Hey Texas, which one of you is Gregor Mendel?

 

The New York Times today reported a new battle in an old war has begun. In Texas, educators, scientists, and creationists are meeting again to wrangle over how evolution should be taught in schools. The article states that the primary focus of groups wanting to revise the curricular approach to evolution are the “weaknesses in Darwin’s theory.” These educators are concerned that teaching evolution as a theory without holes is irresponsible, and “akin to secular religion.” Biologists and evolutionary theorists, on the other hand, believe that exposing children to a theory that isn’t perfect will open them up to pro-creationism arguments. Their argument seems to say that if evolution isn’t taught as a scientific fact, the curriculum will “bring creationism in through the back door.”

As a teacher, I want to raise my hand and ask this question: “In the end, isn’t this not at all about creation versus evolution, but about how we teach our kids to think?”

I have so many reasons not to support a version of the world based on Biblical history. First, the Bible’s been rewritten too many times and across too many cultures for it to be any more accurate an historical record than, say, the many fine plays of Shakespeare (and who’s to say those weren’t divinely inspired… you try to write that much in 23 years). Second, most Biblical literalists would condemn me, a happy homosexual, to the nether regions of hell without a thought (this is, granted, a less than objective objection). Third, the Bible doesn’t make room for some of my favorite beasts, the dinosaurs. (I am aware that recent revisionist creationism theory includes the dinosaurs in the world after the Fall of Man. But that is a product of both the problem and the convenience of revisionism.) However, despite my reasons to hope the biologists win, I sort of have to side with the creationists here.

At least on the surface, what these folks are asking for is to offer our youngest children the opportunity to inspect different views. And, honestly, there’s simply nothing wrong with this, pedagogically speaking. To expose children to differing points of view, to offer them the evidence presented by opposing arguments, and then allow the children to decide what they think is true or true-ish, teaches them one of the most important skills they can learn in life: critical thinking. Throughout their adult lives, they will need to make decisions based on information they receive, and if we don’t teach them to accept that no information is ever perfect, no truth ever without objection to it, they will hardly be prepared to make those decisions.

Let’s take for instance the recent case of a young girl whose parents opted for prayer instead of medical assistance for her juvenile diabetes. The girl died, the parents are being tried by the state. Did they make their decision based on critical thinking? Or was their decision the product of a system of belief that does not allow itself opposition, that does not constantly question its ideas? Would the girl have died if the parents had been trained to think objectively about their circumstances? Maybe there are Christians out there who don’t want to think critically. I say shame on them.

Because there are Christians who want to think objectively (or at least their politics say so). They want to show that evolution isn’t perfect. And the biologists who resist – are they willing to promote critical thinking? It doesn’t appear so.

I’m not being naive. In fact, I’m being idealistic (wait, is that naivete?). To me, anyone who wants to further the cause of critical thinking and decision-making in young children, who wants to foster children’s natural ability to inspect, their preternatural curiosity, has my vote. Children should be allowed to take apart evolution and creationism the same way they need to be allowed to take apart the alarm clock or the toaster. And while we’re at it, let’s put racism, sexism, ageism and homophobia on the table and give them the tools to take those apart, too.

If the creationists want to teach God, then they’re going to need to do more than expose any holes in evolution. They’ll need to obliterate it, take it off the table, and never let kids near it. And maybe that’s their agenda. If the biologists want to teach Darwin, they’ll need to obliterate creation theory, too. And maybe that’s their agenda. To which I have to say to both groups, shame on you.

I say, bring theory back to the classroom. Bring experimentation back to the classroom. Let kids hear it all, inspect it all, and walk away believing what they will. 

The problem in Texas isn’t that some want to teach religion and some want to teach science. The problem is not trusting children with both. Religion has been developed over the years by the curious and the faithful. The same with science. Shut down the conversation between the two, and you silence everyone.

Right, Gregor Mendel?

Let Go of the Bar

I haven’t posted in a while. I haven’t wanted to talk about teaching. Something happens to me when I talk about teaching, and it’s not unlike a child at Disneyland. When I went to Disneyland for the first time, I was in the fifth grade, and me and my family had but one day to explore the magic kingdom. My enthusiasm for riding every ride (and some rides twice), for buying up all the mouse ears and tee shirts and candy, for taking pictures with all the crazy costumed college students far over-reached the possibility of a single day in the park. Time and time again, I felt disappointed by what we weren’t able to do, especially when around me there seemed to be so much possibility. Disneyland is immersive, unlike any other theme park I’ve been to. You can walk the alleyways and streets and paths of Disneyland without ever the imperative to think about the outside world. Disney World is even more immersive – almost delusional in its immersion – where the rules of normal time and space seem intentionally suspended. Bills? What bills? Deadlines? What deadlines? Work? Are you kidding? There’s Winnie-the-Pooh! Oh, and look, there’s a honey pot on his head.

To me, dear readers, teaching is like that. It’s magical. It’s a trip to the happiest place on earth where you can pay for things with your room key and they end up wrapped and waiting for you on your bed. The normal, banal regulations of a daily existence don’t exist in the classroom. It’s a place where you can play, where you are authorized to explore and invent, to reach out, mold, craft, create. It’s where there still is wonder. Why? Because human beings are the world’s best and most natural learning machines. Our minds want no more than to learn, to experience, to be exposed to new thoughts and ideas, and to use these ideas to invent for ourselves a perspective that makes sense. Learning is, must be, an imaginative act. Otherwise, it’s just work. And everyone knows – everyone knows – work sucks.

