Screencast: Using APA-Style & In-text Quotations

I created this 8-minute video to imitate filmmaker John August’s scriptcasts on his personal blog. I wanted to see if his scriptcast idea could work for more mundane writing tasks. For instance, could someone like me, with modest technological know-how, use the same software and create a lesson that might be useful for students in college or graduate school?

In the following video, I show my UPenn students how to use in-text quotations in the context of APA-style. There are several videos on YouTube that demonstrate the general format of APA-style, like how to compose a title page or a bibliography, but I couldn’t find any that explicitly addressed how to erect an idea out of the brick-and-mortar of another writer’s words, and still get the formatting right.

Eventually, we will have wildly popular writers like Stephen King and David McCullough “unpacking” their writing process in digital format, thereby puncturing a sizable hole in that elusive black box known as the writer’s craft. 

This new way of using technology to demonstrate the writing process¹ may not turn good writers into great writers. But lessons like these may help mediocre-to-good writers become very competent, even accomplished writers. All it takes is an Internet connection and a little determination.

[Note:  To make the text bigger and clearer, do two things: (1) Turn the "HD" option on (upper-right); and (2) Go to full-screen view (click the arrow-box on the bottom-right).  Be patient.  This ain't no Hollywood movie.]

¹  Albeit, screencasts like these are still approximations of how words emerge from the writer’s head and evolve to walk the page.  But it’s the closest thing yet to getting into the mind of the writer.

done

Crew Returns to Penn Charter

There is synergy at work here, and not just on the water, but in time, in the wonderful way that remarkable people come together to make opportunities real and attainable for others.

[This contracted piece appeared in the Fall '09 edition of Penn Charter Today, PC's alumni magazine. Click here for the magazine clipping; only for fast connections.]

For more than a quarter-century the waters of the Schuylkill River and the docks of Boathouse Row had been tantalizingly out of reach for Penn Charter students, a curious anomaly for a school so close to the water and one with a remarkable crew connection.

Over the past few decades, how many Penn Charter students, parents, and alumni have run, walked, or biked along the busy artery known as Kelly Drive, passing without stopping or much noticing the statue near the crew pavilion finish-line of John B. Kelly, Sr., “Jack” to most, the three-time Olympic gold medal champion in crew?  Forever he sits in his single scull, a few meters from the finish line, his face the calm strength of innumerable rivers rowed.

How many can recite the details of Jack’s humble beginnings in Philadelphia in the early 1900s, his rise to fame as a world-class athlete, arguably the greatest oarsman in history, and his meteoric rise as a respected businessman, “Kelly for Brickwork,” and the legacy of his four children, two with household names—Grace Kelly (yes, that Grace Kelly) and his son John B. Kelly, Jr., “Kel,” OPC ’45?

Under the guiding hand of Jack and his son Kel, a remarkable squad of rookie Penn Charter oarsmen cut the River in practice and competition, many continuing to row long after graduation, including Kel, who went on to win (twice) the prestigious Diamond Sculls at the Henley Royal Regatta and then his own Olympic medal.  For more than a quarter-century, the campus has remained strangely quiet about competition on the water, while crewcuts and J. Crew have plied the choppy hallways.  But the sculls have come back to Penn Charter.

This past year, Penn Charter fielded its first official crew team since the late seventies.  Instrumental in getting the boats back on the water was a serious interest on the part of a substantial group of students and parents, lead in part by J.B. Kelly III, father of Nick Kelly, currently a senior at Penn Charter, and grandson of Jack.  Mr. Kelly found a strong advocate in Head of School Dr. Darryl Ford.

Both men used their considerable influence to get the community in synch with a new crew team.  Dr. Ford expressed his desire firmly to the athletic department, and Mr. Kelly threw his weight into securing use and space at the Vesper Boat Club, the very club his grandfather rowed for at the start of his remarkable career, a hundred years ago.

While these conversations were brewing, the search for a crew coach was underway.  A few months prior to the summer of ’08, Hanne Gradinger was elevated from a substitute role and offered a full-time art teacher position at Penn Charter’s middle school.  The oars were finally in place.

In high school in Kansas City, Mo., Ms. Gradinger belonged to a crew club, then went on to the University of Colorado, where she was the stroke-seat rower in the Buffaloes’ lightweight eight.  Before taking the helm at Penn Charter, she coached the novice female rowers at the Shipley School.  Her assistant is former Ithaca College rower Emma Morrow.  Both women enjoy sharing their passion and knowledge about the sport to young people.

“I love coaching mostly because I love the sport of rowing,” offers Ms. Gradinger.  “I love watching my athletes embrace the fact that rowing is the ultimate team sport, and once they start to understand that, it creates a very strong bond within the team.  Rowing develops honesty, responsibility, and reliability in a person.  What better time to instill those qualities than in high school?”

Practices for the rookie team, initially granted junior-varsity status, began last March when the weather was still so cold that even runners on Kelly Drive were rare.  For the first few weeks, the coaches worked with Penn Charter students in the classroom and on the docks, a steep learning curve for many, that included first learning a new vocabulary—what is an erg, a gate, a rigger?—then learning proper etiquette and equipment care.

Getting the boats down from the racks and onto the water requires technique and teamwork, to say nothing about actual competitive rowing maneuvers on the water. Penn Charter students took to the program quickly, the coxwains’ eyes clearly focused on the finish line and on gaining varsity status as soon as possible, possibly this upcoming spring.

Practices for the inaugural season were held five-days-a-week, from 3:30—6pm on the River, and also two mornings a week in the weightroom, from 6:45 to 7:45 am.  Generally Sundays were reserved for competitions with storied names like the Manny Flick Regattas, the Dr. Robert White Regatta, and the Stotesbury Cup Regatta.  Penn Charter’s roster consisted of 23 rowers in 9th through 11th grades, 5 boys and 18 girls, and they usually competed in two doubles, one quad, and one eight (four rented boats in all). This spring Penn Charter hopes to own at least one boat and a set of oars.  Work is already underway on designing the school symbol and colors for the blades of the oars.

