Interview on KMUZ

Today I was interviewed by Deanne Bass for KMUZ's show Special Needs, Special People. We talked about the novel, Corporate High School, about the state of education in the U.S. and in Oregon specifically, and about teaching special needs students. The interview was a great experience, and I hope it will be a good listen when it airs on Tuesday (tomorrow) at noon and again on Saturday at 8am. Ms. Bass is a great host. The show is on 88.5 FM and 100.7 FM here in the Willamette Valley, but it also streams live on their website, KMUZ.org. Like most people, I hate hearing my own voice recorded, so check it out and let me know if I was bearable. If so, then, when the show is posted to the archive, I'll link to that here, too! 

T-Shirt Design Contest

Are you a talented artist or someone looking to get more attention for your work? Do you know someone who has graphic art skills and deserves to be noticed? I'm looking for some designs for t-shirts that compliment the novel Corporate High School. Here's the tricky part; because the book is a dystopia, the title refers to something people should not be supporting. It's like saying, "I love the world of 1984!" or "I'm hanging out in a Brave New World!" (Okay, that last one was actually kinda' funny, and I would wear that shirt, but people who haven't read Brave New World wouldn't get it.)  Anyway, I'm looking for something that advertises for the novel (maybe a spoof of one of those school seal t-shirts) but also encourages people to join in the fight against corporation of our public schools. Well, you're the creative folks, so you go for it. Submit your ideas to the Facebook Page or send the images to NotAPipePublishing@gmail.com The runners-up will be posted here along with links to the artists' pages or other works, and the winner will get lots of press and a free copy of the shirt made from her/her design. So have fun with it, and tell a friend!

The Sum of Our Gods is now in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina!

I know, I know. I don't post blog entries often enough. And when I do, they tend to be too long. I'm aware, okay? So here's a short and sweet post; today I got a letter from one of the administrators of the Biliotheca Alexandrina. You and I know it as The Great Library of Alexandria, Egypt. Through a friend, Ramez Salama, I submitted a copy of my first novel, The Sum of Our Gods, a few months ago, and they reviewed it and accepted it into their collection. That's right, something I wrote is in the most famous library in the history of libraries! Lamia Abdel Fatah, the Head of Library Sector, wrote, "Your gift will serve as a valuable tool for the patrons of the Library of Alexandria and will be enjoyed by this and future generations."  That still gives me the chills.

If you ever get the chance to visit the library, it is one of the most impressive architectural and cultural sites I have ever seen, a marriage of form and function that produces a kind of temple to the preservation of knowledge. It can't be fully captured in pictures, but I'll share a few.

And now, when you go, you can find The Sum of our Gods on the shelves. Unless it's checked out. Which would also be cool. 

"Who's Your Favorite Celebrity?" Contest

The NBA's Larry O'Brien Trophy will not be given to the winner of this contest. Sorry. Compete anyway!

I've had so many requests for copies of Corporate High School from teachers and school librarians that there's no way I can fill them all, so I've created a GoFundMe campaign (here: http://bit.ly/1El9c2g). Now I'm announcing a contest that would seem patently venal if the goal weren't to put novels in the hands of young readers. Here's how it works:

"Who's Your Favorite Celebrity?" Contest

1. Choose your favorite celebrities. Artists, musicians, athletes, actors, politicians... The bigger name the better (but make sure it's someone you want your name attached to)!

2. Find your favorites on twitter or Facebook.

3. Copy the following tweet/Facebook post (personalized, of course), and send it to them:

@__________ You're my fave! Help me win a contest and help @teachergorman get books to kids! http://bit.ly/1El9c2g

Prizes:

The person who gets the biggest-name celebrity* to donate (any amount) by midnight, June 11th (the day before Corporate High School is available) will have their name broadcast to the world via twitter and Facebook. (Great free advertising if you're an author/musician/artists yourself).

You'll also win a free, signed copy of Corporate High School!** ***

Oh, and you'll win bragging rights as the person who is most connected to the coolest celebrity!

