O! say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming.
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming.
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

(As sung by citizens of France, courtesy of the amazing and beautiful collection of anthems, created as part of Pangea Day.)

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…this study serves as a good reminder that “home schooling” doesn’t have to mean a mother teaching her own children in the kitchen as an alternative to formal schooling. For centuries the home has been used by private tutors, circuit-riding teachers, clergy, and, as this study reminds us, extension agents and social workers, to offer education to family members, both children and adults. Today’s homes are if anything even more important in the educational ecosystem of most Americans….the home is the location of so many of the commonplace educational practices in which so many engage — adults taking correspondence or online courses, living room reading circles, “cell groups,” a good documentary or quiz show on television–one could multiply examples. When thought of like this we’re all home schoolers in one way or another.

 — Messiah College professor Milton Gaither, author of Homeschool: An American History, reviewing a study of the effectiveness of the Building Strong Families parent education program.

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Over time, I learned that we could study any number of topics without weariness if we did two essential things:

1. Eliminate busywork
2. Live a learning lifestyle

Find out what that means at Janice Campbell: The Overstuffed School Schedule vs. The Learning Lifestyle. While you’re there, take time to follow the link to The Core Curriculum Teaches Connections:

I first discovered the web of great ideas through books I read on my own, rather than through the dessicated textbooks and neatly segregated subjects I encountered in school, and I suspect that it’s the same for many of you.

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President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect on January 1st, 1863, but it took two and a half years, until June 19th, 1865, for that proclamation to be announced publicly and enforced in Galveston, Texas by General Gordon Grainger and his 2,000 Union troops. Ever since then, “Juneteenth” has been a day to celebrate this proclamation of freedom to the captives. It has been an official state holiday in Texas since 1980, and as of this year is officially recognized in 28 other states. It is also a day to reflect on the two and a half year delay, and on the patience, persistence, and force needed to establish justice in our society.

Also celebrated in June is Loving Day, which I only know about by the grace of the amazing street photographer Michael David Murphy of While Seated. The U.S. Supreme Court case of Loving vs. Virginia finally established the legality of interracial marriage in the United States (which was then illegal in Virginia and 16 other states), as of June 12th, 1967. Yes, you read that right: 1967.

More suggested reading, for adults and kids:

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Father’s day always conjures up certain images, the emblems & equipment of the men being celebrated this day; but I wonder how much those images really reveal. The golf Dad, the grill Dad, the gadget Dad, the necktie Dad — it all seems kind of thin. Don’t get me wrong, here; I’d like a steak on the grill with an Oregon Scientific AW131 Grill Right Wireless Talking BBQ/Oven Thermometer and a good beer as much as the next guy. But really is that all there is? Don’t we guys get to be as deep and complicated as the women are supposed to be?

I know, there are other masculine images to choose from: warriors, hunters, builders, rulers — even wizards and lovers. And one would hope that mature masculinity would involve courage, strength, competence, wisdom, and passion. But it seems to me that something crucial is missing from all these portraits of powerful manhood, left ignored or unacknowledged off in the shadows of all those heroic stories we tell. Fathers are parents as well; we deal with those who are (as we once were) tender, and weak, and unprepared. Our strength is employed to their good and enjoyed in their company. That is the true heart of a father. It is a context of relationship changes everything.

All of this comes to the surface in the story of Aeneas, the tale “of arms & a man,” the prince of Troy who escaped that city’s fall with his family, and went on to become the ancestor of Roman kings. The Chronicle Review has a wonderful description of the rich human understanding that has gone into a new translation of Virgil’s Aeneid by Sarah Ruden. Early in her academic career, Ruden lived in Cape Town, South Africa, and saw the ending years of apartheid first hand.

“How imperial conflict works itself out isn’t an academic matter for me,” she explains. “The Aeneid isn’t a stiff antiquarian pageant. It’s immediate and primal…I don’t believe I put the slightest strain on the Latin in trying to echo Virgil’s defensiveness and helpless grief, but first I had to understand it, and Africa gave me that gift.”

Richard Thomas, who taught Ruden at Harvard, puts it this way: “Epic poetry is the title we give it, but look onto any page and you’re looking at human voices, male and female, you’re looking at the human condition, you’re looking at worlds gone wrong, you’re looking at power and victory and defeat.”
 — The Chronicle Review for May 16, 2008, “Measuring the ‘Aeneid’ on a Human Scale”

And you’re looking at families with children. Here is Ruden’s rendering of Aeneas’ thoughts as he flees from the burning city of Troy, leading his wife and young son while carrying his father Anchises on his back:

…dextrae se parvus Iulus
implicuit sequiturque patrem non passibus aequis;
pone subit coniunx. ferimur per opaca locorum,
et me, quem dudum non ulla iniecta movebant
tela neque adverso glomerati ex agmine Grai,
nunc omnes terrent aurae, sonus excitat omnis
suspensum et pariter comitique onerique timentem.

