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Friday, January 28, 2011

Do WE Make a Difference? - Happiness as a Goal of Education

I apologize if this post smells of mothballs. I am utilizing some skills I had packed away.

ὅτε ἥμην νήπιος, ἐλάλουν ὡς νήπιος, ἐφρόνουν ὡς νήπιος, ἐλογιζόμην ὡς νήπιος· ὅτε γέγονα ἀνήρ, κατήργηκα τὰ τοῦ νηπίου.

The passage above is 1 Corinthians 13:11. One of my party tricks comes from the B.A. I have in Classical Studies, specifically Ancient Greek. Yes, I spent time earning that degree. The thing is, there is something liberating in translating a passage of Greek (says the ultimate Nerd). As I translated this one, I felt something familiar stir in me: a sense of discovery. Every time I translate a passage, I discover something unexpected. Consider my translation of the verse from Paul's first letter to the church in Corinth:

"When I was still a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I reasoned as a child: When I became a man, I nullified those childish things."

ἐφρόνουν means to care thoughtfully about something, hence understood. Meanwhile, ἐλογιζόμην means to reason out, like an argument. Both words represent thought of one kind or another, but both are present in the man as a child. Essentially, taken together, they equal the curiosity of the child, the sense of wonder children have innately wired to their perceptions of the world. As Willingham (2009) points out, people are very curious, but they are not naturally great thinkers. This is, of course, where schools come in, interceding and unintentionally severing the sense of wonder.

In a recent blog post (click the title of this post to read it), Jim Burke alludes to Hesse's Siddhartha, referencing how people must become their own teachers take "what wisdom will help us make sense of the world and find our place and purpose in that world." The heart of the post considers whether or not what teachers do makes a difference. People seek Truth about how to be happy, sending their nets into murkier and murkier waters only to come back with unrecognizable fish. The question of difference-making does revolve around whether or not the students we teach go on to successful and healthy lives, but I think happiness is perhaps something that is not readily added to that list. In large part, that is probably because nobody really knows what happiness , or "subjective well-being," is.

The verse from 1 Corinthians comes from the famous "Love" chapter; if anything makes people happy, it has to be love. Right? Well, coincidentally, the chapter contains another verse discussing how love helps us to "know as we are known." One of my thinking role models is Parker Palmer who wrote a book entitled To Know as We Are Known. One of the chapters is called "Knowing is Loving." OK. So Love, that which makes people happy, is knowing. Knowing what? Anything, says Palmer, as long as it is a knowledge that springs from love. Seems a little circular? Let me explain.

Quoting Dostoevsky, Palmer says that a knowledge that comes from love can be a "harsh and beautiful thing." He says that knowledge from love "may require us to change, even sacrifice, for the sake of what we know...If we want a knowledge that will rebind our broken world, we must reach for that deeper passion" (p. 9). He explains that "deeper passion" as "a bond of awesome responsibility as well as transforming joy; it will call us to involvement, mutuality, accountability" (p. 9).

So, I must whip a classroom full of thirty-five young minds into the fever pitch of a church revival over the greatness of Shakespeare. I can just see it now... Nope, just a pep rally.

In seriousness, Palmer does make a fantastic point when it comes to involvement, mutuality, and accountability; a point that Nel Noddings validates in Happiness and Education. She writes, "education for happiness must include education for unhappiness as well" (p. 36, emphasis from the original). Noddings makes the argument that, from the care theory perspective, students must understand both in order to make a happy life because happiness and suffering are always together. Essentially, without understanding what one has to offer, the other only provides a shadow of itself: hollow happiness or sham suffering.

I think she is right. As a rule, adolescents do not know what happiness is because they do not appreciate their unhappiness. Some may, given the family struggles stemming from the recession of recent years. Still others may not have ever felt true suffering and thus cannot understand true happiness. They find their great moment of joy in meaningless pursuits, chasing frivolity after frivolity, making fewer and fewer wise decisions. In essence, they never become "men" and throw away their childish understandings. When I was a child, I understood and reasoned as a child; anyone who spends time with children will tell you that childish understandings and reasoning are cute.

