[Music]
when did you last spend an extended
period of time
a very tiny space with someone
completely different from you for some
of you that might have been your college
dorm room experience and if it looked
anything like this you probably wanted
to escape a lot even though you were
probably stuck with them for an extended
period of time something very similar to
this happens in Mark Twain’s The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn you have
Huck who’s a 13 year old white American
boy of an abusive alcoholic father and a
strict Christian guardian who decides to
escape from both of them then runs into
Jim was a middle-aged African slave
actually owned by Huck’s guardian who’s
just found out that he’s going to be
sold down the river by her now although
they know of each other they do not know
each other but both of these very
different characters find themselves on
the same 12 foot by sixteen foot raft on
the shores of the Mississippi now as a
former English teacher I was always
fascinated by this little detail of the
raft which is buried somewhere on page
50 or so this raft is tiny for two
people and it doesn’t have any bathrooms
but more seriously both of these people
are outlaws one of them is considered a
hundred percent human the other only 60
percent which means that Huck ostensibly
has all the power on this raft and Jim
has absolutely no reason to trust this
kid and on top of that
Huck uses the N word to describe Jim
over
200 times in the novel just one reason
why it’s challenged and banned schools
throughout history however even though
Jim is making a very dangerous and risky
choice to confess his secret to this
white child and stay on the raft with
him and even though Huck is worried the
entire time that he is breaking the law
for colluding with Jim both of these
characters make a conscious choice to
stay on that 12 by 16 raft together they
inhabit it with a common goal escape
north despite the obvious risks and
their obvious differences now on their
journey north this really should be
called The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn and Jim Huck is forced to confront
his learned racism and undergoes a
process of unlearning that I think would
not be possible without the close
proximity and intimacy of this raft
which becomes not just a vehicle to
freedom a physical one but a mental
vehicle of change and over the years
I’ve narrowed down the process of Huck’s
unlearning to ten important elements the
first one is that they have to share the
first meal together it’s actually Huck
who makes the meal of catfish and bacon
and coffee for Jim when they first meet
they confide in each other which means
that they have to tell each other the
secrets of their escape and their
backstories and have faith fides and
confidence in each other and they have
to figure out how they’re going to
create this shared space together on
this tiny tiny raft along the way they
gather all the things that they need in
order to survive they steal a lot of
disguises here’s Huck as Maryann they
protect each other from snake bites from
shifty characters from slave traders but
they also find time to play to enjoy
each other’s company
they hunt they fish they swim and Huck
even reads to Jim and along the way
they’re constantly co-creating who
they’re gonna be where they’re gonna go
and what they’re going to do the last
process last step of this process though
is reckoning
if Hawk had not reckoned which is a kind
of concluding on this raft the
difference is between them we just
stayed differences Huck reckons as the
tenth essential element in his
unlearning and it’s interesting that
dead reckoning is a navigational term
that Mark Twain would have been very
familiar with and what it means is to
determine one’s current position by
considering one’s previous position and
then using data like speed and time and
current to figure out where one is and
for a thirteen-year-old boy and I’ve
known a lot of 13 year-olds in my
teaching career Huck does an awful lot
of reckoning
about his current position in society in
his current position with Jim I think
that there are three very important
reckoning scenes which are worth noting
in the middle of the book Huck decides
that he has to Humble himself to Jim he
decides to apologize to him for the very
first time for hurting his feelings
Huck II think Jim even calls him trash
at one point he does he reckons that he
should he does and he doesn’t feel sorry
for doing so and later on even after
everything that they go through
Huck tests himself towards the end and
he tries praying to God for forgiveness
for helping out Jim but the words when
it come he says and he reckons because
you can’t pray a lie
and then even after that he tries
writing a letter to his guardian and
gyms owner saying where they are but
then he tears it up and reckons if
helping Jim is going to get me set to
hell then all right then I’ll go to hell
remember that the raft is both a
physical vehicle to freedom but also a
mental vehicle to change if it were not
for this raft they would remain
completely different and yet Huck is
able to by the end come to relate to Jim
his friend and vice versa and he’ll even
goes so far as to say essentially I am
Jim their friendship and Huck’s on
learning process should challenge all of
us to unlearn our own prejudices even if
it takes 300 pages in a lot of messy
reckoning now is the 12 by 16 raft
