Gigantic chess set

Originally uploaded by One Ping Only

Here’s Doyle on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Education:

STEM education is all about power. There is no AHEM (Arts, History, English, Music) equivalent. We are not ruling the world with our literature or our concept of self-government or even our music–we are ruling the world with our bombs.

Doyle writes about the beauty and joy of teaching uncertainty from a scientific perspective. I teach about it from an English perspective.
I believe in uncertainty. I believe in giving my students materials to ask questions about, and then getting out of the way and letting them ask their questions.
Right now, we’re reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Most of my students haven’t read it before, which is fine by me, though some have, which is equally fine. There’s nothing wrong with encountering a text for a second or third or fourth time in a school environment, just like there’s nothing wrong with coming to it for the first time in one.
I’ve been having a lot of trouble not telling my students anything more than they need to know to read the book, though. What they need to know is that this is a hard book to read, but it’s definitely readable. The rest will come.
Still, I love the uncertainty. I love stripping myself of my teacherly role, with the exception of taking attendance and answering the phone when my students who have gotten into trouble in their other classes are called down to speak to an administrator. But I really like giving my students as much time as possible to get comfortable and just read. I told them they should start bringing pillows and blankets to class for reading time, and most of them think I’m kidding.
I’m not.

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.

Bodhi & stick, originally uploaded by One Ping Only.

I took Bodhi out on his last longish walk of the summer just now, and he found a gigantic stick to play with on the patch of no-man’s-grass just off Rte. 1 in Old Greenwich. It’s not what I’d think of as the best place to play, but then again, I’m not a four-month-old puppy with an insatiable urge to put everything in the world in my mouth and fight it.

Watching this dog grow has been amazing. When we took him home a month and a half ago, he weighed fourteen pounds and could sit comfortably on Erica’s lap in the car. Yesterday, when we went to visit Erica’s grandparents in Queens, we realized that it was probably the last time Bodhi’d be able to sit on the floor of the passenger seat of my car. He’s more than doubled in size since we’ve gotten him, and he’s definitely learned a lot–he now runs up and down our stairs at will, has figured out what the fridge is for (for ice cubes, obviously), and can fetch when he wants to.

It’s humbling to think that this is the dog that our kids will grow up with. Everything we do with him today will have massive repercussions down the line. The love and discipline we show Bodhi can only help him to learn his role in our family, his new pack. I know this is pretty obvious to anyone who has ever had a dog, but forgive me–this is my first.

I’m looking forward to helping him build a little endurance and tolerance for longer walks–this guy’s got a ton of puppy energy that I’d love to redirect into a passion for mile-long (or longer!) walks, maybe even a trip to Sleeping Giant or something at some point this winter. While I’m excited to see how Bodhi turns out as a grown-up dog, I’m enjoying him as a puppy so much now that I can’t imagine anything being better than these days.

Apparently, the terrorists have discovered Westport:

Both flyers invite recipients to contact “NEWP.”  That’s North East White Pride — I had to google it, because (I’m guessing) whoever made the flyers knew the full name would be incendiary.  A link to NEWP, a Massachusetts address and a phone number were provided.  (The NEWP website says it’s been “supporting white, working class communities since 2003.”

I guess it’s great that white people finally have someone standing up for their rights in these United States.  And they’re looking out for me!

Wait, no they’re not.

NEWP was started in 2003 as a way to promote White Unity and organization. At the time there were several individuals all involved with different gorups [sic], not working together in a very organized way. members and many others around New England were active at home and abroad protesting the Israeli Independance Day in Boston, going to NJ for an anti-immigration rally hosted by Hal Turner [sucks to be you... --ed] and driving all the way to PA for Hammerfest.

Anti-immigration?  Protesting Israel Independence Day?   Being really into Hal Turner?  I can see why leaving anonymous fliers stuffed into little bags in suburban driveways would make you feel like a big man.

