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

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.

A Defense of English

On Sunday, both the Times and the Washington Post published opinion pieces about the emphasis on "non-fiction" in the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts. Jay Mathews's piece in the Post was titled "Fiction vs. Non-Fiction Smackdown."

I have been teaching secondary school for two and a half years now, and I think it's time for me to say something about this. In the departments I've served in, there has been a growing divide between what we call "reading" and "English." 

"Reading" is what is taught in elementary and middle school. "English" is what is taught in secondary school. Except now everyone wants high school English teachers to teach "reading," not English.

Here is what I have learned: "Reading" and "English" are not as different as everyone thinks.

The standards movement has made a big push to improve "reading" scores by issuing standards that describe "reading" skills. Since NCLB, two sets of standards have ruled public schools in Illinois: first, the ACT College Readiness Standards, and now, the Common Core State Standards.

The ACT standards include little in the way of content standards for language arts or social sciences. They don't, for example, recommend any historical content or knowledge of literature or literary history. Now, given what happened when some people attempted to create national standards for the teaching of history, this is understandable--no one in K-12 textbook making or standardized testing seems to want to touch "the culture wars" with a ten-foot pole. But it's sort of left English high and dry.

This is a defense of English Language Arts. English should be a class that combines the teaching of reading, writing, and speaking: reading great works of art, in a variety of genres and helping students develop their tastes in print culture by reading for pleasure; writing all different styles, including narrative and expository writing; learning to speak and present in the 21st century.

The Common Core standards are a huge step up from the ACT standards when it comes to finding a better balance between the modes of language arts. Where ACT has two-ish strands--"English" (grammar and expository writing), "Reading" (reading comprehension in 4 different genres), and an optional Writing test (a persuasive essay), Common Core has four: Reading, Language (grammar), Writing, and Speaking and Listening. The standards are simple, economical, and much less repetitive than the ACT standards.

But the emphasis on "non-fiction," which is how everyone is interpreting what the standards call "informational" text, is extremely problematic. When you look more closely at the standards and what they recommend as "informational," it's more comforting, since they include things like The Federalist Papers and Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." 

But all this hysteria about non-fiction tells a different story. You can tell it's hysteria just by looking at the publications in the booths at all the ELA conferences. To find a title, you can do a little magnetic poetry exercise: 1) choose a publisher; 2) choose a strong verb like "cracking" or "unpacking"; 3) add the words "common core" and "English language arts" 4) add a sticker that promises to help teachers learn how to teach non-fiction STAT.

I, like most English teachers, trained as an English teacher. That means that I majored in English Language and Literature as an undergraduate, and I also got a PhD in English Language and Literature. I went to private school for high school, so most of my English teachers were also English majors. Since I started working in CPS, I have discovered a whole other world of English unknown to many English people, the world of English Language Arts Education. These two worlds have different lineages: the routines and values of English Language and Literature stem from medieval and renaissance traditions of humanist thought and training by reading "great" works of literature (h/t to my dear friend and renaissance scholar Elizabeth Hutcheon for teaching me about this.) The routines and values of English Education (also known as reading) stem from universal public education and literacy initiatives that came out of the Enlightenment, followed by the Progressive movement, the birth of the discipline of sociology, and John Dewey. The keystone professional association of English Language and Literature is the Modern Language Association. The keystone professional association of English Language Arts is the National Council of Teachers of English. (I'm a member of both.)

To sum up (from a disciplinary perspective): English is Humanities, and English Education is Sociology. If you look at the committees that wrote and vetted the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts, you find many English Education academics, many, many representatives from test-making companies, and only one person from a university English department. (I noted this several months ago and promised more--here it is!)

So now we're stuck implementing new standards, too quickly, without being given much time to talk about them or study them first. (Nothing new under the sun in education, it seems.) And the big education publishing houses, like vultures, are circling with their "quick guides" giving us lessons for teaching students how to read bus time tables and recipes. And language arts teachers are expected to do all of this teaching.

