Constructing Trust

open to interpretation

As I browse through The Annotated Emma, Jane Austen’s novel annotated and edited by David M. Shepard, I pause longer than usual over his Notes to the Reader, where he signals plot disclosures and literary interpretations. He explains that Austen “developed … with great skill” several “mysteries … crucial to the story”, and I lean in to listen more carefully, because I have settled on this novel for an upcoming high school English course. Then I come to a complete halt, since I need to see him face to face as he tells me this: “Comments on the techniques and themes of the novel … represent the personal views and interpretations of the editor.” I realize that such a disclosure may be one of the most helpful aspects of my own instruction that I can offer to my students.

open to question

I have mentioned elsewhere how as a sophomore I asked my own teacher “How do you know?” What I was really wondering was, “What tools can I use myself to construct meaning, notice an author’s craft, or spy a symbol embedded in a landscape of detail?” I may have been curious about how much of what had been placed before us was open to question. As I design my course, it may be beneficial to students if I publish similar disclosures at the outset. I appreciate the way Shepard expresses himself, stating that while his views will “provoke disagreement”, he hopes that “in such cases the opinions expressed [will] provide useful food for thought”. And I sincerely trust that my students desire to think critically, needing only to be shown both where and how such questioning can be most productive; their questioning demands my openness to disagreements.

out of a job

I am describing a process by which students learn to be resistant readers. A full menu of theory and procedures for care and feeding of confident and resistant readers may be explored in Gordon Pradl’s Literature for Democracy. What I glean from Pradl’s work, including his NCTE session several years ago on a texts’ authority and context, is that authority, whether of a text, a teacher, or an interpretation, must be allowed to withstand scrutiny.

In a classroom, what would it look like for the teacher to invite questions about her, his, or their own interpretive process? When does a young reader become confident enough, feel free enough, to enquire of the instructor or tutor? It happens best when the younger apprentice sees themself supported by the tutor who guides, but who necessarily does not do all the leading.

Photo by Breakingpic on Pexels.com

I have heard it said that teachers hope to become obsolete – once our students think, write, and read independently, there is no longer any need for us. I want to revise this commonplace. There shall always be a need for experienced readers in a community of readers. If we press toward ensuring shared authority of both co-leaders and co-learners in our interpretive communities, anyone might feel not only welcome at the conversation table, but also enfranchised: having a sense that their full participation as members of such a community is worthwhile. The conversation should feel so lively, unplanned, visceral, and thrilling that no one wants to miss the new revelations or discoveries that might happen there.

a shift in control

Where discussions are thought-provoking and texts are inviting, according to Judith A. Langer, students learn literary language, with support of a teacher, from their involvement in “discussions that matter”. The focus of the course must be on readers developing their own changing perspectives and interpretations; she argues that “a shift in control from teacher to student is a necessary first step for the social interactions to shift from recitation and guesswork (What is it the teacher wants?) to substantive thought and discussion that can extend students’ range of understanding.”

Learning to listen to students’ ideas and to base instruction on students’ responses is a difficult shift to make. (99)

What can I do in September this year to make the shift easier for my own students?

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

For one thing, I can take a lesson from Shepard and demystify my own interpretive processes, by being transparent at the outset of year that my own analysis of a book such as Emma is not the content of the class; rather, their own emerging understandings will be.  I can focus less on homework and grading policies and be more upfront about shifting toward assessments and feedback designed with student thinking, social contexts, and multiple readings and texts in mind.

trust and voice

I have felt at my most vulnerable before students when sharing my writing with them: writing before them, or reading a poem or homework assignment I have written alongside them. Such openness to criticism was presumably a signal of my trust in them to be respectful of my fragile creations and ego. Yet a stronger and more intentional invitation of their trust in me would be issued by course disclosure of expectations at the outset.

A Star Is Born 2018 Trailer – at smooth.com

You have a voice. The opinions expressed here are open to question, provoking disagreements, providing food for thought. Your thoughts matters. I will support your learning purposes. The texts we explore are avenues down which we walk together. There are also some great stories here. And we will get to know some people; and wherever avenues are explored, we’ll encounter more mysteries – “mysteries crucial” to our stories.