For a typical practice, training consists of a series of drills that work on different aspects of the stroke—how to apply pressure, when to apply pressure, and how and when to pause, the whole effort geared towards synchronizing body and blade movements.  The practices for the week build up in intensity and duration and then taper approaching race day.  Some practices involve the repetition of “steady state pieces,” continuous rowing, or aerobic exercises, where the workout is equivalent to a runner’s long-slow-distance workout.

Other practices are focused more on prep racing, like a runner’s training intervals, where students practice the starting race sequence as well as strategies for when and how to effectively “power through” a race.   Each rower, or team of rowers, yearns for the “swing,” that hard-to-define feeling when near-perfect synchronization of motion occurs in the boat, the feeling of cutting through the water and leaving friction, that enemy of racers in all sports, almost in the wake.

A typical practice on the water is an exercise in individual-boat coordination and whole-team coordination.  Synchronization is the best word to describe it, for on the water there is no place for the lone ranger.  “Everyone has to work together, which means that the boat is like a person,” offers Maggie Faigen, current 11th grader at Penn Charter.  “The entire boat has to think as one,” concurs Dylan Smith, 11th grader.  “Bow through coxswain, we all have to help each other, not work against each other.”  Once launched from the dock, rowers congregate on the west bank and “weigh enough” (stop) for all PC boats and coaches.

The River is marked by physical landmarks, such as the Girard Train Bridge, Girard Ave., Columbia Bridge, Strawberry Mansion Bridge, the Island, the Wire, and Gillin Boathouse.  With often more than 20 high-school crew teams on the water at once—and an occasional non-competitive dragonboat clipping the water with its small army of paddles—circumnavigating the Schuylkill is a remarkable exercise in inter-school group work.  Only rowers get a unique view of the city’s skyline.  The busy commute on all sides is strangely out of earshot, and there’s a stillness on the water that is almost palpable.

“I like how diverse and intricate crew is,” explains Susannah Bonn, current 10th grader.  “At times it seems like a team-oriented sport, staying together and pulling your weight.  But sometimes it’s all about you, your stroke rating, your 2K time, or your layback at the finish.  I also like the intensity of some practices.  I never ran four-plus miles on a Saturday. I don’t like ordinary sports, and crew was something that I’d never thought about.  It was a really rewarding experience.”

There is synergy at work here, and not just on the water, but in time, in the wonderful way that remarkable people come together to make opportunities real and attainable for others.  Crew at Penn Charter can be traced back almost a hundred years, with short-lived explosions of interest.

Almost 65 years ago, Penn Charter, organized its first complete rowing team, with local legend John B. Kelly, Sr. as the head coach and Kel, his son, as the captain. The rest of the 1945 athletes were completely inexperienced.  Many members of that magnificent team went on to respectable rowing careers in college, and many continued to row competitively and recreationally throughout their lives, passing the joy onto their children, and eventually to their children’s children.  The sculls have come back to Penn Charter.  For a new generation of student-athletes, the journey begins anew.

[Mark Franek served as an English teacher and dean of students at Penn Charter from 1999-2007.  He is the academic dean at the Rock School for Dance Education.]

NOTABLE STUDENT QUOTES:

“I enjoy going out on the water everyday with people I like being with.  I have grown to really like our team and how we work together.  Crew is more than a team sport.  There is no one person scoring a goal.  Unless the entire team has the same power and stroke, we won’t go anywhere.”

—Alixandre Azizi, 11^th grade

“I actually started crew a little later than everyone else.  The reason I joined was because I wanted to do a spring sport, and my sister, who was already on crew, told me they needed a coxswain.  I wasn’t sure what that was at first but when she told me it was a short person who gave orders, I decided that crew was the perfect sport for me.”

—Julia Binswanger, 10^th grade

“I wanted to try something different than I’ve never done.  I really like crew because it’s not only a team sport but a family sport.  My parents claim to watch me when I play soccer when in fact their heads rarely look up from their PDAs, but with crew they bond with the other parents and spend the whole day watching.  I also like getting shirts for each race.  It’s nice having a reminder of what I’ve done.  Also, you can never have too many shirts.”

—Liz Binswanger, 12^th grade

“I love the sport of rowing because it is a true team sport.  Rowing requires you to row in synchronized motion with the rest of your team.  If anyone is not rowing in tandem, the whole boat gets off balance.  Equally, dedication is essential.  If someone can’t make practice, nobody from their boat gets to row.  The boat requires 100% participation and will not move for less.”

—Billy Wagner, 12^th grade

“The reason I enjoy rowing is the ‘zone’ I feel  moving in unison with other people, the feeling as the boat is heaved forward by four people working together.  I love the feeling at the finish.  I am too tired to think but I can row.  Rowing is a part of me.”

—Alex Brown, 11^th grade

“The first time I was in a boat I was not happy. It was raining the whole time.  When I got off the water, I looked at how much I had improved from just that one practice, and I looked up and down the river knowing that we were one of the only teams to go out in the rain, and we rowed the whole course.  I felt a lot of gratification.  I also realized that I survived the cold rainy weather, knowing conditions couldn’t get much worse.  My first race was on a beautiful sunny 80 degree day.  There is nothing better than spending a day like that on the river.”

—Christy Chollak, 12^th grade

“The feeling of moving through water is almost a spiritual experience, especially the feeling of moving in unity in a quad or an eight.  Crew rewards hard work and determination on both an individual and group level.  Whether you’re a natural, or just average, if you put the time in to train properly, you will get better.  You will see the water going by faster.”

—Nick Kelly, 12^th grade

Mark and May Mon Got Married

Mark and May Mon got married on June 6th, 2009, in their backyard.  The reception was at the Bellevue.  It rained 21 days in June, but not on this day.

Who Moved the 12th Street Meetinghouse?

Penn Charter and George School Students ’share’ a very old building.

[This contracted piece appeared in the Penn Charter Alumni magazine, Penn Charter Today, Spring 2009 edition.  The images are owned by Charles S. Hough, and used here by permission. Click here for the magazine clipping; only for fast connections.]

