The Line

One of my best buds David (amongst many others) just got his iPhone. As a computer geek and technical writer, it was only a matter of time for him; as it seems to be for, well, just about everyone on the planet, according to Apple. After my Palm Pilot blew over Spring Break, even I was eyeing it. Sleek as a seal, literally a jewel of a thing, no question; and with apps that can balance your checkbook and recognize snippets of music over the radio, what are we all waiting for?

I think I might be waiting for a spring breeze. And just what I mean by that, I am still figuring out.

For example, you can’t argue with me about the iPhone’s appeal to the naturalist, because I agree. Peterson’s Guide to North American Birds smaller than your hand? Identify constellations from the photo lens? I know. With so many places it could slip unobtrusively into my backcountry pack, it’s hard to contain the drool.

And yet, and yet. Isn’t there a time when even bringing a book along on a hike– much less a book on crack like the iPhone– actually draws your attention away from…simple…observing?  From simple, visceral experience? The cataloging, the identifying, the compartmentalizing, the defining; doesn’t the din of the mind move us away, at last, and maybe permanently, from the fundamental reality of our senses? When I rush to pin my virtual map up against the stars, doesn’t it, in the end, block them out?

Schooling comes into this in several ways. One (and again): an uncritical love affair with technology does nothing for our students. If we do not give them the tools to see that every gain we make with technology takes something else away– something we may need very badly– then we leave them mired in the worship of what Neil Postman called “the god of technology,” a Faustian bargain at best:

Ask anyone who knows something about computers to talk about them, and you will find that they will, unabashedly and relentlessly, extol the wonders of computers. You will also find that in most cases they will completely neglect to mention any of the liabilities of computers. This is a dangerous imbalance, since the greater the wonders of a technology, the greater will be its negative consequences…

Perhaps the best way I can express this idea is to say that the question, “What will a new technology do?” is no more important than the question, “What will a new technology undo?” Indeed, the latter question is more important, precisely because it is asked so infrequently.

Ask it, friends. As educators, we must ask it.

(This quote  from what should be required reading for every educator, Postman’s mind-blowing lecture “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change.” )

Second, we must recognize that school, in its very essence, also moves us inexorably away from visceral experience. Simply by placing a premium on reading and writing, it does so. This is not my thesis– that honor belongs to David Abram– but it is my belief, confirmed in experience, and it bugs me more and more with each passing day. Yes, this is the English teacher talking.

Yet hopelessly and irrevocably in love with words, I actually wonder if this doesn’t put me in the correct place to criticize their overuse. For if our education becomes a serpent biting its own tail– reading and writing about, well, reading and writing– then what are we actually reading and writing about? What are we really learning?

The whole thing seems to crumble, like a coal self-consumed; one push with a stick, and the ash collapses and blows away.

This is a lot to pile on the poor little iPhone, and you’ll note that I’m not actually placing the fate of the world on its delicate silver shoulders; that, too, would be overestimating its importance.

But there’s that spring breeze, though, moving through the room, or my daughter’s laugh. Hip-deep in apps, I may easily miss them both.

And it just gets easier and easier, doesn’t it.

Your teacher pay check stub ever make you weep? Mine did yesterday, but not for the reason you might think.

I’m deeply aware– some might say obsessively so– about the moral dimension of teaching. Far more than irregular verbs or how to construct an engaging summative paragraph, I work to teach my students how literature can help ask and answer the questions that make living meaningful. And then I kind of kill myself trying to model such living in my own behavior, with varying degrees of success.

Why? Middle school kids notice. In fact, they have an eagle eye for justice that many adults lose. They notice when I slough something off, break a promise, or unintentionally flout my own rules, and have no compunction about calling me out. Some teachers call this disrespect, but I encourage and treasure it. The kids keep me sane and honest, especially when I feel the habit of rigor that they inspire, spilling– necessarily, I believe– into extracurricular areas. Ultimately, I can never forget that my integrity may be the only promise of consistency that some of these kids see. (Thanks, Kant. Some days I wish I never met you.)

So in this spirit, I committed personally to a strict adherence to contract regarding my paid leave use. This depleted my bank of personal days, while leaving a substantial bank of sick days untouched– and unusable for family emergencies. Imagine, then, my reaction yesterday to the fallout from the fact that I had to take nearly four days of unpaid leave in order to be with my dying parent.

(For you rule-mongers out there, The National Family Leave Act only legislates unpaid leave; and in my district, sick time may not be used in its place.)

I don’t publicize this as some kind of “how great I am” moment, or a snotty revenge against my HR department. I hold no grudges there; they’re just doing their jobs. Nor do I mean to whine about the lost money, although this is undeniably part of the steep price I am paying now.

Rather I remain reeling– as usual– in the moral realm; stunned at the message of a system that punishes me– never mind the folks not as luckily endowed with benefits– so swiftly and concretely, for doing the right thing.