But, unlike the standards would have us believe, English teachers actually teach something besides reading skills. They teach content: their content is LITERATURE AND CULTURE. Let's stop putting it all on English teachers. Maybe students need to learn to read scientific articles in science, timetables in math, history in...history. Maybe, as my friend Julie Price always says, everyone needs to be a reading teacher, not just English teachers.

English teachers teach literature because literature is important. The literary does not exclude nonfictional prose, but we would be hard pressed to call the directions for my new electric teakettle literary, or an example of the art of language.

We want students to be able to read and write. But maybe instead of changing what they read, we should change how they read. Most of the authors and publications mentioned in the New York Times piece, notably Malcolm Gladwell and the entire staff of The New Yorker, are inaccessible to most of the students I teach--they're too complex. Non-fiction doesn't have to be gorgeous and eloquent by mid-century New York Intellectual standards to be literary. Non-fiction can be used to teach literary and rhetorical devices like figurative language, narrative point of view, and plot, but fiction is a lot better way to introduce these ideas. We are mistaking non-fiction for "rigor," my least favorite word in education, when literature, especially fiction, especially poetry, IS RIGOROUS. If you want to really challenge 12th graders, instead of giving them 75% "non-fiction," have them read Pynchon or Joyce. Rigor is making kids think, not giving them something to do that will frustrate them.

Kelly Gallagher, an outstanding English teacher in Anaheim and the author of a million books, gets this right.* What we need is balance. My friends who teach college complain that students don't know how to write about anything but themselves. The solution is not to swing the pendulum the other way. There is no quick solution to getting Americans to read better. There are only small, day-to-day strategies. Non-fiction is not the next silver bullet, unless the target of that bullet is the love of reading, which, ironically, English teachers are very good at killing in kids.

The CCSS makes the claim that adult humans read a lot more "informational" text than "literary" text in their daily lives. Maybe that's because we've stopped teaching them to read for fun. In spite of our efforts, fiction sales are at an all-time high. Let's teach literature again: fiction, poetry, expository prose, persuasive prose, satire, parody--all of it. We live in an age of irony, and we're wont teach our students how to understand irony if we only teach them Newsweek articles. Let's bring literature back.

*I have a small beef with Gallagher about what he calls "literary" and what he calls "young adult" literature, but that's for another day.

My "Lazy" Student has Dropped Out of High School. My "Bad" Kid is Saving His Own Life.

The student I called "Joey" in this post has dropped out of high school. I'm devastated. I wish he would choose what's right for his future, but I'm worried that he won't.

The student I called "Mike" in this post is doing "One Goal," formerly known as "US Empowered." He's taking school seriously and he's working hard this year. I couldn't be prouder.

Larry Cuban on Blame

http://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/reframing-shame-how-and-when-blame-for-student-low-achievement-shifted/

Quickest Way for a Teacher to Recover from Illness: Remind her that there's a sub in her room

I find myself lately in the terrible position of being out of work for an extended period. I want to get back to work as soon as possible, but I'm being told to rest and recover and not push myself too quickly. Meanwhile, I am wracked with guilt and worry about what must be going on with my students.

When I share my concern with others, the obvious reply comes, "Well, they'll have a sub, won't they?"

Now you may not even need to think back to your own high school education to reflect on what you know about substitute teaching. You may know someone who has been a sub for some period of time, or you may have seen subs on TV. Let me tell you: in a classroom run by a sub, very little learning happens. I once left very clear, simple, fool-proof plans for a sub to use while I had to attend an IEP meeting, and returned to the classroom to find strange drawings on the board. I grabbed one of my students from the hallway and demanded an explanation. The students were supposed to spend 20 minutes reading silently. The students weren't being silent, so the sub, instead of making them be silent, decided to entertain them with riddles for the last 15 minutes of the period. (e.g. "If a plane crashed on the border between the U.S. and Mexico, where would they bury the survivors?")