— from an edition of Virgil’s epic poem (1st Century B.C.) by J.B. Greenough, via the Perseus online archive

My little Iulus’ fingers
Were twined in mine; he trotted by my long steps.
Behind me came my wife. We went our dark way.
Before I hadn’t minded the Greeks’ spears
Hurled at me, or the Greeks in crowds, attacking.
Now every gust and rustle panicked me
Because of whom I led and whom I carried.

—from The Aeneid translated by by Sarah Ruden (2008)

So to all the fathers out there: a thank-you from those of us you have led and carried. We see your hearts, and we are following your stories.

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From Giovanni Schiaparelli’s descriptions of canali the “channels” which became Percival Lowell’s “canals” on Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Princess of Mars, H.G. Welles’ War of the Worlds, and Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, to Loewen & Yesh’s young adult non-fiction Seeing Red: The Planet Mars and today’s serious considerations of colonizing the red planet, human interactions with the Red Planet have been a blend of wonder, science, imagination, fear, longing & engineering.

In honor of this interplay, The Planetary Society has placed a DVD among the scientific instruments on board the Phoenix Lander that touched down on the Martian south pole this last memorial day. Titled Visions of Mars: A Message to the Future, and made of silica glass that is intended to last a thousand years, “the Phoenix DVD carries personal messages from visionaries of our own time to future visitors or settlers on Mars.”

And it carries books. Eighty-four of them. Plus other artwork, radio broadcasts, and more. We watched the landing live on NASA TV with a friend and our kids, including one-year-old Gwenna. Good to know that when she gets there, she’ll have something to read.

Meanwhile, we’ll be keeping up on the news from Mars via the Planetary Society’s Mars page and the official-but-very-cool Phoenix Mars Mission page from the University of Arizona. And by reading some of those books right here at home…

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I’ve been using the open-source Firefox web browser since 2003, when a techie friend (thanks, Rocky!) emailed our church list to suggest it as a less virus-vulnerable alternative to the standard Microsoft mess.

That makes me an internet expert  — and since I know everything there is to know, I thought I’d write you this handy guide:

Web Surfing 101:

1. Sign up for Download Day, 2008.
2. Receive email when Firefox 3 is officially released sometime this June.
3. Download your new web browser, automatically transferring all your settings and bookmarks from your old browser.
4. Help a bunch of volunteers working for love on a project started by a teenagerwho wanted to help out his mom take market-share away from a monopoly-loving corporate behemoth.
5. (While you’re at it, set a Guinness world record.)
6. Customize your Firefox browser with Add-On’s (also made for love by the Firefox community)
• Adblock Plus with automatically updating ad filters (Easylist + ABP Tracking Filter)
• Foxmarks
• Book Burro
• Morning Coffee
• Sage Too or NewsFox for RSS Feeds
• Colorful Tabs
• Glubble Family Edition (to keep the kiddies coralled on the Net)
• Duplicate Tab
• Stumble Upon
• Forecastfox
• Tiny Menu
• PicLens
• …or whatever else takes your fancy!

If you don’t find yourself inclined toward the Firefox religion, there are other ways to browse happy. (It’s even rumored that Internet Explorer 8 actually works. But I don’t think it blocks the schmutz.)

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Circle M Farm’s Second Annual

Lambs and Lettuces Festival

June 7, 2008
1784 County Rd. H, Blanchardville, WI

• Noon to 1 Snakes Alive!
• 1 to 2 pm Horse Grooming and Rides for Little Ones
• 2 pm on…Spinning Wheel Demonstration
• 2 to 5 pm Knitting Circle with Expert Help
• 3 pm Shearing Demonstration
• 3:30 to 5:30 pm Wooly Fun with Dye, Felt and Spindles
• 5:00 pm Milking Goats and Bottle-Feeding Babies
• 6:30 pm Coffee Roasting over the Fire
• 7 pm Pot Luck Community Dinner
• 8 pm Old Time Jamboree Sing-A-Long

Maybe we’ll see you there!

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So I’m walking across the living room with an open book, and my 11-year-old son asks me what I’m doing. I tell him I’m writing a blog post, and show him the picture of Elizabeth Eckford in 1957, walking to school amidst an angry crowd following the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and as I’m trying to explain this history to a homeschooled white kid living in a (somewhat) racially mixed neighborhood and attending a (somewhat) racially mixed church, and talking about prejudice and laws and the problems of division of resources and the Court’s ruling that “separate but equal is inherently unequal,” his twin brother rushes in from the kitchen and says, “Hey, are you dishing out BOF without me!?”

BOF stands for Brain On Fire, and it is our family’s term for the state of passionate engagement with complex ideas. BOF happens when you try to communicate important, real world information to novice learners without oversimplifying its relationship to everything else, i.e. without dumbing it down intellectually or ideologically.