Recommended Reading

Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. 1980. Harvard University Press.

Langer, Judith A.  Envisioning Literature 2011. Teachers College (Second Edition).

Pradl, Gordon. Literature for Democracy Reading as a Social Act. 1996. Boynton/Cook [Heinemann] .

 

 

your teacher is right

I recently tutored a student online as he prepared for the AP English exam.

“Have you done any preparation in your English class?” I ask.

“My teacher feels that the class should be enough. What we learn in English will prepare us to do well on any exams we choose to take.”

Well, that’s right, I think. So why the choice for online tutoring to prep for the AP Lit exam?

I did not ask this question directly.

I know the signs.

Parental orchestration. Weak knees in the days leading up to the annual May exam seating. A gripping awareness that other people take this test seriously – maybe they know something I don’t.

Leaving aside for now the whole question of The College Board, the value of AP, tests in general; acknowledging that a quick survey of 3o minutes will suffice to acquaint one with the type of questions to expect and the time and attention to allot; I agree with that teacher.

I am that teacher.

---

A slightly different angle, though, complicates my clear vision: my student’s personal goal is to gain confidence as a writer of AP exam essays. Under the umbrella of Writing Hope Works, I have chosen to subscribe to the mandate to coach writers toward their goals, so that they become more confident and resistant writers who write with clarity and force.

Combine this student goal with my belief that English class (and tutoring) exists to serve student learning purposes, and I do feel I can be of service. My writing conference format works well enough here, except for the urgency of time: it is days before the exam; and I charge an hourly rate for my tutoring time. In the normal writing workshop a revision process recurs, terminating with editing conferences. The student’s role is to do a lot of talking about her/his own writing; mine is to listen, encourage, ask a productive question.

Student choice is very important here. If this student CHOSE to sign up for the AP exam, great. If she/he CHOSE to set a goal and find a writing/literature coach, also great. This particular coach is a co-learner: I prepare (reviewing) major works in my personal time along with my tutee, who does it separately while on spring break. I create charts, analyze text, and outline my own response to pst prompts to the open question. I won’t simply lay out strategies – instead we need to learn alongside each other [the physical limitations of online learning notwithstanding].

Me with Penny Kittle, author of “Write Beside Them”  

Yes, this is like English class. I even hear this response sometimes from my pupils, or from others in the background during my online sessions. I harbor a secret delight in their comment: in solidarity with all English teachers I know, the test is not the point. The point is two learners engaging in dialogue with the best minds of all time, both of us finding our voices, choosing how to respond, listening, shaping replies…

I can’t not be who I am called to be as a teacher.

---

And my pupil responds very positively to this. The young writer initiates and chooses activity. Behind the scenes lurk motivating forces beyond our control; but the writer is in control.

And the AP written exam is primarily an opportunity for a young writer to demonstrate control of language. Each prompt imposes specific constraints whose purpose is to draw out the best in each writer, to allow the writer to flourish. It is not much different from The British Baking Show, when it imposes a time and ingredient constraint such as “three chocolates in three hours — B-A-K-E!” The contestants CHOSE to be there in that tent; they CHOSE to work on their baking at home during the week.

detail of a novel preparation chart for Gatsby

So today I am resigned in my position. I will use my experience with writing conferences, literature workshops, and oral exams [with my St. John’s tutors] to inquire with my pupil, dialogue about texts, and solve problems together.

I will enjoy the process of co-learning and co-leading, and will value the goal because it is my AP student’s own goal. If I truly trust the system (Writing Hope Works, whose aim is learner agency; writing conferences, whose aim is writers solving their own problems) then my young writer will set new goals tomorrow. When tests are done, today’s short-term goals are rewritten, and new long-term goals are imagined.

Even in the creation of new goals can I identify with all my learners. My writing goal in the coming weeks is to write a scholarly essay on novelist George Eliot as a critical educator. My teaching goal is to observe a local school model of student-initiated activity.

