Will the Circle Be Unbroken and Coming of Age, by Studs Terkel

Stories bring us together. We've known this forever. Nowadays, we are learning, they also drive us apart.

Where are the good stories these days? In other words, what's a good answer to the failings of public education and politics writ large?

Here is Studs Terkel's: talk to people. Listen to what they say. When someone tells their story and you listen, that is bringing together.

Studs Terkel's works are compendia of such stories, brought together and distilled. A prize-winning audio essay featuring survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki haunts and harrows; a conversation with Myles Horton and Rosa Parks opens a window onto already-legendary history; and books like Coming of Age and Will the Circle Be Unbroken amass and knit together hundreds of hours of recordings with people from all walks of life. Celebrities and common people alike show their humanity; they learn things they never knew about themselves, and we recognize ourselves in them. Replete with allusions to history and with different perspectives on well-worn stories, Studs' works have taught me more than almost anything else. A little outro music, for instance:

Ceterum censeo, social media is for the birds.

Scholarship Opportunity: Philip Pullman and Video Games

Isn't that 'scholarship opportunity' a delightfully ambiguous phrase? Is it an opportunity to get a scholarship, as people usually mean? Or is it a chance to do some original scholarship?

Both, I say!

Announcing the Belacqua Memorial Scholarship Fund.

(Is it named for the imaginary count and countess Lyra was told were her parents? For the indolent shade in Dante? For both, of course.)

The Memorial may be inspired by imaginary namesakes, but the Fund is real. I'll be contributing any pledges received through my podcasts and other online projects and matching them up to $100 per annum. The monies will be disbursed on a rolling basis to scholars whose work comes to my attention and furthers the study of the works of Philip Pullman and/or of Narrative and Mythology in Video Games.

A special thank you to Alexander Schmid, whose inaugural recurring donation to the Bookwarm Games podcast has inspired this endeavor. Huzzah!

Here are some links to get you started. I hope you enjoy!


https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5535590&live=1

http://sntjohnny.com/front/some-philip-pullman-interviews-with-excerpts/129.html

https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-shed-where-god-died-20031213-gdhz09.html

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/aug/12/books.humanities

Labor Union/ Business Models

As it's November, I'll be taking part once again in the nanowrimo fun. My plan this year is to collaborate with some folks at Signum/Mythgard on a story idea of Corey Olsen's. It's called The Hoard, in homage to Tolkien. I'm working on my own writing meanwhile, too, of course, and other collaborative ventures of various sorts, of which a hodgepodge selection below--

Reading Studs Terkel has motivated me to try to find out if there is such a things as a substitute teachers' union. I'm waiting on a reply to some queries I sent out about it, but if there's not, I'm willing to take a shot at starting one up. The main thing a union could provide is a sense of the sub as a person, not just a number. Of course many of Studs' interlocutors also bemoan how unions have lost their way, but this one would be too new to have done so yet!

I've also got some thoughts about hacking the teacher-certification racket. So far, compared to spending a year or two and twenty grand on a Masters in Teaching program locally, dropping 6K for the online program at teach-now.edu sounds pretty good. I really don't want another degree, but even the MA is only 13K! It certifies you in Arizona or DC, but different states have reciprocity agreements about transferring another state's certificate, so it should be possible to make it work. I'm still trying to find out more. If you know a better way to get a certificate, I'd love to hear it!

The best way I've found so far to get to do most of the things I want as a teacher has been to pick up a substitute certificate (most states only require a bachelor's degree, regardless of major, and a certain amount of paperwork), pay the bills that way, and spend my free time writing, collaborating, scheming, reading, and lately making podcasts--in short, actually teaching. There are the obvious drawbacks, though, and so I'm starting again to look into more alternatives.

Washington theoretically offers a route from substitute teaching to a full teacher's certificate, but so far I haven't been able to navigate that particular song and dance and jump those particular hoops, since my district hasn't yet cooperated in the program. 

WA teachers have also recently been the beneficiaries of the mixed blessing of salary raises, thanks to a long-awaited court decision hinging on the interpretation of the state constitution's language about funding for education. Getting a fatter paycheck-per-hour is well and good, but I've already seen several examples at different schools of a growing resistance to paying for a long-term sub, even in situations where the teacher is out long enough to need the support. Not surprisingly, no one seems to want to come out and say that's what's going on. 

On the other hand, transparency and trust are precisely what make Corey Olsen's projects work. They're funded by donations and run on the devotion of volunteers and a small staff and faculty, overseen by the charismatic president and a board, and golly if it doesn't look like, after years of determined work and planning, they're going to make the thing a real university!

Whereas Signum hopes to grant MA degrees and already offers a nonpareil community of learners and opportunities for personal enrichment, the public schools and brick-and-mortar universities, and the prospect of steady employment somewhere within them, confer certain more immediate incentives: social status, health benefits (insurance and health care being perhaps the only racket bigger and messier than schools and academia), leadership, and the chimera of choice within the massive bureaucracy. Cycling back into it, tilting at its windmills, reaching for that golden ring on its merry-go-round, the canned music playing, is tempting. 

Speaking openly about subbing--taking it seriously enough to bother to--is not wholly absent from the zeitgeist. In the perennial glut of publications about the woes of the education system, you'll come across some about substitute teachers: a critique of subs, a big book that came out not long ago. I have not read them, so I can't comment aside from noting that they exist.

I don't know, but would be interested to find out, if anyone yet has proposed or tried to bring to scale something like the business model I'm operating on: working as a substitute teacher so as to be able to fund and have time for online and extracurricular projects. To just explore this a little. 

