Image by comedy_nose on Flickr. Obtained via cc license.

It was never my intention to make two of the girls in the class cry.  All I’d asked was that they write and share a poem.  But there we were, sitting in a circle on the auditorium stage and listening to them choke up as they struggled to get through stories of pain, anger, and fear.

We’d spent the last couple of weeks working on reciting others’ poetry, performing for the national Poetry Out Loud competition, and I had thought that it would be a good idea for students to share their own voices, as they had just shared someone else’s.  There, of course, was the potential for a couple of problems:  tell a teenager you want them to write poetry and they flinch; and I’m the world’s worst poet.

Now, I solved the first problem right away.  Despite having been exposed to free verse much earlier than high school, many students still have this tendency to think that poetry has to rhyme.  I made a point to read, analyze, and discuss a ton of free verse poetry during the previous three weeks so that I could remove the “Does it have to rhyme?” question from the room and hopefully tamper down some of their trepidation toward writing poetry*.  Then, I dug up a bad poem I wrote in high school and read it, promising that on the day when we would all read our poetry to one another, I’d read the worst poem I had ever written.  After all, I told them, you may think your poem isn’t great, but it’s nothing compared to what I will unleash upon you.

The second problem–my being pretty terrible at writing poetry–was a little tougher to solve because it drove to the heart of my actually being qualified to teach.  If I am horrible at writing poetry, then how could I evaluate it?  Am I completely wrong for trying to cover it or even assessing it?  After all, poetry, like any other form of writing, is subjective, and therefore if I have no true expertise on the matter my opinion has no leg to stand on.  Or is this one of those perfect cases of those who can’t, teach?

As terrible as that expression is, it might actually be right.  If I suck at writing poetry, that doesn’t mean I still can’t appreciate it and that also means I can assess students’ poems with no pretense.  I am sure that if I were teaching creative writing, I could develop a rubric for free verse, but in the case of this assignment on this day, I found my inability to write poetry that was too bad to be called crap made me comfortable in giving my students a simple completion grade and sitting back and listening.

Oh yeah, and contributing said crappy poetry.  I set it up earlier and therefore I must deliver, so just to show you I wasn’t kidding, here is “Porcelain,” a poem I wrote in my senior year of high school after being dumped by a girl I had dated for all of two weeks:

Porcelain

I induced it
caused you to vomit
green and orange chunks
and all the yellow-brown mucus
that was an old time
love
relationship
memory
whatever

You completed it
wiped your mouth
toilet paper tainted with residue
once having a white color and freshness
that was once you
me
us
together
whatever

You flushed
drained it all
and swept away everything
that was an old time
love
relationship
memory
you
me
us
together
whatever.

When I wrote this in my creative writing class, it was an expression of all of my pain, of all of the raw emotion that came from being dumped by someone.  Had I read it to my peers at the time, I would have done it in a way that conveyed all of that emotion, wrought with the open wounds of someone who is just trying to survive.  And if I recall correctly, the girl whom the poem is about didn’t like how nasty this poem was (which was my point) and the girl I dated after her hated it so much that she actually burned it and gave me the ashes in a Ziploc bag (yeah, don’t ask).

But something funny happened when I read it nearly twenty years later in my advanced English class.  Now, I don’t know if it was my delivery or the fact that it’s been so long since this poem meant anything to me other than it being crappy, but it went from a raw wound to a work of self-satire.  About one stanza in, the class started laughing and I started chuckling with them, hoping I wouldn’t “break” as I read the poem.  Because I’m not afraid to laugh at myself.

No matter what the reason, it proved to be a great way to connect.  Every writer is a work in progress and I think by showing that I have no qualms about the fact that I am terrible, I wound up easing the tension among all of them and allowed those sophomores to feel comfortable writing their poems, no matter how personal they may have gotten.

I still feel bad about making those two girls cry, though.

*I’ve got nothing against meter or rhyme.  It’s just that both seem to be stumbling blocks to students and free verse helps them let their guard down.

American colleges have planned your rut for you. You go to school, you spend four years trying to avoid being sexually assaulted by a Phi Delt (that goes for women and pledges alike), you graduate $250,000 in the red, and then you DESPERATELY try to find a job—one that offers you upward mobility so that you might quickly work your way up to a salary that helps you pay off all the loan installments you’ll be accumulating throughout your adult life: college, a house, a car, college for your kid, etc. It’s just one giant hole you’ll never dig out of. And that debt you amassed has not only deprived you of thousands upon thousands of dollars, but it’s taken something even more precious: your sense of FREEDOM, dammit.

