The Line

The brother of a dear college friend, Matt Smith, is the Super-Uber-Cataloguer of the Persian Collection at Harvard’s Widener Library. (That’s not his real title.) His recent post on a northeastern private school turning their library collection entirely into Kindles has been kicking around in my head enough for me to finally write about it. This does seem to be the litmus test for worthy posts– whether it survives the mental onslaught of the morning pre-coffee drive to school several days in a row.

Matt’s opinion on the classic “NPR” argument that we all love the way books smell too much to let them die is that this rhetoric is not terribly informed and slightly kinky. It makes me giggle, but it also makes me think that there is a parallel argument to be had about the sensory gratification of technology. My own argument for a long time has been that “literacy tech” dangerously cuts our senses down to two out of five. But I find myself re-evaluating that when I think of a bevy of teens touch-padding their way through Sense and Sensibility on a Kindle, or how my own less privileged ADHD boys beg for laptop work.

I think there’s possibly two factors at play here. One, I wonder if the state of learning via multiple modes of input is still so infantile in our schools that computers actually represent a step UP on the sensory scale.

And two, I wonder if working on a computer is somehow more sensorily captivating than I have been giving it credit for. I’d love to see some studies on this; I don’t know of any. I have tons of questions about it.

Where does that sense of “disappearing”– of time evaporating– on a computer come from?

Is it the same as when you dissolve into a good book, or into a hobby you love– “being in flow”?

Does the limitation of one’s senses on a computer paradoxically help one concentrate on computer-based tasks more, like a person struck with hearing loss compensates with heightened sight and smell?

And what does this all mean in the context of reading and comprehending text?

But all this is not actually the main thrust of Matt’s post. His major concern is that switching a library entirely over to Kindles will necessarily limit the amount of books available to library patrons, restricting them to those relatively few texts that are available through one for-profit corporation.

I suppose my concern is related, but not similar. I mean, eventually, if we decide that Kindles will supplant books the way we decided that books would supplant hand-lettered scrolls, then I’m pretty sure that eventually all 300,000 titles in the world will be on Kindles– and it won’t be any different than selected books being produced by publishing companies.

There’s only one world-shaking difference between this switch and others in the past: the dependence on electric power.

Never before has the physical existence of a text depended entirely on whether you have the capacity to charge your battery. And for me, just like our food, every step that makes the production of a book dependent on something else is one step away from safe– safe from censors, from governments, from book-burners, from dictators.

It’s also why I insist that kids memorize at least The First Amendment and a poem of choice before they leave my classroom. For books, too, despite the safety of their physical presence, can also be destroyed permanently– as well as the knowledge within them. We all know what happened in Alexandria.

But no matter where my kids are in twenty years– in jail, in an abusive relationship, on a hurricane-stricken coast, in a country with no civil rights– no matter what places they find themselves in which others are bent on seeking the destruction of their freedom (and begin by turning off the power)– no matter what, my students will, in all hope, have some piece of inspiration from literature in their minds, glowing like a candle in the dark.

Kindling them, in fact. And isn’t that ironic.

Our extended family just lost a little boy, age 2, in a terrible accident. I push myself into my classroom today, the morning after the funeral, in a haze of exhaustion and heartache. I find what I have come to usually find this first week of school: Eric sitting quietly on the couch, letting loose with stealth snide about politicians with whom he disagrees and hopes that the fourth Aragon book is better than the last. Shena, having such an animated audible conversation with the narrator of the short story I am reading aloud that I have to tell her as gently as possible to settle down. Svetlana, who is debating whether to bring in the thirty page fantasy novel she authored. Josh, who is reading what may perhaps be my favorite independent book this year, Superheroes and Philosophy. And kids in each class, who have only known me for 48 hours, chorusing gently and genuinely that the substitute was terrible and they missed me. Each one, each little life, shining.

