Robins Haiku

 

As robins were late

For southern warmth this winter

Our holly fed them

A Haiku for the Season

 A little Haiku to mark this unusual start to winter:

                    Snowfall turns to ice

                    And the cold keeps us at home

                    Awaiting Christmas.

"A Tale of Two Cities" Paints a Portrait of Today

 I sat down this afternoon to begin re-reading Charles Dickens' classic, A Tale  of Two Cities and was surprised to be immediately struck by its opening sentences:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,  it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope,  it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

Published in 1859 and telling a tale set in 1775, it could have been describing our own times.  What more to say?

"Call Jane" --A Must-See Movie About the Recent Past for Our New Times

 Yesterday, we went to see Call Jane, a new film starring Elizabeth Banks and Sigourney Weaver.  Set in the late 1960s, it is a fictionalized account of the true story of a group of women who organized themselves to provide safe abortions in Chicago in the years before the Roe versus Wade decision, when access to abortions was often controlled by the Mafia. 

It was a matinee, and we were alone in the theater, except for one guy who came in after the film had started.  However, it needs to be seen.  It is a powerful film—one that is especially relevant in this post-Roe time, when the Supreme Court has taken away the rights that Roe had ensured over the past half-century. 

Interestingly, Call Jane is not alone.  HBO Max is offering a documentary about the same group of women.  It is called The Janes.  Here is a link to a review.

The phenomenon portrayed in these programs is one that Americans need to explore.  With abortion now being outlawed in different ways by different states, Call Jane allows us to look back just a generation ago to see what America is doing to itself again.

Celebrating German-American Day

 

Today is German-American Day, in recognition that on this date in 1683, William Penn brought the first German settlers to America—a group of 13 German Quaker and Mennonite families who founded Germantown. As Garrison Keillor notes in The Writer’s Almanac:

Penn the son called Pennsylvania his “Holy Experiment,” and he set about to find a group of righteous men to form a new society founded on Quaker ideals of nonviolence, freedom of religious worship, and equality for all. “Freedom of religion” and “equality” were conditional terms, however. While other religious traditions were tolerated in Pennsylvania, participation in government was restricted to Protestants; Catholics, Jews, and Muslims could not vote or hold office. And Penn’s promises of equality didn’t really extend to everyone: women couldn’t vote, and Penn himself was a slave-owner.

However, Penn’s first 13 German families had a different idea.  As Keillor notes, “Germantown became the birthplace of the anti-slavery movement in America five years later, when several town leaders sent a two-page condemnation of slavery to the governing body of the Quaker church.”

It is a good reminder that, while many settlers from the Old World brought their ideas of white supremacy and intolerance for others with them, some also brought traditions of peace and tolerance that came to be honored as national ideals.  We are still struggling with these issues, but German-American Day is a good time to ponder the broader impact of Quaker ideals on Americans’ ongoing struggle to honor equality as the context for celebrating freedom in all aspects of our lives.

The Teacher Shortage: Another Thought

 Here is a thought on how we might minimize the negative impact of the teacher shortage on today's students:   

Why not encourage States to make a policy that allows retired teachers to teach up to 2 class sections per semester in our high schools without endangering their existing retirement income?  Not all retirees would be interested, but there surely are teachers who would be willing to help--and earn some extra money-- by teaching one or two courses per semester or by providing other professional support.

 At the same time, we need to acknowledge that some uses of new technology--things that we did during the Pandemic to keep learning active for our students--will find permanent homes in our educational environment.  For instance, in higher education, we have already begun to see universities using e-learning to share specialized curricula in areas such as agriculture, geographic information systems, and other areas.   In the U.S. Midwest we have the example of the Great Plains IDEA (Interactive Distance Education Alliance)  through which multiple state universities are sharing responsibility for teaching undergraduate and master's level specialties.  This opens new possibilities for school districts within a State to share junior and senior-level courses at the high school level.  

Another way to increase the teaching capacity of our high schools is to partner with area higher education institutions to offer online "dual enrollment" courses,  in which high school students can earn both high school graduation and college credit.

