Growing uncertainty

Mark Slouka in Harper’s:

What is taught, at any given time, in any culture, is an expression of what that culture considers important. That much seems undebatable. How “the culture” decides, precisely, on what matters, how openly the debate unfolds—who frames the terms, declares a winner, and signs the check—well, that’s a different matter…

The humanities, done right, are the crucible within which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be. Their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their “product” not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their “success” something very much like Frost’s momentary stay against confusion.They are thus, inescapably, political. Why? Because they complicate our vision, pull our most cherished notions out by the roots, flay our pieties. Because they grow uncertainty. Because they expand the reach of our understanding (and therefore our compassion), even as they force us to draw and redraw the borders of tolerance. Because out of all this work of self-building might emerge an individual capable of humility in the face of complexity; an individual formed through questioning and therefore unlikely to cede that right; an individual resistant to coercion, to manipulation and demagoguery in all their forms. The humanities, in short, are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values. There is no better that I am aware of.

Which is awesomely timely.  Here at school, we’ve all been assigned to “data teams,” the purpose of which is to pose a problem, collect data, and attempt to solve it.  Questions that have come up in English Department discussions seem to center around either CAPT skills or knowledge of literary terms. 

I get that.  I understand why it’s easier to design a data-driven exercise around easily measurable information.  But at the risk of sounding like a total hippie, Slouka’s absolutely right about the purpose of the humanities being teaching people how to be human, how to ask questions, and how to have their minds changed.

I have little hope that the data team on which I’ve found myself will concern itself with anything even remotely related to the humanities.  We teach sophomore mid-level English; therefore, the logical assumption is that our data team work will have something to do with the CAPT Reading test that every Connecticut 10th grader will take in March.  I wish I knew how to design a measurable assessment, though, of how much our students’ perceptions of the world and of themselves have been opened up by deep reading and exploratory writing.

Back to Slouka.  I recently had a parent confront me about the lack of formal grammar instruction in our high school.  Raising this point with some colleagues, I heard a whole litany of reasons why, in fact, diagramming sentences is good for high school students.  I was curious about this, and got out my copy of Constance Weaver’s Teaching Grammar in Context, which I had from an English Methods class back in grad school.

In her list of twelve reasons why teachers still insist, despite decades of research to the contrary, that teaching formal grammar in isolation is a good thing, Weaver writes that these teachers

bow to pressure from parents and other community members who are unaware of the research but naively think that teaching grammar will improve their children’s use of English.  Clearly the idea that grammar is good for a person has becomed a hallowed part of our cultural mythology, a legacy from the Middle Ages, when the study of grammar was considered vital for disciplining the mind and soul.

Grammar study, then, is deemed important by society, because it has a definite product (or at least the people who push for it think there’s a product): children who speak Correct English. 

But then, if you really were to study grammar, not just memorize a whole list of rules that seem made to be broken by real writers, you’d learn that our language is constantly changing, and certainly has changed since those scholars so many hundreds of years ago decided that grammar instruction should be the main point of the trivium.

I am pretty sure I’m way more interested in grammar now than I was in high school or even when I began teaching.  I’d love to know about linguistics and the evolution of language and code-switching and all of that stuff.  I’d love to invite my students to take apart the words they read and hear and speak and write to figure out how the structures of English can and do work.  I’m thinking now that when we’re in deep free-reading time (like, after Thanksgiving) that this can be part of what we do.  Starting each class block with a text–a poem, perhaps, or an excerpt from something–to look at the language–not the theme or characters or anything like that, but the language–might be a way to stretch this group more than a little.

Filed under: Matters Educational

Calm, peace

The crazies have hit my school district and hit it hard, but I’m not going to write about that here.  Because it’s the Saturday night of a three-day weekend, and a three-day weekend with no work for me (my new weird teaching schedule gives me a bunch of fairly free mornings to get work done), I’m in a pretty peaceful mood, helped along by a wonderful barbecue dinner on a friend’s deck in the woods.

