#ESPECIALLY !!! since one of the things that the authors talk about is how rubrics in general are a useful way of standardizing grading

[gaydryad]

accidentally getting a little too into my pedagogy class and starting to wonder if I should pivot and go into education (academic field)

[jessicalprice]

something will always fill a vacuum

(reposted, with edits, from Twitter)

Okay, let's talk about why attempts to critique (or hell, straight up stick it to) Christianity in SFF often end up being more anti-Jewish than they are anti-Christian.

This was inspired by Jay Kristoff's work, which manages to evoke a whole bunch of antisemitic medieval tropes AND, as a bonus, even shits on the name "Ashkenazi", which is the Jewish term for most European Jews. But the thing is, Kristoff's SO antisemitic that I don't think it's accidental. I'm more interested in how it happens out of ignorance rather than malice.

So, negative evocations of Christianity in SFF usually fall into one or more of three categories: 

allegories for/evocations of the Inquisition 

allegories for/evocations of witch hunts 

Christianity without Jesus

I suspect there are also plenty of evocations of the Crusades out there, especially in SFF by non-Western authors, but I haven't seen it nearly as much. I want to be clear that these aren't usually discrete uses of these tropes. They usually blend together. Evocations of the Inquisition usually have evocations of later witch-hunts as well, and it's almost always Christianity Without Jesus.

I'm generally fine with using the Inquisition and the witch hunts as models for fictionalized versions of the church as a force for evil. They were Christianity as a force for evil in real life.

But they're often clearly written by people who haven't actually studied the periods in question before using them as a model--the Salem "witches," for example, were Christians, and not just women, and targeted more for financial reasons than religious ones. (Also, they weren’t burned at the stake, for crying out loud. You’re not the granddaughters of the witches they couldn’t burn. Like every word of that slogan is wrong.) But honestly, whatever. I’m not interested in holding fantasy to historical accuracy.

It's the way Evil Christianity Analogues are generally missing a Jesus figure that starts to make them problematic.

Much of the world's perception of Jews and Judaism is basically "it's like Christianity but without Jesus." 

Attempts to portray Christianity Analogues as bloodthirsty and primitive generally assume that what's "primitive" is what's older.

They tend to distrust ritual, and portray ritual either as primitive superstition, or as a facade that the Evil Priests use to manipulate the Naive Villagers.

And you may think you're sticking it to Christianity by doing your fic with evil Inquisitors who burn witches, but when a hallmark of its evil is that there's no Jesus analogue, you're actually not sticking it to Christianity. You're reinforcing its supremacy.

Or put another way, the idea that if you remove Jesus, Christianity becomes evil is just the flipside of "REAL Christianity is inherently good."

If you're going to have masses and priests and Inquisitors and witch burnings and all the other specific trappings of actual Christianity, put a fucking Jesus analogue in there. Because it's not "religion", it's SPECIFICALLY THE RELIGION THAT WORSHIPS JESUS, that did all these things.

Cultural practices are not an equation

A lot of this comes from a very old anti-Jewish trope: the OT God=vengeful, NT God=loving rubric.

Now, I'm not going to spend a lot of time debunking that trope in this thread, other than to say that every single loving- or compassionate-sounding thing Jesus ever said is literally a quote or paraphrase from the Tanakh. 

Yet there's a long-standing idea in pop culture Christianity that the problem with Christianity is the “Old Testament.” You hear it ALL THE FUCKING TIME on TV. Some bigoted Christian character quotes something from the OT and the hero says something like, "we've had a whole other testament since then."

So, the idea that if you do Christianity without Jesus, you get Bloodthirsty Old Testament Religion is a huge trope in... 

<drum roll>

...Christian depictions of Satanism.

You know what I'm talking about, yes? Satanism as portrayed by Christians is missing Jesus, and usually involves a lot of animal sacrifice, and then human sacrifice, and often a smattering of Hebrew, that Ancient And Alien Language. Or sometimes Aramaic. (I could do a whole post about how weird Christians are about Hebrew and Aramaic.) So Satanism as imagined by Christians is intended to be a dark mirror of Christianity, and there are elements of that, in that there's usually elements from Catholic mass, usually some Latin. 

But in essence, what they're creating is Ancient Evil Religion Without Jesus, which ends up looking a lot like what they tend to think Judaism looks like, or looked like back in the day. (Without the "Evil", of course, or at least without saying it out loud.)

animal sacrifice, which Jesus negated the need for 

Hebrew as an ancient powerful magical alien language, rather than as, I dunno, the language of real people? 

a vengeful and bloodthirsty deity figure, without a mediating savior

(BTW, I and plenty of other Jews I know have been asked, by apparently well-meaning Christians, how we handle sacrificing animals in contemporary America. I’m sure that if this post gets any traction, a bunch of Christians are going to respond that they know we don’t actually practice animal sacrifice and let me just go ahead and give you your gold star and your cookie and please note the giant eye roll accompanying said cookie and star.)

A little detour into the Satanic Panic

The attitude toward imagined Satanism, with its ritual and its sacrifice and its churchiness, looks a little different whether you're getting it from Catholics or Protestants. 

With Catholics, it's "this is a mockery of the mass, which is why it's ritualized"

With Protestants, With Protestants, you get something a lot uglier. It’s “our Christianity is fresh and organic and flexible and real and just about a genuine relationship with God,” opposed to ancient, heartless, primitive, ignorant ritual like that in Satanism and Judaism and Catholicism

And of course, when actual Satanism as a practice became a thing, and not just a bogeyman in the fevered imaginings of paranoid Christians, it was primarily as a way to troll Christians. But it also pulled in a lot of really ugly white supremacist Victorian ideas about the occult.

It didn't start from what could we do to create a practice that actually highlights everything that's wrong with Christianity. You know, an actual satire of it. It mostly started with performing what Christians thought Satanism would look like. Trolling, as opposed to critique. It’s evolved since then and developed more into its own thing, and the point of this post has nothing to do with practicing Satanists, so I’m going to leave it there--this is just to point out that Satanism, full stop, both imagined and real, has always been something that exists inside Christianity, and is nonsensical outside/without Christianity. 

So again, and I can't emphasize this enough: What Christians think actual Satanism would look like isn't a critique of Christianity. It's a reification of it. It's self-congratulatory. The Christian idea of Satanism exists only to enforce the “correctness” of Christianity.

You can see this because--edgelordery among heavy metal artists and edgy teenagers notwithstanding--there's nothing actually attractive about Christian depictions of Satanism. No one seems to be having any fun. There's no there there. I mean, Michelle Remembers, The Satan Seller, Rosemary’s Baby, Go Ask Alice, Satan’s Underground, The Omen, Eye of the Devil--in all the famous texts of the Satanic Panic, it’s remarkable how unpleasant and dreary Satanic practices seem to be. It’s hard to imagine anyone finding these practices enjoyable or rewarding. There’s a typical authoritarian Christian lack of curiosity about humans’ inner lives in these portrayals: no one’s asking why anyone would want to engage in these practices. It’s just some people are evil, end of story. 

The entire point of Satanism in the Satanic Panic is to make Christianity look good. 

It exists, in their imaginings, solely to mock Christian ritual, but like, no one actually wants to eat a host made of feces? No one wants to have unpleasant and ungratifying sex? It's just misery for misery's sake, which is what Christians panicking about Satanism apparently imagine non-Christianity to be.

Back to fictional Evil Churches

So when SFF authors/game devs/whoever want to worldbuild a fictional evil church, somehow it usually ends up being Christianity with a very conspicuously missing Jesus.

Obviously, a comprehensive survey is beyond the scope of this Tumblr post, but here are a few examples:

Shin Megami Tensei literally has a church that worships “YHVH,” an explicitly evil god. There’s no Jesus analogue. 

The Church of Tal in Magic: The Gathering is full of hypocritical inquisitors who persecute magic users while using magic themselves. This is pretty obviously a dig at evangelicals who claimed M:TG was satanic in the 80s and 90s, but again, weirdly, no Jesus.

Final Fantasy X has the Church of Yu-Yevon, which of course turns out to be Bad. No Jesus. 

Dishonored is an interesting example, since the Abbey of the Everyman doesn’t have a god--or rather, it’s designed to protect people from its god, the Outsider. But it’s got all the tropes of churchiness and the Inquisition, and of course, no Jesus.

The Deep Church in Dark Souls. 

The Chantry in Dragon Age isn’t straight-up evil--they’re a positive force in some ways, but they're also Inquisition-y toward mages and straight-up evil toward the Dalish elves. No Jesus. 

Mercedes Lackey’s various fantasy worlds usually have some analogue to Christianity (in the first of the Heralds novels, Talia, the main character, comes from a background that clearly draws from both evangelical Christianity and Amish/Mennonite/etc. tropes). There’s no Jesus analogue.

Hell, in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, the church is literally a Christian church. Like, it’s not a completely different world; it’s our world but a little different. And yet somehow Jesus is very absent. 

David Eddings’ Church in the Elenium and Tamuli series isn’t terrible, exactly, but it bounces back and forth between corrupt and hapless. It’s pretty clearly Fantasy Christianity, right down to the scriptures and the clerical titles and the Vatican infighting and yet, no Jesus. 

Terry Pratchett’s Church of Om isn’t wholly evil, but it’s a satire of overly “ritualistic” Christianity--ritual is sterile, ritual is a substitute for true belief--and causes a lot of war. No Jesus, of course.

Brandon Sanderson’s Vorinism arguably rushes right past the accidental antisemitism of “no Jesus makes you evil” into straight-up antisemitism, but that’s a whole other post.

I mean, look, I could make this list really long, especially if I wanted to get into “Evil Religions that do very Christian Inquisition things, but have a pantheon that’s loosely based on the Greeks or whatever,” and how they’re still very much cast in a Christian mold, but never have a Jesus analogue, but we’d be here all day.

If you’re not Christian, why do you think Jesus saved the world?

The point is, a lot of people doing worldbuilding want authoritarian priests and witch-hunting inquisitors and Women Wrecked The World patriarchy and abusive exorcisms of people who aren’t possessed and conversion therapy and all that. Some of them are Big Mad at Christianity, some aren’t, but either way, they believe they have something to say about the harm Christianity has done.

But the real-world people who did all the horrible things Christianity has done weren't practicing Christianity-but-without-Jesus. They were practicing Christianity full stop.

And yes, actual Judaism as practiced by actual alive Jews isn't actually anything that resembles Christianity, with or without Jesus. But the problem is, for most of the world, their understanding of what Judaism is is "basically Christianity, but without Jesus."

When you decide to do an analogue of Christianity to be the evil religion in your SFF/game, but you neglect to include *the central element of Christianity*, which is, you know, Jesus, what you're actually suggesting is that Jesus is the thing that redeems "Abrahamic religion." (BTW, stop using that term since y’all seem to use it to try to blame Jews and Muslims (and by extension, all the other Abrahamic religions that you don’t even seem aware exist) for stuff that is specifically and uniquely Christian.)

So if you think that Jesus is the thing that makes Christianity good, so much that you can’t imagine a Fantasy Evil Christianity Analogue that has a Jesus figure, what does that say about what you think about Jews? 

If you're pissed at Christianity, and if you want to create an SFF setting that contains Evil Religion, why can’t you seem to bear to actually include a Jesus figure in your portrayal?

You’re actually reifying the idea that Christianity (”true” Christianity that actually worships Jesus) is uniquely and inherently good, and all the things you see as trappings of it (belief in a single God, ritual, tradition, sacred texts) are bad without Jesus.

So again, unfriendly reminder that the main Abrahamic religion in which Jesus has no place isn’t the one that did all the colonialism and inquisitioning and witch-hunts and swordpoint conversions and Crusades, and isn’t the one currently taking away your reproductive rights and putting torture of LGBTQ kids into law and trying to make it impossible to exist comfortably if you don’t believe as they do.

That’s all been the Jesus-people, not us.

Maybe think about that next time you’re worldbuilding.

[romeoandjulietyouwish]

do you have any tips on how to start writing fics?

the outsiders brainrot actually has me coming up with ideas and i have a desire to start writing them into actual stories but i've never written outside of class papers/assignments and i don't really know where/how to start since it's all just my own prompts and ideas and there's no grading rubric lmaoooo

like do you plan out each fic with a list first or do you just start writing about the main plot point of the chapter and fill in around that out of order or do you just start writing and see where it takes you...

how do i know when to stop writing or decide on which endings/paths/plot points to go with... the deadly combo of indecisiveness and perfectionism along with having no guidelines or due dates is crippling me so im asking some of my fav authors (who have also been inspiring me to write and be creative)

OMG HI! I love talking about writing so buckle up.

First of all, starting creative writing is hard, especially when you haven't done it before. Heck, I struggle with it so much! For me there are two places I start from:

A moment or visual

When I'm writing a short fic, I don't plan them out, I just start writing and see what comes out. I'm not sure if you noticed, but most of my fics start and take place at night. That is because a visual that really sticks in my head is streetlights coming through windows or a light in a dark room.

I would recommend thinking of a visual you're drawn to or a feeling you want to capture. Start there and then build on the scene.

If that doesn't work for you, think about what you're trying to capture in the story. What character are you focusing on? What aspect of the character? And then start with that character's thoughts or maybe a flashback that leads into the point you're trying to make.

The plot

Right now, I've been writing a lot of one shots, but I really want to write a multi-chapter fic for the outsiders soon! This is the process I use for that.

I always do an outline when writing longer fics, it helps me figure out where the story is and where it needs to go and how long I have to get it there. Here's an example of what my outlines look like, I do one for each chapter.

Chapter 4 Korrin being more fatherly to Vax (big feelings) Vax finds Simon Vax’s backstory reveal (where’s Vex?) Leads to issues with the actual alliance because they find out it’s not recognized by Syngorn Hair braiding First time sharing a bed (v soft)

These are key moments I want in each chapter and the emotional and plot stakes.

And then there's the question of where to end. It's hard, I mean half the time I just end it when it feels right, but I know that's not helpful.

I would say that you should end the story when everything that needs to be achieved One of my biggest pet peeves with fanfic is people ending the stories before they're finished. And I know that it's an artistic choice sometimes, but personally I don't like it lmaooo.

Creative writing is hard as hell. I've been doing it since I was eight and it is still a struggle. When you write, let the story tell you where it wants to go. Sometimes that means it's completely different from what you started with and that's a good thing!

But all in all, don't be discouraged. It takes time to get started, but you should know that I've only been writing Outsiders fics for a month or two and everyone has been so kind and welcoming <3

[crimethinc]

Hong Kong: Anarchists in the Resistance to the Extradition Bill An Interview

Since 1997, when it ceased to be the last major colonial holding of Great Britain, Hong Kong has been a part of the People’s Republic of China, while maintaining a distinct political and legal system. In February, an unpopular bill was introduced that would make it possible to extradite fugitives in Hong Kong to countries that the Hong Kong government has no existing extradition agreements with—including mainland China. On June 9, over a million people took the streets in protest; on June12, protesters engaged in pitched confrontations with police; on June 16, two million people participated in one of the biggest marches in the city’s history. The following interview with an anarchist collective in Hong Kong explores the context of this wave of unrest. Our correspondents draw on over a decade of experience in the previous social movements in an effort to come to terms with the motivations that drive the participants, and elaborate upon the new forms of organization and subjectivation that define this new sequence of struggle.

In the United States, the most recent popular struggles have cohered around resisting Donald Trump and the extreme right. In France, the Gilets Jaunes movement drew anarchists, leftists, and far-right nationalists into the streets against Macron’s centrist government and each other. In Hong Kong, we see a social movement against a state governed by the authoritarian left. What challenges do opponents of capitalism and the state face in this context? How can we outflank nationalists, neoliberals, and pacifists who seek to control and exploit our movements?

As China extends its reach, competing with the United States and European Union for global hegemony, it is important to experiment with models of resistance against the political model it represents, while taking care to prevent neoliberals and reactionaries from capitalizing on popular opposition to the authoritarian left. Anarchists in Hong Kong are uniquely positioned to comment on this.

The front façade of the Hong Kong Police headquarters in Wan Chai, covered in egg yolks on the evening of June 21. Hundreds of protesters sealed the entrance, demanding the unconditional release of every person that has been arrested in relation to the struggle thus far. The banner below reads “Never Surrender.” Photo by KWBB from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

“The left” is institutionalized and ineffectual in Hong Kong. Generally, the “scholarist” liberals and “citizenist” right-wingers have a chokehold over the narrative whenever protests break out, especially when mainland China is involved.

In the struggle against the extradition bill, has the escalation in tactics made it difficult for those factions to represent or manage “the movement”? Has the revolt exceeded or undermined their capacity to shape the discourse? Do the events of the past month herald similar developments in the future, or has this been a common subterranean theme in popular unrest in Hong Kong already?

We think it’s important for everyone to understand that—thus far—what has happened cannot be properly understood to be “a movement.” It’s far too inchoate for that. What I mean is that, unlike the so-called “Umbrella Movement,” which escaped the control of its founding architects (the intellectuals who announced “Occupy Central With Love And Peace” a year in advance) very early on while adhering for the most part to the pacifistic, citizenist principles that they outlined, there is no real guiding narrative uniting the events that have transpired so far, no foundational credo that authorizes—or sanctifies—certain forms of action while proscribing others in order to cultivate a spectacular, exemplary façade that can be photographed and broadcast to screens around the world.

The short answer to your question, then, is… yes, thus far, nobody is authorized to speak on behalf of the movement. Everybody is scrambling to come to terms with a nascent form of subjectivity that is taking shape before us, now that the formal figureheads of the tendencies you referenced have been crushed and largely marginalized. That includes the “scholarist” fraction of the students, now known as “Demosisto,” and the right-wing “nativists,” both of which were disqualified from participating in the legislative council after being voted in.

Throughout this interview, we will attempt to describe our own intuitions about what this embryonic form of subjectivity looks like and the conditions from which it originates. But these are only tentative. Whatever is going on, we can say that it emerges from within a field from which the visible, recognized protagonists of previous sequences, including political parties, student bodies, and right-wing and populist groups, have all been vanquished or discredited. It is a field populated with shadows, haunted by shades, echoes, and murmurs. As of now, center stage remains empty.

This means that the more prevalent “default” modes of understanding are invoked to fill the gaps. Often, it appears that we are set for an unfortunate reprisal of the sequence that played itself out in the Umbrella Movement:

appalling show of police force

public outrage manifests itself in huge marches and subsequent occupations, organized and understood as sanctimonious displays of civil virtue

these occupations ossify into tense, puritanical, and paranoid encampments obsessed with policing behavior to keep it in line with the prescribed script

the movement collapses, leading to five years of disenchantment among young people who do not have the means to understand their failure to achieve universal suffrage as anything less than abject defeat.

