Ho‘ohana Aloha

I decided what to do about Google’s Reader being discontinued (scroll down to the 2nd comment.)

It feels rather liberating! Like when I deactivated Facebook…

RSS is here to stay of course, and I fully realize this was an easier decision for me because I get the RSS benefit in other ways, and feel I have good habits with the curation of my finds. This was really a decision to not pick up another app.

Seth Godin hits a significant milestone:

I’ve done this longer than any professional project I can remember, and I still consider it a joy and a privilege. I write and edit every word myself, and always have. This is me, unvarnished.

Thank you for letting me write this blog for you, and thank you for being along for the ride.

Showing up daily isn’t my challenge—it’s learning to live with the fact that I can’t say everything I want in a single post, that the trade-off of reaching people easily is that you can also lose people easily. It’s a journey, for both of us, and I’m thrilled to be taking it with you.

My biggest surprise? That more people aren’t doing this. Not just every college professor (particularly those in the humanities and business), but everyone hoping to shape opinions or spread ideas. Entrepreneurs. Senior VPs. People who work in non-profits. Frustrated poets and unknown musicians… Don’t do it because it’s your job, do it because you can.

The selfishness of the industrial age (scarcity being the thing we built demand upon, and the short-term exchange of value being the measurement) has led many people to question the value of giving away content, daily, for a decade or more. And yet… I’ve never once met a successful blogger who questioned the personal value of what she did.

Link to a book review of Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson, just added to my Must Read This shelf on Goodreads.

I want to read the book for several reasons. This paragraph of the review stood out for me (in line with one of those reasons), because I transitioned to being a solo businessperson with a partnership network instead of being an employer: I would love to be a job creator, and contribute to our community in that way, but being an employer isn’t presently in my ‘Imi ola (as value-driver: my best possible life).

Anderson recognizes that the world of makers isn’t a utopia. Yes, makers create jobs. But, he notes, “It’s actually more correct to say that small businesses destroy a lot of jobs that they create, since most small businesses fail before their third year.” A global network of small suppliers is likewise fragile. Its transport infrastructure is subject to the whims of an increasingly volatile global climate and political upheavals, and small companies don’t have the pull that large ones do to put pressure on their shippers when things go wrong. What makes this situation work for small businesses is not that it’s perfect, but that it’s good enough. If part of their enabling infrastructure fails them, they innovate to get around it. It’s the momentum, not the stability, that Anderson is banking on to create growth.

I completely agree with Claire Needell Hollander here. I admit that I preferred essay tests throughout my school years because I was so much better at them, but I honestly never have understood why we use multiple choice testing at all. Where is the learning value in being a good guesser?

What really got to me in this article though, was her discussion of “cultural capital.”

I MAY not be able to prove that my literature class makes a difference in my students’ test results, but there is a positive correlation between how much time students spend reading and higher scores. The problem is that low-income students, who begin school with a less-developed vocabulary and are less able to comprehend complex sentences than their more privileged peers, are also less likely to read at home. Many will read only during class time, with a teacher supporting their effort. But those are the same students who are more likely to lose out on literary reading in class in favor of extra test prep. By “using data to inform instruction,” as the Department of Education insists we do, we are sorting lower-achieving students into classes that provide less cultural capital than their already more successful peers receive in their more literary classes and depriving students who viscerally understand the violence and despair in Steinbeck’s novels of the opportunity to read them.

It is ironic, then, that English Language Arts exams are designed for “cultural neutrality.” This is supposed to give students a level playing field on the exams, but what it does is bleed our English classes dry. We are trying to teach students to read increasingly complex texts, but they are complex only on the sentence level — not because the ideas they present are complex, not because they are symbolic, allusive or ambiguous…

FRANZ KAFKA wrote that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.” I once shared this quotation with a class of seventh graders, and it didn’t seem to require any explanation.

Well now, if English Language Arts exams are designed for “cultural neutrality” that probably leaves out Managing with Aloha! I wrote an emotional book, and I am proud that I did so.

She makes an awfully big assumption here about “more privileged peers” though: Most of the people “of privilege” I know haven’t read all the books on the reading list she mentions —- including me!

Along with “Of Mice and Men,” my groups read: “Sounder,” “The Red Pony,” “A Raisin in the Sun,” “Lord of the Flies,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Macbeth.” The students didn’t always read from the expected perspective. Holden Caulfield was a punk, unfairly dismissive of parents who had given him every advantage. About “The Red Pony,” one student said, “it’s about being a dude, it’s about dudeness.” I had never before seen the parallels between Scarface and Macbeth, nor had I heard Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies read as raps, but both made sense; the interpretations were playful, but serious. Once introduced to Steinbeck’s writing, one boy went on to read “The Grapes of Wrath” and told me repeatedly how amazing it was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” His historical perspective was broadening, his sense of his own country deepening. Year after year, ex-students visited and told me how prepared they had felt in their freshman year as a result of the classes.

And yet I do not know how to measure those results.

This also recalled the Maria Popova interview I read earlier this week. When she said,

Because I didn’t grow up in the U.S. and only moved here for college, I’ve always felt like I have this vast literary debt.

—- Maria Popova in the How We Will Read series on Findings

I felt like I was physically shrinking an inch or two, knowing of the vast literary debt I can still pay as well, especially when so many of the classics are offered on Kindle now, and are absolutely free.