treelizard

okay, just one more

this article rocked my world

he GETS it!!

www.wmich.edu/coe/tles/urban/Haberman.pdf

__________________
http://www.dirttime.org

http://morewomeninmma.blogspot.com

Garland

Yo Liz...what do you know about "Jigsaw Classrooms"?

__________________
homo homini lupus

treelizard

Um, I know about jigsaw method... It's where you have different groups each read one page of say a five-page paper and report their results to the larger group...

We have tried it in my classes but students won't listen quietly while other groups share and some groups won't share at all...

Anyway, here's some of my favorite quotes from the article.

"Graduates who lack basic skills may be unemployable and represent personal and societal tragedy. However, graduates who possess basic skills but are partially informed, unable to think, and incapable of making moral choices are downright dangerous."

"Indeed, any teacher who believes that he or she can take on an urban teaching assignment and ignore the pedagogy of poverty will be quickly crushed by the students themselves. Examples abound of inexperienced teachers who seek to involve students in genuine learning activities and are met with apathy or bedlam, while older hands who announce, "Take out your dictionaries and start to copy the words that begin with h" are rewarded with compliance or silence."


"But below this facade of control is another, more powerful level on which students actually control, manage, and shape the behavior of their teachers. Students reward teachers by complying. They punish by resisting. In this way students mislead teachers into believing that some things "work" while other things do not. By this dynamic, urban children and youth effectively negate the values promoted in their teachers' teacher education and undermine the nonauthoritarian predispositions that led their teachers to enter the field. And yet, most teachers are not particularly sensitive to being manipulated by students. They believe they are in control and are responding to "student needs," when, in fact, they are more like hostages responding to students' overt or tacit threats of noncompliance and, ultimately, disruption.

It cannot be emphasized enough that, in the real world, urban teachers are never defined as incompetent because their "deprived," "disadvantaged," "abused," "low-income" students are not learning. Instead, urban teachers are castigated because they cannot elicit compliance. Once schools made teacher competence synonymous with student control, it was inevitable that students would sense who was really in charge.

The students' stake in maintaining the pedagogy of poverty is of the strongest possible kind: it absolves them of responsibility for learning and puts the burden on the teachers, who must be accountable for making them learn. In their own unknowing but crafty way, students do not want to trade a system m which they can make their teachers ineffective for one in which they would themselves become accountable and responsible for what they learn. It would be risky for students to swap a "try and make me" system for one that says, "Let's see how well and how much you really can do."

and this:

Unfortunately, the pedagogy of poverty does not work. Youngsters achieve neither minimum levels of life skills nor what they are capable of learning. The classroom atmosphere created by constant teacher direction and student compliance seethes with passive resentment that sometimes bubbles up into overt resistance. Teachers burn out because of the emotional and physical energy that they must expend to maintain their authority every hour of every day. The pedagogy of poverty requires that teachers who begin their careers intending to be helpers, models, guides, stimulators, and caring sources of encouragement transform themselves into directive authoritarians in order to function in urban schools. But people who choose to become teachers do not do so because at some point they decided, "I want to be able to tell people what to do all day and then make them do it!" This gap between expectations and reality means that there is a pervasive, fundamental irreconcilable difference between the motivation of those who select themselves to become teachers and the demands of urban teaching.

__________________
http://www.dirttime.org

http://morewomeninmma.blogspot.com

Liberty

Not that I'd know anything about any of this....

Out of my belief that one should leave no stone unturned in attempting to understand street combat (thanks Bruce!), I've read books by FBI murder profilers, etc. Looking at their findings from what I have seen out there:

When a kid in a supposedly "safe" school snaps, in the end, he does so for the very same reason some kids in "unsafe" schools end up hardcore street thugs. Either he was messed with to a point he could no longer tolerate, by those outside his perceived boundaries of who could or who could not get away with that. Or he was overindulged in such a way that his perception of boundaries has become screwed up. One or the other.

I've known kids who carried guns as young as 8 years old. Some came from homes where they were viciously beaten mentally and physically on a daily basis. These all had the same thing in common - if anyone so much as looks at me as my dad does, I will kill him!

Others came from homes where their every whim was granted. One kid; every time he was invloved in a crime, his attorney mom would bail him out. He is now doing life. These also had one thing in common - their belief the world is here for their amusement. You hear about rich kids commiting awful crimes who also had this attitude.

Both groups -safe/unsafe-are nutshells. Their abuse - horrible mistreatment or horrible overindulging resulting in what I call "a file missing."