In the pre-rush hour dawn of July 10, 1972, a police escort and two flatbed trucks carrying eight magnificent hand-hewn wooden trusses from the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse inched north, throwing a shadow on Center City Philadelphia for the last time. The centuries-old roof trusses—measuring 20 feet high by 58 feet wide—wound their way north from Twelfth and Market streets, veering in and out of parked cars and beneath overhead cables, turned right on Spring Garden, then north on Delaware Avenue, the entire caravan seeking the breathing room of Interstate 95 and the final destination. The new home of the Meetinghouse would not be William Penn Charter School, whose students and faculty had used the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse for 50 years, from 1875 to 1925, prior to the school’s move to its present location. The Meetinghouse’s new home was destined to be George School in Bucks County, 35 miles up the Interstate. How the complex move occurred is a fascinating story. Why the building didn’t end up on School House Lane is a question often posed by members of the current Penn Charter community. The answer, like much of Penn Charter history, is recorded in a leather-bound volume of the Minute Book, the recorded minutes of meetings of the school’s Overseers.

Handling the Herculean move and reconstruction process was Charles S. Hough, a 1944 George School graduate and a founder of Hayes & Hough Architects. Hough later served as the principal architect for Penn Charter, from 1975 to 1995, and his son, Paul H. Hough OPC ’77, has also been an enthusiastic supporter of the school. Hough orchestrated every aspect of the de-construction and move as well as the reconstruction of the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse at George School. Workers began with the roof, peeling off one layer at a time. After the wooden “skeleton” of the roof was fully exposed, they dismantled the rafters and the horizontal timbers, leaving the trusses—the thick triangular vertebrae of the roof—visible from below. They reinforced the trusses and lowered them to the ground, wrapped the entire assembly in polyethylene and laid them on flatbed trucks. Brick by brick, workers dismantled the façade of the building, carefully chipping away the mortar and saving the bricks for future use.

The crew salvaged most of the building’s structure and historically significant artifacts and transported them to George School for reuse. The materials included the eight trusses, exterior doors and hardware, porches and marble steps, exterior trim, windows and shutters, stone paving bricks, about 50 percent of the exterior bricks, several foot-scrapers, wainscoting and stair railings, pine floorboards, many of the wooden benches and cushions, and the facing bench. Capping off a remarkable list of items was a floor joist, signed “1755 AC + IC” —initials for Abraham Carlisle, the master carpenter, and Isaac Coates, his apprentice. The carpenters’ initials were formed by handmade nails driven into the face of the beam, a pre “John Hancock” of sorts. (Some perspective: The Boston patriot John Hancock would not attach his prominent signature to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence at Independence Hall, a few blocks away, for another 21 years.)

Once relocated to George School, the smaller parts were stored in the school’s old cow barn, while the trusses were stored in a temporary, weatherproof shelter in the woods. Work began in the spring of 1973 and concluded the following year. The architects and George School officials emphasized a recycling and “greening” philosophy that was rare in its time. The builders relied heavily on meticulous architectural notes, diagrams and photographs of the Twelfth Street structure. The building was modernized, but Hough worked to retain the harmony and spirit of the original. Hough opened up the pitched part of the roof and exposed the bottom half of the trusses to the gathered meeting below. Honoring the value of honest work and the resiliency of good craft, Hough embedded Carlisle’s initialed joist in the wall directly above the facing bench.

On September 24, 1974, a little more than two years after that pre-dawn journey from Center City, the George School community rededicated the structure, providing future generations of friends, faculty and schoolchildren the opportunity to worship and assemble in one of America’s most notable meeting houses.

The Meetinghouse that now resides on a gentle hill amidst a cluster of trees on the George School campus can trace much of its material to the original 1812 structure at 20 South Twelfth Street. Some of its material—six of the eight trusses and some of the floor beams—dates even further back in time to The Great Meeting House. That predecessor, a smaller structure erected in 1755 at Second and Market, or High Street as Market was then called, was the principal place of Quaker worship during the Revolution and the presidency of George Washington. In fact, the Great Meeting House site was in use well before 1755, and older meeting houses on the plot can be traced back to 1695, predating the city’s Colonial courthouse, which was built nearby in 1707. Centuries later, the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse is now into its third decade in the care of George School—and the building has been magnificently restored and cared for and looks as if it has always existed in that zip code.

Henry Cadbury, a Quaker historian and birthright member of Twelfth Street Meeting—and also an 1899 graduate of Penn Charter—documented the centrality of the building to Penn Charter and the Friends community in a paper presented in 1962 at the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse in honor of its 150th anniversary. “The worship and ministry and the organized life of the meeting differed little from those of other meetings in the city or out of it,” Cadbury wrote. “The most distinctive features were perhaps what I might call extra-curricular—organizations loosely attached to it or located near. Two of these connections are particularly conspicuous, each lasting about a half century. One was the William Penn Charter School, whose staff and students attended midweek meeting in this house every Wednesday in term time. . . . The other major connection . . . is the American Friends Service Committee from 1917 to 1960.”

Since 1917, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has organized humanitarian and relief endeavors around the globe, fighting for social justice, human rights and peace in some of the world’s most violent and disadvantaged places. In 1947, AFSC received the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the British Friends Service Council, on behalf of Quakers worldwide, and Cadbury accepted the prize on behalf of AFSC. Not bad for an organization that migrated from the Friends Institute next door, to the lobby of the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse, to the dining room, and finally to small offices in the Meetinghouse’s attic, girded, literally, by those giant trusses. In the spring of 1975, AFSC moved into the Friends Center, a modern-looking structure adjacent to the Race Street Meeting House.

As Cadbury noted, Penn Charter students and teachers attended meeting “in this house” from 1875 when Penn Charter built a new schoolhouse at the corner of 12th and Market until 1925 when Penn Charter departed Center City for the green space of Germantown. School documents from the late 1800s explain the reason for the move: Headmaster Richard Mott Jones believed the school should offer students physical education and sports as part of the curriculum, but the Center City school did not have adequate space. Mott looked for short-term fixes—including trying to get permission from the Pennsylvania Railroad YMCA to use a playing field at its 52nd Street Station—and advocated for a long-term solution: 20 to 30 acres of land outside Center City. The school acquired acreage on School House Lane and, in the early part of the 20th century, began using the property for athletic fields. Mott Jones, who resigned in 1917 because of poor health, did not live to see the move to the new property in 1925.