When I talk about teaching, I feel compelled to explain the wonder I feel when I’m in the classroom. I feel compelled to narrate it in terms of techniques and approaches that are not only digestible, but are reproducible. To be honest, though, I have no idea why teaching feels like such fun and like so much invention to me. I don’t know why transparency is easy. I don’t know why it just makes sense to let students take control of their own learning. This is just the natural way that I teach. And I love it.

When I started this blog, I thought I could somehow parse my teaching. I thought perhaps I could use examples from my experiences to narrate. But I find I struggle to do this. It’s like trying to explain to someone how you managed to raise your hands over your head in Space Mountain, or on the Matterhorn. You did it because you believed you were safe. You did it because you knew it would be more fun that way. I don’t know if I can parse my teaching. I don’t know if I can explain – even to myself – why I teach the way I do, and why I enjoy it as much as I can.

I had an e-mail exchange with a student of mine this week. She thanked me for my approach to writing – one of invention and exploration, one that does not attempt to put grammar before expression, structure before innovation – and she said that many, many of her teachers had made her feel she was in kindergarten. They’d condescended to her, expecting her to either already know how to do it right, or believing she would never actually get it right. I responded thus:

You are not in kindergarten here. On the other hand, you are authorized to play, invent, create, and explore. It’s the best of both worlds. All the respect of an adult, all the freedom of a three-year-old.

Why shouldn’t this be the case? Three-year-old children are the biggest geniuses of all, learning at rate that’s not just hungry, it’s obsessed. Little starving monsters, feeding on everything they can find. It’s amazing and it’s delightful, and for some reason our staid curricula don’t support it.

But what’s more, we have to ask whether our pedagogies support that ravenous learning. Do we open up the world for our students and invite them to make of it what they may? Or do we tell them what the world is made of, leveraging expectations for what “learning” means? To open up the world to our students, we have to trust them intimately, explicitly, and utterly.

Just as we have to trust the bizarre magic of Disneyland, couched as it is within the economic power of a dispassionate corporation. Disney may not care about us, just as the education system in America seems oblivious to learning; but the magic that happens along the avenues of the magic kingdom is genuine – just as is the magic that can occur in our classrooms if we’re ready to let it.

Message in a Bottle?

To be honest, I don’t know if this post should find a home here at Slam Teaching, or if it belongs more on my personal blog. I am posting it here, I think, because of late I’ve developed a sort of burgeoning community of teachers concerned with the state of teaching and learning – all of whom communicate with me primarily through this blog, through Twitter, and through e-mail. This “community” looks in reality like a cluster of web pages, lines of text, and the occasional synchronous conversation (also most usually text). I suppose one of the reasons I’m posting this, in fact, is because this “community” right now seems both incredibly involved and engaged, and utterly distant.

I have to admit some disappointment. I am disappointed by my latest post (“of Rules and Relevancy“), by my approach, and by the frankly self-important tone of the post. I admit that there are times when I get frustrated because someone does not see things the way I see things, and I use my command of the language to… well, to squash the opposition. But blogging that frustration seems to me unhelpful – to anyone, but especially to anyone who reads the blog. I don’t know that writing from the desire to make a point is really in the spirit of the Slam Teaching idea; it does not welcome other thought, nor does it engage openly with a new idea. It is, if you’ll pardon me, flatly masturbatory.

Which I suppose leads me to why I’m worriedly writing this post. I am concerned about my “place” in a community of teachers online. What do I mean by that? What do I mean… I mean that, at least as far as I am able to participate in that community, my participation seems a performance. When I write a blog, I am not necessarily responding to anyone in the community, I am not engaging in the dialectic of that community with any directness. I write, and then I expect or hope for an audience for my writing. I hope for feedback to come up against my ideas. I suppose I hope somewhere to find a place where my ideas and the ideas of others meet, entangle, and start talking.

I still don’t think I’m being clear.

When I blog, it’s a practice of writing, first and foremost. I want to practice my language; I want to build some kind of argumentative position. It’s an exercise, a lot of the time, of form. I feel like I’m creating drafts of pieces, rather than writing communiques to any who might read them. Essays toward something I may one day take and own for myself, not messages in bottles.

I see posts on Twitter going from one teacher to another teacher – excitement about collaboration, agreement on issues, etc. – and these seem as evidence for some kind of community forming. I myself enjoyed a long talk with Clay Burell via Skype a few nights back, and in that moment felt like maybe I could understand how this online community could take shape.

But at the same time, I cannot shake that when I sit down to write a blog post, I’ve no idea if it’s relevant. I’ve thought some about the title of my recent posting and sort of chuckled (chuckled sardonically) to myself because I wonder if I’m anyone to talk about relevancy at all. A recent Twitter-and-blog-comment discussion with Penelope of Where’s the Teacher led me to conclude that I may not be able to be of any help or relevance to middle and high school teachers, that my ideas are only applicable at the college level where teachers are freer to explore pedagogical approaches.

I suppose what I worry about is that I am here babbling away into the ether, assuming that what I have to say actually says something… when in fact it may seem the naive chatter of a self-important idealist. One who, frighteningly, chairs a department.

But even beyond that worry, there is my pondering whether the Web 2.0 auto-authorship revolution truly leads to the formation of community. Blogging, tweeting, and the like… If we write simply because we’re allowed to, and no one can stop us, does that necessarily mean that what we have to say is relevant to anyone besides ourselves? At the moment, I feel like the worst kind of teacher: lecturing blindly out at a mass of students who wait and wait for what I’m saying to snag on the meaningful.

of Rules and Relevancy

An instructor comes to me with a quibble about late policies in my department’s composition courses. I’m feeling ornery and rushed when he e-mails, I’m feeling curious and obstinate, so I ask him: “What is your pedagogical reason for penalizing late work?” I know when I ask this that it’s not really a question that needs asking. Is it? Penalizing late work is an assumed practice in teaching. Not unlike the way that “you’ll sit there until you finish your vegetables” is an assumed practice in parenting. Or teaching your dog to sit is always part of dog training. But this morning when he e-mails me and I’m feeling ornery and curious (and I really don’t want my decisions on the subject challenged), I ask the question.

I know, asking it, that I’m actually asking the question of any instructor. I want to say that, as educators, we have both the privilege and the responsibility to ask the questions. But I think it may be too early to say that. I ask the question, this particular question, pretty much whether I should or not.

The response comes back something along the lines of: “I enforce deadlines because there are deadlines in the real world, like taxes, etc.” It’s the response I expected, the response I think just about any instructor would give me in answer to the question. I’m far from satisfied with the answer, though. This is a composition classroom, I want to tell him, and not a course on teaching young people to turn in their tax forms on time. Not only is that decidedly not one of the course objectives, it’s not a responsibility – as an English teacher – I want to take on. I will feel plenty sorry for the student who doesn’t turn in his taxes on time, but I won’t go so far as to blame myself because I didn’t enforce a paper due date.

In part, I’m being deliberately obnoxious here, and I’m also aware that I’m raking this poor, unnamed faculty member across the coals for an answer, frankly, I couldn’t expect him not to give. When I’m ruthless, I’m quite aware of my own ruthlessness.

But the fact is, the problem of his response alarms me. I did not become a teacher to help students learn to meet deadlines set by the Federal government, their future employers, or even other teachers. I became a teacher because I am interested in genius. To me, the cultivation of genius is the only really interesting thing about hanging out with students (or, really, anyone). Grading, paying dues to rubrics, monitoring attendance and tardiness, plagiarism, and the problem of due dates (especially in a writing classroom) are boring. Any time a student or group of students gives me the leeway to throw these pedacratic trappings out the window, I’m thrilled.

That said, I want to get back to the question: “What is your pedagogical reason for penalizing late work?” To me, penalties are only useful because they coerce organization and order in the classroom. Should such coercion be part of the classroom dynamic? While organization and order are not unnecessary, if we use penalties to enforce them, aren’t we assuming that the students will not, of their own accord, organize and order themselves? Is it necessary to take that power from them in order to create a workable classroom? Could it possibly be better to establish an environment of trust? This particular faculty member also supplies that he believes the disorder that would result from allowing students to turn in work “whenever they want, without penalty” (a strategy I was not championing) will cause undue stress, added discussions with individual students, and that these will collaborate to take away from the time he could spend teaching.

Which then draws the definition of “teaching” into question – (when is discussion with an individual student not teaching?) – which is, ultimately, what I want this blog (the whole blog, not just this post) to do.

Let’s go back to beginner’s mind, and to the example of teaching a dog to sit. When I first got my dog, Max, I felt certain he needed obedience training, if only because he had four furry feet and wasn’t training necessary for any dog? But as soon as I started to train him to sit, to wait for his food, not to bark, etc., I found myself questioning: why are these behaviors necessary for Max? Or am I teaching him these behaviors in order to exert my dominance over him, in order to control him? If the latter is the case, isn’t it enough that he can’t eat without my permission, can’t exercise without my help? Isn’t he already dependent enough on me? So, I began to think about revising training to make it relevant to Max and his well-being. Teaching him to sit would be extremely helpful if, one day, he were walking with me off-leash and I needed him to wait up ahead or behind me. I mean, what if a car was coming and he didn’t know how to stop in his tracks and sit? Teaching him to wait for his food kept him from becoming anxious about eating; and training him to wait on a little padded bed in the corner of the room while I did yoga allowed him to be near me without interfering with my practice – saving me from frustration and him from confusion. In other words, training him should not be a matter of convenience for me, but a matter of improving his and my quality of life together.

I could go on, but my point is clear: teaching really is only about relevancy, and not relevancy to us teachers, but relevancy to our students. We are put in the most unique spot of coaching learners into a world of knowledge. What we need to remember is that their world of knowledge may not align perfectly with our own, their process may not fit our schedules, their ideas may not synch with our own. Ultimately, what they learn will be a combination of that material we provide for them, and the material provided by their lives outside our classrooms.

And then there is the fact that most students already deal with the world in some capacity. I don’t think that teachers can make any sort of argument that our students are any more isolated from the “real world” than we are… And don’t we learn a vast majority of our practical lessons (like turning something in on time) from worldly and not classroom experience?

What is the classroom meant to be? Should it be a microcosm of an unforgiving world? Should it be a retreat from that world? Should it be some kind of safe synergy of novelty, rigor, and relevant experience? And if it is this last, what “rules” must we establish in the classroom to keep our pedagogy intact?

Where What We Do…

Now and then, it’s important to retreat. I most often enact the time-honored tradition of moving away from the bustle in order to build a cabin, climb a mountain, consult the stars, or just get some perspective in times when I feel overwhelmed by the newness of an environment, some hysterical novelty, or too many ideas that come crashing together all at once. These last few days in the very early part of 2008 have seen a jarring smashing together of all three aforementioned conditions. My teaching and pedagogy, my relationship with the Web, and the natural conflict-slash-synergy between theory and practice, unexpectedly, have been rolling and roaring around like monster trucks at a rally. (It occurs to me that I might need to unpack the word “rally” in this context…)

When I started this blog, I told myself that I was going to resist the temptation to promote, advertise, or otherwise manhandle any particular Web application, interface, social site, in favor of talking about pedagogy. Classrooms are classrooms, I say. It is the premise of this blog, in fact, that slam teaching – if it is a practice at all – can be practiced no matter what the medium, locale, grade level, or subject matter. It is an approach which is not dependent upon certain or any technologies. Teaching is teaching is teaching, as Gertrude Stein might say. (It occurs to me that I might need to unpack that phrase if I compare it to Stein…) Teaching involves a guide, a pupil, and a text – which, in my pedagogy, can be anything from an actual text (written, visual, or otherwise) to a subject agreed upon by general consensus. That I can think, nowhere does teaching happen without those three ingredients.

At the same time, and perhaps exactly in the spirit of this blog and the notion of slam teaching, I feel I’m learning to teach for the first time. Part of this may come from the fact that, at least within the pages of this blog and within the quiet introspective walls of my own investigation of the practice, I am beholden to no one. I am free to invent teaching for myself, to consider at my intellectual, philosophical, and emotional leisure. Take tea with my pedagogy. “Have a biscuit, please, and tell me about experiential learning.” The truth be told, though, I am beginning to feel that I’m more sharing instant messages back and forth across quantum space with my pedagogy, and there are no biscuits to be found anywhere.

The Internet makes me uncomfortable. It always has. On the one hand, the use of e-mail and instant messaging technology has helped me maintain some of the most important friendships of my life so far. I have been able, almost exclusively because of e-mail, to speak in letters to my friends; I have had whole relationships over e-mail and the Internet; and now, I blog. On two blogs – this one, and on my personal blog. These days, my friends stay up with me more by reading what I write on these blogs, and not as much by e-mail. In a way, these blogs are a broadcast of my thoughts; they are not, generally, a broadcast of the events of my life, and they are very generally directed. I never know who will be reading. I’m exposed and autonomous, identifiable and anonymous. By my reckoning, this is an inevitable product of the relationship between humans and their machines, especially as we use those machines to represent us.

The Web is about representationality, not about reality. You do not know me, nor my teaching style, by reading this. You do not know me by reading my other blog. You do not know me by Googling me, nor by downloading my picture to your desktop. To you, I am a concatenation of images – even images of words, images of text – and not a human being at all. You cannot hear the click of my keyboard as I type this. Even if we Twitter back and forth with one another, all you can really know is the simultaneous presence of my representation and your own.

More than once in my classes online, I have mistaken a girl for a boy. A name on the screen does not always convey sex, never conveys gender. I find myself trying to read between the lines for clues which might winnow out the representational from the real. Am I a nice guy, you might ask, or did I torture puppies when I was younger? Can you get a “feel” for me here online the same way you could if we stood in a room together?

These are, I suspect, old arguments about virtuality. I have this notion that people once resisted talking on the phone, long ago when our communities could be measured in blocks and backyards, when they could just as easily walk over and talk to you in person. There’s always resistance to a new way of communicating with people. And, the truth is, I’m not sure I’m resistant, exactly… But there are moments, moments when the need to retreat becomes pressing, that I remember the instinct to be cautious.

A lot of people are talking about Web 2.0 as if it will be revolutionary; as if it will utterly and permanently change human culture. When people talk about this, they talk about it excitedly. I follow the tweeting of several teachers who find the possibilities of collaboration intoxicating and hopeful. I hear the news about how incredible the new technologies are. I myself have Skype-d with Clay Burell a day away in Korea. For free. The simultaneity of that kind of communication is, indeed, more than a little inspiring.

But what I keep coming back to – what I think we must come back to before we move ahead – is that what happens online is only always representational. I see Clay’s Twitter photo and I think he looks a little tired (sorry, Clay); I see his iChat pic – the one with the goatee – and I think he looks refreshed and energized. (I myself tend to upload only those photos that do not show me as I am, but as I am in relationship with a digital media). I cannot know how Clay really feels, how he really looks, even if we chat on video. In the end, I can only know this if I meet him – which, in all likelihood, I may never.

What are the implications of this representationality when we teach in its realm? What are the implications when we decide to collaborate there? My students will only know me, ever, as Sean-the-teacher; you will only know me as Sean-the-author-of-blogs. Is this enough to form community on?

Or should I put down the phone and come over and see you? Pick up the chalk, close the door, and teach?

Schools Needn’t Fail

When I originally started this blog, I started with a pretty self-important diatribe against the systemization of education, especially in the form of standardized testing, rubrics, and the like. I find myself wanting to return to that discussion again, especially in the wake of the ongoing debate fueled by a post on Clay Burell’s Beyond School blog. On the other hand, I feel the urge to exactly ignore that discussion, because ultimately it leads to an us-against-the-administration discussion, or a persistent feeling of hopelessness, futility, and desperation. Because I did not get into teaching to feel desperate, nor to feel oppressed by or to battle the administration (hey, I am the administration), I hesitate to the point of intentional inertia to enter that discussion.

In my misty-eyed freshman forays into postmodern theory, I wandered across this theory about how power works. I believe both Michel Foucault and Judith Butler are contributors, though I could not for the life of me trace the exact place or documents from which my understanding of the theory arises. (Does that make me a plagiarist, or a scholar?) The idea is this one: that any center of power (the government, the media, the Internet, the school, etc.) is always already oppressive insofar as you are always in relationship with it. Power occurs within a kind of matrix, with the object of power being near the center or at the center of the matrix. Everyone within that matrix (citizens : government, consumers : media, users : Internet, teachers/students : schools), the subject of power, is always either drawn toward that center or is pushing against it. Regardless of a subject’s posture, though, the center is reaffirmed: slide toward it and you acknowledge its power, rebel against it and you do the same thing. Protesting the government reaffirms the power of the federal administration; leaving in frustration a teaching post does nothing to dismantle the school.

I really hated this realization when I had it, or when it was handed me. I felt suddenly existential: why bother to do anything then? The only solution against what most certainly was an entropic system, then, was to ignore it altogether. Pretend the power doesn’t exist. Don’t try to change it, just don’t participate. If I want to teach (and I do), and I leave a school because the policies and the way those policies batter the living happiness out of students and teachers alike are too much for me to bear, I don’t get to teach and the school doesn’t change. The students continue to be beaten senseless, and the only teachers left in school are those who are willing to participate in the madness, or who simply (horrifyingly) agree with it.

So, how does one ignore the power of the school?

Jonathan Kozol: “The first thing I did was to rip down from the walls and blackboards all of these materials – “obedience” quotations and the rest – and to stash the social studies textbooks in a box and seal it shut and stuff it in the closet … I introduced a few familiar poems of Robert Frost, some early lyrical poems of William Butler Yeats, and some beautiful posters of the streets of Paris and its skyline…” (from Letters to a Young Teacher, p. 13).

One of my favorite high school teachers was a certain Mrs. Meyerle, who taught me the five-paragraph essay. She used a couple of class days to explain the reasoning behind the form, told us we’d rarely actually write in it, and then moved quickly on to helping us discover what it was we wanted to write about. She fulfilled the expectations of the curriculum in as little time as possible, trusting entirely in our ability to master it quickly, and then, almost without missing a beat, kept the actual learning happening.

Do these exemplify behaviors that ignore the power of the school? I’m not sure.

When I enter the composition classroom, one of the first messages I send to students – either specifically or more palatially – is that some of them are entering a classroom for the first time where English is not only actually interesting, but where they have power over their own language. I refuse to give tests (and now, as chair of my program, have removed them from all our online templates), and deny fervently and repeatedly that there is a correct way to write. Instead, I lead students through a process of ideation, creation, and revision. I let them explore their own authorities (both over their ideas and their words), and give them lots and lots of room to make mistakes.

When I first introduced this approach to composition people balked. “Um, you’re not going to teach them grammar? You’re not going to teach them spelling? You’re not going to enforce plagiarism rules?” To which I responded, both in word and deed, “I don’t need to. Grammar is useful only insofar as it is common sense; so, I’ll teach common sense. Spelling is overrated; many of the world’s geniuses can’t spell. And I’ll teach them authorship, not plagiarism.” I take this approach to composition because I’m interested in genius, not conformity. The world’s writers break rules, bend them, make new ones. Why shouldn’t my students be allowed the confidence to set the standard rather than wonder if the standard applies to them?

The result, in the first semester of a test-run of this approach, was explosively successful. Attrition rates in composition classes this past semester bottomed out; where in the past a class of 25 would narrow to about 12, now they winnowed down to only about 20. Faculty came to me laughing and complaining that the course required them to really teach rather than just grade. Students reported that they finally understood the ideas behind plagiarism, while at the same time feeling incredibly confident in their own voices and ideas. Some even chose to submit their semester’s work for publishing online; and more than one, allergic at the start of the semester to writing, started blogging.

Has this course changed the system? No. The community college system in Colorado still requires the same outcomes, still requires the same standards. Does this course resist the system? Maybe a little. Primarily, though, it ignores the system by examining on its own an approach to composition. Students meet the state requirements demanded of them, but without ever really knowing they’re doing so. Plus, they leave the class enjoying writing, trusting themselves, and feeling (maybe most importantly) that school hasn’t failed them.

Johnathan Kozol again: “Establishing a chemistry of trust between the children and ourselves is a great deal more important than to charge into the next three chapters of the social studies text … Entrap them first in fascination. Entrap them in a sense of merriment and hopeful expectations” (from Letters to a Young Teacher, p. 15).

There is no standardization around merriment and hopeful expectations. There is no rubric for fascination. But these are human things, removed from the power struggle of “schooliness” (thank you, Clay), and they are more important than measurable skills to a life spent learning.

(An interesting perspective on teachers’ role: Teacher as Daemon and Jester)

Authorship 2.0

Twitter, huh? If you aren’t already familiar with Twitter, you might want to check it out. According to the front page of the Web site, Twitter “is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” Essentially, it allows users to post as often as they like these tiny little blogs that keep any followers of the posts updated on the minutiae of someone’s day. Posts like “Just landed in L.A.” and “Slept in until 10″ are common, as are posts that describe other activities: “Reading an article in the New York Times about the writers’ strike” or “Wishing I hadn’t had so much to drink last night, even though it was fun.” Some people Twitter their thoughts about politics, religion, relationships, etc. There is no matter too insignificant or significant for a Twitter post. If you think it, do it, say it, hear it, you can Twitter it.

I had a long conversation yesterday with my partner about the moral nature of blogging. I had questions about a blogger’s accountability to his audience. In particular, I wondered if there was some necessity, simply because I’d set the expectation, that I follow my last post on Slam Teaching with a continuing discussion of plagiarism. I wondered if I am somehow accountable to you, my readership, and if I could let you down – not just in an emotional sense, but in a very real way concerning my responsibility to you as a fellow instructor or human being – by not posting the promised follow-up to my previous discussion. In a very real way, this communication via blog is limited: it is asynchronous, primarily one-way (like a lecture, if you will), and how the discussion progresses is entirely in my court. Because I must approve any replies to my posts, and because I can edit those replies at will, this blog is, despite appearances, actually generated by one author (me) who determines for himself the rules by which he wields his authority.

Rather than go into a long discussion about the question of accountability in blogging, I’ll segue: Americans are very attached to their own authorship. Is this a safe statement? When I author something, I feel I own it, that it must belong to me because I created it. This is, in fact, one of the sources of the plagiarism problem: the notion of intellectual property. Once I put my words on paper, they are mine; if you use them, you need to let others know that I came up with them first.

But equal to ownership of a text, experiences, thoughts, ideas all tend to be made more real when put into words, videotaped, or saved to a hard drive. Our lives are confirmed when they are textualized. I’d wager this is one reason why we see such a huge move toward blogging. We want to let people know our ideas, and we want our ideas cemented and actualized through the text they create (whether that text is written, digitized audio, or film). We author, and when we do, we create something we own, something we alone are responsible for, and something that confirms us as the authority of our own experiences.

As a teacher of writing, I am ecstatic at this return to written communication. It is as though it’s suddenly cool again to keep a journal, to know how to write well, and to write often.

According to Perseus’ The Blogging Iceberg, “ Teenagers have created the majority of blogs. Blogs are currently the province of the young, with 92.4% of blogs created by people under the age of 30. Half of bloggers are between the ages of 13 and 19. Following this age group, 39.6% of bloggers are between the ages of 20 and 29.” While the vast majority of blogs generated are abandoned almost immediately, the remaining blogs are nonetheless primarily those of a younger set, particularly teenagers. They use these blogs to provide updates on their lives (to author their experiences) for their friends and families.

In other words, middle school, high school, and college students all have a propensity for authorship. They want to say what they think. While that alone is not particularly revelatory, what might surprise some is that what these young people think is important, relevant, circumspect, and insightful. Take a look at Clay Burrell’s experimental Students 2.0 blog, an excellent example of how students can thrive and succeed when given the opportunity to author for themselves.

It started with e-mail, moved to text messaging, migrated to MySpace and YouTube, proliferated across hundreds of thousands of blogs, and now comes with the insistence of a radio signal via Twitter: young Americans, our students, are creating more text than ever before. (And watch out, because services like Ning are going to help them organize text-centered social networks according to their own design.) They are authorities over their own thoughts, and they’re broadcasting.

Though it may not seem so, this post is exactly a follow-up to my previous post on plagiarism. I think the primary problem with the way plagiarism is handled in the academy has to do with the fact that we are asking authors capable of flooding us with their own ideas and reflections to reauthor the ideas of others. Why not think about a pedagogy where we engage our students in their own authorship, their own expertise (with their lives, with the curriculum, with the class material) before we ask them to bow to (and cite) some other expert? The practice of learning from those who come before, of relying on the experts of a given field for information, is time-honored… but may be out-dated. Knowledge and information moves faster now than ever before; authorship is more profuse. Assuming that “the experts” are those who publish written texts and who have been practicing in their field for decades may now be an incorrect assumption. You have a classroom full of burgeoning experts.

In the latest issue of the Phi Delta Kappan, Dennis Sparks, emeritus executive director of the National Staff Development Council, writes about the power of authentic voices from leaders. He says, “By voice, I mean the clear and genuine expression of the intentions, ideas, beliefs, values, and emotions that inform their work… Effective leaders, I believe, bring their authentic voice into every conversation”. (The irony of a citation at this point in my post is not lost on me.)

I really think the solution to the problem of plagiarism can only be gotten at by looking at a single question: What is teaching meant to do? In my own practice, teaching serves the important purpose (not unlike parenting) of creating successful adults, where success is measured by the ability to express “intentions, beliefs, values, and emotions” within a chosen field, occupation, profession, vocation, etc. All the other tools of learning lead to this one result. For me, plagiarism is best handled not by creating assignments that make it difficult to plagiarize, and not by penalizing infractions of the academic policy, but by focusing on the importance of student authorship – an authorship our students are more and more ready to take on.

Brave Tailors All

At the end of the semester, I hear everything. During the semester, I’ve operated the department with relative naivete, believing all classes are sailing smoothly across the weeks. I have time to design classes, to indulge faculty in a little professional development and pedagogical discussion. At the end of the semester, though, the story changes. Students call me at home to tell me how poorly they believe their teachers performed; teachers warn me that I might be getting calls from students who claim mistreatment. I work with each one as I go, trying to give whoever has contacted me the benefit of the doubt, always keeping in mind that it isn’t teachers or students – one or the other – that I must support; instead, I must support successful learning. Teachers, as much as students, can sometimes get in the way of good learning, so when I get the call, I look for where the learning has broken down.

Always at the end of the term, I can count on a new chapter in the chronicles of plagiarism. Instructors in particular want to let me know when a student has plagiarized. Even instructors who are generous enough to offer a second chance make me aware that plagiarism has nonetheless taken place; and those instructors who are less forgiving, or who have seen too many repeat instances in a given term, they let me know so that I can be prepared to stand firm against any student outcry. I think, too, instructors just want me to know they’re being watchful.

At times, these accounts of plagiarism feel more like a head count – you know, the kind where you count the heads you’re lopping off. Or like the brave little tailor who killed seven with one blow. To hear teachers talk about it, the biggest concern with plagiarism is how to catch it more often; how not to be duped by lazy (though subversively competent) students. At conferences and faculty meetings, addressing the issue of plagiarism in the academy most often centers around what new software or virtual-ware is available to catch the evildoers in the act. In these discussions, prevention is conflated with enforcement. This is like preventing traffic violations with cameras and hidden police cars.

I can’t think of any issue academicians face larger than plagiarism. It comes up in almost every meeting; it is always topical. And no other issue seems to create as much of a divide between teacher and student… by which I mean that teachers feel pretty darn justified condemning plagiarists as Untouchables. It’s one area where we are really allowed to be unapologetically rankled; it’s one offense where punishment of the severest kind – the removal of the right to education – is warranted.

So, as educators, what do we really want? I daresay not one of us is waiting grinning in the underbrush for a plagiarist to act (please confirm, though; as I’ve implied, naivete is a weakness of mine). Instead, don’t we want students to succeed?

We’ve all been whacked on the hand at some point in our educations. Whether we accidentally or intentionally plagiarized, or whether we posited some thesis that flew in the face of our professor’s teaching, or by some other academic crime, we have felt the sting of a lesson learned the hard way. Perhaps we feel that is part of any educational experience – we must all traverse the rock and the hard place in order to qualify as learned adults.

I tend to wonder, though, if as teachers we’re not punishing ourselves more than we need to by implementing policies of punishment. Okay, so imagine you walk into your class and you genuinely believe each and every one of your students won’t plagiarize, won’t cross that horrible line. What does it feel like to teach then? The vast majority of the instructors who work in my department don’t know. Each paper handed in to them is subject first and foremost to an internet search; some English teachers – and teachers from other departments – consider it routine to push papers through TurnItIn.com before even starting to read them. Find out if the student did the work before reading for the student’s thoughts… Is this a pedagogical best practice?

I’m being transparent, I’m sure. You know already by my tone that I don’t believe in this sort of hunt. Like catching speeding drivers, to me this is nothing like prevention. This is administration, enforcement. But, I’ll go one step further: neither is the teaching of proper citation a prophylactic for plagiarism. That tried and true method, that always-the-solution solution has, over the years, done nothing to stanch the wound to the academy, our sensibilities, or authorship.

And now I’ve gone on long enough for the time being. I fear the tailors are becoming restless. I invite reactions from everyone (swat if you must), and will follow this post with another to discuss what a few instructors and myself are starting to do about plagiarism that does not necessitate citation, enforcement, or punishment…

How Teachers Talk

This evening I have been part of a round robin of e-mails. Technically, I’ve only been copied on the e-mails since the matter of the discussion involved one of my instructors; nonetheless, I’ve followed with rapt attention. Not just as a supervisor, but also as someone who rarely sees instructors from different departments, all of whom have different philosophies, interact and communicate to try to solve a problem.

The problem is this: a student who “arrived” in class late in the semester (recall that I teach entirely online, and so arrival is a relative term), and who has had various complications during the last weeks – I gather she was sick, and that a nephew was killed in a car accident – is now asking for an Incomplete so she might have a good chance at passing her classes. Three separate classes, three different instructors. Each of the classes, of course, places unique demands on its students; likewise, each of the instructors has his or her own requirements for satisfactory performance.

Apparently, the student has not done well in either her social sciences or her physical sciences class; however, she’s done satisfactorily in her English class. During the flurry of e-mails this evening, some of which half-accused the student of indolence and dishonesty (the student was “confused” – not my quotation marks – and the nephew’s death was apparently convenient to missing a make-up test), the English instructor has contributed very little, saying that the student is welcome to her Incomplete if she really can see no other alternative. The Social Science and Physical Science instructors have been less accommodating, primarily – and not unreasonably – based on the student’s performance in their respective classes.

As much as I’d like to ask the questions that burn in my brain about whether or not the sciences courses are designed truly with the student in mind, or whether there might be reason for confusion and poor performance, I’m much more interested in this other question that’s picking at me: When we have to, how do teachers talk to each other?

In my experience, teachers like to be more autonomous even than artists. In fact, I can only think of one other group who enjoys more self-authority than teachers, and that’s parents. Generally, we don’t like to be told what to do with our “kids,” and I’ve heard seniority, philosophy, even wages thrown around the room in order to defend an instructor’s authority when that authority is threatened. I have been at peaceful conference breakfasts and confronted by an instructor who believes she is the only one who knows how to teach that cornerstone of composition, the research paper. What’s more, she insists, “if you ask me to teach it any other way, I just don’t think I’ll be able to.”

Not that I can’t sympathize. I absolutely can. Please, please never tell me I have to teach Intro to Creative Writing based on someone else’s syllabus! Please never ask me to use quizzes in my composition classes! And rubrics (with a nod to Mr. Burrell)… You may as well ask me to clean toilets for a living (which, by the way, I’ve done). The point here is not whether or not I can sympathize with instructors who don’t want to teach in any way besides their own. The point here is that I don’t know what happens when these folks who are so used to being autonomous suddenly have to cohere.

It’s been almost painful this evening, watching the two sciences instructors verbally wrestle the student to the ground while the English teacher vanished into the e-mail background (perhaps feeling a bit verbally wrestled himself). When the dean finally stepped in, hours after the volley began, it was to recommend a solution; but until she made this recommendation, the fusillade showed no signs of letting up.

The example here is a hard one, because there has been no real resolution; there’s been only a confused flow, staunched by a verdict from on high. Not unlike a playground tussle nipped in the bud by the playground monitor (that pesky adult you have to obey no matter who you think is right or wrong).

It’s only gratitude I have for Clay Burrell (and now Mr. Watson, too) for letting so many people know I was out here in the ether writing my little fingers off; but to be frank, I find myself wondering now that I’m out in the public sphere talking about teaching: how do teachers talk? When I wasn’t a supervisor of them (of us?), I tended not to talk to many of my colleagues – that is, until I found those colleagues whose philosophies agreed with mine. As a supervisor, I find that expressing my philosophies in an attempt to get dialogue going only results in murmurs of agreement or online silence.

I’m like any teacher I know. I want to talk about teaching – how would I not want to? – and I also don’t want my mind changed. Beginner’s mind? Sure, no problem, in the isolation of my own classroom. In a crowd full of otherwise-opinioned teachers? Hm.

Any thoughts from the ether?

Some Resources:

Corporate thoughts?

Cooperation

How Can Kids Do It?

Teachers Teaching Teachers

The Kindness Factor

Am I being too obviously a softy to wonder why we cannot approach our students with some measure of kindness? I would wager that most teachers, when cornered about it, believe teaching to be at least partially an act of nurture. Teachers nurture the growth of the mind, they nurture people into new understanding, out of the shells of not-knowing, and more. Recently, I hired a new instructor who, a tad nervous about taking on 40 students this semester (previously, she’d only taught to a classroom of five), asked me for advice. I looked at her and said: “You’ll be fine. Just be a parent. To forty children. Love them, and let them know you want them to succeed.”

I am too much a softy, I suppose. I mean, listen to me. Love your students? What, buy them toys, dry their tears, bandage their boo-boos? I can hear teachers groaning restlessly, bringing out their vegetables and grumbling for me to get off the stage. Yet, I sort of want to insist: why wouldn’t we start out each new semester thinking first of our students’ delightful potentials, their own (albeit now and then latent) excitement for new knowledge? And how much they need us to coach them toward those things?

Starting in the Spring, I’m offering a total of three redesigned courses. In the world of online education, this means that three whole classes needed to be designed from top to bottom: all the lectures and assignments must be written, the syllabus must be arranged, a schedule put in place, the grade book set up. In addition, there’s a significant amount of navigational content that must be written and encoded. This navigational content takes the place of that moment when a classroom full of students rustle papers and get ready to leave and you shout out above the growing clamor: “Don’t forget, on Tuesday you need to bring your notebooks! And there’s a quiz on Friday! And remember that we have a guest speaker, so show up early on Monday!” The navigational content is pretty much the heart of the course insofar as it tells students what needs to be done, and how to do it.

Each time I have designed or supervised the design of a course, I follow one guiding principle: keep it simple. It should be easy for a student to get from one assignment to the next, or to go from a lecture to the reading material (most of my courses use online – or open – content instead of text books). Learning online can be challenging enough without a student getting muddled in the variety of accidents that can take place on the Internet. Many of the instructors who teach these courses come to enjoy the simplicity of a well-constructed online course, primarily because it saves them from answering dozens of e-mails asking how to submit an assignment, or where the reading is, or how to find the discussion board. But it really isn’t for the instructors that I follow that guiding principle; it’s out of kindness and consideration for the students.

In a course I recently supervised, the instructor presented a grading schema for my approval. He’d assigned various point values to discussions (from five to 50 points), various point values to assignments (anywhere from 30 to 150, with a 75 thrown in for good measure); and the total points possible in the course came to 920. Essentially, the grading schema was indecipherable to his students, and would leave them pretty much at his mercy all semester long. I was reminded of a mechanic telling me my whosits was broken and there would need to be a new valve and pad put in place or else I’d crash my car before I got home. I stared at the grading schema with the same bewilderment and consternation as I might the mechanic. I pictured shrugging and saying, “I guess he must be right,” powerless, surrendering.

I was talking to Jesse Stommel, a superb instructor at the University of Colorado at Boulder (whose Queer Literature course made national headlines), about this idea of powerlessness in the classroom. He said what he enjoyed most was sitting on the desk in front of his classroom, swinging his feet back and forth, and asking his students how their days were going, what they thought of the reading, and whether or not they’d seen any good films lately. He said his students should never feel powerless in his classroom because he is only there for them. Students in fact have all the power in the classroom because only they will chose to learn or not to learn; Jesse teaches because he enjoys it, not because he wants to coerce learning. Learning’s never coercive, it’s necessarily cooperative (anyone who’s ever had a teenage learner understands that).

I sometimes hear from instructors in my department with complaints about their students, about how they refuse to learn, how they are argumentative, or sullen, or inattentive, or confused. I know how they feel, of course. Work is work is work, and always there’s going to be something that’s less than happy about it. But then I remember my daughter, whom I home school, and the moments when she’s sullen or upset. I think about how I deal with her when that happens (lovingly, patiently), and wonder if maybe we shouldn’t, indeed, treat each of our students as we might our offspring.

When we open a class to students, we invite them to take chances, to make mistakes (even to fail). Hopefully, we give them an environment where they can stumble safely. Like learning to walk on soft rubber floors. Couldn’t our classrooms be like soft rubber floors? A place where we can tumble and roll and jump and fall together, never worrying about breaking an ankle or striking the wrong pose?

Other Resources:

Jesse Stommel

Create a Caring Classroom