run away! ! !

Yes, I am obsessed with, and keep returning to Monty Python.

As inspiration, as nostalgia, as poultice; as philosophy.

Thanks in no small part to the gift of the COMPLETE Python collection on DVD, courtesy of best friend and science educator extraordinaire, Susan Berrend. Beneath a shared love of British gardens, humor, and baking shows (and no small affection for Oxford commas and Anglican prayers) resides an even deeper shared commitment to pedagogy, an unwavering interest in discerning student needs and experimenting with new ways to meet those needs.

Which brings me to the force of my allusion to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. King Arthur and his knights are on a quest, but when nearing a treasure horde which may yield the coveted grail, they are frightened by a rampant rabbit.

avoidance strategy

This year I have seen students avoid reading. Some practice what Kelly Gallagher describes in Readicide – where students get assignments done without actually reading. This is ascribed to teacher expectations. One of my students, fascinated by problem-solving, is absolutely convinced that by dedicating time and energy to memorizing punctuation rules and grammar definitions she will inch her way forward and improve her standardized testing score.

Why?

running from or running toward?

Lest I forget that learning is social, and that literacy processes do not occur in a vacuum, these avoidance strategies serve to alert me to the motivating factors in my learners’ worlds.

One learner is driven to complete tasks as quickly as possible in order to move on to the social interactions they look forward to that day. Therefore they will do precisely what the teacher demands, in order to prove to their parent that their calendar is now open to schedule play dates and plan parties. My skill set allows me to integrate even those plans into journaling, research, organizing, and writing-to-learn; I can also involve cooking, makeup, and executive function lessons in authentic and meaningful ways.

For such a student, part of my challenge is to de-school the learner, who will benefit when they see learning as something one does for oneself, as opposed to what one does for others in authority. True, there are wonderful social benefits to the greater community when individuals grow intellectually and acquire wisdom; but one does not learn to love reading just to complete a checklist whose goal is to free one FROM reading.*

race to the finish

Today’s Preakness Stakes reminds me that other learners, like my prescriptive grammarian pupil, run headlong toward a clear goal they have set for themselves, which motivates them. Even if I do not understand the full enticements of these goals, I must acknowledge their power in putting a student in charge of her own learning.

My student can tell me how she learns best, what I should focus on, and how quickly she is improving; she can also relate which fall semester class she wants to qualify for, and how many minutes a day she will dedicate to this finish line. Now, I am no genius, but if you don’t like reading I am not sure why you would want to get into a course that expects you to do a ton of it. The challenge? Actually, I suspect that, like thoroughbreds, the air of competition somehow drives them to top performance.

Yet what role do I play as a democratic instructor who advocates for student voice and shared authority? As a trusted teacher and coach, I can offer advice and exercises that stretch the reader, inviting her take up a text and enjoy it.

I suspect that my I do not fully understand my influence at this time.

A couple of nights ago a school parent from the past recognized me at a concert, and made a point of telling me “Mr. Hultberg got me to like Shakespeare!” The parent also said that our production of King Lear made Shakespeare clear to them. This was poignant, since the performer on stage was Michael Bigelow, a jazz arranger and saxophonist, who had played Lear in that show, which I stage directed and Berrend tech directed.

I have also received a printed invitation to an upcoming ceremony at my current school, and I R.S.V.P.-ed in person to the preteen who had handed me the slip. She said, “I knew you would dress nice, because you always show … respect for people.”

At this moment I simply want to show my respect for the learning choices my students make, and to honor the freedom I claim to value.

When it is most important in their lives, I have to trust that my role as an engaged reader and lifelong learner will exert its due influence some day.

rabbit rampant

So the next time you are frightened by a rampant rabbit, or notice students running quicky in the opposite direction from which you wish to lead them, P A U S E. Remember that they are on a personal quest of their own, and nothing you can do will alter its course. Confide in your trusted friend as I do in mine; value your relationships with students and colleagues, knowing that others will be inspired by your commitment. Trust that what is most important to you – a garden, music – will not fail to exert its due influence in its time.

*Checklists: As I write this post, many of my students are actively engaged in reading ten books this summer in order to win free passes to the state fair!

