Another Voice

Check out this gentleman's comments: http://ventingmycynicism.blogspot.com/2012/09/no-zero-policies-and-failure-of.html.

Zero Grade Policy? First Consider This

I'm sure you've heard that one of the new crazes here in Bedlam (i.e., public high schools) is a Zero Grade Policy.

Sounds like a good idea to me: Zero grades. No grades at all. I mean, really, what good are they? Who can show me a human life made happier, more fulfilling or more successful in any meaningful way by high grades in secondary school?

Wait, what? That's not what is meant by a Zero Grade Policy? It's about not giving zeroes to student work? That's different.

I predict that this new policy will find fertile ground in the barren minds of the people who impose education policy on educators. For them, there is good reason to implement such a policy: Someone wrote a book in which he claimed it was a good idea. He pointed to some research that showed it was a good idea. The policy imposers almost understood the book (so it must've been good) and the author's use of research seemed to be valid (so it must've been).Then some school districts adopted the plan. Therefore, other school districts should fall in line and adopt it as well. That way, we'll all have that plan and that will be good.

Good God!

But while we wait and resist in the gentle and civil manner of teachers who tended to be the good, authority-pleasing kids in their school days, we should busy ourselves with asking some rudimentary questions about graded assignments.

Why do we assign work to be graded? How many graded tasks do we assign in, say, a quarter? Why do we assign that many? Would students learn just as much if we assigned fewer? Would we be better teachers if we didn't spend our weekends, especially the ones with blue skies, grading work that students didn't want to do and which 90% of them only took a cursory jab at?

Why do some students not turn in some or all of those assignments? Would we turn in those assignments if we were students?

As for the number of grades we "need" to have: The college classes in which I learned the most, the ones that inspired me to try to become an authority in some field or other, to become a guide through the Halls of Knowledge, in these classes I had exactly two grades: a midterm and a final. No safety nets, no gimmes, just two occasions during a quarter to demonstrate my newly gained expertise. I studied my butt off for those exams and I can quote that professor (Harry Morris) and the playwright he taught (some guy named Shakespeare) to this day.

I'm not saying this is how we should do it. I'm saying most of us are way overdoing it. In the process, we're inviting students to skip an assignment here or there or to perform half-heartedly on a few knowing they can make it up with 5 or 6 other quizzes. Also, we've created a system -- improved just a tad in the last 2 years -- where underachivers can goof most of the quarter, then apply themselves on a ludicrously weighted 9-weeks exam and come out looking pretty dang good.

Or do we have so many grades because parents think we should give their kids more opportunities to succeed, to prove they are B or A students? Is that what giving a lot of grades really does? No.

Is this not partly the reason even somewhat motivated students don't turn in work?

Another reason (I know this is hastily written, but I have a bunch of quizzes to get to) is that they aren't convinced it's worth their time to do it. If we're going to assign it and spend our precious weekends grading it, we have to sell it. We have to explicitly tell them why it isn't busy work and why it helps accomplish the goals of our class and why we think it's good for them.

And if it is busy work? Man! Are you out of your mind? Who has time to grade that stuff?!

So anyway. Once we all work through questions like the ones posed above, then we might be ready to consider overhauling a grading system and it might or might not include a Zero Grade Policy.

Progress Monitoring: Marzano and Scales

During an in-service on "scales" this afternoon, I soon became lost in a sea of jargon, giving me the opportunity to reflect on what this whole new rigmarole -- and this is just the beginning, we were told -- feels to a teacher of my advanced years.

My ruminations were intermittently interrupted, however, by the anguished cries of my beloved colleagues as they attempted to figure out what exactly the freak "scales" were and why we were having to learn about them.

Sitting in an uncomfortable chair and resting my elbow on a table stacked with the papers my colleagues and I would be dragging home with us afterwards, I had a terrible epiphany.

For the first time in my life, I was relieved to be old. I was grateful that I only had a little time left in a profession that is more and more being orchestrated and overseen by Nutcases United (NU). My gratitude, of course, was tempered by extraordinary sadness and anger at the hijacking of something I hold so dear.

Administrators do their best to calm our fears and dowse our anger by assuring us that this stiflingly disruptive evaluative system -- that seems to be growing tentacles of acronyms -- doesn't change the wonderful way we already teach, it's just a new round of terms to learn.

Nice try. I'm not being sarcastic when I say we appreciate your concern and we understand that you're pretty much as impotent as we are to slow the progress of this Juggernaut.

As the list of indicators grows and the drop-bys increase and the methods of monitoring, measuring, weighing and gauging proliferate, it all becomes more than an overlay of jargon. Let me try a little analogy:

People who have been driving for years eventually train their brains to do all the things required to keep them alive and moving on the road without bothering their conscious minds. We keep an eye on the car ahead of us, and the one ahead of it; we periodically scan the rear- and side-view mirrors; we check our speed limit; we constantly troubleshoot while also pondering elections, football, lesson plans, climate change and Mad Men.

But if we take on a backseat (or passenger seat) driver, someone eager to help us stay safe, we then have to add that person's list of concerns to ours. Our normal, unconscious flow is disrupted as we try to anticipate what our anxious passenger might be seeing. Now, even though we've done it for years, driving is no longer second nature, but strained and anxious.

That's what it's like to try to teach (which is like breathing for someone like me) and to mentally lug around a huge bag full of indicators that must be paid obeisance to. Also, as I have noted here previously, we must act as if there is no extra person in the room tapping away on an iPad. Our community is disrupted, our continuity is disrupted, our rapport is disrupted; the whole prospect of "teaching in the moment" becomes almost impossible while we try to satisfy the needs of the Dark Lord Marzano.

Even if the end product is a good class, it's a fake one on some level.

Okay. Occasionally at today's meeting I tuned back in just enough to get the crap scared out of me chiefly because since I was in about the 7th grade I've been horrible at putting together and sustaining an apparatus such as The Scale. I know this is something I'm just going to have to crib from my colleagues and then feel dirty about it later. Going along with extra stuff that I don't believe in always makes me feel dirty and compromised.

Now about those anguished cries of my beloved colleagues: It was good to hear them. I predict they're just getting warmed up. I work at a school with a terrific faculty, and I sense they have had it up to here with the extra work this crap is handing down to them and, more importantly, with the utter lack of trust it all implies.

Think about it: We have to just keep doing what they say and letting them watch. We have to change the way we talk to our kids. We have to let our kids see us doing things they know we have to do and maybe even watch us do things that go against our teaching philosophy. (I keep expecting one of them to ask, "Don't you have any integrity?") We have to change the way we grade them. We have to add fluff to our plans to meet new demands or try to cram what we already do into newly framed categories. All of this because we can't be trusted to do what we do. All of this because our own profession is not considered safe in our hands.

This all has to stop. Teachers are at the bottom of the food chain, at the bottom of a hole. Someone up on the surface keeps throwing trash on top of us. The people between us and the trash-throwers, people like principals, school board members, and superintendents all seem powerless to stop any of it. While this stuff is falling all around our ears, they keep shrugging and apologizing. They keep saying, "More is coming. This is the direction we're headed so we better get ready for it."

We have become, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, "listless playthings of enormous forces" beyond our control.

I don't believe in those things. It is people, not forces doing this to us, and they have to stop. Someone has to step up. We have to turn this profession back into something we're not embarrassed to be associated with, something that won't chase our young colleagues away so quickly, something we can once more recommend to our kids as an honorable and rewarding way to spend their adult years.

"Welcome! Now start learning."

Here it is the first day, and the bus ramp and the grounds and the halls are alive again with the roar of teenagers. Just walking through that mob is a surreal experience. In these confined quarters, beginning, for many of us, in predawn darkness, the American Salad is tossed, the Melting Pot stews and simmers, assaulting the nostrils with a cocktail redolent of body spray, perfume, aftershave, bubblegum, with the occasional trace of cigarette (?) smoke; add to that the cacophony of croaking male adolescent voices in various dialects, the delightful squeals of young girls racing to hug someone else they’re happy to see, the squeals modulating into hushed sibilance as they share some sacred secret with a sophomore, the casual and constant airing out of four-lettered obscenities so foul they would bring a blush to a drill sergeant’s face.