Look, if you’re going to be some sort of neo-Nazi or neo-Fascist, stop hiding behind some sort of working-class unity facade.  Come out and say who and what you are.  Be like the kid on my bus in high school who was really excited about the Nazi flags he supposedly had at his house–at least he wasn’t hiding anything.  Get yourself onto a talk show.  At least sign your name to your dumb, poorly-edited* literature.

Dan is right.  Man up.

* “Illegal” isn’t a noun, jackassses.

It’s just about fall–well, officially, it’s just about fall, but weather-wise, we’re in the middle of October right now, with temps in the low 60s and a constant overcast sky.  It’s the kind of weather that makes a guy reevaluate the music he’s been listening to.  Does anyone else choose the music in their car/on their music player of choice based on seasonal and climatic factors?

Last night was supposed to be a girls’ night for Erica and her friends, but it turned out not to be the case.  Five girls and four guys went out for a couple of hours at Tiernan’s, which morphs from decent Irish pub with good food to shifty meat market at about 9pm.  While waiting for our respective ladies to return from their perambulations (the taken ones were trying to help the non-taken ones find guys, which the less said the better), Josh and I started talking music.  I’ve definitely got to check out Ratatat and Welcome, based on his suggestions and descriptions.  I traded him my endorsements of Oliver Mtukudzi and the Brian Eno/David Byrne CD from last year.

In a fit of desperation, though, I found myself a couple of days ago looking through Pitchfork’s last couple of end-of-the-year best-of lists and trying to find ways of obtaining anything that sounded good.  My problem now is that so many of the descriptions of what passes for critically acclaimed new music turn me off entirely–it sometimes seems, at least to me, that music writers have to prove their cred by using algebra: n=X+Y-Z (where n is the subject of the review, X and Y are bands whose names are dropped by people seeking to burnish their indie credibility, and Z is something a suburban guy in his early 30s enjoys in his music, like melodies or the ability to keep time).

Right now, anyway, I’m listening to Sondre Lerche, who is an artist I’ve heard a lot about for a few years, and who I’ve never really listened to be before.  I’m going to reserve judgment until I can really pay attention, but so far, his album Heartbeat Radio is working for me.  I need to listen to the lyrics more, but the music, at least, is really pretty and poppy in exactly the right sort of way.  Anyone know anything else about this guy?

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.

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.

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.

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?

Gathering of the Vibes, originally uploaded by One Ping Only.

The entire right side of my head is congested. It’s been tolerable for the past couple of days, but I woke up this morning absolutely miserable, and have spent the day getting worse. All the stress of finalizing wedding plans, finding Erica a car that actually stops when she wants it to, and keeping our dog on the D/L hasn’t helped, either. So I’ve had one of those days.

The hell of it is that if it wasn’t the middle of August, I’d just soldier through this thing and go to work. But since I can sit around and think about it, I am, and that’s making it worse. I’m about to get into self-pity mode, which I hope I can avoid, but I definitely feel it coming on.

A few things are helping me keep everything in perspective, not least the article I read in the Greenwich Time this morning about the former student of mine who died in a car accident in Vermont. I don’t want to go into a whole “at least I have my health and my loved ones” thing here, but yeah, that’s what I’m thinking about.

Meanwhile, we’re actually making a lot of progress in terms of wedding plans. After a lot of back and forth with the catering manager at the venue, who first told us one price, then backtracked, then seemed to misunderstand a lot of what Erica and I were trying to explain, we’re about to sign the contract to have the wedding we want. We should have the paperwork done by the end of the week, with the deposit mailed in and everything. It’s taken a while, but it’s happening.

Speaking of weddings, there’s a non-zero possibility that we’ll finally have the ring finished this weekend too. More on that later.

The next thing to get done–figure out how to get the band heard by more than just our friends and families. We played a couple of strong sets this past weekend, but, as Erica pointed out, the bar was pretty much empty except for people we knew and a few regulars. I’ve got a few books on band promotion on hold at the library, but I feel like it’s going to take more than just books to get this thing going. Anyone have any ideas how to make it happen?