"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 . . .