New York City, Just Like I Pictured It: Queens

New York City, Just Like I Pictured It: Manhattan

New York City, Just Like I Pictured It: Brooklyn

Extra

I am, for you, somewhere between

illumination and idle chatter.

I am parallel and coefficient,

the macro/micro project

of presence and ground zero.

I am, for you, extraneous personality—

Biggie-sized, leaving electric bodies alive

in my evolutionary current.

I am, for you, myth made metal.

The never-was is back again,

Ether composed of stone.

--Mr. S.

Assimilation Impossible

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

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

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

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

On Improving Schools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think big about your schools.

The Great Pyramid

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

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

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

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

The Library of Babel Redux

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beef

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

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

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

So what’s my beef?

I’ll have to think about that.

Mr. Stickfigure is Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signs from the City

"Five Star"


"True Love is Rare"

The Categorical Imperative Redux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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