Attention, "John Henry" fans (a bleg)

A painting by Palmer Hayden of John Henry's death. Note the positioning of his body. Image found here.

First of all, welcome to my new students. It was a pleasure meeting you and talking with you about the next eight weeks.

Second, the bleg: for this summer's class I'm working on pulling together a little unit built around the American folk song "John Henry": (some of) its many different versions; the historical case for John Henry's existence and the two places that lay claim to being the site of the confrontation between John Henry and the steam-driven machine; some speculation as to why this legend and the songs about it hold the place it does in American folk culture; some images; etc. The goal is to use these materials as a kind of laboratory for different acts of interpretation. It could be fun or disastrous--but hey! It's the summer!

Here's where the bleg comes in: I'm looking for leads on either old recordings (or recordings of old versions of) "John Henry," along with a couple of more contemporary re-writings/updatings. In addition to the four versions I listed in this old post (though the Mississippi John Hurt piece is something of a ringer since it's more like a response to the legend rather than a version of the folk song), I also have a version by country blues performers John Cephas and Phil Wiggins. I'm toying with including Johnny Cash's version on his At Folsom Prison album. Here is a list of other performances, along with some contemporary updatings. I'm looking for around six versions of the song in all.

The goal is not to overwhelm but to suggest something of the variety of these songs, a variety nevertheless contained within a fairly firm narrative framework. I have a few weeks for this; I've scheduled it for July 1. Any advice/questions any of you might have would be most welcome.

I'm in the midst of writing up a post on Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666; that should appear here either later on today or tomorrow.

(UPDATE: The truly John Henry-obsessed can thank me later for being pointed in the direction of this and this. A tip of the hat to River's Invitation for leading me to both those places.)

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Public education/Private education: A bleg

As part of my school's Comp II class, we have regular discussions of critical thinking--or try to. Discussions are fine up to a point--if they remain only discussions, then the issue at hand remains abstract, untethered from something students might actually encounter in their own lives.

The teaching of assumptions is especially hard for students to "see" precisely because they so often remain unspoken and/or unexamined underneath our own or others' arguments even as they are often a crucial determinant in shaping the sorts of arguments we/others make. Also, it occurs to me that false dichotomies, though taught separately as a kind of logical fallacy, are often the result of those (unexamined) assumptions. That is, sometimes the framing of dichotomies often leaves out other matters of equal (or even greater) value. As one example: the simple categorizing of nations as "pro-American"/"anti-American" presumes that these other nations only worry about their relations with the United States when making decisions; we do tend to forget that they also have their own internal politics and alliances with/pressures from their neighbors to take into account as well.

Thanks to new-to-me local blogger Jilly for an idea on how to demonstrate this in an accessible way in the classroom. In the midst of this post, she notes that "In our little city [Eastborough, in the middle of the east side of Wichita], everyone sends their kids to private school. There are only three exceptions that I know of - us, my cousins (he's a doctor and she's a nurse) and Roni's [Jilly's daughter] friend Ava (her father is a professor at WSU.) My point is, of all these families, there are multiple highter ed degrees and we choose public school." This got me to thinking about my own and my daughters' mother's respective circles of friends with school-age children and, off the top of my head, it does seem to be the case that, for whatever reason, the people we know with some sort of involvement in higher ed. do seem to choose public schools for their children more often than private schools. Yet among my students when we've had this "private vs. public schooling" discussion, their initial response tends to be that private schools are "better"--if you're directly paying for something, it acquires value; public schools are "value-less"; etc.

Here's the bleg part: I'd appreciate hearing from those of you who either have children for whom you've gone through the school choice process or whose parents made the public school/private school choice for you or a siblings. What sorts of assumptions/information drove the decision-making process? If "education" figured into the discussion, how did that word get defined (or, what seemed to be its definition--sometimes, after all, definitions are assumed as well)? Over time, did those things you valued about "education" (again, however defined) change? If so, how? If you are one of the "for me there was no choice" type--that is, there actually was a choice, but the other option simply wasn't considered--why was that the case for you?

My goal in class won't be to prove that one choice is "better" than the other--what I'm interested in is gathering some information that I can present in class so as to get underneath those assumptions and examine them rather than let them blindly guide our thinking, to think about the word "education" as being perhaps more amorphous than we assume it to be.

If you're interested in sharing your experiences on this, drop me an e-mail at "blogmeridian AT sbcglobal DOT net." If you would, also include your own educational attainment (and that of your parents, if that's relevant to the discussion). If you have questions about what I'm asking, please use the comments for those.

Thanks in advance. You'll be helping further the cause of "higher education"--whatever that is.

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