While the rest of us "normal" people are able to contain ourselves these kids have been damaged to a point where that "normal" file is missing; they're no longer able to distinguish between right and wrong. While some of them can, but the pleasure (or pain) of their mistreatament continues unabated.

My own solution in dealing with either is neither conservative (put a bullet in em) nor liberal (hug em), but conservationist (meet em at a respectable distance, if unaviodable, gun in hand, if you will). It's one reason I train in martial arts. So I can, yet don't have to "go there" unless I need to.

I've met crazy kids! One day, in an alley with some friends, one of these kids came out of nowhere with a 45 handgun. Looking to shoot someone who he thought had laughed at him. I remember they used to call him "Crazy," or something. When he saw me, he told me I should leave. That I had always been "cool" with him. He then took off shooting after the other guys who were with me who had run off in diferrent directions. He is now in a mental institution.

I went and saw him once. Asked him why he din't shoot me. He told me I had never disrespected him. Never taken sides with others against him. I asked him why he did what he did and he told me had planned on killing them, shooting it out with the police, and then taking his own life. When I asked him why, surprisingly he had an answer... "because then, everyone will know not to mess with others!"

Thinking about this now, it dawns on me how cruel we can be with one another, how stupid, never learning from such tragedies, yet ever in shock when they happen "again."

One possible solution? To those parents on this post, teach your kids to always and genuinely respect those they see as somehow different from them. That alone may someday save their life. These people may not set off until they are adults, in a job somewhere. Better to have treated them with respect when they set off then to be on their "list," when that day comes.

This last thing may seem make for a boring forum, but in memory of those mistreated and of those who have died at their hands, no disrespect intended to anyone on this site.

treelizard

I agree that we should always treat students (or anyone) well, but I also think it's important, especially with children, to not be manipulated by their behavior. I also don't agree that one should treat people differently out of fear that they may snap and you'd be on their list. I think treating people fairly might make them feel, in their own skewed minds, that they are being disrespected or that people are taking sides against them. It's hard to explain, but I try my hardest not to play into drama and it drives kids nuts sometimes because they are so used to getting what they want when people do.

__________________
http://www.dirttime.org

http://morewomeninmma.blogspot.com

Liberty

Sometimes I feel like I've had an experience for everything! It's weird...

I used to visit a friend who lived in a building with a lot of people. Every so often, I run into this one guy in the elevator. A loner type. One day, he gets on the elevator with a see through plastic box full of colored pebbles. Thinking to strike a conversation with him I remark, 'Hey, great looking pebbles (or something like that), you building a fish tank or something?'

His reaction -"What do you see me prying into your business!" I mean, really hostile. Like an idiot, I respond with, "Hey, I was just making conversation, that's all..."

"Yeah!" He says, "I know your kind!" At which point I just shut up. I mean, who knows what his problem is.

A few months later, I'm back to visit my friend. The lady at the office stops me and hands me that box with the pebbles in it. Tells me the guy moved and wanted me to have them! That he could tell how bad I'd wanted them!

What a goofy world we live in...

Garland

That's rich! I kind of like the guy's sense of humor.

__________________
homo homini lupus

DickHardman

you been cutting down on the prozac yet garland? say garland, dont you like posting pics of yourself playing with guns bigger than your entire body??? we see the warning signs over and over again....

Attached Images

 

Garland

I view myself as more of the calm, neighborly, chipper, take you back into the woods- skull **** you, hack you into pieces, have sex with the little pieces, and then dispose cleanly of your remains- type of psychopath.

__________________
homo homini lupus

Garland

You want my honest take on the subject, Dick?

People fucking suck. All people have cruel, sadistic, and self serving urges...not to say any urge (or ANY thought or behavior) is not inherently selfish...and those that act upon them despite social constraints are considered sociopaths. They lack empathy and can't relate to others...not like any of us can truly relate to each other (the whole existential theme of lonlieness and isolation)...but they act outside of the social contract built upon reciprocity, and some common set of ethics or a moral code.

There are a few terms I want you to memorize...namely how we intellectualize and operationalize human nature.

Anomie:in contemporary English, means a condition of malaise in individuals, characterized by an absence or diminution of standards or values. When applied to a government or society, anomie implies a social unrest or chaos.

