When the hurly-burly’s done

So my all-time favorite thing about Practical Theory isn’t that Chris Lehmann is a damn good writer or a person whose view of humanity seems very close to my own. It’s that he’s a high school principal who constantly explodes the notion of what high school principals are supposed to be like.

Chris’s latest post just came across my Google Reader–I guess he posted it last night, but I was in a turkey haze from which I’ve just emerged. In it, he addresses one of the things that makes me most embarrassed to be a teacher: the notion of “high expectations” of student behavior.

I know you know these teachers. There’s the one who posts a three-page list of rules (NO HATS! NO GUM!). The one for whom every deadline is treated as a sacred event. The one whose first response to any rustling is to tell students to be quiet.

I don’t work like that. If it weren’t for the bugs I’ve seen in my classroom, I’d bring my own breakfast every day and invite my students to join me. But really? Hats? Gum? Spending all your time chasing down malefactors? Not why I’m in the classroom, buddies. I don’t know how else to put it.

A couple of weeks ago I got into a conversation about homework with a couple of my colleagues. They’re young, they’re hip, and they shocked the hell out of me when I shocked the hell out of them by telling them I just didn’t do homework for about three years, from 7th through 10th grade. I refused, I said, to do homework that seemed like a waste of time. Why would I do 20 math problems when I could go read a book? Why read a book that was assigned when I could read something I’d just gotten from the library? Why bother?

But, one of my colleagues said, what about trusting your teachers to know what’s best for you?

I said nothing, thinking about a lot of the people I’ve worked with for eight years at two real teaching jobs and two student teaching assignments.

What I did say was that every day was a struggle for me to come up with homework assignments that were crucial and built up to some sort of classroom-based epiphany experience for the young human beings in my care.

And don’t, I said, even get me started on not accepting late homework, etc.

But what, said the other of my colleagues, looking very concerned indeed, about holding these kids to some sort of standard? In the real world, in real jobs, there are deadlines, and you get fired if you miss them.

Well, sometimes, yes. But certainly not the first time deadlines are missed. I thought about back when I worked for one of those dotcoms that were ubiquitous at the turn of the century, and how we had a product that was supposed to ship on a certain date. This wasn’t just any product–it was the latest version of our flagship software package, and it represented massive change from the last version, and it was what was going to either make our company a viable force in the asynchronous collaboration game or completely sink us. We had clients (municipal governments of major foreign cities, oil companies, etc) with a little bit of clout. I was writing custom manuals. It was huge.

And we missed our ship deadline. Twice. And there were meetings, and a couple of the clients were annoyed, but in the long run, you know what happened? The final product was way better. The company’s now huge, and though I no longer work there (they tried to claim that it was me who missed the deadline, when in fact no product existed at the time for me to write manuals about, and they finally admitted that they were pretty much full of it), I check in on them from time to time to see how they’re doing.

Maybe not the best example. But I’m sure you can think of one, too–in the corporate world, deadlines are missed, budgets are exceeded, and you know what? The show goes on. The people regroup, and good managers help the employees who are behind to catch up and learn what’s going on.

Also, in offices, you’re allowed to chew gum.

I’m all for high standards–academic high standards. But I’m also for not knocking a kid’s grade down from a B to a C- because he didn’t hand in his homework in time. Are we teaching our students how to read and produce a variety of texts, or are we teaching them that nothing is more important than timeliness?

The best decision I made last year in terms of accepting work was that for my Essay and Creative Writing classes, I’d make everything due in the last week of the quarter. Giving the students weeks and weeks to really polish their pieces made the end results fantastic, in many cases. It made the mid-quarter progress reports an exercise in creative writing themselves, but I’d say it was totally worth it. I’m still experimenting with ways to apply that kind of thinking to my other classes, to treat classes more like workshops with students working at their own paces, but I really have no idea how to do that. It seems, however, more worthwhile than anything else I can think of relating to education. It’s certainly better than complaining.

(Aside, of course, from Moby-Dick.)

The Edge of the American West.  This is how you write a history blog.  The writers subtly connect historical events (miners’ strikes! people taking pot-shots at Teddy Roosevelt!) with today, with a healthy dose of humor.

Kottke.org.  An old-school weblog.  Things of interest, entertainingly presented.

Excellent examples of good blog-writery.  Notice, please, that neither are written by high school English teachers.

(Honors Am Lit I students–please feel free to play around with these models.)

“”I read,” I say. “I study and read. I bet I’ve read everything you read. Don’t think I haven’t. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.” My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with all due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you’d let me, talk and talk.”

David Foster Wallace has died. The one good thing that ever comes out of these events, the deaths of brilliant people way thirty or forty years too early, is that their work gets reexamined and discussed. In the case of DFW, that can only be a positive thing for our society.

Read some of his stuff, please, when you get a chance.

Yeah, I hate ‘em too.  If you read, like I do, a couple dozen teachers’ blogs, you’ll find that for the past week or so, everyone’s been writing about heading back to school and what that means for them. 

So I was reading Will Richardson’s back-to-school post (and if you’re a teacher and you’re not reading Will’s blog regularly, you’re missing out on a TON, not least of which is some insight into what it’s like to be one of those people who present to your entire district on the first day of school when all you want to do is get into your classroom and put stuff up on the walls) and came across this comment from Christian Long:

I wish every speaker/consultant that was blessed enough to have a paying, ticket-holding, captive audience would slam on the brakes when it comes to “here’s how it can be used in your classroom on Monday!” approach…

…and shift entirely to the “What matters to you deeply? What are your passions? What do you what do you want to learn — deeply learn — as a human being, not just as a teacher? And how wide a circle of friends/colleagues do you want on that journey?”

Christian, I think, nailed it.  Without knowing what’s important to you as a person, it’s almost impossible to figure out what to do in a classroom.  Especially if, like me, you’re teaching some courses you’ve never taught before.

So this summer I reread Moby-Dick as a human being.  I wanted to find the emotional hooks, get caught up in the story, care about the characters, and learn something about a vanished way of life.  I wasn’t searching for themes, essay topics, or any of that kind of stuff.  I read as a reader, which is what I expect my students to do.

Okay, yeah, but let’s get beyond that.  Moby-Dick’s a pretty good book, but it’s not the be-all and end-all of my existence.  And if I’m going to be a decent teacher at some point in my career, I’m going to have to be more of a complete person.  So I’m going to have to learn a lot of big things–big things about how adults work, about how younger people work, about the environment and natural processes, about philosophy, religion, and a ton of other things as well. 

And how to learn them?  Well, I guess that’s the biggest thing I need to learn.  Books help, yes, but what about talking to people?  Reading blogs and newspapers?  Watching films?  Getting outside with open ears and eyes?  Cooking?  Messing up?

The best new-to-me curriculum, so far, is the one for English 300: Culture and Identity.  In that class, students are trying to figure out what “culture” is, what their various heritages give to them in terms of world-view and opportunity, and how that plays out for their teenage identities and adult futures.  I think this is the class that’s going to come closest to somehow cracking open a little bit of what we like to call the Human Condition.  It’s also the class for which I’m least prepared, so I’ll be taking that journey along with them.  Should be a ride, at the very least.

The two pieces I wrote for the Franklin & Marshall College Dispatch almost 10 years ago.