[MB: finally finished grading the final essays from my three writing courses! This helped me get through the last of them]
Wednesday, May 08, 2013
David Graeber and Criag Calhoun: The Democracy Project
The Democracy Project
Speakers: David Graeber and Craig Calhoun
The London School of Economics and Political Science
From the earliest meetings for Occupy Wall Street, David Graeber felt that something was different from previous demonstrations. What was it about this particular movement that worked this time? And what can we now do to make our world more democratic again? Graeber presents a vital new exploration of anti-capitalist dissent, looking at the actions of the 99% and revealing the alternative political and economic possibilities of our future.
David Graeber is an anthropologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, who has been involved with the Occupy movement most actively at Wall Street. He is widely credited with coining the phrase "We are the 99%" and is the author of the widely praised Debt: The First 5000 Years. His new book The Democracy Project is published by Allen Lane.
Craig Calhoun is a world-renowned social scientist whose work connects sociology to culture, communication, politics, philosophy and economics. He took up his post as LSE Director on 1 September 2012, having left the United States where he was University Professor at New York University and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge and President of the Social Science Research Council. He is the author of several books including Nations Matter, Critical Social Theory, Neither Gods Nor Emperors and most recently The Roots of Radicalism (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
To Listen to the Conversation
Speakers: David Graeber and Craig Calhoun
The London School of Economics and Political Science
From the earliest meetings for Occupy Wall Street, David Graeber felt that something was different from previous demonstrations. What was it about this particular movement that worked this time? And what can we now do to make our world more democratic again? Graeber presents a vital new exploration of anti-capitalist dissent, looking at the actions of the 99% and revealing the alternative political and economic possibilities of our future.
David Graeber is an anthropologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, who has been involved with the Occupy movement most actively at Wall Street. He is widely credited with coining the phrase "We are the 99%" and is the author of the widely praised Debt: The First 5000 Years. His new book The Democracy Project is published by Allen Lane.
Craig Calhoun is a world-renowned social scientist whose work connects sociology to culture, communication, politics, philosophy and economics. He took up his post as LSE Director on 1 September 2012, having left the United States where he was University Professor at New York University and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge and President of the Social Science Research Council. He is the author of several books including Nations Matter, Critical Social Theory, Neither Gods Nor Emperors and most recently The Roots of Radicalism (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
To Listen to the Conversation
Melissa A. Fabello: Five Locker Room Myths About Penises Debunked
Five Locker Room Myths About Penises Debunked
by Melissa A. Fabello
Everyday Feminism
As the sixth graders noisily filed out of the library, I uncrumpled the index card and smoothed it over against my thigh.
The boy who had dropped it into the anonymous question box in my sex education class told me that he felt very strongly about it and wanted me to read it right away – anonymity be damned.
I passed the card over to my co-facilitator, a smile forming across my lips. “This one is endearing,” I said.
The card read: Why do boys’ penises grow when they see a cute girl?
What a vitally important question to know the answer to! It’s so imperative for us to understand our own bodies and why they react the way that they do.
Reading the question, I remembered – suddenly, joltingly – how confusing it is when your body does things that you don’t understand and can’t ask about.
Whispers from the mainstream media, pornography, friends, and locker room walls sell lies, telling us what we want to hear, convincing us of untruths.
It’s like a game of Telephone, but what’s at stake is our understanding of ourselves and our relationships.
And that’s a dangerous game.
So here’s the truth – about penises.
To Read the Rest
by Melissa A. Fabello
Everyday Feminism
As the sixth graders noisily filed out of the library, I uncrumpled the index card and smoothed it over against my thigh.
The boy who had dropped it into the anonymous question box in my sex education class told me that he felt very strongly about it and wanted me to read it right away – anonymity be damned.
I passed the card over to my co-facilitator, a smile forming across my lips. “This one is endearing,” I said.
The card read: Why do boys’ penises grow when they see a cute girl?
What a vitally important question to know the answer to! It’s so imperative for us to understand our own bodies and why they react the way that they do.
