pedagrouchy

[pedagrouchy]

Week Nine: Guilt and Change

I’ve been thinking a lot about guilt lately (what a profoundly WWU way to start a blog post), so when Kay brought it up in this chapter -- especially in the section on why we hold classroom race discussions in the first place -- my ears perked up. It might be telling that his first reason is precisely this: that “We Have the Race Conversation to Assuage Our Guilt.” I also think the short paragraph under that heading contains multitudes, and I suspect there’s a lot to be learned in the details of the three examples he presents.

His thesis going into these hypotheticals is that guilt is the product of “A teacher’s human empathy” mixed with “keen recognition of his privilege.” Keep this formula (empathy + recognition-of-privilege = guilt) in mind.

The first situation he offers is this: “A novel (like Kindred) about the antebellum South might trigger a teacher’s regret for knowing little about modern-day slavery.” To me, this is a perfect example of guilt at its most useful: guilt that has a tangible, fixable cause and that is very obviously the sane response to a given set of circumstances. This teacher has a responsibility to know about slavery for the sake of his students, and he doesn’t, and it’s totally appropriate that he should feel guilty as a result. More importantly, he can use that guilt to go home and do some research, instead of watching Netflix or whatever. He’ll be able to assuage his guilt exactly in proportion to the amount of good, meaningful new knowledge he brings into the classroom.

The second situation is this: “A history of Ghandi’s approach to nonviolence might trigger a teacher’s shame for not sufficiently owning the benefits of colonialism.” This isn’t as clear as it could be (“owning” rings in a funny way, and “owning up to” might be better), but Kay’s meaning is still pretty straightforward: in this instance, a teacher feels that the way he benefits from the fallout of colonialism ought to be more thoroughly “owned” or acknowledged. It’s unclear whether he ought to be owning it in his classroom, in his conversations with friends, or in the general fuzz of his psyche. If the first or the second, and assuming that his shame is proportional to his actual behavior, then certainly he should change. He could lead class conversations with a lesson on the historical nature of wealth, or be less of a prick about how he’s earned everything he owns. If it’s the third... I’m less certain. Sure, a certain amount of historical self-awareness is healthy. If his great-great-granddad worked for the East India Company or something, then god help him. But if all he feels guilty about is that the world popped him out in a comparatively advantageous spot, I wonder how useful his shame really is. The next example helps with this.

The final situation is this: “After a night of staring slack-jawed at the news, a teacher might feel the need to apologize for all the bad guys who look just like him.” Kay’s thoughts about this teacher go more or less unstated. But in my view it’s this kind of guilt, more than any other, that stymies real change and stifles good discussion. There are so many reasons for this. For one, this is not a guilt that can be acted upon: there is no set of things this person could do to assuage the guilt of sharing a phenotype with, say, a vicious policeman. For another, it’s a guilt riddled with flaws: just because this teacher might not have to fear that policeman, or might benefit from some of the same privileges as him, does not mean that the teacher is responsible either for the actions of the policeman or for the system that created and enabled him. No imaginable view of will and causation allows for a world in which the policeman’s actions (or, for that matter, the teacher’s own whiteness) are the teacher’s fault. It’s more than reasonable to feel guilty about the things we do; it’s cripplingly pointless to feel guilty about the things we are.

So, in light of all that, I’d like to suggest another equation -- one perhaps hinted at when Kay says later that “Guilt, when matured by reflection, can inspire a teacher to approach a sensitive subject with humility.” Here’s my alternative: that human empathy combined with a recognition of privilege can produce action, and that guilt is at best a meter on that equation’s productivity, at worst a sui generis solipsistic rabbit-hole.

UC Irvine professor and hard-partying Marxist Catherine Liu, in an interview with Jacobin, suggests the following:

“Take an objective (but compassionate) view of your own feelings, and put them aside.”

For those of us who at the same time both benefit from the state of the world and truly want to work for change, I think that’s very good advice.

[pedagrouchy]

Week Eight: Discussion in the Classroom

Part One: Deconstructing the concept of a "safe space"

*In chapter one, Kay argues that teachers "must commit to building conversational safe spaces, not merely declaring them" (Kay 16). What pedagogical suggestions in this chapter do you find valuable? Would these suggestions be equally effective in building conversational safe spaces in online learning environments?

I found all the suggestions around building classroom community to be lovely. While I cringe a little at the thought of teaching “listening skills” (just seems... too much like a marketing seminar, somehow), I can easily envision modeling and fostering those skills in venues like the start-of-class discussion and the Good News activity. I guess my hackles go back up a little at all the compliment stuff (I think that would have alienated me so quickly in high school), but ditching the structure and keeping the basic insight -- that people feel more valued and comfortable when you give them meaningful compliments -- makes it feel more like a tip I can use.

As for online environments, I can’t imagine it being so easy. So much of what Kay talks about seems to hinge on really basic human instincts: to engage people who look us in the eye, to warm to those who seem warm to us, etc. And all of that goes out the window when you shift to a digital medium. You can still keep the earnest interest in students’ thoughts and selves, and you can still do light, interpersonal discussions, but even that’s harder than it once was.

