Away from my Desk

The coming weeks and the coming years

I, like everyone I know, am nervous about what's coming in November, and I feel so close to powerless that the distinction doesn't seem important.

I'm writing letters with Vote Forward, and I'll keep it up, but it's a faith-based form of activism: we send out the letters, we hope they'll make a difference, we'll never know if they did, and it remains possible—even likely—that Donald Trump will be our next president, again.

Meanwhile, I read the New Yorker so at least I get saddled with a better class of election anxiety, and I have the overwhelming sense that the country is slipping away from any form I can understand or empathize with, which may be the only universal sensation in America right now.

I learned from the New Yorker that lots of Muslim voters in Michigan are planning to vote for Trump, along with working class voters of all races in Pennsylvania. And I know that Democrats are now overwhelmingly a party of the college-educated, but I still don't get why anyone who isn't white would back Trump, who seems pretty clearly—to the extent that he isn't only in it for himself—to be only in it for white people. Like I said, I don't feel like I understand my country as well well as I used to think I did.

This autumn stretch of activism sucks. We send letters out, like setting messages in bottles afloat on an exiting tide, and then voters in a tiny number of states, most of which I've never visited, will decide whether we get Harris, or a man who has told anyone who will listen that he plans to be a dictator.

But what we do next doesn't have to feel like this.

Whether we spend the next four years in a Harris presidency or a Trump presidency, the work we need to do will be the same: to strengthen the bonds that connect our local community and build power by winning victories that make our city a more safe, abundant, and delightful place to live for everyone. Right now we ALL act like you'd expect people to act in precarious circumstances where nobody except those closest to you seems to have your back, and it doesn't seem like a good idea to trust anyone or anything all that much. Nothing will change unless we change how it feels to be alive right now. But we CAN change that, a little at a time, on our street, in our neighborhoods, across our city.

And if we do that, even a little, and other folks do the same where they live, we'll be in a better place four years from now, no matter what.*

Of course, this all feels urgent NOW but there's a lot that's urgent. Maybe in four years I'll read this post and think "well, I blew it again and forgot to build community" but I hope not.

*BUT a way worse place if Trump wins than if Harris wins, so I’ll keep writing those letters!

If You Meet a Buddha on the Road, Debate Him

I'm partway through reading The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors by Lama Rod Owens. It's a guide to taking a socially-engaged approach to Buddhist practice, based on the concept of the bodhisattva. Owens writes "Bodhisattva is roughly translated as 'spiritual warrior' and is one who is motivated by the energy of bodhicitta, or a profound altruistic wish to free all beings from suffering" (18-19). So far there's a lot in the book that appeals to me, for example the distinction Owen draws between "reactivity" and "responsiveness" resonates powerfully. Here's a relevant excerpt:

Rigidity arises because we find ourselves trapped in the helplessness of the chaos. When I know this and can remember this, my relationship to the carceral state can be an experience of liberation because when I transition from reactivity to responsiveness, the state no longer dictates what I am, and I can start directing my energy towards liberation. When I forget this and start habitually reacting to the chaos, I am consumed by the chaos (39).

There's also a lot that challenges (and in fact implicates) me. For example, this: "To bypass the struggle of people surviving systems of violence in favor of an anesthetic life is itself an act of violence" (20). That really hit home. Also, this line (for context, Lama Rod Owens is Black): "Racism isn't my problem: therefore it isn't my work. [...] Although all Black and Brown people deal with the violence of white supremacy, we do not have the capacity to turn it off" (42).

There's just one thing in the book that REALLY doesn't work for me, and it's the central premise—which means that my issue isn't really with Lama Rod Owens, it's with the Buddha. In Owens' words, the Buddha "cut out a path of liberation by realizing the dreamlike nature of reality" (19). Owens develops this idea further in a section called "The Yoga of the Dream":

The yoga of the dream for the New Saint is the realization that this reality that we live and struggle through is not our true home. It is a dream, an illusion, or even a figment of our imaginations. [...] To free unconscious phenomena, such as unconscious biases or narratives that are not true, means disrupting our perception of what things are so that our experience of phenomenal reality becomes transparent, fluid, and basically, less real. This is how we experience freedom from the realness of things; when things are less real, we begin to feel more spacious, and, therefore, freer (26).