*"biggest-name celebrity" will be determined by the me. Celebrities can influence this judgement by giving more novels to kids. 

**a copy will only be sent to the winner if the contest raises more money than the cost of a book plus shipping and handling. The contest can't take books away from kids, after all.

***in the case where more than one person requested a donation from the same donor, the award will go to the person who tweeted at her/him first, though the names of the others will also be posted as runners-up. So be faster!

Testimony For the Oregon State Senate Education Committee

Today I had the opportunity to testify before the Oregon legislature's Senate Education Committee where I argued in support of House Bill 2655, a universal opt-out from state standardized testing. Here's the text of what I shared (including a couple paragraphs I had to cut for time). I originally included the video in this post, but it played automatically and I couldn't stop that function. I don't like videos that play without being told to any more than you do, so I've removed it, but if you'd like a copy, let me know!  

"Good afternoon, Chair Roblan and members of the committee. For the record, my name is Benjamin Gorman. I live in Independence, Oregon. I’m an English teacher at Central High School. Thank you for allowing me to speak with you today.

"As a teacher, a lot of my job revolves around asking questions, and the best questions I can ask don’t have simple answers. I invite you all to come visit my classroom and meet some wonderful young Oregonians who are learning to critically examine every side of the most difficult questions I can think of.

"Today I'm here to ask a question that's not just difficult; it's impossible. Our school districts have been told they must encourage at least 95% of all students to take tests we know won't help in the education of those kids. If there's any doubt about that, let's put that to rest; the tests are not designed to provide diagnostic information. That's not their purpose. The companies that make them and sell them admit that. Furthermore, we don't get the results until after those students are through with the school year. The tests don’t even help students indirectly by improving the system. We’ve been living in the shadow of No Child Left Behind for more than a decade, and the most important thing we’ve learned is that directing resources away from instruction doesn’t improve instruction; testing students more doesn’t mean teaching them better.

"Many districts freely admit they would rather not give the tests. While giving these tests under duress, the districts also have to deal with the fact that parents have the right to opt their children out of the tests, but only if those students have a disability or a religious objection. Caught in this bind, the districts try to limit which of those opt-outs they will honor. Some districts say certain conditions, like anxiety, don’t qualify unless they rise to the level of an IEP. Others say that moral objections don’t qualify as religious. A different district’s superintendent told me he wouldn’t accept a religious objection which hadn’t been presented to him before the new SBAC test because he didn’t believe a person suddenly converted. Both these kinds of denials create dangerous legal liabilities for the districts. If a parent challenged a denial stating that their child’s condition didn’t constitute a disability, the district could find itself in an expert-filled courtroom. If the parent challenged the denial of a religious objection, or even a moral objection, the district would almost certainly lose a legal fight because the district personnel or the elected school board members would be acting as government representatives establishing which religions or lack-of-religions gave parents certain rights, a clear violation of the establishment clause of the first amendment. But because parents don’t know about these rights, and because many parents wouldn’t consider suing, the opt-out provision, as it currently stands, creates an equity issue; students with parents who have more education and means get one set of rights, and parents who don’t get denials. But then, when a district is faced with dual mandates to test every student while allowing some students to opt out, how is a district supposed to behave? Like I said, the question is impossible.

"As a parent and a teacher, I found myself in a nearly impossible situation, too. I knew I had the right to opt my son out of the testing and, as a teacher, I knew the testing would do him no good. But I also knew that a battle with my son’s school district was a battle with my bosses. Ultimately, I chose to opt him out, despite the fact that it put me and my employers in a tight spot. It came down to my moral beliefs, and I ask you to consider if they rise to the level of a religious objection.

"Here’s what I believe, and what I don’t believe:

"I do not believe the people who run my school district want to make third graders cry for no reason. The district’s leaders are scared, scared that they will be punished by the state, that they will lose funding or be sanctioned in some way, and so they hurt those children because they have made the calculation that those children’s unnecessary but temporary pain is offset by the pain the state could inflict on all the children year round.