My goals have “real-world” constraints, such as a June 1st deadline and particular genre requirements for the written one, including submission to an audience of peers and professors. My own goal mirrors that of my tutee in its imminent deadline, highly qualified audience, and specialized genre. Observing the school demands fingerprinting, arranging hours, and understanding the rules (e.g. “No one will suggest to a child that one activity should take academic precedence over another.”).

---

A common theme runs through the posts I have written lately – not all of them published — every teaching moment is also a learning moment for me. And when my own interests, such as playing cards or piano or reading Victorian novels, put me in the shoes of a learner and student, I appreciate once more how difficult and rewarding learning can be. There is no substitute for the personal relationships formed within small groups learning together and the individualized help from a more experienced teacher. Anyone of any age can be a teacher.

Time and again, analog schools and teachers have proven not only better at teaching students, but  they can actually present more innovative solutions for education’s future.

from “The Revenge of School”, in The Revenge of Analog: Real Things And Why They Matter by David Sax

 

 

Are you standing at the borders of mystery?

Begin mystified
begin unbelieving
___off balance
learning begins.

We learn to believe
___to accept mystery
___to stop the balancing act.

Such moments, seeds of new knowledge
___of wisdom

V  i  s  t  a  s

Are you standing at the borders of a mystery?

                                                                             by G. Hultberg

We are disillusioned. Teachers, students, and parents are disenchanted with school and schooling. Just when we are about to give up, a new book offers hope.

Enacting Adolescent Literacies across Communities: Latino/a scribes and their rites (2017) offers a hopeful vision where young scribes:

• relate learning to their public and private communities;
• work with teachers to demystify literature, writing, and hidden processes;
• co-learn and co-lead in their communities to enact their literacies;
• celebrate:
  • dialogue and discovery,
  • beauty and language,
  • deliberation and negotiation.

Joseph Rodríguez knows teachers. He knows that new and veteran teachers alike are desperate to turn this historic moment into poetry. For some it may be poetry of protest; for others meditative sonnets.

Students, too, want to lend their voices to conversations about the past and present. Who will tell their stories, if they remain silent? Teachers in Enacting Adolescent Literacies invite us to introspection and investigation of past and present lives, and of forces that shape histories.

I love how the same question surfaces in Hamilton, serving as a theme not only of the show, but of histories themselves:

Who Lives,

Who Dies,

Who Tells Your Story?

[PHOTO: composer Lin-Manuel Miranda in Hamilton] spotify:album:1kCHru7uhxBUdzkm4gzRQc

Copyright Respect-mag.com

 

 

 

 

 

In Chapter 2, “Histories and Scribes at Milagros High School”, Mariano Guerra’s students, tired of “succumbing to authority in their schooling lives” and having legitimate questions go unanswered, learn to equate history with investigation and research into the “veracity of sources” and “chronicled points of view”. They move from studying Herodotus, through Mr. Guerra’s teaching as “subversive act”, to their own research as citizens whose education “questions and challenges authoritarian policies”.

The beauty of Mr. Rodriguez’s research and reporting is that it holds out hope for all such students, not merely Latino/a adolescents. Although his work focuses on school sites near El Paso, Texas, with a high percentage of Latino/a students, it invites any teacher to re-engage with the often mysterious, and inherently human, learning processes which drew us into learning and teaching in the first place.

---

 

Upcoming posts this week will feature a few thoughts about Mr. Rodríguez’s book in connection with my own thinking and learning.  

Lexington Books: www.rowman.com

Mr. Rodríguez will co-direct a summer institute Tales From the Chihuahuan Desert: Borderlands Narratives.

unfinished business

This has never happened before.

With at most two class meeting left at the end of the year, I have failed to reach the destinations I had assumed we desired.

There is one act of The Tempest yet be read.

There are two chapters of Tale of Two Cities still ahead.

The group action and product for a collaborative inquiry has yet to be created, though it is under way.

