All posts by plthomasedd

P. L. Thomas, Professor of Education (Furman University, Greenville SC), taught high school English in rural South Carolina before moving to teacher education. He is a former column editor for English Journal (National Council of Teachers of English), current series editor for Critical Literacy Teaching Series: Challenging Authors and Genres (Brill), and author of Teaching Writing as Journey, Not Destination: Essays Exploring What ‘Teaching Writing’ Means (IAP, 2019) and How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care (IAP, in press). NCTE named Thomas the 2013 George Orwell Award winner. He co-edited the award-winning (Divergent Book Award for Excellence in 21st Century Literacies Research) volume Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America (Brill, 2018). Follow his work @plthomasEdD and the becoming radical (https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/).

book banning, Cancel Culture, education, fascism, Kurt Vonnegut, NCTE, Neil Gaiman, parental choice, reading, Teaching

Banned in the U.S.A. Redux 2021: “[T]o behave as educated persons would”

November 11, 2021 plthomasedd 1 Comment

We know of course there’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
– Arundhati Roy

The matrix of a poet’s work consists not only of what is there to be absorbed and worked on, but also of what is missing, desaparecido, rendered unspeakable, thus unthinkable. It is through these invisible holes in reality that poetry makes it way—certainly for women and other marginalized subjects and for disempowered and colonized peoples generally, but ultimately for all who practice art at any deep levels. The impulse to create begins—often terribly and fearfully—in a tunnel of silence.
“Arts of the Possible,” Adrienne Rich

It is the morning of November 11, 2021, and I spend some of that time creating gentle memes to post in honor of Kurt Vonnegut’s day of birth:

I wanted to highlight Vonnegut’s career-long plea for a secular kindness, rooted in his faith in humanism, and I have long admired Vonnegut as an anti-war crusader.

Celebrating the birthday of a person after their death is always bittersweet, but on this morning, the act was awash in a very ugly sort of irony. As I loaded The State (Columbia, SC) web page, I saw this as the lead story:

My home state of South Carolina is heavily conservative—first to secede and uniformly conservative in politics throughout the decades of Democratic control of the South and then Republican in the wake of Strom Thurmond changing parties and later Ronald Reagan leading a conservative Christian shift in the South.

Gov. McMaster is not often “first to” about anything, but he is an uncritical and resolute soldier in the Republican culture war regardless of what that means.

Vonnegut—while alive and since his death—has often had his works challenged and even banned; one of the most enduring things he ever wrote, in fact, was a response to censorship:

In October of 1973, Bruce Severy — a 26-year-old English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota — decided to use Kurt Vonnegut‘s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, as a teaching aid in his classroom. The next month, on November 7th, the head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, demanded that all 32 copies be burned in the school’s furnace as a result of its “obscene language.” Other books soon met with the same fate. On the 16th of November, Kurt Vonnegut sent McCarthy the following letter. He didn’t receive a reply.
Letters of Note

In part, Vonnegut replied as follows:

Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.

I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace?…

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us….

If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.
I am very real, Kurt Vonnegut, November 16, 1973

Reading about the censorship wildfire spreading to SC on Vonnegut’s birthday adds insult to injury, but this is not mere partisan politics, not something as innocuous or abstract as a “culture war.”

Just as Vonnegut ends his letter with “I am very real,” I want to stress that the missionary zeal behind removing and burning books from school libraries is also “very real”:

Calls for censorship, book removal from school libraries, and book burning are the logical next step in the Republican/conservative assault on Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project; at the core of this movement is a misguided demand for parental rights that grows beyond any parents’ children to all children.

Some parents and political leaders on the Right have mistaken Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 as a manual for partisan politics instead of, as Neil Gaiman (born a day before Vonnegut 38 years later) explains in the 60th anniversary edition of the novel:

This is a book of warning. It is a reminder that what we have is valuable, and that sometimes we take what we value for granted….

People think—wrongly—that speculative fiction is about predicting the future, but it isn’t; or if it is, it tends to do a rotten job of it….

What speculative fiction is really good at is not the future but the present—taking an aspect of it that troubles or is dangerous, and extending and extrapolating that aspect into something that allows the people of that time to see what they are doing from a different angle and from a different place. It’s cautionary.

Fahrenheit 451 is speculative fiction. It’s an “If this goes on…” story. Ray Bradbury was writing about his present, which is our past.
Introduction, Fahrenheit 451, Neil Gaiman

In my early days as a public high school English teacher, I had a book challenge targeting John Gardner’s Grendel, but it was clearly mostly about attacking me as a young teacher. While I think we are careless and even cavalier in the U.S. about any parents’ right to control what their children read and learn, I experienced first-hand the power of a few parents to determine what all students read and learn.

I must return to Vonnegut here and stress, “If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.”

Removing books from libraries, banning books from schools, and book burnings are never justified; these are acts of tyranny, of fascism—and not in any way a gesture of what we like to call “American.”

There is no individual freedom without the freedom of the mind. Banning a book is closing the mind.

In Athens-based R.E.M.’s “Its the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” the lyrics include a verse that is haunting in 2021:

Six o’clock, TV hour, don’t get caught in foreign tower
Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself churn
Lock him in uniform, book burning, blood letting
Every motive escalate, automotive incinerate
Light a candle, light a votive, step down, step down
Watch your heel crush, crushed, uh-oh
This means no fear, cavalier renegade and steering clear
A tournament, a tournament, a tournament of lies
Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives, and I decline
“Its the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”

The Republican assault on teaching, learning, reading, and thinking is nothing more than a “tournament of lies” aimed at partisan political power.

Simply put, censorship and book burning are UnAmerican; to ban a book is to dismantle the American Dream.

Resources

Statement on Censorship and Professional Guidelines (NCTE)

Guidelines for Dealing with Censorship of Instructional Materials (NCTE)

NCTE Intellectual Freedom Center

The Students’ Right to Read (NCTE)

See Also

The 451 App (22 August 2022)

Teen’s Eyes Begin Glowing Red While Reciting Forbidden Knowledge From Book On Critical Race Theory

comic books, education, politics, Progressivism

The Politics of Art and Artist: Tom King’s Rorschach

November 9, 2021 plthomasedd

Politicians and political pundits in the U.S. routinely debate whether or not the American public is center-right or center-left in their political and ideological grounding. However, a more important and ultimately consequential reality is that the American public is incredibly politically naive.

At the core of that lack of sophistication is the failure to distinguish between “political” and “partisan”—the former being an unavoidable reality of human interaction and the latter being the mechanical workings of the political system that is essentially the Republican/Democratic binary.

While not a new phenomenon, the Trump era has highlighted the jumbled ideological and political sensibilities of the American public, well portrayed in the fading debate around former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the National Anthem.