Reading the question, I remembered – suddenly, joltingly – how confusing it is when your body does things that you don’t understand and can’t ask about.
Whispers from the mainstream media, pornography, friends, and locker room walls sell lies, telling us what we want to hear, convincing us of untruths.
It’s like a game of Telephone, but what’s at stake is our understanding of ourselves and our relationships.
And that’s a dangerous game.
So here’s the truth – about penises.
To Read the Rest
Tuesday, May 07, 2013
Response to HUM 221 Finals and Course
My comment on FB before heading to the final: "Heading to my Peace & Conflict Studies course to give a final that is not a test, but instead is a consensus decision-making/direct democracy style discussion of possible political tactics and solutions -- solidarity!"
My thoughts afterward:
My students just radicalized my understanding of teaching and education -- I was dreading that Summer I courses were starting Monday, now I am excited to start off my classes immediately doing this style of learning/discussion......
HUM 221 students, please take the time to leave some comments about the course content, the workbook, ideas/theories discussed, and/or the final. If you leave comments for any of the guest speakers, I will share it with them. Please feel free to do this anonymous or to leave your name.
Solidarity, Michael Benton
My thoughts afterward:
My students just radicalized my understanding of teaching and education -- I was dreading that Summer I courses were starting Monday, now I am excited to start off my classes immediately doing this style of learning/discussion......
HUM 221 students, please take the time to leave some comments about the course content, the workbook, ideas/theories discussed, and/or the final. If you leave comments for any of the guest speakers, I will share it with them. Please feel free to do this anonymous or to leave your name.
Solidarity, Michael Benton
Monday, May 06, 2013
Saturday, May 04, 2013
Dan Sharber - World on Fire: Capitalism, the Environment, and Our Future
World on Fire: Capitalism, the Environment, and Our Future
by Dan Sharber
We Are Many
The Keystone XL Pipeline, the recent nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima plant in Japan, the BP oil spill-- these are just three of the most recent and egregious examples of environmental destruction. Many people are standing up and saying that enough is enough. From the tree-sitters blocking the bulldozers in Easy Texas to Daryl Hannah getting arrested, resistance is growing. But what are the causes of the environmental crisis? And what solutions should we offer? More importantly how do we get there from where we are now?
To Listen to the Presentation
by Dan Sharber
We Are Many
The Keystone XL Pipeline, the recent nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima plant in Japan, the BP oil spill-- these are just three of the most recent and egregious examples of environmental destruction. Many people are standing up and saying that enough is enough. From the tree-sitters blocking the bulldozers in Easy Texas to Daryl Hannah getting arrested, resistance is growing. But what are the causes of the environmental crisis? And what solutions should we offer? More importantly how do we get there from where we are now?
To Listen to the Presentation
Friday, May 03, 2013
Thursday, May 02, 2013
Liquid Sound Company: Acid Music for Acid People
[MB: I just finished giving my last student writing workshop of the semester!]
Entitled Opinions: A conversation with Thomas Sheehan about the historical Jesus.
A conversation with Professor Thomas Sheehan about the historical Jesus.
Entitled Opinions with Robert Harrison
Thomas Sheehan has been Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford since 1999. Before coming to Stanford he taught at Loyola University of Chicago since 1972. He received his B.A. from St. Patrick's College and his Ph.D. from Fordham University. He has been the recipient of many academic honors including: Ford Foundation Fellow (1983-85), Resident Scholar at the American Academy in Rome (1983), National Endowment for the Humanities (1980), Fritz Thyssen Foundation (1979-80), and a Mellon Foundation Grant. Professor Sheehan specializes in contemporary European philosophy and its relation to religious questions, with particular interests in Heidegger and Roman Catholicism. His books include: Becoming Heidegger (2006); Edmund Husserl: Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Encounter with Heidegger (1997); Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations (1987); The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (1986); and Heidegger, the Man and the Thinker (1981).
