Parents v. Seattle and Meredith v. Jefferson

Landmark case that directly comments/re-interprets Brown v. Board and forbids public schools for discriminating enrollment by race. Being (a) a minority, and (b) a teacher, of course I have something to say. But since I'm not in the country right now, and China is decidedly racially homogeneous, this is an issue that does not get a lot of coverage here, so, a brief opinion.

At first, my feelings were mixed. After all, as mentioned before, I don't like that race is such a big issue in the US, and the only way to make it less of an issue is to, well, make it less of an issue. In other words, stop discriminating by race, whether positive or negative. By that count, I should approve of the Supreme Court's decision. However, a likely result of this decision is greater de facto segregation in schools. Schools in predominantly white neighborhoods will remain white, and vice versa, since the incentive for busing is now diminished.

Which reaches the crux of the problem: just because public schools are not supposed to discriminate by race, the rest of society still does. Real estate agents and apartment landlords still consciously or subconsciously perpetrate de facto racial segregation. There is still the white flight to private schools, leaving the public schools more minority-dominant. And even though the entry into public school is no longer race-discriminant, the school system itself might still be, through teachers who encourage some students to take AP classes and other students to stay in the regular lane. Teachers who fail certain students while giving others the benefit of the doubt.

School is supposed to be the great equalizer, yes, but it's swimming against the current of society, and it is not independent from it. For example, there was a kid in my class who is very bright, and a natural history student -- inquisitive, asks all the right questions, thoughtful and makes the right connections, can judge the significance of events and evaluate the validity of their source. A solid B+ student in the class. But when he asked me if he should take AP US history the following year, I hesitated, and eventually said no. Why? The AP US History course is very heavy reading and a lot of writing. In-class writing. And 2 chapters a week of reading. Although he writes well, he hates writing in-class. (Whenever he turns in type-written essays, they're always beautiful. Whenever he turns in any class-work, he writes one word answers). Nor does he have the prior training and the home environment for him to read 2 chapters a week. I was worried that AP would not give him the opportunity to shine, and would just fail him because he can't handle the dry work load. AP is intense because that is what the standards require, and the only way to cover that much material in 8 months is to cram.

So in my choice in not recommending that he take AP, am I continuing all of the racial baggage that society has given him? (And thus lowering his chance at college) Or am I saving from failing in a track that wasn't designed for him and has no real bearing to real history anyways? I don't think I was personally racially motivated. If he was a white kid or an Asian kid and had the same temperament and background, I would have recommended the same thing. But fewer white kids and Asian kids need that additional boost in terms of work ethic and academic literacy.

Yes, I could have done more. I could have spent more effort this year getting him AP-ready. I could have had a more extended talk to him about the consequences of the choice, etc. I am learning, and I hope to do better next year. But this is also a case of race in the social sense, and how it connects with race in the school sense. How is this decision going to affect the society's discrimination of race? Is it going to start a domino-effect that changes how we think about race, or is it just going to perpetuate existing social inequities? I'm worried that it will be the latter, but hope that discussion around the case might start people thinking about the former. In any case, something needs to be done in society as a whole, and not just with public schools.

In China

It is an odd sort of thing, being connected on the internet in China, knowing that some sites are out there, but that one cannot access it. Very often, our scope of knowledge is limited by what we already know about. As in, in this connected world, it's rare that you know there's information out there, but have no way to find out more about it. (Granted, access to information is not universally available. For example, if I wanted to know what sort of people are sitting in the Borders in downtown Chicago, I would have to fly there. But in that case, I know that (a) the information is out there, and (b) what I'd need to do to access it). So the limit is what you know about. For example, I'm lying on a bed right now and I don't know what sort of machine makes the fabric of the bed-sheet, what techniques are used, etc. And since I know absolutely nothing about the fabric world, I would have great difficulty looking it up. Google-fu is an increasingly important skill, and is based on honing search terms.

I'm trying to describe the concept of schema? I read a story in History C&I last year that has been in my head ever since: When Marco Polo first saw a Rhinoceros, he wrote in his journal, "The unicorn is an ugly beast..." He did not know that there were new creatures out there, and so when he saw a rhinoceros, he could only see it in terms of the creatures that he already knows. In this case, the unicorn.

And yet, here, I know that, say, livejournal exists. I know it directly, in as much as I can directly type in the URL. And yet I cannot access it. It's like having a part of the schema on "view only", except I can't even view it. It is like Marco Polo saying that "I know what a rhino is. I know what it looks like. I know that it can run 35 miles per hour and its closest relative is the horse. I know where you can find them." And yet cannot produce any proof that it exists, because there are no boats to Africa.

