Paradise Is Not So Bad

I once wrote a poem (lost long ago, probably in the move from California to Georgia) about how I wished teaching were more like acting.  Having dabbled in acting (and I have to stress dabbled – community theater, mostly, and some random stuff in college; we’re not talking about anything substantial – although I was hot shit as Huck Finn in 8th grade), I always loved the surge of adrenalin before the curtain rose, hearing the audience reaction during the show, and of course getting that round of applause at the end.  When it comes to instant gratification, acting is about as good as it gets for my attention-starved ego.

It would be swell if teaching were like that: audience in rapt attention, responding to all the right cues, breaking into applause once I dismiss class – and not in relief that it’s over, but in gratitude for how I enriched their lives in the previous two hours.  But it’s not like that, of course. It’s not a job to get into if you need some kind of immediate boost to your self-worth.  In many ways (and in the first couple years, especially) it actually breaks you down, makes you question your ability and dedication.  I remember it feeling like a war of attrition – grinding through the week just to recharge my batteries over the weekend and do it all over again on Monday.

But you stick with it, and the rewards start to come, even if you have to look for them.  The student who starts every day by putting up his hood and putting down his head starts to pay attention; you begin to see slow growth in writing fluency, those hesitant scribbles growing in confidence and competence; the “reading sucks” kid asks you for a book recommendation.  But it takes time, and sometimes the rewards come in forms that are completely unexpected.

Like yesterday.

As I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere on here, I’m currently teaching a class in writing instruction to pre-service English teachers.  Part of the class philosophy is that teachers of writing are writers themselves, so in addition to exploring different ways of incorporating the writing process, discussing English class minutiae like assessment and feedback, and designing meaningful and authentic assignments, we also write a lot.  Many of these writings are ungraded; the students polish their work in writing groups, and then, on the day the work is turned in, we sit in a circle and they take turns reading their pieces for their peers.  This often results in some spectacular writing, and, most days, that’s reward enough.

For the most recent writing (the last of the semester), I asked my students to take at least 30 minutes and go make some observations somewhere outdoors.  It’s called the Walkabout, and the goal is to be inspired by our surroundings.  I got a lot of great stuff: reflections on the changing seasons, clever observations of other students around campus, a very funny poem about the sad sight of a little kid on a leash at the mall.  One student, however, wrote about Little 5 Points – sort of an artsy-fartsy part of Atlanta, with lots of bars and restaurants, one good music venue, and Criminal Records, the closest thing to Amoeba Records in this neck of the woods.  In the course of her writing – a wonderful piece about the area’s eclectic architecture – she wrote a sentence that struck me as one of most simply profound statements I’ve ever heard about teaching.  Here it is:

“The educator in me admires any attempt at brilliance.”

Teacher friends, that really says it all, doesn’t it?  I can’t think of a better summation of why I do what I do – why I endure the grading marathons, the bureaucratic nonsense that seems to be part of education no matter where I go, the occasionally surly students with their unspoken challenges scrawled in body language.  It’s all worth it to witness those tentative stabs at growth, those first halting steps toward a wider horizon.  Even when a student tries and fails, it’s still immensely rewarding to watch them swing and miss.  It’s the swinging that’s important, for all of us.  Without it – giving in to a fear of failure – we cease to grow.

And the best thing – the thing that I actually feared wouldn’t be true when I first made the transition from high school to college teaching – is that it’s situational.  Now, instead of seeing my students become more confident readers and writers, I get to watch them grow as teachers.  I see that moment where they stop thinking like students and start thinking like educators; I see them get a handle on developing the kind of engaging, rigorous materials that complement quality teaching; I watch them as they cease to be my students and start to be my colleagues.  There are still growing pains – for instance, complaints about assignments, no matter how relevant I try to make them, never fully go away – but it’s worth it to revel in those very attempts at brilliance that my student wrote about yesterday.

To be a good teacher means to be invested in the growth our students make.  And that necessarily means we must be, if not more interested in their successes than their failures, then at least dedicated to turning their failures into successes.  We have to learn to look for those attempts at brilliance and marvel at them for what they are: the first exciting steps toward independence.