On the list of “completed” I am happy to say that small group book clubs and research studies did not suffer. I subordinated my own “coverage of content” goals to student goals such as the book clubs, and curating To-Read lists on Goodreads for their summer reading.

They also worked with younger students to teach them how to get onto Edmodo, and how to dance Jane Austen -style (both 21st Century skills!).

This group chose to read Pride and Prejudice, research dancing and etiquette, and teach peers and younger students to dance.

They provided me with useful feedback and their own reflections about small group and individual learning as readers, writers, and researchers; they offered suggestions for whole class book studies for themselves and future students.

I have not ever faced so blatantly the absence of alignment between my unit calendar and the actual daily learning processes that occur. I attribute the finish–like the Preakness, where my students are California Chrome and I am the pack spread out behind; or the Giro d’Italia, where they are riders out front, and I am the peleton who waits too long to put on the speed and overtake them before the finish–I attribute the finish to the surrender of control that necessarily accompanies the sharing of authority in my classroom. As I try to respond to their pacing, their needs, I adjust the pacing and mini-lessons that I had planned, adding writing conferences to generate encouraging feedback and removing burdensome requirements.

But the subtraction of certain work means re-prioritizing goals, so that I must ask myself “How important is it for their learning?”

For example, I always told them “Tale of Two Cities [whole class novel] is the dress rehearsal; your book club is the opening night.”

Diigo screen for research group

 

Coming into the home stretch at the end of May, we have all run the race. Our students, us; there is plenty of unfinished business on either side. I have a heap of partially operational websites and apps to either dismantle or rebuild as models of student portfolios, class blogs, glogs, and research tools.

Google Site

But for now, I have left it all behind at the paddock.

I have to get out of the old mindset, in which I was in competition with myself against last year’s number of units, with students over whose goals merit priority treatment, or with a Platonic ideal of interpretive community. In the new mindset, my students are in the game, and I am their coach, not their opponent; their goals and my goals merge end evolve over time, but flex more by student progress achieved (Past Performances) than by distance remaining to the final furlong, toward unrealistic expectations.

What I see as unfinished business is actually an opportunity for me to practice a flexible mindset and join my students in the Winners’ Circle.

Holy fear

Romeo: If I profane with my unworthiest hand/This holy shrine… (1.5.92ff)

For years I have shied away from inviting students into a deep engagement with the language of the lovers at their first meeting in Shakespeare’s famous love story. This week I shook off my fear, screwed my courage to the sticking place, and learned from my freshmen.

In the past I have prematurely hurried on into Act 2, afraid to impose my own reading of this scene on the students, because it closes off further thinking about the language in this scene and discourages multiple viewpoints. Ironically, I was doing exactly that anyway by avoiding a close reading of the scene. Today, students organically explored the meeting between Romeo and Juliet. In doing so, they not only classified the diction in the lovers’ sonnet, but began to adopt a critical stance toward that language choice.

A student-created poster hangs in the room: “Learn to recognize paradox in a scene, so we can apply it to the rest of the play”, the unit goal reads. After students met in expert groups to work towards their goal by categorizing potentially paradoxical terms from the scene, I gathered new groups comprised of one member of each expert group at which students shared their findings and reflected on categories of words Shakespeare uses and their effects.

What they taught me was that even at grade nine they make a distinction between author’s intention and reader’s interpretation. Asked to consider aloud the effect of Shakespeare’s language, a student countered with the question, “Do you mean the effect the author intended, or the effect it actually had on us?” Bingo.

I gestured wordlessly to the student — “We are all listening to you,” — and backed slightly from the round table at which we sat. Elated, excited, I was a bundle of nervous energy. Authorial intent? Where does meaning reside? These are concepts I listen for and encourage, yet seldom find emerging even in AP classes without teacher- driven, goal-oriented prompting.

A resistant reader is born.

A vigorous conversation ensues without me speaking.