Part Two: We aren't all the Hollywood teacher hero (and that's fine!)

*What interpersonal skills do you have that you feel will aid you in developing a dialogic classroom? What interpersonal skills do you feel you need to build/improve on so that you and your future students can engage in meaningful classroom conversations?

Well, I think I’m a pretty good listener. I tend to like people as messy, incoherent selves, and I want to hear what they have to say. But I’m also much more comfortable in one-on-one situations than in groups, and that’s always where I feel like I’m best able to listen meaningfully. Going into a classroom space, I’d want to spend a lot of time developing the ability to orchestrate larger conversations, and to find the glimmer of person-to-person connection even within the larger fray of a 30-person class.

Part Three: Being honest about our fears

*What are you most afraid of when you think about discussing polarizing issues in your future classroom/with your future students?

Not to sound all Rooseveltian, but I think my biggest fear is precisely that I will be crippled by fear. Hard racial conversations, especially led by White people, tend to be just dominated by euphemism and hedging -- and I think some White people, and surely almost all non-White people, can see through that in a heartbeat. If I approach issues with honesty, humility, and directness of language, I’d like to hope I can dodge that pitfall. But then, as Kay points out, what feels like honesty and directness can accidentally lead you into the kind of insensitivity that feeds the outrage machine... so maybe I’ll cling to a little bit of fear, for job security’s sake.

[pedagrouchy]

Week Seven: Pop-Culture in the Classroom

1. Morrell provides an in-depth look at five units of study that formed the year-long curriculum of a senior English class. Of these five units, which did you find the most interesting? Why? Could you see yourself using elements (texts, activities, critical frameworks) of this unit to inspire a unit in your future curriculum?

The first unit, which pairs The Odyssey and The Godfather, jumped out at me immediately -- in part because I’ve been reading The Hate U Give for my Young Adult Lit class, and just this morning thought “huh, this would be neat to teach with The Godfather.” As far as treating power relations and violence for ethnic minorities in America, those two texts would pair well. But to address group identity, tribal power structures, heroism, the epic, and history, I can hardly think of a sharper combination than the one Morrell describes.

I can certainly see using either of these texts in a classroom, especially in a way that puts them back-to-back. I loved Morrell’s strategy of drawn-out film viewings -- it had never occurred to me to stomach my fears about continuity ("would the experience be the same, in such small increments?”) in the interest of finding out what opportunities such a form might open. From what he described, it seems like it was worth it. And it certainly can’t hurt students’ skills at close-reading, communal discussion, and critical engagement with visual media.

For a last, more superficial point, I was so excited to see the exam format he chose. This seems like a weird fondness, but I love tests structured that way, and I’ve found that the few professors willing to use them are the ones I learn from (and retain what I learn) the best.

Part Two: I reached out to a good friend of mine who teaches 10th grade English in San Diego and asked for an upcoming unit essential question. Using the unit essential question she shared, create a set of texts (5 ish) that you think could help 10th graders explore this question. Here's the catch: You are only allowed one traditional print-based work of fiction. All other texts have to be multimodal in nature (songs, podcasts, video games, art or visual texts of any kind, graphic narratives, articles, films, digital media, etc.)

For each text, list the name, author/creator, a brief sentence summarizing what the text is and is about, and a short description of how students might use this text as a way to discuss the unit essential question.

EQ: How do we know what we know?

Wow, well, that’s a doozy of a question, so here’s my best shot:

1. Othello, William Shakespeare

Traditional, sure, but it’d probably be lying around in a district closet somewhere, there are great film and audio versions, and I think it bears on the essential question directly. As the story of a man whose knowledge of his wife is slowly eroded and replaced by new, insidiously designed “knowledge,” it has a lot to say about how we go about knowing things, and how other people -- sometimes with bad intent -- can influence the process.

2. Introducing Wittgenstein, John Heaton and Judy Groves

This might be a reach, but I think the graphic narrative format, the biographical details, and the intro-level approach would get high schoolers to at least start to engage with its ideas. Most of all, I’d want to get across the point (and if this is the only point they get, I’m happy) that knowledge is a thing that’s totally inextricable from language. From there, interesting questions about other texts ought to flow more freely.

3. Manufacturing Consent, Mark Achbar, Peter Wintonick, and Noam Chomsky

Again, maybe this documentary is shooting high, but I think that breaking it up into little manageable pieces, the way Morrell does, would give students the chance to engage with a lot of lively, provocative ideas. As one of the most accessible windows into the already pretty-accessible work of Noam Chomsky, it’s hard to beat. Ideally, this would be the point at which themes from Othello might return, and we could discuss how knowledge is often able to play stooge to power.

4. This American Life #670: Beware the Jabberwock!, Ira Glass & Co.

For a more contemporary text, I think this TAL podcast episode on the world of online conspiracy theorists -- and Alex Jones in particular -- would be an entertaining and (hopefully in a good way) frightening way to develop the themes already running through the course. At a time when the ability to generate dangerous, misleading knowledge is so democratically available, it’s more important than ever to ask how that knowledge works, who’s making it, and who it serves. This podcast answers at least the second of those questions in a way that’s gripping, funny, and surprisingly sensitive.