To Listen, go to January 31, 2006 episode in the archives
Entitled Opinions with Robert Harrison
Thomas Sheehan has been Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford since 1999. Before coming to Stanford he taught at Loyola University of Chicago since 1972. He received his B.A. from St. Patrick's College and his Ph.D. from Fordham University. He has been the recipient of many academic honors including: Ford Foundation Fellow (1983-85), Resident Scholar at the American Academy in Rome (1983), National Endowment for the Humanities (1980), Fritz Thyssen Foundation (1979-80), and a Mellon Foundation Grant. Professor Sheehan specializes in contemporary European philosophy and its relation to religious questions, with particular interests in Heidegger and Roman Catholicism. His books include: Becoming Heidegger (2006); Edmund Husserl: Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Encounter with Heidegger (1997); Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations (1987); The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (1986); and Heidegger, the Man and the Thinker (1981).
To Listen, go to January 31, 2006 episode in the archives
Wednesday, May 01, 2013
Michael Thomsen: The Case Against Grades
The Case Against Grades: They lower self-esteem, discourage creativity, and reinforce the class divide.
by Michael Thomsen
Slate
...
John Taylor Gatto, a one-time New York State Teacher of the Year turned fierce education critic proposed an education system built around "independent study, community service, adventures in experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, [and] a thousand different apprenticeships." Schools built on these values have flourished in the margins of state-funded, graded education throughout the 20th century. The most famous example are Montessori schools, noted for their lack of grades, multiage classes, and extended periods where students can chose their own projects from a selected range of materials. The schools have educated many of today's wealthiest entrepreneurs, including Google's Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, business management legend Peter Drucker, and video game icon Will Wright.
A 2006 comparison in Milwaukee found that Montessori students performed better than grade-based students at reading and math; they also "wrote more creative essays with more complex sentence structures, selected more positive responses to social dilemmas, and reported feeling more of a sense of community at their school." Some contend that Montessori schools attract more affluent and successful parents, who give their children an inherent advantage, but the Milwaukee study was built around a random lottery for Montessori enrollment. All the children in the study came from families with similar economic backgrounds, with average incomes ranging between $20,000 and $50,000.
Free schools have taken the gradeless structure even further, treating the school as an open space where students are not only allowed to self-direct but are given equal responsibility in the organization and rule-making of the school itself. The Summerhill School in England is one of the most recognizable and longest-running, founded in 1921 by A.S. Neill. Summerhill is built around the idea of creating stable, happy, and compassionate humans capable of filling any role in society—a janitor being no less a success than a doctor. In place of dedicated courses, students are free to follow their own interests while teachers observe and nudge them toward new ways of thinking about what they're drawn to. Students with an interest in cooking, for instance, might learn the basics of chemistry by way of thickening a sauce. Those drawn to playing soccer might learn to improve their game with some fundamental principles of Newtonian physics.
Schools inspired by the Summerhill model have flourished in recent years, with free schools operating around the country from Portland, Ore., to Sudbury, Mass. The Brooklyn Free School has earned attention for its open structure and regular democratic meetings, where students debate how to handle problems like boredom and whether playing video games on the school computers should be considered a learning activity. The higher tuition costs do tend to attract wealthier families with well-supported children, but many go out of their way to provide assistance to low-income families, favoring diversity over bill-paying. The Manhattan Free School in Harlem makes do on an annual budget of $100,000 and collects full tuition from only 20 percent of its students. The Brooklyn Free School operates on a sliding scale of tuition, collecting full payment from only half of its students, with some paying as little as $20 every few weeks.
It’s a common misnomer to assume no student evaluation happens in environments like these, but in most cases free-school environments require more teacher attention than traditional classrooms. Instead of testing for comprehension of a select group of facts or ideas, teachers constantly monitor a child’s behavior, support an array of student experimentation, and subtly encourage efforts that best match the student’s abilities. In free schools failure is not a punishment for bad study habits but the sign of students testing their knowledge to see if it holds true in practice. In our soccer analogy, success wouldn’t be evaluated by students scoring goals but in gradually learning how and why the ball curves in some cases and goes straight in others, a process that would surely produce many more misses than scores.
