When the hurly-burly’s done

I’ve been looking through my old del.icio.us bookmarks recently, pruning away the ones tagged “toread” that I’ve already read, eliminating stuff that’s no longer useful to me, and generally trying to simplify the list. I’ve been doing something similar with my iTunes library as well, jettisoning music I haven’t listened to in a while, freeing up hard drive space for more photos and Garageband recordings. I’ve brought four boxes of books to the used book dropoff place since the summer, have brought three garbage bags full of old clothes to Goodwill in the same timeframe, have been working to simplify my life and eliminate the unnecessary. Middle-school health teachers from the late 80s, I am afraid, will assume that I am suicidal.

I am not. I am just trying to get to the essence.

There’s something about accumulation of items that is both amazingly enjoyable and horribly depressing. We live in a society in which things are bought, sold, acquired, given, desired, and forgotten. And maybe it’s just the time of year–I have yet to find a magazine that doesn’t include a “Holiday Gift Guide”–but I’m noticing it more and more.

Last week, my Essay Writing students watched Say Anything. There were several reasons for this activity. For starters, I wanted them to write a movie review, so they’re comparing and contrasting it with The Graduate. But beyond that, it’s a great movie for anyone who is directionless and a bit worried about it. Lloyd Dobler, the sort of Everyman protagonist, spends most of the movie floating. The only thing he is sure about is his love for Diane Court.

I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.

This is a quote that I’m sure strikes horror into the hearts of high-powered suburban parents everywhere. Lloyd is a likeable character with no future, and you know what? Things work out for him. That’s not the way it’s supposed to go. He’s supposed to be miserable until he gets into a Top 40 college, gets a job, and retires at 50. That’s how things work. That’s what we do.

But no. I say the disconnection, the dislocation, it’s okay. Not just okay, but part of modern life, and something we need to embrace. In the del.icio.us sweep I mentioned at the start of this post, I came across Chris Lehmann’s “Connection and Disconnection in the Digital Age” reading list and course syllabus. The note I left for myself (and for my colleague and friend Jill, with whom I have managed to make del.icio.us for:tagging into a communications tool to rival Twitter with its simplicity and seeming inanity), says this: “How much do I want to teach this course?”

We’re in a disconnected and decentralized world, and that’s okay. It’s fine. It’s got to be fine, as there’s no choice. What do I mean by “disconnected and decentralized”? Wars on non-state-based military organizations. The rise of Twitter. Outsourcing. $300 laptops. Pico Iyer.

So look at Chris’s reading list. The books and stories and poems he’s selected all deal with the uneasiness of living in rapidly shifting times. The shifts that we think are so new–decentralization and mechanization of the workplace! faster communication with far-flung correspondents! the decline and fall of Western civilization as we know it, as evinced by loosening moral standards!–are not new. They’re all in Joyce, Dos Passos, Eliot, and Beckett. On the Road was shocking 50 years ago, with its depiction of young people without direction who want to do nothing more than travel the nation, get eyeball kicks and other kicks, listen to bop and talk all night with friends, making every night a reunion of sorts, and a celebration of other sorts.

And then came Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan: No Direction Home is about nothing but dissociation, decentralization, floating. The film takes as its central idea the animosity between Dylan and the folk-music scene that developed as Dylan’s sound and lyrics evolved. The folkies felt that Dylan was one of them, and that he turned Judas when his music turned “commercial” (not entirely sure how “Desolation Row” could be considered a sell-out move, but that’s just me). Dylan, meanwhile, felt that he had been unfairly pigeonholed and ought not to have been claimed by any particular scene to begin with. It’s in his lyrics. Relationships change quickly. Listen to the last verse of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and try not to imagine Dylan justifying his “unfriending” of a former lover:

I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I’m bound, I can’t tell
But goodbye’s too good a word, gal
So I’ll just say fare thee well
I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don’t think twice, it’s all right

Tenuous relationships, tenuous existence. We’ve got technology today that both exacerbates and tries to ease the transience of our modern lives. Is using Facebook to keep in touch with friends in Israel, Iran, Australia, Greece, Canada, Indiana, etc. encouraging this disconnect? Today I had a lunchtime conversation with some colleagues about social networking, the decline of face-to-face communication, the fact that kids don’t play outside as much as they used to. The room was pretty much split between those who praised Facebook for being a relatively safe way for people to stay in touch with others in faraway places and those who thought it was bringing about the end of human interaction. I fall firmly on the side that says it’s not doing away with human interaction, but it is making possible a new kind of human interaction. The fact that I can leave a note on the Facebook wall of my friend Alek in Serbia letting him know that I’m okay, that I’ve recovered from Nasal Death, that I played a good gig with my band, is not the end of a way of life.

Or isn’t it?

Preamble: Things are generally good in my life at the moment.  I’ve got a couple of creative outlets, I’m in touch with a couple of dozen new friends from the summer Scotland trip, and as of Thursday, I’ll have the best brakes in the county, if not the state*.

