In the Middle

In the Middle (Atwell, Nancy)

 

Thank you, Adam, for letting me come so early in the school year!

 

By trial and error and with help from a middle school student, I found Adam Holt’s classroom. A mixture of excitement and curiosity raised and sharpened my attention level.  Not having taught middle school students and suffering from amnesia of being a middle school student, I wanted to see how middle school students behave, speak, and learn. Of course, thirty minutes of observation gave me only a sliver of the whole picture.

 

The students reviewed how to study for an upcoming quiz. Study strategies, such as looking over the rules, watching a School House Rock video, making games, and memorizing, were generated by the students. I’ve noticed, regardless of the grade level, students need concrete examples of study skills and Adam expertly anticipated them.  Later, the students paired up to quiz each other on the “super sentences” completed for homework. The Interactive aspect of this exercise allowed the students to give immediate feedback on the benefit of studying with a partner.

 

Let me digress here. How to teach grammar was a big debate when I first began teaching.  I taught third graders, and the consensus was to teach grammar in an authentic format.  The instructional leaders, at the time, promoted teaching grammar using the student’s writing; a method to which I still concur. However, as a new teacher, I was confused and overwhelmed, trying to individualize the lessons.

 

Luckily, the pedagogy of a balanced literacy program came to the rescue. Within the context of a balanced literacy curriculum, a dose of direct grammar instruction and its application in student writing reached a middle ground on teaching grammar.  Adam’s students were obviously getting both direct grammar instruction and the opportunity to apply what they learned in their writings. Sometimes being “in the middle” is a good place. 

Writing: Pre-K through Evergreen

Pre-K
Jen Beazley and Beth Boyd
In the pre-k classroom, Jen addresses fine motor issues and works to strength hand muscles, so at a month into school, students write their names when they sign in every morning. The focus is to encourage the academic confidence and imaginative play of these young pre-writers. Therefore as a class with Jen as the scribe, they create thought/idea webs which require several skills. They use Venn diagrams to compare and contrast. Apples and pumpkins is a fall favorite. Jen and her students examine all aspects of the apple and pumpkin. They even open them up to see similarities and differences. This is brainstorming and critical thinking, and if you sit in on the class, you will hear their imaginations frequently taking flight.

They are also working on making Munchie Mission less abstract for the pre-k students. To make hunger a little more real for pre-k, for two days they will not have snacks so at the minimum they will experience what it is like to want to eat and not have food available. Jen and Greg, the other pre-k teacher, plan to turn this experience into a skit. This will involve critical thinking and reflection on the experience. It will also begin to develop some understanding that other kids are in different circumstances than they are. Here are the buds of empathy forming as they seek to understand “other.”

Second Grade
Yun Tansil
The second grade year-long theme is Community. They begin with the classroom community, move to the GH community, out to Addison, and then the world. They will launch a new writing project in January. The class will brainstorm who in the Addison and greater Dallas area are community workers —fire, police, park and recreation employees, and etc. The class will generate job specific questions and also ask what GH students can do as citizens to make the community stronger, healthier, and more vibrant. This will require critical thinking, research skills, and the potential for commitment to improve the community=empathy.
Also in Yun’s class, the students wrote get-well cards to a classmate who had been sick for several days. This emphasizes the importance of valuing the relationships between members in the community.

Third Grade
Judy Campos
One writing assignment Judy shared was the immigrant journal. After much research, shared exploration, brainstorming, and discussion, the third graders write journals about arriving in America from a child’s point of view. They imagine what the trip across the ocean was like and what the first emotions might be about arriving in a new land and leaving home far behind. This requires evaluative thinking and imaginative engagement. Putting themselves in the experiences of an immigrant continues to nurture the seeds of empathy.
The third graders also write letters to living heroes. They have to define “hero” and then seek to find someone they think is a hero. More evaluative thinking. They then send their letters to their heroes.


Upper School
Marilyn Stewart and Linda Woolley
In Marilyn’s first paper for her ninth graders, she asks them to express their response to a poem; she gives them several to choose from. They work with key images and through a close reading of the text arrive at a conclusion as to why a reader should care about what they think. Here, they not only have to think critically about a text but also about the validity of their reading of it. Later in the year after reading The Reivers, they students write a reminiscence. This requires a close reading of their lives, beliefs, traditions, and values. They become the text, and they have to think critically about themselves.
This type of self-examination is picked up again senior year in the personal narrative. Students have to evaluate themselves and their experiences to create some sort of synthesis concerning the meaning of their experiences. As Marilyn said, “How can they be expected to understand other people or other perspectives if they can’t think critically about themselves?”
Linda will bring in a service learning component to a senior elective this year that will require students to journal about various aspects of their experience. These written reflections are meant to move the students from the point of view of “self” or “I” to seek to understand/empathize with the “other,” perhaps to prepare them for the world beyond GH and a more global environment.
Marilyn also discussed writing for Evergreen. This requires the student to “get rid of their opinions” and seek the opinion of others. They have to be able to report the story from someone else’s point of view without editorializing and without bias. To sort out what are their ideas and what are the thoughts of the people they interview requires sophisticated critical thinking. They then have to pull all the information to some sort of conclusion.

