Today I see the last day of summer 2020. It is also the last time that I will wake up without having to go into a classroom filled with students since our school dismissed on 13 March 2020. It was like there was a fire in the far corner of our cafeteria when we evacuated. Now, most of the building is in flames and we've been equipped with a spritzer bottle to combat the inferno as we're called to return to our classrooms.
I am not happy about the returning school year, though I think such a bald statement misses what's happening here. I'm not happy because my children aren't getting the annual tradition of back to school shopping, the thrill of new backpacks and lunchboxes, the excitement of seeing their friends, the challenge of a new grade. I'm not happy because instead, my children will be stuck at their grandma's house, wearing masks and tooling around on Chromebooks for the majority of the day. I'm not happy because the hollow words of praise from society about what teachers were able to do in the spring quickly collapsed into criticisms for failures, many of which were far beyond a teacher's power to control. I'm not happy that there are people who are planning on using their children as a political statement and thereby endangering other people's lives when they send their kids to school without the mandated masks. I am not happy because I will not be a teacher this year. Oh, I still have a job. I'm still in the classroom. I'm still covering the same moments in history, the same literature of the time. I'm still doing a job, yes, but I'm not a teacher. For me, a teacher is someone who inspires, instructs, and involves students in the process of learning. It's someone who seeks out ways of connecting--emotionally and intellectually--to the students and curricula. It's a person who wishes to use the content to create better people. I'm none of that this year. In order to do that, there are a handful of things that I've come to expect, almost all of which are givens during normal times. I would expect to have a full classroom, a (sometimes beyond) critical mass of minds that come together daily to discuss the great things that I have in store. Instead, I'm getting half a class every other day. This is an excellent accommodation, given the circumstances, and I'm glad that there's at least that much attempt at allowing for social distancing. I would expect students to chat, have fun with friends, and share their thoughts in class-wide discussions as well as smaller groups and individual conversations. Instead, I have them physically separated (about four feet between desks on either side, but they're in rows front to back with only a few inches between seat and desk), will have to listen to their muffled voices, not see them smile (or frown), and keep them in the same spot throughout the year. I am glad that I have as much space as I do, since not everyone can get their classes down to a maximum of 14 kids (which is twice as many as the room would fit if following the guidelines fully). I would expect to see former students passing me in the hallway, eager to share a fun experience that happened to them over the summer, or maybe recollect an inside joke from our time together. Instead, I plan on arriving before the bell to rotate rings and keeping myself isolated in my classroom as much as I possibly can. I'm grateful that my admin allows for this sort of thing, as I know that other teachers aren't so lucky. Normally, I look forward to the recharge that comes during lunchtime, when I can sit and chat with other adults and build up those communal bonds that strengthen the school's spirit. Instead, I have a microwave in my classroom so that I don't have to go to the faculty room where maskless friends will be eating their lunches. I will sit behind my plexiglass partitioned desk and pretend that I'm not imprisoned by an invisible enemy. I'm glad, at least, that I have that small space in which to try to feel safe. A teacher should be a coach as well, and I am always excited to coach three drama students in Shakespearean monologues for our fall competition. Instead, I have to figure out how to walk someone through the intricacies of the Bard via online meetings and remote conversations. I recognize that many events are completely canceled, so even though the competition is just a video submission this year, we're lucky to even have that. I would have expected that our society would take seriously a clear and present threat to our children and their families, that safety would be paramount. But then I remember Sandy Hook and I realized that money will always be more important than human life, and there's no positive spin I can put on this. In a country where our solution to gun violence and global warning--one an immediate threat and one a larger, more abstract one--is to ignore or deny the problem, can I really be surprised that we exhausted ourselves with conspiracies and half-measures? To say that I feel abandoned and betrayed is to put it so mildly that it may as well not be said. Safety aside (as if that should be a thing), I have to keep reminding myself that these thefts of experience are only temporary, that there will come a time when I can return to the classroom with excitement and enthusiasm, that our competitions and assemblies may return, that the futures we hope to build for the students aren't mired by viral uncertainty and political errors. This reminder, however, always spins around when I push away from what I am losing and to what they will miss. I'm not so egotistical as to think that a student who doesn't attend my class will be permanently hamstrung in their future and that they missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn from me. However, it isn't just my class that they're missing out on. It's the entirety of a learning experience that is being lost. I think of my own kids, and how my now-second grader struggled with school at first, but soon learned to really love his class and his school. His enthusiasm keeps twisting about, transforming from excitement into sadness that he can't return to where he wishes to be. Is there ever a year where it's "just fine" that they miss out on everything that year has planned? My now-fifth grader will not get to go on the exciting overnight campout that his grade always gets a chance to attend…I haven't reminded him about that, because why add to his sadness? My now-eighth grader was just starting to get the hang of the middle school experience when we dismissed; now he won't have middle school at all. He will be all online, learning via computer, and missing out on the interactions and friendships that he so desperately needs. As I roll over these realities in my mind, I get more and more frustrated. I don't blame the schools for wanting to be open--I want us to be open. Instead, I keep thinking about all of the missteps, the frittered away months where things could have gone differently but didn't, the energy wasted on pointless arguments and denials that have led to personal tragedies and a nation-wide catastrophe. I try not to look at other countries that sacrificed as needed to get their COVID response under control, mostly because it makes me feel jealous. That could've been us, but you playin'… In all honesty, I'm not surprised that we are in this situation. We are committed to the course we're on, apparently, and though there were offramps galore on this road we've taken, I don't see a lot of people in positions of power moving toward rectifying the situation as it stands. Is it possible to have prevented all of the deaths in the United States? No. Of course not. A novel viral outbreak is going to claim victims. Did we need to lose over 160,000--and be on track to lose maybe as many as 300,000 before year's end?--to say nothing of the untold and unknowable costs of COVID-related infections further down the line? No. Not even remotely. The frustration of people and the desire to seek out the normal we've lost is understandable. I recognize why parents want their kids to go to school--after all, many parents had the option to sign up for online-only schooling; most did not choose it--because of the many different realities that parents have gone through in their own individual journeys. For them, they don't see the risk as greater than the consequence; they likely also never saw their child embraced by cables and wires because that was the kind of hug that would keep them alive. I have. It's not worth saying goodbye to a loved one via Skype so that the soccer team can have a game. So while I understand where parents are coming from, in the end I have to say that what's being asked of me is not "my job"; it's asking for me to risk my life--or worse, my children's lives. I see no beauty in that cause, no desire to flout what's real in favor of hoping for something better. A new school year is supposed to be an opportunity to recommit toward personal growth and learning, to one's own education. All I can see is the potential for a grave, a breach in the ground where what I love has gone. That's not much of a vision for a new school year. And yet that is all I can see. When mid-March arrived and, with breathtaking rapidity, schools went from business-as-usual to crisis schooling, I held back on any opinions about the next school year. I didn't entertain questions about what it would look like, nor postulate how bad the pandemic might become, thereby necessitating some large-scale changes in how I visualize my teaching. I did this for two reasons: 1) I was busy trying to figure out what the best way was for educating my students remotely, and 2) Conceiving of changes implied that my worst suspicions and expectations would be confirmed; namely that statewide responses to the unprecedented (except it wasn't, but who reads history?) event would be so poor as to make opening schools untenable.
