| rpollack.net | Education

¶ A Semester

I have a long row of index cards stapled to the wall above my dry-erase board, one for each week of school year. Red cards replace the white for the weeks of the state tests, and there is one black card that I move over every week. We’ve only got one card left until the half-way indicator. How time flies. (Especially when there’s not ever enough of it.)

I don’t think I’ve changed my mind much about education or approaches to teaching or management, though I’ve certainly made many small adjustments. I use fewer words, and am much more inclined to settle for imprecise or philosophically insufficient explanations (or rules, or procedures). They’re just as unsatisfying and distasteful, but I’ve become somewhat more pragmatic about these instances when the answer that’s satisfying to me won’t get anybody anywhere. (I lie constantly. It’s like a hobby. We need to move on, folks.)

I don’t dress as well, either. I used to make it through the day with my tie all the way up and the top button fastened. Eventually I started pulling the tie down half an inch and unbuttoning the top button sometime during sixth period. Then, sometime during fifth. Then, at the start of third. Then second. Now sometimes before leaving the house. And I don’t usually wear a tie at all on Fridays.

Sometimes I feel like I’m not really teaching, especially when I feel like I’m teaching for the state test. In some ways maybe my thoughts about school have become more like they were when I was a high school student myself. Maybe college and lofty ideas about education made it easier to forget some things. When I was in high school I sat in the back of most classes and read books, or slept. With a few exceptions, I usually felt like my time was being wasted, that I was being baby-sat, that I was being held in a pen because I couldn’t be trusted on the street during the day until I was arbitrarily branded an adult. I certainly learned a lot, but I believed that most of it was learned not because of school, but despite it.

I am very uncomfortable wasting my students’ time, and they often look at me like that’s what I’m doing, and I’m often afraid that I agree with them. If only their resentment was like mine was, and consoled with J.D. Salinger or Dostoevsky. . . .

I don’t want to teach a state-tested subject next year.

I probably would have melted down and quit if not for the regular excursions to Oxford. Certainly that is an enormous argument in favor of the Teacher Corps. I am compelled to admit that the principal benefits I have received there this fall have been with my colleagues Friday nights at the hotel, and Saturday lunches and evenings in the Square. Certainly I benefited on campus as well, especially in the afternoons when I met with the other English teachers, but the benefit balance tilts very heavily away from the time on campus; maybe the social nature of man requires that it be this way, but I wish the difference were subtler. I am looking forward to the different sort of class we’ll have after the break.

The hardest is over, according to everybody who has anything to say about it.

December 7, 2005 · Culture, Education, Teachering · (No comments)

¶ Conduction by Induction and Deduction

So we’re being required by the Teacher Corps to reflect here on the respective problems and benefits of teaching, as they say, deductively and inductively, by which they mean telling the kids the point or letting them figure it out on their own.

Now, I am of the opinion that the only things that are really and meaningfully learned are the things that are pulled out from oneself, whether or not an explanation from someone else coincides with the internal motion. So it follows that “inductive” teaching is a kind of teaching with an expectation of what must happen anyway, but which may not; and “deductive” teaching does not expect it, requiring only memorization. Though of course the magic can happen there, too.

I would prefer not ever to tell the kids the point, and I admit feeling dastardly sometimes for having one. But of course high schools don’t actually educate students; we train them. It is to me a sad condition, and I have not entirely resigned myself to its limitations, but I have basically accepted it. Students who are not interested in self-cultivation of any sort (not to speak of particularly academic efforts) do not easily engage difficult questions. They are accustomed to being baby-sat, to being kept occupied, to memorization and recitation. They sometimes grow angry when these expectations are not met. It is worth the trouble to anger them sometimes, but my energies are not limitless.

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, maybe with a comparable degree of wickedness: You teach the students you have, not the students you wish you had. What would Socrates do? He wouldn’t be preparing fifteen-year-olds for a state test, I imagine.

So I lecture, and they ignore me, and fall asleep (better than outright disrespect). And I try to surprise them often, and provoke them sometimes, and maybe make them a little angry. The objectives that I am required from all sides to write on the board and which are slightly less empty than the words I use to write them are taught in my classroom overwhelmingly in the “deductive” mode, because my students take silent moments or gaps in my control as invitations to chaos. I hope that they are getting an inductive lesson too, though. It’s not written on the board.