The media became enamored with the vocal segment of the public that demanded professional athletes “shut up and just play ball.” Of course, the outcry for no politics in sports came from the same people demanding that athletes conform to so-called proper behavior during the National Anthem, the playing of which at a sport event is a form of political speech and a political decision by the NFL.

In the U.S., the call for “no politics” actually means a demand for “my politics only” so “other people’s politics” is the only “politics” being condemned.

Trumpublicans of 2021, in fact, simultaneously criticize (and mischaracterize) “cancel culture” and demand that certain elements of thought be, well, canceled—such as Critical Race Theory and the right’s (again, mischaracterized) demonizing of “woke” culture.

In the fall of 2021, NFL fans are once again confronted with politics, this time in the person of Aaron Rodgers, quarterback of the Green Bay Packers. Rodgers sits in debates about the best quarterback ever, but he also has enjoyed a life of celebrity, dating famous actresses and briefly being touted as the next host of Jeopardy (based in part on his cultivating an image as “smart”).

A positive Covid test, however, has now tarnished Rodgers’s Golden-Boy whiteness, exposing him to be a Joe Rogan conspiracy theorist and all-around, self-absorbed know-nothing.

What is important here is that while Rodgers is the exact same person he was a year ago, many fans are now rejecting being a fan of his because his ideology, his politics, has been unmasked (literally and figuratively).

The literary world had a similar conflict about the same time with Margaret Atwood, who appears to have slipped over to the J.K. Rowling world of transphobia (or at least inexcusable ignorance about and insensitivity toward trans people).

At its core, these situations are an enduring problem: What do we do when as consumers of entertainment, the ideology and politics of the entertainer and/or the entertainment (sports, film, novels, etc.) conflict with our own?

From Watchmen to Rorschach: “No, Not Once. There Was No Politics”

As a comic book reader and collector from the 1970s, I returned to collecting just before the series WandaVision stormed pop culture. I had been a fan of Vision in my teen years, and the series, I thought, was brilliant.

But it also led me to finding, late to the party, some of the wonderful work with the character Vision since I was away from comic books—notably Tom King’s Vision (2016, vol. 2). With King’s work, I now have a habit of missing the boat since, as a Marvel collector, I just bought and read King’s Rorschach (2020-2021), a continuation of the Watchmen universe created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, and then reignited by the Watchmen series (HBO).

In a preview of the series, Matthew Jackson shares King’s recognition of the essence of the sequel to Moore’s Watchmen:

“[Moore] gave us the notes to talk about our current moment, and so I wanted to play in that sandbox to talk about this,” King said. “It’s a very political work. It tries to be revolutionary the way Watchmen tried to be revolutionary.”
TOM KING BREAKS DOWN HIS ‘VERY POLITICAL’ RORSCHACH BOOK’S PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCES

King also explains that he and artist Jorge Fornes maintain canon of Watchmen but frame this meta-narrative (like Watchmen, a super hero narrative about super hero narratives and the recurring question of vigilantism) as “film noir — to create a kind of hardboiled mystery story in the middle of the Watchmen universe.”

King’s re-envisioning of Rorschach, however, includes, like in Moore’s work, Steve Ditko (co-creator of Spider-Man), but shifts the ideological grounding from Ayn Rand (Ditko’s inspiration) to “‘Hannah Arendt, who is a different philosopher, Ayn Rand’s contemporary, another Jewish immigrant from Germany, but on the left, not on the right, who was obsessed with the concept of citizenship.'”

Both Moore and King offer “very political work,” work that is well crafted with other creators (artists, colorists, letterers), but it is a mistake to discount or reduce that work for attempting to promote a specific partisan politics; instead, I think King is asking readers to consider just what is political—or to understand that everything is political while also swimming in a partisan political reality that can be corrupt on both the left and the right:

The central detective, above on the left, is faced with a planned but foiled assassination during the presidential election between the liberal 4-time incumbent Redford and the conservative challenger Turley, calling for a conservative revolution and target of the assassination.

But as the first panel above shows, even those inside the workings of the plot seem to be unable to see politics at work: “No, not once. There was no politics.”

The Reader, the Writer, and the Text

The assassination plot belongs to “Wil Myerson, a stand-in for Steve Ditko that creates the Question-esque character, the Citizen, who expresses Arendt’s views rather than Rand’s,” explains Steve Baxi, and a young woman sharp-shooter called The Kid.

Despite the admitted political nature of this series, I agree with Baxi’s defense of the series:

[S]ome critics reject the series as a dangerous both-side-ism that creates a problem out of fake left-wing extremism in the context of a real life right wing insurgency.

This reaction, I think, has made it difficult to see the rich work being done by King, Fornés, Stewart and Cowles on this series which examines not only the origins of fascist thought, but the ups and downs of Arendt’s own work. This is not a series that feels like a sequel to Watchmen outside the setting, and instead tells a story that is influenced deeply by the current political climate, taking in the past in a manner akin to what Arendt called Pearl Diving
Watchmen Two-in-One: Hannah Arendt and Rorschach (2020) – Part One

Briefly, I want to conclude here by arguing that the problem is not whether or not a work or an artist is political, or even if that work or artist has a blunt political agenda, but the consequences of how readers respond—and why the politics of the reader is where the real problem lies.

Drawing on Baxi’s explication of the use of Arendt in Rorschach and Lousie Rosenblatt‘s view of how meaning is created from text (the interaction of the reader, the writer, and the text), I think we can confront how literalist conservatives and critical progressives respond differently (and predictably) to any text.

Baxi notes that Arendt’s work fits well into the Trump era, overlapping with Rorschach:

For Arendt, the foundational question of philosophy was “Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?” Indeed everything from training with Heidegger and Jaspers, up to her rejection of Adorno and Critical Theory comes back to a philosophical thinking that richly interrogates our ability to understand and to imagine the world from the perspective of another.

…the problem with Eichmann, and fascists in general, is a failure to think….This capacity for thought is what Arendt’s work focused on, using concepts like storytelling to explain how our ability to think ties into our ability to have empathy, freedom, and sound political judgment.
Watchmen Two-in-One: Hannah Arendt and Rorschach (2020) – Part One

Like Moore, King likely has a political leaning that can be viewed on the left/right spectrum, but ultimately, King is making a narrative case for “[t]his capacity for thought” and “our ability to have empathy, freedom, and sound political judgment.”

In Moore’s original Watchmen, Baxi adds:

…Rorschach was a riff on the Question, and largely a joke Alan Moore was making about Steve Ditko qua Ayn Rand’s objectivism taken to its furthest possible extreme….Regardless of the reasons why, Moore’s presentation of the objectivist, moral absolutist became less a joke and more a serious position of its readers….