The end of the school year was difficult for a lot of reasons. (I detail a couple of them in this other post.) Once the grief process had worked its way through and summer arrived fully, it was easy to fall into my normal summer experience. I tend to be pretty introverted and hermetic, so the pandemic didn't put a lot of strain on my expectations. There were some, of course: I like to take my sons on a special summer experience once per season--a museum, a game store, whatever--but I couldn't do that this year. I also go on a writing retreat with my writing group, which also didn't happen. The Utah Shakespeare Festival had to cancel its season (and I wouldn't have gone anyway), which still hurts my heart. (It will be the first time since 2006 that I haven't gone to Cedar City for my biannual pilgrimage.) As summer waxed, so, too, did Utah's COVID-19 cases. The governor shut schools and churches and sports and a bunch of other things early on in the crisis, but failed to maintain any sort of discipline on the closures. Cases increased and restrictions eased--an inverse of what ought to have happened. Only on 9 July--a full four months after the pandemic began--did Governor Herbert announce that schools would be required to have everyone present masked, a no-brainer of a decision that still required a huge amount of effort to attain. The governor failed to make the mandate a statewide requirement, however, wagging his finger and telling Utahns that they had better start being more responsible or else! (For context: Since the beginning of July, Utah has seen its three highest days of COVID transmission, with our current peak being 9 July 2020 with 866 cases…coincidentally, that's the day where the school mask-mandate came into play.) The national discourse about the wearing of masks--the idea that the government can't tell us what to wear (even though you definitely have to wear clothing when you go outside or else you'll be jailed is, without a doubt, the government telling us what to wear) somehow becoming a rallying cry for armchair Constitutionalists and conspiracy-prone "thinkers"--has made it abundantly clear to me that my worst suspicions and expectations for the federal response to the pandemic were far too generous. And that's saying something. I'm not a fan of conservative politics in general--the thing that they're most often trying to conserve is racism and exploitation under the guise of governmental non-intervention, regardless of what their roots may have been--and I'm highly critical of the man in the Oval Office, so it's not really surprising that my biases meant I didn't have a lot of faith in the government's ability to handle the coronavirus. I admit that I was expecting it to get bad. What I didn't expect was that people would continue to see President Trump as a savior of democracy and a competent president. I assumed that the botched job would serve as a physical, visceral, personal reminder of his failings and would push his pertinence and rhetoric out of our collective minds. But, no. Currently, the United States is home to Florida, one of the largest epicenters in the world of COVID-19. Over 137,000 Americans who were alive to celebrate the advent of 2020 have gone to their graves like beds, killed because of the disease or complications exacerbated by it. That number surpasses how many American soldiers died in World War I by a clear margin…and it took 18 months of being involved in that war to get to our final death numbers. In the case of COVID, we're not even a half-year in. And, while we're still far away from the 1918 numbers (about 675,000 Americans died from that pandemic, more than both World Wars combined, and in the same ballpark as number of dead from the Civil War), we aren't out of danger. At all. I was curious how well we're doing now compared to 1918, which saw its first case on 4 October 1918 and then, by April 1919, had sufficiently contained the virus. Those six months saw about 9% of its population (10,268 people) come down with the influenza. The death count? A reported 576 people. As of right now, not even six months into this debacle, Utah is sitting at 28,855 cases and 212 deaths. Since history harmonizes, it's not surprising to learn that our current case number is about 9% of our 2020 population. That we have less than half as many deaths is a credit to the advances in medical technology and health care, which has absolutely blunted the lethal edge of coronavirus. However, medical experts warn that there is a pending crisis of hospital beds and ICUs that will allow that relatively low death number to remain relatively low. "It feels like we're headed for disaster." And it is in that context that I think about the pending school year. It cannot happen. I fully recognize the manifold problems, nuances, and complications that are tied up with the opening of schools in a month*. I am not insensitive to this at all. I don't know of a teacher who doesn't recognize the dilemma that's involved. Parents need the schools open so that they can return to work; students and teachers put back into the boxes we vacated in March will become vectors of the disease. It's what will happen, given what we know about transmission, infection, and difficulty with COVID-19. Parents demanding that schools open up in five weeks are demanding that teachers and students die for them. It's that simple. The danger to parents, students, teachers, and staff is higher and worse than it was in March. I'm positively baffled by the double standard here. The state of Utah has shown itself incapable of flattening the curve (see again the case counts). Our worst days of this virus are most likely ahead of us. And while there are some measures that can make schools safer, there isn't a way to make them safe. There's a narrative out there that only old people or those with underlying conditions need be worried about the coronavirus, and it's one that people want to believe so much that they are willing to risk lives for it. There are disturbing potential connections to COVID-19 and Kawasaki-like symptoms**. We have no idea what kind of long-term effects COVID-19 can have on a body--young or old--a few months down the line, to say nothing about a year or two or five from now. Deliberately putting people into harm's way in order to serve the economy is ghoulishly revolting. Alternatives do exist, of course. The most obvious one is to lockdown the state, reassess what we mean by "essential workers", and then pay everyone else to stay home. And I mean that: Pay everyone to stay home. Put a hold on all debt payments--not deferring to a few months down the line, I mean a complete stop--and guarantee a universal basic income that allows for food and necessities to be purchased. If people don't have to work, they won't have to insist their kids go to school. However you parse it, though, sending kids off to school "in the fall" is like encouraging them to play with their toys in the street: It's only a matter of time until a preventable tragedy strikes. --- * That's one of the ways in which the danger is being downplayed: We keep saying "in the fall". "Schools should open in the fall." In Utah, that's never been when we go back to school. For us, the school year begins on 18 August--that's five weeks from when I'm writing this. That is still summertime. The sun doesn't go to bed until 10:00 in August; the mercury consistently plays in the high 90s. "Fall" conjures images of autumnal leaves and crisp mornings, a distinctive change in temperature and frost on the lawns. But that isn't what we're actually talking about. When people say schools need to open up "in the fall", they actually mean, "middle of next month". ** This particular article is indicative of the willingness to perpetuate the narrative about who's vulnerable to this disease. If you notice the second bullet point of the summation at the top, it says, "New study pointed out a third of these pediatric patients were obese or had other medical woes". That means that two-thirds did not. The vast majority of those kids were not in a high-risk category! Not only that, but with heart-, lung-, kidney-, diabetes-, age, or obesity problems all being linked to higher mortality rate for COVID-19, essentially half of America is at risk in some form or another. And when you think about the potential transmission factors, almost everyone--or someone they love--is at higher risk. Pointing out that a third of these kids had additional problems tricks readers into finding a way to not be worried about what's going on. Here's a hypothetical: Say that all 330,000,000 Americans get coronavirus and only 1% of them die. When we read "1%", we're inclined to think that isn't so bad. But 1% of 330 million is 3.3 million dead. That's more than all of our wars that we've ever been in combined, plus the 1918 pandemic. Check out this video if you're interested in seeing how our brain tricks us into thinking that this situation isn't as bad as it really is. In order to earn an endorsement for the history class I was hired to teach early in my career, I took a class on early American history. The text book itself was a single volume covering the entirety from a bit about Mesoamerica up to the 2008 election. It was the last section that really stood out to me: Seeing a watershed event like the 2008 election and the Great Recession written down as if just another chapter in a history book was kind of strange.