Fast forward several weeks into the future. See these students generating ideas about culture as they read Fahrenheit 451; hear them wrestling, unprompted by a teacher, with whether books can be meaningful or dangerous; watch them divide into three large reading groups as their solution to a reading problem. By making their own decisions, managing their own talk, and setting their own goals, students gain ownership and authorship of their learning purposes. They will teach me to leap out of the way so they can do the hardest and most enjoyable work.

Melodious Monday

A good Monday – (Thankfully!) – It began in second period with our Romeo and Juliet introduction to the rhythm of the sonnet – which for the first time I equated to “the old soft-shoe” [“Tea for Two”]. Everyone had a hat, and choreographed her/his own Chorus Line-style moves (arms straight out; foot-kicks). Then we got down to business with a quick-write.

Later, in third period, American Lit, my Grapes of Wrath Unit really took off (the Joads are at the government camp) as “families” comprised of 2-3 smaller reading groups met and began discussing human rights. Fur flew further than off a jack-rabbit crossin’ Route 66. Then, to complete our block period, students modeled a democratic process in decision-making about how to establish criteria for journal entries. They have selected themes and essential questions pertaining to the American Dream and Order vs. Chaos, and I was somewhat surprised at how effectively today’s all-class meeting was facilitated, and at the high standards students seemed to aim at, desiring both autonomy and skills that will help them prepare for college. Good job, AmLit!

Finally, my Pride and Prejudice sophomore class split into two groups last week, based on personal preference as to pace, and today met and demonstrated almost total engagement as they shared journal entries, collaborated on vocabulary words they selected from the reading, responded to the prior reading and worked to set future goals. It is about the first time I have seen students reach for my new dictionary and thesaurus on their own. Great things are happening 🙂

Productive energy

Last week I wrote about engagement, which started me thinking about grading; and this a.m. I came across the paragraph I wrote in front of my combination 11-12 class. Here it is, with a modicum of tinkering to contain the verb forms:

An engaged club is alive! In 11-12 this will sound like a hubbub and fervor of excited yet focused energy and attention. People will be holding books, flipping pages, and seeking the exact quote that continues someone’s thought or refutes it; smiles, attentive eye contact, mirth, and every sign of listening will be evident. Sometimes writing will happen, and everyone has a pen or pencil at the ready. For whole minutes, complete silence may occupy a group as they write down their ideas. Other times a group will be quickly speaking, gesturing with hands, making connections, etc. I observe that effectively engaged group members kept their groups intact, without crossing into other talk from the room. Concentration is necessary, of course. There is reference to notebooks, so it is clear that when a person arrives at book club, she or he is well prepared to ask questions, share thoughts from the reading, and add to the knowledge and writing done already. In an engaged 11-12 club, members are open to and encouraging of new thinking and the making of meaning out of what was read. I surmise that meaning-making is a form of life-bringing activity: it enriches life and causes or leads to new growth.

Because of someone’s blog post last week I have been thinking how to modify overhaul my report card grading categories. I’d rather use such categories as risk, trust, caring, initiative, and productive energy–the latter suggested by the above exercise–to lead students to see what I value most in my classes. My current categories, homework sharing and independent reading, begin to do that, but it still niggles at me that they are insufficient to dissuade a senior from approaching me and saying “I noticed my grade went down because I didn’t do that assignment, so I turned it in yesterday.” I guess I would rather have heard him say, “I realized I hadn’t cared enough about the assignment to put my productive energy into it, nor did I even take the initiative to write it down the day you assigned it, then go home and take a risk by posting my changes to the googledoc so everyone in class might see them. I realize now that the rest of the class was deprived of my contributions to the film review criteria–contributions that were important since I love movies and have a lot of experience to offer.”

I am interested to hear what you value in your classroom. As long as we have reports, why not let them reflect what we value? Even if it’s a bit whimsical, I would love to consider non-traditional categories such as critical thinking, productive energy, playfulness…

sophomores write letters with quills as they read Jane Austen.
Hmm… Engaging with new ideas; finding your voice, reaching your goals…

Have you tried rebuilding your grading system? As we call into question even such traditions AS homework, we must replace these obviously empty categories (homework) with meaningful terms that provide information to parents and students about what is truly important: “asks good questions”, “invites others into exchanges about significant ideas or events”.

