Free Fallin'

Before boarding the Cessna 182 at Skydive Newport, I wanted to let on that I had an insatiable appetite for knowledge, but I think the instructors knew better. Certainly the only time any one of them betrayed any hint of stress or anxiety was when I was subjecting them to an endless barrage of inane questions. While reading and signing numerous liability waiver statements, I learned plenty of pertinent statistics about skydiving. For instance, when you jump out of a plane at an altitude of 10,000 feet, you can plunge to the earth at speeds exceeding 120 miles per hour. The free-fall time lasts between 40 and 60 seconds, and the parachute ride from 5-7 minutes. Jerry, my tandem jumper/instructor who moved from his native Holland to the United States 18 years ago, has 16,000-plus jumps under his belt. I found that to be an impressive and confidence-inspiring number, but I wasn’t satisfied, so I pressed for more and learned the following: The chances of both the primary and reserve parachutes malfunctioning are over 12 million to 1.
Now he had me. Still, I had one more question.
“Should I have worn diapers?”
“I haven’t had that happen yet.”
“Great,” I thought. “I get to be first at something.”
As I zipped up my jump suit and got strapped into my harness, Jerry recited a litany of instructions. At 8,000 feet, he’ll strap his harness – and parachute -- to mine, at which point we were to remain seated while shifting forward toward the open door. I was to stick my right foot out and place it on the platform outside the Cessna’s cabin and do the same with my left foot. I was to cross my hands at my chest, grab my harness, and keep my hands there when exiting the plane with my back arched. After feeling his tap on my shoulder, I was to spread my arms wide like an eagle in flight. Most importantly, after we descended to about 10 feet above the ground, I was to stretch my legs into a sitting position so as not to land on my feet and potentially break any bones.
After Jerry finished, Andreas, the photographer/videographer for this flight, began my mini-documentary by asking a question I do not remember. Nor do I remember what I prattled nervously about while being filmed. Once airborne, I do remember saying into the camera: “There’s no going back now.”
If you picture one of those plastic storage bins that you can pick up on the cheap at Target or Wal-Mart stores, and enlarge it to fit 3-4 people, you have a pretty good idea of what the inside of the Cessna 182 looks like. I unsuccessfully blocked out the image of a large coffin. John, the pilot, had the only seat, and I sat on the floor with my back against it. Behind sunglasses, John looked barely out of his teens, and I told him so, but I don’t think he took offense. I spent the 15-minute flight trying to enjoy the scenery on a partly cloudy day and listening to Jerry’s intermittent instructions, but as we kept banking higher and higher, my tension increased.
For some reason, the altitude seemed more intimidating when wisps of clouds obscured parts of the wide, multi-hued quilt of dappled and filigreed land and seascape below. Andreas, creating the entire experience for DVD viewing, pointed the camera at me again. This time I looked into it and said, “I’m scared to death.” I was only slightly exaggerating. Andreas told me to breathe.
Jerry and Andreas placidly looked out the window as if they were sitting on the beach watching the waves roll in, and that helped calm me some. Andreas seemed to nibble on an apparatus that projected from his headgear like it was a toothpick. I assumed it to be a microphone attached to the video camera that was affixed to his headgear. In his left hand he held a digital camera. In a few minutes, Andreas would perform some daredevilry.
Because I had already resigned myself to fate, I felt relieved when Jerry finally told me it was time to don and tighten my goggles. Nevertheless I made sure to note each of the four clicking sounds where he secured his harness to mine.
The first moment of terror came when the cabin door was thrust open. A cold gust of air blew in, and I was sure we’d be blown out. We maneuvered gingerly toward the exit. I placed my feet on the platform as instructed, looked down and realized that the only thing between me and Mother Earth was 10,000 feet of empty sky. Much to my amazement, Andreas was already clinging to a wing support with one hand while taking still photos of Jerry and me emerging from the Cessna. It was the kind of sight that makes one wonder about the genetic make-ups in the likes of Andreas and Jerry.
Because I do not believe, I did not pray. I wouldn’t have had the time even if I wanted to. Before I knew it, Jerry and I were flying, and he was tapping me on the shoulder to let me know it was time to extend my arms. I was Freebird.

