9/11 - 6 years later.

6 year strut.
trying to make sense of what i saw and breathed, 6 years later.
(a work in progress, your comments and dialogue are much appreciated)

This will be the 6 year anniversary of September 11; it's on a Tuesday morning again and the weather in Detroit looks like it will mirror that bright and cloudless day. The only clouds we saw were the plumes of smoke encasing the city like the largest crime scene I've ever lived in. This year, I will spend it at school, but thinking deeply about what it all means now (as I do not only on the anniversaries, but frequently throughout my days), and not getting into the hype about record sales. Why do we always divert our attention from what's really important to the superficial media-fed story-of-right-now that no one will remember in a few years? I know that albums always drop on Tuesdays, but have some respect.

Here's some numbers I want to throw your way. 6 years later, 4 and 1/2 years of war against a shape-shifting enemy, nearly 3,000 civilians killed in New York, 3,761 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq (which was not the original location for our retaliation, but a secondary locale), 3,300 of which have been since the capture of Saddam Hussein. 78,065 Iraqi people have died and while there is some military effort to stop the killing of civilians there, we still cannot own up to calling them people. We call them casualities, unfortunate “inevitabilities” of our glorious attempt to “liberate” the people of Iraq from an awful regime. Because when our royal texas son of a leader is trying to redefine imperialism and domination through ballistic warfare, when there are two sides to a binary story and folks are misinformed by the media but convinced of our patriotic rightness and “their” dark and terrible wrongness, we continue to support this war through our own inaction.

While watching ‘Sicko’ a few months ago, my friends and I mourned the ability (or desire) for large-scale protests in America. Yes, there are tens of thousands of college-aged and left-wing radicals who do participate, who are going to marches in D.C. who were at the anti-WTO rallies in Seattle, who daily use direct action to make a difference and make people think. I am not trying to undermine the important work they do, but in a country of 300 million people, the proportion of active participants in public demonstrations are extremely small. Why don’t we? Do we feel so powerless that we have become wholly futilistic? Do we think that there are other ways to act and that large protests are meaningless? Do we just not care about anything outside of the health and well-being of our nuclear families?

6 years ago today, we were chalking the streets of the West Village with “do your own research on the wtc”, and “an eye for an eye makes us both blind”. We were marching against war in the streets for months, we were conducting teach-in’s about the history and beliefs of Islam in attempt to educate and reduce ignorant hate crimes in the city. There was an urgency to each move we made, and years later, I find myself disappointed in my own inability to stay active. Where has my own zeal gone? Do you realize the intense luxury in being able to be disconnected from the political sphere that implicitly affects your daily life? The technology of war has grown so that because we are not there, we are not inundated with its daily affects (with the exception of gas costs, economic depression, and general disgust with the U.S. when you travel abroad). This makes it all the easier for us to move about our lives concerned with our own needs and desires, and not with the well-being of others across the world, whose lives perish at our hands. There is blood on all of our hands.

See, here’s the thing I’ve always believed. Each human is connected through the commonalities of our struggles and hopes. We need basic things to survive, we strive to learn, grow and understand – even if only for communication’s sake and not for scholarly endeavors. We breathe, we have hearts that pump blood through us, we believe in family and the preservation of culture. We have evolved out of an oral tradition. We have always been able to heal ourselves and are resilient and tenacious creatures. What I’m so desperately trying to understand is a more broad question: how can we value ourselves over other people in the world? When a life stops, there is great loss, regardless of the dollars or debt that the person leaves behind. Regardless of national origin, ethnicity, religion or political affiliation. Who dares to stay that one life is more important than another? Our department of state, our military and president. Despite the legacy of this being a country founded on freedom, it was never meant to be freedom for all – ultimately, that’s much too dangerous.

When I think of September 11, I have the experience of being there, of watching those boy twins burst into smoke and exhale their exhaustion all over us. It was a metaphor that my favorite hip-hop group, the Coup, had put on the cover of their album, “Party Music”, which was released the week before Sept 11th– alluding to the destruction of capitalism as a necessary catalyst to achieving equality this country. It was a grand collapse over a stunned city of survivors, and it was the first time that I went to sleep with tanks on the streets not knowing what the world would look like tomorrow outside my window. If I would be so fortunate to wake.