I suppose it is not so odd to consider having students complete weekly self-evaluations for such categories, compare them with my own observations, and both of us monitor such practices in consultation with the other over a grading period.

I think what I really want, consistent with my prior aims, is for students as well as teacher to continually ask What is Learning?

What is Learning to you? As always, I am waiting for THE Answer.

flipped in-service

Last night we joined librarians, writers, and teachers for dinner, where I heard an elementary school leader share that this week he had attended the best in-service ever. His first grade teacher showed a video of the classroom in which she was teaching students to engage in classroom conversation, using sentence openers such as “I agree with [my peer] because…” and “I disagree with [my peer] because…”
This reminded me of some footage I shot last week as eighth graders in our school building began book clubs. I thought they were really engaged, and that their actions and facial expressions expressed their engagement. I showed the video to my juniors and seniors, who were about to launch into their twice weekly book groups themselves (and whose engagement varies), inviting them to list the details they noticed that might suggest these students were engaged. Then they wrote briefly what an engaged 11th or 12th grade book club would look, feel, and sound like.

I felt the resulting book club conversations improved, and I assume this was due especially to the audio visual aid, which showed students writing, referring to pages in their novels, making eye contact, listening and speaking, gesturing, relating the text to their own experiences, laughing, and focused. I think this was an improvement over the one model live group demo I had begun with several weeks ago, and over my oral or white board instructional reminders prior to small groups in previous weeks.
The administrator I was dining with said “the school’s most important resources are its teachers.”
What would it look like if every teacher and administrator left every teacher-led in-service feeling like it was the best ever? What would a FLIPPED in-service look like? Maximize the learning and sharing potential of every in-service by keeping ALL housekeeping and business announcements to downloadables we view at home; and celebrate professional learning community while we are together.

I almost forgot to add: the first grade students were engaged in solving a math problem–with the goal of deciding whether its solution required addition or subtraction.

Pilgrimage to Dickens Wold

I have just returned from a pilgrimage to the Dickens Universe in Santa Cruz, and what a passage it was! Beginning with the lovely trip down Highway 1, at times fog-enshrouded, sun-warmed, or overcast, the Pacific beckoned and welcomed me. On campus, walking paths through redwood groves or the arboretum

During free moments of the week, I began to list the things Charles Dickens means to me. The list was pretty incoherent, with no center or glue that caused its items to stick to each other. It might leap from a high school encounter with Oliver Twist to a sense of literacy’s freeing capability, and a growing awareness of Dickens’s mastery of evocative prose. Its tangents extended to community theater, teaching, book clubs, and parties. I am an anglophile, only recently willing to admit that a few American authors have written as well as the British masters.

GREATNESS?

What alerts me to greatness in music or literature I call energy. Useless I suppose to explain it or think it might produce an identical effect on another reader. Bowie has this energy in young americans or space odyssey. Elton John’s band exhibits it  on 11-17-70, his first live album. But how do we know I don’t just mean star quality, since I have felt Jack Lemmon exuding something like energy on stage, once long ago? Perhaps it is a sense of theatricality, or of character, embodied in a text performance, brought to life in rhythms that surprise and delight, even jolt.

Lectures during the week drew attention to Dickens’s boundless energy, by which I feel was meant active mind, unlimited imagination, and ultimately self-destructive drive to work. In seminars and high school teachers’ discussions we participants celebrated a life of words, and his words of life — life embodied in actress Miriam Margolyes” vividly human and warm-blooded portraits one evening. Yet I am wondering what drew us all together in the first place.

