Continue At Your Own Peril
We've recently been advised to temporarily suspend our blogging activity and to continue or not as we see fit and prudent. Given that my blog has more or less become a forum for the photos I've been uploading and its other news and thoughts are much sterilized compared to previous postings, I see no reason not to continue. If anyone were to dredge up the whinier, negative, steam-blowing sort of early posts, they would have done so by now.
I'm not entirely sure that not speaking out against the status quo is beneficial. I understand that the reputation of the program and the ability to work within the system is all-important, especially to outsiders, but I think that that's part of the problem. Nobody knows how bad it really is, and Dr. Mullins himself told us the first summer that ungodly billions have been poured into the Delta alone with minimal effect. And this is one of Kozol's main arguments amid an otherwise overly sentimental book - the status quo does not work, and we largely ignore it (e.g. the Dan Ryan highway that bypasses the South Side of Chicago). Programs like Teach for America, ACE, and Teacher Corps are wonderful immediate and local patchwork solutions, but their existence enables the problems to persist. After all, if millions of bright young Americans are partaking in these programs, we're doing our part, right? Our part works on the microscopic scale just enough to let those with macroscopic powers not need to address system-wide reform. (Of course, W. has made this attempt, and I don't possess enough energy nor the eloquence to even begin to describe how callous and invidious his laughing stock of a reform is. Of course, we might be talking about this instead of Iraq if he didn't bungle that one even worse. Good intentions do not produce positive results, and in fact the opposite is clearly the case here; one might argue for the need to steer our ships to sail beyond good and evil, but I digress.)
A humble suggestion/compromise: allow (require?) future Teacher Corps participants to maintain two blogs, one with heavy privacy settings only viewable by others involved with the Teacher Corps since venting is almost a necessary outlet of life down Missippi way, and the other for more positive p.r. sort of purposes available to the public. Perhaps that's dishonest in some way, but as Ben used to say, these blogs were an accidental but phenomenal success, and they wouldn't be without both the good and the bad.
In more mundane news, my Quiz Bowl team recently won their second round of the MS College competition. We now play in the Sweet Sixteen against East Rankin, the team that beat us in the Madison tournament for the championship. My team is optimistic and eager for revenge, motivated in part by the fact that East Rankin suspiciously received not one but two official first and second round byes in this current tournament and we are clearly the number one or two team in the field along with them but don't enjoy the same preexisting reputation. Anyway, photos from the last round can be found here:
http://nd.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2055889&l=3b1f9&id=5601686
I'm not entirely sure that not speaking out against the status quo is beneficial. I understand that the reputation of the program and the ability to work within the system is all-important, especially to outsiders, but I think that that's part of the problem. Nobody knows how bad it really is, and Dr. Mullins himself told us the first summer that ungodly billions have been poured into the Delta alone with minimal effect. And this is one of Kozol's main arguments amid an otherwise overly sentimental book - the status quo does not work, and we largely ignore it (e.g. the Dan Ryan highway that bypasses the South Side of Chicago). Programs like Teach for America, ACE, and Teacher Corps are wonderful immediate and local patchwork solutions, but their existence enables the problems to persist. After all, if millions of bright young Americans are partaking in these programs, we're doing our part, right? Our part works on the microscopic scale just enough to let those with macroscopic powers not need to address system-wide reform. (Of course, W. has made this attempt, and I don't possess enough energy nor the eloquence to even begin to describe how callous and invidious his laughing stock of a reform is. Of course, we might be talking about this instead of Iraq if he didn't bungle that one even worse. Good intentions do not produce positive results, and in fact the opposite is clearly the case here; one might argue for the need to steer our ships to sail beyond good and evil, but I digress.)
A humble suggestion/compromise: allow (require?) future Teacher Corps participants to maintain two blogs, one with heavy privacy settings only viewable by others involved with the Teacher Corps since venting is almost a necessary outlet of life down Missippi way, and the other for more positive p.r. sort of purposes available to the public. Perhaps that's dishonest in some way, but as Ben used to say, these blogs were an accidental but phenomenal success, and they wouldn't be without both the good and the bad.
In more mundane news, my Quiz Bowl team recently won their second round of the MS College competition. We now play in the Sweet Sixteen against East Rankin, the team that beat us in the Madison tournament for the championship. My team is optimistic and eager for revenge, motivated in part by the fact that East Rankin suspiciously received not one but two official first and second round byes in this current tournament and we are clearly the number one or two team in the field along with them but don't enjoy the same preexisting reputation. Anyway, photos from the last round can be found here:
http://nd.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2055889&l=3b1f9&id=5601686
posted by David Jones | 23:59
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