". . .What we have loved
Others will love, and we will show them how."
                                                          William Wordsworth

Why should you join us at the Place-Based Learning Conference?

One reason is that you’ll get a chance to hear the professional techniques of some of Montana’s best teachers. The Heritage Project’s demonstration site directors regularly prepare their students to deliver stirring academic performances before large audiences at our annual Youth Heritage Festival at the state capitol. Here are a few of the things these teachers will tell you:

• How to get your kids to write like Studs Terkel

• What techniques work to lead students from stories about family heirlooms into the essential questions of American history and literature

• How well-planned research serves the development of voice and creativity

• Ways to escape the boredom of reading “copy and paste” research papers

• How to transform your classroom into an adventure by joining our Expedition to the 1930s.

• Simple strategies that draw on the power of family history to teach authentic writing.

You’ll also have a chance to hear what nationally acclaimed educators have to say about place-based approaches to teaching:

• Greg Smith, from Lewis and Clark College in Portland has written the definitive articles on place-based learning for Phi Delta Kappan and Educational Leadership. He will speak on “Learning to be where we are.”

• Rachel Tompkins, president of the Rural School and Community Trust, will speak on “Finding our way: examples of place-based teaching from around the nation."

• Sharon Bishop, co-director of the innovative Nebraska Writing Project, will talk about what she has learned as a high school English teacher about using the power of place to get quality writing. Her topic is “Place-conscious education and the teaching of writing.”

• Guha Shankar from the Library of Congress works with programs around the nation (some inspired by our work here in Montana) that extend schooling into the community. He will discuss “Getting beyond textbooks: fieldwork as education.”

You’ll even get to hear some of Montana’s own leaders in education and writing:

• Historian Martha Kohl, Montana Historical Society historian, writer, and editor, has championed the Project since her arrival in Montana in 1995 and recently served as our guest student-writing judge. In this presentation, she’ll describe the way our students can become scholarly detectives, analyzing historic buildings, neighborhoods, and local primary source records--in the context of big issues and themes.

• Poet Mark Gibbons writes powerful poems. He speaks in a voice that is not afraid of what matters. He talks about what we need to talk about. He’s also a gifted teacher. Don’t miss this chance to hear how he values his deep Montana roots. He’ll read from his new collection, Connemara Moonshine.

• Mike Umphrey has directed the Heritage Project since it began in 1995. He’ll draw on his background as a poet (The Lit Window and The Breaking Edge) and a teacher to explain how a focus on story--including narrative environment and narrative identity--can help teachers untangle all sorts of knots that bedevil schooling today.

• Professor Chad Okrusch will take a hard look at Butte’s past and its present, drawing lessons about community health and renewal that are applicable anywhere. His topic is “Environmental History, Education, and Community Renewal in Butte.”

And if that isn’t enough, you might come for the music. Montana’s widely known musical group, Dublin Gulch--named for a Butte landscape–will offer a concert of the Butte Irish music they’ve been gathering and performing for many years.

Lodging is available at the Red Lion in Butte. More economical dorm rooms may also be booked. Most sessions will be held on the campus of Montana Tech.

Essential Questions for the Conference

What might we restore?

How do we cross to safety?

What should we refuse to part with?

What should we let go?

I could give all to Time except - except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There
And what I would not part with I have kept.
                  "I Could Give All to Time," Robert Frost

The Power of Community-Centered Education

I’ll be presenting a webinar for a Portland State University class this month, taught by Marta Turner. The main reading is Chapter 8 from The Power of Community-Centered Education: Teaching as a Craft of Place.

Now what? School reform after NCLB

One of the more comical aspects of NCLB is
the Hickory Farms facade on the US Depart-
ment of Education building in Washington,
D.C. The homey little red school house
acknowledges what we all know: kids do best
in human-scale places. We are apparently not
supposed to really notice that vast bureau-
cratic structure looming behind, that repre-
sents the reality of school reform via federal
law.

Why are the politicians in charge of education?

Diane Ravitch asks Deborah Meier a critical question on the Bridging Differences blog:

. . .how did American education fall so effortlessly into the control of Know Nothings from the world of business, law, and politics?

How indeed?

