Sunday, October 9, 2011

KeebleTalk: Starlit Evening: Oakland Prostitution and Californ...

KeebleTalk: Starlit Evening: Oakland Prostitution and Californ...: I've lived in the Bay Area for the last 15 years. It is a home to me in the same way Oxnard, Pine Bluff, and Atlanta now are. I am accu...

KeebleTalk: Brief Portrait of a Woman: Tell My Story

KeebleTalk: Brief Portrait of a Woman: Tell My Story: ESE NE TEKREMA "the teeth and the tongue" symbol of friendship and interdependence I met Carol when I returned to Atlanta, to college, ...

KeebleTalk: Why Black Girls Leave Home: an Argument for My Dau...

KeebleTalk: Why Black Girls Leave Home: an Argument for My Dau...: Ever read Gwendolyn Brooks' " Sadie and Maud?" In the poem, published in 1963, Brooks presents Maud as a mouse of a woman who chooses ...

KeebleTalk: What This Is All About: Why I Joined The Occupy W...

KeebleTalk: What This Is All About: Why I Joined The Occupy W...: This morning I watched as CNN and other mainstream media outlets clumsily attempted to analyze the nature of the Occupy Wall Street Mov...

What This Is All About: Why I Joined The Occupy Wall Street Movement

     This morning I watched as CNN and other mainstream media outlets clumsily attempted to analyze the nature of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.   Ali Velshi, CNN's frenetic money man, propped up 4 commentators, 3 bald men with glasses, and one woman with hair and no glasses, to try to explain why Americans have felt the need to camp out, donate blankets, blow horns, call and respond, build blisters on their feet, sing songs of freedom, go to jail, and shut down streets with their bodies in growing waves from one city to another. The woman, admitted the unorganized group may have a point.  Joblessness has remained steady.  But baffled,  Velshi, discredited the Americans on the street saying they were unfocused.  "What is it that they want?" he said.  The Tea Party Movement, he said, had a focus; government was too big and Obamacare offended them.  Ali Velshi reminds me of the woman in the New York subway station I stood in this summer, as I waited in line to get directions back to the airport.
     About five of us stood dripping in what had to be at least 115 degree subterranean heat, trying to get service while she finished her lunch.  I could feel the air-conditioning waft through the portal through which she was supposed to exchange train tickets, change and directions to those of us suspended in her line.  She then answered a phone call on her cell phone without acknowledging us.  I was too tired and hot to get my blood up, but the others in line cursed her.  I understood why, but I had a long haul and needed to remain chilled.
     Ali Velshi's refusal to see the pain and recognize his likeness to the folks on the street, determined to be heard, determined to exact change, reminds me of that woman; she had made it and was on the other side of the glass looking at a group of stoolies who needed her assistance to move forward.
     She derived some sort of power from our helplessness.  Our need for her assistance was weakness.  She was well-favored, somehow, there on the other side of the glass.  She would take her time, separated as she was from needing anyone or anything, having her needs met, in that moment: her self-sufficiency righteously manifest.  That is the dream adopted by many here:  I will one day need no one, my self-sufficiency, in the form of capital success, waits for me just on the other side of overcoming this next hurdle.  That is part of the promise of America. Another part is that if I work hard, I should be able to feed my family, clothe my children, get a decent education, and afford to go to doctor or dentist when the need arises.  That is the promise--work hard, overcome a few hurdles,  and earn financial security.  Yet, undeniably, as Noam Chomsky says, over the last 30 years, the hurdles have become more and more erect against working people throughout America as the power of Corporations has increasingly corrupted our society.
     What I know, what Ali Velshi probably knows, but must deny, and what I knew as I waited for that woman to give me directions back to the airport, is that we are intrinsically bound to each other.  I to each other human, American and not.  We breathe the same air, we have the same needs, including the need for each other.  Truth be told, one day she may need my help as I needed hers that day. That is because we are human.
     Humans are not corporations and corporations are not human.
     And although American laws treat corporations with the same rights afforded U. S.
citizens, (following the Civil War, the 14th, 15th and 16th Amendments to the Constitution, aimed at empowering newly freed African Americans, were used by US Corporations to increase their civic power), we know them as beasts, uninterested in our well-being, content with their own survival, increasing their stranglehold on our Democracy and invariably on our lives.  These ideas are not abstract.  Those people gathered on the street know the concrete consequences of corporations having too much influence upon on our lives and upon our Democracy:

1)  Before Barack Obama even set foot in office, U. S. banks had been bailed out with the promise that tax payers would reap the benefits of this wise decision.
2)  After Barack Obama introduced Healthcare Reform, the Public Option was taken off the table, thereby providing a huge win/win for the Healthcare Industry on the backs of American taxpayers who by 2014 will be required to purchase private insurance if not covered by Medicare or Medicaid.
3)  In the winter of 2010, the White House took the Bush Tax Cuts for millionaires off the table when negotiating to continue unemployment insurance for those without jobs.
4)  In the summer of 2011, the U.S. Congress and the White House allowed The Tea Party and its billionaire backers to blackmail the world's economies, refusing to raise taxes on the nation's wealthiest taxpayers.
5)  Since 2001, The United States has spent  $1, 264, 185, 917, 303  on Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  
6)  10.9 million American mortgages are underwater, with no hope of help from the Federal Government.  
7)  National unemployment now stands at 9.1%.
8)  The mortgage crises caused African Americans the biggest loss of wealth in U.S. history.  
9)  52 million Americans lack health insurance.  
10)  Student loan debt has overcome credit card debt at $946 billion dollars.   
11)  January 2010, U.S. Supreme Court votes 5-4 to remove limitations on corporate financing of political campaigns.  
12)  99% of us suffer the consequences of Wall Street manipulation and greed, while the richest 1% of us  suffer NOTHING--in fact are rewarded with our hard earned tax dollars. 

So, for Ali Velshi and the rest of the corporately funded commentators seeking a short, simple answer for a complex world problem:  Corporate Greed.  Americans want corporations out of our government.  Corporations, which we know must constantly increase their profits, must be regulated.  Our government has an obligation to govern and to protect its citizens from further abuse.  The People are exhausted and hungry.  Go to any neighborhood in this country and find the same sentiment:  we want corporations out of our pockets and we want our government to stand with us.  We must have balance.  We demand balance.  We see ourselves at a precipice.  If you do not see it, close your eyes, turn down the AC and listen.  It is like a roll of thunder.  

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Why Black Girls Must Leave Home: an Argument for My Daughters