September 30, 2005 · Education, Teachering · 1 comment

¶ In the Absence of Books

The literacy level of my students, as I was repeatedly warned, is low. Some of them can hardly read, in fact. I teach one class of honors students (and it was only on the morning of the first day of school that I learned I would teach this class), and in so many ways they are wonderful; but even they, who are able to read, overwhelmingly do not. I had all of my students fill out a questionnaire on the first day, and one of the questions asked the title of their favorite book. I plan to post some statistics gathered from those forms later; for now I will say that hardly anybody answered that question.

We have Prentice Hall Literature textbooks, which contain a diverse assortment of short texts and excerpts from longer texts, and, in the back, the complete text of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. We just got copies in my classroom, and we haven’t started using them yet. I am hopeful though I am afraid that most of the texts in the book will be beyond the capabilities of many of my students.

But my honors class! From the moment I learned that I would have an honors class I was determined, absolutely determined, to have them read books, actual books — novels and poetry that are not subject to the indignity of presentation as units in a textbook. I inherited a classroom with twenty-some copies of Paradise Lost, apparently never touched. It is an exciting thing to inherit, and I don’t know why they were purchased if not to be read. I worry that even the honors students will have such a difficult time with it that they will hate it, so though I am excited to have the book I want to wait until the second semester and gauge ability before issuing copies.

I believed that I needed to find out what books we have available to us, and to choose from among them the book with which we will start. I believed that most high schools had some sort of book room, filled with student copies of the typical high school fare. I learned that we don’t have such a room at North Panola, that we have a cabinet in the library. It was not an encouraging development, but I went to the library to see the cabinet.

First, the cabinet is filled with junk: plastic bags and fabric and styrofoam and gauze and bulletin-board border and so on. The books are piled on top of and behind each other so that it takes some time to unload enough of the shelves to see what they hold. And almost every book there is there in between six and twelve copies.

What the hell do you do with ten copies of The Catcher in the Rye? So far are we from having enough copies of a book to issue to every sophomore, we hardly have any books in sufficient numbers to issue one to every member of one class period. I guess they just don’t ordinarily read books here.

Now, one of my internal conflicts has been between literature whose subject more immediately grabs particular students and literature that is somewhat less immediately accessible to them but which is deep enough and rich enough and subtle enough to warrant exposure despite the inherent challenges. Where is the balance between Milton and Shakespeare on the one hand and J.D. Salinger and Langston Hughes on the other? My students all know a bit about Langston Hughes. What little experience they have of Shakespeare is recalled as unpleasant.

Surely these kids who do not read need to be seduced to reading, and such seduction is far harder to effect with those allegedly dead white men. But I am nagged by a sense that for all the goodness of many 20th century writers, a Homer or a Shakespeare is such a rare and extraordinary appearance, and what a shame to educate so shallowly within the limits of one century. The conflict is eased somewhat by the reality of illiteracy here, and by the resultant awareness that my choices are sharply limited with most of my students. But, again, the honors class! How do I seduce them to the side of literature without doing them the injustice of entirely avoiding that vast and great literature incidentally produced by the dead white male?

I decided that we ought to start with Ralph Ellison‘s Invisible Man. Ellison is an African-American writer from the last hundred years writing about African-Americans in the last hundred years. So maybe there’s fertile soil for literary seduction. And it’s also, by my judgment, a richer and subtler and more challenging book than most on the typical high school canon. And our book cabinet has nineteen hardly touched copies. Unfortunately I have twenty-one honors students, and my own copy is probably lost in California somewhere. So I call the Sardis Public Library. It’s a public library in a black-majority town; surely they’ll have half a dozen copies of Ellison. But it turns out they have one copy. Happily, they can get one more from the Batesville library, ten miles south. So my students are taken care of. I still need one for myself.

