Online @ School

If you are reading this on a computer at a New York City public school, please click on the following link and watch what happens: http://www.facebook.com/. You will probably see something like this:



Legally, schools are allowed to prohibit access to certain sites they think are not suitable for students. My question is, How do certain sites get labeled inappropriate for student (and teacher) use? I choose Facebook as an example.

Facebook, along with Myspace and others, are popular web sites used for social networking. These sites have many possible uses, socializing with friends being the primary one. The site itself allows different members to connect and exchange information, to communicate. There are various levels of privacy and publicity so that members can self-regulate. It seems to me that schools prohibit the use of such sites because they associate them with non-academic, silly playtime. They ignore, however, the possibilities for learning that are yet untapped.

It’s worth noting one major point of complexity with social networking sites. The sites seem like they are private, like the user is hanging out and catching up with friends. However, depending on the privacy settings, this “catching up” might well be out there for the whole cyberworld to see. It feels so private, yet it can be so incredibly public. Consider this: Colleges have been known to look at the social networking pages of those applying to them for school. The Princeton University newspaper reported that graduate schools admissions offices admitted openly to checking applicants’ Facebook pages. It gave them a rounder sense of students’ character, they said. It also gave them a negative impression about fifty percent of the time.

Should schools use the internet at all? Whether it’s for learning about students or teaching students how to communicate online? Does an English teacher, for example, have an obligation to teach his students how to blog? What is the role of the internet at school? The debate is ongoing, with the voices of students, parents, teachers, and administrators calling out from every direction. These voices might almost be as loud as the sounds of keyboards trickling.

Full Contact Scholarship

When I read what one theorist, Dr. Merrifield, wrote about another theorist's, Dr. Soja, book, my jaw dropped in ecstatic joy: "Maybe the real problem here is Soja's prose.  It is far too remote and wordy, and often screams out for clear-spoken directness.  His verbosity militates against him really getting down deep, really immersing himself in the convulsions of daily life and in the cracks and marginal twilight zone of urban life. This is where his Thirdspace [theory] resides and it is plainly where he wants to be, but he cannot quite stoop that low." Whoa.  At times, Merrifield's tone is borderline offensive, I'll grant.  Nevertheless, there is something to learn from him about what it means to discourse with others.  

I would rather hear someone genuinely and thoughtfully disagree with my ideas and representation of those ideas than have my work met with bobbling heads.  As educators, we must balance intellectual encouragement with rigorous thought.  I think the two conflate with some frequency. 

I've done this: So thrilled that a student volunteered his ideas to the class discussion, I have nodded and trailed his thoughts with hmms and rights.  The quality of the ideas were firmly secondary to his willingness to share.  An informal poll of colleagues have revealed similar trends.  How openly we welcome classroom participation.   

But participation is not enough.  With high school students, I think there is much to be said for encouraging quiet and timid students to speak aloud in class.  However, if the teacher's only response is support or permissiveness, then he abandons edification for coddling.  Not all ideas students express are thoughtful.  Teachers have a tricky line to walk.  Though it's important that students take risks in classroom discourse, the sharing itself is only a first step.  If an idea is weak, rash, or problematic, the teacher has an obligation to question it, that is, to model for the class how thinkers explore others' ideas.  

I think teachers often find this modeling difficult.  I've both led, as a teacher, and been led, as a student, in many classes where the classroom discussion becomes wishy washy as others share their ideas with the whole class, deaf to the words of others and infatuated with themselves.  It's as if we have this unspoken binary: Either a teacher lectures or he lets students share, carte blanche.  Either we have a pontificating professor before us or mouthy students bemusing their own ears.  Why might this be? 

It seems to me that many of us (and I place myself in this category as well) are too concerned with the emotional well-being of others, to the point of soft scholarship.  Granted, teachers and classmates have to uphold common courtesy--it's rude to insult others, of course.  But, disagreement in classroom discussion is not discourtesy. 

I'd like to take the lead from the sporting world.  It is, after all, football season.  One would hardly expect two linebackers to spare each other's feelings before a tackle.  Tackling is what they do.  While I don't mean to distill academia into football, it's worth pointing out that at least part of our task as thinkers is to interrogate the ideas of others.  Understand in order to critique.  What we need is full contact scholarship.  I don't mean that students and teachers engage rudely or obnoxiously.  Far from it.  But I am calling for the celebration of disagreement in the classroom, for interrogating what others say, to poke and prod ideas until their merits and limits are clear.  It's not personal; it's academic.

Report Cards and Soda Pop

School isn't really about school. It's a place to learn things so that when you are not in school you can live a thoughtful and compassionate life. In short, school is about non-school. This is important to consider because we forget it fairly often. It's especially forgotten when Departments of Education publish report cards, not to mention when students drink soda pop.