 Ever read Gwendolyn Brooks' "Sadie and Maud?"  In the poem, published in 1963, Brooks presents Maud as a mouse of a woman who chooses to leave home to attend college.  Sadie, on the other hand, as full of vigor as her name suggests, stays home and pulls out some dichotomous mea culpa of adventure and pleasure, scraping life "with a fine toothed comb."  In the end, Sadie dies early willing her "fine-toothed" aesthetic to her children, while her sister Maud lives on, alone in her house, presumably with her dry old books and degree placards to keep her company.  (line 4)  Sadie and Maud both come to mind as I watch my daughters pack and plan out which way to go as the sun sets on their respite in childhood.  I watch them pack and plan and look back on my own leaving, and I think of that poem.  
     As I recall, the poem's absolute irony was lost, reading it the first time in 1988, in a Literary Forms course, on the second floor of Giles Hall.
     There we sat, within a seminar construct, no more than twenty of us.  All women.  All African American; or some derivative thereof, reading an African American female author, being taught by an African-American female professor. And although this seminar never produced any predictable rhythm, no marked warmth or exploratory space, as some professors do not connect with students well,  it did somehow provide relevant fodder for future reflection (as is the case here).  Moreover, our analysis of "Sadie and Maud" warrants some discussion primarily because we stayed within the pages of our text, not actually appreciating the poem's applicability to our own reality.  
     The realization that arises now, that did not then, comes out of my experience as an African-American woman who, over twenty years later, understands clearly that she may never have read Gwendolyn Brooks had she not left home.
     Amazingly, without even thinking I needed to protest in the least, I went through school, K through twelve, without being directed to read any authors of color.  Period.  My post-adolescent view of the world had been shaped by this actuality.   Today, as I explain their good fortune, my students find it unbelievable that in California schools through the seventies and eighties, I had rarely, if ever ( I can almost say never) been directed to read an African-American author.  And in retrospect, the one time I was,  in English 12H,  reading Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" (which at the time would have been great to know) our teacher never revealed the author as a black man.  Mr. ___ did not tell us this.  I now imagine my instructor, as talented an English teacher as I've seen,  believed sincerely in the universalization of textual meaning.   This strict, unwavering method of looking at texts makes sense when considering from whence the practice came:  my high school English professor came out of a traditional graduate program that taught him prior to the flourishing post-colonial criticism that blossomed in the final decades of the twentieth century. 
     He came from the school which, prompted by critics like Robert Penn Warren, A. I. Richards, and t.s. eliot,  began to wring analysis very strictly out of the words on the page;  sans biography, sans history, sans overall context.   They felt one could locate meaning on the page, not in the world:  the grand universalization of signs.
     That self-same universalization,  Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison,  describes as a lobotomizing of texts.  She says that identifying matters of race in a text tends to inspire moves (on the part of the academy) toward universalization--ignoring and thereby minimizing the complications that arise when contemplating the West's racial history.   It is too much to handle. 
     For a student like myself, in desperate need of identifying myself outside the strictures of a what I experienced as a brutally racist education, universalization served to douse water onto the flickering little flame within me.  Lobotomize indeed.
     Did my instructor realize that I assumed Hayden was just as white as everyone else we read, including Joseph Conrad, who in The Heart of Darkness, used Black, Negro, and "Nigger" with an interchangeable deftness which I to this day find offensively amazing?  In my English 12H class, we never discussed this glaring offense as we toyed with analysis of the imperialistic mind and African partition.
     And because the education that I trudged through outside my home focused so consistently upon a culture that minimized my group's historical contribution to it, I found myself unaffixed and unintrigued within it.  I am certain now, that were I to follow Sadie's path, staying home and continuing in California as a post secondary choice, I may have never returned to the South to meet either Sadie or Maud, let alone that Grande Dame of African American poetry, Gwendolyn Brooks.   And oh!  How I did need to meet them all.  
     In her essay, "Saving the Life That is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist's Life,"  Alice Walker argues that a lack of relevant, concrete, visible models is deadly to an artist's life.  She cites Van Gough's struggles with models just before his suicide as evidence of a rudderless, untethered identity; then extends the analogy to herself as a black female artist.  Walker sought out her models feverishly, and found them through dogged, relentless searching.
     Throughout In Search of Our Mother's Gardens Walker explores the relationship of the artist to the world in which he/she lives.  She names among her models Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer--all profoundly important American authors whom I had not read until I packed my trunk for college and headed out into a world I was not expecting to find.  And I knew I had to find something that reflected my cultural relevance to the world and its history, and that something had to reflect so brightly and so effectively as to quell and defeat a rising tide of cultural shame and ignorance warring inside me; warring against my innate desire for self-actualization.  
     The need to fight against shame and ignorance came out of my experiences in California public schools, which only now do I realize paper-cut my psyche in support of untruths and stereotypes which undermined my love for myself and my community.  So thorough and insidious a job had been done, that by the time I graduated high school, I, unlike Sadie, had to leave.  Had I not,  I believe I would have perished.  
     Like many of my age and circumstance, in direct opposition to its  true purpose, my public school education worked to alienate me racially, psychologically, and spiritually from  my Self.  I lost myself in school.  From the moment I stepped into my first class in kindergarten, Ms. Hoffmeister's, in a small Southern California city, I learned to practice the art of defense against psychic attack.  I was told by my classmates to believe that I was defective.  "What if you were Black?" they actually said to each other, in front of me, in an elementary school in third grade, in Monterey County. 
     I recall in first grade, proudly sharing with my classmates that my uncle was a police officer.  A boy in the group interrupted, "Oh, I know him."  My teacher cut him off, "You don't know her uncle."  He smiled, "I know he's a nigger."  My African-American teacher told him not to talk so filthily.  We were six.
      I learned then, in spite of what may have been true or not about my assessment,  that no one in that class could be impressed by my family.  I learned that the decidedly impressive folks were Janet and Mark and their dog Spot, who lived around the corner.   
     What to make of school as I would then go home and hear my mother's
adventures of working to change the South, in SNCC with Julian Bond, Ruby Doris, and a man I later came to know as Mukasa.  She told us about Reagan hunting for Angela Davis and pointed to pictures of the Soledad Brothers on the wall.  My dad's degrees and research on DuBois could not have impressed my classmates.  He was my black uncle's nephew.  I became confused.  I became angry.  Was this not what our folks wanted for us?  They told us that people worked hard, bravely, and many died so we could go where we pleased--so go.  I questioned why they would want this for us.  I could not tell them that this hurt us.
     I resisted, fighting back, sometimes with my hands and sometimes with my words, but mostly with my hands.  And unfortunately, beside just a few years miraculously protected in Arkansas schools,  I matriculated all the way through to graduation in California.  With a keen immediacy, I feel Chris Rock's experience when he says he was attacked daily, and had to fight often, when he was bused out of his predominately black Brooklyn neighborhood.