Assigning excellence (?/!)

Joel Garza, Modern Lyric Poetry
Five questions
Explanation:
First, choose a poem from the text. Next, read the poem carefully and take notes on it—in the book, in your notebook, somewhere. Finally, answer each of the following questions. For this assignment, then, don’t worry about a title, don’t worry about an intro, don’t worry about a conclusion. Just read, think, and interpret.

The questions:

1. What are the effects of this poem’s structure?

2. What are the effects of this poem’s rhyme scheme?

3. What are the effects of this poet’s narrative voice?

4. What are the effects of this poem’s imagery?

5. What’s something you noticed about the poem that I didn’t ask about (meter, allusion, tone, subject, argument, grammar, whatever), and why should I care about that element of the work?

Purpose:
I am challenging students to identify and explain the effects of several poetic techniques and devices, one by one, as they appear in a single poem.

Creativity? Monica: Maybe for the next assignment, return to the same poem and change one of the elements—make a sonnet a haiku, undoing the nature imagery and make it, say, legalistic imagery.
Empathy? Tony: Well, empathy can become a sort of detour. Empathy shouldn’t be shoe-horned into every assignment. Monica: Maybe in looking at one of these poetic facets, especially in poetry, the students can’t help but react empathetically.
 
Monica Bullock, Sixth Grade
Mystery Theater
Explanation:
After writing a biography report (fourth grade), the students are grouped with three or four other students who have researched different historical figures. As a group, the students must construct a play depicting each of these famous people, without naming each of these famous people. The audience is invited to pay close attention in order to determine who is who. Examples: JFK, MLK, Lincoln.
Purpose:
In order to shape character, the students must comprehend the reading they do. They put into practice conflict, characterization, suspense, dialogue, resolution.

Creativity? Each year, the plays are completely different because the subjects and the combinations of the subjects are different.
Empathy? They’re embodying other people fer chrissakes! Jeez, come on.
Rigor? They are lengthy. They are each seven to ten minutes long. Each student is responsible for his/her own character—they have to bring the character into the action. There’s no hiding on this group project.
 
Tony Adler, Fifth Grade
Creation myths
Explanation:
The students live myth throughout the winter—the play, the reading, etc. Each student crafts a creation myth about anything s/he chooses. Examples: the greenness of grass, earthquakes, volcanoes, the earth.

Purpose:
To expose students to a variety of writing genres. To explain the importance of myth generally. To advance their creative writing ability, while working through the writing process (invention, drafting, outlining, revising, etc.). Most importantly, perhaps, this is fun. Many students, by means of this project, are drawn into writing for fun.

Creativity? There’s a lot of structure, yet there are very specific goals. Still, they get to accomplish these goals in any way they’d like. Mindful of the ancient models, each student must first choose an object to depict, then imagine the beginnings, the motivations for such a thing to come into being.
Rigor? While using the myth tradition as a backdrop, they have to maintain a story structure, an internal logic and a resolution. Plus, for fifth graders, this is their longest written project of the year—some run to twenty pages!
Empathy? Students gain empathy for the philosophical/poetic urge. Ancient people explained their world imaginatively, from the ground to the heavens.

Too Fluid

Dawn Beck, Peggy Turlington, Farid Matuk

While our group believes in the need to incorporate critical thinking, imagination, and empathy into our instruction of English across all grade levels, we found these categories to overlap in ways that made the exercise nearly impossible to complete. This may be because the ideas generated last year speak to a different prompt (“how to prepare our students for a changing world”) and so do not lend themselves to being grouped under the three headings of critical thinking, imagination, and empathy. Those items listed by groups in the 2008-09 school year that address discerning between values and organizing information into structures, etc., were easy to label “critical thinking”. One example of this would be “How to structure an essay”. Yet even this concept is potentially something that would be classified under “Imagination” because, of course, structuring an essay requires that a writer project or imagines the perspective of her reader.

