My Indian Self

This book played a huge part in my childhood.  It was probably the most leafed-through book in my house.  The last I remember it was so tattered by use that I dared not pick it up.

Indian Crafts & LoreMy parents had no idea at their wedding in 1950, that they would spend the first year of their married life in New Mexico.  The Korean War recalled my father back into the Air Force, where he was the only PFC in the management offices of Kirkland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.

They both developed an interest in Indian culture.  One of their neighbors was the son of the chief of the Jemez Pueblo tribe a short distance west of the city. My parents were invited to a number of tribal ceremonies and became good friends of the prince and his wife, a Bostonian. I suspect that it was the friendship that stimulated their interest in Indian lore, and it’s probably when they bought that copy of Indian Crafts and Lore.

I thought about that book many times since and several times, I looked for a copy on eBay and Amazon.  The last time, a couple of weeks ago, I found it on Amazon.  Leafing through, I can recall studying every picture and every description.

The Table of Contents

Small Book Image
Click to visit the book’s web site.

My chapter titles are a bit cryptic, so I am adding some explanation to better anchor the reference points.

A Rough Start

I admit that there are some biases in my book. What’s a revolution without biases. To provide some context for my particular philosophies about schooling, I spend about 19 pages describing my pre-(technological)revolution education, including my less than spectacular career as a student.

The Confabulator

TRS-80 Model III, the first personal computer I ever laid my eyes (and hands) on.

Here, I describe my first experiences with personal computers, starting with how I was knocked out of my seat by an idea.

Leaving Kansas, Apples & Kindred Spirits

In 1983, I moved from teaching Social Studies in rural South Carolina to leading an instructional technology program in rural North Carolina. I also joined a users’ group (MICRO5) and transitioned from monochrome Tandys to color Apples – dazzling.

Networks Open the Gates

My first experiences with modems and learning to use computers to communicate. Project based learning (PBL) became our modus operandi – using computers for collaborative learning.

A Line is Drawn

Moving to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction I learned what a small team of passionate and imaginative professional educators could accomplish. I also learned how little could be accomplished from inside the system. I have to note here that what hindered us was not the nature of state government, but the nature of state politics, and a manipulative narrative that sought to demonize government.

New Education Models

After leaving NCDPI, I lucked into a project instigated by Allan Weis and Advanced Network and Services. It was called ThinkQuest and it showed us how we could make students active learners by making them innovative teachers.

My First Flat Experience

I was so embarrassingly naive on my first trip to Asia.

A Bad Day for Education

Our work toward using technology to encourage more progressive styles of learning ground to a halt on January 8, 2002. No Child Left Behind successfully shifted the aim of public education from active learning by doing, to passive learning by memorizing facts to pass tests. Computers became teaching tools instead of learning tools.

Literacy 2.0

This became my most passionate mission, promoting a model for literacy that addressed the changing nature of our information experience. As information became increasingly networked, digital and abundant (and social), merely reading and writing (and arithmetic) were no longer nearly enough to be truly literate.

The Day that Education Almost Became Fun

As video games became more sophisticated and social networks became places that our students visited and collaborated, we started to recognize the unique skills that they were developing – that much of their play was actually the hard work of learning. We began to look for ways to structure classroom activities to trigger the same learning practices that our students were gaining outside of education.

The Evil Empire Strikes Back

As technology became more prevalent in our schools, investors saw a “golden moment.” There was an opportunity to use that technology to “profit by taking over broad swaths of public education.” This has become, in my opinion, the greatest threat that public education has ever faced.

The “Perfect” Technology

Apple’s iPad. It didn’t surprise anyone. But is it so “perfect?”

BookBag 2024

I end with a few pages of casual predictions of where education might be ten years from now (2014, when I started writing this book). This chapter mirrors the first chapter that I wrote in Redefining Literacy, describing education ten years from then, 2014.

Quiet Revolution Promo Video 2

Small Book Image
Click to visit the book’s web site.