Sometimes the country is a state of mind.  Laura Veirs writes a lot of tunes that tap into the repeating meditative patterns of plainsong; sung by the Cedar Hill Choir of “O Brother Where Art Thou?” fame, and recorded in Johnny and June Cash’s cabin, the ending  is transcendent. Enjoy.

Starting school in 48 hours, somehow feeling more prepared and put together than I have yet.  Break a leg, everyone.

Check it out. There’s arguments to be had with my position on this one, so don’t hesitate if you want to argue.

Check it out, subscribe, and tune in shortly for my response to Doug’s first post.

I must be on the right track for this year. The New York Times says so.  (I’m being facetious, of course, but if you want a fast and bright snapshot of the workshop approach I am trying, read this.)

Doug Noon at Borderland is trying it too, and we’re blogging about it together through the year. I am completely jazzed about this collaboration, to use Doug’s lovely adjective. The pairing of an inexperienced suburban/urban female teacher in New York with a rural Alaskan male teacher with 27 years under his belt, both trying the same approach, makes the researcher-poet-monster that feeds on symmetry and lives in my belly very happy. I’ll post the link when we’ve got the Wordpress theme straightened out.

All this talk I’ve been entertaining about teachers who leave, teachers who stay, and why, isn’t theoretical for me. A fairly mass exodus of committed and brilliant professionals from my building occurred this past summer, coinciding with the departure of the sometimes infuriating, ever inspiring dy/dan. The Tempered Radical has just adopted a baby and wonders if he can sustain a family on his salary. The best urban educator I know has been kicking around nursing school and other career choices. I feel…bereft. Blessed. Scared.

The list of gifts over which I have no control– a principal who provides wiggle room, a director with a shared vision of literacy, a diverse but generally socioeconomically sound caseload, a supportive and smart team of teachers who care for each other, and a curriculum which still allows me to muck around a bit and have fun– this list is ridiculously long. It will not last. What can I do in the meantime to turn the tide in favor of my own retention?

I can realize that my longtime dream of a Ph.D. is a final exit. I wish it weren’t true. But if only for the financial burden and the slow roll of innovation, it is highly unlikely that I would be able to return to the classroom with a doctorate and find some sustainable use for it with the kids. This latter scenario would be the only reason I personally could justify leaving for doctoral work in the near future, after only this mere handful of years of teaching. Realizing this– that the system cannot really integrate or balance these two callings of mine– is truly saddening, but also comforting. It’s taken a burden off my shoulders I didn’t realize I was carrying.

So there’s only one answer, isn’t there? I have to do the Ph.D. when I’m actually ready to be a teacher of teachers– that is, when I’m ready to leave the public secondary classroom for good.

I can’t even predict when that would be. In my dream world, my list sustains me for a decade plus at least, giving me sufficient courage, strength, and experience for harder teaching conditions, when they come. But all I can say for certain is that the time to leave is not yet now.

And this gives me a clearer, morally supportable vision of where I am headed. It gives me terra firma: my used bean bag chairs, that thrill of hope for a new workshop approach this year, my classroom library to be balanced, top-heavy with historical fiction (and how did that happen? I don’t even like historical fiction all that much)… uneaten macaroni and cheese sitting on the desk as I alphabetize one more shelf, wondering what kids will like and love upon them in just a few short days.

It gives me a commitment to being here.

The Sound of Silence from readers (with no corresponding dip in subscribers) leads me gratefully to believe that no one is going to mind too much if I give up on Martin Haberman for the moment. I will say (again) that his 1995 book “Star Teachers of Children in Poverty” is moving, creditable, and worth focused attention, but to approach his later work with caution. Hanna, a stalwart commenter and excellent teacher, sent a reflection on the matter I’ll quote at length here. It’s a thoughtful resolution to this troubling interaction with an educational theorist.

“When I read “Stars” I did wonder a good deal about what he based his conclusions on… I’m not sure this bothers me all that much though. It’s got something to do with that searching-for-keys-under-the-lamppost analogy – you know the one? If Haberman had stuck with the hard data, spending lots of time on analyzing and reporting on the frequency of particular responses, the conclusions he could have drawn might well have been so limited as to be relatively unhelpful. At times the value of a conclusion is less in its being certain than in its capacity to encourage different thinking and acting.

