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....

Lisa Sealy's 4th Grade

On Friday, November 21, I observed Lisa Sealy's 4th grade Humanities class. Lisa told me that she hadn't planned anything special, that it was just a regular day of class. The class began with some "business": turning in DOL and revision sheets, and a spelling quiz. Pretty ho hum stuff.
But my interest grew with the spelling test, which the students took in pairs. Lisa has them do this because the lists of words are heavily individualized. They begin with a rule on Monday, and some of the words must refer to the rule. However, many of the words come from other resources and are selected by the students; as Lisa puts it, this gives the some "ownership of language." Furthermore, the kids who are really great spellers use the spelling lists as an opportunity to work on their vocabulary. This explains why one boy had on his list expository.
After this, some really great writing instruction--and writing with quick feedback--took place. The class has been working in description and revision, and you'll see how this lesson scaffolded perfectly with their writing process.
The day before, Lisa had read the class a little bit from the start of The Hobbit. Friday, she gave each student a legal-size sheet of paper with the opening paragraph from the novel on one side. The paragraph is a very rich description of a hobbit house. The students were to draw a picture in the blank part of the sheet. Lisa encouraged them to consider "which words bring an image to mind" and the words "which are most helpful." The drew away for a few minutes. Lisa stopped them and instructed them to "mark words in the piece which helped you get a good visual in your head." They then marked some of these on the board. While I won't provide a transcript here of examples, the discussion was quite sophisticated for fourth grade. Students focused on implications of words and the effects they could have on a reader. Lisa kept extending their thinking with basic questions, most often simply "Why?" She also used proper grammatical terms for words, such as adverb and adjective.
Then Lisa turned the tables on the students. She put a majestic scene of Greenland on the boards. Her challenge: "How are you going to put words together so someone would put this picture together?" The kids jumped right to the task. Watching them work, I saw plenty of thoughtful stares into space, flashing eyes right before pencils starting flying, and quick smiles of satisfaction. After writing for just about five minutes, Lisa stopped them so they could share--which they all wanted to do. The pieces were full of vivid, clever, and figurative language. Consider some of these words and phrases: frothy, colossal, "mountains playing with each other," "snow like make-up and powder," and "as if someone took the ocean and sky and mixed them up." Remember, they wrote for just a few minutes. Even within this short time, the students revealed a high level of self-awareness about their writing. One boy prefaced his reading by saying, "This is not really a good starting sentence because it begins with 'it was.'" Lisa provided positive feedback for each piece. After this, Lisa simply told the students to get out their stories and "apply this to it." I'm sure they did.

Because of another appointment, I'd almost left before hearing the drafts. Lisa asked me to stay for a few minutes, and I'm very glad I did. Hearing the pieces and Lisa's final instruction brought the entire experience together for me. It was a very well thought out class, in many ways an exemplar of writing instruction for any level. It also shone because of how certain activities were lower school appropriate while also opening doors to more sophisticated concepts. At the risk of sounding hokey and cliched, it also was a very "whole brain" activity that drove home the essential concepts in multiple engaging ways.

From Second Grade to Eleventh, from Drafting to Performing

I had the pleasure of visiting two very different classrooms back-to-back, for two very different lessons. On October 27, I saw Carla Kinney’s first graders draft a “1-2-3 story.” On October 28, I saw Andy Mercurio’s eleventh graders perform interpretations of scenes they had written to complement Death of a Salesman. As a sixth grade teacher, I get to see Greenhill students right in the middle of these two extremes (first and eleventh grades). During the observations, I was reminded of how steep students’ learning curves are in their short time here at school and how radically they change from first to sixth to eleventh grades.

I visited Carla’s classroom at the end of the school day. As a culminating activity which tied in holiday themes as well as their morning work, the students were to write a “1-2-3 story.” Carla gathered the students on the carpet to explain the assignment, which was also written out on the flipchart. That morning, they had reviewed the important parts of a story. They were now to write a story with the following elements: 1) Characters and setting (who and where), 2) Action (what happened), 3) Conclusion (how did it end?). Carla assigned the character: their pumpkin. (These pumpkins were individually decorated and on display on the windowsill; students had previously told stories about them and were encouraged to call upon those ideas.) Carla took suggestions from students and gave them options of four settings to choose from: inside a house, a swimming pool, downtown, or a pumpkin patch. The students were to come up with their own action and ending. Students eagerly moved to their tables to begin writing. Carla circulated, offering help and suggestions. She reminded the students of several strategies already under their belts, including sounding out the spellings of words, using proofreading marks, and using problem/solution to tell the story. Students used Carla as a resource, but they also used the rich environment of the classroom to help them with their writing. Around the room, I saw a word wall, a list of weekly spelling words, the five stages of the writing process, and many more helpful items. When one student ran into a spelling problem, he had the following conversation with Carla: “I don’t know how to spell the word pumpkin.” When Carla asked what he could do, the student said, “Look over there,” and then walked to the spot in the room where he could find the correct spelling. At the end of the lesson, Carla shared some student examples. One girl wrote about her pumpkin, Fufu, who was hurt in a pumpkin patch. Fortunately, a nice person took Fufu home and made her all better. Carla and the students identified the 1-2-3 parts of the story which made it a success.