"I don’t believe that you, the members of Oregon’s legislature, want to make third grade Oregonians cry for no good reason. I think you are scared that the federal government will do to us what they have already done to the state of Washington if you choose to abolish the whole testing regime.

"I don’t believe that the legislators at the federal level want to make third graders cry for no reason. They’re scared, too. They are scared that the contributions from their corporate donors might dry up. They’re scared voters might not think they are being prudent with tax dollars if they don’t continue wasting them on measuring schools and actually spend them on more instruction.

"Here’s what I do believe: I believe it’s wrong for adults to needlessly hurt children out of cowardice. I believe every religion agrees on that point.

"Passing a universal opt-out takes the decision out of the hands of frightened adults and puts it in the hands of brave parents. I’m asking you to give parents the power to decide what is best for their children. Maybe those parents’ courage will flow up the chain of command and be felt in Washington D.C.

"Please, be brave for Oregon’s parents and Oregon’s kids. Support a universal opt-out.

"Thank you."

Follow-up: It did pass out of committee, then went to the Senate where is also passed. The bill is now headed to the Governor's desk. Woot! 

Senate passes SBAC opt-out bill

 Joce Johnson, Statesman Journal

"The Oregon Senate approved a bill that would enable parents to opt their children out of statewide tests despite warnings from the federal government that the state may lose federal funding for schools if the legislation passed.

"HB 2655, otherwise known as the Student Assessment Bill of Rights, passed 24-6.

"The bill says that parents have a right to excuse their student from a statewide summative assessment, the Smarter Balanced Test, and that districts have an obligation to to provide notice of that right to families."

Teaching Is Still Worth It

A few weeks ago, I sat in a diner with some colleagues discussing what we say when our students tell us they are considering going into teaching. With differing levels of reluctance or passion, the consensus at the table could be roughly summarized this way:

“Don’t.”

We’d all begun our careers as young teachers do, eager to change the world and a bit naïve about the way the world would push back. Now, some of us ten years in and some 30, we’ve grown into the profession, simultaneously upping our game and learning our limits. But over the last few years, we’ve felt the full effects of the efforts of “reformers” (e.g. privatizers, union-busters, political hacks, or well-meaning theorists who have no idea what it’s like to teach in a real classroom). We’ve done our best to protect our students when the s--- rolls downhill, from the Feds bowing to their corporate donors, to the states begging for adequate funds from the Feds, to the local school district trying to keep up with new mandates from the state, to the building administrators trying to hit the targets from the district. It has rolled onto us, and we’ve done our best to catch it, but sometimes it slides down and splatters onto the kids in the form of testing we can’t prevent, curriculum that chases possible test questions, and standards made by people who don’t teach children. And when we get home, we hop on our Facebook pages to see that some oblivious friend is promoting a clip from Fox News where a millionaire talking head complains that teachers make too much money and don’t work long enough hours.

The job has become more difficult at the same time that the support from the public has decreased. We’re like members of Congress in that people like their kid’s teacher but dislike teachers as a whole (when we get together in groups we’re called a “teacher union” and people seem to think that’s something other than a bunch of teachers), but we’re unlike members of Congress in that we keep doing our jobs and putting our constituents before our party interests. Know what it would look like if we put the needs of teachers before the needs of students the way our politicians put their party interests before their country? A strike. Every single day of the year. Because no one would put up with this if they didn’t care about kids.

And yet, in my classroom, I still love my job. I get to work with wonderful, smart, funny, young people who keep me on my toes and who grow up right before my eyes, each at their own paces and into unique and impressive young adults. They defy every attempt to standardize them into easily quantified, normed data points, and I love them for it.

So why are teachers now discouraging students from going into a profession that still makes us happy? Because the parts of the job we love the best, the last bits we’ve held onto, are now under threat, and there’s a good chance that they might go away before our current students would graduate from masters programs. In my classroom, I still get to do some things that are different from every other teacher in my building, and that individuation shows my students that I care about them and I’m not just marching in lockstep to a curriculum designed by someone they’ve never met, a curriculum sold as a means to produce higher test scores rather than better people. That day, the day of the uniform daily corporate curriculum, is not yet upon us, but we worry, and we want to protect our kids from becoming teach-o-bots.