When I did wake, I found it incredibly devastating to see the missing posters, which were pasted on every available wall, scaffold, bulletin board and window at eye level. There was a vigil on Union Square, right across the street from my house, for two weeks solid, though many of us met there for months afterward to strategize. There, I experienced something so incongruous to many tales of visiting New York – human connection with strangers. We exchanged our stories, let each other know about upcoming events, protests, and volunteer opportunities, distributed fliers, wrote down messages to the lost, deceased and their families. We used the space as a center for trying to understand and make sense of this, tried to put everything into a historical perspective instead of joining the reactionary war-mongers, who seethed with their desire to initiate revenge upon whosoever was responsible, regardless of why it happened. Forging a community in the midst of loss, we worked to honor the loss and understand the causes – explicit and implicit. While Guiliani credits himself on creating this community for New Yorkers, he did not once visit Union Square to speak to us.

I don’t think of this experience as unique, in fact I file it with those of people all over the world who have witnessed massive tragedy or scales of violence. It is of particular interest to me that large-scale destruction and death, in its spectacular glory of explosion, seems to outrank slow-but-steady genocide. Hiroshima (70,000 dead), Nagasaki (40,000 dead) often eclipse the Holocaust (almost 6 million dead) in discussions of WWII, because of the awesome visual spectacle and introduction of nuclear force, as well as the element of immense shame involved in such mass genocide, in retrospect. There are people who still believe that the Holocaust never happened, because it is easier than admitting that their fathers and grandfathers participated. I also tend to align events of this magnitude with natural disasters – such as hurricane Katrina (which killed 1,900 people and displaced tens of thousands), and the tsunami in Indonesia (killed 186,983 people) – but as it is with natural disaster, there is no enemy to blame except for an angry earth who is watching how we destroy her.

Despite many conservative attempts to disprove conspiracy theory and a mainstream media gag-order on divergent points of view, I will always believe in the conspiracy theory that Sept. 11th was allowed to happen by the U.S. government because our president had planned to finish a war that his father could not finish; but needed public support in order to justify it. This is to say, I believe that intelligence knew and chose inaction, that the president wagered a few thousand lives being worth the advantages of access-by-force into the middle east. I don’t see a blatant disregard for human life being so out of the question with the current administration, and in fact, find it utterly crucial to think about who passed away as important to how American grief was collected into war support. What if the planes had struck the low-income housing projects that line the East River, housing almost 10,000 people? Would we, as a nation, have reacted the same way? Would we have jumped up to support a war on terrorism in their names, too? As evidenced by government reaction (or lack thereof) to hurricane Katrina, I feel confident in saying that the outcome would have been different if it was not middle-class white business people who were mostly affected by the World Trade Center, Pentagon and flight 93 hijackings.

Being in New York at the time, I have heard countless stories of people who were called and warned the week before, were told not to fly, not to be in the area by their government-employed friends and relatives who were breeching confidentiality in order to warn their loved ones. I have heard and seen evidence on both sides with regard to the attack on the pentagon (see this video: http://www.pentagonstrike.co.uk/flash.htm and also this article from time magazine: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1531304-3,00.html ). Conservative theorists look to debunk the conspiracy theory based on “expert” opinion, usually provided by someone who is in some way connected to the FBI, CIA or current administration. The left often does not have enough information to support its claims, in part due to immediate confiscations of surveillance tapes and other evidence by the FBI, who were there within minutes to collect evidence from non-government owned local businesses for their investigation. While I think it’s important to understand and to have the American people know what really happened on that morning, I find these debates to be ego-bashing and -tripping more often than they are genuinely useful toward logical, fact-based assessment of the events.

I don’t even know how to move forward and conclude these thoughts. Rereading some of the things I wrote six years ago (http://www.meniscuszine.com/issue13/letter1.html), I realize that I’ve made a very conscious disconnect from a lot of the war coverage, in attempt to distinguish war-mongering from reality. I feel like I don’t know as much as I should right now and am quite tentatively going to publish this. But after years of processing, talking, dialoguing, commenting, re-illustrating, telling my story and listening as much as possible to the stories of others, I still believe that education for social justice is at the crux of trying to envision a world that rises above this madness and looks to value the lives of all people, not just those in power. Critically educating people to understand themselves as citizens who can have power and DO have power, in the face of a media that seeks to keep us pacified and unquestioning, is a liberatory and difficult stance to occupy.