transformative power applicable to other
parts of our life are there other things
that we need to unlearn I think so
I first borrowed the raft concept in my
English classes not just the American
Lit ones but all of them is a vehicle to
create class culture and also urged my
students to unlearn surprisingly school
I wanted them to unlearn the idea that I
was the only teacher and leader in the
classroom and that they were all my
followers to unlearn the idea that
learning was just a solo act and not
collaborative there was all about grades
and competition and that learning was
failure free and it should be orderly
and unmess II so it throwed every new
batch of students for a loop when on the
first day of class they would come in
and a mysterious 12 by 16 space was
taped to the floor and instead of
launching into a boring syllabus of here
the books we’re gonna read here’s how
what everything’s gonna be worth and
here my expectations for them instead it
would tell them the story I just told
you of the raft and invite them to raft
with me for the
remainder of our time together if we
were lucky on a nice day we would go
outside and enjoy this metaphorical meal
first meal with pizza so we’d have a
real meal outside and I would tell them
about the raft there but then I had to
ask them to help me create a shared
mental space that would take us through
the rest of the year now it tell them
that raft stood for respectful
accountable forward thinking and moving
and thoughtful and would ask them what
are these things going to look like for
you and for me and for your classmates
Oh take all of their ideas synthesize
them put them on a big scroll read it
dramatically invite them to pledge their
allegiance to it if they wanted to then
tacked it to the wall so that we could
refer to it throughout the year but of
course the idea behind the raft was for
them to internalize it so the first time
I heard a student say to his or her
classmates hey get back on the raft or I
would ask them are we rafting well and
they’d say no I knew that they were
beginning to internalize it and make it
their own our rafting for us meant a lot
of talking and reflecting it included a
lot of arguing and reconciling arguing
more in the form of disagreeing with
each other and making mistakes together
I remember a particular Friday and I
just finished introducing a new rhetoric
assignment to my freshmen for the
weekend and hand shot up
they said this will not do and I said
what will do and they said please leave
the room after a nice coffee break about
20 minutes they invited me back and a
girl was standing at the whiteboard with
lists and charts and the rhetorical
triangle of ethos logos and pathos that
I had just taught them and she proceeded
to give me their new proposal which they
ended up doing on other occasions when
we were rafting together and some of the
kids were going overboard
I was going overboard or we were all
going over a waterfall together and part
of it was on me I would humble myself
and apologize to them and we’d figure
out where to go but most important on
this raft this classroom raft was the
idea that the students should be
responsible for determining the
direction of it so often we would reckon
what was going well what wasn’t going
well and how could we fix the latter
sometimes whole parts of my curriculum
were tweaked or revised or scrapped
altogether and replaced with something
new that we had created together because
we thought it would be a more effective
or so we hoped many kids took their oars
and paddled wildly because we’ve never
done anything like this before other
kids didn’t quite know how to hold the
oar and because they had never done
anything like this before and treated
this way while all this sounds messy and
unconventional it was there was all in
the name of the raft culture that we
were trying to create a culture of
learning but also unlearning I’ve been
able to throughout the years apply this
raft concept to other areas of my career
in life at my old school I helped
co-create a larger service-learning raft
called class for instance which stood
for character leadership accountability
service and sustainability and this raft
brought together 4th through 12th
graders kids from all of those grades
all different kinds of kids with a
common goal of recognizing and justices
in their world learning about affected
communities serving them with action and
awareness building and we were trying to
help them unlearn things that service
and accountability with the same thing
that service without learning about
issues and creating relationships with
people was not quite service
that leadership without character and
accountability was okay but most of all
the idea that their voices didn’t count
and that they could not change the world
and so they too signed a raft pledge
usually on an oar and committed
themselves to working for an entire year
creating shared spaces outside of the
classrooms with that common goal to
learn how to serve others I also at 626
am every Wednesday and Friday for the
last three years have been part of an
even larger raft community called
November project in Milwaukee and what
we are is a free fun fitness family of
up to 150 people sometimes it uses the
city as our raft as our gym we are all
ages all shapes all sizes all speeds all
fitness levels and we are weatherproof
we do this throughout the year and we
