History Repeating

The image and feared damage of the big bad teacher has grown in political speeches and editorials to mythic proportions. In the hands of those who seek to sharpen their pitchforks to catch this enemy, teacher reform has lost sight of what belongs at its heart: collaboration and support. Unfortunately, history has shown us time and again that when it comes to complex social issues, the public will accept one-dimensional scapegoats crafted from ignorance and fear. One of the most ignorant ideas of late (albeit putting aside Michele Bachmann’s characterizing of the homosexual lifestyle as enslavement) is that it is the teacher’s fault our schools are failing and to fix this we must decisively ax close to half the city’s teachers.¹

This trend toward blaming the teacher isn’t new, it’s just strangely gaining credibility when powerful evidence to the contrary has been surfacing. Prolific amounts of research have recently been printed countering these claims. Articles like “Military Children Stay a Step Ahead of Public School Students” ² and “The Teacher Quality Conundrum”³ prove that the correct approach to fixing the issue is not to ax tons of teachers because:

• The National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP] did a study that shows national improvement in 4^th grade math scores, but stagnant scores in reading. As the author of the article states: “If teachers are so vitally important, why have fourth-grade math scores dramatically improved, but reading scores have flatlined, given that — at least at the elementary level — the same teachers are responsible for each?”
• The NAEP also revealed that, “military bases have outperformed public schools on both reading and math tests.” This is attributed largely to the lack of teaching to tests and micromanagement of teachers. However, I would contend it is also due to a more structured and disciplined home environment that military personnel provide for their children.

Yet, the train against teachers gains in speed lately. The state has spent money unveiling new teacher evaluating systems that have incensed enough administrators and teachers that over 500 principals have signed a protest against them.⁴ Formulas for grading schools continue to be used that punish ones who show improvement. These formulas also clearly state that a school’s grade will improve if they beat out other schools in the community on state testing. This kind of malignant interpretation of ‘competition’ in the education field is prohibiting our ability to make genuine gains that serve the public’s children. For example, during recent conferences, teachers and administrators who have found methods that work to reduce the achievement gap refuse to share. While other schools, quite frankly, appear to be gaming the system since schools who take in more self contained ISS[instructional support students/special ed] students struggle to compete on state tests, and a recent data meeting proved that charter schools and private schools have not taken in the same number of these students as public schools have. This diminishes the collaborative spirit that should be in education. Political officials have wasted time and resources creating formulas to seek out a treacherous villain that doesn’t exist. Yes, bad teachers exist. But, do bad teachers who are in the minority of a school’s staff wreak havoc so pervasively on a whole country? No. AND, it can be argued that some of these teachers are bad because they are rendered so by a government that takes funds away from schools that struggle. How is it that America spends more on prisons than it does on schools?⁵ And, when teachers can’t engage students with updated media because there is none available, we blame the teacher!

As not just a teacher, but as an American citizen, I strongly believe that the government should create a tax incentive for low-income families who have students on track to graduate in four years. This is a reform that would work from the ground up because students in my classroom are part of a culture where pride is gained in gang involvement not in going to a more prestigious school (just today I counseled a student about how he can avoid the gang he recently left when he walks home, and discussed comebacks with another student for when his peers tear him down for showing up for tutoring). Genuine reform requires culture change and it isn’t impossible when support and collaboration WITH teachers, not against them, remain in the formula. The idea of this enemy of the ineffective teacher is more damaging than an ineffective teacher is in the classroom. It has created more chaos in the system than genuine progress.

For my fellow teachers reading this, the ones who understand so well how these issues remain in dire need of addressing in order to truly salvage our education system- please also remember that as teachers who have to wake up everyday to serve our communities with purpose and personality: it’s vital to keep a sense of humor intact and remember to weather the illogical storms that undermine the degrees we’ve obtained. As Troy Maxson from Fences always says: “You gotta take the crookeds with the straights” and perhaps do so with a laugh because politicians, and some administrators through them, are working in circles, and we need to shake our heads and remember their folly is all just : 

 

 

Keep calm, teach on.

