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.

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.

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.

Whether it’s at the movie theatre or my schools, many of our youth have become more superficial, less integral, more belligerent, and more careless with themselves, more than anything.

While it’s easy to point at the parents, I’m of the belief that the village raises the child. When communities as a whole set a standard for how their neighborhoods like, for what their children should know, and how their offspring should behave in any given environment, I strongly believe that translates into higher success for the communities in general.

Hmm, I thought as I picked my way through the layer of trash on the floor of our student center, stepping around kids making out on tables and past the pharmaceutical trade show that clearly doesn’t, couldn’t exist in such an Affluent Suburb Where No Children Are Left Behind. There sure are a lot of things wrong here!

And when an entire section of sophomores rolled into my classroom five minutes after the bell, claiming they weren’t late “because nobody was there,” I thought, There sure are a lot of things wrong here!

And when, at a house meeting in the middle of the week, we were told that the reason why we can’t go to the Board of Ed with an Actual Attendance Policy was that not every teacher in the school consistently enters his/her grades into the attendance database after school every day, I thought, There sure are a lot of things wrong here!

I don’t want this to be a complaining post. Nobody likes reading those, for starters, and May is such a great time of year to try to be happy. So instead, I’ve been thinking about things I can do which will raise my ability to respect myself as a teacher, which should translate into improvements, at least in my immediate sphere.

It really comes down to one thing: I will not teach behaviors that I do not want to see in my students. Or, if you’re more of a positive person, I will teach by example the things that I think are most important. I think this is the only way to counteract what Jose points out.

Thing One: Environmental responsibility

I’m not dumb enough to believe that this high school is going to become even a little bit more environmentally responsible. Replace our non-opening windows and inefficient HVAC system with fresh air? Naaah. Stop allowing students to drive to school? Nope. Rising gas prices (we’re over $4.00/gallon in these parts already) aren’t going to have much of an impact on rich kids driving inefficient SUVs. The school-wide campaign to recycle clean printer paper and print on the other side hasn’t gotten much traction. They’re still selling Poland Spring bottles in the cafeteria line.

I don’t entirely agree with Michael H. Schneider’s comment on UnFogged that it’s not in the American character to change our consumption patterns:

I’m confident that life in this country will get steadily more nasty, brutish, and short. I expect that anthropogenic climate change will accelerate and wipe out most coastal communities and totally disrupt agriculture.

I’m not doing a thing to prevent it. Judging by the election results of the last few decades, people like me are in the majority. Sorry, kids.

However, there are days when I can’t help but nod when I read this bit:

I just hope it happens after about 2035, because that’s about as long as I think I can possibly live. People in this country like being ignorant and bigoted and selfish and stupid, and we’ll choose to stay that way until it kills all of us.

If we could see the impact of our bad decisions, if we could see the impact of our good decisions, I think we’d have a lot more people willing to work to curb their excesses and pitch in. But I also think we need role models for sound stewardship of the resources (natural and unnatural) we’ve got left. Because it’s not just about global warming and the impending fuel crisis; we’re running out of food and money and pretty much everything (except for blogs).

So that’s why I’m planning on going paperless with all of my classes next year. I don’t want to photocopy anything, because all those papers wind up in the recycling bins, which, because of cuts in the facilities department, wind up getting emptied into the same trash cans as everything else. The papers clutter my desk, leading me to discard them, and things get wrinkled and coffee-stained and meet all sorts of other fates. It’s not worth it.

I’m thinking that setting my students up with the Google online software suite would be the way to go: papers could be “handed in” by sharing them on Documents (and I can write comments directly on them). Homework could be posted on Calendar. Announcements via a group on Gmail. Etc, etc.

Thought: does having a computer on to do all this use more resources than using a copy machine to make handouts?

Thing Two: No More Timewasting

My mantra this year has been “another committee…another meeting…another hour spent doing something that doesn’t directly benefit my students.”  I’m on the Senior Internship Committee, which, while a good cause, is really inefficient; I’m doing something involving figuring out which non-special ed support services are available to which kids, which has so far consisted of brainstorming the same things over and over again and writing them on chart paper and yellow legal pads; I spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for students who aren’t in my classes to show up for CAPT test remediation, which nobody wants to deal with; the cringe-inducing tech committee.  There are more, of course.

