Teacher, Thou Servant, Part 3

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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

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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.

Hypocrisy and Forgetfulness: Job Skills for a Career in Education

Hypocrisy and forgetfulness are useful skills when properly applied to a career in education. More precisely, the delicate admixture of both skills is a recipe for advancement. Taken separately, each skill is often considered a vice. Together, they work wonders.

Everyone is a hypocrite at some point, and yet no one is a hypocrite on purpose. As children, we learn what hypocrisy is from adults, often before we learn what the word means. We learn it the first time we see, let alone hear, Do as I say, not as I do. If you’re lucky, it’s a shocking realization that adults don’t always practice what they preach. If it’s a shock, it means you were fortunate enough to spend a few years in the land of truth and righteousness—the birthright of all children but the inheritance of only a few. If you’re lucky, hypocrisy will strike you for what it is: a sin. Eventually, however, you will have to accept hypocrisy not only as a sin or even as a skill, but as a necessity. This is when you become an adult and realize that, sometimes, children just need to do what they’re told. It may not be fair, but there are times when that’s the way it has to be.

Adults use different techniques but the same spirit when we lie to each other. However we do it, we are always doing a dirty job that somebody has to do, making the tough decisions, telling white lies to hide dark secrets. This job may chafe our souls or roll off our backs, but we will all get mud on our shoes. Some of us, though, become artisans of dirty work.

All you need for hypocrisy to become a decisive skill is the proper dose of forgetfulness. First, you need to forget that hypocrisy is a sin. Then, you need to forget whatever it was you were lying about in the first place. All adults have been tempted to demote hypocrisy from sin to necessity—such is the desire of any honest sinner. However, to achieve this elision is to pave the road to success. Having forgotten sin, there is no reason not to see hypocrisy as a tactic—something that can be used to achieve other ends. Still, even this is not enough forgetting to do the job right.

The problem with using hypocrisy alone as a tactic is that it is self-evident, we know hypocrites because their words do not match their actions. Or, their words do not match their other words. In everything he says and does, the hypocrite leaves evidence of hypocrisy. The solution is a careful infusion of forgetfulness. If you do it right, you can forget one side of the equation—the words or the actions. After all, with all we say and do, it’s not hard to lose track of a variable from time to time. It’s also not hard to replace them with something contemporaneous but not so contradictory. Rather than piling lies on top of lies, isn’t it easier to just forget the right things? You can’t be lying about what you don’t remember.

Working with children, hypocrisy and forgetfulness will reap their own just harvest. Working with adults in education, however, is like anywhere else: there’s a lot of history and a lot of competition. People keep track of what you say and what you do, and use your actions for their own ends. Meanwhile, the world whirls and you have to cut corners to keep up and even more to stay on top. The hypocrite that properly forgets is neither a hypocrite nor forgetful. No, she is a storyteller. She restates history in this moment’s telling, forgetting what doesn’t fit and matching memories to actions. She recreates the world in an instant. Storytelling is a beautiful art, and when well-told, a story can save the world.

Mr. Stickfigure is ready to follow a forgetful hypocrite with a story worthy of the world.

The rest of you, though, are full of shit—no matter how far it gets you.

Two Questions About Politics

1. What are they saying?

The public face of politics is its rhetorical message, and this message must be understood to understand politics. Political rhetoric is a sophisticated and asymmetrical genre. Like fiction, writing politic rhetoric involves highly specialized skills, while the reading of politics must be generalized as widely as possible. Sloganeering is not just a matter of “empty” rhetoric, it is a matter of basic literacy. So while political writers gear their message to engage the widest audience possible, they will only reach as far as is expedient. If you can’t understand a slogan, you will be written off as a conscious political subject.

But in America, Tocqueville’s land of lawyers, you have to understand whole speeches.
Four-score and seven years ago. . . is part of the basic literacy of American politics. The first question about politics, then, is the same as the first question about poetry: What are the words on the page?

