Marvin Isley

I just read that Marvin Isley, bass player for the Isley Brothers, died today. While this is sad news, especially since the brother was only 56, it does provide a fantastic opportunity to highlight one of my favorite funk/rock albums of all time, 3+3. 

After leaving Motown and starting their own label, T-Neck records, the Isley Brothers added two guitar playing little brothers, Marvin and Ernie, and their pianoman cousin Chris Jasper. The Isley's had been making hits since the late fifties, but the youthful funk of their younger siblings made 3+3 something special.
Doubt it? Check out "Who's That Lady" and peep Ernie's soaring Hendrix-inspired* guitar riffs being perfectly balanced by Marvin's funky bass lines. Trust me, you need this album in your life.


 

*It's not widely known that Jimi Hendrix actually played with the Isley's back in the day before he hit it big in rock. From Rickey Vincent's Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of the One:

Hendrix wound up in Harlem in late 1963 looking for lead guitarist gigs in an R&B act. He was picked up when Ronnie Isley went to the Palm Cafe looking for a lead guitarist for an upcoming Isley Brothers tour of Bermuda.
Hendrix thrived in the Isley Brothers band, performing his wild stage show, licking the air, biting his guitar, wearing loud bandanas, and getting the most out of his solos. He made $30 a night and didn't complain. 

Check him out on the group's mid-60 release, Testify Parts 1+2.

Standardized Teaching

The death of the book (as we know it) will hasten the death of the teacher (as we know it).

Book, man

At my current school, and many others like it, I have been told to instruct and assess with a careful eye towards "replicating the standardized testing environment."

The thinking is simple: if you want kids to do well on an assessment, then you make sure you teach them so they can know how to do the things you're going to ask them to do on the test. And you practice in those conditions, over and over.

And then it occurred to me the other day that we surprisingly still do standardized testing with paper books. The grading is all scanned in, but there are more inefficiencies in the system. Why kill all those trees? Why not have the kids just take tests on the computer?


That question may take a few more years to resolve logistically, but very soon computer testing will become standard. And that shouldn't really seem like a big deal until you think about how we "replicate the standardized testing environment." If you are going to be assessed in a digital environment, wouldn't you want your learning to be in the same realm?

And if learning is based mostly in the digital environment, what role does that leave for the teacher? The teacher who battles for the attention of students who are progressively more emotionally invested in their consumptive technologies?

Not much.

My students are generally on their best behavior when they have a computer in front of them. They don't disrupt, they don't talk loudly, they keep their hands to themselves (thank God, finally!).

Of course that doesn't ensure effective instruction, or even actual learning. If we're trying to socialize competent, productive members of society, you need a human leading the instruction. Otherwise, the results will be less than ideal.

But that doesn't mean people won't try to use alternate methods, particularly in lean economic times. Human teachers are expensive, in terms of investment of time and money, and wouldn't it make sense to invest more in software (as it were), as opposed to hardware? If you had a program that could show the same test results as a human, wouldn't you hire the program? Some might even say it would be immoral to do anything less. Again, that's taking for granted that learning is only worthwhile if it can be represented by a number.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to numerical assessment of student learning. When you're trying to teach someone a piece of information, the most important question is not one the pupil asks, but the question a teacher asks to check for understanding.

The problem with this new approach to education is less in the principal, but more in the practice. Mahatma Ghandi's philosophy of non-violence is well known, but less attention is devoted to his reservations and distrust of technology. He uses the introduction of trains to India and the virulence of British colonialism as an example. Ghandi says it wasn't trains themselves that were evil, but they were transporters of evil across large distances. The rapid movement of goods was a catalyst for exploitation. Can anyone say cotton gin?

Student performance scores represent a technology that can tell us a lot about how to instruct our children. But it can also be used to transport the evil of greed. Once education is completely corporatized, and once the test performance of children is tied to profit, that's when the evil will be most easily transported. That's when schools will close and open like fast food franchises. That's when caring professionals will be cast out like "obsolete" autoworkers. That's when a generation of students will be taught to value test performance over knowledge.

But we're not there quite yet. We have to be willing to weather the storms of active minds, without relying on electronic pacifiers. We have to work to ensure the careers of educators are not determined merely by test data, but the activation of student thinking and learning. That's why we need to craft an educational philosophy informed, but not enslaved by data.

Like a ham hock in your cornflakes, personified

Real Talk

A student from my school was killed the other day. Walking down the street last Wednesday night, someone snuck up behind Jarren Lindsey and shot him.

I didn't know Jarren well. I had his cousins in a couple of my classes, but he was a tenth grader and I teach freshmen. I did take some pictures of him during an art project for another class. They were working on a project where they painted out a significant moment in their lives. It was amazing to look at the things the kids shared. The kids looked like "regular" teenagers, but they had these incredibly heavy stories behind them. Jarren's was no less heavy, but you could tell he was proud of the painting he had done. In one of the pictures he smiles at the camera, like he's telling a joke. In another, he's looks sober, older.

