"Cold Calling"

We student-teachers were required to implement one of three prescribed strategies in our classroom teaching, and to report on its outcome and benefits. Of the three, two would most naturally span multiple days of class, which for many of us would require additional coordination since several teachers are allotted to each classroom and in most classrooms, thus, each teacher is (mostly) responsible for planning one or two days per week. Consequently, as a perusal of the blogs demonstrates, almost everyone chose the third, which is dubbed, perhaps strangely, “cold calling”: each student’s name is written on a card, and each student is called upon (for whatever they are called upon to do) when his card has come to the top of the stack.

I was familiar with this technique from my freshman mathematics tutorial at St. John’s, when Mr. Black used it to determine which student would demonstrate which proposition at the board. The stack came to be called the Stack of Death, to which Mr. Black responded by rather uncreatively calling it the Stack of Life. I disliked the system because it made a grander production of what should have been (and what, in my other three years of mathematics tutorials, was) a simple and relatively low-pressure affair. What was ideally to be a somewhat open introduction and invitation to a conversation became a solo performance and an artificially heightened responsibility. Mr. Black’s ambiguous grin as he read each card – was he happy to be reminded specifically of each student, of whom he was fond?, or was the reminder an occasion for sadistic glee? – unnecessarily increased the trauma of being expected to demonstrate successful memorization before a group. It was a symptom of this method that, between (infrequent) shufflings of the deck, computations of probability were discussed before each class, taking into account the number of remaining unknown cards, as well as the complexity, length, and conversation-worthiness of assigned propositions (which factors were taken to determine the odds of getting through x propositions in a given class, and thus through x cards from the top of the deck). On those mornings when Mr. Black began by shuffling the deck, one could see whose odds had been high or low by the looks of relief or joy around the room as the odds were again leveled.

That said, there is a great difference between drawing cards to determine who must lead the class through a three to forty minute mathematical demonstration and drawing cards to determine who gets to read aloud the next paragraph from “A Rose for Emily” (or whatever). Nevertheless, since virtually everybody seemed to be trying the Cold Call I thought it would be no harm and would increase the data in the pool if I tried a modified form of it: I drew cards before class, recording the results to a list; I called on students pseudo-randomly as they were ordered on the list, and they never knew about the cards.

So. The results, as one might expect, were not so very different from those of the unmodified form, or of any other more-or-less even-handed method of getting through all of the students. The benefit of their knowing about and seeing the cards is the perception that the teacher is removed from the decision, that they are chosen not by a man with prejudices but by the whimsy of the Fates – though of course this could be an illusion if the teacher were to stack the deck or to read names from cards where they were not in fact written. Leaving the cards (or dice, or whatever) at home after using them to make a list does eliminate the benefit of perceived randomness, and hyper-sensitive students or those unfavored by chance might still feel picked-on; but the grandiosity of drawing the card, the drama of it, and thus some of the pressure, might thus be relieved.

Other benefits, like a better guarantee of getting to every student, of an actual elimination of teacher bias, and of gaining such benefits without, say, going around the room in a circle so that students know when their turn will come and can disengage until then, are maintained.

June 29, 2005 · Teachering · (No comments)

Southern Competence, or, Stereotype Down

I went to a very small college where most administrators could know most students by name, or at least recognize their faces, and maybe it was for this reason that – though the school is small enough that it can afford a greater degree of disorganization than larger schools – my interactions with the administration were seldom negative. And of course I’ve had to interact with many other administrators of various denominations throughout my life, with widely different levels of satisfaction and frustration. But today, here at Ole Miss, I had perhaps the most satisfying encounter with an administration official that I have ever had.

During my undergraduate career I took a few more loans than the ordinary amount, and several times during those years my debt was sold from one lender to another, so I now unfortunately have to manage student debt through four separate organizations. Now that I am enrolled at the University of Mississippi I need to defer my loan payments (no interest accrues during such a deferment, thank you Uncle Sam) but have been busy and rather uninterested in sorting through the information, walking to the registrar’s office to learn the procedure here, and filling out forms to have proof of enrollment sent to four addresses. Today I located the building and paid a visit, with the idea of learning the procedure and perhaps picking up some forms, and filling out one of them with the address to my old college (the only pertinent address I knew without searching). This was my aim, I had no expectation of exceeding it, and I knew enough of administration to have been neither surprised nor overly disappointed if I should have been somehow thwarted from accomplishing even that.