2. Why are they saying what they are saying?

No self-respecting politician or poet would stop with the words on the page, of course. Politicians and other sophisticated readers of politics are not offended by slogans. Sloganeering is a sin only to politically naïve intellectuals. Naïve intellectuals are good at figuring out what politicians are saying, the rhetorical message, but, stopping there, they can only take offense at being treated like the naïve readers of the hoi polloi. The hoi polloi, for their part, get what they need from a slogan: A sense of what their vote is worth this year. A politician also does not mind a slogan, because she will read a slogan the way she reads the whole world. Politicians read the world for clues that betray ulterior motives, and no clue can be so thoroughly written so as to speak only for itself. The most honest, carefully-conceived political speech helps comprise the same field of data as alliterative lies shouted through a bullhorn.

Sophisticated readers of poetry may pick up poems like jewels, cut and finished objects. Readers of politics observe objects in motion, infer tactics and teleology from distance over time, hearing what is said in what is done, and what is done when it is said. Politicians read a protean intertext of objects and actions, and this is the ultimate source of our distrust for them. To read politics in this way is to admit that nothing is finished, nothing is true for everyone, and there is a struggle that has not yet been won. And yet political rhetoric, idiotic slogans and inaugurals alike, always has all the answers. A speech tries to drop like a diamond, a piece of partisan poetry, but even the naïve sense that the sophisticated do not believe in giving away diamonds. No, it’s still bread and circuses. We may be entertained or we may be offended, but we know that politicians don’t spend all of their time tossing pumpernickel through a burning hoop.

If we don’t ask why political rhetoric says what it is saying, we are audience members wondering at the skills of an acrobat. When we begin to read words as moves and moves as purposes, we can no longer be audience to the show. When we read words as moves, we must change to an entirely different metaphor. We must leave the circus tent for the battlefield, a place of terrain and tactics and a place where you can still lose the war. It turns out that one of the jobs of politicians is to establish solid ground for their constituents, a place for them to live as though the battle has been won and to believe that certain things are certain enough to count on.

Political literacy leads to political discontent, now as ever. It is not encouraged in schools, because it rarely transcends the carefully amassed discourse of either rightwing or leftwing politics. Politically sophisticated reading is not ideological, because ideology is what we extract when we ask our first question, What are they saying? When we ask the second question—Why are they saying it?—we find that they are not speaking for this moment alone. We find that the jewels they drop before us have no substance, but are instead movements in a long and deadly game. Discontent follows when political rhetoric no longer answers all of the questions we ask it.

And yet knowledge is power, and it is better to know you ride a plank in the flood than to think you live on dry land. The politically sophisticated reader must give up the consolation of the gods in order to read the intentions of the king. Such is the power and risk of democracy: To know that the king is human and not the voice of god, and to feel the weight of the world that you have allowed the king to carry.

Mixed Metaphor

Hone your skills to the finest point

Because the highest peak has the widest base

Suffer no clowns in your own joint

Because the darkest heart has the brightest face.

Those that know their role

Should slow their roll and mind the pace

If there’s no crime in what you stole

There’s no timing in the race.

Know the presence of a king

But let none stand in your place

Throw your hopes into the ring

And never fear disgrace.

Show your true colors

When mired in dire straights

Flow like soul hot-buttered

and always raise the stakes.

Close no open-hearted

And admire no broken fakes

Finish what you started

and give just what you take.

--Mr S.

Theory and Practice One

Even in education, theory loses out to practice. Sounds great in theory, we say, but it’s just not practical. Anti-intellectualism comes at a price, however, when theory is such a debased tender. We find ourselves leaping from practice to practice in a frantic effort to raise test scores, dragging theory along with us like a campaign banner. No wonder that after thirty years of this jumping and flapping teachers come to regard educational theory as nothing more than the opposite of anything practical. Theory becomes, as it were, that which can never be put into practice.

Theories—even bad ones—are worth indulging. Theories are all we have to prove that we are doing what we do in education on purpose. Before we worry about good theories and bad, we should be sure that we have any theory at all. The absence of a theory is the absence of purpose. Try to define practice without purpose and you will discover why the word theory is still around, despite how impractical we know it to be.

Who’s Taking Care of the Parents?

