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.

I just read a post on The China Beat about Wolf Totem’s reception among Western reviewers.  I haven’t read more than a couple of pages of the book, which I found out about through the Very Short List*, but I feel like I’m going to be into it pretty soon.  Anyway, without knowing a whole lot about the book, it’s interesting to see how varied the response to it is.  Over on Paper Cuts, Jennifer Schuessler calls the reviews of the novel “strangely fevered, if not always appreciative.”

In my own classroom, I’ve just distributed copies of The Odyssey to my sophomores.  For some reason, I always end the year with it, even though it’s the toughest read of our three district-required works (the others are Macbeth and Huck Finn).  I’m not sure why, but every year I feel the need to really sell The Odyssey to my sophomores.  I find myself engaging in some serious used-car-salesman-esque hucksterism (”It’s so good–there’s action, adventure, romance, sex, the works. I can’t believe you’re refusing to even open this book.  You’ll love it!”) to convince my students that a 400+ page epic from almost four millenia ago is going to be fun, or even interesting, to read.

I guess part of the problem is that I feel the need to convince my students that reading a book is going to give them a similar experience to watching a movie or playing a video game, when that couldn’t be any less truthful.  We read books for very different reasons than we watch movies, and that’s okay.  A movie is a two hour commitment, give or take.  It is meant to be consumed in one sitting (I only give five stars on Netflix to movies during which I don’t get up to go to the bathroom or anything).  We can get a lot from watching movies, and some even go as deep (or deeper) than do our greatest books.  TV shows like The Wire, too, can play out as almost Dickensian, introducing us to characters and subplots that boggle the mind.

But reading a book requires a different mindset.  And when I try to communicate this to my students, they tend to shut down.  So I’m asking if any teachers who are reading have any metaphors, allegories, parables, etc they use to explain how and why we should read.  Please post them here, if you don’t mind.

* Why haven’t you subscribed to this yet?  You really should.

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?

• Select and briefly review one teen novel, classic or modern, which is a sure antidote to the daze of high school.
• Title your post Meme: High School Daze to Praise.
• Include an image with your post.
• Tag four blogger colleagues

Okay. So I want to start by saying that there’s no such thing as a “sure antidote to the daze of high school.” Because, y’see, high school’s “daze” is due to so much more than the novels selected by some English teacher. Can I assign Slaughterhouse-Five and then sit back and assume that my work is done, that my little angels will proceed to meet their academic potential in all of their classes? Will On the Road encourage Ryan to shed his conformist exterior and embrace life? Will The Bell Jar prevent Beth’s becoming another teen suicide statistic?

Nope.

So I don’t buy this thing at all. I don’t believe that literature has that kind of power, or at least the kind of power we English teachers hope it has. I’m not going to pick a universally interesting book; instead, I’d like to write a little bit about the book that woke me up a little when I was in high school.

Entering my senior year in high school, I figured I was a pretty fancy reader. English was the only class I really paid any attention to–why bother with math or science or even history when I could focus my attention on Mr. Decker’s rambling discussions about Shakespeare, St. Exupery, and Gogol? Why bother balancing chem equations when I could explicate a poem? And what was all that business about showing my work?

For my senior year, I enrolled in AP English. As a professional educator now, I believe that the AP system is a load of crap. It exists, as do so many pieces of our educational system, to make money for the testing companies. Why should anyone have to pay money to take an exam? The AP courses themselves, though, serve as a place to collect the students who really want to take that course, who proclaim themselves willing to put in a lot of extra effort to do some higher-level work in a particular subject. It’s become a prestige thing, which is unfortunate, and a way to boost students’ GPAs (at our school, at least, Honors- and AP-level courses are weighted). That’s another post.

In my AP English class back in the ‘94-’95 school year, Mr. Leonard gave us a hot mess of good and engaging literature to read. Nobody who took that class will ever forget the day he climbed up on a desk to demonstrate the bark of a dying dog in a poem; likewise, we’re all scarred by the Swedish TV version of Hamlet that rivaled the Black Knight scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail for absurd bloodiness.

For me, though, the best memory of that class came from struggling with, and eventually loving, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. James Agee and Walker Evans’s masterpiece, Famous Men is a multigenre study of Alabama sharecroppers during the mid-1930s. Agee’s prose and Evans’s indelible photographs combine to make the book the most visceral reading experience I’ve ever had.

Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance, and for what purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you do about it; and the question, Why we make this book, and set it at large, and by what right, and for what purpose, and to what good end, or none: the whole memory of the South in its six-thousand-mile parade and flowering outlay of the facades of cities, and of the eyes in the streets of towns, and of hotels, and of the trembling heat, and of the wide wild opening of the tragic land, wearing the trapped frail flowers of its garden of faces; the fleet flush and flower and fainting of the human crop it raises; the virulent, insolent, deceitful, pitying, infinitesimal and frenzied running and searching, on this colossal peasant map, of two angry, futile and bottomless, botched and overcomplicated youthful intelligences in the service of an anger and of a love and of an undiscernible truth, and in the frightening vanity of their would-be purity; the sustaining, even now, and forward moving, lifted on the lifting of this day as ships on a wave, above whom, in a few hours, night once more will stand up in his stars…

The book began as an assignment for Agee, a journalist, and Evans, a photographer. They were to find out about the living conditions of white sharecroppers in the midst of the Depression. Overwhelmed by their experiences, though, Agee and Evans turned their notes and photographs and interviews into a hefty book that is impossible to characterize as belonging to one particular genre. Some sections read as straight journalism. Some sections are nothing if not beautifully executed poetry. The whole thing has the feel of the postmodern in its willingness to challenge existing forms, in its eagerness to include the author and photographer as characters, in its direct appeals to the reader. This is a book that demolishes the fourth wall and brings the reader in.