I was welcomed in by the registrar – an exceedingly friendly woman – who asked to see my student ID and to be told my Social Security number. She entered the latter into her unholy people-tracking database, read to me (correctly) the names of my lenders, and sent me on my way. I was in her office for maybe one full minute, and I touched no form. Proof of registration will be sent everywhere it needs to go, she tells me.

Any horror at my presence in her powerful machine was mitigated completely by the surprise of great convenience and administrative competence. Thank you, registrar, and thank you, Big Brother!

June 24, 2005 · Culture, The South · (No comments)

Panola Map, Choctaw Ridge, and an Alleged Inscription

I was perhaps unreasonably pleased to find this map of Panola County printed in the Wirt books mentioned in my last post, and though I will not deny a map fetish, neither am I wholly without reason. First, a map of a place like Panola County is a rare bird. Sure enough the county appears on maps of the state of Mississippi (more or less as an intersection of I-55 and Highway 6, with a dot for Batesville), but the towns of Sardis, Como, Crenshaw, Courtland, and Pope, though they may perhaps appear as dots, surely are not indicated by perimeters comprising finite areas. Additionally, I am pleased by any map that clearly demarcates the Delta, whose boundaries are so unambiguous when they are crossed but which are nevertheless so ambiguous on maps. I have seen only one other map that so clearly indicates the region (stolen from npr.org).

And of course the quaint hand-drawn character of the map is reminescent of the maps of Middle Earth included in all of Tolkien’s books, which maps were endlessly imitated by me and all other bookish but warm-blooded nine-year-old boys with good hardy souls in them; and the likeness surely activates some psychological trigger.

What’s more, the map heightened my appreciation of a song. I did not know, before seeing this map, that Choctaw Ridge names the boundary separating the Delta from the Hills. The coldness of the (mother’s?) lyric Nothin’ ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge, in Bobbie Gentry’s lovely song, “Ode to Billie Joe,” now benefits from a suggestion of the historical antagonism between the Delta whites and the “Rednecks” of the Hills. Since it is in Panola County that the Tallahatchie River crosses Choctaw Ridge, I suppose the Tallahatchie Bridge central to the song is Panolian, and that the song’s speaker and her family are having breakfast at home somewhere in the western third of the county.

On an entirely different note, a few pages before the map Wirt’s Politics of Southern Equality begins with an inscription allegedly left by a Union soldier on the wall of a Mississippi home, where we are told it remains legible:

To the owner of this house — Your case is a hard one and I pity you.

A Google search does not return any instances of the phrase. I wonder if the inscription is real, and if so where in Mississippi it is.

June 23, 2005 · Geography, History, Music, Photos, The South · (No comments)

Compare & Contrast

 

In August I will begin teaching at North Panola High School, where about 100% of the students are black and many are poor. Perhaps ten miles south of North Panola High is South Panola High, which is racially integrated (and a few times larger). The two buildings give rather different impressions, as you can see in the photographs. More are available here.

When I scanned the map of Mississippi counties with critical teacher shortages I noticed no county but Panola that was shaded on only one half. Though I could guess, I do not know why Panola County is divided into two school districts. I hope the two books Frederick Wirt wrote on the subject of race in Panola County (Politics of Southern Equality and We Ain’t What We Was) will be informative.

June 23, 2005 · Geography, History, Photos, Teachering, The South · (No comments)

Where You Stay, Who’s Your Kin, and Some Related Thoughts

As surely as I am not the first neither will I be the last to observe that many Mississippians, or at least the young ones in the poorer parts of this state, speak not of living in a place but of staying there. I do not know whether the difference is merely dialectical – and no more insightful than whether one says y’all or you guys – or if it reflects a real and substantial difference in one’s understanding of home. I have been asked a few times already where I stay, and where I will stay in the fall, and from what I’ve heard this seems to be no trifling concern of students about their teachers.