So, while we recognize that the boundaries between critical thinking, imagination, and empathy are porous, we also understand the importance of making judgment calls that will allow us to discuss a given assignment or teaching strategy as particularly beneficial to the development of one of these modes over the others. Ultimately, our group thought it would be best to spend time in each other’s classrooms during the 2009-10 school year and blog about the ways the given activities and teaching strategies we witness lend themselves most to the development of one or another of the three modes/aspects of literature.

It seems to us that a conversation about the inclusion and balance of these attributes in the classroom, done after the classroom visits are completed, would be beneficial. A fluid conversation might fit the flexible nature of teaching a little better than a chart. Such a conversation may not quantify these qualities, but we are not sure that quantifying critical thinking, imagination, and empathy is the point; balancing and reflecting seem more relevant to us.

Per Linda's Instructions

Judy Campos, Paula Hall, Marilyn Stewart, Blake Harkey:

In the absence of our list from the previous year, we began our small group’s meeting by discussing a few ways we might effectively address various strategies, characteristics, and traits of excellent writers, especially with a mind towards emphasizing how all of these might be sorted into the 3 categories from today’s meeting. Fairly early in our discussion, we determined that we all felt that each of the qualities of “enhanced literacy” helped to ensure the next; for instance, imagination begets critical thinking begets empathy. From here, we started sharing a few lesson plans that we felt illustrated this notion. The teaching techniques (effective or otherwise) and student skill sets (those that were a stated objective and those that were an unforeseen result) we discussed all demonstrate, to various degrees, critical thinking, imaginative involvement, and empathetic reactions.

Paula and Judy discussed a lesson wherein teachers read aloud to their lower school students a book about the San Francisco earthquake of the early 20^th century. They pointed out that there was a deliberate emphasis on critical thinking, as the students were encouraged to put the event into a historical perspective as well as compare and contrast these events to other epoch-making moments in history, especially current events that the students might encounter while watching the news or looking at a recent newspaper. Imaginative involvement came about when the teachers encouraged the students to imagine themselves in a similar situation, asking what sorts of things from their own homes they might save if they were forced to leave in an extreme hurry. They also looked at various authorial techniques, especially alliteration and hyperbole (complimenting their unit on figurative language, generally), and asked the students to think about how these strategies of effective and evocative writing enhanced the experience of hearing this story and then emulate these techniques in their own composition. Empathy was achieved not only in imagining themselves in this sort of experience, but also examining the ways in which one’s cultural position in the early 20^th century might have colored their individual experience; a person in Chinatown, for instance, would have had a very different experience from a person from the shipping district or a wealthy suburb.

Marilyn discussed how her daily discussion about literature at the secondary level generates questions and discussion points that are not meant to be conclusive, forcing interested students to dig deeper to arrive at a meaningful relationship with a certain work. She mentioned that she really feels that one of the most empathetic parts of her class often comes about in the conclusion paragraph of any given paper, where the student is forced to concisely determine and compose a “so what” closer that demonstrates true analysis and a deeper understanding. My own experiences complimented this, as I reflected how, so often while reading Romeo and Juliet, students find themselves not entirely clear on simple plot points of an assigned scene in the play, but can very accurately characterize the emotional quality of that particular section. This suggests to me that “enhanced literacy” is, quite naturally, deeply tied to a basic understanding of any text, but is not exclusively dependent upon an ability to comprehend difficult vocabulary and lengthy dialogue. Sometimes, I guess, you can really feel it, even if you don’t fully understand it.

So, here’s a list of skills and strategies I think we covered during our discussion, and perhaps a categorization based on our parameters of today’s department meeting:

1. Working in both large and small groups: Empathy. This forces students to consider others’ viewpoints. Also critical thinking, as students are able to listen to a variety of opinions as they form their own.

2. Reading aloud to students: Imagination. We all agreed that this technique should not be in any way limited to the Lower School.

3. Asking open-ended questions: Critical Thinking. Hopefully, this is learned and experienced early, so that when students arrive at each successive grade, their curiosity will compel them to reach beyond the in-class lesson.

4. Following up on previous discussions: Empathy. Even if you’ve changed your mind about something, remembering past circumstances that compelled a certain sentiment or idea can only help your ability to “put yourself in someone else’s shoes.”