This is not a book for everyone. This is a book that could fall victim to what Clay calls “schooliness.” There’s a temptation, I’m sure, to have students extract all the vocabulary words and write context-clue sentences. There’s a temptation to do other, even stupider, things to our students. That’s part of why I’ve never tried to teach this book (I’m sure if I wanted to, I could scrounge up the funds to buy a class set or two. My school has a lot of money). But mostly, I’m afraid that if I did teach this book, there wouldn’t be any students who were like me, ready to be challenged and changed by a book from 70 years ago.

Oh, and I tag these folks (not all of them are high school English teachers, which I hope is okay):  Tree, David, Kim, and Adrian.

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.”

Damn’d be he who cries "hold, enough"

Originally uploaded by jwasserman.

I was tagged. I think I’m most passionate about getting rid of the stuffiness of school and replacing it with a sense of authenticity.

Therefore, I give you

The rules:

* Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative
Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most
passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short
title.
* Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
* Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

I tag, if you are interested and would like to play, the following:

Jose
Kim
Eric
Bruce
Rebecca

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.

Gygax, y’see, was partially responsible for getting me to where I am today. As one of the creators of Dungeons & Dragons, he provided adolescent nerds like me with a way to focus our frustration with everything that goes along with being adolescent nerds–teasing/abuse from peers, bemused looks from adults, etc–on imaginary quests and acts of heroism. I never was a serious D&D player, but for a couple of years, some friends and I would get together from time to time and battle our way through a world created entirely of words, where the results of encounters were determined by rolls of strangely-shaped dice.

The appeal isn’t hard to understand, especially if “being” yourself isn’t all that much fun: if you are, say, a bookish adolescent male with few social skills and no magical powers to speak of. What’s more, D&D offers its players a moral clarity rarely found in the real world: your character has an alignment; he or she can be good or evil, lawful or chaotic. Most players choose good; the paladin, a virtuous knight with magical powers, is a perennial favorite, although the evil-leaning dark elf is also popular. In practice, though, the transformation of player into character often turns out to be cosmetic: the fearless paladin and the sexy dark elf both sound and act a lot like a thirteen-year-old boy named Ted. And what Ted likes to do, mostly, is kill anything that crosses his path. It’s little wonder that Dungeons & Dragons was uncool in the 1970s and ’80s.

Growing up in the 80s and early 90s, there were plenty of apocryphal stories about kids who’d taken their roleplaying a bit too seriously, gone off the deep end, and sacrificed neighborhood toddlers to some strange god. This gave the game a bit of an edge, at least in the eyes of our peers, and perhaps a little of that rubbed off on us, the gamers. I remember one acquaintance being a little shocked that I played D&D but didn’t look like a Satanist.

By the middle of my freshman year, D&D had been replaced by pseudo-industrial music (Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, etc) as our group’s menacing pop-cultural affiliation of choice. Now, I wasn’t a really angry kid–my parents’ marriage was stable, everything I needed was provided, I was smart enough to get mostly good-enough grades (except for math) without trying terribly hard–but I was frustrated with the social order of high school and, by extension, the world. I got very little respect from other kids in my grade, because I wasn’t athletic and was a bit of a dork. I felt like my teachers insulted my intelligence, rightly or wrongly. I was too afraid to get into any real trouble, so I didn’t even want to go to the keg parties that I wasn’t invited to attend. I had my friends, my radio show (we had a radio station, about which more another time), the band, some books, and music.

That was enough, it turned out. As I progressed through high school and learned how to get over myself and actually try to be friends with some of the kids whom I’d hated for so long that I’d forgotten why I hated them to begin with, I set the stage for my own development into adulthood and quasi-maturity. By the summer after my high school graduation, our social groups had become, as they always do, more fluid, to the point where my participation in a scavenger hunt that devolved into a rather sketchy party wasn’t awkward or weird at all, for me or for anyone else there.

Progressing through college saw some logical extensions of my high school interests. Instead of gaming there was writing, culminating in a webzine that ran for several years before finally dying. My high school pit orchestra experiences led me to play in actual bands in college. And I think because I had the outlet for my negative emotions back in high school, I was comfortable enough with myself to take on leadership roles, to be social, to let go.

So thanks, Gary Gygax, though I suppose I ought to thank Trent Reznor as well, and Al Jourgensen, and whoever created WWPT, and everyone else who made high school bearable. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to let out my emotions harmlessly, for keeping me from doing something stupid, for preventing me from throwing away my opportunities. Thanks.