The beginning of March is always a bittersweet thing. On the good side, it usually means that the weather is starting to turn. Sky dandruff falls less often (though we've had precious little snow the past few years). The lawn outside my office window begins to start the process of maybe even trying to think about changing its color from depression-yellow to tentative-green. I can crack my window for some fresh air and to better hear the grumbles of traffic. My brother's birthday shows up, as does my second child's. This year, Daylight Saving Time leaps into action mid-month, which means my homeward bound commute will no longer involve squinting against the rays of the setting sun. So there are some definite perks and positives.
The downside, however, is that my schedule almost always puts the beginning of my World War I unit at the beginning of March. And that is, in and of itself, a bittersweet thing--a confession I'm loathe to make, despite it being true. I'm not much of a historian. There's a very narrow subset of historical moments that I know extensively--perhaps to the level of having forgotten more than what most people will ever know--and the rest is expansive enough to cover what I teach in class. I have been steadily trying to increase that knowledge over the years, and while I certainly know what I'm teaching, I don't have a grasp on other aspects of the same time periods. For example, I couldn't tell you what was happening basically anywhere on the African continent during the 13-1800s, except maybe some Napoleonic fighting in Egypt. I'm pretty ignorant about China pre-19th century. The list could go on. My point is that I know what I need for my classes and then a bit more, except for in certain areas where I know more than is needed for my classes. Those areas tend to revolve around the Tudor/Stuart dynasty in England, and the World Wars. And that's the "sweet" part about starting the World War I unit: I'm going from something that I have some knowledge to something I have (comparatively) more knowledge. Feeling confident and comfortable and knowledgeable about something makes a big difference in the satisfaction of a unit. I won't say there's never a question I can't answer, but I can give a bit of an answer to most of them, and that's a good feeling. Not only that, but I'm pretty passionate about remembering and learning about World War I. I focus a lot on the Western Front (going beyond the trench warfare is one of the areas that I aim to improve my knowledge about as time goes on), yes. Nevertheless, I feel like what and how I teach is not only elucidating for the students, but is valuable for how they understand the world that we live in. I can't think of an event of equal importance in the past century than World War I. (And if you want to argue about World War II, you have a lot of explaining on how we would've ended up with fascism and despotism throughout Europe without the catastrophe of 1914-1918.) And, in a lot of ways, I view it this way because my students have a probably-unhealthy interest in WWII and view WWI with dim curiosity at best and outright apathy at worst. Not only do I get to change their understanding of history through this lengthy unit, but I also get to share some poetry by Wilfred Owen, one of my favorite poets, and that's always exciting. So I have some positive things about "starting the war" this week. But there's also some "bitter" mixed in there, and that's the reality that I'm about to embark on my annual trek through human misery, brutality, callousness, and horror. I know that there's a lot of hero-worship of the doughboys (just kidding; precious few people care about WWI vets; our national memorial to the 116,000 killed in the Great War won't be dedicated until 2024), and it can be hard to go against a received tradition of veneration. Teaching about what humans did to each other, and the hell unleashed upon the world is taxing and draining and depressing. I don't dwell long on the Armenian genocide, for example, but it's one of the things that really kicks me in the guts every time I have to explain it. The disgusting waste of life on 1 July 1916 at the Battle of the Somme is hardly something to relish describing, nor its French counterpart that started in February of the same year near Verdun. We read All Quiet on the Western Front to get a view from the German trenches, only to see that it's basically the same as the view from the British or French ones. We see black and white photos, maps, colorized film clips, and modern day images of century-old weapons. I try to give them a broad understanding about the conflict, because there's so much and one must be firm in cutting out details. But I also try to instill in them the understanding of what modern warfare looks like, the pains it can cause, the scars it leaves. Add to that the utter futility of the fight--the pointlessness of the conflict in the first place, to say nothing of the way in which it set up the world for greater misery and bloodshed just two decades later, and my