It is the great fantasy of education that if we can reach children we can change the world. While it is true that when children change the world changes, it is not true that education alone can change children. Not the kind of education we’re dealing with, anyway—public education, national education. Not with our technocratic grasping, reaching for children at younger and younger ages: kindergarten, Pre-K, preschool, daycare. And yet we cherish the hope that our fantasy may yet prove true, that we may yet discover the formula for fixing kids and saving the world. But somewhere between here and prenatal instruction, we will come face to face with the very entities that make our hope a fantasy: the parents. It occurs to me that we have, perhaps, done all we can to catch the kids before their parents mess them up. Perhaps it’s time to deal with the parents.

Many teachers would say that they’ve been saying this very thing for years, though they have done nothing of the sort. What many teachers have done, rather, is complain about the parents of their students and blame them for what teachers cannot handle themselves. Teachers, like everyone else, believe in the holy trinity of education: teacher, student and parent. It is upon these three mighty pillars that we rest all of our work, our talk and our hope. Maybe it’s time to notice that our three mighty pillars are built on the outskirts of town, across the tracks, inches from the gutter. What happens out here is between teachers, students and parents.

Let me be the first teacher to climb down off the platform and take the crowd back downtown. What on earth do teachers have to do with the parents of their students? Even the most involved parents spend much less time around teachers than they do around other adults. Let’s not forget that the parents of our students, by definition, are working with ya’ll all day long. You, the other adults of America, you, who have so generously allowed us to go about our business out here by the tracks, you are directly responsible for the parents of our students. When our students get home, they get home to parents who spent their whole day with you.

Is it fair to blame noncombatants for the mistakes of the parents of our students? Aren’t parents responsible for their own behavior and its effects on their own children? Maybe they are. But are they responsible to come home and tell their kids that what happened today didn’t happen? If they have been disrespected by another adult, is it their responsibility ignore the slight for the sake of their children? Maybe they are. But all this talk of responsibility sounds a long way from talking about how to take care of children. What if, to take care of our children, we had to take care of their parents—man to man, woman to woman, adult to adult? Would we accept that as our new responsibility? Or do we enjoy too much the freedom of not having to care about how other people’s children turn out?

Maybe part of adulthood is not having to care about everyone. It is certainly what makes teachers such odd kinds of adults: we have to care about how everyone turns out, or at least everyone in our class. And after a few years and enough classes, we know that anyone could show up in our class, so we might as well try to figure out how to take care of everyone. It may be a fantasy, but it’s all we’ve got until we get a little help from civilians. Not in the classroom, not as parents of our students. We need a little help from the civilians who are either involved with or avoiding our students’ parents. We could change the world faster if we didn’t have to wait for these kids to grow up.

To paraphrase Andre Benjamin, go and marinate on that for a minute. There’ll be more on this.

Will Mr. Stickfigure Ever Wake Up?

I am so used to being mistaken for an idealist that I often forget to be insulted. Idealism is an accusation, a charge of infantilism leveled by self-appointed realists. Accordingly, reality is that which reduces an ideal to mere illusion. Idealistic children are often told by realistic adults that they will find out, one day, how it works in the real world. Idealistic adults, it follows, have it worse—grown people who still harbor childish hopes.

As children, idealists are irked by the flat promise of a practical fate. Still, we learn to bite our tongues in the presence our pragmatic elders, knowing that we still have more imagination than experience. Quietly, we set our will against the impending doom of the so-called real world. Quietly, we promise that our own experience will prove our dreams and defend our ideals against the onslaught of the future.

Realistic adults do not mean to be such ghouls of fate. Their hearts are attuned to the idealist’s looming disappointment. At worst, they are frustrated by our unwillingness to accept their hard-earned experience as an antidote to our easy faith. Generally, they see themselves as doing a dirty job that must be done. Better to talk someone out of a dream than for experience to crush it without explanation. And, as irksome as they are, these realistic adults are not wrong.

Children who wish to carry idealism into adulthood must come to grips with reality. Reality, in turn, grips back, crushing childish ideals, leaving behind the next generation of realists. Most of us find it easier to submit our imagination to reality than to infuse our experience with dreams. Slowly, the only remaining idealists are children again.