In the ensuing decades, Penn Charter bought adjacent land, and by the 1970s owned almost 40 acres—enough to make room for the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse, which was in need of a new home. In 1956, two downtown meetings, the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting for the Western District, popularly known as the Twelfth Street Meeting, and the Philadelphia Meeting of Friends, called Race Street Meeting, merged to become the Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting. In her book In the Shadow of William Penn, Margaret Hope Bacon gives a concise history of Central Philadelphia Meeting and she chronicles how, for nearly a decade and a half, the newly created meeting was challenged by complicated talks about how to deal with redundant property, including Twelfth Street and, on Race Street just above Fifteenth Street, the meeting house that survived and is still used today. In September 1969, Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting entered into an agreement to sell the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse and land for $810,000 to the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society (PSFS) with the option of being able to move the building. PSFS had long since bought and razed (in 1929) the five-floor William Penn Charter School building, which resided on the southwest corner of Market and Twelfth Streets, and replaced it with a towering skyscraper. For nearly four decades, PSFS had been eyeing the Meetinghouse property, just to the south, as a site for further expansion.

Perhaps driven by negative publicity over the pending destruction of a structure with significant ties to Philadelphia and Quaker history, PSFS delayed razing the Meetinghouse and instead left it in the care of the seller, Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, which spent many meetings trying to find a proper home for the building. Penn Charter was interested, but so were many other organizations, including the Philadelphia Community College and a local synagogue. Some members of the Meeting objected to selling and moving the building at all. Others pondered the best use of the money once a deal was finalized. According to Bacon, the Meeting proceeded with the sale of the building to PSFS on October 10, 1971, with this justification noted in the minutes: “Since we are an urban meeting our main thrust should be toward the urban crisis and urban development.” During the 1960s, the problems associated with urban decay, inner-city poverty, and racism prompted many urban churches and community organizations to rethink how best to use resources and influence public policy.

Roger Hillas OPC ’45, currently a senior Overseer and then treasurer of the Penn Charter’s governing board, clearly recalls discussions four decades ago about moving the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse. “We were interested,” said Hillas, “but it was going to cost a fortune.”

Hillas’s recollection is supported by school records. Among the dozens of leather volumes on the bookcases in the office of Head of School Darryl J. Ford are four Minute Book binders (earlier volumes are stored in the school archive) recording the minutes of the “Overseers of the Public School Founded by Charter in the Town and County of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania.” Minutes for Dec. 15, 1970, signed by Clerk Barbara S. Sprogell, read: “Expression has been made by several Friends of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting that since the ground under the 12th Street Meetinghouse has been sold and the Centers Committee has no interest in moving the 12th Street Meetinghouse to 15th and Race Streets that one solution might be to give the meetinghouse to Penn Charter in Germantown. Overseers expressed their great willingness to have this Meetinghouse on their property if arrangements could be made to have it moved with funds not belonging to the School.”

Then, almost a year later, this entry for the meeting of Nov. 23, 1971: “Overseers again talked of the possible acquisition of the 12th Street Meeting House for Penn Charter, and arrived at the decision that while desiring it, they thought it unwise as well as impossible to consider spending four to five hundred thousand dollars on moving it to the School grounds. Nor was it deemed the best use of the school’s money to spend upwards of fifty thousand dollars to salvage the beams and woodwork of the Meeting House for their possible later use in a new Meeting House for the School.”

Forty years later, Hough said that it cost $60,000 to deconstruct the meeting house and transport it to George School and, although he did not have a cost on the reconstruction of the building, the figure of $400,000 to $500,000 “did not surprise me.”

The Minute Book not only confirms Hillas’s recollection, it puts his comment in perspective. Penn Charter’s entire budget for 1970-71 was $1,091,945 and the half-million dollar cost of the meeting house project was almost equal to the sum Penn Charter spent that year on teacher salaries: $523,500. (In 1970, teacher salaries ranged from $7,000 to $12,500.) The Minute Book also shows the school engaged in long-range planning for building projects, including renovations to the Main Building and, attached to the kindergarten building, construction of a new Lower School with classrooms for grades 1 through 5.

With the withdrawal of Penn Charter, the problem of what to do with the Meetinghouse still remained. But not for long. In December 1971, Eric Curtis, then head of George School, announced that an anonymous donor—later identified as the Spruance and Alden families— offered to pay to reconstruct the building on its campus if the Meeting paid to dismantle and transport the building. It appeared to be a win-win situation.

The Twelfth Street Meetinghouse, completed in September 1974, continues to throw beautiful shadows on the lives of those who assemble under its giant trusses in Bucks County. For those in the Penn Charter community who wish the historic building was on our current campus, the solace in this story may be the understanding that the building went not to a better home, but to an equally suitable one.

Mark Franek is the former dean of students at the William Penn Charter School. He is currently the academic dean at the Rock School for Dance Education.

Philadelphia Friends Schools (book)

Many of the images in this book would not surprise Quaker schoolchildren in a bygone era of modest schoolhouses and meeting rooms, of cobbled streets and dirt roads, nor would this book seem quaint or mysterious to current students. Friends schools have always had a distinct philosophy of education.

[I recently co-wrote and published a modest little book about Quaker education called, Philadelphia Friends Schools.  The book was a joint-project between the Friends Council on Education and Arcadia Press. The co-writer, Janet Chance, is the lower school director at the William Penn Charter School.  Gathering the photographs required the help of archivists from ten of Philadelphia's oldest Quaker schools.  Writing the captions and chapter introductions appeared to be a straightforward task, but the peculiar components of Quaker education did not lend themselves to easy explanation.  Below are two excerpts.]

Excerpt from the Introduction to Philadelphia Friends Schools:

This book contains a unique series of photographs from the archives of the Philadelphia-area Friends schools that were founded before the 20th century: Friends Select School and William Penn Charter School, both of which trace their roots to 1689; Abington Friends School, 1697; Plymouth Meeting Friends School, 1780; Westtown School, 1799; Frankford Friends School, 1833; Friends’ Central School, 1845; Germantown Friends School, 1855; Greene Street Friends School, 1855; and George School, 1893.

