Walt Whitman vs. Public Enemy

Walt Whitman is also the recipient of New Jersey's highest honor.

One of the more notable features of any English textbook teacher’s edition is what I like to call the “monkey margins.”  These are the notes and guides that are placed in the margins of the pages that are designed to make teaching that particular piece of text so easy that a monkey could do it.  I’ll admit that there are times when I have found the monkey margins useful, like last week when I was able to use them to answer a student’s question about a story’s historical context.

But most of the time, the monkey margins are ridiculous and seeing them reminds me of a time four years ago when I was in my third year of teaching and was at the beginning of my Harlem Renaissance unit in my eleventh grade English class.  I started with Walt Whitman.  Which to someone unfamiliar with the Harlem Renaissance seems to be an odd place to start, but since one of my featured poems was Langston Hughes’s “I, Too,” I felt that it would be great to start with the “source material” so to speak.  Besides, “I Hear America Singing” was in the eleventh grade textbook that every student had so there was no copying necessary.

As textbook publishers often do (in this case, it was Prentice Hall), there were a few poems next to Whitman’s in a “compare/contrast” type of thing and some of the questions the book asked students had to do with looking at the different messages the poems were sending.  I had this in mind anyway when I came up with the idea to use those two poems; after all, so many of us look at the same piece in different ways that I thought it would be good to see different interpretations of the same idea before opening students up to making interpretations themselves.

From the Bookshelf: Kick Me

Very often when I’m figuring out what to teach, I find myself going outside of the classroom English textbook.  In this feature, I take a look at those reading selections.

When I was fresh out of college in 1999, teen television shows and movies were experiencing a renaissance.  American Pie was one the biggest hits of that summer’s box office and Dawson’s Creek was still going pretty strong on the WB.  Having seen this success, television networks did what they always do when a concept is successful: copy it and hope that it works.  That fall, we were treated to teen aliens in Roswell, inter-clique fighting with Popular, and the angst of Jesse Eisenberg and Anne Hathaway on Get Real.  But my favorite show out of the teen explosion–well, the only one I actually watched–was Freaks and Geeks.

Set at McKinley High School in Michigan in the 1980-1981 school year, Freaks and Geeks follows a brother and sister, Sam and Lindsay Weir, through the travails of going to McKinley.  When the series opens, Sam is the geek, finding himself tortured by a bully and having a hopeless crush on a cheerleader; conversely, Lindsay has thrown aside her geek friends and is hanging out with the stoners and burnouts who make up the “freaks” of the title.  NBC cancelled the show in the middle of its season due to terrible ratings (it was on at 8:00 on Saturday night, losing in the ratings to COPS and Early Edition), although fans poured enough effort into a “save the show” campaign that three more episodes were aired in July 2000 (I contributed myself and have a T-shirt to prove it).

The men responsible for getting this show off the ground were Judd Apatow (he of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up fame) and Paul Feig (who recently directed Bridesmaids).  Feig is credited as the show’s creator and in 2002, he published a collection of autobiographical essays entitled Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence.  The stories about torture at the hands of bullies and ineptitude around the opposite sex (something he would further document in Superstud) are clearly the inspiration for a number of the storylines on Freaks and Geeks, as Feig is brutally honest about the ridiculousness of his formative years while at the same time being hilarious enough to not have a pity party.  It’s kind of like he found the correct way to answer that torturous standardized test writing prompt, “What is your most embarrassing moment?”  and answered it enough times for an entire book.

Listen to the students and help them use their voice the right way.

Recently, a couple of posts over on The Innovative Educator have focused on the need for students to have a voice, and how that voice is largely ignored when it comes to just about anything in the school system.  The posts themselves employ a rather melodramatic tone, using words such as discrimination and oppression to make a villain out of the “system,” almost going out of the way at times to paint the public school system as some sort of Orwellian nightmare (though, in all honesty, Kafkaesque would be more appropriate).  It’s the kind of rhetoric that gets people reading despite what facts may or may not be valid in the actual content.

