The Line

I found this anonymous message from a student on my magnetic poetry locker/wall. After I stopped laughing and snapped the photo with my phone (hence the fuzzy quality, my apologies), I started thinking.

Math teacher Dan, at dy/dan, has made a successful recurring piece of posting multimedia materials  under the title “What Can You Do With This (WCYDWT)?” and soliciting comments on how to use them as the basis of math lessons. At the suggestion of another colleague who’s familiar with Dan’s good work, I’d like to do the same here. But I’d also like to ask for thoughts on the philosophical implications of this little line of words.

What can we do with…. the fact that this medium engendered authentic, poetic communication in ELA?

What can we do with… the idea that somehow, somewhere, the kid had enough freedom in my class to get up and make this thing?

What can we do with… good weather?

And most importantly:

What can we do with… my stupid windows, which are east-facing, framed in bricks, and heat up like a pizza oven until 1 PM? *

* And yes, in my defense, they have been open all week. Can’t blame the kid for not noticing, though.

“We get yelled at all the time, every day.”

We’re having a “RESPECT” week at school, where members of faculty get on the announcements in the morning and give the kids a thirty-second pep talk about how to show respect. This is part of our PBIS initiative, which has its strengths and weaknesses. One of them, which unfortunately now hits the kids in the face once a day, is that their ownership in PBIS is very, very small. (Read: none.)

I try to counteract this by flipping the morning message on its head. If the theme is, “Use respectful language,” I ask the kids: “What language do adults use to respect you?” If it’s “Be prepared,” I ask: “What do prepared teachers look like to you?” And then I take notes visibly and think out loud about how to incorporate their feedback into the way things run in my class.

There’s an art to teaching kids how to talk productively in groups without overpowering or bullying them (or letting them do the same to each other) and I have spent many, many, many years figuring out the guidelines I have the kids use. Perhaps that’s next week’s post. What hit me in the face last week, though, was the kids’  unadulterated, consistent, pure message.

“We get yelled at all the time, every day.”

Tween hyperbole? Possibly. But even allowing for this, there clearly is something going on in our infrastructure that makes the kids genuinely feel this way. They are pounded, daily and without cease, with rules and expectations over which they have no control, and into which they have no input. There are no safe spaces at our school (recess? Universal independent study time? Functioning student government? Heck, a graffitti wall?) to offset this, not even the hallways, where students don’t even have time to go to the bathroom, much less have the “privilege” of checking their phones for thirty seconds.

And while clever superintendents ask for their schools to be turned into prisons, I might make the argument that we don’t have much further to go on that score. More kids spontaneously compare school to prison in our conversations than I am at all comfortable with.

I’ve blogged endlessly on the increasingly strong cross-cultural research of Deci and Ryan that human beings need three basics– connection, a sense of competence, and autonomy– in order to internalize healthy behaviors (which is supposed to be the whole damn point of school, is it not?), so the kids’ message isn’t exactly new.

But here’s the worst part for me, as a teacher who works actively to give kids these basics: in a system based on dictatorial control, when I must switch to a more authoritarian role, as in this morning’s fire drill, it unravels all my work.

Sure, the kids comply. Sure, they’re safe. But when we get back to the classroom, it takes me that much more reassurance, explanation, and care-taking to convince them that I’m not faking my interest in their autonomy. That I’m not just another hypocrite who’s making sure that

“We get yelled at all the time, every day.”

And I lose them. Sometimes for just a few minutes. Sometimes for days. And sometimes, as with my most jaded and sensitive kids, for good.

Faber and Mazlish suggest a small set of communicative rules for situations like this which dovetail nicely with Deci and Ryan’s research, and which I am trying to put into play whenever I have to put on the “mama bear hat” and engage my kids’ immediate cooperation. They go like this.

Give the child a chance to be helpful.

State your expectations clearly.

Show them how to make amends if needed.

Then give the child a choice.

Take action, if necessary.

Allow the child to experience natural consequences. (Note: lots of school consequences are not “natural.” Be careful with these.)

Later, problem solve in partnership with the child. Talk about your feelings together, brainstorm together, come up with a solution together.

I am still working on implementing these consistently.

But at least I can guarantee you that, no matter how small and silly they seem, they don’t happen in a prison.

Shape poems, in their 195o’s heyday, were cool. Avant garde, stanza-busting, causing socialites to throw their hands up in dismay and scream Communism. (Not kidding.)

They are also time-tested. George Herbert’s shape poem, “Easter Wings,” was published in 1633.