Amazing how much has changed in a dozen years. Future history books are going to have quite a time trying to conceptualize all that we've experienced lately. It might easier, on one hand: YouTube, social media, and a digital record of ever expanding depth will allow for documentation unparalleled in the history of the human experience. On the other hand, that quantity of information is impossible to sort through, contain, or do justice to. What's omitted from history books is sometimes as instructive as what's left in. When the experience of 2020 is complete, what will be remembered? Australian fires? Presidential impeachments? School dismissals? Pandemic deaths? Pandemic protests? Black Lives Matter? Peaceful protests? Police riots? William Barr's abuses of power? Rumors about Senator Lindsay Graham's sex life? A handful of memes? The list can go on and on…and we're only in June. Of all that's there, the question that lands closest to home is the one about school dismissals. What does it mean to restart school in the fall of the hell-year known as 2020? Though I tend to avoid the Wall Street Journal, this article they posted about the failures of remote learning caught my eye (and my click). There's plenty to unpack here. First of all, perhaps a few questions about the goal for the final quarter of the school year. What did people expect from crisis schooling? Did parents/students think to have a parallel experience to in-class, in-school instruction? Were students dismissed mid-March with a promise that their education would not be impacted by this catastrophe? If so, then remote schooling definitely didn't work. And, as an educator, I didn't think that it would. However, if one's expectation was that the students would still be presented with some of the curriculum, some of the opportunities to increase their skills, some of the knowledge that they would otherwise have gotten, then it did work. Honestly, if a parent thought that helping their kid from home with their school work was going to be the exact same as when the kid was actually at school, that's on the parents' failures. I wasn't teaching my classes--I was trying to help my students learn something. That's it--and that's not even what my normal goal as an educator is. Education has a lot of problems. One happens to be that there's a huge amount of assumptions and traditions that mandate the way that we operate. In Utah (the only state I've taught in, though much of the US is similar), we have a certain quantity of school days (180) that must be held, as well as a certain number of in-seat hours (990) that are expected. When you consider that 180 days out of 365 isn't even half of the year (despite having two thirds of the calendar), it quickly becomes apparent that something doesn't quite match up. We assume our students are in school for nine months; our traditions (multiple three-day weekends, Fall and Spring Break, Thanksgiving holiday, Winter Break) actually change that. In my school, with the different schedules for finals, our three-week intensive called Winterim, and these traditional school breaks, I have approximately 42 days (not counting regular weekends) wherein I don't work with my students and the regular curriculum. This doesn't count the 90 or so days of summer break. This is the system that I grew up with. It's the one that I've always taught in. I'm not (necessarily) advocating its change. I'm instead pointing out that when we think of a school "year", our calendar says something quite different from the actual in-class experience. If someone were interested in shifting around any of these scheduling concepts--say, to reduce the amount of time during summer break, or having shorter days over a longer time period with fewer breaks--there's a lot of ossified tradition to overcome. Many parents (and I include myself here) look forward to the summer break as a chance for family trips, relaxed schedules, and long-standing activities. Childhood is tantamount to summertime (and Christmas, I'd think, for many) in the minds of a lot of adults, and it's only fair that they want to share those beloved moments of their youth with their children. So changing that in a widescale way is working against the current on almost every level. What we expect through this (and other academic traditions) is that our children will come out on the other end educated. And, for the most part, I think this can be a successful plan. While it isn't ideal, the reality is that we have a highly literate society (in that we can read; whether we can process ideas and think about what we read is a different discussion) and our education system can find and refine a lot of talent. But its success isn't predicated on that it exists: It's based upon the way we educate. It's no surprise that when we change the way we educate, we don't get the same kind of successes. One of the educational buzzwords (which has faded in my dozen years of teaching) is "backwards by design". The principle is a good one, I think: You consider what you want a student to be doing at the end of the unit, and then work backwards to see how to get them there. Kind of obvious, isn't it? Yet it's not unusual--at least, in my experience--to think, Hey, I'd really like to teach this particular topic…and then fail to figure out what the ending looks like. The default for many is a test--something that does a good job of measuring how well a kid does on a test--but maybe an essay? A handful of problems with answers in the back of the book? If, however, the educator knows what the ending looks like--the kid understands how to use MLA citation in a paper, let's say--then the beginning is pretty straightforward and sets the kid down the correct path. The end of the year for me is absolutely by design: I have a specific goal and emotional conclusion that I work all year to arrive at. That's how my class works. But it can't arrive at the ending I've designed if the course shifts abruptly and permanently. Did my class "work" the way I expected it to? No, of course not. How could it? Its entire output was predicated on an input that I could no longer do. I think that's what's stuck in my craw about the WSJ article. Not a single regular teacher set out in August 2019 with the expectation of concluding a full quarter of the school year in a remote learning environment. We weren't designing for that endpoint. It could never work for that reason. But what did work? Schools limped on, of course, struggling to figure out how to balance everything from everyone. We did provide content to students--who may or may not have done what was asked of them. Students weren't homeschooled--they learned at home. Any homeschooling parent worth their salt could tell you the difference. And that was something we did with about two days' preparation. This is not to toot my own horn, but to instead contextualize the effort that was required. Normally, a teacher will spend an additional two to four hours a day (roughly averaging and making generalizations) figuring out lesson plans, grading assignments, and preparing for the next day's work. By breaking the needs down into smaller, daily chunks, we're able to remain flexible (in case something didn't work and needs fine tuning the next day) yet not overwhelmed. I make it sound tranquil, but for many the process of teaching is very much laying down the track as the train comes running up from behind. The longer a person teaches the same curriculum, the easier it is to know what she's doing at any given time. This is where innovation and improvisation can come in, as the teacher's skill in the curriculum allows for deviations that weren't possible before. All of this can be implemented in a steady, consistent manner (not that it always is), and the teacher is able to course-correct as needed. By being with the students on a daily basis (in my case; obviously, block schedules are a thing), teachers are able to see what went wrong in their own delivery, where students were confused, and maintain their own sanity by not having to repeat themselves sixty-plus times. That is the process that, via assumptions and traditions, we have constructed as teachers (with the obvious caveat that every teacher's experience is different and unique so mileage may vary). That's how we work. It allows a huge amount of autonomy, as fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants teachers are able to crank stuff out in time for class, while pre-planned-for-the-past-six-months teachers have their routines to keep their ships sailing. Now take all of that skill, intuition, preparation, and planning and demand a new way of delivering content, all within two days. That's what we teachers ended up having to do in mid-March 2020. In my case, I said goodbye to my students on Friday, and some of them I haven't seen since then--and summer has arrived. I now had to figure out how to explain my curriculum, how to encourage participation in discussions, how to communicate my expectations, all on an ad-hoc basis with sundry schedules over which I had no control. Posting an assignment online is not the same as telling students, in person, what I expect of them. The goal of the last quarter was not to deliver my planned content: It was to support student learning in a crisis. That's what I did. And, as far as that goal is concerned, it was successful. Almost all of my students went through and learned something because of what I did. None of them learned what I wanted them to learn--the end point was frustrated--but they didn't not learn. When we ask if teachers failed, students failed, or the system failed, the answer is obviously "Yes" to all three. However, that's grading with a rubric that doesn't fit anymore. We did not make the most out of a less-than ideal situation, but neither did we fail to do our jobs. We did the most with what was available to us--a technique that, especially in Utah, we have been forced, time and again, to utilize. Despite the best efforts of me and millions of other teachers out there, students on the whole are at a lower place in their educations than they would be in a typical year. That much I agree with, and the graph in the WSJ article is a disheartening one. We educators are well aware of the loss of educational progress that happens over a three-month summer. For some students, they're going through a six-month break. Their learning is going to be hampered, potentially for the rest of their academic life, because of COVID-19. This is a tragedy that's going to take years to heal. I will say, though, it's certainly possible that we can make some lemonade from the lemons of the academic year 2019-2020. But I'll save that for a different post. There are a lot of structural fractures that COVID-19 is exposing--flaws in our systems that have long been pointed to, decried, and targeted for change--that are now cracking under the weight of a prolonged shutdown and potentially greater problems down the road. Some are critical--healthcare access, availability, and usage; political programs, including and especially elections; civil rights, understandings of liberties, and repercussions for abuses of power--while others are of a more minor or middling importance.