Of course, this is just a cursory description of the Umbrella Movement of five years ago—and even then, there was a considerable amount of “excess”: novel and emancipatory practices and encounters that the official narrative could not account for. These experiences should be retrieved and recovered, though this is not the time or place for that. What we face now is another exercise in mystification, in which the protocols that come into operation every time the social fabric enters a crisis may foreclose the possibilities that are opening up. It would be premature to suggest that this is about to happen, however.

In our cursory and often extremely unpleasant perusals of Western far-left social media, we have noticed that all too often, the intelligence falls victim to our penchant to run the rule over this or that struggle. So much of what passes for “commentary” tends to fall on either side of two poles—impassioned acclamation of the power of the proletarian intelligence or cynical denunciation of its populist recuperation. None of us can bear the suspense of having to suspend our judgment on something outside our ken, and we hasten to find someone who can formalize this unwieldy mass of information into a rubric that we can comprehend and digest, in order that we can express our support or apprehension.

We have no real answers for anybody who wants to know whether they should care about what’s going on in Hong Kong as opposed to, say, France, Algeria, Sudan. But we can plead with those who are interested in understanding what’s happening to take the time to develop an understanding of this city. Though we don’t entirely share their politics and have some quibbles with the facts presented therein, we endorse any coverage of events in Hong Kong that Ultra, Nao, and Chuang have offered over the years to the English-speaking world. Ultra’s piece on the Umbrella Movement is likely the best account of the events currently available.

Our banner in the marches, which is usually found at the front of our drum squad. It reads “There are no ‘good citizens’, only potential criminals.” This banner was made in response to propaganda circulated by pro-Beijing establishmentarian political groups in Hong Kong, assuring “good citizens” everywhere that extradition measures do not threaten those with a sound conscience who are quietly minding their own business. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

If we understand “the left” as a political subject that situates questions of class struggle and labor at the center of its politics, it’s not entirely certain that such a thing even properly exists in Hong Kong. Of course, friends of ours run excellent blogs, and there are small grouplets and the like. Certainly, everybody talks about the wealth gap, rampant poverty, the capitalist class, the fact that we are all “打工仔” (jobbers, working folk) struggling to survive. But, as almost anywhere else, the primary form of subjectivity and identification that everyone subscribes to is the idea of citizenship in a national community. It follows that this imagined belonging is founded on negation, exclusion, and demarcation from the Mainland. You can only imagine the torture of seeing the tiresome “I’m a Hong Konger, not Chinese!” t-shirts on the subway, or hearing “Hong Kongers add oil!” (essentially, “way to go!”) chanted ad nauseam for an entire afternoon during recent marches.

It should interest readers from abroad to know that the word “left” in Hong Kong has two connotations. Obviously, for the generation of our parents and their parents before them, “Left” means Communist. Which is why “Left” could refer to a businessman who is a Party member, or a pro-establishment politician who is notoriously pro-China. For younger people, the word “Left” is a stigma (often conjugated with “plastic,” a word in Cantonese that sounds like “dickhead”) attached to a previous generation of activists who were involved in a prior sequence of social struggle—including struggles to prevent the demolition of Queen’s Ferry Pier in Central, against the construction of the high-speed Railway going through the northeast of Hong Kong into China, and against the destruction of vast tracts of farmland in the North East territories, all of which ended in demoralizing defeat. These movements were often led by articulate spokespeople—artists or NGO representatives who forged tactical alliances with progressives in the pan-democratic movement. The defeat of these movements, attributed to their apprehensions about endorsing direct action and their pleas for patience and for negotiations with authority, is now blamed on that generation of activists. All the rage and frustration of the young people who came of age in that period, heeding the direction of these figureheads who commanded them to disperse as they witnessed yet another defeat, yet another exhibition of orchestrated passivity, has progressively taken a rightward turn. Even secondary and university student bodies that have traditionally been staunchly center-left and progressive have become explicitly nationalist.

One crucial tenet among this generation, emerging from a welter of disappointments and failures, is a focus on direct action, and a consequent refusal of “small group discussions,” “consensus,” and the like. This was a theme that first appeared in the umbrella movement—most prominently in the Mong Kok encampment, where the possibilities were richest, but where the right was also, unfortunately, able to establish a firm foothold. The distrust of the previous generation remains prevalent. For example, on the afternoon of June 12, in the midst of the street fights between police and protesters, several members of a longstanding social-democratic party tasked themselves with relaying information via microphone to those on the front lines, telling them where to withdraw to if they needed to escape, what holes in the fronts to fill, and similar information. Because of this distrust of parties, politicians, professional activists and their agendas, many ignored these instructions and instead relied on word of mouth information or information circulating in online messaging groups.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the founding myth of this city is that refugees and dissidents fled communist persecution to build an oasis of wealth and freedom, a fortress of civil liberties safeguarded by the rule of law. In view of that, on a mundane level, it could be said that many in Hong Kong already understand themselves as being in revolt, in the way they live and the freedoms they enjoy—and that they consider this identity, however vacuous and tenuous it may be, to be a property that has to be defended at all costs. It shouldn’t be necessary to say much here about the fact that much of the actual ecological “wealth” that constitutes this city—its most interesting (and often poorest) neighborhoods, a whole host of informal clubs, studios, and dwelling places situated in industrial buildings, farmland in the Northeast territories, historic walled villages and rural districts—are being pillaged and destroyed piece by piece by the state and private developers, to the resounding indifference of these indignant citoyens.

In any case, if liberals are successful in deploying their Cold War language about the need to defend civil liberties and human rights from the encroaching Red Tide, and right-wing populist calls to defend the integrity of our identity also gain traction, it is for these deep-rooted and rather banal historical reasons. Consider the timing of this struggle, how it exploded when images of police brutalizing and arresting young students went viral—like a perfect repetition of the prelude to the umbrella movement. This happened within a week of the annual candlelight vigil commemorating those killed in the Tiananmen Massacre on June 4, 1989, a date remembered in Hong Kong as the day tanks were called in to steamroll over students peacefully gathering in a plea for civil liberties. It is impossible to overstate the profundity of this wound, this trauma, in the formation of the popular psyche; this was driven home when thousands of mothers gathered in public, in an almost perfect mirroring of the Tiananmen mothers, to publicly grieve for the disappeared futures of their children, now eclipsed in the shadow of the communist monolith. It stupefies the mind to think that the police—not once now, but twice—broke the greatest of all taboos: opening fire on the young.

In light of this, it would be naïve to suggest that anything significant has happened yet to suggest that to escaping the “chokehold” that you describe “scholarist” liberals and “citizenist” right-wingers maintaining on the narrative here. Both of these factions are simply symptoms of an underlying condition, aspects of an ideology that has to be attacked and taken apart in practice. Perhaps we should approach what is happening right now as a sort of psychoanalysis in public, with the psychopathology of our city exposed in full view, and see the actions we engage in collectively as a chance to work through traumas, manias, and obsessive complexes together. While it is undoubtedly dismaying that the momentum and morale of this struggle is sustained, across the social spectrum, by a constant invocation of the “Hong Kong people,” who are incited to protect their home at all costs, and while this deeply troubling unanimity covers over many problems,1 we accept the turmoil and the calamity of our time, the need to intervene in circumstances that are never of our own choosing. However bleak things may appear, this struggle offers a chance for new encounters, for the elaboration of new grammars.

Graffiti seen in the road occupation in Admiralty near the government quarters, reading “Carry a can of paint with you, it’s a remedy for canine rabies.” Cops are popularly referred to as “dogs” here. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

What has happened to the discourse of civility in the interlude between the umbrella movement and now? Did it contract, expand, decay, transform?

That’s an interesting question to ask. Perhaps the most significant thing that we can report about the current sequence that, astonishingly, when a small fringe of protesters attempted to break into the legislative council on June 9 following a day-long march, it was not universally criticized as an act of lunacy or, worse, the work of China or police provocateurs. Bear in mind that on June 9 and 12, the two attempts to break into the legislative council building thus far, the legislative assembly was not in session; people were effectively attempting to break into an empty building.

Now, much as we have our reservations about the effectiveness of doing such a thing in the first place,2 this is extraordinary, considering the fact that the last attempt to do so, which occurred in a protest against development in the North East territories shortly before the umbrella movement, took place while deliberations were in session and was broadly condemned or ignored.3 Some might suggest that the legacy of the Sunflower movement in Taiwan remains a big inspiration for many here; others might say that the looming threat of Chinese annexation is spurring the public to endorse desperate measures that they would otherwise chastise.

On the afternoon of June 12, when tens of thousands of people suddenly found themselves assaulted by riot police, scrambling to escape from barrages of plastic bullets and tear gas, nobody condemned the masked squads in the front fighting back against the advancing lines of police and putting out the tear gas canisters as they landed. A longstanding, seemingly insuperable gulf has always existed between the “peaceful” protesters (pejoratively referred to as “peaceful rational non-violent dickheads” by most of us on the other side) and the “bellicose” protesters who believe in direct action. Each side tends to view the other with contempt.

Protesters transporting materials to build barricades. The graffiti on the wall can be roughly (and liberally) translated as “Hong Kongers ain’t nuthin’ to fuck wit’.” Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

The online forum lihkg has functioned as a central place for young people to organize, exchange political banter, and circulate information relating to this struggle. For the first time, a whole host of threads on this site have been dedicated to healing this breach or at least cultivating respect for those who do nothing but show up for the marches every Sunday—if only because marches that number in the millions and bring parts of the city to a temporary standstill are a pretty big deal, however mind-numbingly boring they may be in actuality. The last time the marches were anywhere close to this huge, a Chief Executive stepped down and the amending of a law regarding freedom of speech was moved to the back burner. All manner of groups are attempting to invent a way to contribute to the struggle, the most notable of which is the congregation of Christians that have assembled in front of police lines at the legislative council, chanting the same hymn without reprieve for a week and a half. That hymn has become a refrain that will likely reverberate through struggles in the future, for better or worse.

Are there clear openings or lines of flight in this movement that would allow for interventions that undermine the power of the police, of the law, of the commodity, without producing a militant subject that can be identified and excised?

It is difficult to answer this question. Despite the fact that proletarians compose the vast majority of people waging this struggle—proletarians whose lives are stolen from them by soulless jobs, who are compelled to spend more and more of their wages paying rents that continue to skyrocket because of comprehensive gentrification projects undertaken by state officials and private developers (who are often one and the same)—you must remember that “free market capitalism” is taken by many to be a defining trait of the cultural identity of Hong Kong, distinguishing it from the “red” capitalism managed by the Communist Party. What currently exists in Hong Kong, for some people, is far from ideal; when one says “the rich,” it invokes images of tycoon monopolies—cartels and communist toadies who have formed a dark pact with the Party to feed on the blood of the poor.

So, just as people are ardent for a government and institutions that we can properly call “our own”—yes, including the police—they desire a capitalism that we can finally call “our own,” a capitalism free from corruption, political chicanery, and the like. It’s easy to chuckle at this, but like any community gathered around a founding myth of pioneers fleeing persecution and building a land of freedom and plenty from sacrifice and hard work… it’s easy to understand why this fixation exerts such a powerful hold on the imagination.

This is a city that fiercely defends the initiative of the entrepreneur, of private enterprise, and understands every sort of hustle as a way of making a living, a tactic in the tooth-and-nail struggle for survival. This grim sense of life as survival is omnipresent in our speech; when we speak of “working,” we use the term “搵食,” which literally means looking for our next meal. That explains why protesters have traditionally been very careful to avoid alienating the working masses by actions such as blockading a road used by busses transporting working stiffs back home.

While we understand that much of our lives are preoccupied with and consumed by work, nobody dares to propose the refusal of work, to oppose the indignity of being treated as producer-consumers under the dominion of the commodity. The police are chastised for being “running dogs” of an evil totalitarian empire, rather than being what they actually are: the foot soldiers of the regime of property.

What is novel in the current situation is that many people now accept that acts of solidarity with the struggle, however minute,4 can lead to arrest, and are prepared to tread this shifting line between legality and illegality. It is no exaggeration to say that we are witnessing the appearance of a generation that is prepared for imprisonment, something that was formerly restricted to “professional activists” at the forefront of social movements. At the same time, there is no existing discussion regarding what the force of law is, how it operates, or the legitimacy of the police and prisons as institutions. People simply feel they need to employ measures that transgress the law in order the preserve the sanctity of the Law, which has been violated and dishonored by the cowboys of communist corruption.

However, it is important to note that this is the first time that proposals for strikes in various sectors and general strikes have been put forward regarding an issue that is, on the surface of it, unrelated to labor.

Our friends in the “Housewives Against Extradition” section of the march on September 9. The picture shows a group of housewives and aunties, many of whom were on the streets for the first time. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

How do barricades and occupations like the one from a few days ago reproduce themselves in the context of Hong Kong?

Barricades are simply customary now. Whenever people gather en masse and intend to occupy a certain territory to establish a front, barricades are built quickly and effectively. There is a creeping sense now that occupations are becoming routine and futile, physically taxing and ultimately inefficient. What’s interesting in this struggle is that people are really spending a lot of time thinking about what “works,” what requires the least expenditure of effort and achieves the maximum effect in paralyzing parts of the city or interrupting circulation, rather than what holds the greatest moral appeal to an imagined “public” watching everything from the safety of the living room—or even, conversely, what “feels” the most militant.

There have been many popular proposals for “non-cooperative” quotidian actions such as jamming up an entire subway train by coordinating groups of friends to pack the cars with people and luggage for a whole afternoon, or cancelling bank accounts and withdrawing savings from savings accounts in order to create inflation. Some have spread suggestions regarding how to dodge paying taxes for the rest of your life. These might not seem like much, but what’s interesting is the relentless circulation of suggestions from all manner of quarters, from people with varying kinds of expertise, about how people can act on their own initiative where they live or work and in their everyday lives, rather than imagining “the struggle” as something that is waged exclusively on the streets by masked, able-bodied youth.

Whatever criticisms anybody might have about what has happened thus far, this formidable exercise in collective intelligence is really incredibly impressive—an action can be proposed in a message group or on an anonymous message board thread, a few people organize to do it, and it’s done without any fuss or fanfare. Forms circulate and multiply as different groups try them out and modify them.

In the West, Leninists and Maoists have been screaming bloody murder about “CIA Psyop” or “Western backed color revolution.” Have hegemonic forces in Hong Kong invoked the “outside agitator” theme on the ground at a narrative level?

Actually, that is the official line of the Chief Executive, who has repeatedly said that she regards the events of the past week as riotous behavior incited by foreign interests that are interested in conducting a “color revolution” in the city. I’m not sure if she would repeat that line now that she has apologized publicly for “creating contradictions” and discord with her decisions, but all the same—it’s hilarious that tankies share the exact same opinion as our formal head of state.

It’s an open secret that various pro-democracy NGOs, parties, and thinktanks receive American funding. It’s not some kind of occult conspiracy theory that only tankies know about. But these tankies are suggesting that the platform that coordinates the marches—a broad alliance of political parties, NGOs, and the like—is also the ideological spearhead and architect of the “movement,” which is simply a colossal misunderstanding. That platform has been widely denounced, discredited, and mocked by the “direct action” tendencies that are forming all around us, and it is only recently that, as we said above, there are slightly begrudging threads on the Internet offering them indirect praise for being able to coordinate marches that actually achieve something. If only tankies would stop treating everybody like mindless neo-colonial sheep acting at the cryptic behest of Western imperialist intelligence.

That said, it would be dishonest if we failed to mention that, alongside threads on message boards discussing the niceties of direct action tactics abroad, there are also threads alerting everyone to the fact that voices in the White House have expressed their disapproval for the law. Some have even celebrated this. Also, there is a really wacky petition circulating on Facebook to get people to appeal to the White House for foreign intervention. I’m sure one would see these sorts of things in any struggle of this scale in any non-Western city. They aren’t smoking guns confirming imperialist manipulation; they are fringe phenomena that are not the driving force behind events thus far.

Have any slogans, neologisms, new slang, popular talking points, or funny phrases emerged that are unique to the situation?

Yes, lots, though we’re not sure how we would go about translating them. But the force that is generating these memes, that is inspiring all these Whatsapp and Telegram stickers and catchphrases, is actually the police force.

Between shooting people in the eye with plastic bullets, flailing their batons about, and indiscriminately firing tear gas canisters at peoples’ heads and groins, they also found the time to utter some truly classic pearls that have made their way on to t-shirts. One of these bons mots is the rather unfortunate and politically incorrect “liberal cunt.” In the heat of a skirmish between police and protesters, a policeman called someone at the frontlines by that epithet. All our swear words in Cantonese revolve around male and female genitalia, unfortunately; we have quite a few words for private parts. In Cantonese, this formulation doesn’t sound as sensible as it does in English. Said together in Cantonese, “liberal” and “cunt” sounds positively hilarious.

Does this upheaval bear any connections to the fishball riots or Hong Kong autonomy from a few years ago?

A: The “fishball riots” were a demonstrative lesson in many ways, especially for people like us, who found ourselves spectators situated at some remove from the people involved. It was a paroxysmic explosion of rage against the police, a completely unexpected aftershock from the collapse of the umbrella movement. An entire party, the erstwhile darlings of right-wing youth everywhere, “Hong Kong Indigenous,” owes its whole career to this riot. They made absolutely sure that everyone knew they were attending, showing up in uniform and waving their royal blue flags at the scene. They were voted into office, disqualified, and incarcerated—one of the central members is now seeking asylum in Germany, where his views on Hong Kong independence have apparently softened considerably in the course of hanging out with German Greens. That is fresh in the memory of folks who know that invisibility is now paramount.

What effect has Joshua Wong’s release had?

A: We are not sure how surprised readers from overseas will be to discover, after perhaps watching that awful documentary about Joshua Wong on Netflix, that his release has not inspired much fanfare at all. Demosisto are now effectively the “Left Plastic” among a new batch of secondary students.

Are populist factions functioning as a real force of recuperation?

A: All that we have written above illustrates how, while the struggle currently escapes the grasp of every established group, party, and organization, its content is populist by default. The struggle has attained a sprawling scale and drawn in a wide breadth of actors; right now, it is expanding by the minute. But there is little thought given to the fact that many of those who are most obviously and immediately affected by the law will be people whose work takes place across the border—working with and providing aid to workers in Shenzhen, for instance.

Nobody is entirely sure what the actual implications of the law are. Even accounts written by professional lawyers vary quite widely, and this gives press outlets that brand themselves as “voices of the people”5 ample space to frame the entire issue as simply a matter of Hong Kong’s constitutional autonomy being compromised, with an entire city in revolt against the imposition of an all-encompassing surveillance state.