———————————————————————————————————————

1- “Bloomberg Would Only Fire Half the City’s Teachers Hypothetically”

2- “Military Children Stay a Step Ahead of Public School Students”

3-  “The Teacher Quality Conundrum”

4- “More Principals Join Teacher Evaluation Protest”

5-  ”U.S. Must Spend More On Education, Less On Prisons”

My new role model

Change that works? I’m interested. http://vimeo.com/13575876

Etger Keret’s “The Nimrod Flipout”

You willfully sign your mind up to be messed with when you walk into a movie like Black Swan or sit down to read stories by authors like Hunter S. Thompson. The camera work and anxiety addled narrators ensnare you with surreal yet gripping conflict; the aftermath leaving you to contemplate altered senses of reality. Then, on the other hand, there are authors who use subtler methods to stir the mind. Methods that feel as if reading the story is an act of meditation, not an exorcism. One such author is Etger Keret.  In his collection of short stories called The Nimrod Flipout, each story has a gravity that moves you through the virtue of his extremely nuanced creation of three dimensional characters within four pages. Like Black Swan and Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, there are surreal plot twists that serve as metaphors for real life experiences. Yet his metaphors don’t repulse you. They ring so sweetly, yet unsettlingly, accurate that your mind lingers with the image, seeing instead the surreal as real.

The opening story, “Fatso,” is the clearest example of his technique. Click here for the full text, available through LA Weekly. It tells the story of a man who discovers his girlfriend turns into a man at night. An absurd idea and an obvious deal breaker (for most, I assume). The outcome forces you to examine your own relationship and whether or not  you accept your partner’s inner ‘Fatso’. Other favorites from this collection of short stories are “Gur’s Theory of Boredom,” “Shriki,” and “A Thought In The Shape of A Story.”

I’ve used both “Fatso” and “Gur’s Theory of Boredom” in the classroom. The latter led to an interesting debate on whether love is motivated by boredom. A ’4 corner debate’ on Gur’s theory would have been ideal, but now I know for next year.

The Collective Consciousness Advertising Builds

Examining George Saunder’s “Jon”… “Because love is a mystery but the mechanics of love need not be.”

In the exposition of Saunder’s short story the protagonist, Jon, makes this naïve statement on the eve of discovering very private forms of self-love. Well, at least the mechanics of it. As the act leads him to push boundaries created by “coordinators,” Jon begins to see the world through love-tinted glasses and in his case, it’s not all rosy. Instead, it threatens the consumer driven high he once enjoyed in a Vonnegut-styled setting where the nation is built on target audience communities, and celebrities are the people who review new products. Jon’s resulting conflict then becomes how to master the real mechanics of love: the everyday choices that involve more than yourself, the responsibilities of the physical act, the sacrifices it inspires you to make just to be near the person, and even greater… the difficulty of expressing love once you realize how hopelessly inadequate language can be for that task.

There is much more thematically to the story but I hesitate to delve into it for two reasons:  the story truly is a must read, and should I decide to teach it, I’ve already given away too much to students who are cheating by reading this and who need to trust what the story has provoked them to think on their own!

However, for fellow English teachers or lovers of language:

I find Saunder’s statement about language the most interesting. While working to obtain my teaching certificate, it was brought to my attention that one of the reasons to teach the classical canon of literature is to ensure that the population has a similar body of knowledge from which is draw on and make connections. It is thought that on some level we are able to express ourselves clearer through commonly read examples and metaphors that we’ve all interacted with during our secondary education. Saunders seems to point out that this common language has now been created through advertising, or I would argue, TV shows and movies. Yet, is he saying, by the end of the story, that this type of common language (think: Jersey Shore) is full of hot air and empty metaphors? Does it then impel us more so to thrust Keats, Dickens, and Shakespeare on students to save them from an inadequate common consciousness?  Or is it just that– language- whether it be from an advertisement or from an esteemed poet, will never unravel the labyrinth of human emotion so it really doesn’t matter whether we teach the same classical literature to hordes or if we teach different quality contemporary literature to a few, because regardless of what we teach, at best all we’ll have is a beautiful collection of imperfect metaphors to share with each other about who we are?

Addendum

Apparently, The New York Times also had the idea of computers impact on our ability to focus in mind since they posted an article on it this morning: Hooked on Gadgets, Paying a Mental Price. The article touches on many of the same issues I raised yesterday, but with a lot more research behind it. Check it out!

Eight Seconds Isn’t Enough Time To Learn

*Focus Attention Span Average: 8 seconds.