What I know is that the depth and breadth of the patriot act, as well as the subsequent loss of our civil liberties are incredibly alarming. The argument that you must give up certain freedoms in order to eventually be free is akin to the logic that we are at war in order to preserve peace. The fact that we are setting up democracies in other countries, modeled after our own corrupt and fraught system is ludicrous. I have always highlighted the importance in continuing to do your own research about the history of the U.S.’ involvement in the middle east, and how it affects our political and economic interests there today. I urge you to begin making connections between your own life and some of these issues (war, terrorism, national security, diplomacy, imperialism, racism, religion, oil) as they do affect each of us.

There are many ways to get involved and better understand our post-s11 politics and the detrimental affect on our society as well as global culture and politics. I do not wish to be prescriptive, but rather ask you to locate an organization that interests you. I ask you to think of the importance of participating in your democracy, which is corrupt, but can still function if we believe in our own power and start using it. Vote in local elections, as well as presidential ones. And always, keep talking to one another, challenging, thinking and questioning. Critical inquiry is at the basis of change. And at the end of the day, I have to remember that change is very slow, but I believe that education is at the root of change, and this is where I will be working.

In solidarity,
Lauren Fardig

first day madness

disclaimer: tech related in part, but i'm also in need to process the first day of school. jeff and liz, this is a cross-posting. i don't have my field journal with me, so these reactions and observations are off the dome. drawing off of the "participant observation" article, i realize that the most difficult part of my ethnographic observations of my classroom will be to be mindful of the language i use when writing down field notes. i am a practiced ethnographer and have often noted differences in language due to my background in English, but it will be crucial to keep good verbatim records of what is said, instead of summarizing.

tou fue and i arrived 45 minutes early on the first day, as i know the tendency for things to go wrong, especially in a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants district of Detroit, and we wanted to feel fully prepared for the day. both of us were wearing an earhart dark blue polo shirt and khaki's, it made me feel like we were part of the team. kitze and i received some of our class rosters last week, but found quickly that they were quite wrong, as half of the students in our homeroom were not in the right place. miss kitze appeared flustered as she was trying to figure out where the students were who were supposed to be here. we kept hearing announcements over the loudspeaker as to the locations of stray students and new students located in the cafeteria.

to assist in bringing order to the situation, i found myself trying to take over the administrative duties of filling out the scan sheets, taking attendance records down to the attendance office (met mr. sanchez and the whole staff there, too) as well as passing out pencils and forms to students, who diligently filled out the 6 different forms that the district requires of them for attendance and scheduling/counseling. miss kitze sent students out originally to try and locate students that should've been there, and asked about the whereabouts of each student she named. when she came across a familiar name or face, she always asked if they had a brother or sister, or if she had substitute taught them -- and in many cases, remembered the exact play, story or science lesson she was teaching when she met them.

i located myself at her desk, in the front corner of the classroom, and introduced myself to the homeroom as the student teacher for the whole year, that I was from U of M and that i would be here tuesdays and thursdays. given the chaos of the day, i decided that i would take a more observational stance but try to be helpful to ms. kitze as much as i could. the first question they asked me was whether or not i had a myspace account. i learned that the school system has a social networking site called "gaggle" and that there's also a computer program that many of them used last year called "accelerated reader" that i want to learn more about. i also heard the word "ATLAS" thrown around a lot, which is a district-wide professional development seminar/program that they're involved in, and must do more research on that.

the homeroom time that we spent together was spent on going over lunchroom procedures, locker procedures, reminding them about dress code -- i did not participate in most of this section, but noticed that our homeroom is quite talkative and seem to know each other quite well. i noticed that some students were not in dress code, but they have the first few weeks of school to "get into" dress code and can be provided with proper attire by a special program at the school if they cannot afford it. miss kitze told me between class changes that 100% of the students are below the poverty level in this school.

i took particular notice of locker assignments, which was one of the things that we did during lunch, before the students were called down to the lunchroom. the majority of homeroom divided themselves up into pairs for splitting up lockers, but i noticed that there were 5 students - serge, griselda and i have yet to learn the other 3's name - who didn't have partners and had to go out into the hall with kitze to be paired up. i noticed the way that serge looked at the floor the whole time. these students also were all seated at the back of the class and didn't seem to be interacting with the rest of the homeroom class with the vigor of the majority. kitze and i discussed this after class).