In the midst of this pervasive worry about the decline of my favorite profession, I received a note from a former student. She wrote, “I wanted to say thank you! A couple years ago, while in your class, I said the word ‘gay’ to refer to how I felt about something, and you said I had to write a paper explaining why that was wrong. Well of course I used the religion excuse; I was so ridiculously stupid. After a few years of knowledge-based wisdom, I realize how dumb that was! Everyone is equal, and I am disgusted with myself for thinking I was better than anyone else, or that religion would possibly be an excuse for bigotry. There is NO excuse for discrimination based on any difference. Thank you for forcing me to write that paper. I deserved that and much more! Keep teaching students to treat humans as humans!”

I assured her that I don’t think less of her for coming to that realization. Instead, I’m more proud than ever that she managed to reject the bigotry she’d absorbed from the culture around her. She has proven to be the kind of student teachers want to have in their classes, not the ones with all the answers who get the highest test scores and improve our end-of-year evaluations, but the kind who learn and keep on learning after they’ve graduated.

As for that paper I made her write, on the first day of class each year, I explain to my students that they may have whatever bigoted opinion they want, but they may not use racist/sexist/homophobic/bigoted/or-otherwise-hurtful language in my classroom because I have an obligation to make all my students feel safe. If they use that kind of hate speech (after a warning in which I explain why it’s unacceptable) I will make them write an explanation of why it is hurtful and doesn’t belong in a classroom before they can come in the next day. This strategy was never taught to me. It’s not in any of the new Common Core-aligned textbooks. But it’s given me an opportunity to teach students about language they often don’t even recognize as hurtful.   

My colleagues have tons of these strategies that are unique to their classrooms and personalities. Over the course of our students’ educations, they learn different things from all of us. Many of those lessons are nowhere to be found in the state-adopted curriculum, and many of them are more important life lesson than anything a politician has considered mandating. Most of all, in our own ways, we teach students that we care about them, that they are each valued. There is no requirement that we teach that. In all my testing to get a teaching license, I was never asked if I cared. There is no law that says I have to. But teachers do.

Teaching is still worthwhile because we are still allowed to show our students we care about them and about the adults they will become. If the day comes when I am told that there is no time to teach anything other than what is on the state test, that the Pearson Corporation has already decided what kind of adults my students should become and I am only allowed to care about making sure my school district and state get their slice of the ever-dwindling pie, then I’ll be defeated. Until then, I’ll keep fighting for real teaching. And when my students ask me if they should become teachers, I’ll tell them, “It depends.”

“It depends on whether or not you’re willing to fight for real teaching. It will be an uphill battle. And you may not win.”

“But there will be victories along the way.”

And I hope, for the sake of our country, that some of them choose to join in the fight.  

Stunt Casting Harriet from Corporate High School

For my last novel, The Sum of Our Gods, I asked people to stunt cast the various mortals and gods who would play the characters. This time around, I think I've already found the perfect actress to play the lead, Harriet, in Corporate High School. Amandla Stenberg is probably most famous for playing Rue in the first Hunger Games, but it's this video that makes me think she would be the perfect Harriet; she's smart, questioning, and obviously has a moral compass. I'll be sure to mention her name when Hollywood comes calling. 

 

Site Under Construction, so...

...I'll be moving the most relevant posts from my previous blogs (www.TheSumOfOurGods.com and www.Unapologetic-Conjecture.blogspot.com) over here and adding new content soon. Subscribe to stay updated!