However, I find myself driving home from school in a stressed-out state.  I’m annoyed at the immaturity of a few of my students, who insist on ruining it for everyone.  I’m annoyed at the endless staffings at which I find out that the student being discussed is “a good kid,” “easily distracted,”and “wants to do well,” with no suggestions from the guidance counselor or special ed teacher as to how to help the kid.  I’m annoyed at insulting staff development events that assume we’re incompetent and/or illiterate.

Therefore, I resolve to focus on the good parts of my job: the students who want to learn, who are looking for feedback on their writing, who have ideas and can share them without insulting people or boosting their own egos.  Students like the two who came to see me at the end of the day, two boys who are sick and tired of having their time wasted.  One wants a recommendation to move up to the honors level for next semester; he’s a shoo-in unless he completely falls apart and/or kills a classmate.  The other asked about moving to my other section so that he can concentrate on improving his skills (he’s in the much louder of my two sections). It’s sad to me that it’s come down to requests for a move, but talking to these two students today made me realize that there are plenty of students, even mid-level sophomores (our school’s forgotten caste), who are looking for an education and aren’t impressed by juvenalia.

On Thursday, we’re starting a digital storytelling project about slavery in both the antebellum South and in the modern world.  It is going to take maturity and independence on the part of my students as they create their PowerPoints (influences on this project are here,  here, and here), limited to one sentence of text per slide, and including images, music, and voiceovers.  It’ll take maturity to read modern slave narratives, maturity to look through image banks for runaway slave ads, independence to create meaning out of all of it.   I’m a little concerned, but I am going to focus on the students who are trying to do the right thing.  I can help them.

Download Video: Posted by jcwasserman at TeacherTube.com.

Progress reports are due tomorrow, and though I have fewer students failing at the moment, some of the grades are going to be ugly.  Participation counts for a lot in my classes, especially the writing classes, and those who waste my oxygen will not like what they get.

Wish me luck.

* Or at least I hope to, as I’ll be spending a lot of money on them.

So there haven’t been too many new posts here recently, but I’m not going to apologize. I try to keep my writing on this site relevant and readable, and I haven’t had much to address of late been able to formulate anything meaningful of late. There’s a lot on my mind–I started, and discarded, a post called “Our Failing Affluent Suburban Schools,” if that’s any indication–but I’m trying not to get all shrill and annoying here. So.

Yesterday I retreated to Manhattan with some old friends to get lunch and watch Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten. I’m a sucker for rock hagiographies–I was the biggest Behind the Music fan in my circle of friends–but for once, this is about a deserving subject. Joe Strummer is a fascinating person to know about. His posh background never prevented him from empathizing with people of other races or social classes (the film points to the Clash’s cover of  “Police and Thieves” “Police and Thieves” as the moment when punk opened its arms to black people).  And toward the end of his life, after some post-Clash depression that rendered him almost completely nonproductive, he formed a new band, the Mescaleros, that explored folk music from all over the world in service of Strummer’s always political, always optimistic lyrics.

Not everyone is going to change the world, or even give the world a couple of great songs, like Joe Strummer did.  But there are plenty of people trying, and to me that’s really important.  In the teaching profession, we tend to get stuck in our own rooms, hemmed in by state-mandated testing, intrusive administrators who just don’t get it, dumb committees we didn’t ask to be on, parents who are lied to by their children, children who are lied to by the television, colleagues who should’ve retired fifteen years ago, and all sorts of negativity.  But there needs to be room for creativity, for idealism, for all that sort of thing.  I’ve been down about my job recently, for rather personal reasons, but I keep thinking that someone in my classroom, if not a future Joe Strummer him- or herself, will at least get what he and his colleagues tell us.

Speaking of Strummer’s colleagues, do you know Billy Bragg?  I’ve become a huge fan of his in the past couple of years.  He and Strummer were friends.  And even if they weren’t, they were.  Know what I mean?

But I can’t stop thinking.

I sat in a room proctoring a PSAT for sophomores–SOPHOMORES–for which the school shelled out a bundle of money. Sophomores. PSATs are vaguely useful to the tiny percentage of kids who do extraordinarily well on them and might be National Merit Scholars. But the College Board only counts the scores of juniors.

Our school doesn’t pay for every junior to take the exam. (However, there is money available for juniors whose families can’t afford it.) We’re a highly affluent district, but we face budget cuts like every other district. The key is to spend money intelligently and efficiently while maintaining our reputation as a town with excellent public schools.

So the students spent three hours this morning taking an exam that doesn’t count for anything, and for which the school paid around $20/head. I can almost understand if it were a practice CAPT test–the district’s pretty psyched about getting more students to get better scores on that puppy–but a PSAT? Why? Who are we enriching aside from the College Board? Maybe the PSAT/SAT tutoring companies, because you better believe that there’s a lot of talk about that in my sophomore classes when the scores come back in December. Scores for an exam for which these students aren’t prepared (they haven’t had enough math yet).

And it started me thinking about priorities, and what’s important, and what I’d do if I were the boss of everything in a school district.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love my job. It’s now the job at which I’ve worked longest in my life (I’m in my fourth year in the same school). There is rarely a day when I wake up and dread going to work. Oddly enough, those are usually days on which no students are in the building and we’ve got all-day Staff Development. I like reading with kids and helping them write authentically. I adore my colleagues. I’m grateful for the paycheck and the support.

