Month: April 2014

I’m willing to admit that this response may cause a lot of controversy.

If you haven’t heard about this case before, it all started with an 11 yr old boy who made a Facebook post claiming how gangsta he was. His family discovered the post and decided to make a post of their own. The boy was smacked in the face and spanked with a belt to the butt over 50 times, first by the mother and then  the grandmother. The child was required to hold on the the arms of a chair and not move while being spanked.

Before we get into the incident itself and the right vs. wrong debate, I need to point out how much i’m bothered by the portrayals of the incident. Michigan’s NBC affiliate said he was abused for ‘posting false information to his Facebook page’. Meanwhile CNN focused on the fact that this was a public shaming as the beating was posted to Facebook, and that there could’ve been alternative punishments such as taking away the boy’s Facebook page.

I will be the first to admit that I don’t know the entire story here. However, I did see enough of the video to hear and understand what the parents reasoning was. The parents claimed that the child was trying to act like a gangsta, starting down a road of violence and gang behaviors that is all too common for inner-city black kids. They wanted to teach him a lesson before the world had a chance to teach him that lesson. By that I believe they meant that they would give him a beating he would never forget, but not the kind he’d never survive–such as the kind of beating you’d get on the street. This reasoning was completely lost or even disregarded in the news reports I reviewed. In other words, the news refused to allow any sort of justification for the action, instead looking at the act itself and instantly labeling it unjustifiable. This is the problem with the media: We have a tendency in our media to remove context from a situation in an effort to make everything black and white or even to adjust the perception of situations to suit our particular audience or ratings needs. There is no question this kid was beaten severely, but there is also no news outlet that is willing to entertain a reason why. I get it. The savagery of the attack is what we are supposed to focus on. If you look at it in the dimension of relatable ‘objects’ or ‘ideas’ we are seeing a child being brutally spanked and even slapped by several adults–behaviors that we tell ourselves are never okay. In fact, several news outlets went on to say that spanking is never okay.

Guess what? Spanking is sometimes okay. If that means CPS is gonna bust down my door and take my kids away now then so be it. The fact remains that sometimes spanking is the proper course of action for disciplining my child. Note: I didn’t say your child because the relationship between you and yours is as foreign to me as gefilte fish in a jar on ice. I’m with my kids constantly and know their needs and their limitations. I know what buttons to push when I need to leave a lasting message. Would I do what that family did to that kid? Not at all. While I understand the need for a good spanking, the length and scope of it went beyond what I would call acceptable, but once again, I don’t know their situation. I don’t know what passes for a spanking in that neighborhood. My mother once beat me with a brush until it broke and then got upset because I broke her brush. I know many kids who had to go out back and pick out the stick momma would beat them with. All of these stories are part of the Afro-American cultural lore and, in a very fundamental way, exist as a result of the slave culture (a conversation for another time).

I’m not prepared to say that what that family did was right. I will say it was stupid. Posting it sent exactly the message they wanted to send, but also likely punked the kid in such a way that he’ll be forced into violence in order to regain any semblance of a reputation. I am also not going to say that spanking is wrong. It is a part of multiple cultures, no matter how much it is being pushed out of the mainstream media (and in some senses White-American) culture that immediately criminalizes all acts of spanking without heed of context.

I’ve been reminded more and more recently of how social media not only keeps us connected but also escalates friendships in a way that would not happen without social media. There used to be a time when we had to write letters to stay connected. There was a beauty to long form communication; a certain elegance and respect to the way we spoke to one another. The new world order of hashtags and tweets strips us of much of that elegance for brute and obvious communication. If we reduce everything to in your face arguments we lose much of what makes are language beautiful.

Some Thoughts:

1. There are a significant amount of people that watch Hallmark films and dream of having Hallmark moments. All of this points to one very clear fact: I am a cynical sonofabitch.
2. I think I want to write a 39 Clues book. I’ve never written YA and the mere admission of the desire is likely to get me laughed at (not because it is a bad genre, but because switching genres is unbelievably hard). That being said, I want to write a story for my kids.
3. BlackBox is going to miss the boat. They are trying too hard to sell this lead as a sexual creature but are at the same time labeling her sexuality as a result of being off her meds. That isn’t the framework of a hit drama.