According to the newspaper, Jarren and his cousin had just walked some girls to the bus stop and were on their way home. That was the first week of spring break and the weather had just cleared up and was unseasonably warm. People were out and restless on the street. Out of the shadows, someone struck down Jarren and sent his cousin running for his life. Jarren was 16 years old. 
To be honest, I've tried not to mix the world of this blog with my teaching world. I'm a compartmentalizer and it's easier for me to deal with the demands of all my little worlds as long as I can keep them separate. I've tried not to write about personal stuff that's not directly tied to the topic at hand: funk, in all of its forms. Sticking to the script, so to speak, has been tough this year. The second year of teaching is no joke, and to go along with all of that, my school has been slated for closure because of test scores and budgetary reasons.

But something about this feels different. This is about Jarren, but it's also much bigger than Jarren. Two days before Jarren lost his life, I was heading out to play basketball at the rec center near my house. It was 9pm, which I consider early when it comes to playing ball, and my wife and I heard about six gun blasts near our house. We sat up and talked for a little while, but despite my wife's protestations, I grabbed my ball and got in the car. I was driving a block over when I noticed a bunch of guys standing in front of a house. They looked heated about something, but I didn't immediately connect it to the gunshots. When I saw unmarked police car waiting in the cut, I knew something was up.

And something was up. Soon after I left, the police stopped somebody on that corner and, according to the news, shot him after he drew a gun. Unfortunately another one of my students lives in a house right on the corner in front of where the shooting happened. I've chided her about being out late, but the whole thing happened right before her eyes. William Hardy, the young Black man who died, was 27 years old.

And just yesterday morning, a freshman at Douglass High named Danny Gilmore was on his way to school and was shot in front of a grocery store. He wasn't killed, but he is paralyzed. Police believe it might have just been a case of mistaken identity. The alleged shooter is 18. This all happened 8:15am, mind you.

As I get ready to teach my last quarter of freshman English, I've got all of this heavy stuff on my brains. I was planning on seeing my students again for the first time on Monday. I would have all my energetic, engaging lessons planned. I would lead us head-long into a journey of inquiry and discovery that would motivate them to give their best, even in the school's last moments.

But that's not exactly what's going to happen. Instead, I'll see many of my students at Jarren's funeral on Friday. Instead of having everything figured out and planned when I see them, I'll probably have just as many questions as they will.

Ironically, the feeling reminds me of how I felt when Obama was elected. I was caught up in all my reservations about the implications (political, social, economic,etc.) of having a Black president, but my students swept away all the reservations and allowed me to just feel that moment, even if the forces at work were too big for me to understand.

That's what makes this type of post so difficult, because the events of a life generally don't interest me as much as the causes or implications of those events. But lately it seems a little trite to talk about causes or implications. I could link to articles about the schools crisis. Or the gang crisis. Or the gun crisis. Or the drug crisis. Or the roots of poverty laid down by years of racial segregation in Chicago. But I guess this ain't the time for that.

Now's the time to mourn these young men who have had their lives shattered by violence, and pray that no one else falls victim. It's also time for me to continue to plan this last semester for my students. The goal won't be for me to explain all of the causes and implications of incomprehensible events, but instead help them develop the tools they can use to fashion new understandings of the world around them. Understandings that will change things. Understandings that might save lives.

But Friday comes first.

Mister Magic

Thank God for Spring break.

Roberta Flack - Mister Magic - 1970
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Questions

1. Who would have thought that America would have a Black president before it had universal health care?

2. Could Hillary Clinton, with all of the baggage from the first health care run 15 years ago, have passed health care if she was president?

3. Isn't the thought that this young brother hasn't even really hit his prime kind of scary?


Do yourself a favor and watch the President teach on why health care is a battle for America's character.

Teaching Writing and Blowing the Whistle

Lately I've been thinking quite a bit about teaching and why I'm doing what I do. Writing is a big part of what I do with my life. I would even like to make a (gasp!) living doing it. But it wasn't always like that for me. There was a time in school where I didn't really enjoy writing all that much.

When I was in the 7th grade my PE teacher, who I will simply call Coach (his mirrored sunglasses and obscenely bulging neck veins are crystal clear, his name a mystery) introduced us to our school’s “weight training facility”. Volleyball, football, and baseball had been the physical education staples up until this time. In junior high, however, we were crammed into a grimy portable classroom with a circuit of shiny machines that would help us “train”. Class would consist of us moving from one machine to the next, pumping away until we heard a shrill blast from Coach’s whistle.

Coach inspired us with fear (again, the veins and the sunglasses) but after awhile we learned how to slack off just enough that he wouldn’t fail us. Undoubtedly many of us exercised muscles that we never would have otherwise (I never understood the appeal of that weird leg-spreader machine) but there was an unreality to the experience that made it seem silly.

Previously, exercise had been a pleasant and unconscious byproduct of play, but PE class turned it into what seemed like a sophisticated punishment—something to be tolerated or avoided. Looking back on the reading and writing I did in school, I see a strong parallel.