There have been two articles in the last week that at first seem disparate, but which both speak to the same concern I have for education. The first describes the City of New York's system for assessing and ranking its schools throughout the five boroughs. The second reveals that removing soda machines from schools does little to curb students' consumption of it. At the heart of both is an inherent forgetfulness that schooling is nothing if students don't take it out into the world with them. School, remember, isn't about school.

The City's report card system for assessing the effectiveness of its schools uses a multi-layered, extensive process that includes test scores on math and literacy, assessors of quality (consultants from England...Cambridge, I think) who spend a few days interviewing members of staff and students, touring classrooms, and greatly following a regimen prescribed by the principal. Parents are also surveyed. In the words of the grading system's creator, it is "the only school-accountability system in the country where the results could not be predicted by poverty or race, since all results are adjusted based on demographic peer performance. He also said that, analyzing the data, school size and class size do not appear to be important factors affecting progress on test scores." That all sounds wonderful. However, there are many flaws to it. I'll leave it to the numerous critics of the system to spell out most of these flaws. I'd like to add one I've not heard.

The underlying problem of the school-accountability system is that it focuses on the schools. Granted, there is a need to ensure certain functionality--school culture, safety, teacher experience. But, what happens when students leave school? Do they read at home or on the train in the morning? Do they speak about politics or literature with friends online at night? The measure of education shouldn't be just what happens in school--it's much more about what students take with them when the academic doors shut behind them. They are only in school (at a very generous estimate) for seven hours a day, five days a week, ten months out of the year. What of their schooling follows them for the other seventeen hours per day, two days a week, and two months? Well, they are drinking soda, apparently.

The soda machine article supports this idea that school is about non-school. It would be reasonable to think that if soda machines are taken out of schools--where students spend chunks of their lives--there would be a decline in the drink's use. But this isn't the case. It's not the case because, though we shudder to think it, students are only students when they are in school. Otherwise, they are live, breathing, decision-making human beings.

Schools must do a better job, and teachers especially, at making students find the meaning of school outside of school. Some researchers have already begun trying to do this. Elizabeth Birr Moje, as one example of many, has studied how students conflate the various spaces they encounter each day: school and non-school especially. Another researcher, Lalitha Vasudevan, studies young people's use of multi-modal literacies, which seem to both serve and subvert institutions like school and home. These researchers need help, however, from the classroom.

I would add that teachers must take up the charge to confront the internecine role-playing that goes on within school walls: the role of teacher and the role of student. We must move beyond the facade of report cards and become much more serious about our work as educators. We, as pedagogues, have a lot to learn from soda pop.

Scholars Inside Invisible Boxes, Writing on Mirrors

In a foreword to Narratives of Social Justice Teaching, Ruth Vinz describes a sixth grade classroom in which—at the room’s center—is a boy in a cardboard box.  The boy, we later learn, is autistic, and when coaxed out of his box by the student-teacher he darts about the room, stands in defensive position with a pair of scissors aimed at her.  He runs for the window when Ruth, observing the classroom as a university liaison, pulls him down and holds him on her lap for the rest of the period.  The boy draws pictures of animals and plants. The box, you see, was used in the classroom because the boy’s mother suggested it.  When the boy’s mother, and the principal, and the teacher, and the student teacher, and Ruth sit at a table to discuss the child, it becomes clear that each person involved has their own standpoint—some unimaginable to the others—which has led to the normalizing of a child in box.

As I’ve been given this foreword to read as part of a graduate course on writing research, I begin to wonder about the questions Ruth raises.  It’s not just about classroom management or how students with special needs are responded to in schools.  It’s also about how scholars and researchers represents observations on paper. My mind leaves the foreword for a moment and certain words flash in my mind: paper, box, reader, writer, words, margins, representation, space.  I can do little to stop these words.  I pause and type out the sentence you just read and continue reading.

Ruth keeps silent as the others reach a consensus: that the student-teacher must leave the child in the box or leave the placement.  She leaves.  When Ruth continues that “thinking about the box through systems of interaction [might] make visible institutional positions and interaction that often marginalize negotiations and create less than productive spaces,” I quickly add to her list of binaries—school/university, student teacher/cooperating teacher—my own: writer/reader.  What are the spaces of reading and writing scholarship.  Ruth’s writing conveys her awareness of the reader: she crafts a narrative, a story through which she weaves observations and raises questions.  But the tides of academic writing seem far more content with templates and safe forms of “scholarly” writing in which the word “I” can be used only when trailed by speedy apologies.  What sorts of spaces are constructed for the reader when the writer is so busy genuflecting at the altar of Academe?  It’s the faithful who prays to idols while their neighbors suffer. 

