the topic, I gave the students the following assignment today:

Imagine that you are a lawyer in a court case involving one of the films we watched about free will. You must write a 3-paragraph persuasive argument to make your case. Choose one:

A. You are a DEFENSE ATTORNEY for Howard Marks, the man who was arrested for the future-murder of his wife at the beginning of Minority Report. You are trying to get Howard’s conviction thrown out by challenging the entire precrime system. To make your case, you need to argue that the precogs’ visions are not sufficient evidence that Howard is guilty – Howard still had the power to change his future.

B. You are a PROSECUTING ATTORNEY against Dom Cobb from Inception. You want to prove that Cobb is responsible for Mal’s death even though Mal jumped from the building herself. To make your case, you need to argue that once Cobb put the idea that the world was not real in her head, it was inevitable that Mal would kill herself – Mal had NO power to change her future.

I would probably have an easier time with A than B. I can make the intellectual case for determinism. Sometimes I think I can make it too well. But it’s not something I can fully commit to.

I like this assignment because it gives the students who want it an opportunity for a little theatricality. Even if they don’t have a lot of actual courtroom experience, just about everyone has watched enough Hollywood courtroom antics to have an idea of what they would do. And even though I don’t want to get to the point of saying legal = good, illegal = bad, from time to time I think it’s good to have something more concrete, like “Are you going to jail?” rather than something abstract like “Are you a good person?”

This week in ethics, we’re thinking about the way that society punishes the people who do something that society deems wrong. We may be getting ahead of ourselves a little bit, because even though we’ve discussed a couple of ethical perspectives, we have lots of room left to discuss and evaluate what actually is right and wrong. But it’s not a bad idea to think about the stakes of making decisions about ethics. If we as a society decide something is wrong, what is the best way to respond to people who act against that decision? What are the consequences that come from different levels of harshness? What does the way that we treat “wrongdoers” say about the way that we view people in general?

Plus, since this class is using film to illustrate some of its questions, this topic is an opportunity to watch The Shawshank Redemption, which remains my favorite movie. The students usually respond well to it, too, and getting to see a bunch of people see it for the first time is its own thrill. There’s a scene in the movie where Andy Dufresne wants the warden to spend some money to upgrade the prison library. The warden replies that the public only wants the government to spend money on three things in prisons: more bars, more guards, and more guns. Andy is persistent, though, and gradually builds the prison library into a resource that helps at least a dozen prisoners get their high school diplomas. (He has some other projects in the film, but I won’t spoil those if you haven’t seen it.)

This NPR story about Folsom State Prison (made famous by Johnny Cash) from 2009 shows that conflict playing out in the real world – as we spend more money on bars and guards and guns, we spend less on educating and training convicts for life after prison. Whether that actually makes anyone safer or improves anyone’s life is a very open question. I like using this story because I can play the audio from the original radio story and give students the printed article version, so that gives students a couple of different paths to absorb the information. With the article in hand, I ask the students to answer a set of questions that connect to the prison-and-punishment theme. I also hope that thinking about the questions will help the students think about how the media can construct a story to support certain conclusions. It’s definitely worth listening to the story and thinking about what the story says – and doesn’t say – about the prison guards union.

I’ll put the reflection questions after the jump.
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