The Life and Death of a Girl in Chicago

"She loved Fig Newtons and lip gloss."

I have been feeling guilty for not writing anything on this blog about the gun death of Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old girl who attended Martin Luther King College Preparatory High School, the selective enrollment high school where my next-door neighbor teaches drama. For the climax of his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Obama began to describe Hadiya, whose parents were seated next to the First Lady, using the above sentence. He went on to embellish his portrait, but it is an interesting starter to me, because, delivered in Obama's signature matter-of-fact style, it portrays her as just, or merely, a girl.

A girl who, instead of going straight home after school got out early, decided to go hang out in the park with some friends. It is not a big leap of the imagination, when put this way, to believe that Hadiya could have been a student at the school where I taught. We sometimes hold our breath on the days that students get out early, fearing that just these sorts of feuds will have just enough more daylight for the worst to happen.

When the Newtown shooting happened in December, I was certain that it would prove to be the catalyst for real anti-violence reform at the federal level. I was wrong. The real catalyst was not the death of two dozen innocent children; rather, it was the death of a single, defenseless girl.

It matters, too, that Pendleton was just a girl. And she, like so many young women, was such a wonderful girl: she was beloved by everyone around her. Had she been male, the outpouring of grief over her death might have been more easily tempered by questions about what she was doing in that park that afternoon. Equally significant, then, is that the first reform program announced in the wake of Hadiya's death is one from which she would not benefit at all: a $3m investment in the mentoring program known as "Becoming a Man." It does not necessarily need pointing out that Hadiya Pendleton probably had no desire to become a man. This mentoring program, which, like many mentoring and tutoring and after-school programs, has had some success in keeping young men and boys occupied so that they will not be "sucked in" to other, more violent pursuits. It begs the question, then, that "Becoming a Man" might have saved Hadiya, if indirectly, by preventing her killers from becoming involved in a gang. But, as I have written before, programs for teens tend to be very heterosexist in the ways that they insist on strict boundaries between two genders and the behaviors (stereo)typically practiced by those two genders. It deserves pointing out that there are plenty of young women and girls who get up to no good after school, too, and they need things to do after school, too.

Last year, one of my students told me about an argument she had with her father when she wanted to become involved in such afterschool programs as the newspaper and sports teams. Her father didn't want her walking home after dark, which, in these Chicago winters, comes all too quickly. She argued, in response, that he would not make the same interdiction against a male child. And that's almost definitely true. But, considering Hadiya Pendleton or the countless unnamed innocent victims of poorly-targeted gun violence, who can blame him? 

A school that offers every possible sport, that keeps its gym and weight room open, that has a newspaper and a ballroom dance club--that school is preventing violence every day, and, at least at my school, our principal knows it.

Unfortunately, most of these things happen because teachers are willing to donate their time and sponsor these extracurricular activities for no pay. Coaches get paid a small sum, but club sponsors do not. There can be a lot of pressure on teachers to offer activities, because we, too, know what goes on out there if we are not making life interesting enough inside the building.

So you know what? I'll take Becoming a Man. It took the prominent death of an ordinary girl and some journalists pointing out that the park in which Hadiya was shot and killed is just a mile from the President's own Hyde Park-Kenwood mansion. But what a mile! As friends and readers who live in Chicago know, Hyde Park and Bronzeville often appear much farther apart than that, as do Austin and Oak Park, also only a mile apart. It bears pointing out that Harlem and the Upper East Side of New York City are also about a mile apart. A mile is a long way in the big city.

The President's address began to swell into oratory on the note of Pendleton's death. In the style of the man whose name graces Hadiya's school, Obama listed the locales that give a name to other American gun massacres. Newtown. Aurora. Gabby Giffords. There were more, but I sort of lost track, except to notice the places he didn't name, because they are too old, too long gone, to name: Virginia Tech. Northern Illinois University. Fort Hood. The oratory culminated on the refrain, "They deserve a vote." I lost count of how many times the President said it.

But what kind of vote? A vote on what? It will take more than $3 million to memorialize Hadiya Pendleton, the children of Newtown, and the other untold hundreds killed every year in Chicago, and elsewhere.

Yesterday I was listening, as I always do, to Chicago Public Radio, and I heard two pieces that, to me, say more than I can ever try to about the life and death of a girl, or any child, in the city of Chicago. So here they are. 

The first is the story of the violence interrupter Ameena Matthews. Matthews grew up in Chicago and is the daughter of Black P Stones founder Jeff Fort. Matthews is so poised and full of grace about her past life as a gang member that she leaves me speechless.

The second is the story of the recent gun death of another Chicago teen, this time on the west side. Unlike the case of Hadiya Pendleton (whose tragic proportions I by no means want to diminish), this murder will probably go unsolved.

James Baldwin's Schools Now

James Baldwin was born and raised in Harlem, and he attended three New York public schools. Recently while doing some writing on Baldwin I became curious about how Baldwin's schools were doing now, so I looked them up. This kind of research is inspired by one of my writing heroes, Jonathan Kozol, who analyzes symbols like the names of schools to express his vivid outrage about educational injustice.

The short version of my discoveries is this: all of James Baldwin's schools are now "college prep," non-neighborhood high schools. His elementary school is a charter high school, his middle school is a "contract" high school, and his high school is a magnet-ey neighborhood high school. NYCPS prides itself on offering families "options." So, if you want your child to go to high school, move to New York. But plan to pay for private school until high school (about which, in New York, we've heard plenty).

Backstory: A friend of mine wrote me a sweet and incredibly thoughtful note about my post about sisterhood. Because she was writing so much personal stuff about herself, she didn't want to comment publicly on my blog, so I'm going to keep her anonymous here, but she's an awesome woman. One thing she mentioned in her note was something that I had not known about her before: her grandfather was a classmate of Baldwin's at the very storied Dewitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. Celebrity Shortlist: Countee Cullen, James Baldwin, Romare Bearden, Stan Lee, Bob Kane, and Tracy Morgan, as well as dozens of influential people in prestigious mid-century New York professions: fashion (Ralph Lauren), essay-writing (Lionel Trilling), filmmaking (George Cukor).

Basically if you were born in Harlem or the Bronx, but then moved to Greenwich Village when you grew up, then there's a good chance you went to DeWitt Clinton. If producing celebrities is one of the measures of a school, then DeWitt Clinton is one of the greatest college-prep-cum-liberal-arts public schools ever. But, by today's measures, DeWitt Clinton is a "bad" school: New York State got a D on Michelle Rhee's recent and instantly infamous, completely disgusting report card, which makes me want to vomit so much that I refuse to link to it. Suffice to say, it seems pretty clear to me (and to most teachers I know) that Michelle Rhee was not a good teacher.

He is pissed.

OK, so that was the backstory. Here is the real story. Baldwin attended three New York schools, which he often referred to in public only by the P.S. numbers, which have all changed.

In this interview, one of Baldwin's earlier television appearances (on public television, Boston's WGBH), Baldwin names two of his three schools, at first only by number: P.S.24 and P.S.139. When I looked these schools up in the New York City schools database, however, they were no longer the numbers of schools in Harlem, and Baldwin often got their numbers wrong anyway.

For elementary school, Baldwin attended New York P.S. 24 in East Harlem. The school as it was no longer exists, and so I could not find its former name. Thanks to the magic of Google Street View, however, I was able to find out that the school building does still exist (as they often do). The school is now called--wait for it--Harlem Renaissance High School!

Wow. There is so much to say about this, but, to be brief: it does not surprise me, after my decade studying education off- and on- (as a hobby), that James Baldwin's elementary school would have been shuttered, renovated into a charter high school, and named for the Harlem Renaissance, which now goes by many other names in academia.* There is so much irony going on with this school that it makes my head spin. Baldwin would be pleased, but also pissed. Why? Because they couldn't be bothered to name the school after one of the many dozens of brilliant African Americans who actually went there--like Countee Cullen, or like James Baldwin.

In the video interview with Kenneth Clarke cited above, Baldwin notes (with a sardonic grin) the irony that his all-black middle school in Harlem is named after Frederick Douglass. How is Frederick Douglass Junior High doing now? Well, its name has changed, as well as its number. When Baldwin attended, it was P.S. 139, and now it goes more strictly by its name. When Baldwin attended, it was Frederick Douglass Junior High. Now, it is Frederick Douglass Academy High School, Jewel of the Westside, Where Failure is Not an Option. In brief: Baldwin's middle school, named for the most legendary black man in the history of America, "failed" and was reborn as a high school where Failure is Impossible Just Because the School Says So.

