Little Moments Matter

Causing a stir by saying something...

When I got to school today, this photograph had been sent to the all school list-serv. It made my day: first, because the sentiment matched the act of creation itself, and if course, because of how it got there.

My Autobiography and Memoir class read the narratives of Ben Franklin and Frederick Douglass. Both of these men had things to say that the world should hear, both of them were newspaper publishers, and both were certain of their importance in the trajectory of history. Our next book is Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama, another man with a message for the world. I always like to give my students a chance to get a big chunk of the book read before we start talking about it, so I use this time to do projects and writing in class.

Enter Three Words to the World

Antonio Viva (antonioviva at Twitter and at WAMash) tweeted a YouTube link to his class video – Three Words to the World. His creative writing class did an inspiring job, and I thought that this fit in perfectly between Douglass and Obama. Beyond “I Want Change” and “Yes, we can/ Si, se puede,” what three words did my students want to share with the world?

Armed with Flip video cameras, they went out to tell the world. Sophie, with the help of her group, created and recorded the environmental sculpture of wood chips on the sidewalk that reads: Little Moments Matter.

And then they walked away.

Genius

Leaving the words on the cement was a stroke of genius; lots of head scratching, questions, and of course – photographs! The principal stopped to read it, people printed out the photograph, and my class was SO excited. What a lesson in communication for them.

“Say what you need to say.” – John Mayer

Here’s the video. It’s a first draft because they will want to see other soundtracks – they will change the tone and how it reads, so I don’t now where it will end up.

Collages from our Fieldwork Day

Consciousness raising by young women for their peers on the fourth floor here. Click on the images to see them more clearly.

Here is what they had to say and what they had to show us:

The things we LIKE are complicit in the things we DON’T…

Today Theresa and I spent the day with ten junior girls looking at images of women and girls in the media, particularly print media – those ubiquitous women’s and girls’ fashion and lifestyle magazines – and thinking about how destructive they are to us as people – men and women

To Begin

Current Issue of CosmoGirl

We started by looking at a stack of magazines, from CosmoGirl and Seventeen to US and Vanity Fair. The girls made two piles of images – a stack of healthy and positive pictures, the so-called “normal” women, and a stack of photos of über-thin women in impossible clothing doing unbelievable things. We had a great conversation as we looked at these magazines.

Our exploration of these images took at short break when Sarah, an intern at the Chicago Women’s Health Center, came to talk to us about the work that they do. The collective has been in existence since 1975 and provides amazing health care for women in Chicago. She joined our conversation about the media, and our discussion turned to issues of domestic violence and the statistics that a battered woman, on average, will be hit 30 times before she calls the police. That she will return to her abuser seven times before she leaves him for good. We talked about violence against women, abortion services and reproductive justice (their word), counseling, and the transgendered and their difficulties finding health care. It was very interesting to the girls and an excellent segue into our little film festival.

The Film Festival

We showed five short films and one longer piece. We started with the five films produced for The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. Starting with the first “True Colors,” and then screening “Evolution,” “Onslaught,” “Amy,” and “Hair.” I have a hard time watching “True Colors” without tearing up; maybe it’s the fact that I have three daughters or maybe it’s because I always wanted to change my own body (too flat, hair too straight, blond eyebrows and lashes) that it hits home. But it will, without fail, make me cry. “Evolution”, “Onslaught”, and “Hair” make you gasp at the extent of the advertising and how unreal these women really are (really!) but it’s “Amy” that produces the smile and the “awww” from the girls. When the title comes up that reminds us that even though Amy can find 12 things wrong with her appearance, the boy wistfully calling for Amy can’t find one, we all melt. It’s the dream. That the male gaze is less critical than our own.

These are really powerful – but then! Top the festival off with a viewing of “Killing Us Softly 3” a 34 minute presentation from Jean Kilbourne, the filmmaker who created the first Killing Us Softly almost 30 years ago. She makes a connection between the objectification of women in advertising and violence against women, between the hyper-sexualization of children and teens in advertising to the high rate of teen pregnancy. Her argument is compelling in the face of so many examples. In fact, right after lunch, one of the members of the group said we needed to all look at Pink’s video for her song “Stupid Girls.” Grrrrr…. (that’s a growl out to the necessity of having to declare that you “don’t want to be a stupid girl.”) Amazing to watch it as we start to think about gender and power.

