New York City, Just Like I Pictured It: Queens

New York City, Just Like I Pictured It: Manhattan

New York City, Just Like I Pictured It: Brooklyn

Extra

I am, for you, somewhere between

illumination and idle chatter.

I am parallel and coefficient,

the macro/micro project

of presence and ground zero.

I am, for you, extraneous personality—

Biggie-sized, leaving electric bodies alive

in my evolutionary current.

I am, for you, myth made metal.

The never-was is back again,

Ether composed of stone.

--Mr. S.

Assimilation Impossible

The possibility of The Brooklyn Educrat is based on the possibility that saying what should be done has some relationship to doing what should be done. There are times when this possibility seems infinitely improbable, like when you tell a first-year teacher that they should never call the dean. Truth, in purely written or spoken form, is entirely unbelievable. Which does not bode well for the Educrat, your occasionally erupting fountain of pure truth.

It is Mr. Stickfigure’s particular perversion that his purpose is to make everyone feel like a first-year teacher again, so he won’t complain about the mystification and deconstruction of his medium. He is very curious, however, about what makes unbelievable ideas intersect with reality (which is only our most firm belief). How do we assimilate impossibility, how do we pull it down from the clouds and make of it the ground we walk on?

But that’s not really the question. I, Mr. Stickfigure, know the lived truth of what I speak, the truth that persists beyond words and before them. The question, dear reader, is how do you assimilate my truth? Just remember, it’s only my truth on the page. Out there in real life, it’s everybody’s truth. It’s not a matter of whether it’s true, it’s a matter of how long it takes you to realize it. So I’d like to know what I can say here—which is no particular place—that will help you assimilate my impossibilities.

If I could figure that out, I’d be a much better teacher, too.

On Improving Schools

We do not know how to improve our schools, and their will never be better teachers than the teachers that came before us. These are the paradoxical axioms of school improvement, and their dissonance must be accepted before actual improvement can even be imagined. The discourse of education tends to alternate feverishly within this dialectic, however, and most of us find ourselves serving an interest that is vested in stasis and the maintenance of revolving arguments. The history of education is often described, by educators, as being like the swinging of a pendulum—a handful of themes alternating between domination and contemptibleness over time. Such a history can never be progress, it is true, but it will always to be reassuring if we wait long enough. Nevertheless, the back-and-fourth of education is a game of catch between our left hand and our right. The problem is that we have long since dropped the ball.

The ball, in this case, is the project of school improvement. The only thing that can be said about this project with any accuracy is that all—or rather, both—of our answers are wrong. The conflict within education is indeed a dialectic that sustains things as they are—our essays trade thesis and straw man in order to make the same grade. The one thing we can be sure of is that none of this shit is publishable. Which is not to say that educational discourse is worthless. Our mistake, rather, is to have misread the genre of our discussion. What we read as a researched-based project manual is, instead, a form of profoundly unliterary escapism. In the battle of pedagogical Sci-Fi versus facilitator’s Fantasy we have forgotten that we are all geeks.

But we are not just geeks, we are teachers; and we do not forget, we actively ignore these horrors that cannot be comprehended in good health. We are the human eye exposed to blinding light, and our souls require something to consider while we blink the stars out of our eyes. Such are the considerations we have amassed on the topic of school improvement. But we saw what we saw, and we know the kind of knowledge that can only be denied. We know that we are reading and writing and arguing atop small, unmarked graves. Our discourse, then, can never be trivial. Even our most misguided claims are claims of responsibility by teachers. With these, we accept our responsibility for the problems of all the world and say, “We can take care of you in our school.”

Perhaps, though, we do not speak so clearly as this. Many of our schools in need of improvement need to improve their students’ apprehension of this message. Before we savage such schools, however, we should bear in mind that they are always built on burial grounds. These schools are the schools where the blinding light shines brightest—the light of human yearning for all the things that humans need.

These needs have never changed, and they are the same everywhere. There will never be better teachers than have already met these needs, and we do not need to expect more of teachers than teachers have already provided for us. Teachers know very well how to teach, and students know how to go to school. What we don’t know, and that means everybody, is how to improve the schools that teachers and students go to.

Even the strictest definition of a school requires more than teachers and students. Let us take the minimum possible criteria: a physical space for teachers and students to work in. Schools in need of improvement, however they are designated, need better physical spaces. This is an empirical matter, not one of definition. Show me a school in need of improvement that does not need a better concrete environment and I’ll show you a bucket of pastel paint in Rio de Janeiro. The empirical question of improving schools, however, is the question of how to improve the world. That is to say, whether teachers take responsibility for it or not, what we’re dealing with is changing the world. And whether we take responsibility or not, it will take more than teachers to make that change.

But teachers are human, too, and it is a noble effort for any human to improve the world. And if much of that can be done by good teachers in good schools, all the more reason to try. But pendulums are not pyramids, even if they help to build them. As teachers, we should look to the past as much as we admire the old teachers we still want to be. As educators involved in schools, however, we must recognize that most of our discourse can only serve to reduce the infinity of what can be done wrong.

Think big about your schools.

The Great Pyramid

The pyramid is an archetypal form. As an archetype, the pyramid is not merely a shape; it’s form, rather, is an eternal substance. The pyramid exists and persists on all planes, from that of geometry to those of Giza. Yet our pyramids are not only those that we draw as a square of triangles or even those that we build of stone to last five thousand years. Pyramids are the things we live in, as much as we live in our houses or our skins. And, being of eternal substance, we live through pyramids, too.

The pyramid is a form that contains not only all reality, but also all that is impossible. It is the graceful vessel of all extremes, and is the true shape of the world and of life. Remember that a pyramid is only a triangle from one side. Its actual dimensions are more mysterious than even that sacred form. There can be only one peak to a pyramid, and it is a point infinitely small. Toward this point tend all three dimensions of space. The first and second comprise the base, and the base is built in the direction of all things on earth. The third dimension guides the first two to their ever-shrinking, impossible end. When the cardinal directions converge with the three dimensions on a single point, a pyramid is formed.

The greatest opposites are never equal, we have come to learn. Equal opposites are constitutionally inconsequential—this or that, six or half-dozen, and neither here nor there. The greatest opposites have the same coordinates as a pyramid: everything and nothing, now and forever, infinite and infinitesimal. The lesser opposites, though, are also contained, and easily, by any two sides. And between opposites, we know, lie all other things.

Human life is lived to complete a pyramid—to reach an apex beyond which we can only see heaven. We are creatures of the ground, however, and the ground is the base of all pyramids and the place of our birth. We build pyramids to cover the distance between the dirt and our destiny.