First, you might reflect upon the sense in which school itself is a substitute, a surrogate, for a real community of learning. Public schools, and for many people college, are the closest thing we have to a unifying ritual or rite of passage; for many they stand in loco parentis quite literally, providing social workers and psychologists and role models wrapped into the person of the teacher. Increasingly, schools do not come free to students: in exchange for the massive tax expenditures on them, they collect enormous reams of standardized data from them. 

But technology, much as its driven the test craze, can also help recover all that time which is being funneled into testing. What schools are not teaching, there is still time and space to learn there. With internet and a device, it is possible for students to read practically anything. With basic literacy, the resources to become complete autodidacts are at their fingertips, so that socialization is not the only thing they are doing at school. The crucial thing is for them to choose to utilize their time that way, rather than simply playing on their phones. If they understand how dire their plight is, by high school they should be motivated to really learn for themselves and make up for the time that has been stolen from them; up until then, they can't be harmed too badly as long as they remain spirited and rebellious but stop short of actual violence. 

Essentially, this is the line of thinking that leads to my business model. If schools have become impossible to teach in, then what? Recognize that there are other ways!

Besides the personal enrichment that comes of learning at one's own pace and teaching outside the classroom--the same thing looked at from the student and the new teacher's standpoint, respectively--there's a strong economic argument, I think, to be made for this model. 

Here is the substitute's day: a commute, which varies but during which you can listen to music or podcasts or audio books, and ride your bike and get some exercise if that's an option; five or so hours in which there is either hands-on practice in classroom management and continual opportunities to hear from kids about their lives, or, if the work which has been left to do is silent study-type stuff, you have time to read and research on your own, or frequently there's some blend of the two during your day. The teacher for whom you're subbing likely has at least one free period, where you may have to cover another class which hasn't been filled, or else you'll have that uninterrupted time to read and write, or, if you know other staff in the building, you can go and observe a class taught by the best teacher in the school, learning from their best practices, and maybe even learning some content!--unless they have a free period, in which case you get to talk to them; you can, if you're ambitious, conduct interviews, recording your observations. There's endless potential for substitute teachers to conduct surveys and gather data and anecdotal stories, hearing arguments from different perspectives about any number of critical topics we have not yet begun to understand--I just write this blog, but some of it could one day be worked up for publication. 

As for how schools can save money, rather than taking potshots at subs, the obvious thing to do is to never buy another textbook or pay for another curriculum. The curriculum and professional development rackets are ones I'd dearly love to get into in some ways, but then I think I'd sooner see them undermined and finally jettisoned completely.

To begin to dismantle the teacher-certification racket, I would advocate for having the substitute teaching profession blended with the pipeline for new teachers as a kind of apprenticeship program, learning on the job. Have student teachers on call as subs, who can do their coursework online and meet occasionally during evenings as a cohort, or with mentors during free periods; retain a list of retired teachers who can serve as mentors; and by all means include administrators, who need to see what actually goes on in the classroom once a week or so. 

For more drastic ideas, try these: no new buildings--refurbish empty big-box stores and vacant McMansions. Expand online offerings--which are mostly free, unless you pay for live discussion groups and tutoring, which would be well worth it, and much less expensive than the current system. Which gets back into the personal enrichment side. 

Like Peterson is reportedly doing, we can start by offering reading groups on classic and contemporary works. I'd also stress the importance of service and vocational options for students not interested in much reading and writing on texts, but still incorporating for them journal-keeping and journalistic or research writing, personal interviews and oral history projects. The human touch, the feeling tone, as it comes through in Studs Terkel's works, is the other side of the coin of critical thought, and there is no better way to coin it than by reading, writing, listening, speaking. Now we still have to give people a sense of history, of connection and relationship, as much as knowledge about it, which is easily looked up. We desperately need perspective and judgment, to discern and account for the bias inherent in news and history, to recognize the false and its intentions and thus glean a grain of truth even from the worst propaganda, just as much as we need to cultivate an appreciation for what is truly, awe-inspiringly great. 

Maybe none of this quite qualifies as a business plan. Once it's a little more developed it might take the form of a non-profit to allow teachers to take part in seminars on great books. In general outline, you'd supply a certificate of some sort and charge money, so that there is something tangible at stake and a certain level of commitment required. To offset the cost, though, large donors could be found to offer stipends for the cohorts of teachers--and to meet and discuss amongst themselves, much like the Touchstones executive seminars--and here we might do some arithmetic: why not an initial grant of a million dollars, by no means impossible if you know the right person; or to scale down a bit, start from the more reasonable $50K figure that would be enough to pay the initial expenses for the facilitators, so that if each teacher paid $100, that would be 500 teachers reached during the year, 25 groups of 20 at a time, or 50 of 10--and a portion of the cost could even be paid out to them, say $20, for their time and counting towards professional development, or as scholarships, which would still leave a salary fund of $40K. The trouble is finding someone willing to put up the money, and even if that’s only a question of having connections, then there’s the matter of being one among many who’ve probably had this idea, who are making this sort of proposal and wanting to get to do this for a living.

Talking about it again not too long ago with a friend, he invited me to start sending five emails a day to drum up donors and interest. Maybe I will; maybe you can help me by sharing this with just one or two other people you think might be interested. Much like with the incredulous marketing person Alex was talking to at the gym, who couldn't believe we've done nothing yet to market it, aside from social media, the idea of doing something with this beckons all around. Meanwhile we go along merrily producing content: proposing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the next side quest, still busily making episodes about Final Fantasy VII and Harry Potter, working on our night school, and so on...

For more along these lines, see Thoughts, Rooted, etc. If you or someone you know would like to contribute, we'd love to hear from you! Donations are accepted, but at this stage I'd really just like words: comments, questions, shares. Thank you for your time!