Recently, I’ve been thinking more and more about my desire to refuse to go to these things anymore (especially because I wasn’t given much of a choice in the first place).   Why is it that I can complain about these meetings and events, pay little attention when I’m there, and not complete my assignments while if my students did that in my class, I’d come down on them?  Is not the behavior I’m modeling the behavior I’m getting?

The solution I’ve come up with here is not to start going happily to crappy meetings.  It’s time for someone else to pick up that slack.  But I want to focus on giving my students only meaningful work to do, only things that have a clear value to them.  the trick, I suppose, is to figure out what those things are.

Anyway, am I told to be excited by the idea of a few high school students using a blog to organize protests, to call the system to account, and to pass information along?

Why don’t we have this in my district?

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth…

39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces — what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.” Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference — the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

&c.   There are 43 individual lines in this manifesto, and most of them can easily apply to what I think I’m trying to do in my classroom, with the youth group, with the Writing Project, with the bands, and with my life in general.  Do yourself a favor and read the whole piece.

The problem, though, with this kind of manifesto/credo is that while it’d be wicked cool to be able to say you follow the whole thing, it requires a big leap of faith.  Right before I read the ArkiBlog post, I came across this in A.J. Jacobs’s amazingly wise and funny book The Year of Living Biblically:One Man’s Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.

The emphasis on faith is a key difference between modern Judaism and current evangelical Christianity.  Judaism has a slogan: deed over creed.  There’s an emphasis on behavior; follow the rules of the Torah, and eventually you’ll come to believe.  But evangelical Christianity says you must first believe in Jesus, then the good works will naturally follow.

Is it possible that the Jewish approach might help here?  Does it make sense to accept the principles of this manifesto as practices to strive for, hoping that somewhere along the way we’ll have a conversion experience and start to do them as if there were no other way?  Am I asking the right questions?

I got into the Facebook thing this summer when I was getting ready to leave Edinburgh.  Looking for an easy way to stay in touch with my new friends, I realized that they were on Facebook far more than they were using email or anything else.  And it made perfect sense–with Facebook, you can send messages (what we used to call email), share photos, leave notes, play games, post videos.  Pretty much anything you’d want to do online, actually, can be accomplished on Facebook.  All it’s missing are a decent RSS aggregator and document sharing (a la Google Docs) and it’d be unstoppable.

Our school has spent a lot* of money on a fancy new portal system.  The idea is to provide one-stop shopping for the information that various members of our school community need to succeed.  For teachers, this means access to our school email, our attendance and grade reporting database, our Individualized Student Intervention Plans, our class calendars, &c.  For students, it means access to their individual class pages, homework assignments, a digital locker for submitting work, and a calendar for all of their classes in one place.  And parents can track their students’ grades and easily contact teachers.

It’s actually pretty cool, in theory.  I’ve played around with it a little (not as much as I am supposed to have, as a member of the Technology Working Group) and have found it clunky so far.  I have high hopes that it will become more useful.  It needs to have the capability for teachers to add RSS feeds for their individual classes that aren’t either the local newspaper or Board of Ed press releases, and it should have some blogging and wiki capability, for starters.  To be honest, it probably should just be run via Moodle or something equally free and useful.

But then I was thinking: why don’t we just use the system that already exists, and that most of our students are already using and are comfortable with?  Leaving aside the fact that for some reason (and please, someone give me a good reason) it’s banned from our school network, why not use Facebook?

Think about it.  It already has these capabilities:

• Quick and easy private/group messaging
• Public commenting
• Media(photo/video) sharing
• Mobile access
• Automatic RSS feeds
• Rudimentary RSS readers/aggregators

These, meanwhile, are the apps I think Facebook’d need in order to compete as an educational platform.  If you know of any of these that already exist for Facebook, definitely let me know and I’ll try them out.