Baldwin's high school is probably the most well-known of his three schools. As noted above, the Bronx's DeWitt Clinton boasts a stunning list of notable alumni on this Wikipedia page. DeWitt's own website does not have a list of notable alumni, but DeWitt has an alumni association, a rare thing for a public school in an urban or a rural area, but a definite font of cash for most schools that have one.

So, the only one of Baldwin's three schools that still exists is the one that is the best endowed. Endowments matter. The two richest college prep schools in America--Phillips Exeter and Phillips Academy in Andover--have larger endowments than most colleges. Endowment also comes in the form of cultural capital, or fame. When your school has low test scores, but you have successful alumni, their success redounds to the school, which, in turn, makes the students from the school more successful, and usually in creative or scientific fields. (Stuyvesant, the most famous New York Public High School, has bragging rights to a number of Nobel Prizes.) Basically, if you want to find a famous urban high school, go to a hipster neighborhood and walk around a little bit. In Boston's Jamaica Plain, the old high school has been converted into condos. It's the virtuous circle of capitalism: philanthropy, prestige, and--oh yeah--pulling yourself up by your bootstraps--will make up for deficits like endemic generational poverty, about which this country seems more or less committed to doing nothing. Baldwin would not be pleased.

Now, you may call this a travesty of history, and it is indeed comical. But, as with most histories, it says more about who we as a nation are now than it does about who James Baldwin was when he attended these schools. An institution has a history that inheres in infrastructure--a name, a building--even if the school changes numbers or changes leaders. Think about how easy it is to recognize a school from the outside. School architecture matters, and we can think of any school's architecture as an artifact of our nation's architecture. A school is like a magnet: it can attract or repel wealth. I'm guessing there are people who still give money to DeWitt Clinton, easily the most "successful" of the three former-Baldwin schools, because it is the school of Stan Lee, or James Baldwin, or Charles Rangel, or Tracy Morgan. For comparison, if you live in Chicago, you might want to arrange a visit to the storied Wendell Phillips [Academy] High School, where many of my friends teach (because, disclosure: it is now operated by AUSL).

The Horatio Alger story is older than Horatio Alger, but, like all old stories, we should be careful not to love them just because they are old. This particular fairy tale, known as the American Dream, inspires many Americans to believe in a system that is terribly unequal, particularly if you want to do anything that was historically done by a woman, or a man playing a woman onstage (a "queer" man)--professions like teaching, librarianship, stay-at-home-motherhood, nursing, art-making, writing, acting, directing, designing, or anything involving left-handedness.

If the U.S. wants to fix poverty by fixing schools, they're going to need to look for what teachers call "modifications," but what might otherwise be considered, in contemporary Supreme Court jurisprudence, affirmative action. The first thing would be to invest in the impoverished communities that surround most "failing" schools, such as what Harlem Children's Zone founder Geoffrey Canada calls "Baby College" for at-risk parents and Head Start programs. The second thing, after early childhood spending, would be to provide extra supports for students who learn in different ways. At the Quaker school we called these students "students with learning differences." In CPS most people call them "Sped kids," but the more appropriate way to describe them is "students with disabilities." When I was a kid, we called these students by names that adults don't use in polite conversation anymore, but students use all the time, and names that I refuse on principle to reproduce in this context. But if you ever were called one of these names, called someone one of these names, or watched someone call someone one of these names, then you know what they are. And they all mean pretty much the same thing: either "cool" or "not cool."

Here's the thing, though, and maybe I can be so bold as to guess what James Baldwin might have wanted to see if he were alive today. Maybe the way to fix poverty is to address poverty, rather than attack the profession and the dignity of the teachers and administrators who work with the children of the poor every day of their working lives, and the dignity and work of the families that those schools serve.

Here's a fascinating note to end on. There is one James Baldwin School that shows up in a Google search. It is a private alternative high school in Greenwich Village. They refer to the school as JBS, just like my school, which was named after a transcendentalist naturalist: John Burroughs.



*Most academics who study African American literature now call it the New Negro Renaissance or, for academics who do not wish to distinguish activity by black artists from activity by white artists, just plain modernism. This is mostly because to say that the movement was "centered" in Harlem is inaccurate, as this diagram illustrates nicely--half of the people on this diagram never lived in Harlem, many of them were white, and Washington, D.C., Chicago, Nashville, Atlanta, Detroit, Boston, Seattle, St. Louis, and Cleveland, and later L.A. and Oakland, were also hubs of black intellectual activity. Let's put it this way: basically, in any major American city with an immigrant/migrant population, a strong settlement house movement, or a "university" vibe, there were black intellectuals being born and being raised. 

English and English Education in the Tower of Babel, Part 2: The Dread Five Paragraph Essay and Teaching Expository Writing

They are bad words: Five. Paragraph. Essay.

Last year, I assigned three full-length expository or persuasive essays to my honors students per semester, and two to my regular-level students per semester. That was about all I thought we could do in a year, and the grading still nearly crushed my spirit. I began to discover that my students almost routinely wrote one very good "body" paragraph, along with several less-good ones--something of a waste, it seemed. But then I figured that even these "summative" assessments could have a "formative" component: in other words, I could assess my students on their ability to write an organized and thoughtfully argued paragraph, while still having them practice writing an organized and thoughtfully argued essay, a skill to be mastered next year, or even further down the line. People learn how to write slowly by emulation, feedback, repetition, and coaching, and when you have between 28 and 35 students in each of 5 classes, that kind of work turns into formulas all too easily. If all a student is expected to do on, for example, the Illinois State Acheivement Test, or the ISAT, is to write a "three-part response," then that is what we will teach. And we have terrific formulas, and mnemonics, as I noted above. Here are some more:

For an introduction:
A. Attention Grabber
B. Background information
C. Claim

For a body paragraph:
P. Point
E. Evidence
E. Explanation
E. Evaluation

But here's the kicker: when I was teaching my first class of AP literature students a couple of years ago, and I wanted to prove to them that these formulas were Useful to Know in the Real World, I was able to point to any number of editorials in the Chicago Tribune or Chicago Sun-Times that look exactly like this. I was also able to point to one of the chapters of my dissertation, which as a five-page introduction, but still follows the ABC formula:

A: intriguing Anecdote, followed by a "close reading" of the anecdote.
B: Background of what other scholars have thought about the problem presented by the close reading of the anecdote, and why they're wrong about the problem (in the "Little Red Schoolhouse" style of the University of Chicago, this is called "stasis/destabilization").
C: Claim: my "take" on the problem.

In the two pedagogy courses I took for my English PhD, I was told again and again how silly the writing instruction in high school is. When I took the University of Chicago's course called Pedagogies of Writing, they were very intent on insisting that the "stasis/destabilization" introduction was extremely different from the "inverted paragraph" introduction. Likewise, they hated the words "topic sentence" like they were the work of the devil, but they used the words "paragraph-level claim" or even "point sentence" as if these were new inventions.

In Pedagogies of Writing, the instructors were really brutal toward high school English teachers, which, as a Once and Future high school English teacher, I found insulting. They actually showed us a graphic organizer from a Nebraska high school and everyone had a huge chuckle about it! They also showed us a sample essay from a student who had been taught the inverted-pyramid formula for an introduction. The essay was about Beloved. The introduction started with a generalization: Life is full of choices. It then went on to explain that in the novel Beloved, Sethe has a choice about whether to murder her baby or not murder her baby.

I certainly hope that this student never knows that his or her essay is used in this way to teach this course, year after year after year. So little teaching of writing goes on, even in freshman intro courses, that students are more often than not left to their own devices (in this case, literally: the rhetorical device of the inverted pyramid, general-to-specific, which, in this one case, turns out to be quite bathetic). By the time they get to some colleges, students are expected to show up already knowing how to write the way their professors want, or else they are given just one writing course, taught by an exasperated English professor, in which they are told that everything they learned in high school is hopelessly, worthlessly, wrong. It's deflating to the students, to say the least.