5. Hurricane, Bob Dylan

To round things out (and, in a slightly off-smelling way, to end how we started: with a story-in-verse about the unjust treatment of a Black man, written by a White one), I think this classic song of the counter-culture would engage a lot of our prior texts while directing questions of created knowledge toward matters of racial justice in America. Since it’s so short (well, not for a song, but you know what I mean), and since this curriculum is so White (whoops...) it’d be nice to pair it with some work by Black authors that engages the same issues. What I like about this song especially is its more local treatment of created knowledge, which might stand as a nice counterpoint to Chomsky’s State-Department-level critiques.

[pedagrouchy]

Week Four: Canonicity

Othello, William Shakespeare, 1604

1. Canonicity: Why do you think this text is considered to be part of the canon? Who benefits or gets marginalized from an inclusion of this text in the curriculum?

Well, it’s Shakespeare, for the obvious thing. I guess pragmatically speaking that’s not a sure factor -- you don’t see Troilus and Cressida on too many high school reading lists -- but as authors go, he’s about as canonical as it gets. More importantly, maybe, is that it’s one of the four “major” tragedies (Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello), which kind of puts it in a second, nested canon within the first one. Not being a student of Shakespeare historiography, I can’t tell you exactly how either of those canons came to be. I’m enough of a sell-out to the old guard to say that it probably has something to do with Shakespeare in general, and those plays in particular, being really, really good. But excellence doesn’t guarantee immortality, and I recognize that historical forces have been at work on the perception of Shakespeare for four long centuries.

As for who benefits or gets marginalized... that’s a tough question. And it seems like it depends how it’s taught, right? If you held it up as some abstractly, metaphysically great work of WESTERN LITERATURE, then surely the Harold Blooms of the world benefit from the lasting cultural capital. In that case, it seems likely that anyone who didn’t like it, or didn’t understand it, would feel marginalized. But if you taught it in its own context, as a created thing with particular flaws and virtues, subject to the same individual judgments as any work of art, then I’d like to think most people would either take something valuable from it or feel accepted in their decision not to.

2. Contexts: What version of a given historical period does this text tell? How would the narrative differ if someone from a different race, gender identity, ethnicity, or class wrote it?

Well, again, not being an expert on Elizabethan England, there’s not too much I can say about the relationship between the play and the reality it portrays. It certainly suggests interesting things, like that Black men could serve as generals in the Venetian army, but I’m hesitant to draw any conclusions without better historical footing.

The second question seems just as hard: we certainly can’t claim knowledge of Shakespeare’s gender identity, and his class seems like a (somewhat) open question. As for what it would look like had it been written by someone of another race, while it’s a rich problem, it seems like a hard one to solve solidly regarding an era that a) predates so many of our more familiar racial constructions and b) offers so few English examples of non-White writing that we might hold up in comparison. 

3. Literary Elements: What cultural knowledge would someone have to have in order to understand the literary elements (symbols, theme, characterization, etc.) of this text? If the text includes minority characters, are these characters complex or stereotypical?

Someone would certainly need some knowledge of Elizabethan culture and idiom (the stained bed-sheets come to mind, as do all the references to horns), but I feel like that’s knowledge that has to be built from the ground up for anybody, these days. Maybe students from wealthier or more classically-educated backgrounds would have more of that building done by the time they came to class, but it would still be a matter of who’s spent the most time studying the material. Nobody gets a leg up because they come from a family that speaks Elizabethan English at home. I hope.

And minority characters -- ay, there’s the rub. Because traditionally, and in the view of the canon itself, Othello is a prototypically complex hero -- all the tragic ones are. I certainly agree that it’s hard to read (let alone see) the play without getting a sense of his deep and troubled personhood, but I’m not sure that’s a complete answer to the question. What I’d want to ask, more than anything, is whether a character can at the same time contain human complexities and racial simplicities -- whether he can be real as a man, or as a person, but stereotypical as a Black man, or a Black person. Yet even here, it seems like so much cultural context is required. Othello might fit some of our standards of racist stereotype (most notably in his passion-killing of the White, “pure” Desdemona), but we still have to ask how those standards have changed since 1604, and, for that matter, how those standards operate and are commented on in the play as a whole. I can’t answer those questions, but I would sure pose them to a class.

4. Teacher/Reader: How does your own identity, ability, sexual orientation, age, religion, socioeconomic status, race, etc. shape your reading of this text? In other words, how does your own positionality/privilege affect your perception of this text's value?

Tricky question. As a White man, and a White man in an English major, I’m probably propped up in my love of Shakespeare by all sorts of unstated and vaguely sinister forces. If there is such a thing, I’m definitely the type of person who’s “supposed” to like Shakespeare. Most of the people walking around rambling about his genius look like me, and talk like me, and maybe more importantly look and talk like my dad, and my dad’s friends. Shakespeare is an accepted part of a world that I’m also, more or less, an accepted part of. And so that will taint any statement I might ever make about how just obviously good and fun and moving his work is.