World War I unit is a bleak prospect indeed. So that's why I find March to be a melancholic month, despite its manifest positives. This year, with the world "celebrating" the first anniversary of COVID-19, I'm reminded of how I taught this information last year--parked in my office, looking out at the world through my window, talking to my computer screen with a handful of dedicated students who "showed up" for the actual lecture, rather than relying on the recording. I get to teach in person now, albeit in a modified manner, and that has some positives. (Of course, it also led to me getting COVID and almost infecting my heart-warrior son, so on the whole I'd say it's mostly negative.) Here I sit, then, on the week when we "start World War I" (as I sometimes accidentally say before correcting myself and say "start our study of World War I"), I hope you can forgive me for feeling a mixture of bittersweet emotions. Squeaking in at the tail end of December, I finished reading the 37th book of the year. (I finished number 36 three days ago, a Young Adult version of the Spider-Man origin story, told from the point of view of Mary Jane. I may write about that later.) Since I'm trying to finish Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson (in order to be able to start Rhythm of War; or perhaps the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin; or maybe another Art of Magic: The Gathering book; or a history book called Plantagenet that is, as one might assume, about the Plantagenets; or maybe Hamnet, a rave-reviewed novel about the death of William Shakespeare's son; or perhaps the new Attack on Titan that arrived on Christmas Eve, to say nothing of the scores of older, unread books adorning my shelves), I feel as though I've read enough pages to constitute more than simply 37 books. Maybe in 2021 I'll do a page-count instead of title-count to see how that makes me feel.
Anyway, the reason I read Of Dice and Men is because David Ewalt's history about the creation and progress of Dungeons & Dragons is key to my upcoming Winterim. January 2021 will see me and another teacher at my school doing a three-week intensive course on tabletop RPGs, with the original brand smack dab in the middle. We'll also be looking at a handful of other versions of RPGs, then tasking the students to create their own new TTRPG. It should be a lot of fun, and though I'm not quite as excited for this Winterim as I have been in the past (truth be told, I've never been less pumped for a Winterim than I am this year, though it has nothing to do with my topic, coteacher, or students enrolled), mostly because my life feels like a pending storm is on its way. That has left me feeling a bit despondent, a topic I wrote about here, if you want details. Nevertheless, I am on break, which means that I'm reading new D&D manuals, watching YouTube videos of people, trying to wrangle enough patience to try playing with my kids, and finishing up the reading of this book. You know…teacher on break stuff. One of the things about Ewalt's book is his unabashed appreciation for the game. It's true that there is a level of geekery that Dungeons & Dragons attracts, so it shouldn't be surprised that someone who is interested in the past of the game is also interested in the game. Nevertheless, I liked his tone: It's inviting and general, yet clearly connected to the source. He'll use metaphors that require footnotes, but it's not done in a condescending tone, and they always help add to the world of the game that he's documenting. And though I knew a bit about the beginnings of the game thanks to the documentary In the Eye of the Beholder, there are a lot of extra details that Ewalt puts into the book that contextualized what I saw in the film. Not only that, but there is space in a book to go over parts that aren't as tightly refined as what In the Eye of the Beholder could cover. One example that I thought was interesting--and, frankly, underserved--was the chapter on the satanic panic of the eighties. The passing awareness I have of that particular moment in the pop cultural history has always been light, and I was hoping that there might be more in it with Ewalt's book, but he remains focused on D&D for the entirety of that chapter. (I'm interested to see what my students think: They were given the assignment of reading the entire book before we start in January, so they should come in prepared to discuss sections like that with me.) I also liked how he walked me through the history of the different editions without getting bogged down in minutiae. I've only recently started playing--a handful of students introduced me to D&D 5e (fifth edition) a couple of years ago--so though I've been aware of tropes and how to play TTRPGs to a certain extent, I didn't see how there could be so many changes to what seems like a pretty solid foundation. And what's the difference between Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and the others? Ewalt manages to navigate this area pretty well, bringing about the salient