The Library of Babel Redux

The Library of Babel, Borges tells us, contains one copy of every possible book. Alphabets are finite, after all, so there must be a finite number of books. The number is very large, however. For any book you are familiar with, there are twenty-six copies where the first letter of the first word on the first page is different—from A to Z. There are also twenty-six copies where the second letter is changed. Eventually, billions of copies later, there is a book where almost every letter is different from the original you are familiar with, though there are still the same number of words and the words are made of the same number of letters in any book. These iterations of the same book, the vast majority of which are gibberish, take up miles of shelves in the Library of Babel. To them, of course, we must add the billions of iterations of every other book ever written. And to this, finally, we must add all of the books that are mere possibilities: the random jumbles of characters, the exhaustion of every possibility of twenty-six letters and blank space that can fill a few hundred pages. Every book ever written, or that will ever be written, or that can conceivably be written is somewhere in the stacks of the Library of Babel. But good luck finding the one you’re looking for.

I learned about the Library of Babel from Jorge Luis Borges, but I’m not sure what he wants me to take from his image of this labyrinth of text. It certainly makes me think about the discrimination involved in knowledge, and it frightens me by making this discrimination seem necessary. I wonder how fanciful the Library of Babel seemed to Borges, appearing, as it does, so close to literal now. Likely, he saw it coming in some sense. I am not only referring to the more banal comparison of his all-but-endless library to our ever-expanding internet. I am also referring to the inescapably ruthless choices we must make in order to pull knowledge out of the morass of pure possibility.

They say, and rightly so, that information literacy is essential to twenty-first century citizenship. What Borges and I know is that the twenty-first century citizen will have to get used to wandering in the stacks of the Library of Babel. Our ability to find something readable will have everything to do with our ability to avoid an onslaught of nonsense.

Oddly, human beings have a long-standing and fool-proof method for avoiding nonsense, namely, tradition. There has been nonsense longer than there have been seventy-five pages of Google search results. Nonsense is, after all, everything that is unknown—and there’s always been plenty of that. Our traditions are, among other things, beacons in the Library of Babel. They tell us where the meaningful books can be found, where the precious volumes lie. And they lead us to the same books every time, which is precisely the rub.

Because if the internet is our Library of Babel, it is still a relatively comprehensible compendium. The vast majority of Google results are, technically, readable. And many of us think that there is still a lot more edifying stuff that needs to go online. In truth, our library may grow vast without being flooded by the pure gibberish of Babel. This possibility, however, makes the job of tradition that much more difficult. Our library, as it were, is ablaze with so many beacons that we risk blindness trying to see them all. We will have to confront what a tradition so easily becomes when it burns too close to another tradition, namely, discrimination.

Discrimination is prejudice, and discrimination is taste. As we continue to expand our library, so will we be forced to refine our discriminations. My postscript, then, is to those who are teaching literacy in the information age: Know the taste of your own prejudice, because you are already teaching both. The children of the twenty-first century know your knowledge is the prejudice of tradition, and they don’t mind as much as you might think. What they mind is when you pretend that your traditions will be enough for their world. Our library may not be Babel, but it is something new—and there is no tradition for new things. Only traditions that acknowledge their prejudice will be pulled from the stacks and read by our children as knowledge.

Beef

I’ll accept the standardized exams because I expect my own kids to ace them. I’ll accept the data collection because this is the twenty-first century and to forgo data analysis on behalf of our students is to deny them one of the chief privileges and principal powers of modernity. I will accept explicit instruction because, in the end, it is still the teacher’s job to make things clear. I believe in reading skills because I believe I have them. No, if gripes were a meal, all of this would be little more than salad.

I’ll get used to this enormous edifice, poured from the same mold as prisons and sanitariums but still a home away from home. I’ll wince and endure the oddly-timed but evenly spaced electronic shrieks that go by the euphemism bells. I’ll make use of these sparse, never-were and loveless texts because I don’t need more than a sheet of loose-leaf to blow your mind. I’ll turn a blind eye to the absence of the enormous little niceties that make school bearable for all the squares: teams, clubs, dances, plays, bands, committees and all the frivolous accompaniments of grandeur.

I’ll accept the fact that it’s just a job. I’ll choose my battles and draw my lines in the sand. I admit my utility, and sympathize with the many uses to which my colleagues are put. I’ll go home at the end of the day, as if I lived in the suburbs. I’ll get real and be practical and do what I have to do.

So what’s my beef?

I’ll have to think about that.

Mr. Stickfigure is Back

Mr. Stickfigure is back, and more confused than ever. What the hell is it that I teach?

On the students’ report cards it says ENGLISH. On teacher programs it says ELA, short for English Language Arts. And according to a million pages of pedagogical confetti, I am a teacher of literacy. This last title will be my straw man for today. And believe me, this scarecrow is a fire hazard.

The New York State English Language Arts Exam is a devilish assessment. When I started teaching, a grizzled English vet said of the ELA, “And now they’ve made this fucking test that can’t be cheated!” Since he was the type of bilious, weary pessimist I flattered myself to despise at the time, it took me three years to see how right he was. That was when I spent my first week scoring the written portion of the ELA in the district office.

Scoring the ELA is a secure and ritualized affair. Official scorers are never within arms reach of the exam papers that come from their own school. Instead, they toil in small clusters, comparing the work of anonymous students to rubrics and anchor papers. After enough hours of scoring, you begin to feel the data moving through the computer part of your brain—the supercomputer part, the part that is the envy of the merely electronic device that scores the multiple-choice questions.

Human grey matter is the only computer than can perform the calculations necessary to score written exams. But make no mistake, it is calculation we perform, and our output is as pure as raw, binary data. All of this talk about the subjectivity of human scoring is based on a misunderstanding of scale. We marvel at the objective wonder of computer-aided assessment. What we are forgetting is that even computers can’t handle raw, binary data.

It takes an incredible amount of sophisticated redundancy to get a computer to reliably distinguish between A, B, C and D. The first million operations may be flawless, but before long, there’s a glitch. An electromagnetic surge, intermolecular friction, sunspots. A 1 becomes a 0 and a B becomes an A. The reality of data loss is actually what proves the wonder of our technology, which is over-engineered to withstand the loss. It is hard enough for a machine to master its ABCDs, which is precisely why we can’t trust an essay to an insentient computer.

Yes, when you score the written portion of the ELA, your emotions do occasionally swell and cloud judgment. You champion an iconoclast, give the benefit of the doubt to a kindred spirit, strike down a boastful persona. Occasionally it happens, and skews the results. Given the aggregate complexity of the calculations being performed, these subjective lapses amount to an acceptable margin of error. Meanwhile, the human scorer’s brain is leased for the processing of raw data.

After enough scoring, you begin to see the minds of the children behind the papers. More, you begin to see their classrooms, their teachers, their bulletin boards. You see their halls and their auditoriums. Finally, you see all of the way out onto the street and right back into their homes. Yes, these visions are colored by your personality and your prejudices. But when you score the ELA, you’re not judging homes and streets and halls. You’re not even judging classrooms or teachers or individuals. Your task is a simple as it can be made: Decide, on a scale of 1 to 4, to what extent the words on the page imply the students’ ability to express their reading comprehension in written form. And don’t let the generality of this description mystify you. If you’ve made it this far, you would score a 4 on the New York State ELA. It’s as simple as that.

