Grade Junkie Rehab: Benefit versus Credit

GRADE JUNKIE REHAB

           Student writer Orella Chichester remarked, “I’m tired of writing papers for the way teachers will grade them.”  Another student, Arianne Andrew phrased it as “I’m tired of writing papers so that teachers will have something to grade.”  Yet how many times has a student fairly accosted me terrified that they received an A- instead of an A on an essay?  How many times have you, as a student, focused more on a grade than what you were or could be learning?

           

            Especially in our capitalist economies, grades are money.  Just as payment results in a credit to your bank account, grades are credits in your academic bank account.  Just as you earn money, you earn grades.  Just as money is numerical and digitizable, so, too are grades.  Let us make a distinction, though, between what is a benefit to us and what merely earns us credit. Consider these definitions and word origins:

Benefit: advantage; a gift; a public performance for a charitable cause.  From the Latin ‘to do good’.  Used as “Benefit of clergy,” “Benefit of the doubt,” “For the benefit of the community”

Credit: delay of monetary payment, money submitted, acknowledgment/praise of contribution, belief in.  Used as “credit where credit is due,” “give someone credit for,” “credit for actions.” From the Latin ‘to believe in or to trust.’

            When I was an undergraduate, I went through some difficult semesters—dysfunctional family, relationship crazies, financial challenges.  Instead of reading Poe’s “The Raven,” for my American Literature class, I read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince—a book I needed to shore up my psychic energy and come home to myself.  I walked into the exam for that class, sat down to questions I couldn’t answer, and asked the professor if we could talk outside.  I told him that I was unprepared and that it would be dishonest for me to respond to the exam as if I were.  He thanked me for my frankness, that he was glad that I had read what I needed to read, and said that he would just issue me a “C” for the test.  That was a gift to me, a benefit. That’s the best grade response I’ve ever had—beyond my hundreds of “A’s.”  I was focused on what would benefit me, and not for chasing a grade for credit.  I have and continue to develop a successful career as a professor, writer, and performer—in great part because my professor stepped out the numbers game and acknowledged that I had taken care to read what would benefit me.

            I now say to students “Let what we are doing in this class be so important and beneficial to you that you would accept a 'C,' rather than drop.”  The irony is, of course, that the more we focus on substance, learning, exploration, growing, the more likely we are, in the end, to earn the “A,” but the “A” and the hope of it no longer traps us—so that we can’t wait to graduate;  the “A” no longer holds us in its thrall, and our efforts to rock climb up to them no longer bedevils our lives.

            In our digital age, students are reduced to ID#s, grades, and bursar receipts.  Schools have become factory businesses squeezing students through the process. And how foolish it is that sites such as “Rate My Professor” consider “easiness” to be a good grade.

            To worry about grades and credits is to give our sense of self-respect over to the whims of others—to only believe in ourselves, as the origin of “credit” implies, when someone else “credits”—believes—in us.  It hurts me when I offer an exciting event for us to share as a class--like a play, museum visit, or field trip--and all a student asks is whether it will affect his grade if he skips it.  It hurts me when students ask for extra credit activities, instead of ways to expand their reading, writing, and performing experiences.

            This habit of caring more about credit than benefit is sometimes insidious in my life. Consider the Fitbitch. (Thank you, songwriting friend Morellen MacLeish for so renaming the Fitbit watches we wear). There are times when I lose sight of how the record-keeping it offers becomes more important than the health benefits of, let’s say, my daily physical exercise.  I get stressed out (I admit it), that I haven’t reached my daily quota of steps, or that I’m not reaching my weight goals.  The more I stress, the more onerous the exercise becomes and the more I stuff my face in response.  In short, I give my power of self-respect over to an impersonal, commercial device.  Really?!

            So, I remind myself to focus more on benefit, not credit.  Not how far have I walked, but how does the air feel, have the endorphins kicked in, how many ideas volunteer themselves to me as I swing my arms and legs.  Yes, I’m caught up in the credit mill as much as anyone else, but it no longer makes my life, as the rehab folks would put it, “unmanageable.”

Why am I doing this?  What are the intrinsic, real-life benefits?  This applies, here, too: I wrote this post because loving my students gives my life with meaning and joy.  I wrote this post to commit to living more authentically, myself.

Finally, in school, instead of focusing on credits and grades, ask yourself: “What am I learning?”  “How can I grow?”  “How does this amplify my life and self-respect?”  “How can I benefit in a real, lasting way?”  Ask yourself, following our addict metaphor, “Is this professor nurturing me, or is this professor a pusher?”

"Can I Ask You a Question?": Power and Dominance in the Classroom

            “Can I ask you a question?” students new to me ask.  I’m fond of answering (1) “You just did!” (pa dum da); and, (2) “Of course not! I’m your teacher.”  Blinks and winks. No one has ever questioned this question before.