OK, maybe a little bit of learning happens when kids do brain teasers. In my district, what we call "day-to-day" subs come from a centralized pool. They can be assigned to any classroom in the district, any age group, any subject. So you can't just leave your copy of Romeo and Juliet on the desk and ask the sub to pick up at Act 2. Even worse, it can actually be quite difficult to find a short-term leave replacement to cover a classroom for a couple of months in the event of a sabbatical or a maternity leave. (When I was a resident, my mentor went on sabbatical, and I covered her classes for the rest of the year. They didn't hire a short-term replacement. Since I wasn't a certified teacher, they still needed to bring in a sub, so they used subs from the day-to-day pool, who would sit and watch me teach the class, and, if they were good, heckle us. So I had a revolving cast of characters. They should really make a sitcom about substitute teaching. It would be a lot like Extras, but with more "gangsta" jokes.

Anyway, this absence reminded me that I was meaning to post this article that proposes some really excellent solutions to the problem of ineffective substitute teachers. When I taught at a private school, the maximum load for a teacher was 4 classes, and some teachers taught 3 classes. So when someone was absent, we often just covered for each other. But when you only have 2 prep periods, and one of those is your department's team time (so everyone in your department has that period as a prep), then really there is only one period of your day that you might be free to cover someone else in your department's class. Since my district is getting ready to move to a "use them or lose them" policy with our 10 annual sick days, maybe they'd better look into some of these options...

The Kids You Love the Most

I recently told a story about a certain type of kid named Joey. This is a story about a type of kid named Mike. Mike is the kid who is always talking when he's not supposed to be talking. He almost never does what he is told to do. When reprimanded, he becomes combative and belligerent. And, OK, if Mike were my peer, I would think he was kind of a jerk.

But Mike is not my peer. He's just a kid. When you ask Mike why he did what he did (if he can be civil at all), he'll sometimes say, "I guess I'm just a bad kid." Just like Joey, Mike has heard himself called this over and over for years. But Mike is not a bad kid. He's just a kid who messed up. Or one who messes up a lot. That's why I prefer the terminology of the consultant Kristyn Klei, who calls kids like Mike the kids you love the most.

I have not always thought this. When I was first teaching, I had a class full of Mikes (really, they were a combination of Mikes and Johnnys--the kid who will blindly follow whatever Mike does). They drove me nuts. I hated them. And I thought it was all their fault. When people of my generation were in high school (and for sure before), teens were thought of as pre-adults: people who, though inferior to teachers, had the emotional and cognitive capabilities of adults. These teens, so the thinking went, could be told that they had to be more responsible and less lazy. They would do what they were supposed to do if threatened with the proper punishments. And, the good news is, the majority of teens will do what they're supposed to do, most of the time. But if you think that they do this out of fear of being punished, you're wrong.

We now know (and knew when I was in high school, but forget that) that teens are not fully developed human beings. They may stop growing on the outside and start to look more and more like adults (especially kids like Mike, who are often male and of color), but they are still children. The cognitive research is now telling us that the human brain is not fully developed until the age of 25. And the part of the brain that is still developing is the prefrontal cortex, the part that helps you organize and make decisions, decisions like, "Would it be a good idea for me to blurt something out right now?" or "If I throw this thing across the room, am I likely to get in trouble?" or "Is getting into a fist fight ever a good idea?" or "Homework or video games?" The list goes on and on. A colleague and friend of mine has even developed this sort of knee-jerk response when we tell stories at lunch about the dumb things our kids have done. After every story, she says "underdeveloped frontal loooobe" in a funny voice.

When I was 22 and a brand new teacher, I found the Mikes and Johnnys of this world supremely frustrating, and I decided that they were my enemies. They were out to make sure that I could not conduct my class. And so I began to expect the worst from them--nothing but bad behavior, and certainly no academic work. And, don't get me wrong, I still lose my temper with the Mikes when they're driving me nuts. But you have to see a teen as a kid. When a kid does something dumb, HE REALLY WASN'T THINKING OF WHAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. In fact, he is somewhat incapable* of thinking ahead like that. So telling him that he has to be responsible and threatening him with punishment is just not going to work in a lot of cases. Calling him a bad kid will just make that label stick in his mind, so that he learns to assume that he is the kind of kid who teachers hate. And that's why these are the kids we have to love the most.



*Of course, the majority of children are able to stay out of trouble, and there are those especially mature children who are constantly thinking about their futures. But most teens just don't understand that getting bad grades now, or getting suspended, or even arrested, will mean bad things in the future.