  .                     .                      .

     Duplicity arose within us as we were told in public that we were one awful thing, then returned home listening to our parents who taught us of the beauty of our black selves: hair, skin, noses, and souls.  Often, I recall hearing people of my race (and other races of color) condemn themselves for being "too dark," or having "kinky" hair, or broad "big" noses.  I heard it, yet I did not understand how anyone would reject what we were taught was beautiful, even majestic.  Pretty and black did not fit together in my school experience.  One was more likely to hear pretty, even though dark.  And I knew something had to be wrong with this.  Yet the voices of those who believed in their own implicit ugliness prevailed, the voices of those who treated African Americans as monolithically defective was so overwhelming as to cause constant conflict for many of us, within and without.
    My trouble could not resolve itself until I left California.  When I returned to Arkansas, my birth home, I found relief because I knew my cousin Yolanda, was the prettiest girl ever, black, black, and pretty pretty.  Benny W. was known as just pretty, Black Benny.  But maybe that was because I am from the South, and the proud South where we grew our own ideas about ourselves, wrought out of genuine, self-affirming, communal living.  Segregation crystallized the affirmations.  

     In the South we grew, we flourished, protected by that racial unself-consciousness Zora Neale Hurtson experienced while growing up in Eatonville, Florida.  We could be ourselves.  We colud breathe.  We could explore.  We could find who we were through ourselves, without interference from the outside world that insisted on racializing everything in order to dominate everything.
     Because we lived communally and depended upon ourselves, we knew we could be what we wanted to be.  Young men could build houses like my grandfather and uncles.  They could own grocery stores like Alexander and Mr. White and the Lowdens.  They could own a car wash and sell bar-b-que like my cousin Marcus.  They could start a baseball league like my grandfather and his friends.  They could profess at the college like Mr. Haley.  Earn a "terminal" degree.  Found or pledge a sorority.  They could open their own nursery school like my aunt.  They could be a Fulbright Scholar or a librarian like my aunt Billie.  They could even paint the Black Belt and show in New York, like my grandma's cousin Archibald.  

     Mostly however, they could be in love and raise a family and find affirmation in the folks around them who expected them to be and do whatever they wanted because they were glad about their heritage, rooted in their culture, and certain of their own beauty.  They could laugh and cry.  They could be ugly if they so chose.  They could just be. 
     So I say to my daughters, who both have now finished high school: go.  Go far and look for yourself.  Go South.  Go anywhere.  Travel dusty roads.  Look for yourself in the dogwoods and magnolias of Arkansas or the deep red clay of Georgia, Mississippi, or Alabama.  Be like Sadie.  Be like Maude.  Be whomever you choose.  But be sure to bring with you-- my girls, my Loves--your fine-toothed combs. 





Monday, May 16, 2011

Newt Sheds His Clan Hood to Rally the Racists

Newt Gingrich ought to be ashamed of himself.  For those of us surprised by today's ugly, cynical, racial politics--history tells us this is nothing new.  Anyone would be hard pressed to find a decade in which the political establishment did not use race as an insincere tool of manipulation; scaring those easily scared by "others" and frustrating those who can see what is happening, having seen it before.  African Americans are very well acquainted with their role as political pawns.  Don't trip.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony argued against black men (brutes) legally getting to vote before they (belles) could. (1848)  That didn't work out so well, check the 19th Amendment. (1920)

As soon as he enters the race, Gingrich pulls out his old Georgia playbook:  trying to scare the bejibies out of old white folks:  calling Obama a "food stamp" president and referring to his "3-point jump shot." Whatever happened to subtlety?  The irony, dear sir, is that if it didn't work for Palin in the heat of a national Presidential battle, it won't work for you.  Are you serious?  Denigrating another human for personal gain is shameful and Americans know it.  If you didn't scare enough folks enough not to allow Obama to be elected in 2008, forget about it.  It won't happen.  And guess what.  As you throw racial barbs across the room, trying to see what might stick, you do nothing but demean yourself.  In certain quarters you may appear heroic, but in the wide world, you sound like an old, racist relic.  I like what Chris O'Donnell said, most of us under 45 have and love friends and family of different races, religions, sexual orientations, etc., and we don't scare so easily.  We love the world we live in and the people in it.   How about we stick to the real scary stuff:  that Ryan Bill against Medicare and more tax cuts for millionaires, like Donald Trump.        