Grades, I would argue, falls somewhere in the middle. Here's the thing about grades that educators have long groused about: They don't mean anything. Of course, that's only partially true: Money doesn't mean anything, but fiat intersubjective agreement has given us enough traction with the idea that it is, indeed, worthwhile (even necessary). Grades don't mean anything, except for in all the ways that they do. Our American system runs an alphabetical gamut from A to F (skipping E because reasons), with the ostensible meanings being centered on C for average work. In many schools (though not mine), the D rank is a type of failing (though some use it as a passing grade) and means "below average". The B range is "good" or slightly above average, and the A range is used for an indication of excellence on the project, assignment, or course. We all know this--we went to school, after all. There has been lamentation about grade inflation for a number of years, with the basic thrust of the argument being that "an A doesn't mean what it used to". And while there is some truth to that, it misses the point: an A in 1969 might have been much more rare, but it in no way expresses a qualitative meaning about the A. Aside from shifting standards in content and delivery (what counts for "good writing" is a mercurial thing at best), what is actually being graded? Syntax? Rhetorical moods? Accuracy? Expression of knowledge? None of that information is recorded in the A. It's become a mark in a gradebook, a note on a transcript. That issue hasn't changed simply because the calendar has advanced. None of the grades that go to a college admission board has ever explained anything beyond the fact that the student received an A. There's no indication of whether or not the kid cajoled the teacher to give him extra credit or petitioned the administration to have a grade changed. It is not (despite what many wish it to be) an indication of meritorious effort and reward. It is a highly imperfect and disproportionally regarded attempt at measuring student knowledge. In fact, if you were to ask teachers what they mean by the grades they give, you'd likely be surprised the diversity of answers. Some view it as a type of communication: "In my class, your level of effort and comprehension is about 75%. Hence the reason you have a C." Others look at it as a type of mastery over the content: "Your skills in this subject are still burgeoning, so you get a D--you have much to learn, young padawan." Yet others conceive of grades as an average of what has transpired in the class: "You wrote a very good essay but your homework was incomplete and incorrect. I'll just average that together and it'll be, say, a B+." If you've ever looked over the sundry disclosure documents of a high school student, you'll see that every teacher expects something different and renders grades based upon their own subjective (though, I hope, clearly articulated) rubric. This is where the "grades are like money" concept breaks down. You don't go to the store and feel uncertain how much your dollar bill will be worth. Sure, the prices may be higher or lower than you anticipate, but no one looks at the dollar bill and says, "That's only worth eighty-five cents here." Yet that's exactly what we do in our different grading systems. Consider the dreaded English essay. If a student writes a paper about, say, the inclusion of feathers on non-avian dinosaurs, how should I grade that? Ought I to remove points for a failure to use commas correctly? What if they assert that feathered dinosaurs are a passing fad in the paleontological world? That's as factually incorrect as misusing a comma, but should that matter in the paper (remember that it's an English paper). And, of course, I know that the factual assertions are incorrect, but that's because I'm an armchair dinosaur afficionado. If it were a paper about, say, the correct air pressure of footballs in the NFL, I wouldn't know if the kid made a mistake there. And this goes along with any subject: Should a student's math teacher demerit a paper if there's a spelling error? What if the math teacher doesn't know her grammar well enough? And while you could argue that an English paper ought to be graded on English paper standards and a math paper on math paper standards, you're again invoking separate standards, which in no way demonstrates student comprehension of anything save a very slender sliver of what's being graded. (Additionally, in what way is a false assertion correct, regardless of the class in which it happens?) A point in one class is not the same as a point in another class.* A grade from one teacher of the same subject is not the same as a grade from another. And yet that's exactly what we pretend our GPAs indicate--a type of standardization that doesn't actually exist. We all likely have memories of a class that was particularly hard for us. In my case, it was the AB Calculus class that I took my senior year. I was never very good at it, I ended up with a 2 (out of 5) on the AB test, and an A- in that course. It required a significantly larger output on my part than the A I earned in my AP English class. Yet, on my transcript, what did it matter? Anyone looking at that transcript would say, "Wow. This kid is solid in both mathematics and language arts." And they would be grossly misinformed. I'm terrible at mathematics. This isn't just false modesty: I'm not just bad with numbers, I don't even know what to do to the numbers to get the answer I'm looking for. A calculator only works when you know how to use it, and I basically don't. I'm not saying I didn't deserve the A- I got in AB Calc…but I'm not saying that I did, either. I don't know what that A- is supposed to say, what it's supposed to mean, and I was there to get it. As far as problematic linguistical resources, grades are a doozy of one.** Of course, there's more to it than just that. Grades have metamorphosized. Now they are also supposed to be barometers of a student's overall self-image. ("She's a good kid: She has a 4.0.") Concepts of self-identity are tied into the idea of "an A-student", so much so that after the student has demonstrated the skills the grade is supposed to measure, post-semester requests about "giving just one more point of a credit so that I can get an A" are not uncommon. Enormous amounts of stress related to grades comes on teenagers throughout the education system. As cases of depression and attempted suicide increase, the role of grades to act as a type of canary in the coalmine has also increased. Grades are now tasked with warning about mental health problems, while at the same time adding additional stress to a young person's life. Little wonder we focus so much on them: We view grades as a kind of panacea and affliction, the cause of--and solution to--all of our academic problems. When a student's self-image is connected to her GPA, desperation and poor choices often come along with it, to say nothing of existential crises on a mind that is not yet equipped to deal with ontological shocks. Much of what happens in high school is foundational but forgettable, a crucial moment of growth off of which much of the future is built, yet not nearly as significant and important later on as it feels in the moment. Grades factor into that complex system in all sorts of ways, for both good and ill. This, I think, is another component to our insistence on their use. With the structural blows to education that COVID-19 has given us, it's time to consider what we mean by grades. We've inherited this system through endless years of tradition; unfortunately, it's not a pure system from the outset, and even if it were, the pressure on grades to do more than they can has evolved it into a vestigial component of education. There are alternatives to what we want out of a responsibility system*** and that would, of course, come with compromises and changes. While I plan on figuring out some of these alternatives, I think the bigger question is this: Do we want to change this system? We have an unheard-of possibility in the current circumstances to radically and permanently change how we communicate about a student's growth and acquisition of knowledge--or (and this is crazy, I know) maybe something else about the student besides just rote memorization or academic business as usual. Ought we to change what we do? Can the massive lemon that is COVID-19, which has upended grading so fundamentally that the past term is, in my view, a complete waste of time‡, be turned into a lemonade that serves all students better? Are we willing to shift things enough to make education more accessible, equitable, and purposeful? And are we willing to pay the price that such a change will inevitably cost? --- * Though I've often wondered about a school wherein teachers set a price for a grade, with each assignment acting as a type of "payment" for their work, which they then would be able to use as currency for their grades. It sounds nightmarish to me. ** Speaking of problematic linguistical resources, there's also the damage that a grade-based "misstatement" can render. A friend of mine was studying Greek in college. He did well in the class--got an A--but learned effectively nothing because of how his professor ran the course. When my buddy went on to the next level of the language, a different professor expected skills that my friend's transcript said he'd attained, but hadn't really mastered. To this day, his Greek is weak (better than almost anyone else he knows, of course, but for a classics major, surprisingly shallow), and it stems from that parallax gap between praxis and practice. *** I use this phrase deliberately, mostly because I didn't explore this other facet of grades in the essay proper: One of the reasons we teachers like grades is it's a way of generating habits within students so that they grow, learn, and enhance their skills. It's one of the few ways that educators have to manipulate student behavior so that they act in a way that's designed to help them grow as individuals and as learners. Of all the reasons that grades are beneficial, this is one that makes the biggest difference to me. I've taught classes where the grade is irrelevant--"Automatic A, I just expect you to work while you're with me"--and I've had mixed results. Highly motivated students tend to do fine with that, but those who might have worked more diligently had there been a higher grade expectation ended up providing middling work at best. That, again, puts pressure on what I mean by an A in my creative writing class--what's "A" about what they did? That they came to class and wrote? That they wrote well? That they demonstrated some form of learning? Should a creative writing class be more prescriptive? All of these sorts of questions spiral out of the concept of grading, even in a low-stakes elective class. ‡ I view the final quarter of this semester to have been a waste of time, as far as grading goes. None of what a grade can communicate is coming through. None of what I'd like for a grade to do is worthwhile. And though academic institutions will have to keep in mind that applicants who went through Q4 2020 might need some sort of accommodation, that kind of memory likely won't last long. Besides, who hasn't been affected by COVID-19? My first grader didn't get the same education that he should have. How many repercussions will that have going through the rest of his career? It's all well and good that the class of 2021 might have colleges be more lenient when looking at their transcripts, but what about the class of 2031, whose entire schooling careers have been permanently shifted by what has transpired these past few months? With the end of the school year whimpering its way toward graduation, I decided to host some low-expectation online offerings for this week between the end of our school's finals and the official ending of the school year. To that end, I set up a couple of Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, a music-sharing get-together, a Random Stuff I Know™ © ® chat session, a Socratic discussion about David Foster Wallace's "This is Water" speech, and a book club on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I had diminishing returns as the week went on, with only three or four students attending the Random Stuff I Know™ © ® and Socratic discussions. Still, it was a lot of fun to see some of these students again, and to have an hour or so of chatting about something that wasn't curriculum-based.