            It troubles me, not only because we have become so unaware of our language (a topic addressed in other posts), but because it gives me, as the teacher, an additional layer of power and implicit dominance, that is untoward: A student has not only a right but a responsibility to himself, his teacher, and his classmates to ask questions.  I would place “Can I ask you a question?” on the left side of the power continuum, what I’ll call the “left-behind” side, where the student has the least amount of power (right above cowering silence).  For this post, we will focus on the student’s point of view.  Here’s the continuum:

                                                             Student Power

Silence   Can I ask?                                Discovery              You Can’t Teach Me   Silence

            On the other end of this continuum—what I’ll call the “I’m right” extreme is hostile silence, falling asleep, and any of the rude behaviors with which I regale you in The Rude Student.  Right next to that is You-Can’t-Teach behavior that attempts to wrest power from the teacher: statements and questions that are meant to establish the teacher’s limitations and to assume dominance over her. The student in this mode displays showing off behavior: bringing in topics and angles on the discussion in order to distract attention from the general proceedings in the class and onto herself.  We might call this being “The Devil’s Advocate,” which might, without the will-to-power, invoke the fulcrum Discovery mode. But too often, The Devil’s Advocate is challenging the teacher, not ideas.  This bravado is meant to hide a deep-seated feeling of inadequacy, a translation of the fear of the new, resistance to what might feel like a submission to learning something that she didn’t know before.  Another manifestation of this is the student who dismisses new ideas with such declarations as "I don't get it!"--meaning "it's not worth getting.  You're wasting my time." Whereas on the left side of the continuum the student is mired in inadequacy, on the other end the student is fighting to deny it.  On the left-behind side we have untoward submission, on the right, untoward dominance.  

            In the beginning of my teaching career, when I was the director of a developmental writing program—creating and coordinating courses in which students initially felt stigmatized as unbelonging dummies—I committed myself to notice and to diffuse power struggles in the classroom—to be awake to these dynamics and to replace them with, what all the Because I Can Teach posts assume, learning environments that are respectful, energizing, and geared toward mutual creation and discovery of new ideas and skills.

            So, the fulcrum, the middle of our continuum, is what I call the “Discovery” mode—not even the “Balance,” as that assumes a see-saw between “Left-Behind” and “I’m-Right.”  In this mode, students relax their fearful defensiveness to become active creators of knowledge in the classroom.  Questions and ideas flow freely.  Since there is no sense of “I’m better than you” in either direction, we appreciate each other’s contributions and revel in how we, in each meeting, become renewed.  To facilitate this, I model new ways of seeing and doing, and then release students to working with each other.  Ideally, they will hardly notice me floating between groups, so engrossed they are in their deliberations.

            I often say, “If I haven’t learned something new in a class meeting, then it wasn’t a good class.”  It means I repressed my students in some way, asserted dominance in a way I abhor—squelching their development.  On the other hand, it is also my devotion to notice when a student attempts to assume that position of dominance, which is so corrosive to group dynamics.  To help this student, who, in many ways, is less well off than the Left-Behind, find a way to new learning and legitimate power. Hence this blog post.

            And, yes, there are classes where the teacher is faltering—more interested in asserting dominance, hiding his own sense of inadequacy.  How can we, as students in such an environment, look for a way to turn it around for ourselves?  How can we make our time in such a situation an opportunity instead of a grind?  (For one, we can watch how the dynamics play out, as I am doing here.) 

            How are you in the classroom?  Where do you place on the continuum of power? How can you get off the see-saw to renew yourself?  What happens when you ask yourself, “What new, beneficial thing can I learn here, regardless?”  

           

Works Cited:

Because I Can Teach Link: 

             The Rude Student

Cover Art: http://stickpickapp.blogspot.com/2014/02/when-students-ask-questions.html

Story! Not Plod: Don't Be Thorough. Be Deep!

"Plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature"
~Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged.

           To paraphrase or summarize a piece of literature is to attempt to carry the burden of the whole of its mass into an essay.  It’s pure drudgery, trudgery, pain in the, as it were, lower back to write.  It’s boring and a pain in the upper back (and neck) for readers to read.  Paraphrasing and summarizing have been two of the forms of punishment—along with dunce caps, raps on the knuckles, beatings with paddles and switches, and cages—with which teachers have abused students (if only metaphorically). And if teachers are bored reading the results, then, well, it (de)serves them right.

            Early on as a teacher, I vowed to be honest with myself and with my students. I don’t assign boring tasks that result in boring reading.  Paraphrases and summaries are boring.  If they are improvements on the literature, then why have the literature?