The critique of course is that such extreme devotion to an abstract good is ultimately self-contradictory and absurd, as Rorschach’s methods do not play by the same rules as his self-righteousness. While this nuance is clear in the text of the series, it’s also perfectly understandable that some might read Rorschach and find him aspirational. Correct or not, there is an ideology of Rorschach that does see him as good, as right, as the hero we might need.
Watchmen Two-in-One: Hannah Arendt and Rorschach (2020) – Part One

Ayn Rand fits into this perfectly since as a philosopher and a novelist, Rand is nearly universally rejected in the fields of philosophy and literature, but a favorite of naive readers, often adolescents and literalist conservatives/libertarians. In short, many fans of Rand’s novels read them as if they are “how to” manuals, and not texts to be interrogated.

Critical readers handed any text tend toward challenging the text and messages, and often fall closer to Arendt’s ideal (similar to Myerson’s The Citizen).

The legacy of Trump includes organized attacks on K-12 and higher education, focusing on controlling what students are exposed to. Those attacks represent the conservative misunderstanding about the political power of texts and knowledge.

In short, there is politics in any artist, in every text, and in every reader; that political dynamic is unavoidable.

King’s version of Rorschach clearly argues that partisan/ideological fanaticism, regardless of being from the left or right, is corrupt and dangerous; there are many bodies left on the ground in the series.

Neither Moore nor King offers a neat political or partisan solution as they remain in an enduring question at the heart of super hero narratives, as King explains:

“Instead of constructing Rorschach from a Randian point of view, if we construct him from an Arendt point of view, how does that change our conception of superheroes, and our conception of vigilantism? If we go from the idea of ‘it’s obviously bad to kill people without trials’ to ‘Is it bad to kill Nazis without trials?’ it makes a different moral universe and [asks] different moral questions, or at least the same questions but, you know, turning the ball on its side so you can see it from a different angle.”
TOM KING BREAKS DOWN HIS ‘VERY POLITICAL’ RORSCHACH BOOK’S PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCES

The politics of the audience confronts us, and the larger question, maybe the largest, is about the potential in that audience to be the sort of human Arendt (and likely Moore and King) envisioned.

A Collector’s Dilemma: Navigating Comic Book Universes over the Decades

November 4, 2021 plthomasedd

Recently, my partner began doing artwork on an iPad, and one afternoon, I returned to one of my passions as a teenager, drawing super heroes:

After Gil Kane’s cover of Daredevil and Black Widow v1 issue 97

Over the past year, facing as I am creeping into my 60s, I have also returned to collecting comic books, focusing on Daredevil and now Black Widow. Collecting, reading, and drawing from comic books were central to my teenage life from about 1975 through the early 1980s.

Diagnosed with scoliosis in the summer of 1975, just before entering ninth grade, I took solace in those comic books as I struggled against not only the usual terrors of adolescence but also the specter of living life in a clunky body brace throughout high school.

The brace was incredibly uncomfortable, and standing at the long bar separating our kitchen and living room was an ideal place for me to draw from the growing number of Marvel comics I was buying each week.

Collecting comics in the 1970s was a real nerd-life, but it looked much different than now. I visited two pharmacies and one convenience store on comic book release day, carefully sorting through spinner racks. Eventually I had paper catalogues of the books I owned in a 3-ring binder.

Back issues were also a real challenge, but I scoured the for-sale section of the print newspaper and found comic book sellers in the ads of the Marvel comics I collected. Once, my father even took me to a comic book convention in Atlanta.

But in many ways, the 1970s were a very naive time, much simpler and incredibly problematic.

Even then, as I note in my full-length examination of comic books, Marvel seemed overly focused on new readers; comic book publishers know where their money is made—the foundational and enduring characters—and cannot resist returning over and over to their origin stories.

Adulthood interfered with my collecting, and in one of the worst decisions of my life, I sold my 7000-book Marvel collection to help make a downpayment on a townhouse. I squirreled away my full run of Howard the Duck (volume 1), but all the other magical runs—Conan, Spider-Man, Daredevil, X-Men, etc.—were handed over to a comic book store in Charlotte, NC, so that I could properly adult.

After the Frank Miller reboot of Batman and the first Batman films with Michael Keaton, I dipped my toes back into collecting briefly because several of my high school students were collectors. However, since the early 1980s, I really had mostly abandoned the comic book world.

One of the great pleasures of my career shift in 2002—from high school English teacher for 18 years to college professor, 20 years and counting—was starting to write and publish comic book scholarship, and later, often blogging about comic books.

A couple summers ago, I made a huge change in my life, and with turning 60, I decided to allow myself my pleasures, even if they seemed childlike, childish. With the encouragement of my partner, then, I returned to actively collecting comics, and moved my collection into our apartment (from my office).

Even though I have much more disposable income at 60 than I (or my working-class parents) did as a teen, I recommitted to collecting with parameters of spending less than a few dollars per book (maybe $10 or $12 from time to time) even though I was targeting the 620+ issue run of Daredevil—to which I have added the much smaller run for Black Widow (after noticing a recent issue had a legacy numbering of 50).

From the naive and simpler 1970s until the 2020s, huge changes have occurred in comic books—the multiple reboots, the rise of the film adaptations, and the nearly fatal collapse of over-saturation in the 1990s.

But for me, a comic book lover and collector reconnecting with the super hero world, I find the constant renumbering and rebooting maddening.

The quest for complete runs is a nightmare of Dante’s Inferno proportion.

It took some tedious work, but Wikipedia and the Marvel database at Fandom allowed me to map out on my Notes app the 6 volumes of Daredevil and the (ridiculous) 8 volumes of Black Widow.

As I flip through back issues at the 2 or 3 local comic book stores, I have the Notes app open and typically have to click a Fandom link to make sure I am buying a book I need since Marvel provides precious little information for collectors on the covers (currently, however, most do have legacy numbering).

I find the reboots and renumbering some of the worst decisions made by comic book publishers, notably DC and Marvel. Again, these behaviors prioritize new readers, and leave life-long fans and collectors behind. Yes, I am well aware that comic books are a business and the market drives a great deal of what happens in the pages of my favorite titles.

It is maddening none the less.

A perfect example is Black Widow. I jumped into volume 8 of Black Widow, a wonderful run written by Kelly Thompson and drawn beautifully by Elena Casagrande and Rafael De Latorre (and others).

When I noticed that issue 10 of volume 8 was legacy number 50, I was motivated to collect the entire run of Black Widow, a seemingly doable project.

I turned again to Wikipedia and Fandom, constructing another outline on my Notes App. However, I soon noticed that if I collected every issues of the identified 8 volumes, I would own far more than 50 issues.

What gives?

I reached out on Twitter and searched frantically on Google—but finding a clarification for how Marvel determined legacy numbering, and why Black Widow has 8 volumes with conflicting total issue numbering, was nearly impossible.

It seems, according to Fandom, that Marvel counts only volumes 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8 in the legacy numbering—another maddening layer to collecting in 2021.