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Image at http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_7FAsUT6FePU/SWOhlsoMZgI/AAAAAAAAAdA/1Emq5jvchOc/s1600-h/Holy-Grail-Killer-Rabbit-Posters.jpg cited in Moviedeaths.blogspot.com

Degas painting public domain

Photo by GH pradlfan 5/17/2018

anyone can teach english

Rebecca Mead describes an actual English landscape which Goerge Eliot once wrote about, today tranformed by the addition of trees, which have newly risen due to the absence of shepherd boys and sheep. She writes that it is  now “a landscape changed by books, reshaped by reading, transfigured by the slow green growth.” (My Life in Middlemarch, “Finale”)

I love the language of transfiguration Mead uses here, and also Eliot’s repeated usage of related terms of conversion throughout Middlemarch. I enthuse over such things, even to the point of making it the topic of a round table session on close reading of Chesterton and Eliot this fall. Besides liking the words themselves, though, I like Mead’s use of this particular term to describe the complete change – a glorification, if you will – of the landscape of reading after the Education Reform Act of 1882. More children than ever before were given an education, were taught to read and write. Such a fundamental and democratic alteration of the fabric of life was necessary and beneficial. It didn’t require English teachers as we know them today. 

What if every word that came out of an English teacher’s mouth was exclusively at the behest of a learner? 

For all the good we literacy specialists (for that’s what English teachers and reading & writing teachers are) do, I wonder if we wouldn’t be doing the world a service by just turning kids loose in a big public library and hanging out with them there as accessories to their curiosity. 

We experts would spend our entire day at the library, familiarizing ourselves with branches of knowledge, and with new and older titles in the catalogue, from YA to Wittgenstein. We would become resource specialists who could channel our expertise into guiding each child to join The Literacy Club (as Frank Smith calls it) and then to discover the more challenging and interesting books, articles, art and music that standardized classrooms haven’t {usually!} time nor individuality to offer. 



Every student would be required to leave school and go to a library for 2 and a half to three hours daily, which would be staffed by a host of language arts educators. No longer would we have to face the sometimes embarrasing act of grading young readers and writers, nor of manufacturing “evidence” of their progress toward problematic standards. 

I see learning materials still being advertised to English teachers today which diminish a poem by asking pedantic questions about it, labeling it, putrefying it before it has a chance to be lived through, savored, digested, and felt. I would hope that by taking the English teacher out of the school system, the true enjoyment of learning and reading could be coupled with the good that language arts experts want desperately to give to all young people. 

The title of today’s blog occurred to me as I strolled along the Pacific coast on a clear Easter morning, watching waves, cormorants, and harbor seals. There is an immediacy which classroom teaching cannot replace: a learner of any age must only be caught up, surrounded by events (natural phenomena, books, art, music), stimulated to enjoy and learn. I know full well such statements are naive, yet on this first Monday of spring break, after celebrating resurrection and rebirth, and following a week of experiential learning with a group of 21 students and adults on nature walks, in a theater, & making meals at hostels, I envision celebratory learning. 

I really think that with coaching, all content area teachers can help students read and write for school. What we English teachers truly offer is something meta-school. Transfigurations. We want to actually see kids change because of their enjoymemt of STUFF! We know that reading and writing both contribute to such change and also grow as results of it. 

YES, the humanities are crucial for the development of young minds and hearts — of “souls”, as George Eliot might put it, though her complex shades of meaning for this term deserve more space — but when I watch the harbor seal pup following close beside its mother, it learns to swim, feed, climb without a specialized teacher. She is specialized: who better to show her young exactly what it needs to survive in the wild? She provides about a month of such imposed closeness, then he is on his own to continue the learning process. 

I don’t propose to reduce all instruction to 30 days per lifetime. But I do think much of what I do in the classroom is common sense. Seriously, I didn’t need a college degree to help someone read a poem, tell a story, or write a letter. 



But I do use every bit of my classroom teaching experience and pedagogical reading when I have a writing conference; I summon my knowledge of books and people when I discuss books with students. I listen as well as I can. Putting me where I belong, in a library, would ideally pair the thought of luxury (a treasure trove of books!) in a learner’s mind with the adventure of self-improvement, of choice.

I suppose I end up as always, seeing that as long as I am called classroom teacher I will always have a type of authority which be inauthentic. My authentic authority is as an experienced reader and writer. But when I choose to share authority with my students for their learning decisions, it is I who share with them. If I were not associated with a school, but were instead a fixture at the library, readers would see me as a resource at their service, an authority like a text, to be used, questioned, resisted, or enjoyed rather than a teacher who exists to grade them and assign homework.