try to unlearn things like Fitness needs
to cost a lot of money this is free
fitness can’t be fun and wacky that 626
is too early we actually have a 529 am
group now and most of all the fact that
you have to be X Y or Z in order to be
an athlete this is us running up the
hill in the summer in the winter Huck
and Jim 20 to 30 different kids in a
classroom 4th and 12th graders 150
different kinds of athletes unlearning
racism school service and fitness
finally two days ago was the one-year
anniversary of the launch of my biggest
raft yet biggest because it was about
unlearning Milwaukee was something that
the majority of you probably have in
your possession right now a camera of
some sort September of last year in
response to the August 13th police
officer shooting of a man in the Sherman
Park neighborhood and the unrest that
I created sip MKE but it wasn’t just
because of that it was because of the
divisive economist vitriolic language I
heard on social media describing that
Sherman Park raft city inner city
suburban urban good neighborhood
bad neighborhood white people black
people that neighborhood those people
savages barbarians and worse and was not
surprised we had not unlearned these
things even though it was 2016 but I
knew that we had to and a lot of
well-meaning people kept asking what do
we do what can we do and it couldn’t
help but think about Huck and Jim in the
12 by 16 raft before we could answer
what can we do we needed to answer what
do we need to unlearn and these are some
of the images that we saw for days and
weeks and months of that event this
became the narrative not just of that
night but of the Sherman Park
neighborhood and unfortunately for some
all of black Milwaukee and so when we
created zip MKE we wanted the mission to
be to create neighborhood pride show us
what you got to create community
connections let’s start to see each
other to expand social perspectives by
diminishing our preconceived assumptions
about each other and question even
further that narrative that Milwaukee is
only just segregated is only disunited
it’s been a rewarding year but also one
which has been very difficult and messy
we still have to figure out how are we
gonna reach all 28 ZIP codes are we
really making a difference with pictures
and yet these pictures here are also
taken in Sherman Park
invite you in closing to unlearn those
first four pictures I showed you of
violence destruction anger and
frustration and ask yourself when you’re
on the raft and things get messy what do
you do who do you rely on what do you
need to unlearn what do you want to
unlearn and how can Huck and Jim and the
raft help you do it thank you
[Applause]
when did you last spend an extended
period of time
a very tiny space with someone
completely different from you for some
of you that might have been your college
dorm room experience and if it looked
anything like this you probably wanted
to escape a lot even though you were
probably stuck with them for an extended
period of time something very similar to
this happens in Mark Twain’s The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn you have
Huck who’s a 13 year old white American
boy of an abusive alcoholic father and a
strict Christian guardian who decides to
escape from both of them then runs into
Jim was a middle-aged African slave
actually owned by Huck’s guardian who’s
just found out that he’s going to be
sold down the river by her now although
they know of each other they do not know
each other but both of these very
different characters find themselves on
the same 12 foot by sixteen foot raft on
the shores of the Mississippi now as a
former English teacher I was always
fascinated by this little detail of the
raft which is buried somewhere on page
50 or so this raft is tiny for two
people and it doesn’t have any bathrooms
but more seriously both of these people
are outlaws one of them is considered a
hundred percent human the other only 60
percent which means that Huck ostensibly
has all the power on this raft and Jim
has absolutely no reason to trust this
kid and on top of that
Huck uses the N word to describe Jim
over
200 times in the novel just one reason
why it’s challenged and banned schools
throughout history however even though
Jim is making a very dangerous and risky
choice to confess his secret to this
white child and stay on the raft with
him and even though Huck is worried the
entire time that he is breaking the law
for colluding with Jim both of these
characters make a conscious choice to
stay on that 12 by 16 raft together they
inhabit it with a common goal escape
north despite the obvious risks and
their obvious differences now on their
journey north this really should be
called The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn and Jim Huck is forced to confront
his learned racism and undergoes a
process of unlearning that I think would
not be possible without the close
proximity and intimacy of this raft
which becomes not just a vehicle to
freedom a physical one but a mental
vehicle of change and over the years
I’ve narrowed down the process of Huck’s
unlearning to ten important elements the
first one is that they have to share the
first meal together it’s actually Huck
who makes the meal of catfish and bacon
and coffee for Jim when they first meet
they confide in each other which means
that they have to tell each other the
secrets of their escape and their