BOF happens when my kids ask complicated questions before bedtime so Dad will delay sending them to bed, or when a child can’t sleep because he is wondering how the spider DNA could combine with Peter Parker’s, or when a child’s passion for baseball inspires his mother to visit a museum exhibit that ignites in her a passion for the game. It’s part of the culture at our house, and one of the reasons we homeschool. It is the raw material of our learning, which we shape into unit studies, reading lists, and field trips. BOF powers our children’s education and our own continuing education. (As a family, we will probably be spending some time surfing the Civil Rights Digital Library year by year. As parents, and as friends of adoptive and non-adoptive inter-racial families, we will be keeping up with the Anti-Racist Parent blog. And maybe we’ll even read Blood Done Sign My Name out loud with the kids.)

BOF is not just for homeschoolers, of course; it can be nurtured between parents and children wherever they are willing to help one another learn. Kirsten Keller (over at This Mommy Gig) nurtures BOF intentionally with her son. And, yes, even the structures of the Educational Industrial Complex can’t stop a passionate, gifted professional classroom teacher from igniting BOF in his or her students. More and more in our networked world, BOF is an powerful guide for learning. When high quality expertise is just a few links away, why sit in a box and wait for someone to feed it to you? If you’ve got the passion, why not chase down the knowledge yourself? The homeschool community (among many others!) is figuring out how to properly support the pursuit of knowledge, even when it means letting go of the old “knowledge-transfer” structures.

Which brings us back to prejudice.

The homeschool world was in a kerfluffle this Memorial Day weekend over an essay contest sponsored by the Subway restaurant franchise, which included this gem on the registration form:

Contest is open only to legal US residents, over the age of 18 with children in either elementary, private or parochial schools that serve grades PreK-6. No home schools will be accepted.

Why were home schools excluded? While there were lesser prizes appropriate to individual students, the grand prize was $5000 in athletic equipment; apparently, the contest-makers were unable to conceive of any sort of “educational” activity (like kids writing stories) occurring outside of an institution that needed to field a sports team.

A boycott of Subway ensued, and apparently the pro-boycott /con-boycott rhetoric has gotten pretty heated. Debra Hanley at Pricipled Discovery writes:

It isn’t pretty out there, and it is rare that I really see this much division in the boards I frequent. I never knew someone’s choice to boycott or not boycott could be so personal. That my shoulder shrug at the whole thing would result in impassioned defenses of how boycotting does work, and an insistence that we have to remain vigilant even in the little things. Or that those who are not boycotting would see fit to not merely state why they think it is not necessary but go so far as to belittle those who have chosen to do so.

But really, do we make this big of a deal out of other companies who choose to support traditional schools? ….Corporations have gotten away with donating money to schools for some time without raising the ire of homeschoolers. Simply because it comes in the form of a contest, we are suddenly boycotting? And worse, flaming each other?

She quotes American Thinker for the reason behind the offended feelings:

But why is this snub at homeschoolers even an issue? Homeschoolers face constant harassment from “officials” at the state and local school board level, as well as from teachers unions, and they are therefore more than a bit sensitive to perceived commercial discrimination. By banning homeschooled children from their essay contest, Subway has — accidentally or intentionally — placed themselves firmly in the “enemy’s camp.” [emphasis added]

Being conscious of the history and state of education in America could have saved Subway some headaches. Education simply does not equal school, and Subway should have operated with that awareness. And as Debra points out, a very small amount of creative thought on the part of the contest organizers would have been enough to include people who learn in situations, like homeschools, that are different from the institutional school “norm.” (Heck, we even play organized sports…)

Instead, Subway sacrificed homeschoolers to it’s unimaginative notions of education. They asked homeschoolers to go along with second-class citizenship, losing out to institutional schools, and to allow Subway the luxury of ignoring the fact. It was a sacrifice that many homeschoolers were unwilling to make. We refused to acquiesce; we’d been slighted and we stood up for our rights. And, for what its worth, the culprits apologized. They didn’t change the rules of this contest, but promised to write new rules for future promotions. End of story, yes?

No.

Where there is a history of discrimination, sensitivity runs high. Little things make us suspicious, indignant, rationally and irrationally angry; it does not matter if the slight is real and consequential, or imagined and trivial. History makes us ready to fight, to marshal our strength against the enemy, because we believe that is what will make us safe, and (even more) we know that that is what makes our side strong. And who does not want to feel strong? How else, except through our own strength, are we to be protected from political harm from the powers that be? Even if it’s just a stupid sandwich shop.

And homeschoolers weren’t through flexing their muscles. Here was an enemy that made an easy whipping boy, a target that we could vent all our frustrations upon without noticeable consequences. (I mean, really, who cares about Subway? Our dollars give us power, and if their business tanks, it’s not like we’d have to give up fast food or anything….) With so many things to be frustrated about, and perhaps in some circles a tradition of using persecution as a source of political strength, why should we calm down and let the enemy off the hook?