Separated at Birth

I was looking the other day at the committees that developed the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts, which my district will adopt beginning next year. The "work team" committee did not include a single college professor of English. The "feedback group" included ONE professor of English, Mark Bauerlein from Emory University. No knock on Emory or Bauerlein, but, just for comparison, the math work team included three professors of mathematics, from UW-Madison, University of Michigan, and Illinois State, and the feedback group included professors of math from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and UT-Austin.

So what's going on here? To be continued...

The L-Word

Here's a student. Let's call him Johnny or Joey.* (Joey is usually, but not always, a male student.) Joey is clearly bright, with-it, perhaps worldly in ways that other students, even the brightest ones, are not. Joey tends to do well on tests when they concern things he has already learned, such as grammar, vocabulary, or standardized tests. Joey's report card, however, tells a different story. He gets mostly Ds and Fs. He rarely turns in homework. In fact, he almost never does an assignment outside of class, unless it is to read something that interests him. (When you ask him to write a response to what he reads, he won't do that, either.)

When you ask Joey about his performance, he has one word for you: "I guess I'm just lazy."

By the time he's 16, Joey, the promising, talented student with tons of "potential," has probably been told that he's lazy dozens, if not hundreds, of times, by teachers, coaches, parents, and maybe even his friends. Every teacher has taught a Joey. I have two brothers who were both considered "Joeys" when they were in school, and their teachers and my parents called them lazy. I, a strong student, was still called lazy when I didn't want to do chores, or didn't wake up early on weekends.

But I have learned something about this. Does it make sense to call someone lazy who gets Ds and Fs, but works hard for 12 hours a day both Saturday and Sunday helping his dad paint houses or lay carpet? Should you call someone lazy if she spends all her time creating brilliant, funny, beautiful comic books, but doesn't do any of her homework? Is a young man lazy if he spends all of his time outside of school lifting weights and learning martial arts, but not writing that essay? What if he has trouble getting out of bed, has lost interest in everything that ever interested him before, and spends most of his time on the couch instead of hanging out with friends?

Very few people, if any, are actually lazy in the sense that they are committing the sin of sloth. Kids who are not interested in school are almost always either A) interested in other things, or B) depressed. Teachers often respond to these students by punishing them with failing grades. The problem is, failing an unmotivated student is unlikely to motivate him. The Joeys of the world are already not extrinsically motivated. Daniel Pink's terrific argument in Drive, better in the shortened, TED talk version (with animation!) makes this very point. He argues that extrinsic motivation (grades, bonuses, detention, getting fired) does not lead to better performance when cognitive skill is required. Pink has his critics, but his argument is still worth considering, especially in light of this piece on reforming our industrial-revolution-era educational model. This piece essentially argues that, rather than use a punitive/extrinsically incentivized model of education, we need to remodel education completely, tapping into students' intrinsic motivation and training them as critical thinkers.

So, when a student tells me that he's lazy, I tend to argue with him. "Well," I say, "I don't think that lazy people work at their uncle's store for 4 hours every night after school, do you?" or "I don't see any lazy people lifting weights in a gym. Ever."

There is one exception to this rule, though, that both frustrates and fascinates me. Teenagers AS A WHOLE are amazingly lazy when it comes to moving their bodies. Walking down the hall. Taking out a pencil. Standing up and sitting down. They are SO FREAKING SLOW!!! Why? I googled "Why don't teenagers like to move?" and got millions of hits about teens not liking to relocate with their families. I googled "Why do teenagers walk so slowly?" and had more success. Here are some of the answers I found:

• they're too cool for that; people who move fast are overachievers
• they don't care that people are waiting for them or behind them; they're not going to hurry for the likes of you!
• late-onset growing pains
• they're passive-aggressive by nature and moving slowly is a way to take control
• they're uppity
• they're easily distracted (which is different from having ADHD)
• they're sleepy
• teenagers are conservative by nature and therefore they don't like to transition (provided by a friend who is a school therapist)

In sum, the only context in which I allow myself to call my students lazy is when I tell one to move across the room (or five feet!) to work with another and neither one will move. THAT is lazy. If they're not doing their work, then something else is going on.