And this is just Black Widow, a relatively fringe character in print comics (although her status appeared to be much greater in the MCU); when I grabbed some recent Spider-Man issues (prompted by noticing Thompson writing there also), I am even more frustrated by the layers and layers of reboots and alternate universes.

Where, o where, is Spider-Man of my teen years?

I don’t want to be the old man shouting for kids to get off my lawn; I do want to stay reconnected with Daredevil and Black Widow, along with other loved characters such as Wolverine and X-Men.

But I must admit, Marvel isn’t making it easy, and I am not even sure they care.

Kurt Vonnegut, religion, REM

“What a sad parade”: New Adventures in Hi-Fi after 25 Years

November 2, 2021 plthomasedd

Like “Ignoreland” (an often under-appreciated, if not ignored, track from R.E.M.’s 1992 album, Automatic for the People), “New Test Leper” offers a powerful and disturbing commentary on the state of the U.S. in 2021, a country still trying to stay afloat in the wake of the Republican Party revealing its true self under the leadership of Donald Trump.

The 25th anniversary release of New Adventures in Hi-Fi provides fans new and old an opportunity to reconsider one of the band’s finest albums (I am leaning toward anointing NAIHF as its finest album).

When the album was first released, I was drawn to several songs—”New Test Leper,” “Undertow,” “Leave,” “Be Mine,” and “Electrolite.” In fact, I have long included “Electrolite” among my favorite songs by R.E.M., lyrically as well as the performance of the song.

After the anniversary edition was announced, songs were slowly released in remastered and alternative version, including two of my favorites, “Leave” and “Be Mine.”

But what has struck me deepest is returning to “New Test Leper,” a narrative song that sits firmly in the talk-show era of the 1990s while also serving as not just a warning about but a prediction of the country the U.S. was becoming and now has become.

Michael Stipe, as the primary lyricist, has written a number of songs about gender and sexuality, and throughout the 1980s and 1990s, his own sexuality was often the focus of rumor and public debate (situations Stipe brushed off as not so provocative by noting he often performed in make up and skirts).

“New Test Leper” certainly represents Stipe’s deep awareness of Otherness, but the song also focuses on the consequences of being othered in the context of American religiosity and the lurid nature of sensationalistic talk shows of the late twentieth century (which morphed into equally lurid so-called reality TV).

The opening stanza establishes the narrative situation, the talk show, and the tension between religiosity (the false and often hypocritical realities of Christians) and the non-religious speaker who, ironically, quotes Jesus (a recurring move by notable humanist author Kurt Vonnegut):

I can’t say that I love Jesus
That would be a hollow claim
He did make some observations
And I’m quoting them today
“Judge not, lest ye be judged”
What a beautiful refrain
The studio audience disagrees
Have his lambs all gone astray?
“New Test Leper”

The reason the speaker is othered and on display remains ambiguous, a powerful decision by Stipe that allows the song to speak to the larger horrors of being judged by social norms, such as the superficial Christianity of the U.S. The speaker could be gay, trans, a racial minority, etc.

Two images of the song reinforce the negative consequences of being outside cultural norms: first, the allusion to David Lynch’s Elephant Man, “‘I am not an animal,'” and second, the haunting refrain as allusion to Biblical Jesus as the defender of outcasts, “Call me a leper.”

This public confrontation between the speaker and audience, made more tense by the Biblical and pop culture allusions, leaves the speaker deflated and questioning their efforts to be heard against the din of public opinion:

“You are lost and disillusioned”
What an awful thing to say
I know this show doesn’t flatter
It means nothing to me
I thought I might help them understand
What an ugly thing to see
“New Test Leper”

It is, however, the final verse that speaks to where the U.S. has found itself culturally and politically. While the song was released during the Clinton era, the U.S. was still under the weight of the Reagan/Bush years, a political movement that cemented the marriage of Christian conservatives to the Republican Party (see Buccola’s brilliant analysis of the debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, which outlines how that marriage developed decades before the Reagan revolution and the rise of the Moral Majority).

The final verse answers the question from the first verse, “Have his lambs all gone astray?”:

When I tried to tell my story
They cut me off to take a break
I sat silent five commercials
I had nothing left to say
The talk show host was index-carded
All organized and blank
The other guests were scared and hardened
What a sad parade
What a sad parade
“New Test Leper”

Yes, we must admit, Christian conservatives have strayed so far from Jesus as to be nearly unrecognizable as the ambassadors of kindness the words ascribed to Jesus implore over and over, and those of us who recognize that are left shaking our heads and concluding, “What a sad parade.”

In 2021, we are faced with a disturbing 30-40% of Americans just like the imagined studio audience of this song, and Fox News along with several podcasts attracting millions of listeners are driven by “talk show host[s]…index carded/All organized and blank” (from Tucker Carlson to Joe Rogan).

Imagine the speaker as a teacher accused of teaching Critical Race Theory and the audience filled with conservatives shouting faux outrage over something they know nothing about—except we do not have to imagine.

Art often has the capacity to step back and criticize the Now of the creation; exceptional art also serves as warnings, even predictions—although by the time we realize that, we failed to heed the warning and may be too late.

I feel resigned and deflated, like the speaker in “New Test Leper,” and it has become harder and harder to cling to Vonnegut’s belief if humans would just listen to Jesus (and not Christianity or the church) we could save humanity:

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.
“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!
“Cold Turkey”

What a sad parade.

#BlackLivesMatter, George Carlin, race, racism, sexism

Punch Line

October 28, 2021 plthomasedd

Beyond my face-to-face life, few people have impacted my development more than comedian George Carlin. Along with Richard Pryor (and indirectly, Lenny Bruce), Carlin entered my consciousness while I was a teenager in the 1970s, a redneck mired in the racist provincialism of rural upstate South Carolina.

Of course, teachers and writers—along with a wide array of artists, thinkers, etc.—shaped my Self and my mind, but Carlin and Pryor were essential doorways into critical thought. Notably, Carlin and Pryor taught me the importance of language and its relationship to power, foundational concepts that would in many ways lead to Paulo Freire as well as my careers as a teacher and writer.

So when Carlin was trending recently—a video clip of him talking on Larry King with many people connecting Carlin’s comments about comedian Andrew Dice Clay to the current controversies around Dave Chappelle—I felt I had to explore the Tweets and how people were navigating Carlin today:

First, I believe it is important to stress that Carlin clearly begins these comments by supporting Andrew Dice Clay’s right to be the sort of comedian who people found to be deeply offensive, offensive in ways that were not funny (homophobia and misogyny, specifically). Carlin is weighing in but distinguishing between “can” and “should.”

As well, Carlin checked King about “we” laughing at Clay, suggesting that Carlin did not find Clay funny even as he supported something like free speech for comedians.