backstories and have faith fides and
confidence in each other and they have
to figure out how they’re going to
create this shared space together on
this tiny tiny raft along the way they
gather all the things that they need in
order to survive they steal a lot of
disguises here’s Huck as Maryann they
protect each other from snake bites from
shifty characters from slave traders but
they also find time to play to enjoy
each other’s company
they hunt they fish they swim and Huck
even reads to Jim and along the way
they’re constantly co-creating who
they’re gonna be where they’re gonna go
and what they’re going to do the last
process last step of this process though
is reckoning
if Hawk had not reckoned which is a kind
of concluding on this raft the
difference is between them we just
stayed differences Huck reckons as the
tenth essential element in his
unlearning and it’s interesting that
dead reckoning is a navigational term
that Mark Twain would have been very
familiar with and what it means is to
determine one’s current position by
considering one’s previous position and
then using data like speed and time and
current to figure out where one is and
for a thirteen-year-old boy and I’ve
known a lot of 13 year-olds in my
teaching career Huck does an awful lot
of reckoning
about his current position in society in
his current position with Jim I think
that there are three very important
reckoning scenes which are worth noting
in the middle of the book Huck decides
that he has to Humble himself to Jim he
decides to apologize to him for the very
first time for hurting his feelings
Huck II think Jim even calls him trash
at one point he does he reckons that he
should he does and he doesn’t feel sorry
for doing so and later on even after
everything that they go through
Huck tests himself towards the end and
he tries praying to God for forgiveness
for helping out Jim but the words when
it come he says and he reckons because
you can’t pray a lie
and then even after that he tries
writing a letter to his guardian and
gyms owner saying where they are but
then he tears it up and reckons if
helping Jim is going to get me set to
hell then all right then I’ll go to hell
remember that the raft is both a
physical vehicle to freedom but also a
mental vehicle to change if it were not
for this raft they would remain
completely different and yet Huck is
able to by the end come to relate to Jim
his friend and vice versa and he’ll even
goes so far as to say essentially I am
Jim their friendship and Huck’s on
learning process should challenge all of
us to unlearn our own prejudices even if
it takes 300 pages in a lot of messy
reckoning now is the 12 by 16 raft
transformative power applicable to other
parts of our life are there other things
that we need to unlearn I think so
I first borrowed the raft concept in my
English classes not just the American
Lit ones but all of them is a vehicle to
create class culture and also urged my
students to unlearn surprisingly school
I wanted them to unlearn the idea that I
was the only teacher and leader in the
classroom and that they were all my
followers to unlearn the idea that
learning was just a solo act and not
collaborative there was all about grades
and competition and that learning was
failure free and it should be orderly
and unmess II so it throwed every new
batch of students for a loop when on the
first day of class they would come in
and a mysterious 12 by 16 space was
taped to the floor and instead of
launching into a boring syllabus of here
the books we’re gonna read here’s how
what everything’s gonna be worth and
here my expectations for them instead it
would tell them the story I just told
you of the raft and invite them to raft
with me for the
remainder of our time together if we
were lucky on a nice day we would go
outside and enjoy this metaphorical meal
first meal with pizza so we’d have a
real meal outside and I would tell them
about the raft there but then I had to
ask them to help me create a shared
mental space that would take us through
the rest of the year now it tell them
that raft stood for respectful
accountable forward thinking and moving
and thoughtful and would ask them what
are these things going to look like for
you and for me and for your classmates
Oh take all of their ideas synthesize
them put them on a big scroll read it
dramatically invite them to pledge their
allegiance to it if they wanted to then
tacked it to the wall so that we could
refer to it throughout the year but of
course the idea behind the raft was for
them to internalize it so the first time
I heard a student say to his or her
classmates hey get back on the raft or I
would ask them are we rafting well and
they’d say no I knew that they were
beginning to internalize it and make it
their own our rafting for us meant a lot
of talking and reflecting it included a
lot of arguing and reconciling arguing
more in the form of disagreeing with
each other and making mistakes together
I remember a particular Friday and I
just finished introducing a new rhetoric
assignment to my freshmen for the
weekend and hand shot up
they said this will not do and I said
what will do and they said please leave
the room after a nice coffee break about
20 minutes they invited me back and a
girl was standing at the whiteboard with
lists and charts and the rhetorical
triangle of ethos logos and pathos that