The online eLearning environment has been with us now for over a quarter of a century.  It is increasingly a mature, well-supported learning environment at institutions that have taken it seriously.  Now is the time to consider how to fully integrate it to ensure that students have access to the kind of learning that will prepare them for postsecondary and workplace success.

The President and the Freedom Fighter

 

I just finished reading David Kilmeade’s The President and the Freedom Fighter, which looks at the Civil War through the evolving perspectives and actions of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.  It is a fascinating read.  In just about 250 pages, it presents key people and events before, during, and after the Civil War and explores how Lincoln and Douglass saw the issues of slavery and emancipation.  It reads like a novel.

Douglass, an escaped slave who became a major public figure, believed in immediate emancipation.  Lincoln, a self-made lawyer and politician, was concerned about the bringing the Union back together.  He worried that immediate emancipation would make it impossible for southern states to re-join the Union and cause some northern states to join the Confederacy.  He wrote the Emancipation Proclamation and kept it in his desk drawer, awaiting a time when it would be accepted as a solution rather than as an irritant.

The story of these two leaders and the environment that shaped their lives before, during, and after the Civil War, is powerful. 

The Teacher Shortage and How to Solve It

The latest news on the start the 2022-23 school year is that nearly 300,000 teachers have left their jobs over the past few years, creating a severe teacher shortage in both large and small school districts around the country. What we can do about it? Here are some thoughts to start the discussion. 

My first suggestion is obvious. Pay teachers salaries that reflect their preparation and their experience. Teachers are among the worst paid professionals in the nation, yet their work is absolutely essential to the economy and to the overall civic health of our society. Pay them for the education they must do to qualify for the jobs, for the countless hours outside the classroom that they must spend in addition to their classroom time, and for value they add to the lives of their students and to their community. 

Second, respect them for the professionals that they are. Our local school district tends to refer to teachers as "staff." That's wrong. They are "faculty" and should be seen as special contributors to the work of their schools. That should show up in their paychecks, but more importantly, it should give them a stronger voice in school policies and practices related to instruction. 

Third, start looking ahead. Increasingly, we are hearing about the evolution of our K-12 system into a "K-14" system--one where the social expectation is that students will be expected continue their education into the first two years of college. This will place new demands on teachers at all levels as schools try to position their curricula for the new environment in an economy dominated by technology. We ust help teachers prepare for the future--and ensure that there is a good career path for them as education adapts to the Information Revolution. 

However, beyond these immediate issues there is a larger question of the role of K-12 education in a society that is increasingly being shaped by the Information Revolution.  The question we must ask is: What is the purpose of public education in this new society?

In a 2012 article in Education Week, Greg Jobin-Leeds noted, “The unfortunate reality is that many believe training students in Math, Science, English, and History is what it means to educate. Society is far more complicated than the limited ideas covered in these four subjects.”  He went on to argue that “To educate is to prepare and train someone in the necessary skills to have the ability to participate in society as a full citizen. This definition reaches far beyond the scope of the four primary subjects. Education should include thoroughly learning the functions and duties of government, a complete understanding of the constitution and one’s rights, learning how social justice movements change society, how to farm, how to cook, etc. The public school system should exist to prepare young people for life. This is the task of an educator: facilitate the progress of transforming youth into functional independent full citizens.”

Ted Wheeler, writing for NEA Today, noted a 2016 survey by PDK International that asked about the mail goal of public school education.  Responses:

            45% felt that public school education should “prepare students academically.”

            26% felt that public schools should “prepare students to be good citizens.”

            25% felt that public schools should “prepare students for work.”

            4% were unsure

In 2017, a Penn State website on the purpose of K-12 education quoted Martin Luther King’s statement about the purpose of education in a 1948 speech at Morehouse College:  “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason but no morals. … We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.”  The first goal, the article notes, is that “students should develop the capacity for independent thought through inquiry and reasoning.”

