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.