Moonlighting until tomorrow

I always thought there was something fundamentally broken or unfair about people needing to “moonlight” by taking a second job outside their vocation. I had consumed a steady diet of TV police dramas featuring daytime cops with evening jobs as bouncers, security detail, bodyguards, driver safety instructors. Then I began to notice teachers working extra jobs, too. Last year, one of my colleagues supplemented her full time teacher pay working as a waitress at a local restaurant. When did she see her family?

The job of teacher is demanding enough, consuming all one’s time and energy, without the added stress of more time and work. It would feel more whole, be more just, if our teachers could just remain dedicated to their professional art and craft and have time for family, friends, and community; for rest and remaining current in their fields. How do I remain true to my calling while earning enough to survive, now, and retire, later?

Other professions, too, require clean hands: a similar investment of time, service, and diplomacy that appears both impartial and above reproach. The teacher’s craft compares with the doctor’s, clergy’s, governor’s. Many of us cheer the idea of a politician whose hands are not sullied by an inordinate desire for money, and who can practice the wonderful work of statecraft without becoming dependent on the money offered by the pharmaceutical industry or gun lobby. I am thinking that there are noble ideals in teaching; but in acknowledging them I must be wary not to judge myself against an unrealistic ideal. Where do my ideals come from?

The movies

If we applaud the home-y philosopher-stateswoman who is not beholden to special interests, we are not necessarily alienated by the Western-genre myth of a person hired to “clean up the town”. See our mythic heroes John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart. A higher ideal guides such characters, now seen as archetypal, who have come to be embodied in John Ford and Frank Capra movies.

Sometimes these characters step into volatile situations, act to temporarily bring about equilibrium, and leave the town stronger, cleaner, and more whole than when they arrived. All of us humans are touched by some evil or threat of harm, and even if we temporarily gun it down or fight it off, it will outlive us because only something like a love altogether more powerful will disable it. Hints of such better futures are also found in ideal film performances by Clark Gable or Humphrey Bogart. But they are perpetuated in new and original films such as The Post and The Shape of Water in performancesby Meryl Streep and Sally Hawkins.

Both Casablanca and Gone with the Wind end with lovers parting, and someone walking off into a mist, the words “beginning of a beautiful friendship” and “tomorrow is another day” reverberate in the theater as the score swells and the camera zooms out. But we overlook the romanticized heroism or love that redeems such flawed people. Rhet and Rick are profiteers with “hearts of gold”, but they admire idealism in others. Rick sees Ilsa’s and Rhet sees Scarlett’s. Louis is a Nazi sympathizer by convenience; Rhet will fight on the side of the South if it pays better. Everyone is caught between the real world, with its demand for practical tasks, time, and money; and the ideal world, with its tough and courageous love that sacrifices all for family, love, and justice. And most of us, rather than being in love with a single task-specific aspect of our teaching jobs, such as grading papers or taking attendance, are aligned to a more general, abstract habit, such a coaching learners toward independence or encouraging creativity in others.

vocation

That is why I feel the vocation of teaching is caught at this moment in history, caught, like night club owner Rick in Casablanca, between the practical responsibility of running his business (casino, black market) and the romantic heroism of aiding the helpless. In an early scene establishing his virtue and higher calling, he protects a married woman from having to compromise her marriage at the hands of a ruthless, predatory male (who can give her safe passage out of Casablanca in exchange for sexual favors) by fixing the roulette game to ensure her husband wins, then sending them away on an alternate route to safety.

In traditional and archetypal film style, the heroic male is costumed in white and lit strongly; in this shot, I see how Hungarian-born immigrant director Michael Curtiz focuses on the woman’s idolizing gaze at Bogie (Rick), as he, a knight in shining armor, defends her; and while the real love of her life, the man in the foreground, entrusts his savings to Rick. The romantic triangle in tableau foreshadows the actual one eventually played out when Ilsa bargains for her own husband’s safe passage, in order to continue fighting against the Nazis and leading his countrymen to freedom through resistance.

