ArchivePage 2 of 52

Once Again Back it’s the Incredible…

Published
by
Luke
on May 18, 2010
in BLSCI, Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging and Pedagogy
. 3 Comments

the blog animal, ZOE, blogfessor number one.

For the second straight year, we’re awarding the Blogfessor of the Year Award to Zoe Sheehan Saldana, of Baruch’s Fine and Performing Arts Department. The award comes with priority support from the Schwartz Institute on all online publishing endeavors. Of course, Zoe already has that because she’s so awesome.

Zoe developed three sites on Blogs@Baruch this academic year.  Last Fall, she did a Do-it-Yourself Publishing site that used FeedWordPress to syndicate nineteen individual journals where students documented making their own books from scratch (some digital, some not).

This Spring, she used a site in her Basic Graphic Communication course… here’s a description of her course and how she used her course blog from her “About” page:

…this course

This course introduces the graphic design process and methodology. Conceptual and creative thinking is stressed and understood through problem-solving assignments based on research, readings, and classroom demonstrations. The student is introduced to graphic design principles and exposed to historical and contemporary models and current standards of advertising and design. The Macintosh computer is included as the primary graphic design environment. This class is a prerequisite for all advanced Graphic Communication courses. Complete course guide available here, as a PDF file.

…this blog

This blog is a venue for presenting, exploring, and discussing work, ideas, and topics pertaining to the course.

And, finally, together we developed a site for the Focus on Photography Exhibit which served initially as a processing space for members of the Baruch community to submit photos that they wished to be considered for a physical exhibit (which opened last week at the Mishkin Gallery).  The site’s since evolved into an online companion displaying close to 200 images submitted by Baruch students, faculty, and staff.  The submissions process used the TDO Mini Forms plugin to collect information from applicants, allow them to upload their images, and then it published those images to password protected pages where the exhibit judges could asses them. After decisions had been made about which images were accepted for the physical exhibit and which were not, Zoe hacked the Monotone WordPress theme (ideal for photo blogging) to create the online exhibit, which will live beyond the one at Miskhin. The amazing photographic ability of Baruch folks is a topic for another post, but I encourage you to take your time and click through the exhibit to see the fantastic images these folks have captured.

What’s so great about Zoe, beyond her gracious personality and charm, is that she’s exactly what an educational technologist like me needs to get better at what I do: someone who asks questions that I don’t know the answers to, patiently awaits the answer, and works to arrive at a consensus around what can be done with the tools, time, and resources available.  She’s a great collaborator and a creative teacher.  And, as she showed in talks she gave at last year’s CUNY WordCampEd and this year at the Baruch Teaching and Technology Conference, she has a strong grasp of the pedagogical, political, and philosophical impulse behind what we’re trying to do with educational technology at the Schwartz Institute.  As her course blogs and her own art show, she’s an O.E.: Original Edupunk, and both Baruch and the Schwartz Institute are lucky to have her around.

image credit: lumax art

An open letter to the Coen Brothers

Published
by
Lauren
on May 14, 2010
in Fun and Media
. 9 Comments

Dear Joel and Ethan,

So, last week I was reading this article complaining about the state of movies today by film producer Linda Obst. She writes that the only ones that seem to get made these days are those based on comic books and video games, with lots of explosions, dumb laughs, and hot boys under the age of 24. Obst blames the recession, arguing that studios have no money, and are therefore completely unwilling to take on the risk of producing movies that are actually thoughtful or well-written if they don’t have sparkly vampires or require 3-D glasses. (Which doesn’t really make sense to me–wouldn’t movies with big stars and killer special effects require tons of money to produce? Do you have any insight on this?)

I guess I had this article somewhere in the back of my mind when I read this story about diploma mills (h/t Jessie Daniels) about a physicist who happened to see a viral pop-up ad for a bogus university, which somehow led to him falling down the rabbit hole, unearthing a vast transnational network of scam artists. It is a fascinating read full of intrigue, as Dr. George Gollin teams up with the FTC and the Secret Service in a sting operation (OPERATION GOLD SEAL!) to chase and bring down diploma mills. It involves the Liberian embassy, a clandestine meeting at the Mayflower Hotel in DC, and Pentagon officials with fake degrees. It’s like some Cold War-era spy thriller, only about diploma mills instead of assassination and state secrets! Who knew?