Since schools are politically-governed institutions, why would you expect them not to be controlled by politicians? And as you increasingly centralize their governance, how would you not expect lawyers and businessmen to increase their control, as they have of most other centralized bureaucracies where there’s huge opportunity for gain?

It’s not quite true that these politicians, lawyers and businessmen truly know nothing. It’s just that in a democracy where vast numbers of voters are ignorant or inattentive or both, politics will often be dominated by opportunists who pander for gain. It would take a Know Nothing—or at least someone uninformed by much history— to expect otherwise.

Schools depend on the surrounding community for both their clientle and their staff. Public schools also depend on that community for their governance. Ever since I was a young, reform-minded principal, I’ve been quite sure that the community needs to be the unit of educational change, if we are talking about a public school. As long as decisions are made by elections, it’s nearly inconceivable that a school will operate for long at a higher intellectual or ethical level than the community in which it is embedded. To get the community to do something difficult, such as succeeding at teaching children difficult things, at least a majority of the community will need to see and understand the need for doing hard things.

Lost in a national “community”

That seemed hard enough in the town where I worked. When the size of the decision-making community has been expanded to include the entire nation, as it has been under No Child Left Behind, the difficulty is beyond daunting. No individual is likely to be heard above the roar of institutional voices, speaking through costly lawyers in forums created and controlled by big money. Of course we lose our voices.

At this juncture, those of us who would like schools to be thoughtful places where difficult and meaningful work is the daily task, our choices for getting there seem to be either to educate a majority of the national citizenry to share our vision, so we can get past gridlock or ugly compromises and can get on with the work, or to escape national decision-making (though we may want to keep national information gathering and dissemination) and let folks at the site make most of the decisions, through some system of decentralization.

The most hopeful may be vouchers which could allow a network of private schools where decisions about professional practice could be made by professional educators without undue interference from local politicians. Disgruntled parents would not need to campaign for politicians who promise some axe grinding. Instead, their freedom would be preserved through choice. If they disliked what was happening at school, instead of getting involved in politics they could just change schools.

One danger, of course, is that many private schools would just be local franchise outlets of large corporations offering the educational equivalent of happy meals: cheap, standardized, and gratifying but not very good for you. To be honest, I’m not at all sure this would be worse than what many kids are now getting, and I’m also sure that educational fast food would not be the only offerings on the market. McDonalds has not driven good restaurants out of business.

Be that as it may, we are nowhere near the first choice袀reaching a shared vision of what quality public schools would look likeԢindeed, we may be moving farther from it, judging by the partisan tone of our national political conversation. So the first choice seems, well, impossible.

And if the second choice—a robust national system of private schools—doesn’t quite seem impossible, it does seem unsatisfying, ineffective and unrealistic, at least in the short term.

One initial problem with it is that new schools would be staffed by people from the existing education industry and so would tend to re-create the system we would hope to reform. A lot of ideas about teaching that have been demonstrated not to work (whole language, learning styles, multiple intelligences, portfolio assessments and most thing deemed “authentic” or “student-centered") are, nevertheless, ubiquitous and seemingly as ineradicable as false ideas about medicine that seem so ingrained that even many doctors believe them: we only use 10 percent of our brains or we should drink at least eight glasses of water a day.

Speaking about the difficulty of making progress by increasing parental choice, Ravitch somewhat irreverently points out that

most schools will reflect the dominant ideas of the schools of education, where most teachers get their training, so most schools will adopt programs of whole language and fuzzy math. . . . Most students under a pure choice regime will know very little about history or literature or science.

City Journal

This is what I’ve thought for a long time. Parental choice may be better for reasons having to do with freedom, but I wouldn’t expect it to lead to mass improvement on standardized tests. In the short run, a new charter school or voucher school is unlikely to be fundamentally different than a typical public school. Where would it find people who think and act in ways fundamentally different than their colleagues up the street?

Where are our teaching orders?

So things at the moment look a little bleak. At such times, when there seems no clear way forward, I sometimes finding myself thinking about an odd comment Philip Rief once threw out: “Where are our teaching orders?”

An order is as different from an organization as a team is from a committee. In an order, each member has internalized the principles that the larger order is dedicated to so that, in a sense, each member contains the whole. People are bound together by their shared vision and shared commitment rather than by the formal rules, though formal rules will certainly exist as expressions of the vision and commitment and as a way to remember complex learnings.