*Sustained Attention Span Average: 20 minutes.

How long can you focus?

As I was doing research for a new curriculum project today, I came across this blog “What We Share and What We Don’t” by Nina Froriep. She posed a fascinating question: In an age where media outlets have to shed more information than it actually shares, how important is what gets left on the cutting room floor? And even more crucial: why are we pandering to shorter attention spans by making both news and entertainment shows shorter and shorter when that just feeds the problem?

This is a scary thought. We have less information being shared in a world where the Internet should have given us the opportunity to break down all barriers to information, and therefore education. Instead, I would go as far as saying it’s currently crippling us because the Internet holds up two paths: the easy way and the actual learning way. For example, when you are faced with a translation problem for your language class – are you going to look up just the one word you can’t remember as you complete the assignment, or are you going to sign onto Babelfish and have it translate the whole thing for you? As you read Shakespeare, will you sit and struggle with the text and make connotative connections to words, or are you going to read Sparknotes?

Most students these days are doing what busy adults are doing, they are using the Internet to save time. This isn’t wrong entirely since we do live in a very demanding, fast-paced society. However, we need to start paying attention to what these new devices are doing to us. When youtube can be set up to play just a one minute clip of a show, or when the news becomes about the 30 second sound byte, we are lowering our ability to take in a lot of information at once. As a result, current generations not only don’t have the same formative educational struggles prior generations had, but they also don’t have the patience to deal with a minor obstacle to completing an assignment. If we don’t develop strategies to cope with (or better yet, improve) their shorter attention spans, we aren’t allowing them to have true learning experiences.

This means in order to keep education engaging, we need to work on ways to develop student attention spans, and we must create programs that foster an intrinsic academic spirit. At my current school we have experimented with giving out movie tickets for students with improved attendance. I strongly believe this is like putting a band-aid on BP’s oil spill. It will allow for temporary improvement, but will not solve any long term issues. The answer instead comes from developing a partnership with the local community to value education. I think we need fun programs at local libraries (for all ages) and more advertising about existing programs! It’s very important that students are taken at a young age to library programs because an early love of reading eliminates half the battle high school teachers face. In addition, the pacing for reading should consistently increase as a school year progresses, and I believe a goal for reading must be sent home to parents. Often we see parents just at Parent-Teacher Night, but if we engaged parents in other academic after-school activities with their children, we would allow them to take a stronger role in where their child should be in their reading and writing. These are just a few ideas but feel free to message me with some of yours regarding attention span building or events that help foster an academic spirit. Hope to hear from you!

Accepting the image first and the idea second.

On Wednesday night I had the privilege of attending a reading by Mark Doty at Queens College. The poems that he chose for the reading were of a wide variety in both subject and form. He explored the idea of beauty and destruction through the description of a beauty salon set ablaze. He expressed a philosophical point on marriage in the way dogs choose to show affection, and he impressed the crowd when he gave a poignant voice to a mammal that died 40,000 years ago. This is Doty’s gift. He reflects on moments and images, then teases out through his reverie the greater meaning of the metaphors that construct our lives.  Most of us would look at a building on fire, and provided there is help, we then look away, carry on our lives. Doty, however, doesn’t settle to look away and move on. As he describes in his essay “Souls On Ice,”  he lets the image sink in and know before his conscious mind does, what powerful idea is held in his vision. He also trusts both image and language to guide him to that discovery.

This is not easy to do as a writer. I believe it was Noam Chomsky who tried to explain that thoughts without words remain shadows in the brain. This is true for many of us who don’t have Doty like skills to elicit from the shadows our greater thought. To help students hone this skill (and thus improve their critical thinking ability), I am developing a new lesson. One that relies on groups of students looking at powerful images and doing stream of consciousness writing about a personal experience that connects to the image. By connecting experience to image I aim to guide them to tease out a greater meaning in a simple image, thus creating their own metaphors.