What if every word that came out of an English teacher’s mouth was exclusively at the behest of a learner? I think of the way I check out music, books, DVDs from my library. I check out only what I want to. 

Of course I am half playful here, knowing that such a system would be dependent on county taxes, and a host of HR (human resources) issues. But when we step back for a minute and ask how we can actually contribute to new life in young people or adults ready to catch the fire of literacy, such invention and playfulness are needed.

Maybe it could be treated like Driver’s Ed: everybody wants to learn how to drive, right? If literature reading and writing were seen by kids as the class you go OFF CAMPUS for, that demands a road test in the real world, that’s worth paying extra for, and signifies a rite of passage, who knows? Instead of a set of keys at graduation a student gets the key to the executive washroom at the public library, or the unlimited items at checkout; kids would, instead of a parking space, get their own study carrel! They could help select the books displayed in the “new arrivals” shelf, and receive an allowance to apply toward new acquisitions. 

Think how they would transform the landscape of their library, their learning, their lives.

mirror exercise

In drama games we play mirrors, where the goal is to “follow the follower.” First one partner leads and the other follows her/his gestures and expressions as if facing a mirror; then they switch roles: the focus is on following the leader, on close observation. But as they continue, a fluid exchange of leadership occurs, until when both members of one mirroring unit function perfectly, neither an observer nor even the twain can tell who leads. They have achieved the goal of following the follower.

In my English classroom such moments occur as frequent flashes, but just as in drama those spectacular star bursts of creative energy have brief half lives, until you look again and once more it is obvious who leads who.

I have practiced the co-leader co-learner philosophy for at least 8 years now, in class and in my St. John’s College Alumni seminars, at CEL conferences and at church book studies; it even shows up in jazz music when I try to work on songs at the piano with a sax player, and this year it adds a new focus to my Professional Development circle of 4 teachers each struggling to learn about ourselves as instructors with the observations and insights of the other 3.

Today it feels as though my English classes are one long attempt to generate more flashes of following followers. Am I wishing for more beauty in the constellation of student interactions with texts and each other? Clearly, yes.

It seems my students don’t recognize the flash, spark, beauty when I have found it.

Consider my 10th graders, who helped write stories with 2nd graders in October (at our K-12 school): when self evaluating, students didn’t feel their work merited a grade; however, I was able to see that their accomplishment had met at least 5 of our school’s major learning outcomes, in categories of service, critical thinking, and communicating. Grades themselves weren’t the issue, but even as we have begun to move toward narrative feedback of student progress, the language of standards and Envisionment learning (Langer) is not yet adequate to meld in student minds with what they actually accomplish: they do not see reflections of themselves in words yet, but still see themselves as grades.

My seniors notice the problem with being identified as grades, numbers, ACT scores. They desire to be known by colleges for their interests, skills, and personalities; what’s more, they dream of a higher ed experience that they can tailor to their own needs and interests–one that won’t kill off their love of learning things.

I am now focused on starting a Utah StuCamp, modeled on the EdCamp movement, in which a half-day of free meetings with other teens, without an agenda, affords students the opportunity to express themselves and have their voices heard by others, including teachers who assist in the logistics of the operation. I think students need to hear other students, in order to figure out whether they experience learning as more “doing” or “done to”.

Creative problem solving

before vs. after

BEFORE
The time change has wreaked havoc with my sleep system. Waking early, I used the extra time this morning to develop a few conflict cards — improvisation tools for students to use in class today. I have finished, and am certain these will prompt lively engagement from my British Lit students reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

We are about to read the chapter in which Tess and Angel reveal their past to each other in an agape meal: so named by the author. Sensing that the students will benefit from a sharpened sense of the forces at work in the new bride-and-groom’s minds, I plan to use 1-minute skits in which pairs and trios dramatize the internal conflicts.

I employed a familiar id vs. ego or angel vs. devil motif, generally with opposing forces urging Angel Clare to resort to either his pride or humility, his impulses or reason. I also took the couple through the ages, asking pairs to play similar situations in 1620s & 1850 (American Lit students will recall Hester, Pearl, Chillingworth and Dimmesdale), 1968 and 2014.

Because most have read The Hunger Games, I also included several antagonisms related to literary issues. A gifted screenwriter is offered $15 million to produce a script which in no way criticizes modern culture or society. Hardy and the author who acknowledges his influence on her work, Suzanne Collins, challenge the young writer to refuse the contract, in the name of artistic freedom. My final card is a challenge between Katniss and Tess to see who is stronger.

