The Brooklyn Educrat

New York City, Just Like I Pictured It: Queens

2007-08-13T10:02:00.000-04:00

New York City, Just Like I Pictured It: Manhattan

2007-08-08T18:30:00.000-04:00

New York City, Just Like I Pictured It: Brooklyn

2007-08-05T09:52:00.000-04:00

Extra

2007-06-29T07:44:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-21T19:47:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-12T20:21:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-07T19:00:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-16T18:34:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-19T20:38:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-01T21:18:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-28T18:15:00.000-05:00

"Five Star"

"True Love is Rare"

The Categorical Imperative Redux

2007-01-16T19:16:00.000-05:00

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.

Teacher, Thou Servant, Part 3

2006-12-13T19:57:00.000-05:00

Read Part 1

Read Part 2

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

2006-12-12T19:41:00.000-05:00

Read Part 1

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

2006-12-12T06:34:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-07T19:15:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-01T07:34:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-18T13:52:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-16T17:06:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-13T19:13:00.000-05:00

Mr. Stickfigure Watches Himself Write a Paragraph

2006-11-11T19:39:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-10T07:23:00.000-05:00

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

2006-10-24T19:37:00.000-04:00

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

2006-10-18T20:35:00.000-04:00

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?

2006-10-17T21:11:00.000-04:00

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

2006-10-04T20:31:00.000-04:00

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

2006-09-23T11:00:00.000-04:00

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

2006-09-22T06:46:00.000-04:00

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

2006-09-19T18:26:00.000-04:00

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?

2006-09-11T17:38:00.000-04:00

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?

2006-09-05T18:24:00.000-04:00

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

2006-08-24T19:43:00.000-04:00

Talent and Arts in the Curriculum, Pt. 1

2006-08-23T20:29:00.000-04:00

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.

Reverend Soothsayer Speaks on Shoes

2006-08-20T11:08:00.000-04:00

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

2006-08-18T10:30:00.000-04:00

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

2006-08-11T09:21:00.000-04:00

“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

2006-08-04T00:43:00.000-04:00

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.

Mr. Dallas Says, “You Have to Care Enough to Know” (Pt. 1)

2006-07-25T23:02:00.000-04:00

Knowledge is power, but so is ignorance. The careful deployment of ignorance has as much to do with the state of our ghetto schools as anything we know. What kind of ignorance? Well, if you have to ask, you don’t need to know.

It is astounding and embarrassing how little we need to know in order to work in a ghetto school. That is, it is embarrassing how little we need to know about what our students value, how they see the world and why they do what they do. Imagine the audacity of a teacher or administrator, newly hired by a Catholic school, who held forth in class about the evils of the pope. Imagine the audacity of a teacher or administrator, newly hired by the Scarsdale school district (average S.A.T. score: 1300), who held forth in class about the evils of the Ivy League. Now, witness the audacity of teachers and administrators in our ghetto schools who daily hold forth about how their students have no manners (home training, for those who do care to know).

Mr. Stickfigure has never been a pizza-party and soda-pop teacher. Rarely has he offered sugary incentives for work well-done or otherwise. On one occasion when he did provide some paltry refreshments to his class, however, he discovered what he should have never doubted: To a student, each kid offered their heartfelt and unprompted “thank you.”

Now, I am by nature a fan of home training and consider good manners next to godliness. As my students voiced their appreciation, I began to feel embarrassed. Embarrassed, in part, because the meager treats I had offered on this single occasion did not seem worthy of my students’ dignified responses. Embarrassed, more, because I was witnessing something intimately familiar to me: I was witnessing children who had all been taught good manners by their parents, and yet it appeared to me as a surprise. Why had it taken me so long to discover this fact? Because it had taken me so long to give my students something to say thank you for. When I finally did, I saw not just my students and their parents, but my parents, too. In my students’ eyes I saw my mom and dad’s eyes when I returned home from being a guest at someone else’s house, and in my students’ voices I heard my parents intently enquire: “Did you say your thank yous?”

Mr. Stickfigure still does not offer many non-academic rewards, but he has never since complained about the parents of his students.

Mr. B. Dallas, among the most distinguished of my distinguished colleagues, often says, “You have to care enough to know.” His aphorism crystallizes the central dynamic of urban education. Teachers must care enough to know what our students value and what they believe in. We must care enough to know what our students’ parents value and what they believe in. When we care enough to know, we will know everything we need to educate our students.

Sadly, Mr. Stickfigure would add that the converse is also true: If we don’t know, we don’t care.

On Responsibility, Pt. 1

2006-07-24T20:38:00.000-04:00

Responsibility is a pernicious discourse. It is a name used in vain. As a thing, responsibility can only be taken, but when we talk we are always giving it away. No wonder it becomes such a worthless currency to those we pawn it off on.

We pawn it off on our students, telling them what they are responsibily for. Maybe we should blame Oliver Wendell Holmes, sitting on the Supreme Court, working out precisely who will pay the consequences for everything in the universe. Maybe that is when we began to confuse responsibility with liability.