A lot of scattered thoughts running through my head, so have at thee:

 

1. First three weeks are extremely important for establishing a learning environment. Listening to my students discuss their various classes moves that idea from theory to evidence—albeit anecdotal. One of my classes this semester ranks as the most difficult in my no-longer-brief history of teaching. The students are learning to a point, but that point doesn’t rise to the standard of acceptability in my book and clearly doesn’t satisfy my desire to have them leave feeling fulfilled. Consider it the perfect storm of new strategies, early absences, an instructor who gave too much time on task with less than perfect instruction, and a student base with varied expectations which were largely different from the reality of the situation as it unfolded on the ground. I’m looking forward to the growth opportunities available from the end of semester letter.

 

2. Took one of the franchise boys to see The Winter Soldier today. Upon second showing I am convinced that there is quite a bit of storytelling going on between Col. Fury and Black Widow. She has ridiculous daddy issues and this movie is about her learning that one of the two people she trusts above all else doesn’t necessarily trust her or feel about her as she does about him. There is a lot of story there, and given the number of short films that exist between the movies, it is likely I’m missing some of the nuance. I enjoy this budding relationship.

My class is a petri dish. I drop in ideas and methods backed by research and use the time I have to create a highly knucklehead resistant strain of academia. From time to time I find something that works and begin anew, using the working technique as a base for creating an even more evolved form of teaching and learning. I think the addition of gaming as a framework is one that is going to stick. I turned my entire class into a game. It didn’t go perfectly and it still isn’t finished, but the early results are showing me high engagement and interest–even if the topics don’t always get them fired up.

I called it Dominion and blogged about it months ago. Recently I discovered that there is a SyFy channel show called Dominion slated to come out in June. So much for calling my class that. Its probably for the best, because I’ve moved away from the in-character concept of Dominion slightly. With a strong background in RPGs I expected my students to be able to assume the role of a character within their class game, but gave them neither the tools or incentive to do so. Instead I am going to focus on project based learning built around the competition of gaming.

Thanks to one of my newest co-workers, my newest thematic focus is tribes. I want to pair that with mythology in order to develop a game for the summer and fall that works so well that it convinces students to come back for more. Summer is coming, so maybe I’ll finally have time to focus on that enormous yet fulling task.

I’ve been holding a series of classes based around the idea of value. I’m seeking to uncover what student’s value and what they see as important enough in their lives to suffer for. The key to these conversations has been the idea of passion and what it means. To most passion is conflated with love. There is truth in that belief, but passion is more truthfully about suffering and chiefly about the willingness to suffer for some goal or greater purpose.

The particular class I’m sharing these ideas with is teeming with young minds—teens and post-teens filled with the belief of their own immortality and hesitant to care about anything more than the smoke in front of their faces. Occasionally I’ll get an older student in the bunch who gets it; gets the opportunity they’ve been handed. As a husband and father I would welcome the opportunity to focus, if just for 75 minutes twice a week, on figuring out what keeps my heart beating and how to better myself. The classroom is exactly that opportunity, but I don’t see many students having the wherewithal to take advantage of that. Instead they wait impatiently for the moment to pass so they can get a grade and get back to their lives.

We miss so much while rushing to the next tomorrow. Could it be that there were opportunities to become a better person today?

When I woke up this morning it felt like I had unfinished business. I’d left the matter of The Winter Soldier to be continued, largely because I couldn’t stay awake long enough to compose a sentence (more on that below). What I was trying to get at last night was the brilliance of Marvel Studios. See, I am a middling fan of Agents of Shield and I love that the show and the films walk hand in hand. When Thor came out the movie became a focus of the show twice–once as a clean up episode and again when Sif returned to put a foot in someone’s buttocks. This happened again for The Winter Soldier, and here it absolutely had to. See, the future of S.H.I.E.L.D. hangs in the balance and with the film changing everything, and we get to see it begin to unfold in the episode leading up to the movie, and now that i’ve seen this film, I must see what happens to the show.

The film did not suck. It followed the previous film closely and did a wonderful job of introducing a character I thought I would despise and didn’t (Falcon), and a fair job humanizing a character that is much more interesting than her portrayal lets on. I really wanted to know where Hawkeye was. There is suspicion that he is the one infiltrating Zemo’s nest in order to locate and rescue the Maximoff twins (Wanda and Pietro–otherwise known as Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver). I can go with that one, so long as it makes it interesting in Avengers II.