That might be how he felt when attempting to describe China to Italians. It's a miracle they believed him. (Or did they believe him only because he described something miraculous? I do not understand religion, especially not the religiosity of Europeans in the 15th century, but if Marco Polo existed now, would we believe him?)

This entry has strayed in many directions, and should warrant an edit, but since this is but a thinly-disguised announcement about my inability to access Livejournal, I shall leave it as such.

Defunding Race

Today, in-between my two classes (Teaching Special Needs and Readings on Differentiation), I attended a lecture about role of education in the social funding of race. It was a talk given by Gloria Ladson-Billings, who is a famous person in the education field. I'm not very familiar with her work at all. I think she pioneered the idea that it's not an education gap, but rather an education debt that gets accumulated.

Anyway, today she talked about race, which called to mind some ideas from first year at UChicago -- the social construction of race, but also the inevitability of dealing with race in the US. She also pulled out Foucault, which was a familiar entity in this field of unknown Education entities.
Some points of her argument: Race is fully-funded by society. This means that even though race is a social construction that we acknowledge, we all do things as a society that maintains this construction. Young children between the ages of 5 and 7 learn that colors have social meaning. They are introduced to the racial coding, even if race is not actually explicitly mentioned. (This is where Foucault comes in, with his regime of truth and his ideas about sex and the web of power that restricts thought). The example that GLB gave for something that was socially funded was literacy-- it is the currency of social interactions. Everyone is expected to know how to give directions, to read billboards, etc. (Not everyone is expected to know how to do calculus.) She talks about the importance of moving past the dichotomy of "racist" vs. "non-racist," and the need to "de-fund" race from society.

It was exciting to hear about this idea of "social funding", as in we as a society are playing this game, and contributing to the continued use of race as a discriminating factor in how we engage and rationalize society.

However, the second half of the lecture became slightly problematic. GLB moved on to talk about the gradual privatization of social funding since the 70s (okay...), the role that schools play in social funding (basically (a) school has the function to assimilate kids into the collective culture and to foster citizenship, and (b) being aware of which functions of school give implicitly racialized mental images, such as the at-risk students or the AP class, etc), and how to de-fund race.

It is at this "how to de-fund race" that the problem comes up. GLB lists a bunch of things that a teacher education program can do-- making "race in education" classes available to college freshmen, having deeper intellectual discussions, and fighting a good fight despite seemingly impossibility of the task.

Ummm...isn't there more we can do? More than half of the lecture attendees were STEP students. We didn't need to know how to de-fund race in a teacher education program. We need to know how to do it through our behavior and our curriculum. (Her suggestion is basically to talk about it directly with the students by eliciting concrete observations from the students ("What patterns do you see around school?"), and then asking the all-important Why question.)

More importantly, I am concerned with this idea of "de-funding". What happens to the funds? Does de-funding race mean that the funds get re-directly into, say, class, or ethnicity? Is there anything that *should* be funded? How do you de-fund? Is it a matter of stopping the deposits, or actually removing money from the pool?

To apply it to something concrete that has been rolling around in my head for the last week or so...

The Virginia Tech shooting. Incomprehensible horror committed by a mentally unstable Senior who was an English major. His name was Seung-Hui Cho, he immigrated to the US at the age of 8, grew up in Fairfax county, Virginia, and his parents owned a dry-cleaning business. He was a permanent resident of the United States, having spent 2/3 of his life here. Once his identity was revealed on Tuesday, we had:
- the media at first reporting his name as last-name first, to emphasize his afiliation to South Korea
- the South Koreans apologizing
- Asian Americans talking about the pressure on Asians to "represent", in that "oh no, not an Asian" sort of way
Can I say that I was secretly glad when analysis of the event shifted to his history of mental illness and the issue of gun control?

But the first reaction was to say "omg an Asian did it." That would be the social funding of race. To be even more specific, calling the shooting the "Cho's shooting" (vs. "Columbine shooting") would be a social funding of racing. But my problem is this: how do you "de-fund" this? Calling it the "Virginia Tech" shooting would transfer funds to this concept that "college campuses are unsafe and negligent". We're not calling it the "Mentally Unstable English Major" Shooting, but the media was definitely moving in that direction. I mean, we have to label it somehow. College campuses and mental illnesses do not have the baggage that race currently has, but if we de-fund race and fund those instead, then they will eventually acquire heavy implications themselves. Or is there a way to de-fund race without funding something else?

This is what I've been thinking about every time someone says "Cho's shooting". -- 1) Why are we labelling it this way? 2) Are there racial implications (or am I just being over-sensitive)? and 3) Would any other label be any better?

Internet with a purpose

I currently live in a house where the internet is sporadic at best. It is hard to adjust from 4 years of college life where the internet is never off, to a house where the availability of the internet is a few random hours per day. There is nothing like limiting access to something to expose its role in one's life.