Jerry had told me his favorite part of skydiving is the free fall, and now I understood why. Awe replaced my fear. From the sky, Newport County appears Lilliputian. The Pell Bridge, a behemoth from sea level, looks as if it could be toppled with a finger. The Jamestown Bridge bisects the West Bay in a pale, humped line as it stretches to the North Kingstown shore. Dewdrop islands look like green lily pads floating atop the blue surface of Narragansett Bay. Serpentine roads, seemingly the width of arteries, carry microscopic vehicles like blood platelets past miniature houses, knuckle-sized clumps of trees, and checkerboard sections of open fields. A brisk, clamorous and refreshingly chilly wind buffeted us and negated any sense of descending at 120 miles per hour. To afford me the entire majestic panorama, Jerry expertly turned us counterclockwise and back again. When he tapped my head and pointed, it was at Andreas, who was still filming. I smiled, whooped and gave two thumbs up. The furthest thing from my mind was the parachute opening. The experience transcended fun. It was more like ecstasy.
Ironically, my second terror moment came soon after the chute opened. An instant sense of relief followed the emerged parachute’s upward tug as I watched a still free-falling Andreas drop like a rock out of sight. That’s when Jerry loosened the straps on my harness, causing me to drop ever so slightly within its embrace. My heart palpitated.
“What are you doing?” I shouted.
“Just loosening your harness,” Jerry replied.
“Please don’t do that again.”
“It was just for your comfort,” an apologetic Jerry explained in his Dutch accent. “Just for your comfort.”
I asked if there was anything to hold onto. He told me my harness. Good enough. It was time to hang on, take a breath, and enjoy the rest of the ride. It was like floating in a surreal dream, but the nervous edge remained until we reached an altitude where I gratefully thought, “I’d survive a fall from here.”
My butt-slide landing wouldn’t pass muster in a baseball instructional text, but it was just right for skydiving.
“Safe at home.”
Andreas was waiting for me with the camera rolling when I slid to a stop. Adrenaline was coursing through me. I tried to explain my exhiliration with as many details as possible, but the tone in my voice probably said it all.
“I’m going to save my money and do this again next year.”
“Lots of people come back,” was the reply.
For $350 you get the jump, a DVD video, still photos of the entire process, a thrill-packed seven minutes, a bumper sticker, and a certificate that says, in part: "(Your Name) jumped from a perfectly good airplane at Skydive Newport in Middletown, Rhode Island..."
The bumper sticker and the certificate are now displayed with pride.
And to those of you who are wondering: Yes, skydiving is better than most sex…but not better than making love.

Tom Sawyer's Fence

I first have to comment on Dave's introductory remarks to Session 7, most notably: "We have to teach (students) how to evaluate content for style as well as truth," and "In this post-typographic society, we continue to favor print." Regarding the evaluation of content, we should keep in mind that the traditional sources of "truth," as our generation grew up assuming them to be, may be the worst sources on which to rely. For instance, anybody who expects to find the truth from the White House or the Pentagon, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or many other media outlets, including periodicals with both liberal and conservative biases, will surely be left wanting. Finding "truth" in contemporary society is akin to listening to two children tell their versions of why they got into a fight and then trying to piece together some semblance of reality. As for continuing to favor print, please back off all of you contemporary Guy Montags of the world. Print media may still be the best and most reliable format. Anybody who gets frustrated with downloading (or is it uploading?) text on Adobe Acrobat Reader, and then scrolling up and down, backways and sideways, just to get the entire copy on the screen will probably agree. Give me print anytime.
Regarding the pod and vodcasts, maybe the so-called educational cognoscenti, those who brought us the whole-language approach, open classrooms, "the new math," heterogenuous classroom groupings, advisory periods, and a host of other worst practices may have unwittingly stumbled upon something of genius with these pod and videocasts. If it were up to the advocates of these practices, students will spend large chunks of the day in front of either a computer or television screen, and maybe the "experts" are onto something. While whitewashing a fence, Tom Sawyer figures out that work is what a body is "obliged to do," and manipulates his buddies into doing the loathsome task for him. On that premise, if we require students to spend up to six hours a day looking at either a computer or televsion screen, then just maybe when they get home from school they will be tired of the activity, forget that it was once fun, and want to either get exercise, read print media, or both.
In a 2007 survey, the National Endowment of the Arts concluded that teenagers are reading less and for shorter periods of time than at any other time in history, and one of the factors is either the time they spend on computers or in front of televisions. The National Wildlife Federation found that teenagers now spend an average of 44 hours a week staring at electronic screens. Naturally, the best solution to these disturbing trends is to force-feed them television in the classroom. According to the Television Goes to School article, "Watching television may seem a very simple act, but it actually involves a rather complicated thinking process," and "because brains are programmed to remember experiences that have an emotional component, television has a powerful ability to relay experience through the emotions evoked by images." I'm not even going to argue these two points; they may be perfectly valid. But the assumptions that reading and writing do not involve much more complicated thinking processes than watching television and that books do not evoke powerful emotional experiences have to be patently wrong. The percentage of students who can read proficiently in the school district where I teach is only between 62 and 66 percent. By all means, bring on the videocasts and the television shows. What's reading got to do with literacy?
Speaking of which, I have to wonder about all this emphasis on the "21st Century Literacies" when, according to an article in American Educator magazine entitled "Teaching English Language Learners: What the Research Does - and Does Not - Say," 1 in 9 students in today's public schools either does not speak English at all or does with enough limitations that he or she cannot fully participate in mainstream English instruction. Demographers also predict that the number of English Language Learners in public classrooms will increase to 1 in 4 in the next 20 years. It sounds to me like before we dive headlong into 21st Century literacies, we should first try to master those that characterized the 16th Century. Consider me a supporter of blogs and wikkis. If they promote and foster reading and writing, despite the logistical and technical difficulties (120 students, one classroom computer, two overbooked computer labs), I'm all for them, and I intend to utilize them as much as feasibly possible. Regarding the Boob Tube, you're going to have to go further to convince me. In the meantime, I'm hoping that obligating students to watch television and stare into computer screens at school will motivate them to turn those same devices off when they go home. Somehow, I'm not convinced it will happen, though.
June 30, 2008 9:24 AM