I learn that there is a bookstore in Batesville. Apart from the adjacent Christian bookstore, it’s the only bookstore in Panola County. It’s in a small strip mall along with clothing outlets and craft stores, like one would find anywhere in suburban America. It looks very clean and sterile, like a large chain. Surely they have a copy or two. But no. They seem never to have heard of it. So I drive to the next nearest bookstore (actually among the finest bookstores I’ve ever visited, Square Books), which is all the way back in Oxford. Of course they have it there, in that great town. They have it in abundance.

I live in the United States of America, in a part with a black majority, and I need to drive seventy miles round-trip to buy the nearest single copy of Ellison.

(As an aside: it costs almost $30 to fill the tank on my Ford Escort.)

August 28, 2005 · Culture, Education, Literature, Teachering · (No comments)

¶ The Subjective Objective

Academic evaluation is a bitch. The problem of grades, of what to grade and how to grade it, is the permanent affliction of academia. Even in a class whose subject presents clear problems with clear solutions, where the ability to demonstrate material competence is unproblematic, the decision an educator or an institution makes of what exactly to evaluate and how exactly to evaluate it introduces the prejudice of arbitrary decisions and subjectivity. And how much greater, how much clearer is the problem in classes of greater artfulness, of greater creativity and creation, of greater reflection. Some radical institutions have tried to do away with grading entirely; my own little college, by recording grades unceremoniously into a computer, yields to the artificial but more-or-less efficacious necessities of admission to other institutions, to demands for documents to prove and to benchmark ineloquently and without precision; but those grades are not reported to students, who must fill out a form to view them, and the primary evaluations are presented to students orally by their teachers.

I did not come to Mississippi to attend graduate school; I came to teach, to be helpful, to know the South. I am nevertheless enrolled in the School of Education at the University of Mississippi, and my performance in a curriculum culminating in a master’s degree must, of course, be evaluated. I do not envy the School of Education, its dean or its teachers, for this task. Nevertheless, their performance at this task is my single greatest annoyance and complaint with the program I have entered (my not being here primarily for the degree precludes bitterness, but not annoyance). I do not know whether it is endemic to the department or peculiar to the program, but in either case I am faced with a blind, unwavering, pig-headed fidelity to the notion of objectivity, which here, of course, is a joke.

I do not mean to deny the possibility of objectivity in the abstract, or to entertain absurdities about teaching being impossible to evaluate. Of course there are good teachers and bad teachers, great ones and lousy ones, and some significant possibility for rather broad agreement about which are which. But assigning them scores on a 100-point scale with a 20-point rubric and expecting that a 93 presents a real and substantial difference from an 88, or even a 76, is a particular kind of lunacy, and it misunderstands, I think, something very basic about what it wants to do.

I made my peace with subjective grading a long time ago. Sure, it stinks. All right. And that’s why unthinking or desperate educators invented the formulaic five-paragraph essay (or, hell, the formalized definition of the paragraph itself), which is not more expressive or beautiful (usually less, in fact) but is more easily and consistently evaluated, and which thereby makes young people not into students of the Liberal Arts or of the humane or of themselves or even of their world, but into students of standardized tests; and which is perhaps why (or is a contributing reason that) education has almost entirely ceased to be education, becoming instead training for evaluations of arbitrary or somewhat arbitrary content memorization, leading eventually to different levels of job training. The monomaniacal pursuit of objective evaluation is destructive of real education. Objectively evaluatable pursuits, or at least those pursuits that are easily and consistently objectively evaluatable, are usually the least interesting, the least insightful, the least enlightening, the least lovely, the least worthwhile, and certainly the least worthy of the dignity of the name “education.” And all those minutes spent studying the test are minutes wasted, minutes spent learning how to be evaluated, learning how to fill out the form (be it a multiple-choice bubble form or a five-paragraph essay form or an STAI lesson plan form), learning what will be evaluated and how; those minutes remind the student that he is studying for a score, that he is playing a game, and that the goal is not self-cultivation but winning; they pervert the education of the students who are good at this empty game, and they discourage the students who are bad at it from pursuing education at all.