For official scorers of the ELA, panoptic and panoramic visions of the educational landscape are a byproduct of our relentless computation. These images may exceed the margin of error, but they are enough to get a sense of the big picture. What they’ve done, like the old goat insisted, is make a test that tests how well you’re educated. Mr. Stickfigure is here to tell you that his astral presence has witnessed a hundred teachers try every trick in the book to raise their 1s and 2s to 3s and 4s. No dissection and reconstruction of the test and its peculiar format, no battery of last-minute strategies, no school, district, city or state-wide assault on the ELA itself will budge more than a few 1s and 2s. The only statistically reliable assurance of 3s and 4s is a good education.

Which is what makes literacy instruction so confusing to me. Suffice it to say that for teachers of 1s and 2s, the shadow of 3 and 4 looms large across our path. In this metaphor, it is the ELA itself that causes the eclipse. Knowing that light is on the other side, we stare into darkness and prepare our children for the night. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, these are not labels, these are geography, community, family. But if all of this is the purview of literacy instruction, we are going to need a little more light to work with. We will have to come out from behind the ELA so that we can see just how much distance we’re expected to cover in 90 minutes.

The English Language Arts exam tests the art of living in the modern world. You can disagree with me, but the fact that you are here to do so speaks to my point. Would you trade your ability to read and disagree with me for a million dollars? No? Well, you’re a 4, you’ve got it made. You are wealthy in the currency of the language of power. If it is my job to transmit this wealth to my poor students, I’m going to need a lot more to invest in than the image of the ELA exam. I’ll trust the ELA to tell me when my students are 4s, but I don’t trust it to tell me how to get them there.

And yet the ELA has spoken to me with the intimacy of nerves and neurons about what should not be done. We should not treat our 1s and 2s as though they need to earn 3s and 4s on the ELA. We should treat them like we treat 3s and 4s. But 3s and 4s don’t come from English classrooms alone. Where they go to school, English classrooms must justify themselves despite the test. The mission of such schools and such classrooms is to pamper the intellects of their 3s and 4s, an assignment that calls for more than the gruel of remedial instruction. Our poor 1s and 2s live on nonfiction passages and 3-Step Methods, main ideas and processes of elimination, explicit instruction and leveled libraries.

The ELA exam accurately reflects the student’s general level of reading comprehension. If we don’t like what we see, I don’t understand why we keep staring into the mirror.

Signs from the City

"Five Star"


"True Love is Rare"

The Categorical Imperative Redux

I’m really not sure what Kant was up to as a philosopher, but as an aphorist I find him very useful. Allow me to paraphrase one of Kant’s aphorisms and lay no further claim to knowledge of his philosophy:

You should act in such a way that if your actions were to become universal laws for the actions of all people, you would be satisfied.

It’s true that a good idea transcends history; good ideas will be thought again. But to transcend history is to court irrelevance, and a good idea is meaningful insofar as it enters history right down to the blood and bone. I’m not enough of a historian to know where the categorical imperative fit in Kant’s time, and I’m not enough of a philosopher to blame my own inferences on his discourse. But I will say that now, right here in the marrow of history, it’s time to consider whether we can live with ourselves or not.

It’s hard to even think about what it would be like if our actions established the rules that other people had to obey. For my part, I can barely get through the Ten Commandments before I want to reserve some inalienable right for myself alone. Stare long enough at the categorical imperative and you will have to admit that you can dish it out, but you can’t take it. I don’t know if it’s a good idea, but the imperative is a powerful one: it confronts your soul upon consideration, and it does not even need to be real.

Just as the Ten Commandments remind us that God’s laws cannot be kept by human beings, so the categorical imperative makes us realize that we can’t make our own universal laws, either. Unlike the commandments, however, the imperative does not offer a savior—unless it begs one. In any event, perhaps it is time, again, to look at whether we would ever want to live in a world where the privileges we reserve for ourselves became the inalienable rights of everyone else. Think about it for a while and history does indeed get in the way of a good idea. Because it’s in history where we find that there just isn’t enough privilege to go around, which means that it’s impossible to live up to our own good ideas.

Go a day in such a way that your ways are worthy of universal law. At the end of the day, whether you make it or fail, you will have only scratched the surface of your new imperative. Now, begin to imagine the world where other people make the laws for you. This is when it starts to get funky. These people, they don’t know the real you—your hopes, your dreams, your reasons and excuses. All they know is what they see, and most of them don’t even see you. They see the spot on the map where you are, and you will be granted no more depth of observation than that spot.

If you’re fortunate, all those people will already see things your way: When your actions become universal laws, your best bet is to be nice. But what if some of those people are willing to rumble, regardless, meaning that they’re not afraid of what gets done unto them? All it would take is one person who feels she’s been robbed and doesn’t mind a fight.

The world, of course, has billions of people who feel they’ve been robbed. Of those billions, there are millions who are not afraid of a fight. Obviously, therefore, Kant’s categorical imperative is categorically impossible. What makes universal human law impossible is actual human law. It is actual human law that holds millions of people at bay. And these people will not be satisfied just to play nice, because they have nothing nice to play with and nothing to lose. So if the categorical imperative is impossible to realize, it’s still worth wondering if that means you’re lucky. I know I am.

Teacher, Thou Servant, Part 3

Read Part 1

Read Part 2

Despite that fact that industrialization created modern public education, education itself has not benefited from industrial techniques. Industrial techniques are those that increase the productivity of the worker, but a single educator today can’t educate any more students than she could a century ago. While a mediocre factory-worker produces more and more shoes with each industrial innovation, a good teacher still gets flustered when they cram more than thirty kids in her classroom. If we were keeping pace with widgets, we’d all teach in arenas and the Jumbotron would take care of most of the hard work.

The implications of this educational supply curve are myriad. The one on my mind at the moment, however, is the very strong possibility that we haven’t learned anything new about teaching in the last two hundred years. I’m inclined to a Marxist reading of Dewey, his descendants, and his detractors. And a Marxist reading would, perhaps, be too good for the pile of garbage that is written for the professional development of educators. (Servant, this is what they see fit to serve you!) In any event, Dewey’s progressive education seems to have as much to do with, well, progressivism as it does with teaching. Perhaps he was an originator of educational ideas; or maybe an industrial society with a progressive strain is likely to produce a philosopher who comments upon education.

But what educator doesn’t think we need new ideas in education? And what’s wrong with progressive democracy, the best ideal to have been wrestled from the clutches of industry? The only thing wrong with our philosophy, as with all philosophy, it that it makes us forget our history. Our history is not the history of industry. Our history ended when industry began, at the moment of our creation.

Our history ended then because that is the moment we were born. We are all, we teachers of public education, younger than the cotton gin, siblings to Dewey himself. We are new upon the world, and like all newborn souls, philosophy must guide us where tradition does not. But industry, born only moments before us, has created its own history, a history we have not been able to keep pace with. Here we are, doing what no one has ever done before, exactly the same way it has always been done: a few students at a time. What no one has done before is try to teach everyone in the world (universal compulsory education). Other than that, things are the same. We assist in the raising of children according to the dynamic needs of the one and the many. History describes how this dynamic varies, but our history has been foreshortened in relation to the industry that created us. Thus, in a twist of fate, we have as much to learn from ancient history as we do from our own lives.