The ideas are similar enough that we have allowed ourselves to confuse them. Liability refers to consequences and assigns who will pay for them. Listen to yourself the next time you say "responsibility." Couldn't you have more precisely said "liability"?

"You are liable for getting your work in on time."

"You are liable for your behavior."

Don't teachers tell students this all of the time? And don't we mean that they will have to pay the consequences for how they work and how they act?

But we are not lying to them when we say these things. Worse, we are misleading them. It is true that students are liable for many things, but we don't say "liability," we say "responsibility." Who can blame students for coming to shun responsibility, having learned of it through this sad, defeated discourse?

Responsibility can only be taken. It must be accepted and embraced. Only then does it become empowering. How do we find ourselves so bamboozled as to debase this noble notion and foist it upon our students as a liability?

What Should a Teacher Do During the Summer? Part 1

2006-07-04T23:22:00.000-04:00

However I respond to this question today, I will be sure to have violated my answer by September. Nevertheless, it seems apropos to ask ourselves at this time of year: What should teachers be doing now? Mr. Stickfigure, for one, does not think we should be teaching summer school. This is not to say that we should be doing what Mr. Stickfigure does during the summer, which is almost nothing except for going on killer vacations with the beautiful Mrs. Stickfigure. For my part, I only went to school during the summer once in my life, and that was to finish the last class for my master’s. Thus, I can say with certainty that my summers were better spent during the previous 18 years of my education. Now, teaching summer school is not the same as going to summer school, I’m sure. Still, I am a better student than I am a teacher. During the school year I am driven, as a teacher, to offer my pupils a learning experience that, as a student, I could appreciate myself. It’s a round-about way of doing the job, I know, but my instincts as a student are more dependable than my instincts as a teacher. And what my spidey-senses have always told me is that someone who never wanted to go to summer school should not sign up to teach it.

That’s just Mr. Stickfigure, however, and we already know he’s a bit off. Why can’t the normals teach summer school? Or at least the teachers who are better teachers than they were students, can’t they teach summer school? Sure, and more power to them. In fact, they will need it. Mr. Stickfigure crawls to the end of June like a runner with an Iron Lung at the Iron Man finish line. The thought of manning-up for another round in July is tiring to think, let alone to undertake. Fortunately, schools are staffed by more resilient folks than Mr. Stickfigure. Still, teaching during the summer takes endurance, and endurance takes pacing. Let’s just say that Mr. Stickfigure routinely forgets to save energy for that last quarter lap.

But even those teachers with greater endurance than Mr. Stickfigure should not be teaching summer school, because summer school is un-American. Let us not forget that summer is the only season when school is traditionally not in session. Both teachers and students who go to summer school should be the first to realize that this is not summer school, this is de facto year-round schooling. After all, fall, winter and spring are already accounted for: add summer school and do the math. It should not have to be stated, but year-round schooling is a well-known totalitarian mechanism which all honest, God-fearing, law-abiding Americans resist by nature.

We mustn’t forget that without summer vacation, there would be no summer as we know it in America. Summer in America is much more than a meteorological fact, it is a way of life—in all of the laden senses of that phrase. Summer is what forces us to create an alternate yearly calendar which stands in contradiction to the very laws of celestial motion. At any time, we must be able to translate between the years 2006, 2005-2006, and 2006-2007—any or each of which can describe the same or different times. We maintain this divided cosmos because it buys us time. Summer is what gives us time to grow two inches, get our braces removed, kiss somebody in another state. Summer is what forces us to find something to do with our own kids for two months. Summer is what gives us graduation and back to school and the beach and anticipation and beautiful cyclical asymmetry. And the space between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next is what gives us time for all of this. This is the space filled, like the snap of a cuff, by summer school.

From Mr. Stickfigure's Archive of the Unpublished

2006-07-01T18:40:00.000-04:00

Saying Maybe to Urban Education

Maybe I’m starting to guess what happens to guys like me, if they’re lucky, who stay in urban education. Maybe we become those principals with the fierce eyes and the cutthroat dedication to our students’ performance. Maybe we even write books for educational publishing that outline our program and philosophy. Maybe we give seminars and get involved with teacher-training at the colleges. But always with that fierce look in our eyes, that look that says: “Get between me and these children’s test scores, and I’ll cut your throat!”

Good god, that’s not for me. I feel like the Adam of education. I look around at my brethren and I tell them, “I have seen it! ‘Twas a paradise I knew as a boy.”

Schools have to be based on children playing, don’t they? Yes, there must be discipline, but that starts with the adults, who must have the discipline to hold the world at bay, to make the space where their children can play together in an atmosphere of warmth and safety. Who believes, out in this godforsaken land, that what kids really need is a little time and room to play? Who has time to believe this when the children can barely read, barely do math, barely stay children another day?

But I have seen it, brothers and sisters.

And what was it, really, but a community raising its children the best that it could? Is that paradise so lost to us that to expect it of our communities and our schools is to expect the miraculous? Maybe it is too much to expect. Maybe we are too used to seeing our young men die in the street and our young women turn tricks there. Or maybe we thought those young men and women were not a part of our community. What were we teaching them in our schools before they were turned out? How many of them had enough time to play?