• File sharing/dropbox (even better if it was something similar to Google Docs so students could collaborate on group assignments)
• Some sort of homework calendar
• Grade tracking

So I know I said I wouldn’t be writing so much about edtech stuff, but this has been on my mind.  Apologies in advance to Dan and anyone else who finds my lack of restraint disturbing.

* We’re a very wealthy district, and it still seems like a lot.  That’s what I mean by “a lot.”

There’s an alternative to acceding completely or whining constantly, and it begins with thinking through and naming the commitments you bring with you into the classroom, your values, your pledge. These are not pure abstractions, but rather standards to hold in mind. A fundamental commitment might involve taking the side of your students, affirming the humanity of each and resisting anything that constrains or reduces them. Another might be to create in your classroom an environment that is a kind of republic of many voices, allowing every student a space to be seen and heard and known well as a person of worth and value.

Because teachers work in a fluid, complex, idiosyncratic world, and because there’s much beyond our immediate control, it makes sense to focus on these things that you can control. First, you can see your students as whole human beings, three-dimensional beings much like yourself with hopes and dreams, bodies and minds and spirits. You can see with your own eyes, your own curious and critical mind, your own generous heart. And you can resist the alphabet soup of deficits and the toxic habit of labeling kids that infects most schools. No one can make you see kids as creatures with labels clinging to them like barnacles, sharp and ugly. You have a mind of your own, and you can become a student of your students in spite of everything. This gesture alone can be full of surprise, and deeply satisfying.

It’s the third quarter, and it’s March, and here in Connecticut, that means that we’re stranded between our February and April vacations with nothing but CAPT testing, course selections, and preparation for senior internships to hold on to. The CAPT-less sophomores and juniors, the ones who didn’t bother showing up for testing, have been more or less mopped up, and the guidance department is working through its list of kids who haven’t stopped by for scheduling meetings. I ordinarilly wouldn’t have anything to do with the senior internship program, not after last year’s fiasco, but Dave made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, so I get to go to a meeting about it today.

I think, though, that the worst part of this month every year is getting sick of dealing with the same kids every day. I’ve had my sophomores since the start of the school year, and I feel like I know them by now. I know, too, that there are a few of them that, try as I might, I have a hard time digging. I don’t understand their motivation, what would make them do the things they do. I don’t understand why they pick on the socially inept, the mentally challenged, the tall, the short. I can’t fathom the selfishness that comes through when they come to see me for extra help, then, as I’m trying to explain to them what’s actually good about their writing, are off distracting other kids. And that makes it really hard to like them. I care about these kids, I care deeply, and I’m worried for them, but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy their company. They’re damaged, and it is up to better minds than mine to try and fix them. All I can do is teach. And at times, I don’t even want to do that anymore.

There are new things afoot here, though, which give me some hope. No matter how old-fashioned, non-progressive, and embarrassing a lot of our school’s policies may be, we in the good ol’ English Department have a few tricks still up our sleeves. We’ve talked in the past week about portfolio-style assessment for English classes, which’d be great, and a little about new curricula for the 9th and 10th grade programs. These things are exciting to me, and I really hope that the momentum for change is allowed to continue.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to bring myself out of the late-winter funk that has dogged me of late. I’m thinking more and more about ways to go paperless* in my classroom, even though I don’t think I’m in line for a Smartboard or anything like that. We’ve got a fancy new portal system that kind of works, but I’m not sure I want to tether myself to something that’s unproven. I know a few colleagues have started using Google Docs with their students, which to me is a lot more promising. I also kind of like the idea of using the Google Calendar and some of the other apps. Will that make me a Tech Committee traitor? Do I really care?

Oh, one other thing that’s not even remotely related to any of this, but which still has made me rethink my teaching, reading, and writing: Check out the Australian jazz-esque trio The Necks. From what I can figure out, they tend to perform songs that are over an hour long, so this is a rare short piece (it’s a little over nine minutes). I love how free-flowing and organic their music is, and how they’re not afraid of repetition, attention to detail, and jarring statements.

* ie, no photocopying on my end. Students will still have to take notes in their own notebooks, though.