To think historically, one must first accept the distance and difference of time. It is profoundly ahistorical to find the same thing in the past that you see today. And yet we mustn’t forget our own premise: Difference is the evidence of history. For my part, I have yet to meet or hear of the human being that seems so different from me. Not so different, that is, that I can’t watch the way they raise their children to see if there’s something to learn about teaching.

Yes, we should resist positing similarity before difference. But the history of teaching does not parallel the history of its own maker. Or rather, we have a half-history, told to appease the historical consciousness. It is the story of our emergence as an institution of universal compulsory education. This story is important, and it is, indeed, a history: It includes our panoptic architecture, our regular bell-schedules, our legal and hygienic procedures. And yet these are all but the setting for what we like to call the job of teaching. The job itself has changed less in the last hundred years—two hundred, a thousand—than most jobs that people do. It’s easy to get swept up in the excitement and pretend that the way we do things has changed over a few hundred years. But, no, that is the history of our books and our buildings. The history of what we actually do doesn’t even register across such a small scale.

The history of teaching belongs to the history of human families, and we are closer to matters of raw evolution than we are to the industry that created us, or anything else so young. Teacher, if you want to know the secret of teaching, consider how you serve your families before you bother with the next best practice. You can count on that rule of thumb, because it won’t change in your lifetime or in a thousand years.

Teacher, Thou Servant, Part 2

Read Part 1

Those who can do, do. Those who can’t, teach.

--Old Saying

The old adage is an insult, and it is true. No amount of truth can disguise the fact that this is the bromide of a vindictive student; yet no pedagogical sophistry can change the fact that teachers don’t do, we teach. The difference is entirely one of definitions, of course. The doing that is implied, I presume, refers to the actions of important people. The actions, it follows, that unimportant people like teachers teach their students about. Put more simply, the implication is even harder to deny: Teachers teach Shakespeare, we don’t write it.

The epistemological litigator in my mind is quick to say, Yeah, and so what? It’s not like our crabby ex-students are doing so much with their lives, either. (Whose fault is that, teacher?) Tell me about those who can do, do when you’re telling me about something you’ve done, son. Until then, let’s accept insignificance as a part of the human condition and consider that people in general don’t do much worth teaching about. At least some of us teach about it, is my litigator’s rejoinder.

His job is to take my side, of course, just like my job is to teach students about what someone else actually did. I won’t waste my breath denying it, but I will take the time to point out that not everybody can do this job of not doing (teaching). Part of this job is to be obsequious, let us remember. We are the nanny with her fingers near the infant’s throat; we must be trusted to act with our special capacity to bear insults on behalf of our expertise. It is our expertise, after all, that makes us necessary, and a necessity that flaunts its status is a sign of starvation. We are not involved, as teachers, in the luxuries of doing, the art of doing, the war of doing. We are basic—staples, paint, bullets.

In a world of luxuries, people do not want to be reminded of necessity. Because what is a necessity, if it isn’t proof that we are not self-sufficient? The pang of hunger is our reminder that we are ever-incomplete, and so it is among our chief desires to escape an empty stomach. And once we have eaten, we find that bread alone is not enough to make us whole, and that we need other things, too. And these needs are the same as the first: they cannot be ignored until they are satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until we can ignore them. The old adage about teachers is an expression of this ambivalence toward necessity.

The nanny with her hands near the infant’s throat is emblematic of all servitude. She is trapped, not because she has accepted her role as servant, but because she has accepted her nobility. She, most of all, knows the power she possesses. She can end a dynasty with the snap of her fingers. But she also knows that that is all she can do. She can build no empire of her own by destroying this one, because the master will wreck the whole world, and himself with it, before he lets a servant rule. Indeed, the master will do this for much less than infanticide. Any overt reminder of his heir’s vulnerability is enough to endanger the servant, which is world enough for most. And even when it is not, the only nobility worth noting is the one that refuses to destroy the world for its own sake. (I’m sure Nietzsche would disagree; or perhaps he would get the point.) In any event, the deadly hands of many nannies have been stayed through no fear of personal death. Just as often, I’m sure, they were given pause by the vision of a world deprived of something it needs. Or rather, the world as it is, deprived of what it is made of.

The world is made of many hierarchies, each of which bears some resemblance to servitude. Servants are the necessities of masters, and masters hate being reminded of this as much as they love the luxuries of their position. When the servant is a teacher, the master is wont to say, Those who can do, do. Those who can’t, teach. Teachers would do well to heed this as a reminder of where we came from.

Teacher, Thou Servant, Part 1

I.

A scene from Deadwood captures it beautifully:

A rich woman asks a question of the little girl that is her ward. The little girl smiles brightly and nods in answer. The little girl’s teacher, a young woman, stands beside her. The teacher rests her hand on the girl’s shoulder and murmurs, “Answer in words, please.”

All other context aside, what strikes me is the delicate precision of the teacher’s tone. Her message is disciplinary, but her position is deferential. Her voice conveys both the tender sternness of her duty and the requisite deference due her employer. And yet, the relationship is more than employer and employed. In educating the little girl, the teacher is taking on the rich woman’s role as mother, and she anticipates the rich woman’s envy. This is a good teacher, though, and she does indeed know her role. She is a highly-trained servant, and she emotes perfectly for the part. She speaks with enough insistence to do the job the rich woman can’t—or won’t—do. Still, she speaks softly, she says “please,” and she confines her comments to the subject of her expertise. The scene is historical fiction, but it captures a historical moment in education.

Historical moments are moments that destroy mythology. We speak of myths in different ways, it is true. Sometimes, we refer to myths with reverence, like we speak of ancestors. At other times, however, myths are no more than prejudices. It turns out that history is the force that makes myths into misconceptions. History both destroys and discredits mythology by revealing it as simply untrue. It is simply untrue, for instance, that teachers of the past were allowed greater disciplinary freedom with their pupils than today’s teachers. And yet the myth of the Age of the Wooden Paddle is still alive and well among contemporary educators. Whether we pine for the day of the ruler-across-the-knuckles or pride ourselves on having progressed beyond such a barbaric practice, we still believe that teachers used to be able to beat their students into submission.

When my dad first started teaching, parents told him, “Beat the boy if you have to.” As a parent, Dad was not above a spanking. As a teacher, however, he wondered why parents didn’t want to take care of their own beatings. Or, I suppose, why their own beatings weren’t enough to get the job done. Maybe this anecdote proves the myth of the good old days of discipline, but I don’t think so. I think what it proves, if anything, is that parents have always considered it their right to tell teachers what to do. Put thus, it may sound more familiar to contemporary teachers. The only thing worse than a parent who is not involved in their student’s education, we know, is a parent that is too involved. What is striking, however, is that it has always been this way.