Today was the day I hosted the book club, and it was a low-water mark in terms of attendance (only one student came) but a high-water mark in terms of discussion. This is unusual: There's a critical mass of students that are usually needed for a high-quality discussion, and who is in that quantity also matters. Typically, if a student wants to have a one-on-one discussion, it's because she has some specific problem or question that she wants help working through. As far as a book club goes, however, a one-on-one session doesn't necessarily inspire me with confidence with the potential of the conversation. However, when the only student showed up, I was relieved to see that it was Becca--one of my favorite students from one of my favorite families. She had finished reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland earlier this morning and was willing to spend an hour talking with her teacher--now former teacher, I suppose--about this piece of children's literature. I'm really glad she did. I won't go into all that Becca and I talked about--though we managed to range from some light religious comments to deep questions about identity and incorporated some Harry Potter and Shakespeare quotes while we were at it--but instead want to focus on the question that is the inspiration for this essay: What is a classic? This is one of our foundational questions that we pose to our students when they come to my school. We're a liberal arts school built on the concept of learning from "the classics", which we use in both its traditional (that is, the great works of Homer and Virgil) and broader (our students read The Scarlet Letter, for example) sense. It makes sense, therefore, that we try to define our terms when we say that we want to study the classics. When I ask my sophomores what they think a classic is on the second day of school, they often give some good, albeit incomplete, answers. "Something that's withstood the test of time" is frequently put up there, though it's an easy enough idea to challenge. (Is The Princess Bride a classic of film? Can any film be considered a classic, as the form is barely over a hundred years old?) We talk about it being required in school, even though that isn't a required part of the definition…if that makes any sense. There are a lot of other things that they come up with, of course, but the picture should be coming into focus: The understanding of what makes a classic is hard to pin down. Part of that comes from being able to apply it to other media, which I think is a crucial component. The Greeks may have invented poetry, but we've other ways of communicating beyond that now. The concept of film, I think, is really helpful, as it's old enough to be a given in our culture, yet new enough to force additional understanding onto the definition of classic. (Can video games fit into this definition? Yes. Do they? Very, very rarely.) As Becca and I talked about why Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a classic, we pulled on the concept that is partly satirized in the last chapter of the book. In Chapter XII, Alice is brought as a witness in the trial of the Knave who supposedly stole the tarts. The White Rabbit throws in a poem (supposedly a confessional written by the accused) that ought to help clear things up. Unfortunately, the poem is so vague that it could be applied to a great many of situations. "'I don't believe there's an atom of meaning in it,'" says Alice (114), and she's basically right. It's imprecise and is not particularly worth interpreting. The King agrees that it would be better if the poem were meaningless, because then he wouldn't have to interpret it. But he can't help himself, and he starts to "botch the words up fit to [his] own thoughts" (Hamlet 4.5) in an interpretive pretzel that strains to get the poem to mean what the King thinks it ought to mean. Becca and I noticed that this impulse to interpret a book of nonsense is a similar sort of action that the King is doing himself. And that's when we cottoned onto the idea that additional meanings of interpretation are what mark a piece of work as a classic. The text itself is comparatively narrow--there are only two epic poems by Homer, and Virgil has but one masterpiece (and Shakespeare, building off what came before, created a dozen masterpieces because Shakespeare is incredible)--but it invites, encourages, and (most importantly) allows additional interpretations. The boundaries of the story do not confine the meaning of the story. A classic, therefore, insists that the ways into it and out of it continue to expand. Time allows us to see what pieces have endured this sort of hermeneutical expansion--which is why we often think of classics as "old"--but that's more of an outgrowth of its richness. Part of how it does that, I think, is via a return to the beginning. Sometimes that's through direct invocations--Frankenstein's frame story brings us back to where we started, for example--and sometimes it's a matter of thematic closure and the protagonist's completion of the goal. However it comes about, there's a revolution that returns to its starting point: Alice wakes up next to where she'd fallen asleep; Peter Pan refuses to grow; Dante leaves the "straightforward path" of true worship until his theophany amongst the stars. This provides closure, but also encouragement: "You saw one thing this time through. Go again, and see what else you discover." Talking it over with Becca, it was this second component that made such a difference. Today marks the last day of her time at my school: She graduates next Friday, and there aren't any more lessons for her to attend. Even my extracurricular get-togethers are ended. Much like a classic, she has now returned to where she began, asking (and, I think, perhaps, answering) the question that began her entire educational path at my school: What is a classic? In that sense, her classical education was an interpretive journey through the classics, forming her own classic in her growth as a human and a seeker of truth. Being a part of that journey is why I love being a teacher. With the ramifications of the pandemic so immensely unclear--and with Senate testimony from Dr. Fauci having just wrapped up as I sit to write this--I have some thoughts about schooling, the pandemic, and this bizarre piece that happened across my browser, an op-ed by Michael Petrilli called "Half-Time High School May Be Just What Students Need".
To begin with, Michael Petrilli is president of the conservative think tank Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an educator with Education Next (an outlet of corporate education reform policies), and a proud father. Since I'm not really interested in making any sort of ad-hominem argument about him, I bring this up only to say that he is coming from a different point of view and philosophy about education than I do. Additionally, he might have answers to some of my critiques--but they aren't in the op-ed piece, which is what I'm responding to. Petrilli points out an important and unavoidable point: COVID-19 has fundamentally upset what it means to get an education. He begins his piece lamenting the loss of the non-academic value that schools provide: sports events, dances, musicals, and other group-based events. These are crucial components to an educational experience in America and provides an opportunity for students to learn more about how much humankind has to offer. There's a reason why school is more than the "core classes", and exposure to variety (both in and out of the classroom) is necessary. He then paints a picture that is certainly common, though by no means widespread: The tuned-out teenager who's drifting through the day, waiting for the sweet relief of the bell to let them out to their freedom. While there absolutely are those students (and I think everyone, at one point or another, fell into that category), it's also true that there are teenagers sitting in classes that they love, learning eagerly, and anxious to improve their skills and understanding--even for seven hours a day. He claims (and I don't think he's wrong) that students would be happier if "they spent much more of their time reading, writing and completing projects than going through the motions in our industrial-style schools." It's true that our schools have been heavily influenced by industrial revolutionary ideas, as well as Cold War expectations for creating a workforce. In fact, that's the fundamental question about what education is for in the first place: Is it about making future workers? Improving the lives of the students? Providing opportunities to grow and fail with a safety net still in place? Memorizing facts? Socializing? Gaining experiences they don't know will matter to them later on? Forcing them to do things they don't want to do? Our education does a lot of things, but answering this question isn't one we do very well, most likely because there are so many different teachers who go into this profession for so many different reasons, seeing different ways that their career affects their students. Where I disagree with Petrilli's sentiment here is the idea that the students would be spending "much more of their time" in doing school-related activities. In the past two months, I've seen some of my students almost implode because of the workload--which, of course, is reduced from what it would have been during regular sessions--and struggle to meet even a single deadline. (Yes, I'm working with those students; I haven't left them in the dreary wilderness of Bad Grades…yet.) Online schooling--or, as my principal more accurately describes it, "crisis schooling"--is obviously an abnormal situation. It may be premature to draw any conclusions about what's happened the last quarter of the 2019-2020 school year. However, one of the things that we as teachers see every single year is that consistency makes an enormous difference in the overall growth of the student. I love my summers off, but I'll be the first to admit that there is a distinctive loss of retention over the long break. Math and language teachers especially see this, but I have full confidence that, even in a normal situation, if I gave a freshly-minted junior her final from her sophomore year on Day One of her new school year, she would fail that final. This has to do with one of the bigger problems with Petrilli's arguments (which the subtitle of the article is the only place where this problem is at even acknowledged), which is the difference between a senior in high school and a freshman in college is that of age. Teenagers' brains melt during puberty, and there is a lot of stuff that they learn only to forget. That's a natural part of development (and also the reason why they are exposed to the same history multiple times over the course of their education). Petrilli's use of the college paradigm is one I've wondered myself. Why don't we use the Ivory Tower as a model for our more prosaic public schools? As he points out, there's only three hours of in-person schooling during college, so why not do the same for high school? Well, the answer is pretty straightforward: High school isn't college. If you remember your college experiences at all, you'll remember how crucial it was that you manage your time, delicately balancing class schedules, work requirements, and study hours so that you could meet all of your obligations. Often, the on-campus stuff was the easiest part of the day. And though I look back fondly on my college experience, I know that for a lot of people, college was vastly more stressful and difficult to manage than high school. One of the contributing factors was that very thing that Petrilli is exulting over: The freedom to design one's day. I consider myself a pretty committed student during my time as a Wolverine, and I definitely had to fight the urge to skip a class because only the midterm and final count on the grade is pretty strong. I mean, I was paying for the class and still struggled to find the motivation sometimes. What do you think the result would be by putting a child in charge of what she's supposed to do at any given time? When dealing with younger people (yes, even seniors), the routine of the school day is what allows them to move into the more self-directed areas. Almost all educators know of that "one kid" who can't seem to finish his homework, despite having it outlined on the classroom calendar and seeing him write the assignment down in his planner. Ability to plan and manage time is on a spectrum, for sure, so the majority of students tend to do well enough. But if you were to take even a highly organized, highly motivated student and give her college-level schedules, she would likely struggle to decide what to do. I mean, high school kids (yes, even seniors) are still kids. I would imagine that, by now, most parents who are trying to help their own children with the school work coming through the computers now recognize how important it is to provide a lot for growing minds. The educational parlance of "scaffolding" is really important here: Teachers of younger children do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to things like scheduling. The training wheels of disclosure documents and parent/teacher conferences are there to help the students move forward so that they can be ready to stand on their own when it's their turn. There's also a very important issue