Every year, I look forward to Drew Magary’s open letter to the recent class of college graduates and today’s is extra special because it’s been exactly fourteen years since my graduation from Loyola College in Maryland.  So, without further ado, go here (WARNING: EXPLICIT LANGUAGE):

“You’re Fucked But You’re Free: A Message to the Class of 2013″

They’ll be writing the essays in longhand, and what’s funny about this to me (and probably only to me because I’m one of the only people who finds this type of stuff “funny”) is that it’s not due to some pedagogical stance or effort to prove that old-school educational philosophy is alive and well.  It’s because this is testing week and I’d have a better chance of finding Jimmy Hoffa in the auditorium storage closet than an available computer.  Ergo, pen … meet paper.

Although I have to say, having been a “writer” since I discovered my voice (and for a brief time, my muse) in a high school creative writing class (I say “writer” because I don’t have enough published credits to my name), I have written many a first draft in a spiral-bound notebook.  In fact, I still have the green spiral-bound notebook with “Creative Writing Journal, Tom Panarese Period 6″ written on the cover in Sharpie, which I used in the fall semester of 1994 in that creative writing class as well as every notebook I’ve filled since.

Doesn’t make me a writer, makes me a hoarder.

Anyway, while there have been times that I have found writing in longhand inefficient, there are many times when I savor the chance to sit down with a pen, my latest notebook (and maybe my iPod) and a cup of coffee and spend some time working on … whatever I’m working on, especially since they are very rare moments in my very busy life.  That anyone can have the chance to slow things down and get into his own head as a writer is a great chance.  Granted, what’s inside my own head scares me sometimes, but at least I get that chance.

At the same time, I’m grateful for technology.  I was able to write this post via WordPress in one fell swoop, without having to retype it, and published it right away.  When I was in high school in the early 1990s, I would have never had the opportunity to do that.  But it also took me about 45 minutes to write something that probably should have taken maybe half an hour.  Because I had seven tabs open on Chrome and kept switching over to Twitter and Facebook whenever a (1) appeared next to the site’s name in the tab.  Then there was an article I needed to read about Jon Cryer making Superman IV, I discovered a podcast about Saved By the Bell, and had to subscribe to the brand new Two True Freaks podcast feed.

In other words, as much as I love what technology has given me in terms of both efficiency in writing as well as inspiration, I will say it slows down my process because I get incredibly distracted.

So here’s to longhand, may it never die.  Although I will say that there is a downside to the old method–this post was originally supposed to be about something entirely different, but I left my notebook with the draft in my classroom.

No matter what the teacher did or what her behavior was before, during, and after the confrontation, two things are certain:  she’s been placed on administrative leave and Jeff Bliss has become a folk hero.  A smattering of praise via a quick check of the internet …

• “aaronburr,” commenter on the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet:  ”Way to go, Jeff! You’re a true American hero.”
• HumanWazHere, WaPo commenter:  ”GO JEFF GO!!! We need more people like this in the USA!! I Support YOU!”
• Zak Malamed, Student Voice:  ”Hey, buddy! You are quite an inspiration & great representative of the work [Student Voice] is doing.”
• Lisa Nielsen:  ”I commend Jeff Bliss for standing up for himself and all the other students who deserve a beyond-the-packet education … Our children are not our future. They are the voices we need TODAY. Our job is to listen and support them. When they say they can’t learn the way we are teaching (or not teaching in this case) we must hear them and do what we can to ensure they receive the education they deserve. When we do that we will have citizens who are not just good at sitting down and filling in packets but standing up and filling our world with those who are empowered with embrace their right to change the world.”

Now, there are many more tweets, posts, and comments that are similar.  Many are quite different, ranging from John Spencer’s post about how we don’t have the whole story and therefore shouldn’t rush to judgment to Teaching Underground’s post about how all this really does is perpetuate the “bad teacher” narrative to more caustic comments about how Bliss was being disrespectful (although I’d say petulant is more accurate a term).  

This has resulted in the typical back-and-forth that is the high art of the Internet.  Nielsen’s post is most telling.  She begins by asking her audience whether Bliss was disrespectful, includes a screen capture of a tweet of how pro-student she is because in the middle of a teacher appreciation chat she said that her best teachers were students (she also follows this up with someone complimenting her) and then launches into an examination of why Bliss was not disrespectful. She attacks “They,” a popular villain (best when Lee/Kirby were writing him) and bullet points how “They” say x but truly, Bliss was right because y.