*****

Current listening:

Pet Shop Boys – The Most Beautiful Thing

The Flames Are Coming Back

A quick one at the end of the evening.  This video has been making the rounds today, and it’s powerful stuff.  It’s especially stirring for people like myself who are fed up with administrators, politicians, and businesspeople (hi, Bill Gates) thinking they know the first thing about “fixing” education.  Pay special attention to the particularly gratifying image of one of the architects of the new Common Core standards getting shouted down before he has the chance to (presumably) sing their praises.  Keep in mind that the Common Core standards weren’t devised by teachers – they were devised by bureaucrats and the very testing companies who stand to profit from them.  Education reform in its current incarnation is a sham, and those behind it want to see nothing less than the destruction of public education.

I Am the Cancer

I like to think I’m pretty calm.  Teaching high school for ten years either makes a person so twitchy and sensitive they can’t function in daily life, or it makes them positively tranquil in the face of irritants, knowing exactly which battles to fight and which to let go.  I come down firmly in the latter camp.  Generally speaking, not much bothers me.  I think some of this also has to do with the ethnographer in me.  I’m quick to defend even blatantly stupid behavior on the grounds that there must be something reasonable causing it.  I let an awful lot of things slide – including some things I probably shouldn’t.  I’m hard on myself but easy on other people.  It’s just who I am.

But if there’s one thing that raises my hackles – especially recently – it’s anything critical of public education or teacher preparation programs.

But first, an aside.  Of course there are bad teachers and bad schools and bad teacher prep programs.  Obviously.  But guess what?  There are also bad lawyers and bad doctors and bad plumbers and bad politicians and bad bus drivers and bad actors and bad whatever other occupation you could use to fill in the blank.  It’s a convenient trope to characterize most public school teachers as lazy idiots because it makes it easier for the ed reformers to make a case for the privatization of education, which is what they really want.  But there’s a growing body of research out there that concludes pretty definitively that the biggest problem with public education is poverty.  By and large, our middle- and upper-class students perform as well as students in other nations, but this is a problem the education reformers choose to ignore (at their peril, of course).  So while I’m aware that public education is not without its ne’er-do-wells, I’m also cognizant of the fact that they are in the minority (as they always have been), and are a relatively minor concern when it comes to “fixing” education.  Similarly, it would be folly to deny that there are lousy teacher training schools out there.  But with a fairly strict body like NCATE (National Council of Accreditation of Teacher Education) policing many (most?) state schools, any claim of it being a widespread problem is vastly overstated.  This is important, as you’ll see in a moment.

Anyway.

Yesterday I read this troubling article, which essentially states that one reason U.S. education is teeming with shitty teachers (a claim I’d argue) is because when these teachers were students, schools of education gave them grades that were too high (a claim I will argue in a moment).  This supposedly results in bad teachers in two ways:

1) It encourages the intellectual mouth-breathers in our midst (the article’s characterization of education students, not mine) to stick with their degree and certification programs, thereby creating a workforce apparently barely able to spell its own name.

2) High grades are a sign of low standards, so not only are these teacher education programs churning out a bunch of dummies, the dummies are being taught by dummies who don’t recognize them as dummies, thus the inflated grades.  Bad work is seen as good work because the professors aren’t smart enough to know better.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I can speak for myself and my current experience teaching in a secondary English Education program at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.  We currently have approximately 200-250 students in the undergraduate program and 25 in the graduate program, and each year we send roughly 50 new English teachers into the public schools.

Here is what I know about grading in our program generally (and my classes specifically), especially as it pertains to the way grades are discussed in this article; that is, as a way to gauge just how well a program has prepared its graduates for the workforce.  To put it simply, we in English Education grade differently – and approach grading differently – in our classes than other disciplines do.

I primarily teach four classes: Principles of Writing Instruction, Teaching Literature to Adolescents, and the methods class at the graduate and undergraduate levels.  I’ve designed these classes to simulate (as much as possible) the kind of writing and thinking my students will need to do as teachers, and that they will want to see in their own students.  We conduct the same workshops I conducted with my own high school classes so students get first-hand experience in seeing how to teach things like the writing process, literature circles, and Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading.  We then deconstruct those workshops to discuss what happened, and what they think would happen in a “real” classroom.  Larger projects are done over time, and they receive feedback both from their peers in writing workshop groups and from me in individual conferences.  They collaborate (because this is what teachers do), they revise (because this is what writers do), and they learn from this process of collaboration and revision.  I know from talking to and observing my peers that I am not alone in running my classes this way.