And the first thing I wonder is, “How am I going to prepare my students for this inevitable disappointment? How will I ever begin to help them understand?” Because for some of them, an experience like this has the potential to knock them clean out of principled living forever, and make no mistake.

Anyone have some suggestions for pre-teen fiction where the protagonist is left at the end with only the satisfaction of a clear conscience?

“What is honesty worth?” my students ask. They ask this, explicitly and implicitly, every day. My answer today is tangible, secret, and unsatisfactory. It is not the touching and uselessly ephemeral Mastercard sentiment: “It’s priceless.” Today, honesty is worth a tired teacher, some tears, and eight hundred and thirty-nine dollars.

Karl Weick:

Argue as if you’re right. Listen as if you’re wrong.

Cheers to Don Burkins for linking to this in the comments.

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 .

Honestly, the last thing I thought I’d be doing this week is posting in every spare moment on technology and its influences on literacy. Help me.

Or humor me. The mysterious commenter Dave (at dave@dave.dave, apparently) kindly provides this fast and super fun article at Slate from just last week, on the actual means by which we read on line differently from paper text. Michael Agger, who has won my heart with his snarky use of Net-bold type alone:

Humans are informavores. On the Internet, we hunt for facts. In earlier days, when switching between sites was time-consuming, we tended to stay in one place and dig. Now we assess a site quickly, looking for an “information scent.” We move on if there doesn’t seem to be any food around.

Sorry about the long paragraph. (Eye-tracking studies show that online readers tend to skip large blocks of text.)

Also, I’m probably forcing you to scroll at this point. Losing some incredible percentage of readers. Bye. Have fun on Facebook.

Take or leave his wordplay, but I’m going to be be thinking all summer about the ramifications of the Net reading meta-approach this discusses. Could it be– could it– treated as a new genre of reading, unto itself?

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.

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?

First, new header courtesy of Dy/Dan’s link to some stunning photography by Maria Moore. I’m just a sucker for how beads of rain make anything beautiful.

And then there’s this.

Beads for Good Deeds

Beads for Good Deeds is a character-building program that we run once a year at my middle school. Kids and adults are given a necklace of rubber cord with a “starter bead” on it; for each time they are “caught being good,”they receive a bead. Kids can not ask for beads, and they can also recommend staff members for beads in writing. Years in the making now, it’s not uncommon to see staff and students wearing yards’ worth of beads they’ve saved. It’s eye-catching, fun, implemented with fanfare, has tremendous student buy-in, and was conceived by a fellow faculty member whose intelligence, kindness, and creativity I respect a great deal.

I hate Beads for Good Deeds Week.

In a related request I’ve been trying to get to for months, a couple of folks have been asking for a promised second installation on a book on intrinsic motivation which has changed my professional life, Ed Deci’s Why We Do What We Do. (Try reading this to get a general overview.) It’s fitting to take this theory up again now, I think, because– not to put too fine a point on it– BFGD Week exemplifies nearly everything which Ed Deci warns educators against.

I’ve set this up like a FAQ. Skim through it at will.

A Theoretical Teacher’s Questions

Ok, so why should I pay attention to this theory again?

25 years of corroborated, peer-reviewed psychological research. Details here.

The general theory is that extrinsic rewards, without tremendously specific implementation, have a nearly universal negative affect on students’ creativity, long term retention, problem solving, and general learning. Supporting a student’s personal autonomy, in contrast, positively affects all these things.

What’s wrong with being rewarded for being a good person?

It’s not the good behavior that’s wrong—it’s the means by which we reinforce the behavior. Deci’s research (both in and out of schools) suggests that when you extrinsically reward kids for good behavior, their internal motives for engaging in—and retaining—the behavior usually drop dramatically. The reward, versus the behavior itself, becomes the goal. Engaging in the behavior at all is then only a result of being observed doing the behavior—when the observer vanishes, so does the behavior. Sound like Beads for Good Deeds to you?

Deci also makes the point that “being a good person”, particularly to kids, can be extremely nebulous, meaning anything that the observer wants it to mean. For responsible rewards to work (see below), there must be extreme clarity about what behaviors are expected. In BFGD, everything from picking up a dropped book to getting an A on a test can be rewarded.

Are you saying that I should just let students run wild? Where do discipline and limit-setting work into this?

To answer this question Deci uses the example of a painter who is also a babysitter. This person habitually shows up late for babysitting to finish a work of art. If we ask that the artist show up on time, aren’t we limiting his creative autonomy, he asks? And is that something we really want?

No, to both questions. An autonomous person is one who is internally healthy—who feels competent, in charge of the outcomes of their behavior, engaged in a meaningful activity, and who is interpersonally connected. Deci spends the entire second half of the book explaining that autonomy is therefore neither selfishness, nor (ironically) the same as our all-consuming American focus on competitive individualism. (In fact, competition is one of the factors that decreases intrinsic motivation as well.)