Friday, February 18, 2011

The Mourners Tread: Considering the Death of Rational Public Education


      The phone rings repeated from the corner desk, while the teacher paces for fifteen minutes, leading thirty-five fifteen sixteen year old students into a project on Emily Dickinson and "I felt a funeral in my brain."   
     "You want me to get that?"  a student interrupts just as the teacher gets to the part about what to think about, talk about; then write.  
     "No, let it ring."  A minute passes and the phone rings again as students ask questions about the spinster, Dickinson.  They bite at the build-up.
     "I can get that for you,"  the same student offers again.  Teacher sighs.  
     "Go ahead."  Teacher stops the lesson to hear the message.
     "D'Angelo, go to the attendance office."  
     "Do I need to take my things?"  
     "No, no.  She said you'll be right back."
     Teacher fumbles back to lesson.  "Where were we?" He remembers where a "plank in reason broke" and asks students how in the world you can have a "funeral in your brain."  
     "Mental illness," Flustered Antonio barks out as he ducks his chin deep into his black, sweaty hoody.  
     "Ah, ha!"
     The class is two hours long and Flustered Antonio will attempt to take a nap, complain about the way everyone else is writing so much faster than he is, and illustrate a literal plank falling through a brain to symbolize his reading of the Dickinson poem.    
     The phone will ring four more times.  Two announcements will be made over the intercom (excusing the interruption), and Teacher will accept an urgent handwritten message "requesting" (remember that agreement you signed last year about complying with attempts at improving student test scores and graduation rates) his presence at an interdisciplinary Advanced Placement meeting aimed at increasing student test scores during the upcoming High Stakes Testing Season.  In the session, Teacher is told, "This report says colleges aren't even looking at AP scores unless they are 4s or 5s."  Other Teachers ask questions.  
"What do you prefer Administrator, that we narrow or broaden the scope of inclusion? Because we can definitely improve our test scores if we do like other schools do and test students before admitting them."  
"Good question. We want both."  
Teachers hear another plank creaking.  


Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Teacher to Teacher: 10 Tips for Winning Over a Class[room]

Ten Keys to Classroom Management Success


I didn't hear this in my credential program. I share these ideas not to toot any horns, but to try myself to better explore and re-affirm what I, and many other teachers I know, do in classrooms that allows my students to learn in a way that they seem to love.  Administrators love these strategies because they boost their high stakes test scores.  Parents love them because their children, no matter how well or poorly they have done in the past,  meet success and feel empowered.  

1.  Make sure the room is temperate, clean, and aesthetically pleasing.  Most of us are most comfortable in spaces that stimulate our senses positively.  If it's cold, turn on a soft heater.  If it's hot, run the air conditioner.  If it's dismal outside, bring holiday lights and soft aromas to please your students' eyes and noses.  Bring new vibrant colors and culturally responsive  artifacts.  If you keep your students comfortable, and at least act like their comfort matters (even if it doesn't to you yet), they will appreciate it.  Play soothing music softly during work periods.  I create playlists of everything from 70s rock classics, to Sade, and John Coltrane to Bob Marley and Celia Cruz.  I have yet to meet a person who didn't like music or worked well when uncomfortable.

2.  (Urgent) Work with a therapist on whatever you have left undone--particularly if it makes you feel angry, resentful, ashamed, or inflexible.  We bring ourselves into all human interactions; that includes our teaching.  Most students have their twenties and thirties to actualize, then realize their own dysfunction; they have no compassion for ours.  

3.  Continue to master your subject area.  Mastery of the subject will create space for more complex levels of application for that subject and the art of teaching.  Mastery also imbues the teacher with authority among his/her students.  


4.  Be human.  Admit when you are wrong and say the things to your students that you wanted a teacher to say to you when you were young.  Give appropriate complements.  Tell students when they do well;  don't keep it a secret.  Let them know you appreciate them.  Be honest, however, and don't over-do-it.  Kids can sense a lie.    

5.  Ask students what they think about things.  Ask them what they feel.  Everyone responds to interest.  Talk to them; then listen to them.  Set up spaces and time for them to talk to each other.  


6.  Use a variety of entry and application points for your lessons.  Use overheads, blogs, podcasts, video, film, music, newspaper, magazines, books, social media, food, the natural world, etc.  Be creative in other words.