And how much more fierce will my stare have to be if I am to carve out the space to play for the little children of my ghetto school? I don’t think I could bear it. And I don’t think I could bear it if I succeeded and I had to look around at all of the other schools spitting our children back out onto the streets.

So put it this way: It’s fight or flight. Maybe it’s worth it to try, maybe I’d be lucky enough to succeed. Maybe someone else might get something from it. Maybe it’d make a difference. But I still don’t know if I can be one of those principals with eyes as fierce as silver badges.

When my eyes become that way, whole cities will move.

Until then, I make no promises to urban education.

Imperial Schooling

2006-06-26T20:48:00.000-04:00

One of the original sins of imperial schooling is to ignore native talent.

Or, think of an old Western movie: “There’s a new sheriff in town.” Great, but how many sheriffs did it take before they found John Wayne? What happened to the last sheriff? And, most importantly, why does the town need a sheriff in the first place?

In westerns, the answer to this last question is usually that the townsfolk are a bunch of lawless lowlifes. Fortunately, this is not the way we answer the question in urban education.

Beware of What Comes Easy

2006-06-19T19:59:00.000-04:00

Teachers, recognize the risk that you run whenever you treat something you teach as if it were easy to learn. Rather than making it easy for the students, you are making it easy for them to ignore you. This dictum becomes more true the more basic the knowledge you are trying to impart. For it is upon the basics that we build our overtly and admittedly complicated schemes. When students ignore the basics, therefore, they are also turning their backs on the complexity that springs from a foundation of simplicity.

All new knowledge has its consequent ignorance, a special ignorance that can only be achieved through learning something new. The better and longer we know something, the more thoroughly we forget what it was like not to know. Eventually, our very bodies forget how to fall off a bike. For most people, this process of learning and forgetting works perfectly well, because all we forget is what we didn’t know. Teachers, however, are paid to remember what it was like to be ignorant.

When teachers treat their subject as if it were easy, they are forgetting the first thing they needed to remember: It is always difficult to go from not knowing to knowing, no matter how basic the knowledge. Or, more simply, beware of what comes easy.

Appropriate Developmental Education

2006-06-15T20:02:00.000-04:00

What does it mean that human beings grow from divine sparks of pure energy to full-fledged identity in less than ten years? What does it mean that it is a public school’s job to nurture this transformation? These questions have not been effectively engaged in our schools. Our hazy, general understanding of developmental education is not fit to join the conversation. Our understanding, as far as I can tell, goes little further than worried quibbling over the age-appropriateness of various influences. These are appropriate concerns, insofar as influences are precisely that which shape identity. However, I think this discussion tends to distract us from a more useful and energetic heuristic for human growth.

First of all, what is a human being? Let me be both fervently faithful and ruthlessly secular: Human beings are pure energy. For now, I insist upon this fact because it is a much more realistic way to think of people than people tend to think of themselves. Human beings are so self-centric that their very language describes differences among humans as if they were greater than the differences between all humans and everything else. The divine spark ignites a flame that burns upon the earth, and must take its place on the earth, on peak or valley, and burn like only fire burns until it is quenched and evaporates into the universe. We should realize that we never dreamed of a king or a queen so great that they couldn’t be every child.

What Adult’s Mean When They Say, “That’s Life.”

2006-06-14T22:50:00.000-04:00

When we tell kids “that’s life,” we are avoiding an embarrassing conversation. Whatever the particular embarrassment, there is always the added shame that we have nothing better to say about it than, “That’s life.” Most likely, this is the way it should be. Whatever the truth is, it’s probably not suitable for children. And, surely, it is not worthy of the adults who have so little to say about it.

Introducing Mr. Chocintok, a Straw Man

2006-06-12T20:27:00.000-04:00

Mr. Chocintok is a bad teacher. It doesn’t take much to be a bad teacher, and for Mr. Chocintok, it only takes two things. The first is what he does for the students, the second is what he gives the students to do. Despite his universal badness, Mr. Chocintok has been teaching for a very long time. In fact, some people say that’s the whole problem.

These days, teachers know better than Mr. Chocintok. While he will often spend entire lessons lecturing his students—who must take notes and remain silent unless called upon to answer one of his mechanical queries—we know that students must be more actively engaged in the learning process, and that they are not merely vessels to be filled by the bucket of Mr. Chocintok’s arbitrary knowledge.

When he does give the students something to do, Mr. Chocintok always assigns worksheets. Some of the worksheets are so old, Mr. Chocintok has made changes on them in pen and then copied them again: “Rockin’ in ~~the U.S.S.R.~~ Russia” and “~~God~~ Superman Bless Us, Everyone!” are among his more venerable titles. Mr. Chocintok likes his fill-in-the-blank worksheets because all 120 of them can be scored by his wife during a single episode of primetime television.

Thank goodness the rest of us know better than Mr. Chocintok. We know that students must be constructively engaged in an activity, if the process of knowledge building is every going to amount to any kind of edifice at all. We know that we must ask them to do more than fill in worksheets, we must provide them with the strategies to make meaning of the things they read, and ultimately, strategies that to help them become lifelong learners.