But then, I feel like this question is made a lot more interesting by how old Shakespeare is. He’s had time to get claimed, in a pretty deep way, by cultures and cliques he could never have anticipated, and that possibly he wouldn’t have belonged to. I think there’s value in the approach of taking Shakespeare as this monolithic, culturally-created figure to be pushed back against and deconstructed. But I also think there’s a kind of rebellious value in trying to strip away those accreted layers of critical snobbery, and to find beneath them the great, imperfect work of a funny, thoughtful guy writing plays for the common people. Probably, hopefully, a teacher can do both.

5. Assessments: Would a summative assessment on this text allow students to think about ways to enact social change beyond the classroom? Would it allow them to move past the four corners of the text and even a personal connection with the text to understand how this text has greater significance to current issues and events?

This is a little bit of a tangent, but I was thinking about this yesterday, and I had the idea that what I resent about that CCSS standard is less the suggestion that students “stay” in the text than the suggestion that any text has only four corners. In my ideal world, any text worth studying is worth studying because it’s expansive enough to contain our world, in the same way that our world contains it. So rather than treat it as a static object, to spend some time in and then compare to the dynamic world around it, my hope is that students could treat any text -- Othello especially -- as a thing that already is about the world around them.

And if I can get that point across, it seems like options abound. Because Othello already is about justice, and race, and White perceptions of Black feeling, and violent structures, and jealousy about the body, and domestic violence, and hyper-masculine blindness, and on and on. I’ve only ever gotten to see one professionally-produced Shakespeare play, and it was this one, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2019. Iago was cast and dressed as the spitting image of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, and I don’t think a single person left that theater imagining Othello as anything less than searingly contemporary. I hope that a good teaching of this play, and a good summative assessment, would do the same thing -- and make any conversation about its “greater significance to current issues and events” sound understated.

[pedagrouchy]

Week Two: Gallagher & CCSS

In Gallagher’s long list of troubling things about the Common Core State Standards, no item sticks out to me like #3: that “recreational reading is all but ignored.” As a bit of a recreational reader myself, that’s pretty worrying: I think the measure of a literate society is how much its people enjoy reading, not how often they do it out of obligation or necessity or a desire to look smart. What’s more, I think the total absence of pleasure reading risks raising a wall between what’s read for school and what’s read for fun -- where books are only read for school, the idea that they might ever be read for fun seems seriously endangered. My hope in the classroom would be to foster personal reading while chipping away at the idea that it’s really so removed from academic work and thought. What I read for school and what I read for fun have in some places stopped being separate altogether -- but it took me until mid-college to discover that possibility, and I think it’d be an amazing thing if students could start to see it as early as high school.

In the interests of that, here are my ideas:

1. Self-Selected Readings -- More or less stole this one from Gallagher, but so be it. I think the idea of requiring students to read a book a month for pleasure (and then using that book as a way to launch conversations with them about what they like and don’t like in literature, and how books might occupy a place in their sense of self) is very smart.

2. Vibrant Text Selection -- This sounds generic, but I really think that student enthusiasm will have to come in response to books worth getting enthusiastic about. Obviously that’s subjective, but most parts of the tired old high school canon are not exactly rife with comedy or wonder. I think replacing books that are easy but boring with books that are challenging but funny would be a very good place to start. Pynchon and Barth instead of Orwell, anyone?

3. Enthusiasm and Community -- At no point in the last five years have I stopped reading for pleasure, and at no point in however many are left do I plan to. I hope that as a teacher I could share that reading with my students, in an active and regular way. I want to be able to say “hey, look -- this is the kind of reader I am, this is what I’m struggling with, this is what surprised and delighted me, this is what I think.” Doing a weekly share-out, participated in by both me and my students, would be a way to foster a literate community that has real interpersonal depth and heft -- and I can’t imagine it would hurt anyone’s classwork, either.

Glancing over the NCTE standards for this next part, #11 obviously jumps out: “Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.” I think fostering that kind of community and encouraging those kinds of participation are complex and critical goals. But you certainly wouldn’t get that impression from a gloss of the CCSS agenda. 

I’m also always struck by NCTE #2: “Students read a wide range of literature from many periods in many genres to build an understanding of the many dimensions (e.g., philosophical, ethical, aesthetic) of human experience.” Part of it is definitely just that that “philosophical, ethical, aesthetic” grabs my heart. But more broadly, I think the NCTE demonstrates a holistic, humane view of literary engagement that the CCSS sorely lacks. To me it suggests implicitly that literature is a large, old, and essentially human project, and that to teach it as anything simpler is to fail the students and the books. Where the CCSS so dutifully catalogs skills that might one day make students better marketers and executives, I’d like to think the NCTE limns a set of habits and characteristics that might make them better citizens, partners, writers, critics, friends. That, to me, is in line with the role of an English teacher.

