In the Classroom Today

Dispatches from the Trenches

At the Altar of Choice

I am not angry at those who have more money and possessions than I have. For most of my life, I have striven to produce quality work as a writer, musician, and artist, but I’ve also worked as a teacher in order to have a home, send my children to college, and to bear the economic yoke of being an adult in my society. Along the path, I have also discovered that I very much enjoy teaching, and I believe that for much of my career, I’ve been an effective educator. I have arrived at this place in my life mostly through my own choices.

I am well aware that for many other people in the U.S. and abroad, such is not the case, but by and large, most of us make thousands of personal choices over the years that ultimately define what we become. The Determinists, the nihilists, and the fatalists may hash it out any way they like, but that is my considered position. I certainly was not born with a knack for decision-making; yet I believe in Natural Law, and thus adhere to the theory that we possess an innate sense of right and wrong. Still, I would also say that my ability to act upon choices had to be nurtured over time by my parents, older siblings, teachers, and so on. Sometimes that nurturing involved tightly limited, closely monitored choices. And in school, oftentimes and in certain situations, there were no choices at all.

I contend that students today have far too much choice. “Which of these books would you like to read, Cheswick? This one with the pretty cover? This one with all the words in it? Or perhaps one that you’ve already read before?” Suffice it to say that when it comes to books, most students don’t have the experience to choose those that will really contribute to their literacy. Only a knowledgeable and well-read adult can guide them in this.

The same applies to other kinds of choices, too. I have never forgotten a story told by a school superintendent in the district where I was teaching several years ago. He described a high-school boy who would come to him every spring for four years, “broken in spirit” because he could never make the school’s baseball team. “He just loved baseball. He had chosen the game because it was his passion.” It was clear to me that baseball had not chosen him, however, and I wanted to ask, “Why didn’t he just try out for the cross-country team? Baseball is hard, after all.” But the superintendent had worked himself into such a tear-streaked state of empathy that I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Having lots of choices in school - a “menu,” as one educational guru has put it - is, in fact, sometimes counterproductive. Students are addled by the various dishes placed before them, and unfortunately the healthy eater (to extend the metaphor) should have only one dessert.

I realize that there is a fine line between limiting choices and suppressing creativity. As a young person, I was greatly interested in art and had a powerful imagination, but I had no discipline. I did not know what sort of art I wanted to make. I asked myself, “Do I want to paint? If so, shall I work in oils, watercolors, or acrylics? All of these? What about drawing? Pencils? Inks? Charcoal? Am I a realist or an abstractionist? What about pastels? Then again, sculpture seems like a satisfying medium. Clay? Metal? Wood? Play-doh?” Eventually I was lucky enough to have a couple of mentors who perceived my strengths and my limitations, and they helped me to make specific, limited choices so that I might find some success. Of course, when my ambitions shifted to writing, the old wrestling match was renewed: Fiction? Nonfiction? Poetry? Drama?

I’ll go further and say that for these reasons, the teacher needs to be more than simply an education major who keeps up with the latest theories on differentiated learning and classroom management. The teacher must be an expert in his or her subject area. For example, an English teacher ought to be the most well-read person on campus, bar none, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Harold Bloom and beyond, and at the very least, he ought to be able to write the same clear and lively prose he expects of his students. Only then can the teacher become a guide as trustworthy as Beatrice when the traveler enters the many spheres, both dark and celestial, of choice.

In the Classroom Today

Dispatches From the Trenches

The Keyboard is Mightier

I am beginning to believe that my generation has seen some of the broadest cultural shifts of any that has passed…but of course, I suppose that people of every age have believed that about themselves. Even the ancient accountant who said, “You know, Xenophon, perhaps we should put away those beans and try out this new-fangled abacus” undoubtedly believed that he was inducing sweeping change. 

A man born in 1890 who lived to be eighty would have seen the turn of the century, two world wars, the rise of the automobile, the advancement of commercial flight, the eruption of rock ’n’ roll, the Civil Rights Movement, the assassinations of MLK and two Kennedys, the first lunar landings, and so on - all a pretty good argument for his time on earth as the pre-eminent historical observer.