When I started teaching, I felt like a child all over. Veterans told me that I was idealistic and that I would come to learn the reality of teaching. They were not wrong. I have learned enough to know that mere childish idealism does not survive in a ghetto school. Three years. Three years is all a mere idealist can stand. But here I am at seven years, so what I tell you is not hope or conjecture, it is scarred in blood and bone.

Only my best, worthiest ideals have survived. Only the dreams that were never dreams. I hoped, when I began, that all children could be taught, and that I could be happy teaching them. I hoped that the study of language would prove infinitely deep, deep enough for us all to sink into, deep enough for us all to search out the secret currents of love and power. I hoped that everyone was the same as I was as a child—deep thoughts, native action, pure energy. Seven years have tested these hopes and found them strong. These ideals are my surest reality, proven by the very force that was supposed to dispel them—the real world. So if you are still waiting for Mr. Stickfigure to wake up, you have forgotten that he was never sleeping.

Nor does he disrespect his elders. The realistic veterans who told him he was too idealistic were not wrong. Mr. Stickfigure has watched the city deny his ideals for seven years. Seven years witnessing relentless disrespect leveled against his children, their parents and their communities. Seven years of scraps thrown to the ghetto, so that classrooms become like the city itself—block by block—good teacher by bad teacher. Good parent by bad parent. Good people by bad people. Seven years watching people pretend that a few inspiring teachers could ever account for a system and institution in disarray and millions of hearts in the wrong place.

Mr. Stickfigure is here to report that your own kids are being miseducated. Whoever you are, they are your own kids. No, they are you, yourself. They are only ever doing what you would do, or what you could understand doing if you cared to know. That’s the truth, and it cannot be denied due to a lack of experience. But the reality is also a chilling kind of anti-ideal; it is the inextricable assertion that some kids are different enough that they need only be fed scraps. As though if we found a reason for their miseducation, such a reason could excuse it.

What happens in a ghetto school is that people forget who the adults are and what they are supposed to do. This is true both in the school and in the minds of Americans when we think of such a school. What we all forget when we think of ghetto schools is the prime directive of adulthood: “Because I said so.” We forget that the absolute line between adults and children, the boundary that allows us to fall back on our authority as experienced persons, the trump card of the realist, this line cuts both ways. It reflects the ultimate responsibility back on adults, the responsibility of knowing what’s best for our children. Because we said so means that we must take care of those we speak to. We abdicate our authority as adults when we explain our students’ failure as if it were theirs alone.

And yet explaining failure is one of the duties of the realist. With the same voice, we explain the failure of our kids and excuse ourselves from it. We allow the reality of failure to pollute the reality of perfect equality, making of equality an ideal suitable only for children. We count ourselves mature by virtue of pessimism, but relinquish the actual responsibility of adulthood when it comes to our schools. Our realism has become its own reality, not by virtue of being true, but by virtue of having consequences.

The reality of a ghetto school is the reality of lies and appeasement. We lie about the purity of the children we are crushing or allowing to be crushed. We lie in order to appease our adult souls with logic and explanations, excuses for the evidence of our eyes. Mr. Stickfigure has spent seven years in a cyclone of excuses, at ground zero, where the storm touches down and shows just how much damage a bunch of hot air can do. The only reality that has withstood his experience is this: Children want to learn, and they’re just like you. The rest has been the default reality of excuses, lies told loud enough to slander hope and justice, making them mere ideals.

It is in the definition of an ideal that there is really no such thing. But we apply this definition sloppily, politically and selfishly. To call something an ideal is to banish it from reality. To call something an ideal is to prophesize its doom. To call someone an idealist is to dismiss them like a child. So if Mr. Stickfigure sounds idealistic, that’s just how he sounds. This is a grown-up you’re talking to, and as real as it gets.

Brooklyn Bridge Retouched

Talent and Arts in the Curriculum, Pt. 1

I would like to discuss talent carefully. Rather than defending talent as a term or concept, I want to listen to how we use the word and think about what purposes it serves when we speak. More carefully, I want to listen to how we use the word in school and think about how we are defining talent for our students.