7.  Be responsible for yourself; do not ask students to do anything you do not demonstrate.  


8.  Keep your expectations high, and when not met, ask students how you can help them to better understand.  


9.  When you have a bad day, apologize if you need to, and start fresh tomorrow.  


10.  Prepare, prepare, prepare, but be FLEXIBLE!   





Sunday, January 16, 2011

The End of Society: How the Digital Age Reduced Us to Endless Computations




I used to talk on the phone for hours; now, I hate talking on the phone.  When my phone rings, I defer to the caller-id and deduce whether or not to answer, based upon how I feel or moreover, what my mind can handle.  I am busy.  Always busy.  Doing what, I cannot say at this moment, but I know I am too busy to stop and engage an unpredictable human, with an unpredictable demand for my attention. I enjoy predictability.

In that moment of deduction, I wrestle with the character on the other end.  I consider our history together.  I consider the person’s current state of affairs.  I consider our last conversation.  I think about how much I owe the person on the other end.  I consider the possible weight of the exchange.  In that moment, I compute:  to answer or not to answer.  Most often, I do not answer.  My dad tells me I never answer my phone.  I say yes, but I always answer your texts.   

I have recently noticed a change in myself as well as society in general, particularly those of us who live digital lives.  As a lover of language, I notice a drastic shift in how the varied strata within society use language.  Those like myself and many of my generation (and younger) seem to enjoy typing as a form of communication, over speaking.  We prefer reading, over listening.  We seem to enjoy one-sided conversations that get posted somewhere digitally over those that require us to speak, then listen, then respond in real time.  Real time is quite often too much pressure.  Real time conversations require listening, and sometimes I don't want to do that.  Listening is too demanding for me in my busy life, that needs not another emotional kick or unexpected complication.  I compute, do not answer, then return the call when I am settled:  which is sometimes a very long time later, and speaking with raw honesty, sometimes never.  The more I rely on digital communication, the less I enjoy face-to-face and even ear-to-ear communication.  I am unlearning what took me about thirty-five years of living to understand:  I cannot know myself without the mirror others provide for me in real time, in real conversation, when under social pressure, and with the inability to “delete” what I just said.   Revising in real time takes so much out of me.

The idea came to me in class last year.  I teach high school kids.  And to hold a student’s attention today is hard.  I notice a trend.  My students tell me they love my class, and as they say that I think, “Well why was it then so hard to keep your attention?”  Now, I do not mean attention in the sense that I want to keep a student listening to some droning, ad nauseum lecture on the tenets of Nineteenth Century literature.  Lecturing is dead in high schools.  I can’t do it.  My classes are heavily dependent upon seminar, and the seminars, which may soon become as defunct as phone conversations, usually connect to activities.  They also depend upon students talking with each other.  Getting students to talk with each other and getting students to listen to my directions to know how to do application activities is becoming more and more difficult.  What I find is that at the point at which the students have to give up the process of listening, or at least pretending to do so, to talk through a problem I present them, a huge disconnect presents.  When it's time for them to stop (feigning) listening, but rather listening to digest and apply to actual action, there is a disconnect.  I do not mean anything complex. I mean the task of listening to two-step directions.  I have to repeat directions over and over and over because students, even though they are looking directly at my face, and appear to hear the utterances coming from my mouth, are not listening to what I am saying.  They appear not to process my words.  It is easier for me to give them everything typed up on a strip of paper:  which I quite often do.  But where's the variety in delivery?  Where's the need for my persona in the room?  

Granted, some students take visual cues more readily.  Some take verbal cues more readily.  That is not what I mean.  I mean I say, “Here are your directions.”  I say them slowly.  It does no good.  I say them over and over, “one-page for two of you.”  I say it five times.  “You only need one.”  It doesn’t make a difference.  Many will not make the connection.  I then draw a picture on the overhead, hold one page up in my hand; then draw a picture on the board of what I need them to do.  At that moment all questions cease.  My visual is more potent than my spoken word.  The icon replaces the word.  Do not get me wrong, in meetings, I always ask for a graphic organizer.  Visuals also dominate my psyche; as do one-sided conversations.  I blog, and say what I like without responses and without complication.  How often do we get input from folks who disagree with us?  There is no negotiation.  I am my own society. 

I assume that the students who tune out my words come across to me the same way I come across to my dad, who says, “I never answer my phone.”  It’s too much work.  They calculate how much they owe me within that exchange.  We compute the cost of the exchange.  

As we consider the consequences of the current state of social communication and the growing gap between "digitals" and the rest of society who refuse to email, blog, facebook, etc., we should also consider the consequences for interpersonal relationships.  How much change and isolation can we stand?  How many one-sided exchanges can our politics and democracy stand?  As we consider these questions, how about also considering what to do with that awkward interrupt:

"You go ahead."  

"No, you go ahead, I'm listening."  
     

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