Limit-setting, then, is necessary for that connectedness—that responsible behavior towards others. “The really important question, then,” Deci writes, “is how can we avoid being permissive, without creating gridlock?”

His answer: align yourself with the student. Recognize to the student that he or she is a proactive subject, rather than an object to be manipulated or controlled. Set limits—in an autonomy-supportive way.

I wonder how Beads for Good Deeds does this, exactly. There’s some room for it, through the written recs folks can give; but I don’t know if this suffices. And no matter how many times students are told “It’s not a competition,” I can’t see how competition is avoided when the entire point of BFGD is to accrue a tangible good for deliberate display.

Should I add that learning to use interpersonal competition for defining self-worth is one of the specific developmental dangers for middle school-aged kids?

My students would throw a fit if I removed our reward system. They LOVE earning our pizza parties. Doesn’t this mean that rewards are effective?

Rewards work, no doubt. The question is, though: do they work for the stated aims of school? That is, do they promote long term retention of our material, self-motivated citizenship, and a lifelong love of learning?

I’ll quote Deci directly on this.

“The first {problem} is that once you have begun to use rewards to control people, you cannot go easily back. When people behave to get rewards, those behaviors will last only so long as the rewards are forthcoming. The second problem is that once people are oriented towards rewards, they will all too likely take the shortest or quickest path to get to them.”

Deci treats pizza as reward explicitly as an example for schools, in fact. I myself have had several conversations with classes where my students, honoring me with their honesty, have been very frank about the numerous “shortcuts” they’ve taken over their academic careers for a reward. I wonder what shortcuts kids ingeniously engineer during Beads for Good Deeds Week. They’d have to get quite clever about it. It makes me wonder if, in a terrible irony, BFGD actually encourages a worse kind of immorality than simply skimming through a book for a pizza.

Doesn’t intrinsic motivation “reward” you too, however? Does this mean it’s a bad thing to feel good about your accomplishments?

Not at all. “The rewards linked to intrinsic motivation,” says Deci, “are the feelings of enjoyment and accomplishment that accrue spontaneously as a person engages in the target activities.” While this is clearly “rewarding,” it is not anywhere near an extrinsic “reward.”

The experience also goes deeper than mere pleasure. “There is an aspect of intrinsic motivation,” writes Deci, “that is almost spiritual. It has to do with vitality, dedication, transcendence.” The University of Chicago psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls this “being in flow”—when time disappears, when the thrill of being in the present moment is so great that you can’t wait to get back to it.

I’m almost hesitant to ask readers to close their eyes and imagine a school where encouraging this experience for students is its highest priority.

Is praise an extrinsic award? I praise my kids all the time.

Yes and no. Praise is a different kind of extrinsic reward than others, but it has some of the same dangers. It requires an eagle-eye attention to one’s motives. Minimizing controlling language (such as “living up to expectations” or “doing as you should”) is essential. Simple statements such as “you’ve done well” keep interest and persistence at a high level; controlling language had the same empirical effect as other extrinsic rewards in decreasing intrinsic motivation.

Is there any way at all to offer rewards responsibly?

The burden of Deci’s research indicates that it is the CONTROLLING INTENT of rewards which taints them. The less you use rewards to control, the less they negatively affect intrinsic motivation. As a simple means of acknowledgement, or of gratitude, they can be a different story. As Deci writes succinctly, however: “Offering rewards in a non-controlling way requires a kind of deep honesty that often eludes people.”

Conclusion: Beads, or Legos?

There was an article I caught in Rethinking Schools recently which has stayed with me, where a group of teachers wrestled with the implications of a play “society” their elementary-age students spontaneously developed around the use of a set of Legos. It wasn’t so much their conclusions that impressed me—I think they could be argued with– but the fact that they sat down, with care and attention, and collectively and critically thought about all the implications of the Legos.

I love my building and colleagues—they are arguably among the most caring, intelligent, and forward thinking I know. We can do this critical approach, and do it often– but not enough around this program. I wish we did.

As for me, if someone asks why I’m not doling out beads or wearing mine, I’m honest about it. But I deliberately don’t badmouth the program to the kids, since that limits the opportunities for the kids to make their own decisions about Beads for Good Deeds. Since the whole point is to value their autonomy, I try to give it to them.

I give my beads out–one only– to each of my students the first class of the week. When they ask me why, I say, “for being you.”

I ask them all gently—for the nth time in the school year—to think about whether a reward in their hand makes something worth doing.

And my own necklace goes quietly into my five year old daughter’s dress up box.

I was driving into work today listening to Steve Inskeep on NPR finish up a report on presidential candidates (focus Mike Huckabee). And what transitional music do they play in between that report and the next? The first two notes– and only the first two notes– of the initial guitar lick of Depeche Mode’s “Your Own Personal Jesus.” I laughed all the way to school.