In many ways, Carlin was way ahead of his time and this on-air discussion fits well into the larger “cancel culture” debate among comedians (see the Jerry Seinfeld/Bobcat Goldthwait situation, for example); but of course, Carlin’s tempered comments also match perfectly the Chappelle controversy.

The world of the comedian is filled with violent-adjacent language—”punch line” and the common claim that comedians “kill” when jokes or sets work really well. (Carlin has brilliant, early jokes from the 1970s about replacing “kill” with “fuck” in movie dialogue, highlighting the essential violent nature of American culture.)

But Carlin makes a case for the importance that comedians punch up, using comedy to challenge power, and that Clay tended to punch down, specifically at the expense of marginalized groups such as homosexuals and women.

I think, as many on Twitter claimed, that Carlin’s comments are relevant to Chappelle even as some try to justify Chappelle’s trans-phobic rants as attacks on outsized influence by what Chappelle and his supporters see as misguided trans-rights activists. Chappelle apologists, then, seem to believe Chappelle is punching up.

That argument is nonsense, missing a bigger point, one also made by Carlin but somewhat glossed over.

At its core, the problem with Clay and Chappelle is less with them, and more with their audience. One common justification expressed for Chappelle’s recent comedy special is that his garbled perspective on trans people is embraced by his audience and that those he criticizes (trans-rights activists) are the ones out of the mainstream.

Chappelle apologists argue that the court of public opinion supports Chappelle, and thus Chappelle is justified, if not right.

As Carlin notes, Clay had an audience, many white males who, as Carlin notes, were deeply insecure and prone to a wide array of bigotry (that likely would have included anti-semitism, Carlin adds since Clay is Jewish).

If we set aside whether or not Clay and Chappelle crafted funny jokes, if we set aside whether or not Chappelle is punching down or up, we cannot set aside that Chappelle is speaking into and directly fueling environments of hate and exclusivity.

Trans people live delicate lives and their margins are frail, thin, and Chappelle is being cavalier and calloused, placing his right to free speech (in wrong-headed ways) above the lives and rights of marginalized and oppressed people.

Chappelle is certainly aware that there was a fairly recent world where white comedians made their livelihoods on racist jokes and the most aggressive and offensive use of racial slurs; maybe they had the right to that language, and yes, they certainly had audiences who agreed.

But mainstream acceptance of racist jokes and racial slurs were contributing to environments of hate that directly impacted Black people in negative and horrible ways.

Clay and Chappelle should be bright and perceptive enough not to need these comparisons to their own potential frailties, but these points do highlight that comedy is not in some sort of joke vacuum; there are consequences for jokes told and the laughter that often occurs about the Others used in the pursuit of those jokes.

Chappelle’s doubling down on trans-phobia isn’t funny and it isn’t inconsequential.

Finally, while I do support Carlin’s video clip going viral, and I do agree Carlin’s perceptive analysis of punching up and the audience for comedy is directly applicable to the Chappelle debate as well as the current discourse around “cancel culture” (where I side with Goldthwait, not Seinfeld), I have a huge caveat for the added belief that we need Carlin alive today since he would be a solid and powerful voice in this situations.

As much as it pains me to write this, I am certain that given time and space, Carlin would, in fact, disappoint us now. There is a bittersweet advantage to having the ability to cherry pick from Carlin’s brilliance (a real thing, in my opinion) and to ignore that as he grew older, Carlin lived up to his standard less and less.

The Carlin of my teen years, the 1970s, is a sort of peak Carlin, one I tend to idealize; the Carlin of the King interview is the mostly sober and mature Carlin of 1990 (Carlin was being interviewed, not on stage performing).

Carlin tended to devolve into the angry old man, and his comedy content and targets became sloppier and sloppier even as his delivery and craft remained impressive.

I think Carlin alive now would slip and fall on his face right before us—similar to the recent crumbling of the ways some of us have idealized Margaret Atwood.

Carlin’s comments on Clay are worth highlighting, and his analysis speaks to how we can and should navigate Chappelle and cancel culture.

But this is also a lesson in the dangers of idealizing and idolizing.

In my own way, I love Carlin and am eternally grateful for his contribution to my mind.

Carlin was, ultimately, a man, a human, frail and flawed. He occasionally said some really stupid shit.

We don’t need him alive now to recognize that he is right about the direction of punch lines. And we would all be better off if we simply used his words from 1990 to recognize the importance of everyone’s humanity.

There is no punch line more valuable than our collective humanity—and about that, even if he would fail us today, I feel certain Carlin would agree if he were still alive.

Canceled?: The Day Comedy Died

“I’m Just an Old Fart, Leave Me Alone”: On Kurt Vonnegut and George Carlin

deficit thinking, education, Grades, literacy, Teaching, Testing, Writing

On Positive and Negative Feedback to Student Writing

October 21, 2021 plthomasedd

Several students in my literacy course in our MAT program chose to read Donna Alvermann’s Effective Literacy Instruction for Adolescents. While the initial discussion around Alvermann’s essay focused on those students struggling with the density of her academic writing, they emphasized the importance and power of her addressing student self efficacy in the fostering of student literacy development:

Adolescents’ perceptions of how competent they are as readers and writers, generally speaking, will affect how motivated they are to learn in their subject area classes (e.g., the sciences, social studies, mathematics, and literature). Thus, if academic literacy instruction is to be effective, it must address issues of self-efficacy and engagement.
Effective Literacy Instruction for Adolescents

That discussion led to some very insightful comments about the importance of providing students feedback, as opposed to grades, on their writing as part of the drafting and workshop process (anchored in their reading Graham and Perin’s 2007 Writing Next analysis of research on teaching writing).

As a long-time advocate of feedback and someone who practices de-grading the classroom as well as delaying grades (assigning grades for courses but not on assignments), I strongly supported this discussion, and was impressed with the thoughtfulness of the students.

That discussion had a subtext also—a concern raised by several students about the need for teachers to provide students positive feedback (so students know what they are doing well), and not just negative feedback. (Some of that subtext, I am sure, was an unexpressed feeling among some of these graduate students that they received mostly or exclusively “negative” feedback from me on their first submitted essays.)

After several students worked through this argument for positive feedback, I asked them to step back even further to consider, or -re-consider, what counts as “positive” or “negative” feedback.

In the sort of way Alanis Morrissette perceives irony, I found on social media Your Essay Shows Promise But Suffers from Demonic Possession posted at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency—a brilliant portrayal of the tensions created by teachers giving students feedback on their essays, which begins:

I appreciate the hard work that went into this essay. It has many merits, but it also has something profoundly and disturbingly wrong with it. In fact, I’m writing this feedback on my phone, cowering in the bathtub with my wife, after your essay terrorized and nearly destroyed us….