Commentary about hyperbolic metaphors aside, there is a valid point in her hand-wringing.  Students are under-represented in the national discussion about education, even less than teachers.  I’ve read too many articles and books about the theory of instruction that discount the variable the student brings to the actual practice too instruction; furthermore, there are way too many school policies created that pay lip service to students in the name of “protecting” them but seriously make you wonder if the people making those policies really had the students best interests in mind.

So, that being said, if students are lacking a clear voice in the educational discourse, how can they get that voice?  And how can they use that voice  without sounding like they’re whiny kids throwing a temper tantrum?

The quick and easy answer to both of those problems is what students themselves often think of when they are, as a group, upset about something: petition and protest.  Both are fine ideas, but in the long run I often wonder if they are effective.  Getting enough of your peers to mindlessly sign a petition might get it into the hands of building administration and organizing a class walkout (always a favorite, even back to my days in junior high school) might get their attention.  However, sometimes you don’t become known as the person who helped Donna Martin graduate; you wind up being the cause of 50 new truancy cases.

That’s not to say that students shouldn’t organize and/or protest.  It’s just that if you are a student who wants to do so, you have to be savvy about your audience and the world in which they exist.  Is a board of education going to see you as a voice worth listening to or are they going to just think you’re throwing a tantrum?  What gets through to them?  Furthermore, what role do teachers play in this equation?  Well, we can, as teachers, show them how to be effective …

Our Civic Duty

Photo by joewcampbell, licensed under CC

Let’s teach our children civics by being active citizens ourselves.

This is the last sentence of an amazing post by Corey Graber called “Evaluating Our Values” that while it specifically talks about teaching civics, should be read by everyone.

And in all honest, applied by everyone.  I have never taught civics or government (though I do have an endorsement to teach it as a result of half my degree being in political science) but I have taught journalism and I am a yearbook adviser, so I have brought both lessons on the Constitution (the First Amendment, specifically) and current events into my classroom over the years and though the focus of the current courses I teach is literature and writing, I still try to bring social studies into the discussion.  History, politics, whatever … if it might be something that resonates in the here and now and can be connected to what we’re reading, then we might have a richer discussion.

What I also like about the sentence that I quoted above is that it encourages us to be “active” citizens and I personally think that’s actually a brave piece of advice.  The reality nowadays tends to be an environment where we are more or less pressured to do the opposite.

One of my favorite message boards, at least for a while, was the message board of my hometown of Sayville, New York, and one of my favorite discussions to have was about education, mainly because quite a few people who were on the board are very right-wing in their politics, and I do love having a discussion with people whose views are the complete opposite of mine.  Anyway, one of the posters on the board often talks about the “gummint schools” (her words, not mine) and how the teachers are essentially paid liberal brainwashers.  Now, this is the type of stuff more fit for conspiracy-theorists, but I can’t call the person too crazy because not a year goes by when there is some story about how a parent got angry that a teacher shared his or her political views to the class.  And because it was seen as “harming the children” those teachers were the villains in said stories.

I see something very wrong with that.  I had some great teachers in school whose political views were well-known and while I am sure that I was influenced by them to some degree, I don’t see their influence on me as being any more powerful than my parents’, my college professors’, my friends, my co-workers, the media, or really anyone or anything else.  If politics and other issues in the news are supposed to be a discussion, why silence a voice in that discussion?  You know, aside from trying to control said discussion.

A colleague of mine who was my mentor during my very first year of teaching has been very active as part of the Occupy Movement and even before that movement came about, never was afraid to voice her opinion.  It’s one of the things I valued most about the time I worked with her–she had and still has a passion that should never be squelched for any reason, whether that be testing or because someone disagrees with her.

It should be the same for all of us, students and teachers.

Help, help, I’m being reading repressed!

Not exactly what it's like to read in English class. Sorry.

One of the protests I hear most often in the ed-blog-o-sphere (is that even a term?) is that one of the problems with reading in schools is that students are forced to read things they don’t want to read and that turns them off to reading.  Fair enough, I guess, even though I find it a little inaccurate, especially in the way that such protests are often phrased as petulant diatribes that make it sound like I’m strapping my students to their chairs and prying their eyes open A Clockwork Orange style.