that Petrilli fails to even acknowledge in passing, and that's the fact that schools provide 30 hours (or more, depending on the school) of childcare. "Why don't schools start later? Teenagers need more sleep, according to research?" some people (including Petrilli, it seems) ask with a scratch of their heads. Because the work day won't shift correspondingly: If mom has to get to work by 8, she can't drop her kid off at the school at 9. Additionally, shifting the school day back means that academics begin to encroach on extracurriculars and the vital lifeblood of every Prom group, the part-time job. Later start would mean later end, and I can testify that ending one's day at 3:30pm after starting at 8:00am is really rough. Now, obviously, the reason that schools can't collapse the entire schedule (start at 9 and end at 2) is because of state-mandated number of seat-hours. With enough political will, this part of the equation could change--though it doesn't change the parental situation. Pretending for a moment that we could go back to normal school in the fall, except for the idea that kids aren't in school from 8 to 3, what does that do to a working mother's schedule? Is free daycare available? (No.) Is her work kid-friendly and capable of letting the child come and be entertained/cared for while her mom works? (Unlikely.) Divorcees, single parents, and kids from otherwise "less-than-ideal" homes would not be able to provide what full-time school does. Perhaps a rebuttal would be, "Do we really need to pander to the rare exceptions? Couldn't we make a better system and then figure out what to do with the spares?" Aside from being incredibly heartless, this question asserts a couple of things that are going to be increasingly untrue as time goes on: One, that "normal" kids are the ones coming from a nuclear family with a stay-at-home parent (if we're being generous; "stay-at-home mom" is likely more accurate); and two, that those who will be most disadvantaged by a shift that focuses on the "normal" kids are the most vulnerable in our society. Schools provide more than education: They provide a safe place for students whose home-lives are uncomfortable or dangerous; they give food to kids who may not otherwise eat; they give students tools that the kids' parents don't have when they teach them reading, writing, and online skills, often in a second language. No, schools are pretty far from perfect. However, dismissing those students as collateral damage in the wake of a full-system overhaul is a flawed decision. Another issue that I take with Petrilli's piece is the missing half of the equation: The teachers. I really appreciate his focus on students--even if I question whom he thinks is supposed to be in school--because that's the most important aspect of the story. But skipping over the implications that a half-time day would mean for teachers is a massive misstep. There are lots of reasons that we can't simply flip the switch on what we have now. Here are a couple: The average age of teachers in America in 2016 (I'm sure the numbers have shifted slightly) is 42. And while that may be the answer to life, the universe, and everything, it's also an indication of a demographic that is not likely to be making a TikTok video any time soon. I'm not saying that old dogs can't learn new tricks (I hope to be less clichéd than that); I'm saying that a resistance to change is a real issue. One of my coworkers is old enough to be my grandmother, yet she is keenly interested in using digital tools to help her students learn. Yes, she still makes copies and hands out worksheets (and considering the fact she's working with 7th graders, that's probably a good policy to have), but she's always trying to use Google Classroom to provide feedback and devise new strategies with the tech. She may not even be an exception (though some of my other, older compatriots are a bit less flexible in this area), but she isn't in the majority. Teachers resist all sorts of external changes, from new core curricula to what's allowed in their dress code. It comes, I think, from having a great deal of autonomy and authority in the classroom; when that is challenged in anyway, defenses tend to go up. Another reason why radically shifting the educational system requires quite a bit more effort than what Petrilli argues for is a matter of money. This is a sore spot for basically everyone--teachers are tired of being used in self-sacrifice porn and held up as martyrs for a greater cause simply because they have to have three jobs just to make ends meet; taxpayers are tired of seeing bureaucratic waste and six-digit salaries going to district puppets; conspiracy theorists are tired of claiming that public education is a usurpation of God-given commandments that a child only be taught by their nuclear parents (just kidding; they never get tired of claiming any- and everything). But it basically boils down to this: A radical restructuring and re-administrating of a century's worth of educational practices cannot be done for free. I last saw all of my students on 12 March 2020. On 13 March, I said goodbye to some of them (we have half-day Fridays), wishing them a good weekend, and that I would see them next week. By the time Monday, 16 March had arrived, I was at school, frantically John Henrying the track as the steam engine of "online school" barreled my way. I had two days to redesign a carefully constructed curriculum, having to restructure my schedule, my teaching style, and excising some of the most important moments of my year because the next step was incompatible with what I wanted to do. Now, I think I did all right, in part because of an ease I have with technology already (a fortunate advantage that not all teachers share), but did I get a bonus for this? Was I paid extra for having to do something so drastically different from my "job description"? No. In fact, there's a very real possibility I won't even get an annual raise. When teachers say that they want more pay, they're not trying to nickle-and-dime taxpayers. First of all, teachers are taxpayers. Secondly, there is a lot of flexibility and improvisation that teachers have to go through, and since every teacher is a college graduate and over half of them have master's degree, it's only fair to feel that such training and expertise have pecuniary rewards. Thirdly, now more than ever, teaching is a dangerous job. Quite aside from the nightmare of school shootings, schools are petri dishes for the transmission of diseases. Any teacher who is high risk or must care for one (as in my case) is putting her entire family in danger by virtue of her job. I recognize that part of the reason we're even talking about half-time school is because of the need to maintain social distancing as much as possible. Money doesn't solve every problem, but it can help ameliorate certain situations. Now, obviously, my resistance to Petrilli's argument doesn't mean that it's not bereft of merit. I see this pandemic as an opportunity to shift education in a way that I've long felt it needed. However, I do think it's folly to assume we can change things into a "new normal" in the course of six months, especially when we have to look at the broader implications for the less-fortunate students in our country. Maybe some day I'll write up my ideas. It has been two full weeks since I last saw all of my students. I said goodbye to them, expecting to see them again the following Tuesday, with some tentative ideas and plans for what to do if the COVID-19 community isolation were to go into effect.
It very well could be the last time that I get to see them all as their teacher. It has been almost two full weeks of online teaching and learning. On the parenting side, it's going…well enough. Since I have three boys, all of whom are in school, and both my wife and I are teachers--meaning we are online throughout a good chunk of the day--I'm not able to say that it's going flawlessly. We created a specific "bell schedule" that the kids follow pretty well (there are slip ups every day, but nothing like outright rejection of it), complete with wakeup times, family meals, and segments of the day set aside for practicing their respective instruments. I, too, make sure to put some time into drumming and guitaring. Our evenings are what they ever were, though there isn't really homework per se; the school work is, for the most part, worked on during our "school hours". So we're still working through the Marvel Cinematic Universe and I'm still playing video games and watching anime with my wife as the sky darkens. What's been hardest for me has, most definitely, been the online teaching. It isn't about generating lesson plans--I think (I hope? Maybe I'm deluding myself) that my familiarity with the content, the way I organized everything, and the way I've paced the unit on World War I has worked pretty well. If students are diligent and actually do what I provide for them when I sent it out, they probably spend about an hour--maximum--of work for me each day. But there are plenty of students who haven't even looked at their assignments--at least, from what I can tell. Some of them have dropped in for a history lecture (where I discuss some of what I would have told them in person, save I do it on the computer and they video-conference in); most of them are pretty much AWOL. This is frustrating to me because I do still care about my students and their well-being, but I have no tools for learning these things unless I see/interact with them somehow. I recognize that there's a lot going on; I also know that simply dropping everything will make it that much harder to pick everything up again later. And, let's be honest: That "later" is what makes this so difficult. We surely would all feel better if this had a deadline. Holding out until "when it's better" is much harder than "Holding out until June 15". The first one is so nebulous, and there are enough predictions and projections leading out for multiple months that it becomes overwhelming. At least if we had a deadline… Alas, that's not the case. In many ways, that's why I want my students engaging with the content. There are due dates, things to do, stuff that--in my opinion--matters and can help take their minds off of the weirdness of being inside for so long. And for me? Well, since 2008, I've never felt less like a teacher than I do now. In fact, when I was first interviewed for the job that I'm still going with, I told the group of people who were deciding my fate that I didn't want to be a "teaching vending machine, where kids can just get information from." My purpose has always been to use history and literature to get kids to think more deeply about what they think, how they see the world, and the correct way to behave in different situations. And while writing and reading work really well for me personally, fifteen- and sixteen year-olds tend to need a different approach. The in-class, in-person experience is really crucial to how I teach (which is not a surprise; I've believed that basically from the beginning), and it's the component of my job that is most damaged by the current crisis. I have, thanks to a necessary public health move, turned into a teaching vending machine. I enjoy the video conferences with my students that I have almost every day, but it doesn't really compare to what I'm used to. It lacks the dynamism of an in-class experience, if only because the students' microphones are muted or their cameras are off, so how can I hear and see them laugh at my comments and jokes? I can't have them converse with a neighbor, stand up and investigate something with their hands, or play some of the games that students enjoy. In other words, I'm not teaching how I want to--and best am able to--teach. There's little fulfillment in this, and without fulfillment, a job like teaching is not really worth the effort. I'm not alone in this. I would argue that the vast majority of teachers feel the same way. Yes, there are a handful for whom this is a break--they send out an assignment once a week or once a day or whatever and let it be while they binge Netflix and lounge about. I know this, because that's the at-home equivalent of how they run their classes. (None of the teachers with whom I work are that way, I believe; they do exist, however.) For the most part, however, teachers didn't sign up as online-content-coordinators. I'm grateful we have this much--I don't know what we'd do without the digital tools we have--but I'm also keen on not doing this for any longer than is necessary. So, how am I doing? In terms of productivity and work, I think I'm doing well. I feel I've struck a worthwhile balance on that front. But my own mental health and well-being? Not so much. No, I don't miss my commute. I don't miss wearing a tie. I don't miss having to bellow at students to get in uniform or to get to class. I don't miss the cramped hallways and the slaloming of middleschoolers down the stairs. But I do miss school. I miss doing my job. And I wish I knew when it would end. At my school, we oftentimes have college students in the schools of education come by to do some observations of a classroom. My class, I like to think, is unique (isn't every class unique in some ways?) and so I'm always happy to have someone come in, watch what I'm doing, and then ask questions to help me understand what and why I do what and why I do it.
