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?