Its not all consumerist indignation or political opportunism, though. We live in a world of surface impressions, where people’s attitudes and treatment of us can be transformed by a T-shirt. Though prejudice against homeschoolers doesn’t even begin to be in the same league as the brutality and oppressiveness of racial prejudice, it is real, and we understand that it matters how people see us. As homeschoolers, we strive to construct a life worthy of recognition and respect on its own terms, however modest, and then someone comes along and doesn’t even bother to look at what we’ve done. “I am an invisible man,” writes Ralph Ellison’s protagonist. “When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, everything and anything except me….Who knows but that on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” In some ways the anger of homeschoolers is that of Ellison’s Invisible Man, a just response to the refusal to see homeschoolers as valid on our own terms, or even to see us at all, to be unaware and uncaring about where the system — the Education Industrial Complex — shuts us out.

But still — all this over a sandwich story contest? As usual, Principled Discovery asks a penetrating question:

Rights are something we can fight for…. When it is a matter of rights, we dig in our heels, put up a fight and resist compromise. That is what has gotten us where we are today.

But is this the model we should follow for every fight? It is one thing to march on the capitol; it is quite another thing to march on the general public. It seems to me we should be building bridges…

So there may be a time for war — but there is also a time for peace, and for learning together how to live together, when we all lose out to somebody sometimes. Overcoming prejudice and distrust is an ongoing project of bridge-building and, as one parent put it, of continually “pulling out the roots that are embedded in your own heart.” It requires, as Danielle Allen argues in Talking to Strangers: On Little Rock and the Art of Political Friendship, the book that sparked my discussion of school desegregation with my kids, an awareness and understanding of who is losing out to whom, of who made that choice, how that loss will be recognized, and how both that sacrifice and its validation will be reciprocated. It’s not a one-time attitude adjustment, but a continuing journey in the company of people who are not like us, but who may become our civic friends. Such a strategy might go a long way toward more important goals: building a supportive environment for homeschoolers, and reinvigorating the varied practices of education & learning in America today. BOF and all.

Here is how one Christian homeschooing father chose to begin that journey, showing humility and recognition of the intended purpose of the Subway contest rules, without giving up the claim for recognition by the company:

Dear Subway,

Please forgive us for acting like anyone else would. The truth is, we claim to be followers of Christ, but we aren’t perfect at it. We truly hope that you succeed in your efforts to provide exercise equipment to kids that desperately need it. In the future we hope that those of us who choose to home school will be more of a blessing to your franchise. We hope that you won’t see us as a community of self-isolating complainers, but as a community of people who feel so strongly about our kids that we are willing to go the extra mile with them.

Sincerely,
 Homeschoolers

This homeschooler turns his loss of eligibility for the contest into a claim for recognition and an invitation for future relationships. I hope that we, as our Teacher instructs, will be ready to go the extra mile with our oppressors as well. And while we’re at it, we might use this episode to remind ourselves of the deeper, harsher prejudices that exist in our society, among the people with whom we live, and of journeys to which we are called.

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So here are some manifestoes of the present day on books, education, faith, and civic life. Though their weight for good or ill, for much or little, is as yet unknown, these are some of the words that will shepherd us into our shared future:

Sara Lloyd has blogged “A Book Publisher’s Manifesto for the 21st Century”:

…the very nature of books and reading is changing and will continue to change substantially. What is absolutely clear is that publishers need to become enablers for reading and its associated processes (discussion; research; note-taking; writing; reference following) to take place across a multitude of platforms and throughout all the varying modes of a readers’ activities and lifestyle.

Follow this up with Clay Shirkey’s new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations:

…individual weblogs are not merely alternate sites of publishing; they are alternatives to publishing itself, in the sense of publishers as a minority and professional class. In the same way you do not have to be a professional driver to drive, you no longer have to be a professional publisher to publish. Mass amateurization is a result of the radical spread of expressive capabilities, and the most obvious precedent is the one that gave birth to the modern world: the spread of the printing press five centuries ago.

I am a former public school teacher and current homeschooler, and John Taylor Gatto’s works, including Against School have been influential for my family as well as many others:

What if there is no “problem” with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would “leave no child behind”? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?

Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what?

Dana Hanley made the connection between Gatto’s work and the commentary of Harvard Kennedy School’s Paul Peterson on The Education-Industrial Complex:

If politicians in America attended more closely to the needs of the next generation than the interests of unions and bureaucrats, the country could use its ingenuity to create once again an educational system the world would seek to emulate. To do so, however, politicians will have to take on the education-industrial complex.

Christians believe that God Himself has a manifesto, but that does not stop us from feeling the need now and then to proclaim the meaning of that revelation for our present circumstances. The Evangelical Manifesto, penned (with others) by Os Guinness (a faithful friend of his fellow manifesto-writer, the late Francis Schaeffer) attempts to speak, with words of both affirmation and repentance, to the call on Evangelical Christians at this moment in time:

…we boldly declare that, if we make clear what we mean by the term, we are unashamed to be Evangelical and Evangelicals. We believe that the term is important because the truth it conveys is all-important. A proper understanding of Evangelical and the Evangelicals has its own contribution to make, not only to the church but to the wider world; and especially to the plight of many who are poor, vulnerable, or without a voice in their communities.