5. Establishing a Collective Vocabulary: Critical Thinking.

6. Taking advantage of “teachable moments: Critical Thinking, Imagination.

August Group Meeting: Linda, Adam, Yun, Jen, and Beth

CRITICAL THINKING
Problem solving
Reflection
Collaborative work
Flexibility
Cross-curricular work--the concept of patterns

IMAGINATION
Inspiring curiosity
Asking open-ended questions--"What if?" "I wonder..."
Asking questions that will challenge or change a student's paradigms

EMPATHY
Peer conversations, converences
Curiosity about others (situations, lives, thought process)--"Everything is not me."
Awareness of the power of words within the context of a community

Linda's Task - Susan B, Trey, Betsy, & Carla

· Imaginative: Expose them to wide, wide world of literature – especially with vast outside reading possibilities
· Empathy: Explore enduring themes of humanity through use of literature
· Empathy: Introduce to serious topics (Holocaust for example) but in a thoughtful, sensitive way – using literature to think about the world around them and how it has changed
· Empathy: Help them figure out their place in the world as it pertains to what has come before them
· Imaginative & Empathy: Validate them as authors – even little ones get this
· Critical Thinking: Texts encourage open-minded thinking, looking at various viewpoints : Inherit the Wind, Fahrenheit 451, Of Mice and Men…
· Empathy: Reading selections are relevant to their world, their lives
· Imaginative: Inspire a sense of wonder as we help them see the relevance of classic literature
· Empathy: “Text-to-Self” connection – a term first graders use and understand!
· Critical Thinking: Incorporate responsible use of technology into learning·

Jante, Lisa, Tracey, and Mark's List Breakdown

Critical Thinking

• Flexibility
• Adaptability
• Discipline
• Responsibility to Process
• Humor
• Synthesis
• Evaluation
• Inference and Deduction
• Forming Meaningful Questions
• Reflection

Imagination

• Creativity
• Originality
• Resourcefulness
• Risk Taking
• Acceptance and Value of Imagination

Empathy

• Tolerance
• Responsibility to Purpose
• Global/Environmental Awareness
• Sensitivity
• Compassion
• Exposure/Experience

Critical Thinking - Rachel Brodie, Kat Lewis, Dan Kasten, Chloe Bade

To consider the ramifications of an idea.
To look beneath the surface of an argument.
To evaluate subjectively as well as objectively.
To build a case for subjective evaluation with objective evidence.
To reflect meaningfully about the connections between a text and themselves
To separate fact from opinion or bias when reading or listening.
To challenge assumptions, particularly popular sentiments or "givens."
To assess the originality, quality, and relevance of a personal project based on criteria.
To examine personally held biases or tendencies to side with a particular group or party.
To extract themes or "so-what"s from a text.
To identify abstract concepts such as symbolism, imagery, metaphor in both verbal and visual mediums.
To recognize historical context or commentary in a text.
To appreciate the distinction between the rational, emotional, and numinous ways of engaging with the world.

and sometimes....

"Over-analysis causes paralysis." ---Rachel Brodie's mama!

Earlier this week I spent an afternoon period with Peggy Turlington and one of her seventh grade literature classes. The group is currently closing its study of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, so I was treated to seeing them discuss the novel’s themes with a confidence and sophistication that signaled their “acquisition” of the text. Kathleen Andrasick, in her book Opening Texts: Using Writing to Teach Literature, defines acquisition of a text (and I’m paraphrasing) as the student’s unique and idiosyncratic yet textually grounded relationship with a text.

Huh? I encourage you to read the book yourselves, as my formulation of its ideas risks sounding like jargon. What does “unique and idiosyncratic” mean in this context? It means that the student bores into a piece of literary writing with few preconceptions (TKMB is about racism, or Othello is about jealousy) and is guided through a series of reader-response and journal writing activities which help the student build a reading of the text that addresses her own questions, her own frustrations, her own curiosities, and her own enthusiasms, the very ones she experiences on a first or fifty first engagement with a given book. What does “textually grounded” mean here? It means that, while students are encouraged to come up with diverse and even competing takes on a given text, they must build their interpretive practice on careful and precise explications of how the author uses language and narrative strategy to create meaning.

It’s important to keep in mind that Andrasick teaches Upper School students and that, regardless of students’ age/development, the qualities of text acquisition I paraphrase here are ideals. Those of us in interested in teaching toward this notion of acquiring texts would do well to accept and celebrate incremental achievements and to respect the age-specific challenges and talents our students present. Nonetheless, consider this abbreviated list of themes in TKMB Turlington’s students identified as most important to them: the seeming randomness of violence and consequence or how the innocent are often punished, Dill as a “pure” character untouched by the prejudices and popular opinions of a community, the importance of empathy as a prerequisite for judgment and as a prerequisite for intimacy, social stratification in the Jim Crow South, etc. I was impressed with this range and with the earnest way students articulated the theme each had identified and pieced together through his or her study of the book.