You guys are smart. I bet you know where this is going. Please, please, please turn Operation Gold Seal into a movie. It seems right up your alley, a kind of madcap noir. Forget about what Obst said about what kind of movies can be produced these days. I’m sure you are just as sick of the CGI-ification of every single cartoon and toy from the ’80s as I am.

Can’t you just picture Russell Crowe as the rogue physics professor? Or perhaps you’d like to go with an older, more distinguished type like Ben Kingsley or Michael Caine. John Cho and George Clooney would make awesome Secret Service agents, and Holly Hunter and Jeff Bridges can be the couple in Spokane who cooked up the diploma mill scheme.

Okay, and just in case Obst is right, how about a compromise: throw in some of those kids from “Twilight” as undergraduate research assistants, and we’re golden.

Thanks for listening.

Sincerely,

A fan

Technical Changes Causing Cultural Changes. Yes and/or No.

Published
by
Szidonia
on May 13, 2010
in Baruch College, Symposium and Technology
. 3 Comments

This blog post is prompted by Clay Shirky’s argument at our 10th Annual Symposium. In his keynote speech, Shirky addressed the fast technical advancement we are experiencing globally and argued that these speedy technical changes are “causing cultural changes.” His thought-provoking point has stayed with me because I think that this cause and effect relationship deserves some untangling.

Doubtless that, as Shirky showed in his speech, as well as in his book, Here Comes Everybody, the increased access to the public fora of the internet has led to increased awareness of a vox populi able to perform organized action and carry out successful grassroots movements. The internet and sites like Facebook or Meetup has also contributed to a dramatic re-definition of the personal and the private by making public information hitherto perceived off-limits. Yet, do these changes amount to “cultural changes” indeed? Does the unprecedented flow of information via technical innovations affect our moral and ethical values, causing a profound shift in cultural norms, or does it lead “only” to changes in the way we continue to perform these values, adding speed and efficiency perhaps, without altering the basic structures of our various cultures? And shouldn’t we argue that, instead of having a unidirectional relationship between technical changes and cultural changes, these changes are mutually influential, meaning that given cultural norms also determine how technical innovations are being put to use in a given cultural context? Yes, there is a universalizing, levelling and westernizing effect that reaches across the globe affecting those with access to the internet while leaving what I assume is still the larger part of the world’s population relatively immune to such changes. And then we again end up with a rather elite western notion of things going our way without really bothering to note that while we do have a large share in the monopoly over the information highways, there are still many sideroads that remain unaffected by us.

Storytelling and business ethics

Published
by
Linell
on May 12, 2010
in Baruch College and Symposium
. 0 Comments

Bernard L. Schwartz spoke at the Schwartz Communications Institute symposium on April 30th. “I’m a capitalist,” he said, and a “big D democrat.” Schwartz narrated the financial crisis from the perspective of his own political and moral values, that a company has a responsibility to its employers, shareholders, and the public at large. He spoke about capitalism as a system in which work supports safety and human flourishing. This, I thought like a person seeing something she’d only read about in books for the first time, is a capitalist social democrat. But I heard the story Schwartz told first, not the ideology, the way he told the story was my introduction to a particular perspective, formed by experience and knowledge that I myself do not have.

This semester, a professor whose class I’m supporting asked his students to give their opinion on whether or not technological development should be regulated, if it should be up to corporations and market demand, or if government should intervene. The students’ opinions, values, and beliefs varied widely. I found everyone’s perspective intriguing and compelling. As with Schwartz, hearing individuals speak about their economic values and opinions humanized what have predominantly been abstract or historical economic concepts to me. Cass Sunstein’s point that the proliferation of media is making it less likely for people with different political affiliations to talk to each other seemed right, as I realized how exceptional this situation was for me.

While each of the students seemed insightful, willing to probe and test their ideas against other opinions and contradicting evidence, entirely capable of reflective judgment about economics and ethics, it was very clear to me that this was the first time they’d been asked this question in their time at Baruch. I looked at the listing of courses, and found a course called “Ethics, Economics and the Business System,” in the Philosophy Department, a 3000 level class. I wanted to make it a general requirement.

On a recent Charlie Rose show about Goldman Sachs, Newsweek writer and Princeton journalism and writing professor Evan Thomas was asked if the recent scandal is going to keep “the best and brightest” students from the firm.

April 27, Charlie Rose.

Charlie Rose: Is Goldman Sachs a place that the brightest that the smartest people coming out of universities want to go to work, if they want to go to Wall Street, that’s where they want to go?