            But, but, but, I hear a reader sputtering, We have to know what it’s about. Yes, it surely helps to know that Hamlet’s uncle poisoned Hamlet’s father, and that the play Hamlet is a journey through how Hamlet does or doesn’t cope.  That’s the story of Hamlet.  But we don’t have to know (and here I’m leaving out a two-page summary of the play) every first-this-happens-then-this-happens-then-this-happens-then… detail to cut to Hamlet’s To be, or not to be soliloquy.  We don’t have to eat the whole wedding cake to savor our one (or two) slices.  If we do attempt to eat the whole wedding cake, that sack on the boy’s back becomes a big sack of a belly—we end up not being able to stomach the literature.  We get sluggish, vomitatious, sleepy. (But enough of this extended metaphor.)

            Let’s distinguish story from plot—or what I am fond of calling “plod.”  The story is the two-sentence blurb we read when surfing through Netflix for a new film to watch.  It’s what we tell a fellow student who corners you before a class and asks you (as she hasn’t done the assigned reading) “What’s the story about?”  The process of distilling the story enables you to choose your focus and to read more deeply.

            The plod is the breakfast-to-bed details of first-this-happens-then-this-happens-then-this-happens-then…  It fills up the required number of pages; you can do it while multi-devicing, eating, and (forfend!) driving; and you don’t have to learn or change your mind in any way.  It’s substituting a false sense of thoroughness for depth and originality of thought.

            It’s no wonder that the children’s story character, Mr. Plod, is a policeman.  Assigning plod—woops—plot paraphrase/summary—is to police students: Are you following the teacher’s laws?  Are you thinking what the teacher’s thinking?  Summary sites were created to level the possibility of students actually learning how the mind works, how it might work. They pander to our addictions to games and social media—get this school assignment over-with, so I can get back to my phone.

            Other forms of plod include writing (1) Annotations.  In this exercise, students might quote a sonnet line by line, offering a few remarks—notations—after each.  (2) Breakfast-to-bed. Usually used in not-so-creative first-draft story writing, the student starts by detailing image after dutiful image of what it means for a character to wake up. Unless you’re having your character wake up as a huge insect, as Kafka does in “Metamorphosis,” a startling, and engaging premise, breakfast often leads to another form of plod, (3) Close links. First you wake up, then you brush your teeth, then you… (4) On and On. Attempting to cite every instance of a theme or pattern than you discern in your subject matter. (5+) Other variations include Monday thru Sunday, 1 to 10, and, well, I don’t want to plod through all the plodding possibilities here.  Burdensome to write, plod writing is burdensome to read. Whatever creates a feeling of “oh-no,” Do-I-have-to-plod-through-all-this-one-robotic-step-at-a-time? disappointment in you, as the writer, will create it in the reader.  As soon as I get a whiff of that in a student paper, we’re back to the revision board.

Don’t be thorough—be deep. As viewers might say about a film, “get to the chase.”  For our literary purposes, it’s “get to the story.”

                     

Works Cited:

End Art: https://ransom.church/phill/whats-your-story-2/

Because I Can Teach Resources:

A Monarch Shmoops…https://becauseicanteach.blogspot.com/2014/03/in-other-wordsthe-prison-and-misprision.html

One Paper Clip: https://becauseicanteach.blogspot.com/2018/05/one-paper-clip-detail-design-
depth.html

Thank you, Brianna Oddo, for alerting me to Ayn Rand's quote!

Why Write?: Knowing When and How

In a previous blog, Pyramid of Needs, we considered Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of why we do as we do in our lives. According to Maslow, these are our priorities: (1) Survival, (2) Security, (3) Power, (4) Love, (5) Communication, (6) Self-Esteem, (7) Self-fulfillment.  If our first priorities are not satisfied, even minimally, then we can’t get to the higher levels of self-esteem and self-fulfillment.  Where we are on the pyramid shows up right away when we are challenged, as for example when we read or write for a class.

In my textbook, The Flexible Writer, I discuss  three main purposes for writing, which I adapted from James Britton’s insights in “Notes on a Working Hypothesis about Writing”: Self-expressive, Interpersonal, Aesthetic.  A given piece of writing may serve some or all of these.  Practicing writers know how to gauge what is appropriate and don’t, for example, write a mostly self-expressive piece when an interpersonal one might be more effective.

Self-expressive

Self-expressive writing satisfies the need for asserting our survival and security needs.  It satisfies the need to be heard and recognized as an individual, despite social pressures.  Through it, we might vent our anger, complain, grieve; exalt, dream, wonder.  This purpose is often fulfilled by the very act of writing, itself, whether or not someone else reads what we’ve written.  Self-expressive writing often takes the form of first-draft diary entries, letters, autobiographies, lyric poems, songs—rants on Facebook, dashed off Tweets and GIFs. Here is a self-expressive draft written by student Samantha Renner:

I am terrified of the idea of war.  All I can think of are those films of houses gutted by bombs, children lying half-naked and dead in the streets, and blood everywhere.  Sometimes at night, I wake up to the sirens from the fire station down the block, and I panic: What if they are not signaling for a fire? What if, somehow, there are planes coming to bomb our town?  This must be just a little of what people must feel who are actually in a war zone.  It’s terrible.