The worst part is, high school teachers combat the superiority complex of English professors by giving their students arbitrary rules: "don't use 'I.'" Use "transition words" like however, moreover, thus, and--be still my soul--in conclusion. I have taught my students, more than once, to begin an essay of literary analysis with the phrase "In [author]'s [novel/play/poem] [name of novel/play/poem]...."e.g., "In Richard Wright's novel Native Son..." Gag me with a chainsaw! But it sure is better than seeing something like "In the book Native Son by the author Richard Wright he says..." Where we could be teaching rhetoric, we teach formulas that look like rhetoric.

But formulas are a useful teaching tool. Teachers call it scaffolding. A scaffold is a temporary structure that is used when another structure is being built or repaired. What has to come next is the dismantling of the scaffold, to be sure, but it's the old you-have-to-learn-the-rules-before-you-can-break-them argument. I sort of believe this argument. When I taught theory, I found Audre Lorde's formulation "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" extraordinarily useful for teaching the various Marxist/subaltern--postcolonial, feminist, and African American--versions of poststructuralism. But I also always pointed out that word "dismantle" to my students--Lorde's claim is a fallacy. If you want to dismantle the master's house, you must either use the master's tools, or move at a frustratingly slow and careful pace with more rudimentary tools--for example, you can remove a screw with pliers, but it is much easier and faster to remove it with a screwdriver. But Lorde, herself an academic as well as a poet, didn't want to destroy the master's house. She wanted to live in it on her own terms. She had to learn to write like them before she could claim to write like herself.

I am also a firm believer that the relentless teaching of expository writing kills the love of writing in students, much like the relentless teaching of explication kills the love of reading--a Writicide to go alongside Kelly Gallagher's Readicide, if you will. The great majority of the high school students I have taught love to do things with words--they freestyle, they rap, they text, they chat, they gossip. The key is to harness this energy and creativity to the pursuit of improving their writing. It's a bare, biologically verifiable fact that teenagers are  going to be obsessed with themselves. So we let them write about themselves endlessly. And I would rather read 150 mediocre personal essays than 150 mediocre poetry explications any day. But that's because I love teens and their problems don't bore me.

I see so many articles and Facebook comments from my friends who teach in other environments that go along the lines of this one, with the attendant hand-wringing on both sides about how high school students aren't giving high school teachers what they want, and high school teachers are not giving college freshmen what they need, so the freshmen aren't giving the comp teachers what they want. I used to feel this way, and I still go nuts, in my own way, about the your/you'res and the their/there/they'res and the "In my honest opinion I think thats" of this world. (I borrow a tool from my senior high school teacher's box, thanks to whom I learned what a comma splice was. I draw a little spiral in these sorts of mistakes. If the student doesn't learn the error, the spiral gets bigger the next time. I don't remember what my former teacher called it, but I call it Ms. Barton's vortex of despair--my despair at your not having learned this simple rule or redundancy.)

Of course it's fun to laugh when a student misspells a word and, in so doing, creates an irony that is hilarious. Doesn't everyone do this all the time? When we publish the mistakes of those students, and get a good chuckle out of them, why are we laughing? At the incongruity of the error, for sure. But isn't some of the laughter also designed to mask our own anxiety for not teaching them how to spell a key vocabulary word? Or to congratulate ourselves on our own superior knowledge?

When I first started teaching high school, with absolutely no training, I would spend hours writing and revising elaborately written essay questions--usually multiple options for a single assignment--only to receive essays that were all plot summary. The first time this happened, the disappointment was devastating, and the tedium of grading only made the devastation worse. Eventually, I figured out better ways to teach writing in order to get my students to write the way I hoped they would, which was, of course, more like me. When I taught college students at U of C, I went to their Center for Teaching and Learning and found out more about what teachers call "alignment" of assessment and teaching.

But it was only when I took some real courses in education, when I got my M.A.T. a couple of years ago, that I discovered a whole other world of literature and habits of mind that could make me into a better teacher of writing. Most of the writers of my favorite books about teaching have been around for awhile--since the late 80s, in some cases, when I was learning to write as an elementary school student.

The new Common Core State Standards still, like the old standards, emphasize and expect expository writing with clear claims and supporting evidence and so on. But the shortcuts will stay the same. And CPS's new "Performance-Based Assessments" also expect the same, as well as a graphic organizer that must be completed in order to earn full credit.

I just wish that K-12 ed and English ed would actually sit down and talk to each other about the kind of writing they want to see, and how to get there, because I think we do a lot of un-teaching when we could actually be doing re-teaching or scaffolding, also known as "spiraling." I think we laugh because we feel out of control. But maybe, with a little bit more communication, we could spiral writing instruction into control.


Maybe, but no promises, I will write future posts on how English teachers teach writing and grammar. I think my friends who are English professors or trained as English PhDs might have something to gain from knowing about things like the 6 +1 Traits of Writing....just like one of my friends told me that "I do, we do, you do" (aka gradual release of responsibility) is very useful for teaching college students.

English and Education in the Tower of Babel, Part 1: Hand-wringing about writing

I work with another teacher who always gets annoyed when this happens: a student who is writing as fast as he can, in class, stops and dramatically shakes out the cramp he has developed in his hand.

Since I now work in a land where essays are often written by hand, even out of class, and revision is known as "corrections," and malapropisms are the order of the day, I always find dramas about "how students write now" pretty amusing, and also frustrating.

So, with that spirit in mind, let's wring our hands, and then shake them out:

Many prophets are now telling us that writing is one of the most important skills for students to learn to be competitive in the 21st century global economy. Throughout the short history of American universal public education, the teaching of writing has fallen largely on the shoulders of English language arts teachers, both in K-12 and in higher education. The thing is, when it comes to best practices in the teaching of writing, many of us are flying blind, on both sides of the high school graduation milestone. This is, in part, because English educators in K-12 are mostly listening to and reading books and articles by English and Reading specialists in the Education field, while English professors and graduate students in higher ed--the ones who inevitably teach freshman composition--mostly come from the English Language and Literature field or, in increasingly rare cases, the field of English Language and Rhetoric. As I have written before, these two fields--English Language Arts/Reading, as taught in Education departments, and English Language and Literature/Rhetoric, as taught in English departments, are like twins separated at birth (though born hundreds of years apart), or soul mates--sisters from a different mother--who can't recognize each other.

As the title of this post suggests, the two fields have become so alien to each other that they use different languages. For example, in English education, citations are formatted according the style used by most sociologists--the style of the American Psychological Association (APA style). In English lang & lit, citations are formatted according to one of the styles used by most humanists--the style of the Modern Language Association (MLA style), or of the University of Chicago Press ("Chicago style").

My professor of English methods at National-Louis, Katie McKnight, pointed out to our class that English teachers in K-12 (I will, for the remainder of this post, call these people "English teachers" and the college people "English professors") have to be "bilingual" in these two citation styles, which have, at least in my personal experience, somewhat annoying and pedantic differences. When writing one's teaching philosophy for an English department--a teaching philosophy that was first drafted for an Ed class--there is a lot of minute copy editing to be done. It's a pain.

It is with some bittersweet triumph that I can note that the style taught to most high school students, even in history classes, is a quasi-MLA style, which is so hegemonic that most people don't even know that they're using it. MLA style teaches us to underline or italicize titles, to capitalize each letter of the title, to put poem and article titles in quotation marks instead of underlining or italicizing.

But enough about citation styles. All of this is to say that, when it comes to writing, English teachers and English professors are definitely not on the same page. They're not even looking at the same book.

Either this fall or last spring, there was circulated, at the school where I work, an article that informed me that the most important skill for high school graduates to learn before college is to write an expository essay of 3-5 pages. Immediately, the pressure was on to assign such essays, and as much as possible, in order to prepare students for college.

Since I started teaching in 2002, however, I discovered that it is often much easier for students to learn, and for me to assess their learning of, the skill of expressing a clear point and supporting it with evidence in a much shorter assignment, such as a single paragraph, rather than in a whole essay, which takes longer for me to grade and return to them, and much longer for them to write.

I also discovered that students are much more motivated to write about themselves than they are to write about books or other people. And, from what I've seen and heard, when students get to write about what they want, which is, often, themselves, their writing style, mechanics, and voice improve. That is, after all, partly how I learned to write, and, I think, partly how most Americans I know (who, important caveat, like to write) learned how to write.