I can’t wait to see how they will react, but I am pretty certain they will love to be out of their seats and up on their feet doing fast-moving scenes that relate to challenges they face.

AFTER
So, actually it was a good result: it was still a nice day, just before lunch, so we stepped outdoors to tackle the skits.

I was most pleased with the students’ ability to enter into the spirit of the tug-of-war, not over the character’s decision as much as over the ideas that are relevant to lives today.

Students role-played both earnestly and with melodramatic flair, confessing sordid pasts and buried children, tempting one another to abandon or stay with their partner, to forgive or forget each other.

Because double standards for men and women still exist, it was satisfying to see both young men and women making strong arguments for equal treatment. I was also delighted that all but one person had read The Hunger Games (and even she had read parts) and got into persuading the young writer not to compromise his freedom, citing familiar anecdotes about Collins’ real life cultural inspirations.

Wouldn’t you know it, three people were absent from that one class? Yet that afforded the others a few more minutes of stage time. I even had more cards than I was able to use.

I am pretty sure that these imaginary scenes will serve the students as “frontloading” for the upcoming chapter about the Clares’ wedding night. We had taken a few days away from the novel in order to write and share fiction. I feel confident that with such skits and today’s sense of playfulness fresh in their minds, readers will be ready to appreciate and actually enjoy Hardy’s scene.

Photos of earlier scenes

Elementary: a realm apart

I worked as a learning partner with a freshman student on Thursday and Friday as we read “The Red-Headed League”, a Sherlock Holmes story by A. C. Doyle. Although I had read the short story numerous times, this was my first time reading and hearing it read aloud most of the way through. One paragraph especially stood out.

Watson’s narrator writes about feeling mystified at the ease with which Holmes sees clearly, in the midst of the “confusing” and “grotesque” details of the case.

I equated Dr. Watson’s wonderment at Holmes’s mastery to the way students are mystified at our expert interpretive “performances” of English classroom texts. They likely see as magical our detection of hidden symbolism, analysis of setting, understanding of internalized conflicts. The apprentice James Watson stands in awe of the Master Sherlock Holmes, whose idiosyncratic reading of persons, situation, and detail is phenomenal, unattainable.

Even Holmes would have him believe that if Watson only becomes an astute observer he, too, will perpetrate astonishing feats of detection.

We ELA teachers fall into the trap of suggesting that a few meager degrees on an Expert-Novice continuum separate the gurus from the gurees. Is it really true that by demystifying the reading process

we equip readers to perform readings such as we arrive at after years of literature study, curiosity, and attention to fine detail?

Holmes cites ridiculously minute bits of data, such as awareness of the pigmentation of Chinese tattoos. to support his reasoning. No strategy other than obsessive observation might offer Watson a hope of rivaling his friend’s competency for crime detection and problem-solving; Holmes’s wide experience provides him rare entree to the gathering of such trivial data. Which of us, finding herself on a visit to China, would consume the hours in making a study of variations among local tattoos?

Watson tells us “I was always oppressed with a sense of my own stupidity” in his dealings with the Master.

These Sidney Paget illustrations from the original Strand Magazine facsimile reveal Sherlock doing the thinking and work as Watson tags along. His disciple, James, feels as inadequate to the task as Jesus’ disciples must have felt when the Master sent them out in pairs to practice. Similarly mystified, when encountering stubborn demons, they marvel at Christ’s ability. They admit, as Watson must, that their teacher is in a realm apart.

If there is any place our students have an advantage over us at their age, it is in their insatiable curiosity: such curiosity drives Holmes to fasten upon minutiae, and presumably prompts Watson to write memoirs about his master teacher.

Since 2001 when I attended an AP Institute and first understood the importance of student questions, through recent years when Judith Langer in her description of Envisionment Learning suggests “asking relevant questions” as a class goal, and The Right Question website, Essential Questions, and Socratic seminar questions (and Victor Mueller’s prepared follow-up questions), I have explored the ways students come to appreciate their own questioning role as necessary to learning and problem-solving. When they do the work of asking better questions, they feed natural curiosity and train it expand into all areas of lilfe, like a Halloween night horror movie creature, The Blob, which takes over the whole town.