In the end this film tried to be The Empire Strikes Back and fell short. It clearly sets up the sequel and plays well in the meanwhile, but I can’t help but think there coulda been more.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I won’t be doing these so late at night anymore. A lot of things need to change in my life and prime amongst those is the way I handle myself day to day. Not sleeping and draining the tank down to zero is useless. I’m not 26 anymore, and that sad reality is infecting me from the feet on up.
2. Crude humor only works so well because we are so heavily socialized to avoid crudeness. That makes it taboo, and when said with a smile that makes it funny as…

SPOILERS AHEAD. I’ll try to keep them to a minimum, but this post will contain some spoilers for the Winter Soldier. My post isn’t about the film itself, but focuses on a specific character: Nick ‘BMF on my wallet’ Fury. It is clear by now that Fury has undergone significant change since the early days of Marvel. He was introduced into the Marvel Cinematic Universe as an African-American male, despite spending most of his early days as an aging white male. However, the changes don’t stop there.

SPOILER

 

It could be that Fury is not a 40’s super hero. In fact, the new version may not have ever had the Super Soldier serum at all. After being ambushed he professes to some nearly life-ending injuries, but seems to pop  up 90% healthy. So my question is this: Who the heck is this version’s Fury?

 

Too tired to get any deeper tonight. Stay tuned

My children are afraid of the dark. They are not alone. When I was young the darkness terrified me. I believed there were things moving around in that murky blackness that my eyes could not discern. When I first saw I Am Legend and there was the scene where WIll Smith goes into the building to find his dog and there is a circle of ‘those things’ huffing and panting in the darkness, I thought it was the most terrifying thing a movie could present.

I had my reasons for disliking the dark. I’m certain the kids do as well. Only, now that I am older I have a particular fondness for the dark and the near dark. Pitch black is a form a sensory depravation and it allows you to drift off into this murky darkness and not worry about what is out there. Instead you can think about what how to fill the empty space with furniture and ideas..

I’m fresh out of ideas and largely falling asleep at the keyboard…

I had a funny realization in the shower. It was after I came up with a really excellent bit of text for this problem I’m trying to solve at work. Unfortunately said realization immediately wiped the solution text from my memory banks, so there’s that. Anyway, here’s what I figured out: I’m like a sports car riding on three good wheels and that cheap spare tire in the back. You know that car is capable of great things, but if you try to do anything but the bare minimum on that donut, it is going to fall apart. I need a new tire, which is ironic because nearly every wheeled device in my home needs fixing to some degree. I suppose that my metaphor is circular–the car with the blown tire is a metaphor for me and I am a metaphor for the state of my home.

Of course, the beauty of this all is that everything can be fixed.

Some Thoughts:

1. The new Minecraft update is wonderful. I’m enjoying spending what little time I can spare crafting away and building all sorts of marvelous things. A much needed distraction indeed.

There are things in life that are surprising and things in life that are expected. I’ve been fortunate to deal with both, but lately the expected is taking hold. As expected, the winding of the clock down towards semester absolution brings out the worst in all of us. For me it is a matter of trying to cram in as much learning as possible almost as if to make up for the days I wasn’t that great as a teacher. For them–some of them–it is a time to beg for grades above and beyond what was earned. We do this dance every semester, but I wonder if they’ll understand what they’re really asking for when the music stops.

Students often see the Community College as ‘less than’ which leads to a certain boldness when it comes to asking for grades. Why not? We aren’t a real college, so academic integrity shouldn’t matter. Its as if they are saying, “know your place” without once recognizing that demeaning this place by default demeans themselves as students in this place. I cannot change a grade from a D to an A because bad things are happening in your life. Bad things happen in every life. Every semester I walk away a little more encouraged and enlightened by that handful of students who’ve seen the real struggles of life and emerged from that with a clear understanding of the value and role of college–even community college–in their lives.

It is the other kind that vexes me. The ‘vacationer’ college student is a fixture of the institution. That Van Wilder-esque student who feels like they don’t need to apply themselves, because if they did the work would be so easy that it wouldn’t be worth doing. Too many students believe their own myth. I think that is because too many students are a product of their environment, and that environment isn’t riddled with strife the way it is with so many more successful students. People who understand struggle and survive it are the ones who tend to be successful in my book.

Or maybe I’m just rambling.