The Line

S., who earned himself an earlier post, is paging through his binder for a paper he has lost about nine times. The binder reminds me of a molting adolescent songbird, stuffed to bursting and shedding. (The discovery of clear plastic sheaths to protect individual papers has saved this boy’s hide, and I would recommend that any teacher who has recurring problems with wrinkles, rips, food stains and footprints have an available stack of these in the classroom.)

As he riffles through the binder, without looking up, he asks, “Ms. S, what is that thing where you’re super organized? It’s like a, I don’t know, a disorder?”

I try to put myself into his synapses, and then grab it. “You mean, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?”

“Yeah,” he says matter-of-factly, papers flying everywhere. “I ain’t got none of that.”

It’s JP, of course, who’s coming up to me during writing time at the end of class, and I’ve learned by now that it can be for only one of three reasons: a) to show me his incomplete work and beg for help; b) to tell me about his missing work and beg for time to complete it; c) to attempt to make one of those jokes that demonstrates, once again, that there is an unusually decimated circuit between his head and his mouth.

But every once in awhile something astonishingly beautiful opens up in him, like a flower in flash photography.

“In this chapter,” reads the writing prompt I have created, “Haven Peck says his ‘mission’ is the work of slaughtering pigs– something that must be done, no matter how hard it is. What do you think your mission in life is?”

He hands it to me, points to his one sentence, and sits down fast, not making eye contact. I glance at the lack of development and sigh inwardly. Then I actually see what he has put down.

“My mission is to find my mission,” he has written.

All This Weight: Sarah Borges

“I am not letting you fail. Even if that means coming to your house every night until you finish the work. I see who you are. Do you understand me? I can see you. And you are not failing.” — Freedom Writers

Yeah, right.

Dan has some knifing things to say about teacher portrayal in film along these lines: that the heart-attack-inducing martyrdom of the protagonists is merely a sob story excuse for the absence of what real teaching should be: intelligence, ruthless truth-telling, and rigor.

Chris Lehmann agrees last week on his blog, but with a twist. To him, the application of this same rhetoric is what excuses our schools from improving themselves. He asks in turn: why haven’t our best and brightest figured out how to solve the horror of our working conditions already? His answer is to cite this dreadful survey (reading it feels a bit like rubbernecking at a car wreck) as a snapshot of a energy-sucking system that doesn’t leave practitioners enough time to eat and sleep, much less think critically about change.

Myself, I keep going back in my mind to this article by Linda Darling-Hammond in February’s Time magazine on the way teachers are supported in Singapore, and wondering why the edublogosphere didn’t go crazy over it.

Is it indeed because teachers prefer a mythology which camouflages their incompetence? It is because we have no mental or physical resources left to combat the mythology?

Or is there something else in the mix?

I wonder if we are looking at the birth of a new psychological evil. We might call it the Plymouth Syndrome.

A hybrid of the famous Stockholm Syndrome and the against-all-odds, paradigm-resistant Protestant work ethic which carved out our country in the first place, the Plymouth Syndrome causes teachers to make the day-to-day decisions that align ourselves with our “captors,” swallow the global rhetoric of “whatever it takes,” and enable our broken system: in otherwords, to welcome, not challenge, the teacher-martyr mythology.

Why?

For the simple reason that fighting not to change the dysfunctional system, but fighting within the dysfunction, is what actually gives us a sense of purpose. In this scheme of things, if there is no dysfunction—even if the dysfunction is being actively replaced with health– there is no sense of purpose.

Thus the expending of one’s energy running the gauntlet of public education is, in the end, more immediately satisfying, and therefore more desirable, than expending energy to get rid of the overarching dysfunction itself.

I’m not proposing that this is a conscious decision—after all, who says to themselves, “I’d rather teach 165 kids at a pop, thanks”? I mean rather that an educator who cannot find meaning within the system might instead, at a subconscious, bedrock level, embrace her microcosmic struggle itself as the meaning of what she does. Once she does this, she needs only the struggle—not the resolution of the struggle.

The means becomes the end. So why bother with real change?

I have no data for this (and actually find solid sociological research on teacher culture pretty scarce anyway. Ideas, anyone?) So my theory is a conjecture, based on informal observations and the vaguaries of my own heart. But I wonder very much about its prevalence.

For example, the first reaction of my own heart is not to congratulate, but condemn, every time I forgo a completely unmanageable assignment such as weekly dialogue journals. (These would require me to spend five minutes minimum responding to each of my 88 kids every week, for a whopping total of over seven hours of grading. If I spend a thoughtful ten minutes on each journal? Fifteen hours.) Yet why do I react this way? Because I find that partially lose my bearings, my sense of meaning, if I am not mightily struggling with something related to school.

This same heart can feel deeply uneasy without the exhaustion of an 11+ hour work day. It elevates me—indeed, in my silliest moments, elevates me above my own co-workers. (”Where are they at 6:00 in the morning? I must be doing something right.” Insane, isn’t it?) Such toil gives me purpose. It is a symbol of my worth.

I’m not saying this attitude is healthy, or (on the flip side) my entire motivation. But it does exist.

