Happy Birthday, Helen Keller

 

Photo from Wikipedia

This amazing woman was born today 132 years ago.  She is most famous as being the deaf and blind girl that learned how to communicate when she was taught by Annie Sullivan (also an amazing woman, and one of my inspirations as a special education teacher).  This was story was famously depicted in the play and movie, The Miracle Worker.  Keller went on to college, and would eventually become the first deaf and blind person to receive a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Picture of Keller (left) and Annie Sullivan (right) from Spartacus Educational

As amazing as her story is, it is only part of the story.  Historically, she is simply by most known as a deaf and blind woman who could talk and become educated.  What most people don't know is that throughout her adult life, she spent her time traveling the globe as an activist.  Among other things, she campaigned in for Women's Suffrage, Labor Rights, and was member of the anti-war movement in the lead up to World War I.  She was even a member of the Socialist Party of America.  That's right: Helen Keller was a Socialist.

Photo from Huffington Post

As Education Professor Ruth Shagoury points out in a recent piece on Huffington Post, most people don't know the real history of Helen Keller (but should):

If I were creating Hero trading cards for Helen Keller, I would include her passionate work for women's voting rights, and against war and corporate domination. And I'd include her courageous quotes where she asks tough and impolite questions: "Why in this land of great wealth is there great poverty?" she wrote in 1912. "Why [do] children toil in the mills while thousands of men cannot get work, why [do] women who do nothing have thousands of dollars to spend?"

Sounds to me like the mother of today's Occupy Movement.

From publishers like Scholastic Teaching Resources -- which uses her life events to "give children practice reading a timetable" by asking insipid questions such: "How can you use the first two dates to figure out Helen's age at the time she got sick?" -- to St. Aidan's Home School pages, which encourages teachers to show "the Disney version of the The Miracle Worker," the information on-line portrays the same individualistic and socially empty Helen Keller myth.

It takes a little more digging, but I encourage parents and educators to turn to resources like the small press book Helen Keller from Ocean Press's series Rebel Lives, which includes excerpts from her writings on disability and class, socialism, women, and war, or the fine young adult biography Helen Keller: Rebellious Spirit by Laurie Lawlor. It's time to share with children Helen Keller's remarkable adult life. As a defiant rebel, she could be a true hero for 21st century activists.

Indeed, schools should teach about Ms. Keller (her whole biography).  She is an excellent role model for all students: girls, boys, disabled and non-disabled.  Helen Keller is a truly remarkable figure, both for overcoming her adversity, as well as her dedication to social justice.

2011 Person of the Year

I know I am a couple of weeks late writing on this story, but I would just like to take a moment to give credit to Time Magazine's choice for the 2011 Person of the Year: The Protestor.

 

Photo from Huffington Post

Clearly the biggest news story of the year were the protests that arose in the Arab World, and that soon spread to other parts of the globe as well (including in the United States with the Occupy Wall Street movement).  Discontent at those in charge is something that so often gets talked about, but very little ever get's done about it.  Sometimes, a person get's kicked out of elected office, and the next person to replace them is either just as ineffective, or worse than the person they replace.  Occasionally, you see a massive uprising against one's government in a foreign country, but that ultimately falter via government crackdown through brutality and fear (e.g. Iran, 2009).

But this year was different.  Why this year, and not any other year?  It is hard to say.  Time Magazine writer Kurt Anderson writes this:

It's remarkable how much the protest vanguards share. Everywhere they are disproportionately young, middle class and educated. Almost all the protests this year began as independent affairs, without much encouragement from or endorsement by existing political parties or opposition bigwigs. All over the world, the protesters of 2011 share a belief that their countries' political systems and economies have grown dysfunctional and corrupt — sham democracies rigged to favor the rich and powerful and prevent significant change. They are fervent small-d democrats.

For most years, Time would bestow this distinction to one individual, but in more recent years, it seems they have given the "person" of the year (singular) to groups of individuals.  Examples include "The Peacemakers" (1993; represented Yasser Arafat, F.W. de Klerk, Nelson Mandela, and Yitzhak Rabin), "The American Soldier" (2003), and the lazy and pandering "You" in 2006 (representing people who post things on the internet).  Of course, this year falls under that category of multiple winners as "Person of the Year", and "protesters" they couldn't have picked a more appropriate choice.

But what if you did have to pick just one person to represent the whole protest movement?  Quite a daunting task considering that the number of individuals involved in protest movements around the world this year are (at a minimum) in the hundreds of thousands, if not in the millions.  In addition, there is not one person who is primarily in charge of any of these movements, nor one individual that is the "face" of any of these movements, other than the faces of some of the despots who the protestors are demonstrating against to begin with (e.g. Mubarak, Gaddafi, Putin, etc.).  These were truly democratic movements in every sense of the word.  But there is one person, however, that can earn this distinction, because without him, all of these demonstrations may have never even started (or had the impact that they did).