I think about others who write about space and literacy, who seem of a similar camp as those Ruth describes in her piece.  They think that space is a social construct not an empty void to be filled with gibberish and knickknacks.  But even those who write about space and social justice and margins and centers often do so in a form that itself fits neatly into the academic box.  These writers imagine the readers to be just like them.  Whereas the student in the box suffers schoolish injustice, a scholar who writes in a generic box suffers from either complacency or sophistry.   The student’s box is explicit, heartbreakingly physical; the scholar’s box is implied and wrapped in authority of academia.  The student, when coaxed out of his box, arms himself with scissors; the scholar, when one draws his attention to his own box, cuts up opponents with words and indifference.  Both boxes are meant to keep others out, to provide safety from the dangers of reality.  I might suggest that the scholar possesses, in his invisible box, an accessory that our student lacks: a mirror.

I imagine the scholar writing in black marker on the cool glassy surface of a giant mirror.  With each word he sees his own hand and eyes and ears.  Each word reflects him unto himself.  The frame around the scholar’s mirror is of age-old woods from the earliest academic institutions: oak, perhaps, from Oxford; maple from Harvard.  The mirror hangs in a lecture hall that is filled with students eager to learn and inquire.  The scholar stands on a ladder and scribbles away.  He writes with words like is and of course and clearly and punctuates his ideas with periods rather than ellipses or dashes or question marks… He doesn’t typically narrate a story; he performs a tried and true verbal exercise for those who read and write just like him.

What incentive do young scholars have to break with the generic norm?  Their careers are built on being published; journals have a type of writing they accept; scholars, then, write in order to be published.  More than the editors of journals or the scholars themselves, it is the universities that seem most irresponsible here--dismissing narratives as little more than silly fiction, supporting projects that quantify boys in boxes, privileging status over students.  As Ruth suggests that boys in boxes must be met with cries of social injustice and political uprising, so too must we address scholars who write on mirrors.  Perhaps we might at least direct their markers away from looking glasses and toward windows, out of which they might wonder why boys in boxes aim scissors at their gullets.

 

The Myth of Readership

Graduate students and I recently began a course together called Critical Approaches to Literature.  It’s one of simplest pleasures I know of: sitting around a table in good, smart company and making sense of something.  We first had to make sense of the course title. “Critical Approaches to Literature” seems to float in the ether as intangible as imagination.  Made up of just four words, there are two words suspiciously missing. Teaching and reading.  How can there be a critical approach to literature without the critical approach-er and the reader of literature?  

As we began our coursework, we read chapters from Literature as Exploration by Louise Rosenblatt.  Rosenblatt wrote this work in the late 1930s when the dominant methods for teaching literature consisted of using books and poems as historical, biographical, or cultural artifacts.  You’d read Hamlet, for example, and psychoanalyze his character, or you’d investigate the politics of Shakespeare’s turbulent England. Less than half a century prior, the teaching of literature wasn’t even done very often in English.  Those who could afford school read Greek and Latin works mostly—with an emphasis on translation and rhetoric.  While some progress had been made, Rosenblatt saw the need for more.  For Rosenblatt, teachers of literature needed to pay more attention to the experiences of the actual students who were reading.  It was by guiding students from their own life experiences into the text that teachers could help students relate to the works, all in the name of personal and cultural growth. 

I asked my own students to pen responses to Rosenblatt’s writings. I read their papers in various places over the past few days: in cafes, on trains, and libraries.  There is something about slowly spreading out such reading over time.  It almost seems that, somehow, as time and places pass by, what might at first seem daunting (the reading and responding to student work) transmutes into delight. Several students raised one idea in particular that I’d like to focus on here: Rosenblatt’s “reader”. Rosenblatt, like many other education scholars, makes an assumption about students and reading that might well have a devastating effect on teaching: they assume that students and readers are the same thing.  My own experiences as both a student and teacher suggest this isn’t necessarily true.  For a teacher to affirm this relationship between a student and a reader, he must account for the student’s engagements in the act of reading: all the historical experiences reading, the memories of reading, the spaces of reading.

Readers read; students read sometimes.

Rosenblatt misses this point often in her book.  Take, for instance, her chapter entitled "What the Student Brings to Literature," in which Rosenblatt unpacks all the experiences that a student draws on or can draw on when interacting with a text.  Throughout the chapter, Rosenblatt strays from her focus on the student (named in the chapter title) and discusses the reader: "It is easy to detect the influence of the reader's preoccupations and past experiences when, as in the preceding instances, they lead to an interpretation unsupported by the text" (81).  No distinction is made between students and readers, which suggests that for Rosenblatt the two are one.  The seemingly innocuous nature of my point is anything but innocent, however.  The assumption that students are readers--whatever an individual teacher decides "reading" means--leads to choices in pedagogy that then run the risk of creating a classroom, not of readers, but of illusive readers who personate precisely what they know the teacher wants: "readers".  Teachers, too, have their own side in this story.  After all, it is they who lead students in critically approaching literature.