The Action and Reaction

So what to do? Back to the pile of images already culled and four large pieces of black poster board – the young women in our group created collages that show how women are treated as objects (breasts, backsides, torsos, legs), how women are depicted as powerless or victims (the pout, the aggressive male looming, infantilized clothing or props, dead), and how IN-frequently we are shown as having real sized bodies with real sized parts. They responded to questions in writing, and we put their responses and their collages on the bulletin board outside my room.

And the conversations that have already taken place around that board have been amazing – Duane, counselor and the pied piper of our school, explaining to a group of boys how it was not just pictures of HOT girls but that these images actually insulted them as men – a young woman’s voice asking loudly and over and over, “Who did these? Who did these?” until I came out of my room. “These are amazing! Did you do these all by yourself? This is so excellent.” – The girls who created them explaining to their friends (especially the boys) what they represent.

So we like those magazines. We like the clothes. But… they are really destructive to who we are UNLESS we are aware of the semiotic potential of these images. I’ll post pictures of their collages tomorrow when I get back to school.

Itchy Friday…

It’s Friday and I see my American Lit kids at 2:00 – for most of them it’s their last class of the week, and they admitted to thinking the day was already over (much to their chagrin “but it’s not that I don’t like your class Mrs. Tabor, it’s just been a really long week”).  Today I promised to only talk about chapter 8 in the Scarlet Letter – and true to my word we talked only about Pearl, Hester, Dimmesdale, that moment when all the people you wish weren’t together are together and talking about you, and the way that the old men in Boston want to see the supernatural in the child (and how Hawthorne just imagines the governor’s head on a platter a la Salome and John the Baptist).  So, to end class early,  each student had to give me a list of words that were top of mind at this point when they think about the Scarlet Letter – and here is the word cloud that their 150+ words created:

An open letter to the NCAA Clearinghouse

How dare you?

How dare you say that Journalism is not a “real” English class?  How dare you say that my curriculum is not rigorous?  What do you know about the day to day challenges of the student journalist? What do you know about how hard they work to report and write stories?  What do you know about publishing a newspaper or a magazine?

I don’t tell you how to coach, to play, or to run your organization.  I don’t even begin to imagine the complexities of your work.  How can you imagine the complexities of ours?

I’m tired today because I was up until after midnight commenting on and editing student writing.  They are writing again tonight, draft two of the same story – crafting, thinking, writing.  I guess I shouldn’t put forth so much effort or ask my students to work as hard as I do because clearly the work we do is lightweight and should be easy, right?  So how come it’s so hard to do well?

Come teach my class.  I dare you.

“All that is not my soul…”

Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not
my soul. — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, section 3

End of day two of the 2008-2009 academic year. Yesterday almost proved too much for me. The Thursday schedule is brutal in the morning, and there was the added layer of stress getting out the first issue of the school paper. We were having problems with page exports, and it did turn out that there was a problem with a linked jpg file that was crashing Acrobat and InDesign. But I did my very best Lady Macbeth imitations, getting crazier as the day went on.

A sample of my email to techhelp:

at 10:22 We are having export difficulties with the Weekly – We are currently logged in in my class, but I’m teaching until 11:15. Help me, Obi Wan Kenobe…

At 11:16 Adobe Error

Can you read my mind??

At 1:19 Arrgh!! Now as I have waited (im)patiently for the log in to scan in my room I have the finder problem that we were having with my log in so I can’t get to the group shared folder (or any finder window).

at 1:42 – Export failed on my log in: I have to go eat something before I eat the computer – but it failed on my log in. I’m stumped!

I did not eat the computer, and I did finally figure out what the problem was (this morning) after a good night’s sleep and thinking aloud to my favorite Mac man.

Clear and sweet was the arrival this afternoon of the school paper. A back to school issue out the first week of class for the first time in years. We are posting to moodle now as well, and it is so satisfying to see it in color on-line (we print black & white on newsprint.)**

Clear and sweet were also my students. We started with Chapter 1 of The Scarlet Letter today (all page and a half of it), and looked at Hawthorne’s naked themes that he tosses out without any apology (nature, decay, artifice, edifice, death and punishment, youth, age, weeds and flowers). Fifteen students – three girls and a dozen boys thinking about shame and sex and ratting out your friends. For all that is clear and sweet as well.

Time for the weekend.

**I have to shout out to my printer, the able folks at the Law Bulletin who take our pdf by 9:00 AM and deliver printed folded newspapers by 1:00 PM. Astounding, and they make me look good!