After a glimpse into the origins of each school (chapter one), this book focuses on the unique pedagogy of the Philadelphia-area Friends schools during the 20th century. The chapters highlight distinctive features of Quaker education: Meeting for Worship (chapter two), Inquiry and Innovation (chapter three), Community and Collaboration (chapter four), Experiential Learning (chapter five), and Peace and Social Justice (chapter six). An introduction explains the importance of the each chapter’s theme and its relevance to Quaker pedagogy. Concluding the collection is a chapter on the Friends Council on Education, the umbrella organization for Friends schools in the United States.

Curiously, many of the images and captions in this book would not surprise Quaker schoolchildren in a bygone era of modest schoolhouses and meeting rooms, of cobbled streets and dirt roads, nor would this book seem quaint or mysterious to current students. Friends schools have always had a distinct philosophy of education. Friends believe that each person has the capacity for goodness, and the school takes responsibility to nurture that goodness. Friends schools believe that education is preparation for the whole of life: the lively development of intellectual, physical, and social-emotional capacities, as well as the development of the spirit. Friends schools are spiritual communities based on the belief that there is that of God in everyone, yet Friends schools do not proselytize or seek to convert students or faculty.

Excerpt from Chapter Two, “Meeting for Worship,” of Philadelphia Friends Schools:

Simple in design, minimally comfortable and as broad as space allows, the Meeting bench has been a Friends school’s most important learning tool for more than 300 years.

—Robert Smith, Quaker educator

Meeting for worship—or simply, meeting—has played a central part in the curricula of all American Friends schools since their emergence in Philadelphia more than three centuries ago. Even though meeting does not appear anywhere on the transcript, it is the spiritual and educational center of the school. Not only do Friends schools discuss the importance of community, they also deliberately protect and nourish their community. In perhaps no other sustained educational activity is the interconnection and possibilities of the individual and the group publicly under construction each week. Quaker educators and philosophers have variously described meeting as a budding flower, a waiting stream, and a night sky. While no two meetings for worship are exactly the same, the general idea is that members of the community assemble in the meeting room, settle into silence, and remain in silent reflection unless someone—from a kindergartner to the head of school—is moved by the spirit or an inner voice to stand up and speak. The messages are surrounded by long periods of silence. Occasionally a story is shared that is so powerful and memorable that it illuminates the room like a northern star. Other messages come and go like fireflies. At still other times, the message emerges from the communal silence and washes up on shore of the individual mind, like a true unexpected treasure. Genuine reflection and the notion that all lives are hopeful and intertwined are difficult concepts to model and teach week after week, yet that is what Friends schools are doing. This chapter contains images of meeting for worship from the archives of Philadelphia-area Friends schools. The photographs are not ordered by date; instead, they show how the meeting unfolds from the perspective of schoolchildren, who arrive at Friends schools with a wide variety of religious beliefs and practices, including some with solely secular backgrounds.

[To buy the book, visit the FCE website: Philadelphia Friends Schools.]

[Mark Franek is the academic dean at the Rock School for Dance Education in Philadelphia, and Janet Chance is the lower school director at the William Penn Charter School, also in Philadelphia.]

Question of Authority

The Presidency is an office of enormous but not unlimited power.

[This piece appeared in the Philadelphia Lawyer Magazine's spring 2009 edition.  Click here for the magazine clipping; only for fast connections.]

Andrew Patel is probably the only lawyer in the United States who has stood at Ground Zero moments before the Earth shook, and then, in the terrible wake of the tragedy, went on to vigorously defend suspected terrorists, just like he did before the towers fell. His clients have uncommon names like El Sayyid Nosair—a convicted murderer, suspected of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing from prison—and José Padilla—the so called “dirty bomber” and the man whose case is the basis of this story. No one would accuse Mr. Patel of having an easy job. His clients are often demonized by the media. His opponents often have unlimited resources.

The federal government arrested José Padilla, an American citizen, in Chicago on May 8, 2002, and detained him as a material witness until June 9, 2002, when President Bush designated him an “enemy combatant.” Mr. Padilla was subsequently transferred to a military prison in South Carolina where he was held, without trial and in extreme solitary confinement, for over three-and-a-half years on suspicion of plotting a radioactive “dirty bomb” attack inside the United States. For over two years he was denied counsel. After pressure from civil liberties groups and lawyers, including Mr. Patel, the Padilla case was eventually moved to a civilian court.

In a dramatic turn of events, the federal government’s November 2005 indictment did not mention the alleged crimes that had lead to Mr. Padilla’s “enemy combatant” status and his forty-three months of solitary confinement. No mention of a dirty bomb, no mention of planned attacks—or of “planning to plan” attacks—on U.S. soil, and no direct references to Al-Qaeda. Instead, the indictment accused Mr. Padilla of conspiring to murder, kidnap, and maim people overseas. Furthermore, the indictment was handed down several days before a pending Supreme Court hearing on the Padilla case, which would have lead to a showdown between the Court and the President, and likely to more clarity about the limits of the President’s power during war-time.

The change in strategy ultimately worked in favor of the government. After only three days of deliberation, on August 16, 2007, a federal jury in Miami, Florida, found Mr. Padilla guilty of charges that he conspired to kill people in an overseas jihad and to fund and support overseas terrorism. He was sentenced to seventeen years and four months in prison. In one of his first public statements after the conviction, Mr. Patel, in a radio interview, observed: “You have to excuse me. It’s hard to summarize what, to me, is a human tragedy in a sentence or two. We were very sad, very disappointed, and had been hoping for a different verdict. We had been hoping that José would be home with his family today.”

Recently, Mr. Patel spoke to Philadelphia Lawyer magazine editorial board member, May Mon Post, about the Padilla case. Ms. Post and writer Mark Franek took the transcript from the telephone interview and nixed the original questions. Where it seemed appropriate, boldface was added and Mr. Patel’s answers were reordered. The goal was to tell a story in the manner of Esquire magazine’s “What I’ve Learned” column.

I was in lower Manhattan. I will never forget. I was so close. We could not see the building fall. According to the New York Times, if you look at the photographs of the South Tower, which was the first one to fall, and there’s an amazing photograph of it just starting to collapse. And if you look at the bottom of the photograph, you’ll see this brown cloud. According to the The Times, that cloud was moving at 140 miles an hour. I can tell you that from where I was standing, which was two blocks away, when something’s coming at you at 140 miles an hour, you get two steps and then the lights go out. I actually put my hand in front of my face and could not see it. You couldn’t see, you couldn’t breathe. I had been standing shoulder to shoulder with two people from my office, and they just disappeared. I eventually—if you’ve seen people covered with white ash—looking like ghost people. I was one of those people. I had chemical burns in my eyes from the material. As I explained to a friend of mine, for some of us, 9/11 was not a television experience. When you say I will never forget it, that much is beyond the shadow of doubt.