In The Literature Workshop (2003), Sheridan Blau describes the "anxiety of the right reading" experienced by teachers of literature.  Blau asserts that English teachers are caught between the desire to encourage students to interpret literature for themselves, in the spirit of Rosenblatt's "admonition that taking somebody else's interpretation as your own" only yields an empty reading (187), and the reality that teachers teach particular books because they themselves have already determined them to be worth teaching--that is, they have already interpreted the work.  It is this latter point that brings the anxiety of the right reading to the surface: Teachers of literature believe deeply that there is in fact a right and a wrong way to read a text insofar as they deem it worthy of teaching in the first place.  For English teachers, while "right ways" of interpreting are myriad, they are not limitless, which makes the anxiety all the more felt. It's for this reason that Blau sets out to show how "some readings can be wrong and many may be inadequate" (190), not due to the reader's foolishness or stupidity, but "ignorance, inattention, lack of experience, or in some cases the vagaries of a momentarily mistaken perspective" (190).   I agree that the reading skills of students are often in need of guidance from a more experienced teacher.  I also think that to only focus on reading strategies and skills overshoots where students are and assumes a certain degree of readership.  Sure, an instructor might work on particular skills of approaching a poem in class--and these skills might be effective for an in-class activity--but when an instructor treats a student like a reader, he might well assume that such skill- or strategy-based instruction is sufficient.  It is not.  If a soccer coach teaches a young person a series of discrete moves to use when attacking goal, and the young person doesn't ever play soccer as part of his life, what good would such instruction do?  Even if this young person goes to weekly or daily practices, if he doesn't play of his own volition, it doesn't matter.  It might, in fact, spark interest in some; but it would be foolish to assume such a spark in all or even many.  We as English teachers must approach our students as students, not as readers.

Reading is something internal.  While we have devised myriad tests, methods, and assessments to have students externalize their reading, what students produce is not itself reading.  Consider whether or not a reading quiz proves conclusively that a student did or did not complete a reading assignment.  Or, that the student who performs poorly on a reading quiz did just that: he performed poorly on a quiz.  It says little about his reading of literature; it speaks only to his reading of a quiz.  So long as teachers avoid engaging their students about their reading practices and histories authentically, the myth of readership will go on.  But another myth also goes on: a myth of teaching. 

Pedagogy + Politics

The professoriate is losing its radicals, the New York Times reported recently, and new professors are more moderate than their predecessors.  The article suggests that the professors who flooded universities in the 60s and 70s were cut from a different cloth.  Today’s academics are less politically motivated, more moderate, and research-minded rather than ideological.  Teaching, however, has never been apolitical.  Just ask Socrates.

Before the great Greek philosopher gulped down his fatal dosage of hemlock, he stood trial for corrupting the minds of the young.  Having traipsed around Athens asking people difficult questions, never arriving at a certainty and always pushing deeper questioning above all else, Socrates was thought to be challenging democracy in politically turbulent times.  The judicial remedy, of course: to kill him.  

I use Socrates as an example because, in his story, it is moot to argue whether or not he explicitly criticized democracy.  That is to say, it wasn’t what he said, but rather, his trial seems to have been about his teaching method—persistent questioning of one’s ideas.   Whereas I’d like to say that pedagogy and politics be left to their respective corners, Socrates’ story suggests the two occupy a round room.  In terms of Socrates’ trial and sentence, there seems little difference between pedagogy and politics.

It seems to me that healthy thinking necessarily critiques any subject matter.  To think is to, as objectively as possible, learn certain content matter and then develop questions out of it.  But, I might ask, what is one to do with the questions and conclusions one arrives at? If, as a professor, I study the way students have been taught to read over the course of western education, and I arrive at the conclusion that reading has been taught at the expense of oral expression, what do I do with that conclusion?  Do I begin each course with pontification: “Reading, as it always has in our country, oppresses oral communication!”? Do I write on the top of my syllabus, “Reading kills the mind”?  Do I campaign on campus for legislation that privileges oral communication over reading? 

Hardly.  As a professor, my role would be to share with my students the various arguments taking place around a specific topic or question and then to share my own perspective.  My students, I hope, would then arrive at their own conclusions.  In short, I argue for this: Dialectic over rhetoric.  If professors present the latter while calling it the former, they perpetuate the type of sophistry that Socrates warned of, the result of which is intellectual manipulation. 

This particular Times article presents the retiring professor as politically mindful and active.  Professor Olneck, of the University of Wisconsin, for example, begins his syllabus for a course called Race, Ethnicity, and Inequality in American Education thus: “Schools in the United States promise equal opportunity. They have not kept that promise. In this course, we will try to find out why.”  Those seem to be the words of a sophist, for they presuppose the outcome of inquiry thereby preventing students from genuinely (and safely) arriving at their own conclusions.  Where is the room for true dialectic when the course begins at its own end.  How will students respond to the statement, “They have not kept that promise”?  Is there room for disagreement here?  And if there is, how is a student going to know that? 