I like hopeful endings: they satisfy my acknowledged preference for justice and honor. I fear that, with many other people today, I also share an unacknowledged preference for the unreal Western myth to be realized in the midst of our daily real lives.

Thus it comes about that we have an national dicussion on the table about whether I, a classroom teacher, should be armed with a pistol in order to protect and defend my students.

The film buff in me has always wanted to be Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, Clark Gable, and Humphrey Bogart — with a little Hercule Poirot and Fred Astaire thrown in.

Do ya feel lucky? Well, do ya, PUNK?

But I sense there is a collision of worlds in this scenario I have not acknowledged. It is a clash between the Platonic ideal of Teacher and the practical reality of Bodyguard. Yet some idealism about my work remains implanted in me. I am hopeful that my vocation and my workplace can retain their integrity of purpose. Learning happens in an environment that is safe, peaceful, and fun; when Jimmy Stewart as Mr. Smith makes his stand in Congress against corruption, he uses his proper tool, his voice, until it wears out; when Eastwood as Dirty Harry patrols the streets of San Francisco to stop a deranged serial killer, he carries the appropriate tool of his trade, a handgun. Movie teachers, in their fictional worlds, carry their spectacles, their Browning versions, their chalk, and their occasional cane or ruler.

Just what America needs in the classroom: one more phallic symbol of authority and force. I remember a much earlier national conversation steered by the Western myth. We considered the “Star Wars defense system” proposed by Hollywood actor-turned-President Ronald Reagan. To most of my friends, such a mistaken idea was a collision between two worlds: one fictional, in which war was glamorized because it symbolized noble human deeds and ideas (Jedi Knights and The Force) pitted against monstrous cruelty and power (Darth Vader and the Death Star); the other nonfiction, in which human beings on either side might bleed and die, and no one could say with certainty which were the monsters and who the humans.

Fortunately, there are women to compete with this myth of masculine power. Katharine Graham, whose strength towers over the men in her Washington, D.C. world, those attempting to exert force over her publishing The Pentagon Papers in The Post, resists their influence in order to make her independent choices.

As another Academy Award ceremony is telecast, viewers have a choice of new myths in which to believe. The stories themselves may not be new, since they include historical accounts of such events as The Battle of Dunkirk and the fight to publish The Pentagon Papers. Yet the expression of such stories is meaningful and original.

We witness Katharine Graham make a choice that exposes years of top level government officials’ knowledge about the unwinnability of the Viet Nam war; and in The Shape of Water we feel a tyrant’s monstrous contempt for life, beauty, and weakness countered by a mute cleaning-woman’s love and respect for a captive and complex being. Filmmakers, actors, and writers are only a few of the craftspersons serving as today’s “shapers”, the scops [singer-poets] John Gardner wrote about in his 1971 novel Grendel, a reshaping of the Beowulf epic from the creature’s point of view.

empowered teachers

The decisive Moments in our lives are born in the moments we feel the most powerless. We still need heroes, underdogs, and champions; but we must choose them more carefully today.

On Friday I saw a refreshing film hero with an ancient weapon.

I enjoy knowing that the students next to me during the screening admired this teenage girl’s tenacity; two weeks earlier, I had noticed a couple of others picking out the perfect airsoft assault rifle from an online catalog.

Clearly, we are not the first generation to critique the Hollywood commercialization of the myth of the Old West – its glamor, its icons, its hostility to indigenous peoples and disempowerment of women. Unlike some, though, I don’t feel the need to remove all traces of a trigger-happy culture or of a past for which anyone with privilege used it without a second thought. Warhol alters an iconic image so that we can never see it again as we did before. As summer scholars in El Paso at the recent NEH-sponsored “Tales from the Chihuahuan Desert: Borderland Narratives”, we secondary teachers and UTEP program directors Joseph Rodríguez and Ignacio Martinez saw value in keeping old monuments standing alongside newly erected ones, in order that the whole story could be told and no voices silenced. This new figure of a Tiguan woman stands not far from the Chamizal Memorial and U.S.-Mexico border, whereas previous Texas statues tended to honor conquistadors.