The Padilla case is about Mr. Padilla and the Constitutional principles that came out of this case, but it wasn’t really about the Constitution [itself]. That sounds like a trite answer, but it’s really not. This case concerned, as the Supreme Court eventually put it, the authority of the most powerful office on the planet. Can the President order someone to be held by the military as a matter of executive whim? I don’t use the word “whim” lightly. But when you’re a judge, jury and sentencer, then whim becomes the appropriate word.

The notion that the law applies equally to one and all broke down in this case. Here we had the President himself say: “I order that this person be detained by the United States military,” and essentially argue that no court would have the authority to overrule, limit, or interfere with the President’s power to order someone’s detention. And that was really an extraordinary claim of authority by the President of the United States.

In the southern district of New York and in almost all of the federal courts, there is a panel of private attorneys who have sufficient experience in federal criminal investigations where the court will ask us to represent individuals who can’t afford to hire an attorney. I am a member of what is called the Criminal Justice Act Panel in Manhattan. It was Chief Judge McCavey who asked me to get involved with the Padilla case. There’s a very clear rule of federal litigation; when a judge asks you to do something, the answer is always “yes.” That’s how I got involved in this case and these cases.

The public basis for initially declaring Mr. Padilla to be “an enemy combatant” was a declaration by an employee of the Department of Defense—a lawyer—containing certain factual allegations of which that individual had no personal knowledge. In other words, it was entirely hearsay.

At that time there was no redefined definition of an enemy combatant. It basically comes out of a Supreme Court decision from World War II, and at that point what it really meant was an “enemy soldier.” But it’s been somewhat more defined as the litigation went along. But this is not a term that prior to this round of activity by the United States government was generally used in the discussions of the law of war. For example, if the term “negligence” is a legal term that lawyers and jurors understand, and the court can define, and has defined, there will be a dispute about whether a specific act is or is not negligent. The term “enemy combatant” has no such definition. If it sounds bizarre, that’s because it was.

The general allegations were that they had information—there was what was called the Mobbs Declaration, which was the basis for the President’s order, and there was an affidavit from an FBI agent that was the basis for the warrant for Mr. Padilla’s arrest. To answer your question, Michael H. Mobbs, Special Advisor to the Undersecretary Defense for Policy, declares that he is a government employee in the Department of Defense, government reports in records about Mr. Padilla, relevant to the President’s June 9th determination that he is an enemy combatant—I’m sort of paraphrasing this. The information is derived from multiple intelligence sources regarding Abu Zubaydah and Binyama Mohammed. The term “intelligence source” is a broad term. It can be anything from a newspaper report to anyone who talks to someone who then talks to an intelligence officer.  As to these two intelligence sources, the government has admitted that Zubaydah was water boarded. There has been a great deal of litigation and media coverage concerning Benyamin Mohammed. He experienced a rendition to Morroco where he was treated in a manner that would make water boarding seem like a day in the park.

It is distressing that the warrant [in Padilla’s case] was supported only by information obtained by torture. When the source of information is obtained by torture, and the person providing information has no personal knowledge of the source, then you have unreliable information being reported as hearsay. So you have unreliability on top of unreliability, and based on that unreliability, which the government has now to a certain extent admitted, wouldn’t stand up in court. You have someone being thrown into a military brig and held in complete isolation for over three years. In other words, just because someone wants to say something bad about somebody, doesn’t mean it’s true.

For example: If the government obtained an affidavit that said [a person named] Muhammad had met with you, and you had planned to perform a terrorist act in the United States, but there’s no statement from Muhammad, the person who gives the statement never met Muhammad. There’s no information about how the statement was obtained from Muhammad. And yet, you’re thrown in jail, not even a jail that a judge has sent you to, but a jail the President has sent you to. That’s essentially what happened to Mr. Padilla.

When you say “allowed to happen” you assume there must have been a rational basis for it. But this happened because the President said, “I have the authority to do this.” This is exactly what the Constitution was designed to prevent: that level of assertion of power by any branch of government.

The important thing was not what Mr. Padilla said [during interrogation that resulted in a “confession”], but the fact that he was held under military detention by order of the President, and not by order of a judge. He was taken outside the Constitutional system. So what he said is really irrelevant, and has never been and probably never will be used in a court of law.

A conspiracy is an agreement between two or more people to do something unlawful. That’s a classic definition of a criminal conspiracy. The question is, can you have an agreement to agree to commit some crime that hasn’t happened? And the crime that Mr. Padilla was charged with was a conspiracy to commit murder overseas. So it was a conspiracy on top of a conspiracy. And it really kind of stretches the very logic of conspiracy law.

There was no dirty bomb. And the government brought an entirely different set of accusations against Mr. Padilla [in Miami]. The dirty bomb rumors, to be polite, were irrelevant to the charges in Miami. He just was not charged with anything to do with the dirty bomb. Because there was none.

Well, it’s because the Attorney General of the United States went on television and said, “We stopped this guy from setting off a dirty bomb.”

This case was about some very fundamental basic issues. Does the President have the authority to hold someone on his own authority? Does a court have a right to say, “I’m sorry, Mr. President, you can’t do that.” And a number of courts did say, “Mr. President, you don’t have the right to do that.” You don’t have the authority. The Constitution does not give your office the power to do that. It is an office of enormous but not unlimited power.

You don’t have to wait for terrorists acts to be completed before you begin an investigation or a prosecution. That’s certainly true. Because, when guys are clearly involved in attempting to build a bomb [or planning a terrorist attack], that’s one thing. But you also have people who are involved in more advocacy kinds of things. And then the question becomes, Where do you draw the line?