The article later discusses the work of Gerald Graff, current MLA president and professor at University of Illinois – Chicago, who, when writing about the culture wars taking place in American universities posits the notion of “teaching the conflicts.”  For Graff, the role of the professor is to present to students the various conflicts in a given field and let them decide for themselves.  In later works, Clueless in Academe most notably, Graff goes on to say that professors need to model thinking for their students, especially in the form of verbal and written argument-making.  Academic culture is, for Graff, one of argument.  This take on academia seems to differ slightly from the recent lectures and writings of Graff’s contemporary, Stanley Fish.  Fish, as I’ve noted previously, thinks that professors need to keep their political views out of the classrooms.  Graff would hardly take issue with that.  Fish goes on, however, as he did at a lecture a few months ago at Teachers College, to argue that the professor is the content expert in the classroom whose job is to transmit knowledge.  I suggest that as long as a professor or classroom goes in with the attitude that he is the expert, his students are likely to genuflect at the altar of his expertise.  A fair and genuine argument seems highly unlikely. 

The Times presents the notion of a “sensibility gap” between the older generation of professors and the new.  A fledgling professor, Sara Goldrick-Rab, describes how “’Senior people evaluate us for tenure and the standards they use and what we think is important are different,’ she said. They want to question values and norms; ‘we are more driven by data.’”  It is the ideological older generation who demands that newer scholars “question values and norms,” whereas the younger generation seeks objective data.  I caution others not to be duped by the suggestion that data necessitates objectivity.  As the French thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard discussed in his Postmodern Condition, knowledge creation can be created by anyone willing to pay for it.  And perhaps this is an understated and paramount point: funding.

We can talk all we want about political-activism verses data-driven research.  If neither side at least acknowledges that paychecks play a part in the debate, then it’s an empty argument.   I don’t think the paycheck point stunts the dialogue, but it must be at least acknowledged.  This is where Socrates again serves as a model: in Apology, Socrates is described as not accepting payment for his work.  Perhaps only the pauper can claim to be a pedagogue.  The rest, whether they call themselves social activists or data-driven researchers, are the descendants of sophists.

 

The Divorce of Reading and Writing

I’ve become hypersensitive to a term recently that gets floated in education discussions. It seems used with lightness and universal comprehension. The word is literacy. In a recent meeting, someone asked a roomful of educators and doctoral students what literacy actually meant. No one knew. On a basic level, we agreed that it had something to do with reading and writing. This troubled me greatly. Has the term literacy come to mean so little that the relationship between reading and writing is going unscrutinized? What, after all, is the relationship between the two. Reading and writing are used in unison frequently. It seems that at the center of the current conflation of reading and writing is an age-old reductionism: that reading and writing go hand in hand—that there is a seeming causal relationship between the two. Perhaps by allowing these two separate words to be subsumed by literacy, we in education have allowed our own language to become cloudy. Let’s look at a musical example to prove a point.

As a singer, I can read music. Given a few minutes, I can scan through the musical notation after identifying the key signature and hum the song. Being able to read music, however, does not mean that I can compose music. To assume that one ability necessitates the other would be to overestimate my own skill-level and to underestimate the complexity of reading and writing music respectively. Does singing a song mean one can write a song? Hardly. Now, my analogy has its flaws and could be critiqued fairly. But at the heart of it is a simple point that is not easily ignored: reading and writing are two distinct acts and it behooves educators and researchers and theorists to pry the two of them apart.

"Of course reading and writing should be considered together," one might argue, "because in order to write one must know how to read."

True, but in order to read one does not need to know how to write. The two are not necessarily related. Consider these essential differences between writing and reading: students produce writing; they cannot produce reading. The prior is epistemological in nature, whereas the latter is ontological; the prior is a matter of production, whereas the latter is social/spatial; the prior is external, quantifiable, categorizeble; the latter is internal, qualitative, and ephemeral.
Historically, writing seems to have become primary, especially in the latter part of the 19th century when the values of industrialization placed value on product development. Reading began to be seen as a tool for the production of writing, rather than an end for its own sake. Here, we see a teleological treatment of reading—it is a means to a written end. But is that to say reading is purposeless unless the reader writes about the reading? This is troubling. What the reader writes about is likely not to be what was read at all. Rather, it might well be some second-rate version of the reading the student thinks the teacher wants him to have done. The clearest example of this can be seen on a state exam.

One question on a recent New York State Regents exam presented two passages. The student is asked to read an excerpt from a memoir and a poem in order to write a “unified essay about parenting as revealed in the passages.” While there is more to the prompt, including specific instructions as to how to read the texts—including showing evidence and identifying literary elements—I’m struck by the kind of reading the student is told to do here. Is this reading? My instinct is to say, No it isn’t. But perhaps that would be rash. It is a type of reading: teleological reading, perhaps. Using the modifier before the word reading could make a significant difference not only in the way educators or researchers or theorists talk about the act of reading, but it could make be revolutionary for students. I imagine other modified terms for types of reading: aesthetic reading--students reading for emotional impact or pleasure; social reading—students read for the purpose of discussing in a social-academic setting; analytical reading—students read for the purpose of unpacking the structural makeup of a text; laissez faire reading—where students are left alone to read whatever they like, however they like. In any case, students must be brought into the conversation about how they are asked to read texts in school. To neglect the conversation is to encourage dishonest readership where teacher and students go about their roles inauthentically.