[pedagrouchy]

Week Nine: Critical Care

1. How does Boyd speak back to traditional definitions of care in this chapter?

Boyd seems to have a vested interest in questioning the conventional notions of care that she sees as entrenched in “hegemonic whiteness” (54). Specifically, she targets the kind of one-size-fits-all compassion that many teachers bring (or expect to bring) to the classroom, arguing that a universalized notion of care is fundamentally unsuited to dealing with individual student concerns. In this light, she puts a particular stress on context, and on teachers’ serious understanding of the non-school details of a student’s life (54-55). Essentially, if a teacher understands what’s going on at home for a student, she’ll better be able to address that student’s needs and wants in the classroom.

This seems pretty waterproof to me, although I don’t totally buy the neat lateral opposition with a “universal” care for students. To me, it’d be reasonable to say that individual care can stem from a committed universal care -- you love all students by loving each individual student, and you love each individual student because you love all students. That’s sort of circular and unhelpful, but to me it makes emotional sense. Could we maybe redirect Boyd’s point by saying that universal care for students is well and good, but if you’re just going to enact the posture of universal care without striving for the actual love or commitment, you may as well not in the first place?

2. In what ways does an understanding of critical caring complicate your own sense of what care should look like in a classroom environment?

I think Boyd gives us a great reminder that all caring, in all parts of our lives, is slippery and unsimple. Knowing what a person wants is hard enough, without even starting to wrestle with questions of what they need. My limited field testing suggests this is probably a key issue in all human relationships, but maybe it’s especially so in the classroom. Lines around what’s appropriate, what’s professional, and what’s comfortable to share all limit and complicate the teacher-student relationship, so figuring out any given student’s needs inside that system can’t be easy. And then even if you do wrangle some idea of what they might need, all of that comes before any actual messy attempt to put it into practice. Weirdly, in light of all this, Boyd kind of reasons me back to the point she wants to reject: the idea that basically, at the end of the day, all you can do is try to care and to care evenly. Maybe that’s simplistic of me, though.

3. How might a critical care pedagogy look different across different secondary disciplines? For example, how would critical caring manifest differently in a language arts curriculum and classroom vs. a science (or math, or music, or p.e., or history, etc.) curriculum and classroom?

This seems like an important question, since English usually has the burden and the privilege of being the school space most fitted to conversations about tough, personal issues. I think plenty of Boyd’s points -- the practice of giving students space when they’re upset, or of treating them consistently as strong people worthy of respect -- are functionally interdisciplinary. But I can also see them being more necessary, or more frequently necessary, in a class where things like death and power and language and justice are on the table day after day. I don’t think ELA teachers are any more or less beholden to the high standards Boyd articulates, but I kind of do suspect that their commitment is more regularly tried.

[pedagrouchy]

Week Seven: “Where I’m From”

Part One:

I am from two states, two houses, two people

pretty thoroughly unalike.

The routine goes like this:

Get picked up after school and cut south from the endless Palouse hills

until they stop being endless and you hit Lewiston.

You’ll know it by the smell.

Take State Highway 95 and learn fast

(once you’re old enough that your dad will pay you a dollar

(a dollar!!)

for every town, mountain, or river whose name you know)

that the country, too, is made from things unalike:

Cottonwood. Lapwai. White Bird

where you beaned him in the head with that baseball once

and Big Eddy, which looking back ought properly to have been

an uncle, not a town.

Fall asleep finally in the back seat

with your headlamp on and a book in your lap

somewhere just north of Horseshoe Bend.

And then wake up when he nudges you

because you’re cresting the pass,

and the lights of Boise are splayed over the wide dead Pleistocene lakebed

like a dropped chandelier,

and local jazz is coming in through the static.

Six hours.

Twice a month.

Sixteen years

of really pretty thorough

incomprehension.

Only later,

when you bounce out of bounds and into (whoops) adulthood,

rolling out of Boise, out of Pullman,

very nearly right off the American landmass and into the Puget Sound --

only then

craning your neck

do you realize that you are not from both places at all.

Not from Pullman and public schools and Congregationalism and stepbrothers

nor from Boise, books, rigor, pizza, memorized poems and the terrible, honed art of being a plus-one at archeological conferences.

No.

In the rearview it is clear

(and closer than it may appear)

that you are from Grangeville, Uniontown, and McCall --

from the Wallowa Mountains and the Salmon River --

from long liminal nights of sixty-mile-an-hour silence

and the sound of windshield wipers in the dark.

Part Two:

I think this is a nice activity, although I have my little skepticisms about both personal writing and creative writing prompts (or about mandating them, I should say). Where in that bias my ego and my hatred of instructions fall is probably worth investigating. But even so, I liked this one.

Of course, that said, I sort of suspect I would not have liked it when I was 16. I can only speak personally here, but whatever small amount of self-knowledge I have is almost exclusively the product of adulthood, with all its attendant solitude and opportunities for mistake-making and whatnot. But I’m also totally willing to believe that plenty of people were and are ahead of me on that course, and have already by the middle of high school reached the capacity for sober self-reflection I didn’t start finding ‘til college. Here I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts, because I’ve always both bloomed late and been eager to abandon my past, so I’m a long way from unbiased.

