Why Our Students Have to Know Us

For my professional reading, I’ve been going through Mike Rose’s book Lives on the Boundary, which is about the author’s experiences working with at-risk and underprepared students of all ages.  Rose’s approach to education is fully aware of content, but not without first considering the student who has to master it.  This is critical when the students have had academic struggles because they already perceive themselves as incapable of doing whatever they’re supposed to learn.  For that situation, Rose offers this lesson:

Teaching, I was coming to understand, was a kind of romance.  You didn’t just work with words or a chronicle of dates or facts about the suspension of protein in milk.  You wooed kids with these things, invited a relationship of sorts, the terms of connection being the narrative, the historical event, the balance of casein and water.  Maybe nothing was “intrinsically interesting.”  Knowledge gained its meaning, at lest initially, through a touch on the shoulder, through a conversation…My first enthusiasm about writing came because I wanted a teacher to like me (102).

I suppose this ties in with my earlier reflection comparing teaching and cooking.  Students need to know more than just how to do something.  They also need to know that it matters, and the teacher’s concern for them is the first sign that it does.   It’s easier for teachers to be concerned and win students over if they’re passionate about both their subject matter and their students.  Rose had a few dynamic teachers who introduced him to the Beat writers, Albert Camus, Abraham Maslow, and tons of other thinkers, all of whom were challenging to read.  Rose’s teachers, though, had a contagious passion for ideas that was easy for Rose and his friends to catch.  I hope I can fill my career with that kind of outbreak.

The Cookbook Is Never Enough

In Bill Buford’s Heat, the author quits his job at The New Yorker to work as a kitchen slave at Babbo, Mario Batali’s flagship restaurant.  It’s a crazy experience where Buford learns that there is much more to cooking than any book or TV show could ever offer an amateur like him.  When he attempts to recreate dishes from Babbo’s kitchen, he finds that for all the precision and food science the cookbook claims to have, he can’t get the home version to taste like Babbo itself.

I wonder if we do the same thing with best practices.  Researchers (or administrators, or curriculum coordinators) enter a class looking for what makes a great teacher tick.  They write down their observations, thereby legitimizing them, and other experts or bosses proclaim what the teacher does as “best practices.”  But can other professionals recreate what happened in the original kitchen?

What really confounds Buford is that the kitchen staff never measures a single ingredient–recipes take a pinch of this or a handful of that.  This is particularly frustrating when he attempts to make polenta, a deceptively simple food.  Polenta takes three things: cornmeal, water, and time.  But how much of each?  Every set of instructions–even the ones on the bag–is misleading.  “It’s not so much water and so much polenta and so much time,” Buford writes, “but water and polenta and time, in whatever quantities it takes, until the dish is ready, which is never forty minutes but as long as three hours.”  Apparently polenta doesn’t cook itself quickly, and it requires effort unique to a given situation.  Just like true teaching and learning?

While certain principles and methods may arise from a great classroom and be transferable elsewhere, what made magic happen can never be duplicated as accurately as others would like.  The magic comes when you add yourself.  As teachers, we can borrow best practices all we want, but sooner or later, we have to be ourselves.  Our comfort with that inevitability may be a major determinant of our success in the classroom.  We can’t just ask what we’re doing; we must also ask how we can make it our own.

Still Blogging

Being at the KMWP Monday through Friday has given me much more time to blog than I normally used to give myself.  Actually, it probably isn’t even more time; it’s just a consistent amount of time every day.  That seems to help.  My reflections are also shorter than the posts I used to try writing, and that has helped as well.  Blog posts don’t have to be long essays, and perhaps they shouldn’t be–that’s another form for another kind of website (or a different medium?  Reading longer essays doesn’t feel quite right online).  Now I just have to figure out what to say on a consistent basis.

My wife kept a consistently updated blog for several months.  Her interests are food and gardening, so she posted meal plans and photos of her work.  Then she quit for a while; then she started another blog, Domestipunk.  The name really suits her.  It seems that when she keeps it up, though, that she puts a lot of work into it, that it can take a solid hour or more of her time almost every day.  I may still keep up with this, but I also need to figure out how to manage my time so that I can do it.  And my fiction writing, which has lagged during the Institute, still has to take priority.