In this paragraph, Samantha expresses her feelings about war.  The self-expressive purpose is fulfilled by the very act of writing. Samantha doesn’t anticipate a reader, and no one has to have read what she has written or respond to it.

            If you find yourself resenting, defending against, or arguing with others when they respond to your writing, it may be because your intention was only self-expressive.  Know when to show your writing to others.  Read the blog post Writer's Wrodeo: Whoas and Wonders to help you to discern where you are with a particular piece of writing.

            Interpersonal

            Interpersonal writing satisfies not only the needs for survival and security, but also those of power, love, and communication.  Through interpersonal writing, we connect, break, or negotiate with a reader, an audience (a word that literally means “those who listen”).  Our anticipated audience may be as far away as a reader in another country or century, whom we may never meet; or as close as ourselves.  Our anticipated audience may be as specific as an instructor or as general as a U.S. citizen.  Our task is to determine our primary audience and how to reach it.

            In interpersonal writing, we try to convince someone else to recognize us, to do something for or with us, to agree with us, or to change her or his ways.  It may take the form of letters, proposals, editorials, business and legal memos, recipes, instructions—or chat threads.  Submissions to teachers are meant to embody what you have learned and to earn a grade. (We will consider specific educational purposes for writing in an upcoming post.)

            The following is an excerpt from an essay Samantha wrote with a predominantly interpersonal purpose: to persuade her audience of her position.

            Before our country declares war on another country, I believe several things should take place:

     (1) There should be an open debate on media between those who are for and those who are against the war.  Debaters should include the parents of draftable people, military personnel, lawmakers, conscientious objectors, and ambassadors from those on whom we might declare the war.

     (2) There should be films of war played on television, the internet, and social media showing the ravages of war, especially on non-military persons.

     (3) There should be a vote taken from the general population.

     (4) There should be an active campaign to ensure that at least 50% of the population votes.

            Samantha’s interpersonal writing invites debate, action, and results.  She uses rhetorical devices (persuasion techniques) such as bulleted points and clear appeals to emotions (as in her evocation of war images).  In a workshop, fellow writers can help her anticipate how others might disagree with her, so that she can head readers off before they can.

            Aesthetic

            At its best, aesthetic writing satisfies the highest levels of needs that Maslow identifies: self-esteem and self-fulfillment.  It assumes that self-expressive and interpersonal needs have been met and attention can be turned toward writing for the sake of elegance, compression, beauty, overall memorability.  If only aesthetics are managed in a particular piece of writing, then it can be superficially entertaining, but it will lack depth. When, for example, your instructor insists on grammatical correctness, but ignores the self-expressive and interpersonal aspects of writing, writing might be more like a Styrofoam cup instead of one made of fine porcelain.

            Aesthetic writing has action, imagery, and dialog.  The diction (choice of words) is compelling.  Aesthetic writing is based in imagery—to reach deeply into the reader’s consciousness.  It is specific.  It is something new. It incorporates the poetic and lyrical techniques, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. does in his “I have a Dream” speech, or William Shakespeare does in Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy.

            Here’s is Samantha’s poem, focused with aesthetic strategies:

            When will We Awaken?

     The sirens shriek,

     3:30 in the morning, again.

     Somewhere nearby there is a fire.

     This one will be cooled by ready water.

     The children will be carried

     by people in wet rubber coats.

     What of the shrieking in another place

     where no one will carry the children to safety—

     away from bombs bursting in air

     giving proof through the night    

     that a flag may wave?

     Not only has Samantha expressed her outrage at war, but, in focusing on specific imagery and strategically invoking the “National Anthem,” she’s argued against war.  She fulfills all three major modes of writing: Self-expressive, Interpersonal, and Aesthetic.

            Combinations

            Samantha successfully combined all three modes of writing to satisfy a hierarchy of needs.  Sometimes, it can be hard to separate the aesthetic from the self-expressive and the interpersonal in some work.  And that is devoutly to be wished for—to have all three integrated.

            Ask yourself when you are writing, what need or needs you are predominantly satisfying.  And when it comes to writing workshop, be honest with yourself:

If your purpose is mainly self-expressive, then you will not want anything but approval.  Your purpose will be mainly focused on your own experience.  Ask your readers to refrain from suggestions for revision.

If your purpose is interpersonal, writing workshop will provide you an opportunity to test-run your ideas and to strengthen your chances at better results. Be open, listen, thank your readers for their support and commitment to your writing.

If your purpose is predominantly aesthetic, you might, again, only want approval. You might welcome readers to offer their appreciation for different aspects of your writing style as they manifest in your work.

But if you can combine all three purposes, you will afford yourself a lively and supportive atmosphere for becoming the liveliest writer you can be. 

