The Line

I’m sitting at lunch with one of the worst slackers in my entire team of students—he’s in to make up a quiz from three months ago. Bright, gangly; often out of school during the first day of any given hunting season. The words “You’re so gay” are about as prevalent in his vocabulary as, well, nouns.

He has a kind and ironic sense of humor, though, and it is this that has me laughing like an idiot about a story he’s relating about a sub, who apparently cemented his power structure in the class by introducing himself as “King Johnson.”

“And then we started talking about rainbow t-shirts, you know, tie-dye,” says my student, “and then I said I didn’t like them, and he called me homophobic.”

He pauses.

“Like, what does that MEAN, Ms. S?”

I have struggled with nearly every aspect of teaching in this first mainstream year, but one of the things I can manage to do with kids is navigate fairly sensitive topics. We start a very matter of fact conversation about what people mean these days when they say colloquially that someone is homophobic. I wait for the putdown, the expected profession of revulsion, the unthinking spitback of adult conservatism. Silently I start marshalling my defense of treating everyone with dignity, regardless of whether one agrees with their choices.

My kid pauses again, now for a long time.

“But one of my family members is gay,” he says. “And some of my neighbors. And they’re fine.”

And now it’s my turn to pause.

“Then you’re not homophobic, Jack,” I finally tell him.

He squares his shoulders. Shakes his hair out of his eyes. Looks at me.

“No,” he says. “I’m not.”

I got two emails today, hard on each other’s heels, from Ph.Ds I’ve been badgering for information communicating with on classroom issues that have come up.

Harry Brighouse sends a sneak preview of a chapter in an upcoming edited collection of essays– see the attached file controversial-issues.doc– on the topic of navigating controversial philosophical topics in class. I’ve only skimmed it but it reminds me right away of a dialectic classroom approach which hasn’t gotten nearly enough press called The Paideia Seminar.

Sue Sing of the Open University U.K. sends her views, based on her dissertation research, on whether we can legitimately expect adolescents to know how to use apostrophes. This is thanks to Nigel Hall, whom I mention here. It’s worth quoting at length.

“In the UK, children begin to learn about punctuation at
school during the primary years. They are taught the omissive
apostrophe in Year 3 (aged 7), though they are highly likely to have
encountered it much sooner than this through their reading. In Year 4,
children then learn about the possessive apostrophe. Two years later,
by the end of primary education they are expected to be able to use the
mark for both its functions, easily and competently. However, as you
have found with your students this is often rarely the case.

Through my analysis, I learnt that while some children may appear to use
the apostrophe correctly (for either or both functions), they may not
always be using it for the right reasons. However, without exploring
children’s thinking behind their punctuation decisions this fact will
simply go unrealised and therefore what may appear as sound knowledge
and usage in fact disguises a host of uncertainties and confusions. In
addition, children draw on a range of information sources to help them
decide where to use punctuation marks - some of these being
linguistic-based but equally, some being for non-linguistic reasons.
This is not to say that children are not able to understand how to use
such marks; on the contrary, through our research it became quite
evident that our participants were thinking deeply and intensely about
the subject and were really working hard to try to work out what mark to
write and why.”

These guys are great.

I suppose you could put such generosity down to my excellent criteria in choosing Ph.Ds to badger (snort), but the same thing happened several years ago while I was looking for someone– anyone– to give me a crash course in Haitian Creole for an ESL kid who was coming into the district. I got someone on the phone from a midwestern university and we talked for near an hour.

I think there’s a message here to be had about vertical alignment, that lovely educational buzzphrase that usually means the woefully prosaic “we shouldn’t teach the same material seven years in a row,” but should mean “Let’s make it an institutional priority to talk on an ongoing basis to any university researcher who can help us teach better.” Maybe I should have titled this post “They Don’t Bite.”

You’ll note that I choose the words “institutional priority” with great care. I can call every professor at Harvard until their Nobel Prizes come home, but until intellectual partnerships between school practitioners and university researchers are institutionally supported, they will remain the myopic crazy email fun and pet projects of, well, geeks like me.

Do we do enough of this? Are we scared to do this? What does this say about how we conceive of ourselves as professionals– and how we hold ourselves accountable for effective practice?