I find it helpful to recognize my unconscious biases and narratives as illusions, but I don't find it helpful to regard, say, a tree as an illusion. I don't think the phenomenal world IS illusion, and I don't think it would be helpful to me to cultivate a discipline of training myself to believe that it was. This brings me to my BIG issue with the book: the way that Owens uses the phrase "the carceral state." Here's what he writes: "The outer level of change is the recognition of the phenomenal world and the basic reality of suffering and delusion, which I call the carceral state" (30). In other words, the carceral state is "the phenomenal world," not just the messages on our phones and our social norms, but the plants, the soil, and the ocean.

To me, describing the entirety of reality as "the carceral state" feels like ascribing human problems to the world. In fact, not human problems, but systems of domination, which are no more innately human than systems of liberation and mutual aid (it's just that communities that devote themselves to domination tend to crush communities that devote themselves to liberation and mutual aid, because if you devote yourself to domination you tend to get good at it*).

To be clear, Lama Rod Owens has done WAY, WAY, WAY more than I have to liberate us all from systems of domination, so it's a little sketchy for me, in the midst of my too-often anesthetic life, to take issue with his work. But to me, for my thinking, and for my work, it's important that the phrase "the carceral state" refers to a specific way that humans organize our shared lives, one which is only made possible by our collective acquiescence. And my belief is that if we overcome it, we will be free (as long as we are able to sustain our liberation), but we will NOT find ourselves still imprisoned by the oppression of the phenomenal world until we reach enlightenment and recognize that it's all illusion.

This made me think about the film The Mission—I saw it in my seventh grade social studies class, and it left an impression. There's one exchange in particular that stopped my dead in my tracks. The film is about a Jesuit mission in what is now Brazil and, ultimately, about how disputes between European powers and the Catholic church ultimately lead to a group of Guaraní people being massacred and forced out of their homes. After the massacre, there's an exchange between a Jesuit Cardinal (Cardinal Altamarino) who can't really metabolize the horror of what's happened (which he had reluctantly agreed to) and a Portuguese political representative (Don Hontar), who takes a more "pragmatic" approach. Here's the exchange:

Don Hontar: We must work in the world; the world is thus.

Cardinal Altamarino: No, thus have we made the world. Thus I have made it.

It seems to me that if we use the term "carceral state" to refer to EVERYTHING we're accepting the idea that "the world is thus," and I don't accept that.

Having said that, the film is also about the conflict between spiritual and material views of the world, and the film generally sides with the spiritually-minded (the Jesuits) so it's likely that all the main protagonists would side with Owens more than me on the whole "is the world illusion" question.

*For powerful refutations of the idea that "domination" is "human nature" or otherwise inevitable, I recommend reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass and David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything

A note on the title: There's a Buddhist saying, attributed to the ninth century sage Lin Chi, that goes "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." The title is a reference to that. Many years ago (possibly before I was born) my dad composed the music for a play called The Man Who Killed the Buddha.

Last year was the year of the peace sign

I've spent my adult life flummoxed about how to gesture to greet people. As a teenager, I tended to favor the "teen boy upward head nod" which is a gesture that to me carries a homeopathic dose of swagger—exactly the upper limit of the amount I was ready to risk, but without the sense of shame I might have felt by lowering my head. As I type this, I realize this sounds like one of the "Animals of the African Savannah" moments in Mean Girls so I guess that movie's on to something.

To me, waving seems best delivered enthusiastically and with lots of side-to-side motion, which is useful for actually getting someone's attention, but felt like too much for everyday use. But just holding an open, or partly open hand up feels a little too papal. The punk rock/skater friendly middle finger was never going to fly for me. I spent a few years saluting(?!) because it was a clearly-defined gesture, but it doesn't sit right for several reasons.

In San Diego people throw shakas. I think it was seeing that that got me thinking about my hand gestures again (and when I say "thinking" I mean at a subconscious level. Typing this is the first time I've examined this in any sustained way. Just to be clear). I don't have a take on who should and shouldn't throw a shaka other than that it doesn't feel right for me to do it.

Which brings me to the peace sign. At some point between late high school and early college it felt important to me to make it clear to myself and the world that I was not a hippie. I'm not totally sure what caused this but it mattered at the time. During the pandemic I started listening to "Time Crisis" and that brought me back to listening to the Grateful Dead, and it was just a matter of time before (sometime last year) I started greeting people with a peace sign. For my purposes, it's perfect: it sends a message that's important to me ("peace"), it doesn't require a lot of motion, it doesn't make me feel like I'm pretending to be the pope, and it is, by definition non-threatening. And, while looking up photos for this post, I discovered that it's heavily associated with Ringo*, and I can't argue with that.