Many people have suggested (and I happen to agree) that the Person of the Year for 2011 is the man in the picture at the top of this post: Mohamed Bouazizi.  Who is, or rather, who was Mr. Bouazizi?  Here is a description from an article on him from the website African Success, where I also copied the picture from above:

Mohamed Bouazizi  was a Tunisian street vendor born March 29,1984- died January 4,2011, poured petrol over himself on December 17, 2011 and set himself, alight in front of the office of the Governor of his region, life turned upside down in Tunisia and the fires that he lit has burned until it engulfed the entire country from town to town.

 Photo from African Success

He was a student from Sidi Bouzid and upon his father’s death, was obliged to stop his studies and find a job.Faced with the difficulty of finding a job, he ended up becoming a street seller, without official authorisation and desperate he plied his trade as best he could.

His plight echoed the hapless fate of so many thousands and thosuands of young Tunisians, seduced by the promises of western education, yet frustrated and thwarted by a visionless, un-productive, corrupt power structure which dominated the country and suffocated creativity and innovation.


In Tunisia, the President Zine el_Abidine Ben Ali and his family rules his country with an iron bar.

Papers to do this and that, land to build houses on, authorisations of all sorts were obtained by the ‘kind patronage’ of the President and his family.

Mohamed didn’t have the right papers and on the 17th December[2010] the police confiscated his good and threw him out of the market because he wasn’t paying the right dividends to the people the President had put in place. Apparently slapped on the face by Faida Hamdy, it has been upheld that the indignation was the 'spark' that led to him setting fire to himself. Her family have always upheld that she never touched him and a witness who had originally affirmed that she did slap him and has since added that it wasn't true that she didn't slap him.

Mohamed decided to protest by the only means he knew and poured petrol on himself, took out his lighter and burnt himself, becoming the hero and initiator of the ‘Jasmin revolution,’ which brought down the President and his family on 14 January 2011 and made him a martyr and hero of the nation.

The tragic story and suicide of Mr. Bouazizi lead to the ousting of Tunisia's president, and that could have been the end of the story.  A small story of and tragedy and triumph for justice in a small African country took place, but the rest of the world kept going along with business as usual.  But that did not happen.  Here is a piece from an article Reuters on why the The Times of the United Kingdom named Mr. Bouaziz their Person of the Year:

Bouazizi' death from his wounds in January prompted protests across Tunisia, forcing autocratic President Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali to flee the country. Soon afterwards, millions took to the streets in Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere to protest against repression, corruption, poverty and joblessness.

The uprisings unseated despots in Libya, Egypt and Yemen as well as Tunisia, while Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad's writ is disintegrating and other authoritarian rulers in the region are eyeing the tide of public anger with nervousness.

Tunisia has since elected new leaders through peaceful democratic elections.

In an October interview with Reuters, Bouazizi's mother Manoubia urged the new leaders to honor her son's sacrifice by helping poor people like him.

"Nothing would have happened if my son had not reacted against voicelessness and a lack of respect," she said.

"But I hope the people who are going to govern will be able to keep this message in mind and give consideration to all Tunisians, including the poor."

 

Photo from Reuters

Without the death of Mr. Bouazizi, not only would there have not been an uprising in Tunisia, there probably would have been no Tahrir Square, no Arab Spring, no Indignant's protest in Spain, no austerity protest in Greece, no protests on the Kremlin and no Occupy Wall Street.  Without Mr. Bouazizi, both Hosni Mubarak and Moammar Gaddafi would probably still be in power, and it is possible that no one in America would be talking about the wealth disparity between the 99% and the 1%.

While I sincerely hope that no one ever imitates the drastic actions that Mr. Bouazizi took, we who care about these protest movements need to realize what he did, why he did it, and pay tribute to him and what has happened since then.  May the memory of Mohamed Bouazizi live on.  And may the movements around the globe that he helped create continue to gain momentum in 2012 and beyond!

Thanksgiving, 2011

Tomorrow, I will be going to Iowa to celebrate Thanksgiving with some of my wife's family.  It is a tradition that we have done every year since we were engaged, and one I have grown to love dearly.  It is a wonderful time to see members of her family I don't get to see very often.  It is also a time to relax and unwind. I get a few days off to stuff my face with food, shop, and otherwise, take it easy (I usually catch up on a lot of reading on this trip).  