As a result, yes, many of my students get A’s, and most of the ones who don’t get A’s get B’s.  But I’m adamant that this isn’t grade inflation or a sign of my low standards.  By the time a student turns work into me to grade, it’s gone through multiple drafts, at least two rounds of peer feedback, and often a conference with me.  By looking at their work from multiple angles and perspectives, I would argue that by the time the class ends they understand the material in a much deeper, more sophisticated way than if they completed it in isolation, as a high-stakes, one-shot deal (which would be more conducive to lower grades).  We spend so much time discussing and working toward the goals of the class that I would be shocked if more students didn’t get A’s.  And, based on the results, I would argue that I’m pretty well calibrated as a grader.  In three semesters of teaching the methods class, only three students earned C’s.  None of them made it through student teaching.

What this article claims – that an abundance of good grades is indicative of low standards and not quality teaching – is problematic because it fails to take into account how different disciplines approach their subject.  When it comes to assessing my students’ knowledge of writing lesson plans, for instance, I could very easily ask them to write one for homework, collect it at the next class, grade it, and return it.  In that particular scenario, the grades would likely be much lower than a comparable assignment in my actual class.  But I fail to see how that is preferable to the way it happens now, which is designed to reflect the very reality of teaching and writing and teaching writing: we talk about the different components of the lesson plan, look at samples, and write one together.  My students then create one on their own and bring it to the next class, where they will share it with an existing writing workshop group.  They get feedback from the group members and take it home for revision.  They revise it, then make a conference appointment with me. We meet, and, based on my feedback, they revise it again and bring it back to class to share with their writing group one last time.  Only then do they turn it in for a grade and final feedback.  This grade is usually pretty high, but when considered in the context of the entire process of revision, I fail to see how that is worse than a scenario where the student receives a low grade.  By the time we’ve completed the process (and I should mention that we do this with lesson plans more than once), my students absolutely know how to plan a quality class period.  And isn’t that what we want?  What does a bad grade achieve that my process doesn’t?

Look: I take what I do very seriously, and I resent the idea that by giving largely high grades I’m somehow a shoddy teacher or that I have low standards for my students … or that I’m too stupid to know subpar work when I see it.  Instead, why can’t the good grades be the result of what I truly believe it to be: the result of a meaningful interaction with rigorous and engaging coursework where students have demonstrated their deep understanding of the demands of the profession?  I work my ass off to be the kind of professor I rarely had in my own undergraduate program, and while I know the article in question isn’t singling me out personally, it’s difficult not to be insulted.

*****

Current listening:

Trans Am – The Red Line (2000)

Last movie seen:

Take Me Home Tonight (2011; Michael Dowse, dir.)

Comfortable Home (A True Story)

Ridiculous.  That’s the only word I can think of to describe the bravado with which I entered my latest blogging enterprise.  Here’s the problem, and it’s threefold: 1) I like the idea of blogging more than I actually like doing it, 2) I saw a vast majority of my free time get hoovered up by my role as co-director of the Summer Institute of a National Writing Project site, and 3) I am intractably lazy.

That third reason is actually the biggest problem.  I love it when people say something like, “If I won the lottery I’d still have to work because I’d get too bored.”  I have no such problem.  I love what I do and I’m passionate about teaching, but if I won the lottery I’d leave my job and never look back.  I would have no trouble filling my time.  I’d watch more movies and read more books, I’d play video games, I’d travel with Fiancée of Monty, I’d go to all the concerts I currently can’t afford to attend, I’d learn to cook something other than Top Ramen, I’d refine my oenophilic tendencies, I might even write that book I’ve been meaning to write; in short, I’d do all the things I want to do now but can’t because earning a paycheck gets in the way. So in some ways the third reason relates to the first because the thought of daily blog posting seems like an obligation, and there’s no quicker way to kill my interest in something than to make me feel like I have to do it.  I love reading, but I stay the hell away from book clubs for a very good reason: I don’t want homework.

So this post is partially an apologia for not posting with more regularity, but it’s primarily a way for me to relate my experience with Reason #2 above.  I spent the last twenty days running the Summer Institute (SI) of a National Writing Project site, and it was one of the most exhausting and rewarding experiences of my life.