They pour through the gates and flood through the halls, some of them quickly transforming their lockers into makeshift make-up counters and make-out stations. Then a bell or a horn or a chirp or a tone will sound, and a cluster of them will break off from the larger pack and make their way to, of all places, your room.

So Happy New Year, everyone! They’re here! What to do now?

You need to be welcoming and not openly territorial, even though they are certainly invading your space. These young humans are giving you a chance to do what you love, so thank God they’re here (at the end of class, I always try to remember to thank them for coming to high school, and I think I’ve found just the right blend of sincerity and corniness to express such a sentiment). At the same time, they’re entering your home away from home, so it’s right that you should have guidelines about their behavior there: They’re transients; you’ll be there all day. “It’s great to have you here today. This is where I work, so don’t spit on the floor.”

Hospitality is vital. The kids are shuffled around all day and most of them are filled with fears and insecurities. In your class, they should feel at home, accepted, appreciated. It should be a little refuge from the rest of the day. Don’t add to their anxiety. For the 50+ minutes you have them, they’ll be liked and listened to. They still have to work and learn, but it will be with someone who cares about them and cares enough about their learning that she’s willing to expend the energy to make it lively and interactive.

But, especially if you look about their age, your hospitality needs to be tempered with authority. Because you’re young, students will want to like you AND take advantage of you. This requires a precarious balancing act. You can’t not be young until you get older and you certainly shouldn’t stifle your youthful enthusiasm, a little death that will happen in its own time.

It will be your job to show them that you can be cheerful, energetic, cool, humorous – all of that – and still be drop-dead serious about teaching them. It may help to think of it this way: You really like your students (this is an assumption on my part, but if I’m wrong, and you don’t, pick another profession now) and you want to help them become better educated, to have all the options that come with a better education. If even one of them thinks you’re his buddy and he can joke around with you in class and say things he wouldn’t dare say in his other classes, the rest of the class will be distracted and not become better educated.

This is where you have to step up and say something to the effect that while it’s okay to have a good time while we learn, we must all respect the process. You’re coming to the defense of all the kids in your class who are looking to you to teach them. You cannot let them down at the expense of those who think your class is the perfect time to take an hour off and goof around. With this approach, you’re not being mean to the smart aleck, you’re being protective of the other 24 young humans in the class.

Let’s face it: This balancing act may take a little time to work out. Don’t give up and quit during the first week. Let the process run its course. Give the sap time to rise up the tree (if, in fact, that’s what sap does).

During my first year of high-school teaching (after 15 years at a private liberal-arts college), I had plenty of trouble in this area, and it wasn’t because I looked young. As a professor, I seldom had to restore order in the classroom. In fact, if students ever really pissed me off, I could (and did) say something blunt and profane and just walk out on them. They’d be much better the next day. The Dramatic Walkout, however, is not an option for a high-school teacher. So sometimes, especially by sixth period, my high-school kids would just really get out of hand. I’d put out a fire on one side of the room only to notice another one had ignited on the other side – and you can guess what would happen while I was putting that one out.

By the last few minutes of class, I’d pretty much give up and go stand in front of the door to prevent early escapeage and, oddly, chat with the rambunctious little bastages, because, after all, they really did like me. One of them, Jessica, a quiet little mother hen who liked to help all her friends solve their problems, said, “Your problem is that you try to be a nice guy, and that’s not going to work here.” That stung. But a whole bunch of 17-year-olds were crowded around us near the door and they all shut up long enough to wait for my answer. I tried this one: “I’m not trying to be a nice guy, I am a nice guy. And if I can’t teach here while being a nice guy, I’ll go find something else to do.” Okay, that was the voice of desperation and stubbornness speaking, but we all heard me say it and somehow things began to change. They had to learn to adapt to my niceness; I had to learn when to explode long enough to protect the Jessicas in my class.

I’ll be back very shortly with more reflections on and advice for the first days of class.

Why Teachers Hate Texting

Good ol' August: the time when teachers start touching up their syllabuses and students begin their summer reading.

Certainly every school district by now has a policy prohibiting the use of cell phones during class, so of course that'll show up on your syllabus along with the penalty for violating the policy.

You'll probably see their eyes glaze over when you bring it up in class. They already know what's allowed and what isn't, and the ones who are going to do it anyway are more concerned about how to get away with it than what the punishment will be should they get caught.

So my plan is to focus more on justifying the policy than threatening them with the consequences. Maybe teenagers in the 21st century aren't sure why it's such a big deal. I mean, come on. They text like other generations breathe.

The following is my effort to explain texting's lethal effect on a learning environment. My students will get a copy of this and I'm putting it on Blackboard for back-up. If you like it, feel free to use some or all of it. Or you could send me yours. Either way, feel free to post comments.

The Texting Problem:

You Must Be Present to Win

For centuries now, classrooms have had four walls, not just out of an architectural necessity, but to provide a separate space for the world of the mind. Those walls remind us that we are taking a brief sabbatical from that world racing away outside the classroom window while we, in our little refuge, ponder the meaning of things, try to make sense of the world and perhaps figure out our place in it.

Texting, on the other hand, breaks down those walls, and the world and its worries come tumbling into our once sacred space.

The best classes are those in which you are so engaged in the material that you lose all sense of time and are startled to notice that class is over.

This feeling – often called the flow state -- is only possible through focus, concentration and participation, none of which is possible while texting.

While the classroom walls are intact, students often find themselves engaged in intellectual, stimulating, thought-provoking and sometimes unsettling conversations that are extremely rare in the outside world. As a teacher, these highly charged conversations, in which I become little more than a bystander or moderator, are my favorite classes. In these, we share our ideas, watch them change and grow, and listen to other sides of issues, to different interpretations and different ways of looking at things. We watch a first-draft whim evolve, through conversation, into a full-fledged idea.

Because texting takes us rudely out of this conversation and into another, it can thoroughly disrupt this powerful way of learning.

My best classes develop a strong sense of community. While we may not all love each other, we adapt; we learn tolerance and respect; we accept that while we might not all like the same books or music, we all have legitimate contributions to make to this team or family or community that has gradually developed in Building 8, Room 226.

But if you’re texting, you are emotionally and intellectually absent from this community and you’re treating  it (i.e., the rest of us) as mere afterthoughts and annoyances. That behavior is rude, disruptive, disrespectful – in a word, unacceptable.

A class, at its best, could be considered a gift or a communal meal. Everyone is given the opportunity to think, listen, share, learn, give and receive; everyone is invited to leave the room a slightly different human than the one who entered it less than an hour ago.

But this simply cannot happen if you’re texting. You should not try to be in two places at once. You have to stay here. You must be present to win.

Teaching Tip: Reassessing a "Bad" Class

"A parent gives life, but as a parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."  -- Henry Adams

On some days you'll come to class still blazing with the momentum from yesterday and with a batch of lively and provocative ideas. Since you were all on fire yesterday, you assume a brief fanning of embers will kindle yet another conflagration of learning.

A few minutes into class, however, you can sense that the students' spirits are beginning to exit their bodies. They become unnaturally still and quiet, and their faces look like they're posing for a group portrait in the 19th-century. Some eyelids droop, then close completely.

Then you, the teacher, know you are alone, all, all alone, alone with your wilted expectations and the cold ashes from yesterday's fire.

These days are rough on all of us, but can be especially painful to new teachers. In my first year or so as a college professor, I often taught classes that met on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and when a Thursday class fell flat, I would suffer from a low-grade despondency til it reconvened on Tuesday. I couldn't wait to get back in there and make it right, make the failure go away.

