Tag: radical teaching

Rustling Signs, Loud Noises, and Progressive Possibilities

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On Monday, September 26, 2011, I, along with at least 3 other folks from the RT board, and 500 other members of our union, PSC-CUNY, descended on the CUNY Board of Trustees meeting to demand that the university adequately fund health care for adjuncts, who do more than half of the teaching on CUNY campuses. About 100 of us made it into the meeting room, where we stood silently in the audience holding paper signs urging CUNY to “DO THE RIGHT THING.” Early in the meeting, as CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein was droning on about CUNY’s participation in various economic Read More …

“These Heroic Happy Dead”

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Watching with rising nausea the endless patriotic and militaristic boosterism surrounding the 9/11 memorials the other week, I thought ahead to later in the semester when, in my general education Introduction to Literature course, I’d be teaching a thematic section on war. One poem I’ve used often is “’next to of course god america i,” by e.e.cummings. (You can find it at: http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/eecummings/313 .) The first thirteen lines of this 1926 poem consist of words uttered at a graveyard by a politician or military bigwig on Memorial Day or some other patriotic occasion. The last line reads: “He spoke. And Read More …

“New” Business Models for Higher Education: What, Me Worry?

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So I’m listening to Marketplace Money (Sept. 8), and hear host Bob Moon lament that “the lousy economy is causing colleges to keep raising their prices or lowering their quality,” or both. A “vicious, unsustainable cycle–until now.” But here’s commentator Kim Clark with an “example of something done right.” The something right is Clarkson University’s adaptation of Milton Friedman’s old idea to let some poor students in without tuition, and collect a surcharge on their later earnings instead. Clarkson is admitting a few go-getters, free, “in return for a 10-percent share of their start-ups.” It’s investing in two, this year; Read More …

“Do You Miss Teaching?”: Notes From The Other Side

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“Do you miss teaching?” That’s what people ask, almost invariably, when they hear that I’m retired. This has been going on since I quit 15 years ago at age 67. Usually I hesitate before responding. Why the hesitation? I enjoyed teaching, and was very good at it. That sounds immodest, but I assure the reader that it’s true. Former students still write that the courses I taught strongly influenced, in a positive way, the direction of their lives. Of course, this makes me feel good. Yet I retired voluntarily at an age when I was still learning, still getting excellent Read More …

B. Traven’s “Assembly Line”: Teaching Exploitation

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Yesterday I returned to teaching after four years of retirement.  I am teaching two sections of Writing Through Literature and using the excellent anthology Literature and Society (editors Pamela Annas and Robert C. Rosen, both of the Radical Teacher collective) which groups the literary genres of poetry, drama, fiction and non-fiction under such themes as Money and Work, War and Peace, and Varieties of Protest, making it considerably easier to teach literature from a progressive left prospective. Not having taught this course in well over fifteen years, I am curious if or how the political understanding of my students may Read More …

Inclusion At What Cost?

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The current protest movement in Israel—similar to but also different than from the much more urgent, anguished, and even bloody revolutions now sweeping the Arab world—brings into focus for me a dilemma that affects my teaching. For the protesters the question is whether to “depoliticize” the mass movement in order to draw in as many people as possible by focusing on broadly shared civic demands: housing, healthcare, and education. This strategy assumes that once you get people active in one cause they may expand their activism to causes that previously seemed out of bounds, notably Israel’s occupation of Palestine and Read More …

What’s “Radical” About Colleges Supporting K-12?

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I was fortunate enough to be on leave during the spring semester and so was surprised to learn at the first faculty meeting that Trinity College, where I teach, had launched a new initiative to partner with the Hartford Magnet Middle School (HMMS).  The Hartford Magnet Middle School, located right across Broad Street from the College, is one of the nation’s most successful.  About half its students, selected strictly by lottery, come from Hartford, one of the nation’s poorest and largely minority cities; the other half come from the surrounding towns.  Trinity is a small, selective, and expensive liberal arts Read More …

What Gets Better, Exactly? And For Whom?

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Many educators find that one good technique for promoting critical thought is to show students how to “ask the other question.”  Arising from an engagement with the politics of intersectionality—or, the recognition that identity, struggle, and oppression do not follow singular axes but rather emerge from multiple layers, dimensions, and vectors of power, experience, and location—“ask the other question” was first articulated as such in the early 1990s by critical race theorist and legal scholar Mari Matsuda.  Matsuda was addressing colleagues and comrades on the political Left, those who are “down for the cause,” but, in her estimation, too frequently Read More …

Solidarity With Wisconsin: A How To Guide

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To my out-of-state and international friends who want to know what to do: I recommend you do your own phone banking or mass emailing event. With a little review online you can find out the names/numbers of Wisconsin state GOP senators and Assembly reps who are supporting this bill. You can also find out which ones are in danger of recall. Then, you can have your callers explain to the legislator’ staffers on phone or in email that you consider the Wisconsin state line a PICKET LINE. No more dollars into Wisconsin. No more purchasing of Wisconsin products. Publicity ALL Read More …

An Open Letter About the Situation in Wisconsin

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I’m writing to you to share with you a little bit about the unprecedented events in Wisconsin, and to ask how you might like to make a presence and show of solidarity with brothers and sisters to the north. As you probably know, the Tea Party-backed recently elected Governor, Scott Walker, introduced a sweeping anti-labor, anti-family and union-busting budget last Friday afternoon, hoping to avoid public discourse and using a trumped-up fiscal crisis as his excuse (http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/editorial/article_61064e9a-27b0-5f28-b6d1-a57c8b2aaaf6.html). He did so with no warning, and refused all negotiation on his measure. In addition, he made a menacing and disturbing suggestion that Read More …