More recently, a Study.Com piece points to the National School Boards Association position that “public education exists to serve the following purposes, among others:

• Prepare students for college and the workforce, including preparing them for jobs that may not even exist yet due to rapidly changing technology
• Help children fulfill their diverse potentials
• Enable students to become well-rounded individuals, focusing on the whole child and not just mastery of academic content
• Prepare students to live a productive life and become good citizens, while obeying the social and legal rules of society

Add to that mastery of common core and state standards, assessment after assessment, activities, sports, technology, literacy, etc. That's a lot to accomplish. How does it do all this and what is the role of the teacher as well as teacher learning communities in public education?”

In short, the expectations of public schooling in this new world place new and much greater demands on teachers.  It is essential that we fund teaching appropriately and give the profession the respect it needs in order to attract the best teachers to our schools.

Your thoughts?

Democracy and the News

 

This year is yet another year of political upheaval.  It is, of course, an election year, which always encourages folks to express more extreme views of their politics in order to attract voters.  It is also a year of war.  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is giving a new generation visible examples of the damage that an autocracy can create in the world.  And, of course, it is yet another year of pandemic—perhaps the last year when this particular pandemic will yield as much power as COVID-19 and its cousins have done in recent years, but still it is a dangerous year.  It is also a time of ongoing and ever-increasing social, environmental, and technical change, when we need to look at the long-term implications of our actions and attitudes.  And, it is a time when technology and social isolation have combined to create a multi-lane media highway for unsupported opinion, false and purposefully mis-leading information, and, ultimately, lies about the issues facing us and how we might best work to build a better world, greatly expanding the chasm between the two main political communities in the United States. 

It is not an environment where the goal of an election is to choose between nuanced differences among candidates in order to vote intelligently in the primary elections.  The parties have chosen to depict almost all candidates as representing an extreme.  And, since every member of the Congressional House of Representatives is up for re-election, it is a challenge for every voter to discover what the candidate truly stands for.  That makes this spring a good time to step back and consider some of the basics.

Some Definitions

            Perhaps the most basic definition of government is that government is how individuals work together to build and maintain a community—to help each other survive, essentially.  Living in community with others is basic to being a human being.  Biologically, we must care for our children much longer than most other species.  Families become central to the health of individuals over many years.  As families inter-mingle due to parenting and sharing work, communities inevitably evolve.  The relationships that individuals make with other individuals in order to ensure their common safety and health are what define “community” at the most basic level.  A community provides its individual members with protection and with help—whether it be garbage collection, medical care, education, safety, or simply the trust of neighbors—that allows individuals to thrive.

            There are many ways that individuals have organized communities over the millennia.  Some early American communities even changed their governing structure several times a year as the focus shifted seasonally from agriculture to hunting. That said, today several models stand out.  Here are definitions of terms that are tossed around a lot these days:

            Let’s start with “community.”  The online Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines community  as “the people with common interests living in a particular area” or “an interacting population of various kinds of individuals (such as species) in a common location” or “a social state or condition” (among other, more specialized definitions).

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary also defines democracy at a couple of levels.  The most basic: “government by the people especially: rule of the majority.”  However, the idea of majority rule can be interpreted in several ways.  Imagine belonging to an unpopular minority and being “ruled” by the majority—not something that takes a great deal of imagination for many citizens.  So, there is also this more refined definition: “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.” 

Americans live in a constitutional democracy—a republic in which qualified individual citizens may vote at local, state, and national levels for a governor or president and for members of federal and state congresses.  These elected representatives then are empowered to work together to make and implement laws of all sorts.  While there is no Constitutional limit to the number of political parties who may put up candidates for office, two parties have tended to control the majority of elected officers over the years.  Since the 1850s, those have been the Democrat and Republican parties.

The Democratic Party, says the dictionary, is defined as “of or relating to one of the two major political parties in the U.S. evolving in the early 19th century from the anti-federalists and the Democratic-Republican party and associated in modern times with policies of broad social reform and internationalism.” 