Well, readers, I’ve had my first royal muck-up on the blog. I posted something I didn’t read carefully enough, and what I discovered when I did has cast a pall over the entire Martin Haberman post series I had planned.

“Teacher Burnout in Black and White,” a Haberman article from 2004, starts out with a description of the continuum of who stays and who leaves in teaching, and seemed to dovetail so nicely with our discussions here that I punched it right out for everyone in its own post. Turns out, though, that it is a dreadfully argued piece, with plain old errors so numerous that it would be embarrassing– not to mention boring– to critique them all.

I will give you the worst one, though, as it’s also the pertinent one. Haberman takes his entire central thesis (that preservice teachers are so ill-educated about urban work that they fail)– you know, the thesis he has spent the last 40+ years refining?– and throws it out the window.  He begins by stating that interview answers from these same quitting teachers regarding why they leave the profession (the working conditions, the difficulty in classroom management, and so on) should not be trusted. Why?

The reason for concern over the authenthicity of reasons offered for leaving urban schools is that the negative conditions of work are well known even to the general public and must surely have been known to the teachers accepting positions (italics mine).

In otherwords, teachers, who cannot be expected truly to comprehend the problems of working in an urban school, are misrepresenting their reasons for leaving– because surely they comprehend the problems of working in an urban school. (You see the issue.)

And for what compelling alternate thesis is Haberman abandoning the basic rules of syllogistic logic? As he states shortly thereafter, with nary an explicative quantitative or qualitative analysis to support it:

[In fact,] quitters and leavers cannot connect with, establish rapport, or reach diverse children in urban poverty because at bottom they do not respect and care enough about them to want to be their teachers.

This is the first time in the article that the word “diverse” surfaces, and the last six or seven pages are devoted to discussing the problematic ethnicity gap between the majority of white, middle-class teachers in urban schools, and their poor students of color.

And so there you have it– the answer to everything. All quitters appear to be bigots. Soft bigots, perhaps. Unconscious bigots. Bigots reinforced by the problematic assumptions of poor teacher preparation programs. But bigots all the same.

As you can imagine, this calls into question for me the authenticity not of teacher responses, but of Haberman’s research. Mere bias is one thing.  Destructive, unsupported implications involving race and class are quite another. And even were someone to point me in the direction of other, better Haberman work, the paucity of logic and basic scientific rigor in the writing of this article alone is enough to give me the shakes. About race and class in America, for pete’s sake– the two subjects which arguably require our utmost attention and care.

However, I don’t want to commit similar errors of logic and throw the baby out with the bathwater. After all, the main thrust of Star Teachers is not an analysis of why teachers leave, but the common characteristics of teachers who successfully stay, and there is a lot of value in that.

Still, it’s three weeks until school begins for me, and Dr. Haberman? I don’t really have time for this. I’m going to leave where I go next up to the readers. If they’d still like me to blog out your book, I will.  If not, I will continue to recommend it, but with significant reservations. And you can expect a letter from me shortly.

Let me know, folks. And I suppose there’s at least a little good in this. I certainly have learned my lesson about quick linking. There is also value in interacting with several different ways of looking at an issue, as my wise friend Kim L. points out.  And lastly, apparently I am not so burned out an English teacher yet that I cannot be dismayed and saddened by something I have read.

H., in her commments below, mentions the Haberman-coined term of  “strong insensitives” in regards to those teachers who have remained in the profession by disassociating themselves from any responsibility for their performance. In a previous comment my long-time friend and inspiration, Hope, does a lovely job of painting a vivid picture of who these people are. I bet you can name at least one in your building right now.

Take a wander through this related elucidating 2004 article while I make scrambled eggs for my kids– I think it will serve as a fascinating bridge between the last post and the next.  Later this evening I’ll be responding to comments and putting up post #2.