And finally, today no other form of poetry holds  a candle to the shape poem’s potential to link the graphic and the lexical. This is the dominant mode of modern advertising, multi-media art, and communication, all of which the literate citizen needs to be able to interpret (and often create) in spades.

Now, take all this and place it next to your typical seventh grader. Yearning for independence, but still loving stickers and crayons. One foot in high school, one in elementary.  Growing their first tendrils of thought beyond the concrete level of operations.

It’s significant, then, that the litero-jargon name for shape poems is concrete poetry: a format which not only can be used to honor where middle school kids are, but stretch their thinking towards the place where we want them to be. In short, a match made in heaven. And whenever I assign a free-choice writing piece to my kids, the match is made obvious by the dozens of kids who come up and ask, “Can I do a shape poem?”

Until you see what their idea of a “shape poem” is, that is.

And worst of all? It’s not their fault. It’s ours.

Prime example? The centerpiece interactive lesson on shape poetry to be found at ReadWriteThink.org, usually a warehouse of reliable lessons, administered by none other than the National Council of Teachers of English. Get one slide in, and you find this definition:

A shape poem describes an object and is written in the shape of that object.

Really? I mean, I know this is for elementary kids. But really?

Compare this to The Encyclopedia Brittanica:

Poetry in which the poet’s intent is conveyed by graphic patterns of letters, words, or symbols rather than by the meaning of words in conventional arrangement.

The problem is clear. Much the way the teaching of academic analysis has been reduced to the formulaic, one dimensional five paragraph essay, the shape poem has been bastardized, becoming simply the use of a shape to house weak writing, resulting in nothing more elevated than “something cute that can be hung up at Open House.”

We have to teach our kids better than this.

Here, you’ll find– also at ReadWriteThink, reassuringly– a much better lesson on concrete poetry, which can be adapted for middle school kids. Below is my go-to list of exemplary books.

The central guiding premise for a successful concrete poetry approach in middle school, one that is absent from most of the pedagogy on shape poetry I have seen, is that shape guides sense. We “make sense” of the object, theme, or experience using the words, images, and figurative language that the shape suggests to us.

A simple two-dimensional drawing of a baseball, for example…

.. has two types of lines with which to work: the circle, or long, curving arc; and the stitches, or short dashes. What actions in the game of baseball mimic these lines, or suggests them? What feelings, desires, or thoughts in baseball can be long and curving, or short and fast?

These types of questions inevitably make my kids make the face that I look for in class: their little eyebrows knot together, they purse their lips, and fall silent. They begin to scribble. Best of all is to hear the words fall from their lips: “This is hard, Ms. S.”

I love it.

Differentiate upwards by inviting kids to take the inverse approach, using words to create meaningful shapes. (Check out this awesome re-interpretation of Humpty Dumpty.)

Encourage non-artsy kids by inviting them to play with tracing paper as means of gathering possible shapes to work with. (This was one of my great joys as a middle school kid without a drop of artistic talent. I liked tracing elves.)

I have not yet gone the extra and obvious step of formally incorporating technology for graphic design into this project, but welcome any suggestions for this in the comments. Seems to me this is one of the limited ways technology actually adds inherent value to the English classroom.

Shape poetry can challenge middle school kids in exactly the ways they need to be challenged in our modern world: to experiment with technological tools; to think critically; create effectively; and to take that next step away from the literal to the metaphor, from the surface to the deeper meanings that run beneath.

It’s a beautiful form, and a useful one. Let’s take it back.

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

On concrete poetry, with background, definitions, and examples:

Wikipedia: Concrete Poetry

The Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry

National Poetry Month: Day 10

BBC Arts: Visual Poetry

Non-babyish concrete poetry books that middle school kids love:

Technically, It’s Not My Fault

A Poke in the I

Our district’s in pain– significant staff reductions, deficits, the highest poverty level we’ve seen, increasing trickle-down demands from Race to the Top. This is not nearly the kind of pain detailed to me by a friend who is by a friend who is a well-known education writer and blogger and whose daughter is completing her first year as a public school teacher.

I was intrigued, especially, by how Teach For America seems to be immune to the current fiscal seizures in my friend’s situation. Not even Wendy Kopp argues that TFA is a replacement for well-prepared, committed teachers:

“I have never taught. Now that I know what it takes to teach successfully, it would need to be a very serious and long-time commitment to climb the learning curve and do what it takes to truly change kids’ trajectories.”