And free schools perform reasonably well. A survey of former students at Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts found 80 percent of its students went on to college or professional school, and 20 percent enrolled in graduate programs. In 1998, 75 percent of Summerhill students who took Britain's certificate-qualification exams passed.
Abandoning grades would be a massive shock, but holding onto them has not forestalled decay, from waves of school closures for poor standardized test results to the trillion-dollar debt guillotine awaiting college students who'll struggle to win unpaid internships for all their hard work. Eliminating grades would not singlehandedly bring salvation. There is a whole new world of challenges and complications in a classroom without pedagogy and rank. But it would be an ideal place to start anew, to stop motivating students, teachers, and underperformers with the fear of being flunked, fired, or shut down. Without that dysfunctional ranking we could instead form a child’s education around his or her eagerness to discover, contribute, and share. An A-to-F grade scale is only a distraction from that process and in many cases an outright deterrent. It’s time to admit that system has no place in our future.
To Read the Entire Article
by Michael Thomsen
Slate
...
John Taylor Gatto, a one-time New York State Teacher of the Year turned fierce education critic proposed an education system built around "independent study, community service, adventures in experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, [and] a thousand different apprenticeships." Schools built on these values have flourished in the margins of state-funded, graded education throughout the 20th century. The most famous example are Montessori schools, noted for their lack of grades, multiage classes, and extended periods where students can chose their own projects from a selected range of materials. The schools have educated many of today's wealthiest entrepreneurs, including Google's Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, business management legend Peter Drucker, and video game icon Will Wright.
A 2006 comparison in Milwaukee found that Montessori students performed better than grade-based students at reading and math; they also "wrote more creative essays with more complex sentence structures, selected more positive responses to social dilemmas, and reported feeling more of a sense of community at their school." Some contend that Montessori schools attract more affluent and successful parents, who give their children an inherent advantage, but the Milwaukee study was built around a random lottery for Montessori enrollment. All the children in the study came from families with similar economic backgrounds, with average incomes ranging between $20,000 and $50,000.
Free schools have taken the gradeless structure even further, treating the school as an open space where students are not only allowed to self-direct but are given equal responsibility in the organization and rule-making of the school itself. The Summerhill School in England is one of the most recognizable and longest-running, founded in 1921 by A.S. Neill. Summerhill is built around the idea of creating stable, happy, and compassionate humans capable of filling any role in society—a janitor being no less a success than a doctor. In place of dedicated courses, students are free to follow their own interests while teachers observe and nudge them toward new ways of thinking about what they're drawn to. Students with an interest in cooking, for instance, might learn the basics of chemistry by way of thickening a sauce. Those drawn to playing soccer might learn to improve their game with some fundamental principles of Newtonian physics.
Schools inspired by the Summerhill model have flourished in recent years, with free schools operating around the country from Portland, Ore., to Sudbury, Mass. The Brooklyn Free School has earned attention for its open structure and regular democratic meetings, where students debate how to handle problems like boredom and whether playing video games on the school computers should be considered a learning activity. The higher tuition costs do tend to attract wealthier families with well-supported children, but many go out of their way to provide assistance to low-income families, favoring diversity over bill-paying. The Manhattan Free School in Harlem makes do on an annual budget of $100,000 and collects full tuition from only 20 percent of its students. The Brooklyn Free School operates on a sliding scale of tuition, collecting full payment from only half of its students, with some paying as little as $20 every few weeks.
It’s a common misnomer to assume no student evaluation happens in environments like these, but in most cases free-school environments require more teacher attention than traditional classrooms. Instead of testing for comprehension of a select group of facts or ideas, teachers constantly monitor a child’s behavior, support an array of student experimentation, and subtly encourage efforts that best match the student’s abilities. In free schools failure is not a punishment for bad study habits but the sign of students testing their knowledge to see if it holds true in practice. In our soccer analogy, success wouldn’t be evaluated by students scoring goals but in gradually learning how and why the ball curves in some cases and goes straight in others, a process that would surely produce many more misses than scores.