The Republican Party, on the other hand, is defined as “the one of the two major political parties evolving in the U.S. in the mid-19th century that is usually primarily associated with business, financial, and some agricultural interests and is held to favor a restricted governmental role in economic life.”

Many liberal Democrats maintain that the Republican Party, under the continued influence of Donald Trump, is moving beyond fiscal conservatism and toward fascism.  Merriam-Webster defines fascism as “a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control” and a fascist government as “a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.”  That aside, Republicans tend to celebrate individualism in the sense that individual citizens (and their businesses) should be responsible for their own actions and let others—from individuals to businesses to social and ethnic/racial groups and other societal groupings—be responsible for their own actions. 

At the other end of the spectrum, Republicans argue in their political ads that liberal Democrats are pushing the country toward socialism.  Merriam-Webster defines socialism as “any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods” and “a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state.”  My sense is that the Democratic Party’s sense of itself today reflects its heyday as the political home of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the advocate for social change since then—things like labor unions, voter’s rights, support for access to higher education, civil rights, and health care access, most recently, the Affordable Care Act.  These days, critics of the Democratic Party tend to gather these actions together in the term “woke”—trying to deal with embedded societal problems like racism, sexism, etc.  However, the Democratic party is far from promoting socialism per se.

In the middle of this is an ongoing cultural struggle between a strong sense of individual freedom, which dates back to the years before the Revolution, on one hand, and, on the other, the need to identify one’s self as a member of a community.  For two centuries, we have celebrated the wisdom of the Constitution that “all men are created equal,” but have had difficulty agreeing on the definition of “all men” for that entire time.  Similarly, we have had difficulty agreeing on what our obligations are to the other citizens that we hold as being “equal.”   

Somewhere in the middle of all this is a tradition of shared willingness to meet and work together across our differences—for individualists to pay taxes for roads that help others get where they want to go and for governments to let some societal practices succeed or fail based on individual, rather than government support—but also to agree that some things can fare well only if we work together and use our government to help those who need help and, in the process, improve life in the community.  Safe roads and bridges come to mind, along with K-12 schools, clean water to drink, access to medical care, safety from crime, and other things that protect our shared rights as citizens.

Currently, however, the more extreme views are capturing the headlines and the attention of voters in both parties.  To some degree, this focus on the extremes can be attributed to the rapid change in technology.  It has become something of a truism that, while technology can change very quickly, it takes much longer for society to adapt to that change.  We need to develop the means to ensure that receivers of “news” are better able to distinguish between fact and opinion and, even more important, are better able to judge whether information is true or false, direct or misleading. 

The technology that, increasingly, we use to gather information has not been with us for very long.  Earlier technology—broadcast radio and TV, mostly—was subject to the “fairness doctrine,” created in 1949 by the Federal Communications Commission to (1) ensure that broadcasters presented controversial issues and (2) that they fairly reflected the differing viewpoints on those issues.  That policy was withdrawn in 1987, by which time many more media channels were available to the public and the political parties had already begun to use talk shows rather than just the news to promote their positions on social issues.  Time has come, some would argue, for us to better distinguish between “news” (which I would argue is best when it is objective) and “talk” (which should be required to label itself as an “op/ed” medium) and to announce on their programs whether they are “news” or “opinion.”

There is much for all of us, regardless of age or position, to learn about how to function as voters and citizens in this always-new environment that technology has given us. 

A Memory from Annie Dillard

I am reading An American Childhood, Annie Dillard’s memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s.  I grew up at pretty much the same time north of Pittsburgh in what is now Hermitage, Pa., and was delighted to see that we shared some similar memories of roaming the public library.  Here is what she wrote:

What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children?  It is a kind of gratitude, I think—the gratitude of the ten-year-old who wakes to her own energy and the brisk challenge of the world.  You thought you knew the place and all its routines, but you see you hadn’t known.  Whole stacks at the library held books devoted to things you knew nothing about.  The boundary of knowledge receded, as you poked about in books, like Lake Erie’s rim as you climbed its cliffs.  And each area of knowledge disclosed another, and another.  Knowledge wasn’t a body or a tree, but instead air, or space, or being—whatever pervaded, whatever never ended and fitted into the smallest cracks and the widest space between stars.