But teaching students to write personal narrative is obviously not enough. In 9th and 10th grades, which were the grades I taught last year, we were still very much working on the most basic skill of expository or persuasive writing--showing and explaining your evidence, in a single paragraph. In English Language Arts, this is known as a "three part response" or a "PIE" paragraph (Point, Information, Explanation) or a "PEE" (Point, Evidence, Explanation) or, to the chagrin of many a college professor, a hamburger (bread, meat, bread). Even many of a language arts teacher bristles at teaching such a rote form, but I view it as an important step to get pretty good at before going on to write an essay with a more complex point and multiple paragraphs with multiple pieces of evidence to support that point--what is also known, with some notoriety, as a "five-paragraph essay" or, for history teachers, a "DBQ" (Document-Based Question [Response]). Most hilariously, it has become common in my corner of the teaching world to call the point sentence in a DBQ response a "baby thesis," which I find a little too precious, but also apt--hey, at least that means that the main argument is a mother, right?

Incidentally, I have been told on multiple occasions not to call expository/persuasive essays "five-paragraph essays" anymore, because that term bears the taint of rote learning, and word of the genre's notoriety in higher ed has gotten back to secondary ed. We don't want to mess up in preparing our students for college (and, often, we worry about messing up because we will look bad, rather than because we want our students  to succeed in college). But, guess what? Although we changed the name and the number of paragraphs, I'm here to tell you that high school teachers still teach students how to write five-paragraph essays, and that this is because, barring that the student has developed into an exquisite writer before his or her junior year in college, the five-paragraph format is what's most likely to earn a good score on the writing section of the ACT, SAT, or AP tests. Mind you: a good score, but not a great score. The English Language Arts teachers who assess these essays have learned to treat the five paragraphs with suspicion.

But, to tell you the truth? I have written a five-paragraph essay on every standardized test that ever required one, and I have always gotten a very good score. And not only that: the traditional Anglo-American expository style, institutionalized by William Strunk and E.B. White (who, like me, loved George Orwell), has turned out, for me as an academic writer, to be a pretty great one to have in my pocket. So, for what it's worth, my empirical experience as a writer, reader, and teacher of academic writing shows me that the five-paragraph prejudice is not the fault of the expository organization, per se. In fact, traditional expository organization (charged with being "masculine" by none other than Virginia Woolf) is very useful for learning to write fast under time pressure, like in grad school or law school, or on a timed test. So I still teach students how to write point-example-explanation paragraphs, and to assemble them into very straightforward, traditionally-organized essays. But I don't call them "five paragraph essays." Instead, I call them "essays with an introduction, two or three or four body paragraphs, and a conclusion."

Click here to read part 2: The Dread Five Paragraph Essay and Teaching Expository Writing

Everybody's Scarecrow, or, How to Make a Grand Theory of Everything

I'm a teacher, so I sometimes like to give multiple choice tests, because they're much easier to grade, and I'm a busy gal. I know what they do and don't measure, and I like to think I'm pretty good at writing them.

So here's a test for you:

1. Who is to blame for the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut?

A. The NRA

B. one lone gunman

C. the lone gunman's mother

D. none of the above

2. Who is to blame for this country's lousy gun control?

A. Barack Obama

B. Charlton Heston

C. gun toters

D. the 2nd Amendment

3. Who has the best explanation for the tragedy?

A. the academic

B. the preacher

C. the teacher

D. the president

4. Who is Dorothy going to miss the most when she leaves Oz?

A. Glenda the Good Witch

B. The Tin Man

C. The Cowardly Lion

D. Mr. Scarecrow

OK, here are the answers: 1. D, 2. all of the above and then some, 3. none of the above, and 4. D.

How did you do? To meet standards, I think you should have gotten at least 1. and 4. correct, so a 50% or above. Wait, what did you say? 2 and 3 had typos? Those weren't options? You disagree? Too bad. It's a multiple choice test. One of the answers has to be correct. Did you say the test was unfair? Wait, you've never seen the Wizard of Oz? What's wrong with you? If you didn't pass my test, you should have studied harder.

************************************************************************

That was fun. Now let's talk about saints and sinners, and being Against Everything.

I remember very clearly the first time I learned the term academic people use for oversimplifying someone's argument: straw man. I wrote my B.A. thesis (called a "senior essay" at my undergraduate institution) on Gwendolyn Brooks's series of anti-war sonnets at the end of her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville. In an early draft of my essay, one of my friends and advisors, the Romanticist Chris (R.) Miller, told me that I was using Wordsworth as a "straw man" by suggesting that Wordsworth was a hypocrite when he claimed to be one of "the people" in his poetry. Chris explained to me that Wordsworth was by no means a rich man. I was wrong about Wordsworth. And I was getting Wordsworth wrong in the service of my argument, which was that Brooks was just as good a poet, that her poetry was just as smart, just as beautiful, and perhaps even cleverer than Wordsworth's.

The the term "straw man" may have originated with Frank Baum's Scarecrow in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, and adapted into the first technicolor film, starring Judy Garland, in 1939. We sometimes forget that Baum's novel--and the movie--was an allegory, which, to remind everyone, is one of the oldest forms of narrative, a kind of story where there is a systematic relationship between the characters in the story and the ideas or people they represent in the real world. I don't remember (if I ever knew) which figure in Baum's Gilded Age the Scarecrow represented.* But, aside from representing a single human being, the Scarecrow represented the danger of an ignorant man. He doesn't have a brain. He points his finger. He's afraid of everything, and he, just like the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion (who I always remember is William Jennings Bryan) is always getting Dorothy into trouble.

In academia, accusing a writer of using a "straw man" is our way of saying that the writer is oversimplifying someone else's argument in order to use that person as a scapegoat. It is reducing another author to a talking "man" without a brain (or organs), in order to win the argument.

In academia, we do a lot of scapegoating. And now, having had the experience more than once in my life of being misunderstood and blamed for things that were out of my control, I have a lot of sympathy for the Scarecrow, who was always one of my favorite of the characters in the movie, because he's the most lovable. He makes mistakes, just like everyone, but he also gets unstuffed, and burned, and he just wants everyone to get along. He doesn't have a brain, but he does have a heart (even though when they open up his shirt, all they see is straw), and he does have courage. Of all the "good guys" in that movie, I thought that Dorothy was annoying, and Toto was a troublemaker, and the Tin Man was scary, and the Cowardly Lion was also annoying. And as I grew older, I also found Glenda annoying, even though she was my favorite when I was a little girl. But I have always admired people with heart and courage more than smart people. Maybe that's because I was raised to believe that smart people are the best people.

It became clear to me, as I grew even older, that Baum intended for us to find everyone in the novel annoying, to find the whole story annoying and stupid, and he succeeded, at least, in getting everyone's attention. Many of the novel and movie's best lines have become the best dead metaphors in the American idiom. "We're not in Kansas anymore." "If I only had a brain," (maybe we could get back home to Kansas). "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." All of these metaphors are references to ideology: the way dogma tricks us, manipulates us, scares us, causes us to point fingers at others, to roar loudly so that they won't know we're scared.

James Baldwin is now himself being treated as a straw man by many academics, who call him a "liberal" (which is a bad thing, because it means he wasn't a radical). These same academics point out how the Civil Rights Movement, which, in some corners of academia and the rest of the world, we prefer to call the "black freedom struggle," actually "just" reinforced the "liberal Cold War Consensus." In other words, you thought that Baldwin was a good guy. But in fact, he was a bad guy. He wasn't really a radical. 

It's interesting to watch these academics try to dance around one of our saints, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I don't yet know of an academic who has dared to denigrate King. But they do say that King "wasn't radical enough" in his early years, and then they insist that he "became more radical" in his later years. This seems, at least to me, to get King wrong. Lately I've seen lots of my teacher friends posting King quotations on Facebook, and I always pay attention to the dates. King spoke out against "right to work" in 1961, in his "not a radical" days. He also spoke out against American ideology in the early 60s, before the March on Washington. Behind the scenes, he convinced A. Philip Randolph, the President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the founder of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (in 1941), that the 1963 March would get more support if it was billed as a Civil Rights battle, rather than a labor battle. King was a pretty smart guy. In fact, he was a saint.

There were, of course, people outside of academia who denigrated King, both when Congress was considering making his birthday a national holiday, back in the 80s, and when Congress considered authorizing funding for a memorial to King on the National Mall. Some congressmen said he was too much of a radical. He opposed the Vietnam War! He fomented labor riots! Also, he was a sexist! We have FBI tapes that prove that he made sexist and racist jokes in private! King was no saint. He was a sinner. 