Maybe Mr. Chocintok is just too old-fashioned to understand things like strategies. Strategies are things you use in your brain, where no one can see them. Nevertheless, they are there, or if they’re not, you’re not reading these words, anyway. To help you read them, I could show you some of the strategies I use as a certified proficient reader myself. To show you, we’ll need something to write on, like a big piece of chart paper or an overhead projector. Then, I’ll demonstrate something strategic, and provide you with a visual-tactile-kinesthetic manipulative by which you can experiment with the same strategy.

It’s that simple, and yet still Mr. Chocintok can be heard to complain: “The only difference between a worksheet and a graphic organizer is how big the blanks are.”

First Notes on Literacy in the Matrix

2006-06-10T12:35:00.000-04:00

Mr. C. R. Gollum’s comments on yesterday’s post have me thinking about post-industrial education again. He was correct in pointing out that public education works to maximize the efficiency of the industrial system and prescient, I’m sure, in claiming that 100% efficiency will never be reached. The reasons for this are many, but the most important reason is that the question of industrial efficiency is historically moot. Industrial capacity no longer represents the pinnacle of wealth and well-being, though it is certainly still a constituent. It is beyond a cliché, however, to point out that this is the information age, and that purely industrial priorities are no longer enough to drive the machine. Nevertheless, Mr. Gollum’s theme still stands: We are approaching the needs of our time in typical, front-loaded, stampede and cattle-grate fashion. “We need a lot more people that are patient, unhurried, and elegant in their approach to problems,” says C. R. Gollum, and he’s right. Why don’t we have them? Because we are mesmerized, sterilized and, ultimately, terrified by what has become of our world since it went online.

A cliché is often wisdom that you hear so many times that you’ve stopped listening to it. Sometime in the 1990s, a tidbit about computers entered my conscious, downloaded from the mainstream. Something about processor speeds doubling every 18 months. Every two pregnancies, the world is painstakingly recreated, twice as big. Recreated across this microcosm of 18 years—the horizon of adulthood and threshold of generations.

The initial context of this concept involved the rapidly approaching theoretical and technical limits of computer processing speeds. But the limits of computing are not practical concerns of the mainstream, and do not explain the general diffusion of this technological anecdote. As Mr. Gollum also observes, we’re past the point where we know what to do with the things we’ve already automated. That’s a scary thought, and the sublimation of it may lie near the foundation of contemporary existential fear. It is almost comforting to imagine that one of these iterations of 18 months will finally bring a halt to this exponential profusion of computation. At the same time, it is frightening to imagine the sudden cessation of ever-new gadgets, treatments, improvements, extensions, applications, attachments, versions and options that we have not only grown accustomed to, but also expect of the future.

Now that time has allowed me a little distance from its computational context, I am beginning to see the other things that hold this cliché in place in our culture. The periodic doubling of processing speeds is a compelling analogy for our own sense of historical acceleration. The last five old-fashioned, organic generations have each had to live with the hyper-reality of technological reinvention. So much so that our idea of generations describes both family succession and historical epochs.

Part of us still knows that in the middle ages, just like all places before and outside modernity, a generation merely made a mark of slight incline or decline across the recurrent cycle of time. In those days, only gods or conquerors could change the world as it turned.

Our modern generations, however, have had to live with a world that grows up with the kids and yet answers to no king or deity. Generations now find themselves not just at different ages, but on different planes, looking back across the chasm at worlds as different as children and adults. We find ourselves calculating an exchange rate between generations, so that we can evaluate who is too old to keep up, too young to control, too vulgar, not cool, a dinosaur, up to date, obsolete.

It has been established at least as long as the anecdote of 18 months that computer literacy is the baseline measure of contemporary competence. Today’s oldest grandparents are the last generations grandfathered out of the computer literacy requirement. Computer literacy is the litmus of their children’s world, the boomer generation, the generation where everyone had to learn to read again, as adults. Their children, Mr. Stickfigure among them, were the first generation to become computer literate as children. As nominal adults now, ourselves, we take a certain native pride in this, in having been the original ten-year-olds tinkering with this device our parents couldn’t understand.

We’re the ones who are supposed to have learned something from the story about doubling processor speeds. In the information age, we don’t even have to wait for the next organic generation for the world to change. The computer literacy of my childhood is precisely as outdated as a Commodore 64. At that time, computer literacy and computer programming where almost identical. My young compatriots were the last people to know everything there is to know about their desktop computers.

Since then, in less time that it has taken for us to raise our own children, computer literacy has become both more and less like general literacy. Computer literacy is more like general literacy because the changes in computer interface have increasingly allowed us to interact with our computers as readers and writers. To be considered computer literate, in other words, you no longer need to be a programmer. However, my generation—or at least its educators—must face a challenge analogous to the one our parents faced while we were commandeering their computers as children. We must begin to understand something that is foreign to us, even though we think of ourselves as owning it.