Perusing message boards and conversing with people around the government complex, you would think that the introduction of this law means that expressions of dissent online or objectionable text messages to friends on the Mainland could lead to extradition. This is far from being the case, as far as the letter of the law goes. But the events of the last few years, during which booksellers in Hong Kong have been disappeared for selling publications banned on the Mainland and activists in Hong Kong have been detained and deprived of contact upon crossing the border, offer little cause to trust a party that is already notorious for cooking up charges and contravening the letter of the law whenever convenient. Who knows what it will do once official authorization is granted.

Paranoia invariably sets in whenever the subject of China comes up. On the evening of June 12, when the clouds of tear gas were beginning to clear up, the founder of a Telegram message group with 10,000+ active members was arrested by the police, who commanded him to unlock his phone. His testimony revealed that he was told that even if he refused, they would hack his phone anyway. Later, the news reported that he was using a Xiaomi phone at the time. This news went viral, with many commenting that his choice of phone was both bold and idiotic, since urban legend has it that Xiaomi phones not only have a “backdoor” that permits Xiaomi to access the information on every one of its phones and assume control of the information therein, but that Xiaomi—by virtue of having its servers in China—uploads all information stored on its cloud to the database of party overlords. It is futile to try to suggest that users who are anxious about such things can take measures to seal backdoors, or that background information leeching can be detected by simply checking the data usage on your phone. Xiaomi is effectively regarded as an expertly engineered Communist tracking device, and arguments about it are no longer technical, but ideological to the point of superstition.

This “post-truth” dimension of this struggle, compounded with all the psychopathological factors that we enumerated above, makes everything that is happening that much more perplexing, that much more overwhelming. For so long, fantasy has been the impetus for social struggle in this city—the fantasy of a national community, urbane, free-thinking, civilized and each sharing in the negative freedoms that the law provides, the fantasy of electoral democracy… Whenever these affirmative fantasies are put at risk, they are defended and enacted in public, en masse, and the sales for “I Am Hong Konger” [sic] go through the roof.

This is what gives the proceedings a distinctly conservative, reactionary flavor, despite how radical and decentralized the new forms of action are. All we can do as a collective is seek ways to subvert this fantasy, to expose and demonstrate its vacuity in form and content.

At this time, it feels surreal that everybody around us is so certain, so clear about what they need to do—oppose this law with every means that they have available to them—while the reasons for doing so remain hopelessly obscure. It could very well be the case that this suffocating opacity is our lot for the time being, in this phase premised upon more action, less talk, on the relentless need to keep abreast of and act on the flow of information that is constantly accelerating around us.

In so many ways, what we see happening around us is a fulfillment of what we have dreamt of for years. So many bemoan the “lack of political leadership,” which they see as a noxious habit developed over years of failed movements, but the truth is that those who are accustomed to being protagonists of struggles, including ourselves as a collective, have been overtaken by events. It is no longer a matter of a tiny scene of activists concocting a set of tactics and programs and attempting to market them to the public. “The public” is taking action all around us, exchanging techniques on forums, devising ways to evade surveillance, to avoid being arrested at all costs. It is now possible to learn more about fighting the police in one afternoon than we did in a few years.

In the midst of this breathless acceleration, is it possible to introduce another rhythm, in which we can engage in a collective contemplation of what has become of us, and what we are becoming as we rush headlong into the tumult?

As ever, we stand here, fighting alongside our neighbors, ardently looking for friends.

Hand-written statements by protesters, weathered after an afternoon of heavy rain. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

In reflecting on the problems concealed by the apparent unanimity of the “Hong Kong people,” we might start by asking who that framework suggests that this city is for, who comprises this imaginary subject. We have seen Nepalese and Pakistani brothers and sisters on the streets, but they hesitate to make their presence known for fear of being accused of being thugs employed by the police. ↩

“The places of institutional power exert a magnetic attraction on revolutionaries. But when the insurgents manage to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya or in Wisconsin, it’s only to discover empty places, that is, empty of power, and furnished without any taste. It’s not to prevent the “people” from “taking power” that they are so fiercely kept from invading such places, but to prevent them from realizing that power no longer resides in the institutions. There are only deserted temples there, decommissioned fortresses, nothing but stage sets—real traps for revolutionaries.” –The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends ↩

Incidentally, that attempt was a good deal more spontaneous and successful. The police had hardly imagined that crowds of people who had sat peacefully with their heads in their hands feeling helpless while the developments were authorized would suddenly start attempting to rush the council doors by force, breaking some of the windows. ↩

On the night of June 11, young customers in a McDonald’s in Admiralty were all searched and had their identity cards recorded. On June 12, a video went viral showing a young man transporting a box of bottled water to protesters who were being brutalized by a squad of policemen with batons. ↩

To give two rather different examples, this includes the populist, xenophobic, and vehemently anti-Communist Apple Daily, and the “Hong Kong Free Press,” an independent English online rag of the “angry liberal” stripe run by expatriates that has an affinity for young localist/nativist leaders. ↩

[skypalacearchitect]

“Our country has changed,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his decision in Shelby County v. Holder. Congress had reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in 2006 by a 98-0 Senate vote and a gaping 390-33 tally in the House, but in 2013 the Supreme Court’s conservative justices voted 5-4 to strike down its key pre-authorization provision.

The result has been predictable ― systematic disenfranchisement of voters across the South and beyond, undoubtedly contributing to the defeat of Democratic gubernatorial candidates in Florida and Georgia (the latter is still being contested), and perhaps even enabling Ted Cruz in Texas to keep his Senate seat.

Now that Democrats have reclaimed the House and key governor’s mansions, and flipped hundreds of state legislative seats, we have a chance to do something about it. It’s time for them to go all-in on the universal right to transparent and accessible voting.

Re-reading the Roberts decision the day after the 2018 midterms is brutal. He blithely assures America that the days of Jim Crow are over and that the “current conditions” in no way resemble those of 1965. He writes that “while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.” Because of that perceived mismatch, he claimed, he and his four colleagues took the “gravest and most delicate duty” of the Supreme Court and struck down a law as unconstitutional. He said that racism was still bad, of course, but that Congress would have to come up with some new rubric to protect the franchise of voters of color.

Congress, or rather the Republicans who have maintained control of at least one chamber of Congress since 2013, has not developed a new rubric. Instead, Republican lawmakers and officials, especially those in the very states governed by the VRA, have touted the nonexistent threat of voter fraud in order to systematically re-disenfranchise voters of color through a variety of means.

Some of their techniques are almost laughable, such as the preposterous claim to have “forgotten” power cords for the few voting machines sent to a precinct in Gwinnett County, Georgia. Others are dangerous, such as when Georgia police allegedly started harassing Democrats working to get out the vote. Mostly, though, the tactics are simple. Pass voter ID laws. Question every black registration. Close polling locations. Make the remaining locations remote, inaccessible, understaffed and under-equipped. Pour resources into voting sites in conservative districts. Reap the electoral rewards. These tactics have, regrettably, worked to ensure Republicans can continue their white minority rule.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

In this Oct. 30 photo, rejected mail-in ballots sit in a box as members of the canvassing board verify signatures on ballots at the Miami-Dade County Elections Department in Florida.

I wish we had transformed our voting system in 2009 after President Barack Obama took office, but there are many would-be priorities that slipped away during that brief window of total Democratic control. Once the 2010 midterms sailed by with massive Republican victories, we were well on our way to the undermining of democracy through virulent gerrymandering and widespread suppression.

Now it’s time to turn the tables. Instead of seeking nefarious benefits, though, Democrats are in luck that the party does best when they do what’s right. The more people receive their justly due franchise, in general, the more Democrats are elected. But Democrats should push for voting rights everywhere, rather than targeting potential strongholds, because the very nature of our democratic system of government depends on it.

The new House majority should draft clearly written (i.e., short) legislation that mandates automatic registration for all eligible voters and simple but radical measures like universal vote-by-mail. Then, Democrats should attach it to everything that comes out of the House, no matter how mundane. Why not make use of all the bills that pass without debate, like renaming a Texas courthouse or a post office in Florida or Virginia? While they are at the newly dubbed “U.S. Navy Seaman Dakota Kyle Rigsby Post Office” in Palmyra, Virginia, let’s make sure people can use the facility to send in their ballot without needing to take off work.

Republicans will cry foul and raise the specter of fraud, but right now the left can rebroadcast scenes from Tuesday’s election of lines snaking around the block and ballots rejected or altered, and take up the mantle of the defenders of democracy itself. Heck, remote balloting even saves money on staffing polling places and buying expensive machines, so it’s yet another argument that the Democrats are the party of fiscal prudence.

BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is out, but not before he put in place a vote suppression regime that may have thrown the state to Donald Trump in 2016.

We’ve got to do the same thing in every state and county that we can. Wisconsin’s new governor-elect, Tony Evers, must turn from defeating Scott Walker to fighting his heavily gerrymandered legislature that remains deep red. Walker’s voter ID regime arguably threw the state to Donald Trump in 2016; that can’t happen again. Michigan’s new governor, Gretchen Whitmer, faces similar challenges, though there’s less evidence its ID law swung the state in 2016.

Even polar opposites Kansas and New York can come into play. In the former, vote-suppressor-in-chief Kris Kobach lost the governor’s race to Democratic rival Laura Kelly. We’re not going to see Kansas turn blue in the next presidential election, but she has to fight Kobach’s legacy because Kansas’ citizens deserve free and fair elections. On the bluer end of the spectrum, New York’s backward voting laws have contributed to preventing the state from being the progressive forerunner it should be. Precinct by precinct, let’s reclaim our democracy.

Can we get a new Voting Rights Act through the Senate and onto Trump’s desk? Would he sign it? Would the Supreme Court toss this one out as well? That’s a fight I’m eager to see the Democrats take on.

Force the GOP to own its position as a minority party supported only by vote suppression. Make transparency, accessibility and universality of the franchise the watchword of the new Democratic House majority. It’s politically smart. It’s also the right thing to do. It’s too rare that ethics and savvy come together when talking about politics, so seize the moment.

[obfuscobble]

Passerby here - in regards to Fate/Grand Order, the reason they don't explain stuff in detail is because they kind of already did? The Fuyuki prologue in the actual mobile game is a longer, more in-depth tutorial, while the anime is an hour-long film. They can't do EVERYTHING in the short time slot they have. Also, the "explanation on Servants" thing is something repeated in every adaption and spinoff and just gets very redundant after a while, so it getting cut is understandable.

Also, arguing that they HAVE to explain EVERYTHING for newbies within the short 1 hour time slot for the F/GO anime is nonsensical considering the setting of Fuyuki - everything and everyone in Fuyuki (such as the statue Medusa Lancer destroys) only has significance if you’re familiar with Fate/stay night proper, and explaining EVERYTHING would waste time, especially since the premise of “Chaldea has no idea what originally happened in Fuyuki” makes explanation impossible anyway. Basically, you’re treating the Fate/Grand Order anime like some sort of standalone story, when in reality it’s more like the Rogue One to Fate/stay night’s mainline Star Wars, or the Fantastic Beasts to Harry Potter. Even if it’s a spinoff, demanding that it explain everything all over again is pointless and would detract from the plot given the very limited timespan, especially when the premise IS so heavily based in past installments. I hope you understand my points here.

I perfectly understand your points, but please keep in mind that you are making the exact same points as your predecessor which I have already rebuffed politely by reiterating my points of debate.  I thank you for trying to state this case in more detail again, but my counter points remain solid and admittedly mired in my initial reactions to the material.  The strength of my initial negative reactions is what prompted me to write my post, and upon re-view of the film, my problems with its structure, choreography, and colour design remain.

If I may attempt to restate your points, trying hard not to make a strawman : 1. there’s more info on everything in the game, 2. there’s more explanation of everything in the rest of the Nasuverse media, 3. this is for fans who already know everything and trying to explain too much in a short one hour featurette would be wasteful, 4. this should absolutely not be viewed in a standalone manner.

1. there’s more info on everything in the gameI understand this.  But the movie was, as I was approaching it, supposed to get me pumped to play the game had I not already done so.  It did not.

2. there’s more explanation of everything in the rest of the Nasuverse mediaI understand this.  But it doesn’t defend against bad story structure.

3. this is for fans who already know everything and trying to explain too much in a short one hour featurette would be wastefulI contend this.  Allow me to voice my contention in two manners, one polite, and one rude.Politely: Fans who enjoy this are absolutely deserving of their enjoyment, and as a fan placation vehicle this movie is certainly fantastic.  I do not want to rid anyone of their enjoyment of this featurette.  People should hold on to their joy where they can find it. : )  However, I still believe that a shortened running length was not truly a bar to cut out all explanation.  I’m not expecting someone to dump typemoon.wikia.com onscreen.  I was simply stating that within the world that the movie itself created with a protagonist who knows nothing and a fresh new aspect of the Nasuverse being presented, that a tiiiny bit more explanation would have been completely natural to present within the storytelling framework of the brand new setting.  To fully explain Servant structure and the history of Fuyuki is not necessary.  To explain more about Chaldaea and how it interacts with these structures is highly desirable.  That Fuyuki is a mystery to Chaldaea is absolutely fine and a good mystery to hook the audience.  That Chaldaea remains a complete mystery to the audience, apart from clichés that the audience can place upon it through inference, is unforgivable.Rudely: yeah I get it they made a pretty movie out of your waifus look at your waifus in good animation happy new year nasufans here’s a tv special to sell more nasushit including 5000 yen dvds but it’s worth it because WOW YOUR WAIFU she’s moving and going UGUU this is such a CATHARTIC pandering MOMENT you can’t wait to heal her with YOUR MAGIC RITUAL YA KNOW WHAT IM SAYIN[* “your waifu“ in this case referring to the fandom at large, not you specifically, holdharmonysacred, as I do not wish to make assumptions about you.]

4. this should absolutely not be viewed in a standalone manner.You bring up a comparison of Fate/ Grand Order to Rogue One and Fantastic Beasts.  Here is where I very much would like to make more comparisons, as I have seen those movies and their attendant series as well!  However, first it is important to keep in mind that whether one chooses to view a film as a standalone vehicle or as a chapter of a larger narrative is up to the individual viewer.  Yet, ask any good author or script editor and they will tell you that the internal story of a feature should hold itself as a standalone story with good arc structure.  While it’s true that Grand Order had a proper arc structure (problem, mysterious anomaly; action, fight to stop anomaly; resolution, bad guy temporarily wins, time to steel ourselves to do this again), I feel that it failed to present a story that an outsider could care about.

Honestly, Rogue One also failed to impress me as a standalone vehicle.  It was infinitely more pandering than Grand Order, although at least it didn’t leave too many questions unanswered.  Largely, it had more running time to establish its world, which Grand Order did not have.  What Rogue One had in common with Grand Order was a dearth of likeable protagonists.   At least the motivations of Rogue One’s antagonists are clear though, unlike R.E.O. Lev’s.

Fantastic Beasts actually worked as a standalone film.  Parts of it that connected directly to the Potter storyline [erhem, Grindelwald] were frankly its worst aspects.  Yet apart from that, the movie clearly established through its action and a bit of exposition the stakes of its world.  There are wizards and magical beasts and non-wizards, the wizards try to hide from the non-wizards, never the twin shall meet, and in America magical beasts are not allowed to run free in non-wizard areas.  The audience doesn’t have to know about rulings of the wizengamot or the history of wizarding in America to appreciate these in-story rules.  Magic is shown throughout the movie, and major magical plot points like the obscurial are explained, though not exactly perfectly.  But a bully attempt is made.  One can watch Fantastic Beasts without knowledge of the Potterverse and still follow its structure while appreciating its characters who are presented with definite emotional ties and stakes in the movie.  It’s not an outstanding movie, but it does very well to establish the basics of its world.

On the other hand, I maintain that Fate/ Grand Order failed to firmly establish the very basic internal rules that its world runs by either through exposition or onscreen action, preferring to hint at them, and that its characters were flat, especially the main character who could have been replaced with a soggy cardboard cutout for all it would have mattered. 

I understand that the main character of this movie is supposed to be an audience insert surrogate, and a standin for an in-game protagonist, but that’s honestly no excuse for having him be void of emotional reaction to anything in the world around him except Mash.  Mash is hurt?  Oh noes, she’s pretty and talked to me so I guess we’re dating and now I’m upset.  I’ve been transported to some techno-magic base? Oh well.  Everyone else here has died en masse?  Oh well.  Now I’m in the past and things are attacking me?  Oh well.  That girl just died? Oh well.  The guy who was nice to me turns out to be evil and he has some weird plan to do with wiping out the entire human race?  OH WELL.  I’m not asking for him to scream or anything, but the most proactive action he took in the entire movie to move the plot forward was to hold Mash’s hand in her climactic battle, and even then he did so blandly, not even a “ganbatte” or a “You mean a lot to me so don’t give up.”  Every other scene where he took an action, he had stumbled into that place or been pushed there by other characters or the plot at large.  The guy fell asleep during the one scene that would have explained shit to him and therefore us.  How are we supposed to like him as a protagonist?

In conclusion, I do indeed understand the points you laid out in your asks, but feel that I have previously responded to most of them.  Of the new concerns you bring up, my previous complaints about Fate/ Grand Order still hold sway.  And yet, I do not at all wish to say that people should feel bad for liking Fate/ Grand Order.  My stance is that I did not enjoy it, and it failed the rubric by which I was watching it.  You state that my rubric is flawed, and that is a fair enough criticism.  Please continue to enjoy the Fate/ universe and the Grand Order game.  I hope they all bring you lots of continued enjoyment in the coming year!

[deniscollins]

The Trouble With Empathy

Does your organization assess job candidates empathy skills? If not, why not? If yes, does your organization conduct empathy training? How? Why?

When my daughter started remote kindergarten last month, the schedule sent to parents included more than reading, math, art and other traditional subjects. She’ll also have sessions devoted to “social and emotional learning.” Themes range from listening skills and reading nonverbal cues to how to spot and defuse bullying.

As millions of students start the school year at home, staring at glowing tablets, families worry that they will miss out on the intangible lessons in mutual understanding that come with spending hours a day with kids and adults outside their own household. We want children to grasp perspectives of people different from themselves. Yet in recent years, empathy — whether we can achieve it; whether it does the good we think — has become a vexed topic.

While teachers attempt to teach empathy through screens, the national context has become complicated in the months since the police killing of George Floyd. “Because our white leaders lack compassion and empathy, Black people continue to die,” wrote a columnist in The Chicago Sun-Times. When Joe Biden posted a video declaring that “the pain is too intense for one community to bear alone,” journalists called the message an effort to “project empathy” — while activists said empathy was not enough.

At the Republican National Convention, Ja’Ron Smith, a deputy assistant to President Trump, assured the audience that the president is empathizer in chief. “I just wish everyone would see the deep empathy he shows the families whose loved ones were killed due to senseless violence,” Mr. Smith said.