In academia, we love to hate Catholicism and Puritanism, because these religious dogmas act as if there are only good guys and bad guys in the world. Saints and sinners. We, in academia, recognize that Most People Are Complicated. Dogmas only make us hate ourselves. 

At least, we always believed that, until this one guy came along and changed everything. His name was Jacques. He was really smart. He created a powerful following. And he gave us something new to believe in: nothing. 

James Baldwin knew that believing in nothing was dangerous. He saw Bigger Thomas, who believed in nothing, and he knew that believing in nothing was a form of psychosis. Baldwin got in trouble, all the time, for putting himself out there and believing in things. For arguing that everybody needs something to believe in. For calling for peace and understanding. For changing his mind a few times.

In his preface to the play Blues for Mister Charlie, Baldwin explained why he had written a play in which the protagonist, at least in his imagination, is the white man. (Like many plays, the protagonist and the antagonist are sometimes interchangeable.) In Blues for Mister Charlie, a white man, Lyle Britten, murders a black man, Richard Henry. Baldwin explained in his preface that he had written the play in order to try to understand and even to love the murderous white man:

But if it is true, and I believe it is, that all men are brothers, then we have the duty to try to understand this wretched man; and while we probably cannot hope to liberate him, begin working toward the liberation of his children. For we, the American people, have created him, he is our servant; it is we who put the cattle-prodder in his hands, and we are responsible for the crimes that he commits. It is we who have locked him in the prison of his color.

Wait a second. Whatchu talkin' bout, James? Who is in prison? Who is "our servant"? Who needs to be liberated? Who is we? Who is he? It is the poor white man, not the black man, who his enslaved. He's a slave because he believes in America, in the America that puts him on top, and black people on the bottom. He's a fool because he doesn't realize how much the America he loves actually holds him down, and feeds him the lie of race to keep him quiet.

In the talk about Newtown, I see my friends and loved ones arguing on Facebook about who is to blame. Is the gun lobby to blame? Yes. Is American masculine discourse to blame? Yes. Is the mom to blame? Yes. Is the stigmatization of mental health to blame? Yes. Is the wretched young man to blame? You betcha. 

Are we going to keep playing "the blame game," or are we going to do something about it by trying to understand what happened?

Baldwin dedicated Blues for Mister Charlie to his friend Medgar Evers, an NAACP secretary in Mississippi who was shot in the back on his own front lawn, in front of his family. He also dedicated the play to four "little" girls: Denise McNair, 11 years old, and Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson, all 14 years old. The four girls were murdered in a terrorist bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, on  September 15, 1963.

Many American high school students learn of the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing, and I first learned of it when I read Dudley Randall's magnificent poem, "Ballad of Birmingham," as a 7th grader. But a lot of people teach that poem, or the church bombing, out of context. A lot of people don't realize that the bombing happened just weeks after King delivered his "I have a Dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, or they don't know that King gave the eulogy at the funeral for 3 of the girls, not all four. They don't know that King promised the bereaved congregation that the deaths of the girls was part of a larger struggle that we could not yet see or understand. He promised the congregation that the girls were in heaven. He promised the congregation that their deaths, which appeared to be so senseless, would make sense in the long run. Lastly, he promised, that their deaths would not be in vain.

That last line is a quotation, without the quotation marks. So was it plagiarism? King was quoting Abraham Lincoln, for some people, the country's Patron Saint, my grandfather's hero and therefore one of my very first heroes, a man whose stature in American history has grown so large that we have carefully examined and forgiven him his inconsistencies. We have decided that he was, on balance, a Great Man. He was a hypocrite, and he was sometimes selfish, and he sometimes weighed certain risks versus certain benefits and made "calculated" choices instead of "moral" ones. He was a white supremacist but he ended slavery. He ended slavery, but only to save a country that is and has always been sick. And at a crucial moment in the country's history of illness and weakness, he stood on a battlefield soaked in blood and promised that the deaths of all those thousands of young men would mean something, in the end. Was he being manipulative or sincere? Was he cold and calculating or warm and caring? Was he crazy or brilliant? That's what hundreds of historians writing thousands of words have been trying to figure out ever since the words came out of his mouth. But we might already know, instinctively, that the answers to all those question are the same as the answer my mom almost always gives when you give her a choice: No. Yes. Um. In other words: both/and.

One of my favorite critics to love and hate is Walter Benn Michaels. His break-out essay, the one that made his name as a critic, was called "Against Theory." In that essay, he and Steven Knapp use "theory," meaning deconstruction, against itself. The argument of deconstruction is that nothing means what we intend it to mean--in fact, there is no such thing as intending to mean something. There is no such thing as intention. There is only language, and language is like an evil robot that has betrayed its master: it refuses to do what you want it to do. It is out of your control. There is no such thing as control; there is only the illusion of control, and we live in a world of chaos. Michaels and Knapp argued that, in fact, if Saint Derrida's original argument were carried out to its final conclusion (final solution?), we would know that, in fact, humans must have intention in order for language to exist at all. Otherwise, they say, language wouldn't even be language. It would just be marks on a page. It's a brilliant essay. Even though it's Against Everything, it is like Pandora's Box: it contains a tiny little sliver of hope, and it gave me hope when I first read it.

I took a class with Walter my very first term in graduate school, which was a seminar offered jointly by UIC, where Walter teaches, and U of C, where I went for grad school. The class was co-taught by my dissertation committee co-chair, Ken Warren. It was huge, for a seminar--it had about 35 or 40 people in it. And it often seemed like the only person who ever talked in that seminar was Walter. He, the professor, was "that guy." I, normally quite the talker, only spoke once, when I had to read aloud an 8-page essay, the one requirement for the class aside from a seminar paper. I was terrified. Every time someone in that class tried to speak, it seemed to me, their idea would get ripped apart by Walter. That's how he teaches. My course advisor at the time, who had been a student of Walter's, encouraged me to take the class and to "get in the mix." But I was, at the time, way too scared. Would it be an overstatement to call Walter Benn Michaels's intellect sublime, when used as a weapon? It certainly scared the bejesus out of me.

The eight or nine people from U of C who took the class all became close friends of mine through the hazing experience that was that class. And the rest of them all had their own frustrations with that class. One of them hated that Walter turned every beautiful work of art into a racist text. One of them hated how Walter took her paper on Their Eyes Were Watching God and told her that she was wrong to defend Saint Zora, then proceeded to use all of her evidence against her. She turned that paper into her dissertation. When Walter did the same thing to me, it hurt my feelings, but I wrote a way better paper on a different novel--George Schuyler's satirical novel Black No More--for my seminar paper, and since Ken was the one to grade it, I got very helpful feedback and learned a lot. (Schuyler, by the way, was a prophet, but is considered a sinner, because he remained a Republican, though a Socialist, and then became very conservative in his old age. He even wrote a memoir titled Black Conservative. He was a reactionary.)

So was that the hate part or the love part? Both. I have noticed, in my travels, that Walter is incredibly misunderstood by even some of the smartest academics. They think he is "conservative" when he is really radical. They think that he wants to abolish the humanities, when really he has only suggested abolishing private education. They think that he hates Jews, when he himself is a (secular) Jew. They think that he is against anti-racism, when really he is against multiculturalism. He has, in some sense, suffered or achieved the fate of every great thinker: he has become everybody's straw man. And we could read this, in the words of Malcolm X, as Walter's chickens having come home to roost. When you try to make a Grand Theory of Everything, you get too big for your britches, you give the Cyclops your home address, the gods will smite you. When Walter fought Derrida, he was David. Now he's Goliath, and people throw rocks at him.

Sometimes I feel sorry for him, but then I check myself, because I'm guessing he doesn't feel too sorry for himself. He makes a great living and he loves his job. Is he happy? Most academics, like most radicals, are unhappy. I don't know Walter--I barely spoke to him at all when I was his student, and I haven't spoken to him since except to attend some of his talks and watch him eviscerate everyone who tries to disagree with him, which I find obnoxious but also very entertaining. My guess is that Walter also finds it entertaining that everyone misunderstands him, because he can recognize why they misunderstand him. When James Baldwin felt misunderstood, he became angry and vitriolic as well as pained and raw. When Langston Hughes felt misunderstood, he made jokes. He, one of the first great critics of the blues, called the blues "laughing to keep from crying." Sometimes it feels like all you can do is weep. But that's when you have to laugh, just so you can keep going.