I wonder, for instance, what it’s like to grow up in a world of hypertexts. When I sat on the couch and read books as a kid, I was partaking of the same literacy that my parents and grandparents had experienced. Even to those of us with computers, reading texts off the screen was merely a change of medium, a shift in the place of literacy, but not its range or function. It wasn’t until we were teenagers that we began to experience the possibilities of hypertext and came to know computer literacy as a different kind of reading and writing. We were the first generation to master this literacy, but we were not the first generation born into it. That is the generation we are currently teaching, the generation with not experiential reason to believe that the hypertext didn’t always exist right alongside ink and paper texts.

This generation has absolutely no basis for bookish nostalgia, and they never will. They will never know about all the human ages when reading meant looking at ink on paper and could only be read one page at a time, from beginning to end. As teachers of literacy, even the youngest and hippest of my generation have more in common with our parents and grandparents when it comes to the shared experience of learning to read and write. Before our time, we find ourselves dinosaurs of education, unwilling or unable to consider how the basic shape of literacy must follow the changing shape of texts. When we were kids, we never saw anything that looked like the hypertext, so we shouldn’t pretend that we know what it’s like to grow up with that monster in the room. Probably, we should recognize what our parents had to recognize when we started tinkering with their Commodores: If we don’t get hip to this, we’re not going to have anything to teach the kids.

I’d Rather Be Teaching

2006-06-09T07:05:00.000-04:00

As you can imagine, Mr. Stickfigure’s abrasively insightful commentary is not palatable to all. I find eighth graders much more receptive to radical education than adults. It’s easier to persuade them of their destiny and divinity than it is to convince their teachers.

A teacher needs to know how the deserts miss the rain. A teacher must bring the oasis.

Rule of Thumb Number One

2006-06-07T20:34:00.000-04:00

If you think their parents didn’t teach them any manners, you’re wrong.

On Radical Education

2006-06-06T18:37:00.000-04:00

I am a radical not because I choose to be, but because I must admit what I am. If I was a radical by choice, a free radical, I would not be radical enough to suit my nature. I am the metastasis of the progressive spirit—insistent, insatiable, irreversible. In education, it is a good thing that more satisfied minds prevail.

Nevertheless, I offer radical education. Radical education consists in taking things a step further. It begins, however, by accepting responsibility for all of the steps that lead up to that last, radical leap. Those precursor steps will always be necessary, but never sufficient to effect the changes demanded by radical education.

Three year ago, I might have allowed myself to be drawn into an argument about the historicity of progressivism and the worship of newness. But I’m not looking for something new, I am looking for something old that has been lost or taken away, something simple and local and traditional. I’m looking for schools that come from inside the community, that answer to the community, that grow from it.

The idea that schools should be as one with the communities they serve should be self-evident, but in New York it is the exception. Many of this city’s communities are occupied by a school system that functions as an external imposition. Never mind that thousands of people from within these communities also staff the schools, and that they operate as though they are both a part of and at the service of their community.

Part of the problem is that a school cannot server two masters. To be part of the public education system is to partake of the techniques and discipline of a certain kind of schooling. Those techniques were not developed a priori. Rather, they grew in response to the educational needs of a community, and that community is well served by such techniques. In other communities, however, the discipline of public education must be received like the revealed word, only with much less persuasive force. In such a case, a public school is in a difficult spot: Its mandate is to enforce techniques created for a given community upon any community.

Very quickly, however, such a school will discover that the educational techniques of one community are not enough to meet the needs of another. Worse, transplanted techniques do not fail to carry with them other trappings of culture, so that they are not only insufficient, but antagonistic, as well. Put another way, who wants the French to lecture us on how to raise our kids? Or rather, who wants France to run our schools . . . from France?

It is a radical project to make New York City Public Schools into what schools should be. In too many cases, history has ensured that there is nothing for some communities to go back to when it comes to the warm embrace of a public education. The only place to find it, then, is in the future, and it will require radical education to get there.

Mark My Words:

2006-06-06T18:35:00.000-04:00

A school that is no place for adults

is a bad place for children.

What’s Wrong with Urban Education?—or—Notes on the Masthead

2006-06-05T20:04:00.000-04:00

I purposefully avoided the term “urban education” in the description of The Brooklyn Educrat, though it would have been the simplest way to refer to the titular locale. There is something about describing a form of education as “urban” that smacks of the same euphemistic obscurantism employed by record stores when they arrange their Hip-Hop/R&B/Soul/Jazz/Reggae/Blues section under the same label. In fact, the term is such pliable code that it can be found standing in for everything from “inner-city” to “ghetto” to—I’m sure some would argue—the N word itself.

Of course, they do offer graduate degrees in urban education, as well they should. I’m not so naïve as to think that the code doesn’t work both ways. For a professor of urban education, the discipline of “urban education” allows her to say: “We need to specialize in the techniques necessary to advance the academic achievement of precisely those Americans who have the greatest need. They are highly concentrated in poor, urban areas.” And, yes, it turns out that they are predominantly black and brown students.