A good teaching order would both train teachers and operate schools. The animating vision of the order would provide guidance not only for the curriculum, but also for system-wide discipline involving the conduct of teachers and administrators as well as students. Most schools today have adopted the vision of school as a due-process bureaucracy, which often creates organizations that exist in a high state of disorder because the wills of the individuals are not aligned. Students are taught they have rights but less often are they taught they have duties to any particular communal order. Orders must be entered by choice.

At present, leaders who would create different schools usually need to use teachers trained by the universities into the standard progressive ed vision. Though we do have hundreds or thousands of programs that do some teacher training, the training is usually inservice and narrowly focused, and after a summer institute the teachers return to their various schools, where they are likely to be quite lonely.

Focusing on the work at hand

Even so, I feel oddly optimistic. Maybe because at the moment I have lots of work to do and the school I’m at is at least in comparative terms a sane place. It would be a breach of faith to feel pessimistic when every twenty-four hours a brand new morning arrives, and I have energy.

I also know that the rules that govern our reality respond to us. Many of those laws are, as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman put it, “socially constructed,” and some realities we can change by changing such simple things as the way we walk, our posture and the expression on our face.

At times when we can’t do all we would like to do, it may be enough to be honest with ourselves, to listen carefully, to think clearly and to speak candidly. Sometimes we don’t need to solve problems so much as we need to lose our fear of them and turn away from them to the other things that matter to us more.

We only need to change our minds and all sorts of unsolvable problems vanish. Something is going to change. Keep busy and look forward to what’s going to happen next.

The Power of Community-Centered Education now available

“Umphrey’s book is part philosophical speculation, part sociological inquiry, part how-to guide for interested educators. Its depth and intellectual substance propel a reader through its pages, looking for more fresh insights and examples of positive educational practice. His message...fills an important gap in contemporary discussions about what Americans should seek from public schools. What is being lost in our preoccupation with accountability and assessment are more fundamental elements of what it means to be a good human being and those elements are all tied into relationships with those around us and the places that support our lives. Gregory Smith, professor, Graduate School of Education and Counseling, Lewis & Clark
College

“I am so impressed with this wonderful book about teaching and place...It has been observed that 90% of our knowledge is folklore (learned by experience) and this is the knowledge that we will pass on to the next generation. Unfortunately our educational curricula, testing requirements, and bureaucratic busywork have kept teachers and students in a knowledge-restricting straight-jacket. The Power of Community-Centered Education gives us a blueprint for breaking out of these constraints to give teachers and students a way back to real experience-based community-centered learning. Peggy A. Bulger, director, American Folklife Center, The Library of Congress, Washington, DC

“The Power of Community-Centered Education is a passionate and personal testimonial based on real experiences in education...[Umphrey] brings his profound insights on education and community together in a treatise that outlines how to create a successful model for 21st century education. This book should be a “must” for all adults who are educating children and young adults...Umphrey’s experiences as the director of the Montana Heritage Project for the past ten years have resulted in a unique and important view of the way that we learn, and the way that we construct our lives from this learning.” Paddy B. Bowman, coordinator, National Network for Folk Arts in Education, Alexandria, VA

Publisher’s blurb:

We face an epidemic of disengagement in American high schools as our institutions fail to offer meaningful and relevant ways to connect curriculum with students’ emerging life stories. These students do not see how schooling, as it is presently constituted, is important to their own developing identities. One solution to this problem is to organize the curriculum around the concept of community and to link the study of abstract concepts and principles to their manifestations in the places that students know and care about (local history, shared traditions, civic pride, etc.).

The Power of Community-Centered Education provides psychological, sociological, historical, and philosophical insights into why community works so well as an organizing principle for high school. The book concludes with a call to action for all agencies and institutions that have public outreach programs to consider how they assist in building “education-centered communities” that support the work of high schools by offering research opportunities and scaffolding to secondary education.

You can order The Power of Community-Centered Education: Teaching as a Craft of Place from Amazon.

What is a learning expedition?

Ronan students in Christa
Umphrey’s English class take notes
at the National Bison Range.

A learning expedition is an in-depth exploration of a topic. Expedition team members all research the same broad questions so they are all on the same quest, but their individual research questions may vary so they are individually accountable.