It got me thinking about the school improvement plan we were handed yesterday at our faculty meeting (I might post about this fascinating document later), a key component of which was addressing “weakness in background knowledge at all grade levels.” I can’t help but reflect that is only my odd, twisted, totally unique combination of “background knowledge” that let me in on an NPR auditory joke that I would be surprised if anyone else actually comprehended.

So a widely-administered test on understanding this joke, I’m sure you’d agree, would be unfair. And yet isn’t this exactly what we are doing in our listening and reading comprehension passages on a standardized exam?

E.D. Hirsch’s work here, and related articles in the same American Educator, have perhaps the most well-sourced argument I have seen for reading comprehension being tied almost completely to background knowledge. There’s also the old related standby that the “background knowledge” required to pass a standardized reading exam inevitably is reflective of socioeconomic status.

But I think I’m going one step further here. I heard NPR’s joke NOT only because I’ve heard some Depeche Mode, and NOT only because I happen to listen to NPR regularly, BUT because I personally happen to have some musical sense. My “background knowledge” is tied intimately not only to my SES, but to that pattern of exposure, internalization, predilection and talent that everyone has, and never repeats, like snowflakes.

Can we test the reading ability of a snowflake? Sure. (Give it a book about phases of matter and watch the magic.) But can we do it properly with a sole arbitrary reading exam that we administer to approximately 2,800,000 kids in New York State alone? We need different data than that. And we need better.

I had a conversation with one of my English colleagues this past week. We both agreed that we would eventually wander the earth rejected by both neo-hippies and corporate executives alike, since we fundamentally disagreed with the content and the administration of the high-stakes establishment exam we were giving in two weeks, but were giving it anyway.

This blog post won’t be unique or brilliant, but I hope to use it in upcoming years to remind myself of why my friend and I don’t really belong in Purgatory.

First of all, I have to dismiss the idea that participating in an institution is de facto an unacceptable compromise of integrity. My fear is that because I have dearly held principles that are at odds with those of my workplace, and yet I continue to participate in that work, I have at best subsumed myself in passivity– or at worst, screwed up irredeemably. I have to move beyond this fear.

This is not easy. We are a nation born of plucky, underdog resistance to an unjust institution, and the glorification of individualized resistance is in our myths, our ads, our movies, the water—particularly for those Thoreau-worshippers (me) for whom resistance, in general, seems like a great idea. And for Thoreau-worshippers who are also teachers, there’s no arguing that our natural tendencies are given plenty of fuel in the current climate of one-size-fits-NCLB.

But unexamined radicalism is unexamined radicalism. In otherwords, entrenched institutionalists and Thoreau-worshippers can both spout junk. So I must examine my tendencies at their logical conclusion. Should we abandon our schools because we believe that moral compromise is indigenous to them as institutions? Should we teachers go it alone—say, as free market hedge fund managers? Certainly there are some former educators out there who have done so—I know a few. But I’ve yet to meet a thoughtful teacher, sticking it out, who is just a hedge fund manager in disguise.

These teachers know two things about the myth of The All-Mighty Individual, for starters.

First, they know that the concept of somehow achieving moral purity through individualism is false. The struggle to act rightly in schools is born of our humanness– and thus indelibly replicated in the microcosm of our selves. The 10X15 house beside Walden Pond won’t save you or me. (It sure didn’t save Ted Kaczynski.)

Secondly, teachers committed to schools know that the healthy individual is indivisible from community. (Thoreau knew this too, actually, and received friends and visitors nearly every day.) In addition, a mass of psychological research has demonstrated that individualism (the myth) and autonomy (the healthy reality where we are nurtured as individuals in balance with communities) are two entirely different things. I’ll be talking more about this soon when I (finally) get to Parts II and III on “Why We Do What We Do.”

And there’s one last theory I have as to why thoughtful teachers stick it out. I’ve started to think of it as “soft math.”

Soft math is the cost-benefit analysis of participating in institutions which we know are fundamentally flawed. It isn’t quantitative or qualitative, but a yeasty mix of both. Soft math asks the question: does the amount of good that I do—in my college, in my cubicle, my classroom—outweigh the amount of damage I do by enabling a broken system?

In my clear-eyed moments, I know that it is soft math that must be my guide. Soft math does not rule out either change or stability. It leaves room for multiple responsible reactions to one’s teaching circumstances. It requires vigilant observation and reflection in a way that ideological despotism does not.

And, perhaps most importantly, soft math rests on hope. It is accountable hope, to be sure: a hope that must borrow the hardness of diamonds from logic, from precision, from fact. But this hope is also feathered, and perches on the soul.

The poet Adrienne Rich has something to say here too.

Oh you,

who love clear edges

more than anything…

watch the edges that blur.