The Line

Quote I think I’ll make into a t-shirt shortly:

“Doesn’t information itself have a liberal bias?”

Check out the entire interview with Stephen Colbert and Jim Lehrer– I mean, what is this? Heaven?– here.

If you left a comment recently and didn’t get a response, it’s because I’m a jerk. Weekend work is to catch up. Check back Monday. Mea maxima culpa.

All you bloggers: Talk to me about this. How do you sift/answer/triage your comment load?

Update: Nice! Think I caught them all today. If I missed you email me.

Man. Silver bullets stink.

Literature circles, for the uninitiated, have the curse-like blessing of being effective. This nearly guarantees them being extrapolated wholesale to educational environments where they won’t work well. Case in point? My classroom.

Now, I have to admit up front a deep, deep personal bias against fads. (This goes right back to tiny metallic Jordache purses decorated with feathered clips in 4th grade.) Consequently I was already looking at lit circles askance, and doing my damndest to balance this out against the positive testimony of my two 7th grade colleagues. I think I’ve done a pretty good job of tamping down my suspicions– particularly when I consulted with my buds recently, and found that they were working around the same kinks I was. Here’s a few of them:

And, of course, to top it all off, I found the smartest and most concise resource on lit circles out there–two weeks after I started the unit. Sigh.

Remember the theme, however, children: silver bullets suck.

Thankfully, it is made clear by Ms. Brownlie that a specific set of circumstances are required to make her approach to lit circles work. Let’s see how they stack up against my givens.

Yikes. So what’s a girl to do?

Junk it.

Yep. The bottom line is, what I’m doing isn’t working, and I have to get it working.

So here’s the plan. Much like the beloved Wall-E, I am sifting through the garbage mound that I have created by hoping I could slap down literature circles without modification, looking for something salvageable. I’ll keep the general aims and essential questions (which is a unit on biography), but tinker with the insides.

In this way it is my sincere hope to meld the goals of engaging in the collaborative doppelganging prized by my administration, and working to make things better.

I suppose if there’s a life lesson in this, it’s what the angelic multitude says to the shepherds.

Do not be afraid.

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For a terrific article on literature circles drifting from their intended origins in middle school from the National Council of Teachers of English, try the file below.

Literature Circles

UPDATE: Tried “Say Something” for the first time today with a group of kids; explaining it to them, and seeing their bright and engaged faces, set free from page constraints, literally sent chills down my back. We’ll see how this works with my more emergent readers next week, but for now, the evidence is sick encouraging.

SECOND UPDATE: I roped my colleague Kim in at lunchtime today. In a show of bravery I can only hope to emulate, she junked her plans for the next period and tried the alternative model with her neediest class. She came into my room afterwards with lips tightly pressed together and welling eyes; I thought someone had died until she hugged me. “THANK YOU,” she said.

Now we’re gunning for our third colleague. I love teaching.

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you may have a good bead on why my teaching team at school has affectionately dubbed me “The Hippie.”

I let the kids work on clipboards out of their seats. I assign homework once a week, if that. I spend inordinate amounts of time conferencing individually so I can match students with books they’ll fall in love with. And our first whole class assignment was to compile a list of, and vote upon, procedures for dealing with behaviors that violated the two root norms I gave them (participation and respect).

It’s important to note here that I list all suggested procedures for the vote, even those with which I disagree. This is one of the central components of the constructivist and autonomist learning theories on which I build my instruction. In otherwords: after laying down some tools and guidelines, it’s usually a better choice for a teacher to mainly shut up and let the kids figure things out for themselves.

I’d tweaked the rules-creating thing considerably since last year, and was really pleased with the reception. Kids were surprised, engaged, invested. I began with an idea stolen from a colleague: ask for a list of teacher behaviors that kids hate. This is an assignment for which students have no end of enthusiasm (or, sadly, material).

Among them were the hysterical (”Coffee breath. Could you people please chew some gum?”), the horrifying (”I hate it when teachers have long conversations on their cell phones in the middle of class”), the obvious (”I hate it when the teacher punishes the whole class for someone one person has done”), and this near unanimous statement: We hate it when the teacher deliberately embarrasses us in front of our peers.