The essay was formatted correctly, and each sentence was more or less intelligible in itself. But altogether, the effect was—disorientation. Worse, actually. Pure senselessness. The Void.
Your Essay Shows Promise But Suffers from Demonic Possession

This satirical piece does exactly what my MAT students requested, blending positive (“many merits”) with negative (“something profoundly and disturbingly wrong with it”) feedback; and I think, herein is the problem with the dichotomy itself.

Once dramatically while I was teaching high school and often since I have been teaching at my current selective liberal arts university, I have encountered students who perceive all feedback as negative and reject having to revise their writing.

My argument to my MAT students was that actionable feedback on student writing is not inherently “negative” even though it does suggest something is “wrong” and needs “correcting” (perceptions grounded in students’ experiences in traditional classrooms that focus on the error hunt and punish students with grades).

However, I am well aware over almost four decades that part of my challenge as a writing teacher is how to help students see and respond to feedback as supportive and not an attack on their work or them as people (we had a great discussion about whether or not students can or should see their writing as inextricable from them as people).

In other words, affect matters.

Throughout the past 20 years teaching in higher education, I have been struggling against the perception by students than my written feedback is “mean,” “harsh,” “negative,” etc., while they simultaneously find my face-to-face feedback supportive and “good.”

I continue to seek ways to make feedback on student writing more effective as a key aspect of helping students grow as writers and thinkers as well as fostering their independence as writers and thinkers (learning to revise and edit their work on their own).

Students persist, however, in finding the feedback “negative,” and occasionally shutting down.

If there is a path to moving past the dichotomy of negative/positive feedback to student writing, I think it lies in the following concepts and practices:

Having explicit discussions with students about the inherent need for all writers to revise writing, ideally in the context of feedback from an expert and/or supportive writer/teacher. I often share with students samples of my own work submitted for publication with track changes and comments from editors.
Rejecting high-stakes for low-stakes environments in the writing workshop format. This is grounded in my commitment to de-grading the classroom that honors that writing is a process (see More Thoughts on Feedback, Grades, and Late Work).
Adopting strategies and rhetoric that rejects deficit ideology and the error hunt (Connie Weaver). It is important for teachers and students to prefer “revising” and “editing” instead of “error,” “mistake,” and “correcting” as the language surrounding the writing process. The pursuit in writing must be grounded in the recognition that all writing can be better even when it is currently quite good (and especially if is is somewhat or deeply flawed).
Clarifying for students that challenging and critical feedback is intended as actionable by students as writers, and thus, inherently positive. One of the recurring tone issues I experience with students viewing my written feedback as negative is misreading questions; students often read questions as sarcastic or accusatory when I am asking in order to elicit a response (for example, when I write “Did you look at the sample?” how I move forward with helping a student depends on that answer). As my MAT students expressed in the context of Alvermann, students absolutely do need to see themselves as writers and do need to trust they will be successful, but they also must embrace the need to revise and the awareness that no one produces “perfect” writing in one (or even several) drafts.

Feedback and the dynamic between teachers and students (including trust) are the lifeblood of the writing process when students are young and developing. As I noted above, affect matters and the teacher/student relationship inevitably impacts how effective the teacher is.

As teachers providing feedback, we must be careful and purposeful in our feedback, focusing on actionable feedback and creating/maintaining a culture of support and encouragement.

To that end, I believe we cannot reduce feedback to a positive/negative dichotomy that serves only to reinforce the cultures and practices we need to reject, deficit ideologies and the error hunt.

In the McSweeney’s parody above, the writing teacher and their wife are ensnared in a demon-possessed student essay, but the more horrifying detail of this piece is the ending—the realization that teachers and students are actually trapped in an even greater hellscape:

“I did it,” she sobbed. “I killed it. I killed it.”

“You did it,” I said, climbing into the bathtub with her, holding my wife close. “It’s over. It’s all over now.”

Silence.

Then she said, “It’s not over.”

“What—”

“You still have to grade it.”

80%
Your Essay Shows Promise But Suffers from Demonic Possession

Yes, let’s work on feedback and the affect created around the writing process, but let’s not ignore that their are larger dynamics (grades and testing) at play that erode the teacher/student relationship as well as the effectiveness of teaching and the possibilities of learning.

The Trap: The Ends v. Means Tension in the Pursuit of Content Knowledge

October 19, 2021 plthomasedd

Over the course of almost 40 years, I have taught writing/composition to high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. I am well aware of the cumulative toll of reading and responding to 10s of thousands of essays by students who are both learning to think and learning to write.

Those essays are often vapid and jumbled, and thus, the work of a writing teacher can be incredibly tedious.

The Onion parody of student writing, Since The Beginning Of Time, Mankind Has Discussed What It Did On Summer Vacation, is too accurate for me to laugh since, despite sharing the piece with students, I still often read essays that begin with the same sort of dramatic and over-simplified claims fictitious Jeremy Ryan offers:

For as far back as historians can go, summer vacations have been celebrated by people everywhere as a time for rest and relaxation. Many advancements have been made in summer breaks since these early times, but it is also true that many different traditions have lived on and continue to remain with us today. This is why, since the beginning of time, mankind has discussed what it did on its summer vacation.
This is what I intend to prove within the course of this essay.
Since The Beginning Of Time, Mankind Has Discussed What It Did On Summer Vacation

So when I noticed a Twitter thread about teachers/professors struggling with responding to student essays, I offered the following responses:

https://twitter.com/roderickgraham/status/1450390465166168070?s=20

https://twitter.com/roderickgraham/status/1450438500441001987?s=20

I think that is the trap. Writing as assessment of content will often be tedious for the teacher/professor; and then, if we want students to develop as writers and scholars, they must be required to make writer's choices (my previous Tweet). I think we do too little of the latter
— Paul Thomas (@plthomasEdD) October 19, 2021

The trap, as I note above, results from any teacher’s perception of the role of content knowledge and the acquisition of the knowledge in the teaching/learning process.

Is that content knowledge the ends of instruction and learning, or the means of instruction and learning?

I think Rod Graham speaks for many teachers who incorporate student writing in order to assess whether or not students have acquired essential content knowledge as an ends of the lesson, unit, or course.

However, I have a different view of what constitutes “content” and I tend to place that content in the context of the means of learning.

For example, this week in my first-year writing seminars we have begun our journey toward their submitting a formally cited essay. My guiding goals for this assignment is helping students make the transition from high school thinking and writing to behaving and thinking as writers and scholars (especially in ways that are expected in undergraduate education).

First, I cautioned students about what it means to gather sources in order to write a cited essay. Students tend to begin their search of sources with a predetermined outcome in mind (they will lament, often, that they didn’t find what they wanted to find) so I tell them they are seeking a body of evidence in order to learn more deeply about a topic (thus, start with a question, not a conclusion/claim); and then, their job as student-scholars is to credibly represent what the evidence shows (whether that is what they “wanted” to find or not).