This is similar to another lesson I have done in the past where students react to works of art and write a poem inspired by the way the art makes them feel. Please view that lesson here #5 mood poet create and the worksheet here #5b mood ws. I  have now done this lesson four times and each time the students second guess their language and metaphors. It is not until they read to the class and get the positive feedback that they trust what they have created. I’m always impressed though by the remarkable visions they have when viewing the art. Just this year a student remarked about one of the Tristan and Isolde paintings I displayed by Salvador Dali, saying that it was a man with the burden of love on his back and the poem he planned to create will be about how the sea wants to get rid of him in order to get him to move on. In this student’s mood poem he worked to convey the feeling of a heavy burden, while many others viewed the painting’s mood as merely sadness and grief. I was ecstatic about this very layered response, but please keep in mind if you do this lesson that the lower grade level students need a lot of guidance on how to create the poem. I have done this lesson also with all grade levels, but it required two 45 minute periods with my ninth grade class, whereas it was done in one 45 minute period with the juniors.

With my new idea of connecting personal experience, I aim for students to break out of viewing objects and images of the everyday world as empty of meaning. The art is a wonderful thought provoker, but students expect it to have deeper meaning, so what would a student do when instead faced with more typical images like a shriveled up strawberry? Hopefully, through their writing, they will learn not to see merely meaning within the extraordinary, but the brilliance in the seemingly ordinary.

Analytical student projects= one happy teacher!

Last year, I posted a project I came up with called “Silhouettes.” It was designed for The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, but can be adapted for most other literary units. Here is the Silhouettes worksheet. It has since been updated so please use this link not the old one. Follow this link for the updated version of the lesson: #9 silhouettes proj which sets up the project. You will need two 45 minutes periods for this.

My students this year did a spectacular job analyzing the novel’s characterization and applying it to ideas of color, form, and symbol. Here are some pictures of the work I displayed in my classroom. The first one was interesting because in their write up about Jack Salmon they had to explain the ironic choice of a magazine copy of the 1940′s Rosie the Riveter on their poster. The group analyzed how Jack’s role changed in the household when his wife left, and how he was capable of displaying both heated anger and genuine compassion towards multiple characters. This gave him a very flexible gender role, and their image adjustment to Rosie (Can “he” do it?) was a nice fit to suggest these ideas! Very proud!

Getting Trampled As We Fight The Good Fight

It is November 11th and I’m observing Veteran’s day lost in thought for those who have given their lives in war, especially the recent loss at Fort Hood. A friend of mine is leaving for Iraq on Saturday and I can’t imagine being in his place. His journey over the next year will be a harrowing one, and I’m quite sure I would never survive it. Yet, I see parallels in our lives considering the way both situations [military service and education] are being handled by our government. Cutbacks, paperwork being filed to CYA instead of for the purpose of compassion and action, impossible goal setting, and a timeline that just doesn’t make sense- as well as a strategy created in a fantastical world of make believe. A colleague who retired last year referred to us teachers as “Special Forces” and by all means we are. And as a result, I’m beginning to understand the mental plight that besieges veteran teachers and leads them to become those stigmatized tenured teachers who seemingly do nothing to “truly teach.” It is a very quiet form of PTSD.*

Tomorrow I have a lesson aimed at teaching my students how to elevate their phrasing by using more sophisticated transitional phrases, stronger verbs, and more descriptive adjectives. To do this, students will pair up  and edit sentences that came from sample essays from the regents. Once edited, students will compete in a “walk off”- Blue Steel style down a fake runway I’ve created with my monitors. At the end of the runway walk, they loudly say their new and improved sentence and the class votes for who edited the phrase the best and showed the most sophistication.

I should be excited about this lesson, but instead I feel comatose. Although there will be heart warming moments and I’m confident real learning will take place, I’m also sure that I will encounter students yelling in the halls at each other that they are “stank ass bitches” while classes are going on, or telling me I’m a crazy white woman so they don’t need to show me their program and recently I’ve become very tired of patiently explaining to teenagers why it is unacceptable to wrestle in the halls (while they are still locked and fighting). I’m also exhausted from planning 15 lessons per week (on average for my three preps) and handling feedback on homework, tests, and classwork for 170 students. Like Esme Codell said in her book Educating Esme- I don’t have one day. I have 170 days with my students. I have 170 inputs minimum daily. I work every second of my day (including when I leave the school) with blind hope that I can educate in a system that leaves me feeling like I am swimming against the current.