we then went to ms. brakefield's room down the hall for the ATLAS portion of the day -- which were activities designed to build school pride and community within the houses -- for instance, we're in house A and the teachers thought that it would be good to have the opening activity acquaint the students with the teachers in house A (even though we will not be teaching them), as well as giving us an idea of who the students are in house A, so that we can begin to get to know them. since each teacher MUST stand in the hallway right outside of their door between passing periods, the teachers want to know which students are supposed to be in the house and who isn't.

this is to be continued later... i must go to class, but here are some highlights -- after watching ms. kitze and ms. brakefield teach two sections of the activity about amelia earhart's life, i taught the final two... assessing KWL (prior Knowledge, Wonder/Want to know and Learned through the activity) before reading a page on her life and accomplishments. we asked the students to pull out two facts about her life and were interesting to them and also to define a few vocabulary words. each subject area (science, math, social studies) had their own related activity -- for instance, the math classes took at a look at angles of flight patterns and the science classes looked at directionality variables with paper planes).

there is much more to say about getting to know the students during lunch, and what happened after lunch when our real classes came for short sessions with us. class personalities and the differences between them are no joke!

anyhoo... this is just the beginning, it was a hectic day, but i loved every moment of the chaos, and ms. kitze responded by just laughing about it "what else can i do?" she asked. i need to break out the old ethnographical lens again. and learn that it's okay to be long-winded, i'll have a lot of "evidence" to sift through. ooh, and i want to talk about generational differences in technological know-how as i feel that i may become the tech expert of the classroom (there is a technology coordinator as well as a computer teacher -- the computer teacher is a mac specialist, mr. dominguez, and the tech specialist is ms. yglesias, i need to talk to her about the existence of a digital projector for my laptop, note to self).

xoxo
lo

from the beginning til the end of it.

jurassic 5 on my mind, quality control has been the soundtrack to the season. i met with mary (my mentor teacher) at her home in novi yesterday. we've planned out our first essay and in an effort to get to know the students, i'm going to be videotaping a performance of their "all about me" intro essays... we were both bringing up ideas for projects and she's letting me take over the poetry unit in february, as well as the persuasive essay unit. she made it clear that because of detroit funding issues, the first two months of school really are all about the MEAPs, and she found my interest in diving in and collaborating with her on curriculum to be cool.

with a new superintendent in the schools, she broke it down to me quickly: "i don't tend to plan until i get there, because they change it up on us every year, i don't know what the expectations are, and we have to run by the pacing charts, so... we fly by the seat of our pants." she's really excited to explore the kinds of projects and group work we can accomplish with two of us and it already feels like we're on a team. every sentence seemed to end with "we're on the same page" as a conjunction. and though i know already that our styles are different, (when i told her that i was doing the videotaping records of practice thing, she said "oh my god! i better plan exciting lessons, ha!") i can already tell that she's the type of teacher that her students remember for years.

we went over MAC's guidelines and expectations and talked about some of our own objectives, as well as some of the nitty gritty (weekly lesson plans are due on mondays, she will be printing a copy for me for records of practice. we talked about me saving a copy of worksheets/student work, and about their do-it-now (bellwork) journals. thursdays we're going to have a weekly meeting, her prep period is last period, so many details so little time.) over and over again i hear "get to know the secretaries, the janitors, the lunch ladies, the security staff. we talked about dress code for students and teachers, the heat index in her classroom, obtaining a digital overhead for my laptop so we can do powerpoint, i feel like it's alllll taking shape. 2 professional development days and 2 days to set up/clean/organize the classroom next week. i am so incredibly excited, i just can't hide it.

and now back to organizing the effective teaching handbook.
xo
lo

break.

has been quiet. being the dork that i am, i made a list of objectives. i have watched much golf and csi with my dad. been to shows, dog parks (to meet my mentor teacher!), punk week, chilled with my cousins, gone mini golfing, dancing, karaoke-ing, had a lot of fun. still reading books, still listening to common, not quite ready to go back to the world yet. but i've been keeping busy. i want to volunteer as a mentor at the peace center, i want to make the effort to not have my best friends become acquaintances this year. i saw sparks. but what i've learned is that you all are becoming my good friends, too.