The first myth that is destroyed by history is the myth of recurrence. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it is not a historical comment. To the historical consciousness, everything under the sun is new, every day. History, in other words, is time insofar as it makes a difference. The first thing we suspect, then, is anything that has always been the same. And yet history is also genealogy, and it is, indeed, the study of where we came from. Time may be what changes everything, but it may also be the only thing that changes. In any event, teachers come from somewhere, and we do not escape the place we came from.

We are from a class of highly-skilled servants and dangerous slaves.

II.

What makes us dangerous is that we specialize in certain kinds of nurturing. This is the same as to say that we specialize in certain aspects of parenting, and are, therefore, surrogate parents to our students. As surrogates, we accept carefully defined limits to our authority as parents. The purpose of these limits is to prevent the usurpation of the true parents by the teacher. Thus, teaching is a dangerous human activity because it threatens to replace ancestral relationships with economic ones. The day the first teacher taught a lesson was the day we decided we could live with this danger.

Nevertheless, living with dangers does not diminish them, and history is replete with the destruction wrought by teachers. History itself is a destruction wrought by teachers. What we have destroyed is our old myths, and what we have given you in return is everything you have.

This is true, and if you don’t believe it, maybe someday I’ll explain.

III.

As teachers, are we not public servants?

As teachers, are we not servants?

The only difference is the word “public,” and all that means is that we don’t work for a rich lady from Deadwood.

Mr. Stickfigure on the Perils of Being a Dilettante

I.

On the night of my eighth grade graduation—an affair whose celebratory vigor I have only seen matched in Brooklyn—Dad took me aside. “As you go through life, you will see that you can do this and this and this”—he pulled fates from thin air with the tips of his fingers—“and you will see that this is beautiful, this is good, that is good. For someone like you,” he said, “the only danger is in there being too many ways to go.”

As I listened, I knew he was right, but I could not see why this fecundity of fortune would ever be a problem. Now, I’ll admit, I’m beginning to guess.

I recently read an article written by a friend of mine who I went to undergrad with and who now teaches college English. The article is a critical review of an art installation, and it is both profound in content and professional in form. I am accustomed to profundity from my friend, but the professionalism of his prose was new and almost startling. And there was no denying what made the difference: ten more years of experience and training in a field of study, ten more years of knowledge. Yes, there was evidence of practice, of the honing of a craft, of my friend’s axiomatic intelligence. What was new to me, however, was the competence with which he handled knowledge. This knowledge, moreover, was knowledge that had been gathered up and worked on for ten years, irreducible to a shorter span of time or fewer pieces of paper than are contained in the thousands of books my friend has gutted over the decade.

What worries Stickfigure, then, is that it was the knowledge, or the implication of this knowledge, that made the piece so well-written. This is by no means to imply that the profundity of ideas was enough to shine through clunky, academic style—quite the opposite. The coherent elegance of the style, rather, seemed inextricable from the vast, coordinated field of knowledge it relied on. This worries me because I’m afraid that if I’m ever going to be a writer, I’m going to have to do more than practice writing.

The dilettante, you see, goes through life hoping that a quick wit and attention to immediate details will somehow compensate for a lack of experience. Given the diverse superficiality of our world, one can, apparently, live to be thirty without really digging in. So Dad was trying to tell me two things, I think. One was that the world would be my oyster. The other was that to find a pearl, you have to dive down deep.

II.

Of course, one does not live to thirty without digging in. Mr. Stickfigure is now neck-deep in balanced literacy, and it’s close enough to his nose that he can smell it. If it wasn’t for the overwhelming stench of decay that permeates urban education in general, the whiff of balanced literacy would now be unbearable.

I wouldn’t let it bother me if balanced literacy wasn’t the best evidence of my own professionalization. Too bad I don’t want to write those big, soft-cover best-practices books that get handed out at study groups and lugged home to be dropped on a pile of un-graded papers. Sorry, Pops, I’m still reaching for fifty fates. In the meantime, I write stuff like this.

III.

And there is the secret side. I went to my ten-year high school reunion, far away from Brooklyn. Many of my old classmates are also teachers by now. As we stood around comparing notes, someone said, “I can’t believe no one has done anything really big.”

Are you kidding? I though. I’ve flipped the world on its head and I walk on what you call the ceiling.

I may be a dilettante, but I’m a patient one. Give me ten more years and I’ll show you something worth the time it took to learn. I’ll show you what only I have ever seen.

Deep Grammars: The Network

In our times, it is important to understand the concept of a network. The need for this understanding flows out of the reality of actual networks and their importance to our world. By actual networks, I mean any of those things we commonly refer to as such: computer networks, professional networks, criminal networks. The question arises, however, as to whether all of these networks—and many more, besides—actually have something in common. It’s not impossible that we are using the same word to describe incomparable things. In a sense, we haven’t proven otherwise until we can define the network as a concept that accounts for all of the things we call networks. And if we are able to come up with such a definition, it won’t be because of our rhetorical dexterity. No, such a definition can only be provided by history itself.

The concept of a network has much to do with the concept of a net. A net is composed of strands arranged in a grid. A net cannot be defined merely in terms of its perpendicular and parallel lines, however. At every place where two strands meet, the point of intersection is a point of resistance—not just a geometrically incidental overlap, but the place where a net is proven to be an object. When the body of a fish is captured by the net, it is the points of intersection that hold it back. Without the points of intersection, the net cannot exert force upon the world, and has no ontological reality.

And yet a net is not just the sum of its points, or even its ontological reality. To catch a fish in a net, what is not there and does not exist is at least as important as what does exist. It is absence that allows the water to flow through the net; it is the fact that most of a net cannot exist in order for it to be a net at all. As far as water is concerned, there is no such thing as a net. Fish, however, find nets to be their most voracious predators.

A network, like a net, is created through the coordination of objects and absence in order to achieve a purpose that objects alone could not achieve. Imagine you have a hundred pennies and you throw them on the table. One dollar. Scoop them up and put them in a cup. One dollar. Exchange them for ten dimes. One dollar. There is no way to arrange or exchange the pennies in order to make them worth more than a dollar. This is a poor metaphor for a network, but a good way of proving that we do recognize certain objects as having intrinsic value which cannot be increased or decreased by organizing the objects in relation to each other. A network can do this, however, and does so by definition.

In our times, it is important to know if you are dealing with objects that are part of a network. Perhaps, like pennies on a table, you are working with objects that merely happen to have landed side by side. But if you are involved in a network, you better know that there’s a lot more going on than what you see.

Mixed Criticism

Mr. Stickfigure is no secular humanist, but he reads evolutionary imperatives in human actions. It is possible to feel the genetic switches clicking on and off, pushing and pulling animal energy in bursts of immediate either/or reactions. One of the things we have evolved is the use of emotion as a sensory organ. Like all sensory organs, it works both ways, translating the world for our brains, which then prepare our bodies for the world.

On parent-teacher afternoon, I passed a teenager in the hall. He was obviously older than our middle school students, but not enough to be the accompanying sibling of one of our students. As I passed, I had no trouble overhearing the teenager say to his friend, “Rad, dude! That’s so rad!” This was when evolution switched on in Mr. Stickfigure’s brain.

