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.