So why aren’t our policies reflecting that?

My friend has some poignant perspective, and advice. I’ll let her words speak for themselves.

{My daughter’s district} is dismissing teachers EXCEPT for TFA teachers, who get ironclad contracts committing them to stay for two years and the school to keep them for two years. This is the wave of the future: Bring in bright new college grads with virtually no preparation, put them in the worst schools for two years with almost no mentoring (their colleagues know they’ll be gone in 2 years), and then repeat the cycle indefinitely.

People like my daughter are on the opposite end of the spectrum. They take out $50,000 in student loans for a top-quality, richly mentored 3-year MAT program (one year to do coursework and student teaching to earn the credential, two years in a part-time masters program that mentors them through their first two years on the job). They commit to a long-term teaching career in public schools, and enter the first tough year well prepared to collaborate and innovate. And then their district hangs them out to dry.

I am advising her to recommence her job search in surrounding districts with somewhat less brutal cuts, to call on the professional network she’s been building, to keep up close communication with her very supportive principal . . . and, finally, to reach out to all kinds of schools (she turned down a higher paid position in a private school to take this year’s district job).

It’s just a crime against the profession and the public, in my opinion, to strip the public schools of a professional, committed, continuously maturing teacher corps.

It’s a weird day by any standard when the space shuttle goes up for one of its final voyages, commanded by the husband of a Congresswoman who is struggling to recover from from an assassin’s gunshot wound to the head, while two billion people watch the future King of England get married, as a woman embraces her three year old grandaughter on a mattress in the front yard of their tornado-decimated home in Birmingham.

I am a teacher. I rank and judge my students’ products all day long; it’s my job. It’s hard enough not to let that habit of mind bleed into all my reactions to the world on any given Sunday. The myriad and often contraditory ways in which I find myself trying to do that today are even more head-spinning.

Why not take joy in the sight of a princess on her wedding day? Don’t beauty and hope trump it all?

I can’t believe people are more interested in some fat-cat hierarchical royal farce while tornadoes are destroying whole communities in our own country.

Why be sad about a house? At least your grandkid’s still alive.

Good science will save us all.

Gabrielle Giffords can’t use the right side of her body anymore. Space travel seems a little insignificant, don’t you think?

Line up the events. Judge them. Shoot the rest down. Makes that endless soup of world-sized information easier to deal with, for one thing. Makes teaching easier, too. Makes everything easier. 

In her recent article “The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re Going to Miss Almost Everything,” Linda Holmes calls this approach to information “culling.” She’s talking about cultural information, but there’s a universal application to be had here.

What I’ve observed in recent years is that many people…are far more interested in culling than in surrender. And they want to cull as aggressively as they can. After all, you can eliminate a lot of discernment you’d otherwise have to apply to your choices of books if you say, “All genre fiction is trash.” You have just massively reduced your effective surrender load, because you’ve thrown out so much at once.

The same goes for throwing out foreign films, documentaries, classical music, fantasy novels, soap operas, humor, or westerns. I see people culling by category, broadly and aggressively: television is not important, popular fiction is not important, blockbuster movies are not important. Don’t talk about rap; it’s not important. Don’t talk about anyone famous; it isn’t important. And by the way, don’t tell me it is important, because that would mean I’m ignoring something important, and that’s … uncomfortable. That’s surrender.

The “surrender” approach, on the other hand, does not trash other realities so that we can feel comfortable with our decisions on what’s important and what isn’t. Instead, it acknowledges that many, many things are worth our care and attention; and as a singular human being, there’s only so far that attention can– and should– go.

…what we’ve seen is always going to be a very small cup dipped out of a very big ocean, and turning your back on the ocean to stare into the cup can’t change that.

I keep a children’s book on my bedside table and read it– both to my daughter and son, and myself– at least twice a month. It’s Don Muth’s beautiful Zen rendition of the Tolstoy short story The Three Questions, and it concludes with these words.

Remember then that there is only one important time, and that time is now. The most important one is always the one you are with. And the most important thing is to do good for the one who is standing at your side. This is why we are here.

I recognize this now as “surrender.” And it seems to me that this is not only an approach that can keep us healthy as teachers, but as human beings.

So I’ll try to walk through this day with a prayer for Ms. Giffords, a Facebook post enjoying the loveliness of Kate Middleton, a donation to the Alabama Red Cross, and not enough time to get snotty over the relative value of any of them– since I have Scout needing comfort about the fact that she hates the lisp her new braces gives her, and Rachael to grin at over her newfound love of vampire books, and a boy to treat gently after a week of hard-core bullying.