Fast forward to our voting results. Imagine my seriously disconcerted amusement when out of approximately 80 kids, 42 vote to handle misbehaviors by putting the offending student in an isolated desk, in full view of all, in the middle of the room for the period. (The desk in question, ironically, was a temporary base for my digital projector and wasn’t supposed to be there at all.) The students were quite clear that the purpose of this was shame and mockery.

Interesting. Very interesting.

So I whip up a Powerpoint slide showing the voting results and the initial list of hated teacher behavior, with the bold red title: WE HAVE A CONTRADICTION. I gently ask a representative sample of my class sections to fill out index cards telling me how this contradiction could be.

Read their tallied answers, and ponder with me.

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#4: I don’t think kids took the voting seriously.

This, I think, was a key issue. No matter how earnestly and thoroughly I present a co-government model to the students, it goes so deeply against the grain of the majority of their classroom experiences that they refuse to buy in, despite themselves. Mark Windschitl calls this cultural dissonance one of the strongest forces working against constructivism in schools today. So much for our cherished myth of the Lone Ranger Teacher. (Or the Lone Hippie, as it were.)

#3: You’re not being embarrassed by sitting in a corner. You’re being embarrassed by your behavior.

A undeniably strong cohort of kids feel public humiliation to be an appropriate and effective punishment, even though– perhaps because– they hate it personally.

#2: We think it’s funny to laugh at our friends.

This commendably honest insight, you’ll note, has nothing to do with the efficacy of the punishment; it just highlights its pure entertainment. I find myself wondering all kinds of things when I read this. Is our generational gap so unbridgeable, our curricula so existentially useless, our instruction so god-awful boring, our teens’ collective media-shaped sense of humor so cruel, that kids rely on the enlivenment of a classroom solely via crime and punishment? This could keep me up at night.

#1: We don’t want to be embarrassed, but we want to embarrass other people.

It’s tempting to wash my hands of this ambiguity by attributing it to the traditionally regarded shift in preteens from Piaget’s concrete operations to formal operations. I do think there’s some broad truth to the idea that preteens are only just beginning to think outside their little bubbles. A Summer 2008 article from cognitive scientist Dan Willingham has me rethinking cognitive stages entirely, however. He makes this bold and terrifying statement: Recognize that no content is inherently developmentally inappropriate.

Whoa. So once again, it comes back to me. How am I, as teacher, actually asking my kids to move beyond their simplistic (if only human) concepts of equality and justice? How am I teaching them compassion?

And is this something I can even teach?

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I don’t think any of this constitutes an infallibly damning argument against autonomist approaches for middle school kids. However, I think it does– painfully– point out that these approaches cannot be considered some kind of magical silver anti-establishment Bullet of Happiness. (Someone needs to do a cartoon of this. Any takers?)

Let’s summarize. Via autonomy, preteens are not only being asked to stretch their moral and social thinking in an already tumultuous time, but to do so in a wacked out classroom environment which is explicitly unsupported by the infrastructure of most public schools. Additionally, unlike younger counterparts, preteens will have that many more years under their belts to internalize and solidify survival tactics in the social totalitarianism that is standard fare in both the classroom and the lunchroom. Indeed, they may be well on their way to swallowing it all with a smile.

There will be backfiring, incomplete thinking, dissonance, resistance. These challenges need to be met very thoughtfully and carefully indeed. A mere vote on whether to use a dunce cap or not ain’t going to cut it.

For now, I’ve split the difference with the kids by going with their second procedural choice for misbehaviors, which is a system of warning cards used by two other teachers on my team. It’s effective, silent, respectful, and doesn’t re-invent the wheel. But at bottom this merely sidesteps the problem of how not to become an autocrat when when what the kids want, even democratically, is something that I don’t think is right. I’ve copped out, and I don’t like it.

The Hippie has some things to think about for next year.

Dan Willingham’s website: http://www.danielwillingham.com .