Most of us take these brief deflating moments too seriously and too personally. Here are some ways to put these things into perspective:

* The students' collective zombie response probably had nothing to do with you. Try to remember they have six other classes. Maybe they're dreading their next class. Maybe your plans for today have made it difficult for them to copy their homework from a more industrious classmate. Many of them have jobs, and some of them work late. The family they left just hours ago might not have been in complete harmony. Maybe some of them are in relationships on the brink of breakup. Maybe some of them are dreading using a high-school restroom. In short, sometimes you and/or your class are a tiny, tiny part of their world.

* Not all of our classes or segments of our classes are for all our students. Sometimes what we do may be for us, even when we think it's for them.War and Peace, for example, is clearly a world masterpiece, but I don't think it was written for me; Brothers Karamazov was written for me. Therefore, as I educate myself, I select the latter and reject the former with glazed-over zombie eyes. My mentor Professor Eugene Crook once explained to me that, on some level, our students know what they need from us, and that need will be their focus.

We should, therefore, not expect them to look like hungry baby birds every time we open up a new can of worms.

* The beauty of human consciousness is that even as it goes through its "natural selection" process, taking only what it thinks it needs, some of the rejected material seeps in at the moment of intended rejection or goes dormant for a while, then reawakens as a thing of value years later. As a friend of mine pointed out, sometimes teaching feels like casting pearls before swine, but we have to cast the pearls anyway in the belief that in the fullness of time, our listeners will perceive them as such. Here is where we console ourselves with the Adams quote above. We "affect eternity." We "can never tell when [our] influence [starts or] stops."

* The students' collective zombie-like appearance doesn't necessarily mean they aren't learning or engaged. Their brains could be busy connecting today's subject to yesterday's lesson. They could be making connections, possibly uncomfortable ones, to their own lives. They could be cutting against the grain of mass education by actually thinking and reflecting. On many occasions, students from what I perceived as a bad class have thanked me for a good one.

In short, it's best to follow the advice of Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan and "don't get too up and don't get too down." After a decent outing, he headed for the exercise bike. After he got shelled for six runs in two innings, he headed for the exercise bike. After he tossed one of his seven no-hitters -- you guessed it -- he headed for the exercise bike. Do your best. Prepare a feast (or lay out the pearls) for your students, and trust them to take what they need. Then, when it's over, let it go and head for your exercise bike.

Turning Obstacles into Opportunities

The villains -- "study guides," shortcuts and cheat-sheets -- of the previous three posts aren't going anywhere, so my advice to readers searching for teaching tips is to make them work for you. While they can be and often are obstacles to learning, they can also be used as opportunities for learning.

First, why will they not go away? For one thing, SparkNotes and their kind represent a multi-million-dollar industry and nothing short of a rapture or an invasion of highly literate aliens will make them disappear.

Furthermore, we have created a system, an "educational" paradigm, that demands their presence. High-school students in my district, for example, take seven classes a day, creating the "sprinting-through-the-art-gallery" model of "learning." High-achieving students bear the added onus of feeling pressured to take as many AP classes as possible. This creates an extraordinary workload that simultaneously trains them in workaholism while encouraging a dependency on shortcuts.

 One critic of education noted that what students really learn from this model is that nothing is worth paying attention to for longer than 48 minutes at a time. It is certainly not a system that invites young learners to savor the narrative technique of Dickens's 1000-page masterpiece Bleak House.

Our current system is also chiefly interested in students performing well on standardized tests, or "Creating the Appearance of Achievement without Learning How to Learn" (CAALHL). This turns the following into time-wasting, non-quantifiable luxuries we simply cannot afford: brainstorming, pondering, speculating, rereading, meditating, reflecting and conversing. It says, rather, "Cut out the fuzzy stuff and go straight to the answers and some cool test-taking strategies that will outwit the test writers!" It also says, "With the SATs coming up on Saturday, you sure can't afford to be reading about some Victorian governess getting all heated up over her master. Read the summary!"

Finally, technology has succeeded in giving all of us, especially young people, the attention span of a gnat on amphetamines. We never walk alone. Someone is always calling. There is always something we need to look up quickly (Who did invent the waffle?!). So, even if students weren't in the current nonsensical educational system, they would be hard pressed to keep their eyes on a complex text for longer than three minutes at a time.

I can imagine that, in my students' position, even I, the Great Reading Purist and Defender of Lit as Holy Writ, would succumb to the SparkNotes temptation.

So they're here to stay. How can we use them as a productive part of the learning process?

Maybe we should get them out of the closet and start working them into our assignments. Here are a few possibilities, some that I've tried with success, some without success, and some I'll try later:

1. In either an informal essay or a brief class presentation, have them -- singly or in pairs or groups -- support, challenge or qualify those smug little analyses at the end each chapter. They could do a single chapter or a cluster or, if time permits, the analysis of the work as a whole.

The author(s) of these guides tend to be narrow and dogmatic in their interpretations. For example, the last time I taught Henry James's Turn of the Screw, the cheat-sheet used by my class baldly asserted that the book was about James's repressed or latent homosexuality. So this reading showed up in many of my students' quizzes and essays. I was flabbergasted. I agreed that it might be about some kind of repression, but also about hysteria, ambiguity, point of view, madness, pedophilia, or the zany, madcap actions of a couple of truly mean kids.

This would have been a great opportunity to ask, by way of an assignment, "Why would the cheat-sheet writer say this? Where is her proof? Is it biographical? Is it embedded in the text? Do you see greater evidence for another interpretation? Discuss!"

2. As recently suggested by one of my former students, we could use the SparkNotes-type text early to provide background on the primary work's historical setting and its place in literary history, and elements of the author's life that might provide either interest or insight as the young readers work they way through the book. There are entire schools of literary criticism and of pedagogy that cry out against this approach, but we can save these objections for another day.

3. The guides' inability to transfer the magic of, say, Don DeLillo's text to theirs is itself an opportunity for learning. If it doesn't violate some copyright law, a teacher could make a PowerPoint with side-by-side slides juxtaposing DeLillo's eccentric tone and puzzling observations with the guide's bland, soulless, robotic summary. Almost any sensitive reader will find DeLillo's side amusing, but a little sinister; no reader will find anything of value in the summary, whether in the use of language or the content. Surely such an activity will help us define literature and perhaps increase appreciation of it.

4. I can't think of a No.4 right now, but I'm sure there are many other ways to "shake hands with the devil," as the saying goes. But for now I'll leave you with another SparkNotes-inspired assignment: If you should ever have the opportunity to teach a book that hasn't been summarized and analyzed by the study-guide industry, ask students to make their own version, either of a scene, a chapter, or, if you're insane, the entire novel. I did the latter when I was a college professor, and some of the work was outstanding. It required careful reading and research, so it was rather time consuming, but the stronger students seemed to think it was well worth the effort.

A Silly Game with No Winners

Here are just a few more reasons why teachers must band together in their efforts to wean students from their dependency on shortcuts such as SparkNotes:

It's bad for their character. When students turn to a "study guide" (I hate to flatter them with this euphemistic title) before they even begin to read a novel, they're saying, "I can't." (Just my typing those words made legendary Green Bay Packer coach Vince Lombardi role over in his green-and-gold grave!) Oh, yes they can. The least they can do is try. We'll help!

When students turn to one of these creepazoid cheat-sheets (that's better) after reading a chapter or two, they're saying, "I give up."

When they can get away with saying, "I can't" and/or "I give up" and still get credit for performing well in the class, we've all joined together -- Mr. Fred SparkNotes (the founder, I assume), the student and the teacher -- to validate the tired assertion that "High school is a joke," that what we do there is meaningless.

If we have ways to avoid the very thing we're about -- the heart, the guts -- well, of course it is! We're all playing a meaningless and very boring and time-consuming game in which the teacher assigns a great work of literature; the students flee from it to a repository of diluted, already chewed and therefore now tasteless and textureless scraps; the teacher writes a quiz to try to coerce students into reading, both for their own good and to prevent him from being the only person in class who's read it; then the students parlay chunks of SparkNotesian summary and "analysis" into credible quiz answers which, as it turns out, sound exactly like the answers provided by all the other SparkNotes readers in the class.