As the students and Turlington told me about the writing they’d been doing, it became easy for me to see how the group had arrived at this level of text acquisition. Adam Holt, Turlington’s counterpart in our composition program, had each student write a character sketch for one main figure from TKMB. Stopping there would have been a fairly traditional approach to teaching literature. Instead, Holt is having his students design the basic structure of scenes (situation, character list) they will then adlib (all of this was in progress the day I visited). However, each actor will behave in line with the character sketch they constructed through a careful analysis of the novel. In other words, the kids will adlib but within strict confines determined by the work of Harper Lee itself.

This kind of exercise is play but it is serious and valuable play. Using live theatre techniques respects the imaginative act of reading literature. As professional teachers of literature and writing we are often called to account for the value of our work. Why should we take time to read and write in schools when national trends point toward falling achievement in math and science (the implication here is that math and science lead to innovation in industry and thereby increased wealth production)? Why should we take the time to read and write in schools when the professional world asks so little literary reading and the only writing we have to do is the occasional email? Why should my child take an afternoon to read, ruminate, and write when her club sport requires her to be at an all-day tournament where she’ll learn valuable lessons in team work – an important experience employers seek in candidates for leadership roles? Too often such challenges put us in a defensive position and in our rush to advocate for the value of our work we speak of critical thinking and reasoned argumentation.

There’s no doubt the serious training in the craft of literary criticism helps our students to develop these competencies. But building the value of our discipline on critical thinking and reasoned argumentation is a slippery slope. Do we really train our students to solve complex problems with multiple values and contingencies any better than, say, a calculus teacher? Does asking a student to prove his assertion that Hester Prynne is a Christ-like martyr by explaining a piece of textual evidence any finer a method to teach reasoned argumentation than asking that same student to use information found in epidemiological case studies to prove why Fort Worth ISD should or should not close down operation due to an outbreak of swine flue?

Holt’s assignment suggests what is unique to literature and thereby points to a firmer grounding from which to educate or remind parents, administrators, and the public at large as to the value of our work: the transformative power of stories and, more specifically, the imaginative effort it takes to inhabit a story’s various perspectives. Holt’s seventh graders had to study Harper Lee’s rendering of a character’s speech and actions in order to infer a character’s values and beliefs. Now they have to bring that information to bear on wholly new scenarios that require them to interact with other characters from the novel (other roles performed by peers). These students had to perform precise literary analysis but only as a means of inhabiting the character, a powerful method of codifying something as intangible as empathy.

But the project offers more than this. Remember your experience of being read to sleep? Remember your experience of being read to by your teachers? These are pleasures – the pleasure of identifying with a character and then imagining oneself in the world of the story. It’s too easy to dismiss these experiences as lower-order thinking, as passive, and thereby relegated to the status of watching a television sitcom. Should we be teaching pleasure? Well, yeah! If we want our students to be “life-long learners” and “life-long readers” we should most certainly reinforce, value, and teach pleasure. But as our students age and develop their capacity for abstract thought, they give us the opportunity to add consequence to that pleasure.

Holt and Turlington’s seventh graders got to have their imaginations and the pleasure these produce validated, indeed, exercised. But they will also have to bring those imaginative play sessions into dialogue with some very serious questions and ideas. As mentioned above, among the themes students found in TKMB was the social stratification in the fictional but nonetheless segregated and economically depressed town of Maycomb, Alabama. When one student named this as the most important idea in the novel, Turlington was careful to pause and ask the student to be more precise. A nuanced conversation ensued about the difference and overlap between racial and economic stratification, between the educated and uneducated, between the insider and the outsider.

Turlington was able to push for specificity and then tease out nuance because she had laid some careful groundwork. Earlier she had facilitated a discussion on various characters’ definitions of “folks” – notice she did not “teach” her students that Lee’s novel presents us with a critical take on social stratification, instead she began with the text itself, its unique diction, and asked the students to read more closely than they first had. She then asked them to write a brief essay on these various ideas of “folks” and provided them with an age-appropriate outline structure in which the students had to draft out their ideas. Students created the outline in class, peers edited and commented on each other’s outlines in class, then students wrote their essays in class. I love Turlington’s emphasis on in-class writing because, for one, it introduces the important skill of timed, focused writing, a skill our students’ college professors will have expected them to master. Also, it weaves writing into reading as an integral and necessary tool. But I also love this approach because it creates a community of writers and thinkers. In the act of editing and commenting on each other’s outlines, students refine their own ideas. Lastly, students get to produce writing of consequence. Audience = consequence (as Monica Bullock pointed out in an earlier conversation with Joel Garza and myself), in other words, we care about what our peers think, we find ourselves learning from the writing of our peers and thereby developing a sense of what qualities in our own writing may prove instructive to our peers. So Turlington’s assignment seems to me an economical way to create audience and consequence, practice editing skills, and create safe conditions for collaborative learning. But it also simultaneously teaches the two qualitities of Andrasick’s notion of text acquisition: that students should get “there” on their own but they should do so by being responsible to the words on the page.