This year, one of the students followed up with a list of questions that I spent a good chunk of my prep time answering. As I finished, I thought that maybe someone else might be interested in what I had to say, so I figured I'd put the questions and answers here. Hope they help you.
This is pretty easy for me, as I've been given a lot of control in what I teach (I've been at the school almost since the beginning, so most of what's in my curricula has been through my choices). I think, however, if I were to be given a curriculum at a new place, the best way to stay engaged is to learn why the pieces are where and when they are. The logic of historical trends--particularly as we look at what happened in the 19th and 20th centuries--gives a strong motivation to want to teach what I do. (Having the students understand how and why the World Wars happened is a personally important component, so I see most everything that we discuss in the second semester as leading toward that.) So any course that has a logic to it, a reason for its set up, is one that I would have an easier time getting behind. 2. How do you handle the politics of your school? Politics is always a sticky thing, and for the most part I stay out of it. I do what's asked of me as much as I can, I try to do my job well, and let the rest handle itself. I do have great relationships with my administration, which can only be built via time spent together. I don't get the chance to chat with them as much as I used to, but I will sometimes pop my head in during my prep to say hello, see how the admin is doing, and get any questions I may have (say, about an upcoming assembly) answered. My school fosters that sort of relationship--it may not be applicable in other places--and I try to take advantage of it. 3. What do you do when you get overwhelmed? I pretty much just soldier on. I don't often have a lot of additional pressure (see #4 and #5 for details), so my overwhelmed feelings tend to be internal rather than external. If I mess something up that I can't fix--like I realize that I gave a false impression to a class about something in the curriculum, but I won't see them again because it's the end of the semester--I have to shrug and hope to do better next time. Despite teaching history, I can't really dwell in my own past too much, especially if I've made a mistake. Note it. Correct it. Don't perpetuate it. Don't fret on it. On occasion, I've had students/classes that were putting more strain on me than I could handle, so I talked to them about it. I basically let them know that we could either improve our behavior, or there were two massive text books that covered English and history from which they could learn the same information. They decided to change their behavior and things worked out okay. And, hey, there's nothing wrong with donuts-as-coping-mechanism, if you ask me. 4. What are your best tips for managing paper load? I have lots to grade about four times a year: Twice with the end of semester finals, and twice with large papers that I ask the students to write. So, on the whole, I don't have a lot of paperwork to do. Here are a couple of things that I do that have simplified my grading:
5. What are your best tips for maintaining work-life balance? See above. I mean, I do my best not to bring anything home--something I've been able to do as I've grown as a teacher, streamlined my style of teaching, and come up with different ways of remaining ahead of the grading requirements. I have a harder time with after-school stuff--chaperoning a dance, going to sports activities, watching the drama productions--and that comes because of how my family life and responsibilities are divvied up. I would like to do more at the school for the extracurricular stuff, but it isn't always possible. In terms of grading, though, that's school work that I do at school. The only at-home work I do would be reading/studying, which I find enjoyable and refills me anyway. 6. What is something you wish you would have known when you first started teaching? "Buckle up, my man. This is going to be a wild ride." I wish I'd known just how much teaching would stretch me, change me, and refine me. I wish I'd been a bit more humble about what I knew, more willing to learn from others, less willing to let my stress bleed into my classroom, more willing to help out. I also didn't know just how many amazing experiences were in store for me...because there will be. Lots and lots and lots of them. 7. What advice would you give a first-year teacher? "This year doesn't count." I mean, it does for the students, but your first year is the practice year. What really needs to happen by the end of that first year is that you've made a real, solid, genuine connection with some students. You have to be able to look back at what you accomplished and have it be "I made a difference in that kid's life and she did in mine," or else you'll fall apart. You'll recognize all the mistakes you made, all the embarrassing decisions you ran with, all the false starts and think you're a failure. But when I think back to that first year, though I cringe at how I taught, I smile when I remember whom I taught. This goes back to why I don't worry about tests and what-not: If I can make a legitimate, powerful connection between the student and the curricula, some sort of emotional touchstone for them, then I will have done my job. I want a student to look at a play poster for Hamlet ten years down the line and think, I really enjoyed how Dowdle taught that. I should go to this and see if I can understand it any better now. I want them to get warm fuzzies when thinking about Pride and Prejudice, rather than a revulsion about a book that they "had to read in high school". ~~~ Though that's not all I have to say about that, it is all I have to say about it for now. Thanks for reading. In case you missed previous explanations, I do an assignment with Les Misèrables every year with my students. I call it the Yellow Passport as an homage to the paper that Jean Valjean has to abandon in order to live a better life. It comes to represent the problems he had in the past which hold him back. It's essentially a new year's resolution, but in November and December, plus it's a school assignment, so the kids who want to have a good grade are actually going to follow through.