I hate to even write this: If the teachers' questions aren't answered in SparkNotes, then the student fails the quiz, and the student "loses" and the teacher "wins." If the questions are answered in SparkNotes, the opposite is true.

But nobody has won anything! In both cases, the student loses because she has either learned that she can be rewarded for no effort or she makes a lousy quiz grade for not learning anything. And the teacher loses because in both cases, after the quiz, he goes about "teaching" each magical note of a symphony of which his students have only heard covered by the equivalent of an 8th-grade garage band.

A very frustrating bit of theater with perhaps the saddest part being that kids have been allowed to quit, to give up. The aforementioned Coach Lombardi once caught one of his star players taking it easy in practice and nearly tore the poor guy's head off. "You were cheating," he yelled at him. "And if you cheat in practice, you'll cheat in the game! And if you cheat in the game, you'll be cheating the rest of your life and I WON'T HAVE IT!"

Good teachers tend to share Lombardi's philosophy that "We are in the relentless pursuit for perfection," followed by his concession that while we may never achieve perfection, "we will achieve greatness" in the process. Students turn to SparkNotes, however, in the relentless pursuit of a grade, preferably an A, which is not perfection, just a symbol for it. The A is a sign of achievement without the achievement.

Some other sins that can be traced back to creepazoid cheat-sheets:

* They corrupt discourse: The teacher and the students who have read the literature come to class prepared to speak of how the author made magic with words, created images and events we'd never think of in a century, stirred our hearts to joy and/or sadness, changed our view of novels and the world, and perhaps changed our own world for the better. But the vast majority of the class can respond only to what they've been told, so must either remain silent or will themselves into fraudulence and fakery. They can say nothing about how the work made them feel.

* As suggested above, they give students someone else's answers, and hardly anything could be more useless than that. Those answers will work for a quiz, but they take away the opportunity for thought, reflection, assimilation, empathy.

* Unlike the literature itself, they won't keep readers from feeling alone and they can't articulate their thoughts or feelings in language so rich they (the readers) want to memorize it.

A personal example comes to mind here: After I read Tim O'Brien's "On the Rainy River," about a young man who has received his draft notice during the Vietnam War, my response was, "That's exactly what it was like. It's completely true." But O'Brien's character lived in Minnesota and made his big decision in a boat on the Rainy River with the Canadian border in plain sight. I've never been near Minnesota, but all that happened in that story had happened to me. Reading a summary would've deprived me of that connection and of the fact that I still remember exactly when and where I read that story.

Enough! It is time to acknowledge that it is not altogether the students' fault that cheat-sheets have taken over the literature classroom and to list some possible ways to exorcise them (the cheat-sheets, not the students) from our presence.

Anti-Christ . . . Really?

Okay, I can see where you'd think the assertion that shortcuts such as SparkNotes are the Anti-Christ is an overstated attention grabber or the heated rant of some nut job trying to save his flock from falling into the Eternal Pit of Ignorance.

Still, many founders or spreaders or perpetuators of religions have attempted to share their wisdom through literature -- parables, fables, myths, aphorisms, proverbs, koans and such. Implied in this mode of communication is the belief that the listener/reader (but only the worthy, called or chosen?) will have the necessary vision to penetrate the veil of language and behold the Truth; or, to use the agricultural metaphor, to find beneath the chaff of words the Grains of Truth.

But also implied in this is that language -- a narrative, for instance -- is part of the truth and inseparable from it, and to try to extract the truth from the story is like pulling a loose thread from a shirt that eventually unravels the whole garment (this image is badly paraphrased from Flannery O'Connor's original).

In this paradigm, readers arrive at the truth as part of their journey toward it. It is cumulative. The process is part of it. It is not an unraveling, but a gathering together. The poet William Blake said to his readers, "I give you the end of a golden string, / Only wind it into a ball, / It will lead you in at Heaven's gate / Built in Jerusalem's wall."

So when students use SparkNotes or other such things as shortcuts, they go straight to the "ball" without the "winding," straight to the grains without the chaff, straight to the truth without the language that is part of it. In this case, SparkNotes is a cherry-flavored Flintstone vitamin promising health without the need to acquire a taste for nutritious food.

Hence, not only does the student not get the whole story, but the intellectual and imaginative muscles needed to grasp the fullness of the world's great wisdom are not exercised and begin to weaken. The student gets an answer without his imagination being educated. If it is true that study-guide shortcuts seriously hinder the student's efforts ever to know the truth that will set her free, then they certainly can be called -- in a playful manner, of course -- the Anti-Christ.

I would argue that our job as literature teachers is to educate the imagination, not provide the kinds of simplistic answers or formulae provided by SparkNotes and required by standardized tests. Once we educate the imagination, whether students want to use it to get into Bithlo or Jerusalem is up to them.

But is it even possible to wean 21st-century students from SparkNotean shortcuts? That's a matter at which we'll flail away in a future post.

Cooter, Duck and the Anti-Christ

I remember these two guys who sat in the back of my school bus. They were known as Cooter and Duck.

Cooter looked exactly the way northerners picture backwoods southerners: buzzed hair, small head on stooped shoulders, beady eyes, high cheekbones, buck teeth, no chin (and I mean no offense to anyone who looks exactly like that). Duck, on the other hand, tried to mimic the James Dean teen-rebel look, but carried things way too far: His well-oiled hair, for example, teetered absurdly and precariously high on his head, so if he laughed, coughed or sneezed, it all came cascading down over his face, at which point he would shove it back up, all the while glaring at us as if to say, "Don't think this is funny. Think this is cool. Or I will beat you up."

Cooter chattered and cackled nonstop like a zany jackal or hyena sidekick in a Disney film, while Duck said maybe 12 words the whole time I knew him. Having failed a grade here and there, they were a little older than the rest of us. Occasionally, they'd giggle over some raunchy reading material they'd found somewhere.

So we're on our way to school one morning shortly after Duck and Cooter's 11th-grade teacher had assigned Moby Dick. Just after he gets on the bus, Cooter gives Duck a little "looka-here" nudge in the ribs and pulls out of his zip-up notebook a yellow book with diagonal black stripes across the front.

What the rest of us assumed was just more titillating reading to fan the flames of male teenage lust was actually titled "Melville's Moby Dick," followed on the bottom of the cover with the words "Cliffs Notes."

This, then, was my introduction to study guides or cheat sheets or whatever generic title they go by. It was an object of shame shared by a couple of barely literate goobers in the back of a bus who possessed it because they were unable to do what was required of them. And, for the balance of my education, right up through grad school, no one I knew wanted to be seen in public with one of those things and they'd certainly never carry one into a classroom.

I later learned that there was a rather lofty-sounding "Note to the Reader" on the inside of the front cover, warning young scholars that these notes only supplement the work of literature and are not meant to be a substitute for the text itself. But I don't think Cooter and Duck read that disclaimer.

Well, the years have gone by, and Cliff Notes seem to have gone the way of hula hoops, AM radio and rotary-dial phones. They have been replaced by the snazzier colored SparkNotes (sky blue! firetruck red! sunlight yellow!), available at book stores or for more clandestine online reading. There are many other online options, including Pink Monkey, Jiffy Notes, Shmoop (seriously) and one with the blatantly honest moniker of GradeSaver.

My students over the years have heard me somewhat playfully refer to these shortcuts as the Anti-Christ, and, in an effort to help new teachers articulate an argument against them, I will explain -- in a matter of days or even hours -- what I mean by this. But first I'd like to acknowledge that some students, but very few, really do use these abominations to solve a text's knotty problems, to fill out characters' family trees or to get some idea of the value of a quid or the length of a league.

I'd also like to allow for the possibility that the nice people who publish these things really are interested in furthering the literary education of our nation's youth, helping them to live the examined life and to apply classical wisdom to modern-day issues. I do not claim that they're trying to take advantage of young people's fragmented lifestyle, short attention span, laziness, illiteracy and pressure to get high grades to make a truckload of money.