Performance in education, the question of whether someone is becoming more educated, is fundamentally subjective, and is only answerable subjectively. Even objective evaluations of a student’s ability to solve mathematical problems and perform drills, while themselves objective, reflect implicit subjective decisions about relative importance and do not necessarily correlate with education (how many students who can perform calculus drills all day really understand or appreciate the calculus?). Its being subjective does not mean that it is not real, or that it is not absolute, or that it is not knowable or even evaluatable. But any “objective” system of evaluation, any contrivance that allows very precise rather than very broad gradations and that allows those gradations the conceit of reflecting anything real, is a ruse.

So how do you evaluate and assign grades to student-teachers? I don’t know. You do it subjectively, though, however you do it; and the extent to which you pretend to do it objectively is the extent to which you are evaluating nothing, or are evaluating the ability to learn and adjust to the system of evaluation.

There is a manifest absurdity in a rubric that assigns the same weight to the important and fundamentally subjective “classroom management” and to, say, writing the date on the board. Some people have defended the absurdity by calling the latter “free points,” but I do not see how they can defend the existence of “free points” while also maintaining the conceit of objectively evaluating something real. There should be no “free points” in any evaluation system at all; least of all should they exist in a system that objectively evaluates something real. What the “free points” serve to do is minimize the influence of the fundamentally subjective: there’s nothing subjective about writing the date on the board, so you can’t contest that; now the fundamentally subjective “classroom management” has a smaller influence on your overall grade. If we bloat the rubric with arbitrary and mostly meaningless requirements, we effect the air of an intricate and calculated system while minimizing the role of subjective judgment (which, of course, is the only judgment, since judgment requires a subject-judge).

But the subjective is still in there, and the numerousness of graded items encourages a kind of carelessness in the precision of each: with 20 five-point items less care is allowed to each small distinction than would be given on rubric of only three or five items. This teacher’s classroom management was good, it presents no obvious suggestions for improvement, but is it worth four points or five? With nineteen similar questions I reflect less on the subtlety than I would if there were fewer, and the evaluation risks becoming more, not less, haphazard. And how likely is it that a given evaluator, for no conscious fault of her own, would reach more readily for fives when evaluating women, fours when evaluating men? Or vice versa? Or when evaluating pretty or plain teachers, or tall or short ones? Such unconscious prejudice is inescapable, surely, but is it more likely when evaluations are performed simply on simple (though subjective) criteria, or when they are complex on very numerous criteria?

Having seen many of my colleagues teach, and having heard some talk of grades, I find no consistent and substantial correlation between evaluation and quality of teaching, and I suspect that while some reflection of our teaching does exist in our grades, it exists primarily in those very subjective parts that make the formulators of the system so uncomfortable; and unfortunately the greater part of the grade reflects our quickness in adapting to the grading system.

July 24, 2005 · Education, Teachering · (No comments)

¶ Sunflower County Freedom Project

A few years ago an alumnus of Teach for America founded the Sunflower County Freedom Project, “an independent non-profit organization dedicated to educational excellence and leadership development in Sunflower County, Mississippi” (not to be confused with the similarly-named Republican PAC). For an annual tuition of $300 the youth of this poor Delta county receive regular academic tutoring, weekend classes, a network of mentors, martial arts training, summer courses at the University of Mississippi, educational travel, and membership in a mutually supportive community of learning. Last week a group of three participants in the program spoke to me and other members of the Mississippi Teacher Corps, and the same evening performed an original play on the life of Delta civil rights activist Fanny Lou Hamer.

My first awareness of their program left me suspicious of it: they wear matching shirts, they tend to speak in a shared jargon (the older ones fluent and rapid in it, the younger ones tending toward downward gazing and stutters), they ride together in marked vans and try to recruit members and solicit donations. Even after a somewhat deeper acquaintance they continue to evoke for me at least the likeness of Evangelical youth groups, or itinerant religious cults. The older ones, or the older ones who are put forward as representatives, have the sort of nimble delivery and glib certainty of self and purpose that I associate most with Mormon missionaries.

But aren’t they, after all, an after-school program? And who wouldn’t support an after-school program? As such a small program in such a poor region, with no tax-payer support, they do need to solicit donations. And shouldn’t they try recruiting members? To share the benefits of intellectual and physical cultivation? Won’t I, as a teacher, be similarly attempting to recruit members to the world of thoughtful and reflective living? But the suspicion remains, perhaps for fault of its depth in me. Is it totally superficial, a learned reaction to evangelizing? But again, as a teacher am I not a kind of evangelical? Or for that matter as a believer in the importance of the Liberal Arts?