Most of the big assignments I give I've done myself (I have a drawing that I made of Satan for Paradise Lost, and I have chunks of Hamlet memorized, for example), and the Yellow Passport is one that has helped me a lot in the past. Thanks to this assignment, I hardly spend any time at all on Facebook (and I do mean that; I think my grand total a week is maybe an hour, and I've found the only reason I keep the social media site account active is because that's how almost everyone who reads my work knows that I've posted something new). And, though my temper isn't permanently banked, I have improved my interactions with my kids thanks to the Yellow Passport. As I mentioned in the second essay I linked above, I'm doing an edit of War Golem with this year's Yellow Passport. I really do want to get over my editing phobia--or disdain, I suppose? Okay, so yeah, there's a bit of a tangent on this, bear with me: Editing is a blessing of a process. Vocal editing in the nonce is a nightmare--stumbles, stutters, misstatements, and other verbal faux pas will mar a lot of what a person might actually be saying. Yes, there's the advantage of intonation and body language, but there's an irretrievable aspect to speaking: What's said is what's said. You can't go back and tweak and twist and turn. Impromptu speech is a one-shot attempt. In writing, however, there's an opportunity to revise, reshape, revisit, and refine. There's a way to make what's said into something you meant to say. Editing allows that to happen. This is something that I'm gaining as I work through War Golem. I'm given a chance to improve what I've done before. So how is it editing my book again? Well, I think I need to do more research on how other writers edit, now that I have a pretty good grip on how to write. I say this because the process of getting words down on paper is something within my scope. Since college, I've completed over a dozen novels, with a grand total of over 1.6 million words. That doesn't count my short stories, poetry, or abandoned projects, nor does it incorporate my nonfiction writing (stuff like this essay). That's just from completed novels and novellas. That is no small amount, I daresay, and it shows that I know how to get words out. As I've continued to work on new novels, I've streamlined the storymaking process, which has led to a more careful approach to the stories I tell. In my early days, I had a character and an idea and a world and the shape of an idea of something that I wanted to pursue. So I would "pants" my way through--"fly by the seat of my pants"--the book, following that particular day's bit of the story as it came to me. I rarely spent time staring at the blank white screen, but I didn't always know exactly what to have happen next, and I found myself heavily influenced by the most recent thing I'd read or watched--if I'd seen something scary, I would incorporate a monster attack for some reason; if I'd been reading Rainbow Six, I would add in a hostage situation--whether or not that addition would help the story. After I spent a solid three or so years on writing Writ in Blood--still my longest book, even after some serious edits took it to just below 300,000 words--I decided to try something different. I wanted to write more than three books a decade; I needed to write shorter stories. Not short stories, but shorter stories. I started looking at different ways of increasing my output, and I realized that a "fix-it-in-post" mentality was part of the reason that 1) Writ in Blood was so long (I would recognize a problem with the plot and, rather than fix it, I would invent some reason why it was supposed to be that way, which only added to the length of the novel, rather than improving it), and 2) why I hated revisions. They were the deficit spending of writing: I was pushing my in-the-moment problems to my future-self, rather than dealing with them when they showed up. To that end, I began a more rigorous style of outlining. It has been really helpful to me in a lot of ways, not the least because it means that I'm "writing" the book before I actually write it. I can see problems more clearly--that is, an early decision on a certain idea can be shown as flawed simply because I can see the entire story at a glance. That means that my outlines are edited and revised as I go along. Once I lock in a scene by writing it, that becomes the new canon, which means that I can tweak my outline rather than worry about remembering the change when it becomes important later on. By editing the outline--which always changes as the story is composed--I feel more confident that what I've written is what I want to see. In many ways, I write the first draft by writing the outline. Then I write the second draft by actually writing it. Upon finishing the novel, I give it a few months to cool off before I reread it, as if it's an entire book--notes, perhaps, but nothing super specific or line-by-line. Then I go, a chapter a day, through the book and change things. I add details, take away superfluity, and rewrite parts of scenes. The advantage of that is the work of changing the story is done there and then--no kicking the can of responsibility down the road. After I've put those changes in the computer, I have, historically, called it quits. I'd query a little, get rejected less than I queried (most agents don't respond, which technically counts as a no, but feels less concrete), and then move on to the next project. But the Yellow Passport has--I think--changed that. Because I was trying to set an example for the students, I made sure to work on my editing every single day. It was not always easy--in fact, it usually wasn't--but it was immensely helpful. Not only was I trying to incorporate a new habit (the point of the assignment, really, as it's an assignment they're supposed to work on for 24 days straight), I was also seeing my book in a different light. See, the Yellow Passport goal I had for myself was to reduce the grand total of words in War Golem from 101k to 90k. (It only took a couple of days to realize that was unrealistic, so I tweaked it to below 98,500 words, which could happen. I mean, stranger things have occurred.) To do that, I had to start trimming the fat. However, as I mentioned before, I saw that I was actually pretty happy with almost all of the words that I put into the book. Yes, there were some unnecessary adverbs (which I use sparsely (ha! Irony!) for the most part because I try to pick stronger verbs in the crafting of the story anyway), and plenty of passive voice to strike out, but on the whole the story is what I wanted it to be. This has led to an excruciating experience of trying to squeeze the metaphorical blood from the stone--or, in this case, unnecessary words from the draft. I heard of one author who writes all morning and then, in the evening, he takes a Sharpie to his manuscript and excises all but three sentences per page. This is madness to me, and it points toward a worrisome lack of belief in one's abilities. I have plenty of imposter syndrome feelings, but one thing that I don't doubt is that I am the writer of the story and that means that I get to decide what that story looks like. I can weave a worthwhile sentence into the story as I go, if necessary. No reason to assume the worst of my past self. My experience revising War Golem has been a net-positive one. I'm running into the climax of the story--and there may be more tweaks and edits at the latter stage than others, as it's a tricky part of the novel--but on the whole I'm feeling that this has improved my novel. More than that, it's given me confidence that I did, indeed, write the book I meant to write when I started it a couple of years ago. It feels, in other words, like I really am polishing the book, rather than just "editing" the book. The habit of editing has been instilled in me, if only a little bit…though I should confess that the very first day of not having to do the Yellow Passport I skipped that night's work on it. I guess I still have some room to grow. One of the things that surprises me as a teacher of Paradise Lost? Students would not want to live in the Garden of Eden, according to how John Milton presents it, because "it would be boring."
I know that they're fifteen years old ("I'm sixteen!" That One Kid™ is always quick to irrelevantly point out) and still getting a grip on the world, but it really is shocking to me. Here's the deal with Milton's Eden, in case you've forgotten since the last time you read the poem: The Garden is filled with every conceivable fruit and vegetable--indeed, inconceivable fruits and vegetables are also available. There are bounteous rivers, crystal clear, that are healthful and delicious. Animals live there with no danger, including lions that play with lambs, snakes that coil around harmlessly, and tigers prowl through herds without the latter getting freaked out. It's not unusual to see an elephant writhing his "lithe proboscis" to entertain Adam and Eve. The days are warm enough that a constant cool breeze is needed--and provided--and beautiful scents fill the air around flowery bowers. At one point, the amiable angel Raphael says that Eden is patterned after Heaven, which, he tells us, has variety and change because it's nice. I take that to mean that something approaching seasons is possible there--though Adam and Eve don't stay in Eden long enough for us to see for certain. Additionally--and this is crucial for me to explain to my predominantly LDS students--Eve and Adam are fully expecting and waiting for "additional hands" to come to them. That is, Milton doesn't conceive of a sexless or childless Eden*. And, since there's no pain in Eden, childbirth is (we can assume) essentially painless. Death, of course, is completely foreign there ("Whate'er Death is," says Adam when the topic comes up (425)), and wickedness is likewise unavailable. In short, the Garden of Pleasure** is truly a paradise: All of the things that make life beautiful, none of the weaknesses that make it miserable. Milton, I think, does this on purpose: If we as readers are to feel like we've truly lost something, it can't be a conditional paradise. Eden must be a place that we long to be in, so that when it's lost (the spoiler is in the title, people), we care. So when I ask the kids if they'd want to be Eden, their number one critique is that it would be boring--and I don't get it. A lot of kids argue that without opposition, there's no growth. No growth is, essentially, uninteresting (or, rather, boring). And while I understand that from a postlapsarian point of view, Milton goes to show that there's plenty to do in the Garden--gardening, as a matter of fact, to say nothing of exploring all of the cool and beautiful things in Eden--because, again, Eden has to be a place that we'd unreservedly want to go to. "But you wouldn't have anything to do after a while," the children groused. "Eventually, you would waft yourself heavenward," I rejoined, "refilling the celestial halls with humans-turned-angels to refill those numbers lost by the fall of Satan and his Atheist crew!" "What would you do, though? Just, like, tend a garden?" "Yeah." "Nothing else?" "There's an elephant who writhes his lithe proboscis…" And what they're saying--or, rather, what I'm hearing--is that they don't realize just how monotonous life really is. You'd think they would: They are, after all, students. There is a constant grind of schedules, bells, expectations, and repetitions. But they have summer to look forward to, or graduation, or a job… …but that's where I am, and I have to say, it doesn't feel like there's a lot of growth here. There are small lessons here or there, but life has hit the this-is-life-for-the-foreseeable-future-and/or-until-you-die plateau. I've been teaching the same curricula (with some noteworthy exceptions) for over a decade, going through the same jokes, asking the same questions, pointing out the same cool things. I get quite a bit of satisfaction from that, but when I zoom out, the monotony of day-in-day-out living is grinding. Living becomes habitual. Mountain peaks of the past fade into rolling hills of the present and it gets to the point where speedbumps give me nosebleeds. Part of the reason that I can see so far into the future is because there's nothing to climb between here and death. In other words, this brave new world that is filled with so many possibilities--more possibilities than I can ever hope to touch--will collapse until there's variety in the names I memorize and that's about it. Oh, sure, there are changes. My children are still at home and in school, so watching them grow and learn and burst out into the world will be moments to look for and savor. I don't deny that there will be changes, of course, and new joys--and also new sorrows. A life in Milton's Eden would omit that last part, which is why I'm still baffled by my students' responses to the question "Would you want to live there?" When they answer, in effect, "I wouldn't want to live a boring life that's the same every day," I realize that I need to refrain from telling them that I ask myself almost daily: Is this all there is? --- * In LDS doctrine, our First Parents were told that they had to "multiply and replenish the earth"--which is interpreted to mean that this "commandment" was in effect at the same time as the prohibition on the fruit. Where Mormonism and Milton differ is that LDS doctrine claims that childbearing was impossible whilst Eve was in Eden. Until she and her husband departed from the Garden, they couldn't have kids. Milton just assumes that, had Eve not partaken of the fruit, all of humankind would still be in the Garden all the way up to present day. ** Eden in Hebrew means "Pleasure". |
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