Now I’m reclined on the couch in the livingroom.  My fiancee’s upstairs, having opted for the early-to-bed route.  I’ll head that way too in a little bit, but I’m kind of digging being here in this position with a sleeping dog on the floor below me and the sound of crickets and tree frogs slipping in through the windows.  I guess they’re pretty enthusiastic little guys, too, because we live on a main road and there’s not a whole lot in the way of nature in our immediate vicinity.

I commented on the frog and cricket noise while we were at the party tonight, and my friend’s husband said they’d been living in that house in the woods for so long that he didn’t even notice all the sounds anymore.  And I remembered how, a few nights ago, I woke up when our power went off only because the ambient sounds of our apartment–which, as so many newish homes do, hums so subtly that you really only notice it if you try really hard–had stopped.

To some extent, I’m not fully happy unless there’s some sound in my space.  If I’m going to be in a room for a while, I put on music.  Erica likes to have the tv on.  Either way, we’re filling the air with extra sounds, but I wonder sometimes what we’re trying to mask with it.  I let my students listen to their iPods when they’re writing, which might get me in trouble at work, but I definitely understand the need to have some sounds to block out the quiet.

One more thought, then off to bed.  I am thinking more and more about how I listen to music these days.  While I love being able to put iTunes on shuffle and let music play indefinitely, I also miss the delineation of time that exists in an album.  While I’m not quite ready to delete my music library and listen only to what I have hard copies of, I feel like I might be a little less 21st-century-angsty if I were to just relax and spend time with a full album in its entirety.  Do I still have the patience for that, though?  Has my attention span been completely demolished?  I’ll write more on this in the future, after I make my adjustments.

Filed under: Matters Educational, Matters Metaphysical & Philosophical, Matters Musical & Artistic

First Part of September

The first couple of cycles of the school year are going to be about setting up processes, procedures, and habits of mind.  Things going through my mind right now (and which I really have to commit to TODAY, like maybe on my drive up to WCSU for my first night of Critical Theory class):

How to handle reading in my English 212 class: I’m inspired by Doug Noon’s experiences with Free and Voluntary Reading.

This year, everyone in the class reads what they want to read, and they read without interruption for 30-40 minutes each day. They tell me about their books when I go around the room asking how it’s going. I write down what we talk about. They read short passages quietly to me. They write in journals about their books. They meet with partners or in small groups, and they give oral “book reports” written on sticky notes. They make book recommendations to each other. They read at home and before school without being told to, and they tell me they love to read. I even saw one of my students reading a book walking down the hall the other day. It’s going viral.

And here are Stephen Krashen’s research-based 88 Generalizations about Free and Voluntary Reading, for further edification/research/justification.

Getting through the core texts for 212 is going to be a challenge, and one which I’m not going to dig in to until the classroom culture of actual reading takes hold.  I’m planning to start my sophomores with various short texts–poems, essays, magazine articles, short stories, etc–to read on their own and then respond to in their journals. 

I kind of like this structure for our 58 minute blocks:

~15 mins–Poem du jour

~30 mins–Reading time (with me circulating to discuss reading w/ students, check on progress, etc)

~10 mins–Writing/journaling

When a particular class is interrupted by 3rd lunch, which will happen every day to one class, I’ll just do the poem du jour when we get back from lunch.  No worries.

Then there’s the issue of writing.  A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that I would “[i]ntroduce [a] year-long writing project about identifying and analyzing authorial voice/style/intent.”  I’m not entirely convinced that that’s the way to go, especially in the first couple of weeks of school.  I am, however, totally sold on the idea of having the students write to a prompt for 15 minutes a night.

Filed under: Matters Educational, Matters Literary

Because we have them.

Todd Seal wrote this last year, and I’m just getting around to reading it now:

The good thing is that I do know a few things. I know better now what I want out of my students and why I want that out of them. But, specifically, why am I teaching Hawthorne, Whitman, Thoreau, and Fitzgerald? Shakespeare, Sophocles, Plato, and Kafka? Because we have them. Nothing more.

What am I doing to make my students better writers, readers, speakers, and thinkers? Beyond just giving them more chances to practice those skills, pointing out where they can improve, patting on the back when they do well, how am I helping my students?

It all kind of gets back to my aversion to teaching texts or authors.  The problem now is figuring out how to teach the skills or whatever’s left when the texts become secondary to the real meat of the discipline.