Works Cited

Cover Art: http://thewriteconversation.blogspot.com/2016/06/why-write.html

“Pyramid of Needs.” becauseicanteach.blogspot.com http://becauseicanteach.blogspot.com/2018/03/

“Writer’s Wrodeo: Whoas and Wonders” http://becauseicanteach.blogspot.com/2019/03/writers-wrodeo-workshop-woes-and-wonders.html

Britton, James. “Notes on a Working Hypothesis about Writing.” Prospect and Retrospect: Selected

Essays of James Britton.  Ed. Gordon M. Pradl.  Montclair: Boynton/Cook, 1982.)

https://www.albany.edu/cela/publication/article/writing.htm

Rich, Susanna. The Flexible Writer. Fourth edition. Boston: Allyn/Bacon, 2003.

Writers' Wrodeo: Workshop Whoas and Wonders

 

I know what it’s like to be the bronco.  I was four years old. The child of Hungarian immigrants.  Poor. My parents were separated. I was unable to speak or understand English.  Lonely. Unbelonging.  Helpless.  Defended.

            The kindergarten nun—I didn’t have a way of remembering an English name—had handed out flash cards for us to identify pictures with a word.  Of course, I didn’t, at the time, follow what this game was.  I had just come from being wrestled out of the protection of my coat.  I was hungry.  Why was I being subjected to this?

            All the other children were happily calling out words.  When it came my turn, I crossed my arms over my chest.  Pouted.  And shoved the flashcard away with the back of my hand.  I burst into tears.

            What happened next, I don’t know.  But I learned to speak, write, and read in English.  I have been teaching English, now, for over 40 years. My Hungarian father often bragged that a Hungarian girl was teaching the English English. But I feel helplessness and frustration in some students when I introduce new writing strategies in workshops.  The first round is always the toughest: “It’s my writing!” a student will often say, implying that I am violating her privacy.  “That’s the way I like it,” another will say (implying “hands-off!”).  Or, “You just want me to write the way you want me to write.”  The worst part of that is the implication that I’m being just as arbitrary as teachers who insist on the five-paragraph essay, or simply regurgitations of teacher’s opinions.

            In other blog posts, among them, “Reasons for Writing” and “Damning with Praise,” I offer ways in which to understand workshop dynamics. But the most difficult experience is the defensiveness and ego-attachment we are considering here.  And it often comes from experiences that have little to do with writing, per se, and everything to do with the vulnerabilities that come from the kinds of childhood trauma I described above.  If you are peripheralized in any way, especially because of things that you cannot help—nationality, gender, race, age, sexual-orientation, family, ability, or class—any suggestion that you can grow as a writer might feel like just another personal rejection—“Don’t be you. Be like me.”  If, in addition, you have only had single opportunities to hand in papers for a grade—which would make anyone feel anxious and helpless—then any recommendation for redrafting will raise a feeling of despair.

            I regularly meet now with my own colleagues to workshop my own writing—this post, too, has been vetted by my husband, for example. I’ve made many changes from my first draft, calling on the voices of my fellow writers in my head. My editors offer me suggestions, which  almost always help me to make significant breakthroughs in my work. But in the past, in the hands of workshop leaders that were writers but not teachers, I have walked away in tears.  Especially corrosive are those men who use workshops to court women.  (But that’s for another post.)  Then there are workshops where the leader assumes and maintains power by how she metes out attention and praise.  Cliques form. And we’re right back to feeling like the child who doesn’t belong.

So, if you feel, as I did, like pushing away from the desk and sulking, ask yourself these questions.  Is my teacher a writer? Is my teacher a teacher (as opposed to a writer who needs a job)?  Does this teacher have experience and writers’ skills to offer me? Do I want to learn them? Do I feel like I can grow as a writer?  Do I want to reach more readers?  Or is this about my feeling bad about myself, for other reasons?

If I didn’t watch others around me walk, I might have crawled all my life.  If I didn’t have those tall people holding my hands as I stood for the first time, I wouldn’t have walked.  If I didn’t have other dancers show me the steps and model for me how to make the moves—I wouldn’t be the dancer I am.  So, too, with writing.

And if you can’t learn from what is said directly about your work, learn from what is said about others’ writing.  Learn from the insights that arise in you and that you share.  Trust the process. Always express gratitude for others' care and attention. 

Your ego and fears and anger will be like that bronco bucking, kicking, struggling.  But stay with it.  In time, you will tame your fears and recover from the real insults to your integrity that come from xenophobia (fear of strangers) and prejudice.  And then, oh the places your writing will ride you!

How’s your bronco-bustin’ going?

Works cited:

Cover art: http://www.distinctlymontana.com/rodeo-women

End art: http://worldartsme.com/happy-trails-clipart.html#gal_post_64416_happy-trails-clipart-1.jpg

Evaluating Teachers: What's Important

                           


                               Theorems: If it can be assessed, it's not important.

             If it's important, it can't be assessed.