When I was a kid in the fifties, the Sharon Free Public Library filled the front of the yellow brick building on State Street that also housed the Buhl Club and provided space for indoor sports young people.  The Library entrance faced State Street, with wide concrete stairs leading to stout columns and beautiful wood and glass doors.  Inside, was a wonderland of books, organized around a semi-circle of stacks on two levels, plus a first-floor children’s room to the left and a reference/reading room on the right.  It was within walking distance for me, and I spent a lot of time there, haunting the stacks and discovering many great books, biographies and autobiographies, novels, and histories.  It was my haven. 

Thanks to Annie Dillard for a great memory.

The Challenge of Leadership in eLearning: In Memory of Karen Swan

 

On April 1, 2022, I was delighted to take part in a webinar celebrating the research and other contributions made to eLearning by the late Dr. Karen Swan, who died in September 2021.  The webinar was organized by Dr. Raymond Schroeder and his colleagues at the University of Illinois-Springfield and made available nationally by the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (for details see: https://www.uis.edu/colrs/research/swan/).  Below is the presentation that I gave as part of the event.  It was an honor to be able to recognize Karen’s contributions to our field in this way.

***

I am very happy to join colleagues from across the U.S. and Canada today to help celebrate the work and the legacy of our late friend and colleague Dr. Karen Swan.  Karen and I were at different institutions throughout our careers, but we got to know each other primarily through the Online Learning Consortium.  OLC was created by the Sloan Foundation.  It brought together a new community of academics, instructional designers, media professionals, and educational outreach professionals to explore and advance online learning in diverse institutions nationally.  It was where many of us practitioners first met Karen.

In 2020, I co-edited the second edition of Leading the eLearning Transformation of Higher Education.  Karen had written a chapter on learning effectiveness for the first edition of the book.  For the second edition, she and Peter Shea co-authored two chapters that focused specifically on what leaders of elearning programs should know about teaching online and learning effectiveness.   This recognized a reality in our field:  many of the individuals who lead e-learning units are not themselves teachers.  I count myself among that group.  In the first edition, Karen had written that eLearning represented a paradigm change. “Leaders,” she wrote, “must be able to represent these issues to the institution at large, especially when reporting to academic governance groups” (p. 81). In the second edition, Karen and Peter explained that it is difficult to lead in this ever-changing—ever-new, in a way—environment without understanding both the opportunities and the challenges that the technology presents for curriculum development and instructional design and delivery.  And they recognized that eLearning leaders often become institutional change agents whose job is to help the institution adapt to a new teaching environment in a society engulfed by social and technological change.  

Karen and Peter looked at ways to evaluate learning effectiveness in eLearning courses.  “The foundational learning effectiveness task for an eLearning leader” they wrote, “ . . .  often involves justifying the efficacy of learning online.” (p 76)  “It is therefore imperative,” they added, “that online learning leaders engage in efforts to understand promising, research-based practices and the outcomes of efforts to improve online education in their own contexts” (p. 77).  A key to that goal is the Community of Inquiry framework, in which learning happens at the intersection of three elements that must be present in a course:  Social Presence, Teaching Presence, and Cognitive Presence.

They also noted that eLearning leaders need to “take charge of the kinds of outcomes data that their institutions collect,” as this will guide future innovation.  They mention six particular outcome measures that leaders need to communicate within their institutions: 

Satisfaction

Retention

Course grades—or success

Achievement—or “enduring understandings”

Proficiencies—or knowledge, skills, and attitudes essential for the profession being studied

Performance, which Karen and Peter call “the gold standard” of learning outcomes.

In the second chapter, Karen and Peter focused on four pedagogical approaches that can be used in an eLearning environment. 