Childish reasoning is cute because it is innocent. They have "faith, hope, and love" in abundance: faith in their families, hope in their developing understanding of the future, and love for just about anything. Just the other day, my son, a fan of the Disney movie Cars, told me, unprompted, that the car he was holding was Lightning McQueen and that he loves him. At first, I was amazed and warmed by the sentiment; then, I felt embarrassed. Suddenly I had scene after scene of me as a child placing inordinate value on toys and video games flashing before my eyes. As a man, I was embarrassed by the things I loved as a child. I mean, who values a video game featuring pixelated Italian plumbers jumping on all sorts of creatures to save a princess. I certainly did; however, there are so many more things in my life that have so much more concrete value.

So, knowing is love. Love is harsh and beautiful, but also patient, kind. I think that is where we, the public school teachers, come in and make our great difference. We live out love and knowing through our faith and hope in our students. We incorporate Noddings's idea of educating for both happiness and suffering when we ask students to read books like Night and articles about modern-day genocides and then ask students what they mean. When not everyone in our AP and Honors classes gets an A, we teach about suffering and the value of hard work. We seek to understand knowing because we love 150+ kids from other peoples' homes unconditionally and we challenge them to love us back every day. That is the difference we make. That is the lesson on happiness we have to offer.

In Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, the title character offers the following about teaching:

"The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness. If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind."

That is what we as English teachers do best. That is what we should encourage all teachers to do best. We don't feed students knowledge like Grape Nuts, telling them they need more fiber so they should suck it up. We pick out a story, we guide them along its meandering pages, and we help them to see the reflection of themselves in the revelatory light of its ending. We are truly "offering something to children that should increase their lifelong happiness...Some things, even in schools, should be offered as gifts - no strings, no tests attached." We do this easily when we remember, as we get up way too early, as we drive hazily to our schools, as we look at our diminishing paychecks, as we feel the crush of more and more students, that we are rising to go to a building, to talk to kids, to teach them about literature, to talk about a book of all things, to help them see the potential for faith, hope, love, and happiness in each of their lives.

As we turn the corner into a new semester, or as we have turned the corner, I hope you'll keep this happiness in mind (it is a long way to Spring Break).

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Who's Schools? - Over-analysis and the Question of Who Makes the Decisions in Schools

This week is definitely dead week. So far, I've seen and heard a lot about nothing really special. Now, don't get me wrong, the woman who was killed by a neck massager is truly sad (the family is probably reeling), but I do not believe it warrants a 30 minute breakdown on the Fox News Channel.


But that is truly what US culture has become all about. I think that is why AP English Language and Composition has become such a big course in the past decade (including getting its own style of question). We are analysis junkies.


Critical thinking has become a part of our cultural raison d'etre (I apologize, I can't figure out accent marks in this format). I find it utterly confusing that a country that televises un-called for critical analyses of tragic appliance deaths should have such trouble educating and understanding its youth.


It has been a break from school, so I've been reading. So far, I've torn through The Hunger Games, devoured Dave Cullen's Columbine, browsed the first couple of chapters of The Geography of Bliss (I recommend this one highly), cruised through the first half of The Fountainhead, refreshed my Huck Finn, and am currently tromping through Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (also a fantastic read). For work, I'm reading Readicide (best...book...ever) and Kylene Beers's When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do (True Confession: I struggle with struggling readers). What Readicide and When Kinds Can't Read have taught me is that struggling readers don't struggle because they can't read, rather they struggle because they can't read anything under the text.


As a reader of text, whether it is composed of alphabetic symbols or visual images, I am looking for the big ideas so that I might engage in intellectual battle. Parker Palmer discusses big ideas in The Courage to Teach. Palmer says that we have forgotten how to center our classrooms on big ideas. The curriculum will be fine regardless of what we do to it because the big ideas cannot be submerged or destroyed. They are bigger than me, my department, my administration, my school system, Parker Palmer, Kylene Beers, Kelly Gallagher, and a partridge in a pear tree. They are not inviolate and pristine, rather they invite us to dismantle them and reassemble them; we are supposed to climb inside, get comfy, and find ourselves. In the end, that is what big ideas do. They show us the parts of ourselves we cannot physically see and challenge us to evaluate ourselves.