Check this out, on the high-philosophy blog Crooked Timber. Harry Brighouse is one of my heroes– his deceptively slim and devastatingly crystalline book On Education has kept me sane this year. I’m immensely grateful for his link back to The Line, which only happened because of the truly shocking success of this “send your heroes fan letters and ask for feedback” policy I seem to have developed for 07-08. Try it. It works.

More overarchingly, credit for the introduction to Harry Brighouse, and multiple other theorists who are now staples of my educational philosophy, is once again, and rapidly becoming as always, Joe Henderson’s.

“The spring over there takes you by the throat, the flowers blooming by the thousands over white walls. If you strolled around for an hour in the hills surrounding my town, you would return with the odor of honey in your clothes.” — Albert Camus

My students know this instinctively, and I’ve been in a bit of awe this week at the teacher-class relationship which has apparently also so blossomed, in spite of my multiple missteps this year, that instead of dragging in and disengaging in favor of honey in their clothes, they throw their cards right on the table: “Ms. S, can we go outside?”

Truthfully, they know they have a sympathetic ear. I try to honor this request whenever I can justify it academically, which is fairly often– one of the joys of teaching English. Nothing like honing the powers of observation while outdoors. Additionally, by happy accident, the novel we are about to embark upon, A Day No Pigs Would Die, begins and ends in April. We are tracking its content under the essential question Why was this novel 17th on the list of Top 100 Books Banned for the decade? as a continuation of our unit on the First Amendment.

The unit I’ll try next, as it turns out, is going to really offer my throat to Spring: it’ll be based on a workshop I’ll take in August through the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, called the Leopold Education Project.

For more and more I am convinced that this is a fundamental need of children that I am (frankly) morally bound to address immediately: In content, to be able to negotiate decent scientific nonfiction with confidence. In communal responsibility, to understand the finite, fragile, and internconnected nature of our resources. And in plain ol’ to get the heck outside– especially in the face of continued and ever-widening acceptance of physical digital isolation.

Such a unit cannot be solid milk chocolate sunlit meadows and daffodils, though. One of the first “wilderness texts” I read and loved was Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and it comes to mind with a vengeance now. Its first image is one of a frog being liquidated from the inside by a preying water bug. Yummy.

I have to square this with the inimitable sense of belonging I can find nowhere else but out in the woods– the same impulse that drives my kids to bombard me with “Can we go outside?”I struggle with it, as Annie does throughout the entirety of Tinker Creek. The late Stephen Jay Gould, the brilliant Harvard biologist, terms this aspect of nature “non-moral” in an essay that uses similar gruesome examples of predator and prey– I don’t know about you, but bugs seem to have cornered this market.

It’s what causes me to balk when folks suggest that a complete moral code, or system of meaning, may be found entirely with nature or nature’s metaphors. Sorry– I can get with cycles and our bodies being made of elements that are only created within stars, but the bugs. You’ve got to explain the bugs. CS Lewis had to write several whole essays on the problem of pain in the animal kingdom to try and do it.

Beyond that, I know well that if I break my ankle in the Adirondacks backcountry winter with no survival equipment, the mountains will look upon me in their loveliness, unmoved, as I fade away. Funny, perhaps, that this might also be the source of my sense of peace. The trees will never say anything as mean-spirited or abusive to me as I will to myself. Such as how I overphilosophize about my units.

Anyway. These are the things I will somehow have to repackage for profitable consumption for 7th graders. Maybe in a pill? Nah– someone’s tried it already.

1) Why all educators should tar and feather anyone who mentions schools and “competitiveness in the 21st century” in the same breath.

2) Why “high flyer” schools that defy poverty might not be doing anything of the sort.

3) Tell me NCLB measures something concrete. Tell me standardized exam scores reflect teacher prowess. And then tell me why New York State gives its English exam in January, smack between two teachers’ interaction with a cohort of kids. Please. Tell me. I’ve been asking for seven years now.

So at TMAO’s Teaching in the 408, I stumbled over his bludgeoning of a recent San Jose Mercury News article on how the attitude of “school is uncool” may be culturally transmitted, specifically by Latinos. And I said to myself: now here’s a nice, relaxing topic to blog on over Spring Break.