The goal is to find out what is in the library and then to go beyond that, gathering and constructing new knowledge. Expedition members begin in the library, and then they move out to bring new knowledge back to the community, based on interviews, observations, or experiments. To succeed, expedition members need to study and understand factual information, and they also need to learn and apply broad concepts and ideas.

A good learning expedition has several important characteristics:

• It has a mission: to bring back new knowledge (starting with a question and a survey of existing knowledge).
• It requires teamwork. It is both the mission and the group who undertake that mission (teams feature both cooperation and individual accountability).
• It becomes a story (expedition members are protagonists in their own quest: facing problems, overcoming obstacles, experiencing good fortune, and reaching new insights).
• It ends in a gift (research is often service, scholarship can be a gift to the community).

Expeditions are readily organized around the ALERT processes, but this acronym is not meant as a linear guide so much as a reminder of the processes involved in getting from one level of understanding to the next.

The written documents (essays, scripts, transcripts) that are created should be added to a public archives. Work that is archived should meet publication standards. Publication is the final step in the writing process, and the standard for publication is perfection (we don’t always meet the standard, but we don’t lower the standard because of that).

schedule

Exploring Where We Are Through Literature and Writing A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it...Ӕ Joan Didion A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar nonmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. חGeorge Eliot June 19 and 20, 2006 Butte, Montana MONDAY, June 19, 2006 9:00 a.m. Where we are, and why we are here,Ӕ Marcella Sherfy, Education Director, Montana Heritage Project  9:15 a.m. Learning to be where we are,Ӕ Greg Smith, faculty, Lewis & Clark College 10:30 a.m. Place-Conscious Education and the teaching of writing,Ӕ Sharon Bishop, Co-Director, Nebraska Writing Project and Heartland Community Schools 11:45 a.m. Lunch - A place like no other: an introduction to Butte,Ӕ Ellen Crain, Director, Butte-Silver Bow Archives 1:15 p.m. Beyond the text:  fieldwork as education,Ӕ Guha Shankar, Folklife Specialist, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress 2:15 p.m. Break 2:30 p.m. CONCURRENT SESSIONS Best Practices, Montana Heritage Project Teachers ֓Getting to story: investigation as the foundation of writing, Jeff Gruber, Montana Heritage Project Demonstration Site Director (Read these essays by JeffԒs students:  Songs of Hope" by Rachel Reckin and ӓSenator John Geiger: A Cold Front" by Amanda Shotzberger.) An Expedition to the 1930s: what you need to know and what youӒll want to take, Mary Sullivan and Nancy Widdicombe, Montana Heritage Project Demonstration Site Directors ԓPointers, pitfalls, and payoffs: picking great topics for community research--and making any topic great, Nancy Heggen, Montana Heritage Project Demonstration Site Director 3:30 p.m. Break 4:00 p.m. CONCURRENT SESSIONS Ԗ Best Practices, Montana Heritage Project Teachers Point of entry: using family heirlooms to connect students with the big questions in literature and history,Ӕ Renee Rasmussen, Montana Heritage Project Demonstration Site Director How to get your kids to write like Studs Terkel: unleashing creativity through family and community history research,Ӕ  Christa Umphrey, Montana Heritage Project Mentor (Read this essay by Christas student:  ғMy Oma" by Britney Maddox.) Gifts of scholarship: real work your students can do for your community--with an emphasis on non-narrative modes of analysis,Ӕ Sarah Zook, Montana Heritage Project Demonstration Site Director 5:00 p.m. Break 6:30 p.m. Dinner - Butte rats and glory holes: a poet mucks about in the Mining City,Ӕ Mark Gibbons, poet Tuesday, June 20, 2006 9:00 a.m. Finding our way:  examples of place-based teaching from around the nation,Ӕ Rachel Tompkins, President, Rural School and Community Trust 10:00 a.m. Break 10:30 a.m.. Text and context:  using historical sources to understand place,Ӕ Martha Kohl, historical specialist, National Register of Historic Places 11:45 a.m. Lunch - IrelandӒs musical heritage in Butte, Members of Dublin Gulch, Butte and Helena Irish musicians 1:30 p.m. CONCURRENT SESSIONS Ԗ Best Practices, Montana Heritage Project Teachers Finding the national in the local: American history through the lense of local history,Ӕ Josh Clixby, Montana Heritage Project Demonstration Site Director Gearing up for important work: strategies to engage and motivate,Ӕ Dorothea Susag, Montana Heritage Project Mentor This storied place: ‘connecting’ as a step in the writing process,Ӕ Darlene Beck, Montana Heritage Project Demonstration Site Director 2:30 p.m. Break 2:45 p.m. CONCURRENT SESSIONS Best Practices, Montana Heritage Project Teachers ֓Students as leaders of community forumsupdating the Montana Study model,ה Tom Thackeray, Tim Schaff, and Dale Alger, along with student Lindsey Appell from Roundup High School. Additional insights from Montana Study Projects at Libby High School (Jeff Gruber) and Chester High School (Renee Rasmussen) Keeping it real: using family history to teach authentic research and writing,Ӕ Phil Leonardi, Montana Heritage Project Demonstration Site Director Exploring other cultures: a case study of the Hutterite Project,Ӕ Nancy Widdicombe, Montana Heritage Project Demonstration Site Director 3:45 p.m. Break 4:15 p.m. Environmental history, education, and community renewal in Butte, Montana,Ӕ Chad Okrusch, faculty, Montana Tech-The University of Montana 5:00 p.m. Break 6:30 p.m. Dinner - Teaching as placemaking,Ӕ Michael Umphrey, Director, Montana Heritage Project Project exhibits available for review during meal and mid-day breaks.