I do believe there is room for a plurality of voices; new monuments and new myths can help to reinterpret the past and to invite participation in a more hopeful future. In a scene from Middlemarch, author George Eliot composes the view from the window of Dorothea’s future house, “happy” on one side, but “melancholy” on the other; she establishes that in “this latter end of autumn”, in the house’s sunless interior “air of autumnal decline” Dorothea’s fiance Casaubon has “no bloom that could be thrown into relief by that background.” Dual images compete for Dorothea’s attention, the happy side including a small park, a fine old oak, a pleasure-ground, and an avenue of limes “melting into a lake in the setting sun.” The landscapes and interiors represent a choice between two futures: from the same single vantage point today, any of us might look ahead in time in multiple directions and project either dismal and sunless or cheerful and pleasant days ahead. We may not have the agency to effect a change in our circumstance when things appear hopeless. Yet our outlook might take on a new shape given the myth in which we find ourselves.

vocational training

Our teaching can take new shape in response to new students. As Philip Davis writes in The Transferred Life of George Eliot (Oxford 2017), George Eliot had begun one novel in 1869 and set it aside, only to begin a “different novel instead” in November 1870, more than a year later.

The story was of an ardent young woman, Dorothea Brooke, a modern St Theresa though ‘foundress of nothing’, seeking, without the structure of a clear faith, a vocation and an epic life in the modern world. … As D H Lawrence said of George Eliot … ‘It was she who started putting all the action inside.’

Eliot sets aside one kind of work for another, and her result is Middlemarch, in which she eventually found room to accommodate both stories. And in contrast with film, which by its nature externalizes action, she transfers action to the inside. Her influence is felt in genres as diverse as the mysteries of P.D. James, the hardboileds of Ross Macdonald, and the YA of Sara Zarr.

Marian Evans as the novelist George Eliot is a true teacher, having used the art of poetry to fashion little worlds in which characters investigate vocation, question faith, and imagine better futures. Just imagine if all our classrooms could be little laboratories like hers!

One of the drawbacks to such rooms, worlds, and communities is that it takes a good deal of time to read and probe, through open dialogue – true Socratic dialectic – and reflect on vocation, faith, future, and authority. I feel helpless and disempowered when the school schedule, class size, curriculum, and student interest and inexperience prohibit frequent use of such authentic investigations. Such lack of agency can lead to shame when I seek part-time work for which an education is not required. I have applied for my share of odd jobs in recent month, from library aide to UPS clerk to cafe attendant; and I have done some moonlighting that puts my expertise to work as a copy editor, test-prep tutor, and background actor. At this stage, for me, it is realistic to work part-time jobs, in order to press on toward an ideal class in which students use their voice, participate in community decisions, acquire abiding understanding of ideas and how they work, and have agency.

Such ideals are shaped less, I find, by the myth of teacher-as-hero than by the ability of my students to see themselves as having a role in their own future. Maybe it is time I acknowledge learner-as-hero mythology. [Icarus, Bildungsroman, Fellowship of the Rings, Karate Kid]

changing the narrative

When my students have agency and hope, I am able to step in and guide, support, or nudge them in my role as a learning coach. I can replace outdated or unrealistic myths with models and mentors who show me how to be flexible, patient, and strategic as a teacher. There remains for me a temptation to put off tomorrow, as Scarlet O’Hara does, till “another day”; and to subvert the traditional broken and unjust systems of authority as the anti-hero Dirty Harry does. I have even been attracted to the notion of placing it all on the roulette wheel, cashing out, and leaving the game, like a Casablanca character.