 Photo from holidaywallpapers.org

So I am definitely thankful for that.  But there are plenty of other things I am thankful for this year:

• I am thankful for the fact that my wife and I are both now working.  While I would certainly prefer to have an actual teaching job, I am just glad to still be working at all (especially given what a tough year we have had).  I feel very confident that my current position will lead to something better, and we are so fortunate to have the jobs we do given the our economic situation.   Speaking of which . . .
• I am thankful that we are in a decent spot financially.  No, not great; not even that good; but decent.  As I said, we are both working, and we are able to make ends meet.  We are making enough that we are somewhat financially secure from month-to-month.  Hopefully, we can get to a point where we can afford a house, as well as afford to have a child.  Mentally and emotionally, we are ready for both.  But we have to be patent for now.  We are, however, a lot more financially secure than we were when we first got married.  We were basically broke, but we have been able to save since then.  And as with out job situation, we could be a lot worse off given how so many other people are doing in our country.  While we are discussing economics . . .
• I am thankful for the Occupy Wall Street movement.  I won't say I agree with everything they are doing, and I sometimes wish they had more specific ideas (like these).  But it is long overdue that a movement such as this exists.  By that, I mean people actually marching in the streets and bringing attention to all of the damage done by the excesses and deregulation of our economic system.  I don't know what reforms will ultimately come of this movement, but I know that there are a lot of dedicated people who will keep it going. 

Photo from http://weheartit.com/

• I am thankful for Weight Watchers.  That's right, Weight Watchers  I've been on the diet 2 months, and have almost lost 10 pounds.  I am sure I would have lost a lot more if I exercised more than 3 times a week.  I have tried for years off and on to lose weight, but this is the only thing that has really worked so far.  I won't say it's for everyone.
• I am thankful that an old fraternity brother and one of my best friends became a father yesterday.  I mean this especially because I know he has had some of his own personal struggles in recent years, but now seems more focused and at peace than he ever has.  I can't wait to visit him and see the baby.
• I am thankful that after months of going back and forth between a physical rehabilitation program and the hospital, my grandmother has finally settled into a proper nursing home.  And she seems happy about being in the nursing home, which is a pleasant surprise.
• I am thankful for books (especially my new Kindle), video games, and movies.  OK, that is the lazy, materialistic American side of me.
• I am thankful that I decided not to give up on this blog. 
• I am thankful for Missouri Tigers football.  So this hasn't been our best year for football.   But we've got one more game: our final border showdown with Kansas  before we go to the SEC.  M-I-Z . . .

Photo from The Boston 'Zou

• I am thankful that in a month from now, I will get to spend Christmas with my parents and my childhood friends in Central Missouri.
• I am thankful for my dog, and for all of the progress we have made in improving his behavior this year.  It wasn't that long ago he was barking at every little noise he heard, and trying to bite my hand when I reached over his head.  But my in-laws were gracious enough to pay for us to take him to a behavior specialist (you heard me right).  I love you, you crazy little mutt!
• I am thankful for this . . .

 . . . and this . . .

• I am thankful for my wife!  I love you more than anything in the world!

Figting for the 100% (Not Against the 1%)

Activist Van Jones gives perhaps the best speech on the Occupy Wall Street movement at Occupy Boston since it began several weeks ago. Jones does an excelling job of highlighting the movement's short history, and explains the significance of demonstration and occupation as a tactic (as opposed to tactics like lobbying and writing politicians). The speech is quite inspiring despite the fact that a fire alarm continuously sounds off during the second half of the speech.



I say this is the best speech on the movement, but I am open to other suggestions if you find a better speech. Bill Maher's most recent New Rules is a good one also.

A Video for Sunday: More Occupy Wall Street

One can never go wrong with the great Bill Maher. Here, Maher defends the Occupy Wall Street, and discusses the reality of the movement that so many of it's detractors don't want to admit: Occupy Wall Street is not a bunch of hippies.

There may be a few hippies there, but the reality is that the overwhelming majority of the movement are filled with everyday people who are either hard-working, or who can't work because of our shitty economy. Maher is as witty and poignant as ever in this video.



Remember, we are the 99% (hippies and non-hippies alike)

Early Childhood Education, Poverty, and Occupy Wall Street

Nicholas Kristoff recently wrote a fascinating piece regarding education and the Occupy Wall Street movement.  He seems generally in favor of what the movement stands for: the desire to change economic inequality in this country.  While Kristoff doesn't belittle ideas such as raising taxes on the rich, or throwing bankers in jail, he says those ideas will not be nearly as effective to fixing the crisis of income inequality as expanding early childhood education:

But although part of the problem is billionaires being taxed at lower rates than those with more modest incomes, a bigger source of structural inequality is that many young people never get the skills to compete.  They're just left behind.