Nancy Heggen- Lesson for the ALERT model

LESSON PLAN for the ALERT model

Outline for the “R” or Reflect

Pre- Prep: Students have been studying the Vietnam War and have finished listening to a Vietnam Veteran tell his Vietnam story. He is a poet and song writer. He sang and told many of his poems to the students. They will now reflect on their own thoughts and feelings, and how they can tell some of their stories through song.

OBJECTIVES:
1. Students will learn about the role of protest songs
2. Students will identify their own political agendas and write protest songs or poems
3. Students will identify political issues that are important to them, choose a song, and rewrite the words to fit a rhythm.

TIME and MATERIALS:
1. Possibly 3 class periods. (one to research, one to write/edit, one to present)
2. Computer lab to research songs
3. Writing materials, tape/CD player if needed
4. Possibly create your own protest song so students have an idea of what is expected
5. Tape or CD of protests song from Birmingham Civil Rights Institute

DAY ONE: In computer lab
Ask the students to research songs of the Vietnam War. Have students print out and listen to the message of the song.  They will then need to list 5 current political issues that deeply concern them. Encourage students to share their topics. List some on the board.

DAY TWO:
Select an old nursery song to help students write their song or poem. Consider using:
Row, Row, Row Your Boat
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
Michael, Row the Boat Ashore
You are my Sunshine
The Itsy-Bitsy Spider
Use the example(play some) of how the Civil Rights children of Birmingham used simple rhythms so as to focus on the passion of the message. Read students your song.
Students will write and edit their messages today.

DAY THREE:
Present songs to the class. Each student will listen and try to understand the message the song is presenting. Have students comment or write down the message.

RESOURCES:

MUSIC: examples of protest songs
Birmingham Civil Rights Institute of Music:
We Shall Overcome
Blowing in the Wind
If You Miss Me From the Back of the Bus
Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round
Freedom Land
We Shall Not Be Moved
Mind on Freedom
This Little of Mine
Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

BOOKS:
The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien
We Were Soldiers Once…and Young by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.) and Joseph L. Galloway

WEBSITES:
http://www.yahoo.music

Martha Kohl: The Homework of Place

Martha Kohl has applied her passion for understanding the past and for understanding historic places to a variety of professional positions.  Currently, Martha is a historical specialist and writer for the Montana Historical Society’s one-of-kind National Register of Historic Places interpretive sign program. Prior to that she served as the editor of the Montana Historical Society Press from 1995 through 2003 and was editor of Gateway Heritage, the Missouri Historical Society’s quarterly from 1991-1994. From 1988 to the present, Martha also has taught English, U. S. History, and literacy in Missouri and Montana universities and colleges. Martha has authored articles on topics ranging from the historic buildings of Forsyth, Montana, to African American enfranchisement to writing good papers for National History Day presentations. The Montana Committee for the Humanities recently awarded Martha a research grant to examine how Montana weddings—one of our beloved rites of passage—have changed over time and what those changes mean. This larger research project grew out of an article that she prepared for Heritage Education (Spring 2006), “Something Old, Something New: Weddings as Windows on Montana History.”