*Side note: why is it that there's this common to the point of nearly universal "aging rock star" look of sunglasses, lots of earrings, and leather jackets? I get it if you were in Motley Crüe, but so many people have been dressing like that for decades who NEVER dressed like that when they were at the peak of their fame. Of all the eras of music fashion to choose, why did they all end up on that one?

Learning to drop in on a skateboard made me think about faith. I'm not thrilled about it.

When you start skateboarding, there are two "basic" techniques that loom in front of you as gateways into "actually skating:" the ollie and the drop in. For competent skaters, these are so foundational that on their own they don't really qualify as tricks. But if you can't do them yet, they seem basically impossible.

An ollie is a complicated set of motions that you need to carry out not-quite simultaneously. It's really difficult, and I can't do it yet. But a drop-in is just falling through the air and catching yourself when you land. I can drop in,¹ and learning how to do it led me to think more about faith than I have in my entire life up to now.

The specific discipline that requires a drop in is called "transition," as in, transition from a horizontal to a vertical surface, like the curve from the bottom to the side of a swimming pool. In order to drop in, you jut your board out from the edge into empty space like a diving board, or a pirate's plank. Below it is a curve of concrete that starts impossibly steep, and ends up totally flat. Once you step on the front of your board, it'll start falling towards that concrete, and at some point your wheels will make contact. That all makes sense.

But where in that transition will they hit, and how will your body respond to that when it happens? Presumably if you've dropped in hundreds of times, you basically know the answer to that question. The first time you drop in, you DEFINITELY do not. For this reason, it's much less frightening to drop in on a bank (that is, a flat incline). You know what angle your wheels will hit, because it's the same all the way down to the flat. Even so, dropping in on a bank the first time is, itself, terrifying. There's no way to ease into it—in fact, the standard advice is to slam your front wheels down as hard as you can, so that you don't fall backwards onto the edge. That is to say, the scariest of several possible outcomes is the one that happens if you're too tentative. Which brings me to faith.

I haven't thought about "faith" much in my life. I was raised Unitarian Universalist, and my own theological feelings were best encapsulated by the seventh Unitarian Universalist Principle: "Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part." I felt like I believed in a "God" but not a personified deity—basically, I believed in "the force" as described by Obi-Wan Kenobi: "It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together."² This still pretty much covers my religious belief. And while it has a lot to recommend it (apart from anything else, it's what I actually believe in), one notable thing it has going for it, as I think about it now, is that my faith is never going to be let down by it.

And my approach to learning to drop in was to minimize the need for faith by moving as gradually as possible: first, just learn the motion on flat ground. Then find the most gradual incline I could, and work up from there. I actually found two local skateparks with spots that got incrementally steeper and taller as you went around them (shout out to Ocean Beach and Memorial Skateparks), and inched my way around them. But no matter how gradually I progressed, there would be a gap that required faith to cross: my board jutting out into space, the concrete angle of the concrete looking impossible to land on, and I'd need to step out into the void.

Now, the internet has lots of advice on dropping in. A common theme is that it's "all mental" and the most important thing is to "just commit." This seems to carry an implication that as long as you conquer your fear and commit to the drop in, everything will be OK.

This is not the case: last year I had two sprained MCLs that say that you can fully commit to dropping in, and really hurt yourself.

Here's the thing that dropping in taught me about faith: if you try the scary thing and fully commit to it, you MIGHT hurt yourself. But if you try to do the scary thing and don't commit to it, you will DEFINITELY hurt yourself. In other words, faith is no guarantee of success, but doubt is a guarantee of failure.

This also comes up in rock climbing, where "trust your feet" is a common mantra. This sounds great until somebody tells you to actually kick leg out and plant your entire weight on a tiny bump of rock, which, if it DOESN'T hold you, will mean you crash into the side of a rock face. As you may guess, I'm thinking of a specific situation here, and all I could think at the time was "I know for a FACT my foot might slip, why the hell should I trust something that I KNOW might fail?"

Having faith in things that aren't a sure bet doesn't come easily to me, and I continue to hate it. Unfortunately, as it turns out, faith in uncertain circumstances isn't, as I assumed most of my life, optional. You need to have it if you're going to find a soft landing. And sometimes you won't find a soft landing, anyway.

1. On some things, as long as they aren't too tall or too steep

2. I've been revisiting Star Wars with my children and as an adult I find that almost all the cosmology and morality is ill-conceived and incoherent, but I think they really nailed it with this basic idea (not original to Star Wars obviously, but that's where I first encountered it as a young child).

If you're asking students to do rich, interesting work, you don't need to worry about copying

All project-based teachers have had this question about critique (especially model critique): "what if the kids just copy the model?"