Their afternoon presentation left me no less ambivalent. We asked them if they felt they had a positive influence on their peers outside of the program, or if they were teased, or what their friends thought of their participation. Their answers were typically strong and self-affirming though as trite and rehearsed as one might expect from adolescents (“I don’t care what anybody else thinks, they’re just jealous,” etc.), but the most telling insight was that they tend not to have any friends outside of the program. And we would expect them not to, wouldn’t we? They cultivate their minds and bodies while their peers outside of the program are the vulgar, the plebian, the Philistine, the youths whose pregnancy rates and incarceration rates and dropout rates are among the highest in the nation and who in a few weeks will fill my classroom and those of my MTC and TFA colleagues. They can all be recruited, of course, but without a shared dedication to learning and self-improvement, is it fair to expect deep bonds? Surely such separation from the world is a commonplace for religions and to be fair is commonplace for all of us and our little societies and cultures.

The program seems to focus heavily on admission to college, and one of its stated goals is that its participants will go to the college of their choice on scholarship. And I wonder how many of the participants would not otherwise go to college, or would go only with much greater struggle. The Sunflower County Freedom Project deserves praise for this assistance. I was uncomfortable, though, with how much the kids in their program talked about college, and with the hallowed tones they used when talking about it. Maybe the program is responsible for neither, and they spoke only as all eager teenagers do, but I wondered how deep a sense of completion these kids would feel upon arrival at the college of their choice, and what they would do after that sense dissipated. Would they be done? Done with anything? I do not aim to demean higher education, or the achievement it is to convince kids in the Delta to invest themselves in it as a personal goal, but can it perhaps be too deeply revered? Too heavily emphasized? I might not have thought so, and maybe I was prejudiced by my impression of evangelical religiosity, but they spoke of college in tones that sounded to me like they were talking about the sweet hereafter. Can’t the emphasis be on education for its own sake rather than education in order to go to college on scholarship and escape the Delta? Wouldn’t it be less artificial, less a prelude to anticlimax, to emphasize living a decent and humane and reflective life, whether in the Delta, at college, or doing whatever one decides to do and wherever one decides to do it? Maybe, as I said, the extraordinary focus on college was more the ordinary focus of kids about to start their applications, and not the focus of the program. And even if it is the focus of the program, maybe getting Delta kids into college is noble enough a goal.

I am returned to a question I keep finding in Mississippi: what is success for the Delta? I am told that the population in many parts is shrinking though the birth rate is very high. Organizations and governments continue to throw money into it and the people who benefit usually move out of it. Will the final success of the Delta be its becoming empty? The three Freedom Project kids who spoke to us said that they wanted to attend college outside of Mississippi. I asked them whether they thought they’d ever return to the Delta and the nearest answer to “yes” came from one who said he might return for a while, and that even if he didn’t return he would like to contribute money to programs like the Sunflower County Freedom Project. So is the program contributing to the Delta by helping to empty it? Is it a training station for the world outside of the Delta, which begins with social separation and ends with university admissions?

It must be said that the program does instill participants with a knowledge and respect for the civil rights movement and for the cultural contributions of the Delta, maybe with a pride in the Delta and sentimentality for it and its history. So at least they will love the place while they try to escape from it.

The evening performance was very impressive to me. The kids told us about their studies, they demonstrated Tae Kwon Do, they recited poetry from memory and performed a play. There was nothing sinister in it. Maybe the program is something like a religion, and my feelings reflect the likeness: it gives them a place to go and an idea to center themselves; maybe it allows them to realize their smallness and even to acknowledge it ceremonially, and thereby to participate in bigness; it cultivates them and ennobles them; and maybe it also engages in some sort of foolishness, creates some dogma or unrealistic expectations. I am not converted, but there is surely some beauty in it. I liked the kids and was impressed by them, and saw the good the program has given them, and I hope they all succeed and that they either escape the Delta without regret or return to it with determination. I did buy their tee-shirt.

July 24, 2005 · Culture, Education, Teachering, The South · (No comments)