Few would quarrel with a kindergarten teacher’s noble efforts to teach listening skills to 5-year-olds. But as my daughter and her classmates get older, they will run into thornier dilemmas, our era’s version of old questions: Are some divides too great for common humanity to bridge? When we attempt to step into the shoes of those very different from us, do we do more harm than good? At the same time, trends in American education have worked at cross-purposes, nurturing social and emotional learning in some ways, hampering it in others.

Our capacity to see one another as fellow humans, to connect across differences, is the foundation of a liberal pluralist society. Yet skeptics say that what seems like empathy often may be another form of presumption, condescension or domination. In his 2016 book “Against Empathy,” the psychologist Paul Bloom argued that empathy can cloud rational judgment and skews toward people “who are close to us, those who are similar to us and those we see as more attractive or vulnerable and less scary.” The scholar and activist bell hooks put the matter more starkly. White desire to feel Black experience is predatory, exploitative, “eating the Other,” she wrote.

It’s impossible to perfectly inhabit another person’s experience. The important question is the value of the effort, and whether it leaves us separated by an asymptote or a chasm. Can a straight TV writer create an authentic gay sitcom character? If an author of European descent writes a novel from the perspective of Indigenous people, is it an empathic journey, or an imperialist incursion? “I don’t want to throw out what empathy is trying to do,” Alisha Gaines, a professor of African-American literature at Florida State University, told me. “I’m very critical of it though. Empathy has to be considered in the context of institutions and power.”

Ms. Gaines has devoted much of her scholarship to interrogating well-meaning white attempts at empathy for the Black experience, from the white journalist John Howard Griffin’s 1961 book “Black Like Me,” an account of his project to pass as a Black man on a trip through the Deep South, to a modern re-enactment of the Underground Railroad — whose organizers promised “empathy to the extreme,.” Ms. Gaines said: “If for 90 minutes I run around and look for the lantern in the window, what do I take from this into my everyday life? This is playing a slave, not an enslaved person. The humanity gets evacuated out of it.”

Yet, as a literature professor, she wants students to see books as passageways to experiences unlike their own. “I love books because I’m learning something about people I didn’t understand. I’m connecting,” Ms. Gaines told me. “I wasn’t reflected in books I read as a kid. I understood myself through ‘Anne of Green Gables’ and ‘Little Women’ — little Black kids often have to understand themselves through white protagonists. 

At the same time, for me as a little girl reading ‘Anne of Green Gables,’ as much as I saw myself in her precociousness and her deep feeling, I also knew there wasn’t something speaking exactly to me. It was not a perfect mirror. We want to connect to the material on an emotional register and make space for the fact that each story tells a particular story.”

The impulse to participate in the feelings of another may be biological, rooted in our neurology. In the 19th-century German philosophers wrote of Einfühlung, or “in-feeling” — first translated in 1909 as the new English word “empathy.” They did not mean simulating someone else’s feelings, but projecting your own sentiments and memories in the course of an aesthetic or emotional experience, mingling your consciousness with the thing you are contemplating — whether it is a crying child, Picasso’s “Guernica” or a howling mountain landscape.

In the hands of the social scientists who rule our own time, empathy has become one piece of “emotional intelligence,” a term coined in the 1960s and developed by the psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer in 1990. The journalist Daniel Goleman popularized that phrase in his 1995 best seller “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ,” which argued that focusing on emotional skills would reduce school violence and equip students for greater success in life. Research has shown that these capacities are at least as important for long-term happiness and economic security as “hard” skills like reading and math.

In 2004, Illinois became the first state to adopt standards from preschool through high school for social and emotional learning, or SEL. Since then, anti-bullying workshops, classroom rules stressing compassion and wall charts of “feeling words” and “emoji meters” have become more common in schools nationally. “The overwhelming majority of educators and parents acknowledge that teaching children SEL skills is critical,” Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, told me. “At the other end, in corporate America, employers are looking for people who have these skills.”

But the colorful classroom posters and the drive for data through “social-emotional competencies” student assessments — not necessarily bad things in themselves — risk reducing our idea of empathy to yet another job skill. The mania for standardized testing that followed the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act has further hampered teachers’ best and oldest tool for developing emotional understanding: the study of literature.

“I really do believe literature is an empathy tool, and reading literature widely can actually make you an empathetic person,” Sarah Levine, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, told me. In many classrooms, the structure of standardized tests, especially multiple-choice questions and narrow essay rubrics, pushes teachers to drill students on finding arguments and literary devices rather than encouraging them to reflect on their own emotional response. “The standardized testing movement reduces literary reading to fact-finding,” Ms. Levine said.

She recently completed a study of a century of New York Regents exams and found that from the 2000s onward, “the reader disappeared from the questions that these tests are asking students. The reader is being asked to figure out what the central idea of the text is, as opposed to being asked to talk about how a text made them see something differently, or sympathize with someone,” she told me.

“We have to ask: Is this the kind of reading we want kids to do? It makes kids really dislike reading. That doesn’t mean we don’t read critically, but we should be using some of that critical and interpretive firepower on political speeches, political tweets, things that demand attention to the way people are using language because they have immediate impact on us as citizens of the world. We should use fiction for empathy, aesthetic pleasure, examining ethical dilemmas and just the experience of escaping.”

Ms. Levine taught high school English on the South Side of Chicago before Stanford. She said that despite the life of privilege she sees around her now, “the danger we’re exposing students to in English classrooms is just as bad for kids in Palo Alto as for kids in Chicago with many fewer resources. We’re teaching them that literature is not for them, because they aren’t a part of what they read. I don’t mean because they feel, ‘I don’t see Black and brown faces in my literature,’ but ‘I’m supposed to write an argument about a motif,’ and not do what kids do outside of the classroom: read and enjoy the experience.”

Emerson Holloway, an English major at Oberlin College in Ohio, read a lot on her own to make up for the fact that in high school, she didn’t always have “the opportunity to connect and empathize with characters,” she told me.

At Oberlin, she helps facilitate a student group called Barefoot Dialogues, which invites students to discuss a text or work of art over a home-cooked meal in order to “engage in trust and vulnerability to make connections across differences,” she said.

She acknowledged that in academia, empathy across identity lines has become controversial, and it’s crucial to “know your own boundaries,” she said. “You can ask, ‘What’s the point if we’re all so different? I’ll never be able to truly understand,’ and that’s true to an extent.”

Yet the effort to understand feels more important now than ever, she said. When Covid-19 hit in March, Barefoot Dialogues switched to Zoom meetings; its leaders are hoping for a hybrid of in-person and remote conversation this fall.

The college students I interviewed for this story stressed the role of empathy in firing up their curiosity, critical thinking and self-interrogation. “People often dismiss emotion as a weakness,” Andie Horowitz, a political science major at the University of Michigan, told me. “But a certain level of emotion makes you interested in something, wanting to find the truth.”

She explained how her professor in a course on gender and the law led students in a deep dive into the lives of the individuals in cases they studied. “When you understand the people behind the movement, it becomes so much more personal,” she said. “That’s where empathy comes into critical thinking and being motivated to learn more.”

This fall, the sight of students of all ages squirming in front of iPads — struggling to learn about themselves and each other through apps and spotty Wi-Fi — drives home the urgency of social and emotional learning. But empathetic education was under attack long before Covid-19 hit. The desiccation of great books in the hands of testing bureaucrats and the politicization of literature in university classrooms is not a neatly left-wing or right-wing assault. It is a collective failure of confidence in our teachers and students. “When we think our students can’t do something, we’re done. Pack it up,” Ms. Gaines, the professor at Florida State, told me. “Given the opportunity, and the space to be vulnerable and space to say they don’t understand and don’t know, lots of growth can happen.”

This is the gift of liberal education: the invitation to read a book and think about both the variety and the common threads of human experience across time, space and culture. “Empathy extends beyond trying to put yourself in other people’s shoes,” said Ms. Holloway, the student at Oberlin. “Success is not part of that definition, really. The act of listening is a form of that empathy. You’re willing to attempt to understand.” Only by constantly making that attempt — however imperfect — can we learn empathy’s hazards, and its power.

Molly Worthen is the author, most recently, of “Charismatic Leaders Who Remade America,” an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a contributing opinion writer.

[how2to18]

THIS IS THE 26th in a series of dialogues with artists, writers, and critical thinkers on the question of violence. This conversation is with Martha Rosler, an American artist who works in video, photography, text, installation, and performance, and whose work focuses on the public sphere, exploring issues from everyday life and the media to architecture and the built environment, especially as they affect women. She has for many years produced works on war and the national security climate, connecting life at home with the conduct of war abroad.

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BRAD EVANS: I would like to begin with a question on the issue of violence. What role do you think artists have when confronting this all-too-human problem?

MARTHA ROSLER: First, I’d like to be sure I know what we mean by violence; it’s such an elastic term. I often think, though, that the term “violence” has become reified, overly broad, and is losing its contours. We may feel that although we can’t really define it, we know it when we see it. We don’t generally associate violence with humanity alone, as I’m sure you’d agree. We have a fairly complex or differentiated ranking of acts of violence and who or what is likely to use it. So let’s say violence is the excessive use of force, in one form or another, beyond a certain accepted baseline, so we can see violence as exerted even by natural events, such as storms. Violence, then, is sudden force that is likely to break things — or rules or norms.

Our system itself glorifies a kind of violence to the what-is that is now modishly called disruption or creative disruption; in the thinking of the age, disruption is to innovation what automobiles are to buggy whips, to haul out a favored comparison. It is clear that capitalism cannot sustain itself without violence, the violence of expansion and change, which along the way chews up a lot of lives, lays waste to the natural and the built environment, and demolishes the folkways associated with settled ways of life, all at varying rates of speed.

Humans, as carnivores, have a long history of violence simply in the pursuit of living. To look at violence in the context of human societies, violence is related to both law and justice. It assumes there is a power differential among people and groups or classes and that certain uses of force are legitimate — the very word attests to the structure of laws — while others are unacceptable and thus classifiable as violent. More informally, we can class violence as an expression of conflict that in our society at least is regarded as inevitable and inbuilt, on the one hand, but on the other is possibly controllable or (perhaps, aspirationally) eradicable.

If you are asking me how do artists, and even ordinary people — citizens, residents — cope with violence against them or others, on the part of the state or state-like actors, or, conversely, on the part of lawbreakers and other criminals, the answer here is that art can present a certain degree of distilled clarity in the face of what may be felt as chaos. Art can open a space for a new framing of information, it can work to delegitimate uses of violence widely regarded as legitimate, such as attacking and killing protesters — themselves often treated as posing a threat of imminent violence against the established order — or criminal suspects, carrying out a death sentence on people convicted of common crimes, or on a grander scale, invading other countries by use of force or manipulation, or even, more broadly and less anthropomorphically, against the natural world.

I am writing this at a moment when our government uses law as the justification for forcibly removing children from parents crossing without papers at our southern border, yet a shocking number of people are willing to pretend this is justified because it is exercised against a class of people repeatedly dehumanized by this administration and its enthusiastic press and supporters. This is an instance of psychological violence, a category that can slide into metaphor but also is a perfectly reasonable way to talk about the use of authority, law, or ideological messaging to weaken others in pursuit of a desired result — commonly the creation of a stereotypical enemy or interloper.

Conversely, the tactics of delegitimation of others is matched by a concerted campaign of legitimation of the actions of state, often by naming (we’re straying into the “alternate truths” universe here). Dead civilians are labeled collateral damage. The US was long a vocal opponent of torture — until we were caught doing it, at which point it was renamed, following the Israelis, as harsh, stressful, or (most egregious of all) enhanced interrogation techniques, and a White House attorney or two obligingly crafted an opinion proclaiming it legal. The military — the arm of legally sanctioned violence — is a fantastically rich source of calling things by other names in order to control the narrative and hence the reactions on the part of the restive. The new tactics of drone warfare have led to many new terms of art, such as “painting a target” or “blue on blue” that hardly disclose their meaning to the uninitiated.

Those examples you just cited clearly indicate how the aesthetic field is intimately bound to the power and violence of discourse. Politics in this regard, we might argue, is always aesthetic insomuch as it is bound to the creation of images of thought. As an artist, what is it about the discursive field that commands your attention?

Control of language in the face of war extended some time ago to the popular press. Early in World War I, for example, the war minister, Lord Kitchener, threatened to kill any journalist found on the front lines. But exercising war censorship proved far less valuable than recruiting publishers and journalists into collusion with the government by suppressing bad news and disseminating government propaganda — (fake news). President Wilson maintained tight control through his new Committee on Public Information and the support of the new Sedition Act of 1918, which specifically criminalized antiwar expression. But today’s public has been less trusting of war reportage, and the aphorism “In war, the first casualty is truth” (of uncertain attribution), has been in wide circulation since the Iraq/Afghanistan War, although it long precedes that.

And then there is the practice of disinformation — really fake news — (as opposed to more guileless misinformation), the stream of confusing and often irrational targeted messages deployed by state actors and designed to produce confusion in unguarded populations, often foreign ones, for the purposes of electoral or other means of “regime change.” Although diplomacy is itself a highly coded system of negotiation over what labels and narratives to hang on events in the interest of international relations, it is conducted among a cadre of the highly trained; disinformation is a weapon wielded against whole peoples without their consent. Both Russia and the United States deployed this tactic even well before the Cold War.

In the preface to my videotape Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained of 1977, heard over a black screen, I try to draw a distinction between the crime of mass murder and the “ordinary” crime of having people — women in particular, but also non-European foreigners — tagged with “not measuring up.” This voice-over was intended to suggest that violence resides on a spectrum only part of which is regarded as outright violence.

I am mindful here in the importance for stressing (as you have continually done in your own work) the resistive potential of art in response to the oppressive triangulation between discourse, aesthetics, and their affective human registries. What can we take from alternative histories in terms of rethinking the very possibilities for viable resistance?

Opposing civil protests, actions, and uprisings of various sorts simply on the grounds of violence leaves us in a quandary of doubt and certainly goes against “history” — as it tends to assume, shortsightedly, that all human conflict can be captured under the rubric of violence erupting in an otherwise orderly civil society. I leave aside religious violence, against oneself or sacrificial others, meant to actualize the divine. I am also ignoring the use of torture against captives or sacrifices as a ritualized embodiment of group solidarity or even, as in Roman jurisprudence and later, the use of torture on witnesses or the accused to prove — that is, to test — the verity of testimony and confessions extracted from slaves and plebs. Uprisings, revolts, riots, and revolutions, as well as invasions and wars, punctuate human history, and artists — if not employed or commissioned by royals and rulers — often have partisan involvements beyond mere opinions. Historicizing forms of representation, such as “classical style,” and the tradition of history painting use both formal styles and narrative content to glorify certain incidences of violence and decry others. A signal example is the painter Jacques-Louis David, well known for his paintings in support of the French Revolution (and later of Napoleon); I recently saw his rapidly executed sketch of deposed queen Marie Antoinette in the tumbrel on the way to the guillotine.

A question closer to us is whether artists during the (slightly earlier) American Revolution should have deplored the rebels’ use of violence? These questions seem paltry, if not juvenile, against the backdrop of world events. Poets and painters have made political choices in support of war — Lord Byron lost his life in Greece’s fight for independence from the Ottomans, and the Italian Futurists, who glorified violence or simply the shock of modern life, joined the Italian army in World War I, many losing their lives on the battlefield. Famously, Marinetti became an enthusiastic fascist, and many other fascists glorified the aesthetic effects of war. Conversely, as we can see from governmental action against war resisters (refusers, dissenters, opponents) in many countries, just speaking out against war can be seen as actionable and often includes charges of inciting others similarly to resist.

At various times in the US, those who refused army service were arrested and imprisoned; a notable example is the socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, imprisoned for advocating draft resistance during World War I. In World War II, however, pacifism was not widely supported by the populace, in part because of the global threat posed by Hitler and the Axis powers. But now, especially after the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II, there is deemed to be an absolute imperative for even members of the armed forces to refuse an illegal order.

Looking back to your powerful series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, which provided a more personal and intimate critique of the war imaginary, how do you think these works resonate in a world seemingly governed by media spectacles that are no less mediated in their suffering?

I take your use of the term “personal” here to mean centered on individuals, not masses of people. The photomontages you are referring to can perhaps be characterized as familial or on the level of daily life, but to ask how they resonate in a world seemingly governed by media spectacles — I have to remind you that that is an apt description of the world in the period from which those works emerged. By the 1960s, advanced industrial economies like ours had already entered a human-made environment that can be characterized as mass spectacle, as numerous observers, many of them Europeans — Siegfried Kracauer in the 1930s, Adorno and Horkheimer in the 1940s, Herbert Marcuse and Guy Debord in the 1960s are notable examples — had decried both before and after its emergence, and at many opportunities since.

I would like to call attention to your use of the word “powerful” in relation to those works; some have also labeled them, and other works I’ve done, such as the satirical video Semiotics of the Kitchen, as violent. That requires a strong degree of projection (though I would agree that in the case of the video, there is a certain gesturing toward a release of repressed violence, without any particular recipient). But there are no violent acts depicted in any of those photomontages, and you haven’t suggested there is. They conjure recognition of violence in the viewer as a means of arguing against war and repression but still refusing to reproduce it. I would say the same about the video A Simple Case for Torture, or How to Sleep at Night, which has no scenes of bodily torture but a great deal of information — too much information to take in — about state violence, both legitimized and covert.

You have drawn attention here to a very important point concerning the difference between violence (directly physical or psychological) and the power of critique, as then presented as violence because it offends a certain dogmatic sensibility, and often in such cases speaks truth to those who impose power relations through violent means. I am especially taken by the notion that the purpose of art is precisely to confront what seems intolerable, yet to do so in a way that refuses to reproduce the logics of violence. Do you think this is what art should aspire toward?

I wouldn’t begin to propose what art should aspire toward, but I think you have described my intentions in using my work to address injustice, to expose its inherent violence, if you will, without resorting to its tactics, but also to outline the matter at hand as a problem possibly with solutions within human reach. In other words to frame as comprehensible those matters that have been globalized, demonized, naturalized, rendered intractable, without sensationalizing them — but not necessarily following a formula. I want to establish always a space for reflection, even if only after a person’s direct confrontation with the work. This does not apply to my political activities, where I am much less circumspect if the occasion warrants. Sloganeering and appeals to sentiment have their place. However, it is worth noting that it was precisely as immediate antiwar propaganda that I conceived of the works we’ve just discussed, House Beautiful, where my approach had nothing to do with replicating scenes of violence.

Another distinct aspect of your work is to address social and structural inequalities. From the perspective of the arts, how might we recognize such inequalities as a form of violence? And why have you also felt compelled to subvert stereotypical representations concerning those on the margins of existence?