Now, imagine what Turlington will be able to do after her students go through a few of their scenes in Holt’s class? Suddenly students will be able to speak authoritatively from the “I perspective” when they discuss racial and economic stratification and the various privileges such systems afford their dominant members. They’ll be able to more sharply assess Harper Lee’s work if, for example, they chafed under the particular way she imagined a given character and found themselves wishing they could behave differently, if only they’d had the freedom to choose their behavior for themselves. Imagine what it would feel like to be their teacher when you get to remind them they do.

Writing from the ground up!

I knew that Rachel Brodie and Nickie Riley's kindergarten class was going to be about writing, but I had forgotten that writing begins not with essays, paragraphs, sentences, or even words; obviously, it begins with letters. The letter of the day was Y--just like on Sesame Street. I'd never before considered how confusing it is that Y begins with a W sound. Clearly, phonics don't solve all of our problems with English! The kids were very focused in practicing their y's with markers on on individual-sized white boards. Some of the letters were backwards; some had tails too long or tops too short, but eventually everybody had a board full of very credible y's, and they were ready to take on you, your, yellow, yummy, yesterday, and yikes! They even got to practice distinguishing between words that start with Y and others that confuse by starting with W--which, of course, is what Y sounds like!

I came away impressed with the kids' seriousness of purpose and eagerness to get it right. (Well, there was Aiden who needed a little extra attention in the hallway from Ms. Riley!) Even more, I came away awed by the energy and creativity that goes into every lesson with the munchkins. I'm convinced that the younger the kids the better the teacher has to be to achieve success. My hat's off to Rachel and Nickie for making such an important and exhausting job look easy. Dan Kasten

Thanks to Joel and Monica for a great conversation and to Joel for his thoughtful post. I'll try to answer Joel’s last question (On what basis do we decide not to change a damned thing about assignment X or text Y?).

What I value in literature (reading and writing both) is amoral. I don't put much stock in reliable humanist narratives about teaching that tell us we transmit our stories because they represent the best of what's been thought and said or because they help us develop critical thinking or because they make us more reflective about our lived experience. I don't disparage those values, I just don’t believe in them in any kind of necessary or urgent way. I want to believe that beyond their affected postures of disinterest, our students are pretty damn hungry to be taken seriously and to get on with the business of waking up and sensitizing their perceptive apparatuses, whatever those may be, however their temperaments may orient them, be it toward language, visual art, movement, or something else.

I may be quite wrong about that, but I’m no more wrong than anyone who believes our students have any interest in or even extraordinary capacity for the best of what’s been thought and said or for critical thinking or for reflective contemplation.

Bear with me, because I am indeed working my way toward this question of how we decide to not change a damn thing about a given assignment.

So what does seem to me truly urgent and necessary about what we do is that careful reading and writing can: (1) show students that their very subjectivities, their very sense of self/persona are radically malleable, slippery, and various (2) that beyond analysis, reading closely can be an experience of shifting into another self, complete with a new language, new concerns, new perception.

Okay, good, so aren’t we back at the root of a humanist liberal arts education – that to read and write is to imagine one ’s self differently and that doing so is the basis of empathy and that empathy is the basis of a compassionate ethic, and so on? Yeah.

But here’s where I have to start talking about Huck Finn.

My challenge in teaching this canonical American text is not its liberal use of racial epithets. But if I am to teach this text then I feel compelled to guide students, in so far as it’s possible, in inhabiting the text’s consciousness. If, instead, we want to simply critique the novel as an object, say, by ending at a reading of the text that leaves us with some equivocating take on Huck’s movement toward a rejection of slavery (never fully achieved) and chalk up our discomfort at Twain’s minstrel-inspired portrayal of Jim to historical accuracy (relative to a white audience’s racism), then I don’t want any part of that kind of teaching. I don’t want to engage in work that leaves me or my students in some removed critical distance from which our subjectivities are never implicated. I’ve no interest in that kind of teaching because I think it’s cursory, and to model/advocate a cursory engagement with texts is to insult that nature in our students and in ourselves ready to wake up. Wake up to what? Wake up to our meanness, our own racism/sexism/homophobia/etc., our own petty and dark and hurt and venal selves that will readily take advantage of any kind of privilege afforded us in order to get over, in order to survive one moment to the next. And, of course, in the case of this particular novel, wake up to that attention to beauty and appreciation of camaraderie and brotherhood Huck experiences in that singular and painfully circumscribed space of the raft.

