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."