Even if people recognize the inherent violence that poverty and powerlessness impose on others, that realization may not be at the forefront of their assessments of economic and social inequality. A steady flow of ideological messages obfuscates the nature, sources, and scope of inequality. Among those messages is a consistent stream of reductive, counterfactual, and demoralizing images of people — many of them on the margins, not of existence, perhaps, but of everyday middle-class life, but also including the majority group: women! These stereotypical representations have been “naturalized,” sunk into the fabric of everyday life as simple, common sense observation. Rationalized, unacknowledged, discriminatory representations signify what has lately been called implicit bias, which cannot be divorced from structural violence. It’s necessary to highlight and deconstruct these representations.

The structures of feeling, to borrow a phrase, are hung around the verities of general society, which insistently do violence to the lives and understandings of others. The opioid/heroin crisis presents an unmistakable case in point, unfolding before our eyes: when the long-suffering participants in the drug crisis (heroin and crack) were primarily poor urban-dwelling people of color, and a ferocious “othering” was the considered opinion promulgated about those populations. The victims were blamed for exhibiting failure of morality, character, and integrity; possessing outright criminal tendencies, whether learned or inherited — and countenancing poor family structure. Liberals pitied them, documentary photographers captured their agony and ruin, do-gooders argued for them, and politicians denounced them. Once the crisis of drug dependency (heroin and opioid drugs primarily) began to affect largely white rural and small-town populations, denunciations ceased in favor of a great clamoring on the part of local politicians to obtain assistance without blame and treatment without the unconscionably harsh and pitiless policies of long incarceration and often the concomitant loss of voting rights, tied to the previous drug “wars.”

Addressing the objectification of women and the naturalization of everyday forms of abuse this engenders, what have been your thoughts on the #MeToo campaign, which moved quickly from Hollywood onto the arts more generally?

I’m always interested when workplace issues come to dramatically highlight inbuilt systematic abuse. Or to put it another way, when patriarchal prerogatives, which center mostly on the bodies of young women, prerogatives that are known and tacitly acknowledged by everyone while simultaneously denied and individualized (by which I mean put down to individual quirks or predatory behaviors) are thrust into the spotlight and rendered criminal, actionable, immoral, reprehensible, and so on. And then non-celebrity women, non-executive, non-professional women, but rather employees of an entirely different service class, say, “Me too.” And in fact, those women, who are women of color in far larger proportions than the middle-class or Hollywood workforce, said, “Me too,” first, under the initiative of Tarana Burke, as we learned after the celebrity #MeToo movement was launched.

Actresses gained attention by insistent complaints that suddenly captured public attention (in no small part because a confessed groper, raunchy talk-show regular, and “reality”-show host became president of the country, while similar accusations of long-standing, perverse abuse by male celebrities had failed to win court cases for complainants and sometimes even to gain indictments). But this movement helped magnify the voices of other groups of women — poor women, women of color, immigrant or undocumented women, hotel maids, farm workers, waitresses — who achieved little attention or sympathy for their stories about the sexual predations they must endure to keep their jobs.

These working-class jobs are generally in industries where people won’t get cowed into signing Non-Disclosure Agreements, since not much is at stake for bosses in regard to fire-at-will workforces. The point is clear: there are sexual and other gender-centered costs for women who venture into the paid workforce outside their own homes. The arts followed the example of Hollywood, or more properly the Anglo-American theater and film nexus, in that some high-profile men in theater, dance, radio, and television were accused of sexual aggressions and quickly let go. It is too soon to assess the validity of those dismissals. The academe, however, including art departments, have hardly followed suit.

But we’ve been around this “Me too” block quite a few times before: looking just at the United States, there was a concerted patriarchal and right-wing backlash in the 1980s against the women’s and gay liberation wars, attacking abortion rights and gender identity (inciting sex panics), which met with concerted forms of pushback. The attacks continued through the 1990s, symbolized by efforts to derail Bill Clinton the candidate as a sex offender and an advocate of the (permissive, libertine) “values of the 1960s” (including acceptance of gay rights), a narrative thread that eventually led to his impeachment as president on sex-based charges. Women continued to resist, but since the 1980s the mainstream women’s movement has largely focused on the advancement of professional and other middle-class women — think of “power dressing” and “breaking the [corporate and military] glass ceiling” — mostly downplaying the defense of poor women and working mothers.

The political right, while often led by sexual predators, transgressors, adulterers, and so on, continued to use outrage over sexual identity and behavior as weapons to marshal their base. Finally they settled on anti-abortion politics as their main mobilizer after younger voters increasingly accepted gender-centered matters, especially LGBTQI identities and gay marriage. Now, as a result of the continued attacks on women’s bodies at the point of the right-wing spear, Roe v. Wade will likely be brought down at the hands of the Supreme Court. We don’t know what will follow, except that once again poor women will suffer the most.

At present, we have to ask once again, and slightly tiresomely, Is this time different? — will there be major change in gender relations and an end to sexual aggression and harassment? My answer is that many in the age cohort of people we call “millennials” are restive and want to see change immediately and that that’s a good thing: the women’s movement, like most movements, is largely peopled by young women, and this movement is widening as more women of color and transgender women take part. And now, inevitably, the predatory sexual and workplace issues have publicly converged, in light of the ever-growing importance of the culture industries on the one hand and the service industries on the other — though I will predict that middle-class women will continue to fare better than working-class women.

Before we rejoice, however, we ought to keep in mind another growing form of backlash that in many respects echoes the patriarchalism of evangelicals but is associated with racial and political grievances, often borrowing from right-wing and neo-Nazi movements, reactionary social thinkers, and their ilk. This movement of young white men, centered on the internet but all too often moving into the real world, has often viciously targeted young women also in the online world (see “Gamergate” for an exploration of one such early eruption of hatred). This cohort of enraged young men, demanding that women recognize their right to sexual intercourse, calls itself the “incel” movement, from self-denominated “involuntary celibates” who abet their views on the strictly neo-Nazi social media site Gab as well as Reddit and its 4chan or 8chan websites inhabiting the otherwise largely unnoticed corners of the internet.

We are now over two years into the presidential election victory of Donald Trump. What still seems to be a defining feature of his power has been a veritable blurring between the fictional and the real. What role do you think art plays today in this seemingly absurd and yet dangerous setting?

The man was, as you say, elected. He has always been a liar, a bully, and a braggart, and his celebrity persona seems for many voters to have given him a pass on truth. Authenticity in theatrical performance is judged not on the basis of truth value but rather on a form of “convincingness”: how well he fits a familiar role — domineering, authoritarian masculinity paradoxically under threat — as he himself has defined it. Someone like that, demonstrably of low moral character, a con man and dishonest businessman, proved able to perform it well enough to trump probity. This process is not about rationality: Democrats, in their latter-day technocratic, neoliberal mode, appeal to rationality; Republicans don’t. Democrats are afraid to bait the populist beast, Republicans aren’t — the Republican Party recognizes the benefits accruing to their politicians and donor class by policies supported by Tea Party passions. But I have to point out that it is our powerful mass-culture industry that helped boost the popularity and visibility of this personality type, which has in modern days included such figures as Ronald Reagan, Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger (not to mention those who ran as overt racists throughout the 20th century), all men running as authoritarian-populist patriarchs before Donald Trump.

Scapegoating the powerless, our present catastrophic leader has badgered, bullied, and belittled — as a tactic for deflecting attention from searing attacks on policy on many fronts. Those in whose interest he governs have spent decades practicing the seizure of public goods and the destruction of even the idea of community. They’ve built grassroots organizations on the basis of ruralism, resentment, racism, and rage; they’ve bought and paid for academics and think tanks to advance reactionary legislative and judicial agendas, voter-suppression tactics, racist mythologies, anti-woman and anti-LGBTQI rules, and science denialism. Like any Republican since Reagan, he ran as the opponent of the federal government itself, on the promise of crippling its reach while still somehow fulfilling extravagant promises to his followers.

As the ongoing chaos campaign continues, we have little choice but to be there too, constantly showing up, in whatever way we can. Marches, protests, and demonstrations are powerful and absolutely necessary — as is showing up at the polls. But we need an organized movement to continue agitating, not just as resistance and repudiation, but to engineer lasting political change.

So let’s keep on protesting and countering the fairy tales and lies that are so essential to the con game being unleashed on us wherever it can find an audience. Art doesn’t change society, but it can crystallize opinion in the context of citizens’ movements. Art in the modern era is often born of resistance.

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Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist, and writer, who specializes on the problem of violence. He is the founder/director of the Histories of Violence project, which has a global user base covering 143 countries.

The post Histories of Violence: When Art Is Born of Resistance appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[perfectzablog]

How Genrefication Makes School Libraries More Like Bookstores

For 12 years Jennifer Taylor watched kids come into the library at McCaffrey Middle School in Galt, California and struggle: “We’d have rows and rows of books, and they don’t know what to pick.” Students would just wander, she said, sliding out a random spine and, if they found the book’s cover appealing, reading the blurb on the back—usually to their disappointment. After a while, they’d ask her something like, “Where are the scary books?”

Taylor started pulling out her top titles in different categories, making a tabletop display of Mystery books here and Sports there. When she had to box everything up for a remodel anyway, she searched Pinterest and discovered “genrefication,” a movement to organize schools’ libraries by type, like bookstores. Little did Taylor know, she’d stumbled upon a hotbed of controversy in the world of library science.

Under the Dewey Decimal System that revolutionized and standardized book shelving starting in 1876, nonfiction essentially already gets the genrefication treatment with, for example, Music located in the 780s and Paleontology in the 560s. Yet most fiction is shelved in one big clump alphabetized by author’s last name. Under this rubric, a child who liked “The Hunger Games” could find its sequel nearby, but they’d need sophisticated search skills to identify “Divergent” as similar and then find it using a call number.

Many librarians say the “search hurdle” imposed by Dewey classification (a system originally designed for adults) significantly reduces the odds of a child finding something new they’re likely to enjoy. In a genrefied library, on the other hand, a young reader standing near a favorite book need only stick out a hand to find more like it. (It’s a bit like the analog version of Amazon’s recommendation feature: “Customers who bought this item also bought”)

Since genrefication enables one book to serve as a gateway drug to the next, its fans say it encourages literacy—especially for those least likely to effectively scan a book’s summary or master catalog search: struggling readers, students not yet fluent in English, and those with learning disabilities. Illustrated signs demarcating each section and color-coded spine labels provide these kids with visual cues that render them more self-sufficient. Meanwhile, the argument goes, others can still use the catalog to locate favorite authors across genre.

“It used to be when a class would come in,” Taylor said, “I’d have a line of 10 kids that needed to ask me, ‘Where’s this book?’ Or where’s this or that.” After genrefication, she said, “some periods came in, and there wasn’t one kid that needed to ask me anything, and they all found books in half the time.” A child who previously floundered “went right over to the Humor shelf, and it took about 30 seconds,” she added.

Kindergarten teacher Sandra Lampear sorts picture books by subject matter at Rooftop School in San Francisco. (Gail Cornwall)

Genrefication is also said to highlight usage patterns and gaps in inventory, allowing librarians to better tailor their offerings to students’ needs. Taylor was able to purge a third of her collection as she discovered just how many books fell into categories the students didn’t care about; she also realized McCaffrey had far too much Fantasy and not enough Adventure. Blogging on “Beyond the Shelves,” Christy Minton tried to rally other librarians: “Instead of purchasing books that you think your patrons will like, why not start ordering books you know teens will love!” Data-informed curating doesn’t just serve kids better, Minton pointed out; it’s a savvy play in a school climate where budget-cuts rein: “A busy library is a funded library.”

Librarians wield circulation statistics to support their claims of genrefication success. Leigh Collazo, otherwise known as “Mrs. Reader Pants,” reports a 36% increase after she genrefied a middle school library in Fort Worth, Texas in 2011. The team of librarians at New York City’s Ethical Culture Fieldston School also reported “dramatic increases in circulation” in a School Library Journal article entitled “Are Dewey’s Days Numbered?”

Though data on how widespread the practice is aren’t readily available, Tamra Marshall, a certified teacher librarian at Rooftop School in San Francisco*, said the notion that genrefication may be better is “the current thinking in the school librarian world.” But Marshall hasn’t yet tackled the project because, as she put it, “We just do not have the man/woman-power to take on a switch, especially since most schools only get a part-time librarian.” In a popular 2013 article Jocelyn Sams elaborated, “I have a full schedule of classes on most days, and I don’t have an assistant. I can barely get my books shelved in a typical week, let alone redo thousands of labels and change the online catalog.”

Some take advantage of a transition, like Taylor who sorted her collection during a three-week winter break and then completed the project over the following month with help from another staff member and a few students (plus about $500 for new labels). Collazo said she worked on the reorganization alongside an aide and about 10 eighth-grade students a little each day for four months. Others report shortcuts like using books’ copyright pages or Goodreads listings to quickly select a genre. But there’s no question that time and effort stand as barriers to implementation.

Genrefied shelves in the library at McCaffrey Middle School in Galt, California. (Jennifer Taylor)

The Dewey-loyal also oppose genrefication in principle for, interestingly enough, the same reason others support it: self-sufficiency. Sure, they argue, kids might be better able to find a book independently in their school library, but what happens when they go to the public one? When they get to high school? Each library shelving books according to its own system is exactly the problem Dewey set out to fix, and it’s one that’s particularly problematic for high-mobility kids who move from school to school, they say.

That’s why the American Association of School Librarians hasn’t taken an official position on the “white-hot” topic, said its current president Steven Yates, despite “spirited discussion” at the group’s biennial conference and in the “Dewey or Don’t We” issue of its print magazine. “It really comes down to meeting your community’s needs,” he said. In a school with a fixed schedule and generous amount of library time, for example, “there’s time for a lot of library-skills instruction,” and in that setting, he said, “Dewey can be something that can be a lot easier to adopt.”

Even then, the New York City librarians wrote: “Having moved away from an old system of organization that demanded that a significant portion of our teaching time was spent on simply finding books, we’re now able to concentrate on talking with our students about books, as well as teaching them critical thinking and assessment skills.” So the decision could come down to a pragmatic consideration of resource availability and student body composition, but it might also touch the soul of the field: What ought the core mission of a modern school librarian be?

The debate has led to compromise positions. Some leave books for older students in the Dewey arrangement while genrefying for younger ones. Other librarians rearrange middle readers and young adult books but leave picture books shelved by author since it can be unclear how to categorize a story about a duck driving a tractor. (Animals? Transportation? Fantasy? Librarians have gotten creative with multifaceted books such as “Twilight” which qualifies as both Romance and Paranormal. Some report letting students vote at the get-go; others assign a genre and then encourage kids to lobby for a switch.)

Collazo took things in the other direction. She de-Deweyed many of her nonfiction books as well, moving, for example, Parapsychology and Occult to sit alongside scary fiction books: “Students didn’t tend to find the 133 section before, but boy do they find them in the Horror section.” That’s a move others who genrefy say better aligns libraries with the Common Core curriculum.

Back in Galt, Taylor’s new classifications continually evolve. What she initially dubbed Drama morphed “basically into Chick Lit,” and she created a small shelf dedicated to the Holocaust, a focus of school assignments at McCaffrey. Each change is made with one goal in mind, she said: “So they don’t waste a week reading a book that they end up not liking and can’t finish.”

“I really try not to come down on any one side,” AASL’s Yates reiterated, but then added, “I just think that I’ve not seen people that’ve gone to genrefication then go back.”

Note: The author’s children attend Rooftop Elementary and she is a member of the school’s PTA and School Site Council.

How Genrefication Makes School Libraries More Like Bookstores published first on https://greatpricecourse.tumblr.com/

[succeedly]

K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning

Joanna and Matt Pace on episode 172 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter

Joanna and Matt Pace write videos on a popular YouTube channel, Hopscotch. Joanna is an elementary teacher and Matt is a songwriter from Las Vegas. Their 7 Continents song has almost 300K views. Today they talk about what makes a great learning video and how to select good videos on YouTube for K-6 students.

Today’s Sponsor: GradeCam lets you create assessments with formats including multiple choice, true/false, number grids, rubrics, and even handwritten numeric answers that can be read and scored by Aita – Gradecam’s Artificial Intelligence Teaching Assistant.Score assessments, generate reports, and transfer grades automatically. Work smarter instead of harder. Sign up for your 60-day free trial at http://ift.tt/2gzEf8G

Listen Now

Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher

Stream byclicking here.

Below is an enhanced transcript, modified for your reading pleasure. All comments in the shaded green box are my own. For guests and hyperlinks to resources, scroll down.

***

Enhanced Transcript

K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning

Shownotes: http://ift.tt/2xJOq0Y Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Vicki: Today we are talking to Joanna and Matt Pace. So this is really a unique couple – they have a great YouTube channel for K-6 – lots of free resources. Now Joanna, you are a 2nd-grade teacher. And I’m guessing that part of this is your desire to help kids remember. How do we help kids that age remember things?

How do we help kids remember?

Joanna: Well, that’s a great question. I think that most kids learn in different ways. And in my classroom, we try a lot of different things. And some of those include movement and repetition. Music is a great way to take both of those – as they are repeating things over and over and attitude. So, for different kids, some are more powerful than others, but we have noticed (at least in our classroom and my experience with my team members) music helps almost all kids to learn and remember things.

How did you get started?

Vicki: So, what happened Joanna? Did you go home and say, “Write me some music, Matt because you’re the composer?” What happened?

Joanna: That’s exactly what happened! I will look online, I look in stories to see what I can find to help teach concepts that my students are struggling with. And at the end of the day, sometimes I really can’t find things that meet our needs. So, I say, “Matt, you’re awesome at writing a song! Can you please take your skills and make up for what I lack in teaching sometimes?”

Vicki: So, Matt, I was looking at your Continent song. And we’ll post that in the show notes. You’ve got over a hundred thousand people who have seen that particular one. How do you write an engaging song about the continents?

How they wrote the 7 Continent Song

Matt: Well, that one we started off just talking about the key points – what we wanted the kids to get out of the song. And so after we had figured all of that out, then I had to work my songwriter magic to make it rhyme, to make it have an appealing melody. One of the big aspects of a song that we want to keep, is keeping it really short. Because then you can repeat it and then you can remember it. The longer you go the less attention you have because and so trying to say that idea in as concise a way as you possibly can and still make it melodic and singable and rememberable.

Vicki: Matt, are you surprised with the response you are getting to your videos?

Matt: On one side, yes. I didn’t expect our third song that we released on YouTube to have that much of a response. But on the other side, we had seen lots of videos on YouTube that have .. were about similar subjects. Similar type things that were song animation that had so many views. We didn’t know why they had that many views. So people must have been in need of that content. No matter how high or low the quality of the video was, they were getting millions of views. So we figured, if we put something out there that is good quality, that’s educationally sound as well as musically sound then hopefully we’ll get the same response.