The place of religion in human life is deeply consequential. Nothing is more natural and necessary than the human search for meaning and belonging, for making sense of the world and finding security in life. When this search is accompanied by the right of freedom of conscience, it issues in a freely chosen diversity of faiths and ways of life, some religious and transcendent, and some secular and naturalistic.

Nevertheless, the different faiths and the different families of faith provide very different answers to life, and these differences are decisive not only for individuals but for societies and entire civilizations. Learning to live with our deepest differences is therefore of great consequence both for individuals and nations. Debate, deliberation, and decisions about what this means for our common life are crucial and unavoidable.

We ourselves are those who have come to believe that Jesus of Nazareth is “the way, the truth, and the life,” and that the great change required of those who follow him entails a radically new view of human life and a decisively different way of living, thinking, and acting….Here we stand. Unashamed and assured in our own faith, we reach out to people of all other faiths with love, hope, and humility.

Barack Obama’s speech or race in American life, “A More Perfect Union”:

The document [the framers of the U.S. Constitution] produced was eventually signed, but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least 20 more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations. Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution — a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part — through protests and struggles, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience, and always at great risk — to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time….

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America: to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality. The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through, a part of our union that we have not yet made perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care or education or the need to find good jobs for every American….

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past….”

For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away, nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years…. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of that old truism that the most segregated hour of American life occurs on Sunday morning.

That anger is not always productive. Indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems. It keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity within the African-American community in our own condition. It prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful, and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community….Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation….to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns, this, too, widens the racial divide and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now.

It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. And contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle or with a single candidate, particularly — particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own. But I have asserted a firm conviction, a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people, that, working together, we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds and that, in fact, we have no choice — we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

Obama’s speech on race in America can be read in the larger context of the challenge of civic engagement. In this sense, we might do well to read him along with Richard Harwood’s call to Make Hope Real:

My fear all along has been that “hope” would become a casualty of this campaign - that its very meaning and currency would be diminished through overuse and sloganeering….For not all hope is created equal…. But no matter what results emerge…I believe we must see hope differently if we wish to make it real. We must distinguish between authentic and false hope.

…and also with Danielle Allen’s amazing tour from Aristotle to Ralph Ellison and beyond in Talking to Strangers: On Little Rock and the Art of Political Friendship:

Of all the rituals relevant to democracy, sacrifice is preeminent. No democratic citizen, adult or child, escapes the necessity of losing out at some point in a public decision…. An honest account of collective democratic action must begin by acknowledging that communal decisions inevitably benefit some citizens at the expense of others, even when the whole community generally benefits…. Their sacrifice makes collective democratic action possible. Democracy is not a static end state that achieves the common good by assuring the same benefits or the same level of benefits to everyone, but rather a political practice by which the diverse negative effects of collective political action, and even of just decisions, can be distributed equally, and constantly redistributed over time, on the basis of consensual interactions. The hard truth of democracy is that some citizens are always giving things up for others.

Allen’s book is a beautiful example of how to read manifestoes wisely. Her reading studies carefully the testimonies of Aristotle, Hobbes, Ellison, and our own recent headlines & history, sifting through their words to bring deep truths to light, and make visible the places where we stand.

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If you are not familiar with the idea of eating locally, check out Barbara Kingslover’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, Smith and Mackinnon’s Plenty, Deborah Madison’s Local Flavors cookbook, and Joel Salatin’s Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal.

The exciting thing for me about this project, and other similar resources such as Drive Alternatives, is the potential for interaction (personalizing, producing, sharing) in domains that have previously been places of passive consumption. “Though the food map started as a class project,” says the UW News story on the Hundred-Mile Diet Map, “the women will continue to maintain and expand it, possibly adding interactive resources such as recipes, blogs and even food preservation tutorials.” That kind of connection and sharing is what will allow us as human societies to learn to be conscious of and take responsibility for the earthly places in which we live and move. Imagine driving cross country in an alternative-fuel vehicle, and being able to connect with local food and farmers along the way (instead of relying on a national network of fast food outlets) and reinforcing the infrastructure for the non-standard (and sustainable!) transportation system of your choice (instead of relying on the mainstream supply networks). Such an experience is a far cry from the traditionally passive consumption of industrial products, and it is information sharing and community learning, the educational infrastructure supplied by these websites, that makes it possible.

Clay Shirkey’s words on media are true for food, travel, and books as well:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.

Here’s to food, and lifelong learning, that includes us all!

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Gosh, I hadn’t thought of that in years…

I wonder if Andrew Sutherland has worked or will work some spacing effect logic into his wonderful flash-card study site, Quizlet?