It is the invisible ephemerality of the act of reading that we educators have ignored or dismissed. The result has been classroom pedagogy, methods books, and literacy research that have objectified the individual identity of student-readers in the name of knowledge production. Movements to restore the student-reader’s identity (most notably Reader Response and transaction theory) have failed precisely because they have ignored the subjective nature of readership, and the limits of pedagogy: teachers teach students, they cannot force students to be readers. Granted, they can impart and practice certain reading skills, but there comes a point where the student chooses to read or not to read: And the teacher can never know for certain. Only the student himself can choose read.

The divorce of reading and writing must be a group effort. It is a relationship so firmly established at the core of western culture, not to mention educational thought, that to pull them apart will require the ideas, musings, and practices of all involved: educators, researchers, theorists, and especially students. The reward could be great—a new epoch of learning, one of transparency and authenticity, of pleasure in schooling, of deep literary experiences that are as of yet unimaginable.

Public-Private Partnerships, Sans Poets

General Electric just gave the New York City public school system $17.9 million. It’s the largest single grant given to the city schools and will be distributed over a five-year period. The mayor of the city, Michael Bloomberg, had this to say: “Public-private partnerships like this one with the GE Foundation have been essential to our success in turning around a failing public school system. This generous grant will help to prepare our students to be the leaders of the 21st century economy which will be built on science, math and technology” (http://www.thecro.com/node/725). While it’s not clear how exactly the money will be used to help schools (something about funding a “pilot program” in ten city schools), I’m intrigued about the mayor’s, GE’s, and other politicians’ emphasis on science, math, and technology. As an English teacher, I’m trying to avoid the pitfall of discipline jealousy: a sort of Marsha-Marsha-Marsha response to watching the above three content-areas be given so much attention and money as funding for the arts dwindles. And we see the effects of this in the research being produced, for example.

Literary studies have played Jan to other disciplines’ Marsha for at least a century. The famous scene in Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams graphs poetry based on the instructions from a popular textbook is an example:

In the early 20^th century, lacking scholarly respect and funding, literary scholars developed a method of critiquing literature that sought to be as objective about poems as the scientific method was about data. It was no longer about the art of poetry; it was about the poem as an object for quantifiable study. The idea was that literature and poetry were too open to rampant interpretation—the reader could read a work however he wished—and some other academically rigorous method was needed if the study of literature was to be taken seriously. We see the results of this movement, referred to as New Criticism or Formalism, even on the New York State Regents exam today:

The notion of showing how an author used certain literary devices evidences the type of attempt at objective literary analysis that developed in the wake of the reverence and funding for the sciences that was alive and well a century ago. Take, as another case in point, the work of researchers in what’s being called content-area literacy. Rather than just focusing their studies on what it means to read and write, some researchers are aiming their work at what it means to read and write in a specific discipline, like science. I don’t wish to discount or discredit this type of research. I only wish to point out that a professor researching how students process information in science class might well be more likely to get funding than a professor doing a similar study in English class, and certainly music class. It’s not, however, that the tide has suddenly shifted towards funding the sciences or technology.

For example, the mayor’s use of the word “technology”carries with it an interesting story. Often nowadays we are likely to hear science, math, and technology all lumped together. Not to mention “21^st Century” education. What pols mean by “technology” isn’t what scholars mean by it, though. One scholar, Walter Ong, posited the notion that the act of writing is in fact a technology insofar as it uses a tool (a pen, pencil, stylus) to aid humans to do something they can already do: communicate. But writing is not what GE or the mayor have in mind when they bestow millions on the City school system. I wonder what they imagine technology to look like: do they think of computers (hardware, networking, repair), the internet (web site design, research), or maybe even blogging? Would the overseers of this grant consider students who blogged about their learning to have been worth GE’s investment?

Doubtful.

Words like “science”, “math”, and “technology” have little meaning to the dolers of monies. And without clearer meaning, the grant is as likely to trickle into sub-contracted organizations that can justify the measurement of their success any way they like, using words like “achievement” and “succeed” and “growth” or phrases like “move students” and “the data suggests”. Whereas the value of literature will always be inexplicable, much to the frustration of the teachers and scholars in its field, the real value of GE’s grant is likely to be as inexplicable--only its results are likely to come with the graphs and charts and data that have always appeased businessmen and mollified scientists. The Dead Poets might say these same graphs and charts and data frighten the art out of poetry.