Vicki: Yes, because you know YouTube has a lot of great resources. But some things are just are being viewed that are not being made by educators, and I guess that’s the difference. You’ve kind of got a partnership of music and education. So Joanna, what’s the response of your own students to this music, knowing that you are involved?

Joanna: They love the fact that they can put a name to the music. But on the other hand they will beg to listen to it over and over again. They always ask for Mr. Pace to write them another song. Can Mr. Pace write us a song about this? So, it’s fun to see they are understanding the way that they are learning. And that they appreciate music as a learning tool.

Thoughts on memorization

Vicki: Does it bother you that we have so much memorization? I guess that just has to be part of it in the elementary grades?

Joanna: It’s a great question. There’s a lot of different parts going into learning. We hope with all memorization that students have a conceptual understanding before memorization takes place. For example, addition facts. We want them to understand what 1 + 2 means before they memorize it. But at a certain point, as they get further along in their academic careers, or their academic experience, we want automaticity so they can apply those concepts to 2 and 3 and 4 digit addition, subtraction, and eventually multiplication. So, I don’t know that every subject matter needs a song. But I certainly feel like it helps, especially with those students that are on the fringes. That maybe don’t have the same parental support or maybe struggle with some learning disabilities, or autism, or other social disabilities. So I feel like music has a place in the classroom and it is definitely underutilized.

How do we pick effective videos to help kids learn?

Vicki: But not all music is going to be educational or worthwhile. So, either of you can answer this question. When educators are selecting videos for their classrooms, do you think there is a common mistake that educators make when they pick those videos and maybe it doesn’t have the results they want?

Joanna: I would definitely say in my experience, because of the level of desperation and low-funding for educators a lot of times they will go with the cheapest option, not necessarily the best option. And sometimes, at least in our experiences, if we do our research before creating a song, we will – we’ll see a song that repeats the same melody over and over again, but with different lyrics. Which kind of waters down the effectiveness, because the kids get confused on what goes where. If they hear the same melody with different lyrics, I guess it is either…I don’t know if Matt could better explain that. But it definitely confuses them.

Vicki: Well, and Matt, aren’t there some copyright issues with what some people are posting because they are actually not original. You’re making original music, right?

Matt: Well, it depends on the song they are using. We’re going to try to do most of ours original music. One we have done so far was to an old tune that’s now in the public domain. So, people can use that tune however they want for commercial or noncommercial purposes. And that’s totally fine. It just depends on how long the song is. Or how long it’s been since the song was published or how long since the song’s author has died. A lot of the tunes use old folk tunes, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”, things like that. That’s totally fair game to use a melody for a learning song. Hopefully it is used well.

What mistakes do people make when writing videos for kids to learn?

Vicki: So Matt, a lot of educators are getting into writing music for learning. Do you think there is a common mistake that educators may make as they are creating music for learning?

Matt: Well, there are a lot of things that go into writing a song, and especially with such a specific purpose as we’re trying to do. I think one it has to be fun for the kids. If they are going to be engaged, if they’re going to want to use that as part of their learning it has to be a fun song. And the other thing, as I mentioned, concise, short and sweet, and obviously you want it to be correct.

Joanna: We also noticed some are just terrible to listen to. So having some quality in there doesn’t hurt.

Vicki: Well, we’ve gotten so many great tips. I know you want to check the show notes and you definitely want to check their [YouTube] channel, because they have lots more to come in this collaboration because it’s important to select the right videos for learning. I’m so excited, Joanna and Matt, to see you working together because I think that when educators and musicians collaborate that we are going to continue to see an increase in the quality of the videos we are using in our classrooms.

Matt: Absolutely

Bio as submitted

Joanna grew up as a military child overseas mainly in Europe. She studied Elementary and Early Childhood Education at BYU, and this will be her fifth year teaching. She married Matthew Pace, a songwriter from Las Vegas, in 2010. They love working together on various projects, including raising their baby boy whom they adopted last year.

YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgM7EYFFz_dba0OIZs5L9kg

    Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored podcast episode.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.) This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.

The post K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning published first on http://ift.tt/2jn9f0m

[growthvue]

K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning

Joanna and Matt Pace on episode 172 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter

Joanna and Matt Pace write videos on a popular YouTube channel, Hopscotch. Joanna is an elementary teacher and Matt is a songwriter from Las Vegas. Their 7 Continents song has almost 300K views. Today they talk about what makes a great learning video and how to select good videos on YouTube for K-6 students.

Today’s Sponsor: GradeCam lets you create assessments with formats including multiple choice, true/false, number grids, rubrics, and even handwritten numeric answers that can be read and scored by Aita – Gradecam’s Artificial Intelligence Teaching Assistant.Score assessments, generate reports, and transfer grades automatically. Work smarter instead of harder. Sign up for your 60-day free trial at http://ift.tt/2gzEf8G

Listen Now

Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher

Stream byclicking here.

Below is an enhanced transcript, modified for your reading pleasure. All comments in the shaded green box are my own. For guests and hyperlinks to resources, scroll down.

***

Enhanced Transcript

K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning

Shownotes: http://ift.tt/2xJOq0Y Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Vicki: Today we are talking to Joanna and Matt Pace. So this is really a unique couple – they have a great YouTube channel for K-6 – lots of free resources. Now Joanna, you are a 2nd-grade teacher. And I’m guessing that part of this is your desire to help kids remember. How do we help kids that age remember things?

How do we help kids remember?

Joanna: Well, that’s a great question. I think that most kids learn in different ways. And in my classroom, we try a lot of different things. And some of those include movement and repetition. Music is a great way to take both of those – as they are repeating things over and over and attitude. So, for different kids, some are more powerful than others, but we have noticed (at least in our classroom and my experience with my team members) music helps almost all kids to learn and remember things.

How did you get started?

Vicki: So, what happened Joanna? Did you go home and say, “Write me some music, Matt because you’re the composer?” What happened?

Joanna: That’s exactly what happened! I will look online, I look in stories to see what I can find to help teach concepts that my students are struggling with. And at the end of the day, sometimes I really can’t find things that meet our needs. So, I say, “Matt, you’re awesome at writing a song! Can you please take your skills and make up for what I lack in teaching sometimes?”

Vicki: So, Matt, I was looking at your Continent song. And we’ll post that in the show notes. You’ve got over a hundred thousand people who have seen that particular one. How do you write an engaging song about the continents?

How they wrote the 7 Continent Song

Matt: Well, that one we started off just talking about the key points – what we wanted the kids to get out of the song. And so after we had figured all of that out, then I had to work my songwriter magic to make it rhyme, to make it have an appealing melody. One of the big aspects of a song that we want to keep, is keeping it really short. Because then you can repeat it and then you can remember it. The longer you go the less attention you have because and so trying to say that idea in as concise a way as you possibly can and still make it melodic and singable and rememberable.

Vicki: Matt, are you surprised with the response you are getting to your videos?

Matt: On one side, yes. I didn’t expect our third song that we released on YouTube to have that much of a response. But on the other side, we had seen lots of videos on YouTube that have .. were about similar subjects. Similar type things that were song animation that had so many views. We didn’t know why they had that many views. So people must have been in need of that content. No matter how high or low the quality of the video was, they were getting millions of views. So we figured, if we put something out there that is good quality, that’s educationally sound as well as musically sound then hopefully we’ll get the same response.

Vicki: Yes, because you know YouTube has a lot of great resources. But some things are just are being viewed that are not being made by educators, and I guess that’s the difference. You’ve kind of got a partnership of music and education. So Joanna, what’s the response of your own students to this music, knowing that you are involved?

Joanna: They love the fact that they can put a name to the music. But on the other hand they will beg to listen to it over and over again. They always ask for Mr. Pace to write them another song. Can Mr. Pace write us a song about this? So, it’s fun to see they are understanding the way that they are learning. And that they appreciate music as a learning tool.

Thoughts on memorization

Vicki: Does it bother you that we have so much memorization? I guess that just has to be part of it in the elementary grades?

Joanna: It’s a great question. There’s a lot of different parts going into learning. We hope with all memorization that students have a conceptual understanding before memorization takes place. For example, addition facts. We want them to understand what 1 + 2 means before they memorize it. But at a certain point, as they get further along in their academic careers, or their academic experience, we want automaticity so they can apply those concepts to 2 and 3 and 4 digit addition, subtraction, and eventually multiplication. So, I don’t know that every subject matter needs a song. But I certainly feel like it helps, especially with those students that are on the fringes. That maybe don’t have the same parental support or maybe struggle with some learning disabilities, or autism, or other social disabilities. So I feel like music has a place in the classroom and it is definitely underutilized.

How do we pick effective videos to help kids learn?

Vicki: But not all music is going to be educational or worthwhile. So, either of you can answer this question. When educators are selecting videos for their classrooms, do you think there is a common mistake that educators make when they pick those videos and maybe it doesn’t have the results they want?

Joanna: I would definitely say in my experience, because of the level of desperation and low-funding for educators a lot of times they will go with the cheapest option, not necessarily the best option. And sometimes, at least in our experiences, if we do our research before creating a song, we will – we’ll see a song that repeats the same melody over and over again, but with different lyrics. Which kind of waters down the effectiveness, because the kids get confused on what goes where. If they hear the same melody with different lyrics, I guess it is either…I don’t know if Matt could better explain that. But it definitely confuses them.

Vicki: Well, and Matt, aren’t there some copyright issues with what some people are posting because they are actually not original. You’re making original music, right?

Matt: Well, it depends on the song they are using. We’re going to try to do most of ours original music. One we have done so far was to an old tune that’s now in the public domain. So, people can use that tune however they want for commercial or noncommercial purposes. And that’s totally fine. It just depends on how long the song is. Or how long it’s been since the song was published or how long since the song’s author has died. A lot of the tunes use old folk tunes, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”, things like that. That’s totally fair game to use a melody for a learning song. Hopefully it is used well.

What mistakes do people make when writing videos for kids to learn?

Vicki: So Matt, a lot of educators are getting into writing music for learning. Do you think there is a common mistake that educators may make as they are creating music for learning?

Matt: Well, there are a lot of things that go into writing a song, and especially with such a specific purpose as we’re trying to do. I think one it has to be fun for the kids. If they are going to be engaged, if they’re going to want to use that as part of their learning it has to be a fun song. And the other thing, as I mentioned, concise, short and sweet, and obviously you want it to be correct.

Joanna: We also noticed some are just terrible to listen to. So having some quality in there doesn’t hurt.

Vicki: Well, we’ve gotten so many great tips. I know you want to check the show notes and you definitely want to check their [YouTube] channel, because they have lots more to come in this collaboration because it’s important to select the right videos for learning. I’m so excited, Joanna and Matt, to see you working together because I think that when educators and musicians collaborate that we are going to continue to see an increase in the quality of the videos we are using in our classrooms.

Matt: Absolutely

Bio as submitted

Joanna grew up as a military child overseas mainly in Europe. She studied Elementary and Early Childhood Education at BYU, and this will be her fifth year teaching. She married Matthew Pace, a songwriter from Las Vegas, in 2010. They love working together on various projects, including raising their baby boy whom they adopted last year.

YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgM7EYFFz_dba0OIZs5L9kg

    Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored podcast episode.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.) This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.

The post K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning published first on http://ift.tt/2xx6Oyq

[patriciaanderson357-blog]

K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning

Joanna and Matt Pace on episode 172 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter

Joanna and Matt Pace write videos on a popular YouTube channel, Hopscotch. Joanna is an elementary teacher and Matt is a songwriter from Las Vegas. Their 7 Continents song has almost 300K views. Today they talk about what makes a great learning video and how to select good videos on YouTube for K-6 students.

Today’s Sponsor: GradeCam lets you create assessments with formats including multiple choice, true/false, number grids, rubrics, and even handwritten numeric answers that can be read and scored by Aita – Gradecam’s Artificial Intelligence Teaching Assistant.Score assessments, generate reports, and transfer grades automatically. Work smarter instead of harder. Sign up for your 60-day free trial at gradecam.com/coolcatteacher

Listen Now

Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher

Stream byclicking here.

Below is an enhanced transcript, modified for your reading pleasure. All comments in the shaded green box are my own. For guests and hyperlinks to resources, scroll down.

***

Enhanced Transcript

K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning

Shownotes: www.coolcatteacher.com/e172 Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Vicki: Today we are talking to Joanna and Matt Pace. So this is really a unique couple – they have a great YouTube channel for K-6 – lots of free resources. Now Joanna, you are a 2nd-grade teacher. And I’m guessing that part of this is your desire to help kids remember. How do we help kids that age remember things?

How do we help kids remember?

Joanna: Well, that’s a great question. I think that most kids learn in different ways. And in my classroom, we try a lot of different things. And some of those include movement and repetition. Music is a great way to take both of those – as they are repeating things over and over and attitude. So, for different kids, some are more powerful than others, but we have noticed (at least in our classroom and my experience with my team members) music helps almost all kids to learn and remember things.

How did you get started?

Vicki: So, what happened Joanna? Did you go home and say, “Write me some music, Matt because you’re the composer?” What happened?

Joanna: That’s exactly what happened! I will look online, I look in stories to see what I can find to help teach concepts that my students are struggling with. And at the end of the day, sometimes I really can’t find things that meet our needs. So, I say, “Matt, you’re awesome at writing a song! Can you please take your skills and make up for what I lack in teaching sometimes?”

Vicki: So, Matt, I was looking at your Continent song. And we’ll post that in the show notes. You’ve got over a hundred thousand people who have seen that particular one. How do you write an engaging song about the continents?

How they wrote the 7 Continent Song

Matt: Well, that one we started off just talking about the key points – what we wanted the kids to get out of the song. And so after we had figured all of that out, then I had to work my songwriter magic to make it rhyme, to make it have an appealing melody. One of the big aspects of a song that we want to keep, is keeping it really short. Because then you can repeat it and then you can remember it. The longer you go the less attention you have because and so trying to say that idea in as concise a way as you possibly can and still make it melodic and singable and rememberable.

Vicki: Matt, are you surprised with the response you are getting to your videos?

Matt: On one side, yes. I didn’t expect our third song that we released on YouTube to have that much of a response. But on the other side, we had seen lots of videos on YouTube that have .. were about similar subjects. Similar type things that were song animation that had so many views. We didn’t know why they had that many views. So people must have been in need of that content. No matter how high or low the quality of the video was, they were getting millions of views. So we figured, if we put something out there that is good quality, that’s educationally sound as well as musically sound then hopefully we’ll get the same response.

Vicki: Yes, because you know YouTube has a lot of great resources. But some things are just are being viewed that are not being made by educators, and I guess that’s the difference. You’ve kind of got a partnership of music and education. So Joanna, what’s the response of your own students to this music, knowing that you are involved?

Joanna: They love the fact that they can put a name to the music. But on the other hand they will beg to listen to it over and over again. They always ask for Mr. Pace to write them another song. Can Mr. Pace write us a song about this? So, it’s fun to see they are understanding the way that they are learning. And that they appreciate music as a learning tool.

Thoughts on memorization

Vicki: Does it bother you that we have so much memorization? I guess that just has to be part of it in the elementary grades?

Joanna: It’s a great question. There’s a lot of different parts going into learning. We hope with all memorization that students have a conceptual understanding before memorization takes place. For example, addition facts. We want them to understand what 1 + 2 means before they memorize it. But at a certain point, as they get further along in their academic careers, or their academic experience, we want automaticity so they can apply those concepts to 2 and 3 and 4 digit addition, subtraction, and eventually multiplication. So, I don’t know that every subject matter needs a song. But I certainly feel like it helps, especially with those students that are on the fringes. That maybe don’t have the same parental support or maybe struggle with some learning disabilities, or autism, or other social disabilities. So I feel like music has a place in the classroom and it is definitely underutilized.

How do we pick effective videos to help kids learn?

Vicki: But not all music is going to be educational or worthwhile. So, either of you can answer this question. When educators are selecting videos for their classrooms, do you think there is a common mistake that educators make when they pick those videos and maybe it doesn’t have the results they want?

Joanna: I would definitely say in my experience, because of the level of desperation and low-funding for educators a lot of times they will go with the cheapest option, not necessarily the best option. And sometimes, at least in our experiences, if we do our research before creating a song, we will – we’ll see a song that repeats the same melody over and over again, but with different lyrics. Which kind of waters down the effectiveness, because the kids get confused on what goes where. If they hear the same melody with different lyrics, I guess it is either…I don’t know if Matt could better explain that. But it definitely confuses them.

Vicki: Well, and Matt, aren’t there some copyright issues with what some people are posting because they are actually not original. You’re making original music, right?

Matt: Well, it depends on the song they are using. We’re going to try to do most of ours original music. One we have done so far was to an old tune that’s now in the public domain. So, people can use that tune however they want for commercial or noncommercial purposes. And that’s totally fine. It just depends on how long the song is. Or how long it’s been since the song was published or how long since the song’s author has died. A lot of the tunes use old folk tunes, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”, things like that. That’s totally fair game to use a melody for a learning song. Hopefully it is used well.

What mistakes do people make when writing videos for kids to learn?

Vicki: So Matt, a lot of educators are getting into writing music for learning. Do you think there is a common mistake that educators may make as they are creating music for learning?

Matt: Well, there are a lot of things that go into writing a song, and especially with such a specific purpose as we’re trying to do. I think one it has to be fun for the kids. If they are going to be engaged, if they’re going to want to use that as part of their learning it has to be a fun song. And the other thing, as I mentioned, concise, short and sweet, and obviously you want it to be correct.

Joanna: We also noticed some are just terrible to listen to. So having some quality in there doesn’t hurt.

Vicki: Well, we’ve gotten so many great tips. I know you want to check the show notes and you definitely want to check their [YouTube] channel, because they have lots more to come in this collaboration because it’s important to select the right videos for learning. I’m so excited, Joanna and Matt, to see you working together because I think that when educators and musicians collaborate that we are going to continue to see an increase in the quality of the videos we are using in our classrooms.

Matt: Absolutely

Bio as submitted

Joanna grew up as a military child overseas mainly in Europe. She studied Elementary and Early Childhood Education at BYU, and this will be her fifth year teaching. She married Matthew Pace, a songwriter from Las Vegas, in 2010. They love working together on various projects, including raising their baby boy whom they adopted last year.

YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgM7EYFFz_dba0OIZs5L9kg

    Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored podcast episode.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.) This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.

The post K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

[ralph31ortiz]

K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning

Joanna and Matt Pace on episode 172 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter

Joanna and Matt Pace write videos on a popular YouTube channel, Hopscotch. Joanna is an elementary teacher and Matt is a songwriter from Las Vegas. Their 7 Continents song has almost 300K views. Today they talk about what makes a great learning video and how to select good videos on YouTube for K-6 students.