While we wait to find out, perhaps we can play one of Andrew’s games:

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Taken with my smudgy phone camera on my way through our local big-chain bookstore. What a menagerie! Pictured:

• A New Earth
  Eckhart Tolle’s popular Easternish mystic self-help catechism.
• The Shack
  Written by William P. Young and recommended by everyone I know, and their cousin. No less than Eugene Peterson, for crying out loud, compares this to Pilgrim’s Progress! All right, all right, it’s on my list. But I’ll be reading the reviews and watching the conversations carefully.
• The Secret
  New-age magical optimism from Rhonda Byrne.
• Eat, Pray, Love
  Warm, fuzzy, epicurean navel gazing from Elizabeth Gilbert.
• Three Cups of Tea
  Fighting the Taliban with books — fantastic! Visit the home pages for the book and the authors, missionary kid Greg Mortenson and journalist David Oliver Relin.
• Home
  A breather — charming celebrity gossip of dubious accuracy from Julie Andrews.
  Just to cleanse the pallate for:
• The God Delusion
  The evangelical Atheist, Richard Dawkins, makes the case for demonizing religion and religious people in the interests of humanity.
• Nineteen Minutes
  Jodi Picoult’s novel of relentless bullying, a school shooting, and what it all might mean for those of us that still need to live together.
• 21: Bringing Down the House
  The guys from M.I.T. in Vegas, putting their math skills to good use. ‘Cause you need something fun right about now.
• Eat This, Not That
  Most of us will never attempt to game the system in Vegas. Our diets, on the other hand…

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Books are not widgets. Books are a part of our culture and should be treated as such. Making them into throw away goods is bound to lead to disaster. The best way to handle books is like how we should handle food: small scale and local.

 — Jenn, gleefully watching Borders go bust at A Bookseller’s Tale

But books can be beautiful visual data: Literary Organism by Stefanie Posavec. (via Notcot)

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WordPress theme developer and English teacher Justin Tadlock has taken up the debate with a post In Defense of the WordPress 2.5 Widget Panel, where some some very dramatic changes have been made, not only in how that area looks, but in how it works for authors arranging a site. Naturally, the whole debate reminded me of something I read a while back: an article in Science with the catchy title, “Cognitive Supports for Analogies in the Mathematics Classroom.” If the connection doesn’t immediately jump out at you, fear not — and read on!

Widgets: the Draggable Web

WordPress was originally designed to publish web logs (don’t miss NPR’s fantastic 10th anniversary blogging retrospective, which includes a brilliant spot where the narrator surfs the web over the radio!), originally a chronicle of daily activities and personal home page on the web, where the new content from each entry pushed the previous entries further down the page. A “sidebar” is often included to hold navigation and little extras — search boxes, random quotes, even (gasp!) advertising. WordPress, as a publishing tool for these kinds of web pages, handles these two kinds of content differently. The traditionally chronological “posts” are entered in an editing screen similar to many other electronic document editors, and arranged on the web page according to a hard-coded theme template. Adding new updates (“posts”) is easy, just type in regular English — no knowledge of computer code necessary — and click “publish,” but rearranging posts on the page, out of the traditional reverse-chronological order, is hard. You need new code in the templates. For a while, WordPress sidebars worked the same way, via template tags, but then came widgets:

“Widgets” is just a silly buzzword we’ve chosen for this sidebar-chopping plug-in we have developed. They could have been called Gadgets or Gizmos or Wizbangs or Whatevers. On the surface, they’re just things you can use to personalize your WordPress site without knowing HTML. Way down deep, they may be something entirely more significant.
 — Automattic, the company that develops WordPress.

Widgets allowed a website author to stack little boxes of whatever into the sidebar of the blog without ever diving in to that strange-looking PHP code. (Because anything with a recursive acronym is guaranteed to be intimidating for beginners.) Honest-to-goodness coders could make a widget for you, and all you needed to do as a blogger was drag & drop it (or cut & paste it) where you chose. Easy! So easy, in fact, that widgets, whether in WordPress or else-where, have become “the new black,” the basic accessory of the web.

Shiny New Widgets

Here is how we use WordPress widgets:
 

In WP 2.3
1. Click on a widget and drag it from its current location (the available widgets pool at the bottom, or either of the sidebars) to its new location
2. Click on the “Edit” icon to configure the widget
3. Click “Save Changes”
4. Click “View Site” to see that everything works.

In WP 2.5
1. Select sidebar from menus and click “Show” to display
2. Click “Edit,” “Remove,” and “Save Changes” to remove a widget from the sidebar, then return to step one to move it to another sidebar, or
3. Click “Add” on a widget from the list at the left
4. Click “Edit” on the widget to configure it
5. Drag widgets up or down to desired location on the displayed sidebar
6. Click “Save Changes”
7. Click “Visit Site” to see if I got the changes I want to keep.

Which one seems easier to you? The old widget control panel puts everything on the screen in front of you, and lets you move it around on one screen. But what if you have more than just a couple of widgetized areas to manage? Justin Tadlock’s post pointed out the problem with that — at some point, there may be just too much information to display in one place. The new panel manages a lot more information — more “sidebars” and more widgets — but only displays a tiny fraction of it at a time. To move to a new sidebar, you have use the dropdown menu and “Show” button to move to a new screen.