I’m a solo practitioner, but there was a team of us working on the Padilla case. One of the things that really pleased me and made me very proud of our profession was the way lawyers from medium firms, big firms, and small firms rose to the occasion and didn’t say, “Oh, no, this is too controversial for me.” But wrote magnificent amicus briefs at every level. At the District Court level, at the Circuit Court level, and then the Supreme Court. They made themselves available to discuss some of the very arcane issues involved. So it was really the support that we got from the legal community. I think it’s something that all of us can be very proud of. I thought it was extraordinary. It was not, “what’s in it for us, or for our firm?” Instead, it was, “We think this is important. What can we do to help?”

                                                         #   #   #

[May Mon Post, an editorial board member, is the owner of the Post Law Firm and President of the Asian American Bar Association of Pennsylvania. Mark Franek is a freelance writer and a member of Cabrini College’s English department.]

With a Little Help from Friends

People who are out of work tend to take things personally. It helps to rally around friends and family.

[This piece appeared in the Baltimore Sun on Thursday, April 2nd.  The original version appears below.]

My fiancée and I have six college and graduate school degrees between us. For nearly two decades, we’ve worked in non-finance-related, white-collar professions. Last winter she was laid off without warning and without a severance package. This spring I found out that my contract will not be renewed at the college where I teach.¹

With no kids and good credentials, we are fairly advantaged members of the swelling ranks of the unemployed. The situation for us isn’t dire. Yet. But we are experiencing a variety of emotional and financial realities that our parents and our professors virtually promised us would never happen.

To quote the last line of a poem by Emily Dickinson called “After Great Pain”: “First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go.”

My fiancée, who has been jobless for about six months, is in the “letting go” stage. She has started her own business and is busy every day chasing potential clients, updating her Web site and organizing her home office. Her business is showing signs of life. Our friends have helped immensely by referring potential clients to her services via word of mouth, e-mail, Facebook and LinkedIn.

The social networking aspect of the Web has been a godsend. It doesn’t translate immediately to dollars, but it makes one feel a part of a wider community.

I, on the other hand, am still in the “stupor” stage, which for me is a state of mental numbness and bodily lethargy. But it’s fading.

Our wedding is going ahead, but not exactly as planned. We explained our circumstances to the folks at our contracted businesses, and several let us out of the deal without penalty. We are getting married in our backyard, and then heading to the city for an intimate meal with a much smaller cast.

We will go on our honeymoon when one of us gets a job with steady pay.

Meanwhile, if unemployment creates uncertainty for us, it is also terra incognita for our friends and family members who are fortunate to still have their jobs. There is very little advice out there for people who want to find appropriate ways to help friends or loved ones who recently received pink slips. Giving or loaning money is a sticky wicket, but there are other things friends and family can do that don’t require much effort but still make a big difference.

First, keep the lines of communication open and light-hearted. My father recently e-mailed me a picture of his labrador retriever, her nose brown from digging in the dirt, with this message in the subject line: “Even for the brown-nosers, times are Ruff!”

That made me smile.

It also helps to exercise empathy and patience. My friends and family—and to some degree, my fiancée—have all shown an amazing capacity to endure my rants, which are worse than usual, and part of my overall coping strategy.

For instance, last month, amid the AIG payout scandal, my credit card company informed me that my annual percentage rate had increased due to “adverse market conditions.” I suspect that tens of thousands of Americans received similar notifications. The irony was so thick, you could cut it with a derivative.

People who are out of work tend to take things personally.

Just listening, without judging—even if the rants omit facts or cast impossibly wide nets—is beneficial.

Small kindnesses go a long way. Recently, friends of ours invited us to dinner at their house. Mercifully, they didn’t use the fancy dinner plates, break out the good wine or expect us to talk about our situation.

Better times are on the horizon, somewhere. According to the pundits, it’s going to take collaboration at all levels of government and in board rooms all across America to get us out of this mess. We don’t believe that Americans—and American institutions—are inherently greedy and mean-spirited.

We will get through this. Friendship and support are the currency of compassion. They cost virtually nothing.

Mark Franek lives in Philadelphia. He is a co-author, most recently, of the book “Philadelphia Friends Schools.”

¹ A few weeks after this article appeared, I was offered a job at The Rock School, and May Mon settled her first case under her own shingle, The Post Law Firm.  A friend of mine called this article “a typical case of premature Franek elocution.”

Bring Integrity to the Web

Unfortunately, integrity can’t be searched.

[This oped appeared in the Christian Science Monitor on Thursday, March 19th, 2009.  Please patronize the CSMonitor by reading the original article.  If you are interested in the annotated version, continue reading.]

Philadelphia- In this brave new online world of user-generated content, people are entitled not only to their own opinion, but to their own blogs and websites, tens of thousands of them crawling out of the ooze daily, climbing up Google’s rankings, linking to one another and bringing their content to a screen near you.

Most of this stuff is harmless. Some of it is truly breathtaking. There is real power in the fingertips of people who only 10 years ago wouldn’t have had much of a voice past their front porch. But increasingly, online words and images are causing dismay and real damage for other people who never wanted to be in the public spotlight, much less one that’s accessible 24/7.

Today, anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can post defamatory statements to the Web in a matter of seconds. The fact-checking apparatus and journalistic integrity standards that once provided a healthy buffer and filter between words and a wide audience have come crashing down.

Beware what appears in its place. The First Amendment gives people without integrity on the Web tremendous power, too. We need to develop an awareness among Internet users of the importance of acting with honesty and in good faith.

I spent seven years as a dean of students at an independent school in Philadelphia. I’ve watched fights break out, friends break up, and parents appear at my door, in tears, all over some nonsense posted online about their child that they were virtually powerless to remove.

Megasites like MySpace and Facebook have clear policies, but their rules invariably have more bark than bite. There is no telephone number to call. Sometimes days go by before the webmaster responds, usually in an unsigned e-mail. And even then there’s often a catch.

Your child’s anguish may not trump someone else’s First Amendment rights.

Principals have more leverage, but they are busy people. Sometimes the parents of a scared or depressed child can get the principal to invite the posters of the offending material and their parents into the office for a conversation. This often results in the deletion of the material in question; that is, if the posters aren’t anonymous, or from another school.¹

You don’t have to be a teen to be adversely affected by the confluence of powerful new communication tools and average people using those tools with the intent to do harm.