I had just taught them and she proceeded
to give me their new proposal which they
ended up doing on other occasions when
we were rafting together and some of the
kids were going overboard
I was going overboard or we were all
going over a waterfall together and part
of it was on me I would humble myself
and apologize to them and we’d figure
out where to go but most important on
this raft this classroom raft was the
idea that the students should be
responsible for determining the
direction of it so often we would reckon
what was going well what wasn’t going
well and how could we fix the latter
sometimes whole parts of my curriculum
were tweaked or revised or scrapped
altogether and replaced with something
new that we had created together because
we thought it would be a more effective
or so we hoped many kids took their oars
and paddled wildly because we’ve never
done anything like this before other
kids didn’t quite know how to hold the
oar and because they had never done
anything like this before and treated
this way while all this sounds messy and
unconventional it was there was all in
the name of the raft culture that we
were trying to create a culture of
learning but also unlearning I’ve been
able to throughout the years apply this
raft concept to other areas of my career
in life at my old school I helped
co-create a larger service-learning raft
called class for instance which stood
for character leadership accountability
service and sustainability and this raft
brought together 4th through 12th
graders kids from all of those grades
all different kinds of kids with a
common goal of recognizing and justices
in their world learning about affected
communities serving them with action and
awareness building and we were trying to
help them unlearn things that service
and accountability with the same thing
that service without learning about
issues and creating relationships with
people was not quite service
that leadership without character and
accountability was okay but most of all
the idea that their voices didn’t count
and that they could not change the world
and so they too signed a raft pledge
usually on an oar and committed
themselves to working for an entire year
creating shared spaces outside of the
classrooms with that common goal to
learn how to serve others I also at 626
am every Wednesday and Friday for the
last three years have been part of an
even larger raft community called
November project in Milwaukee and what
we are is a free fun fitness family of
up to 150 people sometimes it uses the
city as our raft as our gym we are all
ages all shapes all sizes all speeds all
fitness levels and we are weatherproof
we do this throughout the year and we
try to unlearn things like Fitness needs
to cost a lot of money this is free
fitness can’t be fun and wacky that 626
is too early we actually have a 529 am
group now and most of all the fact that
you have to be X Y or Z in order to be
an athlete this is us running up the
hill in the summer in the winter Huck
and Jim 20 to 30 different kids in a
classroom 4th and 12th graders 150
different kinds of athletes unlearning
racism school service and fitness
finally two days ago was the one-year
anniversary of the launch of my biggest
raft yet biggest because it was about
unlearning Milwaukee was something that
the majority of you probably have in
your possession right now a camera of
some sort September of last year in
response to the August 13th police
officer shooting of a man in the Sherman
Park neighborhood and the unrest that
I created sip MKE but it wasn’t just
because of that it was because of the
divisive economist vitriolic language I
heard on social media describing that
Sherman Park raft city inner city
suburban urban good neighborhood
bad neighborhood white people black
people that neighborhood those people
savages barbarians and worse and was not
surprised we had not unlearned these
things even though it was 2016 but I
knew that we had to and a lot of
well-meaning people kept asking what do
we do what can we do and it couldn’t
help but think about Huck and Jim in the
12 by 16 raft before we could answer
what can we do we needed to answer what
do we need to unlearn and these are some
of the images that we saw for days and
weeks and months of that event this
became the narrative not just of that
night but of the Sherman Park
neighborhood and unfortunately for some
all of black Milwaukee and so when we
created zip MKE we wanted the mission to
be to create neighborhood pride show us
what you got to create community
connections let’s start to see each
other to expand social perspectives by
diminishing our preconceived assumptions
about each other and question even
further that narrative that Milwaukee is
only just segregated is only disunited
it’s been a rewarding year but also one
which has been very difficult and messy
we still have to figure out how are we
gonna reach all 28 ZIP codes are we
really making a difference with pictures
and yet these pictures here are also
taken in Sherman Park
invite you in closing to unlearn those
first four pictures I showed you of
violence destruction anger and
frustration and ask yourself when you’re
on the raft and things get messy what do
you do who do you rely on what do you
need to unlearn what do you want to
unlearn and how can Huck and Jim and the
raft help you do it thank you
[Applause]
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