Filed under: Matters Educational

Planning…

Two weeks from tomorrow is my first teaching day of the new school year.  And now, with some time off from dealing with the summer’s assorted crises (wedding venue sketchiness, the impending death of Erica’s car, housetraining the puppy, etc), it’s time to finally sit down and start working out what, exactly, I want this school year to be like.

For the first time in a while, I’m not teaching any courses I haven’t taught before.  And I’m really not terribly concerned about Essay Writing, which, with the right chemistry in the classroom, pretty much runs itself.  The last time I taught it, in the 07-08 school year, I figured out a system that resulted in tons of individual growth for almost every student; I’m looking forward to refining that system and trying it out with some new kids this year.

What I am a little concerned about, though, are my three sections of ENG212 (mid-level sophomores).  This’ll be the fifth time in six years that I teach this course, and to be honest, I’m terrible at it.  I don’t know how to get my students to care about our three required texts (Macbeth, Huck Finn,  and The Odyssey) while turning them into lifelong readers and competent writers.  Oh, and meeting the state standards for the CAPT.  It’s a lot to handle.

My current plan–which I’m writing about here for selfish reasons, so that I can go back and see exactly what the hell I was thinking this summer and try to keep from getting too derailed–is to push through the core texts by Thanksgiving.  I see it going down something like this:

First part of September: How to read difficult (“boring”) texts, using short pieces (poems, short stories) and films.  Silent reading in class.  Keeping a reading log/journal/scrapbook.  Introduce year-long writing project about identifying and analyzing authorial voice/style/intent.

Second part of September: Macbeth in film (no books–it’s a play, dammit)–Polanski, Kurosawa.  Silent reading in class–nonfiction about Shakespeare.  Continue log.  Incorporate Macbeth into writing project.

First part of October: The good parts of The Odyssey (Fagles or Fitzgerald).  Poetic language.  Continue reading log.  Incorporate The Odyssey into writing project.

Second part of October–>Thanksgiving: Huck Finn in reading groups.  Silent reading in class, as well as reading homework.  Focus on Twain as writer vs Huck as narrator.  Incorporate Huck into writing project.

After this point, my students will be reading their own choice books for the rest of the year.  My experience this summer in the Skills for Success program has left me strong in the belief that students who can pick the books they want to read will actually read them, and will gain valuable literacy skills.

I want this year to be structured around a continuing conversation about what it means to read texts.  I want to use whatever resources I can find about brain processes, psychology, and educational theory–with my students–to help them understand exactly what happens when they can and can’t read what they’re presented with.

I’m also thinking now that Radiolab might have some clips that would be handy for this.  I know they’ve done a lot about how hearing works; not sure about reading.  Jad, Robert, if you’re reading this, help me out, okay?

Filed under: Matters Educational

The great disconnect

The writer behind Post-Punk Nerd once described a big problem.  His/her writing had become terrible.  It was

usually short, no more than a few paragraphs…and add[ed] very little to the public discourse. I have, once, tried to write a piece deeper than the typical blog fare, but in review I find the results to be poor: the language struggles, the sentences enjamb unnaturally and it reads as if I were a mumbling street preacher. What I am trying to say is important, I don’t doubt that, but I lack the skills to say it.

I bookmarked that post and have come back to it time and again.  It almost always leaves me feeling a little empty–not because it doesn’t say anything, but because the solution it poses is simultaneously elegant and impossible in my line of work.  Post-Punk Blogger has decided that rather than write a whole lot of short blog posts, s/he will now focus on writing longer, deeper, harder-hitting pieces.  They will be published less often, but will be of a higher quality than the typical blog writing one often sees around the Internets.

This is a great idea.  Twitter and whatnot have their places, I’m sure (though I still can’t figure out why I’d want to limit myself to 140 characters about a sandwich), but my professional concern is with writing.  Real writing.  The kind of writing that examines and develops and spreads ideas.  The kind of writing against which current school practices seem almost diametrically opposed.

Let’s take timed, in-class writing assignments as a particularly easy example.  And let’s ask a very simple question: What’s the point?  What is the possible educational merit behind having a roomful of students write something until the bell rings, something that will be assessed as evidence of skill at writing, or formulating ideas, or something like that? 