Anyway, here's why I call "study guides" the Anti-Christ . . .

What Love Has to Do with It

And now the long overdue effort to explain exactly how to act on the advice "You can't teach'em if you don't love'em." Feel free to note how far removed this is from the actions of the unfortunate hypothetical teacher featured in my previous post.

Start with a question: How would you treat students if you did love them? How would you make them feel loved?

You would make them feel welcomed, invited, respected. Greet them with warm hospitality. When they enter our clasroom, they shouldn't have the sense that they've interrupted something more important. So wait til later to finish whatever you have going on the computer. You have guests, for God's sake. Put down what you're doing and say hello.

You would be honest with them unless it is impossible to do so. Be encouraging without being hyperbolic. No need to assure a wonderful young person with a weak background in your discipline that she will very likely be admitted to Harvard with numerous scholarships. Be honest, but also tactful and kind, in your assessment of their work. See my post on grading for an elaboration on this point. As for when it's impossible to be honest, I leave it to you to generate your own examples.

You would express gratitude to them at every opportunity. Often when I loan students a pencil or give them a band-aid (hope it's legal!), it bothers me that they don't know to thank me. So whenever they do something to help me -- including showing up for class -- I thank them, both because I appreciate what they've done and because I want to model that bit of civil behavior.

You would listen to them. You wouldn't believe how rarely anyone listens to these kids. Hey, their own best friends text other people during conversations! They're lucky if their parents listen to them a few minutes a day. Many of us teachers are busy composing a response when students speak to us. So, take a breath and give the gift of listening. Sure, it's not a Marzano indicator, but go rogue for just that moment!

You would be flexible in your effort to teach them. Your favorite style of teaching may not be their favorite style of learning. What works well for most of the class may be completely alien to young Herbie in the back row. You cannot squeeze all your students either into your personal pedagogical theory or one imposed on you by the suits, the district, the state. A student will certainly feel loved if you expend the time and energy required to see what works best for him. On a related matter, I will talk about, in a future post, how little I would've liked having me as a teacher. My teaching style doesn't match up well with my preferred learning style.

You would do your best to nurture students into becoming their best selves. We meet them and "love" them where they are when we find them, but how can we not want to see them become aware of their potential and motivate them to reach it? Doing this well may not make us lovable to them, not for a while anyway.

You would care for them as individual selves, but also by helping them become a part of something larger than themselves, in this case a part of a learning community. For example, in The Scarlet Letter, Hester urges Dimmesdale to flee Boston and a find a new and better life. You could assign a personal, informal, journal-like response asking your students to ponder the value of Hester's advice. After each student has had time to be alone with her thoughts and express them in her own voice, ask them all to share their ideas in pairs or groups. Now they see other ways of seeing; and, if the gods of pedagogy are smiling that day, they see how this communal sharing nurtures baby or incipient or still-evolving ideas into maturity when added to the ideas of others.

Finally, because they watch you practice your gift every day (sure, they are somewhat bound by law to do so), you should reciprocate and, whenever possible, watch them practice theirs. By that I mean drag your tired self back to campus and watch them play basketball or perform in a concert or a play or go see their art exhibits  -- anything to show a willingness to know them as they exist outside the narrow confines of your classroom.

There really is something magical about seeing a young person who is struggling in your class and who appears to be happy not to be noticed, stand up in front of hundreds of people and just knock their socks off with a voice apparently sent directly from the heavens. You'll never look at that student the same way again and you'll have a better idea of what it means to actually love him.

Hmm. That's sort of what it comes down to, isn't it? In our line of work, what we mean when we talk about love is the participation of other humans in what we believe is our gift. They are witnesses to it, but more importantly collaborators in it, co-creators of it and recipients of it. And without that kind of love, we can't teach'em.

Don't Let This Happen to You

To close out my reflections on teachers' "losing heart," on their being vulnerable and exposed on a painfully personal level, I reluctantly return to the advice given to me at the dawn of my career and which I passed on to you near the beginning of this blog: "You can't teach'em if you don't love'm."

On the one hand, I stand by that advice. On the other hand, -- and I'm surprised no one has called me out on this -- I'm not sure I can adequately define what is meant by "love" in this context. On yet another hand, I see it as a soggy piece of sentimentality, best suited for a Hallmark card with two kittens on the front, one wearing a tiny mortar-board hat.

I'll start with a cautionary tale for new teachers. If you see yourself in the following characterization, you should make some changes immediately.

Sometimes an unhealthy emotional neediness can disguise itself as love. I'm reminded of  Professor Levy in Woody Allen's film Crimes and Misdemeanors. He says that "when we fall in love we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask of our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted on us."
The professor concludes that love contains the contradiction of returning to the past while attempting to undo the past. First, that sounds like an epic undertaking in reality, here in the world of 98.6. Second, maybe that has something to do with Levy's eventual fate (see the movie!).

Let's think of this condition through a teacher's eyes: There is, let's say, a vacuum in you created by neglect or abuse or even someone's inability either to love you or to communicate that love. At some point, your withered heart is kindled by, as Parker Palmer says, a "passion for a subject." Eventually, fueled by this passion, you find yourself in a room with many people, generally younger than you, all looking at you with what is or can appear to be respect, admiration, affection and -- dare we say it? -- even love.

(With only the slightest bit of attentiveness, we find that not all those adoring gazes are authentic, that many students learn early to create a face teachers feel more inclined to bless with good grades. Once I became a serious college student, I rewarded pretty much every professor -- regardless of how I felt about them -- with steady, but not creepy eye contact and a slight smile that was intended to say, "Keep it goin,' Bro. I'm listening.")

Anyway, whatever is truly behind those eyes, they speak love to the needy teacher. The teacher finally feels warm and at home. The teacher was pretty sure she should have been loved all this time, and now her pumpkin has at long last been turned into a chariot. 

Seen from a less enchanted, more detached perspective, however, a captive audience is merely creating an illusion that her existential craving is being assuaged. They are her students and they no doubt care for her, but they provide absolutely no help in healing that Snowden's wound she's hiding.

What would she not do to hold on to that spell? With all good intentions, she will put her students' perceived affections ahead of their learning. She coddles and flatters, demanding little while rewarding everything, and tries to make herself indispensable to them, to do for them what other teachers can't. She violates professional boundaries by confiding in them, by talking to them as if they are her peers. She listens to them complain about the bad ol' other teachers and adds her own resentments and enlists their collective support in whatever wars she has with colleagues or administrators.

She is the mother hen who, under the guise of gathering her brood under her protective wings, suffocates them instead.

How little will it take to break this spell and how will she live to teach another day? It takes next to nothing. A small voice of dissent. A slight or just a perceived slight. A critical remark from one of her darlings. A look of contempt. Any of these can send her hurtling back to the pumpkin and the ashes.

Now here is a teacher who has truly lost heart and who must seriously rethink that fuzzy advice, "You can't teach'em if you don't love'm."

Icarus in the Classroom

In The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer says "Many of us become teachers for reasons of the heart, animated by a passion for some subject and for helping people learn."

Palmer goes on to say that because of its personal and public nature, teaching is a "daily exercise in vulnerability," which can lead us to "lose heart." Thus we become poisoned by the wine that initially intoxicated us. The lamp we thought would help illuminate the world either blows up in our face or is extinguished far too soon.

I know exactly what Palmer is talking about and I'd like to expand on his observations a bit to make them more tangible, especially for beginning teachers. For certain kinds of teachers, I think it is critical to think very carefully about this topic.

Let's begin with "animated by a passion for some subject." As I noted in an earlier post, my passion for reading transformed me into a person awfully susceptible to an English major. Once I was a sophomore in college, the flames of my passion were fanned by the venerable Mr. Byrne, my British lit professor.

At that point, the English major chose me. Brought up in something of an evangelical environment probably contributed to my considering this process a Calling, a beckoning from and toward something higher.