The first is Constructivism, an approach based on the idea that meaning is something that we impose on the world around us.  We construct meaning in our minds as we interact with the physical environment, the social environment, and our inner mental environment.  In this view, effective learning is active, unique to the individual, and tied closely to our experiences. 

The second approach is Connectivist Pedagogy-- an idea closely tied to the technological revolution.  It maintains that learning involves creating and using networks that connect information to meaning.   This pedagogy, they say, is most evident in connectivist massive open online courses (cMOOCs) -- guided networks of users who find and share content with each other.

Their third model, Androgogy, dates back to 1980, when Malcolm Knowles differentiated between teaching and learning methods used in adult education with those used to educate children.  Knowles argued that, because adults are often driven more by internal needs than external requirements--courses should be organized around problems to be solved and relevant to adult experience and their lives. 

Finally, they describe Heutagogy, a term developed when eLearning was first blossoming.  In this model learners themselves decide on the questions that they want to explore, with the faculty member serving as an “expert guide.”  It is, Karen and Peter noted, a model that may be especially well suited to the eLearning learning environment.

These different approaches to the teaching and learning environment are marked by different senses—different understandings—of how people learn, what they learn, and how teachers can guide that learning process.   The challenge for the eLearning leader is to find a match among these different approaches with the institution’s mission, culture, and strategic goals—and then to communicate with academic units and bring the diverse academic and administrative communities together to move ahead.

This is—at least for this generation of leaders—a continuing process.  In his book, Thank You For Being Late, Thomas Friedman makes the point that we are in an “age of acceleration” caused by rapid change in technology.  But he also writes that social change happens at a much slower pace than technological change.  This is a critical concern for the field—how to be sure we evolve our institutional models to make the most of new technological and social realities that are sure to emerge.

eLearning has developed over the past couple of decades into a powerful learning environment that can help learners be more effective in a new environment that affects all aspects of our lives.  But it continues to develop, mature, and innovate.   Many institutions are just now coming to terms with earlier innovations—things like Open Educational Resources, MOOCs, and degree programs that share online students with other institutions.  More recent innovations—condensed micro-credentials, for instance, or the move to make community college (or the first two years of the baccalaureate degree) free to students—could signal broader changes that could make eLearning even more strategically important to many institutions. 

Beyond that, we’ve seen many institutions embrace eLearning for the first time during the Pandemic.  It was an emergency innovation, and many K-12 and higher education institutions were forced to innovate without a great deal of planning time.  The pandemic helped to move eLearning into the mainstream in a new way and to strengthen the need to understand the learning environments in which it is most effective.

Clearly, in this environment of rapid adoption of technology and great social change, our leaders must be able to communicate to their institutions the best thinking about eLearning effectiveness and how to effectively integrate it into our institutional culture.  In the process, leaders must also become scholars their fields-- who help the university know what is happening around the world with eLearning-- the person who can tell academic and administrative leaders what their colleagues at other institutions are doing and what is happening in the professions where our graduates work.  

The work that Karen and Peter described in Leading the eLearning Transformation of Higher Education has provided a roadmap for these changes.  Throughout her career as a writer and teacher, Karen made a huge contribution to the future of higher education in this new environment.   That work will continue to benefit our field for many years to come.  Thank you.

Works Cited

Miller, G., Benke, M., Chaloux, B., Ragan, L., Schroeder, R., Smutz, W., Swan, K. (2014).  Leading the e-Learning Transformation of Higher Education: Meeting the Challenges of Technology and Distance Education.  Sterling, VA: Stylus Press. 

Miller, G., Ives, K., eds. (2020).  Leading the eLearning Transformation of Higher Education:  Leadership Strategies for the Next Generation. Sterling, VA: Stylus Press.

Writers on Writing

 Here, from the pages of The Writer's Almanac, are some ideas on writing from a dozen of the best: 

Lynda Barry  “People think if you’re writing a story that you have to follow story structure. It’s like thinking the only reason we have teeth is because there are dentists.”

Tracey Chivalier  "Don't write about what you know — write about what you're interested in. Don't write about yourself — you aren't as interesting as you think."