Small Schools Speak

In yesterday's paper, the New York Times heralded the Department of Education's efforts to break up the large public high schools into smaller learning communities.  Speaking of one particular high school in Brooklyn, the Times wrote: "Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has made new small high schools like Law and Justice a centerpiece of his effort to overhaul the system, saying students who get more personal attention will have more success in the classroom."  Yes, students who have more personal attention from adults seem more likely to achieve their goals.  I get that.  But what interests me more is how this notion became newsworthy; how we got to this point in education.  

I'm hesitant to write too sweepingly about education in general.  But I can offer some ideas regarding the history of English class in terms of reading and writing.  

Some scholars have argued, in fact, that it is precisely reading and writing that has led to the current asocial, impersonal, and classroom-packed situation we find ourselves in.  Let me explain: when someone reads or writes, they isolate themselves from live, active, social engagement with others.  That is to say, when one writes one sits in silence and composes soundless symbols on a page.  When one reads, more often than not (and certainly in schools) one reads in one's own head.  The effect of literacy, you could argue, has been only the slow march to schools of de-socialization.  Imagine what these look like: massive buildings with thousands and thousands of students, classrooms jammed with forty students whose identities have already been distorted by the massiveness of the physical space, activities in those rooms that seek to silence students (by reading and writing, for example), and, finally, by requiring assessments that value asocial silence rather than social dialogue.  

This is precisely what the Chancellor is being lauded for--the re-socialization of schools.  

There was some point in the past--scholars say around the late 19th century, early 20th century especially--where the industrial trend of the country said that bigger was better.  The idea of packing a building with as many students as possible who were assigned to study specific disciplines at specific times seemed like a good idea.  Whether or not it ever worked is for someone else to decide.  Few would argue that it does work today.  The Chancellor's plan seems to suggest that it did not in fact work.  I imagine the students at Law and Justice would agree.  

I'm left wondering whether or not we in education are doing a disservice by emphasizing literacy when orality is something many students already show fluency in.  Orality, by which I mean spoken language, seems to me to mean more in many ways than written language.  Spoken words are intimately connected to the speaker.  They convey presence in a way that writing cannot: a writer of a text could well be dead for centuries; a speaker, by the nature of the word, must be present. 

Are we trying to teach students to be present or absent in this world? 

My hope is that we learn from the way these small schools speak.  They speak of the import of presence: presence of teachers, presence of administration, presence of words.  If what we want for our students is their genuine presence, then we  must begin with our own.  And nothing conveys one's presence as the timbre of the spoken word addressed to a single person.  Perhaps if we closed the books, just for a moment, and spoke to each other like learners we'd hear the sounds of learning. 

Fish Goes to Public School

A few months ago, Stanley Fish came to speak to students at Teachers College, Columbia University.  I was in attendance.  His talk consisted of his reading from a manuscript that was to be published this year and taking questions from the audience occasionally.  The thrust of his argument has been repeated many times before and since in his op-ed pieces and blogs for the New York Times.  It goes like this: “there are some college and university teachers who mistake the classroom lectern for a political platform and thereby substitute indoctrination for instruction. But, I argue, this need not happen — it is not an inevitable consequence either of our fallible natures or of certain subject matters — and when it does happen, it should be labeled as wrong and regarded as a reason for discipline by the school’s administration” (http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/politics-and-the-classroom-one-more-try/).   This argument, which Fish has resurrected in the wake of the University of Colorado’s raising of funds to appoint a Chair in Conservative Thought and Politics, states that the classroom is not a political forum; it is a place of knowledge acquisition, of objective discourse.  On that evening, something bothered me about Fish’s argument.  I couldn’t put my finger on it then, and it was only after a few glasses of wine with my wife and our friend that it occurred to me.  It seems to me that Fish’s position falls apart when applied to public school classrooms.  His audience that night was made up of mostly secondary school teachers (current or pre-service) and the difference between the private college setting and the public classroom went unsaid.

So, I’ll say it now.

Fish’s primary concern is that there are a breed of professors who pass off their political views for course content, or, who prey upon their students’ captive attention.  The classroom is not place for politics.  The professor’s job is to convey his expertise to the students, who are to study it, grapple with it, and produce some original response to it.  It is apolitical.  Now, this group that he was talking to, remember, were soon-to-be public school teachers, many of whom express a desire to change students’ lives or even society through their teaching.  For many, and one such friend sat beside me on the edge of his seat with near anger at what Fish was saying, teaching is necessarily political--the books you choose to use in your classroom and the way you read them, how you assess students’ learning, and even how the students address you.  All is political.  And the self-aware teacher uses the politics of the classroom for good instead of evil. 

The college student is not the public school student.  The public school teacher is necessarily political, that is to say, the public school teacher works for the city or state and, as such, has certain responsibilities that extend well beyond content expertise.  From taking attendance (for which a teacher can be held legally accountable) to reporting certain observations to guidance counselors or the police are just a couple examples.  Let’s look at the latter more closely.  Imagine Professor Fish giving a lecture on Book II of Paradise Lost, in which the various fallen angels debate how to retaliate against God for ousting them from heaven.  A student walks in late and sits in the first row.  As she sets up her place for note-taking, Professor Fish notices that she has a black eye.  In such a scenario, the professor may continue his lecture, which, again, is his job: to convey knowledge.  He might ask her to stay after class and ask her about it.  But it’s not his job. 

