Single gender classrooms

This article came across my feed reader.  From the article: “The practice of separating girls from boys in the classroom was the norm decades ago. Now, it seems to be something of a new trend.”

A few thoughts … I read a book on gender and computing that said that while girls do better in single gender classrooms (I think this was specifically wrt math/science) boys do better in mixed-gender classrooms.  This article mentions that in one school, classes are multi-gender for things like gym and computer lab time which seems strange since the aforemetioned book identifies computer education as one of the areas where learning is most gender-mediated (and gym just intuitively seems terribly gender-mediated).  Finally, I would really like to know if anyone has tried to have single gender sessions a few times a week, then merging for classes.  Would this allow different learning strategies to emerge and solidify in the gender-specific classes and then, when shared in the mixed-gender session, students of all genders could pick the strategy that worked best.  Would this not work because students would judge strategies as “girl” or “boy” strategies rather than evaluatng them on their effectiveness or creativity?  Would the confidence in the strategies that might be built from the single-gender classrooms allow people to advocate for their approaches in a way that would convince their classmates despite gender prejudice?

“Oh, Susquehanna” and the geography of race

In the Defiance, Ohio song Oh, Susquehanna, I always envisioned rivers and the Susquehanna, familiar to me from where I grew up, as a metaphor for organic connectedness and aknowledgement that our lives have implications on our neighbors.  The metaphor is imperfect since, when used for our means, rivers become not only connectors but barriers.  As I recently read in James W. Lowe’s Sundown Towns:

Unfortunately, open housing came too late, after suburbia was largely built.  Across the United States, whites had kept African Americans out of most suburbs throughout most of the twentieth century.  By 1968, suburbs were labeled racially.  Once in place, these reputations were self-sustaining.  Desegregating them was an uphill struggle, a mount that we are still climbing.  Like anyone else, African Americans don’t want to live in a place where they aren’t wanted, and one way to deduce that they aren’t wanted is to note that no African Americans live there.  Today, just a little steering by realtors suffices to keep sundown suburbs nearly all-white.  Here is an example from Pennsylvania.  Whites and blacks refer to the suburbs across the Susquehanna River from Harrisburg as “the white shore.”  A man who grew up there wrote me:

I can tell you that there were (are?) sundown towns in Central Pennsylvania.  You were right about the “white shore.”  I have no objective proof at all.  However my mother grew up in Enola, and my uncle live in Camp Hill.  It was common knowledge that African-Americans would not be sold a house in those towns and those that surrounded them.  It was indeed a “white shore.”

By August 2002, when a new black employee moved to Harrisburg to take up her new job with the State of Pennsylvania, the pattern was in place.  “The realtor told me I could live on the west shore, but it’s really called ‘the white shore,’ so I’d probably be happier somewhere else.”  She bought in Harrisburg.  Such steering is illegal, but it goes on every day.

monetizing music

The music industry is whack.  We all know this, but as a person making DIY punk music it’s always hard to reason about making money from making music.  Working a crappy (and moreover, undignified) job to support making records is something that is respected or revered.  With many folks making music coming from college-educated backgrounds or middle-class economic situations with lots of community and family support, the reality is that people could easily transition from a life where they live at income levels below the poverty line and make music to a life where they work a dignified, or at least lucrative, job to support themselves.  Are you flaunting your privelege by artificially living in poverty or by succumbing to an economic vision that doesn’t allow musicians to support themselves without all the cruft, exploitation, hype and wasteful promotion of the traditional record industry?

I don’t have the answers to this, but in his song Moment of Clarity, Jay-Z seems to have made his decision, at least in his completely different set of experiences in life and with the music industry:

The music business hate me
’cause the industry ain’t make me
Hustlers and boosters embrace me
And the music I be making
I dumb down for my audience
And double my dollars
They criticize me for it
Yet they all yell “Holla”
If skills sold
Truth be told
I’d probably be
Lyrically
Talib Kweli
Truthfully
I wanna rhyme like Common Sense
(But I did five Mil)
I ain’t been rhyming like Common since
When your sense got that much in common
And you been hosteling since
Your inception
Fuck perception
Go with what makes sense
Since
I know what I’m up against
We as rappers must decide what’s most important
And I can’t help the poor if I’m one of them
So I got rich and gave back
To me that’s the win, win
The next time you see the homie and his rims spin
Just know my mind is working just like them
(The rims that is)

V Week events I’m stoked about

These are part of the V Week of Events. There’s lots more, but these were the ones that caught my eye.