Today’s Sponsor: GradeCam lets you create assessments with formats including multiple choice, true/false, number grids, rubrics, and even handwritten numeric answers that can be read and scored by Aita – Gradecam’s Artificial Intelligence Teaching Assistant.Score assessments, generate reports, and transfer grades automatically. Work smarter instead of harder. Sign up for your 60-day free trial at gradecam.com/coolcatteacher

Listen Now

Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher

Stream byclicking here.

Below is an enhanced transcript, modified for your reading pleasure. All comments in the shaded green box are my own. For guests and hyperlinks to resources, scroll down.

***

Enhanced Transcript

K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning

Shownotes: www.coolcatteacher.com/e172 Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Vicki: Today we are talking to Joanna and Matt Pace. So this is really a unique couple – they have a great YouTube channel for K-6 – lots of free resources. Now Joanna, you are a 2nd-grade teacher. And I’m guessing that part of this is your desire to help kids remember. How do we help kids that age remember things?

How do we help kids remember?

Joanna: Well, that’s a great question. I think that most kids learn in different ways. And in my classroom, we try a lot of different things. And some of those include movement and repetition. Music is a great way to take both of those – as they are repeating things over and over and attitude. So, for different kids, some are more powerful than others, but we have noticed (at least in our classroom and my experience with my team members) music helps almost all kids to learn and remember things.

How did you get started?

Vicki: So, what happened Joanna? Did you go home and say, “Write me some music, Matt because you’re the composer?” What happened?

Joanna: That’s exactly what happened! I will look online, I look in stories to see what I can find to help teach concepts that my students are struggling with. And at the end of the day, sometimes I really can’t find things that meet our needs. So, I say, “Matt, you’re awesome at writing a song! Can you please take your skills and make up for what I lack in teaching sometimes?”

Vicki: So, Matt, I was looking at your Continent song. And we’ll post that in the show notes. You’ve got over a hundred thousand people who have seen that particular one. How do you write an engaging song about the continents?

How they wrote the 7 Continent Song

Matt: Well, that one we started off just talking about the key points – what we wanted the kids to get out of the song. And so after we had figured all of that out, then I had to work my songwriter magic to make it rhyme, to make it have an appealing melody. One of the big aspects of a song that we want to keep, is keeping it really short. Because then you can repeat it and then you can remember it. The longer you go the less attention you have because and so trying to say that idea in as concise a way as you possibly can and still make it melodic and singable and rememberable.

Vicki: Matt, are you surprised with the response you are getting to your videos?

Matt: On one side, yes. I didn’t expect our third song that we released on YouTube to have that much of a response. But on the other side, we had seen lots of videos on YouTube that have .. were about similar subjects. Similar type things that were song animation that had so many views. We didn’t know why they had that many views. So people must have been in need of that content. No matter how high or low the quality of the video was, they were getting millions of views. So we figured, if we put something out there that is good quality, that’s educationally sound as well as musically sound then hopefully we’ll get the same response.

Vicki: Yes, because you know YouTube has a lot of great resources. But some things are just are being viewed that are not being made by educators, and I guess that’s the difference. You’ve kind of got a partnership of music and education. So Joanna, what’s the response of your own students to this music, knowing that you are involved?

Joanna: They love the fact that they can put a name to the music. But on the other hand they will beg to listen to it over and over again. They always ask for Mr. Pace to write them another song. Can Mr. Pace write us a song about this? So, it’s fun to see they are understanding the way that they are learning. And that they appreciate music as a learning tool.

Thoughts on memorization

Vicki: Does it bother you that we have so much memorization? I guess that just has to be part of it in the elementary grades?

Joanna: It’s a great question. There’s a lot of different parts going into learning. We hope with all memorization that students have a conceptual understanding before memorization takes place. For example, addition facts. We want them to understand what 1 + 2 means before they memorize it. But at a certain point, as they get further along in their academic careers, or their academic experience, we want automaticity so they can apply those concepts to 2 and 3 and 4 digit addition, subtraction, and eventually multiplication. So, I don’t know that every subject matter needs a song. But I certainly feel like it helps, especially with those students that are on the fringes. That maybe don’t have the same parental support or maybe struggle with some learning disabilities, or autism, or other social disabilities. So I feel like music has a place in the classroom and it is definitely underutilized.

How do we pick effective videos to help kids learn?

Vicki: But not all music is going to be educational or worthwhile. So, either of you can answer this question. When educators are selecting videos for their classrooms, do you think there is a common mistake that educators make when they pick those videos and maybe it doesn’t have the results they want?

Joanna: I would definitely say in my experience, because of the level of desperation and low-funding for educators a lot of times they will go with the cheapest option, not necessarily the best option. And sometimes, at least in our experiences, if we do our research before creating a song, we will – we’ll see a song that repeats the same melody over and over again, but with different lyrics. Which kind of waters down the effectiveness, because the kids get confused on what goes where. If they hear the same melody with different lyrics, I guess it is either…I don’t know if Matt could better explain that. But it definitely confuses them.

Vicki: Well, and Matt, aren’t there some copyright issues with what some people are posting because they are actually not original. You’re making original music, right?

Matt: Well, it depends on the song they are using. We’re going to try to do most of ours original music. One we have done so far was to an old tune that’s now in the public domain. So, people can use that tune however they want for commercial or noncommercial purposes. And that’s totally fine. It just depends on how long the song is. Or how long it’s been since the song was published or how long since the song’s author has died. A lot of the tunes use old folk tunes, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”, things like that. That’s totally fair game to use a melody for a learning song. Hopefully it is used well.

What mistakes do people make when writing videos for kids to learn?

Vicki: So Matt, a lot of educators are getting into writing music for learning. Do you think there is a common mistake that educators may make as they are creating music for learning?

Matt: Well, there are a lot of things that go into writing a song, and especially with such a specific purpose as we’re trying to do. I think one it has to be fun for the kids. If they are going to be engaged, if they’re going to want to use that as part of their learning it has to be a fun song. And the other thing, as I mentioned, concise, short and sweet, and obviously you want it to be correct.

Joanna: We also noticed some are just terrible to listen to. So having some quality in there doesn’t hurt.

Vicki: Well, we’ve gotten so many great tips. I know you want to check the show notes and you definitely want to check their [YouTube] channel, because they have lots more to come in this collaboration because it’s important to select the right videos for learning. I’m so excited, Joanna and Matt, to see you working together because I think that when educators and musicians collaborate that we are going to continue to see an increase in the quality of the videos we are using in our classrooms.

Matt: Absolutely

Bio as submitted

Joanna grew up as a military child overseas mainly in Europe. She studied Elementary and Early Childhood Education at BYU, and this will be her fifth year teaching. She married Matthew Pace, a songwriter from Las Vegas, in 2010. They love working together on various projects, including raising their baby boy whom they adopted last year.

YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgM7EYFFz_dba0OIZs5L9kg

    Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored podcast episode.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.) This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.

The post K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

from Cool Cat Teacher BlogCool Cat Teacher Blog http://www.coolcatteacher.com/k-6-educational-music-videos-selecting-right-videos-learning/

[athena29stone]

K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning

Joanna and Matt Pace on episode 172 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter

Joanna and Matt Pace write videos on a popular YouTube channel, Hopscotch. Joanna is an elementary teacher and Matt is a songwriter from Las Vegas. Their 7 Continents song has almost 300K views. Today they talk about what makes a great learning video and how to select good videos on YouTube for K-6 students.

Today’s Sponsor: GradeCam lets you create assessments with formats including multiple choice, true/false, number grids, rubrics, and even handwritten numeric answers that can be read and scored by Aita – Gradecam’s Artificial Intelligence Teaching Assistant.Score assessments, generate reports, and transfer grades automatically. Work smarter instead of harder. Sign up for your 60-day free trial at gradecam.com/coolcatteacher

Listen Now

Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher

Stream byclicking here.

Below is an enhanced transcript, modified for your reading pleasure. All comments in the shaded green box are my own. For guests and hyperlinks to resources, scroll down.

***

Enhanced Transcript

K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning

Shownotes: www.coolcatteacher.com/e172 Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Vicki: Today we are talking to Joanna and Matt Pace. So this is really a unique couple – they have a great YouTube channel for K-6 – lots of free resources. Now Joanna, you are a 2nd-grade teacher. And I’m guessing that part of this is your desire to help kids remember. How do we help kids that age remember things?

How do we help kids remember?

Joanna: Well, that’s a great question. I think that most kids learn in different ways. And in my classroom, we try a lot of different things. And some of those include movement and repetition. Music is a great way to take both of those – as they are repeating things over and over and attitude. So, for different kids, some are more powerful than others, but we have noticed (at least in our classroom and my experience with my team members) music helps almost all kids to learn and remember things.

How did you get started?

Vicki: So, what happened Joanna? Did you go home and say, “Write me some music, Matt because you’re the composer?” What happened?

Joanna: That’s exactly what happened! I will look online, I look in stories to see what I can find to help teach concepts that my students are struggling with. And at the end of the day, sometimes I really can’t find things that meet our needs. So, I say, “Matt, you’re awesome at writing a song! Can you please take your skills and make up for what I lack in teaching sometimes?”

Vicki: So, Matt, I was looking at your Continent song. And we’ll post that in the show notes. You’ve got over a hundred thousand people who have seen that particular one. How do you write an engaging song about the continents?

How they wrote the 7 Continent Song

Matt: Well, that one we started off just talking about the key points – what we wanted the kids to get out of the song. And so after we had figured all of that out, then I had to work my songwriter magic to make it rhyme, to make it have an appealing melody. One of the big aspects of a song that we want to keep, is keeping it really short. Because then you can repeat it and then you can remember it. The longer you go the less attention you have because and so trying to say that idea in as concise a way as you possibly can and still make it melodic and singable and rememberable.

Vicki: Matt, are you surprised with the response you are getting to your videos?

Matt: On one side, yes. I didn’t expect our third song that we released on YouTube to have that much of a response. But on the other side, we had seen lots of videos on YouTube that have .. were about similar subjects. Similar type things that were song animation that had so many views. We didn’t know why they had that many views. So people must have been in need of that content. No matter how high or low the quality of the video was, they were getting millions of views. So we figured, if we put something out there that is good quality, that’s educationally sound as well as musically sound then hopefully we’ll get the same response.

Vicki: Yes, because you know YouTube has a lot of great resources. But some things are just are being viewed that are not being made by educators, and I guess that’s the difference. You’ve kind of got a partnership of music and education. So Joanna, what’s the response of your own students to this music, knowing that you are involved?

Joanna: They love the fact that they can put a name to the music. But on the other hand they will beg to listen to it over and over again. They always ask for Mr. Pace to write them another song. Can Mr. Pace write us a song about this? So, it’s fun to see they are understanding the way that they are learning. And that they appreciate music as a learning tool.

Thoughts on memorization

Vicki: Does it bother you that we have so much memorization? I guess that just has to be part of it in the elementary grades?

Joanna: It’s a great question. There’s a lot of different parts going into learning. We hope with all memorization that students have a conceptual understanding before memorization takes place. For example, addition facts. We want them to understand what 1 + 2 means before they memorize it. But at a certain point, as they get further along in their academic careers, or their academic experience, we want automaticity so they can apply those concepts to 2 and 3 and 4 digit addition, subtraction, and eventually multiplication. So, I don’t know that every subject matter needs a song. But I certainly feel like it helps, especially with those students that are on the fringes. That maybe don’t have the same parental support or maybe struggle with some learning disabilities, or autism, or other social disabilities. So I feel like music has a place in the classroom and it is definitely underutilized.

How do we pick effective videos to help kids learn?

Vicki: But not all music is going to be educational or worthwhile. So, either of you can answer this question. When educators are selecting videos for their classrooms, do you think there is a common mistake that educators make when they pick those videos and maybe it doesn’t have the results they want?

Joanna: I would definitely say in my experience, because of the level of desperation and low-funding for educators a lot of times they will go with the cheapest option, not necessarily the best option. And sometimes, at least in our experiences, if we do our research before creating a song, we will – we’ll see a song that repeats the same melody over and over again, but with different lyrics. Which kind of waters down the effectiveness, because the kids get confused on what goes where. If they hear the same melody with different lyrics, I guess it is either…I don’t know if Matt could better explain that. But it definitely confuses them.

Vicki: Well, and Matt, aren’t there some copyright issues with what some people are posting because they are actually not original. You’re making original music, right?

Matt: Well, it depends on the song they are using. We’re going to try to do most of ours original music. One we have done so far was to an old tune that’s now in the public domain. So, people can use that tune however they want for commercial or noncommercial purposes. And that’s totally fine. It just depends on how long the song is. Or how long it’s been since the song was published or how long since the song’s author has died. A lot of the tunes use old folk tunes, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”, things like that. That’s totally fair game to use a melody for a learning song. Hopefully it is used well.

What mistakes do people make when writing videos for kids to learn?

Vicki: So Matt, a lot of educators are getting into writing music for learning. Do you think there is a common mistake that educators may make as they are creating music for learning?

Matt: Well, there are a lot of things that go into writing a song, and especially with such a specific purpose as we’re trying to do. I think one it has to be fun for the kids. If they are going to be engaged, if they’re going to want to use that as part of their learning it has to be a fun song. And the other thing, as I mentioned, concise, short and sweet, and obviously you want it to be correct.

Joanna: We also noticed some are just terrible to listen to. So having some quality in there doesn’t hurt.

Vicki: Well, we’ve gotten so many great tips. I know you want to check the show notes and you definitely want to check their [YouTube] channel, because they have lots more to come in this collaboration because it’s important to select the right videos for learning. I’m so excited, Joanna and Matt, to see you working together because I think that when educators and musicians collaborate that we are going to continue to see an increase in the quality of the videos we are using in our classrooms.

Matt: Absolutely

Bio as submitted

Joanna grew up as a military child overseas mainly in Europe. She studied Elementary and Early Childhood Education at BYU, and this will be her fifth year teaching. She married Matthew Pace, a songwriter from Las Vegas, in 2010. They love working together on various projects, including raising their baby boy whom they adopted last year.

YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgM7EYFFz_dba0OIZs5L9kg

    Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored podcast episode.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.) This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.

The post K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

from Cool Cat Teacher BlogCool Cat Teacher Blog http://www.coolcatteacher.com/k-6-educational-music-videos-selecting-right-videos-learning/

[aira26soonas]

K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning

Joanna and Matt Pace on episode 172 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter

Joanna and Matt Pace write videos on a popular YouTube channel, Hopscotch. Joanna is an elementary teacher and Matt is a songwriter from Las Vegas. Their 7 Continents song has almost 300K views. Today they talk about what makes a great learning video and how to select good videos on YouTube for K-6 students.

Today’s Sponsor: GradeCam lets you create assessments with formats including multiple choice, true/false, number grids, rubrics, and even handwritten numeric answers that can be read and scored by Aita – Gradecam’s Artificial Intelligence Teaching Assistant.Score assessments, generate reports, and transfer grades automatically. Work smarter instead of harder. Sign up for your 60-day free trial at gradecam.com/coolcatteacher

Listen Now

Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher

Stream byclicking here.

Below is an enhanced transcript, modified for your reading pleasure. All comments in the shaded green box are my own. For guests and hyperlinks to resources, scroll down.

***

Enhanced Transcript

K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning

Shownotes: www.coolcatteacher.com/e172 Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Vicki: Today we are talking to Joanna and Matt Pace. So this is really a unique couple – they have a great YouTube channel for K-6 – lots of free resources. Now Joanna, you are a 2nd-grade teacher. And I’m guessing that part of this is your desire to help kids remember. How do we help kids that age remember things?

How do we help kids remember?

Joanna: Well, that’s a great question. I think that most kids learn in different ways. And in my classroom, we try a lot of different things. And some of those include movement and repetition. Music is a great way to take both of those – as they are repeating things over and over and attitude. So, for different kids, some are more powerful than others, but we have noticed (at least in our classroom and my experience with my team members) music helps almost all kids to learn and remember things.

How did you get started?

Vicki: So, what happened Joanna? Did you go home and say, “Write me some music, Matt because you’re the composer?” What happened?

Joanna: That’s exactly what happened! I will look online, I look in stories to see what I can find to help teach concepts that my students are struggling with. And at the end of the day, sometimes I really can’t find things that meet our needs. So, I say, “Matt, you’re awesome at writing a song! Can you please take your skills and make up for what I lack in teaching sometimes?”

Vicki: So, Matt, I was looking at your Continent song. And we’ll post that in the show notes. You’ve got over a hundred thousand people who have seen that particular one. How do you write an engaging song about the continents?

How they wrote the 7 Continent Song

Matt: Well, that one we started off just talking about the key points – what we wanted the kids to get out of the song. And so after we had figured all of that out, then I had to work my songwriter magic to make it rhyme, to make it have an appealing melody. One of the big aspects of a song that we want to keep, is keeping it really short. Because then you can repeat it and then you can remember it. The longer you go the less attention you have because and so trying to say that idea in as concise a way as you possibly can and still make it melodic and singable and rememberable.

Vicki: Matt, are you surprised with the response you are getting to your videos?

Matt: On one side, yes. I didn’t expect our third song that we released on YouTube to have that much of a response. But on the other side, we had seen lots of videos on YouTube that have .. were about similar subjects. Similar type things that were song animation that had so many views. We didn’t know why they had that many views. So people must have been in need of that content. No matter how high or low the quality of the video was, they were getting millions of views. So we figured, if we put something out there that is good quality, that’s educationally sound as well as musically sound then hopefully we’ll get the same response.

Vicki: Yes, because you know YouTube has a lot of great resources. But some things are just are being viewed that are not being made by educators, and I guess that’s the difference. You’ve kind of got a partnership of music and education. So Joanna, what’s the response of your own students to this music, knowing that you are involved?

Joanna: They love the fact that they can put a name to the music. But on the other hand they will beg to listen to it over and over again. They always ask for Mr. Pace to write them another song. Can Mr. Pace write us a song about this? So, it’s fun to see they are understanding the way that they are learning. And that they appreciate music as a learning tool.

Thoughts on memorization

Vicki: Does it bother you that we have so much memorization? I guess that just has to be part of it in the elementary grades?

Joanna: It’s a great question. There’s a lot of different parts going into learning. We hope with all memorization that students have a conceptual understanding before memorization takes place. For example, addition facts. We want them to understand what 1 + 2 means before they memorize it. But at a certain point, as they get further along in their academic careers, or their academic experience, we want automaticity so they can apply those concepts to 2 and 3 and 4 digit addition, subtraction, and eventually multiplication. So, I don’t know that every subject matter needs a song. But I certainly feel like it helps, especially with those students that are on the fringes. That maybe don’t have the same parental support or maybe struggle with some learning disabilities, or autism, or other social disabilities. So I feel like music has a place in the classroom and it is definitely underutilized.