I feel compelled to stop here a moment and make clear I am not arguing with Joel or with any one of my colleagues in this department from whom I learn almost every day and for whom I have the greatest respect and for whose company in this shared project of teaching I am grateful. I am arguing with myself and with my own tendency to fall short of my pedagogical values. For this, ultimately, is what Joel is asking us to articulate. If I am going to know when an assignment or teaching strategy is done, is no longer available to tweaking, then I had better be clear as to what my values and goals are, what my classroom would look like “in a perfect world.”

And so, as I think about my future engagement with Huck Finn I think of writing assignments that will direct students to imagine themselves slave owners, for one, and to imagine the uncomfortable dynamics of the story set in various circumstances (what if Tom Sawyer came along and spent sixty or so pages playing games and delaying the eventual release of, say, a concentration camp prisoner, or an Abu Ghraib “detainee”; how would those circumstances change how we feel about the story?). I think of culling together contemporary images, video clips, passages of texts that render similar social dynamics, ones where we seem to feel it’s okay to advocate for the dignity of a group out of one side of our mouths while simultaneously getting a cheap laugh by putting out buffoonish representations of that group out of the other side of our mouths (Andy Mercurio brilliantly pointed out that such seems to be the case today with homosexuals and, I would add, women… and isn’t it interesting that some representation of femininity is at the heart of both?).

Where I’m going with this is that I want to upend the hierarchy of reading and writing that places the pleasure of getting lost in a text or of imagining oneself in a story at the bottom and critical thought and critical writing at the top because, as I’ve been trying to say, perhaps laboriously, is that a deeper, more meaningful kind of critical thinking can happen when we begin first with or prioritize the imagination and the implication of self and of consciousness with at least some of our assignments. And so maybe I was wrong at the beginning of this post, maybe I don’t advocate amoral teaching at all. What I advocate, for myself at least, is that I weave creative writing and reflective journaling more consistently and more rigorously into my treatment of texts. Just as I ask my freshmen to create epic similes and to use chiasmus and to play with the effects of these figures before I ask them to analyze how and to what effect Homer uses them, I want to ask all my students to write from the perspectives of our characters, no matter how distasteful (Iago or Tom anyone?) these may be. I guess, to finally answer Joel's question, I’ll know when I will not change anything about an assignment or pedagogical approach when that work helps my students become more adept at shape shifting, if you will. Among the oddball menagerie of characters we present to our freshmen when covering Greek myth is Proteus, the guy who promises to provide some vital piece of information, usually how one gets home, if only the petitioner will hold on long enough to Proteus’ form even as that form shifts and changes from one impossible shape to another. That’s what I’m talking about… in a perfect world.

One last thing: we need to rethink our texts in the upper school. I humbly submit that when we provide a near monolithic block of white male authors telling the stories of white male protagonists, we leave all of our girls and all of our students of color to contort and shift shape and translate consciousness from their lived experience over to whatever the texts offer them. That’s fine. In fact, I would argue, such stretching beyond the familiar is a solid half of what education is all about. But it’s only half. The other part, the missing part for too many of our students, is that of stretching only a little way and finding in the text something that validates, something that helps them shift a little closer to whatever home is for each of them and then closer to whatever home might eventually become.

Fevered Ramblings, Direct Questions

I want to share with all of you the conversation that I had with Farid (Matuk, US) and Monica (Bullock, LS), and I suppose more importantly, the way I’ve been contemplating that conversation. After discussing Linda’s two questions—how/do we teach thriving-in-a-changing-world skills, how do we teach writing—I’m not at all confident that I do either as well as I’d like. As blogs inspire a speculative, yawpish style, I will be as candid and direct as I can. In other words, this is my first draft.

With respect to the changing-world-skills, I quoted from my own course plans: Hopefully, I am teaching some kind of critical thinking skills. Thinking about a text, about a peer’s interpretation, about a teacher’s assessments, about one’s own performance. Farid and Monica wanted a change in diction…interpretive eye, reflective, creative thinking, but not critical thinking. Now, I am always on guard against recycling bits from one class to the next, usually careful to tweak assignments from one year to the next. My language might often get stale before I realize it. I’d better have a good reason for prying pet-words from my students. [From what I can tell, this faculty hasn’t yet perceived a staleness to the word “model” as a verb, and I am prepared to hear the phrase “It is what it is” until I earn Legend status.]