For this place-based conference, we’ve asked Martha to ground us in the combined skills of historiography and historic preservation. She’ll remind us how to “see” buildings and neighborhoods as distinct artifacts of the past. She’ll walk us through the primary historical sources that our students can plumb for still more information about those buildings and neighborhoods.  And then, she will demonstrate how big themes—the social and political circumstances of particular eras—influenced what we see in our own towns. In “Text and Context: Using Historical Sources to Understand Place,” look for a compelling presentation of how an excellent historian melds solid primary and secondary historical source research with the personalities of buildings, towns, and landscapes.

Poetry of Place: Where I’m From

On Monday, in a post on A Shrewdness of Apes, the author thinks of her terminally ill father and reflects on the pieces of her childhood that shaped who she is. 

“I come from a place that plays gospel music over the loudspeaker at a gas station-- you can get Jesus while you get Super Unleaded and a bag of pork rinds to go.

I come from a place where one loves God, Mama, and football-- but not necessarily in that order, particularly on a Friday night or a Saturday afternoon.”

The post reminded me of one of my favorite writing assignments.
A few years ago as a way of beginning to study our local community I had students, who were mostly local, write about where they come from. I thought the background work we did and discussions we had leading up to the writing were very valuable. Students enjoyed thinking about and photographing the places important to them, but the quality of the writing wasn’t as high as I would have liked or as good as I thought is could’ve been. 

Right after I finished the writing assignment I found a much better model for getting the kind of specificity I wanted from students. George Ella Lyon’s book Where I’m From seems to be the original source. Though I haven’t actually read her book, I’ve since run into hundreds of great examples that follow this form. Some just use the model, others have more specific guidelines. Unlike many “forms,” rather than ending up with many examples of vague, similar writing, the style of this makes each piece unique.

I especially like the idea of creating a sort of hyper text poem—along the lines of the first post I mentioned, with links to some of the places and things the poem might reference.

I don’t have examples of my own students work, but there are many others —students, teachers, bloggers—who have also given the format a try.
The Minnesota Writing Project has even used it as a demonstration lesson, as does the United Nations Cyber School Bus.

Almost all the versions I’ve read are interesting. This was the case with my students as well. Nearly every poem my students wrote was powerful in some way—either through the language, imagery or experiences conveyed. Students seemed to appreciate the chance to think about and share what pieces of their pasts had shaped them, and I found that the short assignment really did help me understand where my students where coming from.

Nature deficit disorder

Richard Louv argues in Last Child in the Woods that over the last few decades children have become increasingly separated from nature and this has left them without powerful experiences of natural beauty and spiritual energy. You can listen to an NPR interview with him.

He defines “nature deficit disorder” as “the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and a higher rate of physical and emotional illnesses.” He quotes Paul Gorman, founder and director of the National Partnership for the Environment: “The extent that we separate our children from creation is the extent to which we separate them from the creator—from God.”

The Gift of Stories

Alcestis “Cooky” Oberg has an article about life stories as priceless gifts in USA Today. She makes a point that heritage teachers encounter over and over again--when students encounter stories from their families and communities, they also learn important lessons about how to live that aren’t easy to teach into today’s diverse and divided schools. She notes that the story her godfather gave to his grandson is full of important understandings:

His grandson is not going to find on television the tale of becoming the man of the family at 16 years old either, as my godfather did. He financially supported his mother and sister after his father died during the Depression, while putting himself through Northwestern University on athletic scholarships and odd jobs. He kept 50 cents in his pocket for emergencies and sent everything else home. Self-sacrifice and responsibility for others are not part of the manly role model that is taught in movie chase scenes and shoot-’em-ups, or by celebrity misbehavers and cheaters.