But my calling goes deep, and has a history dating at least back to Socrates, who believed there was justice in showing young people how to question received traditions, systems, and authorities; and there was poetry in the art of speaking properly about humans and divinities. Today social justice is a key term along with agency, and a motivating force in pedagogy which seeks to empower both students and teachers as literate citizens making a difference in society.

Movies and teachers can work to change the narrative stars by which young people sail on their journeys.

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 🙂

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.

Something to say

Today my student groups will cut down scenes from the end of Romeo and Juliet’s Act Three. They will produce a two-minute condensed version of the scene, a la The Complete Works of William Shakespeare [abridged], the parody our drama students put on last week.

Kelly Gallagher said yesterday at a luncheon for the Conference on English Leadership that he teaches the play and other classics “because it has things to say to young people’,” such as posing a the question: Can an ongoing feud between rival families ever end?

Last year, in our initial encounter with the last scene in Act 3, where Juliet dismisses her Nurse for turning against Romeo and urging her to marry Paris, students asked questions that demonstrated their engagement. “Would the Friar be the one who performed the marriage? Why would he do it? Was polygamy lawful then? Can a woman be a polygamist or only a man? Is it immoral or only illegal to have two husbands? Did they have divorces? is a wedding the same as a marriage, and if there is no wedding celebration with lots of people watching, does it still count?

 “Why do they need the parent’s consent?” one student asked. “Haven’t you ever heard of a man asking the father’s permissions to marry a girl?”  “No.” The dialogue and discovery about each other was as rich as the foregrounding text; it served almost as a pretext for talking about what mattered most — the way society and family structures have changed and stayed the same over the years.

   I am excited to see where the classroom talk goes after the scenes are performed. 

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  

Help, I’m Drowning!

Photo by Tanya Little

Is there a contradiction between inviting students to find their voices, and scripting their responses?

I have been stumbling lately over a two-pronged approach to teaching students to be better readers. On one hand, allow them a choice of books to read 50% of the time, help find books they will connect with, and do less damage with the ones we do study as a class by analyzing less; and fewer teacher-selected elements to focus on will allow more reading flow as readers move through the longer classic works. On the other hand, guide and monitor their responses, teach specific reading strategies, assess frequently and minutely for understandings, while encouraging conversational risk-taking and acceptance of diverse and multiple interpretations.
Yes, there must be a canon, but it can change for each teacher.
Yes, there can be reading for enjoyment, but only because it is what “real readers do.”

Has Louise Rosenblatt’s hope — that reading a work for the pleasure it produces should precede any reading for “practical” reasons – been lost?
I suspect we high school teachers fear that young readers can no longer enjoy (are incapable of doing so) a work of imaginative literature more complex that The Cat in the Hat. Or are we afraid they will no longer enjoy such work? In an effort to assuage our collective guilt for allowing some students to get through our classrooms with a less thorough appreciation for the finer works, we have attempted a right-hand left-hand approach to literature instruction. While we tell students to read books for pleasure, we also steal the pleasure that comes with knowing you can read a moderately challenging book on your own, and have fun coming together to talk about it.

I am wondering if the scaffolding ideas suggested by some of the well-intentioned editors and authors who advocate a reader-response, student-centered, shared authority classroom go far enough toward allowing students to accept responsibility for their reading successes and failures. One recently published exercise (worksheet), designed to elicit student thinking about a specific character in literature, still pre-supposed that there were certain things a reader must consider if she or he is to extract all the meat from the shell, so to speak. I am not sure if I object on the basis of teachers feeding the students ideas, supplying hints to answers that ought to be on the page (which closes dialogue rather than opening it), or because the critical thinking called for was not clearly shown to be related to the student’s “lived-through experience” of the literature (Rosenblatt’s term, used by some of these same teachers). Its strength was that it offered the student writer a choice of character to write about; its weakness was that it prescribed what to include about the character.