2/6 Friday — Critical Mass & Speak Out
@ 1pm, SAMPLE GATES
–Take to the streets in a critical mass bike ride to raise awareness of violence against women.

2/11 Wednesday — Film Screening & Teach-In, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo @ 7:30PM
–Join us to view and discuss the documentary film that explores the violence faced daily by the girls and women of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Imapfilter certs

I was having trouble SSHing into my workstation.  It would just hang at the login.  I was worried that I had gotten 0wn3d.  I logged in at the console and ran top and saw that there were a bunch of runaway imapfilter proccesses from my cron runs.

I ran imapfilter from the command line and got the following error:

ATTENTION: SSL/TLS certificate fingerprint mismatch.
Proceed with the connection (y/n)? y

In order to get rid of this error and make it cronable again, I had to delete the contents of ~/.imapfilter/certificates and re-run imapfilter from the command line, telling the program to accept the cert permanently.

This mailing list post was very helpful.

I’m still going to lock down my box anyway.


	


	






	


	
After the snows


	

		
After the snows, the American-made sport utility vehicles seem to own the roads, vindicated by nature from recent events.  They swagger through streams of grey slush bellowing, “I am too big to fail!”

	


	






	


	
Digital Barn Raising


	

		
I was recently asked to advise on the 2009 Allied Media Conference’s How-To Track (you can check the 2008 track out here) and I’m trying to think how to approach it.  Watching teachers recently and thinking about the community organizing that’s happening here in Bloomington, a lot of the skills I want to know how-to do aren’t neccessarily technical.  Still, my goal for this year’s AMC is to help create a track that not only builds and strengthens community and coalitions around consuming and discussing media but in it’s actual production – from editing videos, to making beats, to loading Linux on a server, to hacking together a Drupal module.  These technical tasks are often done in solitude by a few individuals who have been delegated the task or who hold onto the skills and projects too tightly for more folks to be involved.  I’ve always felt excited and empowered by technology, not just in what it can do, but in using and manipulating it.


Comment here if you have anything you’d like to see in a session at the conference or if you know of folks doing awesome stuff with technology and media to further social justice goals.

	


	






	


	
Switcheroo


	

		
I just got a letter from my health insurance company telling me that my primary physician was leaving their network and that I had been assigned to a new doctor.  I wasn’t particularly attached to my first doctor, but I’m still wondering if this switch is “normal” with all healthcare these days, or more frequent because of the state-subsidised, safety-net style health insurance that I have. Should I be happy that the informed me of the switch and that I didn’t have to do anything to find a new doctor, or should I feel tossed around by the system?


On another health care note, I wanted to give a shout out to Ayada who commented, “no dental care = no insurance.”  I completely agree with this.  I can imagine that for a lot of people, their dental health poses more pain and nervousness in their life than other health issues.  This makes me wonder, what should the baseline for healthcare in this country be?  To me, it’s whatever care it takes to make someone feel safe, comfortable, and dignified.

	


	






	


	
Family micro-lending in the U.S.?


	

		
The Northwest Airlines in-flight magazine has been a wealth of insight lately.  I read that Berry Gordy started Motown Records in 1959 on an $800 loan from te Ber-berry Co Op, a fund which family members each paid in $10 every month in order to make loans to launch new family business ventures.  With so many projects (and friends) being broke right now, I want to know how people are funding important work from their base.  This seems like one cool model blasting from the past.

	


	






	


	
Michael Chabon on entertainment


	

		
I love this statement from The Best American Short Stories 2005 :


Yet entertainment – as I define it, pleasure and all – remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as if we have bridged, the gulf of consciousness that seperates each of us from everybody else.  The best respone to those who would cheapen and exploit it is not to disparage or repudiate but to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences, a two-way exchange of attention, experience, adn the universal hunger for connection.


It helps me deal with the questions/conflicts I have as a performer.