COMMUNITY

It might be obvious to suggest that a sense of belonging, or wanting to belong, to something greater than oneself moves us to join in appreciation of this author: Victorian teas at 3, post-prandial potations at 6:30, 3 meals a day, and any number of walks back and forth between venues offer infinitely varied opportunities to mix with new acquaintances. But similar paths to membership in a community exist elsewhere, such as at The Glen Workshops sponsored by Image journal. Dickens’s imprint belongs more exclusively to himself, one feels, than to a shared faith or sense of vocation among attendees. That we have come together is less a phenomenon than that it is Dickens who has called us.

DICKENS WOLD

I plead guilty to misreading Bleak House at nearly every instance of the phrase Chesney Wold, by reading world in the place of wold. Chesney World, then, is the world in which Lady Dedlock lives (or exists)–a self-contained world where her boredom competes with her beauty for authority over Ghost Walk. Face it, this remote setting is as distant from my own world as is Fagin’s den, Joe’s forge, or Wemmick’s miniature castle with its drawbridge that cuts him off from the working life and practical existence. What compels me is the world Dickens creates, and the mysterious way that world is entangled with my own, imbuing it with richer colors and textures; when I read his prose, I am jolted more often into awareness of my own life than by any other writer.

It may be that a well-built sentence will perform in such a way that the teacher in me makes a note to use it as a model. Or the reader in me delights at the pleasure of some humorous passage set amidst a serious paragraph. The voter is warned that today’s corrupt politicians are in league with those of his own day, and my sarcastic or ironic side responds in mirthful agreement and recognition of familiar social ills and truths. His frequent allusions to the Bard and the Bible offer writer’s shortcuts I can follow. Even the costumes and scenery in Dickens’s world evoke my memories of watching or performing in adaptations, of friendships forged with those who loved and acted in theater, of teachers who taught the novels or took me to the plays, or a director who cast me as Sowerberry; I began thinking of myself as a writer when I was put down Drood and took up a pen to attempt the creation of a similar atmosphere. not least is the writer’s ability to achieve what Micah and Jesus refer to as justice, mercy, and humility as agents of love, a love supreme.

The connections this reader already felt and enjoyed we’re deepened last week through close reading and slow reading of the text. Through such exercises, intertextual relationships emerged with poems, paintings, and illustrations. Extending beyond this were avenues of criticism that opened up new ways of seeing links between the Victorian novel, ghost stories, horror, and detective genres–genres my high school juniors expressed interest in last year, and that resonated with my desire to create new thematic units around such writing. As Raymond Chandler writes in a letter:

Murder novels are no easier reading than Hamlet, Lear, or Macbeth. They border on tragedy and never become quite tragic, and if you have to have significance, the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions in which we live in this generation.

Maybe what I am saying through all this is that teachers should never stop asking themselves and each other why we do what we do in the classroom. If a Dickens novel commands authority in the classroom, by all means introduce his voice. If Toni Morrison’s voice speaks, let her have a voice. And when Sara Zarr, Suzanne Collins, Socrates, Seneca, St. Augustine, and Steinbeck speak to young people with authority, give them a voice. Better yet, let’s engage students in opportunities to hear these often intertwining voices in conversation with each other, and invite young readers to declare which of the voices speak to them individually. The challenge I see for myself here is to teach in such a way that my own experience as a reader is available to my students, so that I share my joy over a well-written sentence or book, but only in order that they become more aware of language and its uses. When they define energy forthemselves, or engage in vigorous discussion over the merits of one writer over another, then they hone evaluative tools they will use for a lifetime of reading.

 

opening dialogue

I was delighted last weekend when my drama students used their voices to speak up during our first ever question and answer session after a performance of Holiday. They spoke from the heart, found an audience for their humor, and warmly received questions and offered answers.

Am I a little less certain that the students in my English class book clubs have found such an authentic voice. While the students have ownership, there seems to be little at stake for them. Sometimes when I listen to their conversation, it sounds inane. I hear one student recapping for another the events of the previous night’s chapter (groups set and enforce their own goals for reading and participation). They seem often to skip past the “club” aspect and move directly to the reading aloud of the next section. I find myself wondering about the similarities between the two experiences, both of which offer students a voice, yet which seem to produce widely different results.