It took me seven years to get from Mr. Byrne to my doctorate, and not once during that time did I look back. Not once did I hesitate to fulfill every nickel-and-dime, chicken-shit requirement for every major and degree I conquered or earned along the way.

I did all of this -- like thousands of others -- knowing there would be no material reward. I labored early and late for love and not for money. This is how I was fueled by my "passion for some subject."

So . . .  at the end of it I am anointed Dr. Starling and am sent in a chariot of fire to my first classroom, in my case, fortunately, at a somewhat selective four-year college. "Intoxication" may be one of the nice ways to describe the good days when my students seemed to share my passion, and ideas flew and grew around the room, and the conversations soared far beyond those we tend to have with grown-ups at meet-and-greets and cocktail parties and receptions and such.

Someone should have made me reread the Icarus story.

I began to think it was about me. I thought that if I went away, the magic would go away.

Some days, though, the magic vanished while I was still right there in the classroom. My students hadn't read, or did read and didn't like it, or they found something offensive in what they read or in what I said about what they read. Some days they were sullen and withdrawn. Some days they were high and/or hungover. Some days they talked and laughed as if I didn't exist. Some days, no matter how shrill my appreciation or penetrating my insights or evocative my questions, they simply didn't care.

This was no way to respond to my Calling!

One time one of them actually picked her head up off her desk and looked at me, smiling, and said, "Doc, we really don't care."

All these things happened in 1981 and again in 2012 and in every year in between. This is when Icarus plummets seaward and "everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster."

Teachers' responses to this rejection can be placed on a spectrum that runs from vampirism to detachment, but they almost all result in a loss of heart, burnout and a failure to teach. And, there's still no material reward!

Teach with Your Heart, But Don't Lose It

Reliable studies indicate that somewhere between 40 and 50 per cent of new teachers will leave the profession after only five years, and one of the reasons for this is the rather broad term burnout. I suppose that word covers the roughly 423 reasons I felt compelled to give up teaching forever (I thought) after 15 years as a professor at a liberal-arts college.

Roughly two years after that decision I found in Parker Palmer’s book The Courage to Teach a fairly accurate description – much better than “burnout” – of what happened to me there. Palmer believes most teachers choose the profession for reasons of the heart, but after a few years they begin to lose heart. That sounds right to me, and my next few posts will address some reasons for this process, especially the problem of taking our work too personally.

I hope what I say will help new teachers keep their hearts a little longer, and help experienced ones understand why their hearts may be beginning to feel heavy and hardened.

Sometimes it happens that a student who is clearly a good, decent, kind, lovable human being writes a paper with little support or focus and plenty of lousy sentences and a small sprinkling of major grammatical errors. I have to give the paper a low grade, but I want to tell the student not to take it personally, it’s not about her, it’s just, you know, we have these standards that have been around for a few centuries and you’re not quite meeting them right now, so here’s a D, even though you’re certainly not a D person.

The student is likely to respond with a weak smile and leave the classroom to melt into the bedlam of the hall. But how can she not be thinking, “I wrote that essay. I used my own personal brain and my personal imagination and used the words and syntactical structures that are accessible to a person such as I. How can I not take this D personally?”

Should the student have the nerve to ask me that question, I’d be tempted to respond, “Now you know how I feel all the time!” Teachers frequently take student responses personally, especially, I’d think, English teachers, especially when they’re teaching literature.

Take me, for example. Well before I grew up to be an English major, one of my personal hobbies was reading great books. Not that I knew they were great, or would have known why they were great if I did – I just knew they spoke to me, taught me stuff, made me feel as if my reading them was transforming me into a better human being. When I was very young, I became friends with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Great Expectations and William Faulkner’s Light in August.

I was a college dropout and a reluctant member of the United States Air Force when I read and fell in love with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5.

 I do not use “became friends” and “fell in love” loosely. Before I knew how to analyze or interpret literature (and by extension, I guess, appreciate it), I pal’d around with Huck on the Mississippi and laughed at his observations; I pulled for and was embarrassed by Pip and his awkward and misguided reaching for respectability; I feared Boo Radley, and was much relieved to find him not only harmless but courageous.

By the time I read Catch-22, I was amazed that Heller could write something so absurd, convoluted and outrageous while still mirroring exactly what I was experiencing in the Air Force; and by the time I got to Vonnegut, my cold and distant father had passed away, and Vonnegut became my mentor, my literary dad. He seemed to speak directly into my ear and in so doing helped turn me into the frustrated subversive I am today. Thanks, Kurt!

Obviously, all of these works, and many more after them, have been integrated into my being. Put another way, they are the materials from which I’ve constructed a soul.  They have shaped my values and my language and become the lens through which I observe and interpret my fellow human beings.

And now, as a teacher of AP Literature, I have the honor to introduce these beloved literary friends to my beloved students.

Have you ever had two close friends who were so different you were afraid to introduce one to the other, afraid even to see them try to coexist in the same room? Have you ever had one close friend express contempt for another close friend? If so, you know what it’s like for me all the time!

So when students don’t like the books I’ve chosen or refuse to read them or resort to the Anti-Christ (Spark Notes), how can I not take that personally and eventually tell one old friend (Don DeLillo’s White Noise, for example), “Sorry, Bud. I gotta shelve you for a while. These people don’t like you, and I can not handle the rejection!”

We’re sneaking up on the problem here. We’re good teachers when we care so much that we make ourselves vulnerable to painful rejections, causing us to back off and care less and thus become less effective teachers because we are less of who we genuinely are.

May's Emotional Confusion

This is one of those “Is-it-just-me” pieces, so as soon as you see the answer is “yes,” you’re excused to graze and ruminate in more nutritious pastures. It’s a gloomy meditation on PAYDE (Post-Academic-Year Depression and Exaltation). Sadly, because this condition only manifests itself after school is over, you don’t get paid for getting PAYDE.

Even if you didn’t have to spend the last week of school packing up dozens of boxes with books and other materials from a lifetime of teaching and saying goodbye to your favorite classroom and lugging it all across campus to a new, cold, alien and still soulless place, you may be feeling a little depleted, enervated, emptied-out now that the book is closed on another year.

There’s a rather rowdy war going on inside me right now – but, hey, what’s new? I’m bubbling with gratitude for the long awaited rest after great labor. When the sun starts to set, I can’t keep a smile from my face as I picture the plotless day I’ll mostly enjoy tomorrow. I won’t be getting up at 4:57 a.m., that’s for sure. I won’t suffer from after-lunch fatigue, exacerbated by the funky, erratic and unpredictable nature students take on for the day’s final two hours. And tomorrow evening will not be muddied by anxiety over things I really should be doing.

But at the same time, I also miss my students and my relationship with them. I miss the moments – moments of pointless fun, moments of pure revelation and insight, and moments of joyous learning. I certainly need a rest from the whole thing, but that doesn’t keep me from being sad about the disappearance of these moments from my life. 

I also feel regret, more than a twinge, and I feel this way, to some degree, every May. I feel as if I just blew a big opportunity. I did not do well enough the one thing I do well. I was in a game I should have won, but I lost. At this point, everyone could rush forward and shout, “No, Master! You did not fail! You were wonderful. You couldn’t have done better,” but I’d know better. I have a ready list. I have this year’s catalogue of shame, all the unanswered questions and ignored student issues and failures to enforce rules and lack of patience and grades too lightly given.  

I wonder if teaching is the only profession in which its practitioners inevitably fail, inevitably feel they must be reborn again in the fall (“fall” being a metonymy for “the first week of August,” when many of us pack up our Scarlet Letter lunchboxes and head back to the mines in utter darkness). This leads to the happy and unsatisfying combination of the opportunity for redemption and the awareness of failure. There will always be next year . . . except when there won’t be.

And for me, there has long been an intimation of mortality in the annual May farewells. I found this sentiment pretty well articulated in Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, a novel that will not feel quite as earthshaking in a couple of years as it does to many reviewers now. These words come from a fictional legendary shortstop: “It always saddens me to leave the field. Even fielding the final out of the World Series, deep in the truest part of me, felt like death.”