historical points and putting everything into the narrative of a small, ambitious business, complete with the missteps and mistakes that led to nearly losing the game entirely. It didn't all sing to me, though. There are moments when he narrates a campaign that he's in with his friends, and while I appreciate what he's trying to do with that, it felt a little self-indulgent and not really the point of the book. This happens more toward the end, as Ewalt's love of the game and his excitement interacting with the potential of the new edition (this was written before D&D 5e came out) overpowers the narrative structure that he's been working so hard to establish. His digression on trying a LARP-lite experience was puzzling, as it didn't seem to really connect with the point of his book. I mean, I'm glad that he had fun at Otherworld where he had an opportunity to play a scripted campaign beyond the tabletop, but…how does this really fit in with discussions about the original creators, their own foibles, the process of creating a game with such massive influence on the pop cultural landscape? Admittedly, the subtitle of the book is The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It, and since Ewalt is one of those people, I guess it makes sense that some of his own life leaks in? I found it distracting, though. I read Ethan Gilsdorf's Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks a number of years ago, so I had already passed through a contemplation about what it means for someone to try to join in with the LARPing community and to balance an interest in exploring fantasy fiction. In fact, a lot of Ewalt's experiences mirrored Gilsdorf's. It made that particular section of the book a bit samey, though that's not really Ewalt's (or Gilsdorf's) fault. On the whole, however, I found the book to be worthwhile. I like history, I like pop culture, I like D&D…this is definitely the sort of thing that would resonate with me. I would probably recommend it to anyone who's looking for a bit of an insight into what might otherwise be an opaque topic--why do people pay so much money to just sit around and tell each other stories?--and also fans of the game will likely enjoy this trip down memory's dungeon. If you're only passingly interested in how tabletop RPGs got started, then you're probably fine missing this one. 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. 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. 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. Note: The Concurrent Enrollment English class I'm teaching is writing a personal essay about their literary journey. We're using Fahrenheit 451 as our text, but writing our own stories as we go along. Personal narratives are kind of my jam, so I decided that I would draft my own example essays/approaches to the topic. Fortunately for me, I won't be graded on what I write. Instead, I can simply let the story take me where it will. Here's what I wrote.
Naked trees. Kniving winds. The too-early setting of an October sun. A strange street. A dripping nose. In my cold-chapped hands, I held a flyer for Jim Ferrin, a guy in our ward who was using the youth to help canvas Orem neighborhoods with his candidacy. I did not much care about him--aside from being politically ignorant, I was twelve years old and completely uninterested in doing this bit of service. Besides, I wasn’t friends with any of his kids. Add to that the injury of having had to give up a perfectly good book-reading evening, and my pre-teen angst about the job becomes clearer. I walked to the next house, numb fingers fumbling with the slender elastic, wrapping the half-sheet of paper (hunting-orange in my memory, though who now knows what it really was) around the screendoor’s black handle. As the leaves gossiped past me, I shrugged deeper into my thick leather coat. “I don’t want this,” I said to myself. “I want to be at home, with Lessa, F’lar, and Jaxom.” Lessa, F’lar, and Jaxom, of course, aren’t real. They’re characters from the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffery. Set on a faraway planet, the book series revolves around the men and women who have become selected to ride massive, fire-breathing dragons, all in defense of their planet from a mindless mycorrhizal threat. The world is a rare feat in secondary-world creation, second only to Tolkien’s Middle Earth in the complexity, interaction of disparate parts, and world-building. (The late Anne McCaffery didn’t build her own unique languages for her world--something that will likely always put Tolkien at the top of the list for most detailed secondary-world creation in literature.) To a twelve year old whose primary experiences were imaginative, having such a wonderfully wrought world--even if it was fictional--was where I wished to spend as much time as I possibly could. What I didn’t understand then but can see more clearly now is that Lessa, F’lar, and Jaxom--and Robinton, Menoly, and the rest of the entrancing cast--came into my life as permanent residents, people who became