I agree with the importance of funding early childhood education (and public education in general) as a means of changing society.  After all, one of the biggest reasons why many teachers choose the career they do is to make a greater difference in society (I would include myself in this category).  I don't know if it is more important that other policy measures such as raising taxes, and passing more baking and business regulations.  But nonetheless, education is highly important.  Here is another excerpt from Kristof's column:

“This is where inequality starts,” said Kathleen McCartney, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as she showed me a chart demonstrating that even before kindergarten there are significant performance gaps between rich and poor students. Those gaps then widen further in school.

 “The reason early education is important is that you build a foundation for school success,” she added. “And success breeds success.”

Kristof goes onto quote Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman, who says something I'm not sure I quite agree with.

“Schooling after the second grade plays only a minor role in creating or reducing gaps,” Heckman argues in an important article this year in American Educator. “It is imperative to change the way we look at education. We should invest in the foundation of school readiness from birth to age 5.”

One's early childhood education can determine a lot about how a student will fair in school.  I would even go so far to say that early childhood education does have a bigger impact on a child's education than upper elementary and secondary education does.   But I am skeptical that schooling from grades 3 and up only play a "minor role". 

Admittedly, I have not read Heckman's article, and I am sure he has good data and points to support his assertion.  But how can 10 additional years in school be considered a minor?  How are we defining what important vs less important?  I am not saying Heckman is wrong, I am just skeptical of his assertion.

Kristof also discusses the importance of the Head Start program.  I know multiple educators who like to criticize Head Start (and rightly so to a point) because of the long term ineffectiveness the program seems to have on a child's education.  While Kristoff admits the program has faults, he also shows that it is far better to have Head Start than nothing at all, showing the need for early childhood education:

Take Head Start, which serves more than 900,000 low-income children a year. There are flaws in Head Start, and researchers have found that while it improved test results, those gains were fleeting. As a result, Head Start seemed to confer no lasting benefits, and it has been widely criticized as a failure.

Not so fast.

One of the Harvard scholars I interviewed, David Deming, compared the outcomes of children who were in Head Start with their siblings who did not participate. Professor Deming found that critics were right that the Head Start advantage in test scores faded quickly. But, in other areas, perhaps more important ones, he found that Head Start had a significant long-term impact: the former Head Start participants are significantly less likely than siblings to repeat grades, to be diagnosed with a learning disability, or to suffer the kind of poor health associated with poverty. Head Start alumni were more likely than their siblings to graduate from high school and attend college.

Finally, Kristoff finished his column by discussing President Obama's need to fulfill his 2008 campaign promise of greater funding for early childhood education. 

President Obama often talked in his campaign about early childhood education, and he probably agrees with everything I’ve said. But the issue has slipped away and off the agenda.

That’s sad because the question isn’t whether we can afford early childhood education, but whether we can afford not to provide it. We can pay for prisons or we can pay, less, for early childhood education to help build a fairer and more equitable nation.

It is surprising that no one other columnists or pundits have brought this up.  Not that the Republicans will let him pass new spending on this, but Obama should at least try.  He also needs to quit supporting asinine measures such as Race To The Top and merit pay which only hurts education.  Like a lot of those on the "education reformer" side of the debate, I believe the President has good intentions when it comes to what education in America should look like.  But the reality of his education policies so far only hurt schools because they do so much to hurt teachers and push standardized testing.  This is not the way to fix American education, and it is damn sure not the way to help combat poverty in the long run.

MLK, Poverty, and Occupy Wall Street

Picture of Martin Luther King at a march for sanitation workers in Memphis.  Photo comes from San Francisco Bay View website.

Today, nearly everyone from every political background admires King.  But if King were alive today, he probably would have been called a "a left-wing nut", a "socialist", and even "anti-American".  And just like the Occupy Wall Street movement today, King was considered both radical and controversial during his time.

Today, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial had it's long-awaited dedication.  It is only by coincidence that the Occupy Wall Street movement is gradually increasing support across the country, and around the world.  There is no doubt that today, MLK would not only support the movement with his words, but would be right there with the protesters risking arrest.

Indeed, right before he was assassinated, King had helped organize the "Poor People's Campaign", which was focused on economic justice in the United States.  43 years later, the Occupy Wall Street movement is protesting economic justice in a similar manner as the protests King was involved in, but under different circumstances.  Just as Americans all love Martin Luther King now, and realize how right he was, will America look back to the supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 40 years, and realize how right they are?  I can only hope so.