Joan Didion "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."

E.M. Forster  "The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves." He also said, "One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it."

Doris Kearns Goodwin, when asked why she continues to write presidential biographies, answered, “It is not a question of coming at it from the start as if I’m out to get them, or out to praise them. I just want them to come alive again. That’s all you can really ask of history. Then the reader can feel, with all of the complexity of emotions, what it is that is happening to them.”

Jane Hirschfield  “I don't think poetry is based just on poetry; it is based on a thoroughly lived life. And so I couldn't just decide I was going to write no matter what; I first had to find out what it means to live."

 

James Joyce  "The artist, like the God of the Creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez  "What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it." 

Carson McCullers  "I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen."

Boris Pasternak  “I always dreamt of a novel in which, as in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world."

Philip Pullman  "I have always written what I wanted to write. I have never considered the audience for one second. Ever. It's none of their business what I write! Before publication, I am a despot."

J.D. Salinger  "What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while ... What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."

John Steinbeck  "The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true."  In accepting the Nobel Prize, he said, “A writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”

Edith Wharton  "There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it."

Mail-In Voting:

 

2022 has begun, and with it, the mid-term election processes.  Primaries will be held this spring, and the national Congressional elections in November.  Given the narrow margins between the two major parties in Congress and the increasingly major differences between them in philosophy and political tactics, it promises to be a very competitive election.  The competition promises also to be bitter.  We are already seeing signs of that in new state-level restrictions on voter access.  The challenges and false charges that Trump and his cohort continue to promote make it essential that we find a new consensus on how citizens can best exercise their rights—and responsibilities—as voters.  Citizens need confidence in their access to voting and confidence that their votes count.  It is an urgent public education need.

One key area for citizen education in the coming months is mail-in or absentee voting.  This is a relatively new feature for many voters, who are accustomed to showing up at the voting booth on election day.  However, that is increasingly a problem for many voters, partly because of the pandemic.  However, there are other factors--work schedules and other limits on travel, for instance—that have made mail-in balloting an important new way to ensure that most citizens have the practical ability to exercise their voting rights.  Meanwhile, opponents keep raising fraudulent concerns about the security of mail-in voting.  What we need is better public information about the dependability of mail-in balloting. 

Many will be surprised that all 50 states already provide mail-in voting as an option for citizens.  Ballotpedia reports that all 50 states offer a form of mail-in voting.  The Ballotpedia website notes that thirty-four states provide mail-in ballots to any voter who requests one (of these, seven automatically send a ballot to all voters).  The other sixteen states also support mail-in ballots, but require that voters first submit an application and, in some cases, meet eligibility criteria. In-person voting continues to dominate in both environments.

The Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit center at New York University’s School of Justice, has issued a primer on the security of mail-in voting.  It notes,

“Some critics, most notably President Trump, have claimed that mail ballot systems are unusually vulnerable to ‘voter fraud.’  But years of mail voting around the country show this is false and that there is little malfeasance.”

In short, mail-in voting is not an aberration on the fringe of the elections system.  It is increasingly mainstream means of providing better access for citizens to fulfill their civic responsibility. 

I have been concerned for years about the lack of effective civics education in our high schools.  This is an example of the lack of broad public education. What we need, in order to quell the partisan campaigns against this and other means of encouraging voter participation, is a voter education program to help people better understand mail-in voting as part of the Constitutional process of empowering citizens to vote, to feel confident about voting in spite of negative partisan publicity, and to promote best practices in individual states.  That education should be part of the high school curriculum.  Meanwhile, the Brennen Center primer suggests that there is already a wealth of information could be the basis for a public information campaign to help current voters better understand the system in their states.  A public education campaign along these lines would be a welcome project for groups like the League of Women Voters, the ACLU, etc. 

Simply stated, voters need to be confident that they understand this emerging environment and that they trust in its security.  This will help avoid the kind of fraudulent criticisms that arose in 2020 and the lies that led to the January 6 insurrection.