real to me through the viral act of writing and reading. They felt almost tangible, with problems that were large-yet-solvable, a type of bravery that I could only aspire to, and beneficiaries of a world in which dragons weren’t terrible beasts to slay but instead gentle companions, loyal and true. I grew up in the late eighties and early nineties: Ronald Reagan’s deregulation of what constituted advertisements to children meant that my Saturday mornings were twenty-three minute long commercials with a plot, interrupted by seven minutes of actual commercials. I knew very well how a child could pine for something. After all, watching an entire episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles--during which time there were a half dozen reminders that I could actually play with the Technodrome or get that Donatello action figure to round out my collection--was an injection of desire coming straight into my eyeballs. There was a yearning for the toys on the TV (to say nothing of the jealousy I felt toward the child actors who got to play with the toys during the commercial) that can be difficult to fully understand. I would ache for what I saw on TV, almost as if I could physically feel it. That’s what I felt that blustery October day as I hawked flyers for Jim-Ferrin-in-our-ward. But it wasn’t an ache for the action figures and playsets. It was a desire to return to a written world, a place where these fictitious people lived. I wanted to return to Pern, not suffer through the bad weather of Utah in late-autumn. I couldn’t say that this was the first time that I felt such a pining for the fictitious, but it’s certainly one of the strongest. The pull of characters--a concern for them that was akin to caring about my real life friends and their problems--was so intense that I almost cried. (Being freezing cold and miserable probably only added to that emotional response.) This, of course, is a different sort of experience than when I finally “got” what Shakespeare was saying in Hamlet or could “see” Milton’s brilliance. This was a more tangible, more from-the-gut experience. I found myself wanting to be in a place that I had never seen with people I had never met more than I wanted almost anything else in that moment. I did, unsurprisingly, get to go home when my service was complete. I don’t remember if Brother Ferrin ended up winning that election a couple of weeks later; I do remember, however, that Pern has--ever since that time--been a part of me, a place that I happily return to. And though I don’t ache to return there anymore (at least, not to the same degree), I know the keenness of such yearning. I now look forward to the next time an author’s words can so fully enrapture me--I look forward to being teleported again. 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. My Winterim class' study of Harry Potter involved heading down to Los Angeles and visiting the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Universal Studios Hollywood. I wanted to document a few of my memories here--albeit quickly. Thanks for your indulgence. Day 1 We met at the school at seven in the morning, loaded up twenty kids and six chaperones into four vans, and headed south. I'd broken the trip into four segments, arranging it in such a way that I could lead a discussion in each car with each group of kids. We discussed a couple of portions of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The conversations were pretty similar--done on purpose, as I wanted to give them all the 'same' lesson, inasmuch as was possible--but they were good. I liked them, at least. We arrived at our Air BnB in good time--very few delays, even within the thorny California traffic--unpacked the cars, and made some spaghetti dinner. The students entertained themselves with Disney Plus' The Simpsons and chatted and relaxed. We even got to bed at a decent time, with only needing three forceful reminders from me to be quiet when it was time to go to bed (which was only required the one time). Day 2 After arising and breakfasting, we went down to Sunset Beach, which was essentially empty. The students played in the sand and surf--very cold surf, as it was only in the mid-sixties--until it was time to have another class. We discussed Lupin from Prisoner of Azkaban, as well as exploring some of the fears that we have (in relation to the Dementors and the Patronus Charm). Though having the beach pretty much to ourselves was nice, the sun and the lack of facilities forced us south to Huntington Beach where we had another hour or so of class, plus some wandering around time. It was here that we, again, lost a student in the bathroom. (By 'again', I'm referencing the time when, in Cambridge, England, a student went to the loo without anyone knowing and, as a result, was left there for an hour and a half before we realized what had happened and found her. Yeah. Good times.) The kid had gone into a bathroom to change without telling anyone that he needed extra time. So Gayle and I found him just as he exited the