“Hey, come here for a second,” I said. The kid paused and then approached, his eyes steely and challenging.

“Yeah, what’s up?” he said. We stood, our eyes nearly level, arms across our chests.

“The last time I heard someone say ‘rad’ was in 1984,” I said. “So I thought you might have been talking to me.”

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Are you sure?” I said. “I haven’t heard anyone say that word around here unless they were talking about my sideburns.”

“Okay,” he said, “I was talking about you.”

The exchange was an evolutionary moment in two senses. The first is literal, insofar as we were involved in an emotional exchange with a trajectory towards death. I had chosen this path for us, because I had chosen not to ignore the lad’s comments like I probably should have. And yet, like any fool who bristles when called “chicken,” a fear of my own flight mechanism propelled me to escalate.

But also in the exchange, I could see that I have evolved, too. I could read his mind, and it seemed fair to me: Don’t talk to me like I’m some little kid from this school, you funny-haired freak, and don’t talk to me like I’m scared of you. And, there may have been a touch of, Maybe you should be scared of me. And why not? I might as well be from 1984, for all I look like someone around whom you should hold your tongue. The young man’s interests did not seem to entail my only small claim to authority, which is being a fully certified nerd.

Though the lad was not acting like an adult, he had succeeded in ensuring that I wasn’t, either. But unlike middle-school students, he knew the game he was playing: He had been talking about me, and he wasn’t going to get trapped into lying about it like he was afraid of the consequences.

I let my arms drop first. I asked him what high school he went to. He told me. He spoke with the programmed-response of the student that was still in him, though the man of the streets that he is becoming seemed to regret having answered so quickly. And I saw something else in his eyes as we spoke: it was a kind of emancipation. There was a decision already made staring out from his face with a sincerity that was not mirrored in my own eyes. The next afternoon, the same young man walked past the school while I was having a cigarette. I greeted him from across the street, and he offered the same stony stare as he passed.

Mr. Stickfigure is no gangster, but part of him believes the same thing as that young man: a man is a man, and that means he will kill you. Nor is Mr. Stickfigure a proper feminist, but he sees how our evolutionary danger-mechanisms are shaped and contained by sex in the human species. Man and woman, we have made ourselves in the image of fight and flight. Perhaps as pure animals we are all killers, or all survivors, but as man and woman we kill and survive.

As human beings, we have a history that is all our own, across which evolution has barely had time to budge. We are the same animals we always were, though we remember little of our younger days. All human change and difference is working with the same evolutionary elements it always has, which means that evolution alone will never account for our history.

And yet, our history will always have to account for evolution. All history has to encode the inequities of biological survival, even the history of equality. The historical search for equality has led us to observe and define the ways in which we control inequality in order to make ourselves into human beings. Many of our histories, some would say all of them, have managed the existence of human beings through the dynamic roles of man and woman. The part of the human animal that chooses whether to fight or fly has been controlled by preemptively assigning the functions to gender. History, much of history, is the history of men who fight, and women who survive.

History is not determined by evolution, but it always works with it. Every culture ever to exist is evidence of this work. There is a culture currently in existence, for instance, that has moved the fight or flight mechanism beyond male and female into the realm of law. According to the law, it is the citizens’ duty to flee and the duty of the legal authority to fight. Historically speaking, this is a feminization of the social order. That is to say that citizens in general are called upon to restrain their fight response in favor of fleeing. Those who participate in this culture agree to this deferral of aggression because the law assures them that the aggression of others will be controlled, whether they agree or not.

Recently, I spoke with another guest at our school, or rather, he spoke to me. He was considerably older than the young man, and had, apparently, considerably more authority than me. “This is unacceptable!,” he said, managing be both imperious and conniving at once. “That is unacceptable!” What is unacceptable, I thought, is that you think you can talk to a grown man in that way without getting your face punched in. Mr. Stickfigure doesn’t have to kick your ass to put you in your place, old man, but don’t forget that he could if he wanted to. The young man and I had agreed on this point, and I’ll concede the stronger resolve to him. As for the old man, well, I’m not a kid, either. I’ve read some Richard Wright and I know what you are, too. You’re an American type—the boss who has forgotten the history of bosses. The history of bosses is the history of the strongest animals, the alpha males and females that have driven species since before walking apes were a twinkle in the eyes of some ancient predator.

In a culture such as this, weak men can become powerful. They can also forget that theirs is only a culture among cultures. Among cultures, that is, that still believe a man is a man, and that means you have to be ready to fight.

Assessment and Instruction

Mr. Stickfigure is not a properly qualified statistician, which is perhaps why I do not fully understand the connection between assessment and instruction. Or rather, I understand that there is virtually no necessary connection between the two modes, which, I’m sure, seems like ignorance to some. Assessment, I gather, has to do with observing and evaluating where students stand in relation to given knowledge or abilities. Instruction, I assume, has to do with the stimuli and activities provided to the students in order to move them from where they stand to somewhere else. That, so far as I know, is the only necessary connection between instruction and assessment: in order to move students forward, we must first know where they stand.

Assessment is a difficult process, so difficult, I think, that we tend to think we have achieved more than we really have when we make an accurate assessment. The process of planning, administering and evaluating assessments can be so arduous as to make us believe that, the assessment being done, instruction will follow as a matter of course. “Teaching to the test” is a literal example of this tendency, but insofar as we all pretend to know that teaching to the test is a bad thing, it is a bad example for this discussion.

So let us imagine something else: Sometime in the late 20^th century, a group of distinguished educators lock themselves in a room over the summer. The room itself is enormous, because in addition to the educators, it houses millions of texts, carefully typed on letter-sized paper. In fact, the room holds exactly one copy of every text ever published that is less than 20 pages in length. Methodically, painstakingly, the distinguished educators read each text. As they read, they sort the texts into piles based on their common attributes. Occasionally, they take a break to compare the piles, and sometimes they push small piles together to make bigger piles when they find that their attributes match. After much combing and sorting, all of texts have been grouped into one of five piles based upon criteria that are observable on the page. One of the piles, for instance, contains all of the narratives, everything with a unified plot, setting, characters and theme. Another pile contains all persuasive writing, everything ever written to justify an opinion or change a point of view. Surprisingly, with very few exceptions, almost all of the texts in the big room fit into one of the five piles. These piles are then named, their controlling criteria described, and the whole set is called Performance Standards in Writing. Through much hard work, the educators have arrived at both what students need to be assessed for and what they have to be instructed to do.

Criticism and science are often both misunderstood in the same way. Through their work, both critic and scientist offer an assessment. The critic offers a critique, the scientist offers data. Both are claims to the truth, like all assessments. People, however, are not as interested in truth as we often claim to be. Truth alone rarely satisfies us. Or rather, we demand more than just truth from what is true; we demand use-value. Truths without an accompanying utility do not register on the scale of common knowledge. This kind of truth is for the specialist, the fetishist, the junky. In fact, we are so accustomed to discounting inconsequential truths that we have developed a strange cultural habit: If something breaks the event horizon and is received by us as truth, then we automatically assume that a use-value accompanies that truth. If something is true, in other words, it must be useful.