But your average school does have its reading curriculum and that does often mean that they might wind up spending an entire year studying literature chosen by the state, board of education, administration, department chair, or teacher.  In other words, on the surface, students don’t really have a say in what they are going to be reading.  And apologies to Mrs. Taber, but if I didn’t have to read Ethan Frome in the tenth grade, I would definitely have not read Ethan Frome … and still wouldn’t (apologies also to my wife, who loves her some Edith Wharton, although I don’t know if she actually likes Ethan Frome).  So sometimes they are “forced” to “read” things they “don’t like.”

There’s a bit of a conundrum here.  You want your students to be engaged and get into what they’re reading so that you can help better their comprehension and then move on up the chain to analysis, etc.  But at the same time, if you asked your average high school English class of 25 students what they would like to read, you’d get 25 different answers (assuming they want to read something in the first place).  And it is possible to have 25 different reading assignments, especially if you are looking for a particular type of analysis or other product from your student; however, there’s also still something to be said about introducing them to new literature, perhaps literature that we, as English teachers like.

I know that sounds counter to the whole student-centered learning thing but while I do know that students don’t necessarily want to read stuff they might not like, I don’t often really want to teach stuff that I don’t find interesting either.  So when I approach the idea of considering what to have the class read, I try to strike a balance between what they like and what I like–kind of a “what we like” type of thing.

But what could “we” go for when the English textbook is full of … well, stuff “we” wouldn’t necessarily want to read?  As this blog progresses, I know I’m definitely going to post on different works I’ve read or taught that are a little different or are surprisingly effective in high school.

For now, though, I guess I have a confession of sorts to make and that’s until I was planning a reading unit that consists mainly of short stories, essays, and poetry, I had completely forgotten that it is possible to make those units fun for the students instead of something they have to do.  This realization came to me when I decided to chuck the novel that I usually do this time of year in favor of shorter works that are more conducive to changes in schedule because of things like snow days.  I was flipping through our textbook as well as short story and essay collections at both home and work and I said, “Hey, why don’t I gather a few things that all have to do with the same topic or theme?  And why don’t I choose a theme my students can relate to, like your relationship with your parents? And why don’t I start with something that is very straightforward and work my way up to something deep and complex?”

“WELL, DUH!!!” my brain spat back at me.

Maybe I’m cutting my fellow teachers too much slack or something, but I can see where English class can become dry because we often get stuck in a rut when we are so focused on other things that we are sort of half paying attention when thinking about what our students will be reading for our classes.  And every once in a while, yes, we do need that “Shoulda had a V8!” moment where we realize how insanely boring or irrelevant a work of literature is to a sixteen-year-old. Which is why we often go back to the drawing board.

The Paper Problem

Image by ilovebutter from Flickr (CC licensed)

The best thing I read yesterday was on Washington Post’s “Answer Sheet” blog.  Valerie Strauss posted something written by Steven Horowitz, an economics professor from St. Lawrence University.  Called “A guide to writing an academic paper”, it is a quick-and-dirty look (okay, it’s 4,000 words long, so not exactly quick-and-dirty, but you get the gist) at writing your average term paper:

Though it may seem excessive to write almost 4,000 words on how to write better papers, the reality is that writing papers in college (and the sort of writing you will do for the rest of your life) is not the same as you were asked to do in high school.  My purpose in writing this guide is to help make you into better writers and to help you become better able to articulate your perspective….The point is not to give you pages of rules and regulations, but to give you the things you need to know to create and present your ideas in a legitimate and persuasive way.

He walks through each of the different parts of the paper and what constitutes a good paper, even getting into the details of proper formatting (the best moment comes when he says: “Automatically numbered pages.  Figure out how to do it in Word.”).  And it gets to the heart of the truly good academic paper: one that is clearly organized, whose thesis is exact, and that supports said thesis with thorough proof that is properly cited.

So naturally, being a high school English teacher, I had to ask myself where his need to write a 4,000-word piece on how to write an academic paper comes from.  Why can’t college freshmen write?

I have two guesses as to the answer.  One is obvious, and that’s standardized testing.  If you look at the way classes across various subjects have changed due to an increased focus on passing state tests, you can definitely see that the idea of the academic paper would fall by the wayside.  But in all honesty, spending any more than a couple of sentences complaining about testing is kind of a waste of time because it’s taking the easy way out.

Besides, testing has been around for so long that teachers like myself are trying to find a way to teach what’s important in spite of the test (and even in spite of how tests have “damaged” incoming students), so it’s not like I am going to throw my hands in the air and not attempt it because it’s “not on the test.”

But again … why?  Why is it so hard for them to grasp a concept that I have to say (not to brag … okay, to brag) that while I didn’t completely grasp in high school, at least had a decent amount of practice in (full disclosure: my big paper in my Ancient World History/Lit/Philosophy course my first semester of freshman year was a disaster; then again, that may have more to do with the fact that the semester itself was a disaster)?

I blame technology.

Now, I’m not going to go on some rant about Wikipedia in an effort to sound like every other scared English teacher out there.  I happen to really like Wikipedia.  I’d never cite it–for the same reasons I don’t cite the World Book Encyclopedia–but I still like it.  Where I see part of the problem is in this push for project-based “meaningful” work for students when they are tackling large subjects.  In theory, it’s a good idea because it seems more engaging and students can get their hands dirty and work with media that are better suited to their strengths.  But in practice, it has resulted in a downgrading of the paper to something that is considered as much of a relic as the desks-in-rows “industrial model” lecture-based classroom that is the ire of all reformers and innovators (at least that’s what the talking points seem to be).

It’s also resulted in countless bad PowerPoint presentations that feature groups of students standing in front of a class reading off paragraphs worth of information they have crammed onto a slide (and probably copied and pasted from Wikipedia, mind you), a clear demonstration of … well, that they know how to copy and paste and read what is on a slide.

I know that sounds flip, and I know that the point of doing something like a research project or a paper isn’t the end product, but teaching or developing the skills that lead to that end product, but if we keep throwing out the individually written academic paper in favor of PowerPoints or Prezis or something creative with iMovie or a Twitter feed, we aren’t necessarily preparing those who want to go to college for what their professors will expect.

And yes, I can hear the voices of protest: not everyone goes to college, our job isn’t to prepare kids for college, papers aren’t the future.  But when you have colleges like CUNY overloaded with remedial writing courses and professors complaining to the heavens that their students can’t properly write a basic research paper, talking about all those new things and collaboration sounds more defensive than anything.

We need to make sure we don’t lose it completely.  For my part, by the time my advanced English 10 students leave the classroom in June, they will have written at least four academic papers (in addition to at least two personal essays) because many of them have their eyes set on AP-level coursework and then college, so I would like for them to at least not be completely shocked when they’re assigned a 4-5 pager on The Aeneid three weeks into their very first semester.

For more information on how to write a research paper, check this out.

Resurrecting Poetry

Robert Bly at the Minnesota Poetry Out Loud finals. Photo by Nic McPhee. Used under creative commons license

Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine cover, titled “Rhyme and Reason” was an attempt to answer a question that I’m sure has been asked a multitude of times in the last few decades: Is poetry dead (Online at: “Is poetry dead?  Or in the age of the Internet, does it offer us what nothing else can?”, WaPo, 1/6/12)?

The answer, almost immediately, is no.  The story starts with a description of a reading and meet-and-greet given by W.S. Merwin at the Library of Congress and goes on to spend a decent amount of time showcasing an after-school creative writing workshop at Hart Middle School in Anacostia.

What I find amazing about the piece is not just that middle (and then high school students) in what’s one of the worst areas of Washington, D.C. are actively seeking out a writing workshop where they create poetry, but this paragraph:

The program’s approach to creative writing is surprisingly traditional. It teaches poetry the way poetry has been taught for nearly a century, the way it is taught in MFA workshops across the country: by studying a poem and then writing one. The program’s teachers are published writers who either have or are working on degrees in creative writing. The best of the student work is published in the school’s literary journal, hArtworks.

Now it’s not that the “surprisingly traditional” approach gets me fired up because I tend to be a skeptic when it comes to brand new bells and whistles in the classroom, but because I have always loved the idea of getting one’s hands dirty when it comes to writing.  Maybe it’s just because that’s how I learned how to write–scribbling in a notebook until I felt it was good enough to type up–or because having a poem in one hand and pen and paper in the other and digging deep for a good poem is one of the hardest things you can do.

Trust me, I majored in writing in college and when I had to declare my concentration I chose fiction partly because I had discovered, after two semesters of poetry, that I was pretty bad at writing poetry.

But that was college and this is middle and high school where these students are finding their voices and consequently discovering the voices of others.  So the idea that you might, at 16 years old, write crappy poetry isn’t that big of a deal.  Besides, getting students interested in the idea of poetry in the first place is a step in the right direction.

Because let’s face it: we ask if poetry is dead because it if it isn’t dead in English class, it’s dying a slow, painful death and has been for a very long time.

I remember when I first realized poetry was great.  It was elementary school, when I read A Light in the Attic and Where the Sidewalk Ends.  But while I did go on to read the poems of Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”, I can’t remember anything else beyond epic poetry such as Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales until I took creative writing my senior year of high school.  And even then, I wasn’t reading anything that was too monumentally great and didn’t really get into some of the heavy-duty poets (both Dead White Males and non-Dead White Males) until I hit college.

Poetry isn’t a high priority when it comes to high school English.  It’s rarely on standardized tests and while it is sprinkled throughout your average Prentice-Hall/McGraw-Hill/McDougall-Little/Hyphen-Hyphenated textbook I am going to be the first to admit that I’m not really sure how much reading, analyzing, or writing poetry is actually taught.

After all, it’s kind of tough.  When reading poetry, you have to find poems that grab students’ attention and that at first aren’t too challenging.  Then, you have to keep everyone going while you break it down.  It winds up being kind of a risk.  And writing?  Uh … I got some great stuff out of an advanced English class earlier this year but to be honest, the only advice I gave was that it didn’t have to rhyme and they didn’t have to worry if it was bad.

I do want to explore more poetry with my students and I can say that there are a few things I have done that have worked so far.  First, I do take the time to try to tie poetry into whatever novel or play we may be reading.  While teaching All Quiet on the Western Front for instance, I’ve trotted out everything from the obligatory “In Flanders Fields” to the poetry of Edgar Guest, Wilfred Owen (“The Last Laugh” is a personal favorite of mine), and even George Bilgere’s “At the Vietnam Memorial”.  I’ve done sonnets by Shakespeare, odes by Poe … whatever might work well.

Additionally, my classes have participated in Poetry Out Loud, the National Poetry Foundation’s annual recitation contest.  The purpose of that contest is the discovery and memorization of a poem.  They choose whatever they would like from a large database of poetry and then present it to the class, with the best presenter in the school going to regional, state, and perhaps national competition.  I love the competition just because their poetry database is a wonderful resource but I also like how it allows my students to dive into poetry and find out what they like.

But I’d like to do more, of course.  The dream, I guess, is to get them to seek it out and even write it on their own and bring it in to share or workshop.  I intend to do more creative-minded activities in the last couple of months of this year so I will see what I can do and what works.

What Prompted This?

“It has been said that laughter is the best medicine.  Think of a time when your ability to laugh helped you get through a difficult situation.  Write about what happened. Support your response with details and examples.”

No sooner do I finish reading when the questions start:

“What if we’ve never had something like that happen?”

“What does this mean?”

“How do I start this?”

“How many paragraphs does this have to be?”

“Can I go to the bathroom?”

If you haven’t guessed already, that is the beginning of the most dreaded high school English class assignment of all:  the essay.  And not just any essay, but the prompt-based essay, which is a form of torture so horrific for students that it flies in the face of the Geneva Conventions.  Teachers suffer too, as having to grade 100 essays in a timely manner can send them to the edge of the abyss of insanity, teetering on it as they wonder which “alot” is going to send them careening over into the darkness emerging not with constructive comments but with “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” scrawled multiple times on each of those 100 essays.

But the thing is … I love essays as a literary form.  There’s an art to them that I have appreciated for years ever since I read stuff by Dave Barry and E.B. White in high school and college.  And I love writing them as much as I love reading them.  So why is it that they are such hell?

I want to, and it would be easy to put the blame squarely on standardized testing; more specifically, the writing prompt.  After all, it’s been the standard model for essay writing in high school for decades and it doesn’t look that’s going to change anytime soon.

We all know the drill:  you set aside a couple of days of class time, present a prompt, and the students turn out a five-paragraph essay that consists of an introduction/main idea paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion.  Sometimes, there is something in that pile of essays you wind up grading that blows your mind; unfortunately, most of them are passable at best, tepid displays of the basics of structure and style.  And what drives you crazy–or at least what drives me crazy–is that the prompt and the test it is on has turned writing into an assembly line-like process instead of a craft.

Which is unfortunate because teenagers–even though they are not often awake at 8:00 in the morning–are often full of life and expressive.  They are at an age where they are forging their own identities and finding their own voices.  The essay should be an opportunity for them to tell you what they think and feel and for you to help them make that voice stronger, to help them gain more confidence about expressing themselves in the written word.  But they have been … well, ruined, in a way.  They’re not writers, they’re sled dogs.  Here’s the prompt!  Five sentences per paragraph!  Five paragraphs in the essay!  MUSH!

Obviously, we must be stopped.  Or we must stop ourselves.  Or something  just as dramatic–I’m having a hard time finding a transition here.  I would personally love to be able to completely transform writing in high school so that the standardized test is not considered the be-all and end-all as far as an assessment.  However, since that is not happening anytime soon, what can we do to “stop the bleeding” so to speak and make writing an essay in English class more appealing than losing a limb?

The first answer to this question is blatantly obvious. We can give students an open topic.  You know, do away with the idea of a prompt, and after having them read some very good essays by a variety of writers, tell them that they can write about whatever they want.  This will help them own their topic.  They will care what they write about.

Except that this can backfire and you have to be prepared for it.  You still might get the tepid, bland pieces you’ve already been getting (especially if said blandness is engrained), but what very well might happen is that they are completely lost from the get-go.  I experienced this earlier this year with one of my classes when I told them they could write about whatever they wanted.  A few students came to see me saying that they were glad that they didn’t have to answer another bad prompt but they weren’t exactly sure what to do because it was almost like I had given them too much freedom.  After conferencing with them, I had the beginning of the next day’s class be a quick brainstorming activity: think of as many things as you can think of to write about in an essay.  You have 30 seconds.  Go.  When under the gun, they made lists and we wrote them on the board.  I don’t know how many were actually used but at least it got the blood flowing and the essays have been okay.

Another approach, which I sometimes take and which kind of flies in the face of standardized testing is that I give my students a prompt or choice of prompts (I tend to prefer the latter even though Virginia’s writing SOL is a one-prompt and one-prompt-only test) but don’t get too strict about whether or not they answered the prompt.  If you’re writing a personal essay, you’re not writing a term paper, so you may have a good story to tell and a good point to make.  If it is not exactly on point with the prompt but is a well-thought-out or well-written piece I would like to evaluate it for what it is.  Why should I ding someone on a technicality that seems like a petty technicality?

Of course, the problem with that approach is that when it does come to standardized test day, I am not the person grading my students’ essays, so they will get dinged on a technicality.  So what I did last week in my classes was to give them four different prompts (that were taken directly from state tests) to brainstorm answers for in a short amount of time.  Then, we posted a table on the board and listed all of the different answers that they could possibly come up with.  I even said at the beginning of the exercise that I was trying to show them how to get past the “Well, I never …” and “I can’t think of …” questions that stymie them whenever they get a prompt.  And lo and behold, we found between five and ten different ways to answer each of the prompts.

We went on to write an essay a few days later and the results are mixed, but I didn’t expect a miracle to occur right off the bat.  Getting a process to be less mechanical and more organic takes time, but my hope is that as they head into next year they are a little less sickened by the thought of an essay.