I surrender.

THE RATIONALE:

This is really not to further the complaintfest that has become the popular media’s characterization of teachers these days. I like complaining less and less, I especially have come to dislike complaining over the blog, and the short list of people I admire and trust advocate quite vehemently against complaining. So, no thanks to that.

That being said, I find myself returning to the following math over and over again, for three reasons.

A) I try to argue as if I’m right, and listen as if I’m wrong.

B) I think about education when I should be eating and/or sleeping.

C) I consistently forget how the math goes (English teacher).

I have it scratched out on a bent index card next to my bed, several restaurant napkins, and now the back of a few composition notebooks. I’ve worked it out time after time, distilling to its dirtiest, simplest form, erring always on the side that is not mine. I archive it now in the hope that the link to this post can become a shorthand for three situations.

A) I can use it at parties;

B) I can forward it to certain family members; and

C) I can favorite it and load it up whenever I come away from one of those articles I mention above, usually read way too late at night.

You can too.

THE MATH:

I work 60 hours a week, on average. (You’ll have to trust me on that. I’ve logged and counted it several times to be sure.)
I complete an additional state average of 35 mandated professional development hours every year.
I work at least an additional 30 hours during my paid holidays and vacations.
I work 40 weeks a year. (The length of my school year, absent all vacation and paid holidays.)

= I work 2,465 hours a year.

The average American employee, according to the National Sleep Foundation’s 2008 Survey on Work and Rest, works 52 hours a week. (This includes several hours per week off the clock, as do my numbers.)
The average private American employee, according to the 2010 Employee Benefits Survey of the National Bureau of Labor Statistics, works 47.4 weeks a year (52 weeks, absent the mean days for paid vacation and holidays).

= The average private American employee works 2,465 hours a year.

THE CONCLUSION:

A) Is really, really weird. Scout’s Honor: I worked out my math before any other math, and did not massage anything to make the totals come out exactly equal.

B) Does not reflect the lowballing I’ve done on the average private American employee’s behalf.

C) Speaks for itself.

Good god. Why?

First: You have all the completely unearned, massive engagement of kids who know this song was released only two or three weeks ago to 85 million hits on Youtube. Strong recommendation: don’t wait. Get this into your classroom before two weeks are out.

Second: Like every other human being, kids jump at the chance to be the experts.  They ache to be critics on why a piece of writing works or doesn’t. Let them.

Finally:  Everyone talks about anchor papers and quality exemplars, but just as instructional– and often a heck of a lot more fun– is looking at work that is really, really bad.

How do I do this?

Since the layers of ridiculousness in this tune are near impenetrable, you have to be exceptionally focused and intentional in how this song is presented, or you’ll be at it for the whole period or longer.

In our classroom, kids have a Figurative Language Cheat Sheet which we tape to the front of their English binders in September (copy available here). We use this constantly as one of the rulers of critically analyzing the pieces we read. It serves not only as a visual reinforcement of the definitions, but also as a means of demonstrating that figurative language is the key to good writing across all genres.

Hand out a copy of the lyrics (available here), and have the kids place the Cheat Sheet side by side with it. Our purpose, I tell them, is to use figurative language to determine why this is the worst song on the planet.

Play through the video ONCE.

They will beg you to see it again. Ignore them.

They will also want to tell you many, many things about the song. Be draconian about not taking these comments until you’ve done the analysis.

Give them a strictly timed three minutes to label any figurative language in the song.

Discuss as a whole class.

Three Real-Time Examples:

Gotta get my bowl, gotta get my cereal. This is where I teach the kids about the phrase “labored rhymes.”

Makes tick tock, tick tock, wanna scream. Onomatoepoeia From Nowhere. About a bus, apparently.

Yesterday was Thursday. Today is Friday. Tomorrow is Saturday. And Sunday comes afterwards. While not strictly figurative language-based, this is the verse where we apply Nancie Atwell’s rule of  “So What?” What purpose does this exhaustive list of weekday names serve? (Perhaps Rebecca Black’s audience has trouble keeping them straight.)

And if you have time, discuss the bonus absurdism of the video: for example, how the song moves from 7 to 7:45 AM, when suddenly on the screen there appears to be a massive solar eclipse.

Best Student Comment:

“I’m very glad Rebecca Black didn’t actually get on the bus. She would have had a heart attack. There are just too many seating options.”