I guess you could make the argument that it’s the kind of writing students have to do on standardized tests like CAPT or the SAT.  Fine.  Respect.  But what else is it for?  Aside from exams (in college, perhaps, or in civil service or the military), when will students have to do this kind of writing?

I know, I know, the tests exist.  But where is the movement to change the tests?  Rather than bitch and moan about having to prep the kids for various state exams, college entrance exams, &c., why not push for tools that actually assess skills that students will need when they enter higher education or the workforce? 

I don’t know a single instance in my professional life when I’ve achieved more with the very first rough draft version of something I’ve written or created than something I’ve labored over.  From budget-nag emails in my first job out of college to software manuals I’ve written to lesson/unit plans to grad school admissions essays to songs, the experience has been the same.  Pushing something out for the sake of pushing it out leads to, at best, mediocre work.  If we’re about teaching students that it’s better to hand in some kind of crap rather than nothing at all, we deserve what we get.

This week, my colleagues have been into talking about Turnitin.com, a very expensive subscription website that schools use to make sure their students aren’t cheating when they write papers.  And fine, whatever, I have no problem with teachers who want to use it.  I won’t go near Turnitin, though.  The one semester I did have my students was a psychological hellride–rather than spending my time getting to know my students’ writing, I found myself hunting down every single highlighted passage in their work, rubbing my hands together with glee when I discovered an unattributed source.

If writing, especially school writing, is about playing gotcha with students, I need a new job.  I don’t have the temperament for that kind of work; if I did, I’d be a detective, which would at least get me out of having to go to faculty meetings.  But is it possible that there’s a way to rethink student writing, even at the high-school level, that increases students’ ability to write clearly and stylishly and makes it far less likely that they’ll cheat?

Filed under: Matters Educational, Matters Literary, Matters Political, Matters Technological

Thing of the Day: The End of Writing?

The Atlantic:

If you’re hearing few howls and seeing little rending of garments over the impending death of institutional, high-quality journalism, it’s because the public at large has been trained to undervalue journalists and journalism. The Internet has done much to encourage lazy news consumption, while virtually eradicating the meaningful distinctions among newspaper brands. The story from Beijing that pops up in my Google alert could have come from anywhere. As news resources are stretched and shared, it can often appear anywhere as well: a Los Angeles Times piece will show up in TheWashington Post, or vice versa.

An interesting article about the apparent near-future collapse of the New York Times has me thinking, once again, about writing, its role, and why teachers are to blame for the absolute dominance of crappy writing in the world today.

I’m a member of the Leadership Council of the Connecticut Writing Project at Fairfield University, which means that I spend about one Saturday per month in a room with about 15 other teachers from around the area, drinking really good coffee and lamenting the state of writing education in our public schools.  Our mission is to be the preeminent teacher training organization dealing with matters of writing and literacy, fueled by the belief that writing skills are essential to critical thinking and future success.  I’m honored to be a part of that conversation, and I tend to leave the meetings with a lot to think about and work through.  It’s great.

Not 48 hours after every CWP Leadership Council meeting, though, I’m back at my school beating my head against the wall.  I’m an English teacher; I believe that it is part of my job description to teach students more effective and appropriate ways to write for different audiences.  Unfortunately, I’m not supposed to work with my sophomores on the Writing sections of the CAPT Test; that’s the bailiwick of the Social Studies department, who, generally, blow departmental gaskets when students’ thesis statements are not the very last sentences of their introductory paragraphs.  You know, just like they are in the five-paragraph essays written by such eminent historians as Stephen Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Edward Gibbon.

Okay.  I need to count to ten.

But I really wonder about what we’re doing to our students.  We teach them to write in fairly awful (and completely uninteresting) ways.  The five-paragraph essay is but one example; adding a sixth “counter-argument” paragraph doesn’t make it any better.  Witness also the PowerPoint, the poster, the blog.