This accounts for our simultaneous attraction to and distrust of both critics and scientists. Critics, after all, are only the most persuasive critics: These are the best at taking the world as we thought we knew it and superimposing new truths over its surface. These are the ones who can seduce us into doing what we do not often want to do, which is see things in a new way. Science, for its part, makes us see the world in a new way, and much more literally than criticism. Nevertheless, neither data nor critique is the same as a plan of action, which is what we expect of useful truths. The fact that critics and scientist make us see new truths without providing a plan of action lies at the heart of our discomfort with these characters.

Nevertheless, truth prevails, and a good assessment suggests its own applications. Or, so it would seem by the way we so willingly leap from evidence to implementation in the aftermath of a really juicy truth. In the case of the teaching of writing, we let the distinguished educators do most of the work for us in assessing the Performance Standards. Upon being provided with the five different writing genres—sorted as objectively as words can be sorted—we were asked the question: Now, how will you teach the writing genres?

Our answer is a tautology: By teaching the writing genres. That is, after all, the essence of explicit instruction, rubrics and the writing process. Mr. Stickfigure, for his part, is still stuck at square one. I agree that it’s true that students should be able to write confidently in each of the five genres, and I agree that the five genres aren’t the worst way to categorize a wide range of texts. I just don’t see what these facts prove about how we should teach students. As a teacher, however, I have often pretended I do. I’m addicted to use-value, too. At this point, I’m willing to keep all the standards and assessments as a sign of good faith. But I’d like to stop pretending and start a whole new discussion about writing instruction, this time, with a less presumptuous attachment to the truth.

Stickfigure In Motion

Mr. Stickfigure Watches Himself Write a Paragraph

Note: The following experiment should have special ironic signficance for practictioners of the psuedoscience know as balanced literacy. Of course, this should not be taken as an endorsement of any competing pseudoscience.

When writing a paragraph, how much of it do you need to know when you begin, and how do you know when you’re done?

Or, when starting an argument, how much of it do you need to know when you begin, and how do you know when you’re done?

1. The point you want to make . . . an assertion. That’s the “topic sentence” style, anyway. Let’s try it.

Life is a dream.

2. Then, something else . . .

Life is a dream. A dream can seem so real that it feels like life. But when we waken, life reminds us that we were only dreaming. Or rather, life forces us to forget the dream, forces us to remember as a dream what we dreamed as life. When we waken, life reminds us that only it is real, because it is impossible to wake up into a dream. Or maybe it happens every night. In my real life, I often forget my dreams. But I forget real life whenever I sleep. My life encompasses my waking life and dreams, like a full day encompasses both day and night. So life is a dream like day is night.

What happened there?

At the beginning, the point you want to make is a catalytic assertion, the force that sets in motion what will eventually become a new assertion. The new assertion is not the equivalent of the catalytic assertion, meaning it is not a comparable statement. It is, rather, an argument, representing the flourishing of the original assertion into some sort of dynamic entity. As a dynamic entity, its ultimate purpose can only be achieved by being more than the sum of its parts.

On one level, this mean no more than to say, “A sentence is different than a paragraph.” However, the conditions of this difference are our object of study, so they will not be taken for granted here. But we might as well use what we already know about this elemental distinction:

A paragraph is composed of sentences and so is, by definition, longer. A paragraph says more than a sentence.

There are different classes of sentences within a paragraph, depending upon the imperatives of the paragraph (as opposed to those of the sentence, alone.) What are those imperatives?

When discussing writing as expression, thought becomes the common currency of the various structural elements of writing. That is only to say that writing can be analyzed as expression of thought. In equating writing with thought we will, of course, pay the price for relying on such a notoriously elusive syllable.

Still, can’t we say that a sentence and a paragraph differ in terms of their relation to the expression of thought? If we can, how so? There is the aforesaid difference in length, and the implication that, insofar as a sentence can express a thought, paragraphs are made up of several thoughts. Conventional wisdom is also that these several thoughts are justified and coordinated by a single controlling thought.

My question is: To what extent can we express the controlling thought of an entire paragraph in a single sentence? If it is possible, what justification is there for the rest of the sentences in any given paragraph? If it is not possible, how would we describe the relationship between the topic sentence (which can no longer be enough, in itself) the other sentences, and the controlling idea (which cannot be the exact same as any of the sentences, alone)?

This is where the topic sentence as the catalytic assertion comes in. It follows from what I am implying that the only thing that can express the thought of a paragraph is a paragraph. But unless we begin writing with an entire paragraph in mind, we begin with an assertion that can be expressed as a sentence, and usually is—usually, at the beginning. This assertion cannot be enough in itself, though it must contain enough energy to eventually produce the paragraph it will become.

Depending on the genre and our experience, frame of mind, etc., we actually do begin writing paragraphs with more or less understanding of what the whole paragraph will look like. A swiftly flowing narrative may pour from us as if we cannot keep up with our full-formed thoughts, as though whole passages leapt unbidden to our minds. Or, our writing may be so formulaic that a single keyword implies not just sentences, not just entire paragraphs, but title, introduction, body, conclusion and copyright.

Then there are times when our assertion is really a catalyst, a small yet defiant motion in the void. In these times, we crawl through our paragraphs like spelunkers or tomb raiders, inching forward in the darkness, waiting for that terrifying moment when the line that connects us with the light is cut and we are left rambling in darkness.

This is, of course, the kind of writing to teach. In this kind of writing, sentences differ from paragraphs not only in number, but in kind and order. Here, there is enough magic between the sentence and the paragraph to make the paragraph worth pursuing. In this kind of writing, the idea that “the topic sentence expresses the main idea of a paragraph” is an insult. If that were true, we’d rather turn in an outline and save our ink for something worth writing.

Metastasis Management 1

Mr. Stickfigure is coining a neologism: metastasis management. Metastasis is the second stage of cancerous growth, the out-of-control stage where the profusion of cells cannot be contained by a single tumor. Management is the regulation of systems and maintenance of disciplines. Put the two terms together and you have accurately described the condition of underperforming schools in our over-managed system.

A Critical Analogy

Wanting to open a book store, you buy a small storefront near the park. Previously, the storefront had been a bakery, so your first order of business is to turn an old bakery into a book story. You remove the ovens, sinks and most of the counters. You clean the grease traps and hire contractors to remove them, along with the exhaust hood from the old stove. They also take the unused refrigerators and freezers. Next, you install attractive bookshelves, a display window and a small reading room. You replace the tile floor with carpet and the customer’s bathroom becomes employees only. Then, you purchase your original inventory and decide how to organize it: bestsellers on the wall by the front door, true crime a little further down on the same side, and the New Age spiritualism section is in the back corner. Once you have your first batch of promotional bookmarks ready to dispense with each purchase, you are ready to do what you started out to do—open a book store.