Farid admitted that this [ahem] critical thinking in discussion is what excites his students the most, the possibility that, of these sixteen opinions, those twelve might all be viable options, might all be meaningful for the reader. I squirmed. Ought we not, I asked, appeal--at some point--to a poet’s biography, a poet’s historical context, a poet’s choice of genre, to whittle down some of those viable options? Doesn't an examined life produce the best kind of closed-mindedness? Closed to cheap answers, closed to intellectual fads, closed to lazy rhetoric? Isn’t it the duty of an interpretive viewer of the world to call “Bullsh*t” openly, confidently? Monica (love Monica!) suggested that maybe it was a good thing that the US had both of our approaches. Wait, I have an approach? What is it? You mean I’m not the guy teaching his students to tear pages out of their texts? [Punches self in jaw for getting married, buying house, starting family. Buys cigarettes and gin.]

Okay, I said, so howzabout what we’re doing here? Howzabout for a skill “Shape and sustain a meaningful dialogue, be one of those people upon whom nothing is lost”? Farid asked me to explain the “sustain” part. This led me to consider how I teach writing by means of discussion. Long pauses. Let a question hang unanswered. Frustrate the students’ expectations that each comment has to be blessed, tweaked or refuted by me before anybody else can speak. Isn’t that what readers of, say, Homer are doing on a daily basis…aren’t they offering that umpteenth opinion on a text that has already been explained (by Socrates, by SparkNotes)? And Monica (love Monica!) said, You know what you need—you need an authentic audience.

[Insert energy-inefficient light bulb]

Throw out anything without an authentic audience. Make them write letters, make them write to one another, make them answer one another. [Briefly fights temptation to quote mission statement. Succumbs.] Recreate the changing world by means of our diverse community of learners.

In that spirit, then, let me address you as an authentic audience. On what basis do we say we’re doing well? On what basis do we, as a department, act as authorities on the text? On what basis do we decide not to change a damned thing about assignment X or text Y?

Wonderland

Today I tiptoed into the very magical, very entrancing kingdom of early childhood when visiting Tracey Pugh's Primer Humanities class. When the digital clock strikes 10:00 AM, nine little kids fly from recess into the primer classroom and immediately circle Tracey, Mistress of Ceremonies, waiting for them to join her in the Center of the Blue Universe: a huge rug displaying a colorful map of the world that invites just such circling. Topic of the circle discussion involves the children's reactions to reading Dinorella, a very clever, humorous take on one of the many classic fairy tales the kids have explored. Tracey inspires engagement with her recurring chant "I have a question" that involves each child listening intently and then earnestly trying to help her find an answer to several more questions carefully designed to help students review and summarize important information they had already learned about fairy tales. "When were fairy tales written? How did people start telling them? Are they based on real stories? Do we have talking animals? Was the real Cinderella story....funny?" After this brief but effective review, Tracey reads another, even more hilarious version of Cinderella: Cinderella Big Foot. "Come a little closer," she invites the children and begins reading in her delightfully, charmingly - impersonating all the voices - way.

"I have a question," Tracey asks quizzically, "What do most fairy tales always start with? I forgot."
"Once upon a time!" a child offers.
"Yes, yes, that's right, hey, why were Cinderella's feet a problem?" Tracey wonders.
"She tripped over them in hopscotch and they also took up a lot of room (four car spaces!!!) at the mall," someone says.
"What about the ball? What happens when everyone leaves Cinderella?"
"The Dairy Godmother appears and when Cinderella complains that she has no shoes and no way to get there, she twirls her wand, and makes two really big glass sneakers appear and bus money too."
"How big are Cinderella's feet again? 87 AAA? Everyone check your shoe sizes." Up and down and all around goes Tracey's musical, highly expressive voice, eliciting excitement , reflection, and detailed recall of the fairy tale's universal elements. Now the kids are intently considering their feet, their shoes, and happily concluding Cinderella's feet must be pretty darn huge.

Tracey focuses them next on Prince Charming and his determination to search the kingdom with a tow truck in his desperate search 'to find that doll of a girl' who loses her extra mammoth glass sneaker rushing home from the ball before the clock strikes Midnight. Everyone wants so badly for the sneaker to fit Cinderella's huge foot!
"What does the prince say when he places the sneaker on Cinderella's foot?"
"The shoe must go on!" a little boy exclaims, giggling to himself about how that's a take off on 'the show must go on."

Tracey now brings her class full circle with bigger thinking questions about the differences between the classic Cinderella tale and the two they just heard. She leads her kids through a reflective review of the story's beginning, middle, and end, and what makes each Cinderella so special. Much laughter and lots of smiling balancing with quiet spaces for pausing, thinking, listening, and responding describe the rhythms, sounds, and sights of Tracey's lucky primer class.

As I walk back across campus from Lower to Middle kingdom, leaving the calming magic of Tracey's Blue Universe, I wonder to myself how can I continue inpiring and protecting such open and refreshing imaginings in the students I teach? I have a question....