Respecting Student Culture

It can be difficult to respect student culture.  When I see guys in jeans skinnier or tighter than any I have seen a woman wear, their hair in carefully crafted disarray, with a too-small t-shirt advertising a band with an inside joke for a name, I find it very easy to them as poseurs trying way too hard to impress somebody.  And the music: the bands they listen to are influenced by a lot of bands I love.  The new stuff, though, is so trite and commercial…I could go on complaining, but that would be pointless, because every generation of high school students goes through the same phase and comes out okay.  I could have easily written a very similar description of students in the late 1980′s.  The clothes would be just as tight and the hair just as ridiculous, but the band name on the shirt might be Whitesnake instead of Forever the Sickest Kids.

Sabrina’s presentation today was a reminder that respecting students’ culture is perhaps the easiest way into their hearts.  By taking seriously elements of hip hop sneered at or misunderstood by the mainstream, Sabrina cracked open a world of art and ideas and recognized its inherent meaning for its devotees and the rest of society.  The ideas behind the demo are transferable to any student subculture.  I’m reminded of the punk aesthetic, which in some circles still stands for questioning authority and proposing alternatives to corrupt or unjust policy.  Maybe I can bring some of that in next year.

That iPod of Yours Is Very Useful–Just Don’t Use It.

Pam did a nice job of bringing “taboo” technologies (cellphones, iPods, etc.) into the classroom, thereby legitimizing the ways students acquire information and write in new media.  These technological changes are happening so fast that the adults in charge cannot keep up with them, and often their only response is a wet blanket, such as “No cellphone use ever–unless something really bad happens.”  At the beginning of the year, parents and students alike sign their forms acknowledging that they are aware of the policy, but parents still have no qualms about texting their kids in the middle of the school day.  Meanwhile, there is a lot of good that can come out of the various handheld devices our students are hiding from us.   The reason we don’t seriously consider the potential benefits is simply because in the short term, it is easier not to.  All of this is creating a techno-policy-mess that will be difficult to clean up in the long term.

What If the Glass Is Half-Full?

Today’s discussion of Teacher Research for Better Schools dovetails nicely with this Washington Post blog post by an Ohio principal, who touts all the great things his (non-charter) school is doing in an age when it is all too easy to criticize the public school system as a whole.  Check out what they didn’t do:

We did not fire the staff, eliminate tenure, or pay teachers based on student test scores. We did not become a charter school. We did not take away control from a locally elected school board and give it to a mayor. We did not bring in a bunch of two-year short-term teachers.

And somehow, this school is still successful!  So much of the talk of school reform these days is about gutting the system of bad apples.  Believe me, I know there are bad apples out there; I’ve seen them firsthand.  But of this group, a certain percentage are well-intentioned people who could use some professional development, and a slim minority are the true slackers who collect paychecks while they wait for retirement.  I’ll concede that it takes only one awful teacher to light a fire under a “reformer”; there’s one at my alma mater who has been there for at least twenty years.  He was incompetent then, and he’s incompetent now, but for some reason, nobody bothers him.  It angers me to think about my friends who had him as an English teacher, many of whom were stuck in remedial English when they went to college.  Nevertheless, this is one lousy teacher at a high-performing school.  Should we bring about sweeping reform just to get rid of one guy (or a few people)?  Should we euthanize someone with cancer, or should we just get rid of the cancer?

I would be willing to bet money that the vast majority of public schools in this country are good schools, and that the vast majority of teachers in those schools are good teachers.  It’s easier, however, to point out problems than celebrate successes, or to take something that works in one area and expect everyone to implement it, even if things are fine everywhere else.  There are places where schools are failing, but there is rarely a single source for that failure.  I do not want to risk complacency, and the proposed solutions might work.  However, I have yet to see a workable systemic model for what is so far working just in miniature, with specific populations.

Summer Reading

It’s funny that today’s visiting writer, Jeffrey Stepakoff, spoke briefly about Nicholas Sparks.  I’ve been trying to deal with Sparks for a few days now.

This year, for the second year in a row, I have asked my students to assign me some summer reading.  It’s fun to let them turn the tables on me, and some of them relish the opportunity to force me to read something I would never pick up.

My first assignment is to read Sparks’ novel Dear John, a book I would not normally give the time of day.  Sure, I’ve never read him, but I know enough about his stories to know they aren’t my thing.  Still, I want to give Sparks a fair shot at impressing me.