stall, oblivious to the fact that the group had moved on. After that, I assigned four kids to be the Head Boy and Girls of their respective houses, tasking them with the responsibility to do a head count so that we could avoid that happening again. Once finished with the beach, we returned to the cars and drove home. There, we continued the classwork that we still needed to do, then piled back into the cars to go to Downtown Disney, which was only about ten minutes from the house. The problem was, the parking at Downtown Disney was exorbitant. In the end, we decided that we would drop off the students and a couple of chaperones, then drive the vans back to the house. From there, we ordered an Uber, which got us back to the park for, maybe, six bucks. We tried to enjoy the Downtown Disney vibe, but one of the students brought a harmonica, which prevented him from getting in (they didn't want him busking, I think). Rather than sitting and waiting for us to come take care of it, he wandered away--as if that makes any sense--which required additional work on our part. I wasn't particularly happy with that decision of his. Still, we eventually all made it through security. The kids were let loose--on the precept of the buddy system--to look at what was there. (Part of our Winterim is to study marketing; what better place to see it done than at the park of the masters of all marketing, Disney?) Gayle and I enjoyed a churro together--it's one of her favorite treats--and looked at some of the merchandise. I noticed that, last time I was there, I had been on the lookout for something that I actually wanted to buy. I ended up getting a metal model kit for Cinderella's castle, mostly because I like castles. (It sits on my bookshelf now--though I almost never remember that it's a Disney landmark.) Suffice to say that Disney is not a key component of my childhood. I mean, it's fun--Disneyland is great and I like going there--but there's little about the Mouse that makes me truly excited. Being in Downtown Disney that night, without having been in the park at all, made me feel even less inclined to pay any amount to anyone for anything (churros excepted). Without the brainwashing of being in the park, my interest in the merchandise was basically non-existent. We hired another Uber to get us back to our vans, then returned to Downtown Disney to pick up the students. Once home, we had a nice dinner. For the most part, my wife cooked the food with a student or two to help while I organized the shower schedule and kept students rotating through. (With only two bathrooms in the house, it required a lot of discipline to ensure that everyone had time to bathe.) After dinner, we had one of the houses--yes, I broke up the twenty students into the four Hogwarts houses--help on the cleanup. Day 3 This was an early day, as we wanted to make sure that our tickets worked and we could get into the park. To that end, we left the house in Anaheim at 8am. Los Angeles traffic conspired against us, and we didn't get to the theme park until 9:30am. Then we struggled with figuring out parking--we wanted to park at the Metro station nearby and just walk to the park, but there were signs prohibiting that. While that probably wouldn't have mattered, I happened to pull into a stall that was within eyesight of an attendant. Since there wasn't any other option, I decided to fork over the $28 to park in the parking lot. Still, despite these hiccups, we were able to get everyone through security, get some pictures, and head into the park. We decided to meet at the Three Broomsticks for lunch, then everyone went whichever way they wanted. Gayle and I decided to start at the Wizarding World, since that was our entire purpose in being there. We had our robes on and everything--why wouldn't we head straight there? Because it's January, the weather was quite cool--and, indeed, by the end of the day, was feeling downright cold--but it also meant that the park was not well attended. Gayle and I stood in line for the Flight of the Hippogriff ride, which took seven or eight minutes to get to the front of. (Probably a bit too long of a wait for a ride that short, but that's okay.) Then we and a couple of students went into the reason we were there: Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey. We walked at a steady pace through the Hogwarts queue, enjoying the recreations of the different statues described in the books and seen in the movies, looking at sundry props and listening to the talking portraits. Maybe five minutes later, we were on the ride. Gayle and I have been on the ride before--we went to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Universal Studios Orlando a few years ago--but that didn't change how exciting it was to be on it again. I've grown a lot as a person and as a reader since then, and I have a different relationship with Rowling's world now. Getting to "be there" to such an immersive extent was really enjoyable. Slightly shaken about, we then wandered through Hogsmeade and enjoyed the different