The dual role of a teacher in a democratic classroom must balance between co-learner and co-leader.
I think my questions are about the authenticity of the writing task itself, and whether the task is more closely aligned with James Britton’s exploratory writing or writing to “get things done”. I am also concerned that the writing we ask students to do as they move through a text subverts the opportunity for a truly independent initial response and replaces the early esthetic readings (and its accompanying inferences and interpretations) with efferent reading: reading with a purpose designated by the teacher.
I want to practice ways of helping guide students into enjoyment and appreciation, without robbing them of the right to a primary response to the text (Pradl, Knowledge in the Making). While I have seen some very effective ideas for easing students into a difficult but rewarding text, too many rely on a set of activities designed by the teacher on the basis of his own diagnosis and decision-making about student readiness. Prior to any student encounter with the text, they tend to ask: “What can I do to make the text more relevant to my students?”
They should be asking: “Students, those of you who sensed there was something here that you could relate to – can you share it with the group?”
When we as co-learners in a discussion group admit our difficulties as well as share the meanings we have been building for ourselves as we have read, we become engaged with each other over problems and their solutions. In the model I am seeing too often, the leader pre-selects a problem readers are likely to encounter, then solves the problem for others, preparing to share it directly in the form of a mini-lesson, anticipatory set, worksheet, or essential question which may close rather than open dialogue.

Ways I see that we as teachers-leaders can turn discussion focus toward our class goals:

“We don’t have the writer here, but we do have the writer’s language.”

“What is it about you as a reader that causes you to make that prediction?”

“You made an interesting point. Can you relate that to what has been said earlier?”

Comments above help to facilitate productive dialogue. They keep it moving forward, not only piggybacking on previous contributions to the discussion, by pushing outward from a center. We are permitted ethically to do this because of our experience as readers or facilitators; yet we have not stolen the opportunity for the students themselves to initiate dialogue topics.

The sentences above help direct the conversation to be more pointed, more focused, sharper. These terms are related to vision, I notice: maybe a good series of comments will help us to see in the same way that a photographer can direct our attention by composition of a shot: selecting what is seen in the foreground, background, and middle ground. She arranges the objects in view so that their relationships are seen in the most interesting way, depending on contrasts, fine distinctions, detail, and point of view. Once we have learned how to see, we can look at anything – the subject matter is significant, but we apply similar viewing strategies no matter what the subject of the photograph.
Similarly, once we establish a way of having a conversation about reading, writing, and a text, participants will help each other to see more clearly, and to consider the perspectives of other readers and writers.

The statements above explicitly direct conversation by pointing back to the text, by asking someone to make his thinking “visible” to us, and by asking a speaker to describe relationships between ideas. They help bring the conversation back to common territory, letting all of us hear how what is being said connects to what we are reading or what has been said previously.

Some of the worksheets I see created by current teachers in the publications are in danger of drowning out student voice. If student experience (Rosenblatt’s “lived-through experience of a text) is key to enjoyment, understanding, and appreciation of literature, then a diary entry focusing on character may not work. Specifically, one teacher created a scaffolding activity which asked a student to write a diary entry from a character’s point of view (yes, I have done this), but the prompt was leading. First, student had to choose from two main characters in a Shakespeare play; second, the student had to get inside the emotions and thoughts of the character. Because Shakespeare makes these implicit already in the speeches of the characters, the assignment could amount to decoding his writing – in essence, paraphrasing. But the task was designed as an end product, one which pulls together all the thoughts of the student, class discussions, analysis of language, and the lived-through experience of the student as a reader.
In such as product, one expects a high level of critical thinking, which cannot be accessed by an invitation to paraphrase. Such a prompt needs to be clear about the ways its product must remain true to meaning that the student has constructed, how flexibly it allows for student interpretation of the play itself, where student creativity will be rewarded and where responsibility to the transaction between reader and text is demanded. Furthermore, who will evaluate whether the product is evidence of reading or of writing?

I would like to hear from other frustrated but excited teachers who are working with the same problem: student ownership of the reading/writing process from beginning to end.