*My husband, who Knows These Things, reminded me that the scarecrow in the 1939 film represented the Dust Bowl Farmer. I shoulda known that. I'm a historian of the 30s!

Newtown: A five minute morality play, in the style of Suzan-Lori Parks

Setting: A Hospital Emergency Room. Time: Today.

Triage nurse: doctor, there's been a massive terrorist attack over at the school.

Doctor: how many can we expect?

Nurse: Millions.

Doctor: Was it a biological attack?

Nurse: Yes. They used ideology that induced mass American Psychosis.

Doctor: Wait, ideology is not biology. And what is American Psychosis?

Psychiatrist (pushing glasses up nose): Actually, it is a very common illness. Symptoms include terror, self-righteousness, hypocrisy, inconsistent thoughts, intense anger, intense sadness, heart failure, and death.

Doctor: How is it possible that I've never heard of this condition before? I refuse to believe it exists.

Psychiatrist (in German accent): Your belief has no impact on wheser or not eet exeests.

Doctor: Well, what's your evidence? You see, I'm a doctor. I need evidence.

Psychiatrist: I, too, am a doctor. And you'll see ze evidence when ze patients arrrrrrive. I predict zey vill be members of ze NRA, ze President of ze United States, several senators, some prrrriests and prrrrreachers, some intellectuals, and talking heads of all sorts. Plus many, many children. But ze children will be DOA.

Nurse (in tears): Lord help us.

Theorist (vague European accent, a combination of French and German): He's not going to. Zere eeez no God. Religion eezs ze opiate of ze masses. God eeeez dead. Long live Michel Foucault.

Doctor: Well, how do we treat it?

Psychiatrist: We'll need to consult with several specialists. Doctors, preachers, intellectuals, and artists.

Doctor: What about the President?

James Baldwin (crying): Fuck the president. Fuck this country. Fuck the fucking white supremacist NRA. Fuck Christianity. I love America.

Doctor: Who let that crazy black man in here?

Nurse: it looks like our first patient has arrived.

Words, Words, Words: George Orwell and the Theorists (Part 1 of many)

My Orwell post turned into a 7-page essay when I wasn't looking. So here's part 1: the Prologue.

A young Indiana Jones, played by a young River Phoenix (RIP), once said, “Is everyone lost but me?”

This was ironic, of course. Indiana was the one who was lost. But Indiana Jones, though a narcissist, is often right when lots of people around him are wrong, especially those pesky Nazis. There is a certain kind of person—we can call him a narcissist, or a smarty pants, or a schizophrenic, or a prophet—who often looks around and thinks that nobody sees what he sees.

I am learning a hell of a lot from watching Homeland (just two episodes left in Season 1, so no spoilers, please!). I connect with the show a lot, and with a lot of the characters, partly because of how it uses flashbacks to explain people (which Baldwin did, too—but I’m saving that for my Baldwin post). I'm in a mind-set right now to talk about how my past helps me understand my present. That's what Baldwin knew too, and what Homeland gets right: people are people, and all people, whether they are POWs, or terrorists, or CIA directors, or presidents, or mood-disordered, have baggage.

Hindsight is a blessing and a curse: I can see very clearly the chain of mistakes and misunderstandings that got me to this surprisingly confused place I am in (If you've been reading between the lines, or you know me personally, you know that I am in a confused place. My body and soul are fairly damaged, but I am healing, partly through the soul-searching writing that I do here, in front of lo you dozens of friends and loved ones. (Aside: Blogger stats are kinda crazy scary Foucauldian surveillance kinda stuff. Who is reading in Sweden!? Turn off those cookies!))

Baldwin thought that racism was a failure of interpersonal understanding. The deaths of Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till, and so many other martyrs, then and now, bear him out on that score. But that post is coming up...later.

Dualism--that is our problem. Binary opposition. Black and white. Good guys and bad guys. Enemies and friends. If you're reading this blog, then you probably already know it, just as the makers of Homeland, who seem to have read/watched The Manchurian Candidate 1,000 times, know it: we have been living in a second Cold War since 9/11. Or, put another way, pace Fukuyama, the Cold War never died, it just changed shape.

"Theorists," that motley collection of modern philosopher-kings everyone in humanist academia thinks are really important, but hard to understand, and everyone outside humanist academia thinks are useless, and bad writers, have understood the deadly danger of extremism for a really long time, not least because many of them were persecuted, imprisoned, and killed by various European regimes. So why haven't reason and insight won out, lo these many years since the "rises" and "falls" of totalitarianism, empire, and injustice--in other words, modernity? 

If you ask me? The problem is the writing. Many of the most brilliant literary and cultural theorists (and why are they called that instead of philosophers?) never wrote clearly enough for a non-expert to understand them. Or else they write with so much baggage, so much required background knowledge, so many freakin' footnotes and hyperlinks, that these writers take a massive effort--years of specialized training and expertise--to understand. My family members are very educated people, but even they can't get through my dissertation, any more than I could read one of their articles. Specialization is the enemy of knowledge, if you ask me. Most people don't have the time, as in SIX FULL-TIME YEARS, just for a start, to begin to understand a body of knowledge where a 10-page article can take multiple slow readings and many more hours of discussion just to get the main idea, as we call it in K-12, pace ACT (and not for the last time). 

(Here's where I thank all of my friends who took LIT300 with me senior year, many of whom are now working artists, and my friend Nick, who is now an academic librarian, and my grad school friends, especially the one I fake-named Jim, for the many reading groups: in pairs, in threes, by the dozen. You all made theory way less scary.)

Judith Butler, who helped us realize that gender is a social construction, argued, in the New York Times, that she is not a "bad writer." Complicated ideas require complicated writing. But it seems like fewer and fewer people--certainly fewer than in the heyday of the Great American magazine intellectuals--are learning how to read complicated writing and long, complex arguments. And we're doing that less and less (see my post "A Defense of English"). 

The Humanities are dying, people! And, honestly, who has the time to even worry about it? My blog posts are way too long-winded for many readers, I'm guessing, and my dissertation is 60,000 effing words of boring, alienating jargon. Spit it out, Barton! they tell me. Even my advisors tell me that. Find the nugget. What's the claim? Give it a good title. (And then give it one-or-several subtitles--when I look at the shelves of bound dissertations in the English department at U of C, it's pretty hilarious to see how short the titles used to be. The title of my dissertation is "Staging Liberation: Race, Representation, and Forms of American Theatre, 1934-1965." And most science dissertations just say what-it-is right there in the title: "A gene therapy approach for the treatment of retinal degeneration," by my cousin, Dr. Brian J. Spencer, for example.) It's a sad fact that nobody reads Ph.D. dissertations. All that knowledge, undiscovered, gathering dust until someone else says it better or just gets noticed. Scientists, at least, have a much better chance of actually building upon their discoveries, instead of just repeating them. The humanities could learn a lot from how other academic fields do the publications thing, imho.

Sigh. I don't know, old fogies and change-agents have this way of exaggerating when they say that the newest generation is dumber than the generation before. We progress, we regress. But I am worried, to say the least, about how oversimple and how reactionary the conversations have gotten, how attached we've become to quick fixes and simple solutions to complex problems.

Many of the great Marxist and post-Marxist thinkers thought it was the job of intellectuals to explain, to clarify, to help everyone else understand. "Everyone else" goes by many names, but they are always the group without power: "the proletariat" to Marx, "the folk"* to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, W.E.B. DuBois, and many other black intellectuals, "the subaltern" to Gramsci and the postcolonialists, "the people"* to Kenneth Burke and a buncha other folks, "the rest" to Jacques Ranciere (for which he credits Plato...I think). But the intellectuals have always struggled, way more than the artists, to figure out how to expose the machinery to ordinary people going about their everyday lives. How can we "wake them up," how can we "sweep aside the curtain" (Baum) or "lift the veil" (DuBois)?