i awake to find no peace of mind. said how do you live as a fugitive? (there has been a coldplay influence, too)

how are myspace/facebook infringing on our own civil liberties?

now, this is not surprising, but it's still hella creepy (excuse my lack of intellectual language, the substantive conversation paper has been leeching my brain). i just wrote an email earlier today in which i had asked an educator friend of mine how he felt about having his students on his myspace page -- as i have to think about how to edit mine before heading into schools. they will find me (as will potential employers and many other folks unbeknownst to me) i think i've already talked about this once in my blog, but it represents my burning desire to be fully ME whereever i am, and realizing how i need to tone certain parts of myself down for my students. for instance, especially this year working in a middle school, i really don't need them stumbling onto my page and finding out that i'm not straight. the question of coming out to students is kind of another ball game...

the question i wanted to ask was -- why, as someone who considers myself to be an informed cultural critic and very much a conspiracy theorist, am i participating in this so completely? i admit that part of my myspace obsession is about vanity, but part of it is also about staying connected with friends from all over the world, being able to be updated on their lives by seeing their pages as "records of life", i'll also admit that i like to use myspace as ethnography -- but as liz pointed out in a comment on an earlier blog, the internet has been archived for the past 10 years or so... how can i be supplying so much information about myself and my beliefs? i know i've been on CIA/FBI lists for years because of my activist work, but didn't realize how my blogs might also put me there. add this entry to the list.

so, just advising you (and checking myself) to think about what you put up online. especially on sites that are "personal networking sites", as one of the ulterior motives of these are really marketing ploys (come on, myspace is owned by rupert murdock, it's not a better alternative to facebook, just a different flavor of evil) to gather massive amounts of information and identify trends in pop culture to increase consumption. what are the dangers of our ignorant participation? and how can we best use these tools for their benefits without putting ourselves at risk? i will continue thinking about this.

effective teaching, the beginning of a concept map

i miss new york. my old neighborhood, ---> where it's about to be august and the heat is oppressive, but everyone is out in the streets. reggaeton blasting from every car, there is a vibrancy in every molecule of air in brooklyn during the summer. the city itself has such a strong august personality and will be much on my mind.

i have made a commitment to myself to read a lot over our break (a partial reading list to follow shortly), and while the pure volume of theory that we've been reading over the past six weeks does not seem conducive to reading for pleasure, i am also committing to reading one non-school book (or other form of text) per week during the fall -- as i'm thinking about going back into the classroom, i'm concerned that i haven't been reading enough content texts. i've been reading a lot about literacy and multiple literacies, but not challenging myself as a reader (well, except for speed-reading, which is quite challenging as a technique... but so satisfying!) to delve into new fiction, new poetry, and creative non-fiction, too.

i also had an epiphany today, after the dork squad drove me to my mom's office. i have learned so much in the past few days from our presentations on effective teaching. i want to make a handbook of effective teaching, using all of the records of practice from 695 and our lessons, so that we have something to go back to that is tactile and physical as we head into schools this fall.(or maybe an online resource? thoughts?) i have learned so much already from each of you in this program, and find myself blown away by how different each of our lessons have been, but how much i've taken away from each one.

oh... and while it's not quite done yet (i'm still waiting on some feedback -- there is another revision or two), i wanted to post the poem that i read at my friend's wedding last friday. thank you so much for all of your constructive criticism, it is much appreciated. in the wake of losing sekou and some disconnection with other poetic partners in crime, i realize that there is a large void in who i turn to for feedback. i need to start building that community again -- and given my hectic fall schedule, i get the feeling that this blog may start to take that shape, too. talk about a multi-tasker!

the diva and the poet
(for erin and tony - 7/27/07)

let me tell you something.

when we are in your living room
and talk, surrounded by coffee,
elephants and drawing
the circle bigger, you are two
that bellow large love in
its real form, from home.

you are exactly what i have
in mind when i envision how it could be
to locate my soul alive
in someone else's body.
the way your faces ignite
at the smallest exchange
of touch.

i adore what you
hold open to each other.
there is evidence in
the everyday of
your gentle care and loud passion.

for years, i have watched this grow.
for years, i have admired the
calibrated movement
between your hearts.

i would wish you luck, but
can say with certainty
that your love is how
strength is defined.

(love you big).