Different Limbs, Different Risks
Nancy G. Patterson
Portland Middle School, Portland, MI and
Michigan State University
patter@voyager.net
Deal With It
Patrick Shannon writes that “teaching is both liberatory and dominating. By teaching, we can learn the connections between our lives and those of others and the relationship between those lives and the world we live in."
Portland Middle School, Room 118. It’s Friday at the Middle School
“Ok, you guys. I need your attention.”
The class continues to talk. “Hey, I’d like your attention please.”
Some of the hubbub dies down. “Hey! This is the third time,
folks. I need your attention and I don’t want to have to ask again.”
The class is quiet except for two girls who continue to talk.
“Hang on, Ms. P.” The girl in the bungee pants holds out her arm, her index finger pointed toward the ceiling. “ I just gotta tell her this one last thing.” She buzzes a couple more phrases at the girl sitting next to her, grins a me, and goes silent. I give her my fake snarl.
“OK. How many of you already have e-mail address?” About half my 7th graders raise their hands.
“I got one but you won’t like it,” the kid with the mustache says. He’s almost six feet tall already and he just turned 13.
“Yeah? Why?”
“It ain’t appropriate.”
“I’m not even going to ask.”
“It’s hooterman.” The class laughs.
“Thank you for sharing. We’ll get you a new one.”
“Hey, Ms. P. I got one but I don’t remember what it is,” says the skinny kid in the corner, who is almost 14 but doesn’t seem to be even close to growing a mustache. He wears baggy shorts all year round, with scrawny legs sticking out of them that end in Nike hightops the size of boats.
“You’ll get a new one.”
“But I liked the old one.”
“Deal with it.”
Computer Mediated Chain Poetry
Bakhtin writes: An object is ready-made, the linguistic means for its depiction are ready made, the artisit himself is ready-made, and his world view is ready-made. And here with ready-made means, in light of a ready-made world view, the ready-made poet reflects a ready-made object. But in fact the object is created in the process of creativity, as are the poet himself, his world view, and his means of expression.
Teachers Meeting after school in the teachers lounge—no windows, no air conditioning. It’s May at the middle school.
The library aide begins the meeting, “I found this next to one
of the computers in the library. I thought some of you should know
what these kids are doing with e-mail.”
She reads:
Roses are red, pickles are green
I love your legs and what’s between
I like your style, I like your class
But most of all I like your ass.
I’m a cool girl, in a cool town
It takes a real mother fucker to put me down.
Sex is when a guys communication
Enters a girls information
To increase the population
For a younger generation
Do you get the information
Or do you need a demonstration
“There’s more,” the library aid says, waving the papers. “It ends
with ‘Send this to zero people and you will lose the person you’re with.
Send it to 1-5 people and someone you like will ask you out. Send
it to 6-10 people and you and your crush will get closer.
Send it to 11 or more and you and your crush will be together a long
time.”
The person who left the e-mail message by the computer had sent it to 17 people. A discussion follows about blocking out all the e-mail sites so students can’t access e-mail during school.
I point out that my students need e-mail accounts so they can sign up for free web space so they can do web projects.
“They HAVE to have e-mail accounts?” one teacher asks.
“Yup,” I reply.
Arguing the Frame
In S/Z, Roland Barthes writes: “In [the] ideal text, networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; It has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable…”(5-6).
District Technology Integration Meeting, Board of Education Office conference room. A Friday afternoon.
“I think teachers in this district are just going to have to deal with the fact that we will have one web editor available, and it’s going to be Front Page,” said the elementary teacher who is controlling the meeting. She clacks something into her PowerMac in front of her.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because it’s the best web editor.“
“Well,I kind of like PageMill,” I say
“Front Page is great for frames,” another teacher says. She’s
also an elementary teacher, soft spoken. There’s no PowerMac set
up in front of her, though.
“Except that most web designers tell you stay away from frames,” The
other teachers in the room look at me as if I’d spoken blasphemy.
“Nancy, you can’t just make broad sweeping statements like that,” the high school technology teacher chides.
“Ok. So how come so many big commercial websites don’t use frames?” It’s a stupid conversation, but I can’t let go of it.
“Hey, Nanc. Shop around.”
“I already did. Check out Disney, and Saturn. And take a look
at CNN’s page, and Time Magazine’s. And you might want to look at
Microsoft’s page while you’re at it. They use javascript and tables.
But they don’t use frames."
“Front Page is easy to upload,” the sweet PowerMac-less elementary
teacher points out.
“Well, some web hosting places have a tough time with the Front Page extensions,” I say. “Besides, Netscape Composer is easy for kids to learn and use.” This is really my agenda. I know Composer cold. It ain’t fancy but it is easy.
“That means we’d have to have two browsers loaded on the computers. I don’t see why we would need two browsers,” the PowerMac elementary teacher says.
The Panopticon
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), in the Preface to Panopticon writes “Morals reformed—health preserved—industry invigorated-instruction diffused—public burdens lightened—Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock—the gordian know of the Poor-Laws not cutm but untied—all by a simple idea in architecture!”
Portland Middle School. January. It’s winter at the middle school.
I decided to stay after school and clear some things off the server. I’d stored a number of images in a folder that students could access, images I thought would be useful for a web project they had been working on. But the project was over, and it was time to do a little housekeeping. I began scrolling through the list of images, deleting the ones I recognized and knew would no longer be used. And then I came to one called “baseball.” Baseball. I didn’t save any baseball images. So I double clicked on it to see what the picture was. It was a photo of a well endowed blonde who seemed to be quite interested in her, um, endowments.
I went back to the list of images, scrolled down and found one called “basketball.” It was the same blonde, showing off other attributes. I found ten more pictures, all named for sports. I knew I had not saved the images to the server. And I was the only teacher who took students to the lab, and the only teacher who knew how to get images from the web, and the only teacher who had taught students to get images from the web, I was reasonably sure it was one of my charmers who had so generously shared this art form with the school server. A filter-less server. A filter-less server because I had campaigned against filters.
I checked when the the images had been saved. Some were saved during my class period. Some were saved a few days later during lunch when students have access to the lab. And the images had been saved during those later sessions from more than one computer. The little snot had passed his techno literacy skills on to others.
I went to the principal. I had to.
What my students didn’t know, of course, was that the server knew exactly when the images had been downloaded, and who the downloadee was. Or in this case, were. It turned out to be four boys. Eighth graders. Full of their new found knowledge about images and copying and saving. Among other things.
The filter went on a week later.