I sympathize whole-heartedly with such professors. The discourse of identity must be elusive in an age that considers the Civil Rights Movement to be over and done with. In exchange for certain civil rights, certain people took the right to be done with black and white, as well. Hence, the government can no longer do anything for black people that isn’t classified as an entitlement, having already given them equal rights (please imagine your own scare quotes). Professors, whose disciplines are ensconced in the university, find themselves close enough to government that they must learn to watch their mouths. Hence, degrees in “urban education.” In this context, I can accept a strategic deployment of the euphemism.

For my part, however, I want to avoid the term. I am concerned about the education of our black and brown children—both urban and rural and in between. I am concerned that some of us are willing to work so hard to convert poverty into the currency of all misery. Poverty is certainly an index of misery, but we strain when we try to consume the world of color with this medium of exchange.

That being said, I will be guilty of confusing all of these terms many times before I’m done with them. And yes, I am particularly concerned with the education in this particular urban area. I just thought I would leave the word off the masthead.

Technical Notes for Imaginary Friends

2006-06-04T09:24:00.000-04:00

The mysterious Cathode Ray Gollum has indirectly reminded me that I don't want interested, if hypothetical, readers to have to register a Blogger account merely to comment upon the posts. You should now be able to comment without registering. Also, Mr. Stickfigure's email address is available in my profile. . . . Anyone? . . . Anyone?

2006-06-04T08:22:00.000-04:00

From Mr. Stickfigure's Archive of the Unpublished

2006-06-04T07:40:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader(s?)--Despite the fact that the following post is essay-length, it only functions as an introduction. If this were a boxing match, you would be seeing a lot of dancing and manuevering that ends with the fight's first jab. So if you can wait that long, I tried to make it sting.
--Mr. Stickfigure

Forty Acres and a School:
Meeting the Needs of Universal Education

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the most significant change in American education has been that every child must go to school. Universal compulsory education is both our legal obligation and the ultimate justification for what our schools have become in the century since it was instituted. It is a noble goal and it is noble, perhaps, that we have spent a hundred years grappling with the concrete consequences of instituting such a demanding ideal. Of course, there are practical reasons for mandatory education as well, and those are the reasons that have kept the institution funded when our high-mindedness has waned. By the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, it was becoming clear that a rapidly expanding industrial economy demanded a literate population with a functional command of basic mathematics. Everything about an expanding industrial economy, from the basic signage of transportation, to the linguistic flexibility of advertising, to the legal and scientific apparatus that provided the matrix for it all, everything called for universal literacy and mathematics. Today, at the beginning of a new century, in the midst of a global information age, we expect even more of our citizens by way of reading, writing and ‘rithmetic. And yet, still, some of our schools succeed in meeting the mandate of our time, while others fail. If this is the state of things, then we have not yet realized the ideal of universal compulsory education. We have nearly universal attendance, perhaps, and some schools provide a good education. What will it take to make the schools that are still failing successful, so that our compulsory education can finally mean an education for everyone?

It’s a big enough question that it deserves to be parsed before it is answered. The determination of what it will take to make all schools successful depends upon what is making them fail. Is this failure one for which we have a remedy, if properly diagnosed? Or are we failing to recognize the problem itself, quite apart from whether we know how to solve it? In short, do we even know how to teach all of our children? Or are there some children who are still inscrutable to our methods? Fortunately for my purposes, there is already an extensive body of literature and tradition of professional development dedicated to answering these questions more thoroughly than I can here. Broadly, the term “best practices” applies to this field of publishing and professional exchange. Best practices represent the experiential wisdom of thousands of successful teachers and administrators throughout the country and the world. While specific theories, techniques and products vary as much as the teachers and students who produce them, best practices offer a unified theme when taken as a whole. That theme is also the beginning of an answer to the question of universal education: With the guidance of the right teachers, any child can be a successful student.

We know what to do to make schools successful, but we are not doing it. Consequently, if true, my question has become a charge. Because if we have the knowledge, we must account for why that knowledge has not been made universally manifest in all of our schools. Our habit of looking at particular schools, either successful or failing ones, as discrete and independent artifacts has helped to obscure from us the broad causes of both success and failure. This atomized analysis is, by definition, ill-suited for examination of a universal compulsory education system. Each school in the country--public, private and parochial--participates in the system of universal education. That a significant portion of these schools are failing represents a failing of that system to fulfill its founding purpose.

But what is failing? Where is the system breaking down? Again, there is no particular cog or wheel that we do not know how to fix. There is no social or economic condition that renders children incapable of being educated, and there is no class or culture that has not been served by at least a few successful schools. Thus, the system is not failing for lack of knowledge of how its parts work. Rather, it is failing because there have not been enough operational resources provided to run the entire system. Failing schools are schools which do not have adequate resources to meet the educational needs of their students. This paucity is, ultimately, part of the responsibility of our system of universal education. Failing schools are where our students slip through the crack for lack of ground to stand on.