Mysteries and horror are not that far removed. Holmes borders on the monstrous–isolated, obsessive, so calculating he can appear inhuman. Elana Gomel points out that the cool, unemotional criminal Stapleton from Hound of the Baskervilles is a mirror of Holmes, to whose “cold, precise” mind “emotion” is “abhorrent” (“A Scandal in Bohemia”, quoted in “Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject”). Gomel stresses that the reader of mysteries feels comforted by them, for readers desire to know that the world and other people make sense.

It is a wild stretch of imagination for a non reader to believe how much pleasure in a lifetime may be derived from the inky marks on a virtual or paper page. How much more imagination and faith is required to trust that a full length work provides even more pleasure!

In order to read the world and other people, experience and observation certainly help, but a sense of initial curiosity and deep wonder are readily available to a learner at any age.

I fear, however, that curiosity slips noiselessly away some time during late adolescence. What can we do to foster curiosity?

At Utah’s first #EdCamp last month I attended a session on Curiosity, which made me more keenly aware of its silent departure from the purple room of pedagogy. We participants were like party goers on the eve of Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”, dancing from room to symbolic room pretending that education can thrive even while a plague of indifference gathers its army at the castle doors.

I found curiosity alive and well this week as my 10th grade students led 2nd graders through the editing process on a collaborative story.

Wonder is not gone. Children can be inspired by teens; teens can be reminded of their impulsively curious younger selves; and we their experienced, obsessive, compulsively curious teachers can model a reading life; we must not tyrannize nor oppress them with a sense of their own stupidity. Rather, we might show them how their own sense of curiosity can lead to hypotheses, solutions, and deep and satisfying reading experiences. They, like us, are only trying to make sense of the complex text of the world and its people.

a revolution

Stuck. In a hard place between gamifying A Tale of Two Cities — involving students discovering things I have predetermined and solving problems I have identified and defined; or having them learn it “by wholes” — incorporating play, working on the hard parts, and treating it as the “junior version” of the real game afterward: small group book clubs.

In gamifying, I become gamemaster, a role I am quite comfortable with when it comes to Dickens novels. They chose this book, incidentally.

Sophomores.

In the other option I coach as they identify problems that defy easy definitions, offering useful feedback as they respond to the text (which a well constructed game will also do), and setting up conditions for collaborative inquiry. This approach, too, should lead to discoveries, yet I cannot know in advance what they will be.

Because the novel is set during the French Revolution, I have been thinking that revolution encompasses a good deal that might be worth inquiring about as a reader establishes connections and builds envisionments through this text.

“What is happening is a revolution…against a class system that to a great extent has left progressive education…” http://t.co/kMde8RYx7J

— Jennifer Hubert Swan (@ReadingRants) March 29, 2014

There are so many beautiful aspects of revolution that stir me: patriotism and social change; faith, and spiritual change; education, and intellectual change. And there is that unpredictable awakening that happens in most individuals during the teen years when they rebel against conformity and distinguish themselves from others through clothes, music, art, books…looking for a subculture with which to identify.

I insist upon [the right attitude to work], because it seems to me that what becomes of civilization after this war is going to depend enormously on our being able to effect this revolution in our ideas about work. Unless we do change our whole way of thought about work, I do not think we shall ever escape from the appalling squirrel cage  of economic confusion in which we have been madly turning for the last three centuries or so, the cage in which we landed ourselves by acquiescing in a social system based upon Envy and Avarice.   From Dorothy Sayers’ post-war essay, “Why Work?” 

For a few moments they will recognize Mr. Lorry, who fights through his deadpan facade, whose bright eyes are the only unburied thing about him; Sydney Carton, who redefines his unsatisfying life by leaving it behind; and the embittered Madame Defarge, knitting in silent rebellion at first, her indignation rising until it breaks out in violence.

Possibly they will acknowledge the protests their grandparents endured or waged against the Vietnam War, similarly removed in time as Dickens was from the Revolution.

And then there is the technology revolution. Will they be moved to consider the implications, the new freedoms, the shameful abuses?

And then there is me. Stuck. Witness to a time of great education revolution, yet grudging participant in a system that still issues grades for indefinite achievements, shouts Liberty, Fraternity, Equality! for some, but not for all. As much a relic of the British Tradition (title of my little-used but proudly shelved Prentice Hall anthology) as Mr Lorry or the institution he serves, Tellson’s bank. All I need is the powdered flaxen wig.