It’s typical for Nielsen and bloggers like her, who have more in common with pundits than anyone else:  have a viewpoint/agenda, see something that fits; wait just long enough for it to trend;  swoop in with tweets/a post/an article; get supportive comments, reposts, mentions, retweets; and put another feather in the cap.  And quite frankly, it’s why I think blogging about education probably isn’t worth it anymore.

I’ve been an edublogger/teacher-blogger/whatever the current title is for seven out of the eight years I have been a teacher.  I started with a site called “Stop Trying to Inspire Me” wherein I posted semi-anonymously (using my first name for the most part) and employed a voice that was snarky and often pissy (the title itself came from a complaint I often had after being forced to sit through highly overpaid PD speaker after highly overpaid PD speaker) and when I decided I wanted to both refocus my writing and have something I could attach my full name to, I started this blog.  I also started tweeting and tweetchatting, thinking that as much as I like to “talk shop” and learn from my colleagues, I could learn a lot from fellow educators who weren’t simply down the hall.

Connecting was a great idea–I had some great conversations, read some great stuff, got some great ideas, and even got some traffic for my blog (not my intention, but not a bad thing either).  But then I started to sour on the whole thing, rolling my eyes at people who seemed overly chipper, talked about their PLNs as if they were BFFs, posted nothing but platitudes, and seemed to be there to show off more than anything.  I posted about it at the end of October and then got increasingly quiet, dropping out of tweetchats entirely and not posting anything significant for weeks on end, especially about teaching English, which is what the purpose of this blog was supposed to be.

I don’t know if it’s writer’s block, burnout, or a symptom of some sort of depression, but every post I have drafted and many I have published since I got back from winter break has been negative.  Not toward students, per se, but toward other educators and other bloggers, like those I follow on Twitter and Nielsen, who seem to specialize in talking points and rhetoric to a degree that I can make a drinking game out of the number of times I see them use buzzwords or “hot” terms.  And that rhetoric so dominates the conversation that I feel like it’s not worth it to try and have a rational, honest conversation, and that even if I wound up doing so, my voice wouldn’t matter.

Be the teacher on a rant and you’re told one of two things:  stop complaining because you get the summers off and are overpaid, or your rant is disrespectful and you should know your place because you are obviously not putting students first.  Never mind that such rants often come from a feeling of frustration FOR your students and not FROM them.  People like Nielsen, Seth Godin, et al would rather trump up the “Student Voice” for their own purposes and marginalize whatever contrarian teacher voice may exist in the conversation.  And this is so prevalent that it has led me to ramble on incoherently on a Sunday night about how I just don’t think I can do this anymore.

I’m probably completely off the mark here.  I’m probably rambling on about things about which I have no right to because I haven’t been teaching long enough/don’t have enough followers/don’t have enough edublog awards/am too negative/seem to be too disrespectful to whomever.  I’m probably just seeing end-of-the-school-year exhaustion manifest itself by projecting my frustration at something that does not directly affect me (after all, testing starts this week and then I have to see if the yearbook will sell well enough for us to not be in the red in June).  But it seems that the conversation about education as it is via social media has been happening this way for years and as noble as Jeff Bliss’s champions might think his “I Am Spartacus” moment might be, it won’t really change anything except get a black mark on his history teacher’s record.

Reblogged from Pop Culture Affidavit:

About a week or two ago, I came across a few articles filled with emotional hand-wringing on the part of the generation often referred to as Millenials.  I read about how there is a generational conflict between this younger generation, which seems to be dismayed that the world doesn't think they are entitled to anything; and older generations, who wish these kids would get over themselves.  

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Case in point: I was an honors student in high school, the type of student who often had good rapport with teachers and could readily engage adults in honest debate and conversation.  Though there were times my focus was on, say, the Stanley Cup Playoffs and not the latest Senate hearings, I did pay attention to the news, cared about what was going on in the world, and was active in my community.  So did many of my friends.

But there were also many students in my high school who would have readily tried out for Jersey Shore if it had been on the air in the early 1990s, people who were more concerned with what they were wearing, what they were driving, and where Friday night’s kegger was going to be than they were about the state of the public educational system.

It took me quite a long time to get over the disdain I had for many of these people.  I admit I was arrogant, even snobbish because I considered myself above them and their less-than-honorable pursuits in life.  With maturity comes perspective and while my current crop of students–some of whom are suited to a casting call for Buck Wild–can drive me crazy sometimes, I do my best to make sure they all learn something worthwhile in my class.  You know, even if they’ve used their student voice to change the school’s policy concerning wearing hats in the building instead of protesting against standardized testing.  Some, in fact, have celebrated passing standardized tests because they were up against the eight ball the entire time they were preparing.