Some disclaimers before I continue. I have some experience in this area– I teach in the most racially and economically diverse district in our county outside our city, and have been an ESL teacher for some years—but I’m not even going to pretend this compares to TMAO’s teaching situation. So there’s that.

Nevertheless.

So someone says: it’s not cultural. It’s not in our students’ DNA, or in their baseline assumptions, or transmitted through Cinco de Mayo.

And someone else says: of course it’s culture, you idiot. What else do you call a communally and generationally propagated set of beliefs?

The blows begin, and the conversation ends. And I find myself wishing heartily that Socrates were around.

In his spirit, let’s start with a challenging statement from Gloria Ladson Billings, the former president of AERA and an educator I revere: that most teachers (and by extension, news reporters?) use the word “culture” as a catchall explanation for any anti-school behavior they cannot explain from their students. Dr. Ladson-Billings goes on to suggest elsewhere (and TMAO and his commentator Rebecca Bell agree) that the domino effects of socio-economic status should not be defined as “culture.” And it’s useful, and in many ways accurate, to narrow the definition of “culture” in this way, I think.

However, I now think about European Jews coming out of the unspeakable evil of the Holocaust. To say that such an experience did not become a part of Jewish culture, uniquely shaping their shared sense of history, priorities, and challenges, would be patently ridiculous. And while I would never wish to generalize the Holocaust’s unique horror, I don’t think it’s going too far to say that aspects of what many of our poor minority kids experience are analogous: the socioeconomic deprivation, the ghettos, the pervasive violence, the discrimination. Is it possible to state that the effects of a mass, long-lived injustice such as this are not, or don’t become, cultural for them? I wonder.

Next, consider TMAO’s important point in his post that culture is not a monolith, has dozens of facets and overlapping layers, and can not be treated as a singular thing via one or two quotes from kids who say what you want them to say so you can print your newspaper article. Right on.

However, now consider the flip side: the theory that among these many overlapping cultures, the young people we work with do have, in fact, an undeniable culture that is all their own. What is the community, after all, in which they physically spend most of their waking hours? It’s their peers– in school. (Linda Perlstein’s Not Much, Just Chillin does a lovely job of investigating a particular local kid school culture in Maryland.) Is it inaccurate, then, to suggest that kid-driven microculture—particularly ones in disadvantaged schools– might propagate school-negative attitudes? I wonder.

And I keep wondering. I wonder if the question is not, in fact, whether the attitude that “school is uncool” is “cultural”. For twist the arbitrary lens one way, and it is cultural; twist it another, and it isn’t. Given this, I wonder—truthfully, for the first time—if the whole debate of “what is cultural” is at base merely rhetorical slight of hand. And as such, with all due respect to the brilliant minds involved, I wonder if it is a waste of time.

I wonder if it begs for reframing: the asking of a much deeper, broader, harder question.

I wonder if the deeper question is this: whether the students and/or the communities who might take such anti-school attitudes are doing so by choice— and if so, whether that choice is justified.

The axis of that question, of course, being one of responsibility. And isn’t that the heart of hearts of any question of social injustice? Who is responsible?

Simple questions. Massively complex answers, involving a rubric several miles deep and wide. Getting into it would take a whole other conversation, involving a multiplicity of cooperative disciplines, each willing to pull no punches– especially on themselves. But I guess that’s my point.

For just one example, instead of throwing their muckrakes around, I’d like to see the San Jose Mercury News take on the American mythology of individualism, “hard work”, and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-against-all-odds success, and how that crashes up against the daily lived truths of our poor kids– especially non-native ones.

I’d like to see TMAO, in turn, take on the idea that this very mythology might inaccurately color his perspective on what might be accomplished for these kids by decent schools– or a talented, caring teacher such as himself—independent of much more sweeping socioeconomic change.

I’d like to see Gloria Ladson-Billings write a book specifically on whether there’s any truth at all to this dominant paradigm mythology, and where and how demanding its fruits of our students—and ourselves– is warranted.

And I’d like to see all of us junk any conversation that smacks of a soundbyte or a silver bullet, and talk about how we in public education might address, fruitfully, the entire nexus of influences that make up our children: individual responsibility; media; family; community; ethnicity; economics; nationality; history.

It ain’t pretty. It sure is harder than deciding whether “school is uncool” is “cultural.”