Evan Thomas: I teach at Princeton, believe me Princeton kids want to go to Goldman. Oh yes, overwhelmingly, even more now. The message that’s Goldman is bad news has not filtered down to the class at Princeton, lemme tell ya. At Princeton pretty much everybody wants to go to Goldman Sachs.

Charlie Rose: What does that say about the values of kids in college today? That’s a question for a whole other show.

Evan Thomas: But I’m telling you, the mystique of Wall Street has not died, even as Congress tries to destroy it. Kids still. You know why? Cause they think it’s a sure bet. They still think if you go to Goldman, Goldman is going to navigate these waters. I’m still going to have a house in Greenwich and a boat.

Charlie Rose: And a G5.

Evan Thomas and Charlie Rose laugh.

Gillian Tett: But they also join it thinking, I can do it for a couple of years, I’ll keep my soul, and then I can get out with the money. Now one of the reasons why these emails (from one of Golman’s traders) are so fascinating is they illustrate very graphically the kind of conflicts joining Goldman Sachs would actually face. He hasn’t been there that long, he can see the contradictions and the hypocrisy of what he’s doing, and yet he’s still playing the game.

I wonder how much opportunity Baruch students have to explore their own ethical perspective. I’m teaching a public speaking class this summer, and hoping to make it a personal essay assignment. I wonder how often it comes up for Baruch students, as they make their way to graduation, and if professors here would echo Evan Thomas’s “overwhelmingly, even more” characterization of Princeton. I was glad that, from my limited experience, I wouldn’t.

Irresistible Prompts: Engineering Participation

Published
by
Claire
on May 11, 2010
in Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, CUNY and EdTech
. 3 Comments

In early April, Luke Waltzer wrote a post introducing Performing Diasporas: Identities in Motion, an initiative that seeks to raise the profile of the Baruch Performing Arts Center and to infuse the performing arts into the curriculum. To this end, artists-in-residence Maya Lilly, Randy Weston, and Mahayana Landowne will lead a series of workshops for incoming students that interrogate issues of culture and identity in the context of globalization and late capitalism.

This is where Blogs@Baruch enters the picture. I joined Luke in a training session to introduce WordPress to the 2010 peer mentors, each of whom will lead a section of Freshman Seminar come September. Before our session with the peer mentors, we discussed some of the high and low points of the 2009 blogging season in Freshman Seminar. It should be said at the outset that Blogs@Baruch’s support of Freshman Seminar was amazingly successful in 2009 especially in light of the limited time for planning. Blogs@Baruch supported 60 section blogs with 20 students a week for a total of 1200 freshman bloggers, each of whom were tasked with writing six blog posts over the course of the semester, one after each of the required workshops.

But feedback from the peer mentors indicated that buy-in was low among freshmen. Last year’s peer mentors expressed frustration at having to chase after freshmen and repeatedly remind them to complete their blogging assignments. They also told us that the blogging assignments themselves left something to be desired, and that their procedural nature (to report back on the workshop just attended) tended to put a damper on students’ enthusiasm for the task. And finally, the peer mentors expressed a desire to customize the look of the section blogs.

We took each of these critiques seriously and decided to rethink the approach of Blogs@Baruch to Freshman Seminar in light of the concerns raised by peer mentors.  Luke already had plays to open up the WordPress blogging environment, including giving more control to peer mentors over theme selection and plug-in activation, and incorporating social networking functionality through BuddyPress to create a more networked and collegial environment for peer mentors and first year students alike. Luke invited me to join the team that oversees Freshman Seminar to help him address the second critique, that is, to rethink the role of blogging in the Freshman Seminar curriculum. And so last Friday we collaboratively facilitated two sessions with peer mentors, part of which was a brainstorming session to develop more compelling blog post prompts.

Idle brainstorm moment
Creative Commons License photo credit: everdred

The blog post prompts that follow invite students to reflect on the processes of identity construction through various lenses. In different ways, these blog post prompts encourage students to integrate online, social, and multimedia tools into their student identities, and to consider how aspects of their personal history can inform and ultimately enrich their academic work. If they seem repetitive, that’s because they are. Students are actually not required to complete any of them — which is a whole different issue — but in any case, we are hoping to entice them to do some. The idea is to make the blog post prompts so interesting that students feel compelled to do them!