It’s the truth of the stories told that make them so important:

Our kids need to know real things about life besides the lame fantasies they get on television: the life we lived, the good and bad choices we made, the lessons we learned, what we’d do if we had it to do over again. In short, whether role model or cautionary tale, the real story of our lives is the best thing we can give kids because it’s true, and they’ll learn from it.

Oberg suggests that adults begin writing their stories as gifts to younger family members:

Whether housewife or doctor, truck driver or engineer, lawyer or lineman, we all have stories to tell — great stories. Perhaps we could write, record, or videotape these stories for our youngsters in installments over the years — something for them to look forward to during the holidays. They hardly know us or know what’s important in life anymore, amid today’s noise and clutter.

We will better understand education’s historic role as the means through which succeeding and overlapping generations find what they most need in each other--the young need wisdom and the old need acts of regeneration--as this simple idea is recognized to be as profound as it really is.

Here are a couple examples of what’s possible: http://www.montanaheritageproject.org/index.php/home/more/my-omas-story/ and http://www.montanaheritageproject.org/index.php/home/more/songs-of-hope-music-in-libby-montana-during-the-great-depression/.

Every Moment, You’re Writing

I’ve downloaded a copy of Frank McCourt’s new book, Teacher Man, from audible.com and I’m looking forward to listening to it. This quote from Contra Costa Times increases my anticipation:

“Every moment of your life, you’re writing. When you walk the halls in this school you meet various people and you write furiously in your head.” Frank McCourt “Teacher Man”

A Montana Style, Take Two

Another trait of Montanans that’s related to self-sufficiency is what Montana Jones calls away-from-it-all-ness. Do we keep up with the latest trends in music? Maybe not. Do we care?

Away-from-it-all-ness. Importing musicians with other styles and tastes is easy enough, but Montana style is about getting away from all the hubub and noise and fashion trends and pop crap. Besides, why should we go to the trouble of bringing some of that hippity-hop music here when the kids down the street have guitars and can do a pretty good job of banging out some old rock and roll songs, it’s just as much fun for dancing.

Not following trends. Do it yourself. Avoiding the madness of the world. All part of Montana style.

Full article: http://montanajones.blogspot.com/2005/12/montana-style-part-two-rock-and-roll.html

Not being with “it” when “it” isn’t all that rewarding--part of the reason for living under the big sky, I think. For a longer and some what edgier take on the charm of not being cosmopolitan--what Anthony Harrigan calls the “therapy of distance"--see this article from the Contemporary Review: http://www.montanaheritageproject.org/index.php/institute/great-plains/

I keep running into articles extolling the virtues of life in the nonurban spaces of the West, especially Montana. Harrigan suggested in his 1994 article that the dissatisfaction with urban conditions and the allure of the West might in time lead to some new form of Homestead Boom (Katherine argues that it’s been underway for a long time, since she left Racine, Wisconsin for Montana for precisely such reasons):

Ironically, the settlement of the American continent began—and long continued—with an impulse to escape the crowded conditions of the Old World, whether the poverty-stricken countryside of Ireland or Sicily or the ghettoes of Russia and Poland. Indeed for many generations of immigrants, there was truly a therapy of distance—from poverty, conscription, and religious persecution. The Russo-Germans who settled in North Dakota in the late 19th century truly fit the description of those who seek therapy in great distances. In this connection, I am reminded of the statement by John G. Ackerman in the New York Times Book Review that there is a ‘dialectic of possibility in his history which is potentially liberating’. Thus, in time, urban Americans may turn against the horrors of American urban life and decide to participate in an internal migration—a new movement West.

I would like to see an oral interview project focusing on why recent immigrants to Montana have come here.

Montana Style--according to Montana Jones

Is there such a thing as a “Montana” style? Montana Jones thinks so, and it has something to do with self-sufficiency. This is exemplified by the number of people who hunt for meat, but it’s not limited to that:

I see self sufficiency everywhere I look around here. I see it in the business people I deal with. I see it in the recreation enthusiasts. I see it in the Missoula hippies and the city dwellers. Not everyone is bagging their own meat, but they are watching out for themselves in their own way.

Full article: http://montanajones.blogspot.com/2005/12/montana-style-part-one-hunting-season.html

Self-sufficiency is a near-universal trait of rural people. What’s the alternative? Do our kids recognize and appreciate this trait in those around them?