I do also like that the writing-prompt structure of it -- giving them a stock line like “I am from” to scaffold around -- can prop up the less-than-confident while giving sort of an easy out to the truly disinterested. Maybe this is just my outdated view of things, but I really think teaching creative forms should come with an awareness that not all art is productive or fun or enlightening for all people. If I’d had classes through the end of high school where I was forced to paint and draw and sculpt for a grade, I would’ve been pissed. Ditto if I’d had to go all four years in band. I think we have a responsibility to orient all students in the world of literature that exists, and a real imperative to encourage those who see that world and think “hey -- I ought to be a part of that,” but I don’t think it’s gonna be my job to make good poets the way it will be my job to make good thinkers and good readers and good rhetors. Again -- maybe I’m just bought into some outdated aesthetic frameworks, here. I’m willing to change my mind. But for now, this is where I stand.

[pedagrouchy]

Stimulation, Aesthetics, and Education

1. Robinson discusses the the state of being "fully alive" as one that stems from aesthetic experiences allowing our senses to operate at their peak.  How can we use multigenre writing in the classroom as a way to wake our students up?  How can we help our students investigate writing as aesthetic experience?

As someone who spends an obnoxious amount of time worrying out loud about aesthetic experiences in the English classroom, I’m appalled I’d never even half-noticed the etymological kinship with “anesthetic” and “anesthesia.” To me it states the point better than almost anything else: the experience of (here literary) beauty is one of un-numbness, of clarity, of being awake. I’m not totally sure I accept Robinson’s limiting of this to the senses -- I think the feeling can exist just in thought, too -- but otherwise he’s dead on.

What he has to say about stimulation is perceptive too, in that students today are “besieged” by information at a historically unprecedented scale. And he’s right to draw the comparison between something like social media or advertising (highly stimulating) and whatever’s going on at the front of the classroom (inevitably way less so). What I think gets complicated is the assertion that the front of the classroom needs to be fully competitive in the battle for students’ attention -- in part because I suspect it never will be. Students are, after all, still required to be at school, and that seeds the atmosphere with a certain amount of boredom I don’t think you’ll ever totally purge. Not to mention that classes are at least an hour long where TikToks are a minute, that teachers tend not to all be young, gorgeous, cool, and funny all the time, and, worst of all, that they almost always expect something from you in a way that a Reddit thread never will.

Which is a roundabout way to get to the point that I think stimulation can be exactly as anaesthetizing as boredom. It seems like Robinson, and especially his animator, got this. But I’d like to have heard more from him about how teachers might navigate that space -- whether our responsibility, for instance, is to cater to our students’ fragmented attention spans or to try to expand and nourish them. I figure the answer is probably both. But how? And at what times? Is there any hope anymore of teaching students the pretty hard-won point that sometimes boredom is the path to aesthetic experience? That being alone with their thoughts for long stretches of time, while terrifying, is also as vital as a healthy diet? Sometimes I’m really scared by the paradox that seems to emerge here: that preaching the gospel of boredom might inevitably make you too boring to listen to.

Anyways, none of that was about multigenre writing, which is its own interesting way to approach the question. I tend to forget that writing is an aesthetic experience in its own way, and that probably at its best it can give the same satisfaction of clarity or un-numbness in reverse, reordering the thoughts in your head to say something deeply true rather than reading something deeply true that, however slightly, reorders the thoughts in your head. This seems like an awfully hard thing to get across in the classroom, though. Aesthetic experience seems to have a lot to do with understanding -- like when a movie hits me with all its weight exactly at the moment when the pieces fall together in my head, and I see “oh, so this is what it’s saying.” If I cry at a movie, that’s usually the moment. But to have that kind of understanding of a movie requires you to feel a certain amount of comfort in the world it’s created, and I suspect that to have that kind of understanding as a writer requires an awful lot of comfort in the written word. Which for reasons probably to do with all that above-mentioned stimulation, not that many high-schoolers have. I think cultivating that should be our first priority.

2. Robinson argues that we need to think differently about human capacity and the capacity for divergent thinking.  How do you see yourself using multigenre writing with your future students as a way to support their capacity for divergent thinking?

Duke writes that “When you teach genre with purpose, many -- sometimes all -- students become wrapped up in that purpose” (11). I think this ties both to the paragraphs above and to Robinson’s discussion of divergent thinking. Because the aesthetic experience of writing really is the experience of being wrapped up in purpose: of having a vision, and a high degree of control as you navigate toward it. And in my limited experience, that state of wrapped-ness is the quickest way to get back to childhood’s freedom of divergent thought. Once you feel both purpose and confidence at your back, the paths in front of you branch and multiply. You see connections between things, and you understand how your writing might best follow them.

My bet is that different students would approach this feeling best in different genres, and that all of them would benefit from the widening of their writerly vision that multigenre work prompts. And my hope is that a carefully structured multigenre curriculum might, at least some of the time, open students radically onto the aesthetic experience of good writing.