As Chapter One begins, John describes his hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina plainly, like someone reading straight out of a AAA guide.  Then he distinguishes Wilmington from the Outer Banks:

“The Outer Banks may have more romantic appeal because of their isolation and wild horses and that flight that Orville and Wilbur were famous for, but let me tell you, most people who go to the beach on vacation feel most at home when they can find a McDonald’s or Burger King nearby, in case the little ones aren’t too fond of the local fare, and want more than a couple of choices when it comes to evening activities” (7-8).

So you can go to the Outer Banks to be closer to nature and eat local food, or you can go to Wilmington and eat Quarter Pounders.  That says it all right there, not just about Wilmington, but about Nicholas Sparks himself.  Sure, you can read a more distinctive love story–Possession, perhaps?–but sometimes you just want a cheap hamburger.  Nicholas Sparks is proudly the cheap hamburger.  I don’t say this to trash popular fiction.  It’s very possible to write great popular fiction, as Stepakoff argued in today’s presentation (which was full of other great stories of his work in the TV industry).  But if I’m getting a chain restaurant hamburger, I’d rather go to In-N-Out than McDonald’s.

BONUS FEATURE: Here’s an interesting interview with Nicholas Sparks.  He seems fond of his work.

Tired

Last night I managed to get eight hours of sleep for the first time in days, but the recovery process continues.  Now that I’ve finished the demo, I finally feel like I can focus more fully on the writing part in this writing institute.  Revisions and expansions on my morning work are happening slowly, but ideas are trickling out of my head and onto the paper pretty consistently.

The blogging has been fun, but since I have started and abandoned four or five blogs in the past, I’m trying to look for that moment when I would normally start to lose interest.  Since I’m posting every day, I’m trying to find that point where my interest falls off a cliff and plunges into a river full of crocodiles.  I want to get over that hump and find enough of a balance between blogging, other writing, and the rest of my life that I can continue all three without neglecting any of them.  If, however, I find that there is not enough time to do both blogging and other writing, then I might have to do more of the latter and less of the former.  I have managed to keep a Twitter feed going for almost two years, but blogging takes more than 140 characters at a time.  We’ll see.

Done–With the First Thing

I have never felt as relaxed before or during a presentation as I did today.  There are probably a few different reasons for this.  I didn’t have to worry about a grade.  I had a partner who knew what she was doing (thanks, epbookraider!).  There were no administrators in the room.  All of the “students” were quiet and compliant.  There was high participation.  And we were prepared.

Aside from some presentations in a few graduate level classes, I have never done this much with my peers on a leadership level.  Honestly, I never thought I would enjoy it.  Far, far more often than not, it has been misery to sit through a professional development session; how much worse would it be if I actually had to give it?  Never have I been to any kind of meeting like this and seen joy in anyone there–audience or presenter.  Continuing education may be necessary, but how do we turn it into hell so easily?

This experience makes me wonder how we can fix an awful attitude that we as teachers have helped nurture.  How can we make professional development interesting and enjoyable?  How can we contribute to our own growth?  I guess this is the whole point of the National Writing Project, so I’m not saying anything new.  Perhaps that means the KMWP is doing its job…

I’m With Green

For our first book club meeting, I selected M.T. Anderson‘s The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation Vol. 1: The Pox Party.  I had previously read Anderson’s earlier novel Feed and found this one to be drastically different in style (not a shock, since the narrators are very different guys), but with the same sense of satire.  Anderson knows what he’s doing, but he’s written a very intelligent, challenging young adult novel, one that plays with kids’ brains more than usual.

Apparently Anderson’s gotten a little flak for this, and has even been accused of writing something that’s too intelligent for teenagers.  I found this out when I looked up John Green, author of the next book I’ll be reading, Looking for Alaska.  Green defends Anderson in a nice blog post.

I haven’t yet read the second volume of Octavian Nothing, but I’m with Green.  Literature of all genres comes in all depths and difficulties.  If Anderson wants to write a young adult novel like it’s the Great American Novel, then that’s awesome.  I’d love to see him attempt a young adult Moby Dick*, something big, audacious, and deep.  And it would be especially cool if he didn’t have to wait until decades after his death to get recognized for it.

* Take a look at Power Moby-Dick, an annotated online edition of the novel.