Heroes? It’s not that simple.

A couple of weeks ago, amidst the coverage of the death and funeral of Whitney Houston, a friend of mine posted a picture to Facebook that I’m sure has been shared and re-shared a few times.  The picture, which I’ve included at right, is of a soldier handing a kid a flag that was obviously draped over a casket and the caption reads “Tell Me Again how Whitney Houston inspires you and is a hero.”

I know why it’s made the rounds–it was meant to help those clicking on it gain perspective because we put our entertainers (whether they be singers, actors, or athletes) on a pedestal more than our “everyday” heroes such as policemen, firefighters, or soldiers, but since I am soulless and dead inside I found myself rolling my eyes.

On Friday, my advanced English class began the same way it always does–with morning announcements.  We also had video announcements that day, and those began the same way they always do, which is with a song played over a welcome screen.  That day’s song was “Born in the U.S.A.” by Bruce Springsteen and while it was playing I made a pithy comment about the announcements being useful for once because it tied into our discussion for the day, a wrap-up of All Quiet on the Western Front.  After announcements were over and I could finally begin my lesson, I asked the class if they knew the song (most did) and if they knew how the song was ironic.  A few did but most didn’t so I mentioned the story found in the lyrics about a vet who comes home from Vietnam and has very little to come home to, something that was very true in the 1970s and 1980s and is also true about Erich Maria Remarque’s novel about World War I Germany (I also mentioned how there’s a different version on Springsteen’s boxed set Tracks and I’ll be playing that tomorrow once I put it on my iPod), which is what makes All Quiet as relevant today as it was when the Nazis burned it in the 1930s.

The soldier, as I pointed out when we transitioned from talking about “Born in the U.S.A.” to Paul Baumer’s thoughts at the end of the novel, is human and that is the point that Remarque takes nearly 300 pages to make, after starting us off with an epigraph that is more like an abstract than anything else, saying that the purpose of the novel is to: “… try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”  One of the class’s paper options will be to evaluate this statement and show how Remarque stuck to his stated purpose of showing war’s reality or veered off his path by writing something that was a protest.

I focused more on the role of the soldier and view of the soldier, which Remarque doesn’t seem to take negatively or positively.  He’s indeed cynical but more cynical to the nature of war itself and those who sent those boys off to war (represented in Kantorek, the main characters’ teacher, who spends his class time giving rousing speeches about serving the Fatherland) than he is toward the average soldier.  In fact, if he has any feelings toward that soldier, it’s empathy (Remarque did serve and was wounded in World War I) and he obviously wants us to get inside the rather tormented head of that soldier, whom the generals and government think of not as a person but as an insignificant, replaceable number in a trench. 

Targeted.

About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

This is the most talked about part of a lengthy New York Times Magazine article from this week called “How Companies Learn Your Secrets” (NYT, 2/19/12).  It was first posted to the Times‘ website on Thursday and I clicked on it while doing my routine perusal of the morning news at the beginning of the day and became so enthralled with what I could manage to read in the few minutes I had that I actually printed it out so I could read it between classes and on my planning period.

The article basically talks about the mathematics involved in getting people to buy particular products and establish brand loyalty; moreover, it’s the mathematics and science involved in studying habits and predicting those habits.  And it was so fascinating that I sent it to my wife, who is in marketing and currently wrapping up her MBA.  She said it was kind of like “Moneyball for retail,” which is a great assessment (even though I’ve never read Moneyball but I have seen the movie).  I mentioned that I was thinking about how this connects to my job.  There’s an obvious connection with my job as a yearbook adviser–I’m always trying to get more sales–but I also thought that you can look at what is in this piece and see a connection to my actual classroom.

About a week ago, I made this comment on this blog post:

Education and marketing are both about making someone think that what you are presenting them is what they want. Even the most student-centered or customer-centered of them are planned carefully to get a desired result.

Make what you will of my comment, but I have been wondering lately if sometimes our focus on students’ humanity is sometimes a hindrance.

And heads exploded.

Okay, not really.

Seriously, though.  Think back to the beginning of a school year, any school year, and how well you know your students when classes start; conversely, think about how well they know one another.  We try a lot to “get to know them” and “build a relationship” and everything that every article and PD workshop and everything else tells us we should do.  But what if we took an effort to get to know them before they even stepped foot in the room?  And what if it was possible to do that without placing a personal phone call or making a home visit to every last one of them (something that’s impractical when your total number of students taught is upwards of 100-120)?  What if we adapted the science of habit study to our classrooms the same way Target did to its customers?

Patriotism vs. Reality and Edgar Guest vs. Wilfred Owen

"At close grips with the Hun, we bomb the corkshaffer's, etc." Two United States soldiers run past the remains of two German soldiers toward a bunker. File from Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons

By the time I have a substitute this coming Tuesday, my advanced class will have hit the halfway point of our latest novel, Erich Maria Remarq’s All Quiet on the Western Front.  This is the fourth year I’ve taught the novel (though the first time I’ve taught it to an advanced-level class) and I’ve always done the same thing when we hit the halfway point, which is take a short break and cover some World War I-era poetry and some other material from the period–both literary and historical.

The reason for the break is practical because chapters seven and eight of the novel are massive and while I gave the class a reading schedule when I passed out copies of the book a few weeks ago, you can’t assume that everyone sits down and goes and read the novel that very night.  It’s also a break designed to be helpful to better understand the war itself, as while Remarque’s voice is virtually unmatched, I always like to show other perspectives.

Enter the poetry of World War I, which has gotten a bit of the short shrift in recent years, especially as there are many high school English classes that barely touch poetry at all, and those that do tend to go with the classic Brits or modern Americans.  Don’t get me wrong, I love modern American poetry–a couple of weeks ago, this same class made a valiant effort at breaking down Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”–but what I love about some of the poetry I use from the First World War is that quite a bit of it comes not from people who had MFAs from Ivy League schools are were part of the Iowa Mafia, but from actual soldiers (much like Remarque and his novel).

On Tuesday, I’ll have the class complete a worksheet that goes along with five poems.  The first is what I consider requisite when reading the poetry of the First World War:  Lt. Col. John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields.”  The other four I picked because they are by two poets who are in direct contrast with one another:  British soldier and author Wilfred Owen and American “People’s Poet” Edgar Guest.  The specific poems I’ve chosen are Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est” and “The Last Laugh,” and Guest’s “The Things That Make a Soldier Great” and “Thoughts of a Soldier.”

Now, I’m sure that the word in the last paragraph that made some people recoil in horror and maybe even go all Scanners was “worksheet.”  It is the bane of every “forward-thinking,” “technology-enabled,” “living in the 21st Century” teacher who would see a day off as an opportunity for learning and would set up a lesson wherein their classes watch their appendectomies live than run off 120 worksheets and leave them for a substitute.  I actually see the value of the worksheet here, however.

The class that will be reading these poems is extremely discussion-based.  We talk.  A lot.  And that’s awesome.  But sometimes I think that sitting quietly and writing down your thoughts on something is just as valuable as the back-and-forth with a classmate or a teacher.  The questions on the worksheet involve the expected exploration of literary devices  and how well they either get the poem’s message across or affect the audience, but toward the end I have a couple of questions about whether or not my students like the poems, as well as their opinions on war and patriotism.

Do I really need to change practices?

Photo by Taqi. Used under cc license

Another day, another look at my blogroll/twitter feed/myriad places I get my news and discussion about education … and another day, another spate of posts that continue to talk about how learning should be student-centered and not teacher-centered and how we need to change our practices in order to adapt.  It’s not the first time I’ve heard this and it certainly won’t be the last, and every time I hear it, no matter where I hear it, it feels like a pendulum has swung in a completely different direction than when I was younger and still existed in a teacher-centered classroom.  But the sentiment is that I came from a broken system and since said system is “not working,” doing the opposite will fix the problem.

I’m simplifying it, I’m sure, but I will say that such sentiments do make for good posts and tweets, especially if you’re looking to get a lot of “Right on!” and “You said it!” comments or dozens upon dozens of retweets.  I don’t see a whole heck of a lot beyond platitudes and rhetoric, to be completely honest with you.  That’s not to say that people aren’t taking a long hard look at the problems in the public education system and offering up practical solutions; it’s just that the people who seem to try their hardest to be profound in 140 characters are the ones who get the most attention.

I do believe that there needs to be a paradigm shift (or whatever you’d like to call it), but in these online forums, I often find myself making comments to the contrary.  Part of the reason is that I like being snarky, but part of the reason is that I can’t exactly join the march if it means putting down what I thought was a quality education.  Take this exchange via Twitter between myself and Ira Socol (and no, I’m not name dropping … these four tweets seriously prompted this post):

IS: why is it, whatever kids are reading, some teacher wants them to read something else?

Me: I’ll never forgive my teacher for forcing me to read To Kill a Mockingbird. Such a horrible person.

IS: its easy to make kids hate great literature. Just force it on them

Me: And yet so much great literature I thought I’d hate I wound up loving b/c of English class discussions.

I thought about writing a post about the whole “forcing them” argument but then I realized I wrote it last week, so I didn’t feel like repeating myself.  Iadmit, too, that I was being a bit snarky … because in all honesty, I really did feel that taking English in junior high, high school, and college enriched me as a reader and a student of literature.  Then I let it go because I did have to go into work the next day.

It was in the middle of work that I read post #8,675,309 about how we need to make school student-centric and in this one the writer compared replacing old tools with new tech to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  The message was: we don’t need to change the tools, we need to change our practices.  Again, like every other post or tweet like this, I pretty much agreed.

But then I thought:  is that really the approach we need to take?

While a number of people remember high school and college as just one eight-year blur (especially the college part), I do remember what it was like to have upwards of eight different people teaching me a subject on a regular basis, and I remember that in most cases, they had different styles and methods of doing things.  I had some teachers who were very hands-off and treated the class as self-guided, offering help when needed.  I had some teachers who sat back and talked for 45 minutes (to varying degrees of success).  I had some teachers who encouraged students to lead the discussions themselves.  And when it came to grading?  Oh man, well let’s just say that it might have taken a little while but I definitely realized that they had particular systems and quirks and playing along to them (and in some cases exploiting them) was key.

Yes, that sounds like just being a cog in the system and only going for good grades and all that, but when I think about how the world still works despite all of our best efforts, I can’t say that devotion to a new method or system that looks like it has all sorts of advantages doesn’t have its drawbacks.  You can’t assume that because you have flipped your classroom or made everything project-based or truly made things student-centered that everyone else has too. The person down the hall may still be lecturing.  The person next to him may still be using worksheets.  The person next to her may be overloading her students with projects as well.  You never know–even if you communicate on a fairly regular basis with those other teachers, you may never truly know.