But who is slipping through the cracks in our institution? This question has been answered clearly enough by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Educational Statistics in its annual survey, The Condition of Education:

Certain subgroups outperformed others in reading in 2003. . . . White and Asian/Pacific Islander students had higher average scores than American Indian, Hispanic, and Black students in grades 4 and 8. Additionally, in grade 4, White students outperformed Asian/Pacific Islander students and Hispanic students outperformed Black students. . . .The level of poverty in the school . . . was negatively associated with student achievement in both grades in 2003.[1]

In the event that the connection between race, poverty and test results is not explicit enough, the National Center for Educational Statistics also reports:

Certain characteristics of the highest poverty schools (more than 75 percent of students eligible for subsidized lunch) are evident. Relative to the total 4th-grade population, there was a lower percentage of White students and a higher percentage of Black and Hispanic students in the highest poverty schools in 2000.[2]

Students of color are disproportionately low performing and disproportionately poor. Students of color are slipping through the cracks. These are the cracks left unfilled by adequate resources, the spaces where pedagogical best practices should be operating but are not.

It follows the logic of universal compulsory education that the students with the most needs will require the most educational resources. To follow that logic, however, is to collide with an individualist culture that aspires to be a meritocracy. Here is the dialectic underbelly of universal compulsory education—its constitutional cognitive dissonance. On some level, it’s a fairly simple operation: assess the needs of all of our students and send our best teachers to teach the neediest ones first. But the closer such an idea gets to reality, the more laughable it seems. We are not inclined to shift valuable resources based solely on need; we want to know why resources are deserved, how they are earned, what you have done to merit them. Perhaps this is when it is useful to remember that universal compulsory education is, after all, a subordinate necessity, dependent upon our economic and cultural need for the continuous production of literate citizens.

Maybe we have enough literate citizens to fuel the techo-industrial machine. Maybe the term “universal” is merely a useful heuristic to help us conceive and operate an institution that is not universal, but just very, very large. But as the U.S. Department of Education reminds us, we can never say that we don’t know who is left out of our universe. By definition, they are our neediest students, but American history has made them black. Indeed, the institution of universal education has played a major role in that history, and it has been characterized, mainly, by having insufficient resources to meet the needs of its students.

But what, even in the broadest sense, would it take to meet the needs of our students of color? To the extent that these students are also disproportionately likely to be in poverty, it will take schools with educational resources that, for wealthier students, are provided by the community. These include many things that do not impact the budget of schools in wealthier communities, such as specialized academic intervention, individualized music training, club sports, and other resources paid for privately but which have a positive influence on academic success. High-poverty communities, however, are also more likely to send students to schools with mental and physical health needs, needs that must be met in addition to academic intervention and enrichment, sports and art and community service. In short, there is every reason to believe that it takes more educational resources to make a high-poverty school successful than a school in a wealthy community.

In the end, educational resources boil down to the same thing as everything else: money. Money is not to say cash, however, and the answer is not merely bigger discretionary budgets. Yet the fact that there is so much controversy over public school funding and teacher pay does not bode well for a discussion of the full range of economic restructuring required to make our failing schools successful. If we rule out redistributing resources from successful schools to failing ones, we are left looking at an enormous up-front investment, indeed. The fact that the investment would be made, primarily, in the education of our students of color, leaves only one question remaining: Why don’t we want to make the investment and thereby fulfill the mandate of universal education?

Because the cost would amount to paying reparations, which is a price America has never been willing to pay.

[1] National Center for Education Statistics, “Indicator 9 (2005): Reading Performance of Students in Grades 4 and 8.” The Condition of Education. 2005. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2005/section2/indicator09.asp (accessed March 5, 2006).

[2] National Center for Education Statistics. “Indicator 12 (2003): Poverty and Student Mathematics Achievement.” The Condition of Education. 2005. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2003/section2/indicator12.asp (accessed March 5, 2006).

Note: Since accessed, the above links no longer point to the right sections, so I have disabled them. It is not impossible that I get around to updating them, someday.

Rumble in the Tunnel

2006-06-01T17:35:00.000-04:00

Huge rumble on the train home today. Twenty, thirty teenage boys and girls variously involved in keeping two or three young men from beating the shit out of each other. Numbers do not fairly describe my perception of the scene, being far too definite. Impressionism is more realistic: There was the initial core of two fast-grappling bodies. There was the thrilled, frightened rush of the score or more partisans, instigators and peace-keepers. There were the double tag-teams of girls and boys trying to pull the fighters apart, constantly shifting and being shaken-off.

There were two other grown men on my end of the train, and our eyes might have met once. Then, two impressively inertial young women dragged one of the fighters past us to the end of the car. Speaking as one of the (nominally) grown men, it was an uncomfortable situation. One the one hand, there were certainly plenty of hands already on deck, decking the shit out of each other. (I see a young man swinging sucker punches around a young woman who is blocking the target with her body. His forearm is rebounding off the back of her head.) On the other hand, there’s no point in distinguishing yourself as a grown man if you can’t get a trainload of scrapping minors to take it outside.

In New York City, though, the space between subways stops is about as far away as you can be from anywhere. I sat and watched and—depending on the ebb and flow of the scuffle—stood and watched the fight. Most of the kinetic energy seemed to be spent on restraining the main combatants. The consequence, however, was an imbalance of strategic intents that prolonged the battle. There were only a few head-to-head fighters, and these were wasting their energy trying to get through the throngs of youths working, with no less vigor, to hold them back. This contingent had strength and numbers, but couldn’t end the fight because they weren’t fighting against anyone.