*Johnny and Joey are always the generic names of choice when people who train teachers talk about students. Even when you work at a school where no one is named Johnny or Joey. As one of my students once said, "Jimmy is what white people call their kids who are named James."

The Retention Problem and the Profession of Teaching

Yesterday I went to the doctor, and, looking at my information form, the clerk asked me where I teach. She then confided that she was once an English teacher. "Oh really?" I said, trying to sound friendly, but feeling sad. Of course, this woman may have had any number of reasons for leaving education to become a clerk in a doctor's office, but she is merely one among thousands who leave the profession every year. Almost half of all teachers (46%) leave the profession within the first five years. Beginning around the year 2000, the number of teachers leaving the profession after their first year crossed the 10% mark. Turnover has been steadily increasing since the 1990s. Does any other profession have anywhere near this rate of turnover?

This study from the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, from which I've taken a lot of this data, credits "industrial-era recruitment practices" for the high rate of turnover. This strategy, the authors write, "treats young teachers like easily replaced, interchangeable units--rather than individuals who merit individualized professional development investments." In other words, it would help teachers to remain teachers if we treated them like professionals, rather than assembly-line workers. The biggest obstacle to viewing teaching as a profession is that everyone spends so much of their lives in school that they think they know all about teaching. In actuality, there's a whole lot more to teaching than what students see. I learned this the hard way when I first started teaching without any training. Students probably learn more about teaching while they're in school than patients learn about medicine by going to the doctor, but that may only be because they go to school every day for 13-17 years or more. 

This is where the residency model of teacher training comes in. Residency programs' numbers are somewhat misleading, since the programs usually require some sort of time commitment that falls beyond the 3-year retention measurement that they use. But I can say from anecdotal evidence that teachers who train in a full-year residency (as opposed to a 10-15 week "student teaching" experience) feel more prepared to enter the classroom and are more effective in their first year than teachers from traditional programs. In my own personal experience, having tried to teach right out of college with no training and having taught for a year now after a residency, I definitely feel like a better teacher after the residency. This year has been tough, but my other first year as a teacher was arguably tougher, even though the environment was much more forgiving. The one important caveat here is that I was fortunate to have a true master teacher as my mentor teacher. If a resident is matched with a mentor who is not well-informed about best practice and not an expert on teaching and coaching teachers, then the outcomes won't be as good. And these mentors are not easy to find.

The study also mentions that it is "worth noting" that the trend in higher turnover coincides with the growth of "efforts to expand the pool of potential teachers via alternative pathways.  The influx of more new teachers increased the speed of the revolving door into the teaching profession, but did not stabilize the teaching workforce, and did nothing to improve teaching quality in high-need schools." Programs like Teach for America and its offspring have raised the prestige of teaching in some respects, by attracting Ivy League graduates to the profession, for example. But those same programs have also made it appear as though anyone with a brainy brain can become a teacher, and that it's the kind of thing that anyone or everyone should do for 2-3 years, but not necessarily longer than that. At our last reunion, a classmate told a good friend from high school, who has been teaching in my district for more than ten years, that she thinks "everyone should teach for a year." Burnout is also a major factor in teacher attrition, especially at schools where teachers are expected to work long, unsustainable hours. And many education wonks seem to think that this is not a problem. I just spent about 20 minutes hunting for an old blog post, sadly with no luck, in which a policy wonk said it was no problem that KIPP teachers burned out so easily because there are "plenty of people lined up to take their place." Setting aside the fact that this is a disgustingly utilitarian view of teachers and teaching, this particular wonk is also wrong--the NCTAF study points out that hiring new teachers alone won't suffice to plug the anticipated shortage when baby boomers retire. Current reforms that attempt to convince the public that we should implement "what's best for the children" with an utter disregard for what's best for the working lives of teachers only make things worse.

Teacher turnover is costly and bad for students. By increasing professionalism in teaching, we may be able to turn the tide.

Did the good guys lose the culture wars?