On opening night of Holiday, the cast and crew of high schoolers assembled after curtain call, inviting questions from the audience. My students were poised and diplomatic, becoming ambassadors for the school drama program and for arts education. I suppose now that an element of trust permitted the opportunity to take such a living shape – as if a still life suddenly danced. Members of the cast transformed themselves twice that night – once for their entrances during the performance, a second time when they spoke up during the Q&A. They heard the questions, listened to each other’s replies, and moved the discussion productively and spontaneously forward.

What occurred on the stage – lively dialogue with others about a drama and their own lives – was it related to the work they do in the classroom daily? If so, why was it so different from my experiences in the classroom that week, where productive dialogue seemed to have frozen into a memento mori, a reminder of death?

Catching myself hurtling toward Holy Week, I consciously slow down to examine the conditions that lead toward dialogue as effective performance in one case, and as poor rehearsal in another. Before leaping ahead to celebrate resurrection, I will benefit by introspection and reflection upon my own teaching. Could unintended differences in my own coaching be the decisive factor in the contrasting ways that two groups of students approach and confront a task? Or did the formal theater setting cause the emergence into light of newly awakened, mature learners who engage with friends and strangers, while the informal routine of book clubs in English class had sealed sleepers in a tomb?

I have tried to provide similar environments for both groups of students: a high degree of accountability to each other, a place where they trust each other and me as they work toward independence; I am neither on stage nor backstage with them during performances and audience interactions, nor contributing as either co-learner or co-leader with them during final book club meetings. Students felt ownership because they had chosen their groups through a try-out process in drama or a vote on book club titles.

But some factors contribute to the differences between the two learning processes: as opening night in theater approaches, nerves are palpable and adrenaline is heightened as actors rise to meet expectations of other actors and the audience; in twice-weekly book clubs the expectations produce less anxiety and demand less trust, feeling more like early rehearsals than final performances. In my role as teacher I have set expectations and established routines for months in both cases, but I may have underestimated the degree to which anticipation of public success drives the effort toward independent practice. “Where there is no vision, the people perish,” my place card at C.E.L. 2011 read, “Proverbs 29:18, Leadership Matters.” It is the coach’s role to prepare his students for a successful run, by setting a vision of success – be it a series of book club discussions or a string of performances and dialogues with audience. Finally, I admit the fact that drama participants have chosen theater, but the others have English thrust upon ’em.

Maybe I need to increase the gestation period of the book clubs before rolling away the stone in expectation of metamorphoses. This last quarter, I can be more involved in the group’s decision-making process as they set expectations for new book clubs (having previously allowed them to set their own goals and expectations, with little coaching from the sidelines). I can increase the amount and frequency of feedback I offer during small group discussions as a groundwork for book clubs, by both strict criticism and analysis of their performance of tasks, as I do with rehearsals in drama. I might even allow book clubs as an end-of-unit assessment of what they have learned this year about productive dialogue, so that they engage with each other and me about a text as a part of their final.

I also need to alter my model. Instead of envisioning my students as the dead who may, one Easter morning, emerge from the tomb, I must entrust them with the leadership of others so that they enact Pentecosts and transform society. This shift in view may be suggested in Marilynne Robinson’s new volume on democracy, When I Was A Child I Read Books.

I need to become the one who emerges a new teacher from the womb of the earth, in order to first equip them to do good work, and then to leave them alone to get it done. I will continue with them from the sidelines, cheering them on. But they need to see that I am not their primary audience, nor are their immediate peers. There is a world outside which they need to become a part of, interact with, commune and communicate with.

I cannot lose sight of the glorious knowledge, however, that in both settings students are finding, rehearsing, and using their voices for authentic purposes in preparation for joining dialogues about art, faith, sports, science, literature, society, education, and history – future and ongoing conversations about what matters to them and us. If a classroom book club or a post-play discussion offers even a glimpse of independent thinking so crucial to a democratic society, most assuredly spring is awakening and I, for one, am changing.

Photo Credit: Sara Zarr