The answer to this is, literally, "I'd like to see them try."

Here's the thing: if you're assigning simple, rudimentary work, like, say, a fill-in-the-blank vocabulary worksheet. Copying a filled-in worksheet is fast, has a low cognitive demand, and you don't learn anything from the experience. So a teacher who's giving out a lot of fill-in-the-blank worksheets needs to police copying very closely.

But let's say the assignment is to shoot a short film, and a student shoots a shot-by-shot recreation of the first scene of The Godfather. Copying a film scene shot-by-shot takes a long time, requires serious thought, and you learn a huge amount from the experience.

So create assignments for students in which, were they able to copy it, you'd be astounded by their achievement.

Also, convince your school to pay for one of the plagiarism-checking services that universities use. That makes things better for everyone and means that a kid who's on track to get busted and kicked out of college gets busted by you first, so you can help them understand the error of their ways.

Project Idea: "They Work For Us"

In 2009, I interned as a researcher for Tom Steinberg, founder of mySociety.org, which was designed to help UK residents become more active citizens - it's hard to believe now, but there was a time not long ago when it seemed like the internet was going to be an engine for a more engaged citizenry and a more robust democracy.

One of mySociety's websites was called "Fix my street" - anybody could use it to tell their local council about a specific problem. They also created "They Work For You", which was a website that collected all records of parliamentary debate and voting, and made them searchable.

The project I'm thinking of is inspired by this, but totally non-digital. I'm thinking it would be called "They Work For Us", and instead of an essential question it would have a challenge.

Here's the challenge: Convince an elected representative to do something to improve the community

We'd want to partner with a nonprofit in order to do this, and study approaches to bringing about change that have worked in the past, and methods that are working around the world now. Then I think we'd plan a few campaigns (with different groups in charge of each one) and probably ultimately funnel them into one single campaign based on what seems most likely to be successful.

Some more specific ideas for this:

Plot the addresses of all students on the team on a map (anonymously) so we can see where we live, and focus on specific geographic areas based on that
Do ethnographic interviews and interview various local stakeholders and experts in order to figure out what to focus on

Ideas for teaching "Outcasts United": learning about lots of different conflicts in one book without getting lost

I just finished reading Warren St. John's excellent Outcasts United, about the Fugees, a youth soccer team in Clarkston, Georgia, composed entirely of refugees, and their coach and founder, Luma Mufleh.

I'd love to read this book with students, and while I'll need to re-read it and mark it up in order to develop all my initial ideas, I want to get a few written down now, while I'm thinking of them.

In particular, the ideas in Talking in Class would lend themselves to teaching this - there are so many great "what would you do?" dilemmas throughout the book.

But first, 'Backstory' lectures, which could use a better name.

Many of the book's chapters focus on the perspective of a particular family of refugees living in Clarkston, and open with an explanation of the conflict that forced them to flee their homes. These are social studies gold, but English trouble, because they slow the pace of the book, so less skilled readers will get bogged down in them and have trouble figuring out how to get through the sudden onslaught of new characters and settings, while more skilled readers will be inclined to skim them in order to get back to the soccer (as, I confess, I was once I was about three-quarters through the book).

I have a few ideas for helping the class to track the various families on the team, and for becoming conversant in the history of the 20th century through some of the conflicts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Here's what I'd like students to learn from this aspect of the project:

Know the basics about what happened in a series of significant conflicts
Understand why these conflicts forced people to seek asylum in other countries
Understand the "semi-deep" chronology of events leading up to each conflict, and how they fit in the history of the 20th century relative to each other
Know where these conflicts took place on a map
Understand the role(s) that the US played in these conflicts, in order to underscore the broader point that America played a role in pretty much everything that happened geopolitically since WWII

Big world map

I'll put a big world map on the wall, and when we find out about characters who come from a particular country in the book, we'll put a pin there and label it.

We can also do a quiz or two with a blank map of the world where students just need to indicate where the countries of origin are.

"Semi-deep" chronology

I'm using the term "semi-deep" because I want students to understand that countries don't just suddenly explode into genocide for no reason, but you can ALWAYS go deeper into historical backstory and I don't want to get bogged down.

I'd like to put a timeline on the wall, with notecards indicating important events in the background to each conflict, so people can see the history visually, AND see that, for example, King Leopold of Belgium reigned before WWII.

'Backstory' lectures

Pairs of students will be responsible for giving a ten-minute lecture explaining the conflicts that are described at the beginnings of chapters. Different students will give the lectures on the day that we read a particular chapter. This lecture can draw on what's in the book, but should take more time on explaining everything.