How do we pick effective videos to help kids learn?

Vicki: But not all music is going to be educational or worthwhile. So, either of you can answer this question. When educators are selecting videos for their classrooms, do you think there is a common mistake that educators make when they pick those videos and maybe it doesn’t have the results they want?

Joanna: I would definitely say in my experience, because of the level of desperation and low-funding for educators a lot of times they will go with the cheapest option, not necessarily the best option. And sometimes, at least in our experiences, if we do our research before creating a song, we will – we’ll see a song that repeats the same melody over and over again, but with different lyrics. Which kind of waters down the effectiveness, because the kids get confused on what goes where. If they hear the same melody with different lyrics, I guess it is either…I don’t know if Matt could better explain that. But it definitely confuses them.

Vicki: Well, and Matt, aren’t there some copyright issues with what some people are posting because they are actually not original. You’re making original music, right?

Matt: Well, it depends on the song they are using. We’re going to try to do most of ours original music. One we have done so far was to an old tune that’s now in the public domain. So, people can use that tune however they want for commercial or noncommercial purposes. And that’s totally fine. It just depends on how long the song is. Or how long it’s been since the song was published or how long since the song’s author has died. A lot of the tunes use old folk tunes, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”, things like that. That’s totally fair game to use a melody for a learning song. Hopefully it is used well.

What mistakes do people make when writing videos for kids to learn?

Vicki: So Matt, a lot of educators are getting into writing music for learning. Do you think there is a common mistake that educators may make as they are creating music for learning?

Matt: Well, there are a lot of things that go into writing a song, and especially with such a specific purpose as we’re trying to do. I think one it has to be fun for the kids. If they are going to be engaged, if they’re going to want to use that as part of their learning it has to be a fun song. And the other thing, as I mentioned, concise, short and sweet, and obviously you want it to be correct.

Joanna: We also noticed some are just terrible to listen to. So having some quality in there doesn’t hurt.

Vicki: Well, we’ve gotten so many great tips. I know you want to check the show notes and you definitely want to check their [YouTube] channel, because they have lots more to come in this collaboration because it’s important to select the right videos for learning. I’m so excited, Joanna and Matt, to see you working together because I think that when educators and musicians collaborate that we are going to continue to see an increase in the quality of the videos we are using in our classrooms.

Matt: Absolutely

Bio as submitted

Joanna grew up as a military child overseas mainly in Europe. She studied Elementary and Early Childhood Education at BYU, and this will be her fifth year teaching. She married Matthew Pace, a songwriter from Las Vegas, in 2010. They love working together on various projects, including raising their baby boy whom they adopted last year.

YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgM7EYFFz_dba0OIZs5L9kg

    Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored podcast episode.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.) This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.

The post K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

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Disgovernance and Resistance

Josh Cook on Jesse Ball’s The Curfew

When we read, we read with our memories. Jesse Ball was already an important author in my reading life by the time I read The Curfew, but whereas his earlier books explore more amorphous ideas like our relationship to imagination, the nature of storytelling, and the bounds of reality, The Curfew explores something more direct and tangible. It was like Ball shot an arrow into my memories of political activism and pinned a question that had dominated my thinking for years: how do we intentionally change the world for the better?

The rented yellow school bus was freezing. Frigid February air rushed in through popped interior rivets. I was on my way back to Burlington, VT from New York City where I had joined thousands of people on February 15, 2003 to protest the coming Iraq War. We were supposed to gather in a delineated zone—a cordoned-off area where our Constitutional right to peaceful assembly would not be superseded by the muscular application of local traffic, vagrancy, and other statutes—near the U.N. building where Colin Powell was giving his now infamous speech, but we never got there. Didn't get within five blocks. The streets were clogged with people, and not just in New York. Around the world millions of people were joined in one of the biggest moments of protest in decades all with one clear message: There is no justification for a war with Iraq. We and the people of Iraq will be recovering from that war for decades.

It wasn't my first protest. I'd been to D.C. to protest the exploitative policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. I'd been to the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia to protest United States interference in democratically elected governments. I'd stood with a dozen people at the top of Church St. to protest the war in Afghanistan because “terrorism” is a technique and you can't wage war on a technique. More generally, I wrote a political column in my college's newspaper, participated in the poli sci club, organized events, thought, talked, wrote, and voted.

After I graduated, the nature of my efforts to make the world a better place changed. I didn't have as much time or resources for organizing and protesting. Besides, I had begun to wonder whether our techniques for creating directed, intentional social change towards a more just and humanist society were working. Protests seemed to be more about emotional catharsis (which is not a bad thing) than about changing policy. Any progress seemed to be two steps forward, one and a half steps back.

But we did not stop trying. Social media arrived. The undercurrent of violent racism corroding our law enforcement and devastating the African-American community was finally brought to the attention of (some) white people with #BlackLivesMatter. Occupy Wall Street changed the conversation about income inequality in America and opened up new possibilities for protest and social change, from the flashy occupations, to the quiet but powerful Rolling Jubilee. We watched Republicans start to break our system of government because the nation had the audacity to elect a black man as President—twice!—and we watched that same black man, despite the malicious opposition of Republicans, stitch the economy back together, extract us from unwinnable wars, improve our national health care system, end don't ask don't tell, and lay the executive groundwork for major advances in economic, social, and environmental justice. Later, those on the left, the engine for so much of that change, found another piston in Bernie Sanders. By the Democratic National Convention, the Democratic party had adopted the most progressive platform since the New Deal. I started thinking about how we removed the ability of Republicans to obstruct progress and how to keep pressure on mainstream Democrats to make good on their progressive promises.

The problem of social change—of how to improve the world in the ways you want it to improve—might be intractable, and in the end, those who struggle for change might be left with vague adages like “Don't take anything off the table, do what sustains and energizes you, and try not to hurt anybody else, especially those weaker than you.” I've spent the bulk of my adult intellectual and political life thinking about the problem of social change. On November 9th, the problem changed from the intractability of social change to the necessity of resistance.

Books change with the world in which you read them, and images and ideas from The Curfew that once spoke to protesting for social change, now speak to resistance. William Drysdale, the protagonist of The Curfew, is a violin virtuoso who can no longer play. Instead, he finds work helping people compose epitaphs for their gravestones. An oppressive, coup-installed government has banned all performance, music, and dissent and enforces a vague but deadly nightly curfew. The government's will is imposed by secret police. Dissenters disappear in the night. William himself was left to care for his daughter alone when his wife is disappeared. It is a gray, dour, cowed world, but there is resistance. William's friend, Gerard, entices him to a meeting with the promise of information about William's wife, but the larger purpose of the meeting is to spread “the method of disgovernance.”

It's not a movement. It's barely a group. But it is a revolution.

There is tension at the meeting, an “enforced jocularity,” and some contraband, but there are no posters, no agendas, no manifestos, no mimeograph machines or photocopiers. There are no speeches, no exhortations to action, no exchanges of activist literature. No weapons. If the secret police burst in, they wouldn't find a revolutionary cell, but a tedious party. It's not a movement. It's barely a group. But it is a revolution.

Gerard explains the method of disgovernance to William: “It is simple enough to describe in a phrase or two the whole extent of it. Any member of the government, any member of the police, of the secret police are all targets. You live your life and do nothing out of the ordinary. But if at some moment, you find yourself in a position to harm one of these targets, you do. Then you continue as if nothing happened.”

There is no leader to hobble the movement with hubris. No message to be distorted by the mainstream media. No fashion to be co-opted by corporations. No entry point for lobbyists or FBI infiltrators. No one to pressure into erodible compromise. No legislators. No executives. No proposed legislation to be poisoned by riders and amendments or killed in committee before anyone is forced to expose their true allegiance in a public vote. No one to bribe. No one to corrupt. No one to imprison. No one to kill because you can't kill a technique.

Gerard continues his description: “You never go out of your way to make such an opportunity come to pass. Not even one step out of your way. And yet, without exception, the targets must each day place themselves in danger before the citizenry, and cause such opportunities to exist. One doesn't prepare oneself except mentally.” No plans. No materials. No literature. No manifestos. The method is invisible to power because all power can see are random acts of violence. And once the government recognizes the revolution, who can they attack? Everyone? As Gerard explains, it is a “...war with no participants.” In the end, no matter the salary, no matter the other inducements, no matter the promises of protection and the seduction of ultimate power, no one will join the secret police. Tyrants, even the most cunning and most violent, all have the same fundamental and inescapable weakness: Without volunteers, they are just one person.

Once we are introduced to the method of disgovernance we realize The Curfew is filled with revolution. An old woman is shot for pushing someone in front of a bus, someone is nearly hit by a car, another man is killed by a brick, and “[o]ne could assume, therefore, that if a building was on fire then it might well be a police station.”

By reducing revolution and resistance to a fundamental unit that does not have the flaws, seams, and weaknesses of other techniques for change listed above, the method of disgovernance, a technique of random acts of violence, is compelling. All the revolution needs to sustain itself and succeed is to spread the idea and either people have the will to enact it at a level that is effective or they won't. The burden on revolutionaries is reduced to their individual preparation to act, spreading the method, and convincing people to adopt it. Given the intractability of social change and our new urgency to act, the method of disgovernance or some form of it feels transferable to our world.

In most dystopian fiction, targets are relatively obvious. Whether orcs, stormtroopers, or soldiers, we know who the targets are by their uniforms. But in the world of The Curfew, the government uses secret police: plain-clothed officers disguised to observe unobserved, to inform without being identified, to act with impunity and anonymity. You couldn't spot one in a line-up and you certainly couldn't spot one in a crowded train station.

Gerard answers the problem of identification this way: “You err on the side of false positives. Everyone shifts their behavior to simple routines, and the secret police are forced to become visible, simply to do their work.” The secret police reveal themselves when they arrest people, or are out after curfew without fear, or ask questions whose answers would be useful to the government. Their uniforms are woven by their actions. For Gerard, it is better to risk harming an innocent than wait for absolute certainty, but this is just a technique. Anybody can establish their own rubric and make their own decision. Gerard might err on the side of false positives, but nobody else has to.

In America today, some of the “targets” are public figures, individuals who must put their faces and names on their actions, and, as in the world of The Curfew, our targets clothe themselves in their actions. They become targets when they ask for the names of people who worked on climate change for the Environmental Protection Agency or on women's issues in the State Department. They become targets when they assign executive power over departments to people specifically designed to destroy them, cover up potential crimes and collusion, celebrate in Trump what they condemn in Clinton, line up to catch the scraps of wealth from the coming kleptocracy, and take the moment of Trump's tainted, electoral college victory to spray paint swastikas on public spaces. We are awash in targets. Some of them will have security paid for by our own tax dollars between us and them, but some of them will be on our train or across from us at the dinner table.

But the concept of “harm” is trickier for us. In The Curfew, the secret police shoot people in the street, beat them to death, make them disappear. Since the secret police are murderers, most will accept the ethical validity of a wide range of harm. But, as yet, the violence of the Trumpocracy and the existing sources of injustice it will strengthen and maintain, are at one or two removes. It is unlikely that anyone in the Trumpocracy will order the assassination or jailing of an opponent, swing a club, or pull a trigger. Rather, their body count will come from people who lose access to health care and die of preventable diseases, women who are forced to perform unsafe abortions or carry dangerous pregnancies to term, African-Americans murdered by the police because of the absence of law enforcement reforms, immigrants deported back to lethal situations, people of color killed by mob violence and the Dylan Roots that will take making “America Great Again” into their own gun slathered hands, and, of course, the thousands—or perhaps millions—of people who will die from the effects of climate change. One of the primary motivations for organizing resistance to Trump is to prevent, as much as possible, the harm he can do. But how?              

All works of art seek to establish some kind of applicability, whether it is as direct as we see in The Curfew, or more abstract, esoteric, dialectic, or self-referential. Literature argues for its own relevance. In The Curfew, Ball cultivates a comfort with death and violence before introducing the method of disgovernance, creating in the reader an atypical acceptance of random acts of deadly violence.

The novel opens with a violent and confusing scene, “There was a great deal of shouting and then a shot...An old woman was bleeding hunched over a bench. Two men were standing fifty feet away, one holding a gun. Some ten feet from the bench, a man was lying underneath the wheels of a truck, which seemed to have injured him, perhaps irreparably.” Despite the two dead bodies, this opening passage is disconcertingly passive. There was a “shot” and one man was “holding a gun,” but, in the prose, no one “shoots the old woman.” Furthermore, the other man wasn't “run over by a truck” but is simply “lying beneath the wheels” and he isn't mortally wounded or dead, he just “seemed” to be “injured...perhaps irreparably.” This first scene in the book is one of significant violence, but Ball uses a series of passive constructions to dim that violence, so the bloodshed does not feel as visceral as it should.

After this opening, we shadow William Drysdale on his work day. Violence follows him as he goes from assignment to assignment, including: “I was walking under the bridge on Seventh. There was a shout and she came down, hit not twenty feet in front of me.” Furthermore, as an epitaphorist, every job is an assertion of death. His first stone is for a man who died at 92, his second is for a nine-year-old girl who was beheaded by a slate tile thrown from the roof by the wind (or perhaps by a hand at a different target), and his third is for a butcher's father (a person whose day job is the parceling of corpses). He then meets with the parents and widow of a young man who “died in the night, two weeks ago...—There is no body. The body was taken—a political disappearance by the government. His final assignment for the day is with a fisherman who has chosen to compose his gravestone on what he considers his happiest day. It is the fisherman's third stone. Even the most directly affirmative moment in the book is affirmed by death.

In the world of The Curfew, violence is the fundamental unit of resistance, but the violence in our world is very different, especially when considered in light of likely targets and the persistence (at least at time of writing) of other norms, conventions, checks and balances, and laws that ostensibly prevent acts of violence on both sides of governing conflicts. Furthermore, American resistance, even revolution, has decided on a commitment to nonviolent actions, even when oppressors resort to violence. For a whole range of historic, moral, even practical reasons, causing “harm” does not seem like our fundamental unit of resistance. But, as the characters in The Curfew do, we should find a fundamental unit of resistance for our world and build from there.

Instead of harm, our unit of resistance should be refusal: the fundamental “no.” Our method of disgovernance under Trump could be: “Whenever a representative or surrogate of the Trump administration or the Republican Party it now leads asks you something, you refuse.” Don't perform at or attend his events, or serve in his administration, or vote for any of the policies offered by Republicans, or join him for a photo op. Refuse to let them speak at your college and if the administration invites them anyway refuse to attend. Refuse to let them eat at your restaurant or shop at your store. Refuse to let them hold rallies at your venues.

Part of the value of having a fundamental unit of resistance is that it allows us to, as thoughtfully as possible, respond to people who are comfortable acting thoughtlessly. The barrage of legislation and hearings and executive orders along with the constant stream of scandalous tweets and reports, combine to make it almost impossible to respond with any kind of thought to anything Trump and the Republicans are doing. I'm sure that is, at least in part, a tactic designed to overwhelm opposition and, in part, the hubris of believing without doubt or nuance in your own rightness. But, if our basic unit is refusal, we at least have something we can instantly respond with.

Obviously, those of us who are not members of Congress, business leaders, or celebrities in some field, will have few options for directly refusing the Trump administration, but, that to me is part of the strength of a fundamental unit of resistance. It is simply a base. Just like the characters in The Curfew, we are able to sculpt our own actions to our own circumstances.

Resistance is, in essence, a reaction, and one of the challenges we'll face—especially if one of the chambers of Congress is not flipped in 2018—is discovering and discerning what the fuck we should do on the fly. But even though resistance must always be flexible, must be new when the threat is new, must find ways to both respond and be one step ahead, a base is useful. I suspect, over the next months, as Trump establishes his patterns and as those who have studied resistance more than I begin and continue to lay out theory and ideas, this base will grow in sophistication, but we can start with responding to every request from the Trump administration with “I refuse.”

My desk is cluttered with books, unopened mail, receipts, scraps of paper I've written notes on, notebooks, and coffee mugs. My phone notifies me that I have a text from Daily Action or Planned Parenthood telling me who of my elected officials I should call today and why. From the text messages, Make 5 Calls, Flippable, Swing Left, the people I follow on Twitter, and the dozens of emails I get, I'll decide what small action in the resistance I will take today. Maybe it will be subscribing to one of the newspapers working to expose the corruption and malfeasance of the administration or a donation to one of the organizations mitigating its impact, like the ACLU or MIRA or the Southern Poverty Law Center, or I'll support one of the Democrats running for the House in a special election in some way, or I'll badger friends and family in Maine who are represented in Congress by Republicans to make calls, send emails, and visit offices. It may be taking care of myself with a day off social media and a long walk so I don't burn out. It may be working on this essay.

...the method of disgovernance is a lifestyle. Resistance must be as well.

Hiding behind the idea of “harm,” behind all the violence, perhaps even behind Ball's own lyricism, the method of disgovernance makes another powerful statement about resistance, one I was only able to hear after revisiting these ideas and after six months of thinking of myself as part of the resistance: the method of disgovernance is a lifestyle. Resistance must be as well. The term “lifestyle” can be intimidating, but resistance as a lifestyle doesn't mean giving your life to the resistance. We resist, in part, so we and other people can live around idiosyncratic sources of joy. Consider “reading as a lifestyle,” for example. As readers, we still go to work, have dinner, get drunk, binge watch TV, and fritter away our lives on social media. We still sleep, go out on dates, miss the train, forget our keys, and get a bagel in the afternoon after swearing that salad at lunch was enough. And yet, we make time to read, to visit the bookstore, talk to booksellers, rate books online, research reviews, and maybe even join a book club. We do other things during our day, but no day feels complete if we haven't done at least a little reading.

I don't know if we'll be able to prevent the rise of fascism in the United States and I have even less faith that we will be able to prevent Trump from doing irreparable harm to our world, but we must fight nonetheless. We must turn the world of our experience to the problem of resistance. For me, that world is quite often books, and from The Curfew I've built my fundamental refusal. And no day feels complete if I haven't done at least a little resisting. 

Josh Cook is the author of the Kirkus-starred novel, AN EXAGGERATED MURDER, published by Melville House in March 2015. His fiction and other work has appeared in The Coe Review, Epicenter Magazine, The Owen Wister Review, Barge, Plume Poetry Anthology 2012 and 2013, and elsewhere. He was a finalist in the 2011 and 2012 Cupboard Fiction Contest. His criticism has appeared in the Huffington Post Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Fiction Advocate, Bookslut, The Millions, The Rumpus and elsewhere. He is a bookseller with Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA.

The Curfew by Jesse Ball • Vintage Contemporaries, 2011 • 194 pages