Of course I was “prepared” by my school experience in the strictest sense of the word. Our trips to the weight training facility “prepared” me to interact physically with weight machines, but didn’t prepare me to address my most immediate athletic concern—improving my atrocious jump shot. Instead of motivating me to squeeze as many repetitions as I could out of the 90 seconds we had at each station, Coach’s glowering, punitive presence actually made me want to do less.

Similarly, school taught me how to write a standard five paragraph essay using a bare minimum amount of thought and time to achieve a satisfactory grade. Essays seemed less about discovery than recitation, and that wasn't of much interest to me. Grades were held over our heads to motivate us towards success, but too many times this was articulated as “not failing”. There was little inquiry about our own academic goals, beyond college, and we were rarely asked to synthesize what we learned in readings or in class to other areas of our education or lives. The experience was not much different than a visit to the "weight training facility" where you worked a single muscle with no thought towards coordinating those tissues towards flexible movement.

I realize that education is primarily a personal endeavor. Every student has to demand to be educated in order for anything to happen. And I’m not saying I learned nothing in school; I just wish they had expected and required more of me as a writer and a reader. With the focus on easily digestible bits of information, I think I got lost in the tedium of repetitive motion exercises. I wanted to write things that would change and engage the world, but I don’t feel like I was challenged to do that. So I was “prepared,” but just not in the way I needed.

I think about this a lot now that I am the keeper of Coach’s proverbial “whistle.” My high school students work on five-paragraph essays: five reps of hooks, two sets of contextualizing statements, three concrete detail crunches, and 60 seconds on the commentary sentence step machine. The mastery of these elements is important because they set the foundation for good writing and thinking. But the reality is that I’m also having them work on them because that’s what’s going to be on the test that’s going to be used to gauge how “educated” they are.

Tests have their place, but the danger is that this type of learning becomes rote if it consumes the entire learning experience of the student. It's also dangerous because it's easy to assess whether or not a kid knows how to write a standard thesis statement. It's much more difficult to assess whether a student can think for themselves and create something new. In a test-heavy environment, sometimes the learning that can be easily assessed is the learning that gets emphasized the most. (Coach could read the newspaper as long as he heard the squeaks of the metal equipment.) The English teachers I remember most fondly are those who were not concerned with just the recitation of knowledge, but how this knowledge might profoundly effect what I wanted to do with my life.

Kids need to master content and skills in order to be good writers, but if we never make a connection between a student’s interests and how what we’re learning can aid their pursuit of that interest, we can blow as hard as we want on our whistles; no one will be listening.

Some people will...

...do thangs, do thangs, bad thangs with it.

This song is so funky that no matter what the time or occasion, it's always appropriate.

Misstra Knowitall's philosophy of technology education

A thought:

Merely, putting a pencil in a child’s hand does not teach writing. You have to begin with basic skills: how to hold a pencil, how to write within the margins of a lined sheet, how to erase mistakes, etc. Next, a child needs to learn how to interpret and shape the language they will use to record their thoughts. Grammar, syntax, metaphor, structure, etc. During this instruction, a child must learn the power of words; their role as vehicles for ideas; their potential to both liberate and tyrannize. That is writing instruction that will allow students to more clearly understand the world around them and articulate their understandings of that world.

If this is true, then why is it so often that we feel we are doing enough for our students by shoving computers underneath their noses without giving them a clear understanding of what they can, and should, do with the enormous power at their fingertips?

Needless to say, as our society becomes increasingly integrated with technology, students need to have a greater level of understanding about the technology that surrounds them and how it affects them as scholars, and more importantly, as people. Without these types of understandings, we are setting up our children to be mere consumers of technology (and culture), instead of producers.

As technology advances, people are required to use less and less of their brain cells. Calculators make the ability to add redundant. GPS systems make it even irrelevant to know where you are in the world.

Although students have access to more information than any previous generation, their ability to analyze and understand this information is not keeping pace. This raises a number of concerns, but one of the most important is the role it has in the diminishment of our students’ curiosity. Without an analytic filter to parse the useful from the useless, students are drowning under a tsunami of information that taxes their curiosity and makes them apathetic to learning. What’s the point in learning something new when you can just look it up on the internet?


It behooves us to help students understand how they can use technology to manipulate the world around them, but also how that technology can be used to manipulate their understandings of themselves.

Ron Banks and the Fabulous Dramatics

You know you're too busy when you miss the death of the lead singer of The Dramatics and you don't even hear about until a week later. Ron Banks died of a heart attack on March 4th. The Dramatics were one of the funkiest soul groups of their era. "What You See is What You Get" is up there with almost anything that the Stylistics or Temptations put out. And check those moves.



Some of you may be more familiar with their work in one of the greatest (ignant) video/songs in hip-hop history. The Dramatics sweet smooth touch was a perfect accompaniment to Dr. Dre's rumbling bass and Snoop's drawling vocals.