This is what we’ve come up with so far:

1. If you were an iPhone app, which one would be you and why?

2. Use Grooveshark to make a playlist, a soundtrack for your life, and write a blog post explaining the significance of each song.

3. Cheap eats: Write a restaurant review of a inexpensive lunch spot in the Baruch area or around where you live. Include a photograph of the food.

4. Audit your Facebook account, and write about it; OR Google yourself, and share what’s true and what’s not.

5. Pick a stereotype that you think you embody and expand upon, shatter, or embrace it.

6. Consumer identities: What are the five most important brands that you use throughout the day? Why do you think you are drawn to these brands.

7. Choose a cartoon character that is in some way like you, post a picture or a video of this character, and write a blog post explaining your reasoning.

8. Using Paint or a similar program, paint how you see yourself, and post it with an explanation.

9. Record everything you eat in a day and share it. Reflect on what this reveals about your culture and identity.

10. Take photos or record a video of your commute to school. Describe the various spaces you pass through during this process. For instance you might compare the experience of being on the street in your neighborhood, versus being on the bus or the train, versus at Baruch. What stands out to you?

11. Find images related to your heritage on Flickr, and write a blog post explaining their significance.

12. Write a post about your favorite genre of art, and share an example.

13. Take and share a photo of something at Baruch that doesn’t work OR of some ironically defaced signage in the city at large.

14. If you had $1m and had to give it to a charity, which  and why? OR Respond to an open ended, critical thinking philosophical/ethical question, like for example: Is it acceptable to lie under certain circumstances?

15. Search for your name or an idea about you on flickr, and post the first photo that comes up. Compare it to a photo that you think more resembles you.

I plan to revise this list of prompts based on the feedback of the ever-supportive edtech community at CUNY and beyond. Any suggestions? Help me make these prompts irresistible!

Looking Backwards: The U.S. History Survey Course Starting with Obama

Published
by
Tom
on May 10, 2010
in teaching
. 6 Comments

The curriculum in every history course I have ever taken has shared a defining characteristic:  chronological order.  I am looking forward to breaking with this model when I teach Modern American History at Baruch College this summer.

My course units will be standard, and follow Eric Foner’s popular Give Me Liberty! textbook and companion document reader, Voices of Freedom (special thanks to David Parsons for putting me on to these texts).  However, I will present these units backwards relative to the traditional history curriculum.

As described in the course catalogue, this course “surveys United States history from the post-Civil War years to recent times.”  My class be starting with recent times.  Students’ first reading will be chapter 28 of the textbook (“September 11 and the Next American Century”).  The day before the final exam, we’ll finish with the opening chapter (“Reconstruction”).

For over a decade I have aspired to write a history textbook in reverse-chronological order.  The introduction and opening chapter would pose a series of questions about present day society.  Subsequent chapters would incrementally drop further into the past seeking answers to those questions.  I don’t expect that this format would drastically change the content covered.  However, it would encourage a different mindset while reading, creating a sense of searching increasingly deeper into the past to uncover the roots of modern problems and success stories.  There is nothing in the standard curriculum that prohibits this type of thinking, and good history textbooks frequently queue the reader to draw connections between the present and the past.  By the graduate level, all students are expected to give this type of thinking priority, no matter what order the material is presented. But undergraduates (especially those in introductory courses) need practice in developing the skills and background knowledge necessary to read a history textbook critically.

I don’t have time these days to write a textbook, but I do have the opportunity to try out the approach in my classroom.  During the opening weeks of my past classes, my lecture on the relevance of history and the importance of reading sources critically is normally followed by a sudden plunge back in time.  But not this summer.  I made my final decision about the reverse-chronological course design when I was preparing the assignments for the opening classes, requiring students to interpret the meaning of primary documents from the corresponding period.  I believe that the survey course should introduce students to historical methods, and the basic strategies for historical inquiry, including critical reading of primary and secondary sources and communication of historical arguments in written, spoken, and visual formats.  The first set of documents are correspondence and reports from the late-1860s and 1870s; the last set of documents are memos and emails generated in the last few years on controversial subjects like torture and the “War on Terror.”  When teaching students the skill of contextualization and critical reading, it seems natural to begin with the easier materials (learn to ride the bike on a flat surface first, then practice on a hill).  The most recent documents are naturally easier to relate to.  It takes a lifetime of training to work with documents from the 1870s with the same contextual understanding as documents that appeared in your inbox this morning.  Eric Foner is a leading expert on Reconstruction, so the gap between his contextual knowledge of the 1870s and the 2000s is slim.  He recognizes and appreciates the contingency of events that transpired over a century ago, as well as their relevance to the present.  However, for a student in an introductory course, this is not the case.