The Maximum Lawman

Hello, EDC921 Colleagues:
Before I immerse myself totally into this course, I feel compelled to at least mention some of my misgivings pertaining to blogging, technology in general, and a course such as this. If writing, in its most ideal form, is a democratic process unfettered of censorship and a true exercise in free speech, and blogging is the act of eternally etching one's thoughts and words into the digital archive for future retrieval, we should be aware of the risks we are exposing both our students and ourselves to, and those risks go beyond privacy issues and the ever lurking cyber predators. In this current plutocracy, free speech is a Constitutional right that has been slowly eroding and may be on its way to complete abrogation. So if we ask a student to blog, and he/she reacts to a conflict with a teacher, administrator, peer, a parent or even our government in a way that reveals a desire for violence, even if fantasized, or if a student reacts in a blog to an emotionally disturbing passage in literature with the similar feelings, are we to protect the democratic writing process, that student's right to privacy and freedom from possible future persecution, or should we become thought police and turn the student in to the authorities, thus saving our own necks and possibly the lives of others?
There are other unsettling issues pertaining to the digital age as well. It is well documented that computer overuse has promoted illiteracy rather than literacy, and sentences with characteristics such as the following: "I love this course b/c w/o it I wouldn't write" are turning up in essays everywhere. This is the incipient trend of Orwellianspeak, and that slippery slope may inevitably lead to a government fiat insisting on "doubleplusgood" replacing real colorful words such as "outfreakinstanding."
Yes, this rant reeks of excessive paranoia, but there's another issue to consider here. We live in an era of "globalization," which is the economic term for capitalist imperialism, and Big Business considers labor unions collectively as Public Enemy No. 1. I'm assuming we are all in a labor union, or aspire to be. To the plutocrats, there is no better way to dismantle public schools and their concomitant costs, including salaries and benefits given to educators, than to allow students to earn their diplomas on-line. The prospect of privatizing education and outsourcing our jobs to degreed and certified teachers in low-wage, developing nations makes the Big Business mavens salivate. Our taking this course is tantamount, in my mind, to the sheep fattening up on the farmer's feed before the slaughter.
Of course, there's the other side of the coin. The potential for both personal and professional growth is immense in a course like this, and I am approaching it with this attitude foremost in my mind. I chose a technological goal to be part of my professional development I-Plan to remain certified, so this particular blog smacks of hypocrisy. Nevertheless, digital technology allows the Maximum Lawman's significant reach to extend far into the future, and our relentless quest for this knowledge may eventually prove to be a Faustian bargain. I hope I'm wrong. See you all in Session 3. jack
June 1, 2008 5:08 PM

The Maiden Voyage

Greetings, EDC921 Colleagues and Dave Fontaine.
I am up and running. Maybe "walking" is the more accurate term. I have yet to reach a comfort level with this process. For instance, I didn't know whether to re-type my "Never The Twain Redux" in the previously blank title box, or create a new title for each new blog. It's small stuff; I know.
I regularly read a lot of periodicals (Boston Globe, Providence Journal, Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, etc.) on-line, but I do not, as a rule, read a lot of blogs on-line. A couple of exceptions would be Achenblog on the Washington Post's website, and Bob Ryan's blog for Globe sports fans. I find a lot of blogging consists of rambling from writers who are not polished, or who do not quite understand the value of conciseness. Therefore, I am not going to write a lot unless I have something meaningful to say. If that's the case, I'll certainly not withhold my thoughts. I am sure it will be a pleasure interacting with all of you, and I am looking forward to it. Until the next time...