Right now I am in the midst of an inane conflict with a webmaster of a high-traffic site who refuses to remove an offensive blog about me that is laden with epithets and defamatory statements.²

It was all fun and games until the content of the blog was brought up during a recent job interview. Could it be that the interviewers took Google’s search results – literally, the high ranking of the Web page in question – as evidence of some kind of merit?

The Internet, led by the pervasive power of Google’s ranking system, has become an extension of your résumé. And here’s the real kicker: When thwarted by a webmaster who refuses to give ground, an average citizen can have a very hard time getting links that lead to offensive material off the first page of Google’s search results.

The problem with the Internet is not that there are too many writers. It’s that there aren’t enough gatekeepers with integrity, and there is no clear and consistent way to resolve disputes. Graffiti on the street can be erased or painted over. The critical and sometimes harsh opinions in newspapers and magazines undergo careful scrutiny by editors who get paid, in part, for knowing the legal definition of libel and how to avoid it. The text and images on today’s websites are not always vetted properly. In some cases, they are not vetted at all.

This is yet another reason to lament the dark clouds that have formed over the newspaper industry.

The only kind of text-based information that gets removed from searches immediately by Google are social security numbers and credit card numbers.³ Just about everything else is fair game and food for the machine.

Google may need to consider the loopholes in its “do no harm” mantra.

The lure of the Web is powerful in large part because of its lack of accountability. But that lack, combined with questionable integrity, tilts that power onto a path we should not continue down.⁴

What little control individuals have boils down to several unreliable options: Plead with the blogger or webmaster for mercy. Remind him or her of the real effects words can have on real people. Be cautious. Don’t be surprised if what you write in an e-mail ends up on a website. Ask the website’s host company to investigate the offensive material (sometimes the host will shut down a site if its content violates the host’s “terms and conditions”).⁵ Contact the advertisers on the website in question, and complain. As a last resort, hire a lawyer.

It would be nice if popular bloggers and webmasters of high-traffic sites joined professional associations, pursued continuing education credits, and pledged to uphold a code of ethics.

Some schools are starting to teach net etiquette and online citizenship. Some bullies, however, never grow up; for them, the online world is one giant playground.⁶

For the rest of us, our real power is our moral high ground. Unfortunately, integrity can’t be searched.

 •Mark Franek is a member of Cabrini College’s English department in Radnor, Pa., and former dean of students at William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia.

¹ Principals are on shaky Constitutional ground asking anyone to do anything, assuming the content was produced off campus. I’ve written about cyberbullying and the law before.

² Don’t Google my name and click on the offensive blog. You’ll only make it climb higher.  The blog in question is not worth your time–it was written by a BigSoccer.com blogger in response to a Daily News oped I wrote last year, criticizing Major League Soccer.  There is nothing more boring than reading a blog about soccer complaining about somebody else complaining about soccer.  Trust me.

³ Google will also remove names of people that turn up with pornographic images when Safe Search is turned on. Further, Google will remove text for copyright infringement reasons, but the process takes time. The material has to be researched and the copyright owner identified.

⁴ I didn’t write this sentence; the editor did. I like everything else she did with this piece. Don’t irritate the gatekeepers.

⁵ It should be no surprise that Web hosting companies are re-writing their “terms and conditions” policies with little or no mention of libel, defamation, and copyright infringement. Web hosting companies want clients/customers; they don’t want hassles with individuals calling up or emailing them about potential violations. It’s just one more example of passing the buck down the digital line. Newspapers are caught in the reverse-situation. Most newspaper people care deeply about journalistic integrity and net etiquette. And they have clear policies.  But most newspapers don’t have the personnel to vet user-generated comments, so they have quietly shut down all or most of their comment functionality. Unfortunately, this only increases the migration of people to parts of the Web where there is little or no accountability.

⁶ Maybe the parents of the next generation will think twice about giving their child a peculiar name.  Peculiar names and defamation are a deadly search combination.

What I’ve learned about Education

[In the style of Esquire magazine's "What I've Learned" column. Posted in March 2009.]

Life’s a group project. Sure. But there’s still a leader in every group.

Society puts its best foot forward in kindergarten. Or not.

All I have to do is accept the consequences of what I do know. Why is that so damn difficult?

90% of learning takes place outside of the classroom. For the other 10%, pray (or pay) for good teachers.

We’ve all had good teachers. They’re memorable. They taught us—or gave us—something valuable.

I still have a model house (now with a sagging roof) that I designed in my high school architecture class. Each day my teacher spent the beginning minutes of class modeling good design and showcasing possibilities. For the rest of the class, we were left to our own drawings, as he consulted with us individually. Why can’t more classes be like that?

My first dog’s name was Lichen. I taught her how to sit and stay. She taught me how to throw sticks. And smile. Pets make great teachers.

Learning grammar out of a workbook is like fishing on dry land.

Once, I caught a fish without even trying. I left the rod in the back of the boat, the bare hook dangling a few inches above the water, and went to look for worms. When I returned, viola!, a fish. Sometimes ideas hit you like that. Other times, you have to dig for them.

Most students have something valuable to teach the teacher. Shut up and listen.

You shouldn’t have to read between the lines in schoolwork or in home-life. If you don’t know what a person is trying to say, the first question is: Who owns the problem?

A Swiss Army knife. That’s what a good education should be about: using the tools to whittle the wood to make the fire.

Sorry to admit it but the Internet ranks a close second to every child’s best teacher.

On Ezra Pound’s deathbed, he said he was right about 89% of the time. That was long before grade inflation. So, what did he mean?

I am not comparing myself to Ezra Pound.

While we’re on the subject: William Carlos Williams never quit his day job.

Often, writing is a lot easier than teaching. Words don’t talk back, they don’t shoot spitballs, and they generally aren’t out to join up with their friends and make your life a living hell.

Of course, sometimes teaching is a joy.

Those who can’t do, teach. I never understood this quote. Hercules, among his many spectacular Labors, never taught a class.

Still, the quality of education almost always depends most of all on what is going on at home.

Doesn’t mean teachers should throw in the towel.

Towels make good rags. Don’t believe me? Use your Swiss Army knife.

Would you like to read my annotated philosophy of education?

Advice from Dear Old Dad

Times are Ruff!

(even for the brown-nosers)