(0) If the internet were completely unavailable, life would involve US post, cheaper stamps, newspapers, and more phone conversations.

(1) If the internet was not available in the house, but available in public locations, then life would involve going to the library or elsewhere and checking email, downloading everything, and reading it at home. Websurfing would be similar-- download everything, read later. It was not until 4 years ago that I switched to web-based email. Before that, I had "download-and-read" email, a remnant from the dial-up days. Emails would be written and queued in an "Outbox". Now, that is called "Drafts" in GMail.

(2) With internet available 24/7, I have access to all the knowledge, information, and middle-man services of the internet. At a whim, I can easily look up directions, order books, read the news, and converse with friends. The internet middle-man offers 2+gb to store email and a easy way to search it. It facilitates living in the moment. It caters to my every thought, from "I need a DeGaulle speech from WWII" to "yawn" to "I wonder what is the chemical composition to acrylic paint?" What this instant access and instant service does *not* provide is the will to concentrate on a specific task.
This also means a lot of information is left on the internet instead of made accessible elsewhere. For example, GMail has a convenient "view attachments as html" function. Often, I would just view the word document as html, and only download it if I need to edit it. It is easier to search for the document on GMail than on my computer. Why use a map when online directions are readily available?

My current state alternates between state 2 and state 0. For a few hours a day, I live a normal internet-dependent life of instant gratification. For the rest of the day, I theoretically work on non-internet-dependent tasks. Tasks that require forethought, concentration, and physical action. What I have been discovering, however, is that transitioning between these two modes also takes time. Often, I would sit dazed after the internet is "turned off", just letting my mind wander around the room, at a loss for what to do. I might read comics, or re-tread old stories or files. Or eat a snack. It can be 5 minutes later or 50 minutes later that I can say "all right, I need to do something. I have goals to be accomplished." This is a dangerous transition time. This transition can be eased if I am consciously preparing to leave the internet. If I am saying "okay, after I finish these tasks, I will complete these other tasks in real life."

From this, maybe I can extrapolate that there are two principle ways of engaging with the internet: purposeful, and wandering. Purposeful is applicable to real life, such as checking email, checking maps, etc. But very often we wander. Wikipedia, fark, livejournal, myspace, webcomics, etc. Insular. I'm not saying that one is better than the other, only that we need to be conscious of what we're doing. I need to practice, and then teach my kids, the ability to use the internet with a purpose in mind, (but without losing the free-association aspect of the internet that allows me to expand my horizons.) Meta-cognition, anyone?

Internet -- the universal middle man

I finally had a spare afternoon this weekend, and I decided to finally sit down and put up a proper website for myself. This is the 6th incarnation of a general portal website for myself. Since I design one on average of once a year, my previous designs have become an interesting documentation of the changes in the way we interface and use the internet.

I'd like to posit that the internet has become the ultimate middle man to the world.

The "middle man" concept: The middle man is generally seen in a negative light-- as a consumer, you want to "cut out the middle man" so that you can deal directly with the producer of goods. For example, when I drive to the grocery store to get apples, I am paying middle men all along the way --
- the grocery store, the retailer
- the distributer who has a contract with the grocery store and the farmer (the wholesaler)
- the truckers who deliver transport the apples
Not to mention the farmer and my car.

Now, with the internet, I can theoretically connect "directly" with the original seller, who will then sell me the product at wholesale prices, and then ship it to your door. Theoretically, then, there are only two middle men - the shipper, and the internet.

A purer form of this middle man role can be found in the process it takes to create a website.

In, say, 2000, in order to create a website, you need:
- knowledge of html
- notepad or an html editor
- an ftp program
- server space (either purchased or through the likes of Angelfire)
- an image editor (hopefully one that can resize images)

Now, in 2007, in order to create a website, you need:
- the internet

Want a blog? A few clicks on blogger. Want to share your photos? A few clicks on flickr. They even make the thumbnails and sort it for you. Why create a website when you can just create wiki? With a wiki you don't need to ftp anything. The internet is also becoming a good middleman for social events. For example, you can use eVite to organize parties. Facebook relationships. In current events--using blogs to find out about the Virginia Tech shooting. And in the aftermath, to create memorials. Thanks to the magic of php and various ajaxian experiences, the internet has gotten rid of all the other middle-men that facilitate the individual's contact with the world.

What I worry about sometimes is... what if I forget how to do it without the internet? I am always wary of a monopoly. In this case, it would be a monopoly of process and thought.

So says I, writing on a blog on the internet. No, the hypocrisy is not lost on me.

Test

Hello, this is the inaugural first post on this blog. Here I will attempt to lasso my wandering thoughts into more structured and coherent form.