When we talk about talent, we are usually talking about something that we are good at. Most commonly, perhaps, we are talking about things we do well without practice, almost by instinct. True, we may say a person has a talent without knowing whether they were born with the gift or gained it through years of hard practice. But we tend to practice what we have a talent for, playing to our strengths. What separates the best athletes from the hardest working athletes is not the amount of practice they put in, it is the talent that lies at the base of all that hard work. So while we do not divorce talent from practice, we favor the notion that many talents are inborn, original or even unlearned.

Many teachers intuit that our use of the word “talent” implies a frighteningly genetic and elitist idea of human potential—you got it or you ain’t. As a counter, we are careful to remind our students that everyone has some talent. In fact, by the time they are in middle school, the kids have heard this platitude so many times that it already rings hollow. Many students wonder when they are going to get their talent, or why the talents they do have seem so much less noteworthy or productive than someone else’s. And such kids don’t fail to notice that most of the time we actually say the word “talent,” we are referring to particular talents, talents that imply a destiny in the adult world. These talents, of course, are not for everyone.

Sometime in sixth grade, I became determined to make myself a comic book artist. I bought the official Marvel Comics drawing guide and set about learning how to draw superheroes with all of the self-discipline I could muster. Slowly, I got better at drawing. Just as slowly, I began to realize that I was nowhere near good enough to draw comic book-quality figures. Perspective and foreshortening baffled me, noses and hands destroyed my erasers and, generally, I was unable to force the pictures in my mind out onto the page. I gave it up, more or less, sometime in eighth grade.

During those two years of self-imposed study, talent became a slippery concept for me. I did not enter my study already convinced of my over-riding talent for the art. Maybe I thought the little jet-fighters I often sketched in my notebook suggested an inner talent—perhaps still latent—that foreshadowed my future as a comic book artist. After two years of purposeful practice, I could draw better than I had ever been able to. I also knew that I was nowhere near good enough for Marvel Comics. It was not that the notion became impossible to me. Rather, as I learned what little I did about drawing, I began to understand just how much more I still had to learn. My sense of what I still did not know outpaced what I felt I had learned. I knew people, younger than me, who seemed to have unconsciously mastered artistic skills that still escaped my grasp. Gradually, I began to see representational art as a talent I did not possess, a head start I did not have. Gradually, I wanted to do other things with my life. Gradually, I let the soft pencils go.

When I started teaching, I began to see how much those two years of fruitless questing had been worth, and I ceased to regret my failure. I hadn’t learned to draw like I wanted to, but it was enough to impress my new students when I need to do a quick sketch in English class. Something had stayed—the vestiges of abandoned training, something still worthwhile. I was only a teacher doing his best to muster a decent sketch, but what struck me was that some students saw my efforts as evidence of artistic talent. Whatever it is, I told them, it’s not talent. No, I learned this from hard work and failure—and thank goodness for it.

For me, the nature of talent has become more elusive with time. I began practicing drawing thinking of talent as both something I might have and something I didn’t actually need, as long as I had the will to learn. Two years later, my will had weakened in proportion to what I had learned, and talent now seemed the necessary and missing ingredient. A decade after that, however, what I had learned about drawing was more valuable to me than the faded dream of a career at Marvel Comics. Talent, though, had begun to seem more like a pernicious concept than a natural gift. Why should my students see my meager doodles as evidence of talent, the very thing for lack of which I had quit practicing? After all, I never drew anything that wasn’t the result of mere practice. I began to wonder, if we can disagree so much on the nature of artistic talent, why do we bother with the idea at all?

Drawing is one example of how the weight of the word “talent” does not fall equally on all activities. Certain pursuits are best accompanied by a heavy dose of talent, while others require practice alone. In some cases, the difference makes sense: it takes more talent to handle a trumpet than it does to collect the garbage, perhaps, though both activities can be done well. We are more likely to remark on the talent involved in the former, however. In such an absurd example, the distinction may seem too obvious. Let’s makes some more realistic comparisons between talents and the mere mastery of tasks. Specifically, let’s look at those activities that a school is bound to promote.