A public school teacher must report it.  Legally.  This is a crucial point of difference between Fish’s no-politics-in-the-classroom argument and teaching in a public school.  My students aren’t yet adults.

That having been said, I’m not in favor of rampant political manipulation (or intellectual manipulation for that matter) in the classroom either.  Teachers have tremendous influence on their students.  The wearing of political pins, sharing of personal anecdotes, and even likes and dislikes must be considered professionally.  Recently, I sought to teach students about allusions in Milton’s writings.  In order to explore the concept before applying to the literature, I played an excerpt from Jay-Z’s song “A Dream” in which he samples his predecessor Notorious BIG’s voice, and repeats lines or snippets from BIG’s song “Juicy.”  My point was that when one artist alludes to another artist or text, the allusion carries with it history and even culture.  You get two texts for one, and you get it simultaneously. 

The next day, one student showed me that he had bought “A Dream” and had it on his iPod. 

Is this political?  Not necessarily.  But does it point to the subtlety of influence that teachers have on their students?  Yes, it does.  Influence, however, does not mean politics.  Granted, Fish has certain blatant scenarios in mind—University of Colorado, currently.  But short of professors or teachers using explicit political language in their classrooms, aren’t we talking about basic professional responsibility?  Pedagogues should model thoughtfulness for their students.  Fair enough.  Perhaps if politicians had better models of thoughtfulness our students—in New York City, for example—would have the attention, resources, and physical space to learn.  Perhaps Professor Fish could advise those politicians.  In an op-ed, of course, not his classroom.

Misplaced Homer

On the campus of Columbia University is Butler Library.  Its neo-classical design, with fourteen imposing columns supporting the names of famous ancients, immediately draws the eye of any passerby. The names etched into stone above these columns are of great classical writers: Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, and Vergil.  Interestingly, one of these names is not like the others: Homer.  Homer's name appears carved into the building because its designers thought him to be a great ancient writer.  Homer, most historians now agree, was no writer.  He was a singer--an oral poet--and probably the amalgamation of many bards over many years.  I use Homer as an example because his eternal presence on the facade of the library bespeaks a point of tension in the histories of education and literature, not to mention the current culture of the prior.  Why has speech--orality--become so marginalized in education?  What has happened to the heard spaces of the ancients?  Have they disappeared, or perhaps subverted the dominant written culture in which we educators now find ourselves? 

To understand why Homer's presence is of such interest, it's worth noting whose name is missing.  While both Plato and Aristotle are inscribed, doubtless for their foundational contribution to western philosophy, their predecessor, Socrates, is suspiciously absent.  How could both Plato and Aristotle be so lauded, and Socrates, who died for philosophy, be left out?  One compelling reason is that the building is a library, that is, a place for written words.  Socrates famously denounced writing, saying it had deleterious effects on the memory.  Socrates' absence from the walls of Butler Library point our attention to the status of its inscribed figures as writers.  If Socrates' orality denies him a place on Butler, it's fair to say Homer's presence is in error.  

I draw attention to this error because I think we in education--and literacy especially--live with the effect of a similar error.  Somewhere in the twists and turns of history, orality became marginalized and literacy prized.  There are, I can already imagine, many example of this, not the least of which include our priveleging of writing in classrooms, our yen for silent reading, and our dependence on literate modes of communication for assessment.  

Reading Music, Reading Literature

My friend Brian is back from Japan.  He's a music teacher, about to begin work at a new school on Long Island.  Last night, he and I began comparing the teaching of music with the teaching of English.  I shared with Brian my concerns around reading in my own English classroom--how a teacher can never actually know if a student has read a given assignment.  My argument goes as such: reading is a purely internal act, and while teachers can indeed give students quizzes about a reading or ask them to produce an essay about a reading, these assessments can be completed successfully even if a student didn't read.  What teachers often assess isn't a student's reading; they are assessing students ability to produce something not necessarily related to the act of reading at all.  Literary works, for example, are layered, nuanced, and subject to myriad interpretations.  Any type of reading assessment will fall way short. 

Brian replied that in teaching students to sing, he doesn't focus on the sight-reading of music.  For him, sight-reading is an advanced skill, only valuable after students have mastered the act of singing.  And to master it, they need a model who coaches them.  His description is one of physicality, and performance. 

I wondered, if applied to teaching literature, what Brian's pedagogical value means.  What if, for example, the English teacher prioritized physicality, performance?  How would a curriculum that reserved the reading of literature for only advanced grades affect students' learning?  What if students, after having learned a certain set of basic reading and writing skills, then had to master oration and rhetoric?  Would this be a return to the medieval trivuum?