Crowd-Sourcing a Cover, Part 2

I received some great feedback yesterday on the first draft of the new book's cover, all of which was helpful even when it contradicted other advice. I'm still torn on the ellipses vs. a comma and the necessity/utility of "a novel," but the big divide seemed to be about the lightning. So, I replaced that storm and stretched the building. Which do you folks like more, Edit 1 or Edit 2? This time, I'll give you the whole cover as it currently stands. You'll have to imagine where the info goes on the spine and the back cover. Feel free to comment here or on FB. Thanks for your help! Edit 1

Edit 2

Ben's New Study/Writer's Retreat/Super Villain Lair/Childhood Dream

You may have had this experience when you were a child. Some adult gave you a piece of paper, probably that kind that has lines on the bottom half and a space to draw on the top half, and asked you to draw/describe your ideal house or bedroom. If you are like me, you drew a castle. With robots inside. And lots of guns and swords and bows and arrows. And maybe a water slide snaking in and out of the windows, and a system of tunnels allowing for easy entry and escape underneath the moat filled with sharks and alligators. The adult did not tell you you could never achieve this dream. He/she did not say, "Um, Ben, that's a dumb idea. The water slide looks structurally unsound. Alligators and sharks probably wouldn't live together like that. I'm a little disturbed by all the weapons. This is a childish fantasy, and you should really get over it as soon as possible." If the adult had said that, we would all think that adult is a jerk.

But the world does say that, and we all accept it. Or most of us do, anyway.

Not me. I say the world is a big fat jerk.

My family just bought a new house. It's nothing too grand, just a cookie-cutter house that's virtually indistinguishable from the other houses on the street. Seriously, we've discussed what kind of tasteful lawn ornamentation we can buy that will help us identify our own house without making the new neighbors think we're too weird.

Inside, I get to be weird. I now have my own study/writer's retreat/super villain lair, and it is a childhood dream come true.

Warning: Some of you may find the images that follow to be childish. That's because you have been given advice from somebody who accepted some variation of the Apostle Paul's decision to become a man and "put aside such childish things." Sucker! The joke is on you! Do you know Paul's life story? He spend his adult life first helping the Pharisees and the Romans persecute and kill Christians. Then he went blind for a while. Then he spent the rest of his life building Christian congregations, getting shipwrecked, heckled, tossed in jail, and writing letters until his previous employers had him executed. But you know what he did to support himself financially while he was building those congregations? He built tents. Do you know what a three-year-old calls it when he tosses a blanket over the couch and a chair? A fort. Now, Paul was a true believer, so I'll bet he didn't look back over his adult life and wish he could trade in all the letter-writing and shipwreck-surviving for more time building forts. I'm sure he was happy with his choices. Personally, I'm a skeptic, so the whole executing people and then being executed thing does not sound glorious to me. It sounds unpleasant. Building forts? Cool.

The purpose of this epistle is not to evangelize for extended childhood. It's to show off the room that makes my wife shake her head and wonder how she could end up stuck with a man who has gone bald and grown a gut but somehow managed to get less mature during their fifteen years of marriage.

I started with a room. It looked like this, but slightly bigger and in three dimensions:

Then I painted some lines on the walls. 

And more lines. Then I added color to some of the spaces.

Then I did some sponge painting.

Yep. I made a castle.

Then some friends helped my bring in my bookshelves and boxes of books. (Thanks to my moving buddies!)

I populated the shelves.

My college friends will like this one.

Here's my book with statues of a couple of the characters (the Egyptian gods Sobek and Khepri).

Here's a couple of my favs. Yoda. And Shakespeare. And Star Wars in Shakespeare's style.

I like turtles.

I think Virginia Wolf described this project succinctly.

Not pictured but included in the room: swords, bows and arrows, guns, and lots of toys.

And yes, I do have a robot.

Is this room ridiculous and childish? Yep. And awesome. Should I put aside such childish things so I can be a normal soon-to-be-40 dad with a mini-van and a fantasy football team drowning his dead dreams in ironic Pabst? Nope. Should I get shipwrecked and tossed in jail and executed by Romans? Hell no! Adulthood blows. Build yourself a castle with a robot. Or whatever you wanted when you were 6. Because it's probably a whole lot more fun than what the world tells you to want now.

Now I'm going to go ask my wife if we can distinguish our cookie-cutter house by digging a trench, flooding it, and populating it with alligators and sharks. Just little ones. Classy, like a koi pond, but capable of repelling very small Visigoths. Wish me luck!