I have a similar goal in teaching students to read the textbook.  With the reverse-chronological format, the last chapter covers events such as the war in Afghanistan, lending itself well to students’ critical reading.  They are less likely to take the text at face-value, and instead question what is included and excluded from the text.  The reverse-chronological reading breaks the flow of “the story” reminding students that we are not reading a straight-forward narrative of the past, but rather a guidebook to a more dynamic construction of historical knowledge.

I am not the first person to try out this format, although it does seem to be rarely practiced.  The American Historical Association’s monthly publication Perspectives ran an article in 2005 titled “Reinventing the Survey: Pedagogical Strategies for Engagement,” discussing the merits of a few different twists on the survey course, reverse-chronology included.  However, it did not go into detail about the success or failure of the experiment.  I would love to hear from any of you who have tried anything similar to this, or if you have general ideas or advice on the topic.

Clay Shirky at the 2010 Symposium

Published
by
Luke
on May 7, 2010
in Internet and Symposium
. 1 Comment

We were very lucky to have Clay Shirky provide the morning keynote at our Tenth Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication Intensive Instruction.

We were very unlucky in that we could not get the live stream to work.  But we’re happy to be able to bring Clay’s talk to you now:

Everybody’s Canvas

Published
by
Linell
on May 5, 2010
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

My favorite defacement of an ad in a subway station began as an image of the New York skyline in a hazy sunset. I don’t remember what the ad was for, but I don’t think the designers had figured that it was too soon after 9/11 to depict a reddish, smokey skyline without evoking dread and sadness in the commuters who rushed by, barely taking in the image and definitely not noticing the brand. It was great to see how the contributions to this poster added up over a week or so. First, yes, there was a magic marker drawing of an airplane headed towards the top of a building. Then, few days later a cartoon in ballpoint pen of a little alien appeared, hovering in a spaceship over the East River. A smiling Martian, with cute curling antennae. Bit by bit, other drawings started to fill up the sky, drawn with different pens, in different styles. There was a flying alligators, and even a yelling George Bush stick figure. I would pass this poster in its many phases, and feel really happy about my fellow New Yorkers for collectively and creatively remaking what had maybe been a disturbing and insensitive ad agency’s miscalculation. I thought of this graffiti as a great way to respond to the impolite media that was too quick to jump on the event and fictionalize it.

I can tend to read too much into things, but this year I began to feel like the way some subway posters were defaced was asking for attention beyond the usual idle tearing or tagging. An ad for the movie “Leap Year,” suddenly seemed to actually look like the strangling weed the romantic comedy about a desperate single woman actually is. Someone had either tested under the top layer of the poster to see what was underneath, or had remembered the previous ad for a horror movie (“Wolfman”) in the same place. Someone sliced pieces of the first layer of the bright green “Leap Year” to show twisted dark vines beneath it. The heroine of the romantic comedy now looked threatened by the clutches of a monster, and it was the encircling grasp of another movie. Was it a feminist cut-up, or a coincidence? And was I over-interpreting? I took a picture, and showed it to a friend. He said, “Hm. Maybe. It’s hard to tell.”

Later, a sad face appeared inside the poster for the “Tori and Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood” show.

And, soon after that, a knife and the same tangled vines from “Wolfman” appeared between Jennifer Lopez and some actor guy in the ad for “Back Up Plan.”

My favorite one (sadly, I didn’t get a photo) was of two morning talk show hosts. After their hyper-groomed and hugely smiling faces had been up for a week or so, the subway razor artist peeled around their heads to reveal much bigger heads beneath them. Now it looked as if huge monster heads were surging out of the perfectly suited morning show host bodies.

Eventually, I put my question to Google and turned up a video and an article in the Greenpoint Gazette about an artist who goes by Poster Boy.

At the Schwartz Institute Symposium last week, keynote speaker Clay Shirky described how the internet allows people to critique and adapt systems and institutions. What had previously been one-way communication (television, print ads, etc) has become two-way and multiple-way (Amazon, Facebook). Sharkey succinctly and compelling theorized what he calls a revolution in communication behavior that comes from adapting to these new technologies. I’ve been thinking of how Shirky’s explanations of the effects and significance of new technologies could also be useful towards theorizing older technologies and behaviors. I’ve thought of public art that did a kind of political, public critique of being a 90’s phenomenon, but at that time it was associated with singular artists. I like not being able to tell when subway ad defacement is intentional, when it is the work of someone who considers himself an artist, and when it is more random. It makes me look at these images differently.