Many of them seem also to be markedly curious about one’s kin. I’ve been asked about my kin, and many of the students seem eager to probe when any hint of the subject surfaces in a classroom discussion. And I hear now from several (white) second-year teachers in (segregated schools in) the Delta that the arrival on campus of any white person elicits questions about their relation, “Is he you huuzbehn’?” and, “Is they you kin?” being both frequently cited examples.

One experienced teacher who some years ago was an MTC participant in the Delta mentioned to me the strangeness of realizing that these poor black kids pitied him, a privileged white outsider, for his disconnectedness in the community, for his not having any kin. And they were always trying to connect him, to integrate him into the social world of the Delta, to find his kin. Not to be so integrated, I suppose, is to be in a sort of exile, an unrooted, detached, floating resident; and it is a pitiable state.

Changing the subject, in order to return to it:

Hardly any of my eleventh-grade summer school students read at an eleventh-grade level. Most of them cannot read fluently. We have nevertheless been tied to a standard eleventh-grade literature book, and most of them struggle with it. A student who does not give the least damn about Ben Franklin or Edgar Allen Poe (and why would he?), and for whom reading long passages even of his own dialect would be an exertion, has a hell of a time engaging one of these texts, questioning it, being reflective about it, or, often, even remembering the beginning when he’s reached the end. So I thought to respond to these difficulties by giving them short Biblical passages.

Firstly, the tradition of ancient Hebrew prose, and in particular the reticence of its style, is such that essentially whole and independent narratives that can fit on a single page are common, and that translations exist which are at once lovely and simple. And though their language is plain, the literature is often subtle, complex, and profound. And, best of all!, though I find that most of my students are not Biblically literate, they all seem to come with a deep reverence for the Bible. So I can give them a subtle and complex text, in relatively simple language and that fits on a single page (or at most one page front and back), that they can hold in front of them all at once and read and reread, and they are inclined to care about it.

Tomorrow we will try reading the Binding of Isaac. In another place I might worry about raising eyebrows sensitive to the church-state division, but here my only concern is the potential heresy in the unavoidable questioning of God’s justice. I will try to focus more on the experience of Abraham, though. And if there’s time we might also read, by way of irreligious comparison, the passage from book six of the Iliad in which Andromache pleads with Hektor not to go die at war, to think of the woman and infant that he will leave widow and orphan, and Hektor’s refusal (again a father making a profound decision that concerns the future of his son).

Now, in this reflection on the Israelites I came to think again about the culture of the South, or of Mississippi, or of the Delta. And though it might be that I extrapolated a false rule from the vivid instance of William Faulkner, it occurred to me that the Biblical reverence in the South might seem to include a particular and special fondness for the Hebrew Bible (okay, I’ll say it: the Old Testament). I was just reading Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” and was struck by his several references and allusions to Hebrew books with nary a Greek that I noticed (I think I would expect the opposite of a Christian civil rights activist in an overwhelmingly Christian nation – and I expect that in other writings he must have relied more on the Gospels and Paul), and I was thinking also of Dr. Mullins’s anecdote about the principal and “good ol’ boy” who was so pleased to receive in his school a Jewish teacher since he proclaimed himself a Biblical expert who was especially fond of the Old Testament.

I am not one to begin carelessly identifying causes and effects, but I wonder whether there is not at least some sort of resonance between this culture and the one seen in these particular books, what with the more vengeful God who punishes a people for their wickedness, and with the always held-out hope of eventual triumph over ones oppressors and enemies, with slavery and with exile, with a wandering people who so often stay in a place rather than really living there, and whose tribal culture places so much of their identity and role in their kin – so far as identifying themselves, and somewhat paradoxically even the converts, as the seed of the mythological “high father,” Abraham.

I mean, am I wrong, or does the South really love the Old Testament? (And isn’t the Newer one somewhat more palatable to the liberal softies up North?)

June 15, 2005 · Culture, Language, Teachering, The South · (No comments)

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