Yet consider this: as a boomer born in 1958 and turning a mere sixty this year, I have been privy to the most significant technological shifts modern civilizations have ever seen: the ability to transmit and glean information instantaneously, as well as the perpetual shrinking of the mechanisms by which we do it.

I have been a teacher of literature and writing for nearly twenty-eight years now and need only look at a handful of changes in the way I do my job in order to see the impact of computer technology. I don’t recall the first year that I typed grades and comments into a computer program, but it was probably in the mid-1990s. Until that time, my poor students and their parents had to struggle to read my scrawling. I’ll never forget the teary-eyed sophomore who came to me to ask why I had written that she was “horsing around this quarter in class.” She calmed down after I explained that what I had actually written was that she was “having a sound third quarter in class.”

Email has forever changed the way teachers communicate with parents and students. In addition to individual conferences every semester and the odd afternoon phone call just before happy hour, I am now obliged to read and respond to a stream of emails from over-zealous parents who wish to monitor their children throughout the day: “Crenshaw’s irritable bowel flared up this morning. Please allow him to see the nurse as needed,” or “Crenshaw left his p.e. shorts on the breakfast table this morning. His older sister will drop them off on your desk around ten.” Still, I suppose the involved parent is preferable to the ones that I never hear from at all (and there are plenty of those).

The weight of administrative tasks has been greatly increased by computer technology. I know - advanced communication capability was supposed to make us more efficient…but such has not been the case, sadly. Certainly we have saved a good deal of printer paper, but it is a special brand of anxiety that sinks in when I open my mailbox every hour and find ten new emails demanding my immediate attention. On the other hand, fun is frowned upon: please do not take up valuable kilobytes with trash talk about your alma mater’s basketball team or links to noteworthy articles in The Onion.

These are only three of a myriad of drastic shifts that have occurred in one educator’s daily life in this “developed” world. As to further changes bound to happen at any second, I still take some comfort in thinking back to a workshop I attended roughly twenty years ago, during which a young professor of literature showed us his website. He said that everything he did throughout a given semester or so was there: all the lectures, word-for-word, all assignments, even audio clips of birds honking to enhance a reading of Yeats’s “The Wild Swans at Coole” were accessible at the touch of a fingertip. After his presentation, I asked him, “Has it occurred to you that now that everything you do is on a website for your students’ edification, your university no longer really needs you? The real you, I mean, not the virtual you.”

“I’m not worried about that,” he replied. “I just heard a great lecture last week by an expert in higher education. He made an air-tight argument that students still need interaction with real people. There will always be a need for teachers, since there’s no substitute for the human touch.”

“Interesting. Was it at your college or someplace else?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I watched it online.”

Playing the blues

Does the artist really work in abject loneliness? Does the creative act as executed by painters, sculptors, musicians, writers, et al, truly require confinement and utter solitude? I am lately coming to understand that art is a way of binding our relationships more closely, rather than dividing them. I can say with certainty that the phenomenal experience of knowing that others have been moved by something that I have produced makes me feel connected to them in a unique and significant way. I've also learned that making these connections demands the sort of honesty that can burn you in any number of ways. Besides, an audience can smell a fraud from a mile away.

To my thinking, one of the worst kinds of fraud is the artist who has not done his work. For instance, any musician can play a blues song with only three chords, and one must certainly feel the blues in order to play them, but for the modern blues player today, knowing the great tradition of the blues is essential. I say this mostly as a listener: as a musician, I would not call myself a true bluesman, but I did learn quite a lot of rural blues when I first started playing the guitar, and these days I often have the privilege of performing with a good friend whom I consider a master of the form. As he has done, any aspiring blues artist should listen to the oldest gospel music he or she can find, from both black and white churches across the American South. That music is deep in the roots of the great tree, so to speak. All of the struggle, sorrow, and triumph is in it. We build upon it, grow into it, lean upon it. Then the player must study the giants, the strong-shouldered spiritual heroes - Son House, Robert Johnson, Robert Wilkins, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leadbelly, Mississippi John Hurt, Furry Lewis, Skip James, Tampa Red, Pine Top Perikins, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Memphis Minnie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Bessie Smith, Bessie Jones, Ma Rainey, Elizabeth Cotten, Blind Willie McTell, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Gus Cannon, Charley Patton, and dozens more... Then he or she should try and master the styles of at least three of these demigods, though he never truly will, for this is a lifetime's undertaking. In the end, all he can really hope for is that some of the richness and depth that grew from a people's daily lives of bitterness, laughter, loss, and hope will stick to him just a little bit, and that maybe just a a little bit of the heat of a Mississippi cotton field or the whine of a northbound train will come through in the playing and give it a degree of authenticity.