Is there a talent for the study of history that is equal to the talent for music? Can one have a talent for Earth Studies in the same way that she has a talent for the visual arts? How comparable is athletic talent to clerical talent? These are, of course, the wrong questions. Far be it of me to continue the reification of this shadowy concept. No, let me ask, instead: When do our students hear us use the word “talent?” What is the context of its use and what, most importantly, do our kids infer about talent from what we say? This meaning of talent—the meaning deduced by our students from what they hear—is the one that matters most.

Beginning at the latest in middle school, students are expected to demonstrate mastery of a range of subjects. Often, these are divided into major subjects—math, English, science and history—and other subjects—art, music and physical education. I’ll bet my stake in conventional wisdom that the word talent is heard much more frequently with regards to the last three subjects than it is to the others. Indeed, talent could almost serve as the legal difference between major subjects and the rest: Major subjects do not involve talent in the same sense that art, music and athletics do. The distinction is a legal one because, in many cases, students are only required to pass their major subjects to be promoted to the next grade. It is fair for an institution to require all students to master math and social studies, if for no other reason that everybody else had to do the same thing. Music, arts and athletics, on the other hand, are activities for which great inequities exist between people, activities where talent goes a long, long way. It may be fair to force us all to go to school to learn to read, but is it fair to make us learn to sight-read sheet music? Foreshorten an outstretched arm on a piece of paper? Hit five in a row from the free-throw line? Is it fair to have universal expectations in those areas where nature herself has so arbitrarily sprinkled the blessings of talent?

I once heard an art teacher say, within earshot of her students, that she had always had a talent for art. Other than that she seemed like a nice woman, but I can’t imagine a more destructive thing for an art teacher to say. Even if it’s the truth.

More on this can of worms later. . .

Reverend Soothsayer Speaks on Shoes

Following my bleak examination of the fascism of doing, I thought it appropriate to invite a guest alter-ego to speak on something positive and practical this morning. Please welcome the honorable Rev. Soothsayer.

--Mr. Stickfigure

Good morning, brothers and sisters! On this day of rest, I’ve been asked to speak to the people on the subject of shoes.

As a child, I ran barefoot, unshod across rocks and broken ground. All of us, when we are children, run like this, and it is our naked feet that prove we are all the same, one to another.

As I grew, I grew heavy, and my weight came to press down on my calloused toes. So I put on some shoes and walked a mile in them. I walked a mile and I kept on walking, passing my brothers and sisters along the way. I wore sneakers in the mold of moccasins because I wanted to feel the speed and stealth of youth through rubber soles.

In my time I have worn other shoes. I have strapped on work-boots to brace my back and fancy-boots to loosen my wallet. I have saved my feet from flying chainsaws and prying eyes alike. And yet my moccasins have taken me farther than any. Far enough to see that I will never wear enough pairs to know what life is like for my brothers and sisters.

I am want to take a shortcut to find you, brother, sister. I, like you, am responsible to keep god’s commandment to walk a mile in another’s shoes. But everywhere my path takes me shows me more shoes I will never fill. Yes, I have been troubled, brothers and sisters, when I think of where your feet are taking you. Especially when you are so far away. Where are you going, I wonder, and what’s that you’re wearing on your feet?

How are we supposed to walk in all of these shoes when we’re already wearing the only pair that makes sense? Well, first you’ve got to bring your brother and sister closer to you. You have to bring them from a thousand miles away, or a thousand years ago. You have to bring them from the mountains, from the seas, from the farms and the cities. Bring them all of the way up so that they’re standing right beside you on common ground.

Don’t forget that you already have all the common ground you need, it’s the dirt around your feet and the map of your journey so far. Bring your brothers and sisters to this familiar ground if you want to walk with them. They may have to come a long way to get there, but if they can’t cover the distance you’ll never make a mile.

Because it’s only the last foot that matters, brothers and sisters, that little leap between your shoes and the next person’s. By now, you should be close enough to see that they are much like you: They were young once, they walked upon paths trodden and untrodden, they have climbed and fallen and made their way. All this difference, this was the only the difference between mountain and valley, forest and city and sea. And even all this difference was only part of a perfect sphere suspended between darkness and light.

No, the only difference is in that last foot, the one that changes your shoes to the shoes of another. And if you still think your foot won’t fit, you must count yourself among the specially blessed or cursed of the earth. For the rest of us, if we can walk a mile, we will have found a new brother or sister.