A primer, for the uninitiated.  The National Writing Project has affiliate sites all over the country which provide professional development for teachers of all subjects and grade levels.  Teachers apply and, if accepted, attend the SI for a period of several weeks, Monday through Friday.  The purpose is to innovate in the field of writing instruction, and this is accomplished by 1) writing, writing, writing – in multiple genres for multiple purposes, and to get feedback on that writing by a community of peers, and 2) following the credo, “Teachers teaching teachers,” which means each of the summer’s participants conducts an hour-long workshop on something that’s working for them (or which has the potential to work for them) in their own classroom.  It’s a break from traditional professional development, where some mouth-breathing know-nothing bought and paid for by the district office comes in with a packaged program to sell and proceeds to talk at the teachers for a couple hours while they struggle to stay awake and/or grade papers and/or stifle their murderous thoughts.

Under my virtuoso instruction (because I’m clearly hot shit), the SI started each day with thirty minutes of uninterrupted free writing.  Some worked on older projects (the novel or short story that had been languishing in a desk drawer for a decade), some journaled about the previous day’s activities, some worked on ongoing writing projects that originated from the SI’s other activities.  After that, we moved into other writing workshops (I led some, dealing with things like writing for social justice and exploring logic and argument), which led into the previously mentioned teacher demonstrations, writing groups (where they’d workshop a piece they were working on), or reading groups (where they’d discuss some professional reading).  We had some outside speakers (including my former advisor/mentor/spiritual guru/life coach/all around good guy Sheridan Blau), a delicious breakfast each morning, intermittent bouts of grousing about current ed reform initiatives, and a hell of a lot of laughter.

I know, I know.  In this hastily sketched-out description it sounds kind of blech.  Writing groups.  Wahoo.  But you’ll just have to take my word that being immersed in this setting for roughly eight hours a day was invigorating and inspirational.  Because here’s the other thing about the National Writing Project: it tends to attract really great teachers.  The burnout you had for 10th grade English who treated you with thinly veiled contempt before he retreated behind his desk with the newspaper?  That’s not the teacher who attends the SI.  I had the privilege – and I mean that; I was the lucky one in this enterprise – of working with seventeen teachers who were (and are; I shouldn’t talk about them like they’re dead) passionate about teaching and dedicated to the idea of helping their students.  I don’t know how we lucked into such an amazing group, but any success we had this summer is due to what they brought with them each day.

And so, as I look back on the last few weeks, it’s really, really weird for me to feel content with my role.  I’ll be the first to tell you that I feel tangential to the SI’s success this year.  Even as co-director, my main job was coordinating the calendar and getting things rolling each day.  Yeah, I led a few activities, but I’m no Sheridan, who legitimately and routinely changes people’s lives.  I’m a decent facilitator, an above-average listener, and someone who mainly wants to ensure that no one feels their time was wasted.  So even though I wasn’t the source of the inspiration so many of the fellows said they felt, I guess my capacity for scheduling allowed the inspiration to happen.  Which, now that I look at those words, makes me a really gifted secretary.  But that’s okay.  The end result is the same, and I’m not going to deny how good it felt to show up at school each day, or how gratifying it was to hear the fellows testify to the way their SI experience will transform their teaching for the better.

And here’s the cool thing: this transformation isn’t a one-way street.  Last September I called Sheridan when I was first asked to co-direct the 2011 SI.  He said it would be one of the most fulfilling experiences of my teaching career.  He was right.  Now that I’m working primarily in a university setting, it did me a world of good to touch base with K-12 teachers who, after all, are my people, my tribe.  Much of the time I feel supremely out of place among my post-secondary colleagues, and I immediately felt at home talking shop with the high school English teachers.  But it also felt right to be among teachers sharing their passion for the job.  I picked up things I plan on taking back to my college classes in the fall, and I met people – both in Georgia and from our international cohort in Ecuador and Costa Rica – whom I want to stay in touch with as a source of professional and personal inspiration.  I said it earlier, but it bears repeating: I’m a lucky guy.

I had lots of reasons for not posting at this site for over a month, but only one of them is a good one.  And while I spent an inordinate amount of time, money, and frustration earning my Ph.D., June 2011 made it all worthwhile.

*****

Current listening:

Ty Segall – Goodbye Bread (2011)

Current reading:

Irvine Welsh – Crime (2008)

Last movie seen:

Super 8 (2011; J.J. Abrams, dir.)