And the intellectuals also feel really anxious (and, yes, paranoid) about it, because intellectuals are usually people with power, not people without it, so it feels paternalistic. Ralph Ellison noted in Invisible Man that the statue of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee called "Lifting the Veil" often looked, to him, like The Founder was pushing the veil down, pulling the wool over the young man's eyes. Ideology can't be escaped. Without something to believe in, we are lost. That's why, when Derrida started what became known as "The Structuralist Controversy" and then "The Turn to Theory," which took hold at Yale (in the belly of the beast!), he sounded a little bit terrified, and a lot playful. Derrida's is that kind of joking where everyone is terrified: if you take away the center, all you have is emptiness.** Deconstruction is not a productive, optimistic form of analysis. Derrida knew this, and so he tried to make light, while keeping it serious. He loved a good pun as much as the next guy (Who is the next guy? Depends on whom you ask--but here's a hint: it's another theorist with another double-entendre). But Derrida is an incredibly challenging read. His name is synonymous with "hard to understand." And he liked being hard to understand. If one thing is clear, it's that someone who could invent a word like "ontic-ontology" did not care how much work it would take for him to be understood. Clarity, to many theorists, means oversimplification, and oversimplification is always dangerous, often deadly.

Puns, and figures of speech in general, are a good way to capture complicated ideas in fewer words. And in our field, we have lots of them, often in English, French, and German cognates: differance, presence, signifyin(g), misprision, interpellation, alienation/estrangement/defamiliarization, discipline/punishment/police/vigilance/surveillance, immanence, performativity, representation, the well-wrought urn, Critical Inquiry, the title of the U of C-sponsored English journal. We have a lot of jargon. We like misspelling words, adding hyphens and parentheses to make the puns and dualisms clearer. The End(s) of American Studies. (Con)testing blahdey blah. (Re)presentations, the title of another important poststructuralist English journal. I was tempted to use "Liber(aliz)ation" in the title of the diss, but I refrained, hoping it would be understood. 

All this is to say, English is fun! Playing with words is fun. Because theorists, and literary critics, and poets, and that crazy guy who wore black all the time, and the famous guy who invented that guy, whose name is theonly author's name mentioned in the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts, knew what all those humanism-destroying, STEM-loving, vocational-and-professional-school-remaking (de)formers*** don't get: Words matter. Stories matter.

Orwell knew that. So more on that tomorrow.

*One reason that these two terms in particular--the folk and the people--make many academics squirmy is that they were used by the biggest bad guy: Hitler. Nazism started out as a political party called National Socialism, and Volkswagens started being built....Populism can go bad really easily, and not just in Germany: also in Cambodia. Also in the rest of Southeast Asia. Also in the USSR. Also in China.....Also in the U.S. (See What's the Matter with Kansas?, etc, etc, etc)

**Teachers rarely credit each other, because teachers are able to share ideas without wanting or needing to cite each other. (My students often accuse me of plagiarism when they see another teacher's name on one of my handouts, though.) When I taught Deconstruction, I always used the Stevens poem, and Paul Fry was the teacher who showed me that first. His lectures for LIT300 (which is now ENG300--how times change!--were a model for me in how to make theory clearer to people, so thank you, Professor Fry.

*** This is sort of a silly pun, if you ask me. Reform can be bad. Change can be bad. The problem is that everyone right now thinks that change must be good. But "progressive" and "conservative" or "left" and "right" don't even begin to get at the problem. The problem is "common sense," which is another word for ideology, or what Gramsci called hegemony. Gramsci equated common sense with hegemony from a prison cell in the '30s. But Gramsci's Prison Notebooks weren't published until the '50s, and they weren't translated into English until the '70s, right about when Derrida and DeMan and all those guys were stirring up all that shit at Yale. Cause and effect relationships are a funny thing to try to tease out, pace the ACT. But that's why I love writing history. Because it's fun.

Connections: Wallflowers, Getting Noticed, and the Myth of Meritocracy

As a trained academic, I see connections everywhere. My problem, as a writer, is that I often have trouble explaining these connections to people, and instead I tell stories. (BACK IN THE DAY, Virginia Woolf pointed out that this kind of inductive approach is a particularly female way of thinking and writing, and that our society favors what she then-called "masculine" ways of writing. But NOWADAYS, we're "not allowed" to say that there are female and male ways of writing. More on that in a future post.)

Sometimes we call people who "see connections everywhere" paranoid, especially if they don't believe in God. And Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, may she rest in peace, wrote about this in a brilliant essay that later became a book, and that book was the first thing I read in graduate school. Here's a review of the book that provides a pretty good summary. The chapter that grew out of the essay (that's how academics roll, by the way) was called "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You." (Thanks to Amy, I've been thinking a lot about which writers inspire me, and I should add Sedgwick to the list.)

Sedgwick essentially argues that academia is broken because everyone who writes for academic audiences is so terrified and territorial--so anxious about how people will respond to their work, or about making sure that they say it first--that they're stuck in a feedback loop of paranoia. When I was in my PhD colloquium, I, as a very competitive person who hates competition, really responded to this idea. Can't we all just get along? I wondered. Why can't we agree and disagree respectfully? What ever happened to listening?

Sedgwick called it. The book was published in 2002. But ask any junior faculty or anyone trying to get a job if anything has changed. The rat race continues, and it is kill or be killed out there. For every job in an English department, as many as 500 people apply for it. English academics were living in a recession way before 2008. They've been living in a recession since the 90s, or maybe even before that (this is where I apologize for not knowing everything about a topic before presuming to write about it. That's paranoid writing.)

My PhD colloquium professor was Frances Ferguson.* Another essay she showed us, by the superstar-famous-deconstructionist-theorist Paul DeMan, is called "Blindness and Insight," from the book of the same name. DeMan taught at Yale, and I have been noticing lately how much the Yale English Department influenced my thinking (but not in the ways for which the Yale English Department is notorious in academic circles). Let me just say, for those who are familiar with these writers, that I was assigned to read "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by T.S. Eliot at least 5 times, and I took a class with Harold Bloom. And I had a lot of really amazing conversations with a grad student who taught me twice about Eliot and Bloom. I odn't know what ever happened to that grad student. DeMan was writing in dialogue with both of these men, and his argument, if I may attempt to summarize, is that, in the production of knowledge, you have to essentially take on an attitude of blindness in order to have an insight. In other words,  you have to ignore your predecessors in order to have a good idea.

I told Frances at the time that I really liked the way that this essay treated academic knowledge in the same way as scientific discoveries. The knowledge is out there, and, in some ways, the point is to find it, not to take credit for finding it. (My scientist- and medical-academic friends and family members will attest that this is a very Polyannaish characterization of scientific research.) Everyone wants credit. It's human to want credit. That's what Sedgwick argues--if we paid a little bit more attention to ourselves as feeling human beings (this also goes by the name of psychology or "affect studies"), we might actually become more generous and less paranoid as readers, as writers, and as critics.

Footnote* about Frances Ferguson: In academia, you're supposed to give credit to everyone who gave you your ideas. Frances Ferguson is a celebrity in academic circles, and I am fortunate because of my schooling to have worked with a lot of people who are celebrities-in-academic-circles. Outside academia, a lot of people view mentioning these people by name as "name-dropping." And even within academia, you're not supposed to name-drop until you get more established, because it is viewed as trying too hard, or as relying on your connections instead of on your merit.

So that was a long introduction to this post, which is about why we still believe in merit when really a great deal of getting ahead in this country happens through connections. A very good friend of mine from my PhD cohort (we call them that because we all start at the same time, but finish at different times) and I have been talking about my previous post about my not-my-brother-in-law Tim Kreider. My friend--let's just call him Jim--and I both had this feeling when we were in our early 20s (we were born a month apart) that if we wanted to be writers, we would have to try to sell ourselves, and that is not in our natures. We are wallflowers.

I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower for the first time this summer. If that book had come out just one year earlier, it could have made a big difference to me when I was 18. In that book, the main character is a freshman in high school and a wallflower--someone who is secretly awesome, but goes about his business being weird and different, until some seniors notice him and take him under their collective wings.

That sort of thing happened to me when I was in high school. I was a bit of an outcast, a little bit weird, a mis-fit, and the theater teachers and some other teachers were super kind to me. Of course, then I got called a teacher's pet. I am always trying to tell my students that the kids that they call teacher's pets, or whatever they call them now (in grad school we called the person who talks too much in seminars "that guy") are secretly insecure and lonely.

There is this great essay by David Bromwich (who was at Yale when I was there, but with whom I never took a class) called "American Psychosis." It talks about how American mis-fits (like Flannery O'Connor's serial killer "The Misfit" in "A Good Man is Hard to Find") are the dopplegangers of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The flip side of self-reliance is feeling like an outcast.