Only Analagously Real

And what does all this have to do with that paper on the cognitive psychology of education? The paper investigates how how teachers across several cultures try to make analogies clear to their students. “Learning by analogy,” the authors write, “typically involves finding a set of systematic correspondences (a mapping) between a better-known source analog and a more novel target.” Using data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the authors analyzed videos (available here) of classroom teaching of eighth-grade mathematics (i.e., the students were about 13 years old) in three of the TIMMS countries, the United States, Hong Kong/SAR China, and Japan. They painstakingly coded the videos for moments when teachers taught by analogy, and behaved in ways that would help their students “get it.” Specifically, they looked for instances when teachers:

1. Used a something familiar as the source of the analogy
2. Presented the source analog visually
3. Kept the source visible during comparison
4. Used spatial cues to highlight alignment between corresponding elements
5. Used comparative gestures moving between the source and target analogue
6. Used mental imagery or visualizations of the analogous relationship.

The first three of these teacher behaviors focus on aspects of the source of the analogy that the teacher is trying to communicate; the second three call attention to correspondences between the analogous situations — the mapping between source and target — making the analogy more vivid and present to the students. All of them have been established over the last thirty years of experimental cognitive psychology as “sound principles for supporting relational learning.”

The six principles are helpful because they serve to reduce demands on your brain for processing power and to focus your attention on the right parts of the task. If the teacher keeps a familiar example continually visible (placing a balance scale on the podium while lecturing about balancing equations, for example), then you don’t have to use up cognitive resources holding it in mind. If the teacher lines up that source example with the unfamiliar target (placing the podium and balance scale in front of the chalk board, for example, with the fulcrum of the scale beneath the equation’s equal sign, one pan under the left side of the equation, the other under the right) and connects the two with gestures (touching the left side of the equation, then the left pan, then the equation again) and visualization (drawing a big down arrow on the board next to the “subtract from both sides” step in solving the equation, and telling the students “when you subtract, imagine pushing one side of the scale down”), then taking your old knowledge into the new territory becomes clear and easy. Released from the need to recall the old or to map out the journey, your mind is free to focus on learning the new.

The new widget panel brought this to mind because when you work with WordPress, you don’t really edit your blog; you edit an analog of your blog. The “back end” of a WordPress blog has a systematic correspondence with what readers see on the “front end.” The stack of little blue boxes from my screenshot is an analog for a widgetized sidebar; the PHP code of WordPress links the back end of the blog data to its display on the front end, and thus maintains the correspondence. When I use the widget panel, I am trying to build an analogy between my actions and changes as I use the control panel in front of me (the source analog), and the visible effects of those actions on my site (the target analog).

Working with Widget Psychology

Jakob Nielsen defines usability in terms of whether a user interface is easy to learn, efficient to use, memorable after an absence, discouraging but resilient to errors, and pleasant and satisfying in practice. He also notes that utility is just as important as usability: “It matters little that something is easy if it’s not what you want.” Given the insights drawn from the TIMMS data, what can we say about the usability of the WordPress 2.5 Widget panel?

First, as Justin has pointed out, the utility of the new version is much greater — you can have many sidebars (widgetized areas) without breaking the interface. But the new version is much less usable — it breaks just about every one of those sound cognitive principles for making analogies learnable and memorable. The familiar stack of boxes that is analogous to your sidebar is still there, but only one at a time. The current state most of your blog’s widgets is hidden behind the “Show” button. Instead of presenting your existing layout visibly, it requires you to recall where your widgets are, and choose the correct sidebar to display. Even if I display “sidebar one” to see which widgets I’ve installed there, that information becomes invisible again as soon as I call up “sidebar two.” Spatial alignment is ignored — all sidebars are displayed in the same place on the screen, regardless of where the blog author wants to display his or her content. But laying out a blog is one task where you want both information about content (which widgets?) and presentation (displayed where?) to be displayed together — otherwise, you will burn cognitive resources just to comprehend your own layout. Gestures are limited to sorting widgets up and down a single sidebar — you can no longer make the gesture that is analogous to moving a widget from one sidebar to another. (In a related bug, moving widgets sometimes causes them to lose the data with which they were configured. This is very frustrating; when you move your lunchbox from your kitchen to your locker, you don’t expect your sandwich to disappear.)