And the UnKindest Cut:

“Ms. S, did you know she did another song called ‘Prom Night’?” *

~~~~~~~~

* This is actually a very clever parody. But I couldn’t pass up the punchy ending.

The Rock:

I’m nervous about the new teacher evaluation measures coming down the pike in our state, and always have been. Here, Brad Jupp, a senior policy advisor and former teacher working closely with Arne Duncan, attempts to reassure me last June at an Ed Sector panel discussion that my fears about the skewing of teacher evaluation by highly problematic standardized assessments are unfounded.

It’s been nearly a year since we had that talk, and while I was impressed with Brad’s response, I am still highly skeptical, unfortunately.  My reasons, as it turns out, are literally embodied. They have two names.

The first: Stacey Isaacson.

And the second? President Barack Obama, who responds to a kid’s honest inquiry about the impact of high-stakes testing by taking what appears to be a significant detour from the policies of his own DOE.  For some top-notch reflection and investigative blogging on this deeply interesting and apparently uncensored statement by our President, check out Anthony Cody’s blog. It should give you some serious pause.

The Hard Place:

One of my electronic mentors and inspirations, Heather Wolpert-Gawron, was pink-slipped two weeks ago. Heather, by all measures, is a superlative teacher– a glance at her website will tell you that immediately. Nancy Flanagan, another inspiration, tells her dreadful story in turn. She was pink-slipped too– as Michigan Teacher of the Year. You read that correctly.

Heather, who has the benefit of working as a private section employee before becoming a teacher, kindly explained her take on the situation in an email exchange we had a few days ago.

… I do think that one of the reasons teachers fight so much against other measurements is fear.  Yet coming from the private sector, it’s a way of life.  However, I do believe that a teacher must give back in other ways besides longevity at a district.  Sure, that’s a key element.  But to follow through, what do they do with that expertise? Do they mentor other teachers?  Do they present at conferences?  Do they develop curriculum?  Do they take their knowledge and widen the base of wisdom around them?  We cannot afford to be a profession that shuts its doors and works in isolation.  Seniority represents longevity and longevity is a possible indication of dedication, sure.  But so is giving back your expertise, expanding and growing with the world outside of school.  I think there must be some ongoing evaluation that your practice is growing, that you are trying new strategies as well.

In both Heather and Nancy’s case, The Rock may have saved them both.

Or not.

The Solution?

“The perfect is the enemy of the good”– a mantra you may have heard from ed reformers– is one of those slippery statements that sounds so reasonable, so lovely in its construction, that it’s easy to forget the response of one of the citizens who was confronted with it in my hometown:

Like other critics {of mayoral control}, Glenny Williams worries that change simply for the sake of change could make things worse. “Everybody says, ‘We’ve got to do something,’ he said… “Well, you know: slavery was ‘something.’”

So part one of the solution is not pretty, or elegant, or efficient (lord, I hate that word sometimes). But it’s the only way:

Question. Everything.

However, (part two) there is an undeniable, painful human cost while we do. I think Heather, who speaks from the front lines as one of the wounded, has the last word on that aspect of this mess. Arguably, she seems to have the benefit of a supportive group of co-workers that many other teachers do not. But perhaps that is the very point.

I have gotten enormous support from my administration…  I think they see a direct correlation between what I do outside the classroom as a tool to help me inside the classroom.  I am undoubtedly a better teacher because of what I do.  For that reason, they are hugely apologetic about the pink slip, as if fear that I would somehow blame them…

but as I have said, there is no “them.”

There’s a broken system that can break a person, but as long as we all treat each other decently, none of us will come away from this with anything more than bruises. If we treat each other decently, then we can come to an easier consensus, both teachers and administrators alike, and form a more united front to stakeholders about what is best for our students.

As long as we treat each other decently.

If you think about it, that’s the real bottom line for teacher evaluation, isn’t it.

A heart-rending piece by an astrophysicist on why science fails in Japan– and how art may be the only thing that can rise in its place.

And for those of you needing “harder” evidence, check out this three year meta-study on intelligence and the arts from a consortium of leading neuroscientists funded by the Dana Foundation. Dana also has a fascinating blog for the latest news in neuroscience– subscribe.

I wrote a bit for ASCD recently reviewing a chapter of one of their publications, a dark reflection on modern education by Ronald Wolk. I don’t normally cross-post verbatim, but I thought I would this time.

I have been a rabid “get real, get out” curriculum advocate for a long time now, but in reading this chapter, I find that I’ve begun to question all that. These days, I see in Wolk’s approach the dangerous potential for triaging what we teach in terms of what is “practical”. What will get us a job? What will enable us to be competitive? What will help us survive?