I think we can be a great school. We can be the high school that we say we are, but aren’t yet. But we need to think a little differently.

The obvious issue is the whole state testing/NCLB thing. Let’s ignore the fact that I think NCLB is a racist, classist, antifederalist attempt to bleed our public schools until they’re abolished and every school is either profoundly expensive or is basically an American madrassah. The reality is that we’re stuck with it, which means that as a Connecticut high school, our students have to pass the 10th grade CAPT test in order to graduate.

Fine. But that can’t be everything. And if is everything, we need to keep a couple of things in mind:

1) CAPT’s reading section is a constructivist exam. It asks the students to read a short story and write four journal entries meant to illuminate the reading process. The questions are usually something along the lines of

What questions do you have about the story?

What is the significance of [a quote]?

Does this story remind you of anyone you know in real life, from other stories, etc?

Is this story a good piece of literature?

According to Wikipedia’s entry on constructivist teaching methods,

In the constructivist classroom, the teacher’s role is to prompt and facilitate discussion. Thus, the teacher’s main focus should be on guiding students by asking questions that will lead them to develop their own conclusions on the subject.

2) CAPT’s Writing Across the Disciplines section doesn’t say anywhere, in its instructions, that it requires a tradition five-paragraph essay structure, a thesis at the end of its first paragraph, etc. In fact, the task is usually to read a couple of articles with opposing viewpoints on the same issue and write a letter about your position on it. This is persuasive writing, but it’s not nearly as formalized as a lot of teachers would have their students believe.

Constructivism fits in nicely with Christian Long’s Future of Learning Manifesto. I know this isn’t a new document, but I’ve found myself reading it more and more often recently. I especially love #4:

4. Got Passion? If Not, I’ll Tell You What To Care About.

I have a right to bitch about this class only if I have a dream I can articulate and am willing to put my life on the line for it. Otherwise, I might as well color between the lines, sit up straight, and take great notes.

And get out to recess on time.

Keep in mind, I may be young so I may have a hard time with that “r-tickle-a-shun” thing. That’s your job. Give me the words. Give me the tools. Give me the examples. And then get out of my way.

But the second you see my passion start to go from curious lit match to smoke-jumper forest fire, stop giving me handouts and worksheets and become my Jerry McGuire.

And here’s where I really start thinking about what my ideal school will look like, sound like, smell like, taste like, feel like. It’s not going to be relentlessly high-tech and obsessed with the Newest & Shiniest. But it’s going to have computer access for every student who needs it, whenever those students need it. So maybe one computer per student is in order. And where will that money come from? From not spending it on silly things like the PSAT, fancy consultants that nobody’s going to listen to, computer programs nobody can access, wasting teacher resources in manning a desk to enforce an attendance policy that doesn’t exist, or countless other things.

But even if there were no computers available in the school, Christian’s vision is spot-on. I taught my sophomores a new word today, “self-sufficient.” When they asked what I meant, I advised them to use the resources they had to find out for themselves. The three or four of them in each class who got the joke lost it; the rest got that deer-in-headlights look I usually associate with politicians who accidentally stray off their scripts.

“But how do you teach self-sufficiency and passion?” I hear you asking.

“Through experience,” I reply. “By taking away the ‘training wheels’ that don’t turn. By not dictating how students have to structure their essays. By not standing for excuses for anything.”

“Sweet,” you reply, in the tone usually reserved for trying to extricate yourself from a conversation with the foaming man on the bus.

“Also, by example. By encouraging teachers to take some responsibility for themselves. By encouraging them to pursue their academic interests, participate in meaningful staff development, giving them a say in how the school is run. Top-down leadership results in a stagnant staff and passive students.”

You would reply, but you’ve already run away.

My ideal school would have a completely integrated curriculum–reading, writing, math, geography, history, science, art, music, etc would be crucial to EVERY class.  We don’t separate these skills in real life.  Why do we ask our students to do that?

My ideal school wouldn’t be afraid of the power of social networking.  Here’s Christian again (point #8):

Instead of shutting off every virtual connection I have with the world once I step onto campus, why don’t you teach me how to ‘blog smart’?  Why don’t you bring in some CEO’s into the classroom to talk about the really ‘great’ kid they almost hired, until they Googled her and found those clever spring break shots from Padre Island?  Why don’t you get a MySpace account and come see what I’m writing, even if it p***es me off at the moment?  Why don’t you make me agile, rather than weak?

Oh, and why are you asking my teachers to deliver a world class education for the 21st century knowledge economy but you’ve censored every virtual tool they have at their disposal?  Frankly, I’m not sure why they give a damn.  I wouldn’t if I were them.

But then I’d be blogging my brains out at home after I punched out at the end of the school day. And then become a consultant and get 10x the pay from the same superintendent who hired me to come in and do a professional development day when “blogging” was trendy for 5 minutes.

I plan to write a lot more about this, but I want to let it marinate a little.  I also really need to get to those essays, which I’m looking forward to reading.  My sophomores were asked to write something somehow connecting the “Buddha Boy” of Nepal to The Scottish Play.  Should be quite an evening…