The nineteenth century French pioneer sociologist Emile Durkheim borrowed the word from French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau and used it in his influential book Suicide (1897), outlining the social (and not individual) causes of suicide, characterized by an absence or diminution of standards or values (referred to as normlessness), and an associated feeling of alienation and purposelessness. He believed that anomie is common when the surrounding society has undergone significant changes in its economic fortunes, whether for good or for worse and, more generally, when there is a significant discrepancy between the ideological theories and values commonly professed and what was actually achievable in everyday life. This is contrary to previous theories on suicide which generally maintained that suicide was precipitated by negative events in a person's life and their subsequent depression.
In Durkheim’s view, traditional religions often provided the basis for the shared values which the anomic individual lacks. Furthermore, he argued that the division of labor that had been prevalent in economic life since the Industrial Revolution led individuals to pursue egoistic ends rather than seeking the good of a larger community.
Robert King Merton also adopted the idea of anomie to develop Strain Theory, defining it as the discrepancy between common social goals and the legitimate means to attain those goals. In other words, an individual suffering from anomie would strive to attain the common goals of a specific society yet would not be able to reach these goals legitimately because of the structural limitations in society. As a result the individual would exhibit deviant behavior. Friedrich Hayek notably uses the word anomie with this meaning.

Dostoevsky, whose work is often considered a philosophical precursor to existentialism, often expressed a similar concern in his novels. In The Brothers Karamazov, the character Dmitri Karamazov asks his atheist friend Rakitin, ”...without God and immortal life? All things are lawful then, they can do what they like?” Raskolnikov, the anti-hero of Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, puts this philosophy into action when he kills an elderly pawnbroker and her sister, later rationalizing this act to himself with the words, “...it wasn’t a human being I killed, it was a principle!

Nihilism: Nihilism (from the Latin nihil, nothing) is a philosophical position which argues that Being, especially past and current human existence, is without objective meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value. Nihilists generally assert some or all of the following:
there is no reasonable proof of the existence of a higher ruler or creator,
a "true morality" does not exist, and
objective secular ethics are impossible; therefore, life has, in a sense, no truth, and no action is objectively preferable to any other.
The term nihilism is sometimes used synonymously with anomie to denote a general mood of despair at the pointlessness of existence.

While few philosophers would claim to be nihilists, nihilism is most often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche. In most contexts, Nietzsche defined the term as any philosophy that results in an apathy toward life and a poisoning of the human soul—and opposed it vehemently. He describes it as "the will to nothingness" or, more specifically:
A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos — at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 585, translated by Walter Kaufmann
Nietzsche asserts that this nihilism is a result of valuing nonexistent or non-extant "higher", "heavenly", or "divine" things (such as God). The nihilist who began by holding these values, after rejecting them, retains a belief that all "lower", "earthly", or "human" ideas are valueless (or so little valuable as to be essentially valueless) because they were considered so in the previous belief system. In this interpretation, any form of idealism, after being rejected by the idealist, leads to nihilism. Moreover, this is the source of "inconsistency on the part of the nihilists". The nihilist continues to believe that only "higher" values and truths are worthy of being called such, but rejects the idea that they exist. Because of this rejection, all ideas described as true or valuable are rejected by the nihilist as impossible because they do not meet the previously established standards.


...as Freud aptly stated in "Civilization and it's Discontents"...
“Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus (Man is a wolf to man.)"

We like to crash and crush...everything ties into power and frustration. Hurting somebody in any form isn't about anything besides POWER. And in our society...it's less okay than we pretenth it to be;

YouTube Video

And on that note...I'm going back to my mind altering substances...

YouTube Video

On the Perati (a city of Albany) bridge, there's a black flag,
it's the mourning of the alpini that go to war,
it's the mourning of the alpini that go to war.

On the Perati (a city of Albany) bridge, there's a black flag,
the better youth goes six feet under,
the better youth goes six feet under.

__________________
homo homini lupus

DickHardman

put down the crackpipe and talk to jesus.

Garland

Jesus love me, this I know...for he told me so last week. In a vision. He said it's okay to copulate with anything I can lure in with fruit.

__________________
homo homini lupus

DickHardman

hey well, dont feel too bad about things garland.

at least you didnt get served up like this guy right here.....

http://break.com/index/dog-humps-kid-playing-wii.html

Garland

How do you do it? Dick...you're like a mind reader. Baby, you and I are soooooo on the same wavelength.

__________________
homo homini lupus

treelizard

I had to read Durkeim's Suicide in college. I also read Dostoevsky. The answer is in the Brothers Karamazov: "Each is responsible for all."

__________________
http://www.dirttime.org

http://morewomeninmma.blogspot.com