[pedagrouchy]

Week Three: Lesson Plans as Genre

1. Characteristics of the lesson planning genre: List and briefly describe 3-5 characteristics of the genre of lesson planning that you noticed across all of the lesson plans you explored (my examples on our module as well as others you found in your investigation). 

- Objectives: all lesson plans I saw contained at least a loose summary of where they wanted to direct the students’ learning by the end of class. 

- Materials: all the lesson plans included a list of materials needed, as in document cameras, notecards, worksheets, etc.

- Opening & Closing: all plans involved short activities or guided discussions that could serve to start and end class, acting respectively as introduction  or summary.

2. Differences across lesson plan models and structures: List and briefly describe 3-5 differences you noticed across the different lesson plans you explored (my examples on our module as well as others you found in your investigation). 

- Structure: the lesson plans varied widely in how much top-down structure was imposed, with some breaking things down minute-to-minute and others simply outlining what needed to be accomplished and leaving the organization to the teacher.

- Teacher/Student Choreography: some lesson plans included a high degree of specificity as to where the teachers and students should be and what they should be doing at any given moment in a lesson, while others focused on the activity to be accomplished in the anticipation that teacher/student roles would be straightforward or perhaps subject to spontaneous change.

- Complexity of Objective: some lessons had a very simple one- or two-line objective, while others went to great lengths detailing the precise things students ought to be able to accomplish during and after the lesson. The degree to which objectives were explicitly guided by or aligned with CCSS also varied greatly.

3. Criteria for Excellence in Lesson Planning: Based on the lesson plans you explored as well as your own thinking about what determines a successful lesson plan, list 3-5 characteristics, traits, or evidence of effectiveness in this genre.

- Unity: As in all genres, I think a certain directedness of purpose and coherence as a whole is key to good lesson-planning. I always had a hard time in high school when teachers built lessons that seemed to shift focus or totally jump the tracks every twenty minutes. I want students to be able to feel clearly the arc and interconnection of all parts of a lesson, and to leave class feeling like they’ve walked a clear path, rather than played hopscotch with some connected ideas.

- Clarity: I think that straightforwardness in design should be backed up by straightforwardness in expression. Especially in late high school students are close enough to adulthood to be talked to like adults, and in my experience they have a keen nose for condescension. If something feels like it has to be dumbed down, it ought to be cut.

- Levity: The classroom should be a space for laughter and play. We live in a funny world, some of the time, and it’d be giving up one of the greatest assets a high school classroom has (even over college ones) to forfeit the kind of camaraderie and humor that can grow there. My best high school teachers were consistently my funniest ones, and I hope that by letting students laugh I can also let them breathe.

- Gravity: At the same time, we live in a very serious world, and the purpose of education is in no way a light one. Students are forced to get an education because we as a society are still sane enough to know that education matters. I think all lessons should at their root be informed by a sense of that seriousness, and by the felt urgency of producing a highly literate and articulate society.

4. Potential Difficulties: List 3-5 difficulties that you project you may face as a pre-service teacher working within this genre. 

- In almost all writing I tend to chafe at forms and restrictions, and this is a particularly formal and restricted genre. Graphic organizers, neat chronological layouts, tidy objective-content pairings -- these are not my idea of a good time. Balancing whatever formlessness lives in my character with the rote things that professors and districts will expect is going to be a learned skill.

- I think I probably have a slightly more old-fashioned view of good teaching than the average person, and I’m definitely going to have to temper my belief that a good class can be nothing more than a meaningful topic, a well-informed teacher, and a carefully-led conversation. It’s not that I don’t think creative projects and mini-lectures and worksheets can do valuable work, I’m just going to have to wrestle them into my picture of good pedagogy.

- Coming up with ideas for those more structured activities will be tricky for me, too. I remember so few of them in high school that actually gripped me or deepened my understanding that I sort of feel like I’m dodging pot-holes. I’m sure my experience isn’t universal, though, and I’m more than willing to try and imagine activities that will interest me and my prospective students. 

5. Question: Pose a question or concern you have about the process of lesson planning, the differing structure of lesson plans, etc. This will shape my mini-lectures on lesson planning!

I asked in class about how much influence and oversight district administrators have on your lesson planning, and though I imagine the answer is the same (it varies), I’d be curious to hear about the relationship between your lesson planning and your department in the average high school. To what extent should I expect to be beholden to larger patterns of instruction that more senior teachers in my department want to make mandatory? How do you toe the line between giving students a coherent four years of English education and giving teachers the room to teach the way they feel they should?

[pedagrouchy]

Week Two: Something Old, Something New (Lesson Plan)

Context: This will be a 2-3 page exercise in literary criticism designed to get 10th-graders to a place where they can clearly articulate the things they notice in a poem and begin to record their observations critically. The heart of the assignment will be students’ choice of a favorite song (ideally contemporary) and a poem (ideally pre-1900) which is new to them and which they think bears similarities to the chosen song. By close-reading the two side-by-side, and looking for places where writerly strategies resemble each other, I hope students can get a sense of the continuity of literary history while sharpening their reading and writing skills.