But this is the problem, you see.  Survival is so much more– so much more– than practical understandings. It is so much more than where you get your bread.

Diane Ravitch voices this concern over and over again in her criticism of the narrowing of curriculum under NCLB; others, including myself, are worried about the related economic taint of the recently adopted Common Core Standards. And in terms of my own home subject, the influence of the federal government on the education platform of the National Council of Teachers of English is being hotly debated as we speak by some members.

Below, you’ll find my take on this issue.

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

In upstate New York, as I write, March is the typical lion/lamb stew: bitter winds and whirling snow one hour, and robins chirping in warm sunbeams literally in the next. My 6-year-old son is even tracking “lion weather days” versus “lamb weather days” in his kindergarten classroom. I realize now that his work is deeply connected my reaction to Ronald Wolk’s “Life to Text” (Chapter 13 in Wasting Minds) on a number of levels. First, and overall, the chapter as a whole is very much like March: a mix of truth, optimism, and murkier criticism and supposition.

Second, on the practical level, in tracking the weather my son is doing exactly the kind of real-life work for which Wolk advocates so passionately in this chapter—work that Wolk asserts has not been “widely adopted by mainstream education.” (124) Yet in several places in the chapter, Wolk states that experiential learning is alive and well in schools. It has a history that is “long and distinguished” (124); there are “established beachheads” (124) all around the world; and researchers looking into the question in America have “no trouble finding . . . examples of students learning in real-world situations.” (120) I myself can think of multiple examples outside of my son’s where experiential learning is taking place both in the school in which I work, in schools near us, and in my own classroom.

This is not to say that Wolk isn’t correct in his assessment; only that it doesn’t seem to be terribly nuanced or well-supported. He cites only one student survey from 2005 that indicates that experiential work is lacking in schools, and provides no longitudinal data for how the balance of schooling may have shifted over the years toward this very kind of work. (I imagine, for example, that the one-room schoolhouse in the 1800′s did even less experiential learning than now, to put it mildly.)

In addition, “schooling” seems to exist in a large lumpy pool in this chapter: not only are colleges, K-12, vocational programs, and other organizations conflated, but schooling “across the world” is thrown in for good measure. Having worked in Korea as a teacher, I can say that U.S. schools are a haven of experiential learning by comparison; with a K-12 certification in ESL, I can also say that U.S. primary schools are a similar haven, in contrast to U.S. secondary schools. If Wolk is sincere in his title’s declaration to “do something” about this situation, then why not paint the experiential picture as accurately as possible?

Lastly, let’s also notice what my son is doing with his teacher: connecting real life to the well-known poetic couplet describing March, to which he was exposed before tracking the weather. Living his daily life, eating his Cheerios, and getting on and off the big yellow bus, would my son have come up with the simile that the weather is like a lion all on his own? Perhaps—but perhaps not. This is where I find the biggest hole in the argument for totally experiential-based learning. The “life to text” cycle to which Wolk refers (123) is beautiful and powerful—and yet too often, it presupposes that there is little or nothing of use to be gained from a reverse cycle—of “text to life.”

This becomes especially problematic in the aesthetic realm of education. Let’s look at my home subject of English. Of what practical use is a Shakespearean sonnet or reading John Steinbeck’s books? There really isn’t any, according to many, and this reasoning is what is behind the strong modern push to fill English instruction primarily with nonfiction. And yet our lives are made inestimably better, elucidated, and made meaningful and bearable by being taught to see and understand metaphor, narrative, imagery, and theme.

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

—William Carlos Williams

There are other analogous subjects taught in school. Theoretical physics. Calculus. Art. Music. Even some aspects of history, one could argue, are not relevant to “real-world” concerns. Where do the irreproducible gifts of these subjects go when it is only the realm of sensory, daily experience that dictates our curricula? I would argue that there are significant places in school, like my son’s kindergarten classroom, where the text should come before life—to make that life even richer. This weakness of the experiential approach, admittedly, is not Wolk’s problem. But in advocating for experiential learning above all, it is his responsibility.

Ultimately, I have to end on a note of full disclosure: If you search up my stuff on the web or my teaching blog, you will see a strong bend toward Wolk’s very arguments. Again, I am not saying he’s wrong . . . only, like March weather, that he is perhaps not entirely right.