What pulls me forth from my grave, recalls me to life, as Manette, Lucie, and Darnay are summoned to resume theirs? My freshmen, who last week devised a solution to the problem I posed. They had to evaluate “how do I know if I am finished?” with Fahrenheit 451. One group came back with a great response: “We want to read another novel to compare it with (Lord of the Flies), research some elements of both the books, and then show connections we make between the texts, ourselves, and our lives on the bulletin board with yarn [like the one up there now that the sophomores did].”

My American Lit students are enthused about pursuing an inquiry question arising from The Scarlet Letter that will lead to research and social action: writing a bill to send to a Utah legislator who has promised to read all propositions. They became quite engaged in Pearl’s custody hearing earlier this month.

 

 

No, I am not actually stuck. I am challenged and excited to help my sophomores make sense of a complex text that will yield unpredictably personal and individualized rewards. I just want to be worthy of their thinking, ingenuity, and creativity; this means practicing patience, and allowing ideas their percolating time.

Last time my students did Dickens, my goal was that they would become performers of the spoken text; they found it very helpful when I offered them a guideline that suggested what proficiency might look like, sound like. Fearful at first that they would turn a teacher-designed rubric into a pale excuse for a cause for reductive grading (conformist, aristocratic, abnegating reflection and authorship of their own learning), I was recalled to life by the students’ choice to respond individually to each other’s presentations one by one, pausing between oral interpretations to offer written feedback and encouragement in the form of blank notecards I had in my possession. Each presenter received immediate feedback on her speech from peers, who had also coached her during preparation earlier in the week and could monitor improvements. A true, meaningful recognition by peers of learning by whole, rather than teacher grading on Gradgrind-iose toadying expertise.
Students in those merry days would swap with others who became delightedly immersed in a speech; they recorded the orals as a lasting record of achievement.

The next step sophomores will take is determining whether an Essential Question is to guide their reading and inquiry, now that they have been introduced to the earliest chapters and done some learning activities. Essential questions can work very well; this is where revolution may aid us as a centering concept, but other themes could just as well take the shape of EQs and drive inquiry into this novel. Yet to be a truly responsive coach, I would be remiss not to allow students to delve fully into the love triangle that Dickens places against the backdrop of the French Revolution. For me to urge a Revolution focus would be the equivalent of attending Hamlet and advising an essay be written on the draperies masking the wings, or the fabric of the arras behind which Polonius [spoiler alert] is run through. If the teacher chooses the Essential Question he belittles the concept of democratic decisions. Better perhaps to model frequent socratic seminar questions related to daily readings, asking students to come up with their own opening seminar questions, then periodically grouping and categorizing the subjects of inquiry, watchful for any common elements that might suggest a centering concept.

About my own next step I am ambivalent. The above Tweet appeared just a week after a parent had told me about a book she was reading on grades, motivation, and Finland. I voiced an opinion about grades, homework, and standardized testing, but what I really meant was REVOLUTION. Parents, students, teachers, administrators, colleges, textbook/test publishers, and legislators all play roles in the dialogue about what good learning is. Until we reach consensus about what Dorothy Sayers calls the “absolute value” of doing hard work, the ultimate purposes for and measurements of learning will be frustrated. Last week’s #satchat gave rise to multiple possible ends of the educational project in our country: citizenship, morality, democracy, imperialism. It may be up to stakeholders in each learning community to define its outcomes. Ask essential questions: Why is it worth teaching well and learning well? What can parents do to enter into good learning? How do teachers and students reject tests that don’t measure the things that make good work valuable? How do administrators support and communicate the beliefs about learning among all constituents?

Back to my sophomores. They told me, in response to my mid-year reminder to them that class exists to serve their learning purposes, how to help coach them: 1) “force us outside our comfort zone”; 2) “do a unit where we all read exactly the same thing at the same time and pace”; and 3) “help us work on the hard parts”. That is my mandate. I will fulfill it if I have to don a flaxen wig, take up a pair of knitting needles, and direct the storming of the Bastille in “Tower” Room 209 myself.

 

 

the border of No Man’s Land

I have been reading notes I wrote from 2008 to present, variously headed “NCTE Conference”, “The Canadians”, “Blau”, “Probst” and, my favorite, “Manifesto”. One bit of wisdom gleaned from the pages is that a language arts teacher’s job is to select the texts that afford the possibility of problem-solving. I recently read a story that will be sure to challenge readers, and to yield multiple points of view for authentic classroom dialogue. James McElroy’s story “No Man’s Land” from the recent collection Night Soul and Other Stories is the perfect candidate for my high school English class.