When our students leave each year, the vast majority of them die for us in that we will never see them or hear from them again. And when they leave, our gift of teaching seems to evaporate. It goes dormant. It hibernates for the summer. And I’m not the only teacher who has seriously wondered if he will still have it when school resumes in August.

Then there are those farewell luncheons in which we recognize and applaud our retiring colleagues. I find this so extraordinarily sad I must find a quick exit from the proceedings. I feel panicky at the notion that there won’t be another batch in August, another chance to get it right, to be needed in that way particular to teachers, to make up for the errors of the past, to finally, at long last, be whole in our calling.

      Is it just me?

Why Teaching Is Fun, or Why I Laugh Too Much in Class

I'm teaching Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, and we are taking turns reading scenes from one of the book’s story-chapters.

As a student reads the beginning of a scene where Nector, who is literally standing, comes figuratively crawling back to Marie, who has literally just been on her knees, my eyes glance down a few lines and I see what Marie is going to do and I shake my head and quietly chuckle, one of those stifled-guffaw chuckles, an involuntary quasi-giggle that doesn’t interrupt the reading.

I’m laughing not because what’s happening in the story is funny, but because these characters are about to do the very kind of thing people like them will do. They’re about to be themselves. So I guess I’m laughing in appreciation at how well Erdrich has made this surprising next move inevitable, or these characters’ inevitable behavior surprising.

I’m also laughing because Nector and Marie have become two old friends of mine, and their antics never fail to amuse me.

I do this sort of thing too often in class. Sometimes, for instance, I laugh out loud at something the students find disturbing, but I’m laughing at what an odd disturbing thing this is or what an odd time for it to happen or at my disbelief that the writer ever thought of such a disturbing event.

But this time when I quietly laugh, I glance up and see one of my students smiling. She’s looking at me, but the smile is not for me, but for the fact that I’m laughing at a line that hasn’t been read yet.

I think she’s smiling at the fact that, while her classmate’s voice drones through the unwanted task of reading aloud in class, I have fallen into the text and come back up laughing – a sort of unplanned, public literary baptism. She’s smiling because she has caught her teacher enjoying his life’s work, even at this late stage, even in this cold classroom at 7:27 a.m., with a gang of tired teenagers trying patiently and respectfully to weather the first of the day’s seven classes.

She’s smiling because she knows I’ve been “going over” this book in class for at least 20 years and you’d think I’d have it memorized by now and I’d be sick of it, but look at this ol’ coot – he can’t even wait for the freaking punch line.

Maybe she thinks I’m losing it, that senility is setting in, that I’m some demented crackpot on a bus laughing at the voices in his head while all the other passengers quite sanely dread going to work.

But I hope she’s smiling because she has caught her teacher whistling while he works, being surprised, again, by the joy his life’s work brings him, and as she smiles at this oddity, she envisions a time in future years when her work will give her a similar joy.

Final Marzano Observation Observations

The Class after Observation Day: That flow state that had kept me present, focused and serene during my observation almost immediately gives way to giddiness, and I want to celebrate, to take a victory lap. I have had many, many exciting, rewarding classes, but having one with an Important Audience raises the stakes a bit. So, after a student presentation, we don’t accomplish much.

Post-Observation Conference: Since I can’t think of anything that went wrong, I don’t dread this at all, and it turns out I have no reason to. My observing supervisor is kind, reassuring, generous, complimentary. She tells me I’m a very good teacher, and I say to myself, “On many days, it sure doesn’t feel like I’m a very good teacher.” She tells me it’s obvious that I love teaching, and I say to myself that the days leading up to that class sure didn’t feel like love -- unless love makes you gloomy, angry, uncomfortable, apprehensive, fidgety, anxious, resentful and imposed upon. No, it felt more like the flu.

 As she went through page after page of forms she had to fill out for this thing, suddenly I felt very sorry for her. Thanks to Marzano and his boys, she spends hours and hours doing this.

Looking back, I’m mostly embarrassed and disappointed that I allowed myself to get so caught up in this thing. My first impulse, after all, was simply to ignore it and go on about my business. Call me a dreamy idealist and a  hopeless romantic, but I’ve always thought of teaching as a vocation, a calling, a cause, a mission, far too important to be disturbed by the whims of a hysterical, uninformed, misled electorate and a herd of legislators who are either too dense to pass my high-school classes or are downright wicked in their crass manipulation of the rhetorical fallacies they would’ve learned there.

I’ve learned, incidentally, that I’m not the only teacher with decades of experience who has gotten worked up over the whole thing and been embarrassed about it when it was over. From now on, I hope we’ll all have more faith in ourselves and our students and just go in there and get it done, maybe even forgetting the dates of our observations. And now, some bullet points, a.k.a, mini-rants:

      * The Marzano craze is a brief aberration and will soon go away. It has to.

* Meanwhile, at my school, the administrators are going out of their way to ease anxiety among the teachers and make this thing as painless as possible. I’m pretty sure it’s not like that everywhere. And I’m pretty sure that in many schools, this mess will increase the tension between teachers and administrators.

* If merit pay ever really gets to be a reality, it will likely increase tension and resentment among teachers. What if I don’t get merit pay and some colleague who doesn’t do jack does get it – not that I know of any such colleagues, I’m just saying. What if I get merit pay when all I have to deal with are highly motivated AP students with involved parents, while Ms. Fessmacher down the hall has a gang of hoodlums who can’t wait to get tossed out of the place? 

* If I were a new teacher this year, I’d probably need to be sedated.

* As I’ve said, I had a terrific class when I was observed, but I’ve also had terrific classes without being observed and I’ve had terrific classes when I was observed by someone not evaluating me. I can’t credit the Marzano plan for making me a better teacher that day.

* As I noted in an earlier posting, almost all teacher observations – if not all of them -- are inauthentic or fictional or atypical because of how an observer’s presence changes the dynamics of the classroom. An observer only sees how a teacher and his class perform when they are being observed. Without a SpyCam (I should’ve never given them this idea!), an observer can never see what a teacher and his class are like. An observer can only see a teacher act highly effectively.

* The Marzonian indicators serve only to increase the staged nature of this ordeal. No. 34, for example, is “Applying consequences for lack of adherence to rules and guidelines.” A desperate teacher may be tempted to talk a student into walking in late, for example, so the teacher can show off her skill at applying the consequences. And what if there are no incorrect answers to probe with students (No. 41)?

* It’s pretty sad that all these bulleted points are perfectly obvious, but the nice people who bought into the Marzano zaniness apparently never considered them.
* For a more eloquent and coherent response to a similar disastrous form of evaluation, check out the link below:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/opinion/sunday/confessions-of-a-bad-teacher.html?pagewanted=all

Letting Someone Watch

Two Days Until Observation:  The voices inside me have a shouting match: One tells me I’m wasting my time fretting over this thing, that I should just do what I’ve always done and I’ll be fine. It tells me this whole thing is just a runny nose, not life-threatening pneumonia.

The other voice warns me to prepare for that most humiliating moment, the one where you are forced to acknowledge what you’ve always feared: You are a fraud. You’ve been doing this wrong all these years. A young teacher, the voice says, has no cause to whine about this, but you do. The real game plan is only now about to be revealed to you when the final horn is only seconds away. The horror! To be corrected or chided or guided now, to have the tragic flaw just now exposed.

One Day Until Observation, 2012: The voice of reason asserts itself. In my classroom, I make sure the board looks right and my copies are made and that I’m prepared for another good class with the help of bright, cooperative students discussing a thought-provoking poem. I glance at my list of targeted Marznovian Indicators and accept that not all those things are going to occur tomorrow, and I refuse to rig some scenario in which they will. Everything is in place. I’m ready for someone else to witness what my students see often. I’m not nervous or anxious, and I wouldn’t really say I’m confident. I just am. Let’s do it.