Never think that someone lives too far away, brothers and sisters, to be your brother or sister. And never think you’ve walked a mile in someone’s shoes until they feel like your own.

On the Fascism of Doing, Pt. 1

Fascism desires an active man, one engaged in activity with all his energies: it desires a man virilely conscious of the difficulties that exist in action and ready to face them.

--Benito Mussolini,
The Doctrine of Fascism

A discourse implies at least two people talking about something, so for the time being Mr. Stickfigure’s “discourse on radical education” is a misnomer. I am not referring to this website’s abysmal hit-count alone, I am referring to almost every linguistic interaction I have on the subject of radical education. It has troubled me for some time that my musings seem so esoteric to my colleagues and interlocutors—amusing utterances perhaps, but not evocative of response. Some might suggest that a howling match with a shit-throwing baboon would be preferable to discoursing with Mr. Stickfigure, but I prefer to blame fascism.

The one thing that teachers want from a meeting with their colleagues is something that they can take back and use in the classroom. The logic of this desire could not be more well-founded, since the classroom is where we actually teach. It is up to the community of teachers to decide what is considered useful enough to make their meetings valuable. Surely, the definition of usefulness varies from community to community, just as the needs of teachers and students vary. In a resource-deprived school, however, the desire for something useful to take back to the classroom tends to become a materials fetish. The lack of physical materials is like hunger, and the desire to be fed something tangible banishes all taste and any future beyond the next meal. Mr. Stickfigure is a fool for wondering why these starving souls have no time to discuss his silly discourse.

Because I’m not giving you much to take back to the classroom, am I, teacher? Not, at least, without a hyperbolic conception of usefulness—beyond Mr. Miyagi, but along that trajectory. I want you to see that the most important things you take into the classroom are your brains and your spirit, but I haven’t, apparently, explained how to do that. Indeed, I have not even tried, and I will not now. Now, all I will say is that what goes on in your head always comes back to the classroom with you, and it will outlast anything you can carry in your hands.

But what occurs in our heads is never as satisfyingly solid as a physical resource. No, our heads can be filled with irresolvable contradictions and warring paradoxes. Worse, the sewing of such dissonance is the only unifying objective of Mr. Stickfigure’s discourse on radical education. When he discourses, Mr. Stickfigure wants to shatter the world around you and send you home with shards to tuck under your pillow and dream on. Eventually, the crystal will be reconfigured to show the world more clearly, both how it is and how it should be.

When we see our ghetto schools spit our kids back out into the ghetto, we know there is something we must do, and we know that we cannot do it too soon. Doing, in a failing school, comes only second to having—we need things to do with the students, things to do for the students, things to do to make us useful on a sinking ship. Our devotion to material action, along with our institutionalized aversion to critical observation and discussion, has made us fascists. We are not party leaders, however, we are petty officers of the state. Thus, we know about the “difficulties that exist in action,” we live them daily. And we resort to explaining these difficulties to our students in lieu of the classroom resources we cannot provide them and the instruction that does not enchant them.

A civilian, stuck neck-deep in Mr. Stickfigure’s discourse on radical education, asked with exasperation: “So what’s the solution?”

I’m sure I don’t know.

But I do know there is no cure without proper diagnosis. Until then, we will continue to treat our students as though we are casting out demons. Civilians and soldiers alike must come to see what is happening to our students in a new way before we find any solutions or bring anything useful back to the classroom. Civilians and soldiers alike must be able to balance the call to action between impossible extremes. These extremes, however, are vantage points: places from which to observe how our actions are used by those who have plans that extend beyond their next meal. From there, we can see ourselves, also, when we are full and lazy and bored: When we think ahead of our hunger and take part in the universal plunder of collective action.

So let the discourse on radical education begin by infusing action with uncertainty and satiety with dissatisfaction. Teachers, unless the classroom is where you find satisfaction, you have some things to think about before you walk back through the door. Civilians, unless you are happy that your schools carefully destroy innocent children according to lines as clear as black and white, you have some things to think about before you cast another vote or contribute to another cause.

If it helps you think, Mr. Stickfigure is ready to discourse.