When the hurly-burly’s done

First, I read Jose Vilson, who has quickly become one of my favorite bloggers:

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.

UPDATE: I’ve given up on the book.  It’s way too nice out to be able to focus on something like this.

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.

• The Gas-Guzzler Gambit - New York Times

  tags: environment, globalwarming, economics, taxation, campaign, politics, obama

Has anyone else (aside from Clay, who turned me on to it) seen the NYC Students Blog?  If you haven’t yet, take a few minutes and read it, then come back.  I’ll be here.

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?

Sweet. Clay tagged me. Let’s knock out the rules, then on to the meat of this thing:

• 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.