And free schools perform reasonably well. A survey of former students at Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts found 80 percent of its students went on to college or professional school, and 20 percent enrolled in graduate programs. In 1998, 75 percent of Summerhill students who took Britain's certificate-qualification exams passed.
Abandoning grades would be a massive shock, but holding onto them has not forestalled decay, from waves of school closures for poor standardized test results to the trillion-dollar debt guillotine awaiting college students who'll struggle to win unpaid internships for all their hard work. Eliminating grades would not singlehandedly bring salvation. There is a whole new world of challenges and complications in a classroom without pedagogy and rank. But it would be an ideal place to start anew, to stop motivating students, teachers, and underperformers with the fear of being flunked, fired, or shut down. Without that dysfunctional ranking we could instead form a child’s education around his or her eagerness to discover, contribute, and share. An A-to-F grade scale is only a distraction from that process and in many cases an outright deterrent. It’s time to admit that system has no place in our future.
To Read the Entire Article
Dave Zirin -- Jason Collins: The Substance of Change
Jason Collins: The Substance of Change
by Dave Zirin
The Nation
Hearing the news made me feel like I’d accidentally walked into a wind tunnel. For as long as I had written about this issue and as many times as I had said in recent years that “this will happen in a matter of months if not weeks,” it still hit me like a triple-shot of espresso cut with a teaspoon of Adderall. Thanks to the courage of 34-year-old NBA veteran Jason Collins, we can no longer repeat endlessly that no active male athlete in North America has ever come out of the closet. Instead we’re now able to say that we were there when our most influential cultural citadel of homophobia—the men’s locker room—was forever breached and finally received a rainbow makeover on its unforgiving grey walls. But we didn’t only get the act of coming out. We also got, courtesy of Mr. Collins and Sports Illustrated writer Franz Lidz, about as beautiful a coming-out statement as has ever been put to paper.
As Collins wrote, “No one wants to live in fear. I’ve always been scared of saying the wrong thing. I don’t sleep well. I never have. But each time I tell another person, I feel stronger and sleep a little more soundly. It takes an enormous amount of energy to guard such a big secret. I’ve endured years of misery and gone to enormous lengths to live a lie. I was certain that my world would fall apart if anyone knew. And yet when I acknowledged my sexuality I felt whole for the first time.”
The significance of this moment cannot be overstated. Homophobia becomes eroded when straight people actually have a family member or friend come out of the closet and then have to confront their own prejudice. Now in the NBA we have Jason Collins saying, “Pro basketball is a family. And pretty much every family I know has a brother, sister or cousin who’s gay. In the brotherhood of the NBA, I just happen to be the one who’s out.”
The piece also demonstrates that Jason Collins gets the impact he could have on the way sports both defines and polices our conceptions of masculinity. The 7-foot, 255-pound bruiser writes wryly, “I go against the gay stereotype, which is why I think a lot of players will be shocked: That guy is gay? But I’ve always been an aggressive player, even in high school. Am I so physical to prove that being gay doesn’t make you soft? Who knows? That’s something for a psychologist to unravel.”
Before we sing more hymns to Jason Collins, let’s also be clear about a few facts. First, this did not take place in a vacuum. A rising tide of LGBT advocacy, demonstrations and public demonstrations of power in the face of bigotry laid the groundwork. Collins understands this and writes that he was motivated not only by the movement but by those seeking to perpetuate second-class citizenship for LGBT people. “The strain of hiding my sexuality became almost unbearable in March, when the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments for and against same-sex marriage,” he writes, “Less then three miles from my apartment, nine jurists argued about my happiness and my future. Here was my chance to be heard, and I couldn’t say a thing.”