Here is a link to a YouTube video from a few months back by the amazing Tavis Smiley. He discusses the vital need for American politicians to tackle the issue of poverty (he quote King at the beginning of the video).  This was made before the Occupy Wall Street movement, but it does allude to the disgusting fact that so much wealth in America (the richest, most powerful nation in the history of the world), is occupied by the richest 1%.  This is one of the main things the Occupy Wall Street protesters are standing up against.

A Video for Sunday: Socialism/Occupy Wall Street Edition

 

Picture from Crain's New York Business

This week, I am providing a double dose of videos.

I recently had the immense pleasure of listening to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle on audio book.  It's a novel about a Lithuanian family that moves to Chicago trying to find the American dream at the beginning of the 20th century.  What they actually find is personal and economic hardships not to be wished upon anyone.  Numerous events of a devastating nature crush the family into the lowest depths of despondency and poverty.  By the end of the novel, the main character, Jurgis Rudkus, realizes that evils of American capitalism and finds grace in supporting the socialist movement.  The novel was Sinclair's attempt for the American people to look at the evils of American economic system, and realize that socialism is the direction the country needed to head in.  Here is a video, originally posted on TeacherTube, that talks about the book a little more in depth, and what the real legacy of the book actually came to be after it was published. 



This book, as well as the the ever-growing Occupy Wall Street protests, provides a good opportunity to re-look at socialism.  For the longest time, the word "socialism" has had a dirty connotation to it in the United States, and even more so from the American right ever since Obama took office.  When people hear the term, they equate it with communism.  Images of the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Che Guevera come to many American's minds.  But the reality is that most developed countries around the world, including the United States, have socialism in their economic system to a certain point.  Except unlike other countries in the world, socialism is generally not the evil, dirty word that it is in the United States.  And truth be told, many of us who do call ourselves socialists wouldn't advocate government takeover of all industries and private property (like some claim).  Most socialists (including myself) would probably prefer a type of mixed economic system: a capitalist/socialist hybrid where great emphasis is placed on economic equality, worker's right, and protections in case something bad happens to one of it's citizens (e.g. health care, unemployment benefits, etc.)  Here is a clip from a while ago by MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell on the the use of the word "socialist" to describe himself.



It should be noted that not all those who support the Occupy Wall Street movement are socialists.  What those of us who do support these demonstrations agree upon is that damage that the banks and corporations have done to our economy, and that something needs to be done about the way they do business.  It is a grave injustice that in this economy, corporations are receiving record profits, CEOs and other corporate executives are receiving bonuses, and more corporate cash than ever is being filtered into our political system (among so many other things).  All the while, no new jobs are being added to our economy, and millions of American's are suffering economic hardship, and are worried that they will never be financially secure again.  I won't say we have it as rough as Jurgis and his family did in the early 20th Century, but it is still quite bad, and we deserve better.

Photo from rrstar.com

There are those (myself included) who support the movement, but have expressed criticism to protesters on a couple of different points.  First, the protest needs to broaden it's marchers so that it will be more than just "hippie-types".  While it is perhaps unfair to classify all of those involved with such a stereotype (and we should be grateful to those "hippie-types" for getting the protest off the ground), this is a movement that has grown into something big.  If we really are the "99ers", and we really want to make a significant change in our system, our movement must go mainstream, and try to bring in more than those from the activist left.  We need to bring in average citizens who may normally not be involved with political issues  These can be liberals, socialists, fed up capitalists, moderates, maybe even some conservatives.  We need to grow and unify.

A second criticism is that, while those who are protesting are clearly angry at the actions of Wall Street, they must also be able to come up with some specific, concrete ideas for policy change.  Hopefully, this movement is young, and when it comes to the potential to create change, the sky is the limit.  However, Eric Stetson at Daily Kos has some good ideas for short term changes:

1. A bailout for homeowners who are facing foreclosure and unemployed people with student loan debt -- of equal or greater value as the bank bailouts. Give these people a fresh start by forgiving their debts and keeping them in their homes, and thus improving the economy for all.
2. The "Buffett Tax" (i.e. taxing capital gains at the same rate as income earned from a job, so that working people won't pay higher taxes than the idle rich). It's only fair! And this will help to fund #1.
3. A short-term trading transaction tax for people and financial institutions who use Wall Street as a casino. Such a tax could raise huge amounts of money to fund #1, and would likely reduce the volatility in the markets by making computerized "high frequency auto-trading" by large investment companies less profitable. Such a tax would also make it harder for already-wealthy institutions to "vacuum up" more and more money from the productive sectors of the economy into the black hole of their own coffers.