The pleasure I took in this  story was felt as a blend of the joy we take in acts of attention, the recognition of ourselves as allowing obstructions to prevent such acts, and the satisfaction at solving worthwhile problems. 

First, the difficulties posed by the text: the vocabulary is not a problem, and there is no sexual content or profanity; but the narrative style and fragmented glimpses of characters and relationships offer rich opportunities for problem-solving. When readers talk about confusion encountered in their reading, they are certain to enter into authentic dialogue.

Like any good story, this one needs a second reading before its craftsmanship can be admired; unlike some stories, this one may be baffling in the initial reading – it’s hard to know what to hold on to. I note this because if I were to assign this story, I would need to decide whether to scaffold the instruction prior to their primary reading by offering students a repeated motif, such as jobs, borders, or maps, or to expect them to read it cold, and hope they stick with it. “When to intervene” is my key question in all group reading these days, and I welcome anyone’s suggestions! It must depend on those readers that day, I expect. Either way, I would have to be up front about sharing the problems the text posed for me, and the satisfaction and relief I felt when the second reading worked to clarify much of what had been cloudy.*

Second, the story offers possibilities for self-recognition in our response to a few characters and their attitudes. Here as elsewhere in this post I want to be careful not to give away anything of the story itself, which relies on surprise achieved through a slow and steady layering of language and character details. But, continuing with the threads I mentioned above, I can imagine discussion related to jobs and why we take them, what they mean to us, and the difference between vocation and work. Borders and maps figure prominently and ambiguously in the text, allowing readers to consider all the ways boundaries impact our lives—physical, emotional, cultural; windows, city blocks, rivers, and countries appear in the tale – and maps document divisions and concepts, from streets and backpacking trails to semantic maps found in a classroom. Principally, though, the story can be seen as a poetic portrait of a schoolboy named Ali by an adult writer “Mr. Mo” who befriends him. We meet Ali’s family and his school teacher as well. The relationships in the story will be recognizable to anyone who has spent time in a classroom, a family, or a marriage. I am confident that after a second reading, a classroom conversation would make some headway toward discussing the inherent difficulties we bring to our relationships because we limit our views of others.

Lastly, how do we negotiate meaningful relationships that rely on knowing the truth of the other, rather than on partial glimpses or stereotypes? Using an Osip Mandelstam poem about seeing as a child sees, McElroy suggests the prospect of childlike joy we might take in relationships with the people and things in our lives. Through innocent acts of attention, various characters attempt to get at the essence of a person or thing. In “No Man’s Land”, dialogue, narration, and a digital camera trained on Brooklyn Bridge are ways of capturing truth. But the characters, and we, come up against the obstacle that prevents us from seeing as a child sees. There is no need for me to get pedantic here by dealing directly with the story’s themes or recurring images. I simply feel this story would be terrific for an AP or college English class to tackle, since it opens up possibilities for getting at the many ways this author achieves his effects, and provides entry points for philosophical, artistic, social, and political meanings. The formal properties of the text change even as the sense of time, perception, and self-perception shift. Students would be engaged in describing a relationship between the writing style and the subject matter. There are so many directions a conversation about this tale can go, almost any class would find things to talk about, and confusions to resolve, without the teacher needing to introduce any.

The hardest role for me to play if I were to assign this story would be that of patient listener during class conversation. That is what my students need most. “No Man’s Land” offers its biggest challenge to the reader like me who finds it and wants to share his pleasure with others. Can I sit still long enough for them to give this text the attention it deserves? If so, I will have solved a teaching problem, removed the obstruction of myself getting in the way of their meaning-making, and taken great satisfaction in their unmapped conversation.

 

*An additional teaching problem the text poses, and one which could be made the subject of discussion among students, is the amount of historic and cultural background needed to make the story “easy”. Should the instructor provide a reminder about what it was like for adults in the wake of 9/11 to be aware of physical traits of “Arabs”? Does that happen prior to a first reading, or only later, and then only if students ask a question that would allow the teacher to help? I tend toward a “responsive teaching” approach that  offers help only when students initiate it by asking. In addition, I am indeterminate about whether to offer an anticipatory lesson to involve students before their reading, and set expectations for the story. Students could be prompted to think of a video game series they are especially fond of, or to read Mandelstam’s “To read only children’s books” (from Stone), or to view photographs of Brooklyn Bridge, or to write about a time they felt singled out or left out. The important thing would be to know the students so well that any suggestion would be likely to help them into the story, not seen as a pointless task. Because the text could be seen as what Frank Smith might call “nonsense” to less experienced readers, the goal would be to invite them into it, making it easy.