As part of this lecture, the partners will...

put a pin on the country of origin
put up notecards on the timeline as they explain them
set eight quiz questions for their classmates for the end of the week.

I'll add two questions of my own, and I'll also have the discretion to change the questions if they seem too easy, or incorrect

Specialist spaces and equipment that a PBL school should have

The classrooms at my school are designed for maximum flexibility and maximum visibility: we use chairs that are easy to move and to stack, wheeled tables that can be easily combined to make larger tables, we have lots of glass walls, and most classrooms have one wall that can be opened to turn two classrooms into one big classroom.

For most of what we do at school, this flexibility is ideal. However, projects also need some specialist spaces and some specialist equipment.

Here's my list of spaces and equipment that an ideal PBL school would have:

Specialist spaces:

Garden (designed with a few raised beds so you can have separate control and experimental groups)

Test kitchen

Recording/film studio

Some kind of lab (I'll be honest, I have no idea what a good science lab needs, other than flat surfaces that don't wobble - which I know about because they're surprisingly hard to come by at our school).

Wood shop/Maker Space (personally, I would emphasize stuff like drills and table saws over 3D printers).

Black box studio theater with basic lighting.

Specialist equipment that doesn't needs a purpose-built space:

Musical instruments

Sewing machines

Costumes

Books

Computers with publishing, design, engineering, and audio and video recording and editing software.

Project Idea: "Science Vs. Parents"

The Gimlet Media podcast Science Vs. is a great model for student enquiry. It starts with a clear-cut but open-ended question, such as "do detoxes work?", then defines its terms (in the case of detoxes, looking at four specific types of detoxes) and its standard for evidence (peer reviewed research and interviews with university-based researchers). Also it's funny, weird, and gross.

I was thinking that students could produce podcasts based on the Science Vs. format, but I know that coming up with a question is really difficult in this kind of project, and everything rests on the quality of the question.

Hence "Science vs. Parents" because our parents tell us lots of things, and we may be eager to disprove them (though of course the point isn't to disprove, but to find out the truth).

Off the top of my head, here are questions that I could pursue:

Will taking arnica help with pain?
Will a shower take care of my headache?
Do I need more sleep than I'm getting?
Can deep breathing help me get to sleep?

An immediate problem that presents itself is that I don't want to make a podcast that's going to make my mom feel bad (Science Vs. actually involved parents in the episode on chiropractors, and the producer's parents took it in good humor, but not all parents will be like that).

Anyway here some resources I could use to stitch together with this project:

When we first come up with "stuff parents say that we disagree with", we could use the 2x2 boxes that Kelly Gallagher uses to teach argumentative writing, where you write down their arguments and your arguments.
George Hillock's "Evidence and Warrant" structure and his point that you start with evidence and then make the argument that the evidence demands you make, rather than starting from the argument and finding evidence to back it up, will be helpful too.

Teaching chronological history. Ideas.

I don't know a good way to teach chronological history in a PBL classroom. The only people I know who do it well are teachers who started in a more traditional school, so just have the resources they need at the ready, and know how to "do" chronological history teaching. They, as far as I can tell, shrink that aspect of the class into a day or so a week, and integrate it into the class.

I don't have that. I'm once again thinking, as I do every year, of John Green's Crash Course History videos. There are some problems:

John Green can be pretty insufferable on camera, and his comedy definitely comes with diminishing returns
He talks so damn fast
Because he, not I, will be in charge of the content, I can't tailor the chronological narrative to what we're doing in class (except through selection of videos).

On the other hand (and I think I need to be explicit about this with students) writing lectures takes a whole lot of time, and there isn't time to plan a weekly lecture AND manage a project. Here's a concept I'm kicking around:

On Monday, there's a history question for the week. I suck at coming up with these sorts of questions, but I'm thinking like "would you rather have lived as a Roman or a Mesopotamian. Bear in mind that you can not choose your social status, you will get it at random)." Or maybe a question that links more explicitly to the project, like (if we were doing "Why does the US have troops in __", it could be something like "Is the conflict in your country more like the Trojan war, or more like the war between China and the Mongols?"
On Monday or Tuesday, we watch the John Green video (and maybe I do a second viewing with discussion at lunch for kids who want it. Also, kids can obviously re-watch it as much as they want, and look at the transcription if there is one).
On Thursday or Friday, there's time for small-group discussion or a socratic seminar about the question.
After the discussion, kids write up their argument, thereby practicing the argumentative essay. They highlight their evidence and warrants within the text, so that A) they're thinking about it, and B) it can be assessed more quickly.