Next, I introduce them to the difference between mainstream approaches to topics (the “both sides” approach) and scholarly approaches to topics (more nuanced, and often resulting in only one credible “side”).

To engage with the problems of “both sides” approaches, I shared the current controversy in Texas: Books on Holocaust should be balanced with ‘opposing’ views, Southlake school leader tells teachers.

Several students were visibly shocked by the “both sides” mandate about the Holocaust (much to my relief) so we explored exactly what those “sides” might be, and then applied that to other topics such as slavery in the U.S., sexual assault, etc.

However, when I shared my own work on corporal punishment and the negative backlashes I experience for my public work against corporal punishment, the student reactions shifted dramatically; as is typical, several students argued for corporal punishment (although I clearly noted the evidence overwhelmingly rejects any positive outcome for corporal punishment).

Of course, this is an ideal example of the power of cultural norms and ideology (specifically religious training and beliefs) to trump empirical evidence, and it serves my larger instructional goals, but this dynamic is troubling none the less.

This lesson as well as the cited essay assignment represents my practice of using content as a means to acquiring authentic ways of thinking and writing (a different type of “content”) regardless of the content knowledge being interrogated or explored.

Students are free to choose any topic for this essay, and ultimately, I will be assessing how well they explore and incorporate sources and then how credibly they represent their sources over the course of synthesizing a coherent essay; I also trust that these students will acquire content knowledge (ends) as a result of interacting with that content as a means.

I do recognize that many teachers will and should continue to use writing as a mechanism for assessing the acquisition of content/knowledge, but I also must stress that this dynamic will necessarily be tedious for teachers and students—and that it likely inhibits many important goals for students as independent thinkers/scholars and writers.

As I Tweeted above, students experience content as an ends far too often, and are invited to use content as a means far too rarely.

Prompts and rubrics do most of the work for students, and in effect, infantilize those students, guaranteeing any acquisition of content is superficial and transitory.

If we want students to think and write with sophistication and nuance, we must provide students many, many opportunities to choose what content they engage with and then practice those sophisticated and nuance moves with content/knowledge as a means to their own growth as scholars and writers.

Critical Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory, education, indoctrination

Conservatives Seeking Education as a Buffet of Ignorance

October 11, 2021 plthomasedd

Several decades ago, the following true story about teaching in a small, conservative Southern town, seemed like a once-in-a-career experience: A new social studies teacher at my high school was challenged by a parent because this new teacher covered Middle East geography by detailing the regional tensions correlated with religion among Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

Ultimately, the parent wanted their child removed from the class because, as the parent announced to the principal, “I don’t want my son knowing religions other than Christianity exist.”

Fast forward about three decades—passing through several rounds of school choice movements (which I will connect later)—and now public school teachers and college professors across the U.S. find themselves challenged in a similar but far more extensive and organized way concerning Critical Race Theory (CRT).

Mike Gonzalez, for example, at the Heritage Foundation, has constructed Try This “Critical Race Theory” Checklist for conservative and Christian parents who, like the parent above, want to opt their children out of knowledge.

Along with explosive and even violent school board meetings about mask mandates, Covid, and, yes, CRT, parents are now organizing to opt their children out of education; for example, the Orwellian-named Families for Educational Freedom offer a CRT Lessons Letter and a Intrusive Survey Letter; the former outlines what parents want their children to have freedom from [1]:

We/I,________________________________, the parent(s) of _______________________________, grade ________, are/is exercising our/my fundamental parental rights under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, and/or any other state and federal laws to opt our/my child out of any instruction in Critical Race Theory (CRT), including but not limited to the following ideas or principles —
• That any race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, and/or socioeconomic status is inherently superior or inferior to any other race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin and/or socioeconomic status.
• That any race, gender, sexual orientation, and/or national origin is privileged or oppressed.
• That race-based stereotyping and labeling are acceptable as part of “anti-racism” education.
• That an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of the individual’s race.
• That an individual’s moral character is determined by the individual’s race.
• That America and its institutions are fundamentally racist.
• That the values, principles, and/or ideals of one’s own family or religion are fundamentally incorrect, racist, and/or preventing them from social and emotional growth.
These teachings of CRT foster discrimination and harassment on the basis of race and are a violation of our family’s values and religious beliefs. It is well-established that parents have a fundamental right to direct the religious upbringing and education of their children. Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972). You are not to instruct or inculcate my child on the aforementioned or following subjects, without providing me at least fifteen (15) days prior written notice and providing me with the intended materials and lesson plans.
The prohibition extends to any promotion, legitimization, or normalization of CRT, no matter how your program or approach is defined or packaged, including but not limited to any instruction, materials, or conversations related to “equity,” “privilege,” “intersectionality,” “diversity, tolerance and inclusion,” “anti-racism,” “microaggressions,” “white privilege,” “white adjacency,” “hate speech,” “hate crimes,” “critical social justice,” “postcolonial theory,” “postcolonialism,” “sensitivity education,” or the like.
CRT Lessons Letter

The bullet points may look familiar since they are occurring, often verbatim, in state legislation attacking CRT directly and indirectly as well as banning the use of the 1619 Project.

These misleading but purposeful strategies parents are using to censor curriculum in public schools is a logical evolution from how a minority of parents have been leveraging control over public education for decades—opting students out of sex education, book challenges and banning, a revolving door of school choice schemes that pander to what parents want their children to learn (without the price tag of private schools that are often appealing because there parents can and do monitor and control what is and isn’t taught), periodic challenges to the teaching of evolution, etc.

If polls are even remotely good indicators, the current Republican Party remains about 40% loyal to Trump, suggesting about 10-15% of Americans constitute this movement against CRT (likely a similar percentage to the Moral Majority movement coinciding with the Reagan presidency).

While this is a significant minority, the U.S. has long had a powerful and very vocal conservative and Christian influence that is solidly anti-education.

One of the great ironies (similar to the organization’s name noted above, Families for Educational Freedom) of the backlash against CRT (beyond that CRT doesn’t really exist in K-12 education) is that it rests on an old and tired argument that leftist teachers are indoctrinating students; this is projection from conservatives who are, in fact, seeking to indoctrinate students.

While leftists are extremely rare in K-12 education, marginalized in higher education, and nearly powerless in the economic/political system of the U.S., as I have noted often, true leftists, critical educators, are adamantly opposed to indoctrination and recent efforts by Republicans mirror commitments to indoctrination found in China.

Ultimately, this CRT mania isn’t about CRT, but is part of the steady and determined effort by an anti-education minority to dismantle universal public education and academic freedom because at their core, as William Ayers concludes:

Education will unfit anyone to be a slave. That is because education is bold, adventurous, creative, vivid, illuminating — in other words education is for self-activating explorers of life, for those who would challenge fate, for doers and activists, for citizens. Training is for slaves, for loyal subjects, for tractable employees, for willing consumers, for obedient soldiers. Education tears down walls; training is all barbed wire.
excerpt from To Teach, William Ayers

Conservatives and Christians embrace education as training, indoctrination, as mere preparation for work or passive compliance with the dogma of religion.