Cover Design Danielle Dutton/Illustr Nicholas Motte

Photo of Brooklyn Bridge by Pablo Fernandez at  Hadock’s Photostream  http://www.flickr.com/photos/hadock/with/5679486376/

Balancing Act

On reading Steven L. Layne, Nancie Atwell, William Broz, Kelly Gallagher

I appreciate the viewpoints and passion of all these mentor teachers. Their enthusiasm for learning, for students, and for good teachers and teaching translates into all their writing. They are full of stories, hope, and honesty about what their students are accomplishing. The difficulty for someone navigating the impasses –forks in the road where they may seem to disagree–is one of discernment. It is not “which is correct”,  but “which methods are best for my students today?”

Because they all focus on reading, the issues and solutions they address often feel most relevant to reading workshops in which daily periods are dedicated to reading, as they might be in middle school, where there is also separate time in the day for writing. Since reading and writing are integrated in my high school language arts curriculum (at least in the school day), I am reading them with an eye toward how the reading will relate to the writing that goes along with it. What I am left with after briskly reading each of these authors is a clarified sense of my role and responsibility to make readers of my kids – to help them to love books and want to read them.

Gallagher’s theme is to make certain that a 50/50 balance is met between pleasure reading and assigned reading, such as class novels; Layne’s is that we teachers can do much more to promote a love of reading, and he provides many structures and modelling behaviors we can use to do so. Atwell insists that reading is the single activity which promotes “skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers,” sharing and promoting her own tested methods of engaging mainly younger students (pre-high school) in the pleasure of the reading experience. She and Gallagher observe that book lovers entering ninth grade may soon become indifferent to reading when the fun is choked out of it by well-intended assignments that inhibit the “lived-through” experience Louise Rosenblatt wrote of as an aim in esthetic reading.

All agree that certain scaffolding can occur, and Broz qualifies Atwell’s approach by pointing out the practical need for such teacher expertise in classrooms where you won’t find students able to read Jane Austen on their own (an example Atwell uses).

For myself and my students, I reflect on this past year and fondly recall the many days in my 10th grade class when we had pleasure reading time. I really can and ought to encourage something approaching the 50/50 model. All the books contain practical ideas for how to log the student reading without making it burdensome for teacher or student. It seems that I am fortunate in that I am in a position to teach only the books I love, and therefore my own enthusiasm about the texts we read as a class can transmit to the readers. I also liked the idea of allowing readers an opportunity to read these in any order. As students are making such decisions, it is beneficial that several of the writers provide samples of students learning goals, and introduce scenarios that scaffold such goal-setting for the students.

But because I am also largely affected by the social dynamic of book discussions, believing them to offer students the multiple viewpoints of their fellow classmates, and alternative ways to experience literature, I hesitate to do away with them. All of these writers are interested in helping teens out when literature gets difficult and classes become harder in high school. They are clear about the message that good teachers must do everything in their power to gain and keep readers for life.

So if I can fashion a schedule wherein students can spend a bit of time reading, a bit of time discussing, and a bit of time writing, and involve a combination of student-selected and canonical works, I will be happy. I must add even more times when I am reading aloud to the class, enthusiastically, dramatically; this is a venue which seems to help students to enjoy a book – being read to by an expert reader.

Next, I will read up a bit on writing, with Donald Graves. Tinkering with the fit between reading and writing will help my classrooms to run more clearly toward their goals.

 I am wondering what you are doing or have done to make sense of any of the recent arguments for or against class study of novels, such as Readicide? How do you handle the balancing act between teaching students how to read the challenging books and how to read for all the pleasure they can get?

As  a related note, young adult books are crucial to the arguments in Atwell and Layne, especially. Atwell’s book was recommended to me by Gordon Pradl when it came out; and the necessity of drawing children of all ages to love reading and learning is closely connected with Mike Rose’s ideas in Why Schools?, such as the Jeffersonian ideal of an educated citizenry.

This assortment of related books leads to my central questions about how and when to introduce philosophy and politics to students, such that by senior year they are able to read “Federalist” papers or segments of Tocqueville. I like Matthew Lipman’s work in this area, as well as books like The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten