“The Rain God” by Arturo Islas

Beautiful novel.  It accomplishes so much in just 180 pages. It is able to tell the story of three generations of a family, but the way the telling of these stories is structured makes for very compact (densely-felt) rendering of these stories.

The novel is broken into different sections, and each section reads like a long short story; each section focuses on a different character, beginning and ending with Mama Chona– the matriarch of the family.  [The sections and their main characters: Judgment Day, Mama Chona; Chile, Nina; Compadres and Comadres, Juanita, Miguel Chico, Lola; The Raid Dancer, Felix, Ants, JoEl; The Rain God, Mama Chona]

What I like about the storytelling is this is definitely a novel in that it differs from a short story collection like The Things They Carried or Krik? Krak!.  The characters remain the same in each story (unlike Danticat’s collection).  Unlike O’Brien, the protagonist shifts, and because the narrator is a close 3rd person persona, the narrator seems to shift, to.  Also unlike O’Brien, there is an obvious movement forward in time (Time’s Arrow and If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler conflict with my conflation of chronology and the novel, but it’s an oversight I’m allowing myself right now).

As a way of conceiving a novel.  The narrator begins with a focus on Mama Chona– who she is, how she came to start the family she started.  Then, to continue to tell the family history, the narrator shifts to talk about one character (or one group of characters) at a time.  For example, the death of Felix is but a subplot for the larger drama between Miguel Chico and his wife Juanita.  Parts of Felix’s story (including the introduction of his daughter) come into this section because Miguel enters Felix’s story.  The narrator takes this diversion, shows the reader the characters of Miguel Chico’s brother’s family, and then goes back to the drama of Lola, Mickie, and Juanita.  The next section is fully devoted to Felix, and explains the events surrounding his death.  In the process, the narrator also explains more about this family, and the family history.

I wonder if a way to approach this structure is to think about characters.  Then think about 4 or 5 pivotal events that would effect several of those characters.  Than, write those events from the point-of-view of the characters to whom the event causes the most amount of change or tension.

Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

I’ve yet to know a winner lose.
This memoir, by Oscar Zeta Acosta, is one of the best autobiographies/memoirs I have ever read.  For too many reasons. The chapters alternate between a present-tense narrative that careens into the future and past-tense nostalgic backstory that explains how the writer got “here.”

The first few sentences explain the push-pull I’m talking about:

I stand naked before the mirror.  Every morning of my life I have seen that brown belly from every angle.  It has not changed since I can remember.  I was always a fat kid.

Maybe I’m exaggerating, but to me this is a slick variation of the opening of The Gospel of John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ^1:2The same was in the beginning with God. ^1:3All things were made through him; and without him was not anything made that hath been made. ^1:4In him was life; and the life was the light of men. ^1:5And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness apprehended it not.

What I mean here is more about storytelling/mythos, especially autobiography.  When we seek to tell the story of our lives, we are talking about origins.  As Acosta opens his autobiography, he seems to think his present (his belly– an incredible symbol) has always been what it is.  In The Gospel of John, the past, present, and future are contained in any one moment, and in every moment.  The beginning has always been as it is now.  Or to understand the beginning, we merely have to look at the present.

So that’s structure.  The style: amazing.  Acosta’a voice is a voice that I want to call my best friend.  The voice is funny, self-effacing, confident, observant, capacious, desperate, destructive: Imminently human.  As I read, I was reminded of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.  In many ways, the character of Oscar and the narrator Yunior in Diaz’s novel seem to be an homage to Acosta.  I haven’t found any extra-textual support for this.  It’s just a hunch.  But Acosta and Diaz’s voices– they are definitely talking to each other, trying to understand race and history and personal memory and love and desire.  I could linger over Acosta’s sentences for a good long time.

Content. Toward the end of the memoir, the story seems to grasp for the “raison d’etre” a personal life history seems to need.  Acosta discusses his radicalization, his awareness of Brown Pride, and his sudden passion for the Chicano movement.  I don’t imagine that this is at all sudden.  But Acosta lingers over the details of his younger years, and this hard-living years, that the political years come on quite sudden.  This is me being the critic I don’t want to be.  The point is, the voice, the man, the story, the work is amazing– an amazing piece of American literature.

How I opened my classes in September

I believe in cultivating a life of the mind.

I believe giving our brain the food it wants, honing our thinking can give us the mental equivalent of a sword, making intellectual samurais of us all.

I believe our world could use more intellectual samurais, compassionate as they are smart.

Although I have always loved TV and movies (including Gilmore Girls, and I hate to say it, occasionally America’s Next Top Model) I believe our culture often appeals to our basest qualities.

I believe our desire can be reprogrammed for the sake of lining another person’s pockets.  I’m not original in this, but I believe corporations can co-opt our very human-ness, our wanting—to the point that we barely recognize ourselves.

I believe as your teacher, I am in service to something that counters that force.

Because

I believe we all deserve to be part of an institution whose vision, goal, purpose, and practices are not regulated by profit.  I believe one such institution is a school, and that is why I am here.

I believe we are all powerful.  Yet I believe we often check that power by boxing ourselves up in categories like “I’m not a math person,” or “I hate to read,” or “I’m not musical.”

I believe even as we find our one true passion, we eclipse other passions we may not have had the chance to discover.

I believe we are all poets.

And I believe understanding a poem teaches us how to live.

I believe boredom is a symptom of fear.  If we get bored, I think we are afraid—afraid of what it feels like not to be small.  Afraid of the bigness of the world that makes us small.  With our boredom, we deflect that bigness, lock it out with our own apathy.

Therefore, I treat “boring” as a matter of perspective.  Instead of saying something or someone is boring, I say one’s perspective suffers from boredom.  Boredom can be tolerated or eradicated…if you choose to see possibility in your own intelligence.

I believe one’s mind is like a big magnet.  We magnetize our brains with everything we read, and the more we learn, the stronger its pull becomes, until nothing is beyond the reach of its force.

In short: We are what we read.

I believe when we develop our minds (our ability to reason, imagine, create, interpret, connect) we increase our ability to find aspects of our world interesting.  I believe the more developed our minds are, the more interested and interesting we are able to be.

I believe if we reason better, imagine more, create deliberately, interpret well, speak thoughtfully and connect often we become our own entertainment, our own fulfillment.   And we create more paths by which we can travel.

This why it doesn’t matter which road you take, the one less-traveled or not; it is you, not the road, that is in control.  You determine the story of your life, because as you are living it, you are telling it.

I believe writing teaches us our mysteries.  It preserves our pasts, keeps us in service to our memory.

I believe each of us has a story, and we owe it to ourselves and others to bear witness to that story.  When we become conveyers of our own story, we can live more fully, and more truthfully.

I believe writing is a necessary skill, but even more than teaching you how to write, I’d like us to become authors—people who live inside language, who use language to create worlds, and become world enough for themselves.

I believe English class is not important just because a box on a college application says so.

I believe the ability to interpret challenging pieces of literature and art is a privilege everyone deserves.

We humans are meaning-makers, caught up in the details and ramifications of our own stories. In this class we will read and try to understand and when we do, I believe we will be honoring the very make-up of our being.

Understanding literature can help us see the symbols, foreshadowing, images that shape our stories and become our lives.

I believe life gets better when you are past the phase when the collection of digits that make up your standardized test scores becomes a major means by which you are taught to characterize your capacity.

I believe in school rules.  I believe if you chew gum in class someday someone other than yourself will have to scrape your gum off the bottom of a chair you did not buy or make.

I believe you deserve to cultivate an attention span not broken by the temptation of texting.

I believe food tastes better in the cafeteria.

I believe in taking hats off at the front door.

I believe music is amazing.  I believe music is the keeper of memories we’d otherwise lose if they were not connected to a particular song. And I believe songwriters, even the bad ones, are the bards of our time…

So I am thankful for the innovation that has made thousands of songs portable, but I believe in unplugging ourselves from this world so that we don’t feed the beast of our boredom.

I believe, in a perfect world, grades would not exist.  But I believe they satisfy the fears of people who are afraid that if left unchecked, nothing would happen in schools.

I believe if I don’t grade it, it doesn’t mean the assignment doesn’t matter.

I believe I have done my job when you no longer have to ask me “is this right?”
I believe I have done my job if I make myself irrelevant.

Here’s how I believe that happens:  Whatever the assignment, you find a way to discover what part of you that assignment evokes.  Bring yourself to the task and you will discover yourself in it.

I believe journeys are spiritual and intellectual, not just physical.  I believe honing our intellectual swords, meeting challenges, and bringing ourselves to a task can be revolutionary.

I believe a group of people can be a sacred space.  When secrets have been shared, lives discovered, voices heard, we have all been a part of something that transcends the everyday.

And because of those spaces, we will never be the same.

This, I believe.

I Believe

I believe in cultivating a life of the mind.

Although I have always loved TV and movies (including Gilmore Girls, and I hate to say it, occasionally America’s Next Top Model) I believe our culture often appeals to our basest qualities. I believe our desire can be reprogrammed for the sake of lining another person’s pockets. You hear me? I believe corporations can co-opt our very human-ness, our wanting—to the point that we barely recognize ourselves.

I believe as your teacher, I am in service to something that counters that force.

I believe honing our thinking can give us the mental equivalent of a sword, making intellectual samurais of us all. I believe our world could use more intellectual samurais, compassionate as they are smart.

I believe we all deserve to be part of an institution whose vision, goal, purpose, and practices are not regulated by profit. I believe one such institution is a school, and that is why I am here.

I believe in democracy, but I believe democracy in a classroom can approach chaos. I do however believe in dialogue and our ability to find a common ground.

I believe we are powerful. Yet I believe we often check that power by boxing ourselves up in categories like “I’m not a math person,” or “I hate to read,” or “I’m not musical.” I believe even as we find our one true passion, we eclipse other passions we may not have had the chance to discover.

Despite what you may think, I believe we are all poets.

Remember this: There is always so much to learn, so much worth knowing, so much worth doing as long as in the process we are not bringing harm to ourselves or another.

Therefore, if we get bored, I think we are afraid—afraid of what it feels like not to be small. Afraid of the bigness of the world that makes us small, we deflect that bigness, lock it out with our own apathy.

Therefore, I treat “boring” as a matter of perspective. Instead of saying something or someone is boring, I say one’s perspective suffers from boredom. Boredom can be tolerated or eradicated…if you choose to see possibility in your own intelligence.

I believe our mind is one big magnet. We magnetize our brains with everything we read, and the more we learn, the stronger its pull becomes, until nothing is beyond the reach of its force.

I believe when we develop our minds (our ability to reason, imagine, create, interpret, connect) we increase our ability to find aspects of our world interesting. I believe the more developed our minds are, the more interested and interesting we are able to be. I believe the capacity to be interested and to find material interesting is a mark of intelligence and imagination.

I believe if we reason better, imagine more, create deliberately, interpret well, speak thoughtfully and connect often we become our own entertainment, our own fulfillment. And we create more paths by which we can travel.

This why it doesn’t matter which road you take, the one less-traveled or not; it is you, not the road, that is in control. You determine the story of your life, because it is you will tell it.

I believe writing teaches us our mysteries. It preserves our pasts, keeps us in service to our memory. It makes us precious, which we all deserve. I believe each of us has a story, and we owe it to ourselves and others to bear witness to that story. When we become conveyers of our own story, we can live more fully, and more truthfully.

I also believe the ability to interpret challenging pieces of literature is a privilege everyone deserves.

And this privilege is not gifted by me, or the DOE or whatever college you will attend. I believe that ability is in service to our species, our DNA. Humans are meaning-makers, caught up in the details and ramifications of our own stories. In this class we will read and try to understand and when we do, I believe we will be honoring the very make-up of our being.

We need this skill—not just because there is a box on a college application that asks how many English credits you’ve earned.

Understanding literature can help us see the symbols, foreshadowing, images that shape our stories and become our lives, and I don’t know about you., but mine is a story I want to recognize and understand and WRITE WELL as it is happening, not once it is too late.

I believe life becomes a little better when you are past the phase when the collection of digits that make up your standardized test score becomes a major means by which you are taught to characterize your capacity.

I believe in a perfect world, grades would not exist. Yet I believe since you and I will never live in that world we need to do consider an important distinction: Do you want to HAVE the A, or do you want to BE the A student?

Think about that one….

I believe if I don’t grade it, it doesn’t mean the assignment doesn’t matter. I believe I have done my job when you no longer have to ask me “is this right?” I believe I have done my job if I make myself irrelevant.

Here’s how I believe that happens: Whatever the assignment, you find a way to discover what part of you that assignment evokes. Bring yourself to the task and you will discover yourself in it.

I believe journeys can be spiritual and intellectual, not just physical. I believe honing our intellectual swords, meeting challenges, and bringing ourselves to a task can be revolutionary.

I believe a group of people can be a sacred space. When secrets have been shared, lives discovered, voices heard, we have all been a part of something that transcends the everyday.

This, I believe.

Hit and Miss / vol. 2

May 5, 2008
What to teach and why.

“Literature teachers use literature to teach history.” I didn’t fully understand this quote by a college professor, who was a rebel among other English professors, until I started teaching high school. As I began to plow through the rather intimidating list of classic texts in my 10th grade (world literature) and 11th grade (American literature) classes, I inevitably had to face the question: “So what?” Indeed, why read early American authors, The Scarlet Letter, Oedipus, etc.? Without being aware of it, my answers privvied history. These texts were important because they raised key questions, yes, but they also spoke to the grand chronology of human accomplishments. In order to appreciate The Great Gatsby, my students would have had to have read The Scarlet Letter.

Indeed, my own shallow knowledge of history comes from survey courses I completed for my literature major. At the time, I loved learning literature in this way because it allowed me to see how so many disciplines are connected. I’ll never forget my first semester of college and the overlap that happened in my Western Civilization, Art History, and British Literature classes. Each class offered a new layer into the knowledge presented in another class. The connections were ubiquitous.

To go back to my professor friend’s quote, I have wondered to myself, if I am not teaching history, then when I teach literature, what am I teaching?

Of course, there is the transcendent power of literature, the beauty. I know when I read a well-written book carefully, I become a better reader of my own life’s minutia. For every book I read, I gain a sophisticated backdrop against which to compare and consider the plot, setting, characters, and conflict of my own life. Poetry condenses these connections even more and offers ways of seeing my life I could not otherwise imagine.

With all these serendipitous connections, why rely on historicism in an English class?

One word: Fear.

Those magnanimous, beautiful literary connections are so personal. Doing such a reading in a public classroom can feel…lewd…exposed. How can I sit and allow 34 students watch as I revel in the power of language? And even more frightening is the possibility that they won’t get it, that they will feel distanced from whatever text I am mooning about.

Side-stepping the pull of history, I have spent years using literature to court history’s second-cousin: Social Justice. Using films juxtaposed with short stories, I’ve tried to get students to use their reading of literature to analyze contemporary issues. [If we couldn’t use literature to make more sophisticated judgments of contemporary issues, what was the point?]

Hit and miss: the trials and tribulations of teaching without a net / vol. 1

I was mistaken. After poring over the course catalog of my college and then graduate school, I became convinced that the expertise of English literature would be mine after six years of higher education. My goal: To be a high school English teacher. I didn’t spend much time questioning what being a teacher would look like, or be like. I had my own visceral reactions to high school teachers to ensure me that my own performance would be something superior. Just as my gut knew how to react to another teacher’s lesson, as a teacher, my gut would guide me toward the most fantastic lessons, and therefore toward the elusive “Eureka!” moments I craved as a student.

In theory, student teaching would have been an opportunity to debunk this pie-in-the-sky image of my teaching career. However, my cooperating teacher begrudgingly accepted a student teacher, and I spent a semester emulating her teaching persona. This amounted to presenting a dramatic retelling of the Greek myths students read in their Edith Hamilton books each night. Assessments? Multiple-choice vocabulary quizzes. Instead of testing my theories with my own teaching practice, I padded them by emulating another practice that I once again judged with harsh cynicism.

With lots of creative vision and no practical experience, I was doomed. I know this now. But when I began my job search, I was undaunted, and I assumed I could teach in any school, in any classroom. I could just close the door and work the magic I knew was latent within me…OK, I was a little daunted, especially when private school head-hunting firms encouraged me to be open to teaching anywhere, given my lack of experience. And I was too afraid to navigate the bureaucratic, idiosyncratic hiring practices of one public school district after another. When I got an offer from the small progressive private school with the principal who assured me “I could teach anything I wanted” and “hone my craft and art as a teacher,” I was sold.

There’s a backdrop to this narrative, of course, one I neglected to notice at the time. I was so fixated on the promise of finally being a teacher, and having my very own classroom (etc. etc.), that the increasingly jagged line that was my personal life fell by the wayside. In the car, being driven by the head of the math department from the airport to my hotel, I paid attention to the suburban streets of this Midwestern city. “Can I live here?” I asked myself. Everything was familiar: Shell stations, Walmarts, Olive Gardens, Barnes and Noble. Good, so I can eat, shop, and get gas here. Can I live here? In between the new strip malls with their newly-landscaped beds of bright orange mulch and deep shiny green, sprawling two-story apartment complexes promised pools, laundry, tennis, and work out facilities. Here was a lifestyle in a can. Why couldn’t I live here? The place was already every place I had ever lived (save the depressed old industrial town where I had gone to graduate school—this had to be better than that, right?)

On Violence and Teaching and Rhetoric and Power

March 3, 2008

Right or wrong, as I am getting ready for my class this afternoon, I imagine I am preparing a sermon. Maybe it’s the Martin Luther King reading. Maybe it’s the subject: Violence. But I find myself less interested in the matters of critical reading and writing and grammar I usually try to instill, and more interested in saying something that might strike the soul. (Yes, I said it: strike the soul.)

Too often with teaching, this is a conflict with me. I cling to the convenient facts, or skills, that the office of teaching provides me with the duty to impart. Thanks to seven years of good planning, I can whip up a developmental lesson on almost anything in a jiffy. And yet so often, what I love about literature (its transcendaental power, its beauty, etc, etc) remains uncommunicated, untouched.

The poem Power by Audre Lorde comes to mind. There she asserts the difference between poetry and rhetoric, a difference which speaks to two different modes of power as well. I feel these modes as a teacher. I have power by virtue of my position, my experience, school rules and guidelines, duty, etc– all matters of rhetoric. Then, there is dimension of power that I am often too afraid to employ. That power feels like the power to inspire, and when I feel it, it seems real.

So, if I don’t go into class this afternoon and talk about the structure of John Berger’s essay “Hiroshima” or explainall the allusions in MLK’s “Pilgrimmage to Nonviolence” (skills and information which would indeed offer a kind of power), then what do I do? I feel like breaking down violence in all of its slippery disguises: Institutional, personal, verbal, physical, racial, geographical, political, strategical, medical, environmental, sexual. By doing that, can we look past the rhetoric that bolsters violent acts, rationalizing them in one instance while condemning them in another? Can we begin to look at violence less as a situational phenomenon and more as a function of human nature that can be purged and confronted with nonviolence? (In his essay in the March/April 2007 issue of Orion, author Mark Kurlansky talks about how language has no way to define ‘nonviolence’ except to define it by what it is not.) MLK describes nonviolence as a calculated, deliberate mode of consciousness. He talks about nonviolence as an elevated state, a power that to me sounds less like rhetoric and more like poetry.

About Epiphanies

January 29, 2008

In a relentlessly commercial culture, the communication of our private meanings has been vaguely corrupted around the edges of toxic idioms of merchandising. Wanting to convey an inward sensation of the sacred, we find ourselves skidding toward the usages of sales and marketing. With the idiom already compromised, the experience of revelation begins to grow ever more unsteady: Its effects can be like seasickness, but without the sea. In our age it tends to tremble and vibrate, like any visitation. It breaks boundaries and jeopardizes a feeling for scale.
Chalres Baxter
“Against Epiphanies”
Burning Down the House, Essays on Fiction

By the fourth night, students were tired of the daily debrief. Coming together after a long day of gutting houses, or tramping door-to-door in the stench and the hot sun, was taxing. It was easier to hang out on the cots and eat cookies or hang out by the stoop a few doors down and smoke. Sitting in a circle and listening to 50+ people give a one-minute synopsis of their day only required more concentration and 50+ more reminders of the devastation we were steeped in.

After the first work brigade returned in April, those of us who hadn’t gone with them were buoyed by their tales of community. These pioneers had seen the destruction first, and their recollection assured us we would never believe the sights, the stories. Their pictures, video footage confirmed what the newspapers conveyed: People had lost jobs, had lost their families. People knew people who had committed suicide because relief just hadn’t come—wouldn’t come. The obvious difference between the levee in the ninth ward and the system of levees in the French Quarter confirmed the most cynical suspicions. But, because this group had experienced these things together they had a powerful, unspeakable bond. Many of us wanted to know what it would be like to have that feeling.

While we were there to do work, of course, we were also there to get our epiphany, our own story that would show we had been as close to the incident as possible. Usually it came when gutting houses. Families acquainted with loss had come back to get what they wanted, but left behind a framed Biblical passage. Or, belongings were piled in one unsalvageable heap. Small water-stained images of a family at a birthday party belied better times.

From these scraps, we hoarded our own epiphanies. Once, I even heard a student admit to it. In our debrief, she said she had been waiting for her story about New Orleans, her encounter with a survivor, or the evidence in a gutted house of its former living, breathing occupants. But as she told us of her moment, she said it wasn’t having the effect she had hoped for. She was still depressed.

After 9-11, I had a desire to be close to the incident then as well. It’s not that I wanted to skim the periphery of the smoking, gaping hole at the city’s heart. I wanted to be bussed in after curfew. I wanted to speak to people who had just come from the wreckage. And I did. I volunteered with Salvation Army to serve meals to rescue workers at one of the respite centers. For several eight hour shifts, I spooned baked salmon with capers to one exhausted worker after another.

Is the commercialization of private meanings so wide-spread that I wanted my piece of a more authentic pie? Or, does that commercialization evoke what my husband refers to as liberal tourism, this trend to commodify a cause so that well-meaning do-gooders can feel connected to it, and good about themselves by extension?

When I went to New Orleans I believed my intentions were genuine. I had visited the city a dozen times since I was 14. I had powerful memories of the place, and it was my favorite American city. Now, however, I wonder. Perhaps since these events are only beginning to be commodified, they are the only remnants of the sacred we feel we can trust anymore.

Art and Artifice

26 November 2007

The movie Mona Lisa Smile came up in class on Wednesday, and it was just a coincidence I happened to catch the film on FX yesterday afternoon. I saw the movie with my mom when it came out in 2003; she, my father, and I had seen and enjoyed many a Julia Roberts’ movie together. This was the first one we saw together after his death.

I had high hopes for this post-Brokovich movie, so it was no surprise I was a little disappointed. So disappointed, the meat of the movie didn’t even register with me.

Until yesterday.

I won’t go into the plot of the movie. Google it and imdb, or any other site that features the film will give you the overview.

Yesterday I got the obvious message of the film (the difference between art and artifice) and its connection to the title. Julia Roberts’ character, an art history professor, provides the art which contrasts the artifice in her female students’ lives. Her female students, though Wellesley girls, are well on their way into roles of wives and mothers, roles glamorized and popularized in the advertisements of their time. When Roberts exposes them to work by Van Gogh and Pollack, she raises questions about innovation, vision, change. When she brings in a paint-by-numbers kit, she shows how contemporary culture reduces great art to commodity.

The varied female characters represent the types that parallel this question. One student marries in the middle of the school year, ridicules the other women who begin to live authentic lives, and files for divorce from her cheating husband by the end of the year. Her life shows the pitfalls of artifice. Another student, who elopes in the middle of the year and consequently foregoes law school, is truly living up to her dreams, not false expectations of her dreams, and therefore, as far as we know, lives happily ever after.

The layers of these women’s attempts to get out from under the lie of the feminie ideal of the 1950s reminds me of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Her smile is famously enigmatic. Perhaps its cryptic quality is a commentary on the artifice she too must have been immersed in. Is she happy? Is she sad? It doesn’t matter because ultimately her fate is in the eye of the beholder. She is too-well defined by the gaze of the viewer, not because she is suspended on Da Vinci’s canvas, but because she is a woman. And whoever she is, wherever she is, she is suspended in the fossilizing, idealizing amber of patriarchal traps. Only when she is used as commentary on the artifice of which she is a part, is she art. And even then, it is thanks to the generous strokes of a man’s brush.

When I first saw this movie, I am sure I wanted to be the Julia Roberts character who was visibly adored by some of her students, though they often treated her like a specimen to be pinned and studied, rather than a model to emulate. Of course, her character is redeemed in the end. She leaves the stuffy institution that would have her bound in its own artifice.

When I saw the movie this time, I thought of my third year of teaching. That year was my worst teaching year, perhaps the worst year in general. I was at a low point. My students, particularly my female students, were rabid. They had had the iconic male teacher the year before, and they carried their hero worship of him into 10th grade. (Not surprisingly, their hero worship was congruent to the degree of lofty expectations he dangled in front of them.) I could do nothing right, yet a handful of the girls found ways for me to spend time with them outside of class– taking them on camping trips, taking them on college tours, driving them to school events on weekends. One Friday night I had to take a few of the girls to see a friend in the hospital, only to watch a film the girls had made which included a pretty scathing insult of my teaching. The moment, I’m sad to say, still angers me…

There was no obvious victory (save the admission of one student a year later who said she and her peers recognized the double standard they had held me to), no tear-inducing sing along. No laughing about youthful indiscretions. Maybe I’m revising history a bit, but I think I can claim the happy denoument from Mona Lisa Smile for myself. Although my female critics never saw the err of their ways, I can see they villified me because they feared me. They were each caught up in the artifice of their wealth, their upper middle class families, their Midwestern suburban lives. They were struggling with how to be smart and desireable and special because their over-educated parents had (over time) suggested that’s what they had to be in order to be truly worthy. To be fair, I’m not saying their parents didn’t love them. I’m saying the pressure and artifice of the upper middle class suburban existence suggested these contingencies.

My messy, sometimes circuitous teachings threatened these things. Sometimes I think my very existence as a woman (and one with too many no-name colleges in her past) in their college prep classroom threatened this.

9th Grade English: Dare to Dream

13 November 2007

At some point this morning, after waking up to the fitful sounds of the shnooksie and calming him back into sleep, I started to design my dream version of a 9th grade English curriculum. I’ve been reading the teaching/writing philosophies of Marie Ponsot and Linda Christensen. Both women stress the importance of treating students’ writing as literature and emphasizing what works, as opposed to what doesn’t.

Anytime I get a stack of papers in my hand, by the time I bring myself to grade them, I am burden by my own perceived need to be critical. Part of this anxiety is the feeling that the unit I planned so diligently has failed. Another part is the fear that students won’t become better writers if I don’t bleed over their papers with my questions, suggestions, and examples. Yet, behind this need is the naughty, niggling question: What if I focus on only the good things? What if I do not point out what the student lacks as a writer? Then I can hear the audible gasp and imagine scores of highly connected parents, themselves products of a very swanky education, calling my principal to give the version of my classroom painted by their children: “She doesn’t grade them! Anything goes in her classroom! She has no expectations!” (And of course I hear behind that polemic: ‘How will my baby get into Pretigious Overpriced University without having to conform to clear standards? How will she compete with those students from Prestigious Overpriced Prep School?’)

This is not paranoia; I have encountered this kind of reaction before. I have taught at only two schools, but both prided themselves on being progressive, artsy, and capable of preparing students for prestigious schools. At both schools, there was the expectation from parents that teachers would turn kids on to learning, and yet conform to clear standards. Maybe these two things are not as mutually exclusive as I make them out to be…I digress…

Anyway, in my utopian ninth grade classroom, I would borrow, liberally from Ponsot and Christenson. Both writers/teachers/activists advocate using students work as literature. They both use read-arounds to get students to share their writing to prompt a discussion about ‘what works.’ Both focus on using the writing that emerges in the classroom as the model for what works.

Ponsot stresses that before students can revise (which students assume means merely ‘tweaking’), they must learn to rewrite. She shows this by getting students to read their work aloud and then having the rest of the class rewrite a sentence from that author’s three different times. The idea is to rely on an intuitive grammar to say the same idea three different ways. Then, as a class, students and teachers discuss which sentence is better and why. This sidesteps rote grammar lessons and staring at static examples of some supposed expert’s writing.

Other ideas:

Beginning with fables (abstract/concrete– the principle of composition)
Teaching grammar and literary devices through children’s books
No novels before the second semester

Grades:
If you complete…
90%-100% of the work = A
80%-89% of the work = B
70%-79% of the work = C
…and so on. The rationale is to put emphasis on a work ethic, a kind of habit. I’d argue if a student could learn that skill, then other skills would come more easily…