I love the part of the essay that analyzes the O'Connor short story. I really want to go back and reread the part about the Transcendentalists, because at the time I'm pretty sure I didn't get it. I read it in a reading group on Transcendentalism that I formed with Jim and a bunch of other Americanists. Jim and I were people who talked a lot in seminars, and we always worried, confidentially with each other and our mutual love, my best friend and his wife, about being "that guy."

Jim and I are both paranoid about trying to get noticed. We have ideas, but we want people to notice our ideas without the indignity of having to "sell ourselves." And this is the real American Psychosis, if you ask me. We get sold this idea that if you just work hard enough, you'll get noticed and appreciated. But you shouldn't ever look like you're trying. It's just like my parents always told me: you're pretty, but don't flaunt it. Eventually someone will ask you to dance. But waiting for someone to notice you is a sad game. American literature is littered with the corpses of people who tried, in their own ways, to get noticed--Quentin Compson, Lily Bart, Jay Gatsby, Bigger Thomas, Willie Loman, Walter Lee Younger. Every single one of those men (and did you notice that they're mostly men?) went a little bit crazy because they were so angry at not getting noticed, not getting the girl. As Willie Loman said, right before he died, "Attention must be paid!" Then there are the ones who decided that it was better to disappear than to risk getting noticed: Edna Pontellier, Isabel Archer, Antonia, The Ex-Colored Man, [the] Invisible Man, Helga Crane, Janie Crawford, Lutie Johnson, Annie Johnson in Imitation of Life, Norman Maine in A Star is Born, everyone in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. (Did you notice that they're mostly women and people of color (and one actor)?)

"Getting noticed" is just not how it really works in academia. In academia, if you want to get noticed, you have to somehow work your way to the top of that stack of 500 resumes. And the easiest way to do it--by far--is to have connections. I know from my friends in the arts that it's very much the same way in pretty much every art field. I often sit back and marvel at how many people I knew personally in college are now working artists. And, to me, it's not a coincidence that we all went to Yale, and built up our networks there. It's considered mean or unfair to say that people made it to where they are because they're well-connected. But the point I'm trying to make is that for every brilliant, talented celebrity, there are at least ten equally brilliant, equally talented people toiling away in anonymity.

Sociologists and educators call connectedness "social capital." They recognize that a big way that people get ahead in life is by having connections, and this is not something that shows up in poverty statistics. People living in poverty have no connections. And, often, unfortunately, their teachers also don't have connections. I've tried to share my connections with my students, but I feel awkward and sad about it because it sometimes feels like bragging. I know famous people. When I showed my students my friend Scout Tufankjian's book, a couple of weeks after I had introduced them to my two best friends from college, both working writers, they asked me what I was doing at their school. With all these famous friends, why are you just a teacher?

I have been teaching my students--the honors juniors--about social capital. I have offered to introduce them to all of my friends who are now working in the fields that they want to work in. Because that is how it happens. My students still believe in the myth of merit, and I think, in some ways, so do a lot of my grad school friends, and my family.

One problem we have in academia is that we keep fighting over what is the one right way to organize all of these connections. Marxism? Deconstruction? Affect? God? Magic? Lauren B. gets it right, because she has been telling me for years that people are complicated. There is no one way to explain a person. And a person, and her story, are sometimes a good way to try to explain how things work. I'm working on a piece right now about James Baldwin and Joan Didion and using oneself as a case study. (I'm calling it WWJB/JDD?) When I tell people my story, and my family's story, they say "wow, you have an impressive family. You all must have worked very hard." We did all work very, very hard. But we also had a lot of help.

The myth of American meritocracy is that a kid on the South Side of Chicago and someone like me start out in the same place, that we both have a shot at going to Yale, and hard work is the difference between us. (I love Paul Tough's work because of how he tries to shatter this myth.) And that's just a lie, as I've noted here and here. It's true that there are people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps. My grandfather, born in the Bronx, did. My mother, born in the boondocks of Thailand, did, too. But we were talking over Thanksgiving about how even they had help--my grandpa's mother taught him the value of a good education. My mom's oldest sister helped her through junior college and medical school. Many, many families on the south and west sides of Chicago don't have access to this kind of capital: the knowledge that education really does matter, the means to give their children a better life. That is why the era of No Child Left Behind is so cruel. We pretend--and my students believe--that hard work and dedication and perseverance will get them somewhere. But, without connections, without somehow getting lucky, or getting noticed, all that hard work is statistically likely to land them in a two-year college, at best. Social capital is built over generations. The cruelest ideology in education is the phrase "beating the odds." Why can't we work on changing the odds instead of asking teachers and children to try to play and win a game that is rigged against them?




*Footnote about footnotes: I love writing footnotes, as anyone who has read my academic writing will attest, and I love hyperlinks, as anyone who reads this blog knows, and I use parentheses a lot. It's because I always want to connect something else to what I'm talking about. There's an essay in this about gothic fiction, historicism, and nested narratives. But I digress. My husband is always trying to remind me to "get back to the original story."

Patience

I've been having some more health difficulties of late, and I blame myself for this. Specifically, I blame my lack of patience. I keep trying to declare myself healed before I really am, and then I overdo it, and then I relapse.

This is pretty common among teachers when they get sick, and I suspect it's common in other industries as well. Even though my parents have tried to counsel patience throughout my life, patience is not an American virtue. In schools, patience is at odds with the current fervor for results.

From one perspective, I can understand and even identify with the sense of urgency in public education. The students I am teaching right now cannot wait for changes that might be years or even decades in the making. But I certainly am getting tired of hearing this argument used in the name of radical, untested reforms like "performance" pay.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked one of my students-I-love-the-most how he would rate me, compared to his other teachers, on having patience with him. He gave me a 5 before I even had a chance to tell him which number meant "a lot of patience." (He is very impulsive.) But when I clarified, he said that he did, in fact, mean that I have a lot of patience. And some days I do. But some days I, like anyone, struggle to tolerate teenage boy behavior.

I do, however, feel as though I've grown more patient in the last ten years (the span of my adult professional life), and I also see it as a key measure of my personal growth in that time. The combination of two big milestones--ten years since I first began teaching and graduating with my doctorate--has given me this opportunity for large-scale reflection, and what I've realized is that I've grown up a lot since I started teaching.

When I started teaching, I had no patience for teenage boys.
When I started teaching, I felt frustrated because I wasn't as smart (knowledgeable) as other teachers I knew.
When I started teaching, I often thought I would never get better at it.

When I started teaching, I thought that my students needed to know everything that I knew, right away.

These same things happened when I started grad school: I felt frustrated and inferior because I didn't seem to know as much as everybody else. I thought I would never get better at it. I thought I would never reach a point in my life when I would be able to have the conversations I saw others having. Now I feel like I can hold my own. I still have a lot to learn, but I have also learned to be more patient with myself, and with others. I'm starting to learn to cut myself some slack, which people have been trying to tell me to do for most of my life. Cutting oneself slack requires patience.

In education, we need to have a little bit more patience. This is the basic claim of Charles Payne's wonderful book So Much Reform, So Little Change. It's hard to say this, because it feels a little bit like William Faulkner's advice to the Civil Rights reformers of the South: "go slow, now." To which Thurgood Marshall replied, "They don't mean 'go slow.' They mean 'don't go'." That's not what I mean. Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, Rosa Parks--they would be astonished and disgusted by the state of American schools today. Jonathan Kozol is fond of pointing out that the schools named for these lions of the Civil Rights Movement are often 99% black or Latino. On the day the strike ended, the Chicago Tribune said that the CTU is "against the arc of history." Martin Luther King's legacy died a little bit on that day, as it does every time his name is used in ways that abuse his fundamental beliefs.

No reform is inevitable. And if we aren't careful about how we go about reform, we've already seen what can happen. We who are historians of the 60s know what happened when African Americans ran out of patience with the pace of change. But right now, we are living through an era of reform-in-the-name-of-urgency. And this "doing something is better than doing nothing" mentality is actually hurting children. So we would do well to slow it down a little--try to figure out what works, give pilot projects some time to pan out before abandoning them, let go of the things that "should" work, but don't. 

Real change takes time. The students of today have run out of time, but we shouldn't sacrifice the students of tomorrow in the name of urgency for its own sake.