When I think back on my own teachers, it’s rarely their words and never their tests that I value—it’s who they were as human beings—how they treated us and how passionate they were with their subjects. If the teacher was cruel—like Sister Whatever in eighth grade—making us put our hands on our shoulders until our elbows felt like they were going to explode—well, that’s what I remember—not her name, or subject, or her teachings.  If the teacher was inspiring, like Mrs. Catanzaro, I still carry in me her enthusiasm for reading plays, for hearing what we had to say, for her love of words. I still remember her name and hunted her down to Friend on Facebook.  It’s no surprise that I have made a career of teaching, writing, and performing literature.

But when did it become clear to me that what’s important can’t be assessed or quantified?  As a new appointee to the Kean College English Department, I wrote and taught a course on College Writing: Theory and Research—attended by the then and former chairs, and a number of senior faculty. I asked them at the end of the semester what they most valued.  I was fishing, of course, for praise, vulnerable as I felt as untenured faculty.  I had hoped they would mention my Punctuation routine (see posts…); or how I used Composition research to launch my dissertation; or the writing workshops strategies we successfully explored together. But, over and over, the response was that they remembered best my enthusiasm for teaching and writing.  Years later, one of my chairs told me how much her own writing transformed because of our class together. Well then.  That taught me what my responsibilities as a teacher are.  And they are neither recordable or tabulatable in current Student Evaluation of Teachers forms.

Students learn how I am and do, not what I say—just as children learn more by do-as-I-do than do-what-I-say. If I find a reading assignment burdensome and boring, I can be certain that students will find it even more burdensome and boring. They learn this, Ipso facto: avoid these odious materials, and anything like them. I only assign those pieces of writing that excite me.  To this end, I’m constantly changing which Shakespeare works we read together in our required survey course.  And I do NOT overprepare, so that I can model what it means to encounter a challenging passage, be curious about it, look up words in the college dictionary I tote to every class, apply various critical approaches.  And the students are all part of the process.  Excitement and the application of skills can’t be feigned.  If I overprepare, I will be modeling control and they, in turn, will resist.  I do not want them to learn, Ipso facto, that literature=something to resist.  Most importantly, as I hope this blog shows, I am devoted to living and teaching as authentically as I can, and to being honest with myself and my students.

As universities become mere businesses—crunching retention numbers and low-balling faculty degrees and salaries—they levy digital student evaluations on teachers that are filled with leading questions meant to police teachers rather than to provide opportunities for support and improvement. And there is no space provided for comments and elaborations. Furthermore, these evaluations are forced on students during final grading time, and not during the next semester, year, or decade, when the lasting benefits of a class are most likely to emerge.  Don’t get me wrong, my digitalized evaluations consistently yield high scores.  But they are a distraction, source of stress, and waste of everyone’s time.  They don't give due credit and they mislead students.

To that end, here are proposed questions for a real (e)valuation, following, let’s say, a Shakespeare Survey class that asks how a teacher was, not the what they did or said—these would be distributed a year and then ten years after said class:

1)     Have I had a Shakespeare quote tattooed on my body?

2)     Have I become an attorney because I was so inspired by Portia in The Merchant of Venice?

3)     Do I attend performances of Shakespeare’s plays?

4)     Do I post Shakespeare quotes where they might inspire or comfort me?

5)     Do I daily Facebook chat with my teacher about teaching?

6)     Am I more proactive in my life, so I don’t get stuck like Hamlet?

7)     Do I reread passages of Shakespeare’s plays we discussed in class?

8)     Am I still in touch with classmates I worked with in my Shakespeare class?

9)     Do I write my own poetry, songs, plays, or essays because of our class?

10) Do I share Shakespeare quotes on social media?

11) Do I own/display Shakespeare tee shirts, mugs, or other souvenirs?

12) Do I teach Shakespeare?

13) What was my Shakespeare teacher’s name?

14) Has my passion for reading, in general, blossomed because of our class?

15) How else has my life been transformed because of Shakespeare class?

Add some more real-world questions that embody your take-away from a teacher you valued. Be creative and personal.

Works Cited:

Cover Art: https://patch.com/new-york/bed-stuy/teacher-evaluations-who-s-business-is-it-anyway

The Love of Reading versus Studying: A Continuum

                           

            It used to be flashlights under the covers with comic books—now it’s phones, tablets, E-readers—there is something delicious about wanting to read so much that we sneak it.  I’m not talking about social media, compulsive scrolling, online shopping, gaming, or texting—that doesn’t count as reading—but being eager to return to a book does.

            It would seem that school should inspire the love of learning, as libraries do with clubs and book fairs—but, unfortunately, school ruins reading for most of us.  In this blog post, I want to address this problem and to offer a model to help us recapture our passion for reading, so much so, that we abandon our Netflix, YouTube, and whatever new distractions and addictions have emerged since I posted this essay—because we can’t wait to indulge our love of books.