So what can we do about this? We need to have more information made visible on each screen, and that information needs to be embedded in a spatially meaningful display. But we also need to manage many more widgitized areas than we can display at one time. (Justin comments that the display gets unwieldy with more than three or four widgetized areas to manage.) Here are my suggestions:

Usable analogies — taking the load off your mind:
1. Add more informative labels to the “Available Widgets” pool. leave the column of available/used/unused widgets along the left side of the screen, but move the brief descriptions of widget functions (currently taking up space in the middle of the screen) underneath their respective widget icons (or into tooltips?), and add a note describing the current placement of the widget, e.g.the “Add” link could toggle with something like, “Currently added to Sidebar Three”
2. In the space that has opened up, allow users to display controls for up to six widgitized areas simultaneously, each in its own “Widget Area Management Box,” just like the “Current Widgets” single display. If the theme does not have that many widgitized areas, or you don’t need to work with more than one or two, the extra Widget Area Management Boxes can collapse, like the boxes for tags and categories below the post editing window. Uncollapsed boxes can display a widget area, or can read “none selected.”
3. Allow users to decide whether each Widget Area Management Box will display its widgets in a column (portrait orientation) or a row (landscape orientation).
4. Make everything draggable. Allow users to move individual widgets back and forth between the from the available pool and the currently displayed Widget Areas, and maybe even allow us to move the Widget Area Management Boxes themselves around in relation to each other.

Take a moment with that WP 2.5 Widget Panel screenshot, and see if you can visualize what I’m suggesting.

What could we do with such a setup? Imagine you have 50 types of widget areas available to use on your site. (Yes, fifty. Or maybe a hundred!) Some of these make up a the footer, some are for the standard sidebar, some control items in the header. Most of them show up on specific templates, but not on every page of the site. You don’t need them all in focus at once — just a few.

Your template for an author profile page, for example, might use a widget area for the header, a widgetized author stats & feeds box in the upper left of the content area, two right-hand sidebars, and two widget areas that make up a fat footer. How to arrange the widgets in this set of sidebars? Simple! Select the Header Widget Area from the dropdown menu on the first Widget Area Management Box (WAMB? WAM Box?), and set it to Landscape display, just like the real header on the page. Select the other widget areas you want to use in the other five WAM Boxes, setting the footers to horizontal display as well. Drag the Boxes around, if necessary, so that the header is displayed across the top of the work area, followed by the author stats area and two sidebars displayed as three columns beneath the header area, and the two footer areas are displayed underneath that, horizontally, one beneath the other. Things are lined up on the panel in the order they will be displayed on the page, but in a more compact form. The column of available widgets is displayed on the left — go crazy! Drag and drop widgets anywhere, in any of these six widget areas, in any order, to your heart’s content. The interface puts everything right in front of you, and you don’t have to burn out your brain cells to see what you are doing to your site. Hit save when you’ve got things sorted. When you want to work with a different set of widget areas, those powerful dropdown menus make them available.

So what do you think? How does this compare to other Content Management Systems? Would you like to see such a thing in the WordPress 2.6?

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The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member.

And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

 — From John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1623), XVII: Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris - “Now, this bell tolling softly for another, says to me: Thou must die.”

For the family of Katie Kalmerton, sister & daughter, and the family of Clyde Squire, father & husband — members of our homeschooling community, and members of the Church universal. Our hearts and prayers are with you.

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The result is amazingly powerful. The same set of content can be presented in many different ways, as you can see by selecting different designs from the menus at CSS Zen Garden or Sandbox Designs Live.

But you might have to wait a day to see it, because today is CSS Naked Day, when all the Cascading Style Sheets are stripped off of participating sites, and all you can see is the underlying structure built out of plain HTML. Presentation is important, but presentation is built on content and structure; without a strong foundation, the style matters little. (And when content, structure, and style are there, then maybe some JavaScript can add some helpful behavior, if it promises to play by the rules.)

The structure you’re seeing here is generated by WordPress via the Sandbox Theme, and displayed as your browser sees fit.

Ready to learn more? Visit the reference pages or (more advanced) tutorials on Sitepoint, or check out these books:

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Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

 — Listen to the whole testimony: A God Who Remembers by Elie Wiesel for This I Believe

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“You can’t have it here,” the man snapped at my father as we walked toward his study at the church on Sunday morning. “This is our church, and you cannot have it here. This ain’t your church, Vernon, this is our church. And I am telling you right now, you ain’t having no Martin Luther King service in our church…You can’t have a church full of niggers in here. This is our church.”

“The last time I checked, it was God’s church,” my father replied. “I think it probably still is….But we’re all Methodists here, and part of that is having methods, you might say, for doing certain things….the pastor of the church can determine the number and nature of the services held in the sanctuary. And for the moment, at least, I believe I am still the pastor of this church….And here’s the bishop’s phone number. If he says I am not the pastor of this church, I can’t do it. Otherwise, I plan to proceed.”

Eli Regan [one of the senior men in the church] shuffled around to the front of Daddy’s desk, stepping in front of the man who had been speaking…. “Well, Preacher,” he said, “I have two things two say about all this. The first thing is that I believe in my heart that Martin Luther King is the worst enemy that America has had in my lifetime — the very worst. You don’t think so, but that’s what I think, and I think most of these men agree with me.” There were nods of assent all around the small room. “And the second thing I want to tell you,” Regan continued, “is that if anybody in this room knocks you down, Preacher, I’m gonna pick you back up again. You’re still my preacher.”

 — Timothy Tyson, Blood Done