We came out of the wilderness as the train pulled up to the next station, and the cops showed up as the door opened like they were filming a commercial. Two officers stepped onto the car, but the kids where hip enough to have stopped fighting. The alphas’ whiff was still in the air, though, and the cops were able to pick out the instigators. One, because his girl was hustling him out the door between the cars, and the other because he was sitting on the seat with blood on his shirt and thirteen henchmen and henchwomen surrounding him. If I had to call it, I’d say he lost. This was when I recognized one of my eighth graders from three or four years ago. She was beside the young man, and followed when the cops took him off the train.

People milled around for a while, on and off the train. One of the other grown men took the opportunity to slip into the next car, the other stayed put. I asked my student if she was all right and she nodded. I asked her what happened and she said something quick that I didn’t understand. Stupid question. A few minutes later, most of the kids were back on the train, including the bloody-shirted fighter and my student. An officer tried half-heartedly to get the fighter to tell them his name, indicating that he planned to take the drastic action of writing it on his pad. The fighter made a show of refusing and my student made a show of telling him to just make up a name to tell the cop. Soon enough, the cops had left and we were on our way again, sans fight.

Big ups to three of NYPD’s finest today for not escalating a situation that, were I to be honest, had me plenty worried there for a minute. I also appreciate the timing, but the precincts around here deploy so many cops that the next prowler couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds from the station. But let me bolster this faint praise by saying that today’s officers certainly assessed what was going on better than this eye witness. Thirty nearly-grown boys and girls duking it out under ground, and no-one is shot, stabbed or otherwise seriously injured? A cop’s got worse things to worry about, I’m sure.

What’s in a (First) Name?

2006-05-31T17:16:00.000-04:00

One thing I have learned from my most dignified colleagues is that, in a school, first names are not to be thrown around lightly. It was in my fifth year of teaching that this finally struck me as a visceral truth. That was when a colleague called out to me by my first name while on a field trip. My spine crawled. This was not, by the way, the laid-back, after-lunch, early-afternoon portion of the trip. No, this was during the crucial get-everybody-in-line and let-them-know-you’re-serious part that comes at the beginning. But quite apart from this impropriety, what irked me was the fact that Mr. Jellybowl was no friend of mine in any case.

He was not trying to demonstrate any bond of friendship, of course. He was, rather, working with a different set of standards regarding the proper deployment of first names. Presumably, he was following the conventions of contemporary college-corporate nomenclature, which insist that you "call me by my first name." A professor of critical theory and a VP of marketing have this much in common: they are both willing to rob the tropes of friendship and informality in order to further their institutional ends. “My name is Mr. Stickfigure!” I reminded Mr. Jellybowl, sharply, in front of the kids. Back atcha, bastard.

But I will pay any bastard in education the respect of calling him or her Mister or Ms.

I don’t know no Joe or Naomi until we’ve broken bread or at least cut the bologna.

Resources in General and Intellectual Resources in Particular

2006-05-30T20:33:00.000-04:00

Resources are the things that a school system uses in order to function. This is a simple definition of resources, yet it is treacherous in its consequences. Resources are not the things we tend to point to and call “resources,” at least not the things themselves. Things are resources only insofar as they contribute to a functioning system. This means that common resources like textbooks, desks and computers may not be resources at all. Not, that is, if they are stashed away in a storage closet, administered by an incompetent facilitator or stolen out from under your nose. This is no more than to say that a thing is only as good as the use to which it is put. If a thing is not being put to good use, whatever it is, it should not be counted among the resources of a school.

It also follows from this idea that a school can be deprived of its resources in at least two different ways. The first is the most obvious, and tends to be the focus of more naïve discussions of school resources. It concerns the literal lack of the things that a school needs to operate—insufficient raw materials to run the system. A school may be just as resource-deprived, however, even with sufficient raw material. If there is no system in place to account for your resources, they are just things you have lying around your school.

At this point, it is time for teachers to do an informal self-assessment. Ask yourself: On a scale of 1 to 10, how would I rate my confidence in the following statements (10 being most confident):

a) I will have sufficient resources for my foreseeable classroom needs.

b) Those resources will be effectively administered, not just in my classroom, but throughout the entire school.

If your confidence interval on either part of the question is below an 8, you work in a resource-deprived school.

If you work in a resource-deprived school, you must learn to compensate for this deprivation. Unfortunately, you can only make up for resources with other resources, and they must come from somewhere. The only dependable place to find them, I would suggest, is in your own head. These are your intellectual resources, and they come before all others. If you could teach your first month of class using only loose-leaf paper and the books on the shelf at home, you could be sure that your intellectual resources were in perfect condition. Until then, there is always something to work on while you wait for them to deliver your laptops, manipulatives, and post-Soviet history textbooks.

First Bell at the Brooklyn Educrat

2006-05-28T11:18:00.000-04:00

New York City Standards In Education

Standard A1a:
Students will not live in ghettoes.

Discussion Question: Are we meeting the standard?