            On one end of the continuum is self-motivated, indulgent, glorious wanna reading—the kind we talk about with your friends and never seem to see in a class; the kind where we fall in love with an author and scramble to find everything she or he has written. On the other end of the continuum is studying boring gotta textbooks in anticipation of quizzes for get-it-over-with courses and grades.

            But there are some truly fascinating works presented in classes that belong on the love side of the continuum—that are ruined by how they are “taught.”  So, it’s not even so much what is included in classes as how we are harassed into, literally, confronting them.  It is truly tragic to me that, when I ask my students in their senior capstone courses what they love to read, they look at me like deer stunned by high beams in the middle of the night.  It has been so long that anyone cared about their experience of reading—since they felt any passion for reading themselves—that they don’t know how to answer.  Teachers placed themselves between them and books, co-opting, mediating, and grade-quantifying their experience.

First, it’s such a ridiculous expression: “I’m teaching Shakespeare.”  Under one interpretation of the expression, that’s ludicrous.  Can’t teach Shakespeare anything—he’s totally gone.  And teaching conjures in all of us the fear of metaphorically being the dunce shamed in a corner, having our knuckles rapped with a ruler, or having to suffering detention.  I reject the prevailing pedagogical model that favors learning standard information over learning how to appreciate, that favors assessment models over learning. Teaching should be about inspiring, modeling for, and empowering students to create meaningful, and intellectually and emotionally satisfying lives.

Reading was ruined for me, too.  That’s why I can write this. It has taken me years to actually read through a book without taking notes, highlighting, annotating the margins, and memorizing “key” ideas.  It has taken me years to question whether a book is worth reading through, just because it is a published work that someone else required me to read.  It has taken me years to think of books as treasured friends to turn to for relaxation, adventure, illumination. It’s only now that I’ve stopped, as a teacher, thinking of the works I assign to classes as reading chores for myself.

To rehabilitate us all, I don’t give quizzes to police whether students have read our texts.  We develop an atmosphere of commitment and engagement early on and most students come prepared—that is not negotiable. And I certainly don’t give multiple choice tests.  Horrendously, there are some teachers who actually administer quizzes and multiple-choice tests in Creative Writing courses.  Really?!  I have discoursed on this in other posts, but my focus in our classes is not what I want, but what students actually get from their readings. 

I ask first, a show of hands, of those who have read the portions of texts we will be considering that meeting.  Most students are honest, and they know the rest of us will know—given the nature of our discussions—whether they showed up that week.  That’s usually enough embarrassment for them to come prepared. After that, it’s all about making the reading belong to THEM not to me as the arbiter of grades. And my hope is that they will be able to recover from studying and learn how to enjoy the readings.

One of the following questions will often catapult us into our discussions: Did you like reading this?  Why or why not? What caught your attention?  What did it mean to you?  Is this good, engaging writing?  Why or why not?  What questions arose for you? 

Just as a docent will show visitors how to view new, experimental art in a museum, our class is a place where I can model different doorways by which to enter a piece of writing, such as imagery, theme, characterization, structure—but not everyone thinks alike, and not all strategies will resonate with all students.  I don’t require all students to equally engage with all our strategies. 

Even more than discussion with the whole class, my students discuss readings in small groups—that’s nothing new.  But I don’t micromanage the direction these discussions will take with checklists of questions tending toward “approved” responses. We come together after group readings to benefit from the often unique and inspiring insights that emerge from the reading pods.

Here are strategies to remember if we are to pull our readings away from the study end of the continuum back to the love-of-reading end:

Less is more.  Good books deserve rereading and rereading.  What’s my take away this time from these pages?

Don’t be thorough—be deep.  If I try to memorize and retain everything I read in that limited corridor which is my left brain—I’ll drop it all. Best to carry away one idea that matters, and to integrate it.  Otherwise I’ll drop it all after the test and it won’t be available to me after.

Take what you like, and leave the rest. Most teachers would balk at this. My devotion is to inspire—not terrify.

Consider the continuum.  Are you reading or are you studying?  Ask yourself these questions as antidotes: Do I love this reading?  Why or why not?  How is this reading about me, and not about the teacher or the test?  How can I use this reading to find deeper and more satisfying meaning in my life?  How can I integrate this reading into what I already know?  What else could I read along these lines that might be more inspiring?

I invite you, as well, to read the blog post on TRUST—learn to trust yourself, as a reader, despite the environment of distrust that standard education fosters. Will it be on the Test?: Trust and Joy in the Classroom. The love of reading and your passion for literature will return if you make it your own.

I look forward to hearing about your experience of how studying can ruin reading for you. How can and do you nourish your love of reading?