shops' sundry charms (while suffering the mild panic attacks set on by the prices of everything). We swung out of Hogsmeade long enough to watch the Kung Fu Panda attraction, which was like watching a video game in a rumbly seat…we didn't go back. By then, it was almost time for lunch, so Gayle and I hung out at the Three Broomsticks in Hogsmeade until it was time to eat. Because of how the trip was supposed to go, we had to figure out a way for the students to be able to enjoy the food there without them all cracking open their wallets. In the end, we bought four Great Feasts (large meals with ribs, chicken, corn, potatoes, and vegetables) and thus fed the kids. When we were done, we headed onto the Universal Studios tour, which took a solid hour or so. It was really cool to see some of these sets for films I'd seen--and a bunch for movies I'd never even heard of. The entire experience was enjoyable--especially when we saw some of the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park. Since the Jurassic World ride was closed that day (and the next, as it happened), this helped scratch the dinosaur itch. With that done, Gayle and I explored the lower lot of the park, descending the escalators until we got to the Jurassic World attraction. We arrived just as the velociraptor, Blue, came out for pictures. We watched as it made its angry noises, clacked its mighty jaws, and terrorized some of the smaller guests. Gayle and I got in line and got a few pictures with the creature. We then went on the Mummy ride and the Transformers ride, both of which are close to the Jurassic World section. That essentially finished off our first day in the park. Of course, we still had a commute to contend with. The distance from our house to the park was just over 30 miles, but it still took almost two hours to get back, since the traffic was so bad. Fortunately, we made it with little damage, though I'll admit that the car was pretty quiet--almost everyone was dozing after having gone through such a long day. We got home, made some tacos, fed everyone, did our shower routine, and called a lights out. Most kids, I'd guess, were asleep within a few minutes. Day 4 Originally, we thought that this day would be like day 2: classes on the beach, maybe something fun in the evening. However, through a good deal on the tickets, we actually had a total of three days' access to the park. So, since we couldn't afford lunch for all three days--it wasn't in the budget--we decided to hold class in the morning. Students could then eat the lunch provided by the school or, if they wanted, wait until we arrived at the park. The commute, being in the middle of the day, was much shorter. We dropped off the students (buddy system!) at the Universal City Walk drop off point, then I parked the car in the metro station as before. With my other drivers, we headed to the shuttle that took us up the hill and into the park. Meeting up with Gayle, she and I made sure the students were set before heading into the park ourselves. We decided to take in the shows, watching the Special Effects show and the Water World stunt show before returning to Hogsmeade and browsing the shops. We had to find some souvenirs for our kids, so we passed some pleasant time that way. We also ate lunch at Three Broomsticks again, this time ordering a butterbeer to go along with the shepherd's pie. We went on the Forbidden Journey again (why wouldn't we?), then took in a couple of the rides we'd missed from before--the Simpsons and the Despicable Me rides (which were the same and not particularly noteworthy; the Simpsons ride, strangely enough, was always the one with the longest queue--sometimes as long as 45 minutes--which I can't understand; it's not that good of a ride). We ended our evening by watching the Animal Actors show, which we enjoyed. By then it was getting late and quite cold, so I used a Starbucks gift card a student had given me for Christmas to buy us some hot chocolate. The return trip was long and fairly uneventful, though we did see the remnants of one of the wrecks--a compact car had gone under a pickup truck, with the truck's bumper all the way to the windshield of the car--and we got home safely. We had breakfast for dinner, and as the evening was winding down, one of the students said she was going to jump into the icy cold pool. After all, we'd brought our swimming suits: Why not use them? It was a moment of decision for me: I could indulge them, let them do the dumb thing, and roll my eyes at them; I could forbid them, dropping the disciplinary hammer on them; or I could join in. I decided to do the last one, in part because my purpose in the trip was to find ways to give them memorable, important experiences. What better way than to leap into the icy pool with them? There were probably eight or so of us lined around the pool. I told my coteacher to count us off, then, at three, we all leaped in. The temperature outside was, I would guess, in the high forties--the water was not so warm, methinks. I immediately set out for