OK, I've been meaning to write this post for over a month now, but it has been brewing and stewing, and tonight's whuppin' at the hands of the Tea Party has me sleepless and over the edge.

The Great Backlash
In the last few years, I've been thinking a lot about the Republican echo chamber and the way that it has strategically pushed an agenda that--sometimes implicitly, sometimes overtly--exploits the latent racism of many white voters and convinces them to vote against their own economic self-interest. This is basically what Barack Obama was getting at in his historic speech "A More Perfect Union" (a.k.a. the "race speech"), in which he defended earlier remarks that these voters "cling to guns or religion" because, basically, their lives are incredibly tough economically. This is a rehearsal of an earlier argument in Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?" (and surely also creditable to countless other people) about how people cope with the cognitive dissonance produced by a society in which you are taught your whole life that anyone can do or become anything, only to learn that you actually can only do those things if you are lucky, that there is a really big pie that's big enough for everyone, only someone else has taken your piece because of affirmative action.

Seeing how so many Americans have reacted to the Obama presidency has me even more convinced that we are in serious trouble if we let so much unreconstructed racism go unchecked. The fact that so many people--millions of people--can believe (falsely) that the president is a Muslim AND also believe that this is a bad thing; that hundreds of thousands of Tea Partiers parade around with signs that unabashedly proclaim that they will "take back America" (from whom? for whom?) has me really, really worried. So, to make a long story short, I have become increasingly troubled and convinced that we are living in an era that will become known by historians as the Great Backlash.

What does this have to do with teaching?
Lots. But the one topic that has been weighing heavily on my mind of late is the question I started with, and when I say "culture wars" I should probably be more specific and call it "the canon wars." Here is my capsule version of the canon wars: what people read matters because it affects their attitudes, which affects politics. If people only read texts about how great white people are and how evil non-white people are, then that is what they will think. Conversely, if people read a wide variety of viewpoints and are taught to examine how works of literature fit into a society that oppresses women, people of color, and the poor, then they will become more ethical human beings.* Yes, that is a base summary. But that's basically what it was about. What I've been discovering in numerous conversations with current and former high school English teachers, university professors, English graduate students, and college English majors, is that we are definitely, absolutely NOT ON THE SAME PAGE about how things turned out.

In postsecondary English departments, everyone pretty much agrees on two points:
1. That the old canon is over. We now more or less have a much bigger, more inclusive canon. This means, for people writing literary criticism, that you can almost** never assume that anyone has read what you are writing about, whether that's Longfellow or Gwendolyn Brooks.

2. That canons in general are bad. Any kind of list of books that people can be expected to have read in order to be considered learned, educated, sophisticated, or whatever, whether that list includes or doesn't include Wright, Dickens, Cisneros, Faulkner, DuBois, Anaya, Shakespeare, Morrison, Hawthorne, etc, etc is designed to separate people into the in- and the out-crowd, better and worse, elite and common. Now, it must be said that this second point undercuts the first while also undercutting the existence of university English departments, whose job historically has been almost solely to decide what should and shouldn't be in the canon.

These are the two points that most university professors and graduate students more or less agree "won" the war, whether they like it or not, unless they are over 70 and/or named Harold Bloom. But here's the problem: many, if not all, college English majors may get point #1, but more than likely won't be taught point #2 well enough to understand it. Case in point: one of the major reasons I went to graduate school for English was that I wanted to become yet more expert in literature--I wanted to feel like I had "read everything." In other words, I wanted to master the canon, and to change it to include more African American authors. Only later did I find out that this goal didn't make sense given the arguments that were being made both about what canons are for and about whether or not arguing about canons actually changes anything. So that's why you find me writing this blog as someone trying to become a secondary English teacher.

But, on to my second point. Many, if not all, high school English departments are still very much working on getting to consensus on point #1, or may have sort of compromised on that point and want to put it behind them. I know people personally who still routinely have to justify book selections to departments that want to see more Dickens and less bell hooks.*** Meanwhile, many, if not all, university professors and graduate students have moved on from these arguments, which raged throughout the 1980s and 1990s, because they are believed to be passe.