For other examples of subway art (and better photography) see this article in New York S8#%ty.

The Humanities Drive; Skills Ride Along

Published
by
Michael
on May 4, 2010
in Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Higher Education, Pedagogy, To Ponder, What if . . ., Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction and teaching
. 2 Comments

I am going to reveal a hope of mine; I have long kept this hope closeted, as it seems very likely to bring me disgrace. I hope that Writing Across the Curriculum and Communication Across the Curriculum programs might one day render Composition obsolete.

The development of a specialized knowledge of writing instruction has been one of the most important achievements of higher education in the last forty years. This specialized knowledge of how to teach students to write will remain important. In fact, the incredible utility of this knowledge means that it cannot be confined to specialists! The birth of WAC, analogous to the invention of the web-link, has the potential to completely transform the way we conceive of the essential material of higher education. No longer can we isolate writing instruction to language classes. Could this be the idea that reverses a hundred-and-twenty year trend of increasing specialization in the curriculum?

Okay. So, once again, I have resorted to polemic (here, in the form of a strange sort-of-Hegelean fantasy). However, my conviction is a serious one. The humanities are ill served by the teaching of writing prior to the more fundamental questions. Why are we here, what do we do, how do we form the bases for our beliefs? These deeper questions, which students ponder on their own, are seldom addressed in their course work in Humanities disciplines, even though these are the questions that motivate humanistic study.

I have, tentatively, shared these ideas with my colleagues. The ideas are not well received. “If you can’t write, you can’t think. How can you work on big ideas if you can hardly sort out your words into sentences or your sentences into paragraphs?”

Further confession: I am either so prescient or so far-fetched in my thinking that I even like to imagine WAC and CAC will lead to curricular solutions to the economic problems of today’s higher education in the humanities. There are too many graduate students. Graduate education takes too long. Professorships become scarce as institutions increasingly rely on adjunct- and other temporary appointments. Meanwhile, enrollments continue to climb, especially at junior and community colleges. A caste system has formed where only “the best” professors can teach original courses, and an underclass of highly educated professionals prepare the masses by running them through a byzantine system of prerequisites for contact with the elite specialists.

Specialization in the sciences is important. In the humanities, specialization is like a derivatives market; it takes something that has a basic function, and, in trying to increase the wealth this thing produces, it fouls the thing’s basic functionality.

Let every graduate teach what he wants, but have him also armed to teach writing. Instead of, “how can you work on big ideas if you can’t write a sentence,” let it be demanded, “how can you build advanced knowledge, if you can’t teach basic writing?” The system of levels and prerequisites will fall away. The humanities will drive, and skills will ride along.

Is this really such a disgraceful idea?

Dangerous(ly Misrepresented) Minds

Published
by
Talia
on May 3, 2010
in To Ponder and teaching
. 0 Comments

This American Life recently ran an interesting story about a memoir written by millionaire Steve Poizner.  The book recounts his volunteer half-year as a social studies teacher at Mount Pleasant High School in East San Jose, California.  Poizner’s portrait of a dilapidated, violent, underachieving school in a stinky, blighted low-income neighborhood stirred the indignation of members of the school community and district, who maintain that the school scores about average academically, has a low dropout rate, is not at all dangerous, and is located in a well-kept middle-class neighborhood.  In other words, Poizner lied, or to be more generous to him, made mistakes in his perceptions of the school.Class Dismissed
Creative Commons License photo credit: motionblur

Poizner’s motives for exaggerating Mount Pleasant’s struggles seem clear: he first ran for public office two months after leaving the school, and is currently a candidate for governor of California.  An excerpt from his memoir is posted on his campaign site.  But the story made me wonder: what biases and motives do we embed in our own representations of what happens in our classrooms?  Isn’t even the most humble, self-effacing teacher story from “the trenches” (as Poizner calls the high school classroom) a manipulation of power, since it only reveals the teacher’s angle?  When is it fair to turn our experiences in the classroom into a self-aggrandizing anecdote for a job interview, a cautionary tale for a blog post, or a punchline for our friends—and when is it a betrayal of our students’ confidence?