the side of the pool, shrieking that I'd made a huge mistake. To my surprise, my coteacher--who was not in her swimming suit--was in the water, too: She had jumped in when she'd shouted three, having taken off her shoes and set aside her phone. Other than that, she was in her clothes that she'd been wearing all day. We climbed out--I set about trying to hug Gayle with my wet body--and spent a good portion of time shivering. After an hour or so of getting the showers taken care of, we turned in for the night. Day 5 As part of our final day in the park, we arranged to get--as much as possible--the students in the park for the maximum amount of time. We left early, though we still arrived a half our after the park opened. Dropping the kids off, Gayle and I went to park in the Metro station, only to have the kiosk refuse to register our cars. We decided that it was the sort of thing that we'd have to figure out later, so we went ahead and took the shuttle to the park. Since the Jurassic World attraction was now open, Gayle, my coteacher, her parents, and I went straight there. The queue waiting time said ten minutes, but we essentially walked on, our plastic ponchos covering our Hogwarts robes. We got fairly wet the first time through, but I demanded on going again. And again. Three times in a row--each one as easy to get on as the first. The second experience was the most unexpected: At the end of the ride, the T. rex lunges out of a dark recess, roars at the tourists, then the boat goes down a steep hill, landing with a splash. Well, something must have happened with the boats at the dock, because though Rexy came out and roared at us, we didn't move forward. The dinosaur did her thing, then ducked her head and retreated, no longer interested in us. We sat, waiting to go down. At last, we moved forward and it plunged us down the hill. We immediately turned to the Mummy ride, which we were able to walk onto straight from the queue. That's always a fun ride, I think, though they have changed it a lot since I last was on it: In the past, they had more Brendan Fraiser doing his thing…this one did not. And this is, I think, one of the real problems that both Universal Studios and California Adventure have to deal with: They aren't timeless/classic properties. Sure, Transformers and superheroes are popular now, but ten years down the road? No one will really care--much like no one cares about Brendan Fraiser's version of The Mummy. Yes, some properties really stick around, but most don't. Disneyland itself is the attraction--the whole place is its own classic, nostalgic, timeless area. Some things change, obviously, but its core identity remains. Not so with these other parks. The sun was out, and though the day was warm, we were still wet; we sat at a table to dry off and try to figure out what was going on with the parking situation. After some time, my coteacher said she'd figure it out and that Gayle and I should go enjoy the park. So we went on the Transformers ride. However, a woman in the row in front of us vomited, so we weren't really interested in sticking around. Heading back to the upper lot, we headed to Hogsmeade (easily our favorite part of the park, regardless of whether or not we were there for a Harry Potter Winterim) where we got lunch--fish and chips, plus a hot butterbeer (which I very much liked)--and breezed through the shops. As it was the last day, it was time to start making our souvenir decisions. We didn't want to burden ourselves with too much stuff, though, so we only looked. The Flight of the Hippogriff was walk-on, so we did that. Then, we decided since we were in Hogsmeade, we would go through the Forbidden Journey at our own pace, enjoying the queue much more than we had the other times. We went slowly, letting groups pass us as we stared at the detail poured into the design. We spotted the sword of Gryffindor in Dumbledore's office (and we listened to both of his lectures); we spent time watching the four founders of Hogwarts verbally spar from their paintings; standing in the Defense Against the Dark Arts class, we got to watch Ron accidentally start a thunderstorm, then make it snow. Honestly, a big portion of the fun of that ride is the queue, which is a testament to Rowling's imagination and the ride makers' commitment to creating an exceptional experience. With that ride done, we were feeling pretty satisfied. There wasn't a whole lot else to do--we'd gone on every attraction (save the Walking Dead one, which I wasn't in the mood for)--and time was quickly slipping away from us. We bought ourselves one last butterbeer and pumpkin juice (say what you will, but I love both of those drinks; and they're expensive enough to make it feel like you're drinking gold, good heavens). I saw that the line to Ollivander's Wand experience was short. On a whim, I said we should go in again. It was walk-in speed, so we were soon corralled into the first part of the shop. Boxes of wands--thousands of them--spread upwards to the ceiling on their crooked shelves. We waited