Genre: Literary criticism

Criteria for Excellence in the Genre: 

- Clear evidence of multiple readings and attention paid to the mechanics of the pieces at hand

- Understanding of and focus on the places where the poem and song most closely converge

- Clarity of expression; the sense that insight is coming from strong, simple noticing rather than contorted trains of “intellectual”-seeming thought

- Selection of a poem that really does do similar poetic work to the chosen song

Activities that Will Likely Lead to Success: 

- Discussion of the mechanics of poetry; study of only that vocab which will actually help students attend to and express what’s there in the sounds of the poem

- Practice close-reading poems/songs as a class and building short sentences or paragraphs from the things noticed

- Practice close-reading literary criticism and exploring the scholarly relationship between good noticing, good thinking, and good writing

- Juxtapose old and new works while paying attention to the things they share and particularly to how those things might be articulated

- Establish resources for finding both song lyrics and the poem for the assignment, i.e. using sites like the Poetry Foundation, anthologies I can bring or scan for class use, school/public libraries, or local bookstores

- Discussion of the way that literary criticism is often more about setting yourself up with well-chosen materials than it is about sitting down and having sudden insights; look at poem-song pairings that would make the assignment very difficult and ones that would make it very easy

Potential Difficulties: 

- Unfamiliarity and a sense of helplessness when first looking at older poems written in older English; problems of vocabulary and syntax

- The possibility that trying to tie a loved song to a hard poem will only make the latter seem even duller and more remote by comparison

- Not all students -- native English speakers or otherwise -- will have the ability to read some poems unassisted, and learned helplessness might be at work even in cases where they really can

- The time and challenge involved in all good reading, and the twofold effort of writing about it

Pre-Addressing a Difficulty:

For the first and third problems, I think giving students free range in poem choice -- as long as it’s old enough -- would allow them enough room to pick a poem they feel they can understand. I would of course spend serious time and thought helping those students who felt stumped. And in the process of close-reading the poems I would love to include brief whole-class sessions where people can share particularly difficult lines or passages and the whole class can work to make sense of them.

[pedagrouchy]

Week One: hooks & Freire

In chapter two of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire states, "In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves," noting that such education strives for the "emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality." Keeping this in mind, use your blog post to explore the following questions, directly referencing our readings from both hooks and Freire. (300-500 words)

1. In your own words, discuss what Freire means by a banking approach to education as opposed to a problem-posing approach to education.

2. Think of some concrete examples of what a banking approach to language arts curriculum might look like.  Conversely, what kinds of assignments invite students to take on a problem-posing approach to learning?

3. As you think about crafting your own teaching philosophy, what can you take from the theory of hooks and Freire to ensure that both you and your students experience ��education as the practice of freedom”?

Freire’s critique of the “banking” approach to learning is rooted in the idea that classical education works on the asymmetrical transfer of knowledge between teachers and students: teachers teach, students learn, and that’s that. He pits this picture against his own more democratically-minded vision of “problem-posing” education, wherein a teacher orients both herself and her students toward large problems that can be explored jointly. Somewhere in this process categories of “teacher” and “student” collapse at least partially, and knowledge is allowed to flow freely against the traditional grain of authority and experience.

Freire’s thesis has all the catchiness and glamour of most oversimplified ideas. Unless they’re addressed outside the chapter we read (did anybody else catch footnote 3 on p. 76?), it seems to me like all the interesting questions go unraised. Personally, I’ve had many teachers -- probably most of the ones I’ve loved best -- who’ve been lecturers through and through. Some I’ve never even spoken to. Does the fact that these teachers didn’t “engage” with me personally, or didn’t spur me toward the kind of one-dimensional praxis Freire upholds, devalue or delegitimize their work and skill and dedication? I had a 100+ person Art History class at Western that was taught entirely in Freire’s “banking” mode -- lectures, quizzes, memorization -- but which enthralled me more fully and opened me on new worlds of thought way more completely than a lot of let’s-sit-down-and-interrogate-it classes I’ve had put together. The professor got an ovation at the end of the quarter.

Here’s another pressing question -- for Freire, could there be such a thing as a good asynchronous class? I took one last spring where I never once laid eyes on one of my classmates, yet it was one of the best classes I’ve had. All it consisted of was lectures, serious note-taking, and essays.

For me, then, my issue with Freire is not that his project isn’t a noble one. Education should be the practice of freedom. I just think that his conceptions of freedom and of education are both a little ironically narrow-minded.

Other issues occur as well (are we not put off by his willingness to tout some people as on the path to being “fully human” and others as mere “necrophilous” automatons? do all people who like control and order and systematized learning fall under that pretty thoroughly stigmatized latter category? if so, are we willing to burn bridges with a huge majority of the students in all our sister STEM fields?), but for me the crux is that I can’t get behind any theory of pedagogy that’s so willing to categorically limit the range and scope of great teaching in order to secure some kind of shaky revolutionary high ground. Freire’s goals are admirable. His rhetoric makes me a little bit sad.