Education reform in the news centers on teaching teachers how better to engage students, or hiring more qualified teachers. Time and again this ignores bigger issues of budgetary problems and cultural issues. It burns to hear that the state will only consider our stats for regents scores a measure of success if we get a majority of students from ISS (Instructional Support Services/Spec. Ed) to pass with a 65 or above, on a test where achieving a 55 is the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest to them. That’s no hyperbole either.

It is equally horrible to know that three students that I worked with last year are now pregnant and will soon drop out to pursue GED’s. These students last year went from having 180 absences in their sophomore year, to only being absent 15 days with me. This past June I celebrated those small victories since these three students were part of a handful that I felt I had changed and therefore made a positive influence in my community. But now since they are pregnant and fighting to still get some form of a degree I wonder about the futility of my fight. Teachers are asked to teach better and get absentees back in the class, yet when students are being evicted or getting pregnant I can’t get them back into the room by making a phone call home and I can’t solve that by being more “engaging” (latest buzz word). Cultural issues MUST be addressed if we mean to make a difference! Not to mention that new media components on testing means we need media to teach with! How about Quality Review taking note that we lack the money to get more TVs, other than the three we have for 3,000 students? This would be more helpful to note than whether or not I’ve taken steps to address why nine students are absent. Do the math- with better media I can more effectively teach the other twenty six that are there, and achieve a greater good for a greater number.

Real change is never accomplished by ignoring reality. The reality here is that fixing minor issues has been sold as the cure to the public, and now the burden of proof for effective teaching and its subsequent pressure have put in the corner the one person who knows the truth (the teacher!), and they have no way out with that information. Students need schools that can provide better media, lower class sizes, and a government that will provide monetary support for those families struggling to keep a roof over their head and early sex education and support for areas where the teen pregnancy rate is high. If these things don’t happen, then it doesn’t matter how qualified that teacher is because a Harvard Degree doesn’t protect kids from unstable home lives, it doesn’t magically make teens use condoms properly, or guarantee that this super qualified teacher knows how to speak to a student who wants to jump a kid after school because his hat was stolen.

And the last thing to leave you thinking about is a humorous (yet startling) article from the perspective of standardized test graders. Check out: Reading Incomprehension

*Please Note — In no way shape or form is this meant to undermine the stress soldiers endure. I have sincere amounts of respect for everyone who has fought and continues to fight abroad. I am merely drawing a parallel in the government’s mishandling of these important cornerstones of our society.

Apatow is the new Nietzsche?

Reading “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” for my History of Literary Theory course.  

I wrote the following for the course’s discussion board. Any philosophy majors or other teachers taking theory may appreciate this:

Nietzsche proves that we aren’t looking for truth, we are using language to hide ourselves. There is a pretense of searching for truth by expressing our subjective emotions through metaphor, but that is all an illusion. This is a form of deception we accept in our every day lives and if we believe him, we are running contrary to Western values which tell us to accept our personal feelings as truths to convey. Capitalistic societies exploit our exaltation of the self because to work efficiently they need people to truly believe the idea that “we can achieve as much as we want as long as we try, it’s up to the self.” Yet if Nietzsche is right, we can’t achieve as much as we want because we won’t gain happiness if we remain men of intuition, since we are doomed to continue to make the same mistakes. This vein of thought is still being explored today, and has been found in a somewhat unlikely source: Judd Apatow’s latest movie Funny People. Time Out New York reviewed it (giving it five out of five stars by the way) saying: “Unpretentiously, the film comes around to a grand question: Do we really want to learn from life’s lessons? Or keep on laughing?” I think most of society probably just wants to laugh, and I think that means in Nietzsche’s eyes we remain men of intuition not reason.

Nietzsche’s work also seems to re-pose some earlier concerns about language. Plato’s point of literature as a “copy of a copy” gets new life by Nietzche as he considers the lack of reality truly contained in literature. Sassaure’s preoccupation with the ambiguity of signs and signifiers also seems to lie beneath this exploration of truth. Instead of the pieces of the puzzle coming together though, it seemed like we put them together and found a more jagged edge on it’s outside, one that is harder to make things ultimately fit together because “there is no truth but personal truth” just seems so immature now.

For the teachers out there: Can a high school English class really ever mediate that idea? I tend to think the scope is too large and what we teach kids needs to just be broad themes that resonate as personal truth. Nietzsche might hate me for it, but I’m ok with that.