only a moment before the hidden door swung open and we were ushered into the actual wand-selection room. I was secretly hoping that Gayle or I might be picked--as I looked around, there weren't any children and we were the only two in Hogwarts robes (I in my Ravenclaw, she in her Gryffindor). The wand-matcher began her speech--the same one we'd seen on an earlier day--and prowled the room. Her eyes lighted on me. "Ravenclaw," she said, "do you have a wand?" "No," I said, though that's only partially true: I have a wand. However, I've never been selected for a wand. "And you, Gryffindor," she said, turning to Gayle. "Do you have a wand?" "No." "Come forward, both of you." Gayle and I did as asked, smiling with excitement. The wand-matcher spoke about how wands work, giving a very similar speech to what Ollivander says in the book and movie. She picked one box--one "made" of ivy (they're all plastic, of course)--and pulled out the wand. She handed it to me and asked me to cast the Unlocking Charm. I waved the wand, said, "Alohamora!" and, instead of opening up some drawers, a pile of wands almost fell from a shelf. "Good rebound, but clearly not the right wand," said she. Turning to Gayle, she presented one of oak and asked my wife to light up the room. Gayle pointed her wand to the ceiling and said, "Lumos!" A lightning storm began. "Not the right one, no, I'm afraid not…" The wand-matcher paused, then looked at the two of us. She picked up the two wands and switched them between us. A light illuminated us, a burst of air blasted, and angelic singing filled the air. "Those are both dragon heartstring cores--and they come from the same dragon. That means their cores are twins. We call them brother wands," said the wand-matcher. She then went on to explain what the different types of wood meant and some other similar things. We thanked her as an assistant helped box them up. We were then ushered out and given a quick explanation about the wands. "Wizards must pay for their wands, so it's $55 per wand. If you choose not to buy them, please return them to me." It didn't take much deliberation to decide to keep the wands. Not only had they "chosen" us, but they were the kinds of wands that allowed us to interact with some of the shops in the park (by using the wands in certain locations, "magical" responses were possible, including making paper flit about, music boxes sing, and a dragon to be awakened behind a locked door). We paid for those wands, as well as an extra one for our middle son's souvenir. We cast spells, purchased final merchandise, and finished our time at Universal Studios Hollywood. Day 6
We left the Air BnB early, having cleaned up and packed up with surprising efficiency. Our trip home was uneventful, save that there was quite a bit of snow and wind once we made it back to Utah. Still, we all arrived home safely and in good time, which was nice. I'm glad to be home, even if the weather disagrees with me and the politics here is weird…not that that has anything to do with my past week, but…y'know…it's always there. Final Thoughts Multiple times whilst in Hogsmeade--usually during our meals--it was important for me to try to sit back and soak in what was happening. With all the stresses, improvisations, and tweaks, the trip was a difficult trick to pull off. That's how they always are, of course, but it was more difficult than in the past. (There were reasons for that, none of which interesting enough to go into here.) So it was important for me to try to really relish these fleeting moments of being in these places that mean so much to me. Yes, I recognize that the Wizarding World of Harry Potter wasn't created so that I could have moments of peace: It's a moneymaking venture (and it earned a lot of our money, let me tell you). And that's the tricky part: The cash desire has led to a value that's beyond what's within the park. The memories that the trip generated will be fond ones; I'll reflect on this time with warmth for many years to come. All possible because of money--and the lust for it--that has given me something slightly more ineffable. It's an uncomfortable alliance between the base desire of greed and the human value of ascribing and embracing worth. In the end, though, I have to accept it on its own terms, and be grateful for the time that I have. I hope that this will be something that really sticks with me, something that remains throughout the rest of my life as being a worthwhile effort and a wonderful memory. More than anything, it helps to underscore the importance of forcing meaning onto moments: Like the empty plastic cups of butterbeer, the temptation is for the moment to pay for itself only, to not allow it greater import and worth in our lives. It takes conscious effort to appreciate things as they are, when they are. Here's hoping I can internalize that lesson. |
AuthorWould you like to support my writings? Feel free to buy me a coffee (which I don't drink, but I do drink hot chocolate) at my Ko-Fi page. Thanks! Archives
July 2022
Categories
All
|