So, to sum up: most of the people (high school English teachers) who teach most of the people (everyone who attends some high school but does not become a college English major in spite of the numerous and well-known advantages) most of what they learn about literature and culture never really came around to either of the two views. And is it a coincidence that we are living in the era of the Great Backlash? And is anyone talking about this problem anymore? In my training so far, it seems more or less settled that one wants to teach "the classics" in some form to all high school English students. This is what I must learn more about. So, to be continued...

*For a brilliant argument on why this was never going to work in the first place, see here.
**I say almost because there are still plenty of books that are more or less required, and most of them are still by dead white men. Did you notice how I could just say "Longfellow" but I had to give Brooks's first and last name? Surprise!
***Let's leave aside the question about whether or not a high school English student will glean anything from either of these authors.

Separate but Equal

It has been awhile since I've posted anything. Standard apology.

The summer term has ended so I get a little break. Woo! Time to process a lot of what I've learned so far. I think that my top two are (1) really and truly caring for all students (you'd be surprised at how controversial this is) and (2) lots of instructional strategies.

The third is about gender and education. The last fifteen years or so have seen a boom in the field of research known as the "boy crisis." Basically there are dozens of scholarly and mainstream titles purporting that "our boys" or "our sons" need "saving" because they are "failing" or "being failed" by the educational system. For urban children, this has the more dire implication that schools play a role in sending more African American males to prison than to college. It is true that many teachers display numerous gender biases; male students, and African American male students especially, are often labeled "behavior problems" and are overdiagnosed with ADHD and emotional disturbances.

But the boy crisis language is problematic, and I see the problem as twofold. The first is relatively straightforward: girls have problems too. And not just teen pregnancy, either: lots of challenges experienced by girls in school are actually THE SAME as those experienced by boys. For example, Pedro Noguera, author of The Trouble with Black Boys, cites a survey in which students at a magnet school in New England were asked to respond to the statement, "My Teachers Support Me and Care About My Success in Their Class.” Noguera highlights the number of black males who either disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statment: 80%. But 42% of Black females disagreed, and 27% strongly disagreed, making for a total of 72% of African American females disagreeing with the statement. Compared to the literature about boys and "urban" boys especially, the literature about urban girls seems pretty slim, at least to a beginner.

When it comes to the "achivement gap," girls outperform boys on reading tests, but girls and boys are equal in mathematics. But the difference on the NAEP between boys and girls of any race or ethnicity is less than half the difference between white and Asian students and black and Latino students. So is this really the problem we want to be focused on? A lot of this goes hand-in-hand with the nice white lady factor: if all teachers are white ladies, then all students are black boys, right?

So that's problem number one. Problem number two: a lot of education research and policy has a frankly retrograde view when it comes to what sex and gender are. Hence the subtitles of many of these books: "saving our sons" is especially popular. A lot of this research, and the policy that comes as a result--schools like Urban Prep in Chicago, for example--doesn't seem to want to discuss at great length what counts as being a boy or a man.

This is not to say that these conversations don't happen at all. But there is a lot of work going on around single-sex education that I consider truly dangerous and potentially damaging. Take, for example, this Washington Post article about single-sex ed in a Washington, D.C. school. (NCLB legalized single-sex publicly funded education in 2006.) The article starts out narrating two classes of first grade students: "rambunctious," "spunky" boys and "quiet," "tidy" girls. The article goes on to tell us that the school's principal knows a lot about the "research" that says that "boys and girls learn differently." But the teachers of the two classes have never taught single-sex classes before, and so what do they know about how boys learn and how girls learn? Only stereotypes. Moreover, the research that shows that boys' and girls' brains are biologically different--especially before puberty--is at best tenuous, at worst totally bogus. It is extremely difficult for researchers to separate social factors in these studies. So are single sex schools just perpetuating gender differences, and stereotypical ones at that?

It is telling, at least to me, that the title of the article is--seeming unironically--"separate but equal." It seems that people just don't know enough yet about any of these things--how boys learn, how girls learn, how they learn to be boys and girls--to start experimenting with actual children. I thought that we already knew that separate was always unequal.