Without any software for my 11 TRS-80 computers, I set out teaching myself how to program them myself.  Fairly quickly, I found myself on my knees thanking every Algebra teachers I had ever had.  There was finally a purpose for what had seemed to me like purposeless form of mathematics.

Manual for BASIC language programming
The BASIC programming book that came with the early TRS-80 computers.

You see, I instructed the computer with numbers and mathematics was the language.

Algebra was my syntax.

Video 2

 

Quiet Revolution Promo Video 1

Small Book Image
Click to visit the book’s web site.

I will be producing little 2-minute videos over the next few weeks to promote my new book, The Days and Nights of a Quiet Revolution.  This first one sets some context.  When I was in high school, computers were giant machines that were installed with forklifts.  My father use to take me to his work, a trucking company, to show me their Honeywell computers.

Even after I graduated from college, computers had nothing to do with education.  I had no reason to believe that teaching would be changing in any substantial way over my assumed 30 years as a history teacher.

Video 1

Klaatu Barada Nikto

Novelty UFO at the visitor's center in Moonbeam, Ontario, Canada.When I was out in the world promoting modern ideas about education, I frequently suggest for several reasons that students should be studying science fiction literature in English classes along side Milton, Melville and Faulkner. But This was not one of the reasons:

I had a chat yesterday with my neighbor, Paul Gilster (Centauri Dreams), who is an expert on all things outer space, and especially the latest that is known or suspected about the nature of the universe. He was telling me about ‘Oumuamua, the first interstellar object (not from the Solar System) that we have detected passing through the Solar System. It was discovered with the Pan-STARRS telescope, which is the only instrument on Earth that could have seen it. Pan-STARRS first came online only eight years ago.

Our classification of the object has changed as astronomers have learned more about it, ruling out various theories. One of the few speculations that has not been disproven is that ‘Oumuamua is some sort of autonomous space craft, built by a technologically advanced civilization, and sent out to encounter star systems and gather data about their planets and moons, perhaps to be “phoned home.”

Personally, one of my favorite moments in movies is from “The Day the Earth Stood Still” when Klaatu (played by Michael Rennie, not Keanu Reaves) lands his flying saucer on a baseball field in the middle of Washington, DC. Are we ready to meet our neighbors? What’s the etiquette?

This, and other discoveries, have more and more scientists suggesting that we should be making people, our Earth’s inhabitants, ready for the possibility / probability that we may well discover hard evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations in the near future.

Sources:

Paul’s Centauri Dreams blog article about ‘Oumuamua – https://goo.gl/8RhTBb

Wikipedia article about ‘Oumuamua – https://goo.gl/TqDqEt

Opening scene from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) – https://goo.gl/CPXLdh

Gilster, Paul. Personal interview. 9 Jan. 2019.

This is America

The place of the revolutionary 116th Congress

“..I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I … take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.

The 116th U.S. Congress dramatically illustrates something that I believe about America, that it is a work in progress.  It is constantly struggling to be a better place to live for ALL citizens, than it was a decade or a century ago.

The revered authors of our U.S. Constitution masterfully worked together to re-invent government here. I suspect that this feat could not have been accomplished by anyone else, at any time since. But their work was just a start, as evidenced by the fact that 127 members of today’s congress did not even have the right to vote in 1789, because they were women; and 59 because of their African ancestry, and 4 because of their American ancestry. Today they serve in an elected body that wields the balanced power to govern this magnificent country.

The one aspect that seems less evolved to me is the influence of wealth in my country’s governance. Property is no longer a prerequisite to vote, but money is a requirement to become a member of Congress. According to the FEC, candidates had to spend an average of more than a million dollars – winners and losers [calculated from https://goo.gl/pz7nBu]. According to OpenSecrets, 89% (88.8) of races for the House of Representatives and 86% (85.7) for the Senate were won by the candidate who spent the most money [https://goo.gl/SJoqa8].
American government continues to favor the wealthy.