In Andy’s classroom, I saw three groups of students perform interpretations of scenes from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. The students had written the scenes in groups and were performing them in front of their classmates as a culmination of their exploration of Miller’s work. After each group’s presentation, the group was to offer a verbal analysis of the scene. The first group performed “missing scene” – a scene at Willy’s funeral, featuring a long soliloquy by the deceased Willy. Willy’s soliloquy, according to the students, offered their group analysis through the medium of the character. In the following discussion, Andy noted how Willy had no moment of realization in the play, nor did he in the scene. The second group portrayed the scene between Willy and Howard where Willy is eventually fired. The group played a PowerPoint of the students’ voices, played in conjunction with a series of animations featuring expressive and humorous thought bubbles. In their analysis the students explained that the choices they made in the presentation illustrated Willy’s distorted perception of Dave Singleman. The third group featured a DVD of still photographs of students acting, timed with voice-overs of the dialogue the group had written. The scene was of an argument between Willy and his son Biff. In the analysis, the students explained that, since the scene was based on emotions, the still camera shots emphasized these moments. The students also deliberately modernized the scene to make it easier to relate to. At the end of the presentations, Andy reflected with the class on how pleased he was with the performances. This was a new assignment, Andy explained, with wide parameters and few guidelines. The assignment replaced a “big quiz” that used to culminate the study of Miller’s play. Students were in agreement that they enjoyed creating and analyzing their own scenes; they felt they got more out of this process than they would have gotten from a quiz.

Seeing a first grade class and an eleventh grade class back-to-back gave me a broad view of how students engage in writing at Greenhill. I saw students reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and performing. I saw engaging teachers leading students in these processes in age-appropriate ways. Students were encouraged to be creative, and each assignment incorporated the class reading or other class activities. As a sixth grade teacher, this process gave me much to think about. What role do I play as a teacher who sees them in the middle of these two snapshots? In what ways am I filling that role, and in what ways can I improve?

Lines and Curves in Pre-k

In the beginning, pre-k had the big line, the little line, the big curve, and the little curve, and it was good.

Isn’t this where writing begins--in pre-school, with the formation of letters, with the realization that the word is tangible? They held the big and little line and discovered one was half of the other. They traced the smooth sweep of the curve, and it was a boat or a smile. Then whether by accident or not, the little line and the big line slid into an “L” and then with the quick mixing of lines and curves turned into a “D” and then a “k”—or the sound at the beginning of Lily’s name, the middle of Aidala, and end of Uziek. These letters could form words, and the written word had a shelf life. These stuck around longer than the ones shouted or whispered. The pre-k could revisit their words, share them, or even change them.

Then there was a song about Mat Man, and as the music played, the pre-k outlined his form on the rug using the curves and lines. So on a day two weeks from now when a child in Mrs. Beazley’s class wonders how long she should make the lines in an “E,” she can think of Mat Man’s legs, the long line, and his feet, the short line.

Much of this fifteen minute lesson focused on creating comfort with letters--their curves and lines. Does this then transfer to comfort with words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories? Is this how we teach our students to write and write confidently?

Descending the Page in Second Grade--Observation

In a recent US department meeting, the conversation turned to “How do we teach students to write?” Trey Colvin remarked, “We certainly teach the students to gather ideas, draft, and edit.” My initial response was Of course, we do. And then came the doubt and questions: Do we? If so, how? When? And most importantly, does this make a good writer?

So on Tuesday, September 02, 2008, I visited Yun Tansil’s second grade class. She was in the middle of reviewing the steps of the writing process: prewriting, writing, revision, editing, and publishing. The previous Friday each student had put these steps on a chart along with a class-generated explanation of what the steps meant to a second grader. As Yun pulled up the chart on the SMART board, I heard comments from students such as, “You start over when you get stuck,” “Just put it into words,” “Sometimes my story doesn’t go anywhere,” and “What does revision mean again?”

Under Yun’s skillful guidance, the conversation that followed was a blend of something like we are all writers, writers write, we make mistakes, we can begin again, we revise, and in the end, we publish. Be comfortable with false starts, taking risks, and going back and changing things. This discussion went a long way in removing the fears we have all seen paralyze students when they face a writing assignment. On the other hand, this class was not going to be a place where a student could plead “writing is a process” to keep starting over and over to avoid the final steps. Yun had set expectations and established rules. By the end, the students and I all knew this was going to be a challenge, but there were strategies for dealing with the tough stuff. While Yun did not do away with the prickling apprehension that “What shall I write?” creates in all of us (because isn't this where adrenaline and creativity launch us into our stories), she did begin to create an environment that was safe for an eight-year-old to tackle it.

To close the class, Yun had the students do “invisible writing”--writing on carbon paper and they can’t see what they have written until they pull up the carbon. I wasn’t there to hear the students’ responses to the activity, so Yun sent me this follow up e-mail.

“I don’t know if everyone got the point of the exercise, but when the teachable moments arise, I will refer back to this activity- diving into writing or getting the ideas down without spending too much time erasing/correcting.

“The kids had fun with the activity. Most said that they felt excited when they were writing. One said, ‘The point of the activity was to express your feelings and not always turning out the way you want it to.’ I like this reflection because writing is about taking chances, making mistakes, and having the opportunity to make ‘adjustment’ as June [a student] noted.”

So back to “Does knowing (and applying) the steps of the writing process create good writers?” I strongly believe so. These are necessary skills to have, but as shown in Yun’s class it is also about the attitude a student has toward writing. Perhaps it is a little like mountian climbing. One must have the skills and the equipment but also the courage to begin the climb or descend the page.

How does one nurture such courage?