But it’s the only way we’re going to get anywhere.

Dear Lupe,

Did you ever wish that you could save the world?

Awhile back a student of mine, in seventh grade English, turned in an assigned poem. I loved its simplicity, its rhythm, the way the lines broke on the page. What made my heart even more glad was that it was from a kid I’ve been trying to reach for several years now.

Anyway. I was so proud of him that I posted the poem on my teacher blog earlier this week. And that’s where I found out he hadn’t written it at all. He had plagiarized “Kick, Push,” and confirmed that he had done it deliberately when I asked him about it. And not knowing your rap until this week, I had no idea.

It’s been an interesting journey, these past few days. I’ve cried once or twice. I’ve rethought how I give and support assignments for second language kids. I’ve been surfing your sites, pulling up your stuff on Youtube. I’ve fallen in love with your work. And I’ve rejected completely the punitive coercion that could serve as the consequence for plagiarism in my school. That stuff won’t work. This kid is too smart.

The only thing that will work, I’ve come to realize, is if, somehow, he talks to you.

This might strike you as overkill. What is plagiarism, after all, next to cheese heroin addiction, or teenage pregnancy, or gang bangs? But I would argue that it’s just this kind of tiny, critical choice, and how it’s handled by the adults involved, that can tip the balance in a pre-adolescent kid. Towards a life that is ruled by a living sense of the dignity of human beings, or suffocated with the stale mediocrity of selfishness. Towards a life fortified against amorality, or one that invites it in—in small ways now, and perhaps much worse ones later.

So now is the time.

I don’t really know what I am asking you for. Five minutes on speakerphone would do it. Perhaps a letter. Something that makes you real to my kid. Something that it is not yet, or may never be, within my power to do– try as I might.

Because you see, it’s not enough that you’re like a god to him; it’s not enough that he listens to you constantly and can recite your raps with passion and accuracy from memory in the middle of class. None of it matters—not the poetry, the positive role model, or the message—unless he internalizes it enough to know that in the destructive habit of taking the short, easy way out, he cheats everyone. You. All of us. And most importantly, himself.

I can’t guarantee that this will save the world. Maybe not even this kid. But it might. Will you bank on hope, with me?

Please give me a call.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I’ll be sending this via snail and email to Lupe’s production company, 1st and 15th Entertainment. Anyone else got any bright ideas? Contacts I can use? How much does a full page ad in the Chicago Times cost?

Thanks to both old friend Linda and new friend Patrick for these two tags. The topics are so closely related for me that I can’t really separate them. A couple of these are quotes, but I’ll leave them unattributed as brain teasers.

1) For every person in the world, there exists one perfect book waiting to be found.

2) It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

3) It’s important to know what the t-shirt you’re wearing is really saying.

4) Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.

5) A monkey with a computer is still a monkey.

6) And perhaps this sums it all up for me:

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

— Gary Snyder

Tagged, with absolute permission to decline (I abhor chain letters), for both or either the Passion Quilt (follow Linda’s link for rules) and This I Believe (Patrick’s):

Joe Henderson

H.

Bill Farren

Mr. Chase

S.C. Morgan

So I’m out crazy sick yesterday– fever, aches, nausea, the whole nine yards. This, of course, occurs right at the key point of introduction in a unit I’m creating from scratch based on the First Amendment. Students bring in favorite “statement” T-shirts and analyze them in writing– first for their presuppositions, and then as protected (or not) free speech. It’s challenging for everyone involved, and weird, and genre-busting, and full of little steps and student-centered discussions and teacher as guide and I was very nervous about my ability to carry it off to begin with– never mind that the products are going to be displayed for parents next week.

I’m in at 6 AM before I retreat to my bed, plugging through the haze of my aching bones, writing out what I am sure are completely unintelligible sub plans for a person I’ve never met– probably certified in math 25 years ago. I’m positive I’m going to come in the next day and find shreds of t-shirts, note cards, half-finished background packets, and a charred overhead projector, with a one word message from the sub in red pen: WHY?

Instead I find this note.

“Hi! The kids were great. Most of them got a solid start on their drafts. We had some wonderful conversations. My undergraduate degree was in Constitutional Law, so I think I fielded most of their questions well.”

It was almost worth being absent.