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.

What Should a Teacher Do During the Summer? Pt. 2

“Teachers are lucky. You get your summers off,” people say. They say this kind of thing more often during July and August than during, say, February. No matter the time of year, however, Mr. Stickfigure is happy to remind people that his borough is looking for good teachers.

As previously mentioned, I consider it a near-duty for teachers to take their summers off. Whether they do something productive during that time is up to them and their wallets, but those two months are important to the balance of nature in the educational ecology. However, as a citizen, I feel slighted by the suggestion—usually offered in the early afternoon of a sunny day—that I am somehow over-privileged because I’m not in class with somebody else’s children all year round. Come, now, folks, these kids aren’t that bad! Don’t you have some chores for them to do?

In some fairness, it’s not entirely the lack of America’s most well-educated babysitters that civilians are referring to when they comment so enviously on our extended summers. Most civilians, we must remember, are working a 9-to-5 job. The actual formula is 9-to-5 for fifty weeks a year. Ah, there’s the rub! The asymmetry of the teaching profession cannot help but appear as an earthly paradise to the work-a-day bound. Having somehow learned to stomach the idea that the human animal needs only 14 days of contiguous autonomy per year, the teacher’s schedule begins to look like the good fortune of an overindulged house-pet in the eyes of year-round work horses.

And yet it is only fair that civilians know what all teachers must come to learn: Two months off during the summer is not worth the job of teaching. Ten months is a long time, too, and it is far too long a time to suffer for the sake of a long vacation. In fact, teaching is not a job that should be suffered through at all. It is a virtual guarantee that a teacher who is “living for the weekend” is inviting a miserable week. Instinctually, civilians know that teaching is not a job for those who cannot learn to enjoy it. Despite the occasional jibe, they know that they would find it hard to enjoy the work we do. That is why, during February, teachers are much less likely to hear about how lucky we are to have our summers off.

Are You Being Underserved? Pt. 1

What is it that our underserved schools are not being served? What are the resources, intellectual or otherwise, that these schools are not getting? What is missing from the education of our students? The only short answer is that many things are missing, and there is much that has not been served. But we must start somewhere. . .

Mr. Stickfigure started teaching in an underserved school in the fall of 2000. As evidence that his school is underserved, Mr. Stickfigure points to the fact that he is now a statistical veteran, despite the fact that six years of teaching should barely count as an apprenticeship. Upon his arrival, Mr. Stickfigure began the slow process of learning what the City of New York thinks is missing from its underserved schools. . .

Appropriate pedagogical techniques! The first thing I learned as a new teacher was what not to be as a new teacher, namely, Mr. Chocintok. Since then, I have become immersed to my neck in researched-based pedagogy and, more specifically, the fair art of balanced literacy. Balanced literacy, for those who don’t know, is a researched-based approach to literacy instruction that is built upon the three pillars of reading, writing, and word study. Reading and writing take place in Readers and Writers Workshops, generally in 90 minute blocks. Workshops are structured so that students have the daily opportunity to work independently or in small groups on some aspect of reading or writing. This independent work is facilitated by the teacher through short, whole-class mini-lessons and differentiated small-group instruction. . .

In the abstract, balanced literacy is preferable to interminable lectures that span from bell to bell and result a chalkboard draped in chicken scratch. Indeed, it is preferable in most concrete cases and actual classrooms. Nevertheless, balanced literacy has not been enough to serve my underserved school. Not to say that we haven’t tried to make it fill the gap, and won’t continue to do so. But this is the answer we have been provided to the question: What are our students not being served . . . ?

There are true veterans at Mr. Stickfigure’s school, people who have actually been in the business for thirty years. Mr. Stickfigure does not always agree with the pedagogical practices of his seniors, but he respects the fact that they have been able to stay around practicing anything at all. Because as a premature veteran, Mr. Stickfigure has seen enough to know that the first thing an underserved school must be able to do is keep teachers in its classrooms, however they teach. Only then can these teachers learn to provide service to those who really deserve it.

We will find, of course, that we need more than just a teacher in every classroom. We need sixty teachers lined up to take any one of those classrooms, should the opportunity arise. Mr. Stickfigure may be getting jaded, but he does not think that the censure of Mr. Chocintok and the offer of research-based best practices will encourage prospective teachers to beat a path to our door.