The attacks on CRT and efforts by parents to opt out of curriculum deemed “indoctrination” or claimed to cause “racial discomfort” are poised to turn education into a buffet of ignorance leaving our children and teens intellectually starved and the status quo safely protected.

[1] See:

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. in the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it….
We were a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice. (pp. 24, 25)
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Bicycling, existentialism, memoir

The Inevitable, Exponential Decline

October 5, 2021 plthomasedd

Do not go gentle into that good night,/ Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Do not go gentle into that good night, Dylan Thomas

In the consumer society called “America,” we humans are often nothing more or less than the objects we accumulate.

Or as comedian George Carlin explained, we are ultimately our “stuff”:

Nine months into being 60, I recognize that my life—in the throes of the inevitable, exponential decline—is reflected in some of my most prized stuff, my collection of bicycles that numbers 4 (two Ridley road bicycles, a Santa Cruz MTB, and a Santa Cruz gravel bicycle).

Part of that reflection involves my more than 30 years as a so-called serious cyclist living by The Rules, including Rule #12: The correct number of bikes to own is n+1. Because of major life changes, I now live in a 900-square-foot apartment instead of a house more than twice that size.

Bicycles occupy far too much space, and I have them hanging on the wall, forcing me to climb a ladder just to be able to ride.

As I have been fearing, while alone, I fell off the ladder recently while storing bicycle parts in the only storage space available in the HVAC area above the bathroom. I imagined myself lying broken on the concrete floor while I was falling—feelings I included in a recent poem, blue&black.

The reason I was on that ladder circles back to my bicycles since I was replacing the saddle on my Ridley Excalibur (Flandrien edition).

A few Saturdays ago, I joined the early morning ride from the local Trek store. I took several extended pulls during the ride, and gradually realized my saddle was incredibly uncomfortable, causing numbness and pain.

For cyclists, especially those of us who ride long and intense distances, the saddle is one of the most important components. I rode with Fizik Arione saddles for many years, a flat, long saddle with a faux-suede strip that keeps you from sliding around.

However, I briefly retired from road cycling throughout 2017—after being struck by a car on Christmas Eve 2016—but when I returned to road cycling in early 2018, I had to acknowledge that my body no longer found my road bicycle as comfortable as before.

Much to my chagrin, and embarrassment, I had to raise my stem and change my saddle, then to the Fizik Aliante, a curved saddle designed for people who are less flexible.

I also had to abandon my preferred thin, faux-leather handlebar tape, and returned to wearing padded gloves since I was struggling with hand stiffness and pain.

Those changes made riding more comfortable, even as I strayed from The Rules and the enormous cultural pressure among so-called serious cyclists.

After I stood up from the fall off the ladder, momentarily stunned and shaken, I cursed what had led to having to change my saddle again (this time to the same MTB-style saddle I have on my MTB and gravel bicycle). It took a few minutes to realize I was essentially fine, until I noticed blood marks on the carpet from a small cut on my foot.

Each time I climb the ladder to ride my Flandrien road bicycle, which I have switched to from my Helium SL because the Flandrien is far more comfortable, I see the inevitable, exponential decline of me reflected in the gradual replacement of parts on that bicycle—the raised stem, the padded handlebar tape, the bulkier saddle.

Much of this is depressing because it reflects a life-long war for me between me and my body—a body that never seemed to be able to attain the demands I have made of it, a body often disappointing and flawed.

But there is also more, a recognition that my being drawn to a sport grounded in Rule #5 (harden the fuck up, or HTFU) has a great deal of disfunction that I should walk away from, instead of gradually and reluctantly relinquishing piece by piece.

Some of that disfunction can be traced to my father, a hard-ass product of mid-twentieth century bullshit about working hard and suffering. Any of the success I have achieved as a cyclist resulted from my ability to suffer, just as my father taught me directly and indirectly.

My father suffered himself into an early grave.

And there are days now, especially after mountain biking and some gravel riding, when my shoulders ache just like my father’s failed him for the last couple decades of his life.

The machine is wearing down.

I have been sharing stories about the inevitable, exponential decline with my students, including telling stories about my life as a cyclist for about 35 years.

I now confess that the HTFU lifestyle was a really bad way to live and ride, and that I am paying for it. I usually share the story of the day I quit the Assault on Mt. Mitchell—a 102-mile ride that concludes with about 30 miles of climbing—just as I was starting the climb.

I didn’t just quit that day; I quit ever doing the ride again (after about 20 starts and 16 or so finishes of the grueling event since 1988).

My story of coming to reject a life of suffering, a hobby of suffering, seems to resonate with many of my students, notably my athletes (especially the football players) and students in ROTC.

Those students deeply inside cultures of suffering appreciate a different perspective than what they are being told within those cultures; those students are often up very early in the mornings doing grueling physical activity before starting their day as students.

They are bone tired, often fighting the urge to fall asleep in class.

I tell them that it doesn’t have to be that way, that life can be filled with joy and pleasure.

As I write this, I have recently ridden my bicycles 6 days in a row, and found myself in a hole. Tired. Sore.

As I write this, it is day 2 of rain with several more days of rain forecast.

I am anxious about not being able to ride. I am also slipping into the depression that comes with the contracting daylight of October.

I am a good existentialist who recognizes our passions are our sufferings, but I am far too inadequate at being a human who can resist the allure of HTFU.

Yes, I know—and believe—that we are supposed to imagine Sisyphus happy as he turns again and again to descend the hill in order to roll his rock, his Thing, back up the hill.

But at 60, I am newly aware Sisyphus would be happier if he were simply to quit, no longer to be defined by his stuff.

Claiming Teacher and Student Agency in the Era of the “Science of Reading” (RRC)

October 4, 2021 plthomasedd

Reading Recovery Canada

Claiming Teacher and Student Agency in the Era of the “Science of Reading” – presented by Dr. P L Thomas, Professor of Education
December 13 2021 – 6:30pm (eastern time) – session will be recorded for repeat viewing until August 31, 2022

The “science of reading” movement has direct roots in a U.S. media narrative starting about 2018, but the Science of Reading now drives reading and education decisions in many states and provinces. The decisions and legislation often includes policies and practices not supported by research (for example, grade retention) and further de-professionalizes teachers. This session places the Science of Reading movement in historical context and disrupts the “evidence-based” claims of Science of Reading advocates. The goal of the session is to provide teachers the evidence and support needed to assert their professional autonomy in support of their students’ needs and agency.

Access presentation PP HERE