 

 

Loving Conversation

For me, this is a goal of the education of human beings. It should be the first goal of a student who wishes to be fully human. She or he wants to be brought into a dialogue with The Creator, to enter into dialogue with the writers, thinkers, and worshipers of the past, and to participate in ongoing conversation with classmates, teachers, and the world at large today.

“When all out thoughts…have been brought into a loving conversation with God, then we know obedience in its fullness.” (Henri Nouwen, Clowning in Rome, p72, Doubleday)

For Nouwen, the conversation is “loving” because it occurs with a loving God. When we allow our idolatrous thoughts to be converted into conversation with Him, we are praying constantly, as Jesus and Paul modeled. He notes that prayer itself may be a “true, bitter, and ongoing struggle against idolatry”.
I like reading the phrase “loving conversation” not only as a noun phrase, but also as a verbal phrase, “loving conversation”, with an emphasis on the affection we have for the art and act of dialogue. It means to love reading, writing, and the fellowship we have with other people. It means loving those people we are in dialogue with, listening to them, risking and trusting them with our ongoing struggles, and enjoying the work of making sense of difficult texts and of our life together.
Occasionally I have felt lately that there are obstacles to clear thinking about texts and about each other which get in the way of our making sense of a reading, or of paying thoughtful attention to other people who are engaged in conversation with me. I have been calling these obstacles clutter since they inhibit my ability to see clearly. For instance, my own prejudices against characters like George Wickham or Caroline Bingley in Pride and Prejudice stand in the way of any opportunity to actually see the world from their point of view. It might be actually helpful for me to consider the points of view of these characters in order to understand that certain of their behaviors may stem from the restrictive atmosphere of society in Austen’s day. I feel justified in my derision of their conduct, the same as I feel justified in blaming Raskolnikov or Uriah Heep for their cruelty. But even my reasonable self-righteousness may in fact be a form of clutter which prevents my seeing clearly.
To pull together both senses of “loving conversation” would mean having a loving conversation with others in which we value and respect their ideas, helping each other to sweep away the clutter of misreadings and prejudices. We must do so in the most loving manner possible – and we must actually enjoy and relish such conversations.
But what of obedience? When is the right time to make value judgments about ideas and characters? This is where I believe reading becomes more than a form of exercise. We really are to involve God in our thinking as we are reading. We are to admit –to Him, to our partners in conversation—that we are engaged in a struggle. We struggle to make simple the difficult; to render meaningful the senseless; to construct a valuable whole out of pieces; to submit our wandering thoughts to a rigorous discipline. And we yearn to know that we are doing so in spiritual “obedience”, as Nouwen says.
And isn’t that a struggle that even Job was engaged in? When we look at the world – as presented in literature, as found outside our door, as felt in our hearts – and witness its senseless acts, fragmented pieces, difficult conditions, and wandering attention span, we can in response bear witness to wholeness as well.
By ensuring that “loving conversation” is a goal in a literature class, participants are keeping dialogue going which admits two or more voices at play. [Play is another expressive term for what occurs in a conversation with or about great books] The interplay of two or more voices is necessary for a democratic classroom (or an interpretive community, or a society); even when one of these voices is suppressed, it still enters a silent dialogue which is obedient prayer. One biblical way to understand such a two-sided conversation is as one between law and gospel. As theologian Carl Braaten explains this traditional preaching pattern, a sermon must always include a reference to the law, and a reference to the gospel. This form is helpful to us in a literature class because literature deals with the range of earthly human experience, which falls into two categories: a) human beings after the fall but prior to conversion and b) human beings after conversion but before physical death. We might imagine that the tension between these two sides is like that between our conscience and our unruly desires, or between the great amount we know is demanded of us and the small amount we are actually able to meet the demand. If we can begin to think as we read and listen in a way that invites God into a dialogue with us about everything we are experiencing, we may begin to carry on a loving conversation with Him and with each other that begins to shape and mold us into more loving people.