Observation Day: Class begins before the observer shows up, so I go ahead and make my smooth transition from yesterday without her, telling my students to just relax if I repeat all this verbatim once she steps in the room. The students are in good spirits and, as always in these situations, on my side, but not too obviously so.

Meanwhile, I can see the whole class, from beginning to end, in my head. I know the punch line (or the knockout punch), that thing I have planned at the end which will cause hands to fly up all over the room. I don’t rush it. I know that the moments leading up to it will be good enough – well, actually better than good enough. I begin with group work, something I’m not crazy about, but which will work well with today’s activity. I give them clear instructions, a rationale (hey, it all comes back to the AP Lit exam) and a time limit.

While they work, I take attendance, then stroll around the room, not eavesdropping, but just being present. They don’t need me now; they just need me to trust them to do this right. They all stay on task – all of them – as I knew they would. I hear great comments and questions emanating from the groups, and so does my observer, and I’m gratified. My observer is drawn into one of the groups and I occasionally hear her laughing.

Once the volume of their respective discussions begins to diminish, I ask each group to give me its findings, inviting the rest of the class to jump in if they questions or comments of their own. My aging brain hones in on their insights and I restate them to be sure I’ve heard them right and to be sure the student has said what she intended. I ask follow-up questions when needed and, from time to time, note how this process mimics the early minutes of the poetry timed write on AP exam. We’re thinking it through, brainstorming, finding patterns that, while interesting in their own right, can also be the building blocks of a killer essay.

As the punch line approaches, I’m just a man enjoying his work. I’m doing what I’ve loved doing from the first time I did it. A CAT scan of my inner workings would not have revealed a sense of intrusion or contrivance or artificiality due to the presence of a stranger in the class. I was a man enjoying the sights and sensations as a briskly flowing river took him to a better place. If someone happened to be watching from the shore, why would I care?

With a little more than 10 minutes remaining, my little surprise is projected onto the screen, and the students respond with an appropriately visceral reaction. Just before this, the class had been holding separate parts of the poem in their hands, scrutinizing them, meditating on them, trying to find something on which to construct a theme, then a thesis. The surprise is a minor explosion that, instead of blowing things apart, brings them all together, and, just before the bell sounds, all that had been up in the air, settles into a complete whole back on solid ground.

I thank my beloved kids as they leave. My observer reassures me that things went well. And my next class begins to file through the door.

Continuing to Wait for Marzano

February 2012, leading up to the observation: With my observation now inevitable (I pictured my 2^nd-grade self in line for a smallpox vaccination, counting the kids in front of me, knowing there was no escape), I began to reflect on how many years I’ve spent proving myself to myself and to my students.

On my first day as an intern at Raa Middle School in 1976, I dreaded the possibility of failure and of the negative feedback that comes immediately – almost simultaneously with the incompetent act – for every teacher. Naïve, dreamy, idealistic – belly churning with nerves --, I tried as hard as I could to be an effective teacher. I wanted my students to learn something that day and, okay, I admit it, I also wanted them to like me. I also not only wanted to be an effective teacher, I wanted to be perceived as one, i.e., I wanted my effectiveness to recognized and rewarded.

(And, looking back, I’m really sorry, and I apologize to all of those students who, if they lived, would now be over 50 years old, for starting the class by playing Cat Stevens’ version of “Morning Has Broken.” I meant well!)

The same was true for my first day as a Freshman Comp teacher the following fall, and then again for my inaugural day as a college professor facing a Writing for Science Majors class at 8 a.m. in September of 1981.

I don’t know what other teachers are like, but every day of my teaching career, someone has been in my class watching me critically, making a list and checking it twice, causing me to fret and wince over every blunder and, when the class is over, to count the freaking hours until I can get back to that class and make right the sins of yesterday.

Like John Proctor in The Crucible, the magistrate that judged me sat in my heart; there were also typically 25 more external magistrates sitting in my class.

And now, being driven by my inner pedagogical demons for over 35 years -- driven, I humbly acknowledge, to a small truckload of teaching awards bestowed upon me at every stop along the way -- must I now endure an actual iPad-bearing judge with the power to articulate for the world my competency level as gauged by a Marzanometer? And with the power, in theory, to impact my salary and my job security?

Having driven myself fairly mad with these ruminations, I was led to ponder the unfairness of this ordeal on another count. My experience has led me to believe that to be an effective teacher requires a great deal of time and labor. There is no reason to recount here the hundreds of information bits swirling around in a teacher’s brain from the moment s/he flicks the classroom lights on at an ungodly hour in the morning when even newspaper deliverers are sleeping, to the depleted afternoon when s/he wobbles back out to the car, a bundle of student manuscripts nestled in the book bag.

The daily teaching experience is, as a friend of mine said, like racing into a house on fire, looking for people to save. Even young teachers who still have short-term memory can become disoriented, sign the wrong form, hit the wrong key, give the wrong grade, call the wrong name.

For teachers driven to do their best daily, who are trying with all their might to be highly effective, this is a very demanding and sometimes overwhelming job.  

So. Add to this another layer of bureaucracy to one already Everest high; add many more urgent Marzano-related messages and meetings and workshops; add pre-observation and post-observation conferences, and the forms required for each; add the hours foolish teachers like me will spend on that one class that will be observed, at the expense of the other classes and of that aforementioned bundle of student manuscripts.

It isn’t fair, I thought, to make me a less effective teacher by forcing me to prove that I’m a highly effective one.

Waiting for Marzano

In case you are a seasoned teacher and haven’t undergone your Marzanoscopy yet, maybe I can help by providing you with a timeline of what it was like for me in the days and weeks leading up to the procedure, followed by a play-by-play of the Thing Itself, then a reflection on the entire journey.

I may also include a checklist which should be especially helpful now that we know teaching can be both assessed and perfected through the use of weights and measures.

I hope readers will not be put off by what appears to be whining and complaining. I have tried to be honest about the whole thing, and not worry over whether I’m pleasing any particular audience in the process. So, if it is whining, it’s at least genuine and heartfelt whining. This is what it actually felt like to me, a 35-year veteran of teaching.  

Furthermore, in case what follows is so off-putting that readers can’t get themselves to finish it, I’ll give you a brief version of my conclusion: The process is absurd and wasteful, but not without benefits – benefits I seriously doubt were ever intended by Marzano and his fellow rubricifiers.

August 2011: During preplanning, I hear ominous references to a new evaluation process and to something called iObservation and to something else called Marzano, which turned out to be someone’s name. I tune most of these out because I am too preoccupied with something called Skyward, a program that would soon be taking hours away from my efforts to be a highly effective teacher (HET). Also, I always like to look forward to the new academic year, and I don’t want to be brought down by this intrusive junk.

October 2011: We are alerted during a Wednesday in-service about upcoming workshops to help prepare us for the Marzanofication of the evaluation process. Some would be for rookies (may God spread his mercy upon them), others for out-the-door old-timers like me. I mentally hit delete on the dates for the rookies and go into denial about the others because I have too many papers to grade and I’m still not sure how to change grades on Skyward.

November 2011: As pre-evaluation workshops begin to proliferate, Marzanophobia (or Misomarzano) sets in. I learn there is an especially long meeting on the horizon, a Marzanopalooza, for old-timers, and I immediately set out to learn the most critical information about it, i.e., is it mandatory?

December 2011: I write a snarky blog entry in which I imagine Marzano raking in the dough from this obnoxious system and roasting his chestnuts over an open fire. I also quickly make a mental list of 39 things teachers do that aren’t part of Marzano’s list of indicators, not even his Super Marzanio list of 60, and wonder if it’s okay to stop doing all of these things in order to better my chances of becoming HET.

January 2012: Finally, I’m knocked out of my denial when, at either an in-service or a PLP, I’m handed a date for my pre-observation meeting with a list of requirements for said meeting and a list of the indicators my observer will be iBalling. I guess I will need to fashion a lesson that allows me to allow her to check “YES” on those babies. Now the worrying and fretting can begin in earnest.