Struggling readers need to be challenged with the big ideas in the text. Why would I teach The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to a group of 21st century high school juniors? For one, if you think racism is dead, you must live in the wrong country. Huck's awakening to Jim's humanity is slow and occasionally heartbreaking. Consider the scene where Huck is appalled that Jim might get away and steal his own children away from their owner. I love milking this scene with my students because they can easily access it and it stands in such sharp contrast to the scene later on when Huck gives away his soul to save Jim. Did Twain blow the ending? Maybe. But I am with Francine Prose on this one: I cannot, I should not, think that my chronological standing gives me the right to shake my finger in the face of the great writers of the past. Those two scenes fromHuck Finn are rich with meaning and stylistically well-written. They are excellent teaching pieces from a novel that has parts that are, arguably, better off ignored. But I will not concede to Jane Smiley's view that Huck is somehow part of perpetuating Jim's (and other slaves') dehumanization. There is simply too much heart in that character to write off. Whether or not Twain chickened out in the end, there are overt statements and actions in Huck Finn that bespeak a certain striving toward equality for all men, one of the foundational big ideas of the US.


Since the junior-year English course is a survey of American literature, big ideas that are foundational in the US are extremely helpful. This idea, the push toward a more egalitarian country, is particularly rich. To briefly describe where I work: we are the fourth wealthiest county in the US, but the high school I work in has a fairly high percentage of free and reduced lunch. This division comes from all sort of interesting historical details, like we were the real terminal point of the North during the Civil War. There is a house in the county that served as a headquarters for the Union Army as it stared across the Rappahannock River at the Confederate Army. The community is a result of that forced blending of motley cultures: northern and southern, white, slave, and free black. The students bite so quickly when baited with this issue while some teachers, feeling unmotivated by a lack of salary and a lack of respect, don't even consider having these conversations; worse, they think there is no time to have these conversations before "the Test." Our discussions of progress are usually driven by SOL (Standards of Learning - VA's unfortunate acronym) or SAT scores. Our SOL results have risen considerably over the past decade; unfortunately, our SAT scores have remained stagnant. They are higher than the national average, but they haven't changed. Before people from states like New York and Connecticut get confused, I can say with the certainty of someone who has seen some of the other tests that the SOL is not even comparable with the Regent's exam or the Connecticut test (I can't remember the acronym right now). The SOL is the epitome of a "readicide" assessment (Gallagher, 2009). Big ideas are not alive in a redicide school, so finding them, capitalizing on them, and sharing the success they bring is huge.


Which brings me back to where I started. US culture as over-analysis. Everything has become a matter of quantitative breakdowns, of measurable outcomes, of a populist accountability that asks amateurs to judge the work of professionals based on the most superficial of metrics. I still love the statistic that shows that most people think education is in trouble but are still happy with their neighborhood schools. Talk about contradictory findings. Yet, since education became a golden goose for politicians, everyone has an opinion. Everyone, that is, except those who should.


Consider the reasons teachers leave the profession. The top three, according to Richard Ingersoll's analysis of the Schools and Staffing Survey and its supplement, the Teacher Follow-up Survey (SASS/TFS), are: family or personal reasons, pursuit of another career, or general dissatisfaction. Salaries are part of this dissatisfaction, but other reasons actually appeared more frequently: "student discipline problems; lack of support from the school administration; poor student motivation; and lack of teacher influence over schoolwide and classroom decision making" (Ingersoll & Smith, 2003). The last one is key. Teachers are tired of being judged, blamed, and condemned based on the decisions made by politicians or other equally detached persons. The frustration of other professional teachers, even in my own building, at the inability to use a pedagogy that engages and grows students, versus a pedgogy predicated on readicide, is palpable.


Thus, teachers feel torn; torn between the need to educate and the need to appear accountable; torn between big issues and ideas and narrowly defining what matters; torn between growing students as critical thinkers and letting them stagnate in the upscale public daycare centers our schools have become. Then, the filmakers of the world make documentaries on the heart-breaking state of education, then laud people who have not directly addressed the issues fueling our stammering system. Are schools in perfect shape? Nope. Are there teachers to blame for this? Probably. Yet, teachers are not being allowed to influence how policy decisions are made. Why? They don't know. Ask an administrator (well, to be fair, ask some administrators) at the school or central office level. Teachers are not employed to be consulted, they are employed to do as the system wishes. Unfortunately, I can't think of another profession (besides nursing) that demands such autonomy within such strict regulations (and even nurses can become nurse practitioners; what should teachers become?).


The over-analysis culture has hamstrung our public school systems from curriculum to staffing. Everyone has an opinion, but most do not have the expertise.


Maybe I am wrong. Public schools are supposed to be for the public. What do you think? I struggle with this question all the time and I am interested in hearing others' opinions.