            

                          

Works Cited

Cover Art: https://www.theodysseyonline.com/30-thoughts-college-students-have-while-studying

End Art: https://www.naeyc.org/our-work/families/read-together-support-early-literacy

Left Brain/Right Brain

  

In 1976, Julian Jaynes coined the term “bicameral mind” in his eponymous book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.  According to this model, the brain is divided into two rooms—“bi” meaning ‘two,’ and “camera” meaning ‘room.’  (We call our cameras “cameras” because the first camera was a large room, much reduced now to the thin room which is an iPhone connected to the doorless room which is the digital ether.) According to this early research, the left brain was in charge of language and the right of imagery. In his landmark, 2009 book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Wester World, author Ian McGilchrist offers a much refined theory, informed by extensive research since 1976, to show that both sides of the brain coordinate in the creation of experience.  With that proviso, we can consider how the predominant aspects of our divided brains function in the learning process.

In general, someone who functions predominantly from the left brain, as illustrated above, tends to construct experience as

Linear—one thing following the other in order

             Analytical and Mental

             Product oriented
             Closed
             Staid

Digital—favoring polar binary opposites, as, for example right or wrong, good or bad.

Numerical—clear, quantifiable order, favoring monetary and business systems

Conventional—according to tradition and popularly accepted values

Rule-bound and Prescriptive

Proscriptive—experience and action outside the parameter of accepted rules prohibited

Limiting—at best, the left brain can work four things in consciousness at a time

Rigid and strict

Dividing and Selective

External

Exclusive

“No”

Denotative—words mean discretely, without nuance

Ego and Superego—a will to power

Conscious

Prose

Boxed in

Guarantees
Fear based and inspired

We cannot live socially or in civilized cultures without these functions.  Some of the benefits of the Left Brain include a sense of security and constancy; organization and focus; and social and familial foundations.  The Left Brain identifies goals and marshals them to completion. Language, itself, functions because of Left Brain tendencies.

The problem comes when it presumes to take control of all the brains functions.  McGilchrist argues that, historically, the Left Brain was the emissary from the larger, the contrasting functions of the Right Brain, whose qualities include these:

Global

Contextual

Intuitive and epiphanic

Body and image based

Process oriented
      Open
      Fluid

Analog—favoring paradox and interweaving

Experimental and creative

Evolutionary and revolutionary

Descriptive

Expansive

Patient and flexible

Coordinating

Internal

Inclusive

“Yes”

Connotative

Id

Subconscious incubation

Dreams

Poetry

Out of the box

Possibility
Love based and inspired

The Right Brain is the repository of all of our history as a species—spatially and temporally.  It connects us in what sometimes feels magical ways. It offers us insight, joy, warning, possibility.

            Here’s an example of the difference between Left-Braining and Right-Braining.  I am an international folkdancer.  Every Wednesday night and on long vacations devoted to this art, we get together—women and men ranging in age from 20 to 100, and sometimes with children, to join hands and enjoy the dances from countries around the world and through time, to music that can be soft and prayerlike, or bawdy and rollicking.  After almost 40 years, I know most of the old dances and need only to hear the first few notes and my body knows the rest.  But there is always a leader, whom the rest of us watch.  If I were to put on the music at home, I would know neither the name of the dance nor which step comes next.  That’s because I have mostly Right-Brained these dances.  And, although I am known for being a “good dancer,” expressive, joyful, knowing how to style—and seem to know all the steps—I don’t.

            On the other hand, I have learned dances to teach others, and these I analyze into their component parts, memorize them, practice them, make and correct my mistakes while replaying videos.  I, in other words, take a Left-Brain approach, to “get it right,” correct others.  We have some master teachers in our folkdance group, who always know the steps, and whom the rest of us use as guides.  Too often, though, they devolve into a Left-Brainy make-wrong mode—conventionalizing, criticizing, scolding. What makes my teaching different from that of most other folkdance teachers, is that I also incorporate images in my teaching: “make believe you’re the Statue of Liberty, raising one hand and tucking in the other”; “make believe you are moving through water.”  This helps others to be expressive, joyful, stylized.  And I don’t scold.

            For me, when I’m at my best, this is an example of optimal coordination between the Left and Right brain.  Unfortunately, as Gilchrist argues so cogently in his book, the Left Brain functions have usurped control to assert the will to power. 

In politics, Left Brain leaders manipulate the voting public and constituencies with fear and rigid values. The traditional classroom, too, favors a Left Brain model. The posts on this blog serve as reminders that we are far larger and have greater capacities than the Left Brain would allow, by itself.  We invite the Right Brain into the mix, and favor

Imagery over plot

Experimentation over right/wrong

Community over leaders

Creativity over tests

Original over linear thinking

Learning over grades

Rainbow over black/white

Shapes over straight lines

Possibility over boredom

Spilling over the edges, like the picture above

Poetry over all

And more…

How are your learning experiences structured? Is there a generative balance of Left Brain/Right Brain in your classroom and in your learning process?

Works Cited:

Cover Art: Left Brain/ Right Brain Image

Text:

Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. 
      Boston: Mariner Books, 2000.

McGilchrist, Ian.The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western
      World,  New Haven: Yale UP, 2009.