And if he has done all of this and reaches a point at which he can begin to write his own stuff, the blues artist might then be able to find words and tunes and riffs and rhythms that seem real and that seem as if they have always existed. Only then, as in these lines from Son House's "Death Letter"...

                   I walked up right close, and I said I looked down in her face
                   I said the good ol' gal, she got to lay here 'til the Judgment Day

                   Looked like there was 10, 000 people standin' round the buryin' ground
                   I didn't know I loved her 'til they laid her down

can there be no doubt as to the truth being spoken.

John Lee Hooker | Photo: TeamRock

"Tell Us A Story, Mr. Trippe..."

I am now three weeks into my twenty-eighth year as a teacher. For one who, all those years ago, never expected to have a career in education (I had worked as a journalist up to that point), I am sometimes still surprised at the rejuvenating power of being around young people from day to day. Last year I began teaching middle-school English for the very first time, in part because I had been one of those high-school instructors who frequently grouse about kids arriving in ninth grade ill-prepared for the big leagues, as it were, and I saw this as my chance to do something about it.

    I have collected no data to substantiate what I intend to say here. I can only offer expert testimony.

    If you should hear a veteran teacher proclaim that students’ skills have declined overall in reading, writing, critical thinking, reasoning, problem-solving, and so on, do not doubt it; it is true. On the other hand, it is also true that every year I meet precocious youngsters who have an intuitive grasp of fairly complex ideas, who can talk and write well, and who in some cases have that gnawing hunger for more - tougher assignments, thicker books, loftier ideas. Still others of them are pleasant, hardworking optimists bent on success, who will find their own trails up the mountain eventually. What interest do they all seem to share? The answer is simple: stories.

    At some time in their lives, people (most often family members) have told them good stories.

    Stories within families, told to children at an early age, seem to contribute their emotional and intellectual growth in various ways. For example, the ninth grader who recounted to me her grandfather’s story about serving as a “tunnel rat” in the Cu Chi district of Vietnam showed advanced verbal skills, even if the tale was harrowing; she listened better than many other students in her class, and her writing was superb. The kid whose mother had been in an all-girl band and toured the country could talk about those vast western rock odysseys as though he had been there himself. Even less glamorous stories (“My grand-dad was a logger up in the north woods…” or ”My mom had a raccoon for a pet when she was a kid…”) also seem to have a significant connection to both students’ academic performances and their self-images. It is as if the student might say, This is me…or at least a piece of me. My story is part of someone else’s story.  And if one is a part of someone else’s story, might he or she also be part of a really big story? This is me. My story is part of a greater one. My life has meaning and purpose because my story is integral.

    In fact, research does show that family stories, even those that do not feature sunshine and lollipops, can significantly affect young learners. As Elaine Reese, a child development specialist, wrote for The Atlantic in December of 2013, “All families have stories to tell, regardless of their culture or their circumstances. Of course, not all of these stories are idyllic ones. Research shows that children and adolescents can learn a great deal from stories of life’s more difficult moments–as long as those stories are told in a way that is sensitive to the child’s level of understanding, and as long as something good is gleaned from the experience.”

    I am not suggesting that teachers chuck out those lessons that require discipline and constant review, such as sentence structure and vocabulary acquisition. I do believe it is vital that they alsoinclude as many opportunities for stories - hearing them, telling them, reading them, and writing them - as possible. I can say from my own experience that the light that comes into a young person’s eyes when he or she suddenly realizes the power of a great story is as redeeming as anything I have encountered in my career as a teacher.