This analogy, of course, has everything to do with running a school. More to the point, it has everything to do with changing a failing school into a successful one: A failing school is both an abandoned bakery and an unopened book story. Educators who are working in failing schools have two qualitatively different jobs to do before their schools can succeed. The first job is to put a working system into place; the second job is running a successful school. You can’t do the first job in the same way you do the second one, but you have to do it first. Just like cleaning grease-traps has nothing to do with running a bookstore, fixing a failing school has nothing to do with running a successful one—except for the fact that it must first be fixed before it can be successful.

I’m sure the educators who work at Stuyvesant High School would insist that it takes an enormous amount of work to run a successful school, and they would be right to do so. I would only refine it by saying that it takes a lot of work to maintain a successful school. That is, it’s not easy to continuously produce successful students, even when you continuously enroll the most successful students in the city. And let’s not forget that “successful school” is a euphemism for “successful students.” Failing schools produce failing students. In order to become successful schools, they must do all the hard work that any successful school must do. Before this, however, failing schools must make themselves successful. Making yourself successful, in turn, is not the same as being successful. It is, rather, nothing like it. Or, no more than taking a lug wrench to a pipe fixture is like hosting a book signing.

We’re asking a lot of our failing schools. It’s not just twice as much work to make them successful, it’s two essentially different kinds of work. Which is really to say that we’re asking a lot of our failing students. More, much more, than our successful ones. For my part, I say good for us. Those with the most needs deserve the highest expectations. We do not, however, seem to appreciate the enormity of the task we have set for ourselves.

Or, shouldn’t there be a few more bookstores in this neighborhood?

CUSSING one

The single-lane blacktop stretched before us, bleached gray by the early-autumn sun. I walked beside my best friend, Luke, down the road toward his house. The leaf-trees had not yet begun to change, but their hue had been drained by a thirsty summer. The empty road and open woods made us feel brave, and yet the sunshine kept us warm. As we strolled, we talked—maybe the first conversation I ever had. I was seven.

“Did you ever cuss?” I asked.

I never had. I knew the principle vocabulary of cussing, but had never spoken the words. I had never spoken them because I knew they were bad words, an idea I took seriously. Once, I had admonished Nick Kingsley for saying, “S--t!”

“You shouldn’t say that,” I told him. He and several of his big brothers were hunkered in the yard outside of Adam’s shop. “That’s a bad word.”

“I’ll say whatever I d--n well please!” Nick trailed his answer with stream of tobacco spit. He was but one of the childless adults who were my primary sources for foul language. None of the kids I knew cursed, and neither did most of their parents. We had all been told cursing was bad, and for my part I believed it. Even the childless adults helped prove it—cussing was for people who spit chewing tobacco, not for picky eaters.

“No,” Luke said.

“Me neither,” I said. “But do you know the words?”

“Yeah,” Luke said.

It wasn’t true that I had never said the words. I knew that “hell” had a double-meaning, for instance. The acceptable meaning referred to the place where bad people go when they die, the unacceptable one was a bad word. “Damn” and “ass” had similar caveats, but generally, I avoided all three words to play it safe. I had even learned a Sunday school song that went,

And they all went down to Amsterdam

They all went down to Amsterdam

Amster-! Amster-! Shh! Shh! Shh!

You mustn’t say that naughty word. . .

Our voices were taken up by the pale sunshine and the trees left us out of any earshot.

“What’s so bad about cuss words?” I asked Luke. “I mean, if you don’t say them around grown-ups. . .”

“I don’t know,” Luke answered.

“You can’t go to hell for cussing, can you?”

We thought of the people who we’d heard cuss and hoped not.

“I mean, it’s just a word, right?”

“Yeah, it’s just words.”

I don’t remember who went first, or who goaded most, but I hope it was me. Either way, by the time we crossed the dry stones of Little Boulder Creek, I was saying:

“Yeah. ‘Hell.’ What’s wrong with that?”

“ ‘Bitch.’ What’s wrong with that?”

We searched an unspoken repertoire for our next demystification. Shortly, we were left with only alpha and omega, the power words of vulgarity. Noun, verb, adjective, adverb: We spoke them as undifferentiated, all-encompassing bad words.

“ ‘Shit!’ What’s wrong with that?”

“ ‘Fuck!’ What’s wrong with that?”

The only answer we came up with became our new code: don’t cuss around adults. As to the words themselves? Nothing had happened to us when we said them, the sun was still warm, and it was too late to worry about hell.

I had never cussed until that day, and I have never stopped since. It began as an act of will and has become a mode of potent expression and a token of intimacy. I remember that day, however, because it was the closest I have ever been to the language-magic that used to command the gods. That was the day I cast my only spell, changing bad words into just words and trading ancient superstitions for the earthly liberation of my tongue.

Who Cares What People Think?

There is a certain fearsome liberty in being able to say, “I don’t care what you think.” The word think can mean many things, all of them useful. Sometimes, “I don’t care what you think!” is an act of defiance and lonely liberty. Sometimes, it’s the “I don’t care” of Cassandra, preparing herself to watch you go to hell despite her warning. Even if rarely used, the phrase has been a welcome last resort for us all.

Teachers, however, have to care what people think. No stretching of the definition will escape the fact that teachers must change the thinking of their students. Sometimes, we change the way students think about something, a subject, a kata, a drive-shaft. Sometimes, we are even called upon to change the way students think—about anything. Literacy instruction, in essence, is a form of cognitive re-alignment therapy. Or rather, cognitive re-alignment is the implicit objective of literacy instruction.

State learning standards in language arts are demanding, requiring students to produce evidence that they are sophisticated users of texts. Texts include written, spoken and electronic expression. The gearing of state assessments, however, puts the greatest weight on written texts, and on the students as readers. As readers, students must be able to both mine the text for meaning and discuss the text as an object of study in and of itself. This kind of textual sophistication requires language operations that cannot be separated from either logical processes or experiential intuition.

There is disagreement as to the best way to teach textual sophistication. One approach takes the job literally, insisting that students practice logical processes as such. These are often called “reading skills.” However, though reading skills can be assessed, this is not to say we know how to teach them. Another approach sees logical processes as largely incidental to the acquisition of specific knowledge. That is to say, they see the way we think as a byproduct of what we think about. Is literacy the activity of reading and writing, or is it the study of literature? It doesn’t matter, our learning standards want to see evidence of both.

Either way, we have to care what students think, and how they think. And we do care. Our mounting hysteria is the best evidence of our concern. We are faced with a mystery that deepens the more clearly we assess the situation. How do we get students to do this kind of reading, these linguistic operations, that thought process? How, without throwing the problem out of our classrooms like a private school? We know what we want, and we know whether or not we get what we want. But when we don’t get it, when students struggle as readers, what should we do to catch them up?

A lot of emphasis has been placed on “research-based best practices” as a means of getting students to think the way we want them to. Perhaps one of them is good enough to transform struggling readers into proficient readers on a systematic basis. Mr. Stickfigure, for his part, also believes in setting high standards. But I have learned as much about transforming readers from The Autobiography of Malcolm X as I have from any other research: When we can teach the value of a sliver of light upon the page, we will know how to teach students to think. Until then, we must care, and fail.