To Read the Rest and Access More Resources
by Dave Zirin
The Nation
Hearing the news made me feel like I’d accidentally walked into a wind tunnel. For as long as I had written about this issue and as many times as I had said in recent years that “this will happen in a matter of months if not weeks,” it still hit me like a triple-shot of espresso cut with a teaspoon of Adderall. Thanks to the courage of 34-year-old NBA veteran Jason Collins, we can no longer repeat endlessly that no active male athlete in North America has ever come out of the closet. Instead we’re now able to say that we were there when our most influential cultural citadel of homophobia—the men’s locker room—was forever breached and finally received a rainbow makeover on its unforgiving grey walls. But we didn’t only get the act of coming out. We also got, courtesy of Mr. Collins and Sports Illustrated writer Franz Lidz, about as beautiful a coming-out statement as has ever been put to paper.
As Collins wrote, “No one wants to live in fear. I’ve always been scared of saying the wrong thing. I don’t sleep well. I never have. But each time I tell another person, I feel stronger and sleep a little more soundly. It takes an enormous amount of energy to guard such a big secret. I’ve endured years of misery and gone to enormous lengths to live a lie. I was certain that my world would fall apart if anyone knew. And yet when I acknowledged my sexuality I felt whole for the first time.”
The significance of this moment cannot be overstated. Homophobia becomes eroded when straight people actually have a family member or friend come out of the closet and then have to confront their own prejudice. Now in the NBA we have Jason Collins saying, “Pro basketball is a family. And pretty much every family I know has a brother, sister or cousin who’s gay. In the brotherhood of the NBA, I just happen to be the one who’s out.”
The piece also demonstrates that Jason Collins gets the impact he could have on the way sports both defines and polices our conceptions of masculinity. The 7-foot, 255-pound bruiser writes wryly, “I go against the gay stereotype, which is why I think a lot of players will be shocked: That guy is gay? But I’ve always been an aggressive player, even in high school. Am I so physical to prove that being gay doesn’t make you soft? Who knows? That’s something for a psychologist to unravel.”
Before we sing more hymns to Jason Collins, let’s also be clear about a few facts. First, this did not take place in a vacuum. A rising tide of LGBT advocacy, demonstrations and public demonstrations of power in the face of bigotry laid the groundwork. Collins understands this and writes that he was motivated not only by the movement but by those seeking to perpetuate second-class citizenship for LGBT people. “The strain of hiding my sexuality became almost unbearable in March, when the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments for and against same-sex marriage,” he writes, “Less then three miles from my apartment, nine jurists argued about my happiness and my future. Here was my chance to be heard, and I couldn’t say a thing.”
To Read the Rest and Access More Resources
Happy May Day 2013: International Workers' Holiday
IWW: The Brief Origins of May Day
Ahead of May Day, David Harvey Details Urban Uprisings from Occupy Wall Street to the Paris Commune (Democracy Now)
Peter Linebaugh: The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day (Revolution By the Book)
Seeing Red Radio: A Musical Celebration of May Day
Noam Chomsky: Labor History and Anarchism (repost) + May Day Started Here (Dandelion Salad)
Anarkismo: Mayday. Remembering the past, fighting for tomorrow
School of the Seasons: Pagan Roots of May Day
Events Around the World (as I see them -- feel free to leave reports in the comments):
May Day Protests Worldwide Oppose Austerity, Exploitation
Protests are being held around the world on this May 1st to mark May Day, or International Worker’s Day. In Bangladesh, thousands of workers marched through central Dhaka to demand workplace safety following last week’s factory collapse where more than 400 people died — mostly female garment workers. Across Europe, thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest austerity measures that have cut wages, benefits and social services. In Greece, train and ferry service has been canceled as public sector workers take part in a series of strikes and rallies. In Turkey, riot police fired water cannons at a large crowd of demonstrators in Istanbul. In Spain, more than 80 protests are being held nationwide. And here in the United States, the Occupy Wall Street movement is planning a series of New York City actions including a "Rally for Labor & Citizen’s Rights" at City Hall.
May Day Protests Shut Down Central Jakarta (Jakarta Globe)
Jerry Ashton: Is Occupy Successfully Answering the May Day Call for Help? (Huffington Post)
Sarah Sachelli: May Day parade brings labour history to life (with video)."
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