So I find myself shaking my head a bit when it comes to both Dan and Chris’ assessments. Can they be right, and not entirely right? I wonder if they might be missing the Plymouth Syndrome, a much more subtle sociological dynamic than either fatigue or fatuousness– and one to which intelligent and motivated individuals might be particularly susceptible.

I remember a conversation I had with a colleague last year. We were discussing the working conditions of a private school in a neighboring town, where teachers have weekly half-days dedicated to reflection and collaboration, adequate pay, and no teacher load over twelve students.

“Cushy,” she said, disparagingly.

And I agreed.

Thanks to Kate Olson for bringing this to my attention: Barbara Kingsolver’s commencement address this year at Duke, the eminent author of The Poisonwood Bible and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I am as grateful for this speech as if I was in my cap and gown in the audience: it addresses nearly everything that has been nesting in my brain this year, and nestling its way ever so slowly into my concepts for English curriculum.

Quote:

As you leave here, remember what you loved most in this place. Not Orgo 2, I’m guessing, or the crazed squirrels or even the bulk cereal in the Freshman Marketplace. I mean the way you lived, in close and continuous contact. This is an ancient human social construct that once was common in this land. We called it a community. We lived among our villagers, depending on them for what we needed. If we had a problem, we did not discuss it over the phone with someone in Bubaneshwar. We went to a neighbor. We acquired food from farmers. We listened to music in groups, in churches or on front porches. We danced. We participated. Even when there was no money in it. Community is our native state. You play hardest for a hometown crowd. You become your best self. You know joy. This is not a guess, there is evidence. The scholars who study social well-being can put it on charts and graphs. In the last 30 years our material wealth has increased in this country, but our self-described happiness has steadily declined. Elsewhere, the people who consider themselves very happy are not in the very poorest nations, as you might guess, nor in the very richest. The winners are Mexico, Ireland, Puerto Rico, the kinds of places we identify with extended family, noisy villages, a lot of dancing. The happiest people are the ones with the most community.”

Read it. Read every glowing word.

Yeah, was playing around with my summer goodbye post draft and uploading music files so I wouldn’t have to crank it out while revising twenty plus student literacy profiles in June, and dumped it into the feed accidentally. If you see it, don’t let it confuse you– I’m still around. I’ll put it up with working links in a few weeks. Digital immigrant, indeed.

As I get further into A Day No Pigs Would Die I’m discovering, quite by accident (or maybe not), a wealth of nature-related wisdom packed into it. It does take place on a Shaker Vermont farm, after all. So despite my initial woes, not only is Pigs starting to work well as an example of a banned book, but it makes this unit a shoe-in for the one just before The Leopold Education Project next year. We could collect Pigs axioms (I’m already getting kid-generated questions like, “Is it really true that pigs and cows can’t be penned next to each other?”) and research them, while relating them to excerpts from Sand County Almanac. Perfect springtime stuff, perfect high quality literature, perfect dovetail between fiction and non-fiction. I can’t wait.

I’m reflecting on this while my kids and I are wildcrafting in the backyard this evening– this is the absolutely lovely word, I’ve learned, for harvesting uncultivated edible plants. Today we’re hurrying to get four packed cups of violet blossoms before we cut the lawn. We’ll boil them down with sugar into a deep-hued, fragrant syrup, great over pancakes and near heaven with vanilla ice cream. My daughter is tweezing the flowers with her little fingers out of the long grass, singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” at the top of her lungs.

We’re doing double-duty by also weeding the garlic mustard that’s spread into the yard. One of the worst spreading non-indigenous plants of New York State, it was originally brought over by European settlers as a fast-growing herb for flavor in stews. My daughter offers to help me pull up the shallow root stocks, which complain by letting loose their characteristic pungent smell.

“But why are we pulling these up? They have pretty white flowers on the top,” she comments.

“Well, we don’t really want them in the yard,” I say gently.

“Why?”

I’m suddenly faced with explaining the concept of invasive species to a five year old. This sort of thing happens a lot.

I hunker down to her level in the grass, try to put it in language she’ll understand. “See how it grows so fast, and goes all over the place? When it does that, it takes the light and the soil away from other plants. It doesn’t want to share.”

She processes this, then nods.

“Oh,” she says solemnly. “It’s like people.”

Thanks to Doug Noon for introducing me to all of the following, woven together in a lovely post that summarizes much of what I have been wrestling with this year:

• The new think tank The Forum for Education and Democracy and their report released last week, Democracy at Risk. Stars such heavyweights as Linda Darling-Hammond, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and Deborah Meier.
• Wellford Wilms’ disturbing piece on reform in a California high school, Liberating the Schoolhouse, cataloging the systematic destruction of a bottom-up, autonomous management model. Far more editorial than report, but still leaves one wondering. I wonder in particular what Ed Deci would have to say. Pair it with Henderson’s piece on hierarchical hard-wiring in the brain, and you may want a drink.
• Structuration Theory. This is extremely tough going, only for die-hard intellectual freaks, but fascinating. (Try the user-friendly approach at Theory.org– I mean, you have to love an organization who makes trading cards and Lego figures for famous sociologists.) Stephen Smoliar succinctly applies one of ST’s central ideas to schooling with some scary implications. I have to do some more reading on this.