Yep, the blog.  I’m not convinced that a blog is the best way for our students to learn to write.  And I’m writing this as someone who has had a class of Honors students blogging, with pretty good success, all semester.  Blogs have huge advantages for teachers–rather than collecting every reading homework journal, for example, I can check my RSS reader daily and read everyone’s responses to The Spoon River Anthology instantly.  No paper, no mess, no added weight in my Guilt Bag.  Also, blogs let students (and others) comment directly on each other’s work, which is a big plus.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t really happen.  I’m concerned that most of my students aren’t writing much worth commenting on.  Instead of raising questions, their entries reek of the kind of adolescent certitude usually reserved for 31-year-old bearded English teachers.  Bloggers like them (and myself and too many of my edublogging colleagues) who think they know all the answers are just not doing it right.

When I started this Thing of the Day series so long ago (last week), I figured I’d want a way to force myself to write as often as possible.  Having the implied audience of a blog (as many people as are reading this, I guess) makes me think more carefully about what I’m writing, because I know it will be punished.  Still, though, I’m afraid that I’m contributing to the preponderance of crap that passes for writing on the Internet.

My challenge for myself in the coming semester is to build in more regular writing opportunities for all of my students, at every level.  Journals that become more polished pieces, reactions, letters, screenplays, etc–all are necessary to the development of student writing, and all are things for which I am going to have to make a lot of time.  I’m afraid it will meet with great resistance among my students, but since I’m paid to know what’s best for them, I don’t see any other alternative.

Filed under: Matters Educational, Matters Literary, Thing of the Day

Making sense of nonsense

So a new paper comes out saying the novels are better than reports for helping people to understand problems in faraway places, etc. And I bookmark it, thinking that I’ll get around to reading it sooner or later.

I still haven’t read the thing yet, but it certainly has been on my mind since Thursday morning, when I woke up to the news of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. I tried following the news via Twitter but gave up quickly, and since the initial news reports weren’t making too much sense, I just sort of tuned them all out.

Luckily for my understanding of the situation, I’ve been a huge fan of contemporary Indian literature since I took a class in college almost ten years ago. Immersing myself in the Mumbai of Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, and others, I feel like I know a little bit more about the city than I would’ve otherwise. The Mumbai of my imagination is positively teeming with life, like New York City with fewer traffic laws.

Driving home from my parents’ house yesterday morning, I listened to the BBC World Service’s reportage from the coastal slums of Mumbai. A woman talked about seeing an inflatable boat with six men come ashore, and about them telling her not to tell anyone. A horrifying thing to hear about, indeed, and one that could come straight out of Sacred Games. I was disturbed to hear the story, but at the same time felt comfortable with the geographic and cultural references.

On MetaFilter, DaDaDaDave commented that

I haven’t read The Kite Runner, but it’s certainly possible for a novel to be hokey, melodramatic and simplistic while also contributing to readers’ sympathetic understanding of the world. No one (well, almost no one) would put Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Jungle on a list of the world’s greatest novels, but on a list of novels with the greatest and most positive social impact they would rank pretty high.

I’ve been reading some fairly crappy sentimental novels from the early 19th century for the class I’m taking, and every time I want to just give up–the writing is horrible! the characters are flat!–I have to remember that sometimes books don’t have to be aesthetically good or artistically awesome to have a point.

It seems obvious, I guess, but I think that the best we can do–”we,” of course, being English teachers, writers, and lovers of literature–is to spread the word that reading actually IS fundamental.  Even fluff like the Twilight series (I’m on book #3 and can feel my beard falling out and replacing itself with glitter) has something to say about how people work.  I’ve read a lot recently saying that the books are actually pro-abstinence fables, which may be true, though I certainly didn’t pick that up in the first couple of books.  Maybe I need to read my teen fiction a little more carefully.

Oh, and if you’re looking for something uplifting and fun for a late-November day, I finally got around to downloading and listening to the mixtape by The Very Best. Their remix of “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” almost makes me not hate myself for buying the Vampire Weekend CD.

Filed under: Matters Educational, Matters Literary, Matters Musical & Artistic

Shameless plugs

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably not a broke former hedge-funder (if you are, though, greetings!). You might not have a ton of money to throw around, but since this is the season when many demnads are about to made on your wallet, here are two really great ways to spend a little bit of your cash with a couple of people I love.

First, my sister, Sara, is a teacher in an urban school in the middle of Boston. She loves her job, is absolutely crazy about her kids, and is, I’m sure, the best elementary math teacher in New England. I can’t even begin to explain how proud I am of her.

She’s using DonorsChoose to raise money to buy a table for her students to work at. Now, at the school where I work, we can get whatever tables we want. There’s extra stuff everywhere. Hell, we had a copy machine sitting in the hall for two weeks at the beginning of the year. We have almost a thousand computers, musical instruments, SmartBoards, you name it. Sara, however, needs to raise a couple hundred bucks for a little table for her kids. Click here and throw her some dough, aight?

Once you’ve done that and you want to reward yourself, buy a necklace from Erica. Seriously. If you’re a girl and you’re into this sort of thing, you can’t do much better. And if you’re a guy, buy one for your special ladyfriend, mother, sister, or whoever. Buy one for Sara, even, so she can show it to her students up in Boston. 10% of all Erica’s profits go to the Save the Music Foundation, too, so you’ll really feel good about yourself.

Filed under: Matters Educational, Matters Musical & Artistic

Common sense

Umm…is this that William Ayers we’re all supposed to be afraid of?

There’s an alternative to acceding completely or whining constantly, and it begins with thinking through and naming the commitments you bring with you into the classroom, your values, your pledge. These are not pure abstractions, but rather standards to hold in mind. A fundamental commitment might involve taking the side of your students, affirming the humanity of each and resisting anything that constrains or reduces them. Another might be to create in your classroom an environment that is a kind of republic of many voices, allowing every student a space to be seen and heard and known well as a person of worth and value.

Because teachers work in a fluid, complex, idiosyncratic world, and because there’s much beyond our immediate control, it makes sense to focus on these things that you can control. First, you can see your students as whole human beings, three-dimensional beings much like yourself with hopes and dreams, bodies and minds and spirits. You can see with your own eyes, your own curious and critical mind, your own generous heart. And you can resist the alphabet soup of deficits and the toxic habit of labeling kids that infects most schools. No one can make you see kids as creatures with labels clinging to them like barnacles, sharp and ugly. You have a mind of your own, and you can become a student of your students in spite of everything. This gesture alone can be full of surprise, and deeply satisfying.

Ayers writes almost poetically about the main point I took away from yesterday afternoon’s CWP-sponsored workshop with Jeff Wilhelm.  Classrooms are places where students should be engaged with learning what’s important to them, and what they see as useful.  The inquiry model, about which more at a later date, seems to be a good way of starting to begin to make that change part of daily practice.

As far as “teachers work[ing] in a fluid, complex, idiosyncratic world” goes, few people can say it better than Doug Noon.  His latest post, “Teaching for Change in a Culture of Compliance,” gets at the Ayers controversy (kind of) and the notion that teaching for social justice is somehow dangerous or subversive:

Test-based school reform and the politics of accountability has pushed classrooms further away from discussions about social issues than at any time in the last two decades. Teachers and administrators have been all too willing to embrace the authority of test scores, standards, and “research-based” reading instruction, minimizing and forgetting the value of community, intuition, genuine motivation, and common sense….Inquiring into our history, sources of power in society, current events, and discussing race and stereotyping does not preclude observing high academic standards. And there’s nothing subversive about such discussions unless you admit that the moral order has already been undermined.

What is our purpose as teachers if it isn’t to help students recognize and understand the patterns that might need to be changed?

Oh!  And Bruce Fuller weighs in, too.  Man, this is a great day.

Politicians’ obsessions with making schools and colleges more vocational in character are unlikely to lift the economy. According to new research by James Heckman at the University of Chicago, today’s workers don’t need vocational skills, they need better “non-cognitive” skills — like the capacity to communicate effectively or to cooperatively solve problems.

Schools should be focusing on these human skills, as well as ethical reasoning. Wall Street’s meltdown, linked to shady lending practices, reveals the moral bankruptcy of huge segments of the market. Yet political leaders now urge our children to quietly fill-in bubble tests, seeking only to become productive cogs in a broken wheel.

Filed under: Matters Educational, Matters Political