Furthermore, they sometimes exhibit behavior that would have adults sneer and others say, “Well, don’t worry.  All students/teenagers aren’t like that.”

I know you’re going to tell me you represent and speak for all students, but how do you speak for those who “all teenagers aren’t like” or who seemingly don’t really care all that much about their academic experience and don’t seem to be guided by ideals and a desire to change the educational system/the world for the better?

In the past couple of days, I have seen and read about five or ten articles and posts that all deal with the same topic: whether or not it’s worth it to be a teacher.

I’m sure you’ve seen them too.  There’s someone saying his profession no longer exists.  There’s a response to that, saying they won’t quit despite “inane” reform.  There’s the post saying that young people shouldn’t become teachers.  And then there are the responses to that.  So, in keeping with the trend I’d like to add my voice to all of this and say that if you’re young and you’re thinking about becoming a teacher, good for you.

But I honestly don’t care.

Okay, that sounds really rude and disrespectful and is definitely not encouraging, and if you are truly considering becoming an educator, then I would love to have the opportunity to chat, especially about the realities of working in a public high school every single day.  Granted, I don’t know if my opinions or advice are even worth it–I entered the profession through a career-switcher program, I have less than a decade of experience, I don’t attend conferences, I haven’t published any books, I rarely get quoted or retweeted, I never get featured on “best of” lists, and I didn’t have the foresight to refer to myself using a superlative–but if you’re interested, feel free to get in touch.

But if you’re not?  Well, again, it’s no skin off my nose.

You see, posts like the ones that have been going around are becoming an annual occurrence this time of year, probably because many states are in the midst of gearing up for standardized testing.  Call it what you will–an indictment of the high-stakes testing culture that was established with No Child Left Behind, a reason for homeschoolers and unschoolers to feel more self-righteous than they already are, teachers feeling burned out, unnecessary whining for people who ruin taxpayers’ lives–they’re really nothing more than a Jerry Maguire moment …

Now unfortunately what you don’t see in this clip (because it was the only one I could find of this scene) is what happens the moment after the elevator door closes, and that is everyone who was stunned and maybe even affected by the grand display that Mr. Maguire put on goes right back to work.  And if you’ve seen the rest of the movie you know that he finds personal satisfaction and Renee Zellweger completes him and there’s a remix of Springsteen’s “Secret Garden” using lines from the film that makes people cry while driving their minivans back in 1997, but the people in the office keep on going. Just like hundreds, thousands, dare I say millions of people will read these articles and posts and then go back to whatever it is they were doing.

You certainly don’t want me to tell you that you’re insignificant in the grand scheme of things because nobody wants to feel insignificant; furthermore, if you want to be an educator and feel insignificant, read the comments threads of a couple of those articles to hear what your fellow taxpayers (oh, I’m sorry, your employers … gravitas and all that) think of your part-time job.  But still, beneath all of that does lie the truth and there is something to the fact that if you’re not in that position, someone else is.

It’s the existential dilemma that we all face–we’re told that we inspire children and we really are guiding them on the path to enriched lives; then we’re told that we don’t have a monopoly on knowledge and we are Nazis following our orders forcing them to take a testing death march.  We’re told “Thank you for all you do” and then told to “do more with less,” “live within our means,” and that we’re overpaid.  We’re told that we strengthen the country by educating its children and then are told we are brainwashing them with liberal lies.  We’re told “I couldn’t do what you do every day” and then are told “Must be nice to get the summers off.”

I could go on.

If you want me to sum it up in a sentence, perhaps something that can be tweeted, then I’ll say this:  being a teacher means that you constantly feel like you’re doing something wrong.

But so as not to end on a note so cynical, I’ll say that you will have moments that are positive and remind you why you decided you wanted to be a teacher and are the reason that you stay in the profession long after others would have given up the ghost.  They’ll be different than the ones I have and that’s what’s great because they’re your moments and your experiences.

And if you decide at one point that the balance is tipped in the other direction, that the negatives are badly outweighing the positives, you should be able to feel you can leave, especially since you know that someone else will come along and everything will keep right on humming and that the kids will, in fact, be okay.  I don’t judge anyone who leaves or stays from year to year.

So I wish you the best and well, now that I’m leaving everyone else can get back to work.

Reblogged from Pop Culture Affidavit:

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Just like last week's post, this is another that was an old post that I've updated and revised for this blog.

I think that if I ever actually met him, I